Alice Bliss (34 page)

One table is stacked high with Mrs. Piantowski’s bread and tubs of butter. Other folding tables are nearly groaning under the weight of casseroles and fruit salads, green salads, Jell-O molds, and condiments. Cakes, cookies, pies, and brownies are on the dining room table inside along with two jumbo coffeemakers from church.

Alice walks slowly through the house, taking it all in, the groups of people talking and eating and drinking. Some of them are even laughing. Everyone is here, she thinks, everyone that’s left from their life. Were they all sitting behind her in the church and riding behind their car to the cemetery? Her principal, Mr. Fisher; the school secretary, Mrs. Bradley; B.D., her coach; Mrs. Baker, Ellie’s teacher; Mr. Herlihy, the high school janitor; Sally and Ginny from The Bird Sisters; the Hoyts and the Holschers; and even Stephie and her parents. Mrs. Minty is sitting at a picnic table with John Kimball and his father and his little brother, Joey. And Melissa Johnson. Janna and her mom are sitting with Ellie, and oh my gosh that’s Luke Piacci, the third-grade heartthrob, Ellie must be going out of her mind.

Alice keeps walking, looking for her mom, maybe, or maybe not. She makes one more tour of the house and there, sitting on the stairs, where she did not think to look before, is her mom, a Styrofoam cup of coffee abandoned on the step beside her. She is looking down at her hands and does not notice Alice. She is twisting her wedding ring on her finger, round and around.

“Mom . . . ?” Alice ventures.

Angie looks up, wipes her face with the back of her hand.

“I can’t . . . ,” she begins. “I should be out there, talking to people . . .”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“I just . . . I was on my way upstairs, and . . .”

She looks so lost, Alice thinks.

“That’s when I knew . . .” she says. “That’s when I really knew.”

“I’ll get Lillian,” Alice offers.

“Just stay for a minute,” Angie says, pulling Alice down on the step beside her.

She’s twisting the ring again.

“We couldn’t afford an engagement ring. Did I ever tell you that? And we saved up for months to buy our wedding rings.”

She pulls the ring off her finger.

“Here. Try it on.”

“Mom, no,” Alice says, as she tries to hand it back.

“Go ahead. I could never wear any of Gram’s rings. Her fingers are so tiny.”

Alice slips the ring on. It feels strange. Alice can see where the ring has made a ridge on Angie’s finger. She wonders if that’s permanent.

“I was wondering if I’m still married.”

“
Mom!”

Alice tries to give the ring back.

“Keep it for me. Just for a few days. I’ll ask for it when I’m ready.”

Angie stands, smoothes her hair and her skirt, and heads down the stairs.

“Wait!” Alice says, a note of panic in her voice.

“Just for a few days,” Angie says, before turning toward the kitchen and the backdoor.

“Mom! . . .
Mom!
” Alice follows Angie down the stairs, reaches out to her, the ring in her palm. “Please put your ring back on.”

Angie hesitates. She seems a little dazed.

“Okay, okay, let’s not make a federal case out of it,” Angie says, slipping the ring on her finger. “I just thought . . . Oh, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Alice watches her mother head back out to their friends and neighbors, to the voices and the sympathy and the dozens of reminders that life goes on in its brutal and sometimes beautiful way, whether you want it to or not.

 

Not knowing what else to do, Alice heads outside to the workshop. Uncle Eddie has rolled up her sleeping bag and stood the pallets up against the side wall to make room for the bar. Easily done. One plank on two sawhorses and two coolers full of ice and beer underneath. All the “good stuff” is here; whatever you might want to pour into a glass in honor of Matt Bliss, Eddie’s got.

She wants to keep on going. Or find her sneaks and start running and maybe never stop.

She walks past the workshop and up the little rise to the garden, which is hoed and weeded, just the way her dad likes it. Filled with promise. Everything at the beginning, just getting started.

She continues past the end of the garden and through the new neighbors’ yard. She can’t remember their names. She is not worried about trespassing or upsetting anyone; she doesn’t care if someone comes out and yells at her to stay off the new grass. At Baird Road she decides to go left heading out toward the old Barnes estate where maybe she can get lost for five minutes in what’s left of the old apple orchard, or maybe she’ll find that their old fort inside the lilacs is still there, and she can crawl inside and lie down and disappear for a little while.

The apple trees are in bloom and humming with bees. No one has pruned these trees in a long time, but here they are, still blooming and bearing. She heads past the barn where they used to have two Percheron draft horses and a pair of Chincoteague ponies. Old man Barnes hated tractors and loved horses, even after he got too old to work them. They were a kid magnet for the whole neighborhood and also contributed to the most beautiful roses in all of Belknap.

Alice walks between the curved rose beds to the circle of lilacs. The “entrance” is on the far side. Half a dozen lilacs have grown together, forming a dense wall of foliage, with a circular open space in the center. No one can see you in there. She hesitates and then pushes sideways through two slender trunks and she is inside.

It doesn’t look as though other kids have found this spot. There are no beer bottles or cigarette butts, no mangy blankets or milk crates. It was Alice and Henry’s secret fort through much of grade school. Alice wonders if her parents knew about it. It would be just like her dad to let her go and explore, even if it made her mom kind of crazy.

When did they stop coming here? Was it a decision? Or did they just stop? She thinks she might remember waiting for Henry in here one day, but he never came. Did that happen to Henry, too? Waiting once more and then once more for Alice to come and play.

The branches stir and John Kimball pushes through into the interior. Alice watches him materialize out of thin air and take shape in the dim, green light of the lilac leaves. He crosses to her, it’s not more than a step or two, but when he crashes into her it’s as though he has been running toward her from a great distance, and without warning, he is kissing her. In the green light, he is kissing her. He grabs her in a tight embrace, his mouth on hers. There is no hesitation, no talking, no asking. His hands are startling on her skin, his lips and his teeth and his tongue and his body are pushing her and she is pushing back, she is kissing back, she is holding him, she is pushing into him, she is feeling everything and nothing.

Is it the rough cloth of his jacket, or the uneven ground beneath her feet; or is it the sun, coming out from behind a cloud and pouring through the leaves, or is it the sound of a truck, grinding its gears as it crests the hill behind them—when suddenly the truck she hears in the distance is the truck that slows but doesn’t stop as a body, her father’s body, is pushed from behind the wheel well, to fall, to roll, to lie in the sand and gravel at the side of the road. His uniform filthy, stained with dirt and blood, torn, both boots missing, his feet incongruously bare. His face, she can’t see his face; he has landed with one arm flung out, his face turned sideways, turned away, his fingers, his short, strong fingers curled into fists.

She opens her eyes and pulls away. She looks around; she shakes her head, as if she could clear these images from her mind. When her mother told her how they’d found her father she couldn’t take it in and now, here, kissing this boy, what is she doing kissing this boy, here it is, in a rush, in a flood.

“I have to go.”

“Wait . . . Alice—”

“This isn’t right.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m—” And she struggles to find the right words. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Alice?” Henry calls out . . . “Alice? Are you in there?”

She pushes past John Kimball and slips between the lilac trunks.

“Henry, what are you doing here?”

“I saw you leave. You looked upset.”

“Of course I looked upset.”

“I was worried about you. I followed you.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

John Kimball materializes once again. He reaches out to take Alice’s hand; she jerks away from him. She can see Henry jumping to conclusions and she wants to stop him. She wants to explain, but doesn’t know how she can explain trying to get away from everything and everyone, coming here, coming to this place,
their
place, looking for, hoping for . . . she doesn’t know what, the surprise of John Kimball, the kiss, her father, her childhood, the pictures that are haunting her . . .

Suddenly there is that roaring inside Henry’s head that makes it impossible to hear; he can’t hear the birds, or the wind, or even his own thoughts. Instead, he sees the lilac leaves quivering in the aftershock of John pushing through them; he remembers the interior green-glass shimmer of that space and imagines Alice and John and without warning, he steps forward and shoves John so hard he falls backward into the lilacs. It looks at first as though the branches will be supple enough to bend under this burden, but then there is a terrible ancient keening sound as branches and an entire trunk groan and then crack and fall under John’s weight. As John scrambles to his feet, both Henry and Alice register the gaping hole in the circle of trees.

Henry can see that John is beginning to move toward him, but he doesn’t care what John does right now, let him do his worst. Henry is looking at the lilacs and the broken trunk and branches and something shifts inside of him.

“Henry,” Alice says, and her voice breaks as she says his name.

He looks at her for a long moment, hurt and betrayal and anger loud in the space between them, before he turns to leave.

“Henry!” Alice calls out to him. And then again, more urgently, “
Henry!”

She is about to break into a run to follow him, when John reaches out to her.

“I’ll walk you back.”

“I have to go alone.”

“Alice—”

“I’m sorry.”

And without another word she heads for home.

 

She walks through the yard and it’s eerie the way no one seems to notice her and no one says anything, like she’s invisible. She steps into the workshop, where she realizes she is really angry at Uncle Eddie or whoever the hell it was who messed with her stuff and changed everything around in here without even asking her.

But this could be a good place to test out the invisibility shield. There’s a knot of guys from Matt’s baseball team sitting on or leaning on her dad’s workbench, drinking beer and laughing. She punts a “hey, how you doin’?” right back at them as she circles the table loaded with liquor. Could she grab something? Where would she put it? No pockets in this dress, and the bottles are mostly jumbo size, too big to hide. Then she sees two possibilities: a small squarish bottle of Southern Comfort and a skinny, dark brown brandy bottle.

She lifts her dad’s jacket off its peg on the wall and on her way out the door, grabs both bottles, one for each pocket.

In the house she nabs Uncle Eddie’s car keys from the bowl in the foyer and before anyone can say one, two, three, she’s out the front door. Uncle Eddie has thoughtfully parked his car down the street a ways, to leave room for all of the guests’ cars. She slides in behind the wheel, adjusts the seat, rearview and side mirrors, just like he taught her, starts the engine, and she’s off. She doesn’t look back.

She pulls up in front of Henry’s house and leans on the horn.

When he comes to the door she can see he’s so mad he’s about to brush her off, but then the fact of the car, the pure physical presence of the car, with Alice behind the wheel, pulls him right out to the curb.

“Get in,” she tells him, without looking at him.

“Are you crazy?”

“I’ll let you drive it.”

“Your uncle’s gonna kill you.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Alice, I don’t know how you think you can just come over here and . . .”

“Get in. Or I’m going without you. And you know that’s not a good idea.”

Furious, he gets into the car. Puts his seat belt on. Refuses to look at her.

“Relax. We’re just going down to the lake.”

“And you’ve driven what? Twice in your life?”

“Four lessons from the master. Think of this as practice.”

“You’re in no condition to . . .”

She pulls out, the big sedan purring quietly. There’s a hush inside the car as they glide along East Oak Street.

“Look in my jacket.”

He grabs the jacket; the liquor bottles clank together.

“Jesus Christ, Alice!”

“I could have taken anything I wanted. If I had pockets big enough.”

“Driving. Plus alcohol. Does this sound like a good idea to you?”

“Don’t be a priss.”

“I don’t want to be a statistic, if you don’t mind.”

“So what, you want to go to your room or something?”

“What are you talking about? With you?”

“Yeah, with me.”

“Right now?”

She takes her eyes off the road and looks at him.

“Watch what you’re doing!”

Eyes front.

She drives like a little old grandmother all the way out to the lake, speedometer hovering right around thirty-five. She can tell it’s driving Henry crazy, but he’s still too mad to say anything. She heads straight to the parking lot for the town beach and pulls into the last possible spot, car pointed toward the water, next to a huge willow tree, relatively secluded, nice view.

“This is where kids come to make out,” Henry ventures, and a blush instantly suffuses his face.