Saving Alice (6 page)
Ten months after our wedding, Alycia was born, and from the first moment I set eyes on her, I felt like the richest man on planet earth. I proceeded to bury my entire past—heartache, disappointment, and guilt—and devote myself to my little girl.
I’m going to do this right,
I told myself.
When I’d finished, Alycia remained silent. I’d left out nearly half the story details, including most of the argument at the Soda Straw, and while I’d expected Alycia to complain, she did not.
“So that’s why you married Mom,” she murmured, more to herself than to me.
I gave her a regretful shrug.
“Not very romantic,” she added, slumping back in her chair, and picking at her napkin.
“No,” I agreed. “But your mother is a wonderful woman, and if I’d married Alice we wouldn’t have had you. Not only that, but—”
“I get it, Dad,” she interrupted me.
I should have foreseen her response. She now knew the truth: I’d married her mother because I couldn’t have Alice.
“Did you ever figure it out?” she asked softly. “What Alice was going to show you?”
I shook my head and spoke wistfully. “We’ll never know.”
“Well …
I’m
going to figure it out,” Alycia replied, but with little enthusiasm.
We drove home in awkward silence, and when it was time for bed, she didn’t offer me her bubble cheek, much less say good night.
That was the turning point. The fateful moment. After Alycia learned about Alice, our relationship began its long decline. Except for please-pass-the-salt interactions, she didn’t speak to me for weeks, and eventually, what had once seemed so unbreakable would shatter as if little more than fake party glass.
A
lthough living at those heights was somewhat dizzying and nerve-wracking, my brief sojourn on Alycia’s pedestal was over, and while I found myself breathing a sigh of relief, my decline resembled the old cliché: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
“Haven’t seen any of Alycia’s friends in a while,” I commented to Donna in the kitchen about six months later.
“And you won’t for a while,” she’d replied absently, drying the silverware. “She’s in her embarrassment phase.”
I considered this, and Donna eyed me cautiously.
“I suppose her friends’ parents live in big houses.”
“Stephen, please…”
I slunk to my downstairs office and, as my daughter often did, sat in the dark for hours, pondering the passage of years, listening to a collection of my favorite childhood oldies, the kind of prehistoric tunes that offended my daughter’s fine-tuned musical sensibilities. They never failed to bring me back to a time when the future seemed imbued with relentless possibilities.
After marrying Donna, I’d attempted—on a smaller stage—to reignite the old childhood determination, but trying harder only seemed to yield diminishing results, not to mention a catastrophic meltdown five years ago.
I was now in the midst of my third, maybe fourth, comeback.
But who was counting? By day, I performed routine business details, and by night, I buried myself in a renewed study of stock-market price data, preparing for yet another attempt. Unfortunately, research had taken on a life of its own, and the more I prepared, the less inclined I was to actually pull the trigger.
But someday soon,
I told myself,
it’ll happen, and I’ll finally give my family the life they deserve
.
It was four forty-five on a Wednesday afternoon in late October, and I was dog-tired after a day of fielding difficult office calls. I closed my eyes, nearly fell asleep in my chair, and when I opened them again, my gaze fell on a smaller framed picture of Alycia. She was wearing the Minnesota Twins baseball cap she wouldn’t be caught dead in today.
What a difference a year makes,
I thought.
It’s a phase. It’ll pass.
Other parents who have survived their children’s adolescence often remark:
You lose them for a while, but they always come back
.
And yet, somehow, things weren’t that simple for us. Our present problems seemed exacerbated by the memory and loss of our unusual closeness.
One of Donna’s friends counseled her privately, “Stephen’s problem was trying to be a buddy with his daughter.”
I suppose she’s right, but even that explanation seems too simple. Through the years, I’d never had a problem asserting my parental authority, and until the “moment of truth” Alycia had never had a problem responding to it.
At the office door, I flicked the switch and darkness fell. Omitting my usual good-bye to Larry, still shuttered away in a world of tax accounting, I headed across the empty reception room. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I slowly pushed out into the cold world of streetlights and neon signs.
My breath mingled visibly with the scent of gasoline and oil, and I tightened my coat against the weather.
In the fourteen years since my college graduation, Aberdeen hadn’t changed. The landscape had received its first tumble of snow earlier in the month, signaling the beginning of a typically cold winter, something most Dakotans took in stride. I was thankful for the summery reprieve of the last few days, temperatures that thawed the snow during the day but froze into mud overnight.
I took Sixth Avenue to the east side of Aberdeen, stopped by Taco John, then parked my car in the mall lot. The retailers in SuperCity were geared up for Christmas. Tinseled evergreens with brightly lit red and green bulbs filled the store windows. “O Come All Ye Faithful” blared from the tinny mall speakers, confirming my belief that everything Midwest was a poor imitation of something original.
The mall was busy for a Friday night, considering the circumstances. According to the highway sign on the outskirts of the city, Aberdeen was clinging to a population of twenty-four thousand. When I was ten the population had been twenty-
five
thousand, which told me that for every child born, another got its wings.
I stopped by Tami’s Gift Shop, intent on finding a birthday present for Donna. I labored over this for nearly fifteen minutes, lost in thought, until I finally settled on a pair of earrings with a card that said,
Happy 36th!
“Excellent choice,” the clerk said, a pretty brunette with dark circles under her eyes.
After I paid with a check, I checked the time. I had forty minutes left. As I headed back into the mall, I spotted an unattended youngster smiling placidly up at me, clutching a Big Gulp. The glimmer of his tousled flaxen hair reminded me of my own at his age. Instinctively, I dropped to my heels. “Hey there, little fella, where’s your mother?”
He stared at my coat. I followed his eyes to the source of his fascination: the Mickey Mouse sticker attached to my lapel, a friendly offering from a potential client’s daughter earlier today. I was about to remove it and offer it to him when a sudden flash to my left distracted me. I turned to see a woman’s wrist encircle the boy’s upper arm.
“You leave him alone!”
Stunned with her outburst, I jolted to my feet, coming face-to-face with a woman who clearly had misunderstood my intentions. Her face was a torment of disgust. “He doesn’t have any money!”
Her son dropped his pop container, spilling it across the tiled floor, and immediately broke into tears.
“Now look at what you’ve done,” she yelled, at which point I finally recognized her.
I scrambled for something diplomatic to say. “I’m … we’re … involved in the restitution program.”
“You think
that’s
gonna put food on my grandmother’s table?”
“No, but—”
“Fifty dollars a week?” she snarled.
“It’s the best we can—”
“Well, do better!”
I nodded respectfully and began backing away. “We will, I promise you…”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she hissed. “You run. That’s all you Whitakers are good for. Take the money and run.”
My heart beat against my chest as I retreated to a wooden bench just around the corner. I sank onto it, still shaking, clutching my wife’s birthday present. Setting the bag down, I leaned over, put my face in my hands, and tried to forget what had just happened.
“Away in a Manger,” another warped choral rendition, echoed off the simulated marble floors. Slowly, I breathed in and out and in my lap, I grasped my hands together, fighting the sense of despair that lately seemed to hover just out of reach.
I blew out an exasperated breath and tried a short prayer.
God, I need some help,
and then I stopped. How long had it been since I’d prayed?
Years
.
When I finally got up from the bench, the large marble hallway seemed surreal, my head felt blank, and my thoughts fuzzy.
One step at a time,
I told myself.
My pocket rang. Fumbling through my coat, I found the cell phone and answered it.
“Stephen?”
I didn’t recognize the voice.
“This is Jennifer at Joe’s.”
“Of course.”
“Listen … Paul’s got that look in his eyes again.”
I cleared my throat, deciphering her choice of words. “Just … cut him off.”
She hesitated. “You know how he gets.”
I agreed to come immediately.
I
headed back out into the cold weather. In the car I noticed the forgotten burrito and briefly considered eating it cold.
Minutes after driving out of the mall parking lot, I reached a side street off Main and parked in front of a flickering neon sign. Turning off the ignition, I stared up through the windshield at the night sky. Even the brightness of neon couldn’t hide the twinkling lights far above. But below, within this building, was a dingy room I’d come to despise. And if it wasn’t for Paul, Susan, and a handful of high school friends, I’d never come at all.
“Why
do
you go?” Donna once asked me, especially since I didn’t drink. It was hard to explain my reason—that if not for me, I feared Paul and Susan would lose their way entirely.
“Didn’t Jesus frequent bars to save the lost?” I added feebly.
I almost expected her to reply,
That’s interesting, coming from you,
but she didn’t.
Instead she shook her head. “Go save your friends, Stephen.”
When I got out of the car and entered the bar’s darkness of lost time, the sound of laughter struck me, the clinking of glass, the buzz of conversation, the canned noise from the ESPN TV on the far wall. The room was long and narrow, consisting of a long counter occupied by a mixture of old farmers and younger white collars with beer mugs, their eyes glued to the football game.
Across the narrow aisle were several small tables in front of the windows, and toward the back, I detected the sound of a rowdy pool game mingled with the popping of a pool stick against the ball, with ricocheting clicks against the sides of the pool table. Sitting several yards away at a table by the street window, Paul lifted his glass and nodded.
“Didn’t expect you tonight,” he replied when I pulled out a scarred chair and sat down.
I glanced over to catch Joe’s attention. Wiping the counter, Joe, a former math teacher from Central High, nodded back. I noticed Susan at the end of the counter, sitting on her perch. Wearing a short blue skirt, preposterous for these temperatures, she winked, then continued talking animatedly to the stranger beside her—a younger man with dark brown hair and a mustache.
“Lonely Hearts strikes again,” Paul replied, having modified Susan’s high school nickname to reflect current events.
“Know ’im?” I asked.
“Some loser,” Paul said.
I appraised the alcoholic glaze in his eyes, the splotchy redness in his cheeks. I gestured for Jennifer, the brown-haired waitress and single mother of four who’d called me earlier. With an unneeded pencil behind her ear, dressed in jeans and a red shirt, she came and retrieved my usual order.
“Let me guess,” Paul muttered. “Lemonade?”
I shrugged.
“Someday we’re going to loosen you up.”
Walking away, Jennifer cast me a furtive look:
Handle him!
Susan, as animated and voluptuous as the day she asked me to dance, caught my eye again. I raised my eyebrows inquisitively. She held my gaze a second longer than normal, then narrowed them slightly, an unmistakable signal:
Butt out
.
Paul caught her expression. “Don’t disturb a cat eating from her dish unless you wish to have your face accessorized.” He took another chug of his beer, his eyes darting nervously about the room. Inebriation always seemed to increase Paul’s natural paranoia, but he could keep his words sounding pretty normal. Jennifer returned with my lemonade, which Paul eyed derisively, adding a snort for good measure as he turned away.
Discreetly, I studied Susan’s new guy. Tall and brawny and wrapped in blue denim, he seemed far too enamored with her, considering their obviously short acquaintance.
“Don’t waste your time,” Paul replied, as if reading my mind. He cleared his throat, then leaned over to his right, reaching for something on the floor.
“I need to rid myself of this albatross around my neck,” he replied, placing a sophisticated black Nikon camera on the table. He glanced about the bar, pretending nonchalance. “Know anyone who wants to buy it cheap?”
“Have you advertised?”
“The paper,” he said, shrugging.
“What about eBay?” I suggested, and he responded by biting his lip cautiously. “I suppose I could, but…” His voice trailed off.
I picked up the camera and studied it thoughtfully.
“How’s the market?” he asked me, a nervous deflection from the embarrassing stare of my appraisal.
“Going up without me,” I said, then added, “At least it’s not going down
with
me.”
“What’s worse?”
Good question. I looked up and noticed a tinge of desperation in Paul’s wolf gray eyes. His full head of thick red hair, slicked back, exposed his forehead, which accentuated his already too-narrow face, highlighting a pointy nose, crooked teeth, ending with a geometrically sharp chin. With his Benjamin Franklin style spectacles and pronounced cheeks, he projected a professorially debonair appearance—quirky perhaps, but not unsightly.
Jennifer wasn’t kidding. His edgy mood reminded me of the time in high school when we were hanging out on a Friday night, my only night off. I was studying for a Monday test, while Paul trolled the
Peanut Gallery
for a prom date, which required my moral support.
The
Peanut Gallery
had been a one-time-only experiment, a small school-sponsored booklet containing informal photos of nearly every student in Central. Apparently the administration thought it would lessen the cliquish nature of our school.
Within the sanctuary of my tiny room, Paul had begun making phone calls, inviting one girl after another to the prom, each one in turn asking for his
Peanut Gallery
page number. After a moment of silence, then a polite excuse, the girl terminated the call. Long about number ten, he gave up.
I still remember the sheer panic in his eyes. “It’s a bad picture,” I said. “And besides … these are cold calls. Most of the girls don’t know you.”
Days later he laughed it off, but I can’t say he ever recovered. After that, Paul finished his ascent, or should I say descent, into the world of the mind. It was common knowledge that Paul was a genius, and the reason Larry hadn’t achieved high school valedictorian was because Paul had already claimed that spot. And yet, deploring what he described as the hypocrisy of formal education, Paul declined the honor of addressing the graduating class. It then fell to Larry, class salutatorian, who didn’t appreciate Paul’s scraps. He declined the honor as well. I was on a short list, but it went to someone else.
Eventually, having achieved a scholarship to MIT, Paul recovered from his aversion to college and attended for a semester before washing out. Discovering the truth of the universe was more interesting to him than simply going to class.
Performing the small details of life—getting and keeping a job, taking showers, eating, and attending class—was excruciating for someone like Paul, who suffered from an extremely low boredom threshold. The great ponderings were easy for him, but the routine tasks of life rendered him pragmatically unfit for life. In response to his lack of responsibility, regardless of major or minor, Paul often trudged out his favorite quote:
It’s no measure of health to be welladjusted to a profoundly sick society
.
Worse yet, Paul had a near photographic memory, including the ability to remember conversations nearly verbatim.
A curse,
he’d once said, and I thought of his father’s acerbic tongue.
A few years later he pulled it together enough to finish his bachelor’s degree at a lesser college. On a roll, he continued to achieve a master’s, followed by a doctorate, barely scraping by. His final grades were less than stellar, forcing him to accept an associate professorship of science at Northern State College. Having a job beneath his talent weighed heavily upon him.
I was still examining his camera. “I’ll take it off your hands,” I finally told him.
“But you already have one—”
Crash!
The sound of Jennifer’s dropped tray echoed through the room. “Better go plastic, Joe!” someone shouted, to the amused laughter of nearly half the bar. A mist of smoke seemed to hover above the room, mingled with the scent of whiskey and beer.
I turned to Paul and smiled. “I’ll sell it myself on eBay. Make a profit on your foolishness.”
Paul sighed nervously. “You could probably get, I don’t know, two hundred, two twenty,” he said. “But all I want, well, all I
need,
is one-fifty.”
“I’ll give you two hundred,” I replied, and our eyes met. He blinked, then looked away. “That’s too much,” he said softly but didn’t object as I wrote out the check. By then we were in need of a topic change. He looked at his watch, then squinted as if the numbers were hard to read. “Don’t you need to get home?”
Susan broke into loud laughter across the room. We turned in time to see her reach over and slap the guy’s knee.
This can only end badly,
I thought.
I turned my attention to Paul’s beer mug. Now his words
were
getting more slurred, which alarmed me, and his head seemed to list back and forth like a tall tree in a violent wind. Paul smiled crookedly, then gestured for Jennifer. He could barely raise his arm without shoving the rest of his upper torso off-balance. I found myself drifting off into my own thoughts, wondering when and if Jennifer was going to drop the bomb.
I took a breath and braced myself. “How many have you had?”
“Nonya.”
“Maybe it’s time to—”
“One more,” he said, raising his voice. He flashed me a hideous grin. “For the road as they say.”
“How ’bout
no
more,” I insisted, but he pretended not to hear me.
Since we’d been down this road before, the progression of our conversation was predictable. Jennifer would just have to risk cutting him off. I caught her eye when Paul wasn’t looking and quickly shrugged. She grimaced, then pursed her lips as if steeling her resolve.
“How are classes?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t like grading.”
“Don’t be so tough.”
He snorted, took another drink.
“Read any good books lately?” I asked, hoping to distract him, but he barely shrugged. Apparently, he was drunker than I realized. Normally, the mere mention of his greatest passion—
metaphysical science
—was enough to rouse his enthusiasm.
I decided to pick up on our last discussion: wormholes, little tears in the fabric of reality, what Paul called “rabbit holes” in the space/ time continuum. “So … how does one find a rabbit hole?” I said, smiling as engagingly as I could manage.
He shrugged with barely concealed disinterest. “You don’t. It finds you.”
I made several attempts to revive our previous conversation, but it wasn’t easy, considering how often Paul now had to excuse himself for the bathroom. Eventually, I said something wrong and Paul’s expression dimmed. He shrugged, took a sip of his beer, and glanced about the room again. “As usual, you missed the whole point.”
“How so?”
“Ain’t telling,” Paul replied.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Susan rise from her stool. What’s-his-name helped her with her coat. I caught her gaze again, and she shrugged me off. When her new boyfriend slapped several bills on the table and wandered to the bathroom beyond the pool table, she strolled over to us.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, buttoning up her pink sweater. “And you’re both wrong.”
“This one’s true love?” Paul slurred.
She winked at him. “Yep. You’re going to have to find me another nickname.”
“How well do you know this guy?” I asked, but she never had a chance to respond, because the latest answer to her deepest romantic desires was emerging from the bathroom. Susan introduced him as simply “Brian,” and he grunted his way through the introductions. Just before they left, Susan leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I’m through with this dump, Stephen. I’m getting out. But I’ll send you a wedding invitation.”
She stood up, reconsidered, then leaned over again, whispering so softly I could barely hear her. “By the way, Paul’s had more ’n enough.”
I nodded in agreement.
Later, as he and I watched the sports scores on the television screen and suffered through the explosive laughter of a now-crowded bar, Paul asked me what she’d said.
“ ‘I’ll see you in a few days, once this bozo dumps me,’ ” I replied.
“No, seriously,” Paul persisted.
“Ain’t telling.”
A moment of silence passed.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I’m just touchy tonight. I’m also sorry that I’m so much smarter than you, but I’m mostly sorry that you overpaid for my camera.”
“Could have stopped with ‘touchy.’ ”
“I was on a roll,” Paul garbled out. “Couldn’t help myself.”
When I finally told him her first comment, he only chuckled.
“Yeah. Me too.” Then he leaned back, his head lobbing toward Susan’s now-empty stool, and he almost lost his balance, nearly tipping his chair over backward.
“Why doesn’t she ever learn?” he said when he’d recovered.
I ignored the irony and heard my name from behind me, near the door. I turned and noticed Larry walking briskly to our table. I was surprised to see him. In the darkened room, his kaleidoscope tie glowed like a neon sign in a field of pinstripe.
Larry towered over the two of us and glared at me. “I’ve been calling your cell phone for an hour.”
“It’s in my car,” I replied, gesturing toward the end of the table. “Pull up a chair. Order a Coke or something.”
“What are you doing here?” Larry persisted. “We were waiting for you.”
A small sliver of panic edged into my gut. Larry glanced at Paul for the first time, and they exchanged obligatory nods, still unable, after all these years, to disguise their mutual disregard. Paul’s eyes flickered at Larry’s tie, and I could tell he was losing the battle. Even sober, Paul had difficulty curbing his acerbic tongue.
“Nice tie,” he finally gave in, whispering it under his breath, then forcing a delicious smirk underground. Larry probably noticed it but wouldn’t have given Paul the satisfaction of retorting.