The Summer We Lost Alice (12 page)

BRITTANY MARINI
, seven years old, pulled the covers tighter under her chin as the storm raged outside. A tree scratched at the window. Up this high, she felt like a bird in her nest, hunkered down against the rain.

It wasn't the noise that kept her awake, but her imagination. The lightning painted her walls with shadows of branches and the leaves made patterns of witches and faces with great screaming mouths. The more Brittany stared at the shadows
, the more pictures she found in them. A hand, a claw, a wolf that opened and closed its jaws. Lightning was the magic power that ripped open the sky and revealed the hidden world on the other side of the stars. It made the crack that let the ghouls in. They were around her all of the time, lurking inside the walls, sometimes seeping out through the electrical sockets, hiding under the bed and in dark closets, staring at her through the button eyes of her teddy (and her mother wondered why she cut the eyes out and threw the buttons into the creek).

Nights like this were filled with magic, and not the happy kind of fairies and elves.
Magic of the sinister sort. Monster magic.

Her brother Matt had told her all about the monsters. He showed her pictures in the comic books and told her stories that her mother
would never tell. He held her hand in front of the light and showed her the skeleton monster inside herself that would pop out if she snitched on him. On evenings when her grandmother lay asleep on the sofa, Brittany could see these things for herself on television. Her mother told her it was all make-believe, but that's what a mother would say. Even the books her mom read to her were full of wild things. Nobody could make up so many terrible things if some of them, at least, weren't real.

She looked over at her brother. He lay in bed, tangled in the sheet. His blood ran hot
. He was forever tossing and turning in his sleep and tangling himself all up. His mouth hung open and spittle dangled from the corner of his mouth. The storm wouldn't wake him, not unless lightning struck the tree outside the window and sent it crashing through the bedroom wall, or maybe if the whole house blew down like the Pig's house of sticks.

The bedroom door opened. Light spilled in from the hallway
. A shadow entered that became her mother. Cat's bare feet padded softly across the hardwood floor. She closed the window and turned and saw that Brittany was awake. She took a seat on the edge of Brittany's bed.

"Scared, sweetie?" she asked.

Brittany nodded.

"Don't worry," Cat said. "Lightning never hits little girls in their beds, and–"

"–thunder's only noise," Brittany whispered.

Her mother smiled at her and brushed the hair from her eyes.

A loud
whump
from the other side of the room announced that Matt had fallen out of bed. He seemed not to have noticed, stirring only enough to pull the blanket down over his back.

Cat lifted Matt back into bed, adjusted his pillow and placed it under his head, straightened his covers and tucked them under his arms. She looked at him for long moments. She seemed to be thinking worried thoughts, which she did a lot when she looked at Matt, but Brittany couldn't imagine why. He fell out of bed all the time.

"Is the little boy still out there?" Brittany asked.

"Yes," Cat said, turning.

"Is he alive?"

"We don't know, sweetie. I think he is, don't you?"

"Yes. But he's very scared."

Cat knelt beside her bed. She stroked Brittany's temples with her fingertips, which always made Brittany feel sleepy.

"A lot of people are looking for him, even the sheriff. They'll find him tomorrow. There's nothing for you to be afraid of."

"I know."

Cat kissed her.

"Want to sleep in bed with me tonight?"

Brittany shook her head. She was a big girl now and big girls don't sleep with their mothers.

Cat smiled
. She said, "Well, if you change your mind, you know where I'll be."

Brittany lay awake until the lightning passed and the only sound was the drumming of rain against the window. She was about to fall asleep when something woke her, she didn't know what. She lay very still and listened. She shivered when a low moan reached her ears.
No, not a moan. A howl.

She slipped out of the covers and ran across the cold floor to the window.

In the backyard sat a wolf. It howled mournfully, as if in pain. It must have smelled her because, although she didn't make a sound, it suddenly ceased its wailing and turned its face to her window. It stared straight at her with bright, hot eyes. Surely it couldn't see her, not with rain smearing the window and hiding everything behind a curtain of water, but it leaped to its feet and, in a few long strides, closed the distance between itself and the back door. She couldn't see it anymore, but she heard its big paws thump against the door, right beneath her window. She heard its claws scratch on the screen door.

She waited and listened. When the yard was silent except for the patter of rain, she raised the window and leaned out. The wolf looked up at her and howled. Its eyes burned gold when the
sky flashed in the distance. It scratched furiously at the door again.

She broke away from the window and ran to her mother's room. Cat stirred and sat up a little when she saw Brittany standing beside her bed.

"There's a wolf in the backyard," Brittany said. "He's trying to get in."

Strangely, her mother only smiled and opened the covers. "Come on," she said. "We don't have wolves in Kansas.
Except in zoos."

Brittany climbed into bed and pressed her body against her mother's. She felt Cat's fingers in her hair, which was wet from leaning out the window in the rain.

"Is your window open?" she said. Brittany answered "Yes."

Cat eased herself out of bed and, telling
Brittany to stay there, went to close the window. Brittany took the pillow and mushed it into a wad and snuggled into it. She resolved not to close her eyes until morning. She listened hard, but she could not hear anything like claws on a door. The wolf must have run off.

Cat returned and crawled into bed. She threw one arm over Brittany and drew her close. Her fingers were cold.

"It was just a dream," Cat said.

"No. It was real."

"Dreams seem real sometimes, more real than what's real."

"This wasn't a dream."

"We don't have wolves in Kansas."

"That's what you said."

"Sh. Go to sleep."

"I can't."

"Close your eyes. Sleep always comes, if you give it the chance."

Brittany closed her eyes, but she wasn't going to sleep. She couldn't possibly go to sleep with that wolf out there.

Within minutes her breathing was deep and regular. Cat listened, wide-eyed. Her mind buzzed. She imagined the Proost child alone in the woods, shivering, lost, alone, longing for his warm bed and a roof over his head. She had darker thoughts, too, but struggled to keep them at bay.

She
wrapped her arm around Brittany. She held her tight and listened to the rain thrum against the windowpane.

* * *

When Flo woke to the sound of howling, her first thought was coyotes. Then it occurred to her (because she'd been dreaming and was still only half awake) that it sounded exactly like old Boo, which was impossible. She decided that it must be the Clements' dog next door, the one that was always getting over the fence and making a mess in the yard. The dog was a tomato thief, too, in the summer. That alone was justification to shoot it on sight if the law had permitted.

Everyone in town, it seemed, had a dog.
Hunting dogs. Companion dogs. Watch dogs. Flo made the mistake, long ago, of mentioning in an off-handed way that a little house dog might be nice, something to sit in your lap while you watched television. Then Bill surprised her on their anniversary with a puppy he'd gotten from the pound.

He brought the fool thing home cradled in his arms. It seemed to be all legs and feet when he handed it to her, grinning. He'd tied a length of her good ribbon around its neck and cleaned it up a little, but it still reeked of the kennel, which is to say urine and worse. Looking at its paws the size of skillets, Flo could tell it was going to be a monster. When he asked her what she wanted to name it, she said, "Boo."

Boo turned out to be dumb as a box of rocks. Try as he did, Bill couldn't train the dog for hunting. Boo lacked the pointer's instinct. He was easily lured off the scent by anything that caught his nose, the deader and smellier the better. These days they would call it "attention deficit syndrome," but back then they called it "dumb."

When Alice was born, it was as if Boo discovered that his mission in life was to suffer abuse at the hands of this high-spirited little girl and return it with single-minded devotion. He tolerated the
ear-pulling and slapping and fur-grabbing she doled out in her toddler stage with never a display of temper. When he got tired of it, he sat on her. Just sat on her and pinned her to the floor until she got the message. When she became old enough to play away from the house on her own, he went with her, never wandering far, never letting her out of his sight for long.

For this devotion to her daughter, Flo tolerated Boo's wolfish appetite, his digging, his smell,
his this and his that, but she did not feel compelled to suffer in silence. Her strident complaints were enough to get on Bill's nerves until he snapped out, "If you feel that way, then I'll take him out to woods and put a bullet in him!" Of course he would do no such thing, but it hurt to hear the words.

Flo would sigh and say, "Well, I guess he's a good playmate for Alice
," and let the conversation drift to other matters.

The summer Alice disappeared, so had Boo. Even though it hurt like it was yesterday, it was twenty-five years ago, one or two lifetimes to a dog. The dog at the door could not possibly be old Boo.

So it had to be the Clements' dog, which had no redeeming traits whatsoever, and which was now expressing its fear of thunder by banging on her back door and scratching at the new screen, too stupid to remember that it had jumped the fence and was in the wrong yard.

Flo threw back the covers. She
marched into the kitchen. She flung the door wide, ready to slap her hands together and yell "Shoo!" at the stupid mutt. She stiff-armed the swinging door to the kitchen and it banged against the wall. She marched to the back door and threw it wide.

The dog was gone.

She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered out the screen door into the driving rain. Some dog, too big to be the Clements' Aussie shepherd mix, was leaping over the back fence. For the life of her, it looked like old Boo. The memories and feelings it brought back made her head swim. She gripped the door frame for support.

The dog disappeared, swallowed by the darkness and the rain.

* * *

The rain continued through the night. It pounded the town, batted the leaves off trees and ripped loose the diseased and over-burdened branches. Water flowed in the culverts and seeped into basements and topped up ponds. At the Marini
/Weaver house, rain pattered in what was left of Flo's summer garden, beating the dead flowers and puddling in the low spots. By morning it had washed away the muddy trail of paw prints that began in the garden and vanished somewhere deep inside the woods.

CAT MARINI
woke that morning to find sunlight pouring through the bedroom window and her daughter curled up beside her. She remembered the night's storm and Brittany coming to her bed with some story about a wolf at the back door. It had been a dream inspired by Brittany's overactive imagination, fueled by her older brother's teasing, but there was no point in trying to convince Brittany of that. The dream world and the real one merged in Brittany's mind. Her dreams had a vividness that Cat both envied—her own dreams were frustratingly vague—and feared because of their morbid nature. Brittany could recount them with startling clarity. Cat knew she should keep a journal of Brittany's dreams. She kept meaning to buy a notebook for that purpose. So why didn't she? All she had to do was put it on the grocery list. She made a mental note to do so.

She pulled on a sweatshirt and stepped into the upstairs hallway. She used the bathroom, weighed herself (up another pound), and splashed water on her face. She ran her fingers through her hair, brushed her teeth and swished the staleness from her mouth. She headed downstairs.

Her son Matt was already up watching Saturday morning cartoons. She tousled his hair and said, "Morning, Matt." She picked up the cereal bowl on the floor. The grainy residue at the bottom told her that he'd heaped more sugar onto the cereal than the milk could dissolve. It was going to be a bad afternoon if Matt was on the sugar again. He didn't yet sport the dark circles under his eyes that appeared when he was sneaking sugar at night, eating it by the spoonful right out of the canister, but maybe it was time to lock it up again. That was a hassle for everyone, but it was less upsetting than the rages he inflicted on the family when he was on a sugar binge.