The Summer We Lost Alice (21 page)

"Yes," Cat said, "here you are."

She wasn't sure what to think of Ethan's speech. The words were right. But he was a Hollywood showman, half a step removed from P. T. Barnum. Maybe he was sincere. What was the saying?
In Hollywood, sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake
that—

She looked at her empty cup.

"You want a dirty Martini?" she said.

"No, thanks.
I have to hit the road. I shouldn't have come. This business with the missing boy," Ethan said, "it brought everything to the surface. I had to do something. I picked the wrong thing. I'm sorry."

Cat took her cup to the sink. She wanted a drink in the worst way
, but she didn't want Ethan to see the giant bottle of gin, not if he wasn't going to share her vice. Maybe he was a drug addict. Wasn't everybody in L.A. a cokehead? She turned and leaned against the counter.

"You ever remember anything more about that night?" she said.

"Not really. Bits and pieces come back. I can still see her standing there, I hear her call out. Then she's gone, like a magician's trick."

"And what about
... after?"

Ethan shook his head.

"Memories go away. New ones take their place. It's so hard to know what's real. I was a kid, a crazy kid with an overactive imagination. I think back on it and I know that a good part of what I remember couldn't have happened, not the way I thought at the time. Brains lie."

Cat chewed her lip. She adjusted the faucet to stop the drip. She sat back against the counter.

"So what's with your girlfriend? The psychic bit with the bathroom."

"You noticed."

"Yeah. Where does she fit in?"

"Oh,
God. She ... she thinks she might be Alice. Reincarnated."

Cat laughed, her eyes searched the room.

"Give me a break," she said. "Really? How long did it take you to cook that story up?"

"It's true. I mean, it's true that she thinks that. It's kind of how we met. I'll fill you in."

Cat exhaled a sigh that seemed to last forever. She sat down at the table and picked at a spot where the veneer was coming loose.

"Just tell me one thing, Ethan," she said, "without dressing it up in ribbons and bows. Do you really think my kids are in danger? You think it's like before?"

Ethan shrugged. "I'm just following my nose."

"Your bloody nose."

"My bloody, bloody nose."

She looked at him, then at the walls, the ceiling. She ran her fingers through her hair, avoiding his eyes.

"I don't know, Ethan. I don't know."

Except that, if her children were in danger, if the killer was back, or if there was another one, she wasn't going to sit around and
do nothing, not this time. She wasn't a teenager any more. It would be better to face the threat square-on, whatever it was, and face it sober.

Right now, for some strange reason, she cared what Ethan
Opos thought of her. If his presence did nothing but keep her off the sauce, he'd earn his bed on the sofa. That nose bleeding thing was interesting, too. He had his own ghosts to lay to rest. He might be able to rise to the occasion, if push came to shove.

Then there was his girlfriend. Crazy as a loon with that reincarnation nonsense, but if she believed
it, she'd be on her toes. Another pair of eyes couldn't hurt.

"Maybe it's not so bad you're here," she said at last. "Come on. Sofa bed's already pulled out. I'll move Matt back upstairs. You and your girlfriend—"

"We can share."

"I don't know what
Mom's going to think, but that's your problem."

"I'll deal."

"I guess you'll have to. I guess we all will. With everything."

MATT SLIPPED OUT of his bed on the sofa. He'd grown tired of the voices droning from the kitchen. He felt the walls closing in on him. He wanted to go outside, to run along the dark sidewalks and past the sleeping houses. He looked out the front window and saw a police car waiting. He wondered why. Did they know what he was thinking? He felt trapped between the police car outside and the people in the kitchen.

He headed for the stairs. He ascended as quietly as he could.

He passed the bathroom. Light fanned out from under the door. The other stranger was inside, the woman. He tiptoed past.

He walked through
his mother's bedroom and eased open the sliding door to the balcony overlooking the backyard. He stared out into the darkness.

The evening air smelled like secrets. The breeze that stirred his hair had been places Matt could only imagine. It had twined through trees and ushered clouds and whistled through caves. It had slid on its belly over desert sands and swirled snow on mountaintops.
It had ruffled the feathers of baby eagles and extinguished the matches of sailors far out to sea. It had stolen balloons and floated bubbles. It was timeless. It had swept dust off the backs of dinosaurs, filled the lungs of pharaohs, and it would abrade the bones of the last human to fall on some distant, devastated plain. But tonight it was here, in this little town, fluttering curtains, rattling blinds, and caressing the face of a ten-year-old boy with a troubled mind.

Matt didn't understand why he did the things he did. He was as big a mystery to himself as he seemed to be to everyone else.

His sister, his mother, his grandmother—they all knew he was different. It was as if he had not been born into the family at all, but dropped through the chimney. Maybe he wasn't even a real little boy but a changeling born of goblins. The real Matt was living in the goblin world and feeling as out of place there as Matt felt here. There was the world, and there was Matt, and one did not seem to have anything substantial to offer the other.

Only his father had made him feel that he belonged, and he had left. He went away to war in a place Matt never knew existed until his mother showed it to him on the globe. The name meant nothing to him except that it was the place his father died.

And now two strangers had entered his life. One of them was named "Ethan," a name he'd heard spoken, but never kindly. Matt already knew that he hated him. What was he doing here anyway? Who invited him? Why couldn't he just stay home, even if it meant that Matt had to sleep on the sofa for the rest of his life?

Matt didn't want to share a room with his sister. Why couldn't he have his own room? There was a whole bedroom going to waste—
Alice's
bedroom, and she wasn't even alive anymore.

He wished he could take his sleeping bag out to the backyard and pitch a tent, but the camping
gear was packed away in the garage, up high where it would be a big deal to get it down. It had been forever since they'd used it. His father had liked to go camping, but his mother didn't. He would probably never get to go camping ever again. It wasn't fair.

He heard something rustle about in the yard, outside the reach of the back porch light.
Some animal, a coyote maybe.

He saw a rock in a planter, a smooth, river rock with the words "Bloom Where You Are Planted" carved in it. The rock felt good in his hand. It was a good throwing rock. He hurled it into the darkness. He must have gotten lucky with the throw because he heard a whimper and then whatever-it-was ran off.

Its footsteps made more noise than any of the small night creatures Matt was familiar with. He wondered if it could have been the dog that stole his radio-controlled car. If so, he hoped he'd hit it hard and hurt it. He hoped he'd hit it in the head.

* * *

Heather hesitated before flushing the toilet. She hated these moments in strangers' houses, not knowing the protocol, whether to flush or to conserve water or how noisy the toilet would be. She figured they wouldn't want some strange woman's pee sitting there. The whole reason she'd been directed upstairs was so the flushing toilet wouldn't wake the grandmother, so she pressed the handle. The resulting flush sounded to her ears like a hurricane blasting through the house.

Across from the bathroom was a bedroom, the door shut tight. Next to it, the door was open to reveal a children's room. A breeze came from that door, so a window was open. The air was cool and sweet. Why was the other room closed?

She placed her fingers on the door. A warmth crept up through her fingertips. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the room inside. She moved her hand to the knob and turned. She opened the door.

The room was dark, but her hand went easily to the light switch as if she'd flicked it a thousand times. She heard Ethan's voice in her head:
Doesn't mean a thing. Where else would the light switch be, inside the closet?

The light illuminated the bedroom of a young girl. There wasn't a shred of doubt in Heather's mind
whom the bedroom belonged to. The spirit of Alice dominated the room as surely as it had twenty-five years ago. A swirl of feelings dizzied her head. Heather felt as if she had come home after a long and discursive journey.

She recognized the crazy quilt bedspread with the large, decorative stitches. Patches of the quilt were threadbare, some were torn. It had been that way a quarter-century ago when it covered Alice in her sleep.

Heather circumnavigated the room, touching, touching, touching everything. Here is an old key. Of course Alice would keep it. Here's a ballerina from a music box, broken, the stump of an arm poised beside her head. Who would be so cruel as to throw her away?

Heather moved through the room with no sense of intrusion. Every object she held lay comfortably in her hand. She could almost picture where it was first discovered, whether unearthed in a garden patch or saved from a trash pile or received as a gift from someone who knew of her odd preoccupation
s.

So lulled was she by this feeling of familiarity that she did not even start at the sound of Ethan's voice behind her ear.

"It seemed to Alice that everything worth doing was done by people who lived somewhere else," he said. He joined Heather at the chest of drawers where Alice's treasures were spread out like evidence from a mystery story (wooden spool, arrowhead, bird's nest, rusting metal Band-Aid can of marbles). "Writers came from New York City, actresses from Hollywood, poets from Paris, singers from Liverpool, pirates from the Caribbean, invaders from Mars. No one who mattered came from Meddersville. Not anymore.

"But one time, long ago, the town was filled with strange people who'd traveled from all over the globe to settle in the midst of a wilderness. She saved photographs of them—tight-lipped men in their work boots, stern-faced women, dirty boys.
And their dogs, of course. There were always dogs in the pictures, skeletal, ugly dogs with their noses perpetually to the ground. The pictures are probably here, in one of these drawers, or in a shoebox under the bed."

"She didn't want to live back then, not really," Heather said.

"She couldn't," Ethan said. "It was a fantasy, and she knew it. She told me some of Uncle Billy's stories from those days. Stories about winter days so cold that gunshots froze in midair and weren't heard until they thawed out in the spring. About mosquitoes so large they carried off babies. Women giving birth in the middle of fields and, moving the newborn to one breast, getting on with the plowing. She called them beautiful lies.

"I remember sitting on that crazy quilt and playing with a bunch of plastic buttons that looked like diamonds. She told me that the buttons were jewels stolen from the King of Bohemia and smuggled out of the country in the soles of her great-grandfather's shoes. She showed me photographs of settlers and farmers and their families and made up histories for everyone. They'd all lived through terrible tragedy and undergone unspeakable hardship. Some stories had happy endings. Many didn't."

Heather pulled out a blurry photograph stuck in the frame of the mirror over Alice's dresser. The picture was taken at dusk in a rural garden.

"The backyard," Ethan said. The picture showed a maple tree, barely more than a stick in the ground, and a flimsy wire fence with an upper edge bent from children climbing from one yard to the next.
In front of the fence stood a young girl wearing a cereal box for a hat. Beside her sat a rangy mutt whose eyes glowed from the fire of a flashbulb.

"Alice and Boo," Heather said. "You took the picture."

Ethan looked at her in surprise.

"How could you know that?" he said.

Before Heather could answer, an angry voice scolded them from the doorway.

"
Grandma'll tan your hide if she finds you messing in here."

They turned to see Matt glaring at them.

"Sounds like you speak from experience," Ethan said.

The boy said nothing.

Ethan stepped toward him casually.

"You must be Matthew," he said.

The boy nodded.

"I'm Ethan."

"Nobody wants you here."

"Yes, I understand that."

They stared at one another for long moments. Catherine had been cold, but her son was absolute zero.
Hatred does not burn
, Ethan thought,
it freezes. Robert Frost got it right.