The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  As she had sat there that sad night on Archie's lap in his study, her face against his chest, part of her had wanted to jump up and run away. That night, after she had gone to bed, she had gotten up again and found her wooden sword; thus armed she had leapt back and forth from bed to bed in her room, plunging the sword into the darkness, whirling savagely on her enemies until she was sweating and trembling.

  Archie bent to pick up Theo's suitcase. “Why don't I take these rocks upstairs?” he said. He rested a hand briefly on Theo's head. “I'm sure your grandmother will be all right,” he said. “Not to worry.”

  Theo did not move from his place by the door. His demeanor of that afternoon had changed entirely. He stared at the floor.

  Confused, Alice leaned back instinctively to find Wally. Where was he? When she felt him there behind her, she reached up to hook her arms in his. He lifted her off the floor for a moment before setting her back down, and she realized that she had stopped breathing for a minute. The air filled up her lungs again, a relief.

  “Want to unload that box?” Wally said to Theo, gesturing at it.

  Theo shook his head and looked at the floor.

  “Well, come on and sit down,” Wally said. “The cocoa chef will fix us up in a minute.”

  Wally frog-marched Alice over to the table and heaped her into a chair. Alice hooked her legs around the chair legs and reached out to toy with the salt-and-pepper shakers. After a minute, Theo crossed the room and sat down across from her, his toolbox on his lap.

  Alice looked at Theo. “Did you see the hail?” she asked.

  Theo looked down at his toolbox. He didn't say anything.

  Alice hesitated, confused. “Once Archie found a live frog in a hailstone,” she offered at last.

  Wally returned to the table with mugs. “That's what we like to call a tall tale, otherwise known as bullshit,” he said. He looked down at Theo's bent head. Alice glanced up at Wally, but he was still watching Theo.

  James came over to the table with the steaming saucepan and a ladle and began filling the mugs. “You know what?” he said. “I remember your mom, Theo. We thought she was the most beautiful girl in Grange.”

  “Really?” Alice thought this was interesting information. She reached out and pulled her mug closer.

  “Definitely,” James said. “I mean, she's older than me—how old is your mom?”

  Theo's face turned red. “I don't know,” he mumbled.

  James and Wally exchanged a look. “Well, she must be, maybe, thirty,” James said. “Something like that.”

  “I think she's thirty-three,” Theo said.

  “That'd be about right,” James said easily. Alice felt a sudden rush of warmth for James. He was so good at making conversation.

  “She looks a lot like your grandmother,” James said. “Watch it, it's hot.”

  Theo had lifted his mug to his mouth, but he set it down quickly.

  “So, she took a fall, huh?” James went on. “The rescue squad came?”

  Theo nodded.

  “They'll fix her up,” James said. “Don't worry about it, okay?”

  “I don't even know her,” Theo said. He didn't look at any of them. “I've never been here before. I only came because my mom is sick.”

  James and Wally exchanged another look. “Well, we're glad you're here now,” James said easily.

  Archie came back into the room, pulling on a jacket. “I'm going down to the hospital,” he said.

  James turned around in his seat. “Anything we can do?”

  Archie stopped at the table. “I'll call,” he said. He looked down at Alice. “You see that Theo has everything he needs, Alice.”

  Alice nodded.

  Archie went out the back door, and they listened in silence to the sound of the car heading up the lane. Theo bowed his head over his mug.

  A moment later, Tad and Harry banged in through the back door. “Where's Archie going?” Harry said.

  Wally looked up at them. “Later,” he said, and gestured with his head toward Theo.

  Tad and Harry stopped, staring. Theo's shoulders had begun to shake. He bent his head miserably over his mug.

  Alice stood up. After a moment's hesitation, she went around the table and stood by Theo's chair. “Hey,” she said. “Let's go find the dog.”

  Theo brushed his arm over his face, but he got to his feet, hoisting his toolbox.

  Alice turned to Tad and Harry. “You never told us his name,” she said. “The dog's name. What's he called?”

  “Lucille,” said Tad. At the same moment, Harry said, “Sweetums.”

  “Sweetums Lucille,” Tad said.

  Alice looked at them in astonishment. “He's a boy dog,” she said.

  “Yeah, we know.” Harry shrugged. “What can you do? That's what it said on his tag.”

  “I have a dog at home,” Theo said suddenly. They all turned to look at him. Alice felt a little freezing inside her; there wasn't any dog at Theo's house, she thought. He'd been too afraid of this one; he'd even been afraid of Lorenzo.

  “His name's Ray,” Theo said. “He's named for a boxer my dad knows.”

  “Yeah? Your dad knows a boxer?” Tad sat down at the table.

  “My dad boxes. He's a really good boxer.”

  Wally stood up suddenly. “Let's go find that dog,” he said.

  Alice woke up sometime in the middle of the night. She came fully awake instantly, so awake that she wondered for a moment if she were dreaming. She sat up in bed. Outside, the moon framed in her window spilled bright light over the lawn. Theo had been put to bed in the guest bedroom over Archie's study. The furnace had been turned off already, but the night had grown steadily cooler; Alice had helped Tad set and light a fire in the old fireplace in Theo's room. The window seat under the dormer window was heaped with needlepoint pillows made by Alice's mother, a collection of wildflowers native to New England.

  Theo didn't seem to have brought any pajamas with him. He had opened his suitcase on the floor by the bed—a huge powder blue case with tape on one corner—bent over it secretively, and extracted a T-shirt, striped like the one he had worn at her party. Then he had followed Wally, who took him off to show him where the bathroom was so he could brush his teeth. Alice had sat cross-legged on the foot of the bed in the guest room, waiting, and watching the fire. Archie still wasn't back from the hospital. She hadn't wanted to ask Theo what had happened to Helen; she had sensed not to. She'd been to the hospital in Brattleboro a few times, once to have her arm set when she'd broken it, once to have her head stitched up. The gray floor of the halls there had been highly polished, treacherous like water or ice. Her shoes had squeaked as she'd walked across them.

  When Theo came back into the room, he climbed immediately into bed and lay down, facing the fire.

  “Ten minutes,” Wally said, sticking his head around the door frame. “Then you guys have to go to sleep.”

  “I have a fireplace in my room at home,” Theo said after Wally left the room,

  Alice kept her eyes on the fire. She didn't believe this; it was the same as the boat and the dog, she thought, and she began to feel hopeless. How could you believe anything this boy said? Then he surprised her by saying, “It's boarded up. A fireplace is dangerous. If there was a fire in our building we'd have to go down the fire escape to get out.” He sat up in bed. “You don't have a fire escape here.”

  Alice glanced at the window. You could climb out of it into the fir tree and get down if you needed to. “There's the tree,” she said. She pointed at the window. “You could get out that way. It's okay.”

  Theo lay back down and turned his face into the pillow. After a moment he spoke again in a muffled voice. “These smell like their house,” he said.

  “Who? Helen and O'Brien's?”

  Theo didn't answer right away. “It was scary,” he said then, and Alice realized he meant whatever had happened to Helen. She felt that freezing, breathless sensation come over her again.

&nb
sp; “She fell off her chair,” Theo said.

  This description gave too exact a picture of Helen's suffering. Alice stared at the dancing flames. Helen always came to parents’ night at school with Archie in the fall, even though she wasn't any blood relation to Alice. Alice would write letters to both her father and to Helen, welcoming them to her desk and telling them what she'd been doing at school, leaving them in a folder with a picture she had drawn. She was happy to be able to write two letters, when her classmates only wrote one. Helen would leave her a little bouquet of flowers in ajar and some chocolate kisses and a note that said she was proud of Alice. The note was always signed with lots of Xs and Os.

  “He came in and yelled at me and got down on the floor with her,” Theo said, speaking from the depths of the pillow. “Then he called the ambulance.”

  Alice didn't want to hear any more. She put her chin in her hands. Her head felt heavy, and her stomach had begun to hurt. She had never heard O'Brien yell. She had only heard Archie raise his voice a couple of times, both times at Tad and Harry, once for crashing the car, once for not coming home one night.

  “I want to go home,” Theo said.

  Alice looked over at him. When Eli had left with the other boys last fall to go off to college, Alice had gone around gathering talismans from each boy—a scrap of paper on which one of them had scribbled a telephone number, a comb left behind in the glass in the bathroom, the statute of a frog playing a violin made out of cork that had sat on Wally's bureau, James's edition of Stephen Spender's poems—and laid them under her pillow along with an old compact of her mother's, the powder caked and hard, its little mirror silvered. Elizabeth had taken them out from under the pillow, but she had put them on Alice's bedside table, setting up the frog statue on top of the book.

  “Archie will take you,” Alice said. She was sure of this; Archie would not want a child to suffer. And Theo was obviously worried about his mother being sick; she must have been very sick to send Theo here. But why couldn't his father have taken care of him? This was a question to which Alice could not provide an answer, but she was sorry anyway about the prospect of Theo leaving, and about Helen, and even about Theo's mother being sick.

  Alice wanted to sweep it all away, to go back to the afternoon, when she and Theo had made plans for the dog—she couldn't call the dog Sweetums Lucille; that was just Tad and Harry, teasing them. Theo had talked about the dog delivering mail in a wagon, about building a house for it. He had seemed to ignore the fact that Tad and Harry would be taking the dog back with them to Frost. Theo had wanted to know about swimming in the river, about going down the river in a raft and making a camp, about staying out all night. He had so many ideas, things she hadn't even thought about doing. A wave of helplessness came over her. Helen and O'Brien were too old to entertain a boy all summer; he would have come down to the MacCauleys’ house every day. They could have played in the attic, in the barn, in the woods. He was the kind of boy she didn't think she would get tired of.

  “I miss my mom,” Theo said.

  Alice did not miss her own mother; she longed for her, a distinction she understood was significant. She thought it would be terrible to miss your mother and not be able to see her. And she had never been parted from Archie, so she did not know what it would feel like to miss him. But she could imagine it. That was a new and terrible thing; now she could imagine it.

  Theo had turned his face into the pillow again. He pulled the blanket over his head. Under the quilt, he drew his legs up and away from her.

  Alice had never been away from home by herself except occasionally to a friend's house to play for the afternoon. There was always somebody at home, Elizabeth or Archie or one of the boys. There was always someone there to take care of her. Helen did a wonderful thing with her fingertips on Alice's forehead when Alice's head hurt. Archie ran a fist up and down her spine in an absent way when she went to stand beside him and lean against his shoulder. Even Tad had picked her up once when they had found a possum, probably rabid, its sickening tail dragging in the dust, lurching down the driveway. Sometimes Elizabeth read to her from Reader's Digest, even though Alice could read perfectly well herself; they would sit in the armchair in the kitchen by the fireplace, Alice perched on the arm of the chair and leaning against Elizabeth, while Elizabeth read the jokes to her, her finger following the words, or the articles about dogs rescuing people from burning buildings, or about mirages, how someone had found water in the desert. Elizabeth loved Reader's Digest.

  Alice glanced over at the bundle of Theo buried in the blankets. The fire hissed in the fireplace, making a quarreling, squeaking sound; the little faces in the flames grimaced and drew their lips back over their teeth. She heard Wally coming back upstairs. “I can go get the dog,” she whispered. “He could sleep in here with you.”

  But Theo didn't answer her.

  When Wally came to the door of the guest room, Alice slid down off the bed. At the doorway she paused and Wally took her hand. She turned around. “Good night,” she said.

  At first Theo didn't say anything. Then he surprised her again by sitting up in bed. “It's the end of your birthday,” he said. “Your birthday's almost over.”

  The day had held so many strange events, the strangest of them all, she thought, this boy who was sitting up in bed now looking at her. For a moment she remembered the feel of the hail on her arms, the way it had filled up the birdbath. “You'll always remember this day,” Kenneth Fitzgerald had said to her, and she thought that it was, truly, as if he had known something about all the events to come, the hailstorm, and Helen, and now Theo, here in her house, the wind moving the leaves of the trees outside like a restless, unquiet, unhappy spirit. What kind of man was Kenneth Fitzgerald to know such things?

  Suddenly Theo scrambled out of bed and opened his suitcase again, his back to them. “Wait a minute,” he said. Then he turned around, his fist concealing something. “Here.” He put the object into her hand.

  It was a rock, a smooth white stone crossed with a helix of winding blue veins.

  “It's a good luck stone,” Theo said. “I have a rabbit's foot, so I don't need this.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said. As Wally turned her to lead her away, she looked back at Theo. Standing by the bed in his striped T-shirt and underpants, he raised a hand to her in salute.

  • • •

  Later that night, Alice swung her feet over the edge of her bed and listened. Something had woken her. After a minute she heard voices from downstairs. She crept across the floor to her door and pulled it open a little wider with her fingertips. A cool draft swept over her shoulders, making her shiver. Archie was in the hall downstairs. It must have been the car that had woken her.

  She heard a second set of footsteps, then a third and a fourth. She saw Tad and Harry's red heads pass though the hall below. Wally came out from the living room and sat down on the stairs, his black hair ruffled up in the back as if he'd been sleeping on the couch.

  “He's going to stay there,” Archie was saying to James. “I'll go back in the morning.”

  James said something she couldn't make out. She pushed the door open a little wider.

  “I don't know,” Archie was saying. And then he said something else she couldn't make out. He moved out of the hall toward the living room, the boys following. Alice could hear their voices in the living room, louder now, but too muffled for her to distinguish their words.

  Alice stood up and peeked around her door. The upstairs hall was empty; someone had left the light on in the bathroom at the head of the stairs, and a light was on in James and Wally's room, though the door was closed. Lorenzo, looking like a sea lion in the dark, huge and obdurate and whiskered, was stretched across the doorsill to Archie's room. He lifted his head when Alice stepped into the hall. She was halfway to the stairs when she heard Archie in the hall below; she darted back to her room, but she heard his heavy tread on the staircase.

  She was in bed in a second, but Archie came t
o the doorway a moment later. “Why aren't you asleep?” he said.

  She sat up in bed. “Did you see Helen?”

  Archie came in and sat down on the bed. “I saw her.”

  She wanted him to say something else, something reassuring, but he didn't. “Can I see her?” she asked.

  Archie didn't say anything for a minute. “Not tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe later.”

  Alice lay back down. Archie put a hand on her forehead, as if she were sick and complaining of a fever.

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I hope so.”

  Alice closed her eyes. That was what grown-ups said so they didn't have to give you the bad news right away, she thought. It wasn't a lie to hope that things would turn out in a particular way, even if you knew they wouldn't. Maybe this was what had been lying ahead at the end of this day, she thought. Helen dying. She felt for a moment as if she were falling, as if she had been pushed over a building's edge.

  She thought of all the people who would be sad about Helen dying. O'Brien, of course. And he wasn't the sort of person who could take very good care of himself, Alice sensed. And Ann, their daughter … losing her mother, as Alice had lost hers. And Theo, even though he didn't know Helen very well. Then the image of Helen as a little girl on her canes, her brave bright face looking up from between the nuns at the camera, came to Alice, and she thought she would start to cry, so she opened her eyes instead and spoke. “Is Theo going to stay here?”