by Carrie Brown
Miss Fitzgerald brushed past them. In the doorway she gave a little cry when she saw Kenneth on the floor. She knelt beside him, exactly as Alice had done.
Alice and Theo watched from the door; Alice felt Theo reach over and take a bit of her raincoat sleeve in his fist, hanging on. She realized how hard her heart was beating. The deep, almost restful quiet that had dropped over her seemed to be breaking up, like fog burned away by the glare of sunlight. She was aware of the musty odor of their raincoats; they smelled like the closet under the stairs, like old leather and tennis balls and rubber boots. She was aware of her blood prickling in her fingertips and across her cheekbones and under her arms.
Miss Fitzgerald stood up and hurried to the telephone on the table. Alice felt instantly hot with shame, with the foolishness of her error. She should have remembered the telephone. She knew all about calling 911 in case of an emergency. She knew about how you were supposed to get down on the floor—stop, drop, and roll—if you caught on fire, not go running away. She knew that if you got caught in an undertow you were supposed to allow yourself to be carried out to sea where eventually the current would release you, even though your most powerful instinct would be to fight to return to shore. She knew that if you got caught in quicksand, the same logic applied: stay utterly still, don't struggle, hardly even breathe. She knew not to drink salt water, even if you were perishing from thirst. She knew that if you had been lost for days in the woods, you shouldn't suddenly eat a huge meal when you were rescued, because it would be too much for your body. It seemed that in order to save oneself, again and again, one had to fight one's own instincts, one had to gain mastery over all the urgent imperatives of flesh and blood. One had to be less of oneself, in order to try and preserve that self.
Miss Fitzgerald dialed with trembling hands and held the receiver to her ear. Her eyes slid to Alice and Theo in the doorway, and she deliberately turned her back to them, her green cardigan hanging crookedly over her shoulders like a small, lopsided cape. Her voice sounded breathless, but she gave her name, her address. She started to list the medications Kenneth took, but someone on the other end of the phone must have stopped her, because she fell silent then, answering in worried-sounding monosyllables. When she hung up finally, she put her hands to her cheeks for a moment, staring at Kenneth on the floor. Then she knelt beside him again, stroking the hair from his forehead.
A terrible sympathy rose in Alice; her throat tightened painfully. Miss Fitzgerald looked so old and pathetic, her ugly worried face bent over her brother. But Alice took an involuntary step backward when Miss Fitzgerald, as if sensing Alice's scrutiny, looked over her shoulder at Alice and Theo still riveted in the doorway. Alice was reminded of the feral cat that lived in the MacCauleys’ barn, the calico that could be seen carrying its newborn kittens like dead mice between its teeth, moving them from location to location. She saw the cat sometimes, going out hunting at dusk; it always seemed to be looking over its shoulder. Alice left milk for it in a saucer, when Elizabeth wasn't looking.
“What mischief were you up to?” Miss Fitzgerald said. “What happened?”
Alice stared back at her, speechless.
But Theo suddenly came to life beside her. “We just found him like that!” he said. “We didn't do anything! Alice saved his life!”
On the floor, Kenneth gave a little moan.
Theo tugged hard at Alice's sleeve. Let's go, he mouthed, his expression furious.
Alice's feet felt wooden, but she allowed Theo to pull her along the edge of the room toward the French doors and the terrace beyond. Outside, she registered the rain on her face again, the wet grass sticking unpleasantly to her legs as she ran across the lawn. Theo wanted to keep running, but at the street Alice heard the siren and grabbed his sleeve to pull him back. They huddled down in the tall weeds under the eaves of the garage, watching while the fire truck and the town ambulance pulled up to the curb. Three men and a young woman—Alice recognized her from the YMCA in Brattleboro where she handed out towels and checked people's membership cards—ran up into the house. The front door was still wide open. Rain fell inside on the carpet, leaving a dark, spreading spot.
“Let'sgo,” Theo said again. “C'mon. C'mon, Alice!”
But Alice shook her head. It seemed wrong to leave, as if they would be abandoning Kenneth. They squatted under the eaves, the rain dripping miserably on them.
“You think somebody got him?” Theo said at last.
Alice glanced at him from under her hood.
“I mean, maybe he's a spy,” Theo said. “He kind of seems like a spy. Maybe terrorists got him.” Theo stood up and peered on tiptoes through the cobwebby window into the garage. “There's a car in there,” he said. “Maybe it's got a car bomb in it.” He looked down at Alice, his face miserable with indecision and fear.
Alice tugged him down beside her. “He's an artist,” she said. “He just fell down because he's sick and he's got AIDS or something. He's not a spy. There aren't terrorists here, anyway.”
Theo crouched beside her on his heels. “They're everywhere,” he said.
Alice glanced at him again. His skin looked yellow under his hood.
“You just don't know that, because you don't live in New York,” he said. “Terrorists are everywhere. Don't you watch TV?”
Alice didn't want to tell him that Archie didn't really ever let her watch TV. If there was something important happening in the world, Archie watched the news in his study; sometimes, caught up in front of the screen with a drink in his hand in the evening, he didn't notice when Alice came in quietly and stood there watching, too. She'd seen the footage of the planes flying into the World Trade Centers. She had been struck by the scary silence that had accompanied the images, especially the silence during which the minute black shapes of people's bodies—at first she had been puzzled, and then disbelieving; what were those things?—fell through the air, descending toward an invisible ground. There was hardly ever silence on TV, she'd noticed, and the strangeness of it during those moments had frightened her almost more than what she could see with her eyes. She'd seen the men pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, too. That was supposed to have been an important moment, she knew, but the scale of the event had seemed too small to be truly impressive; Alice had been to football games at Frost where there were more people. And once she'd watched part of a show about how the Americans were trying to find Osama Bin Laden, who was hiding in a cave. The description of the cave—with bedrooms and pantries and roads and tunnels and computers and storerooms and garages—had been fascinating. Yet often it seemed to her that she was hearing the same news over and over again in a vaguely boring kind of loop: there were car bombs being set off in one city or another, a dozen people, or a hundred people, killed. Bad storms, kicked up by global warming, circled the globe like evil dervishes. The summer ice in Antarctica was melting. The air was dangerous to breathe. Usually, when Archie finally noticed her standing there staring at the screen, he would stand up and turn off the TV. “Enough of that,” he'd say. “Let's go watch fireflies.”
Still, she couldn't really claim to watch television regularly at home. “We see a news show at school in the morning,” she said to Theo now instead.
“That's watered-down news for kids,” Theo said. “You didn't see the real thing. You didn't see the planes going into the World Trade Center.” He shook his head, like a jaded adult. “Unbelievable.”
“Yes, I did,” Alice said quickly. “I saw the pictures.” Had Theo actually witnessed this sight? She felt the need to defend herself suddenly against what seemed like accusations of a criminal innocence. She looked at the pictures in the newspaper, and she even read some of the articles, or parts of them. It embarrassed her that Archie didn't allow her to watch television and that she had to amuse herself with reading, or colored pencils and paper, or holding a fishing pole baited with a marshmallow over the river, or practicing the piano, or just playing outside. At school, when kids asked her
if she'd seen a particular show, she just shook her head mutely, smart enough not to lie and say she had. She'd seen TV at other people's houses, of course, and lots of movies—the wonderful one about the pig, Babe; she'd liked Toy Story and Hook and The Princess Bride and Beauty and the Beast. So it wasn't like she had never even seen TV. She'd been mesmerized in what had felt like a helpless way by the bright succession of images on the screen. But now it seemed that she had to apologize for having been denied regular access to this medium, this important conduit for information. She didn't think terrorists were everywhere; why would they be everywhere? How could they be everywhere? But even the YMCA in Brattleboro had a terrorist attack alert level sign in the lobby, though the paper it was printed on was kind of old now and torn at one edge; the warning level had been on yellow for as long as Alice could remember.
Maybe Theo understood something significant about the world that she did not, she thought now. Maybe everyone, everywhere, was at risk all the time. Maybe just over the mountains, or around the sharp corner of the road that hid what was ahead, there were people coming who wanted to do harm to her, not because she was Alice, but just because she was the enemy. It could be completely impersonal, being a victim. You might not have any opinions at all, you might not care one way or another about something, but still you would be struck down where you stood just because, just because you were accidentally allied with something that someone else hated. This was a new version of harm, she realized, a new and helpless version. In her nightmares she always knew her enemy—the monster who reappeared in her dreams from time to time, crunching down the street and uprooting telephone poles; the musketeer with a sickening rapier; even the ghoul rising from the icy marble of the morgue—and she understood that her enemy knew her, too, had been aiming specifically for her. It was a contest among declared foes, and her honor and bravery were at stake. But with terrorists? Well, it was so … random. And you never knew when to expect them, so you would have no opportunity for heroism before you were blown to bits, like all those people waiting in line in bakeries, or at a bus stop, or crossing the street. It didn't matter if you were ready for something, because how could you know what to be ready for, and when? At school they'd sent each child home with instructions for how to put together an emergency preparedness kit, and she'd had to beg Archie to make even a token gesture of compliance. Finally she had gone ahead herself and packed an old briefcase of Archie's with bottles of water and some dog food, granola bars, and batteries; she'd spent her own allowance money on garbage bags and duct tape, because the instructions had said you could tape up your windows with them against a chemical attack.
“No one is going to hurt you, Alice,” Archie had said, putting on his glasses and reading over the instructions. “We live in the middle of nowhere. No harm will come to you here!” But he'd sounded exasperated rather than comforting.
Suddenly Alice and Theo heard voices. Two of the men appeared in the doorway carrying Kenneth on a stretcher. Miss Fitzgerald, holding a coat over her head, came out after the stretcher and was helped into a car. Alice saw Miss Fitzgerald's cardigan sweater fall from her shoulders into a puddle on the sidewalk. Nobody stopped to pick it up.
In a moment, the street was empty. The rain fell quietly on the grass and the black shiny surface of the road and into the fragile, heavy leaves of the trees that lined the street, their branches meeting in the middle to form an arch of watery green, submerging the street in a soft light. Water slid from the eaves of the garage in a curtain beside Alice and Theo, dripping into a groove like a long grave that rain from previous storms had worn in the earth. Where was the cook, Sidonnie? Alice wondered vaguely. Had she already left, gone back to New York?
She hiccupped unexpectedly. There was a wrenching in her chest, and with it the tears began, surprising her, bubbling up out of nowhere. She had thought Kenneth was dead… and perhaps he would die. And yet she hadn't been afraid to touch him. Through her crying she wondered at that; she hadn't been afraid then, only now. She had always thought she would be afraid of a dead body. Her teeth began to chatter.
Theo watched her for a minute and then scooted closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He lowered his face to rest his forehead against her own, a strangely grown-up gesture, like an adult comforting a child. Suddenly he was the one reassuring her.
“We'll get to the bottom of it,” he said. “Don't worry.”
For a moment Alice wavered. She knew—or, one part of her knew—the truth of the situation, which was that Kenneth Fitzgerald had fallen because he was sick. No one had crept out of the shadows to do him harm. But Theo's conspiracy theory, in which he and Alice were cast as detectives or spies, in any case as something larger and more potent and mysterious than they were, had the tempting quality of illusion to it; it wasn't real, and that, at least for right now, was its charm. She could believe it, if she wanted to, she thought; indeed, she could feel it happening, as though she were on a sled teetering at the crest of a long, steep hill, and the relief of this filled her with nostalgic longing, though for what exactly she could not say.
“Don't cry, Alice,” Theo said, and his voice was sympathetic. “Don't cry.”
They stayed like that for a while, hunched down side by side in the weeds, Alice snuffling. The rain fell off the eaves in beautiful silver chains.
• • •
When they got home they were soaking wet and Theo's teeth were chattering. Elizabeth drew them separate baths upstairs and sat on the side of Alice's tub in Archie's bathroom to pour water from a cup over Alice's head. Alice told her what had happened at the Fitzgeralds’.
“Tip back your head,” Elizabeth said. “Eyes closed.”
“She doesn't like me,” Alice said.
Elizabeth didn't say anything for a minute. “She was upset,” she said at last. “You know how she is.” Elizabeth smoothed a hand over Alice's head, pushing away the soap. Alice heard the sound of tires on the driveway, and Elizabeth glanced out the window. “Okay. There's your father,” she said. She straightened up and put a hand to the small of her back. Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. “I'm going to fix supper,” Elizabeth said. “You stay in here. Soak.”
When Alice came downstairs at last, Theo was already in the kitchen. She could hear him regaling someone with the afternoon's events. When Alice entered the room, Archie was standing at the kitchen table. He had the day's mail in his hand, but he had stopped in his perusal of it, apparently to listen to Theo. Wally was sitting at the table, his chin in his hand. Eli stood just outside the open kitchen door on the stone step, supervising the dog Lucille as he nosed around in the wet grass. Through the doorway, Alice could see his feathery tail waving as he loped back and forth, some scent under his nose.
The boys looked up when Alice stepped into the room.
Theo stopped talking. He looked around a little guiltily. No one said anything at first, and Alice wondered what Theo had told them.
“Well. Let's have supper,” Archie said after a minute. “Someone go call Tad and Harry, please. And where is James?” He tossed the mail into the copper bowl on the fireplace mantel and pushed his glasses up onto his head. “Mr. Fitzgerald is all right, Alice. He just had a dizzy spell and fell and gave his head a knock. He's already been sent home from the hospital.”
“What did you tell them?” Alice said to Theo when they were sent off to wash their hands for dinner.
“Nothing.” Theo soaped his hands vigorously under the tap.
“You told them something,” Alice said.
For a moment, Theo resisted. Then he said, “I just told them how you almost gave him mouth to mouth.”
Alice, standing next to him at the sink, stared at him, appalled.
“Well, you almost did,” Theo said. “You would have.” He looked over at her. “I couldn't have touched him,” he said. “But you weren't afraid.”
“I was afraid,” Alice said quietly. She looked away from him to hold her hands under the water, a
nd she watched the soap drain off her fingers.
Theo reached across her for a towel. “That's the hero part,” he said. “Being afraid, but doing it anyway. That's what my dad says.”
Alice thought about the mysterious black man who was Theo's father. She hadn't seen all that many black people in her life. The custodian at her school was black. There were a few black kids at the elementary school, though none in her grade. She'd seen more pictures of black people than real black people themselves, photographs in National Geographic, for instance.
Standing beside her at the sink, Theo pushed her playfully with his shoulder.
Alice looked up and regarded their two faces reflected in the mirror.
Theo grinned at her.
After a minute, Alice pushed him back.
The hospital in Brattleboro was a gloomy brick Victorian building with capped turrets and gingerbread trim painted a dark brown. It had been used as a TB sanatorium for a time; many of the rooms, even those on the second and third floors, had private porches where the patients had sat out in the winter air, wrapped in blankets. Behind the building, jutting up out of a grove of spruce trees, a smokestack stood out grimly against the blue twilit air. Tad and Harry had told Alice when she was younger that the smoke coming out of it was from the dead bodies being burned in the basement morgue. She'd asked Archie about it one day as he was driving her home past the hospital after her swimming lesson at the YMCA.