The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  “For heaven's sake,” he'd said. “That's for the laundry, Alice. The bed sheets, the towels, the—” He had shaken his head. “Don't believe anything the twins tell you, all right?”

  In the main hall of the hospital, Archie stopped to hand to Alice the bouquet of flowers Eli had picked for Helen. “I don't know that we'll actually be able to see Helen tonight, Alice. She's in a deep sort of sleep. But she'll know you've brought these for her when she wakes up.”

  Theo stood a few paces behind Alice. He had not said to Archie that he wouldn't go to the hospital—Alice thought he'd probably been afraid to refuse to go—but he had not said a word in the car on the way to Brattleboro. Alice, sitting in the front seat beside Archie, had noticed her father glance into the rearview mirror several times, watching Theo.

  “She's in a coma?” Theo perked up now at Archie's description. “Uh-oh. That's bad.”

  Archie looked over Alice's head at him. He looked surprised, but he didn't say anything.

  O'Brien met them in a poorly lit little lounge upstairs, where a lamp with a yellow sticky-looking shade listed on a rickety table. He looked exhausted, with deep, rubbery pouches beneath his eyes. His shirt and trousers were badly wrinkled. He accepted Archie's brief embrace, but he didn't speak to Alice or to Theo. He didn't even seem to notice that Theo was there, hanging behind Alice.

  Alice saw Archie register this lapse. He moved to put his arm around Theo as if to bring him forward to O'Brien's attention. But Theo refused to move any nearer, shrugging away from Archie's arm. O'Brien didn't seem to notice this either, but Archie looked at Theo, his back turned resolutely to the two men.

  “Why don't you let me stay here tonight?” Archie said to O'Brien.

  O'Brien shook his head. “I wouldn't sleep anyway,” he said. “It doesn't matter.” He noticed Alice finally and smiled wearily at the bouquet of peonies and hydrangeas in her hand.

  “Well, at least let me take you across the street for something to eat,” Archie said. “We'll only be gone a half hour, just long enough to get a steak and a baked potato or something into you. Alice and Theo can stay here. They can come right across the street and get us if—”

  O'Brien was shaking his head again, but at the mention of Theo's name he seemed to see him for the first time. He stared at him for a moment, but he didn't speak to him. He turned to Archie again instead. “I talked to Ann this morning,” he said. “She's grateful to you for keeping him. She wants to make sure it's all right if he stays—”

  “Of course, it's all right,” Archie said. “Of course, it is.”

  “She wants to come, but she can't do anything for her mother. She might just make it worse, and she's in no state right now … Sorry about this. About the timing of everything.” O'Brien paused abruptly, as if aware of needing to take care with his words in front of Alice and Theo. “She said he would come and get the boy, if it's inconvenient, but I think right now they need to—”

  “It's no trouble,” Archie said quickly. “You tell her just to take care of herself, not to—”

  “My dad could come get me.” Theo had turned around to stare at O'Brien. His chest was heaving with emotion. “Or they could come together. He could drive her. He always drives, because she doesn't like to drive, she hates to drive, it makes her nervous, so he—”

  O'Brien looked down at him. “That's enough, son,” he said after a minute and turned back to Archie.

  Theo's face turned red. Suddenly he made an indistinct noise and tore away, running down the hall. He was carrying his toolbox, which he'd insisted on bringing, and he ran awkwardly, the box banging against his thigh.

  O'Brien passed his hand over his forehead. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and then, more vehemently, “Oh, for Christ's sake.”

  Archie reached down and took the flowers from Alice. “Go and find him,” he said to her. “He doesn't know where he is. I don't want him getting lost.”

  O'Brien had turned away to look out the darkening window, one arm folded across his middle, a hand over his mouth.

  Archie put a hand on Alice's shoulder. “It's all right,” he said quietly. “I'll see you downstairs.”

  Alice looked at O'Brien's back. She didn't love O'Brien the way she loved Helen, but she thought she had been fond of him; he was usually funny and jokey, and she felt that they doted equally on Helen, a fact that united them. But he had been unkind to Theojust now; he had not even said hello to him. Alice knew she did not understand why O'Brien was angry with Theo, for it seemed to her that's what he was, but she had to acknowledge that Theo might have been truthful when he said that O'Brien didn't like even his own flesh and blood if it had been spoiled, as Theo said, by that drop of black blood. She turned away, without saying goodbye and without saying she was sorry, which she had planned to say. Right now, her sympathies were with Helen, not with O'Brien—with Helen in her deep and dangerous sleep, and with Theo.

  On the way home from the hospital that night, rain began to fall and lightning crackled across the sky, illuminating the curving road ahead and the steep hillside of trees on their left in flashes of unearthly white light. They drove along beside the river, and Alice watched the water appear out of the darkness, turbulent and black, in the flickering bursts of lightning. Thunder crashed overhead; Alice felt the force of the concussion in her teeth. Archie drove at a crawling pace, the windshield wipers sluicing buckets of water from the glass, and at last he turned the car down the driveway. The house was in darkness. The power must have gone out.

  Archie swore quietly inside as they felt their way through the kitchen in the dark. He knocked over a chair. “Boys?” he called. “James? Wallace?”

  “In here, Arch,” someone called. It sounded like Wally.

  The boys were sitting in the living room playing cards. There were beer bottles and a couple of candles on the table. Wally had another cigar going and the air was heavy with smoke.

  Archie stopped in the doorway, Alice beside him. He waved his hand against the smoke. “It smells like a goddamn tavern in here. Anybody think to close the windows upstairs?” he asked.

  “Got ‘em.” Alice saw James look up from his hand at the tone of Archie's voice, the rare anger there.

  “How's Helen?” Harry asked.

  “The same.” Archie ran a hand over his forehead. “No one located a flashlight, I suppose.”

  Wally stood up and brought Archie a flashlight. “You're late getting back,” he said. “I've already lost ten dollars to James.”

  Archie didn't say that they'd spent over an hour looking for Theo, who had been discovered finally up in a tree near where they'd parked the car. Alice knew Theo was in trouble for having sat up there on a branch, watching Alice and Archie looking for him up and down the street, calling his name. Finally, returning alone to the car because she didn't know where else to go, she had heard, coming from above her, a strange, birdlike warble, three treble notes repeated and then repeated again. When she looked up, she'd seen Theo's face, staring down at her, and she had felt a wave of relief. She had wondered irrelevantly how he'd managed to haul his toolbox up there beside him, because she could see it, too, wedged into a fork of a branch. She felt a surge of gratitude to Archie for not telling tales on Theo now.

  “Have you got another flashlight?” he said to Wally instead. “Alice and Theo can take one upstairs with them, and I'll go look for the lantern. They need to get to bed.”

  “I'll go up with them.” Wally flicked on his flashlight. Theo, caught in the beam, averted his face, cringing.

  Upstairs, Wally made a game of traipsing around, escorting Alice and Theo back and forth to the bathroom to brush their teeth, helping Theo find a T-shirt and a change of underwear. When he left Theo alone in the bathroom with the flashlight propped up on the edge of the sink, Alice tugged on Wally ‘s arm in the dark hallway. “He should sleep in with me again.” She shivered a little. “He's kind of afraid of the dark.”

  “Okay. I don't see why not,” Wally said.r />
  In her dark bedroom, Alice turned on her side in bed and looked across to the other bed where Wally sat, legs crossed, waiting for Theo.

  “You're leaving tomorrow, right?” she said. Yup.

  When a flash of lightning illuminated the window for a moment, Wally emerged in the strange light in black and white like an old photograph, the beaked bridge of his nose a dark gash down the middle of his face, his eyes wide. Alice lifted her hands quickly and made her camera. She pretended to take a picture; she knew she had just missed the burst of blue light, but the effect of the afterimage hung there in the air a moment, like fireworks blazing against the sky and then going out.

  “What are you doing?” Wally sounded amused. “Taking a pretend picture?”

  “Nothing.” She rolled over onto her back, putting her hands at her sides. She felt sticky and damp. “What's the matter with Theo's mom?”

  She heard Wally shift on the bed, the protest of the old bed-springs. “I think,” he said slowly, “that she's what they call depressed. Sad. Blue.”

  Alice thought about this. “What's she sad about?” she said finally.

  “I'm not sure,” Wally said. “That would be a complex question. There's a little marital difficulty, I think. It's like—” he paused, apparently thinking. “It's like being dead, when you're alive. There's medicine for it, but sometimes people have to go into the hospital.”

  “Is she in the hospital?”

  “I think it's being discussed.”

  At that moment Alice saw the beam of Theo's flashlight bouncing over the walls in the hall.

  Wally got up from the other bed. “Scoot over,” he said and lay down next to Alice.

  From downstairs she could hear the boys arguing over the card game, Tad's wild laugh, a babble of voices raised in complaint.

  “You're glad to be leaving, aren't you,” Alice whispered. Suddenly their world—with Helen so sick, and Theo's mother so sad, and O'Brien so sad and angry and mean—seemed bleak, a place one would long to escape.

  “No. Not really. I'll miss you,” Wally said. “I get sick of the twins, though. They get on my nerves. I get sick of James, too, because he's such a pompous asshole sometimes. Excuse me.”

  “I don't care,” she said. She sighed.

  Wally put out a hand and stroked her hair. “I get sick of everyone except you … you and Eli; you kind of can't get sick of Eli, you know?”

  Theo's light came ricocheting into the room.

  “Okay, pal?” Wally said.

  Beside her, Alice felt Wally's voice, rumbling and deep. It seemed to reach inside her, more a sensation than a sound. He smelled like cigar smoke and under that something that was both sweet and sour, like molasses.

  Theo climbed into bed, the light from his flashlight careening madly over the walls and ceiling.

  “When will the lights come back on?” he said.

  “You two are full of unanswerable questions,” Wally said.

  In the dark, Alice snuggled up against Wally. Theo being there with them had distracted her from the looming fact of the boys’ departure, especially Wally ‘s, but she felt it ahead of her now, like a tree fallen across the road. She wondered how Theo could stand being separated from his mother and father for so long. He hadn't even asked to call them on the telephone, which Archie surely would have let him do. Maybe, she thought, he was scared to call home, afraid of what he would find out if he called. Was his mother sad about being married to Theo's father, sad that white people, maybe even her own father, didn't like him because he was black?

  “I can't get down,” Theo had said from up in the tree at the hospital, and she had had to call Archie.

  He had come over and stood beside her, looking up into the leafy darkness at Theo motionless on his branch. Archie had stepped under the tree and held up his arms. “Let one leg down,” he had said to Theo. “You can step right into my hand here. No, wait a minute. Give me that box of yours first. There you go. Now come on, I've got you. I won't let you fall.”

  Alice had seen Archie's hand go around Theo's ankle and grip it firmly, his other hand going up to steady the boy at his waist as he came down. For a moment Archie had held Theo in his arms before letting his feet touch the ground, and Alice had felt a fierce gladness at seeing them together.

  She brought her knees up to her chest under her nightgown and ducked her head into Wally's shoulder, burrowing against him. It had been a long day, she thought. Then she remembered Monkey Man and Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter outside in the storm, the black disjointed pieces of Monkey Man hanging heavy and sorrowful, stiff as a soldier, his face shut up against the rain, and the flickering body of Old Soldier's Beautiful Daughter, leaning on the wind and reaching her insubstantial arms toward her silent companion.

  EIGHT

  WHEN SHE OPENED HER EYES, the room was full of hot, dusty sunlight. From outside she heard the boys’ and Archie's voices, the sound of car doors opening and closing. She lay still for a moment, registering these sounds, and then, when she realized what they could mean, she bolted out of bed and to the window.

  James and Wally stood talking with Archie beside the station wagon in the driveway, Archie's hand on the roof of the car. On the lawn, Tad and Harry pitched a tennis ball back and forth at each other. She could see only Eli's back where he was bent over the car's open hood, adjusting something inside. She ran from the room and downstairs.

  Wally was wearing an ironed white shirt and blue jeans. His hair was slicked back from his forehead in an old-fashioned style that made him seem suddenly years older to Alice. He looked up as she came tearing out the kitchen door. She ran across the wet grass in her bare feet and jumped into his arms, wrapping both legs around his waist.

  “That's my clean shirt you're getting grass all over,” he said, holding her.

  She put her cheek on his shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut.

  The plans had been rearranged last night after she'd gone to sleep, Wally explained apologetically. Archie had decided that James would be allowed to keep the car for the summer after all, so James would take Wally to catch his flight this morning, continue on to spend two days visiting a girl at her family's lake house, and then go on to his internship in Montpelier. Alice would not make the trip to see Wally off at the airport, after all. In fact, she had almost missed their departure altogether.

  “I'm sorry,” Wally said into her ear. “Sorry, Alice.”

  “Here. Give her to me,” James said, and Alice felt herself handed over. She did not open her eyes for the transfer. She pressed her face to James's neck, smelled the aftershave he liked and, underneath it, the kittenish smell she always associated with his skin.

  “How would you like a tour of the governor's mansion this summer?” James said, squeezing her. “Arch says he'll come for a weekend and bring you with him.”

  She nodded mutely. The shock of having nearly missed them—would they really have left without saying goodbye to her? It appeared that they would have—made her speechless with grief and bewilderment. Did they think she would make a scene, she wondered, and so they'd been too cowardly to wake her up? She had never in her life made a scene; had they not noticed her dignity at their departure last fall, when she had been proud of herself for not weeping? For a moment she was ablaze with anger, and when she squeezed James around the neck she knew it was too hard, a mean, furious squeeze designed to hurt. Then she felt Wally lean in close to her in James's arms. He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck, laying his cheek against her skin for a moment; she slumped in James's arms, defeated, the heat of tears under her eyelids. Then James tightened his arms around her, one more hug preparatory to letting her go, and for a moment she resisted being released, clenching her legs around his waist.

  But her feet never touched the ground. Tad and Harry swept in, plucking her shrieking with surprise from James and bearing her high over their heads, marching off over the grass with her held aloft as if she were a catch bagged on safari.

/>   “Roll her,” Harry said to Tad, and she screamed. They spun her once around, bounced her gently, spun her again. She flopped helplessly, her breath trapped in her chest, her nightgown billowing around her. The white shape of the house seemed to topple; the lawn and trees slid up into the sky.

  “There are cats that weigh more than this,” Tad said, jostling his end of her.

  “She's nothing but a bug,” Harry said.

  She screamed as they rolled her again, and while she screamed and laughed hysterically, she heard the sound of the car's engine starting up, the tires on the gravel. When they set her down, dizzy and breathless, the car was gone and the driveway was empty. She staggered a little into Tad, who put his hand on her shoulder. Harry crouched down beside her, his hands steadying her. It had been a conspiracy, she knew, all of them moving together, moving so fast that she hadn't even seen it happen. It was like when she was younger and stood in the middle of the lawn, her hands over her eyes, counting to one hundred while the boys and their friends scattered to hide. When she took her hands away, the world would be empty. The leviathan of the woods had swallowed them all.

  She sat obediently at the kitchen table while Elizabeth brought her oatmeal and sliced bananas in a blue bowl, toast cut nicely into triangles, a glass of orange juice. It was a thoughtful breakfast, Alice knew, the whole household, including Elizabeth, aware of how Wally and James's departure would affect her. She looked mutely at the toast, feeling suddenly, inexplicably, suffocated by its evidence of solicitude. Behind her at the sink Elizabeth busied herself with the dishes. Archie had kissed her goodbye outside and driven off to Frost. Tad and Harry had disappeared. Eli, too, had vanished. Alice had been left behind, she thought, to be fragile and touchy and unhappy.

  She was not hungry, but she picked up her spoon and began to eat automatically. Elizabeth did not tolerate wasted food. Whatever you didn't finish at one meal would be taken away without comment but then invariably served to you at the next. Sometimes it was far worse the second time around, and Alice had learned to clear her plate. The table was still cluttered with the dishes from the boys’ breakfast, the Blue Willow butter dish, a honey pot with the twisted silver spoon, the sugar bowl with the lid on which a small blushing shepherdess held her chipped skirts coyly in one hand, her crook in the other. Wally had stubbed out a cigarette in a little glass ashtray beside his plate.