The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  Theo, whose initial fear of dogs had worn off entirely, trailed around behind Lorenzo as if after a fascinating and rare species, especially once Tad and Harry had taken the three-legged Sweet-ums Lucille back with them to Frost, and Theo could no longer lavish concerned attention on him. He liked to pretend he was a dog, getting down beside Lorenzo on all fours with his bottom in the air to play, following him around the yard and lifting his leg behind Lorenzo; it was exhausting to be a dog, Theo reported to Alice, who sat on the porch with her chin in her hands, watching Theo pretend to pee on the hydrangeas. He also liked to lie next to Lorenzo on the floor in the living room and mimic Lorenzo's poses, especially the one in which Lorenzo balanced on his spine, front paws curled on his chest and hind legs spread wide like a shameless exhibitionist's, tongue lolling in loony fashion out of the corner of his mouth.

  Eli, observing this behavior one day, had stopped to look down at Theo and poke him with the toe of his shoe. “You are one weird little dude, Theo,” he had said, but Alice had been pleased at his affectionate tone. And Theo certainly seemed to amuse Archie, who listened to him with one eyebrow raised and a smile at the corner of his mouth, as if he were about to laugh.

  Lorenzo lay now against Archie's closed bedroom door like a rug that had been rolled up and dumped there; Alice could imagine how Archie had had to push him out with his foot over the wood floors. When Lorenzo did not want to move, and he especially hated being evicted from Archie's bedroom, he acted as though he had been lobotomized, his eyes staring straight ahead into a middle distance, his limbs heavy as stone. He opened his eyes now as Alice appeared in her doorway, peeping around the doorframe. His head and tail rose reflexively, preparatory to an enthusiastic and noisy greeting of tail banging. One of the only commands Lorenzo ever obeyed was to flop instantly to the floor, eyes shut, if you pointed your hand like a gun at him. Tad and Harry had taught him this trick, and it worked every time, proving the interesting scientific point—the twins said—that dogs could recognize and interpret the symbolic representation of a deadly weapon.

  Alice was glad to see Lorenzo now. She felt strangely as though she had been away for a long time; she had missed him. When she knelt down and opened her arms, Lorenzo heaved himself up, stretched and yawned like a lion, and then came across the hall to her, bumping his shoulder into hers and nearly knocking her over, his tail wagging furiously. She put her arms around him and kissed his salty-smelling head.

  With Lorenzo beside her, his collar in her fingers, Alice stepped into the soft pile of the Oriental runner that ran the length of the upstairs hall alongside the stairs. Its deep colors, pumpkin and garnet and glossy yellow, emerged in the fragile early light like something gradually being refreshed by water. Along the carpet's patterns of waterways and paths, roads and runways, cul-de-sacs and dead-ends, the younger Alice had built elaborate block villages, scooting model cars down the alleys or shepherding herds of plastic horses over the center ground of medallions in a game she'd called Capture the Ponies, in which Alice played a boy with a bewitching affinity for wild horses. The beautiful creatures ran from everyone who tried to capture them, except Alice, into whose outstretched palm they obediently laid their soft muzzles. This had been a very private game; given the circumstances of their mother's death it was understood that none of the children would ride horses, and Alice, though she had harbored a passionate love of horses for a while, had known never to ask for pony lessons.

  She went quietly downstairs. In the back-porch mudroom she found a pair of her shorts crumpled up on the floor in one of the cubbies and a T-shirt of Eli's, which she pulled over her head, discarding her nightgown. From the pantry she got Lorenzo a dog biscuit and herself a Pop-Tart and then, holding the door open for Lorenzo, she went outside.

  The grass was silver with dew, a cool landscape of dusky pearls. In the boxwood bushes next to the back steps, huge spiderwebs beaded with dew stretched like fantastic gilded nets over the leaves. Alice set out across the lawn in the morning's fragile light, her feet leaving dark prints behind her in the cold, wet grass. She crossed the gravel driveway and headed for the path to the river, but at the edge of the woods she stopped, shivering; wet grass clippings were plastered up to her knees, and goose bumps had raised themselves on her arms. She turned around. Her footprints across the lawn, coming to a stop at the driveway, were clearly visible. It looked as though something ghostly had followed her from the house and waited now invisibly at the edge of the grass, a shimmering substance in the early morning air. She had the uncanny feeling that when she turned around again, whatever it was would pick up and come along behind her, silent and dark and helplessly, intimately bound to her.

  There was a set of twins in her class at school, and Alice had always felt envious of them, two red-haired boys with blotches of identical freckles across their identical faces. At one point, Alice had felt strongly that she herself must have had a twin— perhaps one who'd died or been given away. She had asked Archie about it.

  He had seemed startled by the question, even a little upset. “Good God, Alice. No, of course not,” he'd said. “Who gave you that idea? Tad?”

  She had not known how to explain to him that she had found the idea tantalizing, that it was a wonderful thing to imagine two of yourself, so that you would never be alone.

  • • •

  The morning opened up like a kaleidoscope around her, bird, feather, leaf, flower, branch, treetop emerging as the sun rose. The sky itself was like a moving river overhead, clouds with bruised-looking undersides pouring in. Alice thought she could smell rain coming, maybe even hail again; there was that burnt, sulfurous edge to the air that she remembered from the afternoon of her birthday party. By the water, the poplars flashed the pale undersides of their leaves, a flurry of white against green. Alice climbed down to the river where she began hopping along on the rocks at the edge, Lorenzo crashing along beside her through the underbrush on shore, nose to the ground. Now and then, out of old habit, Alice stopped to squat down and examine the rock pools for minnows, stirring the water with a stick and watching the sand in the shallows swirl up into the clear depths like smoke. At one point, a heron rising from the banks across the shore and flapping off downriver startled her. Theo had probably never seen a heron, she thought, and she realized at that moment that she had not been alone without him, except from time to time in the house when they puttered in separate rooms, since her birthday weeks before. It was sort of boring, being by herself now. And then, realizing that, she had to reckon again with the fact that one day, no matter what she wanted, Theo was probably going to have to leave. A sullen, unhappy weight settled in her chest. No one cared what she wanted, she thought. Archie didn't care. She fished moodily in the shallows with her stick.

  Lorenzo heard the noise before she did, lifting his nose from his investigations in the weeds to go utterly still, head turned toward the woods. The leaves of the trees rustled wildly in the cool wind that had come up, a shuffling overhead like conversation in a crowded room, and the trunks of the slender saplings by the water's edge bent toward the ground.

  Glancing up and noticing Lorenzo's alert posture, Alice turned to follow his gaze into the moving trees.

  Lorenzo began to bark. Alice stood up.

  Baying wildly, hackles raised, Lorenzo had taken a warning position, feet planted wide.

  Alice started to call him; he was scaring her, barking like that.

  She thought then of her own dark footprints in the wet grass, the baleful, invisible presence she had sensed behind her earlier as she had left the house. A shiver ran over her. Her childhood seemed to have taken place long ago, in an unreal and summery haze of gold and silver. Today, the invisible companion she had once imagined for herself was no longer the benign imaginary twin of her childhood, the friend who kept her company when all the others had gone away, the playmate who was completely known to her because she was unable to imagine anything other than her own simple self. Now this intimate stranger had
become something tenebrous and unpredictable and divided, with injuries to nurse and a brooding sensitivity, a being both familiar to her as herself and at the same time completely mysterious. For the first time in her life, Alice longed to escape from herself, to shed her own skin. This new person who was dragging her into the future was not at all whom she had imagined becoming, the heroic figure who balanced on the bowsprit and faced the waves, color in her cheeks and wind in her hair. This new self was restless, unhappy, frightened, a crybaby. Alice hated her.

  She started over the rocks toward Lorenzo, who was still barking wildly. She slipped and almost lost her footing entirely. Then, just as she recovered her balance, a flock of birds lifted abruptly from the trees at the river's edge in sudden alarm, and Alice, ducking instinctively as though the flock might veer into her, stumbled again and this time went down with a hard jolt into the water, skinning her elbow on the rocks, her backside painfully hitting the jagged edge of a boulder, one leg sinking into the river up to her thigh. She scrambled, arms flailing, to avoid falling in altogether. The water was breathtakingly cold, so cold she could feel it like an ache in her ears. All around her, the river's sound was huge.

  “Alice! Hi, Alice! Are you okay?”

  She looked up to see Theo, fighting his way through the brush, coming in her direction.

  Recognizing him, Lorenzo bounded joyfully, tail wagging, through the trees toward Theo.

  Alice struggled out of the water and sat down on the rock, reaching for her aching foot. She'd knocked her ankle hard going down into the pool. It was the cold that was making it hurt so much, she thought, but something else lay behind the heat that was suddenly present behind her eyelids, the tears that threatened.

  “Alice! I've got a picnic!” Theo called.

  He came to the water's edge, scrambled over the rocks toward her. He was hauling a grocery bag and his toolbox.

  “Did you break your leg?” His face was wet with perspiration and streaked with filth, his T-shirt smeared with dirt and grass stains.

  She stared up at him. Had he been crying?

  “I woke up and you were gone,” he said then in a different tone, standing over her, and in his voice she heard accusation and understood that he had felt deserted.

  “Ijust went outside,” she said. She'd been worrying about him leaving, she thought, and now he was mad at her?

  He set down the bag and his toolbox, balancing them with studied carefulness on a rock. Then, businesslike, his face composed, he turned around. “Let me see your foot,” he said. He sat down next to her on the rock and lifted her leg gently, experimentally, as if he were testing its weight. “I've got some first aid, you know,” he said. “I mean, I couldn't operate on you or anything, but I know how to tell if a bone is broken.” He peered down at her ankle, touched it gently with his finger. “Does this hurt? No? Good. How about this?” He manipulated her ankle in the other direction. “No?”

  He patted her ankle, set her foot back down on the rock without looking at her. “I think maybe it's just a slight sprain,” he said. “You can lean on me, if you want to.”

  Alice reached down and probed her foot. “It's okay,” she said.

  Theo looked away in dignified silence. The wind ruffled up his hair, pressed his T-shirt to his back.

  “It might be just a little weak,” Alice said after a minute; this concession to his vanity as a medical expert was easy enough to give. She didn't like seeing him hurt, anyway. “What did you bring for the picnic?” She was starving, she realized.

  He turned back to her, gratitude washing over his features. “Apples,” he said, fishing around inside the bag. “Bread. Jelly. I forgot a knife, but we can use my screwdriver.”

  “I'm hungry,” she said.

  “Well, you're lucky I came along,” he said. He gave an indulgent sigh. “Without me, Alice, you'd be in a homeless shelter, you know that? Up a creek with no paddle.”

  He handed her an apple and she took it and rubbed it against her T-shirt. Then, just for a moment or two, she leaned her head against his shoulder. Theo stayed still, his hand inside the grocery bag. The water rushed past them, silver braids between the rocks. Alice felt very tiny, sitting there on the rock, her temple pressed against Theo's bony shoulder. She felt the force of the water behind them, watched it rushing away before them.

  “You know what?” Theo said. “This is the happiest I've ever been.”

  Alice sighed and then sat up and took a bite of her apple. “Me, too,” she said.

  The rain held off, but the air was electric, the sky a thunderous, cinematic landscape of purple cloud towers and theatrical shafts of light. They decided to hurry and go work on the rope walk until the rain began, as it surely would at some point. The wind had grown stronger over the morning, irregular gusts giving way to a steady beating. Alice felt excited, reckless, a little giddy; dramatic weather always did that to her.

  When they reached the point in the woods near the Fitzger-alds’ where they had stopped work, Theo began immediately hacking away at the underbrush, but after a desultory sweeping of the path, Alice gave up and walked ahead into the trees, wanting to see what lay ahead, where they were going. After a few minutes fighting through the brush, she stopped and listened. The wind moved the leaves high in the trees above her head with a heavy rushing sound, as though an army massed overhead, but she could hear something else now, too.

  She could hear the falls of Indian Love Call, she realized; now she was absolutely certain that that was where they had ended up.

  She hadn't realized they had come quite so close; she would have said they were farther upriver than that. She glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, she could hear Theo whacking away energetically at the weeds. Alice pressed on into the trees, bending branches to slip through them. Then, abruptly, as she skidded down into a rocky, root-strewn gully and clambered up its far side, she saw the white emptiness of sky straight ahead. A moment later, she was standing at the edge of the high bank, looking down over the falls and the foaming basin of Indian Love Call. The water rushed past, disappeared over the edge where a hazy blur hung in the air. The air in front of her face was full of cold spray, her ears full of the falls’ thunder. Alice reached out and grabbed a sapling close at hand.

  She wanted to back away, to retreat before Theo came to find her and saw the falls for himself. Archie had said this was a dangerous place, and now she knew, as she had not known before, that she ought to obey his injunctions about the falls, that she ought to have nothing to do with them; she could hear the dead Indian bride's terrible wailing for her lover, the sound of the falls themselves like the rush of your own blood in your ears.

  But it was too late. Theo was behind her and then next to her, and when she put out her arm to hold him back from the edge, his eyes were round with awe.

  In the next instant, thunder crashed overhead, a brittle fork of lightning lit up the sky, and the rain began.

  Instinctively they pulled back from the falls into the shelter of the trees.

  “C'mon,” Theo shouted, and they ran back through the woods toward the Fitzgeralds’, Lorenzo galloping along, panting beside them. In less than a hundred yards, they'd reached the rope walk, and even in the chaos of the storm Alice registered with a thrill of pride how successful they'd been. The path was completely clear; as she ran, she reached out every now and then and grabbed at the rope, its reassuring presence beside her.

  They broke through the trees at the edge of the Fitzgeralds’ lawn and raced across the grass and up the steps to the terrace, but the lights were out in Kenneth's room. Alice pressed up reluctantly against the glass; remembering the time they'd found Kenneth on the floor, she felt afraid to look inside. But when lightning cracked overhead, offering in the glass of the French doors an instant's weird reflection of her and Theo's streaming faces, the phosphorescent half-moon of lawn behind them, and the dark edge of the woods behind that, she turned the handle and they pressed inside. Lorenzo, terrified of the storm
, scrabbled on the floor in his haste to get inside and nearly tripped her.

  They stood just inside the doors, water from their drenched clothes, their streaming hair and faces, pooling at their feet. There was a pillow on the daybed, its white pillowcase standing out in the dark like a slab of ice or stone.

  Lorenzo trembled against Alice's calves. “Kenneth?” she called. She put a hand down to comfort the dog. “Good boy,” she said. “It's okay.”

  “Where's Kenneth?” Theo said, behind her.

  “I don't know.” Alice called again in the echoing darkness. “Kenneth?”

  There was no reply. After a minute Theo said, “Do you think she's here?”

  “I don't know,” Alice said, feeling irritated. It was unnerving, no one answering her. “How should /know?”

  There was another pause, and then Theo spoke again, his voice an appalled whisper. “Maybe she kitted him!”

  At Alice's feet, Lorenzo shook himself, spraying water. Alice winced.

  “I think she's a witch,” Theo said.

  “She's his sister,” Alice said. “She wouldn't kill him. God.”

  “Haven't you ever heard of sistercide?” Theo said. “I saw this episode of Unsolved Murders once. That's when sisters kill their—”

  “Stop it,” Alice said. “She didn't kill him.”

  It was raining so hard outside that the water bounced off the stones of the terrace and noisily struck the French doors as if little stones were being flung against the glass. They couldn't walk home in this, Alice thought. They'd have to call Archie. But where was the phone? There was usually a cordless one in here somewhere. She began to tiptoe across the room.

  “Hey! Where are you going?” Theo said anxiously.

  “I'm looking for the phone,” she said in a loud whisper. “We need to call Archie.”

  But there was no sign of the phone. Alice looked back over her shoulder through the French doors, but it was dark as night out there, and the rain beat hard against the glass, streaming down the panes.