The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  Theo, sitting in what was by now his accustomed place at Archie's right, said he'd had pneumonia, once. “Oh man, it was horrible,” he said, worse even than chicken pox, and he'd had chicken pox so badly that he'd even gotten sores inside his nose and ears and on his lips. “And you don't want to know where else,” he said. “The doctor said he'd never seen a worse case,” he announced cheerfully, twirling spaghetti onto his fork.

  “I'm sure he never had,” Archie said blandly, but Alice saw him exchange a smile with Eli across the table. It bothered her that sometimes Archie didn't seem to take Theo seriously. And it was patronizing and humiliating to smile over somebody's head like that, like you knew something that other person didn't know. She would never do that when she grew up, she promised herself.

  Alice knew that it was stupid to be jealous of someone who'd had so many sicknesses and injuries, so much apparent misfortune, but she couldn't help how she felt. Everything seemed to have happened to Theo. He'd broken his arm and his leg (on separate occasions), his nose and a finger (playing baseball), and once he had developed a cyst on his lower eyelid that caused it to start gushing blood during a holiday concert performance at his school. And yet, she did feel a little jealous. Theo's life seemed to have been full of drama, near-death experiences, and narrow escapes. She wasn't sure she believed him about everything he claimed to have suffered. But just when she thought he'd gone too far, he would provide a convincing detail, such as exactly how they'd had to cauterize the cyst on his eye, the smell of burning in the room when a hair accidentally got in the way.

  “Yeah, my whole eyeball filled up with blood. It was like I was looking out at the world and the whole thing was, like, drenched in blood,” Theo said. “It was cool.”

  Yes, Alice thought, squinting and trying to imagine it. That would be cool.

  It took them only one day's work during Kenneth's stay in the hospital to bring the final section of the rope walk up to the river's edge overlooking the falls. On the crumbling bank they lashed their last length of rope, an old clothesline that Elizabeth had discarded because of rust stains that ruined the sheets, to a tree whose gnarled roots lay exposed, curled like long fingers over the steep bank. From here, they agreed, turning from the shade of the trees to gaze out warily over the tumult of foam and cool spray, the rope bridge could be launched across the span of the water toward the far bank. It was certainly the most dramatic spot on the river, and despite her vague misgivings about the place, Alice agreed that it was a fitting final destination for the rope walk.

  “He should go somewhere, anyway,” Theo said, “not just round and round in circles. That's boring.” This, he said, throwing out his arm to indicate the rushing current, the flat horizon edge of the top of the falls, the mist that hung in the air beyond, this was a destination. “He can just stand here and listen to it, feel the spray on his face,” Theo said, closing his eyes and striking a pose that reminded Alice of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, a framed poster of which was in her classroom at school.

  Yet the problem of the bridge defeated even Theo. What they needed was an elephant, he fretted, a giant, sure-footed creature that could trudge across the river carrying one end of a bridge to the far shore. Probably it couldn't even be accomplished without an elephant, he complained, and as Alice was no help in providing information on how they might procure the services of an elephant, they would just have to wait for Kenneth to recover before proceeding any further. Surely Kenneth would be able to help them overcome the temporary defeat of the engineering dilemma before them. Theo had drawn a beautiful bridge: two parallel spans, cables of heavy braid, with a section patterned like crossed bootlaces in between. “I know it'll work,” he said. “I just don't know how.”

  They had labored all summer on the rope walk, and when they looked back at it from the river now, they could see it winding away through the trees, an innocently meandering path illuminated here and there where the sunlight fell through gaps in the leaves. To Alice it looked magical, like something made by elves or fairies.

  The season was at its fullest, the leaves on the trees large and silky, brushing softly against one another, the flowers bowed under their own weight, the heavy air itself like a colossal heart or set of lungs, beating and breathing around them. Archie let Alice and Theo sleep outside sometimes, and she and Theo lay in sleeping bags on the front lawn under the stars, staring up at the night sky.

  “Can you feel it?” Theo whispered.

  “What?”

  “The earth, turning under us.”

  Alice closed her eyes and concentrated. “Yes!” She opened her eyes in surprise.

  “Me, too.” Theo was silent for a moment. “Whoa,” he said. “It's kinda scary.”

  On a Friday morning toward the end of the third week of Kenneth's stay in the hospital, Archie announced at breakfast that he would drive Alice and Theo in to the hospital to see him that evening.

  “I have meetings all day today but I'll try to get home by six tonight,” he said to them at breakfast, finishing his coffee and pushing back from the table. “Make sure you're ready to go.” He looked over his eyeglasses at Theo. “That means shoes,” he said pointedly.

  Alice, who knew that one of Theo's sneakers, which were his only pair of shoes, had been missing for four days, reminded herself to look in the boys’ rooms to see if there might be an old pair of shoes that would fit Theo; he had very big feet, wide and flat as flippers.

  Theo had appeared unconcerned when his shoe had gone missing, and he did not seem worried now, despite Archie's warning. He ate his pancakes that morning with the zeal and steady concentration that characterized his behavior at all meals. At breakfast one day he had eaten a dozen pieces of cinnamon toast and fifteen sausages; even Eli, who had the biggest appetite of the MacCauley boys, though he was the smallest, had been impressed. Theo ate with a contented, trusting cheerfulness that somehow made Alice feel sorry for him; it was so easy to make Theo happy, she thought, and yet his happiness also seemed so much in peril, assailed on all sides by the many things he found to worry about, not to mention the parents who seemed to have forgotten about him altogether.

  One day, when they'd been out all afternoon on the river fishing and working on their fort, Alice had discovered a crumbly granola bar in the pocket of her sweatshirt.

  “Here,” she'd said, offering it to Theo, who had recently announced that he was starving; he was often starving. “Look what I found in my pocket.”

  Theo's expression had been rapturous. Then he had hesitated. “You don't want it?” he said.

  Alice had shaken her head.

  The granola bar had disappeared like a fly into the mouth of a lizard; one flick of the tongue and it was gone.

  “That was good.” Theo had looked sad. “You have the best granola bars here, Alice.”

  “They're just regular granola bars,” Alice had said. And then she felt mean, as though she were draining the moment of pleasure for him.

  But Theo had shaken his head. “We can't get your brand in New York,” he'd said. “I don't know why not. I mean, you can get fruit from Bora Bora in New York, and they sell special magical medicinal roots from the Chinese rain forest on the sidewalk, so why not these granola bars?”

  In all their weeks together, Alice had not directly asked Theo about whether he wanted to go home to New York. Partly she was worried about unleashing a torrent of homesickness he might have been keeping bottled up inside; partly she did not want to think about when he would have to leave, a future that seemed so bleak to her, she could not exactly believe that it would come true. Yet it still seemed strange, strange and troubling, that Theo rarely mentioned his parents, that since that first night, when he'd said he missed his mother, he had never confessed to homesickness of any kind. But Alice could not forget the fact that just as O'Brien and Helen had dropped out of their lives, and Theo's parents seemed to have ceased to exist, Theo did have parents. He had parents, and he lived in an apartmen
t, and he went to school. He had a whole life in New York that she tried to imagine from the stream of information about television shows and ethnic takeout restaurants he described. And one day soon, for now it was August, and there were only a few weeks left before school would begin again, he was going to have to go home. Sometimes, she caught herself indulging in a fantasy in which she and Theo ran away together, piloting a boat downriver like Huck and Jim, or living up in the woods in a cleverly designed shelter Theo would build. In these fantasies, she surprised herself by taking on domestic duties that felt thrillingly exotic to her—he would hunt, she would cook. But the idea sometimes also made her feel a little embarrassed around Theo. She did not really think of herself as a girl, per se.

  Finally, though, perhaps because now she sensed that Theo's affection for Grange and the MacCauleys—and even Alice herself—was sufficiently genuine and compelling, she summoned the courage. “Do you want to go home to New York?” she said.

  Theo licked the inside of the granola bar wrapper. “Ha! And get blown up by a suicide bomber? Get gassed on the subway? Drink poisoned water? Open an anthrax letter? No thanks, man! It's dangerous in the city.” But then he fell silent. He busied himself baiting their fishing hooks. When he finished, he handed Alice her rod, onto whose hook he had impaled a worm, a task from which Alice shrank. “I don't know,” he said. “Not like it is,” he added obscurely.

  “What do you mean?” Alice said.

  “I want to go home when my mom isn't sick anymore,” he said. “When my dad is happy, and she's happy, and they're not going to get a divorce.” After a minute, he said, “They've forgotten about me, anyway.”

  Alice looked over at him from her perch on the rock beside him. The way he said it, his tone of voice, made her feel hot with anger on his behalf.

  “They haven't forgotten you,” she said. She felt a little disloyal to Theo, insisting on this, because his parents certainly seemed to have forgotten him, and Alice had thought the same thing of them, that they must be heartless, terrible people to leave their boy with strangers all summer, to make only the occasional phone call. But defending them in this instance seemed better than agreeing with him.

  Theo gazed into the water for a minute or two. Then he made the sound of a phone ringing and held up his hand to his ear theatrically, his pinkie lifted. “Hello? Mom? Dad? Hey, wow, you guys don't have to call every day, you know! Yeah, I'm great. Thanks for asking. I'm having a great time. Okay, be seeing you.”

  He pretended as if he were snapping a cell phone shut and stowing it in his pocket. Then he jumped. “Ooops. Got it on vibrate.” He pretended to extract the phone again and answer it. “Yeah, Mom! Hey! Thanks for calling, man. Yeah, I really miss you, too. Okay. ‘Bye.”

  Alice didn't know what to say in the face of this heartbreaking sarcasm. How did you explain parents who didn't seem to worry about their child, who were content to have him gone all summer long? There wasn't anything she could tell Theo, she realized. Instead she leaned toward him until her shoulder touched his, and then she bumped him gently. When he didn't respond, she nudged him again, a little harder, and finally he nudged back. “Stop,” he said.

  “Stop,” she said, imitating him.

  “Stop it!” he whined in complaint.

  “Stop it!” she whined back.

  “A-lice!” he said warningly.

  “A-lice!”

  “You are so stupid,” he said.

  “You are so stupid,” she said back, automatically.

  He smiled then, but he said nothing, shaking his head, lips pressed together maddeningly.

  In his hospital bed, Kenneth, Alice thought, looked as fragile as a leaf that had fluttered toward the ground and come to rest on the white sheets. He was frail and pale, his skin shiny, stretched tight. He wore a patch over one eye, and the other eyelid drooped sadly. There was an IV in his arm; where the needle entered his flesh was a disturbing wad of cotton padding and tape.

  When Alice and Theo came to the door of the room, Kenneth was sitting up in bed, wearing a gray NYU sweatshirt. He held an enormous book close to his face under the bright light of what looked like a sun lamp; Alice recognized it from her friend Sarah Kiplinger's house, where in the winter Sarah's mother lay like a corpse under a sunlamp in her bedroom, with cotton balls over her eyes.

  Alice knocked lightly on the open door.

  Kenneth looked up over the page. For a moment his expression was apprehensive, with the disoriented uncertainty of someone who steps into the shadows after being in the bright sun. Alice remembered her birthday party, when she had felt that he was watching her as if through a periscope. That he was seeing her, but not directly with his eyes.

  “Alice,” he said then, as if it had been years. “Thelonius.”

  The happiness in his voice made Alice feel guilty. He sounded as though he thought they had forgotten him. She stepped forward to offer the heady-smelling bouquet of late summer lilies. “We brought you flowers from Eli,” she said. Theo shuffled behind her in an old pair of Wally's moccasins, still hanging on to her shirt annoyingly. She reached behind her to disengage his hand, but he wouldn't let go.

  Kenneth rested the book he'd been holding facedown on the sheet beside him and took the flowers from her, inclining his face into the trumpets like a man bending to drink deeply from a pool of water. Alice almost reminded him that he would get sticky pollen all over his face that way, but then she stopped. Maybe he wanted it, she thought. Maybe he wanted to roll around in pollen until he was covered with it. The hospital smelled awful, a nauseating odor of bleach and ammonia insufficiently masking other smells underneath, smells whose origins she did not want to think about too closely. She'd been breathing shallowly through her mouth ever since they'd stepped inside, and now she felt a little light-headed. The sunlamp by Kenneth's bed emitted a faint, disconcerting buzzing sound.

  Theo tugged on her shirt. She glanced at him.

  With a gesture, Theo indicated Kenneth, whose shoulders shook silently as he bent over the flowers. He had turned his face away from them.

  What should we do? Theo's look said.

  Alice turned back to Kenneth helplessly. “I'm sorry we didn't come before,” she said. “Archie only said today that we could come, now that you're better.”

  That their arrival, or maybe just the sight of the beautiful flowers, had so unsettled him, made Alice feel desperate. She looked away across the shallow, inconsequential ranges of Kenneth's thin legs under the sheet, over the old radiator, and out the window. The evening sky had turned a deep, glowing indigo; how fragile the planet was, awash in the sky, the spangled galaxies and whirlpools of solar systems all around them. How small she was, how small everyone was, even taken all together. Yet the blue of the evening sky was also the kind of color that made you want to spread your arms and soar into flight. She gazed out the window, remembering from her flying dreams the delicious sensation of tilting on currents of air. The world was full of these sorts of invitations, she realized, vertiginous doorways into itself that were revealed magically in midair like stones rolling away from before the mouths of caves. You wanted to eat the world, and swim in it. It was that beautiful.

  Kenneth coughed and lifted his wet face. Alice looked down at him again, her attention returning to the room. On the sheet beside him was a box of slides, some of them spilled onto the blanket. A rust-colored blotch stained the sheet. In an open box of chocolate-covered cherries, most of which were gone, a few had been smashed open, the cordial seeping out onto the ruffled white paper cups. Alice looked everywhere but at Kenneth's face. She did not want to look directly at his face.

  Kenneth leaned over and took a Kleenex from the table beside the bed, blew his nose.

  Then Theo stepped out bravely from behind her. “Guess what?” he said. “We finished the rope walk!” He extracted a wad of papers from his pocket, his drawings for the rope bridge. “But we've got a little problem,” he said.

  Kenneth was still holding the bo
uquet. Alice stepped forward to take the flowers from him.

  Kenneth blew his nose again, looked up, and smiled shakily at Alice, an apology. “I don't know what's the matter with me,” he said. “I'm a mess.” Then he drew a breath. “At the nurse's station, in the hall,” he said. “They'll give you a vase. Let's put these beauties in water, shall we?” He turned to Theo. “I would love a problem,” he said. “I would love any problem of yours. Come and show me.”

  Alice thought that she could not have sat down on the bed beside Kenneth at that moment, but Theo plunked himself down unconcernedly and began unfolding his drawings and spreading them out on the sheets. “Well, we've hit the falls,” he said. “You know, Indian Love Call? And we want to build you a rope bridge that goes over the river. See? Here.”

  “It goes… where?” Kenneth had taken one of Theo's drawings and brought it close to his face, reaching up to tilt the sunlamp in order to see better. His nose almost grazed the paper, as if he were inhaling it or tasting it. His posture, his hungry, almost ardent exploration of the drawing, reminded Alice, as she stood there with the flowers in her arms, of her own yearning into thin air from the edge of her windowsill, the way she inclined toward that bright, busy emptiness, seeing there the crack in the rock, the secret fissure in the wall, the door hidden by ivy that would open, if only you could find your way through, into a secret garden, the dusty backstage and marvelous winding catwalks of the world, the echoing pavilion in which the clanking, whirring, brilliant machinery of the universe was stored.

  “It goes right up to the edge, at the top of the falls?” Kenneth said.

  “The very, very edge,” Theo said.

  In the hall, Alice stopped at the door and looked in both directions. She could hear the muffled sounds of music and voices from television sets behind the closed doors. At the end of the hall in one direction stood an empty gurney pushed up against the wall. She thought she and Theo had passed the nurses’ station when they had come up on the elevator, and so she turned in that direction.