by Carrie Brown
The explorers had worn only moccasins on their feet, Alice thought, as she had pulled on her snow boots and her coat, tied a scarf around her neck, pulled down the flaps of Wally's hat over her ears.
An enormous lightheartedness came over her the minute she stepped outside and quietly pulled the back door closed behind her, dispelling the fear she had felt lying in bed a few minutes before when, wide-eyed, she had clapped her hand over her clock, the alarm set to go off at midnight. Had she actually fallen asleep? She couldn't be sure.
The snow was beautiful, a benevolent fall of light through darkness. She tipped up her face and held out her arms.
When she crossed the lawn and started up the lane, she became aware of movement in the woods beside her—a silent herd of white-tailed deer, twenty, maybe thirty creatures in all, moving alongside her a few feet into the trees, their heads down, searching for something to eat. A few paused, lifted their heads, and turned to look in her direction and then moved on parallel with her as she walked uphill. When she looked back for them after a few minutes, they were gone, but she felt comforted, knowing they were nearby, coughing into the trees, their white tails flickering.
No one would be able to see her tracks in the snow. She would walk along the road—it was too deep in the woods to make good progress there now, anyway—but if anyone came by she could just duck into the trees or behind a parked car. Still, no one would be out at this hour, and not on a night like this, she thought, even though it was so beautiful, the snow twinkling around her, the breathing silence. Why didn't people come out- side in a snowstorm and walk around? Falling through the streetlights, coming on endlessly from somewhere high in the sky, the snow was so lovely it almost made her want to cry. She wished Theo were with her.
At the houses along the street, paths along the front walks had been shoveled, and cars had backed out of garages and left tracks in the driveways, but already these were filling up with new snow. There were electric candles in the windows, wreaths on a few front doors, Christmas lights wound around porch railings or through the branches of trees in the front yards. In the falling snow, the scene was tranquil and lovely; Grange looked like a perfect storybook town, Alice thought, in which nothing bad could ever happen. No terrorists or suicide bombers or psychopaths or serial killers, no tidal waves or hurricanes or floods or avian flu. And yet once, she remembered, startled, all this land had been covered with an inland ocean through which great dinosaurs had stepped and whales had swum.
There were no Christmas lights on at the Fitzgeralds’. The car was parked in the garage, but the garage doors had been left open, probably so Miss Fitzgerald wouldn't have to shovel away the snow to open them, Alice thought. It would be hard, if you were an old lady, to shovel all that snow. Alice stared up at the house. Miss Fitzgerald's bedroom was at the front of the house facing the street, as far away as possible from Kenneth's rooms. The windows were dark. Alice thought of the crowded rooms inside the house, the narrow passages between stacks of boxes like trails made by small animals, and she shuddered. Snow slipped down the back of her neck. She lifted her hood, shook the snow from it, and pulled it over her head.
Rather than leave her footprints down the front walk and across the lawn, even if they would soon be filled with snow, she broke through the hedge behind the garage and pushed through the low branches of the cedars there toward the semicircle of lawn at the back of the house, where Kenneth's big room gave out onto the terrace. At the edge of the trees, near where the rope walk had begun, she stopped. Every window in the house was dark. Alice thought of Miss Fitzgerald, asleep in her bed in the dark. She had not seen her since Kenneth's death except once from the car when Archie had stopped to get gas. Miss Fitzgerald had been walking along the sidewalk with a bag over her arm. She had not seemed to notice Archie's car nor Alice sitting alone, frozen in the front seat.
Alice's heart began to beat fast. She was warm inside her coat, but her fingers and toes were cold. Suddenly she felt afraid to be standing there watching the house with the woods at her back. There was no way to get to the house now except straight across the lawn, up the steps to the terrace, and to the French doors.
She scanned the house one more time, but there was not a single light on anywhere, as far as she could tell. Again she thought of Miss Fitzgerald, lying alone in her bed. It must be lonely without Kenneth, Alice thought. She knew she would be very lonely, if it were her.
She slipped on the steps going up to the terrace because she couldn't tell under the drifts where they began, and her mittens slipped, too, when she grasped the handle of the French doors and it did not turn. Were the doors locked? Her pulse pounded painfully in her ears and against her throat. She glanced behind her, as if someone from the house next door might be watching her from a curtained window.
She had not even considered the possibility that the doors would be locked; the doors at her own house were never locked.
She shook the doors lightly, despairingly. A thin layer of snow fell off the mullions. And then she pulled off her mittens with her teeth and put her bare hands on the handle. She could feel her head sweating under Wally's hat.
When she opened the doors to the boys’ rooms at home, sometimes banging the door against the wall suddenly so as to surprise the thing that lived in there and came out to dance alone in the gloom of the long winter afternoons, she was never truly afraid. She was sure about the magic that lived in those empty rooms—it was perhaps the only magic in which she still believed, the magic of the thing you could not see—but she never mistook it for something larger than herself. The thing left behind all alone in those rooms and abandoned by her brothers, who long ago had left their own childhoods behind, was a small thing, even a mean thing, but it was a lonely thing, too, like Peter Pan's ragged, lifeless shadow, and she was not afraid of it. Indeed, she was sorry for it and longed somehow to comfort it, to sew it to her foot as Peter Pan had sewn his shadow to his heel and then, boy and shadow reunited, risen crowing into the air. One day, she thought, she would surprise the thing that lived in those empty rooms, that wandered back and forth like a wraith from her mother's dressing room and into the boys’ rooms, bleating and moaning, and it would sweep out the door and flit away into the trees to take up residence inside an owl's nest or a mouse's hole. In a way, it would be like setting it free.
Now, though, her hand on the French doors, she was afraid. She pressed her fingers along the cold length of the handle and then, with a sharp heave, pushed down hard. The door swung suddenly open. It had not been locked, after all.
The white light from the French doors, full of the soft shadows of the moving snowflakes falling like the shadows of rain down a windowpane, lay over the floor. Nothing had been moved; nothing had changed. Kenneth's mobiles hung from the ceiling, stirring in the air she had disturbed by opening the door. The fur throw lay across the settee as if Kenneth had just tossed it aside. One of the leather chairs had been pulled up to the easel, the paper unfurling from its roll onto the carpet. His books were on the shelves, his telescope pointed toward her where she stood just inside the open French doors, the snow falling silently in the darkness behind her. On the round table where she had sat to read were the stacks of books and papers, the shiny ebony head of the African woman with her knots of hair, the carafe of water, half full. Alice ran her eyes over the room lovingly; that it had not changed seemed to her like a miracle or a dream.
And then she looked up. In the round silver mirror across the room over the fireplace, she saw a face and screamed.
She had screamed before she realized who it was, that she was looking at her own reflection.
She clapped her hands over her mouth, but it was too late. The sound had already escaped her. She stood still for one moment, horrified, and then she whirled around and ran out of the room across the terrace through the snow, slipping and falling down the steps and across the drifts that lay over the lawn. In a moment she was in the trees, and then there was nothing but silence and
darkness and the snow falling gently around her.
When she lay in her own bed again, she could not close her eyes. She had crept in through the kitchen door, shoved her wet coat and hat into one of the cubbies on the porch, and slipped up the stairs and into her bed, but her body still seemed to be moving through the snow-filled night, the deer running silently beside her, hidden in the trees. As she had neared her own driveway, a car's headlights had blazed up once out of the darkness behind her, and Alice had felt herself pick up speed as though wolves were at her back. She had not known she could run that fast. In her ears now, as she pulled the covers up to her chin with cold fingers, she could still hear her feet thudding, like the sound of the surf crashing inside the dry, pristine vessel of the conch shell.
Surely her scream had woken Miss Fitzgerald.
If Miss Fitzgerald had come downstairs to investigate, running a flashlight's shaky beam over Kenneth's rooms, she would find the French doors open.
If Alice was lucky, she thought, Miss Fitzgerald would not notice Alice's tracks in the snow; she might assume the wind had blown the doors open. But she would shut them now, for sure, and probably lock them.
Alice was sure the book had been on the table, where she thought she had left it, but it might have been picked up and moved, stuck into a shelf somewhere, or fallen behind one of the paintings stacked against the wall, or kicked under a chair by Kenneth's shoes, filled now with dust.
There had been so many places Alice might have looked, she thought, and now she had wasted her chance. It was over. She would never get back inside.
FOURTEEN
ALICE WAS LYING on the couch, rereading To Kill a Mockingbird, when Archie came to the door of the living room. It was the last Sunday in March, a chilled, rainy afternoon with the feel of ice at its edges, the metallic cold smell of the thaw in the air. Alice had been outside earlier in the day and found snowdrops blooming under the dogwood trees.
“I've got to go up to the college,” Archie announced from the doorway. “Someone's called in sick, and they need a dean at the admissions fair.”
Alice did not look up from her book. She had heard the telephone ring, heard Archie answer it, noted the weary tone of resignation in his voice when, after some moments of his listening silence, he finally replied to whoever had called. She heard his annoyance now. He liked to spend Sundays reading and dozing in his study, and she was sure he did not want to interrupt his day with a trip to Frost. Nor did Alice want to go with him. It was nearly an hour's drive there and then another hour back, and it was boring to have to sit coloring or reading in her father's office. These events always took much longer than he said they would, anyway. “Okay,” she said carefully, not looking up from her book, avoiding his eyes.
“Alice?” Archie put his hand on the door frame, preparatory to returning to his study to collect his papers, shut down his computer, and turn out the lights. The gesture meant that now the clock was ticking; he assumed she would get up from the couch, find her shoes, get ready to go with him.
“Urn, I don't really feel like going to Frost,” she said. She kept her tone carefully even; it was important that she should not sound as if she were whining. Her eyes stayed deliberately on the book before her. “I'll be fine here. “
Archie hesitated.
Alice studiously followed the words on the page, not daring to risk it and look up to assess how seriously he was considering her proposal. Would he actually go without her? He didn't usually leave her alone unless he was just doing a quick errand in Grange. But she was almost eleven. She could stay home by herself; she knew plenty of kids who stayed home by themselves. And it would be so boring at Frost, especially in the rain. Finally, though, she couldn't resist; she looked up, her expression as bland and noncommittal as she could make it, a wide-eyed face that she hoped denied all contrivance.
Archie frowned. “I'll call Elizabeth,” he said.
Elizabeth, reached on her recently acquired cell phone, was organizing a fiftieth birthday party for a friend at her church. She could not come in to stay with Alice. Why didn't Archie just drop off Alice at the church? Elizabeth proposed. Alice could come to the party. It would be fun!
Alice, who had come into the hallway and was following Archie's side of the conversation with growing comprehension and alarm, rolled her eyes. This would be even worse than having to go to Frost. Please, she mouthed to Archie. No.
Then Archie tried calling Tad and Harry, to see if Alice could spend the afternoon with them at Frost; the boys could take her to the gym to shoot baskets or for a swim in the indoor pool. But Archie couldn't reach either of the twins; neither one seemed to have a phone with him. More likely, Archie said, growing visibly further annoyed by the moment, they had run out of minutes.
Alice waited in the hall beside him while he held the phone to his ear, trying the twins a last time.
Finally, he looked at her. “You won't go outside, though,” he stipulated. He hung up the phone. “All right? I'll be home by six.”
“No problem,” she said without thinking and then watched his mouth tighten. Archie hated that expression. He also hated the phrase “My bad,” which the twins used regularly. “I'll be fine,” she said hastily, to distract him. “I'll just read. I won't go anywhere.”
Twenty minutes later, Alice watched from the kitchen window as Archie drove away up the driveway, the taillights of his car at first clearly visible through the rain, then flashing unsteadily and finally disappearing altogether, as if the car had plunged off the steep shoulder of the lane or been swallowed up by the gusts of the storm, restless inflated shapes like the gray sails of an enormous boat that swept over the treetops and across the fields.
Despite having told Archie that she would be fine by herself, she found that once he had actually gone, she was uneasy about the hours stretching ahead. The afternoon seemed gloomy and full of foreboding. She was surprised, really, that he had left her. He hadn't even argued with her, she thought.
She got up and wandered through the dining room and the living room, turning on lights against the watery, gray darkness, but this was almost worse, in a way; with every light on, and the rooms ablaze with a hard, demanding glare, the emptiness of the house intensified, ringing with silence.
Back in the kitchen she climbed onto a wobbly-legged chair to turn on the radio on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. She found an oldies station and stood on the chair, holding on to the mantelpiece and listening to a Buddy Holly song she recognized, watching herself sing along in the mirror: Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue.
After a while, she went upstairs, planning vaguely to root around in the boys’ closets for something interesting to look at among thejumbled shoes, and the slick ties that had slipped from their hooks and fallen to the floor, and the stacks of worn paperbacks with their covers creased and folded back unevenly.
In Eli's closet, in a cardboard file box under a snake's nest of tangled wire hangers, she found sixteen dollars and some spare change, a copy of The Prophet, and a lot of Eli's old school papers; they all seemed to be marked with a red A inside a circle, or “ioo%” or “Excellent!” written across the top.
In the closet in James and Wally's room she found two cardboard cartons of sheet music and a gym bag that, when she unzipped it, caused her to reel back: it was full of rank-smelling, dirty clothes. Scattered on the floor of the closet were various papers and envelopes. She took up a handful and flipped through it: bank statements, mailings from Princeton, letters, including one to James from a girl named Jenny, penned in a round, childish hand, the tail of the Y on Jenny formed into a tiny heart. Alice skimmed the contents. Hey Cutie! I miss you! So, what are you doing this summer? The letter was full of references to people Alice did not know, and she put it aside, bored. Inside an old hiking boot that rattled when she lifted it to move it aside, she found a harmonica, delicate scales of rust like a fossil across its shiny surface. She raised it to her lips and blew. The sound was eerie—it made the hair on her arms ri
se—and she dropped it on the floor of the closet where it fell soundlessly onto a pile of clothes.
She was on her hands and knees, her brothers’ shirts and sport jackets brushing her head and shoulders, when she heard a distinct noise from downstairs, a dull thud like a door banging open against a wall.
A jolt of pure fear went into her stomach. In the closet, she flattened onto the floor and froze. After a minute, her heart pounding, she moved—just her head, a fraction of an inch—so that she could see behind her into the bedroom. In the silence she registered the urgent ticking and creaks of the house, as though a conversation were taking place around her between the walls and the window frames, the ceiling and the floorboards, a dissatisfied, murmuring conference.
Maybe Archie had come home, having forgotten something. This was a comforting thought; the possibility that it was Archie downstairs, and not something else, sent relief washing over her. Still, if he found her looking through the boys’ things, he would be mad. She waited another minute, and then she inched backward out of the closet and crawled over to the window on her hands and knees to look out for his car. But the driveway, when she peered over the window ledge, was empty, only the rain disturbing the surface of the water in the puddles. No car, at least, had approached the house.
Alice sat alert and fearful on the floor beneath the windowsill. What was she frightened of? Murderers? Terrorists? Madmen? Suicide bombers? Yes, yes! All those things, all the horrors Theo had invoked, the faces of strangers intent on harming her, the figures who moved now out of the dark recesses in her imagination, places she had not even known were there, had not wanted to explore, was afraid to own. A dark mass pressed itself invisibly against the comforting world she could compass now with her eyes, the solid, reassuring planes of its surfaces—beds, bureau, bookshelf—even the leaking roof of clouds fleeing overhead, all of it braced like an insubstantial firmament against the oppressive darkness beyond. When she had recognized Theo's fear, she had not been scornful. She had known, deep in her heart, that he was right: the world was terrifying.