Alice Bliss

by Laura Harrington

  June 21st

  They are driving to Maine: Alice, Angie, Ellie, Uncle Eddie, and Gram. The boats are packed in a box in the trunk. Alice wanted Henry to be with them, but had to concede the point of “family only,” and being too squashed in the car. She asked each of them to bring a memento for Matt, something small enough to fit in the palm of their hand. She suspects that Ellie may have spilled the beans to Gram about the boats, but that’s okay.

  Courtesy of Uncle Eddie, they are in a 1982 pale yellow Cadillac convertible. The seats are so comfy it’s hard to stay awake. Gram packed lunch and dinner in a cooler. They’ll spend the night in a bed and breakfast because Mom says Gram’s too old to camp.

  They left at noon, stopped once in Massachusetts, and shortly after sunset they make the turn down the Phippsburg peninsula heading to Small Point. The minute they make the turn, Alice makes them roll down all the windows. She closes her eyes and breathes in the salt water, the bracken and the piney smells. She leans her forehead against the back of Uncle Eddie’s seat.

  And Matt is alive in front of her, he is driving and she is in the backseat with her forehead resting against him, like this, just like this. She remembers the murmur of her parents’ voices in the dark car, Ellie curled up asleep on the seat beside her, Matt with one hand on the wheel and one hand lightly twined in the hair at the nape of Angie’s neck. And Alice, part of it, part of that feeling, by a thread, by her forehead just touching his shoulder.

  It is twilight. It is the solstice. It is a clear, calm night.

  “Can I drive?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “I want to drive the rest of the way.”

  Uncle Eddie pulls over. Alice slides into the driver’s seat; Mom takes her place in the back and pulls Ellie onto her lap so Uncle Eddie can sit beside Alice.

  Alice drives the curving two-lane road slowly, ticking off each landmark as they pass: the turn-offs to the state park, to Secret Beach; Sebasco, with the snack bar that makes the best lobster rolls in Maine; the general store, the granite house, the house with two white barns. She makes the turn onto the causeway to Hermit Island, drives past the Kelp Shed, and carefully maneuvers the sharp turn up the single-track dirt lane leading to the beaches, the Devil’s Bathtub, and the campsites beyond. It’s midweek; the campground is not even half full. Alice parks next to a picnic table.

  They pile out of the car, pull on sweaters, and head down to the beach with the picnic basket, a ground tarp, and some blankets. Alice, Ellie, and Uncle Eddie scrounge the beach and the dunes for wood to make a fire. They roast hot dogs, eat Gram’s famous potato salad and cherry pie, and wait for full dark.

  Clambering up the rocks, Alice stops at the top. The sky is thick with stars, just as she imagined it would be, there is a sliver of a moon low in the sky, and the Devil’s Bathtub is nearly full as the tide reaches its peak. She finds a flat rock to use as a staging area for the boats. She has brought scraps of kindling and paper and matches. Uncle Eddie has his arm around Gram and is guiding her with a flashlight. Mom and Ellie are holding hands.

  Alice sets the cardboard box down on the rocks. There are six boats, one for each of them, and one for Henry.

  “Okay,” Alice begins, and finds she needs to stop for a moment to collect herself. “Okay, so I thought we’d each launch a boat with a wish for Dad. Wherever he is, whatever you believe. If there’s something you want to put on the boat, I think it’ll work. Ellie has a book that she made.”

  “A dictionary,” Ellie pipes up.

  “We tested Ellie’s boat in the bathtub to make sure it won’t capsize. So the boats should all be able to carry a little something. After you make your wish, we’ll light each one on fire, and set it afloat in the water.”

  Alice opens the box and Alice and Ellie unwrap the boats and set them out on the flat rock. Ellie’s Bibliobibuli with its pink hull and white sail almost glows in the dark. Henry’s bright red tugboat Fernticle lies alongside Alice’s blue skiff, Jillick. Ellie hands the yellow barge named Penny to Gram, the orange tug named Tupelo Honey to Uncle Eddie, and a graceful little green skiff with a pink and yellow striped sail named Bliss to Angie.

  “Did you make these?” Gram wants to know.

  “They’re beautiful,” Angie says.

  “What the heck does fernticle mean?” Uncle Eddie asks.

  “Freckle!” Ellie shouts.

  “Jillick?”

  “To skip a stone across water!”

  “Bibliobibuli?”

  “One who reads too much!”

  “Really beautiful,” Angie says again, picking up Bliss and turning the boat over and over in her hands. “I had no idea.”

  “Do you like the names, Gram?” Ellie asks.

  “I love the names, sweetheart.”

  Alice pulls a photograph from her pocket.

  “Ellie,” Alice asks, “should we launch them one by one or all together?”

  “All together. We make our wishes and then light them all at once so no boat will be lonely.”

  “Okay. I’ll start with Henry. This is a photo of Henry and Dad and me having a catch in the backyard when we’re about six. Henry’s wish is that there’s baseball in Dad’s heaven.”

  She puts the photo on Henry’s boat.

  “I made Daddy a dictionary of my favorite long words. It’s illustrated. My wish . . . Do I have to say it out loud?”

  “Only if you want to.”

  Ellie considers, then: “My wish is that Daddy will get to see me when I’m almost grown up like Alice and I’m wearing a beautiful dress and going to my first dance.”

  Ellie ties the dictionary to Bibliobibuli with a piece of twine.

  Uncle Eddie pulls a feather from his shirt pocket. As he starts to speak, he finds he can’t trust his voice. He coughs and clears his throat and pulls out a handkerchief. He looks at the boats and the rocks and the water and the night sky, at his mother and his sister and his nieces and he feels, as he has perhaps not allowed himself to feel before now, the enormity of Matt’s absence. Finally he says:

  “My wish is that if you’re worried about Angie and the girls up there in your baseball playing heaven, Matt Bliss, I’m gonna do my best to be there for them right here on earth. Not like I could ever fill your shoes. But I’ll do whatever I can.”

  He weaves the feather into the rigging of Tupelo Honey.

  Gram has made a miniature cherry pie that she has carried carefully in its own little handmade paper box.

  “I know cherry pie is your favorite, Matt. I wish you all the cherry pie you want every single day. But mostly, I wish you were right here with us. Somehow maybe you are.”

  The tiny pie sits like a crown in the middle of the yellow barge.

  “Mom . . . ?”

  Angie had no idea that this is what Alice has been up to. The request for this trip on this day was, frankly, one big headache. Alice was secretive about almost all of the details and would not compromise on one single element, except for staying in the B&B instead of camping, and even that was a fight. And the more stubborn Alice got, point by point, the more irritated Angie got. But here they are, and Angie can see the plan, she can see the care and design and love in the plan, and now that it’s her turn she finds she can’t even begin to speak. She looks at her daughter and she looks at the boats, the boats made, she now realizes, in Matt’s workshop, on Matt’s workbench, with Matt’s tools. And the choice of this day, the solstice, and Alice’s stubbornness about timing, because she needed to time the boats with the tide, is so exactly like Matt it could make her cry.

  Angie kneels beside her little boat. She has a letter in her hands from their college days when they thought they would live forever. She found the letter in her lingerie drawer, jumbled in with the girls’ letters to Santa and handmade anniversary and birthday cards. She has read it so many times in the past few days she could recite it by heart.

  She thinks, I will always love you, Matt. She closes her eyes and wishes it were last
summer, before any of this had happened, she wishes and wishes and wishes that she could have him back. When she opens her eyes she realizes she doesn’t want to let any single bit of him go, not this letter, not this night, not this beautiful boat. She looks at Alice, who is waiting patiently. She looks at the boat again. Bliss. How perfect. Matt Bliss, she thinks, you should be here for this, you should see your daughter now. She folds the letter and slips it into the boat.

  Alice has a small envelope in one hand and a sand dollar the size of a dime in the other.

  “This is some dirt from our garden and one of the tiniest sand dollars we ever found together right here on this beach. I hope there are tomatoes in heaven, Dad. I hope you can see our boats on the water tonight. We’re lighting them up just for you.”

  Alice pours the earth into the hull of Jillick and places the sand dollar on top.

  Alice and Ellie carefully lay their tinder and their scraps of paper on each boat. One by one they light them on fire and launch them into the water. The boats wobble a bit when they enter the water, and Alice has a moment of panic before they steady themselves. They cluster together at first, floating like a small regatta, magically aflame.

  Angie takes Ellie’s hand and watches Alice, still kneeling where they launched their fleet at the narrow, closed end of the Devil’s Bathtub. The tide is turning now, pulling the boats out to sea, where they begin to fan out a bit, each one responding to the current and the wind and the tide. Bibliobibuli and Bliss are in the lead, it’s almost as if their sails actually work, followed by Penny. Tupelo Honey wallows along bringing up the rear. Jillick and Fernticle are in the middle, their decks burning brightest of all until the sails on Bibliobibuli and Bliss catch fire in a spectacular burst of light.

  Angie wants to call them all back, or she wants them to stay just as they are. Uncle Eddie is in the unaccustomed position of having a slow-motion method of transport and finds himself wishing his boat would hurry it up. Ellie is thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have burned the dictionary she worked so long to make. Alice is looking at the burning boats and wondering if it is at all possible that they will make it out to open ocean before they sink; and wondering at the same time, if it is possible that any of this, the boats, the flames bright in the darkness, could reach her father? Can anything she will do or say for the rest of her life reach her father?

  She looks back over her shoulder at her mother, Ellie, Uncle Eddie, Gram, and they are all caught and held in this moment. All their hopes and their wishes launched on fragile boats, lit on fire and shining like stars in an upside-down sky. Stars floating on the water. Just for a moment, a moment longer. Here. And then gone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With thanks to: * David and Kate, for everything, always.

  * The Kleban Foundation for giving me two years to write.

  * Paulette Haupt, commissioner and producer of Alice Unwrapped, the musical that inspired Alice Bliss; Jenny Giering, composer for Alice Unwrapped for the magic of her music and for making Alice sing.

  * Rachel Kadish, Ann Ziergiebel, Angela Marvin, Jane Potter, Lillian Hsu, Kim Garcia, Liza Rutherford, and Lynn Barclay, my first readers.

  * Melanie Kroupa, for seeing the potential.

  * Carol Green for giving me space to write, and so much more, in Truro.

  * Beth Hartley for information and insights about teens and grief.

  * Molly Ziergiebel for information and insights about running.

  * My agent, Stephanie Cabot, as well as Sarah Burnes and the entire staff at The Gernert Company.

  * My editor, Pamela Dorman, and also her assistant editor, Julie Miesionczek.

  * The team at Viking Penguin, with special thanks to Hal Fessenden.