by Abi Maxwell
Josh’s father called him that night. What they talked of Alice never knew exactly, though some of it had to do with money. His family lived all the way in Idaho, where he had grown up, and Alice knew nearly nothing of them. Only that his mother prayed, that his father was a businessman, that he had two sisters. When he hung up the telephone and came to the kitchen he took the crossword out from under Alice’s pencil, put her coat on her lap, and told her they were going for a walk. She wore that hat, too—for some reason she would always remember that detail. That hat fastened under her chin, keeping the rain out while they walked down toward the gully. There was an old freezer down there, on the side of the road. It had come from Martha and her husband—Alice would learn that soon. It had broken down and Martha and Ronny meant to take it to the dump, so they hefted it up into that flatbed truck and Martha told her husband no, that will fall right out the back, we need to fasten it. Shut your trap, he had told her. Shut your damn pie hole. And it fell out! Martha would say repeatedly, when she told the story to Alice. Fell out right there at the base of the gully, right as they started up the hill.
On the walk Josh talked of his father, how he was aging. Alice knew then that the spell was over, he would come back to her today. Her hip hurt dreadfully and at first she had made an effort to make sure he knew that, but now she did the opposite. When the rain collected in the rim of her hat she reached up and let it pour out slowly, right down the middle of her face. With her eyes crossed she watched these drops in the dim moonlight. Josh leaned in, his hands tucked inside the opening of her large coat, and rolled himself a cigarette. They shared this though Alice never smoked. The lights were on in Martha’s house, and when Alice stopped to look on at it Josh stopped with her. He didn’t know about the walk, the phone call, didn’t yet know anything about Martha. For now Alice kept this, something for herself. Flickers from the television found their home in the curtains.
Josh said, “Some asshole lives there.” Alice said nothing, they walked on, and in time he said, “We’re having sex tonight.”
And they did, with the lights on. “I want to remember you,” he told Alice.
In the morning Alice got up quickly and bathed, got dressed as though she had somewhere important to go, though in truth it was only up the hill to Martha’s. Still, it was something. She had considered keeping the flour to herself, waiting for Martha to apologize, but what good would that do? She put the bag of flour in a big wicker basket, along with Martha’s clean and dry clothing, and she laid a plastic grocery sack over the top to keep it all dry and she walked up the hill humming.
It was raining still, of course it was. Out of habit Alice cursed the rain, but in truth didn’t it make those woods green? Such brightness in winter—for that alone the rain was worth it. And the water, the way it rushed down the hill and even her own body. Perhaps, Alice thought as she walked down toward the base of the gully and past that rusted freezer, she and Martha could take a walk in all this rain. Perhaps they could walk over the mountains and down, all the way to the big lake.
“Shh,” Martha hissed when she opened the door. Alice had the basket hung from her arm. Martha’s head shot out the window and looked in both directions, again a terrified animal. “Leave it,” she snapped. She pointed and then pulled the door closed. With something akin to shock Alice moved to set the clothes and flour where Martha wanted them. When she bent forward there was a slight tap at the window. She turned and saw Martha rush that curtain tight once more.
Alice walked slowly toward home. It was going downhill that made her hip hurt the worst. Josh was at work and before Alice lay one more empty day. With those logs missing from the walls the house was too cold to move about in. She could sit by the woodstove or she could get in the bathtub. Or maybe she would just get back into bed. Curl up. Die.
No. No, no, no.
Alice hadn’t even taken her boots off when the telephone began to ring. Martha. In time, when Alice is remarried and happy, her husband sleeping next to her and a fire at the far end of the bedroom, the phone will ring before dawn and Alice will think, Not Martha again. Though of course by then Martha will be long gone. But she will think that, which will also mean that when, in her half sleep, she curls toward the warm body beside her, she will for a moment take it for Josh, and not her good, true husband.
“Martha up the street!” Martha says it as though it is their first communication of the day.
“Yes,” Alice said.
“Just checking in. You know what my daughter says to me? She’s in the fourth grade and she is a smart whippersnapper, that’s what Grammy Hill calls her. Christy, anyway, she says, Missy Mom, that’s what they call me, Christy and Jason both, they say, Missy Mom? This time Christy says, Missy Mom, you know I am old enough to sit here next to Jason and keep him watching the boob tube. She says she thinks I can go out for a walk at night with my best friend and I say what the heck, Christy, you are one good cookie.”
“Okay,” Alice said.
“Okay? Truly you promise?”
“Yes, Martha.”
“Wait! I know you got a forgetting mind. I told you how many times? No one allowed on our porch! That is the Rule of Ronny, me and the kids say that. No one allowed on the porch and now twice you walked on it. You just wait this time. Eight o’clock? Ronny says he’s coming home from ten this morning until seven at night. Don’t come between then! You just wait on the street when you come, I’ll watch for you, Alice. Alice?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Martha said. “Thank you for the invitation.”
Alice hung up the telephone and turned the oven on. It was cold but she would bundle up and she would move about the house, sweep and maybe put up a decoration or two, and then she would make some cookies for Martha and her children.
Which she did, over and over again. Nearly a month passed in this way. Alice now had a friend, and besides, she and Josh were in a good phase. He had brought a plastic ring home for her and with pride she wore it on her finger. Nights they lay facing each other, legs twined together, and they spoke as though it were their first meeting. They told stories about childhood and stories about their futures, the gardens they would plant and the countries they would visit. Josh told stories about his day, the fool he had made of himself when he made a joke that no one laughed about. You would have laughed, he said to Alice. Which was true, it was what they had. When times were good they could not stop, over and over again Alice and Josh made each other laugh.
Martha was their only trouble. Not because Alice had taken to going for a walk with her every night—that wasn’t a problem because she did not tell Josh about it, she simply went for a walk and pretended it was on her own. But the telephone, the way it would not stop ringing. Martha up the street, I need some flour. Martha, I’m out of sugar. Do you think you can bring over a cup of milk? Just Martha, wanted to see that you slept all right. She called before they were out of bed or after they had gone to bed, and often she called twice with less than five minutes in between. If they did not answer Martha would just let it ring. She was patient in that way.
“Alice doesn’t want to talk to you,” Josh said once. Also, “Don’t you call here again.”
“Your husband ain’t so good to you, is he?” Martha said on one of their walks. Martha who was not allowed to leave the house. Martha with a bruise like an under-ripe plum across her neck. Still, Alice had not been able to answer the question.
“I got a letter today,” Alice said now to Martha as they walked. It was just past Christmas. How Martha had looked forward to that holiday. She had made an Advent calendar for Alice and Josh out of construction paper and pictures that she cut from magazines. Josh had made fun of it but each morning like a prayer Alice had opened one more window. Martha had hung thin cardboard snowmen and Santa Clauses in the windows of her own house, and one afternoon when Alice walked by she watched as Ronny strung up colored lights while Martha stood on the porch clapping. It was Alice’s first view of Ronny,
though it wasn’t a good one, for he had been on the ladder. Still, he looked smaller than she’d imagined, and somehow kinder. He turned as Alice walked past and he tilted his head downward, a sort of wave. Not Martha, though. She kept her focus on her husband.
“Ain’t that something?” Martha said now. She said that she loved mail more than most anything in the world. Her mother had sent her a Christmas package, she said, and in it there were cookies. “Just the taste of home, and still fresh. Some days I just wait and wait for mail.” Martha’s voice moved far away, turned steady and serene. It was not a voice Alice had known Martha held within.
“I do, too,” Alice said firmly. In fact, it was just what she’d been doing when today’s letter arrived: sitting there in the chair by the woodstove and looking out the window, waiting for the mail lady to come by. Usually it would be junk mail for Josh, maybe a bill. Perhaps if she had taken his name she would have felt entitled to open his mail, but as it was she would just set it on the table for him. Mail for Alice had come only once, but still she held hope for something more. And today it came. Nowadays her hip was only a dull pain, she could run, and she did just that, back to the house with the envelope tucked into her shirt. No return address, though she recognized her father’s writing. She had not been prepared for what was inside.
“It was an obituary,” Alice told Martha. “A man I used to know from Kettleborough. Did you ever know Mike Shaw?”
“Todd Shaw, don’t you know him?”
“No.”
“I don’t know, maybe they’re related, who knows. Don’t you know Todd from school?”
“No.”
“He ain’t in our grade anyway, he’s one ahead, and anyway he went to private school for high school. Todd Shaw, I had a true-life crush on him! Nicest boy in our school, I told him that the day he left. I says Todd Shaw, you is nice to everyone, even me. Then I hit him on the shoulder, I always remember that. I says Todd, you don’t have to go all red in the face! Mike Shaw his brother or something, I don’t know.”
“No,” Alice said. “I don’t know.”
“Who sent it to you?”
“What?”
“The obituary, Alice! Who sent it?”
“My father.”
“What father?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Swore on my life.”
“Okay.”
“Alice! Aren’t you going to ask me again?”
Alice shrugged.
“Okay then. My lips are sealed.” Martha swiped her fingers across her mouth and made a motion to throw an imaginary key away. Then she said, “You know the Wickholms in Kettleborough?”
“What? Up on the hill.”
“My aunt and uncle and cousins live right below them. You know what else? I know a secret about the Wickholm family.”
“What is it?”
“I ain’t telling, swore on my life.”
“Okay.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me again?”
“Martha,” Alice snapped. They had reached the top of the hill above Martha’s house. Weeks ago Martha would have been breathing hard, and Alice, too—though not as hard as Martha—but now they could both walk right up the hill without missing a breath. “He shot himself,” Alice said.
“Mr. Wickholm!”
“Martha, no. Mike Shaw. The obituary. He shot himself.” The ground was wet and bright green against the patches of brown mud, and upon everything there sat a layer of gleaming water. And the smell of it all—from the depths the water pulled up that full earth smell.
“Well,” Martha said. She clapped her hands together and looked upward, then pointed. A woodpecker large as a hawk was there in the tree above them. For a moment they watched that bird working. Around the base of the tree woodchips had formed a wide ring. Martha took Alice’s mittened hand. As far as Alice could remember, it was the first time they had touched. It wasn’t sympathy that Martha held her hand with, or anything like sentimentality. Instead it felt to Alice like pure instinct, and awe for that bird. After a time Martha said, “Well, ain’t that a mistake.” Mike Shaw’s suicide, she meant.
“Yes,” Alice said. And somehow, with Martha there at her side, Alice felt it really could be as simple as that.
In late January Martha called with a plan. Her son, Jason, had heard about it at school—on a full moon the ghost of the train conductor walks the abandoned tracks down in the gully in the woods.
“He’ll carry a lantern,” Martha said. “Jason knows three people seen it themselves. And once the ghost of the train itself!” For a moment Martha was silent. They were on the telephone, and her silence was so unusual that Alice, too, said nothing. After some time Martha said, “That ghost train whooshing by and disappearing. If it weren’t for my children, I’d jump right on that train. Ride it straight into disappearance.”
There were two more weeks until the full moon, and in that time the rain let up and then one night snow came down lofty as a cloud. Alice walked out into the gleaming night and there across the way Josh emerged from the snowfall, his appearance so unexpected that he may have been walking out of another world entirely. He crossed the snow to Alice and together they stood within those impossibly and perfectly shaped snowflakes and they were in love then, easy and pure.
On the day of the full moon Alice kept the radio on while she made cookies for the midnight outing she had planned with Martha. All day the announcer spoke of the ice storm that would come. She should have paid more attention to it. Josh, too. He knew the storm was coming but that was not what he worried over—it was the woman. Bad news, he’d taken to calling her, just as he had called some unknown woman that first day Alice had watched him. That day now seemed years ago, and Alice years beyond it.
You don’t have to be Martha’s friend, Josh would say. Do you even like her? Is she smart, Alice? Alice, you do not have to go out in the middle of the night for some stupid escapade she’s planned. Also, what if that husband of hers comes home? He could shoot you, couldn’t he?
Alice should have listened to that, too.
She would have liked some real reason to not go. Not because she wasn’t interested—a small place in her really did believe such a vision possible. Yet it would have meant something to have a reason to not go. My husband would like to spend time with me. My husband wants to make dinner together, love. He cannot sleep if I am not there next to him. A reason like that, Alice had no such thing. She waited for the cookies to cool before wrapping them in wax paper and tucking them into the backpack. She put in a blanket and a thermos of tea. Josh spent the evening reading in the bedroom, and when Alice went in to say goodbye he pretended—she could tell—to be asleep.
Martha was already waiting in the street, and she had her two children behind her. She held a flashlight pressed up against her chin, and the light made her skin a glowing, translucent red. In it her blue veins were revealed. The effect was sickening and her children laughed.
All these weeks, and Alice had never met Martha’s kids. She had not known she would meet them tonight, and their presence sent a quick fear through her. But Martha was their mother, wasn’t she? She was an adult.
“I heard so much about you,” Christy said on the way up the hill. She took Alice’s hand just as a wet snow began slowly to fall.
At the top of the hill above Martha’s house they turned off into the woods, and for their family, walking through the trees could have been walking through a foreign country. They clung together and were silenced, their mouths agape. The woods were lit up with moonlight and there was no need for the light Martha had brought.
Alice had been here before, to the place where the easy stretch of land drops abruptly downward, to the old tracks. Just before that spot the woods come to a halt and a great strip of granite begins. Up this they climbed, to its wide summit. Here Alice opened her pack and withdrew the blanket, tea, and cookies, and Martha said, “You done outdid yourself!” Then Martha gathered her children in her lap and sat dow
n and stared forward. When the wet snow turned to a steady, insistent rain, Alice asked if they might like to go back, but it was as though Martha had lost all hearing, all peripheral vision, too, everything except what was focused directly forward, into the base of this deep-woods gully. Martha didn’t have a hat on but she did not seem to mind the rain, not even when it turned to ice and began to pelt their faces so hard it could have been aimed right at them. Her children didn’t complain. Intently with their mother they waited for the ghost.
And they believed it came, all four of them believed that. Alice for years believed in it. It wasn’t until she was in her fifties, on a day when thoughts of Martha filled her to the brim, that she realized what their vision that night might have been. That was when she went to the museum in Kettleborough that was housed where the train station used to be. They’d had a special exhibit that day, of the animals that used to roam this eastern land. So it was a lost herd of elk, she would decide.
But Martha and her children would never have a chance to decide that. And couldn’t it be better that way, to believe so simply in what they had seen? Alice had been fussing with her rain cap when she heard that involuntary noise of wonder fall from Martha. She looked forward, and there at the base of the gully a wild beast came forth as though from behind a curtain of black draped from the sky. Like an apparition that animal shone. She had a beard of white and she walked with grace upon the iced ground. One by one a pack of children came out of the rain to follow their regal mother. How she glowed, she could have been carrying a lantern. Alice and Martha and the children were together transported.