The Evolution of Alice

by David Alexander Robertson

  “Where are you taking her, please?” Sara said. “I thought you were supposed to be honest!”

  She followed for as long as she could, until the water reached up over her chest, pooled around her neck, and touched her chin. And, even then, she was prepared to swim if it came to that, ready to follow Flora and the beast for as long as she could. But the thing stopped about 10 feet away, with the water only up to its waist, in an area of calm, a place that stretched endlessly toward the horizon. And the water was black all around because the stars were shy that night, except for the reflection of the moon overhead, which touched the water near where they stood, the soft but generous white glow rippling like a flag in a delicate breeze. There, in the stillness, Sara watched as the creature turned Flora’s face toward its own. It breathed gently across her cheeks, which caused her eyes to flutter, then open.

  “Flora, are you okay?” Sara said.

  Flora didn’t answer, but as she stared at the great beast she didn’t scream, didn’t start, didn’t try to get away. She simply lay there nestled in the creature’s arms, the rising of its chest rocking her back and forth as a cradle would a baby. She looked as calm as the water that surrounded them. This brought peace to Sara as well, and she called to her friend no longer.

  She saw Flora try to close her eyes, to fall back asleep, but the beast placed its hand against her cheek and shook its head. “No sleep,” it said in a deep voice that rumbled through the air and across the water, causing tiny tremors. Flora nodded. It turned her over and lowered her close to the water.

  “Look,” it said.

  She did.

  “Do you see?” it said.

  “I’m beautiful,” Flora whispered.

  Then the beast submerged its hand under the reflection of the moon, and the white light pooled into its massive palm. When it brought its hand up, it brought the light also, so the water beneath Flora was now black, her reflection gone along with the moon’s.

  “Drink,” it said.

  She placed her mouth at the side of its hand and allowed the water to spill over her lips, down her throat. When she was done, her head went limp against the beast’s arm. She was asleep once more. The beast turned toward Sara and began to walk back to the house, Flora tucked safely in its arms. Sara walked with them, following them when it entered the house, through the kitchen, down the hallway, and back into her bedroom. She started for her dresser in order to rummage through it and find some dry clothes to put on, but, for the first time, she noticed her nightgown was dry.

  Is this a dream? She kept patting at her clothes to find wet spots, but there were none. And yet she felt awake. Everything felt real. How is this possible?

  “Are you here?” she said to the beast, but it just stood there, silent, waiting.

  Sara lay down, and the beast placed Flora beside her, and she took her friend back into her arms. Without a word, it walked out of the bedroom and left the two friends behind. It’s real. It was real. Sara drifted back to sleep thinking these words as she stared out the window, deep into the sky, where the shy stars lay hidden, where the moon and its generous light seemed dimmer. And she could only reason, as her eyelids grew heavier, that some of the light was now in Flora.

  Sara would wake the next day and find that she and Flora talked the way they used to talk, and in those words there was no room for silence. Her mother would make pancakes with scrambled eggs, which was a rare treat, and Sara could only guess that her mother was happy to find her brighter, just as Sara was happy to find Flora brighter. Flora would leave after breakfast, and Sara would stand in the doorway and wave goodbye. Flora would wave back and smile and her smile would be returned. And all of this is not to say unpleasant things had not happened, because surely they had, and all of this is not to say there weren’t still unpleasant things to come, because surely there were. But, if there were bad spirits there were good ones, and if there were demons there most certainly were angels. Sara would think about this as she considered the new things she had learned and what she had seen. And the following night she would pray the good spirits would visit her auntie, wherever she was, because brightness caused brightness. It was simple momentum.

  EIGHT

  After returning home from the hospital, the first thing Alice did was go to her bedroom. She closed the door and put Grace down on the mattress so the moonlight coming in from the bedroom window fell across her three-day-old body. Alice listened, but the trailer’s usual sounds were absent, replaced instead by the soft cooing from Grace’s tiny mouth. Olive had taken Kathy and Jayne over to her place, and Ryan had stayed in the city with some friends. She’d been upset at first that he would even think to do something like that, leave her and their newborn girl alone, but it wasn’t long before she welcomed the idea. It was peaceful.

  Alice stroked Grace’s cheeks and lay down beside her. She watched as her baby’s eyes darted around as though looking at everything, but she knew Grace could only really focus on her mother’s face. Alice liked that. Grace’s arms and legs were twitching involuntarily. One day they’d move, bring her to the most amazing places. But, for now, she was right where she needed to be.

  STARING AT THE SUN

  SHE THINKS OF THE PAST, all those yesterdays. She wants them back. No tomorrows. She dreams asleep, she dreams awake. The dreams are nightmares, even the pretty ones. The pretty ones are the worst.

  Alice reaches for the remote, her distraction. She flicks the television on. It’s Dora. Alice imagines Grace, her baby, is in front of the television set, telling the characters where to go. She touches the glass with her dirty fingers. She gets smudge marks everywhere. She always gets smudge marks everywhere. When Alice wants to watch her shows at night, everything seems out of focus from the fucking smudge marks. But Grace isn’t really there. Alice flips through channels, settles on a daytime talk show. Midday bullshit. The picture is crisp and clear. No dirty fingers. No dirty glass. She would do anything to have to use Windex.

  She lies down on her side, pushes a pillow underneath her head, and curls her legs into her stomach. She sticks the remote between the pillow and the couch. Her baby is crawling on top of her, bending down so her face is obstructing Alice’s view of the television set. She wants attention. The more annoyed Alice gets, the harder Grace laughs. She tosses her baby to the other side of the couch. Grace laughs, what a fun ride. She crawls back over to Alice, crawls up to her shoulder, lowers her head. “Stop it!’ Alice says. Grace laughs. She crawls all over Alice’s body like goose bumps. But Grace isn’t really there. Alice wishes for the weight against her shoulder. She wants her baby to annoy her, wants to shout at her. She wants goose bumps.

  She falls asleep and dreams she is listening to Grace breathe, listening to her talk, savouring words like a delicacy. Her voice is sharp, sifting effortlessly through stagnant air, through the aroma of stale cigarettes. Alice moves with the sound, along the air, through the window, into the cool morning breeze. She looks at Grace from the outside, her baby’s eyes melting into her cheeks with that smile. Then she blends into the breeze and is gone. When Alice wakes up, she thinks, for a moment, she is back beside Grace. Her tiny breaths like warm kisses, her tiny cheeks squished against the couch, a trail of saliva drizzling from her lips, her tiny feet pressed between Alice’s thighs. But her baby isn’t really there. Alice’s breaths are her own. Her face is cold and lonely.

  Alice makes breakfast for Kathy and Jayne in the morning. They pile out of their bedroom, sleepy, their feet dragging along the floor, their hair dancing every which way like flames, their eyes adjusting to the light. She makes two more plates than the ones she prepares for Kathy and Jayne. She always makes two extra plates. One of the plates almost always gets eaten while the other does not. But Gideon isn’t there this morning. That means he’s either sandbagging for some extra cash or with his grandpa at Innis General Hospital. She doesn’t blame him, of course, but the girls look sad in his absence. He makes faces out of the bacon and eggs—the over-easy
eggs are eyes, the bacon is a mouth. The girls laugh so much at that. So, one plate lies uneaten in front of Alice. She won’t eat it. The other plate is in front of Grace’s booster seat. Alice imagines her there. She picks up the bacon like a lollipop. It’s more a toy than food. She licks it, chews it, bangs it on the plate like she’s drumming, just like she used to see her daddy do. She eats around the yolk. She hates the yolk. Sometimes, she’ll sneak it onto Kathy or Jayne’s plate. They’ll eat it. But Grace isn’t there. The bacon and eggs will get cold, jealously untouched.

  Alice watches Kathy and Jayne eat. They are tidy about it. They are quiet, too. It wasn’t always this way. They used to eat like hungry rez dogs. She wonders if they see Grace too, like she does. Alice will send them back to their room after breakfast. She wonders if her baby will be there, if she’ll play tea with them, or run around bugging them as Kathy tries to read and Jayne tries to colour. Of course she will. She always does. But Grace isn’t there.

  She looks around the room—the kitchen, the living room. She thinks about the hallways. It leads to the girls’ bedroom, her bedroom, and the bathroom. There is nowhere else to go. The trailer is small, so small that her baby can be everywhere. The walls hold memories inside like cigarette smoke. She looks at the booster seat, the uneaten plate. She runs out of the kitchen, down the hallway, into her bedroom. She is gasping for breath. The tears blur her vision like the memories.

  She rushes to the corner of her bedroom, rummages through a pile of dirty clothing until she finds two black duffle bags, one of them emptied, one of them full. She unzips the full bag. Dirty men’s clothing—tube socks, tighty whities, jeans, T-shirts, a hooded sweatshirt. Ryan’s stuff. She rummages through the bag, pulls out a faded red Spider-Man T-shirt. She holds it out to inspect it—the ink stain on the left shoulder, the hole along the right side. She used to like that she could see his skin through it. She scrunches it up and holds it against her nose, breathes violently. Clean laundry. He always smelled, always smells, like clean laundry. No matter what he did or where he went, always.

  She changes into the T-shirt. It’s loose and makes her look ragged, but she doesn’t care. She zips the duffle bag up and slides it flush against the corner of the room, piles dirty clothes back onto it, either to hide it or protect it in her absence. She takes the other empty bag and fills it with clothing; hers, Jayne’s, and Kathy’s. The girls’ clothes smell like Ryan. They are like him in that way. Grace, too. Alice packs just enough clothing to get by. There’s always Walmart in the city. It’s cheap there. Big and crowded but cheap.

  She calls Olive for a ride.

  “Where to?” Olive asks.

  “To the city,” Alice says.

  “Why are you going to the city? You haven’t even been out of your house in forever,” Olive says.

  “Will you take me there, please? I can’t be here anymore,” Alice says.

  There is a silence. Alice wonders who else would take her. She doesn’t want to ask Gideon. He’ll ask too many questions, and she doesn’t want to talk about it, she just wants to go. He’ll ask her to stay.

  “I’ll be over in a bit,” Olive says.

  “Thank you.”

  Alice hangs up the phone and dials her cousin, Krista, in the city. She has a big house in a bad neighbourhood. She and the girls have stayed there before.

  “How long do you need to stay for? I mean, not like it matters. Shit, you can stay forever if you want. I like your kids better than mine, ha.”

  “I don’t know. A while. Long enough,” Alice says.

  “Long enough for what?” Krista says.

  “I don’t know,” Alice says.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway. Just come by whenever you can,” Krista says.

  Alice brings the duffle bag to the kitchen and puts it down beside the kitchen table. Jayne is finishing her food. She didn’t notice Alice run out of the room. But Kathy notices everything. She looks at her mother with big, concerned eyes.

  “Are you okay, Mommy?” Kathy says.

  Alice nods. She looks back at her baby’s booster seat. She looks away quickly, as though she’d been staring at the sun.

  “But we have to go now,” Alice says.

  Jayne pokes her head up from her plate.

  “Where are we goin’?” she says.

  “Away,” Alice says. “Now. Leave your plates. Just come with me.”

  Jayne cries out in excitement, Kathy gets up quietly. She picks up her plate to bring it to the kitchen sink. Alice shakes her head.

  “I said leave it,” Alice says.

  Kathy puts her plate back on the table. Alice throws the duffle bag over her shoulder, takes Kathy’s hand, takes Jayne’s hand, and guides them out of the trailer.

  Alice waits near the end of the driveway, her feet almost touching the line of rocks she made after Grace died. Her baby, she would’ve had so much fun on the rocks. She would’ve played with them in so many ways. She would’ve jumped over them like hurdles. She would’ve leap-frogged over them and got her legs caught on top of them. She would’ve said she was stuck and got one of her big sisters to help her down. Of course, she could’ve got down on her own. She knew her big sisters would do anything for her, though. She was smart.

  Jayne plays basketball, throws all the different kinds of balls into the hoop and cheers each time. Kathy doesn’t play. She stands by the old hockey net and stares at her mom.

  After a few minutes, an old K-car pulls up alongside the highway. Olive honks the horn as though Alice hadn’t seen her. Sara is in the back seat, ready to entertain the girls for the two-hour drive. She looks excited, hasn’t seen the girls in a long time.

  “Come on, darlings,” Alice says.

  Jayne bounds down the driveway, leaps over the rocks, and gets into the car almost in one motion. She bear-hugs Sara.

  “You want the window seat?” Sara asks.

  “Yeah!” Jayne says.

  Sara swings her over to the driver-side window. Jayne laughs. Sara turns and waits for Kathy, who approaches the car methodically. She walks slowly down the driveway, steps over the rocks, and sinks into the back seat.

  “Hey, Kath, I missed you,” Sara says and pats Kathy on the knee.

  “Me too,” Kathy says distantly.

  “I missed ya!” Jayne says.

  Sara laughs. “Oh, I missed you too, peanut.”

  Alice gets into the passenger seat and positions the duffle bag firmly between her feet. Olive glances at the bag.

  “How long are you planning on staying?” Olive asks.

  “I’m not sure,” Alice says. “A little while.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a little-while kind of bag to me.”

  “It’s enough.”

  Olive takes her hand off the gearshift and places it on Alice’s shoulder.

  “You sure about this?” Olive says.

  Alice plays with an old luggage tag tied to the zipper of the duffle bag. She thinks of when she flew to Anchorage with Ryan. It was the only other place she’d been, other than the city. She’d left Grace to go there. She could do it again.

  “Alice? Are you sure?”

  Alice nods.

  “Let’s just go,” Alice says.

  Olive hesitates only a moment longer. She puts the car into drive, does a U-turn across the empty highway, and drives away from Alice’s trailer. The girls are quiet then, even Jayne. The roar of the car’s motor, the hum of the tires against the highway, the air whistling in through a crack in the passenger-side window, all sound deafening.

  Alice sees the worried and confused faces on her girls, wonders if she’s doing the right thing. But then she looks back at their home, watches as the trailer gets smaller, and her swing, and the tree, and the field. Grace is there. She is hiding in the long grass from her sisters, confounding them. She laughs, and it seems as though the grass is giggling as it flutters in the breeze. She is picking blades of grass from the ground and trying to braid them into her hair—unsuccessfull
y. She is bouncing up and down so in the distance it looks as though she is swimming in a lake of golden water. Alice looks away, to the highway, to the grey and the open road. She thinks of the city, where it’s big and distant, and she can hide within its cold embrace.

  “Where are we going, Mommy?” Jayne asks.

  “Away,” Alice says. “Far away.”

  “How far?” Jayne asks.

  “Far enough,” Alice says.

  NINE

  The boy walked outside to find his grandpa sitting on a tree stump. The old man was using a sharp knife to cut pieces away from a block of wood that was beginning to take the shape of an old shoe. There were other shoes like it around the house. They weren’t like any shoes the boy had seen around the rez, though. They were fancy shoes, and they looked like people would’ve worn them a hundred years ago. His grandpa was beginning to work on the tongue. He’d already made little notches where the laces would go. He would use moose hide for them. The boy had seen him do that before. He sat down on the steps and watched his grandpa work, watched the strips of wood fall to the ground as soft as snowflakes. They were all in a pile at his grandpa’s feet. They’d put them in the fire later and use them for kindling.

  “How was your first night?” the old man said.

  “Okay,” the boy said.

  The old man held the shoe up and blew across it. Some specs of wood flew through the air.

  “You’ll sleep better once you’re used to it. It’s always strange sleeping somewhere new, even at your grandpa’s,” the old man said.

  There was a small pile of wood beside his grandpa that was undoubtedly going to be made into shoes as well. The boy wondered where all the shoes would go, and why his grandpa was making them in the first place. He picked up one of the blocks of wood and inspected it. He looked back and forth from his grandpa’s piece of wood to his.