by Averil Dean
The darkness is lifting, the pines outside faintly outlined against the sky. I close the bathroom door behind me and lower myself to the toilet. My urine burns as it trickles over me, and the tissue is tinged with pink. An ugly bruise is blossoming on my inner thigh.
I know where you were—
With my head in my hands, I replay the night before, trying to sort out what Jack knows and what he doesn’t.
I saw you.
I imagine the scene from Jack’s point of view, as though we were characters in a book. He must have followed me to Cherries and seen me there with Ray. Clearly he never saw the gun or he would have said so.
So he saw—what? Me and Ray, together.
It comes at me in a rush. Jack believes I’m with Ray, romantically.
The first time Jack and I met, I was breaking into his house. Now, after seeing me with Ray when I was supposed to be at home working, he surely knows there is a connection between the two events. Jack is too smart to believe in coincidence. He must think Ray has it in for him somehow or is still trying to get his hands on some money. He thinks I’ve been playing him.
Which I have. All along. Just not the way he thinks.
I get up and look in the mirror. My eyes are huge and glassy. The nicks on my throat and shoulder are scabbed over, ugly, and my mouth is swollen from Jack’s teeth. The tattoo around my arm looks more like a circle of thorns than a dandelion chain. The fatigue that’s been building since yesterday is thick and woolen around me.
I open the cabinet and take out my kit, sit at the edge of the tub and lay my left foot across my knee. The blade flashes and lays a delicate etching in my skin, but there is no corresponding fire. I lay three stripes and feel nothing, so I add three more, then three and three and three more, each cut longer and deeper than the one before. They begin to weep and bead and drip, one into the other, and still I’m waiting to feel something.
My throat closes up—not in pain but terror. The razor has always been my friend, my ally, the stimulant I need to focus and snap myself awake. And today there is nothing.
The blood is running so freely now that the towel is soaked red. I pivot around so my feet are in the tub, and watch the thin red line move like an editor’s pen across the porcelain, imagining the way Gus would react to a scene like this if he read it on my pages: This is hyperbole, Alice, pull it back. Less is more.
I trickle some water over my foot, dump some peroxide on for good measure, pad the whole mess with gauze and wrap it around and around with an Ace bandage.
I won’t be able to hide this from Jack. But maybe we are beyond the point of hiding.
* * *
In the living room, I build a fire and stare into it as the morning light seeps across the window. I’m numb with cold and the silence is unnerving. For company, I turn on the TV and listen to it with half an ear, twirling my hair around my finger, trying to think what to say to Jack.
I could feign coincidence, tell him I went to Cherries to meet a friend.... No, not that, I have no friends. I could say that Ray contacted me for some reason. Or maybe I went to Cherries for a drink, and—
A familiar name snaps me to attention. A newscaster is on location, standing in front of a building that I don’t recognize at first. But as the camera pans out, I see that the door behind her is the very one I spent an hour staring at last night. She must be standing almost exactly where I stood next to my car, in the far corner of Cherries’ parking lot.
I sit forward and turn up the volume.
“...body has been identified as that of Raymond Burbank, an employee of the nightclub. Police say he was found by two patrons leaving the club, the apparent victim of a beating. He was taken to Harborview Medical Center and was pronounced dead.... Janet, back to you....”
The colors seem to leach from the room, then spring back to life, vivid and sharply outlined, the edges of my vision fading to black. My head turns slowly, eyeballs sliding ineluctably sideways.
Jack’s shoes are by the door, where he left them last night when he came in after me. I pick them up and carry them into the light. They are thick leather work boots, caked with damp mud. I’ve seen them dozens of times—in my doorway or his, on the front porch, discarded next to the bed. I’ve stubbed my toes on them, scolded Jack for leaving them underfoot. And once, when he came over late at night, I stood with bare feet on these wide brown laces as Jack danced me around the living room and eased me to the floor.
But I have never seen the fat, dark red spot on the toe of the right boot.
Oh, Jack.
This is where we are, where we’re going. Two days ago he said it himself, while I lay facedown on the bed as he smeared ointment over the cut he’d laid across the small of my back:
“You want this as much as I do. Sometimes I get the most insane hard-on, thinking about the blood on your skin, the way it tastes, the way it makes you come.” And later, nose to nose on the pillow: “I’m scared, baby, I’m scared.”
He’s been waiting for me to stop him. But I don’t think I can.
I want it. I’ve wanted, all this time, a killer.
My killer.
Would you kill for me?
Would you kill me?
Are the two so very different?
As I drop into a chair with his boots between my feet, my fingers begin to buzz and tingle. My scalp prickles, creeping up from the nape of my neck like a swarm of ants marching through my hair. I blink at the spot of blood on his boot, which swims out of focus and back to sharp definition. I feel as if I’m waking from a long sleep in a strange place. None of this seems familiar—not the nubbly rag rug under his boot or the view from the wooden chair or the shabby brick fireplace. The house has taken on a feeling of impermanence, as of a motel room or the inside of a stranger’s car. The air is heavy in my lungs.
I get up and go to the bedroom doorway.
Jack’s breathing has grown more shallow. He has turned over and is lying with one long arm flung across the bed, palm up as though he’s waiting for a gift. His dark hair is tousled and soft against the sheet, his eyelashes like a sparrow’s wing against his cheek. He has never looked so childlike, so unbearably dear.
If I stay, he will kill me.
And I can’t bear to let him be punished for it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I take his clothes to the living room, along with a pair of poultry shears from the kitchen. I cut the buttons, zipper and rivets from his jeans and shirt and put them into an empty canvas satchel, along with his boots. Then, a piece at a time, I feed his clothes to the fire, stirring, adding wood, until everything he was wearing last night is reduced to ashes. I empty the writing from my safe and add my notes and journals, tens of thousands of words, all the pages and pages I’ve labored over, and watch them flare and curl inward and disappear.
The buzz sweeps over me, that odd tingle, sharpened now to pins and needles along my arms, tightening across my breasts. A dull ache has begun in the sole of my mangled foot, but I’m moving quickly. I’m dressed and have packed a second satchel with my laptop, wallet, a few items of clothing and a supply of gauze and ointment. And the wooden box.
I know I’m making mistakes, leaving things behind that I should be destroying or taking with me. But I can’t stop. I can’t face Jack.
If I see him wake in the pink morning light, soft with sleep and blinking into the blurry distance, I won’t be strong enough to do what I need to do.
* * *
I step out the front door. The morning air is cool and damp, laced with the scent of the things I have burned. I’m a prisoner at the gate who wants nothing more than to stay in her cell, to be caught and held and maybe even executed in due time.
Jack, Jack...
I swallow around the knot in my throat and step off the front porch, pausi
ng at Jack’s truck to find what I expected: a claw hammer. Stained with blood, wrapped in an old T-shirt. I drop it into the satchel with what’s left of his clothes and boots, sling the straps over my shoulders and set off into the forest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I didn’t think to bring a spade. I’ll have to make do with the bloody hammer.
The earth between the graves of my mother and Nana is cool and damp. The claw sinks in easily, with small sighs of friction, as I loosen the soil and pile it beside the hole. The trees overhead are damp with morning dew that weeps down onto the back of my head and drips into the hole. The gap widens slowly, a mouth in a slow-motion scream.
When the hole is big enough, I lay the box inside. The burnished wood is smooth and fine against the rough-textured soil; the scent of lemon polish rises from the earth, mixed with the odor of soil and decaying leaves. Nearby is a cluster of yellow wildflowers, clinging to the leg of the iron bench. I pluck one and lay it on top of the box.
I fill the hole with my bare hands and return the hammer to my satchel.
* * *
By the time I reach the ferry dock, my left foot feels as if I’m stepping into glass. To avoid the main roads, I’ve been walking for two hours along the hiking trails that crisscross the island. I’ve met no one, and am fairly certain nobody has seen me. All they would notice in any case is a small figure in a waterproof jacket, her head covered in a dark hood. Nothing anyone would remember.
Despite the pain, I would like to keep walking. The motion soothes me. One foot in front of the other, it’s so simple. The trees against the sky, a moss-green path, pines rising like sentinels into the fog. But now I need a different form of transport.
I veer off the path near the parking lot at the water’s edge, and watch from the forest as the morning commuters park their cars or get in line to board the next ferry. For now the dock is empty, but in fifteen minutes the next boat will arrive, and I will be on it.
In my bed at home, Jack will be waking up. He’ll see that his clothes are gone, that I am gone, but my car is still in the driveway. He may assume I’ve gone to get a cup of coffee or am out for a walk. He’ll probably search my belongings for further clues of my betrayal. He’ll pace the house and eventually come looking.
I sit down on a fallen log, curl forward with my elbows on my knees and let the satchels fall to the ground. The air is thick with mist, and for several long seconds there is a plenary silence in which no birdsong or engine or voice can be heard. There is only absence.
On the other side of the island, the Red Ranger bike continues its inexorable crawl skyward, lodged in the throat of the tree, which I see for the first time as another victim of the tragedy. The bike rolled into its branches and stayed there, and the sapling, rooted in place and unable to halt its own growth, has spent the prime of its life choking on the abandoned wreckage. The bike and the tree are victims of their own natures. Freakish conjoined twins, hopelessly fused.
I take my cell phone from my pocket, pull out the battery and dig a hole. I drop in the pieces and use a stick to arrange a few vines of poison oak over the top. My trail will end here.
The ferry approaches through the fog, its light bobbing gently over the water. The silence is cut by the sound of the bell, a single clang, stern in its clarity. I get to my feet. Dimly I am aware of pain. Hunger. An ominous fatigue that will overtake me if I don’t keep moving. I try to ignore my body and concentrate on the ferry. Strange that I’ve never really looked at it closely before. How dirty it is, streaked with algae, the red stripe along its side peeling away in places, windows crusted with salt. In my mind, the ferry has always seemed a magical thing, bearing me across the water and home again; all it is really is a tired old bus.
As I start down the slope to the parking lot, I hear a familiar rumble. I sink into the undergrowth as Jack’s truck swims past, through the ribbons of silvery fog. Inside the cab, his profile is the sharp prow of a boat, sweeping back and forth.
I hesitate. If I get onto the ferry he might follow me. But the next ride is half an hour from now. I am not strong enough to be still that long. Thirty minutes of reflection would be more than enough to send me back to him. Even now, knowing he’s near, probably still furious, a newly minted murderer with a witness to deal with, even with my mind full of fear and a frisson of animal wariness like a blanket of needles across my back, the overwhelming impulse from my body is desire. I want him, so badly that I have to steady myself against the damp bark of a tree as a dizzying tide of longing sweeps up my limbs, gathers tingling behind my breastbone and slides to the base of my belly.
I think of the blade at my throat and imagine what it might feel like to be awash in my own blood. To drown in it or simply seep away. The possibility beguiles me like the yearning for sleep at the end of a long winter night. How blissful to rest, to gaze at the sky and weep into the earth. To give up, give in, to let the life trickle out of me, to die in my lover’s arms. To close my eyes. But none of that is possible. Whatever the release or deliverance for me at the tip of the knife, whatever murky wish it might fulfill, for Jack my death would mean a lifetime of suffering.
He parks his truck at the end of the line for the ferry. I slide down the hill and head for the dock, crouching low behind the line of cars to keep out of sight. When the next group of pedestrians starts up the ramp, I step in front of them and allow myself to be carried along. The fog slides like a curtain behind me, and underfoot is the blacktop, the cement edged in stripes of black and yellow, the wooden dock. The ferry at the end, and the door open with the light shining through. One foot after the other. Unhurried, afloat, I hand my pass to the ferryman and hear his voice ring out, close beside my ear:
“All full!”
Jack’s truck is still on the ramp. He’ll have to wait for the next ferry, and by then I’ll be long gone.
I make my way to the stern and take a rain-beaded seat with the two satchels in my lap. The pins and needles, the numbness, the chill of adrenaline are all gone now, and my body feels curiously soft and empty, a waterlogged husk on the banks of an ancient river.
There are mostly men making the commute this morning. The young guy in the seat next to me is staring fixedly ahead, but I feel the eager maleness of him, and know he’ll speak to me once the ferry gets under way. The space between us is slick with the knowledge, as though we are two magnets laid the wrong way together, gliding along a space that cannot be breached.
The boat unmoors and prepares to separate from the loading dock. I sit narrow in my seat, one knee pressed to the curve of the other. The men around me seem unnaturally large, silent and menacing in their dark wet jackets, steam rising in clouds around their faces. In this forest of men, I am blind and lost, unable to distinguish good from evil, unsure after all that there is anything to choose between them. My eyes shift from face to featureless face. These men are unknowable, unmovable, solid and wooden as the pines.
For them, I am as much a mystery. As Jack said, no one knows anyone else. To believe otherwise is an expression of innocence and arrogance.
As the ferry pulls away, creaming the sea behind it, I see Jack standing at the edge of the dock, scanning the crowd with his hands slung low on his hips. He shrinks to the height of my thumbnail and smaller, until the air between us grows too thick and the distance too great, and he is gone.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
* * * * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I discovered early on that writing is best undertaken in the company of fellow sufferers. It didn’t take me long to find them; we gravitated to Betsy Lerner’s blog like moths to a streetlamp, with occasional burns ensuing that never deterred us for long. Through Betsy I acquired a circle of fascinating though somewhat imaginary friends who beguile me every day in our online conversations, who have allowed me into their minds and who
m I accept with deepest gratitude into mine.
Of all these, it’s the man behind the curtain who has helped me the most. More than the scads of practical advice—and actually, this book was his idea in the first place—August has given me something I never dreamed I could possess: confidence. What he’s done for me and for so many others is beyond my ability to articulate. I can only give thanks for a life transformed, possibly saved. You’re a good, kind man, you are.
Thanks as well to my agent, Jeff Kleinman, for his commitment, his skill and his great speedy-speed. The grass doesn’t grow under your feet, my friend.
My undying appreciation goes out to Erin Craig and Tara Scarcello, who designed a cover I’d like to paper my walls with, and to the marketing, public relations and sales teams for their enthusiasm and all-around badassery.
Thanks especially to my lovely editor, Michelle Meade, whose wisdom and guidance have helped me understand what I was trying to say and decide how to say it.
And how to finish when I’ve said enough.
ALICE CLOSE
YOUR EYES
AVERIL DEAN
Reader’s Guide
Questions for Discussion
Discuss the recurring theme of mistaken assumptions, the idea of each character’s tragic misreading of the people around them. How is Molly’s blindness relevant to this theme?
What’s the significance of the character of Lyle? Why do you think the author chose to give him a disability? Why does Molly taunt him, and what does she mean when she says to Alice, “I’m the kid.”
What do you think of Alice’s mother? Grandmother? What do you imagine their lives were like before Nana died? And after?
Upon hearing that Alice is being taunted at school, her grandmother says, “Learn to use what you have.” How did you feel about what Alice did with that advice? What did her actions reveal about her character? About the person she would grow up to be?