We Can Only Save Ourselves Page 10

  Kathryn nodded, and her head snapped off and rolled across the room, like a bowling ball, but also not because it was misshapen and lumpy. Alice gasped. With a zap of her finger, Hannah Fay sent it rolling unsteadily back to Kathryn, who positioned it back on her neck. Hannah Fay smiled. Alice wanted to have that power too. She would work on it. Her mind was opened, as promised, and she could see a baby for what it was: a cord that could keep her attached to Wesley, let her breathe, give her what she needed to live. But through the window the sky glowed red and orange and hot.

  “Your turn,” Wesley told Kathryn, and she pointed at Apple.

  “Aliens,” Apple said. “Invaders. Someone breaking in and taking what isn’t theirs. You go now, Hannah Fay.”

  “Losing the baby,” she said.

  “You won’t,” Janie said. “Sweet Hannah Fay. The baby will be fine.”

  “It’s not your turn, Janie,” Wesley said. “She could lose the baby. We don’t know.”

  “See?” said Hannah Fay. “It could happen.” She had started crying in a soft, sweet way, and Alice wanted to crawl into her lap, lick the tears off her cheek like a kitten. Things were coming into focus now. The color green was only humming. Wesley wasn’t playing the guitar anymore, and he wasn’t taking pictures, either, but Alice wished he would. She noticed now the floor was covered in little white feathers. The corpse of a throw pillow on the couch, bleeding down. The volcano must be dormant now, she realized, noticing that the sky outside the window was black.

  “Don’t say that,” said Janie. She walked over to Hannah Fay and put a hand on her head. She picked up a strand of her hair and let it fall. “It’s cruel,” Janie said. She went back to the couch where she had begun the night and lay down. With the white feathers surrounding her, she looked like a maiden on a bed of flowers.

  “Fear is healthy,” said Wesley. “We need it. It’s the world’s way of telling us to pay attention. Too many people aren’t paying attention.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Janie. “I just don’t want her to be sad.”

  “You’re stopping her from living in the now,” Wesley said, moving closer to where Janie was lying on the couch. “Let her be afraid.”

  Alice saw that she herself had moved too. She was sitting in the corner of the room on the pillow Hannah Fay had been resting on. She looked at Hannah Fay, who was sitting in the same place, with only the wood floor beneath her.

  “Sit up,” Wesley said to Janie. Janie obliged, but kept her chin tilted back, so she was looking up at him, and folded her hands in her lap.

  Then Wesley hit her across the face. A crack—her head turned, cheek red and streaked. She kept her hands together, and looked down at them, like she was checking to make sure they were still there, all the fingers intact.

  Now he knelt in front of her, a hand on each of her knees. “Hannah Fay,” he said, keeping his eyes on Janie. “Ask her.”

  “Janie,” said Hannah Fay. Her voice was soothing and low, and in it Alice could hear the lullabies she would one day sing to her baby. “What are you afraid of?”

  “The ocean,” said Janie softly, eyes down, a girl who had misbehaved and been scolded. “It’s so big.”

  “Good,” said Wesley. He lifted a finger and touched her chin, then her lips. “Let’s go to bed, everyone,” he said. “But first, can someone hand me the camera?” Kathryn brought it to him. “Look at me, Janie,” he said. She looked up, eyes wet and tired. He held the camera up to his eye, squinting through the viewfinder, and took her picture. “Thank you,” he told her. “Thank you for sharing yourself with me.” He pulled Janie up by the hand, and walked her out of the room, keeping his hand on her lower back.

  “Looks like you’re with me tonight,” Apple said to Alice, sounding worn and tired. “You should have gone to bed hours ago.” Wesley and Janie were gone. So was Hannah Fay, who had snuck into the study, which seemed to be her bedroom. Still in the living room, Kathryn cleaned up in silence. Efficient hands replacing pillows, arranging the chairs at pleasing angles from the coffee table. Then she picked up the small white feathers one by one.

  “That’s a game you like?” Alice asked Apple as she followed her down the hall.

  Apple shrugged. “It’s good to be a little bit afraid,” she said over her shoulder. “Puts things in perspective.”

  “It’s terrible,” said Alice. “Poor Janie.”

  “She knows what it’s like here,” Apple said. She stopped outside the closed bedroom door and turned to Alice so they were face-to-face. Apple looked tired and bleary, like a girl in an impressionist painting. Everything about her seemed fuzzy and indistinct; even her sharp, dark eyebrows seemed out of focus somehow. “Janie’s getting a reward now,” Apple said. “You’re the one who should feel bad. You have to sleep all alone.”

  “I thought I was sleeping with you,” said Alice.

  “I meant alone, as in not with Wesley.”

  “Fine,” Alice said. “Let’s go to bed, then.” She went to open the door, but Apple didn’t move, and Alice, her hand on the doorknob, didn’t turn it.

  “Look,” said Apple finally. “He only hits Janie.”

  “Oh,” said Alice. She remembered the hierarchy of girls she had imagined when she first arrived at the bungalow. This put Janie at the bottom. Or did it put her at the top?

  “That makes it a little better, right?” asked Apple.

  “Of course not,” said Alice. But a few minutes later when she crawled into bed with Apple, who unexpectedly slept all curled up like a little snail in a shell, she fell asleep easily. She didn’t have any bad dreams.

  Chapter Sixteen

  NOW THAT ALICE had been in the bungalow for a few days, she could feel the girls around her, even when they were out of sight. She would hear footsteps in the kitchen and think, that’s Janie, and then Janie would be there, holding a handful of blueberries. She’d hear humming and know it was Hannah Fay leaning toward the mirror in the bathroom, plucking her fine red eyebrows. She hoped the other girls would hear the screen door shut and think, oh, it’s Alice, coming inside, or hear her laugh in the other room and say to each other, that couldn’t be anyone but Alice.

  None of them worked regular jobs except Kathryn, and Wesley went out during the day, often to take pictures, but sometimes to do something none of them knew about. “He has his own life outside the house,” Janie said when Alice asked. “It’s his right to keep it private if he wants to. We don’t tell him everything we do.” (Though they didn’t have to, because the girls did what Wesley wanted. He planted seeds in the wet earth of their brains every morning. He said, “I love a clean house at the end of the day. Don’t you?” They cleaned the house. He said, “I think I’m getting scurvy. Not enough vitamin C,” though he was always tan, and the girls went to the grocery store and came home with arms full of oranges they put in bowls all around the house, in the kitchen, on the dining-room table, the bedside table in Kathryn’s room. He said, “No more cigarettes. Smoking is the sign of a weak will.” The girls stopped that, too, at least when he was around, though we have to say, a weak will is exactly the kind Wesley preferred. He said, “The world outside is dangerous.” And the girls stayed inside. We see the wisdom in this last one, we do, but the difference is that we decide for ourselves.)

  But whenever Wesley found his way back to the bungalow of girls, it was clear to Alice that no matter what they’d done or where they went, they had been waiting. They spent the day in various stages of anticipation, everything building to the opening and closing of the front door, the sound of boots on the wood floors. Now, she waited too. Like the other girls, she listened for vibrations, felt the air for changes, a certain swing to signal that Wesley had come home again. They were like dogs and cats and birds, who sense the shifts in the earth so acutely that they could feel the rumbling of a latent earthquake, could sense the pull of the ocean’s tide before a giant wave came crashing in to eat the shore.

  But instead of running from the wave and th
e cracks in the ground, Alice and the girls waited for it, hoped for it, went running toward it.

  Wesley was mercurial, which made the days he was home exciting, unpredictable. Once he went to the store and came back with a crateful of exotic fruit, unfamiliar and robust, and they spent all day examining the various pieces, peeling the skin, picking the leaves off, cutting them open, and licking the juices off their hands as they laughed and tried to figure out how to eat each one. Another day he woke up and said he had a vision for the girls. “We’re growing our hair out,” he announced. “All of us. I want us to look like we all belong together.” He took the scissors they used to give themselves haircuts at home and hid them until Kathryn demanded they be returned. But still, they never cut their hair.

  On the days Wesley disappeared without leaving any directions, the girls spent the hours talking and smoking and then taking lazy, stoned walks around the neighborhood before coming home to read the old newspapers and magazines Wesley left around the house. There were no books anywhere, even in the little study where Hannah Fay slept.

  Not a single one of the magazines or newspapers was recent. Their covers were black and white and showed crowds of people listening to a short man yelling behind a podium, straight lines of uniformed men beside him, behind him, or they showed soldiers or Russian tsars or people marching, holding signs, their mouths open, frozen and yelling.

  “He loves history,” Hannah Fay had told Alice, flipping through the pages. “They’re actually pretty interesting. I never really went to class, so I’m learning a lot.” Hannah Fay had dropped out of school early, she said. She, like Wesley, wasn’t a person made for institutions.

  But despite his disdain for traditional schooling, Wesley himself was undeniably a teacher. Whatever else he was, he said, first he was a teacher. He taught through language, he taught through music, he taught through his photography. He taught by walking into a room, by giving someone a certain look, by lingering in silence. In all of these things were lessons for Alice and the girls to absorb if they paid close-enough attention. Sometimes Alice wanted to take notes the way she had in school—which seemed so long ago and so silly, what had she thought she would learn there?—but she imagined Apple finding her notes and holding them up, laughing, and so instead Alice tried to commit the lessons to memory. She wanted to make them the bones of her body, the muscles that let her run.

  Wesley in the backyard, in a green plastic lawn chair, the girls sitting like lotus flowers at his feet: “Of course the past exists, and thankfully the future exists, because frankly this world is shit, but it’s the present that matters. It’s what we do in the present that determines what our future will be.” (An aphorism on a poster hanging in the office of a high school guidance counselor. We see you, Wesley. We know your kind.)

  Wesley in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, the girls sautéing onions, setting the table, filling water glasses: “Our future? A king and queens. Rulers of a new world.”

  Wesley examining a leak in the bathroom attached to Kathryn’s room: “Is it worth it to get this fixed? We’re going to be leaving here soon.” When they got to the desert, that’s when everything would start, Wesley said. The grand awakening. “There will be violence,” he warned. “It’s hard for people to acknowledge what they’ve been blind to their whole lives. It’s painful. They won’t like it. And I can’t say we won’t be a part of the violence, but I will say this: we won’t be the victims of it.”

  Wesley walking through the neighborhood, the girls beside him and behind him: “The people who live in these houses are blind and deaf and dumb. The world is going to burn down around them, and they’ll never know. They don’t know why, but they want to stop us. They see us and see we’re different, and that scares them.”

  Wesley in bed with Alice, while Kathryn was at work, the other girls on a field trip to the post office to mail in the utility bill: “It’s a bad world. But we can change it. I can save you.”

  Wesley to Kathryn, to Janie, to Apple, to who knows who else, what others there were: “I can save you. I can save you all.”

  But if Wesley was a teacher, he was also a storyteller, though he might not have called himself that. A story implies fiction, and he spoke the truth. Often, though, he referred to his photographs, the stories a picture could tell with no audible language, and Alice learned to look at the images and read them for what Wesley told her was there. “See the story unfolding here,” he’d say, holding up a photo, pointing at the figure—because it was often people he photographed, in all their ugliness and weakness. The only frivolous pictures he took, he said, were of his girls, objects of pleasure, beauty, of all things good.

  But truly, he could take anything—a car driving with its headlights off at night, an electrical fire in a restaurant near the school, a dead limb falling off a tree in their yard—and make it into a story. Sometimes Alice wondered if he was making it all up on the spot, and she listened the way a child listens to a teacher reading a fairy tale: for pleasure first, for wisdom second. The stories were often frightening, visceral, but sometimes funny, too, and everyone would laugh together.

  She also knew that every story had a purpose for existing, and she began to listen for that. Silent, slow stalking in the dark; a pop, a flash, then flames; a crack and a crash of wood and leaves. All of it boiled down to this: the world outside is dangerous. Unpredictable, uncontrollable. The people in the world outside are dangerous too. Dangerous, blind, ignorant, asleep at the wheel and out of control.

  One night Alice told them about Rachel Granger, how she had been picked up not far from Alice’s neighborhood and murdered. “It wasn’t as nice a neighborhood as the one I’m from,” she said. “Mine is very safe.”

  But Wesley was shaking his head. “You disagree?” she asked.

  “Nowhere is safe,” he said. “And I know the man who killed her.”

  Alice felt her face moving itself into a look of incredulity, and she tried to hide her bewilderment—Wesley didn’t like to be doubted—but he was already holding up his hand and saying, “Not personally. But this guy’s been doing that for ages. I call him the driving man.”

  “So what does he do?” Alice asked.

  “What does it sound like?” Apple said. “He drives.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Wesley said.

  The driving man had never been caught. He would probably never be caught, Wesley said. Wesley wasn’t even sure if he was only one man or if he had an army of driving men, all of them in their cars at night, prowling streets where young women might wave them down, ask for a ride. Then these girls were gone, like Rachel. They were gone for good or they were gone for a while, only to show back up in a ditch, in a Dumpster, even once in the front yard of her own house. It could be anyone. He could be anywhere. Any pair of yellow lights driving toward you, any man who slowed down, gliding beside you.

  This was why the girls couldn’t walk around outside after dark, couldn’t go anywhere at night without Wesley. The truck was always fueled up, there were always quarters in the cupholder for a phone call. “My main priority,” Wesley told them now, “is to keep you safe.”

  Hannah Fay shivered. “Sorry, this conversation really creeps me out,” she said. “It’s so hard to think about what evil people there are out there.”

  Wesley nodded. “You know what, though? He’s fucking waking people up.” He stomped his foot for emphasis. “Everyone is scared, and they should be. We’re the only ones who shouldn’t.”

  “Should we toast him then?” asked Alice, holding up her wineglass. She was a little drunk. Both money and food seemed to be scarce around the house, and she was wondering if that was why the girls were so thin, but somehow there always seemed to be plenty to drink.

  “That feels wrong somehow,” said Janie.

  “A toast,” Wesley said, holding up his glass too, “to those who wake up the masses, through whatever means necessary.”

  Alice watched the other girls lift their glass
es, the wine inside the pale color of moonlight. Cheers, they said, and clinked them together.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ONE DAY WESLEY declared he needed new clothes, and moments later the girls were climbing into the truck bed, off to a secondhand store near the university. “Not you, Hannah Fay,” Wesley said, gesturing instead to the passenger seat. Of course that made sense—it wouldn’t be safe for Hannah Fay, blossoming with baby, to be bouncing in the truck bed as they navigated the roads, filled with potholes and careless drivers, but as Alice watched her ease into the front seat, she felt a twinge of jealousy.

  “Alice, sit, please,” said Kathryn, patting the truck bed, and Alice looked away from Hannah Fay and plopped herself down. As the girls settled and arranged themselves, Wesley took their picture.

  “Well, isn’t this a flattering angle,” Apple said dryly, but Wesley shook his head.

  “It’s exactly the angle I want,” he said. “Did you ever consider that?” When he got into the driver’s seat, Kathryn turned to Apple.

  “If you act like that, he won’t take your picture,” she said. “You have to let him do it just the way he wants to.”

  “I don’t care if he takes my picture,” Apple said.

  “I don’t really either,” said Alice quickly, remembering Wesley’s disdain for the people at the pool party, the ones desperate to feel the gaze of his camera on themselves.

  “Oh, I do,” said Janie. “I love it.” She shivered, even though the day was warm. “Look, I’m getting chills just thinking about it.” She held out her arm for the girls to see, but to Alice it simply looked like an arm. “He has a gift,” she said. “And a mission. I feel privileged even to be a part of it.”

  “Right, but he doesn’t want us to beg to have our picture taken,” Alice said. “He wants us to be different from everyone else.”

  “We are,” said Kathryn firmly.

  The girls went quiet then. Through the window in the back of the truck, Alice could see Hannah Fay looking out the passenger-side window, angled away from Wesley, who was sitting straight and tight. There was room for a whole other girl between them.