We Can Only Save Ourselves Page 11

  Alice knew Wesley loved Hannah Fay. She was a sacred vessel, her body the first home for the child they made together, and because of this, he often treated her like she was breakable, like there was less of her now instead of more. But, Alice noticed, he did not treat her like he wanted to fuck her, though presumably at one point he had. Alice tried to imagine Wesley treating Hannah Fay the way he did Apple, grabbing her ass, pulling her hair, and couldn’t. This, Alice told herself, would never happen to her if she ever got pregnant. She would do whatever it took to ensure Wesley would still want to reach his hand up her skirt, twist his fingers in her hair, growl into her ear.

  (Once we, too, were unaware what our bodies could do besides tempt a man. We did not know the worlds our bodies could hold and grow, how powerful pregnancy made us. But power, too, is frightening, especially in people who haven’t had it before, and some of our husbands turned away from us in bed, afraid to hurt the baby as they entered us, they said, afraid of their own strength and lust. But this wasn’t true—they were really afraid of being, for once, the weaker ones. We didn’t even know this until we’d pushed the babies from our bodies, and we weren’t pregnant anymore, and it was too late. We only knew about the power we’d had when it had passed from our bodies, and in its absence, we felt ourselves sagging, wilting.)

  They passed by the college campus, and because it was late afternoon, the lawns and pathways were covered in little herds of students. They looked fake to Alice, like paper dolls or figurines. “Inauthentic,” Wesley called them on their way home after that first night in the library. “None of those people know what it means to truly live. They aren’t free. They have a million masters they serve. Not us, though. We serve no one but ourselves.” Even before she’d met the other girls and gotten to know Wesley, she knew what he said was true, and that she, too, had been one of those doll-house figurines, pretty and wooden.

  “Are we shopping too?” Apple said when they arrived. “I mean, for ourselves.” She slung a long leg over the side of the truck, even though Hannah Fay had come around and opened the gate of the truck bed so the girls could lower themselves down. Wesley stood with his hands in his back pockets squinting at the store, which was fronted by a wall of windows, and then began to approach it.

  “Is there something you need?” Wesley asked the girls, calling back over his shoulder as they followed behind him.

  “Excitement,” Apple said. She carried an orange crocheted purse on a leather strap so long that the bag, round as a pumpkin, bounced against her leg. “The thrill of the hunt.”

  “New clothes,” said Janie.

  “You have Alice’s clothes,” said Kathryn. “She hasn’t been here that long, so it’s like you just got new ones.” Apple was wearing a yellow dress that once belonged to Alice; she wasn’t sure why she’d packed it, since she had only worn it once, to a Thanksgiving dinner the year before at her aunt’s house. Apple had put it on, and when Alice saw how it suited her, pale and soft under her dark hair, she never wore it again. Now Apple had worn it many more times than Alice ever had. Here, the seasons changed—barely—but Apple in her yellow dress and her orange purse with the brown strap looked to Alice like fall, like the pictures she had seen in the brochures from the college campuses on the opposite coast, the drama and intensity of the changing leaves.

  “I’ve been here awhile,” Alice said, not to defend Apple’s desire for new clothes; what she wanted to defend was her place there with the girls, her spot in the house, in the bed of the truck, beside Wesley at night.

  “Don’t worry,” said Janie, coming up beside her and sliding her hand into the back pocket of Alice’s jeans, the way a boyfriend might in the halls of a high school. “We know you’re one of us,” she said, then slipped her hand out. Alice wanted her to put it back.

  “Not ’til Wesley names you,” Apple trilled.

  “Lay off, Apple,” Wesley said. They were all in front of the glass door, and Alice could see their reflections in the store windows and the clothes behind the glass. The six of them looked half ghostly, dressed in shadows of clothes that once belonged to other people. Wesley opened the door and ushered them in. “Look around, enjoy yourselves,” Wesley said, “but don’t embarrass me.”

  “Us?” Apple asked, eyes wide.

  “You especially,” Wesley said, but he was grinning, and Apple winked and turned away, but not before reaching up and dragging a fingernail across his cheek, like it was a sleek and silver knife cutting him open.

  The clothes hung on plastic hangers and smelled like disinfectant, which made Alice’s eyes sting and her head ache. “I think I’m allergic to whatever they spray on these clothes,” she said to Apple, who was noisily pushing the hangers down the rack, evaluating each blouse with a quick eye.

  “Poor little rich girl,” Apple said without looking up. “Allergic to poverty.”

  “That’s not what I said,” Alice said, blushing. “I don’t have any more money than you do.” And she didn’t. Whatever money she’d had, she’d given to Wesley. It had turned into food in the pantry, water in the faucets, power in the light switches.

  “That doesn’t change anything,” Apple said. “Not really.” She pulled a blue shirt off the rod and held it up to Alice. “This would look pretty on you,” she said. “You should ask Wesley for it.”

  “I’m not the one who wanted new clothes,” said Alice.

  “Girls,” said Kathryn, coming up behind them. “Don’t let Wesley hear your bad attitudes.”

  Apple rolled her eyes. “Kathryn, God, I was trying to be nice,” she said, but she hung up the blue shirt and went to join Janie, who was looking at a rack of shoes.

  “It would look good on you,” Kathryn said, pushing the hangers apart so the blue shirt was visible again. “Sometimes Wesley likes to pick our clothes for us. You could call him over here and keep the shirt just like this and see if he picks it up,” she went on. “Let him think he found it.”

  “I really don’t need anything,” Alice told her.

  Kathryn shrugged. “Who really needs anything,” she said. “New things are just fun. Everyone likes new things.” She smiled, lips tight, no teeth showing. “That’s how you got here, right?”

  “How I got here?” Alice asked. “Wesley found me.”

  “Exactly,” said Kathryn, but she didn’t sound spiteful or jealous or cruel. She spoke the way a weatherman might report an oncoming heat wave. “You’re his brand-new thing.”

  “I don’t mind being new,” Alice said, even though she had just been insisting that she wasn’t new anymore, that she belonged. What she meant was that she didn’t mind being special, chosen, untarnished, unsullied.

  “Of course you don’t. The new toy gets played with the most,” Kathryn said, and Alice realized she had seen this before, had lived through it: first with Hannah Fay, then Apple, then Janie, and now Alice.

  She imagined Kathryn the day Wesley brought home Hannah Fay, her stomach still flat, just a child, Kathryn taking off her glasses and folding them up, even though it meant feeling unsteady in every step because now more than ever it was important to keep Wesley happy. “But,” Kathryn said, “then you aren’t new anymore, and you know someone else will be eventually.” Kathryn, moving with confidence around the kitchen, cooking a meal for this girl, this child, filling her wineglass at Wesley’s insistence, showing her the bedroom she could sleep in. I hope you’ll feel at home, Alice imagined Kathryn saying in a brisk voice, hand on the light switch as she pointed out the closet, the dresser she could use, and Hannah Fay responding gratefully. And Wesley saying, This is home, your home. Our home, and maybe Kathryn would look at him and know something she hadn’t before, about the kind of man he was, about the kind of home her house had become.

  “It must have been hard,” Alice said, “to open your home up to strangers so many times.” To be replaced. To become old.

  “I would only do it for Wesley,” Kathryn said.

  But before Alice could answer, s
he heard Wesley call them, and they left the blue shirt on the rack and went to him. The girls gathered around him as he held up a long black garment. “Check this out,” he said. “A priest outfit.”

  “A habit,” said Janie.

  “That’s for a nun,” Apple said.

  “A cassock,” said Kathryn. “I grew up Catholic.”

  “How funny that it’s here,” said Alice. “I wonder what happened to the priest.”

  “He probably just stopped being one,” said Apple. “Because he probably realized it sucked. I doubt he was killed or anything interesting.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Wesley. He had moved in front of a floor-length mirror. When he held the frock up to himself, keeping the shoulder seam level with his shoulder, the hem grazed his boots. The black of the fabric made his eyes look even lighter, like the shallow edge of an alpine lake. “We were meant to find this,” he said. “I’m getting it.”

  “A sign,” said Alice, who had always been open to signs, and now believed in them in earnest. How could she not? There was the magic of Wesley finding her and finding her again at precisely the moment her life was changing. Then she had always liked the number five—it was a pleasing number, cheery and round, and when Alice joined, she made five. And she loved the other girls, and they loved her. If that wasn’t a sign that she was in the right place doing the right thing, she didn’t know what was.

  “Who found it?” asked Kathryn.

  “Me,” said Hannah Fay. “I thought at first it might be wide enough to cover my belly, but then it felt wrong to try it on when I realized what it was.”

  “Why?” asked Janie.

  “Because she’s pregnant,” Kathryn said. “Out of wedlock. That’s a sin.”

  “Thanks, Kathryn,” Hannah Fay said.

  “Hey,” said Wesley, throwing the robe over his shoulder. “Wrong. Anything that results in a beautiful baby couldn’t be a sin. Besides, marriage is a trap. Being trapped by anyone or anything—now that should be a sin.” (But, one might ask, what does he think a baby is?)

  “And that’s why we’re all so free here,” Apple said. She leaned her head back and spread her arms out wide, her dark hair tumbling down her back, her throat white and bare, like she was reveling in all the freedom. When she stood up straight again, she was grinning.

  “You are,” Wesley said. “No one is making you stay. Leave if you want to.”

  “Lucky for you,” Apple said, “I don’t.”

  “We are lucky,” Hannah Fay said. “We need you.” She turned to Wesley. “Wesley, do you need anything else? Pants? I can grab some jeans if you’d like.”

  He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Everything else can wait. I’ve got plans for this already.”

  “Something kinky?” asked Apple.

  “You’re going to hell,” Kathryn said.

  “Probably,” said Apple, and everyone but Kathryn laughed, and Wesley took the gown to the cashier.

  “This it for today?” the woman asked, giving him a strange look.

  “I’m starting my own church,” Wesley told her, pulling out his wallet. “Would you like to join?”

  “It’s free,” said Janie.

  “Except for your soul,” said Apple.

  “Yes, this is it for today,” said Hannah Fay as the cashier looked in confusion from each one of them to the next. “Thank you.”

  They were piling back into the truck when Apple told them she forgot something and she would be right back. “Hurry,” said Wesley. “I’m starving.” Apple loped across the parking lot and darted inside the glass door of the store. A minute later, she was out again and jogging back toward the truck, stepping on the back tire to propel herself into the bed with the other girls.

  “Here,” she said, digging a blue bundle out of her bag and tossing it to Alice, who caught it and unfolded the shirt from the store. Alice held it up against herself.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” said Apple, and then they pulled out of the parking lot and picked up speed, and Alice’s hair blew in front of her eyes so she couldn’t see.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT IS VERY hard now to remember Mrs. Lange as anything other than two people: first, she was Alice’s mother, and then she was the mother of no one.

  Or first she was like the stately mother of the sweet princess, untouchable and vaguely unknowable, and then she was like the witch who lives on the outskirts of the village, untouchable still and even more unknowable now because, if we’re being honest, we are too frightened to really know her at all. And if we are really committed to the truth, then we can admit that she has always been something slightly alien to us, this woman without a man in her home. When Mr. Lange passed away, Mrs. Lange drifted further from us, like a sailboat on the ocean; we could still see her, but she was moving farther from shore, growing less distinct every day.

  But now she has truly become someone we cannot relate to; here, so far, the rest of us have been untouched by serious loss. We know how lucky we are.

  So Mrs. Lange, then, is no longer like us. Yes, her child is still here, walking the same earth, but she isn’t here. Her mother is a lost thing, too, a pinprick on the horizon. We simultaneously try to hold her in our hearts—we know she hurts, she is broken, she was much like us not long ago—and push her out of our thoughts, because if we think about her too much, the pain begins to burn like a tired muscle, and we can’t carry her any longer.

  At first, once we knew Alice Lange was still alive, that she had simply run away, Mrs. Lange tried to keep up. She attended the neighborhood civic committee meeting and sat in the back, a small beige purse on her lap. She came to a dinner party at the McEntyres’. She handed out Halloween candy to the tiny ghosts and princesses who knocked on her door, telling them they were scary or beautiful, even though her stomach turned hopefully with each chime of the doorbell, imagining, always, that it was Alice outside on the doorstep. She had forgotten her key. She was worried her mother would be mad at her. There were a million reasons why she didn’t let herself right in. But then Mrs. Lange would open the door slowly, and instead of Alice, she’d be greeted by a group of children and an onslaught of memories of all the people Alice had once been. Ever since her daughter left, Mrs. Lange had a hard time sleeping, and that night, instead of counting sheep, she tried to think of every Halloween costume Alice had ever worn. Seventeen years, seventeen costumes, but she could only think of ten, and it made her so upset that she couldn’t sleep after all.

  When Alice was growing up, Mrs. Lange baked all the time. She said she liked having something to do with her hands. Before she became a mother, she used to paint. But, she said, what would she do with all those paintings she had living in her head and in her fingers, waiting to be birthed? They would take up too much space. Whereas with a plate of cookies or a cake, you could see it, admire your craft, and then by the end of the night it was all gone, like a short and beautiful dream. Plus, she told us once, Alice by her side, her daughter was an excellent helper in the kitchen. “I can crack the eggs without getting any of the shell in,” Alice said in a very serious voice. It was just after her father died, so she must have been five, the right size to sit on the counter beside her mother, one egg fitting perfectly in each hand.

  In the fall, Alice and her mother made loaves of pumpkin bread, which they cut carefully in half, wrapped in tinfoil, and left on our front porches. At Christmastime, it was gingerbread men in brown-paper lunch bags. In the spring, soft sugar cookies with yellow sprinkles the color of duckling feathers. In the summer, it was too hot to bake, but come October, we would open the door and see the squat rectangles of tinfoil-wrapped bread shining on our welcome mats.

  The first year that Bev was living here, she went out to get the mail one October day and almost squashed the half loaf of Mrs. Lange’s pumpkin bread. She bent over uneasily, pregnant with Timmy, and picked up the loaf, then peeled back a corner of the foil and sniffed at it. At best,
this bread was mistakenly left for her, or at worst, purposely left for her and poisoned. She walked over to April’s house, bread in hand, and spotted an identical package on her doorstep.

  “Oh!” said April in delight when she saw Bev. “It’s pumpkin bread day!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Bev. “It’s what?”

  “Mrs. Lange,” said April, pointing toward the Langes’ house, “bakes these every October with her daughter, and they give them to everyone on the street. You never know what day in October it’s coming, so it’s a wonderful little surprise.” April bent and grabbed her own loaf. Like Bev, she peeled back the foil and smelled it, breathing in deeply. “It’s like it’s not really fall until you get pumpkin bread,” she went on. “I can’t believe it’s already October.”

  “I can,” said Bev, who was due the first week in November. “Okay, well, I just wanted to make sure no one had laced the bread with arsenic in order to kill me and steal the baby from my womb.”

  “That kind of thing doesn’t actually happen,” April said. “Besides, if someone wanted a baby they could steal the one from my house. Or the twins from down the street. Or the Pittmans’ baby. Why go to the bother of murdering someone and then stealing her baby, when you could just commit the one, easier crime?”

  “Good point,” said Bev, laughing, and this, she would later say, was the moment when she made her first real friend in the neighborhood.

  Alice Lange left us for the first time in September, only days before October would break through. Of course, we didn’t think about the pumpkin bread during that time. For weeks, we were consumed with Alice’s whereabouts, the theories and possibilities behind her disappearance, and it was our own children who reminded us that time was moving on while we sat and wondered about the past—Halloween was in less than two weeks, and they needed costumes, we needed candy for the trick-or-treaters, and once November hit, everything would begin sliding fast into the holidays. So we snapped back, living halfway in the present, a quarter in the future, and reserving the last quarter for Alice Lange, whom we could only see behind us. On November first, exhausted from the night before, we opened our front doors to see that silver-wrapped half loaf of bread waiting for us. April called Bev. “November first. Only a day late,” she said. “I can’t believe she still did it.”