We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  “That will definitely be against the rules,” Kathryn said.

  “Whose side are you on?” Apple asked, but Kathryn—to her credit, Alice thought—ignored her.

  Inside the study, Alice felt struck by a series of images, flashes of shapes she had to make sense of in the darkness—the glowing orbs of candlelight, the white square of collar at Wesley’s throat, his hands folded on the desk like a fallen pair of doves. “Shut the door,” he told her, but she was already doing it, closing herself in with him.

  The study held a desk that Alice knew was made of some dark, heavy wood—it had been in the house when Kathryn bought it—and a chair. At night, Hannah Fay slept on a thin mattress in the center of the room, but now it was leaned up against the wall, the fitted sheet still wrapped around it and her blankets folded neatly beside it.

  And Wesley sat at the desk, and he was both Wesley and not Wesley. It made Alice think of those pictures in which some people saw a vase, while others saw two people kissing, or they saw a crone or they saw a maiden. The picture was both a vase and not a vase, lovers and not lovers, an old woman and a young woman at the same time. This was Wesley in front of Alice. He was Wesley, and he was also a vessel, an act of love, youth, and age—he took everything in the room, in the house, in the universe, and held it all inside him, becoming both everything Alice knew intimately and everything she found alien.

  “Sit,” he said. Alice felt relieved he didn’t call her “child,” the way the priest at her grandparents’ church did when she visited, or make her kneel or make the sign of the cross over her chest. She would’ve done either of those things, but she would’ve felt—wrong somehow.

  Alice lowered herself into a dining chair, the desk a barrier between them, and crossed her ankles. She wasn’t sure if she should keep her eyes down or meet his and finally settled on glancing up at him to see where he was looking: at her, his eyes bright, pinpricks of candlelight reflected in the black. She didn’t know if she was supposed to be holding eye contact with him, or if this version of Wesley would find it disrespectful or presumptuous, so she looked instead at his right ear.

  “Alice,” he said, “what do you think we are going to do in here?”

  “Ah,” she said, thinking of everything she associated with Catholicism. “You said a sacrament. So maybe . . . Communion?”

  “Do you see any wine?” Wesley asked. “Or bread?”

  “No,” she told him.

  “And surely you don’t think I would ask you to actually drink my blood and eat my body,” he said congenially. He was smiling. White teeth above white collar.

  “Of course not,” Alice said, hoping he didn’t hear the uncertainty in her voice. (A man like that, we would tell her, would never shed a drop of his blood for you, not even if you were dying and only he could save you.)

  “Okay,” he said. “So not that.”

  “Confession,” Alice said.

  “There we go,” he said. “Nailed it.” He paused. “Pun not intended.”

  “Pun?”

  “Because Jesus,” Wesley answered, lifting his hands and tapping each palm with a forefinger. “Nailed?”

  “Oh,” said Alice. “Right.”

  “Okay, so,” Wesley said, “confession. What do you think is going to happen next?”

  “I’m going to confess,” Alice said. “To you. About . . . things. Bad things.”

  “Wrong again,” he said. Around him the candles flickered, flames trembling. “I’m going to confess to you.”

  “Are you going to do the same thing to all the girls?” Alice asked. “Confess, I mean.”

  “Normally, I wouldn’t answer that,” Wesley said. “But since tonight is all about honesty, I’ll tell you this: yes, I’m going to confess to all of you, and I’m going to be truthful, but each of you will get part of the story. My story. The part I choose to tell you.” He pointed at Alice, his finger like a sword aimed at her chest. “You, specifically.”

  “Okay,” said Alice. “Wow. Okay. I feel so powerful.” She laughed. “I’m trying to decide what I should ask first.”

  “Sorry,” said Wesley, “but your job isn’t to ask questions. Maybe some other time, but not tonight. Tonight your job is only to listen. But if it’s power you want, then think about it this way: there’s power in listening too. You just wield it differently.”

  “All right,” said Alice, nodding, though she wasn’t sure she understood. “You’ve got my attention.”

  “All right,” echoed Wesley. He took a deep breath. Alice watched his shoulders rise and fall. He bent his head so that he looked like a supplicant (or, we think, like an actor, trying to recall his lines), and Alice waited. A minute ticked by. Wesley lifted his head again. “When I was a little boy, I lived with many women. Not all at once. One by one. My mother first, and then when she left, my grandmother, and when she died, my aunt. It’s my destiny to be surrounded, always, by women.”

  “Lucky you,” Alice said.

  Wesley held up a hand. “Don’t interrupt, please,” he said, and Alice’s cheeks began to burn. “I want to tell you about them. First, there was my mother. She does not have a name. To the state, the country, yes, of course she does, but not to me.” He said this like he was ashamed and divulging a secret vulnerability, sharing with Alice something he normally kept hidden, but she already knew this; it was one of the first things he’d told her, those weeks ago in his truck as they drove out here. (See, Alice? Every word of his monologue, the tone he has affected—all of it carefully chosen. An act. But he’s sloppy too. Can’t even keep his lines straight.) “She never earned a true name,” Wesley went on. “She was a bad and unkind woman, and if I was older, I would have killed her. Does that scare you?” He paused here. “To hear that I could be a murderer? That I could kill my own mother?” He paused again, and Alice got the sense that he was waiting, and so she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. She imagined it, Wesley as a boy or a young man with pricks of acne across his cheeks, lonely and angry. A woman with blue eyes like his, with the same cleft chin. This she could picture. A gun? Poison? This, she told herself, she could not (but another voice, one she could hear but told herself she couldn’t—this voice whispered knife).

  “It scares me too,” he said. “But she left me. A little boy. Her son! What kind of woman can do that?”

  “What about your father?” Alice asked.

  “Alice,” Wesley said. He rubbed his face with a weary hand. “Please. I’ll never finish if you keep interrupting.”

  “But do you hate him?” she asked. Typically, she listened to Wesley and followed his orders, but not tonight. Maybe it was Wesley’s vulnerability, maybe it was the cassock that gave the whole proceedings a kind of unreality, the way she always felt on Halloween, that nothing she did mattered, like the cool night two years ago when she had dressed as Cleopatra, heavy black liner rimming her eyelids, and she had let Carl Miller stick his hands inside her dress (Carl Miller, the first to chart the territory that was the golden Alice; we would have chosen someone different for her, someone who would not have felt her breasts and then pinched her nipples and asked her if she was cold), and it was only the next morning she realized that somehow something had truly been gained but lost as well, a real-life choice made for Alice by a long-dead Egyptian queen. “Do you?” she asked again when Wesley did not answer.

  “No,” he said. “He had no reason to be loyal to me, but my mother did.”

  “I see,” said Alice.

  “You don’t,” said Wesley. “You really don’t. I’ve been working on opening your eyes, and I see it happening, but this is one place where I’m afraid they’re still sealed fucking tight. You had a mother who loved you, but you’re the one who left. That tells me you don’t understand. If you did, you would never have left.”

  “I had to leave,” said Alice. “You know that. You knew I couldn’t stay there. I had to go.”

  “I knew you belonged here,” Wesley said. “But you always have a
choice. It’s just sometimes it feels like you don’t.” He shrugged. “Maybe my mom felt the same way, that her only choice was to leave me. She didn’t see herself as a mother, and she had to go. But even when you do what you think is right, what you absolutely have to do, there’s some collateral damage along the way.” He pointed to himself. “That’s me,” he said, then pointed toward the window that overlooked the front porch. “That’s your mother.”

  “Stop it,” said Alice, shaken. “This isn’t about me.”

  “You’re right,” Wesley said. “I wanted to tell you about the women.”

  “Tell me, then,” Alice said. “And I promise I won’t interrupt.”

  “My mother left me, and I went to stay with my grandmother,” he said. “She was kind and good. She taught me to read, made sure I went to school. When she died, I went to live with my aunt, my mother’s sister, who blamed me, first, for driving my mother away, then sending her own mother into an early grave. Eventually, my aunt sent me away. I’d been getting into a lot of fights, nothing crazy, just boys being boys. But a few of the mothers complained to my aunt that I was a bully, I fought dirty, and my aunt got the excuse she’d been looking for to get rid of me. So she called an institution who dealt with ‘children like me,’ she said, children who were violent. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to be next, Wesley,’ she said. ‘I can’t have you here.’ It’s not like she woke up one night with me standing over her with a knife. Nothing like that.” Wesley stopped here to look at Alice.

  “So she sent you away,” she said.

  Wesley nodded. “From then on, I was the product of institutions,” he said. “In and out, in and out until I was a grown man. This is what I need to confess to you. When I was a boy, I didn’t know how to play the game, be who they wanted me to be, and Alice, Alice, I hate to tell you this, but when I was in there, those places, I did hurt people. I had to. You know how it is to have to do something, to feel you have no other choice. Well, that was the case. I had to do it to get by, until I realized that was what they wanted, they wanted me locked up because I was trash, just some bastard orphan, and I changed. I made myself change. I was good. I became good. And that’s why I’m good now. Now I see the goodness in other people, like you and Apple and Janie. Like Kathryn. Hannah Fay. My good girls. And we’ll keep being good until the world demands something else of us.”

  “Why would the world want us to be anything but good?” Alice asked.

  “It won’t,” Wesley said. “It’s more that the world might not recognize our goodness for what it is. They’ll want us to look like them and act like them, but we won’t do it.”

  Alice, a girl who did know how to play the game, wasn’t sure what to say. On the one hand, she knew the answer Wesley wanted her to give. On the other, she didn’t think the world was so bad. But then again, he was right: she had been lucky, privileged to grow up in our community. The only institution she had ever known was school, and though she had grown tired of it eventually and seen it for what it was—a cage, a holding pen—it had been, for her, a warm and happy place. There, adults encouraged her, her classmates admired her. She grew strong, smart. When we told her she was exceptional, she heard us. She believed it. (And we would tell her, every institution would have cared for you, would have first held your hand and later kissed the ring on that same hand. Not everyone is so lucky, but you were.)

  What must it have been like for Wesley, wherever he was? She imagined him again now, a boy with shaggy dark hair curling over his ears, standing in the doorway of a big, gray place, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, a great room unfolding before him, one whose windows had bars, whose gray hallways branched off like flagella, whose gray floors were scuffed linoleum. Older boys watching. Adults out of earshot and unconcerned. His aunt’s car pulling away from the curb. Of course he knew the world was a false place, that a person couldn’t trust it to give a straight answer. Alice looked at Wesley, and he looked back at her. She saw he was true and strong, and his eyes were bright with tears. (But couldn’t it have been the candlelight making his eyes shine?) She could believe him, he who knew the world so much more intimately than she did. If someday he said the time had come when what the world wanted and what was right and good had diverged so much that the two sides could never reconcile, that the world had closed its eyes forever, banishing itself into the darkness, she would trust him. “No,” she said. “We won’t do it.”

  “Good girl,” said Wesley.

  “Alice,” Wesley said, “I sit here before you ready to confess: I have hated my mother. I have hurt other people, and I mean physically, not just emotionally, though I’m sure I’ve done that, too, without knowing it.”

  Alice wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s frightening,” she finally managed. “And heartbreaking all at once.”

  “May I say one more thing?” he asked. Alice nodded. Wesley put both hands flat on the table, his fingers spread so wide his hands looked giant. “Anything you see in me is in you,” he said. “Do you understand? If you look at me and see a—a—killer or I don’t know, a criminal, that’s what’s in your heart. A darkness.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Alice. “That I’m a bad person?”

  “No,” he said. “You are good. And when you look at people, you project that goodness into them. You change them. You’re changing me, and it’s helping you too. I’m a mirror. What you see is what’s in you.”

  And what did she see? A boy who had been broken and rebuilt into something stronger, into someone with a unique vision. Someone special, powerful. She had been rebuilt, too, she thought.

  (We’ve always thought that part of what made Alice Lange so exceptional, so extraordinary, was a near supernatural capacity for empathy. Wesley must have known this about her too.)

  Suddenly Alice heard the front door of the house opening and closing, and she involuntarily looked toward the window, which faced the front porch; Wesley did too. Two of the girls, laughing. “It’s Apple and Janie,” Alice said. She wondered if they could hear her inside the room. If they had gone outside to listen.

  “Janie,” Wesley said. “I’ve hurt her too. You’ve seen that.”

  “Yes,” said Alice.

  “Do you think I’ll hurt you?” he asked.

  He only hits Janie, Apple had said, if that makes you feel any better. It had made her feel better, and it also made her—strangely, she knew—a little jealous. Because it meant Janie possessed something extra, something that made her stand out to Wesley. She knew this was a horrible way to feel, but there it was sitting heavily inside her stomach, like a poisoned apple she had bit into only once before deciding to swallow it whole.

  “You won’t hurt me,” Alice said. “Only Janie.”

  “Only people who need it,” he said. “Sometimes Janie does. Sometimes she’s far away from what she needs to be. She doesn’t live in the now, and she needs someone to wake her up.”

  From outside she hears the girls again—Apple’s laugh is rumbly, like springtime thunder, and Janie’s is higher. She closes her eyes when she laughs, and Alice remembers Wesley’s hand whipping across Janie’s face, her eyes closed then, too, how she kept them closed a second after the crack.

  “What is my penance?” Wesley asked. “How can I be forgiven?”

  Alice considered this, the thrill of power she felt earlier rushing up inside her again. Love me, she thought, love all of us, but love me best of all. Bake us a cake every night, bring us breakfast in bed, take me on a trip. A road trip along the ocean, up and down the hills. Wear a sandwich board that says “Alice Lange is my queen,” keep it on for a whole day. But everything she thought of was silly, childlike.

  “What do I have to forgive you for?” Alice said instead. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  Wesley bowed his head. “Bless you,” he said. “The others won’t be as forgiving, I’m afraid.”

  (But they will, even Apple.)

  “What will you tell them?” Alice asked. “It will be some
thing different, won’t it?”

  “I do the things I do based on what people need,” Wesley said.

  “I understand,” Alice said.

  “Will you send Kathryn in?” Wesley asked. From next door, the neighbor’s dog barked. “God,” said Wesley, “I hate that fucking dog.”

  (What did Wesley’s confession say about Alice, about what she needed? Was it to be frightened? Because this would be what we ourselves would take away from this, that Wesley was a man formed by prisons, asylums, facilities, a person who heard no other voices but his own. Let nothing else dictate his behavior. She thought this: poor Wesley, strong Wesley, oh, how he had suffered, and he needed her to know this, she needed to know how his life had been defined by loss, how these women, his own family, left him. Alice could make it up to him. The girls could be his new family. She could be a wife to him, a mother to him, a sister, anything he needed her to be. Alice Lange loved redemption.)

  The front door opened and closed again, and they could hear that the girls were back inside. “And can you tell Apple and Janie to quit with the fucking door?” Wesley asked. He ran a finger between his collar and throat and rolled his shoulders back.

  “Of course,” Alice said. “Thank you, Wesley.”

  But he already had his eyes closed and his head bowed, preparing for Kathryn.

  “How was it?” Janie asked when Alice plopped herself down in the armchair by the couch. Hannah Fay had gone to Apple and Janie’s bedroom to sleep before it was her turn with Wesley, but Apple and Janie were still on the couch, Apple’s head in her friend’s lap. Janie held thin strands of Apple’s hair, weaving them in and out and over and under until they were tiny braids.