We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  “Fine,” Alice said. “Enlightening.”

  “Oooh,” said Janie. She didn’t look up from Apple’s hair, but she raised her eyebrows. “Enlighten us now.”

  “Jay,” said Apple. “I don’t know what the rules are, but you know that’s got to be against them.” Janie still held Apple’s hair in her hands like reins, so Apple couldn’t turn her head toward Alice, but she cut her eyes in her direction. “Am I right?”

  “Yes, sorry,” Alice said.

  “Secrets don’t make friends,” said Janie. “That’s what my mom always said.”

  “Your mom is dumb,” Apple said. “Secrets make the best friends.” Alice thought back to all the times she and Susannah had whispered to each other in the quiet places of their lives: dark bedrooms and living rooms in sleeping bags, the school library, the back of the bus on the way home from sporting events. Once when they were all on the school bus together, Millie had peeked over at the girls in the seat behind her and said, “What are you talking about?” And Susannah and Alice had erupted into giggles. “Nothing,” said Susannah. Millie had looked at them suspiciously. “Really, Millie,” Alice said. “Nothing.” The subtext being nothing we’ll tell you. (Of course in the moment when Millie decided to tell us about the floats, a slideshow of encounters with Alice Lange flashed through her memory, including this one of the bus ride, the shame she felt as she turned back around and slumped back onto her own bench.)

  “Well,” said Alice, torn between loyalty to Wesley and to the girls, “I’ll just tell you one thing.” She lowered her voice and leaned closer. Janie stopped braiding Apple’s hair and looked up. “Did you know he grew up in institutions?” Alice asked. “Poor Wesley. Can you imagine?”

  “Oh,” said Apple. “I knew that.” She shrugged. She sat up so that Janie’s hands seemed to fall from her hair, and she crossed her legs underneath her.

  “What kind of institutions?” Janie asked.

  “Like orphanages, or reform schools,” Alice said. Outside the neighbor’s dog barked, paused, then barked again. Alice looked out the front window. The blinds were open but all she could see was darkness.

  “Yeah, an orphanage,” Apple said, “but also prison.” And Alice’s attention snapped back to her.

  Janie’s eyes went wide as she looked from Apple to Alice for confirmation. “No way,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Apple. “Or maybe not prison because it wasn’t for very long? So would that be jail? But yes, basically. That’s the institution he was talking about, I’m sure.”

  “No,” Alice said. She replayed the conversation in her head, Wesley sitting across from her, penitent and alone. “He didn’t mention prison.”

  “Of course he wouldn’t, to you,” Apple said, emphasizing the last word.

  “I’m sorry,” Janie interjected, holding up a hand as Alice opened her mouth, “but let’s get back to why Wesley was in jail.”

  “Shhh,” Alice said. “Come on, we’re not even supposed to be talking about it.”

  “You were fine talking about it earlier,” Apple said, “until you realized you weren’t the expert after all.”

  “I never said I was an expert,” Alice replied.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  Janie leaned forward so her body separated Alice and Apple from each other’s line of vision. “Hello,” she said in a loud whisper. “Jail? Prison? Did he kill someone?”

  Alice caught Apple looking sideways in the direction of the study. “He wouldn’t say,” Apple said. “So I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d say no. Does he seem like someone who would kill somebody?”

  “Of course not,” Alice said. “If he did, none of us would be here.”

  Janie nodded.

  “There you go,” Apple said.

  “Huh,” Janie said, still nodding. The corners of her mouth turned downward in a pensive frown. “I wonder what else we don’t know about Wesley.” (There we go! The million-dollar question. But the girls let us down here, especially Alice, who we valued for her levelheadedness, her reason, who said only:)

  “We know the important things.” She spoke firmly, and it sounded like something Kathryn would say, which troubled her briefly because none of them wanted to sound like Kathryn. But she meant it, and more than that, she wanted the conversation to end. It had felt good to sit across from Wesley at the big desk and listen as he told her about the world and what he knew of it. To re-create her vision of him and attempt to redraw him as a young deviant instead of a boy abandoned—that part had wrecked her head a little, made her stomach hurt, made the room around her sharp and blurry at the same time. All the colors of the room popped brightly—the orange couch, the fat green leaves of the succulents—but the edges of everything were dulled.

  The dog from next door barked again, was always barking. Alice could picture him in his yard, nose pressed into the gaps of the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the neighbors’ property, snuffling in the darkness and then reacting to every movement he saw but didn’t understand.

  “Can I braid your hair, Alice?” Janie asked. “I’m tired of Apple’s.”

  “Hey,” said Apple. “Rude.” But she stood up and stretched, reached her long arms to the ceiling and pushed herself up on her toes so that the slender cut of her calves became elongated and defined, like the silhouette of a cliff above a canyon. Alice got up, too, taking Apple’s place, and put her head down in Janie’s lap, hair spread out in a fan. She closed her eyes at Janie’s touch and fell asleep, waking only when Janie whispered, “It’s my turn. I’m up,” and Alice squinted her eyes to see Apple walking out of the study. Apple faced the living room as she pulled the door closed behind her, tenderly, like she was afraid its glass panes would shatter.

  Alice sat up, groggy. “How was it?”

  “Enlightening,” Apple said. “Like you said. Get up. You can share the bedroom with Hannah Fay. I’ll take the couch.”

  “Are you sure?” Alice asked, but she had already gotten up, like the bed was pulling her to it, and she was powerless to move in any other direction.

  “Good night, Alice,” said Apple.

  “Good night,” said Alice, and she wove clumsily to the bedroom. She climbed into bed and pulled the quilt up as much as she could; Hannah Fay, always hot, was on top of the bedding. She closed her eyes and slept soundly, as if she were the one who’d had a burden lifted that night, not Wesley, as if she were free of a great and heavy weight.

  Chapter Twenty

  AFTER THE SERIES of confessions, Wesley slept in the study on Hannah Fay’s twin mattress—was still sleeping, Alice guessed, since he hadn’t emerged this morning. “What did I miss?” Hannah Fay asked the other girls as she joined them for breakfast, after waking to realize that Wesley had apparently forgotten about her.

  “Nothing really,” Kathryn said, and took a sip of her coffee, shuddering a little as she did. They all had to drink their coffee black because there was hardly ever any milk in the house and certainly never any cream. Alice was used to it by now, but Kathryn always had to choke it down. It amused Alice that Kathryn, of all the girls, was the one who could not tolerate the bitterness.

  No one else said anything after Kathryn spoke. Apple was leaning against the counter by the toaster, eating a piece of plain toast, occasionally brushing crumbs off her shirt onto the floor, and Alice sat at the table and ate from a plate of scrambled eggs. The plate was porcelain but had a hairline crack running through the center, and Alice always wondered if one day it would just break in two. She found herself thinking of her mother’s crystal bowl, the berries glistening prettily in it, and her mother’s slender fingers plucking them from the dish one by one. But then she thought of how the crystal bowl came to her mother and father as part of an entire set of crystal dishes, and with the crystal came settings of china, and from there, a person ended up with cabinets full of Tupperware, and Alice looked at her scrambled eggs, as yellow as sunshine, with gratitude.

  “So nothing?”
asked Hannah Fay again. “Really?”

  “Wesley’s giving each of us a million dollars,” Apple said. “And we weren’t going to tell you.”

  Kathryn rolled her eyes at Apple. “Apple,” she said, “use a plate.”

  “Was it a religious thing?” Hannah Fay asked.

  “Kind of,” Kathryn said with a shrug.

  “But Wesley hates the Church,” Hannah Fay said.

  “You know what he does love, though?” asked Apple, who had gotten a plate down from the cupboard but was still eating over the floor. “Wesley.”

  “He’s his own church,” said Janie.

  “Is that what he told you?” Alice asked. A church, a mirror. What wasn’t he?

  “Wesley is the body and the blood,” Janie said, dramatically casting her eyes heavenward and then laughing.

  “I don’t like the tone of this conversation,” Kathryn said. “Get it all out of your system before Wesley wakes up.”

  “Well,” said Hannah Fay, “I hope he does it again.”

  “A million dollars, Hannah Fay,” Apple said, wiping the last of her toast crumbs off her hands over the sink. She swept over to the girls at the table and rested her head on Hannah Fay’s shoulder. “Think of everything we could do.”

  “Next time,” Hannah Fay said. She reached up to pat Apple’s cheek. “See if I tell you what happens when it’s my turn.”

  But when Wesley emerged from the bedroom just before noon, he was already wearing his boots. “Where’re you headed?” Janie asked. She and the other girls were sprawled around the living room.

  “Outside,” he said, without stopping. In his arms he carried the heap of black robes, and he walked straight out of the house, down the steps, and onto the driveway. He dropped the cassock on the pavement, where it sat like a black hole or some kind of dead animal. The girls followed him outside, and they all stood on the front porch, not knowing quite what to do. Alice leaned against the railing, the white paint cracking and scratchy under her arms. “Wesley,” Kathryn called. “Do you need help?”

  “Get my camera,” he said. “It’s in your room.” Kathryn scurried inside and came back with it, but he ignored her outstretched hands. They watched as he instead reached into his pocket, struck a match from a matchbook, and dropped it onto the cloth. When the flames took hold, small creatures eating up the blackness, he grabbed the camera from Kathryn and took several photos of the robe, first standing on his toes and leaning over, a bird’s-eye view, and then crouching until he was eye level with the mass. Then he turned and walked back up the driveway, up the steps, and through the front door. As he passed the girls, he said, “Kathryn, please take care of this when the garment is adequately burned.”

  “Sure,” said Kathryn, though Wesley was already inside the house.

  “Should I douse it?” she asked the others. “Or will it burn out on its own?”

  “It’ll burn out,” Alice said, unable to shake the image of the match she’d struck, the one that burned down her old life, the one whose light woke her up.

  “I’ll keep an eye on it just in case,” Kathryn said. She looked at the other girls for confirmation. “Shouldn’t I?”

  “I’ll stay out here too,” said Apple. She scooted past the other girls and sat down on the front steps, where Janie joined her.

  “I guess I’ll never get to play that game,” Hannah Fay said. “I wonder why he wanted to burn it.”

  “The mysterious mind of Wesley,” said Janie.

  “You don’t need to question him,” Kathryn said. “If he wants to burn an old robe, let him. We don’t need to understand why.”

  “It’s probably for his art,” Janie said, “somehow.”

  “Or maybe it’s just fun to play with matches,” Apple said.

  “Maybe it made him feel weird,” said Alice, “to tell us such vulnerable things.”

  Apple, her back toward Alice, glanced up and over her shoulder at her. “Wesley didn’t tell us anything he didn’t want us to know.”

  “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t being vulnerable,” Alice said. She flicked a curving shard of old paint at Apple. It landed in her hair, and Apple combed her fingers through it, but it stayed put.

  “Knock it off, both of you,” Kathryn said. Apple and Janie leaned away from each other in unison to let her pass, and as she approached the driveway, she plucked a handful of grass from the yard and tossed it into the fire. Alice thought of a witch in a fairy tale, mixing a potion, casting a spell. A clutch of grass, a bundle of twigs, eye of newt, black cloth.

  “See, everyone loves fire,” Apple said.

  Alice waited for someone to say they would go check on Wesley, but no one did, so she didn’t either. The minute one of them walked into the house, she would’ve followed—to be alone with Wesley was to win, and she knew if she was the someone to go inside, another girl would trail her, a defensive move. The game would be over, a tie, a stalemate. The game was over this way, too, with all the girls arranged outside on the porch and Wesley inside, doing whatever he was doing. Now that she was here, it was hard for Alice to imagine Wesley before the house, to remember what he was like without the girls who surrounded him. Without them, who was he?

  “No one,” he sometimes told them, one perched on his knee, three at his feet, another somewhere else—running his errands, making him a snack, washing his clothes—but hurrying back to join him. “I’m no one without you.” And it was a nice thing to believe that without Alice, without the others, he didn’t exist, and he was only called into being when they conjured him up. There it was, that shock and tremble, again, of power.

  In the end, Alice stayed on the porch. She picked the peeling paint off the rail, flicked it into the hedge below.

  So it wasn’t exactly a win, but it wasn’t quite a loss either—to stand outside with all the girls, to blink in the afternoon sunlight, to watch the inexplicable little fire burn up the confessions of last night, to smile at the confused man who lived next door, as he walked past their house with his son, the little boy turning up the driveway toward the fire like he was drawn to it, until his father stopped him, steering him by the shoulders away from the fire, away from those strange girls, keeping him safe from the things he didn’t understand.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  IN THE MIDDLE of our neighborhood there is a square of woods that reminds us of what the land must have looked like before we tamed it. Wild. Dense. The city calls it a park, but we are mothers, and to us a park is a place with a slide, swings, a seesaw. This has none of those features. It contains only trees and dirt, and the things that live among them, and so we call it the woods. When we read stories to our children—Rapunzel expelled from her tower and into the woods, Hansel and Gretel left to wander in the woods, Little Red Riding Hood watched among the trees of the woods—this place is what they picture.

  Now that we are mothers reading these stories to our children, we see that they are frightening. Mothers die and fathers replace them, children are taken or abandoned or eaten. But we remind ourselves we once heard these stories, too, and look at us. We are fine.

  Once, Nancy Pittman and Christine took a cobbler over to Earl Phelps’s house for Veterans Day—every year, one with raspberries and blueberries and a dollop of whipped cream on top, which we all know doesn’t belong on a cobbler, but which Nancy adds anyway to be patriotic. Bev suggested once that Nancy bring over a Tupperware container of vanilla ice cream instead. “There’s your Stars and Stripes,” she said.

  “I’ll think about it,” Nancy said, but she didn’t.

  Christine had just learned to read, and she was carrying a book of fairy tales. “Can you read that to me?” Earl asked her. He could remember how, when he was a little boy, the world seemed to open when he learned how to read and how it kept opening to him and opening as he got older, and he even left the country, left the continent, learned to read again, this time just a little of a new language, and the world grew, and then the war was over, and he didn’t kn
ow it then, but that was the moment the world started closing back up again, and now it was just the size of the garage where he sat. So when he saw Christine with her book, he wanted to remember how the world had once seemed so big he could lose himself in it. “Sure,” Christine said. “Do you want a story about a mermaid or one about a princess?”

  “I’ll go put the cobbler inside,” Nancy said, lifting the pie plate a bit to remind him why they were there.

  “A mermaid,” Earl said.

  “There are mermaids in our ocean,” Christine told him. “Did you know that?”

  “Everyone knows that,” Earl said.

  Christine sat on the driveway, cross-legged in shorts and her older brother’s baseball T-shirt, and read to Earl as he listened and watched the street. It was a quiet afternoon. Nancy listened, too, admiring the cadence of her daughter’s voice, the easy way her eyes flicked over the words and how each word was like a pearl on a necklace being pulled from her mouth, unspooling on the driveway like an offering to their neighbor. At the end, the mermaid stood on her new tiptoes and kissed the prince. “Kind of gross with the kissing,” Christine said. “But it’s a happy ending for her.”

  Earl Phelps frowned. “That’s not the way the story goes,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” said Nancy quickly, though she, too, remembered a different ending, a sadder one. “It’s right there in the book, just like Christine read it.”

  Christine frowned now, too, and flipped the page to see if he was right, and she had missed something. But on the next page, the tale of Snow White began. The mermaid’s story was over. “How’s it supposed to go?” she asked.

  “Well, first of all, the prince doesn’t fall in love with her,” Earl said. “Because she can’t talk, and no one loves someone who can’t talk. And I can’t remember exactly how, but I think she dies.”

  “Dies!” said Christine. “She can’t die.”

  “She doesn’t,” said Nancy. “If she did, that’s what your book would say.” She pushed up her sleeve and pretended to check her watch. “Let’s go,” she said, reaching a hand down to her little girl. Christine put her hand in her mother’s but didn’t let herself be pulled off the ground.