We Can Only Save Ourselves Page 15

  “I’m sure that’s right,” said Earl. “She turns into mist.”

  “Like fog?” asked Christine. “Or clouds?” She looked up at the clouds, and suddenly they did look different to her. She thought she saw a mermaid’s tail in one, a hair comb shimmering with pearls in another. “So she doesn’t really die?”

  “Are clouds alive?” asked Earl.

  “Come on, honey,” Nancy said, tugging gently on her daughter’s arm. “Thank you again for your service, Earl. Your country appreciates you.”

  “No,” said Christine. Earl watched her tilt her head back and squint at the sky. “They move, though, so maybe. Probably. So even if she turns into a cloud, she might not be dead.”

  “Earl,” said Nancy, but he was looking at Christine, noticing that her chin-length hair didn’t quite frame her face; one side did, and the other side flipped out in the same direction, like two quotation marks closing a sentence. She was working so hard to make the story end happily, to make it so the mermaid lived happily ever after. Once, in that other country, in Earl’s other, bigger life, there had been a village full of little girls and little boys, too, crying and raging and scared, but all the grown-ups were gone. “It’s a trap,” their CO said, and they burned the village down.

  “In the other version,” Nancy said, “she almost dies, but then the angels save her and turn her into one of them.”

  “But the prince doesn’t love her?” asked Christine. “And she doesn’t even get to be a mermaid again?”

  “She does in the book you have,” Nancy said.

  “But there’s another story,” Christine said. “You just said so.”

  “They can both be true,” her mother said. “But you’re upsetting yourself thinking about it. Your story is right there in your book, you read it yourself. Put the other one out of your mind.”

  Christine looked at Earl, who shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

  “Come on,” said Nancy.

  “Bye,” said Christine, and Earl gave her a brusque nod and watched them walk back down the sidewalk.

  To get home, they walked past the square of woods, and it was a sunny day, and Christine was still feeling strange about the mermaid, so she told her mother she wanted to cut through the woods. Among the trees, no one could see her but her mother; she could be anyone, and the world could be anything she made it. If her mother was there, that was good, too, because any world she made would have her in it.

  A couple of years later, when Christine could read anything, knew every word in every book, Alice Lange was gone. After she left, we searched the woods for a body, despite the police reassuring us that she left of her own accord. We couldn’t imagine that she would leave willingly. Our husbands formed the search parties, and back at home we imagined them barreling down the paths and calling her name, and later picking gently through the undergrowth, poking at logs and piles of leaves. They came home somber and dirty. We took off their boots, we picked leaves out of their hair, we ran baths for them, and we didn’t ask them anything about what they’d seen or what they’d been afraid they might see.

  Anything could be in the woods. And with Alice gone, we thought about that more often.

  One afternoon not long after the searches died down, we were all sitting on Charlotte Price’s back patio, the door leading outside still open, and arriving one by one as we finished our responsibilities at home. Our husbands were at work, and the big kids were at school, and Charlotte had walked up and down the street, knocking on our doors and gathering us together for, she said, refreshments and community. We get together a lot even in the best of circumstances, but in those early days after Alice’s disappearance, we were together even more, except, of course, Mrs. Lange.

  Nancy had passed by the woods to get to Charlotte’s, and she thought of the day Earl Phelps had told her daughter that the little mermaid had died and how Christine had begged to walk home through the woods. She started off telling it as a funny story but then said, “Actually, it was the strangest thing. I was so mad at Earl Phelps, and the woods are so creepy, but Christine was dying to take that route.”

  Go on, we told her.

  “I guess I don’t really have a point,” she said, shrugging. “I was just thinking about it. That night I dreamed Christine was lost in the woods.” This time we shuddered. A premonition, we thought.

  “All the kids love the woods,” said April. “For a while there, Bev and I thought the boys were going to move out and live in a tent there.”

  “I wouldn’t have said no,” Bev said.

  “I love them too,” said Mags. “I like to walk the dogs there. It helps them remember they’re animals.” Another thing we know about Mags and the woods: she had an affair once, or more of a tryst because it only happened once, right there under the trees, with Fred Austin, the father of Ben, who loved Alice Lange. She genuinely thought of the dogs at first but then on the last word thought of Fred, his fingers on the buttons of her dress. She was quiet the rest of the afternoon, memories blooming, and after, it was Bev who asked her if she was all right. Fine, she said, just feeling melancholy. Bev squeezed her hand. I know what you mean, she said.

  “Well,” said Charlotte Price, “I honestly don’t know why they always want to go there. The woods are dirty.”

  Bev laughed, interrupting her. “You know it’s nature, right?” she said. “It’s not dirty. It’s actual dirt.”

  “So Charlotte’s right, then,” Nancy said, and Bev laughed again.

  “And it’s dangerous,” Charlotte added.

  We all nodded, even Bev, who for a moment told herself she wasn’t going to press the issue, but then said, “That’s part of what makes it fun, though.”

  “In the woods, no one can hear you scream,” April said, waving the fingers on one hand, like she was hexing us all.

  “Exactly,” said Bev.

  “Exactly,” said Charlotte.

  But Charlotte remembered sitting in her stepfather’s car late one night, a year before she could get a driver’s license, her best friend, Lydia, in the passenger’s seat, on their way home from a party they had snuck out to attend. She thought of how she’d driven fast down the dirt driveway to her house and then, at the last second, right before it seemed like they would hit the big tree out front, she’d veered left into the field and slammed on the brakes. Lydia had screamed, and Charlotte had laughed and laughed and pulled in under the carport on the side of the house. Her stepfather, she thought, had never found out, but now she realized he must have known as soon as he saw the ruts she had carved in the field.

  Mags thought of Fred Austin again.

  Sarah Jenkins, Susannah’s mother, thought of a party she’d gone to with her husband, Robert, not long ago, where she had eaten everything offered to her, drank everything offered to her, ingested things she didn’t recognize. “I didn’t know what it was,” she told Robert as he carried her home through the woods, taking that detour so they wouldn’t encounter any of us, the flash of trees changing from dreamy to assailing. “How could I?” But she had known. She wasn’t an idiot.

  April thought of the woods. She had gone into them, too, but she wasn’t meeting anyone there. It was at night, after the men had spent a long day searching, and she wanted to see for herself. If there was something out there, any fragment of Alice, she wanted to find it, but she came home with nothing but mud caked on the soles of her shoes, the ones she wore only for gardening. She hadn’t told her husband she went. She hadn’t even told Bev.

  We thought of how we watched the news every night, how we dissected it the next day. We couldn’t stop talking about Alice. We thought of Rachel Granger, the picture of her we had memorized. It was different seeing the picture of Alice Lange; no matter how flat and inanimate that one seemed, when we looked at it, all we could think of was her walking to school, delivering us loaves of bread, running behind the wobbling bicycle as the boy on it careered forward and laughed.

  We thought of our husbands looking in th
e woods for a clump of hair, a shard of bone, a finger, a whole girl, and we understood, of course, why the children go into the woods. We understood why Christine wanted to hear Earl Phelps tell her yes, the little mermaid didn’t get to be a mermaid, didn’t get to be a girl, lost her voice, lost her tail, lost her legs, lost a corporeal form altogether and became something we didn’t understand. And now with Alice Lange, we think we might understand, too, why she went and why she stayed away.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  WESLEY MADE THE sun shine. Wesley made it rain. Wesley steered the winds. He never told Alice he was responsible for these things, but she began to see patterns emerge—the sunlight was yellow and warm on days when he woke up happy; if he was sick, it might still be sunny, but the light would be weak, as if it were fighting to make itself shine. On moody days, the weather turned, leaves drifted down, brown and curled. Wesley would grind them with his boot heel.

  “I’ll always call to you if we’re apart,” he told Alice once. They were lying in two sleeping bags zipped together out in the backyard. She had slipped her underwear back on and was wearing a T-shirt, but Wesley’s hand was under her shirt, tracing the outline of her shoulder blades. It made her shiver.

  “Why would we be apart now that we’re finally together?” she asked, looking up at the stars. It hadn’t been long, she hadn’t meant to add the “finally,” but time was moving differently here, the days and years leading up to this moment had been moving slowly, and only now that she was here did she see that time moved as we always said it did: fast.

  “I don’t know,” said Wesley. “But there’s always a chance people will try to tear us all away from each other.” Finger down her shoulder. “This is where your wings would be,” he said.

  “If we’re apart,” Alice said.

  “I’d move the earth to call to you,” he said. “I’d tell the ocean to give you a message. If you’re listening, it whispers to you.” He leaned closer, made a quiet shushing noise in her ear, tickling her and making her laugh.

  The sun, the wind, the flowers, the leaves. Water listened to Wesley too. It rarely rained, so when it did, they welcomed it. The dry ground drank up the moisture, and the girls slept late because no light streamed through their windows in the morning. “It’s raining!” Alice said.

  “I know,” said Wesley, grinning, and there was something about his catlike, knowing expression that made Alice think he’d ordered it up for them.

  This, Wesley told them, was why they didn’t need to worry about where they would go or what they would do when everything ended. He didn’t come right out and say it, but Alice knew—they all seemed to know—that Wesley was intrinsically connected to the events of the end, that his hand might be the one to shake the ground, his mouth to drain the sea, his gaze to start the fire that would never stop burning until everything was consumed by it.

  On the day it rained, he said, “Come on, let’s go outside.” And they all went, huddled together under the cover of the porch, but Wesley leapt down the steps and out into the rain and tilted his head back, spread his arms out wide. No one else on the street was outside, though the dog next door was barking, and then a car passed by, but the driver didn’t slow down, didn’t seem to care about the man standing outside in the rain.

  “It’s not going to rain forever,” Wesley said. “Come on.” Alice went out first. Wesley pulled her to him and laughed until Alice laughed, too, and the rest of the girls came down, trailing him around the yard as the rain soaked the grass. “Enjoy this,” he kept telling them. “It’s a gift, enjoy it.”

  Wesley, giver of gifts, destroyer of worlds.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN Wesley was out and Kathryn was at work, the others sat in the backyard, smoking. They would pass the joint around—everyone except Hannah Fay, who would stay inside until this part was over—until it was too small to pinch between two fingers, and then typically they would switch to the cigarettes Apple kept on hand for when Wesley was gone.

  Today, though, Hannah Fay had come out to join them, holding a tiny, shimmery bottle of nail polish, and said, “Who can I con into painting my toenails? I promise my feet are clean.” So Apple closed up the pack of cigarettes, and Alice said she would paint them because she had very steady hands and got second place in her school’s art show last year. “Say no more,” Hannah Fay said and carefully lowered herself onto the grass beside her.

  Alice, edges softened by the joint, untwisted the cap of the nail polish and thought about all the nice things that came with Wesley’s absence: cigarettes, yes, which she had never smoked with any kind of consistency until now, but also less pressure all around. Apple was kinder, Janie sillier. It had the feeling of summer camp or any time she spent without the supervision of grown-ups, and perhaps the nicest part was that there was still something more to look forward to, the moment when Wesley returned home.

  It was that sleepy window of time right after lunch, and the sun was warm but not too hot, bathing everything in light but not too bright. The nub of the joint sat in an ashtray in the middle of their circle, and the conversation meandered, stopping and then starting again. It was funny to Alice, because when Wesley was there, they always stayed close to the little patio, so that Wesley, who was very sensitive to grass, could sit in the one chair out there that wasn’t broken, and they could sit cross-legged on the ground and listen to him speak.

  But when he was gone and the girls came outside, they always went to the back of the lawn, where the overgrown garden began. They would sprawl out on the grass, arranged like a giant hand had scooped them up and scattered them across the lawn. Today Apple was picking the leaves off one of the overflowing bushes, tearing each one neatly down its middle seam and then shredding each half. Sometimes she would throw a piece of a leaf in Janie’s hair, and if Janie felt it, she would stop talking and pose, like someone was taking her picture, and then she’d leave it there.

  Hannah Fay sat with her knees up and her arms behind her, palms flat on the grass, her dress bunching up around her belly, while Alice hunched over her toenails, blowing on each foot after she finished a coat. “Happy birthday, Hannah Fay,” Alice said. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.” She looked up at Hannah Fay and grinned, squinting like Hannah Fay’s belly was the blinding sun.

  “Wait,” Janie said. “It’s not really your birthday, right?”

  “Nope, not for another six months,” Hannah Fay said. “My birthday’s in May.”

  “I was teasing,” Alice said. “But happy early birthday.”

  “How old will you be?” Janie asked, her hair dotted with the green leaves.

  “Eighteen,” said Hannah Fay. “Teen mom.” She rubbed her stomach and laughed. Alice sat up and kissed her right on the crest of her stomach, and Hannah Fay rubbed Alice’s head and laughed again. “Your hair is so soft, Alice,” she said. “Like a little bunny’s.”

  “Wait,” Janie said again. “So you’re seventeen now?”

  “That’s the way numbers work, Jay,” Apple said. She leaned over and started picking the leaves out, and Janie instinctively leaned back toward Apple. Watching, Alice thought of monkeys she’d seen in the zoo as a little girl, how tenderly and unself-consciously they picked at each other, like there was no boundary between their bodies at all. She tried to remember if she felt like that with anyone before Wesley. Susannah, she thought, sometimes, and when she was a little girl, her mother.

  “But you’ve been here a year,” Janie said, shaking her hair out as Apple plucked the last tiny leaf. She held up a hand and ticked off each finger as she counted. “First it was Kathryn, then it was you, then Apple, then me right after Apple, then Alice.”

  “Right,” said Hannah Fay. “I was sixteen when I came.”

  “Oh my God,” said Janie. “Does Wesley know that?”

  “Of course,” Hannah Fay said, rolling her eyes.

  “Do your parents know you’re here?” Alice asked.

  “
Yes,” said Hannah Fay. “Who do you think writes me all the letters?”

  “Kathryn usually gets the mail,” said Alice, surprised. “I didn’t know you got letters from anyone. I never see you reading anything but Wesley’s magazines.”

  “Well,” said Hannah Fay, crossing her legs so that the toes Alice had just painted were hidden under her freckled thighs. “Wesley and I read them together.”

  “Wow,” said Alice. She started thinking about Hannah Fay and Wesley sitting together in the study on Hannah Fay’s mattress and reading letters from Hannah Fay’s mom, and then that thought turned into a memory of her own mother, who had been lurking formlessly in her mind all morning, of her handwriting, how she always wrote—writes, Alice thought, she was still there in the old house—in a slanted script made of skinny loops and lines. And then she thought of her mother’s hands, the nails and knuckles and the whorl of her fingerprints, and then the picture in her head expanded and kept expanding: the handwriting, the hands, the kitchen table and the same chair she always sat in, facing the direction of Alice’s room so she could see Alice approaching, the kitchen, the living room next to it, the house that held the living room and the bedrooms and the bathrooms, and the swimming pool and the porch swing and the big trees, and Alice felt alone, separate from the other girls and separate from Wesley, who was gone somewhere she didn’t know. Next door the awful dog barked, and Alice heard the other girls again.

  “I haven’t seen my mom in five years,” Janie was saying. “I can’t even remember my dad.”

  “This is what my parents wanted for me,” Hannah Fay said. “They’ve always hated the establishment, too, and they’d pulled me out of school when I was fourteen. We’d moved in with two other families in this big old house on a bunch of acres of land. My parents wanted me to have an extraordinary and unconventional life.” Her voice deepened on the last few words, a false baritone, and Alice took it to be an impression of her father. “Then they met Wesley,” she said in her normal voice, “and fell in love with him a little. Then I met Wesley, and now here we are.”