We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  When Alice got outside, she thought she might see the man there on the sidewalk. He would have had the photo developed in a darkroom, and he would be holding it behind his back like a bouquet of flowers, a surprise. Look at you, he’d say when he held it out to her. And Alice would get to see herself the way the man saw her. It would be revelatory, profound, and Alice would let the man keep it, an image of her to last forever, or she would take it if he would let her, and it would be a private thing, a secret. She knew no matter how good it was, she would not show it to her mother.

  But on the sidewalk, there was no man. It was only us out there, with our children, beginning the day. Life continued around her. Even now, after it all, there are book bags to check, hands to hold, shoes to tie. There are mirrors to look in, lipstick to apply. Dishes to wash, phone calls to make. That day, the man did not come for her. Ahead of her, Alice spotted a pack of girls her age walking in the same direction, hips swishing in bright skirts, their legs as long and perfect as her own, and she hurried to catch them.

  In science class, she took notes, drew marginalia in her notebook—curlicues and roses with petals like concentric circles, repeating in a spiral until they ended in a dot in the center of the flower. In history, she watched a film about Pompeii while their teacher, the basketball coach, sat at his desk with his feet up and head down, whiskered chin to chest. The film showed a reenactment of Vesuvius’s eruption, uncredited actors and actresses playing nameless civilians running and falling and silently screaming, while a deep-voiced narrator spoke of ash like rain, fire chasing after them like demons with a million feet and wings. The destruction made Alice shudder, imagining herself in a situation in which the world began to fall apart.

  We take pains, always, to assure our children of their safety; we remind them we will protect them. But we cannot control the way the earth moves, and a reality of living here, one we exchange for a beautiful home: sometimes the earth revolts. The sea churns with anger, cliffs crumble. The ground shakes, it splits open. It isn’t often—only enough to remind us everything has cracks, everything can break.

  There was an earthquake when Alice was a very little girl. She slept through it, woke up in the morning to tell her mother how she dreamed she was a sailor on a ship. There were mermaids rocking the boat, she said, and her mother marveled at her clever, wild little girl.

  “It’s better to be the volcano,” the teacher said when the film was over, “than anything else in Pompeii.” Hundreds of years later people caught in the ash stayed frozen in the positions they were in when they died, casts of their bodies preserved forever and displayed in museums. One was a dog writhing on its back. Alice couldn’t stand to think of that, so instead she thought of the volcano. She imagined it as a person, a woman, wondered what it would be like to feel the bubbling and the heat, if the volcano knew what was happening or if she was as surprised as everyone else at what she gave birth to, the power of it, if the volcano felt relieved when it was over. It was easier to think about that than the petrified, anguished dog.

  There was a pep rally after school that day to mark the end of homecoming week, and the gym quivered with blue and gold streamers. At one end of the basketball court, the drum line stood in a tight row, arms rigid, wrists limber, each beat of their music like a pulse. Students packed themselves in the bleachers, jostling each other and laughing. They had nearly survived another week; it would be over in an hour, and then they would be free for two glorious days. Soon they would celebrate.

  Below the bleachers, spanning the length of the gym, the cheerleaders, Alice among them, stood in an evenly spaced line and clapped and bounced. They raised their voices in a rallying cry. They would fight and prevail, Alice yelled and chanted with the other ponytailed girls, unable to hear her own voice over the roar they made together. The man hadn’t been on the sidewalk that morning after all, and the wanting inside her had yawned and stretched, but now it was filled with applause and drums and girls standing beside her. They looked at each other and smiled. Look at the frenzy they could whip up with their bodies, their voices. Look at the wildness. What else was there to want when you had all this power?

  Chapter Two

  THE PEP RALLY was at once the last breath of a school week and the first act of a long celebration. The second act would be the football game, and then, the denouement of it all, the dance. Every Friday in the fall was a football game, every Friday night spent with the same people who this Saturday would crowd together at the dance, the boys sweating in synthetic suits their mothers had picked out, touching waists, grazing breasts with errant hands. But despite that, those nights were still a bit like magic. We remember what it was like. The parking lot of the high school became a fairground. The gym they decorated with their beauty, their youth, their small world transformed into something different, familiar if you squinted at it, but better. A world that would elect Alice Lange its queen.

  “You’ll win,” said Susannah. “You know you will.”

  “I don’t,” said Alice, lying. “You don’t know either.”

  “I voted for you,” said Ben Austin. There were five of them at his house, in his backyard, Alice and Susannah and Ben, Millie, and Andrew. Their team had won the football game, and to celebrate, Ben had pilfered a bottle of whiskey from his father’s study. He held up two different kinds of glasses, wondered aloud which kind you drank whiskey from. No one knew, and he shrugged and poured a few fingers from the bottle into small water glasses.

  They sat around the backyard fire pit, a stone circle like a well—another thing Ben was not supposed to touch and did anyway—and the flames made their faces shadowy and strange. Alice watched Susannah laughing at something Andrew said; half her face was the color of charcoal, the other half orange and bright, and it was like she was wearing a mask or she was another person laughing with Susannah’s stolen voice. Her laugh was deep, like a man’s. Susannah hoped someday it would be described by someone as throaty, sexy, instead of simply mannish. With the glow of the firelight on her face, Alice thought she looked beautiful, transformed, and in that moment she was happy for Susannah to be someone entirely new. “What?” said Susannah suddenly, looking at Alice.

  “What?” said Alice.

  “You’re looking at me,” she said.

  “I wasn’t,” Alice said.

  “I saw it too,” Ben said. “It was a very romantic look.”

  “Make out!” said Andrew.

  “Stop it,” said Alice. But they both felt it, Alice and Susannah: not a desire to kiss each other out of love, though they were best friends and did love each other. And they had seen each other naked, changing in and out of wet swimsuits on countless summer afternoons, had marveled together at the eruption of breasts and the growth of strange hair in strange places, slept cuddled up in each other’s bed every other weekend like kittens.

  But now here was a boy watching them, asking them to give him something, and it felt like they should. And Alice thought suddenly of the man outside her house asking her the name of the book she was reading, asking to take her picture. How easy it had been to answer, and he had liked it when she did. Now she could lean over and kiss Susannah, and Andrew would like it. Ben would probably like it too. They would cheer for them, and what was it to her? A moment, just a few seconds. Nothing, really. What about Millie, though? She’d be jealous, Alice realized. Poor Millie sitting there, bare legs crossed and goose bumped, wishing she had been asked to kiss another girl.

  “I’m not nearly drunk enough yet,” Susannah said. But she turned, whole face in the gray shadows now, and blew a kiss at Alice.

  “Boo,” said Andrew, and they all laughed. Ben passed the bottle of whiskey around the circle again. “There’s still hope,” Andrew said when Susannah poured more in her glass. “Pucker up.”

  “Anyway, Alice,” said Susannah, “less than twenty-four hours from now, you’ll see I’m right about the vote.”

  “I saw the ballot box sitting on Mrs. Turner’s desk,” Ben
said. “I should have looked inside.”

  “How would that have helped anything?” Susannah asked, rolling her eyes. “Unless you have superhuman counting skills you’ve never told us about?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ben. He felt his cheeks beginning to burn, and he hoped Alice didn’t notice, but when he glanced at her, she wasn’t looking at him or at anyone else. She seemed disconnected from Ben and the others, like her body was there but the rest of her, the part that made her Alice, wasn’t.

  The next thing that happened surprised us, when we later learned of it. It didn’t fit with our understanding of Alice. Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. This is something we’ve learned.

  Alice Lange, in the light of the fire, under the canopy of a birch tree, its white bark stark as bone in the moonlight, said, “I know how we can find out who won.”

  “What?” asked Susannah. “How?”

  “Let’s break in,” she said. “If it’s on Mrs. Turner’s desk, that’s only one—no, two doors to get through. Only one of them will be locked, I bet.” She could see it in her head, could see how easy it would be, how fun, how funny. Kissing Susannah, that wouldn’t have been right for the evening, but this would. She grinned thinking of it, that yawning inside of her as deep as a cavern. Susannah in the fire’s glow—she wasn’t the only one who could be a different person.

  “You want to know that badly?” said Millie. “Can’t wait to see that you’re going to win?”

  “No,” Alice said. “It’s not about that. I want—I don’t know. I want to do something.” She looked around at the others. “Don’t you?”

  “I can pick a lock,” said Andrew.

  “I’m shocked,” Susannah said dryly.

  “Come on,” Alice said. “It will be fun! It’ll be an adventure.”

  “I’m in,” said Andrew.

  Ben nodded. “Me, too,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t leave you alone with these two clowns,” Susannah said. “Let’s do it.”

  Millie stood up, her scrawny legs nearly as white as the birches, and straightened her skirt. “I’m going home,” she said. “This is a stupid idea.”

  “Millie,” Andrew groaned.

  “It’s dangerous,” Millie said. “There are people who want to hurt kids like us.” Here was a girl who had listened.

  “What are you even talking about?” asked Susannah.

  “A girl,” Millie said. “Don’t you remember? Someone took her.”

  “I promise it will be fine, Millie. This is a very safe neighborhood,” Alice said, though she knew who Millie was talking about, it had happened last year but not here. Millie, too, could feel herself being persuaded, could picture herself walking down a dark street and only being afraid in the most delicious way, the image of that other nameless girl fading away. But then Alice continued: “I understand, though. No big deal. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

  This was the Alice we knew: understanding, magnanimous. The Alice who once spent an entire afternoon helping little Tim learn to ride a bike. This, of course, is a father’s job, but he was away on a business trip, and Tim had insisted he needed to learn right then, right that very second, and Alice had said well, she could do it, couldn’t she, and we watched her standing behind Tim, her hands on the seat of his bike, keeping him steady. We watched him wobble and crash and wobble and crash, and we watched Alice pick him up and hold the bike for him over and over. When Alice let go that final time and he sailed away, she ran after him, whooping and clapping, and we all clapped too. We couldn’t help it.

  “Fine,” said Millie, who, of course, wanted them to stop her, to tell her they needed her. But instead there was Alice dismissing her kindly and gracefully, and to the others Millie was already gone. If she had stayed there, she knew they would have walked past her, so Millie stood a second longer, feet turned out in first position, watching her friends make plans in hushed voices.

  “Well, bye then,” she said. And they all said, “Bye, Millie,” without looking up, except for Alice, who smiled gently and waved.

  Millie made it home easily and safely; she lived around the corner from Ben Austin, and her parents were asleep when she got home because they trusted her. And that was a nice thing, to be so young and to be so trusted that they knew you’d come home, that you’d turn off the living room lamp they’d left on for you, navigate around the sofa and the chairs and coffee table in the dark, find the stairs and climb them, feeling your way until finally you tumbled safe into your bed.

  One evening not long after we had the lampposts installed, April saw Mrs. Lange taking the trash out and looking up at the lights. “Well, Mrs. Lange, what do you think?” April asked, nodding at them.

  “They’re nice,” she said. “It’s like leaving ten lamps on for Alice when she finally comes home.”

  April wasn’t sure what to respond, couldn’t bear to say out loud to Mrs. Lange what she was certain the other woman already knew, that Alice wasn’t coming home. “You’re a good mother,” April said.

  All Mrs. Lange said was thank you, and she turned and walked back up her driveway to her house, where, April could see, a light was burning in the window.

  Chapter Three

  BEFORE THEY LEFT, they stood in Ben’s kitchen and passed the whiskey around, the water glasses now sitting in the sink. Alice shivered as she tipped the bottle back and swallowed. She had reached that pleasant level of drunkenness when the burn of the alcohol was appealing and no longer distasteful, and she felt warm and giggly and brave.

  Ben found two flashlights and gave one to Alice, who was standing silently in front of the refrigerator, looking at the various things his mother had secured there with magnets. A receipt; a list written in his father’s handwriting, only one item—fertilizer with a squiggly question mark beside it—legible; a photograph of Ben as a kid. He was smiling and blinking. It had been bright outside, but his mother had insisted on taking it. When they developed the picture, she had laughed at his closed eyes. “I love it,” she had said. Alice touched its curling corner. “Baby Ben,” she said.

  “Yep,” he said. “I was in first grade.” She thought she saw his cheeks redden. She had done that, brought that color into the world, and she liked that she had.

  “I remember when you looked like that,” she said. “When we were little.” He could remember her, too, when she was little, and Susannah and Andrew and all the others. We can, too, and it seems like we might peek out our front windows now and see them riding their bicycles or chasing each other, still in bathing suits, their mothers blocking the doors until they dried off. But when we look now, they’re gone. It’s only Tim and Billy and Christine Pittman, a whole new group of children.

  “You were cute,” Alice said.

  “Were?” asked Ben. He raised an eyebrow, and Alice laughed.

  “Let’s go,” she said and pointed the flashlight, still dark, toward the front door.

  Ben saw the matchbook he’d used for the backyard fire lying on the counter and grabbed it, slipped it into his pocket. Later, his mother would ask him why. “I don’t know,” he said. He couldn’t look at her when he answered, and she thought of him as that blinking little boy in the photograph, how she worried he was too sensitive, that he felt the weight of others’ gestures and words and movements too strongly. “I thought it might come in handy,” he said finally. “That’s all.”

  Audrey Austin watched her son respond, and in the way that only we have, a superpower we gained as we transformed from women into mothers, she saw what Ben saw when he took the matchbox: himself in the dark school, no lights anywhere, a dead flashlight battery, perhaps. A pretty girl clutching his arm, the burning match between his fingertips the only light, and him hoping the girl would press herself closer. “Okay,” his mother told him. “It’s okay.”

  The walk to the school that night felt longer than in the mornings when there were clusters of kids ahead and behind them, all going in the same direction, when there were tes
ts to agonize over, gossip to exchange, so many things to worry about, so many to hope for too. (We wouldn’t go back to being seventeen or eighteen if you paid us.)

  “This looks different,” Susannah said. “It feels like we’ve been walking too long.”

  “Because it’s nighttime,” said Andrew. “And because you’re drunk.”

  “I’m not!” Susannah said, but it came out in a squeal, and they all laughed.

  “It isn’t taking longer,” Ben said. “I promise.”

  Sidewalks pale and smooth in the moonlight, like ribbons stretched out straight and tight, dark trees rising, their leaves black and spreading overhead, stop signs, fire hydrants, mailboxes: all these things washed in gray. Houses just like their own sat like rocks in a row. The lights inside them were mostly off. Susannah passed them and imagined herself inside her house, in her bed, and she hated herself for resisting the adventure they were on. Look at them! She could be wild and young and free. Uncontainable. She walked faster, like she could catch up to that version of herself.

  Alice imagined herself inside, too, not in her own house, like Susannah, but these particular houses, alien houses. She saw herself walking through the dark rooms, the houses lifeless until she let herself into them and woke them up. Now, in the night, the people inside them didn’t exist. In the morning they would again, when the front doors opened and cars turned out of the driveway and kids played in the yard, but now she looked at the houses and thought of tombs. She thought of the silence of Pompeii in the days after the ash fell and fire ravaged, when the life of people had drained out and they all lay curled up and still, and it scared her, so she turned and looked straight ahead.

  (Even we catch ourselves lost in alarming thoughts. The things we only think in the dark. We surprise ourselves. Sometimes Bev thinks of intruders breaking into her house, imagines herself killing them with a knife from the wooden block in the kitchen, saving her child, emerging bloodied and triumphant, Tim clutching her leg. The pulsing adrenaline of bravery. “Do you ever feel that way?” she asked April once.