We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  “I tell you what you need to know when you need to know it,” Wesley always said. “To know anything more would hurt you.” The girls understood. Fear was one thing. Physiologically, it wasn’t that different from excitement, Wesley had explained.

  But pain was different. Wesley avoided flowers that bees might hover around, he didn’t like to hold a razor to his face to shave it; once when he had a nick on his arm and covered it with a Band-Aid, he got good and drunk before he let Alice rip it off. He said motherfucker when she did, a slow hiss like the air escaping from a punctured tire.

  And now, confronted with her mother’s face, so open and radiant, she wanted to spare her that pain too. Couldn’t tell her she was leaving again, couldn’t bear to see that hope crack open and spill to the floor. So she let herself be scooped up and taken care of, her mother’s hands brushing hair out of Alice’s face, touching her on the arm, on the back, on the shoulder.

  Here was her mother cooking her spaghetti and meatballs, baking her brownies from a dusty box in the back of the pantry. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. “It’s nothing special, but I didn’t want to go out to the store. I just want to keep looking at you.”

  “This is perfect,” Alice said.

  “Tomorrow, though,” her mother said, smiling, “I’ll head over to the store early, maybe while you’re still sleeping. That way I won’t miss anything.”

  It was quiet while they ate, and Alice had seconds and four brownies. “I keep getting so hungry,” she said.

  “Bottomless pit,” her mother said, pleased. When Alice tucked two more brownies into a napkin and carried them upstairs to her bedroom at the end of the night, her mother felt simultaneously worried and relieved—where had she been that she’d learned to squirrel away extra food? Somewhere with too many mouths.

  Alice went to bed early, ate her brownies one after another while she looked out the window, and then crumpled up the napkin in her fist and let it drop to the floor. Here, the lights in each house went out around the same time every night, or they went out in stages: first the lights in the children’s rooms, then the overhead in the kitchen, the lamps on the side tables in the living rooms, finally the light in the master bedroom.

  While Alice sat in her windowsill, Billy Morris was trying to delay going to bed. April had already tucked him in, but there he was out of his room, standing in the doorway of the living room where his parents had been reading. “I have to find Orion’s belt,” he said. “For a homework assignment. I just remembered.”

  “Come on, buddy,” Eric said. “Just pretend you saw it. It’s some stars in a line, and they kind of look like a belt.”

  “Honey,” April said to Billy, “I saw your homework list, and that wasn’t on there. Go to bed.”

  “Please!” said Billy. “I need to go look for it. We’re going to write a poem about it tomorrow.”

  “Fine,” said April. “I’m going to time you. You have one minute.”

  Outside, Billy looked in the sky, but it was kind of cloudy. There was the moon, there were some stars. Weren’t they all kind of in a line? Across the street was Alice Lange’s house. And there she was. He could see her more clearly than the stars, framed by the window like a girl trapped in a painting. She was so pretty. He wondered where she had gone, and if now that she was back, his mother would let him ride his bike to the park again, instead of just up and down the street. He watched her until his mother stuck her head outside, told him his time was up a minute ago.

  “Alice Lange came back,” he told her, but when April went back outside just a few minutes later, the window was dark, and Alice was gone again.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  THE NEXT MORNING, while her mother was at the store, Alice checked all of the places where her mother liked to hide cash. She always said that this habit of hers had driven Alice’s father crazy—he wanted it in a bank where it could make more money just by sitting there, but Alice’s mother liked having it easily accessible in case of an emergency. “You just never know,” she said.

  Now Alice thumbed through the stack of bills, counting. There wasn’t nearly as much as she had hoped, but it was better than nothing. It could help. It would help. It could get them closer to the desert. She imagined coming into the bungalow to find that the other girls were out somewhere, and only Wesley was home, the inverse of their regular world. In her vision, he would have been asleep, waking up when Alice crept in. She’d say guess what, and he’d smile in a lazy, sleepy way and would pull her on top of him, and she’d heap the bills onto his chest.

  Then the other girls would come home—Hannah Fay would be back too—and then they would all go to the desert. They’d wait until the rest of the world ate itself, like a hungry animal gnawing at its own leg. Then they would come back, and it would all be theirs.

  “Allie?” her mother called. The front door closed behind her. “Sweetie?”

  Alice put the money into her bag, shoved the bag in her closet. “Here!” she called, and her mother said something she couldn’t totally understand, but it might have been “Thank you, God,” and Alice thought she might stay just a little longer.

  That night, Mrs. Lange made chicken pot pie, which Alice had loved as a girl and always craved when the weather began to cool in the slight way it does here. She rolled out the dough for the crust, lining a pie tin with it and then filling the pale bowl with potatoes, carrots, peas, gravy. Afterward, she baked an entire chocolate cake. Alice, who had been napping on the couch in the living room, laughed when she came into the kitchen and saw it. “This is amazing,” Alice said. “And ridiculous.”

  “I’m just happy you’re here,” her mother said. “Let’s eat. Do you want to eat the cake first? We can do that, if that’s what you’d like.”

  Alice laughed again. “I can wait,” she said, and she sat down at the table and let her mother serve her.

  “We missed you,” her mother began when they were both seated. “I didn’t get the spices just right for the pumpkin bread in October. No one said anything, but I know it’s true.”

  “You did it without me?” Alice asked, moved by her mother’s generosity of spirit and sad that she hadn’t been here months ago to be touched by it herself, to extend it to the rest of us.

  “I had to do something,” her mother said.

  “Oh,” said Alice. She imagined another version of her mother, standing in the kitchen in front of the stove, mixing and pouring batter into the tins, the spices lined up on the counter beside her. She also imagined another Alice standing with her, maybe waking up from another nap on the couch, in some other timeline, and saying, Oh! I had almost forgotten! Her mother turning to smile at her. I would never have let you forget, she might say. Alice would never trade her time with Wesley for anything, but if she could have let herself be in two places at once, she would have done it, just for a moment, to be next to her mother and measure out the spices just as she had done every year of her life.

  “I thought it might bring you home,” her mother said. “I know that sounds silly, but I thought it might be some kind of a—I don’t know, a signal. That you would feel it and come home.”

  “Mama,” Alice said, a name she hadn’t called her mother in a very long time, the first word she had been able to say.

  “I would do it again,” her mother said.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes when her mother put her fork down. Alice looked up. “I have to ask you where you went,” she said. “I’ve been trying not to. I’m not even sure I need to know, but I know I have to ask.”

  “Nowhere,” Alice said.

  “That’s impossible. Every place is somewhere.”

  “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I don’t know how to explain it. I was in a house with some people.”

  “But what were you doing?” her mother asked. She pictured a house like the one they were in, a grown-up’s house, but she couldn’t envision any other people in it. All the people she imagined were more versions of Alice
, more versions of herself, not different enough from the real her, the real Alice, to truly matter. But that couldn’t be right. If it was her mother she wanted, she wouldn’t have left. “Was there a boy?” she asked. She’d promised herself she would only ask Alice three questions.

  “Sort of,” said Alice. Funny to think of Wesley as a boy. “Yes.”

  Alice’s mother hesitated. “Is there, still?” she asked. Alice didn’t answer. “All right, darling,” her mother said. She felt her face begin to crumple, before she shook the sadness back; she didn’t want to make Alice feel bad or guilty. She only wanted her to stay. “Would you like cake now?”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “Please.”

  “Did anything bad happen to you?” she asked.

  “No,” said Alice. “Only good things.”

  Her mother nodded. “I’ll get the cake,” she said. Maybe she could ask three more tomorrow, three every day that Alice was home, until every minute Alice had been away was accounted for, but when she turned around and saw her daughter sitting at the table, safe and whole and lovely and here, she knew no other answers mattered.

  It was like her mother had put a spell on her, binding Alice to the borders of the front yard. She would walk around on the grass barefoot, and we’d watch her curl up her toes and just stand there. Once Mrs. McEntyre walked the dog past her yard when Alice was outside. “Oh, that poor girl just lit up when she saw Sweetie, and Sweetie ran right over to her, nearly pulled my arm out of the socket,” she told us. Alice, she said, got down on her hands and knees to play with Sweetie, who yipped at her and turned in spastic circles—by then, Mrs. McEntyre had let go of the leash and it trailed after the little dog—and when Alice sat and crossed her legs, Sweetie climbed into her lap and licked her face. “Then the blessed girl just started crying,” she said. “Poor angel. So fragile. I told her if she needed a pick-me-up, she could visit Sweetie anytime.”

  “Oh,” said Alice Lange. “Thank you, but I don’t think I can.”

  And another time, when Earl Phelps, who walks up and down the street every morning for exercise, saw her standing in the yard, he stopped in front of her and asked her what the hell she was doing. “I just like the way it feels,” she said. “I’ve never noticed what nice grass we have here.”

  “Your mama pays good money to keep your yard nice,” Earl said. “Always gets that man to mow and fertilize it so it stays green. It’s important for folks to keep a nice house and a nice yard.” His own house was spartan, his yard as well, but especially for an older man living alone, we had to admit it was nice.

  Alice looked at him, and later he said it was like she was listening to a voice only she could hear. “That’s when I knew she wasn’t quite right,” he said later. “Those eyes. Too pale, like she wasn’t all there.”

  “There are more important things than that,” Alice said to him. “We just have to wake up and see it. All of us are blind until we open our eyes.” She closed her eyes and opened them again, pushed herself up on her toes so she stood an inch taller, then sank back onto flat feet. “But the grass really is very nice,” she said. “Like carpet. Ours isn’t as nice.”

  “That is your grass,” Earl said. Alice cocked her head to the side, looking confused, he said, like a deer right before you shoot it.

  “Be sweet to your mother,” Earl finally said to her and went on his way. “Never knew what a strange girl she was, but she was damned odd that day,” he told us later. We tried to tell him she wasn’t always. But it’s very possible that we just never knew. That it was inside her all along, waiting for someone to stir it up, make it visible. But what do we know? We’re just blind people. Ah, forgive us, we make ourselves laugh. What foolishness.

  Alice couldn’t bring herself to leave, but her stomach ached at the thought of Wesley and the girls waiting for her at the bungalow. She felt so tired, shocking herself by falling asleep after lunch and on the couch at night while her mother watched television. But at the same time a restless energy coursed through her when she was awake, every part of her humming. She kept her bag packed, kept the money in the back pocket of jeans she never wore; that way she was ready to go if she needed to, if Wesley came for her, if he sent a sign that her time was up, past up.

  She somehow knew they hadn’t left her, hadn’t gone off to the rocks and the sweat and the dip of the desert already. Wesley needed her. But her mother needed her too. After a couple of days, they’d settled into a routine: waking up and having a slow breakfast of eggs or pancakes or, once, only bacon, one strip after another, so that their fingertips shone with grease and the kitchen smelled like a diner all day.

  Her mother would read in the backyard, and Alice would lie on the grass and nap or eat strawberries from the same glass bowl. After dinner they watched movies on TV, reruns; then, the hour growing later, her mother would talk, telling her stories about the neighborhood, all the things she had quietly observed about us. We were surprised by how closely she was watching us; it was unnerving to be known, jarring to hear ourselves described like characters in a book. She spoke, too, about Alice’s father, but truth be told, we didn’t care so much about these stories—they didn’t stick with us.

  Later, her mother would think about this time as so special, when their days were so intertwined that she couldn’t separate herself from her daughter, the way it had been when Alice was a baby and didn’t understand she was a person herself apart from her mother. But the truth is it was only Mrs. Lange who really said anything. Alice listened and asked polite questions but didn’t share. She kept a part of herself reserved for Wesley, a smaller part for the girls, a smaller part still for the men Wesley said were still coming, for the girls he hadn’t yet found.

  Only with them did love live, Wesley had told her, but couldn’t it be somewhere else too? Here, her mother humming while she diced onions, and Alice listening, trying to decide if it was a song she knew from somewhere or one her mother made up, sprung from somewhere in her heart.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ABOUT A WEEK after Alice’s return, she and her mother were just finishing lunch, their uneaten sandwich crusts still limp on their plates, when the doorbell rang. “Are you expecting anyone?” her mother asked.

  Alice laughed. “Definitely not,” she said. “Are you?”

  Her mother shook her head, standing up to move toward the door. “It’s a mystery guest,” she said, and Alice’s stomach clenched: Wesley. He had found her, had come to claim her and bring her home. Wesley in her house. Her mother’s house.

  But then she watched her mother open the door, saw her face register someone familiar. (It couldn’t have been Wesley, of course. We would have seen him coming.) “Well, hi, honey,” her mother said. “Can you come in? Alice, look who it is.” Alice got up and walked over, and her mother opened the door wider, framing Susannah on her doorstep.

  “Hi, Alice,” said Susannah. Alice had missed that voice—she hadn’t even realized how much until she heard it now, husky and shy, coming out of the girl she had missed too. Susannah looked the same, just as Alice had left her, and Alice wanted to hug her but instead just said, “Sit with me on the swing,” and her mother smiled and shut the door so the two girls were alone.

  On the swing, Alice sat near the edge so her toes skimmed the porch’s concrete floor and propelled the two of them back and forth. “So,” she said.

  “Where have you been?” Susannah asked.

  Alice didn’t answer at first, fixated on the swing. No one had used it since she had left, and it was dusty, the slats covered in a fine layer of dirt. When she swiped her finger across its arm, her fingertip came back gray, each whorl of her print now visible, like she could press it against a piece of paper, leave behind proof of who she was.

  “You just left,” Susannah said, both amazed and angry. She wasn’t a queen or a rebel. She wasn’t our pride, wasn’t our disappointment. Sitting here, she tried to imagine the kinds of stories people might tell about her if she were to disappear
like Alice: Susannah, the nice girl with the deep voice, someone who belonged in a place like this. She was friends with Alice Lange, and, ah, there’s the better story.

  “I know,” said Alice.

  “So where did you go?”

  “Well,” said Alice, thinking how to explain the bungalow, Wesley, the other girls. How to tell Susannah how asleep she had been until Wesley woke her up. “Someone found me and gave me a place to live,” she offered. “And a job to do. I’m doing something important now.”

  “This wasn’t important?” Susannah asked. She waved her hand at the street, at all of us working in our houses, pulling weeds in our gardens, driving our cars out into the world.

  “No,” said Alice. “It wasn’t. It isn’t.” She wanted to sound firm and kind, to tell the truth. But Susannah looked down, picked up a tiny brown leaf that had floated onto the swing. She twirled it in her fingers and then bent it in half, rubbing a crease with her finger and thumb. When she opened it up, it had broken into two halves. She tossed them to the ground.

  “It used to be,” Susannah said. “You know it did.”

  Alice shook her head. Her hair was so much longer now, Susannah noticed. The brightness of it winked at her, and Susannah felt a coil of anger like a snake tightening in her belly.

  “It was never important,” Alice said. “I just didn’t know then what I know now.” She wanted to make Susannah understand. “Do you remember on our way to the school that night, those houses we passed? And everyone else was asleep, and it was like we were the only people in the whole world who were awake. It was like they didn’t exist. Only we did. That’s how the whole world is.”

  “Did you know Ben took the fall for you?” Susannah asked.

  Alice closed her eyes. She was so tired. Susannah didn’t understand, but she saw, too, that her old friend didn’t want to understand, not really. She opened her eyes. “I didn’t ask him to,” she said.