We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  But now the roar of the ocean was a sound she couldn’t tune out, like the breath of an enormous creature, slow and full. When Carl Miller had left, it had surprised her a bit, even though she told him to. She was too close to home not to feel a sudden urge to go back. Her mother would wrap her arms around her.

  Alice sat there for a while, but soon she stood up, brushed the sand from the seat of her pants, and walked back up the beach to the line of shops and restaurants that overlooked it. Coffee. That was something she could do. Her mother kept cash hidden in various places all over the house—behind a picture frame on her bedside table, in between pages of Great Expectations, in other strange places—and Alice had taken the bills that were under a bag of rice in the pantry.

  She unzipped her bag and dug around for the money, but her fingers kept finding clothes, underwear, toiletries thrown loose among them. She’d been able to fit a lot into the bag, and it was now fat and round, like some kind of featureless head. She dropped to her knees on the sidewalk outside a diner, pushed her hands deeper into the bag. The beach was beginning to wake up. People strolled around her, like she was a rock in the middle of a stream.

  “Hey,” she heard someone say, and she scooted to the side without looking up, trying to get out of the way.

  “Hey,” said the voice again.

  It was one she knew. She looked up. That ribbon that had begun unrolling last night—red, she pictured it, and glossy—unfurled farther, because standing in front of her was the man.

  “Hi,” she said. Surprised but not surprised.

  “I have something for you,” the man said.

  She was still on the sidewalk, knees bent like she was praying, and he stood over her. The first time she looked at him, outside her mother’s house, she’d taken in each piece of him separately: the bag that held the camera, those same brown boots, long denim legs, tight in the thighs; and she thought she could see the shelf of his quadriceps; hair the color of the armoire in her mother’s bedroom and as thick and dark and heavy as it, too, like she could wander into it and pull the doors shut behind her. Thumbs hidden, tucked away into his pockets, surprisingly delicate fingers on display: she wondered if he played the piano.

  The second time she looked at him, she drank him in all at once.

  “How’d you find me?” she said. He didn’t put out a hand to help her up, and so she stood up by herself, like a gangly foal, shoving the items she’d removed back into the bag. When she straightened up, she realized he was shorter than she remembered, only a few inches taller than her. She slouched a little, not wanting him to feel embarrassed.

  (When we imagine him striding down our street, he’s tall in our memories too. “It could have been a different guy,” Bev’s husband, Todd, says one morning over coffee. Bev shakes her head, remembering how she saw him through the window months ago, the sensation of seeing him seeing her. Dark hair, the beard of a prophet, but his eyes were a light and icy blue, the color of winter in places that knew real cold. “No,” she says. “It was the same one. Has to be.” She’s struck by an urge to move, to act. She stands up. “Hold the baby for a second,” she says to her husband, and he obeys, but the little girl looks unnatural there in his arms, even though he loves her, rubbing his nose against her tiny one. “Never mind,” she says. She takes the baby back.)

  On the sidewalk outside the diner, someone bumped into Alice, and she took a stutter step closer. “Sorry!” the person called.

  “It’s fine,” said Alice quietly. She could have been saying it to anyone.

  “I didn’t have to find you,” the man said. His voice was friendly, confident, but Alice noticed that he didn’t blink. In novels she read, people’s eyes were always flashing, but she’d never been able to picture it until now. “Finding means I was looking, and looking means something is lost,” he continued. “And you weren’t lost, were you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Right,” said the man. “So I knew you’d turn up if you were meant to, and here you are.” He spread out his arms to show her where she was, and she looked too. A place teeming with life in every corner, deep in the sand, in the layers of ocean, animals she couldn’t name, couldn’t imagine, in the sky and carried on the wind, and passing her on the sidewalk, passing them on the sidewalk, because they were now a sudden world of two. How giant it all was, and she’d never known.

  “I’ve been coming here since I was a little girl,” she said. “Did you know that too?”

  “What do you think?” he said and laughed, a happy modesty to his tone. The easiness of it made her laugh too.

  “I don’t believe in magic,” she said, “or mind reading or fortune-telling, if that’s what you’re implying.” Her voice was low, teasing, the kind of alto that Susannah had hoped hers would be, Susannah who the night before had gone to the Lange home, knocked on the door, and asked, “Is Alice home?” Mrs. Lange paused, looked past Susannah, and said, “I thought she was with you.”

  “But you’d believe the truth when you saw it,” he said. “When you came face-to-face with it. I can tell. Whatever that truth might be.”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “I’m never wrong about people,” the man said. A smile full of well-shaped teeth. Alice imagined herself reaching out, a finger running down the line of them, up and over the peaks of their sharp points.

  “Let’s go,” he said, already taking a step backward, his shoulders threatening to turn and steer his body away from her.

  “Is the thing you have for me the picture of me?” Alice asked.

  He grinned. “I’ve got so much more than that for you.”

  Another step backward, another hint of a turn, the promise he would disappear again. He would go with her, without her, but he would go. “It’s in my truck,” he said. “I didn’t want it to get bent. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Okay,” said Alice.

  “Okay,” he said. But she didn’t follow right behind him when he finally turned, and we know how close she was to staying behind and letting him walk away.

  (We taught Alice Lange, all of the children, to be careful. Don’t talk to bad people, don’t go anywhere with bad men. This was the mistake Rachel Granger must have made.)

  “Are you good?” Alice asked the man. “A good person.”

  “It’s hard to say for sure,” he called over his shoulder, “but I’m going to go with yes.”

  “Fair enough,” said Alice.

  “It’s the truth,” he said, turning to look back at her, “and that’s all I’ve got. But what else does a person need, really?”

  “Nothing,” said Alice. And so she followed him past the diner where she never got her coffee, past couples and families, past surfers and seagulls, under palm trees, under a sky that turned so blue it hurt her eyes, and instead she looked at the man’s back as he led her away. But, we wish we could have told her, there are really so many other things a person needs too.

  Chapter Eight

  HIS FIRST NAME was Wesley. He didn’t give her a last name. “Names are important,” he told her. “You learn someone’s name or you give someone a name—that’s power. You’re connected. And when you know someone’s name, you can’t ever unknow it.”

  “I forget people’s names all the time,” Alice said.

  “Then you didn’t really know their names in the first place,” the man said. Wesley. “Not their true ones.”

  They were in his car, a truck that rattled each time he accelerated, but he hadn’t said where they were going. Alice didn’t mind.

  “What’s your true name?” she asked. “Is it Wesley?”

  He glanced over at her and grinned. He was wearing sunglasses, and she couldn’t see his eyes, so the action of smiling looked like it took up only half his face; the rest of it seemed untouched. “I guess you’ll have to wait and see,” he said, looking back to the road.

  Alice held the photograph of herself in her lap. She kept looking at it. “Fucking beautif
ul,” Wesley said when he noticed her peeking down at it.

  And it was. She was. She knew she was a pretty girl, and photographs had shown that all her life, but in this one, with her solemn face, serious eyes, she looked like something lovely and strong and ancient, like she had existed for a million years and would exist a million more, untroubled by the ways of mortals. Unknown to them, unknown by them, recognized only by this man with the camera. Wesley.

  They were on the freeway, heading in the general direction of her town, and Alice suddenly wondered then if he was taking her home, if he would pull up to her house, the guts of the seedlings she had crushed underfoot still spattered on the sidewalk, her mother in the kitchen. The green sign advertising the exit for the neighborhood was in the distance, and everything around her, the billboards, the ridge of mountains, the restaurants and stores, was familiar. Here they came, now, closer and closer, and he changed lanes. One lane further to the right.

  “Some people drive like assholes,” he said, and the truck rattled again as he passed a car and moved back to the middle lane.

  The exit was behind them, and Alice felt relief blooming inside her, taking up her insides until she felt full, happy. “Do I have a true name?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. “I don’t know what it is yet. I have to see it on you, in you. I’m not sure, I’ll just know it when I see it.”

  “I like that,” said Alice. “My mom’s name is Martha. My father is Edward. Was Edward. He died.” She looked at him to see if she had volunteered too much. “What do you think?” she said quickly. “True names, yes or no?”

  “Can’t say,” he said. “I don’t know them.”

  “What about your parents?” she asked.

  “What about them?”

  His voice sounded casual, but Alice, the perceptive girl, could hear the effort in it.

  “What are their true names?” she said.

  Wesley didn’t look at her. He watched the road, moved his right hand off the steering wheel, kept the left loosely on the top, so lightly that if they had to swerve suddenly, Alice thought there would be no way he could save them. The fingers of his right hand picked blindly at a seam on the bench seat of the truck. “My mother didn’t have one,” he said. “Because she wasn’t a true person. She didn’t deserve to have any name at all.”

  “Oh,” said Alice. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No,” said Wesley. “It’s okay.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know my father’s name,” he said, “because I don’t know who my father is. He could be anyone.” He looked out his window at a blue car pacing them in the left-hand lane. “It could be that guy, for all I know.” Alice leaned forward to see the driver of the other car, a black man. He wore a hat and had both hands on the steering wheel. He was singing along to the radio.

  “I don’t think it’s him,” said Alice.

  Wesley laughed. “Probably not,” he said. “But I know that guy as well as I know my real father.”

  “Maybe it’s better not to know,” Alice said. “You know?”

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. “Maybe.”

  He held the steering wheel with the pads of his fingers, his other hand still picking, picking, picking at a loose thread. Alice reached over, put her hand on top of his, settled those moving fingers.

  Look, she thought, look at what I’m doing.

  They exited the freeway half an hour later, turning right at a stoplight onto a road Alice had never traveled before, and drove up into the hills, green brush and brown stone out the windows, spiny cacti potted in terra-cotta planters, and houses that looked small until Alice saw them from the side, and noticed how languidly they sprawled. On one street they turned onto, parked cars lined both sides, and only here Wesley began to slow down. “Do you live here?” she asked him. By now the afternoon had grown late and golden, and with each passing minute, Alice was getting farther and farther away from us.

  (On Saturday night, Mrs. Lange had called the police. We urged her to when she and Susannah, who had come looking for Alice, arrived on our doorsteps, knocking and asking first if Alice happened to be there by any chance, then asking when we had last seen Alice, asking if we had any idea of where she could be. We told her we would ask our children, Alice’s peers but also our little ones, our girls who studied Alice like a blueprint for the kind of woman they would someday be, our boys who studied Alice for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. But they said they hadn’t seen her. I dreamed about her, Billy said and blushed. That doesn’t count, said his mother.

  Report her missing, we told Mrs. Lange. But when the police arrived at the Lange home, and Mrs. Lange and Susannah showed them Alice’s room, they saw it was clear Alice had left of her own volition. Her schoolbooks were stacked neatly on her desk. Her closet was missing clothes; the bathroom was missing her toothbrush, her deodorant, a hairbrush.

  The policemen asked Mrs. Lange if Alice had any of her own money, or if perhaps she might have taken some from her mother to purchase bus fare, gas money, a plane ticket? “Alice would never,” said Mrs. Lange. But she would, thought Susannah, and I would, too, and I would have if I had known Alice was going. Susannah felt her initial fear melt away as anger began to burn inside her. Alice had left. She hadn’t been kidnapped. She was living. It was just that she was doing that living somewhere else, not here, not with her mother, not with Susannah.

  “Mrs. Lange,” Susannah said, her voice tight. “I have to get ready for the homecoming dance. I have to figure out a new plan.”

  But Mrs. Lange didn’t answer. She was shaking her head at the policemen, even though they had asked no additional questions, as if she were anticipating the answer she would continue to give. No. Not Alice. Not Alice. No. So Susannah excused herself and went home. “Alice ran away,” she told her mother.

  “She’ll be back,” her mother said, and when Susannah started to cry, she took her in her arms and pressed her cheek to the top of her daughter’s head. “She’ll be back. Don’t be sad,” she said, though it wasn’t often she got to hold her child like this anymore, and yes, she didn’t want her to be sad, but she did want to luxuriate in the feeling of being needed. And Susannah, in an act of grace, let her mother think the tears she cried were the sad kind instead of the angry, jealous kind.

  “Can you check any places where you might have cash lying around, please, Mrs. Lange?” one of the men asked. “Your purse? A safe?”

  “Oh,” said Alice’s mother, and she took them around to her hiding places—the book, the picture, the bag of rice in the pantry. The money was gone.

  “I’m sorry,” the policeman said. “This is both good news and bad news. The good news is it’s unlikely she’s been kidnapped.”

  “Rachel Granger,” said Mrs. Lange.

  “Alice isn’t Rachel,” the policeman said. “This is a different case.”

  Mrs. Lange closed her eyes, wishing for a moment of oblivion, but when she did, all she could see was her daughter. “What’s the bad news?” she asked. “You said there was good news and bad news.”

  “Oh,” said the officer, looking uncomfortable. “She must have wanted to leave, and she did.”

  A difference, then: Rachel was trying only to get home, and Alice was trying to leave it.)

  “We’re just stopping by,” Wesley told Alice as he parked behind a white convertible. “There’s a party.” He got out of the truck and closed the door, and Alice followed behind him as he walked up to a white house that glowed in the day’s last hours of sunlight. She glanced back at her mother’s bag on the passenger seat and felt a sudden sadness and worry at leaving it behind, like the purse had feelings she would hurt by abandoning it, but Wesley, of course, had nothing, and she wanted to match his every move. “Am I dressed okay for this?” she asked Wesley, but he was opening the door—he didn’t knock, here was a man who could cross any borders, any boundaries, confident in being welcomed—and he left it open for Alice without looking back. Sh
e shut it behind them.

  Inside, people stood in little groups in the kitchen, leaning against counters, in the living room, near big windows that overlooked a pool and two strings of paper lanterns already glowing as the day waned. By the windows, a man was playing a guitar and singing, badly, Alice thought, but no one else seemed to care. Some of them had their eyes closed. Some danced. There was music coming from somewhere else, too, out of sight, and the combination of sounds disoriented her. The air smelled of smoke, cigarettes and weed and something unfamiliar, a thick sort of scent. The house was sparsely decorated, or, it occurred to her, maybe the owner had removed everything, anything breakable, before he opened his home to anyone else. To strangers! Because that’s who Alice was now, a stranger, someone unknown. The idea of it was thrilling.

  Here Wesley, a stranger to her, was not a stranger at all. Here people came up to him, smiling, shaking his hand, clapping him on the back, sidling up to him, touching his camera case with eager fingers. Men in jeans, in breezy shirts, women in dresses or bathing suits despite the fading daylight—and one woman wearing nothing at all, draped over a couch in an open, airy living room, a hand over her eyes. Two men, the only ones in suits, like businessmen, stood behind her. They held drinks and talked, as if this were a perfectly ordinary scene. Wesley saw Alice looking at this woman. “I took her photo once. And guess what?” he said. “She took her clothes off then too.”

  “Oh,” said Alice. She looked at the woman more closely. Her body was fine, ordinary, but she was curious how Wesley saw it. “What did you do?”

  Wesley laughed. “Took her picture,” he said. “Are you asking if I fucked her?”

  “I guess I am,” said Alice.

  “I did,” said Wesley. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”

  Alice considered this. “But you aren’t anymore?” she asked. “Fucking her.” (Already she sounds different. Already she has taken a piece of Wesley, eaten that piece like a little slice of cake, absorbed it into her body.)