We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  Thinking of roommates, sort-of roommates even, Alice began to feel nervous. She hadn’t so far, strolling in the park with Wesley, kissing Wesley, who was a good person, who she had met, in fact, in her very own neighborhood. And as long as they were in Wesley’s truck, sitting on this bench seat, Alice was in a liminal sort of place, a capsule shuttling them from her world to his, and as such it belonged to no one. But a house, a home: there was no question. That belonged to someone.

  Two trees, tall and straight with branches and leaves that cascaded down and then flipped out at the end, like a series of witches’ hats stacked one on top of the other, stood in front of the house where Wesley finally stopped. The house was small and blue with trim in a shade of white Alice could tell was meant to be creamy but appeared dingy, the matted color of a sheep’s wool. There was a porch that ran the short width of the house, two wooden beams standing as columns, also painted white, supporting the outcropping of roof. When Alice shifted in her seat, trying to get a better view, she saw a small cactus in a terra-cotta pot by the front door. Because at least when it came to manners (the rest, we’d now say, though never to Mrs. Lange, is up for debate) Alice was raised right, she said, “What a lovely home.” She thought someone might come to the door, the roommate, sort of, but no one did. “I can carry my bag,” Alice said, though Wesley had not offered to take it for her. He stepped out of the truck and slammed the door. Alice slid out and closed hers quietly, followed him up the steps (also painted dreary white, cracked and chipping) to the house, behind him as he opened the door, which was unlocked. A dog barked from next door, and Wesley rolled his eyes. “I’d kill that animal if I could,” he said. Alice laughed.

  The lights were off inside, with the only brightness coming in from the windows, but then he flipped a switch, and a light came on overhead. There were plants everywhere, and she was surprised because Wesley didn’t seem like the kind of man to be overly tender with living things. But there was ivy creeping out of a pot and down a bookcase, a plant with sharp leaves like razor tongues, a cluster of small, fat-leafed succulents sitting on a table beneath a window in a puddle of sun. A red rug on the floor, and even that had vines, green and snaking across the tapestry. When Wesley walked across it, Alice imagined him crushing a serpent beneath the heel of his boot.

  “Janie?” he called. He sounded weary, the way her mother sounded when she came from the grocery store, arms bent and weighed down with shopping bags. She felt concerned he was weary because of her for some reason. He sank into a leather armchair. There was only the one chair and a sofa perpendicular beside it, the color of a tangerine, and Alice thought of Carl Miller yesterday morning, his wide hand covering the bright orange on the carton. The same wide hand touching her body, her face. How far away she was now from him, from all of them, from us.

  Stretched out across the sofa was a guitar. Alice didn’t want to move it, so she looked around. On the walls were photographs, taken by Wesley, she presumed, pinned up with thumbtacks. Most of them were of different women. Or was it the same woman over and over? Alice couldn’t tell. On the floor, lined along the baseboards and leaning against each other, were paintings, but none of them depicted people, instead lightning bolts and storms of swirling color. Some of the canvases were completely covered, while others had only a few brushstrokes across the white. One was black, only black. She wondered if they were good and guessed they were.

  “Janie?” Wesley said again, this time tilting his head back so that his voice carried. “Apple?”

  “Is that a dog?” Alice asked.

  “Is what a dog?” he said.

  “Apple,” Alice said, but he didn’t answer. He stood up and crossed the small living room to a hallway, and Alice, unsure what to do—she still hadn’t sat down anywhere—followed him to a closed door. He didn’t knock but opened the door quietly and went inside the room. Alice took another step forward, but stayed just inside the doorway.

  There was a bed in the middle of the room with a mismatched end table on each side, and a quilt patterned in a jumble of colors at its foot. On the bed she saw two girls sleeping, one on her back, her forearm thrown over her eyes and her hand on her stomach. The second girl slept on her side, curled up and small, like the shell of a snail, her forehead touching the first girl’s shoulder. They both wore dresses, but on the second girl the dress was askew, and hiked up high enough that Alice could see a smirking curve of cheek. Dark hair on both girls, pink skin on both. They looked, to Alice, like the same person.

  “Hey,” said Wesley softly. He walked closer to the bed and nudged the corner of the mattress with his knee. “Wake up,” he said. “I brought someone.”

  The girls stirred, and even this seemed choreographed, that they moved together or in response to each other, sitting up and scooting over and pulling at clothes. Hands in hair, hands rubbing at eyes. Mouths opening and almost forming words, almost smiling. Eyes: they saw Wesley, they saw Alice. They didn’t seem surprised by either.

  “Hi, Wesley,” one of the girls finally said.

  “I was so tired,” the other girl said. “I couldn’t stay awake.”

  Roused from their sleep, they didn’t look exactly alike. Sisters, cousins. An actress in a film and the real-life girl she was cast to play. More similar than different. And young, Alice thought. Her age or close to it.

  (We say, her age or close to it, meaning far away from this man’s. Pay attention, we would tell her. Look around you!)

  “Alice,” Wesley said, “this is Janie.” The one Alice thought of as the second girl lifted her hand and waved. “And this,” he said, “is Apple.”

  Apple was the prettier of the two, with thick, shiny hair and wide eyes that would make beady-eyed Charlotte Price jealous. She didn’t wave or say hello when Wesley introduced her, and Alice felt like the girls were examining her, and she realized, again, how completely out of place she was. The three dark heads of Janie, Apple, and Wesley, the beautiful bodies they seemed to share. And then there was Alice, bright haired and alien and wholly apart. Apple seemed to be waiting for her to speak.

  “I thought you might be a dog,” Alice said finally.

  “Why?” asked Apple, scrunching her nose.

  “I’ve just never met someone named Apple,” Alice said. “It was surprising.”

  “But you’ve met a dog named Apple?” she asked. Beside her, Janie laughed.

  “No,” said Alice. She tried to laugh, too, but it came out higher than her normal laugh, and she was horrified with herself. (We cringe here, to think of our girl like this, uncomfortable and awkward, practically kneeling before these strange young women.)

  “I like it,” she tried again. “It’s different. Everyone I know has an aunt named Alice. It’s very boring.”

  “I actually do have an aunt named Alice,” Janie said. “She always smells like boiled eggs.” Janie tucked her hair behind her ears, and Alice could see they stuck out a bit, and her chin was a sharp little point, like an arrowhead. Unable to stop herself, Alice began mentally creating the hierarchy of the girls in the house: Apple was at the top, Janie was below her. Alice was nowhere, at least for now.

  “Well, I had nothing to do with the naming,” Apple said, shrugging.

  “You should compliment Wesley,” Janie said. He had moved farther into the room and was standing beside her now, and she moved so she could throw her slender arm around his waist. Alice tried not to look. “He’s the one who named her Apple,” Janie said.

  Alice looked now at Wesley, who shrugged, still ensnared by Janie’s arm. “Oh, so it’s a nickname,” she said. Apple did have pretty cheeks, round and pink. Like apples.

  “Not really,” said Apple. “It’s just who I am.”

  “It’s her true name,” Wesley said, disentangling himself from Janie and stepping back toward Alice. Alice turned to him, like the fat-leafed plants in the living room growing to the window, reaching for the light. She thought of the girl at the party, Sadie. I don’t go by that anymore,
she’d told Wesley.

  “I could see it in her right away,” he said. “When I met her, I knew her original name wasn’t right, and so when I figured it out, I told her. When you know something is true, you share it.”

  “What’s your real name?” Alice asked. “Your old name, I mean.”

  “Betsy,” said Apple, giving a thumbs-down. “But good old Betsy’s dead now.”

  “RIP Betsy,” Janie said. She put her hands together in solemn prayer and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but Alice noticed her look down again, quickly, over at Wesley, like she wanted him to approve of her joke and laugh. But he did not, and Alice felt strangely reassured. These girls weren’t infallible. They could be embarrassed too. She wanted to go over and squeeze Janie’s shoulder, but she knew she shouldn’t, so she smiled at her instead. Janie smiled back.

  “Okay,” said Wesley, turning away from the other girls even as he addressed them. “Get up. Kathryn’s going to be home soon, and you need to make dinner.”

  “There’s no food. We couldn’t go to the store,” Janie said. She pulled her legs up and folded them underneath herself. “We didn’t have any money.”

  “Find a way to get some,” Wesley said, heading back again to Alice, as if to signal the conversation was over.

  “You might not like the way we find it,” said Apple. She was out of bed now, on the side opposite Wesley. She pulled up the quilt and smoothed it out, flicking its top edge against Janie’s toes until she, too, got out of the bed.

  “I’m not so small minded,” Wesley said. “Do what you need to do.”

  “I have money,” Alice offered. “Not very much, but a little.” She had paid for the burgers and milkshake earlier because it seemed like the right thing to do—weren’t artists always broke?—and sharing it with the girls seemed right too.

  “We’ll take it,” said Janie. She leaned on a dresser pushed up against the wall and held her hand out to Alice, who still lingered in the doorway.

  “Honestly,” said Apple, looking across the room at Wesley, “there’s enough food for dinner. She’s exaggerating. We’ll get something together.”

  Wesley nodded. “Good,” he said. “And Alice, there might be a time we ask you for money, but not now. Tonight you’re our guest. You’ll stay for dinner, right?”

  “Of course,” said Alice. “Thank you. But are you sure about the money? I don’t mind contributing.” Apple was squeezing past her now, arms up and turning to the side so she was as slight as a playing card, and Alice stepped out of her way, farther into the bedroom. Closer to Wesley. He turned so they were facing only each other.

  “Yes,” he said in a low voice. It sounded private, delicious. “I’m positive.”

  “She’s just staying for dinner?” asked Apple. She was in the doorway now, one hand resting on the jamb. Her whole body was a pause.

  “You’re welcome as long as you like, of course,” he said to Alice, without looking at Apple. “We have room for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Alice. So close to him, this strange man who had chosen her, she felt electric. Beneath that she felt the sting of uncertainty, the warmth of relief. She had planned on staying with Wesley, had assumed that since he brought her here, he was taking care of her, but maybe it hadn’t been as much of a guarantee as she thought. Maybe he had only just now decided. She would be good and kind and open minded. She wouldn’t ask questions about their names. She would give them money if they needed it. She would sleep on the floor.

  “Help us with dinner,” Apple commanded, lingering still in the doorway. “Are you a good cook?”

  “Apple,” said Wesley, now looking past Alice to Apple, “she’s a guest. I’m going to take her.”

  “Take her where?” asked Apple. “I bet I can guess.”

  “Somewhere else,” Wesley said. His voice crackled, and Alice felt glad she hadn’t been the one to annoy him. “You need to calm down,” he told Apple.

  “I’m very calm,” she said. “Come on, Janie,” she called over her shoulder as she headed down the hallway.

  Janie touched each of them on her way out, fingertips light as cat feet on Alice’s shoulder. “Come on,” said Wesley after they left. “I want to show you something.”

  “An adventure,” said Alice.

  “Exactly right,” he said. “It always is around here.”

  Chapter Ten

  WE MISSED ALICE right away. There are some people in our lives whose absence might go unnoticed for days: the freckled woman who bagged groceries at the store, the crossing guard at the intersection by the elementary school. But not noticing that Alice was gone—it would be like walking outside and not noticing that all the trees had disappeared, leaving our world without respite from the sun, without clean air to breathe, without beauty. She was special, yes, but she also made everyone around her special too. And it wasn’t simply that we felt special. We became special. We were transformed.

  But we did miss her in practical ways too. When April needed a babysitter one evening, she got as far as picking up the phone to call the Langes’ before she remembered that Alice wasn’t there. She had to call three other mothers before she found the name of a sophomore girl she might use instead. “Where’s Alice?” asked Billy. “Why can’t Alice watch me?”

  “She’s not home, honey,” April told him. When he asked her when she would be back, April felt overwhelmingly sad, not just because Alice was gone but because she didn’t want to have to tell her child something that might frighten him—that people could leave and never come back—or worse, give him ideas.

  But our lives rolled on without her, starting right away, mere hours after she left, though most of us only learned she was gone for good after Mrs. Lange talked to the police. But we assumed Alice would be back, that she would come to her senses quickly and return; she was always a rational girl, and she had no reason to leave, especially not on the night of the homecoming dance.

  When the other girls got ready in their bedrooms, they dressed partly for themselves, partly for their dates, and partly to gain Alice’s approval, and when she was missing from the dark, streamer-filled gym, they noticed. They looked for Susannah to give them an explanation, but she wasn’t there either. They did, however, find Millie, wearing a blue dress that hid her knobby knees and a smug look on her face. “She probably got arrested,” Millie said, “for burning down the float. Maybe they can find handcuffs to match her crown.”

  “We don’t know for sure that’s what happened,” said a girl named Ruth, a friend of Alice’s.

  “Will she still win?” asked another friend.

  “Probably,” said Millie, though she hoped she wouldn’t, that Alice would not only be expelled from our world but also denied the thing we’d all but given her.

  In fact, when Camille Humphrey was crowned queen at the dance, everyone was still confused as to whether she’d actually won, or if she was the runner-up and named the winner by default. Camille, too, wore a pink dress, with silver shoes she picked because they reminded her of moonlight, and she felt self-conscious in their high heels, rhythmically stepping back and forth with Phillip Turner, the king, as everyone watched. She was cute, sweet, well liked, she knew that. But she was the kind of efficient, responsible girl who was elected student council secretary, not homecoming queen, and she felt like the weight of everyone’s gaze would crush her. When the song was over, she parted quickly from Phillip and put the crown next to her clutch on an aluminum folding chair against the gym’s wall. “It was giving me a headache,” she said, rubbing her temples. “I didn’t know it would be so tight.”

  Chapter Eleven

  WHEN WESLEY TOOK her to the college, the sun was setting, and around them everything was glowing amber, honey, though in some pockets, the light was already gone. In those places, things were going gray. They walked side by side, but didn’t hold hands or touch at all, and as they matched each other’s stride, they blended in with the students around them.

  But where the
other men and women carried bags and books and briefcases, Wesley and Alice’s arms were empty. She had left her bulging leather bag on the orange couch in the living room, beside the guitar. She wondered if she should have hidden it or at least left it somewhere inconspicuous, but maybe that would have seemed rude. And besides that, no one had touched the guitar. Maybe the guitar was a special thing only for Wesley, like his camera. Before they left, she’d seen Janie sitting next to it, but giving it a wide berth, like it was another person.

  “Here,” Wesley said. Before them, tall and long with white columns across the front, rose a white building, its red-brown roof the color of clay. “Come on,” he said and pulled her up the steps. Inside, it all seemed brown to Alice: the tables and chairs and dim lights, spines of books, students in sweaters, standing up and pushing in chairs, swinging bags over their shoulders, walking out as Alice and Wesley entered.

  “The library,” Alice said, remembering, suddenly, standing here two years ago with Susannah and their mothers, visiting the campus for a statewide high school debate competition. Here’s where you’ll study, girls, her mother had said. And Susannah’s mother had said, laughing, Here? You won’t meet your husband in the library, will you? The girls had looked. The boys sitting at the tables, books open in front of them, had seemed to them like men. Yes, they had thought, they could meet their husbands here.

  “This isn’t the place,” Wesley said. “Come on.” She followed him up a curving staircase, two flights, down a hall, past classrooms with their doors closed. They didn’t see another person.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  “Probably dinner,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Alice. She had forgotten there were days and hours, that she had been gone and time existed even when she wasn’t following its patterns and routines the way she always had. Underneath her feet there was carpet—institutional, she thought, and the color of oatmeal. She watched Wesley’s feet move across it in his brown boots. “This is it,” she heard him say, and she looked up. He took a key out of his jacket pocket—Was he a custodian, then? Or a thief?—and twisted it in the lock, turned the knob and gently pushed it open, then flicked on the lights.