A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [60]
When I questioned the policemen they made no answer. When I insisted I was coming along, Alice turned and said, “Stay here, I’ll call you.” The short officer with glasses smacked a piece of paper in my hand. “What is this?” I demanded. I didn’t have time to sit and read. I was walking sideways, together, apart, together, apart, asking Alice to explain the problem. Under no circumstances, I said, was I going to sit at home while she was driven off by two men who were younger than both of us.
The cop said, “Do you want anything from the house, Ma’am?”
They weren’t listening.
To the officer Alice said, “Can I bring some books? What am I allowed?”
“Books are okay. Extra socks, white only, that’s about it.”
She stopped on the sidewalk. She said so calmly, as if she had expected to be hauled away, “I’m in trouble, Howard. Read the piece of paper. Robbie Mackessy says I—awful things. I don’t know how this could have happened but I have to go along. What you need to do is take care of the girls.”
Alice gave me a painting for my thirtieth birthday, from the Go Back in Time Company. An artist in Pittsburgh produced an oil portrait of myself as a Napoleonic soldier. Alice went and hung it in the bathroom over the toilet. The painting was a good likeness. I couldn’t take a piss without feeling disoriented. Last summer on that Tuesday morning at nine-thirty she stood handcuffed on the sidewalk looking at me. It was only the first of many occasions during those months that seemed to take place out of time, or in a historical moment I had yet to identify. “It’s no use coming after me,” she said. She turned then and went into the house.
They must have realized she was harmless because they undid her handcuffs while she filled a grocery bag with books, paper, envelopes. They had let her go, I thought, because they knew she was innocent. But if they had shackled her in the first place it wasn’t right to spring her loose. I wondered how good they were, if they allowed their captives to rummage around for their Lugers. “No,” she shook her head mournfully, “I don’t have plain white socks. Let me look at this warrant thing,” she said, taking the paper from my grip with her free hand.
“Alice—”
“Here,” she said, holding out her wrists to the policeman. “I’ll call you when I sort this out, Howard. I’ll need a lawyer—maybe you could get a hold of Rafferty.”
The girls were hiding in the Ford, springing up and peeking every few minutes and then ducking down. When Alice came from the house she went to the car and in a flash she grasped Emma’s head through the open window. She did so with her hands in manacles. She held Emma’s face. She moved to the front window and did the same with Claire. She had cast some kind of spell on them and they knew they shouldn’t say a word. They opened and closed their mouths. “I’ll call you,” she said to me, just before the officer shut the door after her. As they pulled away, Emma and Claire emerged from the back seat and came to my side. We stood in the dust of the driveway. When the car rounded the bend and disappeared we continued to wait. I guess—and why not?—we thought the road might straighten out to reveal her destination.
After a minute we blinked, shook ourselves. I said we’d go inside and make some Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches. Claire started to whimper. Emma kept it up longest, looking down the road. She probably would have felt about the same if she’d woken to find that a tornado had touched down while she’d slept, a whirlwind that had taken the one thing she valued most. Claire began climbing all over me, suddenly feverish with anxiety. I told her that Alice would be back soon, probably before we were finished with our sandwiches.