Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [105]
Is it the rough cloth of his jacket, or the uneven ground beneath her feet; or is it the sun, coming out from behind a cloud and pouring through the leaves, or is it the sound of a truck, grinding its gears as it crests the hill behind them—when suddenly the truck she hears in the distance is the truck that slows but doesn’t stop as a body, her father’s body, is pushed from behind the wheel well, to fall, to roll, to lie in the sand and gravel at the side of the road. His uniform filthy, stained with dirt and blood, torn, both boots missing, his feet incongruously bare. His face, she can’t see his face; he has landed with one arm flung out, his face turned sideways, turned away, his fingers, his short, strong fingers curled into fists.
She opens her eyes and pulls away. She looks around; she shakes her head, as if she could clear these images from her mind. When her mother told her how they’d found her father she couldn’t take it in and now, here, kissing this boy, what is she doing kissing this boy, here it is, in a rush, in a flood.
“I have to go.”
“Wait . . . Alice—”
“This isn’t right.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m—” And she struggles to find the right words. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Alice?” Henry calls out . . . “Alice? Are you in there?”
She pushes past John Kimball and slips between the lilac trunks.
“Henry, what are you doing here?”
“I saw you leave. You looked upset.”
“Of course I looked upset.”
“I was worried about you. I followed you.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
John Kimball materializes once again. He reaches out to take Alice’s hand; she jerks away from him. She can see Henry jumping to conclusions and she wants to stop him. She wants to explain, but doesn’t know how she can explain trying to get away from everything and everyone, coming here, coming to this place, their place, looking for, hoping for . . . she doesn’t know what, the surprise of John Kimball, the kiss, her father, her childhood, the pictures that are haunting her . . .
Suddenly there is that roaring inside Henry’s head that makes it impossible to hear; he can’t hear the birds, or the wind, or even his own thoughts. Instead, he sees the lilac leaves quivering in the aftershock of John pushing through them; he remembers the interior green-glass shimmer of that space and imagines Alice and John and without warning, he steps forward and shoves John so hard he falls backward into the lilacs. It looks at first as though the branches will be supple enough to bend under this burden, but then there is a terrible ancient keening sound as branches and an entire trunk groan and then crack and fall under John’s weight. As John scrambles to his feet, both Henry and Alice register the gaping hole in the circle of trees.
Henry can see that John is beginning to move toward him, but he doesn’t care what John does right now, let him do his worst. Henry is looking at the lilacs and the broken trunk and branches and something shifts inside of him.
“Henry,” Alice says, and her voice breaks as she says his name.
He looks at her for a long moment, hurt and betrayal and anger loud in the space between them, before he turns to leave.
“Henry!” Alice calls out to him. And then again, more urgently, “Henry!”
She is about to break into a run to follow him, when John reaches out to her.
“I’ll walk you back.”
“I have to go alone.”
“Alice—”