Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [67]
The door opens and Angie nearly falls right over her.
“Alice!? What the hell? What are you doing here?”
“I heard you talking and—”
“There’s toast and jam all over the carpet! Could you be any more—?!”
Gram pulls Alice to her feet and heads down the hall hand in hand with her.
“I’ve won the skirmish but not the battle. I can stay the night. Maybe that will give me a little toehold. Think about what you’d like me to make for dinner tomorrow night. Something your mom and Ellie really love, okay?”
Alice slides into her sleeping bag on the floor as Gram climbs into Alice’s bed.
“You okay on the floor?”
“Yup.”
“This is cozy.”
“Yup.”
“Ellie can sleep through anything.”
“Just about.”
“Good night, Alice.”
“ ‘night, Gram.”
Alice stares up into the dark.
“Gram . . . ?”
“What, honey?”
“I saw him.”
“Where?”
“In my mind, I think.. . . He was walking across a hillside, smoking a cigarette, other men spread out on the hill around him. How could I see that?”
“I don’t know, Alice. You’re very connected to your dad.”
“That’s not rational, Gram.”
“Love isn’t rational.”
“Was it a dream?”
“What do you think?”
“It was so real and so strange. Not like anyplace I’ve ever seen before. And Dad was different, too. Dirty and thin and . . .”
“He’s probably thinking of you just as hard as you’re thinking of him.”
“But—”
“The mind, Alice, there’s still so much we don’t know. Think about that. All that mystery, all that unknown territory right between your ears.”
“You’re funny, Gram.”
“He loves you, wherever he is.”
Alice finally lets herself cry, the stupid tears falling right into her ears. Gram doesn’t say anything, just reaches out and takes her hand. Then Ellie rolls over on her back and starts to snore and they both laugh. Five minutes later—or so it seems—the alarm is ringing.
April 27th
Alice has the woodstove in Matt’s workshop going full blast. She’s wearing his work jacket and a fleece vest and a hat and a scarf. It’s sunny but unseasonably cold with a watery blue sky and a wind fierce enough to rattle the panes of the windows. Will spring never ever come?
First she built a fire, then she refilled the kindling pile and the stack of firewood, and then she hauled her stuff out of the house in two old duffel bags and a milk crate she found in the basement. She blows the air mattress up and hangs her sleeping bag on the clothesline to air out, which shouldn’t take long in this wind. She unpacks the milk carton full of books and photographs and sets the crate next to her bed with a small reading lamp on top.
The photographs go on one side of the workbench, so she can see them from her bed. She has collected her favorite framed photos of her dad from all over the house, rearranging desktops and bureaus so her mother won’t notice which ones are missing. She adds votive candles in old jelly jars. Three doesn’t seem like enough. She’ll have to get more.
She lights the candles. They look nice, she thinks, but there should be twelve at least. Maybe dozens and dozens; maybe she should light a new candle for every day that Matt is missing.
The books, which are Matt’s books, from his “favorite books” shelf, get stacked neatly inside the milk crate: The Art of the Stone Wall, E. B. White’s The Points of My Compass, Wendell Berry’s A Place on Earth. These are the books Alice is planning to read every night, if she gets scared staying alone out here. If she can’t sleep. If she can’t stop thinking about her dad.
Her plan was to