Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [82]
She turns to look at her mother once more, thinking: Call me back. Call my name. Reach out to me.
But Angie is holding on to Ellie too tight, too tight. She is thinking that her heart is going to burst or stop beating. She wants to sink through the sofa and the floor and into the earth, to be with Matt, nowhere else, not to go on, not to put one foot in front of the other, not to be brave and true, but to let go, to surrender, to join him wherever he is.
The phone stops ringing. Alice picks up the receiver and punches in Gram’s number. She notices that her hand is shaking. She notices that the breakfast dishes are still in the sink. She notices that the linoleum floor could use a good scrubbing. There’s no answer at the apartment. She calls The Bird Sisters.
“Gram?”
“Alice? Are you all right?”
“It’s . . .”
And she can’t say “Dad,” she can’t say his name.
“I’ll be right there. And I’ll call Uncle Eddie. Is your mom there?”
“Yes.”
“I’m on my way.”
Alice hangs up the phone and sits in a kitchen chair.
Henry shows up at the back door and lets himself in.
“I saw the car.”
She closes her eyes.
“Alice . . . ?”
She nods her head. He pulls a chair up and sits beside her.
“Did you call your Gram?”
She nods.
“And your Uncle Eddie?”
Another nod. That’s all she can manage.
“Okay, then.”
He takes her hand.
“We’ll just wait.”
They wait. Wait for the news to sink in, for the tears to begin, for a telegram telling them it was all a mistake. That night Alice waits and waits for sleep to come. She finally gives up and goes downstairs. She finds the photograph album she is looking for and quietly steps outside the back door and crosses the grass to the workshop.
She climbs into her sleeping bag, turns on her flashlight, and opens the cover of the photograph album. It is the summer of 1997; she’s six years old. This is the summer she finally learns to swim on top of the water, like the big kids do. There are dozens of photos of their week’s vacation camping at Small Point. Ellie hasn’t even been born yet. Angie and Matt look so young. There are photos of a dinner—was it a birthday? An anniversary? There’s a bottle of wine and a jar full of wildflowers on their picnic table. There’s a photo of Matt, grinning at Angie as he holds two live and kicking lobsters over the pot boiling on their propane stove. In the next photo Angie has her hair up and a skirt on and Alice can see in the photo how pretty Angie is as she turns to smile at Matt taking the picture; and she can see how her father is looking at Angie and loving her; she can see right there, in this photograph, right there in that moment, that they are in love.
She turns another page and there she is, in her red and white gingham checked bathing suit. That was her favorite bathing suit of all time. She never wanted to outgrow that suit. She wonders what happened to it, if it is still in her bottom drawer. She doesn’t remember Ellie ever wearing it. She can’t imagine she would ever, ever let her mother give it away.
It’s a long walk for a six-year-old, all the way across the island. Mom is back at the campsite reading her book while Alice hikes with her dad. At first she was dawdling because she was distracted by the trees and the ferns and the sounds of animals in the woods. She has been practicing walking like an Indian, so she doesn’t disturb anything: not a pine needle, not the carpet of leaves and hidden stones. It’s really hard! And really slow. It is driving Dad nuts. He keeps turning around to find that she is not, in fact, behind him because she has stopped to investigate some new discovery.
“Alice, get a move on!”
“Alice, look up!”
“Alice! You’re missing everything while you worry about your feet!”
How did the Indians do this, she wants to know as she trots to catch up