Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [93]
She starts to cry. She looks down at her hands, suddenly wet with tears. She tries to stop, but this silent weeping seems to be beyond her volition. As long as his body was still moving, she thinks, he was somehow still alive.
Ellie releases her seat belt and climb’s into Alice’s lap. She snuggles under Alice’s chin as Alice’s arms go around her. She insinuates her little hands right around Alice’s neck as she shifts her head to Alice’s shoulder.
Alice closes her eyes and breathes in Ellie, her clean hair, her compact little kid body, her clattering runaway heartbeat, her perfect shell ears. She rests her cheek on top of Ellie’s head and turns to look out the window. She closes her eyes against the day; she tries to let Ellie anchor her, hold her to the earth, when all of Alice just wants to let go, stop breathing, and float away into the sky, to let go of this life and to find her father, wherever he is.
They have left Matt’s body at the funeral parlor, dropped him off like delivering a package, and driven home, where they all scatter to their own corners: Angie to unpack and lie down, Gram to the restaurant, Ellie to visit Janna for the first time in days, Uncle Eddie to the garage. And Alice, where does Alice go?
She is furious that they have to leave Matt in yet another place that is not where he belongs; where he is being taken care of by strangers, or worse, stacked among the dead and left alone.
Alice heads out the back door and past the workshop to the garden. She does not pick up a tool. If she had a tool in her hand, she thinks, she would wipe out every plant in front of her. If she had a tool in her hand, she would knock down the workshop or smash the windows in the car. She briefly thinks of which tool would be best for smashing the car windows. The mattock, probably, or the ax.
She kneels at the first row, the beets, the hell with the mud and the nice khakis her grandmother insisted she wear to the airport, and she begins to weed the row and thin the seedlings. She always hated thinning until her father said fine, and they conducted an experiment. Two rows of carrots, one thinned, one left alone. And Alice saw for herself the result of overcrowding and lack of nutrients. Now she is an expert at this.
The earth is cool and damp and it has begun to drizzle. The sky is a dull oyster gray, almost the color of a sky threatening to snow, though it is much too mild for snow. Still she is cold, with a chill that seems to come from inside of her.
She puts both hands flat on the ground and leans on them. She wants to find her father here in his garden. She wants to believe something, anything, about an afterlife. She wants him to slam out of the backdoor, the way he always does, calling out to her, telling her the plan for the day.
But the door doesn’t slam. Her father does not call out to her.
She peels off her jacket, trades her khakis for running shorts, her muck boots for sneakers, and heads out for a run. It begins to rain in earnest. At first Alice listens to the rain, the hiss of the water under the tires of passing cars, and beneath that, the dead silence without her father and his voice in her head. She wants to run until her heart explodes. A funny way to die.
Soon Alice is so drenched that her sneakers and her clothes grow heavy and start to make squishing sounds. But somewhere