The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  Archie was still in his tuxedo, but he had unbuttoned his collar and his bow tie hung limply around his neck. His white hair was flattened on his head, as if he had been lying down.

  “What time is it?” Alice said. She struggled to sit up.

  Archie put his hand to his wrist as if to check his watch, but he did not pull back his sleeve.

  “It's about quarter to five,” he said, and Alice noticed then that there was a light in the sky on the eastern horizon, a sliver of bright red interrupted here and there by the dark tops of the trees.

  Alice looked back at Archie's grave face and then up at the boys on the porch. “Why's everyone up?” she said. “Is the dance over?”

  “Please come inside, Alice,” Archie said. “And would you wake up Theo, too, please?” He turned away from her and walked back to the house, slowly mounting the porch steps and disappearing inside. Her brothers stayed on the porch, exactly as they had been.

  Alice scrambled to extricate herself from her sleeping bag, scraping her knee painfully on the zipper. She reached out and shook Theo roughly. The grass was cold and wet. She heard the whirring noise again, a little farther off, and she drew away fearfully.

  Theo moaned and scrunched down into his sleeping bag, one hand emerging to try to draw it over his head.

  “Wake up,” Alice said. “Theo, wake up. Wake up!” A terrible urgency and fear was building inside her.

  She jostled Theo again. Her legs were soaking wet and cold from kneeling in the grass. She began to shiver.

  Theo rolled over and squinted up at her painfully as if she were shining a flashlight into his face.

  “Something's happened,” she said. “Get up.”

  “What?” He sat up, bleary-eyed and blinking. “Why are all the lights on? What time is it?”

  “Just get up,” she said. Her teeth started to chatter.

  Theo stared at her for a second and then wriggled out of his sleeping bag. He stood on the grass in his bare feet, in his striped T-shirt and his wrinkled shorts.

  He looked helpless, she thought, stupid and helpless, with his hair standing up crazily and his face creased and bewildered. Once he had begun holding her hand as they had walked back from the dance, he had seemed not to want to let go of it for the rest of the night, and they had fallen asleep on their backs, hands clasped, staring silently up at the clouds crossing the face of the moon, the black depths full of stars appearing and disappearing. She had drifted off, aware of the pulse in his hand, the steam of their breath rising above them into the cool night air.

  She'd been wrong, she thought now. When she'd met Kenneth, and when Theo had taken her hand, she had thought that the life that lay ahead of her had been fully revealed to her, all the complicated, grown-up things that she could not have identified before because she did not know what they were. But those had been only a prelude, she understood now, only the parade's first weak players in their tattered uniforms and tarnished instruments, the dirty urchins and toothless, unfit volunteers who staggered out from the side streets to join the throng, beating old pie tins or the lids of metal garbage cans, anything to make a noise. They had been only the shabby, raucous harbingers of the real thing, the future that came on relentlessly rolling down the street on massive, creaking wheels, ropes straining and whining, a dark and shapeless mass that organized itself blackly against the horizon.

  “Foolish,” Archie said, closing his eyes, his face sagging, leaning back in his desk chair as if defeated. “All of it.”

  They had found Kenneth on the rocks below the falls, he told Alice and Theo. They had followed the rope walk, just as Miss Fitzgerald—hysterical, pointing, accusing—had said they should, and once they reached the end, well, it was obvious, Archie said, where they should look next.

  “How could you be so stupid?” he asked them, and Alice had gone cold with fright.

  In his study, with the dawn light creeping into the room, Archie had raised his gaze at last to Alice and Theo, taking them in as though he was surprised; they were too small and insignificant in their rumpled T-shirts and bare feet and sleep-creased faces to have accomplished anything, much less anything of such magnitude. “Didn't you realize that he could fall from there?” he'd said. “Alice?”

  The tiger skin on the floor had seemed to raise its heavy head, teeth bared.

  “He didn't fall,” Alice said, bewildered but certain. “He jumped.”

  She knew it. She didn't want to know it, she thought, looking back at Archie. But she felt it inside herself, the truth of it.

  Archie stared back at her. “There wasn't any note, Alice,” he said. “He didn't leave a note.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn't matter,” she said at first.

  Then she said, surprising herself, “Yes, he did. I know he did.”

  Archie stood up abruptly then, as though he didn't want to look at them anymore. “I need to go speak to Hope,” he said. “I consider myself at fault, for not supervising you properly this summer.”

  He looked at them for one more minute. “This will be with us for a very long time,” he said. “Forever. Do you understand that?”

  There was a black man standing in the driveway beside a white car. His hair was close-cropped, revealing the shape of his blue-black head. From her windowsill, Alice pretended to take a picture of its perfect oval. She had heard the tires coming down the lane, the slam of a car door. And then there were voices downstairs, and the sound of the screen door below her windowsill sill opening and then banging shut. Tad came down the porch steps into the brilliant light of the day carrying Theo's battered suitcase, the duct tape on the corner of it glinting in the sun. A moment later, the screen door squeaked again and Harry appeared on the steps, hoisting Theo's toolbox in his arms.

  Alice frowned and raised her camera to focus on an empty square of sky above her, an uninterrupted royal blue, like the field of the flag.

  Below her windowsill, the door banged again and suddenly Theo ran thudding down the porch steps and across the lawn, hurtling into the man who stood by the white car. The man staggered as Theo hit him, and then, in a gesture whose emotion Alice could read even from the distance of her windowsill, bent over like a puppet released at the waist and put his arms around him. Archie came slowly down the steps, offered his hand to the man who let go of Theo for a moment to shake hands. Then the man reached behind him as if to extract a wallet from his back pocket. Archie held up his hands and took a step away, shaking his head. He was saying something, but Alice couldn't make out what it was. Theo's face remained pressed to the man's stomach.

  Harry reached out and roughed up Theo's hair, but Theo didn't turn around.

  Alice's heart leaped in gratitude toward Harry for that gesture.

  The man bent over and picked up Theo's suitcase. Archie picked up the toolbox. Awkwardly, because Theo was still pressed against him, the man shuffled with Theo so that he could put the suitcase in the trunk. Then he turned and took the toolbox from Archie. They shook hands one more time, and then Theo, like water sliding down the man's shirtfront, slipped into the backseat of the car without ever speaking to Archie or showing his face and sank down below the level of the window. For a long moment the figures on the driveway remained standing there, frozen in position, as if none of them knew what to do next.

  Theo must be lying on the seat, or curled up on the floor mat, Alice thought, straining from her windowsill to see.

  Once she had hidden in Archie's car during a game of hide-and-seek, and she remembered the feeling of making herself small enough to fit on the gritty floor mat, curled up tight with her nose full of the smell of dirt and gravel and engine oil.

  Neither she nor Theo had cried. After Archie had dismissed them from his study two nights ago, they had crawled underneath the porch in the dirt while the sun rose, and they had looked out at the lawn and the sky through the bars of the lattice. Later in the morning, Wally had come outside to find them, and he had made them come inside. Silent with sh
ame, they had stood in the kitchen, hands and faces filthy, while he made them peanut butter sandwiches. Alice had asked if they could take the sandwiches upstairs and Wally had said yes. Sometime in the afternoon, Archie had come upstairs to Alice's room and asked Theo to go with him. Theo had not come back. Wally had brought Alice a mug of tomato soup and some crackers in the evening. She had fallen asleep on the floor under her bed, and when she had woken up the next morning, all of Theo's belongings were gone. She had wanted to go look for him, she had wanted to find him, but she had been afraid to come out of her room. When Wally had come upstairs to try to get her to come down for breakfast, he had said that Theo was still asleep, that Archie had not wanted him in Alice's room anymore.

  “It wasn't your fault, Alice,” Wally had said. “Come here. Come on. You're breaking my heart.”

  But she had shied away from him, shinnying under the bed again, banging her head on the box spring, tears springing to her eyes.

  And now she couldn't even see Theo.

  She knew he was in the car; she could imagine how he was lying with his face pressed against the vinyl into the crack of the seat, smelling all the things that had fallen back there, pennies and matchbooks and pieces of paper and old pencils and French fries.

  Finally the man got into the car and backed up and then turned the car around and headed up the lane.

  Alice leaned from her windowsill.

  Just before the car pulled out of sight, she saw Theo's face emerge against the rear window, staring back at the house. Was he looking at her window? She remembered her flying dreams, when she had launched out into the air, swooping up toward the moon, the hills falling away beneath her, the tops of the trees a soft, dark mass below.

  She leaned from her windowsill toward Theo's disappearing face, and she knew that the air would not hold her, that it was only air, thin and insubstantial, that if she fell she would tumble over and over until she hit the ground.

  THIRTEEN

  THE FIRST SNOW of that winter began toward the end of a bitterly cold day in early November. Alice had gone to school that morning with a headache. When she got off the school bus at the top of the driveway at five that afternoon, she was shivering with a fever. The bus pulled away, leaving her standing alone in the unnatural silence of the snowfall. Heavy, cottony snowflakes sank gently through the violet air. The snow fell so thickly that Alice could not see fifteen feet ahead of her, and in the last light of the day, the lane dropped off into nothingness, a hallucinatory white blur filled with a flickering interior light and a smoky, hissing cold. Head bowed, the snow forming epaulets on her shoulders, Alice set off toward the house.

  When she came through the back door into the kitchen a few minutes later, Elizabeth turned around from the stove.

  “Why you all red in the face?” she said in surprise.

  “I don't feel very well,” Alice said dully. She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs without taking off her coat and let her backpack slide to the floor. In the warmth of the room, the snow melted immediately to form a puddle under her soaked shoes. A cold trickle ran down the back of her neck, and then another over her forehead and into her eye.

  Elizabeth crossed the kitchen and plastered a hand to Alice's forehead.

  Alice leaned back her head and closed her eyes. Elizabeth's hand was wet and heavy; at that moment Alice felt as if her neck wouldn't support the weight of her own head much less Elizabeth's hand, but Elizabeth's touch was comforting, anyway. Helen had often taken Alice in her arms and laid her cheek alongside Alice's, but Helen was still in the nursing home, speechless and ill; when Archie had taken Alice to visit her, she had been changed almost beyond Alice's recognition of her. It seemed that there were not many people to touch or comfort Alice anymore. Her teacher, Mrs. White, absently rubbed Alice's back a little sometimes as she came around the room to look over the students’ shoulders at their work, and occasionally Elizabeth gave Alice one of her hard little squeezes in a way that made Alice think Elizabeth was sorry for her. In the mornings, Archie kissed Alice goodbye with a careful formality, and sometimes with what she recognized as longing, but she did not want to sit in his lap any longer, and, as if sensing that she would rebuff him, he had not invited her.

  Archie had made Alice write to Miss Fitzgerald, a stiff letter of contrition and apology full of formal phrases that had been painfully difficult to compose. Archie had sent her back to rewrite the letter three times, but in the end Alice had not meant any of it, at least not the part in which she had been forced to acknowledge culpability, stupidity, guilt.

  Sorrow, she had felt. The sorrow was deep and black, like water that rose inside her sometimes and took her breath away.

  She had been furious at Archie for making her write that letter.

  “You don't believe me,” she had said to Archie.

  “It had a terrible end, Alice,” Archie said. “Regardless of what you and Theo intended. He got to the end of it and fell.”

  “Not regardless!” Alice had shouted. “Not regardless!”

  “Don't shout,” he had shouted back at her.

  “I want to talk to Theo,” she said, struggling to control her voice. “Give me his phone number.”

  “Goddamn it, Alice.” Archie had put his hands on his head and rubbed his scalp furiously as though something was eating away at him. “Enough. No. You two did enough damage. No.”

  “I don't love you anymore,” Alice said to his back as he left the room.

  “Go upstairs. Get into bed,” Elizabeth said now. “I'll come up in a minute, bring you some Advil.” She left her hand on Alice's forehead for a moment, though, looking down at her. “Poor thing,” she said. “You sick.”

  Upstairs, the hall was cold and dark. Last year, when the boys had gone back to school, Alice, wanting to enliven the house's abandoned spaces, had assigned each of their rooms a particular purpose: she had read books stretched out on her stomach on Wally's bed under his ship wall lamp with the shade shaped like a sail; she had done her homework in Eli's room at his desk beneath the dormer window; she had carried her paints and colored pencils and the box of paper scraps and scissors and glue into the twins’ room so she could work on art projects on the floor in there.

  This year, however, the boys’ rooms had remained dark and undisturbed. Sometimes Alice quietly opened the doors and stared inside, but the rooms had the same remote museum quality as her mother's dressing room. They were like shrines, sad and old and even a little frightening, as if when Alice turned the doorknob something inside hurried to hide, flattening itself up against the wall and camouflaging itself against the pattern of the old wallpaper.

  In her bedroom now, Alice didn't turn on the light. She bent to take off her wet socks. The effort it took to tug them over her heels was absurdly exhausting, and she sat down on the striped chair by her window and gazed out at the snow. Maybe it would snow so much she couldn't go to school tomorrow, she thought. Or maybe she'd be too sick to go. Being out of school and in her dark bedroom, with the quiet, snow-filled night creating between her and the rest of the world a gulf of white silence, she felt a little better, just shivery and small and dull.

  It was a relief to be away from school. For the first few days this past fall she had been an object of intense and wary scrutiny on the part of her classmates; the news of Kenneth's death and Alice's role in it had spread quickly throughout Grange. Once the children's interest in her passed, though, Alice had failed to do anything to help restore herself to public acceptance. She was quiet, as she had always been quiet. She didn't know what people thought, whether they blamed her and Theo, or Kenneth himself, or nobody at all.

  Her class was studying geography in social studies, and Alice liked maps, as she liked math. She appreciated the certainty of those subjects, their unequivocal boundaries. She especially liked coloring in the maps. At home she'd been working on a map of the world on an old sheet spread out on the floor of the dining room. She'd started one and then had to turn the s
heet over and start again once she had figured out how to make a grid with a ruler and a piece of string so that the continents and oceans were more or less to scale. It was absorbing to draw in the rivers and mountain ranges, the seas and chains of little islands, the lakes and deserts. It was the kind of project Theo would have liked, she thought, and sometimes lying on her stomach on the floor and coloring, she tried to pretend he was lying there beside her. When she had the idea of drawing a tiny sea serpent in the Pacific Ocean, she knew that Theo would have liked that detail. Inspired, she had lifted down the atlas from the bookshelf in the living room and looked up information about the countries— climate, principal exports, crops—that would give her more ideas for drawings. She'd drawn apple trees, salmon leaping upriver, bundles of grain, blue and silver snowflakes falling on the Swiss Alps, the French Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Andes. She did not think her illustrations approached Theo's skill, but she found the hours of lying on her stomach on the dining room floor diverting. She couldn't seem to think about anything when she was coloring, and that was a comfort.

  It distressed her that she didn't seem able to concentrate on books. The familiar stories had lost their charm for her; they seemed silly. And sometimes she didn't bother to do her homework, either. When Mrs. White asked her about it, she just said she was sorry.

  “It's all right, Alice,” Mrs. White said kindly. “But I know you can do the work. I'd just like to understand why you're not doing it.”

  Who cares? Alice had thought, looking at the floor. What does it matter, anyway? The future for which she had been preparing herself, in which she would do her homework and get good grades and become a brave and successful person, had become like a quaint idea from a story. People were not what she had imagined them to be—not her father, not O'Brien, not her brothers, who seemed to have abandoned her to the remote wilderness of Archie's care. The world she had loved so passionately from her bedroom windowsill just six months before, the spring morning that had unfolded brilliantly at her feet, now seemed distant and insubstantial. It seemed, in fact, like a place she had gone to once with a terrible and casual indifference, without any recognition of its value, and from which she was now painfully and mysteriously excluded. It was as if she could no longer find the gate or the key and did not know how to get back there. Or, worse, it was as if that place, that region of her past that was her childhood, its magic conveyed by the rich careless offerings of the world's beauty, had disappeared entirely from the map, the roads leading to it rubbed away, a gray blur where it had been once, as if a mountaintop were enveloped in cloud.