She had the girls get dressed and followed them out to the back yard, where they went off to play, and she climbed up onto her tire and began to swing as high as she could. That’s when I came by. I always checked the back yard first, because more often than not, that’s exactly where they were. I saw the girls way out in the field, playing tag or hide-and-seek or some game like that, and walked up to Alice, and we exchanged greetings bit by bit each time she swung by me. That’s how I found out about what happened that morning, in bits and pieces, each time she passed by.
“You believe in God, Gideon?”
“Why?”
Then she’d be gone, up in the air. On her way down, there was another exchange.
“My girls saw an angel, you know.”
“What? When?”
Up, then down.
“When Ryan was beating on me.”
“How?”
Up again, then back down, and all I pretty much did was recite “when, what, why, and how” as she said all she wanted to say.
It was a long conversation to have that way, but as I heard more and more I wasn’t about to ask her to come down from the tire swing. Up there, she was safe, and the girls were safe and that was that. After she told me everything, she stopped pumping her legs, and after a few minutes her swinging settled into a light rocking. Made our visit a lot easier. I saw her struggling with it a bit, her brain that is. So I decided to say something all Elder-like to her. I pointed to an old dirt road just about 20 yards to our right. It was pretty much grown over with grass, you could hardly see it, but it was still a road. It went right through the field, right up to the distant tree line, and got tinier and tinier on its way.
“You know, my grandpa used to tell me that all the roads around here just lead us right back home,” I said.
I wasn’t even sure what the connection was, and after I’d said it I kind of felt dumb about it. I tried to figure what I was getting at, for Alice and for me, so I added, “But, I don’t know, maybe he was wrong, maybe roads take us to where we’re s’posed to be.”
Alice crunched her eyebrows up and looked at me funny. “Are we talking about real roads, or pretend ones? Like … figurative roads?” she said.
She knew those big words from all the reading she did. Lots of books, she read. I didn’t read much, me, but I knew that word from my grandpa, so I said, “Figurative ones. Like, the paths we take in life.”
“I don’t know. I think your grandpa was right.” She paused, then added, “Anyway, just because they saw a man doesn’t mean they weren’t imagining it. You know? They don’t have to lie about that if they thought they saw somebody. You ever had an imaginary friend?”
“Not one that locked me in a bathroom away from that jerk-off boyfriend of yours,” I said. I meant it, too. I knew her ex, and he was a piece of work. The day he got hauled away was a good day, and I wasn’t the only one who thought that. “But, if they’ve got an angel lookin’ over their shoulders, it’s not anything to worry about, is it?”
“I guess not,” she said.
We stood there in silence for a few minutes. She was looking out across the field at her girls, watching as their heads bounced in and out of view from the long grass. But I could tell her mind was somewhere else, and I didn’t have any other brilliant things to say to make things better.
“I’m glad my mom is dead, in a way. At least today I am,” she said, “because she’d have my ass in church in a second.”
“Well, maybe that isn’t such a bad idea, you know.”
She shook her head and patted the tire like it was a faithful ol’ dog.
“I got my church right here,” she said.
I wasn’t about to argue with her about that. Even gave the tire a pat, too. I left her there to go and do my own things. She invited me over that night and I promised I’d try to make it back to see her. I didn’t see her until the morning, though. I’d like to tell you it was for something important, that I was doing something meaningful and just couldn’t go, but the truth is I fell asleep on the couch watching one of them Law and Order shows. I’ll probably always think about how I screwed up like that. I remember before I fell asleep I was thinking about that old road and what I was trying to say to Alice. I guess I was just saying she shoulda been happy right where she was, because those girls, they were beautiful little things and they loved their mommy so much. She felt bad for a long time after her ex was taken away because she’d kept him around too long, but she did her best, I think. It’s hard letting go of people you love, whether they deserve your love or not. It doesn’t matter what I was trying to say anyway. All that mattered is I wasn’t at Alice’s place and I damn well shoulda been.
Like I said, the next morning I went to check up on how she was doing, and to have a bite of that breakfast she always made for the girls. If I was being honest with you, and I ain’t been nothing but honest so far, I’d tell you that I loved being there at the kitchen table eating bacon and eggs just as much as the girls did. My house, well, there wasn’t ever much to do there. It never felt like a home, just somewhere I put my head down at night. Alice’s house, with her girls and the comfort I felt there, it was more like a home to me. I could almost smell those strips of bacon cooking on the stove before I could even see her place. As I approached her house, though, I could see something was wrong, and those smells, well, they weren’t ever going to mean the same thing to me.
There were cars in her driveway, and they weren’t rez cars, either. There was a cop car and an ambulance, and when I saw that my stomach dropped. Felt like pulling over and puking right on the side of the road. As I got closer, I could see a white sheet on the ground and a mound of something underneath it that looked like a pile of snow. My heart began to beat out of my chest. There were people gathered around out front of Alice’s door. I parked on the highway, just beside her driveway, and ran up to the house. When Alice saw me, she fell right into my arms, sobbing and wailing like I never saw her do before. She pulled me right down to the ground with her, and I kind of leaned up against the trailer and cradled her in my arms like a baby. Her body shook and she got my t-shirt all wet with her tears. The whole time I couldn’t stop staring at the sheet, guessing at its size and asking myself who could be underneath it. There were two local constables there—I knew both of them, Ernie mostly, because he and my grandpa were pretty good friends—and some paramedics. All of them just looked down at us all serious and sad, and I kept myself from asking what happened for the longest time. I guess not hearing it from anybody made whatever happened not real, like if I stayed on the ground forever I could just close my eyes and get stuck right there in time.
“She’s gone, she’s gone,” Alice said.
Her words were muffled because her face was right up against my shirt, but I heard them well enough.
“Who’s gone?” I said, even though I was scared about the answer.
She didn’t say anything more, just the same two words over and over again, each time getting quieter and quieter, until those words were barely a whisper. About then, scared or not, I felt like I’d had enough and needed to know for my own sanity, because my brain was racing all over the place. For the first time, I looked away from the mound, the white sheet, and met eyes with Ernie. I asked him without saying a word, just by motioning with my eyes to the sheet. I swear that sheet is always going to haunt me, just like a ghost. He told me all quiet, as though if he said it soft enough Alice wouldn’t hear it, relive it, all over again. I don’t think it mattered, though. I think by that time Alice had shut herself off from the world. She was whimpering into my shirt in short little gasps of air, like kids do when they can’t shut off the tears. Ernie said that, the night before, Alice fell asleep on the couch sometime after supper. At some point, little Grace crawled out of bed and went out into the driveway for some reason, maybe to try and dunk the big ball into the hoop. A car pulled into the driveway and hit her, ran right over her. Maybe its headlights weren’t working. Maybe th
e driver wasn’t paying attention. Whatever the case, as soon as Grace was hit, the car peeled away quick and left Grace lying in the driveway. Still alive. Struggling to breathe, maybe trying to move, trying to get home, where she was safe no matter what. I hate thinking of her like that. Dying alone, dying scared, crying out for somebody to come help her, crying for her mommy. God damn it. The paramedics said she suffered for a long time until she died early in the morning.
If the car had stopped and let somebody know, Grace probably could’ve been saved. Instead, she was gone, just like Alice said; the baby, the pure one who would never remember the violence the rest of ‘em might never forget. Ernie said he didn’t know who could’ve done something like that, but he wouldn’t rest until he figured it out. I trusted him about that. Ernie was a good man and he never lied to me about nothing. To be honest, thinking about who’d done it wasn’t really on my mind at that point. I just kept thinking about poor little Grace. Always felt like I was really her uncle, not just a pretend one. Always felt like she was my little girl. I rested my eyes on the white sheet one last time before they took her away. I imagined the sheet was bundled up there on top of her bed, that she was snuggled underneath it, warm and safe. Then, I looked away and buried my face into Alice’s hair to blind myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
After the paramedics left with Grace’s body, I helped Alice to her bedroom and tucked her tight into her bed. She fell asleep instantly. That’s the thing about tragedy and sadness: it’s like running a marathon—sucks the life right out of you. By that time she had nothing left, and her body just turned off. I knelt down and sat at her bedside for a little while, watching her sleep, hoping she would have a dreamless sleep, because dreams were sure to turn to nightmares. Even dreams about Grace would, because dreams were tricky. When you’re in them sometimes you think they’re real. When you wake up, you realize they weren’t. I didn’t want her to think Grace was still there. Waking up to find she wasn’t would’ve been too much hurt for Alice. There was just us and the silence and that was nice, even during all the hurt. Sometimes pain needed a quiet place to be, to spread out and get less sharp, I guess. I ended up staying with Alice ‘til the afternoon, thankful for her eagle towel, because it left her room pretty close to pitch black, and she slept for a long time.
Now, the other girls, Kathy and Jayne, they’d been taken away from the chaos by Alice’s sister, Olive. She lived just across the way. But by the time I left Alice’s room and went to look out the living-room window, the girls were back, playing way out in the field as though they were trying to get away from it all. Olive was standing at the swing set watching them. The girls didn’t look any different from a distance. They were still bobbing their heads up and down, playing tag or hide-and-seek. Maybe they were pretending Grace was just hiding somewhere in the tall grass, they could never find her anyway. Everybody deals with tragedy in different ways, whether they realize it or not. Kids do too. Olive, she was standing there and holding herself steady with one hand on the swing set, her shoulders slumped. Every once in a while I saw her body kind of shudder a bit, holding back tears I guess. But stopping tears was like trying to catch rain. They were going to come; you just never knew when they would.
I hadn’t cried yet, me. I wanted to, though, real bad, now that Alice was sleeping and I was alone in her trailer. I even tried to find ways to make myself cry, because I had lots of tears for little Grace. I walked down the hallway and went into the girls’ bedroom. On the dresser by Grace’s bed there was a framed photograph of Grace, Jayne, Kathy, and Alice—in that order—crouched down behind the house. I recognized the field. I scanned their faces, especially Grace’s, and noticed how much they all looked like Alice. Their eyes, their hair, their mouths, their skin colour, everything was just like her. Seeing each of those girls’ faces was like looking at Alice when she was young: Alice at ten, Alice at five, Alice at two. It was like one of those evolutionary charts at school. Those girls, they were going to be pretty, just like Alice. They’d have soft cheeks, big brown eyes, beautiful black flowing hair, thin gentle lips, and perfect olive skin. Grace, she would’ve been so pretty, a real princess.
I stared right at her face, right into her eyes, and knew that she’d be stuck just like she was right there in the picture, forever a girl, forever innocent. And that made me feel a bit better, because we all get damaged in one way or another. Grace, she wouldn’t. Crouched there beside her sisters and her mom, her mouth stretching wide as it could get, smiling as big as I ever saw it, that’s how Grace would be remembered, how she’d always be. I put the photograph down and looked down at Grace’s bed. Her sheets were bunched up in a mound, just how she left them last night before she went outside to do whatever she was doing. My eyes flashed to the driveway, to the sheet formed around her tiny frame, and that bit of good feeling I had went away fast. I felt like my chest was on fire. I rushed out of the house, down the driveway, and back into my car. I rolled down the window and peeled right out of there.
Best thing I could think about doin’ was driving as far away from there as I could get, like doin’ that could get me farther away from the memories and emotions. So I drove somewhere big and flat and wide open, where I could see the horizon, where the road kept going and going until it disappeared right into the end of the world. Then I started to look for the northern lights, to see if I could see what Alice saw when she was younger. I wanted to know that Grace went somewhere good after all the pain she went through. But I didn’t see shit. If there was a God and He did have little Grace, I guess He wasn’t about to tell me about it. Nah, he was set on making me work for that kind of faith. Grandpa says nothing is worth it if you don’t have to work for it and I guess he was right about that. People always talk about going to a better place, and I had to find a way to be okay with that. Besides, anywhere had to be a better place than where she was, dyin’ like she did. I looked up at the sky. Without the northern lights it was all black and endless, and I figured at worst Grace was seeing something just like I was, and that wasn’t too bad, neither.
The next evening, I found myself back at Alice’s. I parked along the highway. Didn’t think I’d ever be able to drive right up to her house again. When I arrived, the sun was well into setting, and there were warm colours everywhere, like autumn, and it was like all those orange and red hues everywhere were trying to flush out the cold death left on everybody, on everything. I walked up to the house, and then around back just like I’d always done, and was surprised to find Alice swinging on her tire swing, going as high as I ever seen her. The girls were out in the field, their heads dipping up and down in the long grass like buoys on a lake. I walked over to the tree and didn’t say a word, just stood there and watched Alice swing until she was ready to stop. I followed her with my eyes so she didn’t seem like such a blur, and when her face became clear I could see her cheeks were soaked with tears and sweat. She was pumping her legs hard, and the tire swing, well, it was getting up so high that I got worried Alice was going to fall outta there. Each time she got up to the highest point, the rope would go slack for a second, and I could just picture her falling to the ground, but then the rope snapped tight again and she came racing back towards me, and each time I breathed a sigh of relief.
When she came to rest, I guess I waited for her to say something because the words weren’t coming to me. I wasn’t sure what I’d say other than sorry a million times over. What do you say to someone when their child dies? Especially when somebody could’ve done something about it. Alice could’ve stayed awake. I could’ve stayed awake too, shown up like I said I was going to. Best I could do now, though, was put my hand on her shoulder and let her say whatever she wanted to, whenever she wanted to. It took her a long time. She just kept staring out into the field, watching her daughters like she always did, from time to time searching as though Grace might just pop into view. When somebody dies, you keep thinking you’re going to see ‘em, like they’ll just walk right into t
he room like they always had. But Grace’s head wasn’t poppin’ out of nowhere, and eventually one little tear came falling out of Alice’s eye. She wiped it away and took a deep breath, then she turned to me, and her eyes almost broke my heart right there.
“Why didn’t he save her?” she said.
And then more tears joined the one little one, and she began to sob all over again, keeling over in the tire swing, causing it to rock a bit back and forth as though it knew to try and comfort her. She meant the angel of course, the one that had brought her kids to the bathroom and locked the door to get them away from Ryan, to protect them. It was a fair question. The strange man who came before wasn’t there in the driveway that night, didn’t bother to take Grace’s hand and lead her out of the path of the car that hit her. For whatever reason, he let her get run over, and there didn’t seem to be any good explanation for it. But maybe people weren’t supposed to understand things like that. I wanted to say something comforting to her, but anything I could think of was going to make her sadder, or more hurt. “She’ll live on inside you.” “Your little angel’s with all the other angels now.” Those would’ve been bullshit words to say.
“You’ll see her again,” I said eventually, because with the talk recently about the angel her girls saw, and what Alice saw as a teenager, it seemed like there could’ve been something out there, even though it had just screwed up pretty royally. (I say could’ve been because I still wasn’t sure myself. To me, you never really know about something unless you put your own eyes on it). She motioned out toward the field and shook her head. She looked defeated, empty.
The Evolution of Alice Page 3
