The Evolution of Alice

by David Alexander Robertson

  “You may not like it. I don’t. But it is the way it is.”

  He closed the scribbler. Was it the words, or was it how he spoke them? Was it the voice? He couldn’t help but think that, if his grandpa could talk, if he could hear the words, the old man would say something that would make everything okay. They would be like a cool, frail hand resting against his. Why couldn’t they be spoken? God, please. Gideon looked over at the Bic pen and wanted to snap it in half. It wasn’t the same and wouldn’t ever be.

  “Say something wise, Grandpa. Tell me something like you always did,” he said, the tears coming again, and Gideon making no effort to stop them.

  The old man opened his mouth, his eyes suddenly desperate, and let out an indecipherable grunt.

  “Say something! Please!”

  The old man tried again, but then shook his head and looked away, out the window. Gideon, tears soaking his cheeks, picked up the scribbler and threw it against the wall. The pages opened and it fluttered to the floor.

  “Fuck you, then! Fuck you!” he screamed.

  Roxie appeared instantly and stopped at the doorway to find Gideon staring at the scribbler on the ground near the foot of the bed and the old man staring at his grandson.

  “Everything okay in here?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Gideon said without looking up.

  His grandpa nodded.

  “You sure?” she said.

  Gideon looked over to her.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine. Sorry,” he said.

  Roxie took one last look, then left.

  Gideon walked over and picked up the scribbler, then returned to his chair and sat down, placing the scribbler flat against the bed in front of him. He began to straighten it out as though it was a wrinkled shirt and continued the motion as he said, “I’m sorry, Grandpa, I’m just mad, y’know? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

  The old man sighed, and then, almost against his will, reached over and took the scribbler. He picked up the pen and wrote, his eyes deep and intense, his brow scrunched together in thought. It took him a long time. Even in the short time Gideon had been there, the act of writing seemed more difficult by the moment. This was how the disease worked; his grandpa got tired faster, and more easily. The old man passed the scribbler to Gideon.

  “Life’s not fair or unfair, son. Life is life, and that’s all we get,” his grandpa had written.

  The words were getting harder to make out, as though written by a child. Gideon thought about Jayne’s writing as he looked at his grandpa’s. There wasn’t much difference. He read the words over and over again, and then tried to imagine the old man saying them. They were there, like a whisper, but there. But would they always be?

  “I’m going to forget your voice. I want to remember your voice,” he said.

  For the last time, his grandpa reached over and took the scribbler. He wrote as slowly and as carefully as he could, fighting through the exhaustion he must have been feeling, the shaking hands and heavy arms. He needed rest. Gideon took the scribbler from his grandpa when he was finished.

  “The words are my voice. The words are what matter.”

  The passage was read once, and then the scribbler was shut. Gideon looked the thing over, the piss-yellow colouring, the cheap, already frayed edges of paper, and the black, fancy letters that spelled Hilroy. Then he rolled it up and stuffed it into his back pocket. By this time the sun had moved from its place outside the window, and the dream catcher’s shadow now spilled out across his grandpa’s body, the webbed black lines making the white bedding look like a sheet of broken glass. The old man lifted his arm, straightened his hand, and reached out to his grandson. Gideon took his grandpa’s hand and shook it, and, as he did, he remembered something the old man had said. He remembered it clear and crisp, as though his grandpa had spoken the words right then.

  “You always shake hands, Grandson. It’s what gentlemen do. You shake hands to thank somebody, to agree with somebody, to say you’re sorry, to say hello, and, most of all, always, to say goodbye.”

  Gideon didn’t get over to see his grandpa the next day, and couldn’t be blamed for it. His day was busy. He’d spent it over at Alice’s place, playing with the girls for the better part of the morning, and then, later, sandbagging homes, because the water kept rising and rising. But the truth was, he didn’t feel like he could, even though, as hard as it was, he wanted to. It had taken him the entire evening to steady himself after he’d left the hospital, and he hadn’t even felt right the next morning. He’d decided that he needed a break. Just for one day. So, he played with the girls as best he could, and sandbagged as hard as he could, even though, during both activities, his mind was elsewhere, either picturing his grandpa’s face or trying to hear his voice speaking to him, saying the words that were written in the scribbler Gideon had taken with him. Some kind of break, he thought as he arrived home that evening. He fell asleep on his futon watching television with plans to visit the old man in the morning.

  He woke up to the sound of his cell phone ringing, which he answered with his eyes still closed.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Gideon?” Roxie said.

  Gideon’s eyes darted open.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “It’s your grandpa,” she said. “He …”

  “Did he lose something else? Can he not move his arms or something?” he said.

  “Gideon, he died this morning,” she said.

  Gideon sat up and ran his free hand through his hair. He pictured his grandpa’s face, sunken, thin, tired. Would that now be the picture he had of the old man? He tried desperately to picture his grandpa before the illness but failed. He stood up and began to pace back and forth. Roxie didn’t say anything for a little while, perhaps giving him time to process the news. Quiet was familiar. He’d learned to deal with it. In his mind, as he paced back and forth, lost in a world without his grandpa, the man who raised him, he flipped through the old man’s scribbler and recited the words within it. But there weren’t enough.

  “You should come here. You should come to see him,” Roxie said.

  Gideon stopped pacing.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I’ll come by.”

  Gideon got dressed and left his house with his grandpa’s scribbler carefully rolled up and placed in his back pocket. He got into his truck, turned on the engine, reversed out of the driveway, and started his way down the highway. Nothing seemed real. The houses at the side of the highway, the discarded items in the ditch, the waking sun, the rising waters, all felt distant and cloudy. He followed the highway’s yellow dotted line, trusted it to guide him, because he didn’t think he could get there on his own. If the old man were there with him, he would tell Gideon something wise, words that only he could say, and things would be clear, and he would know the way. But his grandpa wouldn’t be there, not ever again. He was gone, and with him, his voice, that soothing baritone. But what about the words? What had he written?

  Gideon stopped his truck suddenly, pulled a U-turn in the middle of the highway, and headed in the opposite direction. He ended up at his grandpa’s place, where there were all the boxes waiting to be moved, and all the things that had yet to be boxed. He would pack them later, just as he had promised. The old man had wanted to know it was done, and it would be. The cutlery, the wood carvings, the bed sheets. But not the scribblers, piled up on the floor in the corner of the room. Gideon gathered them up and placed them on the coffee table in a neat stack, along with the one that had been in his back pocket. He didn’t get over to see his grandpa that day. Instead, he spent his time opening scribbler after scribbler and reading what the old man had written.

  “No, I don’t wish I was younger. If I changed what I’d done, then I wouldn’t have learned what I did.”

  “You want to see if I can’t get two damn buckets of water?”

  “I don’t think heaven’s a bunch of white clouds and string music. I think heaven’s a trapline. It
’s green and brown and clear and simple.”

  “If you come late why do you think you can leave early? Get an alarm clock and leave at the same damn time.”

  And the words were all that mattered. The words were enough.

  TEN

  Later that morning, still hiding in their secret place, the old man and the boy sat down together on a large rock and looked out over the calm waters, across the sky’s reflection, all the way to a small island cozied up against the horizon.

  “Of course, Grandson, your daddy died well before your mom, and even before you were born. You know that. And you know, too, all the things I’ve told you about him over the years. When he was your age, he looked exactly like you. Talked like you, too. Anyway, I think you’re old enough to know an important story about your daddy. You see, that island out there, it wasn’t always called Widow’s Island. It used to be called Bald Head, on account of how the trees only grow by the shoreline, never on the hill in the middle of the land. People and things get named for a reason. Widow’s Island, it has a reason for its name too. Years ago, your mom and dad were out in the middle of the lake on their canoe—they always went canoeing around the area, and oftentimes all the way out to the island—when a storm came. It was a bad one, too. The rain was coming down real hard. Well, they were just about as far out as they were in, so they decided to keep on going to Bald Head because the trees out there, they’re enormous, and they figured they could find some shelter.

  “They got there without much trouble, even though the wind was kicking up something fierce. They were experienced on the water. So, they went and found shelter under the biggest tree they could find. Under that tree, they could hardly feel the storm at all. And you know what they did? They went and fell asleep. I’m not kidding, Grandson. They were out there in the storm, under that tree, sleeping like babies. But all around them the storm got worse, and pretty soon there was thunder and lightning, and one of those bolts of lightning hit the tree they were sleeping under. Your mom, she got thrown almost to the water, like the island was spitting her out. Your dad, well, he took the brunt of that lightning strike.

  “You know how I always told you that your dad died in an accident? Well, that right there was the accident. People’ve died worse, Grandson, but they’ve died better, too, and I know it’s hard to hear. I guess if there was anything good about it, it was that your daddy died instantly. Didn’t suffer, not even for a second. Your mom stayed with him. Said she lay down right beside him so they were face to face, and talked to him all through the night like he was still with her, like he was just sleeping. You know how we go to visit your daddy every now and then, and you sit there and tell him all about what you’ve been up to and how much you miss him? Well, he can hear you, Grandson. I’ll tell you that much. Don’t ever think he can’t. And your daddy heard everything your mom told him that night, too.

  “Well, that’s how Bald Head got renamed Widow’s Island. But you know what? That’s not the end of the story. Pretty soon after that, after your mom was rescued and brought back to the mainland, she found out she was pregnant, and that was a miracle. She and your daddy had been trying to have a baby for years but they were never able to conceive one. Nine months later, out you popped. And Grandson, I know you might be wondering why I’m telling you this, today of all days. I guess I just want you to know that, sometimes, good things come from bad things.”

  RUNNING ON FENCES

  HENRY STUMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS to the first floor, trying to rush but encumbered by a straight leg that made him feel like a pirate. The reason Henry had a straight leg was due to the stolen change in his pocket, otherwise known as his booty. You see, his wife had lowered an embargo on frivolous expenditures, and, unfortunately, Henry’s craving for a grande double chocolate-chip frappuccino fell under the category of frivolity. For him, this simply wouldn’t do, and since he was forbidden to spend his own money on frappuccinos he’d resorted to thieving from his son’s piggybank. He figured he could sneak out of the house without getting caught by his wife (who had superhuman senses) by preventing the change in his pocket from rattling. And he would’ve made it without seeing his wife at all, if not for the mirror by the front door. He stopped there after retrieving his coat and made the mistake of gazing at himself, admiring the hold of the new pomade he’d bought. He was pleased with the results, delighted to find that, even though he’d put the stuff in his hair hours ago, it didn’t need fixing.

  “Henry.”

  “Shit,” he whispered under his breath as Bev appeared from the kitchen.

  “What did you say?” she said.

  “Nothing. What’s up?” he said.

  “What are you getting at the store again?” she said.

  She wasn’t asking him because she’d forgotten, but rather testing him to ensure he’d remembered. If he failed to remember one item on the mental grocery list, he would get a handwritten grocery list. And, if Bev wrote out a list, there would inevitably be 10 to 15 more items on it, and that simply would not do. He’d have to spend more time at the grocery store and wait longer to get his drink.

  “A loaf of bread, milk, and a fruit tray,” he said confidently.

  Bev stood there with her head tilted to one side, one eyebrow slightly raised, her arms crossed in front of her chest. For a moment, Henry became distracted. Her arms were too close to her breasts, perky and supple behind her delicately patterned floral apron. He looked her up and down after that, from her loose ponytail, where a few strands of hair had escaped and seductively fallen over the right side of her face, to her bare feet, which always drove him crazy. He’d had a thing for feet since the fourth grade, when he’d seen Stacey Snowden trace her naked foot with a red crayon. He saw Bev’s foot tapping. She was waiting. He snapped out of it. What had he forgotten? Ah yes, clarification.

  “A nice loaf of bread and homo milk,” he said, which made him laugh. The word homo always made him laugh regardless of context.

  “Okay,” she said, suitably impressed, “but don’t get the bread that you get, the sourdough kind. Nobody likes it but you. Get something delicious, but nothing with cheese in it, and no sourdough.”

  He nodded, leaned forward, and gave her a kiss.

  “And please be on time. I need to start supper by …”

  “Five, I know, hon,” he said.

  He turned away, all the while wondering how a loaf of bread that wasn’t sourdough and didn’t have cheese in it could be delicious at all. By then, he’d stopped worrying about the forbidden change. It was behaving in his pocket and he was sure Bev didn’t suspect anything. And, at that point, if she did hear anything that might arouse suspicion, he would simply to tell her that she’d heard his car keys. He opened the front door and walked outside, feeling devious, brilliant, and happy to be met with a rush of crisp air. Travelling along the breeze, Henry swore he could smell a faint hint of double chocolate chip.

  He made his way up the front walk toward his car. As he opened the gate, he noticed that the boy across the street—Juniper or Journey or some other kind of hippy name—was in the midst of doing what he always did: running along the top of his rickety fence, the top boards perilously shifting from one side to the other, the width of which couldn’t have been more than that of a gymnastics beam. Juniper (or whatever) was as lithe as a gymnast, too. He ran from one end of the fence to the other, hopping over the gate in the middle of his little course without breaking stride. Henry stood there for a moment watching the boy and, like always, did so with a mix of awe and bewilderment. The boy was good, there was no question, but why the hell would he do such a thing, and how could he be so pleased doing it?

  Henry didn’t dwell on it long. After all, there were more important things on his mind. He walked across the boulevard, around the hood of his car, and into the driver’s seat. He drove away from his house untroubled and determined to enjoy the drive just as much as he would his drink, even though the scenery wasn’t all that pretty. It was, after all, spring
, and that meant the snow had melted away and all the garbage it hid—the cigarette butts, the Slurpee cups, the beer cans, the dog shit, the McDonald’s wrappers, and so on—was uncovered. Winter hid the secrets of the city. Spring was confession time.

  He hadn’t gone far when the phone rang. Before looking at the call display, he knew it was Bev. She’d forgotten something. The benefit of her remembering now as opposed to before he left, however, was that she couldn’t write down a list for him. So, he answered the phone happily.

  “Hey there,” he said as he looked into the rear-view mirror to check his hair, which in itself was a useless exercise, done more by rote than by necessity; the current length of his hair coupled with the super-powered pomade he’d used made any follicle of hair moving even a fraction an impossibility.

  “I have something to add,” she said. “Are you going to remember?”

  “I can remember five things, yes,” he said.

  “Can you get some pineapple, please?” she said.

  “Aren’t I already getting a fruit tray?” he said.

  “I like to have my own pineapple,” she said.

  “Yeah, but the fruit tray comes with a compartment for pineapple, and me and the boy won’t eat it. You can have it.”

  “Would you mind? Call it a quirk, but it’s like you and your frappuccino drinks, only my quirk doesn’t cost five dollars.”

  “Actually, they pretty much do cost five dollars,” he said.

  Henry could almost hear Bev roll her eyes.

  “Pretty please?” she said.

  “Fine. Okay,” he said.

  He wanted to ask why he couldn’t get a frappuccino if she was getting pineapple but decided against it. He never really won an argument, and he was getting a drink anyway, albeit through underhanded means.

  “So,” she said, “what are you getting?”

  “What I said before plus pineapple,” he said.