The Evolution of Alice

by David Alexander Robertson

  TWELVE

  Alice still remembered the first time she’d been to the city. She was young, and her mother had taken her to Zellers. It was April and the store was busy as people prepared for Easter—shoppers at checkouts had carts full of chocolate bunnies with yellow and blue eyes and cheap pastel-coloured wicker Easter baskets filled with green plastic grass. Alice was entranced by all the stuff at the department store. She followed her mother around the store touching bikes, dolls, clothes, toys, and a million other things. She asked her mother to buy everything she touched, but each time her mother said no.

  “We’re not here to buy junk,” her mother said. “We can’t afford it.”

  “Everybody else is buying fun stuff!” Alice said.

  At the checkout, her mother placed boring items on the conveyer belt and, one by one, they rolled up to the cashier—toilet paper and canned food and boxed food and toothpaste. Then a Cadbury cream egg, in its alluring purple and red shiny wrapping, caught Alice’s eye. She wanted it so badly, but her mother would never buy it for her. She only bought cheap things. So Alice shoved it into her pocket and planned to eat it in the back seat on the way home. Upon leaving the store, Alice followed her mother through the parking lot and to their car but was stopped before she could climb into the back seat.

  “What’s that in your pocket?” her mother said.

  “Nothing,” Alice said.

  She tried to hide the bulge by shoving her hand into her pocket, but it was too late. Her mother pushed Alice’s hand out of the way, reached into the pocket, and pulled out the egg. She looked like she could’ve crushed it in her hand she was so mad, but instead gave Alice a sharp slap on the bum.

  “I’ve never been more disappointed in you, Alice,” her mother said.

  “I’m sorry!” Alice said through tears.

  Her mother grabbed Alice by the arm, dragged her back inside the department store, and right to the front of the busy checkout line they’d just left, much to the displeasure of impatient Easter shoppers. Her mother made Alice hand the cashier the Cadbury cream egg.

  “I took this. I’m sorry,” Alice said.

  “What a shock,” the cashier said as he took the egg with an exaggerated sigh.

  Alice noticed her mother’s jaws were clenched as she rummaged through her change purse and handed the cashier money.

  “Well, at least you had the good sense to bring it back. Most of you only return stuff when you’re caught,” he said, then turned to Alice and handed her the egg.

  “Here you go, kid. Enjoy.”

  The Cadbury cream egg was resting in her palm, glittering in the bright store lights. She looked at her mom, then the cashier, and finally handed the egg back.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  JUMPER

  IN HER BASEMENT APARTMENT, snuggled between Kathy and Jayne, Alice used the light of her cell phone to study the worn photograph of her and her girls. Grace was on the far left of the line, smiling so hard that her eyes nearly disappeared, taken over as they were by her cheeks. Next to Grace, Jayne, leaning forward on her elbows, her fingers locked together tightly, her beautiful long black hair tossed up in the air, whipping around like a flag, and a cute little half smile that made it look like she was winking at the camera. Kathy was next in the line, always slightly understated, always seeming a bit older than her years, her eyes kind of slanted down toward the sides of her face like sideways teardrops, her closed-mouthed smile creating subtle dimples on each cheek, the right cheek carrying a deeper dimple than the left, and her chin resting on her right fist. Then there was Alice, her black hair pushed back behind her ears, her eyes looking directly into the camera, directly at the photographer, her then-boyfriend Ryan.

  Alice turned the phone’s camera on so that she could see herself, and moved the phone beside the photograph so there was a real-time image of her face added to the family portrait. She looked back and forth, from Alice then to Alice now, and wished she’d known then what she knew now. The pain then seemed a pittance. She would gladly trade it for what she felt currently. Give me the beatings, she thought. Give me the bruises and the clothing to cover them up. Give me the shame and give me the meekness. Give me all of it, she thought, just give me Grace. Please, God, just give me Grace. She looked at her eyes in the photograph, the deception in them.

  “Smile, Alice,” Ryan had said. “Just try to smile.”

  She tried. She really did. She looked at her girls to elicit a smile. Tried to ignore Ryan crouching behind the camera. But he was right there.

  “Don’t ruin the picture,” he said.

  She managed to push the corners of her mouth upward. She was afraid if she didn’t he would make her pay for it later. She saw his knuckles on either side of the camera. She could almost feel them against her jaw, her stomach, her arms.

  “Get your hair out of the way. It’s covering your face,” he said.

  With shaking fingers, she did. She pushed her hair behind her ears. Looked at her girls again. She didn’t want them dealing with her getting beaten again, running off to the bathroom, locking themselves inside until he left to cool off.

  “Look at the camera. Look at me, damn it,” he said.

  She did. She looked through the lens, right at him.

  “Fine. That’s fine,” he said with the same tone he used so often, stark and disappointed, the one that made her know she was going to get it later. She’d ruined it. She’d ruined it again. If she could go back to that moment, she would have smiled so big and so hard.

  Alice re-examined the photograph by the light of her cell phone. She looked to the field behind them that stretched far into the horizon, where a line of trees in the distance looked like a strip of Velcro holding up a perfect blue felt sky; to the tire swing just visible on the right side of the picture that allowed her to reach into the heavens and watch the girls play amidst the long grass; to Grace, who would be young forever, forever in the field, filled with an immeasurable joy; then at Kathy and Jayne, who were still with her, who would age, who would find joy, who would suffer, who would laugh, who would cry. In that moment, Alice wondered where she would want those things to happen. In the city everything was close but felt as far away as the tree line on the horizon behind her trailer. It was loud and cold and frightening. She thought back on her time there, and on how it had gone so terribly wrong.

  Days earlier she had left the second-floor bathroom on her way to the basement, where she and the girls had been staying. Alice had spent so much time in the claw-foot tub since moving to the city that she might as well have had permanent prune hands and toes. It was the only place in the entire city, in that small bathroom with cracked powder-blue walls and scratched linoleum flooring, that she was able to trick her body into feeling relaxed. When she had navigated her way down the stairs, carefully avoiding the protruding staples on the last few steps where the paper-thin carpet was coming up, she walked past the laundry room and into her makeshift apartment.

  Krista had set up a twin-sized mattress in the middle of the room, had moved her son’s hockey equipment into the laundry room to make the space. The smell of sweaty hockey equipment still hung in the air, though, even weeks after it had been removed. Scented candles just made it seem like the equipment was burning. There was a bathroom down there, but the water was usually yellow and the showerhead was broken and sprayed water all over the place. Alice and the girls didn’t use it much, except to pee in the middle of the night. Alice could never tell if the girls had flushed, on account of the basement water’s colour. And the fluorescent bulbs were dim, and the soul-sucking flickering light gave Alice a constant headache. Her cousin had set up a small television set near the foot of the bed, and that’s often where the girls were. That’s where they were when Alice entered the room. They looked like pieces of furniture in that depressing basement apartment. Their eyes were vacantly taking in an episode of Power Rangers for whatever damn reason. That wasn’t a typical show for them. Alice felt her heart si
nk.

  “Darlings,” she said, “do you want to go play outside?”

  She surprised herself when she said that. The girls hadn’t been outside for several days by this point. The last time they’d been outside, out in front of the house, Alice had given them clear instructions on where they could go: no farther than the white picket fence to the right, four houses down, and the fire hydrant to the left, three houses down. Letting them go out there at all was an enormous step Alice had taken. She wasn’t comfortable letting them play outside back home on the rez, where cars passed by infrequently. In the city, outside their new home, speed bumps had been created by the city due to the frequent, fast, and oblivious traffic. Alice had been watching them from the front step, and, when Jayne wandered onto the boulevard from the sidewalk, that was that. The girls were called over and sent down to the basement. Having them watch television was far safer than allowing them near a busy street.

  Jayne jumped up as though she’d received an electrical shock. She raced past Alice and up the stairs. Kathy didn’t get up at first. She looked up to her mother inquisitively.

  “Really?” she said.

  Alice nodded. “Yes, really.”

  Kathy stood up, and Alice walked with her up the stairs, where Jayne was waiting by the side door.

  “Can we go out front?” Jayne said.

  She had a bigger smile on her face than Alice had ever seen.

  “No,” Alice said. “You can play in the back yard.”

  “But it’s all muddy back there. There’s no grass,” Kathy said.

  “There’s hardly any grass back home either,” Alice said.

  “There’s only grass back home in the field,” Kathy said.

  “Please, Mommy?” Jayne said.

  “There’s no grass in the driveway back home, and you girls like playing there just fine,” Alice said.

  Kathy gave up. She took Jayne’s hand as Alice opened the door. The girls walked outside.

  “Come on, Jayne, it’s better than nothing,” Kathy said.

  Alice followed behind her girls as they walked to the back yard, right to the middle, and looked around as though lost. Alice surveyed the area. She hadn’t been out there much. Neither had the girls. But Kathy was right. It was almost all dirt back there. Even the box garden near the back of the yard sat unattended, full not with vegetables or plants but rather with bad soil and weeds. She watched Jayne race over to one of the rare clumps of grass and playfully flick at the blades. Kathy aimlessly wandered around the yard as Jayne went from clump of grass to clump of grass. Eventually, Jayne had visited all the clumps and began to wander around with Kathy. The two of them held hands and simply walked from one end to the other. Alice watched all of this, and she couldn’t help but notice how their eyes, their shoulders, began to look the same as when she had found them in front of the television set.

  “There are toys in the garage, I think,” Alice called out.

  The girls ignored her. They walked over to the box garden and sat on its edge. Jayne’s exuberance was gone. They weakly held hands and stared at the dirt.

  “Why aren’t you girls playing?” Alice said.

  “There’s nothing to do,” Kathy said.

  “You didn’t look in the garage,” Alice said.

  Kathy shook her head. “I’ve been in there before, Mom. There are sand toys in there. There is dirt out here.”

  “Well, why don’t you play hide-and-seek then?” Alice said.

  Alice saw Jayne start to get up, but Kathy squeezed Jayne’s hand and held her back.

  “There’s nowhere to hide, Mom,” Kathy said.

  Alice looked around at the back yard. Kathy was right again. There was nowhere to hide. She sighed.

  “Okay, you can go out front,” Alice said.

  Neither girl got up.

  “That’s okay,” Kathy said.

  Alice walked over to her girls. She sat down at the edge of the box garden and put her arm around both of them. Back home the girls had shown signs of missing their little sister, whether they realized it or not. They hadn’t played as hard or as frequently, hadn’t laughed as often, hadn’t seemed to enjoy things like they used to. In the city, however, they seemed to get more depressed and lonely with each passing day. And it wasn’t just that Grace wasn’t there. Gideon wasn’t either. The only times when the girls seemed normal were the times they’d spent with him. Alice had realized this earlier. She’d even texted him recently, hoping that he’d have the time to visit her. He hadn’t texted her back. She imagined how he must have felt when he came by her house to find they were gone. She didn’t blame him for not texting her. She wouldn’t have either.

  She often thought back to something Gideon had said just weeks after Grace died, when she had floated the idea, for the first time, of leaving the rez, even though back then it was something she’d said out of emotion, not intent. “You know,” he’d said, “my grandpa always says that you can’t run away from memories and emotions and shit. They’re faster than you could ever be.” She’d told him to fuck off at the time, but now that she’d left, now that she’d been gone for a few weeks, she saw that he’d been right. The city had only made things worse. Grace was everywhere, even though she was nowhere. She’d followed them there, to the dingy and depressing apartment, to the rush of it all, to the crushing closeness. The memories had come, small ones and big ones, all of them suffocating, and just as frequently as back home. So, going to the city was no escape. Where was there an escape? When would she be free from the pain? She squeezed her daughters hard, leaned over and kissed them on their foreheads.

  “I love you both so much,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” Kathy said.

  “I love you, Mommy,” Jayne said.

  Alice stood up.

  “You can play out here for as long as you want, okay?” Alice said.

  “Where are you going?” Kathy said.

  “Just for a walk,” Alice said.

  She made her way to the side of the house and then turned around. She took another, long look at her girls. They were beautiful, they really were. Everything good about her was in them.

  She didn’t have any real destination. She ambled through the alleyways and avenues of the city in a vain attempt to get lost from everything, from Grace, from herself. Walks in the city weren’t the same as walks on the rez—that much was clear and unsurprising. It was so loud in the city, deafening really, and her eyes rested not against the vastness of the rez and the quiet of its seclusion, but rather against the concrete and steel of the city, cold and austere. Eventually she arrived at a bridge that arched over a railway yard and made her way up, at times travelling faster than the crowd of cars to her left because traffic was backed up considerably.

  At the top of the bridge she was hit with a gust of wind and stopped to feel the air push against her body. When the breeze had died down, she looked out across the railway yard, up to the steel arches that cut the daytime sky into pieces, and for a moment she was not lost, but rather felt calm move through her body. The bitter stench of the city washed away along with its distractions. Gone was the rush of it all, the busyness. Alice looked down, where the train cars looked like coffins, the railway tracks like a confused roadmap, and in that view she was sure she’d found her destination.

  She turned away for a moment and scanned the annoyed and angry faces in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge, the fists punching steering wheels, the mouths lipping profanities, the scrunched foreheads, and then her eyes met with a man’s. She found her gaze frozen there, locked to him, and it was as if his gaze was locked to hers as well. It seemed to her that he intended to say something. A ridiculous idea came to her. Perhaps this man was the angel she’d been looking for, she’d been thinking about, ever since Grace’s death. She made a bargain. If he said something to her, she wouldn’t jump. She would consider his words a sign that there was another way to escape Grace’s memory.

  He opened his lips, and s
he watched as they showed the man’s hesitancy, the back and forth that was going on in his mind. They opened then shut, opened then shut. Then, traffic began to lurch forward, and the man moved forward with it. She listened for his words, waited, hoped for them to come to her, above the murmuring engines, above the bleating horns, above all the frenzied noise of rush hour in the city, but he didn’t say anything. She watched as his car crested the hill and descended into another part of the city, away from her.

  So be it.

  She sighed deeply, then looked skyward. She might have mouthed a prayer, offering words to splash against the overhead grey canvas but didn’t want to give the satisfaction, not to God, and certainly not to a supposed angel. So, empty-minded, she turned back toward the side of the bridge, walked forward slowly, and lifted herself up onto the ledge. There, she stood as straight as could be, certain she had never been quite as high. She stretched her arms out as wide as they could go and began to sway back and forth like the long grass in the field behind her trailer. Jump, please jump, she thought, but her legs wouldn’t move. She tilted her head backwards, stared into the sky. Please, you want this. Don’t you want this? She heard cars stop behind her, doors open then shut, footsteps gathering around the place she stood.

  “Come on, lady.”

  “Get down from there.”

  “Talk to me. I’m right here.”

  She looked around. There were four or five people just below her, looking up to her, pleading to her, reaching for her. There were four or five people, but not the man she had seen, and no angel. But why did she keep thinking about it? Was that why she had come? Not to end her life, as she thought, but rather to test something her girls had told her? Was she still so desperate to believe it? She turned away from the small crowd that had gathered, shaking her head, back to the sky, and stood up there for a long time, lost in thought. Then, eventually, she had one final thought: the angel will come, or I will go to my Grace. Either way, there was peace.