Alice At Heart (11 page)

Randolphs did not have psychic experiences or melodramatic spiritual epiphanies. They were staunch Protestants, raising each new generation to a stiff-upper-lip standard of worshipful decorum. Religious experiences ought to be practical, socially responsible, and good for business. Telepathic hallucinations were looked down upon.

Griffin scrubbed a shaking hand over his black hair and stared out the window, searching. He wanted to find Alice Riley standing in his sandy yard.
No such luck.
He dragged an armchair and ottoman to the window and, gasping for breath, folded his tall, pained body into the seat, then stationed his gaze out the window.

I suffered some kind of neurological brain damage during the explosion. That’s what’s causing these phantom effects
. After all, one of his injuries had been a severe concussion.

But he knew no recent injury explained all the years of haunted dreams, dreams in which Lilith Bonavendier and her sisters took him into their watery arms but would not save his parents. Imaginary conversations and full-body vibrations were alarming new choruses of an old, tormenting song. He poured bourbon into a pewter mug, swallowed a pill to coat the shaky state of his sanity with chemical reassurance, then feverishly returned his gaze out the window, watching the road. Proof of reality had better, by God, arrive soon.

Come on, Alice. Prove there aren’t any mysteries of the deep inside either one of us
.

10

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

—T.S. Eliot

As soon as I finished telling the curious police my version of events—dodging questions from a reporter for the
Macon Telegraph
, too—I packed and left the motel, pulling my boxes by makeshift handles of braided duct tape. I wouldn’t risk a crowd of strangers coming to examine me like a specimen in a zoo. I wouldn’t wait to see them remember my name in the media. Never again.

Maria and her entire family saw me attempting to drag my belongings down a back street and rushed after me. I halted and began backing away. But Maria smiled. “Where are you going, dear friend?” she begged in Spanish.

“To the bus station. I’ve decided to travel on to my relatives’ home.” If I could just get within walking distance of the coast, I would find my way to Bellemeade and then to Sainte’s Point, and I would never set foot on the continent again, never risk being seen as a monster
or
a hero again.

“Oh, no,” Maria protested. “You saved my life. We will drive you wherever you want to go.”

I stared at her. Before I could say another word, her brothers—men from high deserts—began loading my boxes into a car. These people knew how to seek water. I would be in Bellemeade within a few hours, and then, Sainte’s Point. Maybe I’d be better off out on a barrier island with three half-sisters who made me feel ordinary by comparison. Relief weakened my restraint. I pushed the strange events of the day from my mind.

Please, leave me alone,
I said to the unknown man.

Once more he didn’t answer. Or didn’t exist. Or was lurking in some recess of my life, down the road somewhere. Afraid of his silences and my own, I left one stranger and hurried into the car of another stranger’s family.

I had taken a step forward. I was on my way to the sea and the Bonavendiers.

And to him?

Out on the island,
Lilith stood like a statue atop a wide, white-marble dais that had been carried to the New World in the hold of an Italian frigate. The frigate now lay in the waters off Sainte’s Pointe, and the dais, a stunning work with gentle tendrils of vining roses carved around its circumference, sat grandly on the wooded banks on the island’s bayside. A massive maritime oak dipped its limbs around it and wept in mossy tendrils on its surface. The shadow of the nearby lighthouse fell across the oak and the fantastic marble dais at certain hours of day, marking the passage of forgiving time.

Lilith shielded her eyes and gazed across the bay to the southwest, just making out the sand dunes and turreted roofline of Randolph Cottage, sitting like a separate world from Bellemeade. The cool wind melted a flowing white top to her body in the breeze, and a long skirt of sheer silks swayed around her bare legs and feet. She moved with the wind and she listened.

Something had stirred inside Griffin, some part of Undiline’s heritage that vibrated like the lightest touch on a symphonic chord. And something had happened inside Alice because of him. Lilith pressed a hand to her chest and bowed her head. They were both safe, for now. She held out her arms to the water with grateful joy, knelt down for a moment and pressed a kissed fingertip to the dais, then went to call her sisters and prepare for Alice’s arrival.

Alice Bonavendier—not Alice Riley—was finally coming home.

Late afternoon. Hours on the road.
My body ached. I was terrified. I left Maria and her family in Bellemeade, lying to them, saying I had arranged for relatives to meet me and that I would wait alone.

“It will be dark in only two hours,” Maria protested.

I almost laughed. “I’m not afraid of the dark.” She sighed. Her brothers carried my boxes to the veranda of a charming bay front inn called WaterLilies. I thanked Maria and she hugged me.

“You have a special power,” she said. “May you find happiness and bring it to others.”

“I’ll be looking,” I answered, my eyes already shifting helplessly to the bay across the street. Not more than twenty yards from me the water of the world lapped one tendril of its vast tongue at Bellemeade’s coquina seawalls and weathered docks, beckoning me. As Maria turned to go, a quiet sense of knowing came over me. “Maria,” I called. She looked back, and I spoke to her in soft Spanish. “You will have the child you want, within two years. A boy. Healthy.”

She put a hand to her heart and stared at me. She and her husband had been told she would never conceive. “Mia Madre,” she whispered, “you are truly gifted, I pray.” Then she turned and hurried to her car.

My knees wobbled. Now I had become a fortuneteller, divining people’s lives. But I had no doubt I was right about her baby. I shook my head to clear it. As soon as Maria and her family drove away, I deserted my boxes and stepped off the inn’s elegant porch, moving like a nightwalker across a sleepy street lined with beautiful shops, passing, hypnotized, beneath the winter shade of small pines twisted like bonsai by the wind. At the docks, pleasure craft and shrimp boats nuzzled one another like tethered ducks, bobbing on the quiet surface of BellemeadeBay. I went to the edge of the seawall and stroked the coarse surface embedded with sand and broken shells. As I looked out at the little marina and the bay and the island, I began to tremble.

The wind was cold, a bright blue sky domed the world, and my heart was pounding in my chest; my eyes were on BellemeadeBay because something I’ve always feared happened instantly. I fell in love with the ocean at first sight. I might never admit it to anyone, but I was home.

I turned, trailing one hand along the seawall, and walked the tiny main road out of town, passing beautiful little cottages with tree-shaded yards. I caught a wisp of wind-blown moss from the trees on my hand, let it go like a butterfly, every texture imprinting on my skin.

“Find your way east out of town to Randolph Cottage,” Lilith had instructed weeks earlier, when she left me in Riley. She had said something about the Bonavendiers sharing a mainland dock and boathouses with the Randolphs, an old coastal family on the mainland.

I walked beside the waters of the Atlantic, the edge of the waters of the world, scented with brisk brine and fish, adorned by hardy white seagulls and gliding brown pelicans. I walked on the unnatural heels of my laced black boots, the salty breeze curling around my stiff denim skirt and jacket like annoyed fingers. I carried nothing but my awe along a flat, narrow two-lane road where even the concrete was mixed with crushed shell. Sand seeped in pretty patterns onto the pavement from the roadsides, and palmetto grass rattled its hard fronds. Pine woods shouldered me on my right and the long, placid, gray-green bay on my left. On the horizon, fringing the line between water and sky, lay the mysterious silhouette of Sainte’s Point.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the island, the bay, the womb where my teenage mother was seduced by a man old enough to be her grandfather. I was worried but hypnotized by my own conception in this magic, and now I took the first small step to understanding how euphorically she must have danced, my young mother, to Orion Bonavendier’s enchanted song.

I began to hum to myself, my gaze always turned to my left, out there, off the edge of the continent. The water. The bay. The ocean. I had tried to imagine the ocean all my life, but my fantasies had been a dull substitute. I moaned silently with the sweet surf out beyond the horizon; I arched in the perfumed air and smiled at the squawking of the gulls. I reveled in the perfection of it all, what I’d lived thirty-four years without. Tears slid down my face.

People passed by in pickup trucks and salt-rusted cars. Suddenly, they began to turn around, to follow me, and then a dozen or more pulled off the road. Just simply pulled over on the landside. Hardworking fishermen, housewives, and tanned children got out of their vehicles, then stood silently, respectfully, as if they knew my name and were paying tribute.

I halted in confusion. “Hello,” I called. “I’m just walking to the docks at Randolph Cottage. Going to wait for Lilith Bonavendier from Sainte’s PointIsland to meet me , thank you.”

Men nodded. Women pressed their hands to their lips or their hearts. Children studied me with wide eyes. What had I done? Yet, there was nothing fearful about their scrutiny of me.

A little girl darted forward, her puzzled eyes riveted to my spiky auburn hair. “Ma’am, if you’re a mermaid like the other ladies, where’s the rest of your hair?” A mermaid. Ludicrous.

Her mother hurried up, smiling, and took her by a hand. “Miss Bonavendier, you’re mighty fine lookin’, just like we expected.”

“I . . . my name is not . . . I’m not a . . . ” my voice trailed off. “Thank you,” I managed. Clearly these people, these townsfolk of Bellemeade, indulged the Bonavendier claim of mermaidhood, no doubt because the Bonavendier family was rich and powerful. Money and influence put a respectable polish on even the most bizarre traditions. Poorer people conceded. I had conceded all my life.

I bent to the child and smiled. “I’m certainly glad to be here, with or without much hair.”

The girl giggled. I nodded to everyone, then forced myself to turn and walk on. The people stayed in the road, like a royal procession, and newcomers pulled over as well. Soon, fully two dozen cars and at least fifty people lined my way.

My face burned. Lilith and her sisters had brainwashed these kind souls, and I was determined not to fall completely under her spell myself. I kept walking, a mile or two or ten—I was no good at calculating land distances. The crowd let me go on alone, but waved and called out good wishes. I locked my fragile attention on the cool, magnificent bay and Sainte’s PointIsland. Tears slid down the back of my heart, unseen.

I had never been welcomed anywhere before.

Griffin looked away
from the sand dunes and gray docks, the gothic, cedar-and-coquina boathouses, and the dark, shimmering bay below his bedroom window. The sun was sinking in a blue-gray mist along the horizon. His head throbbed with bourbon and fatigue. His legs had stiffened like raw logs, his broken bones seemed to grate inside their casts, and a muscle low in his wrenched back flexed with a pain like a sharp filet knife splitting his spine. He lowered his head, cursed under his breath at the state of his body and mind, then dragged his head upright and forced his gaze back out the window.

And there she was.

11

The world is a very narrow stream for most people. They never realize how many other streams flow to the same ocean.

—Lilith

Alice Riley stood with her back to him, gazing out on the bay with her hands by her side and her head up. She made a long shadow haloed by sunlight glinting off the water. The diamond-fettered light began to silhouette her, flashing between her splayed fingers and feet, illuminating and hiding her at the same time. Griffin flattened a palm on the windowpanes, framing her between his thumb and forefinger, trying to capture her and the magic.

How had she gotten here without a car? Where were her things? Her long skirt and bulky denim jacket gave her the shapeless form of a cloistered nun, and her hair, what he could tell of it from the backlit sun, was cropped as close as a boy’s. But still she made an ethereally seductive sight amidst brilliant illuminations, not reflecting, but instead defining. She slowly knelt by the water’s edge, as if in prayer. White dunes framed her on a miniature beach packed hard and smooth. She set her own stage.

Turn around and look at me
, he urged.
Let me see you and hear you, too
. But she didn’t hear him, or was silent. The water held all her attention. Griffin cursed it, then bit his tongue. He was beginning to believe his own delusions.

She leaned forward, scooped the surf into her hands, and nuzzled her face into that small pool encased in her palms. She tilted her face up, raised her hands, and let the ocean water trickle over her eyes and mouth, shimmering in the sunlight. Her empty hands flew to her bulky bluejean jacket; she wrenched it, still buttoned, over her head and threw it on the sand behind her, revealing a plain white T-shirt that clung to the supple outline of her torso. She sat back on her haunches, pulled up her long, coarse blue skirt, and jerked at the laces on her ankle-high black shoes. Moments later she sent them flying behind her on the sand, too. She got to her feet, swaying as she pulled on the waistband of her skirt. It dropped to her feet. She bounded out of the material as if sprung from a trap and ran toward the nearest dock.