The Rope Walk (10 page)

“Is she going to be okay?”

“I hope so.”

Alice closed her eyes. That was what grown-ups said so they didn't have to give you the bad news right away, she thought. It wasn't a lie to hope that things would turn out in a particular way, even if you knew they wouldn't. Maybe this was what had been lying ahead at the end of this day, she thought. Helen dying. She felt for a moment as if she were falling, as if she had been pushed over a building's edge.

She thought of all the people who would be sad about Helen dying. O'Brien, of course. And he wasn't the sort of person who could take very good care of himself, Alice sensed. And Ann, their daughter … losing her mother, as Alice had lost hers. And Theo, even though he didn't know Helen very well. Then the image of Helen as a little girl on her canes, her brave bright face looking up from between the nuns at the camera, came to Alice, and she thought she would start to cry, so she opened her eyes instead and spoke. “Is Theo going to stay here?”

Archie pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. “For a while,” he said. “Yes. We'll see.”

• • •

When she woke again, the room was utterly dark. The moon had disappeared from her window, and Archie was pushing through her doorway, opening the door quietly with his shoulder, something in his arms. She thought she was dreaming now; the darkness felt close and warm, and there were no lights on in the hall. She heard someone crying, very close by, and she wondered for a moment if it were herself, crying in a dream, because she felt so sad, so forlorn, as if she had been left behind in the oak wood with its silent cathedral corridors between the trees, a place Alice had never visited without feeling that something magical and important had happened there, was happening still perhaps, a resonant throbbing under her feet as though the soldiers of an invisible army were gathering around her, their swords and shields clashing silently. She was afraid of being lost, stolen like the boy Wild Robin who had been taken by the fairy queen to her palace, where his teeth grew long and pointed and he rotted on candy and selfishness and threw hysterical, dangerous tantrums.

Archie came between the beds, his back to her, and leaned over to put down whatever he'd been carrying.

Alice turned her head slowly—it felt as though she were swimming in heavy dark water—and saw the stripes of Theo's T-shirt, the blond burr of his hair. Archie leaned over him, murmuring something, his hand patting Theo's back, pulling up the blankets.

W
HEN ALICE WOKE UP
the next morning, the bed beside her was empty. She knew it had not been a dream, though—Theo's arrival there in Archie's arms the night before—because someone, at least, had slept in the bed. Now the sheets had been flung back, and the bedspread pooled on the floor. Across the room, the window glass was white with sunlight. She couldn't see anything through it, as though the world outside had been replaced by an infinite brightness, a brilliant nothingness. Her door stood wide open, and downstairs Wally was playing the cello.

Usually Alice was the first person awake in her house. Archie was a night owl and slow to rise in the morning, but Alice was often up and reading in the kitchen, a mug of hot chocolate at her elbow, when Elizabeth arrived to fix breakfast. Now, hearing the music downstairs and voices in the kitchen, Alice sat up in bed, disoriented. On the occasions when she was sick and slept through an afternoon fever to wake at dusk, the day having been replaced by a dismal, lackluster twilight, Alice could not defend herself against sorrow; it was as if she had fallen through a hole in the air into a place eerily familiar to the world she knew and yet somehow not the same at all, full of strange shadows and objects
freighted with menace and loss. Soup spilled on a tray in her bedroom, a glass of flat ginger ale with its bent straw, the tired dishevelment of her blankets—all these things conspired to make her both weary and ill at ease, as if she needed to keep exhausted watch against whatever surprises this place, this silent night that had descended on her after no day at all with the sudden, final weight of a coffin lid, might throw up into her path.

Now, a little of that same menace, the sense that things were not as they should be, that they had been altered insidiously in nearly imperceptible ways, crept into the room, despite the brightness of the morning. She got out of bed and stood on the floorboards. They were already warm under her feet from the sun, a comforting corrective against everything that felt so strange and chilling. But what had happened to Theo?

She found him on the porch downstairs. He was sitting on the floor in the shade with his back against the clapboard wall of the house. He glanced up when she opened the porch door, but he didn't say anything. He only raised one slow hand in greeting, and then his dreamy gaze returned to the lawn, his chin resting on his arms crossed over his knees. He wore the same striped T-shirt he had worn to bed the night before.

Alice sat down near him. The night before, with its confused comings and goings, the infectious misery and fear of the crying boy carried into her bedroom at some late, disturbed hour, Alice's awareness of Helen's peril, whatever it was—these events reached through the warmth of the morning sunlight with the disconcerting tread of a bad dream remembered. Yet, as she sat quietly beside Theo listening to Wally play, Alice thought that the music, like the morning itself, was brimming with light and warmth and playfulness. Wally had taught her to listen to music with her eyes closed, to see the pictures it made in her mind: water tumbling over rocks in the river, bumblebees going up and down like sentries
in the orchard, armies massing on the horizon, a ship turning slowly in the wind. Sometimes it seemed to her that music didn't so much make pictures as it expressed what it was possible to feel, things you had felt but had not known how to shape into the idea of what they were. And music could explain not only what you
yourself
might feel; Alice sensed that it could also make you feel what other people felt, people you didn't even know, or people who had lived a long time ago, like the women who stood on the white stoops of the windmills in Holland in the gold-framed painting that hung in Archie's study. Music, Alice thought, could make her feel what those women had felt, standing there holding on to their white hats, with fleecy clouds in the pure blue sky above them and the watery green axis of the fields stretching away into the endless distance. Music could even show you what
things
felt, trees or the wind or the ocean as it touched the shore.

Usually Alice thought the cello sounded sad. The instrument itself suited Wally, she felt, whose face looked like the mask of tragedy, with deep dark eyes and a sober, downturned mouth. But this morning the cello had a happy, almost teasing sound. Alice watched a pair of robins, their breasts high and inflated, hop over the lawn in front of Theo. They almost seemed to be moving in time to the music … in waltz time, Alice realized. How funny. She sighed and stretched out her legs and flexed her toes in the sunlight.

When Wally stopped playing, Theo straightened his back as if he'd been sitting still in one position for a long time. The night before, when he'd stood in front of Alice extending to her his lucky stone, his face had been creased and worried, like something folded up in a pocket for a long time. Sleep—or maybe it was Wally's music, Alice thought—had transformed him. He looked rested, puckish, and playful, his hair standing up in tufts like the golden grass in the field.

The sun felt hot across Alice's legs. It was hard to believe that the world had been covered in ice the afternoon before.

“That's a violin, right?” Theo said to Alice.

“Cello,” she answered.

Theo nodded as if she'd confirmed his guess. “I really like it,” he said. “That's the instrument I'm going to play.” This morning he was wearing his belt crossed bravely over his chest like a military sash. Alice saw that he'd brought his toolbox outside with him.

“I'm named for a musician, you know,” Theo said. “So it's in my blood.”

“What musician?”

“Thelonious Monk. He's my dad's favorite.”

Alice had never heard of him. She thought Thelonious was a strange but impressive-sounding word.

“Hey, Alice. Do you have a raft?” Theo said abruptly.

“Tad and Harry have a rubber one,” she said. His questions had a way of catching her off guard, and she had to think for a minute. “Maybe it's got a hole in it, though. I'm not sure.”

“We could fix that,” Theo said. “It's easy to fix punctures. All you need is a patch kit. Do you have a patch kit? One should have come with the raft from the manufacturer.” He went on, “Or we could
make
a raft. You just lash logs together. It's easy. Where does that river go?”

Alice realized that she'd never thought about it; she didn't know where the river went. Why hadn't she ever asked? Now that Theo had posed it, it seemed like a reasonable question. “We could look on a map,” she said. “Archie has lots of maps.”

“Well, all rivers run to the sea eventually,” Theo said. “It would be good to have a map, though. We should get one.”

It sounded as though he'd made plans already to float down
the river in a raft. But it also sounded as though he meant to have Alice beside him. He expected her to come along.

Just then, the porch door opened and Archie stepped outside. “There you are,” he said. “Your beds were empty. I thought you'd run away or been carried off by spirits.”

Theo looked up at him blandly, but Alice got up and went to Archie and put her arms around his waist.

He rested a hand on her head. “Eli's making eggs,” he said. “And Elizabeth left us blueberry muffins.” He addressed Theo. “Are you hungry?”

Theo looked up at Archie; then a surprised expression came over his face. “I didn't have any dinner last night,” he said.

“Ah.” For a moment, Archie's hand stopped moving on Alice's head. “Well. Extra rations for you this morning then.”

Alice looked up at Archie. “Where's Helen?”

“She's at the hospital. O'Brien's there with her.” Archie looked away from her to take in Theo. “You'll be staying here with us for a little while, if that's all right, Theo,” he said. “I promise that we'll feed you.”

Alice turned inside Archie's embrace to look at Theo. So he
could
stay, if he wanted. There would be no need to escape, setting off down the river in search of his mother. She wanted Theo to want to stay now, but she understood that he missed his mother, that such a feeling would need to be respected. If he wanted to go home, Archie would take him, Alice knew.

But Theo did not make her wait for his answer. He jumped to his feet and assumed a kind of Oriental fighting position, knees and elbows cocked; then he began vigorously boxing the air toward Alice, leaping from foot to foot. He danced near Archie and Alice and boxed the air temptingly in Alice's direction. “C'mon,” he said. “C'mon, Alice. Come and get me.”

“I think I am to take this display as an expression of your approval and enthusiasm,” Archie said.

Alice whirled around and put up her fists, mimicking Theo's bouncing dance. They sidestepped down the length of the porch facing each other, feinting blows. When they came together, grappling, Alice inhaled, taking in Theo's particular smell: this was
who he was
. But what did he smell like? Who
was
he? It was a completely unfamiliar smell, like looking down a long hallway in a strange building. Then a drape at the far end was swept aside, and an idea of Theo's life appeared to her: a history of different beds, and unfamiliar food served on plates with patterns she did not recognize, and music playing that she had never heard before. There was his lifetime of being steeped in the details of his own world, so different from hers, and all of these details had flowed into him, into his skin and his hair and his breath. Her nose and forehead were mashed against his chest as they struggled; she held his arm pinned behind his back. And then Alice was seized by homesickness like a tide swirling around her knees, threatening to take her down. How she loved the old familiars of her own life: the oval shape of the mirror above her dresser with its bunch of chipped plaster grapes at the bottom of the gold frame; the ship model sailing on its dusty green felt sea in the glass box on Eli's desk; the dining room rug, whose pattern of black lines and cream-colored diamonds and rust-colored hills and green rivers was like a topographical map over which she had moved her armies; the pin-headed pieces from the Sorry game; the lollipop-colored tiddlywinks, their perfectly smooth wafers so satisfying when she tested them between her teeth.

With a grunt, Theo released her, and she staggered back.

Archie held open the door. “Dance this way, please,” he called to them, beckoning them in. “Eli's eggs will be cold.”

Theo stopped bouncing then and took a deep breath, fists
cocked at Alice. Alice stopped, too, fists held before her face. They locked eyes, breathing hard.

Then Theo grinned at her, faked a jab at her belly, and took off toward Archie.

“This way, this way,” Archie said, waving him past. He raised his eyebrows at Alice.
“He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.”

She stopped, looking up at him. How did Archie know she had been trying to figure out what Theo smelled like? But that was it. He smelled like spring, like the month of May.

Archie bent to kiss her head as she went past.
“Now, our joy
,” he said.
“Although the last, not least.”

During breakfast, the telephone rang. Archie pushed his chair away from the table and went into the front hall to answer it. All the boys had cell phones, but Archie had steadfastly refused to get even a cordless telephone for the house, claiming that he wanted to keep his conversations short and to the point and that wandering around while talking loudly to someone on the telephone was a sign of boorishness and not having enough to do.

Theo had eaten two platefuls of eggs and had said that he was still hungry; now he was standing beside Eli at the stove, watching as Eli cracked more eggs into the frying pan and scrambled them with the back of a fork. “Don't you guys have a television set? I have PlayStation,” he said. “Don't you have any video games? Do you even know what a video game is?” By the time Alice heard the rumble of Archie's voice saying goodbye in the hall, she had almost forgotten that he had been on the phone; whoever had called had talked for a long time before allowing Archie to say anything in reply.