The Rope Walk (30 page)

One weekday afternoon, Theo was stung between the eyes by a yellow jacket. His forehead swelled so dramatically that his eyes were almost squeezed shut. Elizabeth drove him in to the doctor's office in Brattleboro.

“What will they do to me?” Theo worried in the car, holding a towel full of chipped ice to his head.

“You might have to get a shot.” Alice sat beside Theo in the backseat with a bowl of ice and a dish towel in her lap. The degree to which the swelling altered his appearance was shocking. He looked like a freak. “Eli has to get them for bee stings,” she said, trying to give Theo the comfort of company in his misery. “He can even give them to himself.”

She was not prepared for the tragic dimensions of Theo's horror at this prospect.

“Oh, God,” Theo moaned, clutching the armrest. “Oh God, oh God …” He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, which were already squeezed nearly shut from the swelling in his face. “I have to try and clear my mind,” he said. “Otherwise I'm just going to … freak out.”

“No freaking out!” Elizabeth said, alarmed, from the front seat, glancing at Alice in the rearview mirror. “Tell him no freaking out.”

At the doctor's office, Theo screamed as if he were being murdered. Alice, sitting in the waiting room and listening to him, staring without seeing at an ancient copy of
Highlights
, was both mortified on his behalf and sorry for him. Other patients
exchanged worried looks. Alice's heart beat as though she'd been running for miles, and when Theo finally came out, led into the waiting room by a nurse and Elizabeth, who gripped his arm as though he were a dangerous prisoner of war, he looked defeated and humiliated, and his face was even more swollen than before.

For a day he looked very strange, with a bulging Neanderthal brow and beady eyes. Once he got over the trauma, however, he could not keep away from his own image in the mirror. “Man! I look like something out of
Star Trekl”
he said to Alice, enraptured.

It was cooler down by the water, and there were fewer bees, so Alice and Theo spent a lot of time splashing in the river and fishing, experimenting with bait: marshmallows, cherry tomatoes from Eli's garden, bits of fungus foraged from the woods. After heavy lobbying from Theo, Archie was persuaded to allow them to build a cook fire on the stones at the little beach, and Alice showed Theo how to construct a careful tent of kindling, adding bigger pieces once they had a good blaze going. On most days they grilled hot dogs there for lunch. Theo said they were the best hot dogs he had ever eaten and that he would never tire of them. Alice thought she had never enjoyed a hot dog more, either.

The late summer evenings lasted a long time, gold and silver hours with the sun setting at one end of the sky and the moon rising at the other, a phenomenon that thrilled Theo, who liked to pull Alice down onto the grass to lie with him and watch the stars come out. He was transfixed by this alignment of the planets, the fact of their own position as a tiny speck on the celestial curve.

“You know what? Scientists have proven that the human mind cannot really even
think
about distances like those up there,” he told Alice, head tilted back, eyes traveling across the sky. “We just can't imagine it.”

For a boy who relished the barrage of factual information available on television, Theo was, Alice discovered, surprisingly superstitious. He believed, for instance, that a simultaneous sunset and moonrise was auspicious. On these occasions, he informed Alice, the ancient Mayans staged bloody ceremonies to propitiate the gods; he'd seen a
National Geographic
special about this. He also developed a secret handshake that he and Alice should exchange for good luck, a complicated choreography including a midair finger wagging that Theo said was actually a gang symbol Alice should take care never to duplicate on the streets of New York. Once they got it down, Theo wanted to perform this handshake dance every ten minutes. It was fun, jumping up and down, dropping to a squat and kicking like a Cossack, leaping up to slap hands in the air, wriggling around in a contorted dance, shaking fingers and bumping hips, ending with a double palm slap, one up high, one down low.

“Yo Alice,” Theo would say, and hold up his hand invitingly. That was the signal to go into the routine.

Theo didn't like to be alone at all if he could help it. He even peed with the door to the bathroom ajar, facing the toilet but craning his head around to yell things to Alice through the open door. “Alice,” he said one day, slinging an arm around her shoulder. “You know what? You are a good listener.”

Was she? No one had ever told her that before. It was a whole new way to think about herself. Not quiet. Not shy. Just a good listener.

Listening and looking. A whole life could be spent that way, she sensed, and there would be no end to the discoveries possible. It must be how Lewis and Clark had felt, she thought. The world never ran out of ways to surprise you.

• • •

Kenneth's absence from home on the day Alice and Theo had found the Fitzgeralds’ house empty was only the start of what turned into a prolonged stay in the hospital; Kenneth had pneumonia, Archie had told them at dinner the night after their sorry exploration of the Fitzgeralds’ house.

Theo, sitting in what was by now his accustomed place at Archie's right, said he'd had pneumonia, once. “Oh man, it was horrible,” he said, worse even than chicken pox, and he'd had chicken pox so badly that he'd even gotten sores inside his nose and ears and on his lips. “And you don't want to know where else,” he said. “The doctor said he'd never seen a worse case,” he announced cheerfully, twirling spaghetti onto his fork.

“I'm sure he never had,” Archie said blandly, but Alice saw him exchange a smile with Eli across the table. It bothered her that sometimes Archie didn't seem to take Theo seriously. And it was patronizing and humiliating to smile over somebody's head like that, like you knew something that other person didn't know. She would never do that when she grew up, she promised herself.

Alice knew that it was stupid to be jealous of someone who'd had so many sicknesses and injuries, so much apparent misfortune, but she couldn't help how she felt. Everything seemed to have happened to Theo. He'd broken his arm and his leg (on separate occasions), his nose and a finger (playing baseball), and once he had developed a cyst on his lower eyelid that caused it to start gushing blood during a holiday concert performance at his school. And yet, she did feel a little jealous. Theo's life seemed to have been full of drama, near-death experiences, and narrow escapes. She wasn't sure she believed him about everything he claimed to have suffered. But just when she thought he'd gone too far, he would provide a convincing detail, such as exactly
how they'd had to cauterize the cyst on his eye, the smell of burning in the room when a hair accidentally got in the way.

“Yeah, my whole eyeball filled up with blood. It was like I was looking out at the world and the whole thing was, like, drenched in blood,” Theo said. “It was cool.”

Yes, Alice thought, squinting and trying to imagine it. That would be cool.

It took them only one day's work during Kenneth's stay in the hospital to bring the final section of the rope walk up to the river's edge overlooking the falls. On the crumbling bank they lashed their last length of rope, an old clothesline that Elizabeth had discarded because of rust stains that ruined the sheets, to a tree whose gnarled roots lay exposed, curled like long fingers over the steep bank. From here, they agreed, turning from the shade of the trees to gaze out warily over the tumult of foam and cool spray, the rope bridge could be launched across the span of the water toward the far bank. It was certainly the most dramatic spot on the river, and despite her vague misgivings about the place, Alice agreed that it was a fitting final destination for the rope walk.

“He should
go somewhere
, anyway,” Theo said, “not just round and round in circles. That's boring.” This, he said, throwing out his arm to indicate the rushing current, the flat horizon edge of the top of the falls, the mist that hung in the air beyond,
this
was a destination. “He can just stand here and listen to it, feel the spray on his face,” Theo said, closing his eyes and striking a pose that reminded Alice of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, a framed poster of which was in her classroom at school.

Yet the problem of the bridge defeated even Theo. What they needed was an elephant, he fretted, a giant, sure-footed creature that could trudge across the river carrying one end of a bridge to the far shore. Probably it couldn't even be accomplished without an elephant, he complained, and as Alice was no help in providing information on how they might procure the services of an elephant, they would just have to wait for Kenneth to recover before proceeding any further. Surely Kenneth would be able to help them overcome the temporary defeat of the engineering dilemma before them. Theo had drawn a beautiful bridge: two parallel spans, cables of heavy braid, with a section patterned like crossed bootlaces in between. “I know it'll work,” he said. “I just don't know how.”

They had labored all summer on the rope walk, and when they looked back at it from the river now, they could see it winding away through the trees, an innocently meandering path illuminated here and there where the sunlight fell through gaps in the leaves. To Alice it looked magical, like something made by elves or fairies.

The season was at its fullest, the leaves on the trees large and silky, brushing softly against one another, the flowers bowed under their own weight, the heavy air itself like a colossal heart or set of lungs, beating and breathing around them. Archie let Alice and Theo sleep outside sometimes, and she and Theo lay in sleeping bags on the front lawn under the stars, staring up at the night sky.

“Can you feel it?” Theo whispered.

“What?”

“The earth, turning under us.”

Alice closed her eyes and concentrated. “Yes!” She opened her eyes in surprise.

“Me, too.” Theo was silent for a moment. “Whoa,” he said. “It's kinda scary.”

On a Friday morning toward the end of the third week of Kenneth's stay in the hospital, Archie announced at breakfast that he would drive Alice and Theo in to the hospital to see him that evening.

“I have meetings all day today but I'll try to get home by six tonight,” he said to them at breakfast, finishing his coffee and pushing back from the table. “Make sure you're ready to go.” He looked over his eyeglasses at Theo. “That means shoes,” he said pointedly.

Alice, who knew that one of Theo's sneakers, which were his only pair of shoes, had been missing for four days, reminded herself to look in the boys’ rooms to see if there might be an old pair of shoes that would fit Theo; he had very big feet, wide and flat as flippers.

Theo had appeared unconcerned when his shoe had gone missing, and he did not seem worried now, despite Archie's warning. He ate his pancakes that morning with the zeal and steady concentration that characterized his behavior at all meals. At breakfast one day he had eaten a dozen pieces of cinnamon toast and fifteen sausages; even Eli, who had the biggest appetite of the MacCauley boys, though he was the smallest, had been impressed. Theo ate with a contented, trusting cheerfulness that somehow made Alice feel sorry for him; it was so easy to make Theo happy, she thought, and yet his happiness also seemed so much in peril, assailed on all sides by the many things he found to worry about, not to mention the parents who seemed to have forgotten about him altogether.

One day, when they'd been out all afternoon on the river fishing and working on their fort, Alice had discovered a crumbly granola bar in the pocket of her sweatshirt.

“Here,” she'd said, offering it to Theo, who had recently announced that he was starving; he was often starving. “Look what I found in my pocket.”

Theo's expression had been rapturous. Then he had hesitated. “You don't want it?” he said.

Alice had shaken her head.

The granola bar had disappeared like a fly into the mouth of a lizard; one flick of the tongue and it was gone.

“That was good.” Theo had looked sad. “You have the best granola bars here, Alice.”

“They're just regular granola bars,” Alice had said. And then she felt mean, as though she were draining the moment of pleasure for him.

But Theo had shaken his head. “We can't get your brand in New York,” he'd said. “I don't know why not. I mean, you can get fruit from Bora Bora in New York, and they sell special magical medicinal roots from the Chinese rain forest on the sidewalk, so why not these granola bars?”

In all their weeks together, Alice had not directly asked Theo about whether he wanted to go home to New York. Partly she was worried about unleashing a torrent of homesickness he might have been keeping bottled up inside; partly she did not want to think about when he would have to leave, a future that seemed so bleak to her, she could not exactly believe that it would come true. Yet it still seemed strange, strange and troubling, that Theo rarely mentioned his parents, that since that first night, when he'd said he missed his mother, he had never confessed to homesickness of any kind. But Alice could not forget
the fact that just as O'Brien and Helen had dropped out of their lives, and Theo's parents seemed to have ceased to exist, Theo did
have
parents. He had parents, and he lived in an apartment, and he went to school. He had a whole life in New York that she tried to imagine from the stream of information about television shows and ethnic takeout restaurants he described. And one day soon, for now it was August, and there were only a few weeks left before school would begin again, he was going to have to go home. Sometimes, she caught herself indulging in a fantasy in which she and Theo ran away together, piloting a boat downriver like Huck and Jim, or living up in the woods in a cleverly designed shelter Theo would build. In these fantasies, she surprised herself by taking on domestic duties that felt thrillingly exotic to her—he would hunt, she would cook. But the idea sometimes also made her feel a little embarrassed around Theo. She did not really think of herself as a girl, per se.