The Rope Walk (31 page)

Finally, though, perhaps because now she sensed that Theo's affection for Grange and the MacCauleys—and even Alice herself—was sufficiently genuine and compelling, she summoned the courage. “Do you
want
to go home to New York?” she said.

Theo licked the inside of the granola bar wrapper. “Ha! And get blown up by a suicide bomber? Get gassed on the subway? Drink poisoned water? Open an anthrax letter? No thanks, man! It's dangerous in the city.” But then he fell silent. He busied himself baiting their fishing hooks. When he finished, he handed Alice her rod, onto whose hook he had impaled a worm, a task from which Alice shrank. “I don't know,” he said. “Not like it is,” he added obscurely.

“What do you mean?” Alice said.

“I want to go home when my mom isn't sick anymore,” he
said. “When my dad is happy, and she's happy, and they're not going to get a divorce.” After a minute, he said, “They've forgotten about me, anyway.”

Alice looked over at him from her perch on the rock beside him. The way he said it, his tone of voice, made her feel hot with anger on his behalf.

“They haven't forgotten you,” she said. She felt a little disloyal to Theo, insisting on this, because his parents certainly seemed to have forgotten him, and Alice had thought the same thing of them, that they must be heartless, terrible people to leave their boy with strangers all summer, to make only the occasional phone call. But defending them in this instance seemed better than agreeing with him.

Theo gazed into the water for a minute or two. Then he made the sound of a phone ringing and held up his hand to his ear theatrically, his pinkie lifted. “Hello? Mom? Dad? Hey, wow, you guys don't have to call every
day
, you know! Yeah, I'm great. Thanks for asking. I'm having a great time. Okay, be seeing you.”

He pretended as if he were snapping a cell phone shut and stowing it in his pocket. Then he jumped. “Ooops. Got it on vibrate.” He pretended to extract the phone again and answer it. “Yeah, Mom! Hey! Thanks for calling, man. Yeah, I really miss you, too. Okay. ‘Bye.”

Alice didn't know what to say in the face of this heartbreaking sarcasm. How did you explain parents who didn't seem to worry about their child, who were content to have him gone all summer long? There wasn't anything she could tell Theo, she realized. Instead she leaned toward him until her shoulder touched his, and then she bumped him gently. When he didn't respond, she nudged him again, a little harder, and finally he nudged back. “Stop,” he said.

“Stop,” she said, imitating him.

“Stop
it!” he whined in complaint.

“Stop
it!” she whined back.

“A-lice!” he said warningly.

“A-lice!”

“You are so stupid,” he said.

“You are so stupid,” she said back, automatically.

He smiled then, but he said nothing, shaking his head, lips pressed together maddeningly.

In his hospital bed, Kenneth, Alice thought, looked as fragile as a leaf that had fluttered toward the ground and come to rest on the white sheets. He was frail and pale, his skin shiny, stretched tight. He wore a patch over one eye, and the other eyelid drooped sadly. There was an IV in his arm; where the needle entered his flesh was a disturbing wad of cotton padding and tape.

When Alice and Theo came to the door of the room, Kenneth was sitting up in bed, wearing a gray NYU sweatshirt. He held an enormous book close to his face under the bright light of what looked like a sun lamp; Alice recognized it from her friend Sarah Kiplinger's house, where in the winter Sarah's mother lay like a corpse under a sunlamp in her bedroom, with cotton balls over her eyes.

Alice knocked lightly on the open door.

Kenneth looked up over the page. For a moment his expression was apprehensive, with the disoriented uncertainty of someone who steps into the shadows after being in the bright sun. Alice remembered her birthday party, when she had felt that he was watching her as if through a periscope. That he was seeing her, but not directly with his eyes.

“Alice,” he said then, as if it had been years. “Thelonius.”

The happiness in his voice made Alice feel guilty. He sounded as though he thought they had forgotten him. She stepped forward to offer the heady-smelling bouquet of late summer lilies. “We brought you flowers from Eli,” she said. Theo shuffled behind her in an old pair of Wally's moccasins, still hanging on to her shirt annoyingly. She reached behind her to disengage his hand, but he wouldn't let go.

Kenneth rested the book he'd been holding facedown on the sheet beside him and took the flowers from her, inclining his face into the trumpets like a man bending to drink deeply from a pool of water. Alice almost reminded him that he would get sticky pollen all over his face that way, but then she stopped. Maybe he wanted it, she thought. Maybe he wanted to roll around in pollen until he was covered with it. The hospital smelled awful, a nauseating odor of bleach and ammonia insufficiently masking other smells underneath, smells whose origins she did not want to think about too closely. She'd been breathing shallowly through her mouth ever since they'd stepped inside, and now she felt a little light-headed. The sunlamp by Kenneth's bed emitted a faint, disconcerting buzzing sound.

Theo tugged on her shirt. She glanced at him.

With a gesture, Theo indicated Kenneth, whose shoulders shook silently as he bent over the flowers. He had turned his face away from them.

What should we do?
Theo's look said.

Alice turned back to Kenneth helplessly. “I'm sorry we didn't come before,” she said. “Archie only said today that we could come, now that you're better.”

That their arrival, or maybe just the sight of the beautiful flowers, had so unsettled him, made Alice feel desperate. She looked away across the shallow, inconsequential ranges of Kenneth's thin legs under the sheet, over the old radiator, and out the
window. The evening sky had turned a deep, glowing indigo; how fragile the planet was, awash in the sky, the spangled galaxies and whirlpools of solar systems all around them. How small she was, how small everyone was, even taken all together. Yet the blue of the evening sky was also the kind of color that made you want to spread your arms and soar into flight. She gazed out the window, remembering from her flying dreams the delicious sensation of tilting on currents of air. The world was full of these sorts of invitations, she realized, vertiginous doorways into itself that were revealed magically in midair like stones rolling away from before the mouths of caves. You wanted to eat the world, and swim in it. It was that beautiful.

Kenneth coughed and lifted his wet face. Alice looked down at him again, her attention returning to the room. On the sheet beside him was a box of slides, some of them spilled onto the blanket. A rust-colored blotch stained the sheet. In an open box of chocolate-covered cherries, most of which were gone, a few had been smashed open, the cordial seeping out onto the ruffled white paper cups. Alice looked everywhere but at Kenneth's face. She did not want to look directly at his face.

Kenneth leaned over and took a Kleenex from the table beside the bed, blew his nose.

Then Theo stepped out bravely from behind her. “Guess what?” he said. “We finished the rope walk!” He extracted a wad of papers from his pocket, his drawings for the rope bridge. “But we've got a little problem,” he said.

Kenneth was still holding the bouquet. Alice stepped forward to take the flowers from him.

Kenneth blew his nose again, looked up, and smiled shakily at Alice, an apology. “I don't know what's the matter with me,” he said. “I'm a mess.” Then he drew a breath. “At the nurse's station, in the hall,” he said. “They'll give you a vase. Let's put these
beauties in water, shall we?” He turned to Theo. “I would love a problem,” he said. “I would love any problem of yours. Come and show me.”

Alice thought that she could not have sat down on the bed beside Kenneth at that moment, but Theo plunked himself down unconcernedly and began unfolding his drawings and spreading them out on the sheets. “Well, we've hit the falls,” he said. “You know, Indian Love Call? And we want to build you a rope bridge that goes over the river. See? Here.”

“It goes…
where?”
Kenneth had taken one of Theo's drawings and brought it close to his face, reaching up to tilt the sunlamp in order to see better. His nose almost grazed the paper, as if he were inhaling it or tasting it. His posture, his hungry, almost ardent exploration of the drawing, reminded Alice, as she stood there with the flowers in her arms, of her own yearning into thin air from the edge of her windowsill, the way she inclined toward that bright, busy emptiness, seeing there the crack in the rock, the secret fissure in the wall, the door hidden by ivy that would open, if only you could find your way through, into a secret garden, the dusty backstage and marvelous winding catwalks of the world, the echoing pavilion in which the clanking, whirring, brilliant machinery of the universe was stored.

“It goes right up to the edge, at the top of the falls?” Kenneth said.

“The very, very edge,” Theo said.

In the hall, Alice stopped at the door and looked in both directions. She could hear the muffled sounds of music and voices from television sets behind the closed doors. At the end of the hall in one direction stood an empty gurney pushed up against the wall. She thought she and Theo had passed the nurses’ station
when they had come up on the elevator, and so she turned in that direction.

When she rounded the corner, she nearly collided with Miss Fitzgerald. For a moment Miss Fitzgerald was so close that Alice could smell her, the stale odor of the airless rooms of the Fitzgeralds’ house. Alice gasped and drew back instinctively.

Miss Fitzgerald recoiled, too, as if Alice, though clearly in retreat, had threatened to strike her. Then, casting a quick look around, as if to make sure no one would overhear her, she said, “Don't you ever go creeping about in my house again, Alice MacCauley,” she said. “Bad little girl.”

Alice, wide-eyed, took another step backward. How did Miss Fitzgerald even know they'd been there? That had been weeks ago, anyway. Heat flooded her face and neck. In her ears, the throb of her own heartbeat was deafening. Standing before Miss Fitzgerald, Alice felt as if she was burning up, that a fire inside her was squeezing the breath out of her. Yet as she looked up fearfully at Miss Fitzgerald in the midst of that conflagration of shame and anger and fear, she thought something clearly and slowly; she thought how unfair it was that Kenneth had been so handsome, was still handsome, even though he was sick, when Miss Fitzgerald herself, with her terra-cotta face like the pinch pots they made at school in art, was so ugly. But as soon as Alice thought this—or, she didn't even think it;
she felt
it, including her sense that this unequal distribution of physical wealth between the Fitzgerald siblings was a cruelty—it was as if Miss Fitzgerald read her mind and was forced, by necessity, to defend herself against the devastation of Alice's sympathy.

Miss Fitzgerald's expression was suddenly wild with injury and disbelief. “There is nothing
wrong
with us,” she said. Trembling, she looked at the flowers in Alice's arms and then back to Alice herself. “I am
fine
,” she said, but it came out on a moan that
made the hair rise on Alice's arms. “We're
fine
! Your father does not need to
help
us.”

Alice, terrified, stared up at Miss Fitzgerald. It must have been awful, she thought, looking up into Miss Fitzgerald's face, and it was as if she were telling herself a story, then, reminding herself of familiar details: Miss Fitzgerald being alone all those years when she hadn't wanted to be, never getting married or having children, turning out to be such an ugly woman after having been a promising-looking girl, never playing the piano well enough to really teach anyone anything.

And then her brother coming at last to live with her but being so terribly sick.

There was a Tightness to these conclusions, Alice knew; she struggled to hang on to the truth of them, because part of her did not want to feel sorry for Miss Fitzgerald. She did not want to know anything about Miss Fitzgerald's terrible life; she hadn't asked for any of this. Yet though she could easily hate Miss Fitzgerald for being mean and creepy and annoying, that hate would provide only a bleak ending, Alice sensed, bleak and incomplete.

At that moment, the doors of the elevator opened. Archie, who had dropped off Alice and Theo and gone to park the car, stepped into the hallway. The sight of him in his rumpled jacket, with his glasses perched crookedly on the top of his head and a book under his arm, struck Alice with a powerful wave of relief.

She did something she hadn't done in a long time. She ran toward him and jumped into his arms, hooking her legs around his waist and burying her face in his neck.

Alice could feel his surprise, but he put his arms around her. “Everything all right?” he said. “Hope? Everything all right here?”

• • •

Archie, with Alice beside him hanging on tightly to his arm, made his way to the nurses’ station, where he borrowed a vase for the now-crumpled lilies. Miss Fitzgerald, apparently humiliated at Archie's arrival, had excused herself at the elevators; she'd forgotten the newspapers for Kenneth in the car, she said, hurrying away.

“She found out we were in the house,” Alice told her father. “She's really mad.”

“Yes,” Archie said. “I know. I called her. And the word is angry,” he added automatically. “She's angry, not mad …” He trailed off.

“You
called
her?” Alice was amazed. She had thought Archie wouldn't do anything.

“Just to see if I could help.” He tilted the vase under the spigot of the water fountain at the end of the hall and began filling it. Then he said, “You understand why she's upset, Alice?”

“I think so.”

“I'm afraid my phone call was one of those kindnesses that looks like cruelty,” Archie said. “Or perhaps it was only a cruelty. I don't know. She must have known that the boys would come back after that first trip over there and tell me what they'd seen. Maybe she thought I was punishing her when I called, rubbing it in.” He straightened up, and Alice handed him the lilies. “She's been living like that for years, obviously. It's not very nice, I grant you, but maybe it's really none of our business.”