The Rope Walk (34 page)

In her bedroom now, Alice didn't turn on the light. She bent to take off her wet socks. The effort it took to tug them over her heels was absurdly exhausting, and she sat down on the striped chair by her window and gazed out at the snow. Maybe it would snow so much she couldn't go to school tomorrow, she thought. Or maybe she'd be too sick to go. Being out of school and in her dark bedroom, with the quiet, snow-filled night creating between her and the rest of the world a gulf of white silence, she felt a little better, just shivery and small and dull.

It was a relief to be away from school. For the first few days this past fall she had been an object of intense and wary scrutiny on the part of her classmates; the news of Kenneth's death and Alice's role in it had spread quickly throughout Grange. Once the children's interest in her passed, though, Alice had failed to do anything to help restore herself to public acceptance. She was quiet, as she had always been quiet. She didn't know what people thought, whether they blamed her and Theo, or Kenneth himself, or nobody at all.

Her class was studying geography in social studies, and Alice liked maps, as she liked math. She appreciated the certainty of those subjects, their unequivocal boundaries. She especially liked coloring in the maps. At home she'd been working on a map of the world on an old sheet spread out on the floor of the dining room. She'd started one and then had to turn the sheet over and start again once she had figured out how to make a grid with a ruler and a piece of string so that the continents and oceans were
more or less to scale. It was absorbing to draw in the rivers and mountain ranges, the seas and chains of little islands, the lakes and deserts. It was the kind of project Theo would have liked, she thought, and sometimes lying on her stomach on the floor and coloring, she tried to pretend he was lying there beside her. When she had the idea of drawing a tiny sea serpent in the Pacific Ocean, she knew that Theo would have liked that detail. Inspired, she had lifted down the atlas from the bookshelf in the living room and looked up information about the countries— climate, principal exports, crops—that would give her more ideas for drawings. She'd drawn apple trees, salmon leaping upriver, bundles of grain, blue and silver snowflakes falling on the Swiss Alps, the French Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Andes. She did not think her illustrations approached Theo's skill, but she found the hours of lying on her stomach on the dining room floor diverting. She couldn't seem to think about anything when she was coloring, and that was a comfort.

It distressed her that she didn't seem able to concentrate on books. The familiar stories had lost their charm for her; they seemed silly. And sometimes she didn't bother to do her homework, either. When Mrs. White asked her about it, she just said she was sorry.

“It's all right, Alice,” Mrs. White said kindly. “But I know you
can
do the work. I'd just like to understand why you're
not
doing it.”

Who cares?
Alice had thought, looking at the floor. What does it matter, anyway? The future for which she had been preparing herself, in which she would do her homework and get good grades and become a brave and successful person, had become like a quaint idea from a story. People were not what she had imagined them to be—not her father, not O'Brien, not her brothers,
who seemed to have abandoned her to the remote wilderness of Archie's care. The world she had loved so passionately from her bedroom windowsill just six months before, the spring morning that had unfolded brilliantly at her feet, now seemed distant and insubstantial. It seemed, in fact, like a place she had gone to once with a terrible and casual indifference, without any recognition of its value, and from which she was now painfully and mysteriously excluded. It was as if she could no longer find the gate or the key and did not know how to get back there. Or, worse, it was as if that place, that region of her past that was her childhood, its magic conveyed by the rich careless offerings of the world's beauty, had disappeared entirely from the map, the roads leading to it rubbed away, a gray blur where it had been once, as if a mountaintop were enveloped in cloud.

Meanwhile, she could not make herself do many of the things that had once felt like requisites of the life she had led before, indeed, that had been among its pleasures. The only dependable happiness was to be outdoors; she found the river's rushing colloquy comforting. She did not think that the river had tried to drown Kenneth, any more than she believed that the rope walk had killed him. He had used the rope walk, as he had used the falls and the river.

Archie was persuaded that if Kenneth had intended to kill himself, he would have left a letter; that none had been found was evidence that whatever had happened at the edge of the falls, it had not been premeditated. Archie acknowledged that, perhaps, finding himself poised there, Kenneth had simply … taken the opportunity. But if that opportunity had not presented itself? Archie had let the question hang. And in the silence that grew between them as Alice had stood before her father, Alice felt the ground pull away from beneath her.

“I blame myself,” Archie said, not looking at her. But she knew he blamed her.

Alice did not ask herself to imagine what had happened, Kenneth moving shakily hand over hand through the dark, still woods that evening when everyone else in Grange, including his sister, was at the dance, sweating under the lights; Alice and Theo had seen her there, working alongside some of the other women serving punch and cake. Kenneth's death was too much to think about, too much to consider, the details too shocking; she was sensible about protecting herself in this way and would not make herself picture it. But she could not believe that he had simply fallen to his death; he had known exactly where he was going, she thought. What she could not understand was how he could have ended his life without giving Alice and Theo—especially Alice and Theo—some kind of explanation. Without saying goodbye.

As they crouched in the dirt under the porch the morning after Kenneth's death, Theo had said, “He had AIDS. He knew he was dying. Everybody who gets AIDS dies eventually. Maybe everyone in the whole world will get AIDS. Ijust don't think he wanted to be alive like that anymore, and with
her
.”

Alice hadn't said anything.

“He was sick,” Theo said. “He was in pain.” After a minute, he added, “Maybe it was kind of a brave thing to do. He just… you know.
Whoosh
. Flew.”

“Maybe,” Alice had said. She had felt grateful to Theo for this version of events, for the way it calmed the sick sensation in her stomach, the hideous rise of guilt.

Theo had been quiet for a time, and they had crouched there
together, staring out through the bars of the lattice. “It was meant to be
nice
,” he had said finally, and Alice had been glad to hear the anger in his voice, because she felt angry, too.

Alice stared out her bedroom window now into the swirling blur of the snow falling through the evening air. Her head throbbed and her neck and back ached. Once she had wanted to take on a hundred enemies at once, sword flashing, cape flying. Now she felt both surrounded and curiously alone; she did not know which way to turn.

For days after Theo had been sent home, Alice had wandered around outside or lay on her bed. From time to time Wally had come in and pulled up a chair, sitting quietly near her and smoking cigarettes as if in open, angry defiance of Archie.

“Kenneth must have been suffering, Alice,” Wally said the day after Theo had been taken away “I don't think he meant to hurt you. I don't think he was even thinking about you. Maybe he just had a flair for the dramatic. Or maybe he couldn't think of any other way.”

“I want Theo,” Alice had said. She rolled over away from Wally. The wallpaper was coming loose at its seam; she reached out and picked at it.

“Listen,” Wally said. “You tried to do something wonderful, right? You just have to remember that.”

Alice sat up on her bed and turned to face him. “Why did Archie make Theo leave?”

“Archie just wants the whole thing to go away,” Wally said. “This is exactly the kind of thing Archie hates. People talking about him.”

“He hates me,” Alice said.

Wally had shaken his head. “No, he doesn't. He's just … he feels like it's his fault. Like he should have known what you guys were doing.”

“We didn't want anyone to know. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Yeah, well…” Wally put out his cigarette in the coffee cup he'd brought upstairs. “How long did it take you guys to build that, anyway?”

“All summer.”

“I don't think I could have done that at your age. It's impressive, really.” Wally leaned forward, looking at her bedside table. “Why do you have all those dead bugs in that jar?”

Alice looked at the jar. The last valiant earthquake detectors had fallen on their backs to the bottom of the glass amid the dead leaves and broken twigs. It was awful, she thought, as sad and terrible as a battlefield. She flopped back down on her bed and closed her eyes.

“It's Theo's earthquake-warning device,” she said. “Why isn't Archie mad at
Kenneth?”

“Well, he is. But Kenneth's… you know.”

“Dead,” said Alice, eyes still closed. “You can say it.”

Being separated from Theo was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She knew that her mother's death had been more important in terms of terrible things to happen to a person, but because she had not felt that loss, she could not compare it to this. She had tried calling directory assistance in Manhattan and in Brooklyn and the Bronx, but she didn't know where exactly Theo lived, nor his father's first name—there was no listing in his mother's name—and there were dozens of Swanns in the directories. Every day she saw something or thought something that she knew Theo would have liked. At night in bed she crept her
fingers together over her breastbone and clasped her hands there over her heart, but it was not the same, holding your own hand.

When Elizabeth came upstairs with a glass of water and an Advil, Alice got into bed.

Elizabeth tugged the sheets and blankets into place around her while Alice swallowed the pill. Then, sighing, she sat down on the chair where Alice had been sitting by the window. “That's some snow!” Elizabeth said.

Her head with its neat cap of hair was silhouetted against the silvery light of the snowstorm outside the window. Her voice sounded to Alice very far away. “Maybe I should stay here tonight,” she said. “Roads might get bad.”

“Don't leave,” Alice said groggily from bed. “Elizabeth?”

“What? Wow. Look at that snow, Alice!”

“Don't leave, okay?”

“Okay. Shhh. Go to sleep.”

Alice woke up the next morning feeling light-headed but otherwise well. She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the landscape. Against the snow that lay over the ground, the firs were a deep, velvet green, iced in silver. Recovering from illness often gave her a fragile sense of euphoria, especially if she woke, as she did this morning, to clear weather, the skies an achingly brilliant blue. As she went downstairs, her head felt pleasantly separated from her body, as if her legs and torso were a ship that moved beneath her, cumbersome and heavy, sensitive to currents that her mind, skimming along in the thin air above, could not detect.

“Lucky day for you,” Elizabeth said cheerfully, when Alice found her in the dining room surrounded by an armada of the silver and her polishing rags and a blaze of winter sunlight. “Big water pipe broken at school. You get free vacation. No homework, even. Right?”

“Really?” Alice sat down on a chair in the sunshine. When she reached out to touch the tarnished garland of roses on the coffee pot, Elizabeth made a noise of caution.

“Sorry.” Alice withdrew her hand.

“You feel better?” Elizabeth said.

“Much,” Alice stretched. She stood up and wandered into the kitchen to make herself a piece of toast, which she ate standing at the back door, looking out into the brightness of the morning and over the pure, unbroken whiteness, the slow crystalline dripping of water from an icicle hanging from the gutter of the garage. There were interesting patterns of purple shadows over the snow, the blurred mauve silhouette of a squirrel running along a power line, the immense shadow of the house itself. The world had been simplified, laid out in blocks of color: white, green, blue, gray.

From the dining room, Elizabeth called, “You want scrambled eggs?”

Alice turned away from the window and went back to the dining room. “No, thank you,” she said. She squatted down in front of her map on the floor. She had been working lately on North America, drawing in the rivers in the west, the Missouri and the Snake and the Columbia. She had drawn in the outlines of Montana and Wyoming and Idaho, sketched the tumult of the Rocky Mountains, where Lewis and Clark and their party had been shocked to discover not the fabled Northwest Passage and a gentle slope down to the Pacific, but only the endless rugged heaves of Clark's “Shineing Mountains” stretching far
away into the distance, the snow-covered ranges of the Bitter-roots that would nearly destroy the Corps of Discovery and its brave leaders.

Alice lay down on her stomach at the edge of her map and traced her finger along the Missouri to the Great Falls, where the company had portaged the canoes. The journal entries from those weeks, and the ones over the next two months, when the explorers crossed the Continental Divide, had been the most harrowing in Lewis and Clark's accounts of their voyage west. Theo had stopped falling asleep in the afternoons when she read, as caught up as she was in the story. From time to time, Lewis and Clark had been forced to part company and consider alternate routes, leaving each other handwritten notes pegged to trees, articles of faith in the midst of such a vast wilderness the dimensions of which Alice found astonishing. How had the two friends found the courage to believe they would see each other again? How had they possibly expected to find each other's valiant messages fluttering against the brown bark of one tree in a million? Every time she read about days when Lewis and Clark had to separate, or send a man off to look for a packhorse gone astray, or then more men to look for
that
man when he failed to return, Alice's anxiety had risen. She had been alone in the woods enough times herself, halted suddenly by a prickling at the nape of her neck, an alarm that rippled through her like the wind in the trees, to imagine the explorers beyond the grip of danger or even their own fear. She wanted them all to stay together, but time and time again they bravely had bid each other farewell and set off, sometimes one man utterly alone. Had they never succumbed to fear, Alice wondered? They had written in their journals. They had gathered specimens of roots and moss and plants. They had met Indians and bartered for horses and information and dogs and beaver skins. They had taken their bearings, made
their careful drawings and their maps. Somehow, miraculously, they had survived.