The Rope Walk (35 page)

The sheet was warm now in a patch of sunlight falling through the window where the curtains were drawn back. Alice could smell the acid fumes of the silver polish, hear behind her at the table Elizabeth's vigorous efforts with the cloth. Alice rested her chin on her folded arms and let her gaze wander over her map. Here the men of the Corps of Discovery, stranded by hail and snow in the steep passes of the Bitterroots, had slaughtered their horses to eat and to stay alive, here they had killed a coyote, here in desperation they had melted down and eaten some of their tallow candles.

And yet, it probably wasn't exactly right
here
, she thought. She rested her chin in her hands, looking at the lines she had drawn. Then she consulted the atlas spread open on the floor beside her. She couldn't tell exactly, looking at the modern atlas, where Lewis and Clark's trail had gone. In the edition from which she'd been reading to Kenneth and Theo, there had been a map on the flyleaf of the book much like the map in her copy of
The Hobbit
, with its drawing of the Misty Mountains and Mirk-wood and the Desolation of Smaug. In James and Wally's room there was an edition of
The Wind in the Willows
with its absorbing map of the Wild Wood and Surrounding Country. The map on the flyleaf of the Lewis and Clark journals had shown the explorers’ trek westward with little black symbols like a chain of arrowheads or tiny footprints crisscrossing the plains, and though she knew that the voyage had been a real one across a real continent, the landscape in the black-and-white drawing had seemed as mythical and exciting as an imaginary place. The little track had veered north toward Canada and then descended in a crooked dip through the mountains, a scooped path like the bowl
of the Big Dipper, before stretching out on the runaway lap down the Columbia toward the Pacific Ocean. She looked at her own map and then back at the atlas. She would like to draw Lewis and Clark's route on her map, she thought.

She looked up, startled, as the bough of a fir tree just outside the window released its burden of snow, the drift sliding heavily down the slippery needles and crashing into the shrubs beneath the window. Dry snow rose like a smoke signal into the still, cold air outside. In the silence of the house she could hear the faint, raspy ticking of the clock in the hall, the vigorous rubbing sound Elizabeth made with her cloth. And then another load of snow slipped free, following the first. A second puff of dry snow exploded and hung suspended, sparkling in midair. Alice blinked. A third branch dipped, strained; snow slid hissing toward the ground. A fourth went. A fifth. Each time, Alice blinked as though a gun had been fired beside her ear, a signal going off to bring her to her feet, like Lewis and Clark's men bolting from sleep as a buffalo bull charged into their camp.

She sat up abruptly. What had happened to the edition of Lewis and Clark's journals she had taken to Kenneth's? What had happened to
all
the books she and Theo had brought with them on that first day they'd gone to visit Kenneth? Were they still there on the table in Kenneth's room?

On one of the last days she had read aloud to Kenneth and Theo, when she came to Clark's triumphant journal entry at the explorers’ first view of the ocean, Alice had had difficulty controlling the emotion in her voice.
“Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian
,” he had written,
“this, great Pacific Octean which we been so long anxious to See. and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I suppose) may be heard disti[n]ctly.”

“Whew,” Theo had said from the floor. “I thought they'd
never get
there.”

That evening, Archie came in the back door while Alice was eating her supper. Elizabeth had made her tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich and had pulled up the rickety little bamboo side table to one of the armchairs before the fireplace in the kitchen. The house was cold, and Alice was wearing her pajamas and a pair of heavy socks and one of Wally's hats with the fake fur earflaps.

“Feeling better?” Archie said, putting a hand on Alice's head briefly as he stood by the fire and unwound his scarf. He sat down in the chair across from her. “It's snowing hard again,” he said to Elizabeth. “You should go on home before it gets worse.”

Elizabeth leaned down and gave Alice a hug on her way out the back door. “Dinner's in the oven,” she said to Archie, pulling on her mittens. “You
eat
it, okay? Don't forget. I don't want to come back tomorrow and find it in there again, hard like a old rock.”

“No. Of course not.” Archie stood up, his scarf in his hand. “Thank you.” He looked embarrassed, Alice thought, glancing up at him. Maybe he often forgot about his supper.

He came back a few moments later with a glass of wine and the mail. Alice swiveled in her chair, her back to the fire so she could watch the snow through the window. The snowflakes seemed to be engaged in a battle, colliding and whirling like people running wildly in all directions.

In the chair on the other side of the fireplace, Archie unfolded the newspaper and held it up before his face.

Alice looked at the gray front page of the newspaper. There was a picture of a crowd of people, their expressions violent.

Archie reached out from behind the paper and picked up his wineglass.

Alice watched the newspaper for a minute, but Archie stayed hidden behind it. She picked up her soup cup and looked into it. She stuck her tongue down into the cup and licked. Everybody in the whole world seemed to be angry, she thought.

“Don't forget about your dinner,” she said at last.

“What?” Archie didn't lower the paper.

“In the oven,” Alice said.

“Oh. No, I won't.” He lowered the paper at last. He folded it on his lap and tilted back his head, closing his eyes. He looked old and tired, Alice thought. Once Archie had played Prospero in one of the plays in Grange, and she'd been frightened of him in his cape and stage makeup, with long black lines painted on his face and his hair wild.

She looked down into her cup again and with her tongue reached for the last of the soup at the bottom. It was very quiet in the room, just the fire hissing and crackling gently at their feet, but Alice's thoughts were whirling. She looked over at Archie, trying to reach him with her mind. Could she communicate with him that way, tell him what she was thinking without actually saying the words? She tried, concentrating fiercely, but her efforts did not seem to be successful. He didn't even open his eyes. She tried saying it very distinctly inside her head—
I'm going to go lookfor the Lewis and Clark
—but Archiejust sat there, his eyes closed. It gave Alice a sad sense of freedom. There were all sorts of things she could hide from her father. There were continents that separated them now.

It was neither as cold as she had expected it to be at midnight, nor as dark. The moon was nearly full, and even though snow
was falling lightly, she could see the moon behind the clouds, a blurred lamp high in the sky. The snow-covered fields around the house gave off an unearthly light.

The explorers had worn only moccasins on their feet, Alice thought, as she had pulled on her snow boots and her coat, tied a scarf around her neck, pulled down the flaps of Wally's hat over her ears.

An enormous lightheartedness came over her the minute she stepped outside and quietly pulled the back door closed behind her, dispelling the fear she had felt lying in bed a few minutes before when, wide-eyed, she had clapped her hand over her clock, the alarm set to go off at midnight. Had she actually fallen asleep? She couldn't be sure.

The snow was beautiful, a benevolent fall of light through darkness. She tipped up her face and held out her arms.

When she crossed the lawn and started up the lane, she became aware of movement in the woods beside her—a silent herd of white-tailed deer, twenty, maybe thirty creatures in all, moving alongside her a few feet into the trees, their heads down, searching for something to eat. A few paused, lifted their heads, and turned to look in her direction and then moved on parallel with her as she walked uphill. When she looked back for them after a few minutes, they were gone, but she felt comforted, knowing they were nearby, coughing into the trees, their white tails flickering.

No one would be able to see her tracks in the snow. She would walk along the road—it was too deep in the woods to make good progress there now, anyway—but if anyone came by she could just duck into the trees or behind a parked car. Still, no one would be out at this hour, and not on a night like this, she thought, even though it was so beautiful, the snow twinkling around her, the breathing silence. Why
didn't
people come out-
side in a snowstorm and walk around? Falling through the streetlights, coming on endlessly from somewhere high in the sky, the snow was so lovely it almost made her want to cry. She wished Theo were with her.

At the houses along the street, paths along the front walks had been shoveled, and cars had backed out of garages and left tracks in the driveways, but already these were filling up with new snow. There were electric candles in the windows, wreaths on a few front doors, Christmas lights wound around porch railings or through the branches of trees in the front yards. In the falling snow, the scene was tranquil and lovely; Grange looked like a perfect storybook town, Alice thought, in which nothing bad could ever happen. No terrorists or suicide bombers or psychopaths or serial killers, no tidal waves or hurricanes or floods or avian flu. And yet once, she remembered, startled, all this land had been covered with an inland ocean through which great dinosaurs had stepped and whales had swum.

There were no Christmas lights on at the Fitzgeralds’. The car was parked in the garage, but the garage doors had been left open, probably so Miss Fitzgerald wouldn't have to shovel away the snow to open them, Alice thought. It would be hard, if you were an old lady, to shovel all that snow. Alice stared up at the house. Miss Fitzgerald's bedroom was at the front of the house facing the street, as far away as possible from Kenneth's rooms. The windows were dark. Alice thought of the crowded rooms inside the house, the narrow passages between stacks of boxes like trails made by small animals, and she shuddered. Snow slipped down the back of her neck. She lifted her hood, shook the snow from it, and pulled it over her head.

Rather than leave her footprints down the front walk and across the lawn, even if they would soon be filled with snow, she broke through the hedge behind the garage and pushed through
the low branches of the cedars there toward the semicircle of lawn at the back of the house, where Kenneth's big room gave out onto the terrace. At the edge of the trees, near where the rope walk had begun, she stopped. Every window in the house was dark. Alice thought of Miss Fitzgerald, asleep in her bed in the dark. She had not seen her since Kenneth's death except once from the car when Archie had stopped to get gas. Miss Fitzgerald had been walking along the sidewalk with a bag over her arm. She had not seemed to notice Archie's car nor Alice sitting alone, frozen in the front seat.

Alice's heart began to beat fast. She was warm inside her coat, but her fingers and toes were cold. Suddenly she felt afraid to be standing there watching the house with the woods at her back. There was no way to get to the house now except straight across the lawn, up the steps to the terrace, and to the French doors.

She scanned the house one more time, but there was not a single light on anywhere, as far as she could tell. Again she thought of Miss Fitzgerald, lying alone in her bed. It must be lonely without Kenneth, Alice thought. She knew she would be very lonely, if it were her.

She slipped on the steps going up to the terrace because she couldn't tell under the drifts where they began, and her mittens slipped, too, when she grasped the handle of the French doors and it did not turn. Were the doors locked? Her pulse pounded painfully in her ears and against her throat. She glanced behind her, as if someone from the house next door might be watching her from a curtained window.

She had not even considered the possibility that the doors would be locked; the doors at her own house were never locked.

She shook the doors lightly, despairingly. A thin layer of snow fell off the mullions. And then she pulled off her mittens with
her teeth and put her bare hands on the handle. She could feel her head sweating under Wally's hat.

When she opened the doors to the boys’ rooms at home, sometimes banging the door against the wall suddenly so as to surprise the thing that lived in there and came out to dance alone in the gloom of the long winter afternoons, she was never truly afraid. She was sure about the magic that lived in those empty rooms—it was perhaps the only magic in which she still believed, the magic of the thing you could not see—but she never mistook it for something larger than herself. The thing left behind all alone in those rooms and abandoned by her brothers, who long ago had left their own childhoods behind, was a small thing, even a mean thing, but it was a lonely thing, too, like Peter Pan's ragged, lifeless shadow, and she was not afraid of it. Indeed, she was sorry for it and longed somehow to comfort it, to sew it to her foot as Peter Pan had sewn his shadow to his heel and then, boy and shadow reunited, risen crowing into the air. One day, she thought, she would surprise the thing that lived in those empty rooms, that wandered back and forth like a wraith from her mother's dressing room and into the boys’ rooms, bleating and moaning, and it would sweep out the door and flit away into the trees to take up residence inside an owl's nest or a mouse's hole. In a way, it would be like setting it free.

Now, though, her hand on the French doors, she was afraid. She pressed her fingers along the cold length of the handle and then, with a sharp heave, pushed down hard. The door swung suddenly open. It had not been locked, after all.

The white light from the French doors, full of the soft shadows of the moving snowflakes falling like the shadows of rain down a windowpane, lay over the floor. Nothing had been moved; nothing had changed. Kenneth's mobiles hung from the
ceiling, stirring in the air she had disturbed by opening the door. The fur throw lay across the settee as if Kenneth had just tossed it aside. One of the leather chairs had been pulled up to the easel, the paper unfurling from its roll onto the carpet. His books were on the shelves, his telescope pointed toward her where she stood just inside the open French doors, the snow falling silently in the darkness behind her. On the round table where she had sat to read were the stacks of books and papers, the shiny ebony head of the African woman with her knots of hair, the carafe of water, half full. Alice ran her eyes over the room lovingly; that it had not changed seemed to her like a miracle or a dream.