The Rope Walk (36 page)

And then she looked up. In the round silver mirror across the room over the fireplace, she saw a face and screamed.

She had screamed before she realized who it was, that she was looking at her own reflection.

She clapped her hands over her mouth, but it was too late. The sound had already escaped her. She stood still for one moment, horrified, and then she whirled around and ran out of the room across the terrace through the snow, slipping and falling down the steps and across the drifts that lay over the lawn. In a moment she was in the trees, and then there was nothing but silence and darkness and the snow falling gently around her.

When she lay in her own bed again, she could not close her eyes. She had crept in through the kitchen door, shoved her wet coat and hat into one of the cubbies on the porch, and slipped up the stairs and into her bed, but her body still seemed to be moving through the snow-filled night, the deer running silently beside her, hidden in the trees. As she had neared her own driveway, a car's headlights had blazed up once out of the darkness behind her, and Alice had felt herself pick up speed as though
wolves were at her back. She had not known she could run that fast. In her ears now, as she pulled the covers up to her chin with cold fingers, she could still hear her feet thudding, like the sound of the surf crashing inside the dry, pristine vessel of the conch shell.

Surely her scream had woken Miss Fitzgerald.

If Miss Fitzgerald had come downstairs to investigate, running a flashlight's shaky beam over Kenneth's rooms, she would find the French doors open.

If Alice was lucky, she thought, Miss Fitzgerald would not notice Alice's tracks in the snow; she might assume the wind had blown the doors open. But she would shut them now, for sure, and probably lock them.

Alice was sure the book had been on the table, where she thought she had left it, but it might have been picked up and moved, stuck into a shelf somewhere, or fallen behind one of the paintings stacked against the wall, or kicked under a chair by Kenneth's shoes, filled now with dust.

There had been so many places Alice might have looked, she thought, and now she had wasted her chance. It was over. She would never get back inside.

A
LICE WAS LYING
on the couch, rereading
To Kill a Mockingbird
, when Archie came to the door of the living room. It was the last Sunday in March, a chilled, rainy afternoon with the feel of ice at its edges, the metallic cold smell of the thaw in the air. Alice had been outside earlier in the day and found snowdrops blooming under the dogwood trees.

“I've got to go up to the college,” Archie announced from the doorway. “Someone's called in sick, and they need a dean at the admissions fair.”

Alice did not look up from her book. She had heard the telephone ring, heard Archie answer it, noted the weary tone of resignation in his voice when, after some moments of his listening silence, he finally replied to whoever had called. She heard his annoyance now. He liked to spend Sundays reading and dozing in his study, and she was sure he did not want to interrupt his day with a trip to Frost. Nor did Alice want to go with him. It was nearly an hour's drive there and then another hour back, and it was boring to have to sit coloring or reading in her father's office. These events always took much longer than he said they would,
anyway. “Okay,” she said carefully, not looking up from her book, avoiding his eyes.

“Alice?” Archie put his hand on the door frame, preparatory to returning to his study to collect his papers, shut down his computer, and turn out the lights. The gesture meant that now the clock was ticking; he assumed she would get up from the couch, find her shoes, get ready to go with him.

“Urn, I don't really feel like going to Frost,” she said. She kept her tone carefully even; it was important that she should not sound as if she were whining. Her eyes stayed deliberately on the book before her. “I'll be fine here. “

Archie hesitated.

Alice studiously followed the words on the page, not daring to risk it and look up to assess how seriously he was considering her proposal. Would he actually go without her? He didn't usually leave her alone unless he was just doing a quick errand in Grange. But she was almost eleven. She could stay home by herself; she knew plenty of kids who stayed home by themselves. And it would be so boring at Frost, especially in the rain. Finally, though, she couldn't resist; she looked up, her expression as bland and noncommittal as she could make it, a wide-eyed face that she hoped denied all contrivance.

Archie frowned. “I'll call Elizabeth,” he said.

Elizabeth, reached on her recently acquired cell phone, was organizing a fiftieth birthday party for a friend at her church. She could not come in to stay with Alice. Why didn't Archie just drop off Alice at the church? Elizabeth proposed. Alice could come to the party. It would be fun!

Alice, who had come into the hallway and was following Archie's side of the conversation with growing comprehension
and alarm, rolled her eyes. This would be even worse than having to go to Frost.
Please
, she mouthed to Archie.
No
.

Then Archie tried calling Tad and Harry, to see if Alice could spend the afternoon with them at Frost; the boys could take her to the gym to shoot baskets or for a swim in the indoor pool. But Archie couldn't reach either of the twins; neither one seemed to have a phone with him. More likely, Archie said, growing visibly further annoyed by the moment, they had run out of minutes.

Alice waited in the hall beside him while he held the phone to his ear, trying the twins a last time.

Finally, he looked at her. “You won't go outside, though,” he stipulated. He hung up the phone. “All right? I'll be home by six.”

“No problem,” she said without thinking and then watched his mouth tighten. Archie hated that expression. He also hated the phrase “My bad,” which the twins used regularly. “I'll be fine,” she said hastily, to distract him. “I'll just read. I won't go anywhere.”

Twenty minutes later, Alice watched from the kitchen window as Archie drove away up the driveway, the taillights of his car at first clearly visible through the rain, then flashing unsteadily and finally disappearing altogether, as if the car had plunged off the steep shoulder of the lane or been swallowed up by the gusts of the storm, restless inflated shapes like the gray sails of an enormous boat that swept over the treetops and across the fields.

Despite having told Archie that she would be fine by herself, she found that once he had actually gone, she was uneasy about the hours stretching ahead. The afternoon seemed gloomy and
full of foreboding. She was surprised, really, that he had left her. He hadn't even argued with her, she thought.

She got up and wandered through the dining room and the living room, turning on lights against the watery, gray darkness, but this was almost worse, in a way; with every light on, and the rooms ablaze with a hard, demanding glare, the emptiness of the house intensified, ringing with silence.

Back in the kitchen she climbed onto a wobbly-legged chair to turn on the radio on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. She found an oldies station and stood on the chair, holding on to the mantelpiece and listening to a Buddy Holly song she recognized, watching herself sing along in the mirror:
Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue
.

After a while, she went upstairs, planning vaguely to root around in the boys’ closets for something interesting to look at among thejumbled shoes, and the slick ties that had slipped from their hooks and fallen to the floor, and the stacks of worn paperbacks with their covers creased and folded back unevenly.

In Eli's closet, in a cardboard file box under a snake's nest of tangled wire hangers, she found sixteen dollars and some spare change, a copy of
The Prophet
, and a lot of Eli's old school papers; they all seemed to be marked with a red A inside a circle, or “ioo%” or “Excellent!” written across the top.

In the closet in James and Wally's room she found two cardboard cartons of sheet music and a gym bag that, when she unzipped it, caused her to reel back: it was full of rank-smelling, dirty clothes. Scattered on the floor of the closet were various papers and envelopes. She took up a handful and flipped through it: bank statements, mailings from Princeton, letters, including one to James from a girl named Jenny, penned in a round, childish hand, the tail of the Y on Jenny formed into a tiny heart. Alice skimmed the contents.
Hey Cutie! I miss you!
So,
what are you doing
this summer?
The letter was full of references to people Alice did not know, and she put it aside, bored. Inside an old hiking boot that rattled when she lifted it to move it aside, she found a harmonica, delicate scales of rust like a fossil across its shiny surface. She raised it to her lips and blew. The sound was eerie—it made the hair on her arms rise—and she dropped it on the floor of the closet where it fell soundlessly onto a pile of clothes.

She was on her hands and knees, her brothers’ shirts and sport jackets brushing her head and shoulders, when she heard a distinct noise from downstairs, a dull thud like a door banging open against a wall.

A jolt of pure fear went into her stomach. In the closet, she flattened onto the floor and froze. After a minute, her heart pounding, she moved—just her head, a fraction of an inch—so that she could see behind her into the bedroom. In the silence she registered the urgent ticking and creaks of the house, as though a conversation were taking place around her between the walls and the window frames, the ceiling and the floorboards, a dissatisfied, murmuring conference.

Maybe Archie had come home, having forgotten something. This was a comforting thought; the possibility that it was Archie downstairs, and not something else, sent relief washing over her. Still, if he found her looking through the boys’ things, he would be mad. She waited another minute, and then she inched backward out of the closet and crawled over to the window on her hands and knees to look out for his car. But the driveway, when she peered over the window ledge, was empty, only the rain disturbing the surface of the water in the puddles. No car, at least, had approached the house.

Alice sat alert and fearful on the floor beneath the windowsill. What was she frightened of? Murderers? Terrorists? Madmen?
Suicide bombers? Yes, yes! All those things, all the horrors Theo had invoked, the faces of strangers intent on harming her, the figures who moved now out of the dark recesses in her imagination, places she had not even known were there, had not wanted to explore, was afraid to own. A dark mass pressed itself invisibly against the comforting world she could compass now with her eyes, the solid, reassuring planes of its surfaces—beds, bureau, bookshelf—even the leaking roof of clouds fleeing overhead, all of it braced like an insubstantial firmament against the oppressive darkness beyond. When she had recognized Theo's fear, she had not been scornful. She had known, deep in her heart, that he was right: the world was terrifying.

An image of Miss Fitzgerald emerged in Alice's mind like a figure coming clear out of the gloom, a woman at the end of a dark hallway, all alone and intent as a ghost, with all the power of a ghost to accost and accuse.

The week before, when Archie had come upstairs one evening to say good night to Alice, he had sat down at the end of her bed and quietly told her that Miss Fitzgerald was planning to leave Grange. There was Kenneth's estate to be settled; it was complicated, all his papers and the art, of course, Archie had said. Apparently Kenneth had bequeathed his books and several valuable drawings to the library in Grange. As soon as all that had been taken care of, Miss Fitzgerald was going away.

“What about the house?” Alice had looked at Archie in the darkness, thinking of the mess, the boxes and stacks and the bad smell and the darkness, the little paths threading through the confusion like the tracks of small animals in the woods. “Where's she going?”

“Someone's bought the house,” Archie said. “A friend of Kenneth's from New York.”

Who would ever buy that house, Alice thought, once they'd seen it inside? “Did
she
tell you this?” Alice wished she could see her father's face clearly.

Archie had hesitated. “I have it from a reliable source,” he said finally. “It was … apparently arranged. Kenneth arranged it. She's going to Florida, a cousin there.”

Archie had stood up then and looked down at her. Then he put out his hand and stroked her hair back from her forehead. “It's all right, Alice,” he said, surprising her, as if he understood, after all, though they had never spoken of it, that for these many months Alice had been terrified she would run into Miss Fitzgerald, that the news that she was leaving now would be a relief to her.

“Don't think about it anymore now,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you.”

At his touch, Alice had closed her eyes.
I forgive you
, her heart had cried inside her, and though she had not said the words aloud, she had felt for the first time since Kenneth's death the possibility that one day she
could
pardon her father—for his lack of faith in her, for his failure to comfort her, for his denying Theo to her. It would happen with time, perhaps, just as their aloofness from each other had begun to ease slightly over the passing months. The sensation of joyful release that had swept over her for a moment, the reckless sense that she could go back to how things had been before, had been wonderful, as if her body had become buoyant, filled with air.

Yet now, crouched by the windowsill, listening to the menacing quiet downstairs, she could not banish the figure of Miss Fitzgerald from her imagination. There she was, her lank hair running with rain, her face pressed to the glass, looking for Alice.

Alice made a wild run for the doorway, out onto the upstairs landing, and clattered downstairs. She would not be trapped up
there in a bedroom where she had no chance of escape. Theo would not let himself be cornered like that. Theo would run for it. Downstairs in the front hall she hesitated for a moment, shrinking back—every doorway seemed to contain an ominous threat—and then she fled through the living room and into the old brick passage that led to Archie's study, slamming the door closed behind her.