The Rope Walk (38 page)

Alice opened the envelope and took out the letter.

Dear Alice
, Kenneth had written.
I know you will forgive me, for the hand that made you fair hath made you good, as well. That's a weak paraphrase of Shakespeare, I think, but you know that already, being your father's daughter. Thank you for everything you and Theo have done for me in these my last weeks and, most especially, for my beautiful rope walk, which will take me away from the certain awful end I fear so much and lead me instead to the places I remember from my boyhood, the woods, the river, the clouds in the sky, the underwater filled with bubbles. If I'd ever had children, you are the ones I would have chosen
—
hardworking, brilliant, generous. If lam brave enough for the one necessary moment ahead, I want you to know that I hope by it to spare everyone, including myself, a lot of trouble. Word of the day:
redivivus.
Your great friend and admirer, Kenneth Fitzgerald
.

Alice folded the letter. She crossed the room, the letter in her hand, to the big, heavy dictionary on its stand under the window. She loved the enormous book. The pages were delicate, nearly transparent, with tiny inked illustrations of plants or famous people's faces or strange animals or machines or mountains.

She turned the pages of the book until she found the word.

Redivivus
, she read.
Revived, reborn, or brought back to life
.

She put the book and the letter into her backpack and went outside. The rain had stopped, and in the deep black clearings between clouds overhead there were stars far away, so many it looked as if there had been an explosion up there, showers of sparks now falling toward the earth. She walked down the steps of the library and turned toward home. Beneath the streetlights, the sidewalk under the trees was wet and gleaming; soft leafy shadows moved weightlessly over the ground. She could hear the wind moving in the trees; water pattered down, scattered droplets striking the leaves and startling her with their otherworldly coldness when they touched her head and the back of her neck. There was a wild smell in the air, as if things had been stirred up, and she realized she could identify its component parts—the old, mineral smell of half-buried stones on the mountains, the pinch of fertilizer from bags torn open and spilling onto the floor in garden sheds, the warm breath of overturned soil, pungent as molasses. And now in her love of the world, there was less fear and more longing. The shock of knowing exactly how things could be lost had started to wear off—the past year had done that—so that now, coming hand over hand through starlight and moonlight and lamplight, she thought not of the future, of what would happen next, nor of the past, but only, for a moment, of the shining present.

In Helen's room at the nursing home, an orchid had been placed on the windowsill in an Oriental pot. Its single spray of tiny yellow blossoms, like sleeping bees, drooped in the heat from the radiator that rose up in blurry waves to the open window, where the evening breeze stirred the curtain.

Alice sat on a hard chair beside the bed and looked at Helen's
sleeping face. Until Helen went into the hospital, Alice had never seen her in a nightgown. Helen had been a careful dresser, old-fashioned brooches on her sweaters or the lapels of her jackets, pressed trousers, a cream-colored coat soft as a fawn, with a bright, cherry-colored collar, a scarf printed with a pattern of water lilies around her neck. Because of the polio, she'd worn ungainly black shoes that laced up with heavy cords, but her shoes had been the only things about Helen that were not delicate or small or neat.

Along with the camera, which she took everywhere, Alice now carried Kenneth's letter, too, and she reached up and touched the pocket of her shirt, reassuring herself that it was there. She had not shown the letter to Archie. She and her father were just beginning to recover some of their ease with each other, as if the shadow of last summer's events was finally withdrawing, and she understood that Archie would always see Kenneth, his life and his death, as the place where Archie's protection of Alice had been breached, that no matter what she had to tell Archie about Kenneth, he would not be happy to hear it. In Archie's mind, Theo, too, was part of Archie's failure, Alice understood. And, as always, it was Theo she most wanted to talk to now.

Yet though her desire was great, her trepidation was great, as well. Perhaps Theo didn't ever want to speak to her again—he could have found out her telephone number easily enough. But talking on the telephone was probably not something that would even occur to Theo, she thought, and maybe he had been forbidden to call her, anyway. He had returned to his old friends in New York, his takeout restaurants and Peking duck, and had forgotten all about her. It was painful to think about him not remembering her, not longing to see her, the way she longed to see him. Still, since finding Kenneth's letter a few nights before,
she had wanted to come and see Helen; seeing Helen connected Alice to Theo.

Sometimes Alice sat at the table in the kitchen to do her homework in the evenings while Elizabeth fixed dinner and listened to the evening news, its litany of grim tidings: the report of a dozen miners trapped thousands of feet below the ground, a suicide bomber who blew up himself and twenty guests at a wedding party in Faluja, the collapse of the roof of a skating rink in Germany, killing dozens of children. She felt the ache of fear in her stomach at the news, the endless tide of disaster and calumny, the bewildering reports of injury and wrongdoing. If Theo were listening, he, too, would be afraid, she thought, and she longed both for comfort and to comfort. Elizabeth, with the sturdy, implacable body of a survivor of the world's harm, had become even more infinitely precious to Alice and tolerated without complaint Alice's fierce, sudden hugs when she came home from school.

O'Brien had met Alice and Archie in the lobby of the nursing home when they'd arrived that evening, and Archie had taken O'Brien down the street to a restaurant where they could get something to eat, while Alice had made her way down the hall to Helen's room, Alice had not forgiven O'Brien for his treatment of Theo last summer, his inexplicable coldness, but when she had looked up into his face in the lobby this evening she had felt sorry for him, despite her anger. He had aged over the past year almost as much as Helen herself, whose once quick, knowing expressions had been smudged and blurred by the effects of the stroke.

Helen had been sleeping since Alice had pushed open the door with her fingertips and looked into the room a few minutes before. Many of Alice's drawings had been taped to the wall by Helen's bed, as well as Theo's drawing of the fort he and Alice had built on the river. Alice looked at the drawings for a while,
and then she turned her attention to Helen, the arrangement of shadows and forms that created Helen's face in the blue light of the evening. She reached down and took off the lens cap of the camera and raised it to her eye, bringing Helen's face nearer, pushing it away, bringing it near again, looking at the way the light from the window fell across the bottom half of Helen's face, her shoulder, the ribbon of her bed jacket.

Then, with a start, she realized that Helen had opened her eyes and was looking at Alice.

Alice lowered the camera. She was afraid that she had offended Helen by looking at her that way, as though Helen were an insect under a microscope. She had never been alone in the room with Helen before; usually Archie was there, too, and O'Brien. She was afraid of not really knowing Helen anymore—behind her altered expression, was Helen the same person she had been before? When Archie and Alice came to visit, Helen listened to Archie's slow reporting of events in Grange and at Frost, bits of news about the boys, with what seemed like comprehension on her face. Archie said she understood what was said to her, but she did not speak much, because she couldn't control the words she said; sometimes she reached for a word but another one came out instead, Archie explained, and this was a strain, embarrassing and disconcerting, as well as hard work.

Helen had come into full wakefulness now, and her face, as she seemed to recognize Alice, was restless, almost excited. Alice, reading urgency in Helen's expression, leaned toward the bed, meaning to try to help Helen with the pillows behind her, as she had seen Archie and O'Brien do.

As Alice brought her arm forward, Helen reached up and clumsily caught Alice's wrist. Alice looked down in alarm at Helen's hand closed on her arm.

“Helen?” she said. “Are you okay? Do you need something?”

Helen let go of Alice and began to fumble inside the sleeve of her bed jacket. The piece of paper she withdrew was tiny, crumpled up, and she extended it in Alice's direction, her eyes on Alice's face.

Alice took the paper and unfolded it. On it was printed a telephone number and two words in Theo's wobbly handwriting.
Call me
.

It was Theo's voice, answering the phone.

“Hello?” he said.

Alice heard a siren wailing in the background. It seemed to approach through the telephone and then recede, a pulse of alarm that crested to panic and then fell away in a correction, a diminution of alarm, the all clear of silence. But Alice knew that Theo was still there, his breath in the phone reaching her across the distance between them.

“Hello?” he said again, and now he sounded suspicious. Suspicious, and worried.

“It's me,” she said. “Alice.”

A moment of silence followed. Then Theo said, in a whisper, “Wait a minute.”

A loud crackling followed, as though someone were crumpling up a paper bag right next to the mouthpiece. Alice pulled the phone slightly away from her ear.

“Alice?” When he came back on he was whispering still, but his tone was eager. “Alice, I'm under my bed. Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” She turned, dazed, and looked out the open front door into the evening. If she ducked a little, she could see the night sky, the first stars appearing there.

More crackling. “Can you
still
hear me?” he said.

She felt a flutter of impatience and annoyance. “What are you
doing?”
she said. Wasn't he surprised to hear from her?

His voice was muffled. “I'm just pulling a blanket down over the edge of the bed, so no one can see me,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

She waited. Then she heard a breathy sound, as if he were blowing wetly into the phone.

“Alice, I've missed you so much,” he said, suddenly near. His voice in her ear was so close he might have been standing beside her.

A thrill flew over her skin, like the evening breeze stealing toward her through the open door. Alice felt her breath catch in her chest, a little sob. Why did being around Theo sometimes make her want to cry? Why did she want to cry when she felt so happy?

“Alice?” he said.
“Alice?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm here.” She realized she was whispering, too, although there was no need for it. Archie was at Frost, Elizabeth was cleaning up the dishes and listening to the radio in the kitchen.

“You got my message?” he said. “What took so long? God!” His tone was accusing, as though Alice had bungled an important maneuver. “My mom took it at
Christmas
when she went up there to see them. She understood, Alice. She, like, got it. She said I couldn't call you, though, because Archie would be mad. So that was all I could do, send you a secret message.”

Alice was speechless. All this time, she had imagined Theo had forgotten about her. “Is she better?” she asked finally. “Your mom?”

“What? Oh, yeah. Kinda. But my parents are getting divorced. Wait a minute…”

There was another crashing and crinkling sound. “Hold on,” Theo whispered.

Alice listened. She began to walk toward the screen door, the blue light of the evening captured there, the telephone cord stretching out behind her.

He came back on the phone. “Okay,” he said. “I'm recording this now.”

“You're
what?”

“Yeah. With my tape recorder.”

“Why are you recording it?” She had so much she wanted to tell him, she thought. But he interrupted her thoughts again.

“Why?
Why am I recording it?
So I can listen to it again,” he said.

“So you can listen to
you?”
she said, confused.

“No, Alice,” he said, and his tone was tender suddenly, forgiving, as though she was a loveable dunce. “So I can listen to
you
, Alice, when we get off the phone. So I can hear
your
voice again. I'm recording
you
. I'm recording us.” He hurried on before she could say anything else. “What's happened there, Alice? Are you okay?”

She took a breath, and then she told him about Kenneth's letter, about finding it in the Lewis and Clark, about the lights going out in the library that night.

“Wow,” he said, a few times. “Oh my God. That's amazing.”

“Do you want to hear his letter?” Alice said.

“Yeah
I do.”

She took it out of her pocket and unfolded it. When she had finished reading it to him, he said, “Man. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, Alice.”

“Me, neither,” she said.

They were quiet, and she thought of how their voices ran down the telephone lines toward each other. Another siren
intruded then, its wail so loud she felt the ambulance must be about to burst through the walls into Theo's apartment. It was a terrible sound, announcing the approach of catastrophe, the nearness of death. Yet it was valiant, too. Someone was fighting for his life. Someone else was trying to help him.

“That's so
loud
,” she said, and she heard the protest in her voice, the indignation. “It sounds like it's coming right at you, under your bed, like it's going to run you over. Like it's going to come through the phone and run
me
over.”

“I know,” Theo said. “But it's okay, Alice. Don't worry. You get used to it.”

She listened to the sound of the siren fading away, the whine shrinking to a tiny black dot and then, pop, vanishing into a hole. And then all she could hear on the other end of the phone was Theo, all those many miles away down the long, echoing corridor of their connection, breathing into her ear.