Alice Close Your Eyes (12 page)

I go to the end of the row, into the last shack, and set my gun on the wooden shelf. I wipe my clammy palms again, and fumble in my pocket for a bullet. After a moment, I figure out how to open the cylinder, slide the bullet inside the chamber, close it and disengage the safety. I cock the hammer.

My hands tremble as I raise the gun and point it at the tree stump with a crude plywood target nailed to the center. A wave of nausea rises in me. I fight it back, hold my breath and pull the trigger. The gun kicks in my hands. For a moment I can almost see the blood—the soft, fragile, human insides. The thick wet splatter, lumped with tissue and shards of bone.

My mouth fills again with hot water, and this time there is no swallowing it back. I stagger around the wall of the shack and vomit into the soft green grass at the edge of the forest. Gagging, upended, my stomach heaves again and again, until there is nothing left inside me.

The men down the way are concerned, calling, “Hey, are you okay?” But I can’t answer. I’m too ashamed. This was my last hope and I can’t do it, no matter how much it needs to be done, no matter that it’s my responsibility. I think of the little girls and the gray house and my mother and everything Nana taught me, and still it’s not enough. I can’t do this.

I lean my head on the rough wooden siding and close my eyes.

Jack...

* * *

When my stomach settles, I put the revolver in my purse and drive to Jensen Point. It’s a cloudless day and the sand is dotted with children. I stand for a few minutes at the edge of the pines, watching a potbellied toddler collect shells in an old tin bucket. With each addition, he peers over the rim as if he can’t believe the wealth he’s accumulated. Finally the bucket becomes too heavy and he drops it. The shells spill out and he plops down next to them, sobbing, his cries like that of a strange young bird.

It’s hard to believe Jack was once this small, that all grown men were babies at one time, then toddlers, and knobby-limbed boys on the playground, with outsized teeth and cowlicked hair. They used to cry, their cheeks ruddy and glazed with tears. I look at the toddler’s sand-dusted roundness and try to reconcile it with Jack’s gridded abdomen and the solid heft of his shoulders, the thick pad of muscle at the base of his thumb, the depth of his voice. That this little boy will someday be a grown man seems an alien concept today.

I adjust my canvas purse over my shoulder and stroll past the silvery driftwood to the piled-up outcropping at the far end of the beach, where low tide has bared the mollusk-encrusted rocks and left pools of flat, still water in the crevices. I wander among them, stopping to investigate a fat, four-armed starfish and a pair of crabs that face off like tiny duelists, thrusting and parrying, feinting and scurrying along the barnacles. I put a finger between them but the combatants ignore it, determined to continue the squabble.

I shake the droplets off my hand and watch them scatter across the surface of the tide pool. As the ripples melt together and smooth away, I see my face reflected, shimmering on the water—and over my shoulder, Jack’s.

I flinch, my thoughts darting immediately to the gun in my purse, and almost fall into the water. Jack catches me around the elbow and helps me to my feet.

“Jesus.” I turn to him, moving gingerly over the rocks. “You scared me.”

He steadies me but does not apologize.

“What are you doing here?” My voice is too high and too fast. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

He backs up a step, takes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his dusty flannel shirt, taps one out and offers it to me. I shake my head.

“Why are you worried about where I should be?” he says. “Are you where you’re supposed to be?”

The weight of my purse is dragging on my shoulder. I switch the strap to the other side, farther from him. My chest feels strangely hollow. The sea air sweeps into my lungs but doesn’t seem to fill them.

He squints at me sideways as he lights the cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame. “You have something you want to tell me, Alice?”

His expression makes me uneasy. This is an odd place for either of us to be, alone in the middle of the day. Guilt makes me rise to the attack.

“No, Jack, I don’t. How about you tell me why you followed me here?”

He smiles around his cigarette. “You really need me to spell it out?”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Sure I do. What’s not to trust?”

I glance around at the innocent beach full of small children and pointedly back at him.

“Living a blameless life, aren’t you, sweetheart,” he says.

“Except when I follow you.”

“Mmm, but who’s following now?”

He drags on the cigarette, half smiling, gazing at me down the line of his cheekbone. Clearly he knows or senses some deception. But I won’t be trapped. If he knows something about where I’ve been today, he’s going to have to say it out loud. I’m not going to hand him the information.

I brush past him and pick my way across the rocks, through the tangles of bone-gray driftwood, and retrace my steps across the beach. When I glance over my shoulder, I expect to see him close behind me, or watching from the rocks.

But he is gone.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I’m dreaming of Nana.

We’re back in the trailer with the beaded curtains, but in my dream it looks more like my house or Jack’s. I know it’s Nana’s house because she is at the stove, stirring a pot of soup. She turns to me and smiles. I’m on the other side of the kitchen counter, waiting for my bowl to be filled.

What kind of soup is it, Nana?

She smiles, a stranger’s smile that frightens me. She dips her ladle into the pot and sets a bowl in front of me.

Floating in the broth is the hairless, grinning head of a dog, its lips pulled back over pale pink gums, its skin boiled and ragged, like a pig fetus in formaldehyde. Its eye is clouded and blue, rolling freakishly in the socket.

My stomach turns. I recoil in nausea and dread.

Eat your soup, Alice. It will make you strong.

But I recognize this dog.

It wasn’t fit to live,
Nana says. She has poisoned it and boiled it in a pot.

I can’t eat it, Nana, the poison will kill me, too.

No, lovey, it will make you strong.

In the bowl, the dog’s eye stares through the oil-smeared broth. And I know it’s somehow alive—and can see me.

The eye blinks.

I run out the door and into the street, where I stop to look back. Nana’s window frames are filled with spiderwebs instead of glass. Behind them, the house is burning. Nana is trapped inside. I see her face at the window, engulfed in flames.

I wake up screaming, clammy and nauseated, the sheet clinging like wet cobwebs to my skin.

Jack is there, awake but disoriented. He thinks at first there’s an intruder in the house and reaches for the crowbar he keeps by the bed. I’m clawing at the sheet, my feet bicycling, kicking the covers away.

He pulls me into his arms. I try to push him away but he won’t let go.

“Shh, it’s just a bad dream. Shh...”

I turn and bury my face in his shoulder. He holds me that way until I’ve stopped shaking. Then we share a small bowl of weed and he settles me into the bed. He goes back to sleep, but I lie there listening to him breathe, watching the pine trees take shape against the brightening sky.

After he leaves for work, I scoot to his side of the bed and bury my nose in his pillow, thinking of the way he looked at me yesterday as we stood beside the tide pools, the easy suspicion, eyes narrow and mouth smiling. He took me out to dinner last night as if nothing had happened, but followed me into the ladies’ room and locked the door behind him, lifted me to the counter and fucked me right there, with the faucets turned on and his lips at my ear.

“I’ll always find you,” he said.

Whether he meant it as a threat or a promise, I don’t know.

Finally, I give up on sleep, get dressed and into my car and drive up-island, to the suburban neighborhood where Nana’s trailer once stood. Now the land is covered with a cluster of pastel-colored houses with neatly trimmed lawns and squared-off boxwood. But the trailhead is still there. I park my car and start up the path, where as a child I used to walk looking down, seeking out snails and iridescent beetles on my way to the Red Ranger bicycle in the tree. Here in the forest, nothing has changed. The path turns and switches back under a canopy of moss-draped branches and spiked fingers of pine, where the scent of loam overwhelms the briny scent of the sea. I pass a grove of small trees and stop in front of the Vashon bike. Two young boys are looking up, circling the tree.

The bike is smaller than I remember and not as far off the ground. Someone has replaced the front wheel. The new one is the right size and shape, but too shiny. The bike is a patchwork now, a revisiting of the original injustice, an insistence on keeping the tragedy alive. I wonder how long it will take before the bike is vandalized again, and how long after that before someone reassembles it.

The boys are arguing about why the bike was left here.

“My dad says the kid went off to war and never came back,” says the blond boy.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” says the boy in the cap. “It’s a little kid’s bike.”

This is inarguable. The bike is small enough to be ridden by a five-year-old.

“Maybe he died,” says the blond wistfully. “Maybe he got run over at the tracks, and now he haunts the bike.”

There is a silence. Then one of them says, matter-of-fact:

“Or maybe he just forgot where he left it.”

* * *

At noon, I pick up some deli sandwiches and go to Jack’s work site.

He’s on the roof when I arrive, silhouetted against the chalkboard sky, moving nimbly along the spine of the skeleton house that someone else designed, where someone else’s dreams will live or die, where children will be born and grow and where they’ll sit for hours, staring out the windows. Where secrets will be kept—because what is a house, after all, but a very large box?

I get out of my car and navigate the gauntlet of scrap lumber and mud and knowing looks from the crew, to stand on what will be someone’s front lawn. The ground sinks under my feet, squelching around my shoes.

I call Jack’s name.

He’s surprised, and gratifyingly pleased to see me.

I hold up the lunch bag. “How about a date?”

“Mick’s gonna be so disappointed.”

He climbs down, and we sit on his tailgate with my picnic. I turn my face to the sky, wishing for some warmth from the sun. Summer has come and gone in a flash, hazy and fleeting as it used to be when I was a child. Now the days are shortening and the nights are chilly.

“So what was that dream about last night?” he says.

I shake my head. The dream left me with an inexplicable but overwhelming sense of shame; the last thing I want is to relate it to Jack.

“I can’t remember. Something about work, maybe.”

“You haven’t said much about the writing lately. How’s it going?”

I light a cigarette and shrug. “Well, there’s no shortage of words, but a definite lack of coherence. Gus keeps saying I should take a break. So I’m taking one.”

“For how long?”

“No idea. Until inspiration strikes?”

He points a corner of sandwich at me. “Thought it was you who said there’s no such thing as a muse, that it’s all just a lot of hard work.”

I wobble my head. Writing is unexplainable, one thing today and something else tomorrow. I need to finish the final book in the
Zebra
series and send it to my editor so I can move on to something new. The ideas are coming at me fast and hot, but even as I write them down, I’m conscious of a deeper story brewing underneath.

“How about this,” he says. “We’ll take the motorcycle, drive down the coast and find a place to stay for the weekend. By the time we get home, you’ll be walking funny and so ready to get me off you, writing will seem like the easiest thing you’ve ever done.”

“You’re always trying to put something big and fast between my legs.”

“Who said anything about fast?”

* * *

The motel is small and trim, perched like a sugar cube on the rim of a rocky cliff. The wind rises around us, a cool shock on my face when Jack parks the motorcycle and we take off our helmets. While he goes to the front desk to check in, I wander down the path to the cliff’s edge and stand looking over the sea and the creaming surf below.

I wonder what it would feel like to fly. To see the cliffs and the hotel disappear behind me, to dive like a kingfisher into the crumpled sea. The wind makes me feel light, as though I could sail away on a current of air. I close my eyes, stretch out my arms like wings, cup the wind in my hands and let it carry my arms up and down.

I imagine what I might look like from a window of the motel, poised here like a crippled bird at the edge of the sky. It’s so easy to perforate the membrane between what’s acceptable and what is not, between normalcy and deviance. My perforations are literal. Every nick is an attempt to make solid that shimmering altered consciousness, to get through and behind the curtain of pain, into that shining world a-spin on its axis where everything that hurts is suddenly liquid soft and warm.

The reality, of course, is ugly. Bloody. And misunderstood.

Which is how I came to be admitted to the Parker-Nash Mental Health Center at the age of fourteen. Suicide had never entered my mind, but explaining that I’d gone too far and laid my nicks in the wrong place was not a satisfying explanation to the big concerned faces around me. The incident would not be taken lightly, I was told. I would be helped.

And so began the conversation. Or attempts at conversation. Shrinks have a way of waiting for you to speak—legs crossed, arms open, aggressively silent, letting the vacancy consume the patient’s inhibitions. This probably works in paid therapy. After all, who would fork over two hundred dollars to sit in a chair for fifty minutes and refuse to speak? But I found in the silence another blade to play with. I didn’t correct anyone’s assumptions about me or answer any question more than once. I collected the most painful statements and replayed them in the silence; I let people know that I heard what they were saying about me and didn’t give a shit.

How long I would have played this new game, I don’t know. Because after about a week, Molly Jinks was admitted and took up residence in the room down the hall. She told me later that she had awakened one day utterly convinced that she would die if she left the Center, that it would have been like stepping into outer space. She’d suddenly felt as if gravity would not exist for her, that without the protection of four walls and a roof she would simply lift off the ground and float away. When her soc tried to coax her out of the room, Molly dug in and refused to move. Apparently things went downhill from there, with Molly holding on to the doorframe with both hands, screaming and biting at anything she could reach.

“Intellectually,” she would tell me years later, “I knew I was being irrational. But you become disconnected from your body when you can’t see it. You begin to drift.” She thought about this, and her voice became petulant. “I just wanted to be left alone. I couldn’t understand why everybody kept pulling at me.”

For two days I watched the people around her at the PNC. The patients were afraid of her. An eyeless albino. A freak. Most unfit of all the misfits. The nurses were kind and professional, but they tended to approach her slowly and hurry away.
What courage,
they said, looking over their shoulders.
What a pity!

Yet Molly was docile, sweet to the adults as always. Her resting expression was that of a blind Madonna, a wise half smile playing on her lips as if she were immersed in a world that had only become visible after Lyle Pax pulverized her eyes with a hand spade. She was beyond the membrane. I was fascinated.

It was Molly who came to me, though how she discovered I was there I still don’t know. I was in my chair by the window, where I’d been for the better part of a week, silently watching the wind move through the treetops and the people outside scurrying down the patchy sidewalk. I heard her cane tapping along the wall and watched her round the corner and cross the carpeted living room.

She had grown taller, of course, in the four years since I’d last seen her. Unlike me, she’d developed a woman’s body, slim and lithe, with a lovely flared hipbone and long, slender fingers. Her body should have redeemed her beauty in some way, but somehow it only made her ravaged face more disconcerting—like a Lladró figurine with a chipped goblin’s head glued on top.

Molly patted and crept her way into the chair across from mine, settling back with her legs pulled up to her chin. She unfastened a braid and began to pluck it apart.

“Alice,” she said as if in explanation.

“Molly,” I said, so we’d know where we were.

“You weren’t going to say hello?”

“Vow of silence,” I said. My voice was hoarse with disuse.

From down the hall we heard a fight begin between a patient and one of the nurses:
Get off me! Get your fucking hands off me!
Yelling was common among the lunatics; we barely noticed it.

“I thought you’d write me,” she said.

“I did. But there was no place to send the letters.”

“M. Jinks,” she said. “Care of noooobody.”

“Care of the state of Washington.”

“Exactly.” She smiled, her face turned to the light. The scars radiated from under her black glasses like a child’s drawing of the sun. Her fingers twitched at her braid. “I’m surprised to find you here, Alice. I thought you had better survival skills.”

“My skills are fine. I am surviving.”

“I see. Got tired of being the good girl?”

I thought about this. “I’m exploring my options,” I said.

“Oh, right. Let’s review. Option one: be charming and lovely. Find your forever home, become a schoolteacher, marry well and have two point five children and a house in West Bellevue.”

“I’m sunk right out of the gate.”

“True. Miss Congeniality, you are not. Moving right along to option two: lay low, eighteen and out. Learn to play the guitar. Develop a heroin addiction—not there yet, are you?”

“No, but I’m not ruling it out.”

“Right? You could end your days like a rock star, face down in vomit on the floor of a seedy motel.”

“A rock star with no musical talent. Unprecedented.”

Molly laughed. “Option three: perfect the art of the snarl. Bite the hands that feed you.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“Get jiggy with a bullwhip. Become a jewel thief in a leather mask, the next feline fatale.”

“I’d look terrible in a catsuit.”

“Go bald,” she said. “You could be—”

“Lex Luthor.”

She nodded, leaning her head back on the chair. I could see the bottoms of her empty eye sockets from under her glasses. It was like seeing a man with his zipper undone.

“It’s good to have options,” she said softly.

When it was time for dinner, Molly folded up her cane and took my arm. I was startled, and awkward as I led her down the hall to the dining room, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re beautiful,” she said, “aren’t you? I always thought you would be.”