Alice Bliss (36 page)

She hopes this looks like remorse rather than an attempt to contain hysterical laughter.

“It’s all about trust, Henry,” Mrs. Grover says.

“I know, Mom.”

“Trust you earn every day.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Henry’s head is bending lower and lower over his plate.

“We didn’t . . .” Alice begins.

“Good!” Gram finishes for her.

“You’re too young!” Mrs. Grover adds, picking up on Gram’s perennial theme.

“Can we go now?” Henry asks.

“Go where?”

“Just for a walk,” Alice says in her most innocent voice, like, remember how we were in diapers together?

Miraculously, they let them go. Everyone is so distracted and overwhelmed and exhausted, eating and drinking too much, or not at all, relieved that Henry and Alice and the car are safe and sound, that they return to their conversations and refill their glasses, as Henry and Alice walk out the kitchen door and head off through the backyards.

Gram and Mrs. Grover watch them go and even though Henry and Alice are very careful not to touch each other, Gram and Mrs. Grover can see in their bodies, the way they yearn and turn toward each other, that something has happened. Mrs. Grover sits down suddenly in one of the kitchen chairs, a dishtowel in one hand, a serving platter in the other, feeling an overwhelming urge to cry. Gram sits down beside her and takes her hand.

“He’s loved her all his life,” Mrs. Grover manages to say.

They ponder this a moment as Henry and Alice pass out of sight into the deepening twilight.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Gram says.

The Memorial Day parade passes right by their house, as it always does. Uncle Eddie is driving the newest Miss Belknap in a bright yellow Corvette like he does every year. Different car, different Miss Belknap, same old Uncle Eddie. But Uncle Eddie looks a little different, too, Alice notices, a little uncomfortable, or distracted, like his heart’s not really in it. Maybe this is the last year for a lot of things.

Alice and Henry have set up chairs on the sidewalk. Ellie, Angie, and Gram are marching with the local Veteran’s Association. This year the Greater Belknap VA invited all the families of men and women serving in Iraq to join them in the parade.

Alice and Ellie made Angie a sign to carry:

Alice joins Henry, bringing lemonade, though she refuses to sit down. It is too soon to be out here, too soon to rejoin their friends and neighbors like this. Alice still feels raw, as though her emotions are constantly on the verge of being out of control. Some days she can pretend to be normal, some days she can’t; so she stays on her feet, ready to clear out if necessary.

She has been drawn to the curb almost against her will, to hear the school bands and see the old soldiers and the young soldiers, to see the policemen in cruisers and on horseback, to see the teams marching, and the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. She is not with her team; in fact, she is off the team. She has promised B.D. that she will run all summer and rejoin them for cross country in the fall. Right now, though, Alice still can’t predict what she can and can’t do each day. She is only now beginning to think that she could ever go back to school.

She waves at Mrs. Minty across the street and down a ways, and Mrs. Piantowski, a bit farther down, surrounded by her children. And there’s John Kimball and his father and his brother, Joey; and Stephie, with her mom and dad.

Here comes the Folding Lawn Chair Brigade. Their annual comic routine of synchronized and choreographed moves with lawn chairs and music is always a big hit. This is Ellie and Henry’s favorite part of the parade. Next are the politicians in convertibles, the fire trucks, and the high school band.

The World War II vets and the Korean War vets, in their faded uniforms, their numbers dwindling each year, follow the band, walking a bit slowly, some with pinned up sleeves, some with canes. Next come the Vietnam vets wearing bits and pieces of jungle fatigues, some with ponytails, or bald, with pot bellies or green berets. And finally, bringing up the rear, the Iraq veteran’s group in their desert fatigues. People fall silent as they pass. You can hear the hush rolling up the street, the same way you could hear the bands approaching. It’s eerie to hear the crowds go quiet.

As they get closer Alice can see that Mrs. Grover is walking with Ellie and Gram. Ellie walks between them, holding their hands. And there’s Angie with her sign. Mrs. Piantowski steps off the curb to join them, and so does Mrs. Minty, who is carrying a homemade flag over her shoulder that reads
PEACE
.

Alice surprises herself and walks into the street to join her mother. As if this is what she had planned all along, though in all of the confusion she has been feeling, this is the one thing she was sure she would not do. But here is her mother, carrying a sign with the name of her husband on it, her husband and the father of her children.

There are two other young widows carrying their husband’s names, and a few other Iraq vets and their families. There’s a young man in a wheelchair, missing both legs, another on crutches, another with part of his jaw gone. A smaller group of men and women march under the banner: Veterans Against the War.

At first Alice just walks beside Angie. Henry joins his mother, and he and Mrs. Grover walk right behind them. Alice links arms with her mother, and finally, Angie hands her the sign. Alice carries her father’s name; she holds it high. Angie rests her hand on the small of Alice’s back, and Alice thinks of Matt and the roof and his voice in her ear telling her:
You can do it, Alice.
She carries her father’s name through the streets of her town, past the houses and yards and faces of her neighbors.

She can hear the band playing up ahead of them. She looks back to get a glimpse of Henry and can see that more and more people have joined them. Not a movement, exactly, but a dozen more people publicly standing with the veterans and their families.

Angie leans over to whisper in Alice’s ear before she puts her arm around her waist and draws her close. They walk in unison, more together than they have been in months, possibly years, until Alice hands Angie the sign and peels off from the group and sprints the few blocks home.

 

She walks through the house. Past the six black boxes that arrived a week ago and that none of them can bear to unpack. Each pair of socks, each T-shirt, each letter, each photograph is inventoried on twenty sheets of paper. Everything has been washed, so when you breathe in the scent of a shirt, it doesn’t smell like him. Only his pillow, Alice has found, has any trace of his scent. Maybe they don’t know how to wash feather pillows.

It’s strange but there is really nothing left of her father in these boxes, in these sheets and towels and uniforms. These things are not Matt, they are just things.

She heads out to the garden and sets to work picking baby green beans, peas, radishes, greens. The gourds are going crazy, the tendrils of their vines fanning out across the low fence Alice and Matt built last year. Looks like it’s going to be a bumper crop come fall.

It’s quiet in the garden aside from the buzz of insects and the occasional birdsong. She stops for a moment to really listen: she can hear cars on Belknap Road and poplar leaves stirring like soft coins in the breeze. She closes her eyes and listens again. The moments when she hears her father’s voice in her head are less and less frequent as each day passes. Alice wonders if his voice has gone silent and if this silence will last for the rest of her life.

She heads for the workshop, leaving her basket of produce in the shade. Inside, she stands for a moment, trying to find him. She runs her hands over the workbench, feeling the nicks and dings in the old wood. She trails her fingers over the tools hung along the wall and opens his tool chest, touching everything inside.

She stands looking at the box of letters stored up in the rafters. She desperately wants to read every single one and just as desperately wants to wait as long as possible to read the first sentence. She can feel the promise of his voice in those letters and she also feels a terrible foreboding that reading them will be the end of something; that reading them now, too soon, will diminish the power she is sure they hold.

Finally, she climbs up to get them. She grabs a folding chair and sits quietly for a long time. Her father is trapped inside boxes everywhere right now, except here in his workshop and in the house, in his closet. How soon before her mother cleans out the closet and gives away his clothes? How soon until Angie wants to turn the workshop back into a garage? Maybe Alice is going to have to learn how to use all of these power tools, learn how to make things and repair things, to justify keeping this workshop just the way it is. Who can teach her, she wonders? Maybe she could work with a carpenter this summer, like an apprentice, like being on the roof with her dad. And in that thought, she thinks, there is the echo of Matt’s voice.

She lifts off the top of the box, flips through the letters. The big events he wrote about haven’t happened yet, graduations and a wedding and losing her mother. So she looks through the series of letters with the heading, “the little moments that make up the big moments that might get forgotten.” The first one, “the moment you realize you want this boy to kiss you” seems just right. She opens it and begins to read:

 

Alice laughs. Her father is writing to her about kissing and also more than kissing and he’s funny; she forgot how funny he is. Maybe one of these letters includes his manual on farting and all the special names he has for different kinds of farts: frips and gribbles and spilbers.

He’s funny, she remembers with relief. He was funny and full of life and loved to work hard and get dirty and eat ice cream and play baseball and play with his kids. She remembers his patience those spring twilights playing catch with her and with Henry, the endless pitches to Henry for batting practice, his patience with her in the garden, in the workshop, his delight in teaching her things. Did she really like to garden or did she like to elicit that delight in her father? Does it matter? He was so easy to please. Stand up straight, tell the truth, do your best.

She sees a letter she doesn’t remember noticing before: “Dad’s words to live by,” and opens it right up. Just exactly what she was thinking about.

 

In his perfect block printing, here it is, his list:

If she closes her eyes, she can hear him, in each of these words and phrases, she can hear him.

School has ended. Alice kept up with classes, more or less, from home. The readings and assignments for English were no big deal, and her English teacher, Mrs. Cole, even came by the house twice to talk to her about themes and possible essay questions for the final. Henry helped with history, and her mom hired a tutor for math and science, this incredibly shy eleventh grader named Kimmie. They stretched the rules and let her log her running miles for gym credit, and chorus is just pass/fail anyway. When it came to exam time, Gram sat with her in the kitchen every afternoon for a week as she took her finals, one by one.

The day after graduation, John Kimball drove over to say good-bye. He was leaving for basic training later that day.

Angie, who had never really met John before, or couldn’t remember meeting him at the funeral, fights back sudden tears when Alice introduces them. She holds on to his hand for a long moment, just looking at him.

“Be careful, okay?” she says, before releasing his hand.

“Yes, ma’am.”

When Alice walks him to his car he surprises her and takes her hand, pulling her into a hug.

“I’ve had really bad timing with you. Maybe one day you’ll give me another chance.”

Alice steps away, looks at him. She knows, now, that you can’t send a boy into the unknown with nothing to hold on to.

“Maybe you’ll visit when you’re home on leave.”

“That could be a year.”

“I know. I’ll still be in high school, remember?”

He laughs.

“Getting less interesting to you with each passing day, probably,” she laughs back at him.

“You could write to me.”

“About what? Trigonometry? Homeroom? Track practice?”

“That wouldn’t be so bad. Everybody says letters, real letters . . .”

“That’s just like my dad: ‘
You can’t carry an e-mail in your pocket.
’ ”