Alice Close Your Eyes (15 page)

On the nights she was alone, she usually slept in the living room, exhausted from screaming at the politicians on TV or repeating loud amens and hallelujahs along with the kind of congregants who would shiver and roll their eyes in a religious fervor before falling out in a trance at the miracle of forgiveness. Also, she shopped. She knew all the TV salespeople by name and had strong opinions about which of them could be trusted: “Lisa’s on tonight, she’s doing a cooking show with Cody, and I really do need a new frying pan.” Lisa and the gang sold her on dolls and gadgets and spandex underwear, on Popsicle molds, egg slicers, pinking shears and jewelry, producing a steady stream of UPS boxes and an ongoing flirtation with the delivery man. Verity never remembered what she’d ordered, so every box was a surprise. She said it was like having Christmas every day.

Definitely, she was crazy. But we all have our thing.

I tried to stay out of the way. At night, I would bundle up in layers of socks and sweaters, and go down to the garage to paint that day’s collection of bowls, or experiment with new glazes on the ceramic coffee cups. A space heater buzzed at my feet, and a bare bulb swung overhead, pushing the shadows around the room like dancers. The garage was quiet and damp and uncomfortable, but the silence drew me almost every night.

Sometimes it drew Michael, too.

He was teaching me to play backgammon. He had a beautiful set with red and white checkers made of polished stone that he would rub with his thumb as he surveyed the board. He knew all the variations from Russian backgammon to acey-deucey; he said he’d learned the game at the Center when he was fifteen and used to play with his friends in the yard, or even by himself if no one else was interested.

I liked the patience of backgammon, the interplay of skill and chance. We played most nights when Verity was asleep on the couch or watching the shopping network for late-night deals. Michael kept a tin of weed in the shed, and we would pass the pipe back and forth as we tried to psych each other out, filling the cold room with skunky smoke that mixed with the steam from our breath, mingled over the board, then settled like a cloud bank at the ceiling.

It was easier to beat him when he first taught me the game. Later, as I learned the ropes, I found it almost impossible.

“You were letting me win,” I said.

He grinned. “You wouldn’t have wanted to play if I beat you every time while you were learning.”

“And now?”

“Now you’re hooked. You’ll keep playing whether you win or not.”

“You’re like a drug dealer. ‘First time’s free...’”

“Very perceptive, young lady.”

I looked up. “Really? You’re a drug dealer? What do you sell?”

“Just weed, mostly. Used to push some coke, but that was a pain in the ass. People would buy a little, go away, come back again in the middle of the night for more. And more, and more. A pothead is just gonna take his bag of weed and leave you in peace.”

“Huh. Is this a big deal?”

“Does it look like I’m a big deal? It’s a sideline when I have extra.” He moved a checker, lining them up to beat me again. “When I get my own place, I’m going into business for myself. A buddy of mine said he’d get me some seeds and help me set up a grow house. Really, you just need a room and some lamps to start with, but once the crops are rolling it’d be easy enough to expand. Just takes time.”

“And money.”

“Yeah, money. But not as much as you’d think.”

He went on to describe his plans. He had the whole thing all worked out, with prices and timelines, details about licensing and semilegal sales channels he’d already worked out. It surprised me that he had such a well-thought-out agenda. Michael had always seemed a little lazy to me, unambitious. But as he talked, I began to realize how much work he actually did. Often it was Michael who drove me around Vashon, who did the grocery shopping or the laundry, who collected the hens’ eggs and made dinner for all of us. He was so quiet and easygoing that I had never given him credit for his initiative.

I imagined him prosperous, bright and warm in his greenhouse, with all his plants around him.

“This probably sounds like a pipe dream,” he said, grinning at the weed in his hand. “But I’m really going to do it.”

“I know you are.”

* * *

I have a picture of Michael in my box at home. Just a snapshot I took one night when we went out for pizza. He’s got a slice in his hand, such an ordinary thing. But sometimes I look at the picture and search his face for some hint of knowledge—an orb of light floating near his head, some haunting double image or regret in his eyes.

Sometimes I even think I see it.

* * *

At dawn I’m still awake, curled in a chair by the window of the white motel, the notebook Michael gave me lying open on the table. I thumb through the pages, reading bits of work I did years ago at that rickety desk in Verity’s house. Much of it is unfamiliar to me. Writing exercises, poems, assorted fragments from whatever I was working on at the time, none of which went further than the notebook in my hands. The fact that the pages are written in my handwriting unnerves me, as though my past self is trying to send a message through the void.

Lonesome is a quiet man

who leads you from the crowd, whispers in your ear

that you are not okay.

Lonesome is an open sky: a far-off birdcall to a fallen mate, repeating; a curled-up

chick inside an egg, freezing.

It’s the scent of a stranger’s house, the lure of the unknown, the deep, damp base note of

skin and sweat and semen.

This is where his spirit lives, here

amongst the dying plants, whose leaves

lay crisp and fragile on the floor,

where weed is left in a kitchen drawer, and thick shoes sit

beside the mat, encased in mud that breaks like glass and crumbles by the door.

Here is his mind,

exposed: in the bills, stacked or scattered,

the carpet, clean or torn; in the leftovers, the aftershave, the kitchen knives, the porn.

Within these walls there lives a spirit.

Just inside the door.

I look over at the bed and see Jack is awake, watching me. His hair is rumpled and his wide shoulders are curled lazily forward. One long arm is stretched across my empty side of the bed, palm down. He looks like a big exotic cat, tangled in the sheets.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he says, gruff with sleep.

“Put your glasses on.”

“What are you writing?”

“Just something I started a long time ago from a prompt.”

“What’s the prompt?”

“
Lonesome is
. Dot dot dot.”

“Interesting. Can I read it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jack’s opinion matters to me; I won’t be able to dismiss what he says.

“It makes me uncomfortable. All my subliminal crap is still in there.”

“I’d have thought that was a good thing.”

“Not for me, I’m not that brave.”

He beckons me, holding the blankets up and patting the mattress beside him. I set my pen aside and crawl in next to him, let him spoon his warm body around mine.

“Why would you need to be brave?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No. I’m asking you.”

“The more people know about you, the more powerful they become. You’ve got to hand that shit out in small doses.”

“You think me asking to see your work is a power trip?”

“I think we both understand your desire for leverage.”

He kisses my ear and the back of my neck.

“I don’t want leverage,” he says.

“No? What do you want?”

His voice is a murmur in the half-light.

“I want to give you what you need, and take what I need. I think they’re the same thing. Am I wrong?”

I hesitate. We never discuss the things we do, and Jack never asks permission. He just knows. Somehow, he always knows. His knowledge of my body is almost supernatural, so finely tuned that he can bring me to the edge of climax and spin me there like a yo-yo on the end of a string, until I am wired and slick and pleading for release.

I’m not sure that’s what he means, but the answer is the same in any case.

“No,” I say. “You’re not wrong.”

He lifts the hair from my neck and nuzzles in, wraps his arm around me. For a few minutes we are quiet, and I wonder whether he’s gone back to sleep. I close my eyes and begin to drift.

“Why don’t you ever sleep at night?” he says softly.

Silence creeps into the room.

“Is it just since your mother died?”

“Yes.”

“Since you went into foster homes.” His voice rumbles behind me like distant thunder, a vibration at the back of my neck.

I don’t open my eyes. The sun filters through a chink in the curtains, pinkening my eyelids. His arm is solid and heavy around my waist, his palm cupping my breast.

“Yes.”

“I see,” he says.

What he sees, he doesn’t say, and for that I’m grateful. We lie together quietly and after a few minutes Jack falls back to sleep.

I wish it were as easy for me.

Even with my eyes closed, I feel the presence of the door across the room.

I hear the long-ago creak of another door, one that always opened—even when I’d locked it, even when I’d jammed it with a chair, with a desk, finally with my pink lacquered dresser, which I’d dragged across the room.

Even when I’d sealed it up with an entire roll of packing tape.

Even when I gave up on the bed altogether and slept behind the clothes in my closet.

The door always opened.

Eventually I stopped trying.

Don’t hide from me, Alice, you know I’d never hurt you. I only want to make you feel good.

The horror was that it did feel good. Big hands, strange acrid male smells. Huge invasions that stretched and burned but also, shamefully, brought with the dread an inexplicable excitement, a helpless itching pulse between my legs that utterly devastated me.

You like it, honey, doesn’t it feel so good....

I prayed that it would not. When the terrible thrill rose in me, I tried to absolve myself with nicks and cigarette burns as if a heady dose of suffering would mitigate that awful moment of acceptance, that horrifying onslaught when orgasm rushed through me like a demon and left in its wake a craving for sensation I couldn’t bear to feel. I tried so hard to carve it out of me that the pain and pleasure and shame and fear became inextricably linked in the process, and any one of those sensations could trigger any other.

Later I would fuck other men. Terrifying men who recognized the addict in me, whose perversions mirrored my own. One of them dug a copy of
Lolita
out of his glove box and sent me away with it. I was flattered at first—Lolita was my age, the source of an older lover’s obsession—but after reading the book I realized he’d meant to be ironic. Humbert’s nymphet inspired love. I inspired at most a fascinated infatuation. With my black hair and clothes, flat chest and filthy mouth, I was a sinner’s nightmare. Men fucked me quickly, looking over their shoulders. They fucked me and skulked away.

It seemed I was not the only one trapped in this nightmare; we were all afflicted. I began to feel a sort of nauseated tenderness about the whole business, which I brought back into line with firm swipes of the razor.

Too firm, on more than one occasion.

In the aftermath, as I walked the halls of the PNC with the night nurses and cleaning crew, past doors with names and numbers on the side, I found myself sometimes opening Molly’s door, slipping between the cool sheets as she had done four years earlier when my mother died.

“We are so fucked up,” she would say, but we’d twine together for comfort and I’d stroke her milk-white hair, and sometimes I’d stir at daylight and realize I had slept.

Jack’s breath is heavy now and his hand is warm around my breast.

Doesn’t it feel good, honey, doesn’t it feel so nice....

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I wake up one afternoon not feeling right. My body is heavy, and there is an unlubricated stiffness in my joints that makes even the smallest movement seem like an enormous effort. I get up and sit with my pages, but the words have become hieroglyphics, devoid of meaning, a collection of sharp and painful letters on a glaring white page. It’s three o’clock. Jack is supposed to come over after work; we have plans to check out the new Italian restaurant up-island and maybe go for a drive along the coast. But after a long hot shower and a mouthful of acrid coffee, I decide I’m coming down with something. I call him, leave a voice mail and crawl back into bed, shivering uncontrollably though my face and chest are prickly hot.

I wake again to the sensation of the bed sinking. I am startled, rolling forward, but my eyelids are heavy and almost impossible to open. Through the curtain of my eyelashes I see Jack sitting beside me. His hand is wide and cool on my forehead.

“I think I’m sick,” I tell him as if imparting valuable information.

“I think so, too. You need to see a doctor.”

I shake my head, and the room seems to tilt as though I’m going to slide out of the bed. I clutch at the sheets and close my eyes, muttering that he should go home and let me sleep it off. But he lifts me, blankets and all, from the bed, carries me through the front door and lays me across the backseat of his truck. The engine starts up and I fall asleep again, shuddering with cold, listening to the sound of the tires on the wet pavement.

The next time I awaken, Jack is leaning into the truck—
Put your arm around my neck, baby, there you go—
and carrying me through the open door. Raindrops sting like BBs on my face, the top of my head, my eyelids. Then I am inside, still wrapped in my blankets. I know this clinic and the doctor. His drawl seems even deeper and more languid than I remember, as though his throat is full of oil. Hands at my neck, fingertips gently prodding, a swift professional touch, a wooden tongue depressor that makes me gag. The doctor asks questions and Jack answers. He shifts the blankets around my feet, takes off my socks, puts them back on. I am given a shot, something to swallow, then I am gathered up and we go back into the rain.

* * *

Bed. I bury my face in the pillow and recognize the scent of Jack and know he’s brought me home. His home.

* * *

It’s dark the next time I open my eyes. Jack is at the side of the bed again, with a mug in one hand and three pills in the other. I struggle to a sitting position. My muscles ache, and my head is buzzing as though several vital connections have been burned away.

He hands me the mug.

I take a tentative sip. It tastes like hot, hard lemonade. “What is it?”

“A concoction. Drink it up and take these.”

He puts the capsules on my tongue, presses the back of his fingers to my forehead.

“You have the flu,” he says.

I choke down the pills. “I feel like shit.”

He smiles. “You’ve looked better.”

He takes the empty mug from my hands. I collapse against the pillows and curl onto my side. He goes around the bed and climbs in with me, his big warm body fitted to mine at the hips and knees, his lips pressed to the back of my neck.

I fall asleep with his arm wrapped around me.

* * *

Over the next few days, he stays home with me. He helps me to the bath, washes my hair, feeds me broth and ice cream and pills. He buys a heating pad and tucks it around my feet. We play cards in bed, watch movies, listen to an unabridged version of
The Stand
. I urge him to go to work but he refuses.

“I never get sick,” he says, “so I’m going to take advantage of your flu and score a few days off for myself.”

When I remind him of the project he’s been worrying over, he silences me.

“I’m not leaving you.”

I remember previous illnesses, the social workers who made sure I saw the doctor, then redeposited me at whatever shelter or home I was living in at the time. No one has ever stayed with me this way, not since Michael.

A week before Christmas at Verity’s house, I went down with a bad cold, exacerbated by the fact that I refused to stay in my warm bed at night and instead spent the hours coughing and sniffling in the garage. The holidays had sent Verity into a binge of drinking and shopping, and all I wanted was to be out of earshot and alone with Michael, who took one look at me and left without saying a word. He returned a half hour later with a sack full of medicine and a new space heater.

“I should have thought of this earlier,” he said as he plugged it in and aimed the fan at me.

I rubbed my hands over the warm air.

“You don’t need to baby me,” I said. “I’m a big girl.”

But he had the bottles lined up, all the proper dosages measured out, and a big cup of soup to wash down the tablets.

“Thanks, Dad,” I joked.

He grinned and pulled my hat down over my eyes.

A couple of days later, he brought home a tree from the lot he’d been working in Burton. He hammered two slats of wood to the bottom and dragged it inside, and sat next to it all evening, stringing popcorn and cranberries for garland. He’d bought lights and a box of twelve ornaments at the drugstore, plus a white plastic angel for the top.

For a while, I watched him silently from the kitchen table. His fingers were stained red and he’d been a few days without a shave. But I liked the nimble way he used his hands. Like a musician, deft and sure. After a while, I set my pages aside and went to join him.

“I didn’t know people actually strung cranberries,” I said, threading a needle. “I thought it was just in books.”

“My mom did,” he said. “She did all that stuff. Presents, sugar cookies, big turkey dinner. She said Christmas was for kids, and she always made a big deal of it.”

I hesitated. “You’ve never said...”

“Car accident. I was twelve.”

I pushed a cranberry onto the needle. It made a small popping sound, and a drop of red juice swelled at the tip.

“You must remember her pretty well, then.”

He waggled his head. “I remember her, but I didn’t really know her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean I knew her from a kid’s point of view. That’s not the same as knowing her as a person.”

I frowned. “I think it is. Kids see more than adults give them credit for.”

“Maybe. But my mom was at twice the legal limit when she died, and she was driving. I wouldn’t have thought she’d do something like that when I was a kid. I didn’t think of her as a person. She was my mother. I always kind of thought she was infallible.”

Verity came downstairs then, in her stretch pants and sequined T-shirt. She laughed and said our tree wouldn’t make the cover of
House Beautiful
.

“Maybe not,” Michael said. “But Alice should have a Christmas.”

She raised her glass of red wine.

“Well, I ain’t her mother, so you go on ahead.”

On Christmas morning, I found a stocking by the fire and in it a small box wrapped in brown paper and trimmed with hemp string and tiny pinecones. Inside the box was a fine silver chain, with a sterling pendant shaped like a heart.

I looked up to see Verity’s face, sallow and puffy, the creases from the sofa cushion in a pattern across her cheek. She was looking at me as though she’d made a sudden and unpleasant discovery.

She had saved herself a couple of UPS boxes to open that morning. I found them in the garbage the next day, the seals still intact.

There was knowledge between the three of us after that.

Though I was quiet and stayed carefully out of the way, Verity must have known on some level that I was a threat. She tried to think of ways to keep me out of the house. She’d already gotten me a job as a bagger at the market and now found me another at a secondhand clothing store owned by a friend of hers. She collected the money I earned—for the household.

“I expect you to earn your keep, missy. We got no room for slackers around here. You don’t pull your weight, back you go. You remember that.”

I looked at her steadily.

“I’ll remember,” I said.

Verity went away, muttering under her breath.

Michael and I talked things over during the long, cold nights in Verity’s garage.

“Maybe you should leave,” he said.

“Go back to the Center?” I said. “What’s the point? And anyway, who are you to talk? You’re twenty years old, why are you even here?”

He looked at me across the backgammon board, the light threading through his eyelashes, laying shadows like spiders on his cheek.

“Why do you think?” he said.

But I didn’t know what to think. Michael had friends in Seattle; he could easily have found a place to stay while he got on his feet. Everyone liked him; it was impossible not to. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t leave. His reluctance made me impatient.

“I don’t get you,” I said. “You keep talking about saving for a place of your own, but you’re handing over almost your whole paycheck every week. How’s that going to help?”

“It’s not, I guess. But I feel sorry for her.”

“Why?”

He moved a checker. “Well, look at her. Married and divorced four times, living in a house that’s about to fall down around her head—”

“She’d have more money for repairs if she didn’t send it all to the Home Shopping Network.”

“Alice, come on. She’s grabbing at things because she’s fucking drowning, and all of this—” He waved his hand at the teetering stacks of half-finished cups and bowls on the tables around us. Verity had stopped taking a booth at the market weeks ago. She never said why, and I never asked. “The guys, the booze, the shopping. She’s drowning, and all she’s got to hold on to are a thousand rubber duckies.”

I had to smile. “And you think you’re a lifesaver?”

“No. But I can’t help—” He looked at me. “I want people to be happy.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on his. He turned it over, pulled off my glove, held my hand to his face. My fingers curved around his cool cheekbone. His beard tickled my palm.

“I want
you
to be happy,” he said.

“I know you do.”

He pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist. The skin there tingled with cold.

“You’re underage,” he said.

“Overexperienced.”

“I want to do the right thing. I don’t know—”

I laughed. “The right thing. Okay, Michael.”

He turned his chair and pulled me into his lap, and he swallowed up my laughter, already burrowing through my layers of clothes with fingers so cold they seemed to burn. He uncovered slivers of bare skin, his hand inside my jeans and the slippery warm center of me, two fingers reaching up and his lips like a brand on my neck.

“Stop me,” he said.

Michael was like a brother to me, the closest thing to family I would ever have. But I had no faith in brotherly love. I took off my jeans and opened myself over him. His breath rose in a cloud around my face, and through this haze I watched the house at the top of the yard, the bright yellow window in the corner.

* * *

The next morning, a quiet storm settled over the Sound. The sky thickened and sank into the trees. Snow bloomed in the air, floating as if through water to the ground. An eerie silence crept in. A breathless hush, and everything suspended, waiting.

I dressed and went into the gauzy stillness, past the garage and the small stand of trees to the field beyond, and I stood there alone, turning in slow circles to see my tracks like stitches behind me and the dark smudge of trees through the fog. I tilted my face to the sky to catch the snow on my lashes and the tip of my tongue, to watch my breath disappear into the mist.

Michael came out of the forest silent as a shadow, right to me without stopping. He slid his cold fingers under my cap, pressed them to my scalp, opened his chilled lips and pulled me inside to the warmth of his mouth. The silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat and the soft fan of his breath on my cheek, and almost the snowflakes themselves as they drifted to the ground.

“I’m leaving,” he whispered. “Come with me.”

The untouched snow lay smooth and clean on the field before us. Beyond that, the small quiet road, the patient ferry. A whole world waiting for us to step into it. We could have kept walking across the snow. Maybe we’d be walking still.

Instead, we retraced our steps and went back to Verity’s house.

* * *

I shiver now in Jack’s bed, thinking of the enveloping cold, the empty stillness of that morning. Jack pulls the covers around me and his hand moves over my body without lingering, long firm strokes of friction to warm me. I turn to him gratefully, my head tucked under his chin. His hand moves over my back. His erection rises between us, then softens, unacknowledged.

After four days I am finally able to eat solid food. My body no longer aches, but I’m thinner and weak as a child. I look up as Jack comes out to the back porch, into the low morning light, his cheeks freshly shaved and a mug of coffee in each hand. The sunlight catches in his eyes, skates across the line of his jaw. His sweater is pushed up to his elbows and he has a book under his arm. I feel my body’s response, the slow warm stirring, heat moving down the tops of my thighs, and know the illness is over.

“Thank you,” I say.

He sets down the coffee next to my chair and kisses my forehead. He strokes my cheek with his cup-warmed hand.

* * *

Jack and I find the flower man in the farmers’ market two weeks later.

We’ve stopped for lunch after seeing an exhibit of the work of Julius Shulman, the photographer who immortalized the work of architects like Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright. Jack has several of Shulman’s books at home and has been looking forward to the exhibition for weeks.

“They thought they could change the world,” Jack says as we stroll through the market. Spring has melted into summer, and the city is fresh and sparkling under a flat blue sky. “It seems almost painfully naive, these days.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not the world, but is it too much to think you could improve one corner of it?”