Alice Close Your Eyes (7 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

A strange thing is happening. The world around me is breaking into fragments, as though I’m looking through a sheet of broken glass. Each shard reveals a clear but separate piece of the view, but when I try to put them together it seems the picture is distorted and obscured by the cracks.

The sensation is vaguely familiar. In the days and weeks following my mother’s death, as I was moved from my home and into the foster system, it seemed as though the days were made up of a series of jagged and unrelated images. The visuals stand out in sharp relief, though the larger story—where I went, what decisions were made on my behalf—has never been clear in my mind.

Instead, I am left with individual pieces of the scene: a bubble in the paint next to my bed at the Seattle Children’s Center, a small run in the carpet where the cement showed through, a frayed bit of curtain. Above each bed was a cartoon figure made of tufts of faded plastic like a hooked rug. Mine was Cinderella, which struck me even then as a cruel sort of joke to play on a child.

There were faces. Big faces, pressed too close, and big hands. The damp odor of children, like crayons and wet chicken feathers, with a lid of disinfectant over the top. The clammy pipe-metal handrail on the stairs. A laminated sign in the bathroom with a cartoon picture of a frowning toilet, reminding us to flush.

I went to live at the Center even before my mother’s funeral, processed and ushered along by a succession of adult authority figures who eventually deposited me at the Cinderella bed, in a room I would be sharing with another girl my age.

She stood between the beds as my caseworker, Carla, made the introductions.

“Alice, this is your new roommate, Polly Jinks.”

“Molly,”
said the girl in a thin exasperated voice. “
Molly
Jinks.”

She was fantastically ugly. An albino, with long white hair that trailed over her shoulders in two lumpy braids, and boiled blue eyes that flashed a rabbity pink when the light shone in from the side. Her body was like mine: unformed, narrow, exactly my height. She was wearing a sundress with a safety pin at the waist and a pair of grubby foam flip-flops to which her pale toes clung like roots.

“I stole you a feather pillow,” she said after Carla had gone. “You should probably keep it under the bedspread, just in case.”

In case of what, she didn’t say. She sat down on her bed, legs crossed, plucking at the hem of her dress. After a moment, since there was nothing else to do, I sat, too.

“Your mom died,” she said. It was a simple statement, repeating what she already knew. But the three words twisted like wringing hands inside me.

I am an orphan,
I thought.
Little orphan Alice.

Molly began to unravel one of her braids.

“Mine is still alive. Somewhere. I mean, I guess she is.”

She thought about this as she reached the top of her braid and started over. Her silvery hair twined around her fingers and the inside of her wrists.

Molly must have braided her hair fifty times a day, minimum, each side. She was a chain-smoker on training wheels, who unfastened her rubber bands with the weary anxiety of an adult flicking a cigarette lighter. This was her thing, everybody had one. Some kids would zone out on video games or TV; some would eat too much, or not enough, or they ate small bits of themselves like fingernails and scabs; the older kids fought with the adults, the young ones trailed around after them like puppies. We were twitchy or preternaturally still, as if we’d each short-circuited in some specific way as a result of the missing connections in our lives.

I became a cutter that summer. It was my thing.

“You won’t be here long,” Molly said comfortably. “They’ll want to put you with a foster before school starts. Your soc will start bringing people over for you to meet. If you like them, smile a little and start talking about how much you miss your mom. Or cry, but not too much or they’ll think you’re a head case. But you probably won’t like any of them. I never do. The last place I went, they didn’t even have a TV. Can you imagine? I was there a week, and only because it took that long for my soc to come pick me up.” She tied off the end of the braid and started on the other one. “I didn’t tell her it was because of the TV, of course, or she wouldn’t have come.”

She smiled. “You’ll learn.”

It was summer when I went to live at the Center. The staff had activities for us, I suppose, sports and books and all that, though I don’t remember much of it now.

I remember Molly, my self-appointed mentor. Ten years old, and the most accomplished thief I have ever met.

“Watch this,” she would say. And she’d sidle up to some unsuspecting adult, pointing to a splinter on her palm. When they leaned over to look, Molly’s other hand would dart nimbly sideways to a purse or pocket. She never came away empty.

“You need a distraction,” she told me, clicking her new pen. “But it can’t be the same thing every time or people will catch on.”

I was in awe. “Don’t you ever get caught?”

“No,” she said. “Nobody notices. Don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”

Not funny, exactly, but I saw what she meant.

Molly could steal anything. Mostly she lifted odd little things: a penny that had been pressed into an oval with the Disneyland castle on the front; a barrette made of pink plastic beads; papers from her own file that she never let me read. Sometimes she took expensive things like the magnifying glass she’d snagged from an elderly foster mom, but she never seemed to care about the object’s value. She said money wasn’t the point.

I didn’t have to ask what the point was. I knew it already. Molly’s stealing was a form of emotional scavenging, a way to creep a bit closer by carrying off a person’s belongings. It didn’t take me long to work that out; I was sneaky in my affections, too.

Growing up in foster care had made her something of a philosopher. She had an opinion on every topic and seemed to feel it was her duty to educate me.

“The problem is,” she said as we played cat’s cradle with a loop of frayed green yarn, “everybody tells you to be good, but they all mean something different. Mrs. Drummond means be quiet and remember to flush.”

We were sitting cross-legged on her bed, our nightgowns tucked up, bare knees bumping. I pushed my fingers into the loops and pulled them through hers.

“Teachers mean be quiet and do your homework. And don’t cheat.” She lifted our hands and gave me a sly smile through the lines of yarn. “I bet
you
don’t cheat.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then you’re stupid. Smart people cheat all the time, everybody knows that.”

She shook out the yarn and we started over.

“Foster parents mean be quiet—everyone means be quiet, ha!—and
smile
. A smiling kid makes them look good.”

“Why?”

“Means the parents know what they’re doing,” she said. “Grown-ups are always watching each other. You don’t get to stop pretending just ’cause you’re old.”

We were silent for a moment, trying to make Jacob’s ladder, a complicated pattern consisting of several steps that always fell apart before we could finish.

“You’ll see. Fosters have weird sets of rules, and they think everyone else’s rules are stupid. I lived in one house where they kept a lock on the refrigerator and the cupboard doors. The dad did that, to keep the mom out of there ’cause she was fat. It didn’t work, though. She would get back from the grocery store and hide food all over the house. I mean, everywhere. Under the sink, in the garage, inside the bins full of Christmas decorations.” She giggled, and our ladder collapsed. “Anytime I needed a snack, I could go right to my laundry basket for a bag of chips.”

I looked at her uneasily. Molly talked about foster care like she was telling ghost stories. “Did the dad ever find out?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “But he didn’t hear it from me.”

Mrs. Drummond came to the door. “Lights out,” she said.

Molly gave her an angelic smile and leaped up to turn off the lamp. But a moment later she also opened the curtain, and we resumed our game by the light of the moon.

“Rule number one for how to be good,” she whispered. “Don’t tell the secrets.”

Her fingers slipped through mine inside the loops of yarn, her eyes flashing mercury-silver in the moonlight.

We understood each other from the beginning, and Molly was nice to me. She didn’t seem to mind that I was quiet, and I took comfort in her slippery conversation, in the strange pale presence of her. Her oddness was reassuring somehow, a constant visual acknowledgment that the world around me had shifted and everything ordinary had been left behind. A more commonplace friend would have unnerved me.

Because we were the same height, people started referring to us as Salt and Pepper, and later simply as the Shakers: me with my black hair, Molly white as salt. Opposite yet exactly alike.

Molly was a prostitute’s child. She had come into the world completely unattached and, with her goblin’s face and queer, knowing smile, she made adults uneasy. Every attempt to place her had come to nothing. She was a changeling; no one wanted her for very long.

What she thought of this, I didn’t know. Molly kept her secrets well. It was only now and then, when I’d glance up to see her watching me, when she’d offer to braid my hair or help me untangle a knot in my shoelaces, that a glimpse of her feelings would show through. We would stand side by side at the bathroom mirror, gazing at each other’s reflections.

“You’re going to be beautiful,” she said once.

I could think of nothing to say in response; I wasn’t sure I wanted to be beautiful, but answering that way to Molly would have been like refusing an expensive gift.

“You’re going to be Lex Luthor,” I said finally, and we both laughed, a dangerous moment averted.

* * *

Late one night, weeks after my mother died, I lay awake in my Cinderella bed and started to cry. The crying began from someplace deep inside my chest, as though my tightly held grief had begun to unravel, to release the tears from my body with a pain so intense I thought I was dying. My breath came in sharp, knifelike gasps. My limbs tightened and curled inward. I felt my mother standing at the other side of an uncrossable chasm, too far even for me to make out her features, too far ever to touch. She was gone, truly gone, and I was and would always be alone.

Molly crawled from her bed into mine, shivering down under the covers. She wiped the tears from my face with the sleeve of her polyester nightgown, and patted the top of my head until the spasms subsided. Then she kissed me, tight girlish kisses over my lips and face. She reached up my nightgown and stroked me through my underwear.

Molly said this was what grown-ups did. To make each other feel better, she said.

* * *

I think of her sometimes when I’m with Jack. When his jaw scrapes my skin, when he pounds and pushes too hard, I remember the smoothness of Molly’s young cheek, her tentative fingers and tongue, her secret wish arising from a grown man’s perversion.

Same as mine.

CHAPTER NINE

The first time Jack leaves his clothes at my place, I think it’s an oversight. I wash them and leave them folded on a chair in the bedroom. But the next day he brings more, in an old canvas gym bag, and leaves those behind, as well, crumpled next to the bed. Later, a shirt, an odd pair of boxers, one sock. A pair of muddy work boots drying on the front porch. Gradually the stack of clothes on the chair seems to be saying something, so I clear out a drawer and put them away. I brush off his boots and set them next to mine in the closet and think,
There you are, Daddy,
and wonder where that came from.

I don’t leave my clothes at his house, though he’s been trying, I think, to make me feel at home. He asks me to stay while he’s sleeping, so he can see me in the morning before he leaves for work.

“Bring your work with you,” he says. He buys me a chair for the ship room and clears off the table so I can use it as a desk. It’s surprisingly easy to work in this room, surrounded by the silent, vacant ships tossing on imagined seas—an idea in a bottle, a world inside the glass walls. Like me with my pages, trying to pin the whole thing down. I feel safe in this house, with Jack sleeping like a guard dog down the hall.

In the morning, long before dawn, he wakes without an alarm and pads barefoot to the ship room where I’m working out the latest plot twist. It’s been a long night and I’m at the point in my draft in which the whole thing resembles the ramblings of a nine-year-old. My eyelids feel like sandpaper.

“You look tired,” he says. “Why don’t you come in and lie down.”

My heart turns over like a sleepy child at the sight of him, rumpled and radiating blanket heat across the space between us. I lay my pen aside and rub my eyes with my knuckles.

“I should probably get home.”

He moves up behind my chair and lays his big hand over my chest, his thumb stroking my neck.

“How about I run you a bath, make you something to eat and you can sleep here until I get home from work.”

Since the day we met I have not been alone in Jack’s house or left him alone in mine. I haven’t showered or slept here. I’m tired and hungry, but the bath makes me nervous. I’ve been careful to keep my bad foot covered. The scars could only have been made by a cutter—the assortment of old and new, all on one foot, all suspiciously symmetrical—all unmistakably deliberate.

Jack sees my hesitation and unknowingly delivers the best argument of all.

“I have bubbles,” he says.

Concealment.

So he runs the bath and I light a candle, smoke some weed, brush my teeth. When the tub is full he undresses me and I slide into the water, let it close womblike over my head and come up gently, the waterline at my lips. I blink at him in the candlelight.

“You don’t even know,” he says. He sits outside the tub, his chin propped on one arm, free hand snaking under the surface to find my breast.

“Will you tell me something?” I ask.

“Probably.”

I lick the water from my lips. “What was prison like? What was it like, really?”

“Is this for the book?”

“No.”

He doesn’t answer at first. His hand is gentle, his thumb passing back and forth over my nipple.

“People throw the word
nightmare
around,” he says. “A crowded store is a nightmare. A wait in line. A tax audit, whatever. But in a real nightmare there’s a sense of unexpectedness. Nothing makes sense. You’re going along and suddenly your house is not your house, or the person with you is not that person. And you’re still applying waking logic, you’re trying to make it make sense. You want to wake up, not just because you want to get the fuck out, but because you’re looking for order in the chaos. You want things back the way they were when you were awake.”

His hand travels down my body, his fingers slide between the folds of my labia.

“Prison is that kind of nightmare. Anything can happen and nothing makes sense. It’s a circus of freaks. And you’re locked inside.”

His fingers circle my clitoris, and he finds a steady rhythm, up and down, his eyes on my face. I know, and am comforted by knowing, that he’ll bring me off.

“I thought about women all the time in prison,” he says. “We all did. Alone at night. All of us jerking off, you could hear the mattresses. The cursing. Everyone dying for a woman. Pussy was all we talked about.”

I lean back and let my legs spread open as if in sympathy, thinking of the men he describes, the need in them, the rotation of power from male to female. I feel the echo of that pent-up desire in the gravitational force of my body. The idea moves me. Excites me. There is a difference in the glide of his fingers as he draws the fluid from my body.

“Not even just the way it feels to get laid,” he says. “Not even the fucking blissed-out ride. We missed everything.”

His eyes are on my breasts, which rise and fall with my breath and the tidal pull of his voice and fingers that draws my body like the ocean to the moon. I lift my feet from the water and brace myself on the edge of the tub. My head tips and I arch back. The water eddies around my nipples.

“The way you look when you come, the way your mouth opens. The sounds you make. The way you taste when I’ve got my tongue inside you.”

Orgasm approaches from a distance, a wave on the horizon, building in size and weight. His fingers have not left my clitoris and his voice is low and calm, but underneath is the relentless physical force of him, heavily in orbit around me. I am fluid. I am the sea, rising to the shore.

“So hot and wet, you can’t imagine. You don’t know how much I think about it. You don’t know what it feels like, watching you come.”

A note of tension creeps into the seductive cadence of his voice. He wants me. He wants to see me come and I want to watch him while I do. His gaze moves over my breasts and mouth, to the water where his hand is submerged. He slides his fingers inside, curved upward, and presses hard. He sees my surprised response and murmurs encouragement. This is like nothing I’ve felt before. He’s uncovered a secret my body has been keeping even from me. His fingers pull me into a rhythm and I begin to move with him.

“Let’s see it, baby, let me see....”

He nudges me from the inside, the tip of his finger fitted like a key into a hidden lock. A wave of pleasure overtakes me, sweeps up my body and lifts me to his hand. My lips part and I let go with a sigh. I watch him, watching me, my clitoris in the palm of his hand. He looks as if I’ve given him a gift.

“Oh, fuck, yes,” he says. “You don’t even know.”

I close my eyes. My vagina contracts around his fingers as he draws the last retreating ripples from my body. When I am still, he smooths his hand down my thigh, around my calf and ankle. I remember my ugly foot and drop it quickly back under the bubbles. I see a flash of puzzlement in his expression; to distract him, I rise out of the water to kiss him full on the mouth.

“
You
don’t know,” I tell him, tracing his lips with the pad of my thumb.

He helps me out of the tub and dries me with a beach towel, tucks me into bed. I lie naked between the sheets with the scent of his hair on the pillow beneath my cheek.

“Lie still, baby,” he says. “I’m going to make us something to eat.”

He kisses my forehead and I roll to my stomach and close my eyes. I am swollen, heavy with sleep, warm and tranquil as a sunbather on an empty beach. I hear the distant clatter of pans and dishes, the friendly shush of rain outside the window, and I am asleep.

* * *

My foot.

Something is moving up the sole of my foot. In sleep, I imagine a dog’s nose snuffling. Then awareness rushes me upward. I open my eyes.

Jack is at the end of the bed. He has the covers pushed back and he’s bent over my foot, frowning. His thumb is the dog’s nose from my dream.

I scramble up the bed, swatting him away. With one hand I draw the covers to my chin, and as I do there is a crash. He must have set a plate on the bed and I’ve sent it overboard.

He doesn’t look away from me. His eyes are steady, his mouth an uncrossable line. He takes a fistful of the covers and pulls gently, evenly, one hand over the other. I can hold the sheets in place or I can let go—either way is just the same with Jack.

I am naked and trembling against the headboard when his fingers close around my ankle. He straightens my leg and I look away, more exposed than I have ever been.
Don’t look at me.
I want to scream and fight, bloody his nose with my heel.
Stop looking at me, I’ll hurt you, leave me alone.

He doesn’t say a word. He presses a kiss to the unwilling sole of my foot and lays me back on the barren expanse of the fitted sheet. His voice when he comes makes me want to cry.

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t...”