Alice Close Your Eyes (9 page)

He leaves me then, and I wait through the reassuring crackle of his condom. Then he’s back, settling between my legs. He slips off my blindfold.

“Look at me,” he says.

He pushes forward, an inch at a time, and I can’t help but close my eyes against the pressure, the immense, thick maleness of him inside me. He drags his fingers through my hair. His lips move over mine.

“Open your eyes.”

He holds me still, withdraws and comes slowly back, watching my face. Then he lowers his head, his sandpapery cheek against mine, and begins to thrust in long, elliptical strokes, a gradual acceleration. Each rotation of his hips drives us on.

It feels safe now, to be under his control. The harder he pushes, the more securely I am held, the more relaxed I become. I am inside his space. He’s strong and lethal and he is all around me and he is mine. I want to get as close to him as it’s possible to be. I want the weight of him, the anchor. I want to live under his skin, inside his heavy bones, with all of Jack around me. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, following his rhythm, rising to meet him with each long stroke, until he grows too fast and strong to keep up with, too ragged to follow, and I can only let myself be carried by him into a last blinding surge of pleasure. His cock throbs like a heartbeat and his teeth close on the underside of my shackled arm, and he comes silently, shivering, buried inside me.

When the last pulsing convulsions have stilled, and he’s begun, finally, to soften, he unlocks the handcuffs and rubs my wrists, kisses the angry red marks and apologizes.

“I don’t know, baby,” he says, laying my hand across his eyes. “I don’t know.”

But he never explains what he means.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I keep the box Jack gave me on a shelf in the far corner of my closet. It contains my treasures now, too, separated from his by a wooden divider down the center. It’s a beautiful object, too pretty to be set aside this way, with this motley collection of battered shoeboxes and boot boxes and one flimsy pie box full of odd bits of writing that I’ll probably never use. But when I leave it out on my dresser, the box seems to reproach me.

Secrets are nothing to be careless with. Molly taught me that.

She taught me many things. We spent that summer at the Center in a strange groove, immediately more intimate than I had ever been with another person. The impermanence of our friendship was one of its draws; I knew she’d carry away my secrets as I would carry hers, and there might be a measure of relief in letting them go.

Not that we thought of it that way. We were kids; we moved and played as children do. Most days we went next door to the Pax Nursery, a family-run business with flowers and herbs at the front of the lot and inside the main building, then shrubs and rows of ornamental saplings running out to the edge of the property, behind which was a peach orchard and a slow-moving river. It was something of a haven to the Center kids––a safe, cheerful place that smelled of orange blossoms and clean soil.

Lyle Pax worked there with his father, restocking the plants and transferring the seedlings to bigger pots. At thirty years old, his body was thin and strong as wire, but you could see the disability plainly in the rubbery wetness of his mouth, the way his lower lip hung and twitched as he repeated things over to himself. We learned from his father that Lyle had been in a car accident when he was fifteen and had spent over a year in rehab before his family was able to take him home.

Years later, this disability was stressed by his lawyer. Medical records were produced, showing the extent and location of the brain damage, and expert witnesses were called to explain how little he was to blame for what happened that summer.

No one had the heart to argue. Blame was assigned to those soft white spots on the MRI, those dead little pieces of Lyle Pax’s brain where conscience and self-control should have resided.

Watching him with the late-summer flowers, so gentle with the water on their blossoms, you’d never think he could hurt anyone. Even right afterward, after what everyone called “the incident,” with his spade still dripping blood, with blood on his hands and splattered on the ground, he seemed baffled and as docile as ever. He kept saying tearfully that he didn’t know what had happened; it was something about her eyes.

He was ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, and died several years later in the state psychiatric hospital.

* * *

Molly and I used to go to the nursery sometimes, for something to do. This was deemed a healthy activity, and since the nursery was right next door to the Center, they left us to it. We liked to push our noses into the gardenias and make little puppets of the snapdragons, and Mr. Pax indulged us. He’d give us ice cream sometimes from the freezer behind the nursery counter, and he’d let us eat our fill of peaches, right off the tree. The little Shakers from the Center, he’d call us. We thought we were loved.

If you ate that ice cream too fast, it would stick at the back of your throat and explode in a sudden agony, through the roof of your mouth and like a steel blade to the base of your skull.

“Brain freeze,” Molly would scream, and she’d smack herself between the eyes. “Eat it faster, Alice. Feel the paaain....”

She’d dare me to swallow big mouthfuls, delighted when my eyes began to water.

We used to play hide-and-seek at the back of the nursery, where the saplings and young pines stood in their wooden boxes, going down to the orchard and almost to the river. It was Molly’s game, really. I would have stayed inside with my books if left to my own devices, but Molly couldn’t be still that long.

Instead, I ran and dodged through the trees, tucked myself behind shrubs and inside wooden crates, made myself a secret for Molly to find.

“Hide someplace better,” she’d say when she uncovered me. She refused to be impressed with my hiding places, even when I’d crawled to the middle of a drainage pipe under the road. I crouched there in the mossy puddles, waiting, sure this time she’d pass by and I’d be safe.

It took her about two minutes.

“I’ve hidden here lots of times,” she said, peering into the darkness. “Come out, it’s your turn to be It.”

“No fair,” I said. “You were peeking. You didn’t go all the way to fifty.”

“Whatever. My turn to hide, start counting.”

She would never admit to cheating. It was part of the game as far as she was concerned.

Lyle Pax would sometimes play with us, but I didn’t like being found by him. When the branches parted and the sky showed behind his smiling face, I would jump up and run away, my heart banging like a kettledrum in my chest.

Molly said I was a chicken. She was not afraid of Lyle.

“He’s just slow,” she said.

But I understood that word literally, and knew that Lyle Pax was fast enough.

And I knew something else about Lyle. One day I had gone alone down to the river, not from the nursery but from the back gate at the Center. I found a half-buried tree trunk and sat down near the water, watching the patterns of light as the river eddied and flowed around the rocks. After a few minutes, Lyle Pax came up the path from the nursery, right to the water’s edge. There was something furtive in his movements, in the glance he cast over his shoulder toward his home, that froze me in place; when he unzipped his jeans to reach inside, I was sure he was unloading some bit of stolen merchandise to hide it in the woods. Instead, he knelt down, shifting, and I saw what was in his hand.

Until that day I had never considered the ways in which men were different from us. If I thought of them at all, it was in terms of facial hair and flat chests and deep voices, and strange soft bulges in the front of their pants. The concept of a male erection had never once occurred to me. When Lyle took his in hand, I wasn’t even sure at first what I was seeing. But as his arm began to move, I felt the response from my own body, the faint, dreadful tightening between my legs, the distressing fascination of seeing something adult and being unable to catalog the experience in a way that made sense. I sat transfixed, barely breathing, a silent witness to what looked to my eyes like an act of criminal desperation. His shoulders were hunched forward, the muscles in his hand and forearm tense, straining, as if to rid himself as quickly as possible of something he was not supposed to have.

A strand of milky liquid shot from his fist. He slumped back on his heels and watched the river carry it away. Then he wiped his face with his shoulder, zipped up his jeans and went back to work.

Molly was surprisingly uninquisitive when I gave her a halting version of the story a couple of days later. But I saw the cunning slant of her eyes and knew she’d acquired something she considered valuable.

She began to follow him around, asking questions:

“Why are you putting the geraniums back here with the roses?” We were hanging around outside the greenhouse, hoping Mr. Pax would offer us some ice cream or a soda. “Wouldn’t they look better around the entrance?”

Lyle’s expression was placid. “Dad told me to.”

“Do you always do what your dad says?”

“Sure.”

“Really?
Always?
”

“Sure.” He smiled.

“But you’re grown, you don’t have to follow orders, do you?”

Lyle didn’t answer. His mouth twitched as he thought this through, sensing a trap.

“Sometimes you do what you want.” Molly’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Don’t you, Lyle?”

“Sometimes.”

“By the river, sometimes. Am I right?”

He picked up a bag of mulch, tossed it over his shoulder and hurried back into the building.

Molly stood looking after him. Then she turned to me with an expression I couldn’t fathom.

“Why did you tell me about that?”

I was startled. “I don’t know. It freaked me out, I guess.”

She gave me that same wily glance and went away.

We never spoke about it in the days after that. Molly didn’t seem to want to play, so I went without her to the orchard. Sometimes I saw her with Lyle, laughing, helping him carry the little flats of seedlings. She’d look up at me and grin, one finger tracing a circle next to her ear, and she’d whistle like a cuckoo when he was out of earshot.

I asked Molly why she wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Why should I?” she said. “I’m the kid. He can leave if he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“Well, he can’t really. He works here.”

“His dad owns the place, he can throw me out.”

“Yeah, but you know he’s not responsible—”

“
I’m
not responsible.” Her voice rose and broke over the words. She slapped her chest with both hands. “
I’m
the kid.”

He is, too,
I wanted to say. But Molly’s pale eyes had brimmed with tears and I was too surprised by this to speak.

I heard them nearby the day before the incident. From my seat in the cool damp soil behind the ornamental maples, I watched the two of them at the mouth of the tunnel of trees and I listened to their conversation. Lyle had a pair of pruning shears in his hand, and Molly an oily sack full of her treasures. She opened this and they bent their heads to look inside.

As they talked, I wondered about Lyle, what his life was like, what he thought about. What might a thirty-year-old man with the mind of a child have on the walls of his room? Where would he go when he wasn’t with his family? I couldn’t picture it; Lyle clung to the place, he never talked about anything but the nursery.

“I collect things,” Molly said, reaching into the bag. “Look, this is from yesterday.”

She placed a small object in Lyle’s muddy hand.

“What is it?” he said.

“A kaleidoscope. You hold it up to the light and look through, and see, this part twists....”

Lyle set down his shears and held up the cardboard kaleidoscope. The plastic beads inside clattered softly as he turned it.

“Look-it there,” he said. “Flowers!”

Molly smiled and slid closer to him. She was holding something up to her face, the magnifying glass, which made her eye seem huge and monstrous.

It was nasty of Molly to tease him, but she was like that. She didn’t care about hurting someone’s feelings, even if the person she was teasing had been kind to her. And with as much torment as Molly took from the kids at the Center—goat-face, they called her, and whitehead and freak—it was easy to understand her glee at being on the other side. Someone else was getting the jab. It moved her up a rung.

When Lyle saw the magnifying glass, he let out a frightened shriek like a bird call.

Molly laughed. “You should see your face. Oh, you should see your face.”

He began to tremble. A long sound came up from his throat,
ah ah ah,
and a dark spot spread like ink down the front of his jeans. He dropped the kaleidoscope and stumbled away with his arms crossed in front of him, down the row of saplings toward the house. As his voice trailed away, I crept out from my hiding place.

Molly shook her head, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “Did you see his face?”

“He peed himself,” I said reproachfully.

“Hey, man,” said Molly, who had once been made to sleep in a foster’s garage after throwing up on the bedroom carpet. “Things are tough all over.”

* * *

The next day I was angry at Molly.

She had stolen from me. I had been given a strand of shiny beads, and when it came up missing I went straight to Molly and found it hidden at the bottom of her bag.

I confronted her with the beads, dangling them in front of her nose.

“These are mine,” I said, stung at the betrayal. “You stole them.”

She was sullen and unapologetic.

“There’s no place to hide
anything
here,” she said.

It was because of me that Molly went to Lyle Pax to ask him to hide her things. It was because of me, because I threatened to tell her secret.

There’s nothing worse one person can do to another.

* * *

Some things you don’t need to see. Some things you know.

Molly went alone to the nursery that day with her crumpled bag of treasures. All the small pathetic objects jostling around, a collection that anyone would glance at and toss in the nearest garbage can. But she left the Center and went to see Lyle Pax, to ask if he would hide them for her.

She didn’t realize how afraid he still was, or how unstable.

She walked up the shoulder of the road, pebbles pressing up through the soles of her shoes, the bag rattling gently beside her. She entered at the wooden gate, silently moving up and down the rows of trees.

She didn’t understand how gnomelike she would appear. How strange with her bulbous head and crooked smile, that rabbity pink light in her eyes.

When she laid her hand on his arm, she thought she was meeting a friend.

* * *

From my room with the window open to the balmy day, where I sat with a book across my lap, I heard a high-pitched cry. It began as a sustained whistling note, then broke and deepened to a frantic, throaty wail like something from an animal. The kind of noise you don’t realize that particular animal could ever make.

It took me several seconds to realize what I was hearing.

Screaming. And underneath, a deeper male voice:
ah ah ah.

* * *

Some things you see without witnessing.

When I close my eyes, I see a thin man at the end of a tunnel of trees, a spade like a dagger in his hand. And Molly sobbing on the ground beside him, two red pools where her eyes used to be.

* * *

When I get home from Jack’s house, I set down my purse and head straight for the closet. I take my box down from the shelf and carry it to the living room, set it down and arrange my treasures in a row along the edge of the twill ottoman: a picture of me with my mother and Nana, happy and whole, sitting together on a driftwood log with our feet in the sand and our hair blown by the sea breeze into an intertwined mass of black, blond and auburn; an Arbus photograph clipped from a magazine, of twin girls with pale braids—on one twin, I had colored in the braids with a pencil, and on the other I had blacked out the eyes; my birth certificate and my mother’s death certificate, folded together; the brooch Nana used to wear, an onyx raven with a bizarre crook in its wing and a bloodred ruby for an eye; a ticket stub from
Les Miserables;
a small plastic pack of razors that can be ejected one by one like the candy in a Pez dispenser; an Indian-girl key chain made of beads that my mother bought at a Seattle street fair, because she said it looked like me; and a page of handwritten dialogue from act three of
Othello
: