Saving Alice (2 page)
“I’m sure God has noticed your ears as well,” I said, then surprised myself by adding, “The Bible also says, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, move, and it will.”
The second it was out of my mouth, I felt like a fake. Who did I think I was, acting as an apologist for God? Besides, in a world of famine, disease, and death, I didn’t think Shrek-a-lina ears qualified for God’s overt attention.
“A mustard seed is pretty small, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Tiny,” I agreed.
Alycia’s excitement grew. “And Jesus healed people all the time, didn’t He?”
“You bet.”
“Well … I think my faith is a little bigger than a mustard seed,”
she announced.
“There you go.”
“So … can we pray about this?”
I cleared my throat. “Sure.”
She scowled. “I’ll pray, Dad. You just relax.”
“I’ll do it,” I insisted, and she looked at me warily. I reached for her hands, and we closed our eyes. I whispered an awkward prayer, and when I finished, she seemed suddenly calm. “Okay. All set.”
Ten minutes later, she sat on a bathroom chair as I proceeded to numb her ears, then disinfect them. Alycia kept her eyes closed, and breathed heavily. Her panic returned with the first punch. She grimaced and whined, “Dad, don’t mess up! Don’t scar me for life! Don’t ruin my romantic future!”
“Sssshhhh…” I whispered.
“I
can’t
sssshhhh!”
“And don’t talk about your romantic future to me, please.”
“Face it, Dad, I’m blossoming.”
I punched the last hole.
“Ouch!!”
“You couldn’t feel that.”
“It
felt
like I felt it!”
Finally … I installed the pins and stepped back. Sniffing tentatively, she stood up. Facing the mirror together, I braced myself as Alycia stared at her image in disbelief.
Amazing
. Her ears were hardly distinguishable at the sides of her head.
Alycia burst into tears and hugged me tightly. “I love you, Dad.”
I chuckled wryly and demurred her praise, but she shook my shoulders with wild abandon. “I’m serious! You saved my life.”
I chuckled again. “Well … maybe not your life.”
Wide-eyed, she shook her head adamantly. “I beg to differ, Daddy dearest.” She looked at me with such adoration, it took my breath away. She hugged me again, so tightly, it would have required the Jaws of Life to peel her away.
“And thank you, God,” she whispered into my chest. “Thank you for giving me the coolest, smartest Dad!”
While I didn’t mind sharing the credit, it all seemed so melodramatic. Then again, my daughter was the ultimate drama queen.
You saved my life,
she’d said, and yet when I look back on that day, I tremble.
What I wouldn’t give to have it all back.
A
fter I performed the miracle on Alycia’s ears, dear ol’ Dad could do no wrong.
She fixed me snacks on demand, retrieved the morning paper, and washed my car—no small feat—just to see my pleased expression. She even vacuumed the carpet in my office, and one day when I was studying the price and volume squiggles of the stock market on my home office computer, I caught her staring at me.
My chair squeaked as I turned around. “Something hanging out my nose?”
“Gross, Dad!” she exclaimed, leaning forward and resting her chin in her clasped hands. “I’m studying you.”
“That’s, well, comforting.”
Alycia smiled innocently, a little too innocently. “I want to know what makes you tick.”
“
I
don’t even know that.”
She was undeterred. What came next, during the following weeks and months, was what I call her curiosity phase, a time when she asked me countless questions and sat with rapt interest, palms on cheeks, while I told her stories from my childhood. I should have been honored; instead I was nervous.
While some of our discussions took place around the dining table, most of her interrogations occurred in the car as I played chauffeur—a captive, unable to escape. Of course, I respected her need for pure, undiluted honesty. “When I was a kid,” I once began, watching the road, “we had no computers, no TVs, no cars, no beauty salons, and every morning I walked thirty miles to school— including Saturdays.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell Alycia was rolling her eyes. “For real, Dad.”
“Okay, you caught me. The truth. After school my father locked me in a closet and fed me bits of bread under the—”
“Dad…”
Finally Alycia resorted to pointed questions, designed to penetrate my uncooperative behavior.
Speaking of your dad, why is Grandpa so weird? Was Larry your best friend? Or Paul? Did you get all A’s? How old were you when you first dated?
And the big one:
When did you fall in love with Mom?
I never gave the latter a straight answer, saving the whole truth for much later when hopefully she’d be old enough to understand, like age forty-five. Although my stories contained ample face-saving modifications, Alycia was good at putting two and two together.
I was driving her to the mall one day when she blurted out, “What aren’t you telling me, Dad?”
“Say what?”
“You’re dissembling.”
“Am not!” I protested, then frowned. “What’s ‘dis—’?”
“Start over, and we’ll see if your second version matches the first.”
“Tell me again why you want to hear this?”
“Don’t be so sensitive.”
The more questions she asked me, the more evasive I became. Finally, she fixed me with a knowing smile. “You’re hiding something. You have a secret, don’t you?”
“A secret?”
“Everyone has secrets,” Alycia declared. “Yeah, like a mystery. Hey, maybe I could even solve it for you!”
“That’s clever.”
Alycia brightened. “You do, don’t you?”
I affected my best innocent expression, and then trudged up some rousing tale to distract her—like the day Larry and I threw firecrackers on the top of kid-adverse Mrs. Schumacher’s aluminum trailer in the middle of the night, hastening to add that we apologized years later.
I stopped at the front entrance of the mall, and Alycia got out, then paused in the open car window. She winked. “You can run, Dad…”
“Yada, yada, yada,” I replied intelligently.
For the moment, Alycia dropped the “secret” stuff, but I detected a knowing glint behind her eyes. Very annoying, but as usual she was right. I had a secret, and so did her mother. Actually, we had two, and while they weren’t of the earthshaking variety, so far we’d done a pretty good job of keeping them under wraps.
“I don’t want her to worry,” Donna often told me. “You know how she is.”
I agreed, but obviously we were only buying time. Unless I came clean soon, Alycia would discover the truth from her friends at school. In that event, my daughter would likely storm home and confront me, “Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? I thought we talked about everything!”
The other secret, ironically, was hidden within Alycia’s own name. If she’d just snooped through her mother’s old pictures, she would have figured it out.
Sometimes Alycia’s need for the truth skirted the edges of tact, especially since she had a nasty habit of calling a spade a spade. For better or worse, Alycia has always had an uncanny knack for sizing people up.
On the way to the “Y” where she was enrolled in a summer volleyball camp, she asked me, “How old were you when you realized Grandpa was a jerk?”
I gave her my parental scowl. “Grandpa deserves your respect.”
“Sor-r-ry,” she said melodramatically, as if
I’d
said something wrong. And yet guilt clouded her features.
She quickly transitioned to her next topic, but I was still contemplating her question. The answer was “age ten,” and while there’s a story involved, it’s certainly not the kind you’d tell your pre-adolescent, post–Santa Claus daughter. Besides, Alycia wouldn’t have been interested. It didn’t contain a smidgen of romance.
On the other hand, it’s also safe to say my entire caldron of simmering secrets—including the ones Alycia seemed so desperate to uncover—had originated the day I met Jim.
It all began after a long day in the fifth grade, when I spotted my father’s car parked on the street across from the playground. Without smiling, he waved me over, striking terror into my young heart. I knew I was in trouble for something. But what did I do?
I got into the car, and my father proceeded to drive in the opposite direction of home. For several worried-filled minutes, I scrambled through my mind for my crime, hoping to figure it out and apologize long before he removed his belt. I remember staring at him out of the corner of my eyes—his long narrow face, pale and splotchy, was pinched in concentration. Several wisps of his slicked-back prematurely graying hair had broken free despite copious applications of Brylcreem. The smell always got to me. His large nose overpowered his face—especially from a side perspective—as if it had a personality all its own.
My father often joked,
When we hit it big, I’m getting a nose job,
and my mother would kiss his nose with her typical smooth-thingsover approach,
It’s your best feature, dear!
Although I resembled my father, I’d acquired my mother’s reasonable nose. She did, however, have giant feet for her size. For years I’d monitor my nose carefully every morning, going so far as to measure its length to settle my fears. Sometimes I measured my feet too, relieved when they seemed to be growing. If something had to stick out, I’d rather it be them. Later I wondered if perhaps my family’s penchant for oversized appendages had found their way to Alycia’s ears.
My father cleared his throat but remained silent.
“Everything okay, Dad?” I finally managed to squeak out.
He only grunted. Eventually, he turned into a gravel lot, the tires crunching as he pulled on the steering wheel and parked in front of a seedy storefront with bright neon signs. He told me to lock the door behind me, and I did. I followed him through the lingering clouds of our dust into a cavernous bar saturated with the scent of whiskey and rum and a lingering hazy smoke that stung my eyes.
The bartender, squinting into the doorway, was rubbing a tiny glass with a white towel. When he saw me, he cleared his throat and glared at my father. “C’mon, Lou, they can yank my license.”
My father gestured helplessly and spoke in a woeful tone I rarely heard at home. “I’m stuck with ’im, Phil; the wife’s got one of those doodad appointments, and I got a deal going with Sam. Is he here?” My dad looked around desperately, and I wondered how he could see anything in this dingy place.
Phil shook his head. “You’re a piece a’ work, Lou,” he said, shaking his head. “Make it fast.”
My father shrugged, throwing his briefcase on the counter. “Just tryin’ to make a living.”
I climbed up on the stool, relieved to learn this wasn’t about me, and ran my fingers along the smooth wood finish.
“Thirsty?” Phil asked me, leaning over the counter with hunched shoulders.
I rustled around in my pockets. “ I don’t know if I’ve got enough—”
“Hey, Lou, your kid’s thirsty,” Phil said.
“Put it on my tab,” my father said absently, pulling papers out of his briefcase. My father didn’t drink, but he provided no end of drinks for his clients.
Phil’s face clouded again. “I told you. No more credit.”
I heard the sound of a flimsy door slamming behind me. My father twisted in his seat, and his foul mood did a one-eighty. “Hey, Sammy, I’m bringing the office to you…”
I looked up at Phil helplessly. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not that thir—”
“It’s on me,” someone said in a low, raspy voice, and for the first time, I noticed the guy sitting on my right, wearing a tan cowboy hat. His hair, which stuck out below, was silvery, his face grooved like an old tire, and his nose a misshapen lump of gray flesh, with tiny little spiderlike veins, to match the ones on his cheeks. With a cigarette nestled between two right fingers, he cradled a shot glass with the same hand, as if saving his left hand for something more important.
“Fair enough,” Phil said to him, and then to me: “I got orange juice, 7-Up…”
“How much is the juice?” I asked, still searching my pockets.
“Don’t worry about it,” the old guy said, taking another sip. “Git ’im what he wants.”
Phil nodded, walked away, and I sat there, embarrassed. By now I’d already been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of handouts, and I didn’t like how they felt. “Thanks, mister, but you didn’t have to.”
The old man blew out smoke and gave me a sideways glance. “Don’t mention it.”
I should have left it at that. I’m not sure what I said next, but I probably rambled on about my growing independence.
The old codger cast me another look, a long one this time. “I pity you, kid.”
I was snapped into silence, offended to the quick. For one thing, he didn’t sound all that pitying, and besides, being pitied was the same as a handout. I was about to tell him so when I realized I didn’t know what in particular he was pitying me for.
“I don’t mind”—I shrugged nonchalantly—“As long as I get home for
Star Trek
.”
“Ain’t what I meant,” he said with a hoarse chuckle. He brought the cigarette to his lips, his cheeks sucked in, and his eyes narrowed as he inhaled. The end of the cigarette glowed, nestled alongside the shot glass, and within the gloominess of that room, it had a hypnotic effect on me.
Again, I should have left it at that, but I had an insufferable curiosity and more than a little pride. “So what
did
you mean?”
“Forget it.” He took a swig, stared at the glass, and gestured for another. Phil hunched over the counter again, regarding him warily. “You’ve had more’n enough, Jim.”
“Wife’s got the car,” Jim said. “So it don’t matter.”
Phil sighed and shook his head with disgust. He placed a napkin in front of me, followed by the juice with a tiny red straw sticking out. I took a big, long, thirsty pull, then noticed Jim watching me out of the corner of his eye, as if sizing me up while Phil poured some amber liquid into the glass.
To my left, Dad broke into exaggerated laughter. I glanced over to see his hand on Sam’s back, and suddenly leaning forward, speaking in hushed tones. “Seriously, Sam, this one’s going to go straight up, like a wild dog, the moment they release it.”
I looked back at Jim, and he was staring at my father as if little knives might come spurting out of his eyes at any moment.
“So what did you mean, already?” I repeated.
Jim looked away, took another drag, and when he exhaled his cheek popped out, like my father’s when he was tired or fed up. “You just don’t quit, do you?”
He looked at me again, and his eyes seemed bloodshot and vacant, and everything nice about him disappeared. I felt a cool shiver run down my back, and I wondered if he wouldn’t rather strangle me than speak.
I was about to say his own words back to him, “Just forget it,” when he spoke again, his voice gruff and low: “You ever been to a fortune-teller at the carnival? You know … the Gypsy lady that looks at the lines on your hand and tells your future?”
I thought for a moment. “Mom says it’s of the devil. No one can tell the future.”
His eyes narrowed to slits. “I can.”
I frowned and stubbornly shook my head. “No, you can’t.”
He stubbed his cigarette in the charcoal-stained aluminum ashtray. “Hold out your hand, then, and I’ll prove it to you.”
“No, thanks,” I said, pulling both hands to my lap.
“Suit yourself. This here’s how it’s done…”
I watched wide-eyed as he laid down his drink and cigarette and picked up a shiny knife in his right hand. He held up his left hand, splayed open toward me, showing crevices nearly as deep as the ones on his face. Turning his hand back toward his face, he pressed the knife into his palm, then paused, meeting my eyes.
