Saving Alice (5 page)

“Pardon me?”

“Your accent!” she exclaimed. (
Yohuh ahccint!
)

Imagine that—Alice considered
me
exotic.

Eventually, the three of us became inseparable, and while we attended musicals, museums, and fine restaurants, the Soda Straw became our weekly ritual, a celebration of the end of another grueling week of classes. It was here, the place of so many lively discussions and laughter, that Alice’s regard for me finally evolved into romance.

Most fittingly, Donna witnessed it, the matchmaker becoming the overseer. While she refused to become a hindrance to our developing romance, we sincerely enjoyed her company and refused to let her simply wander off into the sunset. Sometimes we even succeeded in roping her into attending special events.

Unfortunately, and for someone so schooled in romantic literature, personal romance didn’t seem to interest her. Devoted to her studies, she preferred to study the revisionary progression of Fitzgerald’s tragedy
The Great Gatsby,
rather than attend a movie with a casual acquaintance. Much to our dismay, she regularly turned down dating opportunities, although occasionally Alice and I engaged in a little humorous matchmaking of our own … usually to disastrous results.

Of course, Fridays were set aside for the three of us. Alice and I insisted. Comfortable with our friendly humor, Donna preferred the backstage, more at ease as an observer than a participator. We often referred to her as “Scout” after her favorite novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird;
other times we called her “Dorothy” and inquired of her “pet Toto.”

Although Donna met my family only once, my mother adored Donna. Raised in the church, and fervent in her faith, Donna had been born and bred in a small town in Kansas. And while our commonalities—hers and mine—were enough to build a good friendship, Donna reminded me of the life I’d so eagerly left behind, as if “Aberdeen” were still nipping at my heels.

During her junior year, Alice was accepted into Juilliard, an event which surprised none of us but didn’t impress my mother one smidgen. Several weeks later, I called Mom in the morning and informed her of my intentions.

She was politely reserved, if not mildly patronizing, unwilling to spoil the moment but unable to give enthusiastic blessing. I shouldn’t have expected better. From my mother’s perspective, only one thing mattered, and it certainly wasn’t Alice’s significant natural gifts. While Alice had been raised in a respectable Methodist home, it wasn’t enough, in my mother’s humble estimation, to save her soul.

“She’s a Christian,” I argued.

“A
Sunday
Christian,” she countered.

I sighed and made fruitless attempts to argue the point.

“I’m praying for you, honey,” she said at last.

You’ll see,
I thought after hanging up. After I made my first million, I intended to buy my mother the biggest house in Aberdeen or, better yet, Mystic, Connecticut, a coastal fishing town close to the Rhode Island border—if I could convince my parents to abandon South Dakota, of course. My father would have the kind of Mercedes he’d always eyeballed in Danny’s showroom floor. And Larry, who’d stayed home to attend Aberdeen’s Northern State College, would have the kind of financial backing to ensure his own business success.

Everyone would share in the realization of my dreams, but no one more than Alice. She would continue to have the best of everything, the newest, the latest—whatever she wanted. We would travel to Europe in the summer, the Cayman Islands in the winter, and our children—what a delicious thought!—would be educated in the best institutions money could buy. In summer twilight, Alice and I would stand on the breezy balcony of our ocean-front Connecticut vacation home, and with my arms wrapped protectively around her, I would repeat my promises of undying love and devotion. Later, we would walk the beach hand in hand as the sunset gradually disappeared beyond purple skies.

Good ol’ Donna helped me pick out the ring. After beseeching her with my ignorance, she agreed to forego Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair
and spend a Saturday afternoon with me. We cruised from jewelry shop to jewelry shop, ate lunch at famous Valentino’s, a pizza place, and then meandered about for another two hours until Donna finally spotted the perfect ring.

“How do you know?” I’d asked, peering through the glass at her selection.

“It’s so her,” Donna replied, seemingly mesmerized by the diamond ring in the showcase. She paused, and her expression turned wistful. “She’ll love it, Stephen.”

I needed more reassurance.
Was it big enough? Fancy enough? Expensive enough?

“She’ll say yes to
you,
Stephen,” Donna said. “Not the ring.”

In jest I dramatically grasped Donna’s hand, slipping the ring on her finger for a trial run: “Will you marry me?”

She blushed. Then playing along, she answered in similar style, putting the back of her hand to her forehead like Scarlett O’Hara, “Oh, Stephen, I thought you’d never ask. But I simply must refuse. You see … I have
nothing
to wear!”

“Then will you be my best man?” I asked, and she dropped the act.

“May I just say … I’m holding out for something more traditional—”

“What could be better than best man?”

“Maid of honor, perhaps?”

We laughed, and she gave me a congratulatory hug.

So there I was, sitting in our booth, wondering if Alice had stood me up. Beyond the windows, the annoying growl of a muscle car spiked my nerves and jiggled the restaurant windows, followed by the squeal of brakes as it negotiated the curve.

Finally, at four-fifteen, Alice arrived. Spotting her come in the door, I rose too quickly from the booth, bumping my thighs on the edge of the table.

“Clumsy!” she’d kidded me. “You okay, ol’ sport?” an appellation originally bestowed upon me by Donna during her Gatsby period. With Alice’s accent, it came out
ol’ spo-huht
.

Dressed in a colorful skirt and silky blouse, she leaned over and gave me a lingering kiss, closing her eyes, then opening them slowly, as if the touch of our lips had melted her heart.

“I could get used to that,” she said. Then after another quick peck on my nose, she slipped into the booth across from me, her hair shimmering in the overhead lights with an ethereal shade of dark blue.

But the moment she sat down, her eyes dimmed, and her expression fell, maybe not that noticeable to someone else but quite noticeable to me. Normally, her porcelain-smooth face carried the exuberance of a woman who harbored a never-ending fountain of good news with eagerness to share it.

I wiped nervous palms on my slacks and placed my elbows on the table, giving her my full attention. I asked her the usual questions, and slowly she relaxed to her normal self. When I placed my hands on the table, she grabbed them with both of hers and squeezed. “Oh, Stephen! We’re
both
going to New York.” But then her expression dimmed again, as if struggling against something bigger than either of us.

“Everything okay?” I finally asked. After another reflective moment, she shook her head as if she could hide it no longer. Her eyes watered and she sniffed softly.

“What is it?”

She shrugged. “Nothing.” She glanced at her watch. “Where’s Donna?”

“Donna’s not coming.”

She looked confused. Donna always joined us on Friday nights. Alice swallowed, then forced an unsuccessful smile.

I matched her smile, then foolishly proceeded with my original plans. While the words I’d rehearsed that morning seemed inappropriate in the glare of her current hesitant and distracted frame of mind, I took a deep breath anyway and stammered out with, “I have something for you.”

That was my big line, about as romantic as a dish drainer. Her eyes widened as I removed the box from my pants pocket. Turning it toward her, I gently opened it. Her eyes settled on the ring, and then closed shut. “Oh, Stephen…”

I set the box down and reached for her hand. Her eyes glistened. Figuring she was moved by the imminent proposal, I uttered the fateful words. “Alice … will you marry me?”

For an eternity, I waited. Her gaze lingered on mine. She let go of my hand and taking the ring box in her hands, she turned it, examined the ring, then shut the box, and handed it back.

“I
wanted
to marry you, but…”

Her words trailed off into nothing.

I was confused.
Wanted?

Alice pursed her lips. She looked miserable.

Of course,
I thought.
I’m just a kid from Uglyville. How could I have been so stupid? Beautiful women don’t marry hard-luck stories….

In the awkward silence that followed, memories of my past came roaring back—the disdain in Cynthia’s eyes, the pity in Susan’s, the glaring contempt in Jim’s:
Ain’t nothing a Whitaker touches that don’t turn to dust
.

I sat back in the booth, my emotions reeling, unsure how to proceed. Alice swallowed again, appraising the obvious bewilderment in my eyes. She let out another long sigh, leaning back against the booth. I waited as she collected her thoughts. “Stephen…” She hesitated again, her eyes suddenly scrutinizing.

“What is it?”

“Do you love me?”

It was an absurd question. “I
adore
you,” I whispered, grabbing her hand, but she pulled away as if I’d answered incorrectly, her face a turmoil of emotions I couldn’t begin to understand. “Alice, why would you ask such a thing?”

She shrugged and looked away again. Biting her lower lip, she said, “I did something terrible.”

Terrible?
I was confused again, and then her expression shifted, as if coming to a tumultuous but important decision.

“I wasn’t going to show you, but … now … now I can’t keep this to myself.”

She was already sliding out of the booth when a strange foreboding struck me.
Where was she going?
I lurched to the edge of the seat, and grabbed for her hand. Off-balance, she stumbled slightly, and I caught her as she practically fell into my arms.

“It’s in the car,” she said, pushing herself up and away from me.

“Don’t go,” I whispered.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, pulled away again, and this time I released her. My body still goes numb with the remembering. During my rising storm of whirling thoughts, she was already tugging the door open, twenty feet away. Turning back, she paused, and then she wound up and blew me a little kiss. My last glimpse of her face, chiseled on stone.

Nina was standing by the counter. She made a face as if to ask,
Didn’t go so well?
just before full panic set in.

It happened the way I later saw it in my dreams: the blur of the room as I rushed to the door, bright western sunlight blinding me as I exploded across the sidewalk, frantically calling her name, followed by the sudden squeal of breaks, the muffled scream, Alice’s welltrained, operatic voice filling my soul with terror, the sickening thump. Then it was as though she’d simply disappeared, followed by the sudden cessation of sound—the sound of time ceasing forever.

I found her lying against the curb, twenty feet away, her arms and limbs grotesquely twisted. People were screaming around me, but I barely heard them. A distant siren split the air. Alice was unconscious but breathing, and there was nothing to do but hold her broken, bleeding body and whisper frantic words of reassurance. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had slipped away.

During the days that followed, I was in shock, incapable of comprehending or accepting what had happened.
Alice is dead.
Though utterly grief-stricken, Donna made courageous attempts to console me, and I tried to be a comfort to her as well.

“She died quickly,”
the coroner told us.
“There was no pain. She wouldn’t even have known what happened.”

Of course I blamed myself. If not for my inopportune proposal, Alice would never have rushed away. Besides, how could I forget those final moments, our last conversation?

Even Donna seemed consumed by guilt. “I feel responsible,” she told me, which of course was ridiculous, but no amount of discussion would counter her belief. In the years since, however, I’ve grown accustomed to Donna’s sense of unearned guilt.

Not until months later did I even consider the notion: What was in Alice’s car that was so important? No one knew, not even Donna. A cursory examination of Alice’s car had revealed nothing, but it hardly seemed important anymore.

I never showed up for my new job. I went home to the familiarity of family and friends, and stayed. During the following weeks, I spent sleepless nights praying foolish prayers—that God might somehow turn back time, that somehow the whole thing might turn out to be a terrible dream, that somehow I might have a second chance to save her.

Eventually reality sank in: There are some things that even God can’t—or
won’t
—do. There are rocks that even God can’t lift. There are no second chances, no opportunities to make things right, no turning back the clock. As time passed, the veil between God and me grew darker and thicker, my prayers few and far between, until God seemed completely shut away from me. Not only had God betrayed me, He’d abandoned me as well. He’d played the part of a cosmic Lucy, jerking the football away at the last second.

Good riddance!
I screamed one night in the field behind my home, then broke down in angry tears. My mother’s faith, my
own
childhood faith, which had once seemed to be bigger than a mustard seed, now seemed nothing more than a big lie.

Three months after Alice’s death, Donna paid me a visit in Aberdeen. Our meeting at the airport was an implosion of relief, and we hugged each other as if gasping for breath. For days afterward we reminisced about college and Alice, laughing and crying and, eventually, soothing our wounds in each other’s arms.

I asked Donna to stay, and she did. She got a job at Walgreens downtown and shared a house on North Jay Street with two other women her age. In a few weeks we were engaged, and four months after that we were married. I’m sure Donna believed my struggles with faith were only temporary—a natural reaction to grief. She must have been convinced I would eventually regain my spiritual footing.