The Evolution of Alice (22 page)

Jayne jumped up as though she’d received an electrical shock. She raced past Alice and up the stairs. Kathy didn’t get up at first. She looked up to her mother inquisitively.

“Really?” she said.

Alice nodded. “Yes, really.”

Kathy stood up, and Alice walked with her up the stairs, where Jayne was waiting by the side door.

“Can we go out front?” Jayne said.

She had a bigger smile on her face than Alice had ever seen.

“No,” Alice said. “You can play in the back yard.”

“But it’s all muddy back there. There’s no grass,” Kathy said.

“There’s hardly any grass back home either,” Alice said.

“There’s only grass back home in the field,” Kathy said.

“Please, Mommy?” Jayne said.

“There’s no grass in the driveway back home, and you girls like playing there just fine,” Alice said.

Kathy gave up. She took Jayne’s hand as Alice opened the door. The girls walked outside.

“Come on, Jayne, it’s better than nothing,” Kathy said.

Alice followed behind her girls as they walked to the back yard, right to the middle, and looked around as though lost. Alice surveyed the area. She hadn’t been out there much. Neither had the girls. But Kathy was right. It was almost all dirt back there. Even the box garden near the back of the yard sat unattended, full not with vegetables or plants but rather with bad soil and weeds. She watched Jayne race over to one of the rare clumps of grass and playfully flick at the blades. Kathy aimlessly wandered around the yard as Jayne went from clump of grass to clump of grass. Eventually, Jayne had visited all the clumps and began to wander around with Kathy. The two of them held hands and simply walked from one end to the other. Alice watched all of this, and she couldn’t help but notice how their eyes, their shoulders, began to look the same as when she had found them in front of the television set.

“There are toys in the garage, I think,” Alice called out.

The girls ignored her. They walked over to the box garden and sat on its edge. Jayne’s exuberance was gone. They weakly held hands and stared at the dirt.

“Why aren’t you girls playing?” Alice said.

“There’s nothing to do,” Kathy said.

“You didn’t look in the garage,” Alice said.

Kathy shook her head. “I’ve been in there before, Mom. There are sand toys in there. There is dirt out here.”

“Well, why don’t you play hide-and-seek then?” Alice said.

Alice saw Jayne start to get up, but Kathy squeezed Jayne’s hand and held her back.

“There’s nowhere to hide, Mom,” Kathy said.

Alice looked around at the back yard. Kathy was right again. There was nowhere to hide. She sighed.

“Okay, you can go out front,” Alice said.

Neither girl got up.

“That’s okay,” Kathy said.

Alice walked over to her girls. She sat down at the edge of the box garden and put her arm around both of them. Back home the girls had shown signs of missing their little sister, whether they realized it or not. They hadn’t played as hard or as frequently, hadn’t laughed as often, hadn’t seemed to enjoy things like they used to. In the city, however, they seemed to get more depressed and lonely with each passing day. And it wasn’t just that Grace wasn’t there. Gideon wasn’t either. The only times when the girls seemed normal were the times they’d spent with him. Alice had realized this earlier. She’d even texted him recently, hoping that he’d have the time to visit her. He hadn’t texted her back. She imagined how he must have felt when he came by her house to find they were gone. She didn’t blame him for not texting her. She wouldn’t have either.

She often thought back to something Gideon had said just weeks after Grace died, when she had floated the idea, for the first time, of leaving the rez, even though back then it was something she’d said out of emotion, not intent. “You know,” he’d said, “my grandpa always says that you can’t run away from memories and emotions and shit. They’re faster than you could ever be.” She’d told him to fuck off at the time, but now that she’d left, now that she’d been gone for a few weeks, she saw that he’d been right. The city had only made things worse. Grace was everywhere, even though she was nowhere. She’d followed them there, to the dingy and depressing apartment, to the rush of it all, to the crushing closeness. The memories had come, small ones and big ones, all of them suffocating, and just as frequently as back home. So, going to the city was no escape. Where was there an escape? When would she be free from the pain? She squeezed her daughters hard, leaned over and kissed them on their foreheads.

“I love you both so much,” she said.

“I love you, too,” Kathy said.

“I love you, Mommy,” Jayne said.

Alice stood up.

“You can play out here for as long as you want, okay?” Alice said.

“Where are you going?” Kathy said.

“Just for a walk,” Alice said.

She made her way to the side of the house and then turned around. She took another, long look at her girls. They were beautiful, they really were. Everything good about her was in them.

She didn’t have any real destination. She ambled through the alleyways and avenues of the city in a vain attempt to get lost from everything, from Grace, from herself. Walks in the city weren’t the same as walks on the rez—that much was clear and unsurprising. It was so loud in the city, deafening really, and her eyes rested not against the vastness of the rez and the quiet of its seclusion, but rather against the concrete and steel of the city, cold and austere. Eventually she arrived at a bridge that arched over a railway yard and made her way up, at times travelling faster than the crowd of cars to her left because traffic was backed up considerably.

At the top of the bridge she was hit with a gust of wind and stopped to feel the air push against her body. When the breeze had died down, she looked out across the railway yard, up to the steel arches that cut the daytime sky into pieces, and for a moment she was not lost, but rather felt calm move through her body. The bitter stench of the city washed away along with its distractions. Gone was the rush of it all, the busyness. Alice looked down, where the train cars looked like coffins, the railway tracks like a confused roadmap, and in that view she was sure she’d found her destination.

She turned away for a moment and scanned the annoyed and angry faces in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge, the fists punching steering wheels, the mouths lipping profanities, the scrunched foreheads, and then her eyes met with a man’s. She found her gaze frozen there, locked to him, and it was as if his gaze was locked to hers as well. It seemed to her that he intended to say something. A ridiculous idea came to her. Perhaps this man was the angel she’d been looking for, she’d been thinking about, ever since Grace’s death. She made a bargain. If he said something to her, she wouldn’t jump. She would consider his words a sign that there was another way to escape Grace’s memory.

He opened his lips, and she watched as they showed the man’s hesitancy, the back and forth that was going on in his mind. They opened then shut, opened then shut. Then, traffic began to lurch forward, and the man moved forward with it. She listened for his words, waited, hoped for them to come to her, above the murmuring engines, above the bleating horns, above all the frenzied noise of rush hour in the city, but he didn’t say anything. She watched as his car crested the hill and descended into another part of the city, away from her.

So be it.

She sighed deeply, then looked skyward. She might have mouthed a prayer, offering words to splash against the overhead grey canvas but didn’t want to give the satisfaction, not to God, and certainly not to a supposed angel. So, empty-minded, she turned back toward the side of the bridge, walked forward slowly, and lifted herself up onto the ledge. There, she stood as straight as could be, certain she had never been quite as high. She stretched her arms out as wide as they could go and began to sway back and forth like the long grass in the field behind her trailer. Jump, please jump, she thought, but her legs wouldn’t move. She tilted her head backwards, stared into the sky. Please, you want this. Don’t you want this? She heard cars stop behind her, doors open then shut, footsteps gathering around the place she stood.

“Come on, lady.”

“Get down from there.”

“Talk to me. I’m right here.”

She looked around. There were four or five people just below her, looking up to her, pleading to her, reaching for her. There were four or five people, but not the man she had seen, and no angel. But why did she keep thinking about it? Was that why she had come? Not to end her life, as she thought, but rather to test something her girls had told her? Was she still so desperate to believe it? She turned away from the small crowd that had gathered, shaking her head, back to the sky, and stood up there for a long time, lost in thought. Then, eventually, she had one final thought: the angel will come, or I will go to my Grace. Either way, there was peace.

Her legs obeyed, and she stepped forward. She heard shouting behind her, desperate pleas, felt wind rushing against her skin. And it was in that moment, when she was sure it was too late, that she knew she didn’t want to die. It was the way her body reacted as she started to lose her balance, how she whipped her arms back and forth like an injured bird as she tried desperately to steady herself. If you had seen this from below, where the railway tracks were, you would have seen her body embossed against the wide and uniformly grey sky, her arms flapping up and down. And you might have thought that she looked as though she were making snow angels in a vast and open field. You might also have been surprised to see, in the following moment, her body suddenly straighten and calm, as though one of the people behind her had caught her in time. But nobody had touched her. Somehow, some way, she had found her balance.

Alice placed her thumb on the photograph so that it covered Grace’s face, so it was just Jayne, Kathy, and Alice. She scanned the photograph, removed her thumb, and scanned it again. She had done this from time to time since the girls had fallen asleep, testing how it felt with Grace not there, how it felt with her beside her sisters and her mother. It felt the same, though. Even with Grace’s face covered, she was there. She looked at her girls, resting quietly on either side of her. There was no doubt. She was worse, they were worse, where they were. Moving to the city hadn’t removed Grace from their life, and it had taken much more from them. Alice couldn’t believe, either, that she had considered taking herself from her girls’ lives, too. What would they have left? No. They belonged together where Grace would always be, and with her the good memories and with her the bad memories.

Still holding the photograph, she shifted the phone around in her hands and found Gideon’s number. She’d gone to see him after he’d eventually texted back, but he didn’t answer the door, or wasn’t there. But she knew he was in the city too. Why had he come to the city? Was he having the same sort of troubles she was having? She hoped he would respond. She hoped he would be there for her still, even though she didn’t feel as though she deserved it.

She sent him a text that read: “I want to go home.”

Alice placed her phone and the photograph on the nightstand beside the bed. She lay back down, nestled between Jayne and Kathy. Carefully, trying not to wake them, she slipped one arm beneath Jayne and her other arm beneath Kathy, and gathered them both close to her body. They felt warm and safe, and they’d been away from her arms for too long. She fell asleep that night listening to a collision of nighttime sounds; the white-noise hum of the refrigerator, the on-again-off-again low rumble of the furnace, and, most of all, the calm breaths of her daughters. She slept so well that she didn’t hear a text notification that arrived deep in the night. She wouldn’t read it until the morning. It was a message from Gideon.

“I’ll take you there.”

Sometimes all you could hear at Alice’s place was Grace’s footsteps as she raced from one place to the next. She ran flat-footed, and the soles of her feet slapped against the floor like applause. It was one of the reasons why, in the trailer, she wasn’t the best hide-and-seek player. When Kathy or Jayne closed their eyes and counted to 10, they could hear exactly where Grace was headed. Not only that, but, as Kathy or Jayne looked for her, she would almost always call out “I’m here!” because, to her, the best thing about hide-and-seek was being found. The bigger girls, they’d pretend to look for her to amuse her, often right up until Grace notified them of exactly where she was. When they found her, Grace would cry out in delight and stuff her fingers into her mouth excitedly. Then, they’d do it all over again. The only time she stayed hidden was when Kathy would hide with her. Kathy would carry Grace around the trailer to avoid the announcement of her clumsy and loud footsteps, take her somewhere and put Grace on her lap and shush her. Then it would take Jayne a bit longer to find them.

In the field, of course, things were different. Grace’s footsteps were the same, but they were silent against the soil. And when she called out ‘I’m here!’ it didn’t matter, because Grace was so small and the grass was so high that it still took Kathy and Jayne forever to find her. Out in the field, Grace was the best hider, despite herself.

These days, Kathy and Jayne still play hide-and-seek. Not in the trailer, mind you. They never play there. But when they’re allowed to go out into the field, they play like they used to. Kathy and Jayne, they never hide from each other, though. They count to 10 together and go off, hand in hand, to search through the long grass for Grace.

A
LICE SAT NERVOUSLY.
She stared at her own reflection in the thick glass in front of her, the seat on the other side empty and waiting, and carefully inspected her face. She tried her best not to care but did wonder, despite herself, what Ryan would think of her appearance. She was nothing like before. She’d felt alive, and her face reflected that vibrancy. She had felt so much prettier then, and she must have been. Otherwise, Ryan would’ve had nothing to do with her. He was that kind of guy back then. He was probably still that kind of guy. But why did she care what he thought, damn it? Why were her palms so sweaty? Why was her heartbeat so quick?