The Evolution of Alice (8 page)

“How’re you doing today, Al?”

She glanced over at me quick, nodded, and she reached down and took a big drag of that cigarette like she wanted me to notice what she was doing. Maybe it was a cry for help, I don’t know. I took it like that anyway.

“When’d you start doing that anyway?” I said, pointing at the cigarette as if she didn’t know what I was talking about.

She shrugged and then smothered it into the aluminum foil. I waved my hand in the air to push the smoke away. I never liked smoking, me. Got disgusted by the smell of it. For a moment, I wished I’d found Alice out on her tire swing in the back yard because some fresh air woulda been good right about then. I could see why she wasn’t out there all that often any more, though. Being out there, watching on her girls, probably made her think too much of Grace, and how Grace wasn’t playing in the field with her sisters. Alice reached over to her right side and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which was half full, and took another one out. Menthol, they were. Funny. I had a friend who smoked those things when she had colds because she said it cleared her sinuses. Alice stuck it in her mouth and offered me one, but I shook my head. She shrugged again and lit her cigarette, taking another long tug at it before placing it back on her ashtray.

“You know, that ain’t good for your girls,” I said, and what I said surprised me, because I never butted into anything Alice did in the way of parenting. But I couldn’t help it. That smoke, it got into everything. It danced up to the ceiling and then spread every which way, for sure into the girls’ room, and that meant they were sucking it in too.

“They’re fine,” Alice said.

“Why don’t you let me take ‘em out back for a bit? Play around and all that.”

“No, thanks.”

“We won’t go anywhere, Al, we’ll just stick around the field.”

“No!” she said, and that was the first time she ever snapped at me.

Right about then I dropped any talk about her smoking. I thought about the paper airplanes I saw on the ground outside the girls’ room, and remembered how their bedroom window was open, so that made me feel a bit better about it anyway. The smoke’d just find its way out into the air and maybe wouldn’t bother the girls too much. That was about all I could take of sitting there with Alice, though, and it sounded like she had about enough of me, too. It was a different kind of talk than we usually had, but it wasn’t better either. It was weird for me because I always loved being around her, even if we was sitting there together all quiet, but what I really wanted to do was see the girls. So I let out a big sigh and pulled myself up from the couch.

“I’m gonna go check on the girls,” I said, and started to walk out of the living room when she stopped me for a second.

“Hey, Gideon,” she said.

“What’s that?” I said.

“You ever think about getting out of this place?”

“Like outta the rez?”

“Yeah, like out of the rez, out of
here …
”

“Well, I don’t know, I guess so, sometimes,” I said, and the truth was I did think of it from time to time, but not seriously. I wasn’t about to leave Alice and the girls, or my grandpa neither, especially since he hadn’t been feeling too good lately. I didn’t think I could stand living away from any of them.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, and she wasn’t dragging on her cigarette then. She wasn’t staring at the
TV
set neither. She was looking out the window, out into the sky hovering over the big field her girls used to always play in. “I’ve been thinking about maybe heading out to the city.”

“Alice, what would you ever do in the city? Your home’s here and all your family … and me, too, you know.”

“That’s just it, everything I know is here, and I don’t want to know all that anymore,” she said, and that’s when it started to make sense to me, because if the memories in the house were crushing the girls, they were crushing Alice too.

“You know,” I said, “my grandpa always says you can’t run away from memories and emotions and shit. They’re faster than you could ever be.”

“Fuck what your
grandpa
says,” she said.

That was like a punch in the stomach to me. I just stood there like I was frozen or something, until she finally took another drag of her cigarette.

“Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking,” she said, like she hadn’t just swore at me.

“Okay, Al,” I said.

I turned away and went off to the girls’ bedroom, not really knowing what else I could say to her, or if I wanted to say anything at all.

When I walked into Kathy and Jayne’s room, I found the two of them going about their own business, almost oblivious to each other. That wasn’t a natural thing, to me, because they usually did almost everything together. It wasn’t like playing in the field, of course, but it was still together, you know. Jayne had a box of crayons spread out on the floor in front of her, along with a stack of paper, same kind of paper I saw outside the bedroom window on the ground. She was in the middle of scribbling letters on one of those pieces of paper in red crayon, and she was real into it. I could see her little pink tongue sticking out of her mouth she was concentrating so hard, like Michael Jordan when he was driving to the hoop. I smiled at that. That was real cute to me.

Kathy, she was sitting by the bookshelf with her legs curled right up into her chest, her eyes stuck into a novel that looked kinda big for a little girl to be reading. She was holding it up to catch some light coming in from the bedroom window. The girls didn’t notice me when I came in. They didn’t look up or nothing, which was odd, because, like I said, they really loved me lately.

“Hey, Kathy,” I said as I stepped deeper into the room.

At that, she looked up and smiled quick, but only quick, because right away she was looking back at her book. The closer I got, the more I could notice about the book she was reading. It looked like one of Alice’s.

“What’re you reading? Anything good?”

She looked up again, this time to shoot me more of an annoyed look rather than a smile. Then, like she didn’t know what she was reading, she turned the book over to look at the cover, and flipped it back around.

“The Lovely Bones,”
she said.

“That sounds kinda awful,” I said, and that’s really all I could say about it, because I didn’t read much, and I never heard of that book before. Hell, you could probably list off 20 book titles to me and I’d be lucky to know one of ‘em. Kathy, she’d probably read more books than me and she was just 10 years old.

“It’s about a girl who gets
killed
, Uncle Gideon, and then she becomes a ghost and helps solve her own
murder.
”

“Well at least she gets to be a ghost and all,” I said. “That’s kinda nice.”

“I guess so, but she’s
kinda
stuck in purgatory. So, I don’t think it’s all that good.”

I walked over and sat down beside her, cross-legged, and, without asking, I took the book away from her and began to look it over more carefully. I could read and all, in case you’re wondering, I just didn’t think it was too exciting as an activity. Rather be doing other things I suppose.

“Maybe I’ll read it,” I said. “Maybe you should be reading, you know, the books you got in here.”

She snatched the book from me real fast, before I could even think of grabbing onto it tighter. Jayne didn’t even notice any of what Kathy and I were doing; by that time she’d finished writing whatever she was writing, and now she was folding that same paper up with just as much concentration, her tongue sticking out and all. It looked like a little stick of gum, like at any moment she would blow out a breath and it’d turn into a bubble. Kathy looked at the bookshelf and rolled her eyes.

“Uncle Gideon, these are
kids
books, they’re little
baby
books.”

“Well, that’s what you are, aren’t you? You’re a kid, Kathy.”

“Plus, I’ve
read
them all, and I don’t like reading the same thing twice. It’s boring.”

“I just don’t think you should be reading something sad like that, that’s all. Don’t seem right to me.”

“Well, you aren’t my
dad
.”

“Damn right I’m not your dad,” I blurted out without thinking.

Right away I could see that what I said hurt Kathy, probably just as much as what she said had hurt me. Those girls still loved their old man, despite what he did to Alice. Kids just love their dads I guess, and there ain’t nothing you can do to stop that love, even if the person who’s getting the love don’t deserve it—and that bastard sure didn’t deserve getting loved by Kathy and Jayne. Still, it wasn’t for me to say who the girls loved, and, as soon as I said what I said, I felt bad about it. When they got older, they could decide for themselves about him. For now, I figured I needed to keep my damn mouth shut.

“God, I’m sorry about that, Kathy,” I said, and I reached over and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

Kathy put her book down and put her head on my shoulder for a moment, then took it away and buried her eyes back in her book. I gave her a little tap on the shoulder, and when she looked up again I motioned over to Jayne.

“What’s your sister up to?” I whispered so as not to disturb Jayne; I didn’t want to break her concentration. By that time, I could see the paper she’d been writing on and folding up had turned into a crude airplane. So, that mystery got solved, even though I wasn’t sure what she woulda been writing on those airplanes. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Jayne was just any other normal five-year-old girl. I mean to say, you’d never guess by looking at her what she’d been through in her life. She didn’t look altogether sad, unless you looked real deep into her eyes, and she was done up just like I liked to see her, like a girl her age liked to dress. She was wearing one of her dress-up princess gowns, Cinderella I think, and she was wearing it as nice as a real princess. Better, even.

“Oh, she’s making
arrow
-planes.”

“
Aira
-planes!” Jayne snapped, suddenly joining the conversation.

“Oh, right,” Kathy said with a snicker.

“What’re you building those for?” I said to Jayne.

Jayne got up with the paper airplane in her hand and looked it over with a whole bunch of pride. Then, with a smile kind of filled with wonder, she pinched the bottom of the plane between her thumb and pointer finger and started flying it around the room, even making airplane sounds here and there, the typical kid sounds for machines and such. You know, it coulda been the sound of a tractor for all I knew, but it was nice to see her make-believe. And I liked that she was flying the plane around the room, too, because it felt a bit like she was dancing and twirling like she used to. Even her feet were up on their chubby little toes. Those toes were so cute, you just wanted to play this little piggy with ‘em.

“I jus’ felt like makin’ aira-planes,” she said as she flew her clumsy contraption.

I thought about the big pile of them outside the window and wondered why she was throwing them away, because she seemed to like them a lot just to get rid of ‘em. I don’t know, maybe she was trying to make the perfect one and she hadn’t quite made it yet. They were all, like, prototypes or whatever. I figured if she eventually made the perfect one I could pick up the others when I left so they didn’t litter the whole rez. Lord knows, there was enough junk layin’ around here and there, mostly in the ditches between the highway and our houses. Like old broken tricycles or blown-up car tires or Tim Horton’s coffee cups or other shit like that.

“Yeah, but what’re you
doing
with them, Jayne?” I said.

She stopped spinning and held it out in front of me like it was a treasure she found. I think I let out an “oooh” and an “ahhh” to make her happy.

“
Ooooh
… she’s doing something real smart with them, I can tell you that much,” Kathy said in a real snotty tone.

“Shut up, Kathy, you don’ even know,” Jayne said.

“Sure I do. You’re writing little notes down on them and chucking them away,” Kathy said, all matter-of-fact.

“Well,
yeah
, but that’s not what I’m
doing
with ‘em!”

“What in the heck else could you be doing then? Littering, that’s all!” Kathy said.

“I’m not littering!” Jayne shouted, and she started to cry real hard, and the airplane dropped to the ground like a leaf falling in autumn, rocking back and forth like Alice’s tire swing out back. Jayne dropped to her knees and buried her head deep into her lap, and her body started to sob in time with her crying. That just about broke my heart. Truth was, I’d never seen her cry yet, not since Grace died. I think it took Kathy by surprise too, because just as soon as she was tellin’ Jayne off, she was over beside her little sister, her arms wrapped all the way around her. I went over to Jayne too, me, and I took them both into my arms. We ended up like one of them Russian nesting dolls, and just like we were connected, after Kathy started to cry, I found there were a few tears running down my cheek, too. And just like Jayne, well, I’d never cried yet neither. We stayed like that for a few minutes until arm by arm we let go of each other. We ended up sitting cross-legged in front of each other in a crude little circle, and the airplane Jayne made was in the middle.

“I’m not littering,” Jayne said again, this time with a bit of a quivering lip.

“Okay, Jayne,” Kathy said.

“What’re you doing with them, honey?” I said.

She picked up the paper airplane again and moved it around in the air without getting up, in slow motion. She didn’t use sound effects either. I guess she was thinking about why she was making them in the first place. Sometimes kids did things without thinking about it much. Like, on impulse. You know: something seems like a good idea, and that’s that.

“I jus’ wanted ta do something nice, I guess,” she eventually said, without taking her eyes off the airplane.

Well, I wasn’t sure what she meant by that neither, because, according to Kathy, all she was doing was chucking them out the window after she played with them. I was careful not to challenge her, of course, because Kathy had pretty much traumatized her a few moments earlier. So I said, real careful, “What do you mean by doin’ something nice?”