The Singing Bone (19 page)

“He took me to a party there. Oh, the parties—that, too.” She studies her nails. “There were always so many people around.”

“What did you think of Jack Wyck?”

“I was curious. Lee introduced us. He said
Look what I found
, and I didn't know then, but of course. The whole thing was already planned. And then.
What
I found. Not
who
I found. I wasn't even a person to them.”

“Did your parents know?”

“No. They would have killed me. They found out later. I brought Lee home for dinner.”

“What did they think of him?”

“They hated him, of course. They knew more than I did about people. They could tell something was off.”

“And then Lee introduced you to Jack.”

She nods, turning back to him again. “I mean, it was simple at first, but slowly, he—not Lee—
he
wanted me to bring my friends over—Stover and Alice and Molly.”

“‘He as in Jack?”

“Yes. He said ‘Bring them here,' and I wanted to know why. Whenever I asked questions, he and Lee stopped talking to me, and I couldn't stand that because my parents had stopped talking to me by then, so I thought,
I won't ask questions
. And I brought my friends. By then Mr.—Jack—” She swallows and grimaces as if she's tasted something bitter. “He was also my lover. And we were doing things, drugs, and there were parties. This is where I get foggy on details. Memories start to slip together.”

“Is it hard for you to say Jack Wyck's name?”

She nods, sniffs, swallows. It's such a physical response.

“You don't have to say his name,” Hans says. “Please. Don't say it for my sake. We can make it clear in the film.”

“Thank you.”

“I will say the names. Can we continue?”

“Yes.”

“In one of the transcripts from the trials you state that you had taken over four hundred hits of LSD. Is that true?”

“I'm sure I said that, but in reality, I don't know how much LSD I took. Sometimes we did it twice in one day. And sometimes I took up to six hits at once.”

“Did Alice Pearson also take drugs?”

“Alice.” She shakes her head, folds her arms.

“Have you spoken to Alice?”

“No. Have you interviewed Alice?”

“I have.”

Trina nods. “What's she doing?”

“She's a professor of folklore.”

“Folklore?” She laughs—a quick exhalation of disbelief, but then she recovers. “Oh, Alice,” she says, as if chiding her.

“Do you think Alice should be in jail?”

“I don't know where she went that night. All I know is that he said—”

“By
he
you mean Jack Wyck?”

“Yes. All I know is that he said ‘You know what to do,' and she took off like she did.”

“He says he's innocent.”

“Oh, well.” Trina tilts her head to the side. “Of course he says that.” She puts her hands flat on the table and gazes down at them. Then she looks up at him. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Hans says.

“Why are you inviting this into your life?”

“This is my work.”

“After what happened with The Doing, I mean. Jack Wyck—” she says, and then swallows, her eyes big. She's released his name on her tongue.

“You mean what happened in the movie theater?”

She nods.

“It's because of that. For whatever reason,” he says, “I am the one to tell the story. Someone must let other people see.”

Trina curls one side of her mouth into a half smile. “So,” she says. “Alice is the folklorist and you're the bard. Who am I?” When Hans doesn't answer, Trina goes on. “When you came in you asked, ‘How did it begin?' And the answer is that I don't know. I don't know how it started,” she says. “But this is how it ends.”

That night, Molly slept downstairs with Stover, and Alice had Mr. Wyck all to herself. He kept her close all night. “Genie,” he said. “I thought you were lost to me.”

“You don't care.” She sobbed, turning her body into his and then away, shrugging him away from her shoulder when he touched it. “You don't care,” she said again.

“I do.”

“You don't. You went right with Molly.”

“I was already with Molly, baby. You just didn't notice.”

“Why are you with Molly when you have me?' She sat up and came towards him, positioning her body over his. “You have me,” she said, and he grasped her hips.

“I don't have you. You don't have me. We none of us belong to each other. That's something you need to learn now. We don't own anything.”

“I don't own myself. I almost died. Do I own myself? Tell me I do.”

“You don't.”

“Who owns me?”

He didn't say anything. He turned her over. Alice thought of houses—of all the rooms she'd walked into, turning lights on and off as she went. She thought of her friends, downstairs, twined into each other, and of Allegra's fingers on the pestle, crushing the dried leaves and berries, and the blood that flowed out of her. She thought of her mother, alone in her living room with the TV switched on—the blue light around her, her collections piled high, the clink of ice against glass as she lifted a drink to her lips. It was true, Alice thought vaguely,
I belong to no one, and no one belongs to me
. It was like a song, and as Mr. Wyck came, she sang a few bars, humming.
I belong to no one, and no one belongs to me.

She slept curled into his side, and when she woke, Alice traipsed down the steps, lighter somehow, a stranger to herself. She drank coffee, ate some oatmeal, and then went out with Trina and Molly to collect cans to sell. It made it more interesting if they took some acid, and so they did, each a square, and then they went on their way, picking up the crumpled aluminum cans from the side of the road. They went to the park and sorted through the trash. They found a cache near the supermarket, and Trina kept saying, “It's like a fucking monument to cans,” and instead of laughing, Alice agreed, shuffling quickly off in her tennis shoes to fill a bag, thinking how happy Mr. Wyck would be at the sight of all the cans. She started climbing up an embankment of trash. It was so beautiful in the sun. It shone. It was luminous, like a glass mountain. Trina tried to follow, but she got distracted by something. “This is amazing,” she called out to Alice. “You have to see this!” but Alice stood on her radiant mountain, her feet sinking into her shining kingdom.

But Molly wasn't as excited as Trina and Alice. Molly sat down on the ground. “Who is Mr. Wyck?” she asked.

Alice turned to look down at Molly and Trina, who had made her way back to Molly. “I think we're at the dump!” Alice cried down to them. She began to descend the mountain.

Trina rose and drifted off. She'd found a stick and was poking at trash on the ground. She turned over debris, squatted, and straightened again. Alice watched. “Is this a dead baby?” Trina yelled.

Alice ran over to see. “It's a doll,” she said. “Look at the eyes.”

“Oh, yeah.” Trina poked it some more.

“The plastic is melting,” Alice said, staring at it. She leaned over and stuck her fingers into the doll's empty eye sockets.

“Don't look at it,” Trina said. “It's really fucking scary.” She laughed. “You were scary when you were sick.”

“I was scared.”

“I made you well. I gave you antibiotics.” She poked at Alice with her stick.

“Stop,” Alice said. She wanted to look at the doll's hands, at the webbing between the fingers. Now there was something interesting, but Trina kept poking her with the stick. “Fuck off, Trina.” Alice pushed the stick away and sat on the ground in front of the doll.

“You fuck off, Alice.” They began to laugh.

“Tell this doll to fuck off.” The doll
was
scary. It was staring at Alice with its empty sockets. Alice rose and grasped Trina's hand and ran back to find Molly, who was still sitting in the same spot. “You gave me what?” she asked Trina.

“Huh?”

Molly had drawn her knees into her chest. “I mean, who is he?” She looked up at them. “It's not like he's a man. He's not like a dad or a brother or a friend. He's something else.” She rolled back the edge of her shorts. “I have his name tattooed on my leg,” she said to them. “Why is his name on my leg?”

“Because you love him and he loves you,” Trina said.

“So do I,” said Alice. She looked up. “Do you guys hear that?” she asked, but Trina was staring at Molly and neither of them said anything.

“I have one, too,” Trina said. “Molly took something else,” she said to Alice. “Honey, what did you take?”

“Give her some water,” Alice said. She dropped her thermos on the ground. “Do you hear that?” Alice could hear a dog barking in the distance. “I love dogs.

“Who is he?” Molly said, but now she was yelling and rocking back and forth. “Is he real?”

Trina sat down on the ground next to her. Alice picked up Trina's discarded stick and listened for the dog. She couldn't hear it anymore. “What happened to the dog?”

“What dog?” Trina asked.

“You were going to go to college.” Molly pointed at Alice.

But Alice had already wandered off in the direction she thought the dog's barking was coming from. She looked one way, then the other, and then back at her friends. She knew who Mr. Wyck was: he was an angel; he was god.
I am that I am
, and he walked into the light and was made perfect again. She opened her arms wide and began to climb a pile of trash. “I belong to no one, and no one belongs to me!” she yelled.

“Alice!” she heard Trina yell.

“What is she doing?” Molly said. “What is she doing? She was going to go to college.”

Alice threw her head back. Her feet sunk into muck. When she looked down, she thought she saw dark things moving around her. The sun went behind the clouds. She ran back down the way she came and stumbled and fell. She lay there and looked into the sky, her arms wide.

“Alice!” Trina called again.

Alice rose and sang quietly as she walked back to Molly and Trina, kicking the dry earth with the toes of her tennis shoes. “I couldn't find the dog,” she said when she reached them, but they didn't seem to notice her.

On a winter's day, after rain—then snow, the white pitch of sleet—this hill overlooking the Hudson is an adequately bleak setting for a prison. Soon it will be Christmas, the plastic wreath in the waiting room reminds Alice. It's a cheap attempt at cheer, but it's better than giving up entirely—maybe.

One set of clanging metal doors and then the next, the buzz, and another set of blank-faced guards. She's given them her license and put her purse in a locker. She's been through a metal detector, had a wand run over her.
They're serious about metal
, she thinks, and almost bursts out laughing. It's the pressure of keeping her face composed. She's worried she'll do something—what, she doesn't know. She wonders what would happen if she suddenly screamed and ran for the exit. It must happen.

The air smells like the dead mice she used to find in the crawl spaces of Mr. Wyck's house. She expected something masking and antiseptic, but why should she? Alice knows better. Movies never do prison justice. Imagine the DMV with bars. But worse. The waiting never ends. A guard takes her into a room and motions towards a table with chairs. She sits. The chair is plastic. One leg is fastened to the table. The table is fastened to the floor—she guesses so someone won't use it as a weapon, which means it's happened and someone took remedy.

Alice has taken a pill—a small white disk. Her doctor prescribed the pills to help her sleep, and she would like to sleepwalk through this meeting. She's alert—too alert. She should have taken two pills. She feels like she is locked to the chair that is locked to the table that is locked to the floor. She's wearing a crimson sweater. It zips up the front. A black scarf is wrapped about her neck. Her cheeks are pale. She's tucked her hair behind her ears. Blue jeans, hiking boots because of the snow. The room is overheated and her palms, folded together in her lap, begin to sweat.

She has a plan. She will ask him to leave her alone. She will ask him to release her. She knows it's foolish, but she must try.

She's brought her notebook in. The guards leafed through it, but it's blank, so she doesn't care—it's the new one that she bought to replace the one she can't find. She idly taps a pen against its cover. She thinks of the blank white pages inside, waiting. She wishes they would bring the devil out. She'd like to get this over with. She almost didn't come. She said to Hans, “Everyone will know who I am soon enough. With your film—” But there was a thought between them—that maybe he didn't have to put her in the film—and then he said, “But you don't want the Wyckians coming to your door.”

She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again, she sees Jack Wyck.

His hands and feet are shackled. He makes slow progress, this ghost of Christmas past in a dirty gray jumpsuit. When he sees her, he seems excited and even lets himself smile a bit. The guard says something to him and unshackles his feet. He teeters over to her. How old is he now? She does the math. Mr. Wyck is only fifty-five, but he looks older. It's his skin, like paper, his weight, and the way his skeleton is realigning itself inside of his body. He's hunched, smaller.

“Genie!” he says as he sits across from her. “You came. I knew you would. Give me a kiss.” He turns his cheek to the side. In the visitor's handbook, Alice has read that this is permissible. She sits still, staring at him, silent. He turns slowly back to face her. “My, my,” he says, gazing at her. “Still the heartless beauty, are we?” He laughs, a wheezing chortle.