The Singing Bone (2 page)

“No, it was totally weird when I saw her in the parking lot with that guy. I started to go over to say hi and she looked right at me and then turned her back on me.”

“That's just Trina.” Alice rolled her eyes. It was a phrase they were used to.
That's just Trina
. When they were kids, Alice, Trina, Molly, and Stover always had a game—it could be hide-and-seek or Monopoly—­anything—but Trina always found some reason to get mad, to throw the cards into the air or the Monopoly board against the wall. Or she'd just announce that she was going home, her chin high, and Stover trailed after her, saying, “Come on, T., what's wrong? It's no big deal. Come back,” and Molly and Alice, looking at each other across the ruined game, shook their heads.
Why?

  •  •  •  

“That's just Trina,” Molly echoed. She smiled and lit another cigarette.

“What did he look like?” Alice wanted to know. “The guy?” She squatted again, like Molly had, and looked over at her.

“Like, Italian? Dark.
Cute
. Oh my god. So cute.” Molly took a piece of pink bubblegum out of her purse and passed another piece to Alice. “Older? Yeah, I think he's older. He's not in school.”

“Older like by how much?” Alice asked.

“I didn't go up to them because she just, you know, turned her back on me. So weird.” Molly shook her head. “Do you think I should dye my hair blond?” She was examining a strand in the weak light. “For summer?”

“Maybe they were tripping.” Alice said. “Look at me.” Alice looked at her friend's pale round face, the small chin, the big blue eyes, the brown ringlets that used to be blond. She was like something from one of the Christmas cards her grandmother collected. “Yeah, blond,” she said. “Definitely. Like when you were little. Frost it.”

Molly pulled another ringlet straight and twisted it. “I don't know. Maybe they
were
tripping. But I've only known her since I was
five
. You'd think she'd still recognize me. I mean, she's at my house all the time.”

“True.”

Alice thought of Molly's house, how clean it was and the way her parents left the door unlocked for their daughter no matter what the time. She thought of Trina's house—the unfamiliar cooking smells, the round of rose-shaped pink soap on a white dish in the guest bathroom, the blue carpet and plastic-covered white couches—and of Stover's house—the modern furniture, the deck his father built, the swimming pool with yellow walls. Then Alice thought of her own house, and her mother's “collections”—that's what Mrs. Pearson called whatever she hauled home from garage sales or out of the trash—that made each room smaller, the shades pulled, the curtains unwashed. Alice saw her own room: her bed with the green and yellow daisy-chain blanket, the white desk with gold trim, the red plastic record player with the white needle arm. Everything in its place.

  •  •  •  

The four friends could see one another's houses from various windows of their own. Their parents were friends, too—or had been when the kids were young enough to race their bikes in the summer or trick-or-treat in the fall—everyone but Trina's parents, who kept to themselves. Whenever Alice thought about Trina's parents, she saw them perched, blank-faced, on their plastic-covered sofa, as still and quiet as two perfectly painted china figurines. In elementary school, Alice walked to the school bus with Molly, and Molly's mother always asked Alice to hold her daughter's hand as they walked. “She's so small for her age,” Mrs. Malloy said, touching Molly's blond head and putting her hand into Alice's. “Make sure she's safe.”

  •  •  •  

The trees in the distance were losing their outline to the night. “We should go,” Alice said. Molly put her cigarette out. They climbed through the woods without talking. They arrived on a street lined with neat ranch houses. “Lip gloss?” Alice offered the tube to Molly. The flavor covered the smoke smell, just in case. This one was sticky sweet and smelled of root beer. Alice took the gloss back. Molly blew a bubble. “Pizza?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I'll go ask my dad for the car.”

“I'll stay out here,” Alice said.

Alice made small circles in the street to keep warm while she waited. She tried the hustle: One, two, three, four. She hopped. She stood still and looked up at the stars. Inside, Molly's mother was making dinner. The blue light of the television illuminated the den where Molly's father stood with his back to the window. Her little brother came to the front door and opened it, leaning out. “Hi, Alice-Alice,” he called. Alice looked up. Stuart was almost as tall as Molly now.

“Hi, Stuart-Stuart,” she answered. When Stuart was four or five, Alice had started to call him Stuart-Stuart. It made him laugh like crazy. “Stuart-Stuart,” she'd say, and Stuart begged: “Say it again, Alice. Say it more than twice. Say it twice twenty times,” and she'd tickled him, saying:
Stuart-Stuart-Stuart-Stuart
—on and on, faster and faster, until the name became garbled in her mouth and neither of them could stop laughing.

“Mom says Molly can't have the car. She made dinner. She says for you to come inside.” Stuart pushed the screen door back and forth, waiting.

Alice liked “Alice-Alice” better than “head” or “freak”—which is what kids at school called her. She pretended not to care. She'd stopped talking to them ages ago. And her grades were high; people thought of her as “smart”—or that's what she heard from Molly and Trina.
The smart one
. Really? Alice didn't think she was so smart.

She pulled her straight brown hair back and into a ponytail, put lip gloss on her thin lips and mascara on her deep-set eyes. She applied blush, even, because Alice was under the impression that she was too pale.
Hey, ghost
, the mean boys in the neighborhood called after her.
Boo!
they cried, jumping out at her.
Hey, ghost. Hey, phantom.
Dan Crew never said it. When he looked at Alice, he smiled. She'd had a crush on him since third grade. “Hey, Alice,” he liked to say.
Alice
, like it was the only name ever. It made her feel like there was a light shining on her. Molly said if Alice would just
talk
to him, he'd go with her. “Don't be so shy, Alice,” Molly said. “You're so nice to talk to. I'd know.” Easy for Molly to say, Alice thought, with her curls.

“That's okay, Stuart-Stuart,” Alice called. “Tell your mother thank you. I've gotta book.”

When he went back in the house, Stuart repeated what Alice told him. “She had to book,” he told his mother.

“Book? What's that mean?” his father asked.

“
Go
.” Stuart looked at the floor. “She had to leave.”

“Did you wash your hands, Stuart?” his mother wanted to know.

“Yes,” Stuart lied.

“ ‘Book.' Interesting,” Stuart's father said. “Does she ever magazine?”

“Dad. You are a cornball.”

At dinner, Stuart said, “Alice is a jerk,” and Molly hit him on the back of the head.

“Why is Alice suddenly a jerk?” Molly's mother asked. “Don't hit your brother.” She put down her silverware and looked at her children, their pretty pink faces distorted by belligerence.

“Stu has a crush on Alice.” Molly nudged her little brother with her elbow. “Don't you?”

“You're ugly!” Stuart spilled some of his milk when he put the glass down too hard. He thought he was going to cry.

“Stuart! Go to your room. You too, Molly. You're behaving terribly, both of you.” She looked from Molly to Stuart to her husband, who was reading the newspaper. She would have liked to tell him to leave the table, too.

That night, Stuart lay in bed and thought about Alice looking up at the stars. It was like she was waiting for a beam of light to sweep her away. Stuart drifted off to sleep imagining beautiful Alice Pearson trapped in a beam of light, her long legs limp, her feet lifting off the ground, her arms hanging by her sides.

Alice is in the university's library with headphones on. She's listening to a recording of “The Miller's Daughter” and taking notes.
Murder Ballad 10
, she writes.
American. Bentonville, Arkansas, 1958.
Alice taps her pen against the writing pad in front of her. She closes her eyes and listens to the singer tell the story: Two sisters have the same lover, but the lover favors the younger sister. The older becomes jealous, so she takes her sister to walk by the sea and then pushes her into the water. The younger floats to the miller's house.
This is where the story always diverges
, Alice thinks. She holds her breath as she listens: “If you'll give me your diamond rings ten/ Bow and bend to me-o/ But she wouldn't give him her diamond rings ten/ And so he shoved her in again.”

No magical corpse. Miller murders girl. American. Bentonville, Arkansas, 1958
. She underlines
Miller
twice.

Alice's topic is the magical corpse, but Alice's corpses aren't vampires, though she wonders if she ought to do a little research there, too. That morning, she turned to a fresh sheet in her notebook and wrote:
The magical corpse is one who's met a violent death—usually by murder—and is returned to life as part of the natural world. When returned, the corpse reveals the secret of its death. It might be returned as an animal—i.e., Grimm's “ Juniper Tree”: My mother, she killed me. / My father, he ate me. / My sister gathered all my bones, tied them in a silken scarf, and laid them beneath the juniper tree. / Tweet, tweet, what a pretty bird am I. (Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 720). Check “The Singing Bone”(780).
Alice doesn't know what she'll do with the research yet—­perhaps turn it into a paper and then a book.

It didn't take her long to find her key; that's how she thinks of ­ballads—as her key. The way the tale changes, erodes, transforms, and re-emerges tells her everything about the people listening. She's a folklorist, after all. Her world is rich in shifting narratives, half-truths, magical revelations. Hidden keys that open impossible worlds are not unfamiliar to her.
Bluebeard
, she writes.
Robber Bridegroom.

Alice listens to two more American recordings. In both of them, the miller kills the girl. Alice wonders when the story changed. In the older versions, the girl's body is fashioned into a harp or a fiddle. When the instrument is played, it reveals the girl's killer. In Nigeria, the sisters are turned into brothers and the instrument becomes a fish that leaps from the water when anyone travels past and sings, “Your brother is buried here, your brother is buried here.” In the Grimm version of “The Singing Bone,” a brother kills a brother so that he might marry the king's daughter. It is only later that the younger brother's bones are turned into a horn that tells the story of his death, and then the murderer is stitched into a sack and thrown in the river.

Alice admires the simplicity of revenge in folklore. The sister is burned, the brother is drowned, and there's no question about whether it is right or wrong.

She knows the Nigerian tale will not be included in
Child Ballads
, which only cover Scottish, English, and a smattering of American ballads. She's found several versions in Faroe, but they aren't translated into English, French, or German, and Alice isn't familiar enough with the Nordic languages to make an educated guess about the ending. She'll have to find someone to work with, and then she'll bring tales in—“The Juniper Tree,” “The Robber Bridegroom,” maybe—and then she'll go further: Give me a magical corpse in a film. Give me a magical corpse in popular culture. She's making a list, drawing arrows, circling words and crossing them out. She thinks of the new Japanese horror film she went to see the other night,
Ringu
, where the dead woman climbs out of a well, her black hair falling in a wet curtain in front of her face, her white gown heavy with water and earth. Alice would like to include it—as a side note, perhaps. There's so much folklore in the film. The truth is revealed through otherwise nonmagical (
one might even say “every day,”
she writes) contemporary items: a telephone, the ubiquitous black plastic VHS tape.

Work is the only way Alice can focus. Something's coming—a door has been left open. Cold air is creeping in. She can feel it in her back—her cervical spine is knitting itself into a hard stump of rope. No matter how many laps she does in the pool, the sensation is working its way down, towards the lumbar.
Tomorrow
, Alice thinks,
I'll have white hair, a dowager's hump
. No one would notice that Professor Alice Wood is distracted, drifting. The creases at the front of her wool trousers are sharp. Her mohair coat is brushed. Her shirt is pressed. Every night, she rubs the small lines at the corners of her mouth with an expensive cream from a pink glass jar.

The versions from the British Isles—“Binorie,” “The Bonnie Bows of London,” “The Cruel Sister,” “The Twa' Sisters”—all keep the magical instrument.

And what did he do with her hair so fine? He made of it strings for his violin.

There was a message on Alice's answering machine that morning from someone named Hans Loomis. The name is familiar. She was leaving the house when he called and she stood in her doorway listening. He said he was making a movie. When he said that, she decided the call couldn't really be for her. It was some perverse mistake.

And what did he do with her arms so long? He made them bows for his violin.

Alice reminds herself that everyone she'd once known in this part of New York wouldn't recognize her—or they'd be in prison. Or dead. Every day since she's been back, a large part of her brain works at pretending she doesn't miss the palm trees and postcard-ready blue sky of California, that she won't be recognized, her name won't be called from across a supermarket aisle:
Alice, is that really you?
The eyes saying:
I thought you were dead. I assumed you were dead, anyway, I mean, after everything
.