The Singing Bone (5 page)

There are photos from the summer before they were arrested—pictures taken at a party by a guest of Mr. Wyck's. Alice hardly knows which party it is. There were always people in the house, strangers. A face is blurred. She wonders who it is. It could be her. There are pictures of captures and cars at odd angles. There is a picture of Molly's mother with her arms around Stuart. Lee. Only a few of the photos are in color. These were for magazine articles. There was something in
Vanity Fair
—part of a longer article about cults—Alice recalls, and something else in
Time:
“Where Are Your Children?”
The same place they've always been
, Alice thinks.

She doesn't remember Molly ever wearing her hair in two braids—­especially for a class picture. She would have thought it made her look too young. It must have been Mrs. Malloy's idea. And Stover—already six feet tall—you can see how thin and tall he is, like a small tree that shoots up, the trunk still narrow. Is Trina smiling? One side of her mouth is turned up. The curled lip still saying,
Fuck you, Alice.

Alice gazes at the photo of herself. She hasn't seen it for years. She'd just been arrested and she's looking back over her shoulder, her hands cuffed behind her back. Alice remembers the photographer, who got closer than the police would have liked as they transferred her from the hotel into the patrol car. She's wearing a ripped white shirt and baggy blue jeans. Her hair is long and unkempt. She's clearly unhappy, frightened, her eyes round, her mouth a small downward arch, her face pale. A Wyckian has captioned the photo:
Alice Pearson
,
Traitor
.

Traitor? She sits back in her chair.

She clicks the window shut and stares at the screen saver, a scene of a spring forest—too verdant, too radiant to be real—but she would like to be there right now, in that overly ripe forest, in a cabin with a woodstove and something warm to eat, far from the grasp of the Wyckian Society's lies.

When she lifts her teacup, it rattles against the saucer. She puts it down again. She folds her hands in her lap and closes her eyes. Alice Pearson. Indeed. Where is she now? Right here. She opens the web browser again, returning to the Wyckian Society page. Alice clicks “Chat.” A box pops up:
You must create a username and password to join chat
. Beside “User Name,” Alice types “SweetPea.”

has joined the conversation.

DougRamsey: New user alert. Hey SP. Welcome.

SqueakyGirl: Curiosity killed cat

Jay24: The cat gets the mouse.

SweetPea: Hi DougRamsey. Thnx.

DougRamsey: Haven't seen you b4

SweetPea: Just joined.

SqueakyGirl: The cheese stands alone

SweetPea: What are they talking about?

Jay24: Cheeeezzze. yum. ;-)

SqueakyGirl: LOL. Me love cheese. ‘n crackaws.

Jay24: The gathering. <:o)

SweetPea: Gathering?

DougRamsey: Yearly.

DougRamsey: Jay24 wants to meet SqueakyGirl in RT

SqueakyGirl: The pressure.

SqueakyGirl hands Jay24 a camera

SqueakyGirl: pics

DougRamsey: SweetPea u r quiet. Will u b there?

SweetPea: Where?

Jay24: SqueakyGirl I bet ur hot.

DougRamsey: Meet at the graves.

Alice stares at the word “graves” for a moment. Changing her name from Pearson to Wood was like creating a war shield out of tissue paper. Big Anniversary. Twenty years. She is standing on ice, and the ice is cracking beneath her feet.

Hans is in a hotel room on the edge of Poughkeepsie. The world outside is black and still. He is up late with Jack Wyck's drawings. He reads
I am a philosopher, an artist, a free man.
Hans turns a page. He thinks of the list of Jack Wyck's priors that Ariel had given to him: Breaking and entering. Auto theft.
I am a god, a demon, the last light. The body is a shell. The soul is eternal.
Simple assault.
A man thinks he only lives once, but man lives many times. Many places. When I close my eyes, I can see the way time spirals.
Possession of a concealed weapon.
I can see the way we vanish and reappear.
Hans closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose. The drawings are dense and intricate, the writing small. He opens his eyes, looks back at the page.

The words flow around a carefully drawn Celtic triskelion, the three spiraling arms symbolizing life, death, rebirth. Black figures edge the pages. They are silhouettes, without detail or clear features. Hans studies the drawing. He hears a noise and turns in his chair quickly. He looks at the window and is startled by his own reflection in the black glass. He gets up and closes the curtains. He smiles. It is my imagination, he tells himself, but when he turns back to the book, the curtains move once more—a draft, perhaps.

Hans stretches. He gets stiff now. Arthritis? He should do ­something—exercise. He thinks of his walks. He'd like to run. The weather must be turning colder. He turns the heat up. He puts the lid back on the manuscript box and turns on the television, clicking through the channels. He turns the TV up. He wants to fill the room with noise. He jumps up and down, trying to ease himself out of the ache, to warm his muscles. There is a sound in the hallway outside, a dry cough or the rattle of a maid's cart. He turns the television down and listens. Is there someone on the other side of the door? He switches the television off, then the light, and gets down on his hands and knees. Yes. He hears it again—but it's neither a cough nor the maid's cart. It's a bumping sound, a scrape. He thinks of The Doing—the way the women wore their hair in tightly coiled braids, their gray shift dresses pinned on the clothesline, flapping, the fabric ­ballooned by the wind. He remembers the men with their high-belted trousers and stilted gaits—the way they looked at him at worship with a mix of hostility and pity, their hands clutching at the frayed bindings of Bibles.

There it is again—the sound, the scrape. Hans lies down on his belly and looks under the door. It's late. The door handle turns, but the door is locked. And the latch is on. No one is coming in. Still. He can see the shadow of movement outside.

And then he hears it. “That's not our room, Ted.” It's a woman's voice, rough with alcohol. And then a man's, “Yes it is!” And Hans understands. They're drunk and the man is sliding his key card through the lock, trying it this way and that. “Come on, honey. It's this way,” the woman says.

Then they are gone, and Hans is still on the floor in the dark, thinking of The Doing, their crooked operations, and of Jack Wyck with his arcane drawings, the black-eyed birds, the breaking and entering of the body.

He never expected The Doing to blame him. After all, it wasn't Hans who called the ATF. It wasn't Ariel. Someone inside the group must have made the call—or one of The Doing was a government plant. But it didn't matter. Three of them came to the premiere of the
Death Christ
—somehow traveling out to Los Angeles and getting in, posing as press, dressed in ordinary clothes. Hans still doesn't know how they pulled it off. They sat through
Death Christ
, scattered throughout the theater, and when it was over and Hans took the podium to field questions, the three stood, holding their Bibles aloft, chanting:
The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.

And the audience—they thought it was all part of the show. What else could it be? Hans stood at the podium, his mouth slightly open, watching The Doing, vaguely thinking he remembered each of them—yes, he did. The one who called himself Ibriham was right in front of him.
He was so good at chopping wood
, Hans thought. Ibriham's face was red. He pointed at Hans, continued chanting:
So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth!
Ariel, in the first row of the audience, turned in her seat, and Hans wildly wondered if she'd invited them as a surprise, but no, that would never happen—and she must have seen something, because she was up and running for the emergency exit and then Hans heard the first shots.

The police said it was lucky that one of the guns jammed, that at the last minute the theater had hired security.

Everyone said it was lucky that more people hadn't been killed.

Alice walked slowly, watching Mr. Wyck and Allegra. Allegra's skirt was so long that it trailed on the ground behind her. When they came to a fallen tree, Mr. Wyck helped her over it by picking her up at the waist and lifting her. She put her hands on his shoulders and looked down at him. It was pretty, Alice thought, the way her dark hair fell over her face. He carried her like that for a little while longer, and Alice tried to imagine Mr. Wyck lifting her like that. She tried to imagine the way his hands would feel.

Alice liked watching them and she felt a greediness in her gaze, as if she were watching a tightly plotted film. Where had they come from? No one else looked like them. They were the sort of people other people tried to look like, but never quite did. They broke through the gray backdrop of familiarity.

Alice had won a full scholarship to a school upstate, but when she'd visited the campus, it looked so familiar, as if she'd already walked the streets more times than she could imagine. The thought of the long, colorless winters and the frozen expanse of Lake Champlain depressed her. At school, she talked to the librarian, Mr. Valetti, who was also the theater director. She had lunch one day in his cramped office. They sat amid stacks of books. “Alice,” Mr. Valetti said. “You're too smart to hang around here. Get a plan. Be brave. Go to California. If you live there for a year, you can go to school for next to nothing.”

“How?” Alice asked.

“Get a job! Just go out there. Meet people. You have to be open to life, Alice.” Mr. Valetti offered her a pretzel. “So good with peanut butter on them,” he said, and Alice wondered if Mr. Valetti was as much of a stoner as her friends. “Just go!” he said. “Don't get trapped.”

“Trapped” meant “pregnant.” “Trapped” meant “over.” She'd work all summer, save money, board a bus, and go to California to invent a new life for herself. “Choose the life you want, Alice,” Mr. Valetti said. “Not the one that's handed to you.” When she got up to leave, he shouted after her, “And keep singing! I love what you did in
Mousetrap
. Brilliant stuff.”

At night, she dreamed of herself singing on the streets of California. She could make money like that, couldn't she? She wouldn't have to endure another cold New York winter—ever. She imagined herself working as a waitress in one of the health food cafés or as a cashier in a bookstore. She would dress like a hippie, like Allegra, maybe.

“Almost there,” Mr. Wyck called out up ahead. Alice had been this way a million times with her friends—down the hill, through the trees, around the reservoir—but she'd never seen Mr. Wyck before. She wondered how that could be. Alice was tired. The night before, Trina had fought with her mother again, and Trina had climbed into Alice's bedroom window sometime after midnight. “She kicked me out,” Trina said as she crawled into bed next to Alice. “I'm cold. I'm sorry.”

Alice woke just enough to cover Trina. “You can stay here,” she told Trina. “Mom won't care.”

“They want to send me to live with my grandmother,” Trina cried, curling into Alice. “Never. I am never doing that.”

“No,” Alice said. She found Trina something to blow her nose with. “Never.” She held Trina until she fell asleep.

Trina usually talked about music—music and movies, and if she couldn't find weed, she'd ask if maybe they could get hash instead.
We could score from that kid who works Tuesday nights at the 7-Eleven—Gary or something?
Or she'd wonder aloud if she should braid her hair or leave it flat. “What time is it, Alice?” she'd ask, because she never wore a watch. “Did you do the algebra? Give me yours,” she'd say, pulling Alice into the girls' bathroom, biting her lip, filling out the mimeographed sheets with a heavy hand. Trina was the inventor of plans: sell weed, buy a car, marry Keith Richards, live on the beach.
Freedom!
There were no metaphysics involved in being Trina Malik. Religion was boring. That was the problem with her parents. Trina wanted to get fucked up and listen to Pink Floyd.

Mostly Stover wanted to go wherever Trina went, but with Lee in the picture, it wasn't likely she'd invite him anywhere. “My mom wants me to go straight to college,” Stover said once when he and Alice were in Hot Hits, the record store at the mall. Alice leaned against an album rack, arms folded, while Stover leafed through the albums. “She doesn't care where. She says anything is fine as long as I'm not out on the street doing nothing.”

“Come to California with me,” Alice said. “We can play music on the street for money and then you can pick a college. Playing music isn't doing nothing. We'll be like those two.” She laughed, pointing at the cover of the Fleetwood Mac album on the wall.

“Yeah,” Stover said slowly. “Maybe. But not like those two. I'm not wearing knee pants, anyway. Do you like that record?”

“Who doesn't?” she answered. “Don't you?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. It's all right. I like the new Stones.”

“But we'll go to California, right?” She liked the idea of going with Stover, and as soon as she said it, she couldn't imagine going without him.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?” They'd talked about it for the rest of the day, while they waited in line at the Orange Julius and then, walking home, he got more excited about the idea, telling Alice they could buy a car and drive cross-country. They cut around by the reservoir and stopped there to share a joint, passing it back and forth. “I'm sure they have good pot in California,” Stover said between hits, holding his breath so his voice sounded strained.