Saving Alice Read online

  All I ever wanted was you, Donna said to me shortly after our first anniversary. We were making up after an argument, and I must have looked visibly shaken by her declaration, because I couldn’t answer in kind. I tried to think of an equal declaration to make, but the moment passed. “I love you too, Donna,” I replied, and truly meant it.

  She seemed to have a hazy view of our history, including a strange, continued guilt over Alice’s death. Again, I viewed this as normal for Donna. After all, she seemed to feel guilty about everything. I figured she felt guilty over marrying the man Alice loved, nothing more, and if I attempted to question her regarding this, she simply froze up. “You wouldn’t understand, Stephen.”

  I suppose if I’d truly examined it, I might have realized that Donna’s guilt was an indication of something much bigger. It was Alycia, a regular bloodhound for veracity, who would eventually uncover the truth about her mother’s participation in Alice’s death.

  In our second year of marriage, Donna poignantly asked, “Why do you always push me away? Are you afraid you might love me after all?”

  “I do love you!” I declared earnestly, unaware of “pushing her away,” but my assertion only elicited another round of silent tears. Then one day, it came to her like a flash of insight. “You’re afraid of losing me, Stephen. Just like you lost Alice. That’s what it is.”

  I remember holding her near and kissing her repeatedly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “And you won’t,” she replied firmly. “I’ll prove it to you.” And that’s what she’d meant on the day she left, when she’d said, “I failed you.”

  Like many women, Donna was an incurable romantic, and I truly enjoyed buying her flowers, and chocolate, and little cards. In keeping with this, Somewhere in Time was one of Donna’s favorite movies. I thought it was corny but kept my opinion to myself. Christopher Reeve, so enamored with a woman from the past, thinks himself back in time. Yeah, right.

  If only changing the past were that easy, I remembering thinking. Reeve falls in love with Jane Seymour, only to lose her forever when something from the future breaks the spell. The resolution? They are united in heaven. When I saw the ending, I thought, That’s all there is??

  Donna and Alycia, however, wept lakes of tears.

  Later Donna cautioned Alycia regarding certain unsavory aspects to the movie. “They obviously didn’t save themselves for marriage,” she said. “So don’t take any cues from that, Alycia.”

  Alycia only rolled her eyes. “I get it, Mom.”

  “You don’t want to ruin your life,” Donna cautioned. “Teenage pregnancy would be a lifetime curse.”

  “I get it, Mom.”

  Of course Donna kicked herself for letting Alycia see the movie at all.

  Through much of our struggles, our love for Alycia was the glue that kept us together, and for years, I never watched a lick of evening TV. Instead, I came home and spent time with Alycia until it was time for bed. We played board games, made up story scenarios with her dolls, and read nearly every picture book in the library together. As she grew up, the sophistication of her toys and games grew as well. In the evenings, I read from various classics for youth.

  Alycia had always waited for me to come home. When I pulled into our driveway, without fail I would spot a dark silhouette in the living room window. Moments later, the silhouette emerged into focus, a little girl pressing her nose to the window. Then suddenly, the front door would burst open, and Alycia would come running down the steps to explode into my arms.

  She was no less enthusiastic on birthdays, her favorite “holidays,” and as much as she loved her own birthday celebrations, she preferred planning them for others. I remember the night of my thirtieth birthday when she was only seven. I arrived home, and as usual she came sprinting out the door.

  I pressed the power button to the window, and she leaned in grinning. “It’s about time. Mom’s waiting.”

  “What for?” I pretended.

  I had become the proud recipient of her fast-developing state-of-the-art eye roll. “Dad, you’d forget your own head if it wasn’t attached.”

  “Maybe that’s why it is,” I said. “Attached heads are for people like me who really need them to be attached.”

  She grinned, then suppressed a giggle. “Happy old age,” she announced, and then, “As if!”

  I glanced toward the front window of the house. “Alycia?”

  “What?”

  “There ain’t no people in them thar hills, are there?”

  Her face went blank. “Would you like there to be?”

  “Nope,” I replied.

  A wry smile emerged. “What if there were little people in them thar hills?”

  “No little or big people, please.”

  She nodded quickly—a little too quickly. “Cool. You have your wish, Kemo Sabe.”

  I affected a comically stern face. “Tonto…”

  “I mean it!” she protested, and then quickly covered her mouth, spurting a giggle into her hand. “Oops!” She cleared her throat and blanked her face again. “That didn’t mean anything, Dad. Pay no attention to the giggle behind the curtain!”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and sighed.

  “C’mon, Dad. Get some guts.” She opened my car door and pulled on my arm. “This is how it works. One foot goes in front of the other. It’s called ‘walking.’ ”

  I didn’t budge. Instead, I held out my left hand and extended my pinky finger. “Pinky swear,” I insisted, evoking the solemn pledge. “Pinky swear there are no people in there.”

  “In where?”

  “In the house.”

  She extended her pinky, locking it with mine. “I pinky swear there are no people in our house. Now, c’mon, Dad!”

  “All right, all right,” I replied. “I’m coming.”

  She’d tricked me with a technicality. The people in “them thar hills,” which included Paul, Larry, and John, had been hiding in the garage all along. At age seven, she’d planned the entire thing, including the Daffy Duck cake. Dethpicable!

  In the truest sense, my marriage to Donna was imbued with our daughter’s incessant energy. The older she got, the slower she rose in the morning, but once she did rise, resting was impossible until she finally fell asleep under duress. She never could understand how I could relax on Sunday afternoons when the “entire world was our oyster!”

  “C’mon, Dad, let’s take a drive! Let’s see the world! Let’s explore! Let’s eat grasshoppers!”

  I grimaced. “Explore what?” I asked. “Have you forgotten where we live?”

  “Let’s pretend we’re in an exotic world!”

  Her pleas fell on deaf ears, especially during football season, which she considered a crime against humanity. Undaunted, Alycia would wander into the room, lean over me—standing in front of the TV, no less—and whisper, “Defy the couch.”

  Then she’d sit on the floor, and with all the subtlety of a TV evangelist, say, “You’re bigger than the couch, Dad. It has no power over you that you don’t give it.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” I told her, leaning on my side and employing the appropriate sports cliché. “The couch is my friend. I say: Be the couch. In fact, keep your eye on the couch.”

  “The couch has destroyed your will to live,” she countered. “It’s not your friend. It’s your enemy.”

  “Then I invoke the rule of Julius Caesar …”

  She frowned in anticipation.

  “ ‘Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.’ ”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I could have written a book and called it Adolescent Facial Gestures, along with the subtitle: And How to Interpret Them, filling the pages with a hundred photos depicting the subtleties and variations of eye rolling alone, such as, the look-away eye roll, the blink-and-you-miss-it eye roll, the cross-your-arms-deliberate eye roll, the slow-motion eye roll, the nod-your-head eye roll, and Alycia’s all-time favorite: the quick you’re
-crazy-shake-of-the-head eye roll. Sometimes, to preserve its effectiveness, the eye roll was dispensed with altogether, replaced by the delicate one eyebrow raised.

  In keeping with our modified form of communication, Alycia and I would often reinvent the words to Donna’s favorite show tunes, such as, “I’ve grown disgusted with your face,” from My Fair Lady, or my own favorite: “How do you solve a problem like Alycia?” from The Sound of Music, and while Donna didn’t participate in our remake of Broadway classics, every May she would break out her nostalgic records, including Camelot, and sing along: “It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May.” Which elicited the proper retort: “That’s gross, Mom.”

  And if we were really bored, Alycia and I tortured Donna by singing her favorite Broadway tunes in “Elmer Fudd.” “If I wuh a wich man. Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum. All day long I’d biddy biddy bum. If I wuh a wealthy man.”

  For most of Alycia’s elementary years, Donna and I were treated to explicit and elaborate descriptions of classroom life and politics— who hated whom, who liked whom, who wore what—including her teachers’ countless foibles. Mrs. Morrison had a beak like an eagle; Mrs. Shumaker shook the tables when she walked; and Mr. Wolf, her old gym teacher, looked like one.

  We were also treated to elaborate descriptions of the social fabric of elementary school, including the sophisticated caste system. And then, one day, all commentary disappeared. In one fell swoop, we became the enemy, no longer trusted with her inner observations and conclusions.

  Alycia was right about her mother, of course, although I’d never noticed before. Donna did have a “Grace Kelly” thing about her, perhaps more so in college. But what I remembered most about Donna was what seemed to me her spiritual naïvety. She had a rosy optimism, as if everyone would become a Christian if they just listened to reason. When they didn’t, it puzzled her to no end. “Don’t they get it?” she would exclaim.

  And yet mingled within her optimistic Christian faith was her unrelenting disposition to guilt. She was forever repenting of thoughts and actions that had seemed to Alice and me utterly innocuous.

  And yet, paradoxically, Donna’s personal navigation between the seemingly contrary worlds of literature and religion, at least in college, came effortlessly. However, with the passage of time and approaching middle age, it seemed to become difficult, as if she’d suddenly awakened to the irreconcilable differences, then struggled in vain to find a truce between her heart and mind.

  C.S. Lewis wrote that if a child is taught something as harmless as standing on a chair is wrong, then later, even as an adult, they will never stand on a chair without guilt. In fact, it seemed to me that Donna had been taught that nearly everything in life was wrong except standing on a chair. As a youngster, she never attended dances, never listened to pop music, never set foot in a movie theatre, and never ever watched TV. Her folks didn’t even own one.

  Unfortunately, the slow dissolution of her childhood faith accompanied the gradual erosion of our marriage. In keeping with this, I remember the day she threw a Christian novel across the room. Considering her literary tastes, I was surprised she was reading it at all.

  “It doesn’t ring true,” she complained, and when I quizzed her further, she replied, “I can’t relate to it. It doesn’t reflect how Christians really live their lives…”

  I was curious at her seeming overreaction, and she shrugged. “Their miniscule struggles. Their laughable temptations. Their nearperfect lives. And no one makes unredeemable mistakes. I mean … no one even swears in those books. The characters are plastic!” And then she scoffed, “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t let a word slip now and then.”

  I considered this, tempted to dispute her claim. After all, I hadn’t heard Paul swear in years, mainly because he viewed profanity as antiintellectual. Larry rarely swore, because he viewed it as lazy and undisciplined. Despite this, and although I never read fiction, it seemed perfectly reasonable that Christians would prefer to read sanitized stories.

  Donna was undeterred. “Besides … people don’t just sit around having religious discussions.”

  I had to smile. “We do.”

  She only stared at me.

  “We discuss religion all the time,” I said. “And don’t you remember your argument with Paul?”

  She closed her eyes, exasperated. “Please don’t remind me.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At the time I wasn’t aware that Donna was already in a process of spiritual reevaluation. Despite this, I should have known better.

  We’d invited Paul over for dinner. Donna had prepared chicken and rice, green beans, and apple cobbler for dessert, and by the time Paul showed up, six-year-old Alycia had already been tucked into bed. The meal itself progressed uneventfully, but after discussing an assortment of benign topics, Donna naïvely asked, “So, Paul, where do you attend church?”

  Stunned by Donna’s question, I gave Paul a warning glance, hoping he’d temper his famous cynical intellectualism or dispense with it altogether.

  Paul ignored me. “Why would I go to church?”

  I was about to interrupt with something sports-related, but Donna was already speaking, “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Church is for people who believe in God,” Paul replied simply, shoving a spoonful of beans into his mouth.

  I sucked in my breath, hoping Donna would transition to another topic. I knew for a fact that Paul would have loved to discuss literature with my wife. I opened my mouth to suggest it, but Donna was already saying, “You don’t ?”

  “You do ?”

  “Of course.”

  “How?” Paul asked, and we were off to the races. The entire discussion turned into a great debate regarding religion versus science, and I wondered if Donna, despite her educated articulation, knew what she was up against. As for myself, I became a bystander to a verbal Ping-Pong match.

  Donna seemed undaunted. “Do you really think we just evolved, that somehow matter created mind?”

  Paul was all over it. “Quantum physics proves that we create our reality by observing it. God is us, looking back at ourselves.”

  I wanted to crawl under the rug, but Donna didn’t skip a beat. “Physicists are like the blind boys touching the elephant. Each one touches a different part—the trunk, the tail, the legs, the stomach, then declares to know the truth of the elephant. Not only do they miss the big picture, but they forget that the elephant is alive. Defining parts of His creation doesn’t define God himself. There’s a Person behind the pieces of your universe.”

  “A personal God is self-refuting,” Paul said. “It reflects our anthropomorphic tendencies to personalize everything.”

  “Personality is what this universe is all about,” Donna countered. She cited the anthropic principle—the well-accepted scientific theory that our earth had been meticulously designed for human inhabitation. While I’d heard of it, I was surprised that she had too. Then I reminded myself that Donna was a voracious reader.

  “It takes a Personality to design a world for other personalities,” she added. “Look at our human body. The details of our scientific functioning are still beyond our ability to fully grasp, and yet the parts aren’t what we’re about. We were made to think, to be human, to have personality.”

  Paul shook his head, but Donna continued undaunted. “Our Creator knows us intimately. In fact, He became human, Paul, and died for you.”

  Paul nearly came uncorked. “How did we get to this point? First we’re discussing the nature of the universe, and now you’re referring to a myth.”

  “Myth became true,” Donna countered. She glanced at me for a moment, then continued. “Sure … God first revealed himself in the myths of mankind, but the myth of a God becoming human and then dying was ultimately revealed in history.”

  Paul snorted. “You can’t believe that’s literally true?”

  “Of course,” she replied.

  “That’s just fundamentalism,”
he replied, as if identifying it thus closed the argument. “They’ve stolen your religion. The fundamentalists are literal about everything.”

  Donna was quick on the draw. “And the Liberals, New Agers, and Humanists mythologize everything. Christianity offers answers to the deepest longings and questions of mankind,” she replied steadily. “Even if you have a problem with Christian fundamentalism, as you call it, the core of Christianity still rings true.”

  Paul scoffed and reached for his water glass. “Believe me, the god I can conceive of is better than the god Christians have created. For one thing, my god doesn’t send people to hell.”

  “Neither does mine,” Donna replied.

  “My God…” Paul stopped, suddenly unwilling to finish the statement.

  “Your God is my God,” she replied with confidence. “And our God is the truest realization of all our fondest ambitions, hopes, and dreams. When we meet God, our greatest expectations will not only be fulfilled, they’ll be surpassed. When we go home to heaven we’ll never, ever again wonder: Is this all there is? ”

  By now Donna’s face was flushed, but Paul’s face had become a dark cloud of exasperation. In spite of her escalating emotion, Donna persisted. “Imagine having the complete, undivided attention of the God of the universe,” she said, eyes bright. “All the pleasures on earth are mere metaphors for our eventual experience of God. All the joys are an intimation of the ultimate Joy. Everything good on earth is a metaphor for our personal relationship with God.”

  Paul shook his head again.

  “How could you possibly disagree with that?”

  “Because it’s not true,” Paul said. “It’s wishful thinking.”

  “And where did wishful thinking come from?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean … how could we wish for something that doesn’t exist?”

  Paul frowned again, then smiled wryly. “What about time travel? I’ve always wished for that.”

  “Maybe time travel exists!” Donna exclaimed, then added, “In heaven we won’t be constrained by time. Everything in your world of physics fits nicely within the logical framework of a personal God.”