Saving Alice Page 12

  Paul only laughed. “If Christianity is true, how do you explain the church?”

  Donna frowned.

  Paul continued. “Talk all you want about God’s love, but you won’t find it in the church. You want to quote the Bible? The Bible says, ‘You’ll know them by their fruits,’ but there aren’t any to be found! Case closed!”

  Paul smiled as if he’d just scored the big one, but Donna wasn’t to be deterred. “Don’t reject God just because you reject the church, Paul. God is bigger than the church.”

  The conversation took a different turn as Paul began to describe his own personal experiences with Christians and their inability to live up to their own countless rules. Slowly, the wind evaporated from Donna’s sails. She listened but now seemed lost. The red splotches in her face turned pale. The whole thing petered out once Paul realized Donna was no longer arguing.

  The evening never recovered. Later that night, I awakened at one o’clock to find Donna sitting up in bed. When I turned on the lights, I saw tears streaming down her face. Her eyes were closed, and she was hugging herself tightly.

  “Too bright,” she whispered.

  I switched off the light. “What’s wrong?”

  I detected a shadowy shrug.

  “Try me.”

  “You don’t need God to love you, Stephen. And you don’t even believe anymore, so you wouldn’t understand.”

  I stroked her leg. “I’m sorry I invited Paul over,” I said. She shook her head. “It’s not his fault.”

  “You were right, you know,” I said.

  She sniffed. “About what?”

  “The wishful thinking stuff.”

  She shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  Days later, Donna received Paul’s note in the mail, thanking her for the meal and apologizing for the argument. While she figured I’d put him up to it, she wrote him a thoughtful letter back anyway. Although Donna was one of the few who truly accepted Paul, I never invited him back. In turn, this became another in a long line of rejections for Paul, especially painful because of his enormous respect for Donna. As of now, other than Susan, I was his only remaining friend.

  In all truth, and in spite of her disagreement with Paul, I turned out to be the greater thorn in Donna’s faith. While I didn’t discourage her, I gave her zero support. The most I did was smile politely as she talked about her love for Jesus and agree too vociferously with her own frustrations with the church.

  As for my own faith, Donna never accepted why I’d “given up.”

  “I didn’t let go of God,” I replied. “He let go of me. God can’t be trusted.”

  She smiled wryly, but her eyes held bitterness. “Why? Because He took Alice away?”

  I opened my mouth to object.

  “You quit believing at the very time when you should have persisted, Stephen. Did Job quit believing when God allowed everything to be taken from him?”

  “The story of Job doesn’t count,” I argued. “God gave it all back to him!”

  “He didn’t know God was going to do that,” Donna insisted. “He believed without knowing the outcome. Maybe God would have restored everything to you if you hadn’t quit.”

  I was frustrated with her silly notion. “Impossible.”

  “You should have persisted, Stephen, like Jacob wrestled with the angel, or the importune widow, or the woman whom Jesus seemingly scorned, telling her, ‘I’ve only come for the lost children of Israel.’ But later, after she persisted, He marveled at her persistent faith and gave her what she believed.”

  I decided to puncture her argument. “So,” I said, “you’re saying God would have brought Alice back to life?”

  “It’s not like He couldn’t !”

  “You’re kidding,” I exclaimed. “You don’t even believe that yourself, do you?”

  Her eyes glistened. “God can do anything.”

  “Except make you feel loved,” I replied, my voice tinged with my own bitterness.

  Her eyes welled up with tears. “But I won’t stop believing that He does. I don’t care if I don’t feel it. I still believe it.”

  And to prove my point, a few weeks later Donna did something very foolish. She took up smoking.

  I wouldn’t have believed that someone like Donna could do this if I hadn’t seen it firsthand. Initially, I wondered if maybe she didn’t start as a way to help our marriage, as if to further align herself with my antifundamentalism the only way she could. She already was going to movies and watching occasional TV.

  “Why does Mom smoke?” six-year-old Alycia once asked me.

  Because she can’t quit, I almost said. Instead, I struggled to come up with a decent reason. “Your mother’s not perfect,” was my feeble reply. “She’s trying to prove something to herself.”

  My little daughter swept her right hand over the top of her head in her unmistakable gesture: I don’t get it!

  I laughed and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Are you angry with my smoking?” Donna once asked, implying that I should be.

  Of course I wasn’t, which puzzled her. “It’s not a good habit, but it’s your choice.” Such a reply was foreign to her, and I suppose she used it to question my love for her, because, according to her warped childhood view, if I had loved her, I would have berated her personal failings. Eventually Donna did quit smoking, six months after she started, although it took several attempts.

  Our last year of marriage was a disaster. “You touch me like I’m your sister,” she once said, a reference to our uninspired bedroom life, and I remember taking her in my arms and giving her the most passionate kiss I could muster. But when I released her, she glared at me, her eyes glistening, “See?”

  Of course Donna was like any other woman. Surely as a young girl she’d yearned to find her own knight in shining armor, her own handsome Prince Charming. Surely she longed for someone to carry her away to his protective castle. Perhaps she’d even longed for her own Gatsby—her own romantic fool.

  While I couldn’t lie and pretend I hadn’t adored Alice, I truly loved Donna, but despite our college friendship, we never recovered from our dubious beginning. The loneliness and grief we’d quenched in each other’s arms wasn’t a legitimate reason to marry, and my financial failures, my obsessed distraction, and my loss of faith only exacerbated our difficulties.

  Three months before she left, Donna had whispered into the silence of our estranged bedroom, “You win, Stephen.”

  Win what? I thought, recognizing the beginning of yet another futile argument. I kept silent, but she continued in a flat and unemotional voice, “I can’t wait any longer. I can’t compete with your imagination of what might have been. I can’t wait to see the same look in your eyes, the way you once looked at her. I can’t wait for you to love me.”

  I remember sitting up, putting my hand on her shoulder. “Donna, I do love you.”

  She shook her head. “Not like you loved Alice.”

  “But I’m glad I married you.”

  She glared at me. “Then why do you still dream of her?”

  I wanted to say the content of my dreams was outside of my control, but instead I said something even worse. “If we hadn’t married, we wouldn’t have had Alycia.”

  She swallowed. “So that’s the only reason you love me? Because I gave you Alycia?”

  I tried to reply, but she had already turned her back to me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On Wednesday I worked later than usual, but Larry still outlasted me. It was nine-thirty when I got into my car, reluctantly shedding the protective world of work. I started the engine, considering my options. I hadn’t yet returned to Joe’s. Paul hadn’t heard about Donna’s and my marriage separation, at least not from my lips, and Susan, if she was back by now, would be full of consolations, conclusions, and exhortations. In the end, she’d probably throw up her hands with, “Men! Can’t live with them, can’t kill ’em.”

  I sighed into the darkness of my vibrating ra
ttletrap and thought about Alycia. “Leave her alone,” Donna had said.

  “I can’t,” I whispered above the annoying buzz of the car heater.

  I put the car into gear and took the long way home, then backtracked, driving around and around the back streets of Aberdeen, until I found myself on the street leading to Sally’s one-room apartment. As I drove slowly past the window, I peered up at the dark and uninviting curtains. Where was Donna sleeping? On the couch? Where was Alycia? On the floor? Or in the sleeping bag I now recalled seeing in the backseat of the car?

  I’m sorry, I whispered, words they’d grown tired of hearing, words they no longer believed. I stopped the car in the middle of the street where Donna or Alycia, or even Sally for that matter, could peek out the window and recognize me. I considered calling Donna and begging her again to take the house. But as quickly as the thought came, I knew Donna would reject it as she had our bank account. Besides, she’d already moved everything.

  Back during the humiliating court proceedings related to my trading fiasco, during which Donna had loyally stood by my side, I’d never felt like this, as if I were falling through a black cloud, searching for any kind of silver lining.

  Go home, I told myself. Go through the motions. Prepare for bed. Wash the dishes. You’re not the only one who’s staring at a divorce. Tomorrow’s another day.

  I gazed at the window again and imagined Donna behind the curtains. I pictured Alycia talking on the phone, probably in the bathroom where no one could eavesdrop. I put the car in drive, released the brake, and headed back home.

  Later that evening, I pulled on my pajamas, then reconsidered the bedroom. I hadn’t slept in our bed in nearly a week and hadn’t turned on the TV because I couldn’t bear the superficiality of canned lives.

  I trudged out to the living room and threw a clean sheet over the couch. I stared at the phone on the floor and resisted the temptation. How easy it would be just to call her.

  Come home! I’d be tempted to beg her. But why? So I could torture her with another fourteen years of my insidious poverty, not to mention the emotional vacuum we seemed to have created? Maybe she’d be better off without me. Maybe Alycia would as well.

  I sighed with frustration at my own descending self-pity.

  “I’ll be praying for you,” my mother said recently. “Are you praying, too, Stephen?”

  “Sure,” I said, but she knew better.

  Reclining on the couch, I reached over to the lamp table and turned out the light. As usual, I lay awake for hours. I played the memories over and over in my mind, and my mother’s words seemed to echo in the back of everything: Miracles happen to those who pray and believe.

  For a moment, I even considered trying again. I stared up at the ceiling, felt the words forming in my mind, then gave up before they crossed my lips. I turned over on my side and doubled my efforts to fall asleep. Trusting God is a recipe for disaster.

  That settled it, but it didn’t bring sleep. About two o’clock, the notion crossed my mind: The least you can do is win your daughter back.

  I sighed into the listless darkness and shrugged it off, but the thought persisted, growing larger until I finally entertained it: What would it take?

  “She’s in her embarrassment phase,” Donna had said.

  Money, I thought. It would take more money.

  “I keep my promises,” Alycia had declared.

  I modified my appraisal. Money and dependability.

  That thought jumped the curb and landed in the strangest place: Maybe I could finally begin trading again. The idea was ridiculous … and yet tremendously appealing. Trading is how I lost it all; trading is how I had to find it again.

  I turned on my side and tried to mentally force sleep to overtake me.

  “Leave her alone!” Donna had implored me.

  Would it be so hard? I knew what to do, didn’t I? I knew all the methods, the systems, and the process. I’d been studying it for years, methodically searching for the magic indicator, but didn’t it all come down to one truth? Hadn’t I already found the magic bullet? The perfect system wasn’t a system at all: It was me—consistent and disciplined.

  Bottom line: I’d been afraid to pull the trigger again. That’s all. This time I could do it right. I could ride out the inevitable losses without losing my head.

  I sat up and smiled into the darkness. I can win her back.

  My body shivered with the thought. Hours earlier, I’d been at my darkest moment, and now I was suddenly exhilarated with the possibilities. I thought of poor Donna living in her friend’s tiny place, living below poverty level. She deserved a decent alimony. In fact— and by now my brain was blazing—I could pay them all back—every single investor I’d wronged.

  The small flame became a fire. I could redeem the last fourteen years of my life. I could parlay a life of failure—like a magician creating a rabbit out of thin air—into a life of success. I could fulfill a lifetime of broken promises. I could finally finish the journey I began in college.

  There I was, wide awake in the middle of the night, days after losing my wife and daughter, and suddenly I was beginning to believe again.

  I can pay them all back, I said into the darkness.

  The fire became an inferno. I burst from the living room couch and headed downstairs to my cave. I already had the system, didn’t I? It wasn’t perfect, but if implemented consistently, it was good enough.

  I turned on the computer, pulled up a recent spreadsheet file, and began reviewing my old data, thousands upon thousands of past instances, proving to myself yet again that my divergence trading system could work. I studied for hours, examining screen after screen of stock charts until I was too bleary-eyed to continue, and then at dawn it hit me, and suddenly I flicked the computer off. The monitor’s light buzzed into oblivion. I pushed away from the desk and stared at the blackened screen with newfound disgust.

  “Enough!” I whispered.

  I picked up the second Market Wizard book and read one of the passages I’d underlined years ago. “All the great traders gained and lost small fortunes before finally succeeding.”

  It’s time to act, I thought. I felt another surge of adrenalin and considered my resources. At the moment I had seven thousand in the bank that I had intended to split with Donna, in spite of her refusal.

  What if I traded with it instead?

  I continued reading: “Most of the great traders turned small sums into millions—not doubling, or tripling, or even quadrupling their money, but multiplying their money one hundred to one thousand times.”

  My mind was ricocheting like an aimless bottle rocket. Forget the seven thousand. What if I had thirty thousand? And then … what if I employed derivatives? With options or futures, I could turn it into a million bucks in a few months.

  I felt the first pinprick. It’s not the knowing, Stevie boy. It’s the doing. And the doing has always been the devil.

  Even Larry didn’t believe in the possibilities. He didn’t even believe in a predictable market. Years earlier, he’d admonished me: “You’re bending the historical data to match the trading system. Your results are bogus. The stock market is haphazard, Stephen. You’re finding patterns where they don’t exist. It’s like an ink-blot test: You’re seeing what you want to see.”

  Wrong, I now told myself. Hundreds of successful traders have proven him wrong.

  My heart beating like a galloping elephant, I lay down on my cave couch and closed the cover of my book. I repeated to myself over and over: I can do this. I can do this.

  I went to my CD player and inserted the cheesiest collection of tunes I could find.

  “For you, Dad…” Alycia had once exclaimed, “cheesy is a way of life.”

  “Slipping Through My Fingers” broke the silence. I sat back down on the couch, my hands laced behind my neck. The song reminded me not only of my childhood but of one year ago.

  I’d played the song three times, raising the volume with each repeat, and
finally elicited a response from my next-door neighbor. Alycia pounded on the door, then entered the inner sanctum of my cheesy empire, her hands over her ears, her eyes full of mock anguish. “Please make the bad music go away.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  She stood there, hands over her ears, but listening to the words in spite of herself. Her expression changed. “Tell me that isn’t about me.”

  I shrugged. “Why would you think that?”

  “It is about me.”

  “C’mon, it’s a sweet song about how kids grow up too fast.”

  She sighed with exaggeration. “If I hugged you, would you make it stop?”

  I shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s negotiable, I suppose.”

  “I need some commitment here.”

  “Okay, I suppose if you hugged me I’d shut it off.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed again as if she were making a deal with the devil. Lately, variations of sighing had replaced her elaborate eye rolling. I turned in my chair, faced toward the wall, and folded my arms to indicate the strength of my position. “Slipping…” continued to play. After a moment, I sensed movement behind me, and then a kiss on the back of my neck.

  Alycia stepped back as if I was harboring parasites. “There. Now shut it off. We had a deal.”

  “We never shook on it.”

  “Dad…”

  “Besides, no one said anything about a ‘kiss.’ Wasn’t there something in the Bible about a betrayal ‘kiss’?”

  “Dad…” She raised her eyebrows and twitched her pinchers, but the usual mirth in her eyes was missing.

  “Okay, okay,” I replied. “I suppose for a kiss I can turn it down.”

  She harrumphed loudly—another variation of sighing—and stormed out. That might have been our last civil conversation.

  That’s the past, I thought, smiling tentatively. I can do this.

  I can win her back.

  My smile broadened. And maybe I can win Donna back too.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN