Saving Alice Read online

  “And don’t talk about your romantic future to me, please.”

  “Face it, Dad, I’m blossoming.”

  I punched the last hole.

  “Ouch!!”

  “You couldn’t feel that.”

  “It felt like I felt it!”

  Finally … I installed the pins and stepped back. Sniffing tentatively, she stood up. Facing the mirror together, I braced myself as Alycia stared at her image in disbelief.

  Amazing. Her ears were hardly distinguishable at the sides of her head.

  Alycia burst into tears and hugged me tightly. “I love you, Dad.”

  I chuckled wryly and demurred her praise, but she shook my shoulders with wild abandon. “I’m serious! You saved my life.”

  I chuckled again. “Well … maybe not your life.”

  Wide-eyed, she shook her head adamantly. “I beg to differ, Daddy dearest.” She looked at me with such adoration, it took my breath away. She hugged me again, so tightly, it would have required the Jaws of Life to peel her away.

  “And thank you, God,” she whispered into my chest. “Thank you for giving me the coolest, smartest Dad!”

  While I didn’t mind sharing the credit, it all seemed so melodramatic. Then again, my daughter was the ultimate drama queen. You saved my life, she’d said, and yet when I look back on that day, I tremble.

  What I wouldn’t give to have it all back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After I performed the miracle on Alycia’s ears, dear ol’ Dad could do no wrong.

  She fixed me snacks on demand, retrieved the morning paper, and washed my car—no small feat—just to see my pleased expression. She even vacuumed the carpet in my office, and one day when I was studying the price and volume squiggles of the stock market on my home office computer, I caught her staring at me.

  My chair squeaked as I turned around. “Something hanging out my nose?”

  “Gross, Dad!” she exclaimed, leaning forward and resting her chin in her clasped hands. “I’m studying you.”

  “That’s, well, comforting.”

  Alycia smiled innocently, a little too innocently. “I want to know what makes you tick.”

  “I don’t even know that.”

  She was undeterred. What came next, during the following weeks and months, was what I call her curiosity phase, a time when she asked me countless questions and sat with rapt interest, palms on cheeks, while I told her stories from my childhood. I should have been honored; instead I was nervous.

  While some of our discussions took place around the dining table, most of her interrogations occurred in the car as I played chauffeur—a captive, unable to escape. Of course, I respected her need for pure, undiluted honesty. “When I was a kid,” I once began, watching the road, “we had no computers, no TVs, no cars, no beauty salons, and every morning I walked thirty miles to school— including Saturdays.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell Alycia was rolling her eyes. “For real, Dad.”

  “Okay, you caught me. The truth. After school my father locked me in a closet and fed me bits of bread under the—”

  “Dad…”

  Finally Alycia resorted to pointed questions, designed to penetrate my uncooperative behavior. Speaking of your dad, why is Grandpa so weird? Was Larry your best friend? Or Paul? Did you get all A’s? How old were you when you first dated? And the big one: When did you fall in love with Mom?

  I never gave the latter a straight answer, saving the whole truth for much later when hopefully she’d be old enough to understand, like age forty-five. Although my stories contained ample face-saving modifications, Alycia was good at putting two and two together.

  I was driving her to the mall one day when she blurted out, “What aren’t you telling me, Dad?”

  “Say what?”

  “You’re dissembling.”

  “Am not!” I protested, then frowned. “What’s ‘dis—’?”

  “Start over, and we’ll see if your second version matches the first.”

  “Tell me again why you want to hear this?”

  “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  The more questions she asked me, the more evasive I became. Finally, she fixed me with a knowing smile. “You’re hiding something. You have a secret, don’t you?”

  “A secret?”

  “Everyone has secrets,” Alycia declared. “Yeah, like a mystery. Hey, maybe I could even solve it for you!”

  “That’s clever.”

  Alycia brightened. “You do, don’t you?”

  I affected my best innocent expression, and then trudged up some rousing tale to distract her—like the day Larry and I threw firecrackers on the top of kid-adverse Mrs. Schumacher’s aluminum trailer in the middle of the night, hastening to add that we apologized years later.

  I stopped at the front entrance of the mall, and Alycia got out, then paused in the open car window. She winked. “You can run, Dad…”

  “Yada, yada, yada,” I replied intelligently.

  For the moment, Alycia dropped the “secret” stuff, but I detected a knowing glint behind her eyes. Very annoying, but as usual she was right. I had a secret, and so did her mother. Actually, we had two, and while they weren’t of the earthshaking variety, so far we’d done a pretty good job of keeping them under wraps.

  “I don’t want her to worry,” Donna often told me. “You know how she is.”

  I agreed, but obviously we were only buying time. Unless I came clean soon, Alycia would discover the truth from her friends at school. In that event, my daughter would likely storm home and confront me, “Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? I thought we talked about everything!”

  The other secret, ironically, was hidden within Alycia’s own name. If she’d just snooped through her mother’s old pictures, she would have figured it out.

  Sometimes Alycia’s need for the truth skirted the edges of tact, especially since she had a nasty habit of calling a spade a spade. For better or worse, Alycia has always had an uncanny knack for sizing people up.

  On the way to the “Y” where she was enrolled in a summer volleyball camp, she asked me, “How old were you when you realized Grandpa was a jerk?”

  I gave her my parental scowl. “Grandpa deserves your respect.”

  “Sor-r-ry,” she said melodramatically, as if I’d said something wrong. And yet guilt clouded her features.

  She quickly transitioned to her next topic, but I was still contemplating her question. The answer was “age ten,” and while there’s a story involved, it’s certainly not the kind you’d tell your pre-adolescent, post–Santa Claus daughter. Besides, Alycia wouldn’t have been interested. It didn’t contain a smidgen of romance.

  On the other hand, it’s also safe to say my entire caldron of simmering secrets—including the ones Alycia seemed so desperate to uncover—had originated the day I met Jim.

  It all began after a long day in the fifth grade, when I spotted my father’s car parked on the street across from the playground. Without smiling, he waved me over, striking terror into my young heart. I knew I was in trouble for something. But what did I do?

  I got into the car, and my father proceeded to drive in the opposite direction of home. For several worried-filled minutes, I scrambled through my mind for my crime, hoping to figure it out and apologize long before he removed his belt. I remember staring at him out of the corner of my eyes—his long narrow face, pale and splotchy, was pinched in concentration. Several wisps of his slicked-back prematurely graying hair had broken free despite copious applications of Brylcreem. The smell always got to me. His large nose overpowered his face—especially from a side perspective—as if it had a personality all its own.

  My father often joked, When we hit it big, I’m getting a nose job, and my mother would kiss his nose with her typical smooth-thingsover approach, It’s your best feature, dear!

  Although I resembled my father, I’d acquired my mother’s reasonable nose. She did, however, have giant feet for her size.
For years I’d monitor my nose carefully every morning, going so far as to measure its length to settle my fears. Sometimes I measured my feet too, relieved when they seemed to be growing. If something had to stick out, I’d rather it be them. Later I wondered if perhaps my family’s penchant for oversized appendages had found their way to Alycia’s ears.

  My father cleared his throat but remained silent.

  “Everything okay, Dad?” I finally managed to squeak out.

  He only grunted. Eventually, he turned into a gravel lot, the tires crunching as he pulled on the steering wheel and parked in front of a seedy storefront with bright neon signs. He told me to lock the door behind me, and I did. I followed him through the lingering clouds of our dust into a cavernous bar saturated with the scent of whiskey and rum and a lingering hazy smoke that stung my eyes.

  The bartender, squinting into the doorway, was rubbing a tiny glass with a white towel. When he saw me, he cleared his throat and glared at my father. “C’mon, Lou, they can yank my license.”

  My father gestured helplessly and spoke in a woeful tone I rarely heard at home. “I’m stuck with ’im, Phil; the wife’s got one of those doodad appointments, and I got a deal going with Sam. Is he here?” My dad looked around desperately, and I wondered how he could see anything in this dingy place.

  Phil shook his head. “You’re a piece a’ work, Lou,” he said, shaking his head. “Make it fast.”

  My father shrugged, throwing his briefcase on the counter. “Just tryin’ to make a living.”

  I climbed up on the stool, relieved to learn this wasn’t about me, and ran my fingers along the smooth wood finish.

  “Thirsty?” Phil asked me, leaning over the counter with hunched shoulders.

  I rustled around in my pockets. “ I don’t know if I’ve got enough—”

  “Hey, Lou, your kid’s thirsty,” Phil said.

  “Put it on my tab,” my father said absently, pulling papers out of his briefcase. My father didn’t drink, but he provided no end of drinks for his clients.

  Phil’s face clouded again. “I told you. No more credit.”

  I heard the sound of a flimsy door slamming behind me. My father twisted in his seat, and his foul mood did a one-eighty. “Hey, Sammy, I’m bringing the office to you…”

  I looked up at Phil helplessly. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not that thir—”

  “It’s on me,” someone said in a low, raspy voice, and for the first time, I noticed the guy sitting on my right, wearing a tan cowboy hat. His hair, which stuck out below, was silvery, his face grooved like an old tire, and his nose a misshapen lump of gray flesh, with tiny little spiderlike veins, to match the ones on his cheeks. With a cigarette nestled between two right fingers, he cradled a shot glass with the same hand, as if saving his left hand for something more important.

  “Fair enough,” Phil said to him, and then to me: “I got orange juice, 7-Up…”

  “How much is the juice?” I asked, still searching my pockets.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the old guy said, taking another sip. “Git ’im what he wants.”

  Phil nodded, walked away, and I sat there, embarrassed. By now I’d already been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of handouts, and I didn’t like how they felt. “Thanks, mister, but you didn’t have to.”

  The old man blew out smoke and gave me a sideways glance. “Don’t mention it.”

  I should have left it at that. I’m not sure what I said next, but I probably rambled on about my growing independence.

  The old codger cast me another look, a long one this time. “I pity you, kid.”

  I was snapped into silence, offended to the quick. For one thing, he didn’t sound all that pitying, and besides, being pitied was the same as a handout. I was about to tell him so when I realized I didn’t know what in particular he was pitying me for.

  “I don’t mind”—I shrugged nonchalantly—“As long as I get home for Star Trek.”

  “Ain’t what I meant,” he said with a hoarse chuckle. He brought the cigarette to his lips, his cheeks sucked in, and his eyes narrowed as he inhaled. The end of the cigarette glowed, nestled alongside the shot glass, and within the gloominess of that room, it had a hypnotic effect on me.

  Again, I should have left it at that, but I had an insufferable curiosity and more than a little pride. “So what did you mean?”

  “Forget it.” He took a swig, stared at the glass, and gestured for another. Phil hunched over the counter again, regarding him warily. “You’ve had more’n enough, Jim.”

  “Wife’s got the car,” Jim said. “So it don’t matter.”

  Phil sighed and shook his head with disgust. He placed a napkin in front of me, followed by the juice with a tiny red straw sticking out. I took a big, long, thirsty pull, then noticed Jim watching me out of the corner of his eye, as if sizing me up while Phil poured some amber liquid into the glass.

  To my left, Dad broke into exaggerated laughter. I glanced over to see his hand on Sam’s back, and suddenly leaning forward, speaking in hushed tones. “Seriously, Sam, this one’s going to go straight up, like a wild dog, the moment they release it.”

  I looked back at Jim, and he was staring at my father as if little knives might come spurting out of his eyes at any moment.

  “So what did you mean, already?” I repeated.

  Jim looked away, took another drag, and when he exhaled his cheek popped out, like my father’s when he was tired or fed up. “You just don’t quit, do you?”

  He looked at me again, and his eyes seemed bloodshot and vacant, and everything nice about him disappeared. I felt a cool shiver run down my back, and I wondered if he wouldn’t rather strangle me than speak.

  I was about to say his own words back to him, “Just forget it,” when he spoke again, his voice gruff and low: “You ever been to a fortune-teller at the carnival? You know … the Gypsy lady that looks at the lines on your hand and tells your future?”

  I thought for a moment. “Mom says it’s of the devil. No one can tell the future.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits. “I can.”

  I frowned and stubbornly shook my head. “No, you can’t.”

  He stubbed his cigarette in the charcoal-stained aluminum ashtray. “Hold out your hand, then, and I’ll prove it to you.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, pulling both hands to my lap.

  “Suit yourself. This here’s how it’s done…”

  I watched wide-eyed as he laid down his drink and cigarette and picked up a shiny knife in his right hand. He held up his left hand, splayed open toward me, showing crevices nearly as deep as the ones on his face. Turning his hand back toward his face, he pressed the knife into his palm, then paused, meeting my eyes.

  “Mister, what are you gonna—?”

  Slowly, he pulled the knife down, pretending to make a cut several inches long. He did a good job of faking it because his lips were pulled down into a painful grimace.

  It’s just magic, I told myself. Behind my left shoulder I could hear my father’s familiar setup and automatically braced myself for the inevitable father-son hug.

  “It ain’t the hand lines that predict your future,” Jim was saying, turning his open palm toward me to reveal a drooling line of red liquid. “It’s your blood line.”

  My mouth must have dropped open. The old codger was insane. At that point, my father leaned toward me, patting me on my back. “Take my boy here. I’ve already got him enrolled in a savings plan. By the time he gets to college…”

  My father was reaching full crescendo with a sales pitch I’d heard so many times I could have repeated it word for word. The savings plan, of course, was a bald-faced lie.

  Jim tossed the knife on the table, and it clattered against his glass. I waited for him to take a napkin or something to stop the bleeding, but instead he tightened his fist, causing small drops to leak out the bottom.

  I wanted to say, Are you okay? Do you need a Band-Aid? Are you cr
azy? But settled on something akin to pretending what I saw hadn’t actually happened. Besides, I was strangely captivated.

  “So … what’s a bloodline?” I croaked, my throat as dry as the smoke in the air.

  Jim sniffed, still clenching his left fist. He extinguished the spent cigarette in the tray with his right. “It’s your destiny, kid.” And then he added with a ghoulish glint in his eyes, nodding toward my dad, “Your bloodline is your ol’ man over there.”

  The way he said “your ol’ man” shivered through me. His eyes gazed on me again, and his last words came out with a thud. “I ain’t never seen something a Whitaker touched that didn’t turn to dust.” He gave a quick confirming nod of the head, lips drawn down deeply on the sides. “You never stood a chance, kid, and that’s why I pity you.”

  “And that’s enough, Jim.” Phil emerged from the shadows, and I realized he’d been listening to the entire conversation. I felt guilty somehow, party to a betrayal.

  Phil tossed the towel over his shoulder and leaned over the bar. “It ain’t right to take it out on his kid.”

  “Fair warning, is all I’m givin ’im,” Jim replied with another sniff.

  “What you’re doing is scaring ’im,” Phil said. “Go home and sleep it off.”

  After a quick nod, Jim tossed back the final drop of his drink, stood to his feet, and considered his surroundings as if he’d forgotten where he was.

  He glanced over at my father again, tipped his cowboy hat toward me, and headed for the door. I squinted at the light flooding my eyes, just before the door slammed shut.

  My father, as if he’d finally awakened, turned to Sam, and thumbed toward the door. “Know that guy?”

  I leaned over to catch Sam’s reply: “Lost his farm couple years ago. Ain’t been the same since.” Sam made a twirling motion to the side of his ear.

  “Well, that’s not gonna happen to you,” my father said, patting Sam on the back. “So … like I said, options will get you the biggest bang for your buck…”

  Still staring at the door, I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned halfway in my stool, and Phil leaned over the bar and whispered, “Just for your information, kid, Jim bought some worthless stock from your ol’ man about three years ago. It ain’t your fault. Just forget what he said.”