Saving Alice Read online

  Good ol’ Donna helped me pick out the ring. After beseeching her with my ignorance, she agreed to forego Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and spend a Saturday afternoon with me. We cruised from jewelry shop to jewelry shop, ate lunch at famous Valentino’s, a pizza place, and then meandered about for another two hours until Donna finally spotted the perfect ring.

  “How do you know?” I’d asked, peering through the glass at her selection.

  “It’s so her,” Donna replied, seemingly mesmerized by the diamond ring in the showcase. She paused, and her expression turned wistful. “She’ll love it, Stephen.”

  I needed more reassurance. Was it big enough? Fancy enough? Expensive enough?

  “She’ll say yes to you, Stephen,” Donna said. “Not the ring.”

  In jest I dramatically grasped Donna’s hand, slipping the ring on her finger for a trial run: “Will you marry me?”

  She blushed. Then playing along, she answered in similar style, putting the back of her hand to her forehead like Scarlett O’Hara, “Oh, Stephen, I thought you’d never ask. But I simply must refuse. You see … I have nothing to wear!”

  “Then will you be my best man?” I asked, and she dropped the act.

  “May I just say … I’m holding out for something more traditional—”

  “What could be better than best man?”

  “Maid of honor, perhaps?”

  We laughed, and she gave me a congratulatory hug.

  So there I was, sitting in our booth, wondering if Alice had stood me up. Beyond the windows, the annoying growl of a muscle car spiked my nerves and jiggled the restaurant windows, followed by the squeal of brakes as it negotiated the curve.

  Finally, at four-fifteen, Alice arrived. Spotting her come in the door, I rose too quickly from the booth, bumping my thighs on the edge of the table.

  “Clumsy!” she’d kidded me. “You okay, ol’ sport?” an appellation originally bestowed upon me by Donna during her Gatsby period. With Alice’s accent, it came out ol’ spo-huht.

  Dressed in a colorful skirt and silky blouse, she leaned over and gave me a lingering kiss, closing her eyes, then opening them slowly, as if the touch of our lips had melted her heart.

  “I could get used to that,” she said. Then after another quick peck on my nose, she slipped into the booth across from me, her hair shimmering in the overhead lights with an ethereal shade of dark blue.

  But the moment she sat down, her eyes dimmed, and her expression fell, maybe not that noticeable to someone else but quite noticeable to me. Normally, her porcelain-smooth face carried the exuberance of a woman who harbored a never-ending fountain of good news with eagerness to share it.

  I wiped nervous palms on my slacks and placed my elbows on the table, giving her my full attention. I asked her the usual questions, and slowly she relaxed to her normal self. When I placed my hands on the table, she grabbed them with both of hers and squeezed. “Oh, Stephen! We’re both going to New York.” But then her expression dimmed again, as if struggling against something bigger than either of us.

  “Everything okay?” I finally asked. After another reflective moment, she shook her head as if she could hide it no longer. Her eyes watered and she sniffed softly.

  “What is it?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing.” She glanced at her watch. “Where’s Donna?”

  “Donna’s not coming.”

  She looked confused. Donna always joined us on Friday nights. Alice swallowed, then forced an unsuccessful smile.

  I matched her smile, then foolishly proceeded with my original plans. While the words I’d rehearsed that morning seemed inappropriate in the glare of her current hesitant and distracted frame of mind, I took a deep breath anyway and stammered out with, “I have something for you.”

  That was my big line, about as romantic as a dish drainer. Her eyes widened as I removed the box from my pants pocket. Turning it toward her, I gently opened it. Her eyes settled on the ring, and then closed shut. “Oh, Stephen…”

  I set the box down and reached for her hand. Her eyes glistened. Figuring she was moved by the imminent proposal, I uttered the fateful words. “Alice … will you marry me?”

  For an eternity, I waited. Her gaze lingered on mine. She let go of my hand and taking the ring box in her hands, she turned it, examined the ring, then shut the box, and handed it back.

  “I wanted to marry you, but…”

  Her words trailed off into nothing.

  I was confused. Wanted?

  Alice pursed her lips. She looked miserable.

  Of course, I thought. I’m just a kid from Uglyville. How could I have been so stupid? Beautiful women don’t marry hard-luck stories….

  In the awkward silence that followed, memories of my past came roaring back—the disdain in Cynthia’s eyes, the pity in Susan’s, the glaring contempt in Jim’s: Ain’t nothing a Whitaker touches that don’t turn to dust.

  I sat back in the booth, my emotions reeling, unsure how to proceed. Alice swallowed again, appraising the obvious bewilderment in my eyes. She let out another long sigh, leaning back against the booth. I waited as she collected her thoughts. “Stephen…” She hesitated again, her eyes suddenly scrutinizing.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you love me?”

  It was an absurd question. “I adore you,” I whispered, grabbing her hand, but she pulled away as if I’d answered incorrectly, her face a turmoil of emotions I couldn’t begin to understand. “Alice, why would you ask such a thing?”

  She shrugged and looked away again. Biting her lower lip, she said, “I did something terrible.”

  Terrible? I was confused again, and then her expression shifted, as if coming to a tumultuous but important decision.

  “I wasn’t going to show you, but … now … now I can’t keep this to myself.”

  She was already sliding out of the booth when a strange foreboding struck me. Where was she going? I lurched to the edge of the seat, and grabbed for her hand. Off-balance, she stumbled slightly, and I caught her as she practically fell into my arms.

  “It’s in the car,” she said, pushing herself up and away from me.

  “Don’t go,” I whispered.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, pulled away again, and this time I released her. My body still goes numb with the remembering. During my rising storm of whirling thoughts, she was already tugging the door open, twenty feet away. Turning back, she paused, and then she wound up and blew me a little kiss. My last glimpse of her face, chiseled on stone.

  Nina was standing by the counter. She made a face as if to ask, Didn’t go so well? just before full panic set in.

  It happened the way I later saw it in my dreams: the blur of the room as I rushed to the door, bright western sunlight blinding me as I exploded across the sidewalk, frantically calling her name, followed by the sudden squeal of breaks, the muffled scream, Alice’s welltrained, operatic voice filling my soul with terror, the sickening thump. Then it was as though she’d simply disappeared, followed by the sudden cessation of sound—the sound of time ceasing forever.

  I found her lying against the curb, twenty feet away, her arms and limbs grotesquely twisted. People were screaming around me, but I barely heard them. A distant siren split the air. Alice was unconscious but breathing, and there was nothing to do but hold her broken, bleeding body and whisper frantic words of reassurance. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had slipped away.

  During the days that followed, I was in shock, incapable of comprehending or accepting what had happened. Alice is dead. Though utterly grief-stricken, Donna made courageous attempts to console me, and I tried to be a comfort to her as well.

  “She died quickly,” the coroner told us. “There was no pain. She wouldn’t even have known what happened.”

  Of course I blamed myself. If not for my inopportune proposal, Alice would never have rushed away. Besides, how could I forget those final moments, our last conversation?

  Eve
n Donna seemed consumed by guilt. “I feel responsible,” she told me, which of course was ridiculous, but no amount of discussion would counter her belief. In the years since, however, I’ve grown accustomed to Donna’s sense of unearned guilt.

  Not until months later did I even consider the notion: What was in Alice’s car that was so important? No one knew, not even Donna. A cursory examination of Alice’s car had revealed nothing, but it hardly seemed important anymore.

  I never showed up for my new job. I went home to the familiarity of family and friends, and stayed. During the following weeks, I spent sleepless nights praying foolish prayers—that God might somehow turn back time, that somehow the whole thing might turn out to be a terrible dream, that somehow I might have a second chance to save her.

  Eventually reality sank in: There are some things that even God can’t—or won’t—do. There are rocks that even God can’t lift. There are no second chances, no opportunities to make things right, no turning back the clock. As time passed, the veil between God and me grew darker and thicker, my prayers few and far between, until God seemed completely shut away from me. Not only had God betrayed me, He’d abandoned me as well. He’d played the part of a cosmic Lucy, jerking the football away at the last second.

  Good riddance! I screamed one night in the field behind my home, then broke down in angry tears. My mother’s faith, my own childhood faith, which had once seemed to be bigger than a mustard seed, now seemed nothing more than a big lie.

  Three months after Alice’s death, Donna paid me a visit in Aberdeen. Our meeting at the airport was an implosion of relief, and we hugged each other as if gasping for breath. For days afterward we reminisced about college and Alice, laughing and crying and, eventually, soothing our wounds in each other’s arms.

  I asked Donna to stay, and she did. She got a job at Walgreens downtown and shared a house on North Jay Street with two other women her age. In a few weeks we were engaged, and four months after that we were married. I’m sure Donna believed my struggles with faith were only temporary—a natural reaction to grief. She must have been convinced I would eventually regain my spiritual footing.

  Ten months after our wedding, Alycia was born, and from the first moment I set eyes on her, I felt like the richest man on planet earth. I proceeded to bury my entire past—heartache, disappointment, and guilt—and devote myself to my little girl.

  I’m going to do this right, I told myself.

  When I’d finished, Alycia remained silent. I’d left out nearly half the story details, including most of the argument at the Soda Straw, and while I’d expected Alycia to complain, she did not.

  “So that’s why you married Mom,” she murmured, more to herself than to me.

  I gave her a regretful shrug.

  “Not very romantic,” she added, slumping back in her chair, and picking at her napkin.

  “No,” I agreed. “But your mother is a wonderful woman, and if I’d married Alice we wouldn’t have had you. Not only that, but—”

  “I get it, Dad,” she interrupted me.

  I should have foreseen her response. She now knew the truth: I’d married her mother because I couldn’t have Alice.

  “Did you ever figure it out?” she asked softly. “What Alice was going to show you?”

  I shook my head and spoke wistfully. “We’ll never know.”

  “Well … I’m going to figure it out,” Alycia replied, but with little enthusiasm.

  We drove home in awkward silence, and when it was time for bed, she didn’t offer me her bubble cheek, much less say good night.

  That was the turning point. The fateful moment. After Alycia learned about Alice, our relationship began its long decline. Except for please-pass-the-salt interactions, she didn’t speak to me for weeks, and eventually, what had once seemed so unbreakable would shatter as if little more than fake party glass.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Although living at those heights was somewhat dizzying and nerve-wracking, my brief sojourn on Alycia’s pedestal was over, and while I found myself breathing a sigh of relief, my decline resembled the old cliché: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

  “Haven’t seen any of Alycia’s friends in a while,” I commented to Donna in the kitchen about six months later.

  “And you won’t for a while,” she’d replied absently, drying the silverware. “She’s in her embarrassment phase.”

  I considered this, and Donna eyed me cautiously.

  “I suppose her friends’ parents live in big houses.”

  “Stephen, please…”

  I slunk to my downstairs office and, as my daughter often did, sat in the dark for hours, pondering the passage of years, listening to a collection of my favorite childhood oldies, the kind of prehistoric tunes that offended my daughter’s fine-tuned musical sensibilities. They never failed to bring me back to a time when the future seemed imbued with relentless possibilities.

  After marrying Donna, I’d attempted—on a smaller stage—to reignite the old childhood determination, but trying harder only seemed to yield diminishing results, not to mention a catastrophic meltdown five years ago.

  I was now in the midst of my third, maybe fourth, comeback.

  But who was counting? By day, I performed routine business details, and by night, I buried myself in a renewed study of stock-market price data, preparing for yet another attempt. Unfortunately, research had taken on a life of its own, and the more I prepared, the less inclined I was to actually pull the trigger.

  But someday soon, I told myself, it’ll happen, and I’ll finally give my family the life they deserve.

  It was four forty-five on a Wednesday afternoon in late October, and I was dog-tired after a day of fielding difficult office calls. I closed my eyes, nearly fell asleep in my chair, and when I opened them again, my gaze fell on a smaller framed picture of Alycia. She was wearing the Minnesota Twins baseball cap she wouldn’t be caught dead in today. What a difference a year makes, I thought. It’s a phase. It’ll pass. Other parents who have survived their children’s adolescence often remark: You lose them for a while, but they always come back.

  And yet, somehow, things weren’t that simple for us. Our present problems seemed exacerbated by the memory and loss of our unusual closeness.

  One of Donna’s friends counseled her privately, “Stephen’s problem was trying to be a buddy with his daughter.”

  I suppose she’s right, but even that explanation seems too simple. Through the years, I’d never had a problem asserting my parental authority, and until the “moment of truth” Alycia had never had a problem responding to it.

  At the office door, I flicked the switch and darkness fell. Omitting my usual good-bye to Larry, still shuttered away in a world of tax accounting, I headed across the empty reception room. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I slowly pushed out into the cold world of streetlights and neon signs.

  My breath mingled visibly with the scent of gasoline and oil, and I tightened my coat against the weather.

  In the fourteen years since my college graduation, Aberdeen hadn’t changed. The landscape had received its first tumble of snow earlier in the month, signaling the beginning of a typically cold winter, something most Dakotans took in stride. I was thankful for the summery reprieve of the last few days, temperatures that thawed the snow during the day but froze into mud overnight.

  I took Sixth Avenue to the east side of Aberdeen, stopped by Taco John, then parked my car in the mall lot. The retailers in SuperCity were geared up for Christmas. Tinseled evergreens with brightly lit red and green bulbs filled the store windows. “O Come All Ye Faithful” blared from the tinny mall speakers, confirming my belief that everything Midwest was a poor imitation of something original.

  The mall was busy for a Friday night, considering the circumstances. According to the highway sign on the outskirts of the city, Aberdeen was clinging to a population of twenty-four thousand. When I was ten the population had been twenty-five thousand, w
hich told me that for every child born, another got its wings.

  I stopped by Tami’s Gift Shop, intent on finding a birthday present for Donna. I labored over this for nearly fifteen minutes, lost in thought, until I finally settled on a pair of earrings with a card that said, Happy 36th!

  “Excellent choice,” the clerk said, a pretty brunette with dark circles under her eyes.

  After I paid with a check, I checked the time. I had forty minutes left. As I headed back into the mall, I spotted an unattended youngster smiling placidly up at me, clutching a Big Gulp. The glimmer of his tousled flaxen hair reminded me of my own at his age. Instinctively, I dropped to my heels. “Hey there, little fella, where’s your mother?”

  He stared at my coat. I followed his eyes to the source of his fascination: the Mickey Mouse sticker attached to my lapel, a friendly offering from a potential client’s daughter earlier today. I was about to remove it and offer it to him when a sudden flash to my left distracted me. I turned to see a woman’s wrist encircle the boy’s upper arm.

  “You leave him alone!”

  Stunned with her outburst, I jolted to my feet, coming face-to-face with a woman who clearly had misunderstood my intentions. Her face was a torment of disgust. “He doesn’t have any money!”

  Her son dropped his pop container, spilling it across the tiled floor, and immediately broke into tears.

  “Now look at what you’ve done,” she yelled, at which point I finally recognized her.

  I scrambled for something diplomatic to say. “I’m … we’re … involved in the restitution program.”

  “You think that’s gonna put food on my grandmother’s table?”

  “No, but—”

  “Fifty dollars a week?” she snarled.

  “It’s the best we can—”

  “Well, do better!”

  I nodded respectfully and began backing away. “We will, I promise you…”