The Evolution of Alice (6 page)

“Yes,” he said, in an attempt to end the topic right there.

“Well, anyway, it doesn’t do anybody any good. Not you or me or anybody, to worry like that. Have you eaten your sandwich?”

“No.”

“Please eat the sandwich, Ed. Okay?”

“Okay, I’ll eat the sandwich.”

“Fine, that’ll have to do. And don’t forget to take the pictures, please.”

He looked at the camera and nodded his head as though she could see him.

“Take some pictures from different angles, too, just to see what works best.”

“I should have brought a wind machine.”

“Ha. You know, it’s real pretty out there. Take some of the whole cemetery, too. Wouldn’t it be nice to get buried out there one day?”

“I don’t want to get buried at all. You know I’m claustrophobic.”

“Ed, I swear …”

As Nicky started to talk, Edward noticed something on the opposite side of the road ahead.

“Is that?” he said.

“Is that what?” she said.

“Hang on,” he said.

As he got closer, he could see it was a young girl, alone, dressed in a light jacket and blue jeans, and a pillowcase full of something hanging over her left shoulder. She was walking toward him. He pulled over to the side of the road when he was directly across from her and stopped the car.

“Honey, there’s a little girl out here. What do I do?”

“A little girl, like a little
girl
? Or a teenager?”

“Like, a little girl. Like nine or ten or something.”

By this time the girl had stopped walking and was staring over at Edward. He rolled down his window and rested his arm on the door.

As casually as he could, he said, “Hey there, what are you doing?”

The girl didn’t respond. She pushed her hair away from her forehead and placed her bag on the ground.

“Ed, what is she doing?” Nicole said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s just standing there.”

“Did she say anything?”

“No, she didn’t say anything. She’s staring at me,” he said.

“Say something else. She’s probably nervous.”

“Hey,” he said to the girl. “How you doing?”

“Edward, don’t talk like The Fonz! God!” Nicole said.

Regardless of how he talked, the girl didn’t do anything. She kept standing and staring, her pillowcase resting at her ankles.

“I think I’m going to go,” Edward said as his foot began to ease off the brake.

He waved at the girl very deliberately, as though he was testing if she was blind. No response.

“Edward!” Nicole said. “You can’t just leave her there. Where are you?”

Edward looked around. Trees upon trees lined the highway as far as the eye could see. He didn’t think there was anything where they were.

“Nowhere,” he said.

“Is there a house nearby? Is there
anything
nearby? Where’d she come from?” she said.

“There’s nothing. I told you. I don’t know where she came from,” he said.

“Well you can’t just leave her there, Ed. You can’t just leave her
nowhere
.”

“What do you want me to do then? Whatever I do she’s going to think I’m some kind of pervert.”

“Get out of the car and just walk up to her, slowly,” she said, and then added, “but keep your distance, though.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“Yes, Ed, some monster could pick her up. You have to see if you can bring her to her home.”

“Okay, okay,” Edward said as he shut his car off.

“Ed!” Nicole said before Edward hung up. “Just take it easy with her, okay, because she might think
you’re
a monster, you know?”

“I’ll talk to you later,” he said.

He hung up the phone and then, deliberately, very un-monster-like, opened the driver-side door and stepped out of the car.

“Hello,” he said, staying right where he was, the two of them standing on opposite sides of the road. “I’m Edward. Ed.”

The girl shuffled her feet, looked right then left, and shyly put her right hand on her left forearm.

“I’m Kathy,” she said.

“How are you, Kathy?” Edward said, trying his best not to sound like The Fonz.

“I’m okay I guess,” she said.

“You know,” he said, “if you’re going to walk on one side of the road, it’s better to walk on the side where cars are driving
toward
you, so you can see them coming. It’s safer.”

“How will I ever get a ride if the cars going my way are on the other side of the road?”

“Good point,” he said, “but maybe getting rides with strangers isn’t the best idea to begin with.”

“Nobody I
know
is going to drive me where I want to go,” she said.

“Strangers might not drive you where you want to go either, Kathy,” he said.

Kathy picked up her bag and started to walk away in a huff.

“I have a long way to walk, then,” she said.

Edward thought of letting the girl go but could imagine what Nicole would say when he talked to her next.

“Wait,” he said.

Kathy stopped. She turned around.

“Where are you headed? The city?” he said.

“Alaska,” she said.

“Alaska? Where in Alaska are you headed?”

Kathy put her bag back onto the gravel at the side of the highway.

“I don’t really know for sure. It doesn’t matter, though. When I get there I’m going to go farther and farther.”

Edward looked both ways, as though it were necessary.

“Can I come across?” he said.

Kathy nodded. Edward walked across the highway and soon was standing beside the girl. He looked carefully at the pillowcase at her feet and tried to guess what was in it, what a 10-year-old girl would pack. He’d seen fuller pillowcases on Halloween; there couldn’t have been much in it.

“What’s in there?” he said, motioning to the bag.

“Just stuff I’ll need. I got some extra clothes, a book, my toothbrush, and a couple of oatmeal bars.”

“Did you bring toothpaste?”

She thought about it for a moment, and, with a disappointed look, shook her head.

“What about water? You’re going to need water if you’re going to be walking very far.”

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, no.”

“Ahhh, well, travelling 101 is, you bring water and toothpaste. What’s in Alaska?”

“A cousin of mine.”

“Okay. Here’s what I think you should do, and this is just a suggestion. Why don’t I bring you back home, you can get water and toothpaste, and
then
we can talk about going to Alaska, if you still want to. Have you gone very far from home?”

“I don’t really know. I’ve been walking for a while.”

“Isn’t anybody looking for you? Do your parents know you’re gone?”

“My mom would hardly notice,” she said very quietly.

“What about your dad?” he said.

“If I would’ve seen my mom or my
uncle
coming I would’ve hid anyway. They would’ve just got all mad.”

“If you were my daughter, or my niece, I might be mad if you were gone, too, you know,” he said.

“I guess so,” she said.

They stood there at the side of the highway in silence. Kathy looked to the right for a long time, down the highway, as though she could see all the way to Alaska. Then, she looked to the left, and Edward could see she was already homesick, despite how badly she wanted to get where she was going.

“Do you know the way home?” he said.

She nodded.

“Can I drive you there? It won’t take very long in the car I bet.”

Kathy didn’t take long to decide. She nodded her head again. They walked over to Edward’s vehicle. He went around to the passenger side, opened the door for Kathy, and instructed her to place the camera (very carefully) in the back seat to make room, which she did. When she got into the vehicle, he closed the door and breathed a sigh of relief before hopping around to the other side and getting into the vehicle himself. Once more, he was on the highway, this time going even slower, around 85 km/h.

“Do you mind if I ask you why you’re planning on going to Alaska? I mean, if it’s not just to visit your cousin,” Edward said.

She thought about it for a moment.

“The other day my cousin called, and I picked up the phone because my mom was sleeping in the other room. We were talking about how everybody was doing, because my cousin has lots of family where I live, and then he asked me what I was having for breakfast. I told him I wasn’t having breakfast because it was after noon and I’d just finished lunch. He said he was silly because he forgot about the time difference.”

“Okay,” Edward said, and this was followed by a long silence. Then Kathy said, as though Edward hadn’t understood her, “Well
that’s
why I want to go to Alaska, and then even farther. My cousin said the more west you got the earlier in the day it got. So I’m going to keep walking and walking until it’s yesterday, and then last week, and then a few weeks ago.”

“Ahh, I see. You think … I mean, you want to go back in time.”

“Yeah, I want to go back in time. Not too far, but far enough. I just got to figure out how far I have to go.”

Edward hesitated to explain time zones to Kathy because he had an awful feeling that by doing so he would essentially be telling her there was no Santa Claus. But, maybe that was the only way he could convince her not to go back onto the highway all by herself. Even if her mom and her uncle were home when they got there, Kathy might just leave another time, back on her journey to Alaska.

“Kathy, there are different places in the world that have different times. Some times are earlier than ours, and some times are later than ours.”

“So, you can go to the future too?”

“No, no. What I mean is whether or not it’s 12 o’clock here and nine o’clock over in Alaska, it’s the same
time
everywhere. Like, everything’s happening
now.
You can’t go back in time.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, but her face held the slightest hint of desperation, which meant, to Edward, she did understand, mostly, and simply didn’t
want
to understand. He wondered what could be so important that she’d want to go back in time, but decided it wasn’t his place to ask, especially now, as she looked sadder by the moment.

“What’s happened has happened and nobody can change it,” he ended up saying.

“Oh,” she said, and turned her head away to look out the window.

“You know, there are things I want to change. I think anybody would want to change something, if they could.”

“What do you want to change?” she said as she turned back toward Edward, where he could see a few wet lines down her cheeks from tears.

“I’m on my way to visit a friend of mine who died, and I wish he didn’t die. I wish I could go back and, I don’t know, help him.”

“That’s sad,” she said.

“Yeah, it is. But, I can’t go back. So, I’m going there to visit him and remember things about him I liked.”

“I want to help somebody, too,” she said.

“Hmmm. Are there things you can remember about that somebody? Things you liked?”

She nodded her head, and right there, Edward could tell she was thinking about those things because a tiny smile presented itself.

“It’s right up here, turn right,” she said.

Edward nodded, and when the time came, turned right. They drove through some more forested area before the trees cleared to reveal a large open space, where in the distance there were houses visible.

“Do you ever worry about dying?” Kathy said.

“Oh, not really,” he said.

“I do. I worry about it lots.”

“Lots of people do. You know, I have this person I talk to from time to time when I’m worried, and he’s really smart. You know what he tells me?”

“What?”

“He says worry has never changed anything for the better.”

This was followed by quiet, and Edward began to think about the words he’d just spoken. It felt like he’d been talking to himself. He knew very well he worried about almost everything under the sun, and that worry had brought him to the doctor’s office for everything from headaches all the way to stomachaches. But he was never actually sick. At the height of Nicole’s frustration with Edward’s anxiety, she’d said, “If there
is
something wrong with you, do you want to spend the rest of your time worrying about it?” He got annoyed at her then but now began to see what she’d meant.

They kept driving, and as the houses got closer he recognized they were on a First Nations reserve. It wasn’t what he thought a reserve would look like, but he wasn’t sure what he expected. More desolation, maybe—a bunch of boarded-up houses, sad looking people, casinos. The houses weren’t the nicest he’d ever seen; they looked quickly built and more like large sheds than homesteads, but, somehow, they were welcoming and warm, and he liked how things just lay unattended in yards, seemingly without a worry about theft. He saw trampolines, toys, quads, golf clubs, and many other things. You’d never see something like that in the city. Finally, just a couple of kilometres from the highway, Kathy said they’d arrived at her home. “Home” was a trailer with an enormous tree directly behind it. A tire swing hung from the tree’s largest branch, and a big open field past the tree stretched back forever, all the way to a tree line visible on the horizon. Edward pulled up alongside a line of large rocks blocking the driveway from the road and turned off the engine.

“Thanks for the ride,” Kathy said as she got out of the car.

Edward got out of the car too and thought it was best to walk her up to the door.

“You think you can do that? Stop worrying?” Edward said.

“I can if you can,” she said.

They arrived at the door and Kathy walked inside. Instantly, Edward heard a cry from inside the house. Not wanting to intrude, he quietly shimmied over a few feet to look. He saw that a woman, undoubtedly Kathy’s mom, had buried the girl deep within her arms. Another girl, a few years younger, dressed just like a Disney princess, was standing beside the two of them, crying like everybody else, trying to find a way inside the prolonged embrace, eventually collapsing on top of them. A man was there too, standing in the kitchen, and he noticed Edward outside the front door. He stepped outside the trailer.