The Rope Walk (16 page)

“Well, I am. If you have even one little drop of black blood in you, you're black.”

Alice thought about this for a minute. “
Why
don't people like people who are black?”

Theo shrugged. “They just don't.”

Alice was troubled by these assertions, these revelations of dislike between Theo and Helen and O'Brien, though she wasn't sure she believed Theo's statement about Helen and O'Brien being racists and not liking their own grandson. It seemed baffling to her that people might not like each other because they were one color or another; they might just as easily decide not to
like red-haired people, she thought uneasily. Having a lot of colors was much preferable to having only one, anyway. No child would ever be foolish enough to want a box of crayons with only one color in it, she thought. A girl in her class at school every year had a new box of seventy-two crayons, blissfully sharp and pristine. Alice, who was always told to rummage through drawers at home for stubs and broken crayons to fill her pencil box, any other practice being thought wasteful by Archie, was envious. She did not have time to consider any of this at length, though, because at that moment the front door of the Fitzgeralds’ house banged open and slammed inward, the door meeting the wall inside with a loud report. Alice heard herself give a little shriek of surprise, and she and Theo grabbed on to each other. They stood on the path, clinging together. But no one came out the door. It just hung open, a dark hole. Theo and Alice stared at it, horrified.

“Let's
go
” Theo said. He took off around the side of the house in the rain. Alice followed him.

They scrambled up the steps to the terrace and approached the French doors. They were shut, and Alice approached the house cautiously and leaned close to the glass to cup her hand. Theo stood next to her, panting. Rain splashed onto the bricks at their feet.

“Maybe somebody got him,” Theo said breathlessly. “Maybe someone mugged him!”

Alice had never heard of anyone getting mugged in Grange, but she'd played games of cops and robbers with the boys, sometimes armed with a club or more often dragged around in handcuffs or tied up and gagged in the tree house. She peered through the glass. The room appeared to be empty, but a chair had toppled over onto the floor—that was strange, Alice thought—and a pool of blankets lay on the carpet beside the settee. Several cardboard
board boxes, their tops gaping open, stood in the middle of the room. The glass felt cool and wet on Alice's forehead as she leaned against it. The room was quite dark. There was only one light on near the settee, a lamp with its gooseneck twisted at a violent angle.

Theo leaned in beside her. Alice peered into the dim room. And then she heard Theo gasp.

“What's
that?”
he said in a tiny voice, as if the breath had been sucked out of him. He pressed up close beside Alice and pointed through the glass.

At his sharp intake of breath, Alice had reared away from the door as if something were about to come hurtling toward them out of the depths of the room, but now she leaned in cautiously, following the path of his pointing finger. And then she saw it. On the floor, a man's dark trouser leg, bent at the knee, extended from behind the settee. She couldn't see beyond that.

Her fingers found the latch and she pushed open the door and ran across the room.

Kenneth was lying on the floor behind the settee, his head cradled on a toppled stack of books. The wind, gusting across the floor through the French doors behind her, rifled the open pages in a way that made Alice's heart stop for a minute; she was reminded of the blur of calendar pages signifying the passage of time in old movies. How long had he been lying here?

She dropped to her knees beside him. What should she do? She didn't know what to do. She put her hand on his chest. Water ran down her sleeve and dripped onto his shirtfront. Under her palm she could feel the bony case of his chest barely rising and falling, as though something were happening a long, long way beneath his skin, a long way from the surface of the earth. His hair still bore the marks of the teeth of a comb. He wasn't wearing
the cross of tape over his eye today, but she could see where it had left a mark against the white skin of his forehead. His lips were badly chapped.

Theo spoke from behind her, appalled. “He's
dead.”

She shook her head. “No, he's not,” she said. “We have to get help.” She turned around and looked up at him. He looked terrified, but she realized that she felt very calm inside, as if she was thinking in slow motion. When she spoke, she heard her own voice in her ears. She could feel every part of her hand where it lay across Kenneth's chest; she could feel his heart, very far away, offering up its exhausted beating through his shirt and against her palm. Wally had a heart murmur, and when Alice was younger and he had held her on his lap, she had put her ear against his chest to listen for it, the musical, murmuring voice she imagined, like the voices of the children in the auditorium at school, waiting for the principal to stand up and lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Wally's heart, she discovered, beat faster than other people's. Archie's heart, on the other hand, was slow. It sounded like muffled footfalls across an empty museum gallery, each beat a solemn echo of the last.

She got to her feet. “We have to get help,” she repeated.

Across the room, the door was ajar. Alice hurried across the floor between the boxes; at the door she hesitated, but only for a second. Pushing it open, she leaned into the hall.

“Hello?” she called into the gloom. There was a window in the hall, but it was heavily curtained, the red panels finished with greasy silk fringes. “Miss Fitzgerald? Tad? Harry?”

“Try again,” Theo whispered from behind her, making her jump.

But Alice heard the sound of a door opening overhead and footsteps, a woman's clicking heels, coming down the back stairs. A moment later, Miss Fitzgerald appeared.

She looked as if she had been asleep, bewildered and lost. She stopped ten paces from the children, almost as if she were afraid of them, Alice thought.

“How did you get in?” Miss Fitzgerald said. “I didn't let you in.”

“We came in through the terrace,” Alice said. And then she felt angry. It was irrelevant how they'd come in! Were they being accused of something? They
hadfound
Kenneth. “It's Kenneth,” she said, and as she spoke she understood, as if an electrical cable had connected them suddenly, that Miss Fitzgerald loved her brother and that the sight of him motionless and silent on the floor would terrify her. An intimacy would be exchanged now between Alice and Miss Fitzgerald, bearers and receivers of bad news alike, against which Alice protested. Suddenly she did not want to be there, seeing what she was seeing. The powerful sense of indignation she had felt a moment before deflated inside her, like a balloon releasing trapped air. “I think he fell down,” she said in a small voice.

Miss Fitzgerald brushed past them. In the doorway she gave a little cry when she saw Kenneth on the floor. She knelt beside him, exactly as Alice had done.

Alice and Theo watched from the door; Alice felt Theo reach over and take a bit of her raincoat sleeve in his fist, hanging on. She realized how hard her heart was beating. The deep, almost restful quiet that had dropped over her seemed to be breaking up, like fog burned away by the glare of sunlight. She was aware of the musty odor of their raincoats; they smelled like the closet under the stairs, like old leather and tennis balls and rubber boots. She was aware of her blood prickling in her fingertips and across her cheekbones and under her arms.

Miss Fitzgerald stood up and hurried to the telephone on the table. Alice felt instantly hot with shame, with the foolishness of
her error. She should have remembered the telephone. She knew all about calling 911 in case of an emergency. She knew about how you were supposed to get down on the floor—stop, drop, and roll—if you caught on fire, not go running away. She knew that if you got caught in an undertow you were supposed to allow yourself to be carried out to sea where eventually the current would release you, even though your most powerful instinct would be to fight to return to shore. She knew that if you got caught in quicksand, the same logic applied: stay utterly still, don't struggle, hardly even breathe. She knew not to drink salt water, even if you were perishing from thirst. She knew that if you had been lost for days in the woods, you shouldn't suddenly eat a huge meal when you were rescued, because it would be too much for your body. It seemed that in order to save oneself, again and again, one had to fight one's own instincts, one had to gain mastery over all the urgent imperatives of flesh and blood. One had to be less of oneself, in order to try and preserve that self.

Miss Fitzgerald dialed with trembling hands and held the receiver to her ear. Her eyes slid to Alice and Theo in the doorway, and she deliberately turned her back to them, her green cardigan hanging crookedly over her shoulders like a small, lopsided cape. Her voice sounded breathless, but she gave her name, her address. She started to list the medications Kenneth took, but someone on the other end of the phone must have stopped her, because she fell silent then, answering in worried-sounding monosyllables. When she hung up finally, she put her hands to her cheeks for a moment, staring at Kenneth on the floor. Then she knelt beside him again, stroking the hair from his forehead.

A terrible sympathy rose in Alice; her throat tightened painfully. Miss Fitzgerald looked so old and pathetic, her ugly worried face bent over her brother. But Alice took an involuntary step backward when Miss Fitzgerald, as if sensing Alice's
scrutiny, looked over her shoulder at Alice and Theo still riveted in the doorway. Alice was reminded of the feral cat that lived in the MacCauleys’ barn, the calico that could be seen carrying its newborn kittens like dead mice between its teeth, moving them from location to location. She saw the cat sometimes, going out hunting at dusk; it always seemed to be looking over its shoulder. Alice left milk for it in a saucer, when Elizabeth wasn't looking.

“What mischief were you up to?” Miss Fitzgerald said. “What happened?”

Alice stared back at her, speechless.

But Theo suddenly came to life beside her. “We just found him like that!” he said. “We didn't do anything! Alice saved his life!”

On the floor, Kenneth gave a little moan.

Theo tugged hard at Alice's sleeve.
Let's go
, he mouthed, his expression furious.

Alice's feet felt wooden, but she allowed Theo to pull her along the edge of the room toward the French doors and the terrace beyond. Outside, she registered the rain on her face again, the wet grass sticking unpleasantly to her legs as she ran across the lawn. Theo wanted to keep running, but at the street Alice heard the siren and grabbed his sleeve to pull him back. They huddled down in the tall weeds under the eaves of the garage, watching while the fire truck and the town ambulance pulled up to the curb. Three men and a young woman—Alice recognized her from the YMCA in Brattleboro where she handed out towels and checked people's membership cards—ran up into the house. The front door was still wide open. Rain fell inside on the carpet, leaving a dark, spreading spot.

“Let's
go
,” Theo said again. “C'mon.
C'mon
, Alice!”

But Alice shook her head. It seemed wrong to leave, as if they
would be abandoning Kenneth. They squatted under the eaves, the rain dripping miserably on them.

“You think somebody got him?” Theo said at last.

Alice glanced at him from under her hood.

“I mean, maybe he's a spy,” Theo said. “He kind of seems like a spy. Maybe terrorists got him.” Theo stood up and peered on tiptoes through the cobwebby window into the garage. “There's a car in there,” he said. “Maybe it's got a car bomb in it.” He looked down at Alice, his face miserable with indecision and fear.

Alice tugged him down beside her. “He's an artist,” she said. “He just fell down because he's sick and he's got AIDS or something. He's not a spy. There aren't terrorists here, anyway.”

Theo crouched beside her on his heels. “They're everywhere,” he said.

Alice glanced at him again. His skin looked yellow under his hood.

“You just don't know that, because you don't live in New York,” he said. “Terrorists are everywhere. Don't you watch TV?”

Alice didn't want to tell him that Archie didn't really ever let her watch TV. If there was something important happening in the world, Archie watched the news in his study; sometimes, caught up in front of the screen with a drink in his hand in the evening, he didn't notice when Alice came in quietly and stood there watching, too. She'd seen the footage of the planes flying into the World Trade Centers. She had been struck by the scary silence that had accompanied the images, especially the silence during which the minute black shapes of people's bodies—at first she had been puzzled, and then disbelieving; what
were
those things?—fell through the air, descending toward an invisible ground. There was hardly ever silence on TV, she'd noticed, and the strangeness of it during those moments had frightened her almost more than what she could see with her eyes. She'd seen the
men pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, too. That was supposed to have been an important moment, she knew, but the scale of the event had seemed too small to be truly impressive; Alice had been to football games at Frost where there were more people. And once she'd watched part of a show about how the Americans were trying to find Osama Bin Laden, who was hiding in a cave. The description of the cave—with bedrooms and pantries and roads and tunnels and computers and storerooms and garages—had been fascinating. Yet often it seemed to her that she was hearing the same news over and over again in a vaguely boring kind of loop: there were car bombs being set off in one city or another, a dozen people, or a hundred people, killed. Bad storms, kicked up by global warming, circled the globe like evil dervishes. The summer ice in Antarctica was melting. The air was dangerous to breathe. Usually, when Archie finally noticed her standing there staring at the screen, he would stand up and turn off the TV. “Enough of that,” he'd say. “Let's go watch fireflies.”