The Rope Walk (17 page)

Still, she couldn't really claim to watch television regularly at home. “We see a news show at school in the morning,” she said to Theo now instead.

“That's watered-down news for kids,” Theo said. “You didn't see the real thing. You didn't see the planes going into the World Trade Center.” He shook his head, like a jaded adult. “Unbelievable.”

“Yes, I did,” Alice said quickly. “I saw the pictures.” Had Theo actually witnessed this sight? She felt the need to defend herself suddenly against what seemed like accusations of a criminal innocence. She looked at the pictures in the newspaper, and she even read some of the articles, or parts of them. It embarrassed her that Archie didn't allow her to watch television and that she had to amuse herself with reading, or colored pencils and paper, or holding a fishing pole baited with a marshmallow over
the river, or practicing the piano, or just playing outside. At school, when kids asked her if she'd seen a particular show, she just shook her head mutely, smart enough not to lie and say she had. She'd seen TV at other people's houses, of course, and lots of movies—the wonderful one about the pig, Babe; she'd liked
Toy Story
and
Hook
and
The Princess Bride
and
Beauty and the Beast
. So it wasn't like she had never even seen TV. She'd been mesmerized in what had felt like a helpless way by the bright succession of images on the screen. But now it seemed that she had to apologize for having been denied regular access to this medium, this important conduit for information. She didn't think terrorists were everywhere; why would they be everywhere?
How
could they be everywhere? But even the YMCA in Brattleboro had a terrorist attack alert level sign in the lobby, though the paper it was printed on was kind of old now and torn at one edge; the warning level had been on yellow for as long as Alice could remember.

Maybe Theo understood something significant about the world that she did not, she thought now. Maybe everyone, everywhere, was at risk all the time. Maybe just over the mountains, or around the sharp corner of the road that hid what was ahead, there were people coming who wanted to do harm to her, not because she was Alice, but just because she was the enemy. It could be completely impersonal, being a victim. You might not have any opinions at all, you might not care one way or another about something, but still you would be struck down where you stood just
because
, just because you were accidentally allied with something that someone else hated. This was a new version of harm, she realized, a new and helpless version. In her nightmares she always knew her enemy—the monster who reappeared in her dreams from time to time, crunching down the street and uprooting telephone poles; the musketeer with a sickening rapier; even the ghoul rising from the icy marble of the morgue—and
she understood that her enemy knew her, too, had been aiming specifically for her. It was a contest among declared foes, and her honor and bravery were at stake. But with terrorists? Well, it was so … random. And you never knew
when
to expect them, so you would have no opportunity for heroism before you were blown to bits, like all those people waiting in line in bakeries, or at a bus stop, or crossing the street. It didn't matter if you were ready for something, because how could you know what to be ready for, and when? At school they'd sent each child home with instructions for how to put together an emergency preparedness kit, and she'd had to beg Archie to make even a token gesture of compliance. Finally she had gone ahead herself and packed an old briefcase of Archie's with bottles of water and some dog food, granola bars, and batteries; she'd spent her own allowance money on garbage bags and duct tape, because the instructions had said you could tape up your windows with them against a chemical attack.

“No one is going to hurt you, Alice,” Archie had said, putting on his glasses and reading over the instructions. “We live in the middle of nowhere. No harm will come to you here!” But he'd sounded exasperated rather than comforting.

Suddenly Alice and Theo heard voices. Two of the men appeared in the doorway carrying Kenneth on a stretcher. Miss Fitzgerald, holding a coat over her head, came out after the stretcher and was helped into a car. Alice saw Miss Fitzgerald's cardigan sweater fall from her shoulders into a puddle on the sidewalk. Nobody stopped to pick it up.

In a moment, the street was empty. The rain fell quietly on the grass and the black shiny surface of the road and into the fragile, heavy leaves of the trees that lined the street, their branches meeting in the middle to form an arch of watery green, submerging the street in a soft light. Water slid from the eaves of the garage in a curtain beside Alice and Theo, dripping into a groove
like a long grave that rain from previous storms had worn in the earth. Where was the cook, Sidonnie? Alice wondered vaguely. Had she already left, gone back to New York?

She hiccupped unexpectedly. There was a wrenching in her chest, and with it the tears began, surprising her, bubbling up out of nowhere. She had thought Kenneth was dead… and perhaps he would die. And yet she hadn't been afraid to touch him. Through her crying she wondered at that; she hadn't been afraid then, only now. She had always thought she would be afraid of a dead body. Her teeth began to chatter.

Theo watched her for a minute and then scooted closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders. He lowered his face to rest his forehead against her own, a strangely grown-up gesture, like an adult comforting a child. Suddenly he was the one reassuring her.

“We'll get to the bottom of it,” he said. “Don't worry.”

For a moment Alice wavered. She knew—or, one part of her knew—the truth of the situation, which was that Kenneth Fitzgerald had fallen because he was sick. No one had crept out of the shadows to do him harm. But Theo's conspiracy theory, in which he and Alice were cast as detectives or spies, in any case as something larger and more potent and mysterious than they were, had the tempting quality of illusion to it; it wasn't real, and that, at least for right now, was its charm. She could believe it, if she wanted to, she thought; indeed, she could feel it happening, as though she were on a sled teetering at the crest of a long, steep hill, and the relief of this filled her with nostalgic longing, though for what exactly she could not say.

“Don't cry, Alice,” Theo said, and his voice was sympathetic. “Don't cry.”

They stayed like that for a while, hunched down side by side in the weeds, Alice snuffling. The rain fell off the eaves in beautiful silver chains.

• • •

When they got home they were soaking wet and Theo's teeth were chattering. Elizabeth drew them separate baths upstairs and sat on the side of Alice's tub in Archie's bathroom to pour water from a cup over Alice's head. Alice told her what had happened at the Fitzgeralds’.

“Tip back your head,” Elizabeth said. “Eyes closed.”

“She doesn't like me,” Alice said.

Elizabeth didn't say anything for a minute. “She was upset,” she said at last. “You know how she is.” Elizabeth smoothed a hand over Alice's head, pushing away the soap. Alice heard the sound of tires on the driveway, and Elizabeth glanced out the window. “Okay. There's your father,” she said. She straightened up and put a hand to the small of her back. Downstairs, the telephone began to ring. “I'm going to fix supper,” Elizabeth said. “You stay in here. Soak.”

When Alice came downstairs at last, Theo was already in the kitchen. She could hear him regaling someone with the afternoon's events. When Alice entered the room, Archie was standing at the kitchen table. He had the day's mail in his hand, but he had stopped in his perusal of it, apparently to listen to Theo. Wally was sitting at the table, his chin in his hand. Eli stood just outside the open kitchen door on the stone step, supervising the dog Lucille as he nosed around in the wet grass. Through the doorway, Alice could see his feathery tail waving as he loped back and forth, some scent under his nose.

The boys looked up when Alice stepped into the room.

Theo stopped talking. He looked around a little guiltily. No one said anything at first, and Alice wondered what Theo had told them.

“Well. Let's have supper,” Archie said after a minute. “Someone
go call Tad and Harry, please. And where is James?” He tossed the mail into the copper bowl on the fireplace mantel and pushed his glasses up onto his head. “Mr. Fitzgerald is all right, Alice. He just had a dizzy spell and fell and gave his head a knock. He's already been sent home from the hospital.”

“What did you tell them?” Alice said to Theo when they were sent off to wash their hands for dinner.

“Nothing.” Theo soaped his hands vigorously under the tap.

“You told them something,” Alice said.

For a moment, Theo resisted. Then he said, “I just told them how you almost gave him mouth to mouth.”

Alice, standing next to him at the sink, stared at him, appalled.

“Well, you almost did,” Theo said. “You would have.” He looked over at her. “I couldn't have touched him,” he said. “But you weren't afraid.”

“I
was
afraid,” Alice said quietly. She looked away from him to hold her hands under the water, and she watched the soap drain off her fingers.

Theo reached across her for a towel. “That's the hero part,” he said. “Being afraid, but doing it anyway. That's what my dad says.”

Alice thought about the mysterious black man who was Theo's father. She hadn't seen all that many black people in her life. The custodian at her school was black. There were a few black kids at the elementary school, though none in her grade. She'd seen more pictures of black people than real black people themselves, photographs in
National Geographic
, for instance.

Standing beside her at the sink, Theo pushed her playfully with his shoulder.

Alice looked up and regarded their two faces reflected in the mirror.

Theo grinned at her.

After a minute, Alice pushed him back.

The hospital in Brattleboro was a gloomy brick Victorian building with capped turrets and gingerbread trim painted a dark brown. It had been used as a TB sanatorium for a time; many of the rooms, even those on the second and third floors, had private porches where the patients had sat out in the winter air, wrapped in blankets. Behind the building, jutting up out of a grove of spruce trees, a smokestack stood out grimly against the blue twilit air. Tad and Harry had told Alice when she was younger that the smoke coming out of it was from the dead bodies being burned in the basement morgue. She'd asked Archie about it one day as he was driving her home past the hospital after her swimming lesson at the YMCA.

“For heaven's sake,” he'd said. “That's for the laundry, Alice. The bed sheets, the towels, the—” He had shaken his head. “Don't believe anything the twins tell you, all right?”

In the main hall of the hospital, Archie stopped to hand to Alice the bouquet of flowers Eli had picked for Helen. “I don't know that we'll actually be able to see Helen tonight, Alice. She's in a deep sort of sleep. But she'll know you've brought these for her when she wakes up.”

Theo stood a few paces behind Alice. He had not said to Archie that he wouldn't go to the hospital—Alice thought he'd probably been afraid to refuse to go—but he had not said a word in the car on the way to Brattleboro. Alice, sitting in the front seat beside Archie, had noticed her father glance into the rearview mirror several times, watching Theo.

“She's in a coma?” Theo perked up now at Archie's description. “Uh-oh. That's bad.”

Archie looked over Alice's head at him. He looked surprised, but he didn't say anything.

O'Brien met them in a poorly lit little lounge upstairs, where a lamp with a yellow sticky-looking shade listed on a rickety table. He looked exhausted, with deep, rubbery pouches beneath his eyes. His shirt and trousers were badly wrinkled. He accepted Archie's brief embrace, but he didn't speak to Alice or to Theo. He didn't even seem to notice that Theo was there, hanging behind Alice.

Alice saw Archie register this lapse. He moved to put his arm around Theo as if to bring him forward to O'Brien's attention. But Theo refused to move any nearer, shrugging away from Archie's arm. O'Brien didn't seem to notice this either, but Archie looked at Theo, his back turned resolutely to the two men.

“Why don't you let me stay here tonight?” Archie said to O'Brien.

O'Brien shook his head. “I wouldn't sleep anyway,” he said. “It doesn't matter.” He noticed Alice finally and smiled wearily at the bouquet of peonies and hydrangeas in her hand.

“Well, at least let me take you across the street for something to eat,” Archie said. “We'll only be gone a half hour, just long enough to get a steak and a baked potato or something into you. Alice and Theo can stay here. They can come right across the street and get us if—”

O'Brien was shaking his head again, but at the mention of Theo's name he seemed to see him for the first time. He stared at him for a moment, but he didn't speak to him. He turned to Archie again instead. “I talked to Ann this morning,” he said. “She's grateful to you for keeping him. She wants to make sure it's all right if he stays—”

“Of course, it's all right,” Archie said. “Of course, it is.”

“She wants to come, but she can't do anything for her mother.
She might just make it worse, and she's in no state right now … Sorry about this. About the timing of everything.” O'Brien paused abruptly, as if aware of needing to take care with his words in front of Alice and Theo. “She said
he
would come and get the boy, if it's inconvenient, but I think right now they need to—”

“It's no trouble,” Archie said quickly. “You tell her just to take care of herself, not to—”

“My dad could come get me.” Theo had turned around to stare at O'Brien. His chest was heaving with emotion. “Or they could come together. He could drive her. He always drives, because she doesn't like to drive, she hates to drive, it makes her nervous, so he—”

O'Brien looked down at him. “That's enough, son,” he said after a minute and turned back to Archie.