After Alice Fell(7)

I am enclosing a rebel two dollar bill for Toby. His birthday is next Friday if I have my days straight.

Thank Cathy for her letter of last week, it brought cheer. The lemon drops were a marvelous surprise.

As ever yours

—M

Lionel’s return letter was placating and kind. Alice’s was honest.

Here. May 25.

I didn’t do anything wrong. Come home.

—Alice

AND—I’m not sorry. About Benj.

The columns of roses on the bedroom wall dissolve and reform into the white of Alice’s skin, the brown-purple bruises, the blood-tangled hair that took so long to plait.

She didn’t suffer.

She did. Of course she did. All her life.

I gasp for air and bolt up. Hold in a moan and rock forward, elbows jabbed to my thighs. I want to crawl out of my own skin, away from the sear of guilt. I left her here, when I should have come home.

There’s a soft knock on the door and a turn of the knob. A small shoe slides in the opening. I grab my wrap from the end of the bed and pull it round me. Toby slips just inside the door.

“You should wait for an answer first.”

He twists the seam of his breeches pocket, then lets it go and wipes his finger along the edge of his nose.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am. I should wait for an answer, then you will let me in.” His gaze circles the small room, stopping on the round clock atop the mantel. He points at it and contemplates the black scrollwork hands, the bulge of the face, the gold gilt numbers.

“It’s eight and six,” he says.

“Yes. Eight thirty.” So, I’ve slept. The sky is tinged butternut and gray.

“You missed dinner.”

“I did.”

“We had raisin pudding.” He scratches under his chin. His nails are mooned black with dirt.

“What do you need, Toby?”

He shakes his head then turns around, picking something up from the hall floor, and backs into the room. He grimaces, gripping a tray by its corners so as not to upset the bowl balanced at its center. The spoon slides to the lip.

“Let me.” I rise from the bed, take the tray, and set it on the desk. The broth is tepid, no steam; a dab of grease floats on the surface and then clings to the interior of the bowl.

“Do you like beef tea?” I ask.

He pulls his chin into his neck and shakes his head.

“We have something in common, then.”

“Mama said it’s fortificious.”

He calls Cathy “Mama”—I suppose it’s expected. Still, it has only been three years. He was five when Lydia drowned. Old enough to remember her, I think. Is there a prescribed passage of time that must pass before the mantle of mother moves from one woman to the next? Perhaps the word comes prior to the affection, for I see little of it between the two now.

My nose curls at the smell of the broth. I unlatch the window. I’ll tip it to the ground once everyone’s abed. “You can give your . . . Cathy . . . my thanks.”

Toby sets one foot on top of the other. He frowns then, and blinks. His lashes are so long. “Where’s Alice?”

“She’s gone away.”

“But she just came back.”

“Oh, Toby.” I kneel and touch his shoulder. “Alice is . . . She isn’t coming back. She’s with God now.”

“But I saw her.” He swallows gulps of air. His eyes widen, the pupils slipping to black dots. “Who’ll keep away the Bad Ones?”

Alice in the corner, twelve years old, balanced like a stork on one foot, finger scraping the paint and plaster, not turning around. “They’re out there,” she said. “Right outside the window.”

“There’s nothing there. Please Alice, come downstairs. Come down, don’t wake Mother—”

“There are no Bad Ones, Toby.”

“Yes, there are.” He points to the glass, now flat and black but for the flicker of gaslight reflected from the hall. “Out there. It’s why she slept in the glass house. To keep guard.”

Alice believed night creatures lived in the pond—fiends that came from the Narrows, where the pond pinched and bent out of sight. She drew the creatures in the corners of her notebooks. Wire wings stitched in mismatched feathers—white tufts from an owl, black plumes of the long-tailed duck, the emerald offering of a mallard—six red beetle legs with single talons, a dragonfly body with horse’s tail, eight eyes split into honeycomb patterns.

We weren’t allowed to go there as children. It is deep, the slip from the edge a surprise, the stone too smooth for scrambling feet and hands.

Alice drew the Bad Ones sanding the surfaces every night, lingering on lily pads near the deepest crevice, waiting for a poor soul to slip.

Elgin Miller’s son—1812, 10 years old Marjorie & Hester Bickford—1834, 8 & 10

Israel Foley—1737(?) 72 and perhaps drunk Mayhew Greenleaf—1788—wheelwright

More names, written in neat ink on the back wall of her wardrobe, so small she used a magnifier to add each to her roll of the dead. The wardrobe now in Toby’s room. All the names she’d created or recorded from the stones in the town cemetery now covered with paper and glue.

Stephen Lang—1854—24 yrs old, to wed Timothy Lamprey’s daughter Mildred Larkin—1855