Saving Alice (30 page)
T
his was not the Donna I remembered. Her hair was cut chinlength with loose bangs. She was wearing white shorts and a loose-fitting blouse with pink and yellow stripes. Her entire frame was thinner somehow, but shapely all the same.
“No more kisses, okay?” Alycia said, her eyes wide with insistence. Donna embraced me again. Alycia slapped her hands over her eyes. “Okay, okay, I see no evil.”
With melodramatic gusto, Donna kissed me again.
“This is
not
working out according to plan,” Alycia complained, coming over and grabbing our hands. “Time for presents.”
Donna caught my eye. “There’s more?”
“Always,” I whispered, but my words were coming out like echoes, as if I were talking in a tunnel.
Donna swung her hair from side to side to show off the earrings twinkling in the overhead lights. Alycia reached a closet and gave me a warning look, which I took to mean: I’d better have remembered. She poised her hand on the knob and gave me another look. I shrugged and waited, hoping I hadn’t blown it. She pulled open the closet like a magician revealing the lady who had been sawn in half. “Voila!”
There were two large gift-wrapped boxes with silver bows sitting on a small stool. Alycia flashed me a quick,
well done
smile.
I felt proud. Donna squealed again and wrapped my arm into hers. “Oh, Stephen…” she whispered, giving me another peck on the cheek.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Alycia muttered. “Before things get out of hand!”
Alycia loaded up my arms, and I carried the presents to the living room. Cathedral ceilings and tall windows overlooked the sandy beach leading to the cove and the ocean beyond. I put the gifts in a leather chair.
Donna was now standing in front of the windows. She caught me looking at her, and I smiled, embarrassed. A glint of curiosity crossed her features.
Taking a deep breath, I got up and went to the windows beside her. Together we looked out beyond the deck and watched the foamy waves surge against the shoreline.
Moments later, Donna opened my present first, and I wondered what I’d gotten her. It was a framed print. I took a closer look. It wasn’t a print. It was an original. Donna grinned. “It’s beautiful!” She winked at me, and in a humorous tone, designed to sound slightly melodramatic, she exclaimed, “What did I ever do to deserve you!”
Alycia broke in. “Are you kidding, Mom? He’s lucky to have
you
.”
I forced a laugh. Next Donna opened Alycia’s gift. It was a purse.
“I remember looking at this at the mall,” Donna exclaimed.
“I paid attention,” Alycia replied in a matter-of-fact tone.
“What did I do to deserve
you
?” Donna said, getting up to hug her daughter. Alycia shot me a warning glance, designed to intercept any potential sarcastic repartee.
Donna came back over and promptly sat in my lap.
“This is so totally getting out of hand,” Alycia said, jumping up. “I’m going into the next room now, and when I return, you two had better be all finished with all this kissy stuff.”
“Then you’d better be gone for a while,” Donna chuckled.
“Oh, gross, Mom,” Alycia whined. “TMI!” She headed around the corner.
Donna kissed me tenderly and began running her fingers through my hair. “You seem … a little distracted, Stephen. Everything okay?”
The whole thing was already unraveling.
She whispered into my ear. “You and Alycia, and your birthday surprises. I can’t keep up with you two.”
I took another breath.
“Am I too heavy?” She grasped my cheek lightly, peering into my eyes. “Sure there’s nothing wrong? You’re looking a bit partly cloudy.”
I stared into my former wife’s eyes.
“Wanna go upstairs?” she asked.
“You know … actually, I’m not really feeling that well.”
Donna frowned thoughtfully. “I didn’t think so. You shouldn’t pretend, you big-strong-he-man type. Can I get you something?”
“Uh … like what?”
“The pink stuff? Was it something we ate last night, maybe?”
Last night?
“Maybe.”
“Maybe you just didn’t sleep enough,” she said and nipped my ear.
I shivered and she pulled back.
“Did that hurt?”
“No, of course not.”
She frowned and stared at me curiously. I almost expected her to say,
You’re not really Stephen, are you?
The moment she would begin asking me questions, I would be finished.
“I think … I need to lie down for a while.”
“Okay,” she said, and for a moment I thought I saw the old Donna, the one who carried a glint of hurt behind her eyes.
She was getting up when I pulled her back to me, and she giggled playfully. She looked at me expectantly. “We might do a little shopping? Alycia and I? While you rest.”
I nodded, and she got up again. I began walking across the room with renewed effort to appear confident. I was halfway up the steps when I noticed her looking at me curiously. She smiled again, but that questioning in her eyes persisted.
I ascended the remaining steps, past the giant poster of Alice. The moment I was behind the closed door to our spacious bedroom, I let out a sigh of relief.
I leaned against the door, staring around the room with continuing disbelief, waiting for it to suddenly waver into oblivion, after which I would awaken in some asylum ward somewhere.
I could almost imagine someone whispering in the background:
Poor man, lost his mind when his daughter committed suicide. Thinks he’s fallen down a rabbit hole
.
I wandered about the room, touching things, testing the sense of physical solidity as if that would convince me one way or the other. I handled the comb on the dresser. I ran my fingers along the bedspread, feeling the carpet beneath the soles of my feet, closing my eyes and opening them again. I even tried the old standard: pinching my arm.
In the bathroom, I continued to look for anomalies, little clues that would tell me the truth. The shower was still moist. The fog on the mirrors had evaporated. The beige tile felt cold beneath my touch.
Back in the bedroom, I sat on the bed.
What would it take to fully believe? To fully give myself over to this? I didn’t know, but if the hours turned into days, and the days turned into weeks, surely it would sink in. Eventually it would seem like home.
Wouldn’t it?
How was I going to function in a world where I couldn’t remember the past fourteen years? I had to learn the past in a hurry. I had to ask carefully worded questions. Until I got up to speed, I had to keep faking it. Somehow I had to survive in this reality without letting on. I had to learn who I became, and then become that person.
I considered another alternative. What if I came clean? I could face both Alycia and Donna and tell them the truth.
I almost laughed. They’d surely think I was crazy.
“What happened to you, Dad?”
Alycia would ask.
“Did you hit your head or something?”
And then she’d begin looking at me from behind scrutinizing expressions.
No, I had to play along.
First order of business—study the past fourteen years. Eventually, all my questions would be answered, including what actually had happened between Alice and me.
Actually?
I chuckled briefly at the irony.
I got up, went to the dresser, and pulled out the top drawer. Nestled in with spare change, pens and pencils, was a black leather wallet. The outer flap displayed my driver’s license: South Dakota.
Strange
.
I heard a gentle knocking on the door.
“Come in,” I called.
The door opened, and Donna and Alycia appeared in the doorway. Alycia was wearing a Patriots baseball cap.
“Are you feeling any better?” Alycia asked. “We’re going out. Wanna come?”
I considered her offer. What if they asked me to drive? What if we met people I was supposed to know? What if Donna and Alycia embarked on conversations that contained recollections I couldn’t “remember”?
No, I couldn’t risk it yet.
I gestured for Alycia, and she came to me, grasping my extended hand.
“You’re growing up so fast,” I said.
Alycia rolled her yes. “Oh boy, the parental-walk-down-nostalgia lane. Twice in one day.”
“I love you, honey,” I said.
She nodded, smiling sweetly for me. “I love you too, Dad.”
Donna lingered by the door, observing us approvingly.
“So … are you coming or not?” Alycia asked again.
I shook my head. “Not this time.”
Alycia shrugged. “We’ll be gone for a while. Mom wants to go to Essex. And you see … that works out just perfectly for me, because I just want to shop!”
I looked at Donna, and she chuckled. I turned back to Alycia.
“Neat baseball cap,” I said. “It reminds me of when you joined the boys’ team. Remember how we worked for months?”
Alycia frowned. “Joined the boys’ team? Ick. When did I do that?”
“Just kidding,” I replied.
“Dad, your stories are getting weirder and weirder.”
I thought of her ears. “Lean over.”
She did, pushing her hair out of the way. “They’re looking good, huh, Dad?”
At first I felt relief, believing that something of our past had remained, but Alycia quickly clarified the situation. “The miracles of modern surgery, huh?”
Of course,
I realized.
In this reality, we could afford to pay a surgeon to flatten her ears
.
Donna wandered into the room and stroked her daughter’s back. “We’d better go.”
“I challenge you to a rematch,” Alycia said. “When we return.”
“You’re on,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what game we’d be playing.
Donna leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Get some rest, sweetie. And thanks for everything.”
I nodded. They lingered at the door, waved, and left me.
I
began by going through every drawer in the master bedroom. I worked my way through the spare rooms, doing the same, until ending up on the lower walk-out level.
In a downstairs closet, I caught a break. I found another one of Donna’s memory boxes, this one loaded with photo albums and diaries.
I was surprised to see them. Previously—in the other life— Donna had stopped keeping a diary after college. A full thirteen years passed with barely a mention of her thoughts and dreams.
I flipped through them, reading the dates, then recognized the one from college. I opened that one first, flipped through it, and felt a flicker of guilt for invading her privacy.
Sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, I opened to the earliest diary—the
pre-
Alice record—and began reading from a past that had occurred long before I’d lost—or saved—Alice. Since it wasn’t relevant, I nearly set it aside and went to the next diary, but a single line grabbed me.
Dear Diary, I’ve fallen in love with Stephen Whitaker
.
It took me an hour to read the rest of it, and in spite of everything that had happened, in spite of saving Alice in a dream, and somehow waking up and finding myself in a strange future—where my daughter was alive and Donna and I were still married—I was transfixed with Donna’s narrative of the past. No wonder Alice had been so upset.
When I was finished, I leaned against the wall and tried to digest what I’d just learned.
Six months before Alice transferred to our college, I first saw Donna in Lit class. As an accounting major, I hid in the far back, the farthest row to the left. Donna sat three rows over, six chairs up. She liked to wear jean skirts and yellow or blue blouses, and I remember thinking she had nice legs. She also had an untouchable demeanor:
Keep your distance!
Along with this, she never spoke in class unless called upon, and she never raised her hand. Even so, Professor Smith deferred his probing questions to her. After the entire class would weigh in, he’d often ask her, “And what do you say about this, Donna?”
You could sense the class crouching closer: The Queen of Lit was about to hold forth. After her reply, the prof would invariably say, “Exactly what I was looking for.”
Despite the praise, Donna loathed the attention, and she especially did not relish being the teacher’s pet. One day, she walked into class early, offered her hand to me, and said, “Hi, I’m Donna. Can we trade chairs?”
While our seats weren’t assigned, our usual spots had become established through routine. Knowing full well why she wanted my seat and feeling feisty, I smiled. “What’s it worth to you?”
“I’ll buy you lunch,” she surprised me by saying.
“Lunch?” I asked. “That’s it?”
“And dessert. That’s the deal.”
Humored by her silly desperation, I replied, “I was thinking something more like help on the essays.”
Her face fell. “I won’t help you cheat, if that’s what you want.”
I opened my mouth to correct her impression, but she was already walking away. She got situated in her vulnerable seat, opened her book, and waited for class to begin.
Afterward, I approached her in the hall. “Is the offer for lunch still good?”
She frowned. “You didn’t keep your part of the deal.”
“There are three months left.”
Reluctantly, she agreed, and as we walked across campus, I attempted casual conversation.
“What’s your favorite classic?” I asked her.
She answered rather grudgingly, as if telling me would make it less significant.
“To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Why?”
“If you have to ask, you haven’t read it.”
“Touché,” I admitted.
Our short walk was such a disaster that by the time we reached the lunchroom, I expressed polite reservation. “I was just kidding. You can have my seat. We don’t have to go through with lunch, and I certainly would never ask you to cheat for me.”
“So why did you say it?”
“Because ‘help’ means ‘help,’ ” I said with exasperation. “And because I don’t read much.”
Wrong answer,
her expression said.
“I mean … not fiction.”
“So what do you read?” she asked with little enthusiasm. We were standing just outside the door, both of us obviously looking for the appropriate parting words. While she was annoyed with my literary ignorance, I was annoyed with her elitist attitude, and I said what I hoped would offend her the most: “I read Christian books.”
My answer had the opposite effect. Her mouth dropped open. “What kind of Christian books?”
I named some titles and her expression melted. “Wow, and I thought you were a jerk.”
“Well, you’re still a literary snob,” I shot back.
She bit her lip and swallowed. I said good-bye and made to leave with a semblance of dignity when she grabbed my arm. “Stephen, may I buy you lunch to apologize?”
Lunch lasted three full hours. Once we got to talking, we couldn’t stop. She barely made it to her three o’clock Advanced Comp class, and I didn’t tell her until much later that I’d skipped my two o’clock General Science.
We had everything in common. Both of us were born and raised in small Midwestern towns, both to poorer families, and both of us made it to college by the skin of our teeth.
I told her about my rabbit-field prayers, how the sense of God’s closeness was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and she seemed awestruck. “I’ve sometimes struggled to believe God would answer my prayers,” she admitted sheepishly.
I nodded. “But sometimes … God gives a sign.”
She was surprised. “He does? How?”
That was difficult to say, other than it came with a sense of peace and confidence—a clicking into place.
In spite of our inauspicious introductions, we became instant best friends, which was all I had remembered about those days until I read her diary.
“My favorite picture isn’t up here anymore,”
she’d said on the day she packed up and left me, and I now remembered what she meant. Two nights before Alice’s celebrated recital, I took Donna to a French restaurant. Donna wore the only nice dress she owned at the time, the powder blue gown, and I wore the only suit in my closet.
Only faintly do I recall the meal, but I do remember the waitress. She was surly and abrupt, and despite the dominant theme of our discussion—
Christian love
—Donna became increasingly annoyed with the level of service. When we politely asked the waitress to snap our picture, she grudgingly agreed. Finally Donna could take it no longer. “Let’s just go, Stephen. We can talk back at the dorm.”
I remember smiling and saying, “Let’s do something radical first.”
She frowned.
“ ‘Bless those who curse you,’ ” I said cryptically.
“You’re kidding.” She sat back in her seat and looked at me.
“Okay,” she replied. “Let’s tell her we forgive her for being such a lousy waitress.”
She watched as I removed a twenty-dollar bill. Her eyes widened. “What’s that?”
“Our tip.”
She looked incredulous.
“Maybe she’s had a bad day,” I said. “Regardless, all waitresses work for tips, and, besides, we can leave a little note.”
“Like what?”
“Like … we’re praying for you, or … we could write a Scripture verse or something.”
Her expression soured. “If we really want to do the right thing, we’d tell the manager and he’d fire her and save future customers.”
I shrugged. “I suppose that’s justice.”
“You bet it is.” She let out a breath. “Fine, Stephen. Do what you want. But I still think you’re being naïve. God doesn’t expect us to be stupid.”
“Call it an experiment, then,” I said, inserting the twenty beneath the water glass along with a scribbled note, hoping the next day would be better and we’d be praying for her.
Donna’s diary explained what happened next:
Stephen and I were just leaving the restaurant and I felt terribly frustrated. I was also frustrated with myself because I couldn’t feel anything but anger with this woman for ruining a perfectly good date, but mainly I was disturbed with Stephen because he was acting self-righteous (although I know he didn’t mean to). We were interrupted by the sound of a woman’s voice calling to us from behind us, and we turned to see our waitress standing by the door, hugging herself in the cold. Despite the dim light, we could see she’d been crying. We approached her, and she could barely talk. She mentioned the note and the prayer, and gasped out an apology for her behavior. She told us that her family was falling apart, that her father had left her mother.
I wanted to crawl under the cement sidewalk, but Stephen reached for her hand. And then he prayed out loud and afterward said something like: “There’s always hope. Don’t give up believing God is on your side.” The waitress nodded. “Meeting you two has been a gift from God … to me.”
As Stephen walked me back to my dorm, neither of us spoke. When we reached the glass door, I turned to apologize, but he placed his finger against my lips. He told me he’d been just as shocked as I was at the waitress’s response.
We talked until three in the morning. When we parted, Stephen kissed me on the cheek. He told me he couldn’t believe time had gone so quickly.
And then I said something wrong. “Meeting you has been like coming home.” His expression dimmed slightly, and I could have kicked myself. I’d forgotten that home wasn’t all that happy a place for him.
I feel like we’re beginning to fall in love, but I have the impression Stephen is fighting it. Either that, or I’ve been wrong all along.
So, Dear Diary, here I am. In spite of my lifelong determination to stay single, I’m crazy about the only person who’s ever given me any sense that God could love me. I like who I am when we’re together, and if I can’t have someone like Stephen, I don’t want anyone. At the same time, I’m angry with myself for caring this much for him
.
In her diary, Donna wrote this months later:
Unbelievable. I’ve just lost Stephen to Alice, and I never even had him. Then again, should I be so surprised? Why would someone like Stephen even want me? I must have proven to him that I’m not worthy of his love. Even his faith is beyond me
.
The remaining diary entries—one every two weeks or so, were filled with continuing details about classes, Alice, school, prayers to God, and occasionally … her unrequited love for me. While she’d gotten over the initial frustration, the sadness seemed to linger.
Two weeks before I proposed to Alice, Donna wrote:
I know that Stephen and I are supposed to be together, Lord, so why did you take him from me? I know Stephen loves me. Do something, Lord!
That was her last college diary entry.
I placed the diary on the desk and leaned against the wall, closing my eyes.
“It seems you’ve forgotten everything,”
Donna had once told me.
I finally reached for the next diary. Two hours later, I was still alone. I’d read nearly five diaries and perused seven photograph albums. I’d received all the answers I needed. I now knew what had happened after I’d saved Alice, and if I hadn’t read it for myself, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Two weeks after that close call at the Soda Straw, Alice and I had taken a long walk around the campus. According to what I’d told Donna later, I had come to grips with my true feelings.
I’ve fallen in love with Donna,
I told Alice, and unbelievably, Alice hadn’t protested.
“I always suspected that you two belonged together,”
she told me. And then she said something shocking. Her association with Donna had reconfirmed her faith in Christ. In fact, several nights earlier, Alice had knelt before God.
“I’ll find a church in Manhattan,”
she told me, laughing.
“I’ll be the only Christian on Broadway.”
At the end of the walk, I kissed her on the cheek.
“We’ll always be the Three Musketeers, right?”
she asked me, her eyes glistening in the dim light by the girls’ dorm.
I hugged her quickly.
“Maybe I can be Donna’s maid of honor someday?”
“Of course. And I’ll always care for you, Alice,” I said.
Knowing what I meant, she smiled at my choice of words. “Ditto.”
I married Donna two months later. And in March of the following year, our dear Alycia was born.
Surprisingly, in
this
life, I had never lost faith in God. I turned down the Wall Street job—Larry had already called me with his business idea—and we’d moved to Aberdeen. Together, as a family, we attended church, and my habit of daily prayer continued. Every night, I committed my ways to God and asked for divine direction as a husband and a father.
On the other hand, Alice went on to New York City. She became a leading star in various musicals, and Donna’s albums were filled with photos of the reunited Musketeers. But Alice made a few poor choices. She began taking uppers to stay on top of things, and then consumed downers to fall asleep. Her career faltered. So had her faith. She became bitter and disillusioned. She even spoke openly of her scorn for religion.
