‘HEY, ALISON! OVER HERE!’ It was Franny calling above the blur of voices in the cafeteria. The air was thick with the greasy smell of hamburgers grilling. The kids on line in front of her had grayish scoops of mashed potatoes on their plates, the hollowed-out tops filled with brown gravy like little volcanoes with overflowing lava. Franny was at a table near the windows, with Hilary and Karen and the boys from Max’s group. Nick, of all people, was standing up waving an arm in the air, doing some sort of routine. She put an apple and a dish of green jello on her tray and went over.
‘Nick can do this great imitation of Fats Fox,’ Franny said, her long feather earrings swaying as she tossed her head. ‘Watch him, Al. Do it again, Nick. Please!’
Nick had Fats’s midwestem accent exactly right: ‘There will be no run-een in the gym,’ he said, in a tone that mingled irritation and helplessness. ‘Do you want to go down to Mr Barry’s office?’ Mr Barry was the principal. Nick even managed to seem chubby, with his hands flat on his slouching hips. When his jaw dropped and his eyes rolled upward in dismay, he looked so absurd that she had to laugh with everyone else. ‘No more hog-een of that basketball, Alison,’ and he punched her lightly on the shoulder. Hilary and Franny collapsed in giggles.
‘All right, that’s enough fooling around,’ Hilary said. ‘Alison, we’re having a meeting. To decide about Max.’
‘What about him?’
‘Here. First sign this.’ Bobby handed her a card. ‘After Fats told us, I cut history to go out and get it.’
‘A real hero!’ Franny pulled a lock of his hair, and he slapped her hand away.
On the front was a cartoon drawing of a man in bed, his legs up in traction, with crossed patches of bandage on his forehead and arms. Inside it said: ‘Hear you’re laid up, Well, don’t be blue, Just hurry on back, The gang misses you.’
It made her want to puke. Didn’t they understand that Max’s sickness was invisible? He had no bandages. They had all written their names in different-colored pens, some adding little messages and drawings. Karen had made a stick figure on a trapeze with a crutch, and Bobby’s was spelled wrong: ‘Hope you have a speedy recovery.’ The whole thing was a messy scrawl.
‘Well, come on, Alison, sign. We still have to decide on the present.’
In a small space between the broad flourishes of Bobby’s signature and the stiff wiry lines of Elliot’s, she wrote ‘Alison’ in tiny block letters, not her real handwriting. Maybe he wouldn’t notice it. She could see him looking at the card and shrugging one shoulder. ‘Aha,’ he would say with a sarcastic grunt. ‘It appears the gang misses me.’ If he lived to see it.
‘How about flowers, something like that?’ Bobby asked.
‘He’s not the flowers type.’
‘Oh, Alison knows all about it, as usual. Why, did you ever ask him?’ Elliot sneered.
Karen said she heard somewhere that flowers use up the oxygen in a room. ‘He might have trouble breathing.’
‘Flowers are too common. We ought to get something more personal, like maybe a book.’ Nick was looking at her as he spoke. It was funny how ever since Max had chosen him to demonstrate all the new tricks, Nick had begun giving his opinions on every subject, looking you straight in the eye too.
‘A mystery,’ she suggested.
‘Oh, no, Alison,’ Hilary said. ‘He would think mysteries are dumb.’
‘Listen,’ Bobby said. ‘If everyone brings a dollar tomorrow I’ll cut lunch and go to Korvettes. I’ll think of something when I’m there.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Franny volunteered. ‘Boys don’t know how to shop alone.’
‘I wonder,’ said Karen, ‘if he dies and they have a funeral, if we’ll all get invited. I went to one once, my uncle’s. It was really weird. They don’t dig the hole while you’re there. They have it all ready. And you leave before it’s all filled up.’
‘Yeah. My father says a heart attack in a man his age is no joke. He tried to do too much. He thought he was hot shit.’
She stood up. ‘Elliot, you’re such a creepy idiot. And besides, your father is a dentist! He knows teeth, not hearts.’ Grabbing her tray and knapsack, she left them gaping and ran to the girls’ room. She pressed her fists over her eyes till the tears were forced back, and then slipped out a side door and ran home. If Wanda was there she would tell her she felt sick. She did, too—the hollow space had gotten to her head.
There was a note on the kitchen counter: ‘Went to get my hair done. Back around four-thirty. Mom.’ Josh was gone too. He had left early this morning for three weeks in the Northwest. When he kissed her good-bye in the kitchen he murmured, ‘Now no more cutting, remember? And no funny business like the other night, either.’ She had to think of her mother, he had whispered. Keep an eye on her.
She shut the door of her room. Maybe she would never go back to school again. She could pretend to be very weak, and have a private tutor. She could stay in her room forever, reading and writing—you learned more that way anyhow—and after a while she would forget about how she had gotten him upset and sick, possibly killed him. The people in stories could not really be hurt, no matter what you made them go through. Alice had gone on long enough—soon she would start a new one. It could be about an invalid child, like the boy in The Secret Garden, except she would not make her get better in the end. She could sort of fade away, like Paul in Dombey and Son, who didn’t have enough vital spirits. But first Alice had to be finished; she pulled her out from under the mattress.
Alice follows the dark trapeze artist up to the high platform. From there the wild swoops and swings seem even more glorious. She watches his muscles flex and tighten for the perfect timing of every change, and longs to be suspended, like him, from that bar, feeling her body stretched and taut, the rush of air past her face. To fly is her true destiny. He agrees to teach her, and she learns so fast that after only a few weeks he promises her a small part in a performance. The great day arrives. Warming up, Alice swings back and forth a few times, and each time they pass high in the air he smiles encouragement at her. In a state of trance, she listens to the music for her cue. The moment approaches: she will leap to him and he will catch her. She should be concentrating on the timing, but she is too caught up in the swiftness of flight to think clearly. She leaps a split second early. His arms reach out for her, two inches too far. In a panic, she stretches up towards him, to grasp and tug at his fingers, something she was taught never to do. Never pull, just grip firmly, he always warned. But she can’t stop herself. There is no net. She hears the thudding crash of their bodies and the roar of the crowd, then loses consciousness. When she wakes up she has a broken arm, a broken leg, and dozens of bruises. But the trapeze man, they tell her, has suffered far worse injuries. No one will say exactly what. They look at her with cold anger, and leave her alone in her hospital bed. They ostracize her.
She stopped to look up the spelling of ‘ostracize,’ then sat rigid with the pen poised. It would be simple to have Alice die in bed, but somehow she could not bring herself to do that. Yet to have her recover completely and go on to a new adventure did not seem right either. There was no place to go from that point. She felt as though a sheet of rock, like the cruel cliffs of a canyon, was rising in front of her. On the wall opposite she had taped Josh’s postcards of the Grand Canyon. Depth upon depth. She was lost in a Grand Canyon of empty spaces surrounded by walls of ancient rock, and it was not a thrilling place, as she had dreamed, but more lonely and terrifying than she could ever have imagined. She could not write an ending till she found out what would happen to him.
She raced over on her bike. As she hurried toward the elevator, Mrs Cameron stopped her. ‘Mr Fried isn’t in.’
‘I know. I heard. I was going to see Mrs Blumenthal.’
‘She’s not in either.’
‘Do you know where she is? I have to get in touch with her.’
‘She left early and didn’t say. But I imagine she’s over with him in Parkvale.’
She knew Parkvale. It was way on the other side of town. Once last year while Wanda visited Lou after her breast operation, she had sat downstairs in the waiting room. People were slumped over, reading magazines as if they were in a dentist’s office. Huddled in a corner, an old woman wearing a fur coat sat and cried.
‘Oh. Do you—’ She forced herself to meet Mrs Cameron’s gaze. She had been here Friday night, and knew; she must hate her. ‘Do you know how Mr Fried is doing?’
‘I haven’t heard since early this morning. They said his condition was stable.’
‘Stable?’
Mrs Cameron took off her glasses, and for the first time, smiled at her. She was not a witch any longer but human. Her whole face was softer, with soft curving lines around her mouth. There was feeling there. She must keep the human face hidden behind the other, the sealed mask.
‘Stable means he’s not getting any worse. It’s a good sign.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’ She turned to leave.
‘Alison? It is Alison, isn’t it? I can ask Mrs Blumenthal to call you tonight. Why don’t you write down your number?’
She did. ‘I might see her at the hospital.’
‘Maybe, but I doubt if they’ll let you up. They have a rule about age.’
‘I know how to get in places. What’s his room number?’
The smile faded as the glasses were replaced and the mask was sealed back on. Mrs Cameron ruffled her fingers through her hair. ‘I don’t think I should tell you that.’
She reached Parkvale in fifteen minutes and locked the bike outside. Four stories of red brick with a wide circular driveway, the hospital sat on the crest of a sloping lawn, like Pleasure Knolls, like school. Many of the windows were barred. The woman at this desk had a sealed mask too, but she was dark-haired and younger, about Wanda’s age.
‘Could you tell me what room Mr Max Fried is in, please?’ A face sealed with wax. Sealing wax. The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. She and Max...Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages—
‘How old are you?’
‘How old do you have to be?’
The woman stared and wrinkled her forehead. ‘Suppose you tell me how old you are first.’
‘He’s a very close relative. I see him all the time...’
The woman shook her head. There was a row of elevators only a few yards off, but a uniformed guard stood near them, watching her.
‘Oh, forget it. Can you tell me how he is, at least?’
She flipped through pages in a ledger. ‘His condition is still stable.’
Her blood gave a sudden rush, and she kicked the bottom of the counter. ‘Look, all I really want to find out is if he’s going to live or die!’
‘I’m not a fortuneteller, young lady. This is a hospital. And watch those feet.’
On her way out she passed a sign that said: ‘No Admittance to Persons Under Sixteen.’ She stood beside her bike, stroking the rubber grips and running her finger over the chilly chrome of the handlebars. She used to ride over to Max’s sometimes, before the winter snows—it seemed like ages ago. Once he came down to look at it and said it was a good, sturdy bike; he could fix up a bike like that to ride backwards and spin on one wheel and do all sorts of fantastic leaps. A circus bike. But when she asked if he would, he said of course not, he was only talking; it would be much too dangerous around here. She had been planning to ask again, over the summer. It might never be a circus bike now.
She found a back entrance that opened right on to a row of elevators. Pulling herself up to look taller, she pressed the button. From nowhere, another guard appeared. ‘Sorry, young lady, we can’t let you up.’ He waited around till she went out again.
The closed windows all looked identical. Even if she knew which room, it wouldn’t make any difference; he was probably unconscious. He had wanted to get rid of her the other night, and now he had succeeded. He had found someplace completely safe from her. Very clever, Max. In the gym he had said he would catch them. Pretend I am the net. But he didn’t want to be the net any more. Slowly she unlocked the bike and coasted down the driveway. Well, who cared? She had managed all right before she knew him. She didn’t need any net.
March was going out the way it came in, like a lion. The wind slashed her cheeks and whipped up her hair. Fighting it, she speeded up on the bike, zooming along the down-grade past stalled late-afternoon traffic. Near the entrance to the thruway, she shifted to a higher gear. There was no special moment when she decided, but all at once she was turning on to the entrance ramp. An instant later she was part of a massive rush forward. She stayed on the shoulder; three lanes of cars raced by on her left, several of them honking at her. Each one passed with a zoom that rose to a roar, and quickly subsided to a dull, distant hum. One after the other, zoom, roar, and hum—her mind slipped easily into their rhythm, while her eyes, dazed, fixed on the spinning of their tires, which raised faint haloes of dust in the sun. She felt her hair stretched out behind her. With the wind beating on her neck and her throat smarting, she switched again to a higher gear. She was flying on the wind.
An exit was coming up. In the corner of her left eye a dark speck appeared, and grew: something was trying to edge over into the exit lane. She ought to slow down, or else speed up and get past on his right. A queer feeling overtook her: why do either? Why not just wait and see what happened? She and that speck were traveling the lines of a V, and they would meet at its point. Still pedaling, she let her mind lapse on to a dark flat plane where all the bad thoughts got shoved off the edge. She yielded to something soft and static at the deep center of her speed. She could watch her own crash. The zoom grew to a roar; as a horn blared long and loud and the speck in her eye became a huge black blob, she snapped out of the trance and tried to get past it, make it shrink again, but the slope was uphill now. She couldn’t work up the speed. She could feel it only a few yards to her left, but couldn’t stop. She heard a terrible screeching noise that seemed to come from inside her hollow stomach. Standing up on the pedals, she gave a tremendous push and hit the crest of the hill with her eyes squeezed shut, because the blob filled her whole left eye, engulfing her. The screech of brakes ended just behind her, and a second later the driver’s rough voice came from off on the right, shouting that she was a crazy bitch and maybe the next one would get her. His words trailed off on the wind.
Gasping, she coasted down the grade. Her heart was knocking in her chest, but the danger was past and she was the winner. She smiled. She could go on forever, no matter what dangers. She was powerful! Way past her second wind now; the pedals were working themselves. There was no future any more, no bad thoughts to think, only this traveling.
When she got home her legs were trembling so hard she could barely stand. Off the highway, all her special powers had vanished; she had never felt so exhausted in her life. She lay down on her bed to think about how she might finish off Alice, but in an instant was asleep.
Wanda’s voice woke her, calling her down for supper. Not speaking a word, Wanda sat across from her and read Cosmopolitan as she ate. Alison pushed her food around. The pieces of last night’s creamed chicken were like raw inner organs floating in a sticky pale sauce. She threw it in the garbage, but Wanda did not look up. She sat down at the table again and stared, but Wanda did not notice.
‘Your hair looks nice,’ she said.
‘Oh, do you think so? I thought they ruined it this time. In fact, I had a big fight with them over it. I’m in a rotten mood. I had to pay thirty dollars and it’ll take weeks to get the shape back.’ She flipped through her magazine.
‘It’s not bad at all.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Uh-a friend of mine is very sick.’
‘What friend?’
‘The man who teaches in the gym. Max Fried. You remember.’
At this Wanda looked up. ‘Remember! Are you kidding! Didn’t I tell you to leave those people alone, after the other night? Can’t you hang around with people your own age?’
‘They happen to be my friends.’
Wanda sighed. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He had a heart attack. The day after I was there.’
‘Really? I’m sorry to hear it.’ Wanda paused a moment with her lips parted, and ran a finger slowly down her cheek. Then, with a light smack, she laid her hand palm down on the table. ‘But look, Alison, what can you expect? I don’t suppose he’d be living there if he was well. At that age these things can happen anytime.’ She bent her head over the magazine.
Alison cleaned up and did the dishes. Wanda kept reading and Lettie did not call. Upstairs she tried her number again, but there was still no answer. She dialed Max’s number. It rang and rang, and after each ring was a dense emptiness, like the echoing silence when she rode her bike through an underpass. She listened with a chill, almost expecting that some strange hollow voice might say hello—a voice out of nowhere. But it never came. At the eighth ring she hung up and went back to her room.
She took three oranges from the bowl on her dresser and practiced juggling them, as she had done every night for months, but they kept falling from her hands. There was no point to it, unless she could show him. After she got undressed she tried again—this time would be for him. They did have a connection, and she would make him feel it. She could put power in him just as he put it in others. And it was magic, no matter what he said. As she tossed them, the words rang like an incantation in her head, Live, Max, live. To the rhythm of the blood pounding behind her eyes and the oranges smacking against her palms: Live, Max, live. No misses—a miss would be fatal. Over and over the three beats drummed through her body, while her eyes ached so hard she thought they would burst; at last, one at a time, she caught them to her chest. She dug her nails into their bumpy skins till she felt juice running down her fingertips. He would live. She had made him live.
She opened her window. The trees out back were swaying to and fro in the dark, with the wind whistling through them like icy air in a tunnel. It blew cold against her chest. March wind doth blow, Josh used to read as she sat on his lap, and we shall have snow, and what will poor Robin do then...