“How does she look?” Alice asked.
“You are so morbid.”
“What does your father say? What does she do? Does she say anything? Can you remember what your mother’s voice sounds like?”
“Her voice?”
“The last thing you forget is a person’s voice. The next-to-last thing is the sound of their footsteps. Their tread.”
“Tread? Nobody treads.”
“The next-to-the-next last thing is …”
“You are not an expert on this, Alice. No one ever died for you. I don’t mean died for you, of course, that would be preposterous. I mean died in your personal experience. You didn’t even know your mother. You’re not even entitled to discuss these matters with me, if you want to know the truth. The thing is, if my mother insists on staying here I’ll never have my own destiny. What happens to me will still be part of my mother’s destiny. That’s not natural.” Annabel stopped fluffing and stacking her sweaters and paused dramatically in thought, Alice assumed that’s what it was, then began determinedly to pick apart the memory square. “Do you want this lipstick?” she asked.
Alice shook her head.
“I don’t even think it’s Mommy’s hair in this brush. I’m remembering she used it to clean the backseat of the car. She hated the backseat and was always worrying about it, like who Daddy had given a ride to. He was always giving rides to all sorts of people, particularly in the rain. She used to spray the backseat with poison, practically. And photographs where somebody’s cut out, that looks so dumb, you know? I never realized before how stupid that looks.” Annabel dumped everything into a wicker wastebasket and placed a piece of stationery over it.
The room had its equilibrium back, its sterile calm.
“I have to find another way to grieve,” Annabel said.
“I think you’ve passed through the grieving process,” Alice said. “I think you’re in the clear.”
“Both of them are crazy, they always were.”
“Who?” Alice said cautiously. “Mommy and Daddy?”
“Mommy and Daddy, right. I have to take a nap now. Come back later, okay, much later? You can come back later.”
Alice walked a mile down to the intersection where the bus stop was. Annabel was one of those people who would say “We’ll get in touch soonest” when they never wanted to see you again. Alice expected to hear those words any day now. She didn’t know why she spent so much time at Annabel’s house. The house meant something to her, she couldn’t get enough of it. It was already like some stupid memory of a happier time, a time that she could look back on as belonging to someone who was not quite Alice yet. She had felt a beat off all summer — just an hour off her real life, a year or two, maybe a few hundred miles. She wished she could be outside, in the world, but not of it. Still, being outside was very much like being at the bus-stop intersection where the desert and its flitting birds had been transformed into four identical Jiffy Lubes, one on each corner, none seeming more popular or desirable in terms of patrons than another.
The bus bench was empty, but someone had left a portion of newspaper behind. VOLCANO BURIES 450 IN GUATEMALA, a smallish headline announced discreetly. Alongside the article was a large advertisement for a toenail fungus cure. Didn’t people at the newspaper ever think of propriety and balance? Alice irritably stuffed the newspaper into a bulging trash receptacle.
She waited. After a moment or two she realized, realized fully, that she was waiting for the bus. This seemed to her the ugliest folly. She could always use Corvus’s truck to visit Annabel, or indeed to go anywhere, but she wanted it available for Corvus. She fervently wished that her friend would want to use the truck, but she was in one of her sleep marathons, rising only to go to Green Palms. She slept lightly with her eyes open, causing Alice to suspect she wasn’t sleeping at all but traveling somewhere terrible, following narrow, colored paths to multicolored lakes, all to the sound of jungles burning, waves crashing, mountains collapsing, horrible phenomena leaping out, frightful figures, masses of light — all Bardo bluff and all awful, with the added disadvantage that Corvus was alive while she was experiencing this, not only alive but just sixteen and a half years old. To experience Bardo normally, a person was supposed to be dead. Being dead would give a person some protection from this scary stuff, even though the whole point of the Bardo state, as Alice had struggled to understand it, was that it was just as illusory as life’s little activities and memories were. Maybe Corvus was just trying to speed things up so that when she did die at a respectable age — thirty, say — she would’ve done all her Bardo time and could just slip into that thing that had no beginning and no end, which Alice couldn’t grasp at all and didn’t sound all that fabulous, either. She just wished she could keep Corvus from sleeping so much. When she got home she’d make her eat a Popsicle or something. A Popsicle at the very least.
A bus drew up to the curb, the door opened, and the driver called down, “You going to the Wildlife Museum?”
Alice shrank back. “I certainly am not!”
“It’s Appreciate the Variety of World Wildlife Day. They’re running special buses. The museum’s the only place this baby goes. If you want to go someplace else, you’ll have to wait another five minutes.”
“I’d like to blow that place up!”
The driver grinned, then took a small camera from his pocket and snapped her picture. “I’ve received over one thousand dollars by providing the police with tips just on what I overhear on my route.” He shut the door, waved, and passed through the light just as it changed from yellow to red.
To make matters worse, Alice had recognized the camera to be a disposable one.
By the time she got home, it was the news hour. Her granny and poppa had their snacks and seltzer arranged on their collapsible TV dinner tables, which had their own little rack to contain them slimly when not in use.
A large airliner had gone down in the Atlantic weeks ago, and they still hadn’t found all the bodies. The entire glee club of a small southern college had perished, among others. It just went on and on, the search for bodies. The president was addressing the anxious relatives, and someone was screaming at him, “We want our bodies!”
“They’re doing the best they can,” Alice’s poppa told the TV.
“I went to France with my glee club when I was your age, Alice,” her granny said. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“It could’ve been you on that plane,” her poppa said to her granny. “That airplane’s destination was France.”
Fury looked anxiously at the screen, his muzzle white, his eyes large. He was beginning to develop a distaste for the news. His stomach burbled, his paws hurt, he wanted to scratch and couldn’t.
Alice went into the kitchen, removed two Popsicles from the freezer, and peeled back the papers on one, then the other. Both were a thin and watery yellow, a slim bullet shape. She gave one a quick lap and couldn’t determine the flavor. Maybe the treats had been in the freezer too long along with the bagged remains of the birds Zipper had assassinated. Poppa was going to bury them when he was up to it, but he was becoming more and more preoccupied with the news, at all hours of the day. His handyman abilities were slowly atrophying. Overwhelming input and feeble output, he’d say, that’s my problem now.
He called out, “They executed another of them at the state penitentiary. Strangled an old lady with her Christmas-tree lights. Shot a young mother square in the heart and left her triplets toddling around in her blood.”
“Last words?” Alice called. Their last words were sometimes of interest.
“I think they drug them ahead of time to get some of those last words,” her granny said. “Dope up that last piece of pie.”