We go to our bedrooms. She gets ready for bed. I get ready for bed. I change in the bathroom with the door open. I take my time, though I fear it is futile.
Alice comes now to lock the grate. I don’t resist. But then she changes her mind.
“Can I sleep with you tonight?” she asks.
Of course you can, sweetheart.
We close the grate but do not lock it. The key remains in the hole.
“What about your tea?” she asks. Nothing gets past her.
Alice snuggles up beside me.
“I would rather sleep now,” I whisper.
The heat from her body, her breath, her heart beating—none of it bothers me tonight. None of it pulls from my gut the feeling of my lost child, my precious, precocious Annie. None of it stirs the longing, or the guilt, or the redemption that has begun to appear.
Tonight, Alice and I are one. I absorb her into me while I lay awake, making assessments. Contemplating my instincts.
The grate is still open, and with it, my options.
It is a different kind of prison now that I know Dolly is watching me. Before I knew about Dolly I felt the freedom to release my face. To have my own Angry Face or Coy Face or Sad Face. There was freedom to pound my fists into the pillows, to cry, to hold myself and rock myself to a place of calm, like a mother holding her child.
That freedom is now gone, and the open grate does nothing to mitigate this other type of insidious confinement. I have done things in the line of the camera that should be the cause of humiliation. He has seen me naked, changing into the clothes that he slides through the panel. He has seen me naked and unaware and still, this has not kept him here with us. He still longs for more. I think about my old friends and our battle to hold on to youth. But being a size four can’t make you twenty-five. Age is about maturity and knowledge and it seeps out in the way we move and carry ourselves. Here is the proof. I have skinny legs and blond hair and this man has seen all of me. Still, he longs for something more. Something he lost. And knowing this has caused me to reassess. I decide to move on and think about my instincts. Make a new plan.
Alice is also slow to drift off and she rambles now. I want to make all kinds of faces but I hold my expression steady. Pleasant. For Dolly to see.
Alice talks about her first mommy, so I chase away my thoughts to concentrate on hers. I wonder if she is beginning to feel things for me that she felt for her. It’s been too long since she’s had anyone to have these feelings for.
“She smelled good,” Alice says, pressing her nose into the nape of my neck, insinuating that I do not smell good. Maybe I do smell bad to her by comparison, but I am stuck with the cheap body wash that Mick slid through the panel.
“She used to sing to me,” Alice says now. Her voice is soft, dreamlike. I decide not to sing to her because that might upsether, although I used to sing to my babies when they still slept in my arms. I could see my voice reach deep inside them, settle their nerves. Mine was the voice they heard as I carried them inside me. It is primal, the way the body reacts to the voice of the mother.
I think that maybe I will sing to myself one day so she can overhear it, and that maybe she will come to me and ask me to sing.Yes, I think. I will lure her into asking me to sing to her like her first mommy. Maybe I can get close enough. Maybe it will reach her, even just a little.
There are other things she says, and I make a note of all of them.
But my thoughts keep drifting back to the antifreeze under the sink in my bathroom, poured into the teacup which I carried back to my room.
Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, which breaks down in the body by forming sharp crystals. Those crystals shred human tissue, especially the kidneys. I taught some of this to my students when I introduced basic chemistry. Of course, I did not share the rest of it.
How death does not always occur. But severe illness does. Incapacitating illness. The kind that makes it impossible to move, or run. The kind that would allow someone to lock you in a room behind metal bars and then drive away.
It has a sweet taste.
Sweet, like sugar.
Sweet, like Alice. I must believe this. I must hold her close.
And then this sweet girl tells me, in a sleepy voice, “Do you know that it’s selfish to have children?”
I am very quiet now as I whisper, “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she says, “you had children so you could have someone to love. So you could have football games to watch every other Thursday.”
I am still. Perfectly still as I always am in these moments when Alice reveals something new to me. I fear if I move she will stop talking. But she stops anyway.
“I do love watching my son’s football games. Do you know where I go to see them?”
