It was no use, however.
He didn’t even look like Holden under the bright studio lights. He looked like Bernie, he talked like Bernie, and finally he said things that Bernie would say. She had turned him away, but he still said them.I met the love of my life, he said, while she did her best to contain the wave of feeling rising inside her. She put a fist to her mouth, as though she could squeeze the tears back.
But they came anyway. They pushed against the press of her hand and forced their way past her tightly closed eyelids. She told herself they were stupid, that he didn’t mean her, that this was all a mistake. Yet still they came. They made rivers down her face and forced her chest to hitch in this terrible, grief-stricken way.
And there was nothing she could do to stop it.
He was still saying things. Each sentence was steadily worse than the last, until finally the interviewer asked him,So when are we going to meet this ladyand he replied with the worst possible thing he could have. Worse than,Oh I’m taking a camera crew to her tomorrow! Worse than,Her name is Enid Kazinski. Worse than anything she could have thought of had she lived to be a thousand.
“No, that can’t happen. She doesn’t want anything to do with this kind of thing, you know? I think this kind of thing would hurt her. I think I hurt her, just being who I am. Wanting more from her, thinking she could just accept stuff like this. Hell, I can barely accept stuff like this. I don’t know why...I don’t know why I ever thought it would be easy for her. And I’m sorry for that,” he said.
All of which was insane enough on its own. The interviewer glanced at the camera, as though to ask some unseen presence if this was okay. If this was normal, she thought, because it most certainly wasn’t. During his last interview she’d seen him use the wordfunthree times in one sentence. He usually had the bored look of a factory worker who does nothing but repeat the same task over and over again.
But he didn’t have it here. He wasn’t saying the right things here.
Or at least, he wasn’t saying the things authorized by his publicist.
Everyone could tell he wasn’t, and that was before he looked at the camera.He looked right at the camera, as though he’d decided to address America. Only it wasn’t America, of course it wasn’t America, he was addressingherlive on television. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and just in case she was in any doubt, he said her name at the end.
He said her good name, her real name, the name she wanted to have.
“Alice,” he said.
He really did mean her. All of this was about her. How could she hold everything in when it was about her? It was like hearing someone call her name from beyond the wreckage as she stumbled around wondering if anyone out there could possibly be alive. It was like finding another survivor.
All these years, all these and she’d found another survivor. It was enough to make her stand, though she didn’t know where she was going to go. And she said things aloud, though she didn’t know who she was saying them to. She only knew it felt good to do both, to get up and answer him, despite the fact that he wasn’t there.
You didn’t hurt me. You haven’t hurt me.
Wait there, okay? I’m coming to tell you that you haven’t hurt me.
Of course she didn’t knowhowshe was going to come and tell him that he hadn’t hurt her. But once the idea was out there, once it had hold of her, she didn’t want to let it go. She clutched it tight to her as she pulled on clothes that would look passable to outside people, and did normal things like brush her hair.
You had to brush your hair if you were going outside.
And she was going outside. She was she was she was. There could be no arguments about it. No hesitations or deliberations. She had a vehicle that she hadn’t used in two years—but it was serviced and gassed and she would drive it. And she knew where she could find him; he had left his address for her the first time he’d left.
It wasn’t far at all, from her house to his.
But by God itwasfar from her house to the car. That was the real problem. Somewhere in the last two years, someone had put an entire continent between her front porch and the driveway at the side of the house. More than a continent, in truth. It looked like a whole alien world when she dared to peek out the door, all mottled and jumbled and just about covered with obstacles.
Were those steps leading down from the porch? They looked like jagged teeth. She couldn’t imagine putting her feet down onto them—not even after she’d taken three deep breaths and burned his words right over the part inside her that saidno.I hurt her, she thought, but it was to no avail. She could not go down those steps. They were too sharp, too apt to hurt her, too in the open. They stretched beyond the overhang of her house and right into all the air that was out here.Oh God, there was so muchair.
There was so muchsky. She could see it just beyond the terrible steps, hanging there like a big empty threat.Come near me and I’ll suck you right off the ground, that sky seemed to say. And she could see it too. She could see her feet leaving the ground as gravity suddenly stopped being her friend. She could see herself clinging on to the porch railing, body lifting in one long bow toward that endless nothing, arms straining uselessly to hang on.
She would never be able to hang on.
She hadn’t been able to hang on before. She’d tried, but it hadn’t worked. Her mother had still spiraled off into that hated blue, no matter how tightly she’d held her hand. She just wasn’t strong enough, that was the thing. She had never been strong enough—not just in muscle, but in will. That was why when she closed her eyes she saw her family streaming away from her like paper people.
And it was why she couldn’t do this.
She had no idea how she got to the steps. It must have been an illusion—yes, yes, it had to be an illusion. She wasn’t really doing this at all. She had not grabbed the handrail like a goddamn life preserver, and was not currently crawling down each step in the most painstaking way possible. If she accepted for even one second that she was, she wouldn’t be able to carry on doing this.
But she did.
She made it to step two and step three, just by hanging on as hard as she could. By closing her eyes and sweating and thinking of other things—like movie marathons and ridiculous meals and the words he’d sent her. Anything but how terrible this was, or how she would look should anyone chance by. They would probably think she was mad, even though she didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel as if she were doing this as a small and rather awkward child probably would.
She felt as if she were clawing her way out of a goddamn abyss. Someone had knocked her into it then counted her out.She’ll die down there, they had thought. No one could escape the pit. There were ravenous mutant zombies milling around at the bottom, and everything was all in utter darkness, and the walls were not just steep. They were mud-covered and miles long, and in order to scale them you had to jam your fists through three inches of whatever impossible metal they were made out of.
