The Rope Walk by Carrie Brown Read Free Book Online

he was beside her and then past her, leaping to crest the wall and sail over it, his legs flying. His striped T-shirt blazed in the sunlight.
    She hesitated for a moment, glancing behind her. She saw Archie, still with his hands on Kenneth Fitzgerald's wheelchair, look up at Theo's shout. He said something, and Kenneth Fitzgerald moved his head to look in her direction. He didn't look at her, exactly; his head moved like a periscope, as if an invisible eye were guiding him in her direction. Perhaps his nose was sniffing her out as she stood on the wall in her starched party dress, her feet in their patent leather shoes slipping on the stones.
    Archie began to raise his hand; he meant to call her back, Alice thought.
    And so before he could issue the command, before she could be accused of disobedience, Alice jumped.

FOUR
    A SPRING THUNDERSTORM ENDED the party prematurely. The last guests ran for their cars or were supplied with umbrellas from the hall closet and drove away up the lane to the West Road. Alice sat at the kitchen table and watched Elizabeth bustle around, putting away the last few dishes, wrapping the leftover sandwiches in plastic and setting them in the fridge. Finally, Elizabeth was finished. She went to the bathroom to change her shirt and came back, tying a plastic rain bonnet under her chin.
“Birthday
present, under your pillow,” she said in a teasing, singsong voice. “From me. Don't forget to look.” She bent to kiss Alice. Elizabeth always gave Alice money for her birthday, crisp one-dollar bills in amounts equal to whatever age she had reached.
    “I won't forget,” Alice said. “Thank you, Elizabeth.” She put her arms around Elizabeth's neck. Sometimes she wished Elizabeth didn't go home on the weekends, but Archie had said that they must never ask more of Elizabeth than she wanted to give them; she did so much for them all as it was.
    Alice went to the window and watched the taillights of Elizabeth's station wagon disappear up the driveway in the darkness of the rain. Then she sat back down at the kitchen table. In the hall,the grandfather clock struck four p.m., the exact hour when Alice had been delivered into the world. Alice held her breath; now she was truly ten. The moment slid past slowly, chime after chime. The clock's voice rasped, its old gears struggling free for each stroke. When the clock fell silent, Alice stayed in her seat, but she did not feel any different than she had a moment before.
    After the noise of the party, the house was quiet and lonely feeling; the rain fell with a sighing hush that was like the ocean Alice heard inside the goliath conch kept on the top shelf of the cabinet in the dining room. When Alice was younger, Archie would bring down the shell collection for her to play with under the dining room table. Alice had loved the shells, each like a miniature world with its glistening interior and elaborately carved and crenellated surfaces, its mysterious, sad smell of salt, the faint reminder of its old life in the sea. Lying with her elbows propped open before the
Golden Guide to Seashelh of the World
, Alice had learned the names of all the shells: Miracle shells, Babylon Turrids, the Noble cones, tiny Rose murex, cowries with their grinning mouths, Venus clams and cockles and whelks. Words in any arrangement—lists, names, snatches of verse— came easily to Alice, first pronunciation, for which she had an instinctive gift, and then sense; when she was only five or six Archie had enjoyed getting her to memorize, which she appeared to do effortlessly, and then recite lengthy bits of doggerel or silly Ezra Pound or Shakespeare's sonnets:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love's not love which alters when it alteration finds
. She had not been allowed to lift down the shells herself, and now she didn't ask for them anymore, but when she was younger she had spent hours under the table playing with them.
    Now someone put on music in