Alice At Heart by Deborah Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

small creatures, beloved by them, trusted. I sang to them every day. They listened.
    Silence enveloped me except for the bubbling of the aquariums and the soft callings of my small allies. I waited in that quiet, artificial jungle, jerking my gloves off and dropping them on the floor, tearing my scarf away and losing it somewhere on a shelf, my boyish hair rumpled like an auburn scrub brush, my skin gleaming with sweat, fear, and awe. The sound of my breathing made a low roar in my ears.
    Click . The shop’s back door opened, followed by the softest padding of footsteps beyond the doorway to a storeroom. “Alice,” the silver-haired one called quietly from the storeroom. “Shall we enter?”
    It was a little late for niceties, now that she’d been inside my head. I backed into an alcove fitted with floor-to-ceiling fish tanks—a dark, safe cave, I’d always thought, surrounded by bubbling water and friendly, swimming creatures. “I’m here,” I said in a voice that shook. “With the fish.”
    The three women entered the shop’s main room with the gossamer grace of leaves floating on a stream. I straightened, clenched my hands by my side, and stared at them from my dim corner. They gazed back, the dark-haired one looking impatient, the redhead very kind and earnest, Silver Hair frowning at me with wistful eyes.
    “Yes, I’m pathetic,” I confirmed quietly, and Dark Hair grimaced.
    Silver Hair stepped in front of the other two like the queen of a small delegation. “No, you are simply—” she paused, searching for the right words—”simply unaware of your true nature.”
    “And who are you, may I ask?”
    “My name,” she said, “is Lilith Bonavendier.” She nodded toward the dark-haired woman. “This is my younger sister, Mara.” And in the other direction, toward the redhead. “And this is my second younger sister, Pearl.” She paused. I suddenly noticed that the fish, the mice, the hamsters, the snakes, the lizards, and the birds now faced her way. None of them moved or made so much as a peep. “And you,” Lilith Bonavendier went on, looking straight at me, “are our youngest sister.”
    “Only our half-sister,” Mara corrected, then blanched when Lilith gave her a hard look.
    I took a step back, pressing myself against a wall of aquariums. Like all the other small creatures, I gazed at the three women in hypnotized wonder. “What kind of game is this?” I whispered.
    “Oh, Alice. Sisterhood is never a game.” Pulling something from a tiny silk purse bound to the waist of her exquisite pale suit, Lilith moved toward me slowly, as if I might bolt, which I might. She laid the offering on the top of short display shelf. “A photograph,” she said, “of your mother with our father.”
    She stepped back.
    I picked up the old snapshot. My hand shook. I gazed at my teenage mother, smiling on a sun-drenched Georgia beach beside a handsome, white-haired man. Both were dressed in swimsuits, her looking like a wholesome girl next door on the cover of a Beach Boys album, him looking fit and suave and incredibly desirable. And, quite possibly, fifty years her senior.
    “This man,” I said, “could be my grandfather.”
    “I assure you, he is not. Father was not an ordinary man. He was, after all, a Bonavendier.”
    Mara added tightly, “Tell her exactly, Lilith. We Bonavendiers don’t look our age. Father was eight five when he died that summer.”
    “But he didn’t look a day over fifty,” Pearl amended.
    I laid the photograph down. “And if I may ask, how old are you-all?”
    “How rude,” Mara said instantly.
    “I am seventy and quite pleased to be so,” Lilith countered, nodding to indicate her own lithe form. She lifted a hand toward Mara, who yipped in dismay. “Sixty-five.” And Pearl, who laughed. “Sixty-two.”
    I stared at them. Mara and Pearl couldn’t possibly be much older than I, and Lilith had the skin of a beautiful forty-year-old, despite the silver hair.