Alice At Heart Read Online Free PDF

four years old, broken, bleeding, sobbing, with the ocean pouring down his throat. He was more than seventy feet below the surface of the Atlantic.
    Mother . Father. He struggled to point his broken arms toward the bottom. Go get them, too .
    Hush, child, the water has fallen in love with them. They can’t come back .
    The sisters’ voices vibrated inside him, their music fearless in the vast, deadly deep, their souls at home in an ocean world where he would never feel safe again.
    You hate my parents; you killed them , he cried.
    Rest, child. Rest.
    “Whatever you’re dreaming about, stop moving, or I’ll get the nurse to pop you with some more painkillers,” demanded a familiar voice, deep, kind, Southern, and elegant, hoarse from decades of whisky, cigars, and the wrong women. Griffin woke in a groggy daze, tied down by tubes and wires. He looked up at a rugged older man in rumpled khakis and an old flannel shirt. A tiny gold crucifix gleamed in one of his ears. His silver hair was disheveled as always, framing a cynical face tanned brown by the ocean sun.
    Charles Anthony Randolph, known as C.A., first cousin to Griffin’s father, Porter, gently wiped Griffin’s sweating face. “Whatever the hell you’re dreaming about, stop it.”
    “Trying, but I can’t,” Griffin mumbled, floating in a dream world where the Bonavendier sisters and a phantom named Alice sometimes gazed at him with amazing green eyes. Alice in Wonderland. “Tired of looking though the looking glass to find nothing. Nothing. Where’s Alice?”
    C.A. grunted gently at his drugged musings. “You’re not making any sense. If I take you back to Savannah babbling like this, well, hell, the family will think you’re as crazy as me.” C.A. laughed ruefully. As a young man, everyone had expected him to become Porter Randolph’s right hand at Randolph Shipping. But then Porter had drowned off Sainte’s Point and C.A. had gone off some deep end of his own.
    “Randolphs aren’t mean-spirited,” he told Griffin. “They’re just stuck in their own damned belief system, full of rules and order, proper etiquette and sensible duty, not maudlin sentiment. I’m not going to tell any of them the details of this little event of yours. Because you know it’s a miracle you survived.”
    “No . . . miracles in the water. Except Alice.”
    “Look, mister, I don’t know who the hell this Alice is—some lady-friend you left behind or not—but God bless her if the memory kept you fighting. You were under water for over ten minutes before your crew was able to find you. The doctors don’t understand why you don’t have brain damage. They don’t understand why you’re not crippled. Hell, there’re nuns in the hospital chapel who cross themselves every time your name is mentioned. A religious man would say you’ve gotten a second chance. Time to change your life, hmmm? Toe the straight and narrow? Come in from the sea and settle down? You don’t want to end up like your ol’ cousin C.A, do you? A salty drunk with strange ideas.” C.A. dabbed a cool washcloth on Griffin’s head, his touch gentler than his voice. “I don’t recommend it. “
    “I think . . . ” Griffin murmured, “I can breathe underwater.”
    “Okay, we settled one question,” C.A. said with great patience. “So you’re already crazy. I won’t tell anybody, I promise. But that’s no reason for you not to thank God and haul your ass back into the family fold. Just use me as a bad example. You can change.”
    Change into what ? Griffin thought and tried to remember what he might have been when the water loved him like blue sky.
    “We’ve forgotten to take chances, to love passionately, to be different,” Lilith said. “We’ve created a fantasy, here, on this island. But we are real, Sisters.”
    “The world comes to us,” Mara said, scowling. “We haven’t been lonely. We have our kind. That’s all we need.”
    “Liar,” Pearl said