Alice At Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

gently.
    “We’re going to get Alice,” Lilith said firmly. “And then we’re going to sing Griffin home, too.”

4

    In our version of Noah’s Ark, the world was destroyed by a great drought.
    —Lilith
    After a week of public humiliation and private interrogations, the governor and his minions still can’t decide what to do about me, so they’ve decided to give me an award for heroism. It is ludicrous, infuriating, insulting. I have politely declined the ceremony.
    “You will go, Alice, and you will accept,” my mother’s eldest sister orders. “Or the people in this town will drive you out like a sick bird in their house. And I’ll be at the head of the crowd.”
    She’s told me all my life that I’m a burden, that servitude and gratitude are my only hope of paying back the misery I represent. She has pointed out time and again that my mother won the Miss Riley County Pageant the year before I was born. That she had a scholarship to a state university and had planned to become a teacher. That the son of our Baptist minister was in love with her and they had planned to announce their engagement when she turned eighteen. That she had gone to the coast that summer to work as a counselor at a church camp. And that there, under the sultry sun of the beaches and coves and magnolia-scented ocean, some perverted stranger had ruined her and all she would have been.
    I have no doubt my mother was beautiful and beloved and chaste and foolish, and that the family’s adoring memories of her makes her downfall and suicide too painful to forgive. They don’t have anyone else to blame, so they blame me. “Go to the damned ceremony, Alice,” her eldest sister says now. “Or else.”
    Where would I live if I’m driven out of Riley? Where would anyone else give me a job? My name’s been in all the state newspapers and on television and even on an Internet website about odd news of the world. I look at myself and see a notorious outcast. Since I don’t know who or what I am, I have no idea how I could go someplace new and start over as someone else.
    So, tomorrow I will accept my award .
    That’s what they call it, anyway.
    “Please slow the car down, Barret . These unnatural heights make me dizzy,” Pearl announced.
    Barret filled the car’s driver seat next to her like an aging, Teutonic wrestler, though dressed in the finest of dark suits. “Yes, my darling,” he answered, embroidering the affection with a thick German accent. She gently patted his shoulder in thanks.
    The Bonavendiers’ classic silver Mercedes lumbered toward a bridge high over a mountain creek bed strewn with boulders and lush green rhododendron. Ice glinted on the boulders in the cold winter sunshine.
    Lilith tilted her head near a backseat window and stared down into the creek gorge grimly. What an unfriendly part of the world this was, where water was reduced to sneaking between huge hummocks of land like a tiny, living vein in a dull stone. She spread a hand over the opalescent gray weave of her dress suit. She, too, felt breathless.
    “Oh, I’m dizzy, yes, I am. I’m going to be ill from these heights,” Pearl moaned again.
    “You can’t possibly feel air sick,” Mara snapped. Seated beside Lilith in the Mercedes’ backseat, Mara faced straightforward, nonetheless, as she twirled one long end of a sheer, emerald-green shawl over her soft white suit. “These are not the Alps or the Rockies. People can’t even ski here; there isn’t enough snow. It’s just all ordinary and rude and low .” Her blush-pink mouth flattened. She, too, avoided glancing at the deep mountain ravine beneath their car. “You see?” she went on. “I’m not air sick. Lilith’s not airsick. And our new mystery ‘sister’ doesn’t get air sick, obviously, since she’s lived all these years up here in these godforsaken termite mounds. I say Alice Riley is nothing but a typical, senseless land-lover.”
    Pearl coughed. “Breathing is not about