Alice At Heart Read online

  Sainte’s PointIsland, enclave of the Bonavendier family since Revolutionary War times, was glamorous, notorious, alluring, and haunted by gossip even stranger than murder. It was said every Bonavendier for two centuries had been born with webbed feet, swam naked, could seduce anyone at will, was beloved by dolphins, and drank like a fish. Vodka, preferably.

  Most of the rumors, if people could have believed them, were quite true.

  That night Lilith Bonavendier dreamed of lost children, again. A cold dawn breeze slid through the open French doors of her bedroom. She turned restlessly, naked, her hair streaming over her body. Oh, Griffin, that I could have saved your dear mother, at least. The silver-haired eldest of the three Bonavendier sisters sighed as the drowning, black-haired boy cried out to her and her sisters to save his parents, too. Other souls came and went in the mists behind her eyes. Lost chances, lost futures, terrible secrets. Lovers, children. Her only son. All the Bonavendiers who would never be born. Bonavendiers who floated between land and water, lost.

  Suddenly a little girl appeared in Lilith’s dreams. Like Griffin Randolph, this child was outside the realm of the womb. This mystery girl with auburn hair and haunted green eyes floated in an endless void just beyond Lilith’s reach.

  Lilith woke with a jerk and sat fully upright in a massive, canopied bed of teak wood and Asian silk. She rose and hurried toward the morning light at her open doors, throwing a turquoise robe around her slender body and stroking aside hair the color of silver filigree. It hung in wavy tangles to her knees.

  The soft blast of a small boat’s horn sent Lilith hurrying down a hallway filled with antiques and antiquities, the shells of giant sea turtles, the skulls of small whales, a Picasso portrait of her grandmother, a Van Gogh of her great-grandfather, a bust of some caesar filched from a Roman wreck. A relative of theirs, some Bonavendier ancestors had claimed.

  Lilith descended the mansion’s curving gothic staircase. Frowning and distracted, she swept past her younger sisters’ bedroom suites and then the mansion’s front parlors warm with fine lounges, exquisite works of art, well-played musical instruments, and exotic books. During her journey, several luxurious cats and a fluttering white cockatiel joined her, screeching at the chilly sub-tropical winter. Lilith padded barefoot onto a deep veranda strewn with heavy wicker, plush cushions, and several ancient Grecian urns of suspiciously authentic conformation. Her thin robe moved around her in the breeze, flickering around her high breasts, lapping at her strong thighs. She stood for a second, gathering her senses in the pink light, her webbed toes curling on a floor of smooth ballast stones her ancestors had plucked, along with gold, from a wrecked Portuguese merchant ship in the late 1700s. The lawn and massive oaks dripping moss stood before her. Below them, a pretty cove with docks and several of the island’s private motorboats and yachts.

  Be calm. It was only a dream.

  Beyond the cove, the Atlantic burst in frothy tides on the beaches at the edge of the continent. The world began and ended at Sainte’s Point. The beauty and majesty of the island curled around her like a soft cloak, but she searched its folds for hidden treasures still to be found. Several small commercial fishing boats bobbed in the water in the sheltered cove. Just the morning visitors, she thought with a sigh.

  Lilith followed a path down a terraced slope, composing her regal face by the time she arrived at a low, stone dock. The rough men and women who captained the small fleet waited with respectful postures. The steam of their breaths rose around them. They fought the chilled air in heavy sweaters and lined slickers, while Lilith stood there wearing only sheer silk, unfazed.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” each said in a languid drawl.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The grouper are running out beyond the reef, and you’ll have good luck with them until nearly noon.” She went on, detailing other prime catches and fishing sites for the day and telling them the weather would begin to warm by midweek.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” each said.

  This ritual was as old as the Bonavendier legacy on Sainte’s Point. For over two hundred years, the mainland villagers had relied on Bonavendier guidance regarding fish and fowl, weather and tides. As a result, the small town of Bellemeade was one of the most prosperous fishing burgs in coastal Georgia, and no citizen had ever been caught unawares by a hurricane.

  “Your newspapers, ma’am,” a captain said and stepped off his boat just long enough to present Lilith with a canvas bag stuffed with local, state, national, and even several international editions of newspapers. She knew she should buy a computer and gather her news from the Internet, but that would disrupt the ritual.

  “Thank you for the news of the world,” she said, as always.

  As the boats motored away, their engines fading into the slow lap of the surf on the cove’s sandy rim, Lilith sat down with the papers at a garden spot on the lawn. She spread them across a low marble table taken from an English ship in 1822. A chorus of soft whistles and clicks signaled the arrival of a dozen dolphins in the cove, their bulbous, blue-gray heads protruding just above the dark water as they spoke to her. She acknowledged their agitated greetings with a low keen of welcome.

  “Be calm,” she called out. The cockatiel settled on the tabletop, still shrieking. “Be calm, Anatole,” she said to the moody bird. “Be calm,” she said to the cats, which paced the pebbled ground around her feet. All felt her mood. Be calm, she said to herself, again.

  Lilith unwrapped the Savannah Morning News first. The front page fell open as if commanded, and she saw the day’s headlines.

  Savannah native Griffin Randolph critically injured in explosion

  Relatives rush to side of controversial treasure hunter in Spain

  Lilith pulled the paper closer, urgently seeking more information about him. As she did, her gaze fell helplessly on a color photograph tucked on the bottom half of the paper’s front page beside a smaller story.

  Suspicions taint rescue of governor’s granddaughter from icy lake

  “Impossible circumstances,” authorities say

  Lilith raised a hand to her throat. The picture, taken outside the doors of a small hospital in the mountains of northern Georgia, showed a pale, slender young woman in obvious distress. She stared out at the world with stunning green eyes beneath a scruffy cap of thick, auburn hair. Her body was swamped in pajama-like blue scrubs the hospital must have loaned her, and she clutched a white hospital blanket around her like a shield. A crowd of frowning, yelling paramedics, police officers, reporters, TV cameramen, and others seemed to be on the verge of rushing her back through the doors or attacking her. The young woman’s horrified expression and humiliated eyes leapt out at Lilith like a scream. Lilith read the story quickly.

  Alice Riley.

  Lilith rose like a silver dolphin piercing the veil between water and air. She threw her arms wide to the pink and magenta glow on the horizon. She had not sung in more than thirty years. The music, the flow, the vibration, had been lost in tragedy and regret, though she’d tried in vain to recall it so many times. Now, suddenly, welling in Lilith’s soul, stunning her, came a vibrato symphony. She caressed the world with waves of emotion, as much a beacon as the lighthouse that could be glimpsed above the pines far down at the island’s southern tip. Tears slid from her green eyes.

  There is hope for this family, this place, our kind.

  Inside the mansion, her sister, Mara, sat up in her bed. Mara put her hands to her throat. “No, no, no,” she whispered to herself. “Whatever it is, let’s leave well enough alone. We’re safer that way.”

  In another suite of the huge house, Pearl Bonavendier turned to her lover, Barret, and began to cry with joy. “Lilith is singing again.” She and the aging German held each other tightly.

  “It’s a miracle,” he said.

  Up and down the southern coast, in clapboard farmhouses and antebellum mansions, in shabby trailer camps and suburban bungalows, sleeping mothers nuzzled their babies like dol
phins, and women making love turned their faces from their men, yearning for the ocean. Out on that ocean, fishermen smiled in their bunks on huge tankers and factory ships, or paused at their nets on family shrimp boats that had worked the cold winter night, or turned from their fishing reels and first mugs of hot coffee on deep-sea yachts. All stiffened with arousal, warm and puzzled, trying to hear what they couldn’t fathom, mysteries that ultimately made them both eager and a little afraid. There was so much about the deep waters of the world that remained unknowable, yet always, always, irresistible.

  On the operating table of a Spanish hospital, Griffin gave a deep sigh in response. The surgeon said in Spanish, “Holy Mother, I can’t believe it, but I think he’s going to live.”

  High in the mountains of Riley, Georgia, Alice woke in the icy lake where she’d taken refuge during the night, and her misery became a slow keen of confused wonder. She’d never heard anything so mysterious and so beautiful. For a moment she no longer felt alone.

  Lilith ran up the path to the seaswept mansion, calling for her sisters. She and they had lost their souls, their passions, their family’s future, years before. Now, Griffin and the long lost Alice would bring it all back.

  Lilith sang.

  3

  The Nagas of India were matriarchal tribes named for the mythological serpent children of the Goddess Kadru. They were said to host fantastic undersea mansions and keep mystic books of wisdom, and in return, the goddess granted them long lives. What a beautiful story. All true.

  —Lilith

  The little girl I rescued from the lake is our governor’s granddaughter. I saved the governor’s granddaughter. The governor of the entire state of Georgia, I think to myself, as if there were any other state. He commands that world from the mountains to the sea, all the small towns with their Confederate memorials and barbecue festivals, the pragmatic little cities ringing themselves with identical shopping malls and stucco townhouses on tiny lots, and the stewing megatropolis that is Atlanta. In my intemperate and worried mind, he is suddenly elevated to royalty, the king of a kingdom, also ruling our major league sports teams, our Olympic legacy, our mythical Tara, and me.

  His son, the prince, is a well-to-do young lawyer, and the son’s wife is a lawyer, as well, with a long corporate pedigree attached to her name. Not the type to welcome strange mountain women into their circles or to admit any carelessness. They had lost track of their little girl while setting up camp for a hike up Riley’s high ridges and granite over looks, that border the national forest. She had wandered to a picnic area near LakeRiley’s massive concrete dam and mistaken the frail ice around a dock for a skating rink.

  She smiled at me tearfully from a gurney on our way into the emergency room at the county clinic before being whisked away by helicopter down to Atlanta. I doubt I’ll ever see her again. I am officially under suspicion for having faked my heroics, though no one can say quite why.

  I know why. It is simply for being whatever I am.

  “You watched her until she fell in, didn’t you?” an investigator asks me. “You knew whose granddaughter she was. It’s been in the local paper—that the governor’s family was up here, hiking. You knew if she fell in you could get publicity for finding her. And a reward.”

  “I didn’t mean any harm,” I keep repeating, which probably does not sound innocent, now that I think about it. “I was only out for a swim, and I heard her scream.”

  How did you hear her scream from your end of the lake, Ms. Riley? That’s a mile away. How did you get there in just a few minutes? Nobody swims that fast. Your relatives say you’re frail. You have allergies. You’re sickly. You can’t swim like that. No one can swim like that, Ms. Riley. An Olympic gold medallist couldn’t swim that fast. How did you know where to look for the little girl at the bottom of the dam? How did you find her down there? Why were you swimming naked in weather cold enough to make ice on the water? Why didn’t you feel the cold? When you got to the dam, how did you dive under for so long the fire department had time to drive way out to the lake and put on their scuba gear before you surfaced with the little girl? That was over fifteen minutes, Ms. Riley. That’s not humanly possible. Not possible. Not damned possible.

  Tell us, Ms. Riley. How did you do something no one can do?

  Tell us, Ms. Riley. How did you pull off this hoax. And why?

  “It’s not a hoax, or a scam, or a scheme,” I tell them. “It’s just what I can do.” They only stare at me in disgust. After some discussions outside my earshot, they decide to let me go about my business for now, but I’m terrified. I know what can happen when people want to convince themselves there’s nothing to fear from someone strange.

  Freak. Weirdo. Let’s see if crazy Alice really has tits. A half-dozen of Riley High School’s most popular boys held me down one September day when I was fourteen years old while several girls watched, laughing. I was a pale pencil of a teenager with huge green eyes, dark rust-brown hair, and a mouth so pink in contrast to my complexion that I sometimes smeared white corrector fluid on my lips to dull the effect. I hid behind oversized clothes and speechless passivity, though that rarely prevented trouble. People were afraid of me. I saw it in their eyes, and I began to realize that only by acts of bullying cruelty could they prove I couldn’t harm them. That year, I had returned from summer vacation with some semblance of a bosom growing on my stick-thin body. My classmates dragged me into the woods behind Riley High and pried my plaid blouse open to see if I had developed breasts like a normal girl. Then they tore my loafers off and looked at my webbed feet for proof I hadn’t really changed. Finally, they poured a tepid bottle of cola down my throat and watched in curious disgust while I vomited and broke out in large, seeping hives. My allergies were as peculiar as the rest of me.

  After they left me that autumn day, I hid in a grove of laurel shrubs and sobbed while vomit dried on my disheveled clothes. When my legs stopped shaking, I raced through the deep firs and hardwoods of the forest outside town to my beloved, isolated lake. I stripped, dived in, and tried to drown myself—intending to, meaning to, spiraling down nearly one-hundred feet to the bottom of the lake’s dam, where I curled up in the pitch-black darkness inside the rusted cab of a junked car.

  A long time later, when I realized I simply wouldn’t die, I floated wearily to the surface. My skin had turned the lovely color of a pale blue Easter egg, I had a ravenous craving for pure, creamy butter, and my cheap wristwatch had stopped from water damage.

  I stared at it. I had been under for nearly an hour.

  That was the first time I realized just how fully different I was. Every human physiology book I’d read said my abilities simply were not possible. And none of the great religions explained the meaning of my unnatural existence, although some hinted darkly that I might be the spawn of dark forces. My Great Aunt Judith, who never married and was treated as a servant by the other Rileys, raised me like a wild yard cat she was forced to feed. Even as a tiny child, I learned to creep unnoticed through her stern brick split-level in town, peeking out her polyester drapes at a dull lawn she paid a neighbor boy to mow like a bad crewcut.

  Marooned on that loveless island, I escaped by reading every novel in the Riley Municipal Library, losing myself in the melodrama of operas and symphonies, and scribbling disjointed poetry.

  Water. Smooth. Life. Flow.

  How do I find it?

  How will I know?

  Whenever possible, I ate only oily canned tuna, sticks of butter, and soda crackers dipped in bacon grease. Otherwise, I became dreadfully ill. Great Aunt Judith seemed to think I was infecting myself, a natural wick, soaking up germs. She cited that bizarre rationale when she sprayed disinfectant throughout the house and shaved my auburn hair every week, so that it remained only about an inch long. My nickname throughout elementary and high school was bleakly funny but excruciating. Eraser Head. I don’t blame Great Aunt Judith for shearing me like the lawn, and I’ve kept up the practice ever since. Otherwise my h
air will grow in a tangle of curls and waves—an astonishing ten inches a month, on average. It is as wild as kudzu vine on a southern roadside, and like everything else about me, there’s no rational explanation. Great Aunt Judith knew that. She prayed often for her deliverance from life’s shocking mysteries. I, in turn, prayed for mine.

  When she died, she left me her house as if in apology. I sold it and bought my little cabin in the woods beside the lake. In the years since then, I’ve filled the tiny place with good books and art posters I buy at a flea-market frame shop over in Hightower, the county seat. My furniture consists of odd pieces I’ve purchased at yard sales and refinished in soft white shades, the colors of sand and sun-bleached shells. I’ve painted the cabin’s walls blue-black and the ceilings pearl gray, the way the sunlit surface of the lake looks from underneath. I pretend I live inside a vast, beautiful sea.

  A few years ago, I saved enough money from my job at the Riley Pet Shoppe (where I specialize in fish) to purchase a computer, which I adore. I correspond with oceanographers, marine biologists, retired naval officers, and other folk who love the world’s great bodies of water. I keep my refrigerator filled with butter and canned seafood, I clip my hair with a thick electric razor, and I keep my thoughts to myself.

  I admit that mine is not the communal life of family and friends any human being craves. That is why I know I’m human, at least at heart. Because I do crave love and friendship, and I am so lonely.

  Reporters have already begun asking about the fact that my pretty, teenaged mother, Joan Riley, drowned herself in LakeRiley. I was only two days old when my mother walked into the water, thirty-four years ago. The Rileys say my father was an evil stranger who never looked back once he ruined her good-girl life. Mother obviously agreed since she killed herself rather than raise me. There’s no rational reason why I swim in the lake that took her, except I can’t resist a body of water.