Alice Isn’t Dead

“There we go,” she whispered, and she patted his hand. “There we go, man.” Sylvia and Keisha went out back, where he had pointed. They looked down into the embankment lined with trees and Keisha spotted a side mirror sticking out of the leaves.

There was no blood, no body. But the windows of Officer Campbell’s cruiser had been broken, all of them, systematically, and every seat had been slashed over and over. Not a trace of Officer Campbell. Keisha suspected that there would never again be a trace of Officer Campbell.

Sylvia groaned, an animal sound of despair, and she collapsed onto the hood of the car, a car that had belonged to the man who she thought would save her, a man who, as is often the case, couldn’t even save himself.

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The cruiser had nothing useful left. No notes or documents. The computer destroyed. No sign of what he had been planning to tell or show Sylvia. Keisha searched quickly because she felt that it wouldn’t be safe for them to be in this town much longer. She finished up, slammed the door, wiping with her shirt any surface she might have touched.

“Ok,” Sylvia said, her face hard, already on to the next plan. “He was based out of a precinct in Savannah. We’ll go there, see if he left anything that could tell me what he wanted me to know.”

“I’m not helping you break into a police station, Sylvia. You’ve dragged me far out of my way, but you’re not landing me in jail. I have my own search to get back to.”

“Alright, take me to Savannah, drop me off. I’ll be fine on my own. Been fine on my own for a while.”

“I can’t just—” Keisha started but Sylvia waved it off.

“Of course you can. You already want to. I’m giving you permission. Take me to Savannah, leave me near that police station, drive away. You don’t ever have to hear about this again.”

“Ok. Yeah. Ok. I’ll take you to Savannah.”

“Thank you.”

Sylvia didn’t sound annoyed or angry at the possibility of being alone again. She sounded relieved. As they drove out of town, she asked: “What is it you’re looking for anyway? What did you lose to end up circling these roads like me?”

“Ha.” Keisha did not laugh, but said the word to indicate the possibility of laughter. And then she did her best to tell the story, as far as she understood it.

A year and a half before, Keisha had seen her dead wife on the news. After that first sighting, Keisha decided she couldn’t afford to miss a minute. Multiple channels of twenty-four-hour news, and she did her best to cover them all, fast-forwarding, rewinding, searching for proof that she had seen what she had seen.

A fire outside of Tacoma. A landslide in Thousand Oaks. A hostage situation in St. Joseph. Earnest folks speaking earnestly, describing only the bad parts of the world. And among the concerned faces that the news cameras used as a backdrop, Alice. A fleeting face, sometimes, other times a long, head-on stare. Alice over and over. Keisha scrawled down in a notebook in which the first fifteen pages had been grocery lists, a list of every place Alice appeared, and that list became a map of America.

Keisha stopped going to groups. She stopped sitting in circles, stopped describing the shape of the monster that was devouring her, because now she knew that she didn’t understand even the most basic shape of it. The counselors from the groups and some fellow grievers who weren’t quite friends but weren’t quite not friends called her for a few weeks, checking in, but after she assured them over and over that she was fine, they gave up and let her be, and then it was her alone in the house with the question that her life had become.

She quit her job, such as it had been. Ever since what she had believed to be a death, she had been taking a leave, anyway. She went through Alice’s things. Her work stuff, her laptop, letters hidden under piles of clothes. Was that an invasion of privacy? Keisha wasn’t sure. It’s not an invasion of privacy to go through a dead wife’s records. That’s being organized. But Alice wasn’t dead. So did she deserve privacy?

Keisha didn’t care. Alice had made herself a mystery, and now everything she left was a clue. She was a missing persons case and everything she had ever touched was evidence, right down to Keisha’s hands, her skin. The abandoned wife, exhibit A.

Again and again, in the papers and computer files. Phrases Keisha didn’t understand. Praxis. Vector H. References to a war, to “missions.” And more than any other, to Bay and Creek Shipping. Over and over Alice had written about Bay and Creek Shipping.

Keisha had called about a job with Bay and Creek the next day.

“Shit,” said Sylvia.

“Yeah,” said Keisha. Neither of them said anything else for a while.

On the way through Georgia, they passed a house by the highway with a pile of trash burning on its front lawn, big orange flames, thick plume of smoke. A man standing there watching it burn. Sylvia only saw it for a moment, and only in the corner of her eye, and that slice of time was stuck in her head that way forever. The man never moving. The fire never consuming. Keisha never saw him. That moment of time didn’t exist for her at all.

Even after a couple days, Sylvia smelled as strong as ever. Something natural, but not. Organic, but aggressively so.

“What’s that smell?” Keisha asked.

“I was wondering how long you’d be polite. It’s heather oil.”

“Why are you drenched in heather oil?”

“Yeah, I dunno,” Sylvia said. “I’ve heard the Hungry Man, he doesn’t like it. Wards him off. Probably bullshit but …” She shrugged.

“You heard that? Where did you hear it from?”

“You think we’re the only lives he’s touched? You think you’re the only one he’s talked to? Word gets around. I’ve been wandering this country for almost a year now. Others have seen him. I’ve met them. Most were too scared to be as helpful as you.”

Sylvia smiled at her and Keisha managed back a grimace that was a distant cousin of a smile.

“Bad news. I’m real scared too. Kind of all the time. Used to go to therapy and shit.”

“Ain’t important if you’re scared,” Sylvia said. “You’re helping anyway. Can’t control feeling fear. Can control what you do while feeling it. Learned that too.”

“A hard-won lesson of life on the road?”

“Nah, I used to go to therapy too. Anxiety bros?” She held up a fist and Keisha bumped it. Sylvia did a big exploding movement with her fingers, adding sound effects. They both laughed.

“Sure. Anxiety bros,” Keisha said. “I’m still only taking you as far as Savannah, though. Then I have to get back to my thing.”

“I know. Man, I hope you find her.”

“Yeah.”

“Hope she wants to be found.”

“Yeah,” Keisha said. “Yeah.”

Another silence. Keisha didn’t want to say what she was about to say but was unable to stop the words.

“Shit,” she said. “Let’s break into a police station.”

“Thank god,” said Sylvia. “I kept thinking, ‘She’s gonna offer to help me, right?’ And then you didn’t and I was, like, ‘Man, I thought she was a good person.’”

“So I’m a good person now?”

“Good? Remains to be seen. You’re cool, though. Let’s do this.”

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Savannah looked like a city half remembered from a visit years before. Hazy and dreamlike. Brick buildings sagged into themselves. The trees were more moss than tree. The park at the center of town was full of gutter punks. Kids who had run away out of choice, not out of fear. Two of them catcalled passersby, the same line over and over. They’d removed themselves from the system enough to stop showering but not enough to stop harassing women.

Keisha and Sylvia walked the few blocks to the station and scoped it out. The front of the station was a big glass window, fine, but the rest was cinder-block blank, barred windows, a back door hazardously blocked by a dumpster, nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one available opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to case the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at Keisha and Sylvia as they tried to casually walk by.

“Nothing casual about the two of us, I guess,” Keisha said.