Free The Fall of Alice K. by Jim Heynen Page B

leave their house and become a full-time resident at Children’s Care, fifteen miles away in Groningen City. Her visits home and their visits to Children’s Care would be limited. Her sister institutionalized! It was bizarre! It was wrong!

    Her mother waited until she could see that Alice felt defeated. Then she gave the final push: “You shouldn’t be so possessive of your sister.”
    Her mother knew how to drop the last straw, but Alice didn’t collapse. She walked away and went to bed without speaking.
    When Alice came down for breakfast the next morning, her parents were not yet in the kitchen, but there sat Aldah, alone, her hands folded on the oak table. This was not like her to be up without someone waking her, the little sound sleeper, and Alice worried that Aldah might have understood the Children’s Care talk a little too well and was so upset by it that she couldn’t sleep.
    Aldah had chosen to sit in Alice’s chair and at her place at the table, but she did not have any food in front of her. She was barefoot and in her underwear but was wearing one of Alice’s long-sleeved blue work shirts, which hung down onto the bulge of her stomach. She was humming to herself while staring at one of the framed pictures on the kitchen wall, a mountain scene with a waterfall and deer drinking from a stream. Aldah could dream of being somewhere other than Dutch Center too.
    Her sister sitting by herself humming at the kitchen table. It was a lovely thing to see. This was not the image and these were not the sounds of a troubled child who was afraid to go off to an institution.
    Alice stood still and listened, trying to hear what song Aldah might be humming, but she was humming a medley of melodies. “Jesus Loves Me” elided with “Three Blind Mice” elided with “Away in a Manger,” and each stanza, if she was dividing them into stanzas, ended with the final notes of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
    Aldah hadn’t brushed her hair, and strands swirled in every direction, but she had taken the time to put on her glasses. Her humming continued, almost gleefully. Aldah had found a freedom to live happily in a little fantasy life, free from the other members of her family and even free from the television set. There was a beauty and independence here that an institution would destroy.
    Alice did not want to disturb Aldah’s sweet contentment, but she couldn’t resist moving closer. Aldah turned and looked up at Alice and smiled. Alice put her hands on her sister’s shoulders and said, “Keep humming, my angel. It’s very pretty.”

    Aldah did keep humming, louder than before, and when she got to “Old MacDonald,” Alice sang along with her sister’s humming: “Ee-aye-ee-aye-oh!”
    Aldah giggled. “McDonald’s,” she said and giggled again.
    â€œYes, my angel. McDonald’s.”

10
    Harvesting the battered corn could not happen until after several days of warm and sunny weather. At first, the shattered leaves looked like green tinsel, but warm weather made the frayed leaves curl and deaden into the familiar beige of what might have been ripe corn. The yellow-green husks turned color too, and the pulpy kernels oozed through the husks to turn the color of dried pus. A tornado would have been kinder. At least it would have picked up what it destroyed and taken it out of their sight. The corn leaves were like flesh that had been lashed until the skin split and dangled in strips, while the slender cornstalks stood like poles to which the tortured leaves and ears had been bound. The fields looked like they were infected. They looked like they had leprosy.
    When the big equipment finally rumbled through the fields, disappointment carved its way onto her father’s face. They had silage all right, but Alice could see that too much moisture had been lost. They heaped the silage into huge mounds, but it was