Louise listens, considering.
“Her dad caught us. Freaked. He called the cops. Said I forced her. She’s screaming in the background that it isn’t true. It wasn’t true.”
Louise, still standing, sits down now, next to Lee.
“Louise? Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know,” she says. And she doesn’t: feels her instincts are all wrong. Always have been. How, she wonders, can she fix her instincts about people? About men?
“I’m done working for rich people,” Lee says. He’s talking to himself now, more than to her. “I can’t believe I ever did it again. That’s why I hid. Minute I heard what was happening with the Van Laar girl, I split. With my record . . .” He trails off. Continues. “Anyway, there’s a new thing happening out there,” says Lee. “It’s 1975. You gotta go west, is what I hear.”
In her left hand, Louise is still holding the papers and photographs she took down from the walls of her room. She looks down at them. She listens to the voice of another man, making her another promise that won’t come true. How many times in her life has she said yes to a boy or a man just because it was the easiest thing to do? How many times has she let a man take what he wanted, instead of taking something for herself?
She places the papers delicately on the ground. Glances back over at Lee, whose forearms and hands she has dreamed for a whole summer about touching.
She does so now. Places her left hand on the inside of his elbow. He looks up at her, curious.
“You want to mess around a little?” says Louise.
He says nothing. Sits very still as Louise brings her body around to face him, kneeling before him on the ground. She glances up toward the lit house; knows she won’t be seen outside in the dark. She lifts her shirt over her head.
“Jesus,” he says. He reaches forward, puts his hands around her waist.
“No,” she says. “Yours.” She lifts his shirt off, too, and then leans into him, her skin on his skin, on top of him as he lies back onto the ground.
She’ll take what she wants from him, a moment of pleasure in the middle of all this dark, a washing-away of John Paul and the McLellans and the Van Laars and the grand house she was never going to be invited into, ever, no matter what she did.
Tomorrow, Lee Towson will leave for Colorado. She won’t follow.
Alice
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day Four
She’s been shipped back to Albany. Her parents—who have, during this ordeal, largely kept to their room—were the ones assigned to oversee her transport. From Albany, they decamped to Manhattan, with mumbled assurances that Barbara would be found.
Now she is alone.
She’s out of everyone’s hair this way, she thinks, and her shoulders shake a little with laughter. Today, like every day, is a very bad one, and so with Dr. Lewis’s blessing she has been advised that she can take three pills when needed.
She takes them now, her brain ahead of her body, sighing with relief when the pills come out of their home in the glass bottle, anticipating the chemical surge. She chews them up to get there faster.
She closes her eyes. Her mind relaxes, bringing her, unexpectedly, back to the Dunwitty Institute.
To her sister Delphine, her only visitor the entire time she was there.
I’m sorry, she’d said. And then she said more: that she’d been in free fall since George died. That it had not been the first time, with her and Peter; that they’d been intimate, too, when they were young. All the way back when she first introduced Alice to Peter, for her coming-out party.
Was introducing Alice to Peter simply a way for Delphine to stay close to him? Setting him up with her guileless, stupid little sister? Making Alice the brood mare while Delphine and Peter—intellectual matches—carried on together every time Peter went down to New York?
“It’s nothing like what you’re imagining,” said Delphine. Reading her mind. “George and I loved each other very, very much. But we were never interested in a traditional marriage. He was free to do as he pleased. As was I. I’m not sure if you’ll recall this, but I tried to warn you of it, once,” said Delphine. She leaned back. “About how you should—have some fun, I think I said. Did you ever try it?”
Alice said nothing.
“It was wrong of us, Alice. All of us,” said Delphine. “We’ve treated you abominably.”
Silence.
“Will you leave him, Alice?” said Delphine. “You could, you know.”
Silence.
“Alice,” said Delphine. “Alice, are you sleeping?”
At last, Alice smiled. In a way, she thought, she was. She was having a waking dream—the same one she always had.
In this dream, she was locked in a room she didn’t recognize while the search for her missing son went on without her. And someone—she didn’t know who—was standing just outside the door.
• • •
In Albany, Alice opens her eyes. She doesn’t like being here by herself. The house is cold in summer, and all of Albany seems desolate, abandoned. The government workers are taking vacations in places farther north or south. In this city, Alice feels somehow like the only survivor of a plague.
Three pills in her blood now. Her body goes slack.
This, this is how she hears him best: on the other side of the veil, in the other world. The one where Bear lives.
Once, while playing a game of Dictionary, Alice came across the word nonsecular, and this is the word that comes to mind when she thinks of the liminal space between life and death in which she encounters her son.
The space in which she lets herself acknowledge what she did is nonsecular. The space in which she doesn’t work so hard to stop the slivers of light and memory that come at her from time to time, in unexpected moments, so sharply that she feels as if she’s been stabbed: is nonsecular. In this world, when those memories come, she accepts them, examines them impassively, opens herself to them instead of willing them away.
