Chapter 19
Alice
‘Everyone,’ Alice called, gesturing for the campers to come closer, ‘welcome to the decomposition lab.’
Running the decomposition lab had been Alice’s favorite part of her summers as a counselor. She would bring the campers to the compost bin weekly to take a look at where their food scraps went and how they broke down. Now that she had some free blocks of time, she was determined to bring it back.
The group of eight-year-olds observed the giant compost bin with trepidation, none of them taking a step forward.
‘Don’t be shy,’ Alice said, grabbing a shovel to use as a pointer. ‘Come one, come all, and deposit your scraps into the bin.’
She raised the lid and the campers dumped their trays of lunch scraps, matching looks of disgusts on their small faces.
‘It stinks,’ one of them said, and the others laughed.
‘That’s right, it does stink.’ She closed the bin. ‘Can anyone tell me why?’
‘Because it’s rotten food?’
Alice smiled encouragingly at the girl who had answered.
She’d forgotten in her years of dealing with undergraduates what it was like to teach children so young.
She loved that they were still discovering themselves and their interests, that they still viewed the world with wonder. She missed feeling that way herself.
‘Yes, but can anyone tell me why rotting food smells so bad?’
Nobody said anything. Alice gave the bin a whack with her shovel, enjoying the looks of delight on the kids’ faces. This wasn’t the kind of curriculum they had in the classroom and she had their rapt attention.
‘This bin is filled with tiny little organisms called bacteria. The bacteria break down the food, and that breakdown releases gaseous waste.’
‘Like a fart?’ a kid asked, while another blew a loud raspberry into his elbow.
‘Exactly,’ Alice said, unfazed. ‘Can anyone tell me the name of this breakdown?’
Robin, who’d been standing off to the side of the group, raised his hand. ‘Decompotision?’ Robin had mixed up the syllables, but she nodded anyway.
‘Right, decomposition. The bacteria in this bin are called decomposers. Can anyone name any other decomposers? I’ll give you a hint: think of things that live in the dirt!’
‘Bugs!’
‘Exactly! Some bugs are decomposers, like centipedes, millipedes and sow bugs. What else?’
‘Worms!’
‘Yes! If you look closely,’ Alice said, pointing the shovel at the level in the compost bin where the food scraps met dirt, ‘you can see some worms wiggling around.’
The group leaned in, no longer grossed out. ‘There’s one right there!’
‘Can anyone think of any other decomposers? I’ll give you a hint, your parents might eat them on pizza.’
‘Eat them?’ The kids traded horrified expressions. Alice nodded seriously.
‘Olives?’
‘Artichokes?’
‘Barbeque sauce?’
‘Mushrooms?’
Alice pointed at the boy who got it right. ‘Mushrooms! Most mushrooms are decomposers, from the kinds that grow on trees high over your head to the ones you can buy at the grocery store.’
‘Woah.’
‘Decomposers are very important,’ Alice said, turning the handle of the compost bin to mix up the green and brown matter. ‘Just like you and I need nutrients to live, plants need nutrients to grow big and strong. Decomposers help put those nutrients back in the soil for the plants.’
‘And then we eat the plants.’ Robin had a familiar expression of awe on his face.
‘Woah,’ the boy beside him said, looking sideways at him and smiling.
Alice beamed at them. ‘Exactly, it’s a cycle. One of the most important cycles in our natural world. So… who wants to learn more about it?’
When Alice ended the lesson, asking the children to look out for any interesting mushrooms around the woods and to report their findings back to her, she noticed Briar leaning against a tree not far away.
The campers dispersed and Alice put her hands on her hips, turning to Briar. ‘Observing my lesson?’
Briar smiled slyly. ‘Don’t worry, you earned full marks. And I’ve got good news, Sierra’s covering your Cook shift. Thought you and I could sneak away.’
Alice felt giddy at the look on Briar’s face, like the two of them were sharing a secret.
‘Where are we going?’ she whispered, though there was no one around to hear.
‘I’ve got some extra work for you,’ Briar said, gesturing for Alice to follow her.
‘Oh, because I haven’t been working enough,’ Alice grumbled, playing along and continuing on the route she now recognized would bring them to the parking lot.
According to the schedule they’d created, Briar had the afternoon off to deal with her mom’s estate.
Alice decided her choices were either to submit to this kidnapping or to not see whatever it was that Briar wanted to show her.
So she got into Briar’s car without further complaint.
They drove to the main road, and then in a direction Alice had never been in before.
She stared at Briar’s side profile, the red-gold color of her hair striking in the midday light. Allowing herself to really look for the first time, she drank in the familiar sight of Briar driving.
‘You look good,’ she said, because she hadn’t slept much the night before and therefore was prone to blurting out her thoughts. ‘Better, I mean. Better rested.’
A blush crept up Briar’s neck. ‘Oh man, these campers are really running you ragged, huh?’
‘Yes,’ Alice said.
Briar glanced sideways at her, smirking, and Alice felt like something had shifted.
There was a tension between them which had been there, underlying everything for the past few days, but now felt out in the open.
After an agonizingly long silence that Alice knew was probably less than five minutes, Briar pulled into the driveway of a weathered Victorian house.
It was a bright lilac that Alice immediately recognized as Susan’s favorite color.
‘Your mom’s house?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ Briar said, cutting the ignition.
Alice followed Briar up the stairs, careful to avoid a loose nail jutting out of one of the steps. Briar jammed the key into the lock, and Alice got her first glance at the interior.
‘Well, it’s got lovely bones,’ she said. It was true, but it was also the most charitable comment she could have made. Lovely bones beget rotten wood.
‘It’s a shithole,’ Briar grumbled. ‘I tried to convince her not to move out here. Almost all of our fights were about the house in some way. But you can imagine how those arguments went.’
‘Like talking to a wall?’ Alice guessed, trying to remember if she’d ever successfully changed Susan’s mind about anything.
‘Yup,’ Briar said, narrowing her eyes critically at a crack in the wall to their left. ‘I need to fix it up before I sell it, but I’m behind on repairs and I thought I could do some catching up today.’
‘You want me to help you?’ It felt like a turning point. ‘What do you need to do?’
‘Clean out the gutters, take down the Christmas lights – I refused to let her go onto the roof and do that herself when she wanted to in January – and fix a leaky faucet. The banister is unstable, so that’s a hazard.
’ Briar ticked the items off on her fingers as she went.
‘That’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure there’s more. ’
‘Maybe we could write them down?’ Alice suggested, pulling out her phone and taking notes. ‘What about the crack in the wall?’
Briar eyed it with a grim expression. ‘Just another symbol of my fractured world.’
‘Then let’s tackle that one first, shall we?’ Alice said. ‘Where’s the paint?’
Briar led her into the dining room, where she opened the loose door to a closet and gestured inside.
Alice pulled out her phone, adding the door to the list, and then grabbed a can of paint, brushes, spackle, and a scraper.
‘Good thing you know an artist,’ she teased.
‘You still draw?’ Briar asked, taking one of the brushes and heading back into the living room.
‘Never,’ Alice admitted, following her. ‘Sometimes I doodle mushrooms in the margins of my to-do lists, if that counts.’
‘Are they as good as mine?’ Briar asked. Her eyes flitted to the spot behind Alice’s right ear where a tattoo artist had etched in her illustration of a Cortinarius violaceus, in honor of Alice’s camp name. Alice felt the skin there tingle.
‘Better,’ she said, wrinkling her nose at Briar. The drawing had come out looking more like an ear than a mushroom – Alice had been asked on more than one occasion if it was meant to be ironic.
‘Snob.’ Briar layered spackle on the wall and practically attacked it with the scraper.
‘When did this crack appear?’ Alice asked, gently prying the scraper from Briar and employing it with a steadier hand.
‘Oh, you know, around the time my mom’s cancer came back and she neglected to tell me anything was wrong.’ Alice turned to look at her, but her eyes were fixed on the wall. ‘She got really frail and she couldn’t keep up with things around the house. I begged her to come back to DC.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said, dropping her hand from the wall for a moment.
‘The cancer came back in February, didn’t it?
I heard from her around then, but I didn’t get the impression that anything was wrong.
She sounded in good spirits. It wasn’t until her last note that I realized how things had progressed… ’
Briar’s lips twitched and Alice realized that her emails with Susan were still a sensitive subject.
‘Yeah, well, I’d already given up everything for her once, and I would’ve done it again. Maybe she finally figured that out. I’ll never be sure.’ She paused, frowning. ‘But then again, she went and foisted the camp on me after all of that, so maybe she didn’t care about derailing my life.’
Alice knew that defending Susan wouldn’t go over well, but it was instinctual for her.
She had loved and admired Susan so much, had thought of her as something like a mother.
And she also sensed that being angry with Susan, while it might help in the short-term, wasn’t going to help Briar get through this.
But she didn’t know how much she could push Briar, with their tentative friendship being what it was.
‘She must have thought that running the camp would be good for you, in some way,’ she tried, finishing with the crack and putting down the scraper.
Briar sighed, and Alice was glad that she at least didn’t look angry.
‘It hasn’t been all bad,’ she said, glancing in Alice’s direction.
Alice felt a smile grow on her face. The words were simple, but the rush of them made her lightheaded. It was pathetic that none of her recent accomplishments gave her the same floating feeling as one sentence from Briar.
‘But I can’t do it again. I’m not cut out for it. I mean, you’ve seen how it is, the level of organization that’s required to keep things running. I’ve never had that. Always needed you to keep me on track.’
Alice remembered the days after school where she’d go through Briar’s calendar and write in when each of her assignments was due and which ones she would have to work on when. She would text reminders if they weren’t at Briar’s house working on the homework together, which they usually were.
‘I’m not going to tell you what to do when it comes to selling the camp,’ she said carefully. ‘I understand why you’re doing it, I just don’t want to talk about it.’
Briar laughed, leaning against the wall. ‘Should we make a list of things we’re not talking about? Noah, Harper, summer 2015, me selling the camp, you caring about my mom more than me… What am I missing?’
She was lightening the mood, and Alice was grateful for it. Whatever was happening between them couldn’t survive under pressure. And lately, any time they were alone, Alice felt like she could hardly breath with the weight of it.
‘I’m sure we can find things to add to the list,’ Alice said, turning back to the wall. ‘It didn’t seem like you loved me talking about Tess.’ She glanced sideways at Briar, wanting to see her reaction.
‘Exes,’ Briar said, eyes crinkling in amusement. ‘Added.’
‘Hmm, what else?’ Alice asked, turning to Briar fully. She was closer than Alice had realized, and the flutter of Briar’s eyelashes made her forget what she was saying. ‘Um, the other night?’
Briar glanced down at Alice’s mouth. ‘Yeah. Definitely not.’
Neither of them moved. The air felt charged, like all Alice needed to do was lean in and she would get exactly what she wanted. What they had agreed not to do again.
Alice turned back, painting over the same section again and willing her heartbeat to return to normal.
‘I’m glad we had this talk,’ she said, still tense. ‘When I leave at the end of the summer, I want to count myself as made up with you. And Noah.’ Her voice went up at the end of the sentence, inflecting it like a question.
It was the wrong thing to say. Whatever softness had been in Briar’s expression before was gone now.
‘I’m honored to have made it as a stop on the Alice Hughes apology tour,’ she said.
Alice didn’t know how Briar had managed that – to go from someone she knew better than herself to a stranger in a millisecond.