18. Alice Frozen in Time
Alice Frozen in Time
People say you regret the things you didn’t do, not the things you did. Those people don’t understand real, true regret. Because those things you never did? You can’t know the outcome. Didn’t go to Hollywood? Well, maybe you would have made it. But you probably would have come home with credit card debt and the bitterness of broken dreams.
But see, those people who say I’m a murderer… well, they aren’t entirely wrong. I was the one who wanted to go on that ski trip, to learn a sport that had seemed so foreign and exotic to me. But Jeremy was the one who, in his years of experience, took the gondola to the top of the mountain. Jeremy was the one who got caught in that avalanche. Three years of marriage. Three tiny, precious, precarious years when we were twenty-four to twenty-seven where things were perfect. Three perfect years when it didn’t matter that his parents didn’t want him with someone like me, someone lost and abandoned and orphaned. Someone who never had the opportunity to go to college, much less graduate. When it didn’t matter that I didn’t come from money like he did, didn’t have a family name like he did.
Jeremy became frozen in time for me, in the honeymoon stage, when it was the two of us against the world. The two of us and a love so big that it would make your heart burst.
I think a part of me realizes that my memories of him aren’t totally real, that the time we had together seems so perfect because our love was so young, so untainted. But also because I was so young. The Alice I was when I was with Jeremy was so much less afraid of the world. But, whatever the reason, he is still who I see when I close my eyes, whose breath I feel when I’m in that moment right before sleep when the world goes hazy but not all the way dark.
His parents tried to ruin that image for me. As we sat around a shining wooden conference table in their lawyer’s office, his mother pointed at me and said, “She killed him. This is her fault!”
She couldn’t have known how that propelled me back into my worst memory, how, instead of that lawyer’s office, I was suddenly back in my childhood home, sitting on the carpet, buttoning the dress of my favorite baby doll when the plate glass window shattered, when my older brother dragged me across the carpet, leaving rug burns on my thighs and glass embedded in my skin, to pull me away from the 1985 Porsche 944 that I had never been inside of, that my father polished and shined and waxed to perfection weekly. It took me years to understand how that Porsche had come through the window, to grasp that my father had been so drunk—a habit that I didn’t know then wasn’t an anomaly—that he had driven my mother through the house, into the room where we were all sitting.
It wasn’t until that day, sitting in the lawyer’s office, that it occurred to me that maybe none of it was an accident. Maybe my father meant to kill my mother; maybe he meant to kill all of us. I only saw him a few times after that, when my mother’s sister Mina, who I lived with, could gather the strength to take me, to face him. I was never brave enough to ask. I didn’t want to know the truth.
And as that na?ve twenty-seven-year-old, I didn’t understand the ramifications of what Jeremy’s mother was saying, of how grateful I should have been to his father for calming her down. I didn’t even know how insurance money worked. All I knew was that, around that table, in the midst of all that pain, they offered me his million-dollar insurance policy if I’d walk away from the rest of his estate, including the house we shared. I remember thinking, They didn’t love him like I did. No one who loved him like I did could sit across a table from me and negotiate like that eleven days after he died, nine days after we placed an empty urn in the local church’s columbarium because his body was never found, buried under feet of snow and ice and fallen rock.
It was the loss that changed me. That steeled me. That nearly killed me. That shut me off for two more years until Glen with his soft-spoken love for me made me feel like I could breathe again. But it wasn’t the same. Not that I didn’t love Glen. I did. But once you lose your great love, all the others are tainted. You can’t help but be closed off from the world when you’ve lived through the worst that can happen to you.
And that was why, now, at midnight, I was awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I could really push past my fear to love Elliott the way that he deserved.
What scared me wasn’t just the idea of losing him; it was how very much I loved him. For the first time since Jeremy died, I felt like my heart was fully open, like something in the center of me was blooming and wide.
I heard noise out on the landing. Someone else was awake. Thank goodness. I hated the feeling of being alone in the dark. That’s when it was the hardest not to have someone to roll over and touch, someone whose arms could wrap around me and make me safe. I ached at the thought of how easy it could all be, if I were with Elliott right now, letting him hold me, synchronizing my breath with his. The rhythm.
Jamie had been having trouble sleeping lately and would sneak from the bunk room into mine, so I figured it was her creeping up the stairs that I’d heard. But when I tiptoed out of my room, I realized that Iris’s door was cracked, and I could hear Merit’s voice.
I wasn’t trying to listen in on their private conversation, but their voices wafted into the hall as I made my way toward Iris’s room. “You should have seen my dad,” she said. “He looked so small, so pale. It was just awful.”
“I get it,” he said. “I know what it’s like to lose the person that you thought could always protect you—or at least, the person you knew would always try.”
My heart broke for Merit. He’d had to be strong. I tried to be there for him, for Emma too. I tried to be the one to protect them. But I wasn’t, would never be, their parent. I couldn’t be that person for them.
As I reached out my hand, Merit said, “Julie wasn’t wrong about us helping with your dad—”
I opened the door slowly, pushing it with one finger.
“It’s really late, kiddos,” I interrupted.
Iris was sitting with her back against her headboard, her knees pulled to her chest, on the left twin bed. I knew that pose. I’d spent some time in that pose. Merit was perched at the end of her right twin bed. Still, I couldn’t imagine that Charlotte or Grace would be thrilled about them being alone in each other’s rooms at midnight.
“We can’t sleep,” Merit said.
It was so endearing the way he said it. We.
“And why is that?” I asked, sitting down on the other end of the second bed, beside Merit and across from Iris.
Iris shrugged. “We’re just bonding over being fatherless and alone in the world.”
“You will never be alone in the world as long as you have me,” I said. I turned to Merit. “But you need to get some rest so that you can be the star player we all love to watch on the field tomorrow.”
“It’s so much pressure being a star,” he said with faux exasperation. He rose, then leaned down to kiss my cheek before leaving the room.
I raised my eyebrows at Iris, who was grinning from ear to ear.
“What?” she asked as Merit disappeared.
“You are not allowed to have a crush on your mommune brother,” I whispered.
She scrunched her nose. “Do not ever, ever call him that again, please.”
“Fine,” I said. “But you understand what I’m saying.” I pointed at her bed and said, “And you two in each other’s rooms needs to end.”
“I wish Merit wanted to be in my room like that,” Iris said. “But I’m sorry, have you seen his girlfriend?”
I tried not to make a face. I had. With all her extensions and fake eyelashes and push-up bras. Shouldn’t one be a little older before she was laced with so much self-loathing that she had to totally change her appearance? But I was old, so what did I know?
“She is perfect ,” Iris sighed, flopping herself back on the pillow.
What I loved, in this moment, was the resilience of teenagers. She had gone to visit her father in jail and had probably had one of the most traumatic days of her young life, but could still be most upset about her crush’s beautiful girlfriend.
“You, my darling, are perfect. And comparison is the thief of joy. Don’t get caught in that trap.” I paused, then whispered, “And stay away from Merit! You are playing with fire.”
She wriggled her eyebrows at me, and I tossed a pillow at her. “Fine, fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll try to keep him from throwing himself at me. He’s so gross.”
We both laughed. “You okay? Seriously?”
She nodded. “Just tired.”
“I’m here,” I said. “One a.m., four in the afternoon. If you need a listening ear or a piece of advice—or someone to talk some sense into you about older boys,” I teased—“I’m always here.”
She smiled and leaned back on her pillow. “I know.”
“Good.”
I got up from the bed and turned out the light.
“Sweet dreams,” I whispered.
“Sweet dreams.”
But I knew I wouldn’t sleep. Instead, I walked outside, onto the beach, and watched the moon, the way it shone silvery and almost eerily beautiful on the water. I thought about Elliott. About our walk on the beach this week. About the coffee we’d sipped together. About how he wordlessly slipped into the pew beside me at morning prayer. No expectations.
I looked up at the stars and, as I usually did, thought about Jeremy, wondered if he was out there somewhere, if he could see me, hear me, feel me. And, maybe most of all, I wondered if, wherever he was, he could ever forgive me for moving on.