Chapter I
I
Lottie’s voice trails off.
She’s standing at the window, looking out with her back to the room, and in the reflection on the glass Alice can see the crimson tears rolling down her face, waits for her to go on, to explain, but she’s stopped, and Alice doesn’t know if she plans to start again or if that’s it, and Alice looks from Lottie to Ezra, who’s just sitting there, arms crossed, as if he’s heard it before.
By now, it’s either very late or very early, Alice doesn’t know the place a night cuts off, stops being one and starts being the other, all she knows is that she’s been listening to Lottie talk for hours, long after the hotel has put itself to bed, and she still hasn’t told her why.
She shakes her head, shoving to her feet. “All that, just to say you got away?”
“No.” Lottie blinks, shaking free of her own memories as she turns from the window. “I’m trying to tell you that I didn’t. ”
“You want me to feel sorry for you? Because you had a toxic ex?” Lottie lets out a small sound, half-sob, half-laugh, but Alice just throws up her hands. “I’m sorry she hurt you,” she says. “But it doesn’t make up for what you did—”
“The story isn’t over yet,” she says.
“Get to the part that matters, then,” snaps Alice.
“It all matters, ” she snaps back. “Stories matter, Alice. When you live long enough, they’re all you have.”
“I had a story, too,” she seethes. “Before you ended it. I had a life. I had a—a chance to—” Her voice cracks. “I had a future. And now—”
Lottie looks up. “You still do.”
“Oh, fuck off !”
Alice doesn’t realize she’s lunging toward Lottie as she says it, not until Ezra appears between them, one hand gently but firmly holding Alice back, as if she’s the danger here—because of course, he’s not her friend, he’s Lottie’s.
Lottie’s guard has fallen down, and her guilt and grief are poisoning the air, seeping into the room, into Alice, making her feel things she doesn’t want to, cannot bear to anymore, and for what? For what? No, fuck this.
She’s had enough.
Alice turns and storms toward the door, half expecting one of them to try and stop her, but they don’t.
She wrenches the door open, so hard the hinges squeal, and plunges out into the hall, and she doesn’t stop, not when she reaches the stairs, or the marble lobby at the bottom, or the glass front doors, or the sidewalk, or the street, or the entrance to the darkened Commons.
Doesn’t stop until her feet find grass and even then, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s drowning. Her brain insists that she needs air but her lungs know that she doesn’t, and the stillness inside of her is suffocating, and—
“Breathe.”
She didn’t hear Ezra coming after her, but he’s there. “Just breathe,” he says. She glances back and glowers at him, but he only shrugs. “Trust me, it will help.”
And Alice doesn’t trust him, wants to, might have, before he held her back, but she has to do something to stop this crushing pressure on her ribs, so she closes her eyes, drags in a deep breath, counts to four, then blows it out again, the way she learned to years ago.
In, then out, then in again, making a bellows of her lungs until her nerves stop jangling, and her mind begins to quiet, and her body wrings out all the awful feelings that soaked from Lottie into her.
She breathes until she feels the night steady, the ground beneath her and the sky above. She breathes until she begins to feel more like herself again.
“Better?” he asks. She nods, afraid that if she stops to talk, the brittle calm will shatter. “Bodies hold on to certain things,” says Ezra. “Old habits, and all that. For years, I smoked a pipe.”
Alice stares at him, trying to picture it, and the image is so incongruous she almost smiles.
“Don’t laugh,” he says, “it was more common back when I was . . .”
She notices he doesn’t like to say the word for what he was before, the same way she can’t bear to say the one for what she is now.
“The point is, the tobacco didn’t do anything, but there was just something about the familiarity of the act of packing the pipe and lighting it. A sense memory of sorts. The wooden bit between my teeth. The way it calmed me.”
Alice breathes in and out, clinging to the safety of the motion, how normal it makes her feel, even as the night-soaked Commons reminds her that she’s not.
It whispers to her, from the rustling trees, to the flapping of birds, to the three bodies wandering the paths, three sets of steps, three beating hearts.
She blows out another breath, and when she trusts herself to speak again she asks, “When did you give it up?”
“Back in the seventies. Didn’t really fit in anymore.”
“I don’t know,” she says, eyeing him. “I hear it’s making a comeback, with the hipsters.”
Ezra grimaces. “No thank you.” His eyes track over the Commons. “I had a friend who loved the smell of fresh-baked sourdough. He couldn’t eat it, of course, but the scent alone was enough to pretend that if he really wanted to, he could.”
“Great,” mutters Alice. “You guys get pipe smoke and fresh bread, and I get anxiety. Doesn’t seem fair.”
Ezra’s mouth quirks. “The point is, we find ways to hold on to who we were. In hopes it will keep us from becoming someone else.”
She swallows. “Does it work?”
“No. But sometimes it softens the blow.”
Alice closes her hands into fists, clenches them until she feels the crescents of her nails slice into her palms, but the pain is nothing but a ghost.
“I wanted to be someone else,” she says. “That’s why I came to Boston. Back home, I was . . .” Catty’s little sister, Alice almost says.
Always in her shadow, always in her wake.
Instead, Alice shakes her head. “I wanted to be someone new. That’s what this was supposed to be, a starting point. But now—”
“It’s not a death sentence, Alice.”
She glares at him. “Tell that to my pulse.”
“Fine, if you want to be pedantic. But it’s not. Lottie meant what she said. You can live a life. Yes, it will look a little different than the one you thought. But it can still be a life.” He looks back over his shoulder at the hotel. “You should let her finish.”
Alice feels the anger rise again, constrict around her heart.
Anger at Ezra, for protecting Lottie. Anger at Lottie, for smiling at her in the dark, for running with her through the rain, for making her believe that that night could really be the start of everything.
Alice folds her arms, but it makes her feel like a petulant child, so she uncrosses them again.
“It won’t change what happened. It won’t change what I am. What she did.”
Ezra nods, as if he understands. “You’re right, there’s no going back.
But it might help you go forward. Take it from someone who has a few centuries behind them.
You learn how heavy some feelings weigh, how much they’ll drag you down.
Anger and resentment are the worst. They’re like rocks in your pockets. Too many, and you’ll drown.”
Alice turns, and looks across the street at the hotel, the windows staring back like glassy eyes, all of them dark, save one. Lottie is nothing but a silhouette, a girl-shaped shadow, one hand against the glass.
It wasn’t me, she said when Alice first walked in. It wasn’t me.
Now she takes a deep breath one last time, and then forces herself back toward the hotel.
To find out how the story ends.