Chapter 2 After
AFTER
ALICE
two years and eight months later
There’s a certain kind of sadness that comes with the turning of each season.
As fall shifts to winter, there’s a subtle regret that permeates the dry, chilling air.
It splits your lips, cracks them down the center with every taught holiday smile.
It’s a reminder that you haven’t done enough.
You haven’t slathered on enough chapstick.
You didn’t go apple picking in September, even though you said you would.
You couldn’t get yourself out of bed on one too many Sundays.
Then winter wanes, and a deep-rooted sense of lost time breaks out of the frozen soil.
Did you waste those months of hibernation?
Did you cuddle your loved ones by the fire?
Will you ever see those twinkling moments again—the ones tucked between garbage bags of ripped wrapping paper and red-cheeked champagne toasts?
These thoughts hurt so much more now than they did before. Back then, I could wave them away and laugh, pass them off as the musings of the tortured artist I liked to masquerade as.
Now, summer has come to visit, in all its humid glory, and it’s brought a friend who reeks of roses. They’re impossible to ignore, or dismiss with a half-hearted chuckle, that elusive pressure to bloom.
The hottest season might not have officially started yet, but I’ve battled that feeling for months. I’ve been stagnant, lost and longing. Two years stuck, my feet swallowed by wet sand at the edge of California beaches.
A third year standing there, waiting for someone who will never come home, would have seen me washed into the sea and swallowed whole. So, I packed up my bags. And now I’m here.
The unyielding weight of a new season turning—that prospect of productivity I haven’t been able to embrace—plants a seed of doubt in my gut as my car pulls into the driveway. I may have moved, but I’ve only traded reminders of one death for another. This one should be easier to swallow, though.
The wheels crunch over gravel, and no later than thirty seconds after they do, my phone’s ringtone blares through the car’s speakers.
I jab the accept call button.
“You got there okay?” Steph, my agent and friend, says, forgoing a greeting.
“Yes,” I drawl. “You didn’t have to stalk my location. I would have called you once I got settled in.”
“We both know that you’d forget,” she says.
“You don’t know if I had a reminder set.”
“Do you?”
I chew the inside of my cheek. “No.”
“Which is why we have location sharing on,” Steph explains, slowly, in a tone you’d use to speak to a child.
She hasn’t always been a mother hen. We’ve known each other for a decade and made it through art school together, so she knows I used to be much more self-sufficient. But our relationship shifted two years ago, just like all my relationships did.
It’s not that I don’t want to keep her in the loop, but time doesn’t work the same anymore.
It all blurs together; suddenly a week’s gone by and I have fifteen missed calls and twice as many texts warning me that if I don’t send proof of life then they’re going to call my landlord for a wellness check.
Steph might have started as a friend, but she’s more of a sister than anything else. Sophomore year, after staying with me while doing a summer internship in the city, she was ‘adopted’ by my parents.
Mom and Dad were always collecting strays like that, not that I minded. Everyone got something out of it: my parents had big hearts with lots of love to give, my friends got zany, surrogate parental figures that actually cared about them, and I didn’t feel so lonely.
“Ali?” Steph asks, pulling my attention back to the phone, where the pink bubble around her initials lights up the screen. “Did you hear me?”
I wince. “Sorry.”
“I asked if you’re sure about this?” She pauses, but when I don’t answer right away, she continues. “The guest room in our apartment is all yours. And if you don’t want that, we have friends you can sublet from. If you were here we could go on all kinds of city adventures…”
I glance out the window, my gaze falling on the two-story Victorian of 874 Bayberry Drive. With its light-blue facade and large bay windows—ones that I used to curl up under with books from the library on summer days just like this—a sense of rightness creeps over me.
“I love you both, but I’m not moving in with you guys,” I say.
“We’d all feel better if you weren’t alone right now, babes.”
My restless fingers find the three rings that hang from the chain around my neck, fiddling with the platinum bands.
“The answer is no, Steph,” I say, firmer this time.
I love that I have friends who care about me. But it’s getting tiring, having them breathe down my neck with concerned mutterings of how my mental health see-saws. As if I don’t already know I’m three kinds of fucked up.
There’s a bang of a door, and a soft voice filters through the speakers. “Is that Alice?”
“Yeah,” Steph calls out, her voice further away, as if she’s pulled the phone from her ear.
“Tell Erica I say hi,” I say.
“Tell me yourself, you coward.” My best friend since the second grade’s voice blasts through the speaker. After I introduced them during the summer Steph stayed with my family, they quickly hit it off and never looked back. “I’m offended you don’t want to live with us.”
I sigh. “I don’t want to get into this right now.”
“Too bad, we’re getting into it.”
“What Erica means is that we care about you. And we hate the idea of you being cooped up alone in some house in the woods. At least in Cali you were in a city and around people—”
“Meadowbrook is a small beach town on the north shore, it’s not the backwoods,” I say, my fingers choking the steering wheel.
I force my hands to release it, letting them fall to my thighs.
“Look, I need this reset. I’ll keep you posted if I need company.
It’s not like you’re far away. You can come visit.
Or I can take the train in and see you.”
We’re all quiet for a moment, and I find myself squirming on the leather seat in the silence. The timer of the phone call ticks higher, the seconds stretching out between us.
“You guys still there?” I ask.
“Sorry, I muted us so you didn’t have to hear Erica’s screeching,” Steph says.
A soft snort escapes me.
“We hear you though, loud and clear,” Steph adds. “And we’ll be taking advantage of all those extra rooms you have once they’re cleaned out.”
“Did I mention it’s unfair that you’ll be ten minutes from the beach at any given moment?” Erica says. “I wish I had a rich grandma who left me her rickety-ass haunted house when she died.”
“You’re one to talk. Grammie-B lets you vacation at her time-share in Aruba every year. Why are you complaining?”
“Yeah, but it’s not a house out east—”
“Okay, we get it,” Steph interrupts her, and I can practically hear Erica’s eye roll through the speakers. “Text us pictures later, okay?”
“I will,” I promise.
“And you’re still good to have that call with the gallery I set up for next week?” Steph asks. “There’s a decent amount of prep to do, but they’re excited to finally host originals from the elusive Alice Raine.”
Dread fills my stomach, and my finger inches closer to the end call button. “Yes.”
“I’ll text you fifteen minutes before so you don’t forget,” Steph says.
“Bye Steph,” I drawl.
“Bye babe,” Steph says.
“Love you!” Erica screams.
The screen goes dark, and I lean back in my seat with a tired sigh. The engine rumbles, and I let it idle for longer than I should, staring out the front window with my foot pressed on the brake.
I could turn around right now; drive back the way I came and beg my landlord to lease me my old apartment. I could call Steph and Erica, hop on the next Penn Station-bound train, and crash at their place like they offered.
I do neither.
I’m already here. I’ve driven three-thousand miles for a fresh start and I can’t back out now.
The sun lights up my white-knuckled fingers with gold; gripped around the emergency parking brake, I will them to pull the lever. They listen. The brake clicks into place.
I press the ignition and the growl of the car’s engine stops.
There, I committed.
When I heave the last box over the house’s threshold, I release a breath of relief.
The hard part is done, at least the physically hard part is.
Studying the packed foyer—where I’ve dumped all my boxes from the U-Haul—there are still weeks of work ahead of me to declutter and clean my grandma’s things, and days more to unpack and organize my own.
However, I’m nothing if but a masochist these days, and all I’ve got is time.
The only deadline I’m beholden to looms at the end of summer, though I haven’t been able to put brush to canvas once in preparation for the exhibit.
I’ve already delayed my residency with them twice, and I’m thankful I have a team behind me who understands my situation, but the guilt of not producing any art is eating away at me.
Two years of drought has drained my creative well. And no matter how many times I pray to the muses for reprieve, they haven’t yet blessed me with a rainstorm.
I’m hoping this move will change that.
I swat at the stray blonde curls that stick to my forehead. They’ve come loose from my hair tie, which desperately needs to be redone, but there’s a kind of pleasure that comes from the tug of the fallen bun on my roots.
Like I said, masochist.
“Alright,” I declare to the ghosts hiding in the floorboards. “Shower, then grocery store. I can’t clean you up on an empty stomach.”
The hardwood floor creaks its agreement as I trudge up to my room.
The house has lost its luster in the two decades since I last visited, the ornate runner on the stairs faded and the wallpaper peeling in the corners.
School and sports got in the way at first, and then I was too old and too cool to spend my precious summers off at grandma’s—and then I went to college.
And then I was moving across the country with Ryan.
My fingertips run through the film of dust that’s coated the furniture, stacked books, and her half-finished paintings that line the hall. I wipe the grime on my leggings, and the slash of gray stands out against the black polyester.
It’s clear Nana embraced clutter towards the end.
Maybe it gave her comfort, to be surrounded by all these things.
There’s a method to the madness, a safety in the ability to get lost in your own home, all with the knowledge that with a few steps you can find your way back to the warmth of your bed.
It already makes me feel less alone.
I only wish that he was here too, tucked beneath the covers when I crawl into bed tonight.