Chapter 14
As they went upstairs together, Allie was conscious of a wobble in her legs. She felt like she was climbing the stairs toward
moral disaster and personal disgrace. She didn’t know what she wanted more: to pour some gin, or to see Donna’s silky kimono
fall around her feet. Donna glanced back at her and smiled a little contemptuously, and Allie felt a sudden flash of anger
at her, and at herself. Van forgave Allie for wanting to kiss women, be held by a woman—he forgave her more easily than she
had ever been able to forgive herself. But why did it have to be this woman?
(Why do you think? Allie thought in Tana’s voice. ’Cause you can’t have her. She’s Van’s sister. ’Cause it makes you feel terrible and it’s important to feel terrible, isn’t it? It’s a good justification for drinkin’. Not that folks like us need a justification.)
“I hate to do this to you. I’ll even apologize to Tana for you if you want. But I think you’re going to put off your new life
of sobriety for one more day,” Donna warned her. “The two of us need to pour one out for Spock.”
“Leonard Nimoy? Didn’t he pass away last year?”
“Yes,” Donna said, solemnly, “but they’re running a best-of-Spock marathon on TV to mark the one-year anniversary of his death
and it’s making me sad, and you know I hate to feel feelings when I’m sober.”
“Oh,” Allie said, in a weak voice. “I don’t—I can’t, really. I shouldn’t, anyway.”
“You can and you should. We’re in mourning. I’m in mourning. I’m doing the very important mourning I neglected to do last year. Don’t make me do this alone. You’ve had fourteen days. It’s not like you’re wrecking five years of AA.”
“Donna,” Allie said. A whine in her voice.
“Tell you what. Pour two, one for you, one for me. We can toast him together and then I’ll drink both. I can’t toast him by
myself, and a toast when one glass is full of ginger ale doesn’t count. Not unless you’re nine.”
Allie made an uncomfortable sound that was not quite agreement and not quite argument.
They settled in the room under the exposed beams where, once, when they were six in number, they would gather to watch Unsolved Mysteries together. On the screen, a young Leonard Nimoy examined piles of Tribbles, standing next to an exasperated DeForest Kelley.
Allie’s hands shook while she made the drinks, getting elderflower-infused tonic out of the mini fridge, only the good stuff
for Colin and Donna. There was a window steps away, and once upon a time, Allie had looked through it and seen a dark figure
walking in the snow, a man who turned out to be Enoch Crane. Maybe if the shade had been down, Arthur and Donovan would still
be alive now, and wasn’t that a thought?
She missed Van, suddenly, with a kind of painful happy-sadness. She had believed—had desperately wanted to believe—that if
you loved Christ enough, and prayed hard enough, you could stop being gay. But it wasn’t true. She had never been able to
stop feeling breathless around a pretty woman with a dirty mouth. Dirty words—the words Allie never used herself, because
her mother insisted that was how trash talked—made Allie weak with want, always had.
But Van, Van, sweetest Donovan—if only he hadn’t been so determined to marry her. There had never been a better friend! They
could’ve been the Lennon and McCartney of best friends. She thought maybe, finally, at the end, Van had regretted putting
a ring on her finger, had wanted to let her go, to be who she was. Maybe they could’ve had that friendship anyway if they
had been allowed the chance.
“How long do you think Van and I would’ve lasted?” Allie asked.
She sat on the couch and handed Donna a G and T.
Donna shrugged. “I don’t know why you married him in the first place. It was the shock of surviving the flight, I guess. Or
maybe you just had something in you, Allie, something that made you seek out a lifetime with someone who could never make
you happy.”
Allie almost flinched at that. In Donna’s mind, Allie’s impulse to be with someone who couldn’t bring her happiness was a
thing of the past—but it came to Allie that old habits died hard and Donna was the proof.
“He did make me happy,” Allie said after a moment. “He made me laugh. No one could make me laugh like Van.”
“He just didn’t make you cum.”
That was a good word—cum—one that almost always gave her the shivers. Only tonight it didn’t. She still hadn’t touched the drink in front of her,
although the smell was as lovely as always, an odor of lemons and mint, the very fragrance of ruin. Donna threw down half
of hers, then noticed Allison looking into her own glass.
“Just drink it. You know you’re going to. You wouldn’t have come upstairs if you weren’t. We can spend the next two hours
arguing about it or we can skip over that and get to the part of the evening where you loosen up and start enjoying your life
again.”
“Fourteen days,” Allie said.
“Not interested and not interesting,” Donna said. “Fourteen days of people wallowing in their fuck-ups. Competing with each
other to see who had the more awful life. Fourteen days of lousy coffee and worse doughnuts in church basements. Boring. If you plan to be boring, you can go do that somewhere else.”
Allie’s hand trembled when she lifted the glass to her lips. She meant to take just a sip, but Donna reached over, gripped
the bottom of the glass, and gave it a deeper tilt as Allie brought it to her mouth. Allie had to take two icy swallows to
keep from drowning.
“Remember when we all went as Scooby-Doo characters for Halloween and Van dressed up as Daphne? Fishnet tights, micro-miniskirt?
I think he was hoping you’d confuse me for him and want to do him.”
Allie felt herself shrivel inside with horror and shame.
It was almost like Donna knew and enjoyed sticking the knife in.
Then it occurred to Allison that of course Donna knew, she had always known that Allison wanted her.
Donna knew . . . and it pleased her. Disgusted her but pleased her as well. It felt good to
have so much power over another person.
“Are we going to talk about Gwen?” Allie said.
“Not when I’m this sober. And not when you’re this sober either.”
“I can fix that,” Allie said. She finished her drink and got up to pour another.
“I’d love to try a strap-on sometime,” Donna said. “Bend Colin over the back of the couch. He’d love that, you know. He’s
entirely free of inhibitions.”
It was the kind of thing she said to get under Allie’s skin, the sort of comment that usually made her pulse leap. Only for
some reason now it disheartened her, struck her as a crude attempt to get a reaction. Allie wondered how many hours she might
have to sit here before Donna passed out.
Donna said, “I would’ve liked having a cock. I deserved one. More than Van, anyway. How did he wind up the boy? I could throw a football. I could win a fight. I wanted to get on TV when I was a kid and I got on TV, goddamn
it. He never wanted anything. Besides you, which was kind of pathetic.”
“He wanted you to be okay. He wanted all of us to be okay.”
“Shit.” Donna looked away. “Don’t fucking do that. You know I don’t like to cry.”
“Did you cry for Gwen? After Colin told you it was going to be her?”
Donna banged her G and T down on the coffee table hard enough to slop some over the rim and shifted on the couch to face her.
Her cheeks were flushed and hectic. “Gwen was going to kill us, so we got to her first, and that’s all there is to it. She was going to kill us like she whacked those old people in the
old folks’ home.”
“It wasn’t an old folks’ home,” Allie said. “It was a hospice. And they were acts of mercy. I think on some level you know that.”
Donna ignored this. “She’s been working up to lashing out at us—at me—ever since Black Cricket.”
“You think she needed ten years to work up to it?”
“No. All she needed was a reason, and that motherfucking perv in a dress gave her one. Robin Fellows ought to go too, in my
opinion, but Colin is satisfied he won’t bother us again.”
“She,” Allie said, in a quiet voice.
“Oh, don’t start with the pronoun shit. Thing is, even if Gwen didn’t try to kill us—even if, like she said, she only wanted to destroy King Sorrow, and don’t ask me how the fuck she was going
to do that—she knows we’d wind up dead anyway. Without the dragon to protect us? There are people out there, the kind of people
who took me and my brother and tortured us—tortured your husband, Allie! I know you loved his heart even if you didn’t dig
his prick. They’d come for us again if we ever let the iguana wriggle off the leash. Or we’d get a visit from friends of the
people we destroyed. And you know what? I’m not sorry about anyone we wiped out. The world is a better place for it. Because
of us, no one has set off a dirty nuke to annihilate Jerusalem. No one has wiped out San Francisco in a chemical weapons attack.
We saved lives by getting them before they could get us. That’s what we signed up for.”
“I thought we signed up to help Arthur,” Allie said, but Donna didn’t seem to hear her. “Would you make Colin take it back—would
you let Gwen off the hook—if I got on my knees and begged?”
“You’d love to do that anyway,” Donna said, and snickered. “The idea probably gets you hot, you fuckin’ perv. Put the thought
out of your head. I’m a goddamn hestro—heterosecular woman. Your glass is empty. And so’s mine.”
Allie made them each another.
“Do you like me?” Donna asked her, without any warning at all.
“I love you,” Allie said.
“But do you like me?”
“Not much.”
“No,” Donna said, satisfied. “I don’t like me either.
It was the best part of being Van’s sister.
I dinn’t have to care about people. I knew he’d care about them for me.
I’d break it and he’d fix it.” She lowered her head and blinked and a fat tear fell.
“I en’t know why I’m horrible to you. Tell me one good thing about me. ”
“You’re braver than anyone I know,” Allie said.
Donna shook her head and looked at her with real sadness. “How can you be so wrong about everything?”
Donna’s breath hitched and a tear caught in her eyelashes and for the first time in her life, Allie thought, How did I wind up so fascinated by a boring drunk? A notion that gave her a sudden, inexplicable, wild stab of joy. Maybe she could be free of her. Maybe she could meet another
girl. Maybe she had already met another girl.
“Shh,” Allie heard herself saying, and she stroked Donna’s head, and Donna put her cheek in Allie’s lap.
“Want me to gobble your pussy?” Donna asked miserably, her voice clotted by tears. “I could, you know. If that’s really a
thing you need.”
“No, thank you,” Allie said. “That’s all right, darling. Just rest and feel better.”
“Oh-kay,” Donna said, sounding for all the world like a weepy child up past her bedtime.
She made an unhappy sound, twisted this way and that to get comfortable, and produced a wet, chesty burp. Five minutes later,
she began to snore. Allie had to reach carefully over her to set down her tonic water. It was after one in the morning, and
she was fifteen days sober. Had not put so much as a drop of gin in her glass all night.