Chapter 5. Alice
ALICE
In the gas station restroom, Alice lined the toilet-seat rim with paper towels, sat, and ripped open the pregnancy test. She held the stick in the palm of her hand and thought about the tests she’d taken for her pregnancies with Finn and James.
In her own bathroom, with Kyle there. Always, they’d been excited. How different from now.
It can’t be. It absolutely cannot be.
After she threw up at the basketball game, Finn ran off the court to see if she was okay. The assistant coach handed her a towel, and within seconds the janitor wheeled over a mop inside a bucket of gray sludgy water, which nearly made her sick again.
“I’m all right,” she’d assured Finn, and Kyle instructed him to get back in the game as he escorted her out of the gymnasium.
He wanted to take her to the nurse, but she insisted it was the stress of everything—maybe it was?
—and that she was feeling better already.
Kyle carried the duffel bag gingerly by the handle, zipping it up to hide the magazine before tossing it into the dumpster outside.
He cradled her elbow as he walked her to the car.
“You parked in the bus lane,” he said when they got to her minivan.
She held on to his hands. “I don’t want this to ruin the weekend,” she said. “Try to find out what happened, but we can have a bigger conversation with Finn after Thanksgiving.”
Kyle nodded and opened her door. He hugged her, but then someone at the far end of the parking lot called out, “Hi, Principal Williams!” and he pulled away and kissed her dryly on the forehead.
“I think the milk in my cereal this morning was off,” she said, and climbed into the car. “Or maybe it was all the goose poop at my parents’?”
“The goose poop?”
“Can you clean the walkway tonight?”
He brushed snow off her window. “I’ll more likely be shoveling if this keeps up.”
She looked up at the snow pouring from the gray sky. “Oh, right.”
“Try some Pepto. That’ll help.”
Alice drove to the pharmacy in the town over, where instead of purchasing Pepto-Bismol, she bought the pregnancy test, which she planned to take in the bathroom there until she opened the door and found shit smeared across the stall walls.
Instead, hands shaking, she drove to the well-maintained gas station she’d used when she was pregnant with James and constantly had to pee.
She had spent the last half hour eager to take the test and get the results over with, but now she sat on the edge of the toilet seat, elbows on her knees, chin resting in her upturned palm, nervous to go through with it.
Finally, she released her bladder, then placed the stick on the sink counter, buttoning her jeans as she watched the unmistakable pink lines—had tests always been this fast?—emerge to tell her what she already knew.
What had she done?
This was all her fault. The one—the one!
—pill she’d missed when her prescription ran out the month before.
Kyle hadn’t been keen on her going on birth control in the first place.
They’d had to pay for the prescriptions themselves because their health insurance through Saint Mary’s didn’t cover the cost of contraception.
He’d agreed only after James was born, and Alice’s preeclampsia was so serious that the doctor said she could have had a stroke.
Alice assumed missing the pill didn’t matter, considering they hadn’t had sex in so long anyway.
Then, Halloween. Her belly full of lasagna and candy and all that.
Kyle had looked adorable in the Eeyore costume he’d had to wear after losing a bet with the boys.
She still couldn’t remember if they’d kissed.
She cradled the test in her hands, dumbfounded.
I don’t want this .
She closed her eyes and tried to calm her breathing. She couldn’t believe what she was thinking—what she was feeling —in such a knee-jerk way.
I don’t want this .
Okay, okay, okay , she told herself. Slow down.
She splashed cold water onto her face and neck, then sat back on the toilet and lowered her head between her knees. Blood pulsed in her temples.
Just as she was on the brink of a new life. Just as the boys were getting older and more independent. She would be consumed. No, not consumed. Obliterated.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there when she heard a knock.
“Sorry,” she said to the door. She stood in front of the mirror. The light in the bathroom was brutal. Or was it? Her auburn hair looked like a halo of frizz. She kneaded the red spot on her chin and felt a hard lump she knew would be a full-on cystic pimple by evening.
There was no garbage can in the bathroom, so she stuffed the test back into the box and then into her bag. “Sorry,” she said again to an older man in a mechanic’s jumper as she opened the door and rushed back to her car.
On the dashboard, she found a Post-it note from Kyle that she hadn’t noticed before, reminding her to pick up the dry cleaning.
His handwriting was atrocious, and she sometimes wondered if that was intentional, to hide all his misspelled words.
She tossed the Post-it onto the passenger seat and thought about how, when they first started dating, he used to leave love notes in her coat pocket.
Kyle had been Alice’s first serious boyfriend.
They were introduced by mutual friends when she was just out of college, working in marketing for a textile company and living in a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates in Brooklyn Heights.
He was in his first year of graduate school.
On their first date, he explained that he was studying education, because, as a kid, his undiagnosed dyslexia had made school miserable.
This was where he knew he could make a difference.
From the beginning, she admired his discipline.
He woke at the same time every morning, even on the weekends, to run.
He was close to his family, but not so close that it took over their lives.
She’d stopped attending mass regularly in college, but he went every Friday night, and almost immediately after they met, she started to join him.
For Kyle, it was about faith, but for her it was about the rituals.
The collective worship. The sense of belonging.
Even the smell of frankincense. Mass once again became part of the rhythm of her life, and it was comforting.
Afterward, they’d go out for sushi or ramen on Montague Street and then back to his studio apartment in Red Hook to watch a movie.
While her roommates drank Cosmopolitans they couldn’t afford at bars in Tribeca, hoping to meet a guy in finance, Alice couldn’t have been happier with her and Kyle’s quiet life. It was what she’d always wanted.
At twenty-five, she knew everyone thought she was marrying too young, but she didn’t care.
She loved him. She hadn’t expected to get pregnant so quickly, but that didn’t bother her either.
Her parents had met and married in their early thirties, and Nora was in her mid-forties by the time Maggie came around.
In the early days of her marriage, Alice had been excited to throw herself into the role of mother and wife, but that was not how she felt now.
A third child as she neared forty had not been part of the plan.
It wasn’t until she arrived back at the Folly that she could calm herself down.
She applied lipstick in the rearview mirror, combed her hair, and snuck around to the side of the house to stuff the pharmacy bag and the test deep into the garbage bin.
She swore she spotted the raccoon her father had been going on about all week scurrying away as she approached.
When she walked through the front door, James was there to greet her in hysterics because Finn had informed him that one of his most valuable Pokémon cards was in fact a fake. Her father followed after James with the question, “What’s for dinner tonight?”
“Pizza?” she said.
“That’ll do!”
“And your feral friend is out by the garbage again,” Alice said.
Her father groaned. “That’s it.” He reached for his jacket on the coatrack. “I knew the hot sauce and Epsom salt weren’t going to work.”
“What are you going to do?” Alice asked, but by then, her father was heading out the front door, James had returned to get her opinion on the counterfeit card, and her mother was calling for her from the kitchen.