Chapter 16. Alice #2
Inside, everyone dispersed. As Father Kelly instructed—finally offering something useful, if not macabre—Alice used vinegar to wash the ash from her hands.
She kicked off her heels and unbuttoned her pants, her belly swelling like a balloon.
She collapsed onto the leather sofa in the sitting room and closed her eyes, which stung with exhaustion.
When she woke an hour later, the house was dark, and her temples pounded.
She found Kyle outside on the back porch, rocking in the wicker chair and drinking a beer.
She climbed onto his lap and pressed her face into the crook of his neck, breathing in the cologne she hadn’t smelled on him since their wedding.
That was the last time she’d seen Topher.
He’d returned a few weeks before the rehearsal dinner, his skin weathered from a winter on a fishing boat in Maine, but his face no longer hidden beneath a scraggly beard.
Their mother disapproved of the beard, and Alice was touched when he’d shaved it off for the occasion.
After their honeymoon, Kyle hung the wind chime on the fire escape outside their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
A few weeks later, their landlord complained about the tinkling from the shells, and they removed the chime and stored it in the box of things they planned to take when they moved out of the city.
“Have you eaten?” Kyle asked her. Aside from a plate of oatmeal cookies, they’d mostly ignored the food platters covering the island in the kitchen. No one was hungry. No one had the energy to make room in the refrigerator for another casserole.
“No,” she said.
He placed his hand on her belly. “Let me make you something,” he said.
He shifted her to the side and went to stand, but she nudged him back. “Stay for a few more minutes,” she said.
They settled back into each other and listened to the waves they could no longer see.
Kyle pressed her head, still throbbing, to his chest. She was drained from all the crying, but her eyes welled again with hot tears.
The chair creaked as he rocked them back and forth, and Alice looked at the sky, starless from clouds.
“Cait’s moving to London,” she said. “For a job and Bram. I think they’re getting married.”
“Really?” Kyle said. “I didn’t realize they were that serious.”
“I didn’t either,” Alice said. “She’s leaving in September.”
“That’s soon.”
Alice sat up. “Would you ever consider moving to Port Haven? To be closer to my parents. Now with the baby and everything?”
Kyle had just finished his master’s in education, and they’d planned on moving to Asheville, North Carolina, where he’d gone to summer camp as a kid.
“I would,” he said.
Relief flooded Alice. She wasn’t used to Kyle being so flexible.
Of the two, she’d always been the one to make concessions, and the reversal didn’t feel natural.
She was grateful, but asking this of him was hard—almost but not enough to make her backpedal.
Immediately, she let herself imagine breaking their lease in Brooklyn and finding a small house near her parents, where their first child would be born that spring.
Maybe this would make the unbearable bearable, a new measure for life.
She lowered her head to his chest again, and her mind shifted to the question that had been troubling her all week. She held her belly. “What if I carry it somewhere inside me?” she asked.
“Carry what?”
“Topher’s ability to just—” She stopped.
Someone turned on a light inside the house, and they heard murmurings, the tea kettle whistle.
“Your brother had a lot to deal with,” Kyle said. “A lot that he never learned how to deal with. That’s not you.”
Alice nodded. She did not clarify her question. Pregnant, it scared her too much to say it aloud.
Kyle patted her thigh. “Let me make you a tuna fish sandwich,” he said.
“I can’t eat tuna fish.”
They walked inside together, but then Kyle helped her father with the firewood, so Alice made her own sandwich from the chicken and rolls Father Kelly had brought yesterday.
Instead of satisfying an appetite she didn’t know she had, the sandwich woke her hunger, and she assembled a second one before she finished the first. After, she made her mother a sugar-and-butter sandwich and a cup of tea and headed upstairs.
In the hallway, she passed Cait, who had changed out of her black dress and into jeans and a sweater, her makeup refreshed.
They walked by each other without a word until Cait said, “Your pants are unzipped,” and marched down the stairs.
Behind Maggie’s door, Alice heard music. She placed the tea on the floor, plate on top to keep it warm, and fastened her zipper as she knocked. When Maggie told her to come in, she stepped inside and found her sister sprawled across her bed reading.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
Maggie snapped her book shut and gave a thumbs-down.
“Yeah, me, too.” Alice leaned against the door frame. “Do you want to talk?”
She worried how finding Topher would impact her younger sister. She’d already spoken to her about meeting with a counselor back at school, but Maggie hadn’t shared anything with her about the experience.
“I don’t want to ever walk by his room again,” Maggie said.
“I don’t either.”
“Why do you think he did it?”
“I don’t know,” Alice said.
“And why here?”
Alice stared at the reflection of herself and Maggie in the window. “I don’t know,” she said again.
She’d been asking herself these questions since last week, when Father Kelly called from the hospital to say he had bad news.
Her gut told her it was impulsive. Even the detective’s investigation said there was no evidence Topher had planned his death in advance.
But Alice didn’t want to say that now, because she knew Maggie believed she could have made a difference had she arrived home earlier.
And maybe she could have, but it hadn’t been Maggie’s job to keep their brother alive.
Alice had worshipped her brother when they were kids, but as they got older, they grew apart, as seemed to happen with most of Topher’s relationships.
Over the past few years, Alice avoided answering most of his calls—a call, as opposed to an email or his signature postcard, usually meant he was asking for money.
He hadn’t called that afternoon, but had he, there was a good chance she wouldn’t have answered.
“I keep imagining him like a wounded animal,” Maggie said. “You know how they come home to die—”
A burp bubbled in Alice’s chest, and though she tried to swallow it, a loud belch released from her mouth. “My God,” she said, clutching her throat, which burned with indigestion.
Maggie laughed. “I can’t believe I’m going to be an aunt.”
“You are,” Alice said. “And Kyle and I are moving back to Port Haven.”
“That’ll help Mom,” Maggie said. “All of it will help.”
Alice hoped she was right.
The shades were drawn and the lights were off in her parents’ bedroom when Alice walked in, but her mother was awake. Alice placed the tea and sandwich on the bedside table and turned on the lamp.
“Thank you,” her mother said, and she adjusted herself against the pillows. She hadn’t changed out of her skirt suit, and dark circles of mascara made her look like she had two black eyes.
“How are you?” Alice asked.
Her mother closed the bible that had been spread across her chest and placed it on the bed. “Father Kelly gave me a list of scriptures to read, but—” She shook her head. “Cait had a point. Topher may be at peace, but we’re all in hell, aren’t we?”
“Maybe,” Alice said. It was easier for her to admit this when her mother said it rather than Cait.
She sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the picture on the nightstand.
The photo was of Alice and her siblings standing on the beach as kids.
At the bottom of the frame, The Folly’s Crew was written in a sailor’s rope.
She placed the picture back and turned to her mother.
“But we still have each other,” she said.
Nora sat up and took a sip of her tea. “You know, after Maggie was born and I had the four of you, I used to count the years ahead to when you’d all be grown.”
She had shared this story before, or some version of it, but she said it now as though for the first time, and anyway, Alice heard it differently. Not as a funny anecdote about the exhaustions of motherhood but as a confession of sorts.
Nora blew her nose in a handkerchief. “I even wrote out a timeline—” She reached for her bible again and opened it to the back cover.
Alice leaned closer to look. “All of your ages listed next to the year. I would refer to it when things were hard.” She blew her nose again.
“Isn’t that silly? I thought things would get… oh, I don’t know, easier, I suppose.”
Alice tried to see how far the timeline went, but her mother closed the book.
What Alice hoped to find, she wasn’t sure.
Her mother had always said you’re only as happy as your least happy child, but was that really true?
What happens when there’s no possibility of that child ever being happy again?
The sound of a car pulling into the pebbled driveway distracted her from the question, and they both turned toward the window.
Alice slid off the bed and pulled the curtain to the side, and she watched Cait approach an SUV.
The driver, a man Alice didn’t recognize at first but then realized was Luke Larkin, got out and embraced her.
Then Luke opened the passenger-side door, and Cait hopped in.
A moment later, they pulled out of the driveway.
“Who is it?” Nora asked.
“No one,” Alice said as they drove off. What was her sister doing with Luke when she’d just announced she was moving to London to be with Bram? “It must have been the wrong house. They’ve left.”
Sitting in the foyer now and watching Cait on the back porch with Luke, Alice suddenly understood why she’d invited him to dinner.
This didn’t surprise her as much as she’d have expected. She was a master at not knowing what she knew.