Читать книгу Private Means - Cree LeFavour - Страница 7

Spotting the phone charger, she unplugged it from the wall by the nightstand and threw it onto the bed where the hard, white cube clattered against the fiberglass rim of the tennis racket. Tossing orange swim trunks she found hanging inside the closet in the same general direction, Alice again scanned the space before leaving the battered leather weekend bag for Peter to stuff, zip, and carry. Entering the kitchen, she pressed her bare foot to the side of the half case of 2018 Domaines Ott Bandol and slid it across the scratched oak floorboards to the door.

She’d offered a reward. Would she be forced to demand a photo of Maebelle sitting on that day’s newspaper? Would the Post be too tawdry? She should insist on the Times. The insanity of it. This wasn’t Somalia or Afghanistan or the Philippines; it was Manhattan’s Upper West Side—and Maebelle was a dog.

Standing at the kitchen counter, waiting for her husband to move toward the door but not daring to rush him—he was quick to snap lately—she thought of the dog’s future face. Unnaturally aged, the muzzle grizzled and eyes flat, the geriatric canine profile persisted in her mind. It was nothing like the image on the LOST DOG flyer featuring Maebelle’s eager, adorable mug, her nose practically touching the camera lens.

LOST DOG

$2,000 REWARD

NO QUESTIONS ASKED

Do NOT Chase

Last seen May 17th in Riverside Park

at 97th St. Please call:

914-219-8331

Microchip Number: 4689654234566

No, she would not be putting up these posters on every available surface in the neighborhood five years from now. It had been just over a week. When would she give up? In two months? A year? How long was long enough?

He’d left his office door open. Two rooms away she could discern the distinctive inflection of her husband’s official doctor voice on the phone.

Yes, Wellbutrin 300 XL, and the patient does not want the generic … No. DAW, dispense as written.

Waiting for him to finish the call, she remembered taking her twin daughters, Bette and Emile, to a 4-H fair upstate when their chubby legs were just sturdy enough to walk in a crowd—maybe three or four years old. Biting her cuticles, the ragged skin around her nails desperate for a manicure, she recalled the heat of that dusty August day as they waited in line for funnel cakes. She’d been transfixed by a photograph of a teenager on a LOST CHILD poster. The girl’s face was somehow off, but she hadn’t been able to identify what was wrong with it until she read the fine print below the photograph. Her name was Kaylee, and she had been taken from that same 4-H fair. She’d disappeared at just four years old; the photo on the poster was a computer rendering of the girl at fourteen, her nose transformed from a fleshy button into a bony structure, her jawline formed into a too-perfect half oval like the sharp end of an egg, her eyes set deep in their sockets beneath well-defined eyebrows. The artist had even glossed her with lipstick—or at least it looked as if she were wearing something on her unsmiling cherry mouth. In the bottom left corner Alice had studied the then decade-old original image, circulated when the little girl had disappeared. She could have been Bette or Emile’s classmate.

At the time, Alice had thought they should have done a better job with the fourteen-year-old face—made her prettier without cheapening her with makeup—if only to offer the parents the insufficient solace of holding in their minds a more pleasing image of their lost daughter. Maybe they never thought of her as a teen. Perhaps it didn’t matter—she would always remain the girl they’d known for just four years, with her babyish soft, brown curls and pouty lips.

Lost in her thoughts, she turned to see Peter gathering his keys and wallet from the tray in the hallway, weekend bag in hand.

All set? she asked as cheerfully as possible.

I think so. You sure you don’t want to come? It would be good for you.

I can’t. I have to keep looking. As she said it, she felt her throat tighten, the grief of the loss strangling her next words. Peter mercifully broke the silence she created.

Okay. I’ll see you Monday night. Love you. And with that he leaned in for a goodbye kiss.

Alice moved into it but rather than kissing him properly turned her head at the last moment, aiming her lips for his freshly shaved cheek to dodge direct, possibly wet contact with his mouth. The fruity potency of his drugstore shampoo fresh on his wet hair as they made brief contact brought back long afternoons reading fat Russian novels while sucking sour apple Jolly Ranchers.

Peter’s absence, as the door’s lock clicked behind him, immediately inundated Alice’s senses. It was as if a draft had cooled the apartment. In its wake, the atmosphere thinned, the room’s barometric pressure seeming to drop, taking Alice to a curiously open, airy space in which all that remained was her now-familiar canine grief and the promising prospect of a thoroughly chilled Chablis.

Trying to focus on the immediate physical pleasure of the crisp, cool wine filling her mouth, Alice opened the BBC app on her phone and woke her laptop. She recalled her grad school days as she tasted the minerality of the expensive wine. When they’d met, Peter had seemed old—and already a doctor. She’d been practically squatting in a decrepit studio apartment in Harlem, paying for her steady diet of yogurt, apples, peanut butter, and rice cakes on student loans and a tiny stipend from Columbia. Now she was navigating past the worries in her Google email tab to the pleasures of Poshmark, Luxury Closet, and Thredup. Scrolling through shirts, pants, bags, and sweaters, she added items to her various shopping bags. No sale would be completed, no shipping terms selected, no boxes ticked to match billing and shipping addresses. The harmless recreational activity would not cost her a cent.

At fifty-one, she was well into the pitiless softening of her body as time conspired with gravity to ruthlessly work over every cell of skin, cartilage, and muscle. Just in the past year she’d observed the fine crepe of the skin on her thighs. It reminded her of seersucker. The dewy plumpness of her nineteen-year-old daughters’ legs, arms, and cheeks came on as a surprise, their creamy beauty and ripe potential years removed from her own blighted physicality.

She’d been careless in the sun. Patches of liver-colored scale covered her arms and chest while the rest of her body was lightly doodled with odd freckles, cherry angiomas, and moles. Fifteen years of hair dye had resulted in a shade much lighter than her original brunette as the streaks of what had begun as highlights came to dominate the whole. It was no accident; her colorist had taken pity on her, incrementally lightening larger and larger swaths to cover the gray, manipulating the powerful chemicals to keep the effect as far removed as the art allowed from the brassy orange hue that crassly announced its artificiality under the fluorescent light of every New York City bathroom and subway car. For all of this, Alice was still pretty, with a wild, rangy look that matched her Northern California roots.

Running her fingers through her hair from the center part back, she cursed her lack of mental command as she rubbed her thumb and index finger together to release a stray hair. One more down, she thought, as the fine, expensively colored strand dropped to the floor.

If the dog had been there, she would have been in her lap, staring up at her, ears forward, listening. Alice could practically feel her pushing her cool black nose against her forearm. The dog had become an extension of herself the way the twins had as infants. Since that time, with the exception of her daughters, she’d failed at intimacy; her closeness to the dog was proof of this. There was nothing safer or more certain than the animal’s affection. When she wept she’d laugh at herself for whispering, It’s okay. Shhhhhh, kissing the dog’s face, ears, back, and belly as if it were the animal that needed comforting. The dog was never in a mood when she walked back in the apartment. Rather, she was consistently met by the outsize greeting of an animal losing her cool entirely as she whined and licked and wriggled in her arms. Coming home to the empty apartment was an affront.

Alice envisioned the flood of oxytocin all the kisses released, the hormone irrigating her brain, plumping her neurotransmitters with serotonin and dopamine. No wonder she experienced the loss of the dog as a physical assault. She longed to bury her face in Maebelle’s fur and inhale. As she sat, she tried to elicit the experience, the faint scent of Fritos or even, more incredibly, the traces of vanilla butter cookie—a soft, rich scent surely impossible for a dog to emit, especially one that traveled at ground level through the filth of New York City.

Peter’s right foot danced left-right, right-left between the brake and the accelerator. An abandoned seltzer bottle, subject to the abrupt changes in momentum, rattled over the filthy rubber mat on the passenger side, the muffled clank of glass against the metal seat adjuster passing through the car’s interior as background noise, as unidentifiable as inert gas. The bottle repeated its limited range of motion with each stop-and-go of the Memorial Day–weekend migration up the edge of the island as tens of thousands of drivers and their passengers huddled in their cars at dusk, united by the tiresome effort required to escape Manhattan.

Had he forgotten something, misspoken, or embarrassed himself? Was it the cool goodbye to Alice? Or maybe just the heavy traffic? Twenty minutes passed before Peter identified the source of his uneasiness in the noise and motion of the bottle. By this point, his nerves had been so played they erupted into a fluid rage that even he recognized as entirely out of proportion to the irritant. Without releasing his seatbelt, he leaned his six-foot-three frame sideways, his long arm effortlessly retrieving the errant bottle. Ruthlessly jamming it into the cup holder, he resisted the childish urge to hurl it out the window, manfully denying himself the satisfaction of smashing it to bits on the pavement.

Focusing on the shameful expanse of faded silver paint covering the pitted metal of his 2011 Toyota Highlander, he breathed deeply, consciously mesmerizing himself with the idea of glowing red brake lights stretching for miles in his wake, a mirror image of those before him. With his well-preserved head of dark hair, shirt sleeves rolled past the elbow, khaki pants cuffed, and driving loafers, Peter tried to relax into the drive. The proletarian dignity of his well-used car against the piercing glint of the freshly acquired Lexuses, Land Rovers, and BMWs jockeying for position around him gave him a taste of self-righteous modesty. He enjoyed the aggressive game of chicken required as cars closed in on him, bumpers hugging in an effort to gain or prevent a car length’s advantage.

After twenty minutes of spirited play, he knifed the nose of the big car left, breaking free of the mess exiting onto I-95/George Washington Bridge by veering onto the shoulder to avoid a Mercedes SUV blocking the far left lane. The driver had either genuinely decided to exit at the last moment or, more likely, chosen to beat the line by going around the piled-up cars by using the less congested third lane, then cutting in at the last moment.

Asshole, Peter muttered, his righteous irritation resting effortlessly next to the knowledge that he wasn’t above such sleazy tricks himself. Upright in the passenger seat of the errant Mercedes, a large black Labrador retriever sat looking as patient as its breed demanded, and yet Peter thought he detected a vague disgust with the undignified tactics of its chauffeur. The sight of the dog brought Maebelle to mind.

A car—any car—could have crippled her or, for that matter, crushed the three hundred–plus bones in her body, flattening her puny twelve pounds into a ciabatta-like round. Conceivably, she was no more than a furry heap on Riverside Drive or Broadway—but then Alice would have already discovered her. With the interminable walking and looking she’d done in the past eight days how could she not have found her body? Maybe a Staten Island landfill—if that was even where garbage went these days—was her likely end? She was just small enough that the massive rotating brushes fronting the ubiquitous New York City Sanitation Department street sweepers could have trapped her body, the neat, robotic little vehicle suctioning her into its dark metal belly where her weight would compress the foul mess of plastic bags, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers into a cozy nest.

Peter wanted the dog back. He dreaded telling his daughters. He should sue the fucking dog-walking service—yes, he would. The increasing speed of his car as it hurtled down the first open stretch of the Saw Mill Parkway energized the prospect of the great sum of money he’d win in judgment against the pricks at the doggie dot-com. The thought of revenge and physical speed proved an intoxicating combination, flooding him with an expiatory pleasure he hadn’t experienced in months.

The absence of Alice’s mournful, fidgety presence in the passenger seat freed his mind to drift. Peter had done his best to distract her from the dog, although he hadn’t been able to convince her to leave the city for the weekend. She’d chosen to stay, to search for Maebelle and attend a pet-related meeting of some sort. He hoped he’d managed to conceal his relief that she’d chosen not to come. He’d done his best to make a show of his desire for her company just as he’d made an effort to be sympathetic in the present crisis.

How bored he was of Alice’s singular preoccupation. She’d been a wreck—doing nothing but search since the dog walker somehow had allowed Maebelle to slip out of her collar during a group walk and then, of all brainless things, allowed her to disappear down Riverside Drive Park amid the nepeta, drooping bleeding heart branches, and ragged, overblown irises. What kind of half-wit did that? The dog’s legs were all of four inches long. How fast could she possibly get away? The only grace he could identify in the situation was that he hadn’t been the one holding the other end of the leash.

Alice joked that she’d replaced the children with the dog. More like replaced their lost years of babyhood with the dog, Peter thought. Somehow she’d managed to further infantilize an inherently dependent toy of a beast. He liked the dog—even loved it, whatever that meant—but in the end it was a not overly bright mammal they’d chosen to coddle under their roof, treating it as if it were a small, precious human. Sure, his cool attachment was roughed up by Maebelle’s undeniable cuteness, a cuteness that both irritated and charmed him. A Dachshund-Chihuahua mutt, she had a compelling presence, some portion of which was due to big, soft eyes outlined in black. The liquid intelligence of these slightly protruding orbs framed a black gumdrop nose on a background of trim, tan fur.

He would have liked the dog better if he could have reconciled his disdainful jealousy. As it was, he suspected his response to the dog’s presence indicated some unresolved unpleasantness about himself. But damn it. The thing was continually on Alice—sleeping curled up in her bed, on her lap, trailing her around the apartment. Wildly annoyed by the constant kissing and petting, he didn’t dare acknowledge the deficiency her connection to the dog signaled. In fact, he would have been concerned for her psychological state if he hadn’t been quite so put off by the indignity of her puerile preoccupation.

The likelihood of finding the dog diminished every day. People stole dogs—especially exceptionally cute dogs—just as they stole money, jewelry, or whatever else they could grab. Without an owner, a dog was an object, as anonymous and desirable as crisp hundred-dollar bills blowing down the sidewalk. If only Maebelle were ugly or vicious or not quite so greedy for food—she’d practically inhale even a cheap treat out of a stranger’s hand. When he’d foolishly made this point to Alice, all she could manage was an enraged, That’s bullshit! What a mistake—did he never learn? If only he could practice what he knew. For a psychiatrist he could be surprisingly tactless.

On the first evening he’d helped distribute flyers. You couldn’t walk a one-mile radius around their apartment without seeing three dozen of the things.

If someone had her, they’d have seen the posters and decided to keep her anyway; the longer a thief kept her the more attached they’d become and the more unforgivable and suspicious it would be to return her. Alice must know this. She must be despairing. He thought about turning the car around to be with her—but didn’t.

The wine finally whittling at the burr of her thoughts, Alice read descriptions and assessed fabric content before selecting her size. Partial to leafy green and navy blue, cautious of dressing as a lamb when she knew she was close to mutton and yet not ready for Eileen Fisher–baggy old lady, her fifty-one years compounded the shopping challenge her considerable height posed. Even if she wasn’t actually buying, the clothes must potentially fit if the process were to give her any satisfaction. The virtual acquisition required less than possession but more than pure abstraction. The clothes and shoes and bags must be plausible purchases were she to decide to purchase them—always a possibility. But not even wine, an empty apartment, the tiresome BBC drama of Brexit unpardonably mixed with the devastating news of another Ebola outbreak overlain with repeated clicks of not-quite-complete acquisition could keep her from thinking about the dog.

How reckless it would be to pay a ransom, even with proof of life. After all, Alice thought, what is a reward for the return of a lost dog but an offering to pay a ransom. Sure, it was an extra inducement to give back a dog someone had found and then decided to keep. What it wasn’t was a way to motivate people to search for the dog. As tempted as she was by the possibility that it would speed Maebelle’s return, Alice feared her engagement in the shadowy economy. Paying a reward would complicate the happy ending she hoped for, clouding the reunion with the moral responsibility for motivating future abductors.

Her very ability to offer the reward when others could not inflamed her well-developed sense of existential hypocrisy, of how claustrophobically fucked the world had become. This claustrophobic feeling, since the girls left in the fall, had driven her to fill her waking moments with work, a realm in which she could apply facts gleaned from her research to arrive at conclusions that would advance knowledge. Knowledge. That seemed to be the one remaining absolute good in her world. The rest was too messy, awful, and complicated to order or contain.

Although Peter had made it clear he thought the ransom a waste of money—although one that he believed would ultimately not be spent and therefore not a waste at all—they could afford the $2,000. (But was it enough?) Peter had been hauling in a steady stream of patients for more than twenty years now, cramming them into neat forty-five-minute blocks from 7 AMto 6 PM five days a week. At the current rate of $400 an hour, minus the office rent and malpractice insurance, the take was enough to keep them comfortably afloat. Still, they were not above the woes and sorrows of their intellectual working class as they spent all they had on their European cheese, organic Icelandic yogurt, grass-fed meat, plus mortgage, maintenance, and college tuition. They didn’t even have a country house. Anywhere else they would have been flat rich; in New York City, they got by.

Alice dreamed she had her own money. What a humiliation it was not to contribute to their household income—sometimes she wished she’d never stayed home with the girls or that she’d been more aggressive in keeping up in her field. She’d been burdened by juggling their money even if she didn’t make any of it—Peter refused to log in to their bank accounts just as he refused to discuss bills, savings, or budgets. Even if she could afford the Gucci black leather open-toe heels with their playful silver horse-bit buckle or the Dolce & Gabbana ankle-boot stilettos in camel eel skin she’d added to her basket, where would she wear them? She’d lost track of herself entirely in becoming a thing she’d never dreamed she’d be. As much as the girls were everything to her, it was a dubious title she’d earned: mother. Worse, she’d traded without realizing she was making a lousy bargain. She’d never even know what she’d traded for.

She could have farmed the girls out—practically everyone in New York had a nanny. But she’d chosen not to. Sure, she’d completed her dissertation, she had her PhD—the girls were still infants then—but her progress had slowed as the reality of securing a position in her field grew more remote. Over the years she’d written articles and won a few small grants, all the while circling the big prize: a grant from the Earth Institute at Columbia. Now, the lost dog a distraction, she was behind; she needed to complete the application this year, to rush herself to the market before her insights and data grew stale and irrelevant.

The urgency of it had slammed her the moment she returned from California to settle the girls at Berkeley. Doing it would require unyielding discipline. Maybe she could convince Peter to prescribe the latest antidepressant for her, something that would help her motivation and focus: Cymbalta? Levomilnacipran? Wellbutrin? Was she depressed? She wasn’t sure. Wasn’t everyone? Too bad Peter would never do it.

His father, Dr. Jeremy Nutting, had made the mistake of dispensing drugs to family, diagnosing every relative’s ailment from the flu to broken toes to bipolar. As a GP he had claimed expertise in all fields, and when it came to his family he didn’t hesitate to deploy his authority to determine the best course. No great harm had been done, but Peter swore he would never wield his authority in the family as his father had, lording prescriptions for Valium over his mother, dispensing antibiotics to the family dog. Alice would have to see her own GP if she wanted any meds, and even then she might be referred to a psychopharmacologist. To hell with it, she thought, pouring herself another glass of wine.

Closing her laptop, she stared out the window toward the Hudson, fixing her gaze on the West Side Highway where a steady stream of cars came into and disappeared from view only to be replaced by more of the same colors and shapes. The numbing flow of vehicles moved north at what she thought of as smoking speed—slow enough to light a cigarette with the window down, the smoke swirling easily around the car’s interior, the burning cigarette resting in the left hand halfway out the driver’s side window. Rising, Alice retrieved the hidden pack of Camel Blues from a pouch in her purse, forced open the heavy window in the living room, and lit up. Smoking quickly, she drew hard between sips of wine, extending her hand out into the humid evening breeze between drags. She had three days to air the place out before Peter returned; she needed only twenty-four hours.

It was the day after losing Maebelle when, passing a bodega on Broadway while taping up flyers, she’d popped in for a coffee. Standing at the counter, intently focused on looking for Maebelle, her eyes had been attracted by the blue, black, red, green, and silver rows of cigarette packs arrayed neatly behind the register. It was the first pack she’d bought in fifteen years. They weren’t even Camel Lights now—they were Camel Blues. Whatever they were called, maintaining the virtues of her nonsmoking mommy days had no appeal. She’d forgotten how much she missed it. To hell with it, she thought, lighting another off the first.

Indulging herself in a tasty bit of magic as she smoked, she considered the idea that she’d lost Maebelle because she loved her too much—that the loss of her was cosmic retribution, punishment of a righteous force for loving the dog as one should love only the divine. Fortunately, Alice didn’t believe in God. If she believed in anything it was quantum physics, which, as it turned out, was an awful lot like believing in God. If Alice needed confirmation of the bizarre and unknowable universe, she’d found it in her work. To be a biophysicist was to admit that the physical world could not be explained; the ordering principles of the universe exceeded the intellectual capacity of the human brain. It was humbling. On the most minute level the physical world defied all laws. String theory was a framework for understanding matter that contradicted physical reality. It was magic—better than any show and entirely incompatible with fixed Newtonian principles of time, space, and movement. Although he never said as much, she suspected Peter viewed her concession to universal disorder as a form of infantile magical thinking and a possible sign of depression.

If only, Alice thought, the loss of the dog were punishment for something. What a relief that would be. As it was, her disappearance was a senseless mistake. No good could come of it, no lesson learned. It was simply another void, leaving her empty and bitter. The patina of stray dog hairs stuck to her pants, blankets, coats, and sweaters, the abandoned food dish, dry water bowl, and leash hanging by the door reminded her of her dead mother’s clothes. Mrs. Foster had amassed a grand wardrobe. It was all Alice’s now, though she could never wear the clothes without feeling she was borrowing them without permission—an impossibility given that her mother had been dead five years. But some essence buried in the fibers of the garments kept Alice from wearing the clothes, as if the warp of time and space was animated by their use, the electrical energy of a body in contact with the fabric bringing her prickly mother back to life.

Back at her desk, she forced her eyes to focus beyond the cars to the broad, dark expanse of the river where she followed the line of a massive tanker breaking the glassy surface of the water as it passed lazily downriver. The impotent tanker, propelled by a childish-looking red tugboat emblazoned with a giant M, nudged the hulking mass toward the open ocean, working against the incoming pull of the evening tide. As they slid into obscurity she noticed the traffic had stopped.

Gazing at the stopped cars, her wineglass sweating by her side, a tableau of select cars were frozen in view. Alice felt a flash of Peter’s pitiful frustration at being locked in. Rationally, the worst calamity of the traffic-clogging accident that had any connection to Peter was the rudeness of making their friends wait dinner. No, she told herself, I won’t indulge the ridiculous. It’s not my accident—not Peter’s accident—quite possibly not an accident at all. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to unlucky strangers.

Alice tried to think nice thoughts for the imagined victims … hoping the injuries weren’t too serious, nobody had died, they had excellent insurance. But the persistence of the thought that it could be Peter and worse, much worse, the sickening flash that she wanted it to be Peter, wouldn’t go away. No. Not that. Alice knew the monstrous fantasy was just a crazy reverse psychology trick of the mind when you envision the worst and then think you want something terrible to happen because you think it—the mind’s prohibition against the thought forcing what is feared into the foreground. How many times had she rehearsed the grisly play, imagining Peter or the girls or all three of them, dead? When they were on school buses, city streets, subways, or planes the thought flickered, back again as fast as she could think it away.

Most likely it’s just a system breakdown, thought Alice. One tiny fluctuation in traffic flow—a tailgater braking abruptly, a lousy driver tapping the brakes too frequently, someone going too slowly while texting—creating, as it would, a disproportionately large effect on the whole system. The strength of one tiny variable to change the whole from within was more alchemy than science. Ah well, thought Alice. Peter’s probably already past the bridge, well on his way up the Saw Mill, the slowdown in his wake.

Swallowing another great gulp of wine, Alice pushed her phone aside, as if a few more inches would help her resist the urge to call him. Entering rooms having forgotten why she was there, locking herself out, going out for the day without her phone—these actions resulted from the relentless narrative of what she was thinking frequently getting in the way of what she was doing—or was supposed to be doing. Except when she was working. When focused on the internal dynamics of a murmuration she could deliberately bring thought and action together.

The complexities of the liquid movement of massive flocks of starlings as they collectively contracted, expanded, and twisted in eerily grandiose order never failed to hold her attention. Alice applied mathematical formulas and computer models in an attempt to explain how the birds coordinated their movements with such astonishing precision. The rapidity of communication between the masses of birds perplexed science. It was a mystery not yet unraveled in spite of the supercomputers that could crunch set upon set of numbers in three dimensions. Alice’s work explained the surprising phenomenon using precise mathematical equations while still leaving a great deal to poetry. Her love of data acted as a counter-measure to the disorder of her messy room, moth-bitten sweater, unwashed hair, slightly redolent armpits, and filthy feet. Maybe that was why the fine balance between chaos and order attracted her as much as it explained her boredom with maintaining the physical details of her environment.

Grabbing a bag of apricots from the counter, she ran a tub and slid in. There was something inexplicably bewitching about eating a dozen apricots while soaking in a tub of cool water. Her sweat leaked into the chilly black water of the unlit bathroom to mingle with the porcelain along with the pits she carelessly dropped like pebbles between her spread legs. She ate the fruit greedily, biting into them one after the other. Some, soft and sweet with juice, made a mess of her chin. Others, tart and hard, came away in chunks, crisp like apples. She was feeling a little crazy but inclined to be more so. She wanted to stay in the bath forever, eating apricots until the tub filled, not with water but with hard little dark-brown stones, rough edged, bits of soft orange fruit clinging to the crevices. As it was, there were just enough to pool together in the bottom of the tub, schooling like fish seeking safety in numbers. Yes, thought Alice, stay forever.

But eventually she grew cold and practical. Slowly fishing the pits out, feeling for each one with her fingertips, she secreted them back in the damp, empty paper bag. Running the warm water, she scrubbed, the shampoo foaming on her scalp gradually displacing the grime of three days’ sweat—New York City sweat—complicated by hot air forced down subway tunnels onto platforms, by sidewalks crowded with tourists who didn’t know how to walk, and by wave upon wave of longing and regret.