Her fist clenched, and the nails dug into her skin, until she felt little welts with her thumb.
“Alice? Alice? Hello?” Dylan said in her ear.
She let the phone drop.
Jake turned quickly at the sound, then seeing her face, his features turned to worry. He rushed over to her.
“Alice, who was that?” Jake looked at the phone on the floor but didn’t lean down to pick it up. “Something about your mother? Was it your husband?” He looked again at the phone and back to her. “What happened?”
A tide of anger overwhelmed Alice, like the worst red tides at the beaches she and Rob played in as a child, the shore so overwhelmed with dead fish that she thought it was blood changing the color of the water. Of course, he would think it was Walker.
“You!” Alice said, not pausing to apologize for the spit that flung from her lips with the accusation. He stared.
Forgetting about the phone entirely, she turned to leave. Jake picked it up and trailed her, only an inch or two behind her shoes, so close, she thought, that if she stopped, he would barrel into her.
“Alice! Please just tell me what happened! At least let me drive you to the hotel. I thought it was going well, us, together, here.”
He stopped walking when she left the building and stepped off the curb. He wouldn’t follow her anymore, and his words stung her. He would think it was her fault, that she left because of Walker. It wasn’t her fault though. It was Jake’s, and she wanted him to know it. Had always been Jake’s.
She spun on her heels, the words tumbling out of her.
“It was going well, Jake! I was so naive, though, to think you were different.” All the anger of the past few weeks spilled to the surface, all the things left unsaid, she heaped so easily on him. “You’re not different. Everyone has a secret life. My kid! My husband! My mother! Rob! YOU!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jake said, pleading.
“You know why I’m here? I’m trying to find out what happened to Rob. He’s dead, has been for a while, and I’m finally doing what I should’ve done a long time ago, what we agreed to do a long time ago. And I find out you were there, you found him. That’s what the call was. You were there. You were looking for him. Without me. And you found him, and then he disappeared…?”
Jake’s hands were up now in defense, and he tried to calm her down, but it only made her want to scream at him because it reminded her of Walker in the school parking lot.
Her heart raced, but this was so different from the stilted, shushed, transactional arguments she had with Walker. She felt angry, so angry all of a sudden, but alive, yelling at Jake, seeing how he reacted, feeling the power she had over him that she would never have over Walker. How much her words cut him. How focused he was on what she was saying. How he waited for her to twist the knife, trying to anticipate her next move to stop the fight before it got worse, instead of Walker’s approach of trying to out-logic her, to win, to make her feel stupid, to keep quiet so the other parents didn’t hear.
“I was going to tell you tonight; I swear I was. I—”
“Do you expect me to believe that?” she thundered.
“Alice, please just listen to me, just wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“I’m trying to tell you! Be quiet for a second, goddammit!”
She stared at him, trying to catch her breath.
“I realized I was an idiot. After we broke up, the funding dried up in a year.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I messed up so badly, not talking to you first, choosing to stay over what we had. I wanted to come back and to beg you to take me back, but I thought I needed a grand gesture to show you how much I loved you and cared about you. I know it sounds so stupid now.”
Alice stood, still frozen.
“I tracked Rob down. It took me almost six months, but I found people who knew him and knew where he was. My idea was that I would bring him to you and y’all would hug, and you would take me back.”
Alice felt her face soften a little and willed to keep it scornful and rage-filled.
“I found him in some house in Atlanta. He was completely strung out,” Jake said. “I didn’t think it would be that bad. I took him to the hospital and stayed with him a few weeks while he recovered. I told him who I was, and he begged me not to tell you he was there. He didn’t want you to see him like that, didn’t want to hurt you anymore than you already were, and I understood, but I told myself I was just waiting for when he got better, and I would convince him. When I came back one day, he was gone. He had checked himself out. I went back to where I found him a couple of times, but they said he was gone. I knew you were at Duke, so I went there, and I was going to tell you. I went to the environmental science building and waited for you to get out of class. You were with Walker, and I saw him kiss you. You just looked happy. I realized I was stupid all around, thinking you would wait for me when I told you not to. I was so embarrassed that I left.”
Her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her. “You should’ve told me.”
“I know.” He stomped his foot. “I know I should have. I’m so sorry.” He approached her again. “I should have told you the truth about us. I should have told you I never stopped loving you, Alice. I was young. I was hurt. I was a coward. But I think if I’ve learned anything in the last twenty years, it’s that life isn’t long enough to throw away chances like that. Chances like this.”
She looked at him and they were both crying now. She fell into his arms and kissed him, and he was surprised at first, but then kissed her back. The wetness of their faces mixed in with the sweat from the greenhouse air and the spit of their lips against each other. They left his truck, and he hailed a cab and they sat, kissing in the back like they were nineteen again.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Alice woke in the morning, the light streamed in through the open windows onto where she lay in Jake’s bed. Jake’s arm was slung casually across her body, and her left side touched his chest and stomach. The previous night rushed back to her: the dinner, Dylan’s call, the way Jake had betrayed her, her kissing him, the hours she’d spent in Jake’s arms talking about all the things they missed.
He flung open the door to her as he had done the first time, welcoming her into the deep entrails of his brain as if he were welcoming her home. He told her about Kellen with tears in his eyes, relayed how his marriage deteriorated while he traced the curves of her hip with his fingertips. Still tipsy on wine and drunk with passion from their shared kiss, their secrets, the way his tongue danced up her inner thigh, Alice had told him about Walker, the texts, the NYU video, the fog that had descended on her as she marched through a life she couldn’t remember piecing together. The types of conversations she never had with Walker.
Now, though, in the light, her sureness, her confidence disappeared. Every detail of him—his warm breath on her neck as he slept, how every part of his body seemed to curve toward her, the way she noticed in the light that everything in his bedroom, the IKEA dresser, the walls, the bedding, were shades of gray, as if Jake assumed his decorating would succeed if he stuck to one color—it all made her want him more, and that desire scared her.
Outside the windows, even the sky looked gray, like it threatened to storm. Her eyes fell on her dress where she had sloppily discarded it, the cardigan sprawled next to it with the sleeves inside out. What time was it? She started to scoot out of Jake’s hold, but at her stirring, he opened his eyes and smiled. Dammit.
“Good morning, gorgeous. Whatcha doing?”
“Do you know where my phone is?”
“Oh, um.” He stretched his arm over his head. “Around here somewhere.” He climbed out of bed, leaned over to grab his boxers off the floor, and slipped them on. Alice wrapped the sheet around her chest.
“Found it.” He walked over and handed her the phone.
She clicked it on: 8:23 a.m. Still, they must have slept for only a few hours.
“I’ll start coffee.” He leaned in to kiss her once on her left cheek, then her forehead, her right cheek, her lips, and her nose. She remembered the ritual as part of her college years. She wondered if he had done the same thing with his wife. Was he only playing house? Content to share a night together and say goodbye at the airport, as he had done so many years before?
He walked out of the room and shut the door.
Looking at the phone, she saw four missed calls from Walker. After his text yesterday morning—“If that’s how you want it, fine. Mature.”—Alice had expected the silence to last a little longer, like the days it normally did after a disagreement until they both pretended the disagreement hadn’t happened. She sighed.
“Everything okay?” she texted Caitlin.
Caitlin texted back suspiciously quickly for school hours. “Great. Chelsea drove us to school. Ordered Chinese food last night with Aunt Meredith. Enjoy your trip!”
After washing her face and putting back on her crumpled dress, Alice walked into the eat-in kitchen of Jake’s one-bedroom apartment. Behind the couch, a large bay window opened to iron railings that looked out onto a street she didn’t recognize.
Her head hurt, from the wine and from the thoughts about Jake and Walker and her marriage that she had been pushing to the far reaches of her brain and had finally set free. She pressed her index finger into the temple. It was time to go to Lila’s, to finish this.
“Headache?” Jake asked. She nodded, and he fished a bottle of Tylenol from the kitchen cabinet.
Jake shook two pills from the bottle. He produced a glass and filled it with water from the tap before setting it next to the pills on the counter. A small offering, pushed toward her. Walker didn’t even know where she kept their Tylenol.
“Still take your coffee with cream and sugar?”
She nodded yes at him before thinking and drank the water down. She took her coffee with only skim milk now, but she let the inertia of her past habits propel her forward. How would her mother define insanity in those little daily quizzes at the kitchen table? Doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. This man in front of her, now in his cargo shorts with abundant pockets and a T-shirt, looked so similar to the boy she once knew, the keeper of her secrets, with whom she would sit in coffee shops, drinking her coffee with cream and sugar.
She sat, and Jake placed the warm coffee in her grip. She left her hands on the sides of the mug, allowing the warmth to sting her fingers, concentrating on the sensation and the smell of the cup, instead of the tumult in her brain over what to say next.
“I should go back to my hotel, shower, call Walker back.”
His face fell immediately. “Oh.”
“If I don’t, he’ll just keep calling, and I don’t want him to say anything to the kids.”
Jake nodded, but looked away. Did he judge her for being in a relationship where she had to worry about her husband puncturing the lie she had fed about a business trip to their kids, if she didn’t respond? She stared at the tan coffee in the mug, straining to see something under the surface, like in the muddy Georgia waters of her youth.
She stole glances at Jake, who pecked at his laptop as she sipped her coffee, seemingly trying to ignore her, to give her the necessary time to process. How easy it would be to make him happy. She would only need to stay here, to sip her too sweet, too milky coffee, to sink back into their past life.
“Where are we?” She walked to the open windows with her coffee cup to admire the street. “It’s beautiful.”
“The Garden District.” He popped up from the bar and over to the window. “I moved to the neighborhood with Christie when she was pregnant. I used to take Kellen to that park,” he said, pointing to a patch of green. “And after…everything, I left the house, but couldn’t leave the area.”
They stood, looking out on the street. A group of tourists ambled down the block on a tour, and a couple pushed an old-fashioned pram on the other side.
“Anyway, I can take you back to your hotel.” She heard the clink of keys disappear into his pants pocket.
“That would be great.”
“Then,” he said, slowly, carefully, “I thought maybe we could eat lunch, show you a little of the city before you go see Lila?”
She considered this, his face so expectant and hopeful. “Okay, sure. Let’s do it.”
They took a cab back to his office, picked up his truck, and then he drove to her hotel. They sat with the engine off, both trying to decide how to leave things. Finally, she leaned over the center console and kissed him goodbye, lingering long enough for his hand to reach around her back.
“See you soon,” she said and turned around to walk away. She didn’t look back until she shut the door to her hotel room.
The room had been tidied, and she glanced at her belongings, folded in neat little piles that reminded her of Walker and the kitchen island’s clutter he so despised. She plugged her phone in without looking at it and turned on the shower, letting the room fill with steam before stepping in. She normally didn’t take long showers—too wasteful—but today she let the water run down her back as her mind grew blank, even just for fifteen minutes, to get the guilt from Jake’s touch off her body, and the fear that she wouldn’t see him after today. When she emerged, a towel twisted around her wet hair on top of her head, she sat on the bed in the hotel robe and called Edward. He answered on the first ring.
“Could you pull some of the documents together that we…that you mentioned when I was in the office?”
Of course, he didn’t get the message right away. She threw in a few more words: assets, college fund, inheritance, shares in the Center, and finally, he showed mercy and promised to send her an email with information tomorrow. “And thanks, Edward. For everything you did for Rob. I know it probably wasn’t easy.”
They hung up, and she sat on the bed for a few minutes. She leaned back and traced the lines on the ceiling with her eyes. Outside, she could make out the clinking of mimosas and Bloody Marys as the brunch crowd carried on downstairs, even though it was Monday.
She decided to let herself off the hook with Walker. Instead of calling, she texted him that she would be home tomorrow and that they would talk then. Alice dressed, this time in a blouse, cardigan, and jeans with her Converse sneakers. She dialed Meredith.
She told Meredith about Lila King. “Her letter is the last one I have,” Alice said. “What if it’s nothing? What if she can’t tell me anything else?”
“Maybe she can’t. But maybe, that’s just what you need.”
Alice paused, thinking about this.
“None of what happened to Rob is your fault, honey. If that’s what you’re looking for—another way to blame yourself—you aren’t going to find it.”
Meredith had told her this before. Each time her friend said it, part of Alice wanted to ask her to say it again, to repeat it until the thought snaked its way into Alice’s subconscious. But, another part of her wished Meredith wouldn’t say it again, embarrassed that her friend could so easily see the need still hungry in her chest even after all these years.
“I went to dinner with Jake last night.”
“What!”
“And we slept together.”
“What!”
The confession briefly shocked Meredith into silence before she followed up with “How was it?”
“He’s picking me up for lunch in a few minutes, actually.”
“That good, huh?” Meredith laughed, and Alice let herself laugh, too, briefly allowing the warmth of her night with Jake to take up her entire body without the gnawing inside her that Alice worried her meeting with Lila wouldn’t stop. They laughed, longer than was necessary, until the blank sound between them stretched on. Alice could hear her frien
d breathing, waiting for her to say something.
Alice sighed. “Maybe I should tell him not to come.”
“Aww, why?”
Alice bent forward until her forehead touched her knee. “There’s so many what-ifs. Neither of us knows if this will turn into anything. It probably won’t. And the more I,” she gulped, “the more I see him, the harder it’s going to be to leave.”
“If you only have today, though, wouldn’t you want it to be the best day it could be?”
“That sounds like something from one of your books. Not real life.”
“So, what if it is? Take the day off from real life.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” Alice hung up and went downstairs to the lobby, where Jake sat in one of the hotel’s worn leather chairs in jeans and a casual button-up.
“Ready to go?” He offered her his hand, and they walked out to his truck.
“Where are we going for lunch?” Alice climbed into the passenger seat.
She had never been a dreamer. Alice was the practical one, the rule follower. But she tried to embody the confidence and reckless abandon of one of Meredith’s sexy heroines, just an average girl who’d happened upon a fantasy.
She tried to channel Rob. When he had disobeyed their parents’ rules, he did it with all his might. He’d made it count.
“I thought we could drive around a little bit first, since we have a little time?”
Alice glanced at the clock. Each time she did, she became more nervous. Another hour gone with Jake. Another hour until she would leave and go back to the mess that awaited her in Georgia. Another hour to Lila. To the end of everything she would know about Rob.
“Sure, that would be nice,” she said with a smile.
He started the engine, and his hand found hers in the seconds between gear shifts on the slow-moving New Orleans roads. He drove through the different neighborhoods surrounding her hotel and explained the name and history of each. While the damp smell of the air had played with her senses since she arrived, Alice didn’t see the water in daylight until Jake drove along the Mississippi River and then to Lake Pontchartrain. He pointed out where the levees were before the hurricane, and which ones had broken in the aftermath.
How to Bury Your Brother Page 25
