Alice Fantastic

by Maggie Estep

  “And you’ll come over in an hour to rescue me from Alice?”

  “You make it sound like she’s going to beat you up.”

  “She’s not the most sensitive of creatures. Her anger will override whatever else she might feel.”

  “She’s going to feel devastated and you’re going to apologize for not telling her sooner. Then you’re going to call Eloise and tell her too.”

  I felt sicker than I’d felt all day.

  Joe kissed me lightly then shooed me out of the car.

  When I pushed open the front door, there was an eerie lack of barking and only one dog, Ira, my faithful three-legged hound, greeted me. I had a paranoid moment and imagined that Alice, lost in a world of gambling and anger, had let all the dogs but Ira run away. Then I walked into the house and more dogs began appearing. Strolling lazily into the kitchen. Greeting me warmly, but not with the sort of over-the-top lunacy I’d expected.

  I found Alice sprawled on the living room couch. There were dogs nestled next to her, dogs at her feet, dogs on the rug in front of the TV. A few got up to greet me, but the ones nearest Alice didn’t budge other than to give a few half-hearted tail thumps, having apparently sworn allegiance to my daughter in my absence.

  I patted some of the animals as I looked over at my sleeping daughter. The TV was on, tuned to the horse racing channel. There were horses pulling buggies. Trotters, I think. Or maybe pacers. I never can get the difference straight.

  Alice being asleep seemed like a sign that I should simply go up to my bedroom to unpack and take some Vicodin. But my suitcase was suddenly too heavy. Even my smaller bag felt like it would pull my arm out of its socket. I was weak and exhausted.

  I walked over to the stairs and slowly, very slowly, climbed up, leaving my bags behind. I tried to take my mind off the discomfort of the task by admiring the stair-case. It was simple but beautiful, recently rebuilt by a woodworker friend who had hand-carved the banister. It had a life all its own. And it would outlive me by decades, if not centuries.

  I finally reached the top of the stairs. My bedroom door was closed. I opened it, expecting to find dogs inside since I’d told Alice to rotate them from one room to the other several times a day to keep the pack dynamics in check. There were in fact five dogs but also my daughter Eloise, propped up in bed, reading one of her beloved Andrew Vachss novels.

  “Mom,” she said, as if she’d seen a ghost.

  “Eloise, what are you doing here?” This I was not ready for. One daughter I could maybe handle. But two?

  “Where’s Alice?” Eloise asked rather than answering my question.

  “Asleep on the couch.”

  “Let’s wake her up,” she said, jumping up from of the bed as if it were on fire.

  I didn’t know what to think or do, so as Eloise bolted from the room, I sat down on the bed and began petting the dogs, losing myself for a moment in their dogness. Timber and Lucy and Carlos and Harvey and Simba.

  I was sitting in the middle of the bed, surrounded by dogs, when Eloise reappeared, Alice in tow. I toyed with the idea of putting it off, but then, before I could stop myself, I was blurting it out. The cancer. The metastasis. The brief round of chemo.

  I would have kept going but Alice cut in: “We know, Mom.”

  “You what?”

  “We know you’re sick.”

  “You … oh?” They both nodded and looked down at their feet.

  “And you’re not furious with me?” I looked from Alice to Eloise and back.

  Neither daughter said anything, then Alice shrugged. “Mom, I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through or what led you to not telling us immediately.”

  Alice’s apparent acceptance was so uncharacteristic it silenced me. The tenderness, the genuine love in this, pried me open and I started weeping. Which in turn engendered another thoroughly uncharacteristic move from my eldest, who sat down on the bed and hugged me. Eloise got in on it too and we became a snarled threesome of tears and the kind of grief I knew existed but didn’t want to actually feel.

  I held my daughters, feeling their limbs, their heart-beats, their tears. I couldn’t remember the last time we had been like this.

  I didn’t want to let go.

  By the time Joe came to check on us, we had stopped crying. We were all three in the kitchen and Alice was trying to make milkshakes. The dogs, every last one of them, had joined us and there really wasn’t an ounce of space. Joe had to tiptoe over tails and haunches and muzzles resting on paws.

  “What’s going on in here?” he asked cheerfully, as if this were any other night and my difficult daughters just happened to have both come to see me at the same time and we all three just happened to have had a fit of weeping, traces of which were still evident on our swollen, reddened faces.

  “Alice is cooking,” I said with a little smile as Joe came to stand at the back of my chair, resting his hands on top of my head.

  “Hardly,” Alice corrected. “I’m making milkshakes but even someone with my limited culinary skills does not call milkshake-making cooking.”

  Joe laughed. I laughed. Eloise laughed.

  Since both the beds in my house were spoken for and the dogs would be looked after, I decided to sleep over at Joe’s. Alice and Eloise said they’d tend to all the morning dog chores, leaving me to sleep in and relax. I thanked my girls, not telling them that I’m often afraid to sleep these days since every time I do, I wonder if I’ll wake up.

  All that night, Joe held me as fiercely as he could without choking me. We couldn’t seem to get physically close enough to each other. I felt like he was trying to tie me to him, to keep me alive.

  When morning came, I ignored it as long as I could and lay next to him, watching his fitful sleep, his eyelids fluttering, small, wounded sounds escaping his lips.

  I slowly crept from the bed. I was in pain and needed to take something. I had Percocet in my bag. I got two out then padded into the kitchen to get a glass of water. I was nauseous and didn’t know if I’d be able to swallow. I took one small sip of water. It stayed down. I was about to brave one of the pills when Joe came into the room.

  “You okay?” He put his hand on the back of my neck and rubbed gently.

  “Fine,” I lied.

  “Pain?” he asked, not believing my lie.

  “Yes,” I admitted, “but I’ll be all right.”

  I swallowed one of the pills. Felt it traveling down my throat. Willed it to go all the way down and stay there. All the while, Joe was studying me, tilting his head just like the dogs do. I took the second pill and sat down at Joe’s cheerful 1950s Formica table. My head felt heavy, so I rested it on the table, my forehead taking in the coolness of the Formica.

  “I’m not dying. I mean, not right this minute,” I said, speaking into the table, “my head just got heavy. I’m resting.”

  “What would make you happy today, Kim?” Joe asked softly.

  “I can think of a lot of things,” I said, briefly lifting my head to look at him. “I suppose I would like to spend time with my daughters. And my dogs. And later with you.”

  “But what about you?” I added. “Don’t you have an awful lot of work to catch up on?”

  Joe shrugged. I knew he did have work. A ton of it. I also knew he had no plans to tend to much of it while I was still alive.

  “I want to do what you want to do,” he said.

  It was all so sad. I just wanted to shut it off. The fountain of fucking sadness.

  I took a shower, put my dirty clothes back on, avoided looking in the mirror, then went into Joe’s living room where I found him sitting at his piano, staring at the keys as if they were strangers.

  “I’ll spend a few hours with my girls,” I told him. “Please play. Please?”

  He nodded. I leaned over to kiss him.

  He smelled so good it hurt.

  I walked over to my house, stepping past the low stone wall separating my property from Joe’s, slightly buzzed since th
e pills had hit me by now and I was actually enjoying them. It wouldn’t last. Soon, the nausea would outweigh the pleasant oblivion. All the same, I was a recovering addict getting a free ride. It had taken a terminal illness to get that free ride, but some part of me, some still-sick part, didn’t mind all that much.

  I found both my daughters and nearly all the dogs gathered in the kitchen where Eloise was making eggs.

  When I walked in, everyone seemed to freeze, as if afraid breathing might knock me over and kill me.

  “Hi,” I greeted brightly.

  “Morning, Mom,” Eloise said.

  “Hi,” Alice said.

  Ira had run over when I walked in and I stood scratching his head. Timber deigned to get up and poke his muzzle into my thigh.

  “Who’s up for the Rabbit Hole trail?”

  Both daughters looked at me like I was insane.

  “What?” Eloise said.

  “Mom, are you stoned?” Alice asked.

  “I took two Percocet. I’m allowed. I have cancer.”

  “I wasn’t questioning your taking medication, more like if you’re really up for a trail.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said defensively, even though I doubted I would be, “I want to walk. With the dogs. With both of you.”

  Eloise looked up from under her bangs and smiled sweetly.

  Alice scowled then agreed that yes, we could all go to the trail.

  The effort of pretending to feel well had drained me already and I went into the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet, and took another pain pill. I had built up a tolerance over the last few months. It wouldn’t knock me out. But it was a balancing act, taking enough to dull the pain but not so much that I couldn’t function. I hoped for the best.

  When I came out of the bathroom, I found Eloise standing just outside the door. She rushed past me, barely making it to the toilet in time to vomit.

  “Oh no, Elo, are you sick?” I had a sudden vision of my daughter being stricken with cancer as well.

  Just as I was about to get furious with the gods, my daughter wiped her mouth, looked at me, and announced that she was pregnant.

  She said it quietly and firmly the way she might have announced, when she was a teenager, that she was staying out late.

  “Are you sure?” I inexplicably asked.

  “Yes, Mom.” She gave me a dirty look.

  “Um, but haven’t you been with a … uh … woman?”

  “Yes. But before Ava I was with Billy Rotten. Well, for exactly one night.”

  “You got pregnant from a one-night stand?” I asked, aghast. “You made love with a stranger without a condom?”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m sorry, Elo, I’m just … well, I’m happy. Of course. Um … You are … you are going to keep the baby?”

  “Yes, Mom. With Ava.”

  “You’re going to be lesbian parents? Jesus.” I closed the toilet seat and sat down on the lid.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Well,” I said carefully, “I’ve taken three pain pills so my head is swimming. My previously heterosexual daughter is suddenly a lesbian but having a baby by a one-night stand. And I’m going to be a grandmother. Except I’ll be dead by the time the baby is born, so technically I will not have been a grandmother to anything more than a fetus.”

  “Mom, please don’t say that.”

  Eloise knelt before me and made the kinds of cooing sounds I hadn’t heard from her since she was a baby.

  “But Eloise, I told you. I have maybe a month left. Any day now I won’t be able to get out of bed. I’m not going to see my grandchild. But the notion that you are having a baby is a very beautiful one.”

  I cupped my daughter’s face in my hands. She was crying. I didn’t want to start. It would make my face hurt and would tire me even more.

  “Come on,” I said, standing up, “let’s try to walk some dogs.”

  I draped my arm around Eloise’s shoulders. She went into the guest room to find her sneakers and I headed into the bedroom to put on baggy shorts.

  I let Alice drive the van. I sat in the passenger seat and Eloise was in the back, tending to the dogs. We had brought all but the infirm ones for a total of eleven. They were a little boisterous.

  I had asked Eloise if she wanted to stop by her girlfriend’s on the way, see if Ava wanted to join us.

  “No, Mom, you’re not turning this into a social occasion, this is a family walk and though I hope Ava is becoming family, she isn’t yet. So thank you, but no.”

  I was pleased. I wanted my girls and my dogs to myself but hadn’t wanted Eloise to think I was shutting Ava out, particularly when we were passing right by her house.

  As Alice piloted the van into the dirt lot at the Rabbit Hole trailhead, I felt a wave of nausea. I tried to will it away but I must have looked awful.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” Alice asked.

  “Just a little nauseous, it’ll pass,” I said.

  Alice looked at me levelly for a moment. “Between you and Eloise, we need a vomitorium.”

  It made me laugh and gave me energy. I got out of the van. I wobbled a little, then took the leashes off Ira, Harvey, and Carlos, as my daughters wrangled the rest of the pack and we walked onto the rocky trail.

  There had been rain the night before and the dense foliage and tall trees were bursting green. The stones of the rocky path were still wet and, between their slickness and the fuzziness from the pain pills, I had to think about where I put my feet.

  We were silent until we reached the first creek crossing. There, we liberated all the dogs except Rosemary and Lucy, the Ibizan hound.

  As I picked my way from rock to rock through the creek, the dogs ran and splashed and Harvey, in his exuberance, knocked Carlos into the water. The Chihuahua scrabbled then clung to a rock until Alice reached down and scooped him out, depositing him on the other side of the creek. Harvey, who seemed to actually realize what he’d done, stood by looking concerned, then licked the beleaguered Carlos once he was back on terra firma.

  “So,” I asked, as we walked up a slight incline, the dogs bounding and foraging for frogs and chipmunks, “what about these dogs?”

  “What?” said Alice.

  “They won’t all have homes before I’m dead.”

  “Oh, Mom, please stop talking like that,” Alice said.

  “No, Al,” Eloise came to my defense, “she’s right. Denial is not helpful. Mom is going to die. These dogs need a caretaker. Ava and I can take three or four, but not all.”

  “You can?” I asked Eloise.

  “Yes. Ava and I talked about it. The dog we rescued, Ron, is lonely. I’ll be hanging around the house being pregnant and making stuffed animals. I may as well try to find homes for some of the dogs.”

  “So that’s it?” You and Ava are just going to shack up and be domestic and have babies?” Alice said.

  “One baby,” Eloise replied. “Just one. No one has knocked Ava up yet. But yes. We’re going to shack up and be domestic, Alice.”

  Alice actually stopped walking and stared at her sister. I could see how incomprehensible this was to my untamable eldest.

  “Wow,” said Alice.

  It was possible there was a hint of envy in her voice. But it was likely just wishful thinking on my part. I didn’t want my daughter to end up alone against her wishes. She liked being alone now, while she was still vibrant and could pick and choose bed mates as the urge struck her, but I wasn’t sure how she’d feel twenty years down the line when her habitual solitude might become crippling and hard to shake.

  “I want to help with the dogs too,” Alice said after she’d paused long enough to process the concept of her little sister settling down.

  “Thank you, Alice,” I said, “maybe you could take Timber and Lucy—or whoever you think you might be able to find a home for.”

  “Whoever Eloise doesn’t take.”

  “It’ll be quite a crowd in your apartment,” I said.

&nb
sp; “I was hoping to stay at your place until all the dogs are sorted out.”

  “You? In the country for what could be months?”

  “Is that really so shocking?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Eloise echoed the sentiment.

  Alice shrugged. “I like it up here.”

  “But what about the track?”

  “I can get by with computer and TV for a while. Plenty of handicappers never even go to the track.”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “you girls are getting the house anyway, it would make me happy if one of you lived in it, at least for a little while. I’ve loved that house.”

  Both my daughters nodded but neither one said anything. As if by silent agreement, we all three seemed to focus entirely on the dogs, on their grace and energy, on Harvey’s caramel coat gleaming under the bits of sun that reached through the trees, on Lucy’s beautiful, loping gait, on their willingness to be happy and uncomplicated.

  We reached the place where the trail narrows and dips down into a little ravine choked with tree roots. Just as I put my right foot down to purchase, Harvey knocked into me and I tripped and went down into the ravine.

  Everything turned black.

  11. ALICE

  My mother had fallen into the ravine and was lying on her side, unconscious. I felt my mouth hanging open but the rest of me was frozen.

  I finally registered that my sister was screaming at me. My eyes came into focus and I saw that Eloise was squatting down by our mother, whose face was turned toward the dirt. There was a gash on Mom’s temple where she must have hit a rock as she fell.

  “Is she … is she … ?”

  “No, she’s not dead,” my sister said impatiently, “but she’s unconscious. I don’t know what to do.”

  Eloise looked up at me with huge, scared eyes. I was the big sister. I was supposed to be capable. But I was frozen.

  The dogs were milling around and several had come over to sniff at our felled mother, forcing Eloise to shoo them away.

  “Alice, help me.” There were tears in her eyes.

  I reached for the phone in the pocket of my pants.