They couldn’t see from the riverbank that she was sobbing. She had her team visor pulled low, but they weren’t looking at her face, could only take in the whole of her, lit by strength: the glow off her forearms as they cut the air against the dark angle of her torso, determined to leave everyone behind, to go go go. They could see only her power.
* * *
• • •
Her brother didn’t usually travel, and Alice had been stunned that her parents brought him, and without mentioning it in the emails they’d sent about their plans. From their messages, it seemed as though Alice being on the crew team was more an imposition on their regular Regatta plans than a pleasure, and they’d been noncommittal about the parent barbecue and cocktails that followed the final race.
But here they were, waiting, as Alice and her teammates emerged from the boathouse, victorious, Alice’s sister rushing to embrace her and her brother offering a high five. Her parents congratulated her, and swept up in the open camaraderie of the families surrounding them, Alice could pretend for a moment that they were functional.
They chatted with her teammate Clarissa and her parents, and as Clarissa left, she looked from Alice’s brother to Alice and asked, “See you both at the party?”
“Oh, Serpentine weekend parties,” Alice’s father said, looking at Alice’s mother, who had her eyes locked on her son. “Nothing like them, truly.”
“Wow, can I go, Mom?” Her brother’s face brightened in a way that made Alice want to weep. “Can I go?”
Alice’s parents exchanged looks. “I’m not so sure,” said her mother.
Alice knew that her parents interpreted the advice not to drink after a traumatic brain injury as referring to hard alcohol. Her brother had been drinking beers at dinner since he was sixteen, even though Alice wouldn’t dare have a sip of wine in front of them now. She didn’t think it was because he was a boy, but rather an allowance made since so many pleasures were already off-limits when you lived at home with your parents and couldn’t drive.
“C’mon, I never get to go to college parties!”
The sound of a cheer had erupted over parties, so Alice and her parents both heard from her brother a lament at how he never got to go to college, not then, not now, not ever. He hadn’t even graduated from high school. Alice’s mother hired a tutor to help him get his GED, but Alice got the impression on her few visits home that by now her mother was paying the tutor to play video games with her brother, to come over every week and stay longer than his old friends ever did anymore. Her brother could retain some things, but not enough to hold down an office job, let alone manage an investment firm, or join a pediatric practice, or do any of the other things that Alice’s extended family did, filled as it was by aunts and uncles and older cousins who loved to work and found more satisfaction in accruing money than in showcasing wealth.
Her brother was a gardener. He worked year-round at a family farm, in their greenhouse during winter, and outside all summer, refusing, as he had since the accident, to wear a hat. He never bothered with sunscreen, and he had turned red and weathered, with a hairline in sync with his skin, creeping back earlier than Alice imagined it might have had his life gone according to plan. This made the disconnection between the affable, childlike way he behaved and his appearance more pronounced. He was only twenty. But when he’d turned up at her dorm room, Alice had thought for a moment that he was a family friend before he laughed and his eyes crinkled, and she saw that he was her brother.
The summer before college Alice was a gardener herself, living and working on an organic farm in the San Juan Islands. She’d felt a tentative kinship with her brother as she imagined their fingers in the dirt at the same time, wondered how someone who didn’t really know what happened could ever forgive her.
“I really wanna check it out! It’s cool, right, Al? It’s cool?” Her brother looked as though he’d been the one to win a race that day, his smile so wide it made Alice want him to tag along in spite of how ill it made her to imagine bringing him.
“It’s cool with me,” she said, counting on her parents to veto the plan.
“I suppose, if you’re back by midnight. And bring your mobile phone.”
“Can I go, too, Mom?” Brianna had gotten her face painted with the Q-H Ocelot, a little green paw print on her cheek, claw slices on her temple.
“No, sweetie. You’re far too young for that kind of party, I’m afraid,” her mother said, and tried to talk up the hotel pool.
“You might be, too, Alice,” her father said, and gave her the kind of stern, protective look that she’d seen fathers make on family sitcoms. She tried to squelch it, but her heart rose.
What harm was it to bring her brother to the party? It was her fault he never went to college after all, and the least she could do was bring him to the kind of party that, if things had gone another way, he might be bringing her to, pretending to punch his frat brothers when they offered her shots.
He kept his AliceFace shirt on for the party, and this nearly did her in. She’d wept on the boat, the shame. Of what she’d done, but also at the relief she felt whenever she saw him now: that he didn’t remember. The shame again that she liked him better now than she had back then.
“This is so cool of you, Al,” he said on a loop as they walked to the party together. “I’m pumped. Are you pumped? This is so cool of you, Al.” No one else called her Al.
At the party, she was grateful to see that her roommates still had their AliceFace shirts on, too. It might have embarrassed her, but now it made her brother seem less pitiful, and seeing them in their oversized fluorescent shirts, nothing like the party clothes worn by the girls that surrounded them, she was overcome with love. She threw her arms around them, each one in turn, and then they all clustered together, a group hug that displaced several partygoers in the crowded kitchen, and lasted until they needed their hands to take paper cups off a tray of Jell-O shots. Alice was relieved that her brother passed on them and accepted instead a red cup of beer from Conner, who had come sniffing around for Margaret.
Alice could feel herself relax as the booze took hold, and her friends took the lead on entertaining her brother. He had the same shirt on as half the basketball team, after all, and some students might mistake him for one of them. Alice wondered if he could feel this, too, that he’d changed lanes into another life, one that might have been.
Her brother was in the bathroom when a lacrosse player bumped into Alice, burped, and called her a dyke.
“I wish I were a lesbian. Men are pieces of shit. But they’ve got those cocks!” She could scandalize even college boys saying cock with her Boston Brahmin vowels, leaned against the counter in her cream sweater, hair a glacial blue in the bit of black light that streamed in from another room.
A few of the boys clapped and put their hands over their mouths. Ho ho! We’ve got a live one!
Her brother reappeared from the bathroom and they went to the basement to find the keg.
“Later, boys,” Alice called over her shoulder, confident that at least one would be fantasizing about her now, would find her later. Probably the one who’d called her a dyke. It would feel good to reject him, maybe let him grind up behind her first.
She shouldn’t get too drunk, she thought, embarrassed to be thinking about sex with her brother back by her side. She hadn’t eaten much and she had never felt so many emotions at once before, nervous and sad and elated and relieved and ashamed and grateful. The combination made her more out of it already than she’d planned to get, made her feel like centipedes had been injected into her veins. She loved her friends. She was so glad to live with them, far away from her family. She couldn’t believe the horror of what she had done. With her brother so close to her on the stairs she felt off balance, like she could trip, tumble straight through the basement floor, down to whatever hell deserved her.
On their way to t
he keg, her brother stopped, she thought to tie his shoe. He stayed hunched for so long that Alice wondered if she should offer to help him. Did he need help tying his shoes? How horrible she was. But when she bent low, she heard him mutter something about a pin he’d lost. She tried to tell him they would find it, though she wasn’t sure what pin he meant, and before she could ask, someone shoved her brother, said “Move it,” and he fell from his squat onto his bottom.
“Fuckin’ worthless,” the boy who’d pushed her brother said, and Alice felt the words like a phantom limb, just above her breasts, an ache in her sternum, some kind of growth that had never belonged in her body, but had lodged itself there nevertheless. Worthless.
Alice stood, reared back, and shoved the boy as hard as she could, knocking him into a wall.
He had tossed it off, worthless, just because her brother slowed his path to the keg, but Alice was transported back, to the barn where they’d tossed the eggs, to the vinyl bench where her thighs had stuck, to the too-hot air her brother had pushed his finger through to reach her breasts. Worthless.
“What the fuck?” The boy lifted his fist in the moment before he saw that she was a girl, loosened his fingers, but didn’t manage not to strike Alice. The flat edge of his hand landed against the long stripe of her scar.
She put her hand there, in the exact spot she’d sliced open. The scar had mostly felt like nothing in the intervening years, and she didn’t even remember the itch she only learned she’d complained about when she snooped in one of her mother’s old daybooks last Christmas and read: Alice won’t stop scratching her scar and we’re at a loss about it. Have no idea how to address. Cone à la Nancy??? Nancy Reagan was their terrier.
But now it burned and itched; she felt sliced anew.
The boy stepped back, seeing his mistake maybe, but more likely seeing on her face something with which he did not wish to contend. By now, Lainey had come down from upstairs and joined Margaret and Ji Sun, who already formed a circle around Alice, a human shield to guide her up out of the basement.
Lainey took Alice’s brother’s arm, trailed by Lesley and Vanessa up to the kitchen. Vanessa was the only sober one among them, and she volunteered to go in a cab with Alice’s brother back to the hotel. Lainey agreed after making sure Alice’s brother had his cell phone, and that he hadn’t been hurt. He had the strange look of someone slapped awake from a pleasant dream: a smile still on his lips, but eyes worried.
Alice was sheet white and shaking, not making eye contact with anyone but the middle distance. Ji Sun and Margaret each had an arm around her, but they could feel, too, that she was not in her body, and she didn’t respond when they asked her whether she was okay, if he’d hit her head, and finally Margaret, growing nervous, “Alice, are you in there? Earth to Alice!”
“Where is my brother?” she asked when they were nearly back to the dorm.
“He’s on the way back to the hotel. He’s safe.”
“It was so stupid to bring him to the party,” Alice said. It was a relief to her roommates that she spoke, but she castigated herself the rest of the way home, continued on into their room, over their objections.
“Alice, sit down, have some water, it’s okay!” Ji Sun said.
Alice rocked back and forth on the window seat. She kept one hand pressed against her scar, and hammered the other into her knee like a mallet, too rough and irregular to be a tic.
“Alice, stop it! It’s fine! He’s fine.” Lainey grabbed Alice’s fist and tried to hold it, but Alice yanked it loose.
“He’s not fine! He will never be fine. And it’s my fault!”
“It’s not your fault!” they all tried to say. They understood Alice’s guilt as a version of survivor’s remorse, that she had been in the tractor, too, and was unscathed compared to her brother, felt responsible in some convoluted way for distracting him. But now that they had seen the way Alice’s parents treated her, and the way Alice wouldn’t look at them now, something was shifting.
She rocked and keened, and they saw their reassurances were lost on her. They needed to wait in silence until she was ready to speak.
They waited until the light was pulled evenly in both directions, when you couldn’t tell if it was darkest night or earliest morning, the only time of day to share certain things. And Alice did.
What is the right way to react when someone tells you that she wanted her brother dead and she almost made it happen?
They said nothing, for a length of time that had no measure, but seemed interminable, and then they rushed to fill the silence with reassurances for themselves as much as for Alice.
“It wasn’t your fault,” they said. “You made a mistake!”
“No,” Alice said. “When I say it’s my fault, I mean it. It wasn’t an accident. I—I pushed him off the tractor.” Only a second passed before Alice said pushed, but it felt to the others like far too much time, time enough to have to rearrange what they believed possible about their friend.
“But still, it was an accident, you were a child!” they said.
“No. I used all my strength and I shoved him out of the seat. I wanted him to die,” Alice said. She wasn’t crying, and she didn’t look at them. She seemed to be answering the questions of an invisible interrogator.
“But, but, you could have died, too! You put yourself at risk. You didn’t know what would happen!” one of them said.
“Haven’t we all been that angry?” one of them asked. The others nodded, but they weren’t sure. “You were just, you got that mad when you were in a moving . . . vehicle. Anyone might have . . . made the same mistake.” They were struggling to find the right things to say.
All could understand the shoving and the wanting dead. But that they’d happened in the same moment: this separated Alice from them.
“But still, you were only a child!” one of them offered.
“I was older than my little sister is now! I was old enough to want him dead.”
The way she said dead again, definitive, as though he had died. Had they met his ghost? They all thought back to the exchanges they’d had with her brother. Margaret’s family might have called him “touched,” and Margaret wondered now what it meant, touched. Touched by whom? By God? Was it a gift to go through the world a dope?
They thought of his lined face, his big smile, how eager he had been to see Alice, to meet her friends. He’d said to each of them how cool they were, more than once, and even though this embarrassed them, they weren’t immune to compliments, even from someone who gave them so freely.
“It was still an accident really, though, right?” Margaret asked. “I mean, you didn’t kill him.”
“But I wanted to. I tried to. Please,” Alice cried now, instead of answering, as though under oath. “Don’t make me say it anymore.”
“You don’t have to! You don’t have to say it at all,” they said, and then they said they would never tell anyone what she had done.
The look on Alice’s face told them that this hadn’t occurred to her, that they might tell what she had done.
“Oh, God, please don’t tell anyone. I don’t even, don’t even mention it to me. Let’s never talk about it again,” she said. “Promise me.”
They promised, but it didn’t seem enough. Lainey removed the pin from her kilt and suggested they become blood brothers, not changing the word, but adding moon sisters. They could be both. The kilt pin was too dull, so Ji Sun stood and took a NOT MY PRESIDENT pin and a lighter from off the bookshelf. She bent back the pin and burned its tip, poked it into her pointer finger until a spot of blood appeared. She passed the pin along to Alice, who poked hard without a look, and Lainey, who poked and sucked the blood, caught herself, and let it bloom again.
“Can you do me, Alice?” Margaret asked. “I can’t do it myself.”
Alice looked newly bereft. “Why me?” she said, her face crumpl
ing.
“You’re the doctor,” Margaret said. Her eyes widened and Lainey wondered again why Margaret seemed so much younger than the rest of them, even now with Alice looking like a kitten in the days before its eyes opened, a fresh pink grub of pain.
“I’ll do it,” Lainey said, and counted, “One, two, poke!” to Margaret’s Yow, and they pressed their fingers all together, like a toast where each made sure to touch everyone, to look in her eyes.
They were locked together now in this new way, by blood, by Alice’s secret, her worst act. They’d sworn in blood under the moon to keep Alice’s secret, and in this way they vowed to keep future secrets, too.
Alice didn’t tell them what had enraged her enough to push. She knew they might have ideas from their own childhoods. It seemed to Alice the only way she could atone at all, to try not to make her friends see this puppy of a man as a wolf of a boy.
None of them were afraid of her, not even for a second, and this Alice must have sensed when they held her in their arms. They hadn’t known twelve-year-old Alice, but they loved her, and if they had been on that bench with her, they might have pushed her brother, too.
But in this fearless embrace there was a bit of gratitude, too, a feeling that Alice had gone out ahead and done the worst thing, a child’s belief that none of them would ever hurt anyone so much.
PART II
The Accusation
SOPHOMORE YEAR,
2003–2004
Chapter 9
The four felt lucky to be headed together into Professor Walker’s classroom at the start of their sophomore year, reunited after a summer spent pining for one another, pinging emails and cascading chains of phone calls from their points around the world: Ji Sun luxuriating in the Philippines and interning at an art gallery in Seoul; Alice sailing and camping all over New England as part of a wilderness medicine course; Lainey in Vermont, itching in an overwarm usher outfit at an outdoor theater-in-the-round; and Margaret, home in Missouri and working at a new ice cream shop that required her to sing its theme song every single time a customer dropped money in the tip jar. Walker’s was the largest course in all of the humanities, crowded with students and even some faculty members who sat in on his lectures, but the four had lucked out in the lottery and secured spots in discussion sections, too. The class met in Loeb Hall, a small but stately building perched atop the big hill that mainly housed offices for the college’s higher-ups, but also contained a large lecture hall that looked carved from the gilded guts of a rolltop desk. Before the semester began, only Lainey, also the only one who’d read Walker’s work, had said she’d sit in if she couldn’t earn credit, but Margaret had promised to give her spot to Lainey if she got one and Lainey didn’t.
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