fic: FORGIVE THE KIDS (another happy day) (2/3)

[falseeeyelashes]

T W O :
t h e
f u t u r e

Wherein Elliot moves in with Alice and her husband in the suburbs:

1.

One afternoon in late February Elliot moves in with Alice.

He flies in from Portland and takes a cab from O’Hare International Airport out to their house in the suburbs.

The fare is $112.50.

His first words to her are as follows:

“You spot me some cash?”

Alice doesn’t answer, but Michael takes his wallet out and pays not only the fare but a generous tip as well.

2.

“What’s wrong with Elliot?” Alice asks. She is twelve. She is embarrassed by her brother and at the same time ashamed.

Lynn ignores the question.

3.

Before the cab and before the fare and before Michael takes his wallet out, Lynn calls Alice.

“Elliot’s gone and moved to Portland.”

“Why?” Alice asks, her voice quiet and she wipes up the overflow from the kitchen sink with a pink sponge.

“What do you mean why? It’s in Oregon,” Lynn says, as though that’s an appropriate answer to a question like that, a question like why. A question like Elliot. It’s as though they are having two separate conversations running on parallel tracks, but then that has always been the case where Elliot is concerned.

Elliot does not stay in Portland. Elliot does not remain anywhere for long, something transient and nervous buried deep into his bones -- the constant need to keep moving, the constant need to be on the run.

Elliot always was a constant force in motion. The arch of his eyebrows, his seemingly nervous tics as he would speak, a rapid and dramatic cadence to his words, matched by his too expressive face.

It was always Alice with the flat facade, but she could never quite hide the pain in her eyes.

He’d speak and gesticulate wildly -- the wave of his hand, long slender fingers, strong pale hands. His plump mouth, lips darkened as though stained.

The deep rumble to his voice, and Alice is not sure when he stopped being a boy and started talking like a man, that low menacing timbre, the dangerous tilt to his mouth. His voice equal parts mean and soothing.

Her own wide flat mouth pales in comparison. All of her pales: pale lips, pale skin, her pale washed-out hair.

She has never wanted to run. She has always wanted somewhere safe to hide.

You can’t find that when you’re constantly in motion. You can’t find that if you never stay still.

What he is running from and what she is looking for are one in the same.

Home, she thinks, and she knows she is not wrong.

4.

Elliot shows up at her house one afternoon in late February.

While he is here Michael will go out of town. He will leave the two of them alone in the house he picked, the house on the street he liked, the house that’s in his name.

Alice will be alone in the kitchen the morning Michael leaves and Elliot will join her. She’ll be alone in her kitchen with him, with this stranger, and she will be able to feel his eyes on the back of her neck. She will be able to smell the cigarette smoke on him, fresh and almost charred. He will smell almost the way leaves smell when burnt at the height of fall. He will smell almost that good and warm and promising, but like everything about Elliot, there will be something about the scent, something about him, just a little bit off.

She will turn to face him. He will look old and worn to her, leaner and crueler, as though time has done what it can to break him down. That time has let the world catch up to him, that it has found him in Los Angeles or Brooklyn, Portland or Chicago, and he will look all the more used for it.

“Are you going to stay in Chicago?” she will ask quietly.

“Probably not,” he will say, that voice still the same and deep, still flavored with that amused tone of mockery. “But it’s good to see you all the same.”

There will be sincerity there, and it will be that which leaves her on edge.

5.

Elliot moves in with Alice and her husband Michael, their small house in Chicago. Alice lives in the suburbs, a tree-lined street, a gated community, and for all that, among other reasons, Elliot thinks he could hate her.

Her hair is short when she meets him at the door. A cropped bob, bright blonde and shiny, and Elliot frowns when he looks at her. Each time he sees her she looks older than the last.

The same could be said for him.

Alice shows him to the spare room in silence. She doesn’t point out the different features of the house. She doesn’t show him the bathroom or the kitchen or where they sit and watch TV or where she sleeps when the house goes dark at night. Where she sleeps beside her husband. She does not show him that.

She doesn’t tell him that she only just recently redid this spare bedroom. That she knew what Michael’s intention was with that empty bedroom. It was why when he was out of town for a week, some hospital administrators thing at the Cleveland Clinic, she converted it into a guest bedroom. Michael had not said much about it, but he kissed her complacently on the head and two weeks later he started talking about how nice it would be to have a bigger house. How nice it would be to have so many bedrooms, a larger backyard, more bathrooms. More rooms to fill.

Alice let him talk until she finally snapped later that week over breakfast.

“Two people don’t need all of that,” she said, right as Michael was telling her about a listing he saw for a four bedroom house in the very neighborhood they live in now. She stood up after she said it, pushed in her chair and dropped her plate in the sink before leaving him to eat and dream alone.

“You can stay here.”

She finally says it when Elliot steps into the spare room, when he drops his bag on the bed and then flops down beside it. The bedspread is white. Everything in the room is white and sparse, the window overlooking the green backyard.

“You can stay here,” she says, and when Elliot looks to her, her eyes are wary and unsure.

6.

He finds her bedroom on his own.

In the bedroom she shares with her husband there is a photo from their brother’s wedding. Elliot can’t remember when the picture was taken. It was early in the day, if only based on the way the light glints off the bay in the background, the yellow tinge to the sky, the way they are squinting into the camera.

It is a picture of Elliot and Alice and only Elliot and Alice and they are squinting into the camera and they are smiling.

They look young. They look impossibly young. Elliot had not thought they had ever been so young.

He thinks they almost look happy, if only he could forget who they are. If only he could look at these two people as strangers.

7.

When Elliot was eighteen, he plotted to leave.

Not to college, not for school. His grand plan was simply that he would leave. He would pack a bag and then he would walk out the door. “Where would you go?” Alice asked, and Elliot rolled his eyes. He said: that was the point. “What’s the point?” Alice asked, and Elliot accused her haughtily of being deliberately obtuse before he told her that the point was to have no point; the point was to have no direction.

“What about Mom?” Alice asked. She popped a grape in her mouth, her forearms braced against the counter. “That’d kill her.”

Elliot rolled his eyes again and took a grape for himself.

“The guilt over her relief that I am finally out of her hair would subside and she’d find inner peace in a sad women’s yoga club.”

Alice smiled despite herself. “And Ben? He could use a bad influence.”

Elliot pointed at her, his body mirroring hers, bent into the counter on the opposite side. “Not that bad and you know it.”

Alice looked down and her hair fell in her face.

“And me?”

He did not say anything at first but he looked at her funny. He looked at her funny as she looked up at him and batted her hair out of her face.

“You’ll learn all about little kids’ weird mushy brains and what makes them tick and you’ll become like Mother Goose and all those little brats will follow you around and you’ll be wonderful and happy and fine.”

He said it all fast and low, still staring at her and Alice stared back at him.

“Yeah?” she said, just as low, and when Elliot repeated back, “yeah,” he offered a tell: he said it with just enough recognizable resignation.

8.

Elliot did leave, but he left with direction.

He went to the University of Michigan that fall and told anyone who asked that he was going to major in the occult, if only to see what kind of rise he could get out of them.

In the end, he wound up going to three different schools before he dropped out for good.

He made it through one and a half semesters in Ann Arbor before he was kicked out. He picked up his education, at Lynn’s insistence and Alice’s own gentle needling, at Kalamazoo College. He hated it there. He hated it more than he hated Ann Arbor and he had hated Ann Arbor quite a bit. Everyone he met at Kalamazoo said they wanted to go into the Peace Corps and that was just another thing he found to hate about that school. The only thing he liked about the place was the school newspaper but the school newspaper didn’t like him and used big dictionary words like “incendiary” and “firebrand” to describe him, but they used those big dictionary words in a way meant to denigrate and condemn.

After that year spent at Kalamazoo, Elliot transferred out. After that year at Kalamazoo and after his stint at Circle Tree Ranch just outside of Tucson, after he OD’d yet again (Oxy this time) he did all the paperwork and he made all the phone calls (“It’s amazing how sympathetic some people can be to the tale of a former drug addict,” he told Alice later, and Alice said one word: former?). He transferred to UCLA, much to Lynn’s chagrin.

“I don’t like him being that far out west alone,” Lynn said, as though Elliot was about to traverse the Oregon Trail instead of go to school in Los Angeles.

“You sent him to Arizona by himself.”

“I sent him to rehab, Alice -- there’s a difference.”

Alice visited him in Los Angeles, by herself and on her own dime.

When she arrived, it was late afternoon and Elliot seemed so proud to have her there. She wanted to say he looked good, and in a way he did -- he was smiling, he had color to his skin, his shoulders looked broad, his body fit instead of the rack of skin and bones he had been back in the hospital.

But seeing him made her tired. The flight made her tired. Everything, it seemed, made her tired. So she climbed into his bed, mid-afternoon, and she pulled the covers over her, the smell stale and of him. Elliot had rambled away, hopped up on Adderall and Red Bull and the bottle of Jameson he stole from some senior frat brother he had befriended, and even though all three of these elements were violations of Lynn’s agreement to let him go West (“she’s the money, Elliot, of course she has a say in where you go”), Alice didn’t say a word. She just laid in his bed and listened to the cadence and rhythm of his voice, but not the words he said.

And while she was there, she let him pretend he loved it out there.

“Like, fuck, man,” he said, “for settling in fucking Michigan.”

It was a lie though, a part of his game of pretend, but Alice allowed it.

The truth was that California did not suit them though. It didn’t suit Alice, and try as he might -- and Elliot was trying -- it did not suit Elliot either. There was too much openness, too many bleached golds and yellows, too much promise of something greater. They were and are and always will be people bounded by the things they know and fear. There is no place for openness, no claim or strength to be gleaned from a flat and empty sky, a washed out stretch of shore.

For people such as themselves, they need walls and they need cold, they need the boundaries to know where things stand and where they change.

When Alice arrived, she climbed in his bed, and Elliot had slid in bed beside her. Even though the sun had yet to set and even though it shone meanly through the slats of his open blinds he got in bed with her.

His breath was hot against her face and he toyed with the ends of her hair as he told her that it had gotten long.

Alice had shrugged, her eyes half-closed, and she started a smile she did not finish.

9.

Alice in the West was not the right Alice.

After Alice tried to kill herself, after she graduated high school, the summer before she was expected to start college at Michigan State, Lynn sent her away. She sent her to a treatment center along the coast in California.

Elliot visited her. He came with Lynn and Ben stayed home with Lee. While they were there, they ate dinners together at cheap chain restaurants, Applebee’s and Chili’s and just the once a seemingly authentic Mexican restaurant. Each time, it was only Lynn and Elliot, Alice left behind in her room, and each time they would leave the center to go to dinner, Elliot would beg Lynn to let him stay.

“There are rules, Elliot. And we need Alice to get better.”

Their last night there, Lynn let Elliot stay longer. He sat with Alice in her room and they played gin rummy and didn’t really say much of anything to each other.

At eight that evening, Alice’s nurse Rosa had popped her head in.

“No gentlemen in rooms, querida,” Rosa told her.

“He’s my brother,” Alice said.

“I’m her brother,” he said with a dangerous smirk.

“Ay, por supuesto, El Diablo es su hermano,” Rosa sighed under her breath as she walked away from Alice’s room, a quick sign of the cross and then the shake of her head.

10.

He had not even wanted to go to college.

The year Dylan got married, Alice went back to school in the fall but commuted from home.

Elliot did not return to school. He got his GED, and at times, Alice would gently, and not all that slyly, bring up college.

Elliot rattled off a list of names for her: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and the guy who created Dell and Henry Ford and Andrew Jackson and a Rockefeller and Spielberg and Zuckerberg and Russell Simmons and --

“All bros who never got a fucking degree. All bazillionaires. College is just an expensive conspiracy to inter us all into a clockwork culture of fear and assimilation. You know how many commercials are aired aimed solely at getting people all worked up and paranoid about whether they can save enough money for their children’s college education despite the fact they are still trying to pay down their own academic debt? Fucking conspiracy. You really think you need a degree in, in, in, I don’t know, fucking philosophy in order to work in a cubicle plugging numbers into a spreadsheet and having your computer do all the math? You think you need four years undergrad to know how to make a pie chart or give a presentation convincing your superiors or your peers or that rival company why you’re the fucking balls-out best? All bullshit, man. All total fucking bullshit.”

Alice bit the inside of her cheek and impatiently tapped a pen against the book she was reading.

“Well I need a degree for what I want to do.”

Elliot laughed at her.

“No you don’t. Shrinks are the biggest bull-shitters of them all. Except lawyers, maybe.”

Alice frowned. “I never said I want to be a shrink.”

“No you just want to play around with children’s minds like a brain predator or something. A mental pedophile. That’s some fucked up shit, Al.” He gave her a smug knowing look and Alice slammed her book shut and crossed her arms over her chest.

“God just shut up. That’s great if you want nothing for your future but not all of us plan on coasting on our charisma or whatever it is you think you have.”

He leaned forward. “Vision, my friend. I’ve got vision.”

Alice looked at him coldly over her textbook.

“You sound like every stoner I have ever met. There is nothing original or unique about you, Elliot.”

His face had clouded in hurt for just a moment, but it was long enough for her to catch it. He covered quickly, flashing her a shit-eating grin.

“What are you talking about? You don’t have any friends, you don’t know anyone.”

She knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to hurt her just as she hurt him -- sharp and accidental on her part, or so she thought, but with Elliot each blow he delivered was always etched with purpose and desire to draw blood. He leaned forward even more, his hands reaching at the edge of her book, close enough to touch her own hands.

“I’m the most fascinating person you know,” he said darkly, but he was still smiling, his grin had grown.

She met his eyes and then she blinked.

“Don’t know why you look so smug. Like you said,” she said, “I don’t know a lot of people.”

Elliot laughed.

11.

His first night under their roof, the three of them share dinner together: Elliot and Alice and Michael.

Michael is a better chef than Alice, and while Alice mixes together a salad, Michael braises the lamb and he makes the potatoes and keeps talking about some apple tart thing he's making for dessert. Elliot sits at the counter and he watches Alice. He sips at a glass of iced tea, and Alice's hair keeps slipping into her face as she works and the diamond on her finger is huge and bright just as her eyes are huge and bright, and each time she glances at Elliot, it seems to be on accident.

So it's Elliot and Michael that talk. It's Elliot who plays at cheerful, an undercurrent of disdain buoying his words, as he plays along with Michael. He tells Michael he has not had lamb in ages and that apple tarts sound like the perfect dessert if he had to name a dessert and if he actually even cared for desserts, and Michael nods and Alice mixes the salad, and when at last Elliot catches her eye, Alice blinks but does not look away.

"So how were the Maldives?" Elliot asks, a mouthful of braised lamb and potatoes.

"Marvelous," Michael says. "Simply incredible. I, hand to god, could not think of a better destination for a honeymoon. Right, Al?"

Alice nods, her meal untouched. She swallows her sip of wine (none offered to Elliot), and dabs at her mouth. "Sure," she says, unconvincing.

"Can't say I ever been," Elliot says. He's watching Alice again. He's watching her and seeing how far he can goad Michael, trying to see just how much Michael actually knows about Alice.

"I did," Elliot says, "spend quite a considerable amount of time, uh, over in Scandinavia. That was around the time of your little spell in California wasn't it? Terribly restive out there. Great for getting all your mental faculties back on track."

Alice stares at him. There's no reproach in her gaze, not even alarm. Instead she looks bored, almost disgusted.

"No, Elliot. That wasn't then. You're off," she says, stabs a potato with her fork, "by quite a few years." Michael does not comment, not about Elliot's mistake in measuring time and not about Alice's restive stay in California or what she might have needed a respite from at all.

"Right, right, right. California is such a great state. The golden state! I would even wager that in California one can almost feel sane."

Alice licks her lips.

"Why did you leave then?" she asks.

He stops talking and he grits his teeth. Alice watches the small yet pronounced tic at the hinge of his jaw. He is angry, though Alice has decided he has no right to be. Not with Michael, and certainly not with her.

“Your brother is protective,” Michael will tell Alice that night in the dark. But he will say it like Elliot doesn’t have a right to be that, like Elliot has stepped into his territory, and Alice will not know what to say about that. Alice won’t know what to say about how Michael drew that conclusion despite the way the dinner table conversation was dominated by Elliot trying to pick a fight with her.

She will not see anything protective in that.

If he was trying to protect her, she will want to say, he wouldn’t try to humiliate her like that.

12.

Alice was drunk. It was the spring, coming on a year after Dylan’s wedding, and Alice was drunk.

She had gone out that night with friends, her thesis finished, graduation eminent, and so she had gone out. Getting drunk, she found, was easy. The shots burned her throat, felt too warm in her chest, but she liked that. She liked all of it: the free drinks the bartender offered her, how easy it was to be fun and light and stupid, how with enough in her it felt as though nothing really mattered. Nothing mattered but her.

So she was drunk, and she came home. Later, she won’t know why she did it. Later, it won’t fit the reasoning she offers herself (I don’t know why I let him do it), but upon arriving home, she went straight up to Elliot’s bedroom.

The light was still on, shining out from beneath the door, and she didn’t knock. She opened the door and she stumbled inside; she shut the door behind her and leaned back against it. Elliot was sitting there, shirtless in bed, and he looked up at her, his eyes narrowed.

“We swapping places now, huh? Guess I better get slicing and dicing.”

Alice’s easy smile slipped into a scowl. “Fuck you what’s that supposed to mean?”

Elliot laughed and his posture relaxed that much more. “I can smell you from here. And how I thought I had cornered the substance abuse outfit in this family . . . ”

Alice stood up straight, her shoulders square, angry with him and with herself that she even felt the need to rise to her own defense. “I had a few cocktails. That’s hardly . . . comparable to you, like, OD’ing on ketamine or . . . whatever.”

“Which time?” he drawled.

“My point exactly. You can still be the junkie.”

“And you’ll be the nutjob?”

“Don’t be mean.”

In her mind, it was always easy to blame him. In her mind, what happened at Christmas could be made attributable to him. Elliot was the bad one, and Elliot made her bad, too. It did not work that way this time, and no amount of future revisionist history could change that for her. Denial would become her engine for control, but even denial would not have its place here.

Nothing had happened since Christmas. There had been no other shared bottles of expensive scotch and no other empty bathtubs. He had not pressed his open mouth against hers and she had not reciprocated, had not gone down on her back and wanted him to work his way inside her.

Nothing had happened, until that night. And it was Alice who walked across the room. It was Alice who toed her shoes off, who let her jacket fall to the ground with her purse, and it was Alice who got in bed with him.

She got in his bed and she straddled him. Maybe she liked that look of surprise on his face, the way his eyebrows arched not in dismissal or in conceit but rather as a result of the unexpected. Maybe she was brave, or maybe she saw no other option.

Maybe she just wanted to know that he was her own.

She got in bed and she licked her lips and his breath hitched despite himself. She kissed him, her mouth hot, her hands balanced on his bare shoulders, blunt nails threatening to break the skin. He did not mean to groan, but he did, a deep rumble of sound more felt than heard when he kissed her back.

The kiss was all teeth and spit, visceral and mean. When she tasted blood, she did not know if it was his or hers. She did not know if it mattered.

What mattered was the way he grabbed at her neck, how he hauled her down to him, how even though he was under her, even though it was her initiative that brought her here, he still tried to hold the reins of control. What mattered was his hand under her shirt, his hand pulling at her bra, pulling at her nipple, how his hands were warm and her skin felt cold, the arch of her spine, the spread of her legs over his.

What mattered, she will think, is that their roles were reversed: she was the drunk, and he was supposed to be the voice of reason.

Instead he kissed her back.

Instead he pulled her shirt over her head, mouthed at her breasts through her thin pink bra, pulled at her jeans, her panties, and dragged them down her thighs. He was the one to gasp when he touched her for the first time. It was him who said, “Jesus, fuck,” when he rubbed at her and found her wet; it was him that grunted when he slid two fingers inside of her.

Alice lowered herself on top of him. Her chest brushed against his; she rolled her wet cunt against his dick until Elliot snapped and then thrust up into her. Alice’s mouth had gaped open, a soft high-pitched gasp as though he had knocked the wind out of her. He pushed his hips up against hers and muttered the word, “fuck,” when she twisted, ground herself down against him.

He flipped them over and her bare shoulder hit the wall and her eyes widened, not in pain, but sudden terror that someone might have heard them. “It’s fine,” he stammered out, pushing her down into the mattress and grabbing at her hip, “it’s fine.” His fingers bit into her thighs and her fingers bit into his rolling shoulder blades.

He came before she did, her mouth wet at the hinge of his jaw when his entire body went rigid, and he stuck his fingers in her, wet with his come, wet with her, and brought her off. She kept trying to hide her face against his neck, her mouth hanging wide open, small needy sounds escaping her, but he grabbed her by the chin.

He forced her to look at him.

13.

“I don’t know why I let him do it,” she said.

They said: Alice we just want you to be good we just want you to be good we just want you --

14.

Michael goes out of town; he leaves them there.

Alice orders a pizza that night and they eat it together in front of the television, watching old 1970s B-movies and the first half of The Daily Show.

Elliot gets grease on his fingers and wipes his hands with a napkin, his eyes glued to the exposed curve of the neck, the way her jaw clenches, her throat moves, when she swallows. He watches her, the intent hard and unforgiving like a stone within him that she know that he is watching.

"I don't know why you came here," Alice finally says. She bites at her thumbnail before she turns to look at him, and when she does, her eyes are in shadow. Her eyes are dark like his.

"I missed you," he says. He aims for levity, he aims to mock, but he misses his mark. He finds he means it. He knows he means it. He has missed her in ways he will never know or ever want to articulate.

"That's nice," she says. She reminds him of their grandmother in that instant -- cold, aloof, untouched by anyone but herself. It leaves him angry, he can feel it swelling inside of himself.

Before he can decide what he wants to do with that anger, she passes him the remote.

"I'm going to bed," she says, and later, later, always later, neither will be entirely sure if that was meant to be construed as an invitation.

16.

Elliot does not go to her that night, but the next morning he wakes early, the sun just rising, and he walks down the hall to the master bedroom.

When he opens the door, her eyes are open but she’s still curled in on her side, buried in her bed, the covers hiding her body.

Elliot gets in bed with her and he winds his body around hers. She makes a quiet whimper when his chest presses against her back, and the sound only grows when he bites her, his teeth nicking at the back of her neck.

His hand slides down her hip, and she is naked. She went to bed naked, she went to bed expecting this, expecting him, and he can feel her whole body trembling under his.

He says her name once, like a warning, but no, that's not right. If it is a warning, then it's a warning for him, a warning for how far he has let this go. He says her name desperately, and when he says it, Alice makes a sound like a sob.

He rubs his body against hers, and her hips push back against him. She bats at the covers when he drags her up onto her knees, her body bared to him, and his kisses and licks, bites, down the knobby length of her spine.

He fucks her from behind and watches her fingers curl into the sheets, watches them grab and pull. He fucks her hard, the slap of his skin against hers, fucks her until he thinks she’s crying.

He stops then, groans when he pulls out of her, and Alice hides her mouth with her forearm.

"Al," he murmurs. "Al, Al, Alice, Al," he keeps saying, and he rolls her over; her head arches back, her face still covered by her arm, but her legs open to him.

He bites at her hip bone, his mouth tasting the skin of her scars, all those small fine white lines she made into her skin, and he bites her, makes it hurt. She bucks wild under him, her voice strangled, but saying the same word over and over again: please please please.

He licks into her cunt and he can taste himself. She comes with her knee crooked around his neck, clenching tight around around his fingers, his mouth hot and open and wet right where she is the same.

He kisses her after. He kisses her, after, after all this time and all these years and all the places that have come between them. She bites at his mouth, fists his cock in her hand, makes him moan and confess too much.

When he comes, her eyes are huge and glassy, and perhaps, just a bit afraid.

When she had her mouth against his, when she had his cock in her hand, he thinks he said: you’re all I’ve ever wanted.

17.

She left him in her bedroom. He finds her in the kitchen.

Alice is standing at the kitchen sink, at the window, holding a cup of coffee. She must hear his approach because her entire body goes rigid, on alert.

“I want you to leave, Elliot,” she says, but she says it to the window. She says it to the window that overlooks the small back patio with the industrial size grill that Elliot wants to bet has only been used once and that time was the Fourth of July and they held some great backyard gathering for all their neighborhood friends, and what he doesn’t know is that he’s right, and what he doesn’t know is that Alice went to make sangria in the kitchen and she stood in that exact same spot she stands in now and she thought of Elliot, she thought of him for a moment too long, and she forgot about the sangria, forgot about the sliced apples (she knew all the names, Braeburn and Fuji and Red Delicious and Pink Lady -- they had been Pink Lady apples), and stood at the window, at the sink, with the water running and watched Michael at the grill. She thought of Elliot and watched Michael at the grill, and for the first time in a long time she felt the way she used to feel -- she felt younger, more hopeful, though she still despaired of everyone and everything -- and the very thought that there might have been a part of her that got lost along the way, a vital part of her that though it might have made her hurt it had also made her complete, and it was gone now, stamped out, rubbed out, without fanfare or acknowledgement, and she was only realizing its departure then. It made her sadder than she thought she was capable of anymore. It made her forget the apples and the open bottle of wine. It made her forget the party and the smell of the barbecue had become only smoke and burnt meat to her, and she wanted to cry, and she thought of Elliot, and that made her want to cry more.

He has no way of knowing that now. Alice will not tell him. She has asked him to leave, so she will not tell him.

“Why?” he asks flatly.

“What do you mean -- ” she starts and then sputters to a stop. “You know why. Elliot. You know.”

“You afraid I’m going to spill all your dirty little secrets to Michael?”

She looks at him over her shoulder. “It’s wrong,” is all she says, and it makes Elliot laugh.

Then she says, “You’re all wrong,” more to herself than to him. Elliot clenches his jaw and takes a step closer. He thinks this what they call seeing red. He thinks what he is seeing is red. He steps closer, and Alice turns around to face him.

“You think you’re so different?” he snarls. “You think you’re better? Fuck you. Fuck you, Al. You love this shit. You love acting like you’ve got your life together, that you did it, you achieved whatever blissful fucking nirvana all those pamphlets at Dr. So-and-So’s advertise, but you’re a liar. You’re a fucking liar, and I hate liars. All you’ve learned how to do is self-medicate and bury whatever horrible awful dark part of yourself you hate so fucking much inside of you. And well done. Bravo. A worthy performance. But I’m sorry I can’t lie like you. I’m sorry that offends you and upsets you and makes you all . . . squirrelly like you are right now. I’m really sorry about that.”

“Jesus, Elliot,” she interrupts.

“I’m not finished yet. You want a big apology from me? I know that’s all Mom has ever wanted from me, and if we’re baring our souls here and opening up the big wounds and telling all the big scary truths, why don’t you chew on this one for a little while: I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but I’m pretty sure it was when I left the country for a little while, but you have all but become our beloved mother. Look at you. So shrill, so intent on keeping emotions in check -- ”

“Stop it.”

“Nah, nah, I think you need to hear this. I think you need to know that I am incredibly sorry you turned out like Mom. So sorry. And I’m sorry, ok? I’m sorry the only person I have ever loved is you, and I’m sorry I don’t know how to make that stop.”

Alice squeezes her eyes shut, her bottom lip trembling.

“Please,” she says, “Elliot, please.”

“Oh, I forgot. You’re fine. Alice is fine. Alice can’t hear these things because she is good and fine and they found a cure for her but not for me. I’m the leper, but Alice is fine.” He grabs her by the jaw and tilts her face up to his and she stumbles into him, her fingers curling into the front of his shirt.

“Alice doesn’t like to fuck her brother,” he says, his voice ragged and low, hurt in a way she recognizes all too well. “And she certainly doesn’t beg him to make her come. No. She’s good. And she’s fine and she’s okay and she doesn’t talk about these things or want these things; the only one who wanted any of that was me.” He grabs her face that much tighter and Alice is crying openly now. “And Alice doesn’t love anyone, she doesn’t love anyone, you don’t love anyone, least of all me.”

Alice pushes away from him. She throws the coffee mug down hard against the counter and it shatters, porcelain and spilled coffee everywhere.

She screams at him. “Get out! Get the fuck out get out get out of my house get out of my life get the fuck out Elliot.”

Elliot watches her, and for a moment, he is sure what he is seeing is their mother.

18.

Alice kicks Elliot out of her house. She kicks him out of Michael’s house. She drives him to the airport -- O’Hare not Midway. She does not know how to get to Midway.

She braces her hands against the steering wheel, her plum-colored manicure chipped, her nails bitten down to the quick.

She does not put the car in park when she pulls up outside the departures gate.

“No goodbye for your broth -- ”

“Get out of the car,” she says, dark and even, and she has changed so much, too much, she’s covered more distance than he has, and he made an error in judgment because of all things he anticipated this wasn’t among them. Alice was the constant. A year before she said I’m all you have, but sitting in the car with her he doesn’t think he even has that anymore. She won’t look at him, her gaze flat and unseeing as she watches the row of taxis in front of them.

“Yeah? Well fuck you too.”

He slams the car door and Alice jolts in her seat.

19.

Alice in 1999 is not the Alice in 2002 is not the Alice in 2008 is not the Alice in 2012 is not the Alice he left behind.

There was an Alice who favored the apple farm forty-five minutes northeast of Kalamazoo, the Alice who favored apples, who knew their names and said them like they mattered, who knew their specific scent, what the stained flush of color or lack thereof across its skin meant should you first polish and then sink your teeth inside. An Alice who preferred the flesh of one over the other. An Alice who could say their names -- Belle de Bishop and Ben Davis. Braeburn and Alkane, alias Tokyo Rose: small to medium in size, bright shiny red. The Red Delicious and the Yellow Delicious, the Wagener and the Vista Bella -- very dark and very red. Fuji and Spartan, Pink Lady, the Rome Beauty, the Red Wealthy; Priscilla and Primrose and Sansa; Mother and Northern Spy, a fruit that bruises easily.

Alice, this Alice, not only knew them all, but they mattered to her. This was an Alice whose stained flush of color across her skin he knew, and he knew the taste of her flesh.

The Northern Spy. The Tokyo Rose. Vista Bella: very dark and very red. That Alice belonged to a different time; she was not the one he left in the rain.

20.

Elliot pays cash for a flight to Mexico City and he buys John McCain’s memoir and sits down in the smoker’s lounge and waits for his flight to be called.

He’s never been to Mexico. He thinks Mexico is as good a start as any to run to, to start over; every movie he has ever seen the hero flees south of the border and that’s called a good ending. That’s not true. None of that is true. He’s not sure what he is looking for is called a new start or if he’s the kind of man capable of starting fresh. Tethering himself and everyone else to the past has always been his primary weapon. If he’s going to cut loose, it won’t be by his own hand. And he’s never seen a movie where a hero or anyone in particular successfully (or unsuccessfully) fled to Mexico, and if he never witnessed that, then no one ever called it a good ending.

“Mexico, huh?” the businessman says next to him: a nod to the ticket in Elliot’s lap, a flagrantly Americanized pull to his attempt to say the country’s name en español. “Business or pleasure?” he asks.

Elliot smiles, lazy and predatory, more himself than he has felt in days. “La cocaína,” he says, and then he chuckles. With this thumb he smears the Hitler moustache he has drawn on McCain’s face.

21.

Alice pulls over fifteen minutes outside of the city. The falling rain has frozen and the streets are slick with ice and accumulating slush. Her tires slide when she attempts to brake, and that’s when she starts to cry.

She cries noisily, her body bent into the steering wheel. And she cries about the rain and she cries about the ice and she cries about her brother, she cries about Elliot, and she cries because she will never be good, she doesn’t have it in her, she doesn’t want it in her, the only things she wants inside of her is him.

So she cries.

So she calls his cell phone number three weeks later and when it rolls over to his voicemail she cries again.

She says: “I have always loved you. I have always always loved you.”

Elliot left his cell phone in Portland.

He gets it when he returns from Mexico City. He returns much as he left, only richer and with a scar to the right side of his abdomen courtesy of a knife fight in a tequila bar.

He returns to the apartment he had been squatting in with the better part of an indie rock outfit in Portland. His stuff is all still there. They put it in boxes for him and stored the boxes in the coat closet.

In the box he finds his cell phone.

In the box he finds she loves him.

22.

Before Chicago, before Portland, before Michael, before Alice clutched the steering wheel and cried, Elliot went abroad.

He kept calling Alice from cities like Gothenburg or Copenhagen or Gdansk as he tried to fall asleep with the window open even though it was winter and he had tried telling her about that once, how he liked to sleep when it was cold and it smelled like snow because snow totally has a smell, but he had not know how to say that either so he just breathed and she laid back on her bed as the sun set and she breathed too and it was as though they were in the same room and she knew about the snow and she understood it, understood him, and it was a fiction he was more than willing to buy into, a fiction he could sleep with.

It became a habit he immersed himself in so deeply -- imagining Alice, imagining her everywhere he is -- that years later when he would reference the time he spent in Gothenburg or Copenhagen or Gdansk he would place her there as well.

At a party he let such a detail slip and Alice had frowned.

“I was in Chicago,” she said, and Elliot stared blankly at her, the moment in his mind -- Alice with snow in her hair, Alice with a cold mouth at his ear, Alice in Gothenburg or Copenhagen or Gdansk -- too real to have been feigned.

So he looked at her like she was a liar, like he did not want to believe her but he laughed all the same.

So for him, she has been everywhere he has been.

So for him, that means they will meet again.

23.

They meet again. Paul dies three years later, a sudden heart attack, and this will be the first time Alice leaves Michael. The first, not the last.

The second time she leaves Michael, she stays gone for a month. She will be almost thirty and Elliot will be living in Washington, D.C.

He will be a surprise success -- the editor of a politically subversive website (like Drudge, but not lame; like Stewart, but meaner).

The best review he will ever receive in the court of public opinion will come courtesy of a mention by Bill Clinton: “I want to call him a boneheaded asshole, but goddamn, this asshole’s right nine times out of ten.”

But Elliot will not change.

The Elliot of the past, the Elliot of 1999 and 2002 and 2008 and 2012 and the Elliot of today, the Elliot who can remember Alice in an apple orchard and the Alice with the names of the red, red apples on her red, red tongue -- he will be the same.

He does not change.

When are you going to grow the fuck up?

Oh, you know. Some time near the end.

C O N T I N U E D :
O N E | T H R E E