Alice is there now, the mask in one hand. In the other hand, she carries a pair of rain boots.
“You can’t go outside in bare feet, silly,” she says.
I look at my feet. They are bare. My shoes disappeared alongwith my clothes last night while I slept. I would walk with bare feet across broken glass to get out of here but I shake my head and feign self-deprecation.
“Oh, my! I am silly, aren’t I?”
I take the boots. I can’t tell if they belong to a man or woman. They are big and my feet swim inside them. But I can walk and that’s all that matters.
I smile at Alice. I force myself to pull her close to me. She nuzzles her face into my chest.
“Thank you, Alice. You are a very sweet girl.”
I release her now.
“I’ll be back really soon and I’m sure I’ll feel better. Will you be all right for a few minutes?”
She nods. “I stay here alone all the time.”
“Okay.” I kiss her forehead and open the door. She steps back from it so she doesn’t have to breathe the air from the outside.
My heart dances with the hope of freedom. It is near euphoric.
As I step outside, I hear Alice call after me.
“Be careful,” she says. “Don’t get lost in the woods.”
I look back. And she tells me, “That’s how my first mommy died.”
8
Day fourteen
An hour passed. Then another, and another, until Nic stopped watching the time—until a mild form of unconsciousness had shut down her mind, mercifully.
She came to in the middle of the night. Head still pounding, sheets tangled around her body. Wondering how late it was, and if the bar across the street would still be open.
Where was it coming from, this craving? She scanned her body, looking for the culprit. Her head was the obvious suspect, but that was just a red herring. A clever misdirection.
She thought back to the first time she’d had a drink and felt the relief. It was the fall of her senior year—two years after Annie died. She’d managed the fallout with punishment. Schoolwork and running. She’d gotten a job at a local clothing store to fill the bits and pieces of spare time. She’d lost fifteen pounds because she’d deprived herself of every indulgence.
It was Columbus Day weekend. Three days off from school. No cross-country meets or tests to study for. Her parents had both been gone—her father to a conference and her mother to visitEvan. Saturday she’d woken up and run ten miles. She’d worked her shift at the store, then come home to an empty house. A quiet house. She’d tried to read but her mind had been tired and refusing to cooperate. She’d turned on the television but nothing had been able to pull her in.
That was the first time she’d felt them—the hollow spaces. The emptiness that would not fill up. Not with anything.
She’d gone for another run, at night, until her body had shut down and she’d been able to sleep. But then morning had come and her legs wouldn’t move and her mind wouldn’t focus. The store was closed. She’d run out of distractions.
She would come to understand that the hollow spaces had been carved out by the grief, and the guilt, and the self-hatred—the fallout from Annie’s death. But on that Sunday, they had felt like a wild beast writhing with hunger. For the first time in her life, she’d understood why people jumped from bridges, and when she’d found herself thinking about the bridge over the river downtown, she’d gone to the liquor cabinet and poured a glass of vodka.
Within minutes, she was crying. And then laughing. And then bingeing some inane show on her laptop. She’d woken up Monday morning still in her clothes, the laptop dead beside her.
And she’d thought—thank you, God. Thank you for vodka.
By the end of senior year, she’d been caught four times with alcohol at school. Expelled. Her college acceptance revoked.
And still, she thought—thank you, God. Thank you for vodka.
As she lay in the bed now with her pounding head, she muscled back the craving, the hunger of the hollow spaces, and let herself go down the path that she had to consider. If her mother hadn’t walked away, and two weeks had now passed, she was likely dead. Dead in a field that they didn’t search. Or dead at the hand of a stranger.
