“Maybe that’s how your gift works. You don’t try to control or understand it. You simply let it happen.”
“My gift? Gabby, the only thing I’m gifted at is quitting. I have a preternatural talent for giving up.”
Gabby frowned. “All the more reason not to quit now. And for the record, I’ve never believed that about you. It’s just an excuse you’ve been telling yourself for years so you don’t have to pursue anything challenging.”
She was a clever one, that Gabby. If Alice turned her down now, she’d be proving Gabby right.
“Look, just meet Oliver’s sister and see if inspiration strikes you again.” Gabby shuddered. “It really is a horrible image.”
They were at an impasse, eyes locked across the table, a little dot of guacamole at the corner of Gabby’s mouth. She licked it away keeping her eyes fixed on Alice. Around them, pop music cloyed Alice’s ears. The temperature in the room rose, intensified by Gabby’s continued stare. Her insistence was too much, causing Alice to look away. Without seeing it, she could sense Gabby’s triumphant smile.
Gabby always won. Alice had never been able to refuse Gabby, and historically this had been a good thing. Over the years, if she hadn’t consistently said yes to Gabby, she never would have learned to ride a bike, never would have had her first kiss, never would have worn a bikini or Doc Martens, never would have gone across the country for med school, never would have left when it didn’t feel like home.
“Good,” Gabby said, scooping the last bit of guacamole with her index finger. “Her name is Rebecca, and you’ll love her.” She stuck her guacamole-laden finger into her mouth, making a popping sound as she wiped it clean. “This is the start of something big for you, Alice. I can feel it.”
2
The Time Is Now
Alice did not love Rebecca. In fact, she found it difficult to believe Gabby did either.
They met at a bar Rebecca had chosen, a sleek bunker of blond wood and bare white walls, the absence of decor an ambience of its own.
Rebecca slipped onto the bench across from Alice. She did not say hello or make any polite attempts at small talk before presenting Alice with her situation.
“I’m thirty-eight,” she said after ordering them each a glass of Malbec from the tablet left on their table. “My divorce finalized last month. Thank God I didn’t have kids with him, only now, like I said, now I’m thirty-eight. I have two years to meet someone and get pregnant.” She delivered her speech without an ounce of humor. She wore her black hair cropped behind her ears. Her fingernails were buffed and filed, and her neutral-toned clothing looked expensive.
“Lots of women have children in their forties,” Alice said, sipping her wine. She had not seen the waitress deliver it, but there it was, a stemless glass on the table before her.
Rebecca took a microscopic sip from her own glass. “Can you help me or not?”
While she was cold, she wasn’t rude exactly. She came off more as pragmatic than prickly. Could Alice help her?No, Alice reasoned.You are going about this the wrong way if what you really want is love.Although, love and a relationship weren’t necessarily the same thing, not that Alice suspected she could write a story to help Rebecca find either.
Prickly or not, Rebecca was intimidating, so Alice nodded, afraid to say no, she couldn’t help her, but unable to say yes either.
“Good.” Rebecca slid an envelope across the table, took another small sip of wine and stood. “You have seventy-two hours. Anything can be done in that time. I’ll be in touch.”
Once Alice was certain Rebecca wasn’t coming back, she poured the rest of Rebecca’s wine into her own glass and drank it quickly, fearful that the stealthy waitress might disappear it while she was taking a breath between sips. Inside the envelope, Rebecca had enclosed enough money to pay Alice’s rent for two months, all in fifties. She would have to work twenty catering shifts to make that much. Alice looked longingly at the money. Generally, she was not driven by financial gain, but it would be so much easier just to plop a few words on the page than to spend twenty nights smiling until her cheeks ached as she asked strangers if they’d prefer red or white wine with their entrée. She zipped the envelope into an inner pocket in her purse, certain she would be sliding that envelope back across the table when she apologized to Rebecca for being unable to help her. Maybe she would make Gabby do it for her. The woman really was terrifying.
Alice remained at that efficient, impersonal bar until she finished her wine. Sometime during that double glass, her perspective shifted. While her fear of Rebecca didn’t go away, it morphed into pity. She felt for Rebecca, who mistook plans for dreams, who tried to control her future the way she’d controlled her meeting with Alice, through efficiency and determination. The more wine she sipped in the sterile bar Rebecca had selected, the more she thought about the type of woman Rebecca was, what she needed. A reprieve. A respite from her plans, a break from her watch, which had ticked away on her wrist the whole twenty-seven minutes they were together. Even if Alice couldn’t find Rebecca love, she might be able to help the woman slow down. Lord knows, she needed that more than a partner or a pregnancy.
By the time Alice left the bar, the sun was beginning to set on the horizon, a small ball of fire dipping into the ocean. The sky was striated orange and red. Alice unlocked her bike and walked it down State Street toward the ocean, thinking of all the pilgrims in Gabby’s story who had made the same journey. Along the modest strip of beach beside the pier, a few couples nestled on blankets, watching the sun disappear, the glorious colors it left in its wake. Seagulls lined the edge of the water as though they too were saying goodbye to the day.
Alice stood on the bike path until the sky lost all traces of the sun and blended into the dark ocean below. Without the glitter of the sun’s reflection, the water looked thick and sludgy. An image came to Alice, one that hit her with that same clichéd rush of a barreling truck, one that had nothing to do with love. A tingling traveled up her arms, pins and needles like they’d gone numb, a dizziness in her head that was not entirely unpleasant. She hopped on her bike, took the path east, then turned north and headed home.
Her studio apartment was on the ground floor of a Victorian that had once been a single home, now subdivided into four apartments. She’d been living there since she left med school and returned to California. Over those eight years, she’d collected more belongings than the modest garden apartment could reasonably be expected to hold. Stacks of books migrated from the overstuffed bookshelves to the floor, competing for space with bins of her father’s records. An impressive collection of afghans was piled on one side of the couch, an elaborate cat tree and condo for her shorthair, Agatha, was blocking the hallway on the other side. In the far corner, meticulously layered with more afghans, Alice’s double bed was sandwiched beside an antique dresser that was too large for the area. While her apartment gave Gabby panic attacks, Alice liked living this way, cloistered with her stuff, cluttered but clean, cozy. Besides, it didn’t matter how it might appear to anyone else. She rarely had visitors, certainly not the kind who might try to make themselves at home in her space.
On the desk, Alice rearranged her piles of pens and opened her computer to get to work, her body still buzzing with that image of muddy water. She had no idea what she was going to write, but as soon as her fingers grazed the keyboard, they became a life force of their own. She could not control them or the words that emerged from their patter across the keys, the scene that took shape on the screen.
The story was even less of a love story than the one she’d written for Gabby. It began with Rebecca lying in a pool of mud carved into the side of mountain. Steam rose from the surface, cloaking her in opaque mist. For eighteen pages, all that happened was Rebecca struggling to get out of the pool. She tugged at her legs. She tried to run. She flailed. Every effort pulled her further in. When at last she let go and submitted to the mud, she didn’t sink. Instead, she floated. The mud was a soft bed she did not want to leave. Slowly, effortlessly, she wiggled her toes, and like a small motor, they propelled her to the lip of the pool. She tried to step out all at once and was unable to stand. Instead, she let the mud tilt her, leisurely, like it was pouring her out, until she landed on the hard ground, clean in an emerald dress, her bare feet nestled into a sea of rose petals. She lay down in the petals and fell asleep.
Alice wrote until the sky outside started to lighten. Her back ached. Her temples pounded. When she stood and stretched, her body cracked in places where she didn’t realize she had joints. Every cell in her body felt drained, its energy removed and transplanted to the page, but she’d finished.
She stepped away from the desk, confused and a little scared of the words that had amassed on the pages, unsure what they meant yet certain Rebecca would hate it. Rebecca would probably make it halfway through the story before calling Alice to scream, “What the hell is this? Why are you wasting my time?”
And what the hell was it? Alice was not abstract or symbolic. She was rarely one to give advice, especially on how to improve one’s life. Still, she couldn’t shake the tingling that persisted, spreading from her arms to her entire body. Whatever these pages were, they were exactly what Rebecca needed.
When they met again, precisely seventy-two hours after their first appointment, Rebecca went to open the manila envelope with her story inside. Alice stopped her. She couldn’t bear to watch Rebecca read it. More, the story would not have its intended effect if Rebecca rushed it. The whole point was to get her to slow down.
