“Her name was Lauren not Raymond. Edith Lauren, Dee for short. I guess that explains why we couldn’t find her—she gave you a fake name. It says she went missing in 1989. Edith and Samuel Lauren lived in that big glass house on Arriba Street. The house was torn down in the early 2000s after cycling through three owners.” One owner heard a woman singing at night. Another saw a flash of her white slip whenever he passed the bathroom. The third did not see or hear anything, simply felt a weight across her chest every time she lay down.
The police had found Samuel in the kitchen with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his temple in addition to scratches along his face. Dee’s dried blood caked his fingernails. A search party combed the beach for Dee. The coast guard swept the area, but nothing was found except traces of her blood on the rocky shore and a strip of her white cotton nightgown. The police concluded that he’d tossed her body into the ocean, where the tide carried her away, and then returned to the house to kill himself. Without a body, her disappearance was never classified as a murder. To her family she was still missing.
Madeline fidgeted as she listened to Alice read the story.
“You okay?” Alice asked.
“Of course I’m not okay. Would you be okay if you found out one of your clients was brutally murdered by the man you drove her to?”
“No,” Alice said to the pavement beneath her feet.
“Can you take me home now?”
They followed the highway as it wound in a wide arc around the ocean toward the national forest. Madeline stared out at the lush green hills and the blue expanse of the ocean, punctuated by the Channel Islands on the horizon. Alice was thankful for the silence. Her mind reviewed Madeline’s simple story, sentence by sentence, so short that Alice had memorized it.You are the only one who gets to be you.In the secret library those words had seemed empowering, a statement of how our inimitability gives us strength. Now they just felt isolating. No one will fully understand us. We will never fully understand anyone else either. She drove mechanically along the highway, the air pressure causing her ears to pop as they climbed higher.
It was clear and crisp up in the mountains. The sun warmed the car through the windshield, though it did nothing to quell the chill that ran through Alice. Although they had only looked at one of those twenty-eight purple books, she knew what the color meant. Violence. Bruised and hateful ends.
She pulled up the hill onto Stagecoach Road, her heart catching as they passed Cold Spring Tavern. No matter how many times she visited Madeline, she never got used to its presence, unavoidable along the drive. When she let out that involuntary gasp, Madeline observed her but said nothing.
Outside Madeline’s house, they sat in the car, staring at the woods. The car idled, its engine a soundtrack to their silence.
“Do you see now?” Madeline said at last. “Do you see now why you must stop?” Unlike her previous assertions, these words seemed to bring her no joy that she had finally proven Alice wrong.
Of all Alice’s fears that her stories might not work, that her clients’ luck might end, that when the magic dried up they could find themselves worse off than they were before, she had never imagined anything close to murder. Dee’s story was never a love story. She wasn’t an example of a woman who had learned something essential from Madeline when the magic faded. At least Alice had witnessed the potential devastation before it was too late, before she’d been able to inflict violence on one of her own clients.
25
Peaches
After Alice saw Beatriz and Skylar on her morning hike, she heard whispers of other breakups. Rumors of passion that had fizzled. Heat that had tempered. Novelty that wore thin. These things happened all the time, the gossipers insisted with a shrug. Not all relationships lasted, not even those penned by the love scribe. The love-hungry of Santa Barbara were undeterred. They spoke of these instances like they were talking about devastating earthquakes on the other side of the world, fires that could never reach their hills. Once they met their soul mate, they would have the type of love others envied. It was sad, sure, that not everyone found eternal love, but Alice’s stories would work for them.
Alice was dismayed each time she heard of another couple that had not lasted. She tried to comfort herself with the fact that none of these cases had turned violent or ugly, simply an example of two souls who were not meant to be together. It was startling, worrisome, but her odds were still far superior to dating in the wild. As a result, despite the stories they’d heard of love faded, her waitlist continued to grow. People still believed in her gift. Already, she’d helped so many people. So despite her fear, she knew she had to continue—until she found Stefanie waiting at her door.
Alice was just returning from a meeting with a new client. Upon first glance, Ray was a typical Santa Barbara twenty-something: board shorts, a tan, sun-shaped calf tattoo, flip-flops, shaggy hair. “I missed the memo when I moved here,”Duncan would have joked about not fitting the local type. Since his visit a month ago, Alice had not heard from him again. She’d asked him not to contact her, and he’d obliged. Only her brain was not so obedient. Even if her feelings persisted, Alice was right to avoid Duncan. The mere suggestion of how she might get hurt sparked a sharp pain in her chest. She’d just have to endure his presence in her mind for a little longer. Eventually her feelings would subside. They always did.
Ray, by his own estimation, was a philosopher. He worked at one of the tasting rooms, pouring glasses of wine as he recited memorized notes on the legs and the bouquet, but his mind was existential. He went on so long about freedom and existence that Alice had to stop him. “Sorry, I’m just passionate,” he explained, knocking back a tiny cup of espresso with his pinky pointed out. “It intimidates women.” His problem wasn’t that he was passionate. Rather, he confused self-absorption with passion. No one wanted a man who didn’t listen, particularly not one who Alice suspected did not own a proper pair of pants. Clients like Ray were her least favorite. They were also her simplest cases. Her dislike made it easy for her to diagnose their problems, to crank out a story and be done with them. Within steps of the coffee shop, an image came to her, a pie slamming into Ray’s face. She’d have to massage it a little, but she saw it repeatedly, pie after pie across his pensive brow.
When she reached her driveway ready to write the story, a woman was sitting on her doorstep with her head resting on her knees, her long dark hair obscuring her face. She looked up as Alice rolled into her parking spot—one eye crystal blue, the other swollen shut, ringed by purple so dark it looked like makeup. Stefanie Bloom was one of her more recent clients. She’d been so sad when she first came to see Alice. Not sad as in lonely or heartbroken. Something deeper. Something that neither love nor Alice could fix. Sadness was her natural state of being. So Alice had written her a story about embracing all the beauty and strength her sadness afforded her. Now she didn’t look sad so much as pissed. Fed up. She stood and blocked the door.
“Is this what you call love?” she shouted as Alice approached, shoulders hunched like she wanted to disappear inside herself. Alice paused, unsure what to do. While visibly upset, Stefanie did not seem volatile or dangerous, just wounded and scared. “I have a black eye, Alice. You think this is the kind of love I wanted?”
Gabby had prepared Alice for countless scenarios that had yet to arise. They’d rehearsed responses if people wanted their money back, if they wanted follow-up stories to make their partners better lovers, better cooks, better listeners, better shaped. Gabby had prepared her for clients looking for fertility, for fortunes, for health and aging well, never for this.
Stefanie stared at Alice, waiting for an answer she couldn’t provide. “Let me make you some tea,” Alice offered.
As soon as she invited the woman inside, she realized her mistake. Other than Duncan’s brief appearance at her door, no one had been to her apartment in months, not even Gabby. In that time she’d allowed dishes to remain unwashed in the sink, mugs to collect on the desk beside her computer. Her bed was unmade, sheets crumpled at the bottom. At least she’d managed to clean out Agatha’s litter box each night, but that was more on account of her cat’s antipathy to mess than hers. If Alice waited too long to clean the litter box, she would return home to urine on her sheets, something she could never abide even as she allowed the rest of the apartment to go neglected. She had no problem leaving dirty clothes like a trail of breadcrumbs from where she discarded them to when she flopped into bed. As she followed Stefanie’s eyes, she could imagine the story the woman would tell her friends about the love scribe who could not tend to her own space let alone other people’s hearts.
Alice halfheartedly cleared the coffee table of its piles of magazines and notes for stories, stacking them on top of her bookshelf.
“I’ll just make us that tea,” Alice said as Stefanie lifted a ratty afghan with two fingers and dropped it on the other side of the couch.
In the kitchen, as she set the kettle to boil, Alice recalled the story she’d written for Stefanie, the love she’d reported to Alice after she read it. The story was about a peach orchard, a farmer who grew unsightly peaches that no one would buy, even though they were the most delicious peaches, if only anyone would try them. The farmer attempted to make them beautiful. She dyed them. Glossed them with simple syrup. Massaged them until they were round. The deformity persisted. Finally she piled all the peaches in a barrel and stuck a Free sign on top. When they were free, no one saw the blemishes, the discoloration. All they tasted was the sweet flesh inside.
After Stefanie read the story, her mouth went dry with desire for a juicy peach, the kind that would drip down her chin. She ventured down to the farmer’s market and walked the aisles, dismayed to discover that they weren’t in season. What about an orange? Or a tangerine? No, it had to be a peach. She paced the market in growing despair. It seemed vital that she eat a peach, but no one had peaches for sale. As she walked home, forlorn and defeated, she passed a bakery, one she’d never noticed before, with cute teal and white tile. Through the window she saw a single peach pie glistening in the case.
She waited in a modest line, her stomach tensing as the boy behind the counter helped one person then another, relieved when they ordered cupcakes and cookies. Soon there was one customer left between her and that perfectly bronze pie. And then he ordered it.
“Excuse me.” She tapped him on the shoulder until he turned. “I was going to order that.”
