Gabby crawled into the bed and burrowed under the covers, snuggling up to Alice. The room was light enough that Alice could see Gabby’s large eyes, so close to her own. In that moment, Alice knew her best friend was going to be okay. But was that enough to convince Alice she should keep writing?
“I love you,” Gabby told her.
“I love you too,” Alice said. If only it was that easy. If only this was the kind of love people wanted. The kind of love Alice wanted. Again, her mind drifted to Duncan, the pressure of his lips against hers, how much she wanted to kiss him again. And why couldn’t it be that easy? Why couldn’t Alice let herself fall? A fall. A leap, a jump, a crash. There was that language again. The dangerous vocabulary of love. No wonder Alice felt the risks so acutely.
In the morning Alice made them coffee in her French press. When she looked out the window, Oliver was standing across the street with a dozen red roses. To his credit, his eyes were bloodshot and he was wearing the rumpled lucky plaid shirt from the night before. The expression on his face was contrite, pleading. It sent a chill down Alice’s spine. She had no idea how he knew where she lived. She shut the curtains.
An hour later when Gabby left for work, he was still there. Gabby paused at the doorstep and watched as he darted across the street to talk to her. Alice was standing behind her in the open doorway, but Gabby asked her to give them a second. She shut the door and peeked out through the curtains, listening, ready to run out with her father’s bat at the slightest threat.
Oliver said everything predictable. He was sorry. Beyond sorry. He was trying to be funny. He had no idea his jokes would hurt her that much.
“You didn’t think that having you stand up there for fifteen minutes making me the butt of your jokes would hurt?”
“It’s just comedy,” he said pathetically.
“Well, I hope you and your comedy are very happy together. Now, if you don’t leave, I’m calling the cops. And if I see you anywhere near me or Alice, I’m going to file a restraining order against you,babe.” She shrugged her shoulder like he had in his routine and flipped him the middle finger.
31
The Walk
Gabby was not the only one who had been feeling neglected by Alice. Without registering it, Alice had not seen her mother in over a month.
“If I don’t see you this weekend,” Bobby threatened into Alice’s voicemail, “I’m alerting the authorities.”
Alice hadn’t meant to avoid her mother. She hadn’t meant to avoid Gabby either. She’d just retreated so far inside herself, her failures, that she’d lost track of her old routines. And Bobby had been spending so much time with Mark that Alice didn’t need to check up on her constantly. Her mother was happy. Alice had wrongly assumed that happiness had kept them apart rather than her own hibernation.
Alice met her mother by the sea lion statue in Carpinteria for a morning walk. They’d never walked together as an activity. This was part of her mother’s new routine, one she’d created with Mark. As she approached the familiar figure seated on the lip of the statue, facing the ocean, Alice couldn’t shake the disappointment that they’d grown apart, that her mother’s happiness came at a cost to their relationship.
Bobby wove her arm through her daughter’s. In the early morning hours the beach was empty save for surfers carving the waves. Alice and Bobby kept to the narrow wooden boardwalk, each waiting for the other to speak. Alice could not remember a time since her father’s death when there had been such weighted silence between them. She felt the need to apologize, except she wasn’t certain what to apologize for.
“So,” Bobby said, leaning against Alice as a gust of wind rolled off the ocean. “Renata told me about Oliver. How’s Gabby holding up?”
“Okay, I think.”
Gabby had stayed with Alice for three nights while she put her apartment on the market and devised a plan for getting over Oliver. First she signed up for a week-long meditation retreat in the mountains. This was very uncharacteristic of Gabby, who hated silence the way other people hated blasting music, but that seemed to be the point. Alice hadn’t heard from her since she’d left for the retreat, which was a good sign.
“It really is horrible what he did to her and just around the holidays,” Bobby continued as she marched through the wind. “It’s good that she found out what he was like before they got too serious.”
“It was already too serious,” Alice said, trying to block her eyes from the hair that twirled around her head. She’d forgotten the first rule of curly hair and the ocean, always bring a ponytail holder. “I just wish there had been signs earlier. Or maybe there were and we missed them. He really did seem like one of the good ones.”
“He might be, for someone else, someone who doesn’t mind the public spectacle, someone who finds it funny.”
“His jokes weren’t funny though. They were mean.”
“Gabby is strong. She’ll survive this, and she’ll be better for it.”
Alice looked out over the ocean, trying to decide if she agreed. “Are you better for surviving Dad?” she asked.
Bobby stopped walking and faced Alice. The freckles on Bobby’s face had morphed into sunspots, but she still had a girlish look about her. “I’m not sure how to answer that. Do I wish he was still with us? Of course. Am I certain we would have been happy growing old together? I can’t say for sure.” She motioned Alice back toward downtown. “Come on,” she added casually, as though she had not just said something that jolted Alice, that rearranged her world order. “I’m starving.”
Alice planted her feet firmly on the wood planks of the boardwalk. “What are you talking about? You two were perfect.”
Bobby frowned. “Alice, c’mon.” Alice didn’t budge. “No relationship is perfect,” Bobby said.
“You two were,” Alice argued, feeling childish. Her mother brushed Alice’s hair away from her face, awaking a forgotten memory of Alice screaming as Bobby brushed out the permanent tangle of knots in her thick hair. She always remembered her father caring for her as a child, but there were ways her mother tended to her too.
“I think we’ve both remembered your father as we needed to. As I’ve opened myself up to Mark, to the possibility that we might be together for a while, it’s made me revisit how I’ve idealized your father.”
