Tangerine(56)

“She will,” I said, my voice flat and even. “She will come with me. She will see that it’s the right decision.”

“Lucy,” he said, his voice tinged with something like irritation now. I could feel it, his temper, growing, fanned by my insistence, my determination. “Alice doesn’t care about this whole mess with Sabine, not really,” he continued, his words rushed. “If she had, don’t you think she would have said something, done something by now?”

I struggled to find my voice. “She’s afraid of you.”

“No, Lucy.” He laughed. “She just knows there isn’t any better option. Not for a woman like her.”

I felt it then—my breath jagged, sharp, so that it hurt to breathe, so that each and every inhale was labored, painful. “This is my favorite place in all of Tangier,” I said, pushing the feeling aside. “Those are tombs, just below you.” I paused, turning to him, my voice wavering with emotion. “Alice will come with me, John. She already agreed to it, while we were in Chefchaouen. She’s already decided to leave you. You’re just not smart enough to have realized it yet.”

He lunged then, and surprised, I lost my balance, falling to the hard, dusty ground. “You bitch,” he spat. I pushed backward, working to right myself, to keep away from him so that he would not be able to stand over me, towering. I couldn’t see his face clearly, not in the darkness, but I imagined it was red, swollen with anger. It seemed absurd that he should be so enraged. He had had Alice and he had let her go, traded her for that other woman. I think that was it—the thought of his betrayal—that convinced me, absolutely, that it was the right thing to do.

The only thing to do, I knew then.

John had subsumed Alice entirely, rendering it impossible for her to survive autonomously. As long as he existed, she could not. There was only one way to free her, to ensure that she would not always belong to him, to this place. I thought then too of how much John loved Tangier, realizing that he was right. Things were changing, shifting, and Tangier—all of us—would never be the same again. I knew that if he could, he would choose to remain there forever, with her—his Tangier—just as she was in that moment of time.

Once I realized that, the rest was surprisingly simple.





III





Eleven


Alice


WHEN I WOKE THAT MORNING, FOR ONE STRANGE, BEAUTIFUL moment I was back in New England. I could feel the frozen blast of the winter months, could smell the cold, clean air, so that I moved to bury myself deeper within my bed, reaching for the familiar comfort of down. But then, that feeling of euphoria shifted, tilted, replaced instead by a growing urgency, a sense that something was wrong, the realization pulling me under, further and further, until I could no longer find my way out from under it. My stomach ached, and I kicked and clawed, but it was no use. I was back there again, in Vermont, and it was no longer nostalgic and breathtaking. There was now a darkness, something large and uncontrollable that threatened to hold me within its grasp once more. I saw Tom, then, lying in the snow, the white pristine blanket underneath him bleeding slowly into a deep, startling red. I stepped closer. No, it wasn’t Tom at all, I realized. It was John, still and motionless—dead. And suddenly I knew. I knew that—

I sat up abruptly.

Someone was knocking at the door.

My head still slow with dreams, I turned to John, to see if he had heard the knocking as well. I saw his empty side of the bed and remembered. The other night at the bar—the kif, the drinks, his subsequent disappearance to Fez, which I could not blame him for, the need to escape apparently one of the few things we shared between us. After all, I had run to Chefchaouen while he had waited at home—now, it seemed, I would do the same, waiting until he reemerged on the doorstep from Fez, tired and full of the realization that there was no escape from the life we had created with each other.

I took a deep breath, willing my heart to slow, willing the sweat on my skin to dry, but the thought of John, pale and silent, remained before my eyes.

It seemed ages since I had last seen him in front of me.

I had stayed in bed the morning after our night out, nursing a horrendous hangover, so I wasn’t even entirely certain what time he had arrived home, whether he had passed the night beside me, in our bed, or out on the sofa. I had woken to the sounds of him in the kitchen, making breakfast. A boiled egg and a slice of msemmen, followed by a quick cup of tea. It was always the same. Later, I had heard the phone ring—Charlie, I presumed, remembering what he had mentioned about Fez—and the closing of the front door not long after that.

I had listened, after, for sounds of Lucy. For any indication that she was packing, leaving—but there had only been silence. A few hours later, tiptoeing past her door—sometime in the late afternoon, judging by the way the light fell against the walls, insistent, as if clinging to life—I chanced a quick look into her room. It was empty. I had exhaled, feeling something like relief as I returned to my own bedroom and crawled back between the sheets, content to let the day slip by from the comfort of my bed, certain that everything was at last working its way back to how it had been before. And there was a comfort in that, in the realization that Lucy was gone and John was off with Charlie—that I was, once again, alone.

Toward nightfall I had woken and, unable to sleep, passed an hour or two by the window, looking out at Tangier, at the city that had somehow become my home. In the quiet, I allowed myself to wonder whether I could ever love it, wondered whether I could ever really be happy if I was to remain, with John. Our life was already so different from the way I had imagined it, and now that Lucy was gone, now that it was done with at last, I did not know what that would mean, for John and me, whether we would be able to slip back into the normalcy that we had created together—whether that was something that either of us even wanted. I had retired to bed early then, anxious to still the swirling thoughts in my mind, if only for a moment or two longer.