Tangerine(7)

“Is he home?” I asked.

“Who?” Alice frowned. “Oh, John. No, no. He’s at work.”

“And how is he?” I asked, as if we were all old friends, though the words sounded hollow, and I hastened to cover them. “And you, how are you?”

“Good. We’re both doing quite well.” She said the words quickly, burying them underneath her breath. “And you?”

“I’m happy to be in Tangier.” I smiled. With you.

I did not say these last words aloud, though I could feel them, beating steadily within my chest. In fact, half of me was convinced that she had heard them too—or if not heard, perhaps felt.

I became aware that by this time we had moved into her flat, were, in fact, standing in the foyer, the wooden floor covered with an intricately designed rug, my suitcase still hanging heavily from my hands. I wondered at her not reaching for it and showing me to the spare room, so that we could sit and relax and begin to trade stories, like we had done in the old days. It was perhaps too much to hope for, I knew, that things would simply revert back to how they had once been, before that terrible night. And yet still, I couldn’t help myself. Hope still lived, however buried in the hollowed-out cavity of my chest. And yet, there was something in her stance, something in the way she moved—as though a caged and frightened bird, I thought—that led me to wonder whether the problem was not, in fact, the secrets that we held between us but something altogether different.

I had since wondered at Alice’s move to Tangier, recalling the old worn map that had hung over my bed at Bennington. We had made a game of it, over the years, pushing pins into the wall, the tacky white plaster giving way with ease as we decided where we would go once we graduated. The adventures that we would have, together. Paris for Alice, or, on days when she was feeling particularly brave, Budapest. But never Tangier. My own pins were placed farther afield: Cairo, Istanbul, Athens. Places that had once seemed distant and impossible, but no longer, with Alice by my side.

I’ll take you to Paris after we graduate, she said one evening, not long after we first met. We had sat, hidden behind the End of the World, that stretch of land at the end of Commons Lawn, where the earth appeared to abruptly give way—though if one was to look down, one would find only an unfurling of gentle, rolling hills. A mirage of sorts. An illusion. Night had already set in, the dampness of the grass bleeding through the cotton fabric of the blanket we sat upon, but still we remained, happy to ignore its encroachment.

I squeezed her palm in response. I knew by then about the trust that had been set up in her name, about the monthly allowance that she received—checks with her full name, Alice Elizabeth Shipley, written in a careful, old-fashioned script that appeared in her mail slot at the start of each month, precisely—but to make the offer, to extend such an invitation to a girl that she had known only a few weeks, it defied logic as I knew it. My heart had clenched, as if refusing to believe that such generosity, such kindness, truly lived in other people, as my own past had not taught me it was possible. Born in a small town in Vermont, only miles away from the college, I had always considered my hometown a place one drove through on the way to somewhere else, somewhere infinitely better. A scholarship had given me that chance, snatching me from the close confines of a stuffy apartment over a garage, transporting me only a few miles away, though it might as well have been to an entirely different world.

But then, Paris had never happened.

Instead, Alice had come to Tangier, to a place that she had never pinned on our map. And she had come without me.

“What are you doing in Tangier, Lucy?” Alice asked, shaking me from my reverie.

I blinked, startled by her words. “I’m here to see you, of course.” I smiled, my voice catching on the words as I worked to hide the emotion behind them.

I looked at Alice then—properly looked at her—for the first time. She was, as I had noted before, slimmer than the last time I had seen her—paler too, which was strange, considering the climate. There were dark circles underneath her eyes and she looked, I thought, like she hadn’t slept properly for quite some time. Her fingers were worrying at that spot just below her throat, which had turned a more threatening color since I had first arrived. She was wearing a housecoat, despite the hour, a yellow piece that tied at the waist with a simple sash and nearly touched her ankles. Her face was bare, without any trace of paint, and her hair—that once brilliant, thick tangle of golden curls—was shorter now and hung limply, its dingy color indicating that it was in need of a good wash.

“Is everything all right, Alice?” I moved closer, setting my suitcase down beside my feet.

“Of course, of course it is.” Those rushed words again.

“You would tell me, wouldn’t you? If something was wrong? If you and John—”

She flinched. “No, no. It’s all fine. Really. You’ve just surprised me, that’s all.” She smiled, though there was an edge in her voice—something sharp, steely.

But then her shoulders seemed to relax, her smile became less tight, and for the first time, she seemed to notice me: from the new bouffant-style hairdo, held into place by a generous amount of hair spray—although it had already begun to frizz in the heat, I noted sourly—to the dark, belted shirtdress that had cost as much as one month’s rent. It was a far cry from our college days, I knew, but conscious of the fact that I would be seeing Alice for the first time in more than a year, I had wanted it to be evident how well I had done since those days—not in a gloating fashion, the way that other girls behaved around one another, passively flaunting their success only in order to make the others green with envy. No, I wanted to show Alice just how much our days and nights spent together at college had meant, how all our dreaming of the future had not just been a fanciful way to pass the time. I had meant it, every single word. That was what I wanted to show her. That I had never lied, not about any of it, despite what had happened between us.