Locust Lane(9)

And then she started to cry. She collapsed into Alice’s body with such force that she almost sent them both tumbling down into glass-studded harissa. The sobs moved through her like a shaken rug.

“Hannah, sweetie, what is it?” Alice asked, truly alarmed now.

“Nothing,” she whimpered.

The girl pulled back and swatted at the tears covering her cheeks.

“I’m just being stupid.”

“Did you fight with Jack?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know. Just … never mind.”

“Well, is there anything I can do? I’d offer you some harissa, but…”

It was a pretty funny remark, but Hannah wasn’t laughing.

“He’s here,” she whispered, like an actress with a single line in a horror film.

“Who? Jack?”

“He’s staying over. Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s all right. As long as you don’t have sex or anything.”

Hannah’s eyes widened.

“I’m joking,” Alice said as she thought: Stop joking. “I mean, do you want him there?”

“Yes!”

“Then it’s fine.”

“Do you think Dad will be okay with it?”

“I’ll handle your father. But I am a little worried about you being upset. You’re sorta supposed to have the opposite reaction to these things.”

“I guess I’m just being emotional.”

“Emotions are good, right? We like emotions.”

Finally, a wan smile. Hannah looked at the floor, illuminated by light from the still-open Sub-Zero, which had started pinging like an elevator locked in endless descent. The harissa glistened thick and red. Shards of glass emerged like broken teeth. It looked like a gangland slaying photo.

“I should clean this up,” Hannah said.

“I’ll get it. You go back to your boyfriend. And cheer up. These are the good times, kiddo.”

Hannah grabbed two bottles of water from the fridge and vanished. Alice was tempted to leave the mess for the morning, but Geoff was given to barefoot nocturnal wanderings, and their relationship had not yet entered the booby-trap phase. It took half a roll of paper towels to clean up. As she worked, she contemplated what she’d just learned. Jack was staying over. This was new. The tears weren’t necessarily cause for alarm. Her stepdaughter was prone to weeping, barely able to last through a Sally Struthers commercial without dissolving into a puddle of sentiment. It was probably just an excess of feeling bubbling to the surface.

On the other hand, Alice still wasn’t so sure about Jack. Although she’d never seen concrete evidence of bad behavior, there was a faintly sulfuric whiff about him that needed to be watched. Those creepily close-set eyes had a way of cutting into you that didn’t feel accidental; his default tone was dismissive sarcasm. He’d recently expressed some strange opinions about what women wanted that Alice hoped he’d be growing out of soon. And there was a lacerating tone to his laughter that gave her pause. Alice had taken her eye off the ball during her recent adventure, but that didn’t mean it was no longer something that needed to be watched.

She walked to Geoff’s office and paused outside the door. She listened for a moment—he was never happy to be disturbed while working. But he needed to know what was going on under their roof. It was unusually silent inside. She knocked gently. Nothing. She knocked again. More nothing. She opened the door a few inches.

“Geoff?” she whispered into the gap.

There was no response. She poked her head inside. He lay on the sofa against the far wall, dead to the world beneath the Hüsker Dü poster. The slack cadence of his breathing suggested he’d recently visited the deep end of his pharmaceutical pool. Trying to wake him would be futile. She backed out of the room. They’d discuss Hannah in the morning.

Back in bed, glacier water in hand, Alice pondered her own romantic travails. She should go ahead and text Michel, even though she’d resolved not to. It had been three days. Well, four, now that morning approached. She’d written him eight times during that spell, usually in midmorning, the quietest time of his day. Each message had gone unanswered. It was starting to frighten her.

She typed, hey can’t sleep thinking about you. Not exactly a sonnet, but it got the point across. Her thumb hovered over the arrow. Something was stopping her. She could tell herself it was prudence, but she knew it was really fear; fear that this, too, would go unanswered. And so she erased the feeble girlish words and nestled the phone against her stomach. Just in case. Her eyes came to rest on the canister of Ambien on her nightstand, nestled inconspicuously between the Xanax and Excedrin Plus. What the hell, she thought as she reached for it. That’s what it’s there for.

The next thing she knew it was 11:17. Harsh, headachy light poured into the room. Her limbs felt like they’d been filled with cement. Geoff’s side of the bed remained unoccupied, extending his three-week absent streak. Her phone had wound up beneath her body, like an egg she was trying to hatch. There was a single message, but it was only from Celia.

“Lunch?”

She was tempted to decline and go back to sleep. Pull the plug on the day. Maybe take a Xanax this time, just to make sure she didn’t develop any bad habits. But that was another of her mother’s tricks, sleeping the day away. Not-turning-into-Mom might not be the most laudable of goals, but at least it got her out of bed in the morning.