“We’ve met before.”
“I know you were...”
“I was Alice Hodge’s helper. I worked for her family.”
How long ago had the funeral been? Was it eight years ago? Alice and Malachy, all of the family, occupied the Beforeland: where I lived before Belinda’s death and Stefan’s incarceration, where I once looked down on a welter of messy tragedies that only befell other people. I hadn’t talked to any of the Hodges since Belinda’s death. Too much shame. Too much of the same shame.
“I remember now. Rebecca, I hope my son Stefan can help.”
“Oh, I hope so, too,” she said. “It’s about Alzy... I killed her.”
For a moment, my back burst with electrical prickles, because I thought we were about to hear a criminal confession.
Then Stefan said, “Becky, you know that isn’t true. You didn’t...” But he stopped, respectful. He knew all about magical thinking.
“Tell us,” I said.
Stefan thinned his eyes at me: Becky’s letter of remorse had already been written, the file prepared.
“I’m sorry, Stefan. I want to know about the night Alzy died. This matters to me in a personal way.”
“But you do know.”
“I don’t know the details.”
Why had I never wanted to know, to know everything, before? She had been my friend. We’d once been as close as cousins. Now, I recognized that I probably never wanted to know everything about my friend Alzy’s death. At first, it seemed too far from my own reality in life. Now, it probably seemed too close.
“Do you think it’s your karma or something?” Stefan asked.
I noticed that Rebecca, whom I’d met formally only five minutes before, was looking at both of us like she needed to be closer to the nearest exit.
“I don’t believe in karma, but it’s something,” I told Stefan.
“You guys, it’s really okay!” Becky said. “I don’t mind telling you. It’s not an imposition. It will probably help me along this road, if anything.”
Stefan suppressed a sigh, and so did I. They were different kinds of sighs.
So Becky began with the start of her relationship with Alzy.
She answered an ad.
As a new college grad, she answered a lot of them.
But one was particularly intriguing. Intelligent Resourceful Companion, read the headline. The ideal candidate would work for a young professor who had been sick in the hospital for a while. Those words raised an alarm.
“It was the combination of the word young and the word hospital. I thought, what kind of hospital would a young person be in? The mental kind? But then, I thought, who cares? So what if it was? Did it really matter if the young professor wasn’t homicidal? I looked up clinical depression. I looked up schizophrenia. I looked up bipolar illness. I had no idea what any of it meant. I studied English and library science! I needed a job.”
The terms of employment were attractive, she said: A private carriage house off the main house, all expenses paid; use of a car and a weekly salary. The work was mostly nights and weekends; no lifting or physical care. The professor was fully employed during the day. It sounded like something out of a Jane Austen novel.
“Then I met Alzy,” Becky said. “That was it. You know how she was.”
Yes, I knew how she was. Alzy made everything look easy. She fought for poor single moms, her writing and advocacy meant to expose the subtle ways in which even well-intentioned media painted them as the architects of their own disaster. She worked around the clock. When she was literally sick with exhaustion, three shots of vodka taken rapidly perked her up. Impeccable and composed, Alzy would have starter cocktails over lunch with colleagues, drinks with influential friends for dinner, and afterward continue with folks in bars until closing time. Despite all her accomplishments, however, Alzy had the warm heart and politician’s timing of a Hodge. When she sat down with you, it wasn’t just looking at her, how beautiful she was, her ringleted blond hair from Mal’s side of the family and the soft but sturdy dancer’s figure she inherited from Alma, like Erhart’s Mary Magdalene carved from linden wood, it was also the way she treated you. She would get so enthused about whatever you were doing that you would feel as if you’d just lost twenty pounds and defended your thesis. Becky said, “An old friend of hers told me once that he was burned out by his research into synesthesia when Alzy said, what if there was a restaurant in Paris where all the chefs could see taste in their minds, so that the color yellow tasted like braised carrots and the color purple tasted like plums?”
The guy ended up finishing his degree but also writing a novel about that restaurant.
So why would such a woman, accomplished and adept, loved and lauded, already in possession of all the gifts life could offer to the body and the spirit, trade those blessings for a couple of inches of firepower at the bottom of a glass with a twist of lime? Why would she do that, with not a single hint of any addiction in her ancestry, to the tip of the last branch of the family tree?
As Rebecca posed those questions, I thought to myself, indeed...why would Stefan?
I let my eyes slide over to him then, and I saw that he was already looking at me, looking at me as if my skull were made of window glass and he could read every thought on my brain. He knew the answer. There was no clear answer. There was no dot-to-dot that, traced, would set forth a clear route that could be studied, understood and avoided.
“Pretty soon, I figured out that the very attractive money was combat pay,” Becky said.
When Alice was sober, she was diligent, generous, painstaking and charming. When Alice was on a bender, she was devious, defiant, sometimes cruel...and charming. “It was like taking care of a baby who never got older but could filibuster like a senator, which she could, it was her birthright, okay? Lying was to Alzy like the cello to Yo-Yo Ma. She had a gift. It was almost something you could admire.”
With a reproving look that asked, how could you suspect anything else, Alzy would sometimes tell Becky, “I’m just getting my briefcase out of the car.” But minutes would pass. Alzy would not return. Then the grim hunt would begin. Friends’ houses, restaurants, libraries, parks, bars, bus shelters along the lakeshore, the Civic Center parking lot.
Becky would be afraid to call Alice’s sisters or her mother and father or her ex-husband, afraid that they would put Alice back in rehab and Alice would lose her good job or never see her children again. Becky would also lose her good job. The Hodges trusted Becky and treated her like family. And Alzy was ever gallant, loving, contrite, when she was sober.
“I loved her,” Becky told Stefan and me. “I wanted to save her. But I was only one girl.”
Alzy loved Christmas.
The first Christmas after the final salvo of the custody battle with her ex-husband, she was to have the girls with her starting that Christmas Eve. Not a drop of liquor passed her lips. The days were tender and festive. But when they went back to their dad several days later, her mood plummeted.
That New Year’s Eve was gorgeously counterfeit: The sun was so high and bright it was impossible to believe that the high temperature, in late afternoon, was minus four. In the evening Alzy sat and gazed into the fireplace and drank huge mugs of what Rebecca believed was tea. Becky recalled Alice turning to her and saying, “I love my little girls. And I love my husband. I had everything. I ruined everything.”
“It’s not all your fault, Alzy,” Becky told her. “You have a disease. You just can’t have booze, is all. It’ll kill you.”
“Then I might as well be dead.”
“Not even a little. Your girls need you. Your husband probably needs you. You can see how much he loves you. So many people love you and admire you and count on you.”