Back in his room, he cracked a window and tried to get back into the Ed McBain book, but he kept thinking about Alice, her damp cheek on his as she kissed him good night. He also kept thinking about her refusal to discuss what had happened with her husband. Was it because she knew more than she was saying, or was she simply someone who didn’t want to think about anything unpleasant? He realized how little he knew about her. Was it because he’d never asked, or was it because his father had never offered? And now here he was, living for a summer with this strange woman, and she was practically all the family he had left.
He fell asleep above the covers, and woke up cold. He got up and shut the window, then got under the comforter. He listened to the house, so much quieter than his dormitory, where he could lie in bed and listen to the muffled sounds of its other inhabitants. Here, all he could hear was the occasional sound that old houses made, the almost unnoticeable ticks and sighs. He didn’t really like it, the enormity of the quiet, the way it made him feel more alone than he usually did. He felt the negative thoughts rolling toward him, and knew if he let them in he wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. He recited the Lord’s Prayer to himself, even though the words had long been meaningless to him, but it was too late. The horrible dread—this now familiar feeling of insignificance—coursed through him. As always, it felt more like fear than sadness. He knew it would pass, and he concentrated on relaxing his body and focusing on his sensations, listening to the house.
After a while, he was beginning to fall asleep again when he heard the creak of the stairs, maybe Alice coming up to bed. Then he heard faint sounds just outside his door. He listened intently, sometimes hearing them and sometimes not. Moving slowly and quietly, he got out of the bed and took three steps along the worn rug to stand in front of the door. He turned his ear toward the door and listened. It was unmistakable. He could hear Alice breathing just on the other side of the door. He shifted his weight, and a floor plank made a squeaking sound. He listened to Alice’s footsteps as she retreated quickly down the hall.
Chapter 11
Then
After Edith’s death, Jake and Alice settled, quickly and naturally, into a new life together. Alice, as planned, enrolled in classes at the community college, commuting back and forth. She kept her own bedroom at the beachside condominium but spent every night in the master bedroom with Jake, even though there were so many reminders of her mother around.
“Should we pack some of these things away?” Jake asked one morning. He was holding up a half-empty perfume bottle while Alice toweled herself dry in the en suite bathroom.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I mean, do what you want. You can throw that perfume away. I’ll never use it.”
Jake shrugged and put the perfume back on the shelf where he’d found it. He watched Alice dry herself.
“What are you looking at?” she said, smiling. She was bent over, drying her calves.
“You don’t know what you have there, do you?”
“What I have?”
“What you are. What you look like. Right now, you are absolute perfection in every way. You know that? Youth and beauty.”
“And I’m wasting it on you.” She straightened up and smiled so that he knew she was kidding. Even so, she caught a brief look of concern cross his face, like a wisp of a cloud crossing the sun.
“I would never keep you here,” he said.
“I will never leave.”
He pulled her from the bathroom to the bed. As always, what they did together started out slow and reverent, Jake treating her with something akin to worship, and it always ended in an animalistic frenzy, Jake taking complete control. Later, Alice would find bruises on her skin that she didn’t remember getting.
She was as happy as she had ever been. It was a month after the funeral.
When Alice was alone in the house, which was fairly often, she occasionally looked through her mother’s things, sorting through her clothes and shoes, her books, and her few mementos. Some of it Alice wanted to keep, a decent cocktail dress for example, and the Gucci bag that Edith had bought from the fancy secondhand store in Portland. But most of it was junk, and Alice would fill grocery bags with clothes, bringing them down to the condo Dumpster out back and throwing them away, a little at a time. For some reason, she didn’t want to do this in front of Jake, even though she thought it would please him. Still, he must have noticed that there were less and less of Edith’s things around, and that more and more of Alice’s things were making their way into the master bedroom.
At the bottom of the bedroom closet was an old liquor store box filled with some of the more personal effects that Edith had kept, including her Biddeford High School yearbook. Alice had seen pictures of Edith when she’d been young, but never pictures of her as a teenager. There she was in black and white, her hair in a bouffant, looking prettier than any other girl in her graduating class. Alice also found a picture of her in the cheerleaders’ squad, and one candid of her at a car wash fund-raiser. She wore tight white shorts, and a cute sleeveless top, and she was smiling, not at the camera but at another girl. Both had soap bubbles in their hair, and Edith was holding a hose. Alice couldn’t stop looking at the picture, partly because her mother looked so beautiful and so happy, but mostly because of how much she looked like Alice did now. How had she gone from that to what she became, that sloppy, drunken wreck drooling on a couch?
Alice looked through the rest of the box. There was a cheap stuffed monkey that looked like it had been won in a fair, a second-place ribbon beginning to fray, a Bible with a white cover and Edith’s name inside of it, and two letters, typewritten on thin, oniony paper, that Alice was shocked to discover were from Gary Shurtleff, Alice’s biological father. Both were postmarked from San Diego, California. Both were short and apologetic, although in the second one he called Edith an uppity bitch for not writing him back. Neither of the letters mentioned a baby, even though Alice assumed he’d written them after he’d gotten her mother pregnant. Edith had once told Alice that her father had scampered out west as soon as he found out he was going to be a father. Now Alice wondered if her father had ever known about her. She also wondered where he was now. In California still? Then she put the letters back in the box with the yearbook and the Bible and the few other sentimental items that Edith had kept, and brought the whole box down to the Dumpster and got rid of it.
The first winter after high school—the first winter that Alice was alone with Jake—was long and particularly cold. From January through most of March, the coast was pounded with an almost weekly storm, the temperatures rarely above freezing. Alice didn’t mind. When she wasn’t at college, where she’d enrolled in the business administration program with an accounting concentration, she was happy to be at home, warm in the condominium, with its views of the grey ocean, mirrored by its grey sky. The weather made her lazy and hungry. Every day she’d eat macaroni and cheese for lunch, then drowse on the couch, a textbook open across her lap, soap operas playing on the television in the background. She didn’t really pay much attention to them, except for General Hospital, but she liked the background noise. Jake always called before he left the bank, and it would give her time to take a shower, put something nice on, apply a little makeup. On the first real warm day of spring—sometime in mid-May—she met Jake at the door wearing her favorite pair of shorts and a bikini top.
“Summer’s here,” she said.
He squeezed her skin just above the waistline of the shorts, and said, “I’m surprised you can still fit into those things.”