“You have a dad,” Carrie said, with wonder in her voice.
“Kind of? He isn’t my father legally. He didn’t want me.” Alice’s hair was over her face; she spoke into a light-colored curtain.
“Only your mother could keep a secret like this for twenty-five years.” Carrie told strangers intimate details of her life minutes after meeting them and had always found Julia’s composure baffling. Once, when they were teenagers and Carrie was sleeping over at their apartment, Carrie had asked Julia when she’d lost her virginity. Alice and Carrie had watched something happen inside Julia that made her face turn a light shade of purple, and then she’d said she needed to make a work call—at nine o’clock on a Friday evening—and left the room.
“She could have kept this secret forever.” Alice looked at Carrie. “I think she was trying to hurt me with it. She looked…I don’t know, a little excited.”
“About what it might do to you?” Carrie said.
Alice nodded. She felt tears pressing the backs of her eyes. “I don’t see why how I choose to live my life, which doesn’t hurt anyone, bothers her so much.”
“Oh, Alice,” Carrie said.
“I like having a simple life.” Alice could feel all the stray threads inside her; the tiny scissors had cut through every one. “I don’t like to…feel so much.”
“I know.” Carrie was quiet for a minute, then said, “I’ve been keeping my mouth shut about you and your mom, as much as I could, forever. You know that.”
Alice nodded, already resigned to whatever was coming. “Go ahead,” she said. “Say whatever you want.”
Carrie set her face; she took this permission, this opportunity, seriously. “Okay, here’s what I think happened. From my vantage point, you sealed yourself up, probably right after your mom told you that your dad died. The only people you loved before that news—that lie, as it turns out—are still the only people you love with all your heart. The only people you let yourself love. Me, your mom, and your grandmother. I feel like when we were kids, sometimes you almost opened yourself up. Remember you had a crush on that boy with the spiky hair when we were in middle school? But then you closed down completely. You have the best heart, and you don’t use it. Your mom is responsible for that. It’s like she raised you to be a Navy SEAL or something, with a completely unusual skill set. Julia’s even more responsible than I thought, since she freaking lied to you for your whole life. She’s obviously realizing that now and wants to try to undo her mistakes.”
“I don’t need to be undone.” Alice felt her own stubbornness, like a bump in the carpet, but didn’t care. “I wish she hadn’t told me.”
Carrie leaned over and kissed Alice’s cheek. She looked brighter, like a cleaned lantern, after being allowed to deliver the speech she’d been suppressing for years. “Julia did tell you, though, and this is exciting too, you know? Your dad is alive. You can go meet him and ask him why he did what he did. You have all his genes, after all. You can go meet this tall man.”
“I have to figure out the timeline before I can consider that,” Alice said. “I have to find out what happened in Chicago. I don’t know anything, Carrie.”
Carrie eyed her. She knew how Alice worked. The two friends were opposites in many ways, but they both were deliberate about how they lived, wouldn’t tolerate assholes, and always had each other’s back. “How can I help?” she said.
“You can sit with me while I Google him,” Alice said. “And give me time to process everything. There’s no rush.”
The two young women stayed up until four o’clock in the morning on the sofa bed. It was difficult work, because there was a ringing noise in Alice’s ears, she had a hard time reading the sentences on the computer screen, and the images were overwhelming. Her father was the head physio for the Chicago Bulls, so there were numerous photos of him online. There were a few pictures of him in conversation with basketball players, presumably about injuries. He was in staff photos too, with thirty other men wearing identical polo shirts. There was only one photo from earlier in his life, from Northwestern University. It was a shot of the college basketball team, and he was standing at the end of a row wearing a jersey but normal pants, and he was on crutches.
“He’s super cute in this photo,” Carrie said. In the more-recent photos, he looked not only older but worn, like a rock on the beach. She peered closer. “It’s from 1982. So, the year before you were born.”
Alice nodded. She felt slightly drunk, even though she’d had nothing to drink except a few gallons of water at the restaurant. She and Carrie both fell asleep at some point, and since the next day was a Saturday, no alarms went off, and they didn’t wake until late morning. Alice had a headache, but she also felt relieved, as if a burden had been lifted from her. It wasn’t until she was eating breakfast that it occurred to her that she’d muffled her questions and avoided looking for answers her entire life, in deference to her mother. She no longer had to do that. She could ask anyone anything she wanted. This made her smile so widely she felt it in her cheeks, and Carrie looked up from her bowl of cereal and smiled in return.
Alice wondered what this might mean. What were her questions? What did she want to know? What did she want to say? She’d never considered these possibilities before; it felt like she’d been wearing blinders and they’d been removed. The horizon was endless, in every direction. There was a knock at their door; it was Rhoan.
“Carrie filled me in.” He sat down at the kitchen table, as if joining a meeting already in progress. “Alice—this makes so much sense. I always felt like you were waiting for something, like you had your ear to the ground and didn’t want to move in case you missed it. I thought you were waiting for some dude, but this is much cooler.”
“Exactly,” Carrie said.
“I’m going to put my almost-PhD to use. I’m a world-class researcher, you know. We’re going to help you find every scrap of information there is about these people.”
Alice started to object, but Rhoan waved a large hand. “Do you know how happy we are to have the chance to help you? You never let us help you. You always say you’re fine. You have no drama queen in you, Alice Padavano, but this is a goddamn drama.”
“I don’t like drama,” Alice said, to her plate.
“We know. But having the chance to help you makes me so happy I could cry.”
“I am crying,” Carrie said, and she was.
“I know this is hard,” Rhoan said. “But let us take care of you, okay?”
Alice put her hands to her face and laughed. With all the threads cut inside her, there was no way for her to resist. She could feel her friends’ love pushing past her skin, into her body, and she cried too.
“This table,” she said, as something occurred to her. “This was our kitchen table when I was growing up. When I was five, we were sitting at this table when my mom told me that my father was dead.”
“Whoa,” Carrie said.