Swing.
I continued to look at her in confusion until she sighed and took the rope back from me. Watch, she instructed. Alice pulled the rope to the far corner of the room. Stepping onto the thick knot at the bottom of the rope with one foot, she folded her body, so that her arms and one leg wound themselves around the roping. She jumped, pushing her leg back and up, the force propelling her forward. The rope swung across the space of the room, and I stepped back to watch. Alice’s hair flung first forward and then back, so that her face was obscured, her laughter echoing throughout the small room as she swung back and forth, a human pendulum.
A clap of thunder sounded overhead, and I was brought back to Chefchaouen. I turned toward the window, although all I could see was blackness and my own lonely reflection. I continued to stare, realizing how much had changed between my memory of that dance studio and Chefchaouen. It was not just Alice who had altered. Without her, my own sense of self had wavered. I had tried, in the days after the accident, to accept that I would never see her again, that whatever had existed between Alice and me had been ravaged, had been burned up inside that raging inferno until there was nothing left but cinder, the remains of something that once was. And I felt it, this loss. A physical pain, a knot in my stomach, that churned, acidic and angry. There had been moments in New York when I had wandered the streets, unable to sleep, unable to stop thinking of her. I had walked until my feet cracked and bled, and then walked farther still, unable to stop. I had been lost, adrift.
There was that same swooshing noise in my ear, as normal to me by now as it had once been strange. Carefully, I examined it. There was still no pain, no sign of infection—just that unusual feeling of fullness. But then, there was something. I looked at my finger, now covered with grit. It didn’t matter how much I had washed in the bath, Tangier refused to let me go. But where only a few days before I would have relished this notion, I thought of it now with something like panic. Morocco was becoming too dangerous, not just for the expats who remained, but also for Alice, the city threatening to hold her captive. Both of us needed to get back to our original selves, I realized, and not just for twenty-four hours.
I stood by the window, though the view outside was obscured in the darkness. Alice would have to know. There could be no more stalling, no more waiting. I would have to tell her about what I had seen, about the fast-ticking clock that was sounding behind us, everywhere we went. I knew that John would not wait forever.
Ticktock. Ticktock.
And then, Alice was standing behind me, as if she had simply materialized, as if a part of my brain had somehow managed to conjure her. I looked at our reflections in the glass, but we no longer looked like sisters. I wasn’t sure exactly what had changed. It was true that we had different hairstyles now—mine was still long and old-fashioned, whereas Alice had cut hers into something that resembled a bob. I wondered if she had done it before or after her move to Tangier, if it had been in response to the heat or in anticipation of it. There was something else too, something in the way our expressions settled upon our respective faces. They were no longer interchangeable. Gone were the shared gestures, the intertextuality that had once existed between us. We were simply two women—close, once, but different. No longer the same at all.
“We need to leave, Alice.” The words came out hoarsely, as if they had caught in my throat.
A slow, sleepy grin settled on her face. “I know. Although part of me wishes that we could stay longer. Forever, even.”
She thought we were speaking of Chefchaouen. “No, Alice,” I said, with a slight shake of my head. “I mean we need to leave Tangier.”
Suddenly awake, her body tensed. She took a step backward, away from me.
“You can’t stay here anymore. It’s not safe,” I continued.
“No?”
“No.” I cleared my throat. “John knows that I know—about Sabine.”
She looked at me then, confusion crowding her features. But something else was there as well, a peculiar expression that pinched her face and told me what I had already begun to suspect: Alice knew. Perhaps not her name, and perhaps not even with any real certainty, but she knew that John was involved with another woman. Somewhere, however deeply she may have buried it, she knew.
Alice blinked and asked, “Who?”
I shook my head, ignoring her feigned expression. There could be no more hiding, I told myself, no more pretending. My voice was stronger, sharper as I told her, “You know who she is, Alice.”
She looked taken aback, but whether at my tone or my words, I was uncertain.
“I don’t know,” she protested.
I leaned forward. “You do.”
“No,” she said, continuing to back away. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.” She looked up at me, her expression pleading. “I don’t want to know, Lucy.”
“Alice.” She began to shake her head then, with such force that I moved toward her, worried. “Alice,” I murmured, trying to keep my voice low and steady.
Her face was red, her cheeks streaked with tears. “I know,” she said, the words, sounding like a gasp, hanging in the air between us. “I know, Lucy. It’s all so horribly embarrassing, but of course, I do.”
I exhaled—certain in the knowledge that I had been right, that I could still read her, that I still knew her, just as I once had. “What do you think he’ll do, Alice?” I continued. “When he finds out that you know. When he realizes that the money will stop.” She remained silent, her eyes wide. “You know what we have to do, then?” I pressed. “We have to leave, before he realizes.”
“Realizes what?” she whispered.
“That you know as well.” She was silent, and so I whispered: “There isn’t any other way.”
I was no longer certain if she was listening. She was shivering violently, though it was still warm, the humidity evident in the trail of mist on the glass windows. She wrapped her arms around her body, as if to protect herself against the cold, and I felt myself shiver, as if in response.
“We’ll go back to Tangier tomorrow. We’ll tell him together. And then we’ll leave,” I whispered, my voice steady, calm.
“Yes,” she whispered, turning toward the window.
“Isn’t that what you wanted, Alice?” I asked her. “To leave Tangier? To go back home?”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” she replied.
I felt my heart flutter, felt the realization that now was the time to move, to declare. I leaned forward so that I was only inches from her, my face hovering above her tear-stained skin. And then I kissed her.
BEFORE HIM, WE HAD BEEN INSEPARABLE.