He sneered, as if reading my thoughts. “You are all the same, in the end. Tangerines. Every Moroccan you see is for personal gain, for sale.” He stepped closer. “I wonder, mademoiselle, what exactly you are willing to pay,” he said, reaching for my wrist, his fingers clasping my skin, hard, pinching, “and what precisely it is that you are wanting to purchase.”
I wrenched my arm away and in the process collided with Alice, so that she fell to the ground, a cry escaping her lips. In that moment, I forgot Youssef and his menacing tone. He was only a mosquito, I told myself. It was time at last to flick him away. I turned my back to him completely and helped Alice to her feet. “Are you hurt?” I asked, brushing at her skirt, her knees—both of which were now caked in grime and filth. “Alice,” I started again, but John appeared then, had already started to make his way back to us. His hair, now sweaty and limp, clung to the sides of his face, his hat nowhere to be seen.
“I’ve got to head to the office,” he said, standing, his arms hanging limply at his sides, as if the frantic energy that had pushed him forward only moments before had drained away, leaving behind only a shell. He stopped, taking in Alice’s disheveled appearance.
“She fell, but she’s fine,” I said.
John hesitated, then nodded, his eyes taking in the street revelers that flanked us. “It appears Tangier is done. At least as we know it.” He wiped the sweat from his brow, and I saw, so clearly, his love for the country, for this strange little stretch of land that belonged to no one and everyone. I saw how much it pained him, the thought of it changing such that he would no longer be the one in charge but rather the outsider, perhaps for the very first time in his life. He felt powerless, trapped, unable to do anything. And though it pained me to think that we could be at all similar, that any sort of connective tissue existed between us, particularly after what he had tried to do that night, I had felt that before too, felt it, in some ways, every day of my life. I tried to take pleasure in the fact that now he would feel it as well, but the thought only hit, hollow and empty. “Has something happened?” I asked, unsettled by the change in his demeanor.
“Everyone is getting anxious.” He shrugged, though his face conveyed his worry. “What with all the riots in the past few years. They don’t want to be around when things are made official.” He shook his head, his expression weary. Tired, I thought. “I have to go. I’ll be back later, though I’ve promised Charlie that I’ll head to Fez with him later tomorrow,” he said, speaking the words to Alice, who still did not appear to be listening. He turned back toward me. “Please get her back to the flat.” He hesitated. “And be safe.”
And then he was gone, lost in the crowd.
I WOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, gasping for air. At first, I was unsure of what it had been—a nightmare that had snapped me back to life, or a noise from somewhere within the room. My heart beat fast and I felt a sort of confusion cloud my mind as exhaustion made it impossible for me to recall where I was and what had happened. Tangier. It came flooding back to me. I was in Tangier. With Alice.
And then I saw her, standing at the threshold of my bedroom.
In that moment, there was nothing I wanted more than for her to cross the barrier between us. For her to walk into the room, for her to crawl into the small bed—the same one that she had made up for me and that had smelled like her and now smelled of both of us—for her to allow me to comfort her, to care for her. It was a realization that I had come to years ago, on the very first day I had met her. There was no one who would look out for her, who would love her, who would take care of her better than me.
I had waited for her to realize this over the years we lived together in Vermont, tripping happily through the months, wrapped in a cloud of our domestic bliss. There had been picnics, eaten on the lawn and at the End of the World, on sunny spring days. There had been walks around the campus in fall, crunching leaves under our feet, spending afternoons locked away inside the library. And there had been winter. Her favorite season and mine too, because of how much it made her smile, how much it reminded her of being a child, of being a daughter. We stayed inside by the fire, sipping tea and cocoa. I would always check to make sure the wood had been delivered to our house, and if not, would place a gentle reminder. I knew how much she enjoyed watching the flickering of the flames as the snow fell outside. And that final year, when the stability of the life we had created together was threatened, I had taken care of that too. I had done all of it for her—silently and without complaint. I was happy to do it, I wanted to do it. I did it all, waiting until the day when she would notice. That she would realize.
I remained quiet, patient, waiting for her—as always.
But then she spoke, her words cracking the darkness in half.
“I want you to leave, Lucy.”
My heart stopped, my stomach clenched. I thought of all those terrible clichés I’d read in books my entire life and I felt and understood every single wretched one in that moment. I shook my head, trying to shake Alice’s words from my mind. This was not how it was supposed to be. This was not what was supposed to happen. I frowned, turning it all over in my mind, trying to make sense of it, how everything could have changed and I had somehow failed to notice, in the space of only a few hours. I felt the anger, hot and sharp, pressing at my throat. She had already agreed to go with me, she had already promised.
“You mean John wants me to leave,” I finally managed, my words short, clipped. “That’s what you mean to say.”
“No, Lucy.”
She stood tall and erect, as if her confidence, her resolve was bound up in her posture, so that I wanted nothing so much as to push her to the floor, to dispel whatever it was that was forcing her to say these awful things.
She crossed her arms. “I want you to leave.”
I sat up in bed, tossing the covers aside. “You don’t mean that,” I said, my voice, I knew, wavering between placation and harshness. Her words had unnerved me, unmoored me, so that I could no longer figure out what I was supposed to be to her in that moment, could no longer read what she needed me to be. I shook my head. “You can’t mean that, Alice.”
“I do, Lucy,” she said, nodding, the movement sharp and succinct.
“I don’t know what else he said to you,” I began, “but you can’t let him do this to us.”
For a moment, she looked confused; then she shook her head again, this time a small smile accompanying the gesture. “No,” she said softly, her eyes meeting my own. “No, this isn’t John.” A laugh, sharp and bitter, escaped her lips. “This is me, Lucy. Entirely me. I’m the one asking you to leave. I’m the one who wants you to go.” She stopped. “To go and to never come back. I want you to leave me alone.”
My insides crumpled. It wasn’t John, she had promised, but I wanted to reach out and shake her and scream, Of course it is! Of course it’s him! She was too lost, too far under his spell to be able to see it clearly. “Alice—” I began.
She held up her hand, as if to physically impede my words.
“We were going to leave,” I argued, moving out of the bed and toward her. “You had said that we were going to leave—him, Tangier. All of it.”
“No, Lucy. You said. You decided.” She shook her head.
“Alice.” I reached out for her.
“No.” She stepped back into the hallway. “I should never have opened that door. I should never have allowed you in.” She started toward her bedroom door, then stopped. “I know what you did. At Bennington. I know it was you.”
“Alice—” I started.
“Why did you ask me to stay?”
I frowned, startled by the question. “I don’t understand.”
“That day. That awful day in Vermont,” she said, her voice cold and hard. “You told me not to get into the car. Why?”
“Because,” I said, looking away, only for a second—but she had noticed. “I didn’t want you to leave. I didn’t want us to be angry with each other any longer.”