“Alice,” I said, not raising my voice, reveling, just for a moment, in the sound of her name. “It’s me.”
She was far enough away that I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I heard a sharp intake of breath, and I struggled then to contain my delight, pleased to find that I had managed to surprise her. “Well?” I finally asked, raising my voice just a bit. “Do I have to scale the wall?”
A nervous-looking smile broke across her face. “No, no, of course not.” She stood behind an iron railing, its dips and curves made to resemble some sort of ivy, that ended just below her waist. Her hands flew to her throat, the way they always did when she was nervous. “Hold on just a moment. I’ll be right down.”
As I waited, I became aware of a slight fluttering in my ear. As a child, I’d suffered from terrible earaches, and as I grew, there was always a season where I would feel that same pain return, and which would send me rushing to the doctor. But no matter how often I visited, they would always smile and shake their heads, assuring me absolutely nothing is wrong, as they ushered me toward the exit. One physician had paused long enough to instruct me how to lay my finger just above my earlobe and pull gently. If you feel pain now, he said, that means there is an infection. Otherwise, it’s just . . . He had let his words trail, unfinished. Later, he suggested that he had seen similar symptoms among a specific set of patients, a nervous condition that seemed to affect only his more intelligent clientele—though I suspected that the comment was made more to flatter himself, a testament to the practice he had created, rather than from any great desire to help. Still, standing there, waiting for Alice to make her way down the stairs, I repeated this movement, checking for any source of pain, any indication that an infection had managed to take hold. There was nothing, and yet still, the fluttering persisted.
WHEN ALICE APPEARED IN THE DOORWAY, she was slightly out of breath, two bright pink spots on her cheeks, a small heat rash creeping below her throat. She had always been prone to rubbing that same spot—set just between where the two clavicles met—whenever she was anxious. I wondered if she had done that before or after my arrival, or if, in fact, the pink spot was simply from the heat of midday, which pulsed around us.
She looked exactly as I remembered. True, it had been just over a year, but enough had passed between us since then that it seemed almost as though it were a different life entirely. She was still so small—she hated the word petite, I knew—but there was no other way to describe her. Short and blond, she still held the shape of a young girl, a fact that Alice had once frequently lamented. A string of pearls hung, hitting her just above her collarbone, and I was struck by how out of place they seemed, somehow incongruous with the scenery around us. I resisted the strange sudden urge to reach out and touch them, to tear them from her neck and watch the beads as they clattered to the ground, spilling out into the crooks and crannies of the street.
“You look wonderful,” I said, leaning in and kissing her on either side of her cheeks. “It’s been too long.”
“Yes,” she murmured, her eyes bright, but distant. “Yes, of course.”
I felt the sharpness of her bones underneath my hands. She stepped back into the doorframe, behind the threshold, her movements betraying an anxiety that I suspected she would rather not have revealed. Alice motioned for me to follow her, and I did, watching as she led me up a narrow staircase, listening to her warning about what steps to take gingerly, her instructions quickly followed by an apology for the decay of the building, a rambling that she was always prone to when nervous. “It’s absolutely gorgeous, of course, but in desperate need of some repairs. I’ve told John several times, but he doesn’t seem to listen. I actually think he likes it. It’s where all the artists live, he says. Writers, apparently. He’s told me the names a million times, but I can never manage to remember them. But then, I suppose that’s more up your alley. We’ll have to ask him when he gets home from work.”
John. The man that Alice had met after leaving Bennington, the man who was, I had only recently learned, responsible for her move to Morocco.
“Is he home?” I asked.
“Who?” Alice frowned. “Oh, John. No, no. He’s at work.”
“And how is he?” I asked, as if we were all old friends, though the words sounded hollow, and I hastened to cover them. “And you, how are you?”
“Good. We’re both doing quite well.” She said the words quickly, burying them underneath her breath. “And you?”
“I’m happy to be in Tangier.” I smiled. With you.
I did not say these last words aloud, though I could feel them, beating steadily within my chest. In fact, half of me was convinced that she had heard them too—or if not heard, perhaps felt.
I became aware that by this time we had moved into her flat, were, in fact, standing in the foyer, the wooden floor covered with an intricately designed rug, my suitcase still hanging heavily from my hands. I wondered at her not reaching for it and showing me to the spare room, so that we could sit and relax and begin to trade stories, like we had done in the old days. It was perhaps too much to hope for, I knew, that things would simply revert back to how they had once been, before that terrible night. And yet still, I couldn’t help myself. Hope still lived, however buried in the hollowed-out cavity of my chest. And yet, there was something in her stance, something in the way she moved—as though a caged and frightened bird, I thought—that led me to wonder whether the problem was not, in fact, the secrets that we held between us but something altogether different.
I had since wondered at Alice’s move to Tangier, recalling the old worn map that had hung over my bed at Bennington. We had made a game of it, over the years, pushing pins into the wall, the tacky white plaster giving way with ease as we decided where we would go once we graduated. The adventures that we would have, together. Paris for Alice, or, on days when she was feeling particularly brave, Budapest. But never Tangier. My own pins were placed farther afield: Cairo, Istanbul, Athens. Places that had once seemed distant and impossible, but no longer, with Alice by my side.
I’ll take you to Paris after we graduate, she said one evening, not long after we first met. We had sat, hidden behind the End of the World, that stretch of land at the end of Commons Lawn, where the earth appeared to abruptly give way—though if one was to look down, one would find only an unfurling of gentle, rolling hills. A mirage of sorts. An illusion. Night had already set in, the dampness of the grass bleeding through the cotton fabric of the blanket we sat upon, but still we remained, happy to ignore its encroachment.
I squeezed her palm in response. I knew by then about the trust that had been set up in her name, about the monthly allowance that she received—checks with her full name, Alice Elizabeth Shipley, written in a careful, old-fashioned script that appeared in her mail slot at the start of each month, precisely—but to make the offer, to extend such an invitation to a girl that she had known only a few weeks, it defied logic as I knew it. My heart had clenched, as if refusing to believe that such generosity, such kindness, truly lived in other people, as my own past had not taught me it was possible. Born in a small town in Vermont, only miles away from the college, I had always considered my hometown a place one drove through on the way to somewhere else, somewhere infinitely better. A scholarship had given me that chance, snatching me from the close confines of a stuffy apartment over a garage, transporting me only a few miles away, though it might as well have been to an entirely different world.
But then, Paris had never happened.
Instead, Alice had come to Tangier, to a place that she had never pinned on our map. And she had come without me.