“What does it do, Alice?”
“Don’t know. It monitors me somehow. Vivian said it’s an opportunity for me to prove how focused I am on our marriage.”
“GPS? Audio monitoring? Video? Christ! What do they mean, exactly, by monitoring?”
“Not video,” Alice said. “She was clear about that. But GPS, yes, and maybe audio too. Vivian said she’d never worn one and that she wasn’t certain what happens to it once it’s removed. The instructions she received were simply to put the bracelet on me, explain why I was wearing it, and then remove and return it to headquarters after fourteen days.”
I fiddled with the bracelet but couldn’t figure out a way to get it off.
“Don’t bother,” Alice said. “There’s a key. Vivian has it.”
“Call her,” I said angrily. “Tonight. I don’t care if it’s Christmas Eve. Tell her it has to come off. This is absurd.”
But then Alice surprised me. She rubbed her fingers lightly across the bracelet. “Do you think I’m too focused on work?”
“Everyone’s focused on work. You wouldn’t be a good lawyer if you weren’t. Just like I wouldn’t be a good therapist if I didn’t focus on work.” But even as I said it, I did a quick calculation in my mind of the hours I’d worked that week versus the hours Alice had worked. I thought about how many times I hadn’t made it home for dinner since we’d been married—exactly zero times—and how many times Alice hadn’t made it home for dinner: I’d lost count. I thought about her early mornings in the kitchen, going over cases and making calls to the East Coast while I was still in bed. I thought about how, during those increasingly rare moments when we were alone together, she was always glancing at her phone, always somewhere else. Whatever observations were made by the informant at the party, they weren’t entirely wrong.
“I guess what I’m saying is, I want to try this,” Alice said. “I want our marriage to work, and I want to try out The Pact, and if this is part of it I’m willing to go there.” She gripped my hand tightly. “Are you?”
I looked into her eyes, searching for some sign that she was just performing for the bracelet. But there was no such indication. If there’s one thing I know about my wife, it’s that she’s always up for something new, always keen for the next great experiment in health or science or social engineering. Having survived her dysfunctional family, she believes she can survive just about anything. She even applied to go to Mars, back when Elon Musk put out the call for layperson explorers to take the first manned spaceship. Thank God they didn’t pick her, but the point is, she made her audition video, filled out the paperwork, and actually applied to get her ass off Earth and into space and quite possibly die in the process. That’s just how she is. One thing I love about Alice is that she’s so insanely open to new experiences. Risk doesn’t scare her; it excites her. The Pact is weird, sure, but compared to a one-way ticket to Mars, how scary could it be?
That night, in the bedroom, on our large, high bed with its small but beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean, Alice and I made love. She moved with an intensity of passion and desire that, to be honest, I hadn’t seen in a while, though neither of us said a word before or after. It was really amazing.
Later, after she’d fallen asleep, I lay awake, unable to shut off my brain. Was the performance for the bracelet or for me? Nonetheless, I felt grateful—for our marriage, for Alice, and even for this strange new thing we’d gotten ourselves involved in. This Pact seemed to be doing exactly what it was designed to do: bring us closer.
20
Christmas and the days that followed were oddly blissful. My partners and I had shut down the office for the week. It was something of an acknowledgment of the difficult but very successful year we had enjoyed.
We had expanded our visibility and improved our bottom line. In August, we completed the purchase of our building, a charming two-bedroom Victorian that had been turned into commercial space. Our practice had somehow managed to get over the hump and now seemed to be here to stay.
Five days after Christmas, however, my good luck streak came to an end. At five-thirty in the morning, I woke to find Alice standing beside the bed, holding my phone. She wore a towel knotted at her chest, a smaller towel wrapped turban-style around her head. She smelled like lemons and vanilla, this lotion she wore that she knew drove me crazy. I desperately wanted to pull her into bed with me, but the alarmed look on her face told me that wasn’t going to happen. “It rang four times, so I answered,” she said. “There’s a problem.”
As I reached for the phone, I ran through my client list in my mind, bracing for news.
“Jake?”
It was the mother of a girl from my Tuesday group—teenagers whose parents had recently divorced or were in the process of doing so. The woman was talking so fast that I didn’t get her name or her kid’s name. Her daughter had run away, she said. Without asking her name again, I quickly tried to figure out who it was. The previous week I had six teenagers in the group. Three girls, three boys. I immediately eliminated Emily, a sixteen-year-old who’d been coming to the meetings for a year and was about to quit, feeling that she’d finally come to terms with her parents’ divorce. Mandy seemed unlikely too—she was looking forward to a ski week trip to Park City to help her father with his charity. That left Isobel, who was really shaken up about her parents’ recent divorce. I worried that our week off for Christmas would affect her the most, after Dylan.
“Have you spoken with your husband?” I asked.
“Yes. She was supposed to take the Muni train to his place yesterday, but she never arrived,” the woman said frantically. “We didn’t realize it until this morning—my husband thought Isobel was with me. Have you heard from her?” Her voice was shaky with hope.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t.”
“We’ve left a hundred messages and texts.”
“Would you mind if I call her?”
“Please do.”
The mother gave me Isobel’s cell number, as well as her email address, Twitter handle, and Snapchat name. I was impressed that she knew so much about her daughter’s social media presence; most parents don’t, even though social media is where a lot of kids face the most trouble. Isobel’s mother told me they had already called the police but were informed that, at Isobel’s age, she needed to be gone for twenty-four hours before they could open an investigation. Alice stood by the bed the whole time, in her flimsy towel and her turbaned head. When I hung up, she wanted to hear the story.
“Do you think she’s in trouble?” Alice asked, pulling her serious blue suit out of the closet.
“Isobel has a head on her shoulders,” I said. “She probably just spent the night with a friend. She’s angry with her parents right now. She told me that she needed time away from their immature behavior.”
Alice stepped into her skirt. “She said that?”