I slide it into the player on the bedside table, turn the power on, pull the headphones over my ears, sit on the bed, and press play. It’s Alice singing, accompanied by guitars, keyboards, drums, and at one point even a set of children’s percussion instruments. There are several background voices, but those are also Alice. The songs are beautiful and moody.
Track five is a duet. Alice is joined by a man’s voice. It’s another relationship song, a relationship that sounds familiar, and I realize that it’s about Alice and me, though somehow foreign. It’s the story of us, as seen through Alice’s eyes. The male voice sings my lines, certainly better than I ever could. The intimacy between the two voices makes the song deeply disquieting. The intake of breath before each line, the sort of thing that gets removed in the final edit, makes me feel as though I am right there in the room. I try to distance myself, to hear it as it would sound to an outside party, to someone who is not in love with Alice, but it’s not possible.
I remember the day on the stairwell, when Eric knew I was there but Alice did not. I think of the look he gave me. There was a challenge in his eyes, though maybe I read it all wrong. Maybe what I was seeing, instead, was compassion for me, or pity—because he knew something that I did not.
I listen to the disc all the way through, and then I start over again. Like the room in the garage, it feels as though I am peering into a part of Alice that I have imagined but never actually seen.
The musical portrait she paints of me is nuanced, occasionally forgiving, and brutally honest.
For so long, I held on to Alice so firmly, keeping her directly in my sight, looking only at the parts I wanted to see. I encouraged those qualities I loved in her, coaxing them forward, subconsciously hoping that if I ignored the other parts, they would recede and fall away. Of course, in my absence those parts have been flourishing. Yes, Alice has been becoming Alice again, her full and maddeningly complex self. I close my eyes, listening to her voice.
At some point, I hear a noise in the kitchen. I slide the headphones off. Alice is home. I wander down the hallway and find her high heels kicked off on the living room floor. I smell chicken, garlic, a hint of chocolate. I take in the moment, which feels perfect and welcome, until a vague sense of dread edges in. I look out the window and check for any suspicious cars parked on the block.
Alice is standing at the stove in pajamas and a Lemonheads T-shirt, frying mushrooms in butter, a wooden spoon in one hand, a beer in the other. The pan sizzles, and a slight smokiness fills the air. I slide my arms around her waist.
“Well, look who’s returned from the dead,” she says.
I murmur into her ear, “I loved your songs.”
She turns to face me, and I take the glass and the spoon out of her hands and put them on the counter. I pull her away from the stove, into the center of the kitchen. We stand there, locked in a kind of slow dance. At first, she is stiff, her hands perched on my shoulders, back slightly arched, as if she’s unwilling to give in to this moment, and to me. Then her body relaxes. She leans her head on my shoulder, moves her hands down my back, and pulls me close. I can feel her breath through my shirt. “Sorry about some of the lyrics.”
I can tell she wants to say something else. I just hold her and wait. “And the rest of it,” she says, sighing. “I’m sorry for the rest of it.”
Which sounds like a confession, at once alarming and a relief. If this happened between clients, I’d congratulate them on the breakthrough. I’d tell them that honesty is good, honesty is the first step. Of course, I would also warn them that, now that the truth was out in the open, things might get worse before they got better.
“You be you,” I say, and I mean it, I think.
Alice jumps up and puts her legs around my waist, and I am holding her entirely. We haven’t done this in so long, and I’d forgotten how light she feels, wrapped around my body.
79
It’s surprising how quickly Alice and I return to our patterns. I catch up at work, and she returns to her new case. But she leaves for the office a little later each day and comes home a little earlier. And when she’s home, I rarely catch her with the briefcase open, reviewing legal things, doing research. Instead, before we retire to the couch and click on a new episode of Sloganeering, she spends an hour or so on her laptop, inside Pro Tools, headphones on, mixing, tweaking, reviewing the songs for her new album.
We don’t talk about the days I was gone, what happened at Fernley or what happened here in the house. It is as if we have reached some silent agreement. Although the judge sentenced me to mobile incarceration, there was no further explanation. I waited for the bracelet, but it never came. I can only assume that they’re watching me more closely than ever. Maybe the house is bugged. Maybe there is a device in my car. Or maybe it is all some cruel psychological game: the not knowing is its own kind of prison.
Slowly, my hair begins to grow back. The longer it grows, the more Fernley seems like a distant nightmare.
At work, I return to my regular patterns, my clients, the teenagers, the married couples. I slowly start to wrap things up with those who are ready. Therapy, like all long conversations, has a beginning, middle, and end.
At home, I treasure the happiness we’ve found these past few weeks, the stability, the security, the warmth. I can see it in Alice’s eyes: She is happier. I imagine she is surprised to have found a hidden path that has let her merge the different sides of her personality. It feels as though we are slowly building our relationship, unique and different from all others, a marriage not unlike the ideal described in The Pact.
And yet my mind, like a computer calculating pi forever in the background, is still desperately trying to find a way out of The Pact. I sense Alice is doing the same.
Last night, I saw a dark SUV up the corner. The day before, Alice spotted a Bentley across the street. We both know that change is coming, that something has to be done, but neither of us mentions it.
80
On Tuesday, Alice receives word that the keyboard player from her old band Ladder has been killed in a motorcycle accident on the Great Highway. He was in his early forties and had a wife and twin daughters in preschool. Alice once spent two years with him in a van, on the road touring, so the news hits her hard.