“It’s sort of crazy, isn’t it? I keep calling her my daughter, like she was actually here or something, but she never even took her first breath, and I’m a liberal. It’s like I’m completely fucked up about a life that’s totally imaginary.” She looks down. “I’m sorry, Karen. I’m completely messed up.
“Anyway, Ale … my boyfriend left. A month later. McKinsey offered him a position in Buenos Aires, and he took it. I want to blame him. I feel like it would make this all so much easier. If I could just say, ‘What a shitty thing to do, leaving me alone like that.’ I can’t, though. I was a fucking monster. I wouldn’t let him touch me. Not even when she’d finally been … I wouldn’t let him touch me. Twice I told him it was his fault. Didn’t provide any evidence, didn’t cite any examples. Just yelled at him and said he was the reason our daughter was dead.”
She considers what she’s edited away: How, a week after it happened, she crashed her bike into the side of a taxi. The driver complained that she’d done it on purpose; she told the police that she’d had too much to drink, even though the alcoholímetro the cop was using suggested she’d hardly had a sip of beer. How getting out of bed each morning was becoming a more and more herculean effort. How she started showing up to work late and unfocused: three weeks before the baby’s due date, she mistyped four figures into a spreadsheet, which—if her boss hadn’t caught it—would’ve cost the company over a million dollars and Alice her job. How it was becoming harder and harder to get a bottle of wine to last more than a single night.
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. From Buenos Aires I heard he went to Santiago. When I came back to L.A. at the end of that year I considered trying to track him down, but…”
“Yes?”
She tries to remember how many e-mails she sent, and how many bounced back. One every week, she figures, for almost a year. Fifty-two.
“But I just didn’t.”
She remembers how she forbade her brother from investigating Alejandro’s whereabouts on Facebook or Google or anywhere else. Paul had just started at the University of Michigan, and he had taken his spring break to travel down and be with Alice. Donna and their father had come with him. Eloise had promised to fly over from London, but some big disaster at the charity ended up happening at the last minute, and she had to cancel her trip. In her stead she sent Alice a dozen irises, along with two new bulbs, planted deeply in glazed ceramic pots. Even in the darkest times, the accompanying card had read, hope springs eternal.
They were all sitting in Alice’s living room when a man driving a beat-up VW van swung by with the delivery.
“What a lovely thing for your sister to say,” Donna said. She was folding laundry on the couch. “How thoughtful.”
Paul scoffed. “It’s condescending, is what it is. Condescending and cliché.”
Alice remembers watching their reflections float across her dark television screen as she counted the days until they’d all just leave.
“Alice?”
The women stare at her; Karen cocks her head to one side. Upstairs it sounds like a riot has erupted: a bunch of munchkin feet sprinting in every direction at once, voices clambering over one another to be heard.
“I’m done,” she says.
Paul
June 10
The mannequin slams against the hood of the Nissan, leaving it with a watermelon-sized dent. Breaks squeal and tires smoke. From where he’s standing, curbside, Paul can hear Rick Erwing’s suicidal cries of disbelief as the poor son of a bitch white-knuckles the steering wheel. Paul looks down at the mannequin, whose arm is bent above its head at an impossible angle and whose mouth is frozen in a clownish, inanimate smile.
“You need to throw them harder than that,” Goulding says. Paul can feel the doctor’s breath on the back of his neck. He smells coffee, lurking behind a thin layer of Listerine. “I want their heads to roll. Literally. I want the mannequins to fall apart. I want Rick to see them fall apart.”
“My arm feels like it’s about to fall out of its socket,” Paul says, rubbing his right shoulder. Strewn at his feet lie an army of mismatched figures: nippleless women, castrated men, prepubescent children, Band-Aid-hued babies the size and shape of footballs. He thinks about how he’ll have to spend the next hour hurling them at Erwing’s car as he drives in circles around the parking lot, and his arm aches more.
“Think of all the good you’re doing,” Goulding says.
Inside the car Erwing bangs his head back against his seat. The clinical worker sitting next to him makes a note on her clipboard.
The doctor continues, “Before he came to us, this man could hardly pull out of his driveway without thinking that he’d run over someone. And I’m not talking about just some idle worry, Paul. Like how you or I might wonder throughout the day if we remembered to turn off the lights before we left the house. Rick was consumed. He’d have to stop every ten yards or so to check the tires for blood and little bits of brain. It would take him nearly two hours just to get around the block, and then once he’d done that, he’d be worried that he missed something, so he’d have to start the whole thing all over again, retracing his steps.” Goulding wipes sweat from his glasses with the end of his tie. “That’s crippling, Paul. That’s no way to live.”
Paul swats away a gnat. Philadelphia celebrates summer by exploding in bugs.
“And you think this is actually helping him?” he asks.
Goulding’s mouth twitches, and Paul worries that he’s insulted him. “I’m sure of it,” he says. “Absolutely sure of it. The first two months he spent on the couch were helpful to get the lay of the land, so to speak. But if he’s going to be free of this thing, this sort of immersion therapy is necessary.”
With the polished toe of his loafer, Goulding nudges one of the mannequins. A bald, sexless eight-year-old. “Speaking of, let’s give it another go, shall we?” He unholsters a walkie-talkie from his belt and Paul hears static, the sound of Velcro being torn apart. “All right, Marcia,” Goulding says. “Let’s try again.”
Paul watches Rick Erwing shake his head and mouth a tirade of silent pleas. Marcia reaches her arm through the sunroof and confirms Goulding’s instruction with a thumbs-up.
Goulding lifts the mannequin by its left ankle. “Use one of the kids this time.”
“You know, my right shoulder is really starting—”
“Paul, I really need you to be a team player here.”
The Nissan’s ignition sputters to life. Heat waves dance across the empty parking lot.
“Sure,” Paul says. “Of course.”