He unzipped his coat halfway and then took a bottle out from inside it. It was tall and rectangular and the label was facing away from her. A clear liquid occupied the bottom third. He drank from it and then held it out to her.
She did not know which was worse: to say yes or no. This was an opportunity he was giving her. To say no would have cemented her forever, she thought, as an outsider. She couldn’t say no. But could she say yes, and have it seem natural? Lacking any alternative, it was a chance she had to take. Besides, she had had alcohol before: David had given her wine, she reminded herself, and he always let her take sips of the cocktails the two of them made for guests.
Ada walked toward him and took the bottle. She did as he had done: she held it to her lips and took a healthy swig, about as much as she might have taken from a gin and tonic. But this was different, and it burned painfully in her esophagus and settled roughly into her stomach. She immediately felt her joints and muscles loosen. She sat down next to William on the bed.
“Thanks for taking care of Matty,” said William. “I know you help him with his homework and stuff. So thanks.”
“I like it,” said Ada.
“He loves you,” said William. “He always asks me stuff about you. Since our dad’s gone,” he said, but he stopped halfway through his sentence, and did not pick it up again. He drank.
Ada nodded. She noticed a slight elision between his words, a blending-together, final consonants attaching themselves to succeeding vowels. She closed her eyes briefly, letting what he had said echo in her mind, noting the particulars of his accent, like Liston’s, and his intonation. And that sentence: He loves you.
William tipped the bottle back again, showing his white teeth briefly when he was done, running a hand through the light hair that had fallen down across his brow. Then he handed it to her. She did the same. It was gin: she saw the label.
“Bob Conley told me he saw you in the Woods,” said William.
Ada looked at him.
“He said you were hiding behind a tree,” he said. A slight smile was coming across his face, now, and Ada dropped her shoulders in embarrassment. So this was why he was here: to make fun of her.
“Were you spying on me?” he asked her.
Ada briefly considered the idea of denying it all. I’ve been here the whole night, she could say. She could look at him like he was crazy. But in the corner of the room something caught her eye: it was a pile on the floor of her parka and hat and gloves. This, combined with Bob Conley’s testimony, was probably too much evidence to deny.
“I was just going for a walk,” Ada said. “I didn’t know you guys were there.”
He smiled briefly, looked away.
He took another sip. He handed her the bottle. She took another sip.
“Are you gonna tell my mom?” he asked her, with a tone in his voice that sounded like teasing. “I know you guys are pals.”
Ungracefully, he unzipped his jacket the rest of the way and tried to extract himself from it. His wrists were stuck; his hands weren’t working. Ada reached out and held a wristband in place while he wrenched his arm out of it. He thanked her politely.
Then he said, “You used to spy on us before you lived at our house.”
Ada looked at him.
“I saw you,” said William. “Once or twice, in our backyard.”
Ada shook her head. A lump had started in her throat and she willed it backward, swallowing hard. It seemed unfair, somehow, that he had seen her, but she was too tired to deny anything. The gin had loosened her mind and her body and a dull ache had begun to move through her. She was hungry and cold and alone.
“What were you doing back there?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” said Ada. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t tell him that she dreamed about him every night: that it was William she had sought when she made those lonely nighttime walks. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he had a sense that everyone, everywhere, loved and desired him. Did people like William Liston know this? They must, she thought.
They said nothing for a while. They drank again. Normally the silence would have bothered her, but it felt comfortable to her, somehow. She smiled to herself. Why did she worry so much? she wondered. She could say anything she wanted.
“You all seemed so normal. I wanted to see what it would be like to have a normal family,” she said.
He laughed. “Normal,” he said. “Nobody’s normal. We’re probably, like, the weirdest family there is. I guess you know that by now.”
“Except for my family,” Ada said. “We’re weirder. I’m the weirdest,” she said. But there was too much truth to it, and she wished immediately that she had not said it. Besides, the word family had never seemed to apply to her and David. They were not a family; they were a pair. And now they weren’t even that.
William laughed again, and then was quiet. “You’re funny,” he pronounced finally. “You’re smart, too. I think you’re probably smarter than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“No, I’m not,” said Ada. “I am not.”
He was very drunk. The laces of his sneakers were undone and he leaned forward to tie them and nearly slipped off the bed. He caught himself by putting a hand on the floor. “Oops,” he said quietly to himself.
When he had tied his shoe he sat back up and, in one fluid motion, put his hand on Ada’s knee. He did not look at her. She looked at his hand. It was large and smooth. It was still young-looking: it did not have the hardness of an older person’s hand. Only one vein was visible beneath the skin, blue and winding, and she thought about the systems of the body, the vascular web that kept the flesh alive. She had studied it with David.
Ada decided that she did not want his hand there, and was thinking of ways to remove it, when, suddenly, he put it elsewhere on her body: first around her shoulders, and then on her back, which he stroked for a time in long downward arcs. It reminded her of how David had taught her to calm lobsters. William’s movements were not graceful, and he did not look at Ada while he made them, as if his left hand were disembodied from the rest of him. It wandered on its own. She sat very still. She thought about simply standing up from the bed, but she lacked the courage to do it. Should she like this? William Liston was touching her. It was what she had been dreaming of for years. She was not certain. The gin made everything seem distant: an echo of itself.
Suddenly William turned and moved toward her, his face toward hers, and pressed his mouth on her mouth. It was quick and unexpected. It was her first kiss. The temperature was what surprised her most: she wasn’t certain what she had imagined, but it was not this. Perhaps she had imagined William Liston’s mouth as being cold, cool, like the rest of him; but this was something lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. With his tongue he was pushing her lips apart. All of his smells were closer now, too: cigarettes and gin and the outdoors. And his skin, his flesh, the hair on his head. All of it, as close to her as she was to herself.