fic: FORGIVE THE KIDS (another happy day) (1/3)
FORGIVE THE KIDS
(for they don't know how to live)
another happy day. the good daughter and the bad son share the same blood. alice/elliot. 21,535 words.
notes: this fic is so long it's disgusting. idek what happened here. i don't have a defense. apparently this was me while writing this:
a few weeks ago i watched this movie and really liked it! and then, bc i am friends with enablers of the worst sort, i wound up starting to write this! and kept writing this! and. kept. writing. so the blame for this probably falls at may's feet or jordan's or jakk's or idk i guess mine but who likes to assume the blame themselves. um, obvious spoilers for the movie here. and if you've seen the movie then i guess you can imagine the assorted things i should probably warn for here? incest and self-harm and drug use and all that really sort of stuff. yeah. i am a person who exists. /embarrassing.
In my family
we do not
say “goodbye.”
We say
“so long.”
MAIRA KALMAN
Well, shit I know we’re all growing old
But where there’s a will there’s a way --
So way to go.
Say goodbye to your feral days
Say goodbye-bye-bye-bye . . .
SUNSET RUBDOWN
And this daughter . . . Alice: does she live with you or the ex-husband?
She lives with us, Elliot.
[ . . . ]
This daughter Alice. Is she coming to the wedding?
Why are you doing this, Elliot?
O N E :
t h e
p a s t
Wherein their brother Dylan gets married:
1.
The pink bridesmaid’s dress was ruined and Alice left it to hang limp and dirty in the bathroom at her grandmother’s house.
But, first:
Grandma had expected them at her house. She had expected Alice days ago.
She expected the entire family, and in her mind, the entire family would always include Paul.
She never thought much of Elliot when she thought of the family. She thought of Dylan and she thought of Alice; she thought of their fair hair and Dylan’s tan skin and Alice’s wan smile. She thought of the things that belonged to Paul and how they made themselves known through his children. How they made themselves known through her daughter.
There was no room for Elliot in that assessment.
She expected the family at her house, and Elliot, like an unwanted guest, a pest, that serpent waiting in the grass, came before Alice.
He came waiting for Alice. He came, forcing himself to be recalled and to be remembered.
2.
“What’s wrong with Elliot?” Alice asks.
She is eight.
Lynn holds a hand over her mouth to keep whatever emotion threatens at bay before she snaps: nothing.
3.
Alice arrives, like a thief, in the night.
The analogy ends there.
Her arrival is the very opposite of surreptitious, nothing sly or unassuming about the fact she stepped over their grandmother’s threshold and into her house.
Elliot, if he had the words, if he could shelve his pride, would say: the room went quiet when she stepped inside it.
But then if Elliot had the words he would say a lot of things; he would be a different person.
After dinner, Alice sits besides Elliot on the sagging sofa in the family room. Elliot sits there in silence though in constant motion: his hands rolling over themselves, first one foot tapping out an unknown rhythm and then the other taking up the lead. He sits there next to her, surveying both the crowd and the dessert buffet with an open expression of utter and total contempt.
“You look good,” Alice says quietly, the same glass of red wine in her hand that was poured for her at dinner. Elliot watches a piece of lemon cake sag on the plate and then collapse on its side. He turns to her suddenly and Alice curls a fist around first the stem of her wine glass and then a crumbled napkin.
“Could say the same for you,” he says, a dark, thin smile threatening to spread.
“I hear you’re back from Sweden -- or so Ben says.”
Elliot snorts, his eyes drifting back to their aunts, watching the way they watch the both of them. He decides that he spies disapproval in their eyes and he decides that he likes it. He looks at Alice over his shoulder, arches an eyebrow and says drily:
“That what we’re calling it now?”
Alice shrugs and does not comment.
Elliot sighs and leans back against the flattened couch cushions. His elbow bumps against Alice’s arm and her wine sloshes in its glass. He watches her as she leans forward, her body unfolding into straight lines and tight angles, as she reaches and places her glass of wine on the coffee table before them.
Elliot sighs again, and Alice leans back; that dark smile has finally reached his mouth.
“The one thing I gotta say in rehab’s -- excuse me, Sweden’s -- favor? Goddamn, it was like an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet.”
“You’re gross, Elliot.” Her tone is bored and she starts to shred a paper napkin into a pile of light confetti in her lap. He leans into her and brushes it away as she scowls at him, her gaze still fixed on her lap and her knees and the shredded paper at her feet.
“It’s true!”
“No it’s not.”
“How would you know? I was in rehab for teen addicts not head cases like the place Mom sent you. When you take away the pot and the smack and the booze and whatever other colloquialism you’ve got for whatever substance you’re missing you’ve still got your dick and you’re gonna go and stick it any and everywhere. Pretty sure prison works the same way.”
“If you say so, Shawshank.”
4.
To anyone who has ever met Alice after -- after the divorce, after Lynn left Paul, after Lynn met a man named Lee and she made him her husband -- she has told them that Lee is her father.
There is no Paul.
Lee is her father and Elliot is her brother and Ben is her brother.
She has never seen a point to define things by degrees, to halve relations that have always felt entirely full.
If you were to ask her, she would say she’s rounding up. Round the half to a whole. Round the half to a whole and see if that fills the heart.
When Paul asks her, when he all but asks her, when he asks where she has been and what she has become, she finds she doesn’t know how to round that. She doesn’t know what to do with that. How you square something that was meant to be a whole but instead not only gave you empty but left you soured out and weak inside.
Alice doesn’t know what to do with that.
So in the parking lot she cries.
She cries in the parking lot and waits for her mother. She waits for her father and her two brothers.
5.
That night Elliot comes stumbling into Alice’s bedroom. She is already in bed, buried under the covers that stink of lavender and fabric softener and disuse, and when he moves to get in bed with her, his entire body folds in on top of hers.
She can tell from the heavy and limp weight of his body, the clammy feel of his skin against hers, the soft and muffled sounds he makes against her neck, that he is completely fucked up on something. Something, she is sure, that would not be classified as a typical teenage drug or whatever he had used as a defense the night before.
“Jesus, Elliot,” she mutters, her mouth sticky and stale with sleep, “get off me.”
He more or less collapses along her side instead of rolls and he keeps a heavy arm anchored around her waist.
“What the fuck did you take?” she hisses.
“Granddad,” is all he says.
“That’s not an answer, Elliot.”
“Fenta -- fentanyl.” His words are syrupy and slow, and Alice sighs.
“I could tell Mom,” she says to the ceiling.
“Hmmmm.” It’s all he offers, either lazily calling her bluff or simply not caring at all, anything beyond her bed too far away and too unreal to imagine, too far to recognize as a tangible threat.
“You even know what fentanyl does to your system?”
She can hear him smack his lips, hear what sounds like the start of a soft moan and his arm twitches against her belly.
“‘course I fucking know,” he mumbles, each word a brush of his lips against her neck. “Me of all people. Al. It’s me.” His anger sounds diluted to her, watered down and tempered, no ferocity to his mouth, his eyes closed, and she hates him a little for that.
She does not say anything and she does not push him out of her bed. She lays there, under and beside him, uncomfortably warm, her legs sticking to the sheets and to his bare legs. She closes her eyes and finds the beat of Elliot’s heart, each intake of breath, to be impossibly slow. She wonders if that means he’s dying. She wonders if she will wake to a body and a body alone.
“Why were you crying tonight,” he asks suddenly but the question sounds too far away. She turns her head and her chin brushes the top of his head.
“Because I was sad,” she whispers. He shifts that much closer to her, his body draping hers once again.
“Don’t be sad,” Elliot whispers, the words slow, like pulled taffy, sticky and too sweet in his mouth. “Don’t be sad. Don’t be . . . sad.”
When she wakes, the sun is just rising up over the bay. Elliot is already gone.
She wakes to a body alone.
6.
Alice was sent away the year she graduated high school.
That was the year she tried to kill herself. It was summer and Alice had just graduated.
That was the year Lynn cried every morning in the kitchen while she poured Apple Jacks into two bowls, one for Elliot and one for Ben. She cried when she drove the boys to the community pool and cried when their dad grilled chicken slathered with his special-made barbecue sauce (bourbon and peppercorn and just a hint of cayenne pepper and what he called his secret ingredient and what Ben knew was a dash of sugar).
When Elliot would say, “What’s your damage, Mom, god,” or “Jesus, stop crying already,” or simply, “Mom, come on,” she would reply with a hand held over her mouth, the sound muffled and far away.
“I just miss her so much I just want her to come back,” she would say.
“I just want her to come back.”
7.
Elliot had been the one who found her.
“It was an accident,” would be Alice’s feeble recrimination two days later, still in the ICU, her arm stitched up and painful, morphine dripping through her system.
“You tried to kill yourself. What’s accidental about that?” he’d say in response, and when she’d whisper softly, “ . . . the blade slipped,” it would sound like a lie to both of them.
So she’d say: “I was sad.”
And Elliot would say, “Don’t be sad,” and shade the words with condescension instead of the pleading filling up his throat.
“Don’t be sad.”
8.
Granddad dies.
Granddad dies and they fish Elliot out of the bay, his body waterlogged, his eyes half-lidded and the pallor of his skin chalky and white. Granddad dies, but Elliot doesn’t.
Lynn sobs when she hugs him, as though her father’s death has earned forgiveness on the side of Elliot, and for once, for now, Elliot does not press his own luck.
Alice doesn’t touch him. Alice doesn’t touch him until, as though sparked by Elliot’s presence, the room erupts in violence. Grandma wrings her hands and cries and Lynn shrieks at Paul, the same words repeated: You smug fuck don’t you put this on me you smug fuck don’t you --
When Alice touches Elliot she drags Elliot off by the elbow.
“Where are you taking me?” he asks, a lascivious wiggle of his eyebrows, and then he starts to laugh. She pushes him into her bedroom and slams the door behind her.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” she hisses between clenched teeth. Elliot doesn’t say anything, but he’s still smiling, swaying, his balance unsteady. Granddad died. He died, and Elliot didn’t. They fished Elliot out of the bay and left the inner tube floating behind.
“What the fuck, Elliot.”
He narrows his eyes but he is still smiling.
Alice hits him in the shoulder with a weak fist, and he stumbles back. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” She goes to hit him again, but he grabs her by the wrist and squeezes. His face is tight and serious and Alice sounds like she might cry when she asks again: what is wrong with you?
He pulls her to him, her wrist still in his hand, and presses her against him. The first broken sob from Alice goes largely unheard, absorbed by his chest, her mouth and face pressed against the clammy wet fabric. He stinks of the bay and summer and sweat and that scent that has always been distinctly his own. She had told him that once, casual and innocuous, when they were younger, that year they both bought the same green sweater just to piss Lynn (and to an uncertain extent, each other) off.
“It’s yours, asshole,” Alice had said after Lynn yelled at her for leaving her sweater on the kitchen counter.
“You can’t know that for sure,” Elliot said, still a boy but already possessed of that unnerving sense of self-awareness and misplaced confidence.
“It smells like you,” she had said, acidly, and then thrown it at him. He looked at her funny. He looked at her as if she just revealed something he had not known before this conversation and he was equal dueling parts curious and horrified.
“It smells like me?”
Alice had shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
He considered her, his eyes too bright, too dark, his brows drawn like he’s trying to figure something out. “I have a smell.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “God don’t be dumb, Elliot.”
9.
A glimpse, the future:
They will send him to Arizona. Before UCLA, his third college (after University of Michigan, after Kalamazoo, after he is kicked out of first one and then willingly leaves the other): his fifth stint in a rehab facility.
They: his mother, his father, no need to round up. They: not Alice, though when he leaves she refuses to look him in the eye.
She will visit him alone. They sent her West too, once before, but that will be a long time ago. Before UCLA and before Kalamazoo and before the University of Michigan. Before his fourth rehab and before his third. She went West and Elliot had just started high school and Elliot went to visit her.
But that’s not the future.
The future:
They will sit alone in a sterile looking room that overlooks the desert: a flat stretch of land and mesas to the north, the sky almost purple where it reaches the flat peak of rock. The other families who have come to visit will be in this room too, like this is prison and it is the weekend.
Alice will have come alone. She will come without Mom, and Elliot will tell her rehab horror stories, about his roommate who was picked up by the police -- his drug habit not just limited to using but dealing as well, and he was wanted for trial -- or the group sessions where everyone has the same sad story to tell about a misspent youth in their parents’ overstocked medicine cabinets or private schools without the compulsory locker searches. Or he will tell her about Apache Joe, their group leader and former meth addict, and how he was teaching him how to lasso a rattlesnake, because “like, people can totally do that,” that’s something that is possible. Possible in Arizona, where the sky is purple when it meets the land, where the night air is cold and dry enough to make Elliot’s lungs ache, but that’s a thing he won’t tell Alice. He’ll tell her about the roommate on trial, about a girl named Spencer who can -- and does -- cry on cue, and he will tell her about Apache Joe and the rattlesnakes.
And Alice will merely listen, her body hidden in what he will think is an old sweater of his he left at home. Dwelling on that thought will make him feel young and open so instead when she stands to leave, when she stands beside him and his body is sprawled out, taut and predatory yet lazy, in an orange plastic chair, he will pluck at the fabric bunched around her wrist and tell her to buy her own clothes.
And Alice will tell him, her voice wavering just enough for him to read her false, "I hope you fucking rot in here."
But she will drag her fingers through his hair, just barely, just enough, as she walks past him to the door.
10.
At their grandmother’s house, in the bedroom she has given Alice, they sit together on the bed.
He keeps touching her, his fingers pulling at her hair and running down her arms, until she curls her body in against his. The front of her dress is damp and ruined from him, the thin fabric clinging and sticking to her skin. She has stopped crying and he has stopped smiling, and it’s like they can’t figure out if they’re sad about Granddad or their mother or each other or just themselves. He can smell the bay on her, just as she could smell it on him, and her sheer sleeves stick to the palms of his hands.
“You’re going to stay,” she says into his chest, her fingers gripping his forearm tight, the smallest lilt to that final word stay, just enough to make it a hesitant question. If Elliot was to look down, he would see her eyes are closed. He does not look down and he does not close his eyes. Instead he drags his fingers down the curve of her throat, feels her pulse jump, feels her fingers curl into the lean muscle at his thigh, and says, just as soft and low as her request (because that’s what it was, the hesitancy, the smallest lilt, the word stay), “yeah. Yeah I’ll stay.”
And he does.
They sleep on top of the faded floral comforter and in the morning the bed they leave will still be damp, will still stink of the bay and of them. Alice will sleep with her head tucked against his chest, Elliot’s hand caught in her hair, the other high on her waist.
They sleep in the same bed and Alice will wake before he does.
They will drive back up to Michigan that day -- Lynn asleep in the backseat, and Ben and Lee will spend the trip talking about the strangest of things (the mating habits of grasshoppers and the best works created by Austrian composers and the efficacy of setting mousetraps, the board game Mousetrap, so on and so forth) in the most serious, yet amused, voices.
It will be just the two of them in the front seat. It will be the two of them alone, as cut off as they were the night before, though they both refuse to talk about what happened during that night before.
And so they will drive, Alice will drive, and Elliot will find himself wanting to roll her sleeves up, wanting to look at her skin. He will know that’s a wrong and bad thing to want, but he will keep fixating on it, and he will watch her hands clutch the steering wheel the same tight way she had been clutching at first his forearm and then his thigh the night before.
“Home sweet home,” he will murmur when Alice pulls into the drive.
11.
That summer passes without incident.
The fall finds Elliot intolerable, a more than reluctant product of a regimen consisting of forced cold turkey and heavy maternal monitoring. Earlier that summer, Lynn had all but given up the illusion that Elliot would finish high school, and so earlier that summer she had buckled down and earlier that fall he had tested out and gotten his GED that same month.
He’d been clean those entire two months of the summer, the only drug entering his system the negotiated nicotine Lynn begrudgingly permitted, but beyond that, she watched him like a hawk, and Alice had watched him too, but she was more careful, less demanding with her surveillance.
One evening, the start of November, Michigan weather already freezing Alice rests on her stomach on the floor of the family room highlighting an article about the intersection between pop culture and ADHD. Her commute to the school each day varies between twenty minutes to an hour, depending on the weather, depending on traffic, but Alice says she doesn’t mind. Elliot sits sprawled out on the couch watching an old Seinfeld episode, the volume turned down too low to hear clearly.
“I feel,” he drawls,” George Costanza understands me on a deep personal and spiritual level.”
“That’s great,” Alice replies, distracted.
Her cell phone rings. The screen reads PAUL. She does not know why she answers the phone but she does. She hasn’t talked to him since the wedding. To say she has not thought of him since the wedding would be a lie, but it’s a lie she likes, a lie she doesn’t mind cultivating into a truth.
Alice sits up, her posture alert and straight, and when Elliot mouths at her “who?” it takes a beat before she mouths back, “Paul.” Elliot shakes his head, scoffs, and under his breath he says, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
He moves to leave, but Alice reaches over, blindly, her hand meeting the sharp jut of his hip and pushes against him as though to hold him in place. As though she means to say, no, please don’t go, but instead says, “I’m good, I’m good,” over the phone to her father.
Elliot slumps back against the couch cushions and Alice does not move her hand away so Elliot circles her wrist with his fingers. He moves them just a little lower, beneath the knobby pop of bone and he can feel the fine shallow indentations in her skin she has left behind over the years. He can feel her blood thrumming under his hand, how she’s pulled taut and afraid and anchoring herself against this onslaught with him, his body. He brushes his fingers lightly against her skin, and maybe he thinks, just the once, that he has not touched her since the wedding. He hasn’t touched her since she last spoke to Paul, and if there is a connection to be mined here, if you can string a thread through the eye of a needle and pin Paul to Elliot, Elliot to Paul, and then stitch it to Alice’s breast, he does not want to know it.
Her voice is just as soft, just as inaudible, as the actors on the television. She tucks her chin to her chest when she speaks. Her hair falls across her face, hiding her from view. To reach her, he would have to move.
He doesn’t move. The only words he can hear clearly are, “Then why did you call me?” but he can’t see her mouth when she says them.
Alice hangs up abruptly. She drops her phone to the carpet like it has stung her but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look at Elliot and Elliot still has his fingers pressed against the pale underside of her wrist.
When she laughs suddenly, a single hiccup of sound, Elliot can see her eyes are trained on the television. She laughs once, the sound more akin to a sob, before she wrenches her hand from his, pushes her hair off her face and leaves the room.
12.
And this: she breaks down after.
To say Alice has been good since the wedding is to tell a bit of a lie, but it’s a good lie, the hopeful kind. The kind of lie you offer an invalid, the family of the sick, to convince them that maybe things can still get better. She’s been good. She’s been good except for when she cries, sudden and terrifying, in the shower or on her way to school or in the parking lot outside the local grocery store, or when she opens the medicine cabinet, nervous and excited and suddenly, alarmingly, disappointed when she remembers and she sees that, no, they don’t keep razor blades here and no, she’s not supposed to make herself bleed. She’s not supposed to want that. And maybe it’s the wanting that hurts her all the more. Wanting the things you’re not supposed to want. Wanting something no short of seven psychiatrists, her mother, and two general practitioners have told her is wrong and bad and Alice we just want you to be good we just want you to be good.
So she told her father (she told Paul) over the phone, not once, but twice, “I’m good. I’m good.”
So she breaks down after.
She goes to the bathroom, and the first thing she does after shutting and locking the door is open the medicine cabinet. There’s nothing there. Some cotton swabs, a half-used tube of toothpaste, a leaking bottle of face wash and a string of floss. They can’t keep the sharp things because of her and they can’t keep the drugs because of Elliot. They can’t keep a lot of things in this house because of the both of them, because they want them to be good.
Over the phone, Paul had offered that Alice come over for a family dinner. And when Alice had asked, quiet, the question almost embarrassing in its earnestness, if it could just be the two of them, that it would be better if just the two of them met and no Patty and not her daughters, he said, no. He said, no, it would not be better.
Alice wonders if seven psychiatrists, her mother, and two general practitioners told Paul that Alice was wrong and bad and in order for Paul to be good he should never keep Alice. That he wouldn’t be able to keep a lot of things if he kept Alice.
When Elliot knocks on the bathroom door, Alice’s back is to the wall, her breath shallow and fingers curled into fists.
“Al?” His voice is soft, but it carries through the door.
“I’m fine, Elliot,” she says, but she can hear the hysteria to her voice, hear the way his name breaks in her mouth, into the start of a sob, and when the doorknob jiggles she isn’t surprised.
“Let me in,” he says. He says: “Open the door, Al. Come on. Open the fucking door.” He sounds tired, not angry, and when she opens the door, when her fingers touch the doorknob, she thinks that maybe that’s another thing you can’t keep if you keep her: your patience.
There are a lot of things Alice doesn’t like about Elliot, small things, big things, things that would keep most people at bay (things that would make you say he’s wrong and bad, you don’t need a doctor for that second opinion), and she has never liked the way concern manifests itself on his face. It makes him look old. It makes him look like a stranger to her. It makes her imagine a different world where he is the older brother and she is the younger sister; she does not know how to imagine a world where they’re not family at all.
If they weren’t family, she thinks, they would not keep each other.
She starts to cry when Elliot shuts and locks the door behind him, great heaving sobs, and without meaning to she finds herself repeating herself, over and over again.
She keeps saying, “He didn’t want me, he didn’t want me, he didn’t want me.”
“Alice,” Elliot says, and he says it again when he wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her to him, when she stumbles into him.
“Why didn’t he want me?”
Elliot leans his body heavy against hers and he holds her face by the jaw, his fingers tight, framing her face and her mouth, and she looks up at him, eyes glassy and wet.
He says, “I want you.” He leans in, his forehead pressed against hers, and her fingers are pulling at his t-shirt, right at his waist. The lip of the sink bites into her lower back and Alice has stopped crying, her breath trying to even itself out.
Elliot says it again, and again after that -- a tic set off, the emphasis shifting: “I want you,” he says. “I want you. I want you,” until he finally says, quiet and insistent, “You are all I want,” his hands still holding her face and his mouth right there, inches from her own.
Alice shudders against him.
13.
Elliot’s kindness is hardly a constant.
He likes to bait, he likes to goad; he lets his anger take control.
An evening late in the fall Elliot stops in Alice’s room before going to bed. Her laptop is open on her bed, scattered stacks of papers and notes, a few highlighters have rolled off her bed and onto the floor. She has the first draft of her thesis due that Friday and she has spent the better part of the last few days holed up in her room working on it.
“Can I help you?” she asks without looking up from the screen of her laptop, her fingers moving quickly over the keys.
“God you’re boring lately,” Elliot says, smirking as he leans against her door. Neither is sure when the habit began, but whenever they are together, whenever they are alone in a room together, they shut the door. Elliot is sure it has something to do with their mother, especially since as of late it’s as though they live in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War or some shit. Spies fucking everywhere.
He’s sure it’s more than that though. Something about companionship, something about keeping what they share in secret, bounding it between the both of them. And if the door stays shut, then it stays the both of them. If the door stays shut, then they are all that matters.
“I’m responsible lately,” Alice mumbles, distracted, as she jabs at the backspace key.
“Semantics.”
Alice looks up at him over her laptop and leans back against her pillows drawing her knees to her chest.
“Maybe you should start considering the responsible and boring side of life. Mom keeps asking me if you’ve even bothered to consider those college apps.”
Elliot scowls, his mood turning on a dime.
“Why? So I can be like you?”
Alice scowls, too. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come the fuck on. You majored in fucking child development psychology because you’re the most transparent fuck I have ever met. All your Daddy issues ironing themselves out in that thesis of yours?” There’s a slight quirk at his jaw as his scowl blossoms into a self-amused sneer. “Or better yet, how many old men on campus have you spread your legs for, huh? Because come on, we all know someone’s gotta fill that Daddy-shaped void for you, and who better than some middle-aged professor with a saggy middle-aged wife at home and some brats who at the very least get the benefit of your typical American nuclear family even though Daddy’s gone nuclear all up in your cunt.”
“Fuck you, Elliot.”
He smiles, dirty, like he knows a secret, like she’s the punchline of an inside joke only he’s privy to -- like he’s enjoying this.
“Nah, man. That’s not Freudian enough for you! Is it? It’s fucked up, but not Freudian. I’m younger than you. I can’t be the misguided father figure plowing you to some sort of mental and spiritual and, if you’re lucky, orgasmic personal revelation.”
Alice’s face goes flat and unreadable, her eyes -- one blue and one green: “you’ve been fucked up since birth,” Elliot told her once, one of his unkinder days -- are dark in the dim light of her bedroom. Her nostrils flare as she takes a deep steadying breath, and even though her knees are tucked to her chest, her body closed off from him, she sits up straighter, the straight line of her body just as severe as the angled way her wide mouth twists.
“I have work to do,” she says, “and I don’t have time to deal with your suspended late adolescent sexual ideation, okay? I’m sure Mom can find a shrink for you to talk to about your totally appropriate desire to fuck me.”
The sarcasm and contempt are thick in her voice, but Elliot smiles all the same when he winks and then shuts the door behind him.
14.
A condition of Elliot’s return to high school his junior year -- after he was found passed out in the boy’s bathroom with enjoy horse tranquilizer in him to fell Seabiscuit, after his second stint in rehab -- was that he would regularly and routinely sit down with the school shrink.
Her name was Sandra Levi and she insisted that Elliot call her Sandy and for that, among other reasons, Elliot hated her.
The first thing she told him was that she wasn’t going to ask him any questions. She wanted him to speak openly and naturally. Elliot had arched an eyebrow to that.
“There is nothing remotely natural about me sitting here with you. Sandy.”
“And that’s fine. That’s completely fine. We can sit in silence. You don’t have to say a word -- unless you want to.”
Elliot had not liked that. The idea of sitting in silence with this complete stranger staring at him like she knew him and knew how he worked unsettled him. So he started talking. So he tried to antagonize her.
“Am I supposed to tell you that my mom used to make me take vitamins and we could only drink soda on Fridays and that she dropped me on my head a few times or am I supposed to tell you about my deepest and darkest masturbatory fantasies or something?”
“If you think that’s relevant.”
“I’m a sixteen-year-old boy. Of course my dick is relevant. My entire universe is centered around my dick.”
Sandy did not say anything but she made a note on her legal pad. That spurred Elliot on.
“I bet you talk about teenage dick all the fucking time. Your entire job is to listen to boys talk about what they jack it to. Is that what gets you off? Is that why you do this job? Mixing business with pleasure?”
With a straight face and a slightly discomfiting oblivious smile considering what Elliot just said, Sandy said, “We’re not here to talk about me, Elliot.” She said it the way a preschool teacher would scold a wayward toddler who was sticking paste in his mouth or something.
“That’s right. We’re talking about me. Me and my dick.” He looked up at the shrink and smiled. Anyone who knew Elliot even just a little knew that smile.
“I think about my sister,” he said, quiet and dark, and then he leaned back against the couch, his arm spread out along the back of it and raised his chin as though in challenge.
Sandy blinked.
15.
Elliot lost his virginity at the age of thirteen after huffing paint in his buddy Ryan Kreager’s garage and sharing a joint. The girl was sixteen and she was stoned too and smelled like cheap perfume and her mouth tasted of even cheaper chapstick and when Elliot fucked her it was the single most disappointing moment in his young life (among a myriad collection of others that would later be shelved by even more disappointing moments -- moments centered around his family, moments revolving around Alice). Like most things in his life, he blames his disappointment on the drugs: on the paint thinner and on the weed and on how together they made this girl taste like absolutely nothing at all.
He forgot the girl’s name but he she did not forget him and when he fucked her best friend his freshman year of high school (her senior year; she had fine, dry blonde hair that stuck to his lips when she moved over top of him) she spray-painted, illogically, the word COCKSUCKER on his locker.
When she confronted him in the parking lot behind their school, he still had a first name for her -- a name he’d forget somewhere around his second circuit of rehab at Montgomery Falls (Montgomery Falls came before Dovetail Bridge which came before Silver Hill) -- he merely shrugged his shoulders and told her seeing as her friend lacked a dick the term ‘cocksucker’ was quite the misnomer. Besides, she really should consult this friend seeing as she was the superior party in the sack. The girl, logically, started to cry.
Elliot was fourteen years old, going on fifteen.
Alice was still a virgin.
Alice didn’t lose her virginity until she was eighteen years old. Before she graduated high school. Before Lynn sent her away. Before Alice tried to kill herself. When Elliot likes to pretend he is a shrink (which is often; he calls it “an obvious side effect of his clinical upbringing”), he hypothesizes that Alice’s sexual identity is so rooted in her deep-seated daddy issues that the simple rite of passage of popping her cherry was enough to send her on a spiraling journey of shame and self-loathing that culminated in a straight razor, their shared bathroom, and a whole lot of blood two months later.
He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but Alice is never going to tell him that.
Alice let starting forward of their high school’s basketball team, a Jackson Samuels, Jackson Samuels of the athletic scholarship to Duke, fuck her on his mother’s floral print couch that stunk of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume, menthol cigarettes, and disinfectant. She left immediately after -- the entire affair unpleasant, the ache between her thigh sharp and lingering and all too real. She had told herself that she was fine, fine until she arrived home and saw the dried blood on her thigh, could see more of the slight stain of blood in her panties, and could feel the slimy residue of the condom Jackson Samuels had used inside her.
She had started to cry and laid down in the center of her bedroom floor with the lights off and that’s how Elliot found her -- Alice’s hair sticking to her damp face, the room dark, her body curled in on itself.
“Why’d I let him do it?” she had whispered when Elliot pushed her hair back out of her face.
“Do what?” Elliot had asked, the question too demanding, too rough.
“Do what? Do what?” he kept asking. “Do what?”
But he knew.
That week at school he would corner Jackson Samuels, starting forward for the Riverside Tigers, athletic scholarship to Duke. He would get in his face.
He would say: touch my sister one more time I swear to god I’ll make you eat your own fucking dick.
And Jackson Samuels would say: who are you again?
And two months later Elliot would find Alice on the floor of their bathroom, her hair sticking to her cold face, the room dark, her body curled in on itself.
Lynn would say the only time she ever heard terror in her son’s voice for someone other than himself was when she sent Alice away. Not when he found the body but when they sent her away.
But then that probably isn’t entirely true.
16.
She’s good, he said.
She’s fine she’s good she’s fine she’s fine you can’t take her away you can’t fucking take her you can’t take her away she’s good she’s good.
Alice spent the summer at a facility in northern California that overlooked the Pacific.
That was the summer Lynn cried every morning.
I just miss her so much I just want her to come back.
17.
The year Granddad died is the year Elliot turns eighteen is the year they spend Christmas in Annapolis.
Lynn’s sister called her just after Thanksgiving (“Which sister?” Alice would ask; “Does it matter?” Elliot would say), all but haranguing her for the sparse and miserable holiday enjoyed under their mother’s roof.
“You’re coming for Christmas,” her sister said. “And I won’t have you turning the . . . the birth of Christ into a whole rigamarole about you. Dylan’s wedding was enough.”
They come for Christmas. They fly down, the weather too unpredictable for their plans, and sure enough their flight out of Michigan is delayed by three hours due to an ice storm hovering over West Virginia.
When they get there, the house is crowded and Grandma has her friends from the club over.
“What club?” Elliot hisses to Alice and she shrugs.
“These are my daughter Lynn’s children, Elliot and Alice,” she says to the women gathered in the sitting room. They all have the same styled hair, light and fluffy and no longer than their ears, though the color varies from white to gray to a fake red.
“No,” the fake red says and she raises a hand to her mouth, a salute of the dramatic. “These are Lynn’s kids?” she says. “No, they can’t be. These two? Her, maybe, but him? No.”
Elliot arches an eyebrow and the white and the gray join the red and they all keep saying the same thing, a refrain of friendly surprise and something else. It’s like they already knew about Elliot before he walked in, that they knew about him from his grandmother and what they know is far from flattering. It’s like they know about Alice too, the sympathetic cast of their gaze when they look at her, the one of faint disapproval aimed at Elliot.
“They’re Lynn’s kids?” they say. “No. No, impossible.
“They’re brother and sister? They can’t be!”
The white, who has been mostly silent through this exchange, clucks her tongue.
She says: “I never seen two children look less like they belong together. I say.”
18.
Alice visited Elliot in rehab, back when he was supposedly in Sweden.
He hated it there. When Alice visited, he tried to talk her into getting him out early. She sat across from him in the rec room, just as she sat across from him in every other rehab center he would find himself in, and he told her he loved her and that she loved him and that you always help the ones you love.
Alice had pushed away from the table, from him, with a gross look of disgust. She told him that he was sick and not to call her until --
And that was when she trailed off, and that was when he arched an eyebrow and asked her cold and deliberate, “Until what?”
Alice walked away without saying anything, and they didn’t talk again until Lynn casually mentioned to Elliot mid-conversation and mid-visit that she was worried about Alice, that Alice isn’t doing so good, and as she said it, she got all weird and choked up and for once, Elliot didn’t know what to say to that.
So Elliot called Alice that evening. So Elliot snuck out of the cafeteria during dinner and he called Alice. He crowded his long limbs into the phone booth, the one right next to the nurse’s station, and when she answered, he immediately said, “Don’t hang up don’t hang up don’t hang up,” and she didn’t and when she started to cry it was as though he expected this. He expected her to cry, and having his expectations realized reassured him in such a terrible way.
He never was sure what it was that set her off all those days before. Whether it was because he said he loved her, whether it was because he called her out for loving him, or whether it was because he tried to use that love to his own advantage.
He called that love out and tried to make it work for him.
19.
It’s at the dinner table on Christmas Eve that Dylan announces that Heather is pregnant.
Lynn’s eyes go large, but she looks happy, incredibly happy -- definitely happier than Patty, who apparently is not entirely thrilled to be learning this information with the rest of the family, but just as quickly as that disappointment crests on her face, it fades, and she’s announcing more to herself than the table that she is going to be the hottest grandmother ever.
“Wow,” Elliot says, and he applauds slowly, “you wasted no time at all inseminating your sow. Living the American Dream, man! Goddamn, congratulations. Go on and get that.”
Paul is seated across the table from Alice and Alice is seated next to Elliot. He glares at Elliot from across the table and Elliot flashes him his most shit-eating of grins.
It’s at this same dinner that someone mentions how Alice looks so much like Paul. Her father, they keep saying, and Alice freezes up. She drops her fork against the bone china plate and stares down at it.
The chairs are packed in too tight around the table and Elliot’s arm is flush with hers. Her breathing has ramped up and Elliot watches her carefully out of the corner of his eye while Grandma says, a strange hint or pride, that Alice got so much from her father.
“Alice got so much from her father,” she says.
It’s like a shockwave through Alice’s small frame and Elliot is almost surprised that they can’t all hear her bones rattling against each other as she shivers violently, just the once. Without thinking he reaches over and covers her thigh with his hand and squeezes. He rubs his thumb along her inner thigh, against the rough woolen fabric of her tights, and her hand closes over his. When the conversation has turned -- “Oh, I could spend all day discussing the fascinating implications of genealogy, and probably have. With my shrink. Because have we filled our quota today? I know that we must mention at least once just how fucking crazy I am. So! Consider this the requisite mention and in the interest of titillating conversation, how about Patty’s new milkbags, huh?” -- he smiles, provocative, a challenge, and when he goes to move his hand from Alice she grabs him by the wrist and holds his hand there.
She does not touch her meal but she drinks greedily from her glass of red, the muscle in her thigh still jumping under his hand.
20.
At their grandmother’s house, Alice has to share a room with Paul and Patty’s female progeny (“You’re lucky the herp isn’t airborne,” Elliot cracks) and Elliot, par usual, is bunking with Ben.
They hide out in the bathroom that night, the one that adjoins his and Ben’s room. The rest of the house has gone quiet, the lights strung around the Christmas tree unplugged, and everything stinks of evergreen and holly and the chocolate someone burnt earlier that day.
They sit together in the empty bathtub passing an expensive bottle of scotch back and forth.
“That was, like, totally some kind of exercise in psychological cruelty,” he says to her and Alice laughs in agreement.
Elliot gives the bottle a shake and examines the label.
“Pretty sure this was Granddad’s stash,” Elliot speculates.
Alice’s hair sticks to the white tiles at their back, some weird state electricity pulling at the strands. Some weird electricity pulling at the both of them. She looks at him slant-eyed, at the bottle in his hand, and says quietly, “I imagine it must be.”
Later, he’ll look back on this and call it scarily intimate. She’s in her pajamas, a festive pair of red and white flannel pants and a loose t-shirt, while he’s only in his boxers and a thin undershirt. Their knees keep knocking together, their shoulders pressed against each other, and every now and then, her head will lull to the side, her cheek, her chin, resting against him.
He’s drunk. And if he’s drunk, then she must be drunk too. The logic holds: she’s had to drink just as much as he has, and of the two of them, she’s not the one with a varied history of substance abuse; she’s the one with a lower tolerance.
If you want culpability and you want blame, you won’t find it here. He doesn’t know how what happens next came to happen. He doesn’t know who reached for who first. Who took the last pull from that expensive bottle of scotch. Who decided that this would be a very good idea or a very good bad idea or who simply had enough and decided to close that small distance between them.
In fact, he is not entirely sure there ever was a decision to be made at all.
Alice would say there was. Alice would say she let him do this.
But either she kisses him or he kisses her first. It isn’t a simultaneous move: someone starts this. Someone starts this with a kiss, by leaning in, by smearing their mouth over the other. She will imagine that it was him and she will place the blame at his feet, at his mouth and the way it opened over hers. Elliot does not think this way and he never will. He will blame her and it will not matter who kissed who first; the only thing that will matter is that in a bathtub in their grandmother’s house she kissed him back.
(He kisses tentatively at first and that surprises her. If anything he has always seemed to be the type to take what he wants, no questions, no request for quarter. But he kisses her like he is unsure this is what she wants and that might be the kindest thing he has ever done.
Make no mistake: he will never be this young or this kind again).
She kisses him back, and it’s Alice who opens her mouth first, it’s Alice who yields to him in that way. So he gives her what she wants: he kisses her harder, he kisses her deeper. He gets his fingers caught in her hair and every move they make echoes too loud in that bathroom. Her knees bracket his hips, and when he pushes her down she almost hits her head on the tap. She shivers when he pushes her t-shirt up, when the cold porcelain touches the small of her back; shivers again when it’s his warm hands that touch her there.
And each time they move against each other a pointed joint, a knee, an elbow, bumps noisily against the tub and echoes in the space -- something confined yet endless about the space, like a mausoleum done up in only the fragile things, the things that break: white tile and porcelain, the both of them, all that pale skin, the both of them.
Without leaving her body, he reaches and he jerks the curtain shut. But the door is locked, the only witness the mirror, the only witness themselves.
There is something bizarrely inevitable at play. The white-haired woman had said: I never seen two children look less like they belong together. I say. She had said that, yet here they are. She said that, and the others had agreed; they had refused to believe they were brother and sister, refused to believe they came together in a set, that they could possibly belong to each other.
But Elliot now knows that Alice’s mouth is sour and wanting when it is pressed against his, and when he tastes her, when his tongue slicks against hers, her head thumps against the bottom of the tub and her legs open that much more for him. He wants to fuck her, he has always wanted to work his way inside her, make her feel it and ache for it, but he knows himself better than that. He knows what the better part of a bottle of top shelf liquor can do to a man and if he has learned anything he has learned that the side effect of utter and complete chemical dependence is more often than not a limp dick. He still grinds himself against her, listens to that same hitch in her throat she makes just before she starts to cry, but she isn’t crying now. Her eyes are wide open, unreadable and huge. There is no element of surprise to her, just flushed cheeks and an open mouth, swollen and hungry.
So he bites at her throat that much more and it’s crazy to think a good lost girl like her could ever have wanted this too.
21.
A preview, the future:
Elliot calls her from Amsterdam. “Of course you’re in Amsterdam,” she mumbles into the phone. “What time even is it there?” She flicks her wrist and glances at her watch. She figures it has to be around four in the morning where he is if she’s done her math correctly.
She has done her math correctly.
Elliot doesn’t answer her, but he laughs into the phone, a slow rolling chuckle betraying just how fucked out of his mind he truly is.
“I read a book once,” she says and then she pauses.
“You read a book,” Elliot says, his voice fuzzy yet familiar.
“Yeah. Parts of it, parts were set in Amsterdam. And at one point, this cab driver is talking to the main character who was visiting and he said that people think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but really it’s a city of freedom, and it’s in freedom most people find sin.”
Elliot is quiet for a beat. She can hear him inhale, lazy but deliberate, and she’s sure there’s a cigarette clenched between his fingers.
“I beg to differ,” he finally says. “Most sin I have ever found was under the dark heel of oppression.”
“What do you know about oppression?”
“About as much as you,” he says, entirely too serious.
She thinks he said: about as much as you, but she could be wrong.
She fears he said: it’s always been you.
Round up or round down: it’s either the kindest or the cruelest thing he has ever said to her.
C O N T I N U E D :
T W O | T H R E E
(for they don't know how to live)
another happy day. the good daughter and the bad son share the same blood. alice/elliot. 21,535 words.
notes: this fic is so long it's disgusting. idek what happened here. i don't have a defense. apparently this was me while writing this:
a few weeks ago i watched this movie and really liked it! and then, bc i am friends with enablers of the worst sort, i wound up starting to write this! and kept writing this! and. kept. writing. so the blame for this probably falls at may's feet or jordan's or jakk's or idk i guess mine but who likes to assume the blame themselves. um, obvious spoilers for the movie here. and if you've seen the movie then i guess you can imagine the assorted things i should probably warn for here? incest and self-harm and drug use and all that really sort of stuff. yeah. i am a person who exists. /embarrassing.
In my family
we do not
say “goodbye.”
We say
“so long.”
MAIRA KALMAN
Well, shit I know we’re all growing old
But where there’s a will there’s a way --
So way to go.
Say goodbye to your feral days
Say goodbye-bye-bye-bye . . .
SUNSET RUBDOWN
And this daughter . . . Alice: does she live with you or the ex-husband?
She lives with us, Elliot.
[ . . . ]
This daughter Alice. Is she coming to the wedding?
Why are you doing this, Elliot?
O N E :
t h e
p a s t
Wherein their brother Dylan gets married:
1.
The pink bridesmaid’s dress was ruined and Alice left it to hang limp and dirty in the bathroom at her grandmother’s house.
But, first:
Grandma had expected them at her house. She had expected Alice days ago.
She expected the entire family, and in her mind, the entire family would always include Paul.
She never thought much of Elliot when she thought of the family. She thought of Dylan and she thought of Alice; she thought of their fair hair and Dylan’s tan skin and Alice’s wan smile. She thought of the things that belonged to Paul and how they made themselves known through his children. How they made themselves known through her daughter.
There was no room for Elliot in that assessment.
She expected the family at her house, and Elliot, like an unwanted guest, a pest, that serpent waiting in the grass, came before Alice.
He came waiting for Alice. He came, forcing himself to be recalled and to be remembered.
2.
“What’s wrong with Elliot?” Alice asks.
She is eight.
Lynn holds a hand over her mouth to keep whatever emotion threatens at bay before she snaps: nothing.
3.
Alice arrives, like a thief, in the night.
The analogy ends there.
Her arrival is the very opposite of surreptitious, nothing sly or unassuming about the fact she stepped over their grandmother’s threshold and into her house.
Elliot, if he had the words, if he could shelve his pride, would say: the room went quiet when she stepped inside it.
But then if Elliot had the words he would say a lot of things; he would be a different person.
After dinner, Alice sits besides Elliot on the sagging sofa in the family room. Elliot sits there in silence though in constant motion: his hands rolling over themselves, first one foot tapping out an unknown rhythm and then the other taking up the lead. He sits there next to her, surveying both the crowd and the dessert buffet with an open expression of utter and total contempt.
“You look good,” Alice says quietly, the same glass of red wine in her hand that was poured for her at dinner. Elliot watches a piece of lemon cake sag on the plate and then collapse on its side. He turns to her suddenly and Alice curls a fist around first the stem of her wine glass and then a crumbled napkin.
“Could say the same for you,” he says, a dark, thin smile threatening to spread.
“I hear you’re back from Sweden -- or so Ben says.”
Elliot snorts, his eyes drifting back to their aunts, watching the way they watch the both of them. He decides that he spies disapproval in their eyes and he decides that he likes it. He looks at Alice over his shoulder, arches an eyebrow and says drily:
“That what we’re calling it now?”
Alice shrugs and does not comment.
Elliot sighs and leans back against the flattened couch cushions. His elbow bumps against Alice’s arm and her wine sloshes in its glass. He watches her as she leans forward, her body unfolding into straight lines and tight angles, as she reaches and places her glass of wine on the coffee table before them.
Elliot sighs again, and Alice leans back; that dark smile has finally reached his mouth.
“The one thing I gotta say in rehab’s -- excuse me, Sweden’s -- favor? Goddamn, it was like an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet.”
“You’re gross, Elliot.” Her tone is bored and she starts to shred a paper napkin into a pile of light confetti in her lap. He leans into her and brushes it away as she scowls at him, her gaze still fixed on her lap and her knees and the shredded paper at her feet.
“It’s true!”
“No it’s not.”
“How would you know? I was in rehab for teen addicts not head cases like the place Mom sent you. When you take away the pot and the smack and the booze and whatever other colloquialism you’ve got for whatever substance you’re missing you’ve still got your dick and you’re gonna go and stick it any and everywhere. Pretty sure prison works the same way.”
“If you say so, Shawshank.”
4.
To anyone who has ever met Alice after -- after the divorce, after Lynn left Paul, after Lynn met a man named Lee and she made him her husband -- she has told them that Lee is her father.
There is no Paul.
Lee is her father and Elliot is her brother and Ben is her brother.
She has never seen a point to define things by degrees, to halve relations that have always felt entirely full.
If you were to ask her, she would say she’s rounding up. Round the half to a whole. Round the half to a whole and see if that fills the heart.
When Paul asks her, when he all but asks her, when he asks where she has been and what she has become, she finds she doesn’t know how to round that. She doesn’t know what to do with that. How you square something that was meant to be a whole but instead not only gave you empty but left you soured out and weak inside.
Alice doesn’t know what to do with that.
So in the parking lot she cries.
She cries in the parking lot and waits for her mother. She waits for her father and her two brothers.
5.
That night Elliot comes stumbling into Alice’s bedroom. She is already in bed, buried under the covers that stink of lavender and fabric softener and disuse, and when he moves to get in bed with her, his entire body folds in on top of hers.
She can tell from the heavy and limp weight of his body, the clammy feel of his skin against hers, the soft and muffled sounds he makes against her neck, that he is completely fucked up on something. Something, she is sure, that would not be classified as a typical teenage drug or whatever he had used as a defense the night before.
“Jesus, Elliot,” she mutters, her mouth sticky and stale with sleep, “get off me.”
He more or less collapses along her side instead of rolls and he keeps a heavy arm anchored around her waist.
“What the fuck did you take?” she hisses.
“Granddad,” is all he says.
“That’s not an answer, Elliot.”
“Fenta -- fentanyl.” His words are syrupy and slow, and Alice sighs.
“I could tell Mom,” she says to the ceiling.
“Hmmmm.” It’s all he offers, either lazily calling her bluff or simply not caring at all, anything beyond her bed too far away and too unreal to imagine, too far to recognize as a tangible threat.
“You even know what fentanyl does to your system?”
She can hear him smack his lips, hear what sounds like the start of a soft moan and his arm twitches against her belly.
“‘course I fucking know,” he mumbles, each word a brush of his lips against her neck. “Me of all people. Al. It’s me.” His anger sounds diluted to her, watered down and tempered, no ferocity to his mouth, his eyes closed, and she hates him a little for that.
She does not say anything and she does not push him out of her bed. She lays there, under and beside him, uncomfortably warm, her legs sticking to the sheets and to his bare legs. She closes her eyes and finds the beat of Elliot’s heart, each intake of breath, to be impossibly slow. She wonders if that means he’s dying. She wonders if she will wake to a body and a body alone.
“Why were you crying tonight,” he asks suddenly but the question sounds too far away. She turns her head and her chin brushes the top of his head.
“Because I was sad,” she whispers. He shifts that much closer to her, his body draping hers once again.
“Don’t be sad,” Elliot whispers, the words slow, like pulled taffy, sticky and too sweet in his mouth. “Don’t be sad. Don’t be . . . sad.”
When she wakes, the sun is just rising up over the bay. Elliot is already gone.
She wakes to a body alone.
6.
Alice was sent away the year she graduated high school.
That was the year she tried to kill herself. It was summer and Alice had just graduated.
That was the year Lynn cried every morning in the kitchen while she poured Apple Jacks into two bowls, one for Elliot and one for Ben. She cried when she drove the boys to the community pool and cried when their dad grilled chicken slathered with his special-made barbecue sauce (bourbon and peppercorn and just a hint of cayenne pepper and what he called his secret ingredient and what Ben knew was a dash of sugar).
When Elliot would say, “What’s your damage, Mom, god,” or “Jesus, stop crying already,” or simply, “Mom, come on,” she would reply with a hand held over her mouth, the sound muffled and far away.
“I just miss her so much I just want her to come back,” she would say.
“I just want her to come back.”
7.
Elliot had been the one who found her.
“It was an accident,” would be Alice’s feeble recrimination two days later, still in the ICU, her arm stitched up and painful, morphine dripping through her system.
“You tried to kill yourself. What’s accidental about that?” he’d say in response, and when she’d whisper softly, “ . . . the blade slipped,” it would sound like a lie to both of them.
So she’d say: “I was sad.”
And Elliot would say, “Don’t be sad,” and shade the words with condescension instead of the pleading filling up his throat.
“Don’t be sad.”
8.
Granddad dies.
Granddad dies and they fish Elliot out of the bay, his body waterlogged, his eyes half-lidded and the pallor of his skin chalky and white. Granddad dies, but Elliot doesn’t.
Lynn sobs when she hugs him, as though her father’s death has earned forgiveness on the side of Elliot, and for once, for now, Elliot does not press his own luck.
Alice doesn’t touch him. Alice doesn’t touch him until, as though sparked by Elliot’s presence, the room erupts in violence. Grandma wrings her hands and cries and Lynn shrieks at Paul, the same words repeated: You smug fuck don’t you put this on me you smug fuck don’t you --
When Alice touches Elliot she drags Elliot off by the elbow.
“Where are you taking me?” he asks, a lascivious wiggle of his eyebrows, and then he starts to laugh. She pushes him into her bedroom and slams the door behind her.
“What the fuck is the matter with you?” she hisses between clenched teeth. Elliot doesn’t say anything, but he’s still smiling, swaying, his balance unsteady. Granddad died. He died, and Elliot didn’t. They fished Elliot out of the bay and left the inner tube floating behind.
“What the fuck, Elliot.”
He narrows his eyes but he is still smiling.
Alice hits him in the shoulder with a weak fist, and he stumbles back. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” She goes to hit him again, but he grabs her by the wrist and squeezes. His face is tight and serious and Alice sounds like she might cry when she asks again: what is wrong with you?
He pulls her to him, her wrist still in his hand, and presses her against him. The first broken sob from Alice goes largely unheard, absorbed by his chest, her mouth and face pressed against the clammy wet fabric. He stinks of the bay and summer and sweat and that scent that has always been distinctly his own. She had told him that once, casual and innocuous, when they were younger, that year they both bought the same green sweater just to piss Lynn (and to an uncertain extent, each other) off.
“It’s yours, asshole,” Alice had said after Lynn yelled at her for leaving her sweater on the kitchen counter.
“You can’t know that for sure,” Elliot said, still a boy but already possessed of that unnerving sense of self-awareness and misplaced confidence.
“It smells like you,” she had said, acidly, and then thrown it at him. He looked at her funny. He looked at her as if she just revealed something he had not known before this conversation and he was equal dueling parts curious and horrified.
“It smells like me?”
Alice had shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
He considered her, his eyes too bright, too dark, his brows drawn like he’s trying to figure something out. “I have a smell.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “God don’t be dumb, Elliot.”
9.
A glimpse, the future:
They will send him to Arizona. Before UCLA, his third college (after University of Michigan, after Kalamazoo, after he is kicked out of first one and then willingly leaves the other): his fifth stint in a rehab facility.
They: his mother, his father, no need to round up. They: not Alice, though when he leaves she refuses to look him in the eye.
She will visit him alone. They sent her West too, once before, but that will be a long time ago. Before UCLA and before Kalamazoo and before the University of Michigan. Before his fourth rehab and before his third. She went West and Elliot had just started high school and Elliot went to visit her.
But that’s not the future.
The future:
They will sit alone in a sterile looking room that overlooks the desert: a flat stretch of land and mesas to the north, the sky almost purple where it reaches the flat peak of rock. The other families who have come to visit will be in this room too, like this is prison and it is the weekend.
Alice will have come alone. She will come without Mom, and Elliot will tell her rehab horror stories, about his roommate who was picked up by the police -- his drug habit not just limited to using but dealing as well, and he was wanted for trial -- or the group sessions where everyone has the same sad story to tell about a misspent youth in their parents’ overstocked medicine cabinets or private schools without the compulsory locker searches. Or he will tell her about Apache Joe, their group leader and former meth addict, and how he was teaching him how to lasso a rattlesnake, because “like, people can totally do that,” that’s something that is possible. Possible in Arizona, where the sky is purple when it meets the land, where the night air is cold and dry enough to make Elliot’s lungs ache, but that’s a thing he won’t tell Alice. He’ll tell her about the roommate on trial, about a girl named Spencer who can -- and does -- cry on cue, and he will tell her about Apache Joe and the rattlesnakes.
And Alice will merely listen, her body hidden in what he will think is an old sweater of his he left at home. Dwelling on that thought will make him feel young and open so instead when she stands to leave, when she stands beside him and his body is sprawled out, taut and predatory yet lazy, in an orange plastic chair, he will pluck at the fabric bunched around her wrist and tell her to buy her own clothes.
And Alice will tell him, her voice wavering just enough for him to read her false, "I hope you fucking rot in here."
But she will drag her fingers through his hair, just barely, just enough, as she walks past him to the door.
10.
At their grandmother’s house, in the bedroom she has given Alice, they sit together on the bed.
He keeps touching her, his fingers pulling at her hair and running down her arms, until she curls her body in against his. The front of her dress is damp and ruined from him, the thin fabric clinging and sticking to her skin. She has stopped crying and he has stopped smiling, and it’s like they can’t figure out if they’re sad about Granddad or their mother or each other or just themselves. He can smell the bay on her, just as she could smell it on him, and her sheer sleeves stick to the palms of his hands.
“You’re going to stay,” she says into his chest, her fingers gripping his forearm tight, the smallest lilt to that final word stay, just enough to make it a hesitant question. If Elliot was to look down, he would see her eyes are closed. He does not look down and he does not close his eyes. Instead he drags his fingers down the curve of her throat, feels her pulse jump, feels her fingers curl into the lean muscle at his thigh, and says, just as soft and low as her request (because that’s what it was, the hesitancy, the smallest lilt, the word stay), “yeah. Yeah I’ll stay.”
And he does.
They sleep on top of the faded floral comforter and in the morning the bed they leave will still be damp, will still stink of the bay and of them. Alice will sleep with her head tucked against his chest, Elliot’s hand caught in her hair, the other high on her waist.
They sleep in the same bed and Alice will wake before he does.
They will drive back up to Michigan that day -- Lynn asleep in the backseat, and Ben and Lee will spend the trip talking about the strangest of things (the mating habits of grasshoppers and the best works created by Austrian composers and the efficacy of setting mousetraps, the board game Mousetrap, so on and so forth) in the most serious, yet amused, voices.
It will be just the two of them in the front seat. It will be the two of them alone, as cut off as they were the night before, though they both refuse to talk about what happened during that night before.
And so they will drive, Alice will drive, and Elliot will find himself wanting to roll her sleeves up, wanting to look at her skin. He will know that’s a wrong and bad thing to want, but he will keep fixating on it, and he will watch her hands clutch the steering wheel the same tight way she had been clutching at first his forearm and then his thigh the night before.
“Home sweet home,” he will murmur when Alice pulls into the drive.
11.
That summer passes without incident.
The fall finds Elliot intolerable, a more than reluctant product of a regimen consisting of forced cold turkey and heavy maternal monitoring. Earlier that summer, Lynn had all but given up the illusion that Elliot would finish high school, and so earlier that summer she had buckled down and earlier that fall he had tested out and gotten his GED that same month.
He’d been clean those entire two months of the summer, the only drug entering his system the negotiated nicotine Lynn begrudgingly permitted, but beyond that, she watched him like a hawk, and Alice had watched him too, but she was more careful, less demanding with her surveillance.
One evening, the start of November, Michigan weather already freezing Alice rests on her stomach on the floor of the family room highlighting an article about the intersection between pop culture and ADHD. Her commute to the school each day varies between twenty minutes to an hour, depending on the weather, depending on traffic, but Alice says she doesn’t mind. Elliot sits sprawled out on the couch watching an old Seinfeld episode, the volume turned down too low to hear clearly.
“I feel,” he drawls,” George Costanza understands me on a deep personal and spiritual level.”
“That’s great,” Alice replies, distracted.
Her cell phone rings. The screen reads PAUL. She does not know why she answers the phone but she does. She hasn’t talked to him since the wedding. To say she has not thought of him since the wedding would be a lie, but it’s a lie she likes, a lie she doesn’t mind cultivating into a truth.
Alice sits up, her posture alert and straight, and when Elliot mouths at her “who?” it takes a beat before she mouths back, “Paul.” Elliot shakes his head, scoffs, and under his breath he says, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
He moves to leave, but Alice reaches over, blindly, her hand meeting the sharp jut of his hip and pushes against him as though to hold him in place. As though she means to say, no, please don’t go, but instead says, “I’m good, I’m good,” over the phone to her father.
Elliot slumps back against the couch cushions and Alice does not move her hand away so Elliot circles her wrist with his fingers. He moves them just a little lower, beneath the knobby pop of bone and he can feel the fine shallow indentations in her skin she has left behind over the years. He can feel her blood thrumming under his hand, how she’s pulled taut and afraid and anchoring herself against this onslaught with him, his body. He brushes his fingers lightly against her skin, and maybe he thinks, just the once, that he has not touched her since the wedding. He hasn’t touched her since she last spoke to Paul, and if there is a connection to be mined here, if you can string a thread through the eye of a needle and pin Paul to Elliot, Elliot to Paul, and then stitch it to Alice’s breast, he does not want to know it.
Her voice is just as soft, just as inaudible, as the actors on the television. She tucks her chin to her chest when she speaks. Her hair falls across her face, hiding her from view. To reach her, he would have to move.
He doesn’t move. The only words he can hear clearly are, “Then why did you call me?” but he can’t see her mouth when she says them.
Alice hangs up abruptly. She drops her phone to the carpet like it has stung her but she doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t look at Elliot and Elliot still has his fingers pressed against the pale underside of her wrist.
When she laughs suddenly, a single hiccup of sound, Elliot can see her eyes are trained on the television. She laughs once, the sound more akin to a sob, before she wrenches her hand from his, pushes her hair off her face and leaves the room.
12.
And this: she breaks down after.
To say Alice has been good since the wedding is to tell a bit of a lie, but it’s a good lie, the hopeful kind. The kind of lie you offer an invalid, the family of the sick, to convince them that maybe things can still get better. She’s been good. She’s been good except for when she cries, sudden and terrifying, in the shower or on her way to school or in the parking lot outside the local grocery store, or when she opens the medicine cabinet, nervous and excited and suddenly, alarmingly, disappointed when she remembers and she sees that, no, they don’t keep razor blades here and no, she’s not supposed to make herself bleed. She’s not supposed to want that. And maybe it’s the wanting that hurts her all the more. Wanting the things you’re not supposed to want. Wanting something no short of seven psychiatrists, her mother, and two general practitioners have told her is wrong and bad and Alice we just want you to be good we just want you to be good.
So she told her father (she told Paul) over the phone, not once, but twice, “I’m good. I’m good.”
So she breaks down after.
She goes to the bathroom, and the first thing she does after shutting and locking the door is open the medicine cabinet. There’s nothing there. Some cotton swabs, a half-used tube of toothpaste, a leaking bottle of face wash and a string of floss. They can’t keep the sharp things because of her and they can’t keep the drugs because of Elliot. They can’t keep a lot of things in this house because of the both of them, because they want them to be good.
Over the phone, Paul had offered that Alice come over for a family dinner. And when Alice had asked, quiet, the question almost embarrassing in its earnestness, if it could just be the two of them, that it would be better if just the two of them met and no Patty and not her daughters, he said, no. He said, no, it would not be better.
Alice wonders if seven psychiatrists, her mother, and two general practitioners told Paul that Alice was wrong and bad and in order for Paul to be good he should never keep Alice. That he wouldn’t be able to keep a lot of things if he kept Alice.
When Elliot knocks on the bathroom door, Alice’s back is to the wall, her breath shallow and fingers curled into fists.
“Al?” His voice is soft, but it carries through the door.
“I’m fine, Elliot,” she says, but she can hear the hysteria to her voice, hear the way his name breaks in her mouth, into the start of a sob, and when the doorknob jiggles she isn’t surprised.
“Let me in,” he says. He says: “Open the door, Al. Come on. Open the fucking door.” He sounds tired, not angry, and when she opens the door, when her fingers touch the doorknob, she thinks that maybe that’s another thing you can’t keep if you keep her: your patience.
There are a lot of things Alice doesn’t like about Elliot, small things, big things, things that would keep most people at bay (things that would make you say he’s wrong and bad, you don’t need a doctor for that second opinion), and she has never liked the way concern manifests itself on his face. It makes him look old. It makes him look like a stranger to her. It makes her imagine a different world where he is the older brother and she is the younger sister; she does not know how to imagine a world where they’re not family at all.
If they weren’t family, she thinks, they would not keep each other.
She starts to cry when Elliot shuts and locks the door behind him, great heaving sobs, and without meaning to she finds herself repeating herself, over and over again.
She keeps saying, “He didn’t want me, he didn’t want me, he didn’t want me.”
“Alice,” Elliot says, and he says it again when he wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her to him, when she stumbles into him.
“Why didn’t he want me?”
Elliot leans his body heavy against hers and he holds her face by the jaw, his fingers tight, framing her face and her mouth, and she looks up at him, eyes glassy and wet.
He says, “I want you.” He leans in, his forehead pressed against hers, and her fingers are pulling at his t-shirt, right at his waist. The lip of the sink bites into her lower back and Alice has stopped crying, her breath trying to even itself out.
Elliot says it again, and again after that -- a tic set off, the emphasis shifting: “I want you,” he says. “I want you. I want you,” until he finally says, quiet and insistent, “You are all I want,” his hands still holding her face and his mouth right there, inches from her own.
Alice shudders against him.
13.
Elliot’s kindness is hardly a constant.
He likes to bait, he likes to goad; he lets his anger take control.
An evening late in the fall Elliot stops in Alice’s room before going to bed. Her laptop is open on her bed, scattered stacks of papers and notes, a few highlighters have rolled off her bed and onto the floor. She has the first draft of her thesis due that Friday and she has spent the better part of the last few days holed up in her room working on it.
“Can I help you?” she asks without looking up from the screen of her laptop, her fingers moving quickly over the keys.
“God you’re boring lately,” Elliot says, smirking as he leans against her door. Neither is sure when the habit began, but whenever they are together, whenever they are alone in a room together, they shut the door. Elliot is sure it has something to do with their mother, especially since as of late it’s as though they live in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War or some shit. Spies fucking everywhere.
He’s sure it’s more than that though. Something about companionship, something about keeping what they share in secret, bounding it between the both of them. And if the door stays shut, then it stays the both of them. If the door stays shut, then they are all that matters.
“I’m responsible lately,” Alice mumbles, distracted, as she jabs at the backspace key.
“Semantics.”
Alice looks up at him over her laptop and leans back against her pillows drawing her knees to her chest.
“Maybe you should start considering the responsible and boring side of life. Mom keeps asking me if you’ve even bothered to consider those college apps.”
Elliot scowls, his mood turning on a dime.
“Why? So I can be like you?”
Alice scowls, too. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come the fuck on. You majored in fucking child development psychology because you’re the most transparent fuck I have ever met. All your Daddy issues ironing themselves out in that thesis of yours?” There’s a slight quirk at his jaw as his scowl blossoms into a self-amused sneer. “Or better yet, how many old men on campus have you spread your legs for, huh? Because come on, we all know someone’s gotta fill that Daddy-shaped void for you, and who better than some middle-aged professor with a saggy middle-aged wife at home and some brats who at the very least get the benefit of your typical American nuclear family even though Daddy’s gone nuclear all up in your cunt.”
“Fuck you, Elliot.”
He smiles, dirty, like he knows a secret, like she’s the punchline of an inside joke only he’s privy to -- like he’s enjoying this.
“Nah, man. That’s not Freudian enough for you! Is it? It’s fucked up, but not Freudian. I’m younger than you. I can’t be the misguided father figure plowing you to some sort of mental and spiritual and, if you’re lucky, orgasmic personal revelation.”
Alice’s face goes flat and unreadable, her eyes -- one blue and one green: “you’ve been fucked up since birth,” Elliot told her once, one of his unkinder days -- are dark in the dim light of her bedroom. Her nostrils flare as she takes a deep steadying breath, and even though her knees are tucked to her chest, her body closed off from him, she sits up straighter, the straight line of her body just as severe as the angled way her wide mouth twists.
“I have work to do,” she says, “and I don’t have time to deal with your suspended late adolescent sexual ideation, okay? I’m sure Mom can find a shrink for you to talk to about your totally appropriate desire to fuck me.”
The sarcasm and contempt are thick in her voice, but Elliot smiles all the same when he winks and then shuts the door behind him.
14.
A condition of Elliot’s return to high school his junior year -- after he was found passed out in the boy’s bathroom with enjoy horse tranquilizer in him to fell Seabiscuit, after his second stint in rehab -- was that he would regularly and routinely sit down with the school shrink.
Her name was Sandra Levi and she insisted that Elliot call her Sandy and for that, among other reasons, Elliot hated her.
The first thing she told him was that she wasn’t going to ask him any questions. She wanted him to speak openly and naturally. Elliot had arched an eyebrow to that.
“There is nothing remotely natural about me sitting here with you. Sandy.”
“And that’s fine. That’s completely fine. We can sit in silence. You don’t have to say a word -- unless you want to.”
Elliot had not liked that. The idea of sitting in silence with this complete stranger staring at him like she knew him and knew how he worked unsettled him. So he started talking. So he tried to antagonize her.
“Am I supposed to tell you that my mom used to make me take vitamins and we could only drink soda on Fridays and that she dropped me on my head a few times or am I supposed to tell you about my deepest and darkest masturbatory fantasies or something?”
“If you think that’s relevant.”
“I’m a sixteen-year-old boy. Of course my dick is relevant. My entire universe is centered around my dick.”
Sandy did not say anything but she made a note on her legal pad. That spurred Elliot on.
“I bet you talk about teenage dick all the fucking time. Your entire job is to listen to boys talk about what they jack it to. Is that what gets you off? Is that why you do this job? Mixing business with pleasure?”
With a straight face and a slightly discomfiting oblivious smile considering what Elliot just said, Sandy said, “We’re not here to talk about me, Elliot.” She said it the way a preschool teacher would scold a wayward toddler who was sticking paste in his mouth or something.
“That’s right. We’re talking about me. Me and my dick.” He looked up at the shrink and smiled. Anyone who knew Elliot even just a little knew that smile.
“I think about my sister,” he said, quiet and dark, and then he leaned back against the couch, his arm spread out along the back of it and raised his chin as though in challenge.
Sandy blinked.
15.
Elliot lost his virginity at the age of thirteen after huffing paint in his buddy Ryan Kreager’s garage and sharing a joint. The girl was sixteen and she was stoned too and smelled like cheap perfume and her mouth tasted of even cheaper chapstick and when Elliot fucked her it was the single most disappointing moment in his young life (among a myriad collection of others that would later be shelved by even more disappointing moments -- moments centered around his family, moments revolving around Alice). Like most things in his life, he blames his disappointment on the drugs: on the paint thinner and on the weed and on how together they made this girl taste like absolutely nothing at all.
He forgot the girl’s name but he she did not forget him and when he fucked her best friend his freshman year of high school (her senior year; she had fine, dry blonde hair that stuck to his lips when she moved over top of him) she spray-painted, illogically, the word COCKSUCKER on his locker.
When she confronted him in the parking lot behind their school, he still had a first name for her -- a name he’d forget somewhere around his second circuit of rehab at Montgomery Falls (Montgomery Falls came before Dovetail Bridge which came before Silver Hill) -- he merely shrugged his shoulders and told her seeing as her friend lacked a dick the term ‘cocksucker’ was quite the misnomer. Besides, she really should consult this friend seeing as she was the superior party in the sack. The girl, logically, started to cry.
Elliot was fourteen years old, going on fifteen.
Alice was still a virgin.
Alice didn’t lose her virginity until she was eighteen years old. Before she graduated high school. Before Lynn sent her away. Before Alice tried to kill herself. When Elliot likes to pretend he is a shrink (which is often; he calls it “an obvious side effect of his clinical upbringing”), he hypothesizes that Alice’s sexual identity is so rooted in her deep-seated daddy issues that the simple rite of passage of popping her cherry was enough to send her on a spiraling journey of shame and self-loathing that culminated in a straight razor, their shared bathroom, and a whole lot of blood two months later.
He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but Alice is never going to tell him that.
Alice let starting forward of their high school’s basketball team, a Jackson Samuels, Jackson Samuels of the athletic scholarship to Duke, fuck her on his mother’s floral print couch that stunk of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume, menthol cigarettes, and disinfectant. She left immediately after -- the entire affair unpleasant, the ache between her thigh sharp and lingering and all too real. She had told herself that she was fine, fine until she arrived home and saw the dried blood on her thigh, could see more of the slight stain of blood in her panties, and could feel the slimy residue of the condom Jackson Samuels had used inside her.
She had started to cry and laid down in the center of her bedroom floor with the lights off and that’s how Elliot found her -- Alice’s hair sticking to her damp face, the room dark, her body curled in on itself.
“Why’d I let him do it?” she had whispered when Elliot pushed her hair back out of her face.
“Do what?” Elliot had asked, the question too demanding, too rough.
“Do what? Do what?” he kept asking. “Do what?”
But he knew.
That week at school he would corner Jackson Samuels, starting forward for the Riverside Tigers, athletic scholarship to Duke. He would get in his face.
He would say: touch my sister one more time I swear to god I’ll make you eat your own fucking dick.
And Jackson Samuels would say: who are you again?
And two months later Elliot would find Alice on the floor of their bathroom, her hair sticking to her cold face, the room dark, her body curled in on itself.
Lynn would say the only time she ever heard terror in her son’s voice for someone other than himself was when she sent Alice away. Not when he found the body but when they sent her away.
But then that probably isn’t entirely true.
16.
She’s good, he said.
She’s fine she’s good she’s fine she’s fine you can’t take her away you can’t fucking take her you can’t take her away she’s good she’s good.
Alice spent the summer at a facility in northern California that overlooked the Pacific.
That was the summer Lynn cried every morning.
I just miss her so much I just want her to come back.
17.
The year Granddad died is the year Elliot turns eighteen is the year they spend Christmas in Annapolis.
Lynn’s sister called her just after Thanksgiving (“Which sister?” Alice would ask; “Does it matter?” Elliot would say), all but haranguing her for the sparse and miserable holiday enjoyed under their mother’s roof.
“You’re coming for Christmas,” her sister said. “And I won’t have you turning the . . . the birth of Christ into a whole rigamarole about you. Dylan’s wedding was enough.”
They come for Christmas. They fly down, the weather too unpredictable for their plans, and sure enough their flight out of Michigan is delayed by three hours due to an ice storm hovering over West Virginia.
When they get there, the house is crowded and Grandma has her friends from the club over.
“What club?” Elliot hisses to Alice and she shrugs.
“These are my daughter Lynn’s children, Elliot and Alice,” she says to the women gathered in the sitting room. They all have the same styled hair, light and fluffy and no longer than their ears, though the color varies from white to gray to a fake red.
“No,” the fake red says and she raises a hand to her mouth, a salute of the dramatic. “These are Lynn’s kids?” she says. “No, they can’t be. These two? Her, maybe, but him? No.”
Elliot arches an eyebrow and the white and the gray join the red and they all keep saying the same thing, a refrain of friendly surprise and something else. It’s like they already knew about Elliot before he walked in, that they knew about him from his grandmother and what they know is far from flattering. It’s like they know about Alice too, the sympathetic cast of their gaze when they look at her, the one of faint disapproval aimed at Elliot.
“They’re Lynn’s kids?” they say. “No. No, impossible.
“They’re brother and sister? They can’t be!”
The white, who has been mostly silent through this exchange, clucks her tongue.
She says: “I never seen two children look less like they belong together. I say.”
18.
Alice visited Elliot in rehab, back when he was supposedly in Sweden.
He hated it there. When Alice visited, he tried to talk her into getting him out early. She sat across from him in the rec room, just as she sat across from him in every other rehab center he would find himself in, and he told her he loved her and that she loved him and that you always help the ones you love.
Alice had pushed away from the table, from him, with a gross look of disgust. She told him that he was sick and not to call her until --
And that was when she trailed off, and that was when he arched an eyebrow and asked her cold and deliberate, “Until what?”
Alice walked away without saying anything, and they didn’t talk again until Lynn casually mentioned to Elliot mid-conversation and mid-visit that she was worried about Alice, that Alice isn’t doing so good, and as she said it, she got all weird and choked up and for once, Elliot didn’t know what to say to that.
So Elliot called Alice that evening. So Elliot snuck out of the cafeteria during dinner and he called Alice. He crowded his long limbs into the phone booth, the one right next to the nurse’s station, and when she answered, he immediately said, “Don’t hang up don’t hang up don’t hang up,” and she didn’t and when she started to cry it was as though he expected this. He expected her to cry, and having his expectations realized reassured him in such a terrible way.
He never was sure what it was that set her off all those days before. Whether it was because he said he loved her, whether it was because he called her out for loving him, or whether it was because he tried to use that love to his own advantage.
He called that love out and tried to make it work for him.
19.
It’s at the dinner table on Christmas Eve that Dylan announces that Heather is pregnant.
Lynn’s eyes go large, but she looks happy, incredibly happy -- definitely happier than Patty, who apparently is not entirely thrilled to be learning this information with the rest of the family, but just as quickly as that disappointment crests on her face, it fades, and she’s announcing more to herself than the table that she is going to be the hottest grandmother ever.
“Wow,” Elliot says, and he applauds slowly, “you wasted no time at all inseminating your sow. Living the American Dream, man! Goddamn, congratulations. Go on and get that.”
Paul is seated across the table from Alice and Alice is seated next to Elliot. He glares at Elliot from across the table and Elliot flashes him his most shit-eating of grins.
It’s at this same dinner that someone mentions how Alice looks so much like Paul. Her father, they keep saying, and Alice freezes up. She drops her fork against the bone china plate and stares down at it.
The chairs are packed in too tight around the table and Elliot’s arm is flush with hers. Her breathing has ramped up and Elliot watches her carefully out of the corner of his eye while Grandma says, a strange hint or pride, that Alice got so much from her father.
“Alice got so much from her father,” she says.
It’s like a shockwave through Alice’s small frame and Elliot is almost surprised that they can’t all hear her bones rattling against each other as she shivers violently, just the once. Without thinking he reaches over and covers her thigh with his hand and squeezes. He rubs his thumb along her inner thigh, against the rough woolen fabric of her tights, and her hand closes over his. When the conversation has turned -- “Oh, I could spend all day discussing the fascinating implications of genealogy, and probably have. With my shrink. Because have we filled our quota today? I know that we must mention at least once just how fucking crazy I am. So! Consider this the requisite mention and in the interest of titillating conversation, how about Patty’s new milkbags, huh?” -- he smiles, provocative, a challenge, and when he goes to move his hand from Alice she grabs him by the wrist and holds his hand there.
She does not touch her meal but she drinks greedily from her glass of red, the muscle in her thigh still jumping under his hand.
20.
At their grandmother’s house, Alice has to share a room with Paul and Patty’s female progeny (“You’re lucky the herp isn’t airborne,” Elliot cracks) and Elliot, par usual, is bunking with Ben.
They hide out in the bathroom that night, the one that adjoins his and Ben’s room. The rest of the house has gone quiet, the lights strung around the Christmas tree unplugged, and everything stinks of evergreen and holly and the chocolate someone burnt earlier that day.
They sit together in the empty bathtub passing an expensive bottle of scotch back and forth.
“That was, like, totally some kind of exercise in psychological cruelty,” he says to her and Alice laughs in agreement.
Elliot gives the bottle a shake and examines the label.
“Pretty sure this was Granddad’s stash,” Elliot speculates.
Alice’s hair sticks to the white tiles at their back, some weird state electricity pulling at the strands. Some weird electricity pulling at the both of them. She looks at him slant-eyed, at the bottle in his hand, and says quietly, “I imagine it must be.”
Later, he’ll look back on this and call it scarily intimate. She’s in her pajamas, a festive pair of red and white flannel pants and a loose t-shirt, while he’s only in his boxers and a thin undershirt. Their knees keep knocking together, their shoulders pressed against each other, and every now and then, her head will lull to the side, her cheek, her chin, resting against him.
He’s drunk. And if he’s drunk, then she must be drunk too. The logic holds: she’s had to drink just as much as he has, and of the two of them, she’s not the one with a varied history of substance abuse; she’s the one with a lower tolerance.
If you want culpability and you want blame, you won’t find it here. He doesn’t know how what happens next came to happen. He doesn’t know who reached for who first. Who took the last pull from that expensive bottle of scotch. Who decided that this would be a very good idea or a very good bad idea or who simply had enough and decided to close that small distance between them.
In fact, he is not entirely sure there ever was a decision to be made at all.
Alice would say there was. Alice would say she let him do this.
But either she kisses him or he kisses her first. It isn’t a simultaneous move: someone starts this. Someone starts this with a kiss, by leaning in, by smearing their mouth over the other. She will imagine that it was him and she will place the blame at his feet, at his mouth and the way it opened over hers. Elliot does not think this way and he never will. He will blame her and it will not matter who kissed who first; the only thing that will matter is that in a bathtub in their grandmother’s house she kissed him back.
(He kisses tentatively at first and that surprises her. If anything he has always seemed to be the type to take what he wants, no questions, no request for quarter. But he kisses her like he is unsure this is what she wants and that might be the kindest thing he has ever done.
Make no mistake: he will never be this young or this kind again).
She kisses him back, and it’s Alice who opens her mouth first, it’s Alice who yields to him in that way. So he gives her what she wants: he kisses her harder, he kisses her deeper. He gets his fingers caught in her hair and every move they make echoes too loud in that bathroom. Her knees bracket his hips, and when he pushes her down she almost hits her head on the tap. She shivers when he pushes her t-shirt up, when the cold porcelain touches the small of her back; shivers again when it’s his warm hands that touch her there.
And each time they move against each other a pointed joint, a knee, an elbow, bumps noisily against the tub and echoes in the space -- something confined yet endless about the space, like a mausoleum done up in only the fragile things, the things that break: white tile and porcelain, the both of them, all that pale skin, the both of them.
Without leaving her body, he reaches and he jerks the curtain shut. But the door is locked, the only witness the mirror, the only witness themselves.
There is something bizarrely inevitable at play. The white-haired woman had said: I never seen two children look less like they belong together. I say. She had said that, yet here they are. She said that, and the others had agreed; they had refused to believe they were brother and sister, refused to believe they came together in a set, that they could possibly belong to each other.
But Elliot now knows that Alice’s mouth is sour and wanting when it is pressed against his, and when he tastes her, when his tongue slicks against hers, her head thumps against the bottom of the tub and her legs open that much more for him. He wants to fuck her, he has always wanted to work his way inside her, make her feel it and ache for it, but he knows himself better than that. He knows what the better part of a bottle of top shelf liquor can do to a man and if he has learned anything he has learned that the side effect of utter and complete chemical dependence is more often than not a limp dick. He still grinds himself against her, listens to that same hitch in her throat she makes just before she starts to cry, but she isn’t crying now. Her eyes are wide open, unreadable and huge. There is no element of surprise to her, just flushed cheeks and an open mouth, swollen and hungry.
So he bites at her throat that much more and it’s crazy to think a good lost girl like her could ever have wanted this too.
21.
A preview, the future:
Elliot calls her from Amsterdam. “Of course you’re in Amsterdam,” she mumbles into the phone. “What time even is it there?” She flicks her wrist and glances at her watch. She figures it has to be around four in the morning where he is if she’s done her math correctly.
She has done her math correctly.
Elliot doesn’t answer her, but he laughs into the phone, a slow rolling chuckle betraying just how fucked out of his mind he truly is.
“I read a book once,” she says and then she pauses.
“You read a book,” Elliot says, his voice fuzzy yet familiar.
“Yeah. Parts of it, parts were set in Amsterdam. And at one point, this cab driver is talking to the main character who was visiting and he said that people think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but really it’s a city of freedom, and it’s in freedom most people find sin.”
Elliot is quiet for a beat. She can hear him inhale, lazy but deliberate, and she’s sure there’s a cigarette clenched between his fingers.
“I beg to differ,” he finally says. “Most sin I have ever found was under the dark heel of oppression.”
“What do you know about oppression?”
“About as much as you,” he says, entirely too serious.
She thinks he said: about as much as you, but she could be wrong.
She fears he said: it’s always been you.
Round up or round down: it’s either the kindest or the cruelest thing he has ever said to her.
C O N T I N U E D :
T W O | T H R E E