Alice Fantastic (17 page)

I got in the car and cautiously drove along Upper Byrdcliffe Road.

Pulling into Ava's driveway, I saw an unfamiliar Jeep parked at a haphazard angle in front of the house. It looked like whoever had driven the thing had been in a big hurry.

I hesitated at the front door. Part of me wanted to just barge on in and see what Ava was up to in there with this Jeep person. Though I didn't truly think she was up to anything with any person.

I was wrong.

After knocking several times, I finally heard Ava's voice call out, “Who?”

“It's Eloise,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

I heard nothing else for what felt like many minutes. I was slightly sick to my stomach as I stared forlornly from the door to Mom's Honda wondering if I should hightail it back to Mom's, wondering if I hadn't made some terrible error in judgment, if, in fact, Ava had never loved me and was now shacked up with someone she did actually love.

Ava eventually opened the door. Her hair was all over the place and she was wearing only a long T-shirt. She looked at me and said nothing. Didn't invite me in, didn't greet me, just looked.

“Hi. I'm sorry,” I said, “I had a meltdown.” I opened my hands in an apologetic gesture.

“I have a friend over.”

“I should have called, but I didn't want to have an awkward phone conversation.”

I saw a battle in her eyes. I heard someone moving in the room behind her.

“Anyone I know?” I motioned with my chin at the insides of her house.

“Mark.”

“Oh.” I had no idea who Mark was but she said his name so unequivocally, he had to be meaningful.

“Can I come in?” I asked. I didn't
want
to come in, didn't want to see this Mark. I didn't want to see the end of Ava and me.

“Eloise,” she said softly, looking up at me, “what are you doing?”

“I want to see you. I want to be with you. I didn't expect you to take up with some guy five minutes after I'd left. You should have known I'd come back.”

“How should I have known that?”

“You just should have.”

“That's asking a lot. You hurt me badly.”

“I'm sorry. I'm a jerk.”

“You think this sudden bout of humility will fix it?”

“I'm hoping.”

“Come in, I guess,” she shrugged and stepped back from the doorway.

The guy was standing in the middle of the living room. He was wearing khaki shorts, no shirt. He had dark wavy hair and was about Ava's height. He had a beautiful, lean upper body. He was handsome. I hated him.

“Mark,” Ava said, “this is Eloise, my girlfriend.”

Girlfriend?
I thought ecstatically.
Really? Still?

“Hello,” said Mark, looking a little confused.

“I met Mark on the trail,” Ava explained, waving her hand toward the outside.

“You meet a lot of people on that trail,” I said, slitting my eyes at her.

“Yes,” Ava replied solemnly, “that's true.”

“She met my mother on that trail,” I informed the illustrious half-naked Mark, “that's how Ava and I ended up meeting.”

“Oh?” He was trying to be polite but seemed to be realizing he had fallen over his head into some pool of lesbian psychodrama.

“Mark's a composer,” Ava said.

She had lit a cigarette. I didn't see where she'd gotten it. Maybe Mark the half-naked composer. Those types always smoke.

“That's nice,” I said. I stared at the man, willing him to put his shirt on and leave.

He smiled at me, and, when I failed to smile back, looked away.

“Excuse me,” he said, “I have to find my shirt.”

Ava and I watched him walk up the stairs toward the bedroom.

“He's cute,” I said resentfully. “Has a girlfriend,” Ava shrugged.

I felt relief.

“And you're not planning to have him fall in love with you and leave his girlfriend?”

“I hadn't gotten that far in my planning,” Ava said.

Her eyes were sparkling now. She was enjoying herself. Then, suddenly, her eyes went dark.

“You're not here because of your mother … because your mother …”

“Died? No. Not yet. I'm here to see you.”

The sparkle came back to her eyes and she took a step closer. I wanted to reach under her long T-shirt, cup my hands over her small but nicely shaped ass.

“I'm pregnant,” I announced. “By that stupid guy. The one I had sex with once.”

“What?”

“I'm pregnant.”

“I heard that part. I just can't believe it. You had unprotected sex with a one-night stand?”

“Apparently.”

“You're a whore.”

“Not really.”

“You're going to have a baby?”

“I guess.”

“You're not saying it with much conviction.”

“There are a few variables.”

“Such as?”

“Such as what you would think about such a course of action.”

“You'll have to be more specific.”

“Okay. Can you and I be together if I have a kid?”

Ava looked at me through her long, light-brown eyelashes.

“Are you asking me to be the father of your baby?”

“Something like that.”

“Wow. We're really lesbians now,” she grinned. “Do you like that idea?”

“Of being breeding lesbians? Sort of, yes.” She had finally stubbed out the cigarette.

“Can we kiss and make up?”

“It's not going to be as easy as that, Elo. I'm damn glad to see you here, flattered that you're making these sorts of grand proposals, but you fucked me a few days ago.”

“I'm sorry.”

Ava was sitting on the couch now and I went to kneel in front of her. I put my hands on her bare knees and peered up into her vivid blue eyes. I slowly moved my hands up her thighs and a few inches under the T-shirt. She touched my face. I got up off my knees, straddled her, and kissed her.

Which is when the composer saw fit to come back down the stairs.

“Um, sorry … I … uh …”

He was standing at the foot of the stairs, turning from Ava and me to the door, as if afraid we'd attack him like wild dogs.

Ron, who must have been sleeping in another room somewhere, materialized at that moment, rushed over to greet me, then stood slowly wagging his tail, looking from me to the composer to Ava, registering his confusion by tilting his head.

Ava pushed me off her lap and stood up. The back of her T-shirt got stuck in her panties and her ass was hanging out as she walked over to Mark, put her hands on his shoulders, and said, “I'll talk to you soon?”

“Sure, yes,” he answered, lightly pecking Ava on the cheek. “Nice to … uh … meet you,” he added, smiling at me tentatively.

“Yes,” I said, “a pleasure.” I gave him a genuine smile this time.

As Ava saw the composer to the door, I called Ron over and hugged the furry blond beast. He licked my hands and forearms.

“I didn't actually have sex with him,” Ava said after Mark closed the door.

“No? Why not?”

“Well,” Ava shrugged, “we just hadn't gotten there yet when you knocked.”

“Slut.”

“He was a great kisser,” Ava shrugged.

“No more kissing boys, okay?”

“Providing you don't pull any more stunts.”

“Agreed.”

She folded me into her arms.

10. KIMBERLY

J
oe and I were lying on the beach outside Ginney's Motel on the tiny island of Nevis. The sun was setting, the ocean was calm, and I was losing strength by the minute.

I was resting my head on Joe's chest as he smoothed what was left of my hair that, between the humidity and the salt water, had to feel like a Brillo pad.

“I know you love me. You don't have to prove it by touching my hair.”

“Shut up,” he said, kissing my head.

His tenderness was heartbreaking.

When I'd finally told him about the cancer, he'd been furious. There were a few dark days when he wouldn't speak to me. I could see him, if I looked out my picture window, but he wouldn't look back across at me or answer the door. After three days, he walked into my kitchen one morning, stood with his head bowed to his chest, and started weeping.

I held him. We got through it, as much as two people can get through one of them dying.

Now Joe was watching me wind down. On the beach of a tiny, sweet Caribbean island where goats wandered and little Paso Fino horses plucked mangoes from trees.

This was our last night on the island after already extending our trip by three days. I had to go home and face all the people I hadn't told I was dying. I would have preferred driving shards of glass under my fingernails.

“What are you thinking about?” Joe said softly in my ear.

It was the kind of question teenage sweethearts asked each other, not half-dead people in their fifties. It made me smile.

“I was thinking of driving shards of glass under my fingernails.”

Joe's head swiveled. “What?”

“I'm dreading facing my daughters. And my NA friends. Everyone.”

“Just tell them. Tell them you were convinced that keeping the cancer to yourself would make it go away.”

“But it sounds so ridiculous now.”

“It's the truth. It's what you thought.”

I shrugged, then ran my palm down Joe's chest, feeling the hollowness of his belly, letting my hand travel inside his bathing suit.

“Kim, the goats will see us.”

I put my face inches from his and looked inside him, trying to read what was there, wondering if it wasn't sick-making for him to be molested by a cancerous old woman. Death's approach has made me sexually rapacious. As if making love to Joe can stall the inevitable, the big black rabbit hole I am hurtling toward. Even though I spend most of the day feeling too sick to even move, I still want to ravage Joe. One always hears about great loves that come late in life. This one is almost too late. But it is here. I love Joe.

“Is my rapaciousness grossing you out, Joe?” I asked even though I didn't want to.

He sat bolt upright, displacing me from his chest.

“How can you ask such ridiculous questions? More to the point, how could you think something like that? You're the woman I love. You're dying. Touch me.”

That shut me up for a while.

“Do I have to do this?” I asked Joe as he pulled into my driveway.

We'd been traveling all day, making our way back from Nevis to JFK Airport, where Joe had left his car in long-term parking. We'd hit snarls of traffic and I wasn't feeling well, physical illness compounded by emotional unease as we got closer to Ulster County and the moment drew near for me to walk into my house and tell my daughter Alice that I was going to die.

“I don't think you'll feel good about yourself if you just up and die without warning your daughters.”

“But I won't feel anything about myself. I'll be dead.”

“There's no telling what goes on in the world of the dead. Feelings are certainly a possibility. Unlikely, I admit, but not entirely out of the question. Tell your daughter.”

“And you'll come over in an hour to rescue me from Alice?”

“You make it sound like she's going to beat you up.”

“She's not the most sensitive of creatures. Her anger will override whatever else she might feel.”

“She's going to feel devastated and you're going to apologize for not telling her sooner. Then you're going to call Eloise and tell her too.”

I felt sicker than I'd felt all day.

Joe kissed me lightly then shooed me out of the car.

When I pushed open the front door, there was an eerie lack of barking and only one dog, Ira, my faithful three-legged hound, greeted me. I had a paranoid moment and imagined that Alice, lost in a world of gambling and anger, had let all the dogs but Ira run away. Then I walked into the house and more dogs began appearing. Strolling lazily into the kitchen. Greeting me warmly, but not with the sort of over-the-top lunacy I'd expected.

I found Alice sprawled on the living room couch. There were dogs nestled next to her, dogs at her feet, dogs on the rug in front of the TV. A few got up to greet me, but the ones nearest Alice didn't budge other than to give a few half-hearted tail thumps, having apparently sworn allegiance to my daughter in my absence.

I patted some of the animals as I looked over at my sleeping daughter. The TV was on, tuned to the horse racing channel. There were horses pulling buggies. Trotters, I think. Or maybe pacers. I never can get the difference straight.

Alice being asleep seemed like a sign that I should simply go up to my bedroom to unpack and take some Vicodin. But my suitcase was suddenly too heavy. Even my smaller bag felt like it would pull my arm out of its socket. I was weak and exhausted.

I walked over to the stairs and slowly, very slowly, climbed up, leaving my bags behind. I tried to take my mind off the discomfort of the task by admiring the stair-case. It was simple but beautiful, recently rebuilt by a woodworker friend who had hand-carved the banister. It had a life all its own. And it would outlive me by decades, if not centuries.

I finally reached the top of the stairs. My bedroom door was closed. I opened it, expecting to find dogs inside since I'd told Alice to rotate them from one room to the other several times a day to keep the pack dynamics in check. There were in fact five dogs but also my daughter Eloise, propped up in bed, reading one of her beloved Andrew Vachss novels.

“Mom,” she said, as if she'd seen a ghost.

“Eloise, what are you doing here?” This I was not ready for. One daughter I could maybe handle. But two?

“Where's Alice?” Eloise asked rather than answering my question.

“Asleep on the couch.”

“Let's wake her up,” she said, jumping up from of the bed as if it were on fire.

I didn't know what to think or do, so as Eloise bolted from the room, I sat down on the bed and began petting the dogs, losing myself for a moment in their dogness. Timber and Lucy and Carlos and Harvey and Simba.

I was sitting in the middle of the bed, surrounded by dogs, when Eloise reappeared, Alice in tow. I toyed with the idea of putting it off, but then, before I could stop myself, I was blurting it out. The cancer. The metastasis. The brief round of chemo.

I would have kept going but Alice cut in: “We know, Mom.”

“You what?”

“We know you're sick.”

“You … oh?” They both nodded and looked down at their feet.

“And you're not furious with me?” I looked from Alice to Eloise and back.

Neither daughter said anything, then Alice shrugged. “Mom, I can't even begin to imagine what you went through or what led you to not telling us immediately.”

Alice's apparent acceptance was so uncharacteristic it silenced me. The tenderness, the genuine love in this, pried me open and I started weeping. Which in turn engendered another thoroughly uncharacteristic move from my eldest, who sat down on the bed and hugged me. Eloise got in on it too and we became a snarled threesome of tears and the kind of grief I knew existed but didn't want to actually feel.

I held my daughters, feeling their limbs, their heart-beats, their tears. I couldn't remember the last time we had been like this.

I didn't want to let go.

By the time Joe came to check on us, we had stopped crying. We were all three in the kitchen and Alice was trying to make milkshakes. The dogs, every last one of them, had joined us and there really wasn't an ounce of space. Joe had to tiptoe over tails and haunches and muzzles resting on paws.

“What's going on in here?” he asked cheerfully, as if this were any other night and my difficult daughters just happened to have both come to see me at the same time and we all three just happened to have had a fit of weeping, traces of which were still evident on our swollen, reddened faces.

“Alice is cooking,” I said with a little smile as Joe came to stand at the back of my chair, resting his hands on top of my head.

“Hardly,” Alice corrected. “I'm making milkshakes but even someone with my limited culinary skills does not call milkshake-making cooking.”

Joe laughed. I laughed. Eloise laughed.

Since both the beds in my house were spoken for and the dogs would be looked after, I decided to sleep over at Joe's. Alice and Eloise said they'd tend to all the morning dog chores, leaving me to sleep in and relax. I thanked my girls, not telling them that I'm often afraid to sleep these days since every time I do, I wonder if I'll wake up.

All that night, Joe held me as fiercely as he could without choking me. We couldn't seem to get physically close enough to each other. I felt like he was trying to tie me to him, to keep me alive.

When morning came, I ignored it as long as I could and lay next to him, watching his fitful sleep, his eyelids fluttering, small, wounded sounds escaping his lips.

I slowly crept from the bed. I was in pain and needed to take something. I had Percocet in my bag. I got two out then padded into the kitchen to get a glass of water. I was nauseous and didn't know if I'd be able to swallow. I took one small sip of water. It stayed down. I was about to brave one of the pills when Joe came into the room.

“You okay?” He put his hand on the back of my neck and rubbed gently.

“Fine,” I lied.

“Pain?” he asked, not believing my lie.

“Yes,” I admitted, “but I'll be all right.”

I swallowed one of the pills. Felt it traveling down my throat. Willed it to go all the way down and stay there. All the while, Joe was studying me, tilting his head just like the dogs do. I took the second pill and sat down at Joe's cheerful 1950s Formica table. My head felt heavy, so I rested it on the table, my forehead taking in the coolness of the Formica.

“I'm not dying. I mean, not right this minute,” I said, speaking into the table, “my head just got heavy. I'm resting.”

“What would make you happy today, Kim?” Joe asked softly.

“I can think of a lot of things,” I said, briefly lifting my head to look at him. “I suppose I would like to spend time with my daughters. And my dogs. And later with you.”

“But what about
you?”
I added. “Don't you have an awful lot of work to catch up on?”

Joe shrugged. I knew he did have work. A ton of it. I also knew he had no plans to tend to much of it while I was still alive.

“I want to do what you want to do,” he said.

It was all so sad. I just wanted to shut it off. The fountain of fucking sadness.

I took a shower, put my dirty clothes back on, avoided looking in the mirror, then went into Joe's living room where I found him sitting at his piano, staring at the keys as if they were strangers.

“I'll spend a few hours with my girls,” I told him. “Please play. Please?”

He nodded. I leaned over to kiss him.

He smelled so good it hurt.

I walked over to my house, stepping past the low stone wall separating my property from Joe's, slightly buzzed since the pills had hit me by now and I was actually enjoying them. It wouldn't last. Soon, the nausea would outweigh the pleasant oblivion. All the same, I was a recovering addict getting a free ride. It had taken a terminal illness to get that free ride, but some part of me, some still-sick part, didn't mind all that much.

I found both my daughters and nearly all the dogs gathered in the kitchen where Eloise was making eggs.

When I walked in, everyone seemed to freeze, as if afraid breathing might knock me over and kill me.

“Hi,” I greeted brightly.

“Morning, Mom,” Eloise said.

“Hi,” Alice said.

Ira had run over when I walked in and I stood scratching his head. Timber deigned to get up and poke his muzzle into my thigh.

“Who's up for the Rabbit Hole trail?”

Both daughters looked at me like I was insane.

“What?” Eloise said.

“Mom, are you stoned?” Alice asked.

“I took two Percocet. I'm allowed. I have cancer.”

“I wasn't questioning your taking medication, more like if you're really up for a trail.”

“I'll be fine,” I said defensively, even though I doubted I would be, “I want to walk. With the dogs. With both of you.”

Eloise looked up from under her bangs and smiled sweetly.

Alice scowled then agreed that yes, we could all go to the trail.

The effort of pretending to feel well had drained me already and I went into the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet, and took another pain pill. I had built up a tolerance over the last few months. It wouldn't knock me out. But it was a balancing act, taking enough to dull the pain but not so much that I couldn't function. I hoped for the best.

When I came out of the bathroom, I found Eloise standing just outside the door. She rushed past me, barely making it to the toilet in time to vomit.

“Oh no, Elo, are you sick?” I had a sudden vision of my daughter being stricken with cancer as well.

Just as I was about to get furious with the gods, my daughter wiped her mouth, looked at me, and announced that she was pregnant.

She said it quietly and firmly the way she might have announced, when she was a teenager, that she was staying out late.