Alice preferred her Cheerios drowned in milk. Especially once she’d eaten enough of them that the bowl was more milk than cereal, and the remaining Os were left bobbing helplessly in a dairy sea. “Do you think it was another fugue?” she asked Elizabeth. “Like, something set her off and it happened again?”
The widow frowned, then apologized, which seemed to be her default stance. There was no way of knowing, she said.
“Yeah. I figured.” There was one lone Cheerio stranded at sea; Alice dunked it, then mashed it against the bottom of her bowl. She had been awake most of the night and spent too much of it online, scanning a government database of missing people—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. She’d discovered NamUS over the summer after googling “how do I find a missing person.” Many of the resulting sites paired cheerful illustrations with suggestions like “inquire at nearby hospitals and morgues.” Every site ultimately funneled her to NamUS. Alice had made an entry for her mother, but had little faith it would generate any leads. Instead, she spent her time scanning the database’s list of “unclaimed persons.” Most were elderly or mentally ill, but if Alice’s mother washed up somewhere without her memory, she would eventually land on this shore. The database had a third section, “unidentified bodies”: skeletal remains found in the Montana woods, bleached bones found in the Arizona desert, unsettlingly vague “partial limbs” recovered from a dumpster in New Jersey. Before the database, she’d almost enjoyed imagining her mother’s alternate lives—a mountainside in Nepal, an Indonesian beach, a bustling village in India. Now her vision was crowded with bones. The site offered free forensic odontology and fingerprinting, which meant if she ever stumbled over a skeleton, Alice could determine whether it belonged to her. The site also offered the services of an investigator, but the woman Alice talked to had only been interested in playing social worker, pointing her toward local groups that might help her accept her mother’s supposed suicide. This was a service for which she had no need. According to NamUS, six hundred thousand people went missing every year; four thousand unidentified bodies were recovered. Alice wanted to know where were the rest?
“You’re in a much better position to gauge your mother’s emotional state in the days before she… left,” the widow said. “What do you think happened?”
Alice thought plenty, of course.
She thought the timing, her graduation night, could not be coincidental. The symbolism was too obvious: graduation meant childhood was over, that Alice would really be gone. Alice thought maybe her mother was so bereft by this, so terrified by her venturing into the world as Debra had, at precisely this age, that she’d broken. Alice thought alternately that maybe her mother had hated being a mother and that graduation marked the end of her sentence, prison gates swinging open. Alice thought that her mother had loved her either too much or not enough. She knew this was an only child’s fallacy, the belief that everything her mother did was about her, but this was a delusion her mother had nurtured. My happiness is contingent on your behavior, she always said, and Alice thought: happy mothers do not disappear.
Alice’s mother was a science teacher, and she’d taught Alice that the universe was rule-governed and thus comprehensible. You could understand anything if you had enough data points. So in August, while her father was out browsing tombstones, she’d ransacked their room for data. She found no suicide note or secret diary, only evidence of a woman she barely knew: a stockpile of Ativan and Zoloft. There was a two-year-old plane ticket for a flight to California never taken. A police report from a recent mugging. No one had reported it to Alice.
When her father got home, she set the evidence before him. He was unperturbed. The antianxiety meds were nothing new, he told her. The mugging, he said, was a nonevent, purse snatched in mall parking lot, no injuries, no trauma. He hugged her. This is not our fault, he wanted her to understand. We could not have known, and so we do not bear the blame. Alice didn’t stop asking questions, but she stopped asking him.
“I know a fugue usually happens as a response to some kind of trauma,” Alice said.
“You’ve done your research.”
“I couldn’t figure out whether it was, like, immediate trauma, like something bad happens and you lose your memory, or if it could be something that happened a long time before.”
“I’m not sure there’s a straightforward answer to that,” the widow said. “It seems to differ, person to person. In your mother’s case, we were never able to pinpoint the timing of onset, which made it even more difficult to determine causality.”
The scientific jargon seemed to carry the widow back to a former self, one who was more confident and less weighed down. Even her posture had straightened.
“I thought she woke up on a bus, that’s what my dad said.”
“Yes, but according to the information she gave us once she regained her memory, that was nearly two weeks after she left home. Where was she before that? Fugue states can have phases—it’s possible she fugued from the start, and only woke to what was happening on that bus. Or it’s possible she left your father voluntarily and something happened afterward.”
This had never occurred to Alice, that her mother had left, the first time, on purpose. Her father had said he just woke up one morning to find her side of the bed empty; he’d given no inclination that she might have wanted to leave, that they’d been fighting or unhappy. But Alice no longer trusted her father not to leave something out.
“Did she ever talk to you about it?” the widow asked. “Did she have any theories about why it might have happened, or any memories of her time here?”
“No.” Alice was too embarrassed to explain that this was because her mother had kept the episode a secret for her entire life. “My dad says that once she came back, they just tried to make everything as normal as possible, pretend like it never happened. And once they had me, I guess they had other things to keep them occupied.”
Those first few months she was back, it was like a second honeymoon, he’d told Alice, and when the test stick turned pink, their fresh start was assured. Alice had tried to focus on the romance over the implied gruesome details, the frenzied lust of a husband for the wife who he’d thought was gone forever, the desperation of a wife to make up for forgetting her husband.
“It sounds like she was happy,” the widow said. “I’ve really hoped that she was happy.”
Alice’s mother was too guarded against disaster to ever quite embrace happiness, but she seemed to have forged her life to suit her precise specifications, and that seemed close enough. “I thought she was.”
Alice looked down, letting her hair fall over her face long enough to blink back the tears. The widow cleared her throat. “A different tack, maybe. Philadelphia—do you have any idea why she might have come here, of all places? We’d thought at the time that might offer a clue.”
That one was simple, almost embarrassingly transparent, and Alice told her what she knew of the saga of Debra, which wasn’t much. She knew, and told the widow, how Karen and Debra had grown up under the shadow of their dead big brother, that Karen was seven when he went into the hospital to get his appendix removed and never came home. Debra was only three, and didn’t remember life before. So Debra grew up knowing only that her parents were shattered and her home miserable; Karen grew up knowing things could go wrong at any moment, and that it was her job to ensure they did not. To protect her baby sister: this was her mission. Alice knew, and told the widow, how when Debra ran away, Karen was tasked with retrieving her, and instead found her sister seizing and frothing on a dirty floor, choking on vomit, losing, with every second the ambulance didn’t arrive, another piece of herself.
The widow had forgotten she was supposed to look sad. Instead, she looked the way Daniel had when he first saw Alice’s bare breasts: baffled by the untrammeled access to a knowledge that until then had been denied him.
“That was way before the fugue thing, though,” Alice said. “She hadn’t even met my dad yet. The way he talks, she spent, like, four years taking care of Debra full time.” Every day, all day, in that basement, feeding her sister with a spoon, wiping her sister’s drool and her sister’s ass, facing her own failure. Karen asked to take a vacation and her parents threw her out of the house, her father told her once, after an ugly Thanksgiving dinner jarred loose his normal circumspection. Thank god for it, he said, because she finally moved into her own place, got a life, quiet as it was. Otherwise I would never have met her, we would never have had you. “You think that could be why she came here? That if it happened again, she’d come back?” Alice reminded herself she was not here to look for her mother.
“I don’t know, Alice. I’m sorry.”
Wendy Doe’s case file came with pictures. Alice stared at her mother looking utterly unlike her mother. She’d seen pictures of Karen Clark at that age—the photo albums at home were full of Karen Clark pregnant, Karen Clark nervously cradling a tiny Alice in her arms—but this woman was like her mother’s identical twin. Same face, different everything else. In one of them, her mother leaned toward the camera, plunging V-neck inviting a peek, grin wide and untroubled, arms stretched like she wanted to embrace the world.
The widow described her as careless and carefree.
“It’s hard to explain,” the widow said. “Well, maybe this: we were walking through the woods once, one of those spectacularly clear winter days, so deep into the trees that it felt like the world could end and we’d never know. For most people a day like that just blends into all the other good days. But for her? Everything counted. Everything was new. She picked up a pinecone and said, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever touched one of these.’ She said, ‘Imagine if you could do that, something truly new, every day.’ That’s what she was like. I think we all envied it a little.”
“Was it real?” Alice asked, trying to imagine this and failing completely. “Was that the person she really was, deep down, or some fantasy person she secretly wanted to be?”
“That’s actually what I was trying to study, in part.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t get very far.”
There was a small stack of cassette tapes and an ancient tape recorder for which the widow finally dug up two AA batteries. They included conversations between Elizabeth Strauss and Wendy Doe. Alice chose a tape at random and popped it in.
“I can leave you alone for this, if you want,” the widow suggested.
Alice did not want to be alone. She pressed Play.
“I don’t know why I do it,” her mother’s voice said. Alice made a noise, unwittingly, something a little like a whimper. The widow seemed not to hear.
“I like hearing their stories. Maybe I want to know what that would feel like, having a story of my own.”
“You just walk into an AA meeting and pretend you belong there?” That voice was recognizably Elizabeth, something about it almost more familiar than Alice’s mother’s voice. It was the tension in it, Alice thought, the effortfulness of stringing together the words. This woman was thinking before she spoke, worrying about what she was going to say. The other woman, the stranger, was not. “No one questions you?”
A laugh. “You worry too much. Who’s more anonymous than me?” Alice’s mother was defined by her fears, and the fortresses she built to protect against them. It was another way Alice had taken after her; she’d not been given much of a choice. Who would she be, Alice wondered, if she’d been raised by this woman instead? Because this woman sounded fearless. “Anyway, it’s just AA meetings. NA, Al-Anon, whatever I can find. They’re all trying to give up the same things, in the end.”
“What?”
“Bad memories. It’s funny, isn’t it? That they think they can forget by remembering. As if giving their story to someone else means they’ve given it away for good.”
Alice stopped the tape. “She seriously used to crash AA meetings?” she asked. The widow’s first instinct had been right—Alice couldn’t listen to these while someone was watching. It took enough energy to endure her mother’s voice; she had none left to spare for keeping the emotion out of her own. “That’s fucked up.”
“I think she found it comforting. But also…” Elizabeth laughed, almost fondly. “Your mother, back then, enjoyed doing things she wasn’t supposed to do. It made sense at the time.”
It made no sense to Alice. Which meant, if she wanted to understand this other mother, it was a place to start.
A church basement, a semicircle of folding chairs, a rainbow coalition of suffering. She’d picked an evening meeting near Penn, figuring it would draw mostly college students, but almost everyone was old or older: businessmen in suits, nurses in scrubs, an ancient man in a wheelchair, a gym teacher self-identified by her lanyard whistle. The only one around Alice’s age was a straggly haired emo with black nail polish and a leather choker, the kind of guy she would have expected to need an AA meeting but not actually attend one.
She did not belong here. And, having come all the way here, having forced herself into the building, down the stairs, right up to the threshold, she could not bring herself to go inside. She hovered in the doorway, half in, half out. The anonymous alcoholics milled about, waiting for whatever invisible signal meant the meeting would start. The emo guy caught her eye, headed for her. Alice froze.
“It’s okay,” he said gently. “We don’t bite.”
“I’m—I—bathroom,” she spit out, and fled.
Into the twilight dark, past the huddled shapes on the sidewalk—bodies, bodies on the sidewalk, she thought, trying to feel each one of them, failing—up the stairs to the train platform, only two minutes to spare, ticket creased and sweaty in hot palm. Furious with herself. What was the point of coming this far if she wasn’t willing to go any further? It was the same question she’d asked herself the night of graduation, the question Daniel had been too polite to voice.
The train did not come. A muffled announcement failed to illuminate. She was alone on a dark platform in a strange city. The train did not come. She was afraid. She was, on some level, always afraid. Her mother had made sure of that—and done so under false pretenses, because somewhere inside her mother was a woman who wasn’t afraid at all. The train did not come. A man appeared, approached, rapidly, and Alice almost screamed, thinking her mother had been right, danger was at the gates and all it took was one bad decision to let it in, that when she was found naked and bloody on the tracks, she would have no one to blame but herself. Then she recognized him from the meeting, emo guy. A bulky, ostentatiously old-fashioned camera dangled from the leather strap across his chest. Emo-hipster, she thought, and not kindly.
“I know you,” he said.
“No you don’t.”
“Well, obviously. Anonymous.”
“Did you follow me here?”
He laughed, as if the idea of this was ridiculous. “The meeting let out early—someone set off the fire alarm. It wasn’t you, was it?”
“No!”
He laughed again. He had a mildly appealing laugh. “Kidding.” He was, close up, mildly cute.
They waited together in silence. No train. “You left in a hurry,” he said.
“I did.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“I do not.”
He shrugged. “I’m guessing you also don’t want to tell me your name?”
“I’m nobody.”
“Amazing coincidence, I’m nobody, too.” When he realized he was laughing alone, he stopped. “Not an English major, huh?”
“Not an anything major.”
“Bullshit. You have Penn written all over you.”
“Ballpoint. Not Ivy.”
He snapped a photo of her, without warning or permission. Twisted the lens, snapped another. Alice resisted the urge to snatch it from his hands, and instead asked what he thought he was doing.
“It’s how I see,” he said.
“Who asked you to look?”
They waited nearly an hour. No train. He said, “Fucking SEPTA. Want to give up, get a drink?”
She looked at him sharply.
He said, “Joke.” Then leaned in too close. “Want to know a secret, though? I’m a little stoned. Don’t tell.”
Alice raised two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
“Guessing you were never a Boy Scout.” He took her fingers, raised a third. His hands were warm. “So, was that your first meeting?”
Alice nodded.
“If you don’t want to tell me why you left… do you want to tell me why you came?”
She discovered that she did, at least a little. “I guess I thought I could be a different kind of person.”
“Than what?”
“Than the kind of person I’ve always been.” It was true, if not the way he would take it. “Stupid, I know. That’s not how anything works.”
“It actually kind of is. You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true. You change by making one decision you wouldn’t have made before. You walk into the meeting. Even going to the meeting and leaving before it starts. It’s something. One decision at a time. You are what you choose, right? All you have to do is choose different.”
“You’re right. That sounded very cheesy.”
His smile was lopsided. She liked it.
“Look, clearly the train isn’t going to show. I’m getting a taxi,” he said. “You want a ride, Anonymous?”
“To where?”
“My place, I guess, since that’s where I’m going? Joke. Again. Or not. Your call.”
Her mother had raised her to be smarter than this. Never get into a car with a strange man. Certainly don’t accompany that strange man back to his “place,” which, if you were foolish enough to do so, would presumably be the place your body was found. Alice Clark was not the kind of girl who made foolish decisions. Karen Clark had made sure of it. But in this city, Karen Clark had been someone else. Maybe, for this one night, this one decision, Alice could be, too.
It had to be someone else who let him yank her out of the taxi without paying, darted with him around a corner, behind a hedge, where they listened to the cab driver’s cursing and the silence left in his squealing tires’ wake. It could not have been Alice Clark who allowed herself to be guided into a small apartment over some garage in a suburb somewhat shittier than the widow’s. He had Penn written all over him, too, but it turned out he was a barista at some vegan coffee shop serving soy drinks to students, trying to make art from a collection of decrepit film cameras and a bathtub-cum-darkroom, living rent-free over his parents’ garage. He was a twenty-four-year-old high school dropout—fall-out, he said, plunge-out, take-a-flying-leap-over-the-cliff-out. He had been sober for a year if you didn’t count the pot, which he didn’t. He was serious about his sobriety, as he was about little else. The pot took the edge off. And the edge was sharp.
He called her A. She told him she was twenty-two, and he believed it, or said he did. There was an old bottle of Absolut in his kitchen that he said he only kept to remind himself that things can always get worse, and she said she believed him, then she unscrewed the cap and took a large swallow. He said, you’re going to be very bad for me, then he said, just one fucking taste, and kissed her, tongue probing deep enough that she knew his need was neither feigned nor for her, so she took another swill and let him kiss her again, and he didn’t know anything about her, believed she was someone else, which made it feel, in the best way, like she wasn’t even there. She was a girl no one was watching; she was invisible and could do as she pleased, or even simpler, as he did.
She let him shuffle this other girl toward the bed. She let him slide his hands up her back. He could have been anyone. She could have been anyone. She willed herself: be anyone.
Be anyone else.
He did not ask if she was ready, he did not ask if she was sure. He tore open a condom, rolled it onto his dick, and she waited, awkward, unsure what she was meant to be doing with her lips, her hands, whom she was meant to be pleasuring and how, then remembered this accumulation of hands and pits and neck and dick was not her concern, as she was plainly not his, and when he wedged himself inside her, and she gasped, the burn of it, the sigh of it, the finally of it, crossing a line that would never need be crossed again, it was like she was alone. She could endure inside the moment. The pain. The sweat. The weight of body on body. The relief of it, to be crushed beneath. When it was over, she was almost surprised to find him still there, because he seemed so incidental to the experience. It felt almost as if she’d lost her virginity to herself.
He woke up when she started crying.
“Fuck,” he said. “Did I do something? Did you not—fuck.”
“It’s not you.”
He put his arms around her, and they breathed together. This would hurt Daniel worse than the sex, she thought.
“You can tell me.”
He lived with his parents. She had tongued his nipples and he had burped into her unwaxed pubes. She was never going to see him again. “I’m not an alcoholic,” she said.
She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but she felt his body tense. “So you’re a liar,” he said, his lips moving against her neck. He whispered, “Little lying bitch,” tongue flickering at her flesh on each L, then laughed and said he was kidding. Unless she had infiltrated the meeting simply to gawk at the freaks, in which case he was not kidding, so which was it, he said, fraud or fuckup? There was a right answer and a wrong answer, Alice understood, and she was naked in this stranger’s bed. She gave him an answer he would want. She had made her one mistake. She would lie to him persuasively, then never see him again, consider herself lucky to have escaped the night alive.
She was from the desert, she told him. She had hitched across the country, because why not. It was unexpectedly pleasurable to lie. He already thought she was the kind of girl who drank, who slept with random men then wept in their arms; he believed her. She said it was pills she liked too much, not booze, that she’d gone to the AA meeting hoping to score, and she said it like that, booze, score, thinking this was the way this kind of girl would talk. “Don’t worry, I’m definitely fucked up,” she told him.
“You?” He touched her nose, then his own. “Me. You have no fucking idea.”
She wanted to leave, but didn’t know the etiquette for this. So she let him spoon her, tried to relax, or to seem relaxed enough that he would believe it. His sheets smelled like old pizza and her own familiar funk.
“You still don’t know my name,” he said, then whispered, “Rumpelstiltskin,” but she pretended she was already asleep.