When the alcohol evaporates from my blood, I wake tangled in Patrick’s bed. He is stroking the edge of my spine. “Oh shit,” I mutter. I cover my face with one hand but don’t pull myself away from him.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, his finger only pausing in its tracing.
“I shouldn’t have done this.” I push up, pulling the sheet with me, exposing him in the process. He laughs when I attempt to cover him again, and I give up, falling back onto the bed, my head throbbing a low rhythm.
“You okay?” he asks, his lean limbs still exposed, his penis twitching to life, rising to stand.
“No. I have a boyfriend,” I moan.
“Okay.” His voice is quiet, bemused. “I have a wife.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s okay,” he says, tugging me back toward him, and to my horror, my body responds to him, remembering the climax with him, remembering the skill of his attentions on my body. I am always self-conscious about sex, always aware of the shape of my breasts moving, aware of how flawed I am naked—except for last night. I was truly a stranger in my body, and for the first time in my life, I understand what all the fuss is about.
“I gotta go,” I say, but make no move to rise.
“Really?” He takes my hand, placing it firmly around his penis, and a pulse starts reverberating through my body in anticipation.
I am absolutely weary with hunger and fatigue. Tabitha was right, though, I am less hungry, and the sensations of my jeans sitting low and loose across my hip bones is intoxicating. The best images of me are the ones taken after the night I spent with Patrick, the last day of the shoot. I want to believe they are the best shots because I am so lean, after three days of only one solid, finished meal, but the reality is much more secretive. Every time Patrick pointed the camera at me that last day, every time his eyes rake over me, I feel the echo of his hands on me, the illicit touch of him. If anybody notices the chemistry arcing between us, they do not mention it, and I do everything I can not to show how intensely he has affected me.
I feel surprising little guilt. It wasn’t the same thing I share with Trey; it was just an experience, an incredible, mind-blowing experience that happened to someone other than me. When I left Patrick’s room, we agreed that we would keep the secret, and that it would never happen again. I had snuck back into the penthouse and sat on the balcony until the girls began to move inside.
“Where were you last night?” Tabitha had asked when she saw me.
“I was here,” I answered, indicating I’d slept out on the balcony. I don’t want them to know where I had been. It’s a secret. Like all the others I keep in my life.
She had raised an eyebrow, and I had followed her back into the living room, before heading to take my shower, washing the scent of him from my skin, but not the memory.
Karis made me a gift of a small, leather-bound journal, and on the front page, she has written a list of Safe Foods, including carrots and celery and edamame, with acceptable measurements to the side.
Trey was home on Saturday, and they left on Monday for Aspen, so I missed him entirely. There is a message on the counter from him, when I get back from Rosarito, with his hotel phone number. A pang of guilt washes over me, but I put the memory of Patrick in one of the boxes inside my head and close the lid on it.
I dial the number and sit at the table. “Hey, Jenny,” I say when her voice comes over the line.
“Alison!” she shouts. “Are you coming?”
“To Aspen?”
“You can share my room. I have bunks.” She giggles, and I hear shuffling, then Trey is on the line.
“Hey, baby,” I croon, letting my eyes go closed, remembering his dark eyes and the shape of his face
“How was Mexico?”
“Great. I think it was good.” I nod, thinking how the crew liked my look and Patrick had asked specifically for copies of my card.
“Glad to hear it. You okay? You sound tired.”
“I am tired.” I am hungry, my body says, and I get up to pour a glass of water. “What’s this about me coming to Aspen?”
“Nothing, just wishful thinking.” The small pull of excitement, that maybe he was going to invite me to join them, evaporates.
“When will you be home again?”
“The twenty-eighth . . .” His voice draws away from the receiver, and he says something I can’t understand.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just we’re heading out. I’ll talk to you later?”
“Yeah. Trey . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. I just miss you.”
“Me, too.” I can tell his parents are there.
“Okay. See you on the twenty-eighth.” We say goodbye, and I wait until the phone goes dead before I hang it up.
Being back in the condo brings back the robbery, and I check all the locks before heading upstairs to unpack. I set the suitcase on the floor, looking through the room, remembering the disarray I had found that day, and the hollow sense of being violated crashes down. I sit on my bed, too weary to unpack, and fold myself under the blankets, watching a cloud move across the sky through the window until I am asleep.
I wake when I hear motion in the room and open my eyes to see Cici in shadow. The room is full dark. I give a quick glance at the clock, glowing 3:12, and I close my eyes to drift off again. I dream of great vats of pudding, of chocolate and pastas and all the foods that are not on Karis’s Safe Foods list.
The depression that took hold after the robbery abated while I was in Mexico, but now that I am back, it overwhelms me. I feel drawn again toward the sharp objects, although I have no new words I want to say, and any fresh wounds would jeopardize my career. The scars on my feet have faded with time, and only the one on my wrist is stark and visible. I just feel strangely out of control. Writing in the journal helps; it gives me something to focus on.
My head feels fuzzy as I sit here in the kitchen. My thoughts whirl and spin and turn back on themselves like snakes. I’m still upset that somebody broke into our condo and stole from me. It isn’t the money that upsets me; it’s where the money came from. It was the only thing I had left from the baby. Inside that envelope, the one missing envelope, was the money Janice had given me when I had left Life House, the overage for my board, paid by Meredith and Tom. Did she not understand what that money meant to me?
She.
The spinning in my head stops, and I look up the stairs, suddenly remembering something that happened yesterday. I feel all the thoughts cascading down, one by one, fluttering to silence, the way the leaves do in the parking lot after they’ve been caught by the Santa Ana winds.
I almost never use the hair dryer. It was a rare thing for me to reach under the cabinet for it on the day of the break-in. I haven’t missed it since, haven’t thought of it since, except as one of the missing items. Cici does, though—lives for the hair dryer—and when she came to the room yesterday, after her shower, her hair was dry. Hadn’t I heard the hair dryer? It hadn’t registered then—the sound is so much a part of daily life—but it does now.
Had she bought a new one? Or is it like the CD player, never really missing at all?
I take the steps two at a time, being quiet, not wanting to wake the house, but needing to check. I go down the hall, past our bedroom where Cici is sleeping. I open the cabinet, and there, in its spot, is the blow dryer. I take it out. It is the same—not just the same model; it is the same battered dryer. I want to scream. I sit on the floor beside the sink holding the hair dryer in my hands, between my knees. What does this mean? What does this mean?
I am sitting, much the same, when Darla comes down the hall, and not noticing me, she settles on the toilet to pee.
“Holy kumquat!” she exclaims.
I smile in spite of the clear deadly line in my head. Darla cannot ever bring herself to cuss. She prefers fruits and vegetables.
“Sorry,” I say but don’t move to leave. “The hair dryer.” I hold it up in the dim light for her to see that it is the same one.
“Yes, darling, that is a hair dryer.” I don’t look at her, but know by the tone that her eyebrows are dancing and her eyes are narrowed, assessing me, thinking me mental.
“It was stolen. Remember?” I try to keep my voice calm.
“Only I guess it wasn’t,” she says. “That’s good, right?”
“Is it?”
She doesn’t understand.
“Sure, we don’t have to buy a new one.” Her voice is calm, logical, the way you would tell a three-year-old that the peas are not going to make him green. “Ali, are you okay?”
“So, what was stolen? The day of the break-in?”
“My TV, your money, Cici’s CD player, some CDs. Right?”
“No. Cici has her stuff in her trunk.”
“Oh. That’s good. So my TV and your money.”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, looking at the hair dryer, feeling my discontent swell.
“What are you trying to say?” She has long since finished peeing, but she stays sitting, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, looking at me like she knows I’m about to lose my mind.
“Nobody knew I had that money, except Cici.” I say the last words very quietly, almost under my breath.
“You think Cici robbed us?” she whispers and reaches out to close the bathroom door.
I shake my head. “I don’t know what I think,” I roll my lips together, feeling the small bumps under my skin, compressing. “No, I don’t think Cici robbed us,” I finally say, remembering that Cici and Darla are cousins and blood is thick. I am the outsider here. Blood is thick. We protect our own.
“Cici wouldn’t take your money,” Darla says, reaching out and touching my knee. “She wouldn’t.”
I nod, but I am not so certain. Cici will do almost anything for money. It is her God. Messing up our room and taking a TV doesn’t seem like such a stretch. That’s easier than spreading your legs for a stranger, isn’t it? But I nod anyway. Darla and Cici have blood between them. “I know. But what if she mentioned it to somebody?”
I meet Darla’s eyes, and she looks so sad and heartbroken that I feel guilty about asking.
“That money was pretty important to you,” she says.
“It’s not really the money.” I can’t explain. She doesn’t know what I gave up for that money. She doesn’t know the empty space on my shoulder where a child should be.
She wipes and washes her hands before sitting down on the floor beside me, taking one of my hands in hers. “I have a little bit I was saving to replace the TV, but if you need it, you can have it.”
Tears sting my eyes, and I feel one roll over my check. I shake my head. I can’t take her money. “It’s not about the money.”
“It’s just money,” she says.
I wipe my eyes and cover my face with my hands, letting the dryer fall across my feet. “I know. It’s just money.” I had placed, on each of bills Janice had given me, a small heart, so I would never spend it. Now that money is spread apart and used, and it makes me feel empty. As long as I had it, I had a link to my baby. Now she is gone.
Before the break-in, I felt safe, golden. It was a symbol of doing the right thing. I had a plan, a costume, a protective shell. It was my grandparents looking at me like I was doing it right, like I was the golden one. I was my mother, jumping off the Ripson Bridge, the center of the universe.
But really I am Icarus, flying too close to the sun and melting in the heat. I am dashed to earth, broken and irreparable because my money is gone, because my stomach is empty and my mind cannot make sense.