The Hazel Wood

by Melissa Albert

  In the half-light of the hallway, she looked like a predator, and Harold looked like prey. The anger ebbed away.

  “I didn’t call her trash. I just said…” He ran a hand over his drooping head. “These dinners are important. They’re full of potential clients, they determine the course of— Oh, for Christ’s sake, why am I trying to talk to you?”

  Ella leaned against the doorframe, watching him coolly. “I was wearing this the night you met me. Remember?”

  “Yeah, when you were a cocktail waitress. Forget it, I’m not going to stand here defending myself to both of you.” Harold glared at me. “I’m not a monster, Alice. Why are you always looking at me like I’m some goddamned monster?” He turned heel and retreated to the master bathroom.

  “Mom.”

  Ella cocked her head at my tone, looked for a moment like she’d ask. Instead she sighed, long and heavy. “Go to bed, Alice. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

  She touched her forehead to mine, gently, then closed the door between us.

  A dense quiet settled around my ears. It was the sound of living in a place sealed off from the rest of the city, in a vacuum of wealth.

  I walked into the kitchen feeling like a thief, and foraged through cabinets in the dark.

  “Is that a squirrel I hear, rummaging for nuts?”

  I looked at the bag of pecans in my hand and eased it back onto the shelf. Audrey kept tabs and a running commentary on what people ate, her voice hard-edged if it was less than what she did. She sat in the unlit living room, her spume of dark hair in a topknot just visible over the back of the couch. She didn’t turn as I walked closer, but she tensed.

  My stepsister was a sexy, zaftig motormouth who made me feel like an awkward breadstick. She was sprawled out in cutoff sweats and a tank top, always a little under-covered even at home. I watched over her shoulder as she clicked, restlessly, on a long feed of women wearing expensive clothes, ordering things she’d barely recognize when they arrived. It made me think of someone sitting at a casino machine.

  “You playing superhero again?” she asked, her voice too bright. “Did you save your mom from my evil dad?”

  I dropped onto the armchair across from her. “Harold’s not interesting enough to be evil. He’s just not good enough.”

  That made her look up, eyes washed to blankness by white computer light. “You think my dad’s not good enough for your mom?” She made the last two words sound like profanity. “You’d still be living out of your car if it wasn’t for him. Wearing Walmart jeans.”

  I was impressed she’d heard of Walmart, and pissed at myself for telling her something true. “Hey, sometimes we lived in shacks,” I said. “Or trailers. Once a garage.”

  She considered me. “Once I waited so long for my truffle burger it was cold when it got there,” she said. “So I totally get it.”

  “Once our car window got broken out, and Ella replaced it with duct tape and a sled.”

  Audrey smiled faintly, her hand going still on her laptop. “Once my dad bought a boat and named it The Audrey, but he forgot to put a ballroom in so I sunk it.”

  “Once…” The image that came to me then was jagged and fast, a three-frame cut of the bad luck that chased us out of Chicago. I closed my eyes against it, then stood abruptly. “You win.”

  Her expression slid shut, and she smirked down at her computer. “Good night, sis,” she muttered as I passed her.

  “Good night, Audrey,” I replied, too quiet for her to hear.

  Ella and Harold’s room was silent as I passed. I tried to read the silence, but it was hard through a carved oak door. I continued on to the guest room Harold had barely converted for me.

  Every morning I left my eyeliner out on the sink of the bathroom attached to my room. I left books open on the bed, socks under the sheets, jeans accordion-scrunched on the floor. Every night they were gone, tucked back into the cabinet, the hamper, the bookshelf. Waking up at Harold’s felt like living in Groundhog Day. No matter what I did, I couldn’t make a mark.

  I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of The Blind Assassin, because if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with. But I couldn’t focus on the words, and after a while I got up to retrieve the feather, the comb, and the bone from my dirty apron. I held them on my palm a moment before tipping them into a velvet pouch that used to hold Scrabble tiles and tucking it into my backpack.

  I lay back down certain I wouldn’t drift off for hours but found myself waking from a sound sleep while it was still dark. Before my eyes were fully open, I sensed my mother’s presence in the room. She climbed noiselessly into bed beside me, and I loosened my grip on the covers so she could grab her share. I stayed still as she dropped a kiss on my cheek, dry-lipped and smelling of amber.

  Her sigh was silvery; it tickled my ear. I held my breath till I couldn’t stand it, then rolled over to face her.

  “Why him?”

  She went tight, like she was tensing for a blow. I hadn’t hit her since I was ten, but seeing her brace made me press my hands between my knees. I expected her to beg off, to roll over, to tell me to wait till it was light and ask again. Not that she’d answer.

  But she turned toward me, her eyes a faint, familiar shine. “I thought I was in love with him,” she whispered. “I promise I did.”

  “And now?”

  She settled onto her back, long fingers plucking at the comforter. “It feels good to rest. Doesn’t it? It feels so good to just rest.”

  The roar in me, of everything that had happened—the man at the coffee shop, his book, the feather, the comb, the bone—turned down like a volume knob. Because Ella deserved this, didn’t she? Peace in a city so dense and bright its lights ate bad luck like they ate darkness.

  Unspoken things bloomed at the back of my throat, then went cold. And I decided: I’d give her one more day. One more stretch of rest before telling her the same old curse had found us, in a form I didn’t fully understand.

  We lay quiet in the dark a while longer, and fell asleep at the same time.

  4

  I was drawn to the surface of sleep by a longing for good coffee. When I opened my eyes, Ella was gone.

  The best reason to wake up early at Harold’s was to get to the kitchen first. I still felt like a guest, so I preferred to slip around without being seen. A few minutes after I poured my coffee and added milk and honey to the cup, Harold walked into the kitchen in a three-piece suit all buttoned up tight, like he was making up for my having seen him so undone. Pointedly he grabbed the milk off the counter and put it back in the fridge.

  “I was still using that,” I said, leaning against the kitchen island and drowning a pulse of rage with a swig of hot coffee.

  He side-eyed me. “Coffee stunts your growth,” he said finally. “You want to look like a twelve-year-old your whole life?”

  I slammed my cup down on the counter, but he was already leaving the kitchen. I felt like throwing the coffee at his retreating back, but gulped it down in one burning mouthful instead. I needed it. The redheaded man had come to me in dreams, his face looking out from steamed-over windows, his voice whispering stories over a payphone wire. The dreams mashed together with what I’d seen at Salty Dog until none of it felt real. Nothing but the feather, the comb, and the bone, solid in the bottom of my bag.

  When Audrey’s dog-whistle voice alerted me to her approach, I grabbed a granola bar from my stash in Harold’s pantry and slipped out of the kitchen. I’d get my fill of her on the way to school—which Audrey she’d be was harder to predict. Maybe she’d ignore me; maybe she’d talk at me nonstop about some arcane statute of girl code one of her friends had broken. Or maybe she’d punish me for last night, for cutting our twisted bonding ritual short.

  I hit the sidewalk early, an old smoker’s habit. Audrey stalked out in shades at 8:35, and we climbed into Harold’s black town car.

  “Dad’s taking o
ff work today,” she said to her cell phone, tapping away at a text the length of a Bible passage. “And you know what that means.”

  “I do?”

  “It means,” she said, then dropped her voice to a whisper, “it’s imminent. D-i-v-o-r-c-e.”

  I let my head fall back against the car seat’s gamey leather, waiting for the high of victory to hit. It didn’t come. Instead, I had the perverse desire to argue.

  “But they just got married. And what’s his staying home have to do with it? Are they getting a divorce right now?”

  She exhaled hard and spitty, like having to deal with me was too much to bear. “Today’s the day he calls a marriage counselor. He always does that, so he can tell himself he tried. If history really wants to repeat itself, six months from now is when he leaves your mom for the counselor. But it doesn’t matter who it is. Either Ella jumps first or it ends with him meeting someone else because he’s an addict like that. He’s predictable as an effing book. So don’t act like I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She was breathing hard, staring at her phone like she wanted to kill it.

  I paused, then held a hand out, pinkie up. “Don’t worry, Audrey. We’ll always be sisters. I pinkie-swear it.”

  She laughed through her nose. “Oh, yeah, we’ll see each other all the time. I’ll come get bedbugs at your new apartment.”

  “Can refrigerator boxes get bedbugs?”

  “Cute.” Her phone chimed, and she got back to clacking away. I got back to bathing in the thin nausea that accompanied the idea of my mom’s divorce.

  Ella’s marriage was doomed, I knew that. Harold was the last man she should have been with. His taste in books, his rigidity, his obsession with how things looked from the outside: all of it was antithetical to who she was.

  But sometimes in their early days I’d come home to find them locked together on the couch, his tie off and her feet bare. When he kissed her on the forehead she’d turn her chin up toward him like a sunflower. Seeing it gave me a hot and cold feeling, like sweating in a winter coat. Now the air between them was fraught, but for a little while it had crackled with something quick-burning and private. Though they were never going to last, Harold was still something Ella had wanted. Not just for me: for her.

  Guilt bit at me; I twitched it off my shoulders.

  Audrey’s phone chimed again, insistent, and something she read in the misspellings and emoji cluttering its screen made her voice harden. “Just so you know, my dad’s never had a marriage last less than a year. So your mom’s gold-digging skills must be super on point.”

  I looked at her flatly, my guilt melting down to a fine white anger. She felt the shift and her hands went nervous, jittering to a stop on her phone screen.

  There was a time when I would’ve used words to make one clean, cold cut in her, in the place where she was softest—the rubble of acne beneath the foundation layer that ended at her chin; her father’s offhand comments about the fit of her jeans; her own mother, out of touch but still plenty capable of cashing Harold’s monthly checks—then gone in for the evisceration.

  But I couldn’t do it without hearing Ella’s voice in my ear, her hands a warm weight on my shoulders. Breathe in the light, Alice. Breathe out the anger.

  I hated that hippie shit.

  “Just so you know,” I said, nicer than I wanted to, “Ella’s never dated a guy who’s owned anything bigger than a motorcycle before. So she’s that good at gold-digging on her first try.”

  Audrey made a face like my stupid retort was acceptable, then turned her attention toward using her phone’s reversed camera as a makeup mirror.

  The courtship of my mom and Audrey’s dad, in three acts:

  Act One: Harold spies Ella across the room at a cocktail party. “I thought she was one of us,” he liked to say jovially. “I didn’t think she was the help!” This passed for charm when you were Harold.

  When the sea of people between them cleared, he’d seen she was dressed all in caterer black, holding a tray at the level of her waist. If you held them any higher, she’d told me, men had an excuse to get a good angle on your cleavage.

  Harold ate a spanakopita and asked her to write her number on the napkin. Which she did. This is the part I still can’t understand. Was it his Jersey accent that got her? The hair coming out the top of his shirt? My guess is it was the expensive watch glittering around his thick wrist—or, if I’m being less jaded, his eyes. They were a deep, melancholy blue, the kind that hinted at something interesting in their depths. Even if I’d never seen him deliver on the promise.

  Act Two: The first date. Ella left our apartment at eight to meet Harold for a drink, and found a town car waiting for her. Drinks turned into dinner turned into a drunken two a.m. phone call letting me know she wasn’t coming home till morning. This was an Ella I hadn’t seen since I was nine, when she’d driven her boyfriend’s motorcycle barefoot into a duck pond in the middle of a still August night. It freaked her out enough—the obsession, she’d told me later, with the idea of “What if Alice had been on the back?”—that she swore ever after to be home and mostly sober by midnight.

  She’d returned from her date with Harold almost twenty-four hours after she’d left, shoeless (always a bad sign) and wearing a suit coat over her dress. I sniffed it when she wasn’t looking. It smelled like the drunk finance guys who pressed too close against me in the crush of the train when I took it at the wrong time of day. I’d shaken my head. Poor Harold. Ella’s going to eat you alive.

  Act Three: The whirlwind courtship. Epic fifteen-course tasting menus, weekends in the Hamptons, an awkward high tea with me and Audrey. And, of course, the fateful opera date that literally began with him sending her a dress.

  “I just threw up in my mouth, that’s so cheesy,” I’d told her.

  “We can pawn it if the date’s a fail,” she’d shot back, smoothing it over her hips. There was a funny glitter in her eyes as she watched herself in the mirror. I thought of that later, when she came home with a twin glitter on her ring finger: a rock as big as the Ritz.

  My memory of that night is tattered, a movie screen clawed to strings. The glint of the ring lodged in my eye like a shard of demon glass, and the anger overwhelmed me. I remembered Ella’s drawn face as she slammed the bathroom door between us, the splintery give of its cheap wood when I kicked the bottom panel out. The slide of honeyed whiskey over my throat the next day, scalded with screaming, and the miserable heat behind my eyes when I saw Ella was still wearing the ring.

  The person who married Harold six weeks later wasn’t my mother. The woman who was making him miserable now? That was the Ella I recognized, coming out of deep freeze.

  Harold’s driver pulled up in front of Whitechapel, and my stomach did its usual roller-coaster drop. Audrey slipped her phone into her bag, hustling out of the car so quick she was absorbed into a pod of rich girls by the time my feet hit the sidewalk.

  I’d spent my entire life as the new kid, and it never stopped sucking. It didn’t matter if you were starting seventh grade in Podunk nowhere, or your junior year at Whitechapel, the fancy-ass Upper East Side academy Harold paid my way into. The students were the same wherever I went: clannish, judgmental, and unwilling to make an independent move.

  My Monday-morning ennui was overlaid with a low-level dread. I kept expecting to see the red-haired man. He’d broken the skin that separated me from that strange, dreamlike day in my childhood, brought it close. Now that he’d shown himself, he could be anywhere: the man pretending to look at his cell phone on the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street. The jogger running with a Starbucks cup. Maybe I’d walk into class and he’d be there, disguised as a substitute teacher and reading that green book. I ran my hands down my uniform skirt and breathed.

  The first half of my day was Comp, Medieval Lit, Calculus, and lunch. My performance in those classes could be rated as good, fine, bad, and terrible, respectively. After lunch was Drama with Audrey and her gang of future Real Housewives. It
was the one class she never skipped, which had something to do with the fact that our teacher was a floppy-haired former TV actor who made us call him Toby.

  But she ditched today. Her absence meant that, for once, we had the right number of people to pair up for scenes at the end.

  And when Toby started flinging his corduroy arms around, pairing us up at random, I had a premonition: I’d get partnered with Ellery Finch.

  5

  Everyone at Whitechapel was rich, but Finch was on another level. Back when she still thought I was impressable, Audrey had given me a Google-powered tour of her school’s best and brightest—aka, richest. She’d shown me a photo of a younger, geekier Finch at a fancy event, sandwiched between a silver-fox type and a beautiful brown-skinned woman wearing a necklace Ella would’ve loved, which looked like a chain of throwing stars.

  Finch was almost as short as me and skinny, with a crackling energy that followed him like an aura. His hair grew in every direction, and his eyes were caffeinated and quick, a brown a few shades lighter than his skin. He dressed kinda like old photos of Bob Dylan: work boots and high-waisted pants. I had no idea how he got his uniform pants to ride so high.

  None of this would’ve mattered to me except for one thing: he knew who I was. Most people don’t, and if they did, they wouldn’t care. Being the estranged granddaughter of a minor, largely forgotten literary celebrity mattered to pretty much nobody, especially in a school where fundraiser auction items tended to include guitar lessons with somebody’s pop-star father. It was just my luck that one of Althea Proserpine’s few remaining superfans happened to go to Whitechapel, and managed to find out who I was. Finch had cornered me at my locker my first week of school.

  “You’re Alice Proserpine, aren’t you?”

  “Who told you that?”

  Finch was beaming. I’d seen him around, even thought he was kind of cute, but right then I wanted to swipe the grin off his face. “Audrey. Not that she actually told me.” He made a gesture down his front, as if pointing out that being short and Dylan-y was enough to explain why Audrey would sooner shop at JCPenney than be seen talking to him. It was.