Tangerine

by Christine Mangan

  I remained quiet, patient, waiting for her—as always.

  But then she spoke, her words cracking the darkness in half.

  “I want you to leave, Lucy.”

  My heart stopped, my stomach clenched. I thought of all those terrible clichés I’d read in books my entire life and I felt and understood every single wretched one in that moment. I shook my head, trying to shake Alice’s words from my mind. This was not how it was supposed to be. This was not what was supposed to happen. I frowned, turning it all over in my mind, trying to make sense of it, how everything could have changed and I had somehow failed to notice, in the space of only a few hours. I felt the anger, hot and sharp, pressing at my throat. She had already agreed to go with me, she had already promised.

  “You mean John wants me to leave,” I finally managed, my words short, clipped. “That’s what you mean to say.”

  “No, Lucy.”

  She stood tall and erect, as if her confidence, her resolve was bound up in her posture, so that I wanted nothing so much as to push her to the floor, to dispel whatever it was that was forcing her to say these awful things.

  She crossed her arms. “I want you to leave.”

  I sat up in bed, tossing the covers aside. “You don’t mean that,” I said, my voice, I knew, wavering between placation and harshness. Her words had unnerved me, unmoored me, so that I could no longer figure out what I was supposed to be to her in that moment, could no longer read what she needed me to be. I shook my head. “You can’t mean that, Alice.”

  “I do, Lucy,” she said, nodding, the movement sharp and succinct.

  “I don’t know what else he said to you,” I began, “but you can’t let him do this to us.”

  For a moment, she looked confused; then she shook her head again, this time a small smile accompanying the gesture. “No,” she said softly, her eyes meeting my own. “No, this isn’t John.” A laugh, sharp and bitter, escaped her lips. “This is me, Lucy. Entirely me. I’m the one asking you to leave. I’m the one who wants you to go.” She stopped. “To go and to never come back. I want you to leave me alone.”

  My insides crumpled. It wasn’t John, she had promised, but I wanted to reach out and shake her and scream, Of course it is! Of course it’s him! She was too lost, too far under his spell to be able to see it clearly. “Alice—” I began.

  She held up her hand, as if to physically impede my words.

  “We were going to leave,” I argued, moving out of the bed and toward her. “You had said that we were going to leave—him, Tangier. All of it.”

  “No, Lucy. You said. You decided.” She shook her head.

  “Alice.” I reached out for her.

  “No.” She stepped back into the hallway. “I should never have opened that door. I should never have allowed you in.” She started toward her bedroom door, then stopped. “I know what you did. At Bennington. I know it was you.”

  “Alice—” I started.

  “Why did you ask me to stay?”

  I frowned, startled by the question. “I don’t understand.”

  “That day. That awful day in Vermont,” she said, her voice cold and hard. “You told me not to get into the car. Why?”

  “Because,” I said, looking away, only for a second—but she had noticed. “I didn’t want you to leave. I didn’t want us to be angry with each other any longer.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t say anything more, Lucy. I won’t listen. I won’t believe you.”

  “Alice, you’re confused.” I stopped, looking at her, imploring. “Do you really think that I would ever do anything to hurt you?”

  I saw her hesitate, but then she shook her head, swiftly, as if determined to convince herself. “You need to leave, by tomorrow.” She turned, as if to go, but stopped, her words glinting, sparking in the darkness: “And if you don’t, I’ll telephone the police and tell them exactly what you’ve done.”

  She crossed the hallway and closed the door to her bedroom.

  The lock turned, loud and resounding.

  I DID NOT SLEEP THAT NIGHT.

  Instead I sat, watching as the light broke into the room, casting long shadows across the walls before me, my eyelids feeling heavy, my thoughts scattered and confused. When morning arrived, full and bright, I left the flat.

  Once outside I began to walk. I went down narrow paths and tight corners, to familiar places and new territories. I walked until my feet hurt, until they cracked and bled. I discovered the tomb of Ibn Battuta, the explorer. I laid my hand across the rough wall, brushed my fingers across the plaque that had been placed in his honor. And just like him, I refused to stop. I was not tired—thirst and hunger did not exist. I pushed ahead, the knowledge that I had to keep walking, that I must keep walking, buried somewhere deep within me. It was the most important thing. I must not stop, I must not think too hard. At the end of it, I knew, all would be right. Alice would come to her senses, she would tell John what we had decided, and the two of us would leave, head back to England together, maybe stop in Spain for a few months first. I imagined it—the pair of us, in Madrid, then Barcelona. We would drink sherry in one and gin in the other. We would sit outside until the sun faded and night crept in, eating tapas and drinking Rioja. Alice would like that better than gin.

  And then I stumbled. A rock I had not seen. A piece of debris sticking out of the ground that had hidden itself. It was a short fall but enough to wrench my ankle so that it smarted when I tried to place my full weight on it. No one had seen. I was alone in an empty alleyway. And yet, despite this knowledge, I felt my cheeks burn with embarrassment, with anger. I had loved this country from the moment I first stepped foot on its shores, and yet this was the way it treated me. Placing unforeseen obstacles under my feet, causing me injury in its filthy streets, the ground covered in a litany of bodily fluids that I shuddered to think of, my hands and knees now red with scratches, my ankle useless. I thought of Alice. It was the same, wasn’t it? I had done everything for her, loved her, watched out for her, and she had treated me just the same. Hiding things, obscuring my vision. Making me think I was safe. The buzzing in my ear increased. I batted at it, desperate. The effort it required to remain calm seemed impossible, insurmountable. I could feel the anger, the rage, boiling just beneath my skin. Tiny pinpricks emerged along my arms, followed by larger, more sinister red hives. And yet, despite the heat, my skin refused to sweat. It was trapped, somehow, inside my body, refusing to come out. The results were angry red welts that rose across my arms and ran up and down my stomach. I could feel them spreading from my neck and onto my face.

  A man rounded the corner. I ignored him, willing him to do the same—daring him to do otherwise. He passed by me, silent, and for a moment I felt the anger start to retreat.

  Then he turned and spoke: “Smile. Be happy.”

  I shot him a look, one that boiled with hatred, overflowed with violence. He shrank backward, and I was suddenly anxious to get away from him, from this putrid-smelling alley. No, not anxious, desperate. I was desperate to get away, feeling my cheeks flush red again, hot with newfound anger. I was embarrassed and I was angry that this man was able to make me feel this way, that anyone could make me feel this way. I could feel it, as I had in the past, growing out of control. As it had that day of the accident. I could feel its energy coursing through my body, as if I had been shocked, zapped, brought back to life so that all of me was burning, electric, and the source of energy could no longer be contained. It took everything in my willpower not to lunge at him. I knew, rationally, that my anger had nothing to do with him. That it was directed somewhere else altogether. At the same time, I was powerless to stop. I did not want to. I worried that if I did, I would simply break apart, break down, the anger and power—yes, it felt powerful—seeping out of my pores and leaving me small and pitiless, a figure to be laughed at, one to be derided. I felt the tears begin to well. “Get away from me,” I hissed, aware that while he probably would not understand my
words, he would by no means miss my tone.

  A look of confusion swept across his features.

  I almost wished that he would do something—shout, slap, spit—anything, but all he did was slink away down one of the city’s countless alleys, disappearing into the labyrinthine maze.

  In that moment I felt nothing but contempt—for all of them. I hated John and his confident smirk, I hated the nameless faces that I had to push past in order to find one solitary spot in this sea of strangers, and even, for the briefest of moments, I hated her. Alice. I had done everything for her—traveled halfway across the world in order to find her, to rescue her from the mess that she had made of our life. I hated her for her weakness, her spinelessness, for always going back on the decision she had made.

  There was only one thing to do now.

  I turned quickly, leaving behind the darkened alley and heading back into the heart of the medina, back to the Petit Socco. I slipped into Café Tingis, ordered a coffee, and then asked the waiter to use the telephone.

  I dialed the number, hoping he would still be home, hoping he would be the one to answer. I held my breath and waited to hear John’s voice.

  ALICE WAS NOT SUPPOSED to have been in the car that night.

  Tom was not supposed to have died.

  But then we had fought, a torrent of angry words and accusations, powerful enough to match the snowstorm raging outside around us. A blizzard, I had later heard it referred to, so that by the time I had realized what was happening—the car pulling up, Alice stepping inside, the storm at its zenith—the roads were covered in a sheen of ice and the accident was far worse than I had ever intended.

  I had meant it as a scare, imagining—as I felt for it, underneath the hood of Tom’s car, alongside the firewall, moving quickly, my hands working from memory, from experiences I no longer wanted to claim as my own, as I inhaled the deep, unnerving scent of oil that was both home and somewhere else entirely foreign—a broken leg, a lost scholarship, something that would take him far and away from Alice so that she and I would be alone once more. With a pair of pliers I had crimped the line, knowing it would affect the pressure, affect the brakes—but I had not expected it to burst, had not expected the snow and the ice and the mountains and Alice.

  I had tried to stop her, to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen. I had thought about following, about pushing past, crawling into the car alongside her—but I had stopped, frozen, from both the growing storm around us and the words she had spoken to me, about disappearing, about never wanting to see me again. She had fixed me with a look of such anger, such hatred, that I had been rendered useless by my surprise.

  Afterward, I had gone back inside, had stood in our quiet little room, and had realized it was over. That there was no longer a reason for me to stay. And so I had packed my bag, a single suitcase, nothing more, filled only with the things that I had come there with—a few dresses, a couple pairs of stockings. The bits I had acquired along the way—a novel from the town bookstore, a pressed leaf from the previous autumn—these I left behind.

  At first I had thought to avoid the main road and what I might find there—but then I had thought of the woods, of the darkness and the snow, and I had pushed ahead.

  Walking through the blizzard, my hands shaking, blue and numb, I had paused at the wreckage that my desires had conjured, had stood, wondering, my blood thrumming loudly within my ear, what it was all for. I had found Alice, lying in the snow, a good distance from the car, her body smeared with red and black, nearly unrecognizable. And as I stood over the lifeless body of the girl I had loved, the consequence, I thought, of my dreaming, of my wanting, I had felt it: the darkness around me, transforming and moving me, making me into something that I had not intended, a monster I had not foreseen.

  I had moved to New York, to the city—stopping first by the garage I had grown up in, which only days earlier I had been thankful for, for the summers I had endured, sweating alongside the other men in the building, casting them murderous glances when their own lingered too long. From the garage I had taken what little money was in the register—it was owed, I thought, for my years of servitude—and purchased a one-way ticket on Greyhound. Once there, I did not bother to change my name; the city was big and no one would come looking for me, I knew.

  And so I had disappeared. Into a boardinghouse with a dozen or so other girls, running from abusive husbands or neglectful husbands or those just running toward something more. Those first few weeks I had scoured the newspapers, searching for an obituary. There was a tiny newsstand, several blocks away from my rented room, that carried our town’s local paper, and I would make the daily trip, my shoulders shaking in the cold morning air, certain that each new day would bring the announcement I was waiting for, was dreading. A week passed before one appeared for Thomas Stowell, the length of the notice a testament, it seemed, to the great and long line of white-collared Stowells he had descended from, as if such lineage demanded that his passing be recognized. I waited for a similar mention of Alice, but there was nothing, and as the days passed, the man behind the newsstand expecting my arrival, paper in hand—comfort, I supposed he wrongly assumed, for a homesick girl in a new city—I began to feel the justice of it all. It was fate, it was punishment, this eternal waiting. My days were marked by it, my anonymous footfalls that took me from boardinghouse to newsstand to work and back again, all that I could hope for now. And for a while I convinced myself that I could do it, that I could continue on, hidden in the cold gray emptiness of the city, the perfect cloak to hide my monstrosity from the world.

  But then one day, I had seen her: Alice’s guardian, Aunt Maude. I watched her emerge from a taxi not five feet away from where I stood. She wore a smart dress that looked as though it cost more than my entire year’s salary, her hair sleek and expensive. And though I had never met her before, I recognized her instantly from the pictures that Alice had kept in our dorm room, and so I moved toward her, needing, in that moment, to be close to someone who had once been close to Alice. I had pulled my threadbare coat closer to my body, hoping that it would hide my even more depressing dress, which had begun to rub in places from so much use that it wasn’t impossible to see through the fabric.

  “Miss Shipley,” I called out.

  Alice’s aunt had turned, her eyes quickly taking in my form, her lips turned down in displeasure. “Yes?” she asked, her tone curt.

  “Miss Shipley,” I repeated, fixing my face with a small smile. “I thought it was you.” I ignored the slight frown that had settled on her face, as she tried—and failed—to place me in her life. “I went to school with your niece, Alice.” It was the first time in months that I had said her name aloud, and the word stuck, caught in my throat.

  At the mention of her niece’s name, Maude Shipley’s face changed—though it did not relax, I noted. “Did you? Well,” she said, “I’ll make sure to tell her you said hello.”

  And with that one sentence, that one promise, everything changed.

  Later I decided that Aunt Maude’s presence was a sign, one that could not be ignored, one that demanded—no, begged—for my attention. And I felt it then—the thread that held Alice and me together begin to pull taut. We were not finished, not yet. Our story was still being written. It was fate, I decided later, as I felt the darkness that had hovered above me throughout my time alone in New York begin to recede, my sad little rain cloud pulling away at last. I had moved closer to Aunt Maude and said, “Actually, it’s quite fortunate that I met you here. I’ve been trying to get an updated address for her—alumnae stuff, you see—and I haven’t been able to find it anywhere. I don’t suppose she’s still at her old address? The one in London?”

  Her eyebrows arched, and she asked, “And what did you say your name was, my dear? I don’t believe I caught it.”

  “Oh,” I said, my gloved hands moving to my throat, “how silly of me. I’m so sorry, Miss Shipley. I’m Sophie, Sophie Turner,” I replied, using the name of a girl who ha
d lived down the hall from us at school, a forgettable figure whom most of the other girls only ever spoke to because of who her parents were, because of what their wealth meant. I had kept up-to-date with a few of them, using my resources at the publishing company and the newspaper to do a bit of digging, reading with envy of their accomplishments, their plans, so I knew Sophie Turner had been a bit of a disappointment. She had married, though not particularly well, and was living out her days deep in the South, in some state I hoped never to cross the border of, in a town that rolled easily off the tongue and out of the mind. I knew from experience that she was a girl no one could ever remember by sight alone, though they knew the name, knew the weight of it. I had reaped the advantage of this for a time, so when drinks were placed on bar tabs or an occasional night stayed in a hotel, it was always with a smile and a nod of the head, no questions asked and no chance of an embarrassing run-in with a girl no one could remember. Then the Turners had experienced some sort of financial crisis—I had never bothered to learn the specifics—and the managers then became more reluctant to book rooms, to serve drinks, without any guaranteed method of payment. Still, I used the name when it suited me, and now, standing in front of a woman who represented all the things the Turner name had once stood for, I found its usefulness once again.

  At the sound of the name, Maude smiled—though it was still tight—and told me of Alice’s husband, of Tangier. “A part of me regrets introducing them,” she had confided, the frown line between her eyes deepening at the words. “But how on earth was I supposed to know that he would whisk her away to Africa?” For, according to Maude, she wasn’t at all certain that her niece was happy, wasn’t entirely convinced, in fact, that her husband had married her for anything beyond her money. “Can you imagine it,” she had demanded, “a girl like her, in a place like that?”

  It was those words, more than anything else, that persuaded me, in the end.