by Liz Moore
It was the seventh of December, and all the houses on the block had Christmas lights strung up in great number. Liston’s looked nice that year: she had paid her boys five dollars each to decorate the porch. Only David’s house was devoid of lights, and because of this it looked desolate and unmerry. David would have been horrified, thought Ada.
Inside the house, it was just barely warmer than it had been on the street. But it still had its familiar smell, its David-smell, the smell of her own history. She walked up the stairs in the dark, to the linen closet in the upstairs hallway, still full of mismatched ancient sheets and blankets, a down comforter that David used to place on her bed at the start of each winter, a shield against the cold. She gathered this, along with several sheets and pillowcases, and brought them into her bedroom, where she closed the curtains. They were slightly translucent; they had never been excellent at keeping out the morning sunlight. She hesitated, therefore, before turning her bedside lamp on, wondering whether the neighbors would notice a dim glow through the blinds; deciding, finally, that all of them were asleep.
By the muted yellow glow of the lamp, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above her dresser: she looked spectral and pale, her eyes with dark circles beneath them, her shoulders still rising and falling from the exertion of her wild sprint home. She took her hat off and let her hair fall down from it. It looked dark and shapeless, longer than it had ever been before. David used to take her regularly to the same barber he used, an old man who trimmed her hair into a neat bob every other month, but by then she had not had it cut for a year and a half. More. She didn’t want to ask Liston about it. She thought sometimes about cutting it herself.
She dressed her ancient mattress, shivering in the cold. She took her shoes off. She unzipped her parka and let it fall to the floor. Beneath it, she was wearing a sweater and jeans, and she took these off, too, and stood in her bra and underwear, regarding herself for a moment in the mirror. She was shaking with cold, but she made herself stand there, and considered her body. She was average, she thought, in all ways. Average in height and weight. Brown-haired and brown-eyed. She pulled back her hair at the sides of her head and noted that her ears protruded slightly. Her belly button was closer to one hip than the other. Her arms were long and thin.
She turned sideways. She took a breath and pulled her stomach in toward her spine: something she had never thought to do before attending Queen of Angels, but now did regularly. The shape of her stomach had begun to bother her excessively. Recently she had been thinking of herself the way a mechanic thought of a car, as a collection of parts, each of which had a particular flaw: convex stomach, protrusive ears, dry elbows, flat feet, thin lips, fleshy knees. When she thought about it for long enough, she could identify some error in every part of herself, some mistake in her code that she would change if she could.
When she was finished with her examination, she tucked herself into her old bed and shivered into sleep.
She woke up to the sound of the kitchen door rattling. It stopped for a moment, and then resumed; someone was knocking at the door. Her heartbeat surged. For a moment she did not know where she was. She sat up straight in bed, slipped her feet into her shoes, in case she needed to run. She was in her bra and underwear. She pulled the comforter around herself; she wore it like a robe.
She had fallen asleep with the light on. She switched it off.
Then, as quietly as possible, she rose and tiptoed into David’s old room—ghostly, filled still with memories of him—and pressed her forehead to his western window, out of which she could see down to the driveway, to the step outside the kitchen door.
William Liston stood there, his head bowed, looking down at the earth. Ada could not see his face; she recognized him by his jacket, by his stance. He was alone. He looked up at the door again, stepped toward it, knocked loudly a third time.
Ada opened the window. A gust of freezing air rushed in.
“William,” she said, in a stage whisper. He looked up at her, confused.
“Hey,” he said. “Can you come down for a sec?”
She dressed herself as quickly as she could, glanced once in the mirror, and ran downstairs. Then she opened the kitchen door. There was William, on the threshold, one arm clutched to his side, as if he were concealing something under his jacket.
He did not ask if he could come in; he walked forward and closed the door behind him with a foot.
Her heart was pounding with an uncomfortable force. It thudded against her breastbone so quickly and powerfully that she wondered if it was visible to William, through her sweater, even in the dark room. She put her right hand to it instinctively, as if she were reciting a pledge.
William said nothing for a moment, only looked at her. There was a slight sway in his stance that she told herself must be drunkenness, though she only knew this from movies. His smell reached her suddenly: something bitter and woodsy and acrid, alcohol and smoke.
“I thought you might be here,” he said. “I saw your light.”
Her voice caught in her throat.
“Do you mind if I come in for a second?” he asked, which did not make sense. He was already in. Still, she shook her head no.
He took two steps forward and looked around the kitchen. Had he ever been inside David’s house before? She couldn’t remember; maybe when she was very small.
“You come here a lot,” said William. “I’ve seen you walking here.”
“Not a lot,” said Ada, defensively.
William shrugged. “It’s cool,” he said.
“Where’s Melanie?” asked Ada.
“She had to get home,” he said.
He walked out of the kitchen then and into the dining room. “Can you show me around?” he asked her. Her eyes had adjusted; she could see everything fairly well, though the only light came in from the streetlamps outside. So she did: she took him down the hallway, in silence, speaking only the names of the rooms. And then she walked up the stairs with him, and named those rooms as well. Her room was last, and she paused in the hallway, embarrassed suddenly. It was both childish and old-fashioned, her room: her austere little bed with its ancient comforter; her bedside lamp, which was shaped like an apple tree, with little Hummel figurines running round and around its base. The furniture was formal and strange, nothing like the modern furniture that Liston had bought for her children, and that Ada, at that time, preferred.
“Is this your room?” asked William, and Ada nodded.
He nudged open the door and made a slow circle around the little room. His head was inches from the ceiling; he was too large for the space. She stood in the threshold. The single lamp cast a tall shadow of William that moved along the walls as he paced. He ended at the bed and sat down, perched on the edge of it, his long legs bent deeply at the knee to accommodate its lowness. He put his elbows on his thighs and gazed down at the floor.
He looked very old to her suddenly: a man. Much more grown-up than she was. Ada marveled that Melanie was his girlfriend. How courageous she was, to be with someone William’s age. She glanced at him and then away. He was even more handsome than she had remembered. Everything about him was sculpted finely and perfectly, as if designed in advance by an architect: much different, she thought, than her own flawed, imprecise features. She would have changed nothing about him. He was finished.
He unzipped his coat halfway and then took a bottle out from inside it. It was tall and rectangular and the label was facing away from her. A clear liquid occupied the bottom third. He drank from it and then held it out to her.
She did not know which was worse: to say yes or no. This was an opportunity he was giving her. To say no would have cemented her forever, she thought, as an outsider. She couldn’t say no. But could she say yes, and have it seem natural? Lacking any alternative, it was a chance she had to take. Besides, she had had alcohol before: David had given her wine, she reminded herself, and he always let her take sips of the cocktails the two of them made for gu
ests.
Ada walked toward him and took the bottle. She did as he had done: she held it to her lips and took a healthy swig, about as much as she might have taken from a gin and tonic. But this was different, and it burned painfully in her esophagus and settled roughly into her stomach. She immediately felt her joints and muscles loosen. She sat down next to William on the bed.
“Thanks for taking care of Matty,” said William. “I know you help him with his homework and stuff. So thanks.”
“I like it,” said Ada.
“He loves you,” said William. “He always asks me stuff about you. Since our dad’s gone,” he said, but he stopped halfway through his sentence, and did not pick it up again. He drank.
Ada nodded. She noticed a slight elision between his words, a blending-together, final consonants attaching themselves to succeeding vowels. She closed her eyes briefly, letting what he had said echo in her mind, noting the particulars of his accent, like Liston’s, and his intonation. And that sentence: He loves you.
William tipped the bottle back again, showing his white teeth briefly when he was done, running a hand through the light hair that had fallen down across his brow. Then he handed it to her. She did the same. It was gin: she saw the label.
“Bob Conley told me he saw you in the Woods,” said William.
Ada looked at him.
“He said you were hiding behind a tree,” he said. A slight smile was coming across his face, now, and Ada dropped her shoulders in embarrassment. So this was why he was here: to make fun of her.
“Were you spying on me?” he asked her.
Ada briefly considered the idea of denying it all. I’ve been here the whole night, she could say. She could look at him like he was crazy. But in the corner of the room something caught her eye: it was a pile on the floor of her parka and hat and gloves. This, combined with Bob Conley’s testimony, was probably too much evidence to deny.
“I was just going for a walk,” Ada said. “I didn’t know you guys were there.”
He smiled briefly, looked away.
He took another sip. He handed her the bottle. She took another sip.
“Are you gonna tell my mom?” he asked her, with a tone in his voice that sounded like teasing. “I know you guys are pals.”
Ungracefully, he unzipped his jacket the rest of the way and tried to extract himself from it. His wrists were stuck; his hands weren’t working. Ada reached out and held a wristband in place while he wrenched his arm out of it. He thanked her politely.
Then he said, “You used to spy on us before you lived at our house.”
Ada looked at him.
“I saw you,” said William. “Once or twice, in our backyard.”
Ada shook her head. A lump had started in her throat and she willed it backward, swallowing hard. It seemed unfair, somehow, that he had seen her, but she was too tired to deny anything. The gin had loosened her mind and her body and a dull ache had begun to move through her. She was hungry and cold and alone.
“What were you doing back there?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” said Ada. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t tell him that she dreamed about him every night: that it was William she had sought when she made those lonely nighttime walks. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he had a sense that everyone, everywhere, loved and desired him. Did people like William Liston know this? They must, she thought.
They said nothing for a while. They drank again. Normally the silence would have bothered her, but it felt comfortable to her, somehow. She smiled to herself. Why did she worry so much? she wondered. She could say anything she wanted.
“You all seemed so normal. I wanted to see what it would be like to have a normal family,” she said.
He laughed. “Normal,” he said. “Nobody’s normal. We’re probably, like, the weirdest family there is. I guess you know that by now.”
“Except for my family,” Ada said. “We’re weirder. I’m the weirdest,” she said. But there was too much truth to it, and she wished immediately that she had not said it. Besides, the word family had never seemed to apply to her and David. They were not a family; they were a pair. And now they weren’t even that.
William laughed again, and then was quiet. “You’re funny,” he pronounced finally. “You’re smart, too. I think you’re probably smarter than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“No, I’m not,” said Ada. “I am not.”
He was very drunk. The laces of his sneakers were undone and he leaned forward to tie them and nearly slipped off the bed. He caught himself by putting a hand on the floor. “Oops,” he said quietly to himself.
When he had tied his shoe he sat back up and, in one fluid motion, put his hand on Ada’s knee. He did not look at her. She looked at his hand. It was large and smooth. It was still young-looking: it did not have the hardness of an older person’s hand. Only one vein was visible beneath the skin, blue and winding, and she thought about the systems of the body, the vascular web that kept the flesh alive. She had studied it with David.
Ada decided that she did not want his hand there, and was thinking of ways to remove it, when, suddenly, he put it elsewhere on her body: first around her shoulders, and then on her back, which he stroked for a time in long downward arcs. It reminded her of how David had taught her to calm lobsters. William’s movements were not graceful, and he did not look at Ada while he made them, as if his left hand were disembodied from the rest of him. It wandered on its own. She sat very still. She thought about simply standing up from the bed, but she lacked the courage to do it. Should she like this? William Liston was touching her. It was what she had been dreaming of for years. She was not certain. The gin made everything seem distant: an echo of itself.
Suddenly William turned and moved toward her, his face toward hers, and pressed his mouth on her mouth. It was quick and unexpected. It was her first kiss. The temperature was what surprised her most: she wasn’t certain what she had imagined, but it was not this. Perhaps she had imagined William Liston’s mouth as being cold, cool, like the rest of him; but this was something lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. With his tongue he was pushing her lips apart. All of his smells were closer now, too: cigarettes and gin and the outdoors. And his skin, his flesh, the hair on his head. All of it, as close to her as she was to herself.
He had enough hair on his face to shave it: she had seen him once or twice in the bathroom, in his towel. She had caught his eye in the mirror. Now his chin scratched her, his cheeks.
Her hands were frozen at her sides, in little fists. She had seen in movies that people touched each other’s faces, or bodies, while kissing, but a deep and paralyzing fear had come over her and she could not move.
He leaned forward and she fell back on her elbows.
He put his other hand on her, too, over the sweater that David had bought her.
She became aware of his physical size, something she had always found attractive, in a way that alarmed her.
Later, wishing it had been, wishing somehow to rewrite history, she would tell ELIXIR that fumblingly kissing William Liston on her bed had been romantic and exciting, the sudden unexpected fulfillment of all of her fantasies, better than anything she could have imagined. But this was untrue. If she had been honest, she would have told ELIXIR that kissing William Liston was halfway in between nice and not-nice. It stirred something in her, some ancestral memory of closeness and intimacy, some instinctual response. She had not been so physically close to another person since her infancy. She had rarely even been hugged. When she was older, she would remember the episode with a mix of pleasure and discomfort. The scratching of a man’s rough chin across her cheeks would shuttle her unstoppably into a sense-memory of William Liston, and for a pause she would recall, not unfondly, her own young longing for him and its unfortunate fulfillment. But now her brain was working too quickly, and her heart was pumping too fast, and she knew herself to be too young for this, or too young for him, and she was frightened and ashamed.
The muscles of her abdomen tensed; she worked to stay upright as he guided her down. He ran a hand down her face and front and side. There was not much there for him to grasp and there never would be, but she did not know this then; she only thought she was deficient in some way, or that she was not grown-up enough, and that now he knew. He had found out her terrible secret. She wanted almost to apologize. She imagined simply standing up, walking out of the room, but somehow it felt too late. She imagined curling up into a ball and asking him just to cradle her, to be still with her, to leave his hands on her, unmoving, to mother her.
And then she thought of Melanie and realized that invoking Melanie’s name would save her. It wasn’t true—it wasn’t any concern for Melanie that made her want to end what William was doing, but it felt to her at least like a valid excuse. Melanie’s my friend, she could say. We have to stop. It would not have been embarrassing to say this.
She felt William’s hand on the button of her jeans. But before she could deliver her line, the door to her bedroom opened. She punched William’s shoulder hard. The two of them struggled to sit up.
There in the doorframe was Gregory, his mouth open, his face drained of color. In his right hand he was holding the key to David’s house that Ada had given him. His left hung down limply at his side.
“What the hell,” said William. It was the same phrase he had used when Ada caught him kissing Karen Driscoll, the first night she had ever slept at Liston’s.
“Get the fuck out, Greg,” said William. But his brother didn’t move, and after a pause William stood up quickly, threateningly. He moved toward Gregory. For several beats, the two brothers stood facing one another, framed by Ada’s doorway, William head-and-shoulders taller than his brother.
Ada waited. She was certain that Gregory would duck his head and go. She had seen him do it before when confronted: in the hallway at Queen of Angels, when charged at by a peer; in the hallway at Liston’s house, when he was being persecuted by William or even, sometimes, by Matty. But now he didn’t flinch. William, still drunk, swayed slightly. And then, abruptly, he left, knocking into Gregory on his way out, surprising Ada. She did not know what outcome she’d expected, but it was not that. William said nothing before going. Not to his brother; not to her. They heard his footsteps as he pounded down the stairs. The hard slam of the kitchen door.