They walked it off beneath the trees, talked about their classes and their crushes and their dreams, same as they did most nights, but in the woods, with the moon fat and full of longing, it felt like they might find what they sought together. Maybe tucked among a small clot of trees there would be a cottage with a secret door, a portal, and they could pass through this last stretch of their childhood together, emerge unscathed. None would call herself a child; but none would say she was grown-up, either. Arriving at college brought with it much self-conscious talk about how they were really and truly adults now, even as they slung their backpacks over both shoulders, tucked their stuffed animals beneath pillows, called their parents to ask for checks.
Later, when even the moon seemed tired, they headed home along the bike path, deserted at this hour, and felt a presence behind them, big as a bear.
The four drew closer together without saying anything. The knowledge that they were in danger was immediate, transmitted without a word, and they bunched two by two, Alice and Lainey behind, Ji Sun and Margaret in front. They left very little space between their pairs, made of themselves a small house, a locked room.
Lainey dug in her coat pockets for her keys, stuck them up between her fingers like talons, though she had fewer now, just their room key, her old house key, and a runty key to her bike lock, barely big enough for her makeshift claw.
Alice took a quick look over her shoulder, and in a flash saw two men, hulking, dressed in dark clothes and wearing hats, shearling inside one of their sweatshirt hoods sticking in her mind so that that they remained bearlike even now that she knew they were men.
Lainey tried to remember what she had learned about bears. She hadn’t looked yet, but she could feel them there, hear their ragged breath, sense from Alice’s skin that they were animals. There was the type of bear that you were meant to stun by punching it in the nose, and then there was the type you just needed to run from, fast as you could. Was there a type you played dead for? She felt in a panic that they might try this now, all four of them, fall to the ground and see if they could fool these monsters into believing their prey were asleep, already dead. She wondered if she should whisper her plan, but it was too quiet, dead silent in an understanding shared by all six that if they didn’t speak, maybe everyone could pretend there was nothing here to fear.
When had they learned to behave like this? In other peril it was clear that you should run, scream for help, throw your weight against whatever assailed you, holler fire. But this way of attempting escape, not daring to look at or speak to one another, this silent lockstep march—Had they learned it in school? Had they seen it in a film? Was it passed along by their mothers?
The sounds of the bears’ footfalls grew closer, and there was a jingling noise, as though maybe the men had made weapons of keys, too. Maybe they had strung small blades and bones and teeth around their necks. Lainey began to imagine how she would remove herself from her body, and some base part of herself surfaced, wondered whether they would want Margaret first, and would the rest of them run, then, or stay and fight? She told herself she would stand in front of her friends, fought her shame with the resolve to be brave. She drew in deep breaths and willed herself to turn around, but before she could she felt the air cool beside her as Alice unlocked herself, spun on her heels, and shouted.
“Hey! Fuck off!” Alice threw her arms out and started windmilling, dropped her left arm and reached for the flask in her pocket, drew it out slowly, as if it were a grenade.
“Lainey, the call box!” Her one arm still wild, flash of silver near her hip—did Alice have some hidden weapon?—the men seeming to grow larger, closer.
“The what?” Lainey felt a hand on her arm, was it Margaret’s, was it a claw?
“The emergency call box! Get to the box!” Alice screamed, but Ji Sun was already running ahead, toward the narrow blue beacon that would connect to campus police. Lainey recalled now how these had been pointed out on their campus tour, but she hadn’t known there was one here, hadn’t even thought to look.
An intercom crackled and a white light flashed on. They heard the sounds of a car and the men fled. The men were gone, into the woods, by the time the car—not campus police—came into sight, but the way they’d run confirmed for everyone that they had meant to do harm.
The four of them stood there, Ji Sun on the small slope of grass by the call box; Alice, closest to the woods, their sentinel; Lainey and Margaret in between, breathless. Margaret had her arms wrapped around her body; Lainey’s arms were out at her sides, waiting. The four came together and began to run before they exchanged a word. When they’d put enough distance between themselves and the woods, Margaret asked whether they should stay and wait for the police, tell what happened.
“I’m not sticking around!” Alice said. “They could come back. And I don’t want to spend all night talking to the campus police.”
“We reek of booze besides,” Ji Sun added, though she knew that calling upon campus safety services exempted students from penalties related to underage drinking. She knew, too, that she was exempt from these penalties because of her family name.
All had sobered the moment they sensed the men, the alcohol evaporating from their bloodstream in the same collective osmosis that told them not to speak. But now, exhilarated, exhausted, they circled close to intoxication again, drunk on relief from the unspoken imaginings of what they’d escaped.
Home, they huddled together on their window seat. Margaret brought her big quilt out from her room, and they scooched close enough together that they could share it. No one wanted to be alone. Their eyes were wide, unblinking. As the night hung between the deepest dark and the first hint of light, Lainey was reminded of the first time she’d tried Ecstasy, how she could feel it drain from her bloodstream as the sun came up, suck the joy from her brain, replace it with depression and daylight.
Lainey wanted to thank Alice, but again, Alice preempted her. She opened her mouth, said, “I,” and let out a sob.
Margaret reached across Lainey to hug Alice, said, “Oh, Alice, it’s okay! We’re safe.”
“It’s not that,” Alice said. She touched her face, thumbed along the scar at her jawline. She placed her hand across her cheek, a shield. “I’m the one that caused this. I caused the accident. It was my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My limp, my face, my”—another wail escaped—“brother.” She put her head in her hands and cried.
The others were quiet, relieved not to talk about the men. They knew what might have been. But they had escaped! They were heroic. And now their brave rescuer, bearer of the blue light, sat defeated by some other danger, one she was dredging up.
“It wasn’t a car accident,” Alice said. “It was a tractor. We were visiting my grandparents’ old farm in Western Mass. And—” She stopped, took a deep shudder of an inhale that silenced her tears. Her eyes were red, but dry. She didn’t look at any of them.
The others stayed silent. When someone points to her scar and begins to speak, you listen. You don’t say a word until she wants one from you.
Chapter 5
I was twelve. That part’s true. My brother and I, we were riding together, and it was my fault. I . . . caused it,” Alice said.
Her sisters didn’t know. Her brother didn’t even know! Since the accident—everyone in her family called it this—the bit of fuzz around his brain had remained there, fat on a pork chop. Only her parents knew that Alice had pushed him, and they were the ones who named what happened an accident and made it so. Her grandparents were both dead now, took whatever they suspected with them.
“I say it was a car accident since there’s less to explain. People don’t ask as many questions.”
Alice looked at Ji Sun with what Ji Sun took as both accusation and understanding. Alice had a secret, and she was giving it to them to hold. They inched closer t
o Alice; they wanted her to know they would accept.
“I don’t know, I started saying that, that it was a car crash, in boarding school and it stuck.” Alice stopped again. She could not tell them what she had done. She wanted to; she felt it burn in her throat, thicken around her heart, threaten to stop it beating. If she could tell them, what hardened there would open, her heart would beat. But she couldn’t. She could say she was to blame, that what happened was her fault. But she couldn’t say she pushed him.
She crossed her arms over her chest, a reflexive holdover from that time, though her breasts were not quite as flat as they had been then, and no one had poked them in the years since. The space around her sternum had been stroked and grabbed and licked, but not needled in the way it had been by her brother, with pens and sticks, his toothbrush, whatever he could find, but most often his long pointer finger, its touch rough enough that it felt to her he bored a hole in her chest, and she did find bruises on some days when he didn’t wait for what she imagined then as the clay of her skin to reseal before jabbing at her again, fast and hard, finger in that same divot he’d made.
Her brother had been a brat, later a pill, and at the time of the accident, a jerk. These were the ways her parents referred to him when they told her, as they always did, to ignore him. Her older sister, Eleanor, called him worse, but advised Alice to ignore him, too, all of them unaware or uncaring about whatever shift in adolescence had made him malevolent. He took Alice’s body as a personal affront, registered his disgust with it every day. Called her worthless. Poked. Said no one would ever want her. Poked. Her ugly boy body, her disgusting nothing chest. Poke poke poke.
Alice had spent her childhood outdoors and muddy, one of the fastest in her class, a natural in every sport she tried, with almost no pressure to behave more like a girl from her parents or from anyone at the small Quaker private school she’d attended since pre-K. So her brother’s insistence that she wasn’t what she should be confused her, served as her introduction to the idea that she was meant to be sexually desirable at all, and that already she fell short. She was shocked by how cold his gray eyes were when he appraised her, told her she made him want to puke, just the sight of her, her ugly little tits. She had come to pride herself on her potty mouth in boarding school, to capitalize on the way raunchy words registered as extra scandalous from a small, neat girl. But she never said tits, ever. Her brother had made it the worst word, a weapon. When she heard it said with the right fleck of disdain, she still felt a rush of heat in her underwear—not desire, but a wetness that served as warning, that she might pee herself as she had done that day on the farm.
She could still feel the sticky heat of the tractor’s vinyl bench beneath her thighs, remembered seeing her pale khaki shorts in a pile on the porch later, wondered how she could have peed that much, how the stain could be so dark, before she could understand that they were brown with blood.
Earlier that day, she’d had to strip down into her undershirt, cream with lemon-yellow Swiss dots, after her T-shirt got covered in egg, one she’d been tossing with her brother, lightly, just fun. They’d toss and take a step back, toss again, see how much space they could put between them. He hadn’t rocketed the egg at her, she didn’t think, just thrown it with enough force to reach her. She’d been the one to crack it in her hands when she tried to catch it, and they had both laughed. She lost, but she didn’t burn with shame. He wasn’t a monster every moment, and when she thinks of her life at home before she left, she is almost always with him. They are the middle children, Irish twins. On the farm that day Eleanor was inside the house, on the phone with her boyfriend, and her younger sister, Brianna, still a toddler, was on the porch with her parents and grandparents.
She worried the undershirt’s little yellow bow. Why hadn’t she yanked it off? Now, she finds those same bows on women’s bras infantilizing, something Lainey taught her to believe. But as a child, she found them something akin to sexy, and so, nervous making. Even tiny as a fingernail, her yellow bow blazed, and her brother didn’t need the signpost. He reacted just as she knew he would to the undershirt, told her to stop showing off her awful nothing tits, to cover up.
On the tractor, even above the roar of the motor, he continued, and she could make out fucking tits, extrapolate stupid. His mouth was cavernous. She inched as far as she could from him on the tractor’s small bench seat, designed for one adult. He was shouting, laughing, licking his teeth, exhilarated by the distance from their parents, his perch in the driver’s seat, the noise that gave cover to shout his worst. The sun was too hot on her skin and she could feel it tighten on her shoulders, begin to burn. Her parents never made her wear sunscreen.
He took his hand off the wheel to poke her, and they swerved. They were near a small slope of land beside the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the horse pasture. Later, Alice would tell herself that he might have fallen off anyway, caused an even worse accident, killed them both. She had wanted him to die. She wasn’t thinking about hurting him. She was thinking about killing him.
He took aim at her bow, but the tractor jostled, and he connected with her small breast instead. He poked anyway. The bite of his fingernail on her body. He widened his eyes and poked again, in the same spot, harder. He wasn’t even looking at the wheel, and when they swerved again he still kept one hand aloft, accusing her nipple, ready to poke again and try to push into her bones, through her body and out her back. As he tried to right their path one-handed, Alice reared back with all her strength. She read later about mothers lifting cars off their babies with one hand and had no trouble believing in that boundless strength. When she pushed, she didn’t picture her brother crumpled beneath the tractor. No, she felt her rage was enough to rocket him up into the sky, where he would explode in the sun’s fire, burst into a billion bits, drift back down to the dirt as dust. She pushed him with all her might.
“Where were your parents?” Margaret asked. “They weren’t watching?”
“They were on the porch, back at the house. They didn’t hover, they weren’t like that.”
They had come running after her mother noticed the second swerve, just before Alice pushed. But Alice didn’t remember when they appeared, didn’t remember their screams or her father pulling her from off her brother’s motionless body. Didn’t even remember the pain of the two injuries she sustained on her leap: the broken bones that caused her limp, and the nub of a barb that caught on her cheek, sliced a jagged line from her dimple to her temple. Didn’t remember much of anything about the time before her brother returned to consciousness beyond her plan to kill herself, a concept heretofore so foreign that at first she thought she’d invented it. When her brother woke two days later in the hospital, her desire to die morphed into a wish to vanish from her family, a plan facilitated by her parents, who signed her up for so much in the way of after-school and summer activities that she barely crossed paths with them in the year and a half before they sent her away to boarding school. And she’d spend the summers mostly away from home, too, doing wilderness courses and sailing camps, spending as much time on the water as she could, where she could be distant from her family’s pain, unreachable. In every sport, subject, and club, Alice told herself she would be good, do good. That her brother lived made her feel as though her own life had been saved, and it had to be for a reason.
Lainey, Margaret, and Ji Sun were quiet, waiting. They looked to Alice now like children in their oversized sweatshirts, staring up at her, hands folded, eyes wide.
How inadequate it would be to tell them, what, that he was teasing her—her parents’ name for it—and she’d had enough? He poked her in the chest sometimes? These weren’t reasons to kill someone.
“I, anyway, I distracted him.” Hadn’t she? She distracted him to such a degree that he wanted to rule her, ruin her. Lainey had described the cruel girls at her middle school as terrorizing her, and Alice knew that Lainey would call what Alice’s brother di
d a kind of terrorizing, too. But she was too tired to tell them the truth now, even if she’d had the guts. She felt acid roil in her stomach, some knowledge that she was missing her best chance to unburden herself, here with friends who, at least tonight, were grateful to her, believed her to be good.
“Oh, Alice, but you were so young! You can’t hold yourself responsible for that!” Margaret squeezed Alice’s arm while Lainey and Ji Sun murmured their agreement.
She couldn’t explain to them how quickly she’d dove off after her brother, how immediate and all-consuming her regret. And if she ever managed to tell them the truth, to let them coo and call it self-defense, an impulsive mistake that anyone might have made, let alone a child!—there would still be the moment, sliced smaller even than that split second when she decided to push, when she saw her brother’s body motionless beneath her and felt something other than regret: power.
“Alice, let’s go to bed, huh?” Lainey stood up from the bench. “This was such an intense night, and we’re all going to crash at some point.”
The best work Alice had done in the years since the accident was in forgetting, embroidering over the truth quicker than the stitches were removed from her scar. She’d kept them, small black barbs themselves, in the yellowed plastic saltshaker from her Hello Kitty picnic set. She’d taken the saltshaker to boarding school and it was with her now, in a wooden cigar box at the back of her underwear drawer, along with her passport and the jewelry she never wore.
She wanted to yield to Lainey’s touch, but she felt stuck to her seat, to the picture of her brother’s body that surfaced now, pinned to the ground beneath the tractor’s front wheel. He was motionless, but in her mind’s eye now he is waving, thrown overboard by his sister into this sea of grass, signaling to anyone above who might come save him. But it’s only Alice who can see him, and when she lands at his side she covers his face in the blood from her own injuries, so that when her parents finally do arrive they first believe both of their middle children to be dead, even as Alice’s screams surround them.
The Other's Gold Page 4