At the time, Alice had thought they should have done a better job with the fourteen-year-old face—made her prettier without cheapening her with makeup—if only to offer the parents the insufficient solace of holding in their minds a more pleasing image of their lost daughter. Maybe they never thought of her as a teen. Perhaps it didn’t matter—she would always remain the girl they’d known for just four years, with her babyish soft, brown curls and pouty lips.
Lost in her thoughts, she turned to see Peter gathering his keys and wallet from the tray in the hallway, weekend bag in hand.
All set? she asked as cheerfully as possible.
I think so. You sure you don’t want to come? It would be good for you.
I can’t. I have to keep looking. As she said it, she felt her throat tighten, the grief of the loss strangling her next words. Peter mercifully broke the silence she created.
Okay. I’ll see you Monday night. Love you. And with that he leaned in for a goodbye kiss.
Alice moved into it but rather than kissing him properly turned her head at the last moment, aiming her lips for his freshly shaved cheek to dodge direct, possibly wet contact with his mouth. The fruity potency of his drugstore shampoo fresh on his wet hair as they made brief contact brought back long afternoons reading fat Russian novels while sucking sour apple Jolly Ranchers.
Peter’s absence, as the door’s lock clicked behind him, immediately inundated Alice’s senses. It was as if a draft had cooled the apartment. In its wake, the atmosphere thinned, the room’s barometric pressure seeming to drop, taking Alice to a curiously open, airy space in which all that remained was her now-familiar canine grief and the promising prospect of a thoroughly chilled Chablis.
Trying to focus on the immediate physical pleasure of the crisp, cool wine filling her mouth, Alice opened the BBC app on her phone and woke her laptop. She recalled her grad school days as she tasted the minerality of the expensive wine. When they’d met, Peter had seemed old—and already a doctor. She’d been practically squatting in a decrepit studio apartment in Harlem, paying for her steady diet of yogurt, apples, peanut butter, and rice cakes on student loans and a tiny stipend from Columbia. Now she was navigating past the worries in her Google email tab to the pleasures of Poshmark, Luxury Closet, and Thredup. Scrolling through shirts, pants, bags, and sweaters, she added items to her various shopping bags. No sale would be completed, no shipping terms selected, no boxes ticked to match billing and shipping addresses. The harmless recreational activity would not cost her a cent.
At fifty-one, she was well into the pitiless softening of her body as time conspired with gravity to ruthlessly work over every cell of skin, cartilage, and muscle. Just in the past year she’d observed the fine crepe of the skin on her thighs. It reminded her of seersucker. The dewy plumpness of her nineteen-year-old daughters’ legs, arms, and cheeks came on as a surprise, their creamy beauty and ripe potential years removed from her own blighted physicality.
She’d been careless in the sun. Patches of liver-colored scale covered her arms and chest while the rest of her body was lightly doodled with odd freckles, cherry angiomas, and moles. Fifteen years of hair dye had resulted in a shade much lighter than her original brunette as the streaks of what had begun as highlights came to dominate the whole. It was no accident; her colorist had taken pity on her, incrementally lightening larger and larger swaths to cover the gray, manipulating the powerful chemicals to keep the effect as far removed as the art allowed from the brassy orange hue that crassly announced its artificiality under the fluorescent light of every New York City bathroom and subway car. For all of this, Alice was still pretty, with a wild, rangy look that matched her Northern California roots.
Running her fingers through her hair from the center part back, she cursed her lack of mental command as she rubbed her thumb and index finger together to release a stray hair. One more down, she thought, as the fine, expensively colored strand dropped to the floor.
If the dog had been there, she would have been in her lap, staring up at her, ears forward, listening. Alice could practically feel her pushing her cool black nose against her forearm. The dog had become an extension of herself the way the twins had as infants. Since that time, with the exception of her daughters, she’d failed at intimacy; her closeness to the dog was proof of this. There was nothing safer or more certain than the animal’s affection. When she wept she’d laugh at herself for whispering, It’s okay. Shhhhhh, kissing the dog’s face, ears, back, and belly as if it were the animal that needed comforting. The dog was never in a mood when she walked back in the apartment. Rather, she was consistently met by the outsize greeting of an animal losing her cool entirely as she whined and licked and wriggled in her arms. Coming home to the empty apartment was an affront.
Alice envisioned the flood of oxytocin all the kisses released, the hormone irrigating her brain, plumping her neurotransmitters with serotonin and dopamine. No wonder she experienced the loss of the dog as a physical assault. She longed to bury her face in Maebelle’s fur and inhale. As she sat, she tried to elicit the experience, the faint scent of Fritos or even, more incredibly, the traces of vanilla butter cookie—a soft, rich scent surely impossible for a dog to emit, especially one that traveled at ground level through the filth of New York City.
Peter’s right foot danced left-right, right-left between the brake and the accelerator. An abandoned seltzer bottle, subject to the abrupt changes in momentum, rattled over the filthy rubber mat on the passenger side, the muffled clank of glass against the metal seat adjuster passing through the car’s interior as background noise, as unidentifiable as inert gas. The bottle repeated its limited range of motion with each stop-and-go of the Memorial Day–weekend migration up the edge of the island as tens of thousands of drivers and their passengers huddled in their cars at dusk, united by the tiresome effort required to escape Manhattan.
Had he forgotten something, misspoken, or embarrassed himself? Was it the cool goodbye to Alice? Or maybe just the heavy traffic? Twenty minutes passed before Peter identified the source of his uneasiness in the noise and motion of the bottle. By this point, his nerves had been so played they erupted into a fluid rage that even he recognized as entirely out of proportion to the irritant. Without releasing his seatbelt, he leaned his six-foot-three frame sideways, his long arm effortlessly retrieving the errant bottle. Ruthlessly jamming it into the cup holder, he resisted the childish urge to hurl it out the window, manfully denying himself the satisfaction of smashing it to bits on the pavement.
Focusing on the shameful expanse of faded silver paint covering the pitted metal of his 2011 Toyota Highlander, he breathed deeply, consciously mesmerizing himself with the idea of glowing red brake lights stretching for miles in his wake, a mirror image of those before him. With his well-preserved head of dark hair, shirt sleeves rolled past the elbow, khaki pants cuffed, and driving loafers, Peter tried to relax into the drive. The proletarian dignity of his well-used car against the piercing glint of the freshly acquired Lexuses, Land Rovers, and BMWs jockeying for position around him gave him a taste of self-righteous modesty. He enjoyed the aggressive game of chicken required as cars closed in on him, bumpers hugging in an effort to gain or prevent a car length’s advantage.
After twenty minutes of spirited play, he knifed the nose of the big car left, breaking free of the mess exiting onto I-95/George Washington Bridge by veering onto the shoulder to avoid a Mercedes SUV blocking the far left lane. The driver had either genuinely decided to exit at the last moment or, more likely, chosen to beat the line by going around the piled-up cars by using the less congested third lane, then cutting in at the last moment.
Asshole, Peter muttered, his righteous irritation resting effortlessly next to the knowledge that he wasn’t above such sleazy tricks himself. Upright in the passenger seat of the errant Mercedes, a large black Labrador retriever sat looking as patient as its breed demanded, and yet Peter thought he detected a vague disgust with the undignified tactics of its chauffeur. The sight of the dog brought Maebelle to mind.
A car—any car—could have crippled her or, for that matter, crushed the three hundred–plus bones