The urgency of it had slammed her the moment she returned from California to settle the girls at Berkeley. Doing it would require unyielding discipline. Maybe she could convince Peter to prescribe the latest antidepressant for her, something that would help her motivation and focus: Cymbalta? Levomilnacipran? Wellbutrin? Was she depressed? She wasn’t sure. Wasn’t everyone? Too bad Peter would never do it.
His father, Dr. Jeremy Nutting, had made the mistake of dispensing drugs to family, diagnosing every relative’s ailment from the flu to broken toes to bipolar. As a GP he had claimed expertise in all fields, and when it came to his family he didn’t hesitate to deploy his authority to determine the best course. No great harm had been done, but Peter swore he would never wield his authority in the family as his father had, lording prescriptions for Valium over his mother, dispensing antibiotics to the family dog. Alice would have to see her own GP if she wanted any meds, and even then she might be referred to a psychopharmacologist. To hell with it, she thought, pouring herself another glass of wine.
Closing her laptop, she stared out the window toward the Hudson, fixing her gaze on the West Side Highway where a steady stream of cars came into and disappeared from view only to be replaced by more of the same colors and shapes. The numbing flow of vehicles moved north at what she thought of as smoking speed—slow enough to light a cigarette with the window down, the smoke swirling easily around the car’s interior, the burning cigarette resting in the left hand halfway out the driver’s side window. Rising, Alice retrieved the hidden pack of Camel Blues from a pouch in her purse, forced open the heavy window in the living room, and lit up. Smoking quickly, she drew hard between sips of wine, extending her hand out into the humid evening breeze between drags. She had three days to air the place out before Peter returned; she needed only twenty-four hours.
It was the day after losing Maebelle when, passing a bodega on Broadway while taping up flyers, she’d popped in for a coffee. Standing at the counter, intently focused on looking for Maebelle, her eyes had been attracted by the blue, black, red, green, and silver rows of cigarette packs arrayed neatly behind the register. It was the first pack she’d bought in fifteen years. They weren’t even Camel Lights now—they were Camel Blues. Whatever they were called, maintaining the virtues of her nonsmoking mommy days had no appeal. She’d forgotten how much she missed it. To hell with it, she thought, lighting another off the first.
Indulging herself in a tasty bit of magic as she smoked, she considered the idea that she’d lost Maebelle because she loved her too much—that the loss of her was cosmic retribution, punishment of a righteous force for loving the dog as one should love only the divine. Fortunately, Alice didn’t believe in God. If she believed in anything it was quantum physics, which, as it turned out, was an awful lot like believing in God. If Alice needed confirmation of the bizarre and unknowable universe, she’d found it in her work. To be a biophysicist was to admit that the physical world could not be explained; the ordering principles of the universe exceeded the intellectual capacity of the human brain. It was humbling. On the most minute level the physical world defied all laws. String theory was a framework for understanding matter that contradicted physical reality. It was magic—better than any show and entirely incompatible with fixed Newtonian principles of time, space, and movement. Although he never said as much, she suspected Peter viewed her concession to universal disorder as a form of infantile magical thinking and a possible sign of depression.
If only, Alice thought, the loss of the dog were punishment for something. What a relief that would be. As it was, her disappearance was a senseless mistake. No good could come of it, no lesson learned. It was simply another void, leaving her empty and bitter. The patina of stray dog hairs stuck to her pants, blankets, coats, and sweaters, the abandoned food dish, dry water bowl, and leash hanging by the door reminded her of her dead mother’s clothes. Mrs. Foster had amassed a grand wardrobe. It was all Alice’s now, though she could never wear the clothes without feeling she was borrowing them without permission—an impossibility given that her mother had been dead five years. But some essence buried in the fibers of the garments kept Alice from wearing the clothes, as if the warp of time and space was animated by their use, the electrical energy of a body in contact with the fabric bringing her prickly mother back to life.
Back at her desk, she forced her eyes to focus beyond the cars to the broad, dark expanse of the river where she followed the line of a massive tanker breaking the glassy surface of the water as it passed lazily downriver. The impotent tanker, propelled by a childish-looking red tugboat emblazoned with a giant M, nudged the hulking mass toward the open ocean, working against the incoming pull of the evening tide. As they slid into obscurity she noticed the traffic had stopped.
Gazing at the stopped cars, her wineglass sweating by her side, a tableau of select cars were frozen in view. Alice felt a flash of Peter’s pitiful frustration at being locked in. Rationally, the worst calamity of the traffic-clogging accident that had any connection to Peter was the rudeness of making their friends wait dinner. No, she told herself, I won’t indulge the ridiculous. It’s not my accident—not Peter’s accident—quite possibly not an accident at all. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to unlucky strangers.
Alice tried to think nice thoughts for the imagined victims … hoping the injuries weren’t too serious, nobody had died, they had excellent insurance. But the persistence of the thought that it could be Peter and worse, much worse, the sickening flash that she wanted it to be Peter, wouldn’t go away. No. Not that. Alice knew the monstrous fantasy was just a crazy reverse psychology trick of the mind when you envision the worst and then think you want something terrible to happen because you think it—the mind’s prohibition against the thought forcing what is feared into the foreground. How many times had she rehearsed the grisly play, imagining Peter or the girls or all three of them, dead? When they were on school buses, city streets, subways, or planes the thought flickered, back again as fast as she could think it away.
Most likely it’s just a system breakdown, thought Alice. One tiny fluctuation in traffic flow—a tailgater braking abruptly, a lousy driver tapping the brakes too frequently, someone going too slowly while texting—creating, as it would, a disproportionately large effect on the whole system. The strength of one tiny variable to change the whole from within was more alchemy than science. Ah well, thought Alice. Peter’s probably already past the bridge, well on his way up the Saw Mill, the slowdown in his wake.
Swallowing another great gulp of wine, Alice pushed her phone aside, as if a few more inches would help her resist the urge to call him. Entering rooms having forgotten why she was there, locking herself out, going out for the day without her phone—these actions resulted from the relentless narrative of what she was thinking frequently getting in the way of what she was doing—or was supposed to be doing. Except when she was working. When focused on the internal dynamics of a murmuration she could deliberately bring thought and action together.
The complexities of the liquid movement of massive flocks of starlings as they collectively contracted, expanded, and twisted in eerily grandiose order never failed to hold her attention. Alice applied mathematical formulas and computer models in an attempt to explain how the birds coordinated their movements with such astonishing precision. The rapidity of communication between the masses of birds perplexed science. It was a mystery not yet unraveled in spite of the supercomputers that could crunch set upon set of numbers in three dimensions. Alice’s work explained the surprising phenomenon using precise mathematical equations while still leaving a great deal to poetry. Her love of data acted as a counter-measure to the disorder of her messy room, moth-bitten sweater, unwashed hair, slightly redolent armpits, and filthy feet. Maybe that was why the fine balance between chaos and order attracted her as much as it explained her boredom with maintaining the physical details of her environment.
Grabbing a bag of apricots from the counter, she ran a tub and slid in. There was something inexplicably bewitching about eating a dozen apricots while soaking in a tub of cool water. Her sweat leaked into the chilly black water of the unlit bathroom to mingle with the porcelain along with the pits she carelessly dropped like pebbles between her spread legs. She ate the fruit greedily, biting into them one after