Tangerine

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 had 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.

Maude took a small metallic notebook from her handbag, its outside a darkly embossed botanical design, the kind one saw in Victorian wallpaper, and using the gilded pen within, wrote the address on a slip of paper. I took it, my hand trembling as I placed it into my pocket.