An Exercise in the Life They Thought Could Be- A Short Story
Taken from the anthology “The Beginning and The End”, this story and more like it can be found here.
“I’m not like anyone else you’ve ever met,” she said.
“Says who?”
“Me.”
“Don’t you think you should get to know me a bit more before you say something like that?” said the man. He had mottled brown hair of the color that looked like it occupied vast swaths of a muted and unnaturally bland rainbow. It might’ve been red but in a flash it also might’ve been black. He smiled at the woman who sat across from him. They hadn’t ordered food but hot coffees warmed the palms of their hands, a welcome heat in the soft autumn breeze that passed them slowly by. Leaves rustled as they tumbled across rough concrete, in no hurry to go but far too light to stay.
“Who you are has no effect on who I am or who I’ve been,” she said. “I just want you to understand the way things are.”
He smiled. He’d seen her standing on the bridge overlooking rushing waters every Saturday for the last several weeks and it had taken him several more to stop his morning run and ask her the question that had played over and over in his head, as if it came from a record scratched and broken by time. He’d stammered a bit, the remnant of a childhood stutter, but thought he managed well enough to pass it off as being out of breath on an unusually windy day. On that morning, he’d asked her how she was doing and if he could buy her a drink and when she said she didn’t drink, he’d asked if he could get her a coffee sometime instead. She’d smiled then and said yes, that would be just fine. When she said moments later that she didn’t have a phone, his heart sank even as they made firm plans to meet at the little coffee shop just off main street in the center of town. It wasn’t that he would’ve blamed her if she’d been giving him a silent hint, a lot of times it was easier that way, but his heart had leapt when he’d first seen her and it had rarely stopped since.
“I’m Eric,” he’d said.
“You can call me Alice.”
His heart leapt again later that week when he’d turned the corner with a sunset at his back and saw her sitting outside at one of the small iron tables. It teetered uncertainly now and then, the flaw of a short table leg exposed as she rested her chin on her hands. A cozy black scarf wrapped around her neck and fluttered in the breeze, so unlike the stark red hair that shone in the orange light of the evening and seemed so unwilling to be disturbed by anything at all. She hadn’t waved when she saw him coming but she did smile, and he’d never felt more happy to be anywhere at all than he was in that moment. He’d taken a deep breath, coughing slightly at the cold rush of air, and joined her. He didn’t ask if they should move inside due to the chill in the air because she didn’t seem cold. Much as she had on the bridge, she seemed to be exactly where she wanted to be and he didn’t want to do anything to disturb that.
“Do you always start dates like this?” asked Eric.
Alice shrugged. “I don’t go on many,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
She frowned thoughtfully, her lips pursing as she looked away into the coffee shop that bustled with the kind of life that was common once the temperatures dropped. Some wore scarves similar to hers but most didn’t. It wasn’t that cold, not yet. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the point,” she said. “Have you?”
“I mean, sure,” he said. “No one wants to go through life alone, do they?”
“What if you’re two people going different places?”
“Well I’d imagine the company might still be enjoyable for as long as it lasts,” he said. “You know? A travel companion who can at least hang out for a little while might make the trip a little more exciting.”
“Excitement fades,” she said.
He held up a finger that pointed to the sky. “But that doesn’t mean it was never there,” he said.
“You’re an optimist?” she said, and even though it wasn’t really a question, the man nodded. “Interesting.”
“Are you not?”
“I’m not really anything at all,” she said. “I’m just me.”
“Well that’s gotta count for something,” he said.
“I suppose it does,” she said.
He didn’t mention that it didn’t sound like she meant it as a good thing. The right thing to say was something he often found hard to find, so he didn’t want to risk taking a wrong turn so early in the evening. It’d been a while since he’d gone on a date, but it hadn’t been that long.
“So tell me a bit about yourself,” he said. “Are you from around here?”
Alice smiled around the rim of her cup as she drank. She’d asked for black coffee, no cream or sugar, and the steam rose around her face as if she was a genie coming out of a lamp. “Not really, no. But I’ve been here a while,” she said, and he asked if she had any family. “Loads. But they’re not from here either. What about you?”
“All my family is down south. That’s where I grew up, near the canyons down in Arizona,” he said. “How I wound up here, I’ll honestly never know. Once it starts snowing I feel all sorts of regret.”
“I like the heat,” she said, gesturing dramatically at the thick sleeves of her jacket before tossing the loose end of her scarf back over her shoulder. “Always have.”
“I hope you’re prepared then. I saw online that we’re supposed to brace ourselves for a cold winter,” said Eric. “Which is terrible news, but I guess it could be worse.”
“It will always be worse,” she said.
“Ah! So you’re a pessimist!”
Alice shook her head and he loved the way her hair shimmered in the dimming light. It was a sunset all his own. “It’s just the way things are,” she said. “When you know what’s coming it’s hard to be anything. You’re standing in the middle of the road and all you see are the bright lights.”
“A deer in the headlights is still a deer,” he said, and to his relief Alice smiled.
“I guess you’re right. Then I’ll admit to being a pessimist,” she said, raising her coffee in a silent toast. “Happy?”
“I’m slightly competitive so it’s hard not to be. If it helps, as an optimist I can help balance us out. That way we can be the nothing you said you were,” he said. “A negative and a positive paired up to become a flat line of reality!”
White teeth flashed in a quick grin and she ran fingers through her hair that ended in sharp nails painted black. “I can handle that,” she said. “You’re good at this, you know.”
“What? Talking?” he asked, and she nodded. “I try my best. I live under a cloud of constant fear that I’ll say something wrong, so it tends to keep me on my toes.”
“Well you’re doing great,” she said.
“We’ll have to make sure to do it again sometime, then,” he said. “If I don’t blow it, I mean. Because there’s still more than enough time for that.”
Alice looked over her shoulder and down the sidewalk that ran along a main road and stretched on for just long enough that everything at its end was now hidden in the fading light of a day becoming night. “Can I be honest with you?” she asked, continuing only after Eric nodded without hesitation. “I’m afraid this is going to be a one-and-done for me.”
Eric tried not to let the pang of sadness show even as he felt it swell like a wave. “And to think I thought I was doing so well,” he said.
“You’re doing great,” said Alice, and he almost got the feeling she wanted to reach out and take his hand even though she didn’t. “That’s not what this is about. I just wanted to let you know because it would be a shame to let this time we share get clouded by a truth I didn’t tell. I used to lie a lot and, well, I just don’t like to anymore.”
He did his best to smile and tilted his head as he watched the woman across from him. “Just a one date kind of a girl, huh?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so,” she said. “You really know how to pick them.”
“Believe it or not, I’ve been told that before,” he said.
“Have you really? I’m sorry,” she said, this time reaching out and patting his hand, her skin hot against his. “I just have to go home, that’s all.”
“Will you be coming back?”
She smiled and so far it was the only one that seemed insincere. “I don’t believe so,” she said. “It’s not that kind of visit. It’s not a visit at all, I guess.”
“Then why’d you agree to meet?” he asked. “You didn’t have to, you know. I would’ve understood.”
The woman named Alice drank her coffee and the look in her eyes got lost somewhere in the distance that separated them. “Do you mind if I sound like a child right now?” she asked.
Eric laughed. “I can’t wait to hear where you’re going with this,” he said.
“I just wanted things to end on a high note,” she said. “I wanted to remember something nice.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well now I feel like a dick for laughing.”
“Don’t,” she said. “I love the sound.”
“Alright then. If this is going to be your only memory of me, I’ll see if I can’t make it happen a couple more times before the night ends,” he said.
“I’d like that,” said Alice. “I really would.”
“Can I ask you something?” he said, and she nodded. “Why the bridge?”
Alice beamed. “It’s one of my favorite spots,” she said. “I love it there. I love the way the wind feels against my skin and more than that I love to watch the water. Have you ever sat there and watched it? Really watched it, I mean. And have you seen how it moves and how graceful and beautiful it is? I could watch it forever, I think.”
“I guess I kind of took it for granted,” said Eric. “I never thought to look at it that way.”
The woman sighed with contentment and leaned back in her chair, tilting her head back as if dying to feel every bit of the world around her. “I remember the first time I saw it,” she said. “It was everything. And how could anyone ever want to look away from everything?”
“So you go there often?”
“Every day for as long as I can remember,” she said.
“Well I wish I would’ve started running that route much sooner,” he said. “I think I could’ve handled meeting you when we had a little more time.”
Alice smiled and it was the kind of thing that looked so very happy to be sad. “I would’ve liked that,” she said. “It was always going to end this way, but it’s nice to think about a world in which it didn’t.”
“Why do you say that?”
The woman grew quiet then and it was a silence so deafening that it seemed to muffle the world around them. It reminded Eric of the time he’d gone hunting with his father and how, when the forest around them realized they were there and that there were predators in the woods, it was as if any living thing that might’ve been had gone away forever. He’d never picked up a gun again, not after that. It was impossible to forget what that kind of void felt like and no matter what, he never wanted to experience it again. So when Alice went quiet and the wind died around them, he licked his lips and wondered where he’d gone wrong.
If he’d said something to make her feel like the birds in the trees, he’d never forgive himself.
“Alice?”
She looked down at her hands, tapping her nails together as if counting the seconds that passed them by. When she looked up, the smile and happiness of a moment before had gone and been replaced by a mask sculpted by floods of emotion he didn’t really understand, and they moved in waves across eyes that blazed with intensity. For all the times he’d seen her in passing, gazing into the waters of the river with a contented smile on her lips, he’d never once seen her look anything like that. Come to think of it, he’d never seen that emotional chaos in anyone before and it forced him to sit a little further back in his chair. It wasn’t that he was scared, he just didn’t know what to do and powerlessness is a terrible thing.
“Do you believe in God?” she asked eventually, the words coming out with so much reluctance that it was as if they were the very last ones she ever wanted to say.
Eric frowned. He’d been expecting a lot of things, the possibilities bouncing around his imagination in an incessant flurry, but he hadn’t been expecting that. He almost answered flippantly, a sharp joke to break a tension he wasn’t sure how they’d wandered into, but there was something that stopped him. Whatever it was that was causing her to feel what she felt, he wanted only to make it go away.
“I guess I’m not sure,” he said. “I thought so once, but that was a long time ago. I was a different person back then.”
Alice folded her hands in front of her and watched him.
“Is everything alright?” he asked. “If I said something wrong, I’m sorry.”
“He believes in me,” she said.
That was it, those four words, and she said each one with a punishing weight. They fell like boulders in a valley and they broke apart the silence that had settled around them. Suddenly he could hear the birds again, their songs a lilting journey through the air, and he saw leaves that were once again rustling as they scattered across the ground at the behest of that autumn breeze. Those who sat inside the coffee shop went about their lives as if nothing had changed, separated from the pair of them by a solitary pane of glass, and yet he could hear the ringing of porcelain mugs on tables that made them feel so much closer. It made him feel like everything was alright, like the world hadn’t gone strange. It was exactly as it had been. All that had changed was them.
“That’s a good thing, right?” he asked. “That belief?”
“It depends on who you ask.”
“Well, I’m asking you,” he said.
Alice sighed and some of the tension that had gathered around her in a silent storm began to fade. She ran a hand across her face and when she looked at him, she did so with a mix of exasperation and hopelessness that seemed so foreign for the woman he’d only begun to know. “No, Eric,” she said. “It’s not a good thing. It’s just one of those unavoidable truths.”
“I guess I’m not familiar with those.”
“They’re the kind you can’t run away from,” she said. “They’re the ones that follow you all your life, no matter how long it lasts.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
She raised her eyebrows and a wry smile passed as a ghost across her face. “Is there anything you can do?” she asked. “No, Eric. That’s not how this works.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just didn’t seem right not to ask.”
The woman laughed and then she took a deep breath, whistling when she let it go. “I appreciate that,” she said. “I really do. It’s just one of those things.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me about it?”
“I think I’ve killed the mood more than enough,” she said. “There’s no need to ruin a nice time.”
“What if I say you wouldn’t be ruining anything?” he asked. “If this is the only time I’ll get to see you, who’s to say making everything a little more memorable would be a bad thing. And if talking about it helps, maybe it won’t be a bad thing at all.”
“Talking about bad things doesn’t exactly stop them from existing,” said Alice.
“I know. But having a friend might help.”
“You’re a good person,” she said. “I’d hate for you to go through life remembering me as I am. Wouldn’t it be nice if all I ever was was that woman on the bridge? If good things never had to go away?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But that’s not how life goes.”
She sighed and it rose as steam in the cold evening air. “No, it’s not,” she said. “Alright then, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Eric frowned. “The worst thing?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know, I guess,” he said slowly.
“You don’t have to worry,” she said. “There’s nothing you can say that’ll turn my stomach. There’s not much I haven’t seen and there’s even less I haven’t heard.”
Eric laughed, pausing for a moment to take in the way it made her smile. He ran a hand through his hair, wondering if he was only doing it because he’d so liked when she’d done the same, and then he took a long sip of coffee. It wasn’t liquid courage and he’d never once wished for a coffee cup to be filled with whiskey more than he did in that moment, but it would have to be enough. He liked the strange woman from the bridge and he loved the way she watched him as if he was a bird in the trees, something to enjoy if only for a moment. More than that, he wanted her to feel as she’d felt when he’d first joined her at the table and if the only way out was to travel down a strange road with someone he didn’t know, then maybe that was enough.
“Promise you won’t look at me differently?” he asked.
She smiled and nodded. “I don’t bite,” she said.
“Well… I don’t know. I guess I cheated on my college girlfriend,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were in love or anything but it also wasn’t just once. It was a couple times and that kind of thing sticks with you, you know? No matter how many years pass, whenever I think about that time in my life her face pops up and everything I did is always following closely behind.”
“Did she know?”
“Eventually,” he said. “That kind of thing isn’t ever going to stay hidden forever, I don’t think.”
“How does it make you feel?”
“Pretty terrible, honestly. I hate that I made her feel like that,” he said. “She was a good person and I just wasn’t. I don’t know if it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done, but it’s the one I can’t seem to put behind me even though I wish I could. So I think that matters. I think it counts.”
“I think it does too,” she said, and she seemed satisfied.
“I don’t have to keep going, do I?” he asked.
Alice shook her head, her hair moving in red waves. “It’s not pleasant, is it? Telling someone the truth of who you are,” she said. “Thank you for telling me anyway.”
“Hey, whatever you need,” he said, and she smiled. “What about you? Tell me, strange woman of the bridge, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
The fire he saw in her eyes earlier in the evening flashed again. If he’d been a more confident man, he would’ve sworn they really were flames and not just a metaphor for the mischievous look that seemed to be in an endless war with dread. He couldn’t tell if her smile was happy or sad. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or enjoying the moment. All he knew was that he was sitting at a small wrought iron table with someone he simply could not understand. Maybe that understanding would come. Then again, maybe all he’d ever have was the opportunity to tell friends and coworkers about the strange woman and the single date they’d spent together.
“Are you sure you want to know?” she asked.
“Will it help?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve never talked about it before.”
“Then yes. I like you, Alice,” he said. “Whatever is weighing you down, I can handle it.”
She smiled then and there was no part of it that wasn’t bitterness and anger. “Really?” she asked. “If even God can’t, how can you?”
Eric didn’t say anything at all. It wasn’t the kind of conversation you can practice in the bathroom mirror before a first date, not when everything had gone off script without so much as a warning. He just shrugged. It seemed as good a response as any and even though he knew he was standing at the edge of a very long pier, everything that had brought him to that moment was keeping him right where he was. The contentment on her face as she’d lingered on the bridge, looking at something he couldn’t see. The soft smile that greeted him when he’d first said hello. It was all there and he was a small boat held fast in rising waves by an anchor set in the depths so far below.
“I like you, Eric,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I am too.”
“But I have done some terrible things.”
“Haven’t we all?”
Alice raised her cup to her lips, watching him over the rim with eyes masked by its rising fog. “I’m not talking about cheating on a lover,” she said. “Like I said, I’m talking about terrible things.”
“I’m sorry but you’re going to have to elaborate a bit,” he said. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“Do you believe in evil?”
“I don’t know. I guess?”
“I do,” she said. “I always have and do you know why?”
Eric shook his head.
“When I was born, and it seems like so long ago, I heard the voice of God and was told that I was here to start fires and cause great pain,” she said. She sat her cup of coffee on the table and stirred the liquid with her finger, watching with faint happiness as the liquid swirled in its finite space. “There will be no happy ending for me because I’m not the character in a story anyone wants to be. But it’s okay, because I’ve known that all my life. The truth is a black hole and it swallows all things, good and bad.”
“I tried to get into astrophysics once. It didn’t take but even I know there’s no getting away from a black hole,” said Eric. “No matter what, it just drags you in.”
“Do you want to leave? I’ll be alright if you do,” she said. “You asked a girl to coffee and instead you got me.”
“I’m fine,” he said, and he was. He’d been around just long enough to meet more than his fair share of people who weren’t quite right. It didn’t so much scare him as it did make him terribly sad, and while he was aware that his was a sadness that would fade, theirs was not. They’d wear it like a cloak until one night they were swallowed up and there was nothing left to show that they were ever there. “I like being here.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re still the woman on the bridge.”
“Then you’re staying for the sake of who you thought I was rather than who I am.”
The man smiled. “Perhaps in a way,” he said. “But I’m also staying for the sake of someone I saw watching something so ordinary as if it was the most special thing in the world. It’s hard to find people like that.”
“It’s not ordinary to me though,” said Alice. “It’s something I’ve never seen before. It’s something I’ll never see again. I’m not seeing your ordinary things, Eric… I’m seeing something special. I’m seeing waves that are so much like clouds in that you can see everything in them, you can watch them move and change as they become anything in the world.”
“Well, then what do you see in the waves?”
Alice smiled and curled her hands around her cup. She kicked one of the table legs and watched the shimmer as black liquid rolled. “I see a time when I wouldn’t ever have to go home. When I would’ve spent my time here holding people close instead of saying horrible things and pushing them so far away that they were driven to the most terrible choices. I see a little house at the end of an abandoned block, where I could have one of those little fountains in my backyard so that every moment of every day I could sit in the grass and watch clear water tumble slowly down. I see forests that I would never have burned to ash and creatures of the earth that I would’ve fed with corn and pellets instead of pestilence and death,” she said, brushing her hair from where it had fallen in front of her face. “I would’ve done so much more with the time I’d been given because there is no water in the desert and even good things burn in lakes of fire.”
“Do you really think that’s how this ends?”
“It does for me,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’s just how things go.”
“I wish it wasn’t.”
She nodded and watched as the liquid fell still. “Me too,” she said. “I would’ve liked to have learned the piano. Do you like the piano, Eric? It took so long for me to hear it and then one day I realized I didn’t want each key to sound out of tune, that they were perfect the way they were. I could’ve been an artist, I think. Perhaps you would’ve met me writing songs on my bridge instead of saying goodbye to it.”
“Do you honestly think you’re going away?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “This is not my world. It’s not my home.”
“Then I wish it could’ve lasted forever.”
Alice looked up at him and smiled, the mischief and fire dulled by whatever it was that replaced it. She brushed at her eyes as if it was as foreign to her as it was to him. “I do too,” she said. “Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think you’ll tell your friends all about the worst date you’ve ever had and the woman who sat with you?”
Her eyes flickered across his face, moving first one way and then another, and Eric was reminded of the way his mother had looked at him, her eyes so desperately searching while she lay on the hospital bed. He’d left that night in pain and it was not some great gift that he would never have to go back so much as it was a fresh new thing that would stay in his skin like a fishhook that tugged and tore but never pulled free. What had hurt the most was the way she’d fallen back in her bed so tired and worn away by the passage of time. There had been no sense of relief and whatever she’d been searching for in the depths of his eyes and lines of his face hadn’t been found. He’d been her only son, but in that moment when she needed him most, he wasn’t what she’d been looking for. Maybe he hadn’t been anything at all.
Eric flinched when the woman reached out and touched his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Old habits.”
When he swallowed, he found there was no moisture left in
his mouth. She was looking off to her right, her eyes tracking a sparrow as it avoided a passing car for the sake of a lonely French fry that had yet to be claimed. The familiar flicker of his mother’s eyes was gone, replaced once more by the yearning ache with hints of mischievous things that had first stopped him in his tracks when he’d finally caught her attention after weeks of words that only ever seemed to catch in the back of his throat. She smiled when the bird gathered up its prize and vanished down a long alley that echoed with the sound of those like him. She kept smiling long after their final notes had ended.
“What are you, Alice?” asked Eric.
She pursed her lips and glanced back, only to quickly look away. “Pain, I think,” she said. “Agony, maybe? If there’s a difference I never bothered to check.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was surprised to find that he meant it.
“Me too,” she said. “I really am. I didn’t mean to but… a tiger can’t change its spots.”
“Stripes.”
“What?”
“Tigers have stripes. Leopards have spots,” he said, and Alice smiled.
“I didn’t know that. Stripes… Thank you,” she said. “Do you think I’m crazy, Eric?”
He hesitated before shaking his head. He didn’t know why, he didn’t know anything anymore, but he was somehow certain of that one singular thing. “I don’t think so. But I wish I did,” he said.
“Me too,” she said again. “It’s funny how easy it is to prove pain. Everyone always just understands.”
“Have you always been like this?”
“Like me?” she asked, and he nodded. “Yes.”
“For how long?”
“A while.”
“That’s too bad,” he said.
Alice nodded slowly. “It really is, isn’t it?” she said. “I had so much time. And then when I finally understood who I wanted to be, I didn’t have any left at all.”
“Would you really have been a musician?”
The woman smiled. “I think I would’ve settled for being anything or anyone other than who I was. That’s not asking for too much, is it?” she said. “I’ve seen too much death, Eric, and I’ve caused even more. Only a cruel world would welcome me into it as a cruel thing and then punish me for who I’ve been. It doesn’t seem fair. I’ve done what was asked of me and knowing what that means is the only comfort I’ve been given.”
The man across from the woman of the bridge, who he hoped was a woman or a person or something he could at least understand but wasn’t too sure of anymore, wondered if it was just. He’d spent some time toying with the idea of going into law. It’s what a large number of his family had done so it wouldn’t have been too out of the ordinary, but he hadn’t lingered in that mindset quite long enough for any of it to hold much weight. All he had was the life that he’d lived and in it he had done his best each day to be a better person than he had been the day before. Sometimes he failed, he failed a lot if he was being honest, but the best part of that was that it made being better the following day a little easier than it might’ve otherwise been. He’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of in his life, he’d uttered so many words that should’ve been left in the quiet and lonely parts of anyone’s mind, and yet he hoped he was a good enough person to recognize truth.
But maybe it didn’t matter if he could. Maybe he was just there in the moment and the world was simply unfolding around him just as it would’ve if there’d been someone else in his chair instead of him.
He wondered momentarily if he was sitting up straight and if he fell backwards it would look like an old woman on a bed for the dying. She’d always told him to watch his posture. Maybe it had been disappointment in her eyes when she’d seen the man he’d become. Maybe-
“Eric?”
He blinked once and then a second time. It was the strangest thing, how tired she looked. “Again, huh?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I told you I wasn’t like anyone you’d ever met.”
“Do you do this to everyone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s horrible, Alice,” he said. “It really is.”
She smiled. “I know,” she said. “It doesn’t get any better. I think it probably just gets worse over time.”
“You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever known,” he said.
She winked. “A one date kind of girl.”
A silence settled between them and while it wasn’t quite as oppressive as the one that had chased away all sound and life, it was more than enough. He wondered if it was a black hole or a void before deciding it was just something that happens on cold autumn days when two people are afraid of what might happen next. He was worried that his moment might be ending, that the stroke of good fortune he’d felt when she’d agreed to meet him for coffee was about to run out. And her? He wasn’t too sure of anything. He thought perhaps she really was afraid to go home to a place no one would ever wish to go. Then again, maybe she was just a woman named Alice who stood at the peak of a sloping bridge in the hope that someone might come along to whom she could tell an incredible story.
He didn’t know which one it was. People were strange that way. Sometimes you never knew anything about them until they were gone and sometimes not even then.
“What’re you thinking about?” she asked.
Eric shrugged. “Wondering how I got here, I guess,” he said.
“I wonder that too. I really do and I…” she stuttered and paused, her voice growing quiet enough that everything around them got just a little bit louder. “I wish I could stay.”
“Are you sure you can’t?”
The woman nodded just once. There was no forgiveness in it, not for her or the things she said she’d done.
“What happens when you have to go?” he asked. “Can I walk you there? The company might be nice.”
“I’m not sure. I’d imagine I’m probably just not around anymore,” she said, snapping her fingers in such a way that, had they been in a movie, Eric would’ve expected sparks. “Here one moment, gone the next. Nothing to show I was ever here or that I wanted to linger.”
“I could stay with you until then?”
“Do you not understand what I am, Eric?”
“I figure I might,” he said. “But you’ve also told me what you wish you could’ve been, and some of that sounds just fine. At the very least, it matters to me.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Alice didn’t say that she wished his words counted for something, that what she wanted to be mattered half as much to those who watched as it did to her. She didn’t have to. The sadness in her face was becoming a little more noticeable as time passed them by not nearly slowly enough and while Eric was an ordinary man, he wasn’t stupid. There was something wrong and there was nothing more human than feeling the familiar pang of sadness one feels when there isn’t a single thing that can be done to make it better. He’d felt it many times throughout his life and, on the patio and in the company of something he didn’t understand, he felt it again.
“What should we talk about?” she asked, and rather than answer Eric did the only thing he could think to do. He kicked the table leg and watched as the woman stared deep into her coffee cup and beamed. It was a smile that was so bright it might’ve been lit by fire itself, but it was still a smile. It was still beautiful. And once again Eric found himself believing that such a simple truth had to count for something.
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me about who else you could’ve been and what else you might’ve done.”
And she did.
Leaves near death rushed around them and the birds of the alleys and trees sang, and all the while Alice watched small waters move to the tune of who she could’ve been had it all been different. She smiled at the man across from her, the only one who’d ever paused to say hello, and from time to time she laughed. She told him about grandiose dreams that spiraled out from all that she’d seen others do, both in where they went and what they experienced, and these ranged from adventurous travels to jumping out of airplanes. Some were more ordinary and she spoke of those in a quiet tone as if they were secrets just for her, the sort you might tell others when you know the time for hidden things is almost up. Eric didn’t understand most of them and they ranged from standing at an intersection in the center of a big city where you might feel wind coming from every direction at once, to touching a pane of glass frozen by the winter chill only to see it crack from the heat of your palm.
That was alright, though. They were pieces of a puzzle that wasn’t his.
And for all this time, he watched the fire in her eyes burn a little brighter even as her smile dimmed. It was then that the adventures and thrills came slowly drifting down like cotton falling from a tree at the urging of a summer wind. As Alice watched the coffee go still, she looked up at him and spoke of that which she would’ve most loved to know. When she did, her voice came in quiet stutters as if each word was foreign and new and never once did she look back at the coffee cup that now sat cradled in her hands. What she’d seen in it, he didn’t know. He supposed it could’ve been almost anything given the infinite nature of waves and so, maybe it was all of it all at once.
“I would’ve felt everything I made another feel,” she said. “Every loss, every regret, every unkind word. Every whisper that told them to leave behind the suffering. Every look that made them forget who they were supposed to be. Every push that sent them out into open air and blank space. That’s what I’d want, Eric. I suppose even now when my job is over, I want to understand what I’ve done and know what it is about life that made you spiral when I accidentally pushed you into the dark. I want to know what’s there, what I’ve missed, and all the very worst parts of being alive. Because I don’t have that. All I have is the shadow, some weak imitation, and the source of my pain is having to go away without even understanding how a finite life could ever be special enough to ruin.”
“It’s not great,” he said. “You’re not missing out on much.”
Alice smiled even though it didn’t mean any of the things a smile was supposed to mean. “I know,” she said. “But there’s not really life without it, is there?”
Eric thought of his mother and even the girl from college so long ago. “I guess you might be right,” he said.
“I am,” she said sadly. “I know a lot of things, you know. Unfortunately that’s one of them.”
It was then, with the world around them growing a little more quiet and just a bit more still as life began to find its way home, that Alice looked back over her shoulder and sighed. Her breath in the evening air could have almost been smoke mixing with the red of her hair, like a wildfire yet to burn out. Eric knew what it meant even though he didn’t want to and the look on her face said that she did too. It was pain, perhaps the truest part of who or what she was, but it was also exhaustion. It was a look that had been shared by his mother, a brave woman who had fought on for so long only to realize against her will that all things end, and there was no manipulation this time. What he felt, he felt honestly and it was everything he could do to stop himself from begging her not to go, to stay just a little while longer and tell him one last thing she wished she’d been able to do.
Alice, that infinitely strange woman from the bridge, smiled then and in its fragments were bits of the happiness he’d felt as she’d regaled him with tales of who she might’ve been.
“Thank you,” she said. “For sitting with me and pretending I’m more than I am.”
“Did it help?”
She tilted her head and looked at him, her finger traveling again and again around the rim of her coffee cup. “I really have no idea,” she said. “But I think so.”
“Will I ever see you again?” asked Eric.
She smiled that same sad smile he’d seen several times before. “I really hope not,” she said, and while she didn’t elaborate they both knew she didn’t need to.
“Can I sit with you, then? Til the end?”
“The end is all around us, but yes. If you like,” she said. “All I ask is that you close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“I think I’d rather you remember me for who you think I was, rather than what I am,” she said.
“You do know that there’s a part of me that thinks I’ll open my eyes and you’ll still be here, right?” he said. “That this has all been some sort of strange prank?”
Alice laughed and for all the pain that had settled around her, it was a pure and beautiful sound. “If that happens, and it won’t but if it does, all I ask is that you pretend like I’m not here anymore and slowly walk away,” she said. “Even at their most charming, anyone that crazy probably isn’t someone who should be bothered with. Especially not for the sake of a second date.”
Eric watched her in silence for a moment before nodding. “Alright then,” he said.
The woman across from him, that strange person who stood at the edge of a plummeting drop to stare down into the depths of ordinary things, smiled around the tears that had begun to gather in her eyes. “Thank you for everything,” she said. “It was nice to feel different, even if it didn’t last long.”
“I think… I think you would’ve been fantastic at being a regular person,” he said. And there, on the patio of a coffee shop and at the end of a day that hadn’t been anything special for most anyone other than him, Eric closed his eyes.
“I think so too,” said Alice, and the words came quietly and slowly as if they had so very far to go.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring into the darkness with no desire at all to see the light too soon and understand that he’d let her down. He tried counting off the seconds but he stopped when he realized he didn’t know what he was supposed to be counting to. He tried listening, as if he hoped there would be some sort of signal that might alert him that his good deed had come to an end. Then, when he realized there was no way for him to know much of anything at all, he leaned back in his chair and waited patiently for a moment he hoped would come. During that time he found himself wondering if the pain he now felt, the sadness and the loss, was one last bit of the woman named Alice, if even at the end she couldn’t help leaving behind one last sliver of who she’d always been, but he didn’t think so. For better or for worse, he chalked it up to the frustrating nature of being human.
What’s more, for all she said she’d done and who he thought she might’ve been, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe anything other than the strange and beautiful idea that even pain and anguish sculpted by the darkest of caves could want to be something more.
When the time seemed right and Eric opened his eyes, he took a deep breath of air that tasted like smoke and watched the way the last remnants of black coffee trembled in the bottoms of their cups. He watched the waves as she had and when he looked across the table, he smiled mostly to himself. There was pain in it and he wondered if there always would be, but the smile was still there and he figured that had to count for something. So when he got to his feet, he looked across the table and nodded a goodbye he hadn’t had the chance to say. And before he turned to leave, he kicked one of the table legs one last time. Just in case it mattered. Just in case even those small waves might still be seen.
He didn’t know if they would, but he could hope. And as the man walked slowly home, he thought of the bridge and the waters below and got lost in ordinary things.