Filed to story: The One That Got Away
At this, the corners of Alice’s mouth turn down, and I get up and fling my arms around her neck. She leans her head back and smiles up at me. “I’m OK,” she says, but she isn’t, I know she isn’t.
“It’s not too late, you know. You can go over there right now and tell him you changed your mind.”
Alice shakes her head. “It’s done, Bella.” I release her and she closes her laptop. “When will the first batch be ready? I’m hungry.”
I look at the magnetic egg timer on the fridge. “Four more minutes.” I sit back down and say, “I don’t care what you say, Alice. You guys aren’t done. You love him too much.”
She shakes her head. “Bella,” she begins, in her patient Alice voice, like I am a child and she is a wise old woman of forty-two.
I wave a spoonful of cookie dough under Alice’s nose, and she hesitates and then opens her mouth. I feed it to her like a baby. “Wait and see, you and Josh will be back together in a day, maybe two.” But even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not true. Alice’s not the kind of girl to break up and get back together on a whim; once she’s decided something, that’s it. There’s no waffling, no regrets. It’s like she said: when she’s done, she’s just done.
I wish (and this is a thought I’ve had many, many times, too many times to count) I was more like Alice. Because sometimes it feels like I’ll never be done.
Later, after I’ve washed the dishes and plated the cookies and set them on Kitty’s pillow, I go to my room. I don’t turn the light on. I go to my window. Josh’s light is still on.
The next morning, Alice is making coffee and I am pouring cereal in bowls, and I say the thing I’ve been thinking all morning. “Just so you know, Daddy and Kitty are going to be really upset.” When Kitty and I were brushing our teeth just now, I was tempted to go ahead and spill the beans, but Kitty was still mad at me from yesterday, so I kept quiet. She didn’t even acknowledge my cookies, though I know she ate them because all that was left on the plate were crumbs.
Alice lets out a heavy sigh. “So I’m supposed to stay with Josh because of you and Daddy and Kitty?”
“No, I’m just telling you.”
“It’s not like he would come over here that much once I was gone anyway.”
I frown. This didn’t occur to me, that Josh would stop coming over because Alice was gone. He was coming over long before they were ever a couple, so I don’t see why he should stop. “He might,” I say. “He really loves Kitty.”
She pushes the start button on the coffee machine. I’m watching her super carefully because Alice’s always been the one to make the coffee and I never have, and now that she’s leaving (only six more days), I’d better know how. With her back to me she says, “Maybe I won’t even mention it to them.”
“Um, I think they’ll figure it out when he’s not at the airport, Gogo.” Gogo is my nickname for Alice. As in go-go boots. “How many cups of water did you put in there? And how many spoons of coffee beans?”
“I’ll write it all down for you,” Alice assures me. “In the notebook.”
We keep a house notebook by the fridge. Alice’s idea, of course. It has all the important numbers and Daddy’s schedule and Kitty’s carpool. “Make sure you put in the number for the new dry cleaners,” I say.
“Already done.” Alice slices a banana for her cereal: each slice is perfectly thin. “And also, Josh wouldn’t have come to the airport with us anyway. You know how I feel about sad goodbyes.” Alice makes a face, like Ugh, emotions.
I do know.
When Alice decided to go to college in Scotland, it felt like a betrayal. Even though I knew it was coming, because of course she was going to go to college somewhere far away. And of course she was going to go to college in Scotland and study anthropology, because she is Alice, the girl with the maps and the travel books and the plans. Of course she would leave us one day.
I’m still mad at her, just a little. Just a teeny-tiny bit. Obviously I know it’s not her fault. But she’s going so far away, and we always said we’d be the Song girls for ever. Alice first, me in the middle, and my sister Kitty last. On her birth certificate she is Katherine; to us she is Kitty. Occasionally we call her Kitten, because that’s what I called her when she was born: she looked like a scrawny, hairless kitten.
We are the three Song girls. There used to be four. My mom, Eve Song. Evie to my dad, Mommy to us, Eve to everyone else. Song is, was, my mom’s last name. Our last name is Rupert – Rupert like lovey, not like cove. But the reason we are the Song girls and not the Rupert girls is my mom used to say that she was a Song girl for life, and Alice said then we should be too. We all have Song for our middle name, and we look more Song than Rupert anyway, more Korean than white. At least Alice and I do; Kitty looks most like Daddy: her hair is light brown like his. People say I look the most like Mommy, but I think Alice does, with her high cheekbones and dark eyes. It’s been almost six years now, and sometimes it feels like just yesterday she was here, and sometimes it feels like she never was, only in dreams.
She’d mopped the floors that morning; they were shiny and everything smelled like lemons and clean house. The phone was ringing in the kitchen, she came running in to answer it, and she slipped. She hit her head on the floor, and she was unconscious, but then she woke up and she was fine. That was her lucid interval. That’s what they call it. A little while later she said she had a headache. She went to lie down on the couch, and then she didn’t wake up.
Alice was the one who found her. She was twelve. She took care of everything: she called 911; she called Daddy; she told me to watch over Kitty, who was only three. I turned on the TV for Kitty in the playroom and I sat with her. That’s all I did. I don’t know what I would have done if Alice hadn’t been there. Even though Alice is only two years older than me, I look up to her more than anybody.
When other adults find out that my dad is a single father of three girls, they shake their heads in admiration, like, How does he do it? How does he ever manage that all by himself? The answer is Alice. She’s been an organizer from the start, everything labelled and scheduled and arranged in neat, even rows.
Alice is a good girl, and I guess Kitty and I have followed her lead. I’ve never cheated or gotten drunk or smoked a cigarette or even had a boyfriend. We tease Daddy and say how lucky he is that we’re all so good, but the truth is, we’re the lucky ones. He’s a really good dad. And he tries hard. He doesn’t always understand us, but he tries, and that’s the important thing. We three Song girls have an unspoken pact: to make life as easy as possible for Daddy. But then again, maybe it’s not so unspoken, because how many times have I heard Alice say, “Shh, be quiet, Daddy’s taking a nap before he has to go back to the hospital,” or “Don’t bother Daddy with that; do it yourself”?
I’ve asked Alice what she thinks it would have been like if Mommy hadn’t died. Like would we spend more time with our Korean side of the family and not just on Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day? Or-
Alice doesn’t see the point in wondering. This is our life; there’s no use in asking what if. No one could ever give you the answers. I try, I really do, but it’s hard for me to accept this way of thinking. I’m always wondering about the what-ifs, about the road not taken.
Daddy and Kitty come downstairs at the same time. Alice pours Daddy a cup of coffee, black, and I pour milk in Kitty’s cereal bowl. I push it in front of her, and she turns her head away from me and gets a yogurt out of the fridge. She takes it into the living room to eat in front of the TV. So she’s still mad.
“I’m going to go to Costco later today, so you girls make a list for whatever you need,” Daddy asks, taking a big sip of coffee. “I think I’ll pick up some New York strips for dinner. We can grill out. Should I get one for Josh too?”
My head whips in Alice’s direction. She opens her mouth and closes it. Then she says, “No, just get enough for the four of us, Daddy.”
I give her a reproving look, and she ignores me. I’ve never known Alice to chicken out before, but I suppose in matters of the heart, there’s no predicting how a person will or won’t behave.
So now it’s the last days of summer and our last days with Alice. Maybe it’s not altogether such a bad thing that she broke up with Josh; this way we have more time with just us sisters. I’m sure she must have thought of that. I’m sure it was part of the plan.
We’re driving out of our neighbourhood when we see Josh run past. He joined track last year, so now he’s always running. Kitty yells his name, but the windows are up, and it’s no use anyway – he pretends not to hear. “Turn around,” Kitty urges Alice. “Maybe he wants to come with us.”
“This is a Song-girls-only day,” I tell her.
We spend the rest of the morning at Target, picking up last-minute things like Honey Nut Chex mix for the flight and deodorant and hair ties. We let Kitty push the cart so she can do that thing where she gets a running start and then rides the cart like she’s pushing a chariot. Alice only lets her do it a couple of times before she makes her stop, though, so as not to annoy other customers.
Next we go back home and make chicken salad with green grapes for lunch and then it’s nearly time for Kitty’s swim meet. We pack a picnic dinner of ham-and-cheese sandwiches and fruit salad and bring Alice’s laptop to watch movies on, because swim meets can go long into the night. We make a sign too, that says Go Kitty Go! I draw a dog on it. Daddy ends up missing the swim meet because he is delivering a baby, and as far as excuses go, it’s a pretty good one. (It was a girl, and they named her Patricia Rose after her two grandmothers. Daddy always finds out the first and middle name for me. It’s the first thing I ask when he gets home from a delivery.)
Kitty’s so excited about winning two first-place ribbons and one second place that she forgets to ask where Josh is until we’re in the car driving back home. She’s in the backseat and she’s got her towel wrapped around her head like a turban and her ribbons dangling from her ears like earrings. She leans forward and says, “Hey! Why didn’t Josh come to my meet?”
I can see Alice hesitate, so I answer before she can. Maybe the only thing I’m better at than Alice is lying. “He had to work at the bookstore tonight. He really wanted to make it though.” Alice reaches across the console and gives my hand a grateful squeeze.
Sticking out her lower lip, Kitty says, “That was the last regular meet! He promised he’d come watch me swim.”
“It was a last-minute thing,” I say. “He couldn’t get out of working the shift because one of his co-workers had an emergency.”
Kitty nods begrudgingly. Little as she is, she understands emergency shifts.