Hello Beautiful

Alice did have questions, but she wasn’t going to ask her mother or grandmother for answers. Her mother had manipulated her with silences for her entire life. Closed-off conversations, deflected questions. She’d left Alice to guess and strategize without any of the necessary facts. They’d both lied to her — Rose perhaps by omission — and weren’t trustworthy sources of information.

When Alice had left the Greek restaurant and her mother that night, she’d walked all the way from the Upper West Side to the Brooklyn apartment she shared with Carrie. It was a one-bedroom, with a pullout couch in the living room. The official arrangement was that the two women alternated weeks in the bedroom. There was some flexibility to this if Carrie was sleeping at a date’s apartment, or if one of them was too tired to pull out the couch, they would sleep together in the double bed. When Alice walked in, Carrie was already in her pajamas, writing in a journal on the couch bed; it was her week there. She looked like the grown version of the little girl Alice had befriended in kindergarten: petite, with large blue eyes and a brown pixie haircut. Alice, because of how she had stretched and grown over the years, no longer resembled her kindergarten self at all.

Carrie took Alice in from head to toe and said, “Clearly something enormous has happened.” She stood and, as if she were preparing to boil water and gather towels, asked, “What do you need?”

Alice stood by the door until she’d told Carrie everything. Then she dropped her backpack and coat on the floor, tugged off her low boots, and curled up on the sofa bed. She hugged her knees to her chest, and Carrie rubbed her back.

“You have a dad,” Carrie said, with wonder in her voice.

“Kind of? He isn’t my father legally. He didn’t want me.” Alice’s hair was over her face; she spoke into a light-colored curtain.

“Only your mother could keep a secret like this for twenty-five years.” Carrie told strangers intimate details of her life minutes after meeting them and had always found Julia’s composure baffling. Once, when they were teenagers and Carrie was sleeping over at their apartment, Carrie had asked Julia when she’d lost her virginity. Alice and Carrie had watched something happen inside Julia that made her face turn a light shade of purple, and then she’d said she needed to make a work call — at nine o’clock on a Friday evening — and left the room.

“She could have kept this secret forever.” Alice looked at Carrie. “I think she was trying to hurt me with it. She looked…I don’t know, a little excited.”

“About what it might do to you?” Carrie said.

Alice nodded. She felt tears pressing the backs of her eyes. “I don’t see why how I choose to live my life, which doesn’t hurt anyone, bothers her so much.”

“Oh, Alice,” Carrie said.

“I like having a simple life.” Alice could feel all the stray threads inside her; the tiny scissors had cut through every one. “I don’t like to…feel so much.”

“I know.” Carrie was quiet for a minute, then said, “I’ve been keeping my mouth shut about you and your mom, as much as I could, forever. You know that.”

Alice nodded, already resigned to whatever was coming. “Go ahead,” she said. “Say whatever you want.”

Carrie set her face; she took this permission, this opportunity, seriously. “Okay, here’s what I think happened. From my vantage point, you sealed yourself up, probably right after your mom told you that your dad died. The only people you loved before that news — that lie, as it turns out — are still the only people you love with all your heart. The only people you let yourself love. Me, your mom, and your grandmother. I feel like when we were kids, sometimes you almost opened yourself up. Remember you had a crush on that boy with the spiky hair when we were in middle school? But then you closed down completely. You have the best heart, and you don’t use it. Your mom is responsible for that. It’s like she raised you to be a Navy SEAL or something, with a completely unusual skill set. Julia’s even more responsible than I thought, since she freaking lied to you for your whole life. She’s obviously realizing that now and wants to try to undo her mistakes.”

“I don’t need to be undone.” Alice felt her own stubbornness, like a bump in the carpet, but didn’t care. “I wish she hadn’t told me.”

Carrie leaned over and kissed Alice’s cheek. She looked brighter, like a cleaned lantern, after being allowed to deliver the speech she’d been suppressing for years. “Julia did tell you, though, and this is exciting too, you know? Your dad is alive. You can go meet him and ask him why he did what he did. You have all his genes, after all. You can go meet this tall man.”

“I have to figure out the timeline before I can consider that,” Alice said. “I have to find out what happened in Chicago. I don’t know anything, Carrie.”