Page 48 of Life Out of Order

“There wasn’t much to eat where I was.”

“So where were you?”

“There’s a house I end up in, sometimes,” Alba says. “In the past, it’s fairly comfortable and usually there’s food. This time I went forward, and things were sort of—abandoned. Spooky. I was there for a couple of weeks just now, living off of old canned food, trying to ration it because I didn’t know how long I’d be there. I could eat a whole pie by myself. Maybe two.” As she’s talking, Alba opens the fridge, takes out the milk and pours herself a glass. She gulps it and ends up with a milk mustache. I wonder how much of her life Alba has spent away, cumulatively? What if she disappeared for years and I only missed her for a few minutes? What if she comes back and suddenly she’s an old woman? I never realized that she might be living so much of her life in other time, that it might be so unbalanced. What does she do there? Alba wipes off her milky mustache and smiles at me.

I fold the piecrust gently over itself, scoop it up and transfer it to the waiting rhubarb pie. I ease it into position, unfold it and begin to crimp the edges. This is pie number four, and it is not any more confident looking than the first three. “Do you do that a lot?” I ask her. “Disappear and not mention it to me?”

“Not a lot,” she says, warily. “Occasionally. If anything interesting happens, I tell you about it.”

“I mean, you were away for weeks. Something must have been worth mentioning.”

“No,” Alba says in a small voice. “It was just more of the same. Same old house, same canned food. It rained nonstop.” I can tell that she just wants me to let it drop, so I do. We talk about tomorrow, about her family, my family, Thanksgivings past, drunken relatives, cooking disasters. The pies are finally ready, neatly lined up on cooling racks. If only I felt as ready as they look.

Thanksgiving Day

Zach: In the three years that I’ve known Alba and her family, holidays have always been celebrated at the Gomolinskis’ house. Charisse and Gomez love to fill their home with friends, family and random constituents, love to cook for days, love the bedlam, mess and surprises that come with hosting. This year, however, their house is being renovated. They started the week after I moved in with Alba, as though they’d been waiting for me to launch before disarticulating the house beyond recognition.

Clare and Beck are more diffident hosts. They obviously enjoy having us visit, but neither of them are eager cooks, so this is a potluck Thanksgiving, which seems like the correct spirit for our group of artists, anarchists, socialists and fellow travelers. In addition to the usual carnivores’ fare, there is pizza (ordered by Caralora, who got up early to drive here from Ann Arbor and had no time to cook), a tofurkey (contributed by Max and Joe), collard greens and mac and cheese (Celia’s family recipes), and a nonalcoholic cranberry shrub (made by Gomez and Charisse with much theatrical shaking and straining, using raw egg whites, plus rose hip liqueur and vodka for anyone who isn’t Lucinda).

The dining room table has been covered in white damask, china and crystal, and expanded with extra leaves until it fills half the room. At the Gomolinskis’ Thanksgivings it’s usually bamboo plates and cutlery and thirty-plus guests, so this feels fancy and intimate. “It’s good to have an excuse to use all this stuff our mothers insisted we’d need,” Clare says modestly. I know Clare grew up wealthy, in a house that’s in all the architectural textbooks, but I never got to visit—it was sold after Clare’s father died, when Alba was sixteen. Beck’s parents are in a nursing home in Detroit. She’s a minimalist, so it surprises me that she’d have boxes of family heirlooms. She chuckles. “You try saying no to my mama,” Beck says. “I dunno, it’s kind of nice to get it all out of storage. It’s been there for fifteen years, it was pretty dusty.”

I like Beck. I feel a certain kinship with her: We both arrived late and married into the DeTamble family after their main event seemed to be over. Beck has an acute intellect; she is an artist, computer programmer and professor who is keenly attuned to other people, warm and kind, though reserved. Beck is Black, curvy, taller than Clare but not as tall as Alba; her hands are practical, with a few rings but nothing flashy; her expression is often appraising, cautious.

She wears her reading glasses slung around her neck, and her wide mouth is often quirked into a sardonic smile; she has a high forehead and salt-and-pepper hair that she wears long and natural, swept into various updos. Beck dresses in mostly earth colors, somber shades with occasional flashes of red. She seems less like one of my mothers-in-law and more like a friend. Today she looks tired, stressed by more than the holiday. When we arrived at eleven she was still wearing pajamas and had her hair wrapped. When Alba asked her if she was feeling okay, Beck quietly said, I’ve been up all night, Isadora’s being a brat, and immediately excused herself to take a shower and get dressed.

I haven’t met Isadora. Everyone assures me that this is for the best, that I should be grateful to be spared. I can’t help feeling curious about her, though. I know she is Beck’s daughter, her father is Beck’s ex-husband, Jasper, she is sixteen, and she is Lucinda’s best friend. She never seems to be around, somehow; I assume that she mostly lives with Jasper in Detroit, but Lucinda talks as though they see each other all the time. Alba and her family deflect all questions about Isadora as though she’s the madwoman in the attic, so I don’t bother to ask anymore.

We put the pies on the sideboard, roll up our sleeves and start mashing potatoes and whipping cream. Soon the Gomolinskis have arrived. (Charisse is wearing a red-and-green dress with a silver bow in her hair. “I hate brown,” she says. “I’m skipping ahead to the fun holidays.”) Then Caralora, Celia and Lucinda are here, and everyone is laughing, hugging, showing off their outfits, exclaiming over the beautiful table decorations Clare has crafted out of handmade paper and copper wire, little silhouettes of animals and swirls of autumn leaves. Beck picks out a sparrow and affixes it in Lucinda’s hair, her strong hands deftly situating the little bird as though she’s putting it back in its nest.

“Can I go downstairs?” Lucinda asks Beck. As far as I know, no one is allowed downstairs except Beck, so I’m startled when she glances at me and then replies, “Sure, honey,” and Lucinda walks over to the heavily locked and monitored basement door, keys in a password, holds her index finger to the touch pad, and offers her eye to a tiny scanner. The locks shoot back, there’s a beeping sound that cuts off after a few seconds, Lucinda opens the door and galumphs down the stairs calling, “Hey, girl, I’m here!” Someone replies, “It’s about time—” and then the door swings shut.

“Who’s down there?” I ask Beck.

“Not ‘who’—‘what,’” Beck replies. “It’s my AI project. Lucinda helps me train it.”

Caralora comes in the back door with a bundle of firewood. “Zach, you okay? You look a little wan.”

“Hmm? No, I’m fine. Here, let me help bring those in.” I follow her back outside and around the garage to the woodpile. As we start to grab kindling, I ask, “Caralora. Does Beck’s AI project have a name?”

She hesitates, then replies, “Isadora. She’s named after Beck’s daughter, who was stillborn. Why do you ask?”

I feel a little queasy. “I misunderstood. I thought Beck had a daughter close to Lucinda’s age; I thought she lived with her father.”

We pile wood into the carriers. Caralora says, “Alba has been adamant about Isadora: she is offline, top secret, not allowed to meet any new people. Isadora kinda fixated on me, back when Alba and I were dating, and it spooked us. Beck says it’s some kind of bug, but we think it’s Isadora imitating Alba—monkey see, monkey do. Isadora is especially not allowed to meet you.”

“Alba lied to me about her; she never mentioned that this person might not be a person.”

“Eh. If you think back, she probably never told you any actual untruths. Alba mostly lies by omission. Anyway, I don’t see why you care; Isadora is just Beck’s weird science project.” We lug the firewood up the back steps, and I’m obliged to drop the topic.

Alba is sitting next to her mother at dinner, not quite across from me, so I am able to watch the two of them without being obvious.

Alba mostly lies by omission.

I wonder how much of Alba’s secretiveness has been inculcated in her by her parents? Clare spent her girlhood sneaking food and clothing to her time-traveling eventual husband without her family ever catching on; Alba’s dad, Henry, seems to have been a one-man crime wave, conning, stealing and fighting to survive his travels. My appetite has disappeared. Does Alba keep secrets because she is protecting me, or herself? What happens when Alba time travels? Where does she go, who else is there? The not-knowing is eating at me. I hate to be so needy, like a pet with separation anxiety.

This thing with Isadora is different, somehow—a deliberate deception. I feel someone watching me and I look around the table. Beck is at the other end, listening attentively as Gomez speaks. Next to her is Caralora, who avoids my eyes and turns to speak to Celia. Lucinda catches me staring and smiles, then looks away shyly.

Alba and Clare are talking about family recipes; Clare gets up and disappears into the kitchen, then returns with a battered composition notebook. “These were Kimy’s,” Clare says. “I’ve got one that belonged to Henry’s mother, but most of those recipes involve canned mushroom soup or Jell-O, they’re from the ’60s.” They start to flip through the notebook, discussing their favorite meals at Kimy’s, Henry’s favorites . . . I’m sitting across from Rosa. I ask her, “Do you remember Henry?”