Page 53 of Alone With You in the Ether

“You’re meeting him right now, aren’t you?”

“Charlotte. Please don’t.”

“Mom, you’re being ridiculous.”

Aldo sensed they were no longer discussing his cooking. He glanced at Regan’s dress, which was a dark green that slid around her narrow waist to flare out slightly from her hips. He should tell her she looked pretty, he thought, though that was probably an underwhelming word.

“—all I ask is that you not be so irresponsible for once—”

“—notbeingirresponsible,you’rethe one who wanted me to come—”

On second thought, he considered that maybe he shouldn’t use the word ‘pretty’ at all. He guessed many people had told Charlotte she looked pretty, and that Regan had probably made a note never to forget. And perhaps it was merely a word used for children. It felt juvenile, at least slightly. Relatedly, Carissa, the toddler, was gone now. Regan had set the child down and turned away, facing her mother, and Aldo could see the lines of tension in her exposed back.

Pretty, he thought again, and forced himself to think about something else. The prospect of time seemed even foggier than usual. It seemed to have foregone its usual rate in favor of dragging moodily in place, traveling slowly down the notches of Regan’s spine.

“Aldo, has anyone offered you a drink?” came a voice behind him.

It was Madeline, sister of Regan, mother of Carissa. Aldo had begun mapping all the relevant roles and characters, though it was a relatively small map. Charts, to him, were soothing. Corralling organisms of chaos into order was a pleasant (morepleasant) way to occupy his time.

“I don’t need one,” he said, and Madeline smiled broadly. Her smile was more practiced than either Regan’s or Charlotte’s, he noted. It had a look of frequent rehearsal.

“Maybe not a drink, then,” she suggested. “Some air?”

There was a gentle urgency to her voice, which she paired with a motion that angled him away from Regan. Aldo followed reluctantly, a stiffening in Regan’s posture his last glimpse before he turned.

Madeline was considerably smaller than Regan, in air and behavior in addition to physical design. She had a foxlike sort of face, a diminutive nose with liquid eyes and fine features. Her dark hair faded into something delicately golden, trailing over one shoulder. It was difficult to believe she was a woman who’d had a child, much less a medical degree. She looked as though she’d been plucked unsuspecting from her early twenties, or, alternatively, perhaps some sort of grove of woodland fairies. She was wearing a red dress and looked very, very pretty. She, Aldo guessed, would be more inclined to appreciate the compliment, but he suspected that if the younger Regan would find such a thing untrustworthy, the elder would tuck it away somewhere and use it to power her electricity.

“Out here looks nice,” Madeline said, directing him onto the lawn. They’d ordered the same heat lamps Masso used on the small patio of his restaurant, though Aldo noticed Madeline still shivered a little in the October air.

“If you’re cold—”

“Oh no, I’m fine,” Madeline said quickly, flashing him a tight smile. There was a bartender set up outside, safely tucked away from the house. “Sure you don’t want a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Aldo said, and then, because he was thinking it, “It was a good idea to put the bar outside. Better queuing,” he noted, observing that nobody was blocking any of the ingress or egress points of the party. “Smart.”

Madeline’s smile quirked. “Well, you learn a thing or two after doing this enough times, but thank you.”

He glanced down at her. “You did this?”

That, he noted, prompted a different sort of smile. He guessed he’d said something more valuable than complimenting her looks.

“It’s not that difficult, really,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the party my parents insisted on hosting for Carissa’s first birthday.”

“I can imagine.” He could, too, though it was mostly a line other people were fond of using.I can imagine, as if they’d lent their thoughts to it with frequency. Most people were really expressing their capacity for pattern recognition, for modeling data in their heads. He doubted many of them were using true imagination, except possibly for Regan. He made a point to ask her later:Do you imagine things? Is your life a dream or a chart? Have you thought of this or this or this?

He knew she would answer them and shivered prophetically.

“It is a bit cold,” Madeline said, glancing over her shoulder. “I’d go back inside, but we should give them a minute. Sorry about my sister,” she added.

Aldo didn’t immediately see how the two thoughts were related.

“Why?” he asked, and Madeline blinked.

“Well, you know how she is, I’m sure,” she said. “She’s a bit difficult.”

“Difficult,” Aldo echoed, suffering an apprehensive twitch of misalignment at the word, and Madeline shrugged.

“She’s always been this way. Very prone to picking fights, especially with my mother. I always tell her she’s too defensive, and that Mom’s way of showing she cares is, you know… overbearing, I guess, at times. But then she just accuses me of being on Mom’s team, so it’s really a bit of a lose-lose sit-”

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