diadem

xi. red light green light (part four)

(pic is Alice 😍)

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"Where have you been?" asked she.

"To Neverland and back," said he.

"Why did you come back?" asked she.

"To take you to Wonderland," said he.

"I do not understand," said she.

"Will you come with me?" asked he.

She smiled.

"Green light," said she.

_________________________

It's been five years. Three years since he disappeared.

Alice scrubs harder at the dish in her hand in an attempt to try and not fall victim to reminiscing but it is too late, she is lost, thinking thoughts she hoped she'd never think again--

Thoughts of Peter.

"Alice, I got the mail," calls Israel from the front door. Her little brother steps through the entrance carrying a stack of letters (probably bills) and her black, dripping wet umbrella for it has been pouring for the last hour and a half. "I'm on spring break now," he continues, pulling off his wet combat boots and leaving them by the door. "But I still have work in fifteen minutes, so I'm going to go shower."

"Not a problem," Alice smiles at him. "I'm just finishing up the dishes."

Israel pauses on his way to the bathroom and looks at her. "Cleaning the dishes...with cooking oil?"

Alice looks down and yelps for he is right: in one wet hand she holds the oily dish, and in the other a somewhat greasy bottle of cooking oil.

Alice puts the dish and oil down and sighs. "I'm just...I'm just really out of it."

"Were you thinking about him again?" asks Israel, coming up behind her, resting a hand on her shoulder. He might be just fifteen, and she might be twenty-six, but she has always been short for her age and it is little trouble for Israel, six foot one, to wrap his arms around her and press his head to the top of hers.

"You know," she says, her voice muffled by his somewhat rain-soaked shirt. "I'm proud of you, Israel. You didn't have to get a job this young--"

"Oh, hush, you, because you know we needed the money." Israel smiles a little into her hair. "And now we're in this better apartment." They look around for a minute at the somewhat larger, somewhat cleaner five-room apartment they have now. Though Alice is only an intern at a newspaper office and Israel is merely a café waiter, their combined income make it possible to afford better living space.

"Momma would be proud of you," Alice tells him, and feels Israel's smile grow wider. He was always a momma's boy, simply because his earliest memories included her doing happy things like singing or dancing with him.

Even though the truth was that his mother had left them all alone in the world in the cruelest way possible. And Israel knew the horrors of their past. He knew about his father, knew about the men who came, knew about the way Alice found her mother cold and still on the floor of the first floor tiny bathroom, a bottle of unmarked pills in one hand and foam in her mouth. Alice had harbored ill feelings towards her mother -- resentment, anger, bitterness at being left alone with a fussy baby to care for -- and it had taken her almost a decade to forgive her.

But Israel, when he had heard the story from Alice almost two years ago, he disappeared into his room for almost the entire day and when he finally came out, though his face was red and blotchy and streaked with tears, he simply smiled at her and said, "I think that she would have been a wonderful mother, don't you, Alice?"