Chapter 1

I seem to have become Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, tossing cakes out the window at the strange crowd below, grown too large to wiggle but a finger. I wear an overcoat of anxiety in the form of my house, expanding around the shell of me to restrict my every movement. Not physical movement, like the literary Alice, but my ability to make decisions, create art—to move forward in any meaningful way.

Abandoned art projects litter my upstairs studio—the place in which I had intended, only months ago, to make art of the highest order, earth-shattering, world-changing art that would make me famous. At night sometimes I sit on the floor in the center of this ruined ideal and listen to the radio: kitschy old songs from the eighties that captured my heart when I was young and still had one. I don’t get anything done, but at least I maintain some degree of calm.

Of course, if I’m Alice, a crowd of small creatures must be gathered beneath my window, trying to extricate me from my domestic prison. Hapless Bill Lizard can’t quite get it sorted; I hear his tiny lizard croak in my head while trying to start a new project. The other creatures in my brain use me, like the little lizard in the famous story, to do all the dirty work.

It’s only noon now, and my fear hasn’t caught up with me yet today. I think I may almost be at a point where a blank canvas seems welcoming. I’m managing my anxiety fairly well on this particular day, and the voices of Bill and the others are fading to almost nothing.

My real window—the studio window overlooking the gravel path to the house on the river which once belonged to my grandparents—signals a disruption to my possible functioning state. I see Cora’s curly dark hair flying about her head as she makes her way down the path. How I wish the road itself could do something to rescue me—maybe put a large hop-toad in Cora’s path so she would stop and decide her errand wasn’t that important after all. As much as I cling to my Wonderland creatures, Cora can’t stand animals in general, especially “the slimy and slithery ones.”

It isn’t really that I don’t want to see my sister. I do, just not in person. Maybe a photo or a drawing. Even better if she were a character in a movie and I could pause the screen whenever she annoyed me. But of course, things don’t work that way in real life. Before I can think of a reasonable excuse to send her away, her tentative knock sounds below at the front door. Looking down from the window, I see my sister with a smile on her waiting face; this is the smile my entire family believes will somehow “cheer me up.”

When I don’t respond to her knock immediately, Cora calls out from below, “Al, it’s me! Open up!” Cora and our mother are the only people who still call me Al; I managed to escape that designation several months ago, after my breakup with Maddie and a move back to the Crescent City. No one around New Orleans remembered me from childhood, thanks to the piercings, the cropped red hair, and the loss of about thirty pounds. I just introduced myself as Alice and that was that. No more Al. Being Al reminded me too much of the crazy night I met Maddie and she sang that silly old Paul Simon song, “You Can Call Me Al.” She never called me Alice the entire time we were together.

Of course, the violent breakup itself pretty much did in the old Al, leaving scars both psychic and material. I suppose Alice had to take over anyway. Still, I hate it when Cora calls me Al.

I scramble down the winding staircase from the loft and hurry to the door. Cora wafts in with the scent of cigarettes and Estee Lauder perfume, her fluff of hair in perpetual motion.

“Hey, Cora. What’s up? You aren’t working today?”

“Working?” Cora laughs a bit derisively. “Are you?”

I suppress a sigh. “Actually, I was…and you know what I meant. How did you get away from the office on a Monday morning during tax season?” Cora and Mom are both accountants. Which perhaps explains as well as anything else how I came to be seen as the psychedelic sheep of the family.

“Ian can handle it for an hour or so. I had to come see you, to tell you in person…”

“Tell me what?” I can hear the fear in my own voice and the distant sound of the White Rabbit’s scurrying feet. Cora’s news items are seldom positive.

She takes a step up to the small landing below the stairs and plants her feet firmly, as if about to make a speech. I think of the Red Queen pronouncing, “Off with her head!” and suppress a giggle. Cora gives me a silencing stare.