Piper tightens her grip on the armrest.
Her throat closes up.
She panics.
She most certainly does not want to see Bill and Carol on Christmas, and she's even more certain that they don't want to see her. They haven't been face-to-face since that disastrous visit on Piper's birthday, when her father sat on the far side of the table with his eyes downcast.
For thirty straight minutes he studied his shoes, his hands, and his beige cinderblock surroundings, refusing absolutely to meet his daughter's gaze. Carol, meanwhile, made a valiant attempt at conversation while pointedly ignoring the conflict. Her approach was much more in keeping with the Chapman way: put on a smile and pretend that everything's fine until people start to believe it.
In some respects Piper is her mother's daughter: she learned to minimize the damage by painting over it, deluded herself into believing that if she can't see the problem then it simply doesn't exist. Carol didn't admit her husband was cheating on her so she wouldn't have to face the damage; Piper didn't acknowledge that Alex named her before a federal judge, so they could continue on as if that revelation changed nothing.
Deceit didn't feel wrong as long as it soothed the conflict—in fact, it felt a lot like mercy.
But Piper is her father's daughter too: she learned how to dodge responsibility by passing it off as someone else's failure. She blamed Alex's paranoia for wedging them apart. It was another kind of merciful lie, the type that soothes one person's feelings while protecting them from the hurt felt by the other. It's just how Piper learned to do things.
She can see her inheritance now for what it is: her parents are two sides of a coin stamped on fool's gold, which Piper keeps trying to buy a life with. It's a dishonest transaction and she knows that now, but she has nothing of her own left to barter.
Desperation takes hold of her. She turns to look at Doggett for the first time since getting into the van.
"Turn the car around," Piper tells her. "Take me back."
"Ignore her," Alex says from the backseat. "She's just being pissy because she has daddy issues she's too scared to deal with."
"Fuck you. Doggett, turn around."
"Alright look, I'm trying to drive and the road's real slick right now 'cause of all the snow, and the two of you arguing and yammering at me is not helpin' any." Doggett gives Piper a side-eyed glance. "I gotta be honest Chapman, I really don't get why you'd rather be in prison. Don't a few hours of freedom sound good to you?
Piper sinks back into her seat and pulls her arms toward herself, hugging them against her torso. She doesn't have the strength to keep arguing.
But Alex won't let it go.
"C'mon Pipes," she taunts, "I think you should explain it to her. Tell her why you want to go back. Tell her why you won't see your family on Christmas."
A lump is rising in Piper's throat. She tries to swallow it down but it just sits there, heavy and threatening, as Alex continues to berate her.
"Tell her why you took your friends off your visitation list. Why you've refused to see anyone for the last couple of months."
She tries to breathe through her nose but still can't seem to get enough air. Her head aches and her chest feels tight, stretched like a balloon on the verge of bursting.
"Tell her why you're turning away everyone who cares about you," the voice from the backseat demands.
It's a good imitation of the real Alex when she's angry—it has that raw timbre, that hard edge, like her words are trying to grind stone into powder. But it's colder than Alex's voice would be in a conversation like this. It's missing that compassion she reserves only for Piper, which is audible even during the worst of their arguments. The absence of it makes Piper's skin break out in goosebumps.
"Say it, Piper."
"Because they're happier without me," she whispers, "Because I'll hurt them,"
Presumably she means her parents, or maybe Polly and Larry, but after she says it she starts thinking about Alex; about the dreams and the greenhouse and the blood on the concrete. Her throat is still tight but the words finally shake free, spilling forth in a torrent of sorrow..
"I'm dangerous," she confesses. "I ruin things. I ruin people. Everyone in my life is embarrassed to know me."
She thinks of the way Alex started looking at her right before they broke up last time—the mixture of pity and disgust in her eyes, like she was staring at a distasteful stranger.
"I can picture everyone together for Christmas—my parents, Cal, Neri—all of them doing their best not to mention me. If someone says 'Piper' my dad probably drops his fork. I'm worse than a dirty word at the dinner table."
Her eyes sting like they're filling with tears, but when she rubs them with her knuckles she's relived to find them dry. Crying is a release she doesn't feel worthy of.
"Polly and Larry have each other now. Going to prison is the best thing I've ever done for them." She lets out a choked sob of laughter. "Remove me from the equation and it's happy endings all around. As long as I'm locked up…They're just better off without without me."
She doesn't say anything about the most egregious wrongdoing of them all—the way she ruined Alex—because it feels too delicate and important to bury in a list of faults. She doesn't need to say it, because she can see Alex's eyes in the mirror and the look in them speaks volumes. It's morose and accusatory and achingly familiar, and Piper can't bare to look at it.
"Is that really what you think? That everyone's better off if you just don't exist? Jesus, Piper, that's a fatalistic low even for you."
Piper looks resolutely out of the window, her gaze sliding over the passing trees and houses without really seeing them.
"Alright, fine. You really want to see what everyone's lives look like without you? Let's do it. Let's see if a world without Piper Chapman is as great as you think it would be."
Piper's eyes widen. When she focuses on the passing landmarks she realizes that they're now driving through the outskirts of her hometown.
It has that idyllic New England charm, with its little brick chapel and white picket fences. Snow blankets the rooftops of the houses,and swirls of smoke rise from a few old chimneys. It's the picturesque opposite of prison, but Piper feels no sense of homecoming.
"I think I know what's going on here," Doggett says. She's been silent through Piper and Alex's argument, watching the road and listening to what must have been a very confusing exchange. Now she has an expression on her face like the light bulb in her head has just turned on.
"This is like that Christmas movie, that uh, what's it called? That movie. Vause is a ghost, and now she's trying to teach you how to stop being such a humbug."
Piper whips her head around.
"She's not a ghost!" she hisses.
Because Alex can't be a ghost.
If she were she would be dead.
"Yes she is," Doggett says excitedly. "She's like, the ghost of Christmas future!"
Alex lifts an eyebrow. "Do evangelicals even believe in ghosts?"
"It don't matter! I ain't stupid, alright. I know what you are."
She doesn't sound scared, though. Impressed and maybe a little elated, but not scared, which is more than can be said for Piper.
"Look, Doggett—just do us a favor and wait in the car, alright?"
"Yes m'am." Tiffany raises her hand and gives Alex a mock salute.
Piper opens the passenger door and jumps out before the van even rolls to a stop, sucking in lungfuls of fresh air to try and counteract the sick feeling in her stomach.
Her childhood home looms above her. She doesn't want to go in, but indulging this fake Alex's whims seems like the only way to get rid of her. She takes a moment to collect herself and then rings the bell, because it's the polite thing to do.
Piper pictures her mother opening the door, slowly and with a look of surprise that quickly sours. There would be some biting comment about her daughter's perpetual tardiness, or perhaps an exaggerated up-and-down stare and raised brow in response to Piper's attire. But the door doesn't open.
The house remains dark and uninvited, and Piper doesn't want to go in.
"It's unlocked," Alex says, forcing the issue, so she has no choice but to push it open and step over the threshold.
The house seems bigger inside than Piper remembers it. It feels bigger. Her mother's decorative tastes have always been stylishly simplistic, aiming for elegance rather than ostentation, but Piper's never noticed before how empty the house feels because of it. The distance between the front door and the living room archway is punctuated only by an umbrella stand and a useless accent table, so that yards of unused space stretch out beyond the misleadingly titled 'Welcome' mat.
As Piper steps into the living room the hugeness of it seems to press back against her, momentarily crushing her breath away.
It doesn't look like it did when she was a kid. There's a token Christmas tree on the buffet, one of those little plastic things that come prewired with a string of lights. When Piper was little they always got a real tree. The entire family would lace up boots and tug on mittens and trudge off to the tree farm, where she and Cal got to take yearly turns choosing. "Which one, Piper?" her father would ask, and she'd traipse down the row looking this way and that, finally pointing to the one she wanted. "That's perfect, pumpkin," he'd tell her proudly, before turning back to the car to fetch the handsaw.
Bill once had a warm smile and a wink he reserved only for his daughter. Now he can't even bear to look at her.
There's a family portrait hanging above the tree. It looks like posed mall photography. Carol and Bill stand stiffly with their son between them, and Cal is wearing a collared shirt and a professorial little sweater vest, the kind of thing he always hated wearing. Piper can't remember him ever dressing up like that without a loud and hard-fought struggle. In the photo he's standing front and center—the Chapman's only child.
Without thinking Piper lifts her hand and brushes the glass surface of the frame, fingers touching the spot where her picture should be.
"You don't exist, remember?" Alex says behind her.
She's sitting on the floral-printed sofa looking perfectly at ease, and something about the pose makes Piper's heart ache. Alex—the real Alex—has never been to the Chapman's house; not for holidays or family dinners or even a casual introduction.
Piper hid their relationship like a bad habit, a guilty pleasure: something to be enjoyed only when no one was watching. Back then the idea of Alex sitting in her mother's living seemed so ridiculous that it made Piper laugh. Now, though, it doesn't seem as funny. Because Alex looks so nice, sitting there in her soft grey sweater—so clean and poised and perfect—that Piper can't remember why she ever acted so ashamed of her.
She lowers her hand and steps away from the portrait.
"Okay," she says, in a voice of determined calm. "I'm not in the family photo. Is that all you wanted me to see?"
"Look around. Doesn't it feel different?"
Of course it does, but there's no way to articulate the specific uncanniness of it; the strange way that a place can look the same yet feel so unfamiliar.
"It feels different to me. That doesn't mean anything has changed for the rest of them."
"Nothing's changed, huh?" Alex raises an eyebrow. "The house seems pretty empty for Christmas Eve. I wonder where everyone is."
The would-be-casual way she says it seems to imply something a little sinister. It makes Piper notice anew how quiet it is. The full weight of the silence bears down on her, reminding her of the dreams again: of Alex in the greenhouse mouthing words too hushed to hear, words that could be 'Piper' or 'help me' or 'just leave,' each as likely as the other.
She shivers. The air in the living room feels cold. Her mom probably dialed the thermostat down before she left.
"Okay," she says. "I'll play along: where are they?"
"In there."
Alex points toward a doorway out in the hall.
Piper frowns. "That's a coat closet."
"Oh ye of little imagination. Trust me, just open it."
Piper sighs. She's too tired to keep questioning what Alex seems determined to show her, so she follows directions and walks back into the hall.
The doorknob to the closet is cold against her palm. When she pulls it open, the scene around them changes.
The doorframe dissolves, and what's beyond it is no longer the old coats and musty darkness she expected to find—it's prison.
Not her prison. A different one.
She's standing in a visitation room that's more cheerless than Litchfield's, if that's even possible. The walls are a blander shade of beige. There's no artwork made by visiting children, not even those phony anti-suicide posters to break up the monotony. It's just a blank, empty room, with mismatched tables and uncomfortable plastic chairs.
And clustered around one of those tables are the members of her family—Bill and Carol on one side, and Cal on the other wearing a prisoner's uniform.
It's all wrong. It should be Piper sitting there, with her khaki scrubs and her limp, unkempt hair, but instead it's Calvin. Her little brother, clad in an orange jumpsuit stamped 'D.O.C.' in blocky letters. His hair is buzzed short—he's never worn it that way before.
Her little brother.
His face looking disturbingly pale, his eyes dull with resignation. It doesn't even look like him.
"What happened?" Piper croaks out.
"He was arrested two years ago," Alex tells her. "A four year sentence. Longer than yours."
"For what?"
"Manufacturing and sale of marijuana. He was living on a cannabis farm in Idaho when the Feds busted it."
"Jesus!"
It doesn't seem possible. Cal, in prison for four years. It sounds insane. Her brother was always a little reckless, always pushed the envelope a little, but he'd never done something so downright…criminal.
"I don't believe it," Piper says automatically. "Cal would never get involved in something like that, he'd never… well, okay," she reluctantly amends, "maybe he would. But Idaho? What the fuck was he doing out there?"
"Well, without you around to take some of your parents' scrutiny off his shoulders, the pressure was too much for him to handle. You know how your brother is—he hates tradition. He wants to do things his own way. But your parents? They wanted him to do things their way—like you did. Or, would have, had you been born."
Even though she knows this isn't real, the guilt cuts Piper deep. She's Cal's older sister. She's supposed to look out for him, and she wasn't there to do it.
"Your dad wanted him to go to business school," Alex continues, "but Cal wasn't having it. He told your parents he was going to college out west—forged an admission letter, financial documents, the whole nine yards. It was a constructed alibi. He figured he could appease your parents while secretly getting to live whatever life he wanted. Pretty brilliant, actually. Your brother's quite the mastermind."
Piper forces herself to look at Cal's face. It hurts. He has the saddest eyes now. The light in him that seemed so untouchable has all but burned out, and Piper feels like the one responsible.
But then she notices the way her parents are looking at him—or rather, not looking at him.
Carol has her eyes on the clock, watching the seconds tick by like the passage of time is an act of mercy she's praying for. And Bill… Bill is looking at his shoes. At his hands. At his beige cinderblock surroundings. Anywhere but at his son.
Piper takes a deep breathe, letting her lungs fill up as the realization clicks into place.
When her father refuses to look at her, it's not Piper's mistakes he's ashamed to face—it's his own.
"The thing is, Piper," Alex says softly, "you've always been the strong one. It's not easy to placate your parents and be yourself. You can beat yourself up for not being good enough, but it's not on you, and it's not on Cal—it's on Bill and Carol, for setting the bar too high."
It's the first time Piper doesn't have a rebuttal to Alex's logic, and fuck, it actually feels good to have nothing to say. She's trembling a little, her chest rattling with every breath she takes, but she can feel something opening up inside her—the release of some pressure in her chest, excavating chambers of her heart that had long felt buried.
The scene begins to fade, her brother and her parents dissipating into mist.
She's back in the hallway of her parents' house, with her hand on the closet doorknob.
She rescinds it slowly and turns around.
"What if it's not enough?" she whispers. "What about everyone else? What about Polly, Larry…"
"Polly and Larry never became more than neighbors. Polly is a divorced single mother trying to make ends meet. Without her best friend, I might add. Larry lives with his parents and works night shifts at Costco. You were the one person who believed in his writing career, Piper. Without your support, he never published that first article. He never broke into journalism. He never got together with Polly, and neither of them are in a very good place."
Alex's expression is soft. Her eyes hold an infinite tenderness.
She lifts one hand and places her palm against the curve of Piper's cheek. Piper expects it to feel cold, the way it had been in the yard earlier when the heat dissipated from their clasped hands. But this time Alex's touch feels gentle and radiant and warm, and Piper leans into it like she's striving toward sunlight.
"You have no idea how many lives you've helped along, Piper Chapman. I need you to know. I need you to believe me."
When takes her hand away Piper feels the loss of it like a sudden chill.
"There's one more thing I want to show you," Alex says.
This time Piper follows without hesitation.
When she walks through the front door she finds herself facing not the front lawn but a pair of cemetery gates.
The night air is cold against her cheeks—it cuts through her clothes, making her skin break out in goosebumps. Her breath comes out in puffs of vapor as she stares at the bars of wrought iron and the gargoyles that top the stone pillars, grim guardians in the midst of a winter storm.
She shakes her head. "I can't. Please. Don't ask me to do this."
"You need to. It's okay—I'll wait for you here."
Piper lets out a shuddering breath and forces herself to take a step forward. It takes effort to make her legs move, to make herself to go on despite a strong instinct not to. The gate creaks when she opens it, a metallic wail like a long cry of sorrow. She flinches at the sound.
There are no lights beyond the gate, but the snow brightens the night just enough to help Piper see where she's going. Not that she even knows what her destination is—her feet seem to make their own way, picking a path through the tombstones seemingly of their own volition.
She moves slowly, dreading what she'll find when her legs finally stop. Her walk is a long one, taking her to a gently sloped hill in the far corner of the cemetery.
She comes to a halt in front of a tombstone. When she sees the name engraved upon it, her heart nearly stops beating.
'Diane Vause,' it says.
It occurs to Piper then that she never bothered to ask Alex where her mother was buried. She doesn't know what was said at the funeral—did Alex give a eulogy?—or how many people were present. She never asked how it felt to have to choose a casket (but how could anything be good enough for Diane?).
The tombstone is nice, as tombstones go. It's a large, dark slab of stone, and neatly engraved. It looks expensive. Alex still had money back then, and she must have spared no expense on the burial.
But Piper never asked. About this, or about what happened after she left. About any of the cracks that radiated outward from that one shattering moment and eventually broke Alex's life into shards, leaving her all deep cuts and sharp corners.
Piper never had to think about what Alex looked like standing over a lowered casket with a fistful of dirt clutched in her fingers. She got to walk away and not look back, and never asked about the place where half of Alex's heart was buried.
She feels leaden with delayed grief.
She sinks to the ground. It's more like a stumble, really—she pitches forward, bracing her hands to break her fall, and her palms press against something in the ground that's flat and smooth and cold.
It's another stone.
Piper brushes the snow away, and the silence of the night is so absolute that all she can hear is the soft whisper of snowflakes and the too-loud beat of her heart.
If the sight of Diane's tombstone stole her breath, the name on this one damn near breaks her.
The grave belongs to Alex.
When Piper reads the name, her lips move soundlessly to shape the syllables.
And then, finally, she cries.
One chapter left to go! Thanks so much for reading.