Chapter 2
if you had asked the child Alice if she had ever felt haunted, she might have told you about her dead father, about how she would walk down the hallway to the bathroom at night, only to see the framed photograph of him, holding an oversized rainbow trout and wearing sopping wet waders, moving at the edges of her vision.
When she turned to look at the photo directly, the moonlight shining through the vertical blinds, she swore his face changed expression, the familiar wide grin she saw every day behind that sheet of thin glass briefly dropping into a loose-cheeked sadness.
She wondered if he—or his ghost—couldn’t hold that performed happiness for twenty-four hours a day, if he had to relax into wistfulness or regret or loneliness while his family was asleep, before his expression stiffened into that smile again in the morning—or whenever Alice caught him.
Every night, it was as if she surprised him.
She’d stand still and stare, waiting to see if his mouth might droop again, if he might even drop the fish so he could wipe away a tear.
But he never did. Or at least not when she was in front of the photograph, eyes inches from the frame, watching.
After she went back to bed, she was certain he had been keeping watch, checking the shadows behind her for danger, sweeping his two-dimensional eyes along the path in front of her for anything that might be waiting to pounce, anything that she, sleep-addled, could not see.
Everything, from the bones deep inside her body to the foundation of this house to the memories she could never shake even if she wanted to, was always about her father.
If her mother pulled out an old dress, looking for something to wear to a wedding, she invariably said, “Your father loved this dress, especially when we went dancing.” If Alice was looking for paper clips in the junk drawer, she would come across his old business cards, furred on the edges and faded, reading TOM CHOW PHOTOGRAPHY.
His gardening gloves still hung on a hook under the deck; his bucket of tools was still shoved under the stairs in the basement.
Alice’s mother didn’t do yardwork, had never moved or wiped down the rusting machete that was stuffed in with all the other, less ominous things, the spades and rakes and twine.
No, Judy hired people, two refugee brothers from Vietnam, who knew better than to ever meet her eyes and trimmed the grass exactly as they were told, before packing their truck and driving away as silently as possible.
In the summers, Alice liked to escape to the back garden, where her mother never ventured and where the signs of her father’s presence were not so stagnant, not so frozen at the very precise moment he had died, struggling for breath.
The peonies he tied up, the magnolia he watered, the creeping thyme he tucked between the stones of the path—all of them were still here, but they had grown, filled in spaces, created canopies of intertwined overhead branches that hid the one spot, piled with rocks, where nothing ever grew, no matter how many times her father had scattered wildflower seeds or transplanted ferns.
Judy had always told her that her father had buried a dead cat there before Alice was born and covered the grave with mismatched stones he picked up from the alley.
She liked to sit there, her fingers slowly picking at pebbles, the dirt soft and granular at the same time.
She would try to remember her real father then, not the artifacts that had come to replace him.
She remembered that he only shaved on Sunday evenings.
By Thursday, his scruff tickled Alice’s cheek when she hugged him.
He liked meatloaf and Salisbury steak, anything with the cheap ground beef her mother hated.
Ever since he was a child, he had been in love with Cher and Tina Turner, taping up pictures of them from magazines on the walls of his childhood bedroom, the very same bedroom Alice’s son slept in now.
He built a darkroom in the basement, right beside the suite he and Judy lived in after they got married, and Alice could hear the running water whenever he was working, like the big fountain at the planetarium.
Her dad had loved that place, sighing with deep contentment when the padded chairs reclined and the stars lit up the domed ceiling.
He always reached for her hand then, as if he might float away with joy and needed to be anchored by his daughter’s presence.
After a while she didn’t know if she was remembering her real father anymore, or if she was recalling an endless funhouse mirror of moments that, as time went on, became less and less real, and more and more a trick of the brain.
Maybe they were all just gaps and rips in time that she filled in herself, with stories that she unwittingly created, always more serene than any memories ought to be, with a more polite Alice whose hair was brushed and sleek, who never pushed her father’s hand away when he tried to hold it to cross the street.
This, she might have said, was how she was haunted, caught in a loop of wished-for memories.
If she had ever felt a presence as she was falling asleep at night, it was just her longing for her father to read her bedtime stories (though he had always sung her lullabies instead).
If she heard noises coming from the basement, she was just remembering her father’s clumsy body moving through his small darkroom (though he wasn’t clumsy, he knew how to dance).
If, in the moment before she turned the light on, she glimpsed a flash of brightness in the dark reflection of the bathroom mirror, she told herself she was still half asleep, that she was lonely without her father (this, at least, was partly true, she was indeed very lonely).
If there were other explanations, more supernatural ones, Alice never thought of them and was therefore never scared, only sad. Sad to the bone.
This was how she grew up—and how she was able to stay—in the house where her father had also grown up, gotten married, had a baby, and died.
She was repeating her father’s life by staying here, in a house that could very well have been haunted without her ever really knowing it.
In retrospect, Alice considered this ignorance a mercy.
mornings were the worst . Alice hadn’t set her alarm in years, not since Luna was born fourteen years ago, her small, wrinkled body tearing through layers of Alice’s skin and muscle.
From that first day, Luna barely slept past dawn, and so Alice was forced awake too.
By the time Luca arrived, four years later, Alice had given up on sleep as a concept and instead organized her life into periods of rest and activity that lasted for minutes, not hours.
Her days began with twenty minutes for breakfast, ten minutes for coffee, which could be construed as rest, and six minutes for driving to school, and ended with fifteen minutes of self-care, which usually meant turning on a cooking show and then immediately falling asleep, her head thrown back against the sofa.
This morning, Luca was shaking her by the shoulder, rocking her toward the window and back. Still, she kept her eyes closed against the sunlight burning through the thin curtains.
“Mom, I know you’re awake.” Alice could hear the irritation in his voice, that verging-on-adolescent crack that ran through all of his words these days. “Mom. I’m hungry. Mom. Please get up.”
When Alice sat up, she saw Luca, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He was small for his age, and bony, with the joints of his elbows and knees growing against the fabric of all his clothes, including his oldest and most loved pyjamas, the set printed with sharks eating pizza.
“Okay, I’m up. Go brush your teeth first.”
She watched him turn and walk down the hall, bumping into the hanging mirror on the way.
In her bathroom, Alice pushed all the bottles and tubes to the side and placed her palms on the toothpaste-stained counter.
She looked at her reflection, squinting at the messy black topknot on her head, the lines from the wrinkled pillowcase on her cheek, the shape of her breasts under her old CBC Radio T-shirt.
In her twenties, her breasts had pushed against every shirt she tried to button, every cardigan she shrugged on in a cold office.
Now that she was forty, they seemed to have melted into the rest of her torso, no longer round shapes of their own, but dragging, barely perceptible and empty.
Alice raised her hand to the mirror and ran her finger over the cracks, the black snakes and spots that meant the mirror was disintegrating from behind.
Her reflection wavered as she blinked the sleep from her eyes, and when she looked again, she saw a fresh-faced version of herself, hair artfully mussed and beachy, a sprinkle of freckles scattered across her nose, lips pink and full and glossy.
A perfect mom on a perfect morning. This is the way you should look, but you don’t, you really fucking don’t.
She closed her eyes again to brush her teeth, not even bothering to rinse the minty suds out of the sink, then rubbed the dead skin off her face and lips with a burning-hot washcloth.
This time when she looked in the cracked mirror, it was her real self who stared back, puffy and hunched, a pimple growing on her chin.
Alice escaped into the hall, relieved she no longer had to consider the accumulated droop and decay of her own body.