Chapter 2 #4
In the springtime sun, she watched her son and daughter as she stood on the front walk.
They did not hold hands, but their bodies moved in tandem—right foot forward, right foot forward, left foot forward, left foot forward, hands in pockets.
They had both come from her body, both overdue babies, both bigger than anyone expected, and fuck, did that hurt.
In a way, though, she didn’t mind the pain, the sensation of her body cleaving itself from the inside out.
Even in labour, she knew that the contractions were getting her somewhere, to motherhood, to meeting the humans whom she had made, grown her body around, their tiny selves coddled in fluid.
They were hers, in a way they would never be anyone else’s.
Not Grant’s. Not her mother’s. Not the world’s.
As she turned toward her house, back toward the sticky kitchen, to the shower she had not yet taken, she heard the unmistakable roar of her mother’s G-Wagon turning the corner.
“Fuck,” Alice whispered. She waited until she heard Judy’s high heels on the pavement before she stood up straight to face the day.
alice was bent over on her front step, a tape gun in her right hand.
Surrounding her was a semicircle of cardboard boxes, each adorned neatly with a shipping label, each printed with her logo—a stork in mid-flight, carrying in its bill a vintage cloth diaper, complete with folds and diaper pins—and the company name, The Cozy Diaper Company, in pink and white cursive script.
It was cute, too cute, Alice sometimes thought.
What if she had named it Destined for Shit instead?
With a logo that looked like a heavy metal band T-shirt from the 1980s?
She stared at her tape gun. Even her packing tape was pink. “I disgust myself,” she muttered.
She looked up when Grant’s car slowed to a stop out front.
Another new car , she thought, her eyes travelling over the shiny black Audi.
Of course. Her own battered Pathfinder was parked in the alley, so at least she wouldn’t be forced to contrast her ex-husband’s disposable income with her own, or at least his credit limits.
She had never spent more than ten minutes inside his Yaletown loft condo, but she knew that the kids had to share a room, that Grant rented it from one of his golfing buddies, and that the deck, accessible through a rolling garage door in the living room, sat above the patio of a busy seafood restaurant, famous for only hiring young women, each of whom could have been the prettiest girl in whatever smaller city she had come from.
In Vancouver, in Yaletown, they weren’t exceptional, just expected, a pretty human manifestation of a city that hid its ugliness in other, less visible neighbourhoods.
“It’s so sexist, Mom,” Luna had once said, rolling her eyes. “Maybe I should try to save them, deprogram them or something.”
It had been Alice’s decision to end the marriage four years ago.
Grant was, by most people’s standards, a good husband, one who didn’t mind going to soccer practices, driving to the art lessons, taking apart old electronics so the kids could see how they worked.
But he and Alice had been together since university and, one day, when Luca was no longer a toddler, no longer pulling at her breasts or hair or hands every waking minute, she turned over in bed and saw a man she wasn’t sure she had ever loved.
He was fine. But Alice was so very tired of fine.
It took another six months for her to tell him their marriage was over, a moment she had practised in her mind hundreds of times, each time substituting one sentence for another to try to avoid what she knew would be the outcome: Grant’s rage.
She had once watched him stop the car, get out, and punch the driver’s side window of a truck that had cut them off.
When Luna was a newborn, he had given Alice the silent treatment for weeks because she was too tired to watch Law & Order with him at night.
And when an old boyfriend had texted her out of the blue, Grant had thrown her phone against the wall, shattering the screen.
In her head, she heard the same statistic echoing over and over: the most dangerous time for a woman is when she leaves a relationship.
But I have to leave , or I will be dying a little bit every day anyway.
When she finally told him, he was at first silent, and sat unmoving, his arms folded across his chest. It wasn’t until the next morning, after he had slept on the couch, that Grant grew truly angry and said things to her that Alice had never forgiven.
“I always knew you were a whore deep inside. Just a whore waiting to get out.” In that rupture, in between his outbursts about her weight, her expectations, the men he assumed she had been sleeping with, she saw, for the first time, everything that had made him wrong.
When he walked into a room, all blond and tall, he expected the best possible treatment, and he almost always got it, whether it was the best table at the local brunch restaurant or the most stylish sales guy at Holt Renfrew.
He joked that she could never allow her ass to spread beyond a circumference of thirty-six inches or he would leave her.
He shouted at a crying Luca, “Suck it up! Boys are not drama queens!” He wore crocodile-patterned shoes.
He believed he was the smartest person at his office.
He left dirty laundry in piles in the closet and in eleven years of marriage never noticed that someone—not him—was picking them up.
Alice knew she had never been perfect or sweet or sober, but Grant only made her worse, pushing her further into that dark cocoon of grief and sadness she had known since childhood.
She had never once wanted him back.
As Luna and Luca stepped out of the Audi and came up the walk, Alice smiled and asked, “How were your Fridays?” Luna shrugged and continued through the front door.
Luca stopped, dropped his backpack on the step, and hugged his mother around the waist, the top of his head resting just under her chin.
“It was sports day. I hate sports day.”
Grant overheard this as he adjusted his suit jacket. “Jesus, you’ve been complaining from the moment I picked you up from school. Your preference for zero sports isn’t optimal, Luca, so you just have to participate. Fix your attitude.”
Alice watched Luca’s shoulders fall. He was so small, his bones like bird bones, his skin stretched thinly across sharp joints.
There was no hiding the kind of boy he was—emotional, cautious, hyper-observant of the world around him but also the reactions of others—and she knew he would never change, even as he tried to please his father.
She could see a lifetime of effort and disappointment, resentment and distance in the future ahead of him, and she held him closer. Grant sighed, audibly.
“Go pack up your overnight bag, Luca. We’re having dinner with the city manager and his kids in an hour and a half. And we still have to stop at Safeway for breakfast things.” Grant shook his head. “I never eat in the morning, so if you want French toast, you’d better hustle.”
Luca walked slowly up the steps, eyes still focused on his grubby white sneakers.
He paused in the doorway with his hand against the jamb, as if he needed this solidity to bolster himself, to feel as if strength was a possibility.
Alice felt a small pain in her chest. She turned toward her ex-husband.
“What are your plans with the kids this weekend?”
Grant looked at his smart watch. “Dinner with a work friend tonight. Tomorrow I have to cut the ribbon for the new community centre on Kingsway. The kids can come. That family stuff plays well with the constituents.”
Ten years ago, Grant had entered local politics, leaving his job as a health inspector.
First, he got elected to the parks board, then he ran for a seat as a city councillor.
Lately, he had been planning a run for mayor, not that he told Alice about his life.
She only ever read about it on the local news website she browsed every morning.
If he had a girlfriend, she had not shown up in photos of any of his events, not a gala dinner, not a charity marathon.
The kids had never mentioned any trace of a woman in his apartment or talked about anyone other than his family and some of his friends who were also weekend dads with kids who needed to be entertained on a Saturday afternoon.
Alice was sure there had been some women, but Grant kept all of that to himself.
She wondered if he had a broken heart or if he simply needed his public image to be spotless, the kind of devoted father people could trust, or a combination of both.
Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he just didn’t care.
Alice cared. During the long nights alone, after her children had fallen asleep, she cared with an intensity that was red-hot, that felt like it was burning her outward, radiating from her core all the way to her fingers and toes.
If she tried to sleep, she would only toss and turn in her bed, aware that in every direction, there was no one else there.
She no longer wanted Grant, but she didn’t want to push her hands out and touch nothing but cool sheets, smell nothing but her own shampoo.
Grant squinted up at the sky. “How’s the diaper game?”
The diaper game. What a douche .
Alice waved at the boxes with her tape gun. “As you can see, busy.”
He bent at the waist to read a label. “Sweden. Don’t they have their own diapers over there?”
“Not the same ones I carry. People swear by the Canadian-made ones.” Alice was about to explain how she had made a custom curation for this particular customer, but Grant had already straightened up and was now pacing the deck, hands stuffed into his pockets.