Chapter 2 #5
“Where are those kids? I have to make a phone call on the way to dinner. A developer is freaking out about a permit. Jesus. Luna! Luca!”
The two kids hurried out of the house, dragging their bags behind them.
Luna rushed past Alice, smelling of the rosewater spray she liked to mist all over her face.
Alice grabbed her hand and Luna turned back, her face tight in irritation.
“I talked to Mr. Gladstone and he’s checking to see if you can still go on the trip, but he’s pretty sure you can.
He says he’ll even call me during spring break to confirm. You see? It’ll work out.”
Luna rolled her eyes before pulling away. “It’s not fixed yet. I still might not be able to go. Because you just forgot .” She turned and ran down the steps, not bothering to look behind her.
Luca slipped a folded piece of paper into his mother’s hand.
“I redesigned my plan for a security system, so you’ll feel safer when we’re not home.
” Alice stared at the drawing of cameras and wiring, read through the notations for the coding that would enable the system to connect to their wi-fi and therefore her phone.
“It’s good, right?” Luca grinned widely.
“It really is,” said Alice, even though she had no idea how to make sense of what she was looking at. “You’ll get first place in the science fair for sure.”
Grant was already in the car, fiddling with the volume of the music. Alice could hear the Eagles, even through the closed windows. She silently thanked the universe that she never had to listen to classic rock again.
Watching her children drive away was never her choice, so as they were buckling their seat belts, she turned around and taped down the last box.
She heard the car speed toward Knight Street.
When she faced the front walk again, the road was empty, as if her children had never even been there, as if their existence had been neatly erased, leaving only the memory of their warmth and musk on her body, wherever they had touched her last.
An unremarkable grey sedan drove slowly past, two people sitting in the front.
When Alice squinted at the windows, she saw a woman’s face staring back at her from the passenger side.
Her mouth was open in a scream, but Alice heard nothing, just the beeping of the crosswalk light down the street.
But this woman was surely screaming, her hands pressed against the glass.
As Alice took a step off her front porch—she had to help, she had to run after the car and see what was wrong—she blinked against the sun and looked again.
The woman was no longer there. In her place was a little boy with blond hair and a baseball cap.
The car sped up, ran the stop sign, and was gone.
Just a strange reflection , she reassured herself. Just my tired brain playing tricks on me . Her hands shook as she pressed down on the packing tape, feeling the gap where the flaps met with her fingernail.
After Alice called the courier, she went to the bar cart in the dining room and poured two fingers of Scotch. TGIF , she thought, as the alcohol burn dripped down her throat.
she stood under the hot shower, the water like needles on the thin skin of her shoulders and back.
Alice’s right hand rested on the green tile, the same tile her mother had installed almost forty years earlier.
When Alice and Grant moved in after buying the house from Judy, it was one of the things they left as is.
“It’s retro,” Grant had said, while Alice shrugged. “People love this shit.”
The grout under her fingers was grainy, with small pits where pieces had worn away.
Alice knew she could navigate this house blindfolded, guided by touch alone.
In the dining room, there was the narrow strip of the chair rail, smooth from years of dusting.
In the kitchen, there was the angle of the sloping floor, tilted ever so slightly toward the door that led to the backyard.
Down the narrow steps to the basement, there were the old brass banisters, each vertical spindle made to look as if it was twisting forever and ever downward.
She sometimes thought she loved this house, but really she had never been able to stay away.
It was a compulsion, not a simple emotion, driven, perhaps, by how many hours she’d spent here alone after her father died and her mother hurried from open house to open house.
Alice could have had friends over—as Judy had always told her she should—but the other girls at school had always stayed away.
They were not cruel exactly, but they never invited her to birthday parties or asked her to sign their casts or gave her cards for Valentine’s Day.
Even as a child, Alice believed that she carried the stink of death, as if a grey cloud of grief hovered over her wherever she went.
No one wanted to be a part of that. Alice didn’t either, but she hadn’t had a choice.
So on particularly quiet afternoons, when the loneliness became too much, she would sit in front of her closet door and trace the lines of her own face in the mirrored surface, telling her reflection about the day’s events, singing the melody to a Boyz II Men song until she swore she could hear her other self singing in harmony with her. The other Alice always sang better.
After Judy had signed the sale papers and packed up all her stuff, she sat in her car and waved frantically at Alice and Grant, who stood on the front lawn.
“It’s all yours,” she had shouted, her smile so wide Alice thought her face might crack. “I’ve always wanted something brand new!” And with that, she had sped off downtown, toward the glass tower condo she had bought with cash.
Alice turned under the showerhead so the water was now pulsing on her face.
Funny how the bathroom still smelled exactly the same as it had when she was a little girl, how the same pipes still emitted that rusty, damp scent that floated up through the drains.
They had never updated the plumbing, only patched up leaks when they needed to, not touching the work her father had done when he built the darkroom in the basement.
She used to sit in the corner on a stool while he worked, her eyes so accustomed to the red light that she asked for the same bulb for her bedside lamp, a request Judy had immediately refused, saying it would make the room feel like hell.
Downstairs, the water had always been running, a continual spray that washed the chemicals off the prints, that made her think of streams in the woods, not that her parents had ever taken her hiking.
It didn’t matter. She would have chosen the darkroom with her father’s calm presence over the wilderness anyway.
In the steam, Alice realized she was crying.
She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and watched the snot wash away, dribble down to her feet, and disappear into the drain.
This house—where she had lost her father, where she had spent so many hours across the dinner table from only her mother—was the longest commitment of her life.
It was her sibling, her safe space, a keeper of secrets. A burden.
Imagine your most elemental relationship being the site of your worst trauma.
Imagine carrying that contradiction, the love that also contained a loss so deep that it reverberated in your bones for the rest of your life.
Alice didn’t have to imagine it. She remembered the day she ran to her parents’ room, the image of her mother shaking her limp father by the shoulders as she screamed his name over and over again.
The child Alice stood mutely in the doorway, rooted to her position, not sure if she should run and help, or run away and never look back.
She glanced behind her and thought she saw a small figure sprinting toward the front door, pink nightgown just like hers billowing behind her.
No, Alice , she thought, stop imagining things .
She kept her feet on the beige carpet, as if she was charged with witnessing her mother’s grief, noting the blue tinge around her father’s mouth and hands, feeling the deep, heavy guilt that she was the one still alive, that she hadn’t woken up early enough to help, that she wasn’t the one who had found him.
Alice didn’t know then what kind of guilt she was feeling, and she didn’t even know now.
It was both specific and nameless, and this drove her wild.
Whenever she couldn’t sleep, when the gin and cognac and whatever else muddied her stomach and left her lying awake and dizzy, on top of her covers, this was the moment she relived, no matter how hard she tried to lock this memory away in a mental vault, no matter how much EMDR therapy she did.
Her father, dead. Her mother, screaming.
Alice herself, immobile, unable or unwilling to look away.
She had never had night terrors because this wasn’t a nightmare.
Alice cried harder into the hot water, her soapy hands now in fists, ready to punch the green tiled walls, ready to break through drywall and insulation to go—where? She didn’t even know.