Chapter 4 #2
Alice looked at her daughter, at the long black hair framing her face, her pale skin, the soft cheeks that reminded her of the baby she used to be.
She was luminous, in that way that only teenage girls can be, their outer shells not quite practised and dense enough to hide their emotions or thoughts or unexpressed wants, or at least the glimmer of them.
If Alice could just say the right thing, ask the right question, maybe Luna would crack open and reveal everything she tried to bury under makeup and scowls and sarcasm.
“Is that all, Mom? Is there another reason you barged in here?” She looked down at a page, her eyes tracing the lines of a rectangular handbag.
“I just want to apologize again for forgetting about the school trip. I knew it was really important to you, and I still didn’t remember. It won’t happen again.”
Luna shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t care anymore.”
“You don’t have to pretend that you don’t care, honey. I know you do.”
“Actually, Mom, no, I really fucking don’t.” Luna’s voice rose to a high pitch. “It’s just one more thing to be disappointed about, one more thing to add to a long list of reasons of why I am so fucking tired of being a part of this stupid fucking family.”
“Luna! Watch your language.”
Luna laughed, her face turned up to the ceiling. “That’s hilarious. As if my language has anything to do with what goes on around here. Good one, Mom.”
“You know what? I don’t think I want to talk to you right now.
When you’ve calmed down, we can have a conversation.
” Alice stood, her hands in fists in her pockets.
For a moment, she felt a flicker of guilt coming from Luna’s slouched body, but she had fallen silent and Alice didn’t have any energy left to push on this small, rare moment of vulnerability.
When she looked back before she shut the door behind her, she saw Luna curled up on her side, staring at the wall, at the sketches she had taped up, all renderings of beautiful, sort of artsy, famous women—Zoe Kravitz, FKA Twigs, Tavi Gevinson.
Alice wondered, not for the first time, why her daughter drew these women.
As comparisons? As a rebuke to herself and her own looks?
As examples of women she wished her mother could be?
Or was it really not that deep? But now was not the time to ask.
Luca, she hoped, was asleep, but it was more likely he had snuck his phone under the covers so he could still reply to the Minecraft group chat.
But that didn’t matter. It was just sleep, after all, and she did not want to wrestle a phone away from her son.
Instead, Alice paced the kitchen, listening to her footsteps and no one else’s.
“Fuck it. I’m getting some wine.”
She opened the spout of the boxed pinot grigio and watched it pour into a coffee mug. In her slippers, she stepped out onto the front porch. She could smell the rain coming, that ominous scent of ozone. The seagulls flew over the house, squawking what sounded like a warning.
Alice walked down the front steps and turned back to look at the low, wide windows lit against the night.
For a moment she thought she saw someone standing behind the glass, someone standing straight, someone whose gaze was judging her from inside her own house .
Just a reflection from the street lamp on old windows , Alice thought, as she rubbed her eyes with her free hand.
She had been told her house was a vintage mid-century gem by a realtor who had knocked on the door a few months ago.
“My clients are looking for something just like this. And you know, of course, that Cedar Cottage is the hottest neighbourhood on the east side.”
Alice had laughed in his face, this small man in a suit that was simultaneously too tight and too long. “I’m not selling,” she told him. “My family has lived here forever.”
She knew she needed new siding, that the cool thing to do would be to install horizontal cedar planks and paint the window trim a neutral charcoal grey, and maybe change the front door to something industrial adjacent in an oddball colour like mint green or safety orange.
But she liked the way the old grey stucco looked as if it was rising up from the rocks, like it was a product of rain and erosion and the acidity of Douglas fir needles eating the colour from the soil.
This was the way she wanted to see her house, the way she wanted to feel when she walked up the front path to the battered door with the rusty knocker.
The wind was blowing at her back, lifting up the edge of her bathrobe.
Alice padded over to the path that led around the side of the house, through the gate, and then into the backyard.
When Alice had had to let her go after Grant moved out, Pinky had found a job as a support worker at a women’s shelter and had continued living in her suite in the basement, paying market rent for a space that had been included when she was Alice’s nanny.
The suite wasn’t particularly nice; in fact, it was the suite that Alice’s parents had lived in years ago when they first got married and the house belonged to her grandparents.
But when Alice had asked her to stay, Pinky had assured her she liked it there.
“It feels safe,” she had said, “like a little box.” The extra money was something Alice couldn’t turn down, and so she pushed away the guilt for never having updated the tiny bathroom or replaced the teal carpet.
There was a light on in Pinky’s bedroom window. Alice bent down and called out, “Pinky? Pinky, it’s me.”
The blinds twitched, and Alice saw a sliver of Pinky’s face before she heard her voice. “Oh good god. Alice, you scared me.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I just saw your light on and wondered if you wanted to join me for a glass of wine.”
Pinky slid the window open wider. “It’s almost ten. I have to get up at six to go to work.”
“I know, I know. It’s just so quiet in the house right now.
It’s driving me nuts.” Alice felt pressure behind her eyes, the push of tears.
Don’t cry, Alice , she thought to herself.
Stop being a whiny, lonely baby . “Do you want to come up anyway? Maybe we could watch an old episode of Friends or something equally mindless?”
Pinky sighed. “Another time? Do you still want me to make dinner and help you out on Thursday? Maybe we can hang out then.”
“God, Pinky. You have no idea how much I look forward to Thursdays. I know you don’t have to work for me anymore so I really appreciate it.
I mean, it’s the one day I feel like a human being again.
” Alice stood there awkwardly, slightly wobbly on the damp grass.
She could feel the tears starting behind her eyes and looked up at the pitch-black sky so that Pinky wouldn’t see.
Before she looked down again, she whispered, “I just wish I could afford to pay you what you deserve so you could be with us all the time.” She felt her cheeks burn. She hoped Pinky hadn’t heard that.
Finally, Pinky asked, “How much have you had to drink tonight? You don’t seem like yourself.”
Alice wondered what her usual self was even like.
All her life, she had been acutely aware that who she was on the inside—grieving, deeply lonely, afraid that she was ugly or weird or insane—was not what people saw on the outside.
She had spent decades trying to be pretty and smart and friendly, as if all that extra effort would silence the inner voice she had been hearing since she was a child, since the day her father died.
No one will ever love you.
You’ll always be worthless, no matter how hard you try.
I know the real you. I know how wrong you really are .
And here she was again, pretending she was just fine, that she didn’t hear cruel voices, and fooling no one, especially not Pinky.
“I’m fine. Just a little tipsy, I guess! Sorry to bug you. I’m leaving now!”
A shadow of frustration crossed Pinky’s face, and, not for the first time, Alice wondered if Pinky hated her, if this relationship of former boss and nanny was not as intimate as Alice had always supposed it was.
She thought of Pinky as family, as maybe even her closest friend, the sort of friend who was omnipresent, reliable.
Maybe Pinky thought Alice was a spoiled brat, the kind of woman who couldn’t make it through a week without one evening of help with basic domestic chores.
Maybe Pinky was humouring her, letting the lonely, privileged lady believe they were friends because it was easier that way, easier to not explain power or wealth disparity or any of those other gulfs of understanding that separated the ones who lived upstairs from the ones consigned to the basements.
Alice knew all of the possible critiques Pinky might have formed about her.
But couldn’t our friendship be the exception?
As she re-entered her front door, she resolved to ask Pinky more about her old life, the places she had lived, but a nagging question went through her head.
Haven’t I made a mental note to do this many times before?
Back in the kitchen, Alice walked through the dark to the fridge.
When she opened the door, she blinked against the bare bulb inside and squinted at the chaos: old plastic containers with half-eaten school lunches, a ketchup bottle on its side lying in its own red sticky puddle, half a roasted chicken that Alice had shoved in on the top shelf, uncovered and still on its serving platter, breastbone obscenely exposed.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had deep-cleaned the fridge, the last time she had even just thrown out what was mouldy or rotting or stinky.
You see? Worthless. Can’t even wipe down your own fridge .
She tilted the wine box until a trickle of pale yellow began decanting into her cup.
Even if she wasn’t on top of things, at least she didn’t waste alcohol.
Later, in her bedroom with all the lights turned off, Alice pulled the covers over her face and smelled her own smell in the cocoon she had made. It was familiar—her argan oil shampoo, the body butter from Lush, a hint of the cheap white wine she had been drinking—and she fucking hated it.
it was here, under this blanket where Alice was only with herself, that she knew she was losing time.
It was the sensation of falling asleep except not into the sleep of comfort and rest, but rather a sinister sleep, one that always begins with being pushed off a ledge and plummeting into a nightmare where dread builds and builds or, even worse, where you spiral into a blank unconsciousness and flail, but your fingers and toes touch nothing at all.
When Alice was a child, this was what she thought was happening, that kind of dramatic sleep that occurs when one is exhausted or depressed or mired in anxiety.
But as she grew older, she learned to differentiate between this dark numbness and regular sleep.
Tonight, for the first time in years, she felt that familiar tipping over a knife-sharp precipice.
And then there was darkness, an ultimate stillness in which there was nothing, not even the hiss of air from vents in the floor or the beat of her own heart.
She wasn’t sure if she could move or speak. She didn’t even want to try.
Her body may have disappeared completely. But she didn’t care. She couldn’t feel her knees or nose or the tickle of her hair on her neck. Only this lightless, mute blankness.
It was familiar, but then it wasn’t.
Far away, Alice could see a point of light, and, as she watched, it grew closer, slowly taking shape.
She wasn’t walking toward it; rather, it was as if she was watching a movie and the camera was zooming in as slowly as possible, so that she had to squint to notice that it was moving at all.
At first, it was just a rectangle, then she could see it was a doorway, and then, as she strained her eyes, she could see that through it was her own bedroom but as it was when she was a child, when it was her parents’ room.
The light inside was thin, as if it was early morning.
The colours were muted, the red plaid of the blanket not quite red, the black of her father’s hair not quite black.
Her father. Yes, that was him. He was sick. He was coughing. He looked like he might die.
He looked up, and his eyes met hers.
“Daddy,” she said.
“Who the fuck are you? Get away from me.”
And she wanted to scream at him, claw at his face, cry that he should know her, even if he was dying, even if this was a nightmare.
For thirty years, all she had ever wanted was an opportunity to speak to him again, to have a conversation, to ask him questions, and he was ruining it, ruining the oldest wish of her life.
The darkness. The silence. It overwhelmed her then, and she was falling yet again.
She reached out for her father but he was gone, the room was gone; there wasn’t even a pinprick of light.
She breathed in and gave up, because there was no fighting this nothingness; she could only wait for it to end.
Alice had no idea how long she stayed like this, unseeing and immobile, stuck in this place that was her bed but was also not.
I’m asleep, that’s all , she said to herself, a comforting white lie.
And when she emerged into her regular, cramped life, she would believe it was nothing more than a nonsensical nightmare during a long night, even though the remembered dread would stay with her, a nagging, faint terror, like the pulse of scar tissue.