Chapter 7 #2
they only had two hours, maybe three, before Alice had to return home, where Luna was begrudgingly babysitting Luca with two pizzas and a huge bottle of Mountain Dew.
Jas sat across from her at the newest restaurant on Powell, his face flickering in the light from the tabletop candle.
Behind him was a chalkboard listing the day’s dishes and organic wine specials, but Alice couldn’t read them in the dim room.
It didn’t matter anyway. In a place like this, the kind of restaurant that had taken over a space in the Downtown Eastside that might once have housed a Chinese printing company or a laundromat or a corner store that sold both glass bongs and fried chicken, it was easy enough to guess what was on the menu.
Charred octopus. Braised pork belly with pickled cipollini onions.
Unfiltered Okanagan chardonnay. Stone fruit clafoutis.
Alice didn’t care what she ate. As long as it wasn’t the leftover half of Luca’s grilled cheese or the last pieces of watermelon that had been sitting in the fridge for five days.
She watched Jas bury his nose in his glass, breathing deeply.
He looked up, smiling, and she thought her heart was twisting so hard it was on the edge of unbearable.
“It’s so hard to get a local cabernet franc,” he said. “This place must have a lot of buzz if they get first dibs from the wine reps.” His voice was full, the kind that you felt more than you heard. A bass line. A pulse.
“It’s Thursday, so maybe all their supplies are fresh. Look at us! Out on the town on a weeknight.” Alice touched Jas’s hand with her own.
He laughed. “Mom and Dad snuck out! Here’s to total Bronwyn domination.
” Jas held out his glass, his eyes glowing, and Alice couldn’t tell if it was the candlelight or if his eyes really held that much love for her.
Maybe this was what the love she had been dreaming about looked like, felt like, smelled like.
Her brain vibrated with the possibility.
For a split second, she thought she could hear an inner voice that was also, strangely, external.
He didn’t say he loved you. Because he tried to tell you once before, and you fucked it up.
Alice looked to the window to see if it was open, if a rainstorm had suddenly blown in, but there was nothing, just the same bland night sky, the leaves on the trees still as ever.
She rubbed her arms with her hands and felt goosebumps under her palms. She sniffed and it smelled like the old pipes in her house, the collection of damp that greeted her every morning when she went to the basement to pack orders.
He doesn’t love you. How could any man love you after you told him he meant nothing? You stupid fuck.
“Alice?” Jas had put down his glass and was searching her face, as if seeing something in her eyes or mouth he had never seen before. “Are you okay?”
She grasped his wrist across the table. His pulse was steady and even. He felt so real. Alice let go and picked up her glass by the stem. “Yes. I mean, not really. Can we talk about the other night? I want to apologize. I made you feel terrible.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about relationship stuff when we’re both kind of drunk.”
Pricks of anger surfaced on the back of her neck. “Why does everyone have an opinion about me drinking? It’s you and Pinky, and tomorrow it’ll probably be my mom too.” She drank the rest of her wine in one swallow. “I’m sick of it.”
Jas sat back and blinked. “I won’t bring it up anymore, okay? Just like I won’t bring up making a commitment or anything else you don’t like.”
“Oh god, I’m being an asshole again. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.” She bent her head and stared at the remains of the salmon roe amuse-bouche on her tiny matte-black plate. “I haven’t been myself. But I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be anymore. It just feels like nothing makes sense.”
“What do you mean? You just got the call from the Good You. What’s even wrong?”
Alice didn’t know how to tell him that she was afraid of her own house, the traces of her dead father, the basement with its spiders and cracked concrete.
There was the complete and utter cleanliness that she couldn’t remember doing anything about, the rooms her children huddled in where she was an intruder or a nuisance or, worse, unnecessary.
The mornings in her bed with the dry dust of cheap wine on her tongue.
How do you tell the man you secretly love all of this? How do you tell him anything real?
Alice looked up and smiled, the kind of smile that felt so thin and brittle she thought it might crack and shatter, leaving shards all over the table.
But maybe it was the performance that mattered most. “I’m not used to being out on a weeknight.
It’s gone straight to my head.” She waved down the server and ordered another glass of wine.
“Can we talk about serious stuff another time? Maybe when we’re not in a hipster restaurant surrounded by hot influencer girls?
” Jas’s laugh sounded light, and the dread she was carrying seemed to float away.
When the cold sémillon trickled down her throat, it washed away the shiver she had been feeling in her core for days, and she promised herself she would stop worrying.
The wine left a trail of forgetting, and it was everything Alice needed.
despite her resolution to stop, there were times when Alice still worried.
Every time she looked around her house these days, the cleanliness and order were noticeable, but why didn’t she have any memory of anything she had done the day and night before?
Even if she thought she could remember packing that pallet bound for Boston, she questioned it immediately.
Was it that order she remembered or one from six months ago?
Were the sticky spots she found on her fingers and her dry cracked palms hard evidence of struggling with packing tape, of her forgotten work?
Was the memory of plunging the clogged toilet from yesterday, or was it a memory from all the clogged toilets she had cleared during her life?
Did those bruises on her knees and the wet spots on her leggings mean she had knelt in overflowing toilet water?
If she had had one less glass of wine that weekend, would all of this be clear, a series of memories and clues unfolding chronologically as if in a documentary?
In a swirl of worry, she dialled her doctor’s office but then hung up before anyone could answer.
What would she even say the problem was?
Everything was getting done. She had time, more time than she’d had in fourteen years.
Sure, she was exhausted, but she didn’t deserve to complain.
If hours had slipped from her memory, that was a small detail. It wasn’t worth mentioning.
She had felt this kind of time slippage before.
Alice had never forgotten how, in the days leading up to her father’s death, she had been shivering in her bed, the sheets too hot and then too cold, her head pounding as she tried to breathe through snot and infection.
When the cough came, it tore through her chest, raking her lungs like talons.
In the early morning, through the fog, she heard her mother. “The fever isn’t going away. I’ll get her dressed and then we’ll leave for the hospital.” Her father didn’t reply, only coughed. “We may as well get you checked out too. Alice must have given you this bug.”
As Judy pulled Alice out of bed and to her feet, she could hear his cough growing louder and drier and more insistent, culminating in a near-retching that echoed through the house.
Young Alice thought it sounded like his body was trying to turn itself inside out to shed its disease, the way she had felt for days already.
She fell back down on her bed, too tired to hold up her arms so Judy could pull a sweatshirt over her head.
“No, come on. You can do it. We have to go see the doctor,” her mother snapped.
Alice burrowed under her blankets as quickly as she could, into the warm cave that smelled of her own musk, only doubled and damp, several degrees above body temperature, mercifully muffled.
There, she closed her eyes, hoping she might fall asleep, the kind of sleep where darkness is absolute, where there are no dreams and no body that ached as if it was trying to murder itself.
In this quiet, there was no Judy, no fever, no anxiety about rushing to emergency. There was only an utter and total blackness, and Alice did not know if she had died, if maybe the last cough had killed her and she was in stasis, waiting for heaven or hell or something else entirely to claim her.
When she awoke, the light was thick through the curtains.
Alice kicked off the covers and stretched, her six-year-old joints stiff and sore, a different pain than the inflammation from whatever virus she had.
Her arms felt as though they had been pulled out of her shoulders and hastily pressed back in again.
As she rubbed her right arm with her hand, she winced in pain.
Around both wrists were red welts, starting to turn purple at the edges.
She pressed a thumb into her wrist, and there was a sharp new pain, like the blood had only just rushed there.
It was then she heard her mother screaming, a long sustained wail as if she had been screaming for hours already.
Alice ran toward the sound, her stomach twisted in fear.
From the open doorway of her parents’ bedroom, she saw a scene she would replay in her brain for the rest of her life.
Her father lying on his back on top of disturbed sheets.
His head hung at an impossible angle off the mattress, as if his death had begun with his neck, with a violent snapping of the tiny vertebrae.
His eyes were still open, bulging out of their sockets in a sick facsimile of surprise.
How could her father, who had only begun coughing that morning, be dead?
Alice had been the sicker one, the one with the 104-degree fever, the one who had been sweating both hot and cold, who couldn’t bear anyone touching her flushed skin.
It was Alice, wasn’t it, who was supposed to die? Had death got it wrong?
Before Judy could stop her, Alice rushed to the bed.
Her father’s hands were locked, held in the air above his chest in half-formed fists, or really, cuffs, the kind of cuffs one might use to hold another person’s wrists, if they were trying to hurt you.
She fell silent and pulled the sleeves of her pyjamas over her hands, the welts burning beneath the thin flannel.
If her mother had seen them, she never asked Alice any questions about them. Not then. Not now.
Years went by, and she lived a regular life, even if the kids at school thought she was sad and weird.
She went to university, got married, had her kids, and in all those years, she had never forgotten a thing.
Not a dentist appointment, not a playdate, not a spa day with her mother.
Alice could remember happiness, loneliness, and grief held at bay while she got on with the mundanity of her life.
In her head, she stored every tedious, minute detail, even when she didn’t want to, even when she wanted to run away screaming from the piles of diapers or the sink full of dishes, from this house.
But now, every night before Alice fell asleep, she curled up and pulled the blankets over her head, huddled with both her own smell and her own fear.
Had she always been like this? Was blanking out, dissociating—whatever it was called—was this her ?
Was she simply drinking too much, as everyone kept telling her?
What else was she forgetting? What else had she done that there was no evidence for?
What if her life continued like this forever?
She thought of her father again, of his bent and broken body, of the soreness in her arms and shoulders as she stood there, staring at his unmoving eyes and at her mother screaming, face raised up to the ceiling.
She tried to poke at the memory, find cracks that meant there was something else being stored in her brain that she could pick at, speck by speck, until she could recall every last detail.
A voice cut through the fear: Are you sure you want to know everything? And she had to admit, in the darkness of her bed, that she probably did not.
But then she thought of something worse.
What if all of this—the cleaning, the packing, the order, and the reclaimed time—just stopped and she was left unprepared and flailing yet again, buried in her old cluttered life?
Crumbs, unfilled school forms, aphids in the rose bush, the clock advancing at a cruel, unstoppable rate.
She could still feel the weight of it all, remember in the prickling of her skin what it felt like to be moving ahead without really knowing where you were supposed to go.
And it was then that Alice would roll over, restless with anxiety, because the worse fate was clear, and yet that was the one she was choosing.