Chapter 12
ALICE STOOD IN THE now-dark dining room and turned the dimmer switch for the chandelier up halfway, so the room appeared dull and soft, as if everything—furniture, crown moulding, their faces—was furred at the edges.
Pinky had just told Alice her worst fears, her oldest hurts, the story she had kept hidden for years and years, and this gentle light seemed like a mercy, even if it was an inadequate one.
“Do you ever think about the baby?” Alice asked, but then felt shame for the words that had left her mouth. How dare she, when this woman had cared for her own two children, both of them safe in their rooms down the hall. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that.”
“No, it’s okay. Sometimes I do. She would be Luna’s age. When I see Luna, I think of her.” Pinky laughed. “I don’t know why I think of her as a girl. I just always have.”
“What happened to the father?”
“Oh, he still works at the university, as a manager. I hear he’s married now, with three kids.”
Alice cupped her hands around her lukewarm mug. “Did you love him?”
“I was twenty and he was twenty-three, Alice. We thought we loved each other. After we broke up, I never wanted to see him again.” Pinky smoothed a wrinkle in the tablecloth. “I don’t know if he ever thinks of me. We were so young.”
“Men always forget, or they run away from their memories. It doesn’t matter how old they are.” Alice could hear the edge in her own voice.
After a few seconds of silence, Pinky asked, “Is this about Grant? Or the man you’ve been seeing?”
Alice inhaled sharply. “How do you know about him?”
“I live in your basement. I see things, hear things.” Pinky shook her head with a smile. “Why don’t you tell me about him?”
Jas had been a secret for so long, a whisper that came and went with the night, a scent left in the hallway that Alice never explained.
Now, looking at Pinky’s face, her head tilted, ready to listen, Alice didn’t know if she could tell the truth.
The barriers to honesty had built up over weeks and months and they were as real to her as Jas himself. Maybe even more real.
“It’s okay. I won’t say anything to the kids,” Pinky said, placing her hands palms up on the table. “I can see you want to tell someone.”
A gust of wind blew in from the open window, and Alice closed her eyes for a moment against the cool air. She could. She could tell someone.
As soon as she opened her mouth, the words tumbled out, running into one another with few breaths in between.
She told Pinky about meeting him at his bar, how he was the best sex of her life, about his nighttime visits, about how he had left upset because she had pushed him away, instead of inviting him in.
Jas took shape in the space between them.
His rumbly laughter. The shallowness of his breathing as he slept.
His kindness. The way he always said her name when they were talking, as if to confirm her continual existence.
His reluctance to acknowledge that Alice was telling him the truth about what she wanted, even when she told him to his face.
By the time she had told Pinky everything that had happened, Alice was slumped in her chair, her shoulders drooping with what she knew was shame.
As the words sat like a heavy cloud above them both, Alice knew that no one—not her mom friends, not her mother, not even an advice columnist—would ever suggest that she break up with him.
She could hear Judy now. He is a nice man offering you everything, and you still don’t want it.
Stupid girl. And of course they would be right.
Of course. But even if she loved him, there was a part of her that didn’t believe she was capable of love, that took a very small amount of pleasure in hurting him, in being able to control how he felt with just a few words.
Was she evil? Or a sociopath? It was this combination of embarrassment and potential malevolence that was threatening to make her cry.
Fuck it, she really was crying. God, she hated herself so much.
“Don’t cry, Alice, he’s just a man.” Pinky pushed her mug aside and grasped Alice’s hand. “You know what you want, and you told him. He might not like it, but that’s okay. You can move on.”
“But what if it’s not what I want? What if I said I don’t want commitment because I’m scared or mean or too much of a drunk?”
“Well, only you can figure that out. But what I’m trying to tell you is that men are never the answer. They don’t magically fix our lives. Only we can do that.”
Alice laid her forehead on the table. She was so very tired—of being lonely, of being fatherless, of waiting for Grant to fight for her, of wishing that she could have met Jas twenty years ago; tired of managing her kids’ lives and her own life, tired of being the hinge that held it all together.
Maybe she was lashing out at Jas so that for once, she could be the person inflicting pain, the one who could walk away.
Maybe they could all take care of their own fucking feelings and leave her alone.
Pinky stood up and began gathering the mugs and plates. “There are so many good things in your life, Alice. And you can’t even see them.”
“I’m sorry. I know I’m complaining a lot.”
“Don’t apologize. We all live with our own bullshit.”
Alice watched Pinky walk to the kitchen, her slight body moving through angled shadows. She was right. But Alice didn’t want right . She wanted precisely what was wrong.
She called out, “Pinky, you and I should get married instead.”
Pinky’s laugh echoed. “You wish.”
jas came back, of course, his body hovering over hers in her dark and silent bedroom.
This was her secret, wasn’t it, the way that her love for him manifested in these short hours, in this need for his heat in her hands.
Sex could mean nothing or it could mean everything, and Alice knew that the two of them together contained both emptiness and overflow.
And she was the one who wasted all of it as it slipped through her hands, like it was worth nothing.
Here, in this moment, in this dark, with his tongue trailing down the sinew in her neck, he was everything she wanted. He knew her body, how to float his fingers above her skin just so, how to pull on her hair with just the right force. She felt desired and beautiful and perfect.
But dawn was coming. She knew she would make him leave before the light grew real by telling him half-truths that were cruel and false and not false.
And then she would curl up on the side of the bed, her hand lingering on the space he had just left, the rapidly cooling sheets that still smelled like him.
Maybe later she might text him and tell him to never come back or to come back again that evening.
Maybe she would write him an email explaining all the contradictory, confounding thoughts inside her muddled brain, and he would finally understand. Maybe, maybe.
But she knew, really, that she wouldn’t. He was here now, cupping her breasts in his hands, and she wanted this night to last forever.
the next day, alice stared at her inventory, counting the stacks of diapers and covers.
She shook her head as she ran her fingers down the pile of cloth training pants.
Were these the items that should be in that box addressed to Calgary?
Three flawlessly packed orders had appeared on the front porch overnight.
Alice wasn’t sure what was in them and so was counting what was left on the shelves against the online orders she had received.
It can’t be dementia , she thought to herself.
But she was losing time—minutes and hours that she could only assume she spent awake and finishing the work she left undone every evening.
She wondered if there was a place in the house where the forgotten time was hiding, waiting for her to discover it, waiting to be seen and remembered.
She sat down heavily on the worktable behind her.
Nothing felt right, but there was also nothing to complain about.
It was all getting done, after all. But the dread in her stomach had been growing for days, creeping through her limbs until she could feel it in her fingertips, in her toes every time she took a step.
Alice heard a noise, the sound of the pocket door opening in the laundry room. She stood up quickly and felt herself brace. What are you even afraid of?
Pinky stepped into the work area, her denim jacket slung over her arm. Her hair was curled into waves and she wore high-heeled boots, the caramel-coloured knee-high boots that she had bought while visiting an outlet mall with Alice and the kids.
“Pinky! You look so nice. Where are you going?”
“I’m taking you out. We can go to that new Italian place on Kingsway.” Pinky’s coral lip gloss shone in the dim basement light.
“What? I can’t. The kids are home and will need dinner.” Alice raked a hand through her hair. “And I look like shit.”
“Well, you can go and get cleaned up, and I’ll order a pizza for the kids. Luna can look after Luca for a couple of hours. We’ll only be three blocks away.”
Alice opened her mouth to say no, to say she was too busy, to wave her hands in front of her like she couldn’t possibly entertain the idea of going out on a Wednesday evening.
But then she thought of the effort of making sure Jas was never seen by the kids, of shaving her body as quickly as possible, of scheduling her dates on the weekends after midnight when Jas was off work.
She could have been doing anything else during those times.
Giving herself a home facial. Pilates. Origami.
Watching Love Is Blind until she fell asleep.
Pinky knew this. This invitation might have had its genesis in pity or obligation or guilt for all the times Pinky had declined Alice’s offers of wine and company.
But so what? In business, Alice never turned down a good offer.
Why should friendship or faux friendship be any different?
“Give me fifteen minutes,” she said, and she ran up the stairs two at a time to the rhythm of Pinky’s laughter pealing out behind her.
the restaurant was all blond wood and industrial lighting with servers in dark denim aprons, all of them wraith-like, floating across the room as if they had never once eaten in their lives.
One wall was glass, and behind it were rows and rows of wine bottles on their sides, their labels turned out.
It was deafening, the sound of conversation and cutlery against plates and an espresso machine.
Outside, in the park across the street, Alice could see a small grouping of tents, one of the many public spaces in the city where people had begun living.
Here she was, in a building that had once been a coin-operated laundromat, ordering a cocktail that cost twenty-eight dollars, while in those tents, people cooked over small disposable grills, if they were cooking at all.
Alice could smell aged cheese and imported prosciutto, salt and fat layered over and over again.
She had never considered that wealth had a scent, but now she thought it must smell exactly like this.
“That guy is cute.” Pinky nodded at a table of three men, all in their fifties, wearing slim-cut button-downs with discreet patterns. “The one with the grey hair.”
“He looks like a hot Santa. Is that the vibe we’re going for?”
Pinky laughed. “You can rent him out at Christmastime.”
Throughout the restaurant were people shouting, people drinking wine, people holding hands.
Alice spent every day at home, working at her business or working for her kids or sneaking in a secret boyfriend.
She had forgotten what the noise of the world was like, how human emotions tumbled out of a crowd like an avalanche—delight and rage and love, one after the other.
“You look much less sad now,” Pinky said from across the table.
Alice took a sip of her negroni before replying. “Is that why you asked me to come out? You felt sorry for me?”
“Of course. Seeing your sad face made me feel sad. This is really to cheer me up, not you.” And Pinky laughed again, tipping her head back, her hair falling in waves on her shoulders.
“I’m going to pay for this tomorrow morning though,” said Alice. She could already feel the hangover headache starting to throb behind her eyes. “I guess I’m paying for it tonight too,” she laughed as she patted her purse.
Pinky grinned. “I had been planning on it.”