Chapter 13
everything about her mother was an insult, a deeply intimate jab at the soft parts that Luna was used to keeping secret.
There she was, standing at the sink, rinsing the dishes, singing along to the Dua Lipa song on the radio, and Luna wished she would take her stupid fucking yoga leggings and high ponytail and all her disgusting secrets and disappear, so Luna could read her fashion magazines in peace like a normal person.
Alice’s facade of happiness was pathetic, a fragile veneer that Luna was sure she could shatter just by coughing.
And now her mother’s tuneless singing was adding to the fatigue headache forming behind her left eye.
Luna groaned quietly and angrily flipped another page.
She stared at the glossy pages in front of her but couldn’t focus on the words.
Luna couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept more than a few hours in a row, or made it through the night without a nightmare, without struggling through an overgrown garden, sometimes running away from that beautiful, monstrous house with the blue columns, sometimes running toward it.
But she was always afraid in these dreams, always aware that something was chasing her or that something was waiting for her.
She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes until she saw sparks of light, until it hurt, just enough.
“You know, sweetie, I saw a soft glam palette at the drugstore yesterday. It was on sale. I could pick it up for you if you like.” Her mother’s voice felt like splinters in her ears.
“Soft glam means neutrals, Mom. I don’t do neutrals.”
“Well, it might be nice to have options. Neon green isn’t something you can wear all the time.” Alice peeled off her rubber gloves and hung them on a hook. “Maybe you just want pretty makeup once in a while.”
Luna stood and gathered her pile of magazines, sketchbook, and coloured pencils in her arms. “I don’t care about pretty . I do makeup for the art . I’m not basic like you and your other mom friends.”
Alice stopped with a tea towel in her hand. “That’s mean, Luna. And uncalled for. I was just trying to make conversation.”
“About something that I don’t care about. Which you would know if you paid attention to me instead of, I don’t know, hooking up with random douchebags.”
As soon as the words left Luna’s mouth, she knew she couldn’t take them back. They hung in the air, ugly in their naked cruelty, in their unavoidable precision. She clutched her magazines to her chest, as if they could hide her.
Alice threw the towel down on the counter and turned around, so that her back was facing her daughter. “What are you even talking about?” Her voice was quiet, not angry and loud as Luna expected.
“Nothing. There’s nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
With her back still turned, Alice sighed and said, “I’m allowed to have a private life, Luna, and allowed to keep things from my children if I think it’s appropriate to do so.
I’m a person, too, you know. I get lonely.
I get sad. You don’t get to judge me.” And with that, Alice walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to her bedroom. Luna heard the door click into place.
For several minutes, Luna didn’t move, only stood beside the table, art materials still in her hands.
She had tried to hurt her mother, tried to drill into her feelings and fuck them up, and she had succeeded.
She knew herself well enough to realize that this had been her intention.
But now she understood that she hadn’t known what specific reaction she wanted to elicit from her mother—the woman who made all her meals, who came home with clothes she thought her daughter might like that were usually, comically, the exact opposite.
Maybe Luna wanted rage to match her own rage.
Maybe she wanted a fight. Maybe she wanted her mother to promise to never see her stupid hookup again.
What Luna definitely hadn’t wanted was this heavy sadness, this melancholy that blanketed the entire room, that made her think about the ways she had failed her mother her entire life.
The hours she had spent every day accepting love and work that she never thanked her for.
The laundry left unfolded, even though it was her task on the chore board.
The evenings she had refused to look after her brother so her mother could go out with her friends.
The data overages on her phone that she never had to pay for.
And now this: the accusation that her mother hadn’t been paying attention, when in fact she always had been, had paid as much attention as humanly possible.
Lately, though, her mother had seemed especially tuned out, as if there was a conversation happening inside her head that no one else could hear, one that was chastising her or being cruel.
She walked like her knees and elbows were broken at the wrong angles, like a discarded, unpredictable marionette, and it was only now that Luna was putting it all together, that perhaps her brokenness, her loneliness , had led her to distraction, to a new man, and was that the worst thing she could do?
Only that morning, she had walked in on Alice in the bathroom, as her mother was stepping out of the shower, and in that unforgiving bright white light, she could see the dark circles under her eyes, the puffiness around her jaw, the small bloating in her belly.
Luna briefly wondered how a person could look so frail and so swollen with sadness at the same time.
But then she saw the coffee cup beside the sink and smelled the Irish cream steaming off its surface.
And Luna stormed out, furious that her mother was drinking at eight in the morning, and forgot everything else.
But now Luna was sorry, so very sorry, that her mother’s door was closed. And she was so tired that all she could feel was an arrhythmic burning vibration in her limbs that wouldn’t go away.
Luna dropped her magazines back onto the table and yelled down the hall, “Luca, turn down the volume on your stupid game; I’m trying to make art ,” hoping her mother would hear her trying to be good.
She waited, listening, but she heard no movement, no words of reassurance.
Luna had never wished so hard to hear her mother’s voice.
she had never been the child who watched, who hid behind houseplants so she could see what everyone else in her family was doing.
Instead, Luna rushed through rooms and streets and days with the intensity of an unrepentant explorer.
She had to do all the things she had decided were important, whether that was makeup or homework or rewriting the lyrics to her favourite Mac Miller song to be even sadder.
Luna was a girl with her own goals, who assumed everyone else had their own too and were therefore too busy to notice what she was doing.
But in the hours after she had ripped the thin fabric that still tied her and her mother together, she sat on her bed with the door to her room open and watched.
From there she could see the end of the hallway and into the kitchen.
She could see the family photographs that Alice had nailed to the long wall, a series of images that progressed from a young Judy and Tom with a child Alice, to Luna in Judy’s arms, to Luna and Luca together in a double stroller, Pinky standing behind them with her hands on the handles.
There were no pictures of adult Alice. She was always the one behind the camera.
She was the one who decided what they would see every time they considered the pictorial history of their family. And it didn’t include her.
Luna saw her mother in the kitchen, pulling out food from the freezer for tomorrow, stopping to take a sip of the white wine she had poured into a water glass, as if that made it less alcoholic. Alice was slouching, and her hair was falling out of the bun on top of her head.
When Luna was younger, she’d asked her mother about the grandfather she had never known, and Alice had not said much, only that he had died in the house, in his sleep, and that it was peaceful.
And when Luna persisted, Alice shook her head and said, “This isn’t a story for children, my love,” and passed her a cookie, something to stuff into her mouth that wasn’t death or grief or misery.
Now Luna stared at the wall of photographs and saw how much was missing.
Her mother as an adult. Judy’s parents. Alice and Judy together during those years they were alone.
The places in Hong Kong they were from that Luna had never visited.
She saw Alice walk to the bathroom, glass of wine still in her hand, and heard the quiet click of the lock.
Was she drinking as she sat on the toilet?
While she stared at herself in the mirror, at her unwashed hair and the sun-damage spot on her left cheek that was slowly growing bigger and bigger?
Was she talking to herself in there, to her own reflection, to someone who was her but the better version of her that she could have been if she wasn’t so fucking sad all the time?
Did anyone else’s mother disappear into rooms, trailing the smell of old alcohol and musty scalp?
The answers to these questions seemed to lead to one conclusion: her mother was rapidly unravelling. Luna knew all the words for depression and trauma and neurodivergence, but none of them seemed right. No, her mother was drinking a lot, and she was going crazy. Simple. Just crazy.