Chapter 17
dawn. those minutes when it’s not dark and not light, when the things you could ignore in the night grow more and more visible.
This particular morning, Alice awoke at five to a startling sound. What is that? She searched her sleepy brain for a memory to connect with that rip, that trailing off. So familiar, something she heard every day, she was sure of it.
The tape gun. Was it the tape gun?
She reached out across the bed to turn on her bedside lamp and gasped when her hand touched skin, hair, the warmth of another person. Alice bolted up in bed. What the fuck?
Beside her, Jas stirred and opened his eyes.
She inhaled sharply and rubbed her own. When had he come over?
Had she texted him last night? She sifted through her brain, looking for the moment she must have invited him over, the moment she opened the basement door after he gently knocked, but there was nothing. Not again. Shit, shit, shit .
“What time is it?” Jas muttered, running his hand through his hair. “Are the kids up already?”
“No. I mean, I’m not sure. I think I heard something. You’d better go. I can see the light starting to change.”
“Wait.” Jas paused for a second before speaking again. “We talked about this. I don’t have to sneak out.”
Alice froze, one arm in her robe. “I don’t understand.”
“Last night, Alice. We talked about us, about me making you all breakfast. I mean, we’d have to act like I came over just this morning, but you said I could meet the kids today. You said, ‘We’ve waited long enough.’? ”
Alice scrambled out of bed, her robe hanging off one shoulder.
She saw her reflection in the mirrored closet, a slash of a body in the half dim, bisected by the cracks that never seemed to go away.
She wanted to pound her head against the glass until the memories emerged from wherever they were hiding.
“Last night? That’s what we talked about? ”
“Alice, come on. We talked about me meeting the kids today, and that as soon as your company is worth enough to sell, we would take the kids and move to Mexico for a year. Like all those irritating expats on House Hunters International .” Jas held out his hand across the bed, but Alice just stood there, arms at her sides, back against the closet.
“You thought it was the greatest idea. You even said, ‘I can’t wait to be a clichéd rich Karen on the beach.’? ”
She could feel her confusion ebbing away, and anger taking its place.
“That’s the most impractical plan I have ever heard.
Do you know me at all? I would never say that.
” Alice tied the belt on her robe into a tight knot, yanking on the fabric so viciously it bit into the soft skin on her waist. “Is it Thursday? Shit, Grant is supposed to be here at six thirty to take Luca fishing. I need you to leave, Jas, before the kids wake up. We can talk about this later, after I have a gallon of coffee and a hot shower.”
Jas was now fully dressed and standing in front of the window with his hands in his pockets.
“I appreciate you have kids, and you want to do your best with them. And maybe introducing me to them is not the right thing for them right now, and I get it. But, Alice, I’m worth considering too.
I also have real feelings that matter.” His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper.
“I know you do,” she said gently.
Jas walked around the bed and pulled her into a hug. She could feel the denim of his jeans against her thighs, the hard seams. “I can be patient. I can wait for you. But not for that much longer.”
Alice wanted to tell him that she loved him.
She wanted to pretend to remember everything about last night, about the things he said she had agreed to.
Maybe that would change the course of this conversation in the direction that he wanted, into what he had been asking for.
But there he was, dressed and ready to walk away because she had told him to, and there she was, robe half on with a ball of tears behind her eyes, ready to burst with every useless memory but not the ones she needed right now.
She hated this shivering, naked exposure.
She wished she was steelier, a wall of intention and fortitude, someone who could ask for what she wanted without feeling shame.
Closing her eyes, she tried to instead remember all the times she had to be hard, a cold knife blade.
The day she told Grant she wanted a divorce.
When she went to the bank by herself to apply for a business loan.
She hadn’t built a company all by herself by being vulnerable .
She wasn’t stupid. She stood up straight and held her abdominal muscles tight, like a fist. She had feelings to bury and children to protect.
“Okay,” she said. “You can go now.”
She heard him walk down the stairs, the sound of the basement door closing behind him.
Then she heard Luna’s bedroom door open, her steps down the hallway as she made her way to the bathroom.
Just in time , Alice thought, as she put her hand on the doorknob, ready to wake Luca, help him find his waders, pack a sandwich that he would probably forget to eat.
It wasn’t even light out and already there was so much to do.
And yet she continued to stand there, staring at nothing as if waiting for Jas to come back, as if he hadn’t left in justifiable anger.
But then the door was pushed open from the hall, and Alice stumbled backward. Luna stood there, eyes wide, and pulled at the sleeve on Alice’s robe. “Mom, who is that man outside? Why is he fighting with Dad?”
Through the open door Alice heard shouting, two voices she knew so well they were embedded deep inside her.
“Jas,” she whispered. “Fuck my life.”
She would have to explain it all now, to everyone.
All her nighttime secrets, the small precious versions of herself and Jas that she had kept like shiny river stones inside her head.
She closed her eyes and thought of his face lit by the bartop candle, the first time she touched his hand with her long fingers, the old school photo he had shown her of his eight-year-old self in a striped sweater, a brand new toy tool belt around his waist. They were a genuinely beautiful couple in those moments; she had to believe they were.
She counted to ten before she opened her eyes again.
She knew, in the merciless early morning light, as her boyfriend and ex-husband were fighting on the lawn, that those memories would grow sordid and ugly, slick with sweat and cum and dotted with the words she’d whispered into his ear.
She wished there was a jewel box she could hide in, enclosed by velvet and secrets.
There was more, of course, that she had been hiding all this time.
She couldn’t help but think that this one secret, once out in the open, would lead to more secrets tumbling out, hungry for oxygen, hungry for the validation that can only be granted when something is seen and named.
The bottles hidden in the corner cupboards, the basement, the drawer in her nightstand.
The smell of bleach and ammonia on her sweatshirts in the morning.
The guilt she carried for not preventing her father’s death somehow.
Alice blinked. In the predawn dark, everything was indistinct. But it didn’t matter. Since it was all coming to light anyway, nothing would ever look the same.
afterward, alice hid in her room for three full days, lying on her side, her face in her pillows.
She just lay there, her hands worrying at a crease in her duvet cover, the light changing from morning to afternoon to evening, until it was dark.
And then she did the same thing the next day, and the day after that.
Alice left her room only a few times, to use the bathroom or eat handfuls of almonds in the kitchen, but really she only wanted her bed and these four walls, hung with photographs of her children as babies, their round baby eyes like a reproach for every bad decision Alice had ever made.
It was during one of these trips that she discovered Pinky, instead of disappearing into her suite when she was home from work, had returned to her old routines, helping the kids with laundry and meals, her eyes darting between the children and Alice herself, a look of worry on her face.
Pinky didn’t provide a reason for her help, and Alice didn’t ask.
Once or twice, she reached out of her duvet cocoon and checked her phone.
Work, work, Grant, work, mom group chat, work, work, Judy, Grant.
No Jas. He was ghosting her. Alice hated that term, but it was unrelenting in its accuracy.
He had gone silent and invisible, as if he had been blown away by the morning wind, a dandelion ghost man, divided into pappus, gone in a breath.
If he had landed somewhere else, she would never know. She turned off her phone.
Sometimes she heard Luna and Luca whispering in the hall, just outside her bedroom door, arguing as they always did.
“What if she needs us?”
“If she needed us, she would come out.”
“But what if I need her?”
“Don’t be a baby. You’re fine. She just needs time alone.”
“Aren’t you worried about her?”
“Oh my god, just stop talking.”
She could have gotten up and opened the door.
Instead, she burrowed deeper into the bed, where all noise was muffled, where she could pretend she was in a cave of her own choosing.
The soft, wrinkled sheets held her gently, and in that space, she couldn’t feel her joints growing sharper, the fat around her hips disappearing as she slept through the daylight and kept her eyes closed when she was awake through the night.
As she slipped out of the real world, she saw things that seemed just as real but couldn’t be.
A fall over an edge, a floating in total darkness, a light.
Next was a middle-aged woman with brown skin and an uneven bob, screaming, “You must be stronger! How can you be so soft and weak?” And then she burst into tears, reaching and reaching for Alice, as if she was sorry for being so cruel, as if she, too, was scared.
On her arms, a series of bruises, some purple and blue, some healing and fading yellow.
“Who hurt you?” Alice tried to ask, extending her hand, but the woman couldn’t hear her over her own sobs. Their fingers touched for just a second before Alice felt herself being sucked away, back up to the surface, back to her own bed in her own house.
alice was just waking up when she heard a light knock on her door. She ignored it and closed her eyes even tighter, twisting herself further into her duvet. But the knock returned, an insistent pounding that seemed to be keeping its own beat.
When she opened the door, her wrist clicking as she turned the knob, Judy stood in the hallway, dressed in a coral tracksuit with lip gloss to match. Her hands—covered in gold rings, as always—rested on her hips.
“You’re alive then,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I can smell your dirty hair from here.”
“Thanks for always being so kind, Mom.” Alice sighed and leaned against the door frame in exhaustion. “What are you doing here?”
Judy gestured toward the kitchen. “It’s about time you left that rat’s nest of a bedroom.” She peered around Alice at the pile of blankets on the bed, the closed blinds, and the dirty cup on the nightstand. “I didn’t raise you like that,” she muttered.
Alice pulled on her robe and followed Judy to the kitchen.
She blinked against the bright pot lights and steadied herself with a hand against the wall before she could see what was before her.
Near the back door, Luna and Luca standing together as they almost never did anymore.
Beside the table, Pinky with her hands resting on the back of a chair.
On the table, a full spread of Chinese takeout: Singapore vermicelli, house special fried rice, salt and spice tofu, garlic pea shoots, and, Alice’s favourite, prawn-stuffed crab claws.
Luca jumped up and shouted, “Surprise!” He looked around and then said quietly, “We were supposed to do that together.”
Judy placed her hands on Alice’s shoulders. “You need to eat, so we got your favourite things for dinner.”
Alice cupped her stomach with her hands. It felt empty and concave, not a stomach but a sad facsimile of one. “I can’t,” she whispered. “If I ate now, I’d throw up.”
Luca frowned. “No, Mom, you have to eat. You haven’t eaten in days.”
“Even if you don’t feel like it,” Pinky added. Alice saw her rub her eyes with the back of her hand, and it occurred to her that she had never seen Pinky look so tired.
Before Alice could ask Pinky if something was bothering her, Luna started piling food on a plate. “What do you want, Mom? One of everything? Maybe three of the crab claws though.”
“No!” Alice immediately dropped her voice. “I’m sorry for shouting. Please, just let me go back to bed.”
Judy turned around, a half-filled plate in her hands.
As she stood there, a dribble of red sauce spilled onto her bedazzled track pants, but she just left it there, not even dabbing at it with a napkin, as if that small action would have prevented her from staring at her daughter, trying to figure out why she wouldn’t eat.
Judy’s face was slack, her mouth fallen open.
Alice wondered if she should ask how her mother was feeling, but the silence they were all standing in was too thick, too opaque for her to break.
So she turned away from the confused and disappointed faces of the only people in the world who loved her this much, and she ignored the voice in her head whispering, There is something very bad growing inside Judy .
Alice walked back down the hallway. It was better to disappear this way, so her family couldn’t watch her thin, off-balance body reject their kindness.
When she opened the door to her bedroom, the light flooded in from the hall and Alice stepped inside, closing the door silently, the triangle of illumination shrinking inch by inch.
If there were ghosts lingering at the peripheries, scrambling to grasp the light as it disappeared, Alice didn’t know.
Not that it mattered. They were used to being ignored anyway.