Chapter 23 #2
During her pregnancy, she was happy, happier than she had known was possible.
Her belly grew and she walked through the world roundly, with purpose.
She went to her accounting and real estate classes and studied, her hand rubbing a circle on her own body, over and over again.
She aced every assignment, every test. She thought, once, of the evil she used to worry over, and it made her laugh.
Silly me , she thought to herself as she rubbed Vaseline on her snaking stretch marks.
I’m a wife and almost a mother now. There isn’t anything to be scared of.
At least, not anymore. And she smiled at her reflection in the mirror, at the body that grew and filled, that gave under the touch of a finger.
Tom got a job taking photographs for the local newspaper.
They lived in the basement of his parents’ house, a wide flat bungalow just off Kingsway that seemed as if it had sprung up from the dirt.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was the kind of house that she could see them growing old in, the kind that they could pass down to their children.
They had painted the walls blue, built a nursery in an alcove, with white curtains hanging from the ceiling for privacy. The crib stood waiting, soft and quiet.
It was during a late dinner one evening, while Tom and Judy were eating on a small bistro table in the backyard, that they heard Tom’s mother calling for them through the open window.
“Judy, it’s your brother on the phone. I think something is wrong.
” And it was a very bad kind of wrong, maybe the worst. Both of Judy’s parents had died, their car plummeting off the side of the Sea to Sky Highway, down a cliff, flipping on the jagged rocks so many times that there wasn’t any car left to save, only hot smoking pieces, some of it metal and vinyl, some of it, Judy supposed, their bodies.
As she listened to her brother cry and choke, she put her hand on her belly and felt something twist, like a relentless hand tangling her organs on the inside, insisting that she notice.
Judy closed her eyes and thought she could hear a voice.
I am here. She had not been afraid in months, for so long in fact that she didn’t recognize the fear at first, but then the realization was a cold shock, like being thrown into a lake without knowing how to swim—swift, frigid, inexorable, unforgiving.
She knew how to spot a curse, how to recognize when it’s growing inside you.
Her mother had taught her how her entire life.
sam, of course , was keeping the house, the uninsulated small square house near the cemetery, the one that had not been painted or landscaped in all the years Judy had been alive.
On a Saturday morning, she and Tom pulled up outside, a box of cleaning supplies in the back seat.
She stared at the barren, rocky front yard, at the mouldy downspouts, at the shingles peeling away from the roof, and she felt tears prickling behind her eyes.
Tom sighed as he pulled up the hand brake. “Tell me again why Sam can’t clean the house out by himself. He’s the one still living here.”
“He just won’t, and you know it. And there might be things in there that I want, or that will be ruined if he just ignores everything like he always does.” She undid her seat belt and rubbed her belly.
“Is he even home?”
“Probably not. It’s ten in the morning. He probably didn’t come home last night.” Judy heaved herself out of the car, both hands on the frame to steady what felt like a lopsided body. “We’ll start in the kitchen. That will be the worst part.”
It was as cold inside as she remembered, even though it was April and the air outside was tinged with a warm humidity.
Judy wondered if the thin walls could only let in cold air, if the accumulated chill resisted the warmth of spring until August, when everything simmered whether you liked it or not and there was no sleeping in the heavy dampness.
She remembered tossing and turning in her cot during her summers off from school, her cheap polyester pyjamas sticking to her skin like plastic.
Now, she placed her palm on the fragile single-pane window above the kitchen sink, and the cold sliced through her skin, sent shocks through her veins.
Judy and Tom stacked rusted cans of dace, Spam, and cream of mushroom soup in the corner by the back door, pulled up the cracked waxed paper lining the cupboards, and swept out the mouse droppings.
Opening the fridge, Judy threw her mother’s collection of condiments—jars of black bean sauce, fermented bean curd, chili oil, all sealed with a layer of plastic wrap under their lids—into a garbage bag.
Her hands smelled like old garlic. When they were done, Judy quickly scanned the bedroom she used to share with her brother.
Her twin bed was long gone, the baby-blue curtains taken down and replaced with cheap blackout drapes with a crinkled reflective backing.
“God forbid he should be woken up by the sun,” Judy muttered.
She knew there was nothing of hers in this room.
Before she had gotten married, she had made sure not a trace of her remained within these four walls, that Sam would not be able to detect her scent or run his sausage fingers over a sock when he thought of her.
He should struggle to remember how she walked through a room or chewed her food.
If she could have erased all of his memories of her—the fear, the crying, the closed eyes against the horrors of his body and sweating face—she would.
She had to settle for exorcising her own ghost.
When Judy opened the door to her parents’ bedroom, she immediately closed her eyes against the smell: her father’s thick hair cream, Ivory detergent, the white flower oil her mother rubbed into her swollen arthritic joints every morning and night, the cigarettes both of her parents smoked in secret, though it wasn’t really a secret.
The smell was so heavy Judy was sure that when they had left the day of the accident, her mother had closed and locked the window and Sam hadn’t thought to open it since.
It felt like William and Bette were smothering her, holding her down so that all she could breathe was their combined scent, the musk from their bodies and scalps and mouths.
Judy gagged and pulled the collar of her T-shirt up over her nose.
Tom looked in from the hall. “Do you want my help in here? Or do you want me to tackle the basement?”
Without turning her head, Judy said, “I’d rather not go down there and walk through five hundred spiderwebs.”
“Thanks for that image.”
She heard his steps down the stairs, his whistle fading away. It was “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a song Tom said he hated but always seemed to be whistling. Judy smiled.
She opened the closet door. Inside hung her father’s one suit, her mother’s fake fur–trimmed winter coat, and, wrapped in a dry cleaner’s bag, her mother’s wedding dress.
Judy had always supposed her mother had borrowed her dress, or sold it, anything to save the money they never seemed to have.
As she unwrapped the thin filmy plastic, she could feel the stiffness underneath, the layers of synthetic taffeta and crinoline.
She ran her fingers over the thick fabric, and static shot into her skin, tingles that were small but surprised her.
She couldn’t imagine her hard, square mother in this dress, with its folds and fullness, its obvious femininity.
The basque waist was tight and tiny, reinforced with boning.
The long sleeves were a sheer lace, the flowers small and round, violets or pansies or maybe even buttercups.
None of it felt expensive. Judy could feel the rough weave in the lace, the polyester stickiness in the skirt.
Bette must have loved this dress though. There was no other reason to keep it.
On the closet floor, Judy found four yellow milk crates filled with rolled socks and underwear, bras folded neatly in half, jeans and corduroy pants, flannel work shirts and the short-sleeved button-downs her mother always wore, the ones she bought from the three-dollar racks in Chinatown stores that also sold bamboo fans and cheap aluminum woks.
She dragged the first three out, her fingers looped through the holes of the crates’ gridded walls.
When she stuck her fingers through the fourth, her skin grazed something metallic and hard, not the cotton and rayon she was expecting.
She pushed aside a layer of her mother’s serge pants and saw a ring, heavy with keys.
The keys were brass, oxidized almost black, and long and skinny, the kind of keys Judy had only ever seen in scary movies.
She lifted them up, and they weighed far more than she would have thought as they rang out against one another, like bells but stingier, a sound that was both thin and sinister.
Judy dug her hands further into the crate, and she found a book, no, a diary, with a dark blue cover, swollen as if it had been absorbing humidity for decades, the edges of the pages furred from the touch of many hands.
She opened it, and a black-and-white photograph fell out, faded but clear as day.
Judy squinted at the thick curtains, the carved wooden chaise, the beautiful girl in a beautiful dress, sitting with her knees together, her legs at a demure angle.
Judy knew it was her grandmother. It was Gigi.
She flipped through the diary’s pages, trying to read as much of the Chinese as she could, squinting at the words she understood, remembering her mother’s stories to fill in the gaps.
Gigi was kidnapped, then raped, then raped again.
She spoke to ghosts. She had an abortion.
She thought she might be haunted, she thought she was cursed, she thought maybe she was just insane.
Judy could hear her mother, her whispered stories at night, the rise and fall of her voice as she told Judy about everything Gigi had lived through, everything that had contributed to her death.
She could feel her own skepticism, her childhood brain trying to parse truth from myth.
Ghosts aren’t real , her seven-year-old self used to think.
But then why does my mother believe they are?
Judy knew the truth now. Everything her mother had told her was true.
The ghosts were one thing, but the assaults and torture, those burned like a hot blue pilot light in Judy’s chest. She knew what those were like.
That was the real curse that wasn’t a curse at all.
The curse was just a rotten, tortured life.
She heard Tom’s light steps on the stairs, his innocent, pure-hearted steps. Quickly, she placed the diary and keys back into the crate and covered them with a pile of clothes. When he walked into the room, she was holding the crate with both hands, a smile on her face.
“Could you take this out to the car? This is all I want to take home.” She gestured to the other three crates. “These we can take to the dump.”
When Tom was outside, she quickly shut the closet door, leaving the wedding dress, suit, and coat inside. She was done cleaning. Let Sam live with them. Maybe he could be haunted for once.