Chapter 27
in early labour, judy was fine. She walked the hallways of Grace Hospital in her blue gown, breathing through the pain, smiling at Tom because he looked worried.
But as the contractions progressed, she could feel a slow breaking open from the inside out.
And it was familiar, so familiar that Judy wordlessly cried out when she recognized that ripping, that tear growing across her core.
She could feel those old talons scrabbling at the insides of her body, scratching and scratching at the walls of her uterus and birth canal.
“Get it out,” she shouted, “it’s trying to kill me,” but no one understood what she meant and the nurse put a mask with laughing gas over her mouth until she was silent.
Confused, Judy dropped off into sleep between the pains, but still she knew.
Something bad with an undeniable will to live was going to be born.
A baby with claws. A you hun yu gei, that wandering hungry ghost in those old Hong Kong movies.
Or a beast with the eyes of her hard-as-rock mother; the mouth of her laughing, callous brother; the sad wail of her ghostly grandmother.
When it came time to push, with the nurse holding her right leg and Tom holding her left, she didn’t know if she was pushing the evil out, or if the evil was pushing out all the good, leaving her body to fend for itself. She didn’t know, and she screamed with the uncertainty.
As soon as her baby was handed to her, wrapped in a blanket with a small striped toque on her head, Judy wept, tears of relief falling on Alice’s wee face.
She was just a baby, with tightly closed eyes and pink cheeks, small fists like baos, a mouth that opened and closed with tiny squawks that made Judy’s breasts tingle.
A beautiful baby with rolls on her thighs and the softest fuzz on her perfectly round head.
Judy shook her head at her crazy in-labour thoughts, brought on by pain and delirium, and kissed her baby’s chubby cheek.
“Hold on,” the doctor said. “I’ve never seen this outside of a textbook before.” She was holding a metal pan with both hands, as if she had just taken a meatloaf out of the oven. She brought it near Judy’s face and lowered it so she could see inside. “See that? It’s a double-lobed placenta.”
Judy saw blood, two red sacs, and the severed umbilical cord.
It was completely symmetrical, each lump mirrored, every branch of the umbilical cord on the left exactly the same as the one on the right.
She swore if she touched it on one side, the other side would also dimple. Judy gagged and turned her face away.
“What does that mean?” asked Tom, peering into the pan, his forehead wrinkled as if he was in a science class, trying to learn about a portion of anatomy that didn’t come from his wife.
“It could mean nothing. But it could also mean you may have carried a twin who didn’t make it. We call those vanishing twins. If you didn’t have any spotting or bleeding, it might have been absorbed by your surviving baby.”
It’s gone , Judy thought. The evil, the core of my ruined self, has van ished. Vanished . But then she shook her head. Ludicrous. Another crazy thought.
“You could take the placenta home with you, if you want,” the nurse said to Judy. “Some people like to bury it. Some even eat it. You just never know what people will do.”
Before Judy could agree with Yes, that’s hilarious , she heard her own voice say, “Actually, I’d like to take it home.” There was no good reason to. Why did she say that?
Evidence. Dispose of the evidence.
The next day, as Judy stood outside, Alice in her arms, she watched Tom dig a hole in the back garden and drop the placenta, wrapped in a baby blanket and placed in an old plastic ice cream bucket, into the dirt.
Carefully, he positioned a young Japanese maple on top and filled in the hole with his bare hands, patting down the dirt gently.
“Wait,” she said. “It’s crooked. Let me fix it.
” She handed the baby to Tom and kneeled down in the dirt, wincing as pain shot up through her belly.
She pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt and evened out the soil while pushing the skinny trunk ten degrees to the east. She could feel the dirt under her fingernails, smell the minerals and compost and bone meal.
When she was done, she placed both hands on the fresh smooth soil, and she swore she could feel a pulse, maybe even a series of small breaths.
She stood up quickly and turned to Tom and Alice with a smile.
He gave her a thumbs-up, and she sighed.
two months later , the maple died. Tom replaced it with a magnolia.
That died too. They tried holly, rhododendron, and heather.
Nothing grew, not even feral buttercups or clover.
And so, Tom collected a small pile of rocks to mark the spot.
Over time, other plants grew around it, until the rocks were invisible and forgotten, hidden by the broad leaves of hostas, the curls of toxic bracken ferns.
A year after that, Tom’s parents died, his mother first of a heart attack, his father ten days later, hit by a city bus while stumbling home from the bar.
Tom was sad, even disconsolate for a few days, but Judy marvelled at how he emerged from the grief like his old self, as if the deaths that people witness are just a part of life and not the result of violence or insanity or shameful secrets. God, she loved him.
She did not think about vengeful ghosts or a curse. She was too busy. But she should have taken the time, she should have.
Tom and Judy moved upstairs, knocked down walls, bought furniture made of blond oak, painted stars on the walls of Alice’s room.
Judy loved the vertical blinds best, how they opened and closed with the lightest pull of a gold chain.
Dark or light, all under her control. When Alice woke in the middle of the night, Judy held her in the big rocker by the window, watching the dark street through the gaps, the cracks that connected her safe little house to the world outside.
Just before Alice’s sixth birthday, Tom woke Judy up, shaking her from side to side.
“She’s burning up,” he whispered. “I heard her coughing and went in to check on her. She’s so hot.
Where’s the Tylenol?” Judy rushed to the bathroom and then down the hall, tripping over a wrinkle in the carpet runner on the way.
Alice was on top of the covers, panting like a small dog, her face red and damp.
“Mommy,” she croaked. “Everything hurts. Even my toes.”
For the next two days, Judy and Tom took turns staying in Alice’s room, rubbing Vicks on her chest and forehead, checking her temperature every hour, holding her hot little hand as she moaned quietly in her sleep.
The fever went down and then up, the cough grew wet, and Alice cried whenever she was awake, whenever they tried to make her eat a piece of toast or drink a glass of apple juice.
Judy could tell that Alice was dreaming.
Her eyelids fluttered, and she sometimes seemed to be pushing someone off her or kicking at a presence Judy couldn’t see.
Once, she sat up, eyes still closed, and shouted, “You can’t take everything away from me!
That’s mine!” It took all of Judy’s strength to lay her back down, her joints stiff with fear or rage or both.
On the third morning, Alice’s temperature hit 104. Higher than it had been in the middle of the night. They had to go to the hospital.
When Judy walked back into her own bedroom to wake up Tom, he was lying on his side, wheezing, eyes closed, mouth open. He flinched when she touched his forehead, swatting at her hand. “I feel terrible,” he whispered, before he began coughing violently. “I must have caught what Alice has.”
Judy touched his hand and he held on to it, his grasp hot and dry. “Alice’s fever is at 104 now. We have to get her dressed and take her to emergency. And get you checked out, too.” Tom nodded into the pillow. “I’ll go get cleaned up. Why don’t you put on some clothes and then we’ll go?”
Judy pulled a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans from Tom’s drawer and placed them neatly on the bed by his feet before heading to the bathroom.
She was gone seven, maybe eight minutes, but when she returned, Tom was already dead, his upper body hanging off the mattress, as if he had been trying to crawl out of bed to the hallway, to the bathroom where Judy was, brushing her teeth.
Judy screamed his name and dropped to her knees, her hands on his shoulders as if she could shake him awake.
For a moment she couldn’t see or think of anything else, just his face tinged greyish blue, his eyes still and open.
But then she remembered. “Alice.” She stood up and turned around, ready to run to her daughter’s bedroom.
But Alice was already there, standing just inside the doorway, her fine little-girl hair mussed with sleep and sickness.
As her daughter ran toward the bed, Judy tried to grab her to pull her back, but then she saw Alice’s wrists.
On the tender, pale skin were deep red welts, raw and bleeding, as if someone had tried to hold her back.
She looked at Tom’s stiff hands. Was there a smear of blood on the inside of his thumb, the tips of his nails?
She blinked, then pulled her daughter out of the room, holding her by the waist and half carrying, half dragging her to the hall.
The welts healed so fast, it would have been easy to forget that she had seen them.
But she didn’t forget, of course not. Instead, she remembered that Gigi had good reason to be angry.
She remembered how her own mother used to beat her and say it was for her own good.
She remembered how angry she was that both of them had been neglected and abused and noticed only for the wrong reasons, or not noticed at all.
They had been passing down their anger for generations.