Chapter 27 #2
For so long, she had tried to convince herself that the curse was just a story her mother told to explain all the heartbreak and tragedy, and if she scared Judy into submission in the process, then that was a bonus.
Though Judy had once worried about the mess inside her, the evil she was sure she was carrying around, she hadn’t thought about it since Alice’s birth.
Her six-year-old child could not have killed her husband. But a curse might be trying to make her think so.
Her parents. His parents. The dead spot in the garden.
And now this. She had thought her parents had died because her father was a drunk who insisted on driving.
She had thought Tom’s parents had died because they were so in love that one simply couldn’t live without the other.
And the garden, well, that was just bad luck, just the weird minerals in her placenta changing the acidity in the soil.
The doctors told her Tom had developed unexplainable holes in his lungs. He had suffocated to death, all on his own. They called it spontaneous .
What a perversion of a perfectly happy word , Judy thought, as she wept in the closet behind his hanging clothes, his navy-blue wedding suit, the sports coat he wore when he took her dancing.
Everything that used to be his was suffused with his lifetime of happiness, of never needing hard armour, of never even knowing other people needed armour against the bad—the worst—things.
Judy’s own mother, the whispering, angry Bette, had spent Judy’s entire childhood telling her about Gigi, warning about the tragedies that can and did happen.
She had said, “You have to be strong. You never know if the evil will be the man who says he loves you, or the anger you feel inside, or the ghosts that come to you in the night. You must be strong and ready for anything, for everything.”
If she began telling Alice about their family’s past now, as her own mother had, would she be prepared for everything she loved to be taken from her, or would she just live with a terrible sense of foreboding, as Judy had?
Would she see curses everywhere, in her own feelings and thoughts even when there was nothing to fear?
Was it better to survive with a constant feeling of dread, or was it better to be happy, to live so fully and beautifully that no evil could touch you?
In the darkest corner of Judy’s closet was a small box, hidden by folded blankets and old sheets that she kept for cleaning rags.
Pushing them aside, she picked up the box and shook it.
Judy heard the ring of keys. She knew Gigi’s diary was in there too.
Without even thinking, she carried it down to the basement.
She knew where the loose bricks in the walls were.
She knew how much could be hidden behind them.
Objects, yes, but also stories that she didn’t want to tell, that no one, especially her daughter, needed to hear.
When she pushed the box into the hole in the wall, she paused.
Judy had not opened the diary in years, not since she first brought it home from her parents’ house.
She pulled it out again and lifted the book out, carefully holding it in one hand, opening it with the other.
There, the impeccable Chinese characters in fading black ink.
There, the few sentences she understood that she never wanted Alice to see: Everything hurts.
I wish I was dead. Their voices never leave me. Everything will be all right, won’t it?
And the photograph. She held it up to her eyes in the dim basement light. It was exactly as she remembered it. Shiny full dress. Lush curtains. But then she noticed something else.
Gigi’s face was smooth and unmarked, with innocent round eyes, a mouth that was both polite and full, teasing a smile that might never come. Her hair shone, even in this old photo, even in this half light. She was beautiful, and she looked just like Alice.
Judy shoved the photograph between the diary’s pages and slammed it shut, not even wincing as she felt the thin paper crumpling with the violence.
She pushed the book back into the box and stacked the loose bricks into the hole, making sure to preserve the original pattern so no one would notice.
Then she ran up the stairs, shutting the door behind her with both hands.
She knew that the curse was real. But fuck it. It was never going to catch her. She would outrun it every single time.
after that, it was just Judy and Alice. Friends and relatives brought pies and noodles, pretty little bonsai trees, and, sometimes, money.
Judy worked hard, started her own real estate corporation, bought a series of luxury cars, enforced curfews when Alice was in high school, interrogated all of her daughter’s boyfriends, scolded her for majoring in fine arts in university and then for marrying Grant, that boy with the soft, dumbstruck face.
She woke up early and stayed up late, reading economic forecasts, waiting for the new interest rates to be announced.
She was Judy Chow, specialist in luxury living by the ocean, not Young and in Love Judy, who had once stood in front of her mother, afraid, in a yellow dress, clinging to her fiancé as if she depended on him for survival.
No, she changed as quickly as Vancouver, which was exploding with condo towers in every neighbourhood, every suburb.
Regular houses became million-dollar houses overnight, and it was her unlined, smiling face on the For Sale signs.
The city grew and Judy grew old, dyeing the roots of her sleek bob every three weeks.
She injected Botox, dusted her face with the finest milled powder she could find.
Three-inch heels only, to elevate her five-foot-three frame, until she suspected she was shrinking and then she upgraded to four inches, sometimes five.
She drank smoothies with chia and kale and hated every sip.
When she drove through Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside with her windows up and AC on, she didn’t feel like she belonged there anymore, though she used to shop there on Saturdays with her mother-in-law, the heavy bags filled with chicken and oranges and egg tarts, marking her palms with sore red lines.
Judy was always on her way somewhere else now, somewhere west of there—a Michelin-starred restaurant, the bank, the spa for a cold laser facial. She had to keep up. She would keep up.
If she looked in the bathroom mirror and saw a figure hovering behind her, a girl with hair covering her face, a girl who whispered words like life , escape , no way out , she simply left the room, turned on the television and all the lights, and stood in the electric glow with her eyes wide open, smarting from the brightness.
The ghosts—that girl—loved shadows, the places where light met dark, and Judy would rather blind herself than stay in the dim with whatever it was that lurked there.
She didn’t want to think about what had taken her parents, her in-laws, and her husband.
But she would be damned if it took her too.
She never spoke of it, pushed it out of her brain whenever she thought of the box in the basement wall.
Her daughter was free of worry, had never seen a ghost or been beaten or felt herself slowly unravelling.
She had an easy life, with her pretty face and soft heart, even if she thought she was surviving hardship.
This innocence made Judy laugh. The curse could never get either of them.
By the time she sold the old house to her daughter and her loser husband, Judy was in the best shape of her life.
In her new high-rise condo, she set up her Peloton in front of the floor-to-ceiling window so she could watch the traffic on the Granville Bridge below.
Down there, people made mistakes—walking into traffic without looking, running a red light, swerving into a barricade—and died.
Up here on her exercise bike, she could pretend she was out-pedalling what had been chasing her her whole life.
The evil, the curse, whatever it was, could never reach her. Up here, she could live forever.
when the doctor told her it was cancer, she nodded her head, asked the appropriate questions, then drove herself back home in her giant car with its soft leather seats.
In the solarium of her condo, she stood in front of the window, her slippered feet on the tile floor, nose almost touching the glass.
Some people filled their enclosed balconies with potted plants or a wicker chaise or tall pillar candles.
Judy preferred to keep hers empty, all the better to stand bordered by nothing but glass, to feel as if she was floating above the cars and articulated buses and dog walkers below.
Today, as the sun dropped lower in the sky to her right, she leaned ever so slightly forward until her forehead touched the window.
Her stomach flipped, anticipating the fall, but she was fine, she was fine.
Except she wasn’t fine. For the first time ever, Judy Chow considered her own death, considered a future in which she would not be living, not be able to protect her daughter and grandchildren, not be the one who had to hold all the pain of the past while trying to ensure safety for the years ahead.
To the southeast, Alice was alone with her children in Judy’s old house, the place where Tom had died, the place that Judy had run away from, hoping that, in her absence, the memories soaked into the walls would dry up and crumble to dust. Alice knew nothing. Judy had planned it that way.
She could see the years stretching out before them.
Alice driving Luna and Luca to art classes, coding camps, school field trips no one wanted to go on.
There could be whispers of ghosts everywhere, reaching with their filmy hands toward them, wherever they went, and Alice would have no idea, wouldn’t see the signs that she was being watched, that everything she loved could be taken from her.
Judy had been watching, but she couldn’t do it forever. She knew that now.
She turned away from the window and swapped her slippers for a pair of bedazzled sneakers. She pulled her Chanel bag from the hook and locked the door behind her. It was time to go back to the house, find what she had hidden in the basement, and finally tell her daughter everything.