Chapter 28
alice heard the birds before she saw them, the trills from the little round chickadees that lived in the low bushes lining all the gardens on her street.
This morning, eyes closed, she wondered why they were so loud.
Cold damp air licked at her face and chest, and she reached down for her duvet but felt something wet and sharp instead.
Opening her eyes, she saw a dark sky streaked with pink and orange.
A chickadee, yelling into the wind, flew inches above her face.
She sat up. She was in her front yard in the old nightgown she used to wear when she was nursing, now damp with morning dew and stuck to her body, clammy.
Her bare feet were covered in dirt. When she brought her hands up to tuck her hair behind her ears, she could see three of her nails were broken, jagged at the edges as if she had dragged them on the concrete sidewalk.
She groaned. How long had she been unconscious and outside?
She didn’t remember drinking anything last night, but what if she had drunk so much she’d blacked out?
Were the neighbours staring at her right now?
She stood and groaned again. Every muscle, every bone in her body was sore.
Alice stumbled toward the side path, thinking that if she got cleaned up in the basement laundry room, her kids would never notice a thing.
But as she took a step forward, eyes blinking against the rising sun, her foot kicked at a lump in the grass beside the gate to the backyard.
It was a man, lying on his side, one arm outstretched. It was Grant.
He was, he was. At least she didn’t have to tell her children that their father was dead.
Later, while she was riding in the ambulance, the paramedic urged her to hold Grant’s hand, so that he might be able to feel the comfort of it. So she did. Alice was always good at doing what she was told. She hadn’t touched him since.
Now she sat in a vinyl hospital chair, staring at her ex-husband, who was fast asleep.
Alice didn’t know why she was still there, especially since he had clearly been creeping around the house in the middle of the night.
Maybe it was because he had no one else to keep him company and she was still listed as his emergency contact on all of his insurance and health documents.
Or maybe after twenty years of knowing him, it was habit.
She had no urge to touch him. If it had been Jas in this bed, would she have wanted to take care of him?
Alice didn’t know, but she felt relieved that her relationship with Jas hadn’t gone that far.
She loved him. Loved him for the way he made her feel like herself, as if the person she truly was could be someone he wanted forever.
But Alice also knew that if they lived together, she would eventually have to pull his Jas-sized jeans out of the washer, heavy with water, and feel resentment that they took so long to dry, that they took up so much space on her drying line outside.
If he spent time with the kids, she would always be on alert for anything he might say or do that would cause them stress or impact their self-esteem.
If he was in a hospital room like this one, she would have to bring him his favourite pyjamas and the burger he liked from Five Guys.
It was better, wasn’t it, that he was gone? She could convince herself of that.
It was time, she knew, to lock her heart away.
Alice stood and walked to the window; she could see the flat roof of another hospital wing below and 12th Avenue.
Beyond that, the skyline of downtown Vancouver, impossibly modern against the blue mountains.
Alice was quite sure she wasn’t the first person to fantasize about hiking up those mountains, knee-deep in alpine grasses, finding a lakeside spot, and never going home again.
The cougars or bears might get her, but that kind of death was honest and productive, a shrug in the timeline of the food chain.
Preferable to these long hours staring at a man she had left behind, wondering if another man would ever text her again.
Her phone was at the bottom of her purse, where she had purposely buried it last night before bed. Looking at her messages would make no difference to the white noise swirling in her brain.
Grant grunted, and Alice turned from the window to look at him.
He had broken his nose somehow, and the neurologist said he had a nasty concussion, which might or might not result in some kind of brain damage.
Alice stared at his face as he tried to open his eyes, and she felt a flash of pity.
He was small and soft in the hospital bed, like a baby, like their babies had been once upon a time.
She walked over and held his hand, voluntarily this time.
“Grant? Are you awake?”
A line of drool snaked from the corner of his mouth. “Alice?” He was slurring. If she hadn’t recognized her own name, she would have no idea what he was saying.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Not Alice. Like Alice.” The words were simple and yet she had to concentrate on the shapes his mouth was making to understand him.
“It’s me, Grant. Don’t worry. I’m here.”
“It was you. You did this.” Grant lifted his arm and gestured to his head, until his arm fell back down, as if it weighed too much.
Alice inhaled and held her breath. She had been angry at Grant for years, angry at how easily he walked through the world, how shamelessly he reaped the rewards from her business, from her mother’s house, how he filtered everything she’d ever told him about her past through his own trauma-free experiences.
Had there been times when she wished she could punch him in the throat so hard that he would just shut the fuck up and be forced to listen?
Of course. But she had never hurt him. She had no memory of the night before, only wrecked nails and muscles that ached when she shifted.
Alice looked down at the gardening clogs she had hastily slipped on and the long beige cardigan that covered her thin, stained nightgown.
She swallowed before answering. “Yes, I found you this morning. But we need to know who did this. Your wallet and phone are missing. You must have been mugged.”
“No!” Grant hit the rail on the side of the bed with his fist and grimaced in pain. “She hurt me. But she wanted Jas.”
Alice knit her eyebrows together in confusion. “Jas? I haven’t talked to him in days. You’re not making sense, Grant.”
Tears rolled down Grant’s cheeks, and he gripped the sheets with his hands. “The house. Not safe, Alice. Get the kids.”
“They’re fine. I sent them home with my mom, and Pinky met them there to help. If I texted her to make sure they are safe, would you feel better?”
Grant nodded and wiped away tears and snot with the back of his hand.
Alice pawed through her purse to find her phone, pushing aside packets of gum and a Lego minifigure. When her hand touched the screen, it vibrated violently. A message . He finally texted .
She unlocked the phone, and a flashing notification she had never seen before took over the screen. SECURITY brEACH , it screamed, in huge white letters.
“Of course,” she said, shaking her head. “Luca’s security app. I should never have let him install anything on my phone.”
She swiped and then watched a video load.
The first thing she saw clearly was a time stamp from early this morning, 2:43 a.m. The footage was from a camera Luca and Pinky had installed in the back garden.
She squinted and then cried out at an eerily familiar figure staring straight into the lens, as if it was a mirror, and dragging Jas by the foot with one hand as he thrashed behind her.
judy was hovering over Luca and Luna, a plate of sliced fruit in her hands.
“Lucky I had some papaya. It’s very calming. Have some.” She set it down on the glass dining table, and both kids stared blankly at the circles of fruit, the pile of grapes in the middle.
Luca turned to Alice and Pinky, who stood in the corner of Judy’s kitchen, huddled together.
“Mom, we have to go back home. We have to figure out what that thing is!” He shook his head and said, more quietly, “The app should have alerted us when it was happening in real time. I didn’t program it right.
But we know where it went. It’s all on the video. ”
“No one is going back to the house. Not until we figure out what to do.” Alice reached out a hand to steady herself against the floor-to-ceiling window.
Luna stared out at the city below them, the cars inching along the Granville Bridge. “There isn’t much choice, is there? I mean, we have to go and see what’s happening, see whether any of it is real or not.” She turned to Alice. “That woman looked a lot like you, after all.”
Alice sighed heavily. “Everything is always my fault, isn’t it, Luna? Don’t you ever get sick of blaming me for everything? I was asleep.”
“Have you heard from your boyfriend today, Mom?”
“Luna, what are you even getting at?” she asked, though Alice knew exactly where her daughter’s question was leading.
“Either he is safe at home, texting you dick pics or whatever stupid shit you guys are into, or you know where you dragged him and you’re pretending like you’re innocent.” Luna turned back toward the window then, arms crossed over her chest.
“Why would I hurt him? He is, as you say, my boyfriend . Maybe he isn’t texting me right this second, but that doesn’t mean anything. There is another explanation.”
“The curse,” Judy muttered.
“Mom, stop.” Alice didn’t know how to tell everyone that she was worried about Jas, worried that she had hurt him, worried that someone else was out there, torturing him in a dark room. None of it made sense.
“Do you have a better explanation?”
“Maybe it was a really desperate homeless woman who kind of looks like me. There have been a lot of break-ins lately. You know that.” Alice tucked her hair behind her ear in irritation.