Chapter 28 #2
“The curse can look like a lot of different things. It can even look like you.” Judy sat down and stared at the fruit on the table, her forehead wrinkled. “I knew I would have to tell you everything soon, but after so many years of keeping everything quiet, I don’t know if I can.”
Alice kneeled down beside Judy’s chair and held her hands. “If there is something you know that might be helpful, please tell us. Grant is in the hospital. We don’t know what happened to Jas. Please.”
“I don’t care about what happened to those two. Only you.” Judy looked at Luna and Luca, Pinky.
“Okay then, Poh Poh, please explain.” Luna’s voice was soft.
Judy smiled and nodded. After a deep breath, she pointed at Alice’s phone on the table. “I saw the video. She looks just like you.”
“So?”
“There were two babies, Alice. When I was pregnant, there were two of you, but one died early on and only you were born.”
“What? What are you even talking about?” Alice stared at her mother.
“I really hoped I would never have to tell you. But here we are.”
Alice closed her eyes as she waited for her mother to begin.
When she started talking, Alice opened them again and saw her reflection in the window, a scared, muted version of herself transparently floating in front of the downtown skyline.
It was as if she was watching herself through layers, close enough to see but too far away to touch.
There had been two of her once. Was this how she appeared to her twin, to the traces of the ghost that might be following her?
“You can only remember how lucky you are when you remember the old tragedies,” Judy said, staring at the city outside the window.
“And if the bad things happen again, forgetting can kill you.” She looked back at Alice and Luna, her bare face slack.
“That’s what I remember my mother saying to me when I was a child.
Not ‘I love you’ or ‘Marry a rich man.’ It’s almost funny. ”
Judy stood up and began to pace, walking a slow circle around the dining table, past the kitchen island, and back. Alice could see the white roots in her mother’s smooth hair. When had her mother ever let her roots show?
Judy took a breath. “It all started on the day you were born. Well, actually, it started much earlier than that.”
She told them about how her grandmother Gigi had been confined in a mansion in Hong Kong, about the cruel soldiers who had beaten and raped the comfort women.
Later, Judy continued, there were the deaths of her in-laws, the car accident that killed her parents, and then Alice’s birth and the double-lobed placenta.
“We brought it home and buried it in the yard, and your father tried to plant nice things in that spot, but nothing ever took. Everything died.” She told them about how she had found her husband dead, about how that was the moment she decided she would never acknowledge the curse again, that she would outrun and outsmart it.
“But even if you didn’t know about the past, you were still haunted, as I was.
The only difference was that you were haunted by your father’s death.
” As she spoke, Alice thought she could see Judy shrinking, as if her once impenetrable armour was crumbling, revealing the soft small woman underneath.
Judy exhaled sharply and held out her arms to the room.
“I thought I was protecting everyone, never telling you anything, but I see now that everything my mother and grandmother went through still lives inside you”—Judy pointed at Alice—“and maybe Luna, too, no matter what I do. You have just never known it. And I think that might be worse.” She turned and rested her head on the cool glass.
From behind, she looked like a child, watching the street for her parents to come home.
Luna stared, her eyes wide and dark. “There really is a curse.”
“Jesus. There’s no curse, you guys,” Alice said, pacing the small condo kitchen. “Poh Poh is just getting stuff off her chest.”
Pinky whispered, “I believe it. You think you can outrun things, or whatever it is that you’re afraid of will disappear and it won’t matter anymore. But that never happens.” Pinky turned to Alice. “Women carry everything with them.”
Judy nodded. “Only men ever truly forget. That’s why they’re so stupid.” And she laughed long and hard, until everyone else had no choice but to join in.
“It’s all true. The stones in the yard, your father put them there after all the plants died, as a way to mark your sister, so we wouldn’t forget her, but it didn’t work.
And then I made a mistake.” Judy wrung her hands together.
“I should have told you all about her so she would not be forgotten. But I didn’t.
And she was forgotten. Just like Gigi.” There was visible pain etched on Judy’s face.
“The other day, I went looking for some old keepsakes in the basement, and I began to remember so much about the past, things I hadn’t thought of for many years.
My grandmother kept a diary, you know, and my mother would tell me stories from it.
I always wanted to know why it even mattered, but she said it was important to remember the very things that remind us of the worst pain, to honour what almost destroyed us as much as we honour what is joyful.
That way we are prepared and strong when the world is trying to destroy us.
” She reached into a drawer in the kitchen, pulling out a battered book and opening its warped pages.
“Look, here is the diary. And this, this is Gigi.”
Alice squinted. She was seeing the photograph correctly, wasn’t she?
Her great-grandmother in a full-skirted gown posing on a chaise, her hair curled in precise rolls around her face.
It was unmistakable: she looked exactly like Alice.
Luca, standing beside her, sucked in his breath, and she knew he could see it too.
“Do you see now? Do you see how we can never escape anything? How everything I am saying is the truth?”
And Alice had no choice but to nod, her heart dropping in her chest. She thought about her grandmother, who had tried to leave behind the ghost of her own tortured mother when she came to Canada.
She thought of how she and Grant had renovated the house, stripping away as much of her lonely childhood as she dared, but the traumas were all still there, in the bones of her mother, in herself, and even, she realized with a sudden clarity, in her own daughter.
Luna took the photo and held it close to her face. “I know this house,” she whispered, before her eyes welled up with tears. “I’ve been in this house, every night for months. Whenever I fall asleep and I have another nightmare, I’m in this house. Nam Koo. It’s Nam Koo.”
Judy walked over and gathered Luna into her arms. “I’m scared the curse is yours too. You have been confused this whole time and dealing with it alone. That’s my fault. I’m sorry, so very sorry.”
Alice reached out and pulled them both toward her. Judy was stiff at first but soon collapsed until all three of them melted into each other, into one crying, exhausted creature. They were here, together. They had to fix this, together.
When the crying slowed, Judy lifted her head and began whispering, at first in a voice so quiet that Alice couldn’t hear any distinct words. But then her mother cleared her throat.
“You should know: I have cancer.”
Alice stared at Judy with damp eyes. “Mom, how long have you known?”
“That doesn’t matter. The surgery is soon and I am sure I’ll be fine, but you can see now, can’t you, that everything has to be out in the open before it’s all too late?”
Alice grabbed her mother’s arm and pulled her back into a hug, wondering if the cancer was right there, under her hands, pushing at her mother’s skin, growing and growing.
She felt Judy sob again, a wave that rose from her belly to her chest. For a moment, no one spoke, and all they could hear was the rhythm of Judy crying, a sound that Alice had only heard once before, when her father died.
Finally, Luca banged his small fist on the table, rattling the dishes. “We have to go home! Don’t you see? No one is safe!” He turned to Judy. “Isn’t this what we should be doing? Getting rid of this curse or whatever it is?”
Judy nodded, wiping her nose on her hand.
Alice stood up straight. “Everyone calm down. Clearly there is something at the house that has to be dealt with, curse or no curse, twin or no twin. So I’ll go home and see. Everyone stays here with Poh Poh until I tell you otherwise.”
Pinky reached out and grasped Alice’s hand. “You can’t go alone. I’ll come too.”
Alice held on to Pinky longer than she needed to and closed her eyes against the light from the wall of windows.
“The other day,” Pinky said, “I saw something in the basement in the middle of the night. It was you, or it was a version of you that looked like it was rotting away. I thought it was just my imagination, but now I know it was something else entirely.” She paused and took a breath.
“So you see, if I am the only one who’s seen her, I should go with you. ”
Alice felt arms around her waist, holding tight, and she knew it was Luna, the weight of her body against her back so slight, as if her daughter was hesitating, not sure if she should lean in. Alice reached behind and pulled her closer.
After the brief hug, Luna pulled away and crossed her arms over her chest. She lifted her chin and said crisply, maybe even defiantly, “I’m coming too.”
“No, you are absolutely not. We don’t even know what we’ll find.”
“Poh Poh said it’s my curse too. Nam Koo is in my dreams, like a haunting. Don’t you think this matters to me? To the way I’m going to live the rest of my life? God, Mom!”
And Alice couldn’t argue because it was true, it was all so frighteningly true.
“I understand. We’ll be together and it will be fine. It has to be.”
Alice didn’t know if anything would be fine, if her house would be standing when she arrived, or if her mother’s illness would be cured.
But this was what motherhood was, wasn’t it, the tricks you had to play on your own brain to convince yourself that fine was a possibility, a likely outcome.
It didn’t matter that her gut was churning.
In order to keep her children’s worries at bay, she had to say that everything would be fine and she had to act as if she believed it, until she halfway did.
Judy handed her a plate of food. “You have to eat. You look like you can’t fight shit right now.” It was enough to make Alice laugh, and she had never felt so grateful for her mother’s lack of filter.
Luca stood up, Alice’s phone in his hand.
“If I had got the system working earlier, I would have more details, but this is what I’ve got.
I took stills of the video so we can zoom in.
There are time stamps too. She only comes out at night, and she mostly stays in the basement and the yard.
” He patted his mother’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Mom.
I have been preparing for this my whole life. ”