Chapter 30
alice stood in the garden, a shovel in her hand, staring at the pile of rocks against the back fence.
For as long as she could remember, those rocks had never been moved.
They were the same grey and brown rocks that had always been there, some smooth and round, others speckled and lumpy.
There wasn’t a spot of moss or a tendril of buttercup anywhere.
Just the rocks that Alice had never touched.
She began by picking up each rock and setting it in a pile two feet away. They were cool in her hands, with the stillness of inanimate objects. Dead weight , she thought, but then she shook her head. If she was somehow going to appease this demon, she had to stop thinking like that.
Luna came out of the back kitchen door and down the steps, her arms full. She dropped a pile of tools and toys and old sporting equipment on the garden bench, and the noise echoed through the quiet.
“This is what I could find,” she said, sorting with her hands. “There wasn’t much. Too bad we aren’t a family who believes in guns.”
Alice picked up a rubber mallet and weighed it in her palm. “I don’t think the horseshoes will do much, unless we throw them. Do you have good aim?”
“Mom, don’t you remember I dropped out of Little League? I can’t throw anything.” Both of them laughed, the sound rising before dying in the unweeded garden.
“The garden machete. That was my dad’s.” Alice picked it up by its wooden handle, touched the rusty blade with a finger. “I don’t think anyone has used it since he died.”
For a split second, Alice wondered if her father had left the machete for her. Had he been haunting her all her life to prepare her for this moment? Impossible.
Luna pointed at Luca’s wooden baseball bat. “That seems promising. I’ll put it right here, beside the tree.”
Alice stuffed a screwdriver, a box cutter, and a handful of thumbtacks into the pocket of her jeans before picking the shovel back up. “I know I’m supposed to be the mom who knows everything, but this time, I can’t even pretend. What are we even doing?”
Luna stood next to her and nudged the rocks with the toe of her sneaker. “We’re just trying, I guess.”
“What if all of this is for nothing? What if…” Alice paused because she had not admitted this out loud, not to her mother, not to her children. “What if there is no twin? What if it’s been me this whole time, fucking with everyone when I’m drunk? What if I’m the evil one?”
Luna sat down on the grass, snapping off the tips of the blades with her fingers.
“I’ve been thinking that the whole time, Mom, I’m not going to lie.
” She sighed loudly when Alice’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
“It’s not a huge leap to think that you did everything, so don’t act like it’s a shock. God.”
“You’re right. I know it makes the most sense. But it makes me feel so crazy.”
“You haven’t been yourself for a long time, Mom, and I don’t mean the divorce.
Even though you and Dad haven’t been together for years, we were all doing okay for a while.
” Luna sighed again and looked into her mother’s eyes.
“To be honest, I think it was when you met that Jas guy. Everything began to fall apart because, I don’t know, you were too busy falling in love with him.
The rest of it, the rest of us , didn’t matter anymore. ”
Alice felt her stomach flip. It was the worst thing she could have heard from her daughter, that she had upended their lives and thrown her children into uncertainty and chaos because of a man, because of her own selfish loneliness.
Even if there was an evil twin, the fact remained that she had failed to do the one thing mothers were supposed to do: always put their children first.
“I’m so sorry, honey. It’s my fault. I was being selfish.” This was absolutely true, and yet she still hoped that Jas was okay, that he would find the strength to fight for himself. Fight for her.
A tear rolled down Luna’s cheek. “Maybe. But you deserve your own life too. I know that you work so hard for us, and you can’t just be a mom all the time. I’m a feminist, Mom. I know being a woman is a minefield!”
Alice laughed. And then reached over to wipe away Luna’s tears.
“So, I’m sorry too,” her daughter continued.
“I still don’t know if I should trust you or run away from you.
But I’m here because maybe you don’t always have to do things on your own.
Maybe you need me a little bit too.” Luna paused and stared at the pile of rocks.
“What if we help the twin feel acknowledged? What if that’s what you both need? ”
Alice nodded. “Yes, I think so. Maybe we could dig up this placenta and give it a proper burial, try to imagine what her life could have been, before burying it all again.” Alice pushed the shovel into the dirt.
“Have you ever heard of rebirthing, where people recreate their births to deal with trauma? Maybe something like that, but the opposite. A re-death, I suppose.” And they both laughed, not because it was funny but because there was no other response.
Alice looked up at the sky. “I think we have about an hour of daylight left. We’re going to need another shovel. Maybe Pinky can look under the porch for one once she’s done in the basement.”
“It would be more fun if we had some music.”
“Tomorrow, Luna, if it goes well, I promise that we’ll have an epic dance party with pizza and cake and I’ll invite every boy you’ve ever had a crush on.”
as the sun went down, Alice stood in the grass, an old ice cream container in her hand.
It had once been blue and yellow, but the colours had long since faded, its list of ingredients no longer legible.
It was featherlight, as if there had never been anything inside it.
When she shook it, she couldn’t hear a thing.
Luna stood off to the side, staring at the hole in the ground, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her jeans.
Gently, Alice opened the lid, using her ragged nails to lift the edges. Small bits of plastic broke off and fell into the hole, and Pinky kneeled down to pick them up. Alice heard her mutter, “We can’t have a messy burial site.”
Inside: a flannel baby blanket, faded to white at the edges, stained brown in the middle.
There wasn’t much to see, and Alice held the container to her face to look more closely.
There was a handful of dry black chunks and a few loose fibres, but nothing else.
Either it had disintegrated and shrunk over time, or someone had carried it away. Alice took a deep breath.
From her pocket, she pulled out a fuchsia silk scarf, one of the many her mother had given her over the years, always hinting that Alice could try to look a little more put together, a little more blinged out.
Slowly, she lifted the flannel out of the container and wrapped it in the scarf, tying the ends at the top in a fat knot.
Then she placed the bundle inside a brand-new box from her stash for gift orders for expectant moms. The cardboard was covered in a baby-pink linen, a detail that had cost Alice a fortune.
She could never have imagined that this—the remains of a placenta that had once belonged to her long dead twin sister—was what she would use the box for.
Alice placed the box back in the hole, and Luna came to stand beside her.
The sun had fallen below the rooflines of the houses to the west, and there were no more shadows, just a veil of dim that had settled over the hostas, the cherry tree, the stone pig that Luca had once insisted they buy at the garden store.
“What should I say?” Alice whispered.
Luna rubbed her chin with her fingers. “If you had been forgotten, what would you want to hear?”
Alice glanced down at the box, so incongruously pink in the almost black soil.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how it would feel to gaze into the eyes of someone who looked just like you, someone who had known you your entire life, who knew all your secrets, knew how it felt to walk through the world in your body, with your face.
Alice could see her, a version of herself that was smarter, a little braver, the type of woman that others would describe as sharp as a tack , a real dynamo .
She was cutting and glib. But she loved Alice’s kids with a ferocity that was overbearing, verging on suffocating.
She laughed at Alice’s jokes, competed with her just enough that they were both the very best versions of themselves, the sisters who learned Spanish in their spare time, who volunteered at the food bank, who only fell in love when it was rational, when the man was worth their time.
She looked at the box again, so small, so square. How could it contain a whole person? The answer was that it couldn’t. It was Alice who had to contain them both.
“I know who you are,” she said. “I would know you anywhere.”
She nodded at Luna, who threw a handful of dirt into the grave. Then she scanned the darkening sky and said, “I’m sorry. From now on, everything I do is for the both of us. I can carry you. I can remember.”
High above was a shooting star, the kind that streaks across the sky with a tail fifty times longer than its body. Alice could feel the release, the sensation that someone she loved was letting go, floating into the atmosphere, weightless.
After Luna and Alice had made a smooth surface of soil, they silently piled the rocks, one by one, until they formed a small pyramid, tall enough that it couldn’t be ignored, that anyone walking past would pause and be forced to remember.
Alice placed the last rock, softball-sized and a creamy white, on the very top, making sure to find the right angle so that it wouldn’t roll off.
“Do you think this helped?” Luna asked, as she scanned the yard, her hands on her hips.
“I feel like it did. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think she might be at rest now.” Alice checked her watch.
The warm spring air tickled her arms. “You guys, I know I have to stop drinking, but maybe we should have a glass of wine out here, like a wake. To commemorate our weird, nonsensical reburial.”
Luna sighed. “God, Mom. You’re so weird.”
Pinky immediately began walking to the house. “I know just the bottle.”