Chapter 31
alice and pinky sat on the garden bench, a bottle of wine between them, Alice’s spine tingling.
“Pinky,” she whispered. “Do you remember all that work that got done? The packaging, the cleaning, all that stuff I couldn’t remember doing? Was it her? Did she do all that? Had she been here all this time, moving around the house, looking at my kids?”
Luna looked up from where she sat cross-legged on the grass, her head resting on her hand. “She never hurt us, though, Mom. She made our lives easier, really. She only hurt the men. What does that mean?”
“I wish I knew.” Alice glanced at the shrubs receding into the darkness, or rather being swallowed by the expanding dark.
“I used to feel like there was never enough time, like I would work and work, cook for you and Luca, keep cleaning things that were only going to get dirty again, and then I would look up at the clock and a whole day had gone by and there was still so much to do.” She picked at a loose thread on her jeans.
“When all of it was suddenly getting done, I just thought I was forgetting doing the work, that I was drinking too much and blacking out every night, just so fucking drunk and exhausted I didn’t remember what I had done.
But I should have known, Luna. I should have known there is no such thing as extra time, not for free anyway. ”
Pinky patted Alice on the hand. “You’re being hard on yourself.”
“Am I though? I took it all for granted—this clean house, those packed orders—and didn’t question enough. Isn’t that what entitled, privileged people do? That’s what I am then, the kind of person I’ve always hated. All I ever wanted was more time, and I got it. And then I kept taking.”
It had never occurred to Alice that she would one day be in this position of forgetting so much and in the process never acknowledging someone else’s labour—or trauma. How angry this twin must have been that Alice never remembered her, never gave her the credit she deserved.
“Is this why I’ve been feeling like shit lately? I couldn’t leave my bed, couldn’t parent properly, couldn’t remember if I was blacking out. I couldn’t even save my boyfriend. She was telling me that I needed to pay attention to her.”
Luna rolled her eyes. “It can’t be that simple—that all she wants is to be thanked.
Your thinking is too linear, too cause-and-effect.
” She sighed. “We all have complicated feelings, Mom, and you want the one true answer. Like I told you: sometimes I hated you and sometimes I felt so sorry for you I thought my heart would break. She doesn’t have just one motivation, you know? ”
Pinky shook her head. “Maybe there’s more we don’t know. We gave her a real burial, though, Alice. It’s going to be okay.” She grabbed Alice’s hand and held it tightly, so tight that it almost hurt, but that pressure, that strain, was exactly what Alice needed.
“Wait,” said Luna. “All you talk about is Grandpa Tom’s death, how hard it was, how sad your childhood was year after year.
Wasn’t he her dad too? Maybe it’s worse for her because she never had a real life.
You did, instead of her. That would make me pissed.
” Luna threw a clump of moss at the fence.
“I would want to be a real person, too, if I were her. You’re not just her sister, Mom; you’re everything she ever wanted to be and everything she could never be. ”
They could hear the wind blowing the branches of the trees against each other, the rustle of leaves.
The neighbour’s dog barked. These old houses, riddled with gaping siding and disintegrating insulation.
It didn’t matter what you did—you could hear everything.
And everything could hear you. She shivered at the possibility that her own voice reacting to Jas’s touch had echoed through the ducts, only to descend before coming to its end in the gas furnace.
But not before someone—this someone—heard it and knew what was happening upstairs.
Alice gripped the edge of the bench until her palms ached.
Beyond the open basement door, from inside, a sound. Not a creaky hinge. Not the furnace coming to life. A shuffling. Yes, a shuffling. The three of them looked at each other, their heads tilted.
Alice stood up and took a step toward the house; a shadow, a smear of darkness darted outward into the yard. It’s nothing , she told herself. It’s the way the light from the street lamp is hitting the door. It’s nothing to worry about.
But then Alice felt her stomach churning.
She hadn’t had a drink in a week. During all those days she stayed in bed, she hadn’t touched any tequila, any wine, nothing at all.
And now that one glass of wine was swimming in her belly as if she was a teenaged girl who’d had a Long Island iced tea for the first time.
She kneeled on the grass, head down. A roar started inside her head, circling her brain.
She could barely hear Luna’s and Pinky’s voices, tinny and small, through the noise.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
A sharp pain sliced through Alice’s belly, and she was on all fours on the grass, tears mixing with the snot dripping from her nose.
A cramp tore through her stomach, then another and another, and she cried out wordlessly.
She could feel Pinky holding back her hair and hear Luna shouting, “What’s wrong, Mom?
Can you answer me?” She felt an uncontrollable instinct to bear down, to arc her spine so that she was almost curled over, her forehead resting on the cool grass.
The next heave was so intense that Alice saw tiny multicoloured stars flickering at the edges of utter blackness.
She pushed with her entire core, screaming as the tearing started in her chest and ripped its way downward, through muscle and skin and everything else, a pain so ragged she thought this was how she might die, being torn into a million irregular, fleshy pieces.
She could feel something hot and thick shoot out of her body, through the fabric of her jeans, insistent on being pushed out into the world, insistent on feeling air, tasting grime.
It was pouring from her, gory and viscous.
The pain of it, the shredding of her insides.
And then in one breath, the cramps receded as quickly as they had arrived. Alice sat back on her heels, wiping at her face with her dirt-stained hands.
Pinky bent down, her arms wrapped around Alice’s shoulders. “Can you hear me? Can you talk?”
Before Alice could reply, Luna said, “Mom? Mom, what is that ?”
On the lawn and between her knees was a pool of liquid, an impossible nothing of a colour, so thick and gelatinous, quivering on the grass.
She stared at the mass and felt empty, as if her body was nothing more than skin and the thinnest layer of muscle.
Had she given birth to that? She opened her mouth to say something, and a long narrow snake’s tongue came out.
She breathed in quickly, and it was gone.
She was light-headed and seeing things, that was all.
“Mom?” Luna was staring at Alice’s face, her forehead creased in confusion, her hands pulling nervously on the strings of her hoodie.
Finally, Alice looked up at Pinky, who was crouched over her.
She seemed concerned but not scared or disgusted, and Alice exhaled, relieved.
Pinky couldn’t see the puddle, the translucent grey jelly that made Alice’s stomach turn.
It couldn’t be real, she was sure of it.
“I think it’s over,” she whispered, lifting the hem of her sweatshirt to wipe her nose.
“There can’t be anything left.” Pinky helped her up to standing, and they turned around, back toward the bench.
“Mom, just sit down and I’ll get you some water.”
Alice sat down and watched Luna walk toward the basement door, past the quivering pile still on the lawn, giving it a wide berth.
As Luna reached for the knob, Alice felt one more surge and bent over herself on the bench as another cramp tore its way through her.
She thought of all the times she had stayed up all night with Luna or Luca, their little bodies shuddering over the toilet bowl, all the times she had drunk too much and vomited in a garbage can on the way home from the bar, that one time she had eaten contaminated barbecue and had food poisoning.
This was different. Alice was being turned inside out, making external everything she had ever thought or felt or tried to hide, as if there was a secret inside her fighting to get out.
She steadied herself on the bench with her hands, but they were immediately covered in the grey mess. As she bent down to wipe them on the grass, she lost her balance, landing on her knees in the swampy puddle. Her jeans were soaked from waist to ankle. She was so very dizzy.
Still kneeling, she turned her head, and she saw a wet, quivering shape in the semi-darkness, also crouched in the grass, its face only inches from her own.
Alice stared through the layers of slowly dripping muck until she spotted the eyes, long straight eyelashes like the legs of a spider sunk deep in grey-purple skin that hung emptily on a face just like her own.
Those eyes. Alice could see the rage and ferocity behind the lashes, the heat of hatred that warmed this creature’s ice-cold body.
She saw the missing nose, the fleshy orifice that expanded and contracted and gave off a smell so much like rusting pipes and raw sewage that she gagged again.
The mouth opened, and the tip of a narrow tubular tongue flicked outward, tasting the air. Tasting Alice.