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  AFTER ALICE

  a novel

  KAREN HOFMANN

  NEWEST PRESS

  Copyright © Karen Hofmann 2014

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  After Alice is available as an ebook: 978-1-927063-47-7

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hofmann, Karen Marie, 1961–, author

  After Alice / Karen Hofmann.

  (Nunatak first fiction series : 37) Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927063-46-0 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-1-927063-47-7 (epub). —

  ISBN 978-1-927063-55-2 (mobi)

  I. Title. II. Series: Nunatak first fiction 37

  PS8615.O365A37 2014 C813’.6 C2013-906950-X

  C2013-906951-8

  Editor for the Board: Anne Nothof

  Cover and Interior Design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Author Photo: Julia Tomkins

  First Edition: April 2014

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  NeWest Press

  #201, 8540 – 109 Street

  Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada

  This book is for my maternal grandparents,

  Ikey and Lillian Hillaby.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  STYX

  BRIDGE

  ITALY

  POMONA

  HUSBAND

  VETCH

  BABYLON

  MUSSOLINI

  FLOOD

  LEDGER

  FISH GIRL

  LADY OF THE LAKE

  SAGE AND PLUM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  STYX

  The 5:40 from Calgary, descending to the runway a kilometre to the south, rattles her roof and screams, all throat and flash, over the little frozen lake. Explosions of scarlet and green light track down the lake, pulse through the ice. The leafless aspens flare silver, copper, and are reabsorbed into darkness. The jet’s scream drops an octave, glissando. A spectacle of dragons, a kind of Valkyrie ride.

  It’s her signal to close her laptop, abandon her work for the day.

  She stretches and blinks, tumbles from the tight interlocking puzzle of her mental work, of her reading and writing, into the jet’s destruction of silence, into the late afternoon of her empty house, as some component might peel from a shuttle and spin out into the void.

  She had not thought, signing the papers for the house purchase, about the runway. Had not thought — entranced by the house, which in August had been full of light and space; entranced by the green and breeziness of the valley, a long slip of light, air, shade, and Montreal sultry and crowded; entranced by the real estate agent’s phrases: deer, ducks, lake path — she had not thought. She had seen only the lake, sparkling; the bobbing waterfowl.

  She had forgotten how, even as a child, she had thought this area a bleak pinch of the landscape, a dark and dismal passage. The hills in this stretch of the valley low, blocky, not pleasing. A sort of rocky knob, just to the south and west of the lake, scattered now with dead and dying pines, blocking the light, the sun setting behind it by early afternoon. The least desirable land in the whole of the valley.

  Reserve land, of course: what was given back to the original inhabitants as least valuable. Rocky, boggy land; the little lake, shallow and muddy, an afterthought in a valley famous for its lakes. Given back in treaties, this unprepossessing twist of the valley. A shameful illiberality. And now she has bought a house here, a bargain because on leased land.

  Normally at this time, she begins to prepare her evening meal, to dress a little salad, slice cheese, heat up a prepared dinner. But tonight she is going out. The invitation is for seven. She had forgotten, returning to the valley, how early people in this western part of the country dine. It’s inconvenient, at the least. Not really time to eat before, though she doesn’t remember a mention of dinner in the invitation. She is not confident that there will be dinner. And yet, there is scarcely time to eat now, before the children collect her. She must change her clothes, find the bottle of wine she has bought to take along as a gift.

  She has not wanted to go out, anyway. She had not wanted to go to this party. It’s our family, her niece Cynthia had argued. She had pointed out to Cynthia, reasonably, she thought, that family relationships were arbitrary, that a few congenial friends always made better company. But Cynthia had insisted, showing some temper, retreating into an assumed or real inability to understand her. And the boy had seemed to want to go, to want her to accompany them. So now she must go: she will hope that there is something to eat. No time to eat now: no time to eat properly.

  She puts on her black wool trousers and a black turtleneck pullover, combs her hair. Adds her good gold chain with its locket, then takes it off. Too showy; too festive.

  The wine is on the built-in rack in her kitchen. A good local red. Is that appropriate? She hopes so. She has not yet developed a sense of the local opinions about the valley vintners. Should she have bought Italian? Chilean, perhaps? But this wine proclaims itself award-winning, and cost thirty dollars. It must be an acceptable gift.

  Unless, of course, Stephen and Debbie are not wine-drinkers. But she’d have heard that, wouldn’t she, from Cynthia?

  She finds a long, narrow paper bag for the wine — one bought for the purpose, dark purple, with a cord handle. It had been difficult to find, in the heaps of holiday-themed packaging. She had not wanted to bring her wine in a bag decorated with either snowmen or gilt stars.

  The Feast of the Epiphany. That’s what today is, January 6th. Is the party a religious celebration? She recalls now that Debbie’s family name was Ukrainian. Is it a Ukrainian Christmas party that she is going to? Have Stephen and Debbie reverted to some tradition?

  Surely Cynthia would have said. But now she is doubly uneasy. Why had she agreed to go along? And why had she not insisted on driving herself? She does not like waiting for rides. People are rarely punctual.

  At 6:45, she is waiting in her basement-entry vestibule, coat and boots on, wine bottle in its purple bag dangling from her gloved hand.

  On either side of the highway, the orchards, the rows of trees gnarled and fingery in the vapour lights, casting blue shadows. For a few days there was hoarfrost, and the trees were transformed, ethereal. Now they are merely skeletal, bereft of their leaves and fruit. The trees have cauterized black sockets around themselves in the patchy snow. Skeleton trees, ghost trees. Familiar, and yet not, seen now after so many years away. Familiar in the way of something lost and then rediscovered, something whose appearance no longer matches the image in the memory.

  In a clearing along the highway, where the trees have been cut and not yet replanted, figures are silhouetted against bonfire flames. An atavistic scene: the hair rises, slightly, on the back of her neck. But it’s only pruning time, and the prunings, the small lopped-off limbs, being burned. She knows that: while the trees are dormant, the last year’s growth is trimmed to channel the tree’s sap more efficiently into the fruit, to make picking fruit more efficient.

 
Now woodsmoke in the air, insinuating itself through the car’s heating system. Apple smoke. Her smell-memory conjures Mr. Tanaka climbing down from the tractor, his big iron fork lifting the tangles of twigs, of suckers, onto the trailer. Herself and her sister Alice and the other children, made to pick up the prunings. Her fingers numbing inside the ice-stiffened mittens, her nostrils raw under their mucous crusts as she tramped and scrambled and bent in the snow. (Was it deeper then?) The crackle of green twigs, burning; the scented smoke. The apricot tinge of the sky on days when the sun barely broke over the horizon. The gloss on the white tread marks left by the tractor wheels; the blue light in boot prints left in deep snow.

  It’s a short trip, much shorter than she remembers. They are already nearing the little village, now. “Turn left at the lights,” Cynthia, who has been to Stephen’s before, directs from between the seats. Justin is driving, gracefully, alert but relaxed. Too relaxed? He has only his N license, and the highway is slick in patches, with black ice twinkling back the orange glow of the streetlights. After a New Year’s chinook, a thawing and dispersal of snow, there has been a sudden freeze. The highway is likely unsafe.

  She watches Justin’s profile, as always, covertly. Does he look like anyone? Besides Cynthia and her family, of course?

  Her grandnephew is wearing a shirt and tie, the cashmere sweater she has given him for Christmas under his overcoat. His hair is smooth, becomingly cut. Very appropriate, she thinks, approvingly. None of that baggy denim and fleece that young men seem to favour this decade. The costume of a spurious anti-establishment pose. No; Justin looks proper, grown-up, a mature eighteen-year-old. And he seems to be a very good driver. She ought to relax.

  Now they are climbing from the highway up the steep ridgeback hill. The narrow black road glitters. On either side, the spindly hedge of saskatoon berry, waxberry, Oregon grape clambers the bank, the stripped boughs like dark scratches against the snow.

  She recognizes this road, which has changed very little in forty years. This is the landscape of her childhood. She doesn’t recognize the name of the streets in the neighbourhood where Stephen lives, which Cynthia is reading from the map. Squirrel, Marmot, Badger. The lesser fauna of the dry Interior. Stephen lives on Jackrabbit. Jackrabbit.

  It must be a new development. She has left it to Cynthia to navigate, though it’s awkward for Cynthia, who is in the back seat, and has to see their faces to lip-read. She perhaps should have taken the back seat herself, but in Cynthia’s small Japanese import, there is not really enough legroom for her except in the front. Cynthia must lean forward between the seats like a child, trying to read the infrequent road signs.

  “Is your seatbelt fastened?” she asks Cynthia.

  “Yes, Auntie Sid.”

  “Mother!” Justin says, then, mockingly, “Have you washed your hands and buttoned your coat?”

  Cheeky boy. “Perhaps you ought to slow down,” she tells Justin.

  “What is the Feast of Epiphany, anyway?” Justin asks, cocking her a grin. So he has noticed too. A sponge for information: a boy after her own heart, her grand nephew.

  He adds, “I didn’t think we went in for this stuff. And do I want to know my cousins?”

  “You see?” Cynthia complains in her flat, guttural voice. “You set a bad example, Auntie Sid, and then I have to deal with him.”

  It’s an old subject of discussion.

  She says, “There’s nothing wrong with celebrating holidays, Justin. Rituals are important. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Justin says, impatiently.

  Another thing: she objects to “Auntie Sid.” She had always been called Sidonie, emphasis on the first syllable. She had been named after a harpist, Sidonie Goosens, whom Father saw perform in Vienna in 1921. Sidonie had been astonished to hear, in 2004, that her namesake had just died. She had been still living in Montreal, and listening to CBC 2, when she heard the announcement. How could Sidonie Goosens have been still alive, in 2004? It couldn’t be the same woman, she had thought. But it was: Sidonie Goosens had lived to be a hundred and five. She had come out of retirement to perform when she was in her nineties. “Imagine that,” Tom Allen had said, in his sweet, erudite, conversational voice. Sidonie had taken her namesake’s longevity as a good omen.

  The car takes a tight bend and fishtails. She grabs the door handle. Cynthia yelps from the back seat.

  Cynthia herself ought to be driving. But she has had her license hardly any longer than Justin. In Montreal, Cynthia had not bothered to learn to drive.

  “You might want to slow down,” Sidonie says, as mildly as she can. “There are more hairpin turns on this road.”

  “Sorry,” Justin says blandly.

  She should have driven them herself.

  Then from the bank of bleached orchard grasses flanking the road, an apparition rises: a slim-waisted woman in a long, fluttering white dress — a nightgown? — arms taut behind her, as if bound at the wrists, head with its fluttering pale hair flung backward in a posture of desperation. In the few seconds she’s caught in the headlights, the woman dashes, jerkily, away from the road, toward the rows of winter-stripped apple trees, flings herself against a lower limb, clings.

  It’s only as the car passes, as the headlight beam glides on, sucking all light with it, as her angle of vision shifts, as the beams of the vehicle behind them catch the white flash again, that Sidonie, her neck cranked sharply around, comprehends.

  A long strip of white plastic — perhaps the torn packaging of an insulation batt — blown from a construction site. A twisted strip of white plastic, caught in a gust from a passing car. That’s all.

  Justin, at the wheel, says, “What was that! I thought it was a white deer for a second!” Sidonie’s heart an earth compressor, thudding.

  Her nephew Stephen will be forty-seven this year: is that right? Yes; he was born in November of 1959. A middle-aged man now. (How has that happened, that her nephew, her sister’s son, can be forty-seven? And she hasn’t seen him since his wedding, which must have been more than twenty years ago.)

  Of course, Stephen is much changed. He has less hair, his face has blurred, as if a wax model of a face had been pressed with a warm hand; he is fleshier. But also, somehow, he has soured. He looks a little morose, disappointed, ashamed, even as he opens the door and stands smiling. Hangdog, her mother would have said. He has the thick, beetle-like torso of a man who has performed physical labour for thirty years. The set mouth of someone who had hoped for a different life, perhaps.

  Stephen is wearing his hair long, over his ears, though it is receding in front, and a graphic T-shirt with gothic lettering, images of skulls and flames. Rock music is playing from a sound system somewhere in the house, and can be heard, or rather not quite heard, in disharmonic counterpoint to the conversations, to the voices of the guests, and of Stephen and Cynthia.

  And here’s Debbie, Stephen’s wife, who has surely nearly doubled in size in the last twenty years. She looks alarmingly hot, though the house is cool to Sidonie’s skin. Debbie’s face is red, and the tendrils of curled hair on her forehead are damp. Sidonie stiffens as Debbie moves closer, her arms stretching out. She does not enjoy being hugged.

  But Debbie’s skin, when she embraces Sidonie, is surprisingly cool and dry, and she smells lightly of vanilla.

  “So you’ve come back here after over forty years!” Debbie says. “That’s amazing!”

  How is it amazing, she wants to ask, but does not.

  They are not permitted to join the rest of the guests right away, but are shepherded into a sort of library, where she is introduced to Stephen’s children, her grandnephew and niece. They are grown — the boy is in his mid-twenties; the girl around Justin’s age — but they seem graceless, diffident. They have a Slavic look, from Debbie’s family, no doubt: coarse, dirty-blond hair (though the girl’s is dyed black, with light roots), broad cheekbones, pale, slightly almond-shaped eyes. The two of them, brother and sister, look askance at Justin. None of
the three of them speaks.

  The conversation quickly devolves onto the subject of the children, Stephen and Debbie’s offspring and Justin, their resemblances, their accomplishments, their plans. She asks the girl if she is planning on taking courses at the university after she graduates from high school. Her grandniece turns bored, black-outlined eyes toward her. (Hostile? Or just wary?)

  “Maybe,” the girl says. “I want to go somewhere else, though.”

  “What are you planning on studying?” Sidonie asks.

  A flicker of something in the pale eyes. “I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I’m still trying to decide. I don’t know if I’ll go.”

  Stephen says, “It’s a lot of money if you want to go somewhere else. You need to pull up your grades, get a couple of scholarships. Maybe get a part-time job.”

  The girl (what is her name?) sighs as if Stephen has suggested she take on a shift at the mines, and surreptitiously plugs small earphones into her ears. One of the new small, flat digital music devices protrudes from the pocket of her jeans.

  Justin has been reading the back of a DVD package, but is at last paying attention to the conversation. He appears about to speak to his cousin, but then closes his lips, turns away. She does not blame him; it is tough going, making conversation with these two.

  “And Alex?” Sidonie asks. “What program are you in?”

  Alex, with his shaggy hair, his beard, his baggy jeans and plaid flannel shirt, is possibly out of university already. But she has not heard that he has entered a profession.

  Stephen says, “Oh, Alex is taking a break from university.”

  “Dropped out, you mean,” his sister says spitefully. Apparently she can hear them, in spite of the earplugs.

  “Well, now,” Stephen says, carefully, “Alex hasn’t found something he’s interested in yet.”

  “Except sitting in his room all day downloading songs,” the girl says.