Life

  Expectancy

  Life

  Expectancy

  Alison Hughes

  Copyright © 2023 Alison Hughes

  This edition copyright © 2023 DCB, an imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  We acknowledge financial support for our publishing activities: the Government of Canada, through the Canada Book Fund and The Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Arts Council, Ontario Creates, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. We acknowledge additional funding provided by the Government of Ontario and the Ontario Arts Council to address the adverse effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Life expectancy / Alison Hughes.

  Names: Hughes, Alison, 1966- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230198686 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230198694 | ISBN 9781770867093 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770867109 (HTML)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS8615.U3165 L54 2023 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  United States Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934886

  Cover art: Jennifer Rabby

  Cover and interior text design: Marijke Friesen

  Manufactured by Friesens in Altona, Manitoba in July, 2023.

  Printed using paper from a responsible and sustainable resource, including a mix of virgin fibres and recycled materials.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  DCB Young Readers

  An imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.

  260 Ishpadinaa (Spadina) Avenue, Suite 502, Tkaronto (Toronto), ON M5T 2E4

  www.dcbyoungreaders.com

  www.cormorantbooks.com

  For M

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  After

  Before (Two Months Earlier)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ever After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Land Acknowledgment

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Start of Content

  Acknowledgments

  Backmatter

  Pagelist

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  After

  The old clock on her bedside table read 2:25 a.m. Its ticking filled the room and bounced off the walls.

  Chick, chick, chick …

  Sophie listened to it biting off the seconds like a metronome, her shallow breathing keeping time. Staring up into the darkness, watching the deeper shadows of trees dance on her ceiling, she felt another uprush of raw panic. She thrashed out of bed and lunged for the light. From his cat bed, Nickleby lifted his shaggy head and gave her a long, baleful, yellow-eyed stare.

  “Sorry,” she said, sinking down, curling around him, stroking his thick black fur. He suffered it for a minute, then stalked away to clean off the affection.

  This is why people get therapy dogs, she thought.

  She sat on the floor with her back to the bed and stared at the wall, beyond the wall, beyond the house. The cold she felt had nothing to do with the temperature; she was numb-cold, bone-cold, dread-cold.

  Chick, chick, chick …

  She roused herself, looked around blankly, then skimmed a shaky finger down the pile of novels by her bed. Not one of them was interesting, none of them even possibly diverting. For the first time in her life, books failed her. They’d always been a solace, an escape. Not now. Maybe not ever again.

  Her eye fell on a book she didn’t recognize. Good stuff, must read! said her mother’s purple ink on a Post-it Note. It was that book of plays she taught her undergraduates, the one Sophie had said she wasn’t interested in. Sophie flipped the book open and stopped five words in at the stage directions for the first play.

  A country road. A tree. How could the most benign, simple setting imaginable open up a sinkhole of dread?

  A lonely house. A girl.

  Sixteen years old and the curtain was already rising on the final act of her play. Nobody had prepared her for that. Nobody ever said, “Look out, Sophie, this play of yours might have a bitch of a twist! It might also be way, way shorter than you thought.” Sophie imagined herself tussling frantically with an unexpected curtainfall.

  If she had been asked, she probably would have imagined her life as a meandering path to a peaceful death at ninety; an unrecognizable Sophie, ancient and kindly and wise in a wooly shawl, soft, thinning white hair skimming a pink scalp, surrounded by loving children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. A perfect, old lady movie-death.

  And yet here she was, alone, center stage, her script yanked away, forced to improvise because all the rules had changed.

  What were the rules now? Where was her script?

  She tossed the book of plays aside. She needed something short, light. She dug under her bed for a fashion magazine, grabbing randomly at the guilty stash. Officially, she despised the fashion industry. Flipping pages quickly, urgently, through a ton of ads, makeup tips, celebrity beauty secrets, flatter abs. All of it utterly meaningless. She felt old.

  Chick, chick, chick …

  Her flipping slowed; her hands stilled.

  She stared down at the random advertisement that was face up. Pore cleanser, 4x the deep-cleaning action of soap, stop acne before it begins! A model with never-acned skin on one side, and on the other, a simplistic diagram showing epidermis, pore cavity, and the sinister, sludgy oil deposits. All the bad stuff hidden underneath the surface …

  Just like me.

  Stop it. Just stop …

  She hunted unsuccessfully for a nail left to bite, then gnawed on the skin by her stubby thumbnail. She tasted metallic blood; her bad stuff hidden beneath the surface. Shouldn’t her blood taste different now that she knew what was in it?

  2:40 a.m. Nickleby wasn’t even finished his cat bath. She wondered how she was ever going to get through this night.

  Almanacs! Why hadn’t she thought of the almanacs? Even as a kid she’d found facts and figures weirdly soothing, and for the last few years, running through a mental map of world capitals had been her go-to anti-insomnia strategy.

  She stumbled on stiff legs over to her bookshelf and pulled out the most recent World Almanac and Book of Facts from the row of almanacs dating back to 2008. Ordered, structured information, rows of numbers, columns of data blocked symmetrically. Any subject you could think of: State Maps, Flags of the World, International Time Zones, Country Music Singers, the Electoral College, U.S. Unemployment by Industry, Boxing Champions by Class, World History, Common Infectious Diseases, Selected Characteristics of the Sun and Planets. All the answers to everything in one thick paperback, a bargain at fifteen bucks.

  She flipped past Veterans and National Parks, pausing briefly at Sexual Activity of U.S. High School Students (you couldn’t trust that one; kids lie), then galloped through the book, flipping whole inches, a hundred pages at a time. Past Notable Islands, Student Loan Debt by State, Buildings, Bridges and Tunnels. She finally settled with relief on Nations of the World. Statistics, numbers, pure calming facts.

  First up: Afghanistan. She skimmed down the country summary, past People, Geography, Government, Economy, Finance, Transport, and Communications. Her glance sharpened at Health. Why is Health last? Pretty bloody important. But it was the first subheading that had her sitting back.

  Life expectancy: 49.9 male; 52.7 female.

  Sophie stared down at the numbers.

  Less than fifty years for men; that would be Dad. Fifty-two years for women; that’s Mom. They’d be dead and gone tomorrow, tonight, like all the people their age in Afghanistan. That would be the end of their country road.

  She couldn’t get out of Afghanistan fast enough, crumpling the page as she flipped it. Longer lives in Albania (75.7 male, 81.2 female), but as she skittered through the A’s, Angola plummeted: 54.8 male, 57.2 female.

  She flipped obsessively, country to country, the standardized format drawing her eyes down to Health. To Life Expectancy.

  Belize: 67.2 male, 70.4 female.

  Botswana: 56.3 male, 52.6 female.

  Burkina Faso: 53.4 male, 57.6 female.

  Her phone rang at Cambodia. She snatched it up in relief, checking the number. Theo. She hesitated. It was always a long talk with Theo. Did she desperately want or desperately not want to talk to him? Could she actually pull off an even halfway normal conversation right now? She answered on the sixth ring.

  “Oh good,” he said, “you’re up. Thought you were. I was walking home from Quinn’s lame party, and I saw your light.”

  “Nice being a guy so you can walk at night,” Sophie said. Did her voice sound okay? It didn’t to her, but Theo didn’t seem to notice. She’d considered wandering the neighborhood, walking the night away. The air, the movement would’ve felt good, but after that woman got attacked four blocks away a couple of weeks ago, fear kept her in. Inside, a different fear kept her company.

  “You didn’t miss anything. Totally dead. And cold. Look at my hands! Okay, you can’t see them because you hate FaceTime (see, I remembered!), but they’re blue. Bluish. So, can’t sleep? Or just reading all that shit you read?”

  “Just … reading. And I don’t read shit.” Flicker of guilt at the magazine stash under the bed.

  “Only the very highest of highbrow lit’rature for Miss Sophronia.” He butchered an English accent. “I know. Okay, back to me. I just did something stupid: texted that girl I told you about, the rude one? I know, I know, you’re thinking ‘Theo, you dumb shit,’ but she was at the party and not rude and here’s the thing …”

  Theo launched into his story. It was a familiar one; she couldn’t keep up with Theo’s crushes. Sophie’s eyes dropped to the almanac.

  Cambodia: life expectancy 62 male, 67.1 female.

  Chad: 49.0 male (Oh dear God! 49! Under 50), 51.5 female.

  “… then she says all flirty (I think), ‘maybe give me a call.’ What’s that really mean though? That ‘maybe.’ It’s that maybe …”

  Congo (55.8 and 58.9), then a spate of higher life expectancies, then Guinea Bissau (48.6 and 52.7).

  How is there such unfairness in the world? How did I not know?

  “… which makes me think she might be into me. Maybe. Right? Hey! Ronny!” Theo raised his voice plaintively on her nickname. She was “Ronny” to Theo, “Sophie” to everyone else. “Sophronia,” her much-hated full name, was a grimly guarded secret only Theo knew. “Seriously baring my soul here, and I get nothing. You there?”

  “Sorry. Here. Good.” She tried to focus. “I mean, it’s good that she’s texting …”

  “That’s what I thought! Because when it’s just, like, dead air, even I understand that shit, right?”

  “Right,” Sophie said, forcing a snort of a laugh. Could I sound more fake? “Dead air. Bad sign.”

  “And it’s not like I’m high-maintenance. You know me: so low-maintenance I’m, like, barely even there …”

  Riiight, Theo.

  Theo’s voice receded as Sophie jumped country to country. Haiti (61.2 and 66.4), Kiribati (63.7 and 68.8), Mozambique (52.6 and 54.1), Zambia (50.8 and 54.1), and finally Zimbabwe (57.3 and 58.7).

 

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