I pushed my daughter down a rabbit hole three days ago.
She screamed my name as she fell. Not “Mama” or “Mother.” Just my name. Catherine. Like I was a stranger. Like I was the monster.
Maybe I am.
But before you decide, let me tell you about Beatrice Hart. Because none of this makes sense without Bea.
We were seven when she found the hole behind the oak tree. Same oak tree that’s still in my garden now, forty years later. Same hole, I suspect, though it comes and goes like a bad memory.
Bea went down first. Laughing. Always laughing, that girl. She didn’t even hesitate. Just tucked her skirts and slipped into the darkness like she was born to it.
I ran for help. Because that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve always done. Ran away, called for adults, let someone else handle the mess.
By the time I got Father and the groundskeeper back, the hole was gone. Just earth and roots where it had been.
They found Bea three days later wandering in the village, dress clean, hair brushed, not a scratch on her. But wrong. God, she was wrong.
She’d sit in the garden for hours, pouring nothing into empty teacups. Talking to chairs. Going on about queens and caterpillars and clocks that ran backwards. Her mother thought she’d hit her head. The doctors said trauma.
I knew better. Something had come back wearing Bea’s face, but Bea herself was still down there.
“You were supposed to come with me, Catherine,” she told me once. We were nine. She was in the asylum by then, all white walls and white dresses. “Wonderland doesn’t work with just one Alice. It needs two. One to stay, one to leave. One to tell the story, one to live it.”
“My name isn’t Alice.”
“It is down there.” Her fingers dug into my wrist. “I couldn’t leave because you never came. I’m stuck between. Not here, not there. Do you understand? The story needs an ending.”
She jumped from a window two weeks later. They said suicide. I say she was trying to get back down.
I got married. Had children. Pushed it all away like it was a bad dream.
Then my daughter started talking about a white rabbit.
My Alice. Seven years old. Same age as Bea and I had been. She’d come home with grass stains and wild stories about a rabbit in a waistcoat who was always late, always worried, always checking his pocket watch.
“There’s a hole behind the oak tree, Mama. It goes down and down and down.”
I burned that tree to the ground that night. Watched it crack and collapse while my husband demanded answers I couldn’t give.
But the hole remained. Black and patient and waiting.
Two days later, I found my daughter packing a bag. Crackers, her favorite doll, a hair ribbon.
“Where are you going?”
She looked up at me, and for just a second, I saw something else looking through her eyes. Something old and hungry and tired of waiting.
“Wonderland needs its Alice, Mama. There’s always supposed to be an Alice down there. Bea said so.”
“Bea is dead.”
“Bea is the Cheshire Cat now.” My daughter smiled, and it was too wide, too knowing. “She told me all about you, Catherine. About how you ran away. About how you were supposed to go down after her, and then the next girl after you, and the next after her. But you broke the chain. You were too scared.”
“I was seven.”
“So am I. And I’m not scared.”
That’s when I understood. Finally understood what Bea had been trying to tell me from that white room. Why she’d come back hollow. Why she’d chosen falling over living.
Wonderland takes children. But it doesn’t keep them. It sends them back changed, transformed, half-mad with wonder and horror. Walking advertisements for a place that shouldn’t exist.
And then it waits for the next one.
The next Alice.
There’s always another Alice.
My daughter was already walking toward the garden. I followed her to the oak tree, or where it had been. The hole was back. Wide and dark and breathing.
She turned to me, seven years old, my baby girl.
“I’ll come back, Mama. Just like Bea did. And I’ll tell everyone about the adventures I had.”
And I knew she would come back. But not as my daughter. As something wearing my daughter’s face. Something that would smile at her father and sit at our table and call me Mama while my real little girl stayed trapped in a place where time doesn’t flow right and queens collect heads like some people collect stamps.
That’s when I pushed her.
Not gently. Hard. With both hands and all my strength and thirty years of guilt behind it.
She tumbled backwards into the dark, eyes wide with betrayal.
And I jumped in after her.
The fall was endless. Or maybe it lasted three seconds. Time doesn’t work right between worlds.
We landed in a room with doors of every size and a table with a bottle that said DRINK ME.
My daughter wasn’t crying. She was laughing. Bea’s laugh.
“You came,” she said. “Finally. The real Alice came.”
I looked at my hands. Still my hands. Still forty-seven years old, with age spots and a wedding ring.
My daughter stood up, brushed off her dress. When she turned to me, her smile had too many teeth.
“Wonderland doesn’t need children, Catherine. It needs mothers. The ones who’ll sacrifice anything. The ones who’ll go mad in all the right ways.”
“What are you?”
“I’m the story that needs telling. I’m the rabbit hole that needs filling. I’m the reason girls like Beatrice Hart go insane.” She picked up the bottle from the table, held it out to me. “And you’re the ending I’ve been waiting forty years for.”
Behind her, I saw them. All of them. Every Alice who’d ever gone down and come back wrong. Beatrice was there, grinning like a crescent moon. And others. Dozens of others. Girls from different eras, different centuries, all wearing that same too-wide smile.
“Drink,” my daughter said. Not my daughter. Never my daughter. Just something that knew exactly which shape to take. “Drink, and I’ll let her go. The real her. The one I’ve been holding. She can climb back up and live your life and be safe.”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I?” She gestured, and I saw her. My real daughter, small and terrified and crying in the corner. Still seven. Still mine.
I took the bottle.
The liquid tasted like every time I’d chosen safety over courage. Every time I’d run instead of stayed. Every time I’d let someone else be brave.
It tasted like Beatrice Hart jumping from a window.
I drank it all.
The last thing I saw before the shrinking started was my daughter climbing back up, back toward the light, toward home. The thing that had been wearing her face watched her go, then turned back to me.
“Welcome home, Alice,” it said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
And now here I am. Catherine Anne Liddell-Hargreaves, age forty-seven, running through gardens that grow teeth and serving tea to a Hatter who won’t stop giggling.
Beatrice was right. I was always the strong one.
Strong enough to finally do what should have been done forty years ago.
Strong enough to take her place.
The Queen of Hearts wants my head. The Cheshire Cat that used to be my best friend keeps appearing to offer advice that makes no sense. And somewhere above me, my daughter is climbing back into the real world, safe and whole and mine again.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I run from the cards and dodge the croquet mallets.
She’s safe now.
She got out.
Someone had to stay, and it was always supposed to be me.
At least I finally did the brave thing.
Even if it took me forty years and cost me everything.
