Chapter 12 – Chapter I: Summary & Analysis
Spoiler Notice
This summary contains spoilers for Chapter 12 of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. If you haven’t read it yet, proceed with caution.
Summary
Alice wakes to brutal sunlight and a pounding hangover after the party. On her sheets she finds a purple Post-it from Lottie—a simple, final “Goodbye, Alice. xo Lottie”—and three perfect drops of dried blood whose source she cannot explain. Pomegranate lipstick marks her skin like bruises, but the memory of the night’s end has a hollow, vertigo quality, as if something has been erased.
The scene splinters into a childhood flashback: nine-year-old Alice chases her sister Catty across a damp hillside. Catty has just bolted from a dinner where their father’s new partner, Eloise Martin, spoke of being “meant to be,” reigniting Catty’s fury over their mother’s death. Alice, too young to carry intact memories of Sarah Moore, can only run to keep up. She finds Catty leaning against a low stone wall, then lies head-to-head with her on the cold rock as Catty puts in earbuds and plays a haunting song—a stripped-bare incantation about a child lost in the woods. Catty restarts the track again and again, never letting the singer reach the final word “home.”
Back in the present, Alice’s phone alarm blares the same song. Her roommate Lizbeth complains, packs for her boyfriend’s room, and Alice, still shivering and ill, forces herself outside for fresh air. Passing her suite mates, she stumbles downstairs, half hoping to see the trail she and Lottie left in the rain, but only the damp and her own confusion remain.
Key Events
- Alice endures a brutal hangover and discovers Lottie’s farewell note and three mysterious drops of blood on her sheets.
- A vivid flashback plunges into the past: after a fraught family dinner, young Alice chases Catty up a hill; Catty’s anger at their father’s girlfriend Eloise and her ongoing grief for their mother surface.
- The sisters lie on a stone wall while Catty plays a looping folk song that she deliberately never allows to finish, withholding the word “home.”
- Alice awakens fully in the evening, having slept through the day; Lizbeth brusquely leaves, and Alice, feeling wretched, decides to go out for air.
- In the dorm hallway and stairs, Alice moves through a fog of illness, acutely aware of what the previous night may have cost her memory.
Character Development
- Alice: Her adult hangover reveals a deep vulnerability and a pattern of reckless abandon (“that other, reckless Alice”) that she usually tries to hide. The childhood memory shows her innate desire to follow and placate Catty, even at her own expense. She is caught between wanting to belong and fearing she has lost her grip on reality.
- Catty (Catherine): In the flashback, Catty embodies raw, unprocessed grief and a refusal to accept a new family order. Her obsessive looping of the song, cutting it off before “home,” illustrates a willful stasis—she will not allow a resolution that erases their mother.
- Lizbeth: Officious and self-interested, she avoids any real care for Alice, highlighting Alice’s isolation in the dorm.
- Eloise Martin: Though offstage in the flashback, her presence drives the conflict; she represents a gentleness that Catty interprets as a betrayal of their dead mother.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
- The Unfinished Song: The folk lyric “When I was a child / I got lost in the woods…” and Catty’s refusal to let it end becomes a symbol of arrested grief and the impossibility of “home” after loss. The word “home” is denied again and again, mirroring Catty’s emotional lockdown.
- The Three Drops of Blood: The perfect, paint-like bloodstains on Alice’s sheets defy a physical explanation; they trigger a mental vertigo and suggest a suppressed or supernatural event with Lottie—a seed for later mystery.
- Stone Walls: The low, ancient walls that never crumble (secretly maintained by a mason) echo the hidden structures holding the past together, just as Catty claims a wall as “hers” through a misread maker’s mark.
- Water and Rain: The soaked pillow, rain-damp clothes, and the water trail Alice and Lottie left the previous night all blend with the hangover’s shivering, suggesting a world where emotions and memories are liquid, easily evaporated yet leaving a residue.
Why This Chapter Matters
“Chapter I” accomplishes several things at once. It grounds Alice’s present chaos in a childhood trauma, offering a backstory that explains her people-pleasing tendencies and her habit of “assessing the damage” after social abandon. The bloodstains and the missing memory mark a pivot toward the novel’s speculative or Gothic edges: the reader senses that Lottie was more than a party hookup. Simultaneously, the flashback introduces the central motif of the unfinished song, which will likely echo through the narrative as a measure of characters’ ability—or refusal—to find closure. By the chapter’s end, Alice is physically ill, emotionally unmoored, and surrounded by signs that something is deeply wrong, setting the stage for a deeper unraveling.
Study Questions and Answers
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Why does Catty restart the song over and over instead of letting it finish?
She cannot bear the final word “home” because accepting it would mean accepting a new domestic life with Eloise and, symbolically, moving on from their mother’s death. The loop becomes her way of freezing time and refusing closure. -
What might the three drops of blood on Alice’s sheets signify?
They appear perfectly spaced, as if placed, and cause Alice a “mental vertigo” where a memory should be. This suggests that something significant—possibly dangerous or supernatural—occurred with Lottie that Alice has repressed, foreshadowing a hidden truth about that night. -
How does the flashback to Alice’s childhood shape our understanding of her adult behaviour?
The memory shows Alice as a follower who will go to great lengths (lying on a cold wall, ignoring her own discomfort) to stay close to Catty. In the present, she immediately frets about what others think of her party behaviour, revealing the same anxiety about being abandoned or judged that was seeded in her youth.