Between

by Angie Abdou

  Shane goes as far as buying her a personalized license plate for

  her birthday: VRO BBY in hot-pink block caps. His VRO BBY ,

  of course, oozes irony, but Eliot’s too young for irony. So now, Eliot

  thinks girls can’t be captains, and Vero feels certain it’s The Engineers’

  fault.

  “How about if I be the captain, and when Daddy gets home from

  working at the pharmacy, he can fold the laundry?” She pulls Jamal

  away from Shane’s new Italian racing bike. Cervella, he calls her . She

  is now propped up on a wind-trainer so that, in the dead of winter,

  on the snowiest days, Shane can avoid the icy roads, spinning around

  and around, pouring sweat and getting nowhere. Vero’s job is to keep

  the boys from spinning the sleek bike’s overpriced wheels and ampu-

  tating their little fingers in its overpriced spokes.

  “That’s okay, Mommy.” Eliot pulls at Vero’s hand, pushing her fore-

  head until he can see her face. “Don’t cry. Mommies don’t cry, silly.

  You like doing laundry. Because that’s what mommies do.”

  Vero envies Eliot. He can be whomever he wants. Only, very infre-

  quently, he’ll announce, “I’m Eliot now.” Mostly, though, he’s some-

  one else.

  “Excuse me, can I pretend I’m a robot?”

  “Excuse me, can I pretend I’m a football player?”

  “Excuse me, can I pretend I’m an astronaut?”

  “No,” Shane answers, every now and then. “No you can’t. We’ve

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  had quite enough pretending for one day.” He looks at Vero, the

  pain of exhaustion in his eyes a mirror of her own. Parenting has

  aged them, made their skin looser, less shiny. “That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  He seems truly uncertain, like he’s working with a foreign language.

  He runs his hands through his coarse white-blond hair. Usually, it

  springs out from under a ball cap, and he looks almost exactly like

  the second-year chemistry student Vero fell for at twenty, back when

  everyone called him the Candy Man and vied for invitations to the

  psychedelic parties in his sweet suite above his parents’ garage. Only a

  subtle bagginess in the skin around his eyes and at the corners of his

  mouth hint that he’s entered his forties. “Enough pretending? I love

  pretending. I’d never say ‘enough pretending.’ Not for real.” He nods,

  one quick pulse of his chin, as he always does when his mind’s made

  up. “It’s hilarious.”

  They’re both delirious from lack of sleep. His words come to Vero

  as if spoken underwater, wavy and weak, parts of them floating away.

  She can’t tell whether the problem is his voice or her ears.

  Last week, when Vero went to the dentist to fill the holes that the

  acid reflux of pregnancy had gnawed in her teeth, a hygienist asked

  her name. Vero, with her jaw ajar, stared at herself reflected in the

  woman’s protective glasses until they both blushed. “It’s not exactly

  a skill-testing question, is it?” Vero finally said. “I should know that

  one.” Another unfilled pause. “Is it Mommy?”

  Some evenings, when Shane gets home from the pharmacy, Vero

  pushes both boys in his direction, snarling, “It’s your turn.” Without

  looking back at her family, she marches out the door and up the hill

  into the woods. No goodbye hugs. No goodbye kisses. No Mommy

  loves you so much, be good for Daddy. Just gone.

  Deep into the woods, she crouches on the ground, leaning into a

  spruce tree, curling tight into herself. If she keeps still long enough,

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  animals come. Sometimes ground squirrels. Sometimes rabbits. One

  time, a fox came close enough that Vero could’ve touched her—a

  mother with two kits. Vero didn’t care about the babies. She held

  her breath to keep still, her rear-end damp and cold, devoting her

  attention entirely to the mama, sniffing the dirt, licking her paws,

  oblivious to the little ones at her tail, trusting they would take care of

  themselves. When the fox saw Vero—or maybe just felt her eventual

  gasp for breath—she bolted fast into the thick brush. The kits disap-

  peared with her.

  Other times—when Vero doesn’t get her solitude in the woods—

  she erupts after the kids have gone to bed, her anger and frustration

  splattering everything. She runs into dark wet nights, barefoot in the

  thorny grass and up into the forest, its floor strewn with twigs and

  sharp rocks. She races away from Shane and the house, revelling in

  each sharp pain to her tender soles. See! See what you all make me do to

  myself? Your laundry! Your demands! Your dirty dishes! What happened to

  my life? MY life! She pulls her hair and shrieks, beyond caring what

  neighbours think. But always she remains very aware of Shane, his

  white skin and blond hair shining from the porch steps against the

  darkness of the night.

  “What, Vero?! What? ” He holds his arms out to her, all supplica-

  tion. “Geez, Vero, come back here!”

  Vero does come back, later, soaked from the rain, clothes torn, feet

  bleeding. She sits with her feet in his lap while he dabs and bandages.

  “You can’t keep doing this, Vee. You’re acting crazy. Like a wild

  animal.”

  But Vero has watched the wild animals. None of them act this way.

  “Don’t yell at me,” she yells.

  “I’m not yelling,” he says, so quietly it’s loud. His eyebrows, a high

  arch of nearly invisible blond, give him a look of perpetual surprise.

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  Vero counts each of the stubby hairs instead of responding.

  “We need some help, Vee. Live-in help. Just because you can some-

  times work at home doesn’t mean you can do it all. Work is work.

  Parenting is work. That’s two works.” He tries to meet her eyes, winks.

  “I’m excellent at math.”

  They have this conversation often, and she’s given him all the

  excuses: She doesn’t want a stranger taking care of her kids; full-time

  support is too expensive; she couldn’t stand someone they don’t know

  living in their house. The real reason, though, is that she’s observed

  the live-in nannies—in the playground, in the school programs, at the

  mall. They’re ghosts hovering at the periphery of real life, animated

  and alive only until she gets close, and then they freeze, their features

  slack, their eyes empty, their faces so blank she can see right through

  them. Vero doesn’t want a ghost living in her home.

  “No,” she says, this time with no explanation. She speaks to her lap

  and shakes her head, water from her long bangs trailing down her

  nose and dripping onto her clasped hands. “Just. No.”

  The next morning, Eliot holds his jacket in one hand and a glass

  of milk in the other, high above his head away from his baby brother.

  Jamal lunges at it—“mik! mik! mik! mik!” Milk slops into Eliot’s hair

  as Vero kicks his Lightning McQueen runners toward him, scooping


  Jamal away from the dripping milk.

  “You have to help me, Mommy! ” As he reaches for his sneakers,

  Eliot’s cup drops, splattering white liquid on the floor, on the bannis-

  ter, on the wall, on his jacket. His whimper turns to a wail. “I can’t do

  everyfing at the same time!”

  “I know, Eliot.” Vero hears her own voice as a whimper now. She

  pulls his stiff rain jacket around his shoulders with one arm while

  she bounces Jamal gently with the other. Her briefcase, full of light

  armoured vehicle specifications, falls to the floor. “That’s just it, Eliot.

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  Neither can I.” She listens to make sure Shane isn’t around the corner

  in the kitchen, then says it again, relieved to finally hear it aloud.

  “Neither can I.”

  ◊◊◊

  Vero curls on the couch after dinner, tight to Jamal, his warm, wet

  mouth tugging at her breast. Eliot straddles her hips, hands tangled

  in the wild otherworld of her hair. The three of them wind around

  and latch onto each other, so connected they feel like a single being.

  A three-headed wildebeest.

  She repeats Eliot’s favourite story softly in his ear. “You were so

  beautiful when you were born, I couldn’t sleep for three days.” The

  words hardly carry meaning for her anymore. They come forth from

  her mouth, one sliding into the next, like a well-loved song. “I just

  sat and stared at you for three days. Your hot little cheek pressed to

  my arm. My face hurt from smiling. You were the first time I saw a

  miracle.”

  “No sleep at all! For three days! And did you let the nurses take

  me?” He knows the answer, but wants to hear it again.

  “No, Eliot, I wouldn’t let anyone take you away from me. Not for a

  minute. I loved you too much.”

  “So much you couldn’t put your eyes anywhere else. You couldn’t

  even close them to sleep.” Eliot’s voice quivers with excitement but

  stays low. He won’t disturb Jamal. He wants this time to be his. “Like

  a super mom! No sleep is your super power.”

  “No sleep at all, Eliot.” She strokes the back of his neck, soft as a

  seal pelt. “Like a super mom.” But everybody needs to sleep, Eliot. I need

  to sleep. She doesn’t say that.

  “See you in sixty,” Shane’s voice pulls her from Eliot and Jamal.

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  His face peeks through the crack of the door for only a flash before

  it snaps shut between them, and his spandex-clad ass disappears. He

  too speaks in a stage whisper, scared to disrupt whatever spell has

  been cast on the placid Jamal.

  Fine. We don’t need you. That’s what Vero thinks—the words that

  swim through the thick sludge of her mind. But it’s not what she

  feels. The extent of her need weakens her.

  She imagines Shane on his fat-tire winter bike. She sees him

  mashing up the big hill five miles out of Sprucedale, the slick whir

  of his tires scrubbing the crust of the work day from his brain, a soft

  mist hanging in the mountain air, cooling his skin and sharpening the

  sweet scent of the pine air just off the highway. Alive. Not a hint of

  pee or peanut butter aroma on anything.

  Before kids, they rode together.

  “I need this,” he’d say, his face flushed and eyes bright. “I’ve got

  half this town on pills. ‘ Here you go, Sprucedalians: one big one and two

  little ones for everybody!’ The big one so they don’t kill themselves and

  the little ones so they don’t kill anybody else.” He knows too many

  of Sprucedale’s secrets, he says, and pounding up a hill, tasting his

  own heartbeat, wiping his sweat on his neoprene sleeve, helps him

  to forget.

  She remembers that cleansing, cathartic quality of a good, hard

  ride. At the crest of a hill, her whole body buzzed, a physical sensation

  so concentrated and powerful that it was nearly sexual.

  Shane would be feeling that soon.

  “You begrudge me every second on my bike,” he complains, “as if

  Cervella is my mistress instead of a piece of inanimate equipment.”

  He points at his quads, flexes until his pant leg stretches tight across

  the muscle. “See that? Shane Schoeman was made to cycle. I already

  wasted my youth banging heads with my brother on the football

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  field.” He pets his thighs, as if they’re the family poodle. “Now I bike.”

  Jamal has fallen asleep at Vero’s breast, his new teeth resting against

  her nipple. She worries that Eliot will squirm and wake him, but Eliot

  too seems content, his weight warm on top of her as he sucks at a piece

  of her hair, a habit he’s acquired since Jamal’s arrival.

  Today, Shane took Vero to the Sprucedale office of the International

  Nanny Agency on Broad Street to meet Bernadette. Bernie, she said to

  call her. She looked like a Bernie: lean, with a pixie haircut and low-

  slung faded jeans hugging her hips. Her T-shirt read “Well-behaved

  Women Rarely Make History.” A hint of skin, golden from this year’s

  Indian summer, peeked out between the T-shirt and her jeans. Shane

  tightly shackled Vero’s wrist in the grip of his index finger and thumb

  and pulled her in the door. “Let’s just see. It doesn’t hurt to see.”

  “My wife thinks she doesn’t want a nanny. But I know she does,” he

  said, leaning his elbows onto the counter between them and Bernie,

  just the way he leaned into Cervella’s aerobars. “She’s got some weird

  North American hang-ups. Liberal guilt, let’s call it. Tell her: Nobody

  else in the world has trouble hiring servants, if they can afford them.”

  Vero cringed on the word “servant” and watched for Bernie’s reac-

  tion. This little woman gave Shane nothing. No nod of understand-

  ing, no smile of approval, no glint of camaraderie in her eyes. Vero’s

  shoulders loosened a little. She’d assumed that someone working in

  the office of an international nanny agency might be on Shane’s side;

  Bernie, after all, was the one in the nanny business.

  “The life we’ve got is not the one we signed up for, that’s for sure.”

  Shane put his hand on the back of Vero’s neck, fingers creeping up into

  her hair. “Before Vero and I got married, we talked about trekking in

  Nepal, doing opium in Thailand, surfing in Bali. Now, date night’s a

  trip to the grocery store with two screaming, dirty kids clinging to our

  pant legs.” Vero noticed that Shane rambled like this more frequently

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  as he coasted into middle age. The Shane-Overshare, she called it, but

  she just now connected it to young, attractive women. She checked the

  pit of her stomach to gauge her jealousy, but felt nothing.

  Shane watched himself in the mirror behind Bernie as he talked, his

  eyes rimmed red. His unforgiving fair skin showed everything, espe-

  cially fatigue. He looked like he was wearing pink eyeliner. “I suppose


  that’s life, isn’t it?” he continued, unable, it seemed, to stop himself.

  “You’re presented with decisions. You make them. You’re presented

  with decisions. You make them. Again and again. You think this smor-

  gasbord of options will always be there. Then suddenly you realize that

  you’ve decided yourself into a tight little box.” Vero saw that the met-

  aphorical turn this Shane-Overshare had taken pleased Shane, that

  he expected it would appeal to young Bernie, with her trendy haircut,

  feather earrings, and studded nose. “So we decided on kids. That’s our

  box. We can’t change the box, but a nanny would sure help us fluff up

  the pillows in there, make it a little more comfortable. You know?”

  Vero wanted to tell Bernie and Shane about Lito, a round Filipino

  man whose face was usually all sunshine and happiness. He served her

  coffee en route to the LAV plant. Vero wanted to tell them about last

  week, when she asked Lito how he was and his big sunface cracked

  open.

  He’d looked up at the ceiling as if saying a quick prayer and then

  spoke into her still empty mug. “I have a new son,” he whispered, “a

  new son I have never held. Never held. Back home. My boy.” Lito’s

  voice cracked on the word “boy” so that it came out in two syllables.

  She wanted Shane to feel the pain of that break. Lito’s mouth bunched

  up and twitched and his eyelids fluttered. He lost control of the mus-

  cles of his own face, for just a second. But then he licked his lips, shook

  his head, and spoke more loudly. “I’m sorry. ma’am. So sorry. This, not

  your problem.”

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  No. Vero’s problem was deciding what she wanted in her coffee.

  She ordered a double.

  “Yes, ma’am, most certainly.” Lito’s face lifted into a smile Vero

  knew well, one so sparkling and sincere that she’d never before

  thought to question it.

  She wanted to tell Shane and Bernie all of that, to tell them about

  the grip of humiliation that held her, toes to head, when he handed

  her a mug of coffee and wished her a good day. She nodded and said

  nothing.

  “Think of the nanny as a present, from me to you,” Shane said,

  his forearms pressed into the countertop, fingertips stretched toward

  Bernie, even while he looked at Vero. “You don’t have to make any