He would wake up all at once with his face streaked with snot, with the pillow wet, and he wasn’t sure if maybe he wasn’t crying as well. Sometimes Raisa would be there — often, she wasn’t. But if she was, most times she was mumbling and restless, but still firmly asleep.
Unable to fall back asleep, Tom would lie in the bed, staring at the ceiling and imagining spending a whole weekend defeating the mould, at least enough of it so he could sleep through the night again. He was ready to strip the place down, wash all the walls, paint the window frames and any of the wall stains, but Raisa was having none of it: “It’s my place and my rules,” she said, seemingly unaware of the constant smell. “It’s a living thing, Tom. A living thing.” He looked up dangerous moulds online and longed to tell her about the ones that damaged lungs permanently, the ones that required “special remediation.” But he knew she’d ridicule him for worrying, and then all at once it was mid-June again, and the weather was suddenly warm enough for the old wooden windows to be pried open in their damp-warped frames.
June was also the month when he came home after work and found the apartment cleaned out. Well, half cleaned out. All of Raisa’s things were gone, along with some of his things: CDs she’d liked, kitchen knives, all the rolled coins.
He called the coffee shop, but they only told him that she’d quit. When he went over, one of the baristas told him Raisa had told her co-workers that she had a job in Vernon, B.C., and that she and her boyfriend were moving.
“But I’m her boyfriend,” Tom said.
“You’re not the one who used to come and pick her up after work,” the barista said, making a face that looked like she was trying hard to feel bad for him.
He called the landlord, asked if there was a lease, and if he could take over the apartment. The landlord told him Raisa’s real name was actually Ruth, and that, whether Tom knew it or not, he’d been added to the lease three months before. By Ruth — or, at least, Ruth had picked up the papers and brought them back signed, “apparently by you. And, by the way, your rent is two months overdue. I’ll need a cheque — this time, certified.”
By then, Tom was sure he was pretty much ready for anything. As soon as he was back at home, he had the bleach in its big white bottle in his hand. Had the cloth and bucket.
Goodbye, Ray.
And hello there, Armenia.
Bide Awhile
The curtain lifted in the window of the office — just for a moment. Something moved away from the glass and the curtain dropped back down.
The Bide Awhile campground had eight cabins. Small white cabins, two windows on the front, one window balanced squarely on either side of each front door. The cabins in two rows of four, the playground equipment in between.
It was six-thirty in the morning, the August sun angling in along the grass, catching small jewels of dew on the individual blades. Two crows were awake, calling back and forth from the roof of the office and the small shed that held the heating equipment for the pool.
The door of cabin number six was slightly ajar. It had been open all night. On the clothesline by the pool, a small pair of boy’s green swimming trunks hung motionless, waiting for a breeze. Any time the wind shifted itself, the door in Cabin Six would rock quietly open and back toward closed.
In the play area between the cabins, the swings hung still on their chains. Two plastic slides, one yellow, one orange, were sheeted with interconnected water droplets, a skein of moisture, waiting for that one critical droplet to coalesce into a full-fledged drop and then ride down gravity’s curve.
A small girl sat on one end of the teeter-totter, the other end empty and high up in the air. Occasionally, she straightened her legs, stood up, and then came back down to the ground again, lacking that crucial counterweight. Her name was Angie, and she was one of the four people staying in Cabin Six. Angie was five, and she was wearing her favourite sweater: white, with buttons up the front and a pattern of pink houses across the back.
The door in Cabin Six was not supposed to be open.
The door was supposed to have been closed and locked before Angie’s parents, Mike and Beverly — Bev to her friends — Watton, went to bed. Both of the parents had agreed when they arrived that the lock on the door was too high and too complicated for Angie to unlock by herself.
Angie had wandered away once in a grocery store. She was lost for all of fifteen minutes and had gained an instant reputation for disappearing. “Where’s Angie?” “Make sure Angie hasn’t wandered off.” “Is Angie already in the car?” “Who’s watching Angie?” “Sam — go get your little sister.”
Making sure the cabin door was locked was Mike’s job — part of their regular circle of nighttime tasks. Making sure all the doors were locked was always Mike’s job. It was a familiar cycle — rain or shine, calm or storm: just like all the other household routines. Mike had the bathroom first — floss, brush teeth, mouthful of water, spit. Then Bev, with a more complicated, multi-step routine — makeup removal, floss, teeth, a final check to see that every feature, cheek to brow, was in place and in order. While she was in the bathroom, Mike checked the doors, turned off all but the last handful of lights, made his way to bed. Bev would do the last light — the bathroom — and make her way unsteadily through the dark, the familiar world bent awry by the click of the last switch. Mike was often asleep before Bev got to bed, lulled by the calm of regular and expected order.
That morning, Angie was still supposed to be asleep — that was also part of the regular order. But she had woken up, noticing the quiet in the cabin. Her brother, Sam — the two of them happy to be sharing the same small vacation room — had slept through everything. He’d slept through the low, bitter back-and-forth of the argument at the small, plastic-covered kitchen table: Mike and Bev had been sitting next to each other, one corner of the small table between them. Mike had gotten up to get another beer, but when he came back, he had pulled out a different chair to sit directly across from his wife instead, as if making the combat more formal, the opposition more clear and diametric.
It hadn’t been a quiet night in the cabin.
The guests in Cabin Two, straight across from the Wattons, had heard the fight. So did Cabins Five and Seven. But they had all battened down the hatches as if trying to keep out a sudden unforecast storm, closing their windows even though the evening’s heat still filled their small, stuffy, slightly mildewed rooms. They had all turned their backs to the rising voices.
Heather Weekes in Cabin Five did the most, asking her husband, Art, if they “should call down to the office.” Later, she asked if maybe they should call the police.
In Cabin Seven, Anne Elton tried to force her children to sleep by reading bedtime stories far louder than usual, a strategy that proved counterproductive. Oblivious, Barry Elton read the newspaper: “Story says housing prices are going to go up again,” he called from the small living room. Anne frowned in one mid-, and over-loud, storybook sentence, but didn’t even pause. The Elton children were under the covers, but wide-eyed. Neither child fell asleep for hours — and neither dared complain.
Angie got off the teeter-totter, letting the other end fall slowly toward the worn brown trench in the hard dirt. She paused at the edge of the sandbox, looking at the dew-softened edges of the previous day’s constructions. A yellow plastic dump truck poked out of the top of a mound of sand like a half-finished sculpture. Plastic shovels sprawled flat like they had simply been dropped in mid-project at the end of the workday. The two crows had moved and now croaked back and forth from the tops of telephone poles on the side of the road in front of the cabin office: a third joined them, throwing its wings wide as it landed, feather-pointing to a stall in mid-flight and settling out of the air en pointe.
The argument had started, as many do, over money. It had progressed from there first to the easy touchstones that all marriages develop: those soft places where each spouse knows how to counter the other’s defence, so it’s easy to land a careless, glancing bl
ow.
The argument had accelerated to the barren land that all couples know well but most steer away from: the blunt statements that depend on sharp backhands or even carefully chosen lies, the statements that are not meant for clearing the air but are deliberately meant for opening veins. For Mike and Bev, it started with a mutual loss of interest, anchored by the staples of who “was packing on the pounds” and whose “tits were on their way down to here.”
There is a line. Every couple knows it, knows its feel, its shape, its shaggy, feral, dangerous smell. Every couple flirts with it sometimes in the heat of argument or battle, sometimes they get close to touching it. The smart ones pull back, swallowing the almost-said before it can burst out. Sometimes it’s up to one person of the two to decide to harvest that one last small bud of caring, choosing to surrender instead, whatever the cost of lost and personal ground. Giving in, backing down.
But sometimes, neither can give up. And lines get crossed.
For Bev, it was one word, and not the harsh one of the two either.
Mike, standing up and heading for the fridge to get another beer, desperate and losing ground, threw the long — and painful — ball.
“Frigid bitch.”
It was a single shot, made desperately without even looking back at her when he said it, and he only said it because he felt that he had few options. But as soon as he spoke, he knew it would hit insecurity’s bull’s eye. Unerringly. And it did.
The “bitch” she could live with. But the “frigid” was lethal, the kind of thing that cracked foundations, broke windows, blew shingles from the roof in handfuls.
It brought Bev flashing memories of him lurching away from on top of her, a dark shape outlined against the light-coloured ceiling, sweat dripping down onto her from his face while she lay numb and distant and wondering if she was the only woman in the world who had ever felt that way.
In one motion, Bev picked up the empty beer bottle Mike had left behind and threw it. She missed him with the first one, breaking the bottle into long brown shards against the cupboard door beside the fridge, but it didn’t matter that it missed. The second one missed, too, as he went out the door. That bottle landed in the sandbox, unbroken.
They had a rule, one that had lasted for every single day of their entire marriage, eleven years, six months, and scattered uncounted days: settle every argument and make peace before going to bed and tumbling into sleep.
They broke that rule that night in Cabin Six.
Mike, already drunk, pushed out through the front door, slamming it behind him, the door crashing hard against the jamb and bouncing back before the latch had a chance to seat itself. Bev, crying and furious, heard the car start during her retreat to their back bedroom, but then forced herself to neither get up off the bed nor call out.
Mike fell asleep soon after, parked on the edge of a nearby dirt road, his breath slowly fogging the inside of the windows of the cooling car so that passing drivers — if there had been any — might have thought they’d stumbled on passionate teenagers too young to rent one of the nearby cabins.
Bev stayed awake waiting for more than two hours, her ears betraying her by perking up at every sound, however faint, but she eventually toppled into an uneasy sleep, dogged by dreams of running and falling, running and falling, terrified of something she couldn’t escape but was never close enough to see clearly.
At a quarter to seven, Angie walked slowly to the swimming pool gate. The sign said the gate was supposed to be kept closed: the sign said there was no lifeguard on duty and children under ten needed “parental supervision.” Angie couldn’t read. And the gate had been left open anyway.
There were drowned ants in the pool, scores of them, scattered on the light-blue pool cover that had been hauled over the surface the night before. Shallow water skimmed on top of the floating cover: deeper water underneath.
The ants were princesses all, cast out with their wings and their crowns and their former colonies’ dreams, risen up from anthills all around the cabins on the day before, a singularly hot August day. Many found their way down to the regular light-blue chop of the surface of the swimming pool. And even their obvious royalty hadn’t been enough to save them.
Angie stood on the edge of the pool, watching the struggling ants, while Bev slept in the back bedroom, breathing with a faint nasal snore, a gentle fleshy rattle, that Mike had once found endearing but that now annoyed him terribly. Mike slept in the car with the front seat all the way back, the keys still in the ignition, the headlights on until the car’s battery was completely dead.
Angie knelt down, holding a long spear of timothy grass, coaxing a struggling ant onto the stem, bringing the ant over to the flat of the pool deck. On dry land, the princess was pinned to the concrete by her sodden wings, dragged down by finery and struggling helplessly.
Angie leaned out further over the pool cover to reach another ant. And another. Soon, there was a small struggling handful of ants on the pool deck — they weren’t drowning, but they weren’t escaping, either. The crows flew closer. Intelligent birds, they cocked their heads and waited: the fat ants were an annual tasty snack, and the crows had already spent time marching along the shoulders of the pool, plucking the closest ants up with their beaks, dead or alive, and eating them.
Angie tilted back and forth, rescuing ants. The crows waited. The knot of ants grew.
Bev woke up and didn’t hear the children: she hoped they were still sleeping and had slept through everything.
She looked at the closed bedroom door, and, without realizing, she imagined that it was still the same closed door, as if it had remained sealed throughout the night.
The kids had been tired, Bev reasoned, running all day at the beach, the pool, the playground. No, more than tired: they’d been worn out — they would have dropped off to sleep almost immediately and stayed there, sleeping the way small children do, as if drugged unconscious and then laid loose in haphazard, almost boneless arrangement. If they’d woken, she was sure they would have called or come out. The more she thought about it, the more she convinced herself they were still asleep behind the closed door.
She hoped they would still be sleeping when Mike came back.
Fuck her. That’s what Mike thought when he woke up. He was stiff — his neck hurt. And he was still angry. I’ll leave that bitch this time, he thought. Get a divorce. It would serve her right. Let her try to figure out the finances, let her put in the extra hours and then come home to the three-ring circus the way he did.
Single again, Mike thought, he would fuck waitresses until he was good and tired of fucking them. Tall ones, short ones, redheads, blondes. Threesomes. Foursomes. He’d find that temp, the temp who had drunkenly kissed him at the Christmas party three, no, four years before. He’d go online for dates, then tweet his exploits to a growing group of followers, one hundred and forty explicit characters at a time. He would go out every night — he’d try Ecstasy or speed. He’d be a party animal known for his stamina.
He would … go back to the cabin to Bev and apologize.
Of all the things he might do, that was the only one, he knew, that would actually happen. Even though it wouldn’t work. Even though, he thought, he’d wear this one for months, all the more because he knew he’d have to be the one to give in. He sat up straight in the driver’s seat, glad not to have been woken by the police instead of by the sun. He tried the key: the starting motor gave one tired sound and stopped completely.
He opened the car door, put one foot on the ground, and waited until he saw another car in the distance. Then he stood up.
He lifted both arms, waved at the oncoming car, muttering, “Give a guy a break, would you?” under his breath. The car slowed.
“Got any jumper cables?” he asked when the driver rolled down his window.
Angie wasn’t on the pool deck anymore. The sleeve of her sweater was wet, so she took it off and left it next to the pool in the sun to dry. The gate swung closed behind he
r, and she walked back down through the cabins toward the road. When she stepped on the dirt path, her feet scuffed down through the damp of the dew to dry dirt: on the narrow concrete walkway, her feet left no marks at all.
Sam opened the bedroom door and came out yawning.
Bev was sitting at the table. Replaying the fight again, her face blank, the corners of her mouth dragging the sides of her face down. She saw him, stood up, smiled, tugged at her shirt.
“Good morning, Sammy,” she said. “Did you sleep well? Go get your sister up. I’m going to make pancakes.”
Sam yawned again, confused. “She’s not there,” he said.
Bev jumped up, suddenly cold. “Where is she? When did she go?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I was sleeping.”
Angie walked between Cabins Eight and Four, Seven and Three, past her own Cabin Six and its opposing Cabin Two. Past Five and One, and as she walked, all her attention was on the road. Angie knew she wasn’t allowed on the road, but it didn’t look that busy, and it was the only way to the beach.
You turn that way, she thought, looking to the right. You turn that way, and then you keep walking for a very long time, and then it’s sand and waves and seagulls.
Just then, a car that looked just like hers turned onto the dirt road that ran behind the cabins. It swung by on the other side of the cabins just as she reached the last building, the only one without a companion across from it.
It was the office, where the lady with the keys lived, Angie thought. It was a small, stuffy place, and she’d stood at the counter with her father as he’d signed the register, listening to the heavy thump of the twin industrial dryers working over a big load of towels and sheets.
This morning, the lady wasn’t there. The door swung open as she passed the office. The old man was there, the man with the whipper-snipper who cut the grass that shot up tall against the sides of the cabin walls, too close to mow. The man who would soon roll back the pool cover and expose the water’s surface to another day’s play.
The Path of Most Resistance Page 3
