“Put your phone down,” said Joe. “Please.”
Elliot ignored her.
“Ell, please. No phones, not now, not in the middle of an argument.” Or whatever this is. A struggle. Elliot didn’t appear to even hear her. “Ell!”
“What?” Elliot looked up. She slipped her phone into her back pocket. “I want you. So shoot me.”
“Blow you?”
“I said shoot me and you know it. Don’t conflate the two. You always do this. With you it can’t be, My wife really digs me, it’s got to be some ulterior motive, some deep dark bullshit from the recesses of childhood. An orange is not an orange. I did not just ask you to blow me.”
“But you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You like to put your dick in my mouth, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, come on. Come on, Joe. Play fair. You’re being an asshole.” Joe said nothing. “Okay, fine. You already know you’re right. I would like to see your lips on my cock! It would get me off. Those big tits? And so what? So holy hell, big freaking deal. I spent the day with a really hot kid who got me all worked up for my wife!”
“Just leave me alone.”
“Be careful what you fucking ask for, Joe. I mean it, I’m warning you.”
Joe looked sullenly at the baby without really seeing her. Then she looked up. “Are you threatening me? Are you telling me watch out because you have your finger on the pin? Because if that’s what you’re saying, you should fucking be ashamed.”
“Oh, don’t you tell me what I should be. How about I tell you what you should be? Huh? How would you like that? Huh?”
Joe rolled her eyes.
“Be laconic. Go for it. See if I give a goddamned fuck.”
“Maybe if I had a fuck left, I would give it to you so then you could give a goddamned fuck, but my fuck bucket, I am sorry to say, is completely empty.”
“Good.”
“Good!”
“Good!”
JOE
The next day, Elliot banged around in the kitchen, boiling things, heating the very air, thought Joe, and finally reappeared with steamed broccoli and breaded tofu. She carried a bowl to Joe on the couch without a word.
“Thank you,” said Joe. “I have to pee. Will you please take your daughter?” She heard how she slightly inflected “your daughter.” As in, This kid is yours too, so fuck right off.
Elliot accepted Scout without comment, but she wore her steely gaze: jutting chin, narrowed eyes. Elliot wouldn’t be civil again for hours, and the most Joe could hope for was that she wouldn’t be a total prick. Total prick would get on FaceTime and laugh her fool head off just to be annoying; total prick would blare recorded hockey games; total prick would slam out, and Joe would hear the boat engine.
Elliot shushed Scout and jostled her even though the baby wasn’t fussing, while Joe stood watching. Scout did not focus on Elliot any more than she did on Joe. It was easy to feel worried: did the child have autism? Her mother had told her a story about how she had fallen in love when newborn Joe met her gaze; what did Scout’s blankness signify?
It hurt to pee. A lot. Joe bent over her still-big belly and aimed a squirt bottle of saline water at the whole shooting match, but even so, it smarted fiercely. She felt like one big wound; everything ripped or torn or shredded and her uterus sore. Plus, she still looked like she was seven months pregnant, except the skin and fat were baggy, the infrastructure that had kept them taut gone. Which was not to minimize what was going on above her waist. Why had she thought breastfeeding was going to be a neutral experience? All those beatific madonnas with infants. If they were anything like Joe, their tits were orchestral; at one moment full of deep bass aches, at the next a string section of shrill violas and shrieking violins. Milk coming in was an utterly bizarre and unique experience. Once she’d assumed it would spill from her in a thin stream, but no, there were multiple milk ducts, and every milk duct had its own invisible hole. She was more spray bottle than faucet. And none of that happened without a dozen attendant physical sensations, the most predominant among them “let-down.” I feel a little let down. I feel a touch miffed, a tad depressed. Let-down meant the milk genies snapped their fingers up under her clavicles and, all in a rush, the diluted sticky blue-ish stuff sluiced to the nipple and exploded from her body. It didn’t come tidily on one side at once, oh no, evolution had not been that kind. The whole childbearing thing, as far as Joe could determine it, was a mess—she still wore thick menstrual pads, nearly a week after the birth. There was no lining to shed from her uterus, so she didn’t really know what else there was, why the gushing—maybe she was bleeding from the wall where Scout’s placenta had sheered off? Kind of weird that she could have all this—the torn clitoral hood, the blood, the milk—when she wasn’t even related, biologically, to the infant she’d carried and now nursed.
And she missed Dree suddenly, with a strong pang. Dree was so far in the hazy past that their relationship now seemed clean and easy by comparison.
She heard Scout start up.
Wasn’t it a bit weird that the bio mom—MaPa, the resentful parent in the kitchen right now—didn’t feel any small bit of any of this pain and leakage, any of the emotions? Okay, okay, maybe Scout had upset Elliot’s apple cart. Maybe.
“Hey!” Elliot knocked. “Aren’t you done in there yet? I can’t stop her. Joe! We need you!”
Joe considered a way to mark Dree’s death; she could float lanterns with candles out on the lake at night. She stood up from the toilet, long-suffering, annoyed, unwilling to do one solitary thing to help Elliot, even as, at the same time, she needed to rescue Scout, give Scout the solace of sucking. How did offering the baby a finger not interfere with breastfeeding while a soother did? Keeping an infant happy was logical, no matter how the parents got there. She threw open the door to her red-faced wife and her red-faced baby not two feet away. Tears sluiced down Elliot’s cheeks.
“Is there a problem?” Joe said. “Is there a reason you’re crying, Elliot?” She walked right past them.
“Don’t be such a jerk, Joe,” said Elliot, raising her voice above the baby. “So I admit it, I don’t know what to do. Okay! It’s hard work looking after a baby. Okay? Uncle. I don’t know how to handle her. I don’t want to handle her. I just want you to take her.”
Joe leaned back against the kitchen counter and crossed her arms over her chest.
“How can you stand her crying?” Elliot said.
Joe lifted her eyebrows. “My ex just died, if you don’t mind. Might I have a minute?”
“What do you want me to do?” Elliot asked. “Really, Joe, what? I’ve said I’m sorry, I’ve promised I’ll never, ever, think of you sexually again!”
“Ha, ha,” said Joe and gave her a withering look. She took Scout, but Elliot trailed them back to the spare room. “Big wide mouth,” Joe said chirpily, and the baby opened wide, the adorable soprano mouth, and when Joe pulled her in, she latched on so feverishly Joe winced. Elliot sat on her knees beside them, her moist face pinched with regret.
Joe said, “I know I’m being pissy. We don’t know what we’re doing here. We’re out of our depth.”
Elliot took Joe’s chin and lifted it so she would meet her eyes. The baby sent up wet, suckling noises. It was still hot, but a breeze had picked up and was wafting through the windows. Loons called out on the lake.
Elliot regarded Joe, expression inscrutable.
“Maybe we should have done this baby thing in the city with supports,” said Ell.
“I’m just worried you want to be unencumbered. You do, don’t you?” Joe began to cry herself. Again! She knuckled away tears. “You love Scout, but you don’t love me anymore, do you?”
“I see you being vulnerable and afraid, and when I should be helping, I just want to vamoose. I know it’s fucked up.”
“It is kinda fucked up, Ell.”
“But I can’t help you beyond making food and keeping the floor vacuumed. I feel so clumsy. I just choose anything over confron
ting this.” Her chest was caved in and she slid a hand through her hair.
“Having those things taken care of means a lot,” said Joe.
“Being around that girl today made me see it. She was so vital—so skinny and agile and, I don’t know, such a squealy kid. She just made me want to grow up.”
“Dear god, please don’t on our account,” said Joe sarcastically, moving Scout to the other breast. She thought, Dree is dead. And, What would happen if I just got in the boat with Scout and left?
“You are the prickliest goddamned woman I know, Joe.” Elliot heaved a dramatic sigh.
The laundry moved into spin cycle and the cabin shook. Joe put the now-nodding-off baby on the bed. “Okay, let me try again. I would love to come upstairs, Ell. Can we try?” Then she felt a prickle of real alarm. “But if we’re co-sleeping, no alcohol, no drugs? You get that, right?”
“I am not about to endanger our daughter, for pity’s sake.” Elliot looked at her. “Besides, have you seen me drinking lately?”
Our daughter. Nobody could take that away. “I fully realize that was a skanky thing to say, but I had to say it, you know I did, because—Scout. Absolute and total sobriety so you won’t roll onto her.”
“Whatever,” said Elliot. She carried in a rocking chair they’d stored on the porch and plumped it with a soft pillow, took Joe over to it, settled her down like a bird brooding eggs. “I’ll just clean. Maybe that’ll help.”
Joe was uncomfortable in the chair, but she didn’t want to tell Elliot. She wiggled. She rocked and the chair lightly creaked on its runners. Creak, creak, creak. If she used it regularly, that screech would go down in memory as the sound of breastfeeding. She was twisty and anxious. Why did they have to sleep infants on their backs? No blankets allowed. But swaddling, the encasing of an infant in a blanket, was encouraged, as if babies didn’t flail, as if swaddles didn’t pull loose and become, essentially, blankets.
Joe could already tell she was going to be chafing at the rules. Play dates. Was there a worse combination of words?
She thought again of Dree, poor wrapped-around-a-tree Dree. Dead, dead Dree. Joe wished she could go to the funeral to honour Dree’s memory, to walk down memory lane, because there had been many good times between them as well as all the bad, and she could do with a little revisionism on how shitty that relationship was. It would be kind of wonderful to be with Dree’s friends, some of whom had probably been their mutual friends back in Nanaimo, going to whatever ceremony a person like Dree might have planned, a wake, say, or even, who knew, a church ceremony, because she was always going on about how they didn’t have enough spirituality in their relationship, enough religion, so maybe Dree got God, in the end, and would have a funeral in a church, the United Church maybe, or the Anglican. Truth was, Joe didn’t know that much about Dree after they broke up. For a long time, she didn’t want to know, and by the time news of Dree wouldn’t have bothered her, she’d well and truly moved on. She knew Dree had worn feminism like she had the shirts she’d stolen from department stores—something to just pull on when it was handy. Dree had started a battered women’s shelter, which was ripe, given that all Dree could say in her defence against her abuses when Joe left was, I never hit you.
Joe looked at her sleeping daughter, at the hand-hewn cradle, at the mountain of baby clothes on the change table, and she wished she could fly west. But she couldn’t manage here alone, could she, let alone being self-sufficient on a plane, a ferry, and a rental car.
At least she and Elliot and Scout had lives.
Elliot had poisonous exes too, women pretzeled by childhood. There was Dahlia, and Denise, and Daria, the “Ds;” variously drunks, recovered drunks, and spendthrifts who put the “gas” in “gaslighting.” There were the “Ps;” Patricia, Patrice, and Penny who all managed to be secret about polyamorous linkups, including with each other. There was Amy, who, according to Elliot, was a freakball who ran down the street after Elliot’s car screaming You narcissist! You narcissist! Everybody had exes, and the vast majority had unfortunately not moved to Texas.
Joe then had one of those realizations her mother must’ve had: I have a baby. I am responsible. This will never end. Joe’s mother had decided, once, to quieten Joe by taking a drive. She stuffed Joe into a car seat with everything a mom needed to cart along in order to leave the house—soothers, diapers, Penaten cream, bottles, clean clothing, changing mat, warmer clothing, wipes—and drove through the rain-lashed late-night streets, hoping Joe would calm, car tires sounding on the wet pavement. Ten minutes later, she registered the quiet from the back seat and noticed that she, too, was more relaxed. She glanced in the rear view mirror to see whether baby Joe was asleep yet, but there was no baby. She’d forgotten Joe, in her car seat, on the kitchen table at home.
Why did people do this to themselves? It couldn’t be explained by biology—or was it that simple, a sop against death, a chance to pass along genes?
“Come up!” shouted Elliot.
The extra day had made a difference in Joe’s stitches. Upstairs, Elliot showed off the new nest—the far side of their bed, complete with barriers in case Scout rolled, a jerry-rigged change table, and all the supplies a newborn’s mother could possibly need, including a portable kettle for quick cups of lactation tea.
“Ah,” Joe said, “thank you, Ell.”
Elliot said, clipped, “Welcome. But I might sleep downstairs if it’s a racket.”
“What about the mattress?”
“Don’t leak tonight,” said Elliot. “Not until I have a chance to get plastic.”
Joe sat gingerly on the edge of the bed while Ell recounted all the things she had arrayed in the bathroom—all Joe’s supplies, the baby’s bathtub, the baby’s “robe.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been jerky.”
“You’ve been really jerky,” said Ell.
“You too, fuckface,” said Joe, grinning.
“You’re the fuckface.” Elliot smiled. She tried, clumsily, to pull Joe into her arms. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“I know,” said Joe, “me too.” While Elliot had her clenched, she looked around their bedroom like she’d never before seen it, had not fucked here, been ill here, snored and farted and spooned here. She felt marooned. Maybe being back in the city would be better, she thought. Then she thought of Dree again and felt that same catch in her throat.
Poor Dree. Poor dead Dree.
AJAX
They’d barely fallen asleep when Logan woke Ajax. “More adventures. Wake up.”
“The rain stopped,” said Ajax from the sheets.
Logan was dressed in shorts, a polo shirt. “Get out of bed, lazy head.”
Ajax pulled the sheets over her head. “Fuck, Logan, go ’way. Lemme sleep.” Logan uncovered her. Toby stood beside the bed panting, his red tongue lolling. He was almost sure to shake his head in a second and cover her with slobber. She closed her eyes.
“I have inducements,” said Logan. They waggled the Sunday New York Times.
“Ohhhh, gimme,” said Ajax, reaching. She got up on an elbow, frowned. “Did you just boat into Bracebridge?”
Logan laughed. “I have chocolate croissants, smoothies, coffee, strawberries, yogurt.”
“Coffee,” said Ajax nodding.
“Coffee for you in a thermos,” said Logan. They threw Ajax’s shorts at her. “Thick and strong. Vite, vite. Time, she is a wasting.”
Ajax rolled out of bed; held her arms, shivering. “It’s cold.”
“It’s beautiful, quit yer whining. Bring a coat.”
Wrapped in a heavy sweater, the screak and slap of screen door behind her, Ajax followed her lover down to the dock: red canoe. Toby stayed on shore, whimpering piteously.
Logan paddled them over glassine waters in dawn’s light, quiet except for the liquid cuts of the paddle, drops falling, Ajax lifting her steaming coffee. The green-black shore was still shrouded in night, a cowl not yet pulled away for morning’s breath, but the mist burn
ed off the lake in the distance, small comforting sparklers evident on the water’s skin as the sun caught. Ajax allowed herself the luxury of admiring Logan’s forearms, their thighs, their face. Despite the sweater and the heavy borrowed parka, Ajax couldn’t warm up; she shook and couldn’t stop. Slowly they circled the island into the low-hanging sunshine, past stands of birch, pine, and hemlock now bright and dewy. Lily pads opened pink flowers. Geese flew honking overhead; two swans gave pissed-off hoots and swam away from the canoe.
“I canoe,” said Ajax. “Can oe?”
Logan pulled the paddle. “Glad I yanked you out of bed?”
“Glad I’m finished turning fifty. Grateful for last week. The past months. Glad you’re in my life.”
Logan moored and climbed out, held the boat steady for Ajax, who smiled and said, teeth chattering, “Did someone say something about the Times?”
Toby was beside himself just on shore, wiggling his huge bum. Over breakfast, Ajax put her feet up on Logan’s chair, while Logan put theirs on the dog.
“Let’s go zip-lining,” Logan said, looking up. “Want to?”
“Now you want to hang me on a clothesline?”
Two hours later, they were harnessed and helmeted on a rank beginners’ course.
Logan said they loved being in the treetops where they could imagine themself an airborne creature. They loved the wind in their face, relaxing back off the line, even the self-rescues when they came up short at a platform and had to pull themself along, hand over hand. They loved the woody smell.
The course was too strenuous for Ajax even with a prophylactic nitro patch. Logan was solicitous, climbing patiently with her, waiting out her many breaks, sympathizing with her obvious bouts of pain, but was merciless regarding Ajax’s fear of heights. On the suspension bridge, Ajax clung to the railing, and in the end, morbidly frightened, dropped to the boards, making the bridge jitter, and crawled back to the start, terrified.
“You good?” Logan asked Ajax.
“I am not good,” said Ajax weakly, letting Logan pull her to her feet. “Also, I hate you.”
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