Just Like Family

by Kate Hilton

  “I have everything I need,” he said, meaningfully. “But Avery, I mean it. I want us to think about this seriously.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  I grabbed my jean jacket from the hook by the door and sprinted out of the apartment and down the stairs. Once I was on the street, I turned in the opposite direction from the drugstore and headed for Central Park.

  I sat under a tree and took off my shoes; it was too warm for the jacket, but it made a passable cushion. How I loved this park, how I admired the stubborn vision required to rip so much land from the rapacious jaws of a growing metropolis. I plucked a blade of grass from the lawn and rubbed it between my thumb and finger, releasing the pale scent. I believed that the grass here, even freshly mown, wasn’t as fragrant as the grass back home, but its very existence seemed to me a towering achievement. This park made me feel as though anything was possible.

  The park was full of families that day. It was the second week of September, but it still felt like summer. Everywhere, parents were sitting, looking exhausted, drinking coffee that was probably cold by now, and pretending to watch their children play. Pretending that they wouldn’t rather be at home, in a nicer, smaller apartment—the one they had before the baby and the nanny and all the gear that ate up their vacation money—reading the paper after a good night’s sleep.

  I pulled out my cellphone—a birthday gift from Hugh—and called Matt.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing right now?”

  “Studying,” he said. “Sad, I know. Do you have a better offer for me?”

  “It’s a gorgeous day,” I said. “Want to hang out for a bit?”

  “On a Sunday?” he said. “That’s . . . sure. Where are you?”

  I told him, and thirty minutes later, he was handing me a latte and flopping down on the grass.

  “You were fast,” I said.

  “I was motivated,” he said. “And the subway cooperated.”

  My phone rang. It was Hugh. “What happened to you?” he said. “I thought you were going to the drugstore. I was getting worried.”

  “I ran into a friend,” I said. “We’re grabbing a coffee. Are you going into the office?”

  “I will if you’re not planning to be here,” he said. He was put out, and there would be a discussion about my reliability later, not our first.

  “It’s one of my writer friends,” I said. “She needs to talk through her outline.”

  “Which friend?” asked Hugh.

  “Maddy. One of the writers from the café where I work,” I said. “You haven’t met her before.”

  This is how it begins, I thought. It begins with a lie. I’d told lies of omission, when he asked me about my progress on Wednesday afternoons, but those were easy, as easy as faking an orgasm. This lie sat in my stomach like a stone. I’ll make an honest woman of you. How wrong Hugh was about me.

  I could tell that he was softening. Hugh often talked about how important it was for writers to have a network. “I’ll make dinner,” I said.

  Hugh snorted, and I knew I was forgiven.

  “I’ll pick it up, then,” I said. “Do you want pasta? Rosalia’s?”

  I could almost hear him smile. “That would be lovely,” he said. “I’ll see you at dinner, beautiful girl. I love you.”

  “Bye,” I said.

  I disconnected. Matt was watching me closely. He hadn’t pretended not to hear my conversation, but he didn’t comment on it. He said, “So what are we doing?”

  I said, “We’re suspending reality for a few hours. Can you do that?”

  “For you? Definitely.”

  “Let’s move,” I said. “I’m in a restless mood today.”

  We walked north. There was an area that had been designed to look like a wilderness, and it reminded me of the woods around Berry Point. I climbed onto a rock ledge near the tiny waterfall and sat.

  “This is my favourite place in the whole city,” I said.

  “It’s Northern Ontario without the mosquitoes,” said Matt.

  “I usually come by myself,” I said, “when I’m feeling homesick.”

  “Does it help?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes it makes it worse.”

  We sat together and listened to the water and the sound of the wind in the leaves. “I wish I could make it better,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Whatever it is that’s making you so sad,” he said. “Because I don’t think it’s homesickness.”

  I reached for him, pulled him toward me. I closed my eyes, I felt his breath on my face, and then I felt his hands on my shoulders, holding me away from him.

  He said, “I can’t, Avery. I want to. You know I do. But I can’t. You need to figure out what you want.”

  “That could be a lifelong project,” I told him.

  “Then start by figuring out which one of us you want,” he said. “And when you do, I’ll be here.”

  {CHAPTER 11}

  Saturday, July 15, 2017

  I wake up early, after a bad night’s sleep. I’m used to sleeping alone these days; it isn’t that. Guilt, though, makes a poor bedfellow. I’m rattled by Matt’s proposal, but even more so by his hurt. I realize that I rely on him to be the one who keeps his shit together.

  I slip into my bathing suit and wrap myself in a robe. The house is quiet when I creep downstairs. I make a pot of coffee in the portable carafe, choose the largest mug I can find, and head down to the water. I come around the side of the Gillespie cottage and find Kerry, Tara’s mother, in her garden. She gives me a hug.

  “Coffee’s hot,” I say.

  “That gets you a spot on the dock,” she says. “I’ll go in and get a mug, and a towel to wipe the chairs off. Be right there.”

  I walk out onto the old boards. They’ve replaced a few of them this year, but others are showing their age. The mist rises off the water as Kerry pulls two chairs into the best spot and dries them off. I pour the coffee.

  “How’s Matt?” she says. “Martine said he was driving up with you last night.”

  “He’s great,” I say. “Still in bed. Jet lag.”

  “I don’t know how you modern couples do it,” says Kerry. “Such a hectic life you lead.”

  “It can get wild, for sure,” I say. Personally, I can’t imagine how Kerry and Greta and my mother did it, trapped up here all summer long, waiting for civilization to arrive in the form of their husbands every Friday night, herding squabbling children all day like sheepdogs in polo shirts. “Is Tara coming up today?”

  “I hope so,” says Kerry. “That’s the plan. Anna promised to help me in my garden. She’ll call when they’re on the road.” We don’t mention Claire, out of deference to our own fourteen-year-old selves. We respect her right to be a complete pain in the ass, but we don’t have to look forward to her company.

  We sit without speaking for a while. Kerry is better at this than I am. She has taken more than one “vacation” to a monastery to meditate in silence.

  “Avery, I have to tell you something you won’t like,” says Kerry.

  “It’s a popular week for that,” I say. “Hit me.”

  “Hugh is driving up tomorrow with Bill,” says Kerry. “It’s his week.”

  “Of course it is,” I say. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I’m sorry, Avery,” says Kerry. “You’re never here, so it didn’t occur to me to check with you.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, smarting a bit at the word “never.” “I’m sure we’ll be able to avoid each other.”

  “It’s hard, isn’t it, to feel kindness toward the people we’ve hurt?” says Kerry.

  “Kerry,” says Mom, coming out onto the dock in her bathrobe, “we want to encourage Avery to visit, not send her screaming back to the city. Don’t poke at her.”

  Kerry laughs. “I’m practising. Tara’s due at lunchtime. All three of you girls need some mothering. Which reminds me, have you seen Jenny yet?”
r />   Tara, I think. Still telling her mother everything. “Not yet,” I say. “Tonight, maybe. It’s been a long time. It will be nice to see her.”

  For the record, it won’t be nice to see Jenny. Thinking about seeing Jenny makes me want to sedate myself. Or throw myself down on the floor and howl.

  “How about a swim across the bay?” says my mother.

  That’ll do, I think. “Perfect,” I say.

  I peel off my robe and take a few steps that pick up speed until I’m flying off the end of the dock, just like when we were kids, a spectacular entry that would have won our regular diving competition—shallow, minimal splash, head locked between the arms, toes pointed. When I surface, Mom is in the lake, too, coming toward me with brisk, clean strokes.

  “Gorgeous dive, honey,” she says. “You still have it.”

  “In diving, at least,” I say.

  We set out at a gentle pace, but still one that prevents much talking, past the raft and then out into the middle of the bay. We use the Murphys’ yellow boathouse as our beacon, because we know them well enough to know that they won’t mind if we catch our breath at their dock for a few minutes before heading back. When we were kids, it was a rite of passage to be old enough and deemed to have sufficient endurance to swim to the opposite shore and back. Each of us made the first crossing with an adult, and everyone cheered us on from the dock; I swam the first time with my dad. As we got older, we’d make the swim in packs, and gradually the adults stopped worrying about us. They had bigger worries by then.

  I think about Hugh and Jenny as I swim. I can’t decide which one of them I would rather see. It’s like that game we used to play on car trips up here, trips that seemed to last forever. I can still feel the anticipation as we turned off the highway at Mr. McKay’s corner store, the car rattling and the suitcases shifting as we moved from pavement to gravel, and then to dirt and pine needles. Ethan and I would get our parents to stop the car and let us out at the last turn, and we’d run, screaming with pleasure at our arrival, into the field where we parked the cars. I still remember the questions from the game: Would you rather boil to death or freeze to death? Would you rather be blind or deaf ? Would you rather be able to see into the future or change the past?

  I’d change the past. God, how many things I’d change. Things I didn’t control, and things I did. I realize, as I pump my arms in a steady crawl, that I hope Hugh is happy, and it both pleases and surprises me. When I was young, and desperate to leave New York, and him, I became cruel. I had to; my very survival seemed to depend on it. I catalogued Hugh’s shortcomings, itemized them, and reviewed them regularly. It allowed me to dislike him enough to be utterly indifferent to his happiness.

  Now I hope that he got over me quickly, after that initial shock; that he found love again; that he forgot all about me. I no longer want to be the sort of woman who leaves an indelible mark on her past lovers, to be the standard against which all others will be measured, as I did when I was young. I no longer want to be the one that got away, the one to whom thoughts drift in the dark, beside other, less enchanting women. Failed love is a ghost that haunts everyone associated with the disaster. What I want now is an exorcism.

  Halfway across the lake, we switch from front crawl to breaststroke. I could probably do the whole swim without shifting to a more leisurely pace, but I don’t want to push Mom too hard. It is, in fact, exactly what used to happen when we were kids; but then, the parents pretended that they needed to slow down so that the younger swimmers wouldn’t overexert themselves.

  “So,” I say, “I hear you’re dating an archaeologist.”

  “News travels,” says Mom.

  “It does when you tell Kerry,” I say.

  “Did she get under your skin?” asks my mother, puffing a little.

  “She’s become very . . . organic,” I say.

  “Politics agrees with you,” says my mother. “Kerry is certainly into holistic living, as she calls it. But she’d still give you the shirt off her back.”

  “Hemp shirt,” I say.

  My mother laughs, takes in water, and coughs.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, wheezing and floating onto her back.

  We are getting close to the Murphys’ dock now, and we swim the last few strokes in silence. I grab onto the edge, kick my feet hard, and lift myself out of the water to the waist, heaving my torso onto the dock, leaving my legs still dangling in the water. This is the unspoken rule of etiquette on the lake. You can hold on to another person’s dock, but you can’t climb up their ladder and sit unless they are there. “Holding on” is an expansive term, though, and includes flopping on the surface of the dock like a hooked fish, as long as some part of your body is still in the water. My mother climbs up the ladder and sits, breathing heavily for a minute or so. “I’m an old woman,” she says. “Mr. Murphy can deal with it.”

  I climb up as well. “I’m providing medical attention,” I say.

  “A solid defence,” says my mother.

  “Who is this archaeologist?” I ask.

  “His name is Bernard, and he’s retired professor. He’s volunteering on a dig in Mexico at the moment. He’s supervising students and labelling pottery shards. I talked to him last night. It was forty degrees yesterday, apparently.”

  “That sounds horrible,” I say.

  “I agree,” says Mom. “But he’s having a ball. And he’s not really a cottage person, so he’s better off there.”

  “Not a cottage person” is a loaded phrase in these parts. We mean many things by this: an unwillingness to swim in cold water; an impatience with disagreements about predicted weather systems that could be resolved immediately by consulting a computer; a dislike of lumpy mattresses and ancient pillows and musty furniture; an inability to sit on the dock for hours in the fog, pointing out patches of blue in the sky; a preference for personal space over community living; and a general distaste for rusticity. Come to think of it, Hugh was never a cottage person either, and I’ve always been puzzled as to why he insists on coming up here every summer.

  “Is that why you’re talking about selling?” I ask.

  “Partly,” she says. “But only partly.”

  “You can’t sell,” I say.

  “Certainly I can,” says my mother. “I own it. I can come up any time I want and stay with Kerry. Ethan rarely comes, and when he does, he stays with Tara and the kids at Kerry’s. I’m rattling around in this old place. The only time you express any interest in the cottage is when I talk about selling it. I think you are being very selfish.”

  “Selfish?” I say. “I’m not the one being selfish. You act as though it only belongs to you! It belonged to all of us: you and Dad and Ethan and me. We were a family here.”

  “Yes, we were,” says my mother. “But your dad is gone, and you’ve grown up, and all of our lives have changed. I accept that, which is why I can let the cottage go. But maybe you aren’t ready to yet.”

  “I’m not,” I say, wiping the lake water from my face.

  “Why don’t we leave this topic for now?” says Mom. “I want to think some more about it. Are you ready to swim back?”

  “If you are,” I say.

  Mom climbs carefully down the ladder, rung by rung. My throat tightens at this evidence of aging. I launch past her with a showy dive and stay under for an extra few strokes. When I surface, Mom is treading water, her eyes on me.

  “Do you want me to invite Jenny to the party?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” I say, “but I promised Tara I’d see her while I was up, and it’ll be less awkward in a group.”

  “Whatever you like, sweetie,” says Mom. “It’s a treat to see Matt, by the way. It’s been ages since he’s been to the cottage.”

  “He loves it here,” I say. “He’s missed it.”

  “I gather he’s travelling a lot.”

  “Most weeks, yes.”r />
  “How is that working for you?”

  “Fine,” I say. “We’re used to it. We both love our work.”

  “That’s nice,” says Mom.

  “We’re very independent. We don’t demand much from each other.”

  “I’ve always thought,” says my mother, “that if you expect very little from a relationship, you tend to get exactly what you expect.”

  “Jesus, Mom,” I say, “what’s with all the life advice today? Do I look like I need it?”

  “Actually, darling, yes,” says my mother. “You do look like you need it.”

  We finish the swim in silence. Back at our place, Kerry is still in her chair.

  “Good swim?” she asks.

  “Excellent,” I say. “I’m heading up.”

  “I’ll be up in a minute,” says Mom.

  I jog up the stairs and pull open the screen door to the verandah. Matt is at the table with a newspaper, wearing his running clothes.

  “Did you see us in the water?” I ask.

  Matt looks at me. He raises his eyebrows in a false expression of puzzlement. “I slept badly, thanks.”

  “Matt,” I say.

  “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t pretend that you didn’t slink out of here this morning to avoid me. Don’t pretend that what happened yesterday wasn’t a big fucking deal.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “I thought you were asleep! I didn’t want to wake you up!”

  “For future reference, Avery,” says Matt, “when a man asks the woman he has been living with for fourteen years to marry him, and she says that she needs to think about it, you don’t need to worry about waking him up in the morning, because he didn’t fucking sleep.”

  “Lower your voice, Matt,” I say. “Mr. Murphy can hear you across the lake.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t give a shit,” says Matt.

  “My goodness,” says my mother, coming onto the verandah, “that’s quite the colourful language, Matt.”

  “My apologies, Martine,” says Matt. “Avery and I are having a disagreement.”

  “Well, that’s none of my business,” says my mother. “Have you had breakfast yet?”