by Jill Malone
“I’m sorry to be so late,” Claire said behind them.
Liv jumped, dropped the bottles, Simon giggling.
“Sorry,” Claire said again. “Usually Simon wakes me at dawn. I brought your monkey hat.” This last to Simon as she pressed the hat over his untidy hair.
Claire wore short black trunks and a red camisole. Her brown eyes looked larger in the morning like a marmoset’s. They latched Simon’s car seat into the truck. When Claire squeezed between them, her thigh pressed against Liv’s. In a moment, the engine roared, sputtered, and died. Liv pumped the gas pedal, turned the engine over.
“Your stereo,” Claire said, tucking some of the wires back into the cracked console, “is supposed to go here.”
“We’ll just have to sing instead,” Liv said as the truck roared, vibrating so hard that the windows rattled as she reversed down the gravel lane. “Know any Ramones?”
“ ‘I Wanna be Sedated’would certainly be fitting. Or we could just shout at one another.”
“Like a proper family outing. Now you’re talking. Say you want coffee,” Liv said, her mouth nearly against Claire’s ear as the truck shifted them.
“Yes,” Claire said over the tumult. “Oh god, yes.”
They slid the green canoe into the water. Liv held the rope and dragged the boat back toward shore. Hopping from foot to foot, Simon looked apprehensive, swallowed by his orange vest and Capri-length swim trunks. His mouth O-shaped.
“You’re in first,” Liv told Claire. “I’ll hand Simon to you.”
Claire nodded. An adventure at last, she thought, and nothing to do with field guides. Between Liv’s thick black belt—barely holding her plaid shorts at her waist—and her sports bra, Claire could see Liv’s belly tattoos, and a little thrill she thought she’d forgotten rushed through her.
To steady herself, she took Liv’s hand, and stepped into the boat. Simon exclaimed behind them, and rushed forward as though he might be left on shore. Liv dropped the rope and caught the boy as the canoe shot forward with the momentum of Claire’s boarding. Claire fell forward into the canoe, had to right herself and determine how to paddle back to shore.
Simon was crying, his eager little body restrained against Liv’s hip. “I’m OK,” his mother called to him. Paddling ineffectually, frustrated at her gracelessness, she suddenly realized that this was their first adventure since Denise’s death, and found herself near tears. She considered climbing out and walking the canoe back to them.
“Just lean into your strokes,” Liv encouraged.
Watching the girl on shore, and the small grasping boy, Claire felt a sudden, wild laugh climb through her body, and sang, Hey, ho, let’s go, as she leaned forward, dug the paddle downward, and moved the canoe infinitesimally closer to shore.
“Yes,” Liv said. “Look at Mommy, Simon. She’s coming. Look at Mommy.”
He stopped crying and looked: his mother’s face tight with strain; her arms muscled and fluid; the paddle deep in the water and suddenly airborne. In a moment, the canoe rushed toward them and he retreated as though from a monster.
Liv caught the canoe and grabbed the rope. Reluctantly Simon came forward and allowed Liv to hand him into the canoe. He gripped the rungs of his seat while Liv pushed off the bank. The Little Spokane River, narrow and sleepy, meandered through reeds and heron nests; the air dense with insects. Simon listened to the strokes of the paddles, watched his mother’s shoulder muscles flex as though they might launch wings.
Liv leaned forward to give him a drink of water. When he refused to relax his grip on his seat rungs, she braced his back and held the bottle to his mouth.
“Water?” she called to Claire.
And they glided: dragonflies sailing past them and skirting the water’s surface; occasionally the startling screech of a heron, its wings thrown wide as if in greeting; and the great looming trees. Simon held a stick over the canoe, adjusted its wake at will.
A field guide to floating, Claire thought. Remember to launch with spectacle. Anyone can push off a dock. Mosquitoes from the Pleistocene period—roughly the size of bats—will aviate along the river with your canoe. They will influence your velocity. Then Claire stopped rowing, took another swig from the bottle, enjoyed the soothing, umbilical tug through the water.
He fell asleep in Claire’s arms. Hiking back on the trail to get to the truck, she and Liv took turns shouldering the heft of him. On Liv’s upper arm, a thick scar in the shape of a star. Contemplating Liv’s large tribal tattoos, earth brown on her belly and shoulders, Claire wanted to ask the origins, but fought herself and kept walking. For the first time, she felt intimidated by this woman: the skill and silence and markings of her.
“Thank you,” she said, finally. Liv smiled at her, offered to take the boy.
Three
Bailey investigates
The band was ghastly. All three men dour and topless: the singer with his guitar, shuffling to the high hat as though he were a tightly wound child’s toy; the bassist condescending; the drummer a sprawling, hectic pinwheel. In the narrow, frenetic bar, Bailey leaned against the wall, her legs drawn the length of the booth, the unlit cigarette in her mouth masking her lips’ natural pout.
“They’re so earnest,” she said; her eyes were brown beneath the hooded boredom. Her loose blond hair snarled around her shoulders.
Liv shrugged, took another sip of beer, watched the door. Her anxiety to be elsewhere clutched at her like one of the sorry drunks huddled at the bar. She needed to alter her routine. As undergraduates, Liv and Bailey had been friends. In the past six years, they’d both managed a brief escape, but had returned, for varied, unnamed reasons to the town they despised. Over the past few weeks, she had come to regret that decision. She’d forgotten how annoying Bailey could be.
“Why are we here again?” Bailey asked. Her shirt had ruffles at the sleeves, like an aristocrat, or a buccaneer.
“Don’t stay for me.”
“Ha. You’re killing me.” Bailey sipped her shot of whiskey and eyed Liv. “So this woman does something with mushrooms? She, like, studies them or something, am I getting that right?”
“Yeah, she studies them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Liv wished she could say it was important work, but she wasn’t sure.
“Does she sell any?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Like what?” Bailey asked.
“You know. It’s not like that. She’s a scientist. A researcher.”
“Oh, a researcher. Wow.”
“Let it go. She’s nice. She’s had a rough time.”
Liv thought about leaving—making an excuse, any excuse—and trying another bar. She couldn’t decide which she liked less, the band or Bailey. Across the table, Bailey smirked. “Oh, you like her. I didn’t get that at first.”
Liv flicked her lighter closed. This was bullshit; the bars had become just another obligation. This wasn’t even fun anymore. The spazz of a drummer hit everything within reach.
“So you want to fuck the mushroom researcher,” Bailey said. “Wow. Your standards really have fallen. She’s into fungus, dude. Fungus. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You’re boring, Bailey,” Liv said and finished her beer. She stood up and crossed to the door. The girl on her way in stopped and looked at Liv. Tilting the pack toward the girl, Liv asked, “Cigarette?” Her voice sounded tired, even to herself, but the girl turned and followed Liv outside anyway.
In the truck, the girl reattached her bra. Liv lit another cigarette, handed it to the girl, and tried not to be impatient. These girls made her tired. Twenty-eight wasn’t impossibly old, but still, these girls exhausted her. Why did it feel like she wasn’t moving forward anymore? Was it Spokane—back in this town, in the same holding pattern? Or was this what it felt like to be a pioneer: wearying instruction and encouragement? Virgins: the last frontier.
“Can I have your number?” the girl asked.
“Sure,” Liv said, and wrote seven digits on the girl’s arm. “Give me a call.”
Liv dropped the girl back at the bar and cruised out of town. Did they need her, the girls, or did she need them? She felt a little sick now in the aftermath; she felt like a cheater. Even her wrecked console, the pathetic hole where her stereo used to be, made her think of Claire.
On Government Way, the road wound like a riddle, and Liv remembered the way Claire held Simon on her hip in the morning as she picked plates up from the table and set them in the sink. Her loneliness in that house with that silent child, her reticence, the way she sang to Simon as she bathed him. At night, before bed, Claire read to him for an hour. “One more book,” she’d say, though she kept going when he brought another. And Liv stood in the hallway, rapt and waiting.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been on a date, had a conversation about hometowns, favorite books. This was how it was: random connections. These girls didn’t seem to want more. Liv had stopped looking deeper than that. They were habit now, the girls—a necessary habit, like cigarettes—something to occupy her mouth and hands. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed it.
Liv crossed the little bridge and took the next right on the gravel road, tucked into an inconsequential opening between Douglas-fir trees. Gravel crunched beneath the tires as her truck crept forward. A light in the stone house blinked out.
How did Claire occupy her time? Liv would have been surprised to learn that Claire spent most of her time grieving. That Claire stood now, in the dark house, thinking of Simon.
That morning, in the office, beside his winding train cars, Simon had stretched as though he were a gliding engine as well. Feet bare, hair mussed, he still wore pajamas. Claire had realized that she’d missed him. Unaware, until he lolled upon the floor with his trains, how much his presence soothed and sated her. Jealous? Was she jealous of his time with Liv? Or was it simple loneliness?
Field guide to a silent child: how to parent by Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. Ensure you have a track in every room, and enough engines and freight cars to populate the tracks. Listen for the knock of magnets, and the rattle of the wheels on the tracks as though to your son’s own heartbeat. His little wooden consciousness rolling before him like a silent play you will only ever interpret.
Her screen saver had flashed a pomegranate across the monitor, and disrupted her meditation. She might have told, of course. She might have told her aunt’s editor the truth. Her aunt was simply a researcher: though an intuitive hunter of mushrooms—one thought of ballet as one watched her scour the forest litter—her writing was wretched and stilted and tiresome. Denise Bernard’s reputation was founded on her field guides, of which Claire had written every vibrant word. The two women had lived together in this same house for fourteen years, since Claire had come to Spokane at twenty, seeking refuge.
It didn’t have to be a scandal; after all, her aunt had done all the research, and supervised the writing of each book. Perhaps her editor could arrange for Claire to work with another researcher, to continue producing field guides. They could keep it quiet. Maybe no one would ever spot the similarities—move away from mushrooms, and write wild flower guides.
Simon’s trains had derailed in a horrible crash. He’d looked up at his mother and grinned. She’d as likely slit Simon’s throat as expose her aunt, to her editor of all people, a man whose opinion Denise had revered.
“Is James hurt?” she asked.
The boy nodded.
“Does he need a kiss?”
Simon carried the train to her for comfort, flat in his palms as though it were an injured bird, and claimed a kiss for himself as well. Field guide to the medicinal property of kisses. He returned to the track to stage another tragedy.
In the dark office now, the child asleep, the house quiet, Claire dreaded her impending research trip, another first without her aunt. At some point, she’d quit counting firsts, wouldn’t she? First canoe ride on the Little Spokane, first stirring of desire in years, first time she’d stood at the opened window to watch Liv, seated on the hood of her truck, light a cigarette. The night around them swollen with the sound of crickets.
Four
The howling fence
Liv stained the deck. For cigarette breaks, she made herself walk down to the river as though this were any day: their absence not a howling inside her. We’ll be back midweek, Claire had said. Simon had a little mummy sleeping bag that he’d carried out to show her, the most blinding shade of orange she’d ever seen. At the riverbank now, she smoked her second cigarette, imagined the boy sailing his boat in the little eddy just there, a step from her.
On the deck, she worked barefoot and topless, the scent of the stain igniting the dense summer air. Brush strokes were too subtle; she wanted some heavy, painful work. She wanted to demolish a wall, or pour foundation, or dig a trench.
At three, she left and hit several bars before she finally found one.
The howling woke her in the night. For a moment, she panicked and had to grab her own throat to keep from shouting out. Beside her, the girl sweated. Liv threw her pants on, and sneaked out. Before she made it to the truck, she was crying.
In the morning, she drove to Windsor Plywood and bought load after load of wood. She’d build the fence while they were away: digging holes, and dragging posts, and pouring cement. In the garage, she unloaded the wood, went back for more, and did the same.
She dug and imagined Claire pregnant: her face fuller; her breasts like clutching beasts; leaned backward, her hand on her hip; the tremendous pouch of her belly rocked by his mutant kicking. She dug and imagined Simon nursing: his fingers kneading at Claire’s skin; his little shark-mouth seeking; his eyes on her face. She dug and begged the imagining to stop. She saw herself cut the cord. Felt the weight of the newborn in her arms. Heard his wailing, touched his glossy, swollen eyes. Please, she said. Please. She dragged rocks the size of a toddler from the earth, and kept digging.
That night, at the bright fire, she thought herself obscene. She’d been afraid to try the bars: afraid of the howling, afraid she wasn’t in a holding pattern so much as a tailspin. What has happened to me? She drank another beer. Refused to consider the question. Fell asleep on the recliner on the deck, and woke in the dark, trembling with cold.
Two days later, Liv’s hands were bleeding. She’d finished the run along the driveway, and now had only the front of the property left to fence. At the riverbank, she lay on the grass, held her hands in the water, and squinted as cigarette smoke burned her eyes. Suddenly he was on her back, heavy and painful, with his knee in her spine. She rolled over and clutched him to her, her cigarette flung away. “Simon. Simon.”
Claire had grilled asparagus and fish with lemon and butter and roasted garlic. She hadn’t noticed Liv’s hands until they were washing up, Simon asleep under the table.
In the following flurry, Liv found herself seated at the kitchen table, her hands deep in a basin of warm water and Epsom salt. Claire’s lecture was magnificent. It had a thesis and sub-points and a magnanimous conclusion: “We’re taking the weekend off. You and I have been working like slaves, and it’s over. We’ll hike and eat and play with Simon. No research or tools or mending of anything. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“You’re not allowed to injure yourself again. Promise.”
Laughing now, this woman so beautifully earnest, Liv said, “Yes. I promise.” She couldn’t stop grinning—high—poisoned maybe, by lingering fumes from the stain, or some toxin in the fish, or the river water.
Claire lugged the child from beneath the table, carried him away to bed, and then returned to pour each of them another glass of wine.
“Tell me about your trip,” Liv said.
Claire had thrown rocks into the river with Simon, and walked along the trails, watching butterflies. They’d collected sticks and roasted marshmallows, and she had avoided mushrooms by focusing her considerable at
tention on the child. At night, she’d told him stories about the stars. When he fell asleep, she wished for Liv. Pressing her jacket tightly around her, she’d wished she weren’t alone.
I missed you, she wanted to say to this woman soaking her hands in Epsom salt. I missed you, and I don’t know what to do with that. “I haven’t taken a research trip without my aunt, ever.”
A fly had gotten into the kitchen; she could hear it buzzing against the screen door. After she let it out, she said, “Fourteen years.” She might have been talking to the fly, or the door. She sat and added, “practically my entire adult life. I worked with her, and lived here in this house, and obsessed about mushrooms for fourteen years. She’s dead and the work is five chapters from over, but I’m still here.” Water sloshed in the basin as Liv shifted; they watched until the water stilled. “The normal, daily parts are hardest: meals, and grocery shopping, and reading to Simon. All the things that haven’t changed.”
Twenty when she agreed to work as her aunt’s assistant, Claire hadn’t expected to keep the job long, had accepted her aunt’s proposal only because she thought no one would ever search for her in Spokane. Spokane: where the world ended.
“Look at this place,” Claire said, and swept her arm back to take the entire L of the house in. “I missed it. I missed this sad refrigerator—that shade is called pimento, if you can believe it—and the wood paneling in the basement, and that shitty linoleum in the bathroom.” She shook her head. “I was only gone for three days.”
“Just imagine how much you’ll miss it when we gut the place,” Liv said. “Maybe we should leave one room completely intact as a shrine to seventies décor.”
Claire laughed, put her feet in Liv’s lap, and leaned her chair back. When Liv didn’t object, Claire laughed again. Enough of shrines, she thought.
