His breathing was fast and shallow, like he couldn’t get air into his small lungs. “Is my mom sick? Is she going to die?”
“What?”
“Is that why she went to the doctor?” Frank wiped at his eyes and nose with his sleeve. “Is that why I have to live with you now?”
I went cold, like those nights when I’d wake to find Simmy gone. “Hey, kid, people go to the doctor all the time.” I loosened my grip on his coat and set him down. “That doesn’t mean she’s going to die.”
“Maybe she has what my dad had.”
“Listen, your mom is fine.”
I didn’t know if that was true or not, but I said it anyway. Because, right then, I wanted to go home. I wanted to get away from this kid and go back to my life. Because I had a good thing going. I had a job and an apartment and Simmy. I didn’t want to take on Frank’s sorrow. I wanted to keep sorrow from the door for as long as possible. I didn’t want to think about sickness or death, just like how I didn’t want to wake up at night and find myself alone.
I straightened Frank’s coat. “Your mom’s okay. She’s coming to get you at three o’clock.”
He was shivering, so I picked him up and held him against me. I took his hands in mine, to warm them.
“There,” I said. “How’s that? Better?”
WHEN WE GOT HOME, Simmy was on the phone to the police, but as soon as we walked in the door, she said, “Wait—here they are. Sorry,” then hung up. She stared at us, then slid down to the kitchen floor and started to cry with what must have been relief. I wanted to go to her and comfort her, but I was scared. I’d never seen Simmy cry before. I’d known her my whole life and never seen her cry.
Frank looked up at me and said, “What’s wrong with her?”
That made Simmy laugh, and just the sound of it made everything okay. We were young again. We could go back to being happy and safe—laughing and sleeping in and drinking cheap wine. Simmy wiped her eyes, and we could go back to being ourselves.
WHEN FRANK’S MOM came to pick him up, he wouldn’t go to her. He stared at her, and held on to the sleeve of Simmy’s jacket. I could tell he wanted to run and grab her legs and smell her hair, but he was scared. He was scared to love her as much as he did.
“This always happens. He always has more fun at other people’s houses.” Frank’s mom laughed. Then she picked up her son with the ease of someone who was used to his weight. He was stiff and cautious in her arms, but pretty soon he gave in. He put his fingers in his mouth, grabbed some of her hair with his other hand, and held it like he never planned to let go.
What can you ever know about people? As I watched Frank’s mom fish in her purse for a twenty, I couldn’t know if she was dying or not. I’d never seen a dying person. I imagined that death might be inside her body, wandering around quietly, the way Simmy moved through the apartment at night.
“Would you want to babysit again?” asked Frank’s mom. “He seems to like it here.”
“Sure,” said Simmy, because she couldn’t know anything either. She couldn’t know that she’d leave soon, run off with a surveyor who worked up north.
We didn’t mention that we’d lost Frank and I’m sure Frank didn’t tell either. When they left, he didn’t wave goodbye. He dropped us as easily as only kids can. He clutched his mother’s hair and forgot us immediately. And I decided to forget him too.
THAT NIGHT, Simmy and I took off those stupid clothes and lay naked on the yellow carpeting. The TV flickered above us and turned our bodies blue then green then blue again. The news that night was celebratory. Walls were coming down all over the world, and people were filled with a naive kind of hope.
For the first time, Simmy and I talked about the future. We talked about how much money we’d have to save to buy this place. We talked about what we’d name our kids when we had them. I don’t think either one of us entirely believed what we were saying—we talked the way kids talk when they’re inventing stories—but we were giddy with relief, giddy with youth. I told Simmy that I hoped we’d be together for the rest of our lives. She said, “Me too,” and I don’t think she knew then that she was lying. We lay on the floor and held hands. When I closed my eyes, I could feel the train’s hum in my body. I could feel it pulling me, pulling me along its track. Sorrow might come, but that didn’t matter. Because right then, I had a good thing going. Right then, Simmy was there, every time I opened my eyes.
c a u g h t
THERE’S MORE THAN ONE WAY IT COULD GO. Outside the office there might be the shuffle of shoes on waxed floor: students to office hours or professors to the photocopier. Inside, light through the drapes, unvacuumed carpet, stacks of lab books. There might be a half-empty coffee cup that leaves a ring on the desk, an unbuttoned shirt. A kiss and the boy’s hand where the wife’s leg hinges to her hip. Then the way she can’t undo his belt and the way he takes her hand, shows her. The wife’s weight against the lip of the desk, and the boy’s mouth on her neck. There’s no knock at the door, only a turn of the knob. There’s the husband.
OR MAYBE NOT. Instead, the door is closed and there’s the sound of others passing, but the wife’s shirt is buttoned and the boy’s complex belt is buckled. The wife and the boy don’t touch, but maybe, as a joke, they’ve switched seats. The boy laughs because the wife—with some grey in her hair, and those angular shoulders—is too elegant for that chair.
The boy sits straight, his hand to his chin in mock-professorial thought. “Do you walk the dog, or does he?”
“This chair is awful.” The wife presses her back into it. “Seriously. I can’t imagine you in that big house. Who mows the lawn? Who does the dishes?”
“I walk the dog. I take her out before teaching.” The wife is thinking about his knees, cupping them in her hands.
“I want to picture you.” The boy leans toward her, his elbows on his thighs. “When do you wake up?”
“At six. Liam wakes me before he leaves.”
“Liam. Superman.”
“Ben and I eat cereal. Sometimes toaster waffles. He gets ready for school on his own now, so I have time to walk Tasha.”
“I don’t even go to bed until two or three in the morning.”
“I wish you could meet Tash. You’d like her.”
“I bet he’s handsome even at five a.m. I bet he wears a tie.”
“Is that ridiculous—that I think you would like our dog?”
So when the husband turns the knob and opens the door, this is all he sees: a young man in the wrong chair and the wife with her hands tucked under her knees. The boy’s wide-set eyes and the wife turning her head. Maybe the husband stands in the doorway, car keys gripped in his fist, and says to himself: This is nothing. Or maybe he recognizes that look in his wife’s eyes, that blur. And he’s a smart man—he knows talking can be more intimate than kissing, kissing more intimate than fucking. Maybe he stands in the doorway and says to himself: This could be anything.
MAYBE THE HUSBAND SPEAKS to the boy: “I don’t think we’ve met” or “I should introduce myself.”
“I was just leaving.” The boy stands, grabs his denim jacket, and brushes past the husband, through the doorway.
“I got off earlier than usual.” The husband leans against a filing cabinet. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I didn’t expect you.”
“Who was that?”
“A student.” She sips the cold coffee. Lying is easier than expected. “How did you get off early? A hospital doesn’t need doctors?”
“I thought we could pick Ben up together.” He takes a book off her shelf and flips it open. He squints at diagrams of a mackerel’s jaw. “This stuff is so weird.”
“No weirder than humans.” They have this conversation so often it has become one of their jokes. “Imagine what fish would say if they studied our jaws, our lungs, our behaviour.”
“You tell me. What would they say, professor?” The husband winks at her. “You look nice, by the way. That’s a nice shirt.”
>
The wife pauses, her purse over her shoulder. Would he normally say that?
“Grab your stuff.” He jingles the keys in his hand. “We’re going to be late.”
MAYBE THE WIFE and the husband walk down the hallway, along the waxed floor, without talking. They cut through the campus gardens to the parking lot and the wife thinks of the boy, how she met him on a warm, blinding day like this one. Salmon were spawning in Goldstream, and she was there with three graduate students and her son, who had a day off school. She noticed the boy because he was alone. He snapped photographs of fish slipping through water, gulls and dippers lunging at them. He wore a hooded sweatshirt with fraying sleeves, corduroys that dragged in the mud, scuffed boots. The wife watched him wander along the side of the stream, jump from rock to rock, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. His casual walk, his focus.
The boy caught her staring a few times. This woman in hiking boots and a waterproof jacket. This woman who, he had overheard, knew the Latin names of fish, plants, birds. This woman who must be fifteen, twenty years older than him: small lines around her eyes, her mouth. He could see her straight shoulders through the jacket and he imagined she’d spent much of her life outside. Her dark hair reflected the sun, and the boy would have liked a shot of that.
The wife wandered away from where her students did counts. Would her son grow up to be like that boy, clear-eyed and quiet? Probably not. He might grow to be calmer, become as reasonable as his father, but he’d always be chatty.
Where was her son, anyway? The wife looked to her students, who knelt over the water’s bank. Not there. And he wasn’t farther downstream. Or in the cabin they used for maps and equipment. She’d only turned away for a second.
Then the boy aimed his camera upriver, past her, and she followed the lens’s gaze over her shoulder. There. Her son’s pants were wet to his knees and he balanced on a rock in the middle of the river. A salmon had died on that rock, or been pushed there by the current, and the son smacked a stick against the fish’s body. He raised it over his head, smashed it down, and watched the huge, limp muscle shake.
“Ben!” The wife ran toward him. “Ben, what are you doing?”
The son stared at her, the stick in his hand. “It’s dead anyway.”
“Get off there. Right now.”
He jumped into the water and splashed to the bank. “It’s dead anyway, Mom.”
“I said if you came to work with me, you had to behave.” The wife gripped his shoulders. “The water could have been deep there. You have to be careful.”
“I had my eye on him. He was fine.”
The wife turned and saw the boy, who crouched and snapped a picture of the rock.
“Thanks.” She squeezed water from her son’s jeans. “He’s going through a bit of a stage right now.”
“It’ll make a good photo.” The boy took another picture of the broken skin along the fish’s side. “Do you work here?”
“No, at the university. The biology department.” The wife pointed to the three students with their clipboards and rubber boots. “My research is on coho salmon, so we’re out here observing most days.”
The boy brushed hair from his eyes. “Coho?”
“They’re the ones with green heads and red sides,” said the son, tearing his arm from his mother’s hand. “Bright red, like apples.”
“What’s this one?” The boy pointed to the fish on the rock.
“That’s a chum salmon,” said the son, and kicked water at it. “You can tell because it’s green.”
The boy smiled at him. “He’s been paying attention.”
“It’s less common to see coho up here—Ben, stop that. Part of my job is to figure out why they stay away.” Was she using her professor voice? The boy looked into the clear water, and it was hard to tell if he was listening. “I think there are simply too many fish in this river. Coho tend to spawn beneath logs or under overhanging banks. They’re shy and secretive.”
“As soon as they spawn, they die,” said the son, his eyes wide. This detail had made him want to spend the day at Goldstream in the first place.
“A death wish,” said the boy.
“Not really.” The wife waved her hand to indicate the fish, insects, water—the whole system. “It’s just the way the cycle works. It’s perfectly natural.”
The boy smiled, but not at the son this time. At her. “Seems reasonable, I guess.” Then he turned away and held his camera to his face. Across the narrow river, an eagle lifted a mangled fish into the air. He shot, caught it.
MAYBE IT’S AN ORDINARY EVENING: the husband and wife prepare dinner, tuck their son into bed, wash and dry the dinner plates. The wife sits cross-legged at the kitchen table, as she does every night. And the husband pours the wine, as he does every night—half a glass each. Maybe the husband is calm about it, cool.
“So, this boy. How long have you known him?”
“What boy?”
“Come on, Wendy.” The husband swirls the red around in his glass. “Just tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“Please don’t treat me like an idiot.” His voice remains even. “You have a husband, a son. How can you justify this?”
The wife lifts her glass, tilts too much wine into her mouth, swallows. She shifts in her chair. “The Indo-Pacific wrasse.”
“Fish? For God’s sake, Wendy.”
“They’re gorgeous, with swirls of blue in the scales. And they’re polygynous.”
“Pardon?”
“Not monogamous.”
“Of course.”
“They live in schools of about ten females to one male.”
The husband pushes his wine away. “How many lovers do you have?”
“Just listen.” The wife leans across the table. “The females have a pecking order that determines breeding access to the male. If the alpha female dies, for instance, the next-biggest female takes on her role and everyone moves up a step.”
“I don’t get it. Who’s the male in this scenario? Who’s the female?”
“Would you believe me if I said I’m torn?” She reaches for his hand but doesn’t touch it. “If I said I’m crazy about him and I still want you?”
“Not really.” The husband leans away from her. “Explain this fish thing.”
“What’s fascinating is what happens if the male is removed.” The wife sits on her knees. “Within an hour, the alpha female starts to court the other females. And within two weeks, she develops functional testes.”
“Your boyfriend is actually a girl?”
“I’m saying, if those fish can be functional—happy—acting one way and also acting another, oppositional way, it might be the same for us.”
“You think you’re more evolved or something? Because you can switch your affections?”
“It just seems to me there must be more than one possibility. I’m not saying that justifies it.”
“None of this makes sense.”
“I’m sorry, Liam.”
“Your analogy doesn’t make sense.”
MAYBE THE BOY IS HANDY: he can fix an overheating engine, repair broken radios, explain the inside of a toaster. He collects old alarm clocks, the kind with metal bells like ears attached to their round faces. He even once took apart his camera, inspected each mechanism, then put it back together. The wife thought at first he was practical, the kind of guy who would eventually build a workshop in his garage. Now she knows better. He appreciates machines for how graceful they are, how pure: click and whir. Though he wouldn’t put it that way. He would simply say that he rents his apartment because it has an extra half bath he uses as a darkroom, and a fan from the 1940s. He likes the old copper blades, the way they cut through the kitchen air.
And he likes the wife because, when he brought her to his apartment to give her some prints, when he unlocked the door, flipped on the light, forgot to hang her coat, and showed her the fan—the wife didn’t shrug, didn’t laugh. She stood and looked at t
he ceiling for nearly a minute. This was before they had touched.
“That fan is great,” she said, and rocked from toes to heels. Then the boy took her hand, held it. She watched the fan’s slow spin without coming closer, without moving away. She heard her own breath. Then, as an experiment, she pulled her hand from his and touched his lower back. Underneath his shirt, her fingers on his spine.
MAYBE THE HUSBAND doesn’t mention it, lets it go. He and the wife prepare dinner, tuck their son into bed, wash and dry the dinner plates. Half a glass each, and they sleep beside each other, their legs touching. He wakes at five a.m., and the wife hears the alarm’s buzz, the water as he showers. She gets up an hour later and goes to her office until three-thirty, when she walks her son home from school. She points out birds, explains the genius of the arbutus, and lets her son hop in puddles.
When they arrive home at four-fifteen, the husband is sleeping off whatever injuries and tragedies he saw in emerg. He’s on top of the blankets, in sweatpants and a T-shirt, and the wife and son crawl into bed with him. The room is cool because the husband likes the window open, and the son burrows under the blanket, snuggles into the wife. She’s between her child and her husband and she feels warm, feels held. The dog jumps onto the bed and settles against the son, who retells stories he told on the way home—about an eraser fight he started, about a pill bug his classmate brought to school. He exaggerates even more for his father, and the husband tells stories too. Makes his day sound easy.
“A woman came in who broke her ankle two weeks ago. It only occurred to her today to come to the hospital about it.”
“Didn’t she know it was broken?” The son bangs his legs on the mattress, jolting the bed. “Didn’t it hurt?”
“She was so cheerful. She said she just didn’t think it was serious—not until her foot swelled so much she couldn’t stretch her tights over it.”
Vanishing and Other Stories Page 16
