Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  * * *

  Jeremy began to let staffers and a few trusted regulars use the cottage. As he told the bookkeeper, he did it out of a sense that the place truly belonged to the Shack – and not just technically. He also did it, paradoxically, as a way to keep a lid on the fact of its existence. “If you go, it has to be our little secret, okay?” he’d tell people. “If I get all kinds of people asking to go, then that’s it, party’s over. I want this to be a kind of hideaway. So mum’s the word.”

  One waitress took her boyfriend out for a few days. When Jeremy went up afterward, he found the door unlocked and dirty plates still in the sink. Worse, there was a used condom on the floor of the bedroom – he had to go outside to find a stick he could use to pick it up. Another waitress went with a couple of friends, and Jeremy got a call a week later from the cottage owners’ association, saying there’d been complaints about the noise. A family with a place nearby had watched, shocked, while the young women took turns running off the end of the dock and leaping into the water, completely naked and swearing so loud you could hear it clear across the lake. When he went around to apologize, two young boys sat at the picnic table, grinning at him hopefully, waiting to hear if the miracle would be repeated.

  He offered the place to Tyler, who reacted as though he were being told to climb into a metal cooking pot perched atop a pile of firewood and surrounded by torches.

  “You should get out there. Have some fun.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Obviously not,” Jeremy said, his smile slipping away.

  Benny parked a small camping trailer on the lot, and for nearly a week, cottagers nearby were treated to the sight of him standing on the dock first thing in the morning, wearing nothing but distressed-looking underwear and a pair of work boots, toasting the dawn with a can of beer. Phil went for a weekend and ended up locking himself out in the middle of a rainstorm. He had to break in through the window, bending the screen and leaving scuff marks all over the frame and mud everywhere. When he got back, he showed everyone his poison ivy rashes and the scratches on his arms and legs.

  “I’m starting to think I can’t trust you to take a piss on your own,” Jeremy told him.

  “This is what happens when you lend your getaway spot to the people you’re trying to get away from,” Glenn said.

  He offered it to Glenn, more out of a sense of duty than out of any desire to have the man out there, and was relieved when the offer was declined. Glenn had his own place, more than five hours northeast of Toronto, just on the fringes of Algonquin Park. It was nothing more than an enormous lot in the middle of the woods, on which he had installed a semi-permanent trailer. The nearest neighbours were a half-hour’s drive away. He got water out of a nearby stream, and ran the place on propane and solar power. All he did all day was clear brush, read thick books about the Mongol invasions or the roots of the First World War, and occasionally stare back at the curious fox that crept out of the woods to check him out.

  “That’s where I’ll be when everything goes to shit,” he said.

  “Sounds kinda vulnerable, doesn’t it? Out there in the middle of nowhere?”

  Glenn hinted that there were guns hidden beneath the floor. And, he said, he could take care of himself pretty well out there with just a baseball bat. He’d once spent a night with his feet up against the inside of the door, pushing back against a black bear that grew more and more irritated at not being given a share of the pan-fried fish he could smell from miles away. Glenn said he’d left some of the gouges on the side of the trailer where they were, just for show. That was a lesson learned. He now kept a few cans of bear spray in the drawer and one in the car.

  “Nothing gets at me,” Glenn said. “I could live there, no problem.”

  “I’d give it a month before you were trying to fuck the bear,” Jeremy said.

  * * *

  He waited for Charlene to ask to use the cottage. When she didn’t, he finally insisted she go. It was like free therapy, he said, not that she needed it. It would clear her head – she should get out there on her own and just absorb the light coming off the water, let it renew her. Or go with Kyle, too, obviously. Sure, that’d be totally fine.

  Things were still slightly awkward between them, and she went home as soon as her shifts ended, but they found they could talk again during the day without acting as though one might suddenly jump up and burn the other with a lit match. They began listening in on the Tactix games again, marvelling at the way Donnie led his flock of hyperactive young men. Once in a while, if a regular were in for a late lunch or an early beer, and there was nothing else going on, Jeremy would get her to sit with them for a few minutes. The two of them managed to convince Phil not to go through his daughter’s school bag – he was worried she might be smoking pot. If she was, Charlene told him, there was nothing he could do about it except let it run its course, and if she wasn’t, all he’d be doing was letting her know he didn’t trust her.

  “Once you pull that kind of move,” she said, “there’s no taking it back. You’re better off with a daughter who maybe gets high every once in a while, but knows that you love and trust her.”

  Jeremy was impressed, and told her so. She replied that she was probably just quoting an old episode of Degrassi, and that her mother used to go through her stuff all the time, looking for weed and worse.

  “Girls are going to do whatever they’re going to do. You can’t stop them.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  When she’d first brought up the cottage idea with Kyle, he had laughed: no way. She eventually wore him down, pointing out that they hadn’t gone anywhere together for over a year. Once he agreed to go, his reluctance disappeared, and he threw himself into the preparations, pulling his mother’s Honda Civic out from behind the house, gassing it up, and filling it with windshield wiper fluid. He went out and bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of camping equipment, even though Charlene insisted it wasn’t necessary, they’d have all they need at the cottage. “And what if we don’t?” he asked her. “What if we get there and it’s full of rot or raccoons or has a huge leak in the roof? What if we get there and there’s a half-dozen people from the bar already inside?” They left in the morning to beat the traffic and bought groceries on the way, then stopped at a liquor store beside the highway, where Charlene, after convincing the one employee there to let her use the staff washroom to pee, grabbed two bottles of sparkling wine at random. She wasn’t crazy about the stuff, but it made the trip seem more festive, more celebratory. It would be worth the headache the next day and the slippery, racing feeling she got while drinking it.

  When they finally found the cottage, after numerous wrong turns and bad guesses – Kyle had refused to even look at the directions Jeremy had supplied, and had mapped out his own route – Charlene was surprised at how small it was. She was shocked, too, by the dragons, as was Kyle. The two sets of partners – human and plaster – stared across the threshold at each other. The beasts were covered in the bits and bites left over from squirrels making meals of pinecones while standing on top. She imagined coming back up from the water after a late-night swim and almost peeing herself at the sight of those two glowering monsters.

  Kyle took a picture of them with his phone. “I figured there’d be at least some racist shit out here – every cottage has some – but these take the cake.”

  “I don’t get how they’re racist.”

  “Chinese restaurant. Chinese.”

  “It’s racist just because they’re from a Chinese restaurant?”

  “He might as well have a cigar-store Indian out here.”

  “Don’t tell him that.”

  Kyle smirked. “Why, because he might go out and get one?”

  They spent the day going in and out of the water and dozing in the Muskoka chairs. They hung their towels over the heads of the dragons to dry and so that they woul
d not have to see their angry faces. Charlene washed and ate an entire basket of strawberries, and felt calmness creep up through her as though she were being slowly and pleasantly poisoned. She left her phone, which had buzzed a couple of times during the drive, up in the car. Kyle walked around the edge of the property, right through thick brush, and she worried that he’d gone into a sulk. Instead, he came back with armfuls of sticks for the fire and a look of triumph on his face.

  “See? We didn’t need to buy firewood. I told you.”

  He sat and read a book about the fall of the Soviet Empire, while she tried over and over to get through the same page of the novel she’d brought, one she’d been reading on and off for months, never seeming to get any closer to the far shore of the back cover. It was the size of a small briefcase, and so heavy it made her wrists ache when she held it. It was about three families in India. No: Pakistan – she kept getting it confused. Each time she picked up the book, it was as if all the fake-sounding names inside had been shuffled around, so that now the person she’d thought was the father who baked samosas according to a generations-old recipe was suddenly the angry son who had fallen in amongst Islamic radicals, and the woman who tended to her ailing grandfather in a dark room at the back of a house was now the widow who took over her dead husband’s delivery route on her little motor scooter after he had his face blown off by a terrorist bomb unwittingly set by the angry son. She wished she’d brought something in which the body of a man was found under a bridge with a bullet hole in his back and a note in his pocket.

  Charlene had hoped they might have sex as soon as they arrived. During the drive, she thought of ways to help make that happen. She wished she had thought to buy a new swimsuit – the one she had was brown and shapeless and coarse from too many washes and too many heavily chlorinated city pools. She could’ve got herself something revealing and sexy, and then modelled it for him in front of the cottage. She pictured him getting so excited that they’d do it right there on one of the chairs – no time to get all of their clothes off. Then they would go out for a swim together, and later do it again – more slowly and patiently this time – in the bed, for which they had brought clean sheets.

  Clean sheets: Kyle had insisted they bring their own, plus pillow cases, freshly laundered and smelling like flowers and bleach. He refused to sleep on sheets that anyone else had used, or that had been sitting for weeks with spiders, mice, and squirrels running over them. Lying in the bed on their first night after having sat on opposite sides of the fire like two strangers in hoodies, she had to admit he was right: fresh sheets were wonderful. The smell of the fire and the lake was on both of them. She was just starting to drift off when Kyle put a hand on her bare shoulder. The suddenness of it made her jump a little. Even now, after so many years, he didn’t know how to start, and always tried to signal his intentions as clearly as possible so that she would get the hint and take over the responsibilities of starting the operation. His bare arm snaked around her and pulled her to him, and his right leg landed on her thighs. She could feel his cock touch her side very lightly, like a celebrity on a talk show waiting backstage to be introduced, knowing everyone there was aware of him and excited to be in his presence. The thought made her giggle involuntarily. Before Kyle could freeze up at the sound of her laughter, she said, “I really like it here.” Then she rolled over to face him, happily.

  The first time she and Kyle ever had sex, they did it on the living room couch in her mother’s apartment, careful not to mess up the homework they had spread across the coffee table, and which Kyle was helping her with. Sex with Kyle was completely different from sex with anyone else with whom she’d done it. Kyle didn’t grab at her like a furious gorilla, he didn’t push against her as though he were trying to smother her, and he didn’t take off afterward or suddenly get all weird and sullen. Matthew used to grab her hand and put it on his cock, holding it there and jerking himself off with it. It made her feel like Helen Keller, with her clumsy hands on the water pumps. Kyle never forced her to do anything – though there were lots of times, she had to admit, right in the middle of everything, when she sort of wished he would. She didn’t want to be hurt or tied up, and she would not have been able to keep a straight face at the sight of Kyle playing dungeon master, but she wanted to feel as though he were being driven a little bit crazy by her and had been pushed outside his usual limits. Instead, he kept to his limits, and always tried to ensure the pleasure was evenly divided, that they both ended with an orgasmic checkmark in their columns. Sometimes, when she simply could not get over the hump, he would brood about it, and she would have to assure him it made her just as happy to know he was happy. Which was true: she liked that she could do this for him, that she could help bring about such a release of tension. She rarely saw him so relaxed. It helped to know that she would likely get there the next time, that being left in pleasure’s lobby was only an occasional thing.

  As she stared up at the unfamiliar cottage ceiling, listening to her husband’s slow drift into sleep, she began to wonder if that had been the one, and if in a few weeks she would discover she were pregnant. She was surprised at how calm she was about the idea. Normally, whenever she realized they had forgotten the condom, everything turned to panic and worry. But this time, the panic was far off, drowned in the lake. She had seen the look on Kyle’s face, and could feel the message being communicated by the muscles of his ass, and had said nothing to prevent what she knew was about to happen. It wasn’t even that she had done something unnatural – what was more natural than two humans fucking and one coming in the other one? How else was it supposed to work? She was surprised, too, that he had gone through with it, and hadn’t realized at the last moment and quickly redirected the coming spurt of life. Maybe he’d been thinking along the same lines as her. Maybe he felt ready. He came fully inside her, which no one had ever done before. There was a slight bloated feeling, but also a pleasant warmth and sense of satisfaction that was more concrete than usual.

  * * *

  Charlene awoke to the sound of something moving around on the roof just above her head. She’d been dreaming of walking along a beach made entirely of dry clam shells. In the dream, she had struggled to explain to Kyle that the reason she was falling behind was because she was barefoot, while he had on thick rubber boots. The sun looked as though it had only just risen, and it was already warm and humid in the room. The bottoms of her feet held a phantom soreness from all the imagined slices and cuts. She felt herself sink into the mattress at the thought of being responsible for nothing that day but to enjoy herself. They wouldn’t even have to go into town. There was more than enough food and beer for the rest of their stay, and though she always enjoyed poking around in the stores wherever they went, staying put meant not having to deal with Kyle’s anxiety over behaving like a lazy tourist in a place where, for the people who actually lived there, it was just a regular workday.

  She wasn’t worried about anything. She wasn’t worried about finding out if she was pregnant, about telling Kyle, about having to decide whether or not to keep the baby – though she probably would, no matter what. She was pro-choice in theory, and didn’t judge anyone, but felt she had too little authority over her own life to cancel out someone else’s. She wasn’t worried about getting sick in the mornings, getting fat, being in pain, not being able to drink, or even being in labour and delivering a baby. She couldn’t yet think what it would mean to have an actual child around, in the room with her, in her arms, at her feet. The only thing she feared was telling her mother, who’d been begging her for so long to make this exact thing happen, to be careless for one moment and allow new life to come into the world. To make something and to start to live for someone else instead of going along as she was, making every decision based on her own happiness and her own fears. She didn’t want to have to tell her mother that she was right – that letting Kyle’s sperm go flying up inside her had somehow finally fulfilled her as a person and a wom
an. She didn’t feel that way just yet, anyway, though she figured she might start to over the coming months. She was willing to at least entertain the idea, if it came to it.

  She could not help but contrast her current feelings of contentment with the way she’d felt waking up beside Jeremy, in the intrusive glare of his bedroom. The shock of remembering where she was had quickly replaced the disorientation. She’d been naked, with a sheet wrapped so tightly around her ankle as to make her worry for a brief second that getting tied to the bed had been part of the previous night’s proceedings. It hadn’t been, though there was more than enough else to work through. It had clearly been an opportunity for her to try on a new sexual persona, one with sharp teeth and nails and more willing to make demands. He, on the other hand, had moved slowly, constantly pausing as if waiting for her to leap away from him and flee in horror. His reticence had annoyed her, and thinking of the way she had whipped him on – only metaphorically but for the want of an actual whip – made her weigh the consequences of murder-suicide. She pictured herself sneaking down to the kitchen to retrieve a knife big enough to put a fatal hole in his neck with one thrust. Then she would swallow every pill in the house and set it on fire. Instead, she snuck out the moment he went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, even leaving behind her leggings and underwear, which were nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t remember if she had worn a bra to the bar the night before, and gave up the search rather than have to work through why she had not.

  For the entire walk through his oddly treeless neigh­bourhood, searching for a taxi, she kept expecting the white Jeep to pull up beside her. Had it done so, she would have climbed in and resigned herself to this new life as someone who fucked around with her boss. The Jeep never appeared, which told her that Jeremy, getting out of the shower and finding her gone, had decided that this was the best possible result. And so, on the cab ride home, she focused on the twin tasks of creating a plausible alibi – she texted her friend Samantha, telling her there’d been a need for an extra pair of hands with the baby the night before – and rebuilding the concrete fact of her marriage in her mind.