With the sun already gleaming behind the cottage curtains, Charlene lay in the bed and scratched at her bare thigh – something had bit her there. Likely a spider, of which she’d seen many inside the cottage since they arrived, all of them sitting frozen in the corners, looking as though they hadn’t expected human visitors and had been caught at something. The happiness she was feeling was proof, she decided, that things had worked out for the best that morning after Jeremy’s birthday, that her finding an empty taxi before his Jeep found her was the way her fate was meant to play out.
She tried to picture herself as a young mother: brighter, more engaged, more focused, less lazy. She would be tired all the time, but she would also glow with newfound purpose. Nine months of reading deeply about nutrition and diet would transform her meagre cooking skills into something more than up to the task of feeding her husband and child in a way that was dense with health benefits and full of variety. She imagined doing remarkable things with squash, sprouts, and whole grain flour. During her pregnancy, she would bring about peace between Kyle and the couple downstairs, and when they finally moved out for something bigger, it would be amid a sustained flurry of hugs and tears. Even Kyle would cry a little. On their first night in their new house, one of their last pre-baby nights together, they would sleep on the floor, the new mattresses not having been delivered yet, their old bed on its way to the dump or to Value Village. Kyle’s parents would help them pay for it all. He would spread out their new comforters and pin the corners down with her books about breastfeeding. They’d both be awoken in the middle of the night by the unfamiliar sound of the furnace coming to life to warm them where they lay, and they’d smile at each other in the dark and have delicate, careful sex, then fall back asleep in each other’s arms.
Kyle was not next to her in the bed, and she couldn’t hear him moving around the cottage. That didn’t surprise her: she was used to waking up on her own anytime they were on vacation. Whenever they went camping, he always got up early to go for a swim. If she got up, too, she would wander down to the beach, holding her instant coffee for warmth, and sit on the damp sand while he swam. He didn’t seem to mind, though she always got the feeling he was just as happy, maybe happier, when she let him go on his own. The dawn swim was Kyle Time. She went out into the small kitchen area and made a cup of coffee with the last of the crystals in one jar, then opened a new one so it would be ready when Kyle got back. She worried a little about the mark just above the wall socket next to the fridge, a black smudge like a birthmark. Had there been an electrical fire at some point? Should she have the kettle plugged in at all? How else was she going to make coffee out here? Her momentary wave of concern dissipated in a rush of desire for more coffee. There were empty beer bottles on the counter, many of them fringed on the bottom with dirt from around the campfire. Kyle had collected them himself the night before, saying that even a swallow of beer at the bottom of a single bottle could attract bears. She didn’t believe it, but was happy to let him clean things up.
She wondered how he might take the news about her being pregnant. It wasn’t as though he could say he’d been tricked: the cock was his, the sperm was his, he’d bought the condoms himself and had already used most of the box, so it wasn’t as though he didn’t understand how the whole business worked. She hadn’t put a hex on him, he hadn’t been roofied. He couldn’t accuse her of committing a sin that he hadn’t also committed, at least by omission.
She’d once heard a regular at the Shack say that coming inside someone was a sin of emission. Would Kyle find that funny? She doubted it.
Maybe he already knew. If the woman could know right away, was it impossible that the man could, too? Maybe he was off collecting his thoughts, trying to assess how fatherhood would change his world. She wondered if he was better able to imagine the actual child as it would be. Probably he had just as much difficulty picturing anything more than a faceless, sleeping lump wrapped tight in blankets they had to carry everywhere. Even so abstract, the thought of being responsible for a baby calmed her. It slowed her movements and gave her a welcome feeling of mystery and superiority.
With her coffee, she went outside. She didn’t feel like going back into the bedroom to retrieve her hoodie, so she reached behind the door for a heavy raincoat that must’ve been left out there for people to use. It was the colour of egg yolk, and the sleeves went past her hands. She liked the crinkling sound it made as she stepped among the roots and stones. Later they might pull out and play some of the board games that were stacked up on the floor behind the TV. Yahtzee would be fun. And maybe Trivial Pursuit. Monopoly was a no-go, as she hated the effect it had on Kyle: the one time they’d played it together, with friends over for dinner who’d brought the game with them, everything went wrong. They were playing it as a joke, as a tribute to the fact that they were too old for board games and smart enough to find better ways to amuse themselves. The joke died quickly. Kyle started losing almost right away, repeatedly stumbling onto other people’s squares and having to pay up. The chance cards never went his way, and he wouldn’t buy any of the cheaper places he landed on. He was told to loosen up a little and a buy a few things, and so, with a quiet, determined look on his face that only Charlene recognized, he started buying up everything he could, clearing out all his money doing so. The other couple started snagging themselves on his properties, which were positioned at fiendishly unmissable intervals. Within three rounds, Kyle had turned a whole side of the board into an impassable wall of hotels. One by one, the other three died on its sharpened edges. He played until there was only one other person left in the game, Charlene’s friend Samantha, who sat there silent as she was bled to death by his railroads and other holdings. They played it again, and he did it again, and when the others complained that he was ruining the fun, he said there was no other point to the game: “It’s called Monopoly, not Everybody Have Fun.”
Maybe Hungry Hungry Hippos instead, she thought.
She walked down to the water’s edge, expecting Kyle to emerge from the water at any moment, dripping, shivering, and impatient to get into dry clothes. Was there coffee? Yes. A fresh pot. You’re welcome. She looked for his head and shoulders plowing forward and disturbing the surface. Everywhere it was flat and clear. At its closest point, the opposite shore of the lake was still far enough away that the trees blurred together. Swimming there and back might take a half an hour or more, assuming he’d stop on the far beach for a rest. He was nowhere in sight. His shoes and towel were at the water’s edge. There was no one on the lake – no boats, nothing. She wanted to shout, but was held still by the thought that he must be nearby and she was simply missing seeing him somehow. If he were around, he’d be annoyed if she started yelling his name. She wasn’t sure she could get the sound out of her throat, anyway. She waited. A cold feeling went through her as she tried to work out exactly how long it’d been since she’d gotten up, made the coffee, and walked out of the cottage in the ridiculous raincoat, which she now threw off in fear and embarrassment.
The phone was in the car. The keys were in Kyle’s grey jeans. The jeans were in the cottage, somewhere in the bedroom – too many steps, and to begin working through them was to acknowledge that things had reached a point at which calling someone was necessary. She winced at the thought of sirens. Sirens would let everyone know how bad things were.
The keys weren’t in Kyle’s pants, after all. After a frantic search, during which she came close to deciding she would have to put a rock through the window of the car, she found them under the bed. She almost knocked over one of the dragons as she ran outside and up the path, then fought with the passenger-side door until she realized she had not yet unlocked it. Her phone was on the passenger seat. There were messages and texts waiting for her, but she skipped past those to find Jeremy’s name. She couldn’t think of who else to call.
“Please tell me you didn’t burn the place down.”
He sounded hal
f-asleep. She had to swallow before she could speak.
“I can’t find Kyle. He went for a swim, I think, and I can’t find him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t find him. I’m worried.”
Jeremy’s voice dropped and seemed to press into her ear: “You can’t see him anywhere? He’s not out in the water? Could he have gone to town for a second, or for a walk?”
All his stuff was there. His clothes and his shoes were all still there. His wallet. His phone. She was scared.
“Okay, nothing has happened. He’s probably just swimming somewhere and you can’t see him. Or he went for a walk or something. Have you gone to one of the other cottages?”
“Jeremy, his shoes are still here. Everything’s still here except for his swimming trunks. He went for a swim and I can’t see him anywhere.”
“And he was gone when you woke up?”
Charlene felt a premature wave of grief come over her at the word gone. Farther along the road, near the hump of stone Jeremy had warned them to avoid as they were driving in, she could see a pair of small birds fluttering around in the dirt. She couldn’t tell if they were mating or fighting. One would fly straight at the other, then both would flap their wings hard enough to kick up dust. Each bird looked small enough to fit in her pocket. As she stared at them, her mind leapt ahead in time to when there’d be police cars and an ambulance surrounding the Honda Civic. People from neighbouring cottages would be standing in groups, with looks of concern on their faces. Kids would be tearing in and out of the crowd, dimly aware that something bad had happened but energized by the presence of police officers with actual loaded guns on their hips, and by the flashing lights on the cars. They might even get the chance to see a dead body. The kids would pass that information among themselves, so that all of them knew, and all of them were ready: a dead body was coming. All they had to do was wait, and pray that their parents didn’t make them go back inside. The older kids would be watching the faces of the adults for signs of wavering, and for clues about the state this body was in. Had it been hit by a boat? Was it all bloated? Would the eyes be open? Would it be naked?
Charlene had to put her hand against the car.
“I’m really scared.”
She had the sensation of being drawn forward, as if the car had begun to roll down the hill toward the water. The lake was a big magnet, drawing in all life and smothering it in its cold depths, down with the lost sunglasses, fish hooks, pop cans, and weeds.
“Jeremy?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“I think he’s dead.”
“He’s not. He’s going to show up, I know it. Any minute now. He’s just gone off somewhere and didn’t tell you. Everything is going to be fine. It will.”
“I didn’t tell him what happened.”
“What happened? Tell him what?”
“You and me. I didn’t tell him. He didn’t know.”
Jeremy was quiet for a moment. “Look, everything is going to be okay.”
“I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why it happened. It wasn’t your fault, but now Kyle’s dead. Oh my God.”
“Charlene, you have to hold it together. Everything will be fine.”
“Jeremy . . .”
“Yes.”
“It’s not going to be fine, I know it.”
“I’m just getting dressed. I’m coming out there. Everything will be okay.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be here.”
“Why?”
Before she could reply, a loud honking made her drop the phone: a dark blue SUV was navigating the last corner on the road and rolling slowly toward her. At the wheel was a big man with a white beard and sunglasses who waved at Charlene. In the passenger seat she could see Kyle, wrapped in a beach towel. The man with the beard got out of the SUV and walked around to open the passenger-side door, as if Kyle were elderly or infirm. When Kyle stepped down onto the pine needles, his knees buckled slightly. The beach towel had Justin Bieber’s face spread across the entire length of it. There was another towel on the seat. She ran over to take his weight on her own shoulder.
“Whoa, easy,” the man said as Kyle nearly toppled over sideways. “We caught a big one this morning!” He was friendly and firm in his actions, and she couldn’t help think how he reminded her of the host of a show she sometimes watched, the one about home renovations. He introduced himself as Steve, and said he had a cottage directly across the lake.
“If you guys weren’t so far back from the water, I’d be able to see your place from my dock.”
He’d been standing outside having a coffee and spotted Kyle having a hard time of it. It happened a couple of times a summer, he said: someone misjudged the distance and got into trouble. Kyle was lucky, because there weren’t a lot of boaters on the lake that day. Steve himself was supposed to have gone home the day before. His kids made him stay another night.
“Which is lucky, eh?”
“Oh my God, thank you.”
“This is what you do.”
Steve said he would come by later to retrieve the Bieber towel. Normally he would just say to keep it, they had lots at their place, but his youngest daughter would throw herself under the wheels of the truck if they went home without it. “That smiling idiot has come in handy, for once. You okay there, guy?”
Kyle raised his arm in thanks.
Steve gave another friendly honk as he drove off, after refusing her offer of a coffee.
Inside the cottage, Kyle sat in the living room with a coffee in his hands. He seemed to have slipped out of himself, or somehow become his own adult twin: recognizable but fundamentally strange. His eyes were red and tired. He looked helpless and confused. She’d never seen him that way. Even at his worst moments, he was always fundamentally Kyle. Not now.
She sat across from him, on the couch. She wondered if she should sit closer – that would’ve been the more loving thing to do, the more caring thing to do. She couldn’t. Something had happened when she saw Kyle in the SUV, something had passed between them – some understanding that after more than a decade together, new and important information was being added to the profile of their relationship. They’d received a critical update. He had looked angry, but also beaten and drained. In an instant, all the fear she’d had vanished, replaced by a strange, stony feeling.
He was alive, and she was both glad and relieved, but she couldn’t feel anything beyond that. The look on his face had cancelled something. She felt no interest in taking on his anger, in letting its barbed point enter her chest and start to work itself through her. She wanted nothing to do with it. He gave her the slightest angry look, and she rejected it. She simply refused, and he knew it. All in the space of a split second – even before she had helped him out of the truck, they both knew something had ended, a lid had been closed. He had been fished out of the lake, only to be thrown back by his own wife.
“Can we go home?” His voice was quiet, deferential. He seemed to understand that she held the balance of power now. “Early? Can we go today?”
She let him sit and finish his coffee while she packed their bags. She drove the Civic, and he didn’t object. If they got stopped she was prepared to explain to the officer that her husband had nearly drowned that morning and was in no shape to drive, so what they were doing was actually the safer option, despite her lack of a licence. They drove in silence. Kyle was wearing long pants and a grey hoodie, though the day had gotten warm enough for Charlene to roll up the windows and put the air conditioning on in the car.
“Speed,” Kyle said.
Charlene glanced at the dash: she was cruising along way over the limit. She drew her foot back off the gas and nodded without looking at him. It was the first word he’d said in an hour. She wondered if there were more to come.
As she drove on, it slowly daw
ned on her that he had not made her pregnant. No new connection had been made, no tiny, blooming truth. She was sure of it: a process so important could not have started up within her undetected. Maybe the whole upheaval of the morning had killed whatever chance they’d had. The sperm that had been nuzzling its head into the egg had died of shock from all the fear going through her, and the egg went black. Or she had killed it by sheer force of will. Or maybe no sperm had even made it there.
Maybe his little guys just aren’t swimmers, she thought.
She refused to tell Kyle why she was laughing, and he pouted silently for the rest of the way home.
A few weeks later, when a store-bought test added its semi-official authority to what she already knew intuitively – that there was nothing Kyle-like growing inside her – she wrapped the dipstick in toilet paper and hid it at the bottom of the bathroom garbage can, regretting the $20 she’d wasted on the test.
“DISAPPOINTMENTS ARE ARROWS, NOT STOP SIGNS.”
– Grow for It, Theo Hendra
There began a season of calamities and minor fuck-ups. Jeremy, like an animal that sensed changes in the air pressure and took shelter before a storm, could usually tell when these kinds of things were on their way, but this time they completely blindsided him. He had been walking around with such a glow for so long that it was even more of a shock to discover, yet again, that the universe didn’t give a shit about his mood.
First, one of the younger Tactix players got hit by a car while crossing the street to get to the Shack for a game. The car clipped him as he stepped off the curb, sending him back into a mailbox and shattering his leg and hip. Jeremy had been sitting and dozing at the cottage when it all happened. When he got back, he had the accident recounted to him by customers who had turned to look out the front window just as the poor kid got lifted and thrown aside.
Congratulations On Everything Page 20
