Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  And she’d smite them all with an envious glare.

  The fact that her childish fears still loomed large in her life was not the kind of thing she could discuss with Adam. Or anyone, really. She looked down at her wrist and fiddled with the red string that was there (she didn’t practice kabbalah; the red string guarded against the evil eye and was less obvious than a necklace, so Liane wore it on the off chance that anyone ever became envious of her), then abandoned her work, even going so far as to shut down her laptop in an act that felt final, defiant. It’s only for now. I just need a break.

  She went outside and sat on the end of the dock. There was a slight chill in the air. Summer had not yet taken hold. The dock next door was empty, and no sounds were carried to her across the small expanse of water. She thought about what she might say, if she could work up the courage to talk to the Reading Man. Hi, would be a start. But, historically, she had never been able to do this.

  • • •

  Liane had been in grade six when she had her first irrational crush on a boy she didn’t know. Boys she did know didn’t interest her at all, but sometimes she’d see a boy walking down the street or working at a store and suddenly think, That could be him, he could be The One. She’d gift him with all sorts of characteristics he probably didn’t have and lie in her bed at night dreaming up ideal meeting scenarios and perfect conversations. She would eventually feel like she knew the boy, even if she had just created an ideal version of him in her mind.

  This was back when she still believed in The One, of course. Now she wasn’t sure. But she was probably going to marry Adam anyway. “We should probably get married,” he had said to her a few weeks before while they were out for dinner, eating at their regular table in the corner of a picket-fenced patio they liked to frequent. Liane had wished not to feel so disappointed. A different type of woman, the woman Adam perhaps thought she was, would have been thrilled. So practical, yes, why didn’t they? They had made some rudimentary plans—nothing traditional, obviously, and not a destination wedding because it was overdone and presumptuous; how about cocktails? Adam even suggested screening their favorite movie for their friends. (It was a French noir film called Breathless, and it was his favorite, not hers. She didn’t point this out.) Popcorn. Spiked Cokes. But wasn’t that missing the point? The night was supposed to be about them. He had raised an eyebrow when she said this. About us? he had repeated. Liane hadn’t told anyone yet that they were engaged, if they really were. But she knew that marrying Adam would mark some sort of shift into a life she had to stick with. It had never occurred to her that she might not want to. She had always been the type of person to stick with everything.

  Back in grade six, Liane’s routine was to cut through the parking lot of the plaza across from her school every afternoon, although it wasn’t necessary for her to do so. Sometimes she would be with Ilsa, who was in eighth grade, but almost never with Fiona, who was in university by that point.

  When she passed the window of the pet food store, Liane would strain to catch a glimpse of the boy who worked there, while trying not to look like she was looking. He was much older than she, probably sixteen. She was only eleven. This, combined with the fact that he worked at a pet food store and she didn’t have any pets, meant meeting him was unlikely. But it didn’t matter. Liane didn’t know his name or anything about him other than the fact that he almost always wore a purple Barenaked Ladies hat.

  She listened to the album Gordon over and over. When school let out for the summer, she walked by the pet food store at least twice a day. She made Ilsa go with her to three Barenaked Ladies concerts in the hopes that she’d see the boy. She never did.

  “Why don’t you go in and buy a can of dog food or something?” Ilsa had asked after finally refusing to attend another concert, or listen to the song “Brian Wilson,” ever again. “He’ll never know you don’t have a dog.” They were standing outside the store. “Do it! I’ll wait here.” But Liane shook her head, embarrassed. To Ilsa it would have been nothing to saunter in, grab a can of dog food, and ask dozens of questions about it with her hand on the boy’s forearm. He probably would have asked Ilsa out, too. It didn’t matter that Ilsa was thirteen. She looked sixteen and acted even older. But Ilsa would have said no. She would have been angry with the boy, even though he couldn’t possibly have known that it was Liane, standing outside with red splotches on her pale, freckled cheeks, who had a crush on him.

  “I can’t,” Liane had said. “I just can’t. I can’t talk to him. I’ll die.”

  “No one has ever died from saying hello to their crush.”

  “I might be the first.”

  Eventually he had stopped working at the pet food store. It was a while before Liane stopped thinking of him every time she heard that song. Ring a bell and I’ll salivate. How’d you like that? You can call me Pavlov’s dog.

  Now Liane looked down at her empty hands. She was an engaged woman. Her days of girlish crushes were officially behind her. Whether she could bring herself to say hi to the Reading Man was of no consequence to anything.

  She stood and walked back up to the cottage, entering the living room and standing before the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Many of the books on it were hers, some were Helen’s, a few were Ilsa’s or Fiona’s or Liane’s father, Wesley’s, and others had been left by cottage guests. Mysteries and romances and crossword puzzle volumes shared space with Vonnegut (Wesley’s) and Plath (Helen’s), a biography of Violet Trefusis (Ilsa’s; she’d brought it to read the year before, sighed a lot, and left it on the shelf with a bookmark in the middle), Tolstoy (Liane and Ilsa shared the Tolstoy). The crosswords and Sudoku books were Fiona’s. Liane remembered Fiona saying something about how doing these guarded against Alzheimer’s disease. Everything Fiona did had a point.

  Liane continued scanning the shelf, then picked up a book called The Monsters of Templeton. It was unfamiliar to her, probably left by one of Helen’s friends. She took the book with her when she went upstairs to put on a bathing suit and a pair of denim shorts. With the book in her hands—it wasn’t a textbook, not even a classic; there was no reason she needed to read it, but she had been drawn to it by the black-and-white leaves and shadowy figures on the cover, and this was something she had not allowed herself for a long, long time—she went back to the dock.

  She stretched out her legs and started to read—pointlessly, simply for the pleasure of it, alone at the end of the dock, escaping from her own thoughts and memories into someone else’s plotline. She read the first line of the book twice: “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.” She looked out at the water and thought of the snapping turtle.

  At the end of the first chapter she heard the sound of footsteps on the dock next door. Instead of looking sideways, she looked up and around her, at trees and sky, then stretched and started reading again, feeling warm and indulgent. This is what you’re supposed to do at a cottage alone for a week.

  I looked up and began to spin. The stars streaked circular above me, my body was wrapped in the warm black, my hands had disappeared, my stomach was no longer, I was only a head, a pair of eyes. As I touched the beast I remembered how, even on that long-ago night, I could feel a tremendous thing moving in the depths below me, something vast and white and singing.

  She looked over at the man just as he looked up, his gaze moving away from his book and connecting with hers. And she wanted to say, I just read something I thought was beautiful, and it made me feel less afraid. Do you want to hear it? because she was sure at that moment that he would understand the joy of finding a book you’ve never read on your own shelf, falling into it quickly, and deciding to do nothing all day but read it. But instead she smiled at him (which was something, she told herself), trying not to squint too much in the sunlight. He smiled back, and they held on for an extra beat. Then they both looked out
at the water and back down at their books.

  • • •

  By the end of the day, Liane had accomplished the following: she had read the entire novel, infused iced tea with the perfect amount of mint leaves and strawberry, given herself a pedicure using Himalayan sea salt as a scrub and kefir as a foot masque (the former was ingenious, the latter quite gross), and smiled at the Reading Man twice, both times because she had looked up from her book to find him watching her, his own book broken-spined in his lap, the pages blowing in the wind. Eventually he cleared his throat and said, “Hi,” in a voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used for a while, and she said, “Hi,” in a voice that sounded the same.

  She didn’t die.

  • • •

  The next morning, Liane slid her laptop back into the bag she had brought it in. She took the cottage guest book out to the side porch with her coffee instead. She opened it and flipped backward in the book.

  Thank you Helen for a wonderful week. We made the most of the weather and still enjoyed many long walks, warm fires and great food. We appreciate you being so generous in offering it to us for the week. Sincerely, The Smiths (Terri and Dave).

  Liane yawned and turned the page. She had no clue who Terri and Dave were, but they sounded boring. Perhaps they were friends from the village Helen now lived in. Helen had once said that most of the people who lived there were boring, but that she loved them for that because it made her feel more interesting.

  On the next page she saw a familiar scrawl.

  Your children are gorgeous, your cottage is magical and you, of course, are a queen of all things. Love, Edie.

  Liane experienced a moment of surprise, because seeing Edie’s writing made her realize how many years had passed since any of them had seen her.

  Edie had not been boring. Liane had loved Edie. They all had—even Fiona, who had never liked any of Helen’s friends but had spent more time with Edie as a young child than any of the girls, since Helen had toured more back then. There had been some sort of falling-out between Helen and Edie, though, and she had disappeared from their lives around the time Fiona graduated from high school. Liane remembered this because Edie had come to the graduation and Helen had refused to speak to her. Liane had never asked Helen what had happened, and now she wondered why not. They had called her “aunt”; she had been Helen’s best friend.

  Liane looked down at the writing and remembered the time Edie had taken her, Ilsa, and Fiona on an “expedition” to catch caterpillars, which she had somehow known would make cocoons in the jars, which would then turn into butterflies, which the girls would then release at dusk. “Why at dusk?” Liane had asked Edie. “You must always release butterflies at dusk,” Edie had said, her voice full of the mysteries only a woman like her could fathom. She had long hair she braided around her head like a crown and she always wore swishy skirts and an anklet that tinkled when she walked.

  Liane closed her eyes. She remembered more: Ilsa’s jar hadn’t produced a cocoon. Her caterpillar had died. Later, Ilsa had told her she’d switched hers because she’d known something was wrong with Fiona’s—and that Fiona would hate to fail at producing a butterfly. “But didn’t you want one?” Liane had asked Ilsa. Ilsa had shrugged. “Not really. It felt wrong. And anyway, not as much as Fiona probably did.” Liane felt like she was the only person who knew that Ilsa really did love Fiona. She thought perhaps she should tell Fiona about the butterfly, but also that it was too late. My sisters don’t like each other. She realized this, also, as she continued to follow the loops of Edie’s cursive script with her eyes, and thought about how strange it was that there were truths that could exist in families that everyone ignored, even though they were devastating.

  Liane closed the book, stood, and went into the kitchen. She opened the cupboard closest to the stove and grabbed a box of spelt flakes and raisins. She scooped kefir onto the cereal. Then she saw her mobile phone sitting on the counter and brought it with her to the side porch. She thought about not calling Adam, but instead she did. She should have before now. It had been days. There were no missed calls, no texts from him, nothing.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, as though they had talked a few moments ago.

  “Eating breakfast.”

  “Ah, and you didn’t want to dine alone.”

  “Well, no, not really. I just realized I hadn’t called to tell you I arrived safely and thought you might . . .” She was about to say, be worried, but stopped, because it wouldn’t have been true, and what Adam said next confirmed this.

  “I figured I would have seen something on the news,” he, ever the pragmatist, said. “I thought you were probably wrapped up in your work and I didn’t want to bother you.” Pause. “Getting a lot done?”

  “Yes,” Liane lied. “A ton.”

  “Good. As am I.” There was another pause. Then: “I miss you,” Adam said. “The bed feels even bigger without you.” They’d just bought a king bed together, which seemed to have been or was supposed to have been symbolic of something, but in the end all it felt to Liane was vast. She couldn’t imagine it feeling any bigger than it already did. In the night she was so far away from Adam she felt alone. When he moved, she couldn’t feel anything. “I went out to that new restaurant on the corner with Jeff and Brynn,” he said. “It was awful. You would have laughed. The waiter didn’t even know what burrata was when we asked him.”

  “Well, why did you ask him if you already know what it is?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I should probably get back to work,” she said. “I miss you, too. See you next week.”

  She put down her phone and looked at her cereal. Outside, she could hear crickets and bullfrogs and a distant boat. The sound came closer and she found herself channeling Helen, clucking her tongue against her teeth.

  She realized she wasn’t hungry anymore. She left her cereal and went to the bookshelf, intent on finding another book to read because she already knew she was going to be taking another day off from her thesis. It would need to be the right book, one that would say something about her, just in case the Reading Man was checking out her book spines the way she was checking out his. (Halfway through the day before he had moved on to Tropic of Cancer, but then replaced it with The Sound and the Fury again. She wondered why.)

  Tropic of Cancer was there, on the bottom shelf. Her father’s, Liane remembered, picking it up and opening the cover, to where he had written his name: Wesley Robert. She remembered he had suggested she read it when she was only eight, the same year he had died. He had seemed strangely urgent about it, and now she supposed she knew why. “This is my favorite book,” he had said. “I always wanted to share it with you.” Liane was a good reader from a young age, and so she had tried because she adored her father. But eventually she had to concede defeat. “I’m sorry, Dad, but I have no idea what this book is supposed to be about.” “That’s okay, Li. It’s probably a guy thing, anyway.”

  She flipped through the pages of the book. A passage was underlined. “There are no more books to be written, thank God,” she read aloud. Wesley had wanted to be a writer, to pen something similar to his favorite book, and there were times when he would not sleep, seemingly for weeks on end, emerging from the study only to ecstatically declare it was going well and pour more coffee or brandy. Then the crash would come and he would shred the pages while Helen begged him not to.

  He seemed to give up in his final year, and Liane often wondered if that was why he had ended his life, or if the giving up had just been a symptom. But she would never know exactly why he had taken the kayak out onto the lake in late December, why he had weighted himself with rocks, why he had slid into the water to sink down, down, down into the icy depths. He hadn’t left a note and it had taken her years to accept this. She had searched the cottage every summer. And she wasn’t sure, as much as she loved and missed him, that she would eve
r be able to forgive him for not saying goodbye to her, for not leaving her fatherly instructions in some form. Instead, there was a boat in the shed and the feeling she got when she thought of him, one she had never been able to properly define: some combination of nostalgia, sadness, inadequacy, and disappointment. And the fear, of course. The Big Fear, that one day the darkness (more specifically, manic depression) would catch up with her, too. My life right now doesn’t feel happy enough to be able to avoid it.

  She picked up another book: Martha Gellhorn’s memoir, Travels with Myself and Another, about her marriage to Hemingway. It was Helen’s, dog-eared and old. When Liane opened it, there were many passages underlined. One of them: I knew enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man that hated his mother. She went to replace the book on the shelf, and that was when she saw the ring. An engagement ring, unmistakably so. A solitaire on a white gold antique scroll band, just languishing on the shelf. It must belong to one of Helen’s friends. Liane held it between her thumb and index finger and watched the stone catch the light prettily. She needed to text Helen and let her know it had been found so whoever had lost it could stop worrying.

  But first Liane slid the ring onto her finger, forcing it slightly. Then she stared at it and tried to decide if it looked right or not.

  It did not.

  She pulled the ring but it stuck at her knuckle. She pulled again. Nothing.

  And then there was a knock at the door.

  Another knock; another futile pull at the ring.

  At the door stood a man of about Helen’s age. He had a gray beard, brown eyes. He held a burlap bag with handles and there were various forms of roughage poking out the top. “I’m Iain, the neighbor,” he said, as though there were no other neighbors he could possibly have been.