Finally the two mothers go back outside and start down the long staircase together, clutching their cold beer bottles.
Ruth grips the splintery railing with her free hand and follows her friend down to the beach, trying to make her feet move faster than they want to go.
“Whoa,” Stef says over her shoulder, “what’s the rush? You’re on Cottage Time now.”
“I just want to get back to Fern, that’s all.”
“Sammy’s down there, don’t worry about it. Sorry we were late, by the way. We lost track of time. But hey, you got to meet Marvin! Isn’t he great?”
Ruth nods. “He offered to watch Fern while I peed in the bushes.”
“See? What a guy.”
“Except I don’t know him, so I didn’t think that was a good idea.”
“I assume he told you I know him, though.” Stef’s voice tightens. “Right?”
“He did.”
“Jesus, what’s he going to do? You could’ve left her with him for a minute.” Stef stops walking and turns around, so Ruth has to stop walking too. “Marvin’s a weirdo, but he’s harmless. He and his wife look after the twins sometimes. Do you think I’d let them babysit if I didn’t trust him?”
“No,” Ruth says quickly, “of course not.” She hates the smallness of her voice.
The two of them stand there, surrounded by trees. Ruth thinks, stupidly, This really is a beautiful spot.
When she was a kid, her mom and dad rented a tiny cottage for two weeks every summer. It was just the three of them, and they’d let her stay up past her bedtime and eat Froot Loops and Jiffy Pop, and then her dad would take her out onto the dock to look at the stars. They used a flashlight to get there, but once they were sitting down, he switched it off. Then the night was all around them and the lake was going swish-swish and he’d point out the constellations to her, one by one.
“Exactly,” says Stef. “They’re good neighbours, which counts for a lot around here. Apparently we have to rely on our neighbours in cottage country—we’ve joined a community.” She performs a dramatic shiver of revulsion, then turns and keeps going.
The laughter falls out of Ruth, like it always does. Laughing is good, she thinks. It makes everything easier.
From somewhere down below, a few elated squeals drift up. More happy sounds.
“His wife, Lesley, is big into baking pies,” Stef goes on. “She’s got time for shit like that because they don’t have kids. She made us a peach one after we moved in and Marvin carried it over on his paddleboard.”
Ruth tries to see what the girls are doing, but the foliage is thick on both sides so there’s only green. “How was it?”
“I have no idea. It sat on the counter for a few days and then I threw it out.” Stef points at something grey as they round a bend. “Watch yourself there.”
When she sees what Stef is talking about, Ruth skids on some loose gravel and sucks in a breath. “Oh.”
The wasps’ nest is hanging from a low branch, ugly and bulging and too close to the stairs.
“Fern’s never been stung before,” she says.
“Yeah, neither have the twins.” Stef waves a dismissive hand as they pass by. “It’s fine. Just steer clear of them and they’ll steer clear of you.”
“Okay.” Ruth frowns as she focuses on her descent. “If you say so.” She’s almost sure she can hear buzzing behind them.
The girls’ squeals intensify as they get closer to the beach.
“Mommmmyyyyy!”
“I’m here, Fern!” she calls, quickening her pace.
She’s nearly at the bottom now. Only a few more steps to go.
And then at last she has an unobstructed view, and there is her child. Hurtling across the beach with Amelia and Isabelle. Because Marvin is chasing them.
Ruth’s voice is sharp: “Stef, where’s Sammy?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
In her rush to reach her daughter, Ruth trips on the final stair and lands with a grunt. Her beer bottle goes flying and shatters on a rock.
Now the sand around her is full of broken glass.
“Mommy!” hollers Fern. “We’re playing monster!”
Only a few metres away, the three girls swerve toward them.
“Stay there!” Ruth shouts. “Don’t move!”
Stef stops behind her. “I knew I should’ve given you a can. I was just going to slum it with a couple Bud Light Limes, but no, you made me get the fancy microbrews from the back of the fridge.”
“Is there a snake, Mommy?” Fern is standing perfectly still between Amelia and Isabelle.
Closer to the water, Marvin is bent over, fiddling with his feet. “No snakes,” he says. “Just a teeny accident.” He straightens up and strides over in flippers, wielding a pink plastic rake and a yellow plastic bucket, both instruments tiny in his giant hands.
The little girls giggle uproariously as he shuffles past them.
“You’re awesome,” Stef tells him, with a sideways glance at Ruth.
He shrugs away the compliment and begins sifting through the sand with the rake, picking up the jagged amber shards and dropping them into the bucket, which is adorned with a cartoon frog in a coconut bra and hula skirt.
Ruth stays absolutely still as he crouches next to her and lays his palms on the sand and sweeps cautious circles all around her until he’s satisfied the danger is gone.
When she and her dad were done looking at the stars, they always made their way back to the cottage without the flashlight. “Because our eyes have adjusted,” he would say. “We can see in the dark now, just like the nocturnal animals.” She held his hand, which was so much larger than hers and always warm. She walked along the path carefully, startled the whole way by all the outside noises she wasn’t used to. “It’s okay,” he’d say. “You’re safe.” And she was.
“All clear.” Marvin offers a hand to help her up. “And the other good news is, Sammy’s in the boathouse right now restocking the beer fridge.”
“Oh, shit,” says Stef. “I forgot his beef jerky.”
Ruth lets Marvin pull her to her feet. “Looks like you saved the day,” she tells him.
“Does that mean I can stay here with you guys?” His voice is pleading, over the top. “I don’t want to go home yet.”
“What do you say, Ruth?” says Stef. “Should we let him stay?”
“Mommy?” calls Fern. “Is it safe now?”
Ruth nods, and her daughter rockets over and snuggles against her legs. She reaches down and rubs Fern’s back. “Sure, why not.”
The grin Marvin gives her is so wide, it nearly splits his handsome face in two. “I knew you liked me.”
She sees the streak of red then, bright against her child’s skin, and gasps.
“Don’t worry, it’s from me. From when I helped you up.” Marvin displays his bleeding hand, and winces as he picks out the tiniest piece of glass.
RUTH SMOOTHS THE beach towel over the sand for her and Fern. Fern doesn’t like it when there are lumps underneath. If James were here with them, he’d be giving Ruth the look that said, Don’t worry about it.
She gives up and sits down and pulls Fern onto her lap so the lumps won’t offend her immediately.
Marvin is smiling at her over the lid of Stef and Sammy’s cooler, just a few feet away. “Here you go,” he says, and extends his arm to hand her a shiny can of beer. “A prize for the best mom in town.”
“Oh. Thanks.” She takes it from him and their fingertips touch for the briefest instant, and heat crawls up her neck and cheeks and makes her hairline prickle with moisture.
“Where’s your bathing suit?” he asks her. “Don’t you like to swim?”
“Not today.” She should’ve changed into shorts when she was inside. It’s way too hot for jeans. She presses the cold aluminum against her forehead and gazes at the sparkling lake.
He’s still looking at her. “You’re an interesting specimen.”
Fern cuddles clo
ser, wrapping her arms around Ruth’s middle. “She’s my mommy!”
“That’s me.” Ruth bends forward, hiding behind her curtain of dark hair, and brushes her lips against the top of Fern’s fluffy, yellow head. Feather-soft at first but then with more pressure, to remind herself that her daughter is right here, in kissing distance.
Marvin gets up and walks over to sit down beside them. “Lucky girl,” he says, and she isn’t sure which one of them he’s talking about.
Nearby, Stef and Sammy lay out their own brightly coloured beach towels. Then Sammy starts blowing up an inflatable raft while the twins fling sand toys into the air and screech in protest over Stef’s sunscreen-application attempts. She snaps at their bathing-suit straps and slaps on some lotion, but they wriggle free before she can rub it in.
Then Stef looks over at Ruth and Marvin and Fern, and for a moment she stands completely still with her hands on her hips, watching them, before she plunges back into the fray.
A few days earlier, Stef had called Ruth from the cottage and said, “My family is driving me crazy. I love them but I want to kill them. We just had Sammy’s brother and his wife here, and they provided zero relief because all they wanted to do was talk about what life will be like when the baby comes, and I said, ‘Here’s your preview. It will be hell. Now shut up and talk about something else.’ But they never did. And of course Beth-Anne wasn’t boozing but Danny wouldn’t touch a drop either because he’s doing this solidarity thing, which is super annoying if you ask me, but whatever. So you have to come up. I need to drink more, and if you guys are here then I’ll have an excuse to go through more wine without feeling like I have a problem. And you should stay for a week because the summer’s almost over and I really want to show the place off and brag about how we own this gigantic piece of useless land in the godforsaken wilderness now.”
“Ha ha,” Ruth said into the phone. She was surrounded by unpacked boxes in the kitchen of their new house, assembling the ingredients for high-fibre, low-sugar energy balls. She’d found the recipe in a parenting magazine, which proclaimed they were full of nutrition and a “no-fail hit” with kids. The accompanying photo, of a plate piled high with glistening brown nuggets, had turned her stomach.
“Seriously,” said Stef, “you have to see this place. It looks like an actual Swiss chalet. But without the tasty chicken and fries and that sauce they have that’s straight out of heaven and the fingerbowls for rinsing your greasy chicken-hands afterwards. So basically a chalet with none of the good things about a chalet.”
Stef and Sammy had bought the cottage at the start of the summer, shortly after Ruth and James had signed the mortgage for their new house. Nearly every day since, Stef had bugged Ruth and James to drive up for a visit, and Ruth kept coming up with reasons not to go.
“It sounds great,” she said, “but we’re still settling in here, and I’m pretty busy getting Fern ready for kindergarten . . .”
From the family room down the hall, Fern started giggling at whatever was happening on Puppy Commander, and Ruth checked the clock and realized she’d lost track of how long the TV had been on. She tried to ignore the stab of guilt as she counted out twenty cashews. Or was it thirty? If it was thirty, she didn’t have enough. She checked the recipe again. Goddammit.
“Are you kidding me?” Stef snorted. “Take the child to Old Navy and let her pick out a new outfit for the first day. Boom. She’s ready. Now get packing.”
“I don’t mean buying stuff—” She stopped, because Stef would laugh at her. She meant reading books about starting kindergarten, exploring the schoolyard together, showing Fern the door she would take to her classroom. Reassuring her and preparing her. Ruth jammed her phone between her shoulder and her ear so she could dump two cups of rolled oats into the mixing bowl. “We’ve just been talking about what it will be like,” she said. “So she won’t be scared.”
“Why would she be scared? The twins will be there.”
Because they all lived in the same neighbourhood now, like a big, happy family. Just two months ago, Stef had been walking to the park with the twins. “They were going stupid-slow,” she told Ruth and James later, “and I was yelling at them to hurry the hell up and then we turned the corner and ta-da! There it was.” She texted a photo of the for-sale sign to James, and later that same day he and Ruth were bidding on the place with the real estate agent Stef had found for them, and then they were moving out of their cozy apartment on the other side of town and moving into a big, echoey house right around the corner from their closest friends.
James had strolled into the kitchen then and plucked the phone away from Ruth. “Hello, Stef? Did you just invite us to your cottage again?” A pause. “Thank you very much. We’re looking forward to it.”
Ruth snatched her phone back from him as Stef was saying, “Thank God. Forests are boring and I’m completely miserable without you.”
Without who? Ruth had wanted to say, but Stef had already hung up.
She set her phone down on the counter and scowled at James. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I love you but you’re stressing me out, so I’m forcing you to take a vacation.” He leaned over to sniff at the brown sludge in their food processor. “What’s this?”
Ruth scowled harder. “Date syrup.”
“Why?”
“Because I want our daughter to be healthy.”
“Ah.”
She crossed her arms. “It’s going to be delicious.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you.”
“Really?”
“Ruthie. Come on.” James grabbed her elbow and pulled her into a hug.
“She wants us to stay for a whole week. That’s a long time. And we’ll get back right before school starts. I wanted more time to get ready.”
“You have all those happy memories of going to a cottage with your folks when you were little, right? Now Fern will too.” He grinned. “And aren’t you always saying she needs more fresh air, and that being out in nature is good for her health?”
“Yes, but—”
A fresh round of frenzied cartoon barking issued from the family room, followed by Fern’s hysterical laughter, and Ruth sighed.
“How about you and Fern go ahead and I’ll stay behind and finish the unpacking?” he said. “Then everything will be done when we come back home.”
For a moment she was frozen, limbs thick with indignation. Then she relented and rested her head against his chest. “I still have to buy Fern a lunch bag.”
“I’ll buy the lunch bag.”
“It has to be cute. And insulated. And we need mini ice packs. And we’ll miss you.”
“Check, check, check. And I’ll be there after a day or two.” He kissed her. “We’re going to have fun.”
Now it’s the late afternoon on a lovely day and the sun is beating down and James isn’t here and Ruth would rather be anywhere else, but she shouldn’t think that because they’re with their friends on a free holiday and Fern is sitting in her lap, waving a pink shovel at her and asking, “Will you dig with me, Mama?”
“Of course.” She smiles and takes the shovel, bumping her thumb across the tiny rubber hearts on its handle. “I would love to dig with you.”
Stef glowers as the twins dodge her lotion-covered hands again. “Fine, you two want to burn? Then burn. Go play.”
The two girls stick out their pointy tongues and galumph off.
Ruth has already slathered her own daughter in chalky, all-natural sunblock. Now Fern’s warm, sticky, organic-coconut-smelling body is making her sweat even more as she shoves the toy spade into the sand.
Stef wipes her palms on her thighs, leaving matching white streaks, and grabs a beer from the cooler. The can hisses when she pops it open. “Here’s to Cottage Time.”
“To Cottage Time!” Sammy and Marvin shout in unison.
Ruth yawns, and Stef arches an eyebrow. “Are we keeping you up?”
“It was a long drive,” says
Ruth. “And I’m old.”
“You’re not old. You’re the same age as me.” Stef turns to their neighbour. “How old are you, Marvin?”
“Old enough to know better.” He winks at her. “Or forty-six, if you want to get specific.”
“Ahhh!” She reels back, cackling gleefully. “You’re like our dad!”
Sammy rolls his eyes. “He’s four years older than us.”
“To the forties!” Stef raises her can again. “The golden age of wisdom, rugged good looks, and not giving a fuck.”
Ruth coughs, widening her eyes in Fern’s direction.
“She’s oblivious,” says Stef. “Don’t worry about it.”
Ruth takes a long sip of her beer and abandons the shovel. Fern hands her a green plastic turtle mould next, and she fills it with sand and tamps it down as Amelia and Isabelle wade into the lake together, holding hands.
At the beginning of the summer, the two families had celebrated the new cottage and the new house with a barbecue in Stef and Sammy’s backyard, which was now only a few backyards away from Ruth and James’s. The adults were drinking margaritas on the patio and the children were playing “dog,” which meant they were taking turns tying a skipping rope around each other’s waists and yanking on it.
Ruth had said, as she often did, “It must be nice, having twins.”
“Oh yeah,” Stef had sputtered. “It’s awesome!”
“Every time we cross the road or go to the playground or do anything, we basically wait for one of them to die,” said Sammy. “Because it’s impossible to watch them both at the same time. They’re so fast.”
“And stupid,” said Stef.
Sammy nodded. “Yeah, really dumb.”
“It’s not like I planned it this way, obviously.” Stef shook her head as their three girls ran around the yard, barking. “I only wanted one, but my uterus got greedy.”
James had laughed and laughed.
But Ruth had swallowed a mouthful of sour ice and said, “But they keep each other company. With an o-n-l-y c-h-i-l-d, you worry about them being lonely all the time.”
“She can’t hear us,” James told her. “You don’t have to spell.”
Worry Page 2
