“The grass is always greener,” said Stef. “But when you’re the only kid, your friends are your family. You and James and I all figured that out, right?”
Ruth shrugged. “I guess we did.”
“And so will Fern. And if she doesn’t, there’s always booze. For you, I mean. Not for her. That would be bad parenting.” Stef raised her glass, grinning. “And now you’re within stumbling distance from us, so you can drink even more!”
Fern had looked over at them then, and she had the rope around her neck. As Ruth bolted toward her, she asked, “What grass is greener, Mama? I want to see it. And I’m not lonely right now.”
Sammy’s cheeks balloon out with his last few breaths into the air mattress. He’s sitting cross-legged on the sand with it, bending forward at an awkward angle. His eyes are bulging and his face is red with the exertion.
“Ooh,” says Stef, “slide that over here when you’re done, big boy.”
He jams in the plug and shakes a victorious fist in the air, then flops down onto the raft with a mournful sigh and rubs his hairy belly. “My sweet, salty, dehydrated beef, how I yearn for you.”
“Fine, be that way.” Stef glares at him, then says to Marvin and Ruth, “Did you hear about that comedian who died? That adorable short guy from that show? His torso was almost non-existent but I was totally in love with him.”
“He hanged himself,” says Sammy. “Stopped being funny real fast after that.”
“That’s too bad.” Marvin takes a long sip of his beer. “He must’ve had a good reason, though.”
“Whoa, welcome to Downer Town,” says Stef. “I’m trying to talk about comedy here. Also throbbing carnal desire.”
“He’s dead.” Sammy tosses a handful of sand at her. “I’m all you’ve got left.”
Stef unleashes a melodramatic wail. “But I miss him!”
Sammy rolls his eyes and gets another beer.
A few seagulls are circling overhead, screeching at them.
Marvin glances up at the birds and then gets to his feet. He moves a few paces away from the other adults and Fern, closer to the twins and their laughter and splashing.
Isabelle and Amelia keep playing, running back and forth through the shallow water. They notice Marvin and whisper something to each other. All at once they sprint out of the lake and over to his paddleboard that he’s left on the sand. They hold hands and start jumping up and down on it, looking directly at him the whole time.
He doesn’t react to their antics. He doesn’t smile. He just stands there as the gulls wheel and scream above them.
Stef and Sammy are still focused on taunting each other and they haven’t seen any of it.
Fern stares up at Ruth, pulling her attention back. “Who’s dead, Mama?”
Instead of answering, Ruth lifts the plastic mould to reveal a perfectly formed sand turtle. “Look what Mommy made!”
“Ooh,” Fern coos. “I think it’s a baby.”
Stef whacks Sammy’s arm. “You’re just jealous because you can’t tell a joke to save your life.”
Marvin turns around and walks back to the group, and he’s smiling again. “These guys crack me up,” he tells Ruth. “They’re a riot, the way they pretend to fight. I love it.”
“Nothing pretend about it, my friend.” Sammy blows Stef a kiss and she mimes choking on it, bugging out her eyes and clawing at her throat.
“See what I mean?” Marvin slaps his thigh. “When my wife and I argue, we do it for real. That’s why I like coming over here. Life’s too short.” He sits down and says, almost as an afterthought, “I do love her, though.”
“All couples fight,” says Stef, her eyes on Ruth. “Even the perfect ones.”
Ruth stares at the beads of condensation on her icy can. As soon as she wipes one away, another one takes its place. This annoys her more than it should, and she keeps on wiping.
“So,” says Marvin, “how do you all know each other?”
“Ruth and I went to school together,” Stef tells him.
“Ah, so you two go way back. I bet you wild girls got up to a few naughty things in your time, right?”
“Primary school!” Stef yells. “We met in kindergarten, you creepy man.”
“Oops,” says Marvin. “But I bet you’ve gotten up to some trouble since then, though, eh?”
“Smooth,” says Stef. “And yes.”
Fern whispers, “What naughty things did Auntie Stef do?”
Ruth pictures Stef and James alone in a room somewhere. In multiple rooms. In dormitories and offices, on boats and islands. They spend so much time together, and they know each other so well.
She shakes her head at herself and whispers back, “They’re just being silly.”
“We were the only onlies in our class,” Stef tells Marvin. “And all the kids with siblings were weird.”
“I thought some of them were nice,” says Ruth.
“Yeah,” says Stef, “but I was the best.”
“Anyway,” says Sammy, “if it was really an actual life-or-death situation, I could tell a joke. I know lots of jokes. I’m a joke machine.”
“Knock, knock!” Fern shouts.
Marvin leans toward her. “Who’s there?”
Ruth thinks, Too close.
“Barry.”
“Barry who?”
“Barry the treasure where no one can find it!”
And Marvin roars. He doubles over with mirth, too much, too loud.
But Fern laughs too, which means everything must be okay.
“Barry, like bury,” says Marvin. “That’s brilliant.”
Sammy’s phone jingles. He squints at the screen and then holds it up. “Bev and Wally calling!”
Stef groans. “Isabelle! Amelia! Geema and Geepa want FaceTime!”
“Yay!” The twins run over and snatch the phone from their dad’s hand and immediately start chattering to it.
“We could go to the moon and they’d track us down.” Stef shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “There’s no escape.”
“That reminds me,” says Ruth. “Mom says hi.”
“Aww, isn’t that sweet. Tell her hi back. No, wait. Tell her hello.” Stef exaggerates the last word, drawing it out. Making it oddly formal. “Tell her I miss her and I hope she’s holding up and all that.”
“Okay, I will. Thanks.” Ruth nods. “How are your folks doing?” The question skips out of her, too lightly.
“How do you think?” Stef asks sharply, and Ruth winces.
She looks down, fiddling with a knot in Fern’s hair. “I wouldn’t know.”
Stef stares at the lake. “Yeah, well, neither would I.”
“Stop it, Mommy!” Fern jerks her head away from Ruth’s hands.
“Sorry, honey,” she murmurs.
“Hey,” says Sammy, “did you guys see that YouTube video with the wiener dog that runs into the ocean with the GoPro strapped to its neck?”
“It wasn’t an ocean,” Stef says. “It was a lake.”
“And that’s important to the story how?” Sammy gives her a look, then shouts, “Girls! Give me my phone back!”
Amelia gallops over and tosses it to him. “Geema and Geepa were being boring so we hung up on them,” she says, and runs back to her sister.
Ruth finishes her beer and sets the empty can down in the sand. The lake shimmers, beckons.
Her daughter squirms in her lap, trying to find the most comfortable spot, and Ruth makes an irritated face before she can stop herself.
“Hey, hey!” James had said a few weeks ago, when the three of them were at a public pool and Ruth had made the same face without even realizing it. He’d seized Fern out of her arms and tickled her until she squealed. “Why don’t you swim with Daddy for a bit? Let’s give Mommy a break.”
Fern had furrowed her brow. “Why does Mommy need a break?”
“Well,” he said, “there are a million reasons. Which one would you like to hear first?”
Ruth’s jaw tigh
tened. I was fine, she’d wanted to say. We were fine. But instead she just flipped onto her back, kicking her feet and windmilling her arms until she was in the deep end, all the way at the other side of the pool.
They’d gone swimming to escape the new house, which was crowded with boxes and all the work they had to do to make it feel like a home, and Ruth didn’t want to do any of it. She’d neatly organized and clearly labelled all of Fern’s things when she’d packed them, but she’d been haphazard with her own stuff and now she couldn’t find anything when she needed it. She missed their little apartment on the other side of town and she wanted James to miss it too. But he kept going on about how great the new place was and how lucky they were that Stef had found it for them, and then Ruth had made that face and he had no idea why.
She stayed in the deep end for a while, treading water while James and Fern splashed each other and laughed and waved at her. And eventually she swam back over because she missed them.
“What happens to the dog?” Marvin asks Sammy.
“Nothing. It just runs into the water.” He aims a pointed look at his wife. “It doesn’t matter what kind of water it is.”
“Uh-huh,” says Stef.
Over by the dock, Isabelle is examining an object on the sand. Then Amelia walks over with a stick and starts poking at whatever’s there.
Stef leans sideways to drape an arm over her husband’s shoulders, and plants a wet kiss on his gleaming bald head. “Look at our gorgeous, golden offspring with their terrifying praying-mantis bodies.”
He barks out a laugh, shrugging her off. “Their knees and elbows are extremely pointy, it’s true.”
“Stop that,” says Marvin. “They’re just right.”
“Okay, okay.” Stef holds up her hands. “Her child is too cute to live, though.” She nods over at Ruth and Fern. “She’s like an elf crossed with a duckling.”
“I’d say that’s a fair assessment.” Marvin gives Fern another wink, and she scowls at him and Stef.
“I’m not a duck,” she says, and finally climbs off Ruth and moves away to sit by herself.
As soon as she’s gone, Ruth aches for her, even though she’s more comfortable now.
Marvin says, “So does the dog go swimming, or what?”
“It’s not one of those ones where the animal gets h-u-r-t, is it?” says Ruth.
Stef pats her hand. “You don’t have to spell. She’s not paying attention.”
Fern is digging a shallow trench in the sand, tongue stuck out in deep concentration.
“Wiener dogs have those stubby legs, right,” says Sammy, “so it goes under really fast. But I don’t think the dog drowns or anything. At least, they don’t show that part.”
Next, Fern carefully lines up rocks along the edge of her ditch.
“Here, I’ll find it for you.” Sammy starts tapping at his phone.
Nearly instantaneously, Amelia and Isabelle are racing over, shouting, “Video! Video!” Amelia is still carrying the stick, but now there’s something on the end of it.
“And now you have to jump,” says Fern. “I’m sorry, but you have to.” Then she places a finger on each of the rocks in turn, and pushes.
“Okay, here you go.” Sammy passes his phone to Marvin.
“You girls want to watch it with me?” Marvin asks, and it takes Ruth a moment before she realizes he’s talking to the kids.
“Fern doesn’t need to see it,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Then she can play with this!” trills Isabelle, and she grabs the stick from her sister’s hand, and Ruth can see now that the thing on the end of it is a dead fish. Most of the body has rotted away, but the backbone and tail are still stubbornly attached to the head.
Now it’s a puppet with pursed lips and empty eyeholes bobbing toward her terrified daughter, who crab walks backward to get away from it.
Ruth waits for Stef or Sammy to step in, but her friends just drink their beer as the twins slink closer and closer to Fern, ponytails swishing.
“Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me!” Amelia rasps, hiding her face behind the fish’s.
“That’s enough,” Ruth says, loudly, but nobody pays attention.
Then Marvin shouts, “Hey, it’s on now, you’re going to miss it!” waving the shiny silver device like a flare.
And all at once, the sisters lose interest in their game and hurry over to him, dropping the stick and resting their chins on each of his shoulders. Folding their skinny arms and legs around him in an effort to get the best possible view.
Ruth picks up Fern and hugs her so tightly that she squawks, “Put me down, Mama!” But she doesn’t. Not yet.
After all the anticipation, the clip is exactly what Sammy said it would be. Someone straps a camera to a dachshund’s neck, and then the perspective switches to the dog’s as it runs into some water and is quickly submerged.
When it’s over, Marvin hands the phone back to Sammy and nods. “Yep, that’s a good one.”
THEY STAY ON the beach until dinnertime, and then everyone heads back up to the cottage.
It’s silly to call it a cottage, really, because the place is huge.
It feels small right now, though, with all of them crowding in from outside. Stef and Sammy go to the kitchen and Amelia and Isabelle prowl around the living room in their wet bathing suits and drip all over the glossy wood floor. Ruth and Fern huddle together in the middle of everything and Marvin towers over them, taking up space with his wide shoulders and wider grin.
“Go upstairs and get some dry clothes on,” Stef tells the twins.
“Not yet!” shouts Amelia.
“We want chips!” shouts Isabelle.
“I’m making a salad.” Stef uncaps a bottle of Havana Club. “Are your legs broken?”
“No,” says Isabelle, “somebody chopped them off and there’s blood everywhere.”
“Jesus Christ.” Stef rolls her eyes and starts pouring drinks.
Sammy opens the fridge and pulls out a plate stacked with glistening slabs of raw meat. “Hello, my rib-eye children. I am going to cook you and eat you now.”
Fern is gaping at Isabelle. “I don’t see any blood.”
Ruth strokes Fern’s cheek. “She was just joking.”
“Sammy?” says Stef. “A little help?”
“Don’t look at me.” Sammy grabs a barbecue lighter from the counter and squeezes the trigger, then makes a show of blowing out the flame. “The grillmeister must grill.” He points the lighter at Marvin. “And the grillmeister’s assistant must assist.”
“If I must,” says Marvin, “I must.”
On his way to the screen door, Sammy slips on a small puddle of lake water. His arms shoot out and he finds his balance, but drops the steak plate. It breaks on the floor and splatters the wall with red.
Isabelle smirks. “I told you there was blood everywhere.”
“Isabelle! Amelia!” Stef shouts. “Take. Those. Wet. Suits. Off. Right. Now!”
Amelia sneers at her. “Fine.” She flicks a look at her sister, and in one coordinated motion, the twins strip off their suits in the middle of the living room. Then they seize each other’s hands and whirl around and around, shrieking.
Fern stares at them, and so does Ruth.
The girls’ bodies are luminous blurs of sharp angles and soft curves, with shoulder-blade wings and the faint outlines of ribs like long, clutching fingers. Their white teeth flash and their long hair flies, and Ruth wants to whirl with them.
They keep dancing in their tight circle, reckless and free and absolutely connected, and Ruth grasps her own daughter’s hand and pulls her toward the living room. But stops.
Because Marvin is staring too. His mouth even hangs open slightly.
Then Stef breaks the spell and yells, “Upstairs, you two!”
The twins finally obey and scurry off.
Sammy gets a new plate and crouches over the fallen meat. Each piece makes a gentle sucking sound when he picks it up.
�
�Grillmeister, let’s go,” he tells Marvin, who nods, and the two men head out to the deck.
“Well, fuck.” Stef walks over with a tumbler of rum and Coke and a dustpan. “That was exciting.”
Fern yawns, and Ruth picks her up and holds her close. “Let’s get out of here,” she says, and they go.
RUTH DRAPES FERN’S dry towel over the couch in the playroom downstairs and then helps Fern out of her swimsuit in the bathroom, and her naked child stands before her with her little arms crossed. “You said we would go swimming but we didn’t.”
“I know, honey. I’m sorry. We’ll swim tomorrow, okay?”
Fern sighs. “Okay.” Her small shoulders slump like James’s do when he’s disappointed.
She also has her father’s pale-blue eyes, and she’s blonde like him too. Whenever Ruth searches her daughter for evidence of herself, she always comes up empty. “She has your eyelashes,” James likes to joke. Even though she doesn’t, not really.
“It’s getting late,” she tells Fern. “Maybe we should put your pyjamas on?”
Fern nods, and her compliance makes Ruth hopeful. But then she starts to pull the pyjama shirt over Fern’s head and Fern yanks it back up. “No!” The fabric stretches around her seething face, the neck opening wide and pulling the soft skin tight. “I can do it myself!”
“Okay, okay.” Ruth holds up her hands, taking a few steps back.
“And I want privacy.”
“Oh.” She stops. “Are you sure?”
The clouds in her daughter’s eyes darken, the wind whipping up. “Get out!”
“I’m going.” Ruth lays the pyjama pants by the tiny, wiggling toes. “I’ll be right outside, okay?” She pulls the door shut gently and hopes Fern doesn’t notice when she wedges her foot in at the bottom to stop her from using the lock.
Then she stands in the empty playroom and waits.
Above them, the twins’ feet pound across the floor. Back and forth, wildly, like they’re chasing each other.
After several minutes, Fern pulls open the door and runs out of the bathroom, triumphant and resplendent in her pink-and-purple baby-hedgehog-parade sleep set, and yells, “Look at me!”
And Ruth applauds and tells her daughter what a good job she did and hugs her, and her daughter hugs her back.
Worry Page 3
