She reaches the bottom and tiptoes closer to the couch, coming up behind the girls, and sighs with relief when she sees the bright cartoon characters on the screen.
“Hi, Mama,” whispers Fern.
“Hi, honey,” Ruth whispers back. She stands still and watches the movie for a while. It seems innocent enough.
Then the stairs creak.
A hulking shadow looms above them and begins to creep down. Closer and closer.
The children shriek and huddle together, and Ruth’s heart races as she hurries over to switch on the light.
“It’s okay,” she tells them. “It’s only Marvin.”
“Hi, kids!” He holds up three small bowls of bright orange pasta, which are dwarfed even more in his giant hands. “Who’s hungry?”
All three children shout at once, “Me!”
Marvin chuckles as he gives them their bowls. The twins first, then Fern.
When she takes her bowl and his hands are free, he reaches for her.
Ruth’s heart thumps harder and she takes a step toward them.
But he only taps Fern on the top of her head—once, twice. “Hey,” he says, “I like your towel.”
“Thank you.” Fern beams at him. “It’s my favourite.”
Isabelle and Amelia look over then, away from their food and the television, taking in the exchange and staring at Fern’s bright-yellow beach towel, which is emblazoned with lobsters wearing T-shirts. James gave it to Ruth a long time ago, after she first told him she was pregnant. He’d had that wonderful, crazed grin on his face when she unwrapped it, and when she looked confused, he said, “Let’s shell-ebrate!”
It’s a dumb towel, but Fern loves it anyway.
Marvin scuttles a spidery hand closer to her daughter, and all of Ruth’s muscles tense. He taps one of the scarlet claws and jerks his hand back. “Ouch!” he yelps, and Fern falls sideways laughing.
Ruth thinks, Lobsters only turn red after they’ve been boiled.
“Shh!” the twins admonish them, and Fern settles back and fixes her eyes on the TV screen with its flashing colours—purple and green and blue and a blast of pink—and eats her Kraft Dinner with a look of dazed rapture that Ruth has never seen before.
“They look like they’re having fun,” Marvin says when he and Ruth walk back over to the stairs. “Don’t they?”
Instead of answering him, she says, “I just have to get something.”
She leaves him there and goes to Fern’s bedroom to switch on the baby monitor she’d brought from home. Then she goes to her own room and unplugs the receiver by her bed. She holds it tight and wraps the cord around her other hand.
Marvin smiles when she returns, and they climb the stairs together.
“I like how careful you are with her,” he says when they get to the top.
“Thank you.” She only realizes then that she didn’t remind Fern to thank him for dinner. It’s too late now, though.
They walk through the cottage to the screened porch and Marvin shortens his long stride to match hers.
His breath is suddenly shallow, and Ruth wants to ask him if he’s all right but she doesn’t because there is something about his expression that stops her from saying anything. A thin wire stretches tightly between them, connecting them for this moment, and she sinks into their shared silence until Stef’s voice shatters it into a million pieces.
“What took you so long?” she shouts. “We were about to start eating each other!”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” says Ruth. “You already ate.”
“Oh, good lord,” says Stef. “I was being crude.”
“The crudest,” Sammy says, and gives his lips an exaggerated lick.
“I think we just lost our PG rating,” Marvin quips to Ruth, and she laughs.
“Ahh, I see how it is. Marvin’s jokes are funnier than mine now, right?” Stef reaches for the wine bottle. “Look at you two, getting all cozy.”
Ruth decides to ignore her, but when she sits at the picnic table next to Marvin, the heat from his bare skin is blazing and the triangle of hair on his chest is close to her eye level and she tries to shift farther away but there’s no room to go anywhere.
“You want to borrow a shirt, buddy?” Sammy asks, and Ruth squirms even more with the fact of Marvin’s half-nakedness being acknowledged like this, even though she’s not even looking at him at all.
She’s looking at Stef, who’s smirking, and Ruth grabs her own wine glass and finishes the few drops that are left inside.
“I wonder what James is doing right now,” her friend muses. “He should be here having fun with us but instead he stayed home like a good little husband. We’ll have to catch him up on all our adventures when he finally gets here.”
Marvin has been quietly eating the rest of his steak while they’ve been talking, but now he puts down his knife and fork and says, “My wife and I were at a mall last summer and something happened.”
“Whoa.” Sammy grips the table. “I’m on the edge of my seat already.”
Marvin gives him the barest hint of a smile. “It was back in the city where we used to live before we sold our house and moved up here for good. We were in the food court, eating some kind of crap.”
Sammy gestures grandly at the bloody scraps left on their plates. “So, not gourmet fare like this, you mean?”
“No, of course not. Nothing as good as this.” Marvin nudges his now-empty plate away, a tiny movement with just one finger. “Then we heard a child crying, so we looked around. And there she was. A little girl was sitting at a nearby table all alone. Lesley asked where her parents were, and she told us she was lost.”
Ruth is cradling the baby monitor in her lap. It lies there uselessly, the cord drooping.
“I thought about leaving her with the security guard on patrol,” he goes on, “but he looked like a creep. So Lesley took one of her hands and I took the other, and we walked all around the mall until we found her mom and dad. And do you know what they were doing?” He glances around the table. “Take a guess.”
Haltingly, Ruth asks, “Looking for her?”
Marvin shakes his head. “They were shopping. They didn’t even know she was gone.”
Stef dips a finger into the thin, red pool on her plate. Her mouth is a straight line. “What were they buying?”
“Shoes. A pair for each of them.” He smiles tightly and gulps his wine.
“Did they say thank you?” says Ruth. “To you and your wife?”
Sammy raises an eyebrow at her. “That’s a funny question.”
She stares back at him. “Why?”
Stef shuffles closer to her husband, and he puts his arm around her when she says,“Because of course they would.”
“You’d think that,” says Marvin. “But the answer is no.” He goes back to his wine, and the story is over.
Ruth scans around for an outlet and sees one on the wall beside her. She plugs in the little white box and sets it on the table, and the room immediately fills with the muffled noises from the movie downstairs.
Stef frowns at it. “Why’d you bring that up here?”
“In case something happens,” says Ruth.
Stef tilts her head. “What could happen?”
“Anything,” says Marvin.
As if on cue, a staticky squeal blares from the monitor, and Ruth jolts and knocks over her wine glass.
In a flurry of motion it breaks into pieces on the table and Stef rolls her eyes and says, “You’re a liability, woman,” and moves to sweep the shards into her hand—Why would she do that? It’s not safe, Ruth thinks—and then Stef yelps and yanks her hand back and sticks her thumb in her mouth, and when she pulls it out again there is blood on her lips.
“Babe,” Sammy says, “you cut yourself.”
“Shit,” says Stef. “Does somebody have a Band-Aid?”
“I’ve got some in the backpack,” says Ruth.
Stef flashes a gory grin. “Of course you do.”
>
Ruth gets up and goes to the living room, where the backpack waits in a corner.
An image appears in her mind: nine-year-old Stef sitting on Ruth’s mother’s lap in a hospital waiting room, holding her bandaged hand and squeezing tears out of the corners of her eyes. Stef had cut herself on glass back at their house and had a wide gash across her palm. She only did it for attention and now she was getting it so she was happy, not sad. Ruth could tell they weren’t real tears.
The waiting room was full and Ruth’s dad was sitting across from them, reading a magazine. Every so often he’d glance up at Ruth, in her chair next to her mom and Stef, and smile, and she’d smile back but only if Stef wasn’t watching.
The girls had been playing in the family room while Ruth’s parents were upstairs, and then Stef was mean and broke something like she always did.
“Does it still hurt?” Ruth’s mom asked Stef, and Stef nodded and made pathetic kitten sounds and cuddled in closer.
On the mint-green wall above their heads was a framed photograph of a wide-open field under fluffy, white clouds. Ruth sat on her hard, wooden waiting-room chair and stared at it. She wanted to climb into the picture and run across the grass and disappear into the trees that she knew were there, just outside the frame.
Ruth’s dad put down his magazine and stood up. “Ruthie, let’s go get some snacks.”
“Okay.” She jumped up, hiding her grin as she followed him out of the room.
“I want a Kit Kat!” Stef yelled after them, and then they were free.
The hallway outside extended infinitely in either direction. Ruth squinted but she couldn’t see the end anywhere.
“It’s a maze,” her dad said. “And there’s the treasure.”
He pointed at the vending machine to their right and Ruth ran over.
There were rows of red-and-yellow packages on top and rows of blue-and-green packages on the bottom. Someone must have arranged them that way, to look nice. Soothing colours in a sad place. By squeezing her eyes half shut, she could almost fool herself into thinking she was gazing at the sun setting over a lake. But only if she concentrated really hard.
“Did Stef break the photo on purpose?” her dad asked from way up above her.
She leaned forward and a small circle of the vending-machine window fogged up with her breath.
Stef had dangled a glass-framed photograph of Ruth and her parents, all three of them smiling, over the tiles on the edge of the family room. “Oh no,” she said, “this is very slippery.”
“Don’t!” said Ruth.
Stef frowned. “Do you actually think I would?” And then she dropped it and it smashed, and her mouth and her eyes went round with shock.
Ruth’s eyes widened too. “Now you’re in trouble.”
Stef knelt down and started picking up the pieces and sliced her hand almost immediately. “I think I need a Band-Aid,” she said numbly, and started to cry.
Behind the blur of condensation, all the colours in the vending machine bled together—red and yellow and blue and green. “No,” Ruth told her dad without looking at him. Even though she could’ve said yes, and he would’ve believed her. “It was an accident.”
“Okay.” He squeezed her shoulder. “She wanted a Kit Kat, right? What about you?”
She shook her head and reached up to rub the window so it was clear again. So that anyone passing by, with their own reasons to be sad, could get exactly what they wanted.
Ruth finds a Band-Aid in the backpack for Stef, who has followed her into the living room, and gives it to her. The cut is minor this time, skimming across the faded scar on Stef’s palm from her long-ago stitches.
“Thanks,” says Stef.
“Don’t mention it,” says Ruth, and they walk back to the screened porch, where Marvin and Sammy are arguing about something.
Both men’s voices are raised and Stef says, “Whoa, whoa!” as she slides back onto the picnic bench next to Sammy, whose face is ruddy and tense. “What’s going on here?”
Marvin grits his teeth, waving a dismissive hand at Sammy. “He doesn’t get it.”
Ruth hovers in the doorway, then takes a few tentative steps into the room. “Doesn’t get what?”
“That it’s not something to joke about.”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about.” Stef keeps her voice light, enunciating the words to make them sound goofy. Trying and failing to defuse the hostility that thickens the air.
“All I said was, ‘Everybody needs a break once in a while.’” Sammy crosses his arms. “I was merely observing—humorously—that those parents in the mall picked a good day to abandon their child. Because Marvin and Lesley were there.” He shakes his head at Marvin. “I was giving you a compliment.”
Marvin is trembling with anger now, but manages to keep his tone level. “And then you said I don’t have kids so I wouldn’t understand.”
Sammy throws up his hands. “But you don’t! And that wasn’t a dig! I am envious of you and your carefree lifestyle!”
“Jesus, Sammy,” says Stef. “Back off, okay? The guy’s upset.”
Ruth’s back is flat against the wall. She pushes harder but there’s nowhere else to go.
Marvin blows out a long breath. “Those people don’t deserve that little girl.”
The baby monitor crackles to life then, and a child’s disembodied voice bellows, “Mommmmyyyyy! It’s oooover!”
The wail echoes around the room, and all of the adults turn toward the source of it.
“Shut that thing up, will you?” Stef says to Ruth, who nods.
“I think that was Fern,” she says, mostly to herself, as she hurries to the outlet.
“I’ll do it.” Marvin reaches over, unplugs the monitor and gently bundles it up with the cord. He hands it to Ruth with a gallant flourish. “For you.” Then he stands up unsteadily and announces, “Time to go home.”
On the other side of the screen, the night has erased everything. Lake, trees, sky—they’re all gone.
Hesitantly, Ruth asks him, “How are you getting there?”
Marvin wobbles as he climbs over the picnic bench. “Same way I came in.”
Ruth glances at Stef and Sammy, who don’t seem concerned. “I don’t think you should be on the water now, though. It’s pretty dark out there.”
“Don’t worry.” He reaches into his shorts pocket and produces a small, silver light attached to a strap. “I’ve got my trusty headlamp.”
“What about a life jacket?” she asks.
“Marvin goes night paddling all the time,” Stef tells her. “He’ll be fine.”
“Maybe we should call Lesley and let her know you’re on your way?” Ruth suggests.
Marvin shakes his head. “She’ll be fast asleep by now.”
“Lesley’s not much of a partier,” Stef adds. “That’s why Marvin likes to hang out with us. At least, until my husband starts acting like an asshole. Say sorry,” she orders Sammy through clenched teeth.
“Sorry, Marvin,” Sammy mumbles. “Are we still good?”
“Always.” Marvin’s expression clears and he beams around at all of them, then raises a hand to his forehead in a crisp salute and opens the screen door. “Goodnight, chums.”
“See you tomorrow, buddy,” says Sammy.
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Ruth calls after him, but then he’s gone.
“Awww,” says Stef. “You two are adorable.”
Ruth frowns. “I’m going to put Fern to bed,” she says, and heads to the basement.
ALL THREE GIRLS are using the couch as a trampoline when Ruth walks into the playroom. “Bedtime, honey,” she tells Fern, and picks her up and hauls her away.
Fern struggles in her arms and her voice rings with outrage when she protests, “Not yet! Not yet!”
“Leave her alone!” Amelia yells.
“Yeah!” Isabelle shouts. “We were having fun!”
“I think it’s your bedtime too,” Rut
h tells them, but they ignore her and keep bouncing, their long hair whipping around them.
Carrying Fern, Ruth tosses the monitor receiver onto her own bed to plug in later, grabs an overnight pull-up from Fern’s room, then heads to the bathroom. When they’re inside and the door is closed, Ruth sets her daughter down and says, “Now let’s get your pull-up on and brush your teeth.”
Fern is fuming now. Her little face is red and her lips are pressed tightly together. She shakes her head.
Ruth sighs. “We have to get ready for bed, sweetie. It’s late.”
“No.”
“Fine, then I’ll help you.” Ruth squeezes a thin line of fluoride-free training toothpaste onto Fern’s toothbrush, which is purple and shaped like a stegosaurus. “Open up,” she says, and when she pushes the brush into Fern’s mouth, the plastic spikes on the dinosaur’s tail dig into Ruth’s palm.
She scrubs the top teeth as thoroughly as she can, but Fern closes her lips around the brush before the bottom teeth are done. Ruth hesitates, but persists when she imagines the little molars swimming in sugar, rotting from the outside in. She tries to be careful, but Fern gags anyway.
“I’m sorry, honey.” Ruth lets out a shaky sigh as she rinses the brush in the sink. “Okay, let’s get your pull-up on. Do you want to have a pee on the toilet first?”
Fern doesn’t move. Her small hands are balled into fists and her little voice vibrates with wrath. “I hate you.”
Ruth sucks in a breath. “What?”
Fern has never said those words before but now she says them again, louder this time.
“Please don’t say that,” says Ruth. “I’m just trying to help.”
“I can do it myself!” Fern yanks off her pyjama pants and underwear, yanks on the pull-up, then shoves past Ruth to open the door and stomp to her bedroom.
Ruth follows behind, tensed for the next barrage. But when she steps through the doorway, her daughter is already in bed, smiling brightly at her.
“Hi, Mama! Can you read me stories now?”
Ruth exhales and sits down heavily, all of her strength draining away. “I would love to.” She tucks the blanket up around Fern’s neck, then frowns at the stubborn orange crust still glued to one corner of her mouth.
Worry Page 5
