Worry

by Jessica Westhead

  Ruth smiled at that and leaned in too.

  Then Stef walked back into her room and they sprang apart. “What just happened here?” she said, and at the same time they answered, “Nothing.” And they all laughed.

  Stef ran back out to the hallway and returned with Sammy on her arm, and then they were four.

  Except, Ruth knew, that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. Stef was supposed to get the cute one, like always, and Ruth should’ve ended up with the pudgy, prematurely balding dork eating onion pizza and voguing to Pearl Jam out in the hall.

  After a while, she falls back asleep and dreams about another man in another room who gives her a kiss. That’s all it is, just a kiss, but it tastes bad. And Stef thinks it’s hilarious.

  “Mama?”

  Ruth wakes up and James isn’t there. Of course he isn’t.

  “Shh,” she tells her daughter, “go back to sleep.”

  “I woke up and you weren’t here,” Fern murmurs in Ruth’s ear. “I had a bad dream.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m here now.”

  They’re in Fern’s room, in the basement of Stef and Sammy’s cottage. And James is in their new home, without them.

  Fern burrows under the covers and curls against her, and Ruth wriggles closer and inhales her daughter’s stinky-sweet breath.

  The bed is basically a crib, the way Ruth has set it up, with the safety rails tucked under the fitted sheet on either side of them.

  She misses the way Fern would gaze up from her real crib in their old apartment, her chubby baby arms reaching and fingers wiggling. You’re the one I want. Nobody else. She was safe in there too, always content to wait for Ruth or James to lift her out. Stef used to joke that the twins kept escaping from their cage, but Fern never even tried to climb out of hers.

  Now she has a “big-girl bed” at home with pink polka-dot sheets that she picked out for herself. And eventually the safety rails will be put away, and they won’t need to travel with them either. They probably don’t need to travel with them now, but Ruth feels better knowing they’re in place.

  The two of them lie there tangled up together and Fern drifts off, her chest and belly moving up and down.

  Sometimes Ruth has to focus really hard on those parts of the little body when she looks in on Fern at night, because she can’t immediately detect that reassuring rise and fall. She’ll stand there watching, watching, until she sees it.

  Not long after Fern was born, Stef told her, “Just so you know, sometimes when she’s sleeping and you go in to check on her, she might look like she isn’t breathing at first. She’ll be lying there so completely still, not moving at all, and you will be sure she’s dead. And your first instinct will be to poke her and prod her, anything to get a reaction that will reassure you she’s okay. But here’s what you do: smother that instinct and wait ten seconds instead.”

  “What the hell, are you kidding me?” said Ruth. “Why would I wait?”

  “Because if you just stand there and slowly count to ten, I guarantee you that she will move in that time. An eyelash flutter, a finger flick, something. Trust me on this. Because if something is wrong, which it won’t be, then waiting ten seconds cannot possibly make it worse. But if everything is fine, which it will be, you can relax—and the best news is, she’ll still be asleep!”

  “No,” Ruth had said, “the best news is she’ll still be alive.”

  “Right, yes,” said Stef. “That too.”

  Ruth is in Fern’s bed now because of the nightmares.

  Earlier she’d woken in her own bedroom to Fern’s screams, high and terrified, amplified a million times on the monitor.

  Ruth half fell out of bed, ice in her spine, fumbling in the unfamiliar dark for the doorknob and shaking her head. Fucking Bog Princess.

  The monitor vibrated again with her daughter’s distorted fear, the staticky shriek like a funhouse sound effect blaring from a speaker inside a dangling skeleton with red eyes.

  She walked into the hall and stood outside Fern’s door, waiting for the next scream. But there was only silence. She hesitated before going in. If Fern had fallen back to sleep, she didn’t want to wake her up again.

  One night a long time ago, when Ruth was just a couple years older than Fern, she’d woken up and Stef wasn’t there. She’d been sleeping beside Ruth and then she wasn’t, and for a while Ruth lay alone in her bed, happy to have it to herself again with only Stef’s stuffed cat for company. Stef always hogged the blankets so Ruth pulled all of them around her, but then she was too warm. She threw them off and climbed out of bed, wondering where her friend had gone.

  She stood in the middle of her room, listening for clues. But there was only quiet. She took a deep breath, walked to her door and opened it.

  The hallway was darker because there was no night light. At the end of it, though, was her parents’ bedroom, and if she moved quickly, she could get there before anything got her.

  Her small shadow followed her along the wall, keeping pace with her until she reached her parents’ door, which was open just a crack. She put her hand on it and pushed, and it creaked open.

  And there they were. It was still so dark, but her night-animal eyes could see. Her mom and dad were sleeping on either side of their big bed, with a smaller form nestled between them.

  Ruth had stood there, alone on the carpet, small hands balling into fists at her sides. Listening to the three of them breathing softly together.

  Ruth opened Fern’s door and stepped in. The room was quiet.

  “Mommy?” The word came out in a whisper. Fern was cowering under her blankets, staring at her. “I thought you were a monster.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I thought you were sleeping.” Ruth crawled into bed with Fern and curled around her. “But there’s no such thing as monsters, remember?”

  Fern twisted away and fixed her with wide, searching eyes. “Then why are you scared too?”

  Three

  THE WIFE SITS IN THE TIKI BAR A FEW BLOCKS AWAY FROM her apartment and feels happier because it’s very tropical. Lots of rattan and bamboo. The servers are wearing hula skirts and the bartender is wearing a lei.

  A plastic flamingo hangs from the ceiling. The walls and the floor are painted yellow and green and pink and purple and blue. The stereo is playing Polynesian jazz and the TV over the bar is playing Hawaii Five-O on mute.

  The situation is unfolding the way it’s supposed to: the husband is on his island and the wife is on hers.

  She shifts her weight on her stool. Underneath her tight clothes she’s wearing a bulky maxi-pad, and she’s going to have to change it soon. She looks at the stack of parrot-and-palm-tree-patterned cocktail napkins on the bar and thinks, Are those things sanitary? She laughs at her own silly joke.

  The stool has a back and arms, so it’s a high chair. (She laughs again.) She likes the view it gives her. She’s up above the crowd so she can see things more clearly. She can see all the way to another part of the world if she wants to.

  In the centre of the dance floor, a giant rainbow-hued disco ball turns and turns, and the wife shields her eyes against the flashing light to peer at the shapes of couples swaying together. She looks toward them but instead she sees the resort where her husband and her best friend are right now, without her. Which she can’t actually see, of course, but she can imagine it so well. She can imagine them.

  “It’s for work!” her husband said before he left her alone. “It’s just another boring work trip.”

  That’s why the wife wasn’t invited. That’s why she’s here and they’re there.

  The miscarriage was even earlier this time too, so her husband wasn’t worried about her. She’d only just found out she was pregnant before she felt the familiar pinch at the small of her back and the warmth gathering between her legs. She wasn’t even surprised when it happened. She was expecting it.

  But she was still bleeding, and he left anyway.

  “The doctor said you’re f
ine, didn’t she?” He gave her a kiss and then he packed his suitcase.

  The wife and the husband went to a resort once, for their honeymoon. Way back at the beginning, before they ever tried to have a baby, when everything was easier.

  First they met and then they fell in love. They used to smoke way too much pot and climb onto rooftops and look across the whole city together and pretend it was all theirs. They used to go to concerts and he’d hold her and she’d lean against him and they’d sway together in the dark. She was his favourite person and he was her fellow adventurer, her knight in digital armour who could fix any problem with a single click.

  Even when it was just the two of them, though, her friend was always there.

  Even when the wife was a child, and her parents rented a cottage for two weeks every summer and that was the only time when it was just the three of them, her friend was always there, taking up too much room in everyone’s minds.

  She has always been there.

  And the wife has always been fine.

  Even their fertility doctor said it. She sat in her sunny office in the bright, sterile clinic with its unsmiling nurses and white walls and futuristic chrome furniture and told the wife, “We can’t find anything wrong with you. All of your tests have been inconclusive. There’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to carry a healthy baby to full term.” Those words were in her chart, so they had to mean something.

  The wife finishes up her fourth cocktail. This one was a mai tai. She can’t remember the names of the other three but they were equally sweet, and she loved them all. Four is a nice, round number, so maybe she’ll stop now. Or maybe not. She raises her nearly empty glass in a toast. To you, she thinks, whoever you are.

  One summer at the cottage with her parents, she built a clam zoo. Her father had been diving down deep and collecting clams for her all day, so she needed a place to keep them safe.

  She started by stacking rocks in a circle in the shallow part of the water next to the sand, which was as close to the lake as she was allowed to be. She kept stacking rocks until the walls were high enough so none of the clams could escape. But then one did.

  She studied the clam sitting there in its boring, brown shell. So bad to be out of its cage. She was alone on the beach and her parents were far away, and she decided to smash it.

  She picked up the clam and threw it down hard on a rock, but the shell was too strong and it just bounced off. She picked it up again and threw it down harder, and this time, a tiny crack appeared. Then she remembered that the clam was out of the zoo because she took it out. So it wasn’t the clam’s fault but never mind because too late, too late.

  She was a seagull and the clam was her food and she wanted to eat it, so she hurled it at the rocks again and then the shell split open completely. There was the oozing, white body. There was the broken brown shell. But there was no blood. Where did all the blood go? It was white inside, and when she knelt down and examined it more closely, she saw a rainbow.

  She gathered up the pieces of broken shell and the squiggly, slimy guts and held them against her cheek and then her skin was slimy too but she didn’t care. Overhead, the real gulls were circling, screaming at her to get out of the way, give it to them, they were so very hungry, but she told them no.

  She ran and ran and was out of breath when she reached the cottage. She had no voice and she couldn’t shout for her dad but then he was there anyway. He banged out the screen door and rushed over and knelt down and pulled her into a hug. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.” So she told him about the clam and she showed him too, but he wasn’t even mad. He said he could tell she was sorry but why did she do it?

  She dropped the pieces of shell on the grass and wiped the wetness from the guts onto her shorts. “I never want her to come here, ever,” she told him. And he said, “Don’t worry, honey, she won’t. This is our place. It’s only for us.”

  And then he appears.

  A thin man with thinning hair and a Hawaiian shirt, gliding toward her through a sea of men wearing Hawaiian shirts, so it almost looks like he can disappear and reappear at will. Almost.

  He grins at her and calls out, “Aloha!”

  She looks to her left and right. There’s nobody here but her, but she still doesn’t believe she’s the one he wants.

  When she was little, her friend used to dare her to follow strange men into public washrooms. “Go in there and tell him you love him,” she’d say. “Maybe he wants to marry you.”

  The stranger comes closer. He asks if he can buy her a drink, and she says yes.

  He pays for a rum punch, which comes in half a coconut, and presents it to her.

  “Thank you,” she says, and takes a sip. It’s very sweet.

  “Now,” he says, “what are you going to give me for it?”

  She doesn’t answer. Just cradles the broken shell and peeks inside. When she moves even slightly, the tiniest waves appear.

  Four

  IN THE MORNING, SAMMY SHOVELS UP A LOAD OF scrambled eggs and pronounces, with his mouth full, “Statistically, the world is a lot safer now than when we were kids.”

  Ruth is working on a bowl of cornflakes, which do not look appealing at all. The cereal is bloated with lukewarm milk and slowly disintegrating, particles breaking away to form a layer of scum on the surface.

  She and Stef and Sammy are sitting around the kitchen table. Outside on the deck, Fern is watching Amelia and Isabelle take turns skipping. Every so often they give her a chance to try, and she gets tangled in the rope and all three of them laugh uncontrollably.

  Ruth rubs her sticky, stinging eyes and cradles her pounding head. She’d stayed awake in her bed for a long time after their swim, with her hands resting on her belly. The cramps had stopped a while ago, but the blood just kept coming. Keeping her company.

  Eventually she’d drifted off, lulled by the peaceful static from the baby-monitor receiver standing at attention on her bedside table, until Fern started screaming.

  They use the same monitor at home, so they can always hear Fern if she calls for them. Sometimes Ruth lies awake at night listening to the static, and occasionally Fern will mumble in her sleep—nonsense words strung together in a sentence—and Ruth will wonder what she’s dreaming about.

  Once, what feels like a long time ago but wasn’t really, she lay in bed at their old apartment and listened to James’s voice on the monitor telling Fern the magical story of how she came to them. Fern didn’t ask any questions at the end. She just said, “Okay,” and went to sleep. And they never talked about it again.

  Ruth reaches for her coffee and takes a scalding sip, then carefully puts the mug back down. There’s a cartoon on it, showing a bear and a moose sitting at a bar. The moose has tire tracks criss-crossing his body and one of his antlers is cracking off, and he’s saying to the bear, “You should see the other guy.”

  She asks Sammy, “Where did you find your statistics?”

  “Places.” He lifts a random section from the weekend paper and waves it at her. “Sure, sometimes somebody digs up a suitcase full of tiny bones. That happens.”

  “Holy shit, Sammy.” Stef shakes her head at him, but she’s smiling. “You are the worst human being.”

  “But it’s not happening more now, is what I’m saying. It’s always happened. So why do we talk about it more now? Because the Bad Stranger is our boogeyman. Way more kids die every day from drowning or falling down the stairs or choking on hot dogs. But nobody talks about that. It’s more exciting to swap urban legends about this or that little boy or girl getting scooped into a van and never being seen again.”

  “Mama!”

  Ruth jumps up. “Fern?” She pivots toward her daughter’s anxious voice. “Are you okay?”

  Fern squishes her happy face up against the screen. “Where’s Monsieur Foomay?”

  Exhale. She’s fine. “He’s in the backpack.”

  The backpack is ever-present, always stocked with an extra
pair of pants and underwear in case Fern has a rare accident, an extra shirt in case she spills something disgusting on herself, a spare plastic bag to potentially contain either the potentially wet pants and underwear or the potentially gross shirt, extra socks in case Fern’s feet get cold or the socks she’s wearing get wet somehow, pull-ups and a back-up pair of pyjamas in case they go somewhere and stay out late, first-aid supplies, extra toothbrush, wet wipes, snacks and a sippy cup, storybooks and sticker books and colouring books and crayons and, of course—when he’s not with Fern—Monsieur Foomay.

  “Thanks, Mama!”

  Laughter from the twins. The word baby muffled by matching sets of hands.

  Ruth sits back down.

  She never minds bringing the backpack everywhere because Fern has her own loads to carry. Whenever Ruth empties out her daughter’s pockets, she finds rocks, twigs, old elastics, lost buttons, scraps of dirty ribbon. She found a small coil of snakeskin once, papery thin, and instead of tossing it into the garbage, she brought it outside and let the wind take it away.

  She has to empty the pockets furtively, before doing laundry, when Fern is busy doing something else, or she’ll get into trouble. This past spring, Fern caught Ruth pulling a blue shard of bird’s egg out of her coat pocket and asked, “What are you going to do with that?” The shell had a bit of dried yolk and a wisp of feather stuck to it, but Ruth said, “Nothing,” and put it back.

  Stef makes a face at Ruth’s cereal. “Are you actually going to eat that? It looks like psoriasis.”

  Are you actually going to eat that?

  She’d said the same thing long ago in their high-school cafeteria, when Ruth pulled a tiny pink hoof out of her lunch bag. She dropped it on the table immediately, staring at the dainty, thumb-sized body part. The pale, sticky-looking skin. But there was no blood. Where did all the blood go?

  “Oink, oink,” Stef said, and laughed, because they’d dissected fetal pigs that day and Ruth had thrown up, and now she had no appetite for the sandwich and juice box and apple her mother had packed for her, even though, Stef always pointed out, she was old enough to pack lunch for herself.