Worry

by Jessica Westhead

  “Why did you do that?” Ruth asked her in a shaking voice.

  Stef’s smile disappeared. “I don’t know.”

  Ruth pushes her cereal bowl away and scowls at her wavering reflection in the kitchen table’s glossy surface.

  She reaches for the newspaper and opens it to an article about a woman who tried and tried to have a baby but could never get pregnant, so eventually she and her husband adopted a little girl from another country. And for a while, they were very happy. Then one day the mother woke up, and while her husband was still sleeping, she bundled their daughter into the car, drove to a forest on the edge of town and left her there.

  Ruth folds the newspaper back up.

  “Worrying is for suckers.” Sammy chomps on a piece of toast and points the crust at Ruth. “Like Marvin says, life is too short.”

  “You’ll worry less when Fern goes to school,” says Stef. “You’ll have to.”

  “Maybe,” says Ruth.

  “Did you bring toilet paper?” Sammy asks her abruptly.

  Ruth blinks at him. “What?”

  “Jesus.” He honks a sharp breath out of his nose. “She didn’t bring toilet paper.”

  “Sorry,” says Ruth. “Was I supposed to?”

  “Sorry won’t cut it when I’m mid-shit and staring at an empty roll.” He holds up a thick finger. “The rules are: cottage guests have to A) do all the dishes, and B) supply all the toilet paper. Or else they don’t get invited back.”

  “Lay off, Sammy,” says Stef. “I didn’t tell her, okay?”

  “But she should just know. Shouldn’t she? When someone does something nice for you, you need to demonstrate your sincere appreciation. Am I right?”

  “I appreciate it,” Ruth says quickly. “Thank you for having us.”

  Sammy grabs Stef’s arm and pulls her in for a sloppy kiss, exaggerating the smooching sounds until she laughs and pushes him away.

  “Don’t mention it,” she says, but when she catches Ruth’s eye, she’s not smiling anymore. “So.” Stef pulls the knife out of the strawberry-jam jar. “What do you think of our mysterious neighbour, anyway?”

  Ruth presses gently on the handle of her spoon, wondering what she’ll dredge up. “He’s nice, I guess.”

  “I feel sorry for the guy,” says Sammy. “He’s got that wife.”

  “Don’t be a jerk!” Stef points the knife at him. “She’s the one you should feel sorry for. The woman loves kids but they don’t have any. How sad is that?”

  Sammy shrugs. “That’s why we let her babysit.”

  Stef laughs at that and licks the knife clean. “But he’s cute, right?” she says to Ruth.

  “Please,” says Sammy, “not while I’m eating.”

  “I don’t know,” says Ruth. “I’m tired.” She closes her eyes briefly and sees an open doorway. The room beyond is mostly dark, with hardly any light. A tall shape towers inside, but she’s smaller so everything is bigger. And Stef’s hands are on her back, pushing.

  “Marvin might be an only child too, for all I know.” Stef wipes a sticky smear of red off the side of her mouth. “I have no idea. He’s pretty tight-lipped about family stuff.”

  “Mama!”

  Ruth tries to react more slowly this time. Trying to be a cool, laid-back parent. She turns toward the deck, ready to say, “Monsieur Foomay’s in the backpack, remember?”

  But Fern isn’t there.

  She shoves her chair back, nearly toppling Stef. “Where is she? I don’t see her.” She runs to the screen door and looks out.

  The twins are gone. Fern is lying on her back alone on the deck, hog-tied with pink skipping rope.

  Ruth rushes out and kneels down, wrestling with the rubbery knots.

  Fern is smiling. “We’re playing kidnapper.”

  A FEW HOURS later, Ruth is starting to burn.

  She’s at the little beach with Sammy and the three girls, and Stef is up in the cottage making lunch.

  “Fee, fi, fo, fum. I smell little girls, YUM!”

  An ear-splitting screech from Fern and Amelia and Isabelle and they’re off, racing across the beach to get away from Sammy, who chases them with his arms raised over his head, hands curled into claws: “The monster is going to get you!”

  “Ahhhhh!”

  The three girls fly toward her and Ruth reaches for Fern, but they keep going, kicking up sand with frantic feet, huge grins stretched wide enough to eat their terrified faces whole.

  They love this game so much.

  She rubs more sunscreen onto the back of her neck and calls, “Not so close to the shore, please!”

  Sammy calls back over his shoulder, “I understand that it’s physically possible to drown in an inch of water, but I think they’ll be okay.”

  Ruth sits back and watches them run.

  When she and Stef were kids, they loved that game too. Because back then it was fun to be scared. In the daytime, whenever bird shadows darted past Ruth’s bedroom window, the two of them would scream, “Bats!” And at night they would huddle together on Ruth’s bed and tell each other stories about all the imaginary bad men who wanted to get them. And when they were a little older, they went looking for real ones.

  There’s a splash from the lake, and Ruth looks over in time to see a gull flapping away with a fish. The silvery-white belly flashes as it wriggles and then the bird flies away and they’re gone.

  Ruth pulls her phone out of her beach bag and dials into voicemail and lies still while she listens to her mother’s sad voice. “I’m glad you’re at Stef’s new cottage now,” her mom says. “It’s a good time to be at a cottage.” That’s all, and then she hangs up.

  Ruth thinks about calling her back. She holds the phone in one hand, feeling its weight. The shiny metal is warm in the sun. She slips it back into her bag.

  “Hey!” Stef shouts from the staircase, brandishing a picnic basket. “I made sandwiches for the girls. Is your bizarrely healthy child allowed to eat PB&J on Wonder Bread?”

  “Not usually,” says Ruth. “But what the hell.”

  Stef grins as she jumps down the last few steps. “That’s my girl.”

  “Yep.” Ruth lies back and surrenders herself to the sun. “That’s me.”

  She used to have other friends, she reminds herself, and the memory is comforting. The people she met at university were interesting and kind and easy to talk to, and they thought the same about her. Then she graduated and worked in an office for a while, and she made friends there too.

  But Stef didn’t get along with any of them. They were too boring, too snobby, too self-absorbed. Never good enough. Which shouldn’t have been such a problem. Ruth didn’t bring Stef everywhere she went. She had her own life—has her own life. Of course she does. It’s just that they have this history. And so do Stef and James. They’re all tied up together, too tight to breathe. Stef is like family. That has to count for something. So gradually those other friends dropped away.

  Ruth’s parents always said that Stef has a big personality, and this is true. Big personalities are sometimes difficult to get along with. They only shine their light on certain people, and Ruth is lucky to be one of them.

  Except sometimes she imagines that James is gone and Fern is gone and Stef is the only one left. And of course they’re good friends, so that should at least be something. But for some reason, when she really thinks about it, it’s not.

  Now Ruth can see, as Stef strolls toward her, that the picnic basket is stuffed with junk food, bristling with brightly coloured plastic bags and boxes and tubes.

  She sighs and gets to her feet, knees and hips screaming briefly in protest. “I think I’m going to take a little dip.”

  “Knock yourself out. I’ll feed the troops.” Stef gives her a once-over. “Cute suit. I like the ruffle.”

  “Thanks.” Ruth is wearing a one-piece and Stef is wearing a bikini, like they always do. “There’s some cut-up melon in my beach bag, if you want to give them that too.”


  “We’ll see if they leave any room.” Stef winks at her, then hollers, “Kids! Lunchtime!”

  The children and Sammy sprint over and descend upon the snacks, tearing open wrappers and spearing juice boxes.

  A little treat won’t hurt her, Ruth chides herself, and wades backward into the sparkling water until it rises to her shoulders.

  She keeps her eyes on Fern, whose face is already smeared with chocolate. Then she inches back until she can’t touch the bottom anymore. She feels herself going under and closes her mouth right before the lake rushes in.

  She likes it when so much of her is hidden away like this, and she’s just a head bobbing on the surface.

  At the cottage her parents rented, she liked to sit at the end of the dock and dangle her legs over the edge, submerging one foot at a time. When just her feet were in the water like that, it almost looked as if someone had sawed them off and tossed them into the lake and there they were, floating.

  Down below, the blood is barely a trickle now, a few drops staining the pantyliner she’d stuck into her bathing suit earlier. There’s nothing else left.

  She starts treading water and remembers when she was once hugely pregnant, right near the end, and she and James had gone to a beach in the city to enjoy one of their last days of being just the two of them.

  She’d had trouble focusing on him, though, the whole time. She was too busy trying to convince herself that nothing bad was going to happen, but she didn’t believe that was true.

  Her worry would carry her away for a while, and James would ask, “Where did you go?”

  She’d shake her head and tell him, “Just thinking,” and try to smile.

  “Well, don’t think too much, okay? There’s probably some bad stuff about me in there so the less thinking you do, the more perfect I’ll seem.”

  She’d smiled and then struggled to her feet, almost losing her balance on the rocks, and he caught her before she fell.

  “Just relax,” he told her. “I’ll get whatever you need.”

  “I think what I need is to be alone in the water for a bit.”

  There was a flash of hurt in his eyes before he nodded. “Sure.”

  “I’m lighter there,” she added. A feeble joke to take the sting of abandonment away, and she hated herself for not being kinder, happier, more in-the-moment with her wonderful husband who only wanted to take care of her and their unborn child.

  “Well, don’t drift out to sea on me, now.” He grinned. “Even though it’s the lake.”

  She smiled back. “I love you.”

  “I love you too. I’ll be right here.”

  She picked her way along the pebbly sand, anxious about slicing her feet on one of the sharper stones but determined to get where she was going by herself.

  Her body wasn’t her own anymore—the baby had taken over the controls. She wobbled everywhere she went, but that beach had thrown her absurd lack of balance into stark relief. She was in danger of tipping over and hurting them both.

  But once she was immersed in the cool water, she was safe. Her feet anchored on the smoother sand, her belly no longer so heavy.

  She caressed that swollen part of her, dancing her fingers over the tightly stretched skin, and started humming to herself. She liked to change up the words of her favourite songs so they were all about the baby. A silly little exercise to strengthen her imagined connection with the stranger living inside her body.

  Stef had already started giving her advice—do this, don’t do that—because she’d done this all before and she knew everything.

  When Ruth visited her in the hospital right after the twins were born, her friend had been triumphantly topless, a baby on each breast. Sammy was standing next to her, spoon-feeding her soup as she nursed. “Look at me!” Stef had crowed. “I’m acing this!”

  She told Ruth, “When you start breastfeeding, do not wear a bra or even a shirt for the first two weeks at least. Just let the gals swing free, and let your baby go at you whenever she wants. You’ll be exhausted and sore and overwhelmed, but trust me on this. She needs to figure you out and you need to figure her out.”

  She said that for the first few weeks after the twins came home, Sammy would find dried milk droplets all over the house and he’d joke, “It’s like a crime scene in here!” He’d point out the trail of gummy, off-white circles that went all the way up the stairs, and then he’d cross his arms like a TV detective. “Let’s examine the breastmilk-spray trajectory,” he’d say. “What does it tell us about the terrible events that transpired here?” And sometimes Stef would call him into the bathroom where she’d be leaning over the tub with excess milk streaming from both of her nipples like water from a faucet—it would go that fast—and she’d say, “Check it out! I’m a human fountain!”

  Ruth imagined the same thing happening to her, and James would stand in the doorway watching her, his face full of pride and wonder and love and relief. And they’d laugh together about their years of bad luck and how it was actually good luck in the end, because it had been leading up to this all along.

  “Mama!”

  Fern’s voice drags her back, and Ruth takes long, moonwalk leaps from the water to the small, solitary figure waving at her, standing away from the rest of the pack.

  “Mama, can I go swimming with you?”

  The water gets shallower and gravity increases. By the time she reaches her daughter, she’s worn out. She collapses onto the wet sand and pulls Fern onto her lap. “Hmm, I think you should wait a bit. You just ate.”

  “She’s fine,” says Stef. “And you just soaked her anyway.”

  “Yeah!” Fern struggles out of Ruth’s embrace and sticks out her bum, displaying the dark patch on her pink-and-purple suit. “You soaked me!”

  “All right.” Ruth sighs. “Get your floaty on.”

  “Yay!” Fern pumps her fist in the air. “Floaty!”

  “Water wings are for babies,” Isabelle jeers.

  “It’s not water wings, Isabelle,” Ruth corrects her in a singsongy voice. “It’s a floaty.”

  This is what she and James call the stretchy T-shirt attached to a blow-up ring that barely keeps Fern buoyant but allows her more mobility than a life jacket, which Ruth used to insist on, but she’d relented when James explained that part of learning to swim was being able to move one’s own limbs in the water.

  Fern puts it on and wades into the lake, and then before Ruth realizes what’s happening, Fern is swimming away from her—really swimming, moving her arms and legs in a respectable doggy paddle, and the sudden gust of fierce pride somehow overrides Ruth’s protective instinct for a few shining seconds, and in that time she catches herself actually enjoying the sight of her child enjoying herself, and it’s wondrous.

  “Fernie!” Ruth laughs. “You’re a fish!”

  Look at her, so brave and strong, gaining confidence every minute. She’s so happy! Look at her, swimming all on her own. With just a cheap vinyl flotation device between her and a watery grave.

  “Okay,” she calls, “turn around and come back to me, please!”

  But Fern keeps going.

  “Woohoo!” Stef hoots, and Sammy and the girls cheer along with her. “Go, Fern!”

  Ruth turns and frowns at them.

  “What?” says Stef. “She’s doing great!”

  And Ruth surges forward, propelling herself toward her daughter, who is way too far out now.

  Ruth’s feet scrabble against the sand until the water is at her chin, and she kicks her legs hard. With every stroke, she stretches out her fingers for a body part to grab, but the back of Fern’s head keeps bobbing along out of reach.

  “Fern! Stop!”

  And then she does stop. She swivels around, and her beautiful features are all crumpled up, her eyes narrowed and nose crinkled into a snout and lips pulled tight in a snarl. She opens her mouth and howls, savage and furious, “I want to do it MYSELF!”

  Ruth falls backward from the words, and then Fern
swallows a mouthful of lake and her anger is replaced by fear, the switch of expressions so instantaneous that Ruth starts to doubt she ever saw the first one.

  Her daughter bleats out a panicked, “Mama!” and sputters and flails her arms and sinks sideways, and Ruth sees that the ring around her waist wasn’t inflated properly, and she should have checked that, Why the hell didn’t she check that?

  She closes the last of the distance between them and clamps an arm around Fern’s middle, hugging her tight, but the thrashing limbs are impossible to contain and Ruth can’t touch the bottom and she starts to go under herself, taking a deep breath but that’s not going to help, she needs something else to keep them both afloat, but there’s nothing.

  She tries to orient them toward the shore, shoving sideways with one shoulder, tilting her head back and gulping more air but now she’s gulping water too, and she chokes and wheezes, desperate to breathe and she can’t tell if Fern is breathing either. She’s not saying anything, not making any sounds. There’s still strength left in her little arms and legs, Ruth can feel that, but she’s moving more slowly now.

  Ruth tries to call for help but there’s no power in the word. The rasping whisper slips out of her mouth and dies on her lips, and she wonders if their friends even know they’re in trouble or if they think she and Fern are just splashing around together, having fun. They’re not even that far from shore but it’s still so far away.

  Using all the force she has left, Ruth leans back and pulls her daughter closer so she can boost her up on her chest, giving her all of the air to breathe. The weight of her pushes Ruth down, and she sinks.

  But then a miracle happens. A paddle appears in front of her and Ruth latches on, and she and Fern are being pulled to shore and a deep voice is telling them, “You’re okay, you’re okay, don’t worry.”

  And there is Marvin hovering over them, and then Ruth feels sand under her toes and she lets go but that’s a mistake because it’s too soon, it’s still too deep for Fern, but Marvin is jumping off his board and splashing in with them and lifting Fern up and she’s fine, she’s clinging to him and coughing and crying, but she’s fine.