“There you are!” Teresa said. “We looked all over for you.”
I took Evie from Teresa, holding her close and closing my eyes as I breathed in her powder and peach smell. My gut, my breasts filled with the ache of almost losing her, that prickling sensation of letdown. For a moment, the world faded and it was just Evie and me, just us, as it had been in the hospital room the day she was born.
But then Teresa jolted me back to the ice cream shop and the shitty day I was in. “Your friends said you’d only be a few minutes,” she said.
“They are not my friends,” I said.
“Why would they come to you?” Nathan asked his mom. “Why would they leave Evie with you?”
“I assumed you had arranged it,” Teresa said to me. “Didn’t you?”
“I’ll go tell the searchers we found her,” Nathan said, and he jogged out the door.
Teresa watched him rush out. “Kira, what’s this all about?”
A teen cleaned up the ice cream bar. She didn’t appear to be listening, but I knew she likely was. We were the only ones in there. She would be closing soon.
I lowered my voice. “What did they say to you?”
“The women? Not much. They just came by the house and said that Evie and I should wait for you at the fireworks, near the playground.”
So perhaps I had misunderstood as Madison’s phone cut out. Maybe she had been telling me she was leaving Evie with Teresa.
“She said you’d only be a matter of minutes. But Evie was beside herself, Kira. She wouldn’t stop crying. I figured an ice cream would calm her until you found us. I hope you don’t mind.”
“She’s too young for dairy.”
“A little ice cream isn’t going to hurt her.”
“You didn’t think to phone?” I didn’t try to keep the anger out of my voice. Here she was, feeding my kid ice cream, while I searched the water, thinking Evie could be dead.
A flutter of hurt winged across Teresa’s small, heart-shaped face. She had overly large gray eyes, so like Nathan’s, and had been pretty in a pixie, elfin sort of way when she was young. I’d seen pictures. Now her face had taken on the soft, peachy texture some older women acquire after menopause.
“You know we don’t have reception here,” she said. “I didn’t see the point.”
“You could have tried calling my cell on your landline anyway.”
“That woman in pink said you would be here any minute. I was sure you’d find us if we waited. I just assumed you were on your way to see the fireworks with Nathan, as you do every year.” Take it easy, her tone suggested, we’re on island time.
I pressed my face to Evie’s cheek, the warmth of my daughter in my arms almost too much to bear. She tugged my hair and nuzzled into my neck, humming, “Mum-mum-mum.” I sat at the table next to Teresa and put Evie to breast, and all at once the emotion of the day bubbled up in big, shuddering, ugly-face sobs. The girl at the ice cream bar glanced at me and kept wiping the counter.
“Oh, Kira.” Teresa handed me a wad of tissue. She never went anywhere without a packet of Kleenex in her pocket, not for her own use, but to hand out to others. Teresa had a way about her that encouraged a quick and easy intimacy and oversharing. She was one of those women who almost always had a smile on her face, even when walking alone, as if she was remembering a private joke. She wore a hippie skirt, a tie-dyed T-shirt, sandals. Happy clothes, she called them, outfits as colorful as the scrubs she wore as a personal support worker. Her wardrobe always made her seem approachable—which was, I supposed, important in her work, where she helped the elderly or people with disabilities in their most vulnerable moments.
“Evie’s okay,” she assured me. She ran a suntanned hand over Evie’s white-blond hair. My baby’s eyes were closed. She suckled intermittently, already struggling against sleep. It was late, and the emotional strain of the evening had exhausted her, as it had me. “Now,” Teresa said. “Tell me what this is about.”
“Madison—”
“Madison?”
“The woman in pink. She’s Aaron’s wife.” I cringed at the gaffe. “His ex.” I waved a hand in a circle. “They’re going through a divorce.”
Teresa lifted her chin in a gesture so like Nathan’s. “Ah,” she said.
“She took Evie from my truck, then left her here with you.”
“Why on earth would she do that?”
The girl at the counter had stopped wiping, her hand still on the cloth, her eyes cast down as she listened in. I lowered my voice further, to a near whisper. “Madison wanted to trade Evie for Olive.”
Teresa shook her head. “Who is Olive?”
“Her stepdaughter. Aaron’s daughter.”
“I don’t understand. Why would she want to trade Evie for Olive?”
I wiped my nose with the tissue Teresa had given me. How to explain all this? “Madison came to the house this morning, trying to talk to Olive, trying to take Olive while Aaron is away. So I brought Olive up here to get her away from Madison. At least, that was the idea. Madison followed us up. And that other woman you met seems to be working with her somehow. Olive ran off earlier and jumped into her van. I had to chase them down to get Olive. Madison took Evie to get Olive back.”
Teresa sat back a moment, working it all out. “So, a nasty divorce, then.” She tapped my ring. “You’re engaged to this man now? But the divorce hasn’t gone through yet, right?”
I shifted Evie’s weight in my lap, hiding the ring from Teresa’s view. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was going to tell you about the engagement after I talked things out with Nathan. Teresa, I’m selling the summer house. I won’t be coming up here anymore, not now that Aaron and I are getting married.”
“That’s it?” she said. “You’re just cutting ties with us?”
I looked down to adjust my top to better cover my breast as Evie suckled, but didn’t answer, feeling the sting of Teresa’s words. She and I were becoming disconnected, and it was my fault. Until that moment I hadn’t realized just how much that might matter to me.
Teresa let out a long sigh. “I was never really sure of the nature of things between you and Nathan, if you were just on and off, or if you had one of those open relationships that seem to be all the rage with twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings these days.”
An open relationship? Did she really think Aaron was just someone I was seeing on the side? Nathan knew about Aaron. But, of course, he’d neglected to tell me about Ashley, or the other women he’d dated over the years, just as I hadn’t told him about my own short-lived affairs. And Aaron would kill me if he knew about Nathan. That would be the end of things.
“But I thought you’d both grow out of it, grow up,” Teresa said pointedly. “Finally settle down. You and Nathan kept coming back together for so long, I was sure there would be a wedding eventually. Children.”
I felt a deep pang of guilt as I thought again of the letter containing the lab results. She wanted grandchildren from me. From Nathan and me. We could have had a family together, a house together, a life together. It was what Nathan wanted. And I loved him. I still loved him. Why had I forced us both to settle for this half-life?
All at once I knew the answer: because if I loved just one of these men, I would have to trust that he and I could make it work. That was one thing I couldn’t do—trust anyone that much—not after enduring my parents’ relationship, not after living all those years with my mother.
“I never meant to hurt Nathan,” I said. “I never meant to hurt either of you.”
“Well, right now I’m more concerned about you. You and Evie. What have you gotten yourself into?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t completely sure, and the last thing I needed was for Teresa to involve herself in it.
Nathan appeared at the door to the ice cream shop, with Buddy at his heels. “Everyone is relieved,” he said. At the sound of his voice, Evie unplugged from my nipple to look up at him sleepily. When Nathan squatted next to us to k
iss her cheek, Evie patted his head with a sticky hand, overjoyed to see him. Buddy licked the ice cream cone she’d dropped on the floor.
“We’ll talk about all this later,” Teresa said, as I tucked my breast back into place. “I’m just glad everything is all right now.”
“It’s not all right,” I said. “I hit a deer near the hunt camp and Olive took off on me again. She’s still out there, in the bush, or at least she was, I think, when Nathan and I left. Madison and that other woman went after her. If they find her, Olive will likely go with them.” I turned to Nathan as I laid Evie over my shoulder. “We need to get back to the hunt camp now.”
Teresa looked up at the clock on the wall. “You’ve been here, what? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Chances are those women have already found Olive and are gone.”
Nathan shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Kira thinks she ran deep into the woods. If she got lost in the dark, she’s likely still there.”
“That poor girl,” Teresa said.
“We’ve got to find her,” I said, standing.
“We should gather a team of searchers,” Teresa said.
“I’d like Nathan and Buddy and I to go out first,” I said. “A big group of searchers might panic her even more. If we think we need help, we’ll get it.”
I didn’t want any more locals involved in this. They had already let too much slip to Madison. Aaron had repeatedly said that the one thing he couldn’t stand was liars. Throughout their marriage, Madison had made a habit of lying to get what she wanted, and she had manipulated Olive into believing her terrible lies. Aaron had made it clear to me that he wouldn’t tolerate being lied to ever again. But of course, I had been lying to him all along.
Teresa held out her arms for Evie. “Here, let me take her. I’ll get her changed and put her to bed while you take care of this. I assume you still have a supply of diapers in the bathroom.” Teresa had a key to the summer house, just as Nathan did. They kept an eye on the place when I was in Toronto.
“Thank you,” I said.
Teresa put Evie over her shoulder and hugged me with one arm. The press of her breast against mine was comforting. Like a rare hug from my mother that, when I was a child, had left me far too elated and grateful and desperate. I hung on too long now, as I had then.
I heard flip-flops, and Ashley appeared at the door, bringing with her the overpowering scent of tropical suntan lotion. “I’m so glad you found her!” she said.
I stepped back from Teresa. “Yes,” I said, offering Ashley a thin smile. “She was here all along, with Teresa.”
Nathan ran a hand down Ashley’s bare arm. “We’re going back to the hunt camp.”
I shook my head, warning him off. I didn’t want Ashley to know Olive was out there. She’d tell the locals. But Nathan didn’t pick up on it. “Kira’s . . . friend, a teen, is lost in the bush.”
“What?” Ashley frowned accusingly at me. You lost two kids in the same evening? What the hell is the matter with you? “At your dad’s place?”
“How do you know about that?” I asked, then I looked at Nathan. He’d told this stranger about my father’s hunt camp? What had he told her, exactly?
Ashley shrugged. “Everyone knows. A group of us hunt there every November.”
“You take hunters onto Dad’s property, my property?” I asked Nathan. He had taken Ashley there?
“It’s a waste to let that bush go unused,” he said. “All those deer, just waiting to be harvested. It’s not only us.”
“My dad hunts there,” Ashley said. “He has for years.”
And yet no one had bothered to ask me, because I was only one of the summer people, an outsider, though I had thought of this village as home. Worse, Nathan had avoided telling me. He’d known I wouldn’t like it. I didn’t want to go near that property. So Nathan took Ashley hunting there instead.
“We didn’t think you’d mind,” Teresa said soothingly. We, she said, speaking for the locals.
I waved both hands beside my ears. This was too much to take in right now. “We’ve got to go.”
“I’ll let you know how this plays out,” Nathan said to Ashley. “Or if we need help.”
“I’ll wait at your house,” she said, glancing over his shoulder at me.
I didn’t like that, how she presumed to wait at Nathan’s house, or how he touched her arm, how kindly he spoke to her. Ashley shuffled back and forth in her flip-flops, as if working up the courage to say something else, but then slunk out the door, looking back over her shoulder once at Nathan with sad cocker spaniel eyes.
20
As Nathan and I made our way through the crowd to the truck, the thunderhead hovered over us, black and threatening. I could taste the sour, metallic zing of ozone in the air. Waves stirred up by the wind crashed onto the shore. Lightning flashed immediately overhead, and flashed again, splitting the sky in two. Fat raindrops started to fall, leaving dots the size of quarters on the boardwalk. And then the rain fell in earnest, drenching my hair, pounding against the boardwalk, leaving it slippery. People who were still hanging out on the beach clicked their lawn chairs closed, picked up their blankets and ran for their cars.
We sprinted to my rental. “I’m driving,” Nathan said, as if I was a drunk and he was taking away the keys.
“I can drive,” I said.
He held out his hand. “Keys.”
I was too tired to argue. I tossed Nathan the keys and he opened the back door for Buddy as I took my seat. The dog jumped in, treading wet paw prints across the upholstery. My hair was wet from the downpour. Nathan backed up and drove out of the parking lot, honking to get other vehicles out of the way. The rain pelted down the windshield so quickly that the wipers struggled to keep up. The cars ahead of us were going slowly, too slowly.
Nathan pulled out to pass a string of them, parting a wash of water, and the wheels of the truck caught on the slick, hydroplaning. The anti-lock braking system vibrated as it kicked in, and Nathan regained control.
In the glass of the windshield, I saw my face reflected, lit up from below by the dashboard lights. My blond hair slipping out of my ponytail, my clear, pale skin, which my mother claimed was my best feature. But now I looked ghoulish in the eerie light. My father’s ghostly pale blue eyes stared back at me.
As we passed the sweet spot, I quickly checked my messages. Aaron had texted to let me know he was on the road and would arrive in the early morning. I thought of phoning him, but I was with Nathan and there was little time. We’d lose reception again as soon as we sped down the straight stretch. And what was I going to tell him? How was I going to explain any of this? I would have to try later, I knew, but by then I would have Olive back. At least, I hoped so. For now, I tried phoning Madison instead, but she wasn’t picking up. She didn’t respond to my text either. That could mean anything: that she was out of range or still looking for Olive in the bush, or that she had found her and was driving away with her.
As we neared the hunt camp, I pointed at the gray minivan, its emergency lights flashing. The body of the deer was still lying nearby, its blood washed downhill by the rain.
“That’s Sarah’s van,” I said. “Thank god.” Either Madison and Sarah hadn’t yet found Olive, or they hadn’t brought her back to the van. They might have found a sheltered place, perhaps the cabin, to wait out the storm. But Ashley had said everyone knew about my father’s hunt camp, that the locals hunted here. My god, I thought, anyone could be living in my father’s hunting cabin. I had left it empty since his death. What if Olive had run into a squatter hiding out there? Or, if she had found her way back to the road, anyone could have picked her up. I felt nauseous at the thought. She was just a kid, and an anxious one at that. We had to find her. We simply had to find her.
Nathan parked in front of the minivan and flipped up the hood of his coat against the wind and rain as he let Buddy out. I opened the passenger side of the crew cab and rummaged in my bag for a wool sweater to wear under Nathan’s spa
re raincoat. But the rain fell so heavily, I was soaked by the time I got the sweater and coat on. Olive would be drenched too. Dangerous, I thought, remembering my wilderness training. It was dangerous to be wet through at night, even in July. Hypothermia could set in so quickly. My father had lectured me on the importance of being dressed properly for the woods—in wool and nylon, not cotton, which stayed wet—and anticipating changes in the weather. He had told me over and over that more people died of hypothermia in the warmer months than at any other time of year. With her slim build, Olive was in even more danger.
I grabbed my bag and locked up. The stream of drivers behind us slowed as they passed, and one driver, a guy in a Canada Day cap, stopped. “Need a hand with that deer, Nathan?” He thought we were there to pick up the carcass.
“No, we’re good,” Nathan said, raising his voice over the roar of wind and rain. The guy waved and drove on.
Roadkill deer never went to waste on the island. Steady work was hard to come by here, and the meat on a deer would fill a freezer. Once we left, the doe would likely be picked up by a couple of the many unemployed or partly employed men on the island who had a family to feed.
I swung my bag over my shoulder. “Will the rain make it harder for Buddy to catch the scent?” I asked Nathan.
“If we’re fast, it will make it easier. Get something wet, and the smell only gets stronger.”
I nodded, remembering Buddy’s run-in with a skunk. Nathan had bathed him and the stench had eventually disappeared, until Buddy jumped into the lake and came out smelling skunky again, the water refreshing the odor.
“But if the rain continues to be this heavy,” Nathan continued, “it could wash the trail away.”
“Then we better be quick,” I said, pulling the flashlight from my pocket. The rain pelted off the hoods of our jackets, forming rivulets down our backs. The trees around us swayed in the wind, dropping small branches.
Nathan offered Buddy Olive’s hoodie again, and we launched into the ditch and then the bush, the beagle leading the way. As Nathan followed Buddy, wading through the wet grass and underbrush ahead, I lagged behind, searching the forest for shapes, the ghost of my young self. Within these woods there was a dark we never experienced in the city, the kind that infiltrates your spine, sends shivers into your scalp.
The Almost Wife Page 11