“I’m still not sure what to make of all this,” I said. “I mean, did Aaron really fool me all this time?” Or were Madison and Sarah bullshitting me now? “Am I really that blind?”
Nathan sighed a little. “Maybe. Likely. But it wasn’t just you, was it? I imagine Aaron has managed to fool a lot of people, including Madison and Sarah at first.”
He had fooled two women into marrying him, and I was nearly the third. I was almost Aaron’s wife. I realized in that moment that, as much as I hated them for it, Sarah and Madison might have been doing me a favor, saving me and Evie from a life with that man. I felt the engagement ring tight around my finger and pulled it off to stare down at it.
“I should have seen the signs, read through his lies about Madison,” I said. “Especially knowing my mother, how she lied about my father.”
“Maybe that’s exactly why you didn’t see what he was doing,” Nathan said.
I sat up to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“Have you asked yourself why you inserted yourself into this situation in the first place? I mean, why you chose the situation?” I could hear Teresa’s words there, her tone. “Doesn’t it seem familiar to you?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“You’re caught between two warring parents, Aaron and Madison, just like you were as a child. It’s like some part of you put yourself there, on purpose, to relive it.”
No, I thought, looking out into the blackness. Then, Maybe. I’d wanted to believe what Aaron told me about Madison for the same reason I had wanted to believe my mother: because to do otherwise was to admit I was wrong, I was culpable, I was responsible. For helping Aaron wrench Olive from Madison. For my father’s death.
Oh god, I was to blame.
And then I was there again, deep in the forest of my past, sitting on the log at the campfire, searching the bush around me as I waited for my father’s return, as he flushed deer in my direction. Branches shifted in the wind. A chipmunk leapt from one tree to another and ran off, chattering. Somewhere close by, a chickadee sang, chickadee-dee-dee.
Don’t let him see that you’re scared, my mother had warned me. Keep the upper hand. If he sees that you’re frightened, then he’ll know you’re a victim. He’ll be more likely to hurt you. And always keep your hunting knife at the ready. Always be ready.
But ready for what? What would he do? I checked the pocket on the leg of my camouflage pants for the hunting knife my father had given me, to slit a deer’s throat and put it out of its misery should my shot fail to kill it. But it did little to reassure me, to calm me. Why would my father hurt me? I couldn’t reconcile the man my mother talked of with the father I knew. But I knew I should fear him. I knew I shouldn’t want to spend time with him. I knew I shouldn’t love him. The only person I was allowed to love was my mother. I couldn’t love them both. And yet, especially toward the end of our visits, I found myself remembering an old warmth I felt with my father, an ease, a comfort in his presence. Thinking of it, I felt an awful gnawing in my gut, as if a hole were opening up there, and an ache like a hand clenching the side of my head. I yanked off my toque and gripped my forehead as I rocked, cradling the rifle in my arms. This had to stop. I couldn’t do this anymore! I hurt like this all the time. I felt torn apart.
A twig broke in the forest, and I tensed. There was a rustle in the underbrush ahead, and another twig broke. My heart raced, thundering in my ears, and my breath grew short. I struggled to calm my nerves as I aimed the gun and peered through the scope at the forest beyond. The hunter orange. I knew, then, that I could get away with it. A hunting accident. They happened every year. Without another thought, I squeezed the trigger and fired. The deafening blast shocked a flock of cedar waxwings into the sky.
27
I woke suddenly, as if shaken awake. I even felt the hand on my shoulder. But it was only a shard of memory slipping to the surface, my father waking me for a November hunt. There in his hunting cabin, he had gotten a fire going in the potbellied stove to make coffee, fry us up a couple of eggs, runny so we could dip our toast in the yolks. He served those eggs with slices of back bacon. A heavy, protein-rich breakfast to keep us warm for the day of hunting ahead.
My stomach rumbled now at the thought of it. There was a time, before my parents’ divorce, when I had looked forward to those early mornings in the cabin with my father. I had him to myself; his attention was on me and not my mother. I remembered the fact of that anticipation now, as an adult, but not the emotion, the warmth for my father I must have felt.
Now, in this summer house not far from the beach, the early-morning sun filtered through the warped glass of the elderly windows, casting waves of moving shadows on the bedroom wall. I’d always loved mornings in this house, the birdsong, the light. In the evening it was the living room at the front of the house that was aflame in lush red light. The builders had understood how to situate a house to make the most of the day’s rhythms, the morning sun to wake by, the evening glow to rest by. I kept this house for the light, I thought. It certainly wasn’t for the family memories.
Olive was asleep in one of the small upstairs bedrooms. She’d gone straight to bed after she’d taken a hot shower to warm up (and after she demanded I give her phone back). I could hear Evie stirring in her crib in the next room; I suspected her cry had been what really woke me. Safe here with Teresa, she was the only one of us who had gotten much sleep the night before. Madison and Nathan had both insisted that Nathan stay the night with Olive and me at the summer house and be there when I talked to Aaron. And so, while Madison and Sarah camped out at the hunt cabin overnight, Nathan and I had driven here with Olive in the early morning, only a few hours before. And then, before she left for the night, Teresa had wanted to hear about Sarah and Madison and what had gone down at the cabin. I finally went to sleep in the bedroom on the first floor that Nathan and I usually shared instead of the master bedroom upstairs. The old house lacked proper insulation, and the summer heat baked the tin roof, trapping the heat in the upstairs rooms, especially the master bedroom, which took in the afternoon and evening sun.
Nathan and I rarely slept at his house anymore, as we once had before my mother’s death. Now that I was aware of Ashley, I knew why. Even though she wasn’t living with him, his bungalow was theirs in the way that, until this trip up, I had come to think of this room as belonging to Nathan and me. It was ours, even if this house wasn’t exactly ours.
Nathan wasn’t sleeping with me this time. He was dozing on the couch, keeping watch over me and the girls, determined to offer protection when Aaron arrived. But this morning, time felt all stretched and weird, like I had come to Manitoulin a year ago, leaving Toronto, and my life with Aaron, far behind.
Evie cried out for me and I flipped the covers back and, still wearing the clean yoga pants and T-shirt I’d slipped on the night before, shuffled across the hall and picked her up. Once I had changed her and washed up, I carried her through the dining room into the kitchen to make coffee. The house had two entrances at the front, one to the kitchen addition and one into the living room, which was the original downstairs of the house. There were also doors on every room. No open concept here. The builders of these old houses understood the need for doors, for privacy, for shutting out other members of the family.
Except for dust and a few cobwebs, the place was as I had left it on my last trip up, before Aaron had offered me a ring. Evie’s toys were scattered across the scratched hardwood floor in the dining room, which had become her play area. I kept the Toronto house nearly spotless, spending my days following along behind Evie, picking up the toys, soothers, bottles and bits of half-eaten banana slices she cast in her wake even as she dropped them. Strange, then, that my compulsion to tidy didn’t extend to the Manitoulin house. But then, my mother rarely cleaned house here either. She came down to the island to relax and didn’t care what the locals thought. They didn’t matter. Aside from buying lamps and knickknacks, she had
never made improvements to the place. It was almost exactly the same as when she and my father bought it, furnished and decorated, from an elderly couple who had summered there for decades, and they, in turn, had left it pretty much as they found it, even down to the black rotary phone on the gossip table that still functioned as the landline in the kitchen. The place was decorated with antiques that the previous owners and my mother had collected: a dragonfly Tiffany lamp in the living room, a Bakelite radio in the dining room, a Kit-Cat Klock in the kitchen. Old advertising signs were scattered everywhere. There were pressed-glass pieces of all kinds placed near the windows to reflect the light. An impossible setting to bring a young child into, of course. I had to watch Evie constantly.
I put her in the high chair now, with a container of applesauce on her tray, to keep her in one spot. Then I made coffee. While it percolated, I rubbed the sweat from my hands onto my yoga pants and finally picked up the mail Teresa had left on the kitchen table. I couldn’t put this off any longer. There was a hydro bill for the house, a tax notice from the municipality, some junk mail and the letter I had been both expecting and dreading. I tossed the other letters to the table and opened the one from the lab, reading it with my heart hammering in my chest as if I was running a race.
Shit.
I picked Evie up, then carried her and the letter to the living room, where Nathan was still asleep on the couch. I stood at the threshold, watching him as he snored lightly. What would I do now? Evie reached out for the dog, and Buddy whined, looking up expectantly at us, his tail thumping, but he stayed on the floor beside the couch. On guard, keeping watch over Nathan.
A vehicle pulled up to the house, and Evie pointed at the window and clapped her hands, babbling.
I quickly pocketed the letter and, still holding Evie, peered through the lace curtain on the living room window to see Aaron stepping out of his rental, a Jeep. Outside, he stopped to inspect the damage to the front end of my own rental. Seeing him there, with the familiar elderly houses of the village around him, I experienced the oddest sensation, like I’d once had when I bumped into another runner I knew, but at a grocery store rather than a race. There was that instant where I recognized her, but wasn’t sure from where. It was like that now with Aaron. I knew him, of course. But at the same time, he was a stranger. He didn’t belong here, not in this life.
I had hoped for another hour, or at least a cup of coffee to brace myself, before I needed to confront him with Sarah and Madison’s allegations. As for the rest, that could wait for another day.
I shook Nathan awake. “He’s here,” I said.
Nathan rubbed his eyes groggily. “What?” he asked, his tongue thick with sleep.
“Get up,” I said. “Aaron’s here. Grab yourself a coffee while I let him in.”
As I stepped outside, the old screen door’s complaints announced my presence and Aaron looked back at me. “I do have the right place,” he said. “What the hell happened to your rental?”
“I hit a deer,” I said.
“Christ.”
I forced a smile. “You made good time.”
“I only stopped to gas up and grab coffee. I haven’t slept.”
Aaron was a man who used skin products and expensive moisturizers, who appeared younger than his age. But there were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes now, and he looked exhausted. It was hard to believe I had seen him just the morning before. His suit was wrinkled and there was a coffee stain on his violet shirt. Such a small thing, but Aaron was so appearance-proud that for a split second it made me ache for him. But then I remembered everything Sarah and Madison had told me.
He held out his hands to take Evie from me. “There’s my girl!”
“You really didn’t need to come up,” I said.
He lifted Evie in the air and spoke with his daddy voice. “I couldn’t let that bitch threaten my girls. Could I, munchkin?”
This time, when he called Madison a bitch, I flinched. Evie giggled and he put her to his hip as he gazed toward the bay.
“Wow. It’s beautiful here,” he said. “I can see why you keep coming back.”
The early-morning sun shone through the slats of the boardwalk railing, casting long vertical shadows across the dunes. The few people on the boardwalk this early wore jammies or bathrobes as they walked their dogs or nursed their coffee. The waterfront was beautiful, but I was embarrassed by this old house, the flaking white paint, the yellowish lawn that grew on antinfested sand and was dotted with Manitoba maples. Weed trees, my mother had called them, and had them cut down. But they had sprung right back up from the stump, forming wild, bushy mounds. They would keep coming back no matter how many times they were cut at the base. The only way to get rid of them was to dig out the root.
“We’ve got some things to talk about,” I said.
“Oh?” A flicker of worry crossed Aaron’s brow, one of those micro-expressions. There and gone. And for the first time in our relationship I felt like I had the upper hand. But then he offered me the smile that always melted me, the one he knew always melted me.
I glanced at the vacant faces of the houses across the street. “Let’s go inside.”
As we passed through the stairwell into the living room, Evie squirmed, and Aaron put her on the floor.
“Aaron—” I started.
But he ran his hands down my arms. “Let’s have that kiss first,” he said.
I turned my face away.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
And then we heard the tap-tap-tap of Buddy’s nails on the kitchen floor, the beagle’s snuffling as he took in the smells of the house. The fridge door opened and closed as Nathan looked for cream for his coffee.
“Kira?” Nathan called from the kitchen. “You okay with coffee whitener?” He spoke louder than he needed to, purposefully letting Aaron know he was there.
“I’ll take it black,” I said, like there was nothing unusual about Nathan’s presence at this hour.
“Who’s that?” Aaron asked, looking over my head.
I hesitated as Nathan swaggered into the living room barefoot, carrying two mugs. Buddy trotted out after him, sniffing everything, and Evie squealed on seeing the dog, slapping the floor in her rush to get to him. Nathan handed me my coffee and flopped on the couch, putting his feet on the coffee table like he owned the place. When Buddy jumped up next to him, Evie pulled herself to standing beside him, holding a hand up to Nathan, asking to join them. I quickly swept her up, but Evie’s familiarity with Nathan wasn’t lost on Aaron.
“Seriously, who are you?” he asked Nathan.
“This is Nathan,” I said. When that didn’t seem like enough, I added, “He takes care of the house for me.” The half-truth felt as tasteless and dry in my mouth as a cotton swab. Nathan’s face reddened with anger and his jaw flexed as he looked away. “We’ve known each other forever,” I added.
“Old friends,” Aaron said, his voice tense.
“Nathan grew up next door.”
Aaron kept his eyes on Nathan. “I thought I’d heard about all of Kira’s friends. I don’t recall her mentioning you.”
Nathan sipped his coffee. “She’s certainly mentioned you.”
“Nathan helped me find Olive,” I said quickly, shifting Evie. “Buddy is a blood dog, a scent dog. Aren’t you, boy?” The beagle wagged his tail.
Aaron sniffed the air like he was a scent dog himself. “What do you mean, he helped you find Olive?”
Crap. I hadn’t told him. In my foggy, sleep-deprived, stressed-out state, the events of the last day were becoming murky. What else had I neglected to tell him? What had I lied about? But then, as Nathan had said, did it even matter now? Did I still want a future with Aaron?
“Olive ran off again last night,” I said. “When I hit the deer, she took off into the bush at my father’s hunt camp.”
“You’re telling me she ran away from you a second time?” he asked. “Why? What did you do?”
“I didn�
�t—” I took a deep breath to calm myself. “I put down the deer, and it scared her. I didn’t think—”
“You killed a deer? In front of her? With what?”
“A knife.”
“Jesus, Kira. Where is she?” He looked past me through the dining room to the short hall that led to the downstairs bedrooms. “Is she all right?”
“She’s okay. She’s upstairs, asleep. We didn’t get in until early morning. But, Aaron, she’s confused and angry that you—”
He stepped back into the stairwell. “Olive! I’m here!”
Nathan lifted his chin and nodded for me to go on, to tell Aaron. Right. I put Evie on the couch next to Nathan, took out my phone and pulled up the photo of Sarah and Olive I’d taken the night before.
“We met Sarah,” I said. “Or Vicki, I should say.”
Aaron’s head snapped in my direction, and a flicker of fear passed over his face before he reined it in. “Who?” he asked.
I held out my phone to show him the photo.
“You know exactly who,” Nathan said, standing.
Aaron waved at him. “Why is he here?” he asked me, but really, he was asking the room, the universe. Why is this person talking to me?
I chose my words carefully. “Madison suggested it would be prudent to have someone here while we talked about Sarah—Vicki—your first wife.” Among other things. “Nathan volunteered.”
“You’re shitting me. You’re taking advice from Madison now?”
“I’m here to protect Kira,” Nathan said flatly. “And the girls.” He looked the part too. He stood there by the door with his muscular arms crossed, like a bouncer barring the way to a nightclub. Buddy sat beside him, his eyes roaming back and forth between us.
“You presume to protect my own daughters from me?” Aaron turned to me, his face twisted in hurt and anger. “What exactly did Vicki tell you?” he asked. “Oh god, what did she tell Olive?” He called up the stairs again. “Olive, come downstairs!” When he got no answer, he shouted. “Olive!” There was a rustle of bedsheets from upstairs, an annoyed groan.
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