“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Groggy. I’ve got a hell of a headache.”
“Nathan, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry.” He touched the tender goose egg at the back of his head. “This wasn’t your fault. I insisted on staying, protecting you from that asshole.” He laughed a little and then winced. “Obviously, I didn’t do a very good job. Oh god, Kira. If he had killed you or Evie—”
“None of this is on you. I’m just relieved you’re all right. I felt horrible leaving you there on the kitchen floor.”
“You didn’t have a choice. And you gave Mom enough clues that she figured things out and found me right away. I’m just relieved for you that it’s all over.”
I nodded slowly, looking out over the water. Mostly over, I thought.
The town was quiet at this time of day. I only heard crickets and the low groan of bullfrogs below us, hidden in the grasses along the river. Fishermen were out in their boats in the bay. An elderly woman in a kayak bobbed on the shallow waters near shore.
Far up the beach, a slim young woman about my age ran toward us along the shore. It took me a moment to register that she was naked. One side of her head was shaved and her hair on the other side was long and dyed green. Even from this distance I could see that she had tattoos all over her body.
Nathan’s eyes followed her as she headed our way, but he made no comment. Neither did I. Was this the nature of our relationship now, not speaking of the elephant in the room? In this case, the naked woman running toward us. Or maybe it had always been this way. Nathan and I had each lived two lives, one together, one apart.
Okay, out with it.
“Listen, Nathan, you once said you loved Evie as if she was your own. What if she was your own?”
“I don’t know what you’re asking.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Evie is yours, Nathan. She’s your daughter.”
He turned to face me, with Evie on his hip. “You’re shitting me.”
“I had a DNA test done. I just got the letter from the lab yesterday morning. She’s not Aaron’s. I can show you. But all you have to do is look at her.”
He grinned at me, joy lifting his face. “Really?” He looked down at Evie in his arms. She was fair-haired, like me, but with a robust build like Nathan’s. She had nothing of Aaron’s, neither his dark hair nor his slender, patrician features. Evie reached out for Nathan’s nose and he gave hers a gentle squeeze, then held his thumb between his index and middle fingers. “Got your nose!” An old game, one my father had played with me, one all fathers play. Evie squeezed his thumb, not really understanding.
“She is your daughter.”
I felt relief start to settle in. He was taking the news better than I had imagined. But then his expression slowly fell as he worked things through. “But you knew, didn’t you? You knew there was a chance she was mine or you wouldn’t have gotten that paternity test.”
“No, Nathan, really. I didn’t know. You and I had only been together once around that time, when I came up for a visit. But then you asked, remember? You wondered if she could be yours.”
“You said no.”
“I said no, but your question got me thinking about it.” Worrying, actually, though I put off finding out. “So I sent Aaron’s and Evie’s samples into the lab.”
Nathan stared out over the bay for a moment before turning back. “If all that shit didn’t come down yesterday, if Aaron hadn’t got himself arrested, would you have married him and never told me about Evie? Would you have kept my daughter away from me?”
“No, I . . .” I stopped there. The truth was, I didn’t know what I would have done. Shit. Would I have kept Evie from her father, as my mother had tried to do?
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, barely able to breathe. “But I’m going to do my best to make it up to you and Evie. I’m moving up here so you can see Evie any time you want.” It would be much cheaper to live on Manitoulin Island in any case, at least until I figured out how I was going to make a living. And I finally felt ready to make a commitment to the place, to build a community here, to get to know the locals, who already seemed to know so much about me.
Nathan ran a hand through his hair. “If you’re thinking we’ll get back together—”
“I know,” I said. “There’s no going back after this.”
A look of hurt creased his brow, and I realized that was exactly what he was hoping for, to get back together, to build a family with me. But what did I want? Even though I still loved Nathan, I wasn’t sure. I needed time to recover, to figure out who I was now.
“Then what exactly do you want from me?” he asked.
“Evie needs her father,” I said. Just like I had needed mine. I lifted one shoulder. “And you need your daughter’s love.” Just as my father had needed mine.
Nathan nodded slowly. “I want to be in Evie’s life,” he said. “I’ll support her, of course.”
I felt my gut contract at the disappointment on his face. He wanted more from me.
“Maybe down the road you and I . . .” I paused. “We’ll see.” I smiled, holding his gaze, and his lovely sideways grin slid up his face.
Evie giggled at the merganser as it popped up to the surface again, a tiny fish in its mouth. It gulped it down and ducked under for another. Evie, enchanted, clapped her hands.
“You haven’t told Mom about this yet, have you?” Nathan asked.
“No.”
“She’ll be thrilled,” he said. “Are you okay with me telling her about Evie? Or do you want to do it yourself?”
“I think maybe it’s better if you do it,” I said.
He looked up the road. “I’ll go tell her now, then. Can I take Evie with me?”
“Of course. She’s your daughter.”
I kissed Evie on the cheek, and he carried her down the pedestrian bridge, turning once as he reached the steps. “My daughter,” he said, a look of wonder on his face.
I waved and, in return, Evie open and closed her hand.
I watched them start down the road, then I turned back to the lake, taking in the view of the bay. Now that the naked jogger was nearly at the pedestrian bridge, I could see her tattoos clearly: a flock of tiny birds flew across one shoulder; an infinity sign spread over one breast. The word vegan was written in cursive along her arm. Her fingers were covered in tiny tattoos: roses, butterflies, a quarter moon. Her eyes locked with mine and she winked as she ran past at a leisurely pace, completely at ease with her nakedness, as if she was just any jogger out for an evening run. She splashed through the shallows where the river met the lake, laughing at the cold water. I wanted to be that bold, that free, to run for the pure pleasure of it, to celebrate the strength and power in my body, to feel the breeze on my skin. I can, I thought, feeling an excitement I hadn’t felt in years. I could run for no reason other than this.
I tossed my hoodie over the railing of the bridge and, wearing yoga shorts and a halter top, jumped down into the sand of the dune. Then, racing along the shore, my bare feet slipping a little in the wet sand with each step, I ran as fast and as freely as I had ever run before.
41
I parked the rental beside my father’s sign, the plywood cutout of a leaping deer that marked the road to his hunt camp, leaving the emergency lights flashing as I took Evie out of her car seat. Carrying her, I stepped onto my father’s property, following the trail that Aaron and I had plowed down with the Jeep. The field around us was dotted with milkweed and alive with dancing monarch butterflies. Evie leaned away from me, trying to catch them as they fluttered up and out of our way, and then, as we entered the bush that surrounded the overgrown road, she held out a hand to the feathery tamarack branches. We passed the barn and rounded the corner, and there it was, the cedar-shingled cabin. My father’s hunt camp didn’t seem nearly so frightening now. The graying building was just an elderly gentleman left all alone for too many years.
; I carried Evie past the cabin to the trail that led deep into the bush, into my father’s old hunting grounds, and, as I had when Aaron was hunting me down, I began to retrace my father’s last steps.
There was the seating area, just logs, where I had waited on him while he flushed out the deer. It was here that I had fired the shot that had nearly killed him, where we had sipped our last coffee together, through sugar cubes.
She sat there now, on a log, the girl I had been. She watched me and Evie as we passed and then jumped up to follow.
And there was the windfall my father had stepped over, the last time I saw him alive before he disappeared into the bush that dusky afternoon. I stepped over it now, pushing a tree branch out of the way so it wouldn’t hit Evie.
I tromped on, carrying Evie, with my fetch following us through cedar, sugar maple and beech trees, deeper into the dim forest, until, finally, I saw a brightness ahead, the clearing. When I reached the threshold between bush and light, I put Evie on the ground, and she crawled ahead into the field to chase the butterflies that fluttered around the milkweed.
I looked over my shoulder and saw my young self, that frightened twelve-year-old girl, follow the path her father had taken through the forest, stepping into his footprints in the snow. “Dad?” she called. Then again, “Dad?”
She reached me and together, as one, we stepped forward, into the clearing.
My father’s body was splayed over a crust of snow. A pool of blood fanned out like a halo beneath his head. I squatted down, next to his body, and took his hand, so much larger than my own. When I had witnessed my first kill years before—a two-year-old whitetail buck that my father had shot—I was surprised by just how long it took for the body to grow cold, for the life to drain from it. Thinking of that, I wondered if my father was still there in part, but draining away, little by little, along with the heat of his body. I imagined his spirit slipping away like a thread of fog carried on the wind.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him now, on this fine July morning. Then I faltered for words. What could I say? I’m sorry I hated you, or pretended to hate you, that I made you feel so unloved that you took your own life. “I’m so sorry,” I said again.
As Madison had said, I didn’t make him take his life. He could have stayed, fought for me. Something else took him. He was ravaged by a mental illness that I would never fully understand. A wash of relief coursed through me as I realized, finally, that I wasn’t to blame for my father’s death.
I pulled a photograph from my pocket, one I had found at the summer house, of my mother, father and me around the firepit, and showed it to Evie. “My daddy,” I said, pointing to him, but her attention was on the butterflies. She crawled through the field on all fours, trying to grab them.
As Evie played in the grass, I stared down at the photograph for a long time. I could feel my father’s presence so strongly here in these woods that I could almost believe he was still with me. But then he was, in a sense—in me, in Evie, who was the spitting image of him.
“I love you,” I said to my father’s photograph, and to the winter ghost lying on the ground. “Please forgive me.”
I needed to forgive him, too, for leaving me in that terrible way.
I stood and pocketed the photo, and the image of my father’s body melted away. I closed my eyes and breathed in the heady summer scent of cedar bark heated by sun, forcing myself to be here in the present, and not in the past.
I heard a rustle in the bush. Something big. The bear that had been rummaging through the campground’s garbage? I picked up Evie and searched the shadows beneath the trees in the direction of the noise until I saw a patch of white moving toward me through the bush. The beast grunted, a familiar sound I’d heard many times before in these woods, and stepped forward into the threshold between forest and field. Evie pointed at it. The large stag had an impressive set of antlers and was white. Completely white. A ghost deer. Its presence seemed like an answer from my father to my plea for forgiveness, and an apology of his own. Was I really seeing this creature, I wondered, or did it leap from my imagination as the ghost of my young self had? The vision was so strange that I inhaled a quick, shocked breath.
At the noise, the white stag stared at me, its eyes glinting within the shadows beneath the trees. For a long moment, we locked gazes. And then it lifted its head, heavy with antlers, snorted at my smell and sprang away. I saw flashes of white between the trunks of maple and birch trees as the stag ran off, and then it was gone. I stared after it, hoping for its return.
When it was clear that it wasn’t coming back, I adjusted Evie on my hip and finally, after all those years, carried my young self out of that forest.
Acknowledgments
I offer my thanks, first, to my editor Iris Tupholme and my agent, Jackie Kaiser, for handing me the initial seed for this novel and allowing me to plant and cultivate it. The book would not have been written without you. I also offer my gratitude to my editors Helen Reeves and Julia McDowell for helping me realize the story you see here.
I had a cottage on Manitoulin Island for many years and love the region with all my heart. Setting the story on the island was my way of saying thank you as my husband and I let go of our life there. I hope my former neighbors will forgive the many liberties I took with reality to create my fictional community and its characters. And no, none of the characters are based on you. You’re all much better people.
To build the characters in this novel, I found the following books useful: Divorce Poison: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing by Dr. Richard A. Warshak (HarperCollins, 2010); Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody by Phyllis Chesler (Lawrence Hill Books, 2011); Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind by Amy J.L. Baker (W.W. Norton and Company, 2007); and Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Karyl McBride (Atria Books, 2009). I’d also like to thank registered psychotherapist Karen Essex for her invaluable perspective on the children of narcissistic parents and the adults they become. Any errors in the novel on any topic are, of course, my own.
About the Author
GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ’s first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the UK’s Betty Trask Award, the BC Book Prize for Fiction and the Vancity Book Prize. Her second novel, A Recipe for Bees, was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Spawning Grounds was nominated for the Sunburst Award and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award, and shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. Anderson-Dargatz lives in the Shuswap region of British Columbia and, until recently, owned a summer home on Manitoulin Island, Ontario.
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Also by Gail Anderson-Dargatz
The Spawning Grounds
Turtle Valley
A Rhinestone Button
A Recipe for Bees
The Cure for Death by Lightning
Copyright
The Almost Wife
Copyright © 2021 by Gail Anderson-Dargatz.
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Published by Harper Avenue, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Cover art © Laura Ranftler / Trevillion Images
FIRST EDITION
Epub Edition JUNE 2021 Epub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5843-6
Version 05282021
Print ISB
N: 978-1-4434-5842-9
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The almost wife / Gail Anderson-Dargatz.
Names: Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 1963- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210166517 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210166525 | ISBN 9781443458429 (softcover) | ISBN 9781443458436 (ebook)
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The Almost Wife Page 23