Gwen approached the pool at the bottom of the fountain.
“You’ll get wet!” Seth called. Maddie thought that her mother looked ghostly in the dark. Gwen turned to them, then back to the fountain, and stepped inside.
“What if someone comes . . .” said Maddie, glancing around. This was not like her mother, to split off from the family, to put her feet in a fountain that might not have been cleaned in a long time, to basically break and enter. From March to November, she made Maddie and Eli wear sunscreen every single day. She had had Maddie’s phone set to “tracking” until just last summer, years after other moms turned it off. She was not a woman who stepped into strangers’ fountains. She was a woman who made you wear a helmet on a sled.
But Maddie knew, too, that there was something unknown at the centre of her mother, some heavy curtain drawn there. Maybe behind it, her mother was wild—a fountain jumper, or a woman who dared to walk around on a June day without sunscreen. Maddie bit her lip.
“Eww, Mom!” said Eli.
Gwen raised her hands and they all waited for the water to explode. The heat hung heavily. Then—fast—a stream of water, and Gwen’s hands were on top of it, pushing it down. She laughed as water sprayed sideways, soaking her dress, splattering the driveway. Seth laughed, then he went to Gwen, said something Maddie couldn’t hear, and held his hand out. Gwen looked up at the rush of water, then took Seth’s hand and stepped out of the pool, leaning on him, laughing, all the way back to the taxi.
Oh, thought Maddie, my mom is really drunk. She was relieved to make sense of her mother’s behaviour.
Seth directed the taxi driver home, toward the freeway that would take them through the valley and out of the city. Maddie rolled up the window, regretting that she, too, hadn’t climbed in the fountain. She leaned her forehead against the window as malls and towers streaked past. Eli fell asleep, leaning on Maddie’s shoulder, his mouth hanging open. She let him lie on her, resting a hand on his leg. Then her mother put her hand next to Maddie’s, the edges of their palms touching.
Maddie remembered the couple outside the movie theatre. She would never know which film they had chosen. She would never find out if they were in love, or just friends. She would never see them again. Why did this sit on her like a loss? So many people passed by in a day. That’s just how it was. Get a grip, she told herself.
The taxi entered the gates of Shadow Pines, passing house after house, one barely distinguishable from the next. Maddie knew the layout of each house, and the people inside. The Donnes. The Yorks. The Sandus. Grace Cho’s family, where she babysat every third Saturday for Grace’s parents’ “date night.” The flicker of TVs through curtains. A tricycle forgotten on the sidewalk. For the first time, Maddie realized that these houses were trying to look like the ones in the city. “Neo-colonial,” her dad called it. It sounded fancy but it looked disposable: every house was the same, tightly packed, one next to the other. Thin low fences easy to peek over made the backyards feel like a long shared park. The brick siding was an unnatural shiny silver, and the trees were shorter than the ones in the city. Maddie knew that all of Shadow Pines had been cornfields forty years ago. Below that there was probably an Indigenous cemetery, Maddie thought, imagining layers of concrete, corn husks, bones, all stacked atop one another like stripes on a flag.
They pulled into the driveway. The bill was $354. Maddie saw that Seth entered a generous tip into the credit card machine. She liked that, and thought, Suck it, cabbie. My dad’s the boss.
GWEN
That night in bed, Gwen asked her husband about his own dream. It turned out that Seth’s dream was to use the money to make more money—on his own terms, for once. He worked as a financial manager at an app incubator, and every time he said it, Gwen pictured a hospital ward of tiny cribs, rows of smartphones tucked under baby blankets. He told Gwen that he longed to move out from under the shadow of the CFO he worked for. He had been watching closely, and he saw opportunities, but when he pointed them out, it didn’t matter; he was respected enough, but powerless. He couldn’t make things happen; he helped things happen. Now he wanted to make decisions he owned, and watch them spiral out into the world, useful and lucrative. The decent, steady salary he’d brought in for years was a burden, he confessed, not an achievement. Since he moved over to tech from government a decade ago, Seth had been forced to witness many above him cashing in and cashing out, had watched them waving goodbye while he remained in amber, crunching numbers. He felt like a janitor, he said, pushing paper instead of a broom.
Gwen was surprised. She had not known he was unhappy. She had no brothers and a grim, explosive father she hadn’t seen in years. Male anger was recognizable to her, but not male sadness (though maybe they were the same, she thought). Seth was so upright, so infallible. Theirs was a happy marriage, and she was almost certain that he was happy in it. Before Seth, Gwen had assumed that everyone was mostly suffering. While people could get through their days with pleasantries and work, they were, in private, broken. But then she met Seth, who slept soundly, and sometimes even laughed in that deep sleep, a burst of contented sound. So she was surprised that he wanted more, even if it was just a little more. With his shirt off, the pull of gravity on his soft chest, he told her that his boss—young, always wearing wool runners that looked like slippers—was a moron, and now he was free, he was finally almost practically free. She had bought a lottery ticket, something she had never done before. And she had made him free.
“I’ve got crazy heart,” said Seth.
Gwen, still a little drunk, put her hand on his chest and felt her husband’s rhythm racing, a change from its usual calm volley.
“Don’t have a heart attack, okay?”
Seth squeezed her hand, then dropped it, moving fast down her torso, through the waistband of her underwear. This was a surprise. They had just had sex on the weekend, which meant they were at least a week away from the next time, according to the tacit marital agreement of middle age. But Gwen felt the pull, too, and kissed his neck, and they began to wind into one another. Seth was unusually frantic, his breath shallow and panting.
“Slower,” said Gwen, guiding him inside her, letting the familiarity give way to something foreign, deeper. Gwen wondered if every experience she had now would be different because she had money. Seth seemed more vivid to her, but angrier and distant, too. He was loud when he came, and he offered to finish her with his hand, but she declined. It had been a decadent day already; there was too much pleasure bearing down. She should deny herself something and fall to sleep restless and uncertain. This, above all things, seemed right.
At 3:26 a.m., faintly, faintly, in a room far away, an alarm beeped.
Gwen bolted upright. Seth slept, snoring lightly, on his back. He never heard anything at night. She found her nightgown in a ball at the foot of the bed, let it fall over her body.
Gwen moved down the hall, to Eli’s open door. The square mat on the floor next to his bed continued to bleat, announcing his absence. She had found it online, and waited for it to go on sale, because it was German and expensive: a mat that would set off an alarm with the pressure of the sleepwalker’s feet.
The bed was in disarray. Gwen turned off the alarm and listened hard, but there was only silence. She walked quickly down the hall, looking for other open doors. Down the stairs. The stairs scared her most. She leaned over the bannister, checking for a body.
She saw Eli in his statue state, standing at the closed refrigerator, as if waiting for it to open itself. In sleep, unlike in the day, he was so patient. His eyes were open, his arms dangling next to his little boy underwear.
Gwen got close and whispered: “Let’s go upstairs, Eli. Time to go.” He never responded, but this phrase was the key, and it ignited him. He turned, taking small, old man steps. Gwen walked behind him as he scaled the stairs slowly, one at a time, in the deep darkness.
He lay down on the bed gingerly, as if he were sick, protecting his own body. She pulled
up the quilt and gave him a light kiss on the forehead. In the morning, he wouldn’t remember the details of what had happened, but he would know that something had. When he was younger, Eli, his heavy Pull-Ups dragging down the waistband of his pyjamas, would pad into Gwen and Seth’s room the morning after sleepwalking, announcing, “I had the fuzzies last night.” He was proud to name the shadowy experience, those nights that were distinct and differently formed but unknowable to him.
On the back of his door was a calendar and a dangling pen stuck on it with tape. Gwen squinted to find the date. She made a mark. It had been over a month since the last episode, which was good. Perhaps he really was growing out of it, as the doctor had promised. The calendar was a small sadness for Gwen. Gwen knew that Eli wasn’t lacking, and every other surface in his room was covered with evidence of a cheerful boyhood. She took comfort in the baseball cards, trophies, graphic novels, the jockstrap atop a pile of schoolbooks. Still, this little calendar bothered her. She wanted her children to know only lightness, to be drifting along toward adulthood as if on a steady conveyer belt. His suffering was small, but it was something she couldn’t protect him from, which made it much worse.
The worn carpet of the hall; the holes on the door from the various posters and pictures that had been pinned there over the years—all of it seemed dipped in strangeness. Something profound had changed, and for a brief moment, Gwen forgot what it was. And then she remembered: We have money. It was simple. We have money.
In the hallway, Gwen stood outside Maddie’s door with its puffy cloth-covered “M.” She pushed the door open slightly and stood for a long moment, until her eyes adjusted and she could locate the rising and falling of her daughter’s body. She felt, as always, relieved.
Yet darkness pushed at Gwen’s edges. It had done so for years, but this was different. What had happened to them was the muscle that popped the lid off the jar. They were public now. They were in a newspaper, and online. They were known. Her photo could be seen. This meant the past could come crawling out, limb by limb, slick with age and rot.
Gwen shook her head, pushing those thoughts back down. She was just a mother, and a wife, and she deserved a change of fortune, didn’t she? The city was indifferent to her back then when she was young, and it would be indifferent now. And she wanted the city, too, had missed it desperately, in fact. The chaos and crush. The lit buildings, subways, sidewalks, park benches—all spaces blanketed with people. It would be lovely to be invisible in a crowd.
Gwen moved to the window, and pulled back the blind. A patch of darkness by the hedge rippled. She squinted at the shape. A person? A thing? She’d lived with those questions for years, waiting for the crisis, knowing it was inevitable. It was only in the last few years, really, when Maddie was closing in on adulthood, no longer a child that could be snatched away—it was only then that Gwen had begun to relax. Idling, unfamiliar cars lost their dark intentions. She was, at last, beginning to feel safe. Lulled, maybe.
But looking out the window at the black shadow, the fear came, pushing down on her chest, as it had for eighteen years. Ah, yes—this again! Even though the feeling portended disaster, its return was almost a relief, because it was so familiar.
But then the shadow outside was gone. It was just a hedge, a lawn in need of a trim.
Gwen dropped the blind and looked at Maddie, curled and breathing deeply. The move would be good for the kids, she thought. An opportunity. We are so grateful. That was the right way to feel about luck.
Gwen climbed in bed next to her daughter. Seth had told her, gently, that she should stop this ritual. But Maddie never said anything. They had been sleeping in beds together since Maddie was born, when it was just the two of them. There had been no money for a crib. Gwen would wake up in the morning to Maddie’s soft face, already awake, gazing at her own, each hypnotized by the other. She wouldn’t dare now to put her arm over her daughter, but instead faced the back of her head, comforted by the smell of her lemony hair in the little distance between them.
What Gwen had suggested—moving back to the city—was a risk. It could be dangerous for her, for all of them, but especially for Maddie.
And yet—oh, she wanted it. It had been so long since she’d been unsafe. Gwen rolled onto her back, looking up at a shelf of Maddie’s stuffies on the wall. The matted paws of the bunny Maddie named Sleeping Beauty dangled down. Maybe once you’ve been bad, you never lose that longing for it, thought Gwen. No matter how much you tamp it down, a part of you always wants to bleed.
Fall
2
MADDIE
They stood in the foyer, shoulder to shoulder. Then Eli split off, bouncing. Their boxes had preceded them, and their furniture, too, which was suddenly miniature, the wrong scale for the vast living room. Maddie watched her mother moving through the rooms, sniffing deeply.
“It’s toxic,” Gwen announced.
“It’s just paint. It’s nice,” Eli said.
Gwen turned to Seth. “The kids need to go outside while we air it out.”
Seth nodded. He struggled with the latches on the tall windows.
This was how it was with her parents: Gwen steering, and Seth acquiescing. Maddie had never seen them fight.
“The pool is filled!” yelled Eli from the kitchen.
Maddie looked at Gwen. “There’s a pool?” Gwen frowned, nodded.
“Surprise!” called Seth.
Maddie followed, into the yard. Tall shrubs and a high fence on all sides blocked the neighbours, like they were at the bottom of a hole. The pool’s water belly was pocked with leaves. A long white tube snaked from its edge into a hole on the pebbled concrete. Eli ran circles around the perimeter, barefoot.
“We got it cleaned,” said Gwen. “Eli, don’t run. You can’t go in without an adult. Kids drown in pools all the time.”
“Kids drown in bathtubs, too. You told me that,” said Eli, poking at the surface with his bare foot.
Maddie knew that Gwen would make her supervise Eli in the pool. A half hour later, she was lying on her stomach on a towel by the edge while Eli did cannonballs.
“Don’t splash me!” Maddie wore her mother’s black bikini, the only one she could find in the boxes. It was too small, she decided immediately, her breasts and thighs spread across the towel. She could feel her body all the time these days, like a separate thing she carried around, like a mean Siamese twin harassing her.
“Watch me!” cried Eli.
Maddie didn’t, but peeled herself from the towel, and dove in. She was a good swimmer, but no one she knew swam anymore. When she went to the local pool with her friends, they worked on their tans and then moved in a group to the shallow end, standing and talking loudly. Then they all moved out of the pool in the same group formation. In. Out. In. Out. Until supper.
What were her friends doing right now, in the last days of August? May would be finishing coding summer school. Raj would be working at his parents’ restaurant. Emma would have just returned from camp in Algonquin Park. When Maddie had gone to say goodbye, Emma’s bed was covered in stacks of folded clothes. She showed Maddie her new whistle (there had been a lynx attack one year). Maddie had never been to camp. She feared bears, and lake bottoms, and it was expensive. In summer, her parents took her and her brother to a motel in upstate New York with a pool and nearby outlet mall, then on to Montreal to visit Seth’s parents. But her grandparents had moved to Florida, and then they won the money, so this summer, they hadn’t gone anywhere at all. Maddie felt a pang of missing out.
She turned on her back and looked up at the sky, thick with white strands—pollution or clouds? Maddie tried to remember if the city had issued a smog alert. Two airplanes went by each other, wings almost skimming. Eli swam closer.
“Jayden told me that fifty percent of people who win the lottery end up divorced,” said Eli.
“Don’t worry about that.”
“I’m not. Just saying.”
But Maddie had watched divorces i
n Shadow Pines. She’d seen her friends carrying two backpacks—one clothes, one schoolwork—because they switched houses every three nights. She wondered about her parents’ marriage sometimes. She considered the age difference, and the way they had met: in a dentist’s office where her mom was a young receptionist. It wasn’t creepy to her, but it might be, if they were someone else’s parents. Her parents were so in love that they had Maddie right away, without even bothering to get married until Maddie was two. Happy accident, said her mom. In two years, Maddie would be the same age as Gwen when she became a mother. This was unfathomable to Maddie, as likely as becoming an astronaut in two years, or speaking perfect Japanese. She wouldn’t be all that different in twenty-four months, would she?
“Do you want to go to that boys school with the uniforms?” Maddie asked, splashing Eli.
“I don’t know,” said Eli, splashing back. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Maddie could tell that it had never occurred to her brother that all of this was anything but excellent. He’d bought their parents’ line perfectly, and saw his new private school (the potential new school—“God willing,” she’d heard Gwen say into her phone) as a place of non-stop sports, field trips to Paris, video games at lunch.
“There won’t be any girls there. And you won’t be rich compared to everyone else,” she said. “People will probably think you’re the poor kid. The poor kid from the suburbs. They’ll make fun of you.”
“So what? Who needs girls?” Eli looked wounded, then popped under the water and swam away.
Maddie considered her meanness. She would never be so crappy with anyone but Eli. And then, other times, he triggered a love in her that she felt for no one else, the soft, familiar love she’d felt for him as a baby. He was a stuffy come to life that only she could protect and understand, and he was hers alone. But maybe she was thinking only of photos: Maddie at six, surprised face, holding the baby they said was Eli. She used to study those photos because there were so few of her as a baby. A long time ago, when they had been moving to Shadow Pines, several boxes were lost. People didn’t keep everything on the computer then. There was just one picture of her mom holding a little baby they claimed was Maddie. Her mom looks like a teenager; her arms covered in black rubber bracelets, her hair chopped short. In the picture history of Maddie’s life, she started at Eli’s birth.
Stay Where I Can See You Page 2