Stay Where I Can See You

by Katrina Onstad

  Daniel had a plan, he said, but there were actually many of them. A plan to get more vodka, a plan to get sober, to get an apartment, to go up north—the plan was always changing. He would go out in the day, but Gwen stayed in the house. Wrapped in the professor’s quilt, she couldn’t hold her thoughts in. They tipped and spilled. I’ve got to get up from here, she would think, and then she’d find herself in the bathroom, looking in the mirror at her face, ashen and unfamiliar. Back to bed.

  The lights had gone out, and it was cold. Snow fell. Someone had begun burning the professor’s books in the fireplace to keep warm.

  That day, Daniel must have come back, and he must have said: “Let’s go,” but Gwen didn’t remember that part. Gwen didn’t remember the walk to the donut shop, but she remembered standing at the back door in the dark, grey chunks of alley snow around her feet. Light leaked through the cracks around the heavy door, which would be unlocked at this late hour for the garbage run, she knew. The front door would be locked, the Open sign turned off, and Steve, in his baseball hat, would be cleaning, preparing to go home.

  So they walked in. The cart of trays was empty except for one filled with pink donuts, frosted, covered in rainbow sprinkles. Why were they still there at this hour? Gwen wondered. Maybe Steve was taking them home. Maybe he had a party to go to, a daughter waiting.

  Steve had his head inside the juice case, wiping the glass, his bum sticking out, and Gwen thought of Hansel and Gretel: maybe Daniel would just shove him right in. But Daniel plucked him out instead, and Gwen saw the look on Steve’s face—eyes darting, uncomprehending—and then, on seeing Gwen against the wall, next to the tray of pink donuts—rage. Gwen closed her eyes. Then it was just the sound of thumping flesh and Steve’s little moans.

  “Get the money! Get it, Gwen!”

  Gwen opened her eyes to Daniel on top of Steve, who was still flailing, bucking, a puddle of blood forming on the floor under his head.

  Gwen did. She floated to the cash. She punched in the code and it sprang open. There wasn’t much, really—a few twenties and some smaller bills. Gwen held them in her fist.

  Daniel sprang, grabbed her, and pushed her to the back door. Gwen looked behind her at Steve, on the ground, still. She stopped: Don’t die, don’t die . . . Daniel pushed her again. Don’t die . . . And then she saw Steve’s body seize and undulate, like a wet red fish. He groaned and uttered a string of sounds. Gwen made a move to get closer. “What? What did you say?” But Daniel yelled her name. He was shoving past her to open the steel back door. While Daniel struggled with the handle, Steve looked up at Gwen through one puffy eye, pinning her with a look disgusted and furious. “Gwen!” Daniel called. She looked away from Steve, at Daniel bouncing up and down by the open door, his hand extended. Gwen stood still for a moment, refusing Steve’s gaze, then extended her hand to Daniel, moving toward him. But at the door, Daniel didn’t take her hand. Instead, he grabbed the bills she was carrying, and he sprang into a run through the doorway, onto patchy snow, toward the dumpster. Gwen stumbled out, her ears ringing, to see if it was true, if he was really running away, and she saw him sprinting down the alley. Behind her, the heavy door slammed shut.

  Gwen didn’t weigh her choices. She didn’t measure the risk, or calculate her culpability. She didn’t reject calling the police. She didn’t decide not to open the door and return to the bleeding man, crouching and whispering into his ear, next to his gaping mouth: “Shh, now. It’s okay. Help is on its way. I’m here.”

  She saw Daniel running, and it was as if she saw a human-shaped hole suddenly appearing in a concrete wall: this was her chance. Gwen fled in the opposite direction. She raced down the sludgy alley, past the graffiti walls and bags of garbage, and burst onto College Street. The crowds were thick, and she turned in each direction, scanning for Daniel. She picked a direction and ran, head down, panting.

  Gwen envied serial killers, bank robbers, true villains—proud and defiant, agents of destruction. She hadn’t enjoyed it, the havoc they’d wreaked. What she had to live with was something else: she had done nothing. That’s what she would carry.

  6

  GWEN

  The restaurant was funeral parlour chic. If there were windows, they were hidden behind sheets of blood-coloured brocade. The light was low. Men wore suits and ties, and sat across from younger women who locked them in place with their eyes. The older women dined with each other, without men, their skin painted and plumped and their ages unknown.

  The steakhouse was solid and permanent. Tom’s choice, of course. It outlasted all the hot restaurants, enduring in its brick box in the financial district. “So uncool, it’s cool.” Seth told Gwen that was how Tom had described it. Gwen strained in the darkness to make out the print on the heavy menu as they waited for Tom and his wife.

  Gwen recalled that when Seth first met Tom, he had come home excited that night, raving about an incredible presentation for a mobile app for small businesses, a thing of mystical, industry-shattering potential. If he’d had a soundtrack to his enthusiasm, it would have been the trumpets and strings of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

  “Such a clean business plan. Growth potential,” he had told Gwen, phrases that made her sleepy. But his company was still riding high on the success of the fruit-flying app, and they had passed on Tom’s pitch.

  Then Gwen bought a lottery ticket, and within forty-eight hours, Seth quit his job and called Tom.

  Now, with Seth’s investment in Tom’s idea, he could be a partner. Now Seth was a boss in the field of “digital human capital management.” She could see that Seth liked how it sounded: futuristic and aggressive, and a little sexier than what it actually was (payroll software). Tom had already named the company “BuzzSwitch,” which Gwen thought sounded like a failed European dance band.

  The problem, Gwen identified, was Tom. She had met him for the second time (though he clearly didn’t remember her from their Christmas party introduction nearly a year ago) recently in the new office space, which was empty except for a long harvest table. Tom was thirty-four and had the kind of manly, angular jaw that was bequeathed, passed down from generation to generation in a velvet-lined box. Seth didn’t know him that well, except that he had a solid reputation from an earlier start-up that sold for $35 million. His walk was spring-loaded, and at the party where Gwen first met him, she heard him make a cheering noise while on the phone—“Whoot-whoo!” he said to whoever was on the other end. He struck Gwen as a freshman jock, always on the verge of a high-five. But he was a grown-up with a wife and twin toddlers, it turned out, though Seth had only discovered that one day when the nanny came by the office, briefly.

  Tom wanted to celebrate closing their first round of investment. They were locked down or locked in, Gwen wasn’t sure. She didn’t ask for dollar figures. It seemed ridiculous, in fact, this odd mating ritual of sniffing and seduction. No one knows anything, Seth had always said before of the funding process, scornful of too much risk. But here he was, in his new suit, exhilarated, rising up out of his seat to greet Tom and his wife, Julia. They arrived in a cloud of spiky scents, lotions and shampoos evoking forests, doling out handshakes and cheek kisses.

  “If you can bear it, the porterhouse deserves to be eaten practically raw,” said Julia, dropping to her chair, unfolding her napkin. Gwen was seated across from her, and Seth across from Tom. Paired off. Gwen thought of Thanksgiving dinners with Seth’s relatives where the women did dishes while the men watched football. She had loved those nights for their predictability, their strain of noise and fellow feeling. Family was novel to her still.

  Gwen held the menu at a distance. Then closer. She couldn’t read the words very well, yet she could make out Julia’s smoothness; she looked almost wet. The tips of her long hair rested on her chest, exposed beneath her low-cut, sleeveless blouse. When she lifted the water glass to her lips, a hard, long muscle popped in her bicep, then retreated when the water was set down. Gwen watched this puppetry several times: water, fl
ex, water, flex. To be this beautiful in the world would be strange. A woman like that might have reason to be suspicious of anything that seemed like kindness.

  They ordered (Gwen did not get the porterhouse), and the men performed the ritual of the wine. Tom smelled it first, then swirled it in the glass several times while Seth murmured about vintage. Tom declared the wine “amazing.”

  “We should toast the boys,” said Julia, and Gwen was puzzled: What boys? Then she realized that Julia meant Seth and Tom. Tom did look like a boy, in his funny shoes. But Seth—she glanced at her husband. He had dark circles around his eyes, echoed by his glasses. He was not boyish in any way, except perhaps his curls, though they were ever so slightly shot through with grey.

  “To BuzzSwitch,” Seth said.

  Gwen saw that his smile was strained as he tried to wrap his mouth around the terrible name “BuzzSwitch,” and this brought forth a pang of love for him.

  “To the deal,” said Tom. “The first of many.”

  Gwen found the wine bitter, but said nothing.

  As expected, she was quickly abandoned to talk to Julia, while Tom and Seth sequestered themselves, bantering about work.

  “So, Gwen,” said Julia, delicately sawing her meat. “What makes you happy?”

  Gwen tilted her head. “Pardon me?”

  “Do you think that’s a terrible question?” Julia leaned in, a tiny piece of steak on her fork held aloft in the air. “I’m trying it out. One of our executives said it’s a good alternative to the icebreaker: ‘So, what do you do?’ That question can be so loaded for people, you know, especially women who—”

  She stopped then, filling the rest of the sentence with her bright smile, and raised the nub of steak to her mouth and popped it in.

  “Women who don’t have jobs. Stay-at-home moms, I think you mean,” said Gwen. She almost admired Julia for trying to circumvent the question: “What do you do?” Gwen had experienced often how her answer—I’m at home with the kids—led to a sag in the conversation, a glance around the room for a more intoxicating partner.

  Julia leaned back and raised her chin, declaring: “I think being a stay-at-home mom is a completely legitimate life choice. Your children are lucky to have you. Our society is far too work obsessed.” Gwen recognized this posture, too: the standing ovation, mistaking the accidental circumstances of her life, an emotional decision made so many years ago, for virtue.

  She wanted to get away from the subject. “What makes you happy?” Gwen asked.

  Julia touched her mouth and laughed. “Oh, it does sound insufferable, doesn’t it? I don’t think I’ll use it anymore.” She dabbed her chin. “I’m in marketing, with a boutique firm,” she said. “I might offer my services to the boys once they’re up and running.”

  “Aren’t they up and running?”

  “Up, absolutely,” said Julia. She pushed her plate away from her. “But running? Not quite yet.”

  Gwen picked up her water glass, her mouth suddenly dry. How much money had Seth put into the company, then, the up-yet-un-running company?

  The fall chill had slipped in from behind the dark curtains and wrapped itself around Gwen. She thought about Maddie, at home babysitting Eli. In the old house, their three bedrooms were so close together that she could hear Maddie through the walls. But the new house was sturdier, and Gwen was losing her bearings. Last Friday night, she had suspected that Maddie’s footsteps were drunk. This had happened before, of course. The Shadow Pines moms weren’t naive. They discussed and reported to one another incidents of drinking and smoking weed, though the perpetrators were mostly other people’s kids, out-of-control kids. Their own kids, they agreed, were normal, experimenting on special occasions, but nothing to worry about. Gwen didn’t discuss her own fears about alcoholism in her daughter’s DNA. Instead, she tried to assuage her anxiety by sending Maddie links to articles about the dangers of teen binge-drinking to the growing brain. But her tentative grasp on the situation was looser now, in the city. Gwen knew nothing of the places where her daughter was, or the people around her, just as she knew nothing of her husband’s days, stirring at the great pot of money out there, hoping to skim some for himself. For them.

  Julia steered the conversation back to the kids. Gwen ran through their achievements. And then she surprised herself by saying: “It’s not really a choice.”

  “What isn’t?” asked Julia, who looked expectant, curious.

  “Not working. It just happens. It feels temporary, and then one day . . . it’s all you can picture. I’d try to see myself in an office, with my kids far from me, and it was—grotesque. I mean—for me, not for you—” Gwen fumbled. Julia tilted her head, concentrating. Julia was trying, Gwen thought, and so she continued, saying more than she had said in years. More than what was asked. “I couldn’t make it work. It’s a failure of imagination, I guess, more than anything else. I couldn’t see any other way.”

  Julia took a sip of wine. “I couldn’t imagine not working,” she said. “Is it terrible to say that when they go to preschool in the morning, with the nanny, I’m relieved?”

  Gwen nodded faintly, but the confession made her heart race.

  “It’s boring, don’t you think? All day, every day?” Then Julia did an impression of the twins whining. “I don’t want to get dressed, I don’t want to eat that . . .”

  Gwen resisted the urge to say, “But you’ll miss so much.” She might have said that once, when the kids were young and their hands were in her hands, but now she wasn’t so sure she even believed it. The kids’ absence loomed, and then what? There were so many ways to be, and she, Gwen, was locked into just the one—mother—forever.

  Julia mistook her silence for discomfort. “I’m sorry. That was rude. I think what you do—all day—I think it’s amazing.” And then, again, “It’s a legitimate life choice.”

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment, but the men turned and snatched them back. The conversation landed on the excellent new violent TV series that had replaced another excellent cancelled violent TV series. The men vibrated from their professional triumph. The wine ushered the four toward laughter and familiarity.

  “So where do you cottage?” Julia asked.

  Gwen had never heard the word “cottage” used as a verb.

  “We don’t have a cottage.”

  “We’re on Georgian Bay. I was hoping we could commiserate about the water levels.”

  Tom said, “It’s a nightmare.” Seth made murmuring sounds of consolation, even though Gwen knew his childhood summers had passed by inside an air-conditioned apartment in downtown Montreal, and he had a terrible reaction to mosquitoes.

  “Climate crisis,” said Julia.

  “Well, that’s one theory,” said Tom, and Gwen couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “We could barely get the boat through this summer, it’s become so shallow. It’s entirely possible that next year, we simply won’t be able to pass through the channel.”

  Gwen pictured Julia, Tom and a set of whining boy twins on the deck of a yacht, stuck between rocks, Julia waving her thin arms in the air, waiting for a helicopter rescue. “What will happen to your cottage then?” asked Gwen.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If no one can get to it. Will you just . . . abandon it?” The house would go to rot, overtaken by weeds. Wild animals would nestle in the feather quilts and eat the French milled hand soap.

  Julia considered this, and said, “I suppose we’d have to fly in.”

  Seth picked up the cheque, which Gwen tried to glance at, unsuccessfully. Outside the restaurant, Tom kissed Gwen on both cheeks and slapped Seth on the back.

  “You’ll have to come to the cottage this fall,” said Julia, turning to Gwen. “I really mean it. The leaves change and, oh, it’s been lovely speaking to you. I spend my days around marketers and you’re . . .” Gwen waited a little eagerly: What was she? Julia studied her. “You’re unusual.”

  Gwen appreciated this. She
felt unusual all the time.

  Julia’s little purse hung over her thin shoulder like tissue caught on a branch. Gwen leaned in and they kissed, too. Gwen could see at that range that Julia’s muscular arms were covered in goosebumps.

  As Seth waved a cab, Gwen tried to identify this unshakable cold. She had felt it before, she knew. Oh, she thought, as Seth pulled out his credit card and asked the driver if he’d take it: I’m worried about money.

  MADDIE

  Maddie discovered that at 3:30 p.m., after the last bell, a new kind of school rumbled to life. Kids clustered in the halls in sports uniforms, heading toward the gym, zigzagging across the fields with sticks and balls. What came before—the books, the teaching, the workday—had been just preamble. Something rabid ribboned through them all. You stayed to show who you were by signing up for stuff, preferably stuff that would help you get into a good university. Maddie knew she had to do this, too—teachers had told her; Clara and Sophie had told her; her mother had told her—but she wasn’t sure which door to enter as she walked the halls, peeking in the classrooms at various clubs gathered around the Harkness tables. Colourful handwritten signs dangled from doorways with masking tape: LGBTQ ALLIANCE. ROBOTICS CLUB. FUTURE PROGRAMMERS. PERCUSSIONISTS UNITE!

  A figure in a chain-mail mask, body locked into a skintight white body stocking, approached the Model UN sign. Maddie started before realizing what this was: a fencer. A voice came out from the mask, muttering to itself: “Wednesdays at three thirty, room 207.” Maddie watched the fencer wandering off down the halls in little white shoes as delicate as slippers.

  “Maddie!” cried Sophie, popping out of a doorway. “You’re lost. You need an awesome social justice credit, right? Behold: the Centre for Community Values and Action.”

  Maddie beheld the Civics room, and Dr. Goldberg perched lightly on a stool, bent forward. A dozen or so kids looked up at him, rapt.