Stay Where I Can See You

by Katrina Onstad

  The apartment was on an upper floor in a worn high-rise on the east side of campus. Maddie got a subsidized spot in daycare. At night, Gwen pushed Maddie’s stroller home, looking up at the building she lived in with its rows of lit windows, comforted by the presence of inhabitants united by hard work and patchwork grants, loans and promises, charging toward the future. The elevator took forever to arrive, and in the crowd of waiting tenants were men speaking Russian, and women with regal, bright headdresses. The tenants were either indifferent or kind, stopping to admire Maddie as they waited for the elevator. One Brazilian student left a Fisher-Price schoolhouse outside Gwen’s door, faintly smelling of lemon cleaner. Gwen brought her freshly baked bread, and back and forth they went when they could, delivering small gifts.

  It turned out that in the city in the early 2000s, there was some benevolence extended to single mothers, as if to make up for earlier mistakes that left pregnant girls dropping fetuses in alleyways, and babies stashed in shoeboxes. Elaine from student services—a stylish divorcee with clipped grey hair—helped Gwen find a part-time job as a receptionist in a dental office near campus.

  At the interview, the office manager said, conspiratorially, “I’m a single mom, too.”

  Gwen was puzzled. “How did you know?” She thought perhaps it was her look—black eyeliner; the rubber bracelets up her arm—but in fact, the woman had been alerted by Elaine. It seemed there was a single-mom underground railroad, and Gwen was lucky—so lucky—to find herself on it, hurtling along.

  She took classes in linguistics, studying at night while Maddie slept. There was no particular reason to choose linguistics except that lots of women seemed to study linguistics, and a website listed possible jobs for linguists that included acting coach, airline customer service agent and speech pathologist. All of those seemed preferable to the last years of Gwen’s life.

  At student services, Elaine held her hand and said, “You’re heroic.” She invited her to a fundraising banquet where Gwen sat on stage surrounded by university governors and donors, applauded for the mere fact of still being alive, an alive mother of one. She was twenty years old.

  But Gwen didn’t feel heroic. In the library, with Maddie sleeping in her stroller next to her, she would check databases for reports of a robbery in a donut shop on College Street, or worse—a murder. But nothing ever came up.

  She lay awake in the small apartment with its rumbling heating vents and considered her previous life. She could still remember hunger, its slam and monotony. Daniel was somewhere in the world. Only the walls of the apartment separated her and Maddie from that life, and she would not go back. At night, she felt her most fierce. She would slay them all, gut and burn the whole city before she and her daughter would be as forsaken as she had been.

  She was twenty-one when Seth came into the dentist’s office for a checkup and said, “Can you make sure I get the hygienist who doesn’t hate people?” Gwen saw his warm eyes behind his glasses and held his gaze. She exhaled.

  The courtship was fast and tucked around the edges of Gwen mothering Maddie. Seth came over when Maddie was asleep, and he and Gwen sat and talked quietly at the kitchen table, and Gwen played music for him on a donated boom box. He listened closely while she explained the story the music was telling. Gwen liked looking at him listening; she had never seen a face so entirely attentive to her.

  She had been so serious for so long, but Seth could be silly. He drew faces on oranges for Maddie to find in the fruit bowl. He lightened long, arduous afternoons with a cranky toddler by lolling his tongue and pulling Gwen back from the edge of tears. He showed them both a trick with a stack of coins and a cup. He made the bed, washed the sippy cups. This meant less motion for Gwen on days when she had none left in her—no energy for one more task, one more gesture.

  In bed, he was confident with his hands and questions, and looked her in the eyes and made sure she came. To Gwen, her own desire was a revelation: Sex wasn’t ruined for her. Love wasn’t ruined. There was hope.

  They spent nights on the roof of the apartment building after Maddie went to sleep. Someone had put lawn chairs up there, to look down on the alleys and up at the lights in the taller buildings. Gwen would carry the baby monitor, and Seth the bottle of wine. They looked over the city and drank out of the mugs that came with the apartment. Seth asked about her, and she told him more than she had ever told anyone, even though it wasn’t the whole story. It was enough so that she didn’t feel duplicitous. It was enough so that she could be sure that when they were falling in love, they were two real people.

  The dull fact of Seth’s stability felt thrilling to Gwen. He had a job that he liked well enough. He had money but not money like the rich men who had walked by her, or worse, when she’d been on the street. He was certain of her, and unafraid of what she’d been through. She held on to him too hard, and left bruises on his back that he pointed out in the bathroom mirror with a laugh and concern. “Stay,” she said, and he did.

  On a rainy spring day, Seth and Gwen got married at City Hall, holding Maddie’s hands. The very next week, Nancy called to tell Gwen that their mother had died. Her thirteen-year-old Toyota hatchback had been sideswiped on the highway by a semi. Nancy didn’t know where she’d been headed. Remarkably, this had happened three days earlier.

  “I thought someone should tell you,” said Nancy brusquely, letting Gwen know it was an obligation she resented.

  Gwen had been scrubbing a mixing bowl in the sink. If she turned, she could see Maddie sitting cross-legged in front of the TV in the living room, her bare toes wiggling. Gwen liked that she could see her from the kitchen; it was one reason she’d wanted to rent this little apartment in an Italian neighbourhood north of downtown.

  At the age of sixty-three, her mother had died, and no one had told Gwen. It made the new configurations official: Gwen was the mother. The washed bowl was still spotted with batter, she noticed, and then her knees buckled for a quick second.

  Maddie looked over. “Mama?”

  Gwen pulled herself straight, smiled at her daughter and turned back to the mess.

  When Gwen was pushing a stroller, she expected to see Daniel around every corner. She had looked it up: theft over $5,000 would get, at most, five years, or ten, but sometimes, a few months and a fine. She avoided Chinatown. Surely he wouldn’t appear in this quiet part of the city where Gwen, Maddie and Seth lived. She tried to tell herself she was safe, and he was disappeared. Poof.

  Gwen didn’t say that she wanted to leave the city because she felt him around her, waiting. What she did say was true, too: she did not want to return to work, or finish school, or do anything but hold Maddie close and sing her songs. Financially, the place that allowed this was Shadow Pines. Gwen’s salary at the dentist’s office was barely more than the cost of a nanny. She called Elaine at the Women’s Union to tell her, thank you for your help, but she was married now and would be officially dropping out of school. She didn’t need the job at the dental office either.

  The line was quiet, and then Elaine said, “I’m happy for you, of course. But . . . have you considered what it means to give up your studies at this late stage? The implications—your job? There are so many options—you’re a thinking person . . .”

  Gwen excused herself and hung up.

  What were the implications? Well, Maddie wouldn’t have to spend her days in an institution (Gwen started using the word “institution” instead of “daycare,” to anyone who was listening, hoping to conjure exactly that picture: row upon row of snot-covered, screaming babies in beds of tattered sheets, neglected by hardened old women leaning indifferently along the perimeter of the wet-walled chamber, smoking). Instead, Maddie would have a mother and a backyard, and a picture window in the living room. If she stood on a chair, Maddie could see the top curve of the roller coaster at the amusement park across the freeway.

  Then came Eli. Gwen experienced motherhood as she had never been permitted to the first time. Now, with the seco
nd baby, in the quiet of Shadow Pines, the days were soft and dream-filled. Eli was an easy baby, a series of naps and awakenings, with joyful, skin-to-skin feedings in between. Gwen slept too, deep and dark. She had slept with one eye open for years, and now she made up for lost time.

  At 3 p.m. they walked to pick up Maddie at school, and their world expanded to three. Maddie clutched her papers (like a businessman, she always carried papers: finger paintings and art pieces of cardboard and papier mâché) and talked in staccato bursts about her crayons and the class rabbit. With Eli in the carrier across her chest, Gwen showed Maddie lavender, how to push it through her fingers and smell it on her skin. By spring, Eli was looking around, and reaching out at passersby.

  Seth was the anchor, but he was also incidental, a guest star at night and on weekends. He worked long hours, so his invisibility was normal. Gwen reported Eli’s milestones on the phone, each one reached exactly on schedule. Gwen was there to document. In curlicue script, in a leather-covered notebook, she wrote: Tuesday, Sept. 3: Eli says “Da” before “Ma” but smiles at me so it’s okay! March: WALKING!!!! There had been no such book for Maddie.

  The kids never questioned why she didn’t work. The Shadow Pines women, even those who had jobs, rarely commented on it. Once, her neighbour Eleanor, trudging slowly down the road from the GO Train station after a long day working on Bay Street downtown, briefcase dragging from a limp wrist, caught sight of Gwen and Eli in the yard. She stopped to make small talk, and as she departed, she said: “You’re not missing anything, you know. I’m sure you think you are, but you’re not.” Eli had been little, up to Gwen’s knees, and was running around the front yard in his underpants, howling like a wolf. Gwen murmured that everyone was different, and how wonderful difference was. But she knew, smugly, that Eleanor’s two preteen daughters were latchkey kids, and they were waiting at home alone, probably playing violent video games. During those early days, Gwen was quietly righteous. She saw herself as a massive success, like a top-tier corporate lawyer, only her field was motherhood.

  Even so, sometimes the intensity of her own self-guided transformation surprised her. In a window, she would catch a glimpse of a woman whose entire demeanour radiated motherhood—stretchy pants; smear of applesauce on a competent, determined jaw—and then start, realizing it was her. The dark girl in the mosh pit had been replaced, inch by inch, bone by bone, with this whirling, ferocious she-beast. That girl was missing, and unsearched for.

  At night Gwen would put the kids down, and with the kitchen cleared of dinner dishes, she would make the rounds of the house, checking the arrangement of stuffies on pillows, testing doors and locks, noting Seth at his computer, back to her. If all the domestic labour was complete, and a tiny pocket had opened up in which she could reflect, she allowed herself to grieve a little for that girl. It was shameful to do so; she could never explain it to Seth, or anyone. It made no sense, to long for a terrible past. Did she miss being hit, strangled, followed? Yet she could, in fact, put aside the violence and yearn for her youth anyway. She missed desire. She missed noise. She missed chaos. Maybe she missed her own small, unoccupied body, without the wavy stretch marks on her belly. Her new body belonged to everyone, and was a thing to be sucked at and snotted on. It was also a body to be held, she reminded herself, returning to the warm shadows of her home.

  But it had been a long time since she’d felt smug around working moms. Neither Gwen nor Seth had known exactly what would be sacrificed with this exchange of Gwen’s adulthood for their children’s endless childhood. It would be many, many years before they knew.

  Gwen took Seth’s name, and gave it to Maddie, too. Seth said: “Are you sure?” He was flattered. He didn’t know that some women took the names of men as a form of disguise, masquerading as devotion. But Gwen told herself that she wasn’t trying for Gatsby-like reinvention, waves against the current and all that. She thought of “Kaplan” as a place for all of them, a cave to hide in. Gwen felt safe inside its walls.

  She didn’t let herself think about the blanket she was dropping over her past, putting out the flames. It was for Maddie’s sake, she decided. All of it for Maddie.

  There was never a conversation about keeping Daniel a secret. Gwen had crouched down at the courthouse and said to Maddie, “This is your daddy.” Maddie, barely three years old, looked at Seth, and Gwen did, too, nervously, as realization passed over his face. Maddie smiled her tiny-tooth smile, excited. It was true already, Gwen thought; he was her daddy.

  Seth looked at Gwen and nodded, and as he leaned down to hug Maddie, Gwen felt the brick of her past slip off her, her spine uncurl. The decision to stick to this story would require a little work along the way, but she was up for it. She would skim details, and craft for Maddie—for all of them—a narrative of safety and love. It would become real because she said it often, and came to believe it. This was the covenant. It did not feel like a lie. She was ready.

  8

  MADDIE

  Maddie avoided Clara and Sophie. She began to study with the same aggressiveness that she’d engaged two summers ago when she stopped eating for a week. Joshua found her in the library after school and they sat at the same table. She proofread his paper on Cormac McCarthy. He showed her a game engine he was developing in the computer lab. On the days he worked, she walked him to the mall after studying.

  It was a routine that became formalized without discussion. But Maddie, alone in her bed at night, wondered what occupied Joshua the rest of the day, and night. She wondered about his bed, the food he ate. She wondered when they would be together doing nothing but being together, but she didn’t know how to ask for that yet.

  Then, one day after school, Joshua appeared at the table with his thumbs hooked into his backpack straps, elbows bent. “I have to take care of my sister,” he said. “My mom has to work tonight.” He didn’t look at her, keeping his eyes on a display of books on Remembrance Day just over her shoulder. “Do you want to come?”

  * * *

  The rain poured down in great grey sheets. On the subway, they left puddles in the aisle. The bus ride from the train took them north to a part of the city that Maddie didn’t know, far up Bathurst. Strip malls and plain brick apartment buildings bracketed lanes of traffic. By the time they got off, the rain had become even heavier, and Joshua turned to Maddie and said, “Let’s run.” They ran past an empty parkette, then a strip mall with a bagel shop and a giant cartoon pig with the word LECHON on its belly. A mannequin wearing a hot pink nursing uniform had been pulled in from the rain and blocked a doorway to one store, her arms bent at the elbows, lifting something invisible. Maddie smelled bread baking.

  She was a fast runner and felt like speeding up, beating the rain, so she did. She stopped at a crosswalk and Joshua caught up, panting. He looked at her and smiled.

  “You’re fast,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Maddie, suppressing an instinct to deny it.

  Joshua said, “Cool.”

  They came to a low-rise building with a jungle gym humped in the centre. From the outside, the apartments varied in tone and attention: one had flowers in small baskets lining the window and white lace curtains; the next had a car’s bucket seat resting on a porch.

  Joshua used a large key at the door. Maddie stayed behind him as they climbed three flights of stairs to the top floor.

  At 3B, Joshua unlocked the door. The sound of television flew at them immediately. Maddie followed Joshua’s lead, taking off her shoes and placing them on a clear rubber mat with other shoes, all their snouts facing the same direction. Joshua gestured her forward, into the living room. A girl sat on the floor, photocopied worksheets spread out in front of her on the glass coffee table.

  “Turn it down,” Joshua said, and then did it himself. “Alexis, this is Maddie. Maddie, Alexis.”

  Alexis looked at her suspiciously, then smiled.

  “Nice to meet you,” Maddie said. The TV was playing a talk show with a bunch of doctors in scrubs h
ectoring a crying woman.

  “Mom’s working late,” said Joshua.

  “I know,” Alexis said.

  “I’m cooking.”

  “Tacos?”

  “Sure. You shouldn’t do homework with the TV on.”

  “But this lady is getting her stomach stapled, and I have to see her get skinny!”

  Joshua laughed affectionately. Maddie vowed to be nicer to Eli.

  “Are you staying?” asked Alexis.

  Joshua looked at Maddie expectantly. “Sure?” said Maddie. She texted her mother.

  “Alex, we’re going to study for an hour. Don’t come in,” Joshua said.

  Alexis nodded, writing in her notebook while glancing at the screen.

  In the kitchen, the linoleum counters curled at the edges, separating from the seams. They walked past a bedroom with a large bed covered in pink, shimmery fabric. Then Joshua opened the door to a small room with two twin beds and a desk. Alexis had covered her wall with posters of pop singers, class pictures, a drawing of a koala bear eating a flower. Both beds were taut as drums. Joshua’s had a navy blue cover. On his wall was a map of the world.

  Joshua sat on the bed, and Maddie didn’t know if she should, too. It seemed strange to do it and strange not to, so she stood still in the middle of the room, deciding.

  “I like your map,” said Maddie.

  Joshua gave her a sceptical look. “Want to sit?”

  Maddie did, and she could feel the pulse of him, his shallow breath. She noticed a flush on his cheek. And then he leaned close and kissed her. The kiss was hard, and their mouths were misaligned; teeth snapped against each other. But when he pulled away, Maddie felt lightheaded, hungry. Joshua put his hand on her shoulder, then dropped it to her breast, where it stopped, frozen. Maddie moved closer.