Stay Where I Can See You

by Katrina Onstad

  Joshua looked at her, and Maddie leaned in, mouth open, her arms falling around his shoulders. He pulled her tight against him, crushing her against the glass. The mossy tree outside swayed. Then, somewhere in the depths of the house, a baby began to cry. They pulled apart.

  “I should take him to the park,” said Joshua, backing away, flushed.

  Maddie touched her bruised mouth, nodding.

  Getting Carter the baby ready involved changing his diaper first, which Maddie watched Joshua do from a distance.

  Carter’s bedroom featured a giant black-and-white photo of him when he was smaller, his fists curled and eyes closed. It took up most of the wall opposite his crib.

  Carter could walk, it turned out, and he toddled along to the top of the stairs, muttering, “Out?”

  “He knows it’s park time,” said Joshua, moving him away from a possible fall.

  The stroller was perplexing: a long stick on wheels with an egg-shaped seat and a robotic hood.

  “How does this . . . What?” Maddie pushed buttons, watching the hood move slowly back and forth. A word with an umlaut ran along the side of it. While Joshua examined the stroller, Maddie followed the baby as he staggered across the foyer, pointing at things and looking back at her.

  “Chair,” he said, pointing.

  “That’s right,” said Maddie. He got to the wall of books and pulled one out.

  “Boo,” he said, flinging it to the floor.

  “Don’t throw,” said Maddie. She tried to put it back.

  Carter didn’t like that. “No!” He shook his head, then pulled another book. “Boo,” he said. This one was heavy; he tried to heave it, then dropped to his bum. Now he was eye level to the books with black spines, and he began pulling them, grunting and straining. Giant art and design books fell, one by one.

  Maddie gathered each discarded book and made a pile. She felt Joshua looking at her, measuring, assessing her skill with this baby. Maddie didn’t like it. She didn’t want to seem like a good mother to anyone.

  “Carter is very advanced. He’s already reading,” said Maddie.

  Joshua scooped up the baby, who screamed and kicked. “Outside, we’re going outside.” Carter relaxed as Joshua strapped him into the egg-cup part of the stroller.

  They took up the whole sidewalk as they walked, but there were no other pedestrians, just the occasional gently humming luxury vehicle. Maddie thought: We could be a young couple, a teen pregnancy cautionary tale. And then: We are not that much younger than my mom was when she had me.

  The wind whipped through the park, surrounding children and nannies. The nannies hovered around the picnic table, some with strollers and sleeping babies, others whose charges were off in the sandbox, or chasing each other around the perimeter of the park. The nannies were everything but white, Maddie noted, and most were Filipina.

  Maddie followed Joshua toward the table, and the women smiled. One called out, “Hello! How is your mama?”

  A small woman in an oversized pink ski jacket stood rigid at the side of the table, unsmiling. She examined Maddie from head to toe, then looked in at the baby in his stroller.

  “He needs to walk,” she declared, and Carter laughed and kicked.

  Joshua unstrapped him and put him on the ground, where he paused and then accelerated toward the other kids. He picked up a truck and flung it across the sandbox. A nanny rose from a bench to cuddle a crying child.

  The woman in the pink jacket spoke to Joshua in Tagalog, and Joshua spoke back. It was strange to hear his voice but not understand him; for all she knew, he was someone else entirely in that language.

  The woman was gesticulating, and she handed Joshua a piece of paper. He translated, reading it back to her. Her face darkened. She nodded. Maddie saw tears in her eyes, and then she turned away, to be comforted by another woman.

  Joshua moved away from her, and introduced Maddie to the women around the table.

  “Nice to meet you,” Maddie said several times, and she was greeted with wide smiles.

  But when they turned and spoke to each other in their own language, the smiles were different, or gone entirely. Maddie supposed it made sense; they were away from the houses where they worked for only a little while, and they probably had a lot to say to each other in the time that they were free.

  It soon got too cold to stay, and Joshua strapped Carter into his stroller. He put a hat on him, too, and a blue pom-pom bounced on his head.

  “Who was that woman who was so upset?” asked Maddie, as they began to walk.

  “Susan. She’s been waiting a long time,” said Joshua.

  “For what?”

  “To bring her kids over.”

  “They don’t want to come?”

  Joshua exhaled. “It used to take two years of working full-time, and then you could bring over your family. But they’re changing the law.” He sounded impatient, as if he shouldn’t have to explain. “Too many came, and now it takes years. Backlog.”

  Tentatively, Maddie asked, “She has kids?”

  “Three kids. She hasn’t seen them in six years.”

  Maddie looked behind her, as the park retreated. The nannies were still talking and laughing. One was checking her phone, indifferent to the small hands on her pant leg. And there was Susan, crouched and hugging a crying toddler. She held the child tight, kissing her little wool cap, making it all better.

  GWEN

  Gwen parked in a small lot a fair distance from the park. Maddie would not be able to see her, in all likelihood, the minivan’s licence plate obscured by a low wall of decorative rocks. Tracking was easier with the new phones she’d bought for the kids.

  But she had been good; she hadn’t tracked Maddie since that first day of school, and hadn’t checked in on Eli at all, even though the phone meant she could always see where he was. But she had never followed him as often. Eli didn’t need it. He was of the world and permanent in a way that Maddie had never seemed. Hours after Gwen gave birth to Maddie in the hospital, the social worker came in and peered down at Gwen in the hospital bed, Maddie on her breast. The woman saw Gwen’s black streaked hair and arm of rubber bracelets caked with afterbirth, and asked, “Might we discuss adoption?”

  Now, once again, Maddie was under threat. Gwen was a mother making sure her daughter was safe, that was all.

  She scanned the park. How much did Daniel know? And what if he did find her? She didn’t know what he was capable of, but when it came to her kids, not knowing was unacceptable to Gwen.

  Gwen watched Maddie pushing a stroller. A boy appeared. He was Asian, tall and slight in tidy jeans unlike the baggy sweatpants most boys wore. Nothing about him struck Gwen as cool. His floppy hair was the sole teenage gesture, the kind of hair that could make a girl swoony. The boy went off to talk to one of the nannies. So many nannies! They were clustered, their chatter drifting back to Gwen. She could see each nanny’s eyes darting to the kids in her charge, each woman connected to one or two toddlers. Every few minutes, one of the women, mid-sentence, would rush over and pull up a hat, remove a sand shovel, offer a kiss. Experts, Gwen thought admiringly. Expert mothers.

  In the back of the van, the vases of flowers sat covered in cellophane, wilting.

  Maddie hovered near the baby she had removed from the stroller. It was walking in circles, pointing and talking. One day, perhaps Maddie would be a mother. The idea of it almost made Gwen laugh. Don’t do it! she wanted to call out. Or at least: Wait. Just wait. A child is born, and funeral bells ring. You make a little life, and you make a little death, too. From the moment they’re born, they’re leaving, and it’s unbearable.

  Gwen knew she shouldn’t think like this. She should bend toward the light, to the dailiness of motherhood, where the joy was. She made a list: cupcakes, glue sticks, beach vacations, teenagers in the basement in Shadow Pines dancing to hip hop and Gwen and Seth at the top of the stairs, grinning and recording on their phones—the light, the light. Would she really want Maddie to
miss all that? Would she advise her own daughter away from motherhood? No, no, childlessness seemed unbearable, too. (Still she wondered about a life without children, sometimes with envy. Solitary and strong. Or maybe just limbless; a helium-filled human, bouncing through her days . . .) Why, Gwen wondered, couldn’t she picture the in-between, where one was a mother, but also unbroken, unsacrificed?

  The boy put his hand lightly on Maddie’s back. A ripple of recognition ran through Gwen. So it really was romance, then. She was excited for her daughter, but afraid, too. The boy’s hand dropped. Gwen could see Maddie turn to him and Gwen was embarrassed, suddenly, to be intruding, so joyful was the look on Maddie’s face. It was time to leave.

  She had time for one more stop before picking up Eli at hockey and getting the flowers to Everwood, didn’t she?

  * * *

  Outside the mission in Moss Park, a line of men was forming for dinner. Men appeared from around corners and out of doorways, emerging from downtown crowds that kept moving past the church. Men gathered, and more men joined the line. The door at the side of the church—SUPPER 5 p.m.—stayed closed, and the line got longer.

  Gwen walked along the sidewalk directly across the street, trying to be inconspicuous as she scanned their faces. Beards. Eyes lowered. Hoodies. Baseball hats and toques. Only a few spoke to each other, loudly jostling. Others bent and shuffled, separate.

  Gwen didn’t know if she would recognize Daniel if she saw him. She had no photographs. No one took photographs before smartphones. He was something locked in her head from back then, an unreliable police sketch.

  More hoodies. She was looking for a young man with long hair, but Daniel would be old, maybe bald. Men didn’t wear their hair long anymore. These men all seemed old and grey, even the young men.

  One looked up: black eyes beneath the hoodie. From all the way across the street, he caught her eye and froze her in place. They shared a glance, then Gwen looked away.

  She felt caught out. A tourist. A white lady who paid twenty bucks to park her minivan behind a chain-link fence.

  She would not find him this way.

  Gwen walked back to her minivan, where a woman moved the chain-link gate and gave her a nod. Her phone lay on the front seat, chirping and vibrating like a panicked rodent. Gwen wrestled its jumping form, looked down at the numbers: Eli, Eli, Eli. She had forgotten Eli.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” said Gwen.

  She swerved onto the road, but it was after five, and the city was gnarled with traffic. At a red light, she texted Eli, but there was no answer. She attempted to call Seth, looking up from her phone to the street, trying not to kill or get killed. But Seth wasn’t picking up. Gwen pushed through the sludge of rush hour, slamming her hand on the wheel at every red light.

  Gwen was an hour late when she finally arrived at the arena. A few streetlamps spiked the parking lot with light. There were no families left; she had missed the post-game milling.

  Right away, Gwen could see Eli by the doors, sitting on his big hockey bag at the curb, stick upright like a shepherd’s staff. He had a toque pulled down low over his forehead and somehow this hat catapulted him right out of childhood. He could be just a short man waiting for a friend, thought Gwen as she pulled up in front of him, pressing the button to open the sliding doors of the minivan.

  In the rear-view mirror, Eli heaved the bag inside the vehicle and slammed the door. He climbed in the back, removing his hat and fixing his gaze out the window, sliding his body to the edge of the seat, loudly silent.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” said Gwen.

  Eli didn’t answer.

  “Do you want to sit up front?” she said, and then back-pedalled: “I got stuck. But there’s still time. You have your uniform with you, right? You can change at school. We’ll go straight to Art Night.” Silence. “Where’s your phone? You didn’t answer.”

  Still silence. Gwen remembered parenting books and articles in magazines that all advised not to push. Let them come to you, experts said. But she’d never been able to do it. She was forever charging at her children, storming their rooms, their homework, their Instagram accounts. She had been entirely and absolutely present for seventeen years. Now she had missed a pickup—a single pickup—and there was her son, sullen in the back seat, hating her. Hating her for trying to protect him, to protect all of them from—from—someone. Something.

  She had a new thought, one that she’d never had before about Eli: Fuck off.

  “You don’t have to be rude,” Gwen snapped. “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  Eli locked into her in the rear-view mirror, and his eyes were filled with tears.

  “Eli,” Gwen said, immediately ashamed. They were stopped at a red light, and she turned her head back to him. “Sweetie . . .”

  “I thought you died,” he said. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “I thought, no one knows I’m here.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Gwen, and she was crying, too, because he was still a child, and the great unrest that was roiling in her, faster and faster day by day, was instantly stilled by his tears. She reached for his hand, but a car horn beeped, and she had to move along.

  * * *

  Fairy lights arced from the high vaulted ceilings in the halls of Everwood. The children’s artwork hung framed along the mahogany-boned corridors with even, gallery-perfect spaces between. Boys in ties and navy blazers wandered among the parents, dutifully offering pastry puffs and skewers of bocconcini and tomato. The parents moved slowly, murmuring and assessing each artwork, holding their phones aloft. In front of a water-colour of a golden retriever, Gwen scanned a code and a screen popped up on her phone: “Edwin Graham is ten years old. Says Edwin: ‘My Dog is inspired by the baroque masters who painted animals to demonstrate their portrait skills and pay tribute to the most noble companion of all classes.’”

  Gwen stared at the dog’s eyes, which were uncannily human. It was a terrible painting perfectly executed. Oh, Edwin, thought Gwen.

  Elizabeth Morton came up and put her hand on Gwen’s shoulder, breaking her reverie.

  “Not exactly Dürer,” she said, removing her hand to cradle her glass of red wine.

  Elizabeth was looming, even taller in high heels and a short black skirt. It hadn’t occurred to Gwen to dress up. She was wearing jeans and a knee-length blouse, beige. Gwen caught a glimpse of herself in a trophy case and realized she looked like someone in a barber’s cape.

  “Do you think a ten-year-old really said that about the baroque masters?” asked Gwen.

  “He probably heard it on that trip to France last year. They’re little parrots,” said Elizabeth. “Thank you again for your help. The flowers are beautiful.”

  “I’m sorry I was so late—”

  Elizabeth waved her hand. “It’s Art Night. No one really notices the flowers until the spring gala— Hi, Julia!”

  Julia breezed up to the women, leaning in to Elizabeth for a two-cheek kiss. Gwen watched carefully—right cheek first—so she would be prepared when Julia came for her.

  When the women had untangled from their greetings, Julia said, “I’m hoping this event lands my kids a good art dealer.”

  “They don’t have one already? In kindergarten? Late bloomers,” said Elizabeth.

  Gwen laughed. She wondered how many glasses of wine Elizabeth had had.

  “I was just telling Gwen that all this work amounts to nothing.”

  “That’s ridiculous! It’s beautiful, Elizabeth. You’re a master,” said Julia.

  Elizabeth smiled.

  “It does look pretty damn good, doesn’t it? Gwen did the flowers.”

  “No—I just picked them up.”

  “They’re beautiful,” said Julia. She lowered her voice. “Can I complain for a second? I had the most shit day. On top of my own workload, I’ve been helping Tom—well, Tom and Seth . . .” She nodded to Gwen, as if the two of them were in on something. “So I missed a deadline, and one of my bigger clients accused me of ‘neglect.�
�”

  Elizabeth offered Julia counsel (“Fuck that,” she said). Gwen was surprised, happily so, that these women with their thin wrists and red-painted fingernails could swear so casually.

  Gwen had a strong suspicion that Julia was the most competent of the BuzzSwitch team. Tom’s breeziness would be a problem. For him, it didn’t matter if BuzzSwitch didn’t work out; there had already been other BuzzSwitches in his life, and there would be more. He had the air of a man wandering in a sun-soaked orchard dangling with opportunities, abundant and ever perpetual. For Tom, any losses would be temporary. Seth, in contrast, was in possession of hard-earned competence, and inherent doggedness, but also the very human potential for failure. Julia, though—Gwen remembered her tapping away on her laptop at the cottage, slicing through one problem after another. If BuzzSwitch worked, Julia would be the reason. Were her professional triumphs the corollary of maternal neglect? Gwen might have believed so, at one point, or needed to, to comfort herself. But those feelings were long gone. Gwen thought of Eli alone in the arena parking lot, and neglectful mothers everywhere.

  The women were standing in front of a sculpture that appeared to be simply a stack of tin cans. A small trophy stood in front of it: ECO AWARD.

  “I wonder what will happen to these kids when they join the real world and realize that they’re untalented,” said Elizabeth under her breath.

  “Oh, they’ll probably never have to find out,” said Julia lightly.

  United, the three women sipped their wine and scanned the room. The dads seemed to have arrived together, all at once, their suits ranging from grey to dark grey and back again.

  So smoothly that Gwen hardly noticed it, Elizabeth facilitated a merging of their threesome with another group of parents. A short, handsome man was on the edge of the new group, but somehow, he was at the centre, too. This was the famous architect, recognized by Gwen before Elizabeth introduced them. She feared a two-cheek kiss, but he grabbed Gwen’s hand and shook firmly. His square silver glasses occupied 90 percent of his face-scape. The power he threw off was entirely different from Elizabeth’s but just as forceful—coolness in place of her heat.