This was a new way of speaking. It wasn’t the adolescent eye rolling. It was adult contempt, rock hard, tossed down from on high.
Gwen exploded. “I have a job! My job is keeping you and Eli safe! My job is holding this family together!”
“You suck at it, Mom.” Maddie walked out.
Gwen stood, shallow breathing. Maddie wasn’t wrong. It had been a very careful performance: a normal mother; a normal wife. She had made herself a woman without a past, which is what motherhood seemed to require. A clean white space. She had excelled at it, too. It was the one thing she knew how to do. But now her daughter hated her, and would soon be leaving, and her family was in danger. She wasn’t very good at that one thing after all.
Panic surged in her chest, and she followed Maddie into her room. Maddie’s pack and coat were strewn on the ground, and she was sitting at her desk. It was all backwards. Gwen was the one who should have been sulking. Gwen was the misunderstood kid with the crazy parents. She saw herself sneaking cigarettes, leaning her torso out the window to exhale.
She stood in the room, at a loss as to how to repair the breach. Maddie’s head hung low, her chest caved and heaving, waiting.
What would a grown-up do? Gwen thought. She would act like a grown-up, saying calmly, as she did, “We need to meet this boy. Invite him over for dinner.” Then she added, “And when you’re out—don’t talk to strangers. I’m not kidding. Things are different now.”
Maddie sighed loudly. “I’m not five, Mom,” she said.
Gwen left the room on shaky legs, walking down the hall while choking back tears. I’m not five. In the park, five-year-old Maddie came running up to her with the stem of a dandelion that had lost its fluff, distraught that there was nothing to blow, calling, “Mama, it’s not working!” Come back, thought Gwen, bracing herself on the hallway walls. Come back.
* * *
Later, Gwen fed them dinner. She ran a bath for Eli, and when he was soap-scented and in bed, she read to him as if he still wanted to be read to. Maddie kept her door shut.
Night settled around the house. Gwen checked the security system. She moved between the kids’ bedrooms, squatting close next to their sleeping bodies to watch the duvets rise and fall.
She texted Seth, who was on a night flight back to LA to make a morning meeting with Tom and the angel investors. Then, when everything had been secured, Gwen climbed in bed with her laptop and composed a response to the email from Daniel.
Outside, the first snow of the season fell, thin and uncertain.
Gwen watched the snow dropping, vanishing before it touched the ground, and hit Send.
12
MADDIE
Maddie circled the foyer, waiting. Joshua was never late on purpose, but he would be coming from work, so he could get delayed. She hoped he wouldn’t be wearing his work shirt with the brown plastic sheen, even though she knew it wouldn’t bother her parents. She tried not to let it bother her.
He rang the bell for just a split second before Maddie flung open the door. Joshua’s hair was wet from a shower, and he was carrying a clear plastic container.
“I brought cookies. Alexis made them. I brought my school stuff, too. We could do History after?” He turned to show Maddie his backpack, sagging with weight. He peered past her, into the house. “Where are your parents?”
“Let’s go upstairs for a second,” she whispered.
Joshua hesitated. Maddie nodded, coaxing him into the foyer. She hadn’t planned to take him to her room, but he looked so beautiful with his box of cookies and his showered skin smooth as glass (he never had a zit—not ever!) and his nervousness that implied this meet-the-parents thing mattered.
Maddie led him up the stairs, with that feeling moving black and wavy in her middle.
She locked the door behind her and turned to him, a boy standing in her bedroom with a box of cookies in his hand. Joshua’s eyes widened in a question mark, and Maddie took the cookies and placed them on the bed. He threw his backpack next to the box, and they moved toward one another at the same time, hands and mouths reaching.
“Fast,” whispered Maddie, and she leaned against the window.
Joshua moved behind her, pressing his hips into her extended body, reaching around and unzipping her jeans, running his hands between her legs. This was almost enough, just the brush of him, and Maddie said it again, louder, “Faster,” which he generally was anyway, fast and slightly surprised. (Maddie knew she was supposed to make fun of him for that, but it was fine with her; she was fast, too.) As she listened to him unwrapping the condom, Maddie stayed bent over, her hands against the Juliet windows, head bowed, hair curtained. As he entered her, breathing quickly, she wondered if there were neighbours looking up who could see them. She wouldn’t mind. But when she looked down at the empty grey lawns waiting for winter, she saw no one.
* * *
When they walked into the kitchen, Seth was there. He pushed up his glasses as if to see Joshua better, and then held his hand out.
“You must be Joshua. I’m Seth, Maddie’s dad.”
“He knows who you are,” snapped Maddie, instantly regretting it. She was nervous. But Seth didn’t blink.
“Right. You said he was sharp, didn’t you? I forgot.”
“Thanks for having me,” said Joshua, offering the box.
This went wrong: Seth had his hand extended, but instead of shaking Joshua’s, he took the cookies and placed them on the counter. When he turned around again, Joshua had his hand out, like he’d been waiting. Finally, they shook. Maddie noticed that Joshua’s handshake was strong.
Seth fussed around the kitchen, crushing a tin of tomatoes in a pot. Her mother wasn’t cooking much these days.
Stirring, Seth said, “I just got back from California, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit spaced, Joshua. Jet lag.”
“Where were you?” asked Joshua.
“Los Angeles. Have you ever been?”
“No. I’ve never been west.”
“Well, perhaps for you, all of this country is the west, isn’t it? For immigrants, wherever they land is the frontier, I suppose.”
The word “immigrant” rolled through Maddie’s head like a rock in a canyon. The word “they.” So it had only taken a few minutes for that to come up. Jesus.
“Maybe. I don’t know,” said Joshua.
“My family came from Russia,” said Seth. “Just before the war.”
Oh God, thought Maddie: this story (even though she’d always kind of liked this story, it seemed transformed into something different by Joshua’s presence).
Seth moved around the kitchen, stirring and chopping, telling Joshua about how his grandmother paid a priest for safe passage to New York with a diamond ring. While Seth’s grandparents were waiting at the train station, the priest’s wife appeared with a loaf of bread wrapped in a tea towel, and wished them luck. When the wheels of the train had been grinding for hours—the first train of many, toward Lisbon, and the ship that would deliver them to New York, and finally, the train to Montreal—Seth’s grandmother bit into the hunk of bread, thankful for the generosity of the priest’s wife. Suddenly, she screamed in pain (Seth raised the tomato-soaked wooden spoon, for emphasis, spattering red into the air). She had cracked a tooth on a hard object. The priest, or his wife, or both of them, had hidden the ring in the dough.
“The generosity! The risk!” Seth exclaimed.
Joshua nodded encouragingly.
Seth was placing them side-by-side, Maddie thought, trying to get some imaginary version of his grandparents and some imaginary version of Joshua’s Filipina mom to link arms and kick together in some conga line of history. She swung between pride at Seth’s sincerity, and mortification at his cluelessness.
But Joshua, with his sombre brow, was polite. He asked questions about Russian geography as he carried the salad to the table, following Seth.
Eli was already seated. He greeted Joshua. “What’s shakin’, bacon?”
“We’re so happy to have you here, Joshua.” Gwen smiled, inviting, but she was pale and seemed distracted.
She had always checked out from time to time, vanishing into herself with a shuttered expression. Where did she go? Maddie wondered. Her mom’s past was a series of dead ends: left Procter for the city, went to university, met Seth too young, had a baby, dropped out of school. Those were markers; few details on what happened in between were offered. “Oh, I used to love this song,” said Gwen once from the driver’s seat, when some punk girl band came on the radio. In the back, Maddie and Eli looked at each other and burst out laughing. How could that song have ever mattered to Gwen?
Seth and Gwen occupied either end of the table. The table in the old house had been circular. Now, seated at the giant rectangle, everyone was spaced far apart, as if another family could have joined them, sliding between the chairs like black piano keys.
Seth did most of the talking, and Joshua responded politely. Favourite subject? Neighbourhood? Movies? Maddie found the questions parasitic. Her parents were taking bites out of Joshua, which meant there would be less of him for her.
Gwen moved her food around on her plate, back and forth, barely eating. She was somewhere else, Maddie thought.
“So what are you reading?” Seth asked, which he always asked Maddie’s and Eli’s friends.
“Blood Meridian,” said Joshua.
“Ambitious. You reading that too, Mads?”
“No. In our class it’s The Handmaid’s Tale. These women have to make babies for the state.”
“And does Blood Meridian float your boat, Joshua?”
Maddie winced at “float your boat.”
“Dad, what’d you do to your teeth?” asked Eli.
Seth quickly curled his lips over his teeth, clamping his mouth shut.
“Nuffin’,” he said.
“They’re like Tic Tacs,” said Eli.
Gwen was listening after all, because she slowly turned her gaze to her husband.
“What does he mean?” Gwen asked.
Seth’s lemon-puckered mouth slowly came undone. He sighed, resigned. Then he grinned, his lips pulled back in a growl, and there they were: glistening and blinding, snow white teeth.
“Whoa! Dude!” said Eli.
“His teeth aren’t usually like that,” said Maddie to Joshua.
“They look good,” offered Joshua. “Supremely clean.”
“You did something in LA,” said Gwen, astonished.
“It’s no big deal, is it?” asked Seth. “They do it at the airport when you land.” Flustered, he inserted long pauses between thoughts, a tic Maddie hadn’t heard in a while. “They won’t let you into LA with Canadian teeth.” He paused and swallowed. “They call it ‘Canadian yellow’ and make all Canadians bleach their mouths at port of entry.”
“Wait—is that true? Are you joking?” asked Eli.
“It’s no big deal,” said Seth again, but his cheeks were pink, and he was tapping his knife on the table rapidly. No one spoke. “Lasers, okay? Walk-in.”
Gwen continued to stare at her husband with a look that suggested betrayal. Maddie did not recognize this look.
Joshua put his fork down, cleared his throat. “I do find it violent,” he said, and everyone looked at him. “The book. It’s violent, but its violence serves a purpose.”
“What purpose is that, Joshua?” asked Seth. Her parents kept saying his name like he might not know it.
“Well, there’s the Kid, and he’s violence incarnate, just a teenager who kind of like kills to kill, just all about the bloodshed. Then there’s the Judge, and he thinks killing is inevitable, that death and rampage is our natural state. So McCarthy wants us to think about that.”
Eli said, “Where do I get this book?”
Maddie thought that Seth would volley back his own interpretation, and they would sit at the table discussing this book that she hadn’t read. But Seth’s phone was vibrating, and he cut short the conversation, murmuring, “Yes, yes, I think you’re onto something, Joshua. I’ll get dessert.”
He grabbed his phone and stood while Gwen continued to sit in front of her uneaten food like a toddler.
Something was wrong with Gwen tonight. Lately, Maddie had been catching her in an expression of pure mourning, like she was memorizing Maddie’s face before the casket closed. But right now, Gwen seemed like she was avoiding looking at Maddie at all.
Annoyed and hurt by Gwen’s pointed withdrawal, Maddie stood to clear the dishes, and Joshua followed her lead. He moved efficiently, stacking and carrying. In the kitchen, he smiled at her and shrugged, which she didn’t know how to interpret.
Seth brought out a Whole Foods box.
“We’ll put out your cookies, too, Joshua,” said Seth. “You two get the forks and plates.”
In the kitchen, Joshua pulled open a drawer. “Empty,” he said. He tried another one, and another, all embarrassingly empty. They had too much space, Maddie knew, too many drawers.
“Over here,” said Seth, who had found the cake forks.
Joshua brought in the plates, Maddie the tray of Alexis’s chocolate chip cookies, and Seth carried the cake. It was white, with coloured macaroons on the side floating like balls of bubble gum.
“What is that?” said Eli, forlorn. “I like angel food cake.”
“It’s called a Marie Antoinette—ironically, I suppose. I thought Gwen would like it. It’s panna cotta.”
“But Mom usually makes the cakes, remember? Her cakes are awesome,” said Eli.
“You never bake anymore, Mom,” said Maddie.
“I think we left the pans behind when we moved,” said Gwen.
“Just buy some new ones,” said Eli.
“We can’t just buy everything we think of,” said Maddie. “It’s wasteful.”
“They’re cake pans! Mom just bought a twelve thousand-dollar table!”
Seth looked up, knife still nestled inside the cake. “This table?”
Maddie, disgusted with her family, blurted, “Joshua’s dad is in the Philippines. He works in a factory.”
The cake pieces circulated.
“Wait until everyone has a piece, Eli,” said Seth. “What kind of factory is it, Joshua?”
“Jet engines.”
Maddie was embarrassed that she hadn’t thought to ask what kind of factory. She had assumed he worked in a sweatshop, packing fruit or sewing clothes—jobs that people over here felt bad about.
“Is he an engineer?” asked Seth.
“He oversees an assembly line. He should have been an engineer.”
“Why doesn’t he come here? He could probably do that here, for more money,” said Eli, eating his cake.
“It’s not that easy for people to get here,” said Maddie. “In fact, they’re trying to send them back these days. We met this nanny who’s probably getting deported, because she was caught babysitting.” She sensed Joshua glancing at her sideways.
“So what if she babysits? She’s a nanny,” said Eli.
“It violates her visa requirements,” said Maddie.
“That’s terrible,” said Seth. “The government is ruthless.”
Maddie didn’t know which one he meant, here or the Philippines.
Seth’s phone vibrated again. A cloud passed over his face as he looked at the number. “I have to take this, please excuse me.” He left the room.
The rest of them at
e quietly, and the weight of social expectation tilted toward Gwen. Maddie wanted her to wake up and take over Seth’s abandoned duties, and show Joshua that they weren’t greedy, clueless white people.
As if she heard her plea, Gwen asked, “Joshua, would you like your dad to come here?”
“Mom . . .” This question seemed embarrassingly personal to Maddie.
“He’s trying.” Joshua cleared his throat, redirecting the conversation with a question to Gwen. “And what about you? Do your parents live nearby?”
Maddie straightened. Gwen’s parents were off limits. Apparently Maddie had met her grandmother when she was a baby, but she had no recollection of this. There was a car accident soon after, and she died. Gwen’s father was alive, but he was “not a good person,” Gwen had said, explaining why they didn’t see him, even though he lived a few hours away. But that description covered such a span of possible behaviours that it told Maddie nothing: A guy who didn’t replace the empty toilet paper roll? A guy who locked his daughter in a closet? The family didn’t talk about Gwen’s parents.
“My mother died suddenly around the time Eli was born,” said Gwen slowly. “My father—we aren’t close.” She shut the door on the conversation, lifted her napkin to her lips and pushed her plate away. Then she smiled at Joshua kindly. “Water under the bridge.”
“What bridge?” asked Eli.
GWEN
Gwen couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed on her back, listening to Seth’s cell phone murmurs floating from his office into the bedroom.
She had no plan. Waiting wasn’t a plan, but she had become very good at pretending it was. She could just pay him off—but why? Because he could go to the police and implicate you in robbery and assault. He could tell Maddie that she was raised by liars. He could toss a lit match into your home.
She lay there, travelling backwards through the night that had just passed, moment by moment, thinking about the enslaved women in Maddie’s book, with fetuses planted in their bodies like flags. She was surprised Joshua had asked about her parents. He was a thoughtful person. She loathed him nonetheless.
When the doorbell rang at the beginning of the evening, while Seth was cooking and they were awaiting the arrival of the boy from the park, Gwen had been upstairs, on the bed with her laptop, googling private detectives. Two sets of footsteps moved quietly up the stairs and into Maddie’s room next door. No speaking. A door locked.
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