Stay Where I Can See You

by Katrina Onstad

  Gwen had stayed on the bed for a long time, looking up at the ceiling, wondering if she should go next door and alert them to her presence. Perhaps she should just open Maddie’s door, armed with a stack of laundry.

  Such silence.

  Gwen had put down her computer, risen from the bed. She stood in the centre of the room, then slowly walked to her bedroom wall. She spread her hands, then pressed her ear against the white wall (she could still smell the paint, giving them all cancer), catching her daughter’s voice like a safecracker catching clicks.

  After a while, Gwen backed away. Maddie’s door opened. Two sets of footsteps padded downstairs. Gwen could hear Seth exclaiming faintly from the kitchen, “Nice to meet you . . .”

  Maddie’s door was open, and Gwen went inside. She inhaled, but it was just the same faint mix of scented candles and shampoo. Maddie’s binders were in the usual tidy stack on her desk. A worn black backpack lay on the made bed—the boy’s, Joshua’s. Gwen unzipped it and pawed through the contents. Joshua’s binder, textbooks, a calculator, sandwich wrappers. I’m invading again, Gwen reminded herself, aware that if anyone walked by—She shut Maddie’s door, locking herself in.

  In the front pocket, Gwen found his wallet. She opened it up: fifteen dollars. A bus pass. She pulled out a photo of a woman who must be his mother. Gwen admired her muscular, determined face and unapologetic blue eye shadow.

  Gwen put the picture back, and her fingers hit something plastic in the wallet’s fold: a condom. She stared at the package in her hand, black and yellow writing promising Extreme Pleasure. Gwen hesitated before putting it back. Bristly fury gathered in her gut.

  Then Gwen pulled out the boy’s history textbook. She opened it up to the centre and ripped out a single page, listening to the tear, hearing not paper but steel on steel—glass shattering. She crumpled the page into a ball and stuffed it into the pocket of her pants, hidden under her swishing dress.

  Gwen replaced the textbook, carefully slipping it between the other items in the backpack. She zipped the pack. Now her anger melted into sadness, and Gwen knew it would sit astride her all night, through dinner, into the sleeping hours. The ache wasn’t just that she and her daughter were separating. The convergence frightened her, too. Perhaps Maddie would be at once reckless and submissive, a girl with fierce cravings, as Gwen had been at her age.

  Gwen had turned out Maddie’s light and made her way downstairs, to the sounds of dinner, the smell of Seth’s tomato sauce, voices rattling in the kitchen. Dinner was what to think about. Her family was what mattered. She would call on her better self: arrive, arrive. She descended the stairs.

  But Gwen couldn’t stop the remembrance of Maddie’s voice. She kept hearing it, the one word she had been able to make out with her ear pressed to the bedroom wall before dinner, close enough to capture her daughter’s whisper: “Faster.”

  Seth came into the bedroom and went straight to the bathroom, bringing with him a nimbus of overwork and heavy breathing. At his side of the bed, Seth’s phone flashed. Gwen reached for it, taking in a notification: Julia.

  Gwen called out, “What exactly is Julia doing for you and Tom?”

  The tap ran in the bathroom. “Just some consultation on marketing.” The tap turned off. Seth stood in the bathroom door in his boxers and clicked off the light.

  “You’re thinner,” said Gwen. “Richer and thinner.” She shored herself to say something, to tell him at last about Daniel.

  Seth dropped on the edge of the bed in the dark, checking his phone. He sighed deeply, then threw his phone on the bedside table, flopping backwards, head on the pillow.

  “Oh God,” he said. To the ceiling, he added, “We’re having a few setbacks.” He talked about angel investors who had backed away, and the dollar weakening.

  Seth looked so distracted, so thin. Gwen couldn’t say anything right now, and really, what was there to say? Maddie’s dad is extorting me. How’s the new humidor working out?

  Gwen made comforting noises at her husband, with sincerity, assuring him that Tom would figure it out. Tom had never floundered at anything. Tom had the cottage, and the jaw.

  Seth took Gwen’s hand, and the casualness of it—the millionth time-ness of the gesture—animated something in Gwen, an urge for confidentiality.

  “I should tell you something—” she said.

  Seth’s phone vibrated. “Just a second . . .” He dropped her hand, rolled and clicked. “I’m turning it off . . .” he said, and returned to her.

  These little digital interruptions that defined her interactions with her husband reminded her of the loons at Julia’s lake: skimming the water, then ducking down and vanishing.

  “Okay, what were you saying?” Seth’s white teeth flashed. His eyes were on the ceiling, distracted.

  It was not the right time. But still, Gwen had to say something, so she said, “Maddie’s having sex.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Gwen told him she’d heard them (but didn’t mention the textbook, or the specifics of what she’d heard). Seth was quiet. She wondered if he, too, would succumb to a kind of Victorian moral panic; if he, too, would want to scream and break something.

  “Huh,” Seth said finally. “Well, he seems like a nice kid.”

  Gwen frowned. Every once in a while when they were raising Maddie—not often—she had the thought: he cares just a little less because she’s not his. Why else did he approve the late curfew request, or let her drive with the glazed-looking kid who had had his licence for less than twenty-four hours? But Gwen shook away those thoughts, because in almost every instance, she knew that he minded less only because she minded too much. That was their dance. He loved Maddie. He was her father.

  Seth continued, “There are probably worse guys to choose for the first time. Assuming it’s her first time.”

  “It is her first time. Of course it is, Seth,” said Gwen. But then she had to think about that.

  Seth rolled onto his side to look at Gwen. “I know it wasn’t great for you. But Maddie has it better than we did. I hated all the sneaking around, guilty all the time. She should enjoy sex, right? Isn’t that the way we’re supposed to think about it now? Emphasize the pleasure? Not punish them for what’s normal?”

  Gwen rolled her eyes. “Did you read that somewhere?”

  “Damn straight.”

  Gwen tried to take comfort in Seth’s reasoned responses. She did, usually; it was why she’d chosen him. But she hesitated to fling her arm over his body. Julia, the phone said.

  Sleepily, Seth put a hand on Gwen’s neck, and she jerked, as she always did. She could bear the children’s hands around her neck when they were small, convincing herself that their touch was healing old invisible marks. But when Seth touched her neck, she flinched. “You okay?” he would ask, and she would apologize by taking his hand and moving it to her chest, her breast. He would never hurt her, she knew this in her brain, but to her body, the size of his hand was the size of all men’s hands, of Daniel’s hand. It happened each time: Daniel’s hands circled and bore down on her neck. A gasp and thrash—and then the liquid black.

  Gwen gulped for air. Seth murmured and rolled away, oblivious. She lay with her heart pounding. She pictured a bird flying overhead, readying to land—hulking, claws out.

  13

  GWEN

  From the top of Spadina, her vision only slightly impaired by a furry snowfall, Gwen saw the old neon palm tree sign for Palmer’s. She paused briefly, then shrugged off the fear, striding purposefully down the hill from College Street. Little had changed in Chinatown. Signs above restaurants and stores were still in slightly bumpy English (IMPORTS TRADES CO, THE PEOPLES BOOKSTORE). Overhead, electrical wires made webs between the poles, prettily iced over in patches.

  In a small, streaked glass display box by the door of the bar, the marquee advertised bands Gwen hadn’t heard of. Cigarette butts littered the sidewalk, bleeding yellow into the snow. It was afternoon, exactly four o’clock,
as per the plan.

  Gwen pushed hard through the doors. Inside, it was dark; bars existed in perpetual night. Her boots dripped. Gwen looked around at a handful of people day-drinking in shadows. He wasn’t there yet, but still, she put her hand on the bottom of her purse where the outline of the gun pressed against her fingers. Gun or money, she reminded herself, depending on how it went. She felt agile, fit. Her reflexes tingled. The music wasn’t loud, but it was a good song, an old song, with a buzzing curtain of guitars and a woman snarling. Gwen took it in, let it fortify her.

  “Sit anywhere,” said the bartender, an older woman scrolling on her phone. Exactly where the bartender stood now, Harsha the dishwasher had stood, shyly pulling glasses from the machine, his eye black and green. She could picture Gus leaning there, his belly sagging. “That’s your boyfriend’s work. He’s a fucking maniac.”

  “Does Gus still manage the bar?”

  The bartender looked up from her phone. “Who?”

  “Gus. It was a while ago.”

  “Don’t know him. In spring, the whole place is going to be torn down. Condos. They want to keep the neon sign, though.”

  Gwen bought a watery pint, and turned, scanning the room for a table. Then she stopped. She had missed him somehow. But it was Daniel, without mistake. His cheeks were scooped and his hair short. A white T-shirt pressed tight across his upright shoulders; he was broader, more muscular. The eyes were the same, black and unquiet. Over the years, she had thought she’d seen him many times, but always in places that he would never be: the stationery aisle at Walmart; a motel in Pittsburgh where Eli’s hockey team was staying for a tournament. But she had been seeing young men, and he wasn’t young anymore.

  This older version of Daniel was still beautiful. She put her hand to her hair, then dropped it quickly. She had put on makeup. She had chosen tight dark jeans. Crazy, Gwen had told herself as she applied lipstick in the mirror. This is not a reunion. It’s a shakedown. But when she stepped in front of him, she knew that she would become seventeen for a moment, and she wanted to be dressed for it.

  Daniel stared.

  “Blonde,” he said.

  Gwen sat down, unbuttoned her coat, her fingers shaking slightly. She felt him watching her, and experienced twin flickers of shame and desire. It was, in a way, wondrous to see this man again, her first love, the keeper of her troubled youth. A little part of her wanted Seth to see him, too: Look at this! they could marvel, like they did at the painting at Art Night. Evidence of something previously inexplicable.

  Someone had turned the music up for the band’s most famous song. Her entire history with Daniel pitched through her. Her body contained all of it, went back through it and suffered it all over again in the chair, in the ambient beer stench.

  Daniel, holding up his glass, said, “Club soda.”

  His voice was scorched, deeper than she remembered. He told her it wasn’t easy, staying straight, but he was doing okay. He was crashing at somebody’s apartment, but he needed to leave, go to where he could get a decent job. The city was too expensive.

  “You can afford it here, though, huh?” he said, and Gwen recognized an echo of the vague threat of the emails. He stared at her.

  Gwen looked down, heart racing, locking on the glass. He was big, much bigger than her. She froze, unable to speak.

  “What do you think, Gwen?” he said. “Can you help me get out of here?”

  In that question, his voice softened. He became someone to pity. An addict, a broken person. Maybe he could get better. A little money had helped her when she was starting out with Maddie. Mercy, she thought suddenly. Her body held the pain, but it held the love, too. She could feel her curved back tucked into his stomach, his groin, as they lay on the grass in their sleeping bags. Daniel walking next to her as they moved through the city together, bound by the sadness of their young pasts. It had passed for family. This, too, remained.

  She reached into her purse, and her hand hovered between the manila envelope and the gun. Her fingers lightly brushed each. The gun was there to provide her a choice. An option to meet a threat with a threat. But the other choice was money, which might end things, once and for all. Gwen’s breathing accelerated. Now she was confused. He had always made her uncertain of herself, fuzzy. She should have decided before—she should have walked in the door with a plan—

  And then, suddenly, Daniel’s hand reached across the table and grabbed her wrist.

  Gwen stood up, but he kept his grip, his fingers tightening, her shoulder jerked toward the table. She was off-balance, panicked: now she couldn’t reach the gun. Or the money.

  His grip tightened around her wrist, but it might have been around her neck. She gasped for air.

  “Tell me what she’s like, Gwen, my daughter,” he said.

  He said it like she owed him. But she had no debt here, and with a surprise surge of strength she wrenched her wrist away. Around her, the sleepy eyes of the day-drinkers found focus, landing on the scuffle at Gwen’s table.

  Gwen backed away and reached into her bag, searching. She hesitated, then pulled out the manila envelope, placing it on the table. Slowly, she said, “Leave us alone.”

  He stared at her for a moment, a small smile on his lips.

  “Or what, Gwen?” he said.

  He was smirking at her weakness, which he would remember well. She had been the girl too frozen to do anything; too frozen to leave him, too frozen to help an injured man.

  He tapped the envelope with a long finger. “You don’t want your family to know what you got up to, and now you don’t have to worry about it. We’re good.” He put the money in his back pocket and leaned back. He was calm, settled. He cocked his head and asked it again: “So what’s she like?”

  At the mention of Maddie, the gun seemed to grow heavier at the bottom of Gwen’s bag, its heat spreading to her hip where the bag rested—available to her with just one gesture. But what could she do, really? She glanced around the bar: a slack-faced old man at the closest table stared into space. Hadn’t she done enough now, by handing him the money, by taking him at his word that she was buying his vanishing?

  Shaking, she leaned close to Daniel’s face, breathing in his scent, lips to his ear. “Don’t ever contact us again.” Gwen stood to her full height, gripping her bag where the strap met her shoulder. “And Maddie is miraculous.” Then she turned and walked fast to the door, feeling his eyes on her with every breathless step.

  Spring

  14

  MADDIE

  All through winter and into spring, Maddie revelled in the fact of her first boyfriend. Every morning, she awoke and remembered, holding up a telescope to survey her life and ensure the discovery was still visible. Despite Gwen’s hovering, and the love of both her parents, Maddie was aware—had always been aware—that at the beginning and end of every day, she was fundamentally alone. But now there was this other person in her near orbit, this satellite human who was with her always, even when he wasn’t. At night, they texted each other to sleep. In the day, Joshua’s tall frame waited for her by the locker between classes. They weren’t stupid about being a couple, though; some girls got stupid, Maddie had seen it. But not Maddie and Joshua. They didn’t hold hands to make other people feel bad, or have reality-TV–perfect fights in the hallway. Joshua didn’t grab her butt (not even ironically) or ask for nudes. What they had was private, maybe even invisible to other people, Maddie imagined, which made it more sacred and a little superior.

  Mostly, she had someone to do stuff with. When Joshua could get away, they walked a lot, far from each of their homes, through new neighbourhoods in the city that Maddie was still learning. He knew the streetcar routes, and the ravines that spidered beneath the roads and apartment blocks. They walked over the Bloor Street Viaduct, looking down at traffic through the webbed net meant to catch jumpers. In the woods below the Don Valley freeway, they spotted ducks in the Don River, and through the trees sometimes, they would spy a tent, tightly zippe
d.

  One day, Maddie stayed home with a cold. Gwen was on a field trip with Eli’s school, and at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, the bell rang and there was Joshua, who never cut class, on the stoop. He looked nervously from side to side, and held up a plastic takeout bag.

  “Pho,” he said. Maddie must have looked confused, because he said, “Vietnamese soup.”

  They ate soup in front of the TV. They talked about school, and Joshua showed her a new comedian on his phone, a woman who said, “Say WHAAAAT?” at the end of each joke, which was kind of hilarious. They watched a show about a family in California where everyone was good-looking, and the grown kids lived in the guesthouse, and the big problem was whether or not one of the teenagers was going to continue being nice to her much older boyfriend, who had been fighting in Afghanistan. Outside, on a bench in the big backyard, the girl had a talk with her dad, who was grumpy but kind.

  Maddie, foggy from her cold, was enjoying the fast-food high of mediocre TV when Joshua turned to her and said, “I don’t actually know my dad.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I don’t know why I said that to your parents, about him coming here.” Joshua straightened the soup containers on the coffee table. “He probably has another family now. My mom came to get me when I was four, and when we got back to Canada, she was pregnant with Alex. We haven’t heard from him since. Alex never even met him.”

  Maddie took this in, but she didn’t feel too bad for Alexis. Instead of a dad, she had Joshua—a fair trade. He sat cloudy and serious, arms wrapped around his knees.

  “She still sends money to his parents, though.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “You just have to. Bagong bayani—all the OFWs who move here and send money home.”