Maddie had rushed home and asked Gwen, “Do you have any journals from high school?” Gwen clouded over as if nothing had been asked. It was the same blocking she did when Maddie asked about her grandparents, or Procter. Seth would always step in between Maddie’s questions and Gwen. “It was a hard time for your mom. Let’s talk about it later.” But there never was a later.
Maddie had mentioned to Raj once that she didn’t really know anything about her mom’s life before becoming a mom, and he’d shrugged and said his own mom never talked about India either. “It’s an immigrant thing,” he’d said. But what world had Gwen emigrated from? What planet had expelled her? She was her own cold star.
Maddie had just accepted it. All her life, the dead space between dates and facts—she was an idiot. Maybe she had always known. It didn’t take a genius. There was Eli, with Seth’s curls, and there was Maddie, with Seth’s nothing.
Splinters of images came back to her with new meaning. She was tiny, sleeping with her mother in a bed in a strange room with a desk by a window. A dream she’d had over and over. Then there was her little yellow dress, and holding Seth’s hand. That was the first photo of the three of them after the others were lost—she stopped. The photos weren’t lost, though. They didn’t exist. Just the one of her and her mother in the hospital—newborn Maddie in a blanket, her mom’s black rubber bracelets. Where was this guy, this Daniel guy, that day? Daniel. Where was her dad when she was born?
Maddie stumbled out of her bedroom. The house was dark, except for a light in the kitchen. Seth was still out, at work, but as Maddie went down the stairs, she could see her mother in her pyjamas, perched at the island, pulling a sagging teabag from a mug. Seeing her mother dangle the brown, wet teabag from a string was revolting. Maddie’s expensive dinner flipped in her stomach.
Maddie placed her phone in front of her mother, pointing at the email.
As Gwen read, weather passed over her face: fear, sadness, a kind of submission. Probably her mother had been waiting for this reproach forever. She must have known it was coming. How strange to always be waiting, Maddie thought, almost pitying her mother for just a moment, and then letting fury overtake that generosity.
Gwen said numbly, “He was supposed to leave.” She stopped on the email’s last line, which was a request. “No, Maddie—you can’t meet with him.”
“Why not?”
“He shouldn’t be here . . .” Gwen looked up. “You can’t see him.”
Maddie stared at her, the most direct look she’d given her mother in months.
“I know it’s hard to understand, but we did it to protect you. He’s not a good person. I wish he were. But Maddie—he’s not . . . safe, for you—”
“Did he rape you or something? Is my father a rapist?” This question came to her suddenly as a plausible explanation, the ramifications of which were too cosmic to consider, even as she asked it.
“No! God, no,” said Gwen.
Maddie stared. She felt like Truman in The Truman Show when he figures out the conspiracy. All of them, in on it.
“We made—I made—a decision, a long time ago, to try to make it easier for you.”
Nothing about this was easy. Maddie couldn’t imagine a more complicated, knotted mass than her life at that moment. “You’re a liar,” she said simply.
Gwen’s arms hung at her sides. She hunched over at the waist. “This isn’t how we wanted you to find out. I’m sorry, Maddie. Time passed so much more quickly than I ever imagined—please, you can’t see him—you don’t know what he’s capable of.”
Maddie wanted Gwen to say something real, for once. She wanted her to explain all the random accidents that had made her who she was. She was real, Maddie was certain of it; her body was real. It had felt everything. She had been alive for eighteen years. It was the how of it that she never really understood.
Maddie watched her mother open her jaw, then slowly shut it. Then open, then shut, fishily.
Tell me, Maddie willed it. Tell me. But Gwen did not say anything.
Maddie turned and trudged upstairs, arms wrapped around her torso, holding herself in.
She stopped at Eli’s room, because the door was wide open. Maddie flipped on the light. His sleepwalking mat had been shoved to the foot of his bed, useless. His sheets were balled. He was gone.
GWEN
There it was, then. It had happened. She had thought that she would feel relieved when instead, she felt ablaze. She had burned down the world.
Did he rape you? That was Maddie’s question. She had to tell Maddie that there was violence, but not only, and that seemed an impossible task. She couldn’t understand it herself, the swirling duality of that time, the love and brutality conjoined.
A sudden breeze entered the house. The front door was open. Gwen didn’t know what scared her more: someone coming in, or someone going out. She went to shut it.
Maddie appeared at the top of the stairs. “Eli’s not here,” she said.
Gwen looked up at Maddie, letting the fact sink in, then shot out through the open door. Barefoot, she moved on instinct, tripping her way down the landing to the driveway. There was no moon. The sidewalk seemed far away and dark.
“Eli!” called Gwen, her eyes searching the lawn and the garden. “Eli!” She ran around the side of the house to the back, to the pool. The gate was open. Automatic light flooded the pool’s empty walls. No Eli. Now she ran, barefoot, back to the front of the house, her thin pyjama top flapping. Yonge Street, with its speeding cars and night buses, was only a few blocks away. Gwen tripped on the cobblestone, braced herself on the fence and looked left, then right. Nothing, and no one. The only light was on a single porch far away. Windows were black next to their manicured hedges and lawns.
Gwen ran the most dangerous route she could imagine, toward Yonge, calling “Eli! Eli!” When she was a block from the traffic, she stood in the middle of the road and spun in a full circle. A car went by slowly. Gwen stepped toward it, frantic. The windows were tinted. It slowed to a crawl and she lunged at the driver, screaming, “My son! Please!” The car swerved and sped up, passing her.
Gwen caught movement back where she had come from: a figure in the distance. She sprinted.
“Mom!” There was Maddie, directly across the street from her, on the sidewalk. She was barefoot, too, but she was young and faster. “I see him!”
Gwen couldn’t believe how fast her daughter could move, her legs kicking as if swimming, chopping water. Ahead, cars flew past on Yonge Street. By the traffic light, at the intersection, Gwen could see Eli’s small back. He was on the sidewalk, standing and rocking side to side. Then he stopped suddenly—Maddie was closing in now—and moved forward, as if to take a step. It would be a step into traffic, between cars. Gwen ran—she couldn’t tell if he had stepped off the curb—what was she seeing? Two cars came hurtling out of the dark; one leaned on the horn. Gwen knew that loud sounds did nothing. Shaking him didn’t work either. He needed a quiet voice, at a distance, a slow rousing. But there was no time.
He stood rigid, and then Gwen saw it: the slight lean, the intention—he was going to try to cross, toward the flower store, the organic butcher, the gourmet grocer, all closed and dimmed for night. Gwen panted, clutching her heart.
Maddie got there first, tackling Eli, knocking them both to the ground. She heard him wail, letting loose the strange high-pitched sound of the night terrors of his childhood. Gwen reached them, breathless, and fell onto their bodies, their two bodies, trying to tangle her own arms with theirs. But they were impenetrable, braided together.
Maddie looked up at her mother angrily. “Why didn’t you lock up?” she hissed. Eli was silent now, limp in Maddie’s arms.
She was hopeless against them. Gwen stood, pulled Eli from the ground, and he leaned into her, groggy. Gwen buried her face in his hair.
“You ran away,” Gwen murmured.
Eli didn’t say anything.
Then Maddie took his hand, severed h
im from Gwen, and they walked ahead of her in the streetlight, toward the big house.
Gwen straggled behind, her head bowed in shame, the endless, years-long shame a shroud that, at last, all the neighbourhood, all the world, could see, if it weren’t asleep.
* * *
Pulse racing, Gwen sat in the kitchen all night, waiting. The doors and windows had been secured, and the alarm punched. She couldn’t talk to Seth about this on the phone. He kept texting: “Another hour” and “Big developments. Don’t wait up.” Gwen imagined Julia sitting across from Seth at a boardroom table, muscular arms typing away on her tablet, solving the company’s problems, while Seth gazed at her admiringly.
The hours went by hazily until the birds began to sing in the dark, and a moment later, faint sun revealed the backyard. Dew gathered on the plants and deck furniture, beading. Summer was coming.
Gwen glanced at the clock on her phone: 5:45 a.m. The kids would be up in an hour and fifteen minutes. Or would they? Gwen tried to imagine Maddie coming down the stairs, Maddie eating breakfast. That these small occurrences would ever happen again seemed impossible now. Normal had ended.
Finally, just before 6 a.m., a car pulled up, and the front door slammed. Seth. Gwen smacked open her sour mouth.
He threw his keys down on the island, kissed her on the cheek. He didn’t seem surprised to see her sitting there. “Oh good, you’re up.” His shirt was untucked, bunchy with perspiration. He began making coffee, a wild energy in his movements. Something had happened, and Seth’s excitement wedged itself to the front of the line, ahead of Gwen’s heartbreak.
“Guess what?” he said.
Gwen thought how much he must sound like the eager magician he’d been when he was a kid. Young Seth standing before an audience of neighbours in his cape. “Guess what’s in this hat? Guess what card I have?”
As he talked, he ground the coffee in the new grinder and blasted the espresso machine, which made jarring whale noises. In between sounds, he told her about his night. It was, in a way, a confession. Gwen, dazed with fatigue and the lingering fear of the night before, tried to make sense of what he was telling her. The company had been on the brink. The house, in fact, had been put up as surety.
Gwen blinked. “The house . . .”
But they pulled it together at the last minute, Seth said, as if announcing the surprise outcome of a football game. Julia figured it out. Julia pulled the rabbit out of the hat.
“Julia . . .” said Gwen.
Julia had brought in a buyer. A bully offer for the payroll software had been accepted, papers signed at 5 a.m., which would allow them to fund BuzzSwitch for its next phase. Seth was giddy, curls flying.
“Why didn’t you tell me things were so bad?” Gwen asked.
“I didn’t want to stress you out,” he said. “There wasn’t any reason to lay it on you, until we’d solved it. I mean, Gwen . . .” He took one of his long pauses, drank his coffee, leaning on the counter. “You never really want to know.”
“Want to know what?”
“What’s going on.”
She looked at him searchingly. He attempted an explanation.
“I’m Canute, commanding the tides for you.” He drank again. “I keep the world away. That’s the arrangement.”
Gwen understood. Withholding had passed for love in their marriage, and in their family. He was wrong, though: she, not he, was the one who held back the waters, kept everything in place. He made the money, but she fed and wiped and built and tended. She made them whole, and protected them from the cold real world that only she, of all of them, really understood at all. And she was bone tired of the effort, the corralling and containing. Gwen closed her eyes.
Finally, she said, “I need to tell you something.”
So she did. She told Seth of Daniel’s return. The money she’d paid him. The email to Maddie. The looming threat against them all. And then she told him about the crime, and how she had stood there as a man’s blood pooled beneath the industrial refrigerator, and done nothing. How she had, in fact, grabbed the money, as ordered, and run.
Seth listened. He put his coffee down and slid his hands into his pockets. He moved from the counter and stood alone in the middle of the huge kitchen, silent. But he didn’t gasp or buckle at the knees. He was silent. Outside the French doors, chickadees swarmed the maple tree.
Gwen felt at once a twin certainty: that she had never loved her husband more, and that she was losing him. They had arrived at the end of his constancy, his faithfulness. It had finally been spent.
She asked, “Are we still married?”
Seth didn’t answer for a moment, and Gwen couldn’t look at him.
When he spoke at last, he said, “But I know this story, Gwen.”
She straightened.
“You told me all of this when we met, and you’ve been telling me again and again for years, in different ways.”
“I never told you about the store—the manager . . .”
He shook his head. “About being a messed-up kid. You forget that I met you not long afterwards. You forget that you flinched when I touched you. You forget that it took months for you to let me in.”
Gwen was unsure now. That wasn’t the story. He came into the dentist’s office, and they fell in love.
“You saw this weird guy who was too close to his mother, and was probably never going to get married. You were smart and fierce, protecting your daughter. You were . . .” He searched for a word, and said finally, “Unsung.”
Gwen was crying.
“Oh, Gwen. I know you. I know you.” And he took her in his arms, and she laid her head on his creased shoulder and felt the brush of his unshaven chin.
For sixteen years, their bodies had been together. They had imprinted on one another, but also, they had been apart—lost to that awful, inevitable apartness that drifted, unremarked upon, through all marriages. Gwen had always believed that they were so different from everybody else. She had hung her identity on that difference. But it was ordinary, really, the great distance between two people that came and went like daylight.
* * *
Maddie and Eli did come downstairs after all, as they did every day. Seth had led Gwen to the couch, pulled a blanket over her, and she was still there, half asleep, adjacent to the start of the day but not its driver.
“Weird,” Eli declared when he saw her.
“Shh,” said Seth, launching the routine.
Gwen listened to their morning noises. Dishes clattered. “Can you sign this form?” Eli asked Seth. Gwen realized that she had never missed a morning exit before; even when she’d been feverish with the flu, she would haul herself up to pack lunches, empty the dishwasher. Such martyrdom seemed like madness to her now.
When the door slammed and they were gone, Gwen propped herself up and looked out through the picture window. She saw Seth and Maddie standing by the van, Seth with his hands on Maddie’s shoulders. Her head hung, chin on chest. He was talking. Maddie nodded. Then he hugged her close, kissed the top of her head. Oh, Seth, she thought, before falling into sleep. Oh, my husband.
16
MADDIE
The Canada geese had taken over, swarming and screeching, leaving cigarette-butt–shaped feces all over the boardwalk. Maddie tried to shoo one away with her hand. It honked back angrily, so okay, they’d share the patch of beachfront.
She’d chosen a public place on purpose: if he was crazy, like Gwen said, Maddie could yell, or run away. A jogger went by. If she screamed, Maddie was pretty sure someone would hear her.
As she waited, Maddie thought of Seth. She touched her earrings.
He had apologized in the driveway that morning. It wasn’t his fault, she told him. It was Gwen, her relentless tight grip. Did he ever notice that Gwen was always the first mom at pickup at school and playdates, always rushing to get them away from others, back home? She was always on Maddie, had he noticed? But Seth wouldn’t hear it. There were things she didn’t know, he told
her. Yes, yes, Maddie muttered, all those things she didn’t know.
But she felt better when Seth hugged her. Even though he’d been away so much since they moved to the city, and even though he had this crazy new lined face when he showed up late from his new company, he was the same dad. He was her dad, right? That didn’t seem even a tiny bit diluted to her. You are my daughter. I love you. Nothing changes. He dropped her off at the back of the school. Give your mom and me some time to make this right.
But Maddie didn’t enter the school. She was missing a practice test in Functions. She’d already failed a pop quiz the week before. But would universities really take back their acceptance letters? Did any of it matter? She wasn’t sure.
Maddie waited until Seth’s car was gone, then walked to the subway. After a transfer to a streetcar, she wandered the east end until noon when she made her way to the beach.
She looked up. That was him; she could tell. He was holding two coffee cups and wearing a black leather jacket, like it was still the ’90s. She had expected to see herself, but he didn’t look like her, really, except for the dark eyes. Taller, and older than she’d imagined. Maybe he had been handsome once. Maddie couldn’t tell, with old people, who had been what.
“Maddie?”
“Yes.”
Were they supposed to hug now? She didn’t want to touch him. He held out the coffee, and she took it, even though she only drank coffee when it seemed uncool to order hot chocolate.
He sat down next to her. Maddie tried to sneak glances, but they were caught in a weird sideways formation. She could see his hands most clearly. In those hands was something familiar: she recognized her own tapered fingers and red knuckles.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said, like a teacher from the U. He sounded like he’d just woken up.
Maddie wanted to tell him that—topical question!—there was no self to describe. Her self had been shattered a couple of times lately, first by Joshua, and now by her mom. But instead, she told him that she liked school, especially History. He didn’t say anything in response—he didn’t do the adult “mms” and “aahs”—and in that absence, she kept listing things nervously, waiting for them to add up. She couldn’t have a dog, because her brother was allergic. She liked stand-up comedy (watching, not doing). She thought that by now she’d be a better artist than she is.
Stay Where I Can See You Page 20