That night, nothing bad happened to us. We swam until we were tired, then dog-paddled lazily back to the dock. We climbed out of the water, shivering, and got dressed. Then we slipped back into our cabin and changed into pajamas. We were exhausted and happy. We fell asleep with our hair still wet, leaving stains on our pillows.
Every night we sneaked down to the lake, and every night we took off our clothes and swam. I got up the courage to dive in, and felt the water hit my face. We didn’t care about making noise—we felt we were safe—so we played tag in the water. Andrea started the game by pushing me and yelling, “You’re it!”
I swam toward her and smacked her shoulder. “No, you’re it!”
It was stupid to play with only two people, but we didn’t care. We liked swimming and the fact that we weren’t supposed to be swimming. Andrea splashed toward me, and I kicked away from her, and that’s when we heard it.
“You’re it! You’re it!”
It was a voice that imitated ours but didn’t belong to us. I couldn’t see where it came from.
“No, you’re it,” said another voice, deeper this time, and I turned toward the sound. I had been looking at the shore, expecting to see one of the camp’s staff members, but these voices came from the water. From a small metal fishing boat, about fifteen feet away. There were two men in the boat, one at the stern and one at the bow. One of them held oars and rowed toward us.
“Who is that?” Andrea managed to steady her voice.
“Just a couple drunken sailors,” said the rower. “A couple lonesome fishermen.”
I wanted to get out of the water. There was no ladder to climb onto the dock, but Andrea and I could have hoisted ourselves up. Or we could have swum in toward the shore, where it was shallow enough to stand, and simply walked out of the water. We could have done that, except that we were naked.
As the boat neared, the aluminum sides picked up light from the moon. The boat had no motor and the man who rowed had to face away from us in order to move toward us. The first thing I noticed was his thin back and bony profile when he turned his head to ask, “And who are you?”
We didn’t answer. We watched as they drew closer. Neither Andrea nor I appeared to move, though under the surface we kicked furiously.
The men looked about twenty or twenty-one, maybe older. They wore shorts and T-shirts, despite the cold night air. One of them drank from a bottle of something. I’d never had a drink in my life, so I couldn’t tell by the color or even the label what was in the bottle.
“Come on, ladies,” said the one with the oars. He had high cheekbones and eyes set deep in his face. “You’re not going to tell us your names?”
“You haven’t told us yours,” said Andrea.
“I’m Scott.” He pointed with the end of the oar toward his companion. “And this is my brother, Gareth.”
They didn’t look like brothers. Gareth had a face wide like a moon, hair cut close to his head, and muscles bunched along his arms and neck. He was the one holding the bottle, and he raised it to salute us. The liquid sloshed inside.
“Hi, Scott. Hi, Gareth.” Andrea was beginning to take on the flirty, confident tone Lisa used when she talked to the guys her age. “I’m Andrea.”
“Your friend isn’t very friendly,” said Scott, smiling at me and leaning his elbow on the boat’s misshapen gunnel.
“Her name’s Jessie,” said Andrea. “And she’s shy.”
“That’s okay.” Gareth’s voice was deeper and softer than his brother’s. “Shy’s all right.”
“Maybe you can help us, ’cause we have a bit of a problem,” said Scott. “Show them your problem, Gare.”
Gareth seemed to lunge at us, faster than I expected his big body to move. I splashed away from him like a skittish animal, until I realized he was only stretching out his arm. He held his hand out, palm up, and a fishhook was embedded in his first two fingers. There was no blood, but the hook was lodged deep in his flesh, fastening his fingers together.
“Accident,” said Gareth, as though that explained it.
“My brother’s an idiot,” added Scott.
“Maybe we could get the nurse,” I said, even though I knew that was a bad idea.
“This is our nurse.” Scott nodded to the bottle. “He’s going to drink the whole thing and then we’re going to rip that hook right out.”
Gareth pulled his hand away from us and rested it in his lap, as though it were something he’d stolen from the bottom of the lake, a treasure he wanted to keep safe.
Scott kept smiling. “But we’re willing to share, aren’t we, Gareth? You girls want to join us? You care for a drink?”
Andrea’s eyes were on Scott’s face. “I don’t know.”
“We’re not even supposed to be awake now,” I said.
“Who says?” Scott laughed. “You’re grown-ups. You can do what you want.”
He couldn’t have seriously believed this. Andrea and I were thirteen, and we looked it.
“And you’re probably cold.” Gareth dropped his gaze to my bare shoulders. “We got towels in the boat. You can dry off.”
“It’s warm.” My throat was dry. “The water’s warm.”
“Not really.” He kept his eyes on me. “It just feels that way.”
“Who wants to row around in a boat all night?” said Andrea. “That sounds boring.”
“We’re not just rowing around.” Scott pointed across the lake, toward blackness. “We’re going to the reeds.”
Andrea put one hand on the boat’s metal edge. “What’s that?”
“You’ve never been there?” Scott leaned toward her. “The reeds are really tall. You take a boat through and it’s like being in a jungle.”
“If we did go with you,” she said, “we’d have to be back soon. Before it gets light.”
“That’s cool,” said Scott.
Andrea looked at me and there was brightness, a visible excitement, leaping from her face. Then she held the boat’s metal sides with both hands and said, “You guys have to close your eyes.”
Neither of them did. They watched as she pulled herself, naked and dripping, into the boat. Gareth handed her a towel and she wrapped it around her body. She was shivering. “Come here,” said Scott, and she sat beside him. He put his arm around her and whispered something in her ear that made her laugh.
I was used to following Andrea, so I swam toward the boat. I wanted to climb in, to be with her. I also wanted to row through the reeds. I imagined reaching out my hand to touch them, and I wanted to hear the dry clicking sound they’d make as the boat passed through. And I was curious about something else too. I had no desire to try whatever they were drinking from that bottle, but I wondered how Gareth’s mouth tasted.
He leaned toward me, his pale face reflecting the feeble light. “What’s your name again?”
“Jessie.” I could smell the liquor on his breath. “Jessica.”
“You want a hand, Jessica?” He stretched out his arm and I would have taken it, if he hadn’t offered the hand with the fishhook. The metal piercing his skin, the hook ready to bite into mine.
“Come on,” he said. “You scared?”
“Jess.” Andrea waved to me as though she were far away. “Come on.”
“Come here, little miss shy,” said Scott. “Little miss scaredy-cat.”
Everyone in the boat laughed, but I watched only Andrea’s face. In the darkness, I could almost see how she would look as an adult, how her features would shift and age. She already seemed older than me, ready to go wherever these guys would take her.
My voice came out too loud and absurdly polite. “No, thank you.”
“Hey.” Andrea sounded more angry than afraid. “Don’t just fucking ditch me.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“What’s up with your friend?” Scott spoke into her wet hair. “What’s her problem?”
Gareth shrugged and took another drink. He said nothing and I was grateful for his silenc
e. I turned and swam toward the shore. I could hear the boat creak as it moved away, the wooden oars knocking against its sides. I glided past the dock, and when the water became shallow enough, I stood up. I could hear Andrea laughing, but the sound was distant and I didn’t turn around. I wondered if Gareth could see my pale back as I emerged from the water. I hoped he could.
I want to say that I was concerned over Andrea’s safety. I want to say that I did the smart thing, and woke Lisa, and asked for help. I want to say that I spent the rest of the night awake and anxious. But I didn’t. I put on my clothes and felt them stick to my wet skin. Then I crawled back to the cabin, and climbed onto my bunk. I was so tired that I fell asleep in seconds and I slept until morning. I don’t know what time Andrea got in, but she was in bed when Lisa woke us for breakfast. And I don’t know what happened in that boat after I abandoned it. Andrea never told me.
Our friendship didn’t end. She and I continued to spend every day together—suntanning with the other girls, participating in basketball and nature walks and arts and crafts. The next summer, we were again in the same cabin, but we each made a new best friend. The summer after that, we got boyfriends.
I think of her only occasionally now, the few times I allow myself to see a man I know. This man and I, we meet at night, at the edge of our ever-expanding city. We meet away from our daylight lives of jobs and spouses and children. We meet where suburban development bleeds into countryside. Out there, the houses are half built, and the city has yet to put in streetlights. We park on a road without sidewalks, on pavement that crumbles away to gravel. When we turn off our car engines, everything goes dark and we find each other through sound alone. I walk toward the click of his car door closing and he moves toward the jangle of my keys. We reach each other through the noise of our shoes on the pavement, and through habit, and through long friendship. Finding his familiar smell out there is like coming upon those horses at night: a moment of stolen grace, of beauty we don’t deserve. I slip my hands under his jacket, his shirt—my hands swim toward his skin. Then we hold each other, this man and I. We press our chests together and feel the identical thrum of our dark hearts.
Girlfriend on Mars
Amber Kivinen—drug dealer, lapsed Evangelical Christian, my girlfriend of twelve years—is going to Mars.
This is real. This is what I’ve been told.
Amber, three months ago: “Hey? Kev?” Sitting beside me on the Voyager, tucking a blond curl behind her ear. “You busy?”
Me, clearly not busy, wondering if I looked as stoned as I felt: “What’s up?”
That curl bounced into her face again; she tucked it again. “I have to tell you something.”
I expected the something to be that she wanted to adopt a cat, or that she wished I would find a real job, or that she had made out with a guitarist or a guy who writes graphic novels. I did not expect her to say that she would soon be on television in a Survivor–meets–Star Trek amalgam, where she would compete for one of two seats on the MarsNowTM mission. I did not expect her to say that within the year she would (“hopefully”) strap herself into a rocket and blast into deep space, where she would float for nine months like a fetus in a womb before landing on the iron-rich red dirt of Mars. That she would then use the frozen water in the planet’s crust to grow her own food and produce her own oxygen. And she would stay on Mars forever, because the technology to come home doesn’t exist yet. And even if it did. Even if the technology existed, even if she wanted to come back, she couldn’t—her muscle and bone density would have decreased so drastically that Earth’s gravity would crush her to powder.
She confessed all this while sitting next to me on our green IKEA Beddinge couch, in our basement suite off Commercial Drive. She used the same voice as when she told me, last year, about hooking up with a guy we sometimes sell to, a computer programmer/skateboarder named Brayden. (She “accidentally” went down on him on that green couch, one of our first purchases together—the couch we named the Voyager, because we’ve taken our best trips on it.)
“So.” She spoke quietly and looked at the constellation of confusion that was my face. “This is probably a bit weird for you.”
I wondered if I was more stoned than I thought. I waited for her to laugh. But she hadn’t been joking about Brayden, and she wasn’t joking about this.
“I mean,” she chattered, “it’s not dangerous or anything. Mostly the ship will be remote-controlled by people in Houston. It’s sort of like a drone.”
“Aren’t drones notoriously inaccurate?” I said. “And what about aerobraking? What about solar radiation?”
How did I even know those words? From hours of sitting on this very couch, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“Will you do something for me?” Amber took my head in her hands. “Will you be a little bit happy for me? For, like, one second? ’Cause I made it to the third round and that’s kind of a big deal.”
“Since when were you in the first round?” I said. “Do they know you’re a drug dealer?”
“We’re not drug dealers. We specialize in hydroponics. Which, by the way, will be the technology used to grow food on Mars.”
“By the way,” I said, “we sell drugs.”
“To family and friends.”
I thought of when we were kids and she went away to summer camp, then mailed me letters addressed to:
Kevin Watkins
105 Boulevard Lake Road
Thunder Bay
Ontario
Canada
The Earth
The Milky Way
The Universe
“Remember when your parents sent you to that weird Bible camp?” I said.
“Kevin.” She shut her eyes, then opened them. “Are you even listening?”
“Is this like that time you made out with Marcus?” I said. “Just to see what I’d do?”
When she shook her head, her hair bounced like it was already on Mars, like her hair already existed in low gravity. “No,” she said. “This is real.”
Amber applied to go to Mars, without telling me, one year and three months ago. She read about the competition online, then sent in a résumé and a two-minute video of herself. The video was filmed in our kitchen—I must have been out buying groceries or picking up chai lattes from Waves or hanging out with Marcus, and it must have been summer because her hair in the video catches the sunlight and haloes around her face.
I’ve now watched the video over and over, in the obsessive way a man might watch pornography that he happens to find on the Internet and that also happens to star his wife. Our laptop is ancient so the video is grainy and slightly distorted—Amber appears as though she’s looking out through the curved glass of a space helmet. You can see a hint of the sequoia-tree tattoo that wraps itself around her bicep, and there’s chipped green polish on her thumb. Her lip ring glints in the light, and calls even more attention to her shimmery mouth.
“I believe that discovery is a universal human drive.” She leans forward, showing just enough cleavage. “And I am sure that my athleticism, expertise in the field of hydroponics, and thirst for spiritual meaning will serve me well on the first manned mission to Mars!”
The panel of MarsNowTM shareholders and venture capitalists and scientists must have liked what they saw, because Amber beat out over 150,000 other candidates such as Laurie Kalyniuk, housewife in Iowa, and Dr. Christopher Gelt, Germanic literature professor living in Guatemala City.
Round two involved writing a placement exam that tested your basic math skills, and a thousand-word essay about your motivations/ambitions. Amber must have composed the essay when I was having naps or showers or something, because if I’d seen her writing anything, I would have worried. When Amber writes—always in one of those overpriced Moleskine notebooks—it usually means that she has a secret she can barely keep. Like that she bought a single flight to Chile using our joint airline points, or applied to work in a fire tower, or ate pulled-pork poutine eve
ry day on her lunch break even though we were vegans at the time and I was subsisting on peanut butter and rice cakes. Writing is often followed by surreptitious texting, generalized anxiety, and finally by the relief—for both of us—of confession or discovery.
But this time she didn’t want to get caught. This time she quietly composed her essay and submitted it. This time she told me she was going to meet friends for coffee, when in fact she was being checked by a MarsNowTM-hired team of medical specialists: cardiac, psychology, osteopathy, and kinesiology.
Of course, I noticed that she’d joined a gym and lifted weights, enrolled in spin and boot-camp classes, hiked the Grouse Grind every Wednesday with her “Active and Out There!” Meet-Up Group, practiced yoga and meditation for mental/psychological well-being, and talked a lot about maintaining muscle mass. I also noticed that she started taking a cocktail of supplements—vitamin D, curcumin for inflammation, CoQ10, and cal-mag (same stuff we fed the plants). I noticed that she lost weight and became ropy with muscle. I noticed that she stopped getting her period and her boxes of different-
absorbency-level tampons sat unopened in the cupboard under the bathroom sink.
I noticed, but didn’t notice. I lived in my own world, existing mostly in a limited, indoor orbit. (This metaphor only works if you think of me as a small and insignificant planet and our pot plants—glowing under nine thousand lumens of LEDs—as the sun.) And even when she told me—the day before the MarsNowTM team was set to send out a press release—that she was one of 143 MarsNowTM applicants worldwide who’d moved on to round three, I didn’t believe it. Mars just didn’t seem real.
The Dark and Other Love Stories Page 2