Her sad beauty crushing you as you watch her grow, as you slip through the years together to the day she’s on a beach and you’re in your living room staring at her picture, praying she is all right. It is so hard not to reach out to hold her always. To touch her, like your replacement wife will do to you often, your wobbly resilience so in need of tender care.
No. It will not be like that at all. You will shed your dead love for me and emerge with wings you didn’t know you had and your replacement wife will marvel at your metamorphosis. She will be a strong one, someone whose anchors will not give way, but she’ll have kind, wet eyes as she squeezes your shoulder, and you will not have to say anything to each other at all because there will be no secrets and she will just understand. She’ll keep her hand on you because you’ve already been through so much, and no matter what next, her anchors will not give way.
—
Is it time to panic?
Up down flipped around. Defenceless against the lunacy of the sea, its merciless current. I see a flash of someone, a man standing on the rocky outcrop, watching me. Is it you? Please. Please let it be you. Please be the one to save me.
It’s not you. He’s blond. Tanned. Looking for me to give him a sign. A signal maybe, to show I’m not just playing around. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t know when the sky will be there and I can breathe it in. Maybe it’s better it’s not you. Maybe you’ve saved me too many times and this time you would just watch me go under. Nothing is predictable.
I gasp when the sky appears and he’s crouched down in an athletic pose, yelling something. You stupid girl who got herself in this mess, maybe, you helpless idiot who’s going to get herself killed.
Sharp, jagged pain.
My left ankle twists, my right foot feels like it’s being dragged over a cheese grater. But oh my God, sweet mercy: at least, at the very least this is land, sweet fucking land.
The blond man yanks me up by my armpits, pulls me out of the murderous sea and drops me onto the sand.
“Shit,” he says, bending over with his hands on his knees, catching his breath. “Shit.” The waves pulled my bikini bottoms halfway down my legs, my top untied, covering nothing.
“You okay?” He yells it at my face the way my mother yells into the phone when it’s long distance. “Hey!” He slaps my cheek. “Can you hear me?”
I want to sleep.
“Hey—Steve!” the hero cries down the beach. “Call for help!”
I can tell by the way he says shit again, he’s looking at my feet.
There is shouting in the distance. It is your voice, coming toward us.
“Wait!” I hear you call, running. “Don’t touch her!”
It sounds like the territorial cry of a jealous husband but I know it’s not me or you or us you’re protecting, but my rescuer who is about to touch my bloodied foot.
—
“I want to be able to hold you. I want so badly to hold you now and tell you we’ll get through this,” you said, looking out the dark kitchen window, crying. “But I can’t.”
I could not stand up. I’d vomited and it was all over my hands. I saw the back of your head and the lines the comb had made in your hair that morning.
“I swear to God, Natalie. I swear to God. If there’s something wrong with her—”
You choked. Your knees buckled. I reached out for you but there was too much space between us.
“Please,” I said, still reaching. “Please. I can’t breathe.”
When you couldn’t stand any longer you slumped down beside me. You put your arms around me. It was a desperate act. It was a Hail Mary to find something to hold on to, to find out if it was worth holding on at all.
And then, when nothing was better, when I felt how far away you were, you let go.
—
The German wife is holding my cheek against her bare warm belly, my head on her lap. Her hair now an aureole of white around the shadow of her face, her head blotting out the sun. Her voice is lower than I expected, more nuanced, as she directs the blond hero to get certain things: antiseptic, wide bandages, latex gloves. “It will suffice till we get her to hospital,” she’s saying. And she’s British, not German. She looks down at me.
“Natalie?” She sounds like Emma Thompson, warm, in control. “Natalie? Can you hear me. I’m Dr. Paula Stevens. You’re in shock.”
You are holding the baby a few feet away. Swaying together, watching me.
“Natalie—you’ve broken your ankle. We’ll brace it here, get it set at hospital. Good as new before you know it.”
The wind picks up and blows a lot of sand around. You hold up a hand reflexively to protect the baby’s face. She lunges toward me, kicking her feet and whelping, arms stretched out. I reach back for her, but I am lying on the sand. I cannot hold her here, and I cannot hold her the way I want to, I cannot need her like this. She’s a child, not a life raft. I keep reaching, however weakly, but now my eyes are on you and you do not move.
The blond hero trots back with an armload of supplies. The doctor takes the gloves first and puts them on. She lowers my head onto a towel that’s been folded to make a firm pillow and sets to work on my ankle. I am watching the blues and greens and whites of the waves and sky and palms, missing the closeness, the warmth of her body.
Hold on to me.
“What?” she says.
I close my eyes. Pain shoots up my leg.
—
You’re sitting on a cracked vinyl chair with the baby on your lap. I’m in a hospital bed beside you. My leg is in a cast, raised by straps hooked to the ceiling. Air conditioning rumbles; a ceiling fan click click clicks.
“Give her to me.” I push myself up. I am groggy, floating.
You hand me my phone instead. There’s a missed call from my doctor back home. Everything is moving.
“Give her to me,” I repeat, putting the phone down on the bed.
“Call,” you say. “Call now.”
The baby squeals and smiles at me. She stretches out her arms and kicks her legs as though she’s trying to swim through the air. You relent and let her lead you up out of the chair toward me. You put her in my arms and stand there beside us, protectively, and we seem just as we were in the seconds after she was born.
I pick up my phone and call the doctor and you move to take the baby from me as the line rings and the recording tells me to hold. I turn from you and hold her tighter and the recording says they do not give results over the phone. She is snug against my chest. She is smiling and looking across the room at the window. I crumble a little when you put your hand on my shoulder but I do not cry. The receptionist answers and I say who I am and where I am and that I am returning Dr. Myers’ call. My voice echoes in my head and in my chest and across the ocean. I let your hand stay where it is, I let myself believe you won’t let go if I get taken under.
The doctor says she’ll cut right to it and I am holding the baby and rocking and the crying isn’t crying but a tsunami howling to the surface from beneath something that cracked apart inside me long ago. And she is saying, I know, I know, you must be very relieved, as I’m almost choking on all the wet flowing from my eyes and nose and mouth. I rock the baby and hold her against me and your hand slips away as you walk to the window, wiping your eyes. Your back to us as the doctor says, So Barbados, huh? It really is paradise, isn’t it? And when I can’t answer she says, softly, Well, now you can enjoy it.
I hang up and you are a silhouette at the window, looking out over some place I can’t see. We must be far from the water because for the first time since we got here I hear no waves. Just the clicking ceiling fan, the rumbling AC, the rattle of my own breath as I struggle to catch it. The baby babbles in my arms, her small hand wrapped around my index finger. I kiss her head and pull her as close as I can, but, of course, that won’t be enough. It could never be enough.
It has to be enough, for now.
DISTANCE
3.7
Miles or kilomet
res? Nothing on the display to indicate either. Just 3.7. Almost 3.8 now, which Mark knows because of the green dots that make their way around the digital track, slowly tracing a full oval before disappearing altogether and starting again from nothing.
For a second he thinks that kilometres are longer than miles, but knows that is only because the word itself stretches further along a page. Miles are longer. These are miles. They feel like miles. Twenty-six and change in a marathon. Not that he’s ever run that many at once.
Sweat stings his eyes and he has to wipe them with his T-shirt. He forgot his towel in the locker room. If he had a towel he would throw it over the display so he wouldn’t look at it so much.
Still 3.8.
The gym is in Canada so the display should be in kilometres, but he thinks that the treadmill was probably made in the U.S. or, at least, for American consumers and nobody cares enough to convert the readings to metric. That’s just the way things are. He thinks there should be a law like the one ensuring that milk is sold in litres and meat in grams, and a government rep with a clipboard who comes around to check that all the displays are in kilometres. Or maybe that isn’t a law, maybe it’s just an agreement between the manufacturers and grocery stores. All he knows is that he doesn’t buy a quart of milk, he buys a litre. Just one now. For his coffee, and for his cereal when he has some in the cupboard, which is rarely. Any more than a litre and it goes bad.
A soapy mop slaps against the outside of the window beside him, catching him off guard. He almost falls off the treadmill but regains his footing just in time. The mop is worked up and down by a thin man, shirtless and tanned to leather, like he hasn’t been inside since the start of summer. Even now, the evening sun looms over his shoulder as if baking him dry. He wears tattered jean shorts, a straw hat and a dingy hemp necklace that looks like it smells sour, like old urine. A cigarette dangles between his withered lips while he reaches high to the top of the window with his mop, squinting against the rising smoke.
No one walking past pays any attention to the window cleaner. The sky behind him is a hazy vermillion. The sun is sinking fast. It’s a perfect red-orange circle and you can stare right at it while it goes down behind the city, behind the man. Mark would like to tell someone to turn and see it before it disappears. See, it’s almost gone already. Along the row of treadmills everyone is looking forward, though, mostly at the TV screens attached to their machines, little white buds in their ears. Mark turns back to look. The window cleaner winks.
—
Out over the weathered deck, through the tall, sparse, blowing grass, Mark saw her sitting on the sand. The lake and sky were the same blank grey, the horizon nearly indiscernible where their expanses smeared into one beyond her.
Ice bobbed in his drink. He threw it back.
Elise wore his old brown wool sweater, usurped for campfires and late-night conversations with neighbours on the deck, holes now where her thumbs poked through. He hadn’t been ready to surrender it to the sand and smoke of cottage life, the sweater he’d worn each Saturday morning for years as a matter of routine perhaps more than preference, but the moment she slipped it on he knew it was lost to her.
The wind loosened a lock of hair from her ponytail. She tucked it behind her ear, the too-long sweater sleeve covering her palm.
He turned up the stereo and went back to the kitchen to pour another drink. He drank it down, too fast, as if to numb something, as if there was some pain to quiet. But there wasn’t. So maybe it was the opposite. He poured a third to instead awaken a whole part of him that had shut down, to shock it the fuck to life.
He opened his throat like a chute. Electric paddles to the ribs.
Clear.
He poured another.
Clear.
He added a handful of ice to the next, and felt a tiny flicker, a feeble pulse, as he looked out at her on his way back to his leather recliner. The briefest plummet of sadness. Hard to tell for who, though, or about what.
He sunk back into his chair, feet up, and cranked the volume loud to feel his muscles, his organs, his eardrums, his heart twitching to the beat of some, of any, rhythm.
—
The lake was choppy and churning, swirling grey into black, low white peaks crashing down and stretching out over the dark wet sand spotted with shells. For a Southern Ontario lake it could perform an excellent impression of the Atlantic. Elise tried to block out the woods lining the periphery, tried to envision a rocky coast beneath her, but she could only be where she was. Sand stuck to her legs, the cottage behind her, their words and anger still echoing in the trees. Blame and contempt and you, you, you, how you’ve failed me, crescendoing in a closed-fist wallop that had stunned them both silent. The ringing in her ears hadn’t stopped. At least now the mending was up to him. At least now she got to be the sullen, quiet, outraged one passing from room to room with a clenched jaw or looking out over the lake, waiting for him to break, to beg, to return to the same knee on which he’d asked for her hand, exchanging that happy sentiment for teary contrition as he pled for her mercy. She listened to the waves, pricking up her ears each time she thought she heard the deck door slide open or the crunch and rustle of his runners in the grasses.
A pack of cigarettes that she didn’t really want lay at her feet with a lighter perched on top. She hadn’t smoked in months but had grabbed them from the cupboard on top of the fridge on her way out the door as if she’d never quit. Mark kept extras in case a guest wanted one, a supposed habit of hospitality bequeathed by his parents, but she knew they were really for those frequent nights when he was left alone with Neil Young and the dying fire.
The rhythm of the waves finally began to lull her elsewhere, nowhere, an empty place of some reprieve, until the whir and chop of a Jet Ski crossing the wake of a power boat brought her back again. She wondered how much had been heard around the lake—voices carried well—and imagined, as she lit a cigarette, a young couple cuddling by a bonfire with a bottle of red wine, cringing as the argument rippled over the calm water, so pleased with themselves for choosing a partner with whom that would never, ever happen, knowing with such desperate certainty that it could never, ever be them.
Elise wanted to be snapping the ends off of asparagus in the kitchen, sipping on pinot gris. She wanted to go back to that, to the hope of a peaceful dinner, to a quiet night curled in front of a movie while he nodded off in his chair. She listened again for Mark’s approach but heard only the buzz of the Jet Ski getting further away.
—
Mark winced at the sound of her voice. The false cheer of it. The fact that she’d answered.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d catch you. I thought you had a meeting.”
“It was cancelled. I was just picking up some pasta for dinner.”
“Yeah, I was going to leave a message. I think I’m going to head up north tonight.”
She paused. “Okay.”
“So don’t get anything for me.”
She didn’t respond. He rolled his eyes and tapped the steering wheel with his index finger, his blood pressure rising as her silence pressed against him. He flicked on the indicator to merge onto the two-lane cottage highway. “Hello?” he said after a minute. “So, we good?”
“It’s just…”
“What?”
She took a deep breath. “Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing, if you came home.”
Home. Elise quiet, bent over the counter, her face stony as she chopped vegetables he wouldn’t eat. Home. Elise clacking down the plates and telling him some anodyne tidbit about something she’d read on Twitter, about what someone had said at work, cutting the tension with the dullest blade. Home. Her expectation from across the table’s divide, that he’d grunt, nod, say something equally unprovocative in response. Waltzing through a minefield, word by word, gesture by gesture, until it was just late enough for her to go to bed.
“I want to take care of the leaves.”
“Maybe I’ll come up
, then.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“Come on, Elise. Just, come on.”
A warning in her inhalation. His irritation dangerously asymptotic to the black hole. The liquor store was up ahead, the last one before the turnoff. He checked the time on the dash. He could just make it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said into the nothing of the car.
Silence. He pulled into the lot, saw a clerk look out the glass door. Mark waved. Held up a finger, made the sign of being on the phone.
“I’m going to go, Elise. I’m going to hang up now.”
“Wait—”
“I gotta go. Client calling on the other line. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
Nothing.
“Okay?”
“Yeah, okay. I just—”
Mark disconnected the call. He jumped out of the car and jogged to the store entrance. He hadn’t hung up on her. She’d said okay. It was easy to pretend he hadn’t heard the rest. He was already thinking of the fire he’d build. The grip on his chest loosening. The place all to himself. He would get the best red they had here. Two. He would get a good enough Scotch. He smiled at the clerk as he clanked the bottles on the counter. So much easier to breathe. He made a joke. They laughed together, like everything was great. It was going to be a good night.
—
On a city morning Elise woke to him beside her, asleep and heavy. An entire universe in a breathing mass. Sunlight filtered twice—once through the shifting leaves of the tree outside the window, then through the cracks in the blinds—animated the curves of his body.
Elise, he’d whispered in the dark as he got into bed the night before, mouthwash failing to camouflage the smoke and whisky on his breath.
The Dead Husband Project Page 6