Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  “Your dad’s coming for a visit,” Myra had said to Jesse later, trying to sound casual. “Tomorrow afternoon. He’s coming for dinner.”

  “Great,” Jesse had said. “See you later, I have class.”

  “Got all your books?”

  “Think so.”

  She had then gone shopping at St. Lawrence Market, and fretted about what to buy and what to make. She had returned empty-handed and texted Jesse: Let’s take him out. Let’s show him around the city a little. Where do you think he’d like to go?

  And Jesse had replied, Nowhere, or least not to any of the restaurants you like.

  But she had still taken them to Campagnolo, and had felt a little embarrassed when Johnny had said, “Damn, it’s hot in here,” and had taken off his flannel shirt and laid it across his chair, and had eaten his meal in his white T-shirt, essentially an undershirt, and then said, “Is that it? I’m still starving.” He had summoned the waiter and ordered another dish, the tagliatelle, and she had fully felt the wrongness of the setting. She should have bought steaks and potatoes and vegetables at the market and made him the simple kind of meal he liked.

  But why? Why should I have made him what he likes? What about what I like? Myra had barely been able to eat anything, and had left her meal mostly untouched before offering it to him. “I don’t even know what that is,” he had said.

  “It’s duck confit risotto.”

  “No, thank you.” Meanwhile, Jesse sat silently, eating his spaghetti all’amatriciana, and Myra had, for just a moment, hated Johnny, and then hated herself. We really shouldn’t be here.

  She had invited him back to the house for coffee. The conversation had been stilted. At the door, later, Johnny had shaken Jesse’s hand, then pulled him in for an awkward hug. “I’m proud of you, son,” he had said. There were tears in Myra’s eyes.

  “Thanks, Dad.” Jesse seemed genuinely happy. Perhaps he had missed it all, the subtext, the wrongness, the undercurrent of hurt feelings. Maybe he really had been simply eating his spaghetti at the restaurant. Because she wasn’t his mother, was she? So what did Jesse care whether Myra and Johnny got along, whether they had anything to talk about, whether they were able to look each other in the eye, whether they had any sort of connection at all?

  Then Johnny left, and Myra went upstairs to bed.

  • • •

  The next morning, the last person Myra expected to see at her back door was Johnny. But there he was. He looked tired and rumpled, his beard darker than the evening before, gone from five o’clock shadow to morning-after grizzle.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I thought you were driving back last night.” She could see the dogs behind him running in the yard. “The gate’s not closed.”

  “They won’t run away.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t want to go back,” he said. “But I didn’t want to come back here, either.” She stood still, not sure what to do. “So I . . . I slept in my truck.”

  “Oh.”

  “You going to let me come in, or what?”

  Inside, he took off his boots and sat down at her table. “You know what?” he said, and he sounded angry. “Last night, when it was time for me to go home, all of the sudden I saw it. I realized it.”

  “Saw what? Realized what?”

  “That’s why I didn’t go home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw what you hated about it, especially in the winter. What you didn’t like about being at the marina. And then the idea of going back there alone, without you, without Jesse, with the other boys away and probably moving out soon, planning on living in town . . . there really didn’t seem to be any point. And I realized . . . I realized that I miss you. I really miss you.”

  She stood staring at him. She was still in her pajamas, a long white T-shirt and purple shorts. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, not even a little bit. She probably looked terrible, she probably looked old. She had cut her hair when she returned to the city, a bob that landed just below her jawline. Johnny hadn’t said a word about it. Now she wished it was long enough to pull back into a proper bun. It was probably sticking up everywhere.

  She turned away from him and put on the kettle, and thought of her mother, who had passed away a few years before. Her mother would turn on the kettle when things were being left unsaid. She would boil the water, and make the tea, and wait. And usually by the time the tea was finished the things that needed to be said would have been said.

  Myra faced the stove. She looked out the window. She saw a cardinal, bright red, sitting on the neighbor’s fence. In the city, these bird sightings mattered, these small brushes with nature. At the marina she wouldn’t have noticed a lone cardinal.

  Johnny came up behind her.

  “I don’t feel like tea,” he said. He put his hand on her waist. “Turn off the stove.” He kissed her neck. “I miss you so much, Myra.”

  “No,” she said, pulling away but feeling the urge to push toward him, into him. “I want tea. I want to talk, I want to know what you’re really doing here.”

  “I told you, I miss you.”

  “And I told you, it’s not enough.”

  “Did you? I don’t remember you saying that.” She realized she hadn’t, had only said it in her head, out of self-­preservation. Whatever he has to say, it’s not enough.

  “I meant to.”

  He sat down at the table again and she stood, watching and waiting for the kettle to boil. “Myra, the truth? First of all, last night, I went to a bar, and I ran into one of the women who comes into the marina every summer, that Ilsa, the pretty one. And I thought maybe I’d find some comfort with her, so we . . .” Myra closed her eyes. “I’m sorry because I know it’s probably not what you want to hear, but I want to be honest with you.” No, it was definitely not what Myra wanted to hear. She waited for him to keep talking while hoping he wouldn’t. “Anyway, nothing much happened. We kissed a little. It just made me feel lonely for you. I don’t like that feeling at all, didn’t like not being able to push it away.” More silence.

  What exactly am I supposed to say to that? Myra wondered.

  He started to speak again. “I’ve never felt possessive of any woman, like I wanted her to be mine. And I certainly have never felt so upset about any woman leaving as I did when you left. At first I thought it was because you decided to take one of my boys with you, but I knew you were right to do it, I knew Jesse should be at school, and that just made it worse, that you cared so much about him you got him to the exact place he was supposed to be without even giving a rat’s ass what I thought. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever been with. You’re so . . . you’re so smart, you’re so . . . I don’t even know, just different. And I’m not smart at all, as you know. I’ve only ever read one book to the end, that I can remember.”

  “I know that, Johnny, I know. We’ve talked about this.”

  “For school, because I had to. I don’t even know what it was called.”

  “It was called No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod.”

  “See, you’re so smart you even know the name of the only book I’ve ever read, and I don’t even know the name of the fucking book!”

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  More silence. She turned the flame under the kettle down a little. “Most of the time, when you were around, I couldn’t figure out what the hell you wanted with me, what you were doing, why you stayed,” he said. “Honestly, right at the start, when you said you were staying, the first thing I thought was, What would a woman like this want with a man like me? And I figured it was maybe because you weren’t so great after all since you wanted to stay, and I suppose I treated you as such. Less than what you are. But then I started to realize you were great. But th
en you left. I guess I wasn’t surprised when you did. But it hurt. That surprised me.”

  She stood, still silent, watching him as he sat at her table. It was pine and long and pushed against the window. His shirt stood in contrast to the light flowing through the window, bright like the cardinal had been against the snow. Behind him, she could see the dogs playing in the yard.

  “Do you remember why, even if you couldn’t remember the title, you never forgot that one line from the book you read for school—that last line from it, the one you once told me about?”

  “‘We’re all better when we’re loved,’” he said automatically.

  “That’s why I stayed with you.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me. You stayed with me because of a line at the end of a book I can’t even remember the title of?”

  “I stayed with you because I believed that you believed that, that you thought it was true that people were better when they were loved and that you, one day, were going to love me and we were both going to be better because of it. And I also . . . I also stayed with you because I wanted a baby.”

  “Come on, really? You never said.”

  “Yes. Always. The whole time. I bought the idea that you were this virile man who impregnated women at the drop of his hat, and I thought you were the answer to all my problems. I couldn’t get pregnant, when I lived here, with my . . . ex-­husband.” Not technically a lie anymore; they had finalized things when she returned to the city. “When I lived here with him, I didn’t have any luck. I’m barren, I think. Something is wrong.”

  “We could have tried. Maybe that’s the problem. We didn’t really try.”

  “Trust me, I tried.”

  “We should try harder. If that’s what you want, well, that’s fine with me. Let’s keep trying.”

  The kettle had finally started to boil. She shut it off, turned, and got the kettle and two bags of Earl Grey. She stood waiting for it to steep.

  “When you loved me, I was better,” he said. “I know I didn’t act like it, but I was better. And last night, I realized all that was going to happen if I went back alone was that I was going to get worse again. I sat awake all through the night thinking about how to get you back, what I needed to say. And all I can think to tell you is how much I’ve been missing you. How much I miss you. How much I . . .”

  She waited. The tea was probably ready. Now it was probably too strong. Still she waited.

  “I love you,” he said.

  It was enough. Of course it was. What she had always wanted to hear him say, more than anything, ever, was more than enough.

  15

  Black-Throated Loon (Gavia arctica)

  It is widely believed that pairs of loons mate for life, but this is not true. A typical adult loon is likely to have several mates during its lifetime because of territorial takeover. Each breeding pair must frequently defend their territory against other adult loons trying to evict at least one owner and seize the breeding site. Territories that have produced chicks in the past year are especially prone to takeovers. One-third of all territorial evictions result in the death of one of the males; in contrast, female loons usually survive.

  Isabel hadn’t wanted to go back to the cottage at first. “But we’re not going to that cottage,” her dad had said. “We’re going to the cottage next door.”

  “Same difference,” Isabel had replied. Then Liane had come into her room later that day and sat down on her bed.

  “Hey,” Liane had said, and Isabel had made an effort not to feel annoyed by her very presence.

  Liane tried too hard, that was the thing. Isabel and her friend Mykayla, who also had a stepmother (they called her the stepmonster), had discussed it. Even though technically she was being nice, trying too hard was simply annoying. “Like a boy who likes you too much and, like, texts you every five minutes,” Mykayla had said. “Ick.” “Ick,” Isabel had repeated, and they had laughed so hard Mykayla had snorted peppermint latte out her left nostril and then they had laughed harder, all the while glancing to the corner of the coffee shop, where Matt Tillson and his crowd were seated. Isabel had had a crush on Matt for as long as she could remember (in reality, for about a year) and he had never paid her any attention. But now he was watching Mykayla, with her long dark hair and the ability to somehow make mint-flavored milk coming out her nose look cute, and Isabel felt jealous. Boys always liked Mykayla. Mykayla knew what she was talking about when she said, “It’s like when a boy likes you too much.” Isabel could laugh along with her, but had never actually had the experience. Now she looked away from Matt, and from Mykayla now noticing Matt looking at her, and down at the coffee-spattered table.

  “You know, though . . .” Mykayla had tossed a length of hair over her shoulder. “She’s not a bitch. Not like the stepmonster. That’s the one thing she has going for her.”

  “True. She’s not a bitch,” Isabel had said.

  “Let’s say the jury’s still out on this one. Maybe she’ll start taking you out shopping and buying you great clothes and we can chalk it up as a victory.”

  “I think she’s poor. She’s, like, an assistant teacher at university.”

  “Oh. Bummer. It’s too bad she’s not a bitch. Then we could just hate her with impunity.”

  Now Isabel tried to smile at Liane. “Hey,” she said back.

  “I just wanted to tell you that I really think you’re going to have fun at my mom’s cottage. It’s a really nice place. I mean, you know the lake, and it’s a fantastic lake, and my mom, Helen, she’s actually renting a boat, which may not seem like a big deal to you, but she’s anti-watercraft, and my sisters and I always begged for a boat so we could go water-skiing, so . . . that’ll be really fun.”

  “No one goes water-skiing anymore,” Isabel said.

  “Right. Oh. No one does?”

  “No. People wakeboard. I’ve done it before, tons of times.” This wasn’t true; she’d done it once, at her friend Anna’s cottage in the Kawarthas, and had been terrible at it, and had fallen off into a huge patch of seaweed, and Anna’s brother, Chad, had shouted at her that she was probably going to be eaten by a muskie, and she had panicked and swum back to the boat, thinking of the photos on the wall of the cottage of Chad and Anna’s father holding up impossibly enormous­-looking fish, all caught in the lake she was swimming in.

  “Well, I doubt Helen has a wakeboard. But I know she has old skis. And maybe the twins or Eliot will have one,” Liane said.

  Right, the twins or Eliot. Boys. There were going to be boys at the cottage. And this was the only reason Isabel wasn’t flat-out refusing to go. “But what if they’re total geeks?” she had said to Mykayla.

  “They’re from New York, right?”

  “Well, outside of it.”

  “Hmm. I think there’s still the possibility that they’re totally hot. And if they’re not, well, it’s only a few days.”

  “Three days. Without cell phone reception.”

  “Yeah, you’re totes going to die. Maybe send smoke signals?”

  Isabel thought about asking Liane whether her nephews were cute. But she couldn’t, there was no way. Then Liane would probably think they were best friends or something. So instead she said, “I’m going to start packing my bag.” And Liane smiled at her so gratefully that Isabel felt the “ick” feeling again and turned away. Eventually Liane left the room.

  “She’s definitely coming,” she heard Liane say to her dad in the hallway, as if she had had something to do with it. Isabel rolled her eyes but kept packing, carefully choosing her outfits and packing the bikini she knew her dad hated.

  • • •

  Now they were in the car, driving toward Muskoka. Isabel had her headphones in, mostly to drown out the sound of Beatrice, who was going through a very whiny stage—although, to be honest, every one of Bea’s stages so far in her life had seemed
like whiny ones to Isabel.

  Her father reached back and touched her arm. She turned down the music. “It’s too loud, Iz,” he said. “You’re going to damage your eardrums, and also, I can hear it. When someone else can hear the music from your personal listening device, it is no longer a personal listening device.”

  “It’s not a personal listening device. Dad, this isn’t 1982. It’s an iPod, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Isabel! Your language.”

  “What? It’s not like we go to church or anything.”

  “But your sister. I don’t want your sister walking around saying things like ‘for Christ’s sake,’ all right?”

  As if to prove this point, Bea said, “Chrissakes, chrissakes,” and Isabel hid her smile with her hand.

  “See!” Laurence said. “Thanks, Iz.”

  “Dad, you’re the one who said it again, and then she said it—it wasn’t my fault!”

  Her dad opened his mouth to say something, but Liane put her hand on his leg and squeezed. “Don’t,” she said. “Bea will forget she even heard it.”

  Now Bea was whining again.

  “I don’t understand why I have to sit back here with the whiner and Liane gets to sit up there,” Isabel said.

  “Well, why don’t we trade at the next rest stop?” Liane said. “And . . . why don’t we listen to some music that we all like? And then you won’t have to listen to your . . . personal listening device.” She leaned back and tried to share a complicit smile with Isabel, but Isabel didn’t smile back at her.

  “We don’t like the same music.”

  “I think we like some of the same music. You like Jake Bugg, and I have some of his music on my iPod. And we both like the Decemberists and Jack White.”

  Stop trying to be cool! Isabel wanted to shout. But instead she said nothing.

  “We could play your iPod,” Liane said.