Worry

by Jessica Westhead

  Ruth heaves a sob and hears herself mumbling, “Thank you thank you thank you.”

  Marvin places her trembling child into her outstretched arms. “Don’t mention it.”

  SOON AFTER, RUTH and Fern and Stef and Amelia and Isabelle are lined up along the shore, finishing off the last of the junk food and staring out at the lake, where Marvin and Sammy are trying to push each other off their paddleboards and seeing who can stay on the longest.

  Fern is swaddled in her towel, the crustaceans’ red pincers standing guard.

  Ruth holds a small, colourful package over her open palm and the last two FrootSnax fall out. They’re like jujubes but apparently healthier, and are shaped like the fruit they’re supposed to taste like.

  The twins were angry that Stef didn’t get the ones shaped like characters from a show Ruth has never heard of, Rainbow Fashion Fairies or something similar, and Stef had kicked sand at them until they squealed.

  Ruth pops the tiny apple and the tiny orange into her mouth and chews. They’re too sweet and they stick to her teeth and she thinks, I should buy these sometime.

  “Mom,” says Isabelle, “we’re bored. Can we have our iPads?”

  Stef throws her arms wide. “You’re at the beach!”

  Amelia whines, “But we want to play BooBerry Hoedown!”

  Isabelle says, “If we go back to the cottage, can we have our iPads there?”

  “Forget it! I told you, iPads are off-limits this weekend.”

  “But whyyy?”

  “Because Fern doesn’t have one. So it’s not fair to her.” Stef pauses. “And Auntie Ruth said so.”

  The twins turn to Ruth. “But we’ll share ours with her! We promise! We’ll even let her play twice.”

  “Enough,” says Stef. “First of all, you two suck at sharing. Second of all, Fern isn’t allowed, so that’s the end of the story.”

  Fern watches their exchange, wide eyes ping-ponging back and forth.

  “But why isn’t she allowed?” says Isabelle. “That’s mean.”

  Stef looks at Ruth. “You want to take this, or should I?”

  Ruth says, “Fern is too young for those games, girls. But thank you for offering to share with her.”

  Amelia says, “But we know a girl named Yuriah and she’s only two and a half and she gets an iPad.”

  Isabelle adds, “And Yuriah’s brother Leaper gets one too and he’s only a baby!”

  Stef says, “He’s not a baby, he’s one year old, and their mommy and daddy are morons who named their children Yuriah and Leaper. But if you ever repeat that, I will skin you both alive and use your pelts for picnic blankets, do you understand? Now go play. And take Fern with you.”

  “But she’s just a baby!” says Isabelle.

  “She’s not a baby,” says Stef. “Leaper is a baby. Fern is three.”

  “Three and a half,” says Fern.

  “You’re almost four, actually,” Ruth tells her. “Your birthday’s coming up soon.”

  “My birthday!” Fern lets out a whoop and punches the air.

  “Oh yeah.” Stef nods. “What’s the date again?”

  Ruth starts to answer her, but her friend cuts her off and winks at Fern. “Just kidding. I could never forget your birthday! I was there, remember?”

  Fern screws up her face in concentration and Stef laughs. “It’s okay. You didn’t have enough brain cells back then to process sensory details. Your mommy remembers, though.”

  Ruth’s cheeks are too hot and she covers them with her hands. “Of course I do.” She remembers the bright room and the smiling doctor and nurses and medical students, and Fern’s beautiful wail. She remembers crying with James and the surge of gratitude that rose and then faltered when Stef cracked a joke, making everyone laugh. Too hot. She presses her palms against her burning skin, but there’s no relief.

  “Knock, knock, Auntie Stef,” says Fern.

  Stef grins at her. “Who’s there?”

  “Ice.”

  “Ice who?”

  “Ice to meet you!”

  Stef applauds. “Ha!”

  Ruth says, “I think that one’s supposed to be, ‘What did the snowman say to the fridge?’”

  “Don’t correct her,” says Stef. “She’s perfect.”

  Out in the water, Marvin and Sammy are charging at each other in slow motion, using their oars like lances.

  “What do you want for your birthday, Fern?” Stef asks.

  Fern’s eyes go glassy. “Toys.”

  “Nothing electronic, please,” Ruth adds.

  “Oh, come on,” says Stef. “She’s turning four!”

  Ruth shrugs. “Exactly my point.”

  Stef leans closer to Fern and whispers loudly, “Maybe Auntie Stef will do a magic trick at your party and make a video game appear. Would you like that?”

  “Ooh,” says Fern. “I love magic.”

  A cloud of insects levitates nearby. Tiny blackflies. The mass of them expands and contracts, almost like they’re breathing together.

  There was a magician at Stef’s seventh birthday party. He had a moustache and a tall, black hat, and when Ruth asked him if he had a bunny in there, he said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  She knotted her fingers together and gazed up at him. “Yes, I would.”

  He reached down and his eyes were very blue and they made her feel cold as his fingers fluttered behind her ear. And then he was holding up a shiny, gold coin that he’d pulled out of her somehow, from way deep inside, and then Stef was beside her and she grabbed the coin and put it in the pocket of her red corduroy pants and told Ruth, “It’s my birthday.”

  And Ruth had to agree.

  The magician stood in the centre of Ruth’s parents’ family room and performed his tricks to a chorus of giggles and oohs and ahhs.

  Stef had invited four other girls from their class and none of them were friends with Ruth. They wouldn’t even talk to her.

  After the magician left, it was time for cake. Ruth sat at her dining-room table, which her mother had decorated with pink streamers, and ate silently while Stef and her guests chattered away. Then one of the girls, whose name was Yolanda, started laughing because Ruth had chocolate icing on her nose.

  “It looks like poo!” she shrieked, and Stef reached out and shoved her, almost casually, and Yolanda toppled off her chair and started to cry.

  “Don’t be mean to my friend,” Stef told her, and went back to eating her cake, which was the golden kind with fudge icing, which Ruth’s mom had baked for Stef because it was her favourite.

  At the end of the party when the guests’ parents arrived, Ruth’s dad handed the girls their loot bags and they all said thank you, except for Yolanda. They left one by one, the screen door banging shut behind them each time, and then Ruth and Stef were alone again.

  “Did you have fun?” Ruth asked her, but Stef just looked out at the empty street.

  It was getting dark by the time Stef’s mom and dad pulled into the driveway.

  Stef and Ruth were still sitting by the screen door and a cool breeze was blowing in while they ate the candy from their loot bags, which had laughing clown faces all over the crinkly paper.

  Stef’s father stayed behind the wheel and her mother got out of the car. She started walking toward the house and Stef jumped up, grinning.

  From somewhere behind them, Ruth’s mom said to Ruth’s dad in the low voice she always thought was too low for the kids to hear, but it never was, “So nice of them to take time out of their busy schedules.”

  Ruth’s eyes widened, and Stef stopped smiling. She crumpled her loot bag into a hard ball with sharp edges and threw it at Ruth’s face. She flung open the screen door and ran down the steps shouting, “I don’t even want it anyway!”

  Ruth was crying, and her dad knelt down and held onto her as Stef raced toward her mother, who took her hand and ushered her into the back seat, then waved stiffly and climbed back into the front. The car backed up slowly and drove
off.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Ruth’s dad told her, wiping her tears away. “She’ll say sorry later.”

  Amelia whispers something in her sister’s ear, and Isabelle giggles. Then both girls grab Fern’s hands and yank her up. “Come with us!”

  “Okay,” Fern says, and allows herself to be pulled away as Marvin and Sammy amble back over.

  Ruth watches the girls go, shielding her eyes against the sun. She wipes her brow and wonders if she might have heatstroke. She’s very thirsty. She should get up and look in the cooler for a water bottle.

  Sammy shambles stiffly toward Stef with his eyes bugging out and arms thrust forward. “Towel!” he moans. “Give me towel!”

  “Get it yourself.” She flicks a hand at him. “They’re in the beach bag.”

  He leans over her, reaching, and Stef shrieks, “You’re dripping all over me!”

  Marvin stops next to Ruth’s lounge chair and peers down at her. His surf shorts have sharks on them today, and his feet and ankles are caked with sand. Mud-monster feet. “You look flushed,” he says. “I’ll get you some water.”

  She smiles up at him. “Thank you.”

  “See how easy that was?” Stef mutters.

  Sammy gives her a quick look. “What were you ladies talking about?”

  She shrugs. “Nothing of consequence.”

  “Okay.” He yanks two towels out of the beach bag and tosses one at Marvin, who’s crouching next to the cooler. The red fabric settles over his broad shoulders but falls off when he stands up.

  Marvin cracks open a water bottle and hands it to Ruth, and she guzzles it gratefully.

  “Hey, hero,” Stef drawls, “can I get one of those too?”

  “Sorry,” says Marvin. “They’re all gone.”

  “Oh.” She summons a look of supreme disinterest and makes a show of shaking sand off her towel. “Whatever.”

  Marvin sits down beside Ruth, and all at once, she’s acutely aware of his proximity to her and his distance from Stef. And when she sees Stef noticing this too, a current runs through her. It straightens her back and makes her skin hum, and calls her attention to the soft weight of her hair on her neck. She reaches up and plays with a few strands, twirling them around her fingers.

  “We were talking about kids and computers,” Ruth tells Sammy, ignoring the brief pang of guilt telling her she should offer some water to Stef. She’d probably make a joke that it’s all backwash, anyway. She tips the bottle and feels the last few cool drops slide all the way down her throat. “Stef said you guys know some parents who let their one-year-old use an iPad and I thought that was a bit young. Fern doesn’t play too many video games yet.”

  “Do you live under a rock or something?” Sammy asks her. “Did you come to us from the past?”

  “I think Ruth’s got the right idea,” says Marvin. “It’s better for kids to be out in nature and experiencing the real world, and socializing with actual people and drawing on actual paper and using their imaginations to make up their own games.” He pauses when he sees the other adults staring at him. “I mean, that’s what we did when we were little, right? And I keep reading that too much screen time is bad for them, so.”

  “It is!” says Ruth.

  “Aww, look at you two technophobes bonding,” says Stef. “So sweet.”

  Down the beach, the twins point to something by their feet and Fern leans over to look. Then Isabelle pushes her, and Fern falls face-first onto the sand.

  Ruth starts to stand up. But Fern doesn’t cry, so she sits back down.

  The twins are pushing each other over now and all three girls are laughing.

  “James calls you his little dinosaur,” says Stef. “Did you know that?”

  “No.” Ruth frowns. “I didn’t.”

  She hadn’t grown up on video games like Stef had. Ruth’s parents preferred old-fashioned board and card games like Monopoly and Clue and Uno. They let Ruth watch TV, and when she was older, they gave her and Stef handfuls of quarters for Pac-Man and Donkey Kong at the local arcade. But they never saw the point of home computers, while Stef’s mom and dad filled their house with all the latest gadgets and didn’t care how many hours Stef spent playing alone on her Intellivision or Atari or Commodore 64.

  “Did you at least let your daughter watch a movie on the way up here?” Stef asks.

  “Fern doesn’t need movies in the car. She looked out the window and we played I Spy.”

  Sammy looks up from scrounging in the picnic basket. “It’s a four-hour drive!”

  Ruth shrugs. “She had a nap.”

  “Good for you,” says Marvin.

  She holds tight to her smug smile, remembering Fern’s endless, whining demands from the back seat as the trees and farms and fields blurred by. Her own guilty, fervent wishes for her wonderful daughter to just shut up and fall asleep, and the giddy, overwhelming relief when she finally did.

  “Eventually they stop napping, you know,” says Stef. “You can’t hide from the future forever.”

  Ruth licks her dry lips. “I’m not hiding.” When she crushes the empty water bottle, the crackling of the plastic makes her wince.

  “And need I remind you that this terrible, soul-killing technology puts food on both of our tables, and that without it, our children would starve?”

  Marvin is watching them intently now, and Sammy is smirking over the handful of broken Doritos he’s scavenged.

  It’s always been this way and it always will be. Stef is the joker and Ruth is the joke.

  Stef and James will guffaw over their hilarious anecdotes about people Ruth doesn’t know, and Sammy doesn’t know half of them either but he’ll always laugh anyway. But Ruth will just sit there, trying to remember how it felt to be like them.

  “Look at her,” Stef will say with an indulgent smile. “Our clueless Ruthie. Isn’t she adorable?”

  “Her husband and I work together,” Stef tells Marvin, stealing nacho crumbs from Sammy’s hand. “James is my underling, actually. He’s a game designer, and I tell him what games to design.”

  Their neighbour glances at Ruth. “Interesting.”

  “It’s funny,” says Stef. “We both got jobs at the same company after university because it looked like fun. Donut Mondays and Beer Fridays and vintage arcade machines in the break room. But then I shot up the ranks—”

  Sammy waggles his eyebrows. “And we all know how that happened.”

  Stef snorts. “It wasn’t for my hard work, anyway. It’s easy there.” She pauses. “It’s weird, though—they seem to appreciate me.”

  “I appreciate you,” says Sammy, leering.

  She ignores him. “So now I’m the big boss earning the big bucks.” She crosses her arms and leans back. “And I like it.”

  “Good for you,” says Marvin.

  Sammy reaches over and wipes nacho-cheese dust onto his wife’s leg. “Ahem. I also put food on the table, hello!”

  She swats him away, grinning. “That’s right. You pay for the appetizers.”

  Ruth is about to say, I used to make money too, but she doesn’t bother.

  Her office job was never anything special, and she didn’t mind giving it up when she was trying to have Fern. The doctor said maybe taking a leave of absence would reduce her stress, and then James told her she could go ahead and quit if she wanted to because he was making enough by then, so she did. She didn’t miss the work and she didn’t feel bad about that because she was doing enough already. But sometimes she misses some of the people. She misses their gentle, open faces and the conversations she’d have with them and the jokes they would tell each other, even if they weren’t the funniest jokes in the world. Even if the conversations weren’t the best ones she’d ever had. They still meant something, and that mattered.

  The water laps against the shore, and the kids pick up handfuls of wet sand and carry it farther up the beach where the sand is dry. They let the dark globs drop, bit by bit, onto one spot, then stand around frowning at
it.

  “Daddy!” yells Isabelle. “Our sandcastle isn’t working!”

  “You have to use a bucket!” Sammy yells back.

  “Help us!”

  “You put sand in the bucket and pat it with your hand and then turn the bucket upside-down. Does that sound hard?”

  Isabelle puts her hands on her hips and so does Amelia, and both girls glower at him. “We don’t want to do it that way!”

  Fern sits down with crossed legs and pokes at the mess they’ve made.

  “They’re trying to make a drip castle, duh,” Stef tells Sammy. “You don’t need a bucket for a drip castle.”

  “What the hell is a drip castle? That’s not a real thing.”

  “It’s British. Some British guy at the office told us about it, anyway. We’re developing an app where you can make them with magical sparkly sand in all different colours, it’s really cool. But I think I can figure it out IRL.” She throws a pointed look at Ruth and Marvin. “That means ‘in real life,’ for the Luddites in the crowd.”

  Ruth raises her hand and gives it an overeager wave. “I knew that!”

  “I didn’t,” says Marvin.

  Ruth smiles at him, and Stef and Sammy walk over to Fern and the twins and start barking instructions.

  Ruth and Marvin are silent for a while, watching them, and then Marvin says, “I like how calm you are.”

  “Me?” Ruth blinks at him. “I’m not calm.”

  “You are, though. It’s amazing.” He lowers his voice. “Especially after everything you’ve been through.”

  Ruth’s mouth opens and closes but no sound comes out. Her pulse quickens as she waits for what he’ll say next, but he’s quiet again.

  They’re sitting too close. His bare skin next to her bare skin. She wishes she’d brought her cover-up down here, but it’s still folded neatly in her suitcase, not doing anyone any good.

  She takes a breath and manages to ask him, “What do you mean?”

  He doesn’t answer right away, and her heart hammers so loudly she’s sure he can hear it.

  Marvin picks up a small piece of driftwood and turns it around in his hands, then puts it down gently. “Stef told me you had to try for a long time before you had Fern,” he says. “That must’ve been very difficult.”