Worry Read online

  Ruth exhales, picturing her friend radiant and full of knowing. Doling out other people’s business in bits and pieces.

  “Thank you.” She flails around for something nice to say in return. But maybe he never wanted kids to begin with, so a sorry would fall flat. He doesn’t need her pity if he’s living the life he wanted all along. He doesn’t need it either way.

  So she just offers another faint smile, and that seems to be enough because he smiles back. His hair is much darker than James’s. And his nose is bigger, but in a nice way. And he has a nice, square jaw with nice stubble all over it. She always likes how stubble looks, but it’s so scratchy. Sometimes James will rub her face raw when they kiss, and she’ll have marks the next day.

  She feels herself blushing and looks away, and so does Marvin. They both swivel their heads to watch the drip castle taking shape and growing taller.

  The twins and Fern take turns letting the wet sand fall from their fingers, forming peaks and turrets and an uneven wall surrounding them. Their expressions alternate between fierce glee and stern, single-minded absorption.

  Sammy stands back and observes, nodding. “Okay, this is pretty cool. But I still think it would be easier with a bucket.”

  “That’s not the point, though,” says Stef.

  He glances at her. “Is the British guy good-looking?”

  She shrugs. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’ll kill him.”

  “Please don’t. He’s a valuable member of our team.”

  “Is he the one who implants the chips in the kids’ brains?” Ruth deadpans.

  Marvin and Sammy chortle at that, and Stef suddenly wheels around and staggers back over, jerking her head to the left and right with her eyes full of terror, and jabs a finger at Ruth. “Oh my God, it’s you! The Anachronistic One who has appeared to herald the BooBerry Apocalypse, which basically looks like a bunch of parents who are overworked and underpaid and exhausted and just need a few minutes to themselves once in a while, so they let their kids manipulate some digital strawberries around a haunted digital field so the poor, undead digital farmer can get a break once in a while too!”

  “Okay, okay.” Ruth holds up her hands, laughing. “You win.”

  Marvin plucks an empty FrootSnax pouch off the ground and crumples it into a ball. “I guess I’m lucky I don’t have to worry about that stuff.”

  Before anyone can reply, Fern comes running back over, and Marvin grins at her.

  “Mama! Let’s dig!”

  “Sounds good to me.” Ruth finds two shovels in the pile of sand toys. She hands one to Fern and they get to work.

  “Can I help?” Marvin asks.

  “No.” Fern shakes her head solemnly. “You’re going to go in the hole we make.”

  “Am I, now?” His smile broadens.

  “You’re outnumbered, pal. Get used to it.” Sammy opens the cooler and hands him a beer.

  Marvin opens it and takes a big drink. “You guys are the best.”

  “Give me one of those,” says Stef. “And Ruth needs one too.”

  Sammy doles out more silver cans, which glint and flash in the afternoon light.

  Ruth pries up the tab on hers and takes a sip. The beer is delicious and cold, and the sun is so hot.

  Every summer now reminds her of the last time she was pregnant. When she got all the way to the end. And it was funny, but not really, how an entire season that was previously vivid with so many associations could be overshadowed by a single memory. But it’s a big one. It takes up a lot of room.

  She wasn’t drinking beer then. She couldn’t even drink lemonade because it gave her acid reflux. And she was sweaty all the time, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind any of it.

  Afterward, though, there was a lot of pain. The birth had torn her open, and it took a very long time to recover. She had to shuffle when she walked, inch by inch.

  The twins run over and kneel next to Fern and start pawing at the sand with her.

  Stef tosses a couple of shovels at her daughters. “You’ll never bury Uncle Marvin at that rate. Step it up!”

  The girls’ trench gets deeper but not longer. It’s large enough now for one of them to lie in, but not nearly large enough for an adult.

  “The size is wrong,” says Marvin. “It’s too small. You have to make it bigger.”

  The sharpness in his voice makes Ruth look over.

  “Whoa, now,” Stef says to him. “Bossy, much?”

  “Sorry.” He looks dazed for a moment, but then he’s grinning again. “Guess what? Lesley and I are having a bonfire tonight! That’s what I came over to tell you guys. You can’t miss it.”

  “Nice!” says Sammy. “Marvin and Lesley’s bonfires are legendary,” he tells Ruth. “Everybody goes.”

  “I shall put on mascara for the occasion,” says Stef. “Even though Sammy hates it when I wear eye makeup. He’s fine with lipstick. How can you be fine with lipstick and not eye makeup?”

  Sammy hoists his can high. “Because when you do your eyes, you look like a whore.”

  “Whores can be nice sometimes,” says Marvin.

  Everyone looks at him, and a few seconds later he laughs.

  “Sounds like fun,” Ruth says.

  Marvin takes another drink and raises his can in a toast. “Barry the treasure where no one can find it!”

  “Hey!” says Fern. “That’s my joke!” Her mouth is set in grim determination as she continues to dig, and the hole gets deeper.

  She had the same expression a few nights before, when Ruth came home from grocery shopping and smiled at the hush that greeted her, imagining her husband and daughter snuggled up on the couch with a storybook, or sitting side by side on the floor building Lego towers.

  It was really quiet, though. Even if they were reading or doing something else low-key, she would’ve heard something.

  “Fern?” she called. “James?” She walked down the hall to the family room. There were so many rooms in the new house. “Hellooo! Where’s my family?”

  Fern was alone on the big wooden rocking chair that Ruth kept meaning to get rid of, but they’d still dragged it with them when they moved. It was a hopeful wedding gift from James’s parents and it had always been uncomfortable. When Fern was a baby, Ruth would rock her in it while she guzzled her bottles like she was starving, and Ruth’s back would ache for hours afterward.

  Fern was wearing James’s headphones, which made her small face appear even smaller, and she didn’t look up.

  “Hi, Fern! Where’s Daddy?”

  No response. Fern was focused on something in her lap. Ruth moved closer and removed the headphones.

  Fern flinched but didn’t look up from James’s phone. Her gaze was fixed on the screen, her little thumbs hammering away. “Hi, Mama! I’m making the watermelon soldiers shoot the papaya guards with their seed guns! I’m winning, Mama!”

  “Good for you, honey.” She moved away and went farther down the hall to the kitchen, where James was tending to a bubbling pot of pasta.

  He turned and grinned at her, opening his arms wide. “I’m making the three of us a romantic dinner, with candles and everything!”

  “Why is she on your phone?”

  James kept his voice light. “I just showed her some games. She wanted to see them, so I showed her.”

  “She wouldn’t know about them if you hadn’t told her they existed.”

  “Ruth, come on. You’re overreacting.”

  “What the fuck, James.”

  “Keep your voice down.” He jerked his head back at the family room.

  “Well, luckily you’ve turned her into a zombie, so she has no idea what’s going on beyond the watermelon soldiers killing the mango brigade.”

  “Papaya guards.”

  “Did you just correct me on the type of fruit in your horrible game?”

  His shoulders slumped. “I’ll take the phone away from her when dinner’s ready, it’s not a big deal.”

  Her ey
es were stinging. “But it is.”

  James sighed. “Here we go.”

  “I specifically said no phones, no laptops, no tablets, no anything like that until she’s five. Is she five?”

  “Ruth, seriously. She’s going to go to school and she’ll be the only kid who doesn’t know how to use a computer.”

  “No, she’ll be the only kid with social skills and an attention span that lasts more than two minutes at a time.”

  “Why can’t you just be happy here?” He spat the question out. “We have everything we want now. Just be happy.”

  “STOP IT!”

  They both froze.

  Fern was standing in the doorway, the headphones lifeless at her feet. She was holding Monsieur Foomay with shaking hands.

  Ruth stretched out her arms. “Fernie.”

  Fern levelled the dragon first at Ruth and then at James. “Stop saying mean things right now or we are going to burn you.”

  “We’ll stop.” James held up his hands. “We promise.”

  Fern dropped her toy and sank to the floor, and the two of them rushed to her side, rubbing her back, telling her it’s okay, don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy love each other, we were just having an argument and grown-ups do that sometimes, but that’s silly, isn’t it, because you shouldn’t fight with the people you love.

  But then Fern was wailing and shrieking, flinching away from them. She ran back to the family room and dumped out her biggest toy bin. “Look, I made a mess! Yell at me!”

  Ruth and James stood together at the edge of the spilled Lego and puzzle pieces and sparkly dress-up fairy wings and a plastic wand studded with plastic jewels and scattered plastic medical instruments from a doctor kit—a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff, a needle. And all the stuffed animals that Ruth kept giving Fern in the hopes that one of them would replace Monsieur Foomay in her affections—bears and frogs and elephants and lambs—but none of them ever did.

  Five

  THE WIFE LIES ON HER SIDE OF THE BED THAT SHE SHARES with her husband. He already left for work and she is alone, but there’s a baby growing inside her again and this time she’s sure it will keep growing. She doesn’t want to believe that yet, though—doesn’t want to hope even a little bit. Because they have been trying and trying and it never works. It always ends in bleeding.

  But hope is there anyway.

  Yesterday she visited their fertility doctor again, who ordered the test that the wife is so familiar with now. The one that checks the level of pregnancy hormone in her blood, at the very beginning. If the number is high, that’s good. If the number is low, that’s not good.

  Before the doctor sent her on her way, she said to the wife in her kind, compassionate voice, “You need to keep in mind that there are literally a million tiny things that have to go right for conception to succeed. Babies are, quite literally, miracles.”

  Then the nice nurse who works literally next door to the doctor’s office pricked the wife with a needle with that gentle manner she has. She’s always so careful not to make it hurt too much. The wife appreciates that.

  She used to be very squeamish and would have to lie down or she would pass out, but over the years, it got so she could sit up and be totally fine and she started joking with the nurse that she was a pro now, and the nurse would nod and smile and turn away.

  This morning, after the husband left for the tall, shiny office tower where he brings entire new worlds to life, the doctor called with the results. And she told the wife they were good. She has always called and said the results were not good, but this time she said they were good.

  Now the wife has the same feeling she had so many years ago, before things went wrong and before she even knew about the doctor’s test, when she thought it would be easy. When she couldn’t wait to show her husband the plus sign that had formed in the tiny window of the plastic purple wand she’d wrapped up in toilet paper and hidden away until he came home. And when he gave her a gift that was a pun about everything they had to look forward to.

  The wife curls into a C shape and looks out the window. It’s bright and sunny outside and she should call her husband with the news, but she doesn’t want to yet. This time she’ll wait, keep the secret to herself for a while. Let him guess it on his own when she can’t hide it anymore. When she’s bursting with the news.

  She grins at her own little joke, and because she can’t wait to see the look on her best friend’s face.

  She grins because she told her husband she wanted one more try and at first he didn’t think that was a good idea.

  He said, “What if something worse happens?”

  She said, “It won’t.” Even though she’s afraid of that too.

  Because she has heard stories. Friends of friends who gave birth to stillborn babies at six, seven, eight months along. The mothers had to be induced so they could go into labour and deliver the child they knew was dead, had already died inside them but didn’t want to leave. Those babies wanted to stay but they couldn’t, so they had to be pushed and pulled out. And it wasn’t right for them to stay, even though their mothers would have let them, would have gladly agreed to be a home to those dead babies until they died themselves.

  But it’s going to be all right. She’ll be very, very careful.

  And when the wife gives birth to their happy, healthy baby, she will not say to her husband, “See? I told you!” She will be a living, breathing I-told-you-so. And he will love her for it.

  For now, though, for a while, she rests here with her hands on her belly, which has never been flat, and has never been round either, and tries not to worry.

  On the other side of the window, there are so many people doing all the things that people do. Having breakfast, taking showers, arriving at the office, checking their email, shopping for groceries, reading parenting magazines in doctors’ offices because that’s the only reading material available.

  But on this side, it’s just the two of them, and she whispers, “Please.” She closes her eyes. “Please stay.”

  Six

  A FEW HOURS LATER, FERN IS STILL PLAYING IN THE sand, Isabelle and Amelia are wading in the lake, Sammy is off somewhere paddleboarding, Stef is sunning herself, and Marvin is back at his own cottage doing “bonfire prep,” which he explained basically meant stockpiling sticks and opening a few bags of chips and making sure there was enough hand sanitizer by the outhouse. And also drinking heavily, ha ha.

  Ruth is drinking too, because it’s easier that way.

  It occurs to her that if she drank like this at home, she’d have a problem. But they’re on Cottage Time so what the hell.

  They’re all still in their swimsuits and they’ve stopped applying sunscreen. Skin is starting to turn pink.

  Stef’s fingers dance across her C-section scar. She’s always touching it, even when she’s dressed. She’ll reach down and run her thumb over the place between her hips where that little line glows. Sometimes she’ll even sneak a furtive hand inside her waistband, so quickly it might seem to someone else that she was scratching an itch. But Ruth knows what she’s really doing.

  “It’s something I’m good at,” Stef likes to say. “I’m a master baby-maker.”

  Even after she’d only done it once, she was the expert.

  Ruth crumples her empty beer can and drops it onto the sand, and Stef immediately reaches into the cooler between them and hands her a full one.

  She considers saying no, but it’s easier to say nothing and take the can. She won’t have it right away. She’ll have it later.

  She lies back on her lounge chair and closes her eyes, and the blue sky fills with clouds that darken to an angry, boiling green. They clot into a fierce mass and the wind screams and twists it into a funnel that whips the water into giant waves. The cyclone picks up speed, seething with jagged shells and stones and gasping fish. It races toward the shore, where Ruth and James and Fern are building a sandcastle together. And they don’t even notice the tornado until it’s right o
n top of them, because they are all so happy and they love each other so much.

  Stef’s voice drifts toward her. “I was worried about Marvin too, when we first moved in.”

  Ruth’s eyelashes flutter open and she sits up, blinking. The sun is so bright.

  “We’d only been here a few days, and then one morning we were all swimming and he came sailing over to say hello.”

  Out in the water, Isabelle and Amelia start splashing each other. Then they stop.

  Fern is making a sand angel on the shore in front of them. She’s lying on her back and moving her arms and legs up and down.

  “He had his wife’s peach pie balanced on his board, and I kept waiting for it to fall into the lake but it never did. He slid right up beside me and handed me the dish—it was still warm—and he said, ‘Would one of you fine folks like to join me on a tour of the fiefdom?’”

  All of a sudden, Amelia and Isabelle charge out of the lake, flinging water at Fern with their combined full force. She covers her face with her hands and rolls onto her belly, and Ruth is ready to stand up but Stef yells, “Leave her alone, you two!” She shakes her head. “Fucking savages.”

  The twins run back into the water, and Fern calmly begins gathering stones.

  Ruth is still stiff in her chair, and Stef slides her sunglasses down her nose to look at her. “James told me you were concerned about our kids being at the same school.”

  “What?” Sweat slithers down Ruth’s neck. “I didn’t—”

  “You’re overreacting,” James had repeated at the end of their last fight, after they’d put Fern to bed and the argument shifted from the evils of electronics to Stef, like it always did. “So they’ll be at the same school, big deal. They’re her friends.” He was scraping the remains of their spaghetti dinner into the garbage. Fern had only eaten a few bites of hers. She said she wasn’t hungry.

  “I wasn’t even talking about that,” said Ruth. “I never said that.”

  His back was to her so she couldn’t see his face when he muttered, “They’re practically her sisters.”