Worry Read online

  “That’s my point, though.”

  The knife James was using squealed against the red-spattered plates. “You always worry about the wrong things.”

  A scrap of cloud passes over the sun, moving fast although there’s scarcely any breeze. It’s thin and ragged, but its shadow still makes things dark for a long moment before it’s gone.

  “I’m just bugging you.” Stef nods at the three girls with a smirk. “I’d be concerned too. My kids are jerks. But Fern will be fine. She’ll toughen up and grow her shell, like we all do.”

  Fern starts tossing pebbles into the lake while the twins bob up and down a few metres away, and Ruth relaxes a little. “So what happened with Marvin?”

  Stef yawns and stretches and lies back. “Here’s this guy we don’t know asking us to go paddling off who knows where with him, and I’m thinking, Nope, because of course that’s the right thing to think in those situations.”

  “Of course.” Ruth nods.

  Her friend’s hands were on her back, pushing.

  They were eleven years old and Ruth didn’t want to meet the man in the dark park bathroom, but Stef thought it would be funny. Ruth didn’t want him to kiss her, but he did.

  “But then Sammy’s hauling our new paddleboard into the water and saying, ‘Yeah! Sounds great!’ And I tell him, ‘You can hardly even stand up on that thing, bozo. Plus we don’t have any life jackets.’ Because the previous owners left us their board and their boat but not their life jackets, jackasses. And he says, ‘Marvin’s not wearing one!’ All pouty like a baby. So I say, ‘Whatever,’ and Marvin gives me this big, old creepy smile and says, ‘Don’t you fret, I’ll take good care of him.’ And Sammy somehow managed to get on and stay upright, and they both sailed away.”

  The room was dark because it was so bright outside. But the silvery sinks behind the man were shiny in spite of the darkness. She wondered how that could be. He put his big hands on her small shoulders and spun her all the way around and pressed her back against the wall, which was cool against the bare places of her warm skin. Beside her the taps were glinting, like stars.

  Then he was pulling her close and bending down so his face was level with hers, and his eyes were big black circles like a cartoon and then his tongue was in her mouth, squirming. Suffocating her so she couldn’t scream, and that time was forever but then her friend was there, saving her. Tugging her back toward the open mouth of the room where the sun was blasting in, shouting at him to let Ruth go, “You creepy old man, let her go!” So he did. He slunk back into the shadows, mumbling, “I’m not that old, you know.”

  And then it was just the two of them again, in the middle of the day in the park where nothing bad could ever happen, and Stef grabbed her hand and they ran to the playground together. They picked swings side by side, like they always did, and swung and swung, back and forth, until they were sick of it.

  “Two hours went by,” Stef goes on. “Where the hell were they? And I’m telling myself, Everything’s fine. Marvin’s a good guy. Then I think, But how do you know? Something bad had definitely happened. Way too much time had passed. So I said to the girls, ‘Mommy’s going to take the boat out and look for Daddy.’ And they got all whiny. ‘Whyyyyy?’ Because Marvin might kill him so he can come back and claim us as his own family, idiots. I didn’t say that, obviously. But then I remembered about the life jackets, and I pictured myself falling out of the boat and drowning and then who’d protect the twins, and I know I say I can’t stand them most of the time, but every once in a while they do something cute and I’m glad they exist.” Stef pauses to crack open a new beer. “A few minutes later, Sammy and Marvin came back and we all got drunk together.”

  “Wow,” says Ruth.

  “Yep,” says Stef. She takes a breath and the two of them sit there, watching their kids play.

  Everything seems fine, so Ruth closes her eyes again. The sun warms her face.

  “It helps that he’s hot, though, right?” Stef’s languid voice slides along the sand between them. “If he was creepy and ugly, I wouldn’t keep inviting him back.”

  From out in the lake, Amelia shouts, “Ferrrrn! Look what we got!”

  Ruth opens her eyes. The twins are holding up Fern’s towel, which is now soaking wet.

  “Boo-hoo!” Isabelle taunts. “The baby crabs drowned!”

  “They’re not crabs!” Fern yells. “They’re lobsters!” She swings her small arm through the air and Amelia yelps, “Ow!”

  The twins back up unsteadily, flailing under the weight of the drenched terry cloth.

  Fern’s arm flicks again and there’s a small splash in front of the girls.

  Isabelle hollers, “Mom! She’s throwing rocks at us!”

  “What?” Ruth leaps out of her chair. “Fern! Stop that!”

  “See?” Stef grins. “She’s getting tougher already.”

  THE DAY PASSES and Ruth drinks more. Not so much that she loses the ability to parent effectively, but just enough to smooth out the edges of the late afternoon, and then the early evening. Enough so she doesn’t have to think so much about everything.

  She knows it’s not good to worry. It’s not healthy and it doesn’t help anyone. She once heard on the radio that worrying actually meant you were directing negative energy at the person you were worrying about, and Ruth doesn’t want to do that. She heard it was a better idea to picture that person in a situation with the best possible outcome, and that made a lot of sense to her. It sounded nice. The radio expert was a Tibetan monk, or else somebody quoting a Tibetan monk. Ruth doesn’t know anything about Buddhism but the speaker had a very calm voice, which made her want to believe him.

  She’s alone on the beach now. Stef and Sammy and the twins and Fern are in the cottage, and Marvin is gone but they’ll see him later. The same applies to James, actually. Isn’t that funny?

  She’s not the only one who worries, either. James has a particular tone of voice that he only ever uses when he’s anxious about Fern.

  Recently he was giving her a bath upstairs at the new house and Ruth was downstairs on the living-room couch trying to read a parenting magazine, but the words kept blurring together and she couldn’t concentrate on any of the articles, even the ones that looked interesting, and then she heard James call out, “Ruth,” in that tone.

  She dropped the magazine on the floor and ran up the stairs two at a time, and her heart was pounding so hard and what could be wrong? What terrible thing had happened? And she stopped in the doorway and there were her husband and child, and everything was fine, but James pointed at a tiny mole on Fern’s arm and said, “What’s that?”

  “It’s a mole,” said Ruth.

  “Was it there yesterday?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes she grows new moles.”

  “It just looked weird,” he said.

  “What looks weird?” said Fern.

  “Nothing.” Ruth smiled at her. “You’ve got a lot of bubbles in there.”

  Fern scooped some up with a pink plastic spoon. “We’re playing ice-cream store.”

  James was still staring at the mole.

  “Do you want me to finish giving her the bath?” Ruth asked him.

  “No, no,” he said. “You go back downstairs and relax.”

  So she left them alone again and returned to her magazine. She opened it up to a bright, glossy spread showing how parents could organize all of their children’s toys into “classic” plastic milk crates in different colours, which could be neatly stacked on top of and beside each other to create a “funky retro Rubik’s Cube effect.”

  Then there was a loud bang and some frenzied splashing and she threw down the magazine and ran up the stairs, imagining Fern’s head smashing against the porcelain after a slip and fall, her hair matted with blood, James weeping over the tub while the mountain of foam turned pink as Fern sank beneath it, unmoving.

  When she reached the doorway, though, Fern was still fine. Everything was fine, but Ruth pr
etended she had to pee so she could sit on the toilet until bath time was over.

  “Okay if the girls watch more TV?” Stef calls from the stairs.

  Ruth waves a hand at her. “Fine.”

  “I like you when you’re like this.” Stef laughs. “You’re very pliable.”

  Ruth glances behind her but sees only trees, so she turns back to gaze at the water again. The lake is very still and she pictures it filling with soap bubbles, frothy and white, rising and expanding to obscure the dock and the boat and the boat’s little house and the sky and the sun. Until everything is scrubbed clean and there’s nothing left for her to worry about.

  There’s always something, though. Because anything can go wrong at any time. At any moment, the very worst thing can happen. And she knows this is true.

  Her father’s heart attack happened two months after the baby was born. He collapsed where he was standing in his backyard and fell face-first onto the grass, and he was still lying there like that when Ruth’s mother came home from the grocery store. She saw him through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen when she was unpacking a basket of strawberries, which she dropped and then trampled in her rush to get outside.

  A doctor later told her and Ruth that he wouldn’t have felt much pain—“just one big blast of it and then he would’ve been gone.”

  Ruth’s mom nodded mutely when he said that.

  She ran back inside to call 911 but didn’t call Ruth until after the ambulance had come and carried them away and then he was pronounced dead at the hospital, because she said she didn’t want Ruth to worry.

  So Ruth didn’t feel too guilty about stopping at the mall to buy a black dress on the way to meet her mom in the waiting room, even though she was dimly aware that it was a strange thing to do. Her brain and her body were still so wobbly then. Nothing about her was behaving the way it was supposed to. The birth had been a traumatic one, and she thought she would never heal.

  In his small, stuffy office with bright anatomy posters on the beige walls, the doctor interlaced his long fingers and squeezed them together in a slow, steady pulse. “We had a mom and a couple kids in here earlier today with a dad who shot himself in the shower. The youngest girl was the one who found him.” He pulled his hands apart and laid them on his desk, pressing them down and flattening them out. “You can at least be grateful that you don’t have to deal with something like that.”

  The door was open and there was so much activity going on in the hallway outside. A cleaner strolled past with a mop. A nurse hurried by with a clipboard. Orderlies in pale-green scrubs wheeled beds with moaning, alive people on them.

  “Thank you for telling us that,” said Ruth. “It’s very considerate of you.”

  The doctor cocked his head and gave her an uncertain smile, like she’d just shared a joke with him that he didn’t quite get.

  Her mom looked at her too, because Ruth wasn’t normally sarcastic like that.

  That was how Stef talked.

  And there in the airless little box of an office that the doctor had trapped them in with his stupid platitudes, under a poster of the human body with its skin stripped off so all of the veins and arteries and organs were visible, Ruth felt as if her best friend were stretching inside of her, occupying all of the space that was weak and making it strong.

  She had the power to do anything right then. She could’ve punched the doctor in his face and her knuckles wouldn’t even have bruised. She could’ve slammed her fist into his nose and cheeks and eyes until he was a bloody mess of broken bones and ruined flesh and then just stood up and put an arm around her sobbing mother’s shoulders and walked out like nothing had happened.

  But he had a framed photo on his desk of a laughing woman with long, curly hair who was holding a laughing, bald baby very tightly, and there was drool on the baby’s lips—they were shining with it—so Ruth just stood up and put her arm around her sobbing mother’s shoulders and they walked out of the room and left the hospital and went to a fast-food restaurant for dinner but only ate a few of their fries and that was all.

  Then they went back to the house and Ruth helped her mom clean the ruined strawberries off the kitchen floor and then they fell asleep together in Ruth’s mom’s bed, and neither of them woke up for a long, long time.

  “Sammy just fired up the barbecue.” Stef’s voice drifts toward her from somewhere high above the trees. “We should all probably eat something other than chips and Goldfish crackers.”

  “Hmm?” The word buzzes up Ruth’s throat and hangs in front of her. Such an easy thing to say, requiring hardly any effort at all. She didn’t even have to open her mouth.

  “Drink this, you’ll like it,” said a tall, freckled boy a long time ago. He’d mixed up the frozen cocktails in his parents’ blender with his shorter, uglier friend while Ruth and Stef sat together on his parents’ couch in his parents’ basement rec room, which had a bar in it, like in a movie for adults.

  Ruth had never had a frozen cocktail before. She and Stef were fourteen and they’d met the boys at the mall, where they went because it was air-conditioned and because there were always boys there.

  The school year was almost over and summer holidays were starting soon. Outside the boy’s parents’ house, the late afternoon was sweltering. Inside, under a ceiling fan that turned and turned but barely made a breeze, Stef leaned closer to her and whispered, “I get the cute one.”

  Ruth nodded as beads of sweat squeezed out all over her. Somehow Stef never got sweaty back then, even on the hottest days.

  The couch was actually a loveseat and she and Stef were squashed together on it. She could feel the heat of her friend’s bare thigh pressed against hers. They were both wearing shorts and their brand-new matching terry-cloth halter tops. Ruth’s was maroon and Stef’s was royal blue, and Ruth had been happy enough with the outfit in the change room where she and Stef had posed for each other in the mirror, but then she wished she hadn’t changed out of her regular T-shirt.

  The blender stopped roaring and Ruth asked the tall boy, quietly, “Where’s your mom and dad?”

  He said, “Who cares?”

  Stef shrieked out a laugh that hurt Ruth’s ears.

  The loveseat was velour with a flower pattern. Big, fat roses in pink and red and yellow. Yellow roses are for friendship, Ruth thought.

  “You guys better not mess with us because we’re tough,” Stef told the boys, making her voice low and serious. “We cut up baby pigs today. Then Ruth puked all over her desk and the janitor had to come and clean it up. It was really gross.”

  “Don’t worry.” The tall boy smirked at them from the bar. “We won’t cut you up. But don’t puke on us, okay?” He winked at Ruth, and she wanted to touch every one of his freckles.

  Then his ugly friend, the one Ruth was getting, was handing her a tall, plastic glass fogged with condensation, filled to the brim with orange slush, and she was saying, “Thank you,” and giving him her best come-hither smile, which Stef had helped her practise in the change room, and the tall guy was slipping a straw between Stef’s glossy lips.

  They drank their drinks, and when they were done, they politely commented on how delicious they were, even though Ruth didn’t like hers because it was way too sweet. But at least it was cold. Then the boys took the girls’ empty cups away and sat down beside them, squashing them even more.

  An action movie was playing on the TV, and the handsome hero was running through a field to save his beautiful wife from an evil king. The king had the woman’s arms pinned behind her back and his pointy beard was grazing her shoulder.

  Stef’s guy reached behind him and grabbed a blanket that was resting across the back of the couch. He shook it out neatly and laid it over all of their laps.

  The hero sprinted toward the barbed-wire fence between him and his beloved, and the evil king stared him down.

  Stef’s guy put his hands under the blanket and told everyone else they should do the same.

 
The king grabbed the struggling woman’s hands, guided them onto the wire, and forced them slowly along the length of it. And the woman on TV screamed and screamed.

  “Yep.” Stef is suddenly on the beach beside her, taking charge. “You definitely need some real food.”

  Ruth blinks up at her and Isabelle and Amelia and Fern, all of them circled around her lounge chair. Peering at her curiously.

  Earlier, before they went up to the cottage to watch TV, Fern and the twins had taken turns burying each other in the sand. They were experts now, after burying Marvin.

  Fern reaches out and tickles the bottoms of Ruth’s feet, giggling.

  “Hey, stop!” Ruth flinches back. “I’m awake.”

  “You’d better be,” Stef tells her. “Because we’ve got a long night ahead of us.” She claps her hands. “Dinnertime, let’s go!”

  “Hurry up, Mama!” says Fern. “I’m hungry.”

  “That’s why we’re having dinner, sweetheart,” says Stef. “And also so your mommy doesn’t fall on her face.”

  Fern wrinkles her brow. “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she drank too much ALCOHOL!” shouts Isabelle.

  Ruth glares at her friend’s child, then concentrates on standing up without tipping over.

  Stef holds out her hand but Ruth shakes her head. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” Stef grins. “If you say so.”

  “I have to go pee,” Ruth had told the ugly boy when he started to climb on top of her. “I have to go really badly.”

  “Fine,” he said. “But you better get back here fast, or else I’ll come and get you.”

  He moved aside and Ruth stood up, and Stef looked up at her from under the cute, freckled boy who was pressing her down and moving his hands around under the blanket. Then she looked away, and Ruth was free.

  They all start up the stairs together, two big and three little sets of knees and elbows bending, feet raising and lowering, and then they turn a corner and there is the wasps’ nest. Hanging over their heads, beckoning them closer.

  Just steer clear of them and they’ll steer clear of you.