Stay Where I Can See You Page 13

  “Oh,” said Joshua, rubbing his head.

  Maddie was only fortified. Now, she thought, and she leaned in and kissed him. The kiss was deep and familiar, and she had been right: within moments, he was frantic, pulling her to the bed, as if it were his. She lay on her back. He hovered on one elbow, hand on the zipper of her jeans. He stopped, looked her in the eyes.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes,” she answered, with a glinting memory of a sex ed class about “consent.” He’s a good student, she thought. She pulled his T-shirt over his head, and took in his smooth chest, the wiry muscles in his arms. His jeans came off quickly, but she couldn’t get a full look, because he was at an angle, his face next to hers. He used his hand first, slowly, until she was shuddering and slick, the familiar feeling she gave herself early in the morning, between the alarm and school, with the door locked.

  “Wait . . .” he said, and went to his backpack.

  Maddie saw his whole body now, the long, lean legs, the bones of his hips, the hard penis. The sight of his body made her defiant, determined.

  He held up a condom and waved it around sheepishly. “I guess I’m, uh, an optimist.”

  “Have you . . .?” asked Maddie.

  “Once. You?”

  “No,” said Maddie.

  Joshua said, “It wasn’t . . . important.” Maddie smiled. It doesn’t matter, she wanted to say. Everything that came before doesn’t matter.

  Joshua looked at Maddie with flashing eyes as he entered her—sharp, blunt. She had a biologist’s distance on the moment, surprised at how fast he moved. It almost made her laugh. She knew she was supposed to close her eyes and make a lot of noise, but she didn’t; her body didn’t. Her body wanted to look at him, and he looked at her, too. He looked at her with such wonder—such appreciation!—and that collapsed into the animal part of her, the part that wanted to rip his bones from beneath his skin, consume all of him, and he was perfect, it was perfect.

  But then there was a shot of pain—oh God, it hurt, and Maddie cried out. Joshua probably confused it for ecstasy, she thought. He slowed, but she didn’t want that either, pulled him deeper. He stiffened and gasped for breath. This was “coming,” she thought, and as all the energy left his body and he collapsed onto her, she thought, I chose well.

  Afterwards, they lay in the shadow of evening, their clothes off, the quilt pulled up to their necks. All her confidence was gone, and Maddie was cast in a strange feeling, not of loss but panic: That was just the first time. I’ll be doing that forever now, and not always with him.

  She curled onto her side, facing away from him, and Joshua put a palm on her hip. She should try to steer the moment away from that future loss, to pull him closer, she thought. The lottery. She had been holding it in for so many months. Her parents had never said not to talk about it, but doing so seemed hideous. You can’t be that tacky, or that mean to people. Saying out loud what you have is like asking a question: So, what do you have? Or maybe: What don’t you have? But he was different. Safe, she thought, feeling his hand on her hip.

  To the wall, Maddie said, “None of this is real.”

  She rolled onto her back, acutely aware that his hand had moved onto her stomach.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This house. My family. We won the lottery.”

  “Yeah, everyone who lives in this city should probably admit that.”

  “No—literally. We won ten million dollars last summer. That’s why I’m suddenly at your school. Why we have this new house.”

  Joshua was quiet for a long moment. “What were you like before?”

  Maddie considered this question. She had no real answer for him, so she pulled the quilt higher. She looked at the clock. Eli and Gwen would be back from hockey soon.

  “I should be grateful, I know. It’s just—there was nothing that really needed fixing. Everything just got bigger. Like Peter Parker in the lab or something—we got amplified.”

  He looked up at the ceiling. “You just made me realize something: I’ve never met anyone who won anything. You know those raffles at school? Or a door prize? I never really think I’ll win, and I never do.”

  “Do you ever buy lottery tickets?”

  “Nah. My mother thinks it’s gambling. It’s against God.”

  “And your father?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks about.”

  He turned to look at her, pushed her hair out of her eyes, which made Maddie smile; no one but her mom and dad had ever touched her hair like that before.

  “Don’t feel bad about having money. It’s not yours anyway. We’re all just pushed along by our parents.”

  Maddie nodded, deciding that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.

  Joshua looked thoughtful. “What’s really crazy is that in this city, it’s not even that much money. That party we were at? That house probably cost close to your ten million. Your friend Clara went on this cruise last year, and she was telling everyone how her family stayed in a special section of the boat where they had their own, like, butler, and they didn’t have to interact with the other passengers.”

  Maddie wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. Maybe he was trying to comfort her, telling her that while the money set her apart from him, there were all these other people who were apart from her, trussed to even greater sums. Maybe you’re supposed to feel good about that. She didn’t really.

  Downstairs, Maddie heard the front door open, followed by footsteps, and Eli calling, “Anybody hooooome?”

  They rose quickly and stood in the dimming light, not looking at one another’s bodies, covering them item by item. She put a finger to her lips, and they walked silently to the top of the stairs. Eli had turned on a TV, and sports sounds drifted up at them. Eli’s presence meant Gwen was home, too, but Maddie didn’t want to deal with her, so she went down first, scanned the hallway and then gave Joshua the signal to descend.

  Maddie opened the front door, and he walked straight out of the house, his coat and bag over one arm, onto the porch. She pulled the door closed behind her softly and was watching him head down the walkway, when he turned back suddenly and returned to the stoop.

  He stood in front of Maddie and said, “Thank you,” and then blushed. “I mean—not thank you but . . .” He kissed her on the cheek.

  A cheek kiss was a weird, grown-up move, so sexy that she trembled. They studied each other, smiling over what they had shared, and as he finally vanished out of sight, Maddie looked to the sky and suppressed a scream: Holy fuck! THIS PERSON! I LOVE THE WORLD!

  When he was out of sight, she re-entered the house, slipping upstairs to her room. She shut the door and stood at the window, grinning madly.

  Maddie could sense Gwen outside the door before she saw her. Her mother burst in.

  “Blonde!” cried Maddie. With her new short hair, her mom was someone else, not younger, but someone from a fantasy book—someone in possession of a Pegasus or a sword. “I like it,” said Maddie, but Gwen was wild-eyed; the drapey sleeves of what Maddie secretly called her mom’s “pillowcase wardrobe” flopped at her sides.

  “Was someone here?” Gwen asked.

  “No,” said Maddie quickly.

  “You have to keep the door locked.”

  “We have the security system—”

  “I’m not kidding. There are break-ins in the neighbourhood. You’re not used to the city—”

  “Points of vulnerability. I heard the guy.”

  Maddie didn’t want her mother to ruin this. She didn’t want to tell her or anybody what had just happened, minutes ago (minutes!). Surely her mother would sense it, smell it. She was scanning Maddie so intensely that Maddie wrapped her arms around her body.

  “Can I do my homework now?”

  Gwen checked the windows, and then left Maddie standing in the room. Maddie unwrapped her arms, putting her mother’s panic out of her mind. She danced across the room, goofily, and immediately the good feeling returned a
nd settled all around her.

  GWEN

  After the kids had said goodnight, Gwen sat in bed with her laptop, reading and rereading the email. Finally, she typed: Where are you? What do you want? Then she erased it. Her phone rang. She seized it, but it was just Seth.

  He talked and talked, oblivious to her simmering alarm. He told her that he loved LA. He loved that in LA, it didn’t feel like fall, and the sky was a sheet of baby-blanket blue. Tom drove the rental car they were using, which meant Seth got to look at the other cars out the window; so many cars—fast, gleaming cars with Voodoo engines. Gwen had never been to LA.

  She managed to speak, “Did you get any investors?”

  Seth was less exuberant then. “We’ll see. Tom’s positive. We had a few guys tell us there’s ‘location risk.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We’re not in the right city.”

  Gwen’s unease deepened, even as Seth talked on, describing meetings with barely thirty-year-old guys who bought companies and sold companies and invested in new companies and built and tore down and started up over and over. He hadn’t been dressed right, he realized, and went shopping with Tom, replacing his jacket with a garment like a hoodie without a hood, but not a sweatshirt. As he pinged, exhilarated, through his stories, Gwen decided that telling Seth about the letter from Daniel at that moment seemed impossible, like sending a message between planets. There was no common tongue. But she was bursting, too, so she finally interrupted him:

  “Seth—I don’t think we should have left the kids alone the other weekend.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just—it’s not safe here. We don’t even know our neighbours.”

  “We should have people over. When I get back, we’ll invite some people—”

  “No one lives here. Half the houses on the block aren’t even occupied.”

  “Offshore money.”

  “We don’t know who’s actually coming and going—and these crazy lottery people—they could find us—”

  “Oh, come on, Gwen.”

  Behind him, Gwen could hear traffic. She wished it were the ocean.

  “Where are you?”

  “We have another meeting. I’m in a parking lot. In fact, I should get going.” She said nothing. “Gwen, please don’t worry.”

  “I’m not crazy.” It was a sentence women said just before being institutionalized or abandoned.

  “I didn’t say you were. I get it. It’s a new place. It’ll take time. It’s normal to be anxious. But we can’t lock up the kids.” He spoke as if they had had this conversation many times.

  “Maybe we should,” said Gwen.

  “Don’t scare them, okay? Don’t scare yourself.”

  After hanging up, Gwen prowled, checking the rooms, testing the battery on Eli’s sleepwalking mat. She turned on the lights by the pool and looked out from the French doors off the kitchen. She would need to call someone to get the pool drained. A row of juniper trees hunched below the tall fence. She turned off the lights.

  Upstairs, at the threshold of Maddie’s room, Gwen looked at her daughter lying in bed, and thought about her snark at the door. Maddie didn’t know bad things could happen, not really. Gwen climbed in bed with her, but far away, not touching, because if they touched, Maddie would surely push her away.

  Being near Maddie calmed Gwen, and she fell asleep, waking sharply in the pitch dark. Outside, she heard something—a bang, and then the sound of objects falling. Gwen went to the window, heart racing, but it was hard to see anything in the dark. Shapes, black and hulking, vertical and horizontal. Just trees, she told herself. Just trees.

  Winter

  10

  MADDIE

  The front door of the building was propped open by a brick, so Maddie walked right to Joshua’s apartment and rang the bell, as they’d planned the night before. Shuffling sounds and a wet, loose cough came from behind the door. Maddie stood back as steps closed in.

  The door opened, and Joshua’s mother stood before her wrapped in a blanket, smiling, her eyes watering. “Please, come in.”

  Maddie hesitated.

  “I’m Madeline. I came over to study . . . with Joshua—”

  “Yes, yes. Please, I will explain. Joshua has gone. He couldn’t find his phone. Boys! He had to hurry so he could not call. He told me you would come. I will explain.” She coughed and moved to the side of the hall, gesturing for Maddie to enter.

  Classical music played in a faraway room. “Come, come,” said Joshua’s mother, pulling Maddie by the arm, leading her to the couch.

  Maddie sat on the very edge of the cushions.

  “Tea?” asked Joshua’s mother.

  Did she have a name? Could Maddie use it? She decided on Mrs. Andrada in her head, and nothing out loud. Maddie wouldn’t have minded tea with Mrs. Andrada—maybe she would learn more about Joshua—but she declined, because it seemed more polite to do so, and because she had never had tea before.

  Instead of sitting across from her, Mrs. Andrada sat down next to her, smiling, still clutching the blanket around her. She reached for a Kleenex and blew her nose hard, but she was still smiling.

  “I’m sorry. Rude,” she said, tucking the Kleenex in her sleeve.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sick. I should not sit too close.” But she was sitting extremely close. “So Joshua has gone to my boss’s house. He is me today.”

  “Oh,” said Maddie.

  “I cannot work because I am sick. I don’t want to make the baby sick. But you can go, too. The baby won’t mind. My boss is a very good woman. And when the baby is sleeping, you can study, just like you do here.”

  She stood up, so Maddie did, too.

  “Sit, sit. I will get paper.” She patted Maddie on the shoulder and smiled at her. Maddie sat down.

  “You work as hard as Joshua?” she asked, moving across the room slowly, swaddled in her blanket, feet snouting out of the bottom edge. Maddie looked around, stopping at a photo of Joshua as a young child, against a backdrop of a forest. Crooked bangs and grinning.

  “I try. He’s a really good student,” said Maddie.

  “I know!” Mrs. Andrada exclaimed, laughing. “He works all the time. Too hard, I think. I worry. I tell him: You are just a child! Have fun! Go with the pretty girl!”

  Maddie felt herself redden.

  Joshua’s mother wrote an address on a piece of paper. “But I am proud, of course. I want success for him. He must be successful. I always say: my children are my only property.”

  Maddie struggled to make sense of this statement, its coldness next to Mrs. Andrada’s warm smile.

  “Alexis was born here, at St. Michael’s Hospital. Did you know?”

  Maddie shook her head.

  “I went home to get Joshua, in Quezon, and I had one night, just one, with Joshua’s father.” Maddie nodded. “Poof! Baby.” She giggled and kept smiling.

  Heat spread across Maddie’s cheeks. A warning had been issued.

  Mrs. Andrada rubbed her nose with the handkerchief. “You understand. Everything I do is for my children. My children will finish school, go on to university. I did two years of university. I was a track star. Very fit. I was almost in the Olympics. One hundred metres.” She put the handkerchief back in her pocket. “Alexis is a citizen just because she was born here. Not the same for Joshua and me. We’re visitors.” She laughed again.

  Maddie found Mrs. Andrada’s laughter disorienting, like looking at a face where the eyes go in two different directions.

  “But you’re citizens.”

  “Permanent residents.”

  “But you will be citizens.”

  “Yes, yes. But it’s very slow. One letter from the government was never delivered. I was missing one document—we had to start over twice. Whole process again. Two extra years. Still no papers.” She blew her nose.

  Maddie wondered if it was possible that Joshua really was just a tourist, after thirteen years in
the country. It made no sense: she and Joshua were the same.

  “Your parents are proud of you, too,” said Mrs. Andrada.

  Was it a question or a statement?

  “I think so,” Maddie said.

  Maddie wanted to leave. She wanted to stand up from the slippery couch and flee the strange smell (squash, was it?) blowing in lightly from the kitchen, and the photo of Joshua’s stern, faraway father who looked like he might punch his way out of the frame.

  “Here,” said Joshua’s mother. She handed Maddie the piece of paper and smiled. “You warm enough?” she asked, reaching out and touching Maddie’s jacket.

  “Thank you,” said Maddie, putting the address in her coat pocket. She stood to leave. “I’m warm enough, thank you. It was very nice to meet you.”

  Her fingernails on Maddie’s arm were short and clean. Maddie had heard that you could tell everything you needed to know about a person from her fingernails. She looked hard at Mrs. Andrada’s hands, but she had absolutely no idea what that everything was.

  * * *

  Maddie almost laughed when she saw the house. She had thought that the house where she’d been to the party was big, but this one eclipsed it. The house was a giant cube, with smaller cubes on the top and at the sides, all blonde wood and glass. If the house dropped from the sky, bottomless, it would swallow three of Maddie’s new house.

  When Joshua opened the door, Maddie said, “Did you shrink?”

  He gestured upwards. “It’s the ceilings.”

  Maddie padded across the floor in her socks. She stopped in the living room, in front of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, spines arranged by colour. The back wall of the house was glass, overlooking a ravine, a tangle of vines and shrubbery. In this huge room, the cube felt precarious, jutting out over the forest floor like a branch that might snap and tumble.

  “Look,” said Joshua, and he leaned into the glass, pressing his head against it, his arms wide, as if he were flying.

  Maddie did the same and could feel the ravine pulling her down into its thorns.

  “Whoa,” said Maddie, standing up, dizzy. They looked at each other, and Maddie was overcome, fevered: Could they have sex on one of the long grey couches? Could they run up the wide, shining staircase to a bedroom? Everyone talks about your first time, thought Maddie, but surely it was the second time that mattered, the time without the airplane going through the sky trailing its banner announcing: HEY, WE’RE HAVING SEX! This time, it would be only the feeling, that quick feeling that she had tasted so briefly last time, of sinking and being gone.