Stay Where I Can See You Page 7

  With minutes to go before her curfew, Maddie reached the back gate at home. Her presence set off a floodlight, catching both her and the black pool in its beam. She stood on the porch, peering in the doors to the kitchen. Lights shone in the living room still. Her mother would be up, maybe her dad, too. The worst. She was officially wasted.

  Maddie opened the door and stepped quietly, aiming toward the back stairs. But her sandals clicked on the hardwood, setting off a human rustling in the living room.

  “Maddie?” called Gwen. Maddie sped up, leaning on the bannister as she ascended the stairs, calling backwards over her shoulder, “I’m home.” Gwen’s steps quickened, too, but Maddie outran her mother and slid into her bedroom. She shut the door and stood in the dark. She could hear Gwen outside, and see the shadow of her feet in the crack of light beneath the door. Gwen paced, and Maddie knew she was deciding whether or not to come in.

  Maddie realized—and this was weird—that she wanted her to. She was hungry to tell anyone, maybe even her mother, about the evening: the girl on the bed, the litter box, the pool kisses. But she was too drunk, and Gwen would be too careful in her response, too greedy for details. Maddie’s desire to spill her stories could never ever match Gwen’s desire to swallow her whole.

  This small, beer-soaked revelation made Maddie even sadder. She wanted to love her mother like she had when she was little, when Gwen was almost a playmate, the two of them similarly locked in child tasks and conversations. She didn’t want to see Gwen as clearly as she did now, this floating, tremulous woman, so much younger than the other mothers, almost, in some way, younger than Maddie. She missed her other mother. She missed her other self.

  Maddie watched Gwen’s shadow pull away from the crease of light. She took off her sandals and saw a blurry line of blood encircling her right ankle, as if someone had grabbed her there and dragged her across cement. Maddie threw herself on the bed, the ceiling undulating, until she finally fell asleep in a dark, fast thrum.

  5

  GWEN: BEFORE

  The first time Daniel hit her was the same night Gwen watched the band fronted by a singer who would soon become famous, and then overdose in a hotel room a few years later.

  The night they performed, the band was furious, glorious. The lead singer’s long knotted hair concealed his face. His low guitar swung by his hips. They would end up on Saturday Night Live and in arenas, and that night, everyone could feel their success coming, the first drops before a hurricane. People couldn’t get tickets, and the crowd outside stayed in the cold to hear them through the walls. The woman from the Chinese restaurant came out and shooed them away from her windows.

  When the musician sang, Gwen was moved almost to tears. His voice was speaking for her, through her, holding her. She went deeper into the crowd, pushed and pulled back and forth by the bodies, eyes closed, encore after encore.

  Afterwards, Gwen moved backstage to find the singer. She wanted to tell him something. Past the stacks of beer bottles in boxes, she saw him sitting alone in the closet that passed for a green room, its walls graffitied and smashed with holes. He had a notebook on his lap, head bowed as he wrote. He looked up at her, his hair falling away, and the not-yet-famous face was curious. Gwen opened her mouth to speak, but there were two hands on her shoulders, wrenching her backwards into the hall. The door slammed shut on the singer. Gwen was dropped back in the shadows against a stack of chairs, her right side stinging. Daniel’s height increased; his hands grew bigger. He expanded.

  “What are you doing in there?” he said.

  Gwen shook her head, and his open hand moved flat across her face. For all her father’s volcanic rumblings, she had never been hit, and she almost laughed that it was Daniel who did it—Daniel, of all people! She reeled backwards, chairs clattering, her cheek inflamed, her eye loose in its socket.

  After a pause, he came to her, gathered her in his arms. A rescue. “Oh no,” he said, as if he’d walked in on the aftermath of an accident. Was he crying? His upset added to Gwen’s confusion. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  Gwen stepped back, out of his arms. Daniel looked at her almost fearfully, unsure of what she would do.

  She walked out, through the back door, into the rain. A group of fans craned their necks, disappointed it was just her.

  She was stunned into calmness, walking and smoking, considering her options, the welt on her face beating. Gwen counted her money—twenty-seven dollars. Her vision was foggy in her right eye. She remembered the feeling of her head on Daniel’s chest at night. She remembered her father’s fury, and the sound of the TV always on in the house, and how no one from her family had come to find her when she left.

  She did a little math: Stay at the donut shop for another ten weeks. Get enough cash together. But for now—Daniel. She made a list. His sad eyes. A one-off. He’d only hurt her that one time, accidentally, when she’d been talking so close to that bartender and he pulled her by the wrist. He was sweet in bed. He was a good person. Everyone makes mistakes. He didn’t know what she was doing with that singer. He didn’t know about trust.

  Soaking wet, shivering, she walked to Daniel’s apartment.

  When he came back to find her lying on the foam in the dark, he kissed her shoulder and wept and promised. She lay still, wishing she found it harder to make the choice, but in fact, it was easy. She turned to hold him.

  * * *

  For a time afterwards, Daniel was only gentle. His hand hovered near Gwen’s waist, not on her, as if he were asking permission. When he went anywhere without her, when she wasn’t in his line of vision in Palmer’s, he asked people to keep an eye on her, and she took that for caring. “Phil’s around if you need anything,” he’d say, nodding at a squat boy with a rabbit-twitching nose who passed for a friend. “Phil’s looking out for you.” The best thing about Phil was his lean, blond dog, whom everyone called Dog.

  On her eighteenth birthday, Gwen walked the beach boardwalk with Dog while Daniel slept on his foam. Dog hated the leash, a piece of yellow rope, and pulled at Gwen’s shoulder violently, sometimes glancing back at her with surprise, seeming to say: Oh, it’s you—are you still there?

  * * *

  Daniel vanished for days. “Bender,” Phil said, and the word felt right to Gwen: Daniel’s behaviour would bend this way and that, and so would her life. Days were calm, then twisting. When he did reappear, his pretty face was a little different each time, puffed or bruised or skinnier.

  Gus grabbed Gwen by the arm, while she sat at the bar watching a band. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “He’s sick.”

  “He’s fired. Look what he did to my fucking dishwasher,” he said.

  She glanced behind the bar at the dishwasher, open to reveal a rack of unwashed glasses.

  “It looks fine,” Gwen said.

  Gus sneered. “That dishwasher,” he said. One of the Sri Lankan guys from the kitchen was tying a garbage bag behind the bar. Harsha was his name. A slow smiler. Younger, even, than her. They had spoken a few times, or as much as was possible with his broken English. Sometimes she brought the dishwashers cans of Coke from the donut shop, smuggled out in her pack on a hot night.

  Gwen waved at Harsha, and he turned, revealing a dark welt over his eye. Half his face was lumpy and grooved with bruises. He ducked, avoiding looking at Gwen.

  “That’s your boyfriend’s work,” said Gus. “He’s a fucking maniac.” Gwen stared and tried to rise to go to him, but Gus’s hand was on her arm. Harsha picked up the garbage bag and walked in the opposite direction, quickly, out of the bar.

  “Tell Daniel to stay away,” said Gus, squeezing hard before releasing his grip.

  Gwen never asked Daniel about Harsha. She tried to imagine a scenario in which the boy deserved a beating, but there wasn’t one. She held it close, this knowledge of what Daniel was capable of, let it needle her chest. But she said nothing, turning it over and over until she couldn’t bear it anymore. She stopped thinking
of Harsha. She kept moving forward as if nothing had happened.

  Soon after, the little scaffolding around their life together tumbled down. His roommates locked Daniel out. Gwen didn’t know why.

  For a few weeks, they stayed in the living room of a high school friend of Daniel’s, until the guy’s girlfriend said, “No more.” Gwen had her donut shop money, but all the landlords wanted first and last month’s rent, and she could never get it to add up.

  At first, they crashed in the corners of people’s apartments. Daniel had Gwen pack and repack her backpack until he deemed it correct: largest items on the bottom, lightest on the top. Then Daniel said he didn’t like how Phil looked at her, so they moved out of the apartment where Phil sometimes stayed, and slept on the street. Gwen asked about the shelter by the mall, but Daniel told her that was for the really bad off. Anyway, there were bedbugs, and addicts who would steal your stuff. Worst of all, couples were separated at night.

  It wasn’t so bad sleeping outside. It was temporary, just this one summer. They lay in sleeping bags in the doorways of print shops and bookstores—anywhere people didn’t stay late or come early. Daniel kept them apart from the squeegee kids who slept on cardboard and old mattresses; they wouldn’t be dirty like that, he promised. He arranged their belongings carefully, away from view, and blocked Gwen in, protecting her from passersby with his body. Still the streetlight came in, and Gwen’s sleep was staccato, broken by rattling trucks, unidentifiable snaps and smashes in the distance. The birds came before the light, loudly chirping, triggering the heat.

  In the morning, Daniel walked her to the door of the donut shop. She could clean herself there in the bathroom with paper towel. She hid a little of the money she earned in the lining of her bra, a pink one that chafed under her arms, but was pretty—a castoff from Laura. With the rest, she bought fast food and apples in Kensington Market—apples because she had the sense that they should eat better, that better food might help Daniel.

  At the mission in Moss Park, Gwen waited in the churchyard while he went inside to shower. She rested her back against a tree, shaded from the sun, sleepily watching the men go through the door for the free dinner, one man after the next. Daniel would emerge with wet hair, offering her half a sandwich, or pasta in a paper cup. She would lean against him under the tree, eating and watching the men file back out.

  Slowly, she decided that maybe what she had seen at the bar wasn’t that bad after all. In the bar light, Harsha’s face might have looked worse, and probably he was okay. Daniel didn’t get mad at her anymore, even when she had to stay late at work. He waited outside, shoulders raised, watching through the glass as Steve, the manager, closed up. When she saw Daniel eating an apple, Gwen felt pleased, as if she were taking care of him, and he was worth taking care of.

  One night, they lay their sleeping bags next to the bathrooms in a dog park on the west side. It had been twenty-four days since the time he punched her in the stomach. Gwen marked the days in her notebook with check marks.

  The bathrooms were locked for the night, the smell quelled. In the dark, on her back, using the sleeping bag as a mattress because it was too hot to get inside, Gwen could imagine that they were camping somewhere beautiful. “Is this what it’s like up north?” she asked Daniel.

  She rested beneath his arm. He told her about a bear who broke into his foster mom’s house when no one was home. The bear had opened a window and crawled right in. It pulled all the food from the shelves in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, crushing a milk carton and smashing a glass jar of peanut butter. His foster mom came home from work, and Daniel walked in to find her standing in front of the piano, puzzled, gazing at the peanut butter all over the keys. Daniel, who was ten, said, “Maybe the bear played the piano.”

  Gwen loved the story of the musical bear, and watching Daniel’s face in the dark, falling asleep as he told it, nuzzling against him. There was a dark coda to it, though: he should have locked the window, said the foster mom. Soon after, he was sent away again.

  At dawn, dogs came barking and rooting around Gwen’s sleeping bag. She opened her eyes to a park worker opening the padlocks on the bathroom doors, releasing a waft of urine cake.

  She turned to Daniel, but he was already gone.

  At the donut shop, Steve didn’t let her in. He told her she was dirty, and gestured behind the counter, where a new girl stood. “Now that’s a good worker.” The girl gave her a look like it wasn’t true.

  Gwen cradled her pack in her arms, and argued about money he owed her, but Steve kept shaking his head. She’d only ever been paid in cash. There was no record of her working here. She didn’t even have a social insurance number.

  “Sorry.” He shrugged, eyeing her as she backed onto the sidewalk.

  Where was Daniel? Gwen waited across the street from Palmer’s on the sidewalk, her legs crossed, darting inside McDonald’s to pee, then going back to her spot, her stomach churning. She had a UTI—she knew it from the sharp stab in her crotch. She’d need to get to a clinic.

  A man tossed a dime at her. She picked it up, wishing it was a quarter because she needed coins to do laundry. Gwen didn’t bum often: it was boring, and Daniel didn’t approve (but she was the one who took their clothes to the laundromat). In her backpack she carried a sign in ballpoint pen: PREGNANT AND HUNGRY. Only the hungry part was true, but she didn’t feel guilty about lying—either someone would give her money, or they wouldn’t, regardless of her story—unless people were genuinely sad for her. Older women, mostly, crouched down and told her of services available, of God’s love, and when that happened, Gwen was ashamed. But most people ignored her entirely. Young men hissed at her to get a job. A teenage boy called her a cunt as he threw down a dollar, which she kept. If she saw a cop, she would pack up and slip into the crowd before he got to her. That was the most tiring part: to always be scanning, anticipating, waiting to be told, in some way, that she was in the wrong place, as if there were somewhere else she could be.

  * * *

  Days later, Daniel showed up at the reference library, on the second floor where Gwen liked to sit. He looked changed yet again—not just thinner, but faded. She stood up from the newspaper she was looking at and he pulled her close, his neck rusty and familiar. “I got us a place,” Daniel said.

  She followed him to the area next to the university. The houses there had skylights and stained-glass dormers. Daniel stopped in front of a small brick house that looked like a cottage.

  “For you,” he said.

  “Me?” Gwen asked.

  She stepped inside and saw sugar white couches. A bright blue painting of a triangle hung above the fireplace. It, too, was beautiful. There were people huddled in blankets and sleeping bags, and beer cans and cigarette butts scattered on the floor, but it still resembled a home. Daniel slapped a guy on the shoulder, and Gwen thought: Oh no. She cringed, waiting for a fight—but she had misinterpreted; the touch was affectionate. They hugged, and the guy smiled at her, explaining that this was the home of a professor. “A professor of what?” Gwen asked, but nobody answered. The professor had invited a student to stay there while she was on a semester-long sabbatical. But it turned out that the student was a junkie, and she’d brought over not just Daniel and Gwen, but several other stragglers from Palmer’s and around. Together, they drew the blinds and broke the ice machine on the fridge door. They could all wait out the fall, then, among the professor’s books and music (classical, mostly, and jazz that sucked. Someone stomped those CDs to pieces).

  The bedroom sheets were dirty, but they were sheets. A room with a window, and a blind—a museum installation of how people lived. Gwen had almost forgotten. She dropped her backpack and took off her shoes, wiggling her toes in her mud grey socks. Daniel came to sit beside her. Gwen already had an art book open in her lap, glossy black and white photos of kids playing stickball, making mischief in New York City.

  “You’re smart,” said Daniel. He kissed Gwen on the neck. “You�
��ll go to university one day, and we’ll be through.”

  Gwen stiffened. “No,” she said. And to herself: He’s better. Look where he brought me.

  Daniel put his hand on her back, then moved it to her breast and stopped. “What—?”

  She had forgotten the money, tucked in her bra. Daniel held up the wad of bills. A wave of panic rose in Gwen—

  “It’s for us . . .”

  Daniel lunged. The photo book fell. Gwen dropped to the floor in a ball, a reaction learned in school to prevent a body from catching on fire: stop, drop and roll. But he was strong and uncurled her shrimp shape, put his hands around her neck and bore down. He isn’t like a girl after all, thought Gwen, gasping. He is a bear. And then she blacked out.

  * * *

  In her years with Seth, only some parts of this time of her life came out. Gwen did describe the painting over the fireplace, and the band that became famous. One day, walking through a park with Maddie in the stroller, Gwen said to him, “I slept here for a while, right over there, by the bathrooms.” And when Seth stopped walking, she saw a look like pity move across his face. She immediately regretted saying anything. It would take too long, she would have to go too deep to make any sense of it. She picked up the pace and walked away.

  Gwen sometimes wondered if something had happened to her brain in that time. Before every one of Eli’s hockey seasons, parents were required to stand in the cold arena and listen to the coach lecture about concussions. She thought about a player’s brain, slamming around in his skull like a puck in a net, and she thought about her own. Could that be a reason, then, for what she did? Such speculation was a search for an excuse, even though, Gwen knew, there was none.

  When she awoke from the blackout, Daniel had held her, and wept his apology, and Gwen had been silent. She stiffened her body, fixed her gaze, said, “It’s okay.” This was the only thing to say; the words always soothed him, and as he shrank back down to a human size, broken and apologetic, she could use that extra space to get her bearings, to try to figure out what to do.