Weekend Read online

  Elliot leaned down and Joe expected—hoped for—a kiss on the forehead. Elliot, the architect built like a brick shithouse, broad-shouldered, substantial, who should have been the manual labourer instead of Joe, who should have been the large-equipment mechanic instead of Joe. Kick-ass, take-no-prisoners Elliot. But it was just to clean up some of Joe’s baby-tending debris—tea cups, balled tissues, thermometer, orange peels.

  “Wait, Elliot, lovey,” said Joe, touching her arm to slow her. “Thank you for all you do for me. Just … thank you. Thank you for helping me through labour. In case I didn’t say that. I appreciate it all so much.” She looked at the photographs on the walls which Ell had once taken of her, classic black and whites—how perfectly Ell had captured her curves, her mystery, and, more recently, her maternity. Elliot had already done a photo shoot of Scout in her backroom studio. Preliminary photos, she’d called these. Simple black-and-white images of Scout on a piece of driftwood. Scout hanging on the wall in a bathroom bag from IKEA. Scout in Joe’s arms, smooshed in tight. Timed exposures of the two mothers nude from the waist up holding Scout.

  Now Elliot surprised her. She stopped mid-gesture and smiled. “All in a day’s work,” she said.

  And it was enough, for a minute, to fill Joe, to make her feel cherished. At the start of their relationship, they’d done what they called “appreciations” once a week. They sat down and, for five minutes, each had said what they appreciated, and then the other had repeated it back. Maybe they needed to go back to those—why on earth had they stopped them, anyhow? After appreciations, they’d walk around in a stunned glow for half the next week, Joe remembered, surprised to find the other had noticed so many unremarkable things.

  That idea, though, thought Joe—Elliot and Logan in bed. That thing between them that had never cooled. Joe never asked what they did, and Elliot never referenced it; Joe had never asked to join them. But Joe did use the fantasy of Logan to make herself come when she jerked off—her secret. I’ve got the hots for your gf, she could say, honestly. I want to fuck Logan again.

  Again? Elliot would say. What the fuck do you mean, again? And then holy hell on earth for the lie of omission.

  Elliot would be pissed, and who could blame her? Elliot would be hurt because Joe had gone rogue. Rules, spoken and unspoken, were the foundation of their house. They were the front door and the front window and the poppies in the rocky landscape. They were the baby and the theoretical white picket fence. The lines were how, over long negotiation, the two of them learned how to live, love, and stay together.

  Although maybe, Joe thought weepily, the whole thing was coming unravelled before her eyes. It wasn’t information yet; it was just something half-sensed around the corner—the last few months, Elliot distancing herself in a new way, Joe wary and prickly with fear, watchful. Worried that Elliot was leaving her without mentioning it, because she wanted what she couldn’t have, a baby of her own. Scout was a baby of her own, from Elliot’s egg, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing was ever enough for Elliot—as maybe it never could be for someone who’d had cancer. Ever since Elliot had neared forty, things had gotten progressively worse; Joe was maybe just patiently waiting for her to bail. They planned to raise this baby up together and grow old and lose each other to death, however that arrived. It was a commitment they’d made and a commitment they kept making because their intimacy ran deep. Didn’t their intimacy run deep? So it had seemed to Joe, until lately. Previously, troubles seemed only to bond them. Who knew? Maybe a midlife crisis trumped everything. The last few years of infertility treatments—Ell’s womb, Joe’s dusty eggs—had taken a toll. All the things that could go wrong between two women when daddies were plucked out of binders and IVF treatments cost $17K a pop and then often didn’t work. Maybe they turned their backs to one another in bed more than they didn’t.

  They’d pretty much stopped having sex when Joe got pregnant and didn’t miscarry. Twins, and then she lost one, so the docs said, No sex. Then that one remaining baby threatened to come ten weeks early, and the docs again said, Bed rest. And whatever else you do, no sex.

  Somehow Elliot and Joe got used to the No sex.

  How long had they tried before Scout successfully implanted in Joe’s womb and stayed put? Through failed inseminations, through miscarriages for both of them—yes, Elliot, butch Elliot, even though she could never breastfeed because of her mastectomies, had done that for them, gotten pregnant—and then through more failed inseminations. Years. They could cite chapter and verse for every attempt. That was just not stuff you forgot, that you went through without incurring wounds.

  If you’d told Joe that trying for a baby would cost her the vibrancy of her relationship, what would she have done differently? She knew that she was Ms Obsessive to start with, and once she was locked into something, she didn’t let it go. Back then, Elliot claimed she’d never wanted kids and didn’t want them going forward, and it wasn’t okay to just switch the game-plan mid-stream like they were made of money—which they weren’t. Babies were loud. Babies were messy. Babies were expensive. Tell her one good thing about babies that they didn’t already have.

  “You just fall in love with them,” said Joe.

  “Point for me,” said Elliot. “We’re already in love.”

  “But crazy love,” said Joe. “Some different kind of love. So they say.”

  Elliot said, “If what we have isn’t crazy love, I don’t know what would be.”

  Joe said, “It’s something unimaginable for us. We won’t understand until we’re there.” She heaved a sigh. “What if I just long for one and don’t even have a good reason? What if biology is destiny and my body knows I’m about to become menopausal and it just wants, and wants, and wants, gluttonous and primal?”

  “Does it want to take back women’s right to vote, too?”

  Joe laughed.

  Elliot had said, “Even if I had a kid, it would be by adoption. Bringing a baby into this overpopulated world is repulsive. This conversation is really over before it starts, Josephine.”

  “Oh, god,” said Joe. “I can’t even talk to you. Why does it even matter why I want a baby, whether it’s just some urge to spill my genes on the earth? When it comes down to it, how many people have justification? They just want babies. It’s okay. It’s not immoral. There’s a lesbian baby boom out there, or haven’t you heard?”

  “Really? You want me to agree to have a kid because the Joneses are?” No sign of Ell’s dimples. V-crease in her forehead.

  “How about because it would be good for us?”

  Elliot took Joe’s hand in her stronger one, crushed it some. Elliot worked out with weights; it was one of the things Joe loved about Elliot—her passion for lifting, her bulk, her muscles.

  “I just have a hankering.”

  “A notion?” Ell scowled. Joe was forever “getting a notion” and changing around all the furnishings and paintings in a room. “It’ll go away when you hit menopause, and meantime, we’ll still have our life.”

  “Just come to one appointment with me,” said Joe. “Just one.” Just one just one just one. “’Kay?”

  And Elliot relented.

  How does it happen that you go like that, from happily childless to miserably childless in a year? How does it happen that you go like that, from desperately against to desperate to get pregnant in a few months? How had Elliot gone from “no” to enthusiastically “yes?”

  How can we help you today, why did you come to our clinic? Once they heard that, the future seemed a foregone conclusion.

  Joe wondered if Ell, all these years later, would change anything, if she regretted anything. Did she regret going to that first naïve appointment with the fertility specialist? Maybe, of the two of them, Joe was the more regretful, the one who spent the most time thinking about how life used to be when it was just the two of them, before the spectre of a baby turned into egg harvesting and agonists and antagonists and false hopes and false positives and sad, sad nights sitti
ng on the toilet shedding fetal cells, weeping. She would have, thought Joe, she would have given it all up in order to avoid all the pain and struggle and hope and dashing of hope, all the money, all the estrangement from Elliot.

  Even now, looking down at Scout—the navy eyes of birth, pooched lips, mushed nose—and feeling her heart pump love, she was not completely convinced the baby had been worth it if the price was her marriage.

  Elliot called from the kitchen, “I was going to work on the dock today, but it got away from me.”

  Joe said, “Scout’s umbilicus is starting to smell.”

  Elliot turned and said, “What? What?” And Joe said, “The midwife said it would start to rot and it is, it’s rotting. Come smell.”

  And Elliot crossed the room, obediently bending over the baby and rearing back. “Jesus.” She ran to the bathroom and slammed the door.

  “None of this is exactly as billed,” called Joe. Scout started to wail.

  “You can say that again,” she heard disembodied through the door. When Ell came out, she daubed at her mouth. “I’m definitely getting the flu.”

  “Keep your distance, then,” said Joe.

  “Let me just confirm: it is not as billed,” said Elliot, backhanding her face.

  “I know, eh? Gross.” Joe squeezed her right breast, examined her nipple. “My milk still isn’t coming in.”

  Elliot heaved a sigh. “Your milk will come in. You know it will. It just does. Day three, day four.” She took the baby and jiggled her across the room, crooning nonsense. Baby-soothing motions had come on them like salsa dancing, side to side, up and down, side to side, a baby jive.

  “You just said you thought you might be getting sick,” Joe said quietly. Being spoken to sharply made her cry. She didn’t mean to cry, but …

  Elliot didn’t even hear her. “Shhh,” she was saying in time to the baby’s wails. “Shhhhhh, baby-o, shh. Please be quiet, baby-o. Can’t you just be quiet now, sweetheart?”

  This was how it was now and would be forever—the baby an implacable force between them—a bond and a wedge. All that was joyous and funny and lazy and loving about them was buried under an avalanche of diapers and sleepers and zinc cream.

  What was the distress signal of queers who used to fuck but now only watched a newborn suck, suck, suck? You suck seemed both accurate and unfair, but at least it made Joe smile.

  “’Kay, I’m gonna go pick Logan and her girlfriend up,” said Elliot. She hummed “In the Mood” to the baby while she changed her diaper. “I asked them to dinner. I can boil up some pasta, and I’ll pick up salad stuff.”

  Joe felt a jealous twinge that she and Scout couldn’t go in the boat too, not for a couple more days, anyway, until her wounds settled down. Joe was just—stuck. The little woman. The housewife. The bottom line. “We don’t have a life jacket for Scout.” She herself could use a life jacket, one she could wear twenty-four hours a day.

  “Maybe seeing Logan will lighten you up a bit.”

  Lighten me up a bit? And then she thought, I wonder if I’m in love with Logan.

  And then she thought, Fuck. And then she thought, Fuck Logan and the boat she was about to ride in on. “When are you picking them up?” She heard her own voice, high, thin, complaining—the voice of the shrew she didn’t want to be. “I don’t want to see anybody. I just want to be alone with you.” But she meant alone alone with Elliot, not alone in the same house barely acknowledging each other. She meant foot and back rubs. She meant doing things together, telling jokes, cutting up, not this moving exhausted through a series of joyless chores every day. Laundry, sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Boat over to get groceries, gas, supplies. Elliot either fawning and jealous or gone, gone more than she was home.

  AJAX

  Ajax surely hadn’t realized that Elliot, the famous Elliot who once had dumped Logan, would be the first person they saw. For that matter, Ajax hadn’t known anything about a cottage on an island. (Logan owned part of an island? What the fuck?) In fact, she’d only vaguely understood that Logan had a “shack in the woods,” as they called it. That Elliot summered there had completely escaped her. Now here she was, the-ex-that-mattered, the only partner Logan had ever lived with, in the oh-so-butchy flesh. Every time Logan had spoken about her, it was with a stupid grin. In the dusk light of reunion, they both glowed before clearing their throats and pretending nonchalance. To hell with being grown up; Ajax decided she hated Elliot on principle.

  While Elliot loaded the luggage, Ajax looked around the marina. Speedboats. Sailboats—sloops and yawls. Houseboats. Yachts. Logan’s red powerboat. A mess of yellow life jackets up under the boat prow. Osprey nest on a telephone pole. Ajax could hear a woodpecker.

  “Ellman,” said Logan to Elliot.

  “Bud. Glad you could make it up.” Sloppy grin on Elliot’s strong face.

  “How’s the new kid?”

  “You know, a baby. Screams, wizzes, shits.” Half smile, higher on the left, dimples, a shrug; unable to hide her pleasure in the kid’s arrival. “I have a daughter. Who knew I could turn baby crazy?”

  “Congratulations! That’s just wonderful.” A pause. “Why’s it called Lake Boiling Foot?” Ajax asked, pointing at a sign

  “Water’s so hot you can’t barely get refreshed. You’ll see.”

  “So you’re Logan’s—” Low voice.

  Toby crouched and peed.

  “Friend,” said Elliot. “Best friend. For a long time. Since we started architecture school together.”

  Toby shook the dock; it took both Logan and Elliot to tug-convince the scared dog to step into the boat, whereupon he collapsed in a heap with his paws over his ears.

  Elliot said, “Sweet gelcoat, man,” and Logan said, “Mike says two-year warranty.” Logan started the engine, which emitted blue spirals of smoke before putting then shooting away from the pier. Boi talk about boat repairs as they bounced across the lake. Wind poured around the visor, relief from the heat. Forests clambered up on every shore, cottages bigger than most city mansions.

  Logan lifted their chin at the bags of groceries stored under the bow, a question.

  “Missus says you’re expected at dinner later. Picked up some staples for your fridge yesterday.”

  “Thanks,” Logan said. They looked out over the lake, motioned for Ajax to take the wheel. That made Ajax pay attention—she knew boats from her childhood. She canted across to take over, edged the throttle wide.

  “How was the birth, man? Everybody good?”

  “Intense. We’re calling her Scout.”

  Ajax hollered to be heard. “I love Scout! I love the name Scout!”

  Even though it stole her breath, she loved the wind, the jolts of the boat as it slammed into water.

  “Joe was a brave sonofabitch.”

  Ajax craned around. “We can’t come over for dinner if—is it Joe? If Joe just gave birth.”

  “Haven’t seen this one, though,” Elliot punched Logan’s upper arm, “in forever. Come, be social. Joe’s happy to have you.”

  Ajax tried to send Logan a message, tried to meet their eyes: No; it’s not okay. Outside of the boat’s roar, the lake was placid and still. A loon called. Elliot took the wheel. The ride lasted twenty minutes. Elliot steered the boat closer to the dock where it squeaked against rubber tires. Logan reached to pull the stern to the dock, let Ajax clamber out. Sea legs.

  Elliot jumped onto the dock; Logan passed up luggage and groceries. Elliot grabbed bags, said she’d see them at eight, and vanished.

  Ajax cleat-hitched the boat—a knowledge-perk from having grown up on an island—then stood and stretched. She could see one house from the dock, a veritable palace—she could actually see two houses, if you counted a jutting shake wall. What had she been expecting? From what Logan had said, a shed. “It’s beautiful here, Logan. Thank you for bringing me.”

  “I designed it, built it.”

  “You built it?” She didn’t say what she wanted t
o say: You call this a cottage?

  “After Elliot. After Elliot and I smashed up.” They lifted suitcases. “That horrible time when you need a project, a big project so you don’t mourn so loudly you lose all your friends.”

  “You built a cottage here, on the same property as your ex?”

  “Hers was ours. She had to buy me out, and the deal was half the island. I built the second one right when I would have been happy to see her kicked off the island. Hostile, I admit it.” Logan laughed and kissed Ajax’s nose. “But you know what? It’s worked for us for a lot of years by now. Can you just wait for me down here while I take this stuff up?”

  Ajax picked up some of the lighter grocery bags but Logan reached for them. “You sit yourself down and put your feet in. Tell me if the water’s cold. I need a report.”

  They looked at each other; a challenge. “I like to do as much as I can,” Ajax finally said firmly but quietly.

  “Just indulge me. No carrying. I know your challenges. May I quote: Carrying anything uphill. So not on my watch, McIntyre. This weekend is all about being taken care of, for me to pamper you. Let me just put our stuff away and get ready a little to welcome you.”

  Ajax swished her feet while Logan made several trips. It was warm, almost hot—like Elliot had said, Lake Boiling Foot, liquid sluggish air—not like BC waters at all, more like the Bahamas. Water slapped the pylons. Fuck being ill; being ill sucked. Finally Logan was back and kissing her neck.

  A pathway was partly delineated by in-ground solar lights. The house loomed, half log, half river-stone mansion. Logan set down the last bags. “I’m carrying you over the threshold, McIntyre.”

  “Logan, you built a log cottage?”

  Logan grinned. “Logs from the property, as it happens. With a bit of help. Well, okay, substantial help.”

  “Wow,” said Ajax. Logs stained dark brown. Accents of red and white. A wide porch. A clothesline. Chaise longues. A lengthy outside table. A fire pit. A meadow of poppies. They startled a deer, which had been investigating geraniums on the porch; it clattered away. Flashes in the dusk, like phosphorescence in BC waters, discombobulating, winking, until she realized what they must be.