And this, Clara had thought, just wouldn’t do. The togetherness she’d envisioned, the connection she’d come home for, was supposed to be easy, not stressful, not packed into a room so crowded you couldn’t back your chair out. Adam and Jess were preoccupied with Bella, trying and failing to force all these routines instead of just letting her be. They had lost all perspective. Clara had an idea. “What if we got away for a weekend? Just the four of us?” Jess began protesting, but Clara knew she could convince her. “You both could come up to our place. Adam’s sister could take the baby. You said she said shecould.” She looked at Adam, who nodded. It was possible. “A weekend together, all that time.”
“But it’s so far,” said Jess.
“It’s not.” Clara fished the envelope, a letter from the bank, out of her bag. “Just outside city limits. More or less.” She clicked her pen and drew the highway on the envelope, careful lines, not quite to scale, along the lake that glimmered like diamonds. The cabin belonged to the family of Clara’s brother-in-law Bruce, her sister Diane’s husband. It had been his grandparents’, but now there were too many cousins to distribute weeks between and nobody was interested anyway—there were nicer places to go these days. Ultimately, no one wanted to spend the money to do what needed doing, and they were going to sell the property at the end of the summer, but in the meantime, Clara and Nick could live there. A summer honeymoon.
She and Nick were meant to help with the upkeep, to be a presence around the place and keep it safe from drunken teenagers and other vandals. Their job was to make the cabin home, to cut the grass, and have a car in the driveway—thedriveway Clara was watching now, weeks later, as she waited for Adam and Jess to arrive.
She’d made the map as detailed as possible. “You can’t miss it,” she assured Jess, pushing the envelope across the table. “Just follow the directions and you’ll be fine.”
But now she was second-guessing herself. They hadn’t called, and it was getting dark. Nick told her to relax, but she couldn’t. She tried Jess’s cell again, but it didn’t ring through. She turned up the radio to listen to the traffic, but the route seemed okay. The highways were often jammed solid on the way to the summer homes of rich city people, bumper-to-bumper in their luxury SUVs blasting air conditioning, but none of them were on their way to a place like this, too close to the city and the lake too weedy to be fashionable. One day it would be razed for a subdivision, but that was still years away.
Adam hadn’t wanted the map, insisting he could figure it out on his brand new iPhone. Clara told him, “Cellphone service can be patchy.”
“How didyouever manage to find it?” Jess asked.
“We got lost three times,” said Clara. “Drove in circles for hours.” So Jess took the envelope. This was at the end of the meal, when the waitress had still not appeared to clear their plates or refill the coffees, and Bella was crying. People in line still waiting for a table were glaring at them, so they decided to pack up and go. Adam and Jess wanted to show them around their neighbourhood. Nick and Clara could never afford to live there, but this fact hadn’t come up, and Clara was too embarrassed to mention it.
And what if something similar had been going on when Clara was trying to convince Jess about the weekend? What if she’d only agreed because Clara was unwilling to hearotherwise? “It’s a holiday,” Clara emphasized. “A getaway.” She was sure she’d spied a glint in her friend’s eye at the possibility of time away from the baby. “It’ll be good for you. For both of you,” Clara said, indicating Adam. Jess had mentioned in private that she and Adam never had sex anymore due to a complicated combination of timing and vaginal dryness. Clara lowered her voice. “Maybe a nice chance for a little romantic reconnection?” Then louder, “Come on, it’s summer. What’s one summer thing you’ve done lately?” She’d been relentless.
“They’ll be here,” said Nick, who was barbecuing on the deck. Clara had wanted him to wait till the others arrived to start cooking, but it was late and he was hungry, and Nick got irritable when he was hungry, so it was best to let him have his way now. They were bound to show up soon, and maybe they would arrive just as the food was on the table. Clara hoped Nick would take it easy on the barbecue, cook the meat slow and easy. She hoped the car was coming up the dirt road right now.
But then the meat was cooked, being kept warm under tin foil. Nick was waiting, but he wouldn’t wait long. He’d grilled zucchini and tomatoes and halloumi, and everything was done. And still no sign of them.
—
There was no reason for them to be late. Clara knew they were dropping the baby off at Adam’s sister’s along with a cooler stocked with enough breast milk for an entire week, even though this was just a weekend trip, and there was a schedule for Bella’s feedings, naps, and stimulating activities that was apparently as detailed as Clara’s map.
“They’ll be here,” Nick kept saying, refusing to be rattled, and Clara wondered again what Jess and Adam wouldthink of the place, a borrowed cabin on a weedy lake, once they arrived. The wood-panelled walls were kind of ironic. The whole thing suggested a domestic vintage vibe, if Clara were the kind of person who put on pearls and lipstick, ready with a drink and a light when Nick came home from work at the end of the day. Except that Nick didn’t come home from work because he didn’t have a job yet, and he wasn’t supposed to smoke either. But Clara knew he was sneaking cigarettes down by the dock. He threw the butts in the lake. Clara thought of that song about getting married in a fever. When they first got together, Nick’s chief appeal was that she loved everything about him, but the more she got to know him, the less this was true.
—
About half an hour later, Clara said, “I hear a car.” It was so quiet out there at night aside from the sounds of nature, birds on the water and wind in the trees. The radio hummed low in the background, “Umbrella” by Rihanna—the song had been on a loop all summer. She’d heard a car, but it could have been distant thunder. A storm might be a welcome relief, a break in the heat and the atmosphere so charged with tension.
Nick kept eating.
“You hear it too?” she asked. She wanted Nick to hear it, but he wasn’t listening to her, let alone to any rumbles in the distance. “Is that them, do you think?” But now she didn’t need an answer because headlights swept the room, illuminating everything. Clara wondered if they’d been spotted in their tableau, if she’d been caught in her heightened expectation. She didn’t want to be as visible as that.
She went to the door to greet Jess and Adam at the cabin’s shabby backside with small bedroom windows andscrubby shrubs, most of the lawn given over to driveway. On the lake side things were more appealing, and maybe she could have arranged to have them arrive by boat. They were four hours late anyway, and a boat couldn’t have taken any longer. “You’re here, you’re here, you’re here!” she said, flinging the door open. “Finally.”
Jess was wheeling a suitcase up the walkway as if this were an airport. Beyond her, Adam was unloading beer and a cooler from their new car, a huge SUV. “The trip was a nightmare,” Jess said as they squeezed past each other, Clara on her way to help Adam.
“You had the map,” said Clara. “And there wasn’t traffic.”
Adam said, “There was traffic.”
“So much traffic,” Jess called. “We thought we’d beat it if we left later, but then so did everyone. And we took a wrong turn.”
“A wrong turn?”
“There was no owl,” said Jess. “I was looking for an owl. Seriously, what was that map all about?”
“It would have been more straightforward in daylight.”
“Owls are nocturnal,” Adam said.
“Creative license,” said Clara, giving a private eye-roll. She was carrying the beer and held the door open with her shoulder, ushering them both inside. “But you’re here now,” she said. “Nick was just starting dinner.”
“Finishing,” Nick corrected, pushing away his plate and standing up to greet the guests. “I got hungry.”
