Jess really meant this too, Clara knew. Maybe it was even true. Somehow in the end, would it all come out even? Could she actually just sit back and enjoy this? “I have no idea how we fit in that room,” she finally said. “Both of us in that single bed.”
“I loved that room,” said Jess.
“Me too,” said Clara. “But it was absolutely nowhere until you showed up.”
“And I was such a mess,” said Jess. “The bottom of the world had just fallen out, and there was no one to catch me. Until you.”
“And an abortion,” Clara reminded her.
“You and an abortion. Which is what all those Bretts just don’t understand, the way it’s always a beginning. That withoutabortion, there would be none of this.” She gestured at the whole wide world. “Or us.” She said, “We’ve been so lucky.”
“And even when we weren’t lucky, we were lucky,” said Clara. “Isn’t that the real luck? To have stayed together all through our lives?”
Jess recognized the reference. “Like ‘Snow White and Rose Red.’ ”
“The only pair of girls in all of the Grimms. And where are all the rest of them, I wonder?” Clara asked.
“Out picking parsley, I guess.”
Clara spoke after a moment. “You’ve got to know, you made me too.”
And then they were quiet, listening to the sounds of seagulls, boats on the water, a door slam.
“You think we can hide down here forever?” Clara whispered.
“Maybe they’ve forgotten all about us.”
“It’s unlikely,” said Clara, as somewhere up above, one of her children started to scream.
—
Someone was always screaming. “High needs” is what Jess called it when she was referring to the demands of Clara’s children upon their mother’s time. Lucinda, Paulina and Shadoe were all remarkably chilled-out kids singularly, but it was more a fact of culmination. If any of them had truly had high needs, Clara would have been in trouble. She was actually grateful for her children’s patience and understanding, and the good thing was that they were usually only hysterical one at a time, and if it all added up to someone being hysterical all the time it wasn’t their fault.
It was evening and they were inside instead of on the porch because Clara wanted to be able to hear the childrenif they called her—she didn’t believe in baby monitors. Jess’s kids had drifted off to sleep without ceremony, or maybe there had been a ceremony, but Clara hadn’t noticed in the flurry of her own children’s routine, which mainly constituted wrestling all of them into pyjamas and trying and failing to make them stay in bed.
“And I don’t know that it’s anyone’s fault exactly,” said Clara, Shadoe in her arms getting one last feed (Clara hoped it was the last) before bedtime. “It is what it is. What can you do?” A rhetorical question. She was so tired, and this was what she’d really been dreading about a week in somebody else’s home: when the kids go to bed the day is expected to continue.
“The night is young,” said Adam, taking four beers from the fridge, and Nick looked gleeful. He’d forgotten there was an option of a night having youth, other than the infantile kind that insisted on each waking up every hour.
Clara said, “None for me.” You could drink while breastfeeding, true, all in moderation, but not while breastfeeding three. This was her reality and she’d made peace with it, glad that nobody gave her a hard time about it. Besides, Nick would drink enough for both of them.
From her seat in the big chair in the corner, Shadoe in her arms, Clara said, “It’s weird to be at a cottage that’s nicer than my house is.”
“This cottage is nicer than everybody’s house is,” said Jess. “I’m not going to pretend it’s normal.”
“But we’re going to make it cabin-chic,” said Adam. “Hang a paddle on the wall. A moose head.”
“We will not,” said Jess. She took a drink of beer from a tall glass. “It was eleven years ago, can you believe it, whenBella was a baby and we came up to that place you were staying at on Lake Simcoe.”
“The map,” said Adam. “Remember the map?”
“You don’t draw maps anymore,” said Nick to Clara. “I’d forgotten about that. You were a regular cartographer. All those details.”
“Three babies, and you stop thinking about details,” said Clara. “The world is officially out of my hands.” Shadoe was done feeding. She held her out to Nick to take up to bed, even though the likelihood of her staying there was slim. Her three kids would all bunk in together, and even all the way downstairs Clara could hear Lu and Pauly squealing.
Jess said, “Amazing to think how far we’ve come. And all the people we’ve acquired.”
“Summer accommodations have gone a bit upscale as well,” said Clara.
