Mating for Life

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For Joe, and for Maia and Joseph

You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.

—TORI AMOS, “CRUCIFY”

part one

All I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you.

—
JONI MITCHELL,
“ALL I WANT”

1

Snapping Turtle
(
Chelydra serpentina
)

Unlike other turtles, the common snapping turtle cannot hide in its shell because its body is too big. These turtles snap as a defense mechanism, but aren't actually vicious. However, perhaps because of the misconception of aggression, snapping turtles are often targeted, and are endangered in North America. When mating, snapping turtles sometimes engage in an elaborate dancelike ritual in the water that involves eye contact but no touching. Snapping turtles have no defined mating season: they court and mate only when conditions are exactly right.

W
hen Liane swam into the snapping turtle, she screamed. He didn't bite her, but clearly he wanted to. Then he was gone, dipping first his head and then his shell underwater. (She didn't
know
he was a he, but she assumed; there was something placidly male in his glare.)

She sensed the turtle was still there, somewhere below. She turned to float on her back, hearing her mother's voice in her memory as she did. “If you ever feel scared,
don't
panic
. You'll drown,” Helen had instructed from the edge of the floating dock while Liane paddled below. Liane's eldest sister, Fiona, had already been front-crawling to the middle of the lake, where Helen had placed a
DIVER DOWN
sign. Ilsa
had been lying on the floating dock, too, but then she rolled off and swam, dolphinlike, toward Liane, grabbing her sister's ankle from beneath the waves. Liane had shouted and flailed. “Exactly! Thank you, Ilsa. That's a perfect example of what you don't do. Back float instead.” Liane remembered her ­mother's red suit, brown skin, blond hair, and the way she talked to them as though they were already grown-ups. The swimming lessons were the one thing Helen insisted on during summers that spiraled out slowly, like the pucks of Bubble Tape gum they would buy at the marina for $1.25. The girls didn't even have to unpack their bags if they didn't want to. They were never asked to make their beds.

Now Liane looked up at the clouds and tried to fill her belly with air. But her breath was too shallow and she had to kick. Panic soon forced her to flip to her front and start to swim, fast, for the floating dock.

She wanted to go home, and it had only been one day.

Her plan: to swim and eat salads (mostly because she hated to cook, or couldn't cook; it was a chicken/egg situation she didn't care to analyze) and work on the final pages of her thesis. By the end of the week, when Liane's mother and sisters arrived for their annual early summer cottage weekend, she would have finished it. Then Adam would stop asking her
when
she was going to finish it and she would stop feeling guilty for not responding in a more appropriately proactive way to his father's offer of a job on the faculty at the university, as a teaching assistant, pending her thesis defense.

The other part of her plan, and one she hadn't told anyone about, involved the hope that by coming here alone, by treating this as a regular cottage and normal lake—and not the site of one of her life's greatest tragedies—she could erase the past and turn herself into a normal person. The kind of person Adam wanted her to be. The kind of person she didn't think she could be but knew she should at least
try
to be.

Liane ducked her head underwater—eyes closed, testing herself—and resurfaced with a gasp. In addition to the big fears, her week-alone-at-the-cottage plan hadn't accounted for her many small fears. (Turtles. Seaweed. Algae. Other things too embarrassing to mention. Like ants. Beetles. Walking into cobwebs.) All of these things seemed more frightening without company. (Currently: she could still sense the turtle near, perhaps now waiting at the base of the ladder to bite one of her toes.)

She went down again, and this time kept her eyes open. Then she surfaced, blinked the water from her eyes, and saw movement to her left. The turn of a page. There was a man sitting at the end of the dock at the cottage next door—it had been the Castersen place, but the Castersens had sold it, or were renting it out, or something. Liane couldn't remember but knew Helen had explained it last year when the new dock had appeared and, next, a pair of kayaks had replaced the motorized pontoon boat Mr. Castersen had once called his “Party Boat.”

The unfamiliar man sitting on the dock reading looked up and Liane looked down, focusing again on her path through the water. But she should have waved. She was in cottage country. In cottage country, you were supposed to wave (even if you were swimming) and mouth,
Hello,
to people (regardless of whether you knew them). But she was too embarrassed. He had probably heard her screaming about the turtle. He had probably seen the awkward way she'd jumped off the dock, plugging her nose and splaying her legs. And either way, it was now too late because the man—who had copper-blond hair and a matching shadow of a beard—was reading his book again. She kept swimming and looked away from him, but looking away meant she had to look at the shed, so she closed her eyes and ducked under
again.

“Why do you keep it?” she had asked Helen, years before, referring to the kayak that hulked in the shed just up from the water. “What am I going to do with it, throw it away?” Helen had asked. “I couldn't live with the idea of it in a garbage dump somewhere until the end of time. And it seems wrong to sell it. So we'll keep it. Maybe one day you'll take it out.” “Never,” said Liane. What a macabre idea. Horrible. Sometimes she wondered if Helen meant to be so insensitive. She tried to love her mother as she was,
did
love her as she was, but she also wished Helen was more like other mothers. Other mothers would never have left that particular kayak in the shed or suggested Liane go out on the lake in it, for example.

Liane climbed the ladder of the floating dock, wincing and curling her toes against the algae on the steps. Then she sat, hugging her knees to her chest and wishing for a towel. She squinted. The spine of the man's book was orange. A paperback. His head was bent and his shoulders were hunched and he was leaning forward a little.
As though he wants to actually get onto the page, or into it. As though he isn't just reading it but inhabiting it.
Or maybe he was just nearsighted. Still, Liane found herself thinking about a book she had read as a child, about a boy (or was it a girl?) who found a tree with a door in the trunk and when he (she?) opened it, there was another world that had always been there. Liane still asked Helen about it. “Maybe you imagined it,” Helen said once. “You were very creative.” But Liane still believed this book existed somewhere. She was certain her father had given it to her and had written an inscription on the inside cover she could no longer remember the words of but longed to read again.

She straightened her legs, shimmied forward, and slid into the water. The new dock, the one at the Castersens'/Possibly Someone Else's Place Now, was closer than the other
Castersen dock had been, and bigger. Its blond wood planks stretched out, around, and out again.

Closer now. A few more strokes and she would have a clear view. At the perfect moment, the man leaned back to stretch, tilting the book. She saw white, yellow, black writing.

Junkie
by William Burroughs. Disappointing.
And
slightly alarming. Liane gulped air and dove, thinking about how Burroughs had shot his wife in the head. Accidentally. Who could possibly shoot someone in the head
accidentally
? A dozen worst-case scenarios surfaced. She was alone on an island with a man who appeared to want to inhabit a book written about rampant drug use by an “accidental” wife murderer.

Except, Liane reminded herself, they weren't actually alone on the island. It just felt like it because it was still late June and the lake was fairly quiet. The island had plenty of other cottages, most of them tucked behind trees above the granite. When the long weekend came, it would signal the true beginning of summer and the place would feel less isolated. The sound of motorized boats would cause Helen to shake her head and cluck like an irritated hen. She would start talking again about sending around a petition, but she wouldn't. Helen could now identify a lost cause when she saw one.

Liane had reached the ladder of the main dock. She put a foot on the first slimy ledge and pulled up, then took her towel from the closest Muskoka chair, stepped off the dock, and headed for the cottage without looking back at the man. When she was in the shade, she stood on the steps made of stones that had apparently been dragged out of the lake years before by Helen's father. This grandfather Liane had never met had purchased the property in the 1940s and bequeathed it to Helen—and not Helen's brother—when he died. Helen rarely said anything more about this, except that the brother (none of the girls had ever met him, either) had tried to fight
Helen for it in court, saying it wasn't fair that she get such a valuable property when she already made such a good living from her music.

Water dripped down Liane's back. She flipped her head and wrapped the towel like a turban, then kept walking. At the door of the screened-in wraparound porch she dipped her feet into the bucket of lake water she had set outside for the purpose of not tracking sand (and bugs, and Lyme-­disease-carrying ticks) around the cottage and dried them on the towel folded beside it. When Ilsa arrived at the end of the week, Liane knew, she would good-naturedly shun her younger sister's custom, saying she wasn't sticking
her
feet in dirty water everyone else had been sticking feet in, and that she definitely wasn't then wiping her feet off on a musty towel. (“You want Lyme disease? Take this towel to a lab and have it analyzed.”) The sand underfoot would bother Liane, but not as much as it would bother Fiona. Liane would sweep but it would be Fiona who would eventually drag the old vacuum out of the closet and pull it around the main floor. Helen, of course, would have no part of any of it. “I vacuum when I'm about to leave,” she would say. “You're wasting a valuable portion of your life by doing so now.” “I'm wasting
something,
” Fiona would say. “Probably the long-term health of my back. Tell me again why you don't get a new vacuum?” “Because that one still works!” And then somehow, Helen and Fiona would be arguing over an old vacuum versus a new one, landfill versus convenience, and Liane would either glance at Ilsa and roll her eyes or leave the room feeling guilty about causing the fight with her silly bucket of water.

Liane pushed open the screen door and let it bang shut behind her, the sound jarring in the quiet of the morning. From behind the screen she had a view of the dock and she saw the man look up from his book.

• • •

Liane napped. She made soup. She did the
Globe and Mail
crossword as a warm-up and then failed, as usual, at completing any of the crosswords in the
New York Times
. She stared at Sudoku boxes, but could make no sense of them. “Your brain just doesn't work that way,” Adam had once said, meaning it to be an affectionate remark—but there was the superior undertone. He was one of those people whose brains worked
every
way. She had said this to him and heard the unintended resentment.
This must be what old married couples feel like. And we've only been together three years.

She painted her nails with polish she found in Ilsa's room. (Dark red.) She found cream in a drawer in Helen's room and rubbed it all over her face, then broke out in red bumps from the essential oils. (This always happened, yet she always tried Helen's creams.) She iced the bumps. She removed the polish. Then she went up to the closet her father once used and opened it. But there was nothing in it but old jackets, none of them his. She stared into the closet until her breathing became slow and even. She wished that if she pulled aside the jackets, she would be standing before a whole new world, like Narnia. She pulled aside the jackets. This didn't happen. She felt childish and foolish, but also wistful.

What Liane did
not
do was work on her thesis. When she wasn't inside, she was on the dock. She and the neighbor—the Reading Man, as she now called him in her head—were now on cottage waving terms. He had finished
Junkie
and started on
The Sound and the Fury
. She had started bringing her textbooks and reference materials down to the dock. Lying parallel to him, also reading, felt strangely intimate.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, it rained and she was forced inside, where the blinking light on her still-plugged-in laptop seemed to pulse with neglect. She forced herself to write two
paragraphs. Then she reread the words on the screen. They no longer made any sense. She held her breath, and heard the clinking of dishes from the cottage next door.

Liane's thesis was called “The Evil Eye: Envy's Hidden Threat.” Apparently it had the potential to be something of a sensation, even publishable, although Liane didn't understand how any of her findings could be a surprise to anyone. Perhaps it was because she had lived with them for so long that she was now like a woman shocked to find her husband of thirty-some years the center of attention at a dinner party due to the intrigue of his conversational paths.

“It's the way you present it,” Tansy Miller, a brown-trouser-and-black-oxford-wearing academic, had explained to her when Adam's father, the dean, had arranged for Liane and Tansy to meet for coffee. It was Tansy whose teaching Liane would assist,
if
she ever finished her thesis. “It's your frankness. It's the fact that reading your work isn't boring and the students are bound to see it as such. You mention celebrities. They
love
celebrities.” Tansy talked like she had once been a theater major, enunciating her words and using her hands. Liane liked her and wanted to work for her. This had done nothing to spur her into thesis-finishing action.