“That’s odd. Mrs. Krahn said she was grounded.”
“She probably begged and lied,” Johnny says. “Kids are good at that. Especially lying.”
“They’re having sex, you know.”
“I figured,” Johnny says.
“Oh, you figured. What makes you so clever?”
“I work with kids,” Johnny says. “I know when they’re sleeping around. Or think they’d like to. Sometimes it’s the most unlikely ones. Like us, huh.” He laughs. Loraine doesn’t.
“They’re too young,” she says. “I think there should be a law that you can’t have sex until you’re ready to look after kids.”
Johnny draws a finger along the inside of Loraine’s arm. “So soft here. Like your thighs.”
“I told Claire we were gonna get married,” Loraine says. She stares past Johnny’s chin and listens to him breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
He says, “So, you were fooling around, making a point.”
“Sort of.”
“But there was a part of you that said yes.”
“I guess.”
“How big?”
“Like this?” Loraine holds up a little finger and touches Johnny’s nose.
His voice is slow. “That’s big.” He pulls Loraine’s head down and puts one of his earlobes against her eye. Rubs it around.
“I drove by your old place today. On the way home,” Loraine whispers.
Johnny takes Loraine’s ear now and traces it.
“I hadn’t driven by there yet,” Loraine continues. “I always go around. But today, I did. Everything’s gone. The house, the tree.”
“I hired Hank Birton to raze the place.”
“So, clean slate,” Loraine says. “Pretty easy.”
“Not really,” Johnny says. His hand goes up and scratches his jaw. “I’m gonna sell.”
Loraine feels Johnny’s heat, the hardness of his chest, the sharpness of a hip. She gets off his lap and takes a chair across the table from him. She waddles these days. Like a goose. Her hips are spreading, they move
as if almost detached and she feels she could pull them from their sockets. She misses her pre-pregnancy body. Johnny’s smoking. Loraine looks at him. “Will anyone buy?” she asks.
“Doesn’t matter.”
Loraine knows now why Johnny seems so young and springy tonight. He doesn’t care. Chris is like this a lot. Hands twitch and play. Eyes roam all over, never resting on one thing. Loraine begins to feel that Johnny could run tonight. She’d just have to say the word and he’d walk out that door, hop in his car and go. She wonders if she should let him, if she really wants to spend the next years of her life looking around corners for Johnny Fehr.
Of course, she’d just have to say, “Come here, Johnny,” and he’d do that. He’d never say no. And there’s something disgusting in that too, makes her feel lousy and cheap. Loraine doesn’t know what it is, perhaps the time with Claire, looking at her sister’s life and the easy flow of it, but at the moment she dislikes Johnny. He’s eating bread and peanut butter now. The cigarette’s smouldering in the ash tray. He gets whatever he wants.
She wonders who Johnny really is. If he could be violent. Hit her. “Did you ever hit Charlene?” she asks.
Johnny looks surprised. “What a stupid question,” he says finally.
“Just curious.”
“You think I did?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just men are strange. I know a woman whose husband took her to bars. He made her wear a trench coat with no clothes underneath.”
First Johnny says, “And she did it.” Then, he says, “That’s sick. I’m not sick.”
“You’re right. Not like that.”
“How then?”
“It’s more subtle. Like maybe you think you’re better than me.”
“Do I?”
“Maybe you are.”
“Well, maybe.” Johnny’s trying to be funny but it’s not working.
“Like, your religion,” Loraine says. “You’ve got me beat there.”
Johnny doesn’t answer. He slides out another cigarette and says, “It’s like any discovery. When you see it you can’t believe how you lived without it all your life.”
“Why can’t you show me?”
“You’d just make fun of me.” He’s still moving weird. He puts a foot on a chair; his socks are dirty. “You’ve got nicer teeth than me,” he says.
“Ahhh.” Loraine looks at Johnny and imagines him talking about her, about her tits and so on. It happens. Some men do that. She remembers how it first was with him. Like jumping. As if she’d be high up somewhere, and she’d jump and he’d catch her. Jump. Catch. Especially the sex made her feel this way. She wanted to steal him, was fascinated by every little bit; the gaps between his toes, the hair of his knuckles, his odour. She would clamber all over him, sniffing like a furry animal and it was everything: funny, sad, desperate, pleasing. But it was the sadness that made it so rich. Like maybe this would be the last time.
Loraine focuses back on Johnny across from her. He’s talking, about money and bonds and his land. Then he’s telling her about Phil Barkman and the healing power of his hands. He holds his own hands up as he speaks, spreads his fingers, and Loraine can see the flesh bulging around his ring and she feels old. She wants to go back to how it was before; she wishes it were possible to stop the movement of the clock. She wants to tell Johnny this but she isn’t sure he’d understand.
She opens her mouth. “Come here,” she says.
Living with her.
Loraine at the kitchen table, buttering toast. Her knuckles white where bent around the knife. Her tongue curling out, touching her top lip. It is spring, and warm; she is wearing a tank top, purple, and she hasn’t shaved for a while. The sight of those bristles as she stretches the knife across the table makes Chris stoop to his shoelace and from this position he looks up at the armpit of his mother: concave, the beginning of her breast like dough rising, the light blue vein along the inside of her arm.
He has forgiven her. All those grievances of the past, those hateful words, his own disgust for her—this is gone. It is as if he has had a grey film peeled back from his eyes and he now sees clearly. These days she seems so easy. She has pulled the rocker into the kitchen and, when she is not eating at the kitchen table, she rocks herself into a trance, her legs up, her gaze focusing on some small spot on the ceiling. Or, she pages through these books she picked up in Winnipeg, at the public library. Books on childbirth. There are pictures of women: big, naked, standing in profile or facing the camera, mess of bush, breasts sloping and then turning up at the tips, hands usually clasped under the belly, supporting
the load. There is one of a Danish woman. Her long hair covers one breast, her eyes are dark and mournful, her hips are narrow, her shoulders thin; it seems to Chris, who has only really seen Melody naked and even that has been hasty and unstudied, that this is a girl, much younger than his own mother, and that she has been surprised by the growth of her belly, as if the fetus were an unwanted limb. Her thighs do not touch; Chris can see right through the gap.
Chris likes these pictures. They make him want to be near his own mother, to sneak looks at her belly, her legs, her breasts, her neck and ears, the top of her head. She has become, since about the fifth month, a boat sitting lower and lower in the water. He would like to stow away on her, enter a deep and inner hold, and lay himself down and ride her with the swell. Sometimes, when she has discovered the spot on the ceiling, he approaches her from behind, leans in until they are almost touching, and breathes deeply.
On Sunday mornings he brings her breakfast in bed. He makes toast and juice and climbs the stairs to her room and lays the tray on her lap, his hands brushing lightly at her thighs.
“You’re so sweet,” Loraine says. “Thank you.” Her voice is a whisper, as if she were leaning forward and telling him a secret.
Chris’s neck tightens. He is embarrassed, though he cannot help himself. He sits at the edge of the bed and watches her chew. Her cheeks are rounder now, her chin double. The backs of her arms shake when she laughs, though she doesn’t laugh much. One of these mornings, weeks before the baby is due, he says, “You should laugh more.”
Loraine is wary, one eye half-closed, her brain still groggy, “Oh, I should? Give me a reason.”
“The baby.”
“Ah, yes. Do you want to feel?” She pushes aside the tray, lifts her T-shirt, and takes Chris’s hand and lays it on her tummy. “Sometimes it kicks, really hard. There. Feel that?”
“Yes.” Her skin is hot. His hand burns.
“Here, lower,” and she guides his fingers lower. She is smiling. “That’s
its head. It’s dropped. A few weeks before the birth it engages and gets ready.”
Chris looks at his hand. At hers. She is sitting up now and a shoulder brushes his ear. He looks up at her face and she asks, “Are you scared?”
“No, are you?”
“Kind of. I forget what it was like with you. Except the speed.”
Chris wants to touch his mother’s lips. He thinks what it is like to kiss Melody. Melody is hard and thoughtless; greedy. This woman here, this big full-of-baby woman, is the best: like a tub of warm milk.
“Do you want some more toast?” he asks.
She looks at him, frightened by his kindness. “Are you sick?” she asks.
Sometimes, he is burdened by shame. He does not want it to be this way, in fact, he is unsure when this compulsion began. There is a clear memory of an early morning, back in February, when he stumbled to the bathroom and lifted the toilet lid. His mother had not flushed, which was not unusual these days; she was absentminded. Chris stooped to the bowl. Her shit was long and thick and lay perfectly coiled like a snake as if Loraine had laid it down with her own hands. All one piece. Chris was repulsed. He was aroused. It was like coming upon his mother naked in the bath. It had the same effect. He had discovered the wonderful torture of desire.
Back in February, when Johnny moved into the little shed across the yard, Chris knew what his mother did at night. He heard her creep downstairs and from his bedroom window saw her run across the snow to Johnny’s beacon of light. She disappeared and Chris waited. Occasionally he saw shadows beyond the curtains of that tiny window and he imagined they were talking and drinking tea.
One night after Loraine had left the house and flown across the yard, her feet flicking behind her, Chris went to his mother’s bedroom and lay down on her bed. He curled up in the still-warm recess she had left. He smelled her smell. He climbed out of bed and rummaged through her drawers and put on a pair of her panties. Pink. Cotton. He picked up another pair and held them to his nose. Her. He heard a noise and crawled back into her bed. He blushed and stripped.
He fell asleep and vaguely remembered his mother sliding under the covers later, her knees cold, her hands on his neck as if he were the headboard or a pillow. She didn’t move him. In fact, she held his head for a while as if it were a precious and delicate bowl. In the morning he awoke to discover the twisted blanket, thrown aside by his mother, and her bare speckled shoulders. He lay still for the longest time and watched her body rise and fall. She had a different smell this morning, a mixture of the barn and something wet and old. Johnny. The little room. Chris shuddered. His experience with Melody so far had been less than grand and it was by this he judged all sex. Why then, he wondered, would his mother run headlong through the dark and the snow, to a man who was chubby and weak, and who smelled of sweat? He reached out a finger, brushed his mother’s spine and understood that she didn’t know he was there; in the darkness of the room last night she had not noticed him.
Johnny was moving around in the kitchen now. Chris didn’t worry about him coming up. He never did. He only worried about Loraine waking. And yet, he did want her to open her eyes, to discover him beside her. He climbed from the bed. Loraine moved slightly and adjusted a leg so her foot peeked from beneath the cover. Chris went to his bedroom and lay there, full of regret. He must have slept briefly, because he became aware of Loraine and Johnny talking downstairs, their voices muffled and distant as if the house were underwater.
What Chris felt was dirty and lovely. It was full of possibilities and surprises and weakness and doom. On subsequent nights, he watched his mother cross the yard to Johnny’s place and always she fairly flew, her elbows moving out and sideways, her long heavy coat, hiding her
pregnancy, swaying back and forth as she aimed her mounded body at the glowing yellow rectangle. Chris watched her go and then he studied the window and the shadows and he imagined Johnny filling his greedy hands. He fell back onto his bed.
He returned to his mother’s bed a few times, even dug again amongst her underwear. One other night he fell asleep, his face on his mother’s pillow, and she reappeared to discover and wake him, calling him “sweetheart” and kissing him, guiding him from her bed and back to his own. That night she smelled of saltwater and melon. Her body was like a sheet waiting to be folded. She laid him down, pulled his blanket up, and said, “Good night.”
His disappointment was bitter.
With the coming of spring and the nearing of the birth, Loraine’s journeys out to the shed become fewer and fewer. Chris keeps track. One week she goes twice. The next, not at all. The following week, once, skittering around the large puddles which now occupy the yard. Chris wonders if perhaps he is sleeping through these meetings. He forces himself to lie awake and listen, but no, she is not leaving the house.
Her presence becomes bigger and bigger. Some days Chris feels she may split the house apart. She is solid, nothing moves her: not his anger, not his desire, not his fear. She is unaware.
Johnny has Chris doing some work at the centre; Chris is still filling in the hours for community service. Together, they go to Bill’s Hardware and pick up some studs, drywall, screws, tape, and mud. They buy a new sink and toilet too. Pink, because it is on sale. Chris is surprised by Johnny’s knowledge of wood and plumbing; it is as if Johnny were shining a light back onto himself and revealing secrets. One day he asks, “Where did you learn all this?”
“My father,” Johnny says. “I just don’t use it much. Lazy, I guess.”