Shane goes as far as buying her a personalized license plate for
her birthday: VRO BBY in hot-pink block caps. His VRO BBY ,
of course, oozes irony, but Eliot’s too young for irony. So now, Eliot
thinks girls can’t be captains, and Vero feels certain it’s The Engineers’
fault.
“How about if I be the captain, and when Daddy gets home from
working at the pharmacy, he can fold the laundry?” She pulls Jamal
away from Shane’s new Italian racing bike. Cervella, he calls her . She
is now propped up on a wind-trainer so that, in the dead of winter,
on the snowiest days, Shane can avoid the icy roads, spinning around
and around, pouring sweat and getting nowhere. Vero’s job is to keep
the boys from spinning the sleek bike’s overpriced wheels and ampu-
tating their little fingers in its overpriced spokes.
“That’s okay, Mommy.” Eliot pulls at Vero’s hand, pushing her fore-
head until he can see her face. “Don’t cry. Mommies don’t cry, silly.
You like doing laundry. Because that’s what mommies do.”
Vero envies Eliot. He can be whomever he wants. Only, very infre-
quently, he’ll announce, “I’m Eliot now.” Mostly, though, he’s some-
one else.
“Excuse me, can I pretend I’m a robot?”
“Excuse me, can I pretend I’m a football player?”
“Excuse me, can I pretend I’m an astronaut?”
“No,” Shane answers, every now and then. “No you can’t. We’ve
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had quite enough pretending for one day.” He looks at Vero, the
pain of exhaustion in his eyes a mirror of her own. Parenting has
aged them, made their skin looser, less shiny. “That’s funny, isn’t it?”
He seems truly uncertain, like he’s working with a foreign language.
He runs his hands through his coarse white-blond hair. Usually, it
springs out from under a ball cap, and he looks almost exactly like
the second-year chemistry student Vero fell for at twenty, back when
everyone called him the Candy Man and vied for invitations to the
psychedelic parties in his sweet suite above his parents’ garage. Only a
subtle bagginess in the skin around his eyes and at the corners of his
mouth hint that he’s entered his forties. “Enough pretending? I love
pretending. I’d never say ‘enough pretending.’ Not for real.” He nods,
one quick pulse of his chin, as he always does when his mind’s made
up. “It’s hilarious.”
They’re both delirious from lack of sleep. His words come to Vero
as if spoken underwater, wavy and weak, parts of them floating away.
She can’t tell whether the problem is his voice or her ears.
Last week, when Vero went to the dentist to fill the holes that the
acid reflux of pregnancy had gnawed in her teeth, a hygienist asked
her name. Vero, with her jaw ajar, stared at herself reflected in the
woman’s protective glasses until they both blushed. “It’s not exactly
a skill-testing question, is it?” Vero finally said. “I should know that
one.” Another unfilled pause. “Is it Mommy?”
Some evenings, when Shane gets home from the pharmacy, Vero
pushes both boys in his direction, snarling, “It’s your turn.” Without
looking back at her family, she marches out the door and up the hill
into the woods. No goodbye hugs. No goodbye kisses. No Mommy
loves you so much, be good for Daddy. Just gone.
Deep into the woods, she crouches on the ground, leaning into a
spruce tree, curling tight into herself. If she keeps still long enough,
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animals come. Sometimes ground squirrels. Sometimes rabbits. One
time, a fox came close enough that Vero could’ve touched her—a
mother with two kits. Vero didn’t care about the babies. She held
her breath to keep still, her rear-end damp and cold, devoting her
attention entirely to the mama, sniffing the dirt, licking her paws,
oblivious to the little ones at her tail, trusting they would take care of
themselves. When the fox saw Vero—or maybe just felt her eventual
gasp for breath—she bolted fast into the thick brush. The kits disap-
peared with her.
Other times—when Vero doesn’t get her solitude in the woods—
she erupts after the kids have gone to bed, her anger and frustration
splattering everything. She runs into dark wet nights, barefoot in the
thorny grass and up into the forest, its floor strewn with twigs and
sharp rocks. She races away from Shane and the house, revelling in
each sharp pain to her tender soles. See! See what you all make me do to
myself? Your laundry! Your demands! Your dirty dishes! What happened to
my life? MY life! She pulls her hair and shrieks, beyond caring what
neighbours think. But always she remains very aware of Shane, his
white skin and blond hair shining from the porch steps against the
darkness of the night.
“What, Vero?! What? ” He holds his arms out to her, all supplica-
tion. “Geez, Vero, come back here!”
Vero does come back, later, soaked from the rain, clothes torn, feet
bleeding. She sits with her feet in his lap while he dabs and bandages.
“You can’t keep doing this, Vee. You’re acting crazy. Like a wild
animal.”
But Vero has watched the wild animals. None of them act this way.
“Don’t yell at me,” she yells.
“I’m not yelling,” he says, so quietly it’s loud. His eyebrows, a high
arch of nearly invisible blond, give him a look of perpetual surprise.
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Vero counts each of the stubby hairs instead of responding.
“We need some help, Vee. Live-in help. Just because you can some-
times work at home doesn’t mean you can do it all. Work is work.
Parenting is work. That’s two works.” He tries to meet her eyes, winks.
“I’m excellent at math.”
They have this conversation often, and she’s given him all the
excuses: She doesn’t want a stranger taking care of her kids; full-time
support is too expensive; she couldn’t stand someone they don’t know
living in their house. The real reason, though, is that she’s observed
the live-in nannies—in the playground, in the school programs, at the
mall. They’re ghosts hovering at the periphery of real life, animated
and alive only until she gets close, and then they freeze, their features
slack, their eyes empty, their faces so blank she can see right through
them. Vero doesn’t want a ghost living in her home.
“No,” she says, this time with no explanation. She speaks to her lap
and shakes her head, water from her long bangs trailing down her
nose and dripping onto her clasped hands. “Just. No.”
The next morning, Eliot holds his jacket in one hand and a glass
of milk in the other, high above his head away from his baby brother.
Jamal lunges at it—“mik! mik! mik! mik!” Milk slops into Eliot’s hair
as Vero kicks his Lightning McQueen runners toward him, scooping
Jamal away from the dripping milk.
“You have to help me, Mommy! ” As he reaches for his sneakers,
Eliot’s cup drops, splattering white liquid on the floor, on the bannis-
ter, on the wall, on his jacket. His whimper turns to a wail. “I can’t do
everyfing at the same time!”
“I know, Eliot.” Vero hears her own voice as a whimper now. She
pulls his stiff rain jacket around his shoulders with one arm while
she bounces Jamal gently with the other. Her briefcase, full of light
armoured vehicle specifications, falls to the floor. “That’s just it, Eliot.
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Neither can I.” She listens to make sure Shane isn’t around the corner
in the kitchen, then says it again, relieved to finally hear it aloud.
“Neither can I.”
◊◊◊
Vero curls on the couch after dinner, tight to Jamal, his warm, wet
mouth tugging at her breast. Eliot straddles her hips, hands tangled
in the wild otherworld of her hair. The three of them wind around
and latch onto each other, so connected they feel like a single being.
A three-headed wildebeest.
She repeats Eliot’s favourite story softly in his ear. “You were so
beautiful when you were born, I couldn’t sleep for three days.” The
words hardly carry meaning for her anymore. They come forth from
her mouth, one sliding into the next, like a well-loved song. “I just
sat and stared at you for three days. Your hot little cheek pressed to
my arm. My face hurt from smiling. You were the first time I saw a
miracle.”
“No sleep at all! For three days! And did you let the nurses take
me?” He knows the answer, but wants to hear it again.
“No, Eliot, I wouldn’t let anyone take you away from me. Not for a
minute. I loved you too much.”
“So much you couldn’t put your eyes anywhere else. You couldn’t
even close them to sleep.” Eliot’s voice quivers with excitement but
stays low. He won’t disturb Jamal. He wants this time to be his. “Like
a super mom! No sleep is your super power.”
“No sleep at all, Eliot.” She strokes the back of his neck, soft as a
seal pelt. “Like a super mom.” But everybody needs to sleep, Eliot. I need
to sleep. She doesn’t say that.
“See you in sixty,” Shane’s voice pulls her from Eliot and Jamal.
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His face peeks through the crack of the door for only a flash before
it snaps shut between them, and his spandex-clad ass disappears. He
too speaks in a stage whisper, scared to disrupt whatever spell has
been cast on the placid Jamal.
Fine. We don’t need you. That’s what Vero thinks—the words that
swim through the thick sludge of her mind. But it’s not what she
feels. The extent of her need weakens her.
She imagines Shane on his fat-tire winter bike. She sees him
mashing up the big hill five miles out of Sprucedale, the slick whir
of his tires scrubbing the crust of the work day from his brain, a soft
mist hanging in the mountain air, cooling his skin and sharpening the
sweet scent of the pine air just off the highway. Alive. Not a hint of
pee or peanut butter aroma on anything.
Before kids, they rode together.
“I need this,” he’d say, his face flushed and eyes bright. “I’ve got
half this town on pills. ‘ Here you go, Sprucedalians: one big one and two
little ones for everybody!’ The big one so they don’t kill themselves and
the little ones so they don’t kill anybody else.” He knows too many
of Sprucedale’s secrets, he says, and pounding up a hill, tasting his
own heartbeat, wiping his sweat on his neoprene sleeve, helps him
to forget.
She remembers that cleansing, cathartic quality of a good, hard
ride. At the crest of a hill, her whole body buzzed, a physical sensation
so concentrated and powerful that it was nearly sexual.
Shane would be feeling that soon.
“You begrudge me every second on my bike,” he complains, “as if
Cervella is my mistress instead of a piece of inanimate equipment.”
He points at his quads, flexes until his pant leg stretches tight across
the muscle. “See that? Shane Schoeman was made to cycle. I already
wasted my youth banging heads with my brother on the football
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field.” He pets his thighs, as if they’re the family poodle. “Now I bike.”
Jamal has fallen asleep at Vero’s breast, his new teeth resting against
her nipple. She worries that Eliot will squirm and wake him, but Eliot
too seems content, his weight warm on top of her as he sucks at a piece
of her hair, a habit he’s acquired since Jamal’s arrival.
Today, Shane took Vero to the Sprucedale office of the International
Nanny Agency on Broad Street to meet Bernadette. Bernie, she said to
call her. She looked like a Bernie: lean, with a pixie haircut and low-
slung faded jeans hugging her hips. Her T-shirt read “Well-behaved
Women Rarely Make History.” A hint of skin, golden from this year’s
Indian summer, peeked out between the T-shirt and her jeans. Shane
tightly shackled Vero’s wrist in the grip of his index finger and thumb
and pulled her in the door. “Let’s just see. It doesn’t hurt to see.”
said, leaning his elbows onto the counter between them and Bernie,
just the way he leaned into Cervella’s aerobars. “She’s got some weird
North American hang-ups. Liberal guilt, let’s call it. Tell her: Nobody
else in the world has trouble hiring servants, if they can afford them.”
Vero cringed on the word “servant” and watched for Bernie’s reac-
tion. This little woman gave Shane nothing. No nod of understand-
ing, no smile of approval, no glint of camaraderie in her eyes. Vero’s
shoulders loosened a little. She’d assumed that someone working in
the office of an international nanny agency might be on Shane’s side;
Bernie, after all, was the one in the nanny business.
“The life we’ve got is not the one we signed up for, that’s for sure.”
Shane put his hand on the back of Vero’s neck, fingers creeping up into
her hair. “Before Vero and I got married, we talked about trekking in
Nepal, doing opium in Thailand, surfing in Bali. Now, date night’s a
trip to the grocery store with two screaming, dirty kids clinging to our
pant legs.” Vero noticed that Shane rambled like this more frequently
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as he coasted into middle age. The Shane-Overshare, she called it, but
she just now connected it to young, attractive women. She checked the
pit of her stomach to gauge her jealousy, but felt nothing.
Shane watched himself in the mirror behind Bernie as he talked, his
eyes rimmed red. His unforgiving fair skin showed everything, espe-
cially fatigue. He looked like he was wearing pink eyeliner. “I suppose
that’s life, isn’t it?” he continued, unable, it seemed, to stop himself.
“You’re presented with decisions. You make them. You’re presented
with decisions. You make them. Again and again. You think this smor-
gasbord of options will always be there. Then suddenly you realize that
you’ve decided yourself into a tight little box.” Vero saw that the met-
aphorical turn this Shane-Overshare had taken pleased Shane, that
he expected it would appeal to young Bernie, with her trendy haircut,
feather earrings, and studded nose. “So we decided on kids. That’s our
box. We can’t change the box, but a nanny would sure help us fluff up
the pillows in there, make it a little more comfortable. You know?”
Vero wanted to tell Bernie and Shane about Lito, a round Filipino
man whose face was usually all sunshine and happiness. He served her
coffee en route to the LAV plant. Vero wanted to tell them about last
week, when she asked Lito how he was and his big sunface cracked
open.
He’d looked up at the ceiling as if saying a quick prayer and then
spoke into her still empty mug. “I have a new son,” he whispered, “a
new son I have never held. Never held. Back home. My boy.” Lito’s
voice cracked on the word “boy” so that it came out in two syllables.
She wanted Shane to feel the pain of that break. Lito’s mouth bunched
up and twitched and his eyelids fluttered. He lost control of the mus-
cles of his own face, for just a second. But then he licked his lips, shook
his head, and spoke more loudly. “I’m sorry. ma’am. So sorry. This, not
your problem.”
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No. Vero’s problem was deciding what she wanted in her coffee.
She ordered a double.
“Yes, ma’am, most certainly.” Lito’s face lifted into a smile Vero
knew well, one so sparkling and sincere that she’d never before
thought to question it.
She wanted to tell Shane and Bernie all of that, to tell them about
the grip of humiliation that held her, toes to head, when he handed
her a mug of coffee and wished her a good day. She nodded and said
nothing.
“Think of the nanny as a present, from me to you,” Shane said,
his forearms pressed into the countertop, fingertips stretched toward
Bernie, even while he looked at Vero. “You don’t have to make any