Joe curled into a fetal ball to nurse Scout; the sights and sounds normal, the smells of baby powder and urine commingling normally. How had she just landed in the middle of a breakup without even having realized anything significant was wrong?
Gone. Joe was numb. She pinched herself and felt nothing. She flicked her cheek, registered a faint sensation. She realized how many times Ell had come up to the cottage alone over the past couple years. Why? Why had she done that? Joe just wanted it to make sense. And this made no sense. Was it too much to ask that it make sense? Ell, ditching her wife with a newborn on an island, taking their only boat. Come Monday, Logan and Ajax would surely be gone, and what if, at that point, something went awry? What if the baby got whooping cough or an allergy, or god forbid Joe became too ill to feed her, and the landline went dead? This was how jeopardized she now was.
She could hear Ell’s voice in her head: You catastrophize. None of that will happen. You’re giving yourself horror movies. Her wail in response: But it could! She had to plan for the possibility, remote as it was. Apparently, no one else was planning for her welfare.
If Elliot wouldn’t, didn’t, couldn’t—even so, their welfare still mattered. They still needed income, a home, food. She had tremors from the weight of her vulnerability.
Surely it was just a case of horniness—Elliot’s clit pointing like a retriever in some hunter’s field? She’d come back home, she would!
By noon, the sun had long since boiled the maple syrup that had spilled on the patio stones. Maybe Joe should pack—ask Logan to help—go back to the city, to their house in the Beaches, to lick her wounds and be where she had friends, family, support? She looked around the cottage that Elliot and Logan had built pretty much by hand. The plush couches, the crude pine dining table, the worn Persian rugs, the chandeliers. She’d thought it was hers. Wasn’t it hers? Scout had been born here. The birthing tub was still up against the wall in the guest room.
She thought back to Logan and Elliot’s breakup. How had that come down? Elliot had been draconian, hurtful, parsimonious, had kept the cottage that Logan’d helped to build. Logan sued, succeeded in getting half the island, but that was all. It was different then; in the bad old pre-rights days, Logan had been lucky to get that much recognition. But now queers had rights and obligations. Elliot would have to split things fifty-fifty.
Joe, thought Joe, you are extrapolating. Do you know a single thing about separation? She didn’t. When she and Dree split, Joe walked away, period.
What Joe had loved had just turned to dust.
Every time Scout sent up a whimper, it jolted Joe, whose mind was madly calculating money and how much she had access to, even on charge cards, and when she could go back to work, and who would watch Scout, and whether Elliot was going to be a shit—a shit—with the divorce. Divorce. No. Divorce? She meant separation. She would never divorce Elliot. She believed in Elliot, believed she’d do the generous and right thing without a fight. Elliot was honourable. Wasn’t she?
Maybe Elliot had confided in Logan?
Nearly supper time, and she didn’t know where the day had gone. Joe’s stomach growled, and there wasn’t any Elliot around to dish out food. Scout was soaked and poopy, from the smell of things—had Joe even changed her today? Somehow Joe had turned on the air conditioning, and now she shivered. What had just happened? I kissed Elliot here, she thought. Elliot and I wrestled here. This is where Elliot proposed. Joe left the baby shrieking in her cradle and walked outside—aimlessly, in a fog—through the ants and wasps into the flowers wishing they were opium poppies strong enough to put her to sleep.
Logan and Ajax were fucking on the dock—it sent her back inside. Goddamned love.
Back inside, she examined Scout as she changed her. Elliot in her lips, her nose. “I’m so sorry, Scout. I’m so sorry,” she whispered. Joe had already let her daughter, not a week old, down. You have another mother, Scout, but she doesn’t live with us. There had to be another woman! When did Elliot meet her, and why hadn’t Joe suspected or noticed?
She’d wanted to bring their daughter into a good world, a world where avarice and greed and hatred didn’t win, where corporations weren’t gods, where icebergs weren’t melting, where climate change wasn’t alarming, where at least, at least, her parents were good at heart. But maybe it was cruel to have a baby at all in this garbage globe. She hadn’t thought much about that, had she, when the procreation hunger swept over her?
They said you couldn’t know the fullness of love until you had a baby. She got inklings of that now, this love for which she would lay down her life.
Would Elliot really fight for this baby?
Joe could go to Logan’s, barge in, say, Hey, Elliot left me.
Oh god, she could not.
She could not intrude on a romantic weekend with this news. She rambled into the kitchen and boiled instant noodles and ate them out of the colander at the sink. She checked her phone, but Ell hadn’t called.
She walked the house, opening closets. Coat, still here. She wrenched open Elliot’s underwear drawer: All new. She ransacked the drawers of Elliot’s dresser, in which half the clothing was new, still creased. What the fuck? She shook drawers onto the floor. Receipts tumbled in a paper rainstorm. Receipts, she saw, for flowers (she hadn’t received), for dinners at restaurants (she hadn’t gone to), for jewellery (she didn’t own). Twenty receipts, thirty, forty. And a wad of cash, fresh twenties and fifties. Ticket stubs for concerts (she hadn’t gone to). Tickets for museums and art fairs (she hadn’t attended). Then an e-ticket for a trip to Rome. Upcoming in November. No mention of a co-traveller.
She went to check Elliot’s Facebook, but she’d been blocked. Elliot’s email, but the password was changed. Elliot’s desktop—but there seemed to be no clues.
Wow, she thought. Wow.
It wasn’t a dream. This was really happening. Tectonic plates had been shifting, and Joe had been stupidly oblivious. Elliot had moved from love and admiration and a sense that it was the two of them against the world into … whatever this was, estrangement. Hatred, maybe.
Shouldn’t there have been an earthquake first?