Chapter Eleven
My first instinct was to kick off my sandals and run inside to see if I’d left the taps on. I hadn’t. The water was coming
from somewhere. But where? And how long until I was electrocuted? I frantically unplugged my laptop and put it up on the kitchen
table, picked up some now soaking wet magazines and a hoodie that had fallen off the bed. The water that wasn’t soaking into
the room-sized rug was then threatening my ankles. I tried to pull up the rug but it was somehow adhered to the ground. I
was panicked that I’d somehow ruined Ben’s family cottage, and I also needed help. I ran back outside, almost tripped over
the new walkway stones he’d placed that day, and pounded on Dave’s cabin door.
“Sorry! I know you’re asleep! But there’s a flood! How do you shut off the water?”
He cracked open the door wearing his boxers and a T-shirt, utterly confused. Baby’s barks only made the situation more absurd.
“What? There’s no rain, what do you mean?”
“It’s coming from somewhere. Ben told me to ask you if I had any questions or problems about the place. I think this qualifies?”
I said, and ran back to my cabin. He pulled on some sweatpants, then followed me, barefoot.
“Shit,” he said, “I told Ben this would happen!” He trudged through the swampy floor to open a door beside the bathroom I hadn’t noticed before.
“It’s the water heater. This can happen with old water tanks sometimes, they just rust out.
I told the family they should replace it, but they thought they’d get one more year out of it.
I mean, the only good thing is I think all the water has come out now.
I’ll turn the water main off anyway, and cut the power in case the water got in the walls or the electrical. ”
I stood there like an idiot, unsure how to help.
“How long have you known Ben’s family?”
“My whole life. I went to school with his older sister. He was my little brother’s best friend. Our farms were next to each
other. So when I came back to town and was looking for work, Neve hooked me up to be the contractor and caretaker of the cottages.”
“You and Neve are tight?”
“Not really anymore just, you know, old family friends, I guess.”
“Does your family still have the farm?
“Oh no, my dad sold it, the summer after I met you, actually.”
“Why don’t you trust Ben?”
“It’s a long story. So this will take a while to clean up, let’s try to mop up some of it now, and then I’ll take care of
it tomorrow with a Shop-Vac and some dehumidifiers and things like that.”
I nodded like I knew how to do anything. He went to grab a mop from his place and I grabbed what looked like a Swiffer and
tried to push as much out the door as I could. We worked in silence. Then we covered the floor in sheets and towels, trying
to soak up the rest. We opened all the windows. I dragged some of the wet towels and sheets out onto the porch to fold over
the railings to dry. Okanagan watched from the porch chair, amused. The whole cabin reeked and even the air felt filmy.
“You can’t sleep here,” he said. “You’ll freeze with all the windows open, and no power.”
“It’ll be like camping,” I said.
“I have a couch. You can take my bed.”
“No, no. I’ll go get a hotel.”
“No front desks will be open right now.”
“Then my car. I’ve done it before! I work on film sets, so—”
Dave sighed.
“We used to share a tent. I think we can handle sleeping in the same cabin. I haven’t become a murderer. You haven’t become
a murderer, right?”
“Zero kills to my name.”
“Same. And I promise, I will make no moves. I’m a gentleman.”
I swallowed, hard. “Of course.”
“Just let me tidy up a bit, OK?”
“Sure, I’ll grab some stuff.”
My cabin was one big room, and the floor sloped in such a way that literally everything on the ground had gotten wet. And
he wasn’t wrong about the cold. I got into my nightgown and added a hoodie on top so I would be maximally covered. I didn’t
want my outfit to communicate that I had any ideas. Plus I’d been single for five years. I knew not to expect much from men
in terms of their stash of extra clean blankets.
I got my things together, thinking about how much I had pined for Dave over the years. And he probably knew that. For one,
I had written it plainly in my letters to him. We’d both shared so much on that last night together. But then he was able
to just let it go so easily. I would be steadfast. A stoic, bundled-up platonic neighbour who needed a favour.
I kissed the cat’s little head as I walked by him on the porch. I knocked softly on the door, my heart in my throat. I heard
him shuffling around inside. I knocked again, loud enough for Baby to bark.
Dave opened the door and said, “Welcome to MTV Cribs!” He used to say that whenever he pulled back the heavy canvas tarp for his tent at camp.
The inside of Dave’s cabin was almost identical to mine, a giant open-concept room, but Dave’s cabin was also still half renovated—the kitchen cupboards didn’t have doors, there were paint swatches on the walls, no artwork.
The floor was covered in dog toys and tools.
“I’ve only been here for a month. It’s temporary,” he said.
“It’s great,” I said, and I meant it.
“I ran into Neve at the Farm Store and she was overwhelmed trying to get the cabins ready for camp and then to rent to tourists.
I was looking for work and a reason to leave Stirling. Just kind of the right timing.”
“Yeah, same for me. I was just here visiting, right after I, uh, had a gap in my work schedule. The camp gig with Ben kind
of fell in my lap.”
“That camp is really special. It’s only a day camp, you know, not quite as intense as our camp was, but my cousin’s in eleventh
grade, and it’s her favourite part of the year. I took her to New York once to see Broadway plays. I thought about you a lot
when I was there, wondering if you might live there.”
“You didn’t look at my social media?”
“I’m not really into it. I mean, I had Facebook for a while, years ago, but haven’t checked it in a long time.”
There was a photo of his kid on the fridge. “He’s a cutie-pie.”
“That’s my son, Finn. He’s my whole heart,” he said, looking away as though telling me that was painful. He poured a glass
of water and offered it to me. I drank the water down, remembering how he’d said that same thing about me on the beach. It
was a beautiful way to say something very simple. No one had told me anything like that before. I had never felt that important
to anyone. I remember feeling like I’d have walked to the end of the earth for him.
“I’ll take the couch. You’re much too tall for it.”
“No, ladies get the bed.”
I wasn’t listening, I was possessed by my nineteen-year-old id. I leapt over the back of the couch and yelled, “I’m in the
middle of a big bike race!” a line from Kids in the Hall. It was a physical action best done at the age of eighteen, I realized too late. But he didn’t laugh. And the couch made a snapping sound before it tilted like a see-saw.
“Oh no, I was doing our bit. Remember our bit?”
The humiliation was fast and deep. I wanted to sink into the ground and never re-emerge. I sat up and realized he wasn’t silently
judging, he was bent over laughing so hard, it was silent.
“That. Was. How. I. Got. This. Scar. Remember?” And he lifted his shirt to reveal a white and pink line across his belly from
when he’d leapt into a pile of logs at camp trying to amuse me. “Did you break the couch?”
I crawled up as gracefully as I could, then tried to get back on and fake it. “It’s quite comfy,” I lied, making a big display
out of snuggling into the blanket, despite my feet touching the floor and my head hovering at the top of the broken couch,
now three feet in the air.
“Imagine I just said, yeah, sleep on an incline? That’s fine with me?” he said.
“And I’d have to keep pretending it was fine? That would be a good sketch.”
That’s how we ended up side by side in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, with only the dog between us. He’d given me the
duvet and made a big show of getting into his solo sleeping bag and zipping it up to his neck. “OK, good night then,” he said
awkwardly.
“Feel free to watch TV or put on white noise or do anything you do normally.” As I said the words I blushed, imagining what
he might normally do.
“You OK, Goldy? You don’t need to be nervous.” There was old Buckeye, addressing the elephant in the room head-on, his soft
voice in the darkness.
“It’s a strange situation, Dave, is it not?”
“Ouch, Dave. Have you retired Buckeye?”
“I mean, we should probably hang up our jerseys. Given how life moves forward and nothing is as magical as it seems at nineteen.”
“That’s ice cold, Golds.”
Hearing him call me Golds made me feel like I might double over from all butterflies in my stomach. I tried to do the yogic
breathing trick Sarah had taught me when I was complaining about Jason the director. You inhale through one nostril, hold,
and then exhale through the other. I looked up at the moon through his front window and prepared a third act monologue of
what I would say if I wasn’t gutless. If I didn’t already feel like I’d bared my soul to this man once, for nothing. I ran
the lines in my head so persuasively, but I hesitated. I waited outside by the fir trees until the sun came up and you never came. I went to your tent and you were gone. But if I really wanted to go there, I would have to be prepared for whatever he might say back. Like that our connection might
have been all in my imagination. That he had a girlfriend back home, and I was just a pal he got in over his head with. I
had to be OK with whatever might occur after I said what I wanted to say, too. The thought of kissing him was terrifying,
possibly even more so than the thought of him hearing my confessions about how much he’d hurt me, and not caring or understanding
why. So I held back and rehearsed it once more, pressing the duvet between my thumb and forefingers in a rhythmic pattern.
And then, when I got up the courage again, Baby’s snores were accompanied by a rich human harmony. And the fact that Dave
could just fall asleep in this charged moment, like he hadn’t a care in the world, confirmed that my hesitation had been helpful
intuition.
If I thought my own cabin was quiet at night, nothing is more quiet than trying to sleep in a room with someone else you’ve imposed yourself on.
I could hear all my breaths magnified. And every time he shifted, my eyes snapped open.
But his snores were deep, and he was turned away facing the wall, so I grabbed my phone.
I snuggled under the blanket and texted Marlon.
I couldn’t explain my current predicament without a long voice memo.
So instead I asked: Is it weird that Ben isn’t replying to my texts?
He’s your fake boyfriend. He’s an actor. Don’t even freak out for one second of your precious life. Swipe right on a farmer
who can throw you around like a bale of hay.
Ben would be chatting with Marlon every day. Marlon would tell me if Ben was asking about me or showing any sign of a crush
or even just excitement for the coming summer. He’d told me camp was like his vacation from the hustle of acting life, a time
to remember why he worked so hard. Surely he’d say something to Marlon over the 10 a.m. union hot dog break.
Normally after a date, I was relieved it was over, and if anyone texted me too soon, I wrote them off as overeager. Was I
really so clichéd that all it took for me to have more interest was for someone to back away, to be alluring and unavailable?
Didn’t seem mature. Marlon was the voice of reason. I opened up Tinder. All my info and pics were outdated, so I replaced
the text with writer in Prince Edward County looking for some summer romance. I wasn’t awake enough to be witty, and I just wanted to scroll for some distraction. A lot of men holding fish, a couple
of guns, even. Hardly anyone wrote anything below their photos. Why would I hook up with someone who felt burdened by writing
a sentence? And then: Dave.
I was so caught up in immediately swiping left on everyone that I almost said no without pausing, but then I saw his face
and paused my trigger-happy thumb. I burrowed even deeper under the blanket, as if he could catch me. He’d chosen an attractive
photo with his arm around Baby, and the text below it read: Trying to be known. Must like tacos, dogs, men recently humbled by life, be undeterred in pursuit of both daily pleasures
and lifelong intellectual curiosities. Must not be turned off by near perfect impressions from 1970s film classics.
In the text was Buckeye, the idiosyncratic idealist in pursuit of intimacy. Was he also the man of few words cutting through lumber? The dad who missed his son? Reading it made me want to crawl across the mattress to him, offer to know him now the way I once did.
I still hadn’t told Marlon or Katie about Dave. The longer I held it in, the stranger I felt about it. I wanted to have more
of a handle on what was happening first. But right then, all that was happening was I was staring at a photo of him holding
a chainsaw, arm muscles glistening, the text underneath read: Not in Texas.
I was suddenly aware that he was only a foot from me. His snoring stopped. He moved a little closer to me. Was he subtly making
a move? I was afraid to look directly. I felt so much desire. I had never wanted anyone as much as I wanted him right then,
despite us being wrapped in various fabrics, having verbally stated platonic boundaries. I thought about sleeping in my car
just to make the feelings stop. I shifted a bit closer toward him. And then the snoring started again.