Old Growth
Ray’s realtor appears to have nothing on from the waist up. She flashes across the front window of her bungalow as if startled to see them drive into the yard, though Ray did text her from the ferry. Gwyneth glimpses shapely arms, a firm curve of breast. “Your realtor’s topless.”
Ray leers across the steering wheel. “Whaaa?”
But it’s just a nude T-shirt. Gwyneth can see this plainly now that the realtor has stepped outside in her sock feet and is smiling at them, or rather at Ray. A tall woman in her forties, reasonably slim with bushy blond hair, the top piece pulled back in a faded green scrunchie. No doubt the younger and more attractive of the two agents on the island: Ray would have done his research. Gwyneth would like to make a crack about this as well, but feels too chastened by the shirt.
Anyway, she’s too late. Ray has swung open the driver’s door and is loping across the grass to give his realtor one of the bear hugs he reserves for small children and pretty women. Gwyneth pushes her own door ajar and extends one sandaled foot, inspecting her toenails in the late morning light. Purple, at her age. Really? As she stands and unkinks her shoulders, Ray gives the blond woman a quick kiss near the mouth. The two of them glance over. This could be interesting. Is he going to introduce her as his ex-wife? Or as his friend, his advisor, his financier? Of course, he might just say she’s a hitchhiker. This was how he introduced her to his parents all those years ago, and Gwyneth, twenty-four and in love, played along the whole weekend, though they’d actually met tree planting and Ray had gone to the bus station to get her.
“Fern,” Ray says, “Gwyneth. Gwyneth, Fern.”
Fern smiles limply. Then, brightening, she says to Ray, “Just give me a sec,” and turns back to the bungalow where a pair of hiking boots waits beside a wooden chair.
She has a breathy little-girl voice, though on closer scrutiny looks more forty-nine than forty. Gwyneth tries to catch Ray’s eye, but he is gazing around his realtor’s property—three acres with a vegetable garden, an orchard, and a paddock for her horses (Fern gives riding lessons on the side). Gwyneth knows his air of distraction is deliberate, that he’s already pulling away from their tenuous connection on the drive up the coast. If she speaks now, he won’t hear her, so intent will he be on communing with his realtor. Fern certainly seems flattered, pointing out the different types of apple trees and detailing the contents of the compost heap next to Ray’s mud-splattered Focus.
Already, Gwyneth is regretting she’s come.
I think I’ve found it, he had announced on the phone. My land. And when she’d said, That’s great, Ray, he surprised her by suggesting she drive to the island with him before he made his offer. They could get there and back in a day, and if they missed the last ferry, well, they could sleep in the car, like old times. Classic Ray. Yet he seemed so eager. C’mon, Gwyn. You can tell me if I’m crazy or not. And when she still hung back, I promise I’ll be on my best behaviour. Neither of them mentioned the loan, but that’s another reason he would want her to see it, so that she’ll feel easier giving him the $20,000, and on the phone, perversely, this touched her. Not that she cares which piece of wilderness he buys. She’s already made up her mind to loan him the money—for Cam and Jenna, so he’ll have something to leave them, especially now that the cottage has finally sold and Ray is tearing through his share. It’s your money, Ben had shrugged, but you know what he’s like. As for doing a road trip with her ex-husband, he merely rolled his eyes. Maybe you can talk him out of it.
Ray had at least been on time for once, early in fact. He appeared preoccupied with a map while she was kissing Ben good-bye on the porch but smirked as she slid in beside him, Honeymoon still not over, I see. Then he buzzed down the driver’s window and called out, Don’t worry, man. I’ll take good care of her. See you in two weeks! So that she’d had to reach across his skinny lap and shout, Tonight, Ben! See you tonight! As she eased back, she remarked, Still the same old asshole, I see, and Ray gave her a mock salute. But it seemed to relax them both, this allusion to a sexual rivalry that had never really existed—Ray being with Angie when Gwyneth met Ben.
Still, it felt strange sharing a car with him again. He’d started combing his hair back, she noticed, no doubt to camouflage his bald spot, and the light green hemp shirt he was wearing—short-sleeved with a collar and looking like it could use a little ironing—was one she’d bought a couple of months ago for Cam to give him on Father’s Day. In the store, she’d spent a long time fingering it, the fabric stiff like linen but with a hint of softness. So Ray. On the way out of the city, he detoured through a Tim’s for coffees, and Gwyneth pulled back his tab and dabbed his jeans with their stack of napkins after he spilled the first sip. She also agreed to hold the map, though they could have just as easily used the GPS on one of their phones. When Jenna texted, How’s your holiday with Dad? Killed him yet? Gwyneth sent back a smiley face. Not yet. However, it was surprisingly relaxed, like catching up with an old friend. They talked about the kids (how great it was that Cam was finally getting his act together, and who was this new guy of Jenna’s anyway?) and also about Ben. (He’s a good man, Ray said. Solid. You deserve that, Gwyn.) They even joked about a few of his more harmless flaws—how she still has to remind him about his mother’s birthday and the time he drove six hours to his brother’s wedding without his suit. Mostly, though, they talked about the land.
The seller, a middle-aged German, would be leaving behind a half-built house and Ray was debating whether he should finish it or use the lumber for his own cabin in the woods. Why didn’t the German finish his house? Gwyneth asked. No idea, Ray grinned. Maybe he got bored, or his marriage fell apart. He had spent much of his summer Googling solar panels, composting toilets, organic gardening. A couple of pals were willing to help him build next year. In the meantime, he was hoping to find someone local (his realtor had a few names) to do the extra clearing he wanted. Then he would be able to quit his job and retire to the island, go off the grid. He looked at her with that intense light gaze, daring her to tear down this new plan. But that was one of the dispensations of being divorced so long: she would not criticize, not anymore. Sounds great, she said. Then she thought of the VW bus he’d bought for five hundred dollars and left to rust in their driveway, the tree house he was always going to build for the kids, all those rotting boards behind the shed. You’re going to love it, Ray enthused, tapping the steering wheel. Wait till you see all the old growth.
Fern won’t stop going on about the trees either.
“Wait until you see the old-growth firs on Ray’s land,” she says, catching Gwyneth’s eye in the rearview mirror, as if signalling her to gush as well.
They have switched to the realtor’s Outback and Gwyneth is already feeling carsick. Not only is she stuck in the backseat but Fern keeps taking her hands off the wheel to talk, then jerking the wheel back in place to round another bend. Gwyneth wonders if calling the land Ray’s before he’s put in an offer is an old real estate trick. Even Ray is doing it now, wondering aloud if the farmer next door to his land might be tapping his maples.
When they first set out from the bungalow, she made a point of asking Fern about herself. The realtor explained that she was born on the island, as were both her grannies, but that her parents left for the mainland in their teens, only to return with the back-to-the-land movement in the mid 70s. Up until Fern was eight, they lived on a communal farm with two other families. She was home-schooled but mostly she ran wild in the woods. Ray would like that, Gwyneth reflected. He’d always considered himself a latter-day hippie and often seemed dazed by their mortgage, the kids, his job teaching communications to blasé college students. Fern got along beautifully with the other realtor on the island (who made pottery on the side), and, no, she didn’t know why the German had abandoned his house. When Gwyneth asked about her horses, she boasted that she’d been riding since she was three. That’s a long time, Gwyneth said, but Fern laughed, I’m not that old. She kept waiting for Fern to ask a question back. Surely, she must wonder why Ray brought along this definitely old-already woman with the purple toenails. But Fern seemed no more curious about her than the dusty ostrich ferns lining the ditches.
Gwyneth directs a question at Ray. “Have you looked into the water supply?”
“Oh, he doesn’t need to worry about that. There’s good access to groundwater everywhere on the island.” “Her partner’s a civil engineer,” Ray remarks, though he knows full well Ben is a tax lawyer. “Are you okay?” Fern says into the mirror. “I’m fine. I just get carsick in the back.”
“Well, make sure you tell us if there’s anything we can do,” she says cheerily, turning to chat to Ray about his new neighbourhood, while Ray surveys the dense bush with childlike wonder.
When she finally pulls over, asserting with an excited flick of the hand, “Here we are!” there is nothing to suggest they are anywhere, certainly no For Sale sign. Fern, however, hops out of the Outback and points to a stick smeared with pink paint on the side of the highway.
“The western marker for your property line, Ray.” Next, she unfurls a survey map that shows how the eight acres begin narrow, then widen near the house before narrowing again. Ray, of course, has seen the land before—clearly, this is how he’s become so cozy with his realtor—but he frowns at the map and stares vaguely at Fern, as though he’s forgotten who she is or why he’s here. Gwyneth, who’s seen him like this before, guesses he’s starting to feel nervous about the prospect of going off-grid for real. Commitment has never been Ray’s forte.
Fern doesn’t seem to notice and leaps into the ditch. As Ray plunges in after her, he throws Gwyneth a quick backward grimace. “You coming?”
“You bet!”
On the phone, she did think to ask about footwear. Would sandals be okay? Yes, yes, he’d assured her. The German had dug a road in from the highway. But Fern must have decided to take an off-road route.
“You okay?” she calls back over her shoulder.
Huge rubbery leaves slap Gwyneth on the face. Bark grit jams beneath her toes. “Just fine.”
Up ahead, Ray, who has regained his composure, is tilting his head close to his realtor’s as she regales him with the natural attributes of his land. In addition to being a real estate agent and riding instructor, Fern appears to have an exhaustive knowledge of island flora and fauna. She is practically running now, showing off this big-leaf maple and that rare forest flower, noting how interesting it is that a cedar has rooted itself around the stump of a fir. She is quite the nature girl. No doubt, she also leads a Brownie troupe on the side. Ray, however, Gwyneth observes with grumpy satisfaction, is even balder than she’d thought.
“Look at this, Ray.”
Fern has stopped beside an enormous fallen tree. Someone has chain-sawed it into chunks, the largest spanning almost four feet. She nudges Ray’s elbow, beckons Gwyneth.
“See the rings,” she says, pointing at the largest chunk. “You can tell how old it is by counting them.” Definitely a Brownie troupe.
Now, she is caressing the outer rings with her fingertips, and Gwyneth worries that she might actually count them. Instead, she steps back, her yellow hair grazing Ray’s hemp shirt.
“The rings look pretty much the same until you get right up close. Then you can see that some are wider, meaning an easy winter and long growing season, and some thinner, usually a hard winter and shorter growing season.”
“Just like relationships,” Ray quips, “except the best ones are usually the shortest.”
Even Ray seems puzzled by what he’s just said. He and Fern are still hovering by the rings, so Gwyneth rests against one of the smaller chunks of sawed tree and flaps her cardigan at the mosquitoes. She’s promised herself that she won’t think about Angie anymore. But the rings remind her. Once, she watched Ray and Angie standing together like this at a family bonfire—not talking or touching, just standing, and yet the force of their attraction cutting her to pieces. You know he’s not monogamous? his own brother had warned her. She knew, but married him anyway. What had she been thinking? That the two of them were rooted together in some elemental way? That once he had a family he wouldn’t stray? Watching Fern try to make sense of his joke about the rings, Gwyneth almost feels sorry for her. It’s Ray who turns her into such a bitch—even now when there’s nothing between them but their almost grown children and this loan. Why should she care anymore who he screws around with? She is supposed to be done with all that, starting over fresh with Ben.
But he still gets to her. She should have known this. She did know. All the time they were talking in the car, on the phone as well, she’d been softening, feeling the nearness of the old Ray—the one who kissed her breasts before babies, who was always floating off somewhere but still could somehow make her laugh. Even the wrinkled hemp shirt is a tendril, pulling her back. But she’d been a fool to think he wore it for her.
She heaves herself forward. “Are we anywhere near the road yet?”
“It’s just ahead,” Fern sings out.
The road is nothing but a grassy track and the house, when it materializes, weirdly narrow with a tin roof that juts so far out that the two stories look in danger of tipping over. Next to the house sits a leaf-strewn campervan and, in front, a rusted pickup truck. The scene has a haphazard sleepiness about it, as if the German has merely gone out for supplies and forgotten to come back.
Now that they have reached their destination, Ray seems about to break into a jig. “What do you think?”
“What’s with the roof?”
“We think he must have been planning to build two screened-in decks, one on top of the other,” Fern says. “That’s why the roof ’s so extended.”
“Is that the only door?’ Gwyneth points to a large triangular opening on the second floor.
“Oh, no,” Fern laughs. “We think that was meant to be the entrance to the upper deck. The door’s around the side.”
Ray and Fern stride ahead, murmuring back and forth, while Gwyneth picks her way through the nails and shards of wood that litter the long grass. She has wrapped her cardigan over her face to keep away the bugs and knows without looking that the purple polish is chipped now.
Inside the house, Ray is suddenly attentive again, showing her a table of good-quality tools the German has left behind and cautioning her, as they climb the rough stairs to the second floor, to stick to the crossbeams and not stand too close to that triangular opening in the outer wall. He is especially proud of a curious window that shutters from the inside and can be opened only by pulling across a wooden dowel. This dowel is about a foot long and carved with leaves and flowers. It is the one detail of the house that is truly finished.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Fern whispers, stroking a petal, and Ray glances anxiously at Gwyneth.
This appeal is so hapless that she can’t at first respond. Instead, she glances over the edge of the gaping triangle, which seems in that moment a perfect metaphor for their unfinished marriage. Large flakes of brown paint are starting to drift loose from the cab of the German’s truck. Nearby, a plastic tarp clings by blue threads to a pile of mossy lumber. The tarp reminds her of Ray’s faded one-man tent from their tree-planting summer. There’s something you need to know, he’d told her that first night she shared it with him. He was older, had hitched to Mexico, was known around the camp for breaking hearts. I’ve always been a free spirit. I can’t help it. I just blow with the wind. Tangled up inside his sleeping bag, with the shadows of the treetops moving above, she hadn’t understood, or cared much, what this blowing might mean. She knew only that she wanted to curl herself around his body, so thin and pale in the tent light, and not let go. I think I’m in love with you, he also said, lifting her bangs. And she’d felt sure he meant it because he looked so surprised.
Gwyneth sighs and faces him again. The German was clearly insane. She can’t believe Ray is seriously considering finishing the man’s house. It will take him years, if he manages even to stick with it. Really, Ben was right. The idea of his going off-grid is ridiculous—what does Ray know about organic gardening? She watches him toss a screwdriver of the German’s from one hand to the other, his pale blue eyes fixed on her, wanting her to say something nice about a dowel. What is she even doing here? He must know she lacks his realtor’s breezy confidence that he can pull this off. And if he is concerned about the money, why risk her seeing the land, or for that matter seeing him with Fern? Then it all seems so obvious. He is as stuck as she is. Even now, he can’t make a move without turning back to see if she will stop him. Some free spirit—more a tangled kite, twisting in the wind. And for the first time all day, she feels like laughing.
“Nice workmanship,” she says at last, and when Fern asks what she thinks of the rest of the house, she smiles sweetly, “I think it has real potential.”
Fern wants to take Ray to see the very end of the property. Gwyneth says she is still a little carsick and would rather wait. Against the side of the house, they find her a bench—just a narrow workbench pocked with ant holes—though she insists it’s perfect. Both of them seem to want her permission to leave, Fern asking a couple more times if she’s sure she’ll be okay. But she smiles and waves them into wilderness. When she can’t hear their voices, she lies back on the bench. Ray’s trees are shifting overhead as though preparing to uproot themselves and walk away. Not that they can, anymore than Ray. She pictures the two of them out on his land, the giant ferns gently stroking their bare arms, not talking so much now. Ray will be watching for a spot where the ground is soft, where he can pull her down. Or maybe Fern, impatient for his touch, will seize his hand and press him against an ancient maple. Let them do it. She wants them to. Let him add another ring. Even if they forget about her, desert her on this bench by the mad German’s half-house, it will make no difference. The sun can go down, the air turn chill, the house cave in behind her. She will be here, waiting.
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