Chapter Text
July 2030 – Montreal
Tessa Virtue never has been much good at good-byes, and Dani is getting awfully tired of putting up with the drama. She’s pretty sure this hug is about to suffocate her, and if that was a tear she just felt drop on her shoulder...well, that’s pretty embarrassing.
“Mum,” says Dani, directly into her mother’s chest. “I can’t breathe.” The arms around her loosen, and she takes a step back.
Yep, those are definitely tears.
They’re standing in an elementary school parking lot not too far from home. A few meters away from them is an idling bus with a Camp Silver Birch logo stenciled on the side. The day is warm and sunny and the air is filled with the sounds of duffels being loaded into the belly of the bus and dozens of other parents and children saying their goodbyes.
Most of the mothers seem to be handling this moment far better than Dani’s.
“My baby,” says Tessa. “Do you have any idea how much I’m going to miss you?”
Dani just shrugs.
“So, so much,” says her mother, answering her own question. “But you know I’m just a phone call away, and your gran can be there in a couple of hours if you need her.”
Typical, Dani thinks. Mum acts like she’s comforting Dani, but she’s really the one who needs the comforting.
But she’d never actually say out loud, so instead she says, “Relax, Mum! I’ll be fine. I’ve wanted to do this forever!” (At least it feels like forever, even though really it’s only been since January, when some of the grade sevens on her swim team started talking about going to camp that summer and Dani decided she wasn’t about to be a step behind them.)
Mum puts one hand on each of Dani’s shoulders and looks her up and down, inspecting every last detail of her carefully pressed camp uniform. “Do you have everything you need? Did you double check the packing list?”
“Triple checked,” says Dani, winking, because she’s different from her mum in a lot of ways but precision packing is a skill they share. “And I’m not going to lose anything either,” she adds with a wink, “thanks to all of your labels.”
“Don’t make fun of my labels!” says Mum. “You’ll be thanking me for them in no time.”
“I wasn’t making fun!” says Dani. She’s been told before that sometimes her attempts at compliments come out more like jabs. It's something she's working on. “I bet my whole cabin will be jealous.”
For some reason this brings a fresh wave of tears to Mum’s eyes. “My girl,” she says, in a shaky voice.
This time, it’s Dani who goes in for the hug.
“Alright, everybody!” shouts a camp counselor. “It’s time to say those last goodbyes and climb on board!”
Dani squeezes her mum a little tighter, in spite of herself. “It’s okay to be nervous, sweetheart.”
“I know,” says Dani quietly. Just then, Mum’s phone rings. Dani pulls out of the hug and Mum takes the phone from her pocket. “It’s work, isn’t it?” guesses Dani.
Mum nods. “But I won’t answer. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“It’s okay,” says Dani. And she means it. She knows her mum has an important job, but she’s never felt pushed aside because of it. “Anyway, I better go now.”
“Write me letters, okay?” says Mum. “I’m sure you’ll have tons to tell me.”
Dani’s already turning away, but she looks back at her mum for just a second and smiles big. “Oh, you know it!” She marches confidently toward the door of the bus, where she offers her name and the counselor gives her hand a firm shake and checks her off a list.
She climbs the one, two, three giant steps and surveys the scene before her. No parents. No teachers. Just a whole lot of girls about her age, laughing, shouting, singing, and a pair near the front playing cards and maybe, possibly, she’s pretty sure, gambling.
Yep. Camp is going to be awesome.
~
July 2030 – Camp Silver Birch, somewhere on the shores of Lake Ontario
“Camp is going to be awesome, lovebug! You’ll see,” says Dad.
Kate just sniffles and stares down at her lap. She wants to look at her dad, but she can tell that if she looks into his eyes she’s going to start really crying again.
“I’m not going to make you do this if you don’t want to anymore,” he says, “but I really think you’re going to have a good time.”
Outside the car Kate can hear the sounds of triumphant arrivals, of long-lost friends being reunited, of jubilation at the expanse of summer that lies ahead. She feels like she doesn’t belong to this scene, like she’s on the outside looking in. She knows it’s probably just because the thick glass of the window is muffling the noise, but she has a tendency to over-think these kinds of things.
Dad speaks up again after a moment. “You seemed so excited all week, eh?”
“I was,” she admits. She finally looks up at him and it takes every ounce of strength in her not to break into sobs. “It’s just...I’ll miss you.”
“Oh, kiddo, me too,” he says, in that magical voice of his, the voice that has been soothing her since before she could even form memories. The voice that makes her sad sometimes that her dad doesn’t have someone else besides her to love, someone else to wrap up in that voice and make them feel cozy and calm.
As always, his comforting tone makes her feel invincible. “I can do this,” she says.
“Of course you can,” says Dad, with a twinkle in his eye. “You’re a Moir.”
The sound of an engine huffing draws Kate’s attention. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a bus pulling up in the drop-off area, the door opening, girls pouring out. “I should probably go,” she says.
“Only if you’re ready.” Dad has this way of empowering her without ever forcing her to do anything, whether it’s at the rink, or school, or anywhere else. It’s one of the things she loves most about him.
“Well, I’m never going to make friends if I’m the last one to arrive,” she says. And then, after a pause, “Thanks for driving me here.”
“Are you kidding? Like I would ever let my favorite daughter ride to her first day of summer camp on, what, a bus?” He sounds very snooty and a little angry but the tiny smile pulling at the corner of his eyes tells Kate he’s kidding around.
She laughs. Another bus pulls in, and now it’s really time. She unbuckles her seatbelt.
Dad rests his hand on her shoulder. “Write me letters, okay? I’m sure you’ll have tons to tell me.”
Kate wipes the last lingering tears from her eyes. “Oh, you know it,” she says. She picks up her backpack from between her feet, pushes the door open, and stands. Her dad hops out the other side and gets her duffel from the trunk, depositing it at her feet.
Before Kate can try to pick up the bag, a cheerful camp counselor has appeared in front of her and grabbed it. “Hi, I’m Shae!” says the older girl. “Welcome to Camp Silver Birch!”
Kate holds out her hand to shake with the counselor but then realizes Shae doesn’t have a free hand to reciprocate. She pulls her hand away and shoves it behind her back, and she can feel her cheeks growing red. The only words she can manage are, “I’m Kate.”
Shae seems unconcerned by the handshake mix-up. “Well, nice to meet you, Kate! Come on with me. We’ll get you checked in and you can meet some of the other girls. That’s the bus from Montreal arriving now. Say bye to Dad!”
Kate looks up at her dad and sees his eyes have gone dark. She wonders if he’s thinking of when he used to live in Montreal, or if he’s just sad to be saying goodbye to her. She pulls him into one last hug.
“My girl,” he says. “Just remember, no matter what, I love you.”
She grins, and tosses back the required response. “And no matter what, I’m going to enjoy this.”
He ruffles the top of her hair. “Bye, bug.” And then her arms are empty, and he’s getting back in the car, turning the key, and backing out of his spot.
Terror flashes through her for a split second, but the sun is shining, and Shae seems nice, and she’s going to be fine. After all, if she skate a clean program in the final slot at an international novice competition, she can certainly handle three weeks at summer camp.
Shae is walking away from her now, toward the buses and the camp buildings, and Kate runs a few steps to catch up. She watches the girls coming off the bus from Montreal. She sees girls of all shapes and sizes, some that look happy and some that look sad. Some that she can see herself making friends with, and some, not so much.
Then she sees something that makes her stop dead in her tracks.
It’s a girl with hair just the color of hers, but shorter. A girl with the same smile as her, the same smile as her dad. A girl with exactly her eyes.
Suddenly the other girl looks her way, and it’s obvious, from the way she stops and stares, that she sees it too.
Their eyes lock, holding each other’s gaze and not letting go.
It’s the smallest of moments, but it changes everything.
~
January 2019 – Ilderton
It’s the smallest of moments, but it changes everything.
Tessa is standing at the sink washing bottles, again, staring out the window at the snow-covered landscape. She has spit-up on her shirt, and bags under her eyes, and she hasn’t had a shower in who-knows-how-long, but that’s all fine. It really is. Because she loves her daughters and she doesn’t regret them. How could she, when they have her green eyes and (as of just the other day, when she noted it on the page of milestones in each of their baby books) his warm, crinkly, perfect smile?
What she does regret, though, is that somehow she ended up here, in a little house just down the road from his parents, doing dishes and laundry all day when there’s a whole world out there just going on without her and she has no plans to rejoin it anytime soon. She can remember being twelve, or twenty, or even twenty-eight, and thinking she wanted a life with him, but she never imagined it being like this.
Her phone buzzes in her back pocket.
He’s probably texting to say he’s on the way home. Maybe stopping for groceries and wants her list. She turns off the water, towels off her hands, reaches for her phone.
It’s not a text, but an email. From McGill University. Dear Ms. Virtue, Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you...
Business school. She’d almost forgotten. She applied before the girls were born, not because she intended to go right away, but because she wanted to see what would happen. And now...it’s happening.
Something snaps inside her, and she knows. She’s going.
Just like that she’s upstairs, running from room to room, throwing things into suitcases for her and the girls. This is new to her, the idea of doing something on an impulse. She’s always been a planner, even more so since she became a mother, but life has thrown something at her out of nowhere and she’s going to do her damnedest to make the most of it.
When the bags are packed, she hauls them downstairs, trying to ignore the stitch in her side. It’s like her muscles are telling her don’t do this, but she doesn’t want to listen. Her feet take her back upstairs and into the nursery. She pauses in the doorway.
It’s so peaceful. The afternoon sun filtering through the curtains covers the whole room in pale pink light, and the white noise machine in the corner dulls the screaming thoughts in her mind. It hurts to disturb this, but she has to. Ever so gently, one by one she lifts her daughters out of the crib (that they still share because they’re so little, and they comfort each other, and they keep each other warm), and sets them down into their car seats.
She’s tip-toeing down the stairs, trying to move quickly but smoothly so she doesn’t jostle the babies and wake them up, when she realizes that the sun is dipping lower in the sky and it must be later than she thought. Without even meaning to, she’s gotten herself into a race to make it out of here before Scott gets home.
She’s fumbling with the toggle buttons on her coat, going down a mental checklist, when it strikes her that she doesn’t even know who she is anymore because the Tessa she used to be would never try to run away from Scott, good, loyal, supportive Scott, in secret. There’s so much about her that’s changed. She’s not sure whether she likes the person she’s become.
Then, the sound of his key in the lock. Her fingers freeze mid-button. He pushes the door open and steps inside, stops short when he sees her, the two baby seats, and a whole bunch of luggage all gathered in the foyer.
“Um, hi,” he says. “Where are you going?” An entirely reasonable question.
“Montreal,” she blurts out. She felt a bit odd about holding onto her place there when she moved to Ilderton, but now she’s happy she did.
“Why?” he pushes. “When are you coming back?”
She says nothing. He looks at her face, at the suitcases, back at her face again, and suddenly he knows. You’re not coming back, she can see him thinking, but he doesn’t dare say it out loud.
Still she says nothing. He reaches for her hand, and she shies away. Her eyes are trained on the floor, but she can feel his eyes like knives, staring at her. “What’s going on, T?”
I love you, she wants to say. But she knows it won’t change anything. It won’t change all the ways they’ve always been different and always will be.
So instead she says, “This isn’t me, Scott. This...all of this. I need to figure out who I am...outside of us.” His whole body changes when she says it, but she forges ahead. “I need more.” She hates how the words are coming out like some horrible romance novel cliché, not at all how she wanted them to.
“How long have you been feeling this way?” he says, pleading. She doesn’t want to tell him the truth, so she doesn’t answer, lets him keep talking. “Why didn’t you tell me? What happened to talking about things?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, I just...I don’t know.”
“So you’re...what? Leaving me?”
“Moving back,” she spits, before she can chicken out. “Going to business school.”
“Don’t do this,” he says.
“I have to,” she replies.
“Well, you’re not taking the girls,” he says. “That’s not fair.”
And she hadn’t really thought about it, but of course it’s not. Then again, what solution could possibly be fair to them both when they each love those babies more than anything in the world?
She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a ragged exhale. “One each, then.”
“Are you—” he starts, and then stops himself. “This isn’t the fucking Parent Trap, Tess.”
From her car seat on the floor, one of the babies lets out a whimper. In one fluid motion Scott picks her up and starts to rock her. After a moment, she’s quiet again.
“She always settles better for you,” says Tessa. “You take her.” She’s said it before, more than once, in the middle of the night when the baby’s screams came blaring through the monitor. This time, it’s forever.
Scott doesn’t say anything, just stands there bouncing the baby gently up and down. He’s staring down at his daughter like she’s everything, and Tessa’s not sure she’s ever loved him more. It’s now or never to tear herself away. She reaches over and opens the front door.
His head jolts up. “If you leave right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you,” he says, low and measured like he’s trying to put armor around his heart.
“Well if I don’t,” she says, even as something inside of her is breaking, “I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself.”
“Tessa, please,” he tries one last time.
Without another word—because she’s not sure what words she could possibly find to say to him now—she takes a suitcase in one hand, a baby seat in the other, and walks out the door.
Only when she’s safe in the bubble of her car, right foot heavy on the gas, eyes glued to the horizon, does she let herself think about the things she’s leaving behind. Some of them she’ll have to send someone—her mother, maybe—to pack up and bring to her; some of them are things that can’t be touched, or held, or taken back.
She turns off his family’s dirt road and onto the main drag toward the center of town. Then, only then, does she let the tears fall.
Tessa Virtue never has been much good at good-byes.