Jessie Van Rheenen
When the girl was twenty-five, her husband lost his first wedding ring. They'd been married less than a year. It was a beautiful gold band, engraved with leaping dolphins. A family heirloom from his side. He told her the whole story: how he was rowing on the lake when the cat's paw wind picked up and then the rain started. On shore, she'd watched the clouds darken and open over their cottage after hours of calm blue sky. The rare June storm. He told her how he battled back to the beach, trying mightily to keep the nose of his boat perpendicular to the crests, and barely made it in over shoulder-high waves. But his fingers were so, so cold—runs in the family, you know, Mother had terrible Raynaud's—and at some point the band slipped off.
After the storm, he spent days snorkeling back and forth, looking for the glint of the ring in the sand.
Stop, the girl said finally. She felt sure it wasn't a sign that he didn't love her enough. Who believed in those omens, anyway? They went out and bought another cheaper ring at a pawnshop in Reno.
When he lost his second wedding ring, their friends back in the big city laughed, said what a rake—that's the way these friends talked. And you had to admit: two seemed harder to ignore. The girl tried to laugh along with them, though it came out weakly. She hadn't been feeling well since the first ring. She'd become too familiar with the ugly avocado tile of their bathroom floor.
She'd had two abortions before she got married. One was in college, and the other was with a man she spent time with right before her husband. The first one seemed like bad luck, but the second had made her worry. What did it say about her as a person? Her husband knew only about the first. She'd meant to tell him, once, until she found she no longer meant to. She didn't think about either often, except to wonder if she should be thinking about them more. But she tried to reject that kind of thinking. And she had other things to keep her up.
The girl was pregnant again, it turned out, and sick all the time. She stayed at their little rented house by the lake while her husband drove his old pickup to work. He kissed her every morning, his hand over her ear, See you, sweet pea, and the coffee breath moving from his mouth to hers almost made her heave.
She spent a lot of time by the front windows. Their nubby lawn met the lake after a slim stripe of volcanic sand. Birds picked at the dangling feeder and spat seed onto the ground. Every so often, one flew into the glass with a bump she could hear from anywhere in the house. She always let them stay there on the ground, crumpled, and about half the time, the birds flew away an hour later. Sometimes they left a little smear of feathers on the glass.
The girl's husband lost his second ring on a job site for a new custom home. A real mansion, he said from beside her in bed while she tried to read a baby name book. This couple timed things just right and made bank. You wouldn't believe what they've got us putting in there: home theater, bar in the basement, eleven bathrooms. Though a few are half-baths, he conceded. Eleven bathrooms! The girl tried to imagine what one would possibly do with eleven bathrooms, half or not.
Her husband worked late, even Saturdays and Sundays, and always came home tired and on edge. She was between temp jobs—no point looking now with the baby so close. The decor in their rental became oppressive: two mismatched floral couches in the space for one, pewter chandelier over patio furniture in the kitchen, peeling fake brick mantel. The bathroom had a bidet they referred to as 'the foot bath' after she'd washed her sandy feet in it, unsure what else to do with an extra basin so close to the toilet. When she lost things and looked for them, the girl instead found other people's bobby pins and earring backs between cushions or under the bed. They all went into a Christmas cookie tin rather than the trash, hopefully, as if she or someone else might make use of them one day.
She dreamed almost nightly of rings. Rings and babies. Giving birth to infants with rings around their necks like golden collars, rings inside the mouths they opened for their first cry, rings for eyes, an umbilical cord made of stacked rings. Her own mother had never worn a wedding ring, and now the girl thought she knew why.
Even in late summer, there was too much wind to walk by the lake. She felt exposed. The whorls of glittering rock with many names—pyrite, brazzle, fool's gold—gave her some weary false hope. She hated the feeling at least as much as she hated the clutter inside. Instead she walked the neighborhood, breathing deeply. Her throat felt raw. To distract herself, she picked out the perfect house for each month of the year. That white colonial for December. The Italianate villa for August. That cozy craftsman for October—why not? She wanted a life of clean lines, she saw now. The equivalent of the drying barn they'd passed once on a road trip when she was young, all gray wood slats and open air. She wanted to find that feeling in a house. It seemed to her the most important work.
The girl passed yard markers for the company where her husband worked as a foreman. She saw open house signs out on corners in the afternoons. Often she followed the cheerful notices in. A few were almost foreclosures, families desperate to sell. Some homes were sweet, with gables and flower boxes and working shutters. One had blue hopscotch squares painted on the terrace, and another had tuna tartare and artichoke toast out on trays in the foyer. She didn't trust the fish, but ate three of the toasts and kept them down.
People looked at the girl differently now. The hard-soft lump gave her an appearance of vulnerability and kindness. She started wearing stretchy dresses over leggings, her long dark hair drawn up. She walked around in flat slippers like a dancer might. She'd never been made to feel gentle before. Now, she was given first go at the bathroom, gladly, touched by strangers, and trusted with other people's children.
At one open house, a woman needed to take a call outside and left her little boy with the girl. He wore a tiny backpack in the shape of a watermelon slice and his left shoe was untied. While they waited together, he scratched his ear. Can I touch the baby? he asked.
Of course not, she said, horrified. She raised her hands to her belly like a fence. The boy looked crestfallen, as though this was the answer he'd expected.
She liked to think she'd developed an eye for staging and an instinct for what was false. That someone's career consisted of picking out abstract, inoffensive paintings and cool gray fabric palettes to appeal to potential buyers like her seemed a waste; she at least vastly preferred the homes that felt lived-in. Real. The girl peered into every unlocked closet and touched the hanging shirts, feeling an affinity for the absent owners through their unlucky, inconvenient belongings.
When zealous agents asked her to sign in, leave her information and any feedback on the property, she used her name but invented email addresses that felt real enough: thesearchinglady@gmail.com. Lassonthemove@hotmail.com. Mrsringcollector33@yahoo.net.
At another house, one with exposed beams and a stone façade, she told the nosy realtor she was a single mother-to-be. She'd been recently widowed. It was a tragic boating accident. You're looking to start over? the woman said. This is just the place! Or at the next one, her baby's father became an all-star sperm donor. Very well educated. Great teeth and DNA. No curse of disapproving parents-in-law.
Sometimes she astonished herself. A former boss, unseen in the next room of a newly-listed rancher, overheard the latest one, about her dear husband stationed on a stealth submarine in the Pacific, and she had to laugh off the poor man's bewilderment. After, she put an end to those stories.
During her daily walks, the girl wondered which job site was the one where her husband—the real, flesh-and-bone one—had lost his second ring. If it was buried in rubble or maybe lodged in someone's fresh foundation. If it too had been washed down to the bottom of the lake.
He left his third ring on the kitchen counter. He must've taken it off to do the dishes. The girl took this ring and put it in her Santa tin with the other shiny lost bits. She waited for him to ask her about it. To come to her, rueful and shamefaced.
He went to work the next morning. He came home for a late dinner. They had broiled trout with noodles, and he kept his left hand in his lap while he ate and spat out the fishbones into a small pile.
Where's your ring? the girl asked. He was drinking black coffee now, though they hadn't cleared their plates yet.
What do you mean?
Your new ring.
I put it in my bedside drawer when I went out rowing on the lake, he said.
No, you didn't.
What?
You didn't. I took it, she said.
Why would you do a thing like that? He pushed his chair back.
I think we should move, she said.
This is all the hormones talking, isn't it.
I've been looking at houses. It's a good time to buy, if we're staying here. Property values are going to go up, business will be good for you with so many remodels and teardowns. We shouldn't keep renting. She took a sip of her seltzer. Besides, she said, what if the baby crawls out into the lake?
Do you hear yourself? he asked.
Or more likely chokes on your latest wedding ring. The way you leave them lying around. Careless, Joseph.
Yes, you're absolutely right, he said. The baby will crawl into the lake and find my first ring and choke on it. Doubly dead.
It was horrible, but the girl laughed. She went into the bedroom and got his ring from her tin and he put it back on. This third one was copper. It had squared ridges and worn initials inside the band, what looked like an H and maybe an R. He hadn't told the girl the story before, but now he did: He'd found it on a new job exactly one week after he'd lost his second ring at the other site.
I cut into a chunk of insulation from a cabin we scraped and saw something shine inside the pink fibers. A sign, he said, as he splayed his fingers over her stomach and kept them there. He drummed them and she thought she felt the baby leap inside her like a little steelhead.
No one ever claimed it, sweet pea, he added, as if she'd accused him of something awful. They say the place used to belong to an old hermit fisherman. But who knows? Probably a dead man's ring. I didn't want to upset you.
She nodded, as though this all made perfect sense.