Inside

ONE

Montreal, 1996

AT FIRST GLANCE, she mistook him for something else. In the fading winter light he could have been a branch or a log, even a tire; in the many years she’d been cross-country skiing on Mount Royal, she’d found stranger debris across her path. People left behind their scarves, their shoes, their inhibitions: she’d come across lovers naked to the sky, even on cold days. In spite of these distractions, the mountain was the one place where she felt at peace, especially in winter, when tree branches stretched empty of leaves and she could see the city below her — its clusters of green-spired churches and gray skyscrapers laid out, graspable, streets rolling down to the Old Port, and in either direction the bridges extending over the pale water of the St. Lawrence. This winter had been mild, and what snow did fall first melted, then turned to ice overnight. Now, at the end of January, it had finally snowed all night and all day, at last enough to ski on. Luckily her final appointment that afternoon had canceled, leaving her free to drive up before the light was gone. She slipped around the Chalet and headed into the woods, losing the vista of Montreal below, gaining muffled silence and solitude, the trees turning the light even fainter. One skier had been here before her, leaving a path of parallel stripes. On a slight downhill slope she crouched down and picked up speed as she moved around a bend.

Turning, she saw the branch or whatever it was too late. Though she tried to slow down, she wasn’t quick enough and ran right into it and was knocked out of her skis, falling sideways into the snow, realizing only when she sat up that what had tripped her was the body of a man. Her legs were on top of his, her right knee throbbing from the impact.

The air torn from her returned slowly, painfully, to her burning lungs. When she could breathe she said, “Are you all right?”

There was no answer. He was flung across the trail with his head half buried in the snow. Beyond his body the ski marks stopped. She thought he must have had an accident, but then she saw his skis propped neatly against a tree.

She got to her feet and gingerly stepped around until she could see his face. He wasn’t wearing a hat. “Excuse me,” she said, louder. “Are you okay?” She thought maybe he’d collapsed after a heart attack or stroke. He lay sprawled on his side, knees bent, eyes closed, one arm up above his head. “Monsieur?” she said. “Ça va?”

Kneeling down to check his pulse, she saw the rope around his neck. Thick and braided, it trailed beneath him, almost nestled under his arm, and the other end rested on a snowbank — no, was buried underneath it — and on the other side she could see that the branch it had been tied to had broken off.

She hurriedly loosened the rope and found the beating rhythm in his neck, then opened the first few snaps of his coat in the hope that this might help him to breathe. His face wasn’t blue. He was around her age, thirties, his short, wavy, brown hair riddled with gray. Still his eyes wouldn’t open. Should she slap him? Administer CPR? She pushed him gently onto his back. “Monsieur?” she said again. He didn’t move.

She skied quickly back to the Chalet and called 911. In her halting French, all the more fractured because she was out of breath, she tried to describe where in the woods they were. When she returned, he was lying where she’d found him. “Sir,” she said, “my name is Grace. Je m’appelle Grace. I called for help. Everything will be all right. Vous êtes sauvé.”

She put her ear next to his mouth to hear his breath. His eyes were still closed, but he heavily, unmistakably, sighed.

Later, at the Montreal General, she realized that both pairs of skis had been left behind. The emergency workers had loaded the man into the ambulance and she had followed it, weaving through the traffic along Côte-des-Neiges. She wasn’t even sure why. Because the Urgences-santé men had looked at her expectantly, assuming she and the man had been skiing together? Because one of them had said, in commingled English and French, “The police—ils vont vous poser des questions at the ’ospital,” and she had nodded obediently, like a schoolgirl?

It was partly curiosity, to know what had driven him to such an act; and partly pity, because anyone driven to hang himself would have to be suffering deeply and terribly. And it was partly that she of all people had been the one to throw herself across his path.

Maybe it was just because she wanted to know what had happened. Regardless, she was sitting in the waiting room hours later, shivering each time the glass doors slid open with an icy draft. The linoleum was streaked with gray-brown slush people had tracked in, and she could smell car exhaust and cigarette smoke from the sidewalk outside. There was no sign of any police officer wanting to ask her questions. The man had been wheeled off, with a canopy of nurses over his still-silent body. Grace waited, though she wasn’t sure for what or whom. When she remembered the skis — probably long gone by now — she smacked herself on the forehead. Hers were practically brand-new. She looked at her watch; it was seven o’clock, completely dark on the mountain. She was tired and hungry and ready to go home. Before she did, though, she wanted to know that he was being taken care of. She walked over to a nurse at the reception area.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Can I see him?”

The nurse didn’t look up from her paperwork. “Qui, madame?”

“The man who was brought in earlier. The skier.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his name. He was found on the mountain.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“I found him up there.”

“So you aren’t family.” Her tone was hostile, weary.

“I’m a therapist,” Grace said suddenly. “Une psychologue?” The nurse nodded, her manner softening at the French. Now she seemed to grant her a professional capacity, and Grace didn’t disabuse her. “I must see him as soon as possible,” she said, trying to sound authoritative.

The nurse hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and pointed to the elevator. “Three sixteen,” she said.

Grace knocked before entering. The man was lying on his back, wearing a hospital gown, an IV drip attached to his arm. He was staring at the ceiling with a blank expression that didn’t change when she came in. Whatever pain he’d been feeling on the mountain was absent from his face now; he might have been waiting for a train. Visible around his neck was the thick red abrasion from the rope. Clearing her throat, she sat down in a chair next to the bed.

“Do you speak English?” she said. No answer. “Vous parlez français?” Again, nothing. “I took a little Spanish in high school, but that’s all gone, so these are pretty much your only options,” she said. His clothes were folded and stacked on a bedside table. “I’m going to look through your things for your name, unless you specifically tell me not to.” She went through the clothes, feeling for a wallet, and he made no move to stop her, even when she found it and pulled out his license. John Tugwell. English after all. She put everything back as it had been and sat down again. “John, my name is Grace,” she said, “and I’m a therapist, though that’s not why I’m here. I was just skiing when I found you lying on the ground. The branch you tied yourself to broke off. I called the ambulance.” But for a blink, he made no sign of being conscious. She couldn’t even tell if he was listening. His hands, palms down above the blanket, lay flat, unclenched.

“There usually aren’t many people in that part of the park,” she said, “which I guess must be why you chose it. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t come along. Would you have tried again, after a while?”

He said nothing.

There were deep lines around his eyes, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. His lips were unnaturally pale. Beneath the thin hospital blanket his body looked sturdy and solidly muscled. It was impossible to tell, as he lay there, whether he was handsome or not. The spirit that would have animated his face, giving it character and attitude, had receded from view. She stepped closer. Even at this little distance his body seemed to give off no heat whatsoever, as if he’d been permanently chilled.

“You’re back from the dead,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want to be, but you are.”

For the first time his eyes met hers. They were green. Then he blinked again and closed them.

“If you want to talk,” Grace said, “I can listen.”

They wheeled him out and then returned him to the room with his leg encased in a black boot, and the doctor came and spoke to Grace as if she had a right to be there. His ankle was sprained. There were scrapes and bruises all over his face, but they weren’t serious. A nurse dropped off some crutches. The doctor, who looked exhausted and no more than twenty-five, gave him a prescription for painkillers and told him to come back in two weeks. Grace said she’d drive him home.

“Sir, we need to evaluate your situation before you go,” the doctor said obliquely. When the patient said nothing, he turned to Grace. “An appointment will be made with the psychiatric department,” he said, his manner very formal.

She nodded.

“Our staff will make you the appointment?” the doctor said, turning back toward him.

From the bed, the man’s eyes met hers in a plea. She shrugged; he had already refused her help.

He coughed and said, “I didn’t really mean to do it.” His voice was hoarse and clouded with phlegm, as if the words were caught deep inside, trapped in some cave or web.

“What do you mean?” the doctor asked.

“I just wanted to see what she’d say.” Tugwell jerked a thumb in Grace’s direction. His voice was painfully rasped and he swallowed visibly after he spoke, but then he modulated it to a tone of playful wryness. “We were skiing together and I told her I was going to kill myself and went off in a different direction. I said I had the rope with me and was going to do it immediately. It took her nine minutes to decide to come after me. Nine minutes! Can you believe that? I timed her.”

“You told your wife you were going to kill yourself to see how she would react, and then you timed her?” the doctor said, frowning skeptically. A francophone, possibly he thought he hadn’t understood the story correctly.

“Almost ten minutes,” Tugwell said. His eyes sprang back to her, and her heart twisted strangely in her chest.

The doctor looked at Grace. For a moment she hesitated: to go along with his story was so absurd that no sane person would even consider it. This man needed help, starting with the psychiatric evaluation and professional intervention. Yet something in his expression, a sense of collusion, drew her in. The spark of life in his eyes was so sudden and bright that she wanted to keep it there, to fan it from a flicker to a flame.

Maybe it was because she thought the hospital would likely give him the briefest, most cursory treatment. Or because she felt responsible for having brought him in. Or because she was happy that he’d turned to her for help.

“He’s never there for me either,” she said, as petulantly as she could.

The doctor sighed heavily and checked his watch. “So this is a marital squabble.”

Grace nodded.

Tugwell said, “I guess things got out of hand.”

The doctor, shrugging as if this weren’t the strangest behavior he had ever seen, clicked the end of his pen and made a notation on the chart.

“I’ll take care of him,” Grace said.

Too busy to worry about it, the doctor left.

When they were alone in the room, Tugwell looked at her again. The flicker had gone from his eyes, as if the effort of that one lie had tired him beyond all reckoning. “Don’t you have anywhere else to be?”

“This isn’t about me,” she said.

“Dodgeball.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, I meant dodging the question. I’m groggy.”

“I’m not dodging the question,” Grace said, although she was. “I just don’t think it really matters. Nothing about me really matters right now, not to you. You’re hurt and I’m willing to drive you home and get you settled. Or I can call someone else. Do you want me to do that? Is there somebody you want me to call?”

He closed his eyes.

“Do you need help getting dressed, John?”

“Tug,” he said. “And no.”

“Is this another dodgeball thing?”

“I’m called Tug.”

“Okay, Tug,” she said. “I’ll be right outside. Call if you need me.”

When she came back five minutes later he was in his gray fleece jacket and black ski pants, with one unzipped pant leg rolled up over the ankle cast. She pushed him in a wheelchair to the parking lot and helped him into her car, stowing the crutches in the backseat. Inside she cranked up the heat, and he leaned his head back and said nothing. She wondered where his family was. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. If he didn’t want her to be taking care of him, he wasn’t putting up much of a fight — but the resistance could be internal. He might just be waiting for her to go away, and then he’d try again. Those were the ones who often went through with it, the cases who humored you until you finally left them alone.

“Do you live by yourself?”

“Yes. You?”

“Yes.”

“Not married?”

“Divorced.”

“Me too,” he said. “Well, separated. Not official.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is that why you wanted to do this?”

There was a slight pause before he said, “You don’t beat around.”

“No point,” she said, adopting his bulleted way of speaking.

He looked out the window until she understood he wasn’t going to answer the question. Which was fair enough, but then he turned back. “You’re a therapist, you said.”

“Yes, that’s right. I have an office on Côte-des-Neiges. Grace Tomlinson. You could come by if you wanted to, or call, any time. I’m listed.”

“This is how you get business? Skiing around looking for depressed people?”

“That’s right, exactly,” Grace said cheerfully. One of her professional skills was to remain unruffled. “It was a slow day until you turned up. Can you direct me from here?”

He nodded. They drove north along St. Laurent, through Little Italy, into a neighborhood where most of the signs were in Vietnamese. He told her to turn onto a darker side street, mainly of triplexes, the external staircases dusted with snow. Finally, in front of a yellow brick building, he asked her to pull over. Lights showed on every floor. People don’t leave lights on unless they think they’re coming back, she thought. “Someone waiting for you in there, Tug?”

“You’re inquisitive,” he said.

“Yes. You said you lived alone, so why didn’t you turn off the lights?”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. After a moment he said, “The lights are on for the dog.”

“You have a dog?”

He shook his head. “It’s my ex-wife’s dog. My wife’s. Whatever she is to me now, it’s her dog. But she had to go out of town, so I’m taking care of it. This happens all the time. She’s picking him up later. He would’ve been fine, okay? He has water, food, a chew toy. I hate that dog.”

“Why do you suppose that is?” Grace said.

“Jesus, is this the therapy-mobile? Are you giving therapy to me in your car? I’ve been in therapy before.” The words spilled out of him, scratchy but hectic. “You know, the most helpful thing the therapist ever said to me was, There’s never going to be a perfect time to do anything in your life. Maybe today wasn’t the perfect time to do what I did, what with the dog being there and everything, but I remembered what the therapist told me and I was consoled.”

“You were consoled, really?” Grace said. This wasn’t a phrase she heard every day.

“Yeah, kind of. Within limits.”

“As with everything,” Grace said, earning, for the first time, a nod of agreement from him.

He opened the door and hopped out, then opened the back door to retrieve his crutches. As he tried to pull them out, he lost his balance and fell to the ground, and the crutches careened away on the icy sidewalk. “Fucking hell,” he said.

She turned off the engine and got out. He was hopping angrily up and down, trying to reach a crutch that had landed upside down in a snowbank. She picked it up, dusted off the snow, and held it under his right arm. He was balancing, just barely, on the other crutch. He took a step toward the front door, then fell down again.

“Look, I think you’re going to have to let me help you.”

He said nothing. She put her arm around his waist and braced her hip against his, forcing him to lean on her, then stepped carefully up the walk with his arm across her shoulders. He used a crutch on the other side to help them both up the stairs. It took them five minutes to reach the front door, and another two for him to fish the keys out of his pocket.

Once the door was open, without looking at her, he muttered, “Thanks.”

“Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“You need help. I don’t think there’s anybody in there except a dog that can’t help you with the crutches.”

“You don’t know that. He’s a pretty smart dog.”

“Well, he’d also have to be a tall and dexterous dog,” Grace said, “which is rarer.”

He shrugged. Resignation was all he had to offer. Inside, the place was nicer than she had expected: wood floors, Persian rugs, bookshelves, artwork. There were stairs off to the right; she was sure the bedroom was upstairs, which wouldn’t be easy for him.

He crutched awkwardly toward the back of the apartment, and the dog came out to greet him, a tiny Dachshund that pranced around his shins and whined. Worried that Tug might lose his balance, Grace sat down on the couch and called the dog over, and he jumped up into her lap and settled down like a cat.

“Aren’t you friendly?” Grace said. She heard water running in the kitchen, then it stopped.

Tug stumbled back into view. “Look, I appreciate your help and everything, but I’ll be fine now.”

“Do you have some friends or family we could call? You shouldn’t be alone.”

“In our hearts none of us are ever alone,” Tug said. “The therapist told me that, too.”

She decided to try a different tack. “What floor is the bathroom on?”

“There’s one on each.”

“And your bedroom?”

He sighed. “Upstairs. Why are you so pushy?”

“I’m not pushy. I’m efficient. I’ll get you settled in and then I’ll go. I think it makes the most sense for you to sleep down here. I can go upstairs and get some sheets and things. I’ll just take them off the bed, okay? I won’t snoop around or touch anything. I’ll be right back.”

He shrugged, as best he could with the crutches under his arms, and sat down in an armchair. The dog deserted her for him.

Though she tried to keep her pledge, she couldn’t help but notice that the furnishings upstairs were equally tasteful. It didn’t seem like him at all. It wasn’t that she thought he wouldn’t be tasteful, just that he would be neglectful of things like that. It must be the influence of the ex-wife. She stripped the bed of its duvet and sheets, carried them bundled in her arms downstairs, and made up the couch.

“What do you have in here to eat?” she said.

Now he looked not annoyed but amused, the barest quiver of a smile hovering around his lips. “Nothing.”

“Let’s order a pizza,” she said.

“Are you serious? Come on. Who are you?”

“I found you in the snow,” she said, “and I don’t want you to kill yourself.”

“So you think you control me now. You own my life.”

“No, I think we should order a pizza.”

And she did. The dog went outside through a pet door into the triplex’s small backyard, where he tiptoed around anxiously before running back inside. Grace set plates, napkins, and glasses out on the coffee table. When the pizza came, she paid for it. It was ten o’clock already and she had patients the next morning, but she didn’t care. She could tell Tug thought she was a busybody or some deeply lonely person with nothing to go home to. These things were possibly a little bit true. What was mostly true, though, was that she didn’t like to fail at things, as she would if she left him and he killed himself, because it was within her power — merely with her presence — to stop it.

They ate pizza and watched a movie from the seventies starring Jane Fonda. After it ended she said, “Why don’t you try to get some sleep? Do you want me to bring you some painkillers?” Thus far, she hadn’t seen him take any of the prescribed drugs.

“Nightingale,” he said.

“You mean Florence? Look, I just want you to be comfortable.”

“I’d be more comfortable if you left,” he said. “Didn’t you say you’d get me settled and then leave?”

“I can’t do that,” Grace said. “At least not tonight.”

“Why?” he said, his voice flattened to a tone of pure exasperation.

“Because if I left and you killed yourself, it would be my fault.”

Prone on the couch, his head against a cushion, his bandaged ankle raised on another, he frowned at her. The color had returned to his lips, and she noticed that they were quite pink, not feminine but sensual, the lower lip full, even when straightened, as it was right now, in an angry line. “You want this to be all about you, is that it? You have a complex or something.”

“Maybe,” she said lightly.

“You want me to owe you.”

“You don’t owe me anything. I don’t want anything except for you not to kill yourself.”

“Why?” he said again.

“If you saw someone about to commit a murder,” Grace said, “wouldn’t you feel obligated to stop it?”

He shook his head. “This is different.”

“Not to me.”

“Maybe you’re on some kind of sexual kick. You’re attracted to damaged men you think you can save and therefore control.”

Grace laughed. “Who’s the therapist now?”

Though she would have denied this last charge to her dying breath, she did have to fight the urge to go over, sit down next to him, and hold his hand. She felt that a physical touch might ground him somehow. She wanted to put her palm on his shoulder or cheek, to communicate through her skin that he wasn’t alone, that his particular self was worthy of recognition, held value and weight. She moved a little closer, though still in the armchair, not wanting to alarm him.

“My ex-wife would be very unhappy if she found you here,” Tug said.

“Why is that?”

“She’s very jealous.”

“There’s nothing here to be jealous of.”

“You don’t think? She comes back and finds a strange woman in my house giving me an extracurricular therapy session? Is that what they’re calling it these days? That’s what she’d say.”

“You’re getting divorced because you were unfaithful,” Grace said.

“No,” Tug said. “No.” For the first time she saw his face lose its impassive hold, now twisting in the grip of emotion, with tears welling in his eyes.

She waited for him to go on, but when he didn’t, she decided to change the subject. “What do you do for a living?”

Tug looked at her evenly, his eyes gone suddenly dry. “I work at a stationery store.”

“Stationery as in paper.”

“Wedding invitations, office letterhead, thank-you notes. Whereas you’re a commando therapist, running around offering counsel to people in pain wherever you find them.”

“I don’t know how you feel about your work,” Grace said slowly. “But for me, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to pick and choose your moments. It seems inconsistent to be a therapist all day and then act completely different at night. Do you see what I mean?”

She saw him finally see her, really take her in, not as an irritant or an obstacle but as a person. She saw herself register on his mind. He was staring at her, and without knowing exactly why, she felt herself flush.

“I guess I don’t feel that way about my work with paper,” he said, and smiled.

“Does your ankle hurt?”

“Not so you’d notice,” he said.

It was midnight, the dog sleeping in Tug’s lap. There was no sign of the ex-wife. Grace watched him for a little while, in the dark of the strange living room. By half past twelve they were both asleep, she in the armchair, he on the couch, and when she woke up in the morning he was still alive.

Having quickly showered and changed, Grace was in her office before nine. Her back ached from dozing off and on in the armchair all night. She’d left Tug glowering on the couch, no happier than he’d been the night before, nor any more willing to discuss what had happened on the mountain. She was reluctant to leave him alone, but she couldn’t stay and witness his life indefinitely, much as she’d been tempted. The morning passed quickly, though Tug was always there in the back of her mind, his voice coming back like a song’s refrain. She kept thinking about his blank face as he lay in the snow, the angry redness on his neck, and how his eyes had suddenly, startlingly come to life when he concocted that ridiculous story in the hospital. What kind of person was he?

Again and again she pushed her curiosity away and tried to focus on the individuals in her office, the bustle and din of an ordinary day. Frank Lavallée, the fifty-five-year-old, mid-divorce recovering alcoholic. Mike and Denise Morgenstern, a married couple from Rosemount who couldn’t talk to each other without arguing. Annie Hardwick, who was sixteen years old and cut herself. As they spoke, Grace narrowed her gaze on their faces. Their mouths moved constantly, their lips pressed flat in concentration, wet with spittle or foam when agitated, injury or emotion written there first. Annie’s mouth showed a twinkle of braces that came and went, flashing in the soft light of the office lamp like signals from a faraway ship.

When Annie felt the urge to cut herself, Grace told her, she should visualize herself as a movie star — the girl’s fantasy of a successful life — and convert the energy into a different behavior, something a star might do, like exercise or studying her lines (for which homework could stand in). This was what they were working on. Annie had a journal in which she wrote down her thoughts, and she reluctantly showed it to Grace, her neat handwriting chronicling all her dismal urges, the thirst for pain, the hunger to see her own blood. Cutting, she wrote, was the only thing she could really feel. She craved it, enjoying the building anticipation and then the secret, controlled fulfillment, the private pain she lavished upon herself like a gift. On the journal’s cover was a photo of an all-boy band she’d scissored out of a magazine, and next to that was a shot of the beach house where she spent summers with her family and a strip of pictures taken with a friend in a booth at the mall. All these images were safe and sweet and innocent, while the notes inside were unhappy and violent and tortured. I am rotten, she wrote. I am diseased.

Grace had given her an assignment: to write a letter to herself from the future, a happy future in which she’d gotten everything she wanted, about what she’d been through as a teenager and how she’d survived it. Annie complained — she had enough homework to deal with already! — but Grace knew she liked the satisfaction of being given tasks she could complete, unlike the larger task she set herself every day, which was to be beautiful, smart, unassailable, and perfect.

Grace felt for Annie the particular pity that a person who had a happy childhood feels for one who didn’t. An only child, she herself had grown up in a world dense with her own imagination. For three years she’d had a make-believe friend named Rollo Hartin. Her indulgent parents had set a place for Rollo at the dinner table and plumped an extra pillow for him in her bed. Grace was the kind of child who brought home injured birds and tried to nurse them back to health. When she saw cats wandering around the neighborhood, she took them home for bowls of milk. Hours or days later, their confused, angry owners would stop by to reclaim them.

This was in a leafy suburb of Toronto. Her parents were happily married. Doctors themselves, they had found in each other the ideal mate. Every evening at five o’clock they’d come home, open a bottle of white wine, and talk to each other about their day for half an hour; just the two of them, wrapped up in their own company. They believed that the foundation of a family was a strong marriage — which Grace, as an adult, also believed — and yet somehow the very strength of their marriage, the unity of the front, sometimes gave her the impression that she was an intruder in it. As soon as she went off to the University of Toronto her parents retired, sold the house, and moved to an island off the coast of British Columbia, where her father worked on a novel, her mother made ceramics, and they still observed the white-wine ritual at five o’clock every day.

Grace had spent her life attempting to recreate in her own space the perfection of her parents’ lives. It hadn’t helped that they always made it look so easy. There was an inherent mystery to the simplicity of it, to how well things worked out for them. They must have been the luckiest people alive.

When she was at university, she met Mitch Mitchell. His actual first name, which he considered unusable, was Francis. A graduate student in clinical psychology, he was the teaching assistant in a lab her second year. She had originally intended to study literature, because she liked analyzing the motivations of people in stories, but it turned out that the truer draw was psychology itself. Getting to the roots of human behavior, the mind laid bare in all its frailties and contradictions, fascinated her. She fell in love with the subject and Mitch at the same time, and later on she wasn’t always certain that she had kept the two things separate in her mind. After they married, she followed him to Montreal, where he had a residency, and enrolled in graduate school herself.

The first few years passed quickly. They both kept very busy. On the weekends they went hiking in the Laurentians or out to eat downtown, Grace marveling, as they drove past, at the crowds lined up outside Schwartz’s all day and night. Mitch taught her to love Fairmount bagels, which they ate straight from the bag and still hot from the oven, unable to wait until they got home. Sometimes they visited his mother, who was frail and lived alone in Lachine. Grace took French classes and worked at a clinic, counseling people who were addicts, or getting divorced, or failing at school or their jobs, who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Every day she and Mitch came home and drank wine and talked about everything except their jobs, the dull weight of all those intense and brutal conversations. They talked about politics, the weather, houses they were thinking of buying. They never talked about sex, which they were having less and less of. They never talked about unhappiness, their own or other people’s. In other words, they did everything they had been taught professionally was wrong.

One Saturday morning she came home from the store to find Mitch emerging, oddly red-faced, from the bedroom. At first she didn’t want to say anything. She put away the groceries, and Mitch got into the shower. Then she walked into the bedroom and started looking around his side of the bed. Stuffed hastily below the mattress, its shiny spine extruding like a scab, was a porn magazine. The girls were young, with enormous fake breasts. That was the most disturbing part, she thought at first, their lack of resemblance to any real woman. But this wasn’t true; the most disturbing part was that her husband was jerking off to a porn magazine while she was at the grocery store. She tried speaking to herself as if she were a client: This kind of behavior is not uncommon, nor does it signal an automatic betrayal. But it was bullshit. All the counsel she had ever given burned to ashes in the face of lived experience.

Mitch walked in, wearing a towel, and stopped. Seeming to read her mind, which he could still do, he said, “No. The most disturbing part is that I feel more emotionally connected to the girls in those pictures than I do to you.”

Grace began to cry, tears not of anger or sadness but of sheer, straight pain. Mitch comforted her, because he was good at that. And they slept together with a kind of pathetic, slippery lust she hated even to remember, the porn magazine askew on the floor beside the bed. They didn’t separate until a year later, but looking back she knew this was the day their marriage ended.

She lived alone now, in a two-bedroom apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. She’d been on some dates since the divorce, but nothing had taken. She was thirty-five and thought that maybe she just wasn’t the marrying kind — a statement she would have dismissed, or at least raised an eyebrow at, if it came from a client. The therapist’s prerogative was sometimes to put the blinders back on.

Most of the day’s appointments were routine, until it came to Annie Hardwick. During an earlier visit, Grace had seen the shiny pink scars that inched up the girl’s pale stomach to her rib cage; she had lifted her shirt with a feigned reluctance that failed to conceal her pride in the harm she’d done herself. As common as cutting was, Grace still winced to see the evidence of it on Annie’s skin. The girl wasn’t beautiful yet, but she was going to be. She hadn’t grown into herself or into her body. Her features loomed too large on her face, and blue veins showed through her translucent skin at her temples and chin. Her dirty-blond hair hung thin and lank to her shoulders, and her forehead was covered with small red pimples. In a few years, Grace could imagine, when Annie was taller and learned to sit up straight, when her body grew curves to match her face, she would look like the movie star she so desperately wanted to be.

But Annie didn’t know this. All she saw was the infinite distance between herself as she was and the perfection to which she aspired. Her father was an orthodontist and her mother a lawyer, and they had raised her to hold herself to a high standard. She got good grades, participated in extracurricular activities, had friends and family who cared for her. All this was invisible to her, or at least immaterial. Her lack of perspective was gigantic. When she looked at herself she saw an ugly, mean, ungainly girl, constantly failing, deservedly ignored. She believed wholeheartedly in her own shortcomings, and nothing Grace had told her had unsettled this conviction.

One day her mother had found her asleep on the couch. A button on her shirt gaped open, exposing her midriff, and her mother thought she saw a rash there. Bending closer to inspect it, she saw that it was an intricate maze of cuts, each line crossing the next, forming a mass that looked like a star.

Hence, therapy.

Annie’s after-school hours passed in appointments: the dentist, the hairdresser, the dermatologist. She was being raised and tended by a corps of professionals, to which Grace was only the latest addition. Thus far, she didn’t think they had made much headway. The girl was polite, did as she was asked, and answered questions at a reasonable length, all while giving away as little as possible. Her parents believed her when she said she wasn’t cutting anymore. Grace didn’t.

But today was different. She came in wearing a fleece zip-up over her uniform, with her long hair swept up in a messy ponytail. Usually she sat staring at the ground with her legs crossed as Grace prodded her to get the conversation rolling. This time, though, she held the homework assignment out right away.

Taking it, Grace said, “Why don’t you tell me, in your own words, what it says?”

Annie shook her head. “Please don’t make me,” she said. “Look, I did it. You can read it, okay?”

“This wasn’t really for me. It was for you. To get you thinking when you’re on your own, and to give us a basis for our discussion here.”

Annie didn’t say anything, just looked at her with her enormous eyes. Her face had a coltish, unfinished look, a softness in her features, as if her bones hadn’t quite finished forming. Her hands played nervously with the pleats of her navy-blue kilt. Her fingernails were long and perfectly manicured; it was something she and her mother did together. As Grace watched, Annie lifted her hand and squeezed a pimple on her chin, tried to stop, then pressed it again, the look on her face pleading.

Grace waited her out for a minute, hoping she’d give in, but finally relented. “All right,” she said. “I’ll read it out loud—”

“No!” Annie said. “Please.”

“Okay. I’ll read it to myself, and then we’ll talk about it. You have to promise that we’ll be able to discuss it together, all right? Is that a deal?”

The girl nodded and looked down at the floor. Finally, Grace looked down at the page. The letter was extremely short, the handwriting strangely androgynous: slanted, angular, not the usual bubbled teenage-girl script.

A Letter to Myself Now From Myself

When I Am 24, by Annie Hardwick

Im sorry I couldn’t focus on this assignment.

I think Im pregnant.

Grace looked up. The girl was crying, her head turned toward the corner of the room as if this made her invisible. She sniffled.

Grace held out a box of tissues. “Here, blow.” Then she said, “Do your parents know?”

Annie shook her head.

“Have you taken a pregnancy test?”

She nodded.

“How late are you? When was your last period?”

“I should have gotten it almost a month ago,” the girl burst out. “You have to help me.”

“Of course I’ll help you,” Grace said calmly. Instantly Annie’s face brightened, only to dim again when she added, “I’ll help you tell your parents.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Annie said. She’d never sworn in session before. She’d stopped crying now, and her face was red and swollen. “My mom threw a fit this morning because I have a hangnail. ‘Annie, there’s no point in me buying you a twenty-dollar manicure if you can’t keep it neat for more than a day. Why are you so careless?’ What do you think she’d say if she found out I had a fetus inside me? How careless is that?”

Careless was the last thing Annie was. She was weighted with care, which was rounding her shoulders and curving her spine; it was crushing her.

“I think she’d be glad, in the end, that you could confide in her,” Grace said, though truthfully, Annie’s characterization of her mother seemed accurate. The girl might have been high-strung and deluded about her own failings, but she had a pretty good grasp of her parents’.

“You’re crazy,” Annie said, the tears falling again, “if you think she wants to hear about this.”

“What about your father?”

This question made Annie cry even harder. “Oh, God,” she said.

As bad as Grace felt for her, her pulse was quickening. This was the first time Annie had reached out to ask for help, or ask for anything at all. It was a major crisis that could push her over the edge, but, properly handled, it could also bring her back.

Grace let her cry for a moment, her shoulder shuddering with sobs before finally slowing. Annie blew her nose loudly once, twice, then sat fidgeting with the tissue in her lap. After a while, Grace said, “Tell me about the boy.”

The girl shook her head.

“He’s part of this too, you know,” Grace went on. She needed Annie to say if she knew him well or just a little, whether she loved him, anything that might lead to a real discussion.

But Annie only shook her head again and smiled wryly. “He’s nobody,” she said, her tone weary, suddenly wise. She was a chameleon: in her school uniform, crying and begging for help, she’d seemed a child; now, crossing her legs and smiling mysteriously, she could have been five years older. Grace could feel her receding, the mask of her face closing. So for the next few minutes she gave a rote explanation of the options, of Annie’s future, urging her to seriously consider all the possibilities, to talk to her doctor, to think, and to remember that no matter what happened, her life would not be over.

Annie nodded, acting as though she were listening, but when Grace paused, she said, “I can’t trust the doctor. She’s friends with my mom and I know she’d tell her even if she promised she wouldn’t. I can’t trust my friends, they’re such total gossips I know they’d have to tell somebody and soon it’ll be all over school. You’re the only person I can tell.”

“I’m glad you feel you can talk to me.”

The girl saw an advantage and pressed it, leaning forward and locking her wide eyes on Grace’s — the same posture she probably used at home when asking for some special present. “Will you promise not to tell my parents?”

Grace sat back. For the second time in as many days she felt herself being enlisted in a pretense, a story in which she ought to play no part. And again she felt that same need to take a risk, to earn the trust of someone in need, because nobody else in the world seemed to have it. But this was a child. “I can’t do that,” she told her.

“I should’ve known,” Annie said. “This is such a waste of time.” She stood up and stuffed her things into her bag, the zipper of her fleece singing as she pulled it up.

“Wait,” Grace said, wanting to give the girl something to carry with her out of the office. “Just remember that you have options.”

When Annie turned, her face was as blank as snow; anything she’d just revealed of herself was now hidden behind a gate of disbelief. Only the tinges of pink at her eyes and nose hinted at the explosions of the past hour. “Sure,” she said, “options.”

Grace had the sharp, sudden feeling that the girl would never come back again, or share anything of herself if she did. This wasn’t the first time that she’d seen a teenage girl in trouble, but Annie had gotten under her skin — her quicksilver changes between adult and child, how hard she came down on herself, the shy glitter of her braces-thick smile. Grace wished it were permissible to tell her the simple truth: that the same thing had happened to her in high school, and that while she would never wish it on anyone else, everything had turned out fine. This was hardly appropriate therapeutic practice, and she never once had been tempted to confess it before. Something about Annie was different from other patients, and it made her want to prick the bubble of the girl’s unhappiness. And the way she talked about the baby’s father, her air of shielding secrecy, had touched Grace’s heart, and her memory.

She bit her lip. “Okay, Annie,” she said, “I won’t tell.”

When she closed the office at five thirty and stepped outside, it was her own life, not Annie’s, that she was thinking of. Back in high school, she had been a champion downhill skier, gifted on the slopes. She had spent her weekends drowsing on overheated buses to and from Blue Mountain. Her parents’ house had a wall filled with her trophies and medals and blurry photographs showing her swooping across the finish line in an aerodynamic crouch. There had been talk of recruitment, of Olympic possibilities. Her coach said he’d never seen a skier so confident, so fearless. Her connection to the sport was part instinct and part habit: she skied because she always had and because her body knew how to do it without being instructed. Even the muscle aches that sometimes woke her up at night felt like part of her, as natural as breathing. Then, the year of her sixteenth birthday, her boyfriend Kevin blew out his knee on a sharp turn in a semifinal heat.

Kevin’s was the first body Grace knew as well as her own. Sinewy, olive hued, it had revealed itself to hers in the backs of buses, cars, a room at their friend Cheri’s house during a parents-out-of-town party. His chest was almost hairless, his muscular calves ropy with veins. The fact that she at first had been frightened by its contours and smells, its unexpected explosions of hair, its capacity for sexual performance, made her eventual familiarity with it seem all the more important, more earned. Seeing him in the hospital bed with his right side bandaged and cast in plaster, she felt the throb and pulse of pain in her own body.

Two weeks after his accident, Grace said she just didn’t feel like skiing anymore, that she was quitting. This was understood as an act of dramatic renunciation by her teammates, parents, and coaches. Taking it as a testament of her great love, Kevin burst into tears, though this might have had something to do with all the drugs he was on. Her parents encouraged her to confront her fears and get back on the horse. Grace explained calmly and maturely that she had simply decided it wasn’t worth it, that there were other things in life she wanted to pursue. But she was lying. The truth was that just before Kevin’s accident she had discovered she was pregnant. She knew exactly what to do, and she shot toward it as if on skis: she had an abortion. She didn’t tell Kevin, or her parents, or her friends. It was all very straightforward.

Afterward, to her surprise, she in fact didn’t feel like skiing, and Kevin’s accident provided the perfect cover story. Originally she’d thought she might take a couple of days to recover, as if from a flu, and then, to the rousing cheers of her parents and teammates, return to the sport. But she soon discovered that the urge to race, to compete, to win, had been bled from her on the same morning. It had all been too ridiculously and awfully easy. She had a baby inside her, just like that, and she got rid of it, also just like that. Two equally momentous, symmetrical events.

Not one soul knew what she’d done, and the air of corrupt superiority this secret engendered in her changed her more than either the accidental pregnancy or its termination had. She told herself that she ought to give up something she loved — skiing — in reparation for her carelessness and ruthlessness. But even this sacrifice proved easy and false. Once she quit skiing, she was surprised to discover how little she missed it.

Kevin endured months of rehab and within a year was back on the team. Grace had no idea what had become of him, this boy whose body had once been so familiar, whose child she’d had inside her. During his recuperation she’d tended his skin with vitamin E lotion to minimize the scars. She’d thought about the thin, olive-skinned children they’d have someday, when they were ready, when it was time. As his knee healed, they swore they’d always be together. Yet when she got into U of T, she accepted without even really discussing it with him, knowing he’d already started eyeing a girl on the swim team with chlorine-bleached hair. Life carried them so fast down the slope and far away from where they’d started that they hardly noticed it happening. They broke the promises they’d made to each other so quickly and easily that they didn’t even have time to feel betrayed.