Inside

TWELVE

Montreal, 2006

AS THE FALL went on, Mitch’s work life settled into a routine that was, if not exactly easy, then comfortably regimented. Group-therapy meetings took up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Tuesdays and Thursdays he devoted to paperwork and individual counseling. It was the one-on-one sessions that spooked him most. With just one other person in the room, the narrowness of the equation struck him as dangerous and potentially explosive: eyes either glancing away from his or boring into him with pain or anger. It was simply too intense. To cut down on these, he volunteered to take on every administrative task he could instead, from grants and project management to a review of hospital procedures. At lunchtime, he’d close the door to his office and eat a sandwich he’d brought from home while listening to sports radio. Hockey season was starting and he let the predictions and opinions wash over him, defensive pairings and forward lines, who was being called up or traded, gambling scandals, injuries. Sometimes he even took notes, picking and discarding players for his fantasy team. When people knocked and came in, they often saw him scribbling away and frowning in concentration, and he let them think he was absorbed in work.

One weekend he went to visit Malcolm in Mississauga. His brother and Cindy lived in a messy, rowdy house in the suburbs, where they managed the chaos by constantly adding to it. Three children, two cats, and a dog; video games, toy pianos, televisions. To their menagerie they had recently added a rabbit, who sat in a cage in the living room, cowering inside an empty tissue box, though the children kept trying to tempt it out with carrots and celery and once, in an unattended moment, a hamburger.

“I know you like hamburgers, but Snowball doesn’t,” Cindy explained soothingly to her sobbing daughter after throwing the meat away. “It’s just not his thing.”

Malcolm was laughing. “Snowball was at school,” he told Mitch, “but he’s allergic to the fluorescent lights in the classroom or something. So we’re foster-parenting him, I suppose. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

From a skinny, spastic boy Malcolm had grown into a round-bellied, amiable, balding man with a moustache and a constant smile. Being around him relaxed Mitch when nothing else would. On his visits to the house he felt like just one more happy addition, inconspicuous but loved, with little demanded of him, much like the rabbit. It didn’t matter that he slept on the couch or, when he woke up in the morning with a burning sensation in his leg, found a Transformer action figure wedged under his thigh, or that Emily, the youngest, threw up on him in the backyard after a game of tag they were all playing got a little too rough. The children beat up on him, included him in their games, and left him alone when he said he was tired. The place was dirty and hectic and he could disappear into it, losing track even of himself, like he couldn’t anywhere else.

He didn’t know how Malcolm had managed to become such a good father without having a model for it, nor did he know how he and Cindy still managed to laugh at each other’s jokes and argue cheerfully about whose turn it was to cook or do the dishes. Malcolm wasn’t an especially successful engineer; he had made it to a certain level and hadn’t been promoted further in years. He wasn’t a particularly good cook, either, or hilarious or even all that hardworking. Cindy complained that he was disorganized, useless at home repairs, and not very good with money. He wasn’t good about asking Mitch questions about how things were going. His sole talent, one he’d had since childhood, was the best imaginable, and it had surrounded him his entire life, flexible, capacious, grown to embrace his wife, their family, their house, and, when he was around, even his brother. He had the gift of being happy.

It was always a shock for Mitch, after leaving those crowded confines, to find himself back in his quiet apartment in Westmount. He could hear his downstairs neighbors, a gay couple, entertaining a group of friends to gales of laughter.

The future he was looking at was without color, without noise. Hopelessly quiet. He spent the night awake, unable to shut out the silence that had taken over his life.

And so he was alone. To combat this solitude he had but few weapons: his job, his routine, and, increasingly, Grace and Sarah. October became November and he continued to help them as best he could. Grace’s cast had been removed and she was walking again, though she still winced at times and there was a stiffness in her movements, in the hunch of her shoulders, that made her look older than she was. Four days a week she went to rehab and returned home exhausted, close to tears, even though, as she told Mitch, most of the time she was lying down while the trainer pushed her legs in one direction and then another, working on her mobility. “You wouldn’t think it would hurt so much, but it does,” she said. “By the end of it I want to throttle this poor nice woman who’s just trying to help me. It’s like when Sarah was born and I told the doctors I hated them.”

“You hated the doctors? Why?” Sarah called. She was in the other room but had the smart child’s habit of listening closely at inconvenient times.

Grace grimaced. “I didn’t really hate them,” she said. “I just thought I did.”

Sarah came into the kitchen, where Grace and Mitch were sitting at the table, with a drawing dangling from her hand. Her forehead was creased with concern. “Because it hurt when I was born?”

“It hurt a little at first,” Grace said carefully, “but then it didn’t. And then you came out, and I was so happy.” She drew her close and wrapped her in a hug. Sarah buckled her arms around her mother’s waist, squeezing hard, and Mitch saw Grace clench her teeth in pain. She kissed Sarah’s head and said, “Now go back to your drawing. Don’t you have homework to do?”

“I finished it,” Sarah said, and left the kitchen, her troubles apparently forgotten.

Mitch brought Grace a glass of water and a couple of Tylenols, knowing her well enough to tell when she needed some. There was an extra weariness to her face, as if her head weighed too much for her neck, and her eyes grew blurry and vague.

“Thank you,” she said.

Mitch had stopped coming around as much, since now she could do almost everything herself. But he continued to run a few errands, adding their usual weekly groceries to his, stopping by to change lightbulbs, take out the trash, fix the shower rod, things she wasn’t up to yet. He had grown used to the shape and purpose these activities gave to his days, and he looked forward to Sarah’s happy greeting and his chats with Grace. By this point he wasn’t sure if he was helping or being helped, or whether the distinction even mattered. He and Grace were casual together, having slipped into a practical, easygoing friendship. Eventually she wouldn’t need his assistance at all, and he didn’t know if they would continue to be part of each other’s lives.

One day, Azra was coming up the steps as he was leaving the apartment. He had last seen her in mid-September, back when Grace was utterly prone.

“Hey!” he said, and gave her a quick hug, only noticing as he drew back that her expression was less friendly than quizzical.

“Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

She looked flustered. “Nothing, I guess. You’re still helping out? That’s nice.” It was a poor recovery; obviously she found his presence unexpected and strange.

“Well, not all the time or anything,” he answered lamely, wondering, even as he spoke, why he was acting like it was something to be ashamed of. “Grace hasn’t mentioned it?”

“No,” Azra said, “she hasn’t.”

Together they absorbed the implications of this remark. The only way he could think to end the awkward pause was to tell her he had to be going.

Back at the apartment, he resolved not to call or visit Grace unless she specifically asked him to, and felt a flush of shame whose source he couldn’t explain. Should he feel bad for having been there in a time of need?

But it turned out he couldn’t keep the resolution. He enjoyed the time he spent with the two of them, and he and Grace were getting along well. There was no reason, he told himself, that they couldn’t be friends. The following weekend, he called her up and proposed various plans for an afternoon outing. This was what Martine would have expected: an exhibit at the museum, or a new children’s movie, or he could teach them how to fly a kite. He had researched the possibilities beforehand.

Grace sounded touched but puzzled. “That seems pretty ambitious,” she said. “We’re more like not-goers. Not-doers. Sometimes we go to the park.”

This took him aback. “So what do you usually do on the weekends? Or used to, I mean, before the accident.”

Every child he knew — and this included his niece and nephews — faced a battery of activities and playdates on Saturdays and Sundays. They started playing competitive sports before they were five, and their lives were enriched by music lessons and art classes as soon as they could walk. For Grace to buck the trend so completely was not, he thought, quite like her. Then again, maybe he didn’t really know what she was like.

“Not much,” she said. “Why don’t you come over?”

So he did. Grace sat on the couch, as she had throughout her recovery, surrounded by a disassembled newspaper, some unanswered mail, a mug of tea, and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. Sarah lay in front of her on the carpet, working on a jigsaw puzzle, her long blond hair in two braids. In the kitchen, talk-radio voices debated some issue, though Grace didn’t seem to be listening.

She offered him a cup of tea, a snack, maybe a book — should he have thought to bring one himself? — all of which he declined. Instead he sat opposite the two of them in an armchair, with the front section of The Globe and Mail in his lap. He was thinking that this was the most feminine scene he had ever witnessed in his life. Maybe his mother would have liked to have a Saturday like this, instead of taking him and Malcolm to the park and watching them beat each other over the head with sticks.

The atmosphere felt so serene that he was surprised to notice Grace staring worriedly at her daughter. He knew she was still concerned that the accident had marked her psychologically, but if this were so, the damage was subtle and well concealed. Sarah was lying on her stomach, wearing blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, her legs kicked up in the air. She had pushed her puzzle aside and was reading a book, propping her chin on her hands, her eyes so close to the pages that they were almost crossing. Mitch waited for Grace to scold her — his mother certainly would have — but she didn’t.

“What’s institutionalized?” Sarah asked. It was clearly an adult book, and Mitch wondered if she should’ve been reading it.

Grace, however, seemed unfazed. “What’s the context?”

“The girl was institutionalized against her will, and she stayed under doctors’ supervision for five years.”

“Okay,” Grace said. “So if it was against her will, what does that imply?”

“That someone else put her somewhere.”

“Good. And if there are doctors there?”

“That the somewhere is like a hospital?”

“Excellent. To be institutionalized is to be placed in a facility, often a hospital, when you can’t care for yourself.”

“My father was institutionalized.”

Mitch looked up. It was the first time he had heard the father mentioned.

“No, he wasn’t, Sarah. He was never institutionalized.”

“But he was sick.”

“That’s right. He was sick, and he died.”

“In a hospital.”

“In a — oh, I see what you mean.” Grace’s tone was very calm. If the subject upset her, she didn’t show it. “Usually, to be institutionalized means in a mental-health facility or a prison, something like that.”

“And my father wasn’t in any of those.”

“No, honey,” Grace said, “he wasn’t.”

Sarah went back to her book. Grace looked up and her eyes skated over Mitch’s. The expression on her face was one he had seen before: part guilt, part pain, part unidentifiable something else. As if she were listening to some inner voice, some call that no one else could hear.

A few minutes later, tiring of the book, Sarah asked Mitch to play with her. Flattered, he got down on his knees, but she shook her head and led him into her room. Holding his hand, she showed him around and explained everything in great detail: her dolls, her schoolbooks, her winter clothes, her summer clothes. She had a collection of seashells she had brought back from a holiday in Prince Edward Island, and another of barrettes that she’d been adding to, she told him very seriously, “her entire life.” She held out a piggy bank and asked him to guess how much it weighed.

“Heavy,” he said. “Maybe five pounds.”

“Lots of money in there,” she said airily. “I’ve been putting it away for a rainy day.”

“Very responsible of you.”

“I’m mature for my age,” she said. “My teacher told Grace. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did.”

This was an affectation, he knew, calling her mother by her name, to tell him she was grown up. Was this childish flirting? Certainly it made him uncomfortable. His niece, Emily, was a tomboy, and his nephews were hooligans who cared only about hockey and wrestling. A simple fake-out punch to the gut was all it took to get the ball rolling with those three. It was like playing with a bunch of puppies, all laughter and flung-out limbs. Sarah was a different animal altogether.

“Here,” she said, “look at this.”

On her tiptoes, she pulled a shoebox off a shelf, then sat down on her bed and balanced it on her lap. He sat down next to her, and she opened it with a ceremonial gesture that made clear it was the most important thing in the room.

“What’s this?”

“This,” she whispered, “is the rainy day.”

He couldn’t tell, at first, what it was; it looked like a box of litter and dirt, with some paper envelopes and tiny, shriveled objects nested in tissue.

She took things out one by one and placed them in his hand. “These are seeds for forget-me-nots. These are seeds for daisies. This is a tulip bulb. This is an iris. This is freesia. This is clematis.”

“You’ve got a whole flower garden in here.”

“No. These are just the seeds and bulbs,” she said impatiently. “I save my allowance and buy them from a catalog. Next spring we’re going to plant them in the back. We were going to do it last year but I didn’t have enough money yet. Since my birthday I have enough. And there’s more in the bank. In the summer we can get live plants.”

His hands were overflowing with bulbs and envelopes. She put the box in his lap, and he started placing them carefully back inside.

Then she jumped up off the bed and opened a photo album. “This is what it’s going to look like,” she said, her voice hushed to a stage whisper. “The secret garden.”

There were no photographs inside, just pages cut from magazines, construction-paper drawings, collages, seed catalogs with prices circled. Each page was an explosion of yellow and purple and pink. She had all the names memorized; she wanted to put the daisies next to the irises and the daffodils. She had arranged the garden a thousand times in her mind, she explained, as she flipped the pages for him.

“How did you get so interested in flowers?” he said.

She cocked her head. He thought she was seriously considering how to answer, but it turned out that she was just deciding to ignore the question. After going through all the pages, she put the album away, took the shoebox from him, and replaced it carefully on the shelf.

Then she came back to the bed and scrunched herself up against the wall, with a pillow in her lap. “This is the story,” she said. “There’s a girl, and her parents die, and she has to go live in a big house that belongs to her uncle. But he’s not there. And she finds the key to a secret garden in the back of the house, and she unlocks it and makes all the flowers grow again. And there’s a crippled boy named Colin, and she brings him outside and he learns to walk and the uncle comes back and everybody’s happy and it’s all because of the garden.”

“So that’s why you want to have a garden too?” Mitch said.

Sarah shrugged. “It’s just a notion of mine,” she said.

She came out with these words, these shrugging, adult phrases so out of sync with her age. He supposed it was because she read so much. But it gave her a quality of otherness that, despite her cute blond looks and her obvious intelligence, wasn’t exactly charming. Both she and Grace were a little internal, and together they seemed a closed circle, walled off from everybody else. A secret garden. It made him want to pull them out of the apartment and into the world, make them laugh and run around. Help them be messier. Sillier.

“Think fast!” he said, and grabbed the pillow from her lap.

She reached for it, laughing, craning her arms to get to where he held it, up behind his head. “Give it back!”

“You have to come get it,” he said, holding it higher.

She was bouncing on her bed now, reaching around him, shrieking with laughter and excitement, the seeds and bulbs forgotten now. At last she crawled over his lap, and he let her grab the pillow and hit him over the head with it.

“Oh, you got me,” he said. “You’re too fast.”

“That’s true,” she said modestly, and smiled. “I’m extremely fast.” Then she jumped off the bed and ran out of the room.

An hour or so later, bundling themselves into jackets and hats, they went off to the park. Sarah almost immediately ran into a friend and went off to the swing set with her. But instead of playing on it, they each sat down in a swing and fell deep into conversation.

Grace watched them, her hands stuck deep in her pockets. “They’re already adolescent at ten,” she said. “God help me.”

The other mother, a young woman with long curly hair and dangly earrings, nodded vigorously. “It’s only going to get worse, too,” she said. “She’s asking me for makeup.”

“Oh, no,” Grace said.

The two of them went back and forth, trading dark forecasts about the future, while their girls gossiped together not fifty feet away. The wind picked up. Mitch stared longingly at a group of guys playing Frisbee at the other end of the park. There seemed no reason why all this static talking had to take place outside. Women, he thought.

Everyone else in the park was on the move: people throwing sticks for their dogs, toddlers careening around wildly while their parents chased after them, couples with their hands in each other’s pockets. A Peruvian band was unpacking their flutes and drums. Despite the clouds, the atmosphere was festive and happy.

An extremely pretty young woman walked by. She was under-dressed for the weather, wearing jeans and a sweater, no hat, and her long blond hair was flapping around her like a flag. High-heeled boots gave her walk a sexy, rolling sway. She passed them with a glance, but Mitch didn’t think much of it, other than to note her beauty. But then she turned around and came back toward them. Mitch ran his hand through his hair before he could stop himself. She obviously wasn’t looking at him — he was old enough to be her father — but her attention was blatant.

The young woman was staring at Grace. As she got closer, Mitch thought she looked familiar, though so faintly that he couldn’t have said where he knew her from. Grace barely noticed. Her eyes flickered over the girl, pausing uncertainly for a second, and then she turned back to her friend. They were discussing how to introduce new foods to kids who were picky eaters.

“I try to tell her it’s good for her,” Grace was saying, “but she doesn’t want to listen.”

The young woman walked by, making no secret of her staring, then crossed the street and was gone.

The three of them headed back to the apartment.

“God, it’s great to be able to walk,” Grace said, smiling. She stretched her hands out on either side, reveling in her health. Her pinched posture was uncurling, her shoulders squared, and the wind had reddened her cheeks. Mitch could still see the memory of pain in the shadows under her eyes, in the care she took when stepping off the sidewalk; it colored the happiness she was feeling, gave it form and weight. She and Sarah were holding hands.

His thoughts shifted to Martine and Mathieu, and then, reluctantly, to Thomasie. He had been doing his best not to think about any of these people, and spending time with Grace and Sarah had helped to distract him, but of course they were always there, alert soldiers standing forever at attention in the back of his mind. He looked at Sarah and thought that the life Grace was giving her was, despite its recent rockiness and the lack of a father, bright and secure, and it was impossible not to contrast this with the wan, difficult lives of others he had known whom he had abandoned or been abandoned by.

All these presences and absences. A child enters the world; a child exits the world. He felt heavy with responsibility and regret.

Sometimes he hated himself simply because he was alive when others were not, and he wanted to wipe out the memories of every patient he’d had, every problem he’d caused or heard about or failed to alleviate. Other times he thought he would never forget any of these things and that it was important not to, perhaps the most important task of his life. Witnessing the pain of others is the very least you can do in this world. It’s how you know that when your own turn comes, someone will be there with you.

Sarah was telling her mother a story about a magician who flew all around the world, making waterfalls stop, making trees grow. He couldn’t tell whether it was from a book she’d read or a movie she’d seen or if she’d made it up herself. She was a fanciful girl who didn’t seem to always distinguish between fiction and reality; perhaps Grace indulged her too much in this.

Back at the apartment, Grace ordered a pizza and asked Mitch if he wanted to stay. He shook his head. Sarah had gone off into her room.

The two of them were alone. Though they had spent a fair number of hours together over the past few months, today was somehow different, more awkward, probably because he hadn’t come over to help; he had just come over. The whole time, at the apartment and the park, he had felt distant from the two of them, a separate entity, a hanger-on. He guessed that their time together had reached its logical end; their lives would go on, on divergent tracks, as they had already done for so many years.

Grace was puttering around the kitchen, putting dishes away, wiping down the counters. She had accepted his help so silently, so willingly, then hid it from Azra. She’d taken what was expedient and left the rest. The only thing he’d wanted out of the situation was not to feel ashamed of what he was doing, but now he did, and that was Grace’s fault. He stood there silently fuming.

Sensing his mood, Grace turned around and leaned back against the counter, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Azra told me she ran into you the other day,” she said.

“Yes, outside. I didn’t realize my coming around was a secret, Grace.”

She was courteous enough to blush. “It’s not.” She crossed her arms. “She just didn’t understand.”

“She was the one who asked me to help in the first place.”

“To bring in the mail, water the plants. She thought it was weird that you’d be so involved.”

“It’s not that weird, Grace. I mean, yes, a little. But not impossibly weird, or I wouldn’t have done it.”

“I know,” she said. “Of course. But Azra worries about me, when it comes to men. She thinks I live too much in the past already.”

“This is about Sarah’s dad, I guess?”

That same faraway expression stole over her face.

“Don’t say it’s a long story,” he said.

She laughed. “It’s not that long. I really threw myself overboard when I met him. I wanted that feeling, whether or not it was real. The feeling of totally giving yourself over to something. Of not looking back.”

“And then what?”

Tears were glimmering in her eyes. “Now I can hardly remember his face,” she said. “I grieve for that.”

He reached out for her hand, his right clasping her left, like some secret reverse handshake. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She nodded and withdrew it, the heat of her palm lingering for a second in his. “Maybe you shouldn’t come around so much.”

“Okay,” he said, and then: “That’s it?”

She didn’t answer, and they stood there in the kitchen. It had been a strange collision, this time they’d had together. He wondered when or if they’d see each other again. Somehow the word good-bye seemed too final, so he didn’t say it, and neither did she.

In the nights to come Mitch lost the ability to sleep. He watched old movies in the middle of the night, spent hours with the Weather Channel. He went to work and got through the group-therapy sessions on autopilot; he listened intensely to the participants’ stories but forgot them immediately; when writing up his notes he couldn’t remember much of what they’d said, and his scrawled observations seemed like the thoughts of a stranger. He called no one. He ran five miles a day, his skin flooded with warmth against the increasingly cold air. In November, a freezing rainstorm encased the leafless trees in ice, the salt on sidewalks crunching beneath his feet. The Habs lost to the Maple Leafs. His fantasy picks were a shambles.

He didn’t take up drinking; he didn’t miss a day of work. He wasn’t even sure that other people could see the numbness inside him, the mechanical nature of his commitment to his own life.

There came a time when, without quite noticing at first, he was sleeping through the night. The running helped, and so did work. He wouldn’t have said that his spirits, for lack of anything else to do, were rising; he wouldn’t have wanted to admit that. He would have said that he came from a family where each person had a talent. Their mother’s was to take care of them. Malcolm’s was to be happy. His was to let things go.

When the card came in the mail, a thick white envelope with a Christmas-tree stamp, he recognized Grace’s handwriting with a mix of pleasure, guilt, and regret. She had always loved holidays, every one of them — she gave gifts at Valentine’s Day, Easter, even Memorial Day — and none more than Christmas. She started shopping in September, stashing the presents under her bed. Mitch smiled, thinking of it now. We’re doing great, the card said. Thanks again for your help this year. Love to your family, Grace and Sarah. The card was a picture of the two of them in red sweaters, a blond head and a dark one smiling at the camera. Grace’s eyes were lined and tired, but she looked less frazzled; with her arms around her daughter, she seemed purposeful and amused.

Love to your family, he read again.

He called her, and when she picked up the phone she sounded breathless.

“Oh, Mitch,” she said. “This time of year is always so crazy, isn’t it?”

It was the day before Christmas Eve. He had the following week off, and would spend Christmas itself with Malcolm and his family, returning the next day. It wasn’t, for him, an especially hectic season, but he knew that for others it was.

“Thanks for the card,” he said. “How’s everything?”

“We’re getting by. Leaving tomorrow for Christmas in Vancouver. I don’t know what possessed me to travel. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Vancouver will be nice,” he said. “Warm.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great once we get there. Now I have ten thousand things to get before we go, and no sitter for Sarah. The usual insanity.”

Mitch paused, but only for a second. “Can I help?” he said.

He thought this might provoke an awkward moment, but Grace seized upon the offer.

“That would be amazing,” she said. “Can you come by in an hour and pick us up? My car’s having issues, by the way. It’s that kind of holiday season.”

“You got it,” Mitch said.

He put on his coat, grabbed his wallet and keys, and turned off the lights, finding himself humming. He could have stopped to tidy things up in his apartment before leaving, but he didn’t have to. Everything was already in order. He didn’t have a single thing to arrange.

He drove them downtown, heading along Sainte-Catherine so Sarah could see the Christmas displays at Ogilvy’s, and parked in a lot on de Maisonneuve. As they walked, the winter air bit their cheeks and noses. He followed Grace and Sarah into the stone church facade at Promenades Cathédrale, descending down the long escalators into the underground city. The neon-lit stores stretched endlessly, each a riot of shoppers, the air hot and close. From every store blasted a new carol. Christmas is coming, the Payolas sang wearily, it’s been a long year. Roving packs of teenagers were jostling around the kiosks. One of them, a boy, almost knocked Sarah over and when Mitch yelled at him he spun instantly away, muttering something. “It’s okay,” Grace said, “let it go.”

Sarah waded through the crowds with her coat unzipped, pointing at the decorations, the gaudy trees, the robot snowman waving his arms and nodding his head, the children lined up to see Santa. After a while she started to get cranky, so Mitch took her to the food court for some ice cream while Grace ran around picking up various purchases.

“What do you think?” she asked Mitch when she came back with a sweater for her uncle. He suspected the man would prefer not to receive a sweater at all, but didn’t say so. He felt a headache coming on and related more to Sarah’s exhaustion — the girl was listing sideways, trawling her plastic spoon through a pool of chocolate sauce — than to Grace’s stress over choosing the right present.

“Listen,” she said, folding the sweater back into its bag. She sat down across from him and put her arms around Sarah, who leaned against her. “I’m sorry about how we left things.”

“It’s okay, Grace. You were right. It was weird.”

She smiled at him. Her coat was open and beneath it she was wearing jeans and an old McGill sweatshirt. She still moved slowly, stepping gingerly as though she were wearing high heels instead of solid, fur-lined, rubber-soled boots. Despite this lingering air of fragility, though, she looked good. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and her long hair fell to her shoulders in smooth waves.

“So how are you?” she said.

“I’m good,” he said.

“Are you going to Mississauga for Christmas?”

“Sure. I have to teach Malcolm’s kids new bad habits for 2007.”

Grace cocked her head. “I’m glad. You’re alone too much, I think.”

He let this pass.

“I feel like I never thanked you enough for helping me out.”

“You thanked me plenty,” he said.

When they exited the stores, the day had fled and the streetlights picked out sparkles on the icy sidewalks. The three of them hurried to the car, backs hunched against the cold, the adults laden with presents they stuffed into the trunk. Mitch turned the heat on high, and within a few blocks Sarah fell asleep in the back, her face practically hidden by her hat and hood.

He drove west on Sherbrooke toward Grace’s neighborhood. Beyond the McGill campus, the rounded shadow of the mountain hulked on the horizon with its illuminated cross. Grace turned the dial to a classical music station, and the soft ripples of a piano concerto filled the car. They didn’t talk. Her face was turned away and she was looking out the window, which grew opaque with condensation. Like a child, she pulled off one of her gloves and with her fingertip wrote some illegible letters on it, then wiped it all away with the flat of her hand and put the glove back on. He kept taking his eyes off the road to glance at her, wondering at her silence, so notable after her animation in the mall. She was probably exhausted too. Drawn to the sight of her strong, thin frame in the passenger seat, her burgundy-colored hat, her dark hair spilling out from underneath, he felt a flicker of unaccustomed energy shiver across his skin. He’d missed her.

Ten minutes later, he pulled up to her apartment building and parked. Sarah was still asleep in the back.

Grace rubbed her eyes, then turned to him. “You saved my life today,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“It was nothing,” Mitch said.

“No, it wasn’t.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, an ex-wife’s kiss, friendly, sexless.

Yet something in it washed over him and he found himself holding her hand, their gloved fingers intertwined. He could just barely detect the contours of her hand beneath the leather and fleece, its muscles and heat. “I’m glad you’re doing better,” he said.

Grace nodded, her eyes grave and tender in the shadowy interior. Whatever she heard in his voice must have registered on her, because she squeezed his hand. She seemed to know exactly what he needed, and he couldn’t figure out how, unless maybe this was her talent. She got out of the car and gathered her daughter in her arms. Mitch opened the trunk, unloaded the many gifts, and stood there in the street, the handles of the shopping bags cutting into his gloves, waiting.

She smiled at him in the winter dark, and then invited him inside.