Inside

THREE

Iqaluit, 2006

MARTINE, OF COURSE, didn’t want him to go. When he told her about the contract, she stood in the living room with her arms crossed, looking, with her thick-framed glasses and disapproving frown, more like a librarian than the lawyer she was. When she was hurt or vulnerable, she reacted with stern anger, and Mitch loved her for the transparency of this posture, almost as much as he loved the quiet, resigned way in which later, in bed, crying a little, she would set it aside.

“I don’t understand,” she said then. Her curly hair was a tangle of silver blond on the pillow. Her French accent, as always when she was upset, grew stronger. “It’s so far away.”

“The rotation’s only a few months,” he told her. “And the money’s great.”

“It’s depressing up there. You said so yourself.”

“That’s because the people are depressed.”

“So why do you need to go to a place like that?”

“They don’t have enough health care up there to serve the native population,” he said. “They need help. They need me.”

Martine raised herself up on one elbow, holding the palm of her hand against her ear as if to block out this statement. “C’est assez, là,” she muttered to the pillow, and he didn’t ask what, specifically, she’d had enough of — this trip, or his arguments on behalf of it. In the apartment’s other bedroom, Mathieu thrashed around restlessly, as he always did for hours before falling asleep. Once on the other side, though, he slept as if dead, and in the mornings, while Martine made breakfast, it was Mitch’s job to guide him back to consciousness from his faraway state. He wouldn’t ever have admitted to her how much he hated doing this, how often he crouched by the boy’s bed, looking at his chest to make sure he was still breathing — always certain that this time, this morning, he wasn’t — or how violently he sometimes had to shake Mathieu’s shoulder before he finally, reluctantly, awoke. Rousing the bear, is how Mitch thought of it, as if the child were some gigantic, threatening animal instead of a scrawny, thin-limbed faun. Most mornings, he would scrunch himself into a ball and mutter angrily, “Non, non”—to consciousness, to Mitch, to the world. Then Mitch would try to pick him up and carry him to the kitchen, but Mathieu didn’t like to be touched and would hammer his fists against Mitch’s chest until he left him alone. This war was a daily ritual.

Unspoken between Martine and Mitch now was the accusation that he was leaving to escape the burden of her son; that he might be needed by the people in Nunavut, sure, but that most of all he needed to get away.

He’d met Martine on the day her divorce became final, a moment of sorrow and vulnerability that he wasn’t too scrupulous to take advantage of. Had he met her even a day later, he believed, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. Forty-five, sexy, and brilliantly smart, Martine took care of her job and her son with determined energy, and she dispatched her husband once he proved unequal to the task of having a difficult child and rebelled by having affairs. Only at night did cracks show in her independent daytime self; but even then she rarely reverted back to the crying woman he had first seen smoking a cigarette outside the Palais de Justice, choking and sobbing through the gray storm of her own exhale. Mitch had mostly been single since his own marriage had fallen apart, and what few relationships he’d had arose when he was pursued. But this woman was so clearly in need of help — a kind gesture, a tissue — that he stopped and fished a Kleenex packet out of his coat pocket. The day was cold, and her eyes were red and pinched. Her curly hair was piled on her head in a messy, complicated arrangement, strands escaping here and there. She thanked him in French, and he responded in kind. Delicately, she transferred her cigarette to her left hand and blew her nose goose-honkingly hard with her right. That a woman could look so beautiful in the midst of an operation like this made Mitch’s heart turn over. He had always been a romantic, but divorce and middle age had squeezed it out of him, or so he’d thought until now.

“Are you all right?” he said.

The woman looked at him with an undisguised scorn that had a kind of desire glimmering around the edges of it. What she wanted, he thought, was for a better candidate to come along, but she’d take what she could get.

“I need a drink,” she answered, switching to English.

“Could I buy you one?”

She nodded and led him, pretty aggressively, he thought, to a bar on Saint-Paul — but it was just that Martine, he figured out later, saw no need to pretend not to know what she wanted. He ordered a martini for her and a beer for himself. She kept smoking, lighting one du Maurier off the flaming stub of the last, as they exchanged bare-bones information: names, professions, the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked. Her hair continued to slip free from its moorings, half of it now hanging down.

“Were you married a long time?” he asked.

“It felt like a very long time,” she said. “But the last few years we were living apart anyway. Fait que, this isn’t really a very big change.”

“But it is.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

He bought her another drink, and another. By ten o’clock they were in bed in her apartment off Pie-IX, her eyes closed, his T-shirt still on.

“J’ai besoin,” she murmured against his neck. “J’ai besoin de toi.” She made it clear she needed a very specific part of him. He pressed himself against her in response, and she guided him inside. At eleven o’clock she thanked him, as sweetly and impersonally as you might thank a waiter for good service, and asked him to leave. Afterward he stood shaking his head in the icy street. The road was deserted, dark. Above the cluster of apartment buildings to the east, the tower of the Olympic Stadium seemed to be saluting him. His heart sang. He wondered if any of it had really happened. Wanted fervently to make it happen again.

He left for Iqaluit two weeks after breaking the news. From his window seat, the land was obscured by a thick layer of clouds, and he tried to imagine the rock and ice beneath, hoping to feel loose, set free. He had been happy there once before, during the summer he had separated from Grace, when the Arctic had been a refuge, a clean slate. After failing so miserably at marriage he had been determined to succeed at his job, and he’d thrown himself into it with wild energy, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. The worst thing about the divorce was that he had lost any sense of himself as a decent person. After all, he loved everything about Grace — her values, her personality, her dreams. He just didn’t love her. Confronting this fact was humiliating, disastrous. Mitch had always been the nice guy who wryly accepted that nice guys finish last, and now he discovered that he wasn’t all that nice, and that he was finishing last anyway, with only himself to blame. To make up for all of this he turned to his job and to the Arctic. When he wasn’t working he founded and coached a boys’ basketball league. It was the most exhausting, industrious, and ultimately rewarding time in his life. For a while, after returning to Montreal, he’d kept in touch with a couple of the kids, but gradually — and naturally enough — correspondence on both sides fell off. The invitation to return had come so suddenly, and he’d been so consumed over the last couple of weeks by his arguments with Martine, that he hadn’t had much time to think about the place itself.

It was June, still light when they landed after ten o’clock. The buildings of Iqaluit lay scattered like pebbles dropped from a casual hand, inconsequential to the vast expanse around them. Here and there in the landscape rose gray slabs of rock, half covered with moss, that looked like the backs of whales rising up from a choppy sea. The sky was a brilliant blue, untouched by clouds, and the air felt clear and thin. The other passengers, most of whom looked like they were coming home, filed silently across the tarmac into the small terminal.

He’d arranged for a taxi, and the drive was his first clue that he didn’t remember as much as he thought he did. It wasn’t that the place looked better or worse — the same prefab buildings balanced on their stilts, some of the rocky yards neat, others strewn with snowmobiles and assorted debris — but that his sense of direction and layout had diminished over a decade. Only the rough, bruise-colored expanse of Frobisher Bay oriented him, its white-crested waves crashing against the stubborn ice. The city had grown, and there were new neighborhoods he didn’t know. The taxi driver, an immigrant from Bosnia via Winnipeg, greeted his few questions with grunts. As the car drove slowly through the twisting gravel streets, children gazed at him with naked curiosity. The boys he had coached in basketball would be adults now, with families of their own, and Mitch knew he wouldn’t recognize them. He had made friends here, but most of them were whites like him, from Quebec and Ontario, here to work for a short duration and doubtless gone back south by now.

The taxi pulled up to the apartment that had been leased for him. They had said only that it was a duplex, but as he was paying the driver the front door opened and a tall, thin man with a shock of red hair stepped out.

“You must be the new man, then,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Johnny.”

“Mitch.”

“We’re sharing quarters,” Johnny said, “but it’s a large house by local standards, so have no fear. You know how tight housing is up here.” His voice held the lilting, musical cadence of a Maritimer. He grabbed one of Mitch’s bags and waved cheerfully at the taxi driver, who ignored them both and drove away. Johnny looked to be in his thirties, ruddy-cheeked and leather-skinned, whether from liquor or exposure to the elements Mitch couldn’t tell. He led Mitch up to a bedroom with a bed and a desk, dumped the bag on it, then gestured down the hall.

“My room’s back there, then. Come by any time you need anything, I’m always up. Can’t sleep at all in the summer here. I get this nervous energy. In the winter I sleep fourteen hours a night and watch TV all afternoon if I can. That’s what this place does to you. Let’s have a drink. You’ve been here before, I heard.”

“It’s been over ten years,” Mitch said once they were in the kitchen, where Johnny poured him two fingers of whiskey in a smudged glass. He’d heard nothing about a roommate, but he actually didn’t mind. With someone to talk to, he’d be less likely to sit around brooding.

“I’m an engineer myself,” Johnny said. “From St. John’s, originally, but more than happy to be away from it. Here consulting on a new sewage plant. Got my hands in the shit, as they say.”

“Do they say that?”

“I say it,” Johnny said. “Cheers.”

They drank, sitting on red plastic-seated chairs around a Formica table, furniture that looked like it had been brought in forty years ago. At one end of the counter was a microwave splattered with sauces and grease, at the other a crowd of liquor bottles. Through the window Mitch could hear kids kicking a soccer ball around. It should’ve been past their bedtime, but it still felt like noon, and the Inuit weren’t big on nighttime rituals anyway, he remembered, believing their children would wind down naturally on their own. He drank the whiskey slowly, holding each sip for a moment on his tongue before swallowing; the combination of flying, the brightness, and the alcohol made him feel pleasantly light-headed and numb and far from home.

Johnny topped up his whiskey. When he’d introduced himself, Mitch was sure he was younger, but up close his face was deeply lined, with dark brown splotches on his cheeks and forehead, and his teeth were stained brown. It could be he was in his forties or fifties and maybe his rangy thinness was less a product of fitness than of a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, one of which he lit right now, exhaling the smoke in a broad stream. “So you’re a shrink, they say.”

“A therapist, actually,” Mitch said, remembering how quickly news traveled in a small place like this one. “I specialize in addict—”

“So no drugs, then. No prescriptions,” Johnny said, clearly disappointed.

“No.”

“No Xanax? No little helpers?”

“Cognitive behavioral therapy,” Mitch said, enunciating each syllable with slow annoyance.

Johnny made a flapping gesture with his left hand. “Talk, talk, talk. Give me the drugs, is what I say. In fact, if you want to see my behavior change, shoot me straight in the vein.”

Mitch stood up. “I guess I’ll hit the sack.”

Instantly Johnny sprang up and clapped his hand on Mitch’s bicep, the long ash of his cigarette falling on the table between them. “Christ on a stick,” he said, “I didn’t mean to insult your line of work or nothing like that. I just hoped to score a little extra in the way of supplies, eh? Had my hopes up for the medicine cabinet here.” He smiled at Mitch ingratiatingly, as if this were a natural explanation between friends. When Mitch didn’t say anything, he flushed, looking suddenly youthful again. “Forgive me,” he said. “I been up here too long.”

“Forget it,” Mitch said.

“Anyway, I’ve got other sources,” Johnny said philosophically, “so no harm done.”

Mitch left him lighting another cigarette, went to his room, and lay down on the single bed, the flimsy pink curtain doing nothing to block the sunlight. The smoky smell on his clothes reminded him of Martine, and he thought he should call to say he’d arrived safely; but as he was thinking it, his head swimming with whiskey, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

After his first date with Martine, he should have let it go. Clearly this was what she expected; he was a prospect too lame to be considered for the long term, redeemed only by being just smart enough to recognize it. But he didn’t want to. For years he had occasionally gone out with some divorced woman, usually sticking with her long enough to have sex a couple of times, to be reminded of the existence and practice of sex, after which he would let things drop. He became the guy who didn’t call. The guy who met your kid and played catch with him one weekend, then never came around again. It wasn’t heartlessness so much as apathy, and if Grace, at one time, would have reminded him that one could easily arise from the other, well, she wasn’t around to do so now.

But with Martine he felt like he’d met a movie star. He didn’t have her phone number, and he’d forgotten, after their cursory introductions at the bar, her last name. But he remembered her small charming apartment building off a little allée in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and took a chance, showing up there on a Friday night at six thirty with a bottle of wine and a cooler filled with food. One thing Mitch had going for him: he could cook. He figured he might as well play to his strengths.

The child who answered the door was lithe, blond, storybook cute, maybe seven years old. In French, Mitch asked him if his mother was home. The kid just stared at him, rhythmically biting his lower lip and then releasing it. Mitch asked what his name was and still got no response. Finally he crouched down and introduced himself, which accomplished nothing. The boy was rubbing his right toe against the hallway carpet in exactly the same rhythm as the lip biting. In his right hand, for some reason, was a twenty-dollar bill. He dropped it on the floor and ran away.

Mitch stood up, not sure what to do now. From the back of the apartment, Martine was yelling about cold air coming in and she came down the hall to investigate, smelling of perfume and cigarettes, her hair in a bun at the base of her neck. When she saw Mitch, she stopped short.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were the pizza man. That was probably confusing for Mathieu.” It was impossible to miss the tone of reproach.

“I apologize,” Mitch said. “I didn’t know you had a son.” He wondered where the child had been the other night.

She looked at him blankly, her hands twisting in whatever task she’d just been performing — folding clothes, maybe, or washing dishes. Her glasses were slipping down her nose.

“I brought you some dinner,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I guess you have pizza coming, but … well, I brought a roasted lamb shank, new potatoes, and salad. And a bottle of wine.” He gestured at the cooler at his feet. “I thought, it’s Friday night, and you might not feel like cooking … ”

It seemed she wasn’t going to say anything. No wonder her kid didn’t talk. She was even biting her lip just as he had.

From some back corner of the apartment came an unholy shriek and the angry tumble of furniture falling over. Martine turned and ran back down the hall, and after a moment he could hear her murmuring and her son’s outbursts calming, finally quieting, like waves diminishing as they lapped against the shore.

He stood in the hallway, winter’s cold hands grabbing his back, feeling like more of a jackass than he had in his entire life. After a few minutes he wrote his phone number on a piece of paper, wedged it under the lid of the cooler, and called out, “Well, I’ll be going now. Good-bye!”

There was no answer.

When he woke up, in Iqaluit, he called home, but there was no answer. It was Saturday, and Martine was probably out with Mathieu at the zoo or the museum. She had a mania for activities. She wanted Mathieu to be well rounded and hoped that if she constantly exposed him to a variety of events he might pick up something new instead of remaining the lightly autistic, science-obsessed boy he was. No advice on this matter would be tolerated. He left a message, and went to find the clinic. It was cool and windy, the sky a range of grays from charcoal to steel to pearl. But it was also summer, and on the hard-scrabble soil were the miniature blooms of dwarf daisies and Arctic poppies, with light-green lichen spreading delicately over the rocks. He felt the gorgeous pleasure of being away. No matter what happened here, for good or bad, it wasn’t home, and there was a luxurious freedom in that.

At the clinic, after introducing himself to the nurse on duty, he was shown to his desk and given a roster of appointments that began immediately. People had been backed up for weeks while they waited for his rotation to start — the last person, apparently, had had some kind of meltdown and returned to Toronto with a full month on the clock — and they were scheduled thickly, one every twenty minutes. In the nurse’s brief description of this last counselor, Mitch heard a clear contempt for fragile southerners, but as she spoke he only nodded, feeling confident and ready to get to work and prove himself. He knew from experience that at least half of these patients wouldn’t show up. They’d forget, or change their minds, or had never intended to come in the first place; they’d gone along with the idea to be polite, because a judge or doctor had recommended it, but that didn’t mean they truly consented. They just didn’t want to be rude and say no.

So he had some free time. He looked out his office window at the parking lot, where a few birds were pecking at trash that had spilled from a garbage can’s overflow, and at something that looked suspiciously like a pool of vomit. Behind him there was a knock, and he turned around to see a young man, seventeen or so, standing in the doorway. He was very skinny, with dark eyes, floppy black hair, and lips so dark they looked painted. His red windbreaker was streaked with dirt.

“Hey,” Mitch said. “Can I help you?”

The kid licked his chapped lips. “They sent me here,” he said.

“Who sent you?”

“The people down the hall,” the kid said.

“Which people?”

The boy’s answer to this was an inconclusive shrug. Mitch gestured toward a chair and asked what his name was.

“Thomasie.”

The boy sat down. With his round face and high cheekbones he was handsome, the hair falling over his eyes giving him a movie-idol look.

“Thomasie what?”

“Reeves. That was my dad’s name. He’s down in Sarnia. That’s where he’s at.”

“And your mom?”

“Yeah,” the kid said, giving him a weird, furtive look.

While they were talking, Mitch flipped through his files and his calendar, but there was nothing under “Reeves.” The boy sat opposite him, balancing his elbows on his knees, his expression either hooded or blank. Glancing out the window at the parking lot, he began gnawing on a fingernail, pulling it off gently, bit by bit, then examining it and flicking it to the floor.

“So tell me what brings you here,” Mitch said.

Thomasie smiled without humor or gratitude; he seemed shrunk beneath the protective hull of his jacket. Mitch had the feeling he was being judged, that if he said the wrong thing the kid might jump up and sprint out of there. So he waited. The silence between them grew thick, and neither appeared willing to break it.

Thomasie shook a cigarette out of a pack in his pocket, tapped it against the palm of his hand, stuck it behind his ear, then cleared his throat. When he finally looked at Mitch, his expression was strangely sincere and earnest, guileless. “You’re new,” he said.

“That’s right. I just got here. Although I was here once before.”

Thomasie nodded. “Yeah, my dad remembered you from when you were here before. He played in the basketball thing you did. We don’t have basketball right now. We got a guy doing like an adventure club or something? But mostly kids stay home and play video games.”

Another silence. Mitch tried to remember a kid named Reeves, but he hadn’t known most of their last names — they were a mass of adolescent energy and short attention spans, and he’d spent each session trying to incite enough enthusiasm that they’d care about the game but not so much they’d get into fights. He was dismayed to realize, now, that he probably didn’t remember many first names, either.

“So what can I do for you?” he finally said.

Thomasie smiled again, and the bland, empty secrecy of those smiles was starting to get on Mitch’s nerves. He rubbed his temples, telling himself to be patient. He was feeling last night’s whiskey a bit.

“Everybody around here knows about it,” the kid said. “I thought maybe you did too.”

He paused expectantly, but Mitch had no file and hadn’t been following the news from up here. He shook his head slightly, and Thomasie looked down at the floor. Clearly he’d hoped to be spared having to tell the whole story.

“My mom, she’s in the hospital,” he said. “Been there a while now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mitch said. When the kid didn’t go on, he added, “What happened?”

“She was out partying one night and she was walking home from her friend’s house with my little sister. Anyway, there was a storm, and she didn’t make it home.”

“What do you mean, she didn’t make it home?”

Thomasie bit off another shred of fingernail before answering. His right knee was jiggling, practically jack-hammering. “She passed out in the snow,” he said, in the quiet, almost affectless manner common to many Inuit, his intonation so flat that it took Mitch a moment to grasp the horror of where this was going. “When she woke up the world was white. That’s what she said. My little sister died. They might send my mum to jail, but right now she’s still in the hospital. She lost most of her eyesight, that’s why the world was so white. They don’t know what happened to her eyes. She also lost some fingers and toes, but that don’t bother her as much as the eyes. The world was white. It’s weird she says that, because it was dark when she woke up. It was still winter, and anyways, she was blind.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mitch said, and the kid nodded. He had spoken calmly, without tears or anger, his fidgeting and nail-biting the only signs of emotion. The office door was still open, and Mitch could hear steps and voices outside. Someone with a scheduled appointment was waiting in the hallway.

Thomasie leaned back, as if spent, and sucked on his bloody fingernail. He didn’t seem inclined to say anything more.

“What was your sister’s name?” Mitch said.

The boy’s attention strayed to his shoes, which he examined closely for some time. “Karen,” he finally said. Another pause. Then, still looking at his shoes: “I dream about her sometimes. She’s alone in the snow. It’s like she’s in heaven — except not really, ’cause she’s cold and uncomfortable. She keeps asking me to come see her, and I try, but I can’t get to her. Then I wake up.”

Mitch nodded. “You wish you could have helped her and your mom.”

Thomasie shrugged. “I been at the hospital so much, with my mom, they told me to come see you.”

“I’m glad you did,” Mitch said. “So let’s set up some appointments.”

“You got any drugs?” the boy said. “I don’t sleep good.”

Mitch flushed. “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“My friend got some pills when his dad died.”

Mitch sat back. “I’d like to help you,” he said, and Thomasie looked up. “We can work with a psychiatrist on some treatment options. But mainly, you and me, we’ll just be talking, working through some of the stuff that’s happened.”

The boy was already standing. “Okay,” he said, in a monotone that implied neither agreement nor refusal. Before Mitch could ask him to wait, he loped out, his sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. Then a middle-aged man came in complaining that he shouldn’t have to be here just because he and his wife had “one goddamn fight.” Mitch had to focus on calming him down, and soon grew absorbed by this new story, this new crisis. But his eye caught a flash of red out of the window — Thomasie Reeves’s windbreaker, bright against the drab gray parking lot as he strode quickly away, his head down against the wind.

The rest of the day passed normally, with addiction counseling, unemployment sagas, eviction nightmares. These he was used to. He knew how to help people break such stories down into their composite elements and start to reconfigure them. He saw his job as gently prying their fingers from their own throats. A long time ago, as a young man, he had thought of himself as a savior, and this was the fervor he had passed on to Grace. Now he believed in small, specific steps and broad-based statistical results. He wasn’t as enthused about his work as he once was, but he was more confident in his ability to execute, and he slept better at night.

At six he finished up and walked through the clinic toward the exit. It was a quiet, dark place, with green corridors and an overworked, lethargic-looking staff that paid him no attention, but he didn’t mind. Nor did it bother him to step out into a bright June evening so brisk that he shivered. He had gotten away.

After his disastrous visit to her apartment, he thought he’d never see Martine again. The bachelor life he had grown used to now seemed pathetic, and a sense of futility draped itself over him, wrapping its suffocating arms around his neck. From now on he would be alone.

Then she called.

This time, they met in the middle of the day and took Mathieu to a movie and then to the park. An unexpected thing happened. Mitch had liked Martine — in the fizzy, hopelessly insecure way you like someone who’s out of your league, and clearly slumming in your league for just one night — but he fell in love with her son. And it was reciprocated. The kid had Asperger’s, it seemed; he was a dinosaur expert and could recite encyclopedia entries about them from memory. He told Mitch all about the T. rex and “the land before time,” apparently the dinosaur era. And as Mitch listened to this beautiful, robotic child, he felt his heart cracking like ice cubes in warm water. By the end of the afternoon, Mathieu was holding his hand and lecturing him about velociraptors.

Martine, for her part, was amazed. “This never happens,” she said, sounding almost offended.

“Can we take him home?” Mitch heard Mathieu say to her in French. “I want to play with him.”

Martine said, “He’s not a toy, my love.”

The kid just looked at her blankly. Other than dinosaurs, it was hard to know what he thought about anything. Mitch could only imagine the heartbreak of this for Martine, who constantly threw him lines, hoping their hooks would catch and she could reel him in. Mitch wanted to say that of course he’d go home with them, but the memory of his first encounter with the boy prevented him from speaking.

“Ask him yourself,” Martine finally said.

“You come with me?” Mathieu said to him instantly. He had yet to call Mitch by name or to acknowledge that he was an adult. He treated him like a cross between an audience and a companion.

“Yes, I’d like to come with you,” Mitch said, then glanced over at Martine, expecting to see gratitude and appreciation on her face. Instead, she looked irritated and a little concerned. She held out her hand to her son, who ignored it and took Mitch’s. Thus unified, thus fractured, they went home.

Over the next few months, Mitch’s relationship with the boy deepened into ferocious, passionate intensity. They spent every weekend together. He took Mathieu to Parc Lafontaine, to the planetarium, played with him, read Tintin to him. Martine wasn’t keen on school-night visits, so midweek he’d find himself in a reverie of longing, wondering what Mathieu was doing at that very moment, picturing his blond head asleep on his red flannel pillow.

Things with Martine were, understandably, a little strange. They hardly spent any time alone. They never went out to dinner or a movie, and he didn’t meet any of her friends. But he stepped into her home life, drawing himself inside the bubble of her apartment, her weekends, her kitchen table. After Mathieu went to bed, the two of them would talk — mostly about the child — while doing the dishes or drinking a glass of wine. They went to bed together, but a lot of the time they just went to sleep, Martine curled up against him with a hand on his shoulder or hip. Tired from a long week, she wanted to be held and comforted as she drifted off. When they did have sex, it was ritualized, purposeful, and quick — which was not the same as unsatisfying. There was a deep comfort in the dullness of it that he could never have anticipated. Sometimes she asked him to stay with Mathieu while she took a bath and read a magazine. It was as if they had skipped dating and gone straight to the long-married stage.

This went on for a year, then another. He didn’t meet the rest of Martine’s family, though her parents lived in Montreal North and her sister not five streets away. Somehow, without any conversation, certain rules had been established. Weekends only, even in summer — except in August, when they went on vacation together in Maine, where Mitch and Mathieu played Frisbee on the beach and jumped in the waves.

He wondered, every so often, why he tolerated these conditions, and always reached the same conclusions. First, as strange as the situation was, there was no doubt that it was better — a thousand times better — than living on his own had been. Second, he believed, though he never articulated this to Martine, that if he hung on and stuck around, eventually he would be more than her son’s companion and her weekend comfort. He would be indispensable. He was counting on that.

Thomasie Reeves came back a week later. In the interim, Mitch had been settling into the duplex; he had bought groceries and stocked the kitchen, and gone for walks around town to let people know who he was and how long he’d be staying. He was welcomed with uncommon grace, tinged with reserve; it was clear that they were used to seeing people like him come and go.

Johnny, he learned, was prone to long absences and sudden reappearances. Mitch would go three days without seeing him, only to wake up one morning and find him frying eggs in the kitchen, asking Mitch to join him, talking a mile a minute about some woman he’d been with the night before. Sometimes he brought the woman back home, and in the morning Mitch would see her sleepily pulling on her shoes in the living room, acknowledging him with an awkward, hungover wave. He hadn’t had a roommate since he was nineteen, but in fact he was glad for some activity in the house, a sense of life going on around him. A couple of times he stayed up late with Johnny, who told hilarious anecdotes about his relatives in Newfoundland, so long and involved that Mitch couldn’t remember them very well the next day. Johnny was a performer, a teller of tales, and the fact that he had no interest in other people, and never asked him what his life back in Montreal was like, suited Mitch perfectly.

He still hadn’t talked to Martine. He’d left several messages, and she’d called once — at a time when she must have known he’d be tied up in appointments — saying that everything was fine, she was glad he had made it safely, and there was nothing to worry about. But things were unraveling — that much was obvious. Less so was how he felt about it. Mainly he was glad to have this much distance between himself and the difficulties of home. He tried not to worry too much about Mathieu; he was opinionated, aggressive, and in his own way emotional, but not much given to abstractions. Which is to say that while he was attached to Mitch, he wouldn’t miss him when he wasn’t around. At least, Mitch didn’t think he would.

He asked around at the clinic about Thomasie Reeves, and everyone shook their heads and talked about how sad that case was but didn’t say anything more. Every conversation about it trailed off into silence. One free afternoon, he went to the library and asked a librarian about the incident. She sighed and said, “Gloria Reeves,” directing him to the newspaper accounts. The little girl, Karen, had been three years old, and they’d found her curled up inside her mother’s coat, pressed against her chest. The paper ran a photo of the family lined up on a couch, with Karen sitting in her mother’s lap and Thomasie beside them, all three of them wearing white turtlenecks and wool sweaters, a Christmas tree in the background.

A few days later, Thomasie appeared in Mitch’s doorway. He was wearing the same outfit as last time, and his lips were just as chapped.

“Come in, sit down,” Mitch said calmly. “How’s it going?”

“My mom’s worse,” the boy said. “She’s like in a coma or something. I think she doesn’t want to wake up.”

“I don’t know if that’s how it works,” Mitch said.

“It seems that way to me,” the kid said.

“What do the doctors say?”

Thomasie seemed not to register the question, intent instead on telling Mitch what he’d come to say. “They said I should stop visiting her so much. That maybe I should go stay with my dad.”

Mitch wasn’t sure why anybody would tell a kid to stop coming to the hospital, but maybe getting out of town for a while wasn’t such a terrible idea. “What about that?” he said. “Going down south for a little bit.”

Thomasie rolled up the sleeve of his windbreaker and held out his forearm, where there was a whorl of white scar tissue, raised and bumpy, in the crook of his elbow. “My father,” he said.

Mitch’s heart sank. “Did you tell any—”

The boy was shaking his head. “That’s family business,” he said.

Mitch sat there gathering his thoughts. When he was here last time, Thomasie must have been one of those little kids he’d seen running around, apparently joyful. And his father, whom Mitch didn’t remember, would’ve been a teenager with a family, playing basketball in the local league before going home to take out his anger on the children he’d had too soon. Mitch had been inside a number of homes in Iqaluit, and met people who’d drawn close together despite having no jobs or money, who cared for their families and sheltered relatives in need of help, who scraped together enough to buy school supplies for their kids. He’d also seen homes that weren’t so lucky, where things had gotten out of control. All it took was one haywire generation and sometimes there was no coming back from that — especially for the kids. Thomasie’s home must have been one of those, but it was pretty rare to come out of a place like that as well spoken and personable as he was, and rarer still to appeal to someone like Mitch for help. To have the wherewithal, or the desperation.

“Could you tell the doctors I don’t have to go?” Thomasie was saying. “Maybe you could talk to them.”

“Why?” Mitch said. The question came out sounding unkind, even cruel, but he just didn’t know what the boy hoped he could accomplish. He instantly felt ashamed, with Thomasie’s bright black eyes searching his face for a response. “All right,” he said.

The boy nodded, then abruptly ran out of the room, maybe afraid that if he stayed too long Mitch might change his mind.

There was a lull before Mitch’s next appointment, and he looked out the window, thinking, his gaze fixed on nothing. There was a febrile quality to the boy, a stoppered intensity no doubt born of grief. Mitch knew he was walking into an explosive situation, something almost impossible to handle easily or well, and it gave him the same sense of excitement and danger another person might find in hang gliding or drugs. In falling in love with the wrong person. In falling in love with the right person.

He sat daydreaming of Martine and Mathieu in happier times, the long weekends of dinosaur trivia and Frisbee playing. He missed them, but his longing had less to do with geography than with his demonstrated ability, in spite of all his best intentions, to fuck things up. They still hadn’t spoken. She was punishing him for leaving, and for everything that had happened before he left. It was like they were having a conversation. His leaving and her not calling when he was reachable were remarks, just as surely as if they’d been talking it through. In this back-and-forth, it was only a question of who would budge first — and he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be Martine.

Mitch had been with them for over two years when it happened. It was March, with winter still holding on tight and squeezing out one snowstorm after another, as if trying to build to some grand finale. Mitch’s coworkers took turns going on vacation to Florida or the Bahamas, returning five days later with sunburns and airs of grim disappointment that winter hadn’t given up and vanished while they were out of town. But Mathieu loved snow and playing in the park and never seemed to feel the cold, even when his lips were turning blue and his teeth were chattering. When Martine told him it was time to come in, he would tremble with rage, as if she were robbing him of his most precious possession, then slip loose and run away. And when she finally caught up with him he’d flail his fists, hitting her wherever he could, and Mitch could tell that it hurt her both emotionally and physically. Afterward, when she finally got him home and in bed, she would be exhausted. Mitch brought her tea and stroked her hair, and sometimes held her while she cried.

With him, Mathieu was calmer. He had moved on from dinosaurs to particle physics, and to Mitch he seemed like a genius. He could explain the principles of nuclear fission for an hour, describing its various complexities, and it didn’t matter whether Mitch responded or not. If, however, he left the room, Mathieu would get upset, so he took to reading the newspaper in the boy’s room while these lectures were delivered.

This wasn’t a perfect life; he knew it wasn’t what Martine had once imagined; but it had its own warmth and pulse and pleasures.

Then, one Saturday, the three of them went to the Biodome, an indoor zoo that featured four different habitats, with corresponding flora and fauna, and visitors could walk from one to the next, trading tropical humidity for frigid Arctic air. As ever, Martine was hoping that this new experience might open Mathieu up, move him beyond physics. And at first, things went well. After the cold outside, the warm, wet air made them feel like they were on holiday. They walked through the rain forest, glimpsing birds high above in the trees and enormous capybaras in the streams below. Mathieu held Martine’s hand without complaint. Then he spotted something in the thick leaves overhead — a tamarin monkey, scampering, just barely visible, its golden-brown fur flashing against the trunk of a tree. Mathieu wanted to touch it, to play with it, for his mother to buy it for him and take it home with them. Martine patiently explained that the monkey wasn’t a pet or for sale, that it was happy in this rain forest but wouldn’t be in their apartment, which was too cold and didn’t have any trees.

None of these arguments made sense to him. “Singe! Singe!” he screamed, and Mitch wondered if Mathieu not only wanted the monkey but somehow identified with it, seeing himself up there, loose and wild and uncontained.

Around them families scurried away, eager to distance themselves from the howling boy, lest his behavior prove contagious. Mitch tried to distract him by talking about the snakes in the next room, but that didn’t work. Then he made the worst mistake of all, a gesture he replayed in his mind for weeks to come: he took hold of his shoulder, hoping to steer him toward a new attraction and change the scene. But Mathieu screamed even louder, wrenched himself free, and darted away. When Martine reached out to catch him, he pushed back — in a fit like this he was curiously strong — and knocked her right over the railing behind them, onto a steep, rocky slope. Unable to break her fall, she slipped and then rolled on her side, her hands grasping at air, down to the bottom. People were yelling and pointing, and Mitch instinctively grabbed Mathieu. When the boy tried to pull away, Mitch yanked his arm and heard — over the commotion of the crowd and the upset chattering of the monkeys — the soft pop of his shoulder dislocating.

Mathieu’s pretty face went white with shock and pain, and then he fainted.

Later, in the hospital, they popped Mathieu’s arm back into joint and bandaged Martine’s sprained ankle. Despite the relatively minor injuries, all of this took hours, and Martine refused to leave Mathieu alone with Mitch, who told her, over and over, “I’m so sorry, it was an accident.”

Each time she just shook her head, as if trying to clear her ears, without saying a word. She didn’t tell him to go, and by the end of the night he realized why. Because of her sprained right ankle, she needed him to drive them home. She was very practical, Martine. When they reached the apartment, she said, “I think we need to be alone tonight,” and he walked back to his place in what turned into an ice storm, the freezing rain pelting his coat.

Though he called Martine the next day to apologize yet again, and swore he wouldn’t let the incident dislodge him from their lives, things did change; cracks soon filtered across the surface of a situation that had been delicate to begin with. But they weren’t the cracks he’d anticipated.

The next weekend, he went over to cook them dinner. He hadn’t seen Martine, but they had spoken on the phone, their conversations scattered and filled with pauses that she blamed on the pain relievers she was taking for her ankle. When he showed up, it was Mathieu who came to the door. In Mitch’s thoughts the boy had loomed larger, stronger, and more demonic, and it was a shock to see how fragile he was, so clearly a child.

“Hey,” he said.

“Je peux faire un ruban de Möbius. Venez voir,” Mathieu said, turning around and walking back to his room as if nothing had ever happened. Mitch watched him twist the strip of paper for a while, the accompanying recitation high-pitched and breathless, and then said, “I’m going to say hi to your mother for a minute.” Mathieu didn’t respond, though he stopped talking, his small hands still turning the paper around.

In the kitchen Martine was drinking what looked to be, given her violet smile, a third or fourth glass of wine. She waved at him sloppily, hopping around to set the table. As he leaned over to kiss her cheek, she banged her hip against a chair and said, “Ow. Shit.”

That was their hello.

He told her to sit down while he made the pasta Bolognese, and she sat there chattering about their follow-up visits to the doctors and funny things Mathieu had said about her sprained ankle — a performance so untypical that it filled him with dread, and he sank into silence when she called Mathieu to the table. She kept it up all during dinner, joking with Mathieu and tousling his hair until he solemnly told her to stop. After five bites he asked to be excused, and she let him go. She didn’t eat much either.

Mitch washed the dishes and prepared to leave, the sorrow of endings pressing down on his heart. He felt sure he would never see any of it again: the tiny, cozy kitchen with its tomato-red walls, Martine’s handwriting on refrigerator-hung lists, Mathieu’s science books stacked on the counter.

Martine was in the bedroom, and when he went in to say good night she kissed him with her wine-dark mouth. He tasted the salt of tears. She dragged him to the bed and down on top of her, her hands under his sweater scratching his back, her good leg slipping over the back of his jeans. In all the time they’d spent together, she’d rarely initiated anything, and never had she shown such pulsing lust and desperation. She had his sweater and shirt off now and was trying to remove her own, but her elbow got snagged in the sleeve of her cardigan and caught him squarely in the face, knocking off his glasses.

“Fuck me,” she said. She was still crying.

“Martine, my love,” Mitch said, kissing her wet, crinkled cheek.

He was slipping in and out of her without rhythm or traction, trying and failing to match the jerking, spastic motion of her hips. She was crying harder now, practically choking, so Mitch slipped out and put his arms around her. He didn’t know what else to do. It was as if the Martine he knew was dissolving. She shifted until her back was to him, then curled into herself, her knees meeting her chin. He was shushing and comforting her, muttering gentle and meaningless sounds, when he heard a small noise behind him, lifted his head to look, and saw Mathieu silhouetted in the doorway.

The boy stared at him, his blue eyes open and frightened. Mitch watched anxiously, waiting for him to explode, but he just stood there, his gaze never once moving from Mitch’s face, even to examine his mother’s hidden, shuddering figure. Then he padded back down the hallway to his room.

Martine was whispering to her knees. He bent closer, curling himself around her protectively, bark on her tree. Only when he pressed his cheek against hers could he make out what she was saying. He’d thought she was talking to herself, but she was speaking in English and, therefore, to him.

“Please don’t leave me,” she said.

It was the last thing he’d expected her to say. What could he do? As her tears dried, he curled even closer. He didn’t leave. He told her he never would.

If only he could have stayed right there with her forever, inside that moment of calm. But life wasn’t like that; it was work and cooking and mothering and chores, and Martine went back to all these things, soldiering through. He did his best to help her, but something had shifted between them. A dam had broken and he understood only now that she had kept him at bay for so long because behind that dam was a raging torrent of water that could swamp them both. She needed him. She started calling him every night at ten, after Mathieu had gone to sleep, to talk about her day. This he loved, but she never wanted to get off the phone. What she wanted, he finally realized, was to drift into sleep with the phone against her cheek, with him murmuring reassurances. Before long he was spending Wednesday nights, and then Thursday nights, at her apartment, where he would murmur those same reassurances in person.

That crying fit was never repeated, but he sometimes woke up in the middle of the night to go to the washroom, and when he came back he’d notice, in the bedroom’s dim light, the glint of tears on her face. The idea that she was crying in her sleep broke his heart.

Soon he was spending all his time at their place, his own apartment gathering dust.

They talked about everything, constantly hashing things out. They discussed what had happened in the zoo, how angry she had been at him and Mathieu and how oppressive that anger was, how much he regretted what he’d done, how sorry he still felt. She said she forgave him. All he had to do to stay in her good graces, it seemed, was to listen. Martine could talk about the stress of raising Mathieu for hours, could dissect the minutiae of his sentences and gestures and bowel movements. After the first of these sessions, she put her arms around his neck and thanked him.

“For what?” he said.

“For listening. For being here. I need you so much.”

These were exactly the words he’d been aching to hear for so long; but now that he heard them, the effect wasn’t what he expected. This had to do with Mathieu. Mitch couldn’t get over — and would never admit to Martine — how, that afternoon in the zoo, he had been so blinded with rage and protectiveness that in another second he would’ve knocked Mathieu to the ground. He’d thought he loved the child, but in that instant recognized the truth: he only put up with him, for her sake.

He was so disappointed in himself, so ashamed, that he began to crave escape. All through April and into May, nestling into the apartment while spring came, taking Mathieu to the park on weekends, attending the year-end concert at his school, lying in bed with this lovely, heartbreakingly vulnerable woman in his arms, he thought constantly about getting away.

He told Martine that the call to come north came out of the blue, and this was true enough — but only after weeks of dropping subtle hints and sending friendly e-mails to acquaintances he hadn’t spoken to in ages, just to keep his name in their minds. And when he told Martine he was thinking of going but wanted to talk it over with her first, even as he said it he knew that he’d already made up his mind.

On a gloomy Thursday morning he met Thomasie Reeves outside the hospital where his mother lay in a coma. They had arranged this over the phone, the boy’s voice slow and stilted, as if it were coming from another continent. He seemed to think that Mitch could convince the doctors of what he couldn’t, and that everything would change once Mitch had seen his mother for himself. As he approached that morning, sidling up the street in the same sideways, loping stride Mitch had noted from his office window, the smell of marijuana was almost overwhelming. Thomasie seemed bathed in it, his eyes red, his expression muted, his whole personality turned down a notch. Mitch’s heart went out to him; if this were his mother, he would’ve wanted to numb himself too.

He reached out his hand and Thomasie stared at it for a second, in confusion or fascination, before shaking it; then they went inside. The nurses walking past smelled the pot, and one of them grimaced in disapproval. Mitch shot her a look, and she rolled her eyes. In the waiting room, a father sat cradling a sick girl maybe two or three years old; his face was impassive, the child’s cheeks flushed a dark, unhealthy red. Opposite them, an old woman had fallen asleep with her round face dropped against her chest.

Thomasie, his face intent, led Mitch down a dim linoleum hallway without saying anything. He was wearing the same windbreaker, over which he’d slung a blue backpack. Beneath the pot was another, gamy odor, and his hair hung limp and thin. Mitch wondered if anyone was taking care of him — telling him to bathe, making sure he got something to eat. Every time Mitch had seen him there were dark circles under his eyes.

Thomasie stopped at a closed door, then opened it. Inside there were two beds, one of them empty, and the woman in the other had to be the boy’s mother. According to the newspaper, Gloria Reeves was only thirty-nine, but she looked much older, her face mottled and creased. Mitch glanced at Thomasie, who had wanted so desperately to come; he was standing uncertainly at the foot of the bed.

His mother’s eyes were closed, and she was hooked up to an IV and a monitor that indicated her heartbeat. It took Mitch a moment to register that the index and third fingers of her right hand and a chunk of her ear were missing, lost to frostbite. The tip of her nose was black. Though her breathing was labored, she seemed composed and too still, like a wax figure someone had arranged into position.

Mitch saw a doctor passing by outside and, after nodding to Thomasie, stepped out in the hall. He had met him a few days ago, a genial, outdoorsy young man from Victoria who was just out of medical school and on a year’s rotation in the Arctic.

“Bobby,” Mitch said, “how are you?”

In response, the doctor not only shook his hand but also grasped his upper arm, his eyes flickering with concern. “I see you’re here with Thomasie,” he said. “You know, we asked him not to come by so much.”

“Why would you tell a kid not to visit his mother?”

“He’s disruptive,” Bobby said. “He comes here stoned, even gets in bed with her. Sometimes he’s drunk and yelling at the doctors. It upsets the other patients. And God knows it’s not helping his mother, no matter how out of it she is.”

“What’s her condition?”

“Bad,” Bobby said flatly. “I mean, of course there’s a one-in-a-million chance. But her brain was probably damaged irreparably by those hours in the snow.”

“So she’ll stay in that bed forever?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. She’s deteriorating, and I don’t think there’s much functioning neural activity. Thomasie gets excited because her eyes open sometimes, but that’s just muscle reflex. It doesn’t indicate anything significant.”

When Mitch nodded, Bobby clapped him on the arm and strode off down the hall, whistling a little, young and vigorous.

When he stepped back inside he was surprised by what he saw in the dim light. Thomasie was half lying on the bed, with his legs on the floor and his upper body pressed against his mother’s, his head buried in the crook of her neck. Then, sensing Mitch’s return, he got up, keeping his eyes averted, and tucked something under her pillow — a small bottle of rye he must have had in his backpack. He glanced over at Mitch but didn’t say anything, and they left the room.

Once they were outside, Mitch said, “Maybe you shouldn’t visit quite so often, Thomasie. I’m not sure it’s helping her.”

The boy shrugged bashfully, as if he’d been complimented. “I don’t mind,” he said, “I don’t have much else to do.” He finally looked Mitch in the eye. “Talk to them,” he said. “Tell them I like coming here.” Then he walked away, his shoulders hunched against the wind.

A few days passed in which he didn’t see or hear from Thomasie. Then, one windy Friday afternoon, in between appointments, he got a call from the doctor.

“Just thought you should know,” Bobby said, “that Gloria Reeves died this morning. Her organs finally shut down. Thomasie was with her.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Mitch said. “How’d Thomasie seem?”

“He took it very quietly. Didn’t say much. Maybe he’ll do better now that she’s not just hanging on.”

“Maybe,” Mitch said, and hung up, finding the doctor’s optimism so misplaced as to be offensive. He sat there alone in his office thinking about the woman asleep in the snow, her tiny daughter shivering against her cold skin. The world was white. It made him ache for Martine and Mathieu, but when he called, there was no answer in Montreal. She was probably just screening his calls.

The next day he decided to find out where Thomasie lived, which wasn’t hard. Iqaluit was small, and almost everyone was related or connected somehow. One of the night nurses turned out to be Thomasie’s father’s cousin, but when Mitch told her he’d heard he was down in Sarnia, she pressed her lips together and shook her head. She was a smart, competent nurse who’d earned a degree at McGill before returning to the north, and they’d talked about her time in Montreal. She’d been chatty about life in the city, but her family was a different story.

“Thomasie’s been to see me a couple of times,” Mitch said, as casually as he could.

She looked up at him. She was short but strong, with long black hair kept off her forehead by a headband that made her look incongruously girlish. “He lived with me for a while growing up,” she said. “George and Gloria, they always drank too much, so we had Thomasie sometimes. And three of my sister’s, after she took off with her second husband. But the kids grow up and they have to learn to take care of themselves.”

Mitch flushed, not wanting her to feel that she was being accused. “Of course,” he said, “I didn’t mean—”

“He’s a sweet boy,” she said, her eyes softening, and gave him the address before picking up a stack of charts and moving quietly down the hall.

So on his day off Mitch set out carrying a bag of cookies. He couldn’t think what else to bring. Like most houses in Iqaluit, Thomasie’s was tiny, and scattered in the front yard were dolls, a beach ball, a white tricycle with pink ribbons hanging limply from the handlebars, all smudged with dirt and bleached from exposure. In the constant sunlight it was impossible to tell whether anybody was home. He knocked on the door but heard nothing inside. There wasn’t a car parked on the street, but he didn’t know if Thomasie’s family even had one. He knocked again, and this time heard what sounded like something being dragged across the floor. He knocked a third time, and finally, a minute later, Thomasie opened the door.

He was wearing sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt, and, draped over his shoulders, a blanket he’d apparently pulled off the bed. Mitch, never having seen him without his red windbreaker, was shocked at how thin he was. He stared at Mitch without a trace of recognition, his eyes not even seeming to focus, his hair a riot of tangles around his head. He was enormously stoned.

From behind him came a girl’s voice. “Who is it? Who’s out there?”

“I heard about your mom. I came to see how you’re doing,” Mitch said. When he didn’t get any response to this, he held out the cookies, which Thomasie took without a word. Still clutching the blanket around himself, he opened the bag and started eating, crumbs falling to the floor.

“I said who is it?” the girl called again, impatient and stern. “Don’t just stand there with the door open.” Mitch heard footsteps, then she pushed Thomasie aside and stood there looking at him. “Oh,” she said, evidently knowing who he was. She was a teenager, around Thomasie’s age, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, her hair neatly combed back into a ponytail.

“This my girlfriend,” Thomasie said. “Fiona.”

“Hi,” Mitch said stupidly, and she nodded at him.

“He brought cookies,” Thomasie said.

“Invite him in,” Fiona said. “God.”

She pulled Thomasie back by the blanket and gestured for Mitch to come inside, pointing him to the couch and Thomasie to the facing chair. Her movements were strong and martial, somehow all the more convincing for her thinness and youth. She was in charge here. Mitch had been expecting a chaotic mess, but the house was clean and well cared for. All around them was the evidence of the missing mother and daughter: finger paintings tacked up on kitchen walls, a calendar with days circled on it next to the door, above a pile of little shoes and boots.

“What do you want?” Fiona asked him, sounding more curious than confrontational.

“I came to offer my condolences,” Mitch said, but she looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken in English. Or maybe she just couldn’t imagine why he’d thought this would be helpful. When, after a long pause, she still didn’t speak, Mitch tried again. “Do you live here?”

She glanced at Thomasie, who was looking down at his lap, fixated on the cookies. Her expression was equal parts disappointment, concern, and affection. “I’m his cousin,” she said, then registered the look on Mitch’s face. “Second cousin. My parents live down by the hospital. After his mom got hurt I came over to help take care of him.”

“Fiona takes care of everybody,” the boy said.

“Be quiet, Thomasie,” she told him, but fondly.

“She’s got the best grades at school. She’s going to be a lawyer.”

Fiona sighed; it was a sigh of having heard all this before, of wishing he had the expectations for himself that he had for her.

“That’s great,” Mitch said. “I was worried about you,” he said to Thomasie. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Fiona kept looking at him, a straight, direct gaze he couldn’t quite interpret. He wasn’t sure if she was blaming him for not doing more before or asking him to do less now. Maybe both.

“He’s not alone here,” she finally said.

Mitch could tell she felt reproached. He seemed to make everybody feel bad, all these women doing their best to hold the lives around them together. “He’s very lucky,” he told her, also the wrong thing to say, because she frowned and Thomasie snorted.

Fiona stood up and, with an air of weary responsibility, offered him some tea, then went into the cramped kitchen to prepare it. Thomasie had put the cookie bag on the floor but was chewing contemplatively, looking up at the ceiling. His condition had deteriorated rapidly, and it wasn’t just that he was high, more that he had given up on communicating — given up, it seemed, on everything.

Mitch sat forward, wanting somehow to break through. “I’m so sorry about your mother,” he said. “What was she like?”

Slowly and with evident effort Thomasie lowered his gaze to Mitch, his eyes unfocused, red-tinged, and made a vague gesture with his hands, as if holding a watermelon. “She was small,” he said.

Fiona came back into the room carrying two mugs. She gave one to Mitch and the other, after shaking him none too gently by the shoulder, to Thomasie, seeming as much his mother as his girlfriend. As he faded in and out, Fiona and Mitch managed to have a conversation. He learned she’d worked since she was thirteen at a general store in Iqaluit and was an honors student who planned to earn a bachelor of laws degree at Akitsiraq Law School. Her mother worked at the general store too, and her father mostly helped around the house. She presented these facts directly, assuming they were what Mitch had come for, sounding neither shamed nor boasting.

Thomasie fell asleep in his chair.

After twenty minutes or so, Fiona looked at her watch and said, “You should go now.”

Mitch nodded, thanked her for the tea, and paused at the door to shake her hand.

As she held his hand in her cool, dry palm, Fiona’s eyes suddenly glistened. “He’s not doing too good,” she said, and at last she seemed like a teenager, her body slight beneath her hulking hooded sweatshirt, her shoulders curved. “Maybe you can help him?”

“Of course,” Mitch said, automatically. He was walking down the street before it sank in that no measures he took would bring back Thomasie’s sister, or his mother, or the life he should have had. He hadn’t meant to lie to the girl; he just wanted her, for that one moment, not to feel so alone.

That evening, he called Martine. They had finally spoken a couple of times over the past week, but she’d been in a hurry, eager to get off the phone. There was too much to talk about, or too little. He had already filled the air between them with explanations, and now there was no room for anything else. He talked, as he had before, about the people of Iqaluit, how much they needed him, how fulfilled he felt, all lies or at the very least exaggerations.

“I’m happy for you, Mitch,” she said wearily.

They’d stopped calling each other by their first names long ago, using nicknames and endearments instead, and his name falling from her lips now sounded strangely formal, distancing, even bruising. He sighed. “How’s Mathieu?”

“He’s made a friend.”

“Really? How did that happen?” Friendship wasn’t a social need Mathieu understood.

“At camp. His name is Luc. He comes over and plays on his PlayStation while Mathieu plays on his Xbox. They never talk. But they like sitting there together. Mathieu even asks me to invite Luc over.”

“Martine, that’s great. Really amazing.”

There was a pause on the other end. It could have been that she didn’t believe him, or that hearing him say “Martine” instead of “sweetheart” was as jarring to her as it had been to him. And possibly she was thinking, You should be here to see it.

“I have to go,” Martine said. “I need to get dinner.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can’t wait to see you — just three more weeks.” He was sticking to the fiction that theirs was a difficult but necessary separation, enforced by external circumstances over which he had no control, to be followed by a romantic reunion at the end of his rotation.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “I’m seeing someone else.”

“No,” he said without even thinking. He couldn’t imagine this. “I don’t believe you.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to. It’s true whether you believe it or not.”

“Is it that guy Michel at your office? Because you know he’s an asshole, Martine.”

“It’s not Michel. It’s Dr. Vendetti, actually.”

This was a name he’d never heard. “Who?”

“He’s my gynecologist.”

This information silenced him. There was so much to take in, all of it bad. That he had never once thought, in all their time together, about Martine even having a gynecologist made him dizzy with remorse. There was so much in her life he hadn’t paid attention to. And then there was the image, undesired but fully resolved, of Martine with her legs spread in stirrups, leaning back while this man put his hand inside her. He would have done anything, in that moment, to have her back, to have never left her — and this, he knew, is why she had told him.

“I have to go now,” she said. “Dinner, like I said. Take care.”

He was formulating exactly what to say next when he realized she’d hung up.

Mitch was a man of moderate habits. He didn’t smoke, rarely overate, walked as much as he could. So it took very little, when the need arose, to obliterate him.

To accomplish this goal, he bought two bottles of whiskey and invited Johnny to play cards. A short hour later he was twenty dollars down and felt the room temperature rising, so he took off his sweater. Seated across the table, Johnny smiled enigmatically, his freckled cheeks flushed red, the smoke from his continual cigarettes wreathing him cloudily, so that he looked like a magician or a wizard.

“You don’t drink much, do you?”

“I drink a regular amount.”

“You’re drunk now, and you’ve only had one drink.”

“Didn’t I have two?”

“And it isn’t easy to lose twenty bucks at gin rummy.”

“You,” Mitch said drunkenly, “are a damn card shark.”

Johnny shrugged and poured him another drink.

Mitch fought the urge to weep and tell him that he was his only friend. But it was true; in this place, right now, he was. Johnny won another twenty dollars before Mitch passed out.

It had been so long since he was hungover that he didn’t recognize the terrible commotion in his bloodstream. He thought he had food poisoning, then remembered he hadn’t eaten dinner. There was a terrible smell in the room, and when he opened his eyes he saw he’d thrown up into a bucket that Johnny must have left by his bed for just that purpose. Aching from his neck to his knees, he felt like he had a fever, so physically terrible that he couldn’t even think about Martine. Disgust — with himself, his body, and his behavior — was the closest thing to an emotion that he could summon.

Which was to say that things had worked out perfectly.

He had the day off and thought he might lie around in bed all morning, go for a walk in the afternoon, then see if Johnny was up for another night of drinking. If he could drink himself into oblivion for a couple of nights, his mind and heart might start healing, and he could sober up feeling better about Martine and Mathieu and himself. Or feeling nothing at all.

The light streaming through the thin white curtains hurt his head, and he thought about turning over, then decided this was too drastic a course of action, with potentially awful consequences. His stomach wavered unhappily, and he closed his eyes.

“You did a number on yourself,” a voice said.

He looked up to see Johnny standing next to the bed, silhouetted in the window, whose curtains he’d just thrown open.

“Get up,” he said. He seemed towering, mountainous. He left the room — for good, Mitch hoped — but was back all too soon with a can of Pepsi and several pills, which Mitch swallowed without asking what they were.

“You’ll feel better soon,” Johnny said.

“Thanks.” He was sitting up in bed now, pillows propped behind his back, feeling a sense of accomplishment for having made it halfway horizontal. Johnny sat by him for a while in silence. Every few minutes he handed him the can of Pepsi and told him to take a sip, more solicitous than Mitch would have imagined possible. As his headache slowly ebbed, Mitch realized that Johnny was waiting for the pills to take effect.

The can was half empty when Johnny said, “Heard the news this morning. About the kid you were telling me about last night. Thomasie.”

Mitch opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He closed it again, tasting on his tongue the sick trace of whiskey, the sugary bite of Pepsi. It was too early for him to feel anything yet, and he let this moment linger, knowing that soon he would feel altogether too many things. “What has he done?”

“He drank a pint of vodka and stepped onto the highway in front of a truck in the middle of the night. The trucker’s in the hospital. No note or anything.”

And there it was. Another terrible thing in a world already sick to death of terrible things. I should kill myself too, Mitch thought. His shoulders shook, and he welcomed the coming sobs — but what happened instead was a shudder of his stomach, and the Pepsi and pills lurched back out, strands of spittle webbing the bucket and his sleeves.

“I know you tried to help him,” Johnny said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“I didn’t do any good.”

Johnny took him by the hand, as if he wanted to hold it, but then curled his palm around the still-cold Pepsi can and said, “I’ll let you get dressed,” and left the room.

At the clinic, for the first time, everyone wanted to talk to him. To know what Thomasie had been thinking, what he had told Mitch about his mother. A helicopter had flown in reporters from as far away as Montreal, eager to report on Inuit problems and the crises of addiction, poverty, and fractured families. Mitch was supposed to be an expert on these issues, and his phone rang so incessantly that he finally pulled the cord out of the wall. He had nothing to say.

They held a combined service for Thomasie and his mother at the community center, where an elder delivered the eulogy and no one from the family spoke. A friend of Thomasie’s from high school played the guitar and sang a John Denver song. There was no sign of Thomasie’s father. The nurse from the clinic was there, and so was Fiona, with her parents, but when Mitch expressed his condolences she looked right through him and said nothing. He pressed his card into her palm and told her to call if she needed anything, and she crumpled it into her pocket like some useless receipt.

When he asked to be released from his rotation, the request was granted immediately. What he wanted most was to get away from all the understanding looks and forgiving glances. Another fragile southerner, the community seemed to think. They’d never expected him to last long, and didn’t condemn him for wanting to leave. If only someone had blamed him, he might have been able to stay.

He returned to Montreal in August, and the city was turgid with heat, empty of people. His apartment felt like it belonged to someone else. Several times he picked up the phone to call Martine but always put it down again. Though he was due a vacation, he reported to work anyway, knowing how much he needed that structure and company to get through the days. He’d always been like this in difficult times, working weekends even when he didn’t have to, sculpting his hours to make everything else fit neatly into place.

On Sunday evening he went for a long run on the mountain, the familiar, muffled beat of the tam-tam drums by the Cartier monument matching the rhythm of his pulse. After the cold nights of Iqaluit the dense, humid air felt good against his skin, his muscles unclenching as he sweated out the poisons inside.

He’d thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he fell into a dreamless, blanketing state and woke at dawn feeling like he’d been deep underwater. At six thirty the phone rang, and he raced to answer it.

“You’re nothing,” a woman’s voice said on the other line. It wasn’t Martine.

“Who is this?”

She was crying in rhythmic sobs and wheezes. “You were supposed to help.”

“Please, who is this?”

“I hope you lose somebody you love.”

“Fiona,” he said.

“You’re nothing,” she said again, and hung up.

He stood in the living room in his underwear, still holding the phone in his hand, the early-morning sun bright behind the curtains, birds chirping outside. He thought of nothing except Thomasie Reeves: his chapped lips, his red windbreaker, his face as it must have looked when he stepped out onto the highway, firm and unblinking, into the brilliance of those headlights, massive as planets, barreling toward him in the pale Arctic night.

The dial tone sang, then switched to a higher beep. Mitch was happy. He was satisfied that someone hated him as much as he deserved, and was willing to tell him so. At least there was one person in the world who told the truth.