Inside

SIX

Montreal, 2006

MITCH HAD BEEN back in Montreal for two weeks when he saw his ex-wife for the first time in years. It was September, and fall was coming on strong. The Labor Day weekend passed stormy and breezy, warning everyone to put the follies of summer behind them. Kids walked the streets with their heads down, bent under backpacks, listless in their new school clothes. September had always been Martine’s favorite time of year: she said it felt like promises. Whenever the phone rang, he thought it might be her. Even knowing it wasn’t, he’d pick up on the first ring, alert and vulnerable to the telemarketers on the other end or his brother calling from Mississauga.

He didn’t call her himself, because he didn’t know what to say.

He was crossing the hospital parking lot late one afternoon when a middle-aged woman called his name. He stared at her blankly, a half smile frozen on his face. She put her hand on her chest and said, “Azra.”

“My God,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and gave her a hug. She was Grace’s best friend, or had been back when they were married. She had gained weight and her hair was different — now sleek and straight, with a red tint, not long and black and curly — but her eyes were still wry and kind, reflecting the same surprise at how he had aged as his must have about her. She had always been vibrant and wiry, a churn of energy fired by some personal electricity. She and Grace used to talk in the kitchen for hours, exchanging confidences about their futures, husbands, jobs, sex lives, problems with their parents. It always amazed him how quickly they would plunge into the depths of conversation, as if the surface held no tension at all.

“How are you?” he said now.

“Oh, you know,” she said, and they both laughed. She held on to his elbows briefly — they’d always liked each other — before letting go. “Have you seen her?”

He followed her quick glance at the building behind him. “Is Grace here?” he said. “What happened?”

Azra grimaced, as if weighing whether or not to tell him whatever it was, but surely there was no reason not to. He and Grace had worked hard to forgive each other, and if the process was necessarily incomplete, it had been undertaken in what they both acknowledged was good faith. They’d kept in touch for the first years after the divorce, then gradually moved on with their lives.

“She was in a car accident last week,” Azra said. “I thought maybe you’d heard. She was stopped at a light on Jean-Talon when a car rammed straight into her. She has a broken leg and a broken pelvis and I don’t even know what else.”

“That’s awful,” Mitch said. “Are you heading in now? I’ll go with you.”

She hesitated for a second, then shrugged and nodded, and they walked inside together, catching up on each other’s news. Azra and Mike had two children, and Mitch heard their names and ages with the usual small pang of having let a stage of life pass him by. Outside Grace’s room, he stopped and touched Azra’s arm. “Why don’t you go in first and make sure she doesn’t mind if I say hi?”

He waited in the hallway after Azra disappeared inside. He worked on a different floor and knew few of the doctors here; it occurred to him now how circumscribed his routine really was. Then the door opened, and Azra gestured him in.

“Grace,” he said.

Nobody could look their best when lying in a hospital bed after a car accident, and Grace was no exception. Her face was etched with wrinkles, her skin weathered. Threads of silver shot through her limp brown hair. Her broken leg, on top of the covers, was frozen in its white trunk. Below it, a fuzzy red sock seemed the only brightness in the room. Surrounded by machines and hooked up to an IV drip, she seemed fractured and frail. Mitch couldn’t help thinking about Gloria and Thomasie Reeves, about Mathieu’s shoulder and Martine’s ankle. Feeling like the world had broken everyone he knew, he took one of Grace’s small, dry palms in his. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”

“It was a Honda, actually,” she said. Her facial expression held the dreamy vagueness of sedation. Behind him, Azra cleared her throat. She had taken off her coat and was setting things on a counter by the window: books, a pillow, a stuffed animal. Watching her friend’s movements, Grace seemed to have trouble turning her head.

“Sarah thought you should have the bear,” Azra said, waving it at Grace. “She said he’d keep you company.”

Grace licked her lips, which were chapped and feathery. “How is she?” Her voice cracked, and Mitch poured her a cup of water from a bedside pitcher and handed it to her.

“She’s doing great. She really wanted to come today, but I told her you wouldn’t want her to miss her swimming lesson. I’ll bring her tomorrow.”

“I don’t even know how to thank you.”

“Oh, shut up,” Azra said fondly.

“Who’s Sarah?” Mitch said.

Grace’s eyes met his. “My daughter.”

Mitch swallowed, surprised he hadn’t heard that she’d gotten married and started a family. On the other hand, after the divorce they’d migrated into separate social circles and never ran into each other. He’d been the one who stopped seeing their mutual friends, who’d switched neighborhoods and haunts. It was easier that way.

“She’s staying with Azra and Mike while I’m here,” Grace went on. “It sounds like she’s having a great time. I don’t think she’ll want to come home.”

“It’s fun for all of us, having her,” Azra said lightly.

“She’s always hated being an only child,” Grace said. Though her words were wistful, her voice was calm.

There was no mention of the father; Mitch guessed he was out of the picture. He realized that both women were looking at him expectantly. “Is there anything I can do?” he said, more to Azra than to Grace.

“You know, there is,” Azra said. “Maybe it’s weird to ask, but Mike and I are both working, and with the kids and all their activities … Well, is there any way you could go over to Grace’s and do the mail and the plants?”

“Of course. You don’t mind, Grace?”

When she looked at him, her expression was dazed. She couldn’t be bothered to mind right now, that much was clear.

“She lives on Monkland, I’ll write down the address,” Azra said. “Here, I have an extra set of keys. This really helps, Mitch. Thanks.”

He felt dismissed. He squeezed Grace’s hand again — cold against his own — then walked down the green hallway with her keys in his pocket.

He drove west along Sherbrooke, past the dark red turrets of the Westmount Library, the setting sun piercing the windshield. All along the street people were hurrying home from work, leaning forward against the wind that was whipping leaves off trees and whirling them around. He knew a lot of people who lived in this part of town but rarely socialized here, having peeled away this layer of his life a long time ago.

Outside Grace’s building the trees were a riot of green and early, creeping yellow. He walked up the steps, remembering the apartment they had moved into as a young married couple so long ago. They had been so thrilled to buy their first things together, furniture and dishes, all of domestic life a novelty. It was hard to believe they’d ever been so young. He left the mail on a table in the hallway and went into the kitchen, looking for a watering can. There were dirty plates in the sink, and cereal boxes and granola bars and fruit scattered across the counter. But it was a homey kitchen, a child’s smeared finger paintings tacked on the fridge. On the counter was a school photo of a blond girl with a gapped smile and clear, wide-set green eyes. She didn’t look much like Grace, who had had dark hair even as a child.

He couldn’t find anything to water with until, rummaging through the cupboards, he found a teapot that he recognized, queasily, as his mother’s. God knows when she’d given it to them. She’d been dead for seven years.

He filled the teapot with water and wandered from plant to plant. Toward the back of the apartment was Grace’s bedroom, and he peered in for a second and then, seeing no plants, stepped back with a feeling of relief. The other bedroom was a riot of pink sheets and stuffed animals and books and toys. No plants there, either.

Five minutes later he was done, and he put the teapot back exactly where he’d found it, which seemed stupid given how messy the kitchen was, but still. It felt like the right thing to do.

Back at his own apartment, he thought about Grace as he made dinner. When they met, he was halfway through his PhD program, the teaching assistant for a course Grace took called Personality. Later in their relationship, she confessed to having an encyclopedic memory of that time — what they’d said, where they’d been, what each of them had been wearing. He smiled and nodded, but truthfully he remembered little of those early encounters. What stuck in his mind was Grace’s work, her professional, detailed lab reports, so superior to those of her peers that halfway through the term he stopped reading them and gave her an automatic A. The sophistication of her performance was in dire contrast to the handwriting on her quizzes, which was round and bubbly. She didn’t dot her i’s with hearts or flowers, but she seemed like the kind of girl who had, and not that long ago. She pressed down so hard that sometimes the pen broke through the paper. It was the penmanship of a very young, very determined person.

Although he’d thought then that he was depressed, in retrospect his time as a grad student was, in fact, the happiest of his life. The worries that had so nagged at him now seemed like luxuries. Was psychology important? Was it effective? Did it matter? He stayed up at night chewing over its various intellectual and emotional bankruptcies, and these anxieties functioned as ballast, distracting him from his suspicion that it was himself, not the profession, that was unworthy. Eventually, as he started working, the worries dissipated, and at night he thought about the people he worked with and their problems, not his own.

After that class was finished, he started seeing Grace around the department, meeting with her professors, working in a lab. They would run into each other late at night at the vending machine, or reach for the same milk container at the coffee shop at eight in the morning. Neither of them had a life, so they made one together.

He couldn’t recall a single thing Grace had said to them when they were dating. What he did remember was how he felt, things he’d said that made her laugh or nod at his wisdom. Over candlelit dinners she sometimes looked like she wished she had a notebook handy. At first this was great; then it was uncomfortable. He wanted her to figure out that he wasn’t all that wonderful.

But after he really got to know her, he understood that this was just her nature. She brought the full force of her attention to bear on you, made you drunk with that and with yourself. She wasn’t being manipulative; she was genuinely interested. Once he realized this, though, he began to resent her for not thinking he was uniquely gifted. It was unfair, but he couldn’t help it. He stopped calling, stopped inviting her out. In response, she asked him over, cooked dinner, and started telling him all about herself, her family, stories from her childhood. Then she calmly engineered him into bed, and there, without exactly being the aggressor, she let him know that he had been ignoring her, that it was his turn to pay attention. And he did.

A year later they were married. They were in their early twenties, and the only married people they knew were their parents’ age. Everyone seemed to think it was cute — or reckless. “You’ll be divorced before you’re thirty-five,” his mother muttered darkly when he gave her the news. And she was right, as she was about most things. She had loved Grace, though. He wondered if she still thought they’d get divorced when she handed over the teapot. She was a materialist, his mother, stroking her favorite blanket and cardigan sweater in her last days at the hospital, long after she’d forgotten his name.

He had never wanted to admit it, but he mourned the loss of Grace the student, the adoring undergrad. When she got her own degree and they became peers, the tectonic plates beneath them shifted, resettled. They stopped having sex. They were buddies. What this said about him, his loss of desire, his need to dominate, was so profoundly unflattering — and so unutterably, unchangeably true — that he couldn’t even think about it.

Grace was perfect for him. She was trustworthy, caring, loyal, and smart; she understood both him and his work. So their divorce was, for a time, the great failure of his life — until he went on to other failures.

He discovered the truth about his marriage when he almost slept with a patient. An unhappily married forty-year-old banker whose husband was sick with pancreatic cancer, Marisa was rumpled and bosomy, with a messy tangle of upswept brown hair and lipstick that was always smudged; her perfume was unpleasantly spicy and overpowering. Every time she came in he thought she looked like she’d just gotten laid, although he knew from their sessions that this wasn’t true. Lonely, bereft, she wanted someone to hold her hand; she loved talking to Mitch, and there soon developed an unspoken tension that he allowed to build. He even grew to rely on it, the excitement of it feeling, at times, like the only thing that got him through the week.

At home he and Grace were sleeping in the same bed but on different schedules; she went to bed early and he stayed up well past midnight, so they overlapped as little as possible. Then Marisa’s husband died, and the day after the funeral she came into the office sobbing, dissolving, and admitted that despite her pain she was flooded with relief. Mitch patted her hand, understanding that she had chosen him for this confession instead of a priest, and that to violate her trust would be profane.

Years later he saw her at the Jean-Talon Market, and she looked great. She had lost weight, and her hair and clothes were less rumpled, though she still couldn’t keep her lipstick on. She was standing fifteen feet away, choosing an eggplant, and when she looked up and saw him, the expression on her face was horrified. He nodded noncommittally and drifted away, realizing that she hadn’t looked at all sexual during that terrible time in her life, of which she had just been reminded. She’d just been a mess. Only someone as lonely and narcissistic as Mitch could have interpreted it otherwise. He walked quickly to his car, half his grocery list abandoned, thanking his lucky stars that the damage hadn’t been worse.

A couple of days later, he stopped by Grace’s room again, during visiting hours, showing up empty-handed; bringing flowers to your ex-wife seemed like a weird thing to do, no matter what the circumstances were. There was another patient in the room, the wall-mounted television was blaring a French téléroman, and his heart went out to Grace. She hated television, which gave her headaches when she was tired. Now she was staring up at the ceiling, slack-jawed, her expression vacant, her hands by her sides. When he knocked, her eyes jumped to life, and she looked so happy that he flushed. He should have come back sooner.

“How are you feeling?” he said, pulling up a chair next to her.

“Fantastic.” She smiled, in spite of her evident pain. She had lost the glassy-eyed look, though she was still pale and the planes of her face were shadowed. Somebody had braided her hair. “Azra says you helped out at my place. Thank you.”

“It was nothing.” He had brought back the key to her apartment and set it on the bedside table, on top of what looked like a drawing her daughter had done.

In the other bed, a middle-aged woman moaned, seemingly agitated by the TV as well, so Mitch turned around to look. The soap opera was taking place in a hospital too, where a young woman wearing a lot of makeup was hooked up to a life-support machine while a handsome doctor looked down at her in consternation.

“Mais non, mais non,” the other patient mumbled, though Mitch couldn’t tell what exactly she was objecting to. A detergent commercial came on with a raucous jingle, and Grace winced. Noises carried into the room from the hallway, too: doctors being called to stations, the bright chatter of nurses, the hum and beep of distant machines. He was so used to being in a hospital that he rarely thought about it from the patient’s point of view, how difficult it must be to get well in the midst of the chaos and noise. He wished now that he had brought Grace something, a magazine or a book. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“I don’t know. Tell me what’s new. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

He shrugged, not knowing where to start.

“I heard you were with someone, a lawyer or something.”

This gave him pause. “Where did you hear that?”

Grace’s eyes sparkled at him. “It’s a small city. Somebody met her at a party.” She was right, of course — it was a small city — and it was no big deal. Nonetheless he felt at some obscure disadvantage. “It didn’t work out,” he said.

Grace reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Sorry.”

She was watching him intently, waiting to see if he had anything more to say about it, which was so typical of her, and so different from Martine, who simply would have changed the subject, that he smiled. He realized, now that his initial shock had passed, that Grace still looked good. She had stayed trim, probably still ran and skied. For a second he couldn’t help picturing her in those early months, splayed on their bed and whispering to him urgently, “Come inside.” She never put it any other way, and when he did she’d say his name, as if his identity had been a bit of mystery to her but was now, at this crucial moment, confirmed. This was the Grace he would always think of: young and smart and so fiercely competent that it took him years to discover just how vulnerable she was. She smiled at him now, wistfully, as if she were tracking his thoughts.

“It’s okay,” he finally said. “What about you?”

“Oh, no. Between work and Sarah, I don’t have time to meet anybody.”

“Where’s your practice now, anyway? Are you still on Côte-des-Neiges?”

She shook her head, wincing as if it hurt to do so. “I quit. I’m a teacher now. Grade six, on the West Island.”

“What? Seriously?” He was shocked by this. Plenty of therapists burned out, tired of hearing about intransigent life problems day after day, but Grace’s passion for her work had always seemed inexhaustible, her curiosity about other people such an entrenched part of her personality. She was the one everybody cornered at parties, the recipient of her friends’ troubled late-night phone calls. Strangers poured out their hearts to her in airports and grocery stores, and she never complained or seemed frustrated or bored. Her profession suited her better than anyone he knew, including himself.

“It’s a long story,” she said, clearly not intending to tell it.

Then her eyes shifted behind him, and he turned and saw a little blond girl trooping into the room — scissoring her legs in giant steps, swinging her arms like a tiny soldier — with Azra trailing her. Then she saw Mitch, stopped short, and cocked her head to the side. He guessed she was about nine.

“Come here, you,” Grace said fondly.

Mitch stepped back as the girl approached her mother and gently ran her fingers along her arm, as if afraid she might break.

Grace smiled at her. “That tickles,” she said.

Sarah smiled and kept doing it, her fingers scurrying up and down Grace’s arm like mice.

“Stop, kiddo,” Grace said. “Say hello to my friend Mitch.”

“Hi,” the girl said, without looking at him.

“Hi, Sarah. How are you?” This wasn’t the sort of question you asked children, who didn’t go in for small talk, and the girl ignored it. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence. It was just one more thing that had happened — her mother in this strange place, the doctors, staying with Azra.

“What’s the best thing that happened to you today?” Grace asked her.

“Azra gave me a Snickers,” Sarah said.

Behind her, Azra laughed guiltily. “Sorry, Grace. I know you don’t usually give her chocolate.”

“It’s okay,” Grace said, unconvincingly.

The patient in the other bed seemed to have fallen asleep, and Mitch reached up and turned off the television. In the sudden quiet, Sarah’s high voice rang brightly as she stood at her mother’s bedside and talked about her day. Playtime, a story about elephants, a boy who had pulled her hair, something the teacher said, a bug at recess — he could tell Grace loved hearing all these details, her eyes fixed on Sarah. After a while, the girl ran down like a battery losing its charge. Her attention shifted to the window, and she started over to it, explaining something she’d just learned about Canada geese.

Azra took some crayons and paper out of her bag and suggested that she draw a goose for her mother.

“Okay,” Sarah said, then sat down in a chair, balanced the paper on her knees, and started to draw, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in a caricature of concentration.

Leaning against the wall, Azra let out a long breath, obviously exhausted. Mitch wondered where Grace’s parents were, or the rest of her support network. She had always had plenty of friends.

Azra excused herself to go to the restroom, nodding at Mitch to indicate that he should keep an eye on Sarah.

He returned to Grace’s side and said softly, “She’s really cute.”

“Thanks.”

“She looks like you.”

“No she doesn’t. She looks like her father.”

“Does she?” Mitch said, but Grace didn’t respond. The subject was clearly off-limits. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he said.

Grace looked at him with a small, quick smile, her eyes flickering. He realized — still able to read her after all these years — that she was in enormous pain, and scared, certainly not in any condition to tell him what he could do to help. He had a sudden, intense urge to hold her in his arms or, equally powerful, to walk out the door and never come back. He glanced down, afraid that his face might betray these thoughts, and when he looked up she was still smiling, as if that tight-lipped expression were holding her entire face together. He touched her hand and made his voice strong and calm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

She barely nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said. “Seeing each other again.”

When he was at work, he tried to act as though his confidence hadn’t been shattered. Everything there — his office, his coworkers, the nurses — felt not familiar, as it should have, but strange, his days all out of rhythm. He wondered if his chair had always seemed a little too low for the desk in his office, or if he had called the secretary on the third floor by the right name. He wasn’t sure, in general, of anything. Showing up each morning in his sports jacket and khaki pants, takeout coffee in hand, he felt he was faking it even more than he ever had when, as a student and intern, he actually was. His own voice seemed to stand at a remove. Time passed stickily, each minute clinging to him as though not wanting to let go.

His coworkers had heard about what happened during his rotation in Nunavut, and their response was to avoid him, expressing their sympathy with distant nods and grimacing smiles when passing in the hallways, everyone’s eyes focused on a spot just over his shoulder. Mitch understood this fear of contagion. Failing a patient as he had was every therapist’s worst fear, and it was far better to steer clear of it, even for those whose profession advocated understanding. He only wished that he could steer clear of it himself.

Commencing a new group-therapy session on substance abuse, he tried to pare away self-doubt and cleave to the core of his work. There were ten patients, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty, united by their reek of cigarette smoke. They sat in a circle, downcast, jittery, each one’s chair at a calibrated distance from the next; no one wanted to touch another person, even by accident, in this room of misery and anger. Thank God for other people’s problems, he thought.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s start.”

He laid down the ground rules in a lecture he’d memorized so long ago that he didn’t even mark the words as they left his mouth. Then came the introductions, and he tried to listen carefully and note every detail, but time and again he felt himself drifting away, untethered to the moment, and had to reel himself back in again.

An hour and a half later he was alone, uncomfortably, with his thoughts. The session had gone reasonably well, and they all had left with their “homework” for the next week, nodding as he’d told them what to do. He knew from experience that there would be a serious drop-off in attendance, and he usually made bets with himself about who would stay and who would go. This time, though, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Thomasie’s face kept passing through his mind.

He threw his pencil across his desk, and sighed.

At five o’clock, he left work and headed to Martine’s apartment. He didn’t want to call in advance. He wasn’t sure that what he had to say could be blurted out over the phone, in the few moments her politeness would afford him, and he wouldn’t be able to say it without being able to read her face as he spoke.

He rehearsed a speech over and over in his mind, knowing he had only a few seconds in which to win her over. He was so preoccupied with the wording of his plea that he didn’t even see her coming down the street until she was almost in front of him — her cheeks chafed red by the autumn wind, a blue scarf bunched beneath her chin. She was carrying grocery bags and he reached out to help her with them, but she shook her head. Her hair was twisted into one of her usual chaotic arrangements, strands escaping everywhere. They stood in the street, afternoon traffic inching by, horns blasting. She was beautiful.

“Martine,” he said. “Please.”

Her short, humorless laugh hung between them like smoke. All the lines he had practiced dissolved in the frigid air. Instead he said, “Will you marry me?”

He had no plan, no ring. Martine cocked her head to one side, her expression neutral, examining, as if he were some new piece of evidence brought before her in court. He had no idea what she was thinking.

“So, you’re back,” she said at last.

“I know I should’ve come by earlier. Much earlier. I just — I’m sorry. But please, I love you. I love Mathieu.”

Martine set the grocery bags down, then fished around in her pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and drew on it deeply. Finally she said, “I know you’re attached to him.”

“It’s so much more than that,” he said impatiently. “I should never have gone away. I shouldn’t have let us drift apart. I should have told you how much you mean to me, I should’ve insisted. I never should’ve let you let me go.”

Almost involuntarily, it seemed, she was nodding in agreement. “That’s right,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Then she glanced up at her apartment. Since the windows of both Mathieu’s room and the living room faced the street, he thought she was checking to see if her son was watching, to incorporate him into the decision. This gave him the confidence to think that she might invite him in. Five more minutes, and he’d be inside.

He was buoyed by this thought, and by the idea of seeing the child again, playing with him, hearing his high, tinny voice. He had missed those cozy weekends, the family dinners, even the science lectures.

Martine was looking at him steadily, waiting for him to say more.

He wondered why she hadn’t picked up Mathieu from day care, as she usually did, but maybe she had a sitter for him. Surely he wouldn’t be in the apartment alone. This might explain her hesitation, when of course she ought to be inviting Mitch in so they could have this conversation in comfort rather than on the street.

“Martine,” he said.

She threw her cigarette down and stubbed it out with the pointy toe of her boot, rubbing the black stain of ash into the sidewalk. When she finally met his eyes again, she just shrugged. Mitch knew, then, that Mathieu was with a man, not a sitter, and that this man had, in a matter of weeks, already gotten further with her than he ever had.

“That doctor?” he said. “Vendetti?”

“It’s going well,” she said. “Mathieu likes him too. You taught him to be friendlier with people. I’m grateful to you for that.”

She was speaking with grave formality. He felt like he was being presented with a plaque at some awards banquet. It made him angry, and he couldn’t restrain the sad, inevitable sentiments, so stale until you had to inhabit them yourself, when suddenly they glowed freshly with truth. “He’s not the one for you,” he said. “You and I belong together.”

With a distant, constrained smile, Martine picked up her grocery bags, one in each arm, balanced, self-sufficient. “You should go,” she said, and she walked away up the stairs.

And that was it. He had felt so unmoored the past few weeks that this latest blow hardly sent him into a tailspin, just dropped him deeper down the same dark well. The next morning he was back at work, greeting his coworkers and drinking coffee from his regular mug. He was sitting at his desk, feeling moody and nauseous, when he remembered someone who had it a lot worse. So when he had a break in his schedule, he took the elevator downstairs and knocked gently on Grace’s door.

She was alone, staring at the ceiling, her expression pinched, the braid in her hair loose and tangled. She was still wearing the fuzzy red sock on her foot below the cast.

“Hey there,” he said softly.

She turned her head slowly, as if her neck pained her, but when she saw him her eyes again lit up, giving him the first good feeling of the day and, possibly, the week. “Mitch. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I hope you don’t mind. I’m on a break.”

“I don’t mind at all. I’m just lying here in a drugged-out fog.” She patted the bed beside her, her hand flopping jerkily in the air, and said, “Come over here.”

He pulled up a chair and sat down.

Over her hospital gown she was wearing a pink bed jacket that looked like it belonged in an old lady’s closet. The other patient had apparently been discharged, so she had the room to herself.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not bad,” she said.

From her stiff posture, her hands quieted at her sides, her head leaning heavily on the thin pillow, he knew she felt a lot worse than she was letting on.

“Can I ask you a favor?” she said.

“Shoot.”

“Can you get me a pen?”

He cocked his head. “You planning to write your memoirs in here?”

Instead of laughing at this admittedly pitiful joke, she was holding out her hand expectantly, her expression dire. He took a pen from his jacket pocket and handed it over. Immediately she stuck it down inside her cast, using the end of it to scratch. She let out a loud, involuntary groan of satisfaction, and Mitch, embarrassed, looked away. She kept digging for a couple minutes, feverishly, then stopped and held the pen out to him. “Thanks.”

“Keep it,” he said.

She grimaced. “You have no idea how itchy a cast is. It’s almost worse than the pain.”

“It sounds awful, Grace.”

“Oh, it’s not,” she said lamely. “They think I’ll be able to go home soon. I don’t know about going back to work.”

“What kind of teacher are you, again?”

She closed her eyes, her voice faint and distant. “Grade six. In Beaconsfield.”

“What happened to your practice?”

“It’s a long story,” she said. It was the second time she’d used the shopworn phrase about this, and he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t even sure why he was here. Of course he was worried about her, as he would be about anyone he knew in this condition. But maybe there was something else, too. These days he felt disconnected from everything, even his own past, and seeing Grace again after so many years seemed to offer him something: a thread, a hope of stitching himself back together.

“How about you?” she said. “How’s your work?”

That was the last question he wanted to answer. But he could see she was tired of talking, so he told her about his group this morning. The young man who was already forming a crush on the thirty-year-old management consultant next to him (Grace nodded very slightly at this), the older bus driver whose only contribution to the discussion was to say, “My wife made me come.” The mousy, brown-haired woman who didn’t say anything after she introduced herself and then, halfway through, burst into tears. The bus driver, with an immediate, fatherly instinct, patted her shoulder as she buried her head in her hands. And everyone else relaxed, because each of them knew that at least one other person in the room felt just as desperate and injured as they did. Grace listened to all this with her eyes closed; except for that initial nod, she didn’t move at all. Her breathing was soft, and he wasn’t sure if she was awake, if he was keeping her company or simply filling the room with noise. After a while, he ran out of substance-abuse anecdotes. They were quiet together, and he felt strangely peaceful. Between the slatted blinds a ray of late-afternoon winter sun shot into the room, thin but brilliant, streaking across Grace’s face, and she squinted. When he realized she couldn’t move away from it, he got up and closed the blinds.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’d better leave you alone. Sorry I talked your ear off.”

Grace smiled at him, but her eyes looked tired. “It was nice,” she said, “but you don’t have to keep coming here, you know. It was kind of you to help with the apartment and everything, but you’ve done enough.”

Mitch snorted — the idea that he’d ever done enough seemed ridiculous, given the recent truths of his life — but then nodded. “I don’t mean to intrude.”

“You’re not intruding,” she said. “You’ve been great. But you’ve done so much already.”

This was as direct a request to leave as Grace would ever utter. Yet something bound him there in the room — her wan eyes, or his need to be of help. “Where are your parents?” he said.

She sighed. “My father died a few years ago. My mother isn’t well enough to travel.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her head moved slightly in a gesture that was meant to be a shrug. She was exhausted now, her eyes fluttering open and closed, her hands splayed out beside her, palms up. He moved closer, wanting to touch her arm, to somehow lend her some of his physical strength, because she needed it.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t have a lot going on, so let me help you out. For old times’ sake.”

“That’s not a good reason,” she said, and the dryness of her voice was a reminder that all was not simple between them.

But she must have changed her mind, because a week or so later the phone rang one evening, and it was her, sounding quiet but determined.

“It’s me, Grace. I’m out of the hospital.”

“Congratulations! How are you doing?”

“I’ll live,” she said. “Listen, I decided I’d like to take you up on your offer.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and he was.

“Azra’s overextended, and a couple of my other friends have flaked out on me. Do you think you could help me with some errands and getting Sarah to and from school?”

“Of course I can.”

There was a pause. “That’s, well, it’s good of you,” she said awkwardly.

“It’s not a big deal, Grace. I’m happy to do it.”

The next day he went over. He found her on the couch wearing a gray sweater, the bottom half of her body swaddled in a thick wool blanket, her cast a raised lump beneath it. She looked better than she had in the hospital, but not by much. A small end table was set up with essentials: a glass of water, a box of tissues, a cluster of yellow pill vials.

“Thanks again for doing this,” she said.

“Stop thanking me,” Mitch said. “Please.”

She grimaced a little, as if her pride hurt as much as her injuries. Looking at the place more closely than he had the first time, he noticed that the furniture was slipcovered in her favorite colors, blues and pale greens, and he recognized several of the watercolors hanging on the walls. At a cruel moment late in their marriage, he had told her that her taste was bland; now it struck him as soothing, and he felt peculiarly at home. It was a quiet place, still as a pond.

“Sarah’s over at a friend’s,” Grace said. “Here, I have a list.”

On a yellow legal pad — and Mitch remembered now that she had always used one as a student — she had written down a succession of chores. Laundry. Groceries, with each item detailed down to the brand. Sarah’s schedule, when to drop her off and when to bring her back. The things Sarah liked for lunch. A manual of parenting, with everything explained, in Grace’s round, neat handwriting.

Her voice was all business. “I’ll tell you where the laundry baskets and the machines are,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t mind doing this?”

“Please,” he said. “I’m glad to have something to do.”

It sounded more pathetic than he intended, as if he didn’t have anything else to do, which wasn’t exactly true. Or possibly it was a little bit true. But he busied himself around the place for an hour or so, then went out to Loblaws and came back to unload the groceries into the fridge and cupboards. All the while Grace lay on the couch, drifting in and out of consciousness. At first she seemed to make an effort to raise her head when he came into the living room, but when he told her to rest she closed her eyes gratefully.

He did laundry in the basement, nodding at a neighbor who glanced at him curiously, and ran a few errands off Grace’s list during the washing and drying cycles. When the clothes were dry, he brought them back up to the apartment and put her things away in her dresser, trying not to look too closely at the underwear. Sarah’s impossibly small clothes went into the white dresser in her room. When he came back into the living room, Grace’s eyes were open, but her expression was even more strained.

“Are you okay?” he blurted. “Is the pain worse?”

“I have to ask you to do something,” she said. “I am so, so sorry about this.”

Right away he knew what it was, and oddly enough felt no hesitation. It was a relief to have another specific, physical task that needed to be accomplished. “It’s all right. Remember when you got food poisoning in India? I’ve already been through the worst.”

“Thanks for bringing that up,” she said, but then she smiled.

He crouched near her. She smelled both gamy and chemical, like a specimen left unattended too long in some dusty lab. An unwashed scent mixed with the must of bandages and ointment. She pointed at the bedpan under the end table, and when he arranged it beneath her, tears glistened in her eyes from the pain of the jostling. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“It’s not your fault.”

He left her alone for a few minutes, then collected and emptied the bedpan. When he came back again, Grace had cleaned herself and he disposed of the trash she’d left in a container by the couch. Her eyes had a burning, febrile expression, part humiliation, part pain.

“Worse than India?” he said.

“Much worse,” she said.

He squeezed her hand and put his arm around her as gently as he could, and her head collapsed against his chest, her body buckling with a sob. For a few minutes they sat like that, then she shook her head and wiped her eyes. The most awful moment, he understood, had passed.

At five o’clock Sarah’s friend’s mother brought her home, and Sarah approached the couch with the same fearful care that Mitch had noted in the hospital. He microwaved some pizza, poured juice, and set up a video for her to watch on the TV. She was very quiet and sat beside her mother on the couch with her knees curled up to her chin, leaning timidly into the corner cushions.

An hour later, when a friend of Grace’s stopped by to help them get ready for bed, Mitch said it was time he left.

“Thank you,” Grace said, her eyes again filling with tears.

“Please,” he said. “It’s all right.”

So he slipped into her life through the side door. He didn’t think that much about it, or wonder if it was right or wrong. What he’d told her was the truth: he was grateful to have something to do.

Over the next two weeks, he stopped by Grace’s every few days. He stocked the apartment with food. He drove Sarah to school and back home. He did laundry.

When he mentioned to his brother on the phone what was happening, Malcolm laughed. “I never pictured you as Mr. Mom,” he said.

Mitch was annoyed. “That’s not it,” he said, and explained that other friends of Grace’s were also taking turns in the rotation. But it was true that he never much bothered with these domestic tasks in his own life, where he had only himself to look after.

“Okay,” Malcolm said good-naturedly. “Isn’t it weird, though, hanging out with Grace and her kid?”

“No,” Mitch said. “Not after such a long time, anyway.”

But parts of it were, in fact, a little weird. Sarah, for example, was totally different from Mathieu. If he lived in a universe boundaried by his own mind, a planet of dinosaur facts and physics equations, she craved constant interaction with other people. She always ran to the door to let Mitch in, less out of any particular affection for him than a burning desire to talk to someone. She told him stories, put on costumes and danced for him, held his hand and asked him to play. Her need for attention was infinite. He wondered if she had been like this with Grace before the accident or if her clinginess came from knowing that her only parent was fragile and could disappear. He often came home exhausted, not from doing chores but from playing with Sarah.

As for Grace, she sometimes had bad days when her pelvis was hurting — she was trying hard to cut down on her pain medication — and would snap at him or barely register his presence. Other days, desperate for company after lying alone by herself in the apartment all day, she wanted to talk almost as much as her daughter.

One night the three of them played Sorry! a game Mitch hadn’t seen since he was a child and was amazed still existed. Sarah clasped her hands together in feverish concentration as she bent her head over the pieces. She knew all the rules, about bumping and sliding and the safety zone, and explained them to him carefully, condescendingly, as if he were the nine-year-old. But he kept messing up — doing things with his pawn that he wasn’t supposed to — at first because he didn’t remember how to play and later just to get a rise out of Sarah, who rolled her eyes, stuck out her palms with exaggerated irritation, and exclaimed, “Mitch! How many times do I have to tell you about this!”

“Sorry, Sarah. I’m old and slow.”

She nodded. “I know that. You can’t help it.”

Across the table, Grace’s eyes met his, sparkling with suppressed laughter, and he smiled. He was having a good time. And it was peculiar to find himself once again in the company of a single woman and her child. Not that they were replacements for Martine and Mathieu. The time he spent with them was at once less stressful, with no element of romance, and more uncomfortable, because his role was less defined. Sarah was less extreme in her behavior than Mathieu, and Grace was far less tempestuous than Martine. It felt not like a repetition of the previous triangle but a new version of it, from another angle. A pattern stretching across the recent years of his life.

They let Sarah win, and Grace read her a story, and then the two of them helped her change into her pajamas. Mitch took her into the bathroom and helped her brush her teeth, gently guiding the toothbrush around her small mouth, afraid of hurting her. She bared all her teeth in the mirror, a crazy person’s smile, and said, “All clean.”

She climbed into bed, muttering some story, her room dark except for the blue glow of the nightlight. She was whispering herself to sleep, casting a spell, and didn’t seem to notice when he left.

Back in the living room, Grace was sitting on the couch. As he walked in, she examined him so openly, so curiously, that he felt self-conscious. “My friends think you’re a saint,” she said. “They say no other guy would do what you’re doing.”

He shrugged, blushing a little.

“I said you’re just feeling guilty about something,” she went on. “So what is it?”

This was Grace all over. She didn’t let you get away with anything. He shrugged again. “I let people down,” he said.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Would you like a glass of wine? I think there’s a bottle of Bordeaux in the cupboard.”

Mitch was touched by this. When they were married he drank Bordeaux almost exclusively, the most expensive he could afford, afraid of seeming unsophisticated. These days he drank whatever was offered or on hand. In the kitchen, he uncorked the bottle and poured himself a glass, then went back to the living room and sat down in an armchair kitty-corner to Grace. The color was back in her face, and Azra had come by the day before and helped her take a bath and wash her hair. She no longer had a wince of constant pain. She raised her mug of tea in a toast.

“You’re looking a lot better,” he said.

“No I’m not,” she said firmly. “I look like forty miles of rough road. As my grandmother used to say.”

He laughed, and they sat in silence over their drinks. Without a specific task to do, being with her did feel odd; the familiarity, combined with the distance between them, set him on edge. It was like seeing yourself in a funhouse mirror, with your features distorted and your body torqued yet insistently, regrettably, your own. Only now, sitting in her living room, did he realize what a good job he’d done of burying the painful aspects of their divorce, and how violently they still pulsed beneath the layers of the intervening years.

Stymied, he said, “Why aren’t you practicing anymore?”

“Oh, I’m practicing,” she said. It was a long-standing joke between them, so old he was surprised she even remembered it. “I’m just not very good.”

“Elementary school teacher,” Mitch said. “Tell me how that happened.”

Something flitted across her face — pain, of course, but other things too, maybe memory, even humor, in some elusive combination he couldn’t decipher. She was older and less beautiful, his ex-wife, and he wasn’t in love with her anymore; but seeing her pain was like feeling his own, because for so long he had had a part in it.

“It was the usual, I guess. Burnout.”

He didn’t believe her but didn’t think it was his right to press. “I never pegged you for that, somehow. I thought your energy was endless.”

Grace looked at him thoughtfully. “Maybe the problem was that I had too much. That I thought you can accomplish things you really can’t.”

He waited.

“I had some patients,” she said slowly, and then stopped.

“You realized you couldn’t do as much for them as you’d hoped.”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, tears brightening her eyes.

“But sometimes we can do too much,” he said. “We almost have too much power, don’t you think?”

She shook her head. “I think people do whatever they want, no matter what we say.”

“Maybe so,” he said.

“Anyway, so I closed my practice and went back to school and became a teacher. It works well with Sarah, too, because we have the summers together. And what about you, Mitch? You still like your job? It seems like you’re doing well, from what I hear at the hospital.”

“Oh, there’s not much to report,” he said.

Grace’s smile was tight. “Lucky you.”

Afterward he walked out into the breezy night and strolled around the neighboring park before getting back in his car. He was a little tipsy from the wine, and the cool air felt good on his face. Plenty of others — dog walkers, hacky sack players, groups of teenagers — were in the park, reluctant to give up on the long nights of summer, with fall looming dark before them.

He walked along Monkland, on a route they might’ve taken together a long time ago. People were sipping drinks on the outside terraces, laughing and chatting. The door to the Old Orchard pub was open, the high, quick notes of a Celtic fiddler embroidering the air. Then he left the bustling avenue and drifted back to the side street where he was parked, the noise dampened by the leafy trees.

The windows of Grace’s apartment were dark. Before leaving, he had asked how she thought Sarah was doing, and from the small nod that greeted the question he understood this was the first thing he should have said.

“She seems good. Her teacher says she’s doing great. I don’t know, though. I worry that she’ll be affected by seeing me like this. I feel like I should talk to her about it, but everybody says I should just let it go.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Let it go?”

Grace met his eyes. “No,” she said.

In the lamplight her face was burnished and sallow. She looked both hopeful and sad, so much like she had when they were younger, and he drew closer to her, drawn by memory or habit or some instinct that would never die in him as long they both lived.

She put her hand on his arm. “It isn’t going to be like that,” she said firmly.

He nodded, and kissed her cheek like a brother or a friend, then arranged a blanket over her on the couch and left.

He woke up the next morning feeling better, if not about himself then about the world. Lying in bed, the phrase old flame came to him, and he considered how little it described the truth of the situation. Between him and Grace there was nothing burning, which his gesture last night had only confirmed. But there was something else, solid and enduring, that was more like old furniture, with the steady reassurance of lasting objects.

Since returning to Montreal he had sprung out of bed most mornings and gone for an hour-long run, hoping to purge his body of unwanted and disturbing thoughts. It was both discipline and penitence. But today he stayed in the apartment, drinking tea and reading the newspaper.

“Are you having a slow burn?” his mother used to say, trying for the second or third time to wake him up for school. As a special treat, every few weekends they’d have a slow-burn morning as a family, and she would let Malcolm and Mitch hang around the kitchen while she made pancakes and bacon.

His mother was an ample, competent woman who had raised them on her own. She worked as a secretary at CN Rail, and every morning after they left for school she’d take a bus downtown. Mitch could still remember the perfume she wore, and the hideous orange lipstick she seemed to consider a professional necessity. She had left school at sixteen to work in her family’s restaurant, but never expressed any sadness at having missed out. Nor did she complain about coming home after a full day’s work to cook dinner, do the laundry, help with homework. “You’re my good boys,” she’d say, tucking them into bed.

And they were. They both did well in school, and in this she said they took after their father. Mitch was five when he died. Malcolm, who was two years older, claimed to have memories of him, and at night after the lights were out, Mitch would sometimes beg to hear them; but these stories shifted and changed so much, often borrowing from whatever TV show or comic book Malcolm was into at the time, that Mitch was doubtful even as he hoped to believe them. What they knew of him was this: he’d been born in 1921, in Winnipeg, and served in the Canadian infantry during World War II. He’d become an engineer, also working at CN, met Rosemary in the family restaurant where she’d been waitressing, and whisked her off to Montreal and marriage. He was smart as a whip (another of their mother’s favorite sayings); and he died, much too young, of a heart attack, which was why they should listen to her and never, ever start smoking.

All this Mitch accepted as gospel throughout his childhood and adolescence, as Malcolm, too, became an engineer and moved to Toronto. Not finding himself inclined to engineering, Mitch took a degree in psychology. But at Christmas one year, when he told his mother his plans to pursue this in graduate school, she burst into tears.

They were sitting at their tiny kitchen table, and he stared at her, dumbfounded. He wasn’t used to disappointing her, and had expected she’d be pleased; she was always proud of his success in school. “It’s almost like a doctor,” he said, pathetically.

Rosemary was shaking her head. “This is because of your father, isn’t it?”

Mitch had no idea what she was talking about, and by now he rarely even thought about his father.

Tears poured down his mother’s face. “I knew it,” she said. “I kept watching you, knowing it would come out. And here it is.”

He stood up and put his arm around her. “This is just what I’m interested in,” he told her. “What I care about.”

She took his arm and guided him back into his chair, then held his hands and looked into his eyes. “This fascination you have with people’s minds, all your curiosity. It’s because you want to understand what made him do a thing like that. But you aren’t like him. You know that, don’t you? And some things can’t ever be understood.”

In that moment he felt something tilt inside him, as if a picture that had been hung upside down was suddenly righted, and he saw clearly what it showed.

Heart attack was what they told the neighbors, because Rosemary didn’t want their pity, didn’t want stories to surround her boys. Protecting them was always her first and overriding instinct. But the truth now came back to him with the shock of recognition: his father in the basement, on a sleeping bag, with an empty bottle of pills on the floor next to an empty bottle. He remembered a rancid stench that was mixed with the odor of bleach, because his mother had cleaned everything up before calling the doctor and asking him what to do.

Rosemary dried her tears, carefully and quickly; she never indulged herself in anything, even crying. “He was a sweet man, really,” she said. “But he had such a darkness in him. His parents told me he was never the same after he came back from fighting. It weighed on him, the things he saw in France.”

Mitch squeezed her hands.

“I always hated that he left us,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t enough for you boys.”

“That’s not true,” he said. He would have liked to say, You’ve given me everything I need. He would have liked to say, Feel how much you are loved. Instead he sat with her, and let her talk about his father.

His mother wasn’t sure about Grace at first. She was so young, so excited about psychology. She had no idea how to cook and no immediate plans for a family.

“That’s just fine,” Mitch’s mother said. “You take your time.”

But it was clear she was reserving judgment. Partly this had to do with psychology, which she had always distrusted; she didn’t truly believe anything could be achieved by all this talking. Compared to Malcolm’s work — he consulted on bridges and roads, projects their mother would have liked to put plaques on — Mitch’s was invisible, intangible, and, quite possibly, nonsensical. Usually, when he came home to visit, he’d give her the briefest possible update and then change the subject to the news or the weather.

Snow was the great equalizer of their family. They all hated it, the three of them having shared the task of shoveling for years. They could talk about it for hours — when it would start, how much was coming, when it would end. Nothing bonded them so completely as snow.

But Grace. The first time she heard them ranting about snow, she said, “You just have to get out in it!”

Rosemary smiled at her and lit a cigarette; for all she had warned the children against smoking, she herself was never able to quit. “Now why would I want to do that, dear?”

“You have to embrace the snow. Have fun with it. Go skiing, build a snowman, throw snowballs. That’s what you should do,” Grace told her, her eyes shining. “I promise you, it’ll change your life.”

“Ah, well,” Rosemary said. “I suppose I like my life the way it is.”

In the brief pause that followed, Grace’s cheeks turned red and she looked down at the table until Malcolm’s wife, Cindy, who was good-hearted, changed the subject by telling Rosemary that she was going to start selling Avon.

“We have such pretty lipsticks. I’ll bring you some.”

Rosemary’s orange lipstick was a running joke among Cindy, Malcolm, and Mitch.

“Well, that would be nice, dear,” Rosemary said. “I’m having such a hard time finding my shade. I believe that they’ve stopped making it. Last time I went to Cumberland’s, the girl there said they hadn’t seen it for months.”

So the conversation moved on, and Grace recovered. She always did, and never gave up. Her persistence, in the end, was what won Mitch’s mother over — that, and the first Christmas they all spent together. Grace had been quiet for most of the day, and Mitch could tell she was nervous. She was stepping back, listening, trying to figure out how to slip into this already-formed family without disturbing its contours. They opened presents together on Christmas morning, after a breakfast of pancakes. When Rosemary opened her gift from Grace, she was silent for a long time. Mitch braced himself, wondering what was wrong. Then he saw, to his horror, that she was crying, his mother who hardly ever cried.

He stared at Grace, who didn’t notice his concern. She was looking at Rosemary, waiting.

It was a box of orange lipsticks. She must have gone to every drug store in Montreal, buying up their entire supply of Rosemary’s favorite shade. There was enough ugly lipstick in that box to last a lifetime.

His mother said, “This might be the nicest thing I’ve ever seen.”

As she got older, Rosemary grew freer with her tears. She cried at Mitch and Grace’s wedding; she cried when her grandchildren were born; and she cried, well and truly sobbed, when Mitch had to tell her that he and Grace were getting divorced.

“Now you’ll never have a family,” she managed to say.

For a fleeting instant, and for the first time in his life, he hated her. How could she say something so awful to someone who already felt like a failure? And what was she talking about? He was still young, and maybe he’d remarry; if he wanted a family, he could still have one.

But she was right, of course. He never did.

Five years after his divorce, Rosemary was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

“I always thought it would be my lungs,” she said with typical dryness. “Now I’m glad I never gave up smoking.”

It was winter, and Mitch had driven her to the hospital. They were sitting now in his parked car, and he breathed in her familiar smell of cigarettes and Jean Naté perfume.

“I don’t know about that,” he said.

They had been given a timeline, and it was short. Malcolm was flying in from Mississauga. Cindy and the kids would come later, by car, for one last visit. They had discussed all this calmly in the lounge over coffee, his mother orchestrating the next few months, knowing exactly what had to be done. Her knack for organization was outrageous. She should, he thought, be put in charge of the world.

At the time Mitch had a girlfriend named Mira, a nurse he’d met at work. Short and jolly, she cooked delicious Indian meals she had learned from her mother, and supported him through Rosemary’s entire illness. She came along to the hospital whenever he wanted her to and stayed home when he didn’t. She met Malcolm and Cindy but didn’t try to ingratiate herself with them. At night, when he cried, she held him.

Within weeks it was close to the end. Malcolm had taken a leave from work and was staying in their mother’s house, and Mitch often spent the night there too, the two of them staying up late drinking whiskey, sitting there silently with nothing much to say but unable to leave the comfort of each other’s company. On one of the last nights, Malcolm asked him about Mira.

“I’m not sure,” Mitch said. “She’s been great about all this, that’s for sure.”

“It would make Mom happy,” Malcolm said. “She always worries about you being alone so much.”

Mitch remembered. Now you’ll never have a family. And he began to think about a time in the future when maybe he could begin to pay Mira back, offer her some of the same comfort she’d given him throughout this ordeal.

The following afternoon, he brought Mira to the hospital. She hadn’t seen his mother in a couple of weeks, and by now Rosemary was breathing heavily, her thin cheeks laboring, her eyes fluttering. But she looked up at Mira and smiled.

“Oh, Gracie,” she said. “I knew you’d be back.”

Mira patted her hand, unfazed. A nurse, she of course didn’t need his explanation about how the drugs were shuttling his mother back and forth through time, how sometimes she thought he was five years old and asked him what he’d like for breakfast. But something changed between them in that moment, and after his mother died they stopped spending every night together, gradually disentangling, and finally Mira met someone else and moved to Ottawa.

Long after his mother’s death, he thought about her remark. It was one of many moments in which he realized, not with shock but nonetheless with horror, how much his private pain, the decision to divorce, had stubbornly refused to remain confined to his own life. It made him feel more guilty than ever.

But gradually he began to change his mind about what she’d said. Rosemary had been capable, doting, self-sacrificing, but also bossy and desirous of control. She had made up her mind to love Grace, and the divorce made her angry because she had to undo that relationship, and not of her own choosing. She didn’t let go of things easily. Or people. He remembered something she’d said about his father when they finally discussed the suicide. “He wouldn’t let me in,” she said, “and I refused to stay out.”

Even in her last days, as her body withered and her confusion grew, she didn’t fabricate events that hadn’t happened or see people who weren’t there. Calling Mira by Grace’s name was the only time she got something like that wrong. Maybe it was intentional, a way of reminding him of what she’d said after the divorce, less a moment of sorrow than a curse. You will never have a family.

He understood, finally, that he would never know how to interpret her remark, because the only person he could have asked to clear it up was gone.

He missed her still, not all the time but with occasional pangs of clarity so intense they made him dizzy. He felt that now. He would have liked to tell her he’d seen Grace again, that he was trying to help her. He would have liked to present this to his mother not as a trophy or a prize but as a scar, something tough but healed, ridged with the passage of time. Because if anyone understood what it meant to lose and go on, it was her.

Or maybe it was as simple as this. He would have liked to hear that voice from his childhood, from his slow-burn mornings, the voice of orange lipstick and Craven A cigarettes, speak again; to hear her say, “Oh, Gracie. I knew you’d be back.”