The Robber Bride

XXVIII

Charis follows Zenia and the man who is not Billy along Queen Street, at a distance, dodging around her fellow pedestrians and occasionally bumping into them. She bumps into them because she feels that if she takes her eyes off Zenia, even for an instant, Zenia will vanish—not like a popped soap bubble, but like someone out of a TV kids’ cartoon, turning into a bunch of dots and dashes and beaming herself off to some other locale. If you knew enough about matter you could walk through walls, and maybe Zenia does know enough; although any such knowledge must have been acquired by her in a sinister way. Something involving chicken blood, and the eating of still-alive animals. The collection of other people’s toenails, pins driven in. Pain for someone.

Zenia must feel the stun-ray intensity of Charis’s gaze burning into the small of her back, because at one point she turns around and looks, and Charis darts behind a lamppost, almost braining herself in the process. When she recovers from the bright red sensation in her head (It’s not a hurt, it’s a colour) and dares to peek, Zenia and the man have stopped and are talking:

Charis wends her way a little closer, leaving a trail of hostile glances and muttered comments on the sidewalk behind her and smiling weakly at those who, with frayed cuffs and hands held out and the swollen, sunken faces of those who eat too much refined sugar, ask her for the price of a meal. Charis doesn’t have any small change, having left it as a tip at Kafay Nwar; she doesn’t have very much money, period, although more than she thought she’d have after lunch, because it was Roz who figured out the bill and her accounting procedures always end up with Charis paying less, she suspects, than she ought to. Anyway, Charis doesn’t believe in giving money to panhandlers, being of the opinion that money, like candy, is bad for people. But she would give them some of her home-grown carrots, if she could.

She makes her way to a good vantage point behind a hot dog vendor stand with a bright yellow umbrella, and lurks there, despite the offensive smell (pigs’ innards!) and the sinful cans of pop (chemicals!) lined up beside the mustard and relish (pure salt!). The vendor asks her what she’d like today, but she hardly hears him; she’s too engrossed in Zenia. Now the man with Zenia turns and his face is towards Charis, and with a jolt like putting her hand on a hotplate Charis recognizes him: he’s Roz’s son Larry.

It’s always a jump in time for Charis to see Roz’s children grown up, although of course they have grown up and she herself has watched them do it. But their aging is hard to believe. It’s like the times Augusta is in the next room and Charis walks in, expecting to see her crosslegged on the floor playing house with her Barbie doll—Charis hadn’t approved of that thing, but was too weak to forbid it—and instead finds her sitting in a chair in a wide-shouldered suit and sling-back high heels, painting her nails. Oh August! she wants to say. Where did you get those weird dress-up clothes? But those are her real clothes. It is a true head-bender to see your own daughter walking around in clothes that might have belonged to your mother.

There is Larry, then, in jeans and a fawn suede jacket, his taffy-haired head inclined ,towards Zenia, one of his hands on her arm. Little Larry! Serious little Larry, who would purse his mouth and frown at the very same time his twin sisters were laughing and pinching each other’s arms and telling each other they had big snots coming out of their noses. Charis has never been altogether comfortable about Larry, or rather about his rigidity. She’s always felt that a good massage therapist could do wonders. But Larry must have loosened up considerably if he’s been having lunch at the Toxique.

But what is he doing with Zenia? What is he doing with Zenia right now? He’s bending his face down, Zenia’s own face is reaching up like a tentacle, they’re kissing! Or so it appears. “Listen lady, you want a hot dog or not?” says the vendor. “What?” says Charis, startled.

“Crazy broad, shove off” says the vendor. “Get back in the bin. You’re bothering the customers.”

If Charis were Roz, she’d say, What customers? But if Charis were Roz she’d be in a state of deep shock. Zenia and Larry! But she’s twice his age! thinks the vestige of Charis that remains from the time when age, in female-male relationships, was supposed to matter. The present Charis tells herself not to be judgmental. Why shouldn’t women do what men have been doing for ages, namely robbing the cradle? Age is not the point. The point is not Zenia’s age, but Zenia herself. Larry might as well be drinking liquid drain cleaner.

While Charis is having this uncharitable thought, Zenia steps sideways, off the curb, and disappears into a taxi. Larry gets in after her—so it was not a goodbye kiss—and the taxi is sucked out into the current of traffic. Charis dithers. What should she do now? Her urge is to phone Roz—Roz! Roz! Help! Come quickly!—but that would do no good, because she doesn’t know where Zenia and Larry are going; and even if she did, so what? What would Roz do? Burst into their hotel room or whatever, and say Let go of my son? Larry is twenty-two, he is an adult. He can make his own decisions.

Charis sees another taxi and runs out into the street, flailing her arms. The taxi squeals to a stop in front of her and she hurries around, opens the door, and scrambles in. “Thank you,” she gasps.

“You lucky you not dead:” says the driver, who has an accent Charis can’t identify. “So, what can I do for you?”

“Follow that taxi,” says Charis. “What taxi?” says the driver.

So that is that, and worse, Charis feels honour-bound to pay him three dollars, because she did after all get into his cab, but she only has a five-dollar bill and a ten, and he doesn’t have change, and she doesn’t want to ask the hot dog vendor, considering what he just called her, so it ends with him saying, “Time is money, lady, do me a favour, forget it,” and there are bad feelings all round.

Luckily they are digging up Queen Street, yet again, and Zenia’s taxi is caught in the jam. After running down the street some more Charis manages to find another empty taxi, only two cars away from Zenia’s, and she flings herself into it, and together the two taxis ooze slowly through the downtown core. Zenia and Larry get out at the Arnold Garden Hotel, and so does Charis. She watches the uniformed doorman nod to them, she watches Larry put his hand on Zenia’s elbow, she watches them go through the brass-and-glass doors. She herself has never been through those doors. Anything with an awning intimidates her.

As she’s trying to decide what to do next, a bicycle courier starts swearing at her for no reason at all. Jesus lady, watch the fuck out! It’s an omen: she’s done enough for today.

She walks down to the ferry dock, buffeted as if by wind. Being in the city is so abrasive; it’s like dust blowing into your face, it’s like dancing on sandpaper. Although she’s not sure why, she minds being called lady even more than she minds being called crazy broad. Why is this word so offensive to her? (Listen, says Shanita’s voice, with amused contempt. If that’s all you everget called.~

She’s feeling baffled and inept, and slightly frightened. What is she supposed to do with what she knows? What is she supposed to do next? She listens, but her body tells her nothing, even though it was her body that got her into this, with its mischievous yen for caffeine, its adrenalin rushes, its megalomania. Some days—and this is becoming one of them—having a body is an inconvenience. Although she treats her body with interest and consideration, paying attention to its whims, rubbing lotions and oils into it, feeding it with selected nutrients, it doesn’t always repay her. Right now her back—for instance—hurts, and there’s a cold dark pool, an ominous pool, a pool of browny-green septic acid, forming somewhere below her navel. The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.

She stands on the ferry, leaning on the railing, facing backwards, watching the wake rise and subside into the notoriously poisonous lake, tracing and obliterating itself in the same gesture. Light glitters on the water, no longer white but yellowing; it’s afternoon and there goes the sun, there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it. She will never get any of those days back, including the ones she should have had but didn’t, days with Billy in them. It was Zenia who made off with those days. She took them away from Charis, who now doesn’t even have them to look fondly back on. It’s as if Zenia has crept into her house when she wasn’t there and torn the photos out of her photo album, the photo album she doesn’t possess except inside her head. In one single snatch and grab, Zenia stole both her future and her past. Couldn’t she have left it a little longer? just a month, just a week, just a little more?

In the spiritual world (which she has now entered, because the ferry, with its soporific motor and gentle sway, often has this effect on her), Charis’s astral body falls to its knees, raising imploring hands to the astral body of Zenia, which burns red, a red crown of flames like spiky leaves or old-fashioned pen nibs flaring around her head, with emptiness at the centre of each flame. More time, more time, Charis pleads. Give back what you took!

But Zenia turns away.

~IX

The history of Charis and Zenia began on a Wednesday in the first week of November in the first year of the seventies. Seventy. Charis finds both parts of this number significant, the seven and the zero as well. A zero always means the beginning of something and the end as well, because it is omega: a circular self-contained O, the entrance to a tunnel or the exit from one, an end that is also a beginning, because although that year saw the beginning of the end of Billy, it was also the year her daughter August began to begin. And seven is a prime number, composed of a four and a three—or two threes and a one, which Charis prefers because threes are graceful pyramids as well as Goddess numbers, and fours are merely box-like squares.

She knows it was a Wednesday, because Wednesdays were the days she went into town to earn some money by teaching two yoga classes. She did that on Fridays, too, except that on Fridays she also stayed late to put in her share of volunteer time at the Furrows Food Co-op. She knows it was November, because November is the eleventh month, the month of the dead, and also of regeneration. Sun sign Scorpio, governed by Mars, colour deep red. Sex, death, and war. Synchronicity.

The day begins as mist. Charis sees the mist as she gets out of bed, or rather off the bed, because the bed is a mattress on the floor. She goes to the window to look out. There’s a miniature transparent rainbow stuck onto the glass, though Charis did not stick it there: it was left over from the previous tenants, a batch of burned-out hippies who also drew pictures in Magic Marker on the flowered, faded wallpaper—naked people copulating and cats with halos—and played the Doors and Janis Joplin at top volume in the middle of the night, and left mounds of human shit in the backyard. They were finally kicked out by the landlord with the help of the next-door neighbours after a screaming acid parry, during which one of them set fire to a black plastic beanbag chair in the living room under the impression that it was a carnivorous puffball. The landlord—an old man who lives at the other end of the street—welcomed Charis and Billy, because there were only two of them and they did not have a big speaker system, and because Charis said she intended to plant a vegetable garden, which indicated some sort of decorous coupledom; and the neighbours were so grateful for the change that they didn’t even make a fuss about the chickens, chickens that may or may not be illegal, but this is the Island and strict legality is not the norm here, witness the number of house additions that go up without a permit. Luckily they have a corner lot, so there are neighbours on only one side.

Charis painted over the naked’people and cats and dug the human shit into her compost heap, telling herself that it was the right thing to do because the Chinese used it, in China, and everyone knew they were the world’s best organic gardeners. Shit to food to shit, it was all part of the cycle.

They moved into this house in late spring, and from the very first Charis knew it was right. She loves the house and, even more, she loves the Island. It’s infused with a vibrant, brooding, humid life; it makes her feel that everything—even the water, even the stones—is alive and aware, and her along with it. Some mornings she goes out before daybreak and just walks around, up and down the streets that are not real streets but more like paved bicycle paths, past the dilapidated or sprucedup former cottages with their woodpiles and hammocks and patchy gardens; or else she just lies on the grass, even when damp. Billy likes the Island too, or so he says, but not the same way she does.

The mist is rising from the ground and from the bushes, dripping from the old apple tree at the back of the yard. There are still a few brownish frostbitten apples, hanging from the twisted branches like burnt Christmas decorations. The fallen apples Charis was unable to use for jelly lie rotting and fermented at the base of the tree. Several of the chickens have been pecking at them; Charis can tell by the way those chickens stagger around, so drunk they have difficulty walking up the ramp into their chicken house. Billy thinks those drunken hens are cool.

The wide painted floorboards are cold under her bare feet; she hugs her goose-pimpled arms, shivering a little. She can’t see the lake from here: the mist blots it out. She makes an effort to find the mist beautiful—everything made by nature should be beautiful—but succeeds only partly. The mist is beautiful, true, it’s like solid light, but it’s also ominous: when there’s mist you can’t see what’s coming.

She leaves Billy sleeping on their mattress, under their opened-out sleeping bag, and puts on her embroidered Indian slippers, and pulls one of Billy’s sweatshirts over her cotton nightgown. The nightgown is Victorian-style, second-hand; she bought it at a used-clothing place in Kensington Market. It would be cheaper to make such nightgowns, and she’s bought a pattern and enough material for two, but there’s something wrong with her sewing machine—a treadle model she traded some yoga lessons for—so she hasn’t cut either of them out yet. The next thing she intends to trade for is a loom.

She tiptoes from the bedroom and along the narrow hallway, and down the stairs. When she moved in here with Billy, six months ago, there were several layers of worn linoleum covering the floorboards. Charis stripped off the linoleum and pulled out the nails that were holding it in place, and scraped away the black tarry goo that had oozed from it, and painted the hall floor blue. But she ran out of paint halfway down the stairs, and she hasn’t got more paint yet, and the bottom stairs still have the outlines of the old linoleum stair treads. She doesn’t mind them, the traces; they are like signals made by those who lived here long before. So she’s left them alone. It’s like leaving a wild patch in the garden. She knows she is sharing the space with other entities, even if they can’t be seen or heard, and it’s just as well to show them you’re friendly. Or respectful. Respectful is what she means, because she does not intend to get too cosy with them. She wants them to respect her, as well.

She goes into the kitchen, which is freezing cold. There’s a kind of furnace in the house, beside the water heater, in the dank, dirt-floored lean-to—the root cellar, Charis calls it, and she is indeed keeping some roots in it, some carrots and beets buried in a box of sand, the way her grandmother used to—but the furnace doesn’t work very well. Mostly it blows lukewarm air through a series of grids in the floor, and makes dustballs; anyway, it seenis like a waste of money and also like cheating to turn on the furnace before it’s absolutely necessary. You should make use of what is naturally provided, if possible, so Charis has been scavenging dead wood from under the trees on the Island and using the ends of boards left over from building the henhouse, and breaking the odd dead branch off her apple tree.

She kneels before the cast-iron cookstove—it was one of the things that made her want this house, the wood stove—though it turned other people off, people who wanted electric stoves, so the rent was low. Figuring out how to work it was hard at first; it has its moods, and sometimes makes large clouds of smoke, or goes out completely even though it’s packed with wood. You have to cajole it. She scrapes out yesterday’s ashes, into a saucepan she keeps handy—she’ll sprinkle some into the compost heap later, and sift the rest for a potter she knows, to make into glazes—and stuffs some crumpled newspaper and kindling and two thin logs into the firebox. When the fire has caught she crouches before the open stove door, warming her hands and appreciating the flames. The apple wood burns blue.

After a few minutes she gets up, feeling a stiffness in her knees, and goes over to the counter and plugs in the electric kettle. Although there’s no electric stove the house has some basic wiring, a ceiling fixture in every room and a few wall sockets, though you can’t plug in the kettle and anything else at the same time without blowing the fuses. She could wait for the iron kettle on the wood stove to boil, but that might take hours, and she needs her morning herbal tea right now. She remembers a time when she used to drink coffee, at university, a long time ago, in one of her other lives, when she lived in McClung Hall. She remembers the fuzzy feeling in her head, and the hankering for more. It was an addiction, she supposes. The body is so easily led astray. At least she never smoked.

Sitting at the kitchen table—not the round oak table she would like to have, but an interim table, an artificial table, an immoral table from the fifties, with chrome legs and black curlicues baked into its Formica top—Charis drinks her herbal tea and attempts to focus ori the day ahead. The mist makes it more difficult: it’s hard for her to tell the time, despite her wristwatch, when she can’t see the sun.

The most immediate decision to make is: who will have breakfast first, herself or the chickens? If she does, the chickens will have to wait and then she will feel guilty. If the chickens do, she will be hungry for a while, but she will have her own breakfast to look forward to while she is feeding them. Also the chickens trust her. They are probably wondering where she is, right this minute. They are worrying. They are reproachful. How can she let them down?

Every morning she goes through this minor tug-of-war, in her head. Every morning the chickens win. She finishes her tea and fills a pail at the sink, then goes to the kitchen door where Billy’s work overalls are hanging on a wall hook. She pulls them on, stuffing her nightgown down the legs—she could go upstairs and get dressed, but it might wake Billy, who needs his sleep because of the strain he’s under—and kicks off her slippers and slides her bare feet into Billy’s rubber boots. This is not the most attractive feeling: the rubber is chilly, and damp with old foot sweat. Sometimes there are wool work socks to put inside the boots, but these seem to have wandered off somewhere; and even with the socks these boots would be cold, and way too big for her. She might get some boots of her own, but this would violate the accepted version of reality, which is that Billy feeds the chickens. She picks up the water pail and waddles out into the yard.

The mist is less threatening when you’re actually in it. It gives Charis the illusion of being able to walk through a solid barrier. Dripping grasses brush her legs; the air smells of leaf mould and damp wood, and of wet cabbages, from the halfdozen of them still in the garden. It’s the autumnal smell of slow combustion. Charis breathes it in, breathing in also the ammonia and hot-feather scent of her chickens. Inside the henhouse they’re making the sleepy crooning cooing sounds that show they are at ease, a sort of broody, meditative humming. Now they hear her, and change to excited cackles.

She unlatches the wire gate that leads to their enclosure. Charis’s first idea had been to let the chickens range free, totally fenceless, but there turned out to be a cat and dog problem; and also the neighbours, although tolerant of the chickens in general, didn’t much appreciate having stray ones in their own yards, scratching up their flower beds. The chickens don’t like the fence and try to get out, so Charis always closes the gate behind her before opening the henhouse door.

Billy built the henhouse himself, working with his shirt off and the sun on his back, whacking the nails in. It was good for him, it gave him a sense of accomplishment. The house tilts a little but it does its job. It has one door for the hens, a small square one with a ramp going down, and another for the humans. Charis opens the chickens’ door and they crowd and strut and cluck down their ramp, blinking in the light. Then she goes in by the human door, opens the metal garbage can where the chicken feed is kept, and scoops up a coffee tin of feed, which she takes outside and scatters on the ground. She prefers to feed the chickens outside. The book says you should let the straw litter and the chicken droppings build up on the henhouse floor because the heat of decomposition will keep the chickens warm in winter, but Charis does not think that food eaten under such circumstances can possibly be healthy. The cycle of nature is one thing, but you shouldn’t confuse the different parts of it.

The chickens cluck hyperactively, mobbing her legs, making small fluttering hops, jostling and pecking one another, giving out yelps of anger. When they have settled down and are feeding she carries their water container outside too and tops it up from the pail.

Charis watches the chickens eat. They fill her with joy, a joy that has no rational source, because she knows—she has seen, also she remembers—how greedy chickens are, how selfish and unfeeling, how cruel they are to one another, how they gang up: at least two of them have naked scalps, from being picked on. Nor are they placid vegetarians: you can start a riot among them just by tossing them a few hot-dog ends or scraps of bacon. As for the rooster, with his eye of an insane prophet and his fanatic’s air of outrage and his comb and wattles flaunted like genitals, he’s an overbearing autocrat, and attacks her rubber boots when he thinks she’s not looking.

Charis doesn’t care; she excuses the chickens everything. She adores them! She has adored them ever since the moment they arrived, flowering out of the feed sacks in which they travelled, shaking their angels’ feathers. She thinks they are miraculous. They are.

Inside the henhouse, she rummages through the straw in the boxes, hoping for eggs. In June the hens were bursting with eggs, laying two a day, huge milky ovals with double and triple yolks, but now, with the declining angle of the sun, they’ve fallen off badly. Their feathers and wattles are duller; several of them are moulting. She does manage to find one egg, an undersized one with a pebbly shell. She slips it into the breast pocket of her overalls; she will feed it to Billy for his breakfast.

Back in the kitchen she takes off her boots; she leaves the overalls on, because she’s cold. She slides another stick of wood into the stove, warming her hands. Should she have her own breakfast first, or wait and have it while Billy has his? Should she wake him at all? Sometimes he’s mad if she does, other times he’s mad if she doesn’t. But today is a city day for her, so if she wakes him up now she can get him fed before she catches the ferry. That way he won’t spend the morning asleep, and blame her later.

She climbs the stairs and walks gently along the hall; when she gets to the doorway she stands for a moment, just looking. She likes looking at Billy in the same way that she likes looking at the hens. Billy too is beautiful; and just as the hens are the essence of hen-ness, Billy is the essence of Billy-ness. (Like the hens, too, he is a little frowsier now than when she first encountered him. This also may have something to do with the angle of the sun.)

He lies on their mattress, the sleeping bag pulled up to his neck. His left arm is flung across his eyes; the tan on it is fading, although it’s still dark, this arm, and pelted with short golden hairs, like a honeybee covered with pollen. His short yellow beard shines in the white room, in the strange light from the mist outside—heraldic, the beard of a saint, or of a knight in an old picture. Or like something on a stamp. Charis loves to watch Billy at such moments, when he’s quiet and still. It’s easier to maintain her view of him that way than when he’s talking and moving around.

Billy must sense her flashlight gaze on him. His arm moves away from his eyes, the eyes themselves open, such blue! Like forget-me-nots, like mountains in the distance, on postcards, like thick ice. He smiles at her, uncovering Viking teeth.

“What time is it?” he says. “I don’t know,” says Charis.

“You’ve got a watch, don’t you?” he says. Don’tcha. How can she explain about the mist? Also that she can’t take the time to look at her watch, because she’s looking at him? Looking is not a casual thing. It takes all her attention.

He gives a small sigh, of exasperation or desire, it’s so hard to tell the difference. “Come here,” he says.

It must be desire. Charis goes to the mattress, sits down beside Billy, smooths back the hair on his forehead, hair so yellow it looks painted. It’s still amazing to her that the colour doesn’t come off on her skin. Although her own hair is blonde as well, it’s a different blonde, pale and bleached-out, moon to his sun. Billy’s hair glows from within.

“I said here,” says Billy. He pulls ,her down on top of him, zeroes in on her mouth, encircles her in his golden arms; squeezes her tight.

“The egg!” says Charis breathlessly, remembering it. The egg breaks.

XXX

That’s what Billy was like, at the time. He was always after her then. In the mornings, in the afternoons, at night, it made no difference. Maybe it was just a sort of nervousness, or boredom, because he didn’t have that much to fill up the time; or it might have been the tension of being there illegally. He would wait for her at the ferry dock and walk back to the house with her and grab her before she even had a chance to put the groceries down, pressing her back against the kitchen counter, his hands pulling up her long flimsy skirt. His urgency confused her. God I love you, God I love you, he would say at these times. Sometimes he did things that hurt—slapping her, pinching. Sometimes it hurt anyway, but since she didn’t mention this, how was he supposed to know about it?

What had she felt, herself? It’s hard to sort out. Maybe if there had been less, less plain old sex—if she had felt less like a trampoline with someone jumping up and down on it—she would have learned to enjoy it more, in time. If she could relax. As it was she merely detached herself, floated her spirit off to one side, filled herself with another essence—apple, plum—until he’d finished and it was safe to re-enter her body. She liked being held afterwards, she liked being stroked and kissed and told she was beautiful, a thing Billy sometimes did. Once in a while she cried, which Billy seemed to find normal. Her tears had nothing to do with Billy; he didn’t make her sad, he made her happy! She told him that, and he was satisfied and didn’t push her for answers. They talked about other things; they never talked about that.

But what was it supposed to be like? What would have been normal? She had no idea. Every so often they smoked dope—not a lot, because they couldn’t afford much of it, and when they had some it usually came from one of Billy’s friends—and at those times she got an inkling, an intimation, a small flutter. But it hardly counted, because her skin felt like rubber then anyway, like a rubber suit she had on with a grid of tiny electric wires running through it, and Billy’s hands were like inflated comic-book gloves, and she would get involved with the convolutions of his car or the whorl of golden hairs on his chest, and whatever her body was up to was no concern of hers. One of Billy’s friends said that there was no sense in wasting good hash on Charis because she was stoned all the time anyway. Charis didn’t think that was fair, although it was true that being stoned didn’t make as much difference for her as it seemed to make for other people.

Billy wasn’t the first man she’d slept with, of course. She’d slept with several, because you were supposed to and she didn’t want to be considered uptight, or selfish about her body, and she’d even lived with one man, although it hadn’t lasted. He’d ended by calling her a frigid bitch, as if she was doing him some injury or other, which puzzled her. Hadn’t she been affectionate enough, hadn’t she nodded her head when he talked, hadn’t she cooked the meals and laid herself down compliantly whenever he wanted her to, hadn’t she washed the sheets afterwards, hadn’t she tended him? She was not an ungiving person.

The good part about Billy was that this thing about her, this abnormality—she knew it must be one, because she’d listened to other women talking—didn’t bother him. In fact he appeared to expect it. He thought women were like that: without urges, without needs. He didn’t pester her about it, he didn’t question her, he didn’t try to fix her, as the other men had done—tinkering away at her as if she was a lawnmower. He loved her the way she was. Without anything being said, he simply assumed, as she did, that what she felt about it didn’t matter. Both of them were agreed on that. They both wanted the same thing: for Billy to he happy.

Charis lies under the sleeping bag, propped on one elbow, touching lightly the face of Billy, who has his eyes closed and may be on his way back to sleep. Maybe one of these days she will have a baby, Billy’s baby; it will look like him. She’s thought about it before—how it would just happen, without any decision or plan, and how he would stay with her then, stay on and on, and they could keep living here, like this, forever. There’s even a small room in the house where she could put the baby. At the moment it’s full of stuff—some of it is Billy’s, but most of it is Charis’s, because despite her wish not to be pinned down by possessions she has a number of cardboard boxes full of them. But that could all be cleared out and she could put a little cradle in there, with rockers on it, or a rush laundry basket. Not a crib, though; nothing with bars.

She runs her fingers over Billy’s forehead, his nose, his gently smiling mouth; he doesn’t know it, but this touching she does is not only tender, not only compassionate, but possessive. Although he is not a prisoner, he is in a way a prisoner of war. It’s war that has brought him here, war that keeps him in hiding, war that makes him stay put. She can’t help thinking of him as a captive; her captive, because his very existence here depends on her. He is hers, to do with as she will, as much hers as if he were a traveller from another planet, trapped on Earth in this dome of artificial interplanetary air that is her house. If she were to ask him to leave, what would happen to him? He’d be caught, deported, sent back, to where the air is heavier. He would implode.

He might as well be from another planet, because he’s from the United States; not only that, but from some dim and esoteric part of it, as mysterious to Charis as the dark side of the moon. Kentucky? Maryland? Virginia? He’s lived in all three places, but what do those words mean? Nothing to Charis, except that they verge on the South, a word also lacking in solid content. Charis has a few images connected with it—mansions, wisteria, and, once upon a time, segregation—she has seen movies, back in her other life, before she was Charis—but Billy does not seem to have lived in a mansion or to have segregated anybody. On the contrary, his father was almost run out of town (which town?) for being what Billy calls a “liberal,”

which is not at all the same thing as the solid, the orthodox, the bland-faced and interchangeable Liberals that appear on Toronto election posters with such stultifying monotony.

The United States is just across the lake, of course, and on clear days you can almost see it—a sort of line, a sort of haze. Charis has even been there, on a high-school day trip to Niagara Falls, but that part of it looked disappointingly similar; not like the part Billy comes from, which must be very strange. Strange, and more dangerous—that much is clear—and maybe because of that, superior. The things that happen there are said to matter in the world. Unlike the things that happen here.

So Charis runs her fingers over Billy, gloating a little, because here he is, in her bed, in her hands, her very own mythological creature, odd as unicorns, her very own captive draft dodger, part of a thousand headline stories, part of history, tucked away in secret in her house, the house for which she alone has had to sign the rental lease because nobody must know Billy’s name or where he is. Some of the draft dodgers have visas, but others—such as Billy—don’t, and once you’re inside this country you can’t get a visa, you’d have to go back across the border and apply from there, and then you’d be nabbed for sure.

Billy has explained all this; also that the Mounties are not really the Mounties of Charis’s childhood, not the picturesque men on horseback, in red uniforms, upright and true, who always get their man. Instead they are devious and cunning and in cahoots with the US. government, and if they put their finger on Billy he’s a dead duck, because—and she must never tell this to anyone, even his friends here don’t know about it—dodging the draft wasn’t the only thing he did. What else? He blew things up. A couple of people too, but they were an accident. That’s why the Mounties are after him.

If he’s lucky they’ll go through the extradition process, and he might have a chance. If unlucky they’ll just tip off the CIA

and Billy will be kidnapped, some dark night, and whisked back across the border, maybe across the lake in a speedboat, the way the Canadians smuggled liquor during Prohibition, he’s heard of guys they’ve done that to—he’ll be spirited away and thrown into jail and that will be the end of him. Someone will cut his throat, in the shower, for being a draft dodger. That’s what happens.

When he says things like this he holds onto Charis very tightly, and she puts her arms around him and says, “I won’t let them,” although she knows she has no power to prevent such a thing. But just saying this has a soothing effect, on both of them. She doesn’t quite believe it anyway, this doom-laden scenario of Billy’s. Things like that might happen in the United States—anything can happen there, where the riot police shoot people and the crime rate is so high—but not here. Not on the Island, where there are so many trees and people don’t lock the door when they go out. Not in this country, familiar to her and drab, undramatic and flat. Not in her house, with the hens cooing peacefully in the yard. No harm can come to her, or to Billy either, with the hens watching over them, feathery guardian spirits. The hens are good luck.

So she says, “I’ll keep you here with me,” even though she knows that Billy is an unwilling voyager. She suspects something worse, as well: that she herself is just a sort of way station for him, a temporary convenience, like the native brides of soldiers who are posted abroad. Although he doesn’t know it yet, she isn’t his real life. But he is hers.

This is painful.

“Well.” says Charis, sliding her mind quickly away, because pain is an illusion and should be circumvented, “how about some breakfast?”

“You’re beautiful,” says Billy. “Bacon, huh? We got any coffee?” Billy drinks real coffee, with caffeine in it. He makes fun of Charis’s herbal teas and won’t eat salad, not even the lettuce Charis grows herself. “Rabbit food,” he calls it. “Fit for nothing but little bunnies, and women:” Li’l.

“There would have been an egg,” says Charis reproachfully, and Billy laughs. (The overalls with their breast pocket full of squished egg are of course no longer on Charis but on the floor. She will wash them, later. She will avoid hot water or the egg will scramble. She will have to turn the pocket inside out.)

“Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,” he says. Cain’t. Charis turns the sound over, silently in her mouth, tasting it. Cherishing, storing away. She would like his name to be Billy Joe or Billy Bob, one of those double-barrelled Southern names, as in films. She hugs him.

“Billy, you are so .. :” she says. She wants to say young, because he is young, he’s seven years younger than she is; but he doesn’t like being reminded of it, he’d think she’s pulling rank. Or she could say innocent, which he’d find even more of an insult: he’d think it was a comment on his sexual inexperience.

What she means is pristine. What she means is his unscratched surface. Despite the suffering he’s gone through and is still going through, there’s something shiny about him. shiny and new. Or else impermeable. She herself is so penetrable; sharp edges stick into her, she bruises easily, her inner skin is puffy and soft, like marshmallows. She’s covered all over with tiny feelers like the feelers on ants: they wave, they test the air, they touch and recoil, they warn her. Billy has no such feelers. He doesn’t need them. Whatever slams into him bounces right off—either he dismisses it, or instead of hurting him it makes him angry. It’s a kind of hardness, which exists quite apart from any sadness or melancholy or even guilt that he may be experiencing at the time.

Maybe it’s this: his own sadness and melancholy and guilt are his, and therefore important to him, but they’re contained inside. Those of other people don’t get in. Whereas Charis is a screen door, an open one at that, and everything blows right through.

“I’m so what?” says Billy, grinning. Ahm. Charis smiles back at him.

“So ... well, you know,” she says.

Charis did not exactly meet Billy. Instead he was allotted to her, at the Furrows Food Co-op, where she knew a good many people although not well. It was a woman called Bernice who got her into it. Bernice was Peace Movement and in some church or other, and they were parcelling out the draft dodgers they had collected, sticking them here and there in people’s houses, like the English children who were shipped across the ocean during the Second World War. Charis just happened to be at the co-op that day, and Bernice more or less raffled off the draft dodgers, and Billy was left over, him and another boy (Bernice called them “boys”), so Charis said she would put them up for a few nights, in her sublet Queen Street warehouse room, one on the broken-springed Goodwill sofa she had then and one on the floor, just until they could find some other place, if Bernice would supply the sleeping bags because Charis didn’t have any extras.

Charis did not do this for political reasons: she didn’t believe in politics, in getting involved in an activity that caused you to have such negative emotions. She didn’t approve of wars, or of thinking about them. So she didn’t understand the Vietnam War or want to understand it—although some of it had seeped into her head, despite her precautions, because it was in the air molecules—and above all she didn’t watch it on TV She didn’t even have a TV, and she did not read newspapers because they were too upsetting and anyway there was nothing she could do about all that misery. So her reason for taking Billy in had nothing to do with any of that. Instead she did it out of a sense of hospitality. She felt an obligation to be kind to strangers, especially strangers who were down on their luck. Also it would have been too weird to have been the only person at the co-op who refused to take anyone in.

So that was how it started. After a few days the other boy moved out and Billy stayed; and then after a few more days she realized she was expected to go to bed with him. He didn’t push it; in that early time he was diffident and shy, disoriented, uncertain of himself. He’d thought it was going to be more or less the same on this side of the border as on the other side, only safer, and when it turned out that it wasn’t either one of those things he was confused and upset. He realized he’d done something monumental, something he couldn’t reverse; that he’d landed himself in exile, perhaps forever. He’d made life hard for his family—they’d supported his decision about the draft but not about the other stuff, the explosives, and they were getting what he called “a lot of flak.” Also he’d deserted his country, a notion that has a good deal more meaning for him than it does for Charis, because in Billy’s schools they started the day with their hands over their hearts, saluting their flag, instead of praying to God as they did at Charis’s schools. For Billy his country was a kind of God, an idea that Charis finds idolatrous and even barbaric. She finds the standard God with his white beard and anger and lamb sacrifices and death angels barbaric too, of course. She has gone beyond all that.—Her God is oval.

Also Billy worried about his friends back there, back home; guys he’d gone to school with, who hadn’t escaped with him and were probably, even now, on their way across the sea or being shot at in rice paddies or blown up by guerrillas as they walked along some hot mud road. He felt he’d betrayed them. He knew the war was wrong and that what he’d done was right, but he felt like a coward anyway. He was homesick. A lot of the time he wanted to go back.

This was how he talked to Charis, in fits and starts, in bits and pieces. He said he didn’t expect her to understand, but she did understand some of it. She understood his emotions, which came at her in a deluge—watery, chaotic, a melancholy blue in colour, like a great wave of tears. He was so lost, so wounded, how could she refuse to offer him whatever comfort she had?

XXXI

Things have changed since then. Since they moved to the Island, and into this house. Billy is still nervous, but less so. He seems more rooted. Also he has friends now, a whole network of exiles like himself. They even have meetings, on the mainland; Billy goes over there a couple of times a week. They help out the new arrivals, they pass them around and hide them out, and Charis has had to put up more than one of them, briefly, on the living-room sofa—a different sofa now, still second-hand but with better springs. Living with someone, Charis has discovered, leads to real furniture, although having real furniture was one of the things she renounced years ago.

Occasionally the exiles forgather at her house to drink beer and talk and smoke dope, though they take care to keep the parties quiet: the last thing they need is the police. They come across on the ferry and they bring their girlfriends, stringyhaired girls quite a lot younger than Charis, girls who take baths in Charis’s bathroom because they live in places where they don’t have bathrooms of their own, and they use up Charis’s few towels and leave rings in Charis’s old claw-footed bathtub. Dirt is an illusion, it’s just one way of thinking about matter, and Charis knows she shouldn’t be upset about it, but if she has to deal with an illusion of dirt she would rather it be her own dirt, not the dirt of these vacant-eyed girls. The men, or boys, refer to these girls as “my old lady,” though they are the opposite of old, which makes Charis feel some better about the fact that Billy calls her by this name; as well.

Billy’s group is always talking about plans. They think they should do something, take some action, but what kind? They’ve gone so far as to make up a list of names, the names of the others in the group, though they’re first names only and false names at that. Charis—peeking at Billy’s copy of the list, although she shouldn’t have—was taken aback to discover that some of them were women’s names: Edith, Ethel, Emma. During the parties, as she gets cold beer out of her tiny refrigerator, as she dumps chips and mixed nuts from the co-op into bowls, as she finds the shampoo for some girl who wants to wash her hair, as she sits on the floor beside Billy, breathing in second-hand pot smoke and smiling and gazing into space, she has listened in, she has overheard, and she knows that Billy is really Edith, or vice versa. He’s named after Edith Cavell, some person in the past. There are telephone numbers, too; some of them are scrawled on the wall beside the phone, but Billy tells her it’s safe because they’re just the numbers of places where you can leave messages. They also have a plan to put out a newspaper, although there are several draft-dodger newspapers already. A lot of other guys got here before Billy and his newfound friends.

Charis isn’t sure all these cloak-and-dagger props, the sneaking around and the codes and the pretend names, are really necessary. It’s like kids playing. But the activity seems to give Billy more energy, and a purpose in life. He’s venturing out more, he’s less cooped up. On the days when Charis thinks the danger isn’t real she rejoices in this, but on the days when she believes in it she worries. And every time Billy steps on board the ferry to go to the mainland, there’s a corner of her that panics. Billy is like a tightrope walker, stepping carelessly blindfolded along a clothesline strung between two thirty-storey buildings, thinking he’s only four feet above the ground. He believes that his actions, his words, his tiny little newspaper, can change things, can change things out there in the world. Charis knows that there is no change possible in the world at large, no change for the better that is. Events are deceptive, they are part of a cycle; to get caught up in them is to be trapped in a whirlpool. But what does Billy know about the relentless malice of the physical universe? He is too young.

Charis feels that the only thing she herself can change is her own body, and through it her spirit. She wishes to free her spirit: this is what led her to yoga. She wants to rearrange her body, get rid of the heaviness hidden deep within it, that core of evil treasure she buried some time ago and has never dug up; she wants to make her body lighter and lighter, release it so that she’s almost floating. She knows it’s possible. She gives the yoga lessons because they pay for the rent and the phone and for the bulk food she gets cut-rate through her work at the co-op, but she gives them also because she wants to help other people. Other women, really, because most of the people who take the classes are women. They too must have heavy metals hidden in them, they too must yearn for lightness. Although this class isn’t about weight loss: she tells them that straight out, right at the beginning.

After she’s dressed, after she’s cooked Billy his bacon and toast and coffee, Charis packs her leotard and tights—into her Peruvian carry-bag and runs around the house unearthing spare change for the trip from all the places where she’s hidden it, for emergencies such as today, when she’s run out of cash. The mist has evaporated now and the weak November sunlight is filtering through the grey overcast, so she can trust her watch again and she doesn’t miss the ferry. She hardly ever misses it anyway unless it’s a case of Billy, Billy and his spontaneous and overpowering urges. What can she tell him then? I have to work or else we don’t eat? That doesn’t go over too well: he thinks it’s a criticism of him because he doesn’t have a job, and then he sulks. He prefers to believe that she’s like a lily of the field; that she neither toils nor spins; that bacon and coffee are simply produced by her, like leaves from a tree.

The yoga classes are held in the apartment above the co-op, or what used to be an apartment. Right now two of the rooms are offices, one for the co-op, one for a small poetry magazine called Earth Germinations, and the big front room is kept for meetings and for classes like the yoga ones. Charis will teach only ten people at a time: any more would overload her circuits, break her focus. They bring their own towels and mats, and usually they already have their leotards on under their clothes so they don’t have to change. Charis gets there before the others, changes in the bathroom, and spreads out her mat, which she keeps in a cupboard in the co-op office. The old hardwood floor gives you splinters if you aren’t careful.

Her first work is to abolish her surroundings. The faded wallpaper with the mauve trellis pattern on it must recede, the squares of darker wallpaper left by former pictures, the stale smell of used house and of the dank pee-stained carpet on the stairs coming up and of the lunch relics in the office wastebaskets, which nobody ever empties. The traffic noises from outside must go, the voices from the street and from downstairs—she erases them from her mind with a firm hand, as if they’re on a blackboard. She lies down on her back, knees bent, arms loose overhead, and concentrates on her breathing, preparing, centring herself. The breath must go in and down, fully in and down to the solar plexus. The furtive scurrying trivial mind must be shut off: The I must be transcended. The self must be cut loose. It must drift.

The first class goes as usual. Charis knows she has a good voice for this, low and reassuring, and a good pace. “Honour the spine,” she murmurs. “Salute the sun:” The sun she means is inside the body. She uses her voice and also her hands, a touch here, a touch there, nudging the bodies into the right poses. To each individual woman she speaks in a whisper, so as not to call attention or embarrass her or interrupt the concentration of the others. The room fills with the sound of breathing, like wavelets on a shore, and with the scent of tensed muscles. Charis feels energy flowing out of her, through her fingers, into the other bodies. She doesn’t move much—this is not what anyone else would call exertion—but at the end of the hour and a half she’s exhausted.

She has an hour’s break, to replenish herself. She drinks an orange-and-carrot juice from the juice bar downstairs to get some living enzymes into her system, and helps the others sort out the dried-bean pricing, and then it’s time for her second class. Charis never much notices who is in which class; she counts to ten and registers the colours of the leotards, and once she’s into the class she notes the particularities of the bodies and especially the spines and their wrong positioning, but the faces are not important to her, because the face is the individualism, the very thing Charis wants to help these women transcend. Also, the first exercises are done on the floor, with the eyes closed. So she’s a quarter of the way through before she realizes that there’s a new person, someone she’s never seen before: a dark-haired woman in an indigo leotard and plum-coloured tights, who—strange for such a dimly lighted day—is wearing sunglasses.

This woman is tall, and thin as a razor, so thin Charis can see her ribcage right through the leotard, each rib in high relief as if carved, with a line of darkness beneath it. Her knees and elbows stick out like knots in rope, and the poses, as she performs them, are not fluid but practically geometrical, cages made of coat-hangers. Her skin is white as mushrooms, and a dark-light phosphorescence glimmers around her like the sheen on bad meat. Charis knows unhealth when she sees it: this woman needs a lot more than just one yoga class. A big hit of vitamin C and a dollop of sunlight would-be a start, but they wouldn’t even begin to touch what’s wrong with her.

What’s wrong with her is partly an attitude of the soul: the sunglasses are its manifestation, they symbolize a barrier to inner vision. So just before the lotus meditation Charis goes over and whispers to her, “Wouldn’t you like to take your sunglasses off? They must be a distraction:”

For answer the woman slips the glasses down, and Charis gets a shock. The woman’s left eye is blackened. Black and blue, and half shut. The other eye regards her, hurt, wet, appealing.

“Oh,” Charis breathes. “Sorry.” She winces: she can feel the blow on her own flesh, her own eye.

The woman smiles, a harrowing smile in that emaciated and damaged face. “Aren’t you Karen?” she whispers.

Charis doesn’t know how to explain that she is but she isn’t. She is once-Karen. So’ she says, “Yes,” and looks more closely, because how would this woman recognize her? “I’m Zenia,” the woman says. And she is.

Charis and Zenia sit at one of the little tables beside the juice bar at the far end of the co-op. “What would you recommend?” says Zenia. “This is all new to me,” and Charis, flattered by this call upon her expertise, orders her up a papayaand-orange, with a dash of lemon in it and some brewer’s yeast. Zenia keeps her glasses on and Charis doesn’t blame her. Still, it’s hard to talk with someone whose eyes she can’t see.

She does remember Zenia, of course. Everyone in McClung Hall knew who Zenia was; even Charis, who drifted through her university years as if through an airport. Educationally she was a transient, and she left after three years without completing her degree: whatever it was that she needed to be taught, it wasn’t on the curriculum there. Or maybe she wasn’t ready for it. Charis believes that when you are ready to learn a thing the right teacher will appear, or rather will be sent to you. This has worked out for her so far, more or less, and the only reason she isn’t learning anything at the moment is that she’s so fully occupied with Billy.

Though maybe Billy is a teacher, in a way. She just hasn’t figured out exactly what she’s supposed to be learning from him. How to love, perhaps? How to love a man. Though she already does love him, so what next?

Zenia sips her juice, with the two ovals of her dark glasses turned towards Charis. Charis isn’t sure what she can say to her. She didn’t really know Zenia at university, she never spoke to her—Zenia was older, she was ahead of Charis, and she was in with all those artistic, intellectual people—but Charis remembers her, so beautiful and confident, striding around campus with her boyfriend Stew, and then later with short little Tony as well. What Charis remembers about Tony is that Tony followed her one night when Charis went outside to sit under a tree on the McClung lawn. Probably Tony thought Charis was sleepwalking; which showed some insight, because Charis had certainly done some sleepwalking in the past, though she wasn’t doing it then.

This action of Tony’s revealed a good heart, a quality much more important to Charis than Tony’s academic brilliance, which was what she was known for. Zenia was known for other things as well—most notoriously for living with Stew, right out in the open, at a time when such things were not done. So much has changed. It’s the married people, now, who are considered immoral. The nukes, they are called, for nuclear family. Radioactive, potentially lethal; a big leap from Home Sweet Home, but in Charis’s opinion more appropriate.

Zenia too has changed. In addition to being thin she’s ill, and in addition to being ill she is cowed somehow, beaten, defeated. Her shoulders hunch inwards protectively, her fingers are awkward claws, the corners of her mouth droop downwards.

Charis wouldn’t have known her. It’s as if the former Zenia, the lovely Zenia, the Zenia of obvious flesh, has been burned away, leaving this bone core.

Charis doesn’t like to question—she doesn’t like to intrude on the selfhood of others—but Zenia is so drained of energy it’s unlikely she will say anything at all, otherwise. So Charis chooses something non-invasive. “What brought you to my class?” she asks.

“I heard about it from a friend,” says Zenia. Every word seems an effort. “I thought it might help.”

“Help?” says Charis.

“With the cancer,” says Zenia.

“Cancer,” says Charis. It isn’t even a question, because didn’t she know it? There’s no mistaking that whiteness, that sickly flicker. An imbalance of the soul.

Zenia smiles crookedly. “I beat it once before,” she says, “but it’s come back.”

Now Charis remembers something: didn’t Zenia disappear suddenly at the end of the year? The second year Charis lived in McClung Hall, that’s when it was: Zenia vanished without an explanation, into thin air. The girls used to talk about it over breakfast and Charis would listen in, on the rare occasions when she bothered with listening, or with breakfast. They didn’t have much there that she could eat: bran flakes was about it. The gossip was that Zenia had run away with another man, dumping Stew flat and taking some of his money as well, but now Charis divines the real truth: it was the cancer. Zenia went away without telling anyone about it because she didn’t want a lot of fuss. She went away to cure herself, and to do that you need to be alone, to be free of interruption. Charis can understand that.

“How did you do it, the first time?” says Charis. “Do what?” says Zenia, a little sharply.

“Beat it,” says Charis. “The cancer.”

“They did an operation,” says Zenia. “They took out—they did a hysterectomy, I can never have babies. But it didn’t work. So then I went to the mountains, by myself. I stopped eating meat, I cut out alcohol. I just had to concentrate. On getting well.”

This sounds exactly right to Charis. Mountains, no meat. “And now?” she says.

“I thought I was better,” says Zenia. Her voice has sunk to a hoarse whisper. “I thought I was strong enough. So I came back. I’ve been living with Stew—with West. I guess I let him take me back into our old way of living, you know, he drinks a lot—and the cancer came back. He can’t take it—he really can’t! A lot of people can’t stand to be around sickness, they’re afraid of it.” Charis nods: she knows this, she knows this deeply, at the level of her cells. “He just denies that there’s anything wrong with me,” Zenia continues. “He tries to get me to eat ... mounds of food, steak and butter, all those animal fats. They make me nauseated, I can’t, I just can’t!”

“Oh,” says Charis. This is a horrible story, and one that has the ring of truth. So few people understand about animal fats. No, more: so few people understand about anything. “How awful,” she says, which is only a pallid reflection of what she feels. She is troubled; she is on the verge of tears; above all she is helpless.

“Then he gets angry” Zenia goes on. “He gets furious with me, and I feel so weak ... he hates me to cry, it just gets him angrier. He was the one who did this:” She gestures towards her eye. “It makes me so ashamed, I feel like I’m the one responsible ..:’

Charis tries to remember Stew, or West, whose name once changed so abruptly, just like her own. What she sees is a tall man, a somewhat inturned and unconnected man, gentle as a giraffe. She can’t picture him hitting anyone, much less Zenia; but people can have deceptive exteriors. Men especially. They can put on a good act, they can make you believe they are model citizens and that they are right and you are wrong. They can fool everyone and make you seem like a liar. West, no doubt, is one of these. Indignation rises in her, the beginning of anger. But anger is unhealthy for her so she pushes it away.

‘ “He says if I really have cancer I should have another operation, or else chemotherapy,” says Zenia. “But I know I could heal myself again, if only .. :” she trails off. “I don’t think I can drink any more of this right now,” she says. She nudges the juice glass away. “Thank you .... you’ve been really nice.” She reaches across the table and touches Charis’s hand. Her thin white fingers look cold but they are hot, hot as coals. Then she pushes back her chair, takes up her coat and purse, and hurries away, almost staggering. Her head is bent, the hair is falling over her face like a veil, and Charis is sure she’s crying.

Charis wants to jump up and run after her and bring her back. This desire is so strong in her it’s like a fist on her neck. She wants to sit Zenia down again in her chair and put both hands on her, and summon up all her energy, the energy of the light, and heal her, right on the spot. But she knows she can’t do that, so she doesn’t move.

On Friday Zenia isn’t in the yoga class, and Charis is anxious about her. Maybe she’s collapsed, or maybe West has hit her again, this time more than once. Maybe she’s in the hospital with multiple fractures. Charis takes the ferry boat to the Island, fretting all the way. Now she’s feeling inadequate: there must have been something she could have said or done, something better than what she did do. A glass of juice was not enough.

That evening the fog returns, and with it a chilly drizzle, and Charis makes a good fire in the stove and turns on the furnace as well, and Billy wants her to come to bed early. She’s brushing her teeth in the drafty bathroom downstairs when she hears a knock at the kitchen door. What she thinks is that it’s one of

Billy’s group, with yet another draft dodger to be parked overnight on her living-room sofa. She has to admit she’s getting a bit tired of them. For one thing, they never help with the dishes.

But it’s not a draft dodger. It’s Zenia, her head framed in the wet glass square of the door like a photo under water. Her hair is soaked and streaking down her face, her teeth are chattering, her sunglasses are gone, and her eye, purple now, is piteous. There’s a fresh cut on her lip.

The door opens as if by itself, and she stands in the doorway, swaying slightly. “He threw me out,” she whispers. “I don’t want to disturb you ... I just didn’t know where else to go.”

Mutely Charis holds out her arms, and Zenia stumbles over the threshold and collapses into them.

XXXII

It’s a sunless noon. Charis is in her garden, watched by the hens, who peer greedily through the hexagons of their wire fence, and by the remaining cabbages, goggling at her like three dull green goblin-heads emerging from the ground. The garden in November has a mangy, thumbed appearance: wilted marigolds, nasturtium leaves faded a pale yellow, the stumps of broccoli, the unripe tomatoes frost-killed and mushy, with silvery slug tracks wandering here and there.

Charis doesn’t mind this vegetable disarray. It’s all ferment, all fertilizer. She lifts her spade, shoves it into the earth, and steps on the top edge of its blade with her right foot in Billy’s rubber boot, digging in. Then she heaves, grunting. Then she turns over the shovelful of soil. Worms suck themselves back into their tunnels, a white grub curls. Charis picks it up and tosses it relentlessly over the fence, in for the gabbling hens. All life is sacred but hens are more sacred than grubs.

The hens fluster and racket and abuse one another, and chase the one with the grub. Charis once thought it might be a good spiritual discipline to refuse to feed her hens anything she wouldn’t eat herself, but she has since decided that this would be pointless. The ground-up shells, for instance, the crushed bones—hens need them to make eggs, but Charis doesn’t.

It’s the wrong season of the year to be turning the garden. She should wait till spring, when the new weeds poke through; she’ll have to do it all over again at that time. But this is the only way she can be out of the house without either Zenia or Billy wanting to come with her. Each is eager to be with her alone, away from the other one. If she tries to go for a walk, just to be by herself for a short time, just to unwind, there’s a rush for the door: a subdued, oblique rush (Zenia) or a gangling, obvious one (Billy). Then there’s a psychic collision, and Charis is forced to choose. It’s bothering her a lot. But luckily, neither one of them has any great desire to help her dig up the garden. Billy doesn’t like mucking in the dirt—he says why do so much work, because all that comes up is vegetables—and Zenia of course is in no shape. She is managing to take feeble, occasional walks, down to the lakeshore and back, but even those exhaust her.

Zenia has been here for a week now, sleeping on the sofa by night, resting on it by day. The evening of her arrival was almost festive—Charis ran a hot bath for her and gave her one of her own white cotton nightgowns to put on, and hung her wet clothes up on the hooks behind the stove to dry, and after Zenia was finished with the bath and had put on the nightgown Charis wrapped her in a blanket and sat her in a chair beside the stove, and combed her wet hair, and made her a hot milk with honey. It pleased Charis to do these things; she experienced herself as competent and virtuous, overflowing with good will and good energy. It pleased her to give this energy to someone so obviously in need of it as Zenia. But by the time she’d settled Zenia on the sofa and had gone upstairs to bed, Billy was angry with her, and he’s been angry ever since. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want Zenia in the house at all.

“What’s she doing here?” he whispered that first night. “It’s just for a bit,” said Charis, whispering too because she didn’t want Zenia to hear them and feel unwanted. “We’ve had lots of others. On the same sofa! It’s no different:”

“It’s way different,” said Billy. “They don’t have any place else to go:”

“Neither does she,” said Charis. The different thing, she was thinking, was that the others were Billy’s friends and Zenia was hers. Well, not friend exactly. Responsibility.

That was before Billy had even laid eyes on Zenia, or spoken a single word to her. The next day he’d grunted a surly “Morning” over the scrambled eggs—not home-grown, unfortunately, the hens had dried up—and the toast with apple jelly that Charis was serving to both of them. He’d hardly looked at Zenia where she sat hunched over, still in Charis’s nightgown. with a blanket wrapped around her, sipping her weak tea. If he had looked, thought Charis, he would have relented, because Zenia was so pitiable. Her eye was still discoloured and swollen, and you could practically count the blue veins on the backs of her hands.

“Get her out of here,” said Billy when Zenia had gone to the bathroom. “Just out:’

“Shh,” said Charis. “She’ll hear you!”

“What do we know about her, anyway?” said Billy.

“She has cancer,” said Charis, as if this was all anyone needed to know.

“Then she should be in a hospital,” said Billy.

“She doesn’t believe in them,” said Charis, who didn’t either.

“Bullshit,” said Billy.

This remark struck Charis as not only ungenerous and crude, but faintly sacrilegious as well. “She has that black eye,” she murmured. The eye was living proof of something or other. Of Zenia’s neediness, or else her goodness. Of her status.

“I didn’t give it to her,” said Billy. “Let her go eat someone else’s food.” Charis was incapable of mentioning that if anyone ought to decide who ate what around this place it should be her, since she was the one who either grew it or paid for it herself.

“He doesn’t like me, does he?” said Zenia, when Billy in his turn was out of hearing. Her voice quivered, her eyes were filling. “I’d better go .. :”

“Of course he does! It’s just his way,” said Charis warmly. “Now you stay right where you are!”

It took Charis a while to figure out why Billy was so hostile to Zenia. At first she thought it was because he was afraid of her—afraid she would tell on him, tip off the wrong people, turn him in; or that she would just say something to someone by accident, something indiscreet. Loose lips sink ships used to be a slogan, during the war, the old war; it was on posters, and Charis’s Aunt Viola used to quote it as a sort of joke, to her friends, in the late forties. So Charis explained all that to Zenia, how precarious Billy felt and how difficult things were for him. She even told Zenia about the bombs, about blowing things up, and about how Billy might get kidnapped by the Mounties. Zenia promised not to tell. She said she understood perfectly.

“I’ll be careful, cross my heart,” she said. “But Karen—sorry Charis—how did you get mixed up with them?”

“Mixed up?” said Charis.

“With the draft dodgers,” said Zenia. “The revolutionaries. You never struck me as a very political person. At university, I

mean. Not that there were a whole bunch of revolutionaries, around that dump.”

It hadn’t occurred to Charis that Zenia would have taken any notice of her at all, back then, back in her vague, semi-forgotten university days, when she was still Karen, outwardly at least. She hadn’t participated in anything, she hadn’t stood out. She had stayed in the shadows, but it turned out that Zenia at least had spotted her there and had considered her worthy of notice, and she was touched. Zenia must have been a sensitive person; more sensitive than people gave her credit for.

“I’m not,” said Charis. “I wasn’t political at all:”

“I was,” said Zenia. “I was totally anti-bourgeois, back then! A real bohemian fellow-traveller.” She frowned a little, then laughed. “Why not, they had the best parties!”

“Well,” said Charis, “I’m not mixed up. I don’t understand any of those things. I just live with Billy, that’s all:”

“Sort of like a gun moll,” said Zenia, who was feeling a little better. It was a warmish day, for November, so Charis had decided it was safe for Zenia to go out. They were down by the lake, watching the gulls; Zenia had walked the whole way without once holding onto Charis’s arm. Charis had offered to get her some new sunglasses—Zenia had left the old ones behind, the night she ran away—but she hardly needed them any more: her eye had faded to a yellowy-blue, like a washedout ink stain.

“A what?” said Charis.

“Shit,” said Zenia, smiling, “if living with someone isn’t mixed up, I don’t know what is:” But Charis didn’t care what people called things. Anyway, she wasn’t listening to Zenia, she was watching her smile.

Zenia is smiling more, now. Charis feels as if that smile has been accomplished singlehandedly by her, Charis, and by all the work she’s been putting in: the fruit drinks, the cabbage juice made from her own cabbages, ground up fine and strained through a sieve, the special baths she prepares, the gentle yoga stretches, the carefully spaced walks in the fresh air. All those positive energies are ranging themselves against the cancer cells, good soldiers against bad, light against darkness; Charis herself is taking meditation time every day, on Zenia’s behalf, to visualize that exact same result. And it’s working, it is! Zenia has more colour now, more energy. Although still very thin and weak, she is visibly improving.

She knows it and she’s grateful. “You’re doing so much for me,” she says to Charis, almost every day. “I don’t deserve it; I mean, I’m a total stranger, you hardly know me:”

“That’s all right,” says Charis awkwardly. She blushes a little when Zenia says these things. She isn’t used to people thanking her for what she does, and she has a belief that it isn’t necessary. At the same time, the sensation is very agreeable; also at the same time, it strikes her that Billy could be showing a bit more gratitude himself, for everything she’s done for him. Instead of which he scowls at her and doesn’t eat his bacon. He wants her to make two breakfasts—one for Zenia and a separate one for him—so he doesn’t have to sit at the same table with Zenia in the mornings.

“The way she sucks up to you makes me puke,” he said yesterday. Charis knows now why he says such things. He’s jealous. He’s afraid Zenia will come between them, that she’ll somehow take Charis’s full attention away from him. It’s childish of him to feel like that. After all, he doesn’t have a life-threatening illness, and he ought to know by now that Charis loves him. So Charis touches his arm.

“She won’t be here forever,” she says. “Just till she’s a little better. Just till she can find a place of her own.”

“I’ll help her look,” says Billy. Charis has told him about West punching Zenia in the eye, and his response was not charitable. “I’ll do the other one for her, is what he said. “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, a real pleasure:”

“That’s not very pacifist of you,” said Charis reproachfully. “I never said I was a goddamn pacifist,” said Billy, insulted. “Just because one war’s wrong doesn’t mean they all are!”

“Charis,” Zenia called fretfully, from the front room. “Is the radio on? I heard voices. I was just having a nap.”

“I can’t say spit in my own goddamn house,” hisses Billy. It’s at moments like these that Charis goes out to dig in the garden.

She pushes her shovel down, lifts, turns the soil over, pauses to look for grubs. Then she hears Zenia’s voice behind her. “You’re so strong,” Zenia says wistfully. “I was that strong, once. I could carry three suitcases:”

“You will be again,” says Charis, as heartily as she can. “I just know it!”

“Maybe,” says Zenia, in a small, sad voice. “It’s the little everyday things you miss so much. You know?”

Charis feels suddenly guilty for digging in her own garden; or as if she ought to feel guilty. It’s the same way with a lot of the other things she does: scrubbing the floor, making the bread. Zenia admires her while she does these things, but it’s a melancholy admiration, Sometimes Charis senses that her own healthy, toned-up body is a reproach to Zenia’s enfeebled one; that Zenia holds it against her.

“Let’s feed the hens,” she says. Feeding the hens is something Zenia can do. Charis brings out the hen feed in its coffee can, and Zenia scatters it, handful by handful. She loves the hens, she says. They are so vital! They are—well, the embodiment of the Life Force. Aren’t they?

Charis is made nervous by this kind of talk. It’s too abstract, it’s too much like university. The hens are not an embodiment of anything but hen-ness. The concrete is the abstract. But how could she explain this to Zenia?

“I’m going to make a salad,” she says instead.

“A Life Force salad,” says Zenia, and laughs. For the first time Charis is not delighted to hear this laughter, welcome as it ought to be. There’s something about it she doesn’t understand. It’s like a joke she’s not getting.

The salad is raisins and grated carrots, with a lemon juice and honey dressing. The carrots themselves are Charis’s own, from the box of damp sand in the root cellar lean-to; already they’re beginning to grow small white whiskers, which shows they’re still alive. Charis and Zenia eat the salad, and the lima beans and boiled potatoes, by themselves, because Billy says he has to go out that night. He has a meeting.

“He goes to a lot of meetings,” murmurs Zenia, as Billy is putting on his jacket. She has given up trying to be nice to Billy, since she wasn’t getting any results; now she’s taken to speaking of him in the third person even when he’s standing right there. It creates a circle, a circle of language, with Zenia and Charis on the inside of it and Billy on the outside. Charis wishes she wouldn’t do it; on the other hand, in a way Billy has only himself to blame.

Billy gives Zenia a dirty look. “At least I don’t just sit around on my butt, like some,” he says angrily. He too speaks only to Charis.

“Be careful,” Charis says. She means about going into the city, but Billy takes it as a reproof.

“Have a real good time with your sick friend,” he says nastily. Zenia smiles to herself, a tiny bitter smile. The door slams behind him, rattling the glass in the windows.

“I think I should leave,” says Zenia, when they are eating some of the applesauce Charis bottled earlier in the fall.

“But where would you live?” says Charis, dismayed. “Oh. I could find a place,” says Zenia.

“But you don’t have any money!” says Charis.

“I could get a job of some sort,” says Zenia. “I’m good at that. I can always lick ass somewhere, I know how to get jobs:’ She coughs, muffling her face in her spindly-fingered hands. “Sorry,” she says. She takes a bird-sip of water.

“Oh, no,” says Charis. “You can’t do that! You’re not well enough yet! You will be soon,” she adds, because she doesn’t want to sound negative. It’s health and not sickness that must be reinforced.

Zenia smiles thinly. “Maybe,” she says. “But Karen, really—don’t worry about me. It’s not your problem.”

“Charis,” says Charis. Zenia has trouble remembering her real name.

And yes, it is her problem, because she has taken it upon herself. Then Zenia says something worse. “It’s not just that he hates me,” she says. Her tongue comes out, licking the applesauce off the tip of her spoon. “The fact is, he can hardly keep his hands off me.”

“West?” says Charis. A cold finger runs down her back. Zenia smiles. “No,” she says. “I mean Billy. Surely you’ve noticed it.”

Charis can feel the skin of her entire face sliding down in dismay. She has noticed nothing. But why hasn’t she? It’s obvious to her, now that Zenia’s said it—the energy that leaps out of Billy’s finger-ends and hair whenever Zenia is near. A sexual bristling, like tomcats. “What do you mean?” she says.

“He wants to haul me into bed,” says Zenia. Her voice is lightly regretful. “He wants to jump me.”

“He loves you?” says Charis. Her entire body has gone slack, as if her bones have melted. Dread is what she feels. Billy loves me, she protests silently. “Billy loves me,” she says, in a choked voice. “He says so.” She sounds to herself like a whiny child. And when was the last time he said that?

“Oh, it’s not love,” says Zenia gently. “Not what he feels for me, I mean. It’s hate. Sometimes it’s so hard for men to tell the difference. But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” Charis whispers.

Zenia laughs. “‘Come on, you’re not a baby. He loves your ass. Or some other body part, how would I know? Anyway, for sure it’s not your soul, it’s not you. If you didn’t put out he’d just take anyway. I’ve watched him, he’s a greedy shit, they’re all just rapists at heart. You’re an innocent, Karen. Believe me, there’s only one thing any man ever wants from a woman, and that’s sex. How much you can get them to pay for it is the important thing.”

“Don’t say that,” says Charis. “Don’t say it!” She can feel something breaking in her, collapsing, a huge iridescent balloon ripped and greying like a punctured lung. What’s left, if you take away love? Just brutality. Just shame. Just ferocity. Just pain. What becomes of her gifts then, her garden, her chickens, her eggs? All her acts of careful tending. She’s shaking now, she feels sick to her stomach.

“I’m just a realist, that’s all,” says Zenia. “The one reason he wants to stick his dick into me is that he can’t. Don’t worry, he’ll forget all about it after I’ve left. They have short memories. That’s why I want to go, Karen—it’s for you.” She’s still smiling. She looks at Charis, and her face against the weak light of the ceiling bulb is in darkness, with only her eyes gleaming, red as in car headlights, and the look goes into Charis, down and down. It’s a resigned look. Zenia is accepting her own death.

“But you’ll die,” says Charis. She can’t let that happen. “Don’t give up!” She starts to cry. She clutches Zenia’s hand, or Zenia clutches hers, and the two of them hang onto each other’s hands across the tableful of dirty dishes.

Charis lies awake in the night. Billy has come back, long after she went to bed, but he hasn’t reached for her. Instead he turned away in bed and closed himself off and went to sleep. It’s like that a lot, these days. It’s as if they’ve had a fight. But now she knows there’s another reason too: she is not wanted. It’s Zenia who is the wanted one.

But Billy wants Zenia with his body only. That’s why he’s so rude to her—his body is divided from his spirit. That’s why he’s being so cold to Charis, as well: his body wants Charis out of the way, so he can grab Zenia, shove her up against the kitchen counter, take hold of her against her will, even though she’s so ill. Maybe he doesn’t know that’s what he wants. But it is.

A wind has come up. Charis listens to it scraping through the bare trees, and to the cold waves slapping against the shore. Someone is coming towards her across the lake, her bare feet touching the tops of the waves, her nightgown tattered by the years of weathering, her colourless hair floating. Charis closes her eyes, focusing on the inner picture, trying to see who it is. Inside her head there’s moonlight, obscured by scudding clouds; but now the sky lightens and she can see the face.

It’s Karen, it’s banished Karen. She has travelled a long distance. Now she’s coming nearer, with that cowed, powerless face Charis used to see in the rnirror looming up to her own face, blown towards her through the darkness like an ousted ghost, towards this house where she has been islanded, thinking herself safe; demanding to enter her, to rejoin her, to share in her body once again.

Charis is not Karen. She has not been Karen for a long time, and she never wants to be Karen again. She pushes away with all her strength, pushes down towards the water, but this time Karen will not go under. She drifts closer and closer, and her mouth opens. She wants to speak.

Karen was born to the wrong parents. That’s what Charis’s grandmother said could happen, and it is what Charis believes as well. Such people have to look for a long time, they have to search out and identify their right parents. Or else they have to go through life without.

Karen was seven when she met her grandmother for the first time. On that day she wore a cotton dress with smocking across the front and a sash, and matching hairbows on the ends of her pale blonde pigtails, which were braided so tight her eyes felt slanted. Her mother had starched the dress, and it was stiff and also a little sticky because of the damp late June heat. They took the train, and when Karen got up off the hot plush seat she had to peel the skirt of the dress off the backs of her legs. That hurt, but she knew better than to say so.

Her mother wore an ivory-coloured linen outfit with a sleeveless dress and a short-sleeved jacket over it. She had a white straw hat and a white bag and shoes to match, and a pair of white cotton gloves, which she carried. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” she kept telling Karen anxiously. “You’re a lot like your grandmother in some ways:” This was news to Karen, because for a long time her mother and her grandmother had hardly been on speaking terms. She knew from listening in that her mother had run away from the farm when she was only sixteen. She’d worked at grinding hard jobs and saved up her money so she could go to school and become a teacher. She’d done this so she could be out from under the thumb of her own mother; the crazy old bat. Wild horses would not drag her back to that rubbish heap, or this was what she said.

Yet here they were, heading straight to the farm that Karen’s mother hated so much, with Karen’s summer clothes packed neatly into a suitcase and her mother’s overnight bag beside it on the rack above their heads. They passed dirt fields, isolated houses, grey sagging barns, herds of cows. Karen’s mother hated cows. One of her stories was about having to get up in the winter, in blizzards, before sunrise even, and go out shivering through the whirling snow to feed the cows. But, “You’ll like the cows,” she said now, in the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos at school. She checked her lipstick in the mirror of her compact, then smiled at Karen to see how she was taking it. Karen smiled back uncertainly. She was used to smiling even when she didn’t feel like it. She would be in Grade Two in September; she was hoping she wouldn’t be put in her mother’s class.

This wasn’t her first time staying away from home. Other times she’d been sent to her aunt, her mother’s older sister Viola. Sometimes it was just overnight, because her mother was going out; sometimes it was for weeks, especially in the summers. Her mother needed a long rest in the summers because of her nerves. Well, who wouldn’t have nerves, considering? said Aunt Vi with disapproval, as if what could Karen’s mother expect? She was speaking to Uncle Vern but looking sideways at Karen as if the nerves were Karen’s doing. But surely not all of them were, because Karen tried to do what she was told, although sometimes she made mistakes; and there were other things, like the sleepwalking, that she couldn’t help.

The nerves were the fault of the war. Karen’s father was killed in the war when Karen wasn’t even born yet, leaving Karen’s mother to bring up Karen all by herself—a thing that was understood to be very hard, practically impossible. There was something else too, which had to do with Karen’s mother’s wedding, or else the absence of it. Whether her father and her mother were actually married was one of the many things Karen wasn’t sure about, although her mother called herself Mrs. and wore a ring. There were no wedding photos, but things had been done differently during the war; everyone said so. There was something in Aunt Vi’s tone of voice that alerted Karen: she was an embarrassment, someone who could only be spoken of obliquely. She wasn’t quite an orphan but she had the taint of one.

Karen didn’t miss her dead father, because how could you miss someone you never even knew? But she was told by her mother that she ought to miss him. There was a framed snapshot of him—not with her mother, but alone, in his uniform, his long bony face looking solemn and somehow already dead—which appeared and disappeared from the mantelpiece, depending on the state of Karen’s mother’s health. When she was up to looking at it, the picture was there; , otherwise not. Karen used the picture of her father as a sort of weather report. When it vanished she knew there was going to be trouble, and she tried to keep out of the road, out from underfoot, out of her mother’s hair (road, feet, hair, how could she be on or under or in all of them at the same time?). But she didn’t always succeed, or else she succeeded too well and her mother would accuse her of daydreaming, of not helping, of not caring, of not giving a sweet Jesus about anyone but herself, and her voice would go up high, up higher, up dangerously high, like a thermometer, into the red part.

Karen tried to help, she tried to care. She would have cared except she didn’t know what she was supposed to care about, and also there were so many things she needed to watch, because of the colours, and other things she needed to listen to. Hours before a storm, when the sky was still windless and blue, she would feel the whisper of the distant lightning running up her arms. She heard the phone before it rang, she heard pain gathering in her mother’s hands, building up there like water behind a dam, getting ready to spill over, and she would stand terrified in the middle of the floor with her eyes elsewhere, looking—her mother said—like an idiot. Stupid! Maybe she was stupid, because sometimes she didn’t understand what was being said to her. She wasn’t hearing the words, she was hearing past the words; she heard the faces instead, and what was behind them. At night she would wake up, standing by the door, holding onto the door handle, and wonder how she got there.

Why do you do that? Why? said her mother, shaking her, and

Karen couldn’t answer. My God, you’re an idiot! Don’t you know what could happen to you out there? But Karen didn’t know, and her mother would say, I’ll teach you! Little bitch! Then she would hit the backs of Karen’s legs with one of her shoes, or else the pancake flipper or the broom handle, whatever was nearby, and thick red light would pour out of her body and some of it would get on Karen, and Karen would squirm and scream. “If your Daddy was alive it’d be him doing this, and he’d do it a damn sight harder, believe you me!” Hitting Karen was the only function Karen’s mother ever ascribed to her father, which made her secretly relieved that he wasn’t there.

Ordinarily Karen’s mother did not say Jesus and God and bitch, she didn’t swear; only when she was heading into a patch of bad nerves. Karen cried a lot when her mother hit her, not just because it hurt but because she was supposed to show that she was sorry, although she was confused about why. Also, if she didn’t cry her mother would keep right on hitting her until she did. You hard girl! But she had to stop at the right moment or her mother would hit her for crying. Stop that noise! Stop right now! Sometimes Karen couldn’t stop and neither could her mother, and those were the worst times. Her mother couldn’t help it. It was her nerves.

Then Karen’s mother would fall on her knees and wrap her arms around Karen’s body and squeeze her so she could scarcely breathe, and cry, and say, “I’m sorry, I love you, I don’t know what got into me, I’m sorry!” Karen would try to stop crying then, she would try to smile, because her mother loved her. If someone loved you that made it all right. Karen’s mother sprayed herself every day with Tabu perfume; she had a horror of smelling bad. So that was the smell in the room, during these beatings: warm Tabu.

Karen’s Aunt Vi didn’t like Karen very much, but at least she didn’t touch her, and it wasn’t bad at her place. Karen slept in the guest room, which had large disturbing roses on the curtains, orange and pink ones, like cauliflowers. She stayed out of the way as much as possible. She helped with the dishes without being asked, and kept her handkerchiefs folded in the top bureau drawer and her socks in pairs, and did not get dirty. “She’s a nice enough little thing, but there’s not that much to her,” said Aunt Vi on the telephone. “Milk and water. Well, I keep her clean and fed, it’s not that hard. Anyway it’s only Christian charity, and it’s not as if we have children of our own. I don’t mind, really.”

Uncle Vern went further than that. “Who’s my girl?” he would exclaim. He wanted Karen to sit on his knee, he rubbed her head, he put his face down close to hers and grinned at her, and tickled her under the arms; Karen didn’t like this but she laughed nervously anyway, because she could tell he wanted her to. “We have a good time, don’t we?” he said boisterously; but he didn’t believe it, it was only his idea of how he should behave towards her. “Don’t pester her,” said Aunt Vi coldly.

Uncle Vern’s skin was white on top but red underneath. He mowed the lawn in his shorts, on Sunday evenings when Aunt Vi was at church, and at those times he got even redder, though the light around his body was dim and a muddy green-brown. In the mornings, when she was still lying in bed, Karen could hear him grunting and groaning in the bathroom. She would put her pillow over her ears.

“She does sleepwalk, but not that much,” said Aunt Vi on the phone. “I just keep the doors locked, she can’t get out. I don’t know what Gloria makes such a fuss about. Of course her nerves are shot. Left with a—well, a child on her hands, like that—I feel I have to help out. But then, I’m her sister.” She dropped her voice when saying this, as if it was a secret.

Her aunt and uncle did not live in an apartment, the way her mother did. They lived in a house, a new house in the suburbs, with carpets all over the floor. Uncle Vern was in the home furnishings business; there was a real demand for home furnishings because it was right after the war, so Uncle Vern was doing well, and right now Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi had gone on a vacation. They had gone to Hawaii. This was why Karen couldn’t stay with them, but had to go to her grandmother’s instead.

She had to go, because her mother needed a rest. She needed it badly; Karen knew how badly. When she peeled the starched skirt away from the backs of her legs, some of the skin came off too, because last night her mother had used the pancake flipper, not the flat way but sideways; she had used the cutting edge and there had been blood.

The grandmother met them at the train station in a battered blue pickup truck.

“How are you, Gloria,” she said to Karen’s mother, shaking hands with her as if they were strangers. Her hands were large and sunburned and so was her face; her head was topped with a straggly whitish grey nest, which Karen realized after a moment was her hair. She was wearing overalls, and not clean ones either. “So this is wee Karen:” Her big, crinkly face swooped down, with a beak of a nose and two small bright blue eyes under wiry eyebrows, and her teeth appeared, large too and unnaturally even, and so white they were almost luminous. She was smiling. “I’m not going to eat you,” she said to Karen. “Not today. You’re too skinny, anyway—I’d have to fatten you up.”

“Oh, Mother,” said Karen’s own mother reproachfully, in her sweet Grade Twos voice. “She won’t know you’re only joking!”

“Then she better find out fast,” said the grandmother. “Part of it’s true, anyway. She’s too skinny. If I had a calf like that I’d say it was starving:”

There was a black-and-white collie on the seat of the pickup truck, lying on a filthy plaid rug. “Into the back, Glennie,” said the grandmother, and the dog pricked up its ears, wagged its tail, jumped down, and scrambled into the back of the truck via’ the back fender. “In you go,” said the grandmother, picking Karen up as if she were a sack and hoisting her onto the seat. “Shove over for your mother.” Karen slid along the seat; it hurt, because of her legs. Karen’s mother looked at the dog hairs, hesitating.

“Get in, Gloria,” said the grandmother drily. “It’s just as dirty as it always was.”

She drove the truck fast, whistling tunelessly, one elbow jauntily out the window. Both windows were open and the gravel dust billowed in, but even so the inside of the car stank of old dog. Karen’s mother took off her white hat and stuck her head partway out the window. Karen, who was squashed in the middle and feeling a little sick, tried to imagine she was a dog herself, because if she was, then she would think the smell was nice.

“Home again, home again, jiggy jog jog,” said the grandmother jovially. She swung up a bumpy driveway, and Karen caught a glimpse of a huge skeleton, like a dinosaur skeleton, in the long weedy grass in front of the house. This thing was a rusty red, with sharp spines and many encrusted bones sticking out of it. She wanted to ask what it was but she was still too afraid of her grandmother, and anyway the truck was no longer moving and now there was a commotion, a barking and hissing and cackling outside, and a grunting, and her grandmother was yelling, “Be off, be off with you, shoo, shoo, boys and girls!”

Karen couldn’t see out, so she looked at her mother. Her mother was sitting bolt upright, her hat on her knees, with her eyes tight shut, scrunching her white cotton gloves into a ball. The grandmother’s face appeared at the window. “Oh, for

Christ’s sake, Gloria,” she said, jerking open the door. “It’s only the geese:”

“Those geese are killers,” said Karen’s mother, but she clambered down out of the truck. Karen thought that her mother shouldn’t have worn her white shoes, because the yard in front of the house wasn’t a lawn, it was an expanse of mud, some of it dry, some of it not, and some of it not mud at all but animal poo of various kinds. Karen was familiar only with the dog kind, because they had that in the city. There were now two dogs, the black-and-white collie and a larger, brown-and-white one, and at the moment they were herding a flock of geese back towards the barnyard, barking and waving their brushy tails. There were a lot of flies buzzing around.

“Yeah, they can give you a good peck,” said Karen’s grandmother. “You just have to stand up to them! Show some willpower!” She reached in for Karen, but Karen said, “I can get down by myself” and her grandmother said, “That’s the ticket.” Karen’s mother had gone ahead, carrying her overnight case in one hand and waving her purse at the flies, picking her way across the yard through the clumps of poo in her high heels, and the grandmother took this opportunity to say, “Your mother’s weak-minded. Hysterical. Always has been. I hope you’re not.”

“What’s that thing?” said Karen, finding some courage because she sav~ that it was required of her.

“What thing?” said her grandmother. Leaning against her grandmother’s legs was a medium-sized pig. It snuffled at Karen’s socks with its alarming snout, wet and tender as an eyeball, drooly as a mouth. “This here’s Pinky. She’s a pig.”

“No,” said Karen. She could tell it was a pig, she’d seen pictures. “The big thing, at the front.”

“Old cultivator,” said her grandmother, leaving Karen to wonder what a cultivator was. “Come on!” She strode off towards the door with Karen’s suitcase under one arm, and

Karen trotted along behind. In the distance there was more barking and cackling. The pig followed as far as the house, and then, to Karen’s surprise, came right in. It knew how to nose open the screen door.

They were in the kitchen, which was a lot less like a rubbish heap than Karen had thought it would be. There was an oval table covered with oilcloth—light green with a design of strawberries—with a huge teapot and some used plates on it. There were some chairs painted apple green, and a wood range and a saggy maroon velvet sofa piled with newspapers. On the floor there were more newspapers, with a ravelled afghan thrown on top of them.

Karen’s mother was sitting in a rocking chair beside the window, looking exhausted. Her linen outfit was all creased. She had her shoes off and was fanning herself with her hat, but when the pig came into the room she gave a slight scream.

“It’s okay, she’s house-broken,” said the grandmother. “That is the limit,” said Karen’s mother, in a tight, furious voice.

“Cleaner than most people,” said the grandmother. “Smarter, too. Anyways, this is my house. You can do what you like in yours. I didn’t ask you to come here and I won’t ask you to leave, but while you’re here you can take things as you find them.”

She scratched the pig behind the ears and gave it a slap on the rump, and it grunted gently and squinted up at her and then went over and flopped down sideways on the afghan. Karen’s mother burst into tears and scrambled out of her chair, and headed out of the room in her stocking feet, with her white gloves crushed to her eyes. Karen’s grandmother laughed. “It’s okay, Gloria,” she called. “Pinky can’t climb stairs!”

“Why not?” said Karen. Her voice was almost a whisper. She’d never heard anyone talk to her mother like that. “Legs’re too short,” said her grandmother. “Now, you can take off that dress, if you’ve got any other kind of clothes, and help me wash the potatoes.” She sighed. “I should’ve had sons:” Karen opened her suitcase and found her long cotton pants, and changed into them in a room her grandmother called the back parlour. She didn’t want to put on shorts because of the backs of her legs. They were a secret between her and her mother. She wasn’t supposed to tell, about the broom handle or the pancake flipper, or there would be trouble, the way there was when her mother punched one of the Grade Two boys in the face and almost lost her job, and then what would they eat?

“I’ll show you your own room later, when Gloria’s over the sniffles,” said her grandmother. Then Karen helped her grandmother wash the potatoes. They did this in a smaller kitchen off the main one where there was an electric stove, and a tin sink with a cold-water tap. Her grandmother called this room the pantry. The pig came in with them and grunted hopefully until it was sent away. “Not now, Pinky,” said the grandmother. “Too many raw potatoes make her sick. She loves ’em, though. She’ll take a drink too, and that’s just as bad for her. Most animals like to go on a good drunk if they get the chance:’

For dinner they had the potatoes, boiled, and chicken stew with biscuits. Karen wasn’t all that hungry. She fed pieces of her dinner furtively to the pig and also to the two dogs, who were underneath the table. Her grandmother saw her doing it but didn’t object, so she knew it was all right.

Her mother came down for dinner, still in the linen dress, with her face washed and a fresh mouth painted on and a grim set to her lips. Karen knew that expression: it meant her mother was going to see this through or else. Or else what? Or else things would not be so good, for Karen.

“Mother, are there any serviettes?” said Karen’s mother. Her mouth jerked into a smile, as if there were strings pulling up the ends of it.

“Any what?” said the grandmother. “Table napkins,” said her mother.

“La-di-da, Gloria, use your sleeve,” said the grandmother. Karen’s mother wrinkled her nose at Karen. “Do you see any sleeves?” she said. Her jacket was off, so her arms were bare. She was taking a new line: she’d decided that they would both find the grandmother comical.

The grandmother caught this look and frowned. “They’re in the dresser drawer, same as always,” she said. “I’m not a savage, but this is no dinner party neither. Those who wants can get them.”

For dessert there was applesauce, and after that strong tea with milk in it. The grandmother passed a cup to Karen, and Karen’s mother said, “Oh, Mother, she doesn’t drink tea,” and the grandmother said, “She does now” Karen thought there might be an argument, but her grandmother added, “If you’re leaving her with me, you’re leaving her with me. ‘Course, you can always take her with you.” Karen’s mother clamped her mouth shut.

When Karen’s grandmother had finished eating she scooped the chicken bones off the dinner plates, back into the stewpot, and set the plates down on the floor. The animals crowded around them, licking and slurping.

“Not from the dishes,” said Karen’s mother faintly.

“Less germs on their tongues than on a human’s,” said the grandmother.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” said Karen’s mother in a choking voice. “You should be locked up!” She jammed her hand over her mouth and ran out into the yard. The grandmother watched her go. Then she shrugged and went back to drinking her tea.

“There’s clean inside and clean outside,” she said. “Clean inside is better, but Gloria never could tell the difference:” Karen didn’t know what to do. She thought about her stomach, with animal slobber and dog and pig germs in it; but strangely, she didn’t feel sick.

When Karen went upstairs later, she heard her mother crying, a sound she had heard many times before. She went carefully into the bedroom where the sound was coming from. Her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking more desolate than Karen had ever seen her. “She was never like a real mother,” she sobbed. “She never was!”

She squeezed Karen tight and cried onto her hair, and Karen wondered what she meant.

Karen’s mother left the next day, before breakfast. She said she had to get back to the city, she had a doctor’s appointment. Karen’s grandmother drove her to the station and Karen went too, to say goodbye. She wore her long pants, because of her legs, which were hurting again. Her mother kept one arm around her all the way to the station.

Before starting the truck the grandmother let the geese out of their pen. “They’re watch-geese,” she said. “Them and Cully’ll take care of everything. Anyone tries to get in here, Cully’ll knock them down and the geese’ll poke out their eyes. Stay, Cully! Come, Glenn.” She drove just as fast as before, almost in the centre of the road, but this time she didn’t whistle.

When the time came to say goodbye at the station, Karen’s mother kissed Karen on the cheek and squeezed her tight and said she loved her, and told her to be a good girl. She did not kiss the grandmother. She didn’t even say goodbye to her. Karen watched the grandmother’s face: it was shut tight like a box.

Karen wanted to wait until the train was actually moving, so they did. Her mother waved at her out of the train window, her white gloves fluttering like flags. That was the last she saw of her real mother, the one that could still smile and wave, although she didn’t know it at the time.

Then Karen and her grandmother went back to the farmhouse and had their breakfast, which was oatmeal porridge with brown sugar and thick new cream on it. With Karen’s mother gone, her grandmother was not so talkative.

Karen looked at her grandmother across the table. She looked thoroughly. The grandmother was older than Karen had thought the day before; her neck was bonier, her eyelids were more wrinkled. Around her head there was a faint pale blue light. Karen had already figured out that her teeth were false.

After breakfast Karen’s grandmother says to her, “Are you sick?”

“No,” says Karen. Her legs are still hurting but that isn’t a sickness, it’s nothing because her mother says it’s nothing. She doesn’t want to be put to bed, she wants, to go outside. She wants to see the chickens.

Her grandmother looks at her sharply but only says, “Don’t you want to put on your shorts? Today’ll be a scorcher,” but Karen says no again and they go to collect the eggs. The dogs and the pig aren’t allowed to come with them, because the dogs would try to herd the hens, and the pig likes eggs. The three of them lie on the kitchen floor, the dogs’ tails thumping slowly, the pig looking thoughtful. Karen’s grandmother takes a sixquart basket with a dishtowel in it, to put the eggs in.

The sky is bright, bright blue like a fist pushed into an eye, that puddle of hot colour; the thin piercing voices of the cicadas go straight into Karen’s head like wires. The edges of her grandmother’s hair catch the sunlight and burn like fiery wool. They walk along the path, tall weeds beside them, this tles and Queen Anne’s lace, smelling deeper and greener than anything Karen has ever smelled before, mixing in with the sweet pungent barnyard smells so that she doesn’t know whether it smells good or bad or just so powerful and rich it’s like being smothered.

The henhouse is near the chicken-wire and rail fence that’s around the garden; inside the fence are potato hills, and lettuce in a frilly row, and tripods of poles with climbing beans on them, their red flowers humming with bees. “Potatoes, lettuce, beans,” Karen’s grandmother says, to Karen, or possibly to herself: “Hens,” she says, when they get as far as the henhouse.

The hens are two kinds: white with red wattles, and reddish brown. They scratch and cluck, and peer at Karen with their yellow lizards’ eyes, one eye and then the other; sparkles of many-coloured light run off their feathers, like dew. Karen looks and looks at them, until her grandmother takes her arm. “No eggs out here,” she says.

The henhouse is musty inside, and dim. Karen’s grandmother gropes in the straw-filled boxes, and under the two hens still inside, and puts the eggs into her basket. She gives Karen one egg to carry, for herself. A tender glow comes from inside it. It is a little damp; there are bits of henshit and straw clinging to it. Also it’s warm. Karen feels the backs of her legs throbbing and the heat running from the egg up into her head. The egg is soft in her hands, like a beating heart with a rubber shell around it. It’s growing, swelling up, and as they walk back past the garden through the sun’s glare and the vibration of the bees it gets so large and hot that Karen has to drop it.

After that she was in bed, lying on her stomach. Her grandmother was washing off her legs. “I wasn’t the right mother for her,” said the grandmother. “Nor she the right daughter, for me. And now look. But it can’t be helped:” She put her large nubbly hands on Karen’s legs and at first it hurt more, and then Karen got warmer and warmer, and then cool, and after that she went to sleep.

When she woke up she was outside. It was quite dark but there was a half moon; in the moonlight she could see the trunks of trees, and the shadows the branches made. At first she was afraid because she didn’t know where she was or how she’d got there. There was a deep sweet smell, a glimmering of flowers, milkweeds as she learned later, and a fluttering of many moths, the white flakes of their wings kissing against her. Somewhere near was running water.

She heard breathing. Then she felt a wet nose pushed into her hand, and something brushed against her. The two dogs were with her, one on either side. Had they barked when she came out of the house? She didn’t know, she hadn’t heard them. But she didn’t worry any more because they would know the way back. She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn’t sick any longer.

Finally the dogs nudged her gently, turning her around, herding her back towards the dark bulk of the house. No lights were on anywhere; she thought she might go in and up the stairs and into her bed without her grandmother knowing. She didn’t want to be shaken or told she was hard, or hit with anything. But when she reached the house her grandmother was standing beside it, in a long pale nightgown with her hair feathery in the moonlight, holding the door open, and she didn’t say anything at all. She simply nodded at Karen, and Karen went inside.

She felt welcomed, as if the house were a different house, at night; as if this was the first time she had entered it. She knew now that her grandmother walked in her sleep, too, and that her grandmother also could see in the dark.

In the morning Karen ran her hands over the backs of her legs. Nothing hurt. All she could feel, instead of the sticky welts that had been there before, were some tiny thin lines, like hairs; like the cracks in a mirror.

The room Karen slept in was the smallest bedroom upstairs. It used to be her mother’s. The bed was narrow, with a scratched headboard of dark varnished wood. There was a white bedspread on it that looked like a lot of caterpillars sewn together, and a chest of drawers painted blue, with a straight-backed wooden chair to match. The drawers were lined with old newspapers; Karen put her folded clothes into them. The curtains were a faded forget-me-not print. In the mornings the sunlight came in through them, showing the dust on the surfaces, and on the rungs of the chair. There was a braided rug, shabby from use, and a dark wardrobe jammed into one corner.

Karen knew her mother hated this room; she hated the whole house. Karen didn’t hate it, although there were some things about it she found strange. In the big front bedroom where her grandmother slept, there was a row of men’s boots in the closet. There was no bathroom, only an outhouse, with a wooden box of lime and a little wooden paddle, to put the lime down the hole. There was a front parlour with dark curtains and a collection of Indian arrowheads picked up in the fields, and huge stacks of old newspapers all over the floor. On the wall was a framed photo of Karen’s grandfather, from a long time ago, before he got crushed by a tractor. “He didn’t grow up with tractors,” said the grandmother. “Only horses. Damn thing rolled on him. Your mother saw it happen, she was only ten at the time. Maybe that’s where she went off the rails. He said it was his own fault, for meddling with the Devil’s inventions. He lived for a week, but there was nothing I could do. I can’t do a thing about bones.” She said these things more to herself than to Karen, as she said many things.

The tractor itself was still in the drive shed; her grandmother used to drive it before she got too old. Now the fields were worked by Ron Sloane from down the road, and he used his own tractor, his own baler, all his own stuff: The second week Karen was there one of the hens went broody and made a nest on the tractor seat instead of in her box. Karen found her, sitting on twenty-three eggs. “They’ll do that,” said the grandmother. “They know we take their eggs, so they sneak off by themselves. The other hens’ve been dropping their own eggs on her. Saving themselves the bother. Lazy sluts:”

That hen had to be moved back into the henhouse though, because of the weasels. “They come at night,” said Karen’s grandmother. “They bite the chickens in the neck and suck out their blood:” The weasels were so thin they could get through the smallest crack. Karen imagined them, long thin animals like snakes, cold and silent, slithering in through the walls, their mouths open, their sharp fangs ready, their eyes shining and vicious. Her grandmother sent her into the henhouse one night after dark, with the lantern, while she herself stayed outside, looking for cracks in the boards where the light shone through. One weasel in a henhouse, she said, and that would be that. “They don’t kill to eat,” she said. “They kill for the pleasure of it:”

Karen looked at the photo of her grandfather. She could never tell much from pictures; the bodies in them were just flat, made from black-and-white paper, and no light came out of them. The grandfather had a beard and heavy eyebrows and was wearing a black suit and a hat; he was not smiling. Karen’s grandmother said he was a Mennonite, before he married her and broke with the rest of them. Karen was not able to make any sense of this at all, because she didn’t know what a Mennonite was. Her grandmother said they were a religion. They wouldn’t use anything newfangled, they kept themselves to themselves, they were good farmers. You could always tell a

Mennonite farm because they farmed right to the edges of the fields. Also, they didn’t hold with war. They wouldn’t fight. “In wartime they aren’t too popular,” she said. “There’s people on this line who still aren’t speaking to me, because of him.”

“I don’t hold with war, either,” said Karen solemnly. She had just decided that. It was the war that gave her mother so many nerves.

“Well, I know Jesus said turn the other cheek, but God said an eye for an eye,” said her grandmother. “If people start killing your folks, you should fight back. That’s my opinion.”

“You could just go somewhere else,” said Karen.

“That’s what the Mennonites did,” said her grandmother. “Trouble is, what happens when there’s no place else to go? Answer that one, I say to him!” Her grandmother often spoke of the grandfather as if he were still alive—“He likes a good pot roast for dinner,” or “He never cuts corners.” Karen began to wonder whether he was indeed still alive, in some way. If anywhere, he would be in the front parlour.

Maybe that was why they never used the front parlour, only the back one. They would sit in it and Karen’s grandmother would knit, one bright afghan square after another, and they would listen to the radio, the news and weather mostly. Karen’s grandmother liked to know if it was going to rain, though she said she could tell better than the radio, she could feel rain in her bones. She fell asleep in there every afternoon, on the sofa, wrapped in one of the finished afghans, with her teeth in a glass of water and the pig and the two dogs guarding. In the mornings she was brisk and cheerful; she whistled, she talked to Karen and told her what to do; because there was a right and a wrong way to do everything. But in the afternoons, after lunch, she would droop and begin to yawn, and then she would say she was just going to sit down for a minute.

Karen didn’t like being awake while her grandmother was asleep: This was the only part of the day she found frightening.

The rest of the time she was busy, she could help. She pulled weeds out of the garden, she collected the eggs, at first with her grandmother and then by herself. She dried the dishes, she fed the dogs. But while her grandmother slept she didn’t even go outside, because she didn’t want to get too far away. She stayed in the kitchen. Sometimes she looked at the old newspapers. She would search for the weekend comic pages and study them: if you put your eye up close to the page, the faces dissolved into tiny coloured dots. Or she would sit at the kitchen table, drawing with the stub of a pencil on pieces of scrap paper. At first she tried to write letters to her mother. She knew how to print, she had learned at school. Dear Mother, How are you, Love, Karen. She would walk down to the mailbox beside the road and put the letter in, and lift the red metal flag. But no letters came in return.

So instead she would sit there drawing with the pencil stub; or else not drawing. Listening. Her grandmother snored, and mumbled in her sleep sometimes. There were flies buzzing, distant cows, chuckling of geese, a car going by, way down on the gravel road at the front of the property. Other sounds. The tap dripping into the sink, in the pantry. Footsteps in the front parlour, a creaking, what was it? The rocker in there, the hard sofa? She sat very still, chilled in the afternoon heat, with the small hairs on her arms lifting, waiting to see if the footsteps would come closer.

On Sundays her grandmother would put on a dress, but she didn’t go to church—not like Aunt Vi, who went twice a day on Sundays. Instead she would take the huge family Bible out of the front parlour and stand it up on the kitchen table. She would close her eyes and poke between the pages with a pin, and then open to the page that the pin had chosen. “Now you,” she would say to Karen, and Karen would take the pin and close her own eyes, and let her hand hover over the page until she felt it pulled down. Then her grandmother would read the part where the pin had stuck in.

“‘If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise,”‘ she read. “‘For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God: Well now, I know who that must mean.” And she would nod her head.

Sometimes though she would be puzzled. “‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel,”‘ she read. “Now I don’t know at all who that could be. Must be too far ahead:’ She only read one verse a Sunday. After that she would close up the Bible and put it back in the front parlour, and change into her overalls and go outside to do the chores.

Karen kneels in the garden. She’s picking beans into a six-quart basket, yellow beans. She picks slowly, one bean at a time. Her grandmother can pick with both hands at once, not even looking, the same way she knits, but Karen has to look, to find the bean first and then pick it. The sun is white-hot; she’s wearing her shorts—and a sleeveless blouse, and the straw sunhat her grandmother makes her wear so she won’t get sunstroke. Crouched down like that she’s almost hidden, because the bean plants are so big. The sunflowers watch her with their huge brown eyes, their yellow petals like spikes of dry fire.

The air shimmers like cellophane, a clear sheet of it shaken over the flat fields; it crackles with grasshopper static. Good haying weather. From two fields over comes the drone of Ron Sloane’s tractor, the clack and thump of the baler. Then it stops. Karen reaches the end of the bean row. She pulls a carrot up for herself, wipes off the dirt with her fingers, then rubs the carrot on her leg, then bites into it. She knows she’s supposed to wash it first but she likes the earth taste.

There’s a motor noise. A dark green pickup truck is coming up the drive. It comes fast, skewing from side to side on the gravel. Karen knows the truck: it’s Ron Sloane’s truck.

Why isn’t he in the field, why is he coming here? Mostly nobody visits. Her grandmother has no opinion of the neighbours. She says they think stupid things and they gossip, and they stare at her when they pass her on the street, when she goes shopping in town. Karen has seen people doing that, all right.

The truck skids to a stop; there’s a rush of geese, the dogs barking. The door of the truck opens and Ron S.loane falls out. Staggers out, holding his arm. The tanned skin of his face looks like a brown paper bag, all the pinky-red gone out of it. “Where is she?” he says to Karen. He smells of sweat and fear. His sleeve is torn, his arm is dripping blood, pouring blood, she sees now. The hurt, the danger comes off the arm in shock waves of brilliant red. Karen wants to scream, but she can’t, she can’t move. She calls to her grandmother inside her head, and her grandmother comes around the corner of the house carrying a pail, and sees the blood too and drops the pail. “God Almighty,” she says. “Ron.”

Ron Sloane turns his face to her and it is a look of abject, helpless appeal. “Fuckin’ baler,” is what he says.

Karen’s grandmother is hurrying towards him. “Boys and girls, boys and girls,” she says to the dogs and geese. “Cully, out,” and there is a barking, cackling retreat.

“It’ll be fine,” she says to Ron. She puts out her hand and touches him, touches his arm, and says something. What Karen sees is light, a blue glow coming out from her grandmother’s hand, and then it’s gone and the blood has stopped. “It’s done,” she says to Ron. “But you need to get to a hospital. All I can do is the blood. I’ll drive you, you’re not fit. That was a vein; it’ll start again in half an hour. Get a wet cloth,” she says to Karen. “A tea towel. Cold water.”

Karen sits in the back of her grandmother’s truck, with Glennie the dog. She always sits in the back now, if she can. The air whirls around her, her own hair ripples against her face, the trees blur by, it’s like flying. They go to the hospital, twenty miles away, in the same town as the train station, and Ron gets out, and then he has to sit and put his head down, and then Karen’s grandmother gets an arm around him and they hobble together into the hospital like people in a three-legged race. Karen and Glennie wait in the truck.

After a while her grandmother comes out. She says they’re leaving Ron Sloane at the hospital to get sewed up, and he will be all right now. They drive back to tell Mrs. Sloane what’s happened to Ron, so she won’t worry. They sit at Mrs. Sloane’s kitchen table and Karen’s grandmother has tea and Karen has a glass of lemonade, and Mrs. Sloane cries and says thank you, and the grandmother doesn’t say you’re welcome. She only nods, a little stiffly, and says, “Don’t thank me. It isn’t me does it.”

Mrs. Sloane has a fourteen-year-old daughter with pale hair, paler than Karen’s, and pink eyes, and skin devoid of colour. She passes a plate of store cookies, and stares and stares at Karen’s grandmother as if her pink eyes are about to fall out. Mrs. Sloane doesn’t like Karen’s grandmother, although she urges her to have more tea. Neither does the white-haired daughter. Instead they are afraid of her. Their~fear is all around their bodies, little grey icy shivers, like wind blowing on a pond. They’re afraid and Karen isn’t; or not as much. She would like to touch blood too, she would like to be able to make it stop.

In the evenings, when it’s cooler, Karen and her grandmother visit the cemetery. It’s less than a mile away. At these times Karen’s grandmother puts on her dress, but Karen doesn’t have to.

They always walk, they never take the truck. They go along the gravel road beside the fences and the ditches and the dustcoated weeds, and Karen holds her grandmother’s hand. It’s the only time she does. She holds it in a new way now, feeling its stringy veins and its knobs of bone and the loose skin on it not as old but as a colour. The colour of light blue. It’s a hand with power.

The cemetery is small; the church beside it small too, and vacant. The people who used to be there have built a new church, a bigger one, out beside the main highway.

“That’s where we put the women and children, when the Fenians came,” says Karen’s grandmother. “Inside that very church.”

“What are Fenians?” says Karen. The word makes her think of a laxative, she’s heard it on the radio. Feen-a-mints.

“Trash up from the States,” says the grandmother. “Irish. They wanted war. Their eyes were bigger than their stomachs though:” She talks about this event as though it just happened the other day, but really it was a long time ago. Over seventy years.

“We’re not Irish,” says Karen.

“Not by a long shot,” says Karen’s grandmother, “though your great-grandmother was.” She herself is Scotch, partly, so Karen is part Scotch too. Part Scotch, part English, part Mennonite, and part of whatever her father was. According to her grandmother, Scotch is the best thing to be.

The cemetery is weedy, though people still come here: some of the graves are mowed. Grandmother knows where everyone’s buried, and why: a car crash at a crossroads, four dead, they’d been drinking; a man who blew himself in two with his own shotgun, everyone knew only they didn’t want to say because then it would be suicide and that was a disgrace. A lady and her baby, the baby’s grave smaller, like a tiny bedstead; another disgrace, because that baby had no real father. But “All fathers are real,” says the grandmother, “though they’re not all right:” There are angel heads on the grave—stones, urns with willow trees, stone lambs, stone flowers; real flowers too, wilting in jam jars. The grandmother’s mother and father are in here, and her two brothers. She takes Karen to look at them; she doesn’t say “their graves,” she says “them:” But mostly she wants to see Karen’s grandfather. His name is carved on his stone, and his two numbers—when he was born, and when he died.

“Maybe I should’ve sent him back to the Mennonites,” she says. “He might like to be with his own people. But most likely they wouldn’t’ve took him. Anyways, he’s best here with me.

Grandmother’s own name is carved underneath his, but her righthand date is a blank. “I had to get it fixed beforehand,” she says to Karen. “Nobody around here to do it, after. That Gloria and that Vi would probably just dump me into the ditch, save the money. They’re waiting for me to die so they can sell the farm. Or else they’d move me into that city, some hole in the ground. So I fooled them, I bought my own gravestone. I’m all set, come hell or high water.”

“I don’t want you to die,” says Karen. She doesn’t. Her grandmother is a safe place for her, although hard. Or because hard. Not shifting, nQt watery. She doesn’t change.

Her grandmother sticks out her chin. “I don’t intend to die,” she says. “Only the body dies:’ She glares at Karen; she looks almost ferocious. Her hair on top is like thistles, after they’ve gone to seed.

Did Karen love her grandmother? thinks Charis, halfway to the Island, sitting at the back of the ferry, remembering herself remembering. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Love is too simple a word for such a mixture of harsh and soft colours, of pungent tastes and rasping edges. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” her grandmother would say, and Karen would flinch, because she could picture her grandmother actually skinning one. Her grandmother went out at dawn with her .22

rifle and shot woodchucks; also rabbits, which she made into stews. She killed the chickens when they were too old to lay or just when she wanted a chicken; she chopped their heads off with an axe, on the wooden chopping block, and they ran silently around the barnyard with their necks fountaining blood and the grey smoke of their life rising up from them and the rainbow of light around them fading and then going out. Then she plucked and gutted them and singed off their pinfeathers with a candle, and after they were cooked she saved their wishbones and dried them on the windowsill. She had five there already. Karen wanted them to break one, but her grandmother said, “Have you got a wish?” and Karen couldn’t think of one. “You save these for when you need them,” said her grandmother.

Karen asks more questions now; she does more things. Her grandmother says she is toughening up. When she goes to the henhouse by herself to get the eggs, she swats at the hens if they hiss and try to peck her, and if the rooster jumps at her bare legs she kicks him; sometimes she carries a stick, to beat him off. “He’s a mean old devil,” her grandmother says. “Don’t you take anything from him. Just give him a good whack. He’ll respect you for it.”

One morning they’re eating bacon, and her grandmother says, “This here is Pinky.”

“Pinky?” says Karen. Pinky the pig is lying on her afghan where she usually is during meals, blinking with her bristlylashed eyes and hoping for scraps. “Pinky’s right here!”

“This is last year’s Pinky,” says her grandmother. “There’s a new one every year.” She looks across the table at Karen. She has a sly expression; she’s waiting to see how Karen will take it.

Karen doesn’t know what to do. She could start to cry and jump up from the table and run out of the room, which is what her mother would do and is also what she herself feels like doing. Instead she sets her fork down and takes the rubbery chewed piece of bacon out of her mouth and places it gently on her plate, and that’s the end of bacon for her, right then and there, forever.

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” says her grandmother, aggrieved but with some contempt. It’s as if Karen has failed at something. “It’s only pigs. They’re cute when they’re young, smart too, but if I let them stay alive they’d get too big. They’re wild when they grow up, they’re cunning, they’d eat you, yourself. They’d gobble you up as soon as look at you!”

Karen thinks about Pinky, running around the barnyard with no head, the grey smoke of her life going up from her and her rainbow light shrinking to nothing. Whatever else, her grandmother is a killer. No wonder other people are afraid of her.

xxxv

It was Labour Day. That was when Karen’s mother was supposed to come on the train and take Karen back to the city. Karen had her suitcase all packed. She cried, in her narrow bed, under her chenille spread, under her pillow. She didn’t want to leave her grandmother, but she wanted to see her mother, who—already—she couldn’t remember clearly. All she could remember was her dresses, and the smell of Tabu, and one of her voices, her sweet voice, the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos.

Her mother didn’t come. Instead there was a phone call from Aunt Vi, and Karen’s grandmother said there had been a hitch and Karen would be staying a little longer. “You can help me put up the tomatoes,” she said. Karen picked tomatoes and washed them in the pantry, and her grandmother scalded them and peeled them and boiled them in jars.

Then it was time for school to begin, and still nothing happened. “There’s no point starting you at that school,” said Karen’s grandmother. “You’d just be in and out:” Karen didn’t mind. She didn’t much like school anyway, it was hard to pay attention to so many people in the same room at once. It was like the radio when there was a thunderstorm near: she could hardly hear a thing.

Her grandmother brought the Bible out of the front parlour and stood it on the kitchen table. “Let me see, said the blind man,” she said. She closed her eyes and poked with a pin. “Psalm Eighty-eight. I’ve had that before. ‘Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.’ Well, that’s right enough; it means I should get ready to go, myself, pretty soon. Now you.”

Karen took the pin and closed her eyes, and her hand followed the strong current that pulled it downwards. “Ah,” said her grandmother, squinting. “Jezebel again. Revelations, Two, Twenty. ‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which callest herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.’ Now that’s a strange thing, for a little girl:’ And she smiled at Karen, the smile of a withered apple.

“You must be living ahead of yourself.” Karen had no idea what she meant.

Finally it was Aunt Vi who arrived, not Karen’s mother. She didn’t even stay at the grandmother’s house. She stayed at the one hotel in town, and the grandmother drove Karen in. Karen didn’t sit in the back of the truck this time. She sat in the front seat with the dog hairs, wearing her dress, the same as the day she came, looking out the window and not saying a thing. Her grandmother whistled softly.

Aunt Vi wasn’t all that pleased to see Karen but she pretended to be. She gave Karen a peck on the cheek. “Look how tall you’ve grown!” she said. It sounded like an accusation. “You’ve got her suitcase?” she said to the grandmother:

“Viola, I’m hardly senile yet,” said the grandmother. “I’m not likely to forget her suitcase. Here you go,” she said to Karen softly. “I put a wishbone in it.” She crouched down and put her bony arms around Karen, and Karen could feel her square body, solid as a house, and then her grandmother wasn’t there any longer.

Karen sat on the train beside Aunt Vi, who fussed and fussed. “We’ll have to get you enrolled in school, right away,” she said. “You’ve missed almost a month already! My goodness, you’re brown as a berry!”

“Where’s my mother?” said Karen. She couldn’t think of any berries that were brown.

Aunt Vi frowned and looked away. “Your mother isn’t well,” she said.

When Karen got to Aunt Vi’s house she went into her usual room with the orange-and-pink flowered curtains and opened up her suitcase right away. There was the hen wishbone, wrapped in a piece of wax paper, with a rubber band around it, from her grandmother’s jar of saved-up rubber bands that was kept beside the sink. She took the wishbone out. It smelled sour, but rich and full, like a hand with dirt on it. She hid it in the hem of one of the curtains. She knew that if Aunt Vi found it she would throw it away.

Karen’s mother is in a building, a new flat yellow building that looks like a school. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern take Karen to visit her. They sit in the waiting room, on hard chairs covered with a nubbly fabric, and Karen is frightened because Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are so solemn; solemn, and at the same time avid. They are like the people who stop their cars and get out to see when there’s been a car accident. Something is bad, something is wrong, but they want to participate in it, whatever it is. Karen would rather not, she would like to go back right now, back in time, back as far as the farm, but a door opens and her mother comes into the room. She walks slowly, putting a hand out to touch the furniture as if to guide herself: Sleepwalking, thinks Karen. Before, her mother’s fingers were slim, the nails polished. She was proud of her hands. But now her hands are swollen and clumsy and there is no ring any more on her wedding finger. She’s wearing a grey housecoat and slippers that Karen has never seen before, and also she has never before seen her mother’s face.

Not this face. It’s a flat face with a dull shine on it, like the dead fish in the white enamel trays at the fish store: A fading light, silvery, like scales. She turns this face towards Karen; it’s expressionless as a plate. Eyes of china. Suddenly Karen is framed in those eyes, a small pale girl sitting on a nubbly chair, a girl her mother has never seen before. Karen brings her two hands up to her mouth and breathes in, a gasp, the reverse of a scream.

“Gloria. How’re you feeling?” says Uncle Vern.

Karen’s mother’s head swings towards him, a ponderous head, heavy. The hair on it is pulled back, held with clips. Karen’s mother used to do her hair up in pincurls, and when she combed it out it would be wavy. This hair is plain and straight, and filmed over, as if it’s been kept in a cupboard. Karen thinks about her grandmother’s root cellar, with its smell of indoor earth and its rows of preserve bottles, bright berries glassed over, powdered with dust.

“Fine,” says Karen’s mother, after a minute.

“I can’t stand it,” says Aunt Vi. She dabs at her eyes with a hankie. Then, in a firmer voice: “Karen, aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?”

Aunt Vi’s questions are like orders. Karen slides off her chair and goes over to this woman. She doesn’t put her arms around her, she doesn’t touch her with her hands. She bends her body from the waist and places her lips against the woman’s cheek. She hardly presses at all, but her mouth sinks in and down, on the cheek that is like cool rubber. She thinks of Pinky without a head, collapsing in the barnyard, becoming ham. Her mother has the texture of luncheon meat. She feels sick to her stomach.

Her mother receives the kiss passively. Karen steps back. There is no red fight around her mother now. Only a faint mauve-brown shimmer.

In the car on the way home, Karen sits between Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern instead of in the back where she usually sits. Aunt Vi wipes at her eyes: Uncle Vern asks Karen if she wants an ice cream cone. She says no thank you, and he pats her knee.

“I felt so bad, my own little sister; but I had to do it,” Aunt Vi says, on the phone. “It was the third time, and what could I do? I don’t know where she got them! Lucky the empty bottle was right there beside her so at least we could tell the doctor what she took. It’s just a wonder we were in time. Something in her voice, I guess; well, it’s not like I hadn’t heard it before! When we got there she was out cold. She had bruises on her mouth for weeks, they had to pry it open to get the hose down, and today it was like you wouldn’t of known her. I don’t know—shock treatments, I guess. If that doesn’t work, they’ll have to do an operation,” She says operation in that solemn voice, the voice she uses for saying grace, as if it’s a holy word. She wants it, this operation, Karen can tell. If her mother has an operation, some of that holiness will rub off on Aunt Vi.

Karen went to school, where she said little and did not make friends. She was not teased either, she was mostly ignored. She knew how to do that, make herself invisible. All she had to do was to suck in the light around her body; it was like sucking in her breath. When the teacher looked at her the look went right through, to whoever was sitting behind her. This way

Karen hardly needed to be in the classroom at all. She let her hands do whatever was required: long rows of a’s and b’s, neat columns of numbers. She got gold stars for neatness. Her paper snowflake and her paper tulip were among the ten pinned up on the corkboard.

Every week, then every two weeks, then every three, she went with her aunt and uncle to visit her mother. Her mother was in a different hospital now. “Your mother is very ill,” Aunt Vi told her, but Karen didn’t need to be told. She could see the illness spreading on her mother’s skin, like the hairs on arms, gone out of control; like filaments of lightning, only very small and slow. Like grey mould spreading through bread. When her mother was veined through and through like that, then she would die. Nobody could stop her, because that was what she wanted to do.

Karen thought about using her wishbone but she knew it wouldn’t be any good. To make awish work you had to really want it, and she didn’t want this woman to stay alive. If she could have had her mother back the way she was before, during the good times, yes. But she knew this was impossible. There wasn’t enough of that mother left. So she kept the wishbone in the hem of the curtain, checking once in a while to make sure it was still there.

Karen sat in her room. Sometimes she banged her head softly against the wall, so she wouldn’t have to think. Or she looked out the window a lot. Or she looked out the window at school. What she looked at was the sky. She thought about the summer. Maybe next summer her aunt and uncle would go on a vacation and she could be back at her grandmother’s farm, gathering the eggs, picking yellow beans in the sun.

On her eighth birthday Karen has a cake. Aunt Vi has baked it, and put sugar roses on it from the store, and eight candles. She asks Karen if she wants to have a little friend over, but Karen says no. So they eat the birthday dinner by themselves, the three of them, Oh Lord, bless this food to our use, Amen, and there are tuna and egg salad sandwiches, and peanut butter and jelly, and Aunt Vi says, “Isn’t this nice,” and then there is Neapolitan ice cream in three colours, white, pink, and brown. After that the cake. Aunt Vi lights the candles and tells Karen to blow them out and make a wish, but Karen just sits there, looking at the flames.

“I don’t think she’s ever had a cake before,” Aunt Vi says to Uncle Vern, and Uncle Vern says, “Poor little tyke’” and ruffles Karen’s hair. He does this often these days and Karen doesn’t like it. Uncle Vern’s hands have a heavy luminescence around them, thick like jelly, sticky, brown-green. Sometimes Karen examines her blonde hair in the mirror to see if any of it has come off.

“Make a wish,” says Uncle Vern heartily. “Wish for a bicycle!”

“You have to close your eyes,” says Aunt Vi.

So to humour them Karen closes her eyes, and sees nothing but the sky, and opens her eyes again and obediently blows out the candles. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern clap their hands, applauding, and Uncle Vern says, “Well, what do you know! Look what we have here!” and out of the kitchen he wheels a brandnew bicycle, bright red. It’s decorated with pink ribbons and has a balloon tied to one handle. “What do you think of that?” says Uncle Vern eagerly.

It’s dusk; the smell of mowed grass comes in through the open window, the June bugs batter themselves against the screen. Karen looks at the bicycle, at its glinting spokes and chains and its two black wheels, and knows that her mother is dead.

Her mother did not die for another three weeks, but it was the same thing, because sometimes (thinks Charis) there is a fold in time, like the way you fold the top bedsheet down to make a border, and if you stick a pin through at any spot, then the two pinholes are aligned, and that’s the way it is when you foresee the future. There’s nothing mysterious about it, any more than there is with a backwash in a lake or with harmony in music, two melodies going on at the same time. Memory is the same overlap, the same kind of pleat, only backwards.

Or maybe the fold is not in time itself but in the mind of the person watching. In any case, Karen looks at the bicycle and sees her mother’s death, and collapses onto the floor, crying, and Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are baffled and then angry, and tell her she is a lucky girl; a lucky, ungrateful girl, and she can’t explain.

There was a funeral but not very many people came. A few teachers from her mother’s old school, some friends of Aunt Vi’s. Her grandmother wasn’t there, but Karen didn’t find that strange—her grandmother in the city would have been out of place. There was another reason as well—stroke, said Aunt Vi, and nursing home, in the tone of voice that was supposed to enlist other people’s sympathy for her—but these words meant nothing to Karen and she didn’t want to hear them, so she put them out of her mind. She had on a navy blue dress, which was the closest Aunt Vi could get to black, at short notice, although—she said on the phone—she should’ve seen it coming. Karen wasn’t allowed to visit her mother’s body in the coffin because Aunt Vi said it was too shocking a thing for a young child, but she knew anyway what it would look like. The same as alive, only more so.

Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi have had part of their cellar re-done. They’ve had plasterboard put over the cement-block walls, linoleum with thick carpeting over it on the floor. They’ve made a rec room down there, rec not like wreck but like recreation. There’s a bar with bar stools, and a set of chinese chequers for Karen, and a television set. It’s the second television set they’ve bought; the first one is kept in the living room. Karen likes to watch the set in the rec room, out of everyone’s way. She doesn’t actually have to pay attention to what’s in front of her on the screen; she can be by herself, inside her head, and no one will ask what she’s doing.

It’s September, but outside, upstairs, it’s still dry and hot. Karen sits on the carpet, in the rec room where it’s cooler, in bare feet and shorts and a sleeveless top, watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie on TV Kukla, Fran and Ollie are puppets, or two of them are. Overhead, Aunt Vi’s shoes clack busily back and forth across the kitchen floor. Karen hugs her own knees, rocking gently. After a while she gets up and goes to the bar sink and runs herself a glass of water, and puts in an ice cube out of the little refrigerator, and sits back down on the rug.

Uncle Uern comes down the stairs. He’s been mowing the lawn. He is a deeper red than usual, and the smell of sweat encircles him, like the water drops when a wet dog shakes itself. He goes to the bar and gets out a beer, takes the cap off the bottle and drinks down half, and wipes his wet face with the towel beside the sink. Then he sits down on the sofa. The sofa is a sofa-bed, in case they have visitors, because Karen has the room that used to be the guest room. That room is still called “the guest room,” although Karen is living in it. They don’t have visitors, though.

Karen gets up. She intends to go upstairs, because she knows what will happen next, but she isn’t fast enough. “Come on,” says Uncle Vern. He pats his huge, hairy knee, and Karen goes reluctantly towards him. He likes her to sit on his knee. He thinks it’s fatherly. “You’re our little girl now,” he says fondly. But he isn’t really fond of her, Karen knows that. She knows she is unsatisfactory to him, because she doesn’t talk to him, she doesn’t hug him, she doesn’t smile enough. It’s his smell she doesn’t like. That, and his greeny-brown light.

She sits on Uncle Vern’s knee and he pulls her higher up onto his lap and encircles her with one of his red arms. With the other hand he strokes her leg. He often does this, she’s used to it; but this time he moves his hand up higher, between her legs. Kukla, Fran and Ollie continue to talk in their made-up voices; Kukla is some sort of a dragon. Karen squirms a little, trying to move herself away from the enormous fingers, which are inside her shorts now, but the arm tightens around her stomach arid Uncle Vern says into her ear, “Hold still!” He does not sound hearty, wheedling, the way he usually does; he sounds angry. He has both hands on her now, he rubs her back and forth across himself as if she’s a washcloth; his sticky breath is all over her ear. “You like your old Uncle Vern, don’t you?” he says furiously.

“You two!” Aunt Vi calls gaily down the cellar stairs. “Suppertime! There’s corn on the cob!”

“Be right there!” Uncle Vern yells hoarsely, as if the words have been expelled from him by a kick in the stomach. He shoves one finger right up inside Karen, and groans as if he’s been stabbed. He holds Karen against himself for another minute: the energy is leaking out of him and he needs a bandage. Then he lets her go.

“Scamper upstairs,” he tells her. He’s trying for his fake voice, his uncle voice, but he hasn’t got it back; his voice is desolate. “Tell your Auntie Vi I’ll be up in a minute:” Karen looks behind herself, to see if the back of her shorts is browny-green, but it isn’t; only wet. Uncle Vern is wiping himself off with the bar towel.

Uncle Vern lurks, he lies in wait. Karen evades him, but she can’t evade him all the time. The strange thing is that Uncle Vern never comes looking for her when Aunt Vi isn’t in the house. Maybe he likes the danger; or maybe he knows that with Aunt Vi there, Karen won’t dare to make a sound. It’s unclear how he knows this, or why this is so, but it’s true. Karen’s fear of Aunt Vi’s finding out is greater than her fear of Uncle Vern’s sausage fingers.

Soon one finger isn’t enough for him. He stands Karen in front of him, facing away so she can’t see, a big knee holding her on either side, and puts his hands up under her pleated school skirts and slides her panties right down, shoving something hard in between her legs from behind. Or he uses two fingers, three. It hurts, but Karen knows that people who love you can do painful things to you, and she tries hard to believe that he does love her. He says he does. “Your old uncle loves you,” he tells her, scraping his face against hers.

When they are having dinner afterwards he laughs more, he talks louder, he tells jokes, he kisses Aunt Vi on the cheek. He brings them both presents: boxes of chocolates for Aunt Vi, stuffed animals for Karen. “You’re just like our daughter,” he says. Aunt Vi smiles thinly. Nobody can say they aren’t doing the right thing.

Karen loses her appetite: the effort of not thinking about Uncle Vern, both when he’s there and when he isn’t, is making her weak. She becomes thinner and paler, and Aunt Vi discusses her on the phone—“It’s the loss of her mother, she’s the quiet type but you can tell she feels it. She just mopes around. I wasn’t expecting it to go on this long. She’s almost ten!” She takes Karen to the doctor to see if she has anemia, but she doesn’t.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” says Aunt Vi. “It’s better if you talk about it. You can tell me!” She has that solemn, avid look on her face, she’s expecting to hear about Karen’s mother. She urges and urges.

“I don’t like Uncle Vern touching me,” says Karen finally. Aunt Vi’s face goes slack, then hardens. “Touching you?” she says suspiciously. “What do you mean, touching?”

“Touching,” says Karen miserably. “Down there.” She points.

She knows already she’s done a wrong, an unforgivable thing. Up to now Aunt Vi has been willing to tolerate her, even to put on a show of liking her. Not any more.

Aunt Vi’s lips are white, her eyes are sparkling dangerously. Karen looks down at the floor so as not to see. “You’re exactly like your mother,” says Aunt Vi. “A liar. I wouldn’t be surprised if you went crazy, just like her. God knows it runs in the family! Don’t you ever say such an evil thing about your uncle! He loves you like a daughter! Do you want to destroy him?” She starts to cry. “Pray to God to forgive you!” Then her face changes again. She wipes her eyes, she smiles. “We’ll just forget you ever said that, dear,” she says. “We’ll both forget it. I know things have been hard on you. You never had a father.”

After that, what can be done? Nothing at all. Uncle Vern knows Karen has told. He is nicer than ever to Aunt Vi. He is even nice to Karen, in front of people; but sadly, as if he’s forgiving her. When Aunt Vi isn’t looking he stares across the dinner table at Karen, his eyes in his face of uncooked beef shining with triumph. You can’t win this fight, he’s telling her. She can hear the words as clearly as if he’s spoken them. For the time being he’s-avoiding her, he no longer tracks her through the house, but he’s waiting. He’s itching to get his hands on her, but not with any pleading whispers. Now he won’t ask if she likes him, now he’s more like her mother used to be, before she would start screaming and reach for the broom handle. That ominous lull, that softness.

Karen sleeps with her head under her pillow, because she doesn’t want to hear or see; but she’s sleepwalking again, more than ever. She wakes up in the living room, trying to get out through the French windows, or in the kitchen, shaking the back door handle. But Aunt Vi locks all the doors.

Karen is sitting straight up in her bed, holding her pillow against her chest. Her heart is beating with terror. There’s a man standing in her dark bedroom; it’s Uncle Vern, she can see his face in the light that comes through from the hall, just before he eases the door shut. His eyes are open, but he’s sleep-walking; he has his striped pyjamas on, he has a glazed look. Don’t ever wake a person sleepwalking, said her grandmother. It breaks their journey.

Uncle Vern sleepwalks quietly across the floor to Karen’s bed. With him comes a smell of stale sweat and rancid meat. He kneels and the bed heaves like a boat, he pushes and Karen falls backwards. “You’re a little bastard, that’s what you are,” he whispers softly. “A sly little bastard.” He’s talking in his sleep.

Then he falls on top of Karen and puts his slabby hand over her mouth, and splits her in two. He splits her in two right up the middle and her skin comes open like the dry skin of a cocoon, and Charis flies out. Her new body is light as a feather, light as air. There’s no pain in it at all. She flies over to the window and in behind the curtain, and stays there, looking out through the cloth, right through the pattern of pink and orange roses. What she sees is a small pale girl, her face contorted and streaming, nose and eyes wet as if she’s drowning—gasping for air, going under again, gasping. On top of her is a dark mass, worrying at her, like an animal eating another animal. Her entire body—because Charis can see right through things, through the sheets, through the flesh to the bone—her body is made of something slippery and yellow, like the fat in a gutted hen. Charis watches in amazement as the man grunts, as the small child wriggles and flails as if hooked through the neck. Charis doesn’t know she is Charis, of course. She has no name yet.

The man sits up, his hand over his heart, gasping for air now himself. “There,” he says, as if he’s completed something: a task. “Shut up now I didn’t hurt you. Shut up! You keep your dirty little mouth shut about this or I’ll kill you!” Then he groans, the way he does in the bathroom in the mornings. “Oh God, I don’t know what got into me!”

The small girl is rolling over onto her side. As Charis watches, she leans over and vomits onto the floor, onto the man’s feet. Charis knows why. It’s because that brown-green light is inside her body now, thick and sticky, like goose turds. It came out of Uncle Vern and went into Karen, and she has to get it out.

The door opens Aunt Vi is standing there, in her nightgown. “What is it, what’s going on?” she says.

“I heard her in here,” says Uncle Vern. “She was calling—I think she’s got the stomach flu:”

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” says Aunt Vi: “You should’ve had sense enough to take her into the bathroom. I’ll get the floor cloth. Karen, are you going to do that again?”

Karen has no speech, because Charis has taken all the words with her. Karen opens her mouth, and Charis is sucked back, it’s as if she’s being vacuumed into their shared throat. “Yes,” she says.

After the third time Karen knows she is trapped. All she can do is split in two; all she can do is turn into Charis, and float out of her body and watch Karen, left behind with no words, flailing and sobbing. She will have to go on like this forever because Aunt Vi will never hear her, no matter what she says. She would like to take an axe and chop Uncle Vern’s head off, and Aunt Vi’s too, as if they were chickens; she would watch the grey smoke of their lives twist up out of them. But she knows she could never kill anything. She isn’t hard enough.

She takes the wishbone out of the hem of her curtain and closes her eyes, and holds both stems of the wishbone, and pulls. What she wishes for is her grandmother. Her grandmother is far away now, almost like a story she was told once; she can hardly believe she once lived at such a place as the farm, or even that there is such a place. But she wishes anyway, and when she opens her eyes her grandmother is there, coming right into her room through the closed door, wearing her overalls and frowning a little, and smiling also. She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There’s a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen’s, cool grains of dry rice. Then she’s like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she’s only a swirl in the air, and then she’s gone.

But some of her power stays there, in Karen’s hands. Her healing power, her killing power. Not enough to get Karen out of the trap, but enough to keep her alive. She looks at her hands and sees a trace of blue.

What she has to do is wait. She must wait like a stone, until it’s time. So this is what she does. As soon as Uncle Vern touches her she splits in two, and the rest of the time she waits.

Her grandmother is dead, or dead to this life, though Karen has seen her and she knows there isn’t any death really. The Bible arrives in a large box, addressed to Karen, and Karen puts it in her suitcase under her bed, ready for when she can leave. Her grandmother has left her the farm, but because Karen’s not old enough she can’t have it or even go there, although she wants to. Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi are her guardians. They are in control.

When she grows breasts and hair under her arms and on her legs and between them, and has her first period, Uncle Vern leaves her alone. There is a space between them, but it isn’t like an absence. It’s a presence, transparent but thicker than air. Uncle Vern is afraid of her now, he’s afraid of what she’s going to do or say; he’s afraid of what she remembers, he’s afraid of being judged. Maybe it’s because her eyes are no longer timid, no longer vacant or beseeching. Her eyes are stone. When she looks at him with her stone eyes it’s as if she’s reaching in through his ribs and squeezing his heart so it almost stops. He says he has a heart condition, he takes pills for it, but they both know it’s a thing she’s doing to him. Every time she looks at him she feels loathing, and a deep nausea. She’s disgusted with him, but also with her body, because it still has his dirt inside it. She must think of ways to get clean inside.

When she feels those things she has to seal them off. She has to or else she will be destroyed. She splits herself in two and stays with the cooler part, the clearer part of herself. She has a name for this part now: she is Charis. She picked the hint for her new name out of the Bible, with a pin: “The greatest of these is Charity.” Charity is better than Faith and Hope. She can use this new name only to herself, of course. Everyone else still calls her Karen.

Charis is more serene than Karen, because the bad things have stayed behind, with small Karen. She’s polite to her aunt, but remote: One day, when she is over eighteen, she asks the two of them what they have done with her grandmother’s money. Her uncle says he’s invested it for her and she can have all of it when she’s twenty-one, and meanwhile some of it can be used for her education. Aunt Vi acts as if this is an act of great generosity, as if the money belongs to them and they’re giving it away. But nevertheless they’re both relieved when she goes to university and moves into McClung Hall. Aunt Vi is nervous of her because of her stony eyes; as for Uncle Vern, he doesn’t know what she remembers. He hopes she’s forgotten it all, but he isn’t sure.

She remembers everything, or rather Karen does; but Karen is in storage. Charis only remembers when she takes Karen out, from the suitcase under her bed where she has put her. She doesn’t do this often. Karen is still little, but Charis is growing up.

Charis turned twenty-one; but nothing was said about her grandmother’s money. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t take money from them anyway, because even though it was really her own money it had been in their hands, it was dirty She wouldn’t be able to get it anyway without a fight.

She didn’t want to fight. Instead she wanted to go away somewhere else, and as soon as she felt ready she simply dropped out of sight. Out of their sight. It wasn’t so hard when you knew no one would come looking for you. She left university before finishing—she was flunking her courses anyway, because they failed to hold her attention—and went travelling. She hitchhiked, she took buses. She worked as a waitress, she worked in an office. For a while she was in an ashram on the West Coast, for a while she stayed on a communal farm in Saskatchewan. She did various things.

Once she went back to the farm, her grandmother’s farm; she wanted to see it. But it wasn’t a—farm any more, it was a subdivision. Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish; and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.

When she was twenty-six she dumped her old name. A lot of people were changing their names, then, because names were not just labels, they were also containers. Karen was a leather bag, a grey one. Charis collected everything she didn’t want and shoved it into this name, this leather bag, and tied it shut. She threw away as many of the old wounds and poisons as she could. She kept only the things about herself that she liked or needed.

She did all of this inside her head, because the events there are just as real as the events anywhere else. Still inside her head, she walked to the shore of Lake Ontario and sank the leather bag into the water.

That was the end of Karen. Karen was gone. But the lake was inside Charis really, so that’s where Karen was too. Down deep.

XXXVI

Until now, in her house on the Island, until this windy night with the scraping branches. Karen is coming back, Charis can’t keep her away any more. She’s torn away the rotting leather, she’s come to the surface, she’s walked through the bedroom wall, she’s standing in the room right now. But she is no longer a nine-year-old girl. She has grown up, she has grown tall and thin and straggly, like a plant in a cellar, starved for light. And her hair isn’t pale any more, but dark. The sockets of her eyes are dark too, dark bruises. She no longer looks like Karen. She looks like Zenia.

She walks towards Charis and bends, and blends into her, and now she’s inside Charis’s body. With her she brings the ancient shame, which feels warm.

Charis must have said something or made a sound, because Billy’s awake now. He has turned over, he’s pulling her to him, he’s kissing her, burrowing into her with his old urgency. It isn’t me, Charis wants to tell him, because she’s no longer in charge of her own body. This other woman has taken over; but Charis doesn’t float away, doesn’t watch from behind the curtain. She’s in the body too, she can feel everything. She can feel the body moving, responding; she can feel the pleasure shoot through her like electricity, unfold in a hundred colours; like a peacock’s tail on fire. She forgets about Karen, she forgets about herself. Everything in her has been fused together.

“Hey, that was different,” Billy says. He’s kissing her eyes, her mouth; she’s lying in his arms, limp as a sick person; she can’t move. It wasn’t me, she thinks. But it was, partly. What she feels is difficult: guilt, relief. Anguish. Resentment, because Billy has the power to do that; resentment also, because she has lived for so many years without knowing about it.

Deep inside, far inside her body, something new is moving ..

(That was the night her daughter was conceived. Charis is sure of it. She has always known who the father was, of course. There weren’t any other choices. But the mother? Was it herself and Karen, sharing their body? Or was it Zenia, too?)

In the morning she feels more like herself, like Charis. She doesn’t know where Karen has gone. Not back underneath the lake; it doesn’t feel like that. Possibly Karen is hiding somewhere else inside their shared body; but when she closes her eyes and searches with the mind’s eye, here and there within herself, she can’t find her, although there is a dark patch, a shadow, something she can’t see. When she makes love with Billy she doesn’t think about being Karen, or Charis either. She thinks about being Zenia.

“Promise me she’s leaving soon,” says Billy. By now he’s no longer angry. He’s insistent, pleading, almost desperate. “She’s leaving soon,” says Charis, as if reassuring a child. She loves Billy more now, in some ways; but in some ways less. Once greediness comes into a thing, the greediness of the body, it gets in the way of pure giving. She wants Billy’s body now, for itself, not just as a manifestation of his essence. Instead of simply ministering to him, she wants something back. Maybe this is wrong; she doesn’t know.

They’re lying in bed, it’s morning, she’s stroking his face. “Soon, soon,” she sings, crooning, to soothe him. She no longer thinks his body wants Zenia. How could he want Zenia, now that Charis wants him?

It’s the middle of December. The frost is in the ground, the leaves are off the trees, the wind is gathering momentum. Tonight it’s straight off the lake, hurling itself through the trees and bushes, tearing at the plastic sheeting that Charis has stapled over the windows to keep out the drafts. There are no storm windows for this house and the landlord has no intention of buying them any, because in his opinion all the houses on the Island will soon be bulldozed flat, so why spend the money? There’s also no insulation.

Charis is beginning to see the drawbacks of living here. Already two of the houses on her street are empty, their windows boarded up. She wonders whether they will have enough wood to keep themselves warm when the real winter comes. There’s a man at the co-op who might trade some yoga lessons for wood, but wood is heavy, so how will she get it to the Island?

They will all need winter clothing too. Billy is in the city tonight, at another one of those meetings. She pictures him at the ferry dock, waiting for the last boat back, shivering in his thin jacket. She should be knitting him something. She’ll go to the Goodwill store, soon, and try for some second-hand coats.

One for Billy, one for herself, and one for Zenia as well, because Zenia has only the clothes on her back. She’s afraid to go to West’s place to get the rest of her clothes, or so she says. She’s afraid West will kill her. He has an obsessive personality—gentle on the outside, but sometimes he goes berserk, and the thought of her dying drives him crazy. If he’s going to lose her, if she’s going to be dead, he wants to be in control of her death himself. A lot of men are like that, says Zenia, with a reminiscent stare into space, a tiny smile. Love drives them mad.

Once upon a time, Charis would never have understood a statement like that. Now she does.

Charis is certain she’s pregnant. She’s missed a period, but that isn’t all: her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like, fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-pink, like the inside of a hibiscus. She hasn’t told Billy yet, because she isn’t sure how he’ll take it.

She hasn’t told Zenia either. For one thing, she doesn’t want to hurt her. Zenia can’t have babies because of her hysterectomy for cancer, and Charis doesn’t want to flaunt or boast. But also Zenia is now sleeping in the small room upstairs, the one that used to have all Charis’s cardboard boxes in it. They moved her up there because Billy complained about never having any privacy in the living room. It’s this little room that Charis wants to make over into a nursery for the baby, after Zenia is gone. So how can she tell Zenia she’s pregnant without practically booting her out onto the street?

And she couldn’t do that, not yet; although when Zenia mentions leaving, Charis no longer tells her not to even think about it. She is torn: she wants Zenia to go, but she doesn’t want her to die. She would like to cure her and then never see her again. They don’t have all that much in common, and now that she has part of Zenia inside herself, the only part that’s necessary to her, she would rather—not have the actual, fleshly Zenia around. Zenia takes up a lot of time. Also—though Charis hates to think this way—a certain amount of money. Charis doesn’t really have enough money for the three of them.

Zenia is looking a lot better, but this can be deceptive. Sometimes she’ll eat a good meal and then rush to the bathroom and throw up. And just yesterday, after they’d been discussing when Zenia might be ready to leave—after she’d been saying she was sure the tumours were shrinking, she was really getting on top of it—Charis walked into the bathroom and found the toilet bowl full of blood. If it were any other woman she’d have assumed that the woman was having her period and had forgotten to flush. But Zenia can’t have periods. She has made that clear.

Charis was concerned, and asked about the blood; Zenia was offhand. It was just a hemorrhage, she said. More or less like a nosebleed. Minor. Charis admires her courage, but who is she trying to fool? Herself, maybe. She doesn’t fool Charis. From time to time Charis wonders whether she should suggest a hospital. But she can’t stand hospitals. Because her mother died in one she thinks of them as places where you go to die. She is already making plans to have the baby at home.

Charis and Zenia are sitting at the kitchen table. They’re finishing supper: baked potatoes, mashed-up squash, a cabbage salad. This cabbage came from the market, because Charis’s own cabbages have all been used up. They’ve been turned into juice and poured into Zenia, green transfusions.

“You’re looking stronger today,” says Charis hopefully. “I’m strong as an ox,” says Zenia. She puts her head down on the table for a moment, then—raises it with an effort. “Really, I am.”

“I’ll make you a cup of ginseng,” says Charis. “Thanks,” says Zenia. “So, where is he tonight?”

“Billy?” says Charis. “Some meeting, I guess.”

“Don’t you ever worry?” says Zenia.

“About what?” says Charis. “That it’s not just some meeting.”

Charis laughs. She has more confidence lately. “You mean, some chick,” she says. “No. Anyway, it wouldn’t interfere:” She believes that. Billy can do what he wants with other women, because it wouldn’t count.

Billy has begun speaking to Zenia. He now says good morning to her, and when he comes into a room she’s already in, he nods and grunts. What he calls his Southern manners are having a struggle with his aversion to Zenia, and the manners are winning. The other night he even offered her a puff on the joint he was smoking. But Zenia shook her head and Billy felt—rebuffed, and that was that. Charis would like to ask Zenia to take it easy on Billy, to meet him halfway, but after the way he’s behaved she can hardly do that.

Behind Zenia’s back, Billy is if anything even ruder than he was at first. “If she has cancer I’ll eat my hat,” he said two days ago.

“Billy!” said Charis, appalled. “She’s had an operation! She has a big scar!”

“You seen it?” said Billy.

Charis hadn’t. Why would she? Why would she ask to see a person’s cancer scar? It wasn’t something you could do.

“You want to place a little bet?” said Billy. “Five bucks there isn’t one.”

“No,” said Charis. How could you prove such a thing? She had a short vision of Billy rushing into Zenia’s room and tearing off her nightgown. That was not something she wanted.

“Penny for your thoughts,” says Zenia.

“What?” says Charis. She is thinking about Zenia’s scar. “Billy’s a big boy,” says Zenia. “You shouldn’t get too anxious about him. He can take care of himself. “

“I was thinking about the winter,” says Charis. “How we’re going to get through it:”

“Not how—if,” says Zenia. “Oh, sorry, too morbid. One day at a time!”

Mostly Zenia goes to bed early because Charis tells her to, but sometimes she stays up. Charis makes a good fire in the wood stove and they sit at the kitchen table and talk. Sometimes they listen to music, sometimes they play solitaire.

“I can read the cards,” Zenia says one evening. “Here, I’ll read yours.

Charis isn’t sure about this. She doesn’t think it’s such a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice? “Just for fun,” says Zenia. She has Charis shuffle the deck three times and cut away from her so the bad luck won’t come towards her, and then she lays the cards out in rows of three, for the past, the present, and the future. She studies the rows, then adds another set of cards, crossways.

“Someone new is

coming into your life,” she says. Oh, thinks Charis. That must be the baby. “And someone else is . going out of it. There’s water involved; a crossing of the water.”~~ Zenia herself, thinks Charis. She’ll get better, she’ll leave soon. And anyone who leaves here has to cross water.

“Anything about Billy?” she says.

“There’s a jack,” says Zenia. “Jack of Spades. That could be him. Crossed by the Queen of Diamonds.”

“Is that money?” says Charis.

“Yes,” says Zenia, “but it’s a cross card. There’s something off about the money. Maybe he’ll take up dealing drugs or something.”

“Not Billy,” says Charis. “He’s too smart.” She doesn’t really want to go on with this. “Where did you learn?” she asks. “My mother was a Roumanian gypsy,” says Zenia carelessly. “She said it ran in the family.”

“It does,” says Charis. This makes sense to her: she knows about gifts like that, there’s her own grandmother. Zenia’s black hair and dark eyes, and also her fatalism—they’d go with being a gypsy.

“She was stoned to death, during the war,” says Zenia. “That’s terrible!” says Charis. No wonder Zenia has cancer—it’s the past lying inside her, an oppressive heavy-metals past that she’s never cleaned out of herself. “Was it the Germans?” Being stoned to death seems worse to her than being shot. Slower, more bruising, more painful; but not very German. When she thinks of Germans she thinks of scissors, of white enamel tables. When she thinks of stoning, it’s dust and flies and camels and palm trees. As in the Old Testament.

“No, by a bunch of villagers,” says Zenia. “In Roumania. They thought she had the evil eye, they thought she was hexing their cows. They didn’t want to waste their bullets so they used stones. Stones and clubs. Gypsies weren’t the most popular item, there. I guess they still aren’t. But she knew it was going to happen, she was a clairvoyant. She handed me over to a friend she had, in another village, the night before. That’s what saved me.”

“So you must speak some Roumanian,” says Charis. If she’d known all of this, she would have gone about curing Zenia some other way. Not just with yoga and cabbages. She would have tried more visualization, and not just about the cancer: about the Roumanians. Perhaps the keys to Zenia’s illness are hidden in another language.

“I’ve repressed it,” says Zenia. “You would too. I got a look at my mother after they’d finished with her. They left her there, lying in the snow. She was just a big lump of rotting meat:”

Charis flinches. This is a stomach-turning image. It explains why Zenia throws up so much—if that’s what’s inside her head. She needs to get such poisonous images out of her.

“Where was your father?” she says, to steer Zenia away from the dead mother.

“He was a Finn,” says Zenia. “It’s where I get my cheekbones.”

Charis has only a vague notion of where Finland is. It has trees, and people with saunas and skin boots, and reindeer. “Oh,” she says. “Why was he in Roumania?”

“He wasn’t,” says Zenia. “They were both Communists, before the war. They met at a youth congress in Leningrad. He was killed later, in Finland, fighting the Russians, in the Winter War. Ironic, isn’t it? He thought he was on their side, but it was them who killed him:’

“My father was killed in the war, too,” says Charis. She’s glad they have a bond in common.

“I guess a lot of people were,” says Zenia dismissively. “But that’s history.” She has gathered up the cards and is laying out a new batch. “Ah,” she says. “The Queen of Spades.”

“Is that still my cards?” says Charis.

“No,” says Zenia. “These are mine.” She isn’t looking at the cards now, she’s looking at the ceiling, obliquely, out of her half-closed eyes. “The Queen of Spades is bad luck. Some say it’s the death card:” Her long black hair falls like a heavy veil around her head.

“Oh, no,” says Charis, dismayed. “I don’t think we should do this. This is too negative.”

“Okay,” says Zenia, as if she doesn’t care what she does. “I think I’ll go to bed:”

Charis listens to her as she climbs up the stairs, dragging one foot after the other.

XXXVII

The winter wore on. It wore them down. Taking a bath was an arctic experience, feeding the chickens was a polar expedition: trudging through the snow, battling the fierce winds that swept in off the lake. The chickens themselves were cosy enough, inside the house that Billy built. The straw and droppings kept them warm, the way they were supposed to.

Charis wished there were a layer of straw under her own house. She tacked some old blankets over the walls, she stuffed some obvious cracks with wadded newspapers. Luckily they had enough wood: Charis had managed to acquire some, cheap, from a person who had given up and gone back to the mainland. It wasn’t split, and Billy split most of it, working outside with the axe, on warmer days: he liked chopping. But the house was still cold, except when Charis built the fire up to danger level. At those times the air inside got muggy and smelled like heated mouse nest. There were real mice living under the floor, driven in by the cold; they came out at night to clean up crumbs and leave their droppings on the table. Zenia brushed the droppings off onto the floor, wrinkling her nose.

Nothing more was being said about her leaving. Every morning she gave Charis a bulletin on her health: better, worse. One day she felt up to a walk, the next day she told Charis that her hair was falling out. She no longer expressed any hope, she no longer seemed to be participating in her own body. She took the things Charis offered her—the carrot juice, the herb teas—passively and without much interest; she was humouring Charis, but she didn’t really think they would do any good. She had periods of depression, when she would lie on the livingroom couch, wrapped in a blanket, or slump at the table. “I’m a terrible person,” she would tell Charis, her voice tremulous. “I’m not worth all this trouble:”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Charis would say. “We all have those feelings. They’re from the shadow side. Think of the best things about yourself.” Zenia would reward her with a little wavering smile. “What if there isn’t anything?” she would say weakly.

Zenia and Billy kept their distance from each other. Each still complained to Charis; they seemed to enjoy this, chewing each other over. Each liked the querulous taste of the other’s name, the flavour of accusation, the bad taste. Charis would have liked to warn Billy not to be so harsh to Zenia: he could drive her to snitch on him, about the bombing. But Charis couldn’t tell Billy this without admitting that she’d betrayed his confidence, that Zenia knew. Then he would be furious with her.

Charis didn’t want fury. She wanted only happy emotions, because any other emotions would smudge her baby. She tried to spend time only with the things that gave her peace: the whiteness just after it snowed, before the soot of the city had a chance to fall; the gleam of icicles, the week they had the ice storm that took the telephone lines down. She walked around the Island by herself, being careful not to slip on the frozen paths. Her stomach was growing harder and rounder now, her breasts were swelling. She knew that most of her white-light energy was being directed into the baby now, not into Zenia or even Billy. The baby was responding, she could sense it; inside her it was listening, it was attentive, it was absorbing the light like a flower.

She hoped the other two didn’t feel neglected, but there was nothing much she could do about it. She only had so much energy, and increasingly there was none to spare. She was becoming a more ruthless person, a harder one; she could feel her grandmother’s ferociousness in her hands more strongly now. The baby inside her was Karen again, unborn, and with Charis watching over her she would have a better chance. She would be born to the right mother, this time.

In her head she spent time decorating the small room, the> baby’s room. She would paint it white, later, when she had the money, when Zenia was gone. In the summer, when it was hot, Billy could build a sauna in the backyard, beside the henhouse. Then next winter they could sit inside it and get heated through, and go outside and roll around in the snow. That would be a good way of using the snow; better than sitting inside and complaining about it, the way Zenia did. And Billy too.

In April, when the snow had melted and the shoots of Charis’s three daffodil bulbs were poking up through the brown earth, and the chickens were outside again, scratching up the dirt, she told Billy and Zenia about the baby: She had to. Soon it would be obvious; also, soon there would have to be some changes. She wouldn’t be able to carry on with the yoga classes, so the money would have to come from elsewhere. Billy would have to get a job of some sort. He didn’t have the right papers but there were jobs to be had anyway, because some of his draftdodging friends had them. Billy would have to get off his butt. Charis wouldn’t have thought like this, before the baby, but now she did.

And Zenia would finally have to go. Charis had been a teacher to her, but if Zenia failed to take advantage of what Charis had given her, that was her own concern.

Enough is enough, said her grandmother’s voice within her head. First things first. Blood is thicker than water.

She tells them one at a time, Zenia first. They’re having dinner—baked beans from a can, frozen peas. Charis has not been so meticulous about organic lately; somehow she lacks the time. Billy’s in the city, again.

“I’m going to have a baby,” Charis blurts out over the canned peaches.

Zenia is not hurt, not the way Charis has feared she would be. Nor does she offer any wistful congratulations or woman-towoman hugs or pats on the hand. Instead she’s contemptuous. “Well,” she says, “you’ve certainly screwed up!”

“What do you mean?” says Charis.

“What makes you think Billy wants a kid?” says Zenia. This takes Charis’s breath away. She recognizes that she’s been going on a certain assumption: that everyone else will welcome this baby as much as she does. She also recognizes that she hasn’t been taking Billy into account. She did make one attempt to imagine what it would be like to be a man, to be

Billy, having a baby, but she just couldn’t do it. After that she made no effort to divine his reaction.

“Well of course he does,” she says, trying for conviction. “You haven’t told him yet, have you,” says Zenia. It’s not a question.

“How do you know?” says Charis. How does she know? Why are they fighting?

“Wait’ll he finds out,” says Zenia grimly. “This house is going to be one whole hell of a lot smaller with a screaming brat in it. You could’ve waited till I was dead.”

Charis is amazed by her brutality and selfishness; amazed; and angry. But what comes out of her is close to appeasement. “There’s nothing I can do about it now,” she says.

“Sure there is,” says Zenia, patronizingly. “You can get an abortion.”

Charis stands up. “I don’t want one,” she says. She is close to tears, and when she goes upstairs—which she does right away, without for once doing the dishes—she does cry. She cries into their sleeping bag, wounded and confused. Something is going wrong and she isn’t even sure what it is.

When Billy gets home she is still lying on the sleeping bag, with the light out and her clothes still on.

“Hey, what’s the matter?” he says. “What’s happening?” He kisses her face.

Charis heaves herself up, then throws her arms around him. “Haven’t you noticed?” she says tearfully.

“Noticed what?” says Billy.

“I’m pregnant!” says Charis. “We’re going to have a baby!” She’s making it sound like a reproach; this isn’t what she means. She wants him to celebrate with her.

“Oh shit, “ says Billy. He goes slack in her arms. “Oh Jesus Christ. When?”

“In August,” says Charis, waiting for him to be glad. But he isn’t glad. Instead he’s treating this like a big catastrophe; like a death; not a birth. “Oh shit,” he says again. “What’re we gonna do?”

In the middle of the night Charis finds herself standing outside, in the garden. She’s been sleepwalking. She’s in her nightgown and her feet are bare; the mud and leaf mould crumble under her toes. She can smell a skunk, a distant one, like those run over on highways; but how could a skunk be here? This is the Island. But maybe they can swim.

Now she is fully awake. In her hand there’s the imprint of another hand: it’s her grandmother, trying to tell her something, trying to get through. A warning.

“What?” she says out loud. “What is it?”

She’s aware that there’s someone else in the garden, a dark shape leaning against the wall by the kitchen window. She sees a small glow. It wasn’t a skunk she smelled, it was smoke.

“Zenia, is that you?” she says.

“I couldn’t sleep,” says Zenia. “So, how’s Big Daddy taking it?”

“Zenia, you shouldn’t be smoking,” says Charis. She’s forgotten she’s angry with her. “It’s so bad for your cells.”

“Fuck my cells,” says Zenia. “They’re fucking me! I might as well enjoy myself while I’ve got the time.” Her voice comes out of the darkness, lazy, sardonic. “And I have to tell you I’m sick to death of your do-gooder act. You’d be one hell of a lot happier if you’d mind your own business:”

“I was trying to help you,” Charis wails.

“Do me a favour,” says Zenia. “Help someone else:” Charis can’t understand it. Why was she brought out here to listen to this? She turns and goes inside, and gropes her way up the stairs. She doesn’t turn on the light.

The next day Billy takes the early ferry into the city. Charis works feverishly in her garden, digging in the spring compost, trying to blank her mind. Zenia stays in bed.

When Billy comes back after dark, he is drunk. He’s been drunk before but never this much. Charis is in the kitchen, doing the dishes, dishes left over from several days. She feels heavy, she feels clogged; there’s something in her head that won’t come clear. No matter how hard she looks, she can’t see past the surfaces of things. She’s being blocked, shut out; even the garden today wouldn’t let her in. The earth has lost its shine and is just an expanse of dirt, the chickens are petulant and frowsy, like old feather dusters.

So when Billy comes in, she turns to look at him, but she doesn’t say anything. Then she turns away from him, back to the dishes.

She hears him bump into the table; he knocks over a chair. Then his hands are on her shoulders. He turns her around. She hopes he’s going to kiss her, tell her he’s changed his mind, that everything is wonderful, but instead he begins to shake her. Back, forth, slowly. “You ... are ... just ... so ... goddamn ... stupid,” he says, in time to the shaking. “You are just so goddamn dumb!” His voice is almost fond.

“Billy, don’t do that,” she says.

“Why not?” he says. “Why the hell not? I can do what I like. You’re too dumb to notice.” He lets go of her shoulder with one hand and slaps her across the face. “Wake up!” He slaps her again, harder.

“Billy, stop that!” she says, trying to be firm and gentle, trying not to cry.

“Nobody ... tells ... me ... what to do:” He steps back from her, then brings his leg up, knee into her stomach. He’s too drunk to aim well, but it hurts her.

“You’ll kill it!” She’s screaming now. “You’ll kill our baby!” Billy puts his head down on her shoulder and begins to cry, hoarse choking sobs that sound torn out of him. “I told you,” he said. “I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Told me what?” she says, stroking his yellow hair.

‘‘There’s no scars,” he says. “Nothing. There’s no scars at all.” Charis doesn’t put it together, what he’s talking about. “Come on now,” she says. “We’re going up to bed:” They do, and she rocks him in her arms. Then they are both asleep.

In the morning Charis gets up to feed the chickens, as she always does. Billy is awake: he stays warm underneath the sleeping bag, watching her dress. Before she goes downstairs she comes over to give him a kiss on the forehead. She wants him to say something, but he doesn’t.

First she lights the stove, then she fills the pail at the sink. She can hear Billy moving around upstairs; also Zenia, which is unusual. Maybe she’s packing, maybe she’ll leave. Charis certainly hopes so. Zenia can’t stay here any more, she’s causing too much disturbance in the air.

Charis goes outside and unlatches the gate to the chickens’ compound. She can’t hear them rustling around this morning, she can’t hear their sleepy cooing. Sleepyheads! She opens the chickens’ door, but none of them come out. Puzzled, she goes around to the door for humans and steps inside.

The chickens are all dead. Every single one of them, dead in their boxes, two of them on the floor. There is blood all over the place, on the straw, dripping down from the boxes. She picks up one of the dead hens from the floor: there’s a slit in its throat.

She stands there, shocked and dismayed, trying to hold herself together. Her head is cloudy, red fragments are swirling behind her eyes. Her beautiful chickens! It must have been a weasel. What else? But wouldn’t a weasel drink all the blood? Maybe it was a neighbour, not anyone right next to her but somebody else. Who hates them that much? The chickens; or her and Billy. She feels violated.

“Billy,” she calls. But he can’t hear her, he’s inside. She walks unsteadily towards the house; she thinks she’s going to faint.

She reaches the kitchen, then calls again. He must have fallen asleep. Heavily she goes up the stairs:

Billy isn’t there. He isn’t anywhere in the room, and when she looks into Zenia’s room he isn’t there either. Why would she expect him to be?

Zenia is gone also. They are both gone. They aren’t in the house. Charis runs, she runs gasping, down towards the ferry dock. She knows now. It’s finally happened: Billy has been kidnapped. When she reaches the dock the ferry is hooting, it’s pulling away, and there is Billy standing on it, with two strange men close to him. Two men in overcoats, just the way they would look. Beside him is Zenia. She must have told, she must have turned him in.

Billy doesn’t wave. He doesn’t want the two men to know Charis has anything to do with him. He’s trying to protect her.

She walks slowly back to the house, goes slowly into it. She searches it from top to bottom, looking for a note, but there is nothing. In the sink she finds the bread knife, with blood on the blade.

It was Zenia. Zenia murdered her chickens.

Maybe Billy wasn’t kidnapped. Maybe he’s run—away. He’s run away with Zenia. That’s what he meant by no scars: there are no scars on Zenia. He knows because he’s looked. He has looked at Zenia’s body, all over it, with the light on. He knows everything there is to know about that body. He has been inside it.

Charis sits at the kitchen table, banging her head softly against it, trying to drive out thought. But she thinks anyway. If there are no scars there must be no cancer. Zenia doesn’t have cancer, just as Billy said. But if that’s true, what has Charis been doing for the past six months? Being a fool, that’s what. Being stupid. Being so deeply stupid it’s a wonder she has a brain at all.

Being betrayed. For how long, how many times? He tried to tell her. He tried to make Zenia go away, but then it was too late.

As for the dead chickens and the bread knife, it’s a message. Slit your wrists. She hears a voice, a voice from a long time ago, more than one voice. You are so stupid. You can’t win this fight. Not in this life. She’s had almost enough of this life anyway; maybe it’s time for the next one. Zenia has taken away the part of herself she needs in order to live. She is dumb, she is a failure, she is an idiot. The bad things that have happened to her are a punishment, they are to teach her a lesson. The lesson is that she might as well give up.

That is Karen speaking. Karen is back, Karen has control of their body. Karen is angry with her, Karen is desolate, Karen is sick with disgust, Karen wants them to die. She wants to kill their body. Already she has the bread knife in her hand, moving it towards their shared arm. But if she does that, their baby will die too, and Charis refuses to let that happen. She calls all of her strength, all of her inner healing light, her grandmother’s fierce blue light, into her hands; she wrestles Karen silently for possession of the knife. When she gets it, she pushes Karen away from her as hard as she can, back down into the shadows. Then she throws the knife out the door.

She waits for Billy to come back: She knows he won’t, but she waits anyway. She sits at the kitchen table, willing her body not to move, not moving. She waits all afternoon. Then she goes to bed.

By the next day she’s no longer so spaced out. Instead she’s frantic. The worst thing is not knowing. Maybe she’s misjudged Billy, maybe he hasn’t run away with Zenia. Maybe he’s in prison, having his throat cut in the showers. Maybe he’s dead.

She calls all the numbers scribbled on the wall beside their phone. She asks, she leaves messages. None off his friends has heard anything, or will admit to it. Who else could know where he is, where he might have gone? Him, or Zenia, or both of them together. Who else knows Zenia?

She can think of only one person: West. West was living with Zenia before she turned up on Charis’s doorstep with a black eye. Charis views that black eye from a different angle, now. It could have had a valid reason for existing.

West teaches at the university, Zenia told her that. He teaches music or something. She wonders if he calls himself West, or Stewart. She will ask for both. It doesn’t take her long to track down his home number.

She dials, and a woman answers. Charis explains that she’s looking for Zenia.

“Looking for Zenia?” says the woman. “Now why in hell would anyone want to do that?”

“Who is this?” says Charis. “Antonia Fremont,” says Tony.

“Tony,” says Charis. Someone she knows, more or less. She doesn’t stop to wonder what Tony is doing answering West’s phone. She takes a breath. “Remember when you tried to help me, on the front lawn of McClung Hall? And I didn’t need it?”

“Yes,” says Tony guardedly.

“Well, this time I do.”

“Help with Zenia?” says Tony. “Sort of,” says Charis.

Tony says she’ll come.

XXXVIII

Tony takes the ferry to the Island. She sits at Charis’s kitchen table and drinks a cup of mint tea and listens to the whole story, nodding from time to time, with her mouth slightly open. She asks a few questions, but she doubts nothing. When Charis tells her how stupid she has been, Tony says that Charis has not been particularly stupid; no more stupid than Tony was herself. “Zenia is very good at what she does,” is how she puts it.

“But I was so sorry for her!” says Charis. Tears roll down her face; she can’t seem to stop them. Tony hands her a crumpled Kleenex.

“So was I,” she says. “She’s an expert at that:”

She explains that West couldn’t have punched Zenia in the eye, not only because West would never punch anyone in the eye but because at that time West wasn’t living with Zenia. He hadn’t been living with Zenia for over a year and a half. He had been living with Tony.

“Though I suppose he might have done it just walking along the street,” she says. “It would be a definite temptation. I don’t know what I’d do if I ran into Zenia again. Soak her with gasoline maybe. Set fire to her.”

As for Billy, Tony is of the opinion that Charis shouldn’t waste time looking for him; first, because she’ll never find him; second, because what if she did? If he’s been kidnapped by the Mounties she won’t be able to rescue him, he’s probably in some cement cubicle in Virginia by now, and if he wants to get in touch with her he will. They do allow letters. If he hasn’t been kidnapped, but has been bagged by Zenia instead, he won’t want to see Charis anyway. He’ll be feeling too guilty.

Tony knows, Tony’s been through it: it’s as if Billy has been put under a spell. But Zenia won’t be content with Billy for long. He’s too small a catch, and—Charis will excuse Tony for saying so—he was too easy. Tony has thought a lot about Zenia and has decided that Zenia likes challenges. She likes breaking and entering, she likes taking things that aren’t hers. Billy, like West, was just target practice. She probably has a row of men’s dicks nailed to her wall, like stuffed animal heads.

“Leave him alone and he’ll come home, wagging his tail behind him,” says Tony. “If he still has a tail, after Zenia gets through with him.”

Charis is astonished at the ease with which Tony expresses hostility. It can’t be good for her. But it brings an undeniable comfort.

“What if he doesn’t?” says Charis. “What if he doesn’t come back?” She is still sniffling. Tony rummages under the sink and finds her a paper towel.

Tony shrugs. “Then he doesn’t. There are other things to do.”

“But why did she murder my chickens?” says Charis. No matter how she considers this, she just can’t get her head around it. The chickens were lovely, they were innocent, they had nothing to do with stealing Billy.

“Because she’s Zenia,” says Tony. “Don’t fret about motives. Attila the Hun didn’t have motives. He just had appetites. She killed them. It speaks for itself.”

“Maybe it was because her mother was stoned to death by Roumanians, for being a gypsy,” says Charis.

“What?” says Tony. “No, she wasn’t! She was a White Russian in exile! She died in Paris, of tuberculosis!”

Then Tony begins to laugh. She laughs and laughs. “What?” says Charis. puzzled. “What is it?”

Tony makes Charis a cup of tea, and tells her to take a rest. She has to look after her health now, says Tony, because she is a mother. She wraps Charis up in a blanket and Charis lies on the living-room sofa. She feels drowsy and cared for, as if things are out of her hands.

Tony goes outside with some plastic garbage bags—Charis knows plastic is bad, but she’s found no alternative—and collects up the dead chickens. She sweeps out the chicken house. She fills a pail of water and does the best she can with the blood.

“There’s a hose,” says Charis sleepily.

“I think I got most of it,” says Tony. “What was this bread knife doing in the garden?”

Charis explains about trying to slit her wrists, and Tony doesn’t scold her. She simply says that bread knives are not a viable solution, and washes it off and puts it back in the knife rack.

After Charis has had her rest, Tony sits her down at the table again. She has a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen. “Now, think of everything you need,” she says. “Everything practical.”

Charis thinks. She needs some white paint, for the nursery; she needs insulation for the house, because after the summer there will be a winter. She needs some loose dresses. But she can’t afford any of these things. With Billy and Zenia eating up the groceries, she hasn’t been able to save. Maybe she will have to go on welfare.

“Money,” she says slowly. She hates to say it. She doesn’t want Tony to think she’s begging.

“Good. Now, let’s think of all the ways you can get some.”

With the help of her friend Roz, whom Charis remembers dimly from McClung Hall, Tony finds Charis a lawyer, and the lawyer goes after Uncle Uern. He’s alive, though Aunt Viola is not. He’s still living in the house with the wall-to-wall and the rec room. Charis doesn’t have to go and see him—the lawyer does that for her, and reports to Tony. Charis doesn’t have to tell the whole story about Uncle Uern because everything the lawyer needs is there in the wills, her mother’s and her grandmother’s. What has happened is perfectly clear: Uncle Uern has taken the money he got from selling the farm, Charis’s money, and put it into his own business. He claims he tried to find Charis after her twenty-first birthday, but he couldn’t. Maybe this is true.

Charis doesn’t get as much money as she should have—she doesn’t get interest, and Uncle Vern has spent some of the capital, but she gets more than she’s ever had before. She also gets a creepy note from Uncle Vern, saying he’d love to see her again because she was always like a daughter to him. He must be going senile. She burns the note in the stove.

“I wonder if my life would’ve been better if I’d had a real father,” she says to Tony.

“I had one,” says Tony. “It was a mixed blessing:”

Roz invests some of Charis’s money for her. It won’t bring in very much, but it will help. Charis spends part of what’s left buying the house—the landlord wants it off his hands, he thinks the city will tear it down any day now, so he’s happy to take a low price. After she’s bought the house she fixes it up, not totally but enough.

Roz comes over to the Island, because she loves renovating houses, or so she says. She is even larger than Charis remembers her; her voice is louder, and she has a bright lemon-coloured aura that Charis can see without even looking hard.

“Oh, this is terrific,” says Roz, “it’s just like a doll’s house! But sweetie—you need a different table!” The next day, a different table arrives. It’s round and oak, just what Charis wants. Charis decides that—despite all appearances—Roz is a sensitive person:

Roz busies herself with the layette, because Tony doesn’t like shopping and anyway wouldn’t have a clue what to buy. Neither does Charis. But Roz has had a baby of her own, so she knows everything, even how many towels. She tells Charis how much it all costs so Charis can pay her back, and Charis is surprised at the lowness of the prices. “Honey, I’m the original bargain hunter,” says Roz. “Now, what you need is a Happy Apple. They’re those plastic apples, they dingle in the bath—I swear by them!”

Charis, once so tall and thin, is now tall and bulgy. Tony spends the last two weeks of the pregnancy at Charis’s house. She can afford to, she says, because it’s the summer vacation. She helps Charis with her breathing exercises, timing Charis on her big-numbers wristwatch and squeezing Charis’s hand in her own little hand, so strangely like a squirrel’s paw. Charis can’t quite believe she is actually having a baby; or she can’t quite believe that the baby will soon be outside her. She knows it’s in there, she talks to it constantly. Soon she will be able to hear its own voice, in return.

She promises it that she will never touch it in anger. She will never hit it, not even a casual slap. And she almost never does.

Charis goes to a hospital after all, because Tony and Roz decide it will be better: if there were complications Charis would have to be taken to the mainland in a police launch, which would not be appropriate. When August is born she has a golden halo, just like Jesus in the Christmas cards. No one else can see it, but Charis can. She holds August in her arms and vows to be the best person she can be, and praises her oval God.

Now that August is in the outside world Charis feels more anchored. Anchored, or tethered. She no longer blows around so much in the wind; all of her attention is on the now. She has been pushed back into her own milky flesh, into the heaviness of her breasts, into her own field of gravity. She lies under her apple tree on a blanket spread on the patchy grass, in the humid air, in the sunlight filtering through the leaves, and sings to August. Karen is far away, which is just as well: Karen would not be dependable around small children.

Tony and Roz are the godmothers. Not officially, of course, because there isn’t a church in the world that would do things the way Charis wants. She performs the ceremony herself, with her grandmother’s Bible and a very potent round stone she found on the beach, and a bayberry candle and some spring water from a bottle, and Tony and Roz promise to watch over August and to protect her spirit. Charis is glad she’s able to give August two such hard-headed women as godmothers. They won’t let her be a wimp, they’ll teach her to stand up for herself—not a quality Charis is sure that she herself can provide.

There is a third godmother present, of course—a dark godmother, one who brings negative gifts. The shadow of Zenia falls over the cradle. Charis prays she will be able to cast enough light, from within herself, to wash it away.

August grows bigger, and Charis tends her and rejoices, because August is happy, happier than Charis ever was when she was Karen, and she feels the tears in her own life mending. Though not completely, never completely. At night she takes long baths, with lavender and rosewater in them, and she visualizes all of her negative emotions flowing out of her body into the bathwater, and when she pulls the plug they swirl down the drain. It’s an operation she feels compelled to repeat frequently. She stays away from men, because men and sex are too difficult for her, they are too snarled up with rage and shame and hatred and loss, with the taste of vomit and the smell of rancid meat, and with the small golden hairs on Billy’s vanished arms, and with hunger:

She is better just by herself, and with August. August’s aura is daffodil yellow, strong and clear. Even by the age of five she has definite opinions. Charis is glad about that; she’s glad August is not a Pisces, like her. August has few electric feelers, few hunches; she can’t even tell when it’s going to rain. Such things are gifts, true, but not without their drawbacks. Charis writes August’s horoscope into one of her notebooks, a mauve one: sign, Leo; gem, the diamond; metal, gold; ruler, the Sun.

In all this time there is no word from Billy. Charis decides to tell August—when she is big enough—that her father died bravely fighting in the Vietnam War. It’s the sort of thing she got told herself, and possibly just as accurate. She doesn’t have a solemn picture of Billy in a uniform, though, for the simple reason that he didn’t have such a thing. The only picture she has of him is a snapshot, taken by one of his buddies. In it he’s holding a beer and wearing a T-shirt and shorts; it was when he was working on the henhouse. He looks hammered, and the top of his head is cut off. She doesn’t consider it suitable for framing. ,

The ferry pulls into its dock and the gangway goes down, and Charis walks off, breathing in the clear Island air: Dry grass like reed pipes, loam like a cello. Here she is, back at her house, her fragile but steady house, her flimsy house that is still standing, her house with the lush flowers, her house with the cracked walls, her house with the cool white peaceful bed.

Her house, not theirs; not Billy’s and. Zenia’s, even though this is where it all happened. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to stay here. She has exorcised their fragments, she has burned sweetgrass, she has purified all the rooms, and the birth of August was an exorcism in itself. But she could never get rid of Billy, no matter what she tried, because his story was unfinished; and with Billy came Zenia. The two of them were glued together.

She needs to see Zenia because she needs to know the end. She needs to get rid of her, finally. She won’t tell Tony or Roz about this need, because they would discourage her. Tony would say, keep out of the fire zone. Roz would say, why stick your head in a blender?

But Charis has to see Zenia. and very soon she will, now that she knows where Zenia is. She’ll march right into the Arnold Garden Hotel and go up in the elevator and knock on the door. She’s feeling almost strong enough. And August is grown up now. Whatever the truth turns out to be, about Billy, she’s old enough not to be too hurt by it.

So Charis will confront Zenia and this time she won’t be intimidated, she won’t conciliate, she won’t back down; she will stand her ground and fight back. Zenia, chicken murderer, drinker of innocent blood. Zenia, who sold Billy for thirty pieces of silver. Zenia, aphid of the soul.

From her bookshelf she takes down her grandmother’s Bible and sets it on her oak table. She finds a pin, closes her eyes, waits for the pull downwards.

Kings Two, Nine, Thirty-five, she reads. And they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.

It’s Jezebel thrown down from the tower, Jezebel eaten by dogs. Again, thinks Charis. Behind her eyes there is a dark shape falling.