Goose Egg

It is three o’clock in the morning on the longest day of the year. 

In your dream, you are singing Schubert and you and I are still the same person, elastic, joyful, and promising. It is your graduation recital from the Victoria Conservatory. You are twenty-three.

You are wearing a blue dress you sewed yourself out of satin; it has the puffy sleeves and unflattering waist of women’s formal wear in the eighties; still, you are radiant. This is one of the happiest days of your life. Graduation recitals are long solos for each Vic Con student. You are the only one singing this afternoon and you picked the repertoire, the kinds of squares that will be served at the reception, and the venue. Most of your classmates used the Anglican church or the conservatory’s concert theatre but you asked that art gallery downtown if you could sing in one of their big, skylit rooms. They wheeled in a baby grand for your accompanist, and when you toured the room yesterday, it was perfect. But overnight they hung a new show so now you are singing against a backdrop of large-scale nudes. Your parents, flown in from Edmonton, are sitting in the audience. A paper cone full of flowers lies on the folding chair beside your mother, ready for your father to give it to you as soon as the recital is over. You sing the last bars, with the big interval you have been practicing for seven months, and then—you are still counting—there is a single beat of silence in that airy room. For the first time, the applause can only be for you. You wonder if it’s possible that you will actually become an opera singer. That and having children are the only things you want to do.

The interval at the end of the Schubert piece drove your sister Carol crazy. A lot of things drove her crazy, or maybe just confused her, like when she came to live with you at the end of September, having gotten permission to finish her last high school courses by correspondence, and opened your fridge as soon as she’d put that lamp and her suitcase down and stared in horror and said you’d both need to go shopping. You had done your most major grocery shop since moving in that morning, in preparation for her arrival. 

But you loved having her there with you. Together you heaved a pink velour couch from the Salvation Army up four flights of stairs to your apartment. Carol arrived home one night with two bags of supplies from the asian store and taught you how to make curry. On Sundays at church, you split up and made the rounds of the older couples whose children had moved out. Usually one of you got both of you invited for lunch. Carol brought her car out West with her. On days you were late for class, she drove you to the conservatory. You sat in the passenger seat, your nylons around your ankles, trying not to slice yourself with your razor while Carol shifted gears with all the energy and suppressed rage of a middle-aged cab driver. Then Carol would go off to the library to fight with calculus, and you would rush through the concert-poster plastered halls to class. The conservatory smelled like an old piano. Also, depending on where you were, like rosin, wet wool, and tomato sauce. Your favourite part of the building was the practice rooms on the third floor. You were studying singing but your parents were still paying for piano lessons as well, which you took from a retired performance pianist with long red hair and seven children at her home on Tuesday evenings. She taught you pieces from the Royal Conservatory Program. You only had your grade eight and you wanted to get your grade ten. Your parents wanted that too, and expected it of you. Often though you found yourself in a practice room playing the German hymns they sang in your grandmother’s church. 

In December you snipped sprigs of holly from the hedge across the street and delivered Christmas cards on your bicycle because there was no snow. You were in Victoria and you felt you were also in a Victorian Christmas card. The bicycle had made your legs strong. You had lost weight and gotten an exuberance of a perm; you bought dramatically understated silk blouses with shoulder pads such as an apprentice at a european opera house might wear; your voice had become rich and controlled, and you didn’t know it but it was becoming less affected. When your parents came for Christmas and to check on you, it was late when they arrived and you and Carol greeted them in matching kimonos. They were impressed that you girls had a table-top tree; they had wrapped gifts, brandy beans, and pfefferkuchenplatzen with them. Your father disapproved of how little you practiced over the holiday, but you started going to school early every day again after they got in their car and drove back to Alberta. Carol had finished her Fall courses early.

She was racing to finish her Spring courses though, before your parents came back for your recital. You had taken to singing difficult arias in the blooming streets and incessantly in your apartment. You could feel yourself becoming a singer. A month before you finished your diploma in voice performance, one of your instructors told you to think about videotaping your recital. Therefore your father borrowed a camcorder from your mother’s sister’s husband. It is set up on a music stand in the aisle beside your father’s seat, recording your beatitude as the applause renews itself and your instructor comes up to present you with a bouquet of carnations, beating your parents to the punch. They don’t mind. Your father is a teacher and he respects this teacher’s privilege over his own as a mere and sometimes dubious parent. But he is not dubious now. He is having the same revelation as you. He is ready to concede that the family history he plans to write might begin with the birth of his own mother in a hamlet in German Poland, go on to describe her youth and courtship with his father in the Lutheran choir, her escape with five small children from Russian soldiers, her loss of her son, the author, age two, when the pillow he was swaddled in was thrown into a baggage car, the family’s voyage to Canada, their settlement in Yorkton, the potatoes she peeled to feed a family of twelve, the stroke his brother had at fifteen, his own graduation from teacher’s college, your birth—and end with a modest account of his daughter the German-Canadian alto’s promising career. Your mother is in awe of you, and when she congratulates you she giggles nervously, making you believe your recital is a mystifying joke to her. No, the mystifying joke is your mother, the little girl who lived to play football, feeling a silly laugh bubble in her throat when she tries to say she is proud of you. You start to turn away from her, abruptly incensed by how awkward it is to juggle two bouquets, and feel yourself falling through the floor. 

You are sitting bolt upright in bed, awake. This is your old bedroom. It looks as it did before you left for Victoria, the gold-coloured shag carpet, the ivy plant you pinned to the walls, the record player in the corner, the polyester bedspread, though the room is still dark. You are fifty years old. You are sweating.

I barely recognize you. Not because of the buzz cut, or loose skin starting to hang under your jaw, but the way you paw for your phone, rooting around in your blankets, is embarrassing. You texted all six of your children last night, keeping yourself by a great act of will from calling them, and no one has responded. You open each text conversation to check. The last message from Jacob, who is sixteen: “LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!!!!” From Josephine, who is nine: “wer’e outside the school.” From Leah, who is twenty-three: “Mum, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t have time to play the adult in family situations. Cal doesn’t talk to me and neither does Dad. Please don’t put this in my court.” From Hannah, who is fourteen: “Yvonne said I don’t need to talk to you about this.” Rosemary, who is twenty-one, has never texted you. You know that she lives in the city because she came to see you in the hospital, but only protected by her Catholic priest. You open your email, refresh Facebook, and finally call your voicemail. Your mailbox is empty. You open everything again, sending the display screaming past with strong sweeps of your thumb downward. You don’t dare open any of the conversations with David, your husband. In the last one, he said that if he isn’t able to cut you out of his life soon, he will likely kill himself. 

The pain of this is enough to send you out of your body, and has been for some time. The pressure of this unstated fact, that he felt like this, almost caused your skull to explode. All throughout your marriage, especially in the last ten years, you had to go for long walks. You mistook the house for your own head. You were physically displaced. A dumb mass of grief and hate, an invisible goose egg, pressed on your brain until neural pathways broke at their crossroads and joined up again, illegitimately. And you had little room to think. You would leave the house suddenly and walk for hours. By now you’ve cried about how David and the children never came after you. You’ve been living with them for five months, but your parents still panic when you go off on your own. More than once they have called the police, the way you used to when Leah tried to stay over at her boyfriend’s. Your mother is so nervous and overextended that she is experiencing psychosomatic paralysis of her left side. When Carol calls to check in on her, she giggles.

You worry about your mother, but you worry much more about the children, especially the four youngest still in the house with David. How did Josephine get to be nine? You can’t remember her sixth, seventh, or eighth birthdays. And Carol took her out for her ninth birthday because that was the day after Jacob was admitted to hospital. Where did Carol take her? The mall? Josephine came home preening with a new pair of earrings, but she didn’t want you to see them. Which hospital had taken Aaron? They didn’t want you to see him either. The sun is rising now; the edges of the ivy leaves gleam. You are falling asleep again, against your will. It seems impossible that summer is coming. Last summer you had a family and a home. Has Cal gotten a bicycle yet? David doesn’t notice how heavy he’s getting, how unhappy he is at school. You’re his mother. You’re happy to buy a bike for him. You have more money now than you’ve had since you were working full time, the year after high school. The lace curtains on the window were what you bought with your first paycheque. But your father put five thousand dollars in an account for you in January, and there’s still some left. You have offered to pay for Cal’s bicycle, driving lessons for Leah. It has all been refused. In Leah’s case, it worries you because a young woman should be able to drive. Leah has been on her own since she was seventeen, but still she seems to have no interest; at least now her boyfriend has a car.

You fall asleep as the sun rises through your lace curtains and throws a delicate pattern like a veil on your bristling hair and heavy face. It feels strange to be afraid of you. Your body is almost flat under the covers. You look like a very old woman, and like an old woman, you are sleepless. Every moment you sleep through is another thing taken away from you. It is just after six when you get up, and as usual, you don’t even need to look out the window to feel yourself on the wrong side of the river. Though your parents have always lived on the south side, you and David only rented, and eventually bought, homes on the north side, and it has been thirty years since you felt at home in the shadow of the university, surrounded by bars and bookstores and parents jogging with ergonomic strollers. Your house, the house you own half of, though David’s salary paid the mortgage, is so far north it is almost in St. Albert, across the freeway from a long bank of box stores. You could afford to buy there, and a block in, it is quiet. Leah and Rosemary got their first jobs in the shopping complex, and spent most of the money there too. Except Leah must have paid some rent on that first apartment, the bachelor suite in the house your father rents out. You didn’t know she was moving out until he helped her carry her bed out of the basement. She hasn’t spent a single night back. Neither have you, since January. 

The clothes you put on, tan dress pants (your mother calls them slacks) and a pink t-shirt with a butterfly design in plastic jewels, are hand-me-downs from an aunt in her late seventies. Almost all the clothes in the closet are, or things your mother picked up at Wal-Mart. You can’t find a clean pair of socks and you are still not a person who will wear dirty ones. You’ve been known to make drugstore runs for clean underwear, a habit that exemplifies everything that is wrong with you for your father. Now you’re on your phone again, sitting on the edge of your old bed. Individual strings of synthetic carpet slither around your bare feet. Flooded in early light, the room seems smaller and narrower, like a National Geographic prison cell, viewed from above. When you stand up, take your purse from the doorknob, and open the bedroom door, it is surprising. Your parents are asleep and will be until eight o’clock, when your father’s clock radio will play the CBC news and he will get up, remembering aloud or silently how his mother always rose before rest of the household. Hung in the hallway are four large frames; each one holds twelve or fifteen pictures of the Kause family. There are your father’s parents, surrounded by nine adult children on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Your Oma still has long hair in a bun and one of your uncles is wearing a blazing white suite. There are your mother’s parents, sitting on opposite ends of a chesterfield in their formal living room, some kind of coffee time in progress. There are your parents on their wedding day, in front of a line of old cars. Your mother’s veil is billowing; she looks like an apologetic movie star. 

And there you are with Carol, in pink felt tams and boxy jackets, horsing around on a homemade skating rink. Both of you look slightly maniacal. Maybe it’s adrenaline. Maybe it’s one of your early forays into make-up, your mother’s Mary Kay samples, blue eyeshadow and plum lipstick she will not throw away but will never wear herself. Your father is proud of your teenage beauty but ashamed of the time you and Carol spend in front of the bathroom mirror. You are a little ashamed of it too, though Carol seems immune. She is immune to all kinds of liabilities you fall into. When you were five you fell off the half-built deck of this house and landed on the newly poured driveway, your legs in the splits, your favourite dress thrown over your head. You didn’t break anything, so all your mother can talk about it the blood that seeped through your panties before your uncle scooped you up. Everyone could see it: little Carol, the men working on the house. When you were eleven your science teacher took your whole class on an overnight camping trip to Elk Island Park. Your father was delighted with Mrs. Simon’s display of initiative, and hopeful that you would take an interest in nature beyond The Language of Flowers, a book you were obsessed with. You packed secret Kit Kat bars, the big flashlight, and your diary, where you wrote almost a week later about waking up in your tent, shivering, and realizing that you had wet yourself. The four other girls in your tent slept on as you dragged your heavy corduroy sleeping bag outside, stripped off your pajamas, and rolled everything up. They all thought it was typical that you had gotten up early to pack up. At home, your father tried to put the sleeping bag back in the garage, and your mother asked for your laundry, but your reputation at school was preserved. You were a goody-two-shoes. Almost everyone liked you. Though you didn’t do all your homework, you had excellent grades. Your father didn’t think it was right, but he had only had to work hard to learn English at the same time as everything else. He was fourteen when he arrived in Canada, and at first they put him in a grade two class. Your second-generation art projects were all-consuming and remarkable. In grade six you cast your entire family’s faces in plaster of Paris, then made masks of them and took a family portrait with your father wearing Carol’s mask, your mother wearing your father’s, and Carol wearing your mother’s. You were the only person under thirty who sang in the church choir. Your adeptness made your plunges into strange and sometimes shameful behaviour even more jarring; perhaps it even made them notable at all. There is the event your father calls the incident with the apple. He brings it up constantly now, a senseless source of grief, though anyone who hears the story wonders why it bothers him so deeply. You are sick of hearing it. You were sixteen. It was a Sunday in the spring. The church was holding its annual general meeting after the service, and there was a potluck set up on tables in the parking lot outside. You were standing around with some other teenagers, eating an apple. The boy you liked, the dentist’s son, was there, and you wanted to prove you didn’t care what he thought of you, and also you thought you could make everyone laugh. You told them you could eat an apple like a horse, no hands. You opened your mouth as wide as possible and lodged your top and bottom teeth tightly in the skin of the apple; you bit down. The apple fell from your mouth without ceremony, hit the pavement with a dull crack, and rolled under a table. Everyone laughed. Encouraged, you crawled after it and emerged with the apple held once more in your teeth, tiny rocks clinging to your lips. This is how your father saw you, glancing over from his conversation with the pastor, and your friends howling. As far as he was concerned, sixteen was finally too old for a pass on these things, it was the first time you were a disgrace. But he didn’t feel that way again until sometime after Aaron was born. 

You are only fifteen in the skating photo. Fifteen and in grade ten, the year you start listening to Bach and Handel, the year you buy your first pair of high heeled shoes, for your cousin’s wedding. Those shoes are probably still in the front closet. You don’t look for them. Clumsy, you lace up a pair of pink and white running shoes instead, open and close the door quietly, adjust your purse on your shoulder, and begin power walking away from your parents’ house. A tall young woman wearing a military jacket and a green neck scarf comes up the other side of the street. She is leading a snuffling Irish wolfhound with a red bandana tied around his neck. Her shoulders are straight, her eyes are calm and sad. A wine bottle sticks out of her backpack. She ignores you so naturally and completely it does not seem rude. You call good morning to her anyway, and she stops her long striding, ducks her head to one side, and gives you an embarrassed smile. You paint quite a picture in your hand-me-downs, your mother’s bucket hat riding on your head. The tan slacks are pulled up too high and as you’ve been walking the seam has disappeared into the crack of your bum. You keenly remember caring about these things, but you are not sure how you could possibly attend to them now. Your bare feet are still surprisingly cool and dry inside your shoes. At the corner of 85th avenue, you turn North. 

The bridge is directly ahead of you, at the end of this busy street. You pass a brick school, a McDonald’s, a consignment clothing store, a Safeway, a United church with a sign advertising a daycare, three bars, two sushi restaurants, two coffee shops, an olive store, and a bike store. It is not even nine o’clock and all these places are full of young people in plain, shapeless clothing, their bare arms and legs decorated with hair and tattoos. They carry canvas bags full of groceries. They sit in the sun with paperback philosophy books. Though you are under the impression that smoking has gone out of style, that it is now universally condemned, they smoke, and drink from mason jars they produce from their backpacks and expensive-looking bottles of juice. They arrive and hug each other and leave. Bicycle locks hang from their jeans. Though they are all lonely, they all live together and have come from each other’s beds. They pay no attention to you. You reach the bridge without encounter or incident, sooner than you expect.

The sidewalk leading down to the pedestrian path is both tilting and narrow. Bicycles gasp past on either hand, but you don’t think to move to the right side of the path. You angle your feet against the concrete and shuffle down holding your arms out from your sides. You are already getting a blister on the top of your toe. And the sun is already hot. You don’t remember whether you have ever crossed this bridge on foot until you are well out over the river. But of course you have.

Your highschool boyfriend certainly photographed you standing in the middle of the path, as you are now, the bridge streaming back behind you like a cape. You got used to having your picture taken; you got to like it, even though no part of the exercise seemed to be about you. To your mother’s horror, your boyfriend was Chinese. He was a year older than you, in pre-med, and his camera was a Leica and expensive. He liked your big German nose, your dark eyebrows. On the bridge with him you wore your white graduation dress and tennis shoes, and carried your pumps. The two of you had decided it would be nice to walk across the bridge to the legislature grounds where everyone else in your class was going to stand in the fountains to have their photos taken. He thought the bridge was classier. Really, you just wanted to walk across it holding his hand. He was your first boyfriend that was safe. He pursued you; it seemed you hardly needed to do anything. For your birthday he gave you a watch your father couldn’t afford. It was a man’s watch like Asian women wore, with a big white face and a strap made of linked gold plates. You wanted to like it, but it was heavy on your wrist when you played the piano. You felt like your mother was looking at you every time you lifted your hand. You felt like your clothes looked cheap. You thought he would be offended if he saw you and you weren’t wearing it. So you returned the watch, playing sweet, saying it was too extravagant and it made you uncomfortable, and broke up with him two weeks later. You felt like your independent, wholesome self again. You went back to dating boys who needed your help. 

Both you and Carol were attracted to wracked, tortured, and defeated men, and you were attracted to men who romantically tortured and defeated you. In grade nine, Carol got a pair of white go-go boots to impress her boyfriend. He told her that legs were almost too fat to pull off white boots. He put his arm around her shoulders. He would tell her if it got past a certain point. Carol spent the next two and a half years fasting, as she called it, for weeks at a time. Eventually, weak and irritable, she would be driven into the kitchen late at night to make and eat two peanut butter sandwiches on rye bread and drink three glasses of milk. She would be revived immediately afterwards, and go back to eating five meals a day. Sometimes she broke up with her boyfriend after the peanut butter sandwiches, over the phone, then a few days later they would get back together. Once, you were so angry with her for being such an idiot, you threw a full hot cup of coffee at her and she had to shower and change before she could go to school. And all of Carol’s boyfriends were like that, until she came back from India. 

The boy you date right before the aspiring doctor photographer, you meet at youth group. Your parents don’t like him either, but in a way they can’t blame you: they themselves have recently taken in a pregnant fifteen year old. She hates them, and you. You try and mostly succeed in loving her until after she gives birth, when you start catching her making the baby drunk on gripe water. You sneak into her room while she’s at a doctor’s appointment with your mother and empty the bottle down the drain. Less than a month later, the girl runs away. In the meantime, you start dating Shane. He lives in a group home. He is on parole. The pastor drives him to church every Wednesday night and urges him to sit near the front of the room. He always wears a frayed, shiny blue blazer that is too big for him in the shoulders, though he is tall and beefy, with short blonde hair and a thick neck, almost hulking. He has hard eyes and an ecstatic smile. He doesn’t know any of the songs. By now you are leading the worship service before Bible study, standing on a carpeted stage in the sanctuary with a tambourine. Your voice is still thin and somehow prissy, but your memory is good and your pitch perfect. You love leading everyone in singing. The boy who sits on stage with you, hunched over a guitar, looks at you through his long hair. You are only politely interested in him. Shane stares at you, mocking, disbelieving as you close your eyes and raise your free in the air. You hold it there, pushing your palm out towards him in ecstasy and emphasis. At the end of the worship service, the pastor, impressed, asks you to offer the closing prayer. Within three weeks you and Shane are going out. He takes you bowling twice in a row; the second time he says he’s forgotten his wallet. His friends treat you with a kind of dogged reverence, except when they’re drunk and they laugh at you, at how high your necklines are. None of your friends get drunk, though lots of people in your class do. Shane is surprised that you are surprised that he also gets high. In fact, he is a drug dealer. He sells weed and acid. He doesn’t see anything wrong in the drugs themselves, but he knows that he’s gambling a lot on the rest of it. He doesn’t have time for breaking into houses and convenience stores, roughing people up anymore. He doesn’t want to get charged again but he is philosophical about the possibility. You have long, pleading conversations that end with Shane’s head despairing in his hands. And your life with your parents in your church seems increasingly clean and desirable, and increasingly naive. The longer Shane dates you, the more ludicrous it seems that though you will pray for him, though you will invite him to suppers of cabbage rolls and spaghetti at your mother’s table and share your Christian pop records with him, you will not redeem him by sleeping with him. He pressures you. You start feeling anxious and sick; you’ve decided to break up with him when your father finds out Shane is still selling drugs. After supper he shoos Carol and your mother out of the dining room, pulls the sliding door shut, and asks you why you’ve been spending time with this boy. Your father is almost in tears. Explaining yourself, you make it impossible to stop seeing Shane now, though your father forbids it. After he is arrested again, you even visit him once in jail, a brick building on the edge of China town. You used to think it was a vacant school. It both wounds and inflates your pride when, Shane locked up, such a clean-cut boy starts calling you.

You have left the bridge, downtown, and China town behind. You are walking along an unfamiliar street. There is a church, on one side or another, every half-block. Where you should have turned West you have been taking yourself East. Now you are walking purposefully through heaps of trash that buzz and shift on the hot sidewalk. Ahead of you, there is a boy on the hot sidewalk, convulsing. He looks something like a break dancer, the way he propels his whole body around with his scrambling feet. A man steering a woman’s bike with one casual hand on the handlebars, in the same manner as the hand of a young lawyer on the steering wheel of a Porsche, edges past you. A garbage bag full of bottles and cans is slung over his shoulder. He drops off the curb to ride around the boy, whom you can now see is drooling thick streams that have been flung in webs over his face. He’s probably Aaron’s age; he has a feathery beard on the end of his chin. Aaron didn’t talk to you or David about starting to shave, but he must have started. You step off the sidewalk and go around him. Only one or two of the nine or ten people on the street are looking at the seizing boy. On the steps of the church you are passing, a woman in her forties is sitting, crying and screaming and cursing someone. She is tall, with short, professionally-coloured hair, long legs, bracelets, earrings, and a big belly. She is not talking into a phone. She is hoarse with rage, but unselfconscious about pausing mid-cry to light a cigarette. She picks up where she left off. She says she won’t be made a fool of, that you can go fuck yourself, that you’re a fucking liar and she’s sick of it. At intervals she lifts up her shirt to scratch her stomach. She sees you and asks what day it is, if the Thursday lunch at the church is over yet. Politely, you ask her which church. She looks at you for a moment, then she sucks mucus into her mouth, spits, and starts to laugh. Across the street, a couple, hanging on each other with a sleeping bag draped over their shoulders, stops and turns. The girl is wearing pink sweatpants and knee-high boots with a spike heel. She puts one hand on her hip and the sleeping bag falls off.

You are scandalized. You had almost forgotten about your purse. You turn left, which you think is West. It is. There’s another church, First Baptist, which looks newer than the churches behind you. You were married in a First Baptist church, in Red Deer. The memory is so beautiful and alien that you still find it comforting. Your walk down the aisle, trembling and shining like a drop of water hanging from a faucet, is a well-worn track. 

David’s father and brother didn’t come to the wedding. On your way to the ceremony in your newly acquired blue VW bug, you and David stopped at his parents’ large brick house so his father could see your dress. It was the first time you met him. Bedridden since David was twelve, David’s father came downstairs in a motorized chair that went up and down on a track. David’s mother belted him in at the top and followed him down. He was a heavy man with thick, wavy white hair and arthritic hands bent almost ninety degrees sideways at each knuckle. David was embarrassed either of or in front of him; he said as little as possible. You all took a picture in the entranceway. David’s father told you your dress was very pretty and you left for the church where he was a member. Carol and your best friend Doris were already there, steaming their pale pink bridesmaid suits in a Sunday school room in the basement. Carol was pacing the floor in her pantyhose, eating a Big Mac, composing her speech in her head. You were worried about the decorations in the hall. Later you would ask David about them, and he would admit he didn’t notice the white streamers and white paper bells you were concerned would be too much. You put them up on Friday afternoon, before you had to pick up David from the airport.

Almost your entire romance had been conducted with David in Vancouver. You met in September, at a university library book sale in the Butterdome. One of your friends was manning a table. He stepped out for lunch, you slid into his folding chair, and when David came looking for a friend—he knew him too—you were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. David had never had a serious girlfriend. He liked your full lips, the way your eyes squeezed into crescents when you smiled, your beautiful cursive (writing down your name and address on a promotional U of A bookmark), your straight white teeth. He sent flowers to your apartment the next night and a week later wrote in his journal that God had answered his prayers for a wife. He made plans to return to Vancouver. The first time he was in your apartment, waiting while you filled all the dirty dishes in the sink with water and put on your lipstick, the phone rang. It was one of a couple other men you’d been seeing. Bravely, he asked if you were there. David said you were not. The man didn’t call again. When they were little, Leah and Rosemary found high drama in this story. They liked to reenact it, whoever was being David yelling into the phone and then slamming the receiver down and whisking an imaginary you into her little arms. And at the time you were impressed by it. Were you scared? This was one of the nights on which you and I began to separate. You didn’t even know that all you were depended on our cleaving together, but with a hundred episodes like this, we easily wrenched ourselves apart. I became at times your  absent observer. But at your wedding, the procedure was very much incomplete. David went back to Vancouver at the end of September and you wrote letters and talked to him on the phone. Do you know where those letters are? You might like to read them again. While you were in Edmonton, working at a Cotton Ginny, going to auditions, singing solos in choir, David was working in a key cutting store, praying up to three hours a day, and finishing his master’s degree. 

He was about to turn thirty. He had spent his twenties in school, first for illustration, then in library science. He had bounced between Red Deer, Edmonton, and Vancouver, going to Europe once—England, and Spain where he ran with the bulls. In all those years, he hadn’t belonged to  a church. He had prayed, in agony, in many cathedrals. He had read Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, Saint Augustine. Returning to Vancouver in the spring before he met you, he joined a house church run by some seminary student friends. His new congregation thrilled him. They were serious, intellectual, and ascetic about their faith; the mood at services was a cross between the fervors of monasticism and Marxism. It was nothing like his parents’ church, with its board members, its prosperity, its female members’ Sunday hats. When he was a child his father used to sit in the car on Sunday mornings, honking the horn while his mother got three children ready for church. It was after joining the house church that he started writing in a journal and praying for, among other things, a wife. 

David’s life up to this point had been both rebellious and insipid. Now he was anxious to let God guide his every action—his simplest behaviours and decisions. He wrote you letters, fasted, and prayed. For your part, you were charmed and excited by the seriousness of this man who wrote to you three times a week and called you on the phone after his service every Saturday night. Your own upbringing, proper, materially comfortable, the ongoing effort of your parents to realize a dream of prosperous security, a new Canadian family heritage, was unsatisfying to you. You dreamed about a warmer, more humid, more adventurous life: a pack of kids to breastfeed, a yogurt maker, Birkenstock sandals, honest poverty, a van. You had a vague image of yourself practicing scales with your new baby held snugly in a sling. You could teach piano and voice. It would be better than working in the mall. The music they played was so dreadful, you went out on your lunch break one day and bought a Bing Crosby tape to play in your own store. 

When you came to visit David at Christmas, you felt that here was a possible escape from posturing and upward mobility, the pressure of a career your father would recognize. David didn’t have a car, so you cabbed from the airport. You offered to sleep on the couch in his apartment. You hadn’t explicitly talked about it, and you couldn’t afford to spend four nights in a hotel. He offered you the bed. Privately, you thought there could be worse things than the two of you sleeping in the same bed. Leah was so mad when she found out you weren’t a virgin when you got married. David didn’t have an extra set of sheets to make up a proper bed on the couch anyway. You weren’t intending to sleep with him; you didn’t think he wanted it. The purity of this relationship, after some of the other you’d had, was an unexpected, unasked-for, but accepted gift. Neither of you knew who to blame for the sex you had on the first night, and the second, and the fourth. 

The third night was, he told you, the third Sunday in Advent. He had candles to light, two purple and one pink in a wreath made of hot-glued pinecones on his dinette table. And he had gifts for you. (You had been wondering when to take your gifts for him—a cabled sweater and a copy of The Snow Queen—out of your suitcase. When he opened them he was very pleased with the sweater. He laughed awkwardly when he unwrapped the picture book. But he didn’t open his gifts until after you had yours.) You had to wait in the galley kitchen while he set something up, then he took your hand, told you to close your eyes, and led you to it. The first gift was a creche with figures simply and ingeniously constructed out of coloured paper, faceless in the style of folk art, set up on the mantle above the boarded-up fireplace. A star made of yellow, white, and gold paper was tacked to the wall above it. It was hard to believe a man had made this for you. Your father bought you gifts. The things your aunts made were crocheted afghans with obscene colour combinations and slippers knitted in acrylic yarn. You took David’s face in your hands and kissed him. The second gift was a book of Christmas carols illustrated in a Victorian style, with all the verses printed, and piano music, like a hymnal, as well. All the old English and pagan and Scandinavian carols you learned for Christmas concerts at the conservatory. He had written a dedication and the date on the first page. He had said there were three gifts and you were what the third one was, though your head was full of the first tow and you were holding the carol book, when he took a small printed tin from under the couch. He gave it to you to open. You fumbled with it—you were sill holding the book against your chest—but by putting your foot up on the coffee table and bracing the tin against your thigh, you were able to get the lid off. David knelt down on the carpet in front of you and took the tin back. He plucked out a gold ring with square diamond.

A few minutes later, you were rummaging in your suitcase for the bottle of German Christmas wine you brought with you. A day later you flew back to Edmonton, engaged. Your parents had never met David, yet when you told them, you were so determined your father quickly saw that since it was impossible to thwart you, it was his duty to back you. Your mother was glad David was neither a drug dealer nor Chinese nor a front-line social worker like one of your other boyfriends. She was worried that if she protested your engagement to a man with whom you had spent less than one month in the same city, your feelings and your independence would be badly hurt. (Now that you had found a nice white boy these things would have to be nurtured, to a point.) Your father, weighed on by knowledge of his position, despite your disregard for propriety, tact, and due procedure, said he would pay for the wedding. You were in charge of the honeymoon and your dress, but he paid for everything else. He took out a second mortgage on his rental property. You and David set a date for early March. 

Even if no one wants to talk about it, you and David, three months ago, had your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. 

Your first fight, through letters and then over the phone, was about where the wedding would be. You wanted to get married in a quaint, steepled Lutheran church in Yorkton, where your favourite aunt had gotten married and your Oma still attended. David said his mother and sister would never come out for it. As far as he was concerned, the only viable option was his parents’ Baptist church in Red Deer. You finally agreed. Planning the wedding, you got so stressed out that you lost ten pounds. In February you decided to start going to a tanning salon in the mall so that you would look healthy in your white dress. You’d never been in a tanning bed before. You didn’t know you were supposed to wear underwear, and increase your sessions gradually. The first time you went, you got a burn. The girls at the store laughed about it for a week, and slapped your butt whenever they passed you. And then, before you’d even really changed colour, it was March and you were putting up white streamers and paper bells, rushing more than you wanted to because you had to drive back to Edmonton to pick up David and his pastor from the airport. You hadn’t seen him since Christmas, but David didn’t want to kiss you in front of him. That night David and the pastor stayed at one hotel, and you and Carol stayed at another. You spent most of the evening in the bathroom, applying mud masks, shaving your legs When you woke up in the morning under the thin, cigarette-burned blanket in the discount hotel room, it did not feel real. There was nothing familiar to place this day, in the context of the rest of your life, as your wedding day. Carol held you with your dress. It took up so much space, and seemed to sway and move forward with its own momentum, as if it were wearing you. The two of you wrestled it into your car, and you went to pick up David. You separated again the church parking lot; he wasn’t supposed to see you yet. David went in to the deacon’s office to conference with his best man—the friend from the booksale—and the pastor from Vancouver, who performed the wedding. 

Did you want him to? His voice was nasal and American. He and David stood at the front of the church while your father sombrely walked you down one of the modern sanctuary’s two aisles. David’s face was shining. His face looked very young, and like your father he had tears in his eyes. Surprised by the arrival of your own expected happiness, you blushed and warmed under your veil. David didn’t quite wait for you to reach him; he stepped out to the single stair you had to climb and helped you up, so that when you let go of your father’s hand, the two of you were standing three inches above him. Your father nodded to David and went to his front-pew seat. Your mother was there, in a turquoise brocade dress with a corsage pinned to it. Your bouquets were made of roses, freesia, and baby’s breath. You’d arranged them yourself and tied them with white ribbons. Carol adjusted your train. When David’s pastor got to the line in the marriage service that said the wife must respect her husband, he elongated his e’s. The wife must reeeespect her husband. He sounded like an auctioneer. You almost laughed. While you were still standing up there, only waiting to sign the marriage certificate and say your vows, your cousin Kathleen came to the lectern to sing a solo. She was no singer like you. The song she had chosen was not classical or traditional. It was called I Cherish the Treasure, and while she was singing it, a look of consternation on her face, her voice warbled until she sounded like she was performing underwater. David winced. Carol kept her eyes fastened kindly on Kathleen. Your older relatives in the pews—your father’s brothers and sisters—almost all of them came—were rapt. You knew the singing was not good, but you were happy and happy that it didn’t bother you. Saying your vows, you had never felt so solid, so surely right. If everything had been touch and go, to this point, now, you felt, you had something. And you had signed a paper, which seemed to like a protection against dissolution, a way for your marriage at least to be recognized, and to take on the real substantial life that you wanted for your singing career. 

At the reception, there were not enough seats and your great aunts stood around on their varicose veins with their styrofoam plates. You didn’t even notice. Your father was embarrassed. You didn’t like white cake, so you had ordered black forest sheet cakes instead. The money you received as wedding gifts almost exactly covered your honeymoon—three days in Jasper. Before you left, someone took a photo of you standing on the steps of the church. It is still in your wedding album. You look happy, but serious; you are standing alone. No husband, no baby, no invisible mass, no debt, no dirty dishes, no children’s birthday party crowds the frame. You have had so little space. 

Now the whole city lies loose and huge around you. You turn onto a main drag lined by Caribbean restaurants and key-cutting stores. You are indignant that so many streets should feel unfamiliar in this city you’ve lived in most your life. This street—this publicity of life; these young men in new yellow work boots and cargo pants, gesticulating with litre-sized slurpee cups; these women carrying—you stop and turn around to look—their groceries on their heads; these girls with home-dyed dull black hair, huddled, secure in their boyfriends’ clothes, vaping mint-grape steam; this man sitting on the curb removing his shoe, proclaiming O death where is your victory, O death where is your sting (he is wearing purple latex gloves)—must be the city your children are becoming familiar with now, inheriting. The two-parent household is no longer their safe haven. It is no longer yours, either. For the first time since leaving your parents’ house this morning, you falter. You feel old. You have a strong sense of being an imposter in this, your abandoned children’s city. You want to go home.

It is close to noon now, no longer just promising-hot, but hot. Your inner thighs and the backs of your knees are slippery with sweat, and chafing against the fabric of your dress pants. Your feet are very painful. By concentrating on the pain, you have been able to travel through this frightening urban carnival without losing yourself entirely. It seems fitting that returning to your home after six months should be painful. You have already accepted it. It seems a small price to pay. You know you are not always a perfect mother; you are almost glad of the pain. As far as Josephine is concerned, she doesn’t have a mother. This knowledge sends you reeling, again, with the confusion and injustice. And you are sure you gave her—gave all of them—everything, because you now find yourself with nothing. If it wasn’t all funnelled to them, then where? You didn’t become an opera singer, not even a singing teacher. You raised your children. Somehow, your effort all dribbles away and they don’t receive any benefit. Josephine’s grades are terrible and still can’t use her right hand. She dangles it from her wrist like a hurt puppy. And she runs with a lopsided gallop. It has been three and a half years since she was in regular physiotherapy. David certainly isn’t taking here; he has his hands full trying to keep up with the dishes, and taking out the trash. And painting the bathroom. He took the baseboards off and painted one coat of primer over everything—the walls, the rose-sprigged ceramic tiles—eight years ago. It has been like that since, little nails sticking out of the wall where the baseboards used to be, a dust mask hooked by its dirty yellow elastic over one of the lightbulbs above the mirror. The house was in a horrifying condition when you left. In the meantime, David has found rotten food and feces in Calvin’s room. Carol told you. Calvin always barricades himself in there and he never sleeps with a sheet on his bed. The laundry for six children gets overwhelming. Leah and Rosemary used to play a game called Laundry Mountain. Eventually, you started paying them to fold it—one cent for each item and five cents for a pair of socks. Both of them hoarded unmatched socks in secret hiding places, raiding each other semi-regularly. It seemed less of a problem then.

You recognize that Tim Hortons. The red English letters, the brick building small, diminished in the sunlight. You aren’t lost at all; you are, once again, on your own map of the city. You were dressed very differently the last time you were here. In a filmy, many-layered purple dress to hide some of your postpartum body. You were wearing black pumps and driving a new Dodge Caravan. Aaron was just a few weeks old. Since David had just been ordained an Anglican priest, you had Aaron baptized, though you were still unsure what the role of infant baptism was; it made sense to you that baptism was for believers. You were baptized at age twelve, after nine months of special classes, and your immersion in the newly-installed water tank off to the side at the front of your church was meant to signal your mature commitment to a life of practical faith. It was the fulfillment of the prayer you had repeated after your mother at age five, asking Jesus to come into your heart. As you emerged from the water, the pastor’s wife handed you a beach towel, the pianist struck up  O Love How Deep How Broad How High, and the church received you with open arms. Aaron was baptized at the back of the sanctuary at St. Faith’s, over a stone font with water scooped up with a scalloped brass shell. He blinked and spluttered, but didn’t cry.   

You still aren’t sure what if anything was supposed to happen. You committed him to God’s care in this way and many others, starting the first time you held him. It does not seem to have worked. When Aaron was baptized, David said you should both submit to the Holy Spirit’s ability to work beyond your understanding. You didn’t want to perform faith experiments on your child. But David was already so worried he wasn’t fit to be a priest. 

After the service, Carol and her husband and their two kids and your uncle Gottlieb and your parents all met you at Tim Hortons for the kind of Sunday afternoon fast food experience that had been a weekly tradition throughout your childhood. You and David didn’t shop or go to restaurants on Sundays, as a rule, but it was a special occasion. The house was a mess. You still wanted Aaron’s baptism to be celebrated with your family. You thought it might give it a sense of weight and normalcy. David occupied himself with seven- and five-year old Leah and Rosemary, partly because they were hungry and therefore rambunctious, partly to avoid your father. Your father, expansive at his grandson’s baptism, thought he too had his doubts, wanted to everyone’s lunch. He said he could afford for everyone to have a chili bowl, a donut, and a drink. David snorted. You were relieved. You couldn’t afford to pay for eleven people to order chili and a donut and a drink. Leah was beside herself. Wide-eyed, clasping her little hands, almost sanctimonious, she asked you if she could really have root beer and dessert. It was true that you never let the girls order either of these things.

Why did she annoy you so much? Standing in line at Tim Hortons, holding a floppy Aaron, trying to corral the family group and keep Rosemary from climbing on the regulars (rigid elderly couples looking past each other while they chewed whatever combo they had a coupon for, and slurped their coffee; construction workers in boots caked white with mud, orange coveralls, and helmets covered with stickers: beer logos, the silhouettes of women, cartoon characters, cannabis leaves), Leah stood primly beside you, not helping but not making things worse. Things were quite bad. The actual event of Aaron’s baptism had not quelled your fears or uplifted you. Your husband was, at the moment, retreating from you and the baby, sitting at a table by the window looking at his hands while the rest of you waited in line. Your family’s presence at the church and now, here, was only serving to crowd and confuse the question, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere around your growing certainty that you had done the wrong thing. 

You go into the Tim Hortons to ask for a cup of tap water, they can’t refuse you plain tap water, and sit down. It’s air-conditioned and cool inside, which seems strange for a place that’s supposed to be a bakery. You can feel sweat evaporating like coffee steam off your skin. That smell of sugar, oil, and coffee still makes you feel sick. The cafe is, again, loud and jostling and full of people smiling insincerely. Heavily, you run into heat and smell of grass and exhaust outside, banging into one of the glass doors you slam your body against, that in fact you have to pull open. You needed space. Carol tried to help you in those early days after Aaron was born. Neither you nor David would admit that you were descending into a postpartum depression. It is difficult to look back and try to tell how much of it was hormone fluctuation, how much was the growing mass inside your head finally making itself felt. A kind of stubborn afterbirth, undiscovered, unhypothesized, and impossible to expel. Eventually it would have be dug out, excavated like a knife blade buried in a sick tree. But surely you did not throw a knife at yourself. 

You did blame the children, fairly or unfairly, for how squeezed, how compressed you felt. You certainly no longer stood alone on an empty stage. Leah had it all figured out. She stood so close to you, threatening to usurp you. You felt the classic violent urges toward your baby son. For months, you couldn’t unload the dishwasher for fear of even handling a knife, and whenever possible, you had David carry Aaron up stairs down which he could easily be thrown. But you sometimes wanted to thrash out and hit Leah too. After Aaron was born, in desperation, you took a book out of the library on helping older children cope with a new baby in the house. Leah, seven years old, free of responsibilities, free as a bird, got to it before you did. And when you tried, as the book suggested, to implement a weekly chore chart, complete with stickers and incentives, taped at a child’s-eye level to the door of the fridge, Leah laughed at you. Observing her sister, Rosemary wouldn’t go along with it either. But other times you loved Leah, even marvelled at her. She was smart. She read the parenting books because she loved power but also because she loved to read. She wrote, too. When she was five she emerged, glaring, from a time-out and told you she needed to know how to spell ‘mad.’ Later she showed you her poem, called “me when I am mad.” Like you, she sometimes lied to make better stories. Once on a date, before you met David, you kept the man you had just met going all evening about how you were a brain surgeon. 

As you continued not getting better, Leah used to try and scandalize her friends’ mothers by telling them exaggerated versions of conditions at home. After being dropped off at home one day, Mrs. Obeleski still in the doorway, Leah ran into the kitchen and screeched something about Rosemary taking off her underwear. The lack of control you had over her, as she kept on at the top of her voice, was enraging. When Mrs. Obeleski had offered you a tense laugh, and left, shutting the door behind her, you pushed Leah into the back entrance landing. You locked the kitchen door, leaving her to go outside (it was February) or down into the basement, where she would be afraid. Leah says you yelled at her through the door, yelling you were going to call Social Services and have them take her away. You don’t remember that. It would have been a relief, in a way. You didn’t know how long you could handle her. 

There was a reprieve when Aaron was one and you found out you were pregnant again. In exactly the opposite way you expected, this time your expanding belly felt like an increase in breathing room. You always loved being pregnant. Determined not to lose Leah and Rosemary entirely before the new baby came, you devised a plan to become imaginary pen-pals with each of the girls. Your letters to Leah you wrote as Rowena Rabbit, and to Rosemary as Blue Bear. Perhaps because she was too young, Rosemary didn’t usually write back, but after a cynical probation period, Leah entered fully into the spirit of the game. She wrote long, earnest, emotional, and often funny letters. There was no chance she wasn’t wise to Rowena’s secretary’s identity, but she even talked about her problems with you. On her ninth birthday you snuck into her bedroom while she was sleeping and left an entire package of Pull n Peel licorice and a birthday card with a watercolour painting of a rabbit-populated midnight picnic. For Leah, who always confidentially pressed a loonie into your hand the night she left a tooth under her pillow, in case the tooth fairy needed financing (Leah hated to be disappointed), the gift from Rowena seemed magical.

You have stayed in familiar territory; you are already walking into the block-long shadow of the Royal Alex now. Hannah was born here. It is the platonic ideal of a hospital—a series of massive pale brick boxes that people go into and do or don’t come out of. At the bus stop in front of it, exhausted-looking nurses in scrubs and Lululemon hoodies stare past you down the street down which the numbers 9 and 140 buses come. You can’t remember ever taking a city bus. Nevertheless, you feel a certain solidarity with these nurses. You too are inhumanly tired. The nurses here were kind to you, young and brisk and knowledgable after you gave birth to Hannah. 

Her second-trimester ultrasound showed an ominous calcification around her heart. The technician saw it immediately, though Hannah was squirming, and labeled it on a chart, noting it aloud, impartially in the tone of a dental hygienist speaking in code to a dentist though they are anticipating digging one of your molars out of your jaw. He was trying not to alarm you. He wouldn’t let you get up quite just yet and left you in the dark room, the jelly getting cold on your stomach. The technician came back, with a doctor, who told you that a heart calcification was a strong marker for Downs Syndrome. He assumed you would want to consult with David before you decided to terminate the pregnancy, but also assured you that it was entirely your choice. You were revolted, but you just smiled at the doctor and said you believed every child was a gift from God. You drove yourself home and didn’t get out of bed for two days. You could not stop thinking about your friend Shelley from the conservatory. She had moved to Edmonton after graduation and you had had your first pregnancies together. She didn’t get any warning. Cassiah was a Downs baby who required fourteen surgeries in her first three months. She couldn’t breastfeed and Shelley couldn’t find a formula she didn’t vomit up. Shelley called you in the middle of the night, beside herself, and while you held Leah to help her go back to sleep, Shelley said she wished Cassiah would die. 

But five months after that ultrasound, Hannah got a ten on the APGAR scale. She grew up to be your quietest child, withdrawn, prim, but in close company wry and hilarious, like an adolescent Agatha Christie. She tried to kill herself the same summer—last summer—Aaron did, but that only came out in January when she calmly explained that she had swallowed an economy-size bottle of aspirin, and it had made her sick to her stomach, but that was all. She had heard a high, thin ringing in her hears—to the social worker’s consternation, she described it as sounding like a choir of nuns—had been dizzy, had stumbled into the bathroom and thrown up, but that was all. She spread her hands, palms up. Nobody had asked her about it at the time. Carol asked you later  if you were seeing any parallels here, maybe to the weight loss competition, unnoticed by you at the time, between pre-teen Leah and Rosemary. Rosemary’s anorexia put her in the hospital and caused her hair to fall out; Leah’s bulimia was a bolt out of the blue when she said she needed you to come into a doctor’s appointment. She had been scared to tell you herself. But Leah had never been skinny. And both of the girls were so pretty. You didn’t understand it. You chalked it up to some fundamental difference in temperament. You and Carol never made any sick pact like that. 

But you knew you were partly to blame with Aaron. When you found him in his bathroom in the basement, his face flushed and swollen, his jew fro damp and blood-streaked, and blood on the floor, so much blood and such bright red and so shiny and liquid as to to short-circuit your already compromised brain and defy a rational response, you screamed, and what you screamed was that he should go ahead and kill himself. He looked at you and hurled his body against the shower wall. His head cracked against the tile. David hadn’t let you come to the hospital. 

Did you truly not understand why? You have since apologized to him, but Aaron refuses to accept your apologies. It hurts you. He is your first son. You prayed for him and God gave him to you. You suffered for him. And you were angry at him for endangering his own life in that way, making you responsible. As if you could have done anything to physically prevent a sixteen year old boy from harming himself or anyone else if he wanted to. Aaron was seven inches taller than you, last time you saw him, bursting out of his clothes from all the time he said he was spending in his high school’s windowless workout room, his nails painted, his neck thickening, his head massive with hair. He wore black t-shirts with words and images that seemed designed to portray Satanic and sexual perversions in grotesque, ad hoc communion; whatever was not true, whatever was not noble, whatever was not right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy. Think about such things. You can’t. Literally and figuratively, you cannot get your head around them, or the painful problem that is your son. Then, there was something in the way. Now there is a kind of neurological dry-gap where I live, the same feeling you had in your mouth after your wisdom teeth were removed when you were fourteen. You cried all evening and the next morning your sceptical mother drove you back to the dentist’s office. Dr. Kern packed your gums with clove paste, spicy, sweet, and numbing. The pain went away.

You had often wished that Aaron would go away. Even when he stayed late at school or went to the mall or wherever he went with his friends, his fear and rage infected the house. If he came home and came down the basement stairs to find you putting in a load of whites with hot water and bleach, he would lose it, lunging toward his pile of black laundry, accusing you of burning pink stains into it. The one time recently that David had started setting up to finish the seven year old paint job in the bathroom, Aaron had roared when he saw the paint cans and pleaded with David to carry them out of the house. A few weeks later he asked David to put a lock on his cupboard where he kept the paints for painting the little monster figurines he collected and used to paint. David, who didn’t have a spare lock and was uncomfortable in hardware stores, said maybe. The last time you stood briefly in the doorway of Aaron’s room, you vaguely noticed that he had jammed a rolled-up magazine like a bolt through both of the cupboard handles. His hands, when he got up to shut the door in your face, were red and rough. He ate constantly, but never at the dinner table. He sat in front of his empty plate, jiggling his leg.

You cannot remember when dinner became so hard. When Leah and Rosemary were little, you did make your own yogurt, though you were the only on who ate it, and breadmaker bread with Red River cereal added to it for fibre. On Saturday mornings you made braided challah (the girls each made their own twisted knot, or an attempt at an initial), and on Saturday afternoons you roasted a chicken that you served later on the blue and gold china that had been the only thing on your wedding registry. Leah and Rosemary laboriously folded the paper napkins into butterflies, which they speared onto each fork, and you got your votive candles from beside the bathtub and set them in the centre of the kitchen table. The girls usually had a bath right before supper on Saturdays, and they would wriggle in their places like clean, excited fish, their hair wetting the shoulders of their pajama tops. It was very close to what you wanted, in some ways even more precious because every week it was a challenge.

Aaron would have eaten with the family if you have continued to rise to the challenge, if Saturday dinners he could remember were like that. Instead, grocery shopping became increasingly complicated. You were too anxious to spend a large amount at one time, so you took to buying just enough for the next meal. A couple of frozen pizzas that sat neat and contained on the kitchen counter, with none of the frilly, sprawling extravagance of vegetables to be peeled, sacks of rice, bloody, tacky raw meat, ingredients. In-greedy-ents. Even so, you often had to call David at work from the check-out, your card declined, asking him to transfer money from the other account. Do you even know how much money he earns, what your food budget actually was? Before she disappeared, you used to borrow grocery money from Rosemary, who was careful as the banker in Monopoly. Aaron hated you for all of that. 

When he went into the hospital—you are past it now, and it feels you walking away from him again, helpless, unwilling, rejected, in a panic, while he sleeps in a room with plexiglass walls, in the ward with the girl who swallowed a whole bottle of bleach. You might be surprised to know he wasn’t bothered by her. He asked her gentle questions. They became friends. You remember. Miraculously you are, this minute, this June day, almost a year later, walking towards him instead. You are quite far North now. Only twenty blocks to the house. You have a last card to play, if only Aaron and the little kids will listen. You were very sick when he cut open his arms, when you said those things, and later when he tried to electrocute himself with a metal zipper, and later, when he jumped out in front of a car. Your optic nerve was squeezed along with everything else. You could not see him to love him. You have always loved him. When Aaron went into the hospital, Carol and your parents, worried and confused by you for years, already, leapt into high gear. The situation, as they saw it, had cracked open like a dropped egg, and they were eager to help clean up. They called Aaron’s school social worker, demanding the answers you couldn’t give them. When the social worker found out that Aaron was still trying to kill himself, she opened the first family file. Two case workers came to the house one evening on only twenty minutes’ notice and Josephine went berserk. Convinced they were going to take her away, she hid in her closet, which did nothing for the general impression social services got. After interviewing everybody (you defended your family passionately, David said as little as possible), they said they were going to investigate household support options. In the meantime, they were advising the children’s psych ward at the Royal Alex not to release Aaron to go back, as long as you were living there. As if that was in question. 

Leah got to swoop in and take Aaron to stay in her basement suite with the cold, atheistic, mildly autistic man she called her husband, though they were not legally married. They put their scissors, kitchen knives, and razor blades in the garage. Aaron stayed there for three days and then Leah called the social worker and said she didn’t think she could do it anymore, her husband was leaving her to deal with her brother by herself, staying away until late every night, she had gotten drunk while Aaron slept. The social worker, surprised that a twenty-two year old without a car was incapable of rehabilitating her suicidal brother, lapsed in her resolve to keep Aaron away from you, and he came home. But the wedge was in, and they had all gotten the idea you were the one who had to leave.

You are closer to the house now than you’ve been since January. You feel good. You stand out less on the North side; it is cool in this underpass. You stop walking. You would like to sit down, but pools of water, broken bottles, soggy leaves and condoms flood the sidewalk. Walking up and into the sun again, you become aware of your feet. They are like pulpy balloons almost bursting under your weight. Under your stubble, your scalp shines with sweat and a fault line appears in the light, a thin, hot, and needling track pain activated by the sun to remind you of your compromised brain casing, as if you are a dropped doll. One of the ones with the realistic flopping heft and weight, the eyes with stiff lashes that sweep open, the cry. Compelled as you are by this image, you are shocked by how fragile you feel. You wonder whether you are going to faint. You would prefer to do it a few blocks closer to the house; you don’t have much confidence in these teenagers who are riding trick bikes are if they were full-sized cruisers, skate shoes scraping the asphalt, butt cracks leering out their tight jeans, cigarettes held aloft. The women in hijabs pushing strollers dragging with plastic grocery bags, would help you. They are used to dealing with difficult situations all out of proportion; the Superstore where they go shopping is still fifteen blocks away. It is the same one you used to frequent, sometimes three times a day. Older men and women wearing Eskimos jerseys and hoodies with union logos and the names of adult rec league teams stalk around the women. They have variously come from the library, the liquor store, the registry office, and the bingo hall. Every one of them would probably call 911, though you can’t be sure.

It’s strange, how shabby Calder, where you are now, next to Wellington, your neighbourhood, feels after only six months at your parents’ house in the South. The adults you pass look either sleepy or mildly shocked. The black leather of the women’s purses is cracked, the nylon of the men’s backpacks frayed. There is a sleeping anger born of material insecurity, lack of personal time, subpar media, processed food, and overwork. Even if, on the South side, you feel uneasy in the face of modern educated youth, there is no chance there that your sudden collapse would trigger a sense of personal outrage, of the injustice of having to care for a stranger abandoned by the incompetent social system that has abandoned you. Only the North side children are animated. Their clothing is all cheap but brand-new, and they carry bottles of Sprite and root beer that they can barely fit their small hands around. 

From here until you reach your house, you will traverse an uneasy gradient from the commercial strip in Calder, patronized by tradespeople on unemployment, children left to their devices, and those pulling double shifts as nurses, cab drivers, substitute teachers, drive-through attendants, to the quiet, well-kept bungalows in the residential section of Wellington, where the timid whitebread children of the previous generation’s middle class—nurses, teachers, and cab drivers—only leave to get into their parents’ cars and travel to sports, schools, and daycares in other parts of the city. You would prefer to faint there. You have five hundred dollars in your purse. Already you are passing the weedy, pink and green row houses, a bonafide American-style housing project fifteen years in construction. A NOW RENTING banner hangs on an orange netting fence, partially obscuring Tyvek-wrapped buildings surrounded by rutted mud. Across the street is the strip mall with the Shop Easy that always smelled of oxidized ground beef, the bakery where Leah and Rosemary used to buy cinnamon knots that they competed with each other not to eat. Coke slurpees, they had an implicit agreement, didn’t count. 

Though you guess it’s much later, it is three o’clock. Once in the sky, the solstice sun can stay up, unmoving, for years, until it finally drops dark. You’re not wearing a watch; you have forgotten your phone; it is as if you have no convenient way of telling time. 

The strip mall marks the boundaries of what you always considered your neighbourhood. The last time you were here on foot, you had taken one of your fleeing walks. It was early evening, early September. The kids had just finished their first week back at school and they were still treating their new planners and rolls of white-out tape in coloured plastic cartridges with pleasure and reverence. When had you last had beautiful new consumables, unsharpened pencils, a new lipstick? The air was cool and dry and smoky on the back on your sweaty neck, and the drugstore was lit up, a destination. You went inside and stole a package of thank-you cards with a series of Monet’s waterlilies on them. You just took them off the wire rack and slipped them into your purse. The middle-aged security guard had a square grey beard and burgundy turban. He watched you progress through the tiled image on his monitor and then came jogging out after you, dumbfounded, almost excited to learn what the forty-nine year old white woman was doing stealing three dollars’ worth of stationery from the Calder drugstore. You could not explain to his satisfaction. You only felt sad, and angry, as he took the cards from your hands and suggested you go home. 

But the last time you saw this street—the drugstore, yes, the house with the yard a field of brown-eyes susans, the Catholic junior high school, the bungalow with the pink stucco turret built over the livingroom—you were in your father’s car. He was driving you away from what the social workers had called a family conference. Your mother was in the back seat. It was early evening, early January. It was dark as the middle of the night. Your father drove as he never drove, accelerating up to stop signs, jerking the steering wheel. His gardener’s tan face was almost white. He was trying to get you to explain your financial situation. You were screaming at him. 

You had walked in, unwilling, after David, your parents, and all of the children except Rosemary were already gathered in the livingroom, tense, miserable, and keen, two female social workers sitting at your dining table, presiding. Snide, still invulnerable, you asked what this was. You noticed that Leah had managed to be there even though she hadn’t come for Christmas. The social workers were both ludicrously young and seemed to know that they had been trained to whisk children out of homes where they were being beaten, not to deal with this kind of privileged, invisible dysfunction. One of them ran her fingers along the waistband of her jeans to make sure her shirt was tucked in in the back. The other one, solemn and yet somehow giddy, opened a folder on her lap. She said you had all gathered there that night so that some voices that weren’t being heard could be heard. She asked if anyone would like to start. Josephine, who was sitting alone, buried her face in a pillow. Into the silence, you asked it anyone minded if you sat down, and when the awkward social worker said of course not, you sat down on your piano bench. It was handmade, maple wood, and the seat lifted up so you could store sheet music inside. David gave it to you when you turned thirty. 

The solemn social worker turned to David and asked him if she could repeat some of the statements he had made to her earlier. He thought the household’s many conflicts all stemmed from you, he was tired, he wanted you out of the house. She asked if he knew what the implications of his statement were, for you, for the children. David said that if it wasn’t for the children he wouldn’t be here, would he? Josephine lifted her face from the couch. She had picked up on the new controlling rhetoric within which she was both compelled and enabled to say things she had not thought to say. Her voice had not been heard. She wanted you to leave, too. Staticky strands of blonde hair stuck to her face, which you stared at. Josephine whirled to the social workers. She was so tired of being tired all the time. She was tired because they never did anything, just lay around all the time, and people got in fights, and you were always getting mad at her. 

Both of the social workers began asking the same question. You yelled at her and locked her in her room, Josephine said. Once at supper she was singing a song from a movie and you threatened to shoot her if she didn’t shut up. The social workers were startled, though the conclusion they moved to missed the point. You have never even held a gun. Leah, aware of this, became aware of the social workers’ impression and still it seemed important for her to confirm what Josephine was saying. You did say it, and Leah heard you.

They went around the room. Leah and Aaron wanted you to leave. Cal ran blindly and heavily down the hall. The social worker asked Josephine if the things she said before meant she thought it would be better if you didn’t live at home. Josephine said yes. Your mother, sitting with your father closes to the door, her coat still on as if to protect her from the pain inflicted on you, made a shocked sound like a hiccup. Hannah chose this moment to calmly relate the details of the last summer’s suicide attempt. The social worker turned to David. His head and arms hung down like an abused gorilla’s. His thick, wavy hair, almost entirely grey now, hung down in despairing, prophetic curtains. He was growing it out, and growing his beard, to assert his independence, because you didn’t like it. He raised his head. He looked past you. You could never have imagined David saying that you needed to leave.

Within ten minutes you had been forced out. Gently and definitively, the social workers stood and asked you to go pack a bag and leave, for the time being, until the source of your family’s conflict became more clear. Could you go to your parents’ home, was that a safe place for you? Would your parents take you there? You could and they grimly would, but you didn’t understand how it was possible. You said you were going for a walk and ran out of your home and down the street, passing from the opposite direction the playground you are now passing. When you came back, your parents were standing in the entryway and your suitcase was on the front steps, where you are standing now. It is summer solstice and it is four-thirty in the afternoon. 

You are brave and stupid to come back. Though your sense of rightness and home, your love for your children (and you still love David too, though it is more painful and you do not expect him to be here this afternoon) can leap across the gap, the aching dry gap, in your brain, their love for you still butts up against the tumour. The size of a toddler’s fist, it was discovered in February and three days later removed with an emergency surgery. They cut a flap in the back of your skull and cut away all they could; it was growing on the base of your brain. Your neurosurgeon said it could not possibly have affected your reasoning capabilities or your personality. What about your ability to wash a sink full of dishes or install a CD-rom? He guessed it had been slowly growing for at least twenty years.

It had been growing for twenty-six years.When you came back to Edmonton with your diploma from the conservatory, you brought your bike with you. That summer, riding home from choir practice, you hit a trailer hitch embedded in the asphalt of a parking lot. You went flying, landing on your shoulder, hitting your head, bruising your brain. The tumour started growing then, forming like a cloud around a dust mote, a crystal around an impurity in the compound. Slowly, it began pushing me out. But you thought you only had a mild concussion. Within a few weeks, you were back on your bike. In September you met David and two years later, you already had Leah. By the time Aaron was born, it had begun interfering, scrambling your signals, allotting you less and less space to think. And less space to love.

You want to try and apologize now. 

Josephine sees you and screams from inside the house. She appears from above the waist in the window for a moment, standing on the couch, tangled in the curtains like a Greek senator in a toga. You are standing on the front steps of your home, holding a box of a dozen donuts from Tim Hortons. You hear a small body crash into the door from the other side. The dead bolt clacks into place. Inside, Aaron is pounding up the stairs from his bedroom in the basement. Josephine is jumping up and down, already hysterical, and holding out the phone for Aaron to grab as soon as he clears the top stair. Cal is crying on the bed no has ever made. You are standing there, tremulous and exhausted. Your pink t-shirt is wet with perspiration. At the first sight of Josephine, you start to cry. She can’t balance on the on the couch cushions for long; her stiff, slow left side causes her to lose her balance, and topple rather than jump down to get her brother, her blonde hair flying back from her face. It looks like it hasn’t been brushed in a week. She looks stricken when she sees you. 

Aaron calls David first, then the police. They are not giving you a chance; they don’t understand. You have five hundred dollars for them. You haven’t even thought about using that money yourself. As soon as you got it from your father, it was theirs. And you still have the key to this door that has been closed against you, if only you have the guts to use it. Shifting the box of donuts to one arm, you open your purse. The key is there, on the brass peanut keyring with the car key for the car you and David bought together, that he has driven to work today. You fit the key into the lock. Inside, Josephine shrieks again. Unseen by you, Cal’s face appears in his bedroom window at the front right corner of the house. You open the door. Hannah and Josephine are hiding behind Aaron, who is even bigger than you remember. He looks like a large,  majestic, patriarchal creature, an elk about to be plowed down by a semi truck. Involuntarily, you open your arms to him, box of donuts and all, trying to draw the line between this creature and your betrayed little son. He is on the phone. He tells the police you are in the house, his voice rising and almost cracking. 

A path in your brain you cannot consciously follow me down veers off, protecting you, and you turn around and step back through the door. You walk down the three steps, and set the box of donuts on the top step where they will melt and sweat in the sun until Aaron carries them to the garbage cans in the alley so that David and the other kids won’t have to deal with them. When you are halfway down the sidewalk, Hannah lunges around Aaron land slams the front door. 

The bachelor’s buttons and peonies you planted in the flower beds have run wild, and the morning glory vine has not been trained back on to the trellis. You are too tired to hook the new tendrils on. You move away down the street and leave them sprawling. Your feet throb and your arms feel both dead and buoyant, no longer carrying anything. You were so hopeful about the house when you and David bought it. The downpayment was a gift from David’s parents after they heard that you were planning to rent again. David squirmed, but you felt openheartedly grateful. He was so nervous about choosing the right place. You were both proud and embarrassed that he brought a level and some kind of “sonic” device for checking a foundation for cracks with him to every showing, telling the realtor that he’d heard one prospective neighbourhood was built on a swamp, another on a potentially problematic incline. For months after you moved in, you’d look out the window and see him across the street with a sheet of looseleaf, squinting over the top edge, trying to determine whether a corner of the house had sunk. His mother never came to visit; his father died soon after you bought the house.

You did not know what to expect at the funeral. David, who had not spoken to his older brother since he was nineteen, pretended not to know what you were asking about in the car on the way to Red Deer, early on a Saturday morning. The viewing was at eleven o’clock. You didn’t have Josephine yet; the other kids cooperated with your hustling them into the funeral home while David went in to the viewing room ahead of you. You all looked a bit oblivious, in new clothes from the Sears outlet store while David’s extended family sat quietly in folding chairs and inherited pearls, rising to offer stiff handshakes. You walked in to see David shaking his brother’s hand, as if beginning a business meeting, which David had never done. His mother was saying it was about time her boys were civil to each other, and going on to say that she wasn’t sure which car David’s brother and his wife would be in on the way to the cemetery. You felt as if you had entered a terrible daytime television show. You had been prepared for unparalleled shame and awkwardness, or David’s complete avoidance of his brother. You had prayed for a scene to be made, and then an apology. Instead, David’s mother was clucking, his brother was turning away with a bland smile. You felt an urge to gather David, Aaron, and Cal behind you, to shield them from his sight. But David wasn’t standing anywhere near you, and though had felt as big as a cow when you were getting into your navy acrylic funeral dress that morning, you were limp and wispy in the face of your mother-in-law’s stubborn, decades-old charade. You wondered if she had ever tried to protect her children from anything except one particular brand of social shame. And you resented the damage done to David, and the fact that at some point she had passed you her secret, like a plate of sandwiches. 

After the funeral, you felt differently about the house, though for a couple of years, and especially right before and after Josephine was born, you tried to make it into your own true home. You added bachelor’s buttons, delphinium, peonies, (and in a fit of whimsy, hops) to the lambs’ ears and creeping thyme in the front flower beds. The delphinium always bloomed for Rosemary’s birthday in July, the peonies for your birthday in June. You had your father rototill you a garden in the middle of the backyard lawn, under the garage eavestroughs. He shook his head, the lifelong gardener, furious with your bullheaded stupidity, but he did it as you asked. Why did you want to put it there? Did you think the runoff would irrigate your crops? You planted peas, corn, zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, radishes, sorrel, lettuce, watermelon, eggplant, and pumpkins, all in the space of twelve square feet. A full half of the plot was washed out the first time it rained. You took a great deal of pleasure in your garden anyway, and in the fall convinced your father to plant an apple tree opposite. David started and never finished painting the bathroom. He set up his bookshelves and his rowing machines in the big rumpus room in the basement. You talked with each other about hanging a big chalkboard in the there, for the kids. Instead, the room filled up with the boxes you didn’t have time to unpack. You added black garbage bags of hand-me-down clothes Carol and your aunts kept giving you for the kids. You didn’t have time to sort through them and wash them; the laundry was already a colonizing industry, the laundry room a sweatshop with insane quotas and the mountain of (clean) clothing and bedding your children played on. Later there was also the hole Leah kicked in the wall, which is still there, unrepaired, in the house you are walking away from.

Any energy you started out with this morning only existed to carry you home. The further away you walk, the greater the panic that comes with knowing that you have no place in the world to rest. All of your energy is used up in the fluttering of your heart, a bird attempting to fly over a dark chasm and hitting a pane of suburban glass instead, falling back, its beak cracked. And you are exhausted with the heat and badly dehydrated. The five hundred dollars is still in your purse, in fifty dollar bills. It doesn’t seem like any kind of practical solution. 

The bank of box stores that carries on, block after block down 137th avenue, is where you last worked. It was five years ago, in the maternity clothing store. You wonder what time it is; the store closes at nine. It is only just past six and nowhere close to sunset. It is bright and glaring as noon. Many of the storefronts have different signs.Your lack of touchpoints in space and time compound each other. You know that it would be impossible for you to walk all the way back to your parents’ house now. Perhaps you still know someone at the maternity store who will break one of your fifties. You used to work with a plump young woman named Safia who tucked her phone into her hijab and usually carried on two conversations simultaneously for the entire duration of her shift. She liked you. She planned never to have children herself, but she thought of you, the mother of six children, in terms of a figure from a comic myth. Safia was thirty, still lived with her parents, and said she intended to keep living with them until her father found her a rich man to marry. Both of you wore maternity clothes from the store. You liked the styles anyway, and you got a discount. You liked almost everything about working there. Sometimes you told the women to make their husbands try on the prosthetic belly worn with a harness under clothes from the third-trimester line to make them fit properly. The husbands always complied, but inevitably began scrambling in horror out of the harness as soon as they’d gotten it on, trying to make jokes. Sometimes, if you were closing alone, you tried it on yourself, and felt its comforting weight swinging with you as you mopped the floors, and the parking lot darkened and emptied outside. 

It is not dark or empty now. You thread your way through packed rows of SUVs, walking in the middle of the lane between stalls until a car horn like the blast of a trumpet, held and repeated, bears down on you. You trip sideways out of the way. Both your feet are blistered in more than one place now. The car barely misses you; there are three more behind it. A woman with hair straightened and highlighted into a smooth, stripey cap plunges purposefully out of a home furnishings store and into the parking lot, trailing her teenage daughters. All three women wear bootleg jeans, coloured camisoles, cropped leather jackets, and ballet flats. One of the daughters is carrying a large globe of frosted glass. They move from the air conditioned building to their air conditioned vehicle. Just before closing the passenger side door, the same daughter sees you. The Tim Hortons box left grease stains on your shirt. Your face is florid with sun. You are hunched over your own body, as if to provide a windbreak for it, and the fluttering bird, unconscious that you are holding your hand to your chest, a poor woman from a renaissance painting. You straighten up under her gaze, about to smile at her. The look she gives you is one of disgust, confusion, and annoyance. She turns to her sister in the backseat, then thinks better of it and pulls the car door shut. 

You cross the last leg of parking lot and reach the maternity store. It is cool and airy inside. Clothes blow gently on their racks with the rush of hot air that enters with you. You like the dress the mannequin standing at the entrance like a greeter is wearing. Safia is not there, only a tiny, glaring blonde, but by now you are glad Safia will not have to see you. When you politely ask the blonde if she is able to make change for you, she starts to tell you, apologetically, that there is a store policy, that she can’t open the till anyway, without processing a transaction. She changes her mind when you pull out your yellow envelope of fifty dollar bills. Then she says, simply, no, and asks you to leave. 

You shuffle out into the heat. The sun off the beetle backed parking lot hurts your eyes. The air is dead and smells of petunias, Starbucks, and tar. There is a bus stop across the street. You sit down on the bench and the relief of pressure in your feet is so great that the blood flows backward up your legs. Your varicose veins throb with it, intestinal like your aunts’ and your mother’s, though those women all continue to wear the strappy printed sundresses they wore on dates with your uncles and father, picnics in one of the big Canadian city parks, with straw handbags and white leather sandals. 

A 121 bus comes, stopping with a puff and squeak, almost roaring off again because you do not stand up fast enough. You begin explaining to the driver that you are not trying to avoid paying the fare and that you want to give him the fifty dollar bill. He waves you up into the bus, shaking his head. 

The bus takes you to a mall, where you get off because everyone is getting off, everyone except one grizzled, pot-bellied man in a Kokanee t-shirt. Here he is, the living incarnation of the men your mother warned you about, that you in turn warned Leah and Rosemary about, though they rolled their eyes and Leah told you she didn’t intend to go through her life being afraid of men. He has been riding the bus your entire life, while you were riding your bike, then driving the white boat of a car David’s father passed down to you, then driving the minivan David bought when you found out you were pregnant for the fourth time. He has been taking Edmonton transit, his stomach hanging like a bag of milk over his waistband, his hands dirty, his gaze in your direction unwavering. You leave him on the bus, stepping unsteadily out of the back doors in a crush of people pushing past you, threatening to spin you around. He rides on. 

You don’t recognize the mall, though you have been here once to pick up a prescription from the pharmacy inside the Wal-Mart. The bus terminal is in the back parking lot. There are houses visible, across six lanes of traffic, and there is the grey Lego box of the mall. Most of the people you got off the bus with cross the terminal to another stop. You follow them, and when the digital orange lights of a bus that says 5 Coliseum swing around the corner, shining against a sky that is finally beginning to soften, you get on their bus. You are about to explain your fifty again but the bus driver, glaring, plucks a transfer slip from your hand, glances at it, raises red-penciled eyebrows, and hands it back to you. A boy behind you wearing large padded headphones and white sneakers and a swinging a gym bag the size of a body bag pushes you down the aisle of the bus. 

This one is cleaner. The royal blue upholstery hasn’t lost its nap. There are no vitamin water bottles rolling the length of the floor with every stop. There are no dirty men, mostly young people—retail staff just off work, the girls with false eyelashes, the boys with muscles, silent and composed between their ear buds, expensive bags perched like loyal animals on the seats beside them. They don’t look at you at all. The windows are open. A breeze that smells of cut meridian grass, exhaust, flowers, and the noxious, exciting deodorant worn by teenage boys flows over your arms and your head. Peachy light gleams on the pores of your face and in it your eyes are a clear, gold-flecked green. The bus’s tires grip the pavement, the bus rolls forward smoothly, and the motor hums deep and even through your seat and through your body. 

Your sense of peace and safety is so great that you decide to get off the bus on your own, pulling the yellow cord strung along the ceiling of the bus as several of the groomed young people have done when they, presumably, felt, as you do in your swollen feet, that they had seen a place that appealed to them, where they wanted to get off the bus and walk along the street. The storefronts you are passing begin to remind you of Victoria, all awnings and little patios. There is a bar with its front windows rolled up, the whole red and black room open to the street. There is a shop named after a fruit and a display window full of life-size origami sculptures, twisted flowering branches, and jewelry hanging from an ornate gold frame. There is a French bakery where girls in black dresses and strings of pearls are putting up antique chairs before sweeping the floor. There is a Greek taverna with a mural featuring a seaside town, white tablecloths, and shot glasses scattered around professional couples, happy, touching each other’s hands. There is a Scottish import shop with kilts and swords in the window. When these give way to more mundane establishments—a heavily screened Vietnamese restaurant, an insurance broker, a discount hair salon, all closed—you turn down a residential street. 

You feel adult again, having taken all of this in. Not a fusty old woman, not a delinquent, not one of the compromised and infirm. Before you turned off the strip, you really had almost bought yourself a coffee, in a glass mug with a curled handle. You remember asking for steamed milk on the side. You had assumed your life would be textured by such luxuries. You envisioned a life with wine at dinner every night, bakery bread on Saturday mornings, and fresh flowers on the table. The street you are walking down now is lined with old trees whose branches brush each other far above your head. You had assumed you would be allowed to grown undisturbed. to be watered and pruned occasionally by designated crews, to leaf, thicken, and branch out, to be colonized without great harm, to become, in your age, only more magnificent. Though you were occasionally warned that such undisturbed growth is usually bought, like the houses on the street, with sums of money so great these sums have nothing left to finance, you didn’t intend to go through your life feeling limited or impoverished. As if to illustrate this point, you cross a lawn. You sit down on a bench beneath a wicker arbour. And luxury was still in reach when Leah was a baby, and even later when Rosemary had just been born. That first summer with both girls, it felt like you spent every day on a quilt on the grass in the park, the babies fat in flower printed bonnets. Your mother came with you, sometimes your father. They handled the double stroller and produced cottage cheese containers full of raspberries mid-morning. At lunch you walked down to the German deli and import store where you worked in high school. It is still there; do you know that Leah worked there the year she was twenty and quit after she cut off the tip of her finger on a meat slicer? You bought butter cheese, kaiser rolls, and black forest ham. Basia, the Polish woman you used to work with, her nails even longer, her hair now tomato red, now platinum blonde, threw up her hands when she saw the girls and tried to give them cold weinerwurst. Your father, if he was with you, asked for three hundred grams of headcheese while your mother whispered to you furiously that he never finished it. 

You milled your own babyfood for Leah, sitting on a park bench. Your father fell asleep. Your mother poked him suspiciously and smoothed her short hair with its natural marcel wave. She took a sudden swig from your father’s coffee thermos. Your mother played football with the boys in highschool and worked as a typist for two years after graduation, before she got married. Her boss wanted to date her, but he was just a manager who dated other typists. He didn’t seem to be going anywhere. He bought her a fur coat, which she refused. Just then your father came along, the second-oldest of thirteen, a reader of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German, a hard worker. He regularly walked across the city to visit her in the evenings, and then walked back home again, arriving after two in the morning. Do you know whether she was in love with him? She is devoted to him, but here was a woman whose conception of romance had developed as a shy little immigrant girl in love with her grade five teacher, Mr. Lukiwski. Peter Lukiwski, tall with brown hair, brown eyes, a convertible, and a kind smile. Your mother had two braids she could sit on at her desk, tied with ribbons by her mother, a woman who had baked nine-egg tortes for wealthy families in Germany and discarded the pale ends of rhubarb stalks, now faced with teenaged sons who were growing hydroponic marijuana. Your mother lamented those braids, and the February skating party her teacher was planning for the class when she didn’t even own a pair of skates. It was a miracle, nothing short, that she convinced her mother to let her cut her braids off the same day her teacher called her up to his desk at the beginning of recess and asked if she might like to borrow his wife’s skates for the party. The next evening, he picked her up in his convertible, even more exotic with the accordion top pulled up, the white leather skates on the floor of the front seat when she got in. The cold air nipped her ears and she touched her head. 

Your father never had a convertible, though he did, with your mother’s help as a typist, graduate from university and become an elementary school teacher. He raised goats, rabbits, and saltwater fish. Your mother worked as a caretake for a little boy with cerebral palsy while he took a master’s degree. He burned out and retired the year you got married, devoting himself to his vegetable garden. What he grew, your mother processed, complaining occasionally, as a joke on herself. But your father went to Saskatchewan one July to visit his brother, without her. You were over with the girls. As soon as his Volkswagen was out of the driveway with its cooler full of sandwiches and crumb cake, she was out in the spinach patch (roughly the size of her queen bed), uprooting armfuls of plants with maniacal glee. It had just gotten to be a bit much. She would tell your father the plants had bolted, gone to seed. 

At the end of the day, David came and picked you up from your parents’ house, and you went back across the river. 

For all that spinach your mother didn’t want to freeze, the wax beans she didn’t want to blanche, the endless jars of applesauce she cooked every September, your father did graft a different varietal of apple branch onto a tree in his backyard for every child you had. He had not added branches for either of your miscarriages, a fact you had grabbed on to and brought up many times over the past six months, with the tree budding through your old bedroom window. Though he was angered and confused by every pregnancy after your third, the graft for Josephine was the rarest and most delicate he attempted. You sat on the bed nursing Josephine weeks after she was born, watching him fiddle with the little pot of melted paraffin, the stubby grafting knife, the neon orange grafting tape. It was early fall, a good time for a graft to take: the sap in the trees slow, the grass under your swollen feet still soft, Josephine warm and heavy on your chest, solid as a magic bag. Milk-drunk, the two of you fell asleep.

You wake up. It is almost dark. You are sitting on a bench in a stranger’s front yard, but luckily, the big gabled house and glassed-in porch behind you are dark; no one is home. You get up, the lawn pitching under your feet, and walk back to the street with the awnings. Only the bar is open. Another 5 is coming down the street. When it stops for you, you show the driver your wilted transfer, relieved at least to know this much. He looks at you, clamps his lips together, and does not mention that the transfer is hours-expired. Fully one half of the passengers on the 5 at any given time have escaped the fare simply by not having it. They still have to leave Glenora, where they are not welcome, and get to the Coliseum station. The bus, brightly-lit inside, does not feel as safe. The longer you stay on it, the less safe it seems. Halfway down Jasper, a couple get on. The man digs around extravagantly in his jeans for their expired transfers while the woman, propelled by the motion of the bus starting to move again, falls into the first seats trying to stop a running stream of mucus with the back of her hand. She and the man find each other hilarious. As he lurches toward her, the bus driver watching him in the rearview mirror, the woman removes her hand from her nose long enough to pull a cracked pink purse up on her shoulder and rake back her hair. She has to sniff violently part way through the manoeuvre. The man smirks at her as if he is pleased, and she wriggles her shoulders at him. The purse falls down again. At the next stop, both of them get up and move into the seat behind you. You can hear the man whispering something against the woman’s neck, the woman giggling and sniffling. Then she moans. Up to this moment, you have not heard that sound coming from anyone but yourself. 

The bus stops to let on an exhausted Filipino woman in a Tim Hortons visor. The back door opens automatically and you step off. On your left, across the street, is a brand new hotel, something Leah and her boyfriend would describe as a brutalist ice sculpture. On your right, the river valley is darkening below you. It is past eleven o’clock. You and Carol used to walk in the valley at night after you came back from Victoria, unconcerned by the reports of women attacked while walking the trails alone. Carol liked to eat second supper anytime between ten o’clock and midnight, and she would stop by to get you on her way back from the Esso with a box of Kraft Dinner and a package of pepperoni. Your first apartment with David, the one you lived in only five months before moving north to a house farther from your parents, with room for the baby, was around here. It has been demolished, but the new hotel building and vacant lots surrounding it throw you off. Looking around, you wonder exactly where it was that you lived.

A week after you moved in, Carol buzzed at ten-thirty. She was standing on your step eating shepherd’s pie out of a tupperware container and drinking hibiscus tea from Second Cup, which she passed to you when you came to the door. David was upstairs. She had walked across the high level but she wanted to try going down into the flats, for once, since you lived so close now. She said she had a chocolate bar in her fanny pack. 

The flats weren’t quite so developed then. Now they’re full of large, vinyl-sided houses with white-gravel-surrounded shrubs arranged in cul-de-sacs and mazy crescents instead of the numbered grid. Every house has a sports car and an sports utility vehicle in front of it. Several pristine garages with neatly parked lawnmowers, at least one pegboard wall, and stacks of labeled blue storage bins are open to the evening and spilling light onto concrete driveways, on each of which is a pot-bellied man in cargo shorts and a pastel golf shirt is studying a manual for a power tool. 

You told Carol she couldn’t just show up at this hour of the night; you were married. You had other priorities. 

What were they, exactly? When Carol left to walk back through the river valley alone, indignant, already clear in her mind that there was something wrong, but still expecting it to be resolved within six months, a year or two, were you relieved to climb the stairs back up to your new apartment? It smelled of tuna melts made with swiss cheese and the musky grape shampoo in the black bottle you sued then. Did David look up from reading C.S. Lewis when you came in? Your hair was wet from the shower and you were wearing the satin bathrobe with pink rosebuds on it. You were not pregnant with Leah, but you were about to be. Where you thinking about it? Did you abdomen shiver and bloom under your own hand with the idea of it? Was David’s idea of a wife rich enough to include a wife that might give him a family? Did you know? Did you ask him?

Did he want you for himself? Was he enough for you?  

A party is going on in one of the big rich houses you are walking past now. The wind, lifting suddenly, smells of marijuana, car exhaust, and honey. Two girls in short dresses are stumbling down the block with their arms around each other. One of them drops to her knees on the edge of a lawn and vomits, the other one expertly roping her long hair around her hand to hold it back. 

You are sick with yourself for sending Carol away. If you have been on a walk with her since, the tumour has absorbed the memory. 

For the first time all day, your arms and legs feel light. Your feet are stinging a little, but your head is cool. The asphalt is exceptionally smooth to walk on. In the dark, you move much faster than you have been moving, and in fact seem to glide. Your grief over Carol opens your chest and grief for your husband and children spills out. It is as if all the blood in your body is grief and it pounds in your head so that the old pressure builds again, and then subsides. There is a hole in you, gaping and clenching, that will not close up. You too, throw up on the edge of a lawn. You have Kleenex in your purse from your mother. I have more questions for you. 

Do you feel now, on your way back from that house, that is is possible to be good? Why didn’t David ever take you to a doctor? Did you realize it, the year your love for your children became a manifestation of illness? Why did you need the children? Was Josephine born early enough for your to love her at all? Do you ever feel beautiful? How did you survive without Carol? When was the last time you made a plan and it worked? When did you last sing opera? When did you last make love? Could you feel the invasion of your brain? Did it scare you?

Can you feel my grief over you? Can you feel my anger? If I leave you wandering this bourgeois street late at night, is that all there is? 

“Goose Egg” appeared as “North” in Project Compass (Monto Books 2017)