3

Thirty minutes later, the children began screaming as a monster came out of the dark. The back-up generator cleared its throat and grumbled to life. The place warmed up fast, and the moms took everyone’s wet gear and hung it all to dry on the corners of information boards flashing error messages. The Asian girls conferred and left, smiling and nodding their way past Shane and Prin’s attempts to stop them.

So now it was just the two families. Within an hour the iPad was dead; an hour later the phones were, too. Soon all the games and songs and snacks and ghost stories were finished.

They toasted the lemurs as a family—as two families. Prin’s girls scooted and crouched along the glass, waving and beckoning, popping up and down, their faces bright and urgent.

Who could get a lemur to look first?

Who would pick the New Year’s lemur this time?

Only they stayed away, the lemurs. They turned in on themselves and peeked at the people over coils of tail and the furry backs of family members. The twins were banging on the glass with their action figures and calling out threats that were shouted down by Shane’s demand that his older daughter join in the fun and then by his own cajoling and banging on the glass with his camouflage-coated e-cigarette. Never mind his curdling soul, Prin’s heart belled when he saw how his daughters placed their hands on the boys’ wrists to make them drop the Iron Mans.

The three older girls calmed the boys and showed them how much better it was to be soft, quiet, gentle. Little Pippa reached up to do the same to Shane, who stepped back like a giant backing away from a hummingbird made of spun sugar.

Now all six children were bright and urgent and pantomiming along the enclosure. Soon furry heads began to pop up and linger. Curious, the lemurs began to advance. One called out and the sound was like a comedian impersonating a monkey impersonating a loon. Dart and stop, dart and stop and turn, dart and stop and go on, they came closer and closer, their big eyes panning up at their hard-pinging heavens.

“Daddy, look, I think that little one on the side is looking at me!” said one of the boys.

“You picked the New Year lemur!” said Philomena.

The children cheered. Shane cursed the battery in his camera, which had died unexpectedly. Prin could find nothing sour or false in his daughters’ cheering, in these other people taking what should have been theirs. He felt rebuked and rebuked.

“I think you should talk to Shane,” Molly said.

Still more rebuked.

“About what?” asked Prin.

“Alanna had breast cancer. It’s in remission now,” Molly said.

“Oh. Is that what you were talking about, before the power went out?” asked Prin.

“Yes, and he might have some advice about how to tell the kids,” Molly said.

“Molly, I have a plan for how to tell the kids, remember?” said Prin.

“I know, dear, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out. Anyway, she said Shane had a really good idea for how to do it,” Molly said.

“So, you told her about me, about the diagnosis,” Prin said.

“We were just talking about how we’re both always just so tired, and I must have mentioned it,” Molly said.

“So yes, you told her,” Prin said.

Molly made a pained face.

“Molly,” he said.

“The children know something’s wrong. You need to tell them. Your surgery’s only a few weeks away. And they can tell I’m worried about something, about you, but I’ve said nothing because I know you’re trying to be careful and thoughtful with the news. Only the plan’s not working out the way you wanted. So do something else. Talk to Shane. Or play with the kids while you can. Do something else. Don’t just stand here looking at your dead phone.”

He waited for her to start crying, but this time she didn’t; she didn’t offer to split a Hail Mary and she didn’t wait around for a hug, either.

They had met in a church basement in Milwaukee in the early 2000s. At the time, Molly was an undergraduate at Marquette. She lived at home and was volunteering with a Montessori program. Prin was a graduate student from Toronto who spent one morning a week at a soup kitchen helping old men read Sports Illustrated. Secretly, he liked the way they talked about food and women. He could never. Volunteering gave a little moral ballast to the hours and hours he spent reading and talking about reading and writing about talking and reading.

The two of them met a few days after Prin had broken up with his graduate-school girlfriend, who was five years older than he was, didn’t want children, and didn’t really eat food. She was sort of Jewish, and from New York City And everyone always thought Prin was a good little Catholic boy from Canada. This would show them!

The entire time Prin had dated his graduate-school girlfriend he willed himself to believe that the life ahead of them, when they got married, or did whatever you did instead of getting married, was what he wanted. At friends’ parties in hot apartments full of ferns and cats named Sontag and Mephistopheles, she liked to say that they were the ironic Abelard and Heloise: he was a celibate who wasn’t a priest, and she was a none who was no nun, the homonym being the joke that led into a discussion of her dissertation research into sexual wordplay in popular women’s magazines.

She was small and bony and post-everything, including monogamy, as Prin was shown in the worst possible way one afternoon.

Whereas Molly was beautiful and round and baked every day and was everything Catholic and Catholic everything, and they married inside a year and he got a job back in Toronto and after four children and a three-bedroom house and two lines of credit and one positive diagnosis, their life together had been good and was good. Like skating on a river. You hear what might be cracks but what’s the good of thinking about them? It’s good, even great, so long as you keep going.

Had been, was, and would be good, great: it was only prostate cancer! And early stage, no less! This was not cancer cancer. He certainly knew the difference. We all do. A school friend’s father, an uncle, a few of Molly’s aunts, assorted neighbours and godparents: all suddenly wasting and suddenly bald but grinning for pictures, and then wasted and bony and glancing off-camera, and then, now, gone.

Whereas this was Prin’s cancer: he had trouble going to the bathroom for a while and then he wet his pants without noticing at a neighbour’s backyard party. And now he had to tell them. And he had had a really good plan, a plan that was prayed-about and well-researched—he wasn’t screaming and screaming and screaming like he could have been.

What more could God ask of him?

“Excuse me, Shane, can I get your advice about something?” Prin asked.