Faithful

I.

He’s at a cocktail party. On the rooftop, in the moonlight. He’s talking to Phil Goldman: loud, and a loud tie. Talking about golf, or Phil is; then fishing. Masculine bonding rituals, boring to him. He made an effort, upon leaving the academy and entering the productive economy so-called, to acquaint himself with such things, to learn how to look at ease on the links, hooking bait. But this was narcolepsy-inducing, and he’s always found, probably it’s a liability, that once he tires of something he can’t bring himself to drudge through for very long. We’ve bought a boat, Phil Goldman says, driving it up to the cottage on the weekend, you should come out sometime, bring Cynthia and the girl, what’s her name again? Hannah, he says, watching the moon paint the glass of neighbouring bank towers. The wind is cold. Of course, says Phil, embarrassed, perhaps, to have forgotten his boss’s daughter’s name, not noticing that his boss is indifferent, is preoccupied by moon and glass. What time is it, he wonders. When can I leave. Will the streets be quiet when I drive home. Will my mind be tranquil — and Phil’s asking him if he’d like another drink. He says: thanks, scotch.

Phil heads to the bar, procures two glasses of scotch. Before he returns, he detours to the guardrail at the edge of the building, where there stands a woman in black. Her necklace is bright blue, and her earrings. You can see them at a distance. They stand out against the white of her skin. Phil greets her, smiles, gestures loosely with the glasses in his hands. She responds politely, he can see from across the roof, but not with feeling. She doesn’t meet Phil’s eye, rather stares off, much as he, Jake, stares off, at the city lit up and darkened in the night. He’s never seen her before. Her hair is black. Her skin is pale. She looks, and he’s not typically given to thoughts like this, thoughts touched by fancy, but the impression comes strongly: she looks like a swan. Long neck. Pink in the face, the cheeks pink, the lips pink, a softness and lightness about her beneath which you sense, as you sense in the presence of swans, a feral power. Phil laughs, touches her shoulder, rubs the finger vised tight by his wedding band against the side of his leg; she’s remote, elsewhere. He watches. Hannah had a piano recital today. He missed it. He was in meetings, then at dinner with Steyn, a fund manager he likes, then at this party. No chance to see his daughter play, just time enough to call and hope to hear her voice, and find she’d gone into the theatre already, his wife wishing him well and telling him in her warm and charming way about her day’s banal adventures with the not-for-profit board on which she volunteers, this grey Thursday’s engagement. He watches the woman in black.

Phil returns, glasses in hand. They discuss a fraught merger in which the firm’s involved, a problematic tributary of its paper trail that leads to a Chinese magnate connected to the Thai sex trade. He wants to laugh, wildly, dangerously. At a lull in their conversation, Phil glances at the woman in black, half laughs, half scowls. What a fucking nutcase, Phil says. Who, he says. You don’t know about Rebecca Weiss? Why, he says, should I? Phil laughs. Secretary with Clearwater. Long story. Gross story. Beneath my dignity to gossip. Ask anyone on the seventh floor.

He approaches her. She leans against the guardrail, facing the city. He stands beside her and watches the city and drinks. I don’t believe we’ve met, he says. You have a short memory, she says. I’ve got an excellent memory. Almost as excellent as your Latin dance — and it comes back to him, a charity function, a salsa band, they were introduced by George Massey, she asked him to dance, and when he danced with what he considered restraint, she ran a nail along the back of his neck and said: It’s not a waltz, you know. I remember now, he says, forgive me, I try to repress my misguided attempts at grace. You shouldn’t be talking to me, she says. Oh no? It’ll be bad for business. Is that so. Don’t look now, but everyone’s staring at us. You have eyes in the back of your head? You’re a good host, Mr. White, I appreciate that you want me to feel welcome, but I’d hate to deprive your more important guests of their star. My associate tells me you work at Clearwater, I’m surprised we haven’t met before. I’m inconsequential, she says. Not like you. The new figurehead. He can’t tell if she’s being sincere. And he can’t take his eyes off her. Congratulations on climbing to the very top rung, she says. I’d get vertigo.

A hand on his shoulder. Phil Goldman’s there, with a short bald man he recognizes, a lawyer, Jenkins, Jones. An introduction is made and he’s led away. He drinks, half-listens to Jenkins or Jones, nods and smiles, emits warmth. He thinks about his wife. Wise and kind, Jewish also, as he supposes this Rebecca Weiss must be. You might even say there’s a resemblance, though not in the eyes, and not in the pallor, and not in the lips. They haven’t had sex in six months. Since he was promoted, since he got the top job, to be exact. It’s his fault more than hers. He’s been busy, he’s been tired. That’s not why. He has felt, since he was promoted, an unease at home. He’s stopped meeting his wife’s eye. His daughter’s too. He is aware of a stirring within himself of what he can only call shame. It bewilders him. He’s developed a habit of leaving the house in the mornings before Cynthia and Hannah wake up. He slips out of bed, shaves and showers and dresses, skips coffee, skips breakfast. He used to love to see his wife and daughter at the kitchen table in the morning, it reminded him why he works, gave meaning to his labour. Now he feels an awkwardness even at the thought of it. He would sit with them and not know what to say. He’d feel like a stranger among them.

It’s past one. The party’s finished, the roof almost clear, the caterers putting lids on platters, wiping up. He says goodbye to Phil and friends and watches them go out, and turns to see Rebecca Weiss by herself at a table, her eyes on him. Still here, he says. Nowhere to go. Awfully well-dressed for a homeless person. Didn’t say I’m homeless, she says without a smile, just got nowhere to go. Nowhere worth going. It happens sometimes: attend a party, stay till the end, meet no one interesting or no one available, then find at the end of the night I’ve got nowhere to go. And I can’t go to sleep. Why not? I’ve lost the habit, it’s like anything else, you don’t sleep for long enough you lose the habit, you can’t remember how once you did it so naturally, you try to recall the steps you took to fall asleep, what it felt like to stop thinking. Who are you, he says. She laughs. I imagine your wife must be very beautiful, she says, laughing. Yes she is. Go home, she says. And repeats, unaccountably: Go home, go home, go home. No, he says.

They leave together. She lives in a condo by the lake. He abandons his car in the parking garage and together they walk towards the water. Taxis’ lights glare and pass by. The wind whistles through concrete. He feels as though in a dream. Their words, their glances, their syncopated steps — about it all is a lightness, as though nothing they do together could possibly be of any consequence. How crazy that is. He knows, he knows. She’ll invite him inside, he knows. And then what. He has made no firm decision about this, though he’s got presence of mind enough to realize that to walk this far at her side is probably itself a decision. He’s always been faithful to his wife. He’s never been seriously tempted. Even now, even strolling alongside this woman with blue necklace against white collarbone, even this doesn’t feel like temptation, feels rather like a game. Their not talking about it, their drifting down the windy street together in silence — this is the complicity of children who each know the rules to a game but won’t speak them aloud, lest by speaking they prove that their game is manmade and not magic. How drunk are they? Just barely. She’s beautiful to him, but no more so than his wife, and not conventionally so, not an ideal, too strange, too fierce. Who’s leading, he wonders. Did I will this or did she? Do I have the power to stop it? And do I want it to stop?

When they get to her building, she invites him in. He comes in. Their clothes are on the floor right away. When they’re finished he asks if he can have a glass of water. She disappears into the kitchen and he thinks: I’m now a man who does this. Then he thinks, just as distinctly, with surprise: And I’m not ashamed. Which isn’t to say he’s proud, either, he doesn’t see the evening in terms of conquest, and anyway he’s not sure whether she’d be his conquest or he hers, but gone now is the feeling of shame that plagues him at home, in the office, as he sits in traffic, the sense that he’s lost direction, that something hard and fast in his soul has dissolved just lately and he doesn’t know how it’s happened and he doesn’t know how to make himself whole again. He feels happy. Thirsty. Their sex was satisfying. He likes the sound of her in her kitchen. The view from her bedroom, the wide, dark sweep of the lake. She returns with his water and stands by the bedside, in the glow of a lamp he’s turned on. Her curves delight him. Her hair falls across her breasts. Thank you, he says. She nods, distant, and withdraws to the balcony. Who are you, he says. She turns and he sees that she’s crying. I don’t mean to be rude, but you should go, she says.

He drives home, morning comes, and so does guilt. But he can’t stop thinking about her. In bed beside his sleeping wife he thinks about her. At his desk, in meetings, watching numbers diminish, increase, he thinks about her. He imagines he sees her face at crowded crosswalks, in the parking garage, behind an elevator’s closing doors. He gets little work done. After lunch he buzzes Paulson, a young analyst, hardworking and discreet, whom his predecessor lured from Clearwater Capital, the firm where she works. He’s always liked Paulson. Narcissism, maybe: Paulson reminds him of himself, what he might’ve been at thirty had he been in this business then. Have a seat, he says casually as Paulson eases the door shut behind him. Tell me, what do you know about Rebecca Weiss? Paulson blinks. What, you mean the dirt?

It’s all gossip. To be taken with a grain of salt, says Paulson, and frankly I’d take the whole shaker. Goes something like this, she’s on vacation, Venice, two or three weeks, she meets a guy, English, and they fall hard for each other, they have a thing. So what happens is I guess she decides this romance is more important than what she’s left behind here, because she doesn’t come home, she follows this guy back to London, and they’re shacked up for I don’t know, a month or two. Anyway, here comes the crazy part. Mitch Friedman at Clearwater, he’s in London meeting clients. He gets out of the Tube and who does he see in Hyde Park, on a bench by herself, but our lady. He tries to talk to her. And what does she do, she ignores him. Completely. Acts like he isn’t there at all. He makes some calls, I don’t know the details exactly, but apparently she’s had some sort of breakdown, she’s an outpatient at a hospital over there. Two weeks later, Monday morning she shows up for work downstairs as if nothing’s happened. Everybody goes what the fuck, right? But she seems totally fine, you’d never know anything weird had gone down. And nobody wants an HR hassle, so we all kind of nod and go oh, okay. And that’s it. And then a couple days later she disappears again. Make some calls, eventually they call her building manager, building manager knocks on her door, she’s at home. She’s just decided not to show up for work again. A guy from Clearwater goes over to her place to talk to her, she’s civil and everything, invites our guy in, offers him coffee, but when he asks her why she’s not at the office she shrugs and says she can’t get out of bed. You’re out of bed now, our guy says. I can’t get out the front door, she says, I know it’s unacceptable, you should probably fire me. Crazy, right? She was never like this before, back when I knew her. Sweet, sexy, sharp wit. Dude did a real number on her when he dumped her.

He’s flirting with danger, he knows, but he can’t turn his face from it, he feels mesmerized, eyes fixed to a flame burning up in an unknown dark. Daylight floods his office, feels cloying. He leaves early, considers going to see her, decides against it. At home in the afternoon, his wife out on errands, his daughter at school, he sits in his study with the lights off, watches the arms of his old apple tree sway in the breeze. He stares at his bookshelf, lingers over his several editions of Anna Karenina. He thinks not about Vronsky and Anna’s adulterous passion, as if in search of instructive parallels, but instead about Levin, the man who wins all that he desires — beautiful young wife, tranquil domesticity, a life of genteel leisure — only to find his thoughts turn again and again to the razorblade, the pistol, the noose. A man prosperous and lost. Worried his irreverent life has meant nothing and yet unable to turn to religion, unable to believe. He hears his daughter come home, move about. He likes to listen to her like this, in her private moments. She’s come from choir practice, he remembers. Friday. A committed girl, his daughter, to stay after school to sing on a Friday, the weekend awaiting. Committed, focused, a real gogetter. Like him, like her father: destined for big things, for success, like her father. He sits in his study and listens, not making a sound.

After work on Monday, he returns to Rebecca’s apartment. She buzzes him in, meets him at the door without surprise. Their sex is fierce, fraught. She makes coffee. You shouldn’t have come back, she says as they sit together in her narrow kitchen, coffees steaming. I understand I’m a great adventure, but look at me. You must know about me. Now that we’ve done this once or twice, isn’t it time you got back to your perfectly ordered life? You have a distorted image of me, he says. She laughs. Describe your wife to me. Give me a break. Please, I’m curious, I want to picture her, I think about her all the time, she’s become a central figure in my daydreams, I want to get the picture right. Your wife, your house, your little family. What do you do here all day, he says, you should get out of the apartment, I understand this guy hurt you, but — her chair scrapes linoleum, she moves to the cupboard, takes a bottle of bourbon down from the shelf. Come for a walk with me, he says. Your wife will see us. Let’s get dinner. What do you want from me, she says. He’s silent. Her apartment is bright, swept with the day’s last daylight. I feel rude when I kick you out after sex, she says, and I hate to be rude, so maybe let’s end this here. Fine, he says.

That’s it. It’s over. He’s sad, he’s relieved, a bit bewildered. But soon he slips back into his accustomed patterns. Work consumes his attention, distracts him. He becomes once again an attentive husband and loving father, remembers how to play those parts convincingly, smooth out the wrinkles, plaster over the gaps through which peek inadmissible desires, unhelpful questions. One night later that week, when he’s sure Hannah’s asleep, he crosses the hall to Cynthia’s bedroom. (They’ve long slept in separate rooms, first because he snored, later, after his snoring abruptly stopped, because they were already in the habit and why break the habit when it works so well for them both, affords them such rest.) She’s reading, something about the Jewish population in British Mandatory Palestine. His smile is wry. Should I be concerned about this? She sets the book on her knee. Just because you like to pretend you have no history and no roots doesn’t mean everyone else has to, she says. He kisses her. He kisses her again. Honey, she says. You don’t want to? I want to, sure, but … you’re not too tired? I’m wide awake, he says.

It’s good. He thinks this during the act and afterwards. It’s better. His affair was a flop by comparison. Cynthia’s attentive, present, she knows what pleases him, he knows what pleases her and he’s pleased by her pleasure; while with Rebecca — enigmatic, unknown, an adventure (to use her word) — he was ungenerous, thought only of his own hunger and how to sate it. He liked himself less with her. Was it a mistake, he wonders, picturing Rebecca’s narrow, harrowed face in the shadows of his darkened bedroom as he returns from his wife. No, not a mistake. It was, he might say, at the risk of rationalist glibness, an enriching experience. Not dignified, but nevertheless a contribution to the fabric of his life, to his understanding of the world and of himself, a garish light that reveals to him the boundaries of the role he plays, where lies the line beyond which he becomes, irrevocably, another man. The womanizer. The erotic man of influence, proud and insatiable. Even Voltaire, he remembers, wouldn’t reject sexual intrigue if wisdom were at stake, Voltaire who slept with a man once for the sake of philosophy but wouldn’t repeat the experiment. He’s had his moment. And he’s glad that it’s passed.

A week later he wakes up so depressed he can hardly get out of bed. It takes him an hour to dress. He’s late for work, he’s unshaven. His colleagues notice; he doesn’t care. Shame twists him again, again he’s consumed by thoughts of her, long neck, pink cheeks. Yet how absurd that is! He doesn’t love her, he hardly respects her, she leads the sort of shadowy life he rejected as an undergraduate, as vapid as lurid. He has more than she does, he has everything. So why does he scan her file over and over, obsess for hours about their time together, the sound of her voice? He comes to the conclusion, by the end of this black day, that he’s sorry for her, profoundly sorry, that this funk he’s in is subconscious penance for the luck he’s had, the happiness she’s been deprived of. He realizes he wants to help her, give to her; his love for her, if love it is, is basically philanthropic; or perhaps all love is. (No, he thinks: no, all love isn’t.) They must be close to the same age, maybe she’s a bit younger, but he realizes he thinks of her almost like a daughter. He wants to offer her friendship. He wants to offer himself as a salve.

Cheered and purposeful, nervous, he returns to her apartment after work. I’ll leave if you want me to, he says as she opens the door. I just want to see how you are. Her eyes are raccooned with fatigue. I’ve got the kettle on, she says, you want tea? And she steps out of the doorway. They sit in her kitchen and talk. He finds it difficult to say what he means, what he’s resolved to say. I want to see you, he says; which isn’t what he means. She’s pale. I don’t know if I can do this. Not like we’ve been doing. I want to see you as a friend, a companion. You’ve come back to reject me? I’ve come back because I think you need me in your life. She laughs. Call me arrogant. Arrogant, yes. And I need you in mine. Like a shot in the head, she says, laughing. It seems to me you must spend too much time here by yourself. What do you do with your days? I read, she says. I read about the irremediable loneliness of the soul, it’s the only kind of reading that makes me laugh, and I like to laugh. I masturbate, I surf the Internet. I look at pictures of places I once travelled. Most of them have changed since I was there. It makes me feel old. A feeling I like. And I write, she says. Really. Yes. I can show you. And she rises and drifts into the living room, her shoulders slumped, her walk languid.

She’s written poetry. Reams of it. He sits beside her on the sofa and reads from a battered notebook, her gaze hot on his cheek. He has no idea why she’s opened up to him, shared with him these intimate stirrings laid out in chicken scratch, but he doesn’t question it. He’s glad of it. Well? she says. He keeps reading. Much of her writing is histrionic, verbose. But some is extraordinary. A poem about a street brawl outside the apartment where she lived with her lover in London, her feeling then of the fragility of her world’s order, how swiftly violence breaks out, the equally jarring swiftness with which it ends, and the silence it leaves. A poem about strangers’ children: longing for them in Covent Garden, considering what the theft of a child would entail, if it might be defensible. Many about her lover. All of her interesting poems, he finds, are in some way connected to that man, London or Venice, sudden departures. Your opinion is loaded, she says, I know your credentials. Does she refer to his aborted career as a scholar? To his own youthful attempts at verse, published in prominent journals, promising, abandoned, scuttled by his feeling that poetry isn’t a craft, can’t be perfected, admits only failure in finer and finer degrees, perpetuating the illusion that something permanent might in the last event be said? It’s good, he says. Do you still write? No, he says, haven’t for a long time. Why not? Never really liked to. I found words weren’t well suited to express the way I saw the world, words specify, make concrete, I stopped writing because I felt my experience of the world was less stable than that, constantly shifting, a series of impressions none of them trustworthy neither evil nor good, I found words pinned things down too rigidly, so I stopped. Numbers are better, at least the numbers I deal with, they don’t claim to explain the world, only their own worldly sphere, transient, limited. She stares at him, runs her hands through his hair. I painted, he says. Late adolescence. I painted constantly. That was better. Suited me better. I thought that was what I’d do with my life. Why didn’t you? The lifestyle. The form of life. It scared me. Get up, sit down and work, eat drink sleep. And again. No sense of advancing, progressing, rising. I was scared I would feel I were standing still all my life. She places her finger on his lips, traces the edge of his lips with her nail. So?

He must be a better husband and father. As he emerges from her building into an evening sun shower, her scent lingering faintly, he decides this. It’s clear that the affair will go on, he’s too weak to end it and doesn’t want to, it makes him happy, it calms him: but it also creates a debt, and he must pay it. He won’t leave his wife. What eases and delights him, he sees clearly, is not the affair but the balance, the harmonics of family and lover struck together, routine redeemed by voluptuous escape. There’s a careers fair approaching at Hannah’s school, and he volunteers, with Hannah’s blessing, to speak about business and banking and markets in terms that 13-yearolds can understand. He shows up, makes jokes, stokes dreams. Afterwards he takes Hannah out for lunch. Are there a lot of girl investment bankers, she asks him over teriyaki chicken. Some, he says. I think I want to do that, she says. I want to be like you, if I can get better at math. He laughs. You don’t need much math to do what I do. Then what do you need? I don’t know, he says. Luck. Instincts. Appetite.

Most evenings, when he arrives home from Rebecca’s apartment at dusk, he takes his wife and daughter for dinner, listens with pleasure to their laughter, stories of their day. And later at night, most nights, silence reigning in the wide halls of their immaculate, under-furnished house in Forest Hill, he slips into Cynthia’s room and they make love. One night, as they finish, he sees she’s crying. His stomach drops; somehow she’s found out. What is it, he asks. I didn’t get a chance to know you when you were young, she says. When you were twenty. Somebody else got that. Another woman. And tonight I thought: this is what he was like. He finds himself moved also. Shattered, for a moment. But he covers it up, catches his breath, swallows hard. So I was doing it like a boy? I was fumbling? No. And you know it. I’m still in love with you, she says. Oh. Was that in question? I didn’t ask the question, I’m very good at not asking those questions, but tonight I did and the answer is I’m still in love with you. Good. Good, I’m glad. And you, she asks. Are you still in love with me, Jake? It was never a question for me, he says.

It’s humid and grey early summer when the call about the suicide attempt wakes him in the night. Thought you’d like to know, says Paulson, thought you wouldn’t want to be the last to know. She’s at Mount Sinai, she’s been admitted. He flies out of the house, his shoes half on. Driving down empty side streets, he has the distinct sensation of falling. She’s unconscious when he gets there, nobody at her bedside. He asks a nurse what happened. Are you family? Close friend. Pills, says the nurse. She’ll be fine. In the short term at least. Are you staying with her? She’s been alone all night. He sits by her for hours, watches her chest rise and fall. Every few minutes he has to fight the urge to lean over the bed and shake her, hard. She wakes around seven, doesn’t react to the sight of him. Maybe she doesn’t recognize me, he thinks. Maybe she wasn’t trying to kill herself, maybe she was trying to scrub her memory clean, maybe it’s worked. You’re going to be late to the office, she says. He’s silent. Her eyes fixed on the ceiling, she shakes her head. I’m a lark. An itch. It means nothing. You’ll never leave your wife. We’re killing time. I won’t love again. I’ve tried, I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and I can’t. It isn’t in me, it’s dead, I can’t. And I don’t want to pretend anymore.

The affair barrels downhill from there. They fight terribly the day after she returns home. A vase smashed, chairs overturned. Minutes after he leaves her apartment, he can no longer remember what the fight was about. He swears to forget her, promises himself it’s over this time for good. Late evening now and the streets are still crowded, streams of strangers milling towards subway entrances, men and women in suits leaving work, and young people, so many kids, holding hands and stealing kisses. What are they doing here, so deep downtown, in the smog of trade? He slows, watches them, tries to remember what he wanted at that age; tries to remember what he wanted yesterday. He’s tempted to descend into the subway tunnels with them, to retreat underground, anonymous, and disappear.

But he must get rice. Cynthia’s asked him to pick some up. She’s cooking tonight, stir-fry chicken. A meal he likes. Too much drama, he thinks, not good. Bad blood pressure in the family. He retrieves his car from beneath his office tower, heads north, home. Dusk is settling already and traffic’s light.

A week later he hears from his brother for the first time in ten years. He’s on his back porch on a muggy Sunday afternoon when Cynthia hands him the phone, and from the look on her face he guesses it’s Ezra even before the first word rasps over the line from Vancouver. Jake, Jake. Been way too long. Good to hear your voice, man. His brother makes small talk: I heard about the crazy weather out there, like a sauna, hot here too this year but you know Vancouver, not so suffocating, can’t stand that. Ezra asks about Cynthia and Hannah, about work: Still trading stocks for millionaires, huh, got any hot tips for me? He answers perfunctorily — his girls are fine, no hot tips, everything’s fine. The porch door slides open behind him and Hannah emerges, a slim volume of poetry tucked under her arm. She crosses the backyard into the shade of the apple tree and sits, absorbed at once. He realizes he’s been silent on the line and so has Ezra. So, says Ezra. He waits. So, I … I’m not just calling to shoot the shit, I know you probably don’t … He waits. You’re not in touch with dad, huh. No, he says, not lately. He’s … fuck, Jake, I’m out on a limb here, I don’t know what to do with this, I love you. Okay? I love you. What’s going on, he says. The phone’s damp now with sweat, the heat unbearable. He’s got maybe a few days, man. Asshole, you know? To go and get like this. Mom called me, you know Mom, said she refused to call you if I wouldn’t, she was doing her old thing, trying to get you and me … anyway, the point is he’s got maybe a few days and … well, as you can imagine … Silence. Finally, quiet but resolved: I’m not going to see him. Thought about it. But the answer is no. Gotta be that way. And maybe one of us should go. So. I know it’s pressure and everybody’d understand if you couldn’t come out, you’re all the way across the fucking continent, it’s an interruption, I know that, but anyway, there it is. Up to you. Take care of yourself. I love you, man.

The sun is shining, birds are singing, his daughter is reading beneath the shade of the apple tree, and on his back and neck the sweat is rapidly chilling. He shivers and goes into the house. Upstairs in his bedroom, he shuts the door and swears till he wears himself out. Unsteady, a tightness in his chest, he yanks a suitcase from the closet, unzips it and throws it open on the floor, flings clothing in. He must be loud, because Cynthia appears in the doorway. She asks him what’s happened, where he’s going. Vancouver, he says. He packs. Don’t let him, she says. Don’t let him what. Whatever he’s doing this time. Whatever he’s asking you for. Don’t give in. He keeps packing. He knows he’s not being fair to her — she wants only to help, to understand. But he’s unable to offer any coherent account of what he feels right now. I have a fundraising meeting at the synagogue tonight, please get dinner for Hannah before you go, she says as she leaves the room, her voice edged with exasperation. He keeps packing.

On the flight west he imagines what he’ll say to his father and what his father will say to him. It’ll be difficult, he thinks as he gazes at the ridged seafloor of clouds. They’ve always had trouble communicating. His father was once a king of the garment industry, in charge of three factories and an army of salesmen that he’d inherited from his own father, who’d built the business nearly from scratch, so the family mythology goes, after escaping pogroms in Poland with pocket change and forged papers. And his father directed the interests of this dynasty for many years, shortly before and after the death of his own father, and the family was prosperous, and Jake idolized his father, not only because the family was prosperous but also because his father seemed, even to a boy of twelve, a complete person, the image of balance and grace, kind and loving to his family, wise about matters both high and low. When accusations surfaced of his father’s embezzlement of funds, he felt no scorn, felt only that a time of great difficulty approached and they should prepare themselves for it. He was right. His father lost everything. And one morning he woke up and was an adolescent and his father seemed to him a humiliated man, and this wasn’t just the typical disenchantment of adolescence but also true. His father retreated into drink and self-pity; at thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, he saw this and didn’t know how to feel, swung from hatred to wrenching sympathy. They drifted together and apart with the seasons while he still lived at his parents’ house, he never arrived at the settled hostility towards his father that Ezra, still a child then, soon developed, but they never spoke as easily as they’d done before, especially not after he adopted his mother’s Anglo-Saxon maiden name, White — a name, to his mind, innocent of history, free of remembered mythology or tradition, a name he could inscribe as he wished — as the standard he bore into the world.

He lands in Vancouver late at night and takes a cab to the hospital. The nurse on duty tells him his father is asleep, hasn’t stirred much all day. His father’s condition is precarious but, for the moment, stable. He glances into the room and turns away. I’ll come back in the morning. He leaves his hotel details at the nurse’s station, requests that he be contacted immediately if anything changes.

From his hotel room, he calls Ezra to tell him that he’s come. He makes a token suggestion to meet at the hospital the next morning, which Ezra ignores. They settle on breakfast at the hotel restaurant. When they hang up he undresses, goes to the window, peers out. It’s dark now and all he can see are lights in the harbour and on the North Shore. In the morning the mountains will greet him. If even a little he believes in God, mountains have something to do with it. On previous trips to Vancouver, he’s had the thought more than once that they’re appointed here as guardians of his father and brother, that they perform the sacred filial, fraternal duty that he’s impiously shirked. Yet the sleep he falls into is warm and fathomless.

In the morning, in the lobby, he spots Ezra right away, at a window table in the hotel restaurant, coffee mug and newspaper in front of him. He’s aged. And groomed to deny it: long hair, scruff, T-shirt and jeans. Self-conscious about his pressed shirt and pants, he goes into the restaurant and greets his brother. Ezra stumbles to his feet, grins, extends his hand. Good to see your face, hasn’t changed a bit. Yours neither. Ezra asks again about Cynthia and Hannah, his house, his job. Still the happiest man alive, aren’t you? Things are fine, he says. He’s about to ask after Ezra’s wife, but Ezra pre-empts him: Yeah, Sheila and I fucked it up years ago, after my troubles, she stayed with me for a while but when my luck ran out and the cash was gone and I couldn’t provide for her lifestyle, well. I’m sorry, he says, I didn’t know. No no, of course, it was all happening a long ways away from you. Ezra flags the waiter and orders a glass of rye. A bit early, I know, he says, but a little before lunchtime calms my nerves, I don’t make a habit of it, I’m under a lot of pressure, and it’s a, how would you say, a special occasion. His drink arrives. Cheers. Can I persuade you to come to the hospital with me? Ezra sets the glass down. He frowns, his eyes wander. Nah, he says. Not interested. Wish it were different, but the thing is, I know it won’t make anyone happy, not me, not him, you know? All it’ll do is make me feel like shit, and he’ll be no better off, either. No better off, he thinks, in a final sense, maybe, but he knows their father would be struck by how uncannily Ezra has grown into the old man’s echo. Macho, fragile. Pretentious about lack of pretention, wielding lack of affectation affectedly, like a challenge. And hot-blooded: quick to anger, quick to love, betrayal intolerably keen. Sorry. Wish I felt otherwise. In other news, says Ezra, I’ve got a business prospect that could be real interesting, we should talk, we always said we’d get into something together. And Ezra outlines the details of a new industrial development along the oceanfront in Richmond. Investment possibilities. Let’s talk more about it later, he says, and changes the subject. He eats quickly. As soon as he can, he says he has to get going, he’s meeting a client in West Vancouver before he returns to the hospital. It isn’t true, and he lies badly, too emphatically, but the pull his brother has always had on his life’s orbit is insidious. Good to see your face, Ezra says. Let’s meet up again before you head home. Talk business.

He walks across town to the beach, watches boats drift into the bay. From here his life back home looks strange and small. His time with Rebecca Weiss feels from this distance like a pebble dropped into the centre of the ocean, a brief ripple testifying to the impact, then nothing. The objects of his life back east seem featureless. He can remember his house’s size and colour, say, but details elude him: how close together the hedges are, the shape of the doorknobs, what’s tacked to the fridge. His wife’s face, the face of his child — of course he never forgets them. But from this distance their edges are blurred. At moments like these, anonymous in the ocean breeze, he remembers that he existed before those others existed in his life.

It’s nearly evening when he works up the nerve to cross the threshold of his father’s hospital room. He sits bedside for an hour before his father wakes, senses his presence, turns to face him. They haven’t seen each other in a year, since his father last flew east to visit his granddaughter, stayed at their house for a week during the summer and complained about draughty windows. Looks about the same now. Faded. You must be jetlagged, the old man says, his voice all catch and rasp. His father’s concentration isn’t good, and he seems to be hallucinating, refers a few times to “the bunch of you,” others in the room. The old man asks after Hannah, Cynthia. They’re fine, he says. He mentions Hannah’s excellent marks, the high school where she’ll start in the fall. His father drifts out of consciousness again.

The night wears on. He wanders out to the nurses’ station and talks to a nurse about his father’s condition, returns to the room, reads yesterday’s paper. He’s standing by the window at around two in the morning when the old man opens his eyes and speaks in a tremulous voice he almost doesn’t recognize. No, not me, I was too good for that, I never went to shul, I never went to church with your mother, oh no, I thought it was bullshit, I paraded that around the house, hypocrisy, let the fools pray, what do I need with cheap consolation. As if I knew anything. Maybe it would’ve helped. Tell your mother I regret everything. Tell your brother I forgive him and God help him.

His father dies in his sleep a few hours later. He calls Cynthia, who offers condolences and to get on a plane with Hannah; he asks them to stay put. Easier that way. The cemetery isn’t far from the beach and the scent of the ocean permeates the proceedings, he’s aware of it acutely, it distracts him. Ezra isn’t there. He consoles his mother. She and his father divorced twenty years ago, she’d been involved with Lionel for many years more than that, the affair open and acknowledged, Lionel the real paternal force in the house after his father’s fall. But it’s clear that she’s shaken. Lionel’s dead, and she’s drifted from her children. She must feel terribly alone, he knows, and the thought of it saddens him, but the truth is that she’s become a stranger to him. His feeling towards her is respectful and obliging yet also disturbingly cool. He accompanies her to her hotel after the funeral and proposes they have dinner together so she won’t be by herself. She says she’ll call to let him know. He knows she won’t.

He returns to his own hotel room and repacks his suitcase, restores items to his toiletry kit. When he’s finished, he calls Ezra and tells him that their father is buried. Ezra is silent on the line, and then he weeps and weeps and tries to talk and can’t and so keeps weeping. He listens to his brother cry, breathes into the line to let him know he’s there. I’m leaving tonight, he says. Thank you for letting me know he was almost out of time. I’m glad I came. I’m glad I saw you. There’s a long silence. He notices his brother’s breathing has changed, acquired a sharpness. Like the last time. He has a presentiment of what’s coming and he’s right. You fucker, says Ezra. You bloodless trash. Why don’t you fuck off and die. Not hesitating but not angry, he hangs up. He falls back on the bed, sets the alarm for a few hours later, early evening, and sinks into sleep.

Later he’ll wonder what might have happened if instead he’d checked out early. If he hadn’t been there to receive the call from reception, to hear Paulson whisper the news. He’ll wonder if, had he called Cynthia with his plane’s arrival time in Toronto, he might’ve been on the other line when Paulson tried to reach him. Later there will be days when he wishes this is what had happened. He’ll imagine his wife’s face grown older, folds of skin on her neck slackened with age. He’ll struggle to remember the way his house looked when he approached it at dusk in the evenings, on his way home from work or Rebecca, and how far apart the hedges were, and the shape of the doorknobs, and the shine of Cynthia’s auburn hair in sunlight, in the kitchen. All this could still have been mine, he’ll think. I have given up my inheritance to venture forth into the wilderness and I do not know what fortune awaits me there, perhaps only death awaits me. Nevertheless I have packed my bag with those few things I require and I will not ask for anything while I live though I may want so help me God. Was this his cast of mind in those first moments? Later he won’t be able to recall. And he’ll worry that his actions then were not a poem but merely animal. Instinct, survival.

The ring of the phone on the nightstand penetrates a dream of dunes and wakes him around 4:30. He feels groggy, bleary-eyed, he sits up, nausea. Phone knocked from its cradle, retrieved off the floor, raised to his throbbing head — yeah? A call for you from Toronto, sir. Yeah, okay. And there’s Paulson, whispering, asking him how his flight was, how his trip’s been, not getting to the point. Unlike him. Why are you whispering? He sits on the edge of the bed, nauseous, thirsty. Okay, says Paulson, I can tell you everything at once or I can let you deal with one thing at a time. Tell me everything at once. She’s dead. No screwing around this time. Knife through the heart. I’m very sorry. It knocks the wind out of him. When his breath returns, it brings with it the taste of vomit. The other part you need to know, says Paulson telling him everything at once, is she left a note, going through her reasons, making her argument for suicide and so on, a lot of garbage, she was a very sick lady, but you need to know that even though she doesn’t use your name, you’re mentioned in it. In a way that might be problematic. What does she say? Well, she says, more or less, that there’s a man in her life who — Read it to me. Paulson hesitates. Sound of a briefcase unfastened, papers riffled. Don’t want to keep rolling my numb body up the hill each day. Can’t. Won’t. Too heavy. Longing for the man I can’t have. Pity for the other one. Good God. This man has won everything in his life by exertion of the will and he values none of it. His wife is a possession, his daughter is a weekend hobby. His life is perfectly rational, perfectly controlled, perfectly meaningless to him. He’s incapable of genuine passion, he has eliminated from his life the possibility of anything transcendent, for the sake of simplicity, and out of fear. He’d be a narcissist if he weren’t such a coward, as it is he’s desperately afraid to look at himself, I think he must avoid mirrors for fear of finding he has no reflection. He’ ll believe I’m killing myself because I’m miserable, but he’s wrong. I’m killing myself out of love. Because there’s nothing in the world but love and probably nothing out of the world but love either. I’ve exhausted my options here. I will take my chances elsewhere.

The first thing he does after hanging up the phone is unzip his bag and let its contents spill across the floor.

II.

He had a child’s wonder. Beyond fifty and grey and ragged and his eyes were a child’s and he listened as though he were certain each stranger might offer a revelation that would upset his vision of the world. He was terribly lonely. He had not one month before committed an act of terrible defiance and it nearly killed him, but when I met him he was beginning to emerge from the shadow of what he’d done. He had but a day earlier come forth from the woods where he’d been camping. I call it camping. He’d been sleeping in the woods, that’s all. He’d carried in his sack a paltry amount of food and water, he’d had no knowledge of those woods or of wilderness survival, and if a bear had come or some other misfortune had befallen him, he would have been helpless. How he occupied himself in those days, half-buried in silence, I can’t say. What peace he knew was mixed with staggering pain, the cost of his act of terrible defiance. But just imagine him then: this man who’d spent his life in a grey tower then come down and lived each hour upon the black earth.

I spied on him. Daily he rose late, dressed quickly, left the inn without eating and traipsed through the woods to the beach. I took my lunch break when he left and followed him, and when he emerged on the beach I hid behind the rocks and observed his ritual. He stripped naked. Naked he waded into the water, and in the blistering light he bathed himself and sounds emerged from him that were not song but were not speech either. He was calling his ships to return to him. What those ships were and what bounty they carried neither I nor likely he himself could say. He was exulting in his freedom and trying to exorcise the demons his freedom brought or did not purge. After he had thus bathed himself he returned to the beach and lay down in the sand and there in the caustic sunlight typical of that summer he lingered.

Jacob’s isolated corner of beach was significant to me moreover because it was there that as a girl my life was changed by Wilson Nash. In my last year of high school Wilson Nash was my boyfriend. That was the time when I began to hear my voices. Sometimes woman and sometimes man, my voices from the start issued instructions. They commanded trivial things in those early days: don’t eat that potato, lift your left foot three times before you enter the church on Sunday, that sort of thing. Now I can see those tasks were tests. There were intimations of purpose in my voices’ first commands, but forceful revelation of my purpose was to come much later, when I was ready for it. In the beginning my voices only impressed on me that I must do as they said.

That night on the beach when I was seventeen, Wilson grew amorous and I had to tell him what my loudest voice, the shrill female one, had told me, that I was to leave him and forget about him as soon as I could manage it. This struck him as a declaration of unfathomable cruelty. He was confused and angry and felt something was owed him. I resisted at first but soon ceased to protest, aware that a purpose lay in wait for me that no act of brutality could interfere with. It wasn’t long before the town knew of what they called my madness. The story of my rape became known also and transmuted into the story of my promiscuity, more palatable than the rape of the mad and requiring no involvement of the law. My family bore the social cost as much as I did. Nobody acknowledged the genuine reason why a penalty was thus exacted.

Within days of Jacob’s arrival at the inn, I began to receive from my voices intimations of his importance. At first only hints I got, keep an eye on that man, have you noticed the way he walks, the quality of his gaze, pay attention. My shrill voice soon grew more pointed. That man is your deliverance and you are his, it told me. And so I sought to know him better. One morning at the beach where he swam naked daily, I shed my clothes and stepped out from my hiding place to meet him in my nakedness. It was a rather silly while before he noticed, and when finally he did he was a ways out in the water and I think he didn’t quite trust his eyes, because as he crept to shore he betrayed no reaction at all. We observed each other at ten paces. Without a word between us, I came to him and he took me in his arms. He lowered our bodies to the sand. The midday sun was hot upon us and the tongue of the ocean needled our embrace. But he surprised me then and merely held me close. I thought he must be repelled by my body. But as he gripped me tight the shame passed out of me, and I grew convinced that my purpose lay indeed with this man.

Our days wove themselves together. I’d follow him to the beach by mornings, my presence now acknowledged and plain and what a relief it was, to watch him with frankness, in my nakedness behold his. My senses woke, and all through my body coursed the rattle of the firs and maple leaves, the taste of the ocean breeze, the blue of the sky and the white of the spume and the long, browning flanks of Jacob’s weathered body. He ploughed his limbs through the ragged water and made the noises I’ve described, not quite song but not speech either. Afterwards he’d lie with me, though we continued through that season to abstain. And more and more this seemed no insult and no loss, and more and more I sensed his importance. We lay there like animals scarred by a hunt narrowly escaped and not long past, nursing each other’s wounds.

It wasn’t till I found the courage to visit his room one evening after dinner that words came. He was reticent, but once I’d coaxed a first detail out of him, that his father had died, it would’ve been impossible to dam the flood that followed. When he spoke about the family he’d abandoned and his departure from them, he did so in a way that was contradictory, confused. He said he was in search of something. He didn’t know what. He believed the manner of living he had abandoned was poisonous to him, though he could not say precisely why or with what form of life he hoped to replace it. Often there was an undertone suggesting that he saw his time in our town as a sort of temporary wilderness trial, a test of his resolve and of the willingness of the world to reveal the truths he sought. Often there was an undertone suggesting that to his family and his avowed amoral life he would soon return.

Yet it was only a month later that circumstances changed. He came in from the woods one day soaked through with rain and said he wished to renew a bad habit of his youth, and did I know a place in town where he could find rudimentary art supplies. I directed him to a store that would suit his ends, where he bought canvases and an easel and paints of basic colours. These he carried past the inn to the half-drowned woods. Absent he remained for five hours. It was early evening when at last he returned, the autumn sky streaked with dark. He did not leave his room for dinner. The door was unlocked when I arrived and that was strange, usually he locked his door and checked his locks with a paranoid rigour. I crept inside and found him seated on the far side of the bed with the easel before him, its matter concealed from me by the angle. He motioned that I should approach.

But it was no longer just the two of us in the room. My voices erupted in a raging chorus and I doubled over from the shock, he asked if I was okay, I could barely hear him much less answer. It was some time before the exhortations within me calmed enough that I could distinguish them. The shrill voice broke through at last and told me Jacob was tied to the destiny of our race in ways the greatness and terror of which it was beyond me to conceive, and now my time had come to live my purpose, which was to see the fruits of that man’s soul delivered into the light of day, where the impact they were destined to have was greater and more awful than that of the Hebrew prophets whose vision for mankind was carried forth unto the nations past the bloodied thresholds of disbelief, lo and behold, lo and behold, that. That was my sacred calling. That belonged to me, Patricia Bender, whom everybody sneered at and ignored and thought a whore and an awful blasphemer wise to keep the children far away from. The shrill voice spoke thus to me. And it was a long time before the passion subsided and I became again aware of my body sprawled on Jacob’s bed. The man loomed over me with a look on his face of considerable concern. What on earth could I say. I shook with terror that he’d spurn me for my strangeness. But he merely asked again if I was okay.

Soon afterwards, Jacob said he planned to leave our town and asked if I’d come with him. He’d met a man in the harbour who hoped to sell his cottage and Jacob had proffered the total sum in cash. I told him I’d join him. Gave me no pause. My voices continued to insist on his importance, and he and I had developed what could be called little other than a marriage. Chaste it was, yet I called forth from him the truest stuff of his heart, and he treated me with a tenderness so unlike the glares I’d known most of my life.

I never quit my job at the inn, just packed my bag and left with Jacob. He had purchased a vehicle from the man who’d sold him the cottage, and it was a cool October morning when into the back of that car we loaded the nothing the both of us owned and piled in and drove out of town. We had food for weeks and water and some tools the uses of which I knew even if Jacob didn’t, such ignorance a comical remnant of his prior life. I’d been the one to prepare our provisions also. It was the beginning of a mutual reliance that was to blossom between Jacob and me, a partnership that left him free to become a man untouched by anything outside his immediate sphere. He spoke during our long drive of the needfulness of that transformation. He said he would live henceforward an apolitical life. I just kept my mouth shut. I knew that whatever the story he told himself about why we were driving out of sight of mankind, there to remain for years and perhaps for the rest of our lives, he was certain in that isolation to set upon work of great importance, and I was to be his succour and his aid, his midwife, his wife.

The sun was shining when we arrived at the place that was to be our home. We’d travelled there through the thick of the woods and it was evident on the last stretch of our drive that we’d ventured far from other human life. The property seemed a wreck. The clearing in which the house stood was overgrown with weeds, and through the tangles skittered small life in great profusion. The house itself boasted wood boards rotten past recovery, a dilapidated porch half crumbling, the stairs broken, the front door unwilling to close. Yet the interior suited our ends just fine. The rustic furnishings were in good repair, as were the windows, tall and broad. They flooded the house with light. Perhaps on account of the proliferation of dust that hung everywhere suspended in the sun, that light seemed not entirely of this world. The look on Jacob’s face gave form to the pleasure I felt. He brushed dust off the kitchen table and plugged in the refrigerator and drew an age of repressed water from the tap. We slipped out of the house and roamed the edge of the woods and drank deep our wilderness. Later we unloaded the car and ate fruit and sipped wine and carefully in the evening made a fire. It was no surprise to either of us but felt like the natural course of things when that night for the first time we made love. It was not exactly an act of desire but rather of confirmation. And it rocked the both of us. It rocked us like neither of us had expected. My voices were all silent.

In the dead of that night Jacob got out of bed and set up his easel in the wide main room. The great windows flooded the room with moonlight, more than enough to paint by. Up behind him I crept. There for a while stood observing. And he was ignorant of my presence as his hands moved over the canvas. So strange, I thought, the forms of this life. Interrogated by reason they are inscrutable. Why should a man painting by moonlight in the wild backcountry of his civilization be of any real significance at all? Why should his painting? Why should a woman devote herself to such a man? It seemed to me as I watched Jacob that the answers to those questions would be obscure beyond all hope in the absence of guiding voices. How helpless are the children of the earth who have no voices to guide them. They are freer than me perhaps but compassless and with so few years given them in the span of a life to sort out where they must go and what they must do. My voices made perfectly explicit to me what was worthy of my deepest devotion. How many souls can count themselves so lucky?

III.

The summer when I was 28, I took a week of sick leave from my job at the Jewish community centre and bought a plane ticket to Victoria. I was a little more than five months pregnant with David. My husband gave me his reluctant, anxious blessing and asked if I’d like him to come along. No, I said, stay here for me: be my beacon from home. I might need one.

The morning of my departure, before I left for the airport to catch my early flight, I slipped back into our bedroom to kiss his sleeping face and found him in prayer at the window, tallit and tefillin wrapped around him. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad. Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, The Lord is One. I unwrapped the black tefillin cords from his arms, traced with my fingertips the dark hairs that rose from beneath the leather.

He crouched and rested his head on my belly. Listening.

“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

I hadn’t flown since I was a child. I’d been twelve the last time, a trip to New York City. My father had had a series of Wall Street meetings and, obliged to stay a week but with plenty of spare time, had decided to bring his family down, show my mother and me around, take us to the Empire State Building, Broadway shows, elegant restaurants on the Upper West Side. It had seemed to me such an adventure, such a privilege, though the photographic record of the week suggests I spent nearly every minute with my nose in a book. The experience of flying I’d found terrifying and liberating. This time I had the thought of Aaron and David to comfort me, though also to intensify my fear that the plane might crash. I had more than my life to lose.

A rush of relief upon landing. I rented a car, raced south towards the city, the day hot and bright. Impossible not to wonder if he’d once driven along this same route, observed these same evergreens. Fifteen years is nothing. Had the airport changed, the highway? Had he even flown from Vancouver or had he taken the ferry instead? Were his thoughts of what he was leaving or of what he was heading towards? I rolled down the windows, half-convinced myself I could taste the ocean in the air, sang a soft medley to the vagabond’s grandson inside me.

When I arrived in Victoria, I headed straight to the Segno Gallery, a narrow storefront tucked between a dive bar and an antique shop. I hopped out of the car, peered through the gallery’s windows. And there it was. Close enough to touch.

Proof of life.

Aaron’s cousin had stumbled across it online. After years of therapy and grief, including my runaway act at sixteen, when I’d escaped to Vancouver to look for him and my mom had flown west to collect me and refused, so painfully, to be angry — after all those years of resolving to forget my father, to move on, my husband’s cousin had found him by accident. An art student, at work on a research project about a collective of small galleries in Victoria, Yoni had called me up and said: Man, you’ve gotta see this … some dude on the other side of the country has painted you.

An astonishing resemblance. The portrait was on the gallery’s website. He’d painted me at fifteen or so, an extrapolation of the girl I’d been when he’d known me. Jacob Belinsky — the name he was born with. I didn’t tell my mother, who’d since remarried. I didn’t want to reopen what I knew she’d still feel as a wound. But for me it was too late.

He has me seated in a giant rocking chair. My hands are folded in my lap. Behind me is a window that lights me; through it can be seen a dry and barren plain that stretches to the horizon, a landscape that has a stark noon beauty but nevertheless seems treacherous. The portrait evokes an inconsolable loneliness, though this loneliness doesn’t seem to emanate from me. My eyes are bright. A hint of a smile plays at the corners of my mouth.

Jacob Belinsky. I couldn’t understand it. In fifteen years I’d searched online for him hundreds, thousands of times, every variant of his name. Fruitless, always. For Yoni to stumble across him like this, so casually, was almost beyond belief. Was his reappearance considered, intentional? Was he calling out to me?

Of course I couldn’t be sure that he was — but I became obsessed with the possibility. For reasons I can’t explain but that consumed me from the moment I saw his portrait of me, I needed him to know of the life growing inside me. I needed him to see my adult face.

Miles of dense forest, an earthen blur. I rolled down the windows, let the breeze dry my sweat. All the details the Segno Gallery’s owner had shared over e-mail looped inside me: a string of images, not quite real, sepia news footage from an alternate universe. My father comes into the Segno one day a little more than a year ago, a pile of canvases in the back of a pick-up truck. He’s exhausted, dejected after a day of visits to the city’s galleries, his hope almost gone that he’ll find one willing to display his work for sale. Helen Koreeda, the curator, wants his paintings as soon as she sees them. He entrusts them to her and drives off, disappears down this green-walled highway I now speed along. And then what? The reel goes blank. Ms. Koreeda had told me he hadn’t returned to her gallery since the day they’d met. She sent all correspondence to a post office box in a small coastal town about five hours northwest of Victoria.

It was evening by the time I got there. I deposited my luggage in my room at the inn near the edge of town and wandered out to what seemed to be the main drag. Once a sleepy fishing and logging region, tourism had enlivened this part of the coast: there were a handful of newish stores, restaurants, and bed and breakfasts that catered to the surfing crowd in particular. The locals seemed friendly. They met my glance, smiled at me and my belly. I strolled along a pier from which I gazed out at the untroubled, undisclosing water. The bank, the library, the liquor store — all housed in old clapboard buildings. Never in my life had I felt more urban, more a citizen of the concrete canyon, wilderness of taxicabs. So much of what I observed I had no name for: the local tree species, the relationship of the ocean to the land: not a “gulf”, perhaps an “inlet”? And though there was hypnotic beauty here, the day’s last light glimmering on the water, I was also struck by the drabness of this town in whose environs my father had perhaps spent years of his life, its fog of parochial constriction. I didn’t want to stay long.

I bought a sandwich, balm for my cramps, from a little rundown diner and found the post office just before it closed for the night. It was a claustrophobic room that in a hundred years probably hadn’t changed in any detail besides the introduction of florescent lights. The clerk, a woman around my age, eyed my belly. I told her I hoped to get in touch with the man who rented PO Box 59.

“59?” she repeated.

“That’s the one.”

“A man?” She checked her register. “I just started working here, but according to the record there’s no man listed for that one. That box belongs to Patricia Bender.”

“Who’s that? You know her?”

She blushed. “Sorry, can’t help you there.”

I wandered back down the road to the diner, which was almost deserted. The waiter who’d taken my sandwich order, a tall, husky-voiced guy probably in his sixties, noticed me and approached. I asked if he knew where I might find Patricia Bender.

He became interested in one of his cuticles. “Oh, no. That family hasn’t lived here for years. Moved to Victoria a long time ago.”

“But she has a post office box here.”

“Don’t know anything about that.”

My audition for the role of amateur detective had just started and already I felt worn down. Crampy again, my swollen feet aching, David doing calisthenics inside me, I bought some fruit and a granola bar and drifted down to the water’s edge. Dusk was settling, the day’s heat easing. I sat on the edge of a dock and peeled my orange. Boats’ rigging clanked in the wind.

“Hey, miss.”

I looked up from my orange. A boy no older than fifteen stood at the edge of the dock, his long blond hair tossed by the breeze in all directions, skinny arms poking out of a tank top.

“You back at Campbell next year?”

He looked at me as though he were sure he knew me.

“Sorry, I think you must have me confused with someone else.”

“You weren’t a substitute at Campbell once or twice last year? Grade Nine English?”

“Nope, not me.” I thought I’d try my luck. “Maybe you can help me out. I’m looking for a painter named Jacob Belinsky, I was told he’s spent some time around here. Ever heard of him?”

If he hesitated, it was for no longer than a fraction of a second.

“Don’t think so.”

“How about Patricia Bender?”

This time the hesitation was pronounced.

“Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

“I think she knows the man I’m looking for.”

He chewed his bottom lip. “Well, if you’re asking. No nice way to put it. The lady was a batshit crazy slut. Slept with anything that moved. Famous for it. They say she met some guy at the inn where she was working as a maid, some old guy with money, and he literally bought her as his personal whore and carted her off to a shack in the woods.”

My heart hammered. “You shouldn’t talk about people that way.”

“Whatever. Everybody knows about those two. Sometimes kids go out to their house and egg it.”

I tried to hide the jolt this gave me. “So you know where they live?”

“Everybody does.”

“You mind showing me?”

I fished the map and a pen out of my shoulder bag and passed them to him. He glanced at the map, at me, and jotted a mark near a logging road outside of town.

“If you’re not from around here,” he said, “how’d you know her name? Who are you, anyway?” “Old friend of the family.”

It was like I’d cast a spell and turned him to stone. He stared at me. When at last he revivified, he backed away.

“Hey, hang on. What’s wrong?”

But he was already hurrying off along the dock.

Bewildered and hopeful, in that order, I rose and walked back into town.

“I’ll be home before you know it.”

Phone pinned between shoulder and ear, my hair still wet from the inn’s unenthusiastic shower, I transferred some essentials (maps, snacks) from my suitcase into my shoulder bag. I’d try to find my father tonight. I couldn’t wait till morning, not when I had so little time to spend here.

“Just a week.”

“I have it marked on my calendar,” Aaron said. “Believe me.”

“You’re still angry.”

“I was never angry. I just don’t understand why this couldn’t wait till after you deliver the astronaut.”

“I’m not going to go into labour at five months, baby.”

“You’re putting yourself under a lot of strain.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Just be careful, okay?”

“I will. Promise.”

I hurried out to the parking lot, tossed my shoulder bag into the passenger seat of my rental car, stole a bite of the pasta dinner I’d ordered from the inn’s restaurant. As I drove out of town, the sky was beginning to grow dark.

It was star-speckled navy by the time I reached my exit from the highway. I turned onto a narrow dirt lane, pulled up to the shoulder and wolfed down my food, got back on the road. The mouth of the woods soon swallowed me, the trees’ canopy nearly concealing the sky. I snapped on my high beams.

My thoughts circled what the boy by the harbour had told me. Was that my father? A man who’d abandoned the most enviable of lives to shack up with a younger woman in a small town? What a joke. Nauseating. Yet maybe even nausea was an overreaction. I didn’t know the man. Would any debauchery make his absence worse?

There was a part of me that didn’t care what he’d done, simply wanted to hear him apologize and say he loved me. He’d loved me when I was a girl, I know it. Not enough, you might say. But sometimes love can see itself clearly only with absence, with the passage of time. Sometimes love can know itself only as regret.

Absorbed in this fantasy, I’d probably been lost for fifteen minutes before I realized it and panicked. I hit the brakes; the car squealed to a stop. I peered at the uniform black woods around me. How far would I have to drive before I found an inn or motel? How much gas did I have left? What if I drove for hours in search of a bed and was left without enough gas to get the car back to town?

I parked well off the road, checked the locks eight times.

In the morning it wasn’t long before I found the place I was looking for.

Deeper into thickening woods and then a clearing. Sunlight. At the end of a dirt road, a squat cottage. I stopped the car as soon as I saw it, concerned that he’d hear the engine. That if he heard me he’d take fright and bolt like a hunted animal. How many times had I pictured this moment? I wished that Aaron were with me and then felt glad he wasn’t. Of course I had to do this alone.

Car door clicked shut. Crunch of leaves underfoot. No other cars here, or none in sight. Birdsong in the trees, endless forest around the house. Maybe he’d been enraptured to discover this place. Had he bought it, or had he stumbled across it like a lost boy in a fairy tale? Had he settled in for good, resolved to end his days here? Would I bring my child here? Impossible. The house might’ve been made of gingerbread for all I believed in its reality. And yet. Sweat on my brow, along my sides, between my legs. My hands to my belly, instinctive. I climbed the rickety porch steps, crept to the door, and knocked.

Nothing. No sound of movement within. The woods around me still and indifferent. I waited. Knocked again. No response. Then, inside, footsteps. A creak of floorboards. I took a step back, composed myself; considered the skirt I was wearing, light and summery and not long, wondered whether it were the right attire for a reunion with your resurrected father, oh well, too late; prepared my face, not a smile but also not an anxious grimness that might make him think I’d grown into someone smileless. I considered what I might say to him when he appeared in the doorway — earnest acknowledgements, stoical grunts, stiff jokes — and when at last the door opened, after what felt like an hour and was probably a quarter of a minute, my mind went blank.

Not him.

A woman. She remained in the house, the door opened no more than a cautious crack. If this was Patricia Bender, she wasn’t as I’d pictured her. Emaciated, her face pasty, the woman in front of me might’ve been in her forties — I intuited that she was, or not much older than that — but she could’ve passed for sixty. She radiated infirmity.

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you lost?”

“Patricia,” said half my voice.

“Yes? Who are you?”

“I’m looking for Jacob Belinsky.”

She opened the door a little wider. Stared.

“Hannah,” she said, with an impossible glimmer of recognition.

My laugh was unnatural, strangled. “That’s me.”

Dark and humid, smell of mildew. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. We passed through a cramped foyer, firewood stacked against the wall, into a large room that seemed to take up most of the cottage. There I discovered the reason for the darkness: all the windows, their casings tall and wide, had been boarded up. Slivers of daylight snuck inside through gaps between plywood and window frame. The obstruction made the cottage feel like a crypt. Along the back wall of the main room was a basic kitchen — gas range, paint-stained steel sink, jarringly modern blender — with a pair of doors beside it. The rest of the room was occupied by rickety wooden furniture, flimsy lamps, and a couch with ripped flower-print upholstery, set too close to a fireplace. A few books were stacked on the kitchen table, the text on their spines illegible in the dimness. As my eyes adjusted, I noticed many other books scattered on the floor, in piles and singly. I also noticed, along each wall, an odd beige paneling, waist-high.

Canvases. Dozens of them, faced towards the walls.

“Would you like some tea?”

I shook my head. She crept across the room, with an unsteadiness that made me wonder if her eyesight were failing, and sat in a rocking chair by the fireplace, a thin cushion beneath her. The rustle of leaves whispered into the house.

“How did you recognize me?”

“He painted you.”

She released a torrent of coughs into her forearm. When the fit passed, she looked up at me, eyes watery.

“He’s dead. I’m sorry. I buried him myself behind the house.”

I felt like laughing long and hard but thought she would be startled, so I didn’t. Such relief. Incomprehensible — I’d longed to find him, I’d come all this way. And yet I felt a burden had been lifted from me.

“How long ago …”

“Last year.”

If I’d searched harder for him when I was a girl. If I hadn’t made myself forget.

“And these canvases. His work.”

“Yes.”

“Would you please tell me about him?”

She didn’t meet my eye. “He was a special man. I saw that from the start. And he was wounded when I met him. Deadened. He became whole again here. I was part of that. I helped him.”

“Deadened … how do you mean?”

She eased herself out of her chair. “It’s difficult to talk about him.”

I was so overwhelmed that I might’ve just nodded and left it at that, but then the rattle of the leaves was pierced by another sound: a car approaching.

She froze. My stomach churned, David kicked. The car drew close and stopped. Engine off. Car door clicked open, clunked shut. Heavy footsteps nearby, in the grass, on the creaky porch. The doorknob turned, the door swung open. Daylight flooded the house.

My father stood in the doorway.

I couldn’t feel anything at first. Just stared. By now he was well past sixty, but he looked a decade younger than that. He’d lost none of his bearing; the white hair seemed hardly to age him. That hair, always thick and wavy, had grown long. My hands went to my belly.

“Hannah.”

His voice hadn’t changed. Neither had his way of looking at me, gentle and attentive. His mouth seemed different. Somehow more ready to laugh.

“Must’ve been a long trip,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

I shook my head.

“Let’s step outside.”

Sunshine, birdsong. I trailed a few steps behind him, struck by the athletic confidence of his walk. Weathered blue jeans, an old plaid shirt, the back of his neck tanned deep brown. I was so angry with him, dumbstruck with anger. And so fascinated by who he had become. He glanced back, his eyes lingering on my belly; I felt a hot blush spread through me.

We stopped at the edge of the woods, in the shade. Right on cue my eyes were full.

“What is this, Dad?” Dad. Muscle memory. “What are you doing here?”

He stared at his hands.

“Well, you’re going to have a grandson. Thought you might like to know.”

And I started to walk away. I had no idea what I was doing, but I sure was doing it.

“Hannah.”

“What? What?” Birds thundered from one branch to another above me. “What’s so important that you didn’t need to tell me for fifteen years, when you could’ve looked me up in the phonebook …”

I felt ridiculous. I was twelve years old again, upset about some domestic injustice, ready to barricade myself in my bedroom in protest. I had no experience of what it was to be an adult with my father.

“Please,” he said.

“I don’t understand why you hated us so much.”

“I didn’t hate you.”

“You left.”

He stared at the dirt. “It’s complicated.”

“Fuck off. Really. Being thirteen years old and realizing your dad’s decided he doesn’t give a shit about you anymore, that’s complicated.”

“You have every reason to be angry.”

I laughed. I laughed with all of me.

“I never wanted to hurt you and your mother. I never regretted anything so much as that.”

“Nobody forced you.”

“No, nobody forced me.”

The birdsong deepened the quiet of the clearing.

“She told me you’d died.”

He blinked. “Trish.”

“She buried you behind the house.”

“She worries about my past catching up to us.”

“Your past as in me and Mom?”

“She’s unwell. She doesn’t always know what’s what.”

I glanced at the cottage, its rotting boards and peeling paint. “Why are you living with a sick woman in the middle of the woods?”

“She refuses to leave.”

Squirrels scampered in the trees. I shivered in the sunshine, drenched with sweat.

“How about I introduce you properly.”

I followed him into the house. Furious. Elated.

“Why do you keep it so dark in here?”

“Patricia says it’s better for her. It wasn’t always this way. We boarded up the windows last year.”

“Your father knows I’m not long for this world,” came her thin voice from the next room. “So any alterations he makes for my sake are temporary.”

“You’re gloomy today.” His affectionate tone unnerved me. “But we can turn on a light, can’t we?”

She didn’t respond. He tugged the chain of a yellowed lamp on a squat table; the room got very slightly brighter. He went to the stove, ignited the gas. “I think I’ll make some omelettes. Any food restrictions?”

“Not firm ones. I usually keep kosher these days, though.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

He glanced at Patricia, still seated in her rocking chair. “Trish. My daughter Hannah.”

“We’ve met.”

“What do you do out here?” I asked her. “What keeps you busy?”

“I ease the birth pangs of his work.”

“And … when his birth pangs are all eased? Do you have work of your own?”

“I manage the household.”

My dad chopped mushrooms, added them to a pan. “Has Isaac come back from the garden?”

“Not yet.”

“Isaac?”

“Isaac is our son.”

You’d think that would’ve knocked me off my feet. But, maybe because I’d just been confronted with so many extraordinary realities, maybe because the thought of my father and this woman raising a child in that lightless shack in the woods seemed so singularly crazy that it had to be true, I wasn’t surprised. Flawless dream logic.

“How old is he?”

“Fourteen.” He lowered the heat on the stove. “Will you keep an eye on the food for a moment while I get him?”

As he left the house, daylight poured inside and escaped again.

I leaned against the kitchen counter, prodded the eggs with a spatula, glanced at Patricia. She sat motionless, her eyes vacant.

“You have a son.”

“Isaac was an accident.”

Her voice was ice slipped down the back of my shirt.

“Lots of kids are. Then they arrive and you love them regardless. So I hear, anyway.”

She was silent.

“I can’t imagine living out here with a child,” I went on. “So far from other people. Must be tricky for him to learn about the world.”

“Your father has taught Isaac more than most people learn by the time they’re your age. Our son has lacked nothing.”

“Sure, all I meant — ”

“He’s lacked nothing.”

I felt a throb of pure hostility towards her. It disturbed me. “My father tells me you’re ill. I’m sorry.”

“Your father’s a genius, but he doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut.”

“It must be hard to manage an illness out here.”

“My needs are nothing.”

The front door opened, daylight swept in, and my father entered with the wispy shape of a boy behind him. I realized Isaac and I had already met.

The kid from the harbour averted his eyes when he saw me, busied himself with unloading the handful of vegetables he carried: cucumbers, onions, tomatoes.

“Isaac, meet Hannah,” my father said.

“Hi.” He didn’t look up.

“He’s heard lots about you. The way you were as a little girl, of course.”

“So you’ve been honest about what happened.”

“I don’t want him to make the mistakes I made.” He took the vegetables from his son’s hands. “He can make his own mistakes.”

“You’re in high school?” I asked my newly minted half-brother, who gave the floor his undivided attention.

“Yeah.”

“Out here or in town?”

“In town.”

“How do you get there from here?”

“Dad.”

My father rinsed cucumbers, sliced them. “Isaac was homeschooled until last year, when we exposed him to the horrors of high school. He’s since become a monster.”

“Is that true? Are you a monster?”

“I dunno.”

With disconcerting ordinariness, we sat around the kitchen table for lunch. My father had made mushroom omelettes and salad; I ate with great appetite. When I’d finished, I watched the rest of them eat in silence. I felt I was observing a family whose practices I was ill-equipped to comprehend, products of another culture, a distant age. Yet this was my family.

I caught my dad staring at my wedding band.

“His name is Aaron.”

“And he … keeps kosher too?”

“Yeah. Sort of. It’s a work in progress.”

“How do you mean?”

I fiddled with my fork. Not convinced he had any right to know about my life. “We both grew up completely secular, and we both felt there was something not quite satisfying about that, so we … looked into it.”

“I went to church as a girl,” Patricia said. “Terrible. Everyone there to pass judgment and mark their place in the community.”

“I think a lot of what drew me and Aaron to Judaism was a craving for community. We’ve made many friends through our synagogue. I feel much less isolated than I used to.”

Isaac looked up at me. When our glances met, he averted his eyes.

“I’m happy you’ve found something in Judaism,” my dad said. “Certainly more than I ever did.”

“Would you like help with the dishes?”

“Don’t be silly, you’re our guest. Isaac, will you show Hannah the garden?”

Isaac rose, brought our plates to the sink, rinsed them. A dutiful, conscientious son. Raised in the wild like an animal or a god. Who, when asked about his parents by a stranger, mentioned no relation to the man who was his father and the woman who was his mother, instead described them as degenerates. I was fascinated by him.

He led me from the house through a small bedroom. A worn double mattress, tangled sheets, an ancient nightstand. Clothes in a heap on the floor, books in piles.

“This is their bedroom?”

“Yeah.”

“And where do you sleep?”

“Mine.”

Steps from the house, the woods enveloped us. There was no path, and he weaved and darted ahead of me. Nervous that I might lose sight of him and be lost, I half-jogged to keep up.

A few minutes later he stopped.

“This is it.”

When my father had said they had a garden, I guess it was my own metropolitan prejudice that had led me to picture the kind of plot you’d maintain as a hobby in your backyard. Their garden, if that’s the word for it, was magnificent. A wide clearing, deciduous trees in dense ranks along the periphery, walls of green and brown; a stream. In the earth on either side of that stream, an astonishing variety of plants. Some bore fruits and vegetables: strawberries, raspberries, onions, tomatoes. Others burst with flowers.

To make this. To renounce the life he’d made, with great cruelty, at great cost, and to make this. Of course it didn’t justify his behaviour, redeem him or the time I’d wasted, grieving and enraged, because of his betrayal. But I couldn’t help but be moved. It all seemed so formidable — the sophistication with which the garden was arranged, the sheer extent of it, the mixture of plants cultivated for their utility with others that did no more than affirm the genius of nature, its voluptuous consolations.

Isaac walked along the edge of the stream. “I’ve built a basic irrigation and drainage system. My dad helped me. It’s been set up here for almost two years.”

“You built an irrigation and drainage system when you were twelve?”

“Twelve and a half. It’s pretty simple. Low-tech. Just a way of taking advantage of the stream here, directing storm water.”

I trailed behind him. Glancing at the soil on either side of the stream, I noticed networks of ditches, furrows. “A lot of your food comes from here?”

“Not animal products, obviously. Or grains. We’re not proper farmers. We do eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, though.”

He skipped along. His comfort, his pride in this place were unmistakable. They made him look older.

“Why did you lie to me about your parents?”

“I told you what people in town say about them. Especially the guys at school.”

“But you could’ve mentioned they happened to be your mom and dad.”

“I didn’t know who you were.”

Yet he’d recognized me eventually. “The painting.”

“Huh?”

“You grew up with my face in the house.”

He shrugged. “I was just like, whatever. If you wanted to visit, great. Anything for a little change.”

“You’re not happy out here.”

“It’s so fucked up. I never realized how fucked up it all is. I’m such a freak.”

“Most people feel that way in high school.”

“I have to get out of here. It’ll kill me if I don’t.” He said it without glibness.

“You don’t even know,” he went on. “Such a fairy tale life out here, right? My mom’s hated me since the second she laid eyes on me. It’s gotten even worse since she’s been sicker. It’s like she blames me.”

The way his mother looked at him, didn’t look at him. The caustic way she spoke about him. “How can she blame you?”

“All she cares about is Dad. Every minute I took away from her is a minute she didn’t fulfill her sacred mission to serve him.”

“Her sacred what?”

“She thinks he’s like a prophet or something. It’s totally fucking insane.”

“He must be flattered.”

“She’s got this degenerative neuro disease. Doctors in Victoria think it causes her psychosis, but they don’t really know. Dad’s been so busy with her lately, since she got sicker. I know they’d both find it easier if I just wasn’t around. So it’s not even like totally selfish that I want to get out of here. It’s for them, too.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. My responsible adult instinct was to talk him down, reassure him that at least one of his parents cared about him very much, that pretty soon he’d be old enough to make his own decisions about where to live and what to do with his life and could leave his parents’ home, if he wanted to, without much difficulty. My stronger instinct was to tell the kid to run.

“Is your baby a boy or a girl?”

“Boy.”

“And you’ve got a husband.”

“Yeah. The two of you might get along.”

“I don’t get along with most people.”

“Where would you want to go, if you left here?”

“Somewhere with millions of girls and a good library.”

I laughed. “That place exists.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon together in the garden. I told him about Aaron and home, my work at the Jewish community centre, the terror and exhilaration I’d felt since I’d found out I was pregnant. He told me again and again of his longing to get out of the woods, off the Island, away from his mother. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but he felt the education our dad had given him prepared him for anything.

We returned to the house just before dark.

“A nice spot, huh,” my father said. “Most of tonight’s dinner comes from there.”

With several antique lamps aglow, the house no longer felt quite so sinister. It was almost cozy.

“Stunning,” I said, apropos of the garden, conscious of how weird it was to compliment my father on anything. “How long have you been working on it?”

“I planted the first seeds the year Isaac was born. It’s actually a much simpler set-up than it seems. It was something to occupy myself with. I’m unemployed, you know.”

“You’re a famous painter,” Isaac said.

“After fourteen years of painting here for myself, I brought a few to a gallery. I’m not exactly a fixture in the art world.”

“Let’s just say you’re a famous painter, okay? That way we can pretend life here isn’t totally shit.”

“Fifteen years in the woods, just educating this one and growing a garden and painting. Of course Mom and I weren’t enough for you. You were looking for Eden.”

From the bedroom closest to the kitchen came a hacking cough.

“Obviously he found it,” said Isaac.

The silence of the night was uncanny. The moon had disappeared behind clouds, so I couldn’t see a thing when, after dinner, I stepped outside to call Aaron. I crept around the side of the house, guiding myself along the wall with my hands. My eyes adjusted a little and I could make out the tops of the trees, silhouetted against the sky. They fenced the clearing in, kept the world out.

“Do you smoke, Hannah?”

My father approached, a lit cigarette between his lips.

“Since when do you?”

“Little more than a year. Another bad habit of my youth I buried.”

“Another?”

“I thought I’d gotten rid of the painting, too. Funny how everything eventually comes back. If I were a believer like you, I think I’d go for one of the Eastern faiths. Cycles. Reincarnation. That sounds about right. It seems to me that most people are reincarnated a few times over the course of even a single life.”

“I never said I was a believer.”

He slid to the ground beside me, leaned against the house’s splintered slats. He met my eye with an intensity that startled me. “Did I interrupt you? Have you made your call?”

I shook my head. “So what’s your plan now? Are you going to hide in the woods for the rest of your life?”

“It’s clear she doesn’t have much time left. Eventually I’ll leave with Isaac.”

“Does he know that?”

“We don’t discuss his mother’s condition. He leaves the room whenever I try to broach the subject. But I’d need to get out of here anyway, I’m running out of money. Isn’t that ridiculous. Fifteen years and soon I’ll need a job.”

He stubbed out his cigarette.

“For a long time I thought I was giving him everything, everything he might need. Now I wake up in a sweat convinced I’ve failed him, Trish has damaged him. I live in constant terror that he’ll run off. I’m sure he’ll do it. I’ll wake up one morning and the car will be missing, I’ll find it parked at the bus station in town. Not a doubt in my mind. Just a question of when.”

“Why him and not me.” Selfish, maybe. But it was all I could think. “Why so terrible to lose him but not to lose me.”

“It was terrible to lose you.”

“Bullshit. It was your choice.”

He didn’t say anything. His face looked bloodless.

“I’m sure Mom wouldn’t have minded if you’d bought an easel and paints, if that’s what you needed. Why couldn’t you let us in?”

The silence swelled to minutes.

“I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t paint. If I truly believed, my life would be enough. The other pieces of my life.”

The wind whistled. He brushed his hair from his face.

“I paint to inch towards an understanding of … something ultimate. But that’s madness. What kind of fool tries to paint his way to an answer when he’s sure no answer is possible? Why live for the mystery if there is no mystery? Why not just accept the pleasures of the world?”

He rolled the butt of his cigarette between his fingers.

“I didn’t tell you and your mother about my painting because I didn’t know about it then myself. My painting is the articulation of a question I suppressed very persuasively in those years. But for some people I think such questions might be permanent.”

His frown deepened.

“Sorry. I’m keeping you from your call. Your husband must be worried.”

I shook my head, but he’d begun to walk away already.

The moon rode high. David rolled over inside me, passing in his sleep from one dream to the next. Exhausted, I leaned against the house and called my husband. He picked up on the first ring.

“My pilgrim.”

“Guess what.”

My hands shook so much I thought I’d drop the phone.

“I found him.”

Startled from sleep. Cold sweat, full body ache. Everywhere dark.

I sat up and the room spun. Aware that I had seven or eight seconds at most before I threw up, I stumbled into my father’s tiny, mildewed bathroom. Afterwards, I tried to be as quiet as possible, checked that the area was spotless, washed my hands with the tap open no more than a trickle. No sounds from the rest of the cottage.

I crept back to the couch, unsteady on my feet, still nauseous.

Isaac watched me in the darkness.

I almost cried out, caught myself.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle. I heard you get up, wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

“Everything’s fine. Thanks.”

“I’ll head back to bed then.”

He didn’t. He settled into a corner of the couch and wrapped his long arms around my pillow, peered up at me.

“My dad says you’re staying.”

“Not for too long.”

Only after we’d finished dinner had it struck me that the sky was dark, my luggage back in town at the inn. And my last attempt to navigate the woods by night hadn’t been a success.

He avoided my eye. “I was wondering if I could ask you something. If you could help me.”

“Of course. Anything.”

“So. So, I. Um. Don’t know how to talk to girls.”

Another wave of nausea hit me, probably unrelated to his remark. “There’s no trick. It’s just like talking to guys.”

“No, I mean I actually don’t know how. I didn’t know a single girl until last year. Other than my mom, who obviously doesn’t count. I’d seen girls in town but never had a conversation with them. So when I met girls at school, I just acted towards them like men do in books.”

“Which books?” I was pretty concerned.

“Exactly. Books aren’t consistent. I mean, I wasn’t going around asking girls to touch my crotch or anything. I just told them the nice things I thought about them. And then asked if I could kiss them.”

My concern was leavened with amusement. “Maybe I can give you some pointers.”

“How did your husband win you over?”

“He was just himself. Kind, soulful. Funny. You’ve got all the same assets he has. You just need to find somebody who can appreciate them.”

“Right, yeah,” he said, with a peremptory nod. “And so, like, what did your husband say when he first wanted to have sex with you?”

“Uh.” Aaron had said, more or less, Shall we? The end — not quite the end — of a long third date. “Can’t remember exactly. But we’d gone through some preliminaries first.”

“Same here. I’d been in class with these girls for weeks before I told them how I felt.”

“It’s great that you’re honest with them. You never know, maybe next year you’ll be the school Casanova.”

“Fuck no. All I want is one. One real love. I find that, I’ll hold onto it for the rest of my life. I know what my dad was like when you knew him.”

My stomach somersaulted. “What? What was he like?”

“I’m not going to be that way, swear to God.”

He straightened my tangled sheets on the couch, fluffed my pillow.

“How long are you staying?”

“I don’t fly home until Wednesday. I could stay almost till then.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

“If you feel sick or you need anything, wake me.”

I thanked him. He sprang from my sleeping place and hurried back to his own. I thought, for the first time: he sort of looks like me. The shape of his face, texture of his hair. Those big green eyes. I wondered if he’d had the same reaction when he’d spotted me in the harbour, if even before he’d recalled my portrait he’d sensed a kinship. If, seeing me, he’d felt for a moment less alone.

The sky was blue, the sunlight searing. We lazed in the garden’s shade. I had with me a well-thumbed book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi and theologian; Isaac had brought Notes From Underground.

“My dad gives me reading lists. I’m developing at an accelerated pace.”

“What else has he gotten you to read?”

“Lots. All of Shakespeare. Plato, Homer. Emerson and Whitman. Henry Miller.”

“Really? Henry Miller? How old were you when this happened?”

“Twelve?”

“I think that might be child abuse.”

“Nah. I read Miller before I knew what the big deal was about cunts or cocks. It was just a story. Sort of boring, actually. I think he wanted me to be bored so I’d remember my boredom when I had to figure sex out later. Like maybe then I wouldn’t go crazy imagining it was the best thing ever.”

“He’s a controversial guy, our father.”

“He also pointed out the parts of Dante that show what some people think happens to you if you live like Henry Miller.”

I laughed. “Do you believe that? You’re blown around by terrible winds eternally for your sins of lust?”

“There’s no reason why it couldn’t be true. Although, like, there’s also no reason why it has to be. My mother sort of believes it.”

“Really. I thought she wasn’t a fan of the church.”

“She thinks there has to be some sort of other reality. Or else what’s the point of her voices, you know? She thinks there has to be something after she dies to prove her life meant something.”

And if in the meantime she’s miserable to the person to whom she owes the greatest part of her care, the son she brought into the world, if she condemns him to a life of trying fruitlessly to piece together why he wasn’t worthy of his parent: too bad. Her higher calling exempts her from any charge of mere cruelty. Tough luck to be born the mystic’s child.

“What about you?” He twirled blades of grass, slipped them beneath his rolled up shirtsleeves, at ease. “You believe in all that afterlife stuff?”

“It isn’t a huge part of Judaism. The tradition is more this-worldly, more about sanctifying the everyday. Did our dad never talk to you about it?”

“Nah, he’s not religious. He hates that stuff.”

And yet his life here was all reverence. This garden. His art. The love he had for his second family.

“What was he like when you knew him?”

“I remember I sensed his unhappiness pretty clearly at times. I never understood it. I’m not sure he did either.”

“Yeah. Yeah, Dad’s a strange one, huh? I mean he’s nice and all, but he’s pretty hard to get a read on. I never know what he’s thinking.”

“You must know how much he worries about you.”

“Yeah, I dunno.”

“He does. A lot.”

“I’m going to read for a while, okay?”

The woods must have scrambled my sense of time, because it was only as sundown approached on the following evening that I realized it was Shabbat. I hadn’t welcomed the Sabbath without Aaron in nearly three years. Every Friday evening in Toronto, he and I would walk to our little synagogue, daven, return home to eat a feast of a dinner, and spend the rest of the evening reading and fucking. The next morning we’d rise early and return to shul, after which we’d meet friends for Shabbat lunch, usually at the home of Dave and Julie Greenberg, a young couple like us: raised in secular Jewish families, not wholly reconciled to that inheritance, curious. Back at our apartment, the afternoon would again be spent in rites of sex and study, before the first stars appeared in the Saturday sky and the holiness of the day — so the story went — departed. For three years this discipline had been a deep and constant pleasure in my life. Strange that I should forego that pleasure to break bread with my reverent atheist of a father.

He laid out dinner, a vegetable lasagna. Patricia, bedridden since morning and seized by hacking fits, had gotten herself to the kitchen table and sat, rigid, next to Isaac.

I took a breath, told myself it didn’t matter if they thought me pushy or foolish, and asked my father if he had any candles.

“Why?”

“It’s Friday night.”

He rose and rummaged under the sink, where he retrieved a book of matches, a candle, and a tarnished silver holder. He set the candle in front of me, lit it, and turned away.

I covered my eyes, sang the prayer. Since there was no wine on hand, I proceeded, according to tradition, to say Kiddush over the bread.

“Shabbat Shalom,” I said.

“Shabbat Shalom,” said Isaac. His parents stared at him.

“So what are you painting right now?” I asked my dad.

“Same as usual. What’s on my mind.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll know when I’ve finished.”

“Dad’s been selling work like crazy.”

“Isaac is my biggest fan. My second biggest.”

He glanced at Patricia. She didn’t acknowledge him.

“You must be proud that my dad’s work is getting recognition.”

She was silent.

“Patricia isn’t thrilled that I sell my paintings.”

“How many have you sold?”

“I’m not sure.”

“A dozen,” said Isaac.

“Be quiet,” said his mother.

“Why can’t he answer my question?”

“He wasn’t asked.”

“Isaac, how many paintings has your father sold?”

“A dozen.”

Her chair scraped backwards. With the table as a support, she pushed herself to her feet, picked up her plate, and hobbled into the bedroom.

“Excuse me a moment,” my father said.

Isaac stood, snatched our plates, brought them to the sink and scrubbed them, hard.

When my father emerged, he stepped outside to smoke. I trailed behind him. He stood on the porch and listened to the night with lupine attention.

“I’m sorry for the pain I caused you,” he said.

The breath left my chest.

“How have you grown up to be so loving? Why don’t you hate me?”

“Just the way I’m wired,” I said, barely.

“You should lash out at me. Leave me.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, you lost that privilege.”

His laugh was hoarse.

I took his hand. “Let’s go be with your family. It’s Shabbat.”

Just after dawn, Patricia woke in terrible pain.

My father pretended to be calm and focused as he rooted through her supply of medications, his eyes squirrely with panic. I offered to help; he brushed me off. I stepped outside in time to see Isaac run into the woods. Not long afterwards, my father burst onto the porch and, with a soft voice and wild eyes, asked me to get his son, put him in the car with me, and drive into town as fast as I could to fill a prescription.

I found Isaac reading in the garden, told him what his father had requested. At first he shocked me by resisting. Wanted to stay where he was. His muted revenge. Stepped on and neglected by his mother all his life, it wasn’t that he hoped for her to suffer, he just didn’t care to be involved in the scramble to relieve her pain. Finally I convinced him — said I wanted his company myself, which I did — and together we drove out of the woods, the morning damp and grey.

He directed me to the pharmacy in town. I parked and hurried out of the car, prescription in hand, and was about to head inside when I realized he wasn’t following me.

“I’m gonna go to the library and use the Internet.”

“Not now. Please.”

“Just want to check something real quick. I’ll be back before you’re done.”

I couldn’t waste time arguing. The sound of Patricia’s pain reverberated in my head.

In the tiny pharmacy, little more than a supply closet in a bungalow that also housed a doctor’s office, I waited in line for ten minutes. When it was finally my turn, the woman behind the counter scrutinized Patricia’s prescription with a zeal that struck me as judgmental. I tried to imagine what I’d say to my dad if his son slipped away on my watch. He’d insist he didn’t blame me — nobody could stop Isaac if he were determined to run — but he also wouldn’t know who else to blame, besides himself. Isaac must know what difficulties he’d create for me if he disappeared now, I thought. We’re friends — surely he wouldn’t choose such an awful moment for his escape. But when the pharmacist returned with the drugs, he was still nowhere to be seen.

I waited ten more minutes and began to drive around town in search of him. I parked by the harbour and scanned the decks of boats, dashed into surf shops and the bank and the supermarket to see if anyone had noticed him come in or pass by. No such luck. As I’d expected. He knew the town, knew I’d be looking for him, knew where he could hide. I couldn’t linger with the drugs in my car and my father alone with Patricia, waiting. I’d have to come back for him.

As I entered the woods, the car’s air conditioner on full blast, my phone vibrated on the passenger seat.

“Sorry. Need some time to think.”

My gut leaped into my throat. “Where are you?” “Don’t worry, I’ll call you later when I wanna come back.”

“Wait, Isaac — ”

He hung up. The little prick, I thought, dizzy with relief.

I rushed into the house, it sounded just like I remembered, or worse, or very much worse, my dad had lost all semblance of composure, he snatched the drugs from me and disappeared into the bedroom to administer them, and it was half an hour before he emerged and shut the door behind him and the house settled into a black silence.

Sweat-soaked, he asked: “Where’s Isaac?”

I explained.

When I’d finished, he walked across the room and ripped away the boards nailed over the windows. They were thick boards; he flung them down like kindling. When all the windows had been revealed and the room was illuminated with a quality of daylight that was wonderful perhaps not only because it replaced the morbid dimness, he slid to the floor, spent.

“Much better,” he said.

Shortly after two in the morning, my phone rang.

“I’m ready to come home now.”

I sped through the woods, my high beams shocking the trees out of their sleep. My son twisted inside me. What was I still doing here? Why was I putting myself under all this strain? If something were to happen to the baby, I’d never forgive myself.

My brother crouched on the curb in front of the pharmacy, pale in the streetlights’ glow. He looked so small and vulnerable that it took all my resolve to stay angry.

“Get in.”

We drove in silence. He sat with his eyes closed.

“It’s not that I don’t understand,” I said, as we entered the black tunnel of the woods. “But you’ve got to pick your moments better. He had enough to deal with.”

“Wasn’t about him.”

“I need to leave soon, you know that. He won’t have my help on days like today, he’ll need you. You can make each other’s lives easier right now.”

He didn’t speak for the rest of the drive.

The reunion between father and son was understated. My dad didn’t chastise Isaac, just told him there were leftovers from dinner and his mother was in less pain. Isaac hurried into his bedroom, and my dad went to check on Patricia for what he said would be five minutes.

An hour later he hadn’t reappeared. I waited on the couch, stared at my reflection in the uncovered windows steeped in night. The house was still and silent apart from the occasional creak of wood.

David kicked. I had a cramp. And that cramp crested into another, and another, and my heart started to pound, and then the cramps subsided, thank God, but I thought, and it was like a slap to the face: I must be absolutely out of my mind.

I packed in a hurry. I left a note for my father on the kitchen table, slid another note under Isaac’s bedroom door. And I slipped out of the house.

In an hour I was back on the highway, a knife’s edge of the day’s first light on the horizon. The rush of freedom, the relief were overwhelming. I was halfway to Victoria before this began to chill me.

IV.

The landlady raps at the door. Phone call for you last night, she says. Who, he asks. Claimed she was your daughter?

A charge leaps from his gut to the top of his scalp. What’s the number. She gives it to him. Right away he calls. His daughter’s husband’s recorded voice asks him to leave a message. He says only hello, please call, I’m here. For an hour he waits for the phone to ring. It doesn’t.

Claustrophobic, he slips out of the house and walks down to the beach. The early summer air is crisp. He stands, as usual, as is his routine, not far from where he stood when, nearly twenty years earlier, he looked out to sea and summoned the shapes of his life back east and found them evanescent. Here, before the tribunal of the mountains.

He remains in Vancouver because the hum of city life numbs him. That numbness he once sacrificed everything to escape has become a necessary salve. To live without his son, without knowing his son is safe and healthy, is impossible. He lives impossibly. Why can’t he let him go? Because he’s getting old? Because of his stiffening back, his weakening vision — his fear of dying alone? Or because his son is a necessary part of him: a tandem heart, an extension of his breath. Hannah grew up largely without him, without the best of him, but of Isaac’s childhood he witnessed most of the waking minutes. He educated him. He taught him what he valued, what he doubted. His son’s sense of beauty is his. And his son’s laughter.

So goes the broken record of his late life, echoing inside him as he shuffles down the beach full of young people at the start of their lives, beginning their search or their denial of the search, waking to the mystery and living it in the blood or locking it securely in an airless vault to be opened after death. The scent of the sea rocks him. The mystery, he thinks, the old mystery, still there, still just out of sight. Reveal it. Reveal it now or let it not be revealed forever. I’m tired of waiting.

He paints for an hour when he gets back to his room, drinks more coffee, eats toast and fruit. Waits for the phone to ring. He paints a while longer. This, in his numbness, has become his life. He has no friends. He reads voraciously, half-convinced that some book exists, if only he can find it, that will lead him to his son. For similarly chimerical reasons, he frequents an Internet café a few streets over. Strangely, his recent painting, born of this benumbed shadow of a life, has met with a warm reception. There are now a handful of galleries on the west coast that display his work and sometimes even sell it. The income is helpful; when, on that last evening of his previous life, he walked into the bank and cashed half his liquid assets, he didn’t expect he’d need to make the money last this long. Years ago, he would’ve been gratified by the attention his art’s received. But his world without his son is a magic lantern show. Will I ever stop feeling guilty, he wonders. Will the day come when he’ll seem to me like any other grown child, gone off to make his own life? Is my attachment unnatural, he wonders. As unnatural as once my detachment was? Why this anxiety when maybe he’s thriving, happy? Why this fatal weight that never leaves me?

The phone rings as he puts his painting aside for lunch. Hannah’s voice seems to him changed. Matured, more darkly melodious. Hannah, he says, all other words stunned into silence, the way they were when he first saw her grown into a woman, when she trespassed into his sanctuary and the pain of leaving, the consciousness of what he’d left, came flooding back. As it does now. With surprising ease, she says. I wasn’t hiding. You’re still painting? There’s nothing else. His daughter is silent for a thickening moment. Before she speaks again, clouds pass and his room is filled with light of a fine dappled quality, ghosts of leaves speckled along the walls, his arms. I’m sorry I left the way I did, she says. I panicked. It wasn’t fair. I’ve wanted to apologize for a long time. The absurdity of his daughter’s contrition makes him feel sick. Please, he says. But when I tried to get in touch with you again, the woman at the gallery in Victoria said all her recent letters to you had been returned. I didn’t know how to reach you. I wasn’t reachable, he says. Your landlady tells me you’re on your own now. Why don’t you visit us? David’s two. Come meet him. Stay with us for a while. I couldn’t trouble you, he says. Don’t be ridiculous, Dad. Family’s family.

He protests for twenty minutes, but his relief when she doesn’t relent makes him sob uncontrollably as soon as he hangs up the phone. Within a week he’s packed up everything he owns, deposited a number of paintings at a gallery in Kitsilano for safekeeping, and gotten himself on a flight. He hasn’t been on an airplane since his long ago journey west, and as the plane takes off he trembles, hands vised around the armrests, knuckles blanched. He calms when the plane reaches its cruising altitude, grows so relaxed that he almost drifts off to sleep. His mind leapfrogs between thoughts. How strange to return home so suddenly after so many years. To return, he thinks with a flicker of lancing grief, to the scene of the crime. Rebecca Weiss. He can hardly recall her face.

He dozes for a while, wakes shortly before landing, and becomes aware of a tidal pain at the edges of his perception. By the time he’s off the plane it’s overwhelmed him. As he wheels all his belongings in his carry-on, shuffles towards the concourse where his daughter awaits him, every nerve in his body radiates grief. He doesn’t understand why he’s still alive. He feels ancient. Pain crests into panic and his legs fail; he collapses against a wall in a hallway outside the concourse, struggles to make the breath go down. How has he wound up like this? Nothing left to desire, nothing to live for. What mystery, he thinks. The only mystery is by what means the world eviscerates you. Once that’s revealed, there’s no question left to be asked. All that remains to desire is oblivion.

It’s in this frame of mind that he shuffles out to the arrivals hall, so it surprises him to feel — as he sees his daughter with her husband, a thin man with warm eyes, who holds their son, bright with young life and a full head of curly blond hair — a quickening of his blood he might almost mistake for joy. Hi Dad, says his daughter. And she wraps her arms around him. Her husband introduces himself, introduces his grandson. Flesh of his flesh. His grandson. Glad to meet you, he says, his voice and body unsteady. I’m Jake. Jake or Jacob, take your pick.

They drive into the city. He sits enveloped by his daughter’s family, observes them in wonder, oscillates between excruciating grief and excruciating joy, terror the base note. He feels like a child: helpless, aimless. I haven’t been to Toronto in almost twenty years, he tells his grandson, whose eyes go wide. I have lots of wonderful memories of this city. Many of them involve your mother when she was a young girl. His daughter’s expression is both compassionate and wary. He understands. I won’t stay long, he says, asking permission to embrace the joy he feels by swearing his readiness to relinquish it. Stay as long as you like, says his daughter. David needs all the Bubbies and Zaidies he can get, says her husband from the driver’s seat. That way he grows up knowing who he is. He looks at his grandson, who’s preoccupied with his own thumbs. I’m not sure I can tell him who he is. Who are you, he asks the thumb-beguiled boy. David, says David.

It’s nearly midnight by the time they arrive at his daughter and her husband’s apartment, a two-bedroom walk-up above a furniture store. He has no appetite, but he accepts his daughter’s offer of bagels and tea, afraid that she might otherwise leave him on his own. He sits with her in the kitchen as her husband puts their son to bed. Unsure what to say; frightened that a too clear expression of the tenderness he feels, overtaking him tidally as his pain did, might alarm these young strangers who are his closest living relations; alarmed himself at his rending passions, his weakness, his inability to know what he needs and what he lives for. Tell me if you don’t want me in your life, he says to his daughter as they wait for the kettle to boil. Just tell me and I’ll go, I don’t mind. She doesn’t respond. The kettle boiled, she pours tea, brings over the bagel she’s toasted and buttered for him, the cucumber she’s sliced, and sits at his side. What’s left for me to do, he asks. I’ve lived a full life. Maybe it’s time to call it a day. We’re always in need of babysitting help, she says. You think you’re allowed to quit this life while Aaron and I can’t afford to hire a nanny? Soon her husband joins them, and they talk long into the night. Mostly he listens. Picking his way forward along the edge of a chasm, refusing to look down. Looking instead at the faces in front of him.

He sleeps on their couch for now, a makeshift solution until they can figure something else out. He tends to his grandson every weekday while the parents are at work. The boy fascinates him, gives him great pleasure to observe. They watch cartoons together. The boy dashes around the apartment, tyrannizes the furniture. There are moments that evoke memories of his son’s childhood, and the pain is intense. But it passes. The boy doesn’t let him grieve for long, is too demanding, unforgiving of selfabsorption. He knows his babysitting regimen won’t satisfy him forever, his intellect will need more to keep it occupied. But for now it’s a respite. It occupies his time, holds the emptiness at bay.

He considers calling his ex-wife but doesn’t know what he’d say. He could apologize, though the thought of such a belated apology, its outrageous inadequacy, makes him nauseous. He calls anyway. A man answers. He hangs up at once. Later he calls again and gets her machine, where he leaves a brief message. I’m in Toronto, he says. I’m sorry to intrude. Just wanted to let you know I’m here. Hannah tells me you’ve been well. I’m glad. I’m glad, he repeats, ancient history shuddering through him. Please don’t call me back if it’ll create difficulties for you. He hangs up, rushes outside, walks for hours. She never calls back.

One evening, he slips out of the apartment to buy basic art supplies. He brings them to the breakfast table the next day. What’s this, his daughter asks. I have arcane wisdom to impart to your son, he says. When the parents have left, he sets up his easel in the centre of the living room, opens the blinds to let the grey day in. The boy observes him with uncharacteristic diffidence. Just a moment, he says. I’ll show you. Everything set up, he leads the boy to the easel and stands him on a chair. Show me the world, he says. The boy looks at him, unsure what he’s supposed to do. He guides the boy’s brush to the paint, to the blank surface. Go on, he says.

The parents arrive home from work to find an alien snow of paint-streaked papers scattered across the hardwood floor. We’ll clean it up, he calls from the bathroom, where he’s scrubbing the boy’s hands to try to dislodge the more stubborn patches of paint caked onto his nails. Over dinner he apprises the parents of the progress the boy has made, how their toddler has progressed from applying blobs of paint helter-skelter, with a primitive enthusiasm, to a subtler, more delicate approach whereby concentric circles are interpolated among the blobs. The parents, though sceptical, aren’t uninterested. He is a painter, after all, and it may be somehow beneficial for their son to be exposed to the fine arts at a young age.

The next day, and then every day that week, he paints with his grandson. He continues to guide the boy’s hand over the canvas, to suggest shapes he might make, patterns he might impose, intermittencies of colour that might produce a shiver of delight. Yet by the fifth day the boy clearly wishes to take charge. With a show of small-limbed resolve, the boy wrests possession of the paintbrush from his instructor. The hand that holds the brush moves with assurance. Slowly he becomes aware that his grandson is painting with reference to him. That at intervals the boy looks up to take him in. Comprehending, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he moves to the window in front of the easel and sits on the ledge, in line with the boy’s gaze. He observes his grandson, who still looks two-going-on-three, but two-going-on-three and focused. What does the little boy see when he scrutinizes the old man’s face?

The boy drops his brush at once when his mother arrives home. He runs to her, throws his arms around her legs. As his daughter kisses his grandson, Jacob hobbles over to the easel, where, without looking at it, without even a glance, he folds up the portrait his grandson has made of him, goes to the window, opens it a crack, checks to make sure nobody’s watching, and lets the paper fly out into the evening. The breeze takes it. Gone. He closes the window. How was your day together, his daughter asks, lifting his laughing grandson high in the air. Perfect, he says.