For the second time that morning, Lavinia left her spade and the pails of potatoes she’d been digging to slip between the tight rows of corn standing blue and hard in the early light. She pulled off her coat—one of Jack’s old flannel ones, far too large—and wiped sweat from her forehead and upper lip with the hem of her shirt. She leaned back, resting her forehead against her arms, and tried to take long, slow breaths, tried to pull the air through her, clear and cold and still-dark, like water from the rain barrel when the ice was chipped open. It would be good to go there now, to where it stood under the shadows of the eaves on the north side of the house, hack off a big chunk to hold between her lips. But Jack would think she was slacking. So she crouched between the rows of corn, smelling the rich root-cellar smell of dug potatoes and rolling her forehead against the skin of her arms.
From where she crouched, she could see Jack through the browning leaves, hammering against the truck engine by the barn, each blow ringing across the yard like the clipped pealing of a bell. It was a strange sound, one that did not travel up, toward the slowly lightening sky, but only outward, across the fields—still dark and rimy—as though it too stuck fast to the earth. Each blow running in ripples beneath her boots, shivering up through her bones, her stomach—a small, wayward earthquake.
That shivering made her think of those snake pits where she’d stopped once with her parents, on the only family holiday they’d ever taken—south, to Cypress Hills. They’d stood, the three of them, looking down at what appeared at first not to be snakes at all, but simply a shifting mass that rippled as though beneath one skin.
But once she’d been able to distinguish the individual bodies on the rocks, Lavinia could not look at them without a queasy, dizzy, skin-crawling feeling, as if she could sense their movements coming up through the earth to her feet. And so she’d tried to pretend she was somewhere else, staring instead at the sunlight beating off a tin sign she could not read in the distance, until her mother finally sighed, “We should get a move on, I guess,” and her father said, “Road’s not getting any shorter,” and they’d piled into the car, Lavinia in the back, wedged in on one side by suitcases and a plastic cooler, panting and sick, forehead up against the hot window, unable, for some reason, to roll it down, to touch anything with her hands.
Just thinking of those snakes made her feel ill again, so she thought instead about earthquakes, about how the ground could split open in a second, swallowing everything. Not here, though. That kind of thing didn’t happen here. No natural disasters, nothing quick and awful and spectacular. Just drought. Just slow death.
For two weeks now, she’d been feeling weak, tired—no, exhausted. “Strong as a horse,” Jack used to boast when they were first married, “and twice as hungry.” It was a stupid thing to say, but she’d liked it, heaping another helping onto her plate as if to say, He’s right, you see? I never fill up, I never do. As if it united them somehow.
Now she could eat almost nothing; at times, she thought she could even feel something there in the pit of her stomach, something hard and foreign. Lump, she thought, and clenched her hands into cold fists against her belly. But there was no real pain. Not yet, anyway. Just a terrible sense of something gone wrong.
When Lavinia met Jack, she’d already lived in Medicine Hat a few years, city girl, sworn off ever returning to the dust hole where her parents still farmed. “A desert,” she told the girls at the all-night pancake house where she worked, “right down to the damn dunes.” And she’d describe the hills where her father grazed his cattle, the parched scrub, the hot smell of stinkweed and sage, the sandfly bites that would swell instantly to the size of quarters. She’d tell all the jokes she knew—Hear about the hooker who entertained a farmer from Saskatchewan? How did she know he was from Saskatchewan? First it was too dry, then it was too wet, then he asked if he could pay her in fall. She’d shake her head and say, “Wild horses.”
Then Jack turned up. He came in one night with some friends, drunk, all of them, and rude. She’d cried afterwards, when she was alone in the staff bathroom. She wasn’t sure why; she’d had worse customers. When he came back the next morning to apologize, she agreed—maybe because of the way he stood awkwardly at the till, waiting for her to finish her table, his plaid shirt so new she could still see the creases from the package; maybe because he used her name without checking the tag on her shoulder; or maybe just because, after all, he seemed awfully sincere—to go on a date with him.
She wasn’t surprised to discover he was from the Sand Hills, too. Lots of people around town were, younger people, unwilling or unable to continue battling the land for a living. The struggle wasn’t worth it. Farming wasn’t about pride anymore, or love, and certainly not about money. Besides, there was plenty of work to be had in the oil patch. Big money. And you could travel. Will the last person to leave Saskatchewan please turn out the lights? That was the running joke. Lavinia never said it, though; that one she didn’t find particularly funny.
Neither did Jack. “Ingrates,” he said that first night as they sat over beers in the Westlander. “And smartasses. Not a clue what it took to get those farms started. What their grandparents went through. Great-grandparents. Stuck it out through the thirties and God knows what all kinds of hell.” He shook his head. “Now? Too goddamn lazy. Spoiled. Got the world figured out.”
He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table, tapped it. Lavinia sipped her beer, thinking, He has the bluest eyes, blue like the lakes in the Wheat Pool calendars—photographs she’d clipped and Scotch-taped to the walls and ceiling of her bedroom when she was a girl, loving both the scenery and the names: Jackfish, Witchekan, Big Quill. She’d lie across her bed on hot summer afternoons and stare into all that blue, running the names cooly through her head, like a chant. Pelletier, Candle, Old Wives.
“Tell me,” he said, pointing his cigarette at her, “tell me you don’t miss it. All that open space. Those fields. The light there. Some days you can see ten, twelve miles.”
That reminded Lavinia, briefly, of another joke, something about watching your dog run away for three days. But she did not tell it. She was listening to Jack, thinking, Maybe I wasn’t looking, all those years. Maybe it was there. All that time. Maybe it was me.
Thinking, Bigstick, Manito, Willow Bunch.
Jack leaned toward her across the table, so close she could see those lakes had little yellowish pockets of light, shifting like water lilies. Like trout. “Tell me,” he said again, “tell me you don’t miss it.”
Two weeks after the wedding, she packed up the few dishes and odd bits of furniture she’d collected, helped Jack load it all into his truck and they headed east, making a quick stop at the pancake house so Lavinia could drop off her uniform and pick up her final cheque.
“Never thought I’d see the day,” one of the girls said.
“Yeah,” Lavinia said. “Well.”
She spent the first few months setting the old farmhouse in order—rearranging kitchen cupboards, sweeping out closets, even putting a row of petunias and marigolds in the freshly weeded patch beneath the south kitchen windows, carrying water to them in an old ice cream pail every evening.
Her mother was thrilled. “My daughter,” she said, “come back to the fold.”
Her father simply gloated. “Got yourself a nice place here,” he’d say, looking around. “View of the Sand Hills.” He’d say it each time they came.
And at first she kind of thought so, too. It was a nice place. The red-painted outbuildings, the neat white farmhouse which, though small, was bright and had a tiny veranda round the back where she could imagine them sitting on rare windless evenings, sipping coffee, listening to the crickets and watching the light slip off the land.
Now, a little more than a year later, they had yet to sit there in the companionable silence she had imagined. Jack, she realized, never sat. He just moved from one task to the next, evenly. When he stopped, he slept. Determined to make the best of it and to entice him, too, she’d tried sitting there one evening on her own, pulling out two kitchen chairs. But she felt guilty and then angry, watching him cross and re-cross the yard well into dusk. Ignoring her. Making his point. And so she’d dragged the chairs back inside, sat instead looking out the kitchen window where at least he could not see her. Sat looking at those red buildings slowly darken and sag. Wondering why she hadn’t noticed before how they all seemed to tilt slightly in one direction from the constant assault of wind.
Homestead, he’d called the farm when they first met, a place he could not possibly leave. “They can put me six-feet-under right back by the barn. Suit me fine.”
Homestead.
At the time, it had made sense to her. Such a beautiful word. Endearing. And she’d thought, quite stupidly, He could make me love it.
The ringing of the hammer against the truck engine stopped, and in a moment Lavinia heard Jack’s heavy bootfalls coming across the yard. She wiped her face again, pulled on her coat and quickly slipped back through the leaves. But he was already standing there, her spade held loosely in his fingertips.
“I had to pee,” she said, though there was no real reason why she should explain. He looked down at the near-empty bucket. “Ground’s hard,” she added. “On account of the frost.”
She held out her hand for the spade, thinking he might drop it there in the dirt. It was hard to tell with Jack. Moody. But he just nudged the bucket with the toe of his boot and handed her the spade.
“Going to Schecters’,” he said.
Lavinia had not been to Ray Schecter’s place since that once before she and Jack were married, not long after Ray’s wife had been taken back to the hospital in North Battleford for the third and possibly final time. Lavinia had never met her.
“She’s a schizo,” Jack had explained amiably as they rode over in the truck. “You know what that is, a schizo?” Before she could answer, he reached across and squeezed her thigh. “That’s a schizophreniac.” He tapped his forehead beneath his cap. “She’s not right.”
Lavinia plucked gently at the dark hairs on the back of his hand and he pulled it away. “What do you mean,” she asked, “not right?”
He rolled the window down and adjusted the rear-view mirror, though there was nothing to see behind the truck but a cloud of dust. She turned anyway, just to check.
“She’s mental. What more do you want to know?”
“I mean,” she said, “how did it happen?”
“How should I know? She’s a schizo. They’re probably born that way.”
Lavinia frowned and looked out the window, out over the brown furrows of fallow fields that looked as if they’d been raked by enormous fingers in smooth and continuous patterns. The familiar monotony of colour, the unvarying shape of the land. The way you could never get out of that sun, or that wind. It could make anyone crazy.
“What’s the matter now?” Jack said.
“Nothing,” she said carefully. “It’s just, that doesn’t sound nice, calling her that. A schizo. It sounds … disrespectful.” But disrespectful was not what she meant. She did not know exactly what she meant, only that the word grated on her. Schizo.
“Oh, for Christ sakes.” Jack shook his head, tipped the brim of his cap lower. They hit a particularly hard ridge on the dirt road (on purpose, Lavinia thought) and the truck jumped, jolting her on the seat so hard, her teeth clacked together.
Up ahead, Schecters’ place sat neatly on a small rise, the house at the highest point, the outbuildings sloping gradually away, as if sliding almost imperceptibly downhill, though the word downhill was in itself a gross exaggeration.
“Anyway,” Lavinia said, “it doesn’t matter.” She rested her hand on his arm.
“Okay,” Jack said. “Okay. Forget it.”
They rolled past the house, and Jack pulled the truck to a stop outside the hog pens. Ray was already there, leaning across the railings. Lavinia reached for the handle, but Jack said, “Won’t be long,” and slammed the door, crossing the yard in long strides.
Lavinia sat in the hot cab, feeling close to tears, Ray’s presence a few yards away the only thing keeping them in check. Over nothing, she thought. That was the worst part.
She watched Ray look up as Jack approached, lift one hand in a half-greeting and lean back away from the pens, his T-shirt pushed up a little over his belly. He shook his head at Jack, jerked a thumb toward the pens. “Sonofabitch,” he said, and shook his head again. She watched as Jack hooked his long body across the rails, then leaned back, too, tipping his cap away from his forehead. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. Then he turned suddenly and waved to Lavinia. “Come on,” he called.
Ray nodded at her as she stepped up to the pen.
“See that?” Jack said, pulling her close by the sleeve of her shirt.
At first she saw nothing but a large, spotted sow, curled sideways in the mud.
“What?” she said.
“There,” Jack said, pulling her closer.
She leaned across the rails, peering over to where Jack pointed.
“Only one left,” Jack said. “Christ, Ray, that’s a goddamn shame.”
It was the blood she noticed first, a rusty brown colour smeared across the sow’s muzzle, then the one piglet squirming between its mother’s speckled hind end and the pen boards.
“What?” she was about to say again, but Jack said, “Nature’s way, I guess. It’s a Christly shame, but there ain’t much you can do about it.”
“Nature’s way,” Ray said. “Shit.”
Lavinia looked up at Jack, and as she did, realized with a terrible, heavy feeling in her stomach what they were talking about. She stepped back from the pen—lurched back, she knew, though neither Jack nor Ray seemed to notice. It was one of the things she found hardest of all, living there on the farm with Jack—getting used to the ugliness all over again, the blood and sudden deaths, the way a headless body could race oblivious, as if fleeing for its life. The smell of it all.
Ray took off his cap, slapped it against the rails. “Guess I should try and get that last one.”
Jack shook his head. “Be a cold day in hell before you’d catch me in there. She’ll chew your nuts off.”
Ray put his cap back on and kicked a clump of mud from the rails. “Yeah,” Lavinia heard him say as she walked quickly back to the truck, “guess you’re right.”
She slammed the door and sat there in the cab, hot, thinking, You bastard. Why would you show me that? But she already knew.
Toughen her up. City girl.
She jammed her spade now into the dirt and rubbed her shirt between her breasts where a line of sweat trickled toward her belly. Her armpits were wet and itchy and had a rank, oniony smell, although she’d bathed the night before and dusted on talcum. She thought, with disgust, I am rotting from the inside out. Jack had noticed, too, rolling away from her last night and twitching into sleep. She’d lain there in the darkness, pressing the palms of her hands into her belly, willing the sickness away. She’d prayed a bit, too, a kind of Hail Mary, what she could remember of it. But she must have fallen asleep partway through because she didn’t remember getting to the end. When she’d awoken, she’d thought, That’s a sin. It must be. It must be worse to start a prayer and not finish than to never pray at all.
By the time Lavinia had filled a bucket, the sun was high and the frost had turned wet on the earth. Mud had caked to the spade and to her rubber boots. She was so thirsty, her tongue felt swollen and heavy in her mouth. When Jack left her standing in the corn, she’d watched for a while as his truck disappeared down the road. Then she removed her coat and shirt and worked in her bra. Though the air was still cold, sweat collected beneath her armpits, and even working slowly as she was, she was forced to sit frequently on an upturned bucket to rest. The surface of the earth was damp and soft, but underneath it was still clenched with frost and she had to stomp hard on the spade to gain even a couple inches of depth. She thought she might go back to the house, rest a while and then come out again when the earth had warmed. Jack would likely be at Schecters’ all day, maybe that night as well. And she could always hear the truck coming anyway. She planted the spade into a mound of dirt and lugged the full pail to the house, stopping every few feet to rest.
The clock in the kitchen showed just shy of noon. She washed her face at the sink and rubbed it dry with a dish towel, then drank four mugs of water so fast it trickled from the corners of her mouth. Now, a few minutes on the couch was all she needed.
But once she lay down, she realized she could not sleep. She kept thinking for some reason about Ray, about his wife, trying to imagine what she looked like. She’d asked Jack once.
“Christ,” he’d said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She’s blonde.”
“Pretty?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “I guess so. In a way.”
Lavinia could not imagine Ray with someone who was pretty. But as soon as she’d thought it, she felt bad.
“What’s she like?”
“Christ, Lavinia, I don’t know. What do you keep harping on her for all the time?”
“Just curious, I guess.” Then she added, “He must miss her, living there all by himself.”
“He goes to see her,” Jack said. “He visits her. All the time.”
Lavinia wanted to say, “Would you? If it were me, would you visit all the time?” but instead she said, “They didn’t have kids?”
She was about to ask, “Why not?” when Jack said, “Enough, already. I don’t want to talk about her.”
At the time, she hadn’t thought it an odd thing to say. But later, she’d wondered about the intimacy of what he’d said. Not “I don’t want to talk about it,” but “I don’t want to talk about her.”
And she’d felt angry and embarrassed and unreasonably jealous. She knew it was stupid. Still, sometimes she thought about Ray’s wife quite a bit, tried to picture her face, her hair. What shade of blonde? Long hair, or short?
Later, Lavinia sat wedged between Jack and Ray on the truck seat. Ray spread himself out, knees apart, one arm across the back of the seat behind her. They both reeked of sweat and liquor, but what was worse was that Lavinia could still smell her own rotting odour.
Jack was driving fast, swerving sometimes in the soft ridge of gravel at the shoulder. Lavinia clutched the edge of the seat, wishing she’d learned how to drive a standard, dizzy and hot, sick with the careening motion, the smell of them all, bumping against each other at every jolt and turn. She wished she had stayed home, but that would not have been possible. Jack was in high spirits when he and Ray returned from Ray’s place that evening, jovial. He would have coaxed, cajoled and, finally, become annoyed with her if she’d refused. Besides, getting out now and then wasn’t so bad. It was just this nausea. And the thirst. She wished she’d brought something to drink. She wished a lot of things.
Jack fiddled with the radio, found the country station he liked.
“So,” Ray hollered over the music, leaning in too close to her ear, “ever been to a carnival before?”
“No,” she said, turning slightly away from the sour yeast smell of his breath.
“You gonna keep that to yourself, you miser?” Jack eyed the bottle wedged between Ray’s thighs.
Ray passed it across her, banging his elbow accidentally into her mouth as they hit a pothole. She rubbed her tongue across the inside of her lip, could taste a bit of blood where the skin was ragged.
“I’ve been to a few,” Ray said, oblivious. “Been to that fair in Saskatoon, too, the big one.”
Jack took a long drink from the bottle, passed it back to Ray. “You never been out of this county in your life.”
Lavinia looked at him quickly, thinking, His wife’s in North Battleford. He goes there all the time. You said.
Ray tried to manoeuvre the bottle to his mouth but kept getting jolted, his arm flailing in mid-air. Rye splashed out on Lavinia’s sleeve. “In sixty-eight,” he hollered. “Before I was married.” He screwed the lid clumsily back onto the bottle. “Was something else.”
Lavinia shifted her weight on the seat, reached behind to adjust the sharp end of a seat belt clip that was digging into her back. She would have liked to put the belt on, but there was no way to do it without their noticing. She thought, If I have to die, don’t let me die like this. Not in a graceless twist of metal.
“There was a woman, I swear to God, a woman weighed over nine hundred pounds.”
Jack laughed and thumped the wheel.
“And one,” Ray said, encouraged, “half-man, half-woman. She had a beard. And—you know. Everything.”
Lavinia thought Jack would laugh again, but he just shook his head. “Christ,” he said.
“And there was this thing,” Ray said. “Hell, I don’t remember what they called it. It was, well, it was human, I guess—part, anyway—but they kept it in this cage, and they warned everybody, ‘Keep your hands away from the bars!’ Didn’t have to tell me twice. Bit the heads off live chickens.”
“No shit,” Jack said.
“No,” Ray answered, settling back against the seat. “No shit.”
Lavinia looked at him quickly. Something about his voice had made her think, with a start, He’s faking. He’s not drunk at all. And she wondered, Is he so lonely, then? Is he that desperate?
Jack suddenly pulled the truck to the side of the road. “Gotta see a man about a horse,” he said.
When they were alone, Lavinia, on impulse, turned to Ray. “What’s her name, anyway, your wife?”
“Linda,” he said, his voice sounding startled in the dark of the cab.
“You must miss her,” she said.
But before he could answer, Jack swung the door open and slid in beside her, singing, “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.”
When neither she nor Ray joined in, he whistled the song to himself, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. The three of them shoulder to shoulder, Jack hurtling them through the darkness, toward the lights of town.
The carnival wasn’t as big as Lavinia expected. They’d set up in the empty lot by the railroad tracks across from the bar. Cars lined both sides of the street for blocks—farmers and people who’d come from other places where the carnival wasn’t stopping—but most of the town people just walked down. They strolled every street, ghostly and bristling with excitement.
Jack took one last swig of rye and led them to where two torches marked the entrance. Lavinia and Ray trailed slightly behind. She glanced over at him once, at the heavy set of his shoulders, and thought he wanted her to say something to him. Something, maybe, about his wife. But Jack turned to wait for them, so she hitched her purse strap up and kept walking.
“What’s the matter?” Jack said, thumping Ray on the shoulder. “Somebody can’t hold their liquor?”
Ray laughed a little and nodded. “I’ll get it,” he said, as they reached the gate. He paid for all three tickets and handed them their stubs. Then they stood there a moment, looking around.
“Hey,” Jack said to Ray, “there’s your girlfriend.” He pointed at a garishly painted sign depicting a bearded lady. “Let’s see if she still remembers you.”
Ray nodded and jingled some change loosely in his pocket. “I need to take a leak,” he said abruptly.
“Suit yourself,” Jack said as Ray disappeared into the crowd. “Guess you’re not interested,” he said to Lavinia.
She shook her head, but he had already wandered off across the field, bumping into people as he went. Lavinia looked past the booths to where a lighted Ferris wheel turned slowly against the sky. She walked toward it through the bright alley made by the food vendors, realizing for the first time that she hadn’t eaten yet that day. She positioned herself in line at the first vendor and ordered a Coke and two hotdogs, eating the first immediately in three huge bites while standing at the booth, then downing half the Coke. It was possible, she realized, that she hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she wasn’t sick at all. She took the second hotdog and her Coke and strolled back toward the Ferris wheel. It was darker there, away from the food. And cooler. She felt better than she had in weeks.
“Ma’am,” someone said, close to her. Lavinia started, almost dropped the half-eaten hotdog she held. She realized she’d been expecting Ray, but the man at her elbow was young, a teenager probably. A boy. His hair combed back slick from his scarred face.
“Ma’am,” he said, smiling, “you have not seen nothing till you have seen the eighth wonder of the world, and we have it right here.” He waved toward a small trailer at his back, lit by a single yellow bulb. “Right on up those stairs, ma’am, is a sight to behold straight from the Amazon jungles, the only one of its kind in captivity.”
“What is it?” she asked, unable to look away from the fine fuzz of hair that darkened his upper lip. He had an accent. American.
“What is it, ma’am?” the boy repeated and then leaned in confidentially. “It is the giant anaconda of the Amazon jungle, measuring thirty-two feet long. That’s right, thirty-two feet.”
Lavinia looked over her shoulder toward the bearded lady tent. She couldn’t see Jack or Ray anywhere, but it was difficult in this crowd. “How much?” she asked the boy, wiping a spot of mustard from the corner of her mouth.
“Just fifty cents,” he said, “and worth every penny.”
She handed the boy her Coke while she rummaged in her purse for some change.
“That’s right,” the boy called to people passing them, “straight from the Amazon jungles.”
She slipped two quarters in his palm, took her Coke and headed up the steps.
“Whoops,” the boy said to her, tapping the hotdog, “you can’t take that in there.”
Lavinia considered throwing it away, but instead she hungrily stuffed the whole thing in her mouth. As she turned to drop the wrapper into the garbage, she saw someone moving far on the other side of the trailer, past the lights, near the chain-link fence at the tracks. It looked like Ray. And she thought, Is it possible she’s really never coming home, his wife? And then something else occurred to her, something she’d never thought to ask Jack, about Ray’s wife going back to the hospital, maybe forever: Who decided?
The man at the fence—was it Ray?—looked over then and Lavinia waved. She was about to call out to him when the boy ushered her inside along with a couple she didn’t recognize. The woman held a little girl by the hand. “Excuse me,” she said politely as they squeezed by Lavinia in the doorway.
Inside, the trailer was smaller than it had appeared and completely dark except for a flat lighted cage in the centre of the room. The man held the little girl up so that she could see inside.
“That doesn’t look like thirty-two feet, does it, Harv?” said the woman.
“Say,” the man said to the boy who had followed them in, “this snake isn’t thirty-two feet.”
“That’s the thing,” the boy said, “it’s hard to tell when they’re all balled up like that. But see down there, that’s the tail. Imagine, now, if it was all stretched out.”
The woman looked skeptical. “Still,” she said, “thirty-two feet.”
Lavinia moved closer, looked in at the snake. The woman was right, it didn’t really look that big. It lay motionless, a dull grey colour.
“Daddy,” the little girl said, “doesn’t it do anything?”
“Well?” the man demanded of the boy who leaned in behind Lavinia, pressing against her, smelling of peppermint candy. “Doesn’t it do anything?”
“A snake this size,” he said, “they don’t move around much.”
The woman made a tsk sound with her tongue against her teeth. “Well,” she said, “that’s not very interesting.”
“No,” the boy agreed, “no, you’re absolutely right. But I’ll show you something that is.”
“What’s he going to do, Daddy?” the little girl asked as the boy returned with a small cardboard box.
“I’ll tell you what,” the boy said to her, “would you like to help me give this old snake her supper?”
The little girl nodded and the mother said, “Oh, aren’t you lucky now.”
“I don’t know.” The man hesitated, looking from his wife to his daughter. “Is this such a good idea?”
“Why, sure.” The boy grinned. “It’s nature.”
He removed the lid from the cardboard box.
“Okay,” the boy said, “I don’t do this for just anybody.”
The little girl looked up at Lavinia from across the lighted cage, her eyes glittering with anticipation. Lavinia could not look away. She thought, It’s nature.
“Ma’am,” the boy said to Lavinia, “would you mind opening that hatch there?”
Lavinia paused on the trailer steps, willing herself not to be sick, one hand against the wall for balance, dizzy with nausea and the slow dawning of something awful—could it be?—one hand pressed to her stomach, knowing now what was there. Certain of it. She tried to make some quick calculations in her head, but she was too irregular, it was hard to remember for sure. No, she thought, no, not possible. We were careful. But it was possible, of course it was. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She sat down on the metal steps with her purse on her lap, drank her Coke in huge gulps, wishing she had another.
“Lavinia?”
Ray walked toward her out of the shadows. “Okay?” he asked, stopping in front of her.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “I think so. I don’t know.” But she was fine, of course she was. She had to be. It could be a lot worse. Couldn’t it? She could be dying.
He sat down next to her on the steps and lit a cigarette.
“Guess you know the wife’s up in Battleford,” he said after a few moments. “At the hospital there.”
“Yeah,” she said, not really listening, “yeah, Jack said.” But she felt like saying, Listen, I don’t care. I don’t care about your wife. I don’t. I have bigger problems.
“It’s a hell of a thing,” he went on. He shrugged. “What was I supposed to do? I can’t watch her all the time.”
Lavinia looked at him then. “What do you mean? Why would you need to?”
“Oh,” he said, taking a long drag on his cigarette, “she’d wander off. Evening, usually. Or at night. I was afraid she’d get hurt. That something would happen. She’d be barefoot sometimes. In her nightgown.”
Lavinia shook her head. “To where? Where would she go?”
He shrugged again. “Around. Toward the hills mostly.” He paused and flicked his cigarette out into the night. “She made it clear to the lake that last time. Not that she ever knew where she was.”
Lake? she wondered, and thought of the pictures that had plastered her bedroom. What lake? One of mine? Redberry? Ministikwan? Buffalo Pound? But before she could ask, Ray said, “When Jack found her.”
“Jack?” She was about to add, “My Jack?” but realized how stupid it would sound.
“He took her back, that last time,” Ray said. “I couldn’t. It was better that way anyhow. She preferred it.”
“Jack took her?” Lavinia asked, thinking Ray must be mistaken, thinking she wasn’t hearing right, that she was confused. It was too much, all this at once. It didn’t make sense. Besides, she and Jack would have been seeing each other by then, engaged maybe; he would have said something. She shook her head. “Were they friends or something?”
“Yeah,” Ray said after a minute. “They were friends.”
Lavinia felt another rush of nausea, took a deep breath to quell it. They were friends? Jack and—what did he call her? A schizo? She lifted her Coke bottle, forgetting it was empty. She was so thirsty. She looked around for a drinking fountain. A spigot. A hose, anything. Her stomach was lurching. Her tongue swollen. She didn’t need to hear this right now. Didn’t need to hear about Ray’s wife. She needed to sort out her thoughts. She wished Ray would leave. If he wouldn’t, she would have to. Or she would have to tell him, Please, I need a minute. I need to be alone here.
Just then she saw Jack, standing beneath the Ferris wheel, awkward in that weird, coloured night air, turning a slow circle as if looking for them. For her. She rose, steadying herself against the trailer.
“Where you going?” Ray asked.
But she didn’t answer.