7.

THE FIRST SCOTCH PROVIDED THE anaesthetic my nerves needed. I was safe in this metal box at ten thousand metres.

But Lucy isn’t.

The thought was a rock dropping into the pit of my stomach. It was my first thought of Lucy since Tim’s message. I had been so relieved to get a flight. I had thrown things into a bag and called Mary Frances. She had been willing to take the dogs, and drive me to the airport. The price was a half-hearted lecture on running to Marc.

I barely heard it. The blood was hammering in my ears. I couldn’t miss this flight. I couldn’t spend another night alone in that house. I couldn’t endanger my friends’ lives. Marc had been receptive. More than receptive. Relieved. He would be there to meet my plane. I willed the car to go faster.

Mary Frances dropped me at Departures just in time for me to make the connector flight to Toronto.

Now, en route to Thunder Bay, I looked around the plane as if someone had plunked me into the middle of a bad dream. I leaned back and shut my eyes. With every second I was getting farther away from Lucy. Who might be getting closer to death. Or already dead. But with every second I was also getting closer to Marc and I imagined his arms already around me, grounding me.

But I knew I couldn’t stay. Marc might reground me for the moment, but that wouldn’t solve anything. Not for Marc and me. And certainly not for Lucy. I resolved to get the first flight out in the morning. Then I signalled the flight attendant and ordered another Scotch.

At the Thunder Bay airport, I tried to tell Marc I needed to go to the booking desk, but exhaustion and alcohol slurred my words. And I needed some help with my bag, and with walking. Marc led me to his truck, not the ticket desk.

I had no recollection of arriving at his house or going to bed. I was only aware of Lucy visiting once again, with more of her macabre messages.

The return of consciousness brought the return of panic. It wasn’t about Tim. Or Lucy. The walls of my bedroom were closing in on me.

I shut my eyes to get rid of the illusion. I opened them again. The walls were one foot from the bed on three sides. But they weren’t moving. That was one relief. And it wasn’t my bed, or my bedroom. That was another relief. Followed by momentous claustrophobia.

I bolted from the room. There wasn’t far to bolt. Marc’s bedroom opened onto the only other room in the tiny house—a combined kitchen and living room. The clock on the microwave said four o’clock. Outside it was bright daylight. I was shocked. I had slept for fourteen hours.

I took in the room around me. The unmistakable imprint of Marc was everywhere: canoe paddles propped up against the walls, posters and prints of northern rivers, scattered photographs, topographic maps pinned to the walls. All the things that had, until six days ago, cluttered up our house. The sight of all the familiar things dissolved the panic. Among the clutter I found a box of granola and a note: “Be back @ 5.”

What I wanted was a phone book to call the airline. Or just a cab to get me to the airport. Lucy needed me. Marc didn’t.

Marc had hidden the phone book.

When that paranoid thought occurred, I knew I was in trouble. Marc didn’t have a sly bone in his body.

I wondered if he had slept beside me. The crumpled sheets on the couch answered that question. The sight depressed me. I looked out the front window. I seemed to be on a suburban street of small bungalows. White smoke billowing out from several smokestacks in the distance marred a view of striking cliffs. The sight of the smokestacks depressed me too.

Getting some food into me brought me out of my thoughts about Marc and back to those I’d been trying to escape. I couldn’t escape Lucy even if I tried. She was in my brain, right there wherever I went, waiting for me to go to sleep so she could come to me. Was this a huge guilt complex surfacing because I hadn’t been there for her? I thought of how negative she had sounded all through the fall. How physically weak she had sounded just the previous week. Something had been going on this past year. Something bad.

The dream images had been briefer this time, but no less disturbing. The hazy figure of a woman peering over Lucy in a darkened building. Seeming to be worried about animals getting in through cracks in the walls, getting to Lucy, lying there, on some kind of bench. She was alive, but just barely, and only until Saturday night. On Saturday night, Lucy’s weakened whispering voice had said, she was going to be dumped in the Gatineau River.

I scrounged around the house for a pen and paper. It was a fantastic story. My imagination, it seemed, had no limits. But as long as there was even a remote chance Lucy might be alive, that she might be found in time, I had no choice but to listen. And act.

I put down my pen and picked up the spoon again, still hungry. So much seemed to point to Marnie being the woman. Her arrival at the site with Tim the very next day. Their stroll together down the tracks. Tim calling her that night from my house (the only friend he called). Trish’s bizarrely volunteered information: I don’t know why I’m calling. As if something had compelled her. I found it odd they were talking so long on the phone when we knew Lucy was missing.

The contradiction hit me on the last spoonful.

That night at my house, Tim had told me he had left a message for Marnie, and that he had to call her because she would be worried about why he’d been trying to get hold of her. He’d said he was waiting for her to call back. But Trish had said that Tim had phoned late Sunday afternoon. She had said they knew Lucy was missing.

That would explain why Tim’s first words to Marnie when he’d called from my house had been not an explanation of why he was calling but simply, “We found the car.” Because Marnie already knew why he was calling. Because, while Trish had been away, and for whatever bizarre reason, Marnie had helped him do whatever he had done to Lucy.

And my vision of Marnie on that dark street? I could put it down to hallucination, but maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t. Maybe it was a sign. For me. Clarification. That she was involved. Maybe she was checking on Lucy. I couldn’t believe I was thinking this way. But whatever was going on with my sanity, the fact remained that Lucy’s instructions had borne out; they had led me to abandoned outbuildings in a part of Ottawa I had barely ever been to.

Outbuildings. The word I had got in that second dream had been outbuildings. Abandoned outbuildings. But I had only told Quinn abandoned “buildings.” Buildings could be any kind of building. Like the one we had searched through. Outbuildings meant storage or farm buildings. And farm buildings meant barns. And barns could be burnt-out barns….

I thought back to the dark shadowy shapes of the barns and their charred, caved-in roofs and walls. There wouldn’t just be “cracks” in those walls; animals could presumably roam those ruins freely. She couldn’t be in those barns. But there could well be other outbuildings close by. Buildings we hadn’t seen in the dark.

Had a tail been put on Marnie? They had to follow her before Saturday night. Maybe if I offered them the information about Marnie—the contradictory things people were saying, not the suspect offerings of my dreams—maybe they would finally listen.

I pushed the bowl away and reached for the phone. There was no question: I was going to have to keep making a fool of myself for Lucy.

At the other end of the line, Lundy was pleasant but preoccupied. “Are you sure he didn’t call before Lucy went missing?”

“Trish said he called Sunday afternoon. She said they knew then that Lucy was missing.”

He was silent. I sensed he was taking notes. Finally.

I overcame my embarrassment. “Did a tail get put on Marnie?”

“We wouldn’t have had a reason to put a tail on Marnie.” He said it without a trace of self-consciousness. As if our encounter the previous morning had never taken place. “But,” he added, “we’ll check this out. Thanks Ellen.”

I hung up so angry I forgot to tell him about the outbuildings.

I punched in the numbers to access my messages. There were two new ones. I pressed 1. I dreaded the sound of Tim’s voice.

But it was a woman’s voice. Anna’s. “I hope you don’t mind my calling. I haven’t been able to sleep. The police are telling us nothing. I wondered if you might have heard anything. If you get a chance, could you please call me back?”

I wrote down the number she recited, and played the next message.

“Hello. This is Kevin Hopkins calling. I’m an old friend of Lucy Stockman’s. I heard you being interviewed on the radio and understand you are involved in searching for Lucy. I was wondering if you would mind giving me a call? I can be reached at….”

I wrote down the second phone number, an Ottawa exchange, under the first. His voice was so sad, it impelled me to call. And I thought he might be the easier of the two to talk to.

He was. I didn’t have to talk at all. He was an outpouring of stories about Lucy. “I didn’t know who else to call,” he said. It was the voice on my answering machine, full of sadness and grief. “I don’t know any of Lucy’s other friends. I hope you don’t mind. I needed to talk to someone who knew her.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. And realized I meant it.

“I’ve known Lucy for over twenty years. I introduced her to yoga. She became my teacher. And she was a good friend. But in the last year or two I let that go.”

“She had become so negative,” I offered, in empathy.

There was a deep sigh on the line. “Yes. But she wasn’t always like that. She was a bombshell in her twenties. She mesmerized us all. She was so sharp and witty and fun.”

His words amazed me. And then, suddenly, I could see it. From my first meeting with her at the Gallery: the bombshell Kevin was describing. I had forgotten that Lucy.

“She could have had anyone she wanted,” he said. And then he laughed. “She did have anyone she wanted. But she always dumped them eventually. I was never sorry. Until Curtis.”

“You knew Curtis?”

“Oh yes. I had high hopes for Lucy and Curtis. He really did fit all her criteria. They had so much in common. Music. Food. Dancing. He loved to dance as much as she did. They moved in together. Worked on their issues together. He was good for her. He called her bluff, and he wouldn’t let her run away. He made her stay and fight her demons.”

I was relieved to hear Kevin talking about Curtis this way. Maybe I would call him. Some day when this was all over.

“But she did run away, in the end,” I said. “She ran to Tim.”

“Lucy was always running away,” said Kevin, flatly.

“So she wouldn’t be abandoned,” I said. The word was suddenly there in my head, from one of our early conversations.

“She told you about that?”

“She called it her abandonment issue, didn’t she? She seemed kind of, I don’t know, almost excited by it.”

“I know what you mean. I think it was enthusiasm to work it out. It went way back.”

Back to her early childhood. I was starting to remember what Lucy had told me. She’d been quarantined in hospital with chicken pox as a toddler. She’d said her mother had never come to see her. “I confess I never really believed the part where her mother never visited her in hospital,” I told Kevin now. “How could you not visit your baby in hospital?”

“I guess you never met Mrs. Stockman.” His tone was wry. “She really was off in her own world. Did Lucy tell you she was a poet? She could have been a model as well. She was very poised. And very absent. That seemed to suit Lucy’s father. He just wanted his wife to look beautiful and to have his dinner on the table by six-thirty every evening. I don’t know how she accomplished even that. I think that was all the domesticity she could manage—certainly not raising two girls. I don’t think Lucy was so far off the mark when she claimed the house had raised her.”

“So she felt abandoned by both parents?”

“Pretty much,” said Kevin. “And you know what those formative experiences can do. You end up repeating them in your adult relationships. That’s what happened with Lucy. She was always choosing men who weren’t there. But she was very aware of the pattern. She was determined to break it.”

“But, from what you said, it sounds like Curtis was there. What happened?”

“Lucy Stockman’s famous unrealistic expectations.” The words were harsh; the tone was fond. “She wanted Curtis to be something he wasn’t. She wanted him to be there all the time. On her terms. Oh, that’s not entirely fair. It takes two, as they say. Curtis was no saint either. And he didn’t have a very good job. Lucy was the breadwinner. She was pretty proud of being financially independent. Of being secure. Obsessed, you might say.”

“So she started a relationship with Tim,” I said, to get him onto Tim.

There was another heavy sigh at the other end of the phone. “Something was driving her. Even Curtis could see that. He was no match for Tim. She drove halfway across the province to visit him in prison. It might even have been in a snowstorm. Something really had to be driving her to do something like that. She rarely ever drove farther than the Gatineaus.”

I remembered Lucy saying once that she had been making progress in fighting her fears. I hadn’t given much thought to how much nerve it would take to actually visit a prison. God, she knew how to pick her cures. “But that was good, wasn’t it?” My voice was doubtful. “Progress of a sort.”

“I guess you could say that. By the end she was sneaking things in.”

“Sneaking things in? To prison, you mean? Past the guards?”

Kevin laughed. “Don’t let Lucy mislead you with all her fears. She had balls that one. She even smuggled in a bottle of wine once. Candles too, I think. I can’t remember what else. She said she wanted to smuggle in some romance to that most unromantic of places.”

“Holy cow.” I couldn’t imagine it.

“And after Curtis moved out, she learned how to do things for herself, how to be alone. I think it was the first time she’d ever lived on her own for that long. Two years. I think meeting Tim took her out of her self-absorption. Even Curtis hadn’t been able to do that.”

“You mean so she could rescue someone else?”

“No.” His voice grew thoughtful. “I don’t think Lucy was into rescuing anyone but herself.” Then: “Do you think he did it?”

I answered before I could censor myself. “Yes.”

Another sigh. “It seems obvious doesn’t it? Maybe too obvious.”

I steeled myself for the same question from Anna. But the call went to a machine. I left a message saying I would be back in Chelsea after the weekend.

*

THE LETTER CONFIRMING SHE WAS eligible to visit arrived the same day the Sidekick did. She took it as a sign. Encouragement from the Universe: Go to Warkworth. She read the list of rules. She examined the directions.

The physical directions were straightforward. There was even a list of local motels in nearby Campbellford. But where was the section called “How to get your nerve up”? She had to find the courage somewhere deeper inside herself than Trish’s hands could go.

Fuck the courage. That was just a word, like “fear.” Just do it.

She would have preferred the unsettled weather to be over. But it was the middle of April when anything could happen—rain, sleet, thunder, snow, a blizzard. The best she could do was pray for the day to be clear.

Her prayers were answered. There were no clouds in the sky the day of her drive. There was no storm to contend with. Not outside the car. The storm was inside the car. The storm was behind the wheel, letting nothing stand in her way—not the fear, not the panic, not the overwhelming impulse to turn the car around fifty kilometres out of town.

*

I WAS STARTLED OUT OF my thoughts by Marc bursting in through the door. He saw me and slumped against the door jamb. “I have been trying to call you all day. I thought you had flown the coop.”

“I’m about to,” I said, “if I could just find your blasted phone book.”

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

“I never heard it. I just woke up an hour ago.”

Marc smiled. “And I bet you have a splitting headache.”

I gave him a wry look. “Actually I don’t. I guess I slept through the hangover too. Marc, thank you for … for … I appreciate your letting me come here. But I have to go back. Do you have a phone book?”

“It’s in the truck,” said Marc, as if that were the natural place to keep a phone book.

“Marc.”

“You could have phoned Information.” He was crossing the room toward me. He came in slow motion. It gave me too much time to think, to brace myself. If he put those arms around me, I’d be finished.

But he stopped two feet away.

“Marc, I can’t stay here. I was an idiot to run away. I need to talk to the police. I need to look for Lucy.”

“Ellen, there’s nothing you can do.” His voice was infinitely gentle. “Lucy is dead.”

“You don’t know that! I think she’s alive. I can’t explain.”

“You could explain if you wanted to.”

His body was too close. There was a magnetic field around it, pulling me, irresistibly, in. I took a physical step back. I shook my head. “I can’t.”

Marc was looking at me. “You could, though. You could stop being so stubborn for once in your life, and we could—” He stopped. “I’m sorry I left like that. I want to try again.”

I shook my head again. I couldn’t bear the longing on his face. I also couldn’t do anything about it. Not now. “I can’t deal with this right now. I need to get back—” The words got caught in my throat watching him turn on his heel and head back out the door. I heard the truck door open. And shut.

This had happened already, a week ago. It couldn’t be happening again, here. I didn’t want to be left here.

I ran to the door. I slammed right into Marc. Right into the phone book between us.

He pushed me away, gently, with the phone book, and held it out to me. Looking away.

I took the book. I hugged it. I walked to the phone, and sat down, and opened the book. I tried to see through the blur.

“Ellen.”

I wiped my nose on my sleeve.

Arms came around me from behind. I sagged against them.

Marc’s familiar voice spoke in my ear. “Stay. You’re scared and you’re exhausted. I won’t bother you. You can stay as long as you need to.”

He lifted me to my feet, turned me around, held me close.

“Oh Marc. Stop being so bloody understanding. I can’t stand it.” And I burst into tears for the first time ever in the arms of my now ex-lover.

I waited until Marc had gone to pick up the Chinese food. Then I made another call to the Ottawa police. If they weren’t going to follow Marnie, I would just have to give them the more complete directions back to the barns.

Neither Roach nor Lundy was available. It was after six. Quinn would be gone. I told the switchboard operator it was important. I asked to speak to anyone who was available. I waited to be put through to another officer.

“Sergeant Quinn here.”

I inhaled a breath. Relief and nervousness vied for the dominant place in my lungs.

“Sergeant Quinn.” I made my voice formal. “It’s Ellen McGinn. I have more information. The messages are getting clearer. I have more specific directions now about where Lucy is. But she’s going to be moved soon. You have to act soon.”

“Okay, Ellen. Slow down. I’m listening.”

I told him to go six or seven kilometres south on Bank Street starting from Lucy’s street. I told him there was a street off Bank; that it might be Hunt Club but I wasn’t sure. “And this time,” I said, continuing my half-lies, “I got outbuildings. Not just buildings. It could be those barns, or some other outbuildings close by.”

It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected lying to Sergeant Quinn, though I wasn’t sure anymore why I felt I had to.

“I’ll have this checked out, Ellen. I promise.”

“It has to be soon. The other piece of information is that Tim is supposed to dump Lucy’s body in the Gatineau River Saturday evening.” I felt stupid saying it, but he didn’t question it.

“That’s tomorrow. He’d have to go back there then to where she is.”

“Yes, but it might be too late by then.”

“What d’you mean? You said Saturday night.”

“She’s still hovering between life and death, but my sense is she’s barely coming to consciousness now. The sooner you get there—” My voice broke.

“Are you okay? Do you want to come in?”

“Well, it might take a little while to get there.” I gave a half laugh. “I’m in Thunder Bay.”

“You’re where?”

For some reason I enjoyed taking Sergeant Quinn off his guard.

“I’m visiting … a friend.”

“Isn’t this a bit sudden?”

I hesitated. “I needed to get away.”

“I see.” Something in his voice changed. I couldn’t put my finger on it. “And when you do you plan on being back?”

“As soon as I can get a flight. Tomorrow probably.”

“Pretty quick visit,” he commented. “Give me the number there.”

It was my turn to be taken off guard. I didn’t want to give him Marc’s phone number, but there was no way to refuse. His request had not been phrased as a question. I gave him the number.

“Lundy and Roach are going to be working through the weekend,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re doing, try to enjoy yours and leave it to us.”

“Yes,” I said. Maybe, finally, I could.

*

THE SIGN FOR THE TOWN of Warkworth pointed to the right. A much smaller, more discreet green sign with an arrow pointed left for Warkworth Institution. How did the residents of Warkworth feel about having their town name associated with a prison? You wouldn’t want to be going around saying, “I’m a resident of Warkworth.” People might get the wrong idea.

She considered turning right. It seemed the friendlier option. Except it didn’t. Tim wasn’t there. And the residents of Warkworth were likely an embittered and hardened community who didn’t welcome tourists. They likely lived in prisons of their own. Prisoners of a prison town.

She shut off these pointless thoughts. At least she tried to shut them off. The brain went where it wanted. She had no control. She only had control over whether she followed where it went. Her brain could take the road to the right if it wanted and go and gawk at the Warkworthians. But she was going to turn left.

The road to the prison followed the gently rolling hills of idyllic farmland. The view from prison (were there windows in prison?) was at least peaceful. But what about the view from the farm? Maybe the farmer had made so much money from the sale he didn’t care about the view. More likely, the government had expropriated the land and the farmer had to live with it. Except didn’t you get money from expropriation? She thought so. Expropriation for a prison would probably have made the farmer very rich. He was probably happy to live with it.

“It” loomed in the distance—a compound of institution-grey, single-storey buildings planted in the middle of open fields and surrounded by a high chain-link fence, with coils of barbed wire at the top. As she got closer, she could feel something snake-like coil around her heart. She sounded the mantra that had got her this far from home: Tim is in there, Tim is ahead of me, Tim is waiting for me.

The snake uncoiled. The sudden release seemed to open something in her heart beyond what had been there before. The new openness felt remarkably like joy.

*

SLEEP WOULDN’T COME. I DISENTANGLED my arms and legs from Marc’s. I shut the bedroom door quietly so I could turn on the light in the kitchen without waking him. He was breathing in that contented audible way of his that was not quite snoring. In fact, it usually lulled me off to sleep too. My body was relaxed. Marc had drugged it, another talent he had. But he couldn’t drug my mind. Not that night. It was spinning.

Sergeant Quinn was among those in the vortex. I should have explained why I’d left Ottawa. He had known I wasn’t telling it all. I should have just admitted I’d been suddenly terrified of Tim. His tone had changed after I’d said I was in Thunder Bay. Suspicious was what it had become. But suspicion of what? Oh God. Suspicion of everything. That I, someone who knew Lucy, had been the one to find her car. Why I was giving him all those directions. How I knew where to direct them. I knew because I must be involved. I’d come to him in a panic in the dead of the night. Claiming I thought she was alive. Claiming a voice in my head was telling me where she was. Then I had taken off. And when I didn’t show up back in town tomorrow, as I’d said I was going to? What would he make of that?

I put the kettle on and opened cupboards, hoping Marc had tea in the house. He didn’t.

On the couch, I let the mug of hot water fill my insides and made myself think rationally. Suspicious behaviour wasn’t everything. What were the things you needed? Motive and opportunity. Well, I had opportunity. My live-in boyfriend had conveniently taken off the day before. Lucy had been invited to my party. Maybe she had shown up after all the guests had left. And motive? Maybe I had decided to eliminate her from Ottawa’s cutthroat communications industry.

Even this ludicrous thought didn’t calm me down. Everywhere my brain went, an unpleasant train of thought was waiting. I reached for the paddling magazine on the coffee table. Like the Gideon Bible in a motel room, it was the only thing around to read.

But the magazine made me think of Marc. And Marc made me think of Curtis. And Curtis made me think of Lucy. Kevin had said meeting Tim had brought her out of her self-absorption. Visiting a man in prison would do that for you.

*

SHE STOOD AT HER FRONT door. She waited as she had waited in front of the gate at Warkworth the day before. She stood as if expecting the door to swing open the way the prison gate had slid open. She wasn’t seeing the metal curls on the screen door; she was seeing the metal links in the prison gate and the sign posted on it: STAND CLEAR UNTIL GATE IS OPEN.

The wording had bothered her. One could stand tall, stand out, stand up, stand for … and stand clear of. How did one simply “stand clear”?

She had forced herself to ponder this question as she waited. She was standing, shaking knees notwithstanding. Was she clear?

Yes. Clarity of mind was, in fact, the only thing she did have at the moment. She didn’t have “clarity” anywhere else. Her body was giving her its usual not-calm responses: dry throat, sweating palms, shaking knees. Her head ached from the long drive. But she was here, by God. And, all stress aside, she was clear. She knew why she was here and that she was supposed to be. It was another miracle. Like Tim’s letter arriving in the mail.

She concentrated her attention on the block-lettered sign. Was this clarity going to abandon her after the gate was open?

According to the instructions she’d been sent, once the gate opened, she was going to have to surrender her purse to a guard. She was going to have to walk through a metal detector. She was going to have to wait for someone to phone someone else, who was going to check the photo she’d had to send in and confirm that she was who she was claiming to be. She wasn’t going to be searched. It was illegal for them to do a body search unless they had reasonable cause. Knowing all these facts gave her a semblance of control. It was a semblance at best.

In front of her, the gate finally slid open on rattling wheels. She walked through the front doors and found herself at the end of a line-up of people who looked all too familiar with this procedure. No one else seemed to be nervous. They seemed bored.

It didn’t help. Nor did knowing what was to come. She steeled herself, terrified that when asked to surrender her purse she was going to refuse. Which wasn’t going to get her anywhere, least of all in to see Tim.

She wasn’t prepared for the smile the guard offered along with his orders and outstretched hand. She handed over her purse as she might her child to a kindly caregiver. He would look after it; she would get it back.

The metal detector was simply a doorframe she had to walk through. Like at the airport. It did not reach out to hurt her. She didn’t set off any alarms. She didn’t have to endure the wand in the guard’s hand being brushed over her body. She could swallow again.

The guard—the same or another, she could barely tell—led her through door after door. They came to a large room, where the guard pointed to an empty table. She could see his lips moving, but there was such a loud noise in her ears—a noise quite apart from the noise in the room—that she couldn’t hear the words. She sat down. She was short of breath; her heart was beating too fast, too lightly. She was exhausted. But she was here.

She stared around her at the green-walled room. She might have been sitting in a public cafeteria. Snack and pop machines lining one wall. Couples and families sitting at the tables, eating cellophane-packaged sandwiches and chips and drinking canned pop. Children running around; parents yelling after them. They might have been ordinary families or couples, except for the institution green worn by the male at each table. As if a crew of janitors had sat down for a break. Except janitors didn’t have numbers sewn on their shirts. Here were the inmates. Inmates. Take off the prefix and they became what they were in this room: mates.

It was also true that in ordinary cafeterias people didn’t usually sit on each others’ laps, or neck in the corner. The guards, watching from their observation room, seemed to be ignoring this behaviour. How far could a couple go before they were stopped? Was discreet fucking tolerated? Who was to say what was happening in that corner. Would she and Tim be necking there one day? The idea filled her with a perverse excitement.

No one had warned her about the smoke. Her shortness of breath became a physical reaction to the air. Her headache intensified.

Every time the door opened and a guard-escorted inmate walked in, she started. Was it Tim? Did she even remember what he looked like? Would he recognize her?

It was out of her hands. The gate had opened. She was inside the beast now. Clarity was no longer required. Clarity, in fact, was no longer possible. Terror held her in her chair. The terror of the first day (and many days) of school, the terror of hospitals, the terror of churches. Spaces that swallowed her. Spaces that deprived her of her ability to see.

Each inmate who entered was a blur.

Stand clear. Sit blurred.

She sat blurred until a man stood before her and brought her to her feet.

As she stood, dazed and exhausted, the screen door swung open. She had to step out of the way.

There was a man in the doorway. He looked puzzled. “Why are you just standing out there?”

She didn’t respond.

“Hello?” said Curtis. “Earth to Lucy. Come in. Come in,” he repeated, stepping aside and opening the door wider. “Did they lobotomize you while you were in jail?”

She stepped in through the door. She handed over her purse. If body searches had been legal, he would have found it was her heart, not her frontal lobe, that was gone. She was amazed at how detached she felt from him. And not amazed at all.

They sat down at the kitchen table. Curtis poured her a glass of wine. She was too tired to appreciate the gesture. She was too tired to drink it.

She was overcome by the wearying sensation of having driven not just hundreds, but seemingly thousands, of kilometres. What was she doing here? Who was this man? He sat before her, shoulders slightly slumped, avoiding her eyes. Where were the presence and confidence he had exuded in the courtroom? Where was the familiarity she had felt in meeting him there and in their letters and phone conversations? She was sitting before a prison inmate who, when he had lived in her world, had committed countless acts of fraud—and one act of manslaughter. What was she doing?

She was starting to feel dizzy. The smoke seemed to have filled not just her lungs but her entire insides. It was choking her. She was going to faint. She just needed to signal to one of the guards. She could get up and walk out without saying a word. They could pretend she had never come. She could go back to her safe, familiar world and he could stay here, in his.

In her mind, she was already summoning the guard, mentally raising her arm as if he were a waiter.

Tim cleared his throat. “Your drive here,” he began.

Her horror magnified. In her mind she was tugging furiously on the guard’s sleeve, to get her out of there before Tim spoke. She was terrified he was going to say something mundane about the drive, the weather. That he wouldn’t be who she thought he was. That she’d made a massive mistake. Her head began to spin. Nausea overwhelmed her. She was going to throw up.

“Your drive here,” repeated Tim, “means a lot to me.”

The words entered her head like a peacekeeping troop and made it stop spinning. The nausea vanished. Her vision cleared. It was Tim. Thank God he was still not looking at her, had not seen her face; it was shyness, not social backwardness. It was respect. It was nothing she’d ever experienced before.

“I’m kind of overwhelmed by you sitting here in front of me.” Tim gave a small, embarrassed laugh and then he met her eyes.

The guard she had summoned in her mind stood waiting. She handed him all her doubts, all her skepticism, all her fears—shitloads of fear. And then she sent him away.

“If I seem a bit stupid, and like I got nothing to say, it’s … well….”

There was a long pause.

“Do you mind,” he said at last, “if I just sit here and look at you for awhile?”

He was looking at her. She was supposed to be talking, spilling out the experience. She didn’t want to share this. She didn’t want it exposed to his cynical paintbrush, his layering of ridicule and mockery. Thinly disguised jealousy.

She met Curtis’s eyes. And for the first time she saw the pain in them.

Pain. It was so clearly there. It felt like someone was squeezing her heart.Without thinking, she reached out her hand across the table. “I feel that all you want to do is cry and cry.” She was speaking words she had never uttered to a man before—had never even thought. “I wish I could take you in my arms and just let you cry.”

The eyes that met hers were startled, and did fill, then, with tears. “No one’s ever said that to me before.” He added, in a voice of wonder, “How do you see that?”

She had no answer. She didn’t know. Except that maybe the clarity demanded of her at the gate had also been a warning: be sure you’re ready for what you’re going to see behind this gate.

She had, somehow, become ready. She had never seen anyone else’s pain like this. She had—she could be honest about it now—always been so focused on her own. Had always wanted someone to look in her eyes.

But now she was looking across the table at this boyish, vulnerable man and she was suddenly standing clear. She had arrived here at Warkworth to meet herself.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Curtis Frye.” He stuck out his hand.

She started.

Curtis sighed. “I see you left your tongue behind too. What did they do? Cut it out so you couldn’t report on the pampered conditions you found?”

She ignored his bait. She couldn’t look at him. She fixed her eyes out the window on her vegetable garden at the back of the yard. It was looking neglected. It needed weeding, watering. Now that she had seen the pain in Tim’s eyes, pain was everywhere, like the weeds. What was that line about the scales falling from your eyes? How was she going to bear this—this seeing what was? How was she going to contribute to the pain she saw in Curtis now, too, and watch it grow and take over?

She wasn’t, not yet; it would be unbearable. Besides, she told herself, Curtis would never believe her anyway. It was too soon to speak. Too soon even to know these kinds of things. You couldn’t fall in love with someone after one meeting. She wasn’t even sure she had. She wasn’t sure what it was she felt, but it wasn’t the usual infatuation of falling in love.

So she shrugged, and the shrug let loose a lie. “The visit was okay. He’s a lonely man in prison. He needs a friend, and I can be that friend. That’s all there is to say.”

She made herself look at Curtis then, and she made herself believe what she had just said, so he would believe her too. It was half true anyway. She steeled herself for a sneering remark. Cynical she could deal with.

“And just how often do the pity visits take place?” Curtis was delivering, on cue.

This time she rose to the bait. “As often as I feel like it,” she shot back, and felt better.