Archive of Our Own ^beta

Alicia’s feet hurt. Her right little toe had, for an hour, throbbed in time with her heart. Then it had gone numb. Was that better or worse? Probably better, all things considered. Ornamental women didn’t need feet. She could replace her legs with prostheses, the feet formed with a Barbie’s ballerina arches. Maybe she could find a designer to make them for her. Change the question from who are you wearing today to who are you today. At the end of the day she could shed the legs, and her feet would never ache again. Or would they: an ache so deep her nervous system would recall it long past its end.

She surfaced, briefly, to check in. Luc was still talking, gesturing at Bob. Luc’s glory days, if the term glory were generously applied, had long since passed. But there is a kind of man who becomes lodged in time, revisiting memory so often that it escapes its vessel and bleeds into the present. They flocked to Bob. He was generous with his attention, with everyone from the tiniest fans who wanted autographs to—well, to Luc.

By the time the coat room attendant arrived, Alicia had decided the fundamental problem was too little champagne and was surveying the room for a waiter. The attendant stood at Alicia’s elbow, chin tucked, until Alicia nodded at her. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she murmured. “You left your phone when you checked your coat? And it’s been ringing nonstop? I wanted to tell you, in case—”

“Thank you,” Alicia said, touching Bob’s arm as she turned to follow the girl to the coat check. He met her eyes, gave her half a smile. “I’m going to go check on it,” she told him.

“Jack trying to decide on a tie again?” Bob said. He sounded hopeful. “Do you need my help?”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” It was a little cruelty, leaving him there. She couldn’t feel her right pinky toe. Her feet seemed uneven, like the ground lay at an angle.

The phone rang again as Alicia reached it, a digital marimba clinking at her. She frowned, sliding her finger across the screen to answer.

“Kent?”

“Mrs. Zimmerman,” he said on the other end. “I—” He took a deep, gasping breath.

She felt his voice like ice. You leave ice against your skin too long and it burns you. It’s cold, so you’d think it would have the opposite effect. But at the end of the day, hot or cold can kill your skin. All your body knows is that what’s touching it is too much.

“Where are you?” she said. She waved at the attendant, mouthing coats.

“I’m—we’re at Hôpital Pierre-Boucher,” he said. “I swear I didn’t know—I just, he didn’t answer when I knocked and I thought he went to bed early and they won’t tell me—they won’t let me—“

“Kent.” She gathered the coats over her arm and tucked the phone against her shoulder as she retraced her steps into the ballroom. “Take a breath. Tell me what happened.” Ornamental women do not cry. Ornamental women do not panic, or think about panicking. Their sons do not—they do not.

Kent was silent on the other end of the line. “Slow down,” she said, weaving her way through clusters of people with glasses in their hands. “You’ve done this for Jack. Slow everything down.”

His breath tore out of him. That was movement; that was something.

“Tell me what happened.” She could see Bob now, his shoulders climbing towards his ears as Luc rambled.

“Jack said he had a headache and went to bed,” Kent said. He sounded like he was reading from notecards. Each syllable arrived with metronomic precision. “I was watching TV, but when I went to go to bed I saw his light was still on, so I knocked. He didn’t answer. I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep? I went in and he—” A choking sound. “He was in the bathroom. I don’t know how long. He took a lot—and he wasn’t— I rolled him onto his side, called the ambulance. They took him in and—”

“Kent.”

“I don’t know, they won’t say—”

“Kent.”

He stopped talking. She thought, they’re eighteen.

Bob looked up as she approached, and she watched his smile slide into something sharp and focused. Game face, she thought. An uncontrolled laugh bubbled at the junction of her clavicles. She forced it down.

Once, as a child, she had swallowed a whole cinnamon jawbreaker. It had dissolved slowly, clawing at her from the inside, and she had smiled the whole time because five dollars and pride were on the line. She had tasted cinnamon for days afterward, the flavor scrabbling upwards onto the back of her tongue.

Ornamental women do not laugh hysterically. She swallowed again, against the clenching of her throat. The movement burned.

“Excuse me,” Bob said to the group of men gathered around him. “I’ll—I need to go.”

“We’re on our way,” Alicia said into the phone. “We’ll be there in half an hour.”

“I couldn’t—” Kent said, rushing, confessional. “I don’t think his heart was—”

“Stay there,” she said, cutting him off.

“Okay, Mrs. Z,” he said. Softly, his voice catching, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I should have—”

She hung up the phone. She couldn’t—she couldn’t. She could guess how he was going to finish the sentence. He would make a series of self-recriminations that she would have to deny. It’s not your fault, she would have to say, whatever happened. Her mouth couldn’t make the words.

“Jack?” Bob said, his hand on the small of her back as he unfolded his coat from her arm.

“He’s at Pierre-Boucher. Kent couldn’t tell me what happened, exactly. Something at home, with his medication.”

Bob shoved his arms into the coat sleeves. It took him two tries to find the first buttonhole. “Is he—”

“I don’t know.” At his disbelieving look: “I don’t know, Bobby.”

She should know. What’s the old canned maxim? Having a child is like letting your heart walk around outside your body. When something goes wrong with a heart, you feel it: a pain in the shoulder, a shortness of breath, a deep fatigue. Some animal part of you fights death.

She had wanted champagne. Her toes had hurt. Her heart had broken, and she had felt nothing.

“Okay.” Bob was walking with purpose now. People moved out of his way almost unconsciously. He had that effect, years of parting people before him. “All right. We’ll be there in twenty minutes, we’ll find out then.”

They retrieved the car from the valet. In the passenger seat, Alicia pulled her shoes off and sorted through the glove compartment for a pair of flats. The blood rushed back into her toes, searing hot. She flexed them against the rug. She wanted them to hurt more.

Bob’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel as he guided the car out of the lot. “Maybe it was just a bad panic attack? He’s had them before. And tomorrow, with the draft.”

“Maybe,” she said. A mercy. Underneath her skin crawled eighteen years of arguments—more, if you counted from the first time they’d discussed children. (“Child,” she’d said. “One. One child.”) She thought of the first winter, trapped with a baby who had left the sleepy months and entered the screaming ones. Everything in Pittsburgh was grey. After years in Montreal, it had felt impossibly provincial. The language was clumsy, the people slow. She’d lived in Quebec long enough to start thinking in French, in its looping negatives and half-swallowed vowels. After the move, her native English irritated her, caught between her teeth like a seed.

Bob had built a backyard rink as soon as snow stuck in November: laying the cooling mats, raising the boards, stretching the liner, flooding the surface. Early in the mornings, when Jack had been at his fussiest, Bob had laced his skates, wrapped Jack in a down bunting, and taken him for slow, looping laps. He’d come in for breakfast, later, the baby asleep on his shoulder. “He loves the ice,” Bob had said wonderingly, and something inside her had shivered. It was the same part of her that watched her husband slam into wood, into glass, into the armored bodies of other men; watched him spit teeth and dab ointment into the bruises that bloomed over his ribs; watched as his pupils contracted from painkillers and he said Ali, Ali, you’re the smartest and the prettiest, I’ve got the best wife, before he leaned over the side of the hospital bed and threw up on the floor.

They drove in silence. The dashboard clicked as Bob signaled a lane change, then went quiet. Alicia turned on the radio, flipping through CBC voices murmuring in French, an Elvis song, something jazzy and chaotic, no meter she could hold onto.

Kent thought Jack’s heart had stopped. How was it possible she hadn’t known?

Breathe, she thought. It was almost funny. She had spent so many evenings sitting next to Jack while every muscle of his body contracted, while he shook and fought, alone in a place she couldn’t enter. Time passed while she read him scripts she was considering or recited half-remembered Shakespeare. She had closed her eyes, listening for that moment when his breath slowed, when his hands unfisted, when he muttered, “I’m tired, Mom,” which was her cue to ruffle a hand through his hair and whisper, “I love you.”

“Ali,” Bob said, like a question, like he meant to follow it with something else. Like he wanted an answer.

“We don’t know,” she said. The words felt sharp in her mouth. “There’s no reason to speculate.”

He shook his head, his expression frustrated. “No, that’s not— He didn’t tell you anything more?”

“He’s a child, Bobby. He’s in a hospital and his—and Jack is somewhere they won’t give him information.”

Bob tightened his grip on the wheel. She watched the strain of it raise tendons on his hands. The corners of his eyes pinched.

“I just think,” he started, before pressing his lips together. “Anyway. We’re almost there.”

The hospital rose up as they turned into the drive, following the signs marked urgence. The building was framed in steel and glass, covered in brick. My son is in there, Alicia thought. For the first time she felt the terror of it, high in her throat. She had read stories of mothers who lifted cars, broke through doors, fought off wild animals in defense of their children. She wanted something to grab with her hands. When something has claws and teeth and burning eyes, you know where you stand.

They walked in together. Alicia’s dress was too long for flats and tangled around her feet. Fuck this, she thought, snatching it up. The designers who touched her body like it belonged to them, who wrapped her in fabric sewn with tiny even stitches by women in a design house in New York or Paris or Milan—or Montreal if they were attending something at which the commentators would say, approvingly, sa robe a été fabriquée au Canada. She had spent so many nights struggling for breath, stuffed into bras that cross-hatched her body like abandoned fishing nets, dragging her down into a deep ocean.

When you’re drowning, you don’t look like you’re drowning.

“Merci, merci,” Bob was saying.

They followed a woman in dark scrubs down a series of hallways. Every door looked alike, every intersection identical. Alicia wished she had tied a thread to the outside, something to lead her back out.

“Celle-ci,” said the nurse, pointing. Bob said, “Merci,” again and pushed open the door.

“Parlez vous anglais?” Alicia asked when the nurse spoke in a rush of French.

“Of course,” the woman said. “The doctor will be here very soon. You may sit with him. I’ll find you some water.” The door closed soundlessly behind her as she left.

The room folded in on them, lit from underneath cabinets and from a door to the bathroom, left barely open. Alicia thought of the way her room had felt when she was a child in it: small and warm, like being wrapped up tight with someone you love. At night, when she had turned out the light, the darkness outside thickened with possibility. The only light aside from the stars came from the Millers’ front porch, twenty minutes’ walk away over the hills. She had pretended to be a captain adrift at sea, a secret agent hailing a fellow saboteur by lamplight, an explorer charting unknown caves. She had told herself stories, there in the darkness, about what the future would hold. Maybe she hadn’t stopped.

“Jack,” said Bob, gently. “Jack.”

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t look. She was still staring at the bathroom door, left ajar. Had someone used it? Surely Jack hadn’t—couldn’t have. She had given birth in a hospital like this one, in a room like this. Big uncomfortable bed and washable floors, windows overlooking a garden.

Why couldn’t she move?

Bob was sitting on the bed now. He had a hand in his hand.

Jack’s hand, she thought, but the meaning slipped away. What belongs to a person? She had made that hand with her body, but it wasn’t hers. It was no longer part of her.

Bob murmured something before leaning his forehead down against the hand. Alicia said, “I need to—” and fled.

— 

She remembered, after turning down the third unmarked hallway, her phone in her purse. Where are you, she texted Kent.

In the er, he texted back. u here?

Be right there, she wrote, and asked the nearest person wearing scrubs for the directions.

The emergency room was large, row after row of plastic chairs interspersed with low tables stacked with magazines. It smelled acrid, like bleach, like sweat. “Saigne,” a man was saying, to her left. She shut it out, scanning the room, finally spotting Kent huddled in a corner. He looked up as she wove her way through the chairs and benches. Under the fluorescent lights, his eyes were dark grey, sunken into his face. He’d pulled the sleeves of his hoodie over his hands, and wrapped his arms around his knees, pulling them into his chest.

“Mrs. Z,” he said when she approached, “Is he—?”

“I don’t know.” She sat next to him. “Bob’s with him. They said the doctor would be in soon, but it’s better for Bob to listen and translate anyway.”

“He’s alive?” The words sounded like they’d caught on something barbed and dragged struggling free. Kent folded himself more tightly into the chair, head ducked, eyes hidden. A tremor rippled over his back, tightening his shoulders. He curled his hands over his head, fingers in his hair. “Did he wake up?”

“He’s alive. We don’t know— I don’t know the rest yet.” She tried to look at him, but her focus slid away. It felt like reflex, the way she might squint against the sun, or a reflection of it. “I’m going back in a minute. You should go home. I’ll call you a car.”

His head came up at that. “I can’t go. I have to be here, I have to—”

“You’re not doing him any good here.” She wrapped her hands over the edge of the chair, grounding herself. “We’ll have media soon. People will notice that Bob’s not at his own charity event, and we’re not exactly anonymous. We can keep you out of it, at least.”

His jaw worked before he buried his face again. “Fuck the media.”

“That’s not the way this works. You know it’s not.” She put a hand on his shoulder. The muscles jumped, and he leaned away. “It’s going to be a story. No matter what we do. We need to control it. You’re going to be drafted—” The words lodged in her throat. She pulled at his hand until he unwound enough to reveal his face. His eyes were shockingly green at this angle, green the way secret places deep in the woods were green, the way a single plant clinging high above the treeline was green; they were swollen and red-rimmed and more than a little wild. She needed him to hear this.

My son is in the hospital, she thought. He hasn’t woken up.

She left her chair and crouched in front of Kent’s, her hands on his. The hem of her dress tore with a tiny rending sound. She thought, viciously, good. “Look at me,” she said. When his eyes didn’t meet hers: “Look at me.” He looked. “You’re going to go first tomorrow. In half an hour, when Jack drops out of the draft, every single person in the Aces organization is going to be on the phone. They’re going to call you up on a stage and you’re going to smile and say ‘Thank you for the opportunity’ and go to Las Vegas. When they ask—” He tried to say something, his mouth opening, but she cut him off with a quick shake of her head. “They’ll want to know what happened here. You don’t know. You weren’t involved; you weren’t there. If Jack had a problem, you didn’t know about it. You hope he has a fast recovery and you’re looking forward to the opportunity with the Aces.”

“Can I see—”

“No,” she said. “Kent, no. This is the best I can do for you.”

He nodded, jerking his head up and down once. “Okay,” he whispered.

“Do you understand?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Z.” His hands clung to hers, trembling. His face stretched into a grimacing smile. There was a translucent stillness in his eyes, like they had been plucked out and replaced with glass. He twisted one side of the smile up, raised an eyebrow: “Jack Zimmerman who?”

She squeezed his hands once and let them go. They dropped into his lap and fidgeted there, like they couldn’t remember how to be hands. He wove his fingers together, then separated them and tucked fists underneath his arms.

“I’ll call the car now,” she said. “Do you have anything else with you?”

“No. Just my phone. I didn’t even—” He laughed, wetly, nodding at his feet, and she noticed for the first time that he wasn’t wearing shoes. Just socks, dirty now on the soles, covering his finely arched feet.

“Come on,” she said, “Let’s go.”

They walked towards the exit as she called the driver. Kent flipped his hood up over his head and leaned against a nearby wall. The doors, sensing him, swished open, then shut again.

“I should’ve done more,” he muttered. “I thought it was all gonna get better once we— I thought it was just, like, a phase. You know, like you remember that week he couldn’t sleep because his favorite pajama pants got chewed up in the washing machine and he had to throw them out? It was just—he had to sleep, eventually, so he did.” Kent shrugged, his face miserable. “I thought he’d...sleep, eventually.”

She thought, If I were, but the thought stopped there, like the rest of it had wriggled loose and dived away. They stood in silence for a long time. Her brain recognized thoughts and dismissed them. It occurred to her that she should say something, make some reassurance, but she had no capacity for it. The evening had scooped out her insides and replaced them with something cool and foreign. Her years of training, of practice at small talk while drunk, starving, so jet-lagged she had no idea whether the sun had just set or was about to rise—all of it had deserted her in one outgoing rush. In the middle of her was a silence, thunderous in its emptiness. It reminded her of swimming, the way the water plugged your ears and echoed your heart back to you.

At last, her phone chimed. “The car’s here,” she said.

Kent looked at her. He folded something away inside himself, straightening up from his slouch against the wall. The door slid open for him: you move, therefore I move.

“Kent.”

His shoulders slipped down, and he half-turned.

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, Mrs. Z,” he said. His face did something complicated. He blinked twice, hard, and walked out into the night. The doors glided closed.

—

In Jack’s room, Bob had dragged a chair next to the bed and was sitting in it, rifling through paperwork.

“What did they say?” Alicia asked. Jack hadn’t moved. A tube trailed from his mouth. His hands were large and very pale. The machines around him made sounds she couldn’t interpret. He had always been numbers, she thought: height and weight, GP and PIM and PTS. First or second. She knew what those numbers meant. She didn’t know what these numbers meant.

Bob set down the papers and rubbed a hand over his face. “Too much of his medication, and alcohol. They think he’ll be all right. They’re going to try to take him off the ventilator in a few hours.”

She pulled another chair over and sat. “Have you called Julia?”

Bob nodded, his eyes fixed over Jack’s head. “She said she’d be in touch once he’s officially withdrawn.”

“Good.”

He nodded again before pushing his hair back from his face and straightening. “I got you some scrubs,” he said, handing over a pile of coarse turquoise cotton.

She stepped into the pants, then unzipped her dress to peel it off. The dress pooled around her ankles, shimmering like a tiny lake. It reminded her of a trip she had taken to Yellowstone, of deep holes beneath crystalline, acidic, boiling water. They looked like places monsters might den. The water there was stunningly clear. If you fell in, it would kill you.

“They left me these,” said Bob. He offered her a handful of brochures for rehabilitation centers. “For when he wakes up. They think—they recommended for us to choose one we think could handle the privacy requirements. Apparently there are some that are better suited than others.”

Alicia thought that she could not continue to have this conversation, that the words themselves were like the clear, clear water. There were boardwalks over the water, and signs everywhere to be careful, but still every year people died. Just walked right in and disappeared. Sometimes they were people who knew the way, and then lost it for a second, and that was that.

“Can I touch him?” she asked instead.

Bob looked at her for a long moment. Then he set the brochures down and gestured toward the bed. “The nurse said it was fine, and not to worry if you set off an alarm, it’s probably just jostling a monitor.”

She climbed onto the mattress next to Jack, pulling back the thin blanket and tucking her body alongside his. He had been small for so long—round and soft, big-eyed and cautious. Now he was so much larger than her. She hooked her chin over his shoulder and leaned her face into his hair, the way he had liked when he was young, before he could brush her off with an exasperated, “Maman.” From this angle, she saw the top of an ear, the fringe of dark eyelashes.

Bob was humming something next to the bed, a fragment of a song he had sung to get Jack to sleep. Bébé n'veut pas faire dodo. She hummed along. She had forgotten most of the words, but the tune was engraved in her the way a place, or a scent, makes its mark and refuses to let go.

—

They woke her up to extubate Jack, and the first word from his mouth after she re-entered the room was, “Hi,” like they were meeting for the first time. His voice rasped. She thought maybe she was meeting him for the first time.

“Hi,” she said.

“Maman, I’m—” he said, like he meant to follow it with sorry but wasn’t sure he meant it.

Then Bob was there, and they were speaking quietly to each other in French. In moments of exhaustion the language still deserted her. It felt like listening through a thick layer of wool, each strand another night she hadn’t slept, another bruise she had rubbed ointment into, another shaking hand she had held to her face as she said, Shh, shh, it’s all right.

She wanted to ask the why that stuck at the back of her throat. But she knew why, didn’t she? Hadn’t she?

In a moment, Jack slipped back into sleep, and Bob stood, stretching his arms over his head. His suit was wrinkled, the jacket thrown over the back of a chair nearby and the shirt unbuttoned at the collar. He looked haggard, like he had skipped a week of meals instead of one missed breakfast.

Rage tore through her like a rogue wave, so startling and violent she had to fight her way to the surface of it. She wanted something to break. She wanted to break it with her hands.

“This ends here,” she said. Her voice was astonishingly level.

Bob looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

“I let him—I let you let him do this.” She could feel her heart beating, the too-fast, electric pulse of it in her chest.

His forehead furrowed. “I don’t—let him do what?”

“How could he have chosen anything else?” She stared at the floor. There was a scuff near the bed, like someone had pushed it back and forth too many times. How many people had festered here, had died here?

“Ali,” said Bob. There was a coil of danger in it.

Her heart beat, impossibly, faster. She heard it rushing in her temples. “How could I have thought this would end somewhere else? I let you convince me he wanted—”

“Don’t.” His hands made fists. He shoved them into his pockets, turned away.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t make this about—”

“Oh, what? Don’t make this about you?” There it was, the car she could lift. She wrapped her hands around it. “Don’t make this about your fucking game?”

His eyes were huge, hurt. “What the fuck, Alicia.”

“It almost killed him,” she whispered. She wanted, fiercely, to take Jack far away. Somewhere equatorial, where it would be an absurd waste to freeze a plane of ice for sport. “If he’d been a normal kid—”

“He’s not a normal kid.” Bob had his hand up now, pinching the bridge of his nose.

She took a deep breath. Her lungs felt like someone had wrung them out and left them crumpled. “Do you remember, taking him out on the ice when he was little? And I knew, and I let it—I thought, well, maybe he’ll be mediocre, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Nobody forced him. He loved it. He loves it.”

Watching his face tore at something in her. She studied the sheets, tucked neatly in to the bottom of the mattress. “Does he?” she said, her voice soft. “Or does he love you? I loved you, but I had a choice. I didn’t have to love hockey too.”

He was staring at her. There wasn’t enough light in the room, she thought. The room was so dark. Was it day or night outside? Time inside a hospital works differently than time outside. It doesn’t divide into minutes or seconds, but into breaths, into heartbeats. She sat and drew a leg up to her chest.

“Loved?” Bob said, almost silently.

She didn’t answer. After a time, he came and sat beside her. He held out a hand, palm up. She pretended not to see, and a while later he withdrew it.

“I’m going home tonight, to pick up a few things,” she said. “I’ll make up the guest room.”

He made a small noise she couldn’t identify. Like Jack, she thought. They buried what weakened them, dug cavernous holes for it, raised cathedrals on top.

She reached blindly for the brochures the nurse had left behind. On the covers, men and women smiled wide, white, even-toothed smiles. They looked as if they had never spent a moment not-smiling. Their faces were suited to it: symmetrical, with guileless, gamine eyes. They had had problems! But no more!

“The doctor said that one was a good choice for people who need more discretion.” Bob had his head down, his face turned away. “They have some experience with people like—you know.”

It’s a little fucking late, Alicia thought, but she snatched the words back before they left her mouth, swallowing them down, ignoring the cinnamon-sharp burn.

“All right,” she said, opening it, her eyes scanning blindly over the rows of text. She wasn’t sure whether the brochure was in French or English. The letters of it swam. She forced her eyes to focus. Read, assess, recall. This she knew how to do. This was—useful was the word that came to mind.

In the bed, Jack breathed, marking off the time.

—

At midnight, she called a car to take her home for a shower and clothes that hadn’t been industrially laundered. There were, as far as she could tell, no reporters waiting at the house. Apparently Julia’s respect our privacy at this difficult time, backed by her firm’s litigious reputation, had done its work for the moment.

The porch light was on, but the rest of the house was dark and quiet. She kicked her shoes towards the rack and walked by memory to the kitchen, pulling down a glass and filling it with water. In the darkness, her fingers looked skeletal. She flicked on the bulb above the sink and rested her elbows on the countertop, letting her head sink into her hands. She was too heavy, she thought, for her body. Like a beached sea creature, crushed slowly by its own mass.

When she turned to lean back against the counter, she made out the faint outline of someone on the couch, feet dangling over the arm. Of course.

From closer, she could see the grey suit pants, chosen for the occasion. My treat, she’d said. Kent had laughed and said What the fuck do I know about suits, and Jack had hissed Kenny, in a scandalized voice. Like she was the one who needed protection.

On top, his shirt and a crumpled black-and-white jersey. It would have PARSON written across the back in bold block letters. There was another one, somewhere, that read ZIMMERMANN. Or was it this one? Had they just taken the letters off and replaced them? Whose work was that?

She couldn’t look at it. “Kent.” Reaching along the wall, she found the light switch and flipped it. “Kent, wake up.”

He blinked his eyes open. They clouded with something she couldn’t place.

“Mrs. Z?” He ground the heels of his hands under his eyebrows, rubbing sleep away. “Time’s it?”

“It’s late. Let’s get you to bed. Is your mom back at her hotel?”

He looked quizzical for a moment, like he was listening over a long distance. “Yeah,” he said finally. He sounded uncertain.

“Up. Bed.”

“I’m sleeping.” The words slurred into each other. One side of his face was creased from where he’d rested it on a throw pillow.

For a moment, Alicia skidded back into the fraught first years of parenthood, putting a recalcitrant toddler to sleep. “Let’s go,” she said.

“‘S he awake?” Kent shook his head as if trying to clear it.

“He woke up, for a little while.”

“Did he— Did he say what—”

There were no words, she thought, for the question he was trying to ask.

“We don’t know.” She waited as he hauled himself up off the couch, stumbling over his own feet. “We’re just going to take it as it comes.”

“Okay.” She trailed him up the stairs, toward something she couldn’t put a name to.

At the door to the guest room, she paused. Kent grabbed the back collar of his jersey and pulled it over his head, unknotted the tie and yanked it open. His fingers fumbled with the shirt buttons and he kicked off the pants by stepping on the cuffs like a child. He stood shivering in an undershirt and socks and boxers printed, ludicrously, with tiny hockey sticks. He wrapped his arms around himself, fingers digging into his shoulders.

“I didn’t tell her,” he said, too loud. “Mom. She asked why he wasn’t—I didn’t know if you had a story. I don’t think she—I didn’t tell her anything else, either. You don’t have to worry. There’s no one who knows.” He darted a glance at her, asking a question she didn’t know how to answer.

This would be the place, Alicia thought, for a good person to make it right. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Her words pooled like a dammed river, waiting for a single point of weakness to tear open.

“When do you leave for camp?” she asked instead.

“Two days. We’re driving out.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be back home before then,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. Then, in a rush, like he had to run the words together to force them out, “Can I say goodbye?”

She looked past him, into the room. Hockey posters, a rumpled bedspread, a pair of shoes kicked off in the middle of the floor. One of Jack's hoodies, tossed over the back of a chair. “We can’t have visitors yet. I’ll let you know once he has a phone back.”

He bit his lip. She had a flash of memory, of the time Jack had fallen and broken his wrist at practice. He had cradled it to his belly and his eyes had gone wide, but he hadn’t cried. He’d just looked surprised that something inside him that used to be one piece was now two.

“Thanks, Mrs. Z,” Kent said. He was still shivering. “I’m gonna go to bed now.”

“I’m headed back to the hospital. Bob has his phone if you need anything before you go.”

A silence fell between them, something breathless, like the space between the call for quiet and the call for action. There, you weren’t quite yourself and you weren’t quite your character; you were some strange hybrid of the two. You could become anyone.

“Take care of yourself,” she said, finally. She pulled him into a quick hug, and his whole body shuddered violently once before it stilled.

“Yeah, okay, Mrs. Z.” He stepped back and grinned his wide media smile, eyes sparkling. “I’ll send you a postcard from Vegas.”

“Well,” she said, “of course you know what happens in Vegas makes for excellent gossip.”

“I’ll let you know who’s secretly into wine coolers and who runs the D&D game.”

“I’d expect no less.”

He smiled again, a thinner, more genuine expression. “Let him know it would’ve been him? It all—it would’ve been him.”

“I’ll tell him you’re thinking about him.”

He sent a short breath out his nose and swiped fingers under his eyes. “Sure.”

“Sleep well,” she said, “Drive safely,” and left him standing in his doorway, in a pool of light.

—

Jack’s room was just as he had left it. Or—well. The cleaning service had come, she thought, and tidied up what was left in the en-suite. They probably talked about it among themselves in soft-edged Caribbean French: the detritus of rich fathers and their rich sons, bottles of liquor that they would have to work two days to afford drained by teenagers and hidden, empty, in the trash. Alicia walked into the bathroom. There, invisible women had cleaned up the scattered pills and folded a point onto the toilet paper. They had wiped out the bathtub; it gleamed. There was not a single trace of mineral deposit on the sink.

She opened the medicine cabinet. Bandages, medical tape, a finger splint. A package of toothbrushes, a tube of toothpaste rolled meticulously from the end. Hand lotion, arnica gel, ibuprofen tablets in three strengths, a pair of nail clippers, a comb, hair product. There weren’t any of the pills. Bob had probably asked the service to dispose of them.

Alicia walked back into the bedroom. Jack had made the bed, like he always did, sheets and pillow and comforter layered and folded just so. She trailed her fingers over the edge of his nightstand and opened the drawer. Inside, she found a spiral-bound notebook with a dogeared green cover. It had a pen jammed into the spirals, forcing them open. Inside were hockey plays, a few notes on drills, bullet-pointed analysis of Eastern Division defensive strategy. She flipped through page after page of Dot to Dot done in alternating blue and black ink, a tiny blue K at the center of half the squares, a scrawled J in the other half. Someone had drawn a cartoon of Jack with the blue pen: huge drooping eyes and curling hair. He was holding a hockey stick in one hand and the speech bubble coming from his mouth read: I am King of the Squares. In black pen: a single line through “of the squares.” The rest of the pages were blank.

Underneath the notebook, she found an old cigar box, probably something Bob had brought back from a trip. There were condoms in the box, long strips of them folded neatly over each other. A bottle of lube. Three empty condom wrappers. She pushed the lid down, and some mechanism in the hinges closed it with a sharp snap.

At the sound, the room seemed heavy with hidden things. She crossed to the desk, pulling the drawers out in turn. Pens, pencils, highlighters, rolling tubes of chapstick and loose paperclips, a few pads of sticky notes, graph paper, a calculator. She tore open the closet and felt along the wall for the light switch. Jack had organized his clothes by occasion and within occasion by color. White and black t-shirts, the only ones he would wear, 100% cotton with no tags. She had bought them five at a time. The shoes, at the bottom, lined up in pairs.

Whirling, she scanned the rest of the room. Where would something hide in here? She pulled the bulletin board from the wall, pinned medals chiming against one another, papers fluttering. There was nothing behind it. Nor was there anything behind the posters. The putty that held them up by their corners left oily spots on the wall. The last one ripped as she took it down, a long jagged line bisecting a grim face under a helmet, eyes tracking out of the frame to the right, one arm held out to counterbalance a sharp, ice-shaving turn.

Under the mattress? That was where people in movies hid things they didn’t want to be found: pornography and cash in rubber-banded rolls. Under the mattress was dust.

She spun again. Where was it? If she were better at this—if she were a detective like ones on TV—she would have tools. There would be special lights that showed blood and bodily fluids, even after they had been bleached away. She would have gloves and tweezers and tiny plastic bags. She would crouch and look and the room would say something to her: here is what happened. Early on, she’d been the dead body: a girl, alone, hurrying home, looking behind her, fumbling for her keys. Then: stabbed, or shot, or garrotted; lying at the center of a blood-painted talisman, or fished out of the river, or discovered at the recycling plant. She had kept her face very still and breathed so little that black spots swarmed through her vision. Over her body, covered with a thin sheet, lying on a morgue table, the actors would say witty things, and that she was a sweet girl, taken too soon—that her life was valuable chiefly because she hadn’t gotten to live it.

What would one of those brilliant detectives say here? Ma’am, did your son have any history of— 

She was breathing quickly. Her hands rose to her face, to her eyes, which burned.

There was probably some trick to it. Jack had had a multiplication table, when he was little, with tiny panes of translucent red plastic that slid down to reveal each of the answers. When you shook it upside-down, the answers disappeared. Then, you could slide the red doors closed to show the answers again. She didn’t understand how it worked, exactly. Something about the color of the plastic and the way the backing was printed combined to make numbers appear. 2 x 8 is 16. 7 x 6 is 42.

She thought, I should sit, and did so, on the edge of Jack’s bed. The comforter had been knocked askew, the pillow fallen to the floor. Underneath, the sheets were the soft brushed bamboo fiber that Jack had chosen, the day they had gone to the store and run their fingers over every set in the aisle.

He had cried here, sweated out fevers and spent afternoons reading and written in his notebook. He had—there were empty wrappers, in the box. But she had suspected that, and so it wasn’t so much a hidden thing as the sort of understood secret that parents and children held between them. To play a dead body, all you have to do is smooth your face into a mask and breathe so shallowly that it’s almost not-breathing. She had been very good at it.

There weren’t secrets here. The secrets were inside a body. His body, that maybe wanted to be dead but wasn’t, that crashed into and tangled with other bodies. Weighed and measured like a prize calf that it’s an honor to have chosen for sacrifice. Her body, that grew him and wouldn’t let go so that he had to be separated from her with a knife.

Her eyes had stopped stinging. She wiped her hands against the scrub pants she was still wearing. Right. She had come to get clothes and to take a shower and she had done neither. Without warning, the energy drained from her body and she sagged forward. She had never felt so tired. On the count of three, she thought, and heaved herself up.

— 

The doctor, when Alicia and Bob spoke to her, explained in frank terms that Jack had, essentially, died. He’d been unresponsive when the ambulance had arrived. They hadn’t, at first, found a pulse. “They brought him back,” said the doctor. “He was lucky they could establish and maintain an airway. He was lucky his friend found him, and knew what he had in his system.”

Brought him back from where, she had wanted to ask. Is there some sort of waiting room? A ferry, maybe. What do you have to pay to re-cross the river?

Jack had always been quiet, but now he was silent. He had always been reserved, but now he was hollow. Whatever animated him had fled, leaving only the costume it wore. The skin of his face draped over the bones.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him as he sorted through the duffel she had packed for rehab.

He looked wrongfooted by the question. “You’re not going to ask me how I’m feeling?”

“I know how you’re feeling. I can see you. What are you thinking?”

His whole body flinched away from the question. “Mom, I—”

She ran a hand along the wall, the textured vinyl snagging at her fingertips. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, I just, I don’t know.”

Some part of him was missing. What did you have to trade? she thought.

“Are you hungry?”

“No, not really.”

“You’re sure? We could grab something at the cafeteria, or drive thru on the way—”

He threw the bag on the bed and zipped it in one rough motion. “I said no.”

She pulled her hands towards herself, over the vulnerable spread of her stomach, the low scar.

“All right. Do you need anything from the house?”

“No.”

“All business today, huh?”

His head snapped up.  “You told me I have to go, so I have to fucking go. You want me to be happy about it?”

“I guess not.” She tugged at the hem of her shirt, smoothing it with fingers that wanted something to catch hold of.

“I have everything. Let’s go.” He looked away, avoiding her eyes. His shoulders hunched.

“Sweetheart—”

“Don’t,” he said, his voice strained. “Mom, Maman, please don’t.”

When she laid a hand on his forearm, his whole body stiffened. It felt like touching a wax figure: so lifelike, from certain angles.

Together, they walked out of the room and down the hallway. She knew it now, knew the railings and tiles and pastel tones, could navigate without reading any of the signs on the walls. She tried again: “I heard they have art classes, in the afternoons. Maybe you can try one.”

He walked faster. They passed the nurses’ station, the bathrooms, a waiting room panelled in gentle teal. In a moment, Alicia thought, Jack would be walking fast enough that she would have to jog to keep up. She bent her head and lengthened her stride to keep pace with him. They burst through the front doors that way, practically running, to find Bob in the car outside.

“You can sit in the front,” she said, but Jack shook his head, sullen, silent, and opened the back.

None of them spoke. Bob drove grimly, his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, keeping exactly to the speed limit. Alicia folded her hands in her lap to keep from picking at her manicure.

Outside, the trees flashed by: here and gone, here and gone.

— 

With Jack checked in, Alicia climbed back into the car. She’d held out her hand for the keys on the walk and Bob had dropped them into her palm without looking, perfectly coordinated. She turned the key in the ignition and then waited for her body to do the rest of its work: one hand on the wheel and the other levering the car into reverse, her foot on the accelerator.

Her foot didn’t move.

A memory surfaced: a teacher, holding a thread. She had broken the thread, then wound it in loops between her hands to show that many threads together were impossible to break. She had said something about remembering, about the connections we make between things. But Alicia had felt that first moment in her marrow: a thread, pulling, and the snap.

“Ali?” said Bob.

She shook her head.

He shifted in his seat, turning towards her. “Do you want me to drive?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

Bob wrapped an arm over his chest, like he needed it to keep his ribs closed over his heart. Or maybe that was her, with the ribs flying apart, the part of her that should be closed bursting open.

“You don’t have to be,” he said.

My son is alive, she thought.

“I am.” Her body shook its paralysis, and her hands fell where she expected them, her feet where she wanted.

“I’m not,” Bob said softly.

She didn’t know what to say to that. She checked her mirrors and backed out of the spot. They followed the road towards the city, until Alicia, observing an impulse she couldn’t name, took an exit into the broad expanse of land to the west. Bob was quiet, and the car ate up the distance, the engine rumbling.

After a time, she pulled to the side of the road. Pebbles clinked underneath the tires, scattering into the ditch. She turned the car off and climbed out.

Bob scrambled out after her, skidding in the gravel. “Ali, what—”

They were looking at a field. She thought, If I scream, no one will come.

“You know, where I grew up?” she started.

He squinted out at the field. “Yes?”

“It was farmland. Rolling hills everywhere. All covered with wheat. In the fall at the harvest everything was gold as far as you could see, and the trains never stopped coming through to collect it.” She paused for a moment. “You know underneath it? It’s—well, it was lava first. It bubbled out and cooled, and then it was covered by loess, slowly, over thousands of years. Fertile soil. A lot probably lived there. But to the north there was this gigantic lake, made by an ice dam. Huge. Bigger than Lake Ontario.”

“What are you saying?”

She spread her hands, an expansive gesture: this big. “There was an enormous lake, behind a wall of ice. But when you put water and ice together, the water starts to melt it. The ice cracks, and then one day, it collapses.”

Over the field, a raptor circled. Bob’s feet shuffled. She wanted to freeze him, make him stop. He was never still.

“You must have been able to hear it from kilometers away. The lake emptied out as a hundred-foot wall of water, moving a hundred miles an hour. It was so much water that the land it went over looks like an ocean now, like you’re standing on swells. It’s so far outside human scale that no one believed it could have happened that way.”

“Okay,” said Bob, slowly. It was the way he might talk to a skittish animal, the way he had talked to Jack when Jack was small and mercurial and Bob hadn’t known what to do with something that responded neither to reasoning nor command.

“It happened over and over and over. For thousands of years. The lake got dammed up, filled, emptied.”

Bob nodded. He had taken a step closer, so that they stood near one another without touching.

“It must have seemed like an apocalypse.” Something closed in her throat, but she coughed and pushed past it. “It was an apocalypse, maybe. Did you know that hasn’t always meant a catastrophe? It comes from the Greek. It meant to uncover, to lay bare. There are whole parts of the Columbia Basin that the floods scoured down to rock.”

“I remember. We’ve visited.”

“It took such a long time for everything to build up, and then all at once—” she swept her hands down and apart: washed the spider out.

Over the field, the raptor paused, hovering before it dove. She lost it in the sea of green. Mice must have to be ambivalent about their babies. So many of them would die, plucked away by cats and birds, necks snapped in traps, poisoned, drowned. You don’t name a thing that is going to die. You don’t love it.

“I don’t know what to do, Ali,” Bob said. “I’m just—”

The water would have been so cold, rushing over the land. “Just what? Angry? Sad? Point to the face on the chart?”

“That’s not fair.” His voice was reasonable, everything about him reasonable.

“It’s not. And yet.” The raptor struggled up again, its talons empty. Something lived another day.

“You’re not alone in this.” He held it out like an olive branch, a tentative offering. 

She swatted it away. She was angry, angry in a way that she had never been, in a way that was not allowed, that was unreasonable. “I’ve always fucking been alone in this. Who do you think was raising him—”

“You were gone just as much on location—”

“I always knew, though, I always knew, he’s my son—”

Bob swung around at that, grabbing her elbow, his fingers digging in. “He’s mine too.”

They stopped, both breathing too quickly. She looked down, at the rocks underfoot, at the struggling weeds that grew beside the highway. Here, the apocalypses happened at glacial pace: the slow creeping forward, the melting back, all of it leaving ground-down earth and the occasional erratic, like an offering.

All at once, the anger left her, replaced by something murkier and more terrifying. “We almost lost him, Bobby.”

His hand on her arm loosened, his thumb tracing a circle on her skin. “I know that, you don’t think I know that?”

She was blinking too much. She couldn’t look at him. “I should have stopped him.”

Bob shook his head. “He fell in love with it, Al. That’s not up to us.”

Wasn’t it? “He could love something else. Fishing, or—I don’t know—accounting, or rocket science, or poetry. Does he know that? I think we took a child and never let him learn who he was.”

“He knows who he is,” Bob said hoarsely. He leaned into her, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her in.

“He loves playing.” The long road trips, the careful blue-inked Ks. “I thought he might love— But I don’t think it went both ways.”

Bob made a harsh noise. She could feel his jaw tighten. “That wouldn’t have lasted. Couldn’t have. Jack never even told us—”

“I know it wouldn’t have, but isn’t that what love is? It’s irrational. You do stupid things to keep it. They both did stupid things to keep it, Bobby, drank too much and probably—” She thought of the box, the soft sound it made when it closed. “We never would have let him do this for a—person. We never would have let him leave home. We wouldn’t have let it build up and build up and build up until it burst.”

“But we did,” said Bob in a low voice. “We did. We can’t undo it.”

“I know,” Alicia said.

He pulled back to look at her. His eyes were warm, full of something determined. “We’re going to get through this.”

Alicia nodded. She turned her head away and still she could feel his gaze on her, open and searching.

“We just—it’s day to day, you know?”

She smiled at that, unwillingly, the expression pulling at strained muscles. “Yeah,” she said. She dragged a hand over her face. “Day to day.”

There were little floods, she thought, all the time. Little ruptures. Spills of love, of fear, of passion running over a landscape that would change, and change again. The ripples spread in a pattern beyond the power of mathematics to describe. The lakes filled and emptied, filled and emptied, scouring what lay beneath them clean.

—

“Of course,” said Lucelle, “we ought to review the seating chart with Claude’s divorce in mind.”

“I’ll do it,” said Rosalie. She wrote something in her notebook, then capped her fountain pen and set it down on the table. “He could have waited until after the dinner to sleep with his assistant, no?”

Gentle laughter rippled around the table. Alicia smiled reflexively. Her fingers tapped on the side of her thigh.

“Why do you suppose it was this one that did it?” said Max. She leaned closer to the rest of them, like she was sharing a secret. “It was certainly not the first.”

“I think she was waiting for the youngest to graduate. It’s tidier if there aren’t children involved, isn’t it?” Rosalie didn’t quite look at Alicia. She didn’t quite not.

Max patted her hair away from her forehead. “I’d forgotten they still had one at home. University?”

“McGill, I think,” Lucelle supplied.

“Oh,” said Max, “brains and beauty!”

“Plus deep pockets wherever one or the other might not quite suffice.”

The women paused, for a moment. Alicia felt their eyes in the negative space around her body.

“And how is Jack?” Rosalie asked delicately. She picked up her cup of tea and held it suspended between her fingertips.

Alicia shuffled her feet under the table, stretched her toes. She had worn sneakers today. Comfortable pants. An old t-shirt with a hole near the hem, so soft she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. Out of uniform. Max had greeted her at the door with only a moment’s hesitation, a minutely raised eyebrow. “He’s doing well,” she said. “Keeping up with us, reading a lot. He’s told me so much about the Second World War—which I should know more about, Grandpa fought in it. In the Pacific, on an aircraft carrier. There are pictures of him in the water.”

“It’s good for him to have interests,” said Max. “He was always such a bright boy.”

Alicia thought that Max must have known a different child to call Jack bright. Focused, determined, stubborn, smart—but bright carried a lightness with it, a shimmering edge. Jack did not shimmer around the edges.

“He can always re-enter next year, yes?” said Lucelle. “You timed his birthday just right for that. Did Bob have a hand in setting the date?”

Max laughed. “Of course. They always schedule their babies for the off-season.”

Lucelle flipped over the piece of paper with their printed agenda. “It was such a joy to watch him play last year. They’re so big, those boys!”

Setting her tea down, Rosalie said, “I keep telling Felix he has to work on his forecheck and his edge control if he wants scouts to take him seriously. They play so quickly now, it’s like watching hummingbirds.”

There were nods of agreement from around the table. “What does his coach say?” asked Max.

Rosalie beamed. “He thinks Felix will go in the draft to the Q. I hope to someplace he doesn’t have to billet too far away. I just, I worry, you know? He’s good, but he’s not brilliant, not—” She looked briefly at Alicia’s hands. “Anyway. It’s not even the season, and listen to us. Let’s talk about summer! Max, did you plant your garden?”

“I’m trying heirloom tomatoes this year,” said Max, and Alicia thought, like hummingbirds, the fragment caught in her mind. The improbable delicacy of it: six-foot-tall, 200-pound men slamming into each other, like hummingbirds. You could crush a hummingbird in your hand, if you caught it. Or you could let it pause its frenetic flapping for a moment, alight on your finger, then fly away again. For a moment, you could hold its soul like a glass bead between forefinger and thumb.

Later, Lucelle showed her to the door. “My love to Bob and Jack,” she said, handing Alicia her purse. “It’s so common, you know, for children to need a little time to decide.”

Alicia bristled. “He’s not taking a gap year.”

Lucelle held out a hand placatingly. Her fingernails were manicured, glossy, rounded at the edges. Her eyes flickered down to Alicia’s sneakers. “No, of course. I didn’t mean that.”

“He almost died, Lucelle. He almost—”

Lucelle touched her on the arm, a feather of a touch. “It was thoughtless of me. He’ll be back at it in no time, you’ll see.”

“I think he probably will,” Alicia said. She tasted it in her throat, the burn of it. There it was.

“Such talent. It’s a shame he— Well. If you and Bob need anything….”

“Thank you,” said Alicia. She thought that if she stayed any longer she would do one of several things ornamental women did not do: yell, cry, say cruel things, whip her purse into the oil portrait of Lucelle’s daughter that hung gold-framed in the entryway. She might say to Rosalie: take him and run.

She smiled and said goodbye. In the car, she folded her hands over the steering wheel and rested her forehead between them. She tried what the counselor had suggested: deep breaths, shoulders back, sliding the blades of them down along her spine.

After a time, she lifted her head. She flipped down the sun visor and checked the makeup under her eyes, blotting with her fingers. The key turned smoothly in the ignition, the car purring to life, and she started down the long curve of driveway that led to the world.

—

1:21 pm
Hes ok tho?

1:34 pm
Yes, he’s all right.

1:35 pm
He hasnt said

2:48 pm
He doesn’t often have access to a phone.

2:48 pm
Im gonna be busy they run us hard

2:48 pm
Can u ask him to call

2:51 pm
I think my vm is working again

4:14 pm
I’ll let him know.

4:15 pm
Thx

1:28 am
I dont know what i should of done different but ijust

2:09 am
Tell him happy bday

—

Alicia woke suddenly, sure that something had roused her but unable to place it. The clock next to the bed glowed 2:37. The numbers were the wrong color, the wrong shape. Waking in the guest room disoriented her, every time. She held very still.

A sound floated up from the kitchen. Rustling, the click of a light switch, the opening and closing of the refrigerator. Familiar footsteps. Alicia swung her legs out of bed and wrapped her robe around her.

Bob was leaning against the kitchen island, his face tilted up, a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a kitchen towel and draped over his eyes. He’d turned on the under-cabinet lights, which cast overlapping parabolas of light over the counters and onto the floor. Something dark stained the front of his shirt. Blood. The iron-thick scent of it.

“Long night?” she said neutrally.

“Long night,” said Bob. He fumbled sideways, his eyes covered, until he found a bar stool to sink onto.

She folded her arms over her robe. She wanted to be wearing more clothes for this. “Am I going to read about you tomorrow?”

“No. It’s—no.” He blew out a long breath.

She reached forward, pulling the towel and the bag of peas off his face. The bag was wet with condensation, the towel damp. It came away with a streak of red. His face, underneath, had begun to swell, an asymmetry around his left eye socket turning pink. More blood ringed his nostrils.

“Bobby,” she said, startled.

He looked away, winced. “There won’t be media. I called Julia, she got NDAs down.”

Alicia traced the line of his cheekbones, the orbit of his eye, the bridge of his nose. He grunted, but kept still. “Nothing feels broken,” she said.

He smiled a little at that. How many times had they done this dance, her fingers on his face? Trying to name the damaged places.

She dropped her hand. “What happened?”

His jaw worked. He rubbed a hand against his thigh, looking for something to do with it. “I was out with Mathieu. We went to the bar, you know, by the river, and there were these— They don’t know shit, Ali, but they talk like they were there. They weren’t fucking there.”

Silently, she held out the peas, wrapped in the towel. He settled them back over his face. When he started talking again, it was muffled. “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I know we’re supposed to take life as it is, the good mixed with the bad, nothing you can really do. You’re grateful for the good and you work through the bad. But god, god, they started talking and I wanted to kill them.” He took a breath, another, dragging in lungfuls of air one after the next. “He’s not a thing. If he was their child—but no, he’s a body, something hollow they can put hockey in, and I couldn’t—” His mouth twisted.

With careful fingers, she began undoing the buttons of his shirt. “I know.” The shirt fell wider over his collarbones. She touched the long rise of bone, briefly, on the spot where it had snapped and mended. There was still a bump. She reached for the cuffs, undoing them one at a time, tugging them down over his wrists. She had a sudden sense-memory of doing this for Jack, when he was young; for Bob, when he had broken three fingers in his right hand; for her father, as he was dying. All of them had looked at her with the same wide, glimmering eyes. Bob hissed a little as the fabric slithered over his knuckles, and she set a hand on his knee. “I’ll be right back.”

They hadn’t needed the first aid kit in the bathroom for a long time, but she had gotten into the habit of checking it, keeping it stocked. In the kitchen, she opened the kit and tore open a packet of gauze, wetting it briefly in the sink. The blood on Bob’s knuckles blotted away, spreading through the gauze until she threw it away and started over with a new square.

She worked slowly, methodically. She had done this so many times, on nights when he had come home with a big stupid grin and a butterfly-bandaged cut over his eye, on nights when he had come home angry and stayed that way, retreating into his study until he had worked through whatever dogged him from a loss. It had happened less and less often, as he got older. In the last years, she had come to expect to see him paired off with another veteran during a scrum, their arms hooked together, waiting it out.

“What do you talk about?” she’d asked him once, after a particularly chippy game. Over the course of three periods, he’d wandered around the edges of four scuffles and one out-and-out fistfight, chatting with his partner of the moment.

“Our kids, mostly,” he’d said. “Which of our joints hurt the most this week. Whether we’re going to miss our bedtimes if the boys keep going after each other.”

She had laughed at that, and he had smirked, adding, “How our wives prefer when we don’t get punched in the face.”

Now, she dabbed blood from his knuckles and thought about casual violence, the singing-blood joy of it. Jack had smiled less and less, off the ice. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed because he had smiled so much on it. Big, bright-eyed grins, his whole body a celebration.

There were rules, there, that governed the violence, that bound it. “You can’t do this out here,” she said, spreading a thin layer of antiseptic over Bob’s hand. “You know they’re waiting for us to make this kind of mistake.”

He nodded. “I know. It won’t happen again.”

“All right.” With practiced hands, she repacked the medical kit. Swept the bits of leftover paper off the counter and into the trash. Kept her head down. “I wanted—” she said, but couldn’t explain it. She had wanted something to hurt, something to grab onto. She recognized the blood on his face. She wanted to bleed it.

Bob lifted the peas from his face and looked at her, one eye open, the other swollen now into a mostly-lidded slit. “Ali,” he said, his voice impossibly soft. He reached for her hand and pressed his lips to the knuckles, guided her palm to his face. She blinked at the edge of the counter. It was blurry; when had it gotten blurry?

Alicia let her hand stay there for a moment, just long enough for him to lean into it, before she pulled it back. Her chest was tight. “I’m going to bed.” She looked around for a reason, eyes catching on the medical kit. “I’ll take this. I’m sorry, I can’t—it’s not—” She started towards the stairs.

“Hey.” Bob was standing, a silhouette in the low light when she turned back to him. “Hey.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck, like he was embarrassed by something. “I love you, okay?”

“Yeah,” Alicia heard herself say. She met his eyes. “I love you too.”

Upstairs, in the guest room, she curled under the blankets and watched the clock: 3:16, 3:17, 3:18.

—

Early on, people had said, “The days are long, but the years are short.” Alicia had smiled and nodded, because ornamental women do not complain about their offspring. They do not say: there are fluids leaking from me; I spend my day wrapping a potato in cloth and watching it sleep, hoping it wakes up again, dreading the moment it wakes up again. She had thought: the days are long, the nights are long, the years are fucking long.

The years were long. They had stayed that way.

The days had become shorter, first when Jack started to sleep, then when he could be left with someone else for more than a few hours, then when Alicia’s scar no longer reminded her with every movement that she had a child at home.

Now, the days were long again. She went to the gym, molding herself into a form her body resisted more each year. She read, her eyes skipping whole paragraphs. Several times a week in the afternoons, she and Bob drove to the rehab facility. Inside, the counselor collected them and ushered them into a room with potted plants and with Jack, where they talked. The talking felt like it took place within a thin bubble of glass. She thought: I want to smash it. But she wasn’t sure what she wanted to smash. She wasn’t sure what was on the other side.

“I don’t know what this is for,” Bob confessed to her on the drive home, three weeks in. “Do you know what this is for?”

She shook her head. “They said it would help us support him, when he gets out.”

Bob swallowed, once, his throat bobbing. “I want to help. I want to—understand.”

She wanted to understand, too. She wanted to tear apart whatever had locked Jack in a room, alone, while she stood unaware in another, of her own.

They kept going. They talked, and talked, the prospect of more exhausting. It was like climbing a mountain by pulling it down, one shovelful of dirt at a time, until you stood level with where the summit used to be.

Someone had designed the center to be ruthlessly calm. Pothos and peace lilies. Greys and purples and soft powder blues. She longed for something out of place. A red sweater. A loud, persistent laugh. The calm snaked through her until the thought of it was infuriating.

In between the trips to and from the city, she worked. There were always more meetings, more guest lists, more seating arrangements. The other women sent sidelong glances at her and spoke with quiet voices, as if she had a headache. Once, Lucelle said, delicately, “The next meeting will include the senior members of the Foundation Board, so business casual is expected,” and did not look at Alicia’s worn jeans, her canvas shoes, her ponytail.

On a Tuesday, after a tense negotiation over invitation font, Rosalie pulled her aside. “I don’t know what you’re going through,” she said. Her face gathered into a tight-lipped expression.

“All right,” Alicia said, a dismissal.

Rosalie took a step, like she meant to walk away, before she turned back and said, quickly, “Vincent, you know, he only played a few years, not like Bob.”

Alicia knew. There had been plenty of conversations over dinner. War stories.

“He forgets things,” Rosalie whispered. She looked around, like she was sharing a secret. “He gets confused. And I just think, what if Felix also—” Her eyes filled.

A reflected surge climbed through Alicia, sending her hand reaching for Rosalie’s before she processed it. They stood there, hands linked, as Rosalie took unsteady breaths.

“He’s your child,” Alicia said. She tightened her grip on Rosalie’s hand. “I didn’t—” Her throat wasn’t working. She tried again. “I don’t know what’s right.”

Rosalie nodded, her face downturned. “I don’t know either,” she said. She dropped her hand, swiped fingers under her eyes, and looked at Alicia.

Alicia smiled. “No smudges,” she said. She almost left it there. But as they gathered their purses, checking themselves by habit in the entryway mirror, an impulse seized her. “Hey,” she said to Rosalie. “Do you want to get a coffee?”

Rosalie looked startled. Alicia watched her face settle into polite refusal and then take a turn, try something new. “I’d like that,” she said, almost a question. Then, more firmly: “I’d like that.”

— 

Jack was waiting for her in front of the building, his duffel packed. He’d dropped weight, the lines of him softened by time away from the ice.

“Hi, Mom,” he said when she got out of the car. He folded her into a hug that managed to touch her as little as possible. “It’s good to see you.” She was reminded of the way he’d greeted his grandparents: unflinchingly respectful, as warm and distant as autumn.

“I missed you,” she said as he tossed his bag into the car and climbed into the passenger seat, pushing it as far back as it would allow. “It’s too quiet in that house with just your father and me. I still have no idea how he talked me into five bedrooms for three people.”

“I’ll come make some noise, then, eh?” 

Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she caught the flicker of a smile before it was snuffed. She grabbed hold of it like someone swept downriver might grab hold of passing debris: a lifeline. “I did always complain to Rosalie about you clattering around the house at ungodly hours.”

Jack shrugged minutely. “I’m a morning person.”

“Four AM is not morning, Jack. Four AM is night. It’s a time for sleeping.”

“You know what they say, hockey waits for no—” He cut off, and she watched him fold in on himself like a dying star. The burn, the flaring growth, the collapse.

She scrambled after him. “Has Bob been keeping you up to date on the goings-on of the Montreal gossipmongers’ club?”

“No,” said Jack.

“Claude’s getting a divorce.”

Jack’s fingers tapped against his knees. He looked out the window at the passing houses, the fields.

“Alex is shutting down the club; I think he got bored with it.”

“I’m surprised he hadn’t already,” Jack said gamely, the way someone at a party where everyone has been standing too long might say, Remind me what it is you do?

“It’s ridiculous, grown men playing with owning things.”

“Like the prison restaurant?” he said, a slight wry twist to his voice.

“The prison restaurant! Who makes a few million dollars and thinks, oh, what the world needs—”

“—is another golf course?”

She laughed, surprised at the frisson of guilty amusement. “We shall never speak of this to your father, but yes.”

“He loves his 18 holes.”

“He does. The universe’s most boring game, and you have to be up at the crack of dawn to play it.”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t hate it.”

“Ah, but you are my child, and inherited some taste in other areas.”

He smiled at that, a small wistful expression on his face. His smiles had always looked a little sad, an upturned mouth paired with the downward slope of his eyebrows.

“I thought,” she said, not, truthfully, having thought, “I thought we could go camping. Do you remember? When we went and it rained for days and days?”

“I remember,” Jack said. She had thought he would complain, nine years old and soaked to the bone. Instead, he’d drawn into himself, cold and miserable and determined not to let a hint of it show.

“I still have my gear in the basement. We could stop and pick up a few things at the MEC—a new sleeping pad. Bob never wants to go with me. It’s always, ‘Ali, why would I want to sleep on the ground when I could sleep on my bed?’”

Jack made an amused sound. “It’s a good question.”

She swatted at him. “It’s not a good question! We don’t talk to anyone. We smell the fresh air. We sleep under the stars. We live by our wits.”

“We’re not planning on long lives then, are we?”

Her throat went dry, all at once. She swallowed and heard a click.

“Let’s go next week,” she said, her voice scratchy. She coughed to clear it. “It gives me time to file the permit.”

“Okay.” Jack was quiet for a moment, before he said, hesitantly, “Is Papa— Where—”

“He’s all right. He had a children’s charity event he couldn’t reschedule this afternoon.” She was thinking of the yellowing bruise under his eye, disguised with concealer before he left the house, the way he hesitated every evening before he said goodnight and closed the door to their room. The way the guest room she slept in, a few meters away, had begun to feel like a set: a place she inhabited as someone not-herself. “He’ll be home for dinner.”

“Good.” Leaning his head against the window, Jack let out a long breath, and Alicia thought, Good, an echo, a prayer.

—

The first day, they parked at the edge of Lac aux Herbes and shouldered their packs. The air wrapped them in the pine-scented morning, the vague hint of algae beneath. Hushed. Jack cinched his backpack around his waist and adjusted the straps over his shoulders. No one else had arrived at the parking lot yet, and anyway they were headed into the backcountry, where, if they were lucky, they wouldn’t run into another human for three days.

“You’ve got the extra map?” she asked. He nodded. They ran through the essentials checklist again: dry clothes, a water filter and a backup, food, shelter, first aid.

“All right,” she said, “adventure awaits.”

Jack looked skittish, like he might decide the car was the better option after all. She watched him, carefully pretending to settle the weight of her pack against her back. At last he nodded, and she took that as her cue. They walked together into the woods. The trees, in a pine forest, grew spaced in such a way that they could walk easily among the trunks. The trees had grown here for hundreds of years. Alicia calmed, the richly oxygenated air flowing through her, the coolness of the shade closing overhead. These trees had seen worse, would see worse. They would outlive her and her child, her grandchildren. One might fall to fire, to lightning, to disease, but a tree’s memory lives on in the forest. It’s there in the paper-thin seeds foregone by squirrels or the questing, intertwined roots.

“Would you rather be able to fly or to see ten minutes into the future?” she asked, the question stumbling out of her.

Jack let out a short laugh, surprised. “Would you rather?”

“Don’t make fun, we’re hiking. We have to make noise.” She grinned. “Unless you want me to shout ‘Hey bear’ every five seconds. Or I could sing showtunes!”

“Mom. Fine.” He thought about the question as they walked, boots crunching over years of pine needles. “Can I change the future?”

“No, only see it.”

“Do I need wings to fly, or can I just...levitate?”

“Levitate.”

“Okay, then fly. There aren’t any rules about flying. I’d get at least a few good games in before they could come up with any.”

Ducking under a low branch, Alicia said, “You don’t want to know what’s coming?”

He was quiet for a while before he said, “No.”

They hiked like that, steadily into the forest. She could no longer see the parking lot behind them, and the familiar panic swelled for a moment, stretched, burst. It had always seemed ridiculous, the way humans subdivided nature. This, here, is civilization; this, beyond the trailhead, wilderness. Does a moose respect the boundary, a seed, a gust of wind? Birds can’t read the trail maps. Fires don’t constrain themselves to wild forests. All the same, some primal part of her awakened out of sight of the road, reorienting itself to a world not inscribed with line after perfect straight line.

Looking at Jack, she wondered whether he had that part in him too, whether it was still an inheritance of people who were raised in cities. His head up, his shoulders back, he walked easily. He checked what came ahead of them, moving gracefully among the trees. Her throat hurt, watching him.

“It’s your turn,” she said.

“My turn?”

“Would you rather.”

“Mom.”

“Them’s the rules, city boy. You walk in the woods, you play would you rather.”

She felt more than saw his eye roll. “Fine. Would you rather get lost in the woods with someone who can only sing, or someone who can’t talk at all?”

“I see what you’re doing there. Do the songs have to be real ones, or can they make up lyrics?”

“Real ones.”

“Can they still communicate by writing even if they can’t talk?”

He ducked his chin, thinking about it. “They can write.”

“Okay, then I’d take the non-talker.” She hefted her bag up onto her shoulders, and before she could think it over, before she could second-guess: “In college, my girlfriend and I spent a week hiking the Appalachian Trail and I don’t think we said more than a hundred words to each other.”

Jack made a sound, bitten-off, on a rising tone like a question. His eyes slid over to her, and she let herself smile, revisiting the memory. “She loved hiking; it was really what we had in common. That and being from far away. She was from Kenai. Alaska. Her family packed fish.”

“Fish?”

“Salmon. They grew up in a trailer, five kids and the ocean.”

There wasn’t much to say to that. Alicia remembered having heard it for the first time: five kids in a trailer? Carol had laughed and said, Well, we didn’t spend much time indoors, and Alicia had said, Still, Jesus, the smoke from her cigarette snaking upward.

It was vital, suddenly, for Jack to know, for there to be no ambiguity between them. “I dated her for two years. We broke up when college was over. She got involved in nuclear disarmament, and then she went back to school and became a lawyer. She and her wife work for the Human Rights Campaign now.”

“What happened?” Jack asked so softly she almost didn’t hear it over the rustle of their footsteps.

“We wanted different things. We were going different places. She was going to change the world, and I wasn’t—I didn’t have the courage she did. I was afraid for her, and it turned into being afraid of her. It just...didn’t work out.” Now, she could think of it without the lump in her throat, without the twist of anger. At the time, it had felt like the end of a world.

Carol wasn’t the kind of person who believed things happened for a reason. She fought like the salmon her family had harvested: hurling herself upstream. She had occupied government offices and ferried leaked documents, raised fists and, like Alicia, attended funeral after funeral after funeral. Alicia had watched her with a strange mixture of jealousy and alarm. She had wanted to believe in things the way Carol believed in them, throwing her whole body towards a vision.

“Does Papa—”

“He knows. They’ve met.”

Jack tucked his chin down into his chest. His hair was too long, curling down over his ears. He hadn’t liked having it cut as a young child. He would squirm at the buzzing of the clippers and flinch away from the vacuum at the end. Every three months, Alicia had crouched in front of him at the barbershop, her eyes on his, telling him stories—the sanitized outlines of her movies, loosely paraphrased fables—until one day, he had said I can go by myself, Mom, and that had been that, one of many tiny separations.

Now, he shook his head and the long hair fell over his forehead; he brushed it back absently. After a time, he seemed to come to a decision because he lifted his chin and nodded once. She’d seen that before: the gathering of boys, the strategy, soldiers with no war except the one they created themselves, flinging their bodies down the ice. They waited for Jack, that play army, and when he had said what he had to say and given his nod, they slid to realize his vision. When he said something, he meant it.

“Okay,” Jack said firmly.

She didn’t know what more than that she’d expected. Maybe she had wanted Jack to peel open some part of himself, in the way that she felt peeled open. The faintest breeze hurt, the lightest touch, reaching parts of her that weren’t meant to be exposed.

“It’s your turn,” he said when they had walked another hundred feet in silence.

“My turn?”

“Would you rather.” He settled his shoulders, looked at her, and smiled so broadly that she ached with it. His eyes sparkled, and she thought, inarticulately, Oh, oh. “Them’s the rules, as you Americans apparently say.”

“You spent your first five years in Pittsburgh, you ridiculous child,” she said, her voice ragged. “You have an American passport.”

He snorted, a half-laugh caught in the sound. “Still.”

“Fine. Would you rather never be able to eat meat again, or never be able to eat vegetables?”

“Do vegetables include grains?”

“Anything that comes from a plant.”

“Eggs?”

“You can eat those with your vegetables.”

“All right,” he said. “No meat.”

“Your turn,” she said, blinking back something that threatened to spill from her, and she trailed her hand along the bark of a tree as they walked, the roughness under her palm singing life, life, life.

—

They stopped to eat dinner alongside a trickling creek, then screwed the tops on their bear canisters and stacked them. A distance upwind, they stopped again, this time to make camp, pitching the tent and laying out mats and bags. The sun had begun to set by the time they were finished. They crawled into the tent and turned on the lantern, comfortable on their backs with the books they had brought. Jack had packed a mystery, something with a vaguely corporate cover and large block letters. They read until the night settled in earnest, and then, in silence, tucked their books away and turned out the light.

In the darkness, they lay listening to the night-sounds: the scuttle of tiny feet, wind-stirred branches groaning. The sustained melody of insects calling to one another, their instinctive music.

There was nothing, Alicia thought, listening to Jack breathe, that she wanted more than this. Her child alive, the world around them.

“Maman?” Jack whispered, just as she had begun to sink into sleep. Alicia hummed a question in response.

“I know I wasn’t,” he started, “I was trying to be— I didn’t want anyone to know. About my head, or about—”

The words wrenched something in her. “I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could tell us,” she said quietly. 

They’d said this all in therapy, a bland counselor sitting on bland, industrial furniture in a room with strategically placed boxes of tissues and windows on the outsides of which nothing ever happened. They’d held hands, and made I-statements, and started the process of rebuilding, as if a house that has been destroyed and rebuilt from the same materials is the same house. Here is a house. Here is a pile of bricks. Here is a house again.

The counselor had praised their openness, their work ethic, and Alicia had thought, Coachable, bitterly, on days when she was not her best self.

It meant something different, saying it here without witnesses. She whispered, “No matter what, no matter what, I am yours first.”

“I know,” Jack said. He made a wet gulping sound, and Alicia groped sideways until she found his shoulder, his chest, until she could pull his back to her and fit their bodies like nested parentheses.

“I’m glad you had someone. I don’t know—whatever’s between you. I’m glad you weren’t—” She wanted to say alone, but the word lodged like an arrow behind her ribs.

Jack didn’t say anything. He trembled in the dark. She clung to him, thinking of ballads, of ancient stories, of clinging to the beloved regardless of the form they take. People took strange forms all the time. The trick was holding on until they came back.

Minutes later, hours later, Jack’s shoulders began to relax, and then the rest of him by degrees. She tucked her forehead against his spine. Land that has been underneath a glacier rebounds, moving back upward, when relieved of the crushing weight of the ice. It takes thousands of years, the land rising, rising.

Jack spoke, at last, in a low voice like a confession. “When I was—Coach Pelletier said if I needed something, he was looking for an assistant. For peewee.”

The glaciers advance and retreat, dam and collapse, calve tremendously into the sea. The land waits, underneath, for its moment. Then, it soars towards a memory of what once was.

“He’s still coaching AAA?” She said it smoothly, even as something cold filled her lungs. Her arms pulled him closer, her fingers slipping against the slick fabric of his sleeping bag.

“Single-letter.”

She forced the next question out. “Are you? Looking for something?”

He was silent for a long time before he said, “I don’t think I want to leave it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re not,” he said, and paused, searching for a word before settling on, “upset?”

Her instinct was to deny, to say, Your choices are your own, but she did him the courtesy of thinking about it before she answered. “It’s not easy to leave a thing you love. Even if it scares you.”

“People do it.”

“Of course they do.”

“They’re not good. The kids. Coach P says they mostly run into things and fall over.”

“All right,” she said cautiously.

“They sound like they’re having fun,” he whispered, and the cold in her lungs became a flood, became an apocalypse, a washing-clean.

He loves it, Bob had said. He had loved it for so long.

“I trust you,” she said.

Jack wiggled around in his sleeping bag until they faced each other, tucked close in the dark. “Thanks,” he muttered into her hair, this child who was now an adult, a known heart in a stranger’s body. She held on.

—

Jack was subdued the next day, offering occasional one-word answers to her questions. They played an alphabet game, and three rounds of I Spy before Jack shot a sideways look at her and said, “There are trees, Mom. There are lots of trees,” and the game fizzled.

They ate lunch alongside a small lake, listening as fish slapped into the shallow water under an overhang. A deer wallow had killed a patch of grass a few meters in from the edge of the water, and dragonflies darted around them, intricate flying predators snatching smaller insects out of the sky.

That night, they made camp and watched the sky: so many stars as to be uncountable, tiny satellites tracing arcs between them. They did not speak, and the silence settled around them like a shelter.

—

The route they had plotted looped into the woods and then back, and so on the third morning Alicia struck camp with the kind of excitement at returning to showers and coffee that she always felt after a few days in the wild. The prospect of it gave her a restless energy. She settled it by counting her steps, listening to the meter of them as she and Jack walked. By midmorning they had left the backcountry proper and rejoined a vague path, which promised a flat walk to the car. She had just opened her mouth to tell Jack it was his job to talk or sing today as repayment for her eight-hour mostly-monologue of the day before when she looked up and saw the bear.

It stood in the center of the path they had chosen, head tilted towards them. “Jack,” Alicia said, one hand on his arm, the other freeing her can of bear spray.

“I see it,” he said.

Ahead of them, the bear lifted a paw, then dropped it and nosed at a rotting branch. The movement rippled across its shoulders and down its well-fed belly. Alicia slid in front of Jack, the movement instinctive. “Hey bear,” she called, pitching her voice low. “Hey bear, we don’t have a problem with you. Just out hiking for the day, like you.”

The bear raised its head, snuffled a little, and lowered it again.

“Hey bear,” Jack called, and he was beside her now, his own bear spray in hand. She darted a glance at him and saw only calm, the coiled energy he wore like armor in the moments before he stepped onto the ice. “Move along, eh? We want to get home.” He took a step forward. “Get out of here.”

There was nothing between them, Alicia thought frantically, nothing between Jack and the bear, just a long stretch of open ground dappled with shade. Jack took another step forward, out of her reach. In a gesture that was probably fluid but paused for Alicia like stop-motion, the bear rolled its eyes up and studied Jack’s face. It swiveled its head from side to side, assessing. Jack returned the look, back tall, chin up.

For a long moment, they stared at each other. Then, with a heaving grunt, like the transition from stillness to motion required herculean effort, the bear swung its body into a lope and disappeared to their left.

Jack stood, breathing slowly, his hands loose at his sides. He tucked the bear spray back into its loop on his pack and pushed his hair back, out of his eyes. “You all right, Mom?” he asked. Alicia’s words deserted her. Nodding, she replaced her own spray and closed the distance between them.

She had thought it would be sudden, the putting-back-together of it, the mending. She had thought one day she might wake up with a ribcage resealed, a heart stitched, the deep well where she carried her fear drained. Instead, she had spent months bent over the tattered tapestry of herself, of Jack and Bob and the world in which they lived, matching dyes and threads, undoing water damage stitch by tiny stitch. She wove the bear in now: its dark haunches, its long claws. The way Jack stood afterwards, among the trees, wrapped in her arms.

“Guess we should’ve sung more showtunes,” Jack said. She laughed, once, a surprised burst of a sound, and leaned into him as they continued to hike, through the forest and back towards home.

—

Bob had unearthed a hose from the garage and started watering the plants in front of the house when they got home. As grounds for waiting outside the front door went, it left room for improvement.

“We have a sprinkler system,” Jack said, eyeing the leaking hose, the rusty nozzle.

“The plants looked thirsty,” Bob said. He trained the hose on a well-watered serviceberry shrub.

Alicia took pity on him. “We had a good hike,” she said. And, as she opened the front door, “Jack fought off a bear.”

She snuck a look back at Jack’s wide-eyed expression and Bob’s startled, “You did what?” There, that was something for them to talk about.

— 

The light was out in their bedroom. She almost returned to the guest room, abandoning the whole thing, when she heard footsteps, the familiar sounds of running water and the clink of a towel over the rack, a comfortable routine.

She opened the door.

Bob had one hand braced on the sink like his legs couldn’t quite hold him, his other scrubbing over his face. He had undressed to an old pair of flannel pants, frayed at the hems where they touched the floor. As she watched, he scooped up a mouthful of water, swished, spat. When he looked up, his eyes met hers in the mirror. She hadn’t known what she expected to see in them. Surprise, maybe. She wondered what was in hers.

Alicia had realized, when she was twelve or thirteen, that her parents had whole conversations without words. It was as if they had strung endless loops of phone lines between them in a tangled knot of experience and companionship. She could ask a question and watch as they sought each other’s eyes out over the dinner table. There were twitches of eyebrows, shoulder movements, little smiles, all of it a complicated language built of fragments she couldn’t read and would never be able to learn. Later, in college, she’d read about twin languages, whole worlds built on the premise that there was no meaningful distinction between you and I.

Bob’s mouth opened slightly, his back straightening. His fingers slid off the edge of the sink. He held her gaze in the mirror for a long time. When he turned to look at her, his body was a question.

He had been beautiful, when he was young. She had thought that, seeing him for the first time: beautiful. (Not handsome? he had joked when she had confessed. The hockey player you’d always dreamed of, who even had most of his own teeth?) He was probably less beautiful now, a softness to him he hadn’t had before, a sagging of skin and dulling of eyes. But the thing is that when someone ages in front of you, one grey hair, one extra fold of skin at a time, they stay beautiful. She saw him as she had seen him, as he was now, as she would see him, all of it overlayed like film exposed again and again to light.

She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. An answer.

He held his right hand out, palm up, eyes locked on hers.

Slowly, she reached out in return. She drew two fingers over his wrist with a touch so light that she felt only a phantom warmth, the radiant heat of the blood rushing underneath skin. His fingers twitched. The brushed moth-like against the base of her hand.

Another step forward, and he made a sound, a tiny drawing-in of breath. He swayed towards her like the ground had heaved beneath him. He wove his left hand into the fine hairs at the back of her neck. A question.

She leaned her head into the hand as her eyes closed. She couldn’t get enough air. Her lungs expanded, but it was as if they had shrunk, or had suddenly become trapped in a too-small rib cage. Opening her eyes, she took the last step.

Bob’s hands were at her waist, under her robe, tugging at the belt. He made a hungry noise when she surged into him, a noise that she had heard a hundred times, a thousand, and every time sounded new. They broke apart, and she whined at the sudden distance, throwing the robe off her shoulders, pulling at the waistband of his pants until he pushed them down and kicked them to the side, and then there was bare skin against bare skin, and god, she had missed this, had missed what it was to want this, what it was to be a body that wants. Bob nodded, restringing the wires between them, the invisible space through which flowed nights of jolting awake to check on an infant; long-distance fights in angry whispers so as not to wake a sleeping roommate; weeks, months spent traveling; the way their eyes had snapped together like magnets after the cup win, Alicia’s arms full of Jack, her heart beating so powerfully she was sure it could break through the glass.

There were slip-faults, sometimes, in time, in the way things push up against one another until they are suddenly, completely rearranged. They had gotten to the bed, her hands following a path from shoulder to hip to knee so well-worn she could have drawn it with her eyes closed. His eyes went huge with want as she covered his body with hers, settled over him. He worked a hand between them, fingers fluttering, and it wasn’t enough, was just enough to tighten her hamstrings, pull at her toes, but not enough to release them, and she must have made a noise because Bob hummed and rolled them over, tucking a pillow under her head and sliding down the bed to take a deep breath at her hip, to look up and meet her eyes and grin. She felt herself grin back, a big, stupid, open expression, the kind of grin that had been trained out of her at 21 when her agent had said, maintain the image, maintain the image, and had shellacked pink lipstick and demure, eyelash-fluttering smiles over a kid from wheat country, a kid who had smiled those demure smiles over and over again until the day a sweaty man with a forest of curls returned one full of joy and bloodstained teeth, and so there you go, there they were. She grabbed a handful of his hair and closed her eyes.

—

Afterwards, she hid her face in Bob’s chest and said, “I’m sorry.”

His arms tightened around her. “Hey, now,” he said. He had the look on his face that meant he was clawing his way back from the edge of sleep, and she loved him. It pulled at her the way the moon pulled at the tides, a gravitational force.

In the morning, she pulled her robe around her and went down for coffee only to find Jack already sitting at the table. He had the newspaper spread open, and looked up when she came in. Something about him changed, some tiny set of his shoulders or expression on his face. Then he said, “The house is too quiet without me?” and raised his eyebrows as far as they would go.

Alicia laughed, her face flushing. She pulled two mugs from the cabinet and filled them with coffee. “You know,” she said, walking with great dignity back towards the stairs, “I haven’t told you your birth story in a while. I’m sure I could—”

“I know, I was stubborn even then, there were blood and guts involved—”

She had started to climb the stairs, and waited until she got to the top to call back, “So much blood and guts!”

“Do I want to know?” Bob took one of the coffees and set it on his nightstand.

She followed a sip of her own with a kiss. “Just reminding him where he came from,” she said.

—

“I’ll drive you,” she said to Jack on the first day of practice, as he slung his bag over his shoulder.

He eyed her cap, sunglasses, and oversized hoodie dubiously. “Mom.”

“It’s been a while,” she said, grabbing a pair of gloves from the basket by the door. “I’m allowed to be interested.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“I won’t embarrass you. I won’t talk to anyone.” She took off the sunglasses, looking him in the eye. “I promise.”

Frowning, Jack said, “Okay, once.”

They were out the door and into the car before he could change his mind.

She wanted to hate it. Perched high in the stands, she watched the silent movie play out: Jack, skating backwards as the kids wove towards him; Jack, offering a hand as a child a full head shorter than the rest caught a divot in the ice and sprawled face-first onto it; Jack, skating close to offer advice instead of shouting it across the rink. The kids clustered into groups, peeking sideways at him. Slowly, one at a time, they began to offer tentative nods, or momentary, incandescent smiles.

Almost against her will, her stomach unclenched, her jaw relaxed. The clean smell of the ice floated up, the promise of it. They were here to skate on it, gouge it, build up industrious little piles of shavings. Then the maintenance crew would come and sweep it clean. Every few hours it was remade.

She found a number she hadn’t saved to a contact in her phone. Typed, He’s doing better, hope you’re doing all right, and sent it before she could second-guess herself. She turned off the ringer.

At the end of practice, Alicia wandered down towards the ice. Jack was standing by the boards, his hair loose and sweaty, his eyes shining. Coach Pelletier laughed at something he said, and said something in return too quiet for her to hear.

Jack turned and saw her. He was smiling. Her breath caught in her chest. She was sure she said something, sure she exchanged pleasantries with the coach about his children (grown, now), and his wife. But all she could see was the smile, the way it trailed Jack’s eyes across the rink.

—

Over coffee, Rosalie said, “Why haven’t we been doing this for years?”

Alicia looked out the window. It was raining, a summer shower that had people scuttling from awning to awning, whatever was to hand over their heads. “I don’t think I was—” she started, and then didn’t know what to say. Ready, maybe. Here. Me.

Rosalie looked at her. She was so patient.

“I wasn’t home, yet,” Alicia said finally.

It didn’t explain anything, but Rosalie nodded like it did. “Are you home now?” she asked.

Alicia thought about it. “Maybe,” she said. Then, trying the words out, fitting them to an idea that had just begun to take shape, “I think—I think maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I was waiting for something that won’t ever—” The sentence failed her, in the end. She made a rueful face and threw up her hands. “I don’t know.”

Rosalie took a sip of her coffee. “Do you think that’s enough?”

Alicia knew the answer to that one. “I think it’s enough.” She blinked, hard, and swallowed.

They smiled gently at each other across the table, eyes brimming. Then Rosalie laughed and said, “Look at us, old women, sitting here crying into our coffee.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Alicia. “I’ve got a few good decades in me yet. A lot of hiking to do before I hang it up.”

Rosalie brightened. “I love hiking,” she said, setting down her coffee and leaning forward. “There’s a path, in Japan, that takes you from monastery to monastery through the mountains. I’ve always wanted to go, but I can’t get anyone to go with me.”

Alicia wrapped her hands around her mug, the steam drifting, and said, “That sounds amazing.”

Outside, the rain had stopped. The buildings were dripping on the sidewalk, but people were walking more slowly now, weaving around puddles. There was nothing chasing them. They had no particular place to be.

—

Bob stood and stretched after dinner, patting his belly with a grumbling, “I’ll pay for that later.”

Alicia rolled her eyes at him. “As if you’re not about to go try whatever they can fit in the deep-fryer at La Table with those enablers you call friends.”

“Alicia!” he hissed, mock-scandalized. “In front of the child?”

“It’s time,” she said regally, “for him to learn who his father truly is.”

“It’s not a well-kept secret,” Jack said.

Bob clutched at his chest. “In my own home.” He ducked to kiss Alicia, his hand broad and warm at the back of her neck. “For that, I may try the fried mushrooms this time.”

“Say hello to Mathieu for me,” Alicia said as Bob wrapped a scarf around his neck and pulled a hat down over his ears.

“Of course. Ma femme! Mon fils! Bonne soirée!”

“Drink water!” she called after him as the door closed.

When she turned back around, Jack was looking down at his plate, smiling.

“What,” said Alicia.

“It’s just—” Jack hesitated, then shook his head and stood to clear the table. She rose to help him, piling silverware and stacking plates. They loaded the dishwasher, a gentle silence between them, and by mutual agreement settled on the sofa across from the TV. Jack flicked it on, switching from channel to channel. The colors of it flashed across his face, turning it blue, red, a brief, ghostly white.

He finally settled on something monochromatic and historical. The narrator droned, a grey-toned voice over grey-toned footage. Young men and guns, young men smoking cigarettes, young men looking at maps and sleeping with boots on and huddling, wide-eyed, inside the hulls of ships. Alicia drifted, her feet up on the couch, her stomach full.

“I got some letters,” Jack said, a shade too quickly. The narrator was talking about rations, the minimum amount of energy required to keep a body from consuming itself.

Alicia closed her eyes and breathed in, breathed out. “From where?” she asked. She had the sense that she was taking the first steps onto a frozen lake, the ice beneath her creaking.

“From—the other day—from a college? I thought maybe—” He stared unblinkingly at the television, his body a knot of tension. “I thought I could apply. In a year or two.”

Alicia opened her hands from where they had tightened. Oceans filled like this, drop by drop. Drop by drop. Emptied, and filled again.

“Did I ever tell you about our class prank the year I was a senior at Samwell?”

Jack relaxed a little, leaning back into the couch. “No.”

“Well,” she said, and even as she said it, saw him: safe, loved, among friends, “we learned somewhere that cows will only go up stairs.”

“Oh no,” he said.

“Oh yes,” said Alicia.

He groaned and covered his face. “Is there a statute of limitations on cow crimes? Am I an accessory now?”

“Be quiet. Listen to your elders.” She threw a pillow at him. “Stop laughing, this is serious. It was a glorious evening on Lake Quad, and my friend Maggie and I were conducting important research on the security guard rotations at Founders’ Library. We had, of course, indulged in the university’s motto, Penitus Potes.”

“Mom,” Jack said, but he was laughing helplessly now, his whole body curled on the couch in a fit of giggles. She watched the tension leave him. The flood of it flowed outward, carving new channels, until it joined a boundless sea.

“Listen up,” she said. “It’s a good story.”