by Alix Ohlin
At the clinic, for the first time, everyone wanted to talk to him. To know what Thomasie had been thinking, what he had told Mitch about his mother. A helicopter had flown in reporters from as far away as Montreal, eager to report on Inuit problems and the crises of addiction, poverty, and fractured families. Mitch was supposed to be an expert on these issues, and his phone rang so incessantly that he finally pulled the cord out of the wall. He had nothing to say.
They held a combined service for Thomasie and his mother at the community center, where an elder delivered the eulogy and no one from the family spoke. A friend of Thomasie’s from high school played the guitar and sang a John Denver song. There was no sign of Thomasie’s father. The nurse from the clinic was there, and so was Fiona, with her parents, but when Mitch expressed his condolences she looked right through him and said nothing. He pressed his card into her palm and told her to call if she needed anything, and she crumpled it into her pocket like some useless receipt.
When he asked to be released from his rotation, the request was granted immediately. What he wanted most was to get away from all the understanding looks and forgiving glances. Another fragile southerner, the community seemed to think. They’d never expected him to last long, and didn’t condemn him for wanting to leave. If only someone had blamed him, he might have been able to stay.
He returned to Montreal in August, and the city was turgid with heat, empty of people. His apartment felt like it belonged to someone else. Several times he picked up the phone to call Martine but always put it down again. Though he was due a vacation, he reported to work anyway, knowing how much he needed that structure and company to get through the days. He’d always been like this in difficult times, working weekends even when he didn’t have to, sculpting his hours to make everything else fit neatly into place.
On Sunday evening he went for a long run on the mountain, the familiar, muffled beat of the tam-tam drums by the Cartier monument matching the rhythm of his pulse. After the cold nights of Iqaluit the dense, humid air felt good against his skin, his muscles unclenching as he sweated out the poisons inside.
He’d thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he fell into a dreamless, blanketing state and woke at dawn feeling like he’d been deep underwater. At six thirty the phone rang, and he raced to answer it.
“You’re nothing,” a woman’s voice said on the other line. It wasn’t Martine.
“Who is this?”
She was crying in rhythmic sobs and wheezes. “You were supposed to help.”
“Please, who is this?”
“I hope you lose somebody you love.”
“Fiona,” he said.
“You’re nothing,” she said again, and hung up.
He stood in the living room in his underwear, still holding the phone in his hand, the early-morning sun bright behind the curtains, birds chirping outside. He thought of nothing except Thomasie Reeves: his chapped lips, his red windbreaker, his face as it must have looked when he stepped out onto the highway, firm and unblinking, into the brilliance of those headlights, massive as planets, barreling toward him in the pale Arctic night.
The dial tone sang, then switched to a higher beep. Mitch was happy. He was satisfied that someone hated him as much as he deserved, and was willing to tell him so. At least there was one person in the world who told the truth.
FOUR
Montreal, 1996
GRACE HAD JUST come back from work when the buzzer to her apartment rang. For a second her pulse quickened; she had the brief, impossible thought that it was Tug. Maybe he had come to explain what had happened. To thank her. She’d told him her last name, so it wouldn’t have been hard to track her down. She tucked her hair behind her ears, straightened her sweater, felt herself flush. All this in the few seconds before a crackling sound came through the speaker, and she realized it wasn’t him.
“Dr. Tomlinson,” said a female voice, “it’s Annie. I’m coming up.”
There were footsteps on the stairs and Grace watched Annie Hardwick climb the last few steps unsteadily, clutching the rail, her pale face turned upward. Wearing a puffy ski jacket that dwarfed her thin frame, she was hunched under the weight of her backpack.
“I took a cab here,” she said, panting, when she reached the top step. “I didn’t know where else to go. I need to lie down for a few hours. I can’t go home, my mom will see the bleeding and she knows it’s not my usual time.”
“Jesus,” Grace said, letting her in.
The girl was shivering. Underneath the ski jacket she wore her school uniform, a short skirt and tights and a cotton sweater over a button-down shirt. Her long hair was pulled back in a wide navy headband. Grace took her coat, led her to the couch—where she lay down, obedient, fragile—and spread a blanket over her.
“All the women in my family are very regular, my mom says,” Annie said. “Set a clock by them. And the two of us cycle together because we live together, so she’ll definitely notice that something’s up.”
“What happened?”
“I went to the doctor,” she said. “Your address is listed, so I came here. I told my mom I was eating dinner at a friend’s house and I’d be home by nine.”
Her legs contracted under the blanket, her knees moving up toward her chin, and she started to cry, without moving to wipe her tears away. “It’s too bad because I sort of wish I could just go to bed,” she said in a soft, distant undertone. “I mean, I wish I had my mom.”
Grace sat down on the couch and put the girl’s head in her lap and stroked her long hair until she quieted, then slept.
An hour later, Annie woke up and seemed more alert. She went into the bathroom and came out a few minutes later and asked if there was anything to eat. Grace made her a bowl of soup and she sat on the couch and ate it, slurping like a child. Then she handed Grace her empty bowl, smiled, and readjusted her headband. “I like your apartment,” she said. “It’s small, but it’s nice.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“A little.”
“Do you want me to call your parents to come pick you up?”
“No. I’ll take a cab in a little while, okay? Listen, I’m really sorry I just showed up here, but I didn’t know where else to go. I can pay you, like, for an extra session or something.”
Her parents had taught her to pave her way with money. When Grace said nothing, she blushed. “I’m sorry.”
She lay back down on the couch, more languorously this time, and began to ramble, talking more freely than she ever had in Grace’s office about her parents, their financial problems and arguments, their general cluelessness about anything to do with her life. She said she felt sorry for them, for how stressed out they were about everything, and that they deserved a better daughter.
“It’s like with Ollie,” she said. “Some of my friends, they don’t understand how I could be with him, because he’s not always that nice to me. He always acts really nice around teachers and parents, so they all think he’s like the perfect kid even though it’s just an act. And he flirts with other girls and maybe even hooks up with them for all I know. My friends think I’m like this victim, or whatever. But what they don’t understand is that I need to be with somebody like that, somebody who’s like me. Ollie and I have to be together because we can’t go around hurting nice, normal people. I haven’t told him about the other stuff, but I don’t have to feel as bad about that as I would with a nice guy.”
“What other stuff?”
“Oh, just stuff,” Annie said dreamily. “Sometimes I meet people.”
“It sounds to me like you might be putting yourself in danger,” Grace said. “Which is a bad idea.”
“No kidding,” Annie said. “I mean, obviously.”
She fell asleep again, and when Grace woke her at eight thirty she sat up immediately, her forehead crinkled in worry. “Am I late?” she said. “Shit.”
Using the phone in the kitchen, she called a cab. Then she said, “Thank you for your help,�
�� her tone blatantly impersonal, her eyes fixed on a spot just over Grace’s left shoulder. For a moment, she seemed to consider shaking her hand, but then she turned abruptly and left, her steps tumbling heavily down the stairs.
Grace poured herself a glass of wine and told herself she had just made a terrible mistake. Now, even more than before, she was colluding with Annie, part of her secret. She thought about calling Annie’s parents right away, but something stopped her. The girl had cried and rambled so openly, had shown such trust in her. In trouble and pain, she came to her door, and what could Grace do but let her in?
In her first year of practice, Grace had a patient named Morris Tinkerton, an American who had come to Montreal to work for a telecommunications company. He spent the entire first session explaining his job in elaborate, technical detail, and Grace had waited for all this information to lead into whatever issue had brought him to her, before realizing it was simply an avoidance technique and irrelevant to any problem he might have. In the second session he began talking about his wife, Suzanne, a college professor who had chosen to remain behind in Minneapolis. Her field was the sociology of health care—who got what kind of medical treatment and why—and Morris spoke as knowledgeably and thoroughly of her work as he did of his own. Starting to feel like she was being held hostage at a boring dinner party, Grace took notes on a yellow legal pad. She decided that professional commitments had forced the two apart geographically and, most likely, emotionally as well.
Morris was thirty-five but looked ten years older, his face settling into the slack paunch of middle age, and his outfits, strangely childlike polo shirts and khaki pants, made him seem, paradoxically, even older. He spoke with a lilting, almost Scandinavian accent and settled himself on her couch with his palms resting on his knees and his posture rigid, as if he’d been belted into a ride. When he first mentioned the dog, he referred to her simply as Molly, and Grace thought that in her boredom she’d failed to make note of this third important person in their family.
“So when Molly and I were out walking the other day,” Morris said, “I was thinking about Suzanne and certain concepts in her dissertation.” And: “I’ve been working such long hours lately that I’ve hardly had any time to spend with Molly, and I resent that.” These statements sent Grace scrambling back through her notes. Was there a child she hadn’t registered? A sister or some relative who lived with them? Or was Morris having an affair? She had a sleepless night after that session, contemplating what a poor and inattentive therapist she was.
But then she realized Morris was doing it on purpose, that behind his rigid bearing and studied calmness was a mind restlessly circling around pain that couldn’t be referred to directly and had to be approached sidelong. Pain that was occasioned—she understood in the third session, when he mentioned a leash and a park—by a dog named Molly.
“Tell me more about her, then,” Grace said. “What’s she like?”
At first Morris looked like he’d been punched in the stomach. He chewed the inside of his cheek, his breath labored. Then he looked across the room, staring at the poster over her head as if it were a distant horizon, and his eyes grew soft, almost wet. “When we got her, she was just a pup, just this little ball of fur. Like a pincushion or something. Really, you’ve never seen anything like it. Now she weighs as much as Suzanne does, practically. Almost a hundred pounds. Of course, a lot of that’s fur. If she were shaved she’d probably lose at least ten.” He laughed about this, low and fond, as if he’d given it a lot of thought.
“So you’re the dog’s primary caretaker,” Grace said.
“Primary caretaker?” Morris repeated. He seemed offended by the language, and his normally static hands fluttered up in the air before resettling on his lap like large, pale moths. “I guess. I feel more like she takes care of me. When I come home at night, we’ll go out to the park and she’ll run and fetch, and then we go back and sit on the couch—and when she lies next to me, I feel like she’s what I’m coming home to.”
“And what about Suzanne?” Grace said.
“She doesn’t get Molly,” he declared with sudden ferocity. “She doesn’t understand her. She’ll sit there and say, in this baby voice, ‘What do you want, sweetie? Come here, sweetie!’ When any person with a brain in their head could tell that she wants to go out and pee, or get up on the couch. I mean, it couldn’t be more obvious if Molly was using a diagram or a neon sign.” He shook his head. “It drives me crazy.”
They spent the rest of the session discussing his expectations, and why it mattered, in terms of their marriage, that Suzanne “get” the dog. Morris grew so exercised that the hair around his temples was matted and wet, and more than ever he looked like a little boy. Grace suspected that Molly was a stand-in for his own feelings of abandonment and betrayal, since Suzanne hadn’t come along to Montreal. By the end of the hour she believed they’d made some real progress, and Morris, too, seemed tired but happy.
She was so convinced of this that she could barely speak when he showed up for their next appointment with the dog on a leash.
“Since we were talking about her, I thought you should meet the famous Molly in person,” he said, and Grace felt a pricking in her temples. The dog sat at Morris’s feet with her back pressed against his shins, then rested her chin on his lap. She was enormous, and her shaggy black hair obscured her eyes. Morris reached down and rubbed her chest, making an affectionate, growling sound. It so startled Grace that she sat up straight and coughed.
“Everything’s changed since Molly came into my life,” he said. “She makes me feel like a better person, and we understand each other. I feel calm.”
“There’s a lot of evidence that pets help soothe anxiety and depression,” Grace said. “But do you think your marriage—”
“Tell me,” Morris interrupted, resting his large hand on Molly’s shaggy head, a gesture like a benediction, “do you think it’s weird to feel more love for your dog than you do for your wife?”
Grace examined him carefully. “I think we often wish all our relationships were as full of unconditional acceptance as those we have with animals.”
Morris shook his head. “I don’t just mean acceptance. I mean I love her. I think she’s beautiful and noble. I think her existence on earth is a great thing, and I’d do anything to make her happy. I never felt like that about Suzanne, not even on our honeymoon.”
Grace had the feeling she should tread lightly. “I’m sure you must’ve felt more”—she was going to say romantic, but thought better of it—“optimistic about Suzanne in the early days, didn’t you?”
“Optimistic? That’s not what I mean,” Morris said impatiently. “I love everything about this dog—her eyes, her body, the way she’s leaning against me right now. She’s my home. This dog is my home.”
Grace put down her pen. It was imperative, she knew, not to judge. But passing judgment is how we navigate the world, go left instead of right, do right instead of wrong. “Don’t you think, Morris,” she said softly, “that dogs are easier to love because they don’t talk back?”
In front of her this large, childlike man began to cry, with the creaking, stunted tears of someone who rarely sheds them. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wish it were just me and Molly. That Suzanne would leave us alone. You don’t have to tell me it’s stupid, I know it’s ridiculous.” He let out a low, ravaged moan, and the dog leapt up on the couch and licked his face and squirmed into his lap, and he smiled through his tears. “I love her,” he said.
To love a dog not as a pet, but as you would a person, is impossible. It’s like asking a child to be an adult, or expecting your partner to always give love and never receive, or always receive and never give. A fantasy, a refusal to negotiate the complicated, muddy emotional needs that define any relationship. All this Grace tried to explain to Morris while he cradled a hundred-pound dog in his lap. He listened and nodded and dried his cheeks. Then he said, “Thank you very much,” and left her office. She neve
r heard from him again.
It was Morris she thought of when she saw John Tugwell again. Because she knew there was no good reason she should be so intensely interested in him; that he was a troubled person, one more likely to suck her into his trouble than to be drawn out of it. But when she saw him, the rush of gladness made her catch her breath. And none of the commonsense warnings she gave herself could counter that gladness and drag her back to earth.
Until that moment, she had told herself she was just looking for a birthday present for her friend Azra. That stopping into this stationery store in Westmount had nothing to do with the incident on the mountain. Then she saw him. He stood at the back of the store behind a counter, flipping through a book of wedding invitations with a couple. When she walked in, he glanced at her, but neither of them smiled or even nodded. Turning away, her heart thrumming, Grace browsed through some clothbound journals. In the background she could hear his voice patiently listing paper brands and prices.
Another clerk, a woman with bleached-blond hair, said, “Est-ce que je peux vous aider?” and Grace shook her head. She must have uncapped a hundred pens and flipped through every birthday card before she finally picked one out and bought a journal as her gift. He was still waiting on the bridal couple, the woman unable to make up her mind.
“I think I should ask my mom what she thinks,” she was saying.
“She’ll like whatever you like,” her fiancé said.
“But she usually helps me figure out what I like,” she said.
The blond woman, who was ringing up Grace’s purchase, met her eyes and smirked. “I give them a year,” she muttered.
Grace nodded mechanically, taking the bag. As she was turning to go, the couple thanked Tug for his time and left.
“I’m not totally dependent or anything,” the woman said. “I just trust her judgment. It’s good to get a second opinion.”