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Picasso’s not for the common people, he says. The vehemence is thrilling. I like that he doesn’t know who his parents are. I make my decision.

What’s he saying about Picasso, I ask Isobel.

Bernard is a bullshit artist, she whispers.

Bernard stays the night because of the rainstorm. He’s afraid of lightning. He tells me that if I am on a mountain road it’s possible the lightning will pour down the hill like water and pool at my feet. If this happens I should crouch on the nearest boulder. Be careful not to dip my toe, no matter how beautiful it looks. The electricity goes out and we all gather at the window to watch the lightning over the mountains. The thunder rolls and cracks. We can hear the cows lowing, we can hear
their bells. Someone is whacking them with a switch. I think: Part of the world lives with stinky, delicious cheese and weasels with glass eyes. Part of the world hates Picasso. Part of the world dances around a bonfire.

We are eating ice cream from the carton. Alex is asleep with a white sheet wrapped tight around her in the next room. The lightning zaps the snaggled interlocking branches of the olive grove. Lightning flushes through the grove like blue blood pulsing in organic tissue.

It’s getting closer, I say to Bernard, whose breath I can feel on the back of my neck. I regret saying it because in the next minute I understand from the particular heat or smell coming from him, or the quality of his breathing, his stillness, that Bernard is terrified. We are all huddled in the window. He’s a chef during the winter season. I didn’t decide. At no point did I make a decision.

Lyle and his sister Isobel and her boyfriend Lucien run into the garden to gather the laundry. It’s already so heavy with rain the sheets are dragging in the mud. We watch them dash back and forth in the battering lightning. It is monstrous and ancient, insubstantial, lethal, full of bliss. Something that might pick them up in its long pointy fingernails and fling them across the field. Bernard is rubbing circles on the cheeks of my ass with the flat of his hands while I lean against the windowsill watching them below. The lightning is stomping toward us on rickety legs; one gnarled, X-rayed bone pierces the mud, then the other. It keeps coming. Lyle and Isobel and Lucien are running under the wet sheets, they are like trapped moths beating
their wings inside an overturned glass. Bernard presses a knee between my legs and spreads them apart. He crunches up my cotton skirt in his hands. He slides my underwear down to my knees. I am leaning on the window, the stone sill digging into my elbows. When he comes I think, unbidden, of something that I’ve heard about tuna. That if they die while panicking you can taste the fear in their flesh.

This thing with Bernard only took a minute. I swear that when the lights came back on and everybody burst back in soaked and loaded down with wet, muddy sheets Bernard and I did not exchange one complicit glance. It wasn’t sweet, nor was it scurrilous. Pete looks like Lyle. Or his expressions, his smile, look like Lyle’s.

It’s past four in the morning and Lyle hasn’t come back from the Ivanys’. I want him to come home. My arms ache from walking Pete. I sit in the cold living room, Pete wrapped in a quilt, and watch David Letterman. He shows a video clip of himself chasing a man in a chicken suit. He grabs a fire extinguisher and sprays the man, who lifts his knees high and grabs at his tail feathers as if this is hurting. A taxi pulls up outside and I turn off the TV and stand in the dark behind the lace curtain to watch for Lyle. But a giant blob of silver helium balloons bobs out of the cab, and a woman’s boot tests the slush. It’s my nextdoor neighbour. Her boyfriend comes around to her door and holds her by the elbow. He stands beside her while she struggles with her keys. He is looking into the sky, his breath frosty. He turns her from the door and takes the collar of her jacket in his
hands and draws her to him and kisses her for a long time. Then she tries the keys again and the door opens and they go inside and pull the balloons in behind them.

Pete starts to cry. His body straightens, goes stiff, he almost squirms out of my arms. His cheeks are flushed. He tangles some of my hair in his fist and pulls it out. I lift it away from his hand. I get out his snowsuit and lay it on the carpet and push his arms and legs into it. I go out to the car and put Pete in the car seat and start it and wait for it to warm up. I want to drive past the Ivanys’. See Lyle’s silhouette against the living-room curtains.

But I decide instead to go to the Fountain Spray. I try to think if we are out of anything, and we are. We’re out of milk. But I am stopping because it’s open. Because of the fluorescent orange signs that say Sale. The longer I stay away from home the more likely Lyle will be there when I get back. I’ll know as soon as I look at the front of the house if he’s inside, though it may not be altered in any physical way. Or it will be altered in a way I don’t register consciously. Footprints in the snow. I stop for the name, too, the Fountain Spray. I will say later, So at four in the morning there I was at the Fountain Spray buying milk. Some comic telling of the life without sleep. Though it hasn’t had that name for years. Needs, it’s called now. Needs. There’s a young man leaning over the counter with the paper. His arms crossed, he’s rocking as he reads. The radio slightly off the station. Celine Dion, the song from
Titanic
. There’s a stand with a giant pyramid of lemons. Even in the garish light of the all-night convenience store the lemons are blaring with colour.
I think of the woman with the yellow roses in the graveyard and wonder if I dreamed her. It’s been so long since I’ve slept. The waking world creeps into the dreaming one. The young man, a boy really, looks up and closes the paper. The man who crashes the door against its frame shattering the glass and who then draws a hunting knife out of his filthy khaki jacket isn’t as incongruous as the lemons. I’ve seen him in the streets lots of times muttering vengefully. I have crossed the street to avoid him. I’ve seen him waiting in the early morning hours for Theatre Pharmacy to open so he can get a prescription. In a few seconds he has wrenched most of the boy’s body out over the counter, cut a slice through the boy’s pale blue shirt. The shirt sleeve is muddied fast and sticks to the boy’s arm, it darkens quickly, down to the cuff. The rack with bars and gum stands in my way. Pete starts to cry. The man turns to look at us. I can see his fist on the boy’s shirt, twisting it. Perhaps the boy can’t breathe. A big jar of pickled eggs falls off the counter and the fat, limbless eggs trundle across the floor as if they have places to see. A stand of chips falls over with hardly a sound. A truism: There are always innocent bystanders. I understand myself to be a bystander.

Pete and I, like extras in a movie. It’s the over-brightness, the late hour, I check myself over the way a continuity girl would size up an extra, to see if my presence is necessary, believable. My suede coat with a fur collar, the belt hanging loose from the belt loops, the Velcro flap on my boot sticking out. They are tired boots with wavy lines of salt. My feet are wet. The Velcro gives when I walk and I have to bend over,
with Pete in my arms, in the mall or near the parking meter outside the supermarket, to secure the flap, and it gives again. The boots are baffed out. An expression my mother-in-law uses. The essence of Lyle’s mother flits through my head. She is part of the gushing collide of loves and hates and non-moments of my life that is just now thrown into sharp relief. Pete’s forest green snowsuit. My fawn gloves, misshapen, a hole in the thumb. I am flabbergasted to find that the evening is bottomless. The continuity girl tallies the accumulating texture, the nuance of each detail I bring to the scene. I appear to be exactly what I am. A woman with a toddler in a convenience store during a hold-up. I am an obdurate subplot, stubbornly present. How did I get here?

But every bystander at four in the morning is brought to a convenience store by some aberration in their regular schedule. A disruption no more or less dramatic than the one that has brought me here. I am here because I believe in retribution, have been half waiting for it, half longing for the relief it might bring, ever since the night with Bernard. This is a comeuppance, an answering for, a just reward. That is my motivation as an extra in this scene, if extras need motivation. The man with the knife turns to me. If he was brought here by supernatural voices, they are telling him now,
Not the boy, dummy, the woman
. I’m not an innocent bystander. Sirens so far away they could be out in the Atlantic. Policemen. Someone shouts, Don’t move. But I am at the door, and then a punch in the guts by a force so powerful it knocks the breath out of my lungs. I am drilled open by a pillar of granite. I am knocked off my feet and
I’m driven across the tiles until my head smacks the beer cooler at the far end of the store. Cans and boxes, everything flies in my face. I’m drowning.

The baby was ripped from my arms though my every thought was to keep him there. My arms are crossed over my chest as though he’s still in them. But he isn’t. I am holding only myself. A firehose. I am in four inches of water. Everywhere there are bobbing lemons. There are more lemons than anything else. Pete is floating face up in his snowsuit. I lurch toward him, grip the front of his suit in my fist. The water gives him up with a smack like a kiss. We are both screeching with our mouths wide and our faces red.

The doctor at Emergency checks Pete’s bones, his heart, blood pressure. He looks in Pete’s ears. Pete is perfectly fine; the snowsuit is waterproof; he’s not even wet. I phone the Ivanys and get the machine. They’ve gone downtown.

I am in the bedroom window looking out at the street. It’s still snowing. I see the streetlights dim, for a moment some vague tube inside glows orange-pink, and then the light goes out. The sun is up now. I hear the front door open and quietly close. Lyle knocks his boots against the wall. I hear him sigh as he bends to untie his laces. I hear him drop his sheepskin coat on the banister and hear it fall to the floor. I can tell he’s mildly drunk. I can tell by the squeak of the banister that he’s leaning on it too heavily. Finally he comes into the room behind me. I turn and I have Pete in my arms.

I say, He’s asleep.

Close Your Eyes

W
e are on a yacht in St. Pierre. Maureen’s boyfriend, Antoine, has invited us to go sailing, but there’s something wrong with the engine, so we remain tied to the dock. The marina is a blast of white sails and the blue is very blue. We lie on the deck and suntan. I have a book by Marguerite Duras open on my stomach. Maureen and I read most of this book one night three years ago. A short novel about a seventy-six-year-old woman of great literary fame who attracts a thirty-six-year-old lover.

We read it in the kitchen on Gower Street during a snowstorm, taking turns reading aloud while the headlights of fishtailing cars swept the ceiling and the velvet funk of pea soup rose from the stove. We were overjoyed for Marguerite Duras. Way to go Marguerite, we yelled.

But now, three years later, the story seems very different than I remember. The young lover is bisexual. Has affairs with
bartenders in a nearby hotel. He seems to be terrorizing the novelist, who is too old and proud and drunk to do anything about it. She spends all her money on him and waits for him to bring food, sometimes going hungry. How had we mistaken this for hope?

I’m also hungry. We spent a lot of money at a local shop, but most of the food has been eaten. There is a florid pink sausage pebbled with lard, and a can of duck. A package of biscuits from Norway that hasn’t been opened. We’re too lazy to go back into town. For a long time nobody talks. Then my husband lifts his head from a faded canvas pillow and looks one way, then the other. He puts his head back down, rolls his shoulders.

He says, I’ve just had a very strong memory of a bus ride in Cuba.

I say, With the careening eagle in the ravine.

He says, Not that bus ride.

I say Maureen’s name. She doesn’t move. Then, very slowly, she sits up. She says, Isn’t sleep strange, it overtakes us all, whole cities — the activities just stop for hours. It’s just struck me.

Think of all the dead people, I say.

Antoine’s hand emerges from a hatch, waving a baguette. Then his head appears very near Maureen’s thigh. He bites her and she squeals. He beats her stomach with the baguette.

We eat the Norwegian biscuits and dip the hardened bread in cardamom tea in enamel cups, without saying much. The fresh air has made us all sleepy. For a while, there’s commotion as a giant yacht ties up next to Antoine’s.

The three sailors are dressed in Helly Hanson fleece, royal blue, red, yellow. A woman of perhaps forty with a long mane of steely ringlets raises the American flag. The flag flutters weakly and then wraps itself around the mast, like a barber’s pole. A white Styrofoam plate lifts itself off their deck and floats in the water. They each pause and look at it. Then they step over the deck of Antoine’s yacht to get to the wharf.

As he steps from Antoine’s deck, one of the Americans loses his shoe. Maureen tries to fish it out with a long pole, but the shoe begins to fill with water. Antoine climbs over the side. He inches his back down the creosote timber of the wharf with his feet jammed against the yacht. It looks like he will either be crushed or fall into the filthy harbour. A speedboat passes and the yacht moves closer and the space for Antoine is very narrow. The American woman in white pants clutches the arm of the elderly man. The man removes a white baseball cap and rubs his forehead with the back of his hand. Maureen smokes and her hand trembles near her mouth.

All this for a shoe, the man says.

But Antoine scrabbles up, spider-like, and holds the shoe in the air like a trophy. He does a little bow and tips the shoe, letting the water spill out. Everyone applauds.

Early in the morning I go to the yacht club to shower. I meet a woman and child from France, a family who tied their catamaran onto the Americans’ yacht during the night. The woman gets out of the shower and isn’t in a hurry to cover up. She has a tattoo of an orange and black butterfly in the concave dip near her hipbone. She scrubs her daughter with a thick
white towel. The room is full of steam and the smell of shampoo. The child has the same blond hair as her mother, shiny and pale like mashed banana. The woman tells me she has been on the catamaran for five years. They have been all over the world. Both the children were born while they travelled.