Alix Ohlin - Inside

“And where are your students now, Millicent?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t say I was a good teacher,” she said.

He laughed, shaking his head. “You are very intriguing.”

“No, I’m not, but thank you anyway. I should go. Thank you for the drink.” She turned away, only to feel his hand on her wrist, more forcefully this time.

“Can I persuade you to stay a little longer? I am sure your students are having a good time, wherever they are.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

She grabbed her bag and walked out with a surge of adrenaline that was buoyant, clarifying. When he caught up with her outside and tugged on her arm, she wasn’t surprised; she just sped up to try to evade him. He kept alongside her, edging her to the left, and within a few steps they were in a cobblestoned alley, her back against the wall, his weight pressed against her shoulder. Though the streets were crowded, the alley was narrow and shaded and the tourists too distracted, she knew, to glance sideways. His hand was under her sweater, his rings cold against her skin. His mouth was on her neck. She let him lean close, tilting back her neck and nudging his legs open with her knee, then slammed it against his crotch, hard.

“Fucking bitch,” he said, staggering backward, with a certain admiration in his rage. They faced each other and there was a moment when she could have run but didn’t want to. She was ready. When she reached out as if to brush that crumb off his face, he slapped her hard across the cheek and her ears rang and blood poured hot and thin from her nose. The taste of warm metal. He came up to her again and she hooked her ankle around his, tripping him onto the cobblestones, then pulled pepper spray out of her pocket and gave him a dose in the eyes. As he moaned and writhed on the ground, she ran away.

Back at the hotel she took a long, hot shower and studied the redness on her right cheek. Toweling off, she threw up her drinks. There were scratches on her neck and back.

When she got to the pub everybody stared, and Elizabeth immediately cornered her in the restroom. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

That evening she was brilliant. She could feel the group’s energy shifting as everyone responded to this new Anne, completely different from the stiff, insecure outsider at the dress rehearsal. During those two weeks in Edinburgh, she never once faltered. The other actors praised her, befriended her, and bought her drinks. Every once in a while someone would ask her to explain what had happened that afternoon — especially once the bruises started showing — but she just shook her head.

What fueled her wasn’t the injury but the ownership of a story that was a mystery to everyone else. The refusal to explain. The secret high that came from thinking none of them knew her at all.

Montreal, 2006

MITCH HAD BEEN back in Montreal for two weeks when he saw his ex-wife for the first time in years. It was September, and fall was coming on strong. The Labor Day weekend passed stormy and breezy, warning everyone to put the follies of summer behind them. Kids walked the streets with their heads down, bent under backpacks, listless in their new school clothes. September had always been Martine’s favorite time of year: she said it felt like promises. Whenever the phone rang, he thought it might be her. Even knowing it wasn’t, he’d pick up on the first ring, alert and vulnerable to the telemarketers on the other end or his brother calling from Mississauga.

He didn’t call her himself, because he didn’t know what to say.

He was crossing the hospital parking lot late one afternoon when a middle-aged woman called his name. He stared at her blankly, a half smile frozen on his face. She put her hand on her chest and said, “Azra.”

“My God,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and gave her a hug. She was Grace’s best friend, or had been back when they were married. She had gained weight and her hair was different — now sleek and straight, with a red tint, not long and black and curly — but her eyes were still wry and kind, reflecting the same surprise at how he had aged as his must have about her. She had always been vibrant and wiry, a churn of energy fired by some personal electricity. She and Grace used to talk in the kitchen for hours, exchanging confidences about their futures, husbands, jobs, sex lives, problems with their parents. It always amazed him how quickly they would plunge into the depths of conversation, as if the surface held no tension at all.

“How are you?” he said now.

“Oh, you know,” she said, and they both laughed. She held on to his elbows briefly — they’d always liked each other — before letting go. “Have you seen her?”

He followed her quick glance at the building behind him. “Is Grace here?” he said. “What happened?”

Azra grimaced, as if weighing whether or not to tell him whatever it was, but surely there was no reason not to. He and Grace had worked hard to forgive each other, and if the process was necessarily incomplete, it had been undertaken in what they both acknowledged was good faith. They’d kept in touch for the first years after the divorce, then gradually moved on with their lives.

“She was in a car accident last week,” Azra said. “I thought maybe you’d heard. She was stopped at a light on Jean-Talon when a car rammed straight into her. She has a broken leg and a broken pelvis and I don’t even know what else.”

“That’s awful,” Mitch said. “Are you heading in now? I’ll go with you.”

She hesitated for a second, then shrugged and nodded, and they walked inside together, catching up on each other’s news. Azra and Mike had two children, and Mitch heard their names and ages with the usual small pang of having let a stage of life pass him by. Outside Grace’s room, he stopped and touched Azra’s arm. “Why don’t you go in first and make sure she doesn’t mind if I say hi?”

He waited in the hallway after Azra disappeared inside. He worked on a different floor and knew few of the doctors here; it occurred to him now how circumscribed his routine really was. Then the door opened, and Azra gestured him in.

“Grace,” he said.

Nobody could look their best when lying in a hospital bed after a car accident, and Grace was no exception. Her face was etched with wrinkles, her skin weathered. Threads of silver shot through her limp brown hair. Her broken leg, on top of the covers, was frozen in its white trunk. Below it, a fuzzy red sock seemed the only brightness in the room. Surrounded by machines and hooked up to an IV drip, she seemed fractured and frail. Mitch couldn’t help thinking about Gloria and Thomasie Reeves, about Mathieu’s shoulder and Martine’s ankle. Feeling like the world had broken everyone he knew, he took one of Grace’s small, dry palms in his. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”

“It was a Honda, actually,” she said. Her facial expression held the dreamy vagueness of sedation. Behind him, Azra cleared her throat. She had taken off her coat and was setting things on a counter by the window: books, a pillow, a stuffed animal. Watching her friend’s movements, Grace seemed to have trouble turning her head.

“Sarah thought you should have the bear,” Azra said, waving it at Grace. “She said he’d keep you company.”

Grace licked her lips, which were chapped and feathery. “How is she?” Her voice cracked, and Mitch poured her a cup of water from a bedside pitcher and handed it to her.