Alix Ohlin - Inside

Within weeks it was close to the end. Malcolm had taken a leave from work and was staying in their mother’s house, and Mitch often spent the night there too, the two of them staying up late drinking whiskey, sitting there silently with nothing much to say but unable to leave the comfort of each other’s company. On one of the last nights, Malcolm asked him about Mira.

“I’m not sure,” Mitch said. “She’s been great about all this, that’s for sure.”

“It would make Mom happy,” Malcolm said. “She always worries about you being alone so much.”

Mitch remembered. Now you’ll never have a family . And he began to think about a time in the future when maybe he could begin to pay Mira back, offer her some of the same comfort she’d given him throughout this ordeal.

The following afternoon, he brought Mira to the hospital. She hadn’t seen his mother in a couple of weeks, and by now Rosemary was breathing heavily, her thin cheeks laboring, her eyes fluttering. But she looked up at Mira and smiled.

“Oh, Gracie,” she said. “I knew you’d be back.”

Mira patted her hand, unfazed. A nurse, she of course didn’t need his explanation about how the drugs were shuttling his mother back and forth through time, how sometimes she thought he was five years old and asked him what he’d like for breakfast. But something changed between them in that moment, and after his mother died they stopped spending every night together, gradually disentangling, and finally Mira met someone else and moved to Ottawa.

Long after his mother’s death, he thought about her remark. It was one of many moments in which he realized, not with shock but nonetheless with horror, how much his private pain, the decision to divorce, had stubbornly refused to remain confined to his own life. It made him feel more guilty than ever.

But gradually he began to change his mind about what she’d said. Rosemary had been capable, doting, self-sacrificing, but also bossy and desirous of control. She had made up her mind to love Grace, and the divorce made her angry because she had to undo that relationship, and not of her own choosing. She didn’t let go of things easily. Or people. He remembered something she’d said about his father when they finally discussed the suicide. “He wouldn’t let me in,” she said, “and I refused to stay out.”

Even in her last days, as her body withered and her confusion grew, she didn’t fabricate events that hadn’t happened or see people who weren’t there. Calling Mira by Grace’s name was the only time she got something like that wrong. Maybe it was intentional, a way of reminding him of what she’d said after the divorce, less a moment of sorrow than a curse. You will never have a family .

He understood, finally, that he would never know how to interpret her remark, because the only person he could have asked to clear it up was gone.

He missed her still, not all the time but with occasional pangs of clarity so intense they made him dizzy. He felt that now. He would have liked to tell her he’d seen Grace again, that he was trying to help her. He would have liked to present this to his mother not as a trophy or a prize but as a scar, something tough but healed, ridged with the passage of time. Because if anyone understood what it meant to lose and go on, it was her.

Or maybe it was as simple as this. He would have liked to hear that voice from his childhood, from his slow-burn mornings, the voice of orange lipstick and Craven A cigarettes, speak again; to hear her say, “Oh, Gracie. I knew you’d be back.”

Montreal, 1996

GRACE WASN’T USED TO having a patient’s parents threaten her, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what Annie Hardwick’s father had said. You shouldn’t be allowed to muck around in people’s lives . She hadn’t been mucking around; she had only listened to the girl and offered her the best advice she could — which, after all, was the service these people were paying her for. She carried on this argument with Mr. Hardwick inside her head, because he wasn’t there to listen. He did leave a brief message on her office voice mail at ten o’clock one evening, sounding like he’d been drinking. “You’ll be hearing from our lawyer,” he’d said.

But she hadn’t heard anything at all, from any lawyer or even from Annie, who had missed three appointments in a row.

Meanwhile, things with Tug were getting serious. The distant, reserved man she’d first met was changing under her gaze. He smiled often, and there was one particular laugh that came out only when the two of them were alone; it made her laugh too, in a burst of happiness all the more intense for being private, a language they had invented and spoke only together.

On her birthday, he took her to a dark, noisy Greek restaurant in the north end, where they sat cramped in a back corner and drank harsh red wine and ate grilled octopus and lamb. His cheeks flushed, Tug told her a long story about a childhood friend of his who’d been a jumper — off tree branches, then train trestles and buildings — and never got injured, no matter the height. “It was impossible,” Tug said, shaking his head, “but he always survived.”

“Crazy,” Grace said, smiling.

His hand was on hers across the table. He had also survived.

Every once in a while she tried to get him to talk about that day on the mountain, and he wasn’t evasive so much as shallow. He’d say, “I was unhappy, Grace,” and leave it at that. She’d ask a few more questions, trying to edge deeper, and he met each of them with a one-sentence answer.

The longer he refused to discuss it, the more she wondered about it, picking at the mysterious scab. Of course she wanted to know just what, exactly, had brought him to such a dark place. He was relatively forthcoming about his divorce. His ex-wife was living in Hudson with her parents. They had been together four years, but were very different people, and though it was sad, it was no huge surprise that things hadn’t worked out. It didn’t sound like a lie, only a flat, simple version of the truth. As for his professional life, he talked about working in Switzerland for UNESCO, which he made sound boring and bureaucratic. He had had enough of it. He wouldn’t work in the stationery store forever, of course; he was just taking a little time off to decide what came next.

He had similarly specific yet terse answers for her questions about his financial situation, his time in treatment, his relationship with his family. Trying to find out more, she felt like she was hammering endlessly on the same reluctant nail.

Tug, however, had few questions for her. She suspected this wasn’t because he didn’t care, but because he knew it would make their conversations lopsided. If he didn’t ask very many, then she would seem like an inquisitor. It worked; she stopped asking.

But the questions didn’t disappear; they just lodged deeper in her consciousness. She knew, in fact, only the broadest outlines of his life: where he’d gone to school, that he’d married and worked abroad. His inner life was hidden behind a curtain, on a secret stage. The gap between what he said and what she didn’t know swelled between them like a bubble that kept expanding; sometimes, when she reached out her arms to hold him, the bubble felt like all she could touch.

On a Thursday afternoon, during what had been Annie Hardwick’s reserved slot, Grace was catching up on some paperwork. She hadn’t yet granted this appointed time to someone else, but the next week she would. This was one of the papers she was looking at — the schedule. Then, to her surprise, there was a knock on the door, and Annie stepped inside.