Alix Ohlin - Inside

A few weeks passed and Tug seemed better. He began talking more about his time in Rwanda, the other aid workers, the rolling landscape, the people. He talked about Marcie, too, how he had failed her every time they were together, yet didn’t want to stop failing — because failure was where he lived now, it was his comfortable new home. Stories would come to him at inconvenient, even bizarre times. Once they were in the supermarket, and he turned to her at the butcher counter and told her about a man he’d seen by the side of the road, his body dotted with open sores, flies perched on him, waiting for him to hurry up and die. Grace stood there listening and nodding until he said, “Anyway,” and he was done. He turned to the butcher and bought their rack of lamb and only when they walked away did she notice the looks other customers were giving them, wary and aghast.

Another time they had dinner with her friends Azra and Mike at a Portuguese restaurant on Duluth. The first half of the meal was fine. They drank two bottles of wine and made small talk about the food, the cold weather, Azra’s job. Grace’s oldest friend, since high school, she had a dental practice in Côte St.-Luc and always joked that the two of them should set up an office together, a suite where they could each have an office and hang out together between appointments.

“I’ll drill the teeth and you drill the minds,” she said, laughing, as the dessert came.

“You’re drunk,” Mike said affectionately.

“What do you think, Tug?” Azra said.

He didn’t answer, and Grace glanced at him. His cheeks were red, his forehead sweaty. She put her hand on his leg, but she could tell it didn’t soothe him, that he didn’t even register it was there.

“I think it’s a pile of crap,” he said.

Azra raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“You glory in the pain you inflict. Grace doesn’t do that. People whose bodies are suffering can’t think clearly about their lives. You’re a fool if you think otherwise.”

“It was really just a funny idea,” Azra told him.

“Tug,” Grace said softly.

He stood up suddenly and left the restaurant.

Her mouth hanging open, Azra looked at her, and Grace shook her head. She wouldn’t follow him; he’d only be angry if she did. “It’s not about you,” she said to Azra.

“What’s it about, then? My God.”

“He’s been through a lot. It’s good, actually, for his emotions to come out like this. It means he’s not suppressing them.”

Azra reached across the table and touched her arm. “Watch yourself,” she said.

When she got back to her apartment, he wasn’t there. But in the morning she woke to find his legs wrapped around hers, their fingers interwoven. She turned and made love to him gently, as if he were injured or ill, and when they were done he was still pressed up against her.

That’s how it went: one day lovely, the next flawed. In this respect, was it so much different from anybody else’s life?

She wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary on the Tuesday morning in April when her session with Roch Messier was interrupted by a knock on the door. She thought it was likely her previous patient, who maybe had left an umbrella or something else behind. But when she saw the two blue-uniformed Sûreté du Québec officers in the hallway, she felt the dread she’d long nursed within herself, the sense that she’d known this would happen.

One officer was male, the other female.

“Madame,” said the woman, “are you Grace Tomlinson?”

She nodded and led them to the reception area. They refused her invitation to sit down and stood uncomfortably, like early party guests, in the middle of the room.

The woman asked, “You are an acquaintance of John Tugwell?”

“Yes,” she said. Her chest felt frozen, as if a block of ice were lodged there.

From the pocket of her heavy uniform coat the woman withdrew a note, unfolded it, and held it out to Grace. She didn’t take it, just read it in the officer’s hand. It had only her name and the words I’m sorry .

“We found him on the mountain,” the officer said.

She knew it was cowardly to faint, but she recognized in herself the need to exit the situation as quickly as possible. She couldn’t afford to be brave, to be composed, to be alive . Not right now. She let herself do it, and fell.

Azra came to her apartment and sat with her through endless, empty hours. Everything had flown out of Grace’s hands: it wasn’t her place to identify the body, to make funeral arrangements, to call his sister or his ex-wife or friends she’d never even heard of. Her roots in his ground were shallow, and now the ground itself was gone.

By eleven that night Azra was asleep on the couch and Grace was alone, awake, in her bed. She wanted desperately to talk to someone, and almost woke Azra up; but she didn’t, because the only person she wanted to talk to was Tug.

The funeral was held in Toronto, where his sister lived, and Azra drove Grace there and back. They sat in the back and didn’t speak to anyone. Grace didn’t feel comfortable introducing herself to his family, since Tug had made no introductions himself. Ordinarily not a pill taker, she downed enough Valium to get her through the day, then the next, and the whole following week.

She discovered that she longed to go back to work, to lose herself in the world of other people. Her patients were her only relief, their sessions the only time she was able to withstand her own thoughts, and she felt overwhelmed with gratitude. She needed them as much as they needed her, maybe even more.

But each evening she was trapped at home, hopelessly angry at him, and she couldn’t stop crying, the tears fat and hot on her cheeks, her shoulders heaving, immobilized by grief. Pinioned in place on the toilet, in the shower. On the floor of the living room.

Her mind veered constantly back to that day on the mountain, remembering that she’d nearly taken a different path entirely, that for an infinitesimally brief moment she’d considered just leaving him there — choices that would have saved her from having to endure this pain.

None of which — the crying, the questions, the choices, her memories, her body’s memories — changed the fact that he was gone.

Every morning her eyes were swollen, deformed, and her throat cracked and salty. One Friday she woke to find the world blanketed in snow — the last storm of the year, surely. In the pale early light she called her answering service and asked them to cancel all her appointments for the day. Then she put her skis in the car and headed west to Gatineau Park. Snow was falling lightly as she sped along the highway. She used to go to Gatineau with Mitch, so long ago it seemed like another life. She had never been there with Tug.

Her goal was to wear herself out in an enormous swath of white, blank calm. She started off fast, making long strides, her quads tight, her breath coming fast, her heart galloping in her chest. Though she was exhausted from lack of sleep her body felt strong, rich with stamina. She always felt like this right before her period, though it was late this month, probably due to stress. A suspicion blinked in her mind like a distant neon sign, then went out, then came back on again. It was possible; it wasn’t impossible. She wasn’t a teenager. She was always careful. Of course, as her mother had always told her, every method has its percentages.

Thinking about this, she messed up a turn and almost crashed into a tree, correcting wildly at the last minute, her right pole flying up beside her. She found herself skiing hard down an incline into a grove of skinny birches, and then she was through them and into a clearing, all by herself in a pocket of space and snow.