Alix Ohlin - Inside

Grace paused a long while. “He was unhappy,” she finally said. “He couldn’t shake the things he’d seen.”

Tug’s mother nodded, and Grace could see her shifting the blame over to those things and the places where he’d seen them, making compartments for this blame, cabinets in which to store it away. But even as she watched the process unfold, Grace began doubting herself. She didn’t know if Rwanda had anything to do with it. The darkness that had led to his death might have been inside him all along; it could have been what sent him abroad in the first place, along with his restlessness, his sparks of anger, his desire to escape. It seemed as though he had always felt hemmed in.

“Was he planning …,” she said. His parents waited for her to finish, her father’s elbows propped on the white tablecloth. “Was he coming back here?” Back to Marcie, she meant, but wasn’t sure if they understood.

They looked at her, both of them aged, stooped, the skin on their faces wrinkled and loose, as if the events of the past few weeks had weighted them physically, pulled them toward the ground. Tug’s father shrugged. “You know as much as we do.”

It seemed a terrible thought. All three of them knowing so little about him.

Sitting at this table, Grace realized that she had come because she hoped it might help her to decide what to do about the baby. But now she saw that his parents had no answers; they had as many questions as she did.

So many patients wanted her — or somebody, anybody — to make their choices for them, partly to absolve themselves of any blame. She always told them that no one else could live their lives for them, that they had to take ownership, and they were never pleased to hear it. What was worse than having to take responsibility for everything you did or felt or said? For the way your actions radiated out to change not just your own life, but those of the people around you? She understood fully now how hard it was to follow her own advice.

And Marcie. Grace ached for her, and for her sake truly wished she hadn’t come. And to say that she was pregnant — that was impossible, even if she decided to keep the baby. It would cause everyone so much more pain, and introduce endless complications. To keep the secret was terrible, yes, but to share it was even worse. She thought of what Tug had said about life in the “comfortable nations.” This house was a comfortable nation, she thought, or at least it wanted to be, to safeguard its borders and tend to its citizens. She shouldn’t disturb it any further.

“I’m sorry,” she said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I’m sorry I came here. I didn’t mean to intrude.” Her voice trailed off, as if noting its own insincerity. Obviously intruding had been the entire purpose of her visit, but Tug’s parents were too polite to point this out. Silent Canadians.

Her heart throbbed for them, for the loss they had to bear, so much deeper and harder than her own. “I didn’t know Tug very well, or for very long,” she said, her voice gathering strength as she went on. “We were just friends. I’m a therapist, and he talked to me a little about his problems.”

Joy sat with her head bowed, as though receiving a benediction or a blow.

Grace was determined to make it the former. “He talked so much about you,” she said. “And Marcie. All of you. How much you had given him over the years. He felt terrible that everything he’d been through kept him apart from you.”

His mother sniffled.

“He loved you so much,” Grace went on. “He told me that often.”

Neither of them spoke, and she wondered if they would ever speak again. She stood up, but then Joy did too, throwing her arms around her with surprising speed and force. She was short and frail and it felt like being hugged by a sick child.

Grace spoke through tears into her short gray hair. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help him.”

She put her arms around Joy’s shoulders, a tentative, constrained hug. She had told what comforting lies she could, and she didn’t regret it. If anything, sad as she was, she felt closer than she ever had to Tug, who had told so many lies. The notion that he could go on, survive, find some happiness in the world — this was the biggest lie of all, not because it was outlandish or fake, but because it had been so possible and so close to coming true.

When she left a few minutes later, the rain had stopped and the sky was pearled and gray. She was holding a box of cookies that Joy had insisted she take — a memento she never would’ve imagined bringing home. As she got into the car she looked back at the house, where most of the curtains were drawn. But on the second floor a window was open and a lamp was shining, and she could see Marcie pacing back and forth with her hands in her hair.

Grace felt utterly alone. Having isolated herself within the miniature universe she and Tug had created together, so intent on rescuing him, she had almost forgotten how to live in the actual world. Now that he was gone, to emerge from that experience felt like waking from a drugged sleep.

Behind the steering wheel with the engine running and the heater on, she shivered not from the cold but from a sense of possibility, of the enormity that lay ahead. She knew she would have the child of a person she had loved for just a few months. Despite her pain and sorrow, it somehow felt like exactly what she’d always wanted — for her life to change in a way she couldn’t foresee. She said a silent farewell to Tug’s family and drove off into the future, and the unknown.

Montreal, 2006

AS THE FALL went on, Mitch’s work life settled into a routine that was, if not exactly easy, then comfortably regimented. Group-therapy meetings took up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Tuesdays and Thursdays he devoted to paperwork and individual counseling. It was the one-on-one sessions that spooked him most. With just one other person in the room, the narrowness of the equation struck him as dangerous and potentially explosive: eyes either glancing away from his or boring into him with pain or anger. It was simply too intense. To cut down on these, he volunteered to take on every administrative task he could instead, from grants and project management to a review of hospital procedures. At lunchtime, he’d close the door to his office and eat a sandwich he’d brought from home while listening to sports radio. Hockey season was starting and he let the predictions and opinions wash over him, defensive pairings and forward lines, who was being called up or traded, gambling scandals, injuries. Sometimes he even took notes, picking and discarding players for his fantasy team. When people knocked and came in, they often saw him scribbling away and frowning in concentration, and he let them think he was absorbed in work.

One weekend he went to visit Malcolm in Mississauga. His brother and Cindy lived in a messy, rowdy house in the suburbs, where they managed the chaos by constantly adding to it. Three children, two cats, and a dog; video games, toy pianos, televisions. To their menagerie they had recently added a rabbit, who sat in a cage in the living room, cowering inside an empty tissue box, though the children kept trying to tempt it out with carrots and celery and once, in an unattended moment, a hamburger.

“I know you like hamburgers, but Snowball doesn’t,” Cindy explained soothingly to her sobbing daughter after throwing the meat away. “It’s just not his thing.”

Malcolm was laughing. “Snowball was at school,” he told Mitch, “but he’s allergic to the fluorescent lights in the classroom or something. So we’re foster-parenting him, I suppose. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.”