Ignoring her mother, she wrote, “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know-”

She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, “-what fate has in store for me, or for you-”

Floating Bridge

One time she had left him. The immediate reason was fairly trivial. He had joined a couple of the Young Offenders (Yo-yos was what he called them) in gobbling up a gingerbread cake she had just made and intended to serve after a meeting that evening. Unobserved-at least by Neal and the Yo-yos-she had left the house and gone to sit in a three-sided shelter on the main street, where the city bus stopped twice a day. She had never been in there before, and she had a couple of hours to wait. She sat and read everything that had been written on or cut into those wooden walls. Various initials loved each other 4 ever. Laurie G. sucked cock. Dunk Cultis was a fag. So was Mr. Garner (Math).

Eat Shit H.W. Gange rules. Skate or Die. God hates filth. Kevin S. is Dead Meat. Amanda W. is beautiful and sweet and I wish they did not put her in jail because I miss her with all my heart. I want to fuck V.P. Ladies have to sit here and read this disgusting dirty things what you write.

Looking at this barrage of human messages-and puzzling in particular over the heartfelt, very neatly written sentence concerning Amanda W., Jinny wondered if people were alone when they wrote such things. And she went on to imagine herself sitting here or in some similar place, waiting for a bus, alone, as she would surely be if she went ahead with the plan she was set on now. Would she be compelled to make statements on public walls?

She felt herself connected at present with the way people felt when they had to write certain things down-she was connected by her feelings of anger, of petty outrage (perhaps it was petty?), and her excitement at what she was doing to Neal, to pay him back. But the life she was carrying herself into might not give her anybody to be angry at, or anybody who owed her anything, anybody who could possibly be rewarded or punished or truly affected by what she might do. Her feelings might become of no importance to anybody but herself, and yet they would be bulging up inside her, squeezing her heart and breath.

She was not, after all, somebody people flocked to in the world. And yet she was choosy, in her own way.

The bus was still not in sight when she got up and walked home.

Neal was not there. He was returning the boys to the school, and by the time he got back somebody had already arrived, early for the meeting. She told him what she’d done when she was well over it and it could be turned into a joke. In fact, it became a joke she told in company-leaving out or just describing in a general way the things she’d read on the walls-many times.

“Would you ever have thought to come after me?” she said to Neal.

“Of course. Given time.”

The oncologist had a priestly demeanor and in fact wore a black turtle-necked shirt under a white smock-an outfit that suggested he had just come from some ceremonial mixing and dosing. His skin was young and smooth-it looked like butterscotch. On the dome of his head there was just a faint black growth of hair, a delicate sprouting, very like the fuzz Jinny was sporting herself. Though hers was brownish-gray, like mouse fur. At first Jinny had wondered if he could possibly be a patient as well as a doctor.

Then, whether he had adopted this style to make the patients more comfortable. More likely it was a transplant. Or just the way he liked to wear his hair.

You couldn’t ask him. He came from Syria or Jordan or some place where doctors kept their dignity. His courtesies were frigid.

“Now,” he said. “I do not wish to give a wrong impression.”

She went out of the air-conditioned building into the stunning glare of a late afternoon in August in Ontario. Sometimes the sun burned through, sometimes it stayed behind thin clouds-it was just as hot either way. The parked cars, the pavement, the bricks of the other buildings, seemed positively to bombard her, as if they were all separate facts thrown up in ridiculous sequence. She did not take changes of scene very well these days, she wanted everything familiar and stable. It was the same with changes of information.

She saw the van detach itself from its place at the curb and make its way down the street to pick her up. It was a light-blue, shimmery, sickening color. Lighter blue where the rust spots had been painted over. Its stickers said i know i drive a wreck, but you should see my house, and honour thy mother-earth, and (this was more recent) use pesticide, kill weeds, promote cancer.

Neal came around to help her.

“She’s in the van,” he said. There was an eager note in his voice that registered vaguely as a warning or a plea. A buzz around him, a tension, that told Jinny it wasn’t time to give him her news, if news was what you’d call it. When Neal was around other people, even one person other than Jinny, his behavior changed, becoming more animated, enthusiastic, ingratiating. Jinny was not bothered by that anymore-they had been together for twenty-one years. And she herself changed-as a reaction, she used to think-becoming more reserved and slightly ironic. Some masquerades were necessary, or just too habitual to be dropped. Like Neal’s antique appearance-the bandanna headband, the rough gray ponytail, the little gold earring that caught the light like the gold rims ‘round his teeth, and his shaggy outlaw clothes.

While she had been seeing the doctor, he had been picking up the girl who was going to help them with their life now. He knew her from the Correctional Institute for Young Offenders, where he was a teacher and she had worked in the kitchen. The Correctional Institute was just outside the town where they lived, about twenty miles away from here. The girl had quit her kitchen job a few months ago and taken a job looking after a farm household where the mother was sick. Somewhere not far from this larger town. Luckily she was now free.

“What happened to the woman?” Jinny had said. “Did she die?”

Neal said, “She went into the hospital.”

“Same deal.”

They had had to make a lot of practical arrangements in a fairly short time. Clear the front room of their house of all the files, the newspapers and magazines containing relevant articles that had not yet been put on disk-these had filled the shelves lining the room up to the ceiling. The two computers as well, the old typewriters, the printer. All this had to find a place-temporarily, though nobody said so-in somebody else’s house. The front room would become the sickroom.

Jinny had said to Neal that he could keep one computer, at least, in the bedroom. But he had refused. He did not say, but she understood, that he believed there would not be time for it.

Neal had spent nearly all his spare time, in the years she had been with him, organizing and carrying out campaigns. Not just political campaigns (those too) but efforts to preserve historic buildings and bridges and cemeteries, to keep trees from being cut down both along the town streets and in isolated patches of old forest, to save rivers from poisonous runoff and choice land from developers and the local population from casinos. Letters and petitions were always being written, government departments lobbied, posters distributed, protests organized. The front room was the scene of rages of indignation (which gave people a lot of satisfaction, Jinny thought) and confused propositions and arguments, and Neal’s nervy buoyancy. And now that it was suddenly emptied, it made her think of when she first walked into the house, straight from her parents’ split-level with the swag curtains, and thought of all those shelves filled with books, wooden shutters on the windows, and those beautiful Middle Eastern rugs she always forgot the name of, on the varnished floor. The Canaletto print she had bought for her room at college on the one bare wall. Lord Mayor’s Day on the Thames. She had actually put that up, though she never noticed it anymore.