Lorna also took the opportunity of getting out one of Elizabeth’s storybooks and when they were settled again she read to the children. It was a Dr. Seuss book. Elizabeth knew all the rhymes and even Daniel had some idea of where to chime in with his made-up words.

Polly was no longer that person who had rubbed Lorna’s small hands between her own, the person who knew all the things Lorna did not know and who could be trusted to take care of her in the world. Everything had been turned around, and it seemed that in the years since Lorna got married Polly had stayed still. Lorna had passed her by. And now Lorna had the children in the back seat to take care of and to love, and it was unseemly for a person of Polly’s age to come clawing for her share.

It was no use for Lorna to think this. No sooner had she put the argument in place than she felt the body knock against the door as they tried to push it open. The dead weight, the gray body. The body of Polly, who had been given nothing at all. No part in the family she had found, and no hope of the change she must have dreamed was coming in her life.

“Now read Madeleine,” said Elizabeth.

“I don’t think I brought Madeleine,” said Lorna. “No. I didn’t bring it. Never mind, you know it off by heart.”

She and Elizabeth started off together.

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,

Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

In two straight lines they broke their bread

Brushed their teeth and went to bed-”

This is stupidity, this is melodrama, this is guilt. This will not have happened.

But such things do happen. Some people founder, they are not helped in time. They are not helped at all. Some people are pitched into darkness.

“In the middle of the night,

Miss Clave I turned on the light.

She said, ‘Something is not right-’ “

“Mommy,” said Elizabeth. “Why did you stop?” Lorna said, “I had to, for a minute. My mouth got dry.”

At Hope they had hamburgers and milkshakes. Then down the Fraser Valley, the children asleep in the back seat. Still some time left. Till they got to Chilliwack, till they got to Abbotsford, till they saw the hills of New Westminister ahead and the other hills crowned with houses, the beginnings of the city. Bridges still that they had to go over, turns they had to take, streets they had to drive along, corners they had to pass. All this in the time before. The next time she saw any of it would be in the time after.

When they entered Stanley Park it occurred to her to pray. This was shameless-the opportune praying of a nonbeliever. The gibberish of let-it-not-happen, let-it-not-happen. Let it not have happened.

The day was still cloudless. From the Lion’s Gate Bridge they looked out at the Strait of Georgia.

“Can you see Vancouver Island today?” said Brendan. “You look, I can’t.”

Lorna craned her neck to look past him.

“Far away,” she said. “Quite faint but it’s there.”

And with the sight of those blue, progressively dimmer, finally almost dissolving mounds that seemed to float upon the sea, she thought of one thing there was left to do. Make a bargain. Believe that it was still possible, up to the last minute it was possible to make a bargain.

It had to be serious, a most final and wrenching promise or offer. Take this. I promise this. If it can be made not true, if it can not have happened.

Not the children. She snatched that thought away as if she was grabbing them out of a fire. Not Brendan, for an opposite reason. She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain extent, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time. So it would be reprehensible-also useless-to offer him in any bargain.

Herself? Her looks? Her health?

It occurred to her that she might be on the wrong track. In a case like this, it might not be up to you to choose. Not up to you to set the terms. You would know them when you met them. You must promise to honor them, without knowing what they are going to be. Promise.

But nothing to do with the children.

Up Capilano Road, into their own part of the city and their own corner of the world, where their lives took on true weight and their actions took on consequences. There were the uncompromising wooden walls of their house, showing through the trees.

“The front door would be easier,” Lorna said. “Then we wouldn’t have any steps.”

Brendan said, “What’s the problem with a couple of steps?”

“I never got to see the bridge,” Elizabeth cried, suddenly wide awake and disappointed. “Why did you never wake me up to see the bridge?”

Nobody answered her.

“Daniel’s arm is all sunburnt,” she said, in a tone of incomplete satisfaction.

Lorna heard voices which she thought were coming from the yard of the house next door. She followed Brendan around the corner of the house. Daniel lay against her shoulder still heavy with sleep. She carried the diaper bag and the storybook bag and Brendan carried the suitcase.

She saw that the people whose voices she had heard were in her own back yard. Polly and Lionel. They had dragged two lawn chairs around so that they could sit in the shade. They had their backs to the view.

Lionel. She had forgotten all about him.

He jumped up and ran to open the back door.

“The expedition has returned with all members accounted for,” he said, in a voice which Lorna did not believe she had ever heard before. An unforced heartiness in it, an easy and appropriate confidence. The voice of the friend of the family. As he held the door open he looked straight into her face-something he had almost never done-and gave her a smile from which all subtlety, secrecy, ironic complicity, and mysterious devotion had been removed. All complications, all private messages had been removed.

She made her voice an echo of his.

“So-when did you get back?”

“Saturday,” he said. “I’d forgotten you were going away. I came laboring up here to say hello and you weren’t here, but Polly was here and of course she told me and then I remembered.”

“Polly told you what?” said Polly, coming up behind him. This was not really a question, but the half-teasing remark of a woman who knows that almost anything she says will be well received. Polly’s sunburn had turned to tan, or at least to a new flush, on her forehead and her neck.

“Here,” she said to Lorna, relieving her of both of the bags carried over her arm and the empty juice bottle in her hand. “I’ll take everything but the baby.”

Lionel’s floppy hair was now more brownish-black than black-of course she was seeing him for the first time in full sunlight-and his skin too was tanned, enough for his forehead to have lost its pale gleam. He wore the usual dark pants, but his shirt was unfamiliar to her. A yellow short-sleeved shirt of some much-ironed, shiny, cheap material, too big across the shoulders, maybe bought at the church thrift sale.

Lorna carried Daniel up to his room. She laid him in his crib and stood beside him making soft noises and stroking his back.

She thought that Lionel must be punishing her for her mistake in going to his room. The landlady would have told him. Lorna should have expected that, if she had stopped to think. She hadn’t stopped to think, probably, because she had the idea that it would not matter. She might even have thought that she would tell him herself.

I was going past on my way to the playground and I just thought I would go in and sit in the middle of your floor. I can’t explain it. It seemed like that would give me a moment’s peace, to be in your room and sit in the middle of the floor.