“How did you know that I ran away?” Anne said.
Hilary lifted her hand and gestured around the apartment. “It’s empty,” she said. “On purpose empty.”
“I guess,” Anne said.
Hilary looked at her, and suddenly her eyes were sharp, gleaming. “Girls who look like you can have whatever they want,” she said. “You chose this.”
Anne held her gaze. “So did you,” she said.
THREE
Iqaluit, 2006
MARTINE, OF COURSE, didn’t want him to go. When he told her about the contract, she stood in the living room with her arms crossed, looking, with her thick-framed glasses and disapproving frown, more like a librarian than the lawyer she was. When she was hurt or vulnerable, she reacted with stern anger, and Mitch loved her for the transparency of this posture, almost as much as he loved the quiet, resigned way in which later, in bed, crying a little, she would set it aside.
“I don’t understand,” she said then. Her curly hair was a tangle of silver blond on the pillow. Her French accent, as always when she was upset, grew stronger. “It’s so far away.”
“The rotation’s only a few months,” he told her. “And the money’s great.”
“It’s depressing up there. You said so yourself.”
“That’s because the people are depressed.”
“So why do you need to go to a place like that?”
“They don’t have enough health care up there to serve the native population,” he said. “They need help. They need me.”
Martine raised herself up on one elbow, holding the palm of her hand against her ear as if to block out this statement. “C’est assez, là,” she muttered to the pillow, and he didn’t ask what, specifically, she’d had enough of — this trip, or his arguments on behalf of it. In the apartment’s other bedroom, Mathieu thrashed around restlessly, as he always did for hours before falling asleep. Once on the other side, though, he slept as if dead, and in the mornings, while Martine made breakfast, it was Mitch’s job to guide him back to consciousness from his faraway state. He wouldn’t ever have admitted to her how much he hated doing this, how often he crouched by the boy’s bed, looking at his chest to make sure he was still breathing — always certain that this time, this morning, he wasn’t — or how violently he sometimes had to shake Mathieu’s shoulder before he finally, reluctantly, awoke. Rousing the bear, is how Mitch thought of it, as if the child were some gigantic, threatening animal instead of a scrawny, thin-limbed faun. Most mornings, he would scrunch himself into a ball and mutter angrily, “Non, non”—to consciousness, to Mitch, to the world. Then Mitch would try to pick him up and carry him to the kitchen, but Mathieu didn’t like to be touched and would hammer his fists against Mitch’s chest until he left him alone. This war was a daily ritual.
Unspoken between Martine and Mitch now was the accusation that he was leaving to escape the burden of her son; that he might be needed by the people in Nunavut, sure, but that most of all he needed to get away.
He’d met Martine on the day her divorce became final, a moment of sorrow and vulnerability that he wasn’t too scrupulous to take advantage of. Had he met her even a day later, he believed, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. Forty-five, sexy, and brilliantly smart, Martine took care of her job and her son with determined energy, and she dispatched her husband once he proved unequal to the task of having a difficult child and rebelled by having affairs. Only at night did cracks show in her independent daytime self; but even then she rarely reverted back to the crying woman he had first seen smoking a cigarette outside the Palais de Justice, choking and sobbing through the gray storm of her own exhale. Mitch had mostly been single since his own marriage had fallen apart, and what few relationships he’d had arose when he was pursued. But this woman was so clearly in need of help — a kind gesture, a tissue — that he stopped and fished a Kleenex packet out of his coat pocket. The day was cold, and her eyes were red and pinched. Her curly hair was piled on her head in a messy, complicated arrangement, strands escaping here and there. She thanked him in French, and he responded in kind. Delicately, she transferred her cigarette to her left hand and blew her nose goose-honkingly hard with her right. That a woman could look so beautiful in the midst of an operation like this made Mitch’s heart turn over. He had always been a romantic, but divorce and middle age had squeezed it out of him, or so he’d thought until now.
“Are you all right?” he said.
The woman looked at him with an undisguised scorn that had a kind of desire glimmering around the edges of it. What she wanted, he thought, was for a better candidate to come along, but she’d take what she could get.
“I need a drink,” she answered, switching to English.
“Could I buy you one?”
She nodded and led him, pretty aggressively, he thought, to a bar on Saint-Paul — but it was just that Martine, he figured out later, saw no need to pretend not to know what she wanted. He ordered a martini for her and a beer for himself. She kept smoking, lighting one du Maurier off the flaming stub of the last, as they exchanged bare-bones information: names, professions, the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked. Her hair continued to slip free from its moorings, half of it now hanging down.
“Were you married a long time?” he asked.
“It felt like a very long time,” she said. “But the last few years we were living apart anyway. Fait que, this isn’t really a very big change.”
“But it is.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
He bought her another drink, and another. By ten o’clock they were in bed in her apartment off Pie-IX, her eyes closed, his T-shirt still on.
“J’ai besoin,” she murmured against his neck. “J’ai besoin de toi.” She made it clear she needed a very specific part of him. He pressed himself against her in response, and she guided him inside. At eleven o’clock she thanked him, as sweetly and impersonally as you might thank a waiter for good service, and asked him to leave. Afterward he stood shaking his head in the icy street. The road was deserted, dark. Above the cluster of apartment buildings to the east, the tower of the Olympic Stadium seemed to be saluting him. His heart sang. He wondered if any of it had really happened. Wanted fervently to make it happen again.
He left for Iqaluit two weeks after breaking the news. From his window seat, the land was obscured by a thick layer of clouds, and he tried to imagine the rock and ice beneath, hoping to feel loose, set free. He had been happy there once before, during the summer he had separated from Grace, when the Arctic had been a refuge, a clean slate. After failing so miserably at marriage he had been determined to succeed at his job, and he’d thrown himself into it with wild energy, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. The worst thing about the divorce was that he had lost any sense of himself as a decent person. After all, he loved everything about Grace — her values, her personality, her dreams. He just didn’t love her. Confronting this fact was humiliating, disastrous. Mitch had always been the nice guy who wryly accepted that nice guys finish last, and now he discovered that he wasn’t all that nice, and that he was finishing last anyway, with only himself to blame. To make up for all of this he turned to his job and to the Arctic. When he wasn’t working he founded and coached a boys’ basketball league. It was the most exhausting, industrious, and ultimately rewarding time in his life. For a while, after returning to Montreal, he’d kept in touch with a couple of the kids, but gradually — and naturally enough — correspondence on both sides fell off. The invitation to return had come so suddenly, and he’d been so consumed over the last couple of weeks by his arguments with Martine, that he hadn’t had much time to think about the place itself.