“It’s okay,” he finally said. “What about you?”
“Oh, no. Between work and Sarah, I don’t have time to meet anybody.”
“Where’s your practice now, anyway? Are you still on Côte-des-Neiges?”
She shook her head, wincing as if it hurt to do so. “I quit. I’m a teacher now. Grade six, on the West Island.”
“What? Seriously?” He was shocked by this. Plenty of therapists burned out, tired of hearing about intransigent life problems day after day, but Grace’s passion for her work had always seemed inexhaustible, her curiosity about other people such an entrenched part of her personality. She was the one everybody cornered at parties, the recipient of her friends’ troubled late-night phone calls. Strangers poured out their hearts to her in airports and grocery stores, and she never complained or seemed frustrated or bored. Her profession suited her better than anyone he knew, including himself.
“It’s a long story,” she said, clearly not intending to tell it.
Then her eyes shifted behind him, and he turned and saw a little blond girl trooping into the room — scissoring her legs in giant steps, swinging her arms like a tiny soldier — with Azra trailing her. Then she saw Mitch, stopped short, and cocked her head to the side. He guessed she was about nine.
“Come here, you,” Grace said fondly.
Mitch stepped back as the girl approached her mother and gently ran her fingers along her arm, as if afraid she might break.
Grace smiled at her. “That tickles,” she said.
Sarah smiled and kept doing it, her fingers scurrying up and down Grace’s arm like mice.
“Stop, kiddo,” Grace said. “Say hello to my friend Mitch.”
“Hi,” the girl said, without looking at him.
“Hi, Sarah. How are you?” This wasn’t the sort of question you asked children, who didn’t go in for small talk, and the girl ignored it. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence. It was just one more thing that had happened — her mother in this strange place, the doctors, staying with Azra.
“What’s the best thing that happened to you today?” Grace asked her.
“Azra gave me a Snickers,” Sarah said.
Behind her, Azra laughed guiltily. “Sorry, Grace. I know you don’t usually give her chocolate.”
“It’s okay,” Grace said, unconvincingly.
The patient in the other bed seemed to have fallen asleep, and Mitch reached up and turned off the television. In the sudden quiet, Sarah’s high voice rang brightly as she stood at her mother’s bedside and talked about her day. Playtime, a story about elephants, a boy who had pulled her hair, something the teacher said, a bug at recess — he could tell Grace loved hearing all these details, her eyes fixed on Sarah. After a while, the girl ran down like a battery losing its charge. Her attention shifted to the window, and she started over to it, explaining something she’d just learned about Canada geese.
Azra took some crayons and paper out of her bag and suggested that she draw a goose for her mother.
“Okay,” Sarah said, then sat down in a chair, balanced the paper on her knees, and started to draw, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth in a caricature of concentration.
Leaning against the wall, Azra let out a long breath, obviously exhausted. Mitch wondered where Grace’s parents were, or the rest of her support network. She had always had plenty of friends.
Azra excused herself to go to the restroom, nodding at Mitch to indicate that he should keep an eye on Sarah.
He returned to Grace’s side and said softly, “She’s really cute.”
“Thanks.”
“She looks like you.”
“No she doesn’t. She looks like her father.”
“Does she?” Mitch said, but Grace didn’t respond. The subject was clearly off-limits. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he said.
Grace looked at him with a small, quick smile, her eyes flickering. He realized — still able to read her after all these years — that she was in enormous pain, and scared, certainly not in any condition to tell him what he could do to help. He had a sudden, intense urge to hold her in his arms or, equally powerful, to walk out the door and never come back. He glanced down, afraid that his face might betray these thoughts, and when he looked up she was still smiling, as if that tight-lipped expression were holding her entire face together. He touched her hand and made his voice strong and calm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
She barely nodded. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” she said. “Seeing each other again.”
When he was at work, he tried to act as though his confidence hadn’t been shattered. Everything there — his office, his coworkers, the nurses — felt not familiar, as it should have, but strange, his days all out of rhythm. He wondered if his chair had always seemed a little too low for the desk in his office, or if he had called the secretary on the third floor by the right name. He wasn’t sure, in general, of anything. Showing up each morning in his sports jacket and khaki pants, takeout coffee in hand, he felt he was faking it even more than he ever had when, as a student and intern, he actually was. His own voice seemed to stand at a remove. Time passed stickily, each minute clinging to him as though not wanting to let go.
His coworkers had heard about what happened during his rotation in Nunavut, and their response was to avoid him, expressing their sympathy with distant nods and grimacing smiles when passing in the hallways, everyone’s eyes focused on a spot just over his shoulder. Mitch understood this fear of contagion. Failing a patient as he had was every therapist’s worst fear, and it was far better to steer clear of it, even for those whose profession advocated understanding. He only wished that he could steer clear of it himself.
Commencing a new group-therapy session on substance abuse, he tried to pare away self-doubt and cleave to the core of his work. There were ten patients, ranging in age from twenty-one to sixty, united by their reek of cigarette smoke. They sat in a circle, downcast, jittery, each one’s chair at a calibrated distance from the next; no one wanted to touch another person, even by accident, in this room of misery and anger. Thank God for other people’s problems, he thought.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s start.”
He laid down the ground rules in a lecture he’d memorized so long ago that he didn’t even mark the words as they left his mouth. Then came the introductions, and he tried to listen carefully and note every detail, but time and again he felt himself drifting away, untethered to the moment, and had to reel himself back in again.
An hour and a half later he was alone, uncomfortably, with his thoughts. The session had gone reasonably well, and they all had left with their “homework” for the next week, nodding as he’d told them what to do. He knew from experience that there would be a serious drop-off in attendance, and he usually made bets with himself about who would stay and who would go. This time, though, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Thomasie’s face kept passing through his mind.
He threw his pencil across his desk, and sighed.
At five o’clock, he left work and headed to Martine’s apartment. He didn’t want to call in advance. He wasn’t sure that what he had to say could be blurted out over the phone, in the few moments her politeness would afford him, and he wouldn’t be able to say it without being able to read her face as he spoke.
He rehearsed a speech over and over in his mind, knowing he had only a few seconds in which to win her over. He was so preoccupied with the wording of his plea that he didn’t even see her coming down the street until she was almost in front of him — her cheeks chafed red by the autumn wind, a blue scarf bunched beneath her chin. She was carrying grocery bags and he reached out to help her with them, but she shook her head. Her hair was twisted into one of her usual chaotic arrangements, strands escaping everywhere. They stood in the street, afternoon traffic inching by, horns blasting. She was beautiful.