“You’re getting divorced because you were unfaithful,” Grace said.
“No,” Tug said. “No.” For the first time she saw his face lose its impassive hold, now twisting in the grip of emotion, with tears welling in his eyes.
She waited for him to go on, but when he didn’t, she decided to change the subject. “What do you do for a living?”
Tug looked at her evenly, his eyes gone suddenly dry. “I work at a stationery store.”
“Stationery as in paper.”
“Wedding invitations, office letterhead, thank-you notes. Whereas you’re a commando therapist, running around offering counsel to people in pain wherever you find them.”
“I don’t know how you feel about your work,” Grace said slowly. “But for me, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to pick and choose your moments. It seems inconsistent to be a therapist all day and then act completely different at night. Do you see what I mean?”
She saw him finally see her, really take her in, not as an irritant or an obstacle but as a person. She saw herself register on his mind. He was staring at her, and without knowing exactly why, she felt herself flush.
“I guess I don’t feel that way about my work with paper,” he said, and smiled.
“Does your ankle hurt?”
“Not so you’d notice,” he said.
It was midnight, the dog sleeping in Tug’s lap. There was no sign of the ex-wife. Grace watched him for a little while, in the dark of the strange living room. By half past twelve they were both asleep, she in the armchair, he on the couch, and when she woke up in the morning he was still alive.
Having quickly showered and changed, Grace was in her office before nine. Her back ached from dozing off and on in the armchair all night. She’d left Tug glowering on the couch, no happier than he’d been the night before, nor any more willing to discuss what had happened on the mountain. She was reluctant to leave him alone, but she couldn’t stay and witness his life indefinitely, much as she’d been tempted. The morning passed quickly, though Tug was always there in the back of her mind, his voice coming back like a song’s refrain. She kept thinking about his blank face as he lay in the snow, the angry redness on his neck, and how his eyes had suddenly, startlingly come to life when he concocted that ridiculous story in the hospital. What kind of person was he?
Again and again she pushed her curiosity away and tried to focus on the individuals in her office, the bustle and din of an ordinary day. Frank Lavallée, the fifty-five-year-old, mid-divorce recovering alcoholic. Mike and Denise Morgenstern, a married couple from Rosemount who couldn’t talk to each other without arguing. Annie Hardwick, who was sixteen years old and cut herself. As they spoke, Grace narrowed her gaze on their faces. Their mouths moved constantly, their lips pressed flat in concentration, wet with spittle or foam when agitated, injury or emotion written there first. Annie’s mouth showed a twinkle of braces that came and went, flashing in the soft light of the office lamp like signals from a faraway ship.
When Annie felt the urge to cut herself, Grace told her, she should visualize herself as a movie star — the girl’s fantasy of a successful life — and convert the energy into a different behavior, something a star might do, like exercise or studying her lines (for which homework could stand in). This was what they were working on. Annie had a journal in which she wrote down her thoughts, and she reluctantly showed it to Grace, her neat handwriting chronicling all her dismal urges, the thirst for pain, the hunger to see her own blood. Cutting, she wrote, was the only thing she could really feel. She craved it, enjoying the building anticipation and then the secret, controlled fulfillment, the private pain she lavished upon herself like a gift. On the journal’s cover was a photo of an all-boy band she’d scissored out of a magazine, and next to that was a shot of the beach house where she spent summers with her family and a strip of pictures taken with a friend in a booth at the mall. All these images were safe and sweet and innocent, while the notes inside were unhappy and violent and tortured. I am rotten, she wrote. I am diseased.
Grace had given her an assignment: to write a letter to herself from the future, a happy future in which she’d gotten everything she wanted, about what she’d been through as a teenager and how she’d survived it. Annie complained — she had enough homework to deal with already! — but Grace knew she liked the satisfaction of being given tasks she could complete, unlike the larger task she set herself every day, which was to be beautiful, smart, unassailable, and perfect.
Grace felt for Annie the particular pity that a person who had a happy childhood feels for one who didn’t. An only child, she herself had grown up in a world dense with her own imagination. For three years she’d had a make-believe friend named Rollo Hartin. Her indulgent parents had set a place for Rollo at the dinner table and plumped an extra pillow for him in her bed. Grace was the kind of child who brought home injured birds and tried to nurse them back to health. When she saw cats wandering around the neighborhood, she took them home for bowls of milk. Hours or days later, their confused, angry owners would stop by to reclaim them.
This was in a leafy suburb of Toronto. Her parents were happily married. Doctors themselves, they had found in each other the ideal mate. Every evening at five o’clock they’d come home, open a bottle of white wine, and talk to each other about their day for half an hour; just the two of them, wrapped up in their own company. They believed that the foundation of a family was a strong marriage — which Grace, as an adult, also believed — and yet somehow the very strength of their marriage, the unity of the front, sometimes gave her the impression that she was an intruder in it. As soon as she went off to the University of Toronto her parents retired, sold the house, and moved to an island off the coast of British Columbia, where her father worked on a novel, her mother made ceramics, and they still observed the white-wine ritual at five o’clock every day.
Grace had spent her life attempting to recreate in her own space the perfection of her parents’ lives. It hadn’t helped that they always made it look so easy. There was an inherent mystery to the simplicity of it, to how well things worked out for them. They must have been the luckiest people alive.
When she was at university, she met Mitch Mitchell. His actual first name, which he considered unusable, was Francis. A graduate student in clinical psychology, he was the teaching assistant in a lab her second year. She had originally intended to study literature, because she liked analyzing the motivations of people in stories, but it turned out that the truer draw was psychology itself. Getting to the roots of human behavior, the mind laid bare in all its frailties and contradictions, fascinated her. She fell in love with the subject and Mitch at the same time, and later on she wasn’t always certain that she had kept the two things separate in her mind. After they married, she followed him to Montreal, where he had a residency, and enrolled in graduate school herself.
The first few years passed quickly. They both kept very busy. On the weekends they went hiking in the Laurentians or out to eat downtown, Grace marveling, as they drove past, at the crowds lined up outside Schwartz’s all day and night. Mitch taught her to love Fairmount bagels, which they ate straight from the bag and still hot from the oven, unable to wait until they got home. Sometimes they visited his mother, who was frail and lived alone in Lachine. Grace took French classes and worked at a clinic, counseling people who were addicts, or getting divorced, or failing at school or their jobs, who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Every day she and Mitch came home and drank wine and talked about everything except their jobs, the dull weight of all those intense and brutal conversations. They talked about politics, the weather, houses they were thinking of buying. They never talked about sex, which they were having less and less of. They never talked about unhappiness, their own or other people’s. In other words, they did everything they had been taught professionally was wrong.