“No,” Mitch said. “Not after such a long time, anyway.”
But parts of it were, in fact, a little weird. Sarah, for example, was totally different from Mathieu. If he lived in a universe boundaried by his own mind, a planet of dinosaur facts and physics equations, she craved constant interaction with other people. She always ran to the door to let Mitch in, less out of any particular affection for him than a burning desire to talk to someone. She told him stories, put on costumes and danced for him, held his hand and asked him to play. Her need for attention was infinite. He wondered if she had been like this with Grace before the accident or if her clinginess came from knowing that her only parent was fragile and could disappear. He often came home exhausted, not from doing chores but from playing with Sarah.
As for Grace, she sometimes had bad days when her pelvis was hurting — she was trying hard to cut down on her pain medication — and would snap at him or barely register his presence. Other days, desperate for company after lying alone by herself in the apartment all day, she wanted to talk almost as much as her daughter.
One night the three of them played Sorry! a game Mitch hadn’t seen since he was a child and was amazed still existed. Sarah clasped her hands together in feverish concentration as she bent her head over the pieces. She knew all the rules, about bumping and sliding and the safety zone, and explained them to him carefully, condescendingly, as if he were the nine-year-old. But he kept messing up — doing things with his pawn that he wasn’t supposed to — at first because he didn’t remember how to play and later just to get a rise out of Sarah, who rolled her eyes, stuck out her palms with exaggerated irritation, and exclaimed, “Mitch! How many times do I have to tell you about this!”
“Sorry, Sarah. I’m old and slow.”
She nodded. “I know that. You can’t help it.”
Across the table, Grace’s eyes met his, sparkling with suppressed laughter, and he smiled. He was having a good time. And it was peculiar to find himself once again in the company of a single woman and her child. Not that they were replacements for Martine and Mathieu. The time he spent with them was at once less stressful, with no element of romance, and more uncomfortable, because his role was less defined. Sarah was less extreme in her behavior than Mathieu, and Grace was far less tempestuous than Martine. It felt not like a repetition of the previous triangle but a new version of it, from another angle. A pattern stretching across the recent years of his life.
They let Sarah win, and Grace read her a story, and then the two of them helped her change into her pajamas. Mitch took her into the bathroom and helped her brush her teeth, gently guiding the toothbrush around her small mouth, afraid of hurting her. She bared all her teeth in the mirror, a crazy person’s smile, and said, “All clean.”
She climbed into bed, muttering some story, her room dark except for the blue glow of the nightlight. She was whispering herself to sleep, casting a spell, and didn’t seem to notice when he left.
Back in the living room, Grace was sitting on the couch. As he walked in, she examined him so openly, so curiously, that he felt self-conscious. “My friends think you’re a saint,” she said. “They say no other guy would do what you’re doing.”
He shrugged, blushing a little.
“I said you’re just feeling guilty about something,” she went on. “So what is it?”
This was Grace all over. She didn’t let you get away with anything. He shrugged again. “I let people down,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Would you like a glass of wine? I think there’s a bottle of Bordeaux in the cupboard.”
Mitch was touched by this. When they were married he drank Bordeaux almost exclusively, the most expensive he could afford, afraid of seeming unsophisticated. These days he drank whatever was offered or on hand. In the kitchen, he uncorked the bottle and poured himself a glass, then went back to the living room and sat down in an armchair kitty-corner to Grace. The color was back in her face, and Azra had come by the day before and helped her take a bath and wash her hair. She no longer had a wince of constant pain. She raised her mug of tea in a toast.
“You’re looking a lot better,” he said.
“No I’m not,” she said firmly. “I look like forty miles of rough road. As my grandmother used to say.”
He laughed, and they sat in silence over their drinks. Without a specific task to do, being with her did feel odd; the familiarity, combined with the distance between them, set him on edge. It was like seeing yourself in a funhouse mirror, with your features distorted and your body torqued yet insistently, regrettably, your own. Only now, sitting in her living room, did he realize what a good job he’d done of burying the painful aspects of their divorce, and how violently they still pulsed beneath the layers of the intervening years.
Stymied, he said, “Why aren’t you practicing anymore?”
“Oh, I’m practicing,” she said. It was a long-standing joke between them, so old he was surprised she even remembered it. “I’m just not very good.”
“Elementary school teacher,” Mitch said. “Tell me how that happened.”
Something flitted across her face — pain, of course, but other things too, maybe memory, even humor, in some elusive combination he couldn’t decipher. She was older and less beautiful, his ex-wife, and he wasn’t in love with her anymore; but seeing her pain was like feeling his own, because for so long he had had a part in it.
“It was the usual, I guess. Burnout.”
He didn’t believe her but didn’t think it was his right to press. “I never pegged you for that, somehow. I thought your energy was endless.”
Grace looked at him thoughtfully. “Maybe the problem was that I had too much. That I thought you can accomplish things you really can’t.”
He waited.
“I had some patients,” she said slowly, and then stopped.
“You realized you couldn’t do as much for them as you’d hoped.”
She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, tears brightening her eyes.
“But sometimes we can do too much,” he said. “We almost have too much power, don’t you think?”
She shook her head. “I think people do whatever they want, no matter what we say.”
“Maybe so,” he said.
“Anyway, so I closed my practice and went back to school and became a teacher. It works well with Sarah, too, because we have the summers together. And what about you, Mitch? You still like your job? It seems like you’re doing well, from what I hear at the hospital.”
“Oh, there’s not much to report,” he said.
Grace’s smile was tight. “Lucky you.”
Afterward he walked out into the breezy night and strolled around the neighboring park before getting back in his car. He was a little tipsy from the wine, and the cool air felt good on his face. Plenty of others — dog walkers, hacky sack players, groups of teenagers — were in the park, reluctant to give up on the long nights of summer, with fall looming dark before them.
He walked along Monkland, on a route they might’ve taken together a long time ago. People were sipping drinks on the outside terraces, laughing and chatting. The door to the Old Orchard pub was open, the high, quick notes of a Celtic fiddler embroidering the air. Then he left the bustling avenue and drifted back to the side street where he was parked, the noise dampened by the leafy trees.
The windows of Grace’s apartment were dark. Before leaving, he had asked how she thought Sarah was doing, and from the small nod that greeted the question he understood this was the first thing he should have said.
“She seems good. Her teacher says she’s doing great. I don’t know, though. I worry that she’ll be affected by seeing me like this. I feel like I should talk to her about it, but everybody says I should just let it go.”