Grace was puttering around the kitchen, putting dishes away, wiping down the counters. She had accepted his help so silently, so willingly, then hid it from Azra. She’d taken what was expedient and left the rest. The only thing he’d wanted out of the situation was not to feel ashamed of what he was doing, but now he did, and that was Grace’s fault. He stood there silently fuming.
Sensing his mood, Grace turned around and leaned back against the counter, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Azra told me she ran into you the other day,” she said.
“Yes, outside. I didn’t realize my coming around was a secret, Grace.”
She was courteous enough to blush. “It’s not.” She crossed her arms. “She just didn’t understand.”
“She was the one who asked me to help in the first place.”
“To bring in the mail, water the plants. She thought it was weird that you’d be so involved.”
“It’s not that weird, Grace. I mean, yes, a little. But not impossibly weird, or I wouldn’t have done it.”
“I know,” she said. “Of course. But Azra worries about me, when it comes to men. She thinks I live too much in the past already.”
“This is about Sarah’s dad, I guess?”
That same faraway expression stole over her face.
“Don’t say it’s a long story,” he said.
She laughed. “It’s not that long. I really threw myself overboard when I met him. I wanted that feeling, whether or not it was real. The feeling of totally giving yourself over to something. Of not looking back.”
“And then what?”
Tears were glimmering in her eyes. “Now I can hardly remember his face,” she said. “I grieve for that.”
He reached out for her hand, his right clasping her left, like some secret reverse handshake. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She nodded and withdrew it, the heat of her palm lingering for a second in his. “Maybe you shouldn’t come around so much.”
“Okay,” he said, and then: “That’s it?”
She didn’t answer, and they stood there in the kitchen. It had been a strange collision, this time they’d had together. He wondered when or if they’d see each other again. Somehow the word good-bye seemed too final, so he didn’t say it, and neither did she.
In the nights to come Mitch lost the ability to sleep. He watched old movies in the middle of the night, spent hours with the Weather Channel. He went to work and got through the group-therapy sessions on autopilot; he listened intensely to the participants’ stories but forgot them immediately; when writing up his notes he couldn’t remember much of what they’d said, and his scrawled observations seemed like the thoughts of a stranger. He called no one. He ran five miles a day, his skin flooded with warmth against the increasingly cold air. In November, a freezing rainstorm encased the leafless trees in ice, the salt on sidewalks crunching beneath his feet. The Habs lost to the Maple Leafs. His fantasy picks were a shambles.
He didn’t take up drinking; he didn’t miss a day of work. He wasn’t even sure that other people could see the numbness inside him, the mechanical nature of his commitment to his own life.
There came a time when, without quite noticing at first, he was sleeping through the night. The running helped, and so did work. He wouldn’t have said that his spirits, for lack of anything else to do, were rising; he wouldn’t have wanted to admit that. He would have said that he came from a family where each person had a talent. Their mother’s was to take care of them. Malcolm’s was to be happy. His was to let things go.
When the card came in the mail, a thick white envelope with a Christmas-tree stamp, he recognized Grace’s handwriting with a mix of pleasure, guilt, and regret. She had always loved holidays, every one of them — she gave gifts at Valentine’s Day, Easter, even Memorial Day — and none more than Christmas. She started shopping in September, stashing the presents under her bed. Mitch smiled, thinking of it now. We’re doing great, the card said. Thanks again for your help this year. Love to your family, Grace and Sarah. The card was a picture of the two of them in red sweaters, a blond head and a dark one smiling at the camera. Grace’s eyes were lined and tired, but she looked less frazzled; with her arms around her daughter, she seemed purposeful and amused.
Love to your family, he read again.
He called her, and when she picked up the phone she sounded breathless.
“Oh, Mitch,” she said. “This time of year is always so crazy, isn’t it?”
It was the day before Christmas Eve. He had the following week off, and would spend Christmas itself with Malcolm and his family, returning the next day. It wasn’t, for him, an especially hectic season, but he knew that for others it was.
“Thanks for the card,” he said. “How’s everything?”
“We’re getting by. Leaving tomorrow for Christmas in Vancouver. I don’t know what possessed me to travel. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Vancouver will be nice,” he said. “Warm.”
“I’m sure it’ll be great once we get there. Now I have ten thousand things to get before we go, and no sitter for Sarah. The usual insanity.”
Mitch paused, but only for a second. “Can I help?” he said.
He thought this might provoke an awkward moment, but Grace seized upon the offer.
“That would be amazing,” she said. “Can you come by in an hour and pick us up? My car’s having issues, by the way. It’s that kind of holiday season.”
“You got it,” Mitch said.
He put on his coat, grabbed his wallet and keys, and turned off the lights, finding himself humming. He could have stopped to tidy things up in his apartment before leaving, but he didn’t have to. Everything was already in order. He didn’t have a single thing to arrange.
He drove them downtown, heading along Sainte-Catherine so Sarah could see the Christmas displays at Ogilvy’s, and parked in a lot on de Maisonneuve. As they walked, the winter air bit their cheeks and noses. He followed Grace and Sarah into the stone church facade at Promenades Cathédrale, descending down the long escalators into the underground city. The neon-lit stores stretched endlessly, each a riot of shoppers, the air hot and close. From every store blasted a new carol. Christmas is coming, the Payolas sang wearily, it’s been a long year. Roving packs of teenagers were jostling around the kiosks. One of them, a boy, almost knocked Sarah over and when Mitch yelled at him he spun instantly away, muttering something. “It’s okay,” Grace said, “let it go.”
Sarah waded through the crowds with her coat unzipped, pointing at the decorations, the gaudy trees, the robot snowman waving his arms and nodding his head, the children lined up to see Santa. After a while she started to get cranky, so Mitch took her to the food court for some ice cream while Grace ran around picking up various purchases.
“What do you think?” she asked Mitch when she came back with a sweater for her uncle. He suspected the man would prefer not to receive a sweater at all, but didn’t say so. He felt a headache coming on and related more to Sarah’s exhaustion — the girl was listing sideways, trawling her plastic spoon through a pool of chocolate sauce — than to Grace’s stress over choosing the right present.
“Listen,” she said, folding the sweater back into its bag. She sat down across from him and put her arms around Sarah, who leaned against her. “I’m sorry about how we left things.”
“It’s okay, Grace. You were right. It was weird.”
She smiled at him. Her coat was open and beneath it she was wearing jeans and an old McGill sweatshirt. She still moved slowly, stepping gingerly as though she were wearing high heels instead of solid, fur-lined, rubber-soled boots. Despite this lingering air of fragility, though, she looked good. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and her long hair fell to her shoulders in smooth waves.