With the formalities of the funeral behind her, Kate felt herself begin to relax.  

A giddy shriek of female laughter drew her attention to a crowd of older women surrounding artist David Sutherland, Meredith Island's most famous native son, and according to Alex, the A-list of contemporary British artists.  Kate reckoned he must have been going on seventy but looked younger with a full head of faded blonde hair.  Unlike so many older people whose faces fatten to blur their original features, his face had managed to retain its high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a jawline softly rounded yet remarkably unbroken by jowls or creases around his mouth.  As a young man, he must have been stunningly attractive.

My father was my first competition. He got the words down fast. Stories would spin from dad’s brain, dusting our dinner table with whimsy and adventure. The children of writers talk about the sanctity of the study, the private magical terrain of the parent’s imagination. I guess I experienced some of that, but it also felt ordinary. Writing was Dad’s occupation and he went to work like I supposed other parents did, except he was around. He found the job lonely, so when he carried his brown leather briefcase into the car and drove the hour to Toronto for rehearsals or meetings, those were good days. 

Nora sat in the train compartment by herself, an open book on her lap, watching the fields drift past. The engine was chugging away somewhere behind her, pulling her along. She was falling backward through the landscape, into a forgotten space that lay beyond it. As she fell, she thought about the argument she had heard the day before, through the closed door of her grandparents’ bedroom.  

“Why should we send her to live with that horrible woman?” her grandmother had demanded.  “She’s perfectly happy here.”

“Hush,” replied her grandfather. “She’s only twelve. That woman is her mother, and she loves her. And there’s the brother.”

Nora had wondered if her grandfather meant she loved her mother or that her mother loved her.

“Brother! Half of a brother. Partial.”

Rose didn’t know that eleven weeks after Quentin left Big Rock Lake to return to New York, I’d spent the night in this hospital. The abortion clinic. 

I wanted children. But one day, not now. Having children was not something Quentin and I had discussed, but I could imagine his reaction if I told him I was pregnant, and it would not be positive. I wasn’t willing to risk losing him, so by myself I made the choice between him and our baby.

A meeting with a counsellor to discuss my options was a prerequisite for the surgery. I talked about being young, and unmarried, and having plans for graduate school. That was easier than admitting my real fear that my boyfriend of not quite four months would leave me. 

Chapter 2 

The night pressed in so that the lamps had been turned on in the apartment upstairs. The store was closed and there was a dance being held that evening in the community hall, so the girls were getting themselves in order—brushing and curling hair, adding ribbons, and choosing the right evening dresses and shoes. Lizzie thought that it was one of the loveliest things about growing up in a family of mostly girls, that you could look around this large room and imagine they were all part of a Life magazine photo, like starlets from Hollywood. 

There was a sharp knock at the door and in came Mama. She was dressed in one of her prettiest evening frocks.

In the beginning was an angel, a church and a knife.

I hunted down the angel, Remiel, in Barcelona. He was working as a living statue, one of those street performers whose job it is to separate tourists from their money before someone else does. His office was a wooden pedestal on La Rambla, the pedestrian boulevard by the harbour that every visitor has to hit before they start exploring the real city. He was tucked away among the kiosks that sold everything from postcards and magazines to live birds. A silver robot stood on a box to the left of him, while a clockwork man dressed in gears, wheels and pistons was on his right. Remiel was made up like a demon with golden skin, bat wings and two tails, holding a leather tome bound with three locks. He looked like just another out-of-work circus performer vying for tips. Apparently even angels have to make a living these days.

The pendulum of literary fashion usually swung violently once it began.

The disillusioned young moderns of the new century turned their backs on their elders under the impression that they had made a completely new discovery about the world they lived in. For that great Renaissance characteristic – love of action – they substituted the conviction that the world was a pit of iniquity and the only thing worth doing was to sit down and point out its sins. For that other great Renaissance characteristic – love of beauty – they substituted a kind of horrified fear of sex coupled with a fascinated interest in its abnormalities. And for vigour they substituted cleverness: “I’m not insulting you; I’m describing you.”

Drunks, children, and Tommy Middleton always told the truth.

Having your heart broken is like finding out you have bedbugs—not in an emotional sense, but practically. Both broken hearts and bedbugs require extreme treatment. You can’t just wash your sheets and think that’s enough. Not only is it not enough, you’ve likely made the problem worse by carting your dirty laundry all over the place.

You can get your house fumigated (this could be a metaphor for therapy), but even that won’t be enough, because the memories will be as bad as the bugs themselves. They’ll continue to plague you whether they’re there or not, crawling all over your legs and feet as you lie awake at night, unable to sleep. When you put on that T-shirt, you’ll feel them running up your neck into your hair. They’ll make their home in all the quiet, innocuous places in your life, burrowing into memories and holidays and songs and smells, and every time you think you’ve gotten rid of the last one, you’ll discover that you were an idiot to think there would ever be a last one.

That’s not how bedbugs work, and it’s not how broken hearts work.

it started with a little black box, past a door and down a hall, one with a light switch that didn’t seem to work. old corridor with a draft, a sound, voice; there might have been someone talking to you. 

kid was shaping coloured plasticine between his finger and thumb, shaping it into a figure, a man, cowboy maybe — here’s a head, funny little legs, an arm, arms. the revolver. surrounded on the dining room table by clay sculptures, buildings and streets, a spacecraft, a whale. a world was unfolding in the structures spread out there, pushed and pressed into shapes and bodies and things, and someone might have been talking to him but kid didn’t mind it at all.