Over the first few days, we established a pattern: We took two meals a day civilly together. The rest of the time, Grace watched the flat-screen TV, sitting on the couch or in Karl’s chair. She would spend half the morning on hair removal and making herself up. Then she would stare at the news reports the rest of the day. Even then, she sometimes had the tweezers and a hand
mirror beside her, as if she thought SHV might jump right out of the TV and into whatever lip or chin hairs were left on her. We ignored each other, unless laundry needed to be done, in which case I asked Grace what needed doing and collected it and tottered into the pantry to complete that task. It gave me something to do that allowed me to be in a different room from Grace.
We were eating breakfast one day when I decided to confront our situation. I pointed to the pepper and, in mid-gesture, asked her to forgive me for sleeping with Karl. It was the first and only time I said those words: that I’d slept with Karl.
Grace passed the pepper. I waited. She asked if I was going to fucking use it, or did I just want to make fun of her? She had a haughty way of saying the word
fuck
. We hadn’t showered yet and so she’d not yet gone through her strange ritual of putting on her face even though there was no one except me to see her. She tried to raise an eyebrow, but she had no eyebrow, not even a fake thin line of brown. It made her face, which was usually so defined, look hollow. I told her I didn’t want to make fun of her.
“That was never my purpose. I didn’t even know you then.”
“No, you didn’t. And you fucking don’t now,” she said, and she took the pepper back and shook it over her eggs before stabbing them with her fork.
I watched her shove the lumps of them into her mouth. She had four long horizontal lines in her forehead. It wasn’t until her plate was empty that she said, “Contrary to what you
might think, I don’t actually care that you fucked Karl. I knew he was doing it. I even knew it was you. I could tell you the dates and times.” She stared down at the ceramic plate, which, like everything else in the cabin, bore a washed-out plaid pattern. On her face was a defeated look, one I hadn’t seen before.
“What I resent is
that
—” She picked up her knife and fork and gestured at my belly in a way that made me wary. “He didn’t tell me about
that
.” She rose and turned and put the dishes in the sink.
She left them for me to wash, which I did dutifully, combing off the specks of pepper using a scrub brush. I stared at the blue bathroom door. The pipes groaned as she adjusted the water pressure.
I remember the hum of the water through the wall of the bargain hotel Moira and I stayed in during our escape from New York. I lay on the bed while Moira showered. I kicked my shoes off and I waited for the sound of the shower to stop. The day’s coffee and you pressing on my bladder had left me feeling bloated. The thrum of the water continued and I got up. I remember opening the door to the bathroom. Moira didn’t turn toward the sound.
“Sorry,” I squeaked as I entered.
I could see her vaguely through the curtain, which was thin and pink. The room was warm and steamed, and smelled like bleach. I sat on the toilet. My pee was loud. I said sorry again.
“Don’t worry about it,” Moira said, and I heard her punch in the shower tap to cut the stream. Her hand came out from behind the curtain and wandered over the rack, then pulled a towel into the shower with her. She stepped out, towel-wrapped, and left the room without looking at me.
When I joined her in the main room again, she was lying on the bed in the towel, her eyes closed. Her legs still had droplets of water up and down her shins, but she didn’t seem to care. Moira must have heard me moving around, but she didn’t say anything or react. I dug through my bag for some things, then left her there alone and took my shower, which I didn’t rush. It was like we both needed to get the day off us.
When I came back into the room, she had yanked on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and was still lying on the bed. She had pulled her hair back in a bun. It made her look tired. We lay beside each other on the bed for a while, a foot of ugly comforter between us.
“I want Chinese,” Moira said, sitting up.
She ordered the food and then phoned someone who I guessed must be her boyfriend, twice. She was sitting right next to me and I had no place to go to give them privacy, so although I flipped through muted TV channels, I didn’t pretend not to hear. I watched the solemn faces of the American president and the Canadian prime minister at separate press conferences but the TV remote was so old I couldn’t figure out how to turn on the closed captioning.
Meanwhile Moira had her two phone conversations. It took a half-hour before I realized the calls must have been to
two different men. I asked her about it afterward, but she shrugged her shoulders. She said she wasn’t romantically involved with either of them—they were just friends. “We just spend a lot of time together.”
I wondered what that was like, to have a boy
friend
and endless hours and days of being with someone without some dread hanging over your head. It sounded pretty good. It sounded like something I was supposed to have done by my age. I wondered whether each of Moira’s friends knew about the other, and if either thought he was having a relationship with her.
She seemed to know I wanted to ask, because she said, “Really, it’s not like that. We just go to coffee shops in the afternoon, and shows and stuff.” Then she pointed at the TV and said, “Can you change it? To something dumb. I don’t know about you, but I can’t watch the news right now. I need to come down.”
When the takeout arrived, even though there was a table, we ate the food cross-legged on the bed holding the Styrofoam containers under our chins, as if it were safer there.
Later, in the middle of the night, I woke up crying. Moira was awake too, and I asked her, “Why did he shoot her that way?” In spite of everything I’d seen, I couldn’t stop thinking about that cop, standing over the woman, holding a gun.
Next morning, I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed about waking up bawling in the middle of the night. It helped that Moira got up and immediately did sit-ups. It put a distance
between one day and the next. It had never occurred to me to do such a thing in my life, and I watched her, a little bit in awe. I tramped down to the lobby and brought us back hot beverages. We both fought with our hair for a bit and I put on some foundation to cover my freckles and avoid an issue at the border. Then we shoved our things into Moira’s big pack and my suitcase, and left. We weren’t very far from Buffalo, it turned out—about three and a half hours. Moira must have known that, yet she’d let us stop. Maybe she’d needed to, as I had.
“I think I should go with you all the way to Toronto,” she said when we were on the road. She was sipping at her tea and staring at the plastic lid between her fingers when I glanced over. The day was grey and the passing scenery flew by greyly too.
“I’ll be all right,” I told her.
Moira said that with two of us travelling, we would think smarter, react quicker. We should also take the Lewiston border crossing, she said. It was just a little farther on from Buffalo, but it was smaller—maybe there’d be less hassle.
“If you come with me, you’re still stuck,” I protested.
But she said she had some musician friends in Toronto and she’d always wanted to play there—she would see if she could hook up a gig “to make up for the bomb-out of the last one.” She gave a weak smile. If anything, she said, I was still doing her the favour.
I wondered if she had a third boy
friend
there, but then I felt bad for thinking it. I knew I was just envious she didn’t have my problems.
I phoned Larissa on my cell and told her to make dinner
for one more. “She works with artists. You’ll like Larissa,” I told Moira after I clicked off.
She asked how I knew Larissa, and after I’d told her she said, “So you just, like, met her around, and the next thing you were transferring to her high school?”
Something like that, I told her. I mentioned that I’d had to lie about my address in order to get into the school; I also had to take a bus across the city.
“You must have had a real connection.”
“I guess so,” I said. Glancing in the rear-view, I watched my own forehead scrunch.
“I’m just surprised,” Moira said, rearranging her things in the bag on the floor. “It sounds like you picked up your life and rearranged it for someone you didn’t know that well. Is that something you do a lot? I mean, like with this guy—” She meant Karl.
I cut her off. “It was—it was a good school,” I explained. “Larissa lived in a better area of town than I did. They had a full arts program there.”
“Oh, I see.” Moira nodded. These were reasons she understood.
She put the radio on and cruised the dial until she came to some disco.
“No,” I told her. “This is my mom’s music.”
She laughed. “What?” She’d grown up on jazz and classical, then gone to school for jazz and classical.
She thumbed the buttons. A talk radio announcer stated, “With more than a hundred thousand new infections, not to
mention the Canadian prime minister’s statements about SHV last night, tensions are bound to be up. How can people prepare themselves psychologically for what’s happening?”
I put out my hand for her to leave it, but she had already settled back into her seat.
“That’s a huge rise,” Moira said, her brow furrowed. “A hundred thousand. That’s really
up
.”
“Well, Dane,” a guest expert said to the host, “it’s normal for people to be afraid of what they don’t understand. The threat here is something we can’t detect immediately. I mean, it can take hold of a woman at any time and the only cues we have are behavioural. Reported cues are ‘looking bad,’ ‘looking in rough shape,’ or ‘not being herself,’ but what does that really mean? So immediately, there’s a paranoia that sets in. The threat becomes abstract, and the fear is almost as intense as the disease itself.”
The host, Dane, sputtered that there had been a surge of cases of women with highlights, women who were not natural blondes, and that that was bound to increase public panic.
The expert—I guessed she was a psychologist—responded that, yes, certainly, there had been
some
cases among women who dyed their hair. “But SHV is still largely a preventable virus. If you are a blonde, or even a fair-haired woman, and you feel like you have a cold or the flu, the thing to do is to alert a relative or even a co-worker—someone—that you are feeling rundown, and
don’t go to work
. Don’t go out to pick up your kids from daycare. Don’t go to yoga. Simply make alternative arrangements on the off chance you do have SHV. Everyone
should be washing and sanitizing their hands regularly, and also limiting social activities. Avoid needless errands and outings in order to limit exposure. We can’t prevent the virus once it has taken hold, but we can prevent its spread—”
“Yes,” Dane cut in, “but the second point is that some women who are bleachers aren’t protecting themselves by going to a darker shade. Why is that, Doctor? Because they’re afraid they’ll look bad?”
“Partially, but also because we don’t want to admit we might be susceptible. And so on the one hand there are women with lower incomes who are natural blondes, who simply can’t afford to dye their hair. We’re not talking about one box of dye, we’re talking about ongoing hair maintenance. And on the other hand, for women who
are
bleachers, we’re talking about making a break with a history of behaviour, which is always hard for people to do.”
“In the long run, we can’t afford
not
to.”
“Exactly.”
Dane interrupted to say he was speaking to Dr. Janet Rosselli, and they’d be back shortly with more tips for readying for the next wave of SHV.
“Also up next: How Americans will be affected by our neighbours to the north and the hard stance they’re taking toward SHV.”
Moira changed the dial. The hum of the highway began to weigh on me. The sky streaked hieroglyphs on the glass, which the wipers erased.
“So are you going to tell this guy?” Moira asked again, meaning Karl. “I think he should take some responsibility.”
“Responsibility. What does that really mean?” I asked her.
But now that Moira had me talking, I was forced to admit that Karl wasn’t very responsible. Take that book he was supposed to send back to one of his former students. I remember that was the first time I wondered if he’d been involved with her too, if she was one of the girls Kovacs had meant. He’d got the book down off the shelf the day I signed up for his course, but it had sat there on his desk for weeks. He never mailed it to her like he’d said he would. I found it again on the shelf above his desk later, when he and I were involved. When I asked him about it then, he said he had sent it back, and when I pulled it out and showed him, he said, “Oh no, I bought that second-hand, to replace it.” But I’m pretty sure it was the same copy.
When I confessed this story to Moira, she pursed her lips, the way she often did, and put her lime-green Keds up on the glovebox. I noticed she wore more practical shoes that day, as if she thought she might need to be prepared after the previous day’s ordeals. I hadn’t seen her in sneakers before.
“I think you’re too smart for this guy,” she said. I remember she kept calling him a “guy,” which struck me as comical. “I think you’re trying to punish yourself.”
I laughed. “You’re Oprah now?”
She gave a short grunt. “Maybe for sleeping with him the first time.”
“
I
seduced him,” I told her, but she remained unconvinced. I could see the disbelief in her broad, stern face.
I switched the windshield wipers to a higher speed and
drove a little faster, as if we could leave the conversation between two sets of exits. Far back from the highway the trees were dark with rain and blurring at the edges of my vision. Among those still holding their foliage was a copper one, with a hole where the leaves had fallen from it. A wind came up and shook it, and I watched it pass into my rear-view where the whole thing seemed to float, frail and yellow as antique lace.