Dear Dad,

I trust this finds you, Mother, Don, Gillian, and Ann as fit as you looked at the seaside last week. From the news this week, I fear it was the last of our family holidays together for some time. Lucky we got it in before Germany signed up with Russia. Now, we can only hope the German people can persuade Hitler not to go to war. Meanwhile, I’m stuck here in West London. No phone, of course, nor any hope of getting one. But the rent’s low and they let me use their well-tuned piano. Also, they never complain about my violin. Best of all Ealing’s on both the Central and District tube lines and within thirty minutes of work available at any concert or dance hall west of Piccadilly.

I’m grateful, Dad, for our long chat on the way back to the boarding house on Sunday. Sorry I got us lost for a while, but it did give us a chance to talk without interruption from my giddy little sisters.

As mentioned, I’ve done much soul-searching, particularly since conscription started last spring. While I realise the Montreal job at McGill University’s music school looks specially tempting for someone my age, I agree with you that a man must do his duty and all that. I can’t abandon my country in face of attack, but rushing into battle seems equally abhorrent.

Please try to see it from my view. I do feel proud of Britain’s pledge to support Poland. I can’t blame my friends in Berlin, mostly musicians, for Hitler invading Czechoslovakia. I simply cannot risk killing a fellow student, a teacher, or their families. Many of them welcomed me into their homes like a son or brother. All the ones I know hate Hitler. As do I, of course.

All this ruminating brought me to decide, yesterday morning, to register as a Conscientious Objector, a “conchie,” as our neighbours in the village will no doubt call me. Please understand my motives and don’t take me for a coward.

So I found my way up the hill to the recruitment centre in St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church basement, where they used to hold cookery sales and children’s pageants. Today, instead of the gleeful ring of reedy voices fighting over the best costumes among racks of musty clothes, I heard a sergeant’s far-from-dulcet tones shouting, “Take off your knickers, boys, and line up for the nice doctor.”

About thirty of us dutifully queued up by nine o’clock, all shivering in our birthday suits and holding bundles of clothes over our modesty, while men in khaki stomped around in army boots and shouted orders. The uniformed men looked a darned sight better fed than most of the skinny recruits, some with ribs even showing through their backs. At least this conscription will mark the end of the Depression.

At any rate everyone treated me well. The sergeant told me, “It’s good you came and signed up on your own before getting called up. Should count in your favour.”

They said they’d assign me to “an essential job” until they decide what I’m “fit for.” Not sure what that means, but I put myself down as willing to go to the front with a medical unit in any capacity needed. I just don’t want to kill anyone, Dad.

Will write in a couple of days. Meanwhile, tell Don he can use my gramophone but keep the needles sharp and never ever touch my long-playing Beethovens.

Your loving son,
David.

Ealing, London, W.5.
October 5, 1939.

Dear Don,

Am still at same address. Glad you’re taking on the mantle of Elder Brother now I’m away, and that Gillian asked you what she should do. She’s only fourteen, for heaven’s sake! Tell her to keep studying. After she takes matric., she can join the Women’s Land Army. She likes gardening and we need more home-grown food in order to be self-sufficient. Meanwhile, she and young Ann should keep up the voice training and knitting. I’d appreciate some warm socks for Christmas. And tell Ann not to worry about growing too tall. It runs in the family. Later, she can be a fashion model, like Mother before I arrived.

Please be advised you should be proud of your big brother, who is now on the front line of—drum-roll, please—a fish-paste factory.

My call-up papers arrived last week. Sorry for not writing immediately but I didn’t want to worry Mum and Dad until I knew where they’d send me. I’ve written to them separately.

The factory’s within cycling distance, in West Acton. It consists of two Nissen huts stuck together, end to end, backing onto a park dug up for allotments. Since our family name is Bean, and, as usual, I’m the tallest and skinniest, they have dubbed me “String.” The family running the factory hails from Ireland, as do most of the workers. I’m the only conchie, but they say they don’t mind because the Irish aren’t at war “at all, at all.” Youngest, at barely fourteen, are Pat and Jacko.

These fine autumn days we take our tea breaks out back by the allotments where I play penny whistles and spoons with the two lads. We’re quite the trio in our matching general-issue hairnets and white cotton lab coats.

Last spring, the boss—he of “Shearing Fish Pastes: Finest in the World—installed the latest in fish-paste-making equipment: extruders, grinders, mixers, and steam ovens. I started out on the extruder, which is Men’s Work, although the more burly girls pitch in when we’re short handed.

Hard to imagine how it works? Well, Mr. Shearing’s secret recipe gets pumped through overhead pipes running the length of the two Nissens to four outlets pointing down to the raised counters where we stand at the ready. The mixture comes out at these four stations looking like something the dog might extrude from his rear end. We hold up our little jars, skim off the excess with spatulas, drop the jar in a segmented metal tray and whip up another jar in time to catch the next dollop. All day, all night, it goes, in three shifts, in a steady rhythm with teams of three to an extruder pipe so there’s always a jar held high.

I’m developing strong muscles lugging the metal trays and crates to the pressure ovens, where the steam seals the jars and cooks the mix. A constant din comes from the bottles rattling on metal punctuated by pops and squeaks from the half-dozen ovens. One day I’ll write a concerto for fish-paste jars, crates, and ovens. Our most exciting moments in this dangerous war work happen when glass jars shatter, for we must beware of glass shards and boiling hot steam when the oven doors clang open. And all this to the merry tunes of “Music While You Work” blaring from the radio.

Mr. Shearing himself, a distinguished man with white hair and moustache, stands erect in his lab coat, guarding the mixers and peering down the assembly line through thick spectacles. Shearing oversees the correct apportioning of ground herring to tomatoes, or shrimp to filler. Two fat and warty women, Florrie and Gertie, with huge raw hands the colour of lobsters and faces to match, strip the fish, or rip heads and tails off shrimp. At tea time, Florrie and Gertie wax quite outspoken about their private, um, relations with their husbands, which they find infrequent and unsatisfactory. My older mates suggest the ladies might inject some romance into their marriages by wearing frilly knickers and washing the smell of fish off their hands before leaving the factory, suggestions they whisper to one another because they wouldn’t want to rile those two knife-wielding worthies.

We’re not supposed to talk while working, but everyone’s adept at speaking out the side of the mouth while watching out for Mr. Shearing’s keen and angry looks. My mates may seem a rough and common lot at first, but many times they’ve covered for my slowness with the spatula and clumsiness with bottles and crates.

By the way, I only got lost twice while cycling to and from work. A new record!

Bests from your older brother,
String.

Acton Hospital,
Gunnersbury Lane,
London, W.3.
November 13, 1940.

Dear Don,

A beautiful hospital volunteer—married, alas!—is penning this for me.

Around three this morning I came off night shift to find shrapnel raining down like red-hot bullets pattering and jumping on the pavement. A full moon and noisy night, with ack-ack guns pounding, tracer bullets popping, and vicious explosions in the distance. About four blocks from the factory I hopped off the bike and into a street shelter. With all the racket, no one was asleep, so they got everyone singing (off-key mostly) until we heard a German bomber drone directly overhead and all went quiet. We waited some seconds for what we dreaded, then ducked—you can’t really help it—as we heard the usual Doppler scream of bombs. We counted two strings of bombs, but only ten explosions, close together. Each impact rocked the shelter. People muttered, “Some poor devil’s getting it.” A man upchucked into a fire bucket in a corner. We waited for the eleventh and twelfth explosions, but the last two must’ve been duds or set to go off later. When the ground stopped shaking we all ran out and I nearly choked on the smell of burning herring and tomato paste. I headed straight back to Shearing’s. I’ll never forget the sounds of wardens and First Aid people clearing a path through the broken glass, blowing whistles and shouting to one another as they strung lines of garden hose and formed bucket brigades to get water to the fires. I found the front office and the mixing and extruding area had suffered a direct hit: nothing left but shattered glass and burning debris covered in pink fish paste, all eerily lit by a wooden shed burning in the park and the light of the full moon.

Under two blankets lay the bodies of little Jacko, the Irish lad, and poor old Florrie, looking like a grey beached whale. The wardens told me both died instantly when the corrugated iron roof collapsed. Gertie, who’d arrived early for the morning shift, was inconsolable. Pat got trapped, unconscious, with the burning counter crushing one leg and the rest of the building about to cave in. We couldn’t wait for the firemen. We used whatever we could to lever the counter off him. As soon as we got the lad clear we helped a First Aider tie a tourniquet on his thigh.

We were looking for warm coats to keep Pat from going into shock when Mr. Shearing padded through the glass in carpet slippers and red silk quilted dressing gown, which he pulled off to cover the boy. He looked like some broken down old tramp standing there in his striped ‘jammies, taking in the smouldering mess, sodden with water from hoses and stirrup pumps.

I warned the wardens I suspected two unexploded bombs had landed somewhere in the area, and waited with Pat for the ambulances. As we left, the back allotments exploded, twice, sending up massive clods of earth. We had to dodge a hailstorm of earth, potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and clods of earth. The noise from this debris drumming down was augmented, but not enhanced, by the arrival of emergency vehicles making their usual clanging racket to keep people out of the way. At Acton Hospital they put some whopping bandages on my hands to cover burns I hadn’t noticed when helping to free Pat. The doctor and pretty nurses assure me my paws weren’t badly damaged, but for a few days they’ll be dressing and undressing me. For the family honour, of course, I try to resist, but (blush) they insist.

They’ll probably send me overseas now, unless I get lost on the way.

Love to Mum, Dad, and the girls. Will write to them all.

Your favourite brother,
David.

P.S. Poor young Pat lost his leg above the knee but will survive ok.

ATEU: Allied Troop Entertainment Unit,
Somewhere in Italy.
May 25, 1944

Dear Folks,

That is what the Yanks call their families. ATEU (otherwise known as “Atchoo!”) assigned me to team up with a Yank, also a musician (clarinet and violin), Bob Shoupelli. Our mates call us “Shoup and Beansh.” He comes from New York, though his “folks” were born in Florence and emigrated right before the Depression.

Anyway, we are elated here on the Italian front. The people treat us with great courtesy and warmth, particularly since Shoup speaks first-class Italian. Best of all, Shoup discovered a musical family and together, we formed our own quintet. They’re the Fratellinis. Imagine this, Gillian and Ann: Signora Fratellini or her sister chaperones the two oldest daughters (flute and divine cello) whenever we’re there. The distinguished Signora, a fine cook, has practically adopted us. Here in censored for the past d weeks, Shoup brings them food to cook from the U.S. army canteen. They can’t grow anything because retreating German troops land-mined the fields. We sit down in their tapestried dining room, in the un-bombed part of the house, to delicious meals on real plates, with wine—such a treat after months of dreadful army food. But this will soon end. For my sins, I have been assigned to pppddddddppp, renowned for its nnnn old nnnnnnnnnnn and beautiful ppppppp. I leave on nnnnnnnn.

However, my dear ones, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of war and look forward to seeing you all again soon. Please send along photos to show the Fratellinis. The youngest sister (flute) wants to see Don in his naval uniform. Also send Mother’s, Gillian’s, and Ann’s foot sizes. Shoup gets genuine nylon stockings from the PX.

Stay safe.

Your loving son and brother,
David.

MR. AND MRS. RONALD BEAN, 4 MARKET ROAD, TETBURY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. JUNE 4, 1944. WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON, LIEUTENANT DAVID BEAN OF THE ALLIED TROOP ENTERTAINMENT UNIT, HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION IN ITALY. CAPT. IAN HENDERSON, THE WAR OFFICE, LONDON, W.1.

ATEU: Allied Troop Entertainment Unit,
Somewhere in Italy.
June 8, 1944

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bean,

I met your son shortly after landing at Anzio. We played music together all the time, and a happy association it was. David had a brilliant career ahead of him. He played every chance he had: washboard and spoons in hillbilly sessions, jazz or swing piano, or classical violin in quintets with an Italian family of musicians who “adopted” us in nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

I can only imagine what a difficult time this must be for you, but I want you to know that David was a fine soldier who never compromised on his determination not to be responsible for the death of another human being.

Like you, I cling to the idea that he may yet be alive, but perhaps wounded, in one of the smaller towns or villages the unit passed through, or maybe he has lost his way somewhere. He set out for mmmmmmmmm on nnnnnnnn on a small motorbike, borrowed from one of the sappers. I should never have let him go out on his own.

Be assured that I shall somehow find a Jeep and set out to find him. I know he would do the same for me.

Yours sincerely,
Bob Shoupelli.

ATEU: Allied Troop Entertainment Unit,
Somewhere in Italy.
July 10, 1944.

Dear Mum, Dad, Gail, Ann, and Don,

Confirming my telegram, I am indeed very much alive, although not thanks to any superior brain power.

I was riding along the road to dddddddddddd to see the iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii on a borrowed motorbike, a noisy two-stroke putt-putting thing, and as usual was wondering if it was the right road, when I saw four German soldiers ducking behind a hedge. I cut the engine and cried out, “Halt!” and they froze. “Ich bin ein freund,” I said.

They looked rather sceptical of this, until I explained that I’d studied in Berlin and had lots of jolly German friends, and would never kill anyone.

The leader of these lads, none of them over seventeen, laughed and slapped me on the back, saying, “Freund? Ah, freund!” Then the weasels had the cheek to tear off my uniform and dress me up in one of theirs. It was filthy and miles too small. The tallest donned my uniform, rolled up the sleeves and trouser legs, straddled the bike and pretended to be a British officer. Two others took each of my arms and a third walked behind me. You can guess the idea was for Motor-Bike Fritz to look like the brave British lieutenant bringing in four scallywag German deserters.

We continued this way for a while, with me watching my chance to run, until we came on a group of British Tommies, who promptly arrested the lot of us.

I ended up being interrogated by our own Military Police who, soon as they heard me talking German to my erstwhile “freunds,” accused me of spying. I haven’t been in that much trouble since I took a wrong turn in Portsmouth and ended up behind the WRENs’ barracks’ bathhouse with a dozen half-naked women screaming for my blood.

And then, out of the blue, Shoupelli drives up in what he calls “a hot Jeep.” He managed to convince the authorities that I was merely a musician, incapable of thinking up a ridiculous spy plot, and totally incompetent of finding my way from Point A to B.

Apart from that, it looks as if we may go to lllllllllllllllllllll in the near future.

Yesterday’s news of Caen falling is welcome indeed. We’re all sick and tired of war, many of us having walked practically from the bottom of Italy to iiiiiiiiiiiii.

But I love Italy and the Italians. Shoupelli and I plan to return after the war to study composition in iiiiiiiiiiiiii, where we enjoyed making music with the Fratellinis. We might all apply for work at McGill University or form a swing band or play at the Albert Hall.

I’m alive and almost drunk on the freedom to make plans for the future again. What else can I tell you?

Your ever-loving son and brother,
David.

The small town is about a mile back, a twenty-minute walk through motionless air, past the boarded-up George and Elaine’s Fruit Stand. Cal, now ten feet ahead of me, slaps his neck. Another greenhead. I haven’t been bitten once. “Fuck,” he says, smacking one on his left arm a few seconds later. “What the fuck?”

“They love you more than me,” I say. The story of my life, I could add but don’t because he’d think I was trying to get a reaction. He might be right.

What I say instead is, “Remember that movie where Kurt Russell’s car breaks down in the desert and his wife is kidnapped and because he loves her so much he risks his life to find her?”

Cal punts a stone. “Didn’t see it.”

Cal hates movies, maybe as much as I love them. He didn’t even know who Hugh Grant was when I told him he was him to a T. Dark, wavy hair, ocean-blue eyes, made bluer against his green sweater. I love Hugh Grant. Rented every one of his movies, a habit I haven’t been able to kick for three years. Four Weddings and A Funeral? Gimme a break. Scintillating, smart characters. Just like the tart-tongued Andie McDowell, whose mannered sexiness masked her crushing loneliness.

“Even if it meant dying,” I continue, “I’d take a bullet for someone. Or jump in front of a train.”

“When would you ever need to jump in front of a train?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I do,” he says. “Because it wouldn’t happen. It’s stupid.”

“Okay,” I say, “but my point is the only way you’d ever know if someone really loved you is if they put their life on the line when it counts. Otherwise you gotta take their word for it.”

This time he stops, turns, and eyes me like I just crawled out of the lagoon.

He used to look at me like I just stepped out of the shower, dripping and exposed. That first night at Casey’s, when he cornered me down the long corridor to the ladies’ room, even then, boozed up and smelling of Pall Mall, he looked as if he could devour me alive. That’s what people don’t understand: it’s the little things that make a person think there’s still something to wait around for. Like the time he told me that he loved me once.

The first place we find is a bar. More like a bunker with dim lighting and mirrored walls. Glasses dangling by their stems on racks above. Midday drunks scattered about.

As Cal heads to the can, I head to the counter. The bartender is flipping around the TV above him when I yell, “Stop!” because wouldn’t you know it, right there on the screen, Music and Lyrics, starring Drew Barrymore and Mr. Hugh Grant himself.

I say to the guy next to me, slumped over his beer, “The best time of my last fifteen years was sitting at that piano with you, and she says, That’s wonderfully sensitive. Especially from a man who wears such tight pants, and he says, It forces all the blood to my heart.”

“You know earthworms got five hearts,” this guy says.

“That’s too many,” I say back.

“Cut ‘em in half they can still make themselves whole again.”

“Hearts?”

“Worms. But hearts, too, I suppose. After Katrina they were all over the damn place. Wanna see?”

“Why not?” I say, and take a bar stool.

Out of his jacket he pulls this small photo album with plastic sleeves. All the pictures in sepia, of storm ravaged homes, wounded land, hard, lost faces. And page after page of close-ups of spittlebugs and earthworms popping up through mud and sludge. “Think they’re any good?”

I tell him I like the destruction and then how, against all odds, life still figuring out a way to break through.

“Name is Hank,” he says.

“Abbey,” I say, and we shake on it.

“I’ve got photos of ‘em all. Andrew. Hugo. Gustav. I used to go where the storms go.”

“Some kind of storm chaser,” I say.

“Yep.”

Just then Cal is back, zipping up his pants. “We need a tow,” he says to the bartender.

He’s wiping out a glass with a rag, and stares at Cal. So Cal goes, “You know, tow truck? Mechanic? DO YOU SPEAKY THE ENGLISH?”

“You got a drink in mind?”

“Sure, draft,” Cal says, and I clear my throat.

“Oh yeah, make it two,” he says. But not like Oh, yeah, how stupid of me, more like Oh, yeah, I forgot you were here.

We get our beers poured and then the bartender walks off toward the phone at the end of the counter.

Cal yells, “Sherlock, it’s stuck up thataways. About a mile.”

“Cal?” I say.

“What? I’m just joking with the guy.”

I then say, “Look,” and point to the TV. Hugh Grant is dancing in his tight black leather pants, playing up the has-been pop star perfectly.

“She’s gonna make your ears bleed with that stuff,” he says to the guy he doesn’t even know. “If I were you, I’d move down a few,” he adds, and laughs hard, like a smoker. Then he sees the Lucky 7 terminal in the corner and walks over with his beer. I turn back to the TV.

“My boyfriend thinks I’m nuts.”

“Are you?”

I mention my fixation with Hugh. How I like watching him play the heel and then coming through in the end.

“I hear ya,” he says. “Like something’s got a hold of you and won’t let go. Like that machine over there.”

He flicks a finger toward Cal as he drops another coin into the slot. We hear him say, “Fuck.”

“Phil,” he says, and now I know the bartender’s name, “when you gonna get rid of that devil machine?”

“Not in your lifetime,” Phil says, back from the phone. It sounds like a conversation they’ve had a thousand times before. Cal and I’ve had a thousand conversations about the same things, too. Cal bolting up in the middle of the night, screaming about how shitty life is in Northfield, and me screaming back, “Just say the word and my bags are packed.”

Cal is suddenly at the counter again, cashing in a couple of bills for coins.

“The guy’s gonna be there in half an hour,” Phil tells him.

“Where? Here?”

“At your car.”

“Shit. Why not here?”

“Coming from the other direction, I guess.”

Cal steams off with coins, back to the Lucky 7.

“I used to play that,” Hank says.

“Any luck?”

“Would I be sitting here?” He then takes a sip. “I’ll tell you what nuts is. Going back to the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

I glance up at the TV. Hugh is singing on stage at Madison Square Garden. Cut to Drew, walking up the aisle, pissed that it’s over between them. Then cut to Hugh, singing “Don’t Write Me Off Just Yet,” then back to Drew, who stops in her tracks, spins around, her expression a mixture of shock and awe.

“Great scene,” I say, sort of teary-eyed. “You like Hugh?”

“He’s okay, I suppose.”

“Okay? You ever see Four Weddings and A Funeral?”

“Was he in The Flight of the Phoenix?”

“You’re thinking of Dennis Quaid.”

“Yeah. He’s cool.”

“Grant’s cool.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Maybe. Just the same act, it gets tired is all.”

Cal is dropping a coin into the machine. The cards roll around and around on their spools. “Fuck.” He shoves in another coin, another fuck.

When he comes back, he throws down a few bucks for the beers. “Well, we’re outta here.”

“Wait,” I say. “This is the part where they kiss.” When I don’t move or take my eyes off the TV, Cal says, “Well, see ya.”

Hank leans back and tilts his eyes at Cal, says nothing.

After Hugh grabs Drew, I stand and tell Hank I’m from the mid-west where tornado season is fast approaching.

He smiles and says, “My dear, I’m getting too old to chase storms.” Then he puts his hand over mine. It feels like a warm loaf of bread. I don’t move it for a few seconds.

Outside, a surprise thundershower. Raindrops falling the size of nickels. And the wind is howling, bending me sideways. Cal is already out on the road toward the car, running as fast as he can. I lean into the wind and rain and run too, though my head gets curious about what would happen if I let go. Would I be swept away, tossed across the fields like an errant tumbleweed? Would I roll on and on, circle the earth forever? Would Cal risk his life until he found me?

Rain soaks my face, a thousand tiny jabs. He’s so far ahead of me now I can barely make out his figure.

So far ahead, in fact, I begin to imagine him not even there.

“Some people believe that it is good luck to have rain on your wedding day,” Judith said cheerfully.

Anita poured coffee into her favorite mug, a black one with a large white A on the side and a chip in the rim, then sat down at the table next to her aunt. Lately, she thought of her aunt as Saint Judith, Saint Jude for short. What else could she be after taking on the responsibility of raising Anita when her mother and father died? Judith had given up the career of an overseas correspondent to become a weekly columnist and an instant parent. In fourteen years, she had never heard the woman complain. Any regrets, if she had them, were not voiced.

“Kevin’s mother has rented enough tents to create an upscale refugee camp,” Anita said, scooping two heaping teaspoons of sugar into her coffee.

“It is nice of the Sinclairs to host the wedding.” Judith ventured. “Kevin’s a dear, but you know we would have never been able to put on a spread for that family. Oh, they are always pleasant to everyone and not snobby by any means, but they are used to certain things. Do me a favour, don’t get so used to certain things that you won’t eat my macaroni and cheese casserole.”

“Well Kevin is her only child,” Anita said. “Some women like taking care of such details. I’m not one of them. The things I decided to take care of are more than enough wedding details for me. And I don’t think you have to worry about the casserole. It’s still my favorite.” The spoon, hitting the mug as she stirred, underlined her words with porcelain-steel music.

“I know what you mean about wedding details,” said Judith. “They aren’t my forte, that’s for sure.”

“Do you ever wish that you had married?” Anita said. She searched her aunt’s face as she posed the question. Up until she was sixteen, Anita would look for her mother in Judith’s face; but the more she had looked the more she noticed the differences between the two sisters. What she saw these days was that the years had been good to Judith. Her mother, no longer accumulating time, existed only in the photo albums and old videos stored in the hall closet.

“Oh, I think if the right person had come along, I would have married,” said Judith, “but who’s to say that the right person still can’t show up. Fifty-two is not that old you know.” Her voice shifted and she leaned back in the kitchen chair to look directly at her niece. “Don’t go thinking that you’re the reason I didn’t get married. I had plenty of offers, just none that I could live with.”

Anita brushed her teeth and jumped into the shower, surveying her body as she adjusted the water temperature. She had put on a few pounds since they announced the engagement, but not a noticeable amount. At her final fitting last week, the dress was perfect. How lucky she had been to find one she liked that was on sale.

It was at a little boutique that Kevin’s mother had recommended, located in Barberry Market, an area of old stone houses that had been turned into upscale businesses. The signs hanging from each were understated and catered to a clientele that didn’t need to be screamed at. She drove down with Judith one afternoon, thinking they would just look. They found a parking spot on the other side of a street split by a median with a couple of benches and some annual beds. It was the end of April and the empty gardens filled the air with an organic smell of damp soil.

They looked at several dresses, but she kept coming back to the same one. “Go ahead, try it on,” the woman said, unzipping the clear plastic so the gown could be viewed better.

Her reflection: auburn hair, freckled skin, white dress, shouted at her without words. Was she ready for this? She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“It suits you,” Judith said.

“This particular gown is part of a special promotion,” the salesclerk said. “Reduced because of the arrival of new stock.”

Today that special promotion was hanging on the back of her bedroom door.

They met the rest of the girls at the beauty salon at eleven, Ingrid and Wendy, Anita’s friends and Kevin’s cousin Michelle, since he didn’t have a sister.

Ingrid greeted them with over-exaggerated hugs and kisses that made Anita feel like a plush toy that had been returned after an unplanned absence. “You do realize,” Ingrid teased, “that by this time tomorrow you will no longer be a single entity but part of a pair.”

“Like shoes,” laughed Wendy.

“Or salt and pepper shakers,” said Michelle.

“I don’t know if I should be jealous or relieved,” said Ingrid.

By the time they left the salon, the sky was clear, the sidewalks, nothing but strips of glare. Anita wondered whether or not this had any bearing on her luck, now that both the sun and the rain had made an appearance on her wedding day.

“Just in time for photos,” Judith said. Leave it to Judith to say the right thing.

Judith excelled at saying the right thing. After the funeral, she and Anita had returned to the house, which was empty for the first time in days. Someone had tidied up, depriving them of the much-needed busy work. Anita flopped down on the sofa, no longer feeling like the preteen who, just the previous week, had gone to a sleepover with her friends. She had returned the following morning to find a police car waiting in the driveway. Anita resented that loss almost as much as she resented her absent mother and father and the stoned kid who ran the red light. Judith came in and sat down next to her. “I always wanted to learn how to play one of those things,” she said, pointing to the Nintendo system on the shelf below the TV. “How bout we order a pizza and you can teach me?”

That night they slowly allowed themselves to laugh, and yell at the characters that jumped across the television screen, and then to slip into a realm where silliness prevailed. Afterwards they slept, waking late the following day with a new understanding of the roles they had inherited in each other’s lives, knowing that anything either one of them did from now on would impact the other.

Judith gave her away. That was something that Anita insisted on and Kevin agreed. It was only right. They walked down the aisle arm in arm amidst harp music and the rustle of satin and silk, neither one shaking or teary eyed, no mention of what Anita’s mother or father may have felt, no need to, they had stopped dwelling on the past years before.

“Kevin’s uncle Gerald would be glad to walk you down the aisle,” his mother had suggested along with several other options, all male as dictated by tradition. His mother was not one for altering institutions. But she was also not one for fighting small battles so in the end she concurred.

Mrs. Sinclair liked Anita and thought of her as hard working and smart, not some spoiled bimbo who couldn’t see past her next visit to the spa. Although she had always been comfortable, the older woman had learned the same lessons that Anita had at an early age; that nothing was to be taken for granted and that important things can disappear, the way her brother had disappeared into the river; and afterwards, the way her mother had disappeared into the bottle. Of all the girls that Kevin had been involved with, Anita had the most substance. The least she could do for the girl is give her a beautiful wedding. And a beautiful wedding dress for that matter, no one needs to know of the arrangement made between her and the owner of the boutique.

I think I’m switching to autopilot,” Kevin whispered in her ear part way through the receiving line.

Anita smiled. She could think of nothing better than sitting down and putting her feet up. “Tell me again why we didn’t consider eloping,” she retorted while waiting for his grandfather to close the gap in the stream of people. Kevin laughed and bent to kiss her enthusiastically on the mouth. The room burst into a round of applause.

“Okay break it up,” said Kevin’s grandfather leaning forward to peck Anita on the cheek.

Next in line was Richard. His face, like a statue with stone eyes and a rigid jaw, moved towards her. “Will you be going by Mrs. Sinclair now, or do you intend to keep your own name?” His question surprised her.

At dinner, Judith had made a speech that was both happy and sad. She talked about their life together and about new beginnings, the one they undertook fourteen years earlier and the one that Anita and Kevin were now embarking on. “I believe that Anita can manage anything that comes her way, including you Kevin,” she quipped. A statement that was followed by laughter, along with whoops and whistles from Kevin’s friends.

The rest of the day went off without a hitch. Everyone would remember it as a lovely event. Mrs. Sinclair had taken their wishes and transformed them into a choreographed work of art. Anita tried to imagine how Kevin’s mother would use those skills on the many committees and boards that she was a member of.

She was curled up in the king-size bed next to Kevin. He had slipped quickly into sleep after they had made love. To her, it doesn’t arrive as easy so she slid out from under the covers and grabbed the complimentary terry robe. The hotel room was on the top floor, overlooking the harbour. A fog rolled above the water looking pinkish yellow from city lights that never allow darkness to settle or stars to shine. Standing in the window, Anita continued to revisit the day in her thoughts. For her this is a nightly habit, rehashing the events of her life in twenty-four-hour segments, one of her prerequisites for sleep.

Richard had come to the wedding. Richard who managed university the way she did, on part-time jobs and student loans, barely making ends meet as he worked his way towards being a heart specialist. She knew he would be excellent, he had already filled a hole in hers.

“It’s up to you,” he had said to her, “but I think you should go. Why stay home all alone when you can go out and enjoy yourself?”

So she decided to go, taking transit to the closest intersection then walking the rest of the way. The music could be heard all the way down the street, mostly bass, turned up and throbbing like a heart. It started to rain and she was without an umbrella so she ran. A little later, when she was standing in a crowd chatting and sipping a rum and coke, she felt two hands rest on her shoulders and heard a voice from behind. “Even soggy, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

That night with Kevin was a fluke. Who would have thought they would run into each other at a party that Richard couldn’t attend because he had to work. She and Kevin had been together several years earlier, the summer she was eighteen. No commitments, there were universities to attend and careers to secure. Sex was something that had happened between them. It happened again, aided by memories and alcohol.

There was the baby to think about. She had been on antibiotics at the time, for an ear infection. A warning came with her birth control pills. She had read it only once in her teens when she first started taking the oral contraceptives. She considered an abortion, discussed the option with her doctor. He told her she needed to make a decision quickly, but she let the deadline pass. It wasn’t that she was religious or that she thought it was wrong. Some days it seemed perfectly right: other days, not right for her.

The child could belong to either of them; both have similar features. Kevin was so excited when she told him. “We’ll get married,” he said. “I hope it’s a girl.”

Anita had weighed her options and made her decision. It was a decision she would consider every time she handed over her baby to the nanny that Kevin’s mother offered to procure, and when she returned to university to continue her education debt free. Later she would consider it again when her daughter walked down the aisle as flower girl at Judith’s wedding and upon seeing a photo announcing that Richard had become Head of Cardiology. She would consider it every night for the rest of her life. This was something she knew for a fact while standing in the window watching the shoreline become obscure.

I want to eat in the kind of Chinese food restaurant you find in small northern Ontario towns. Restaurants with names like “Lucky Moon” or “Sun Palace” or whatever. I want the red sauce on chicken balls and a fork, no option of chopsticks, that kind of place. Even if it is not Chinese food, I want to eat in the kind of restaurant where you get pre-packaged moist towelettes, not just one, but a whole little white rectangular dish of them, lined up and free for the taking, no limits. I want Jason to feel terrible and Jared to feel less terrible but terrible nonetheless. I want them to see that I have left our once beautiful and now totally ruined Mile-end apartment, and upon realizing this, I want them to throw their hands up into the air and say “How can we be such assholes, she’s our sister!” I want them to then launch into long, weepy and indiscernible sentences weighed down with serious words like “Family” and “Blood.” I also want a pair of great fucking leotards, thick and cable-knit like when you are five, but extra long for maximum leg movement. I have had enough of polyester and the saggy-crotch feeling of insufficient leg length. I have had enough of everything.

I don’t know where I’m going but I know that I’m traveling at two distinct speeds. My body is stuck on this lumbering bus, heading to another bus, heading to Abitibi-Témiscamingue, and my mind is going everywhere else simultaneously, wrapping back around itself several times, and igniting in flame. I have been trying to focus on one spot in the upholstery pattern of the seat, bore myself into some kind of hypnotic state and even out, but I cannot for the life of me stop switching my legs around. I am overwhelmed by the desire to pull the stuffing out of the seat ahead and then reinsert it carefully in such a way as to round out the top edge and thus prevent the overhang of hair from the woman in front of me. Her stupid mouse-brown ponytail keeps coming over and catching in the bristle of the dirty head rest. I have bought a horse on the internet from a man who lives outside of a town called Amos, and I have paid for it on my brother’s credit card. I don’t know what I am going to do exactly, but I do know that I am not going to panic. It is not a thoroughbred and things could be worse.

I don’t do drugs and I don’t eat hot dogs or Kentucky Fried Chicken. These are my standards. They are the result of the power of documentary film. This is not the full truth. The main reason I do not do drugs is my brothers. I mean, here I am working hard every damn day to learn the bass guitar and develop a signature style, and they are just off, splayed on some crusted-up couch all the time, smoking weed and trying to grow ironic mustaches. We did not start out this way and I’m disappointed. Disappointed in a more profound sense than our parents, even. Jared came to visit us in Montreal for a weekend and ended up never leaving or finishing school. Jared has not technically graduated from high school—he’s missing those last bits about calculus and Margaret Laurence and everything, and for what? Lattés and ganja at the Social Club, not to mention the influence of some really bad women.

The last time the bus stopped it was at a St. Hubert Resto-Express in the middle of nowhere, three hours north of Montreal. I was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot and these three young guys from the back of the bus were jumping around in their t-shirts, paw fighting like faux hooligans. You’ve got to understand that it is both February and 3 o’clock in the morning as this is going on. It’s about 25 degrees below zero and these three guys are out in the parking lot, smoking up or taking ecstasy or whatever, and wrestling. One of them kept stretching out his t-shirt with one arm, I believe for the purpose of revealing a bit of his pubic hair to me. It fanned out over the edge of his very low-strung teenager snowpants. It was not as erotic as intended.

“Quez tu fait ma fille?” he asked me.

“Paaar-don?” I said in my lazy French.

“Anglophone!” another one said, laughing, “You should sit wit us.”

“No thanks,” I said and smashed my cigarette into the frozen pavement for effect.

“Bitch.”

This is what I understand. Monsieur Gagnon lives outside of Amos and Amos is a small town in the region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, and Abitibi-Témiscamingue is a northwestern edge of Quebec somewhere between Ontario and the Arctic. I will take two buses for a total of 8 hours, catch a lift to the parking lot of the Ukrainian Church in the center of the town, and Monsieur Gagnon will meet me there. I have three hours and a sunrise left to figure out what it is I am going to do with the horse. Her name is Celeste and she is a gorgeous palomino half quarter filly. I don’t know what that means except for $800, not $25,000 like Sameera Sunphire – Desperado V/ El paso granddaughter. I am angry but I am not a bitch.

I feel like everyone is moving too slow around me. The last thing I needed was for Jason to bring that girl into things and slow it all down even more. Abby is a bartender and the kind of person who seriously wears Daisy Duke-styled jean shorts and lectures about what is organic and what is, like, really not. I don’t understand. One minute we have this great band with a lot of potential and the next, Jason is locked in his room all the time, shagging or passed out or eating 6 dollar dragonfruit. It’s terrible. We spend evenings just sitting around listening to Abby going on about how she will never do Botox but when she is really old, “like thirty-five or something” she will get some ethically extracted snake venom injected into areas that “need refreshing.”

“Abby,” I said, “Why don’t you just go to the zoo and get a snake to bite your face.”

Jared didn’t even crack a smile. I realize now how screwed up things were by this point.

“You are really a high-strung person, Bea. You should try yoga or getting laid,” Abby said, pulling a leg warmer up to the fringe of her stupid miniature pants. “See you guys later, somebody’s got to work around here.” She stuck her tongue down my brother’s throat for a moment and left.

Someone in our apartment complex has given up on exercise. Two weeks ago an old Stairmaster got dumped in the alleyway with a piece of notepaper taped around its neck. “FREE” it said in severe handwriting. I wanted Jason to help me move it up to the porch but he kept procrastinating, endlessly. “Listen,” he said finally “I meant to tell you this, but Abby is having some roommate issues and is going to crash here for a while. I told her she could put her stuff in there.”

I don’t understand where these people are going. They are all inches above sleep and seemingly depressed, hooked-up and muted-out by their own technological devices. There is somebody about five seats back with some really cheap headphones on and all I can hear is the tinny static of some almost recognizable pop song on repeat and people breathing their wet breath in and out in the dark. I tap my chin on my kneecap before switching that leg down again, my foot tangled in the strap of my Dad’s old camera. I tap at my tooth with a fingernail and lean my head closer to the window where I am more likely to breathe just my own breath and not the breath of other people.

It was a Tuesday morning and Jason had called me from the diner to say that he had had a great night that was not yet over and that I should come join him, he was eating bacon with this Finnish band, these REAL PEOPLE from Finland. And also could I bring the camera. And also could I bring the striped sweater on the back of the couch and fifteen or twenty dollars.

“Come on Bea, they have a manager and he is like the tallest guy I have ever seen in my life.”

For a very great and brief moment, I thought we were getting back to the good times. I pulled on some boots and brushed my teeth, stuffing everything into a plastic shopping bag, and I ran. The air was sharp and clean and white as ice fire within me. Two blocks down the street I realized that I had to go back and wake Jared up for this. He is just a kid in a lot of ways, I thought to myself, but he deserves to be eating bacon with Finnish people and helping to plot our next move.

I sprinted back and arrived breathless, sweating into the neck of my jacket. When I got home there was some vaguely AC/DC-like band blaring from the stereo, the shower was on, and my brother was in it. I could hear Abby in there with him, causing major psychoanalytical damage to me, her whore-y thong underwear contaminating the tiles of our bathroom floor.

I kicked my legs around on the Stairmaster in the alley until Jason finally ambled home to see what was taking me so long. I told him.

“You’re a liar,” he said after a long moment, “and you try to ruin everything.”

I want Monsieur Gagnon to be quiet and kind-hearted, a hard-working loner with a heart of gold. I want him to see me waiting there in the parking lot of the Ukrainian church, pacing in my dress and insufficient leotards and think to himself, damn, this girl is on the verge of something very great, I can feel it. I want him to take me by the hand and lead me to the door of the trailer.

“Here you go,” I want him to say. “She’s all yours.”

I want Celeste to look me in the eyes and to love me immediately, shaking her mane around a bit in the frosty air. I want her to step down eloquently from the trailer and for Monsieur Gagnon to weave his fingers together into a step.

“Up you go,” he will say.

I want to get on the horse and I want to run.

Dreaming of tooth loss can be a symbol of death or sudden monetary windfall, and Frances was worried.

“Maybe you’ll win the lottery?” I suggested.

“No, I think someone is going to die. I’ve always thought I was a little psychic.”

When I was in the sixth grade my friends and I wanted to know who was the most psychic in our class. This was before we knew anything about odds or statistics, so we made cards with symbols on them: squares, triangles, hearts, circles. One person selected a card and concentrated on the symbol while the rest of us tried to pick up their brainwaves. We kept score of who guessed the most correctly, and in the end I was the most psychic, but that was mostly because I had accidentally cut up the cards unevenly and could tell what they were by their shape.

“What am I thinking?” I asked.

“You’re wondering who’s going to die.”

“Sorry, lady,” I told her. “Try again.”

Sometimes you look back on conversations like that and you wonder if there is something to be said about omens. Okay, there are statistics that explain it’s just life happening, but maybe there are also signs or premonitions worth paying attention to, interpreting.

A few days later, I left Frances a voicemail. Hey, last night I had a dream too. I’m wearing a necklace made of teeth, human teeth—as if they’re a string of pearls—and some have roots. I show the necklace to people, you’re one of them.

A few months after I started dating my boyfriend Nathan, he gave me pearl earrings, these small creamy globes with dull gold backing. They had belonged to his grandmother. The earrings reminded me of bath beads, the way the beads looked solid, but how if you squeezed them soap would gush out. He told me that pearl is calcium carbonate fused together with a compound called conchiolin. He always knew stuff like that, these useless facts. Molluscs produce conchiolin as a response to irritating objects in their shells. When you combine the two compounds together you get nacre, which is commonly known as pearl. When he wasn’t looking, I bit into an earring, surprised by its strength.

My father called at 3:15. I remember waking up and looking at the clock. He said my name twice when I answered. My brother, Peter, had been in an accident. I listened to my father, but I also zoned out, and I sat on my couch and looked at the outlines of frames hanging on my wall. I noticed I had left my balcony door open and hugged my bare legs towards myself. And then I put on some clothes and took my car keys and drove to the hospital.

Things I’ve made wishes on: dandelion fluff, white horses in fields, lost eyelashes, even times (11:11, for example). As a teenager, I heard stories about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France. People would travel from all over the world to visit the site to get healed. I heard that if you prayed a certain series of prayers to the Lady of Lourdes over nine days, something good would happen. When I started reciting the prayers quietly in bed, I felt a twinge of guilt for diluting the prayers of those more deserving of goodness—the sick, the crippled, the elderly—but I kept at it anyway. On the tenth day, I went to school and I clearly remember having a fantastic day. There were no miracles, but the day was really good, and I wondered if the prayers had something to do with it.

But when my brother had his accident, I was stubborn about my wishes and prayers. I thought, if this is going to happen, it’s going to happen. It wasn’t that I was angry, but that I felt useless. A wish was a puff of air; it was nothing. My mother prayed and then she stopped because she said that whenever she prayed, something bad happened anyway. It didn’t mean that God wasn’t listening, it just meant that whenever one becomes so solemn it’s because something serious has happened, something big and often something irreversible. So we kept quiet and still, but that didn’t change anything either.

Peter had been coming home from a night out. His car got a flat tire and he tried to change it, but the jack wasn’t working properly, so he walked out into the road to flag down some help. It was a highway, not busy. Two lanes, a few lights. The problem is that other drivers don’t expect people to be there, in the dark and with car trouble.

Peter liked sending postcards and he mailed cards to me even when we were living in the same city. The last postcard he sent had a picture of an old-timey amusement park on the front. He wrote, How many vegans does it take to change a light bulb? They can’t—vegans can’t change anything, and then he described a hot dog he had eaten. My brother had been a vegan for the past few months. An experiment, he said, to see if he could do it, but how could he when there were all these hot dogs in the world begging to be eaten? He had forgotten to write my apartment number on the postcard, and it didn’t get stuffed into my mailbox until over two weeks after it had been mailed, the day before his funeral.

Soon after the funeral I went camping. I wanted to go somewhere that felt and looked different, somewhere quiet and dusty. When I told this to Nathan he said, “Definitely, let’s do it!” as if it was the best idea I ever had.

“I mean, I want to go right now.”

Nathan paused, but he could tell how desperately I meant it, and by the time we gathered our things together and figured out a game plan, it was late. We drove up to Georgian Bay. Nathan set up the tent in the dark as I sat at the picnic table and shone the flashlight in his direction. I wasn’t very helpful, so he took the flashlight himself, and I kept sitting there, digging my fingernails into the damp wood.

In the morning we rented a little motorboat. It cost $30 for the day, plus a credit card as security, and before we left they gave us a map of the area, a photocopied piece of paper with little squiggly island shapes sprinkled throughout. I squinted at the map and directed the boat. We wanted to swim, but we wanted privacy and eventually we settled on an empty-looking cottage perched atop massive, flat slabs of granite. We anchored the boat and jumped into the water.

I don’t know who started it, but we had sex on the rocks outside the cottage. Ted Hughes wrote this about the first time he slept with Sylvia Plath: you were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish. It felt like that. Nice. It was the bathing suit, I think; the swimming. And then I stretched out, stomach down with my cheek on the rock which was warm from having absorbed the heat of the day. I breathed and closed my eyes and thought about how things petrified, how it wasn’t fair that when molluscs were upset they eventually produced pearls, and how if I just lay here for awhile maybe things would harden into something good.

I didn’t get up for a long time, and Nathan swam back to the boat to grab our towels. He held them above his head as he treaded back and then covered me with them. Eventually he forced me to get up, practically dragged me to the boat, and we chugged back to the campsite, me in the front, refusing to wear the lifejacket, my t-shirt, or shorts.

The camping trip was an example of how, after Peter died, I would come up with plans, with ideas. Ways To Feel Better. These ideas would make so much sense at the time, and then, suddenly, they would stop making sense and I wouldn’t know what to do. I was flummoxed. I didn’t recognize this pattern until long afterwards, even after it had been suggested to me by others, and at the time I would cling to the idea, whatever it was, white-knuckled, and no one would be able to shake me of it.

At the end of the summer Frances and I sat in her backyard, looking up. There were black birds shooting around in circles, squeaking. The sounds they were making made me think they were bats, but Frances said, no, they were swallows. Squeak, squeak. Despite the squeak, definitely, swallows. Sailors used to think that swallows would pull them to safety if they were drowning and if that didn’t work, their souls to heaven. They would get tattoos of swallows as talismans. The birds we were looking at were darting around, small and quick. You would need hundreds of them to swoop down and lift you up.

I could see Frances’s talisman on the inside of her wrist. A tattooed, cursive F for her name. It was small, and unless you knew it was there you might think it was just a birthmark or an errant splotch of ink. She didn’t mean the tattoo in a narcissistic way. She meant it as a symbol that in the end, throughout your life, you always have yourself to rely on. She got it in Europe and didn’t tell me about it. I noticed it myself, and when I asked, she was sheepish. “I was kind of drunk at the time.”

Frances told me that my brother had been planning on stealing her idea and getting his own initial tattooed on his body, on his chest. Frances and Peter had dated for awhile. They had remained friends afterwards and he wrote her postcards too. He told her about the tattoo in his last card. I was jealous that hers had been serious, while mine had been a joke.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Did that upset you?”

I was having problems clearing my mind. I constantly felt coated in a layer of wax paper: crinkly, opaque. I felt like those scrambler rides at amusement parks, the ones that spin you into dozens of little circles, and just when you’re getting used to the velocity of the swings, you’re dropped.

“Here, let me show you something.” Frances was taking yoga and she wanted to teach me what she had learned.

“I’m not good at the breathing stuff,” I said. “Or meditation. Or Sanskrit.”

But she made me get up anyway. We took off our shoes. She showed me how to bring the bottom of my right foot to the inner part of my left thigh so that my right leg was jutting out to the side, like a flamingo. This was the tree pose. After you steady yourself on your leg, your root, you lift up your arms and branch out. And then you keep your balance. The trick to staying up is to focus on a single fixed spot. I stared straight ahead at the top of the tree across the yard, ignoring Frances’s swaying profile beside me, ignoring the squeaks of the swallows above. I kept my arms stretched out and I curled my toes. I didn’t stay up for very long.

“It’s not so easy, is it?” she asked as I steadied myself and grunted. When my foot touched the ground, I did it again, and then again.

I realized that for those few seconds I would think only of keeping my balance. When it worked, when I stayed up, I felt good. My rooted leg was strong and with my arms above my head my body looked streamlined, graceful. I got the idea that if I kept standing on one leg and looking up, if I kept focused and if I practised this pose, maybe eventually I could train my body to produce something beautiful. Something beautiful and permanent and solid.

I walked towards the car with my lady laughing behind me, took one quick look over my shoulder, and tossed the fucker towards the car. I lost my balance and the stone came up short, crashing to the ground, sending an echo into the still night. I lay on the ground laughing with my lady and finally got up for another attempt but as I went to grab the block, I noticed that there was someone in the driver’s seat. The windows were tinted so we had a hard time seeing in, we walked towards the door and knocked on the window, we were not given a response so I quietly opened the driver’s door and to our amazement sitting in the driver’s seat was the two-chick wonder, stark naked, bleeding from the head. He stunk of whiskey and pussy and we started laughing because we finally knew the truth about all these Firebird driving motherfuckers, it all made sense and we walked home hand in hand with cab money to spare.