A lifeguard in red trunks tells us that swimming now is dangerous, in spite of the crowd bobbing in the water. We should come back at 5pm, when the tide is lower and maybe (if we are lucky) the winds will have shifted, carrying the jellyfish away.

But this is our one and only chance to see the beach; we leave for Canada in two days. “You have to dip your toes in the Indian Ocean at least once,” insists my father.

So we wade into the water, with the masses. Some are wearing swimming shirts, but others are in t-shirts and pants. Only a handful are swimming in trunks and bathing suits. I stare at the water, vigilant. I’m so cautious that I hardly feel the warm salty froth, tickling me between my toes and nudging the hairs at the bottom of my calf, where I neglected to shave.

I think I see one – and jump back, out of the tide’s reach. “Let’s sit on the beach,” Gail offers. “It’s not worth the risk.” We find a spot and I pull out some tiny, white towels from a plastic Checkers bag. I really ought to have picked better towels from the linen closet at Dad’s house. The towel barely covers my bum.

But the sand is the right temperature, and I dig my toes into the grit as we look out in silence at the ocean and the crowds. Mothers with tiny children wear sparkling, silky saris that they have to hold up, just out of the current’s reach. Cloaked Muslim women, all in black, let their robes carry in the breeze. Zulu women in church hats laugh and tease each other.

All watch the children, who giggle at the same pitch as the water laps at their tiny toes. I think, no child of mine would be in that water. Just eight weeks along, I hold my belly, protectively.

~ ~ ~

There are no presents this year. In Durban, there are few lights, few Christmas trees. Here, Christmas means summer, picnics, family time in the great outdoors. It doesn’t mean snow and frost and naked trees. It doesn’t mean presents, stacked three high in front of a shimmering fir tree. The fir trees here look anorexic and have hardly any branches to speak of. On the highway, we see them in tidy rows, waiting to be harvested.

I wake up Christmas morning in my twin bed, placed as close as possible to Gail’s twin bed, in Dad’s new office. He’s just moved into this 100-year-old house that creaks and smells funny. His stuff is still in boxes, but his computer hums obnoxiously in the corner. This morning, I don’t crawl into bed with Gail: I pick up the remote and turn on the air conditioner to cool the room so she can sleep.

In the den, I open my laptop and think I might write. But before I can type a word, I feel it: a nagging cramp under my belly button. The second time it comes, it is a short but stabbing pain. It’s not right – it can’t be right – it’s Christmas Day, for God’s sake. I tell myself, “You’re being a hypochondriac again.” Like the time I thought I had appendicitis and spent five hours in the emergency room on a Friday night. Ridiculous.

At Christmas Dinner, at Dad’s boss’ house, Gail and I retreat to the opposite end of the patio to avoid the chain smokers. We sit on folding chairs and she rubs my back as I fight growing irritation. The cigarette smoke, the diet Coke Dad poured into my glass, the mosquitoes that fly so silently before they dig in – everything here is toxic. I hold my belly now, as the cramps keep coming, but I say nothing. First World problems, and all that. Here, in this land of so much poverty, I cannot appreciate a good meal and kind strangers. This evening is as perfect as a Canadian Christmas in South Africa could be: the hand-made Christmas crackers, the holiday trivia game, the decorations hauled to Durban from Edmonton – but it all feels wrong.

I want to be at the farm, with Gail, stuffed full of her mother’s yams and napping on the couch with the dog grumbling at my feet. I want to stand on the deck in the cold, looking up at the stars in the pitch-black sky, surrounded by bison, shadowy firs, and snowy fields. I hold onto this Canadian cliché with my whole heart.

~ ~ ~

The day after Christmas, I awake to a hint of crimson. It screams at me from a wad of toilet paper. The sun is streaming into the bathroom and I stare, unblinking, at the moss-coloured wallpaper, and the big, white, claw-foot tub. I stare numbly and realize the pain is getting worse.

Gail and I talk ourselves into believing that it’s normal; that my uterus is just expanding. The Internet tells us so. When my father suggests we go for a drive up the coast to check out some of the beachside towns, we agree. Then we stop for lunch at Umhlanga, and a trip to the restaurant bathroom confirms what I’ve been dreading: a long, slippery streak of bright red. Any vestige of normalcy is gone.

I brace myself against the stall and weep until I can stand the heat no more. I stumble back to the patio, red-eyed, sit at the table: “I’m miscarrying.” I hate this word. It’s so medical, so incomplete. It does not convey the gnawing pain inside my belly, the growing void.

~ ~ ~

In a slurry of algae, a crane nudges a white mass, floating atop the water. I think for a moment that her beak is like a pair of chopsticks in a bowl of murky miso soup, pushing a piece of tofu around. It takes me a moment to realize she is trying to revive her limp-necked chick.

When the thought crystallizes, I gasp and reach for my belly. Gail leads me into the next enclosure, but it’s too late: the image is burnt into the back of my eyes. The grief stricken mother, trying to wake her child. I want to hold that bird in my arms, console her.

I have no idea that, in less than two weeks, I’ll be finding my own lifeless chick in the toilet bowl of a South African hospital. I will recoil at what I’m seeing – intellectually stunned but emotionally numb. I cannot find my olive-sized fetus in the mess, but I look for it.

I open the door slowly, and look for the nurse. She is not there, so I creep down the hallway, hoping no one opens that door and finds the horror show I’ve left behind. I find her tending to a young man sitting on a gurney. “I think…maybe it’s finished,” I say, dry-eyed and clinical. As if I need expert validation. In my shock, I examined it in the palm of my hand, like a medical examiner.

This isn’t something you read about in pregnancy books. They do not tell you that you will see your own insides in Technicolor. They don’t tell you that you will cry so hard and deep you think your ribs will crack. You will want them to. Because you will never know why.

~ ~ ~

We kill time in the Johannesburg airport by browsing the souvenir shops. They’re all the same: shelves and shelves of over-priced wooden carvings and gaudy beaded jewellery and stuffed giraffes and t-shirts.

But I’m drawn to the ivory orbs. I hold one in my hand. It is cool to the touch, heavier than it looks. I poke an index finger through the hole at the bottom. It’s just an ostrich egg, but I want it. Gail isn’t impressed. “They’re too plain,” she says, “what about one of these?” She points to the rows of eggs with prints of maps and zebras and other designs. But they’re ridiculously expensive.

Finally, we spot another batch – this time, with holes drilled into the sides and animal designs etched into the shells. We pick one.

Covered in bubble wrap, and nestled between my feet, that hollow egg makes its way back to Edmonton, miraculously intact. When we awake at 4 am the next day, I fish it out of its bag, free it from layers of packaging. Gail finds a tea light and a barbecue lighter. In the dark living room, finally alone with our grief, we watch our egg glow. “I thought it would be brighter,” Gail says. But I can make out just the barest hint of an elephant with her trunk raised, triumphant or heartbroken.

I dream of walking without shoes on a beach with no end and no beginning, the sand rubbing my feet till they’re baby soft, till all the layers of protection wear away.

After seven years, we are finally returning to Maine, to the beach of my dreams. The first time, Ghis and I stumbled upon it by accident; we walked out from the parking lot, over the hill, and there it was, sand curving out to a peninsula. The tide was just right, so we walked our two dogs across the endless sand to the rocky island. On the far side of the island, the ocean stretched all the way to Europe. I drank the blue with my eyes until my soul felt calm. In the photograph, I am standing there in my red Gore-Tex jacket with a huge smile on my face and my arms stretched out as if I want to hug this ocean that I know and love, and have missed since moving to Montreal. I am sure that if I can get back, I can feel that way again: peaceful, free, alive.

We are four hours away. In South-eastern Quebec, the landscape is so large, I feel like we’re in a toy car. We drive straight up mountains and plummet down the backsides. Sometimes, I have to close my eyes. “Faster, Daddy,” shouts Morgane from her car seat.

“No, not faster,” I reply. It’s a relief to reach the deserted Quebec-Maine border. Ghis pulls up at the booth and I’m surprised to see it’s outside my window, not the driver’s. Ghis speaks over top of me. “We’re going to Southport Island,” he says.

“When was your last visit to the States?” the official asks.

“Last autumn,” says Ghis.

“Actually, wasn’t it this spring – you know, when we went to Vermont?”

Ghis’s eyes tell me shut up. I do what he says even though his inaccuracies bug me. He edits what he shares with the world in a way I can’t.

Road trip rules state that we can buy all the junk food we want. “Hurray,” shouts Morgane, who is still new to the rules. I eat a few chips and take a bite of my chocolate bar. “Are you going to finish that?” Ghis says, his fingers inching closer.

“When it’s a night in Africa, is it a day here?” asks Morgane. “What if it were never night, then what would people do because they wouldn’t sleep…” Her chattering is tiring me out; if I don’t say something, Ghis will.

“Our ears need a rest, honey.”

There is a moment of quiet, then her voice resumes, a conversation we are not a part of. “Hello Bear,” she says. “Hello Sally Rabbit.”

We snack our way through Maine until the turnoff to Boothbay Harbor where I spot water. “Is that the ocean?” I ask hopefully.

Ghis shrugs. “Maybe an inlet. We should call Meg and Harry.” We are on our way to these strangers’ house midway up the Maine coast. I don’t feel so well. Relax, I tell myself. We’re just CouchSurfing. It’s just a website to connect travellers with people offering a free bed or couch for the night. Ghis has already told Meg and Harry about us, our five-year-old daughter and our small husky. They wrote back to say: Yes, this weekend will work for us.

I need to see my beach so badly that I agreed to this. I should have recognized that adventurous glint in Ghis’s eyes, the same one I see each time he leads us off the trail and into the prickle bushes. It’s the glint I saw when we walked on top of that mountain ridge in British Columbia so many years ago and had to cross that vertical patch of snow, his impromptu lesson on self-arrests – “if you start to fall, spread your arms and legs wide, and try to dig into the snow with your hands and feet” – and my subsequent tears and questioning of my blind faith.

“How are you?” Ghis asks, in his loud cell-phone voice. I monitor the situation with my highly sensitive antennae. When his face drops and he says, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I think: We won’t be able to stay there after all. But he hangs up the phone and says, “Our host is sick, but not contagious.”

I open my window to get some air. “What are we going to do for dinner? Are we supposed to have dinner together?”

“I invited them to eat out with us,” Ghis says. “We’ll see what they decide.” I hope the gifts we brought will be enough and that they won’t see us as cheap opportunists. The web site forbids the exchange of money, but encourages surfers to bring their hosts gifts. I hope they are interesting people. They are both historians. As we turn into their driveway, I take a deep breath and remember: nobody ever died because of a socially awkward situation.

Our hosts meet us at the car. “Hello,” says Meg, a lady with thick brown hair, in her late forties. “Hello,” says Harry, a round-ish, balding teddy bear of a man. “How was your drive?” Their three dogs dance around our feet. Morgane sees them and wants to stay in the car. I carry her on my back up the slate steps to the house. She will be my shield, deflecting the attention off of me.

It looks like a traditional Maine house, two square buildings joined by a corridor. Wood shingles and green trim. Construction is underway on a third building – a barn with a beautiful half-moon window. This is where Meg is going to write her book on World War I Women. They show us our wing of the house. I walk past the framed New Yorker covers on the living room walls. I feel like I don’t belong here. Two nights free accommodation and a chance to revisit my beach; that’s why I agreed to couchsurf. I feel like a bug in their house. Or some dirt someone tracked in. I wonder why they said yes and if they’re sorry now. I want to tell them that we don’t have any expectations.

As a child, I learned not to expect too much. Although my step-brother and two step-sisters got orangeade in their lunches, I packed only water and peanut butter sandwiches. I feel small again. I trail behind as they walk us through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. “Don’t worry – we have our own in the addition.” So, the second house is really an add-on. There are so many places to sit. I imagine myself in the screened-in patio, at the backyard picnic table, at the dining room table. The dogs follow us everywhere. They crowd Morgane and try to lick her face.

“Maybe the dogs could go outside,” Morgane says, purposefully within earshot of our hostess. “The cats can stay.”

Our hostess takes us up two flights of stairs, to her daughter’s bedroom where we will sleep. I slow down as I pass each shelf of books. I don’t touch a thing, but my eyes take in every detail. I am memorizing these people.

“These are our daughter’s American Girl dolls,” says Meg as she pulls out a box of tiny clothes. “It’s been a long time since anyone played with them.” Morgane plants herself in the middle of an explosion of party dresses and swimsuits, shiny black shoes and flippers. “The dolls are historically accurate,” says Meg. “My mother never knew what to buy, so I picked things from the catalogue.” I gaze at a picture of a soccer team on the wall and wonder which one is their daughter. Inside the dolls’ miniature school book, a child has written the following lines: I will not write on my desk. I will not write on my desk.

Downstairs, we present them with our initial gift: ice cider and apple butter. Approximate value: $20. They thank us and place the gift on a side table. Then they decline our dinner invitation. Harry is under the weather; he wants to retire and watch “the game.”

“Our beach,” says Meg, “is just a mile down the road.” Ghis tells her we’ll drive. I smile – both for the beach and my relief at leaving the house. Imposing on strangers bring me too close to my childhood. Every day, my stepmother made it clear that I wasn’t welcome. I didn’t want to be there, anyway. I dreamed of every second weekend when I would be with my mother. I made myself a fierce promise that when I grew up, I would never go anywhere where I wasn’t wanted. So what am I doing here?

Their beach is nothing like my beach. It’s a small, sandy stretch surrounded by rocks. The sand is too wet for sitting. As we arrive, the wind picks up and clouds drown the sun. Morgane wants us to stand in the water, so I do, but not for long. Some of the locals are swimming. It’s too cold, but I let her put her bathing suit on. I make her change behind the towel on the beach. “No, Mommy, in the car,” she says, shaking her head like a filly.

Ghis gazes at a couple of kayaks. He’d love to be out on the water. “Let’s just go have dinner,” I say, shivering. When I say I’m disappointed with the beach, it leads to an argument. After the argument, we drive across the swing bridge towards Boothbay Harbor, where we walk past an old-fashioned bowling alley, a salt water taffy factory, and a lady with a four-scoop ice cream cone. Her husband is taking her picture, and she looks embarrassed. She sees me looking and explains, “My sister was here and she had three scoops.”

Morgane and I are soon too hungry and tired to walk any farther. All the restaurants look the same, lobsters everywhere, but we don’t want any. We find a patio overlooking the harbour, and I order a strawberry margarita even though I don’t usually drink.

When we get back to the house, the door is open, but nobody is home. I stroll around, admiring a silver tea set and a framed poster from Italy. Then I kick back on the couch in the living room. “See, I’m CouchSurfing,” I tell Ghis. He’s busy on the laptop, but acknowledges my comment with a half-smile.

The dogs announce our hosts’ arrival. They look very sleepy. “What inspired you to get involved with CouchSurfing?” Ghis asks them.

“Our daughter signed us up,” says Harry. “She said we had too much room, so we needed to have people over. We didn’t even know she’d done it, until we got a message at this old email address that we haven’t used for ages.”

“She’s a CouchSurfing ambassador,” adds Meg. Their eyes fill with love.

“Where is she?” I ask.

“In Paris, training to be an opera singer,” says Meg. “She dropped out of the conservatory and left to study with a controversial teacher. She has lessons every day, even Sundays.” Morgane grabs a toy Mozart figurine from the coffee table. I watch her, afraid that she will drop it.

“She won’t be able to unlearn this technique if it doesn’t work,” says Meg, looking worried. “But her teacher thinks that within a year, she’ll be a star.”

“That’s great,” I say. “Wow. She’s really doing it.”

“What’s your background in music?” Ghis asks.

“I wanted to sing. But my mother said I had to be a lawyer. So, I studied history. And she didn’t even pay for graduate school.” She puts on a recording of her daughter, singing arias to accompany a friend on violin. We all close our eyes and listen.

I lean back into the couch and enjoy the stillness. A solitary voice breaks the silence, with only a cello in the background. Nobody feels the need to speak. The only movement is her voice tying and untying my heart. I don’t have to think about words; when it is over, I will tell Meg and Harry how beautiful it was.

The interlude ends with a click as Meg shuts off the recording.

“Is your voice similar?” Ghis asks.

“We have exactly the same voice,” she says. “But my daughter has the star quality.” Ghis turns on the laptop and pulls up their daughter’s CouchSurfing profile. I am eager to see what star quality looks like. We all stare at her photo, a close-up of a red-haired girl with flowers in her hair. The picture is taken at night and it looks like she’s on a boat, the Seine River in the background. “Oh my,” says Meg. “She’s gone and dyed her hair red!” Harry looks away. When he turns back, it is to ask what our plans for tomorrow are.

“We’re going to Popham Beach,” I respond without hesitation.

“I’ll wash your beach towels for you,” says Meg.

I rub my forehead. Doesn’t she realize I’m trying not to impose? All I can see is a price tag stamped on everything we touch. One bedroom suite. $150 per night. Laundry service. $8.95. I think we’re going to have to buy another gift. I sneak away to our room and dream of my beach.

In the morning, Morgane and I peek out the bathroom window and discover that we can see the kitchen below. I admire the square island in the middle of the room. On it are the bananas we bought for breakfast.

Later, we sit at the table and eat the homemade muffins our hostess made using wild blackberries from their property. I feel shy and slightly ashamed as I spill crumbs onto their red tablecloth.

My stepmother made homemade bread, but I could never slice it straight. The only time she noticed me was when I did something wrong. I sliced the bread crooked. My father would ask me to try harder. I’d get up early, so I could eat before my stepmother got up. Then I’d retreat to my room and open a fresh novel.

I bring myself back to the moment. This is not my father’s house. We are all consenting adults. It’s like eating with friends of friends. Or a long lost aunt and uncle. Except we are strangers connected through cyberspace.

We get in the car and head towards my beach. As we drive over the swing bridge, Morgane sings A Whole New World, the way one does when wearing headphones. I admire the well-kept, colourful heritage houses we pass, imagining myself living in each one. After crossing a long bridge, we look for a place to grab lunch in historical Bath. “What about there?” I ask.

“Too late, passed it,” Ghis says. “We’ll just stop at the general store.” If it’s not closed, I think.

It is, so we have to backtrack. There’s not much on this long peninsula. I frown as the miles between me and the beach increase. Going to the beach is supposed to be fun, but the intensity of my longing is getting in the way. It’s hard to keep my eagerness a secret from Ghis, but if I tell him, he’ll tell me: it’s just a beach.

It’s Ghis’s turn to choose lunch and he wants pizza, the greasy stuff. While he orders, I walk to a health food store and buy things I’ve never seen in Canada: Kashi granola bars, microwavable mac & cheese. I come back to eat and find that Ghis has eaten his way through all three bags of chips. I snatch back what’s left of mine and Morgane’s.

As we get closer to the beach, I feel lighter. I’m one kilometre away from freedom. I am going to run all over this beach. But we can’t find any American change to pay for the parking. The park ranger tells us it’s okay if we don’t pay. But someone has to stay with the dog in the car.

“Are you sure that can’t be ‘okay,’ too?” Ghis asks, with a much thicker French accent than necessary. The ranger is sure. Ghis offers to stay, since he’s in the middle of the last Harry Potter. He doesn’t mind at all, but I am grateful beyond words.

Morgane and I walk over the rise, and it’s still there, as beautiful as the first time I saw it. So much space. I can breathe here. She picks up white shells while I take pictures. She dodges a wave, then digs in the sand, bent over like a dog. For a moment I am happy just to be there, but I can see my rocky island, and it’s low tide.

“Let’s make a sandcastle!” Morgane shouts.

“Come with Mommy first.”

We cross the sandy expanse. It’s so far, and we travel at a slug’s pace. Finally, I take my daughter’s hand and we climb up onto the big, rocky island. She wants to bring a handful of sand. “You just can’t,” I say. “How will you climb?”

We reach the top, my daughter and I, and I am proud of her. I let go of her hand while I take in my surroundings.

It’s not quite what I remember. I forgot about Fox Island, with its lighthouse. True, after this there is nothing, not until Europe. But today there is no blue in the sky, and no blue in the sea. I swat my legs. I’m getting bitten all over. I don’t remember any mosquitoes here. I try to inhale the smell of the ocean. It smells like rotting sea life.

There’s nothing here for me, no wind to blow away my worries, no open space to clear my mind. Just a bunch of mosquitoes who won’t leave me alone. I might as well be back on the beach with Morgane. After we climb down, she draws a big heart in the sand. I cinch the hood of my red Gore-tex jacket to protect myself. She is oblivious to the mosquitoes, but will pay later. “C’mon,” I tell her. “There will be other beaches.”

My daughter is exhausted; she drags behind me, crying, “Mommy, don’t leave me here.”

I turn to her and say. “I won’t ever leave you.” But the mosquitoes are driving me crazy, and all I want is to get off this beach.

Back at the car, Ghis is sleeping in the driver’s seat. He looks so innocent. Don’t act too disappointed, I think, or he’ll never do another thing for you.

After that, my dreams lose their grand scale. All I want is no mosquitoes. We drive to nearby Fort Popham and my wish is granted. Morgane is excited; she wants me to climb the thirty-foot granite tower, look out the windows, go back down and do it again. I stay in the car while Ghis and Morgane walk on the beach with our dog. I listen to an old song I love while gazing out at where the Kennebec River meets the sea. The music makes me feel grounded, leading me to wonder: Did I come all this way to find a piece of myself in our car? For now, the car feels like the best of both worlds: home and away.

I think about our argument in the car, yesterday, after the first disappointing beach. Morgane kept complaining. “I don’t want to go to a restaurant. I don’t want this music. I don’t want the window open.”

Then I told Ghis, “After coming all this way, that was a bit of a let-down.”

His response came at me out of the blue. He exploded. His voice was louder than his cell-phone voice. “I can’t stand your complaining! Just… please… stop… complaining!”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been caught off guard, but this time I questioned whether I was responsible for his anger. It didn’t seem right. “If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything,” snapped Ghis.

His comment felt like a spider creeping up my neck. I couldn’t ignore it. “Am I supposed to only have happy experiences? It’s not because I’m disappointed that you have to take it personally,” I told him.

“Are you saying…” he challenged, “it’s my fault if I’m angry?” His face was red, and he was shocked, his laughter sarcastic.

“Yes.”

Ghis swerved off the road, stopped sharply, and yelled, “Get out!”

For a second, I considered it. Perhaps there was a time when I’d have done what he said, but this time I was struck by a vision.

I am seven years old and riding in my father’s brown Oldsmobile, heading home. This is the year my parents will break up. This is the year my mother will be forced to move out. Soon I will become a visitor in my own home. It’s 1978 and seatbelts are not yet compulsory. The passenger door opens and I simply fall out of the car. My father keeps driving; the car gets smaller and then disappears. I sit there in the middle of the street, wondering about the sudden change in perspective. I don’t even think to cry.

There, on Southport Island, in between the general store and the swing bridge, my childhood faded into the past. And I felt sure that this car, this space, was as much mine as his. I said, “No, I’m not getting out.” Nothing, no crow bar, no explosion of anger could make me.

Faced with a human brick, an unmoveable wall, he could do nothing but stare while his balloon of anger deflated. The more it did, the lighter I felt, until I had to stifle
a laugh. Pop – everything became normal again, Ghis became Ghis, and we crossed the swinging bridge in our family car. “I just want you to be happy,” he said. “But I can’t be responsible for everything, for all our decisions, for your happiness.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind. I don’t need you to do that.”

A quiet voice spoke up from the back seat. “Mommy, can I tell you something?”

“Sure honey. What?”

“I love you.”

Here, by the Kennebec River and the Atlantic Ocean, my heart swells. I get out of the car and spot Ghis and Morgane, two specks far down the beach. When my daughter gets close enough to see me, she starts to run and doesn’t stop until she is in my arms. I hug Ghis, too. “Let’s make a sandwich,” says Morgane. “I’ll be the cheese!”

Back at the house, we all jostle around in the kitchen. Harry asks me to stir the risotto for a minute. Ghis is preparing our contribution, green beans with goat cheese and balsamic vinegar. At the table, we feast on pork tenderloin and homemade crisp, also made with local berries. We brought wine, and our hosts open a second bottle. I don’t drink.

After dinner, Harry gets up and moves to his comfy chair. My daughter follows him. She pats his belly and then climbs over it and settles into a comfortable perch on his lap. Like she’s always done this. Everyone sees this and understands that this is a gift of trust.

“I’ll read Morgane a story,” offers Meg. “The one my daughter loved about a mouse in a house.” They sit at the bottom of the stairs while I sit at the top, thinking about my father and how he read to me every night. Was that why my stepmother was so angry? We worked our way through The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings. And Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Later, Meg, wearing a night-blue velvet housecoat, tells me about being the only child in her unhappy mother’s house. Then we talk about our daughters. “Morgane,” she says, “is obviously very intelligent. I see the same thing in her that I see in my daughter.” I am pleased by this, but I see the fear in Meg’s eyes that never goes away. She doesn’t know how her daughter’s life will turn out. We nurture and protect our girls, but we also want them to live, even if it’s hard to watch. This intimate understanding of Meg reassures me. Meg won’t ask for anything, won’t make me feel guilty, won’t punish me for accepting their hospitality.

Harry and Meg go to bed, but Ghis and I stay up late. We tiptoe outside to the hot tub. It feels good to submerge ourselves. The house lights shine warmly behind the windows. Ghis wants all the lights off, but it’s too dark for me. He finds a switch and the water lights up. I lean on him in the green, glowing warmth. It starts to rain, but we just laugh. We’re already wet.

After four vaginal examinations, the ultrasound wand is almost commonplace. At every visit, Dr. J uses the wand to examine and measure my ovaries and uterus, as well as the minute cyst that has not budged from the right side of my fallopian tubes since my first visit in March.

“I can’t find your uterus,” Dr. J says this morning.

“Well, I’m sure it didn’t go anywhere,” I say, trying to smile, though the discomfort of the wand borders on more than mild pain.

Dr. J removes the wand, sits back in his chair and closes his eyes, my attempt at humor not even registering. “Sometimes,” he says, “when you try too hard to look for something, you cannot see it.”

He may be referring to his inability to find my uterus on the ultrasound screen, but I cannot help but think there must be some larger, albeit unintentional wisdom here, if only I could find it.

A minute or two later, Dr. J resumes his search with the wand, ultimately finding my uterus tilted far back on the right side. “It’s hiding,” he says.

“Why would it do that?” I say, imagining this most private of organs scooting away out of his, or at least the white rod’s reach.

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re nervous.”

Never mind the fact that I’m lying on an examining table with an ultrasound wand rammed up my vagina; not to mention the three days of Follicle Stimulating Hormone injections I have been giving myself in order to trigger the development of multiple eggs—somewhere between two and four but not six or eight. The idea behind the FSH injections being to up the chances of a single conception; what’s to be avoided: multiple fertilizations. Long term, the practice risks over-stimulating the ovaries and can bring serious health complications, chief among them ovarian cancer; but short term the procedure is common practice and considered safe. On a more mundane level, because our health insurance does not cover these procedures we’re spending $2,500 a month for treatment. What’s to be nervous about?

“Well?” I ask, once he removes the wand and turns off the ultrasound screen.

“I don’t understand it.” His brow is furrowed, and the bright lights reveal the perspiration there. “No change.”

“What do you mean no change?”

Only now do his eyes meet my own. “No increase in uterine lining, no developing follicles.”

“Maybe we need to increase the dose,” I say.

He doesn’t seem to hear me. “Are you sure you are having regular periods?”

“Of course I’m sure.” He asked this same question during my initial visit to his meeting room where my husband and I faced him across an enormous faux mahogany desk littered with plastic models of female reproductive organs. At that visit, our three-year-old daughter, Sophie, accompanied us. For the first ten or so minutes, Sophie sat quietly on my lap; once ten minutes became fifteen, she began to squirm and tried to talk over our conversation.

“Here,” Dr. J said at that visit, thrusting a teddy bear in scrubs across the desk at Sophie. “Why don’t you play with this?”

Sophie grabbed the bear and although I was grateful to see her calmed, I knew I would have a hell of a time getting it away from her. Sweet as he was, even then I sensed that Dr. J was clueless when it came to children. His specialty was knocking women up via the latest in medical technology. Children belonged to another field of expertise, something Sophie seemed to clue in on right away.

My high-energy daughter was conceived when I was thirty-eight and my husband, forty-nine. There were no doctors involved, no drugs. I just left the diaphragm in the drawer one night. It was the second time in my adult life that I did not use birth control. Well into my thirties, the main focus was always not getting pregnant, or at least not focusing on getting pregnant. Sophie beat all of the odds. (“A handful,” the nurse called her as she tried to roll off the changing table the night of her birth. “A spirit determined to make her way into this world,” I tell her now.)

“How high a dose of FSH are you taking now?” he asks.

“Seventy-five.”

“Let’s increase it to the next level,” he says.

I remove the injection pen from the refrigerated package in my purse and the nurse sets the dial to 112.5.

“You’re to continue the injections for four days,” he says, already backing towards the door. “Then come back and see me on Tuesday.”

~ ~ ~

Four days later, Dr. J has no trouble finding my uterus.

“Well?” I say, once he’s measured the uterine lining, the ovaries, and counted the follicles containing tiny eggs.

“There are four eggs,” he says, “but they don’t seem to be developing.”

“What do you mean?” I feel as if someone has just hit me, hard, in the stomach. “I don’t understand.”

Dr. J looks weary and perhaps a little irritated. “You don’t seem to be responding to the injections,” he says. “There is no point in doing the insemination this month.”

My mouth is dry, and I have trouble swallowing. If I say anything, it is inarticulate at best.

He fixes me with the dark eyes I initially found endearing. “Are you sure you are having regular periods?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m not saying you’re menopausal—”

“Of course I’m not.” Wasn’t it just weeks ago that he told me my FSH level was at the top of the list for a woman my age; and didn’t he say my husband’s was “a young man’s sperm?” What was he trying to do, win our trust only to abandon us? At this moment, Dr. J seems to stand before me as a luxury car salesman – even though he’s not wearing an Armani suit – or a game show host: Bob Barker in bowtie and plaids. What kind of deal, I want to ask, have we made?

“Check her estrogen levels,” he tells the nurse, not the middle-aged one from Friday who seemed annoyed when I asked her to help me calculate the remaining amount of FSH in the injection pen to be sure I had enough, but the pretty young one with an eighteen-month-old son in daycare from eight to six.

Without another word, he is gone.

“Is it possible that the injection levels have simply been too low all along?” I ask the nurse now.

“It’s certainly possible. We don’t want to over-stimulate you. Look,” she says gently, as the needle pierces my skin. “I know how disappointing this is. What you need to understand—”

“Yes?” I say, too eagerly, watching as the vial fills with blood.

“Here,” she says, “we live day by day.”

Peri-menopause

It’s raining when I leave Dr. J’s office and step into the gray morning without an umbrella. The hospital grounds are under construction, so I have to walk the length of two hospital parking lots before I reach my car.

Dr. J told me from the beginning not to become too hopeful—What if it does not happen? What will you do then? You need to consider this now. I could recommend a good counselor if you want to talk. I told myself and him that I could handle the process.

By the time I climb behind the wheel, I’m sobbing.

Who did you think you were you kidding anyway? A voice inside me asks. Not get your hopes up indeed.

How could I prevent my hopes from rising? I began buying ovulation kits last autumn, at this late stage in my reproductive life learning to track that optimal window for conception.

And when that didn’t work, I obtained a referral from my ob/gyn, and my husband and I went to see Dr. J in early February. Following the blood work and other testing, we made a game plan. We’d give the procedure three months. I would inject myself with FSH for the first week of my cycle to stimulate my ovaries, and then Dr. J would set or monitor the day of ovulation so that it concurred with the artificial insemination. By the end of March, I had received my own hormonal lab kit from the Freedom Fertility Pharmacy, whose symbol is the silhouette of a pregnant woman with her head tilted back in joy, her arms raised in the air as if in salutation to the moon and sun.

“You need to slow down,” Bill cautioned when I suggested a baby name or talked about postponing a trip next summer if we have a child. His words come back to me now as I sit in the car gripping the steering wheel.

Still, there was that night a few weeks ago when he confessed that he, too, had been looking more closely at newborns. Ten fingers, ten toes.

And didn’t he hurry to the door to greet me, cheeks flushed, the last time I came back from Dr. J’s? (He didn’t just hurry; he practically ran.) “Well?” he asked. “How did it go? Tell me.”

The blue of his eyes, the eagerness I saw there, recalled our daughter’s. How patiently he has been teaching her to find and recognize shapes: circles in car wheels, triangles in roofs; and how absurdly happy when she pooped in the potty for the first time.

It’s only now that it really sinks in, the fact that these treatments might not bring a second child into being. A newborn. A sibling for Sophie. Am I really able to handle the kind of disappointment this process might lead to? By focusing so intensely on conception, transforming it into a lengthy medical procedure, aren’t I setting myself up for a hard-hitting fall?

“We haven’t even completed one cycle, and Dr. J wants to stop the process this month,” I tell Bill later.

“I don’t get it,” he says.

“Neither do I.” I don’t say so, but I’m beginning to wonder if Dr. J will tell us that he was wrong. Despite the blood work and the semen analysis, we are not good candidates for fertility treatments.

The next thing I know, I’m typing up a letter to fax to Dr. J.
 
 

It’s Friday before Dr. J returns my phone call. “I want to apologize for how I handled your visit on Tuesday,” he says. “Even before I received your fax, I knew I needed to call you back. It was a rough day.”

“Thank you,” I say, carried back to that airless, deflated cry in the hospital parking lot.

“Look,” he says, “I’m in my forties also, so I can understand—not entirely, but somewhat—how you feel. Fact is, you’re in the peri-menopausal years. Your body’s irregular behavior is proof of this.”

I listen to him outline a course of action whereby my estrogen and FSH levels will be tested at the start of my next period before we repeat the process. “We could try more aggressive treatments,” he says, then names various drugs and procedures, including something called Lupor, which suppresses the reproductive system entirely; and even though he doesn’t bring up in vitro fertilization, or any of the more drastic steps, there’s a sick feeling in my stomach.

Maybe this is not to be. Face that. You have to face that.

“I’m not optimistic, and I’m not un-optimistic,” he continues. “You’re a very healthy woman, but your body is behaving irregularly. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“I understand.”

Here we live day by day.

For now, there are no answers.

Face that.

Fertile

What a funny business he’s in, I realize now, struggling to arrive at that out-of-reach objectivity. Not only did I get my hopes up very quickly, I began kicking around the idea of life with a newborn—Noah if he’s a boy, Fiona if a girl—and a four-year-old, easily picturing myself pushing a double stroller around town, or teaching Sophie how to give her baby sister or brother a bottle.

“I’m a little worried about you, worried about what you’ll do if this doesn’t work out,” a friend said recently. “Why are you so focused on having a second child now?” My friend is ten years younger than me and in the midst of finishing her dissertation. For the moment, she’s content with a dog and a yoga studio membership.

I tell her the truth, which means I tell her that Sophie has brought me more joy, as well as more heartache, than any other human being.

“Like I said,” she repeated, “I’m a little worried about you.”

Yesterday afternoon, Sophie and I set out on foot with the dogs and her stroller (just in case). I’m going to move at her pace, I told myself, resolved not to hurry her from one place to the next. We’ll take our time.

“Watch me, Mama,” Sophie said, hoisting herself onto a neighbor’s foot-high brick wall.

“You’re doing really well,” I replied, as she walked along, in one hand, an ice cream cone, in the other, the stuffed dog she’s taken to calling Swizzle.

Seconds later, she caught her foot on one of the bricks, then tumbled off the wall and into the ornamental grasses, which thankfully cushioned her fall.

I knelt beside her on the sidewalk.

“I scraped my knee, Mama,” she said, pointing to the reddening skin.

“You’re okay, lovey,” I said, brushing her off.

“I’m going to try again,” she said, and clambered back onto the brick wall.

Some twenty minutes later, we arrived at the elephant fountain two blocks away. We visit “him” almost daily, but not until this visit did Sophie stroke the wrinkled surface of his cast iron trunk, and swish her fingertips through the water that trickled out.

With nobody else do I look at the world so closely.

Because of Sophie, I’ve taken to salvaging butterfly wings and blue jay feathers. Because of Sophie, a walk around the neighborhood is a lesson in enchantment. “I’m going to turn myself into a bell,” she said a few months ago, “and then I’m going to ring myself.”

Conceive

“I would love to have a second child, too,” my friend Rezka tells me during our daughters’ swimming lessons this morning. “But I’d never subject myself to fertility treatments.”

“It’s just for a few months,” I say.

“Even so, it’s dangerous,” she says, then plunges into an overview of Linda Carter, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, who, she claims, underwent ovarian stimulation during the treatment’s more experimental and less carefully regulated years.

I have no idea what to say here, except that when we were children, my little sister idolized Wonder Woman. We never missed her show on Friday nights. For just a moment, I picture myself in her sexy leotard and thigh high boots striding into Dr. J’s office, the show’s theme song accompanying my super-heroine moves. “What happened to her?” I ask.

“She never conceived a child,” Rezka continues, “and she died of ovarian cancer.”

The theme song fades out.

“Aren’t you afraid of what will happen to you, not a year from now, but in fifteen years once Sophie, and any others to come after her, really need you?”

“Like I said, I’m only planning on doing this for a few months,” I reply, as our daughters splash in the water some twelve feet away from us.

Rezka shakes her head.

“What scares me more are the miscarriage rates for women over forty,” I hear myself say.

She lays a hand on my arm. “Don’t think about that. You’re so healthy. Losing a baby can happen at any time, to a woman at any age.”

Even with Dr. J’s help, the odds are against my becoming pregnant and successfully carrying a pregnancy to term. The chance of becoming pregnant in any one month is about twenty percent in women under thirty, and only five percent in women over forty. Dr. J, too, has drawn my attention to the fact that my reproductive situation has radically changed since I gave birth to Sophie.

I’m not alone.

Dr. J, to the best of my knowledge, is childless and unmarried, and he reminds me a little, just a little, of my high school biology partner, Jimmy Hoffman, a smart, skinny teenager who imprinted a baby chicken to himself for his semester-long project. As soon as the egg hatched, Jimmy was the first person that chicken saw. It—“Noodle”— followed Jimmy everywhere. He even talked about taking it to college. Dr. J isn’t skinny, but I think he was once, and I’m sure he was probably awkward well into adulthood. In fact, he is rather awkward now. On his last vacation, he drove to Oklahoma—“the middle of nowhere”—to visit relatives. As difficult as it is for me to picture this Beirut-educated, balding Middle Easterner in Lubbock, Texas, it’s even more difficult for me to picture him in a small town in central Oklahoma. And I really cannot imagine him at a cocktail party, something I have done, in part to soften the embarrassing intimacy of those ultra-sound sessions and the comprehensive, all too direct nature of some of our talks (How often do you and your husband have sex? Do you experience pain during intercourse?)

It’s his profession that gives him an aura of divinity, at least a halo, for patients who seek out fertility treatments are—at least to some extent—desperate. At the very least, we’re extremely eager: wide-eyed, overgrown children before a Christmas display. Is that part of the draw for him, I wonder, recalling our last conversation: If you don’t get a period, we’ll make you get one.

Though Dr. J has not suggested anything so radical as what makes headlines in the field, reproductive endocrinologists have to be among the group of doctors at the top of the list for playing god.

I have been willing to go on board with this plan because my desire for a second child is that strong, and although my reasons are those of women throughout the world, they are certainly not rational. Don’t I have one healthy, beautiful child? Weren’t the last three years among the most demanding, physically and emotionally, of my life (and Bill’s)?

Strong-willed personalities both, now that Bill and I are regularly under-slept and worn out with juggling the demands of teaching undergraduate as well as graduate students, university responsibilities, and a household that includes two dogs and Sophie, not a week goes by without a fight. Usually, we argue over something as ridiculous as who was supposed to buy new pillows for a houseguest’s visit, or why I gave Sophie ice cream too late at night, a quarter scoop being the supposed cause of her high energy eleven p.m. antics.

“Sometimes, when you try too hard to look for something, you cannot see it.”

Am I beginning to see what I could not that day in the darkness of the ultrasound room? The etymology of fertility is not just about fruitfulness. It comes from the Latin ferre “to bear” or ”to carry.” The obvious connection is childbirth, but don’t endurance and the idea of ferrying across come into play here as well? Uncertainty is what I must learn to carry, and in time, regardless of the outcome, to carry with grace. After all, when I was waiting for the results of the amniocentesis during my pregnancy with Sophie, didn’t my close friend, now a grandmother, tell me that the unknown, the surrender of control, was part of a mother’s journey? Something I would have to learn to live with for the rest of my life?

This evening, after a late afternoon rain, Sophie joins me in the garden where I am looking for ripe tomatoes.

“Watch, Mama,” she cries. In her hand she holds a wooden stick to which Bill has attached some four feet of glossy pink ribbon.

“Watch me!” she cries again, bolder now, ebullient, as she begins to twirl in circles, plunging the stick up and down and around, so that the ribbon arcs and swirls around her, a pink rainbow undulating across the silver-blue sky.

We need to buy some fresh mint. A rough-hewn board serves as a counter. The merchant in his filthy apron, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, is barely visible behind his mountain of green leaves. Maman fingers the bouquets, picks one, then exchanges a few words with the placid man who finally agrees, “Ouara!”.

Farther along, we find mountains of scented oranges. Maman’s hand is expert at this, “Jouj kilograms!”. An old, noisy, rusty Roberval scale is called into service. The oranges are tipped into the basket. Maman bargains with the merchant who offers her peppers, grapefruit, mandarines, dates, guavas, kumquats and pomegranates. “Choukrane, not today, we’re in a hurry, inch’ allah tomorrow!”

An old man wearing a jellaba is half-asleep in his chair, on his lap a copper plate of cakes dripping with honey. Using a sheet of newspaper, he holds out a honey-almond briouat that has been dipped scalding hot into boiling honey. Tomorrow, there will be a griouch made with sesame, saffron or orange blossom. Another time, there will be a sugar crescent cookie or a butter ghoriba. A few dirham change hands. He places the money in his turban.

We need lemons, coriander, and cumin for the tajine stew as well. The display is magnificent under the bright sunshine. Multicoloured spices, ground with care and displayed in small pyramids exude various aromas: nutmeg, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric. Beside them are jute bags full of peppers, maniguette, lavander, citron tree, bay leaves, licorice and aniseed. The merchant holds out three small newspaper cones full of spices.

Finally, a few olives: green, purple, and black. Plump, oily, tender, stuffed with anchovies or almonds, macerated in hot red pepper or fennel seeds, always aromatic. “Zitoune,” a word I know both in Arabic and French. We finish with a bouquet of anemones, mimosas, or marigolds placed on top of the basket. Off in the distance, we hear the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. The enchanting aromas accompany us on our way home. Spices, herbs, and fragrances are a prelude to all that is joyful in Morocco.

Holding onto my friend’s arm under a black umbrella, we make our way slowly through the crowded market pulling our wet caddy. Hens, ducks, and rabbits patiently await their fate in small, overcrowded cages. The fruit and vegetable displays announce the seasons. Wooden crates are full of apples, pears, medlars, figs, quinces, leeks, cardons, and beets. Over here, pumpkins of every size, over there a mountain of Swiss chard. We fill basins with huge dark green Webb lettuce. The electronic scale shows the price, which is rounded off by the merchant. An old woman’s miniature display offers pine honey, a few walnuts, thistles, and chestnuts. The smell of fruit, dampness, poultry, and cheese. Umbrellas collide. A small donkey and its owner, stoic despite the rain, offer up honey lozenges. A small boy wearing a yellow raincoat stands in the centre of the bustling marketplace trying to sell his two kittens. We plough our way through the crowd engaged in talk of the bad weather, children or politics. Mud-spattered street pedlars call to housewives huddled under plastic tarp awnings, lured there by the promise of the spoon of the century—“a cook’s third hand”—or by dishcloths capable of cleaning anything and everything without the benefit of detergent, all for the modest sum of . . . We enter the covered part of the market and shut the drenched umbrella. We’re off to get bread: a huge, dark ball with a thick crust. And a spongy Saint-Genix for dessert, chock‑full of red pralines in melted sugar. A few francs for the baker. The smell of roast chicken fills the air. To our right, the horse butcher’s and the vendor for pork, fatted chicken and rabbit. Why not stop for a few fresh quenelles, pork sausage, and some crozets. To our left, the fishmongers. We’re jostled and our caddy gets stuck on a display stand. Farther down, the gentle country aroma of cheese; creamy Saint-Marcellin, runny reblochons, aged beaufort, tome in brandy. How about a raclette tonight? A tartiflette? Some matafans? New words for me in French, my mother tongue. A girlfriend makes her way over to us, we exchange kisses and share the latest gossip. A colleague waves. A neighbour greets us and invites us over for coffee. With a bouquet of dahlias on top of our weighed-down caddy, we make our slow way home. Sainte-Chapelle’s bells ring, announcing twelve o’clock. Housewives make their way back to their kitchens. The rain has stopped. The Chilean trio is about to start up again on their pan flutes. Under the sun’s light, Chambéry’s market brightness will assume its full éclat, a veritable impressionist painting come to life.

My young son’s hand in mine, we make our way into the supermarket pushing a huge cart. The fruit and vegetable display is meticulous, in tidy rows, and colourful under the neon lights. Everything is clean, immaculately so. The displays are calculated as to their height, presentation, quantity, juxtaposition, and groupings. No aroma, not of bananas, peaches, or even mangoes. Likely the fruit was picked before it had ripened for the trip across the world in sealed containers to arrive in a presentable state on our plates. Automatic sprayers deposit artificial dew, giving the fruits and vegetables from around the world a reprieve. I reach for the products I’m familiar with, laden as they are with memories: coriander, clementines, dates, pomelos, pomegranate, persimmon, and sweet potatoes. I discover a host of other products: durians, cranberries, cantaloupe, okra, cherimoles, pecans, granadilla, rambutans, star fruit, mangosteens, physalis, tamarillos . . . So many words that I learned in English first, and only in French later. Around the world in sixty seconds or less. I imagine the bunch of grapes being packaged in Chile, the avocado leaving Mexico and the mandarins exported from Japan, their long trip through the crush and refrigeration gases, and the climate shock of their arrival in our snow‑covered lands. No apparent sign of the seasons: strawberries, peaches, cantaloupes, raspberries, and bananas are offered year‑round. I hurry, my shopping cart is full of plastic bags to protect the tastes and colours I love so much. I inhale the scent of the coriander as I set it down on the cashier’s moving belt. I weigh the firm red pomegranate in my hand. The cashier smiles and asks me to identify the contents of several bags. What strange tastes I have! “I’m from Morocco . . . and from France.” In her eyes, I’m as exotic as the contents of my bags. We exchange dollars. I carry my plastic bags. So unlike the string bags, the cloth bags, the wicker baskets and caddies. My little boy carries a bouquet of tulips imported from the Netherlands. We return to our car, incognito in the Canadian city that has become my home for the past twenty years.

The taste of Morocco, France, and Canada come together on my tongue . . . my mother tongue. I dip into one then another to meet my gustatory and linguistic expectations. I close my eyes, I taste and I remember . . . Heat versus cold, the snow versus a scorching sun, sweet and salty, and yet, together in me, all the blends of scents, spices and colours reach a place of harmony. A single scent or colour transports me to picturesque Morocco, the French countryside or the Canadian expanses. The three cultures live inside me, hand in hand.

I’ve woken up four different nights around 3 a.m. to the bip, bip, bip of one of my eight smoke detectors in this three-bedroom, two-bathroom house that’s become my bachelorette pad. One of their silly backup batteries is dead, but I can’t figure out which one. I stand at the top of the steps in the dark, trying to figure out which one it is, since the sound echoes and I have to listen closely. Half asleep still, I shuffle into slip-on shoes and haul a triangle ladder up my steps from the basement to stand on the top rung, tipsy. Barely awake, I pull the detectors off their base from the high cathedral ceilings and remove the batteries. I keep remembering and then forgetting to call the fire department to bring their boys and check them. My dog, Ivan, curls up at my feet when I return to bed these nights, huffs loudly like he’s bored and confused, and begins snoring. I hardly fall back to sleep before it’s time to wake up for work.

I buy new expensive area rugs from Ikea and wait until Ivan’s stomach flu has run its course, and begin tearing up the old carpets I bought from Ollie’s Discount Outlet, quickly realizing that the entertainment center and television that my ex-boyfriend and his brother slowly shifted into the living room when we moved in are too heavy for me to get one of the carpet slabs completely out from under it. So I take scissors and cut around the wooden empire, leaving carpet coasters under the furniture legs while drinking wine from the bottle because I feel weak without a man to help. And then Ivan and I lie on the new carpets and sigh.

Days later, I call my dad to ask how to transplant a new seat onto my bicycle, how to fix a storm door, how to stop a leak.
 
 

I find stiff brown bags of tomatoes dropped over the makeshift fence from the old and friendly minister and his wife who grow a small garden in the lot behind their concrete back yard. And sometimes he even puts my trash can on my porch after the garbage trucks have pulled away on pickup day. In the Spring, he pulls lion-headed dandelion weeds from the front of the house to save me the trouble.

When I speak to my dad, I tell him how nice Mr. Ed is, how he looks after me.

I spend nights on the back porch after tending to the dilapidated flowerbox garden that’s unhinged at one end. With dirt and grime still under my fingernails, I watch the sun set while smoking and drinking a beer.

The boy down the street comes by every Monday evening to ask me if I need my grass cut, and I say no, regretting not paying the small price as I add a new callous to my finger while cursing at the 1950s push mower that gets tangled in the gangly weed arms. Ivan settles into a flower box, watching and sunning, and tilting his head every time I say that four-letter word.

My cell phone can be silent for days, so I order every new movie from Comcast ignoring the stacked, unread books staring me down from my bookshelf. I order pizza and eat the second half when it’s cold. I keep the house at 60 degrees, sometimes cooler, and walk around the house wearing clothes like a homeless person, with layer after layer drooping over my body: T-shirt, sweatshirt, socks, pajama pants, legwarmers.
 
 

I spend an hour chipping the ice off of my car and shoveling the snow around it at least once a week in these frightful Northeast winters. I have to pop the emergency break more than once in January to prevent skidding my car into the lamppost at the bottom of my steeply inclined street, which everyone says is too dangerous to be anywhere but San Francisco. I come out to salt my steps, but find that someone else, anonymously, has already helped.

I don’t answer the door when I’m not expecting company, just like my dad taught, and when Ivan barks at the interruption, I cover myself with the blanket on the couch just in case the unannounced stranger stands on tiptoes to look through the peep window. I set my house alarm that I haven’t yet registered with the alarm monitoring company , but it still makes an awesome shrilling sound. I hope the alarm will go off if someone opens the downstairs window which I’m not sure is completely locked. I haven’t tested it because I’m paranoid someone will see me and break it, and break in. I lie awake at night and when the bars let out, and the patrons heavy-foot the hill, I hear boys fighting with girls, and girls fighting with boys, and caravans of cars with hip-hop blaring. I can’t help but think about the two guys whose faces were stabbed down the street and around the corner and I’m a movement away from calling 911 for no reason except to speak to someone other than my dog.

Who stabs someone in the face?

I wonder if I’m clinically crazy to live alone in Baltimore.

My dad tells me he’s found some nice apartments for singles.

But I lock my bedroom door and keep a rope ladder by the bed, just in case I need to escape in the nick of time. I have a duffel bag to put Ivan in so I can carry him on my back down the rungs, and out to safety.

Everything I own is in one lone bedroom because it’s where we slept when we were together here, and the other bedrooms, once broken in by two roommates, sit empty and echoey and have the better view, but the colder air. I shower with both bathroom doors open so I can step to the other side of the house briefly and see the traffic on 83 and the Pepsi sign. Ivan stays in bed until it’s time for breakfast.

I only clean when I’m bored or angry or expecting company. Other than that, there’s a lot of dog hair and sometimes I forget to take out the recycling and it piles up for weeks in cardboard boxes with the bills, with magazines never-thumbed-through, and with Baltimore Sun Plus crossword puzzles.

Sometimes, I can still smell cologne in my pillowcases.
 
 

The alcoholic across the street stayed with me after the cops came when a tractor trailer pinned my parked car up against the curb, because he knew I had no one else around. And he could speak Spanish. He was nowhere to be found when I came back from surgery a week later. My friend dropped me off, my car being a repeat-victim of a hit and run. I walked to the liquor store and scored him a six-pack of beer anyway and he gave me the name of a good local body shop around the corner to go to.

I sleep naked sometimes, and sometimes not, and sometimes in the morning I am in such a rush that I hyper-dry my pants and skirts in the dryer because I don’t have time to iron them. I still have to put makeup on and feed Ivan and let him out and make my lunch and do the dishes and set the fake alarm. Ivan sits between my legs when I’m on the lid of the toilet blow-drying my hair and looks up at me, as if waiting for something.

I have parties and invite everyone I’ve ever met and spend days cooking food for far too many people but everyone shows up hours late, and I’m already drunk from waiting. And they’re not hungry.

I drive to Target during lunch break or Rite Aid on the way home from work to buy electronic mice repellent doohickeys that buzz incessantly and keep me from falling asleep. Sometimes I try bait, in bags or loose, or traps, or more bait, or more traps. I see a mouse scurry out of my slipper and across the hardwood floors in dimmed lighting, and while Ivan hardly notices, I keep my feet on the couch for hours.

I snuggle with Ivan in the early morning hours when it’s cold, too cold to get out of bed to stomp down the steps to turn up the heat, and he licks my face until it hurts.

Weeks later, spring arrives. The ants come.

I say no to trips and invitations, because I have no one to watch the dog.

But once in a while, I have someone over and Ivan is put out into the hallway and scratches at the bedroom door until he calms down when it’s important. And it’s creepy, but he slides back onto the bed after we let him back in and he sleeps between us, like I’ve been with someone he loves too.

I get drunk alone sometimes and dance to old vinyl records, like Diana Ross, Fleetwood Mac, even Mötley Crüe, and Culture Club, and Ivan tap dances around me, his nails clicking the floor, because he thinks I’m happy.
 
 

I buy only what I will eat so I never have food when friends come over unexpectedly and sometimes I spend the weekend in the same pajamas covered in dog hair. I wear my reading glasses with the scotch tape on the side of them, and filter in and out of sleep and movies I can’t remember.

I still find relics of the man I loved and the roommates I could have lived without, and I throw them away, or sell them, as I see fit. And I still hear footsteps where none should be. And when I lay down at night, in silence, I write poetry in my head until I fall asleep.

I hear my neighbor run up and down his steps through the thin wall separating our homes and I know that he can hear me when I call Ivan handsome and carry his stuffed toy and his eight rawhide pieces up the steps and speak to him in baby voices saying, “Mr Stinkyface” and “tired tired boy” as we slink up the steps to bed.