months,” he told her. “And the money’s great.”
“It’s depressing up there. You said so yourself.”
“That’s because the people are depressed.”
“So why do you need to go to a place like that?”
“They don’t have enough health care up there to serve the native population,” he said. “They need help. They need me.”
Martine raised herself up on one elbow, holding the palm of herhand against her ear as if to block out this statement.
“C’est assez, là,”
she muttered to the pillow, and he didn’t ask what, specifically, she’d had enough of—this trip, or his arguments on behalf of it. In the apartment’s other bedroom, Mathieu thrashed around restlessly, as he always did for hours before falling asleep. Once on the other side, though, he slept as if dead, and in the mornings, while Martine made breakfast, it was Mitch’s job to guide him back to consciousness from his faraway state. He wouldn’t ever have admitted to her how much he hated doing this, how often he crouched by the boy’s bed, looking at his chest to make sure he was still breathing—always certain that this time, this morning, he wasn’t—or how violently he sometimes had to shake Mathieu’s shoulder before he finally, reluctantly, awoke.
Rousing the bear
, is how Mitch thought of it, as if the child were some gigantic, threatening animal instead of a scrawny, thin-limbed faun. Most mornings, he would scrunch himself into a ball and mutter angrily,
“Non, non”—
to consciousness, to Mitch, to the world. Then Mitch would try to pick him up and carry him to the kitchen, but Mathieu didn’t like to be touched and would hammer his fists against Mitch’s chest until he left him alone. This war was a daily ritual.
Unspoken between Martine and Mitch now was the accusation that he was leaving to escape the burden of her son; that he might be needed by the people in Nunavut, sure, but that most of all he needed to get away.
He’d met Martine on the day her divorce became final, a moment of sorrow and vulnerability that he wasn’t too scrupulous to take advantage of. Had he met her even a day later, he believed, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. Forty-five, sexy, and brilliantly smart, Martine took care of her job and her son with determined energy, and she dispatched her husband once he proved unequal to the task of having a difficult child and rebelled by having affairs. Only at night did cracks show in her independent daytime self; but even then she rarely reverted back to the crying woman he had first seen smoking a cigarette outside the Palais de Justice, choking and sobbing through the gray storm of her own exhale. Mitch had mostly been single since his own marriage had fallen apart, and what few relationships he’dhad arose when he was pursued. But this woman was so clearly in need of help—a kind gesture, a tissue—that he stopped and fished a Kleenex packet out of his coat pocket. The day was cold, and her eyes were red and pinched. Her curly hair was piled on her head in a messy, complicated arrangement, strands escaping here and there. She thanked him in French, and he responded in kind. Delicately, she transferred her cigarette to her left hand and blew her nose goose-honkingly hard with her right. That a woman could look so beautiful in the midst of an operation like this made Mitch’s heart turn over. He had always been a romantic, but divorce and middle age had squeezed it out of him, or so he’d thought until now.
“Are you all right?” he said.
The woman looked at him with an undisguised scorn that had a kind of desire glimmering around the edges of it. What she wanted, he thought, was for a better candidate to come along, but she’d take what she could get.
“I need a drink,” she answered, switching to English.
“Could I buy you one?”
She nodded and led him, pretty aggressively, he thought, to a bar on Saint-Paul—but it was just that Martine, he figured out later,
“It’s depressing up there. You said so yourself.”
“That’s because the people are depressed.”
“So why do you need to go to a place like that?”
“They don’t have enough health care up there to serve the native population,” he said. “They need help. They need me.”
Martine raised herself up on one elbow, holding the palm of herhand against her ear as if to block out this statement.
“C’est assez, là,”
she muttered to the pillow, and he didn’t ask what, specifically, she’d had enough of—this trip, or his arguments on behalf of it. In the apartment’s other bedroom, Mathieu thrashed around restlessly, as he always did for hours before falling asleep. Once on the other side, though, he slept as if dead, and in the mornings, while Martine made breakfast, it was Mitch’s job to guide him back to consciousness from his faraway state. He wouldn’t ever have admitted to her how much he hated doing this, how often he crouched by the boy’s bed, looking at his chest to make sure he was still breathing—always certain that this time, this morning, he wasn’t—or how violently he sometimes had to shake Mathieu’s shoulder before he finally, reluctantly, awoke.
Rousing the bear
, is how Mitch thought of it, as if the child were some gigantic, threatening animal instead of a scrawny, thin-limbed faun. Most mornings, he would scrunch himself into a ball and mutter angrily,
“Non, non”—
to consciousness, to Mitch, to the world. Then Mitch would try to pick him up and carry him to the kitchen, but Mathieu didn’t like to be touched and would hammer his fists against Mitch’s chest until he left him alone. This war was a daily ritual.
Unspoken between Martine and Mitch now was the accusation that he was leaving to escape the burden of her son; that he might be needed by the people in Nunavut, sure, but that most of all he needed to get away.
He’d met Martine on the day her divorce became final, a moment of sorrow and vulnerability that he wasn’t too scrupulous to take advantage of. Had he met her even a day later, he believed, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. Forty-five, sexy, and brilliantly smart, Martine took care of her job and her son with determined energy, and she dispatched her husband once he proved unequal to the task of having a difficult child and rebelled by having affairs. Only at night did cracks show in her independent daytime self; but even then she rarely reverted back to the crying woman he had first seen smoking a cigarette outside the Palais de Justice, choking and sobbing through the gray storm of her own exhale. Mitch had mostly been single since his own marriage had fallen apart, and what few relationships he’dhad arose when he was pursued. But this woman was so clearly in need of help—a kind gesture, a tissue—that he stopped and fished a Kleenex packet out of his coat pocket. The day was cold, and her eyes were red and pinched. Her curly hair was piled on her head in a messy, complicated arrangement, strands escaping here and there. She thanked him in French, and he responded in kind. Delicately, she transferred her cigarette to her left hand and blew her nose goose-honkingly hard with her right. That a woman could look so beautiful in the midst of an operation like this made Mitch’s heart turn over. He had always been a romantic, but divorce and middle age had squeezed it out of him, or so he’d thought until now.
“Are you all right?” he said.
The woman looked at him with an undisguised scorn that had a kind of desire glimmering around the edges of it. What she wanted, he thought, was for a better candidate to come along, but she’d take what she could get.
“I need a drink,” she answered, switching to English.
“Could I buy you one?”
She nodded and led him, pretty aggressively, he thought, to a bar on Saint-Paul—but it was just that Martine, he figured out later,
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