Friend of My Youth

a drowning, and they both disappear. Karin looks at these pictures of the pale, lumpy ice monstrosities, these pictures Austin took, so often that she gets the feeling that he is in them, after all. He’s a blank in them, but bright.
    She thinks now that he knew. Right at the last he knew that she’d caught on to him, she understood what he was up to. No matter how alone you are, and how tricky and determined, don’t you need one person to know? She could be the one for him. Each of them knew what the other was up to, and didn’t let on, and that was a link beyond the usual. Every time she thinks of it, she feels approved of—a most unexpected thing.
    She puts one of the pictures in an envelope, and sends it to Megan. (She tore the list of addresses and phone numbers off the wall, just in case.) She sends another to Don. And another, stamped and addressed, across town, to Brent. She doesn’t write anything on the pictures or enclose any note. She won’t be bothering any of these people again. The fact is, it won’t be long till she’ll be leaving here.
    She just wants to make them wonder.

Goodness and Mercy

    Bugs said so long to the disappearing land, a dark-blue finger of Labrador. The ship was passing through the Strait of Belle Isle, on its third day out from Montreal.
    “Now I’ve got to make it to the white cliffs of Dover,” she said. She made a face, rounding her eyes and her small, adept mouth, her singer’s mouth, as if she had to accept some nuisance. “Else it’s over the side and feed the fishes.”
    Bugs was dying, but she had been a very slender, white-skinned woman before she started that, so there wasn’t a shocking difference. Her bright-silver hair was cut in a clever fluffed-out bob by her daughter Averill. Her pallor was by no means ghastly, and the loose tops and caftans that Averill had made for her concealed the state of her arms and her upper body. Occasional expressions of fatigue and distress blended in with an old expression she had—a humorous, hardened plaintiveness. She was not looking at all bad, and her coughing was under control.
    “That’s a joke,” she said to Averill, who was paying for the trip out of some money left to her by the father she had never seen, to remember. When they made the arrangements, they hadn’t known what was going to happen—or that it was going to happen as soon as now looked likely.
    “Actually, I intend to hang around making your life miserable for years to come,” Bugs said. “I look better. Don’t you think? Anyway, in the morning. I’m eating. I was thinking I’d start taking little walks. I walked to the rail yesterday, when you weren’t here.”
    They had a cabin on the boat deck, with a chair for Bugs set up outside. There was a bench under the cabin window, occupied now by Averill and in the mornings by the University of Toronto professor whom Bugs called her admirer, or “that professorial jerk.”
    This was happening on a Norwegian passenger-carrying freighter, in the late seventies, in the month of July. All the way across the North Atlantic the weather was sunny, the sea flat and bright as glass.
    Bugs’ real name, of course, was June. Her real name, and her singing name, was June Rodgers. For the last year and three months she had not sung in public. For the last eight months she had not gone to the Conservatory to give lessons. She had a few students coming to the apartment on Huron Street, in the evenings and on Saturdays, so that Averill could accompany them on the piano. Averill worked at the Conservatory, in the office. She biked home for lunch every day, to see if Bugs was all right. She didn’t say she was doing it for that reason. She had the excuse of her special lunch—skim milk, wheat germ, and a banana mixed up in the blender. Averill was usually trying to lose weight.
    Bugs had sung at weddings, she had been the paid soloist with church choirs, she had sung in the
Messiah
and the
St. Matthew Passion
and in Gilbert and Sullivan. She had sung supporting roles in Toronto productions of operas with famous imported stars. For a while in the fifties she had shared a radio program with a popular drunken tenor, who had got them both sacked. The name June Rodgers had been well enough known all the time that Averill was growing up. It was well enough known,at least, among the people that Averill usually met. It was a surprise for Averill, more than for Bugs, to run into people now who didn’t recognize