Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

put, and rode off to the store. Stay there, don’t move, don’t worry, she said. Then she kissed Lorna’s ear. Lorna obeyed her to the letter. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen, she remained crouched behind the white lilac bush, learning the shapes of the stones, the dark and light ones, in the house’s foundation. Until Polly came tearing back and flung the bike down in the yard and came calling her name. Lorna, Lorna, throwing down the bag of brown sugar or walnuts and kissing her all around her head. For the thought had occurred to her that Lorna might have been spotted in her corner by lurking kidnappers—the bad men who were the reason that girls must not go down into the field behind the houses. She had prayed all her way back for this not to have happened. And it hadn’t. She bustled Lorna inside to warm her bare knees and hands.
    Oh, the poor little handsies, she said. Oh, were you scared? Lorna loved the fussing and bent her head to have it stroked, as if she was a pony.

    The pines gave way to the denser evergreen forest, the brown lumps of hills to the rising blue-green mountains. Daniel began to whimper and Lorna got out his juice bottle. Later she asked Brendan to stop so that she could lay the baby down on the front seat and change his diaper. Brendan walked at a distance while she did this, smoking a cigarette. Diaper ceremonies always affronted him a little.
    Lorna also took the opportunity of getting out one of Elizabeth’s storybooks and when they were settled again she read to the children. It was a Dr. Seuss book. Elizabeth knew all the rhymes and even Daniel had some idea of where to chime in with his made-up words.
    Polly was no longer that person who had rubbed Lorna’s small hands between her own, the person who knew all the things Lorna did not know and who could be trusted to take care of her in the world. Everything had been turned around, and it seemed that in the years since Lorna got married Polly had stayed still. Lorna had passed her by. And now Lorna had the children in the back seat to take care of and to love, and it was unseemly for a person of Polly’s age to come clawing for her share.
    It was no use for Lorna to think this. No sooner had she put the argument in place than she felt the body knock against the door as they tried to push it open. The dead weight, the gray body. The body of Polly, who had been given nothing at all. No part in the family she had found, and no hope of the change she must have dreamed was coming in her life.
    “Now read Madeleine ,” said Elizabeth.
    “I don’t think I brought Madeleine ,” said Lorna. “No. I didn’t bring it. Never mind, you know it off by heart.”
    She and Elizabeth started off together.

“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
In two straight lines they broke their bread
Brushed their teeth and went to bed—”

    This is stupidity, this is melodrama, this is guilt. This will not have happened.
    But such things do happen. Some people founder, they are not helped in time. They are not helped at all. Some people are pitched into darkness.

“In the middle of the night,
Miss Clave I turned on the light.
She said, ‘Something is not right—’”

    “Mommy,” said Elizabeth. “Why did you stop?” Lorna said, “I had to, for a minute. My mouth got dry.”

    At Hope they had hamburgers and milkshakes. Then down the Fraser Valley, the children asleep in the back seat. Still some time left. Till they got to Chilliwack, till they got to Abbotsford, till they saw the hills of New Westminister ahead and the other hills crowned with houses, the beginnings of the city. Bridges still that they had to go over, turns they had to take, streets they had to drive along, corners they had to pass. All this in the time before.
    The next time she saw any of it would be in the time after.
    When they entered Stanley Park it occurred to her to pray. This was shameless—the opportune praying of a nonbeliever. The gibberish of let-it-not-happen, let-it-not-happen. Let it not have happened.
    The day was still cloudless. From the Lion’s Gate Bridge they looked out at the Strait of Georgia.
    “Can you see Vancouver Island today?” said Brendan. “You look, I can’t.”
    Lorna craned her neck to look past him.
    “Far away,” she said. “Quite faint but it’s there.”
    And with the sight of those blue, progressively dimmer, finally almost dissolving mounds that