The Love of a Good Woman

astonishment, or shame, and fell asleep again and woke with a memory I got used to denying in the morning. For years and years and surely long after he was dead Mr. Gorrie operated in my nightlife this way. Until I used him up, I suppose, the way we use up the dead. But it never seemed to be this way—that I was in charge, that I had brought him there. It seemed to be working both ways, as if he had brought me there, too, and it was his experience as much as it was mine.
    And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.
    But I never saw the charred beams of the house fallen down on the body of the husband. That had happened a long time before and the forest had grown up all around it.

SAVE THE REAPER

    T HE game they played was almost the same one that Eve had played with Sophie, on long dull car trips when Sophie was a little girl. Then it was spies—now it was aliens. Sophie’s children, Philip and Daisy, were sitting in the backseat. Daisy was barely three and could not understand what was going on. Philip was seven, and in control. He was the one who picked the car they were to follow, in which there were newly arrived space travellers on their way to the secret headquarters, the invaders’ lair. They got their directions from the signals offered by plausible-looking people in other cars or from somebody standing by a mailbox or even riding a tractor in a field. Many aliens had already arrived on earth and been translated—this was Philip’s word—so that anybody might be one. Gas station attendants or women pushing baby carriages or even the babies riding in the carriages. They could be giving signals.
    Usually Eve and Sophie had played this game on a busy highway where there was enough traffic that they wouldn’t be detected.(Though once they had got carried away and ended up in a suburban drive.) On the country roads that Eve was taking today that wasn’t so easy. She tried to solve the problem by saying that they might have to switch from following one vehicle to another because some were only decoys, not heading for the hideaway at all, but leading you astray.
    “No, that isn’t it,” said Philip. “What they do, they suck the people out of one car into another car, just in case anybody is following. They can be like inside one body and then they go
schlup
through the air into another body in another car. They go into different people all the time and the people never know what was in them.”
    “Really?” Eve said. “So how do we know which car?”
    “The code’s on the license plate,” said Philip. “It’s changed by the electrical field they create in the car. So their trackers in space can follow them. It’s just one simple little thing, but I can’t tell you.”
    “Well no,” said Eve. “I suppose very few people know it.”
    Philip said, “I am the only one right now in Ontario.”
    He sat as far forward as he could with his seat belt on, tapping his teeth sometimes in urgent concentration and making light whistling noises as he cautioned her.
    “Unh-unh, watch out here,” he said. “I think you’re going to have to turn around. Yeah. Yeah. I think this may be it.”
    They had been following a white Mazda, and were now, apparently, to follow an old green pickup truck, a Ford. Eve said, “Are you sure?”
    “Sure.”
    “You felt them sucked through the air?”
    “They’re translated simultaneously,” Philip said. “I might have said ‘sucked,’ but that’s just to help people understand it.”
    What Eve had originally planned was to have the headquarters turn out to be in the village store that sold ice cream, or in theplayground. It could be revealed that all the aliens were congregated there in the form of children, seduced by the pleasures of ice cream or slides and swings, their powers temporarily in abeyance. No fear they could abduct you—or get into you—unless you chose the one wrong flavor of ice cream or swung the exact wrong number of times on the designated swing. (There would have to be some remaining danger, or else Philip would feel let down, humiliated.) But Philip had taken charge