Inside (8 page)

“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 her
hand 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’d
had 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, saw no need to pretend not to know what she wanted. He ordered a martini for her and a beer for himself. She kept smoking, lighting one du Maurier off the flaming stub of the last, as they exchanged bare-bones information: names, professions, the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked. Her hair continued to slip free from its moorings, half of it now hanging down.

“Were you married a long time?” he asked.

“It felt like a very long time,” she said. “But the last few years we were living apart anyway.
Fait que
, this isn’t really a very big change.”

“But it is.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

He bought her another drink, and another. By ten o’clock they were in bed in her apartment off Pie-IX, her eyes closed, his T-shirt still on.

“J’ai besoin,”
she murmured against his neck.
“J’ai besoin de toi.”
She made it clear she needed a very specific part of him. He pressed himself
against her in response, and she guided him inside. At eleven o’clock she thanked him, as sweetly and impersonally as you might thank a waiter for good service, and asked him to leave. Afterward he stood shaking his head in the icy street. The road was deserted, dark. Above the cluster of apartment buildings to the east, the tower of the Olympic Stadium seemed to be saluting him. His heart sang. He wondered if any of it had really happened. Wanted fervently to make it happen again.

He left for Iqaluit two weeks after breaking the news. From his window seat, the land was obscured by a thick layer of clouds, and he tried to imagine the rock and ice beneath, hoping to feel loose, set free. He had been happy there once before, during the summer he had separated from Grace, when the Arctic had been a refuge, a clean slate. After failing so miserably at marriage he had been determined to succeed at his job, and he’d thrown himself into it with wild energy, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. The worst thing about the divorce was that he had lost any sense of himself as a decent person. After all, he loved everything about Grace—her values, her personality, her dreams. He just didn’t love
her
. Confronting this fact was humiliating, disastrous. Mitch had always been the nice guy who wryly accepted that nice guys finish last, and now he discovered that he wasn’t all that nice, and that he was finishing last anyway, with only himself to blame. To make up for all of this he turned to his job and to the Arctic. When he wasn’t working he founded and coached a boys’ basketball league. It was the most exhausting, industrious, and ultimately rewarding time in his life. For a while, after returning to Montreal, he’d kept in touch with a couple of the kids, but gradually—and naturally enough—correspondence on both sides fell off. The invitation to return had come so suddenly, and he’d been so consumed over the last couple of weeks by his arguments with Martine, that he hadn’t had much time to think about the place itself.

It was June, still light when they landed after ten o’clock. The buildings of Iqaluit lay scattered like pebbles dropped from a casual hand, inconsequential to the vast expanse around them. Here and there in the landscape rose gray slabs of rock, half covered with moss,
that looked like the backs of whales rising up from a choppy sea. The sky was a brilliant blue, untouched by clouds, and the air felt clear and thin. The other passengers, most of whom looked like they were coming home, filed silently across the tarmac into the small terminal.

He’d arranged for a taxi, and the drive was his first clue that he didn’t remember as much as he thought he did. It wasn’t that the place looked better or worse—the same prefab buildings balanced on their stilts, some of the rocky yards neat, others strewn with snowmobiles and assorted debris—but that his sense of direction and layout had diminished over a decade. Only the rough, bruise-colored expanse of Frobisher Bay oriented him, its white-crested waves crashing against the stubborn ice. The city had grown, and there were new neighborhoods he didn’t know. The taxi driver, an immigrant from Bosnia via Winnipeg, greeted his few questions with grunts. As the car drove slowly through the twisting gravel streets, children gazed at him with naked curiosity. The boys he had coached in basketball would be adults now, with families of their own, and Mitch knew he wouldn’t recognize them. He had made friends here, but most of them were whites like him, from Quebec and Ontario, here to work for a short duration and doubtless gone back south by now.

The taxi pulled up to the apartment that had been leased for him. They had said only that it was a duplex, but as he was paying the driver the front door opened and a tall, thin man with a shock of red hair stepped out.

“You must be the new man, then,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Johnny.”

“Mitch.”

“We’re sharing quarters,” Johnny said, “but it’s a large house by local standards, so have no fear. You know how tight housing is up here.” His voice held the lilting, musical cadence of a Maritimer. He grabbed one of Mitch’s bags and waved cheerfully at the taxi driver, who ignored them both and drove away. Johnny looked to be in his thirties, ruddy-cheeked and leather-skinned, whether from liquor or exposure to the elements Mitch couldn’t tell. He led Mitch up to a bedroom with a bed and a desk, dumped the bag on it, then gestured down the hall.

“My room’s back there, then. Come by any time you need anything,
I’m always up. Can’t sleep at all in the summer here. I get this nervous energy. In the winter I sleep fourteen hours a night and watch TV all afternoon if I can. That’s what this place does to you. Let’s have a drink. You’ve been here before, I heard.”

“It’s been over ten years,” Mitch said once they were in the kitchen, where Johnny poured him two fingers of whiskey in a smudged glass. He’d heard nothing about a roommate, but he actually didn’t mind. With someone to talk to, he’d be less likely to sit around brooding.

“I’m an engineer myself,” Johnny said. “From St. John’s, originally, but more than happy to be away from it. Here consulting on a new sewage plant. Got my hands in the shit, as they say.”

“Do they say that?”

“I say it,” Johnny said. “Cheers.”

They drank, sitting on red plastic-seated chairs around a Formica table, furniture that looked like it had been brought in forty years ago. At one end of the counter was a microwave splattered with sauces and grease, at the other a crowd of liquor bottles. Through the window Mitch could hear kids kicking a soccer ball around. It should’ve been past their bedtime, but it still felt like noon, and the Inuit weren’t big on nighttime rituals anyway, he remembered, believing their children would wind down naturally on their own. He drank the whiskey slowly, holding each sip for a moment on his tongue before swallowing; the combination of flying, the brightness, and the alcohol made him feel pleasantly light-headed and numb and far from home.

Johnny topped up his whiskey. When he’d introduced himself, Mitch was sure he was younger, but up close his face was deeply lined, with dark brown splotches on his cheeks and forehead, and his teeth were stained brown. It could be he was in his forties or fifties and maybe his rangy thinness was less a product of fitness than of a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, one of which he lit right now, exhaling the smoke in a broad stream. “So you’re a shrink, they say.”

“A therapist, actually,” Mitch said, remembering how quickly news traveled in a small place like this one. “I specialize in addict—”

“So no drugs, then. No prescriptions,” Johnny said, clearly disappointed.

“No.”

“No Xanax? No little helpers?”

“Cognitive behavioral therapy,” Mitch said, enunciating each syllable with slow annoyance.

Johnny made a flapping gesture with his left hand. “Talk, talk, talk. Give me the drugs, is what I say. In fact, if you want to see my behavior change, shoot me straight in the vein.”

Mitch stood up. “I guess I’ll hit the sack.”

Instantly Johnny sprang up and clapped his hand on Mitch’s bicep, the long ash of his cigarette falling on the table between them. “Christ on a stick,” he said, “I didn’t mean to insult your line of work or nothing like that. I just hoped to score a little extra in the way of supplies, eh? Had my hopes up for the medicine cabinet here.” He smiled at Mitch ingratiatingly, as if this were a natural explanation between friends. When Mitch didn’t say anything, he flushed, looking suddenly youthful again. “Forgive me,” he said. “I been up here too long.”

“Forget it,” Mitch said.

“Anyway, I’ve got other sources,” Johnny said philosophically, “so no harm done.”

Mitch left him lighting another cigarette, went to his room, and lay down on the single bed, the flimsy pink curtain doing nothing to block the sunlight. The smoky smell on his clothes reminded him of Martine, and he thought he should call to say he’d arrived safely; but as he was thinking it, his head swimming with whiskey, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

After his first date with Martine, he should have let it go. Clearly this was what she expected; he was a prospect too lame to be considered for the long term, redeemed only by being just smart enough to recognize it. But he didn’t want to. For years he had occasionally gone out with some divorced woman, usually sticking with her long enough to have sex a couple of times, to be reminded of the existence and practice of sex, after which he would let things drop. He became the guy who didn’t call. The guy who met your kid and played catch with him one weekend, then never came around again. It wasn’t heartlessness so much as apathy, and if Grace, at one time,
would have reminded him that one could easily arise from the other, well, she wasn’t around to do so now.

But with Martine he felt like he’d met a movie star. He didn’t have her phone number, and he’d forgotten, after their cursory introductions at the bar, her last name. But he remembered her small charming apartment building off a little allée in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and took a chance, showing up there on a Friday night at six thirty with a bottle of wine and a cooler filled with food. One thing Mitch had going for him: he could cook. He figured he might as well play to his strengths.

The child who answered the door was lithe, blond, storybook cute, maybe seven years old. In French, Mitch asked him if his mother was home. The kid just stared at him, rhythmically biting his lower lip and then releasing it. Mitch asked what his name was and still got no response. Finally he crouched down and introduced himself, which accomplished nothing. The boy was rubbing his right toe against the hallway carpet in exactly the same rhythm as the lip biting. In his right hand, for some reason, was a twenty-dollar bill. He dropped it on the floor and ran away.