

Daily Life: A Novel

by Lesley Krueger

Copyright 2014 Lesley Krueger
Diving into the Jury Pool

This is what it's like being called for jury duty in a murder trial.

First, you get up far earlier than you have to. Washed and brushed, you stand at the kitchen window with a mug of tea absently watching a robin outside, a particular bird you recognize from the mutant orange feather on its back. You watch it skittle over the back lawn, running in bursts, cocking its head from side to side until it stops, pauses—jerks a worm out of the grass and pecks it to death. You try not to see this as symbolic. Fail.

Then, my God, the clock says you're late. You slam down the tea and trip over the cat (Archie, indignant) before bashing out the door, not forgetting to lock it because you never know who's out there, even in Toronto. Life is fraught. Life is complicated. And if you don't make it to the courthouse on time, God knows what's they're going to do to you when you've got enough problems already.

I'd received my original notice of jury duty four or five months before. By then, I was already obsessed with the way we were living our lives in a time of enormous upset, what the newscasters called worldwide economic volatility coupled with worsening climate change. Layoffs. Hurricanes. Tsunamis. The Great Recession reverberated through our families in ways we didn't understand, changing life in ways we couldn't control, and changing it forever. We're not like David Copperfield anymore, wondering if we're the heroes of our own lives. These days most of us feel like collateral damage.

As I passed through the subway turnstile, I surprised myself with a decision. I would keep a record of all this, starting with my experience of reporting for jury duty. A record of daily life. I thought I could probably get out of serving on the jury, since most people did. But it was a particular moment in a particular time that was getting almost too interesting, what experts were calling a hinge time. A hinge that pinched hard, not only when you were called for jury duty, but as you went over your family finances, or when you considered the future of a novel you'd just shed blood to write.

The experts talked about disruption in the arts, about disruptions in every sector of the economy, what amounted to the world falling into pieces that everyone agreed would be put back together differently. I might as well fiddle while Rome burned. Scribble while the butter churned, and life changed forever.

The first notice said only that I would be liable to serve on a jury sometime in the future, and asked me to fill out an enclosed form. I sent it back saying I was a writer, which I hoped they would recognize as code for Don't Pick Me.

Long after I assumed I hadn't been chosen, a summons fell through the mail slot. Four double-sided folded pages ordered me to report to the courthouse for possible jury duty in a second-degree murder trial. I stared at the summons, the thought of murder and juries and civic duty making a muscle twitch in my upper left arm; a long thin muscle I'd never particularly noticed before, although obviously something had to be in there.

Arriving at the courthouse, I found a long line of what I assumed to be fellow potential jurors waiting in the plaza outside. We shuffled through a revolving glass door to enter what the French sign marvellously called le palais de justice, where we turned out our pockets for a security check like the ones at the airport, our backpacks and cellphones and wallets riding plastic trays through an X-ray machine as we walked under the sensor archway one by one, and held our arms wide in surrender.

Jury pool, the sign said, Courtroom 6-1. The muscle in my left arm twitched as I headed upstairs.

The courtroom in question proved to be a big windowless room on the sixth floor covered in dark wood panelling. When my husband had been called for jury duty a few years before, no specific trial was named on his summons. The jury pool was kept in an ordinary room, a holding pen, and after a few days most of them were sent home.

Being called for a murder trial seemed to make things more solemn. We were checked in by two uniformed women and sent directly into the courtroom, a group of carefully, statistically, unimpeachably average citizens. Upright, impatient, business-looking people, humble, slow-moving people, many chubby, workaday types, fewer thin people than you used to see, and a decent number of retired people looking stoked by the chance to serve, including one old man who kept saying, "What's that? I can hear just fine. I said I heard you. What?" We looked like passengers in a typical subway car: citizens of every conceivable age, race, class, eyes, nose, chin, hair and lack of same.

Overheard: people talking about getting out of it. Most of us had our summonses ready, and at the end of the Jury Questionnaire was a question shouted out in capitals:

12. THIS TRIAL WILL TAKE APPROXIMATELY 6 WEEKS TO COMPLETE. WOULD SERVING AS A JUROR FOR APPROXIMATELY 6 WEEKS CAUSE A SUBSTANTIAL HARDSHIP FOR YOU BY INTERFERING WITH YOUR BUSINESS, EMPLOYMENT, FINANCIAL, MEDICAL, FAMILY OR OTHER OBLIGATIONS?

My Yes and No boxes were blank, since I'd decided to leave the answer to Fate. Friends told me that judges usually let writers off, and I was counting on that. But in all honesty, I couldn't claim substantial hardship, not that week.

With jury duty looming, I'd worked long hours to get ahead on the writing I had underway and the film projects I'd contracted for in my day job. My novel was out at a publisher for consideration and I was writing a kids' book to no real deadline. Two short films I'd written were in the can, while the producers on my active feature film projects were looking for money, which these days is like corralling a herd of unicorns.

Of course, when you're wearing your screenwriter's cap, you always hope for the miraculous e-mail, the phone call from the famous director's assistant ("I'd love to speak with Mr. Fincher"), for buckets of luck pouring from the sky.

But film was going through the same upheaval as everything else, the middle fallen out of the industry the way it's falling out of society, so there are mega-million-dollar Hollywood films, a huge number of films shot for virtually no money, and very little in between. On balance, there was very little chance I would be pursued by a famous Hollywood director while the trial was underway. More likely I'd get asked to do slave labour on several movies with infinitesimal budgets, also known as working on deferred payment. It wasn't a hardship to turn those ones down. In fact, the trial gave me a better excuse.

Murder? Cool.

Well, maybe not for the victim.

And in fact, I knew very well that I shouldn't shuffle off jury duty without an ironclad reason. That's the other part of it, civic duty. (Arm goes twitch, twitch.) How you owe a duty to the justice system, especially since you've lived places where it's broken, in Mexico and Brazil, and the last thing you want is for that sort of corruption to happen here. You want a just society in every sense. For the family, for the future.

So my boxes were blank, in case it did rain Finchers. My phone was in my pocket, set on vibrate. But if it didn't buzz?

Nine forty-five. A uniformed woman appeared in the courtroom, saying that it wouldn't be long before someone came in to tell us what it meant to be called for jury duty.

"I heard that," called the retired man. "What did she say?"

At 10 o'clock, another woman came in, apologized for her hoarse voice and told us that anyone wanting to be dismissed from jury duty for medical reasons or because of imminent travel plans should come to the front of the room. She gave no explanation, just said that the rest of us were free to go, but had to report back at 9 a.m. the following Wednesday.

Relief. Such relief to leave, hoping there was a mistrial or a guilty plea that meant it would all go away. It was still beautiful, blue sky, exactly the right temperature for walking home, 6.7 kilometres of exercise; I checked online. Shaking off my anxiety, I headed northeast, passing the Diversity Garden, reaching busy Dundas Street, seeing a tall young man in an expensive-looking pinstripe suit throw down a skateboard with wheels the colour of green traffic lights and ride it across Bay Street toward the Eaton Centre...

Where my half-brother Bob sat panhandling.

No. Bob couldn't be back on the street, not after all these years. I think it could be him, and pushed through the crowd to make sure. When I got close, the man was leaving, heading around a corner. I didn't think Bob moved like that, not such an eel; it almost certainly wasn't him. But my relief about the trial was gone, and all the way home, I wondered why the man had left so suddenly if he hadn't been trying to avoid me.

Only a day into writing this, I'm already falling behind. There aren't enough hours to live, work and write about living and working, especially when I've been staring out the window more a writer usually does, which is quite a bit, not because of the trial, but because I keep wondering if the man I'd seen panhandling might really have been my older half-brother.

I didn't know I had a half-brother until I was ten years old, when Bob showed up at our door, the son of my father's first marriage. My parents had never told me about the first marriage, either.

I can still picture the scene in the kitchen, in suburban North Vancouver. The cupboards were avocado-coloured, the appliances gold. I angled my head up at the gangly new arrival, who had a brown suitcase. Being a kid, I was always angling up, usually feeling like a fairy-tale girl lost in a forest of adult trunks, trying very hard to understand what was going on.

"This is Robbie," Dad said, as my mother stood behind the sink worrying her rings.

"Bob," the new guy said.

"Bob. He'll be your half brother. Yeah. He's going to stay with us a while."

Years later, I learned that my parents had taken Bob in after his mother and stepfather had kicked him out. Dad wanted to get him through Grade 12 so at least he'd have a diploma. His mother lived over town, across the Second Narrows Bridge in the east end of Vancouver. North Vancouver was up Grouse Mountain in the West Coast rainforest, salal and huckleberries rioting through the trees at the end of the block, the hillside falling down to Mosquito Creek, which turned dangerous during spring melt-off. I wasn't supposed to go down there, but of course I did all the time. All the kids went down there, digging for treasure, adventures, a little manageable danger. Now we had a new danger in the house, I knew that right away, but Bob was surrounded by so much mystery that he didn't feel entirely manageable, and at first I wasn't sure how to feel about him.

There was no hope of my parents explaining what was going on. It wouldn't have occurred to either of them to be pals with their children, me and my younger brother. They weren't the right generation for that, and they seldom answered direct questions.

"How does the sperm get to the egg?" I had asked my mother not long before, having paid a big girl a quarter to see a sex education pamphlet handed out to the Grade Sixes. My mother was ironing at the time, and ironed faster.

"It will all come out in time," she said.

So there was no sense in asking about Bob, and why I'd never seen or heard of him before. That first evening, he disappeared into the basement bedroom, where he played muffled songs on a portable radio; I could hear it upstairs in my bedroom. Bob stayed downstairs for a couple of days, even taking a plate into his room at suppertime, and no one objected or even spoke about him much. I think they must have registered him for school though, since he came in the kitchen on Monday morning ready to go. He picked up a lunch bag from the counter and thanked my mother politely, calling her "ma'am." I followed him outside, holding my Monkees lunchbox, walking up the driveway between two borders of peace roses that in autumn, still had a few flowers but no leaves. When we passed the hedge that blocked my mother's view from the kitchen window, I expected Bob to speed up and lose me, but he continued walking along amiably.

"You're tall," I said.

"What grade you in, anyhow?"

"Guess," I said.

He wore a black leather jacket, something I hadn't seen before.

"Grade Five?" I asked.

As one rainy Vancouver day sopped into another, Bob kept walking partway to school with me, never joining the packs of teenagers filtering out of neighbouring streets, always heading off on his own when our paths to elementary and high school diverged. In this way he became my liege and prince and hero, whose few words I hung on. "Well, she's a dick, isn't she?" he said once, when I complained about my teacher. Even though he was quiet himself, Bob always listened to my chatter, he fixed my bike seat when it started wobbling, and was in general like a sports hero, one of the B.C. Lions running backs my father admired, bashful and charming and obliging right up to a point I learned to recognize, when his eyes turned to diamonds.

The first time I saw him like that, Bob had been with us for maybe a month. We were alone in the kitchen, and he signalled me to keep quiet as he pocketed the car keys off the windowsill. Bob was on curfew but our house was porous with windows, and a few minutes later, the family car squealed off.

"What?" I heard my father ask, from his recliner in the living room.

When the Mounties brought Bob home, I was still awake in bed and shivering with a mixture of elation, guilt and fright. Inching open my bedroom door, I heard about his joyride along the suicidal bends of the Upper Levels Highway. He could of killed himself, a grunt-voiced Mountie said. Could of totalled the car, my father agreed, although it was pretty clear that he hadn't, and I soon understood that the Mounties and my father were scolding Bob by talking to each other about what might have happened. Taken out a guardrail. Destroyed public property. Fathers still talked like that when I was young, to other men, over your head, although it wouldn't last much longer, once they decided to be pals.

I also heard that what they were saying was underpinned with "boys will be boys." I didn't know the world nostalgia, and could never have pictured my father doing anything like that himself, although I knew the Upper Levels would have been nearly empty at that time of night, and understood that this was another instance of manageable danger. One time, we'd had to drive back from Squamish past dark when we'd got a flat tire, and even though my mother fretted about logging trucks, the road had been deserted. Standing inside my bedroom door, I could put a lot of things together, picking up the fact that Bob's joyride had posed little danger to anyone else, and knowing that, at the time, you were allowed a certain amount of leeway in playing havoc with yourself.

I couldn't have explained this, of course, but I knew it, and knew that everything would be all right. Slipping into the hallway, I saw my liege standing in the kitchen with his head hanging down and a half smile on his lips, trying not to look too proud. My father and the Mountie didn't look that much different. This was a negotiation in which everyone already knew the ending.

Bob grew up to be a longshoreman, a logger, working the sort of jobs you could get on the West Coast without a high school diploma, our father having kicked him out a few months later. Dad finally reached his limit not on the havoc Bob wrought but on the petty thefts that fuelled it, the bottles of Southern Comfort paid for with cash slipped out of my mother's purse, since she was often a little absent-minded about leaving it lying around.

It occurs to me now that my mother wasn't absent-minded at all, and I'd like to remember the look on her face when my father came home from work, and they called Bob into the kitchen. Everything important happened in the kitchen, with its wallpaper of orange and brown kettles. My mother had caught Bob with her open wallet in his hand after school—I had seen this—and now my father was going to deal with it. Some discretion was required, so I was spying from the top of the basement stairs.

At first it was a dumb show, my father standing with his arms crossed, Bob standing with his head down, not defiant at all. My mother's face is blurred; I can't tell what she was feeling, what she thought, what she had planned.

"You could have asked," my father said. "If you weren't ashamed of why you needed it. But I suppose you were, and so am I."

I was, too. Petty theft upset me in ways that bigger things didn't, because it was so small. It made Bob seem small, and this confused me badly. I wanted him to explain it, and instead he just stood with his head down while my father waited.

Finally Bob said, "You never had any use for us anyhow."

"What in hell does that mean?" my father asked. When Bob very deliberately gave him the finger, my father said, "Get out."

Bob left the room, passing me silently on the basement stairs, making a broken egg with his hand on the top of my head. By the time he reappeared with his brown suitcase, I was spying from my bedroom, and watched as he headed out the door with no more fuss than he'd made when arriving. I learned later that he went back to his mother and stepfather, who got him a union ticket.

Maybe my mother felt a little remorseful. She kept inviting Bob to dinner, ignoring my father's silent objections. The fact he accepted her invitations: where does that come from? I didn't understand most of what happened when I was a kid, and don't understand half of it even now.

Staring out the window, I decided that it could well have been Bob on the street. These days, I think of him as one of those people who have a harder time than many of us being alive. Not long after I finished university, after I'd moved east, he showed up at my door saying that he wanted to make a clean start. He stayed with me for six or eight weeks, moving out when he had enough saved from his construction job for first and last month's rent.

Bob stayed clean for his first couple of years in Toronto, then hit the bottle again. He cleaned up a second time, got hooked on crack, paid a price, then finally got off the rollercoaster eighteen years ago when he met Lauren. Lauren had been battling a few bottle-shaped demons herself, but she dug in as a hair stylist and kept them both steady, even after Bob fell off a roof a two or three years ago and could no longer work in construction, going on disability instead. We've never been close, but we're family, and after thinking for a while longer, I decided to give him a call.

Somebody else owned the phone number; she'd had it for a few weeks. Well, people changed service providers all the time, Bob more than most, and he always turned up eventually. Hanging up, I decided to forget about it, and spent my unexpected day off in the garden.

It was a hot day in early summer, flowers blooming weeks ahead of their usual time. Global warming, luxuriant and eerie. But let's not get into another issue, lost souls and murder trials being enough for now.

I reported back to the courthouse on Wednesday morning. This time, the sign offered a couple of new details. The charge was now first-degree murder, and there were two defendants.

Upstairs, the uniformed women not only checked you into the jury pool, they put aside pieces of paper printed with your name. Other potential jurors trickled into the courtroom for another hour, some familiar faces gone—no deaf retired man—but still a large enough crowd that I hoped a jury would be chosen before my name was called. I still hadn't checked off the questionnaire box pleading to be excused, dithering about what to do.

At 10 o'clock, an avuncular-looking judge came in—"All rise"—along with three black-robed lawyers and a pair of crown attorneys, the prosecutors. Two shackled men in their twenties were led in by police officers, who placed them in a dock facing the judge before unlocking their handcuffs. One of the accused murderers was younger and more muscular than the other, with a closed face and shaved head. The second looked a little slacker: longer face, looser posture, a small gut. Both were dressed in tidy collegiate-style clothes.

The judge spoke in a public speaker's well-modulated baritone voice. He said we had been called as possible jurors in a trial he estimated would last two or three weeks. Since the defendants were black, we would be asked whether we had any prejudice for or against black people. Since it involved street gangs, we would be asked whether we had any overwhelming feelings about street gangs that would prevent us from delivering an objective verdict.

A gangland killing. People around me shifted uneasily. One or two looked frankly scared. I went out-of-body, wondering if I was in conflict. My new novel surfed time periods and genres to tell the story of one family over two hundred years. In the end, the modern generation of my Tayler family suffers a murder, and gangbangers are suspected. I'd done a large amount of research, which included interviewing a detective from the Toronto Police Service over lunch on the Danforth.

"I'll be the tall one with long hair and brown coat," I had said, when arranging to meet him.

"I look like a cop," he replied.

The cop (shaved head, highly polished loafers) turned out to be nearing retirement and planning to write detective novels afterward. A fair exchange. He would give me procedural tips while I gave him writing tips. The detective couldn't talk about specific cases, but he told me how a murder investigation generally worked, giving me some background on street gangs and helping me construct a plausible killing.

Now life was imitating art, and I half wanted to be on the jury. The deliberations had to remain secret, but I could check my research against testimony in open court. On top of this, the judge had said the trial would last two or three weeks, not six. Even if I was Finchered, the world's best screenwriting job erupting from my phone, the contract negotiations would take longer than that. If they didn't, my agent could make them.

Novelist Graham Greene famously said that writers have a splinter of ice in their hearts. There's also supposed to be a curse: May your family be cursed with a writer. I half wanted to be on the jury, but also didn't, feeling queasy about having to examine gruesome murder photos of a real-life person, questioning my motives, not particularly liking myself for having such an icy heart. I hoped I'd do a good job if I was empanelled, but I'd also be doing something else.

Meanwhile the crown attorney read out a list of names, presumably of witnesses. Potential jurors were asked to say if they recognized anyone. I listened closely for the name of the detective who looked like a cop but his name wasn't mentioned. Then it was on to jury selection, and the judge finally explained how it was done.

A tumbril? That wasn't the right word. A tumbril was an old-fashioned farmer's cart, the type they'd used to take prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution. But in court that morning, as the registrar put our names into a wooden drum, the word leapt to mind.

Maybe I meant tumbler. The judge had told us that the registrar would spin the tumbler and pull out names one by one. The first forty members of the jury pool chosen would be in Group A, the second forty in Group B, and so on. After being assigned to groups, we would be called in order of selection to be questioned individually about jury duty until twelve jurors were chosen and the rest of us could go home.

As we sat in the courtroom all that long morning—the judge on his bench, the accused murderers in the dock, the robed lawyers and crowns turning restlessly in their swivel chairs—the jury selection process lumbered along like a tumbril. Some potential jurors were in the upstairs courtroom where I sat. Others were in a room downstairs, and appeared on a video screen when their names were called.

The process was both painfully slow and riveting, like a chess game, each name read out and spelled. One time, both of the accused leaned forward intently, staring at a man called to the downstairs video screen, obviously knowing who he was. A vigorous-looking middle-aged black man. He had the air of a community leader, a school principal or minister, someone with authority.

Yet while both of the accused seemed to recognize the man, they didn't exchange a glance. They paid absolutely no attention to each other throughout the proceedings, remaining passive or impassive. When researching my novel, I'd been told that gangbangers were called soldiers, and apparently the Crown was going to claim that these young men were soldiers in a street gang. I thought that either they were showing military discipline, or they were callous, terrified, or depressed. Maybe all of these things.

By lunchtime the registrar had called eighty people for Groups A and B. The rest of us were dismissed until 2:20 p.m., so I went looking for my brother around the Eaton Centre. When he'd lived on the street, Bob had usually worked a specific territory; people did, so if I'd seen him there the previous week, there was a chance he'd be back.

No joy. He wasn't there with his cap out, or a Hungry sign by his crossed legs—not among those giving out free Qur'ans from the bundle buggy parked at Yonge and Dundas, for that matter—and I reversed again and decided I was wrong. After lunch in the food court, I took a long walk before arriving back at the courthouse, where the tumbril rolled again. They were filling group C now, and as the Registrar called names and numbers—C20, C21, C22—I didn't see much chance I'd end up empanelled.

Suddenly, my head felt weirdly open, my eyes unfocused. C25, C26. I was already bending to pick up my backpack when my name was called, knowing that I was going to be C27. As I walked to the front of the courtroom, I thought it had something to do with our imperfect grasp of time, how our senses take in data before our brains can process it, and sometimes there's a jumble, crossed wires. Maybe we feel déjà vu, we've been here before. Maybe we think we know the future when we don't.

Strange, though. I felt unsettled as the final people in my group were chosen, and was glad to get out of the psychic hothouse when we were dismissed until 9:30 the next morning. Leaving the courthouse, I calculated that with one hundred six people ahead of me, they would fill the jury long before my name was called. My shoulders again drooped in relief, even though I might still decide to serve on the jury if asked. Or not?

I was still mulling as I walked past the Eaton Centre for the second time that day. A sudden movement, a cap snatched, a man eeling away from his panhandling post. This time I was certain it was Bob, but before I could call his name, he was gone.

I've sometimes found that when you get a keen first impression of a person, when they say or do something odd early on, you keep expecting them to be like that, even when mutual friends say it was completely uncharacteristic. Maybe that was why I've never managed to think of Lauren as my sister-in-law, even though she and Bob had started living together eighteen years ago.

After court that day, I had a hard time making myself call her. I wanted to know what was going on with my brother, why he seemed to be back on the streets, but I had never felt comfortable with Lauren, even though she was a cheerful, breezy person, a pretty woman about my age who brought dessert and gifts whenever she and Bob came to dinner, liking to laugh and speaking politely to our pets even when they got old and smelly.

The first time Bob brought her over, years ago, the kids were away at summer camp, and we had a quiet dinner at the picnic table in the back yard. There were ladders lying by the house and a pile of lumber sat under a tarpaulin, since we'd just cut off the roof to go up another storey. We had—still have—a long, narrow bowling-alley house that had three bedrooms on the second floor, one quite small. With our son and daughter getting older, we wanted more space, a master bedroom and studies for both my husband and myself on a new third floor. Our yard was a construction site, but the debris was swept up, the climbing red roses were blooming, and I'd put out luminarias, sand-filled paper bags containing votive candles, an idea I'd picked up in Mexico, where we'd recently spent three years, sent there by my husband's newspaper.

I wanted to like Lauren, yet she was jittery, chattering, pushing me away. Something distressed her. Lauren's backbone was too straight, and her wrists fluted as she spoke as if she was conducting an orchestra. She was—is—blond-by-choice with a lithe figure and Italian brown eyes, and she quickly told us that she loved dancing.

Also that the contractor had a lot of ladders. And that tarp, she said. Where's that been? It was quite an adventure to eat in a construction zone. With candles like the hydro was out. How unique!

Offended delicacy, I saw. It had never occurred to me before that someone would take umbrage at being asked to eat near a couple of ladders, or feel intimidated by brown paper lunch bags filled with kitty litter and corner-store votive candles. Intimidated, I mean, by never having heard of luminarias, and feeling she was being downgraded and mistreated at not being invited inside. She wanted a properly-laid table, proper candles in brass candlesticks. What my mother called fuss.

Casting around for a way to make her feel comfortable, I said I was thinking of changing my hair, my brother having told me on the phone that Lauren was a stylist. I'm not usually any good at directing conversations away from sore points, but everyone knows the value of asking for advice.

Now Lauren became fixated on my hair. She kept chattering, saying she had a few ideas. I should come to her salon, at least if I didn't mind the trek out to Scarborough. She insisted that she'd make me over, even when I protested that my long-time stylist's feelings would be hurt, or when I tried to distract her a second time by pointing out that the bats had come out. Sunset. A flap of wings overhead.

"They really do get in your hair," she said. "It's probably a nesting instinct."

"Bats, they don't nest," Bob said. "They hang upside down in caves."

"What do you know about bats?" Lauren asked. "I know about bats. You wouldn't believe what I've picked up over the years."

Bob shuffled down into himself and gave her a look of adoration.

Unfortunately I suffer from Canadian politeness, and people can wear me down. A week after Bob brought her over, I was sitting in Lauren's chair in a Scarborough salon, showing my putative sister-in-law magazine photos of short, asymmetrical haircuts.

"Colour," she said, barely glancing at the photos. "You need colour, highlights. Perk you up."

"I perk along," I said weakly, understanding that Lauren was going to do exactly what she wanted to and that I was going to let her.

It wasn't just craven politeness. There was also something a little hard and selfish about letting her do this. In some ways, I was still the child I'd been, still ready for small adventures, for going down Mosquito Creek, for trying things on. I didn't actually care that much about my hair—a stylist probably wouldn't anticipate that—and I was interested to see what Lauren would do. I'd see what she really thought of me, her opinion revealed by the style she chose. She would also reveal something about herself, her taste, her ability as a stylist. I've already mentioned the curse of a writer in the family. Welcome, Lauren.

Chemicals. Dye cap. Clip, clip, clip.

Reveal: me as mousy and pasty-faced, nose thrown into relief by short, curled-under, blow-dried bangs, my skin looking sallow because of a particularly brassy hair colour, the circles under my eyes looking deep enough to dive in.

Over my shoulder, Lauren's smile showed a combination of malice and nerves. "On the house," she said.

Just as well, I thought, caring far more about my hair than I'd anticipated. I'm going to have to find a high-end joint to fix this.

"The colour was deliberate, but the cut wasn't, poor dear," Mr. High End told me, when I asked him to deconstruct Lauren's work. He went on to give me a stunning, asymmetric, multi-hued style that I loved, although fortunately it didn't remain in style for very long, since I nearly went bankrupt trying to keep it up.

After court, when I finally got Lauren on the phone, I didn't tell her that I'd seen Bob on the street, just that I'd tried his phone and found he'd changed his number.

"Kicked him out," she said. "He can take care of his own bloody-fucking self. I'm sick of the whole joint. Deserve better."

There was party music in the background, and after nearly twenty years in Alcoholics Anonymous, Lauren was drinking.

A long pause while I took this in.

"I liked your kids, anyhow," she said. "They can call me if they want."

Thursday morning. I sat with other members of the jury pool in the courtroom. A chatty woman beside me said she'd heard someone on the escalator say they'd only chosen seven jurors the previous day out of the first two groups of forty. She and several women around us were desperate to get out of serving, but I still teetered. In my life, I've been asked to be many things—loving, insightful, generous, helpful, supportive, protective, useful, fair, sceptical, demanding, pushy, even cold—but I'd seldom been called upon to be precisely just.

After a short wait, they started calling people to the front of the room in groups of five, starting with the first in our group, C1. The line moved quickly. The first five left the room, another five were called to the front, and before long, it was my turn. As I sat down near the judge's front door of the courtroom, I said to the woman beside me that I was C27, and the funny thing was, my street address was number twenty-seven.

"It's an omen," she said.

"What? That I'll be called?"

"That you'll go home," she said.

We were summoned into a corridor. More chairs. Another wait. Then I was called into a new courtroom. When I walked through the door, I felt very small and undecided, a bit lost, and the room seemed to balloon around me, le palais de justice, as grand and airless as a cathedral. It was really just another panelled courtroom, but I felt as if the walls receded and the ceiling blasted high, and in the close warm air was a faint shimmer of the numinous.

The judge had told us earlier that if we were called before the bench, we would be asked whether we were willing to serve. If so, we would be questioned, after which the Crown or the Defence would either accept us or issue a summary challenge resulting in dismissal. The Crown had forty challenges. The two defence lawyers each had twenty.

The avuncular judge now told me to approach the bench, and I walked into the witness box to his side. He looked comfortable in his black robes, his white collar and red sash, one leg thrown over the other, leaning back in his chair as if the entire courtroom was the desk in front of him to ask whether I was willing to serve as a juror.

Now I had to make my decision.

"I am," I said.

"You are?" the judge asked, sounding surprised.

I was a little surprised myself, and gave a rueful shrug. If you want me, you can have me.

"Swear her," he told the registrar, and I think it was the registrar who gave me the choice of swearing on a holy book or affirming that I would do my duty. A Bible, a Qur'an, Sikh and Hindu texts were lined up along the edge of the witness box, but I said I would affirm, holding up my hand the way they did on TV.

Sworn in, the judge asked me to step onto the floor and face the defence. One of the lawyers was standing at a podium. The ceiling felt even higher and the lawyer's voice was sonorous as he read the statement we had been told to expect, asking if we had any feelings for or against black people that would prejudice our decision.

"I do not," I said, my voice sounding as small and tinny as I felt.

The lawyer very slowly read a second statement asking if I had any overwhelming feelings about street gangs that would prevent me from reaching a fair judgment, his voice as rhythmic as a preacher's.

"I do not," I repeated, meaning that you could be a gangbanger, guilty of all sorts of heinous crimes—drug crimes, assault, whatever—but that didn't necessarily make you the murderer in this particular case.

The lawyer then asked me to face the two accused, who were far apart in an open-fronted box to my right on the far side of the room. I looked from one young man to the other, meeting their eyes in turn. I thought they both looked hopeful.

To my surprise, the lawyer asked if they would accept me as a juror, and both nodded.

"The defence accepts," the lawyer said, and I felt a surge of something I couldn't quite define.

Looking more interested now, the judge levered himself up and faced two men sitting in the jury box to my left, asking if they would accept me. I wondered if they were other jurors already chosen that morning. No one explained but both nodded, one half shrugging as he did so. They would accept.

I stood there helpless, a heartbeat away from being chosen, as the judge turned to the Crown.

I love cliff-hangers. The way 19th century novels were published serially, chapters published in magazines not long after the writer had written them, the books unfinished as their earlier chapters were already being read—avidly, if it was Dickens—each chapter ending with a mystery or surprise or revelation that kept you wanting more.

I also love the way television series have been playing with that, season-long stories told through weekly chapters, each a separate story but also feeding the overall arc. Why not start doing it again when writing this record and, why not, posting parts of it online? Call it a collusion of the 19th and 21st centuries. Why not leave myself sitting in that cathedral-like courtroom, waiting for the crown attorney to decide if she was going to chose me for the jury?

And then...

The short, blond crown scarcely looked at me.

"Challenge."

"Dismissed," the judge said.

I don't think he rapped a gavel, but I remember hearing one as I floated out of the reverberating palace of justice. Free of jury duty—for three years, according to the whispering clerk at the door—I sailed down the escalator and emerged on Armoury Street, where I tried to call my husband. Stalking back and forth, not getting an answer, I saw two other women from my same jury group tumble out the revolving door. They looked as giddy as I felt, sure that things that turned out for the best.

"I got off. I had to," the dark-haired woman said. "I'm the only person in my family with a job."

The other woman—the woman who had talked of omens, tall and elegantly spare—said she was a contract worker and afraid her contract wouldn't be renewed if she was forced to take a month off work, no matter what the law said.

"My boss was already telling me how I was screwing up her vacation," she said, endlessly grateful that the judge had let her off too.

My turn.

"I said I'd do it."

Both were surprised into stillness, and I smiled.

"But the Crown challenged me. I guess she didn't like my looks. And the irony is, my younger brother is an assistant crown attorney."

We hooted with laughter and went our separate ways. I forgot to look for Bob out panhandling, but I phoned my younger brother that night to tell him what had happened. I'd called him when I first got my summons, and he'd said he didn't have a murder trial coming up; it had nothing to do with him. The defence probably wouldn't want the husband or wife of a crown on the jury, but excluding brothers and sisters was pushing it. I couldn't get out of it that way, he'd said.

Now he chuckled, and told me I probably looked too arty for the Crown. "It could have gone differently," he said. "I would have chosen you."

He thought about this, and seemed to convince himself. "Women are usually more conservative in their judgments than men."

As I hung up, I told myself again that things had turned out for the best. I'd done my civic duty. Had nothing to reproach myself with, certainly not for being arty.

Now I could attend the trial as a member of the public. In open court, I could check my research on gangland killings, and think about issues of justice that had been preoccupying me. That the whole long jury selection process had also piqued my interest in the crime: who the victim was, and who the accused might be. I had been meticulous about not checking out the case online, trying to preserve my objectivity.

Nothing to stop me now.
Trials

The murdered man was an innocent victim, maybe a case of mistaken identity, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The archived news stories online said his name was Michael Bishen Golaub. He had been thirty-four years old when he died, the father of five sons, a furniture maker everyone agreed was an honest, hardworking man with no connection to street gangs. A few years ago, at about 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 16, he had been at a barbecue at a friend's house in the Mount Olive area of Rexdale in northwest Toronto when, out of nowhere, he was shot to death.

Two men were arrested hours later and charged with first-degree murder: Christopher Sheriffe, nineteen, and Awet Asfaha, twenty-four. Sitting in my office, I wondered which of the young men I'd seen in the dock was which. The slacker one looked older. I also wondered why it had taken several years for the case to come to trial, and why my summons said I had been called for jury duty in a second-degree murder when the charge had been first degree from the start.

"There is evidence of some planned deliberation," Toronto Police Service Detective Doug Samson was quoted as saying. Reports at the time also said the police didn't think the Golaub killing was gang-related, although local people said there had been a recent spike in neighbourhood violence owing to friction between "crews" from Mount Olive, where the killing took place, and Jamestown, further to the south.

People interviewed said it all went back to an incident earlier that year, when someone had stolen a gold chain off the neck of the wrong person at a mall. Two weeks before Golaub was murdered, another man had been shot in the face in front of the same townhouse complex, although he'd survived.

Justice, I thought. Criminal justice, vigilante justice: the gold chain. Economic justice, the rich getting richer, the rest of us not. I sat at my desk thinking of the way this connects up, and the impact on families, then called the registrar's office at the courthouse to learn a few more details about the trial. (Former day job: journalist.)

The clerk told me the avuncular judge was Mr. Justice Eugene Ewaschuk. Checking Mr. Justice Ewaschuk out online, I stumbled into controversy. In 2005, a defence lawyer opened a criminal trial where Ewaschuk was presiding by presenting a petition from twenty-one criminal lawyers asking him to recuse himself from the case because of his well-known bias against the defence. The article said he was called Judge You-Is-Fucked by prisoners in jail. A modern hanging judge. The story said that lawyers called him Tex behind his back.

I was dismissed from jury duty on Thursday afternoon. With a long weekend ahead, I assumed the trial would start the following Tuesday. I could be there, not having been Finchered, and feeling quite relaxed about dropping in on the trial. It is a concrete fact that my arm stopped twitching as soon as I was free of jury duty. Also that it hasn't twitched again a single time to this day. In any case, there was nothing to keep me from being in the courthouse on Tuesday ready to hear the Crown's opening argument. I could pick up vocabulary. Details. Life.

It was sunny as I headed out the door that Tuesday on foot, having resolved to walk the 6.7 clicks to and from the courthouse every day I went. Healthy living, ongoing project to lose ten pounds etc. As I headed west, I thought about how you mix up all these small daily agendas with bigger ones, exercise with murder trials, the banal butting up against the tragic. Today, two alleged killers' lives hung in the balance. Meanwhile, over the weekend, I had cleaned out a closet.

We hadn't moved house in almost twenty years, and during that time we'd lost too many of our elders, most recently my mother. Family stuff had piled onto our stuff—and we were never minimalists—so at New Year's I had made a resolution that I'd actually been carrying through, starting another ongoing project (number 2,567) to get our house in order. I was slowly moving from room to room, cleaning and painting and sorting, keeping what we liked and used, throwing out the crap and setting the rest aside either for charity or our annual fall street sale.

Our son and daughter were launched. My husband and I were alone in the house, and it was time to set things up for the rest of our lives, clear a psychic space. That weekend, I whirled through the second-floor closet, tossing sheets and towels onto the floor to be sorted, then moving onto the coats—so many coats, you'd think we were Canadian—stuffing the ones we hadn't used for years into a plastic bag for the homeless.

In the bag and out the bag, thinking that if my brother Bob was back on the street, he would need a proper coat, and would probably like to hand out others to his friends. I paused for a while, plastic bag in hand, thinking that Bob would need more than a coat, although it was always hard to predict what he would ask for, and what it was possible to give.

My brother wasn't out panhandling when I walked by the Eaton Centre. Probably too early for him to be at work, and when I arrived at the courthouse, I was early for the trial, as well. To kill some time, I walked over to a chain-link fence I'd noticed around an empty rectangle of plaza, hoping the sign might explain why this ordinary-looking patch of concrete had been imprisoned.

The sign informed me that Her Majesty the Queen in Ontario forbade the erection of yurts.

Yurts, I thought. Her Majesty didn't want people to defecate or urinate, either. I wondered if the Occupy protesters had set up camp here the previous summer, meaning that my daughter had set up camp. And got kicked out by the police? It looked possible. We knew Raine's opinions in detail and at length, but she remained hazy on particulars, especially if these involved violence or arrest. From what we'd been able to put together, Raine had been arrested during more than one protest, although they'd always dropped charges and she had never gone to trial.

Her Majesty preferred an absence of campfires, I read. No graffiti. A paucity of tents. Walking away from the chained enclosure, I paused to look at a nearby sculpture you could interpret as either citizens holding up a frieze symbolizing justice or citizens being weighed down by a frieze symbolizing justice. My daughter wasn't on trial. Two other mother's sons were. People had a morning coffee in the shadow of the sculpture, and stretched their legs into the sun.

Oyez, oyez, oyez, the court registrar called. In the name of Her Majesty the Queen something something, please turn off your cellphones.

I arrived in the courtroom just in time for the age-old formalities, more or less, and sat down to find a witness already in the box, a pretty young woman who clearly didn't want to be there. I'd been wrong: the trial had started on Friday. I'd missed the opening statement, in which the crown attorney had laid out her case against the accused, and I had to read between the lines to figure out what the witness was talking about, and what her testimony had to do with Michael Bishen Golaub's murder.

Listening to her speak, I felt like a magpie picking up pieces of glass and garbage, gathering random details and trying to build them into a story. At least it felt familiar, the same sort of piecework I do when writing fiction.

It's also what the police do, or so I figured when writing my latest novel. Cops picked up this and that, all out of order: clues, seized weapons, insight, lies. Hopefully they used it to come up with the true story, but of course they could get it disastrously wrong, and I had to presume the two men in the dock—Christopher Sheriffe and Awet Asfaha—were innocent until proven guilty. Pulling out my notebook, I settled into the public gallery, its three rows of oak benches at the rear of the courtroom looking like pews.

The witness's name was Hannah. Under cross-examination by one of the defence lawyers, Hannah was talking about a barbecue, the fact that she and her friend Roxie had met the two accused murderers for the first time at the barbecue on the night before Bishen Golaub was shot. Roxie had paired up with Christopher Sheriff, while Hannah had got together with Awet Asfaha, who proved to be the older, slightly slacker man in the dock. She said she called him Sean because he reminded her of somebody on TV.

Hannah said they left the barbecue as part of a crowd, heading to a joint called Juicy Jerks, where everybody drank and danced. Leaving Juicy Jerks in the early hours of the morning, they drove to a hotel in Christopher Sheriffe's car. With them was a fifth man whose name Hannah never knew. She and Roxie called him Clumsy, not to his face. Hannah wasn't sure, but she thought Clumsy was the one to pay for the hotel when they checked in. They went upstairs to their room, then Clumsy left to cruise the hotel, where other people from Juicy Jerks had checked in to party. Hannah, Roxie and the two men stayed put in their room, drinking and watching TV.

A sitcom, the lawyer suggested.

"The Discovery Channel!" Hannah said, sounding offended.

They kept drinking, and eventually all four of them fell asleep. The defence lawyer put it to Hannah in a bit of a mumble that no one was contesting the fact that she and others had boyfriends and girlfriends, that the two men were perfect gentlemen and nothing happened.

Hannah agreed to this, looking like a dusty little sparrow ruffling her feathers. It wasn't just murder and justice on the line, but also her reputation, and maybe her self-respect. She watched the Discovery Channel and didn't sleep around, certainly not with a man who would be arrested the following day for murder.

Clumsy was the first one up the next morning, Hannah said. The defence lawyer seemed to want her to say that Clumsy was unhappy at spending the night on the couch despite paying for the hotel room, but it seemed to me that Hannah wouldn't commit. She said he just wanted to make sure they left before check-out time, and left early himself. The others went back to sleep or slept in, only leaving the hotel in the early afternoon, not long before Bishen Golaub was murdered.

Jerky surveillance video from the lobby showed Hannah and the others arriving at the hotel and leaving it early the next afternoon, and judging from further defence questions, it seemed important that Awet Asfaha was wearing a grey hoodie, and that he didn't wear his hair in cornrows or braids.

Other surveillance video showed the four of them driving out of the hotel parking lot in a silver Mazda Protégé with Christopher Sheriffe at the wheel. Hannah agreed it was Sheriffe's car; that they went to a gas station where Asfaha was supposed to buy $10 worth of gas to pay Sheriffe for the ride, but bought cigarettes instead; that the women were dead tired and wanted to go home to Roxie's place on Kipling Avenue; that Asfaha mentioned he had an errand to do.

Hannah was quite specific on this point. Asfaha had an errand. Also that the two men seemed to be "talking in code."

Sheriffe dropped the women off, but not before they agreed to get together again later that day. Hannah left the car, never to see either Sheriffe or Asfaha again—at least not before seeing them in court almost three years later, when she didn't meet their eyes.

I tried to pick out the most important part of her testimony. Was it that Clumsy had reason to be bear a grudge against the accused men, who had hooked up with girls when he hadn't, even though he'd paid for the hotel room? I also wondered whether people who witnessed the shooting would describe Bishen Golaub's killer as wearing a grey hoodie like Asfaha's, or whether they would testify that unlike Asfaha, he wore his hair in cornrows or braids.

Maybe it was important that Asfaha had seemed interested in doing his errand while the women were still in the car. That could make it more likely that the errand was innocent. Or creepier, if his errand involved killing someone, and he wanted Hannah and Roxie around as alibis. It had to be important that the two men were "talking in code."

The lawyer asked if all that long night and morning, Hannah had ever expected she would one day receive a subpoena to testify in a first-degree murder trial.

No, she had not, she said.

Two things about the courts.

One, the immense number of chairs. Chairs lining every branching corridor of the courthouse. The judges' high-backed chairs in the courtrooms. Lawyers' padded wheelie chairs whisking back and forth in consultation. Stationary chairs in the jury boxes. Chairs for the accused and for the police guarding them, chairs lined up behind the public galleries. More chairs revealed when doors opened on small mysterious offices between the courtrooms. Hundreds, probably thousands of chairs. Buy stock in chair companies! As long as there's a justice system, people will have to sit and wait.

That's the second thing, the waiting. Trials have a morning break, a lunch break, and an afternoon break before the trial adjourns at 4:30, on top of which the public is ordered out of the courtroom whenever the judge and lawyers need to argue legal points, although not as often as the jury.

I'm falling further and further behind writing this up, and pretty soon I'll get to the reason why life in my family got so crazy, and why it's become even crazier. But let me say now that after Hannah testified, I took a chair in the corridor and tried to decide whether or not to keep coming to the trial. I couldn't be there every day, having taken on a couple of small work projects. And with evidence pouring in out of order, like an old-fashioned film with the reels mixed up, I wasn't sure how much I'd learn, anyway.

But were they really so mixed up? No one contested the fact that the accused killers had hooked up with two women at a barbecue the day before the murder and partied with them all night. All four of them slept over at a hotel until the next afternoon, when they left in a car driven by one of the accused. The other accused mentioned having an errand to do, and the two women left the car at an apartment on Kipling.

A few minutes later, outside a house very close by, Michael Bishen Golaub was shot and killed. Between the moment the women got out of the car and the moment that Bishen Golaub was murdered lay a crevasse, infinitely narrow and immeasurably deep. The Crown would have to close it, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Asfaha and Sheriffe had driven away from Roxie's apartment block to murder an innocent man.

Next up, they said, was the forensics officer who had investigated the crime scene. I decided to stay.

It turns out they go in first with a videocam.

Detective Constable Lynn Langille, twelve years in the forensic identification unit, testified that it was very hot and hazy when her office received a call at 2:35 p.m. on Sunday, August 16 about a shooting outside 23 Mount Olive Drive in Rexdale. Taking the humidex into account, the temperature hovered around 40 degrees Celsius. She arrived at 3:06 p.m. to find numerous uniformed officers already on the scene and the victim, Bishen Golaub, removed.

Pillows and ice had been rushed to the victim, who was alive after the shooting, but who had died shortly after being taken away. The detective constable walked onto the scene filming the pillows, a pair of broken sunglasses in the road and what she meticulously called "a red stain" on the sidewalk—not yet forensically known to be blood—before walking her camera around the corner, where a witness had already told police he had seen a car idling immediately before the murder.

When I was researching my novel, no one told me the forensics unit videotaped so much of their investigation. Yet as more video played on the courtroom screen, Langille jumped to the next day, testifying that when her office executed a search warrant on the apartment of Awet Asfaha—who had been arrested quickly—she had been the first inside, filming as she went.

It was probably one of those things that seem so obvious to people in the know that they don't even bother mentioning it. The detective who'd helped with my novel hadn't mentioned it. I thought about how badly this must hamper police investigations, when people—witnesses—don't mention something they think is obvious when outsiders have no idea.

The apartment? What appeared to be a basement suite in a residential house. One bedroom empty, another with a mattress on the floor, the living room narrow, tidy and plumply furnished. On the police video shown while Langille testified was a black leather couch, glossy-looking electronic equipment and a red-fronted bar area, also looking to be leather, with a framed photograph of a young man on the wall behind it. The young man's face showed up later on a tee-shirt the police found in a bedroom closet, a slogan on it saying, "RIP José Hierro Saez. Mourning You Until We Join You."

Was this what a gangbanger's apartment looked like? What you got for dealing drugs, for being a Crip or a Blood, if that's what the Crown was getting ready to allege. You got leather sofas and dead friends. You got your fingerprints lifted from a silver Mazda Protégé (as the detective constable would say, more video playing), and forensics working their dabbers inside the car, checking every millimetre for gunpowder residue, which was later discovered in trace amounts on both the car interior and on clothes worn the day of the murder by Asfaha and his co-accused, Christopher Sheriffe. You got a twenty-five-year prison sentence staring you right in the face.

These particular defendants also got the avuncular Mr. Justice Ewaschuk asking the difference between cornrows and braids, and the lawyers and crown in their busy swivel chairs not being able to answer. It was notable that everyone at the front of the courtroom was white, except the accused and one court clerk, while everyone in the public section at the rear was black, except me.

A fraught and dangerous place for people not to understand how to speak the obvious to each other. It made me think how much worse this communication gap must have been when witnesses were talking to police. After Detective Constable Langille stepped down from the box, the case over for the day, I left the courthouse thinking it was just as well that the jury was such a Toronto cross-section, some people looking as if they knew all about cornrows and braids, most remaining stony-faced, if alert, throughout the afternoon. I felt relieved at not being on the jury and having to bear that weight of fairness on my shoulders.

Then I reached the Eaton Centre and saw my brother Bob panhandling.

This time he didn't slip away.

"Hey," I said. Bob slowly unwound from a cross-legged sit, knocking over his cardboard "Hungry" sign as he wobbled to his feet. He looked skinny and scruffy and hung over, but he didn't have the crack jitters, that much of a blessing.

He didn't answer either, licking his lips, looking bashful and ashamed.

"Better come home," I said, stepping out to signal a cab. One swerved instantly to the curb, driven by a beefy driver. I bent down to the front passenger window and said firmly, "We're going to the east end," making sure the cabbie knew that both Bob and I would be getting in, and that I expected him to take us.

The cabbie looked as stony-faced as a juror, barely nodding. Bob hung back.

"No worries," I said, mostly to myself. I opened the door and gave Bob a look, and he cringed down to get a small khaki pack and his sign. Amazing that one look did it. I've never liked having so much power over someone, although the history of the world suggests there are people who like it too much.

Inside the cab, Bob collapsed like a heap of discarded clothes as I told the cabbie my address. Again he nodded curtly, although his eyes in the rear-view mirror were kind. The CBC was playing on the radio, an interview about a music school in Regent Park taking donations of used instruments. These days the city seems to be criss-crossed by well-educated educated cabbies listening to the CBC, most of them immigrants. This man was from somewhere in West Africa, I guessed, thinking about the music school. My son's old trombone.

"Who's he?" the driver asked, looking straight ahead.

"My brother."

The driver shot me a look in the rear-view mirror, the first time he'd met my eye. It seemed to be the right answer, and he removed himself from the scene.

"Should we stop off anywhere to get your stuff?" I asked Bob.

"Stole it," he said.

"Someone stole it at a shelter?"

It was so obvious that he didn't bother answering. We were caught behind a streetcar until the cabbie wheeled north and east, crossing the river.

"If you'd go up to the Danforth?" I asked, and the cabbie turned north again onto Broadview, passing the neon fringes the east-end Chinatown and the grassy slopes of Riverdale Park before we reached the Danforth. Turning right, we continued on past blocks of stores.

"Stop!" I cried.

The cabbie braked.

"Won't be long," I said, dashing out before anyone could object and batting into a chain store. I'd been through this with Bob years ago, and grabbed some jeans his size, a belt, a pair of black tee-shirts, a jacket (before remembering the closet and putting it back), underwear, a three-pack of socks, a pair of sneakers and a gift card for clothes he could choose himself when he sobered up. Careworn and skinny as he gets, Bob has always been particular about clothes. Our father's old word came to me. Natty.

"There!" I said, shoving the big plastic bag at Bob as I got back in the cab. Without any warning, my brother broke into silent sobs.

The cabbie's eyes in the rear-view mirror: yellowed whites and brown depths. I looked for either approval or contempt, but the driver showed a sort of flat understanding. Seen enough in his life, I would guess.

Bob's story: "Lauren got a boyfriend."

When we got home, I took him down to the basement apartment we'd originally built after our son decided to go to university in Toronto. We'd thought it would get years of use, with Raine graduating from high school four years after her brother. Instead, she went to Concordia in Montreal, only moved back to Toronto in time for the big protests last year, living in a tent at first, and more recently with her boyfriend.

We had a back-up plan to rent the place if we needed to. It had a bathroom, a kitchenette and its own entrance out the back door. But we wouldn't get that much money and renting was a hassle, all the horror stories about tenants you couldn't get rid of, loud music booming through the floorboards, cigarette smoke, and anyway it was a great place for friends to stay when they came through town.

My organizing project had started in the basement, and given my weakness for house porn—design magazines—I'd taken care to get the place comfy. Bob started weeping again when I gave him toiletries and toothbrush, a white terry-cloth bathrobe and towels for his shower, handing it over as if I was housekeeping and this was a hotel.

Stepping back, I saw that the place actually looked like a chain hotel room, full of inexpensive, mass-produced indulgences. That's how magazines told you to decorate these days, stuff all bought at once and curated in a way that was supposed to show your taste but didn't. Your aspirations, maybe. To live in a hotel? Live a rootless, modern life.

Bob told me about Lauren's boyfriend after his shower, sitting in the sunroom off the kitchen, an alcove that we'd renovated out of an old pantry and tiny sunroom. In saying that she "got" a boyfriend, I figured my brother wasn't being ungrammatical, not "Lauren's got a boyfriend" abbreviated, since his grammar was as good as his clothes. Instead, he meant that Lauren got a boyfriend the way she sometimes got a new car. Acquired.

"What about your mom's furniture?" I asked. "All those antiques you refinished. You're not going to just leave them."

"They're Lauren's," he said. "She earned them, putting up with me." Bob overflowed with self-pity, the one thing I cannot stand, especially when I hear it from myself.

Getting up, I decided it was probably too early to discuss what was going to happen, and thought I'd better phone my husband to talk about Bob staying with us for a while. I also pictured the little cold room off the basement laundry, right next to Bob's room, where we kept a respectable stock of wine and beer.

"I asked about this when you've been with us before," I began.

"Cold turkey," he said. "Cold turkey is the only thing that gets you off it."

"If you want it to," I said, remembering a couple of times in the past.

"My life is not about getting what I want," he said. "That's your challenge."

He gave me a look of dislike. Fleeting, but there it was. Families, I thought.

"Well," I said, "I'd better cook dinner. I thawed some steaks."

"You want me to barbecue?" he asked. As Bob stood up, stretching his arms, the sleeve of his tee-shirt pulled back and I saw several small circular marks healing on his upper arm. Cigarette burns, I thought. He saw me staring and pulled down his sleeve.

"Shelter," he said, and that was plausible. But I pictured Lauren smoking, and thought about the way people blamed their infidelity on their partners, how they'd supposedly been driven to it. That had played holy hell with one of my friends, and I wouldn't put it past Lauren. Cigarette burns, none of it.

"Those shelters are rough places," Bob went on, rambling into the kitchen. "Thank you, I should have said. Thanks for everything. I like a good steak. Just like Dad. You remember Dad and his steaks. Even your mom's steak and kidney pies."

My husband and son don't want to be written about in my diary, in paper or online. Raine doesn't care, since Raine is the name we gave her, and she changed it in her mid-teens, so no one calls her that anymore. But I'm going to use bloody Lauren's real name because fuck her. She can sue me if she dares.

I made it back to court almost two weeks later. For the moment, let me just say that quitting alcohol cold turkey doesn't work if you've been drinking too much and too steadily, especially if you've gone cold turkey before.

When I slipped into the courtroom, a plainclothes police officer was already on the stand. Before too long, someone said the name Samson, and I figured this was the Detective Doug Samson I'd read about in archived news stories, shortish and fit with wide shoulders in a good grey suit, his head shaved bald. (Pause for joke about Delilah cutting off his hair. Maybe Detective Samson has heard that one before.)

Samson was not only in the witness box, but also in a video on a screen angled slightly toward the jury, conducting one of those famous police interrogations that go all violent on TV. Samson was questioning a man who had withdrawn into a hoodie, his face hidden, his hands balled into his armpits. They were in a small bare room, only a table and a couple of chairs, the camera shooting the scene from a position in the top corner. This was early in the morning of August 17, about twelve hours after the murder, and we were seeing excerpts from what was apparently a long interrogation.

The archived newspaper articles had said Christopher Sheriffe and Awet Asfaha had been arrested shortly after Bishen Golaub was murdered. Now a word here and there told me that both had showed up at a parked car that the police were staking out a few hours after the murder. I remembered how the forensics officer had said a witness at the scene had given police a description of a silver Protégé that had been idling around the corner from the crime scene. Apparently it had driven away immediately after the shooting, the driver failing to stop at a stop sign.

Now I learned that the witness had given police an all-but-complete licence plate—he seemed to have testified the previous week—and they quickly found a car matching the description. We had already heard that Sheriffe had driven a silver Protégé with that licence plate to and from a hotel the previous night, and that forensics had swabbed it afterward for gunpowder residue. I wondered if the Crown was alleging that Sheriffe had driven the getaway car while Asfaha was the gunman. That would make both guilty of murder, since Sheriffe would be an integral part of the crime. Why someone would use his own car for a murder was the question, although not one that Samson asked the hooded man in the video clip we were watching.

When the man eventually flipped back his hood, I saw that it was indeed Sheriffe, and didn't think he wasn't going to say anything, no matter what the questions.

In a clear voice, Samson said he thought Sheriffe was trying to help his friend, presumably Asfaha. Said that once he, Samson, walked out of the room, Sheriffe wouldn't get another chance.

"I want to speak to my lawyer," Sheriffe said.

Samson told him that was his choice. No voices were raised, no drama played out. Sheriffe hunched down again, and Samson remained largely immobile in his chair.

"I want to know what you think is going to happen," he asked Sheriffe.

"I'm going back to jail... Then... I don't know. I want to leave."

"The kind of evidence we have, you're not going to leave," Samson said quietly. "This is your last opportunity to tell us the truth."

Sheriffe remained silent. Samson left the room. Sheriffe immediately slipped out of his chair and lay on the floor, curling into a foetal position on the pale tiles.

Watching the video, I thought about the police interrogation toward the end of my latest novel, that one that I'd started trying to find a publisher for. Compared to Detective Samson, my fictional detective goes a little overboard, as fictional detectives tend to. Maybe not all real-life interrogations are as calm as the one Samson conducted, which looked as dramatic as paint drying. Yet maybe they have to be, with a video camera rolling, and I wondered whether I ought to calm my fictional cop down. I love drama, but I also love novelists and filmmakers who stay close to daily life, especially once their detailed look at the paint-drying nature of most of our lives drifts into the surreal and the magical, as that style of art so often does.

Mexican director Carlos Reygadas made a film a few years ago called Silent Light that shows a family of Mennonites in northern Mexico cooking and bathing in a reservoir with bars of homemade soap. They get sweaty from farming, and even sweatier from a guilty, hairy, middle-aged love affair. Then we see a calm death, a stilted funeral, and a pale corpse slowly opening her eyes. Surrealism, magic, bim bam boom.

Much different from bam bam drama.

Yet as I sat in the courtroom, watching Samson's video, I also had to consider the way drama can erupt into daily life. A man is enjoying a barbecue, standing by an ordinary chain-link fence, when someone he's never met runs up and shoots him. There's also what happened in our family, a big part of the reason I'd missed two weeks of the trial. Do I really need to calm down my fictional detective, or is his outburst plausible, given that he loses it outside the video-equipped interrogation room? Given what we'd just been through ourselves.

I'm in the kitchen when I hear a lamp crash over in Bob's room downstairs. I stand in front of the open fridge, wondering if something is wrong, and knowing that it is.

Slap, slap. The crash downstairs is followed by a rhythmic beating. Two days after Bob moved in, I'm starting to think about lunch. My brother had been increasingly ill since he arrived, vomiting up his steak that first night, sweating and shaking all the next day, taking only liquids but insisting he'd be fine. This is what it's like, he said, going off the booze cold turkey. It can be tough, but he's made it through before and he knows he will again.

More slapping. Even though I know that something is wrong, I head downstairs reluctantly, not wanting to invade his privacy, not wanting to see whatever is going on—making it real—but already holding the phone in one hand as I turn the doorknob with the other.

Bob is having a seizure on the floor. I know it's a seizure even though I've never seen one, his hips bucking, heels kicking the carpet, one loose hand slapping the bed, which is what I've been hearing. The bedside lamp has fallen back against the wall—no danger of cut glass—but I'm terrified by the way Bob is biting the air. I remember that you're supposed to wedge something in their mouths so they don't bite off their tongues. After a second's stupidity, I run upstairs for a wooden spoon, and when I'm downstairs again, I wait until Bob cranks open his mouth and shove it in, and he bites down hard.

Calling 911, I hear myself sound factual. My brother is having a seizure, I say. No, I don't think he usually has them. No, (striding into the bathroom), no epilepsy medication. We need help.

I'm a little proud of remaining calm, then remember being good in a couple of emergencies but feeling faint afterwards, and ask the 911 operator if the paramedics can come straight to the basement. After hanging up, I realize the front door is locked. Bob is still seizing, but I grab pillows off the bed and wedge them around him, race upstairs, fling open the door and race back down. Only when I'm back in the basement does it register that it's a beautiful day outside, sunny and perfect.

Bob is flailing more weakly when I hear footsteps upstairs. Either we're being robbed or it's paramedics.

Neither. Two uniformed firefighters stride in, one of them a tall, strong-looking woman. I cede my place by Bob's side and explain what's going on.

"Cold turkey isn't such a good idea," her male partner replies, standing above us.

As the female firefighter works on Bob, I flash back bizarrely to a man I once met at a party, how he said firefighters are famous for having freezers in the basement of every firehouse.

Meat, a woman said. They cook on shift.

Dead kittens, the man told her. A call comes in, one of the firefighters says, Who's got the kitten? Someone grabs a dead kitten, they fight the fire, and after they extinguish the blaze, one of the firefighters emerges from the smoke directly in front of the TV cameras, a half-hidden and nearly thawed kitten cradled in the crook of his arm.

Little guy's a fighter, he tells the cameras. The world goes Awwww and the firefighters' budget remain unassailable—the man at the party being a cost-cutting politician who had, on several occasions, failed to cut the fire department's allocation.

While remembering all this, I'm giggling louder and louder, almost hysterically.

"Your brother's going to be okay," the male firefighter says kindly, although when the woman begins oddly enthusiastic cardio pushes on Bob's underfed chest, I'm not sure that he will.

Faintness is so strange, the way the world telescopes, clear at the centre and muzzy around the edges. For some reason, feeling faint, I decide to lever myself up and stand beside the male firefighter, which of course makes me fainter. Slumping into an armchair, I put my head between my knees, acutely aware of the way sounds are muffled in a basement, the house weighing down on you, a compression of noise. One friend who tried to stay down here during her last visit to town felt so claustrophobic she had to move upstairs.

"Feeling dizzy?" a male voice asks. "You're doing the right thing."

Yet I wonder about whether I've actually been negligent, never having gone online to check "cold turkey & seizure & death."

Soon there's a confusion of footsteps, the paramedics arriving, the firefighters heading off. Archie-cat appears, rubbing against my legs. A crackle of emergency noises and oxygen masks before they lift Bob onto a stretcher. I raise my head cautiously to find I'm past being faint, and a paramedic tells me they're taking Bob to Toronto East General. We agree I'll follow in my car.

Bob's wallet is on the bedside table, and when I reach Emergency, I'm able to produce his health card and do the admission papers with the no-nonsense triage nurse behind the barrier. Afterward, she won't let me see Bob. Taking a chair in the lounge, I feel as if I'm back in the courthouse. The hospital suddenly strikes me as another institution where you sit and wait to be judged. I always have a book in my bag, but I don't feel much like reading anything serious, and reach for a several-year-old People magazine with a cover story about one of Jennifer Aniston's early non-pregnancies.

The last time I was at Toronto East General, I was bringing in a friend, a poet who had fallen on the ice, briefly knocking herself out and afterward not being able to tell me what day it was. As I sat in the lounge, a woman who'd brought in her feverish teenaged daughter recognized the emergency doctor walking by as Vincent Lam, whose book of stories, Bloodletting and Other Cures, had just won a major award.

The woman rushed off, wanting to get her copy of the book for Lam to autograph. Her daughter was furious, steaming with fever and disdain. I'm sure that wasn't the end of that particular story, but I never knew what was. My friend walked into the waiting room soon afterward, still wearing her hospital bracelet but declared by doctors to be fine, and telling me she always gets the days of the week mixed up; that's half of what being a poet is.

Bob has been inside emergency for about an hour when there's a change of shift at the triage station. In the bustle, I wander casually out the door as if checking the weather (still perfect) then motor up to the incoming nurse as if I've just arrived, saying that I'm here to see my brother. After checking his computer screen, the nurse takes me through to Bob's cubicle, still in the emergency department, a tiny green rectangle where he's asleep, snoring slightly and attached to a cardiograph and IV tubes. The fact he isn't in intensive care strikes me as either promising or negligent, and how can I tell which?

An hour or so later, with Bob still sleeping, a harried-looking emergency doctor who isn't Vincent Lam comes in and tells me that Bob has had a "cardiac event," although he won't get any more specific before they do more tests. The doctor is very handsome, with black hair, darkish skin and large grey-green eyes, like the Afghan girl on the magazine cover. He says that Bob also has delirium tremens. They'll keep him for at least one night, probably more, and refer him to detox afterward.

"No detox," Bob says, waking up suddenly.

"You're back," I say.

"No detox," Bob says more loudly, pulling at his IV tubes.

"Calm down, buddy," the doctor says, sounding sounds tough and leaning in to hold Bob down.

Terrified of another event, I tell my brother, "No one's going to make you do anything."

"Gotta promise." Bob shoots me a look over the doctor's shoulder that's equal parts slyness and terror, and I find myself thinking that's a pretty good definition of blackmail. I feel very shaken. It bothers me that the doctor won't say heart attack. I have no idea what to do.

"You've got to," Bob insists.

"No, she doesn't, buddy," the doctor says, sounding even tougher, clearly having no use for alcoholics taking up his beds. Under the circumstances, I hate myself for finding him handsome, but he looks even better angry, a strong-jawed, flashing-eyed movie star.

Considering Bob's slyness, I also wonder how much tolerance I have for alcoholics myself, drama being more bearable in books and movies than in your home, your castle, your private boutique hotel where, like every hotel manager, you'd like everything to be perfect, meaning that in your heart of hearts, you don't really want any guests.

A few days later, Bob was discharged from hospital. They said he'd had a mild heart attack and prescribed a regimen of pills and medical visits. He was also on a schedule set by the detox counsellor. Stat: one beer at intervals (greater each day) to wean him off alcohol.

Bob mostly stayed in bed at first, watching TV and waiting for his bottle. It made me think of when my son was born, how the hospital pharmacy sent up a can of Labatt's Blue pasted with a prescription label to bring down the milk. When Raine was born more than four years later, they'd not only stopped the beer, they turfed you out of hospital almost as soon as the baby was in diapers. They still made you take a wheelchair to the hospital door, baby in the crook of your arm. Then they practically tipped you onto the sidewalk.

It didn't seem to have hurt Raine. After Bob had been home a week, she walked unannounced into the backyard, where I'd coaxed him outside to eat lunch. She looked as lovely as always, if a little worried. Of course, given Raine's concern for the state of the world, that was pretty usual, too. She bent down to give Bob a kiss on the forehead, and he looked up at her adoringly. They had bonded when Bob stayed with us for a few months when Raine was five years old, not long before he met Lauren.

It was another beautiful day, warm and still, sparrows chattering in the bushes. When Raine asked Bob how he felt, he gave a long, sick-person's answer about his heart rate and blood pressure. Nodding periodically, Raine pulled a plate of cookies out of a re-used brown paper bag and placed it carefully on the table. As she sat down beside her uncle, still listening, I was struck again by how much they resembled each other, although it was hard to figure out why.

Bob looks like his mother, our father's first wife, with her narrow blue eyes, wavy hair and lazy, cynical Forties smile. Raine looks quite a bit like my mother, Dad's second wife. She isn't as tall as me and she's far more neatly made, with my mother's enormous grey-blue eyes, glorious skin and sexy big-lipped mouth.

Then Raine turned aside, and in her long, slender neck, I saw my father, too. My mother always compared Dad to actor Gregory Peck. Don Draper, she would say today. The long face, the crumpled forehead, a dark look of being both adult and damaged. I look a lot like my father, which is a far better deal for men than for women. Bob has quite a bit of Dad too, although more in his expression than his features. Maybe that was what made us all look a little alike, the length of the paternal genes.

In personality, of course, we couldn't be more different, and I have no idea how Raine ended up in our family. She is both astonishingly gentle and easily wounded, her big eyes often widening in puzzlement, which makes her look like a frightened deer. Yet she's also relentless, with a soft precision in her voice that never varies, no matter what goes wrong.

"Are you comfortable in the basement?" she asked Bob, her eyes following his every move. Bob was fidgeting, nervous after his heart attack—my poor brother, such a big diagnosis—acting as if the breeze hurt his skin.

"I am," he told her, although he didn't sound like it.

"Some people feel claustrophobic."

"Cosy," he said, trying to be jocular.

"There's also my old bedroom on the third floor. Maybe you'd like to have the windows and sun."

"That's your Mom's office."

"Yes, but we've used every room in the house for almost everything. She had her office in the basement for a while, and in her and Dad's bedroom."

"I feel safe down there," Bob said, sounding sincere.

"Then you don't want to move upstairs," Raine said, and did me the courtesy of looking relieved. "You're happy."

"Last time I stayed down there," Bob said, "it was a real basement. Concrete floor with an old rug and a futon, remember? But I was younger then, and still had my back."

"Your poor back," Raine said, touching his arm. "Have you thought about going vegan?"

Above us, four or five pairs of mating dragonflies flew joined like biplanes. I can't describe the look on Bob's face, so maybe I'll just stop right here.
Reversals

When I made it back to the trial, accused murderer Awet Asfaha was on the stand with a story that turned everything upside down. He hadn't shot Michael Bishen Golaub, but implied that his co-accused, Christophe Sheriffe, knew who did.

A cutthroat defence, according to a lawyer friend I ran into later that day. It was something people did sometimes to get off a murder rap: give up their co-accused while testifying that they were innocent themselves.

Asfaha was already in the witness box when I slipped in, watching himself on a three-year-old video as he was interrogated by Detective Samson hours after his arrest. It was a fascinating double image, Asfaha's present-day self watching his earlier self with an intent and speculative expression. Maybe he was considering how he was going to spin what he'd told police. Maybe he couldn't hear the muffled audio.

On the video, Asfaha looked and sounded far different than the polite, collegiate man in the box. Past-tense Asfaha was speaking about what he was up to at the time of his arrest.

"I had a bottle," he said. "I was going to see some bitches."

The video showed Asfaha wearing his sweats way low even for back then, the waistband riding beneath his butt. He slouched and spoke all mumble-mouth, sometimes acting disgusted, sometimes offended, sometimes indignant. By bitches, he meant the two women he and Sheriffe had dated the previous night at the famous Juicy Jerks, Roxie and Hannah, whom I'd seen on the stand. When he and Sheriffe were arrested, getting into Sheriffe's car, they were two innocent men on their way to meet the women for another date.

After the sequence ended, present-day Asfaha turned to face the judge.

"I was upset and used profane language toward the girls and I'm sorry, sir," he said.

The lawyer interrogating him looked sceptical. The law student sitting beside me whispered that this was Christopher Hicks, who was acting for Sheriffe. Asfaha must have been testifying for at least a day by the time I got there. The student told me that he'd taken the stand in his own defence. He'd already been questioned by his own lawyer and was under cross-examination.

Hostile cross-examination, given the way Asfaha was pointing a finger at Hicks's client. Hicks kept hammering at the fact Asfaha had said nothing about the shooting on the night of his arrest, calling up a series of video clips.

"I'm fucken telling you I don't know shit," past-tense Asfaha told Detective Samson.

Now, from the witness box, present-day Asfaha was saying that on the afternoon of the shooting, he and Sheriffe had dropped off their dates at Roxie's place, driven down nearby Mount Olive Drive and parked around the corner, where evidence from several witnesses showed that Sheriffe's car had sat idling before the murder.

Asfaha said he wasn't sure why they were there, but he got into the back seat of the car when Sheriffe asked him to. He didn't hear any gunfire, and had no idea that Michael Bishen Golaub was being shot a block away.

Suddenly a man with a gun in his hand raced around the corner and slammed into the front seat of the car. Sheriffe peeled off. According to Asfaha's testimony, Sheriffe was driving the getaway car and presumably knew the shooter, but he himself was an innocent passenger who hadn't shot Bishen Golaub, as the Crown alleged. The shooter had been a third party, someone Asfaha now said he hadn't seen very well and couldn't identify, aside from saying that his hair was in cornrows.

Hicks continued to look sceptical. Asfaha was claiming that he'd ridden in a car with the person who had arguably shot Bishen Golaub, yet he couldn't describe him, and hadn't said a word to police when he was interrogated that night, even after he'd been charged with first-degree murder?

Hicks played another video clip, with Asfaha insisting that he didn't know shit, and telling police it was their job to find the killer.

"I'm hinting to them that somebody's out there," present-day Asfaha told Hicks, after the clip. "I have to consider your client, sir. I have to consider my safety and my family's safety. I'm not going to put myself out there like that."

Hicks wasn't buying it, but here's another part of the story. During my previous visit to court, after detective Samson had testified, an expert on street gangs had alleged that Hicks's client Christopher Sheriffe was a member of the Jamestown Crips, more usually known as the Doomstown Crips. He was allegedly the leader of a Crips sub-group called the Hustle Squad, where he was known by his street name, Hitz.

Now Asfaha went on to say that he personally had nothing to do with street gangs. He'd hardly known Sheriffe before Juicy Jerks, and implied that he was afraid what Sheriffe's friends would do to him if he named the real shooter.

Still hammering, Hicks called up another video clip showing a much different Asfaha than the one now in the dock.

"Think I care about a fucken niggah losing his life, bro?" he asked police.

Bishen Golaub's wife ran from the courtroom, only coming back later in Asfaha's testimony, clutching some tissue and looking brave.

I had a meeting with a writer/director not long before this about the script for his first feature film. I was story-editing, asking questions, offering notes before he did a rewrite. What we mostly talked about was character, reminding ourselves how real people are complex and contradictory, and how you learn more about them over time, although maybe you understand less. They surprise you, behave out of character, reveal themselves through actions you didn't see coming.

In $200 million Hollywood films, they talk about reversals and reveals, how the action looks as if it's going in one direction, then it veers off suddenly so that say, James Bond doesn't get killed this time, either. Okay, we all know that, but what keeps you watching is the ingenuity and surprise of Bond's escape from, say, an airport hangar, and the reveal of a betrayal along the way; how Bond evades his pursuers, somersaulting through a parkour routine, buildering—stuff ninety-nine per cent of us would die trying, even if we knew what it was—ending up in a place you couldn't have predicted, with none of the action or psychology going in a straight line, and all of it shot in brilliant light at vertiginous angles. Ideally, anyhow.

In low-budget films like the writer/director's, what you've got is character reversals, people being unpredictably human. In first-draft scripts, a story editor can often predict what's going to happen way in advance, the characters slogging forward step by step, behaving one-dimensionally, dragging the story behind them like a corpse. Far too often, this predictability makes its way onscreen and I annoy my husband by poking him in the ribs and saying, In five minutes, she's going to rescue him.

The trick is to write a character who, say, starts by doing something apparently homophobic, so the audience thinks they've got him slotted. Then he behaves in a way that suggests he isn't homophobic, something else is making him act badly toward a gay character. Or, now you think about it, a character who among other things is gay. Then maybe your guy does a third thing, and you realize he's both homophobic and whatever that something else is, something that might be a lot more sympathetic. It could also be worse, but in either case there's a fight in his soul about what part of him is going to win, his better self or his bad side, and the audience is riveted, wanting to know which.

So here's Awet Asfaha in the witness box, staring at his videotaped self in a way that suddenly floods him with dimensionality. He slouches, pulls upright, leans forward intently, his gaze sharp and lively. In the video, it's fucken this, fucken that. In the box, he calls the judge and lawyers Sir, and leaps up whenever the jury enters or leaves the courtroom. He says he'd changed before the murder. Says his employer will vouch for him. Reliable, he says. At work every day. Admits he's scared of his mother.

Mostly Asfaha looks wide-eyed, which I read as both terrified and hopeful, so incredibly, cravenly hopeful that the jury will believe his story. Can it really be possible that Bishen Golaub was shot by a man wearing clothes that witnesses described as being pretty much identical to the ones Asfaha was wearing the previous night in the hotel—clothes that he was shown wearing on hotel surveillance tape—that the gunman ran down Mount Olive Drive and leapt into Sheriffe's car after the shooting; that this happened without Asfaha having the flimsiest idea what was about to go down, without him asking any questions when Sheriffe told him to get into the back seat, without him being able to give police enough information about the real gunman afterward to get out of a charge of first-degree murder?

There were also the trace amounts of gunpowder residue found on Asfaha's clothes. Had he really got those simply by being in the car with the shooter?

Possible, I suppose, since Christopher Sheriffe's clothes also showed traces of residue, and no one claimed he'd ever left his car, although according to the police, Asfaha's clothes showed more residue than Sheriffe's. You also had to remember Hannah's testimony about Asfaha having an errand, which suggested he had more of an objective that afternoon than I'd heard him explain. Plus there was the fact that the two details that Asfaha volunteered about the alleged shooter matched the description of an eyewitness to the killing who had testified before he did, and who had described the killer as being about nineteen and having cornrows, when Asfaha was twenty-four and wore his hair in a fade.

On the other hand, you had the Crips. Guns. Retribution. The jury could only vote to convict if they agreed Asfaha was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and the expert testimony I'd heard a few days before set Asfaha's story bobbing in a sea of doubts, awash in questions that kept most jury members looking every bit as intent as Asfaha, and at some points, deeply troubled.

Gang expert Aman Nasser of the Toronto Police Services introduced himself in the witness box as a plainclothes constable handling major crimes in 23 Division, which policed the west side of the city, including Rexdale. He spoke a week before Asfaha's testimony, and you should picture a young man as wide and squat as former major league baseball catcher Pudge Rodríguez: dark, calm and unmistakeable.

In fact, Nasser was so unmistakeable that I couldn't help wondering about his safety, although police officers don't get killed that often in Toronto, and when they do, it tends to involve speeding cars (or unfortunately a lumbering snowplow), not gangland take-downs. I figured that maybe the persistence and toughness of police in tracking down cop killers must shield Aman Nasser from the gangs he shadows. In any case, here he was in open court with many eyes on him, and some of them pretty cold.

Nasser said he'd been born and brought up in Rexdale, gone to high school there, and in college he'd majored in phys ed with a minor in Caribbean studies. I thought of the neat bungalows and townhouses Nasser's colleague in forensics had videotaped on the muggy afternoon when Bishen Golaub was shot, the houses kept up, the gardens weeded and lawns mowed. He'd grown up in one of them, and now he worked his turf.

Nasser looked for confidential informants, he said. CIs. Now we were back on TV ground, things you saw on Coppers and The Wire. Nasser explained how people who were arrested might have a "conversation" with police about what was happening on the street. A debrief, he called it. Sometimes the person would agree to act as an informant, and go on to provide information to police about drug dealers and murders over a longer period of time, maybe until he moved away or went to jail.

Some were compensated. If they had been charged with a crime, they might get a lesser sentence or even find charges waived. Sometimes they got money. Unlike on The Wire, they wouldn't get their payment out of the cop's back pocket, but from a separate police unit. Nasser mentioned paperwork in a neutral tone, although that wasn't how I'd heard other police officers say the word when they were speaking off the record.

The crown attorney questioning Nasser—the one who'd rejected me from the jury—was establishing the cop's bona fides. I'd learned her name was Laura Bird.

How many debriefs had Nasser conducted?

"I've done hundreds. Five hundred, easily."

And how reliable were the confidential informants?

You could test them. The information passed on—snitched, as they say in the hood—might be about someone possessing firearms. If more than one informant said a particular guy had guns, the likelihood was higher, and maybe police would apply for a warrant to go into the suspect's home. If they found firearms, that confirmed the informants' reliability, and you trusted them more.

"In these neighbourhoods, the majority of people are good people," Nasser said. "They want to tell you things but they're afraid something will happen to them. It's the same with confidential informants. If their identity gets out, more than likely they will be killed."

Which was why Nasser was in court instead of the CIs who had filled him in on the role of gangs in Rexdale, the trafficking they did, the fights between rival gangs, and especially the weekly exchange of gunfire and the murders that meant the pleasant-looking suburban neighbourhood wasn't always so pleasant, after all.

When you see murders on TV, or watch shows about traffickers, it can seem pretty distant, Us and Them. But as Constable Nasser testified, I was having a hard time feeling the distance. The fact is, I had a one-time trafficker living in my basement, my half-brother having been convicted years ago of moving some pot. This was during his crack phase, when he sold drugs to pay for his habit. He'd been sentenced to two years less a day and had served eight months in prison.

Our neighbourhood in east-end Toronto is generally safe, but we have shadows like Bob flitting around, and our share of ghosts from murders here and there. A few years ago, a teenager was shot to death at a pizza joint not far away, what the newspapers called the victim of a gangland killing, but most other local illegality doesn't amount to much. Our garages are periodically tagged with graffiti, junior-high vandalism. Neighbours have suffered the occasional break-in and we once had bikes stolen from our garage.

But there was also the summer night my husband and I were walking along the Danforth with a lawyer friend. He pointed out a restaurant, open but empty, one of a few around here that are always pretty empty, even though some of them had been operating for years.

Fronts, our friend said. On Mondays, the restaurant owners would go into the bank with sacks full of bills, saying they'd had a good weekend, house full, plenty of customers paying cash. But really it was their take from illegal activities, prostitution or trafficking, which they were laundering through a legitimate business.

As he spoke, I seemed to see a topography of crime laid onto a normal-looking grid of streets, not an underworld so much as an overworld: things happening slightly above our heads as we go about our business. Like most topographies it's generally flat, but here and there you get invisible hills of incidents. Once you know about it, you can feel a thickening in the air as you walk past certain empty restaurants or the pizza joint, and I couldn't help wondering if our topography flowed into Rexdale's, profits from drugs sold up there being laundered just down the block.

Only connect, E.M. Forster said.

And then there's Bob. He was subdued when he got out of prison all those years ago—nearly twenty now—and never messed with crack again. But the booze called like a siren, and for a while Bob was desperate, working a little and drinking a lot. We couldn't really see him, the way he scared the children. We had to cut him off.

Then a buddy of his died on the street, huddled on a ventilation grate. He couldn't have been Bob's first friend to die in such neglect, but this time it really seemed to hit home. He sobered up and came over to apologize, later staying with us for a few months. After that, he met Lauren, and everything was different.

Bob is looking different again these days, his skin grey after his hospitalization. He seems floored by his diagnosis, awed by it, abashed, even though the doctors say it was a very mild heart attack and with care, he'll be fine. Bob he takes care, following his detox regimen to the minute and taking his pills on the hour. Lately he's also been helping out around the house, taking charge of the bread machine. Speaking of reversals: a one-time crack addict patiently baking bread.

I'd forgotten how much my brother loves bread. When he stayed here before, we had our first bread machine going, with my husband and the kids needing packed lunches every day. Bob soon took charge of baking, and chowed down on fresh toast for breakfast and thick cheese sandwiches for lunch.

Now I came back from a meeting one day and found he'd hauled our latest machine out of storage in the basement, where we'd been keeping it since Raine had left for university. That delicious smell of bread baking, as warm and earthy as a sunlit field.

"You're going to ruin my diet," I said. "When I just walked exactly 9.2 kilometres back from Ossington and Dundas. I checked. And ate bloody tofu for lunch."

Bob looked up to see if I was joking. When he saw that I was, at least ninety-five per cent, he laughed at me silently.

"Something I can contribute," he said, and in fact his contribution was pretty time-consuming. Bob sat at the kitchen table while the bread machine kneaded the dough, sometimes reading the paper but often just staring at the machine, waiting for the Add Ingredients beep to put in something like flax seed, the waiting for the dough to rise and for the end-of-cycle buzzer, when he'd take out the dough and knead it by hand for the second rising, preferring to bake it in the oven rather than in the machine, to get a better texture and a harder crust. When the bread was ready, four hours total, he finally considered himself off shift, and headed downstairs to watch reruns of Frasier.

One day when I got home, I found small plastic bags of poppy and pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, raisins and dried cranberries ranged along the top of the butcher block. Add Ingredients, I thought.

"I like that Bulk Barn," Bob said, from his usual seat at the kitchen table.

As our father grew older and disabled by arthritis, he usually sat at the kitchen table on his days off, drinking coffee, playing solitaire.

"So you got your disability cheque," I said, understanding that Bob was ready to talk.

"They cut me off," he said. "A neighbour snitched about me retiling Lauren's bathroom, and they said I could work. I should be working."

Lauren's bathroom. Not our bathroom. I put my bag on the counter, wondering if the seeds and nuts had come from money he'd got panhandling; if that's what he'd been doing while I was out.

"So did you find any work?"

"All that tiling put my back out for weeks."

"When was this?"

"A while ago now."

"So how have you been living?"

"Her." Meaning Lauren. I wondered if that explained why he was leaving Lauren his mother's furniture, the antiques he'd refinished so beautifully, which he said she'd earned. Maybe the fact he'd lost his pension was also part of the reason she'd kicked him out, tired of carrying the weight. Why the other man had looked more attractive. "Lauren got a boyfriend," Bob had said.

"I'll find something," he told me. "Once I get a little better, if that's all right. Some people get jobs at the Liquor Control Board. Those are government jobs." Seeing my expression, he added, "Or Home Depot."

"I see a lot of construction guys working at Home Depot," I said. "You've never tried there before?"

His shoulders drooped. Helpless eyes.

"Maybe they'll have something for you next time," I said. "But you've got to get better first. I hope you know you can stay here as long as you want."

"Thank you," Bob said, looking so relieved he broke my heart.

Of course he had to stay. Yet when I went upstairs to my study, I couldn't help logging onto my financial program. Bob was sixty-two. Who would hire a sixty-two-year-old man with a bad back and a recent heart attack? I didn't see it, and although I knew he could have taken his government pension early, I also knew that payments were smaller when you did that, and stayed smaller all your life, not going up when you hit sixty-five. I did some calculations. On their own, the early-retirement payments wouldn't be quite enough to live on, and since they'd cut him off disability, Bob had nothing else.

I wasn't having the best year myself, having taken too much time to finish my novel, and lately—haphazardly, almost absentmindedly—accepting more low-budget projects than I'd intended. An old friend, a novelist, had become pretty interested in my lucrative sideline of script doctoring, and had recently asked what I was up to. I told him I'd done precious little script doctoring lately, having been too busy with everything else.

"So you made the mistake of going for quality," he said.

We couldn't ask Bob to help us out with room and board. If we did, he'd have to take his pension now, and would never have enough to live independently, not without permanent support. If we carried him for the short term, Bob would be able to get his own place when he went on full pension. That would be in three years, and surely he could get a job in the meantime. I was probably wrong; he'd find something. You can't predict anything the way the economy is these days.

Yes, you can. But I didn't need my financial program to know that we could afford to add one person to the grocery budget for as long as we needed to. We ate simply, fresh ingredients, home cooking. Thank God and Premier Tommy Douglas for medicare. Bob would only need money for spending and transportation, and our younger brother would help. I knew my husband would say, "What else are you going to do?" And he would be right. What else were you going to do?

Find a publisher for the novel, work on quality films and attend the trial, which was beginning to obsess me. As my half-brother slid into our house and into our lives.

Constable Nasser had a very specific definition: a street gang member participates in crimes for the benefit of the group. Sometimes gangs are attached to a neighbourhood, but not always. If they are, their territory or turf may be a very small patch of ground—sometimes just a length of sidewalk—where they exercise and defend their right to commit crimes. They won't let rival gang members set foot there.

"Having the ability to sell drugs exclusively in their neighbourhood is of paramount importance," Nasser said. "Trafficking is very lucrative. You can make a lot of money in a very short period of time."

On the stand, Nasser mapped out a police vision of Rexdale. Some parts belonged to rival gangs calling themselves Crips or Bloods, which weren't closely tied to the gangs of the same names in the United States. Not all Crips got along, either. Nasser threw out a few names. The Stovetop Crips, the O-Block Crips, the Doomstown Crips—all these were Rexdale gangs, he said, and all were more or less allied. But they were deadly rivals with the Mount Olive Crips, who owned the street where Bishen Golaub was murdered.

According to Nasser, Bishen Golaub's death was part of a series of back-and-forth shootings among Rexdale gangs that had seen six violent gun incidents in the three weeks before he was killed, each apparently in retribution for the one before.

"There's usually a target," Nasser said. "But if they don't find who they're looking for, they'll shoot anyone in the territory. The message is not to mess with us."

That's what it meant for Bishen Golaub to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some witnesses claimed he bore a slight resemblance to a high-up gang leader, but from what Nasser said, he could also have been a random target. I got a sense that police weren't sure of the exact reason he'd been shot, or maybe that they couldn't prove anything. In any case, I thought Nasser skirted the subject of motive.

Yet he was firm about the Toronto Police checklist for identifying gang members. There were seven criteria: involvement in gang-related crime, acknowledging membership in a gang, being identified as a gang member by physical evidence, being identified by a reliable source, association with other gang members, use of common gang markers, such as tattoos, hand signals or bandanas in gang colours (red for the Bloods, blue for the Crips), and previous court findings.

Producing a photograph of two rows of smiling young men, Nasser identified them as the Hustle Squad, the gang sub-group allegedly led by Christopher Sheriffe, or Hitz. He said a confidential informant had supplied the photo and identified the men, a couple of whom held their hands out in a C shape, which Nasser said was the Crips hand sign.

One of the young men had been investigated by police for wearing a blue bandana. A second man wore a mourning tattoo saying, "RIP José Hierro-Saez 1987-2007" honouring a friend who had been killed in a shoot-out. The man with the tattoo was named Aeon Grant, and he would be shot to death himself on December 3, 2009. A third was Grant's half-brother, who would be convicted of a home invasion in Rosedale and possessing firearms. A fourth was the brother of the late José Hierro-Saez. A fifth, nicknamed Midnight, would be murdered in Fort McMurray, Alberta, not long after the photo was taken, on November 9, 2008. He was seventeen at the time of his death. The man in the centre front of the photo, identified by Nasser as another half brother of Aeon Grant, Rai-Sean Greenidge, would be convicted of trafficking two pounds of marijuana.

Nasser identified several others, some tentatively. Most had nicknames, including Casino, C-5 (his older brother was C-4), M-1 (for Moolah First) and Tizzy or HAM Tizzy—"'HAM' means hard as a mother..."

"Thank you. We get the idea," Mr. Justice Ewaschuk said.

A week later, Awet Asfaha testified that on the night of his arrest, he hadn't known Christopher Sheriffe's legal name. His government name, he called it. He knew him only as Hitz, and intimated again that he was frightened of him, or at least wary, even though he was a few years older than Sheriffe. In his telling, it was Sheriffe and his friend, after all, who had killed Michael Bishen Golaub.

I dropped into court for a couple of days running to hear Asfaha testify, Constable Nasser's testimony unavoidably in mind. Sheriffe remained remarkably stony-faced throughout. Nasser had certainly painted him as a hard case, barely into his twenties with at least three friends shot to death and at least one more convicted of a violent crime.

But as the cross-examination continued, Sheriffe's lawyer, Chris Hicks, insisted that he was an innocent man. Asfaha was the bad guy, the murderer.

And then he dropped a bomb. According to Hicks, Asfaha was also a drug trafficker. At the time of the murder, he'd been running cocaine to Fort McMurray, Alberta, with a friend named McFrinn Paddy, who would himself be shot to death six weeks after Bishen Golaub.

"You are a Crip," Hicks told Asfaha. "That's not an intimation. That's a fact."

Reveals and reversals. Of course, dropping in and out of the trial, I missed whole blocks of testimony, including Constable Nasser's take on Asfaha. I also realized from Hicks's phrasing that Asfaha had previously mentioned "mistakes" in his past. It made me think about screenplays, how you pick your moments to drop in and out of a story, so what the characters are doing and discussing will always seem new. You can't take one step after the other, filling in every blank. You have to jump.

There it is again: the chip of ice in a writer's heart. Here I was, thinking about writing when Asfaha was literally fighting for his life, trying to fend off Hicks as he attacked his story of a third party being the one who killed Bishen Golaub.

Hicks was fighting just as hard for Sheriffe.

"For some reason," he told Asfaha, "you shot Mr. Golaub. For some reason, you included Christopher Sheriffe in your plan, when he was an innocent man. You got Mr. Sheriffe to drop you off in his car to do this errand that Hannah mentioned."

"Your client and his friend shot Mr. Golaub, sir, not me. I'm disgusted sitting with him in that same box."

I glanced at Christopher Sheriffe, who seemed to return the compliment. I'd noticed at the start of the trial how they never exchanged a glance. Now I knew why.

Hicks leaned forward. "Did you kill Mr. Golaub?" he asked.

"I did not kill Mr. Golaub, sir," Asfaha said. "Your client and the other man killed Mr. Golaub."

With a disbelieving shake of his head, Hicks closed his cross-examination. But the day wasn't over. With a rustle of her long black robes, assistant crown attorney Laura Bird stood up.

Laura Bird: "Once you saw the fellow running toward you with a gun in his hand, why didn't you just leave?"

Awet Asfaha: "When I seen him running toward us, I said, Let's get out of here."

Bird: "You were in the car with him for five to seven minutes. You must play it over and over in your mind."

Asfaha: "I know what you're going to say, ma'am."

Bird: "You have an answer ready for everything, don't you, Mr. Asfaha?"

Morning in the courtroom. Laura Bird had already lit into Awet Asfaha the previous afternoon. Blood sport, but Asfaha seemed to be enjoying himself, maybe as a change from Metro West Detention Centre, where he was being held.

Bird must have been happy to hear Asfaha repeatedly incriminate Christopher Sheriffe as the getaway driver in Bishen Golaub's murder, which would make him legally guilty. At the same time, she picked away at his assertion that a third party had done the actual shooting, someone he didn't recognize, even though he'd seen the man run down the street and jump in Sheriffe's car, and ridden with him for those crucial five to seven minutes afterward. Despite the fact this had to be the most memorable incident in his life, she said, Asfaha didn't seem to remember very much about it.

Bird: "What colour was his hoodie?"

Asfaha: "I don't remember."

"How tall was he?"

"I don't remember."

"His build?"

"I don't remember."

"What nationality did he appear to be?"

"I don't remember."

Mr. Justice Ewaschuk: "Did he have an accent?"

"I don't remember an accent, no, sir."

Bird: "Where did he say he wanted to be dropped off?"

"I don't remember. I didn't pay any attention."

"He said 'he had aired the niggah out.' Did he say that in response to something Mr. Sheriffe said?"

"I don't remember."

"You were there. This was the most remarkable experience of your life. Did Mr. Sheriffe answer this?"

"I don't recall, ma'am."

"What did the gun look like?"

"It was black."

"You have some familiarity with guns, don't you, Mr. Asfaha. You had some bullets yourself. What kind was it?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

"What did he do with the gun once he was in the car?"

"I think you could get killed faster by peering over his shoulder and seeing what he's doing."

Walking back to her desk, then toward the lawyers' podium again: "Jamestown is a small community, isn't it, Mr. Asfaha?"

"Yes, it is."

"And (at the time of the shooting) you had spent 14 of the past 15 years in the Jamestown neighbourhood. You went to school there, you lived there, your sisters lived there. You knew young people."

"I knew people in the neighbourhood, yes."

"You must have been surprised that you didn't know the identity of the shooter."

"It's not like I go around doing a census," he said.

"You could have gone into 23 Division. You had critical information. You could have asked for witness protection."

"Trust in witness protection? No one believes in that."

"If you didn't want to put yourself out there, you could have called Crime Stoppers."

In the dock, I thought Christopher Sheriffe looked faintly amused. Meanwhile, Bird kept hammering, and Asfaha kept failing to remember particulars about the alleged shooter, although he named others, including Christopher Sheriffe, whom he believed might have gang connections. He wasn't sure. He insisted that he wasn't a gang member himself, despite his own admitted cocaine trafficking and a couple of arrests.

Only when Bird had rested her examination did Asfaha have more to say to his own lawyer, Liam O'Connor. During re-examination, O'Connor questioned his client on one of the main points made by both Bird and lawyer Christopher Hicks: Why hadn't he given the police more information at the time of his arrest?

"In real life, sir, that doesn't work out," Asfaha said.

"You're thinking about being a witness in a crime," O'Connor said.

"I didn't think I did a crime."

"But as a witness?"

"I was afraid for my life and my family's life, sir."

"Have you given us this information to avoid criminal consequences?"

"No, sir."

"What are the consequences of giving the information you have here?"

Silence.

"What are the consequences of giving the names of gang members to which you're party?"

"Death."

"Where are you staying now?"

"I'm in segregation," he said. "They think my life is in danger."

Asfaha's voice finally faltered. He sank back into his chair. And then he was dismissed.
Disabilities

The courthouse was getting familiar, along with the vocabulary of gangs and murder. Your government name. Your street name. By the time Awet Asfaha stepped down—Solo or Doulo, as he was called on the street—I'd been rubbernecking the trial off and on for almost four weeks. Outside the court, I overheard lawyers saying it was likely going on for a couple of weeks longer. Too long, one said. They risked losing jurors and having it crash into a mistrial.

Such a relief that I hadn't been picked for jury duty. Six, seven weeks of sitting in court every day? And having to hang in there, despite whatever else was happening in your life. I'm not sure how we would have handled my brother's heart attack if I'd been on the jury. It was just as well to drop in when I had time, especially with a vacation just around the corner.

Only trouble was, people were starting to notice me, the families of the accused casting sidelong glances as I left the courtroom heading for the escalator. Heads swivelling, eyes curious in a way that made me itchy. Being a writer, I prefer to live on the sidelines, watching rather than being watched, wanting to be both invisible and exempt. The victim's wife was the only one who never paid me any attention, even though she was in court every day, always sitting in the front row of the public benches, a shortish woman with a kind and sensible face.

Once, outside the courtroom, I'd heard her being comforted by two other women. One of them said that even if Asfaha and Christopher Sheriffe were acquitted of murdering her husband, she didn't need to worry. They would be killed themselves as soon as they got back on the streets.

"I don't want anyone else to die," she said. "I just want justice."

As I left the building after Awet Asfaha's testimony, I thought one of the men from Sheriffe's family watched the direction I was taking. No, I wanted to tell him. I'm not really here.

Of course, that didn't stop me from watching the families of the accused as the testimony incriminated either Asfaha or Sheriffe. Each family occupied a bench in the public gallery behind the widow. People I'd picked out as being with Sheriffe usually sat one row ahead of Asfaha's family, and there was never any eye contact between the two groups. Most were women, most of them young and extremely pretty. You'd think they were actresses or models out on a casting call, so many of them with big brown eyes, all so thin and beautifully dressed, ankles crossed to show their legs, always polite when I ran into them in the washroom.

One older man sat in Sheriffe's row, thin and loose-jointed, wearing a clatter of medals on ribbons around his neck. The younger guy, the one I thought was watching me as I walked out of the courthouse, often sat on the bench beside him. If he was watching, if I wasn't being paranoid. Maybe he was looking over absentmindedly, or simply curious about the lone white woman appearing irregularly at back of the courtroom, taking notes in a school notepad. I had no reason to think he was ganged up, but in any case, when I looked back at the courthouse he was facing the other direction, talking on his phone.

Of course, the fact he wasn't all that interested had its tiny, opposite ping, writers wanting to be both invisible and noticed, bratty creatures that we are.

I was laughing at myself as I passed the Eaton Centre, where a new panhandler had taken my brother's place, a very thin woman sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard, her face as creased as tree bark. I figured it must have been a prized spot, given the crowd of people streaming past. As I shook off the trial, I wondered if there had been a fight over who got to sit there.

For no logical reason, it occurred to me that Bob could re-apply for his disability pension. So they'd cut him off for re-tiling Lauren's bathroom—their bathroom—proving to government minds that his ruined back didn't keep him from working. But after his heart attack, the doctors were insisting he take it easy. Daily walks, avoid stress, don't try to work, not for a while. There had to be some provision for getting back on disability if you hit a wall.

When I got home, I took the idea between my teeth and laid it like a dog at Bob's feet, waiting to be patted. He was sitting in the kitchen, occupying a thick atmosphere of baking bread.

"Mind your own bees wax," he replied, and stood up warily.

It was hard to imagine anyone looking tougher. Bob broadcast disrespect, his eyes squinted down to slits. Because I'd suggested he could reapply for his disability pension?

"I was only trying to help."

"You think I might have had about enough of that?"

Walking a wide circle around him, I went into the little sunroom and leaned against the window. Wispy clouds in the sky outside. A wind shaking the lilac trees. I hadn't asked enough questions about why Bob had ended up back on the street, forgetting that you couldn't take what he said at face value. An exercise of imagination, trying to figure out what was really going on with Bob.

"So they're after you for restitution," I guessed. "They said you had to pay back, I don't know, X amount of your pension? As a penalty for tiling the bathroom?"

"Can't get blood from a stone."

Bob turned aside, looking down at the oven, where the timer clicked down to one minute. Tension, waiting for the next click down.

"Meaning what?"

He kept his eyes on the clicker. "That's what the caseworker said. No sense going after me for payback. 'You can't get blood from a stone.'"

"Did they call it fraud?" I asked. "Did they charge you, for taking a pension when they said you were working?"

"You want me to leave?"

When Bob looked over at me, I saw our father's long face. Skin weathered by the streets. Just a glint of blue from his eyes.

"Guess I'm not pretty enough for ya," he said.

"I've got a right to know what's going on in my own house, Bob."

"The deserving poor, that's you want. A quotation from Dickens. Or Miss Grote. Grade 12 English."

The oven beeped, the bread ready. We have one of those annoying beepers that just keeps going. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Bob ignored it.

"What are you telling me?" I asked. "Did they try to get the money back from Lauren?"

Beep. Beep. Beep.

"Since they couldn't get it from you?"

Beep. Beep. Beep.

"Is that why she got mad at you? Kicked you out? Part of it, anyhow."

"No one's getting a goddamn penny from Lauren."

No, they weren't. We exchanged a wry glance, and—Beee—Bob finally hit the oven timer, taking out the two warm loaves of bread. He eased each out of its pan with a wooden paddle, placing both on a rack to cool.

"If you were planning on disappearing for a while, they know where you're staying," I said. "From the hospital records."

"Big Brother's computer doesn't work that well," he said. "And they've only got six months to file charges. Blood from a stone, she said. Unless her boss gets onto her, I bet she lets it go."

"You're betting this," I said.

"A gambling man," he agreed, looking pleased with himself.

Privately, I figured they wouldn't come after my husband and me for restitution. Bob hadn't been living with us at the time. In fact, it was a good deal for officialdom if we took him in, and there was no reason to ruin it by bothering us.

I also knew that bureaucrats sometimes found sacrificial victims when they had to keep their own heads from rolling.

"So if they can charge you within six months... your six months ends when?"

Bob cut himself a slice of too-warm bread, buttered it and went outside.

I was still feeling unsettled when Christopher Sheriffe's mother took the stand a few days later. As it happens, she had sent me a Facebook message the previous week, responding to my online postings. She insisted on her son's innocence, and once she began her testimony, that was her overwhelming message in court. In answer to questions from her son's lawyer, she said her name was Marjorie Sheriffe and that she was the biological mother of Christopher, who was the youngest of five children, all of whom had finished high school. She and her husband had lived in their own house for nineteen years. For all of this time, she had worked for the Royal Bank.

As a character witness for her son, Marjorie Sheriffe was questioned gently by his lawyer, Christopher Hicks. She quickly revealed that Sheriffe had star potential as a soccer player, internationally-recognized athletic talent and—she added rapidly, half under her breath—a developmental delay. As early as elementary school, Sheriffe was on the track team with his good friend Aeon Grant, who would later be shot to death. When he was older, Sheriffe added basketball and soccer to his repertoire. Soccer quickly became his main game, with Sheriffe being scouted by an English professional club, the Blackburn Rovers F.C., over a twelve-year period.

"Let's not make too much of this," Mr. Justice Ewaschuk said, interrupting Hicks. But as Hicks went on insistently to detail Sheriffe's trips to England with his father—including six months when he trained with Birmingham City F.C.'s Under 16 team—Ewaschuk grew more interested. Sheriffe played in the Ontario Cup, and earned a spot on Canada's Under 16 team, playing a tourney in Trinidad and Tobago as a forward striker.

"Left foot strikers are very much in demand," Ewaschuk said, leaning over to speak to Sheriffe's proud mother. "I had a son who played at that level."

Yet Marjorie Sheriffe said that her son had also suffered serious injuries, ones that made me wonder whether his pro career had been scuppered years before, even though she still seemed to hope for it fiercely. He had damaged one eye badly during the Ontario Cup, the smashed orbit leading to emergency surgery in which doctors put a metal plate in his cheekbone. Another serious a year later had left him with a plate in his knee, although according to his mother, the Toronto F.C. was monitoring her son even now. Meanwhile, he'd been training as a carpenter and had done his apprenticeship through the union.

The street name Hitz? Marjorie Sheriffe testified that she had given him the nickname herself when her son was a toddler and hit his siblings. It stayed appropriate, she said, since Christopher was accident prone when he got older, and later played a physically aggressive game of soccer.

Now Hicks leaned in, both Sheriffe and Awet Asfaha looking riveted in the dock.

Was her son a member of a street gang? Hicks asked.

"My son is not in a street gang," Marjorie Sheriffe said, as if the subject was closed.

So here was Christopher Sheriffe in three dimensions, seen through the prism of his mother's love. It was a love that I felt burning even more brightly a few moments later, during a break in her testimony. This was when Marjorie Sheriffe became the first person to ask me what I was doing in the courtroom. As we stood in the corridor, I told her how I'd been called for jury duty and rejected, yet had grown fascinated by the case.

"I've always said this was a great story," she answered. "It would make a great movie, or a book, when the truth comes out. As we're confident it will."

"I have a son myself," I said. "This must be hard."

"It is hard," she agreed, for once a little hesitant. Then she firmed up. "But we're confident that the truth will come out, and that justice will be done, both for us and for the victim's family."

Marjorie Sheriffe's cross-examination started after the break.

"We all want our children to grow up to be astronauts, to be politicians or scientists," the lawyer said. "We don't want them to grow up to be gang members."

This was Liam O'Connor, who was representing her son's co-accused, Awet Asfaha. He spoke in a soft, staccato voice, his diction a little unpredictable, so you were never sure what he was going to say next, what angle he was coming from. He wasn't quite asking questions so much as putting statements that might or might not demand an answer, saying that her son had started getting in trouble with the law during his teen years.

The first incident, both agreed, involved an assault on his brother in 2006 over an iPod belonging to Christopher which his brother didn't want to give up. Christopher was charged after using a pen or pencil to stab his brother in the upper stomach area.

Later, he was charged with trafficking marijuana.

"I think he was with some friends at a plaza in Brampton," Marjorie Sheriffe said. "I'm not sure who the friends were. He paid a donation and the charges were withdrawn. I asked him not to do it again."

Afterwards, O'Connor pointed out that a brother of Christopher's good friend Tony was shot to death. Marjorie Sheriffe testified that she didn't know if Tony's brother was a gang member, and said she hadn't asked. O'Connor pointed out that Tony and Christopher had gone to elementary school with Aeon Grant, who was also shot.

"Was this a gang situation?" he asked.

"I have no idea," Marjorie Sheriffe said. "I didn't ask my son. I read everything in the newspaper and online."

Shown the photograph of the group of young men, including Christopher, that Constable Nasser had testified made up the Hustle Squad of the Doomstown Crips, Marjorie Sheriffe said she didn't recognize the hand signals being made as gang signs.

"My son is not in a gang," she said. "He was not a gang leader. My son's interest was to go to school and play soccer. I don't know anything about gangs."

Did she know he smoked marijuana, as text messages sent from his phone seemed to suggest?

"My son has never smoked marijuana in front of me or in the house."

What about trafficking?

"He never has any money," she said. "I give him lunch money and spending money. There's so sign of any marijuana proceeds. My son doesn't sell drugs. I gas the car; he only uses it when my husband is off work. I give him money, gas, and the car when it's available to use. When he works part time, he buys his own clothes."

Throughout Marjorie Sheriffe's testimony, Awet Asfaha leaned forward in the dock, seeming transfixed. Forearms resting on his thighs, he clasped his hands loosely when O'Connor went on to remind the jury that the charges stuck when Christopher was arrested and charged with the murder of Michael Bishen Golaub.

"That's not what you want for your child," O'Connor said.

"No. Nor for the victim," Marjorie Sheriffe shot back.

"You know that a police officer came here and said he had heard from two reliable confidential informants that your son is a gang member."

"I got that about the informants from the paperwork that came to the house. I know my son is not a gang member."

O'Connor pointed out that Christopher was held in custody until he received bail six months after he was charged, when he was placed under house arrest at home—"under my control," Marjorie Sheriffe agreed, "and the control of my husband and son."

"Since his release, he has made you a grandmother twice while under house arrest," O'Connor said. "And was back in custody recently for a new charge."

Commotion. Lawyers leaping to their feet, the judge barking from the bench, the jury sent out of the courtroom as I wondered what would be said about this new charge when they got back, and what could be.

The bare outlines of the story, given in front of the jury:

Not long before his current trial for murder, Christopher Sheriffe had been arrested and charged over an incident that had occurred several years before. He was alleged to have stabbed another young man with a large knife, nearly severing his bowel. The young man was so seriously injured that he was hospitalized for a long time, but was able to identify the person who allegedly stabbed him by his street name, Hitz. Liam O'Connor was treading carefully, although I gathered that police didn't seem to have connected "Hitz" with Sheriffe until quite recently. But as O'Connor told the jury, Sheriffe was still only charged with aggravated assault.

"He is presumed to be innocent," O'Connor emphasized. "He has not been convicted of the crime."

Nor would he be convicted; Sheriffe would be cleared of the crime a year later. In fact, as Marjorie Sheriffe pointed out at the time, her son had never been convicted of any crime, despite his earlier arrests for assaulting his brother and for trafficking marijuana, and a more recent assault charge O'Connor mentioned arising from a domestic problem involving his girlfriend.

Marjorie Sheriffe was a modern woman, a homeowner and Royal Bank employee, always impeccably dressed. But as she defended her son, she also struck me as eternal, a mother figure from down through the ages, a matriarch, the empress of her home. I thought of the way you tried to work yourself into that sort of role when you were a new mother, how you had to keep forcing yourself to rise to the occasion until finally, arguably, you grew up yourself.

So you're in the supermarket and your two-year-old is having a tantrum in the carrier seat of the shopping cart, flailing, screaming, shrieking, beating harsh little bullet fists against your chest. I want. I want. I want. Maybe you're exhausted, sick off-and-on for six months with a cold that keeps rotating through the family, sleep deprived, work pressing down, not enough money, and all you want to do is burst into tears yourself.

So I developed a mantra to repeat silently at times like that while I tried gently and firmly to settle the child. I'm the adult here. I'm the adult here. I am the adult.

That might be partly how I became one. Yet as Marjorie Sheriffe testified, I couldn't help thinking about something else that had happened not long before when I lay in bed one night reading. The night was warm, the window open. A child was having a screaming tantrum somewhere up the street and the howls were getting closer.

I checked the clock: after 11 p.m. The child was out far too late and he or she was shrieking with exhaustion. Soon the shrieks approached my house, and I heard a woman speaking in a low but piercing monotone to the child, whose cries were wordless and rhythmic. They seemed to stop on the sidewalk below my window, and as the woman's voice rose, I began to hear what she was saying.

"You can't hit Mommy like that. What if Mommy hits you back? I'm going to hit you back so you know what it's like. I'm going to give you such a slap. If you bite me like that anymore, I'm going to bite you back. I'm going to do it. I'm going to bite. You just watch me. I'm going to bite."

The child's cries grew hysterical. I slid out of bed and pulled back the curtains, looking down to see a woman bent over a stroller under the street light. She was speaking right in the child's face while rocking the stroller violently from side to side. The child, maybe two years old, arced its back in the stroller, struggling to get free.

"I'm going to give you such a slap," she said. "I am. You watch."

I grabbed my dressing gown, planning to go outside and try to calm her down.

"I'm going to slap. I really am." A low, thrumming, sensual note entered her voice. "Hit you fat in the stupid face."

"Do you want me to call the cops for child abuse?" I yelled.

Sudden silence from the woman. She straightened up, started pushing the stroller ahead, racing away with disorganized strides as the child kept sobbing.

"That's a child. You're an adult. Act like one," I yelled, shrugging on the dressing gown, ready to follow.

"I'm sorry," the woman said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

She sounded utterly contrite, absolutely horrified with herself, and I realized that I'd never seen her actually touch the child. My arms dropped. If I went out now, I might make things worse.

The woman stumbled away into darkness. I was glad I'd interfered and maybe brought her back to herself. But the you're an adult part left me feeling self-righteous, overbearing and not very wise. A busybody from a Norman Rockwell painting, when towns were small and interference went too far.

Back in court, the lawyer suggested that Marjorie Sheriffe had gone too far. He suggested that she'd prepared for her testimony by educating herself on what both Constable Nasser and Awet Asfaha had said in court, even though witnesses were deliberately kept out of the courtroom before they testified in order to avoid precisely this. Her husband and son had been in court all along, he suggested, and they'd told her about Nasser and Asfaha's testimony.

"I also read about it in the Toronto Sun," she said. "An article in the paper."

"But haven't your husband and son been filling you in on what happened in the courtroom?" O'Connor asked. "Awet Asfaha testified for four days. I suggest your husband and son told you what Mr. Asfaha said."

As she hesitated, Mr. Justice Ewaschuk scanned the public benches angrily. Picking out the father and son, he roared, "Leave my courtroom NOW."

Two men left: the watchful young man and the older, loose-jointed one with the medals around his neck. Christopher Sheriffe's athletic medals, I now realized, as the heavy door hushed closed behind them.

Marjorie Sheriffe went on with her testimony, continuing to refute all suggestions that her son was a member of a street gang until the moment she left the stand. Because of the repetition, I stopped making detailed notes. But one moment stays with me, something that was said before the judge's roared order, when O'Connor was asking his initial not-quite-questions, painting Marjorie Sheriffe as a mother in denial.

"No one wants their child to grow up to be dangerous," he said. "Correct?"

"Yes."

"You must have seen signs through the years of the way Christopher was headed."

"No. My son was always in school. I had counselling for him. If he has done something wrong, I will forgive him."

"Does that include murder?" O'Connor asked.

Silence.

Mr. Justice Ewaschuk leaned over kindly.

"You don't have to answer that," he said.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother. And he said: I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?

What if your brother defrauds the disability system, which doesn't have enough money for everyone who needs it? What if some nosy neighbour claims he defrauded the system on tenuous evidence and the government social worker cuts him off? What if the social worker is wrong, and he didn't defraud the system? What if she's right?

What if your son is accused of murder? What are your responsibilities? For his predicament, for his salvation, for his exoneration, perhaps for his crime.

I don't know any easy questions anymore, much less answers. But I love questions, live for them, and the courts are amazing that way, lawyers whapping them out like tennis pros banging a serve, deploying the same killer strategy in another big rectangular court, dressed in theatric black instead of whites and maybe a tad less fit, but clearly living for the game.

Next to face the court was Christopher Sheriffe's friend, Rai-Sean Greenidge, called by the defence as a character witnesses, Sheriffe's brotherly keeper.

Greenidge was a handsome, slow-talking, sleepy-eyed man who said he was the half-brother of Sheriffe's friend, Aeon Grant: the one who was shot to death in a Rexdale stairwell in 2009. Greenidge testified that he had grown up in Rexdale and Hamilton, where his father lived, and after working in factory jobs, logistics, shipping and receiving, he'd gone to work in 2009 for Breaking the Cycle, a federally-financed program targeted at at-risk youth, trying to get them away from street gangs. Maybe it was 2010. He had trouble with dates, he said.

Greenidge also said he'd been convicted in March, 2012, of possession of two pounds of marijuana for the purposes of trafficking, and given a conditional sentence of six months. He testified that knew Sheriffe as his brother Aeon's friend, and because of Sheriffe's athleticism. He was aware that Awet Asfaha lived in the neighbourhood but they had never hung out.

It's the match points scored, back and forth, that keep things lively in the judicial court. Is that the correct vocabulary? I don't play tennis, having quit trying after a pro told me years ago during a lesson in Vancouver that I moved my hips like a Davie Street hooker.

In any case, the courtroom livened up when Greenidge was shown the picture of the Hustle Squad that Constable Nasser had entered in evidence, saying he wasn't the guy crouching front and centre, as Nasser had claimed. Instead, Greenidge said he had taken the picture after a friend's funeral in 2008.

He also said the Hustle Squad was a name given to Sheriffe and his basketball-playing buddies because of the way they hustled on the courts. Not a very original name, often given to high school athletes, but one that had nothing to do with street gangs.

The C-shaped hand signs flashed by a couple of the young men in the photo? Nothing to do with the Crips, either. One was nicknamed C-5; he was just showing off his moniker. Not that Greenidge knew much about the Crips; he wasn't a member and therefore didn't know who was. Nor was Christopher Sheriffe ganged up. Rexdale got a bad rap. Good people lived there.

And so it stood until Awet Asfaha's lawyer Liam O'Connor began his cross-examination: "'Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.'"

Quotation from Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), no doubt posthumously bemused by O'Connor's segue from his timeless piece of wisdom into the first question.

"What's a good place to hide drugs?"

It's fascinating the way examination and cross-examination make a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of whoever is on the stand, a person of extremes.

According to lawyer Liam O'Connor, rather than being an upright anti-gang counsellor, Rai-Sean Greenidge was the interim head of the Doomstown Crips, filling a leadership gap after a police take-down of Jamestown gang leaders. O'Connor said it was no wonder that Greenidge worked with at-risk youth. Fresh picks for the Crips.

"You're twisting it," Greenidge said.

What about his conviction for trafficking?

The two pounds of marijuana were for his personal use, Greenidge said, with his slow smile. He told O'Connor he had pleaded guilty to the trafficking charge on legal advice, willing to accept a conditional sentence rather than risk a prison term at trial.

"So you admitted to facts that weren't true," O'Connor said.

"I had no choice."

"So you lied to the court. If you're telling the truth now."

Checking his notes, O'Connor confronted Greenidge with allegations from Constable Nasser's confidential informant that he was ganged up, along with the accused murderers, Sheriffe and Asfaha.

"Sir, anybody could say that anybody is in a gang."

"You've been saying, 'Somebody's going to have to step up to the plate and do something about Asfaha.'"

"That is one hundred per cent not true."

"You've been saying someone has to step up to the plate, and stop this Solo or Doulo," O'Connor said, using Asfaha's street names, and presumably referring to Asfaha's claim that Sheriffe had masterminded the murder of Michael Bishen Golaub, while he'd played no part.

Again, Greenidge denied it, and denied Christopher Sheriffe's involvement in street gangs, given his stable family: "His mom is one to embarrass you outside."

Again checking his notes, O'Connor said, almost offhandedly, "The problem with being a gang member is that you can't name names in court."

"I told you their names," Greenidge said, speaking of the young men in the Hustle Squad photograph. "So that proves I'm not in a gang."

"Name one Doomstown gang member."

"I'm not able to do that. To say who is a gang member."

"Mr. Asfaha was able to name names," O'Connor said, even though Asfaha had to face down the possibility he would be killed in retribution.

"Sir, if I was scared of being killed, I wouldn't be here."

"You're stepping up. You're stepping up for the boys. Taking one for the team," O'Connor said, and showed Greenidge a photograph of rappers he claimed were gang members, including one street-named Little Puppy.

"I don't know him as a gang member," Greenidge said. "I can't confirm anyone's in a gang."

Because he would be killed?

"I'm not a gang member. I'm not going to be killed."

"You didn't tell us who's a gang member, so you won't be killed, I hope. But you know the code about snitches in the neighbourhood. If you drop names, you're dead."

"I know that," Greenidge said.

And so it went on, O'Connor repeatedly asking Greenidge to name gang members, and Greenidge repeatedly saying that since he wasn't in a gang, he couldn't name anyone who was.

"I feel you're judging me," he finally said, "and judging the neighbourhood."

Not long ago, I met with another writer/director about her script. She was facing a problem writers often confront as we write and rewrite: our stories grow elaborate, filigreed, sprouting sub-plots and secondary characters that curl like vines around the trunk of our main story, sapping its strength.

The writer/director had two brothers in her story, secondary characters, a good brother and a bad one, Cain and Abel. What would happen if she combined the two into one character? If she created a brother who did both good and bad? Was it possible to create a psychologically plausible character who treated her female protagonist badly and his father worse, yet who interspersed these bad actions with good ones, who was split between self-interested impulses and kind ones, who could fall in love with the protagonist despite discovering that she had used him—or perhaps because she had—and whose ultimate choices we, the audience, could not foresee?

Sitting in a courtroom meant watching rival lawyers portray one person as a good and bad brother all at once. Put together what they said about Rai-Sean Greenidge and you got a gang leader who tried to keep at-risk youth out of gangs. Nor did anyone try to explain the contradiction beyond suggesting that one half of the portrayal was a lie.

People being complicated, maybe Greenidge really was a gang leader who wanted to keep raw kids out of gangs. It was riveting to try and reconcile two radically different pictures, searching for the personality under the allegations, and it ended up making me wonder about the extent to which writers can present inconsistent characters in their work without trying to explain their inconsistencies, asking the audience to fill in the gaps.

Leave too many gaps and your narrative makes no sense, so maybe it's a question of how little explanation or backstory to deploy for your characters. I often close a book lately feeling that a writer has over-explained, tying things up too neatly. Or worse, he or she has fallen back on modern cliché, so a final plot twist reveals that yet another character's problems started with childhood sexual abuse.

Sitting there, I could see how jurors filled the role of audience, or maybe critic. They were charged with having to evaluate the play in court, deciding whether to believe a witness or discount his testimony, and often it was either/or. Was the witness a good brother or a bad one? Was Rai-Sean Greenidge a gang leader or youth worker? And most importantly, what did that say about the two men accused of murdering Bishen Golaub?

Around this time, my brother decided to be two-sided. He was still mad that I'd asked whether he was being charged with fraud, and usually only looked at me sideways and grunted. But he also started taking care of the house. I'd come home and find the kitchen floor washed and the vacuuming done. One time, the back stair risers re-painted. Bob never did much at once, so I could see he was taking care of himself, following doctors' orders, and managed not to worry. In fact, to enjoy it.

Suddenly, we had a wife. I mean a house-husband. And how great was that? Sideboard dusted, cat hair swept from the back corners of the stair treads. Bob was working off his room and board, and I felt a snowballing sense of relief. A few years of living together could work. Advantage: everyone.

"So you've got a servant," Raine said, dropping by one afternoon with some vegan macaroons. We were standing at the kitchen windows, watching Bob clean the garage, his backlit form appearing and disappearing in the bright rectangle of open door. Raine looked lovely, that perfect skin, her curly hair pulled back in an elastic, layers of wispy, insubstantial tops over leggings. My beloved daughter: I could have killed her.

"Sweetie, we didn't ask for this. He's doing it on his own."

"But under what pressure?"

"You mean from himself? People need to feel useful. It's a matter of self-respect."

"Or fulfilling society's expectation to be worker drones."

Which perhaps explained why Raine didn't seem to have a job lately.

"Sweetie, but you brought Bob some vegan cookies. Not apple pie with cheese and a nice lard crust."

She didn't understand, her blue eyes widening.

"He loves apple pie," I said. "And the word 'vegan' makes him go cross-eyed."

"He doesn't have to eat them."

"And he doesn't have to clean the garage."

Raine thought about this, and asked, "Can we calculate the respective degrees of expectation that both of us are placing on Bob?"

Good Lord, what have I spawned?

I might have thought that before.

"Look," I said. "It isn't just a matter of people wanting to work. They deserve to work. And I was thinking, with Dad putting in such long hours lately, and me having to hustle for freelance, and Bob, well, he's not going to be able to get a job, is he? I mean, we're going to have to help him till his pension kicks in. So if he keeps things up around here, it's either like some retro-traditional, environmentally-correct, ye olde family household, or, I don't know, a communal farm from the 1960s. Both of which you presumably approve of. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Never hasty to answer, Raine thought about this, a vision in golden skin.

"My generation deserves jobs too, and we can't get them. Your unemployment is fifteen per cent."

"Have a macaroon," I said, reaching for the tin. "They're good for you. Like little fluffy beige bibles the missionaries handed out to heathens in the 19th century."

"Mother, you're getting tendentious."

I saluted her with a macaroon. "This is going straight to my hips," I said. "And it's your fault."

It turned out that Bob was preparing a surprise. Once he'd tidied the god-awful mess in the garage—sorry, once he'd manfully tackled the manly glories of the manly man cave—he disappeared inside every afternoon, raising a ruckus with hammers and saws and refusing to say what he was up to.

At least it was a happy noise. With a vacation ahead, I was running between meetings, my laptop and the courthouse, and sometimes the buzz of what wasn't said grew loud and worrying.

In court, an elderly gentleman on the jury slumped further into his seat by the hour. Either he'd already made up his mind on the verdict and had stopped paying attention or, more likely, he wasn't feeling well. I hoped not, for many reasons. If he were dismissed, they were one juror away from a mistrial. Everybody's time wasted, including mine.

Meanwhile, Raine kept dropping over. I could see that something was bothering her, and prayed she wasn't splitting up with her partner, the lovely Mac. I would say, Lovely Mac, who kept her calm, except that Raine was always calm. Mac, who during the year they'd lived together had allayed many of the anxieties under Raine's calm exterior.

Mac was a graphic designer, a stocky young blue-eyed man with a cheerful, reassuring air. I think his experience with some of the contracts you get as a beginner had taught him that with hard work and ingenuity you could create something fine out of very unpromising material. He didn't seem to believe that things always went to hell, despite what Raine said about the recession and climate change ruining the planet. It touched my heart to see them together. A smile jumping from his eyes to hers and spreading slowly across her face. The last thing I wanted was for them to split up.

At least my brother was content, not just cleaning bathrooms and baking bread, not just repairing the faulty electrical in a wall socket, but spending his noisy couple of hours in the garage every afternoon, emerging with a smile and a bounce, talking to me again ("The bread rose well today, you figure?"), and generally looking so pleased with himself that I didn't snoop under the plastic tarp he threw on top of his project, thinking how, for our newly-retro household to work, it wasn't just a question of each of us contributing something to the mix. Each of us also had to do something we loved, and have the privacy to do it.

It was at this point in an increasingly complicated trajectory that I went to court and found Christopher Sheriffe on the stand, a carpenter who in the past had faced a charge of trafficking. Part of the distracting mind-noise I heard was separate parts of my life kicking together, with Sheriffe's career sounding a little too much like my brother's. Meanwhile, more people were growing curious about what I was doing in court, calling me on it, stripping away my invisibility.

Detective Samson was the most impressive, walking over one day in the corridor to say he'd been trying to figure out where he'd seen me before.

"You were in the jury pool, weren't you?"

No one else had got that on their own.

Of course, everything bleeds into everything else. We look at every part of the world through the same pair of eyes; the same beliefs and preoccupations. Of course I saw Sheriffe through the prism of my brother's experiences. Only connect, Forster advised, and I keep thinking about that, the way we spend our whole lives making connections, trying to make sense of the world, using what we know to try to figure other things out. Which is a good way to make a mistake, when you think about it.

Christopher Sheriffe was under cross-examination, still buff despite being in the Metro West Detention Centre, or maybe because of it, and talking with a slight speech impediment. I remembered his mother mentioning that he'd been diagnosed with a developmental delay. Together with his slightly thickened speech, this might have caused Sheriffe to be labelled slow by teachers.

Yet he had no trouble handling the cross-examination by Asfaha's lawyer, Liam O'Connor, listening closely to the hostile questions, taking time before he replied and giving brief, cautious answers. What the answers revealed about him between the lines was another question, and from what I heard outside the courtroom, different people had widely-differing views of Sheriffe's mental acuity. Also of his arrests for violent crimes.

"You have no regard for life," O'Connor said.

"I have a lot of regard for life. I saved a dog..."

"No regard for human life."

"Yes, I do, sir."

O'Connor was rattling off questions, swishing restlessly around the court in his long black robes as the trial reached a climax. It had to. I'd come in to find that the older gentleman on the jury had been dismissed for health reasons, and that the matron had told the judge two other jurors were coming under pressure. One had to make a deadline at work, another had to start a new job soon or risk losing it.

If they both dropped off the jury, Mr. Justice Ewaschuk would be forced to declare a mistrial. Six weeks of testimony for nothing, tensions left unresolved, unease still biting the families, and God knows how much public money wasted. A lawyer I knew estimated that a murder trial of this complexity might cost as much as $1 million.

O'Connor seemed to blast away without any thought of deadlines. But of course he had to, trying to raise reasonable doubts about his client's guilt, verbally circling Sheriffe with a long series of seemingly-disconnected statements.

"Your parents are lovely," he said. "They come to court every day. Your father wears your soccer medals every day. They've had to struggle to support you. They're not super-rich."

"They did not struggle. I did not struggle. We're hardworking, yes."

"They had a lazy son. Your mother put gas in the car."

"I was out of work."

"You were arrested for murder. You spent six months in custody. Then your family rallied around to bail you out... How much did they put up?"

"I'm not sure, sir."

"Over a hundred thousand dollars?"

"I'm not sure."

The registrar came back with the figure: $252,000. O'Connor pointed out that the family would be at risk of losing "a colossal amount" if Sheriffe didn't fulfil the conditions of his bail. In archaic legal terms, to keep the peace and be of good behaviour.

"Yet your buddies came over and smoked marijuana in the back yard."

"I smoked before jail, but I went off it in jail. I worked out every single day. So I never smoked after I got into shape."

"You were around marijuana. If the police showed up while your buddies were visiting, it wouldn't have mattered if they were the ones smoking marijuana and not you... Your parents would be out a tremendous amount of money."

"They smoked. I kicked around a ball. I would be in the same area, but two or three feet away. Five or six feet away."

"You were conducting illegal activities while on bail. You didn't even respect your family."

"It didn't say anything about me. Only (my friends)."

Checking his notes, O'Connor said, "You couldn't work while on bail."

"My dog had puppies. A Rottweiler. She had twelve puppies, and I sold them for $700 each. I sold my pendant for $1,200."

"But your parents gave you everything, didn't they? All they owned."

"Yes, sir."

"You're not from a divided family. Yet now you're facing a murder charge and the possibility of life in jail."

"I believe in justice, sir."

"You must realize the jeopardy facing you," O'Connor said. "And during the time you weren't working, you brought two babies into the world."

"I don't feel I took a risk because I believe in justice."

"Those babies won't have the upbringing you did," Connor said, adding without much of a pause, "Why did you stab your brother?"

It was riveting to watch Liam O'Connor pick up bits of testimony, sentences, answers, flotsam from the now six-week-long trial and fling them back at Christopher Sheriffe in no obvious order. I thought again about the holes that writers leave in stories, gaps meant to allow our audiences to weave in their own experiences so they can identify with our characters.

O'Connor was writing a story in court, creating his version of Christopher Sheriffe's character, opening gaps. But in this case, his goal was to get the jury not to identify with the accused. In bringing up his stable home life, the way Sheriffe had allegedly abused his home by breaking bail conditions, the fact he had stabbed his brother despite his family's stability, the fact his own babies wouldn't have a traditional home with their father in prison, O'Connor was saying, A) Sheriffe was prone to violence despite his stable background, and B) Sheriffe's babies wouldn't have the same stability and would therefore be prone to violence, which was his fault.

A gap in logic, which O'Connor was pretty clearly hoping the jury would fill by saying, One way or the other, he sounds bad.

Why did Sheriffe stab his brother?

"I was over-excited."

O'Connor left a silence.

"I didn't mean to stab him. There was no real damage. You look at his stomach today, you can't see anything."

"The mother of one of your children. You beat her up too, didn't you?"

"If I beat her up, she wouldn't have come back. She told her parents I beat her up."

"You kicked your right foot on her right calf and caused her to fall down. Then you pushed her against the bannister."

"No, sir."

"Then you followed her to school."

"I followed to the school she went to, yes."

"Monsignor Johnson Catholic Secondary School. You grabbed her purse and shoved or punched her... You took her cellphone."

"I didn't walk out of the school with her phone. I gave it to her friend, Samantha."

"She eventually had your baby and now she has left you," O'Connor said.

Weaving around his arrests, O'Connor landed on the stabbing for which Sheriffe was still facing a serious assault charge, and for which he was later acquitted. Sheriffe said he'd been acting in self-defence, while O'Connor alleged that the stabbing went back to an earlier conflict between Sheriffe and the injured man, the man having claimed that Sheriffe and a friend stole his dog along with some clothes and electronics.

"You told him, 'Accuse me, and I'm going to kill you,'" O'Connor said. "So he armed himself with a sword. On January 4, at 12.30 a.m., you approached his townhouse. He asked you to leave. You refused. He ran up to his bedroom and locked himself in."

Sheriffe said he had often gone over to the townhouse to chill, as he did on the night in question. "I was sitting at the table when he called me upstairs."

"He dropped the sword when you broke down his door. The two of you began struggling after you kicked it open."

"I don't know who kicked it open. He grabbed me. He had a sword, I had a knife. I drove the knife into him and pushed off."

"He had to be rushed to Sunnybrook Hospital. You were allegedly defending yourself, but you fled. He was able to say a nickname when police came. Hitz. They took him to Sunnybrook, removed a portion of his bowel and sewed him back up."

Maybe hoping to catch him off guard, O'Connor abruptly turned to the record of Sheriffe's text messages from the week before Michael Bishen Golaub was murdered on Mount Olive Drive. He claimed they showed Sheriffe had been keeping tabs on the movements of the Mount Olive Crips, who were said by police to be rivals to his own Crips sub-group, the Hustle Squad. Implication: he was stalking the rival Crips as part of a violent gang rivalry that had already led to several recent shootings.

No, said, Sheriffe. He was only flirting via text with a girl from the Mount Olive neighbourhood, keeping track of who was around because he wanted to visit the girl by himself.

"I don't want to make anyone feel bad (by seeing her) when I already had a girlfriend," Sheriffe said. "You talk to a girl, sometimes you say random things to keep her talking."

"Including about gang wars?"

Not for the first time, Sheriffe denied that he was in a gang, as had his buddy Rai-Sean Greenidge and other friends who had followed Greenidge to the stand.

"There's a theme in your evidence," O'Connor said, "and in Rai-Sean's and Tony's and Metawi's. Isn't there?"

"Yes sir, the truth," Sheriffe said.

The courtroom exploded with laughter.

"Got me there," the lawyer said ruefully. "I shouldn't ask open-ended questions."

Without breaking stride, O'Connor then claimed the real theme was their denial of gang membership. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," he intoned, then launched into his attempt to prove that Sheriffe was a Crip, that he was guilty of murder, and that O'Connor's client, Awet Asfaha, was Sheriffe's innocent dupe.

Here's the thing. It was entirely possible for every lurid allegation to be true, for Christopher Sheriffe to be a drug trafficker, to have risked a quarter of a million dollars of his family's money by arguably breaking bail, be a leader of the Crips; for him to have assaulted one of his baby mamas, to have stabbed his brother and nearly disembowelled a man who'd accused him of stealing his dog, even for him to have kept an eye on soldiers from the Mount Olive Crips, and at the same time to be innocent of the murder of Michael Bishen Golaub.

When this all started, when I had been called for jury duty and the defence lawyer had asked if I had any overwhelming prejudice against street gangs, this is what I meant when I'd said no. You could be a gangbanger, a crack trafficker, a serial rapist, the scum of the earth; you could have been found guilty of a dozen previous murders, I could loath the very sight of you, but as a jury member, I would still have insisted they prove you guilty of the charge you were facing beyond a reasonable doubt.

That's my hope, anyway, my ringing declaration, even though I know I'm a fallible person; that people are fallible, that the system is fallible. My younger brother told me of a case when he was a criminal lawyer and his client had been convicted of something he was sure the man hadn't done. When he apologized, his client said, "That's okay, counsellor. I actually did it the last time, and you got me off, so this kind of evens things up."

Rough justice. But you wanted better than that in a murder case, where the sentence was twenty-five years in a hard-core prison, and Liam O'Connor was pulling out all the stops on behalf of his client, while Christopher Sheriffe was fighting back hard.

Then we hit the crux.

The day of the murder, August 16th. No one, including Sheriffe, denied that he was sitting in his parked car around the corner when Bishen Golaub was shot, that someone had run to his car from the crime scene, or that he'd driven away afterward. No one denied that Asfaha had driven there with Sheriffe, that Asfaha had talked about doing an errand that day, and that Asfaha and Sheriffe were both in the car when it left. But Sheriffe denied knowing who had shot Bishen Golaub, and claimed he had played no part in the crime.

The question was, whether Sheriffe was an innocent dupe of Asfaha, a self-admitted crack dealer who, according to the Crown, had got out of Sheriffe's car and shot Bishen Golaub. Or was Asfaha right in claiming that he was the dupe of Sheriffe, an alleged Crip; Asfaha having just happened to be in the car at the time of the shooting and had been expected not to snitch?

That day in court, O'Connor kept hammering at Sheriffe with Asfaha's claim that he had no idea why Sheriffe had parked around the corner from Mount Olive Drive. He reminded Sheriffe of Asfaha's allegation that after Sheriffe told Asfaha to get in the back seat of the car, a young man with a gun had run around the corner and slammed into the front seat, saying he'd aired out the niggah, and that Sheriffe took off. Sheriffe, the Crip, was the mastermind of the crime, he said, as well as the getaway driver.

"You decided it was time to move up in the gang."

"I swear on my life I never killed anyone," Sheriffe said.

"But you have a body on your name. What does it mean when people say that?"

"That you killed someone. That hurt me. I swear on my kids' life I never killed anyone. I love them so much. I'd never put my kids through that."

"You were earning your way up."

"The way I'm going to earn my way up is to play soccer. I'm going to get better and better until I'm a professional."

"You were the fellow shooting up Mount Olive."

"I swear on my kids..."

"Stop that with the kids," O'Connor snapped.

Lunch. Afterwards, O'Connor kept hammering, and finally Sheriffe got specific:

"There was no one else in my car, sir. No one else entered my car. Only Mr. Asfaha entered my car."

Sheriffe insisted that he didn't know who killed Bishen Golaub, but there was no third-party shooter. Only Asfaha doing his errand and getting back in his car.

What about the witness who described the shooter as wearing his hair differently than Asfaha?

"I heard she mentioned cornrows," Sheriffe agreed.

"Like your friend."

"What friend?" Sheriffe said, finally sounding exasperated.

"Phones, when they're on, they send out signals to show where you are," O'Connor said, switching tacks. "So you take out the batteries. The Jamestown Crips figured that out."

"Sir, I don't associate myself with the Jamestown Crips."

"Mr. Asfaha had his phone on, when you did not. You took him along, this expendable little drug dealer."

"No, sir."

"You were, in particular, looking for Drops's address. Drops was on a police watch list for carrying out shootings that summer," O'Connor said, and laid out a scenario in which Sheriffe and other Jamestown gangsters thought that Drops was living in a townhouse on Mount Olive Drive where a barbecue was underway that Sunday afternoon. In fact, it was the first party held by some new tenants. But according to O'Connor, the Jamestown crew thought Drops was attending.

"I don't know, sir."

Sheriffe and the third party, with whom he'd presumably been in contact, decided the third party would shoot the rival gang leader. Sheriffe would wait around the corner at a pre-arranged time to spirit him away. Bishen Golaub was shot by mistake, an innocent man who slightly resembled Drops. O'Connor pointed out that both Asfaha and a Crown witness said that Sheriffe's car had been running while he waited.

"No, sir. My car was off."

"You burned around the corner. You heard (the witness) say he would have got all the letters on the licence plate if you had been going slower."

Then O'Connor brought up text messages harvested from Sheriffe's phone, some from people he said wanted to buy marijuana, some concerning the police.

"On August 6, you texted someone, 'Don't come to the block 2 many feds.'" Establishing that 'the feds' were the police. "The next day, you texted someone, August 10 at 10:14 a.m., 'I just had 2 tear it from feds over there.'

"Were you running away from the police on Mount Olive?" O'Connor asked.

"No, sir," Sheriffe said. "I just don't like getting in competition with the police."

"On your evidence, the shooter must be Mr. Asfaha."

"I don't want to make a mockery of the court."

"You say Mr. Asfaha left your vehicle and no one else got back in the vehicle." Yet among the witnesses the Crown called, O'Connor said, no one saw anyone walk from Sheriffe's car to the shooting. "While lots of witnesses have someone walking right back to your car."

"No imaginary person came in my car. Only Mr. Asfaha."

"But you don't know who the shooter is."

"If I did, I would be happy to tell police."

"It takes a brave fellow to come here and come clean," O'Connor said.

"Sir, for the jury, for the victim and his family, no other person got in my car."

Sheriffe was a murderer, O'Connor said.

"No, sir. I am a soccer player and I am a carpenter."

And O'Connor rested his cross-examination.
The Light on the Lower Branches of the Trees

After seven weeks, the testimony was over. The lawyers made their final summations, each continuing to claim his man was innocent while blaming the other defendant for the murder. Meanwhile, the Crown laid a pox on both their houses. They'd collaborated, she said, two drug-dealing, gangbanging Crips, Awet Asfaha the gunman and Christopher Sheriffe the getaway driver. During their testimony, she said, each had clearly implicated the other and lied in claiming that he wasn't involved himself. She asked the jury to find both men guilty as charged.

I remembered our friend telling me that the accused men's lawyers had been using a cutthroat defence. I'd run into him at the courthouse fairly early in the trial, striding along in his lawyerly black pin-striped suit and highly polished shoes, gleaming with expense. We usually saw him on the weekend in jeans and a tee-shirt, but he'd dropped down to University Avenue for a bail hearing and stopped in the hallway to ask about the case, curious how Mr. Justice Ewaschuk was handling it. I'd already read online that criminal lawyers weren't the judge's biggest fans, believing him to be pro-Crown, a modern hanging judge, Judge You-Is-Fucked.

Ewaschuk seemed impartial to me, I said, maybe a little too courtly toward the junior Crown attorney on account of her pregnancy, which clearly wasn't holding her back. But he had to be about seventy, so it was probably a generational thing. True, he often snapped at Sheriffe's lawyer, Chris Hicks, but he seemed to like Liam O'Connor, who got him laughing with jokes about being just an Irish lad, my lord.

My friend chewed on the answer. "Well, under the circumstances all he really has to do is sit back and avoid an appeal."

I wasn't sure I understood.

"Cutthroat defences hardly ever works," my friend said. "The accused convict each other."

Outside the courthouse on the morning of the judge's summation, I passed the jury gathering around a concrete bench, each with a little wheelie suitcase. They were laughing and chatting, pretty clearly looking forward to getting some time in a hotel after putting their lives on hold for almost two months. Or maybe they were just relieved it was ending. They would weigh the evidence, order room service (I love room service), reach their verdict. I wondered how quickly.

That afternoon, walking home, I tried to digest the instructions from the judge. He had told the jury that it was possible to find Asfaha and Sheriffe guilty of first-degree murder, which involved pre-meditation; of second-degree murder, which meant no pre-meditation but an intent to kill or cause bodily harm; or of manslaughter, which meant causing the death of a human being by an unlawful act.

Anyone could be party to the offense, he said, including not only the person who directly caused the death of the victim, but also someone who was involved in a killing with the purpose of aiding or facilitating the offense—in other words, the guy holding the killer's coat, handing him the gun, or a getaway driver. This person had to know that an offense was going to take place, he said, and they had to aid the perpetrator. Acting with purpose was key, he said.

So both men could be found guilty or not guilty, one could be convicted and the other let off, or just conceivably, each could be convicted of a different offense, all of it depending on who the jury believed. It was probably naïve of me, but I had been shocked by the number of lies told on the stand. Witnesses contradicted each other to such a breathtaking degree that a sizeable part of the testimony had to be untrue. Good luck to the jury in sorting it out.

It was a beautiful day. Trying to put the trial behind me, I began mentally packing my own wheelie, getting ready to head off the next morning to a cottage, a place we rented for one or two weeks every year. If I'd been chosen for jury duty, I would have had to miss our first few days at the lake. It wasn't first time I was relieved the Crown had rejected me—although damn, even half an hour after the jury retired, I wanted to know how their deliberations were going, to be a spy in the corner, a fly on the wall. At least cellphone service had reached the cottage. I could google the verdict, and see things through to the end.

Not that anything was ending. Not for the accused murderers, and as it turned out, not for me.

An hour later, I turned onto our street to see a big white delivery van pull up outside the house. Two wiry men opened the back doors and manhandled a floppy new plastic-covered mattress onto the sidewalk. I wondered which of our neighbours had bought a new bed, then saw the men trundling the mattress up our front walk.

"You've got the wrong house," I called, reaching the porch just as they put the mattress down. The older of the two pulled a crumpled pink invoice out of his shirt pocket and smoothed it.

"Number twenty-seven?" he asked.

Looking over his shoulder, I saw Raine's signature.

"Oh Lord," I said. "My daughter."

"We're supposed to take it to the third floor," he said, button brown eyes lively at the hint of a story. "You got pictures and such to get out of the way?"

I remembered Raine questioning my brother about whether he felt claustrophobic moving into the basement flat. Wouldn't he be more comfortable on the third floor? No? Was he sure?

That's your mother's office, Bob had said, and I'd thought Raine had looked relieved for my sake to hear how content he felt where he was.

Maybe not so much for mine.

After the mattress and bedframe were upstairs, after giving in to the button-eyed man's curiosity and alluding to my daughter's possible joblessness—"Well, she didn't buy your worst bed," he told me, "if that means anything"—after the pictures in the stairways had been restored to their nails, I headed outside and knocked on the garage door.

"Come on in," Bob called happily.

"Did Raine mention anything about a bed?" I asked, aware too late that Bob was holding up something for me to look at.

"That's lovely," I said, trying to switch gears. He'd been making a birdhouse. So this was Bob's surprise: a fantastical Victorian gingerbread birdhouse constructed from scraps of reclaimed wood. My husband had saved anything he thought might prove useful from our renovations, planning his own eventual carpentry projects, and I suddenly recalled seeing the back end of a man dangling out a dumpster late last week outside a gutted house down the block. Bob, I now realized. He'd fashioned distressed, half-painted wood in old-fashioned blues and greens and lavenders into a birdhouse so whimsical I wanted to move in myself.

"A bed?" he asked, looking austere, and putting the birdhouse behind him on the bench.

"It really is lovely," I said. "I mean it, and I'm sorry I barged in verbally. But look. I'm concerned because some men just delivered a bed with Raine's name on the invoice. She told them to take it up to the third floor."

"She's claustrophobic," Bob said. "Or I'd move out here."

He brightened at the thought, looking around the garage as if making plans.

"Has she given you any clue what's going on?" I asked.

"I would have told you," he said, and I was grateful not to hear any resentment in his voice. "Something's going on, though."

"I know," I said, leaning against the workbench beside him. "She doesn't seem to have a job, and I'm afraid she might be splitting up with Mac."

"That's their decision."

"It is," I said, seeing pieces of another birdhouse already cut on his workbench. I picked one up, feeling the good weight of old wood.

"You could sell these. Shabby chic, they call it."

"Those décor places down in Leslieville," he agreed.

"You might have to, if I don't get more work."

"You're always afraid work's drying up," he said. "I've heard it for years."

My husband said that too, pointing out that something always came along. It had been coming along a lot more slowly lately, but this wasn't the time to discuss that.

"It's just like Raine to send over a bed by way of an announcement," I said.

"Don't be too hard on her. She isn't a word person like you are. Raine says things in her own way."

"She won't answer her phone. It's going to kill me, waiting until she shows up."

"She knows that," Bob said. "You two."

That evening found us sitting in the kitchen. Raine had formally rung the doorbell, even though I'd left the front door open and the screen unlocked. Michael Moore and his documentary crew would have walked right in, filming Canadian guilelessness, but Raine found it necessary to ring the bell at her parents' house, even though she seemed to be moving back home. Pattering downstairs, I was enormously relieved to see Mac standing behind her, a jumble of re-useable shopping bags at their feet. So they weren't splitting up, after all.

When I flipped on the front hall light, Mac winced aside, shading his eyes. He was wearing sunglasses too, when it was close to sunset. Eye strain? Not good for a graphic designer. I had been worried about Raine, but maybe it wasn't her. Maybe Mac needed time off work, and he seemed to have been the one paying the bills.

"May we come in?" Raine asked. She was still being formal and old-fashioned, and I suddenly understood that much of what my daughter did was symbolic. Not just getting her bed delivered, but protests, occupying, petitions. I work in symbols myself, in words. It occurred to me that most people's work used to be far more concrete, but their daily lives had been marked by symbolic actions. Men tilling the fields and tipping their caps, women milking the cows and bobbing down in curtseys. Bowing and scraping, they also said. We're blunter and more egalitarian now in our recondite jobs, and in many ways that's just as well. But good things have been lost, too.

"May we come in?" she said, meaning so much beneath the surface.

I opened the door and answered just as formally, "You're very welcome here."

"We might have to stay a while," Raine said, and walked inside.

Mac told us his eye problem was called optic neuritis. We were settled around the kitchen table, Bob, my husband and me, non-alcoholic beer in hand out of deference to Bob. Mac said it started with a pain above his right eye. He was finishing up the latest issue of a magazine he edited with friends, and because it got worse when he moved his eyes, he thought it must be some kind of muscle strain and ignored it.

Then he woke up blind in one eye, the right eye, not quite blind but with black snow and dizzy vision.

"Like the Darkness descending in Silent Hill," he said, and I remembered that Mac was a gamer. His voice sounded crushed, as if a dog had got hold of his throat, and he took off his sunglasses to show the eye, his manner as formal and weighted and symbolic as Raine's. Not that I could see anything wrong. Blue-grey eyes, a pleading look.

Fortunately their doctor, who had been an emergency room doctor, scrolled through the list of possibilities in her computer mind and asked if he'd had any other problems lately, any numbness or tingling.

Surprised, he said, yes, in his left arm, something else he'd ignored. Pins and needles. He'd thought his posture was probably to blame. He tended to hunch over, leaning on his left elbow, and had probably pinched a nerve.

Then he remembered his aunt.

"It's not multiple sclerosis?" he'd asked.

"Multiple sclerosis?" I repeated stupidly.

"Don't jump to conclusions," Bob said. "The body's a real clockwork, that's for sure. All those moving parts. You couldn't make it up."

Raine had been keeping her eyes on the table top as Mac spoke, but now she looked up, although not at anyone in particular. I realized how much of her formality came from being very upset and trying to keep it under control.

"There are theorists, I don't know if you've read them," Raine said. "They say computers are getting so exponentially faster, we're going to reach a point this century where programmers can simulate life. They'll be able to make computerized creations who think they're real. But the universe is so big and old, they say that if we can learn to do it, it's statistically impossible that we're the first species who has. Which makes it likely that we're a simulation. So we're arguably made up," she said, turning to Bob, "and someone is putting us through this. Some programmer. Which makes them mean."

Mac took Raine's hand before going on as if she hadn't spoken.

"The doctor told me people with MS in their family have a somewhat elevated risk," he said. "It's not much greater than what risk anybody faces, but MS is pretty common in Canada, in northern countries, and you've got to think about the package."

As Raine looked away again, Mac said the doctor had been pretty sure he had optic neuritis, and that it could be the first sign of MS. But it could be a sign of other diseases, too. Occasionally it even showed up on its own.

"I had to see some specialists," Mac said. "I'll probably be seeing them a whole lot more."

Two separate ophthalmologists with different sub-specialties had confirmed the optic neuritis. The neurologist said she needed to do an MRI, checking for lesions on Mac's brain that would confirm MS. You usually had to wait for an MRI, but St. Mike's had a cancellation, and they went into the clinic at 3 a.m., and into the clang, clang, swish BOOM zit of the overarching, plastic-smelling, magnetized tube.

"Pyramid Head breathes like that in Silent Hill," Mac said. "You just needed one of those Gregorian soundtracks, and the MRI would have been horror. A horror movie. What it feels like, being trapped in there, not knowing your fate."

After a pause, Mac added, "I knew."

Then he gave himself a shake, and said that the specialists agreed optic neuritis went away on its own within two or three months, usually leaving little damage.

"I'm sorry," Mac said. "That and a few other things, it's left us pretty broke."

"Join the club," Bob rumbled companionably.

"I think it might be starting to get better. But I don't know when I can work. And Raine doesn't have any luck getting jobs."

My daughter flushed lightly, the red blooming up her neck and onto her cheeks.

"I'm sorry you've had to deal with this," I said. I didn't say, deal with it alone, without asking for help, but Raine heard anyway and finally flashed me a look.

"It's been private," she said. "And we had a lot to do."

"All those tests," I answered peaceably.

"We were lucky," Mac said. "I'd already moved my gear out of the apartment. My buddy rented me a room off his studio. God was looking after us."

I hadn't known Mac was religious, but he spoke of God with pleasant matter-of-factness, as if they were well-acquainted. When Raine shifted irritably in her chair, I wondered if this was a disagreement between them.

"Our landlady started snooping," she said. "She let herself in when we weren't there. I think she was checking that we weren't going to leave without paying the rent, except it started before we moved Mac's gear. Then she started taking things. My bracelet: I know it didn't fall off somewhere. Food. Not what you'd take if you were hungry, but there would be less strawberry jam in the jar. Less bread. She'd come into our home and make herself a slice of bread and jam. It was invasive."

I pictured their apartment on the second floor of a shabby old rooming house full of apartments, some of them little more than cubbyholes. The landlady lived downstairs.

"The place was falling apart, and she wouldn't fix anything," Mac said. "The leak in the bedroom ceiling. The stove. First one burner goes..."

"So you held off your rent, and now you've done a flit," Bob said. "But what's their diagnosis? It's not your heart?"

Mac looked sufficiently confused that I wondered if Raine had mentioned Bob's heart attack. Maybe he hadn't wanted to move in with us, and if she'd mentioned Bob, he would have been able to argue that it was asking too much.

On the other hand, he'd been brought up by a single mother in Windsor who'd been laid off a couple of years before from her autoworker's job and was barely scraping by. His father was long gone. They didn't have anywhere else to go.

"We wouldn't just pull a flit," Raine said. "We left her the furniture. Mostly we scrounged it, but it's fine, we fixed it. She can rent the place furnished."

"Didn't have bedbugs, did it?" Bob asked. "Because if it did, you can't bring your clothes in here, either."

Bob had been with us less than a month, but my brother already seemed to feel ownership of the house. That was what they said about immigrants: the first sign of acculturation was hostility toward newer immigrants. I remembered our neighbour Joe, up the street, telling me once in an Italian accent, "They're letting in too many a Chi-nee." Bob gave that same look to Raine.

"No worries," Mac said. "And MS affects your nerves, not your heart, and they won't say if I've got it. The MRI didn't show any lesions to speak. But I talked to my aunt, and I pretty much know that I do. They're going to do more tests and decide if they're going to put me on anything. My aunt says they always do more tests."

He raised his clasped hands and lowered them again to the table.

The next day, my husband and I drove north on the Don Valley Parkway. Archie-cat would get his ears well scratched, the garden would be watered, and our house would be turned upside down while we were away. We'd offered to take everyone along for a vacation at the lake, which we thought the kids needed. Not that they're kids, with Raine turning twenty-three. But she and Mac said they needed to move in properly, and Bob didn't know what he'd do up there with no TV. Besides, both he and Mac had doctor's appointments, more tests.

A word with many connotations. I was feeling pretty tested myself.

We'd taken Raine and Mac up to the third floor after finishing our quasi-beer. For a few years now, I'd had the luxury of a top-floor study that ran the length and width of the house, one big, skylit room with a storage closet at the front, a bathroom cut out of the corner at the top of the stairs and a deck out back. My lovely study. Unlike the rest of our narrow, cozy old house, which was built in 1915, it was light, spacious and relatively empty, since I exercised and did yoga up there on a happy expanse of bare carpet.

Goodbye to spaciousness, at least for a while. I told Raine and Mac we would leave the TV as it was in the middle bedroom/den on the second floor. They could move my desk and filing cabinets to the little cubby of a sun porch behind my husband's office at the rear of the second floor, which I'd planned on using as a sewing room one day. They had friends coming over to help them, so they could also move the wall of bookcases from my study to our bedroom. The bookcases would displace a couple of armchairs that we only really used to throw clothes on at night, and they could take those upstairs. They could use the old oak library table that I'd been using as a second desk...

"Thank you, Mother. We can cope."

So Raine and Mac would have the third floor, my husband and I the second and Bob the basement, laundry room aside. The first floor of kitchen, living room and dining room would be common ground. After our many renovations, each floor had a bathroom. Such opulence, to have three bathrooms. When I was growing up, we had one small bathroom and a line-up. Years after my younger brother and I had moved out, my parents installed a second one in the basement. People had started doing that, but it remained a symbolic bathroom, a marker of middle-class life, and I don't think anyone ever used it.

Our own house had seemed empty after our son and daughter moved out six years before, but now we were back to using every inch. Widesizing, I've heard it called. Five of us living in one house on my husband's full-time salary and my freelancing. Luckily, we'd paid for the cottage rental months ago. Friends rented it out for a few weeks a year to help with the taxes. A small 1960s pre-fab—a box on a rock, they called it, although the rock fronted on a lake. I'm not sure we could have justified taking a vacation if the rent had still been due. I'd played with our financial program after we'd packed, and the amplified food budget alone had made me switch to a nice game of Angry Birds.

Carrying my suitcase toward the garage that morning, turning to look back at the house, I'd had such mixed feelings. Part of me was selfishly glad to have my daughter back home. She had left so early, only eighteen when she'd headed off to Concordia. At the same time, I was so sad for her and Mac, saddled with illness at a time when young love was supposed to saturate life with the brightest of reds and the sunniest of yellows, every moment heightened, intense, reverberating with hope.

Instead, there was a sound of retching coming through the open bathroom window upstairs. Mac didn't seem one to complain, but he'd mentioned a headache as they went to bed. I get migraines, and I knew how bad a headache has to be to make you vomit.

Memo to Mac's friend, God. He's only twenty-five. Couldn't you have waited?

We'd been renting the same cottage for a dozen years, and had settled into a usual route to Muskoka. Turning right at Newmarket, we drove a short way down Davis Drive to a farm stand where they trucked in fresh fruit and vegetables from all over southern Ontario. Parking in the dirt lot, coughing from the dust, we stocked up on everything from big watery radishes to cheese curds and maybe some ginger cookies, despite my perennial diet.

Afterwards, we drove on to the intersection where we usually headed east to the Rose Family Farm (established 1840) where we'd buy strawberries or raspberries straight off the fields, sweet little nubbins of summer. They had a chip truck, too, and deep fried potatoes they farmed themselves, French fries on a swing bench under a green and white marque tent.

But the chip truck only opened weekends, and this was Wednesday, so we turned north instead. For the first time, our friends hadn't been able to rent out the cottage for the whole time they'd wanted to, so they'd thrown in a few extra days ahead of our Saturday-to-Saturday week. As we turned north on Highway 48, we saw other signs of economic uncertainty, For Sale signs everywhere, on rural houses and small-town bungalows, on shuttered roadside businesses and trucks and cars pulled up at the end of long dirt driveways. I wondered who was making a positive move and who was being forced to sell.

Words started repeating in my head to the rhythmic beat of the engine. Justice, injustice, tests and trials. Then: lemon meringue pie. I craned my neck as we passed the United Church outside Pefferlaw, where one year we'd stumbled on a bake sale and bought the best lemon meringue pie in the world, real grated lemons made into a custard as light and rich as crème caramel. Another year, when we were taking a rare August vacation, we seen a sign and dropped southeast to Cannington, where the local historical society had been holding a quilt and craft show.

All these memories rolled along with the car's smooth progress, cocooning me inside a richness of association. I remembered that writer Timothy Findlay had lived outside Cannington in his Stone Orchard, and thought of the time I'd talked to Findlay at the opening of an exhibit of manuscripts at the National Library in Ottawa.

I think that's where it was, although I have no memory of why I was there or when this occurred, which makes me distrust my very clear mental picture of the manuscript of his novel, The Wars, being written in green ink. Can I really remember it so precisely, the handwritten pages displayed in a small glass case? The feeling of bending over the case, the swanning curve of my back. Dr. Oliver Sacks writes that our memories are vagrant, undependable, although he adds that his own false memories have become as significant as true ones.

What I definitely remember is abashedly praising the book, and Timothy Findlay shaking off my compliment, genial but brisk. His partner, Bill Whitehead, gave me an apologetic look, and after Findlay moved away, said he thought Tiff didn't fully appreciate the novel, which he agreed with me was brilliant, because it had come to him so easily, and he loved best the books that had cost him more.

Highway 48 became Highway 12, and we turned north again to shadow the eastern shore of Lake Simcoe, soon reaching the point where the Canadian Shield breached like a whale through the southern Ontario soil. Turning down rackety 169, we passed more For Sale signs until we reached a big cloverleaf, finally curling onto Highway 11, where traffic blurred north on the four-lane speedway at one hundred twenty clicks per hour.

With the grey of the Shield all around us now, the quality of the light altered. More stringent, I thought. A cooler blue to the sky, and the stunted trees had a blackness to their needles and leaves. It felt clean here, and deep, and on this last long stretch of the drive, I found myself leaning forward as I drove, pushing up to one hundred thirty clicks, telling myself it was only thirty above the limit and that I was following traffic.

Blackish trees, the grey-pink rock, orange lilies blurring along the roadside. Soon we reached the turn-off for Lake of Bays, switchbacking through the low hills into Baysville and the final pair of turnoffs to the cottage, the big lake flirting in a sparkle of light through the trees. Finally, two and a half hours after leaving home, I bumped down the short, steep dirt drive to the cottage and parked, pulling hard on the emergency brake against the slope.

Then the lake. We unpacked quickly and hurried down the brown humus path toward the dock, tree roots gnarling across it, chipmunk burrows dimpled beside it, sun glinting on the water ahead, the cedar slats beneath our feet. The dive.

Shock. Cold water. Not so cold. Surfacing, shaking water from my hair, I knew that the lake was warm for this time of year, far warmer than usual after a hot and early spring. The weedy smell, the brownish golden shallows near shore. I turned onto my back and floated lazily, the noontime sun on my face.

A cleansing, I thought. A rest before having to deal with so many changes at home. We'd swim, canoe, read, cook our simple meals, listen to baseball on the radio, look for birds and play with cameras. My husband had brought his grandfather's mandolin, a 1916 Gibson, so the days would be speckled with music.

But I was thinking too much, and rolled over to plunge into a crawl. Arm over arm, swimming parallel to shore, I felt the skin of the lake part ever so briefly. Felt the weight of the water below. One arm, other arm, legs kicking just beneath the surface. Flipping onto my back again, I heard the light wind on the water, the slap of waves on shore. A jay calling. A chickadee. Peace.

Later, lying on the dock, I thought about the overlap of meaning between the two words, trial and test. They were like ocean and lake, one bigger than the other, although it probably didn't feel that way when you were swimming in either, far from shore. By late afternoon, Mr. Interweb reported no verdict in the murder trial, and I knew we wouldn't hear from Raine about Mac's medical tests, which might determine whether he had MS, and dictate how they would treat his optic neuritis.

I kept thinking, Mac's only twenty-five. The two accused murderers were only twenty-two and twenty-seven. I had felt adult at that age, but lying in the sun, I thought that I'd been a fragile, sketched-in version of myself, howling inside with uncertainty, crouching in my core, battered by the opinions of others, always insisting that everyone else was wrong but knowing they were right. It would have been easy to get lost, and the fact I didn't, not really, was owing partly to my luck in not being tested too gravely.

It could be a harsh old world, whether it was overseen by Mac's friend God or by Raine's alien programmer—whether these were different metaphors for the same great Something—or whether my two dears were equally wrong and there was nothingness. The void.

Yet whatever the answer, I felt surrounded by beauty. A merganser swam past the dock just then, her orange beak and her brownish, elegant, tufted head ticking a path forward for the three adolescent chicks in her wake. A smell of barbecue on the wind, a smoky waft of coals. Children laughing down the lake. A splash. More splashes.

Last year, schools of minnows had twinkled through the shallows, thousands of them, the tiny ones keeping closer to shore and the bigger ones in deeper water. The lake floor was sandy there, and under the sun, the water looked golden and the minnows were smooth brown darts of light. When I'd waded in, they'd flicked against my legs, a swirl of them, like drops of underwater rain.

Four days later, I got up very early and went down to the dock, and what I found was extraordinary. The sun rising over the treed hill behind me shone low on the rippling lake, and the tiny wavelets reflected the sunlight back toward shore, so bright waves of light quivered among the lowest branches of the trees, pulsing on their rough trunks and along the granite shore. All was silvery and golden. I felt remarkably privileged watching this undulation of light, this dance, the adumbration, the trembling in of a new day.

A rustle at the shoreline, and a long, rich creature slid among the ferns. It was a mink, as sleek as a lie. A black and white warbler darted above it. The black and whites always flew about eight or ten feet off the ground, scampering through the air, never lighting anywhere for long. Two scruffy mallards swam past, moulting at the neck, stopping to stand on some barely submerged rocks and peck at their feathers.

The previous day, the jury had convicted Christopher Sheriffe and Awet Asfaha of first-degree murder. Coming back from a long canoe ride, I'd read online that the judge had not yet formally pronounced sentence, but knew it was mandatory. Life. They were going to go to prison for twenty-five years without any possibility of parole.

It had taken the jury three days to convict. I wondered about the length of their deliberations, and whether the young men would make it out of prison alive. Asfaha had broken the cardinal rule of gangs by naming gang members on the stand. He'd already been in protective custody in jail, and although I'm not an expert on these things, I presumed he would have to be imprisoned far away from members of the Crips, which meant far away from his family. Yet if the Crips wanted to find him?

Meanwhile, Sheriffe had been portrayed in court as a violent young man, despite his mother's passionate defence of her son. Marjorie Sheriffe had testified that she herself had nicknamed him Hitz early in life, and that he was noted for his aggressive style of soccer. We'd also heard testimony in court about the violent crimes for which Sheriffe had been questioned or arrested—although significantly, not convicted. Stabbing his brother, assaulting his former girlfriend, nearly disembowelling a man who'd accused him of stealing his dog. Prisons were violent places. Maybe Sheriffe would be all right, maybe not.

His poor mother, I thought.

I'd texted Raine that evening. Everything all right? She'd answered with a smiley-face emoticon, blowing me off. Somehow, looking at that, feeling exasperated with my daughter, I suddenly knew that I hadn't heard Mac retching as we'd left the house. That was Raine, and she was pregnant, and I was left closing my eyes, feeling overwhelmed.

On the stand, Christopher Sheriffe's mother, Marjorie, had said that she would forgive her son if he'd done anything wrong.

"Does that include murder?" the lawyer had asked.

A pause.

"You don't have to answer that," the judge had said.

Now, maybe she did.

Motherhood, I thought, and the word reverberated in my mind like the light on the lower branches of the trees. 
Widesized

It took me until November to get caught up on writing about the trial. Once I did, Marjorie Sheriffe posted a comment on my Facebook page saying that she objected to what I had written. I'd gone ahead with the plan of posting my first drafts online as a sort of updated 19th century serial. Marjorie Sheriffe hadn't appreciated the trial part of this, insisting that her son was innocent. I thought of her as I looked out back, where fall leaves were blowing under a light blue sky, wind chimes ringing, thin white clouds slipping east in the breeze. November didn't look as innocent as May, I thought, and turned back to my laptop.

The trial was over, but I thought I'd writing about the daily-ness of life, seeing what we were up to, and what was going to happen next. On this November morning, my husband was at work, holding down the one conventional job in the family. I was in my study, otherwise known as the cubby behind my husband's evening office on the second floor, twelve feet by six, big enough to hold my writing table and chair and a wall of shelves anchored into the brick wall.

In the kitchen, Raine was experimenting with vegan apple-based jellies, trying to get the right proportion of apples to beet sugar. She wouldn't use refined cane sugar, which is whitened by being filtered through the charred bones of cows, and jams and jellies set slightly differently without it. She had lots of apples to practice with, having gone down to Niagara with Mac earlier in the fall to pick bushels of McIntoshes and Granny Smiths that we'd been storing in the cold room downstairs. In the past couple of days, she had already filled a shelf with purple apple-grape jelly and clear pinkish-red jalapeño pepper-apple jelly, and planned to harvest the last of the mint from the garden to make apple-mint jelly—an indulgence for the rest of us, since of course she doesn't eat lamb, and I'm not sure what else it goes with.

And yes, Raine was pregnant. She'd known from the moment of conception, as I had, and it was confirmed two weeks later when she started vomiting. For the first few months, Raine suffered badly from nausea, which only lifted in the late afternoon. It left her unable to do much during the day, including getting a job, projectile vomiting being such a turn-off during job interviews. Wanting to contribute something, she often worked late into the evenings, putting up shelves of jams and preserves. For me, memories of this summer and fall will always be scented with raspberries, rhubarb conserve and blueberry-lavender jam, with canned peaches and cloved plums, the flats and bushels of slowly-ripening fruit smelling like orchards by night.

Mac? Lying down upstairs. The optic neuritis had ebbed, leaving him with little permanent eye damage, thank God (which he did). But lately he'd been getting nasty attacks of vertigo, one of the many possible symptoms of multiple sclerosis, which had been confirmed. After his eyes improved, Mac started trying to get his graphic design business back up and running, but there was little room in the competitive freelance market for people who couldn't work 24/7, and given the vertigo, he didn't know how it was all going to play out.

Meanwhile, Bob was out in the garage, contemplating the change of season. The store owner down in Leslieville who'd been buying his birdhouses wanted something more winter-y, but rejected the idea of dollhouses made from Bob's charmingly-coloured scavenged wood, which he couldn't guarantee was lead-free.

"So it's all right for birds that there might be lead in their houses," Raine said.

"I wouldn't necessarily bring that up," Mac said.

Yet putting it this way makes us all sound atomized, when one of the big things we were doing was trying to live together, five people in one house from two generations.

Five and four-ninths people. Three generations, next spring.

And I suppose that having thought hard about justice while attending the murder trial, this remained my biggest concern: how to move forward justly and decently in a rapidly-changing world, when conventional jobs were disappearing and paycheques were shrinking, when you were being spied on by your own government and internet service provider, not to mention by miscellaneous hackers peering through your webcam on mornings when your eyes were bags and you weren't wearing make-up (I know they can do it, so don't try to convince me otherwise) as meanwhile the video of His Honour the Mayor smoking what was alleged to be crack cocaine embarrassed Toronto, and several senators we were paying very nice salaries up in Ottawa had come under police investigation for fiddling their expense accounts.

Given all that, how could we be just in matters big, small and annoying?

As, for instance, in deciding in a widesized, multi-generational house who got to put what furniture where.

Coming home from the cottage, I'd reached the back door when my phone rang. It was my son, saying brightly, "Hi Mum."

"Hey you," I said. "I'm just walking in the back door."

Silence. A dropped call?

"I told her not to do it," he said. "Catch you later."

The sound of hanging up.

Feeling puzzled, walking up the back stairs, I saw that there were more chairs around the kitchen table, which struck me as a good idea. But as I headed further inside, I found that Raine had switched the rooms around. You used to walk out of the kitchen into the dining room, which I thought had a certain logic to it. Now the big square room was crammed with sofas and armchairs and stand-up lamps brought from all over the house. The smaller room beyond it, the 1915 parlour, had been the living room a week before. Now it had the dining table and chairs crowded inside it, so you could no longer use the fireplace, which I loved. Raine smiled proudly from the head of the dining table, when all I could think was, It's my house.

I also sensed a huge issue. Mentally detaching, my eyes going a little unfocused, I felt myself drift up to the ceiling, becoming a fly looking down on ghostly versions of the family members who, in my mind, were slowly gathering around the table. As each sat down, I could see how their motives and objectives were very different, and pictured the many way in which we were going to clash.

Such a weird, vague feeling. I'd never had it before, although I'd read about something like it when researching my novel, the multi-generational saga, so maybe this was a subconscious echo. During the Peninsular War, circa 1810, Lord Wellington of the British Army was said to be able to see a battlefield from on high, although his viewpoint was usually described as that of a hawk or an eagle and not a common housefly's. They said he had the ability to look down at the tidy military squares made by his red-coated regiments and the blue-coated French enemy, understanding the topography, seeing where skirmishes would be fought and pitched battles raged, where chaos lurked, where defeat lay and victory hid, all this before the battle even began.

A fascinating viewpoint, but I found the idea of skirmishes and battles too depressingly appropriate. The issue: were my half-brother and daughter and her lovely partner moving into our house, by which I meant my husband's and my house, or were we jointly sharing a house and a collective life where we would have to make new rules that suited everybody?

Who was in charge? Was anyone in charge, or were we all equals holding up the roof? (Which, by the way, needed re-shingling.)

During university and immediately afterwards, I had lived in a series of sketchy student houses where we made decisions collectively, drawing up cooking schedules which more or less worked and cleaning schedules that didn't, and the meetings when we divided up chores took forever. We had forever. We loved talking, negotiating, parsing the subtext of our wants, needs, emerging abilities. In other words, talking about ourselves.

Now, looking at the way my daughter had rearranged our furniture, I found that even thinking about the amount of time those meetings took to be utterly exhausting.

But I also wanted Raine and Mac and Bob to feel good about themselves. I wanted them to be happy. They were going through hard times, and I wanted to help as much as I could. I ached for their troubles in a world that's grown so harsh on the vast majority of us who aren't feral, aren't eagles, aren't webcam nerds spying on innocent people's eye bags, meanwhile understanding how to monetize every waking second. How can you not want your family to be harmonious and happy? My heart beat with love for every one of them.

While in an evil corner of my mind, I wanted them all to feel so good about themselves that they would grow empowered, vigorous, employable, and move back out.

With just a glance at my daughter's proud, slightly flushed face, I could see it would take subtlety on my part to handle these issues. Not handle, which implied being in charge. I would need to be understanding and tactful, respecting everyone's point of view while listening patiently to people's manifold hopes and wishes, behaving in an immensely supportive manner as we jointly and with calm deliberation found our way forward.

"Put it back."

"Mother..."

"We didn't discuss it. If we're all going to live together, people can't take unilateral action."

Raine drooped, then shook her feathers like a little sparrow and sat back up, nodding, blushing even harder, accepting the fact she'd transgressed against equality, respect, due process and other tenets of domestic nirvana.

"My bad," she said.

I didn't live in a sketchy student house during university without learning how to use people's idealism against them, not least because of the many times mine was used against me. When Raine's friends returned to move the furniture back in place, more or less, I felt a little ashamed of myself. But only a little.

In any case, we now had five people in the house, all but my husband working at home. Or not working, as was often the case.

Raine, for instance, dropped down to city hall this morning, acting as a silent witness in Nathan Phillips Square as the city council asked Mayor Rob Ford to resign. She e-mailed a picture of herself holding up the sign she had made the previous night.

"YOU ARE SORRY," it read.

I was doing the budget, and am able to report the unsurprising fact that feeding, clothing, transporting and wiring up five adults is expensive. I was lucky enough to be working on a number of film projects, but I wasn't doing so well on the book side of the business, my latest novel having been rejected after six months of consideration by a big international publisher. Judging from the e-mail from my agent, the editor seemed to like the book, but the marketing person thought, quote, my brand was unfocused, presumably because I wrote both books and film scripts, while I'd published a non-fiction e-book about baseball that summer.

"They call it having an unfocused brand," I told my agent. "I call it trying to earn a living."

Branding was the newest buzzword, personal branding, branding yourself, promoting your brand. I'd first heard it from a friend who had gone to work for Elton John's film company, Rocket Films. My friend said that Sir Elton and his husband and manager, David Furnish, had become interested in promoting Sir Elton's personal brand, creating film, TV and theatre properties based on his catalogue of songs.

After that, I started hearing about personal branding everywhere, the term taking over from multi-platforming. A couple of years ago, writers were supposed to multi-platform our projects over several media. Your feature film needed a TV tie-in, or vice versa, along with a potential novelization and a video game adaptation, on and on. Then everyone, en masse, figured out that multi-platforming was far too expensive to be viable, so its opposite came in, branding and focus.

Writers know the words used in rejection slips are just a cover for people saying they don't like your work. If they like it, they'll find the vocabulary to justify their taste. You can't take buzzwords to heart, yet as I tell my students, learning how to use them is your only hope of charming the people who like to throw them around, including the arts administrators and marketing types who control an awful lot of money.

Multi-platforming? "I'm a story-teller, so I work in a lot of different media."

Branding? "I'm a story-teller. My brand, I guess." (Cue the self-deprecating smile.)

Before long, of course, there will be a new buzzword, a new way in which we're asked to contort ourselves. It makes me tired to even think about. Yet that evening, when my laptop beeped with another incoming an e-mail, it wasn't a new selfie from Raine, but an invitation to a conference on trends. The Astound Summit, it was called: The Future of Audience Engagement. Social media, branding, finding an audience. Skimming the prospectus, I saw that the conference seemed to be about up-to-date ways of selling your art, learning new trends and new vocabulary. I didn't have to look back at the budget before registering, already well aware that there are five people in our house who like to eat.

The summit proved to be held at OCAD U, the oddly named Ontario College of Art and Design University, the giant pencil box on stilts downtown. I hadn't been inside before, but people said the architect had used up either his ideas or his budget on the outside of the building. Inside, it was pretty much like any other school.

That first morning, glancing around the lecture hall, I could see they were right. Ranks of desks, a lectern and an audio-visual screen at the front of the room. But I started learning new vocabulary even while eavesdropping on the audience settling in around me, and settled in for a good listen.

Granular. The men in front of me were talking about granular and granularity, my first new words of the summit. I knew what they meant, of course, but I had never heard them used that way. The men were discussing how detailed you wanted to get when you analysed information about social media usage, how gritty, how many grains of sand you wanted to pan out of the data stream.

I could see that to them, granular = bad. Over-analysis = bad. They wanted to pan for the simple things people really wanted, their form of gold, then figure out how to bypass traditional media and take their products directly to consumers.

Some day, maybe pretty soon, I'll probably look back on the summit as a time capsule, a vacuum-sealed container where many of the favourite marketing trends of late 2013 were packed into a few windowless rooms. Or unpacked, as the speakers liked to say. Into those institutional rooms were flung buzzwords and neologisms, data on the newest trends, future projections that showed reasonable promise of actually coming true. Ideas were scrutinized for their potential profitability, weighed and harvested by rooms full of restless artists and entrepreneurs, exchanging cards, pouring free coffee, grabbing healthy sandwiches, their ambition roaring through the hallways like a minotaur.

It occurred to me, as I listened to the succession of speakers, that conferences like this were important even if many of the speakers' projections proved to be wrong or ephemeral. Futurists of fifty years ago had promised society that technology would create more leisure time, and I began to wonder if their benign and well-publicized predictions had disarmed people by making new computer technology look hopeful. If we'd realized that it would actually drain away our leisure time, we might have been more like the machine breakers of the early 19th century, tossing the first Apple out the window and sending Steve Jobs after it. But for better or worse, that's not what happened, and I wondered if this kind of summit was part of the reason why.

I also began to realize that the speakers were throwing out the kind of information that didn't always get written down. It was too arcane for journalists, too ephemeral for books, the sort of thing that often got lost. Pulling out my pen, I started taking notes.

One reason newspapers are dying? As the conference opened, I heard about the particular case of ski resort operators from Vail, Colorado, who had approached Todd Cherkasky, the Global Lead, Research and Insights, at a company called SapientNitro in Chicago. Cherkasky was the keynote speaker at the summit, and what he said about the changing rules of advertising that first morning was a shock to me: the shock of the new.

According to Cherkasky, the Vail resort operators originally asked him to design a traditional advertising campaign for newspapers and magazines. In the past, this was the best way to reach potential visitors, while of course the ad revenue kept the media afloat, our faltering newspapers publishing, investigative journalism alive. Cherkasky said he told them that it no longer worked.

"Spending more on media to push out content doesn't help," he told us. "The linear model of consumption has become a false concept. From 1906 to 2006, content was king. Now, we have an experience-driven model. Consumers are demanding more input into their experiences. More of a mash-up."

I scribbled the quote in my black-and-white student's notebook, then lifted my pen, wondering what he meant by experience-driven.

Instead of designing ads, Cherkasky explained, he convinced the Vail resort operators to embed technology in ski passes—chips—so skiers could keep track of what they were doing on the mountain. They could record what time they took the ski lift, what route they took down the mountain, their times on a run. A specially-designed app even let them even compare their own performance to the time taken by American World Cup skier Lindsey Vonn on the same run. Meanwhile, they if they didn't want to shoot their own photos, they could get their pictures taken by professional photographers seeded around the resort.

The second part of the plan involved Vail going wireless, even the ski slopes. That way, skiers could post their photos and stories instantly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even while skiing downhill. By sharing their experiences—repeatedly demonstrating what a great time they were having—the skiers would advertise the resort to their broad circles of social media friends. Each skier would become an advertiser. In fact, they'd become the star of their own ad.

Vail loved Cherkasky's idea. The chip was seeded, the mountain wired. In 2009, the first year of the campaign, visits went up 5.5 per cent, while revenue rose 13.1 per cent. In other words, in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, they had managed to increase visits to an expensive ski resort. All in, Vail has enjoyed a thirty per cent growth in revenue since Cherkasky stepped in.

Yet in 2009, one hundred five U.S. newspapers were shuttered and 10,000 media jobs were lost, a fact Cherkasky didn't mention, but that I found in an online business archive when I got home.

Bulletin: Nike had recently shuffled forty per cent of its above-the-line budget for TV and print ads into digital engagement.

Bulletin: a retail chain had recently installed technology to block customers' smart phones inside its stores, afraid they were showrooming—visiting the stores to look at products they planned to buy more cheaply online. After installing the phone blocker, the chain went bankrupt.

Bulletin: data monitors seeded in customers' smart phones showed the vast majority of customers using their phones in stores aren't showrooming. Most of them are either playing videogames or calling friends.

Playing videogames while shopping? Presumably teenagers played while waiting for their friends to try on clothes, or as friends made up their minds among products; was that right? If so, it was one of those everyday details that people find so obvious or unimportant they seldom write it down, and that are easily lost to history.

The summit was making me think about how much time people spend doing things that will be forgotten, even though as a society, we might do them for centuries. I'd thought a little about that at the murder trial, when I realized the detective I'd interviewed, the one who looked like a cop, hadn't thought to tell me that forensic officers videotaped crime scenes. Now I remembered reading a book about servants' lives where I learned that for a couple of hundred years, most people in England scattered sand on their floors to absorb grease and dirt, sweeping it out and replacing it once a month, always taking great care to draw fanciful patterns on the sand when it was new. That's who the Sandman was: the man who sold clean sand door to door.

Social Alzheimer's, I thought. Listening to other, equally-arcane details of wifi usage and modern life, I felt that I'd flown to one of the moons of Saturn, a dark space inhabited by beings who breathed slightly different air, historians of the present time who made a profession of honing in around those little things we didn't even notice we did—although unlike historians researching the Sandman, they weren't harvesting knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but because they wanted to profit from what they learned.

Whether writers and other artists could profit from it was another question.

In his Globe and Mail column, novelist Russell Smith has despaired of social-media marketing as an effective tool for writers. "Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion—on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn't care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel," he wrote. "This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one's 'profile' by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one's humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn't have to do that."

Yet the summit presenters talked about actually making sales. Digital media strategist Eric Leo Blais pointed out that too often, people use social media with the vague intention of upping their profiles, without focusing on precisely why.

What product were you trying to sell? It didn't work to try to sell an image, he said. You couldn't eat image recognition even if you achieved it. Instead, you had to define what you were pushing, and develop strategies for reaching people you didn't know who might actually buy it. A book, a film, a sneaker. He pointed out that one social media campaign he conducted for a small Canadian feature film, scheduled to play for a week in a Toronto theatre, allowed it to extend its run to eight weeks, playing to full houses every night.

To do this, of course, you needed to keep on top of who was using what media, so you could target outlets used by the people you wanted to reach, understanding who was actually using the social media sites and when. The summit occurred as the Facebook audience was aging up, with the vast majority of users over forty and college-educated, while teenagers were leaving Facebook and migrating to Instagram and Twitter in droves.

Instagram and Pinterest were skewing heavily female, Blais said, while Google+ and Twitter were just as heavily male. Twitter also skewed younger, with news junkies predominating, making it a good place to try to publicize your product.

Suspension of disbelief is my job—or at least, creating it is—while suspending cynicism is probably my biggest challenge, especially at conferences like this. But there's also suspension of laziness, which can be an even bigger challenge. It's one thing to dutifully note where the potential social media audience exists for writers, and I carefully wrote down all the figures. It was another to reach it so you could publicize your art. Which is to say, it was an astonishing amount of work.

Youtube guru and online video producer Corey Vidal told the conference that his company compiled long lists of websites, fan sites and special interest sites to which he routinely publicized his videos the moment he put them up on Youtube. He figured that for every one hundred sites he sent to, ten would post a link to his video. Afterwards, a percentage of visitors to those ten sites would share his link on other sites outside the original hundred-site network, and a certain number of visitors to those additional sites would share with even more sites and so on.

"That's part of selling yourself and your business," Vidal said. "You have to make your lists and go after everybody on them."

While doing this, Vidal's employees also publicized his videos on social media sites, tweeting and pintering and facebooking their fingers raw, hoping that with the concatenation of posts and hits, their latest video would go viral. There was no guarantee it would, of course, but it wouldn't go without a campaign.

Meanwhile, Eric Leo Blais noted that research showed only one per cent of people scrolled down their Facebook newsfeeds, so if they didn't read your post soon after you put it up, they were going to miss it. That meant if you were going to publicize your projects on social media sites the way Vidal did, you had to either pay Facebook for space on newsfeeds or know when your audience was likely to be online. Once you did, you could schedule your posts/links/tweets to reach your target audience, using services like HootSuite that offered a delayed release function. Write your posts in one morning a week, and the server would send them out at programmed intervals.

If you were trying to reach teenagers, for instance, you had to wait until after school when the kids were on wifi at coffee shops or in the local mall. You also had to understand they would be accessing your content on smart phones and format accordingly.

On the other hand, if you were trying to reach those increasingly rare adults with traditional desk jobs, research showed that it was actually best to catch them during working hours, when research showed they tended to be surfing around online for three hours of their eight-hour days.

All of this was intricate, up-to-the-minute, a snapshot of the times, and it would probably be out of date in two seconds, something else lost to history. Nor did some speakers' sophistication in marketing have anything to do with the sophistication of their content, and with anything that might last. All good wishes to Corey Vidal, but his cat videos were ephemeral sub-art, like the 17th century pamphlets of jokes and political satire that are now carefully warehoused in university libraries. People enjoyed making them and watching or reading them—by which I mean both Vidal's Youtube videos and the 17th century satires—and Vidal clearly enjoyed making money from them, but here's a question: Does this sort of marketing only really work with the type of lite videos he promoted, or could it work with real content? Good books. Good music. There seemed to be a radical disconnect between the media and the message, and I wondered if the first might subliminally cheapen the second.

There was also the fact that Corey Vidal had a staff, including one person whose job was to compile his evolving list of websites, while Eric Blais was a consultant hired to do the notably granular work of promoting other people's projects. They expected writers to do all this on top of actual writing?

That's a rhetorical whine. The answer is yes, and that included writers who were published by conventional houses. Only a dozen years ago publishing houses still assigned editors to edit manuscripts and promoted them through in-house publicists, arranging for publicity photos, tours, readings, sometimes even holding book launches with open bars. The last blast of the golden age. For the past decade, I've been watching it erode, writers having to pay for the publicity photos first, for book launches and so on, and now having to do most of the promotion that once fell to in-house employees, both by hiring freelance publicists and by setting aside considerable time to post on social media. One writer signed to an international publishing house recently told me that she's even had to hire her own editor, since the the in-house editing notes on her latest manuscript consisted of a one-page letter from her overworked publisher.

I know another writer who spends three hours a day online connecting with her audience, servicing both her website and social media sites. Her last book was a bestseller, so it works, at least for her. Yet I also can't help wondering what subtle influence this has on her writing, whether she now writes at least unconsciously to the very specific and highly interactive audience that follows her—a very flattering audience—and whether this is good or bad.

Barnaby Marshall feels it's good. The director of creative technology at Slaight Music, Marshall told the summit that the rise of social media doesn't just demand new forms of marketing, it demands new forms of art. The day is passing when musicians deliver a completed song to fans, he said. Now he believes that musicians should post a new riff on the cloud and ask for feedback before moving from riff to song.

"As an artist today, you have to embrace all processes before you go about creating products," Marshall said. "You need to lose control of the product—step aside from it being a product rather than a process."

In other words, the artist needs to become indistinguishable from her audience, just another member of the interactive group chatting on her website. Rather than creating focus groups to react to an end product, an album or song, musicians are being asked to initiate a collaboration with their fans so that they, as partners, can create the type of mash-ups that Marshall sees as the future of art. Art as collaboration, going back to the days when Leonardo da Vinci had a studio of assistants who executed his paintings, and maybe even introduced individual touches of their own.

Listening to him speak, I felt both fascinated and horrified. Was he really talking about subsuming the artist in the audience, and making art by committee?

Maybe this form of compromise art will sell. Well, it already does. Hollywood studios have been doing it for years, churning out highly-profitable Spandex superhero sequels, each with a dozen writers on board and often with a director-for-hire at the helm. Corey Vidal has been successful at it online. Perhaps as a result, another friend told me recently that after receiving editing notes from a publisher, "I realized they were trying to turn my book into chick lit. They were asking me to dumb it down."

Chick lit sells. Art doesn't. And I don't think it's entirely clear where that leaves those of us trying to make a living while making art.

I went to the summit hoping to learn a little bit about how to use social media. As I left, I wondered how much I could stomach doing. The most economical approach seemed to lie in being disingenuous. I'd talked to a filmmaker in the OCAD U corridors, a man who had raised money for his film on a crowd-funding site. As Barnaby Marshall advised, the filmmaker brought his funders and fans on board by asking them to help make creative decisions, letting them pick the movie poster and so on. Or at least, appearing to let them.

"I'm a director," he told me. "It's not like I'm going to give up control. We let them vote on three posters, and I made sure I could live with all three. I had my favourite, but in the end, I didn't care which one they chose."

He shrugged. "It worked." He made his film, which played at festivals to enthusiastic reviews and won prizes that boosted his career.

Walking home from the summit, I felt thoroughly conflicted about social media, which I was starting to think of as S&M. It seemed a little sad that the best idea I could come up with was being disingenuous, which skated pretty close to being insincere.

Then I was startled out of my granulated world by walking inside to find Raine cooking dinner. She didn't hear me come in. The cooktop fan was making a racket, and I hung back to watch her. Unaware she had an audience, Raine chopped her way through a couple of onions, looking so perfectly content it melted my heart.

Raine doesn't want to get a job. It suddenly struck me that not only does she not want to, but that in her quiet, stubborn way, she doesn't plan to. Awaiting her baby, propping up her man, Raine intends to live a low-pressure life, engaging with the world mainly by protesting gas pipelines and errant mayors, standing on the fringes with her ironic homemade signs. YOU ARE SORRY.

"Oh," Raine said, spotting me. Then she gestured at the butcher block with her knife. "Scalloped sweet potatoes."

Giving her a hug, I wondered if this might be the other option. Instead of self-promoting your work to death, you find new ways to cut costs, maybe taking the route we'd haphazardly stumbled on and cramming an extended family into your wide-sized house. One person would volunteer to be a full-time cook, making cheap and delicious meals from scratch. Others would get whatever jobs they could. Meanwhile, the artist in the family would keep working, hoping for a payoff that would buoy everybody's ship one day, and buoy their hopes in the meantime.

That's probably all we've got these days, both civilians and artists. We live in hope that we'll get the one-in-a-million payoff, whether it comes from a lottery cheque, a bestseller or an indie movie hit. There's no more middle ground left for filmmakers, writers, artists. No middle-budget movies, no mid-list books. You either earn nothing or you earn huge amounts, and no one has ever been able to predict when huge happens, or figure out how. Ask the movie studios, with their mega-million-dollar flops. As a publisher said to me years ago, "If we knew how to spot a hit beforehand, we'd publish nothing else."

It occurred to me to forget everything I'd been brooding about at the conference. Also that I couldn't. You've probably got to grit your teeth and do it all.
The Ice Storm Cometh

A month later, when I read about the approaching ice storm, I decided to believe the experts who said the worst of it would bypass Toronto. Like everyone else in the city, we already had enough to do before the holidays and didn't need the added drama of a storm. The idea of not needing it slid easily into the conviction that we wouldn't get it, and once that was out of the way, I continued on as usual, postponing everything that didn't have to be done immediately.

At about two a.m. on the last Sunday before Christmas, I woke up abruptly, startled out of my sleep. It wasn't a noise that woke me, but silence. Muzzily, I realized the usual comforting, womb-like hum of the world had stopped, the breathing of the furnace and the murmur of the city outside. There was also an unusual intermittent sharp plink and shattering that sounded like a kid's xylophone being rattled.

I elbowed my husband. "The power's out," I told him. "From the sounds of it, the ice storm hit us, after all."

Go back to sleep, he muttered. Nothing we can do. Probably won't last.

Yet the power was still out when we woke up the next morning, and I looked outside to find an inch-thick layer of ice coating the trees and wires, sprayed on top of everything like a fall of transparent snow. It was very beautiful, the grey day softened even further by the refraction of ice over brown bark and neon-coloured cars huddled on the street, which was a sheet of glass. I could see that this was serious; the power would be out for a while. A test of familial togetherness, I thought, dressing quickly and heading downstairs. I wondered whether we'd pass.

With our gas service unaffected, I turned on the fire in the living room, glad that it threw such a good heat. We had a gas cooktop too, and in the kitchen, I struck a match to light a burner for the kettle. It seemed like another undemanding adventure, making tea without artificial heat and light. A lite modern version of the Ur-Canadian experience, channelling pioneer ancestors who lived in sod huts on the Prairies that eventually became chicken coops on descendants' farms.

"At least until the descendants lost the farm," I said, once the others had come in, and we sat drinking tea and coffee around the breakfast table, feeling macho. "Like the cousins on the Prairies who over-mortgaged. Then the banks took the farm, and they had to start driving truck for the county roads department."

"After which agribusiness took over from the banks," Mac riffed. "Buying the farm, bulldozing the historic coops so they could build a factory hog farm."

"Where there's a new baby pig virus these days," Raine said.

We had the barbecue out back, as well, and a couple of canisters of propane. We agreed that we'd be fine, the indoor temperature at fourteen degrees and stable, the thermometer outside the kitchen window reading nothing worse than minus two. As I looked into the backyard, the sun came out, making the world look like a beautiful disaster, a brilliant glitter crackling from every twig and stem, the thin branches of the lilacs and the Rose of Sharon doubled in size by transparent sheaths of ice. Beyond them, the maples in the next street over became giant crystal dancers raising their arms above the glistening rooftops, a few brave chimneys sending wisps of smoke into the sky.

We put our smart phones in the centre of the kitchen table, planning to conserve their charge and listening instead to a little red battery-powered radio my husband brought downstairs. When the extent of the damage became clear, we felt even tougher. The authorities said in tinny radio voices that it would take up to seventy-two hours to reconnect 300,000 households left without power, but we could last three days.

"Except that it'll be more like a week for some people, probably two," said Mac, who had been visiting his grandmother during the famous Montreal ice storm sixteen years before. "They can get grids back up in a two or three days. But when branches knock down peoples' wires, that part takes forever."

"Good," Raine said, from her post by the stove. "I mean for us, not for old people, or sick people. We can see what it's like to live environmentally."

"I'm old," Bob said amiably. "I know what it's like."

"Come on," I said. "You grew up in the east end of Vancouver. Life was entirely convenient. The milkman came to the door. The egg man. You weren't exactly pumping water in the back forty."

"One TV station, off at the air at 10 p.m."

He had me there.

"No social media either," I said nostalgically.

The light in the kitchen was old-fashioned that first morning, pale grey clouds covering the sky outside, the bright kitchen blues and yellows washed out. We all wore hoodies and sweaters, holding our cups of tea and coffee between our palms, and soon enough eating Raine's buckwheat pancakes, piles of them smothered in organic maple syrup with rashers of Bob's bacon on the side.

At least, some of us were eating Bob's bacon; Raine tried to stay upwind. It was funny to see my daughter and brother perched identically on the edges of their chairs, both eating slowly and with bite-by-bite appreciation, the two of them so similar yet disagreeing completely about a growing number of issues that had been percolating to the surface over the past couple of months, especially diet.

Fortunately, invisibly, they'd reached an accommodation on cooking. Our kitchen had slowly evolved into Raine's territory, becoming a strictly vegan space with products she disapproved of relegated to a pantry in the laundry room: salt and vinegar potato chips, lard for pie crusts and crinkly packaged items that I agree are probably deeply harmful to the human species but also entirely delicious.

Meanwhile, the barbecue had become Bob's domain, especially after he ceded bread making to Raine. He headed outside three or four days a week, grilling the bacon or chicken or fish we stocked in his basement kitchenette, augmenting Raine's menus with the same care he'd lavished on the bread, and enjoying a cigarette or two while he waited for the meat to cook, his heart attack and the doctors' warnings already receding into deep time.

Raine was distressed that Bob had gone back to smoking, although she managed to keep quiet even when he stank of it, as he did after cooking the bacon outside. Yet when Mac speared another rasher of bacon, Raine vibrated with anxiety. Raine believes that multiple sclerosis can be treated with a vegan diet and exercise, and I suppose she has as good a chance as anyone at being right, since the medical community doesn't seem to know much about MS, its causes or its cure, despite multi-millions of dollars spent in research.

"So what's everyone going to do today?" I asked, watching Raine follow every strip of bacon to Mac's lips. "I was going to finish my Christmas shopping, but maybe not."

"Mass," Mac said briefly, still chewing.

Raine grew even more distressed. "But I thought your new priest was homophobic?"

"Unfortunately," Mac agreed.

"And the streets are just covered with ice."

Usually Raine didn't challenge anything to do with Mac's religion, which is maybe his way to combat MS, or to accept it, or both. Two sides of the same coin.

"It's crap out there." Mac continued chewing agreeably.

"And your vertigo, your balance..."

I had to get up, clear away a few plates, seeing for the first time how the enforced togetherness of life during a storm was going to prove more difficult than any amount of cold and dark. Poor damn pioneers, I thought. Trapped with their families all winter.

Even before the storm, I'd been thinking about the way that most of the important events in life aren't things we choose. Instead, they happen to us. Usually we're not agents of change so much as pawns of it. For a novelist and filmmaker, that speaks to plot—as in, don't try to put your protagonist in charge, much as she wants to be. Even worse is letting her get what she hopes for, at least in ways that she'd like. The sad fact is, things hardly ever turn out the way we'd like, and we often react in ways we would never have expected. Which can be satisfying in novels and film, if not always in real life.

Maybe that's why love stories are so popular. Deciding to go after a particular man or woman is among the few big, life-changing choices we can make, at least in modern cultures. Watching or reading about the pursuit is not only entertaining in itself, it also gives us the pretty illusion that we can make equally profound choices in other parts of our lives.

As I did the breakfast dishes, it grew increasingly clear that the storm had been dire. The tinny radio said it had caused the most widespread blackout Toronto had ever seen, and this was already a punishing winter. Scrubbing the griddle, I found it utterly fascinating that this huge plot point had descended on Toronto. Something had happened to hundreds of thousands of people across the city, to neighbours, to me and my family. Something to observe and learn from, I thought. Arguably something to use.

I often talk to my students about writers not only having to live their lives, but having to watch themselves live it, putting a part of their consciousness on their shoulders like a big-eyed homunculus or a videocam, observing and recording useful details. Of course it's cold-blooded. There's that Graham Greene quote about writers having to have a chip of ice in their hearts. I have to admit, I've got one lodged in there pretty deeply.

Finishing up the dishes, I watched my family debate what to do after breakfast, not knowing what I'd do with this, but noting that Raine and Mac especially were a little lost without endless power for their electronics. The TV was down, and the videogame console, and their laptops and phones operating on rapidly-draining batteries. Mac began to talk about going to the coffee shop to charge his battery after church, while Raine made little distressed noises about the greater chance he'd lose his footing doing two errands instead of one. Not that she had any other ideas what to do.

"Read?" she asked. "In the morning?"

"But that's a luxury," I said.

Raine looked dubious. Well, I'm a writer whose daughter doesn't read much. Fortunately for the future of books, my son reads constantly.

A sudden crack outside like a rifle shot was followed a breath later by a soft thud that made the house judder. We all hurried to the front porch to find that a huge, ice-covered branch from the Norway maple outside had broken off, taking down the power lines that led to our house and our next-door neighbours', which now lay to the ground.

Our neighbour, Jack the long-distance bicyclist, was already outside.

"This is bad," he said, scratching his shaved head. "This is very, very bad."

It was 10 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, with Mac about to leave for church, there was another crack and another soft thud as a second branch came down on top of the first. This time we found it had broken the mast at the side of the house that fed the power into our meter.

Staring at the tangle of branches, I could feel our family fall to the bottom of the Toronto Hydro priority list. They had to get power back to hospitals first—the radio said both Toronto East General and Sunnybrook were operating on generators—then to public buildings, then to whole neighbourhoods, and only then individual houses.

I turned surprisingly indecisive as we headed inside. My husband was already on the phone line trying to report our individual outage, facing a constant busy signal and a declining amount of battery power. Meanwhile, I couldn't decide whether to move the perishables from the fridge to the cold room in the basement, which would be a waste of time if Hydro appeared sooner rather than later. Maybe I should chip the ice off the front walk instead, at least if the fallen wires didn't make that dangerous. Maybe it was best to clear the back walk so we could get the car out if we had to.

"I probably shouldn't go to mass," said Mac, who was looking just as indecisive. He and Raine sat down in front of the fire, where they began debating whether to head over to a friend's house, someplace with heat. Even though they had made noises about conserving power on their phones, they had been texting friends non-stop about the outage. Several had texted back with offers of a spare bed, worried about Raine's pregnancy and Mac's MS.

"What about going to Carson's?" Raine asked. "Her roommate went home for the holidays."

"I don't think Carson really means it," Mac said. "She told me last week how she was looking forward to some privacy. I think she just wants to feel noble by offering."

"That's not very sympathetic."

"You can't be blind about people," Mac said. "I mean, I know a little about blindness now, and I don't recommend it."

"You're not getting me to go to one of those warming shelters they've got," said Bob, who was sitting on the floor by the fire. "I know about shelters."

"No one suggested you go to a shelter," I said, walking a loop around the main floor.

"It's for people who don't have anyone to fall back on," Raine said.

"I already fell," Bob replied. "Is that what you're saying?"

The mildly-argumentative jostling reminded me of something a friend once said when I asked how her kids were coping after her husband moved out. "They usually seem fine," she said. "But the moment even the tiniest thing goes wrong—or not even wrong, just wacky—they go off the rails and end up fighting and crying. It's as if there's enough underlying tension that the smallest thing tips them over. They forget how to behave."

I guess I forgot how to hit the ground running, and before long, I forgot as well the unspoken rules that had started to govern our widesized house. After pacing for a while, I moved the perishables from the fridge to the basement and started a homemade soup for lunch, absentmindedly taking over the gas cooktop instead of cracking ice from the pathways outside. When I began chopping onions, Raine came in, looking distressed at my incursion into her domain.

"It's warm by the stove," I said. "We'll take turns, all right?"

From the look on her face, it wasn't all right, but for the moment I didn't care, probably at some unconscious level wanting to be in charge of something. I'm not saying that I liked my behavior. Over the past few months, we'd fallen into ways of living together that were more or less fair and more or less worked, mainly by being polite to each other rather than talking it out. It was interesting to see that even under slight pressure, these started falling apart, too.

After lunch, with Raine already pointedly preparing dinner, I went back to being indecisive. Normally I cleaned the house on Sunday afternoon, at least our part of it. But vacuuming wasn't an option, nor laundry, and the light wasn't good enough to dust. Perching in front of the fire, I wondered how clean the house would have been when it was new in 1915. They seemed to have had gas lighting; we'd found pipes in the walls during a renovation. But mainly they would have used candles, which in my experience obscured the dirt instead of revealing it. Useful when you wanted to have an elegant dinner. Not so much when you needed to clean up afterwards.

Yet here's the thing about candles: my experience of them was limited, at least before the ice storm. Certainly before I headed back to the kitchen late that Sunday afternoon, wanting a cup of tea.

It had invisibly become 4 p.m. I could see perfectly well, but the sky had gone steely and the light inside felt discouraging, with the kitchen cupboards having turned introspective. I decided that lighting a candle would cheer things up, and stuck a couple in some candlesticks before I rasped a match to light the cooktop, lighting the candles afterwards as the flame burned toward my fingers.

It was astonishing how little illumination the candles cast in twilight. In my surprise, I forgot the match and burned my fingers before flipping it into the sink. The candles weren't even making a circle of light on the counter, much less brightening the room. How embarrassing to wait this long to discover something your grandparents probably knew before they could walk. Blowing out the candles, I wondered vaguely if the ones I'd bought were defective, although I knew they weren't. In fact, when I lit half a dozen in the living room after dark, they cast a light strong enough to read by.

That first evening, we were all warm enough and well-fed. But we remained slightly restive, trapped inside a plot and waiting for things to lumber forward. There was no way of knowing how long the power would be out, how cold it would get inside, whether we should change our plans for Christmas. The radio said electricity was slowly being reconnected around the city, tens of thousands of people already back on the grid. Curled together on the sofa, Raine and Mac decided not to leave, not yet.

Taking a rocking chair, I found my indecisiveness waning with nothing else to do but read in front of the fire. I held my book angled into the candlelight, reading more slowly than usual, struggling a little to make out the words and eating the paragraphs slowly. The pace of reading by candlelight was another discovery and an unexpected delight. Over dinner, we'd each unwrapped a Christmas present early, and mine was the new novel Longbourn by Jo Baker, the world of Pride and Prejudice as seen through servants' eyes. It proved light but enjoyable, and so appropriate to the shadowy fire-lit room that before long, I thought about reading it aloud, although a quick glance around the room reminded me that no one else was likely to be interested.

In fact, Mac quickly grew bored with reading and threw his book aside, listening for the sound of Hydro trucks crunching down the frozen street. Raine slowly forgot about her knitting, letting it fall in her lap. Usually they were both industrious, but none of us was quite ourselves. When Raine went downstairs to get the Scrabble board, I heard a crinkle of packaging and realized she was sneaking a bag of her old favorite, salt-and-vinegar potato chips, scarfing them down in the laundry room before coming back upstairs.

"I hope this means you're going to take your kid to MacDonald's sometimes," Bob said, raising an eyebrow. "Let him be like other kids so they don't beat him up."

"How do you know it's not a girl?" Raine asked, putting the Scrabble box on the coffee table.

"I thought you didn't ask the ultrasound."

"We didn't," Raine said, kneeling by the game.

Bob ruminated on this, holding a blanket draped around his shoulders.

"You sure you still like surprises?" he asked, before nodding at the Scrabble board. "Me and Lauren used to play that. When she felt domestic."

Smiling, Mac knelt beside Raine and invited Bob to pick a marker. The three of them played Scrabble for the rest of the evening, Mac being stoic even though he was stuck with the Q for most of the game without a U ever coming open.

And then, Dear Reader, to bed.

On Monday, I got up to find that the inside temperature had fallen to twelve degrees, which proved to be perfectly livable. It was minus three outside; not bad either. We coped. Shopped, cooked. Raine and Mac went to a coffee shop to recharge their phones, while Bob spent most of the day at the library. I used the morning light to clean my office and the afternoon to cook with Raine, going to bed early and hunkering under extra covers.

But it went down to minus fifteen outside on Monday night, and I got up on the morning of Christmas Eve to find it a chilly eight degrees in the house, even though we'd left the gas fire lit all night, Bob sleeping on the sofa to keep an eye on things. Boiling big pots of water on the stove raised the temperature to nine degrees, which made a surprising difference as we ate a breakfast of hot oatmeal and raisins, the milk icy cold from the cold room.

"This isn't fair," said Bob, who was still hunkered under his blanket. "I bet they've got power in the rich part of town."

I didn't think that was true, but my brother sucked his lips in protest.

"Weather isn't fair," Mac said.

"It's not weather," Raine said. "This is climate change. Man-made."

"Global warming is crap," Bob said. "You might want to check on how cold it is outside."

"You didn't just say that," Raine told him.

"Something wrong with your ears?" Bob asked.

"With your judgment," Raine muttered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

As Bob bristled, my husband and I exchanged a glance, and he suggested it might be time to talk about going to friends' houses, with the temperatures due to stay cold outside.

"Who do you think might take Archie, too?" I asked, nodding at the cat, who had spent three happy days in front of the fire.

With Raine and Bob still casting evil glances at each other, we made some calls. Packed some bags, got ready to leave. Afterward, we gathered in the living room for a final afternoon's unsettled dimness, waiting for friends and family to get home, either from work or last-minute shopping. If we were reacting this poorly to a minor emergency, I wondered how we would we react to something major.

Suddenly the power came back on, the furnace clanking twice then burring to life, the hall light suddenly shining.

"Ahhh," everyone said at once. I felt a huge burden drop from my shoulders that I hadn't even known was there. Around me, everyone else's shoulders dropped the same way, as if an invisible yoga teacher had told us to let them go. The suitcases, which had looked so important a moment earlier, receded into the background.

People talk about the raised tensions around holidays, the fights that erupt at American Thanksgiving when everyone suddenly finds themselves in a room at once, adult siblings grown unaccustomed to being together. At a writerly level, I saw how I could use the ice storm to portray the tensions at a fictional gathering, possibly during a far greater emergency, heightening our responses, deepening them, using them to create believably prickly behaviour in characters forced together under pressure.

I also realized that part of the tension came because we're more blunt than people used to be, when generations had to live together and often held their tongues. We seemed to be ruder now, freer with unsolicited advice. Wrong to be repressed, we say, shaking our heads at the pioneer past. But repression has its uses.

Things were subtly different in the house after the power came back on. Raine had always been the indulgent niece, Bob the adoring uncle. Yet his sceptical crack about global warming had put Bob on the wrong side of my daughter, and here's something I learned, after knowing her forever: Raine held grudges.

My twenty-three-year-old daughter started casting sulky teenage-style glances at Bob, whom I thought had probably tossed off his remark out of irritation rather than true scepticism. He was a powerless man in many ways, and being stuck in a cold dark house had turned that hard fact far too literal. After we'd finally decided to leave the house on Christmas Eve, as the rest of us chose among offers from friends, Bob stayed silent. He had a primitive phone and limited computer skills, no Facebook account, no social media connections, and he claimed to have misplaced his old paper address book.

"How am I supposed to remember everyone else's phone numbers? I can barely remember my own."

It grew painfully obvious that Bob had no friends he could land on, and although I got him a family invitation easily enough, the experience was hurtful. If Raine hadn't picked up on his crack, Bob would probably have forgotten it. But as immensely sensitive to disapproval as he was—something else that came into focus that week—Bob couldn't forget that Raine had called his judgment into question, and couldn't resist baiting her.

"Record cold on the Prairies," he called upstairs, watching TV in his apartment shortly after the power came on.

"It's a polar vortex," Raine called back, going to stand at the head of the stairs. "Climate change—it's hitting the Arctic hard. The ice is melting, and the oceans are dark. They're absorbing heat. So it changes things, wind patterns, cold air forced south."

Her voice sounded scratchy. "Something like that," she finished inadequately, unused to talking so much at once.

"So they say," Bob called from downstairs, every word leaking scepticism.

"It's going to be a harsh winter," Mac said, taking Raine by the shoulders and leading her back to the kitchen. "And it ain't over yet."

Nothing was over. No fleet of Hydro trucks had rumbled into our neighbourhood like heavy-assed cavalry, raising our fallen power line. They'd restored electricity to the entire neighbourhood, presumably by repairing a substation, meaning that the line from the street to our house was still on the ground. Obviously, it was still securely connected, not hissing around our front yard like a cartoon snake. I figured Toronto Hydro would appear one day to put it back up, but in the meantime, we were probably safe.

Two hours after the lights came on, there was a knock at the door. Opening up, I found two young Hydro workers in their twenties shuffling their feet.

"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news," the first one said, a bear of a young man who looked remarkably like the actor Seth Rogan, only taller. "We're going to have to cut off your power. A line on the ground like that, it's a hazard."

I was stunned, listening blankly as he talked his way through what was obviously a script. They were going to have to cut the wire, after which we would need to hire a private certified electrician on our own dime to put our broken mast back up. Anything connected to our house was our responsibility, not Hydro's. Once the mast and line were back up, we had to get an inspector from the Electrical Safety Authority to certify the electrician's work. Only then would Hydro return and reconnect our house to the grid.

"How many weeks will that take?" I asked, too unfocused to be as belligerent as Seth obviously feared. "And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?"

I actually find that many young Canadian men in their twenties look remarkably like Seth Rogan, bearish and hopeful and superficially calm. Seth's buddy was his opposite, short, thin and bristly. Both were dressed in heavy-duty beige coveralls criss-crossed with reflective tape. Looking from one to the other, already thinking in film mode, I remembered reading that Warren Beatty would go down on his knees to studio executives begging them to make his movies. The executives were so embarrassed, they caved.

I've never gone down on my knees to anyone in my life, but I wasn't going to let Hydro cut off our power. Tall Seth and short Bristly could have been my sons, and anyone's sons would have nearly died from embarrassment at the sight of their mother on her knees. Could I do it? Could I really?

"You look cold," I said, deciding to try a different angle. "Would you like some hot eggnog? We've got a gas stove, so we've been able to make eggnog even when it got really cold, like down to eight degrees this morning, which was a killer. Let me get you some..."

"Thanks, ma'am, but we really can't..."

Switching from Scatty Mother to Mother-in-Charge: "But maybe you can leave the service on, at least overnight. I'll try to find an electrician first thing tomorrow."

Bristly looked even more bristly. Tall Seth hesitated. My son is tall. I'm tall. Maybe Seth's mother was tall, too.

"I'd appreciate it," I said.

I'd appreciate it if you cleaned your room, did your homework, got home before 10 p.m. And you know as well as I do that you don't want to see me unappreciative.

The two retreated to consult, after which they dogged indecisively to our neighbour's house, where the line was still lying on the ground, as well. I heard tags of conversation, my neighbour's voice slightly raised and entirely persistent. "...going to cut my line when there are still 100,000 people in the city without..."

More Hydro consultations, after which Bristly secured our yards unhappily with yellow caution tape. Seth—such a nice young man—appeared at the door with a piece of paper that he didn't fill out, telling me to start calling electricians. Hydro would be back tomorrow.

Long story short. New Hydro people knocked at both the neighbour's door and ours on Christmas day. The man at our door didn't actually like eggnog, thanks. Wide-spaced eyes, a clamped expression, curly dark hair. Mark Ruffalo playing a bad guy? He insisted he was going to cut our power. At least, someone had to cut it. Hadn't the other guys left a piece of paper? Yes, I said, giving him the steely stare, and failing to mention that the paper was blank.

Meanwhile, I could hear a Hydro woman at my neighbour's door telling him that the downed lines weren't hazardous, and she'd leave things alone at his house and ours while we hired an electrician certified by the Electric Safety Authority. Such a lovely woman, short and pleasantly wide, like most of us a cross between almost any actress and Melissa McCarthy.

Stepping past the non-eggnog-drinker, I heard Melissa say that her colleagues had made raising the lines sound more complicated than it was. The certified electrician we hired would have to temporarily cut our power to fix the power mast, probably for a couple of hours. But after raising the wires, he could reconnect us to the grid himself, and we would stay connected until an inspector from the ESA okayed his work. Then everything would be fine.

We were already trying to find an electrician? Good, she said. Because there was a chance someone else from Hydro would cut off our power over the weekend if an electrician hadn't got the wires up before then.

Trailing that final threat, Melissa collected her colleague and left.

"I'm going to go after them with a shotgun if they try to cut us off," our neighbour said. "I mean, if I had a shotgun, I would."

Spoken like a true Canadian vigilante.

"Or we could tweet it," he said.

The next day, our neighbour found a certified electrician who looked at the damage on both our houses and emailed me a quote: $1,600 plus tax. Giving the okay, I cursed the fact that we had to take a financial hit after a tree owned by the city dropped some branches on a line that's owned by Toronto Hydro. A couple of overbooked electricians had already warned me that repair prices were through the roof, not only because of demand, but because some unscrupulous firms were buying up any electrical parts they could find to create an artificial shortage, raising prices sky-high. Ice storm profiteers, the electricians said. Happy New Year.

In fact, the crisis ended well before 2014 crept in on very cold feet. The electrician we hired spent the Friday after Christmas repairing the service at both our house and our neighbour's, working a long day on his own since his apprentice was on vacation in Cuba. He was a nice guy, and his work was soon invisibly approved by the Electrical Safety Authority in an emailed certificate that informed us:

WE HEREBY CERTIFY THAT AN ELECTRICAL INSPECTION AT THE AFOREMENTIONED ADDRESS WAS CONDUCTED OR IS DEEMED CONDUCTED ON THE INSTALLATION DESCRIBED HEREIN

After receiving the certificate, I deemed the emergency to be over. Yet I couldn't help noticing that since the very helpful electrician had charged our neighbour $1,400 plus tax on top of the $1,600 plus we paid, he'd earned $3,000 for twelve hours work, less the cost of a few parts. Also that his apprentice was on vacation in Cuba.

"Maybe you could go back to school to be an electrician," I told Raine, who smiled vaguely, as she usually does at any mention of gainful employment.

"Seriously," I said. "Let's take one lesson from this whole bad experience."

"You're earnest, Mother," she said, then thought for a while. "The only lesson is that climate change has arrived, and we probably deserve it for ruining the environment. Rough justice."

"Minus forty next week with wind chill," Bob said, putting his head in the kitchen. "Record cold."

"Oh, shut up," Raine said, shocking even herself. She passed a hand down her face. "I'm sorry," she said.

But Bob had already gone.
Change Jars

Stress isn't good for people with multiple sclerosis. Temperature extremes are hard, too. Poor Mac, he never complains, but the cold, stressful winter was pounding him. This morning, he got up from the breakfast table and tottered with vertigo. A prizefighter, his knees buckling. It was hard to watch since you couldn't do anything to help.

"Bad," he said, holding onto a chair. "Maybe I'll go lie down for a while."

Raine got up to stand behind him, although he doesn't like to take peoples' arms and held onto edges and corners to make his way toward the stairs. Another chair, the butcher block, the hutch, the kitchen doorframe: these don't move unpredictably the way that people do. The dining room table, the back of a chair, another chair, inching his way along the sideboard to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, when he could start the long slog of getting to the top floor.

We seemed to have made it into a new year. Post-ice storm, I'd been hoping that nothing much will happen for a while, although given our experiment in living, I knew it probably would. Widesized. I often think about that word, a new term coined to define something everyone used to accept as given, multi-generational living. Life. My generation was probably a historic exception, most of us having left home as soon as we could, easily able to find jobs and support ourselves.

Now, stepping into the new year, I couldn't help contemplating ramifications in the new-old, including the fact that in days past, most people probably knew their children's partners far better when they arrived in the family than they do now. As I listened to Mac's slow thump, thump upstairs, I realized that after five months of living together, I didn't really know him very well, and wondered what that was going to mean in the days and months and years ahead.

Mac and Raine had been together for a while before she brought him over, so there was never any I-just-met-a-guy, and I have no idea how they met. Nor will it come up if I don't ask, since Raine isn't one for girly talk, no more than I am. Mac isn't all that chatty either, although he told us not before Christmas that his mother, a former autoworker who was unemployed for a long time down in Windsor, has finally got a job as a greeter at Walmart. Being a university-educated graphic designer makes him an outlier in his family. He's an only child, but he seems to be close to a cousin his age who's serving in the armed forces, and has been deployed twice to Afghanistan.

Mac was still trying to reboot his virtual design business, still located upstairs, and getting an increasing number of new contracts for web design jobs that he'd been ploughing through lately despite the vertigo. Cheques have been arriving in the mail, and I think he and Raine must be using his fees as their spending money, since Raine hasn't asked for anything more than food and shelter. I'm not sure what we'd say if she did, when she could probably find a temporary job now that her morning sickness has passed, although it's growing clearer every day that she has no intention of doing so.

Money—support—was going to be a tricky issue as we moved ahead. Raine shopped for most of the food, although I bought the meat and fish Bob grilled. At first, when Mac was still having eye problems, I gave her more than I figured she needed so she could pick up whatever they lacked.

She never did. The money I gave her tallied up with the food receipts that came back, and every nickel of the small change went into a Mason jar on the kitchen hutch. Raine has always been meticulously honest and we quickly learned that Mac is the same, although at times, both can strike me as unworldly.

Unworldly, but not gullible. There was a week back in November when I noticed that the Mason jar was gone from the hutch. I didn't think anything of it until I was coming downstairs one day and overheard Raine and Mac talking to my brother in the kitchen.

"You can put the jar back," Bob was saying.

"You sure?" Raine asked.

Bob must have given one of his nods, chin tucked into his neck.

"You're sure?" she repeated.

He must have nodded again.

"Lead us not into temptation," Mac said.

"That would be your job," Bob said. "Mine is not to take you up on it. And I figure that maybe I won't anymore."

I crept back upstairs, deciding to leave it to them. This was before Raine and Bob had started jostling over climate change, and I thought she could handle him better than I could. A day or so later, when I found Raine alone in the kitchen cooking tofu, I looked at the Mason jar and asked, "Anything you want to tell me?"

Raine gave me a sideways glance and pursed her lips.

"Mac's feeling pretty good today," she said. "Maybe he's going to get better."

"The vertigo's awful, but it's just another episode. It'll go away soon."

"If only he'd eat properly," she said, which is another ongoing issue.

Doctor Google has told me in his scatter-brained fashion that the subject of MS and diets is complex and fraught. Type in "MS + diet" and you get a whole range of conflicting non-medical prescriptions. There's the vegan diet Raine advocates, the ultra-low-fat Swank diet that doesn't allow red meat, the Paleo diet which calls for acres of it, the modified Wahls Paleo diet from a doctor who has MS, the Best Bet Diet with its 20 daily supplements... Online, some people claim they got better on each of them.

Consider the fact that if you're a healthy person packing on the pounds, the cause is often pretty simple: Too many calories + too little exercise = weight gain. In my experience, add portion control to a Paleo or vegetarian or Mediterranean diet, and you'll almost certainly lose weight, especially if you exercise. Paying meticulous attention to what you eat is usually the key, along with perseverance. All three of today's most popular diets get you to cut out processed foods and refined sugar, which we all know are the bad guys, no matter how much we love our chocolate truffles, and hazelnut gelato, our dulce de leche...

But no one is sure what causes multiple sclerosis. It's an auto-immune disease where your own immune system starts attacking your brain and spinal cord. Scientists figure there's probably some trigger, possibly environmental or viral, that sets off the disease in people with an underlying genetic susceptibility. Since it's far more common in northern Europe and North America, another factor could be lower levels of sunlight and Vitamin D in our blood, which we process from sunlight. But they don't really know, at least not yet. In other words: ? = MS.

That means you can't design a diet to fight the underlying cause of the disease. You can only experiment and observe what seems to help. Yet by setting off down that road, you're heading into the realm of the placebo effect, self-reporting and most misleading of all, hope. If you think it's going to help, maybe it will.

There's also the fact that MS is an unpredictable disease, and you can suddenly stabilize or go into remission for no known reason. Start a diet just as you were about to get a little better, and you're going to attribute your improvement to the diet, not to coincidence. That's pretty benign, but if you slack off the diet and suffer a coincidental relapse, you're liable to beat yourself up about it, like a cancer sufferer who's told it's her fault she got sick for being repressed, too stressed, eating fatty foods, whatever. That's happened to more than one friend of mine and it makes me furious.

Ever since Raine and Mac came to live here, I've been paying repeated visits to Doctor Google's MS sites. It's better than spending an hour checking social media, although of course I do that, too. The joys of having a home office.

In advocating a vegan diet for Mac, lots of people believe that Raine is right. In fact, the ultra-low-fat Swank MS diet veers toward vegan in its emphasis on fruits and vegetables, although it also calls for frequent meals of oily fish, some lean chicken and turkey, limited non-fat milk and dairy products, and up to three eggs a week. Even the Paleo diets advocates meals of mostly vegetables and fruits, although if I'm reading it right, it adds lean, ethically-raised meat and cuts out beans and pulses, along with some starchy vegetables and the relatives of nightshade.

By the time you add the meat and fish Bob grills to Raine's vegan meals, I figure we're eating a healthy Paleo-vegan diet. Lots of greens, pulses, fruit and nuts, frequent salmon, some grilled meat—and of course my mother's butter tarts, which I baked not infrequently over the holidays once the power came back on. But of course your mother's butter tarts never count.

Googling "vegan + pregnant" has convinced me that Raine and her baby will be fine, although I'm not sure I want any more hemp waffles for breakfast, dear. And I can't see how a small steak once every couple of weeks is going to hurt Mac, although Dr. Swank would disagree.

Yet diet has become the focal point of tension in our house, just as it's the source of so much tension and self-reproach in too many women I know, a way to both address and avoid the deeper issues that are disappointing us, both in ourselves and in each other.

First World problems, of course. Raine, watching Mac lift every forkful of Bob's bacon to his lips. The expression on Bob's face when he sees that Raine is once again cooking tempeh.

Raine looks over my shoulder as I type. "MS is a First World problem, Mother. That doesn't mean it bites any less."

"That's true. I'm sorry."

Over her shoulder as she leaves: "I hate that you called me Raine."

Last night's temperature: minus twenty-two. Last night's menu: scalloped sweet potatoes, green beans with almonds, black bean salad and grilled trout, with enough sweet potatoes and bean salad left over for a couple of lunches or more sides tonight.

"The salad has plenty of protein," Raine said.

Mac took another spoonful, smiling amiably, then served himself a piece of trout.

"Build yourself up," Bob said.

"Food can also build up disease," Raine said. "It can feed the wrong things."

I wasn't sure about my daughter's nutritional theories, but restrained myself and held up a forkful of sweet potatoes.

"These are really good."

"I would say greasy," Bob said.

"That's not grease. That's extra virgin olive oil."

"Can I propose a ban on extra virgin jokes?" I said quickly.

"That's what you want, isn't it?" Bob asked. "Nobody saying anything. Weird from a so-called writer."

I took a pained breath. So-called writer. Still no word from the next publisher about my manuscript.

"There's a paragraph in an Alice Munro story I've been thinking about," I said, after a moment. "So I looked it up and memorized it. Anti-Alzheimer's exercise, aside from anything else."

It had taken me awhile to find the story, which I finally remembered to be Royal Beatings in Who Do You Think You Are? from 1978. I have all of Alice Munro's books, in hardback starting with Open Secrets, but this one was old with brittle brown paper pages smelling of dust and mites.

What I'd remembered was the way Alice Munro wrote about people living at too-close quarters, usually poor small-town families, and the way they never addressed the others' private selves directly. Meaning, I think, the way that people used to be allowed private selves, however grudgingly. In Royal Beatings, the girl, Rose, would listen to her father as he worked in his upholstery shed behind the house.

As she did, Rose would hear not just coughing from the shed, she'd hear her father muttering, although she couldn't make out any words. He would mutter at different speeds, depending on what type of work he was doing. Sometimes words would break out, which would he could try to cover up by coughing or swallowing, or what Munro called "an alert, unusual silence."

"That's very beautiful," Raine said.

I went on: "'Macaroni, pepperoni, Botticelli, beans—'"

Other things her father said. Rose would repeat his words but couldn't ask him what he meant. "The person who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space. It would be the worst sort of taste to acknowledge the person who was not supposed to be there; it would not be forgiven."

Looking around the table, I thought we'd stopped being any good at allowing others their privacy. People talk a lot about individuals not valuing their own privacy, putting every old fact about their life online. That's a personal choice. But it's my impression we also call people out more in our blogs and tweets and posts, making note of their choices and what we allege or imply are their mistakes. We don't let them get away with things. People never used to get away with things either, but I don't think they were called out as directly. Fashion choices and dietary choices used to be noticed and probably gossiped about but not thrown in people's faces.

Of course they were noticed. The quote from Munro actually ends: "It would be the worst sort of taste to acknowledge the person who was not supposed to be there; it would not be forgiven. Just the same, she loitered and listened."

"So if Mac wants some fish, you let him eat fish," Bob said.

"I wasn't going to say that," I said.

"It would be more honest if you did, Mother," Raine told me. "Maybe people value honesty now over gossiping behind your back. Haven't I said that before?"

"It's still Mac's beeswax," Bob said.

"And don't you think his health is my business when we're having a child?" Raine asked, rounding on him.

"Hello? I'm here," Mac said, holding up his hands.

In the silence, Mac turned not to Raine, but to me. "I looked up the Swank diet you wrote about," he said. "And this is it, on my plate. Fish and non-saturated fats and vegetables. A study he did over thirty-four years showed the MS didn't progress when they stuck religiously to his diet."

Raine went wide-eyed.

"I mean, thanks, but you don't need to cook meat for me anymore," he told Bob. "Beef or pork. Maybe you should try the Swank yourself. They say it's good for your heart."

"Not you too, Buster," Bob said.

"And for the environment," Raine said, glowing from Mac's concession. "CO2 emissions are one thing. But another huge issue is methane. And a lot of it comes from cows."

Bob lifted a cheek and farted noisily.

Nobody knew what to do, so after a moment's contemplation, we gave up and ate.

When I was thinking about Alice Munro's observation, I'd actually remembered the paragraph that came next, about the olden-days family bathroom being at close quarters, often to the kitchen. I've got the dusty paperback beside me now, the paragraph about how tearing off a piece of toilet paper or other more intimate movements on the toilet seat could be heard by everyone in the kitchen. But people were prudish back then, so everyone pretended they didn't hear anything, and that the noises made inside the bathroom were unconnected to whoever walked out.

Re-reading that, I thought again about the chip of ice in a writer's heart. It must have been a fearsome thing to have a Rose-like Alice listening, listening, listening in your house. Because everything she says strikes me as precisely right. I remember people like that from my childhood, prudish relatives from my grandparents' generation and sometimes people the same age as my parents. And isn't it astonishing, how rapidly and invisibly we've changed?

Change jars. Change jarring us all. Okay, it's a bad pun. But the thing about living with MS, and living with someone with MS, is the constant change. Added to the social changes we're all facing lately, it can make you feel you're rattling around in widening circles like a jar about to fall.

Once thing I do know about Mac is that he's been diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, RRMS. It means he has relapses (or attacks or episodes) of symptoms that come on unpredictably and then go away, either completely or in part.

He's lucky he doesn't have primary progressive MS, a more serious form where you don't have attacks but experience a steady decline toward the wheelchair, although some people with primary progressive can have long periods of stability. The public tends to think this is what MS is like, but only a minority of people are diagnosed with primary progressive. Nor has Mac had MS long enough to move on to secondary progressive, which a bigger percentage of people eventually do. That's where you first experience the relapsing-remitting form, but as you get older, you stop having discrete attacks and slowly get worse.

Celebrity Jack Osbourne was diagnosed with RRMS two years ago at twenty-six, the same age as Mac when he was diagnosed last fall. Since then, Osbourne sometimes blogs about the exercise and diet choices he's made. I don't know how he got onto yoga and organic food, but Mac's neurologist didn't recommend any changes in his diet or lifestyle. As Mac has started coming to grips with the disease, he's been making changes on his own, adding karate classes when he got his vision back, then mindfulness meditation and now his ultra-low-fat diet.

Being diagnosed with RRMS after you experience an episode of optic neuritis turns out to be pretty common. That's how Jack Osbourne learned too, as did a couple of friends of mine. Mac's neurologist told him it would go away within two or three months, and it did, leaving only a tiny smudge in the corner of his left eye's field of vision. The only other MS-related problem he's had is this recent vertigo, which the doctor said shouldn't last long, either.

From my friends, I know about other possible MS symptoms. One has been lucky. Her optic neuritis flared twenty-five years ago on the highway between Ottawa and Montreal as a sudden psychedelic zizzing of colours. The passing winter trees ripped neon in a natural LSD trip, a kaleidoscopic whirl that she found exquisitely terrifying. She tried to focus on the licence plate up ahead, and it glowed.

After her optic neuritis went away, she didn't have any more episodes for years. The neurologist said she had benign MS and told her to go away. Only in the past couple of years has she experienced another common symptom, a weird numbness in a band around her ribcage that she says feels like dental freezing that won't let up. To look at her, you'd never know she has a chronic disease.

I don't talk about MS much with my friends, but pick up little facts they drop like breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel. Another says that her neurologist told her last summer that the disease often seems to stabilize after about twelve years, and since she was diagnosed twelve years ago, both the data and his gut tell him that she's probably not going to have any more attacks. He said that she's probably in the habit of paying close enough attention to her body that she'll notice a slight continual loss of function, but that might have more to do with aging than it will with the disease.

My friend accepts this, and is left with three major coping points. Her balance is a little off and she notices a weakness in her left leg. I don't see it, but she says I would if we went cross-country skiing and I watched her glide inexorably off the trail. She snowshoes now instead.

My friend—let's call her Lynn—also has periods of the famous MS-related exhaustion that she says is worse than the usual exhaustion you get from exercising too long or working too hard or stressing yourself out.

"It's like moving through Jell-o," she says.

The third symptom is scariest. Lynn's throat muscles sometimes stop working when she's eating, a paralysis in her esophagus that can be ghastly. She says she's learned to be calm and drink water to wash the food down, but if she could trade away a symptom, that would be it.

The other person I know with MS has a tougher time, with bad spasticity in his legs that means he can only walk with a walker, although he got a scooter last summer that has made his life far easier. He's lucky in one way. Neurologists use MRIs to track lesions caused when the immune system attacks the neural network in the brain and spinal cord. His MRIs show that he has virtually no lesions in his brain. Instead they're clustered in his spinal cord, which has attacked his ability to walk but left him with no cognitive damage.

That's what the MS people I know fear the most, the lost of cognitive function that can come from lesions in the brain. They get frightened every time they come into a room and stand there blankly, unable to remember why they came in. But everyone does that. I do it sometimes, and tell my friends a joke my mother liked when she got old. Forgetting where you put your keys is perfectly normal. The problem is when you can't remember what keys are for.

So where does this leave Mac? What's the prognosis?

Fact: there isn't any prognosis in MS. The uncertainty is killing, although that's also what makes MS folks like the rest of us, never knowing what's going to happen when. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Good night.

Of course, one of my friends with MS says, "I've already been hit by a bus." Truth. Some of us have only been hit by metaphorical cars or scooters. But there are always buses out there with our names on them circling the ring roads, big old red double-decker buses that can suddenly circle in and—BAM! Maybe the real difference between healthy people and folks with a chronic disease is that they can always hear the engines rumbling, although they still have no clue when to expect the next hit.

I think the uncertainty is biting Mac, confused by the dizziness of his vertigo and the spin of the latest polar vortex. He said once he feels worse in the cold, making his point one time and not mentioning it again. As I say, I'm not sure I really know this man living in our house with my daughter, but I think he gets quieter when he gets depressed.

Yet being widesized brings variety into life, if nothing else. Bob is the reverse, turning garrulous when he's irritated, and believe me, he's been irritated. Bob is having a hard time, still unable to work on his birdhouses out in the frigid garage. Turns out he doesn't like making dollhouses, which he thought would sell in winter. He likes making birdhouses. But he can't make anything when the space heater kecks out, struggling with minus sixteen. Without much renovation going on out there, he can't do any dumpster diving for construction debris either, and an idea he had about making miniature birdhouses as bookends down in the basement hasn't panned out.

"I wanted to charge what my labour took," he said last night at dinner. "But she said she can't charge that. I've got to work on my economics, she says."

Meaning the storekeeper who's been taking his work.

"You want to know about economics? At what she was going to charge, I wouldn't earn two bucks an hour."

The poor woman probably isn't having a great time either, not with the cold winter cutting down street traffic. And since she was part of the pre-Christmas blackout, she had to close her store for three days at the busiest time of the year for the type of whimsy she sells. Bob's gingerbread birdhouses. Antique factory fittings repurposed into lamps. Oiled-up wooden tool boxes repurposed to hold plants or magazines.

"Global warming," Bob says. "What a joke. It's going back down to minus thirty-fivewind chill. And I don't have anything to do."

"Maybe you can sell your bookends on Etsy," Raine said.

"If you want to talk about climate change," Bob said, "you know what's causing climate change? All those miles of Internet servers. You know how hot they get? And how much air conditioning those so-called server farms need? Isn't that what they call them?"

I was astonished that he knew.

"Talk about climate change," Bob went on. "Your Etsy is causing climate change. Being online."

"So now it exists," Raine said.

"If it exists."

"You can also go to maker fairs," she said. "You're on the cutting edge, being a maker."

I was pleased at Raine for not rising to the bait.

"Next summer," she went on, "when the baby's here, I'm going to sell jams and jellies at the fairs, and maybe at farmers' markets. We're all small businesspeople now."

"Pseudonym for being unemployed," Bob said.

"Synonym," I said absentmindedly. It was the first time I'd heard Raine talk about her plans after the baby. It didn't sound as if they'd be moving out anytime soon.

"I like pseudonym," Mac said. "People use it like that. Hi, I'm Self-Employed."

"I'm sick too, you know," Bob said.

"Mac's right," I told him. "The kind of Paleo-vegan diet we're eating is good for your heart."

"Alcoholism," Bob said.

We were all silent for a moment.

"You need to work when you're sick," Mac said. "It's a distraction."

"Distraction from what?" Bob asked aggressively.

"I don't know," Mac said. "From being alive?"

This was around the time that I found myself haunted by the news story of a man in L'Isle-Verte, Quebec, the one who got a call from his eighty-eight-year-old mother saying that her nursing home was on fire and she couldn't get out. He got a ladder and warm clothes and sped over, arriving before the emergency crews.

She was on her third-floor balcony and his ladder only reached the second. The man climbed up the ladder as far as he could and then clambered a floor further up to his mother's balcony. There he dressed her in a coat and scarf and mittens and shouted for someone to get a longer ladder. But no one came and as the fire burned closer, they lay on the floor, struggling to breathe.

"I had to decide if I was going to die with her or go back down myself," he told the CBC. "I had to make a decision. It was not easy."

The man climbed back down and searched frantically for another ladder. When he finally got one and climbed back up, he found his mother still lying on the patio and knew she was dead.

Thirty-two people were confirmed killed or missing at the nursing home, some of the bodies unlikely ever to be found.

Talk about putting your own problems into perspective. I set out to write about daily life, and what's drama for us—illness, people sniping at each other, lifting a cheek to fart—doesn't really amount to much. Raine was happily pregnant, Bob showing no signs of his heart attack. Mac's vertigo wasn't any fun, but he said it was bearable and the doctors told him it wouldn't last. People with MS tend to get no more than one or two attacks a year, so once this went away soon and that would be it for a while. Count your blessings, I told myself.

And I did. But what doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the bigger picture was still our life, our only precious lives, and yesterday, as I absentmindedly watched Bob walk out to the garage, something else started.

It was late afternoon, and I was looking down on the backyard from my second-floor study. I assumed Bob was getting something he needed for his improvised workshop downstairs and was surprised to hear the car start up. During warmer weather, when he'd been building his birdhouses in the garage, Bob moved the car into the laneway and parked it parallel to the garage. But it was minus thirteen, minus twenty-six with wind chill, and I didn't see how he could work out there.

Bob was going to take the car.

I ran downstairs as soon as it hit me, but when I got outside, the automatic door was closing and Bob was gone.

Count your blessings? Bob didn't have a valid driver's licence and wasn't covered by our insurance. What if he had an accident? Presumably if I reported the car as being stolen, we'd be covered. But then Bob would be charged with auto theft, or theft over whatever thousands of dollars, and he'd go to prison. I didn't know what to do and phoned my husband, only remembering when I got his voicemail that he was in meetings all day. Bob didn't answer his cellphone, either.

Below the fold in the newspaper on the first day after the L'Isle-Verte fire was the story of Justin Bieber's arrest in Miami for driving without a valid licence, driving under the influence and resisting arrest. He was allegedly drag racing, clocked at sixty miles per hour in a thirty miles per hour zone. Drag racing? That counted as Sunday driving on Highway 401. Comedy below the fold and L'Isle-Verte tragedy above. It was a crazy old world out there, sure thing.

Now, driving without a valid licence didn't seem so funny. Driving under the influence was never funny at all. I knew someone who'd been killed by a drunk driver. Sitting at the kitchen table, I couldn't decide what to do. A rattle at the front door made me leap to my feet, but it was Raine and Mac coming in from shopping, putting down their bags, throwing off their coats.

"Bob borrowed the car," I said.

Raine looked puzzled. "But his license expired."

"Well, he did."

"But he can't."

"I thought that was weird the other day when he said he was an alcoholic, like out of the blue," Mac said, unpacking the veggies.

"I really doubt he took the car to an AA meeting," I said.

"He meant he needed a drink."

I realized Mac was right, and that the man my daughter had brought into our lives was pretty shrewd.

"Drinking and driving?" Raine asked. Her voice started to get shrill.

"Where's his old local?" Mac asked.

"I was thinking about calling Lauren," I said. "She might have an idea where he goes. If I can get up the nerve."

"What if we need the car?" Raine asked even more shrilly. "What if Mac has to go to the hospital?"

Mac gave her a strange look. Raine was practically vibrating.

"It isn't fair," she said. "He's being really unfair."

Mac took Raine by the shoulders and led her away. I heard him say just above a whisper, "What are you obsessing about now?"

Lauren was drinking again when I got her, obviously not at work. I wondered if she'd taken the day off, if she'd lost her chair in the salon, if business was slow and she'd gone home early, although I already knew that I would never find out.

"You've got some nerve, calling me," she said.

I felt the red rising to my cheeks. So Lauren had read online what I'd written about the way she kicked Bob out, and my suspicions she'd abused him.

"Lauren, Bob took the car..."

"Good."

"And his licence has expired, so it's not good, okay? Not for him, if he gets caught. Arrested. Whatever."

"You're busted, bitch," she said. "Putting up that crap on your website. 'I'm going to call her by her real name and fuck her.'"

"First name," I said, wanting to keep her calm enough to learn about Bob.

"Fuck you back," she answered. Or maybe, Fuck you, twat. Her diction was a little slurred.

"I need to know the name of Bob's local, Lauren. To keep him out of trouble, okay? We've just got a human thing going on here, and maybe you can help."

She swore at me again. I didn't think Lauren could be enjoying this any more than I was, but she didn't hang up.

It occurred to me that Bob must have mentioned my website. They must have been in touch. He said they hadn't been, but they must be.

"Is he there? Can I speak to him, please?"

Lauren must have held her phone away to yell, "Hey, is your name Bob?"

I heard male laughter but it wasn't Bob's. Maybe someone who knew him. Knew about him. Lauren's side of the story, anyhow.

"Well if you hear from him..."

She hung up.

The first time I read about the nursing home fire in L'Isle-Verte, an onlooker was quoted by a newspaper reporter about the woman on the third floor. He said he saw a man searching frantically for a ladder to reach his mother on her balcony, but he couldn't find one in time and had to watch her burn.

Watch her burn, that was the quote, the shimmer of martyrdom behind it.

Reading the son's story later on the CBC website, I found the power came from his unembellished tale of what happened before the onlooker had seen him, when he first grappled his way up to his mother's balcony without a ladder tall enough for her to climb down on.

"I had to decide if I was going to die with her or go back down myself," he said. "I had to make a decision. It was not easy."

Both versions of the story haunt me.

Watching your mother burn.

It was not easy.

Of course, the one about burning might not be precisely true, since the son didn't mention it.

Either that or he couldn't bear to mention it, but it had happened.

As a human being, your heart aches. As a writer with that chip of ice in your heart, you think about the way we tell stories. What's more effective: mythic, Dickensian exaggeration or simple declarative sentences giving a plangent statement of fact?

I had a creative writing student once whose style was very simple at first, and I liked it. I thought there was a lot left unsaid that resonated through the spaces between her words. But she decided that wasn't going to get her published and began embellishing her prose. The stories sprouted adverbs and adjectives like a teenage boy sprouting whiskers, until her prose became the stylistic equivalent of a big ole granddaddy beard. It wasn't to my taste, but she published a couple of romance books and she was happy, and good for her.

Sitting at the kitchen table, wondering what to do about Bob and the car, I needed to tell myself a story about what was likely to happen, and it was hard not to construct the granddaddy version.

Oh my God! He's going to get drunk and drag race just like Justin Bieber except in the middle of the afternoon, killing a young mother and her tiny helpless baby in his stroller as they cross the intersection in a marked crosswalk—killing a pregnant mother and her identical twins in the middle of a school crosswalk—and I would be responsible, both morally in a way that would turn me into an emotional ruin for the rest of my life and financially in terms of a multi-million dollar lawsuit—since he hadn't actually killed the pregnant young mother, he'd left her a tragic quadriplegic unable to enjoy her precious triplets' childhood, and we'd lose the house and end up bankrupt and homeless, battling it out with a consortium of feral drug addicts for possession of the corner near the Eaton Centre where Bob used to panhandle.

I could also tell it simply, noting that Bob is a good driver, that he's never had an accident or been arrested for drunk driving, and that he liked to take cabs. Mac was probably all right. He'd probably gone to a pub somewhere near his old apartment in Scarborough and left the car parked outside. There was a chance he'd try to drive home later when he was drunk, but it was far more likely that he'd pay for a cab to a buddy's place, or that someone would take away his keys, or that he'd forget about the car and leave it there for however many days the bender lasted, meaning the worst thing likely to happen was the car getting towed and impounded.

Obviously you tend to calibrate your response to a situation based on what you believe is the most likely outcome. Based on the likeliest story, in other words. On some kind of fiction you tell yourself. That's what I do, anyhow.

Sitting there, I decided we'd better find the car before it got towed. We could deal with Bob when he got home.

There's another way to handle drama, of course: Raine's. Define what's right and wrong and act accordingly.

"Raine is really mad that Bob stole the car," Mac said, coming back into the kitchen. "She's had about enough of him lately."

"Borrowed?" I asked.

"I think he kind of stole it. The question is whether you call the cops."

"Myself, I think it's family business," I said. "But I appreciate her point. Even though she tends to talk about police brutality when she goes to demonstrations."

"The point being that cops shouldn't beat on people, just like Bob shouldn't steal the car. She's a person that holds to her principles."

I used to be more like that myself, seeing things in terms of good and bad. Opposites. A dichotomy rather than two sides of the same coin. It was a good way to be, but draining.

"This whole thing is hard on her, me being sick," Mac said. "It isn't what she signed on for. And she's so beautiful."

Mac's voice cracked, and I put my hand on his, this young man I didn't really know. He held it for a while, then let go.

"Remember what she was saying about Bob being unfair?" Mac asked. "She's pretty much tied up in fairness and justice. When being sick is more or less cosmically unfair. You don't deserve it."

He looked at me earnestly.

"I believe that God gives you strength for the trials he puts upon you. He tests you, but he gives you access to his love and glory in order to combat despair. And if you don't believe, the way Raine can't believe, then yeah, life can look pretty unfair."

"I'm afraid I don't believe in a god who tests people," I told him. "Whether making them sick, or making them lose their mother—making all of L'Isle-Verte lose their parents, for that matter. Not to mention 10,000 people killed in South Sudan over the past six weeks, and what's happening in Syria..."

I realized I was talking with my hands and stopped.

"I don't know," I said. "I know that being sick is a trial, and I'm so sorry. But maybe it's a trial in the old-fashioned sense, a tribulation. I really don't think it's a test or a judgment. Life isn't fair, and I wonder if you have to accept that and still keep trying to make it better. Knowing, of course, that you'll probably fail."

"That's pretty harsh."

"But realistic?"

"You don't want to call the cops," Mac pointed out. "Which might be realistic."

"We can borrow a friend's car and go out to Scarborough this evening. I don't want Bob getting in the car when he's drunk, obviously, but I don't think he will. I'm frankly more concerned about the fact we can't afford a new car right now. I don't even want to pay for towing."

My social media experiment hadn't exactly been filling the coffers, although I recently took a flier on some quote, monetization efforts. I'd been mulling over the blog of the self-publishing expert who advised digitizing a short story and offering it free on Amazon in order to promote your e-books. If people liked the story, she said they'd pay to download your books.

I chose my story The Hockey Stalker about a woman being stalked by a weird man with a fetish for female hockey players. It was based on a true story, actually. I first published it a few years ago and it had been selected a couple of times for anthologies, so people seem to liked it.

After a designer did a lovely cover, I put it up on Amazon dot everywhere, signing up for a promotion that allows readers to download e-something for free during a set five-day span. The expert advised posting permanent freebies so you could build an audience, but Amazon makes that hard to do, and I needed to do more research. Meanwhile, I chose five days not long before Christmas for the promotion. Of course, you can't just throw a story out there, so I also spent several hours promoting it on a dozen sites that advertise free e-books to a hard core of e-readers.

Despite my obsessive nature, I didn't lurk online waiting for downloads. Well, actually, the promotion intersected with the ice storm, when I wasn't using the internet much. Yet when I finally checked in, I was astonished to find that hundreds of people in seven countries had downloaded the story, including one lonely reader in Italy and another in India, both probably Canadian expats. It was enough to rocket me up the Amazon rankings to number 5,186, at least by one reckoning and for a couple of days.

In the weeks since, precisely two people have bought the story, which is now available for ninety-nine cents, and not a single e-book has sold. Since I get a royalty of thirty-five per cent for each ninety-nine-cent sale, I will be seventy cents richer when the pay-out hits my bank account. Not enough for a car. Not enough for a tow. Not enough for a coffee. Fortunately, I don't drink coffee.

"I'm really sorry," Mac said, after I'd told him.

"It's okay, I find it fascinating," I said. "Social media. Life. Even Bob's behaviour."

"Maybe you and I, we're not as disappointed in Bob as Raine feels. She has a kind of emotional investment in him from when she was a kid."

"How are you feeling?" I asked.

"I don't find MS fascinating," Mac said. "I get into things when they're more abstract."

Then he excused himself and went back to work.

That night, a friend and I drove around Scarborough looking for the car. Raine insisted on coming along, and we started by checking the shopping streets near the apartment Bob had shared with Lauren. When we didn't find it, we tried a neighbourhood further east where Bob had lived years before. He might have picked a local early on and stayed loyal.

When we passed a pub, Raine would jump out to look for Bob, even with the car nowhere in sight. It was a modern riff on an old family story: my grandmother often sent my mother into the bar of their small-town hotel to bring my convivial grandfather home. As we waited, I remembered my aunt telling me once that the other three children in the family usually turned to my mother when they wanted something out of their parents. She was both charming and shy, which made her very attractive, especially to men. We'd always said that Raine looked like my mother, but it only occurred to me now that she was something like my mother in other ways: attentive, shy, a mixture of contradictory parts. Confrontation cost her, but she sought it out.

No Bob. Never any car. When we passed Lauren's apartment for the third or fourth time, Raine decided to try to speak with her. There was a light in the window and figures were moving across it.

Quite a few figures, I realized, watching Raine ring the buzzer.

As she did, a man walked out the front door, doing a double-take when Lauren's voice came over the intercom, and blocking the door when Raine tried to go in. When I rolled down the window, I heard him complaining loudly.

"...all the racket coming outta her apartment lately. She can't do that."

"She's my aunt. I'll speak to her," Raine said, and slipped past.

"My kids keep calling people uncles and aunts," my friend said, as I rolled up the window. "They refuse to shed relatives after people break up, they're so totally into community. You think it's because of the whole online thing? Or did Facebook take off because kids were already inclined to want sharing?"

"We seem to be the ones to want Facebook these days. Kids are leaving it in droves."

"I used to like being alone. Now I feel insecure if I can't get enough bars on my phone. We need to be part of a big school of fish."

"A murder of crows."

"A shrewdness of apes."

"That's what they call them?"

"A charm of goldfinches. A sneak of weasels. A gaze of raccoons."

"What about giraffes?"

"A tower."

It wasn't long before Raine got back in the car. We waited as she buckled up.

"Lauren's really mad at you," she said.

"Did Bob tell her about my website?"

"She googled you. You're the only published author she knows. And in terms of getting her fifteen minutes of fame, this is how it happens."

"She said that?"

"'How it fucking happens.'"

"So she hasn't seen Bob."

Raine shook her head. "People my age, we don't care so much what someone puts up. It says more about them. I mean, as long as it doesn't hold you up to damage. But it's a deal to Lauren even if no one knows you're writing about her. Plus, a lot of her clients have decided to let their hair go white, or dye it at home, and she doesn't make that much on cuts even if they book. She's pretty broke and pretty stressed."

My friend pulled out into traffic.

"Don't writers feel responsible?" Raine asked.

My friend and I exchanged a glance. She's a writer, too.

"A gaze of writers," I said.

"A sneak of writers," she amended.

"I'm sorry?" Raine asked.

"I feel responsible," I said. "But I can't seem to help myself any more than Bob can. It's what happens as you age. You end up being more yourself."

"Is that an excuse or an apology?"

"Simple fact," my friend said, as we headed home.

It's been a few days now, and there's still no sign of either Bob or the car. His phone rings when you call but he never answers, and when I'm not furious, I'm starting to get worried. My husband thinks that since the city hasn't called, the car hasn't been towed. Bob has probably stashed it in a friend's driveway or carport while he's otherwise occupied. Yet it's still so cold, I picture him reeling out of the pub and falling into harm.

"When are you going to call the police?"

Raine has been getting more and more agitated, and walked around the kitchen this morning while eating her oatmeal, unable to sit down.

"Do people actually call the cops on their relatives?" I asked. "We hardly ever use the car."

"At some point he becomes like a missing person."

"The cops won't treat him like a missing person. They probably have a pretty thick file on Bob. They'll just treat him like an alcoholic out on a bender."

"That's vile."

"So police are good or bad? Maybe we should get that straight."

"What do you think?"

"That they're already overworked, and they can't do much about this one, anyhow."

"But stress is bad for MS..."

"I'm not stressed!" Mac snapped.

He took a long, deep breath.

"I think I'm getting a cold, that's all."

"Viruses are terrible for people with compromised immune systems," Raine said. "And I'm getting one, too. And I'm pregnant..."

"Sweetie, you've got to calm down," I said. "None of this does any good."

"It's too much," she said, rattling her bowl onto the counter. "It's too much, okay? It's just too much. Nothing goes right around here anymore. We're besieged by climate change. And Mac is sick, and I go and get goddamn pregnant..."

Even the clouds outside went still.

"I didn't say that."

"It's way too late to get an abortion even if we believed in it," Mac said.

"Your church doesn't believe in it. I was respecting your rights as the father."

The other morning, when I was up very early, I glanced out at the houses on the west side of the street. The air was so cold and the early sun so bright, they looked cut into the world behind them. That's how clearly I heard what Raine said.

"Our baby will be loved," Mac said.

As he went over to her, I slipped out of the room and went upstairs.

Sex and MS.

Doctor Google has told me something about that, too. As in problems associated with. So in a way, I was relieved to hear Raine and Mac making up that night on the floor directly above us. But only in a way. You don't want to overhear your daughter's sex life, the stifled moans, the unstifled moans. At least, I hope you don't. It's not just a mixture of funny and annoying, like sex heard through the walls of a cheap motel.

This was far more intimate, especially when they got louder. You have an investment in your daughter being happy, but you don't want to feel even the faintest erotic twinge when they're rattling their bed across the floor, hear your breath entering a single rib deeper. It's your daughter, for God's sake. Pull the pillow over your head.

Under my pillow, I tried not to be too hard on them. Raine and Mac were usually inaudible up there, whatever they were doing, and it must have been a strain. Not this time, and I wondered why. Were they telling us that everything was really okay? I'd had roommates years ago who had loud sex, and part of that was boasting. Sometimes they were settling scores, sometimes they were needling. None of it was ever simple.

I burrowed deeper under the pillow, remembering something from Charles Foran's biography of Mordecai Richler. Toward the end, he prints a furious letter Richler wrote about his mother having taken a lover when he was twelve. Officially, the man was only a boarder in their Montreal apartment. His mother didn't go into the man's room and nothing was going in on there, anyway.

But they had regular sex and Richler knew it, heard it, and this seem to have incensed him until the end of his life. You can overhear the bathroom explosions Munro writes about and it's embarrassing but also anthropological. Sex sounds are different, more or a challenge to what's going on in your own life, although they're usually played for comedy in film. The motel room, thin walls, Hey buddy, keep it down.

Fact: MS can cause impotence in men. A not-uncommon symptom, Doctor Google says, although it can be treated with the usual drugs advertised by all those smirking women on TV. Mac clearly didn't have that problem. Maybe that's why he didn't care if we heard: he needed to prove to as wide a world as possible that he was still a stud. As I lay there, I felt a little sad for him, on top of everything else. Boasts are often sad, once you grasp what's underneath.

Sad, but also exhausting. Hours seemed to pass, and I grew almost frantic with the need to sleep. Reaching down, I scrabbled around on the floor until I found one of my slippers. Raising it, getting ready to heave...

A snore from my husband brought me back to myself. I gritted my teeth and headed back under the covers.

The next morning, practically tripping on the circles under my eyes, I told Raine, "You might want to move your bed to other end of the room."

For a moment, my daughter looked blank. Then she gave me a quick glance and burst into laughter, unconstrained and utterly merry, a big happy belly laugh of the kind we haven't heard often enough lately around here.

"All right, Queen Victoria," she said, and ruffled my hair.

Sometimes things are all right around here, too.

Bob called this morning from Vancouver.

"Vancouver?" I asked stupidly.

"I always wanted to just get in a car and drive."

"Bob, it's our car."

"I was going to move it out of the garage, get some crap to build some crap," he said. "And I got behind the wheel and thought, Why not?"

"I gather that's a rhetorical question."

Bob chuckled, sounding very pleased with himself. "Don Valley Parkway to the 401 West. Hit some real weather on the way out."

"Bob, you have an expired license. You weren't insured to drive. Do you even realize what a disaster that could have been?"

"Well, it wasn't."

"And you don't think it was wrong? Not even faintly?"

"Now you sound like your daughter."

We couldn't let him move back in. This was too much. But we had to get the car home and shrieking wouldn't help.

"When do you propose bringing it back?"

"I don't."

Hello, police?

"I'll be staying out here. Eight degrees when you're, what, minus that much?"

"Bob..."

"Car's on its way. Friend of mine's kid, he graduated at Christmas and wants to visit some buddies back in Kingston. He'll drop it off in Toronto and pick up one of those ride-sharing things on to Kingston. You pay gas for someone who's already making the trip. People are getting creative. You ever heard of this Airbnb?"

I pushed back my hair. "So you're saying you gave the keys to our car to some kid we don't know? And it's heading back east without insurance, either? Bob, I need the kid's name."

"Kyle."

"Last name?"

Bob called to someone: "Kyle got your last name?"

I heard a female voice in the distance. Bob seemed to repeat, "Merritt?"

"Merrick," he said, coming back on the phone. "Kyle Atwater Merrick. A very smart kid. He just graduated engineering at UBC."

Some people might have been reassured. But when I worked on the UBC student newspaper, we were deadly enemies of the engineers, whose knuckles we thought dragged on the ground. They were on the political right, we were on the left. Every year, they hired a hooker and a horse to stage a Lady Godiva ride across campus. Every year, we pulled a stunt against them.

The year I was editor of The Ubyssey, we pulled one I'm still proud of. Since we printed the newspaper at the shop where they jobbed out their jokey annual news sheet, The Red Rag, we knew when it was coming out. That year, we prepared a Red Rag of our own to distribute across campus the day before. But ours was Red as in Maoist. We filled the entire rag with Cultural Revolution-style recantations of the engineers' sexism and racism.

A Ubyssey staffer who knew Chinese calligraphy helped doctor a photo of the engineering building with a fake banner that we translated as, "Engineers Denounce Dean Gage." This was their beloved dean, Walter Gage, who had recently stepped down as university president. They hated that one. I don't remember all the gags, but everyone loved it, and the engineers were beside themselves with rage.

Their usual response to The Ubyssey's stunts was to grab the editor and dunk him in the library pond. But since I was a her and they saw themselves as chivalrous, they weren't going to dunk me. In fact, they seemed to be at a loss—until finally we came into the news office one day and found it filled with garbage. Anti-climactic, we agreed. A lame response. Especially since it was the university cleaners who had to clear it out.

So here was an unknown UBC gear driving our car across the country in notably cold, snowy winter. I got a few more details from Bob, but he wouldn't tell me the kid's phone number.

"You don't want him texting and driving."

"Come on, Bob."

"You can't spook him."

"In other words, he has no clue we didn't know about this."

Silence.

"What would he do if he found out, Bob? Don't tell me he'd ditch the car and take off?"

"Of course not," Bob said in a big, fake, happy voice, before quickly saying goodbye. As I hyperventilated, Raine and Mac checked the kid out on social media, tracing him through friends of friends of friends. In fact, Kyle had dropped out of UBC the previous year, afraid he was racking up too much debt.

Alienated from Dad, living with single Mom, he'd taken whatever jobs he could find. Hard hats and Fries with that and Grande chai no fat half sweet latte. Now he'd heard from a ski buddy in Blue Mountain, not Kingston, whom he thought might get him a job at the resort. After the online friends had vouched for the kid's essential reliability (if also for the fact he was a bit of a stoner) I called our insurance agent and threw myself on his mercy. He's a nice guy, not easily stressed, although I didn't test him with the stoner part.

"It'll probably be all right," he said. "Unless he gets himself killed and sues you for wrongful death."

I could hear him smile at his joke.

"That would make a good movie," he said hopefully.

It hit me once the insurance rider was in place. The woman in the background. All the time Bob had been spending at the library. The sudden itch to go. The way he'd driven straight to Vancouver.

He'd met someone online through the library computers and had moved to Vancouver to be with her. Was that right? Maybe she hadn't been entirely straight with him. Bob sincerely seemed to believe that her kid had graduated in engineering. Maybe he hadn't been entirely straight with her, certainly about the car. I'm often glad that online dating post-dates me.

We hadn't been in Bob's room downstairs, presuming he was on a bender and respecting his privacy. Now, when I went downstairs, I saw that at least he'd told me the truth. All his clothes were in the closet, such as they were. A few ironed shirts, a sports jacket and two pairs of jeans, a couple of sweatshirts, underwear and tee-shirts neatly folded on the shelf unit, four pairs of socks, an extra pair of sneakers and a pair of dress shoes; this plus toiletries in the bathroom, a library book beside the bed (Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man) and library DVDs on top of the old TV (The Hunt for Red October. Skyfall). Due dates were coming up; I'd have to take them back. On a folding worktable were some neatly-aligned tools from the garage, a half-finished birdhouse/bookend, some of those small sample containers of paint you get for free. Not much else.

Bob really must have planned to move the car and decided to just take off. Presumably he'd bought some clothes and a bag en route so he didn't weird out the Vancouver woman by showing up empty-handed. Or maybe that wouldn't be an issue. He was still a good-looking man and she was old enough to have at least one university-aged kid. Of course, she could still have been twenty years younger than he was.

The basement flat had that echo-y feeling of abandonment. I've always felt people not only have a presence, they have an absence, and I felt Bob's absence down there.

With the idea of shipping his clothes out west, I started making a pile, then realized he hadn't given me an address and probably wouldn't. Walking around, picking up a hammer, one of our Dad's hammers, I thought about taking the tools back to the garage, but couldn't be bothered. Instead, I grabbed the library book and DVDs, heading upstairs to find Raine and Mac in the kitchen.

"Kyle's in Calgary," Raine said, waving a text on her phone. "He's been making good time, but he's on his own and he needs to take breaks. He's planned a route to land on friends, but he'll have to do at least one motel in northern Ontario."

"So we're paying?"

"You want me to tell him you aren't?"

I took another of the chairs and put down the DVDs and book, the last Kurt Wallender mystery, wondering if I'd have time to read it before the due date.

"I'll take over the cleaning," Raine said. Bob's job. His birdhouses must have been selling pretty well, providing him not only with spending money but enough to pay for the drive to Vancouver. The cleaning he'd done in exchange for room and board.

When I didn't answer, Raine insisted, "I've got time."

"So you're not getting a job. Either before or after the baby."

She hesitated.

"We haven't been talking about things," I said. "Bob was right about that. He just gradually took over the cleaning without making a deal. The same with you and cooking. We should probably talk about things a bit more. I mean, I'm fairly observant. But."

Raine looked away, a little distressed.

"She's been fighting agoraphobia," Mac said, taking Raine's hand. "She's on this elastic? That kind of extends to the Danforth and the shopping, which is safe. But then it snaps back. There's been a lot of stress lately. But my business is picking up, and pretty soon we'll be able to start paying rent."

"You don't need to pay rent," I said. It was true Raine hadn't gone to any demonstrations lately.

"Now Bob's gone, we can rent out the basement," she said.

I would have taken her hand if Mac wasn't holding it. "I'm so sorry, sweetie. It's been hard on everyone. Do you maybe need some counselling?"

Raine made a face and took back her hand.

"I'm basically lazy," she said, surprising Mac. "I'd just rather stay home. There's been too much going on lately. I can get over it, going outside. I just haven't really wanted to, especially in the cold."

Mac and I both looked as Raine for a minute as she brooded.

"Frankly, there's been too much going on for me, too," I said finally. "Too much change. I've been feeling indecisive lately. It's weird."

"You're fine," Raine said quickly.

Yes, Mom's fine. Mom's got to be fine.

"I'm okay," I said. "And by the way, Kyle's not staying in the basement, not for more than a night."

"You're not saving it for Bob," Raine said. "Not after this."

"Bob's gone, and he isn't coming back. Not if I have anything to say about it, and I think I do. I just hope he's happy."

Raine and Mac both looked relieved.

"I kind of want to see what he posted on the dating site, though," I said.

Raine gave me a puzzled look. Then you could see her put it together, and she got on her phone, looking mischievous.

Bob's picture wasn't all that old, and he'd only taken five years off his age.

It's been a long road for me, and I'm not saying it's been easy, but I'm not at the end of my road yet or my rope, even though I'm now early retired. What I'm looking for is comfort, if that appeals...

I couldn't read any more. I felt nosy, and stepped back from Raine's phone.

"I can see how he'd want comfort after Lauren," I said.

Raine, who was still reading, said, "Lauren told me he liked being roughed up. Like in 50 Shades? She says that's what you saw on him."

"Cigarette burns on his arms?" I asked. "I'm not an expert on S&M, but I don't think so."

"I didn't say I believed her. It could have started out that way." Raine shrugged. "She wanted you to issue a correction, though."

Well, there you go, Lauren. The end of a story, perhaps. Bob out in Vancouver, the car due in soon. I felt I knew Mac a bit better lately, not to mention my daughter.

Nothing ends.

The baby would arrive in a couple of months. Mac still had MS, and it was a chronic disease.

But then, to the cynic, with all its relapses and remissions, so is life.
Winterlude

It was a ridiculous start to the trip, up almost before we went to bed to get a dawn flight to Cancún, a bumpy four-hour flight, an hour in Mexican customs and immigration, two hours spent picking up the car ("This will only take ten minutes, señora, except the car you reserved isn't here"), and six hours driving down the coast almost to the border with Belize, including an hour-long stop at a supermarket in Tulum.

We were heading to a small beachfront hotel outside the town of Xcalak, planning a desperately-needed vacation. We in this case meant me and my husband, our son Gabe and his girlfriend Anna. Raine and Mac were cat-sitting back in Toronto, and waiting for Kyle to show up with the car. I hoped he wouldn't be settled in there when we got back, a new guy in the basement, but I'd decided not think about that until I had to.

Heading south, we passed the imposing entrances of the Mayan Riviera resorts and were soon driving through a long expanse of scrubby swampland. I preferred travelling to more exotic locales, but I was so tired, I was happy to pull part two of the Canadian trifecta: a week at a cottage, a week on the beach, a week's staycation at home. For a few days anyway, I didn't want to hear about missing cars, climate change, technological disruption, salaries dropping like yo-yos with strings that wouldn't snap up. I wanted a rest. Big towels. Liked pretending that the past futurists were right, and technology had given us endless amounts of leisure time (as of course it had, for people who'd lost their jobs).

The hotel had advised us to get there before sunset, but waiting for the rental car that wasn't there had put us behind, and the sun was getting low as we turned off the main coastal highway onto a secondary road. In the driver's seat, periodically braking for speed bumps, iguanas and a series of suicidal ground birds, I reminded myself that I loved Mexico. We had lived there for three years, visited as often as we could, and felt terrible about the drug violence making peoples' lives so hard up north. Things were much safer in the south, so when the sun elongated at the horizon, and gave its brilliant flash before dipping out of sight, we weren't perturbed by the fall of the early tropical night. No armed narcos were likely to appear, and I had experience in looking out for Grandma walking down the middle of the road, and chickens.

After making the final turn, with only eight kilometres to go, we found ourselves rattling down an astonishingly potholed sand road that surely couldn't lead to the hotel, except that everyone we asked said it did. It had rained, and the water in the potholes made them look bottomless, and I was afraid the road was going to eat the car. Down a cenote we'd go, sacrificed to the Mayan gods. Best case scenario: they'd vomit us back out, given that our last meal was Subway sandwiches at the Pemex gas station in Cancún.

All four of us were exhausted by the time Gabe spotted the modest hotel sign by the side of the potholed road, which by that point was as wide as a suburban driveway under overhanging palms and sea grapes. Staggering from the car, we were met by our great friend Frances, who had been there for a week, and our hosts Dave and Lesley, who cleverly offered margaritas. It was sometime after 7 p.m. and about twenty-eight degrees, making it forty-four degrees warmer than Toronto had been when we'd taken off twelve and a half hours before. We had decided to do one long day's travel rather than staying overnight in Cancún, and it was a good plan, but it had been a long time since I'd been so glad to get anywhere, and for so many reasons.

"Snow up to here at home," we would tell a couple of Mexicans later that week, hands halfway up our quads.

Incomprehension on their faces.

"Pues?" one said.

Our hotel, the environmentally-friendly Sin Duda Villas, had been built sixteen years before by an architect from San Francisco who had run it with his wife until they sold it the previous summer. The architect put solar panels on the roof and a rainwater-capture system throughout the grounds, so the hotel ran off the grid. The brightly-painted main building, set amid a lovely tropical garden, was situated to catch the breezes off the Caribbean, which was just steps away. A smaller two-room villa was on the other side of the sand road under flowering trees.

Now Sin Duda was owned by Canadians Dave and Lesley (who spelled her name correctly). They had driven down from Hay River in the Northwest Territories the previous year, and their car, with its polar-bear license plate, was still sitting under sea grape trees when we arrived.

With its seven rental units, Sin Duda was far from an all-inclusive resort. We had booked the big main-floor suite with its own kitchen and living/dining room and a bedroom behind louvers you could open at night to catch the wind. Gabe and Anna were in a terraced bedroom next door while Frances was upstairs.

They could have used the upstairs communal kitchen to cook, as people in other units do. But we all met in our room for meals, which that first night we threw together from the tortillas and cheese we'd bought in Tulum—the tortillas still warm when we bought them—along with Gabe's guacamole and vegetables that actually tasted fresh, taken from bowls we'd filled with mangoes, bananas, red peppers, tomatoes, oranges, avocadoes, carrots, celery, melons, all of them lined up along the kitchen counter with a dozen white eggs in a bright, healthy jumble.

We also had Lesley's margaritas, which arrived almost immediately. After all that travel, I tossed back two and. soon. found. myself. talking. like. this. When Frances had arrived the week before, she'd pulled in with her extended family, whose holiday times we couldn't make match up with ours, and their first encounter with Lesley's margaritas led a few of them to a bout of skinny-dipping in the Caribbean past midnight. Lesley was still referring to it fondly when we arrived.

"Yes, well," said Frances, who was able to stay on until heading up to Cancún for a conference the following Wednesday.

Not an all-inclusive resort, as I say. There, I've always felt you travel in class more than locale, the resorts designed to minimize the cultural differences with home. For a week or two you get maids cleaning your room, everyone treats you deferentially, you can order all the food and drinks you want, never having to think about money when everything's pre-paid, and meanwhile play your days away as if you were posh.

Sin Duda was one of those places where you not only did your own cooking, nothing else was laid-on, either. You remained middle class, with the emphasis on dislocation in place rather than status. Sun, warmth, the Caribbean. The beach, snorkelling, sea kayaking, fishing, diving.

Yet you didn't get Mexican culture there, either. When Frances and I went for a walk the next morning, the surf was calm, the white sand beach protected by an enormous reef you could see as a line of breakers on the horizon, the world's second largest coral reef and one of its healthiest, curling north from Belize. The beach was miles long, but we only came across other foreigners, mostly Americans who lived in big seafront houses. The potholed road north of Xcalak leads to an American/Canadian enclave, settled in the late 1990s by a wave of expats of which the hotel's original owners had been part.

Many of their houses were now for sale, and the real-estate signs along the road were in English. As Lesley told us, most of the original owners had reached their seventies, maybe with one partner widowed or both needing better access to health care, and as they sold up, a new group of expats in their late forties and early fifties was starting to move in.

The enclave was obviously helping the local economy, with a succession of Mexican caretakers weaving their motor scooters around the potholes en route to work every morning. The only other industry was fishing. I didn't talk to many local people, but based on the feelings of Mexicans I know—of people everywhere, including myself—I imagine they're happy to have jobs while resenting the internationalization and homogenization of their country. Starbucks mushrooming, Walmart colonizing in the suburbs, H&M moving in. It disappoints tourists seeking exoticism and ruins local businesses, but everyone shops in chain stores anyway, in Mexico or Canada, Brazil or the Netherlands, and probably everyone feels just as ambivalent.

I first travelled to Mexico when I was a teenager, backpacking with a friend, and it was a very different country, the rhythms different, people disappearing for siestas the way few people do anymore, many local eateries and no chain stores. Mexicans didn't face the drug violence they do now, nor the pollution, but they were kept down by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which controlled the country in a semi-dictatorship. There was a tiny middle class, a miniscule elite, and almost everyone else was kept poor.

So I wasn't sure what to think about the wealthy Canadian-American enclave, the Mexicans motor-scootering to work in big expat houses—the fact they had motor scooters—the way their tee-shirts and shorts were pretty much like mine, or the fact they lived as they'd always lived in the type of widesized, multi-generational homes we were heading back to, so that the overflow of food we'd probably end up leaving would go back to Xcalak on scooters to be shared around another multi-generational family.

Nor did I know what to think about the wealthy Mexican enclave in beautiful seaside West Vancouver, just across the Capilano River from where I grew up, where Canadian gardeners and cleaning ladies tended the big expat houses of Mexicans living up the mountain from Ambleside Beach, and where I once met a personal trainer who said her employers sometimes re-gifted her with overflow bling, which she took home to her tiny condo in the far suburbs, an hour-and-a-half's ride on the Seabus and Skytrain from the place where she, too, had grown up, and could no longer afford to live.

First day in Xcalak: walking and talking and swimming. Lunch. Swimming and talking and walking. Margaritas and dinner and talking and more margaritas. Afterward. talking. like. this. Second day, much the same plus reading, as Gabe and Anna took out sea kayaks and went snorkelling. Third day, pleasantly the same until Frances and I went in swimming after lunch, and something strange happened.

The beach was part of a nature reserve and seagrass had to be left growing in the shallows, small schools of tiny silver fish darting through the wave of brown. There was a path cleared through the grass so you could wade out on sand. After that, you swam for a while just above the seafloor to reach deeper water where you finally kicked loose. It never got all that deep inside the reef. Where we were swimming, maybe a hundred feet from shore, the water was only about eight feet deep, sunlit and clear.

Frances and I got in a bit of exercise before paddling around together and talking. Great friends, we had first met when we moved to Rio de Janeiro on the same day more than twenty-five years before. With small children at home and our husbands usually travelling, often together, we kept each other sane while exploring Brazil. We'd never lived in the same city again, but had been in touch ever since, sometimes vacationing together as the children grew up.

Now, the wind came up as we paddled, and when we decided to head back, it cost us work. The current was urging us south, although we knew there was never any danger. Even if we weren't able to make it to the hotel beach, we would come ashore in front of somebody's house. In any event, the swim was strenuous but we got in fine, and Frances walked off to speak with another guest who beckoned her over.

I was left standing on the beach and looking at the hotel. I can see it now as I saw it then, and I had no idea where I was. I knew I was in Mexico, knew that I was looking at a hotel, knew that my husband would be sitting on the terrace outside our room. But I didn't recognize the hotel and realized I needed help, walking up to the terrace to find my husband reading.

"I have no idea where I am or how long I've been here," I remember telling him. "I think I might be having a stroke."

I remember my husband getting me to sit down, and the next thing I remember is lying on the couch inside the room as Lesley put a bag of ice behind my neck. Dave was turning on a standing fan, while Gabe and Anna looked worried. I recognized all of them, even Lesley and Dave, whom I'd only met days before.

"Do you know it's Tuesday?" my husband asked.

"I thought it was Monday."

"What did we have for dinner the night we arrived?"

"On Saturday," I said. "We threw cheese and veg together with tortillas."

"Sunday?"

"Gabe cooked some chicken on the fire on the beach."

"Monday?"

"We made rice with beans and bacon. So it must be Tuesday. That's right."

I was fine, and knew I was fine. But the odd thing is, they told me that I'd sat on the terrace for several minutes while they did neurological tests—touch your finger to your nose, resist when I try to push your arms down, how many fingers am I holding up?—and I had absolutely no memory of any of that, and don't to this day. Nothing. Somewhere between five and ten minutes of my life are permanently gone, although my husband told me later that I had seemed calm and lucid, and had passed all the tests, physically fine.

"Dehydration," Lesley said, giving me a sugary soft drink.

I realized I'd probably mentioned the possibility of a stroke since my aunt had recently suffered a mini-stroke while vacationing in Mexico, a transient ischemic episode, briefly losing the sight in one eye. When she got home, tests revealed a partially-blocked artery in her neck. She had an operation the following week and fortunately she was fine. I saw my doctor when I got home too, and he said that since I never showed any physical symptoms, and still wasn't showing any, I hadn't had a stroke. It was probably a combination of too much sun and dehydration, as Lesley had said.

"And stress," Lesley added shrewdly. Yeah, stress, I thought, and scenes from the last few months came at me like a movie montage. Bob's heart attack, the ice storm, our budget, items marked in red.

I'd never experienced a collapse like that before, and would have preferred fainting, passing right out, to missing those five or ten minutes when everyone agreed I seemed lucid. What did that say about personality? About consciousness, about memory? About being a zombie? Kidding.

Frances and I had been talking about a trip we took to São Paulo in 1988, where we saw Bruce Springsteen and Sting do a duet of Every Breath You Take during an Amnesty International concert. We were standing so close to the stage that the body language of the two men struck me as being off, and I'd turned to Frances and said, I don't think they like one another. I could still remember the look on two rock stars' faces after more than twenty-five years, but I couldn't remember ten minutes of my life that morning.

Of course, there are an increasing number of things I don't remember, days and events and people from the past, all of them every bit as gone. It was like society forgetting its little daily habits and doings, what I called social Alzheimer's, although more personal and a little frightening. I've always kept journals, but lately, if I re-read one from years before, I sometimes come across things that I simply don't remember.

A man helping my friend and me at a hotel in Sarajevo?

If I sit quietly for a moment, the memory sometimes surfaces. I see a brown wood hotel desk, the shape of a dark man in a suit by the elevator with his back to us. I see his shoulders grow alert as the clerk fails to understand English or French, see him turn his head, see him coming over with a helpful smile. But how reliable is this mental picture? Am I composing a fiction based on what I've just re-read? How can I know whether I'm doing that or not?

Scary questions. It's frightening to lose ten minutes; to know that you don't remember what you just did. Looking back at my life, at the highlights I remembered and the great gulfs in everyday memory, I tried to console myself by something I'd read: that there are a few people who, through some neurological wrinkle or mistake, can remember everything that's ever happened to them, and they have to fight going mad.

I also thought about Raine's code writers on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse, the ones she said could be creating us, and it seemed possible that one might well have created me yesterday. He could have given me a sketchy backstory and written me into the world to live a story he's going to compose from now on, and all I can access are the highlight memories he's coded.

My doctor asked if I'd been doing drugs.

No, just the margaritas.

"Alcohol," he said. "Dehydration."

I thought about the belief of atheists (contradiction?) that we're purely physical creatures; that memory, consciousness, personality—what we call our souls—are all chemical, and that self-awareness is simply the result of feedback loops in our brains.

I read on the couch for the rest of the afternoon, drinking sugary soft drinks, feeling fine if existentially worried. The wind stayed up and howled all night.

The next day, we drove Frances to the bus.

Gabe drove, my husband navigated. I wasn't the only one worried about my small collapse. But it was going to be a good day, aside from saying goodbye to Frances. We'd leave at 7 a.m. to drive her one hundred twenty clicks up the highway to the bus stop in the town of Limones, where the online schedule said an express bus arrived at 9:20 a.m. that would take her on the first leg of her journey to Cancún.

After putting her on board, we'd visit some Mayan pyramids outside Limones. Anna had never seen a pyramid, and Gabe only vaguely remembered visiting a few when we had lived in Mexico and he was very young. Visit the pyramids, have lunch, head back to the hotel for a swim.

By day, the potholes on the road to Xcalak looked shallow, unlikely to swallow the car, although that didn't make the trip any less bumpy. Once past Xcalak, a narrow paved highway cut straight through swampy terrain. Waist-high, yellow-flowering herbs grew right to the edge of the pavement, and purple morning glories draped themselves over scant trees. At sunset, when we were last through, some of the vine-covered trees had looked like distant trolls guarding the indigo sky.

Outside the town of Majahual, we angled northwest on a wider and faster road, arriving at the Limones bus stop at 9:10, ten minutes before the express was due to arrive. Having spent so much time in Mexico, we asked two young women waiting on the bench how late the bus was likely to be. They giggled, and one of them told us that the 9:20 hadn't been running for months, despite what the online schedule said. Instead, the express arrived at 8:45 a.m., if it arrived, which it hadn't that morning. They were waiting for the 10:20 local that stopped at every town between Limones and Playa del Carmen. If Frances went to Playa with them, she could catch the local to Cancún, although from what the girl said, it wouldn't get her to her conference until long after it had started.

"Right," Frances said, meaning that it wasn't.

"The thing about Mexico and the Internet," I said. "It allows a whole new layer of stuff to go wrong."

Around us, the flame trees were coming into bloom. One woman cooked tortillas over a charcoal fire at a roadside stand. Others stood in their shop doors wearing aprons, while nearby signs advertised rines y mofles, wheel rims and mufflers, at garages that sent a fug of grease into the hazy sky. A helpful cab driver came over, offering to take Frances another hour up the road to the town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, where there was a real bus station. We thought we'd better take her ourselves, and after we pulled in, that worked. At the station, on the white town plaza, a ticket agent agreed she could catch an express expected in from Mérida that would get her to Cancún in good time. Fingers crossed, hugs all around, new visits sketched in, including back to Xcalak, where her family—all divers—had had an exceptional time out on the reef. Damp eyes, next time, goodbye.

The Chacchoben archeological site proved to be all but empty. We'd been warned that cruise ships docking in Majahual brought a frenzy of passengers to the site, but luckily we'd missed them, and were able to wander in pairs past the excavated pyramids, their steps roped off. My sister-in-law's Grade 4 teacher had never come back from March break after falling off the top of the Pyramid of the Sun outside Mexico City. They still let you climb it when we lived here, although I clambered up so many times when friends and family visited each winter that I finally got tired of pretending that I wasn't scared of heights and started sitting in the shade with a book.

Hillocks under trees at Chacchoben showed how many pyramids remained to be excavated. Roots writhed across the hard limestone ground. It was peaceful and hot, and Gabe and Anna saw spider monkeys in the trees, a baby hanging by its tail as it meticulously shelled a nut. I saw a little orange-and-black bird flitting through some scrub that proved to be an American redstart, a species we often saw at the cottage in Muskoka. Other birds were sensibly resting in the mid-day heat, leaving only the vultures soaring above.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at a Mennonite bakery in Limones, where some other guests at the hotel had told us we might get lunch. They were frequent visitors to Xcalak, and one of them said there was a recent Mennonite settlement in the region, perhaps a split-off from the well-established Mennonite colony in northern Mexico that Carlos Reygadas had portrayed in the movie I'd thought about after Bob's heart attack. There was also a colony of Hutterites, improbably blond, who would sometimes drive their black buggies down the highway, and a group of Mormons who were said to be polygamous, although no one was sure if that was true.

The bakery had chocolate nut bread but no lunch, and we ended up stopping at a restaurant where a posse of truckers had pulled up, always a good sign. The fish was fresh, the tortillas fresher. Tortillas, pyramids, non-existent buses, giggling girls, the smell of charcoal smoke, broad women in aprons standing in their doorways, morning glories, flame trees, unconfirmed rumours of polygamous foreigners, vultures circling above the road and trucks with names in the parking lot. I was in Mexico at last.

The next morning, an e-mail arrived from home, although of course I wasn't checking messages, as I'd told everyone I worked with. Raine said our car was in the garage and the driver, Kyle, staying in the basement. Not wanting to deal with another sad story and a new long-term guest, I e-mailed back asking her to thank Kyle for delivering the car, but pointing out that I had said from the start that he couldn't stay, and expected him to be gone before we returned.

From Raine: That's unfriendly.

From me: He got free transportation out from Vancouver. Don't push it.

From Raine: Who's pushing?

From me: I feel pushed, so someone must be doing pushing.

From Raine: Why are you so stressed? Daddy told me.

From me: The signal isn't good. Better sign off. Big hug to Mac.

I went to lie under a palapa to read. The wind remained up and the white-capped sea struck me as a little menacing after my small collapse, so I didn't think I would go swimming, certainly not on my own. Yet I was restless, didn't like my book, didn't want to be so stressed, yet couldn't relax into vacation mode. Deciding to get some exercise, I took off for a walk along the beach.

That wasn't what I needed, either. With the wind up, the beach was littered with plastic trash beating in on every wave. Other guests had told us that the litter had been bad for five or six years. These days, the caretaker had to rake up an astonishing amount of plastic every morning. Flip flops, rubber gloves, plastic bags and drink cups, plastic straws, pens, broken toys, fishing gear, disposable knives and forks, toothbrushes, plastic bottles, little round plastic spheres that I finally realized came from roll-on deodorants...

The previous fall, I had seen a documentary, Midway, about cast-up plastic on Midway Island in the Pacific. It wasn't just unsightly, it was killing hatchlings in the albatross colony that had nested there for millennia. They filmed one young albatross whose beak was held closed by a green plastic ring off a soft-drink cap. Autopsies showed the stomachs of other birds were crammed with plastic bags. It looked just as bad along the Xcalak shore, and I thought about the pelicans, terns and frigate birds that flew past us daily, and which must have nested nearby.

Strolling along unhappily, taking pictures of the detritus, I ended up talking to an American expat out walking his dog. He said they thought the plastic came from cruise ships, fishing boats, and probably from islands to the east, mainly Jamaica and Cuba.

Something else washed up too, what the local people called square fish. He said he didn't speak much Spanish, but the name translated as something like that.

"Pescado cuadrado?" I asked, knowing where this was going.

Packages of drugs.

We had passed frequent police checkpoints as we drove down from Cancún, and on the map we'd noticed a canal cut through the southern part of the Xcalak peninsula near the border with Belize. We thought it might have something to do with smuggling, and the American said it was a military canal closed to civilian traffic. The Mexican navy used it to move patrol boats from the Caribbean Sea into the Bay of Chetumal without passing through Belizean waters. Anything you could imagine was smuggled through the Yucatan, he said, including a fortune in drugs.

The American had heard of two square fish washing up nearby during the past year, one of twenty-five kilos, both of which were quietly moved out in ways that failed to involve the military. The man couldn't say how, telling me it was a local matter that nothing to do with foreigners.

Bending down, he picked up a piece of round pumice stone.

"Find plenty of these lately, too," he said, clearly wanting to change the subject. "Volcanic. Must be an eruption going on undersea."

Back at Sin Duda, Dave had no information about the square fish, but told us that bone fragments sometimes washed up on a point of land further north. I wondered if they came from drug fights, but he said they appeared to be shards of ancient human bones from Mayan ruins that were now undersea. The former owner had told him that after the last big hurricane had blown through Xcalak nearly a decade before, the sea had temporarily retreated, exposing Mayan buildings that no one had known were there. People had lived and died nearby in a settlement long lost to rising sea levels.

Human bones and sea levels. Still feeling stressed, I went for another long walk before lunch, and saw a small hermit crab wearing a blue Bic pen cap instead of a shell.

Talking with Frances about the Amnesty International concert had made me think about an interview I'd read years ago with Bruce Springsteen. I couldn't remember the exact question he was asked, something about the dream of rock and roll, whether being a rock star was what he had always dreamed of, or whether being a rock star was anything like what people dreamed of—that might have been it—but I'd always remembered his answer, which was, No, it's not like the dream. Because people dream of a life without complications. And a life without complications doesn't exist.

That was what I'd really wanted from our beach holiday, a week without complications. I felt annoyed with Raine. She didn't know why I was stressed? Really? I was just as annoyed at myself for being unable to relax. My mind was still busy, churning on about plastic, MS, Kyle in our basement. Let go, I told myself, and when I couldn't, I signed up for Lesley's afternoon snorkelling expedition, when she swam out far from shore for hours. If nothing else, I might be able to exhaust my nerves into submission, hopefully without another collapse.

Lesley snorkelled most days, sometimes taking guests, always checking local reefs for the invasive lion fish. It was a gorgeous creature, black and yellow with a ruff of spines, but it was massively destructive. A native of the Indian Ocean, it had probably been dumped into the Caribbean by aquarium owners who got bored, and was now eating it way through native fish, a plague on reefs all along the coast, with no local predators except Lesley. She speared any she found and fed them to the moray eel that lived in a small reef not far offshore.

Gabe and Anna joined us as we got kitted up and swam out, already scattering schools of fish when the water was only four feet deep. I know birds rather than reef fish, even though they're as colourful as flocks of undersea warblers and swimming is like flying. We soon met with thousands of small silver fish, and palm-sized ones striped blue and yellow—sergeant majors, Lesley said as we surfaced—and others we saw looking down again, with a blue spot that made them look like sunfish in a Canadian lake, although a lot warmer.

When we reached the nearest reef, schools of fish fled toward the living coral. There were bright yellow fish, and a tiny, delightful fairy basslet, half yellow and half purple. Some bigger ones looked black until the sun caught them, and they flashed deep indigo. Lesley showed us where an octopus lived in a crevice in the coral, his red eyes shining out. He'd decorated the door to his lair with seashells, and when Anna touched one shell, he pulled it away from her. Mine!

I'd chosen the wrong flippers from the pile at Sin Duda. One kept coming off, and I had to keep surfacing to fix it, but before long, that didn't matter. It was so beautiful out there that I finally felt free, stress bubbling off the hairs of my arms and legs in a chemical fizz. Swimming forward, I saw living conchs inside their blush-coloured shells, and lobsters waving their antennae from crevices in the coral. Hundreds of fish swam everywhere, in the near reef and the next one over, and across the sandy floor.

Two southern stingrays wafted by, graceful and unconcerned, maybe two-and-a-half feet wide and half that long, flapping their grey wings in the turquoise water. After watching them fly off, we went to look for the moray eel. Lesley hadn't seen him for five days and had been afraid he'd found another lair, bothered by too many snorkellers. We stayed back, catching only glimpses of his girth through arches in the coral, a creature thicker than my thigh.

Afterwards, we took off on a long looping swim toward an outlying reef. We had to fight the current to get around it, but once we were on its far side, the current was our friend, carrying us along beside the coral among darts yellow and blue and silver. As we watched, two sleek barracuda swam over the top. Another stingray shot up from the sea floor in a push of sand and bubbles. More lobsters hid in crevices, sea fans stood out from the coral, anemones waved. Solitary fairy basslets hovered against the coral, as purple and yellow as little Easter eggs. Sergeant majors, angelfish. Blue fish, yellow fish, black fish and silver.

Heading back, I swam over a patch of sand and sea grass, and a remora fish tried to get friendly. Black and silver striped, with suckers on the back of their heads, remora usually hitch lifts on bigger fish and turtles. This one kept going for my leg, trying to attach its suckers. When I first felt something hook on, I thought leeches, which I loathe. Shaking my leg, I managed to dislodge it, but the fish kept trying to attach itself as I kept shimmying away, everyone surfacing to shriek with laughter at my remora dance, at least until it started after them.

That night, back on shore, Dave took a flashlight and showed us puffer fish that had swum into the shallows to sleep. Half a dozen of them lay motionless, and when he prodded one, it puffed partway up half-heartedly before going back to sleep.

The next day, more snorkelling. Then it was time to go home.
Cats and Other Concerns

A few weeks later, it was finally spring. The crocuses were blooming, and I'd scattered cayenne pepper to keep the squirrels from beheading them. Destructive little buggers: the previous year, they'd torn off all the flowers and didn't even eat them. This year, I was fighting back with spices, meanwhile looking after a feral cat, my limping friend, George.

It had still been winter when we got back from Mexico, and bitterly cold, but I'd had to rewrite a film script on deadline and vanished into my study. Was I submerged six weeks or seven? Fortunately, Raine and Mac were doing well, Mac's vertigo receding and Raine's pregnancy advancing normally through the final trimester. Bob seemed to have settled back happily in Vancouver, so thoroughly acculturated that he'd got himself onto Instagram and begun taunting us with photos of daffodils, which usually arrived as snow pellets were beating against the windows.

By the time I finished a good draft of my script, robins sang from the rooftops. A pair of cardinals was visiting the feeder, the male calling cheerfully, pew pew pew pew pew. The relief I'd found in Mexico had lasted, partly because I always feel better when I'm writing every day, and because other things sorted themselves out. As I'd feared, Kyle was in the basement when we got home, a short, chunky kid with narrow brown eyes who made helpless fists and ducked his head under a mess of uncombed hair. Fortunately, he proved a cheerful enough stoner that he took off without complaint—"I mean, I wouldn't want me here, either"—and Raine made no objection, Kyle having been smoking just about everything down there, including tobacco.

"I showed him the warnings on the cigarette packages," she said. "And he said it was all right, he wasn't pregnant. How do some people manage to keep themselves alive?"

Life, ebbing and flowing. In fact, the only real problem we faced was the difficult turn taking by my pal George, the feral cat we'd been feeding off and on for about four years. And I wasn't sure if he really had a problem or not.

I don't know why I began calling him George. Maybe it was his huge, lionish head. George Rex. He was a tabby with lean flanks and large paws, and since he was unneutered, I don't think George could ever have been a house cat. Born rough.

The winter George first arrived, we'd been having a problem with rats. I saw them outside one snowy morning busy vacuuming up the fallen seed underneath our bird feeder, a biggish one and a couple of babies. When I crashed open the back door, yelling at them, the rats scarpered back to a neighbouring wreck of a garage, which was porous with loose boards.

Weird anthropomorphizing: I thought the baby rats looked confused, even hurt at being yelled at. We immediately took down the feeder, but by then they seemed to have set up shop in the rundown garage: the biggish rat, a bigger one, and a whole skitter of babies.

We trapped eight rats in our own garage that winter, seven babies and the second-biggest one, presumably the female. A friend told us that a male rat will send its young to trip rat traps—and judging from our garage, its mate as well. Our friend claimed that afterwards, the male will eat the peanut butter from the traps, presumably feasting around the bodies of its young.

Urban myth? After we'd trapped the others, we continued to see the big fat rat nosing around the yard, and even though we kept setting traps, Big Daddy never bit. He seemed smarter than that. But even though I'd found the small, offended babies almost cute, he set off all sorts of primal feelings. I wanted that nasty, greasy rat out of my life, although nothing we did seemed to shoo him.

Then one day I noticed a feral tabby cat washing himself in the back yard, and the rat was gone. I have no idea whether George got him, or if the scent of cat was enough to send Big Daddy packing, but we haven't seen a rat in the four years since. Instead, George moved into the beat-up garage, where they stored all manner of junk—old dryers, old tires, a mess of ragged curtains and boxes and papers—in what must have been a warmish shelter from the storm.

A while after we became neighbours, George began to sit on our back deck looking fixedly into the kitchen, clearly wanting to be fed. Hoping to keep him around, I started giving him breakfast. Some weeks he would show up every day, some weeks only once or twice, and there have been times over the past few years when he's disappeared for months, although I would usually run into him now and then in a back alley, often quite far away.

We're obviously not the only people who have been feeding George. No matter how long he's away, he always comes back looking healthy, and his coat is magnificent in winter. Yet he doesn't seem to like humans. For a couple of years, he wouldn't let me close, rearing back and hissing whenever I crossed an invisible line while giving him his food. I thought it was probably just as well that he was wary, and didn't try to push it.

Yet I like cats, and in the end I couldn't resist. Maybe a year ago, I started holding out my hand so he could give me a sniff. George stopped hissing at me, and eventually let me pat him. On rare occasions, he'd even deign to purr. Whether because of this, or because other people had stopped feeding him, George had been coming to the back yard every morning for the past few months. He'd taken to giving a quick yowl as he slipped onto the deck. I'm here and I'm hungry.

All seemed well until couple of weeks before I finished my script, when George showed up limping, favouring his right front paw. I wondered if he'd broken a bone or if his paw was infected, and began feeding him more to try to help him recover, keeping an eye on his progress. The neighbours had torn down their garage last fall, but he seemed to have found another residence nearby, possibly several. Aside from the limp, he looked well enough, although his nose was often raked with bloody scratches.

Gradually the limp got worse, and for once, George wanted attention. He would lie on the deck after eating, looking in the kitchen window as if waiting for someone to come out. If I sat down nearby, he would purr like a housecat and let me pat him. His paw looked swollen, although he wouldn't let me touch it. If I tried, he'd start and hiss and limp away, looking disappointed in me, and weary.

What to do? The lion needed a thorn drawn from his paw, and he wouldn't let me draw it.

Take him to the vet, I decided.

How to catch a feral cat: Feed him as usual on the back deck, run inside to bundle up in a puffy old winter coat and leather gardening gloves, grab the cat when he's finished eating and carry him inside, ignoring both his hiss and claws to lock him in the back stairwell, then pull out a phone to confirm the appointment with the vet, who had told me earlier that if I could corral him, she would look at his injured front paw.

Catching George proved far easier than I'd anticipated, maybe because he was getting weaker from whatever was bothering him. I got him inside without any major damage either to his coat or mine, and after I'd confirmed our appointment, he accepted an ear scratch as I sat with him for a few minutes in the back stairway, and even purred half-heartedly.

Of course, when I went to get the cat carrier, he grabbed his chance to spray everything sprayable, and it wasn't much fun getting him into the carrier, even though I've taken enough cats to the vet that I knew to set the carrier up vertically and wedge him in bum first. Yet it wasn't long before we were at the clinic, and the vet and two of her assistants were tying on leather aprons so they could examine George's injured paw. The vet was dubious about the whole venture, saying she might have to anaesthetize him to get a proper look.

"Which costs," she told me pointedly.

As I sat in the waiting room, reading the Your Cat in Human Years poster, I thought about how much I hated watching tourists bargain with local people when I lived in Latin America. If you honestly can't afford $20, I would think, buy one blouse instead of two.

I also wondered how much anaesthetic costs, calculating from the poster that our house cat, Archie, was pushing forty in human terms and from memory that our budget was pushing its limit, even though we were no longer feeding Bob.

When the vet came out, taking off her gloves like a surgeon, she told me that she hadn't been forced to put George under, which made my wallet happy. In fact, she said he'd behaved better than most house cats. He was also in far better shape.

"All muscle," she said in some awe. "I could feel all down his flanks."

She didn't think George's foot was broken, but he had a lump on his paw that might be either a tumour or an infection. An infection could have started after he picked up a foreign body, a thorn or a piece of metal he'd stepped on, or it could have come from getting bitten or scratched in a fight. The vet couldn't tell what was going on, and in order to treat him properly, she would have to do X-rays, a biopsy, tests.

"That's going to be $750," she said. "More to operate afterward if we have to, or to treat him with drugs. You might want to think about a thousand dollars, maybe more."

"Can't you help me out on this?" I asked.

"I am," she said.

How much do you owe a feral cat? An injured creature you've grown fond of over the years, who has done his duty as neighbourhood rat catcher and otherwise never hurt anyone. A friend has told me about a documentary adding up the number of songbirds killed by feral cats, but I've never seen George go after birds. That's Stanley, who caught a starling in our backyard last month, but Stanley is another question.

"A thousand dollars," I repeated.

"You might also want to consider getting him neutered," she said. Three hundred dollars more.

Our car was parked outside the clinic, silently demanding work. The ice storm had damaged the gutters on our house, many of which we had to replace. We'd just taken a vacation, which wasn't cheap, and the tendency of food to cost money, and transportation, and clothing...

"What I can do," the vet said, "is to lance the swelling and see if a whole lot of pus comes out. Then we know it's an infection."

"Okay," I said, caught up in a mental picture of oozing pus, so she nodded quickly and left.

It turned out that George didn't ooze, but in case he had a less obvious infection, the vet gave him a shot of antibiotics and another of painkiller. "That ought to keep him stoned for three days," she said. "If the antibiotics work, he might be better at the end of it."

Bill: $211. Under the circumstances, it felt like a bargain.

"Well, George, I hope you're still talking to me," I said, loading the carrier into the car. "You bloody well better be."

After driving the few blocks home, I opened the carrier and let George out into the backyard. He sat on the path for a moment, looking as stoned as promised. Then he gave his usual yowl of farewell, trotted over to a gap in the fence and disappeared, his tail flicking.

My husband thanked me that night for not spending $1,000 on a feral cat. In my experience of marriage, you can say many things to your partner that you never would have predicted, if asked in advance.

But our dinner table being what it is, we also had a philosophical discussion of how people should spend their money. My grandmother always said that it's vulgar to speak about money, but we should probably do it more often and more deeply. What is right, what is needed, what is owed.

"Obviously, we shouldn't spend money on any more stuff," Raine said, looking around pointedly.

It's true our house is pretty fully furnished. When I first moved to Toronto, everything I owned fit into a blue metal trunk, and my most valuable possession was a pair of contact lenses. Now we had a house crammed full of junk-store furniture I fixed up years ago, rugs and pottery from Latin America, comfortable sofas and chairs that eventually replaced the ones from the garage sales, and most recently, heirlooms from our grandparents and parents.

Most of our things have a story attached. The best involves a carved and inlaid highboy, probably a piece of 19th century export ware from Japan. We call it the Thing, and it came from my husband's grandparents. His grandmother was English, a nurse who met his Canadian grandfather during the First World War when he was a young soldier suffering from the Spanish flu. They got married after the war and crossed the Atlantic, living first in Ohio before settling in Toronto.

Grandma had known a family in England that had owned an import firm. During the 1930s, the two surviving daughters immigrated to Ontario, where they operated an orchard. One was a laudanum addict and died. The other went to live with my husband's grandparents in Toronto, bringing her furniture with her, much of it imported by her family, including the Thing.

During the Second World War, a visitor came to the grandparents' door and asked for the surviving sister. She spoke with him on the porch in German and didn't say anything after he left. Grandma was nervous: Canada was fighting a war against Hitler, after all. What had they been talking about?

The woman refused to answer, packed a suitcase and left.

My mother-in-law thought she saw her years later on the street, and thinks the woman saw her too, and turned away. Grandma believed the family might have been partly Jewish, although the sisters weren't religious and she wasn't sure. I doubt she was right, since in that case the woman could have come up with some explanation of the man's visit. Puzzled and upset, Grandma kept the furniture for more than forty years, waiting for the woman to come back for it. She never did.

When we were living in Mexico, my husband got a call from his mother. Actually, he was on a trip to Nicaragua, which is a hot, strange place to get a phone call about family heirlooms, especially since Nicaragua was at war. His mother said that Grandma was going to sell her house to move in with his aunt. They were giving away most of her furniture and his mother was trying to find a home for the Thing, which nobody else wanted.

Long story short, the Thing was delivered to our house in Toronto soon afterwards, along with a couple of other things my husband asked for and more stuff that no one else wanted. My younger brother was living there at the time with a revolving cast of law-school friends, and they didn't have much furniture, so it filled a gap.

That's just one story. There are many others. Raine was right in saying we didn't need any more stuff in the house, but I love being surrounded by stories.

On the other hand, I resent the need to constantly upgrade technology, which is where so much money goes these days. How many billions do Bill Gates and the heirs of Steve Jobs really need? Ethically speaking, I believe they should give away all of their upgrades for free.

A roll of the eyes from tech types. Gabe and Mac both spend their money on gear. They love to research it, save for it, can't wait to pick it up, and like Raine, they have little concern for the type of house stuff that I like, although Raine is more agnostic on the subject of technology.

"Food," she said, ticking off her priorities. "Bicycles and subway tokens. Shoes, boots, I suppose athletic equipment. I mean, you should grow food, not buy it. You can make clothes. You can make almost everything you really need. Repurpose it, anyhow, from all the stuff people throw out."

Raine sewed her maternity wear from a box of my mother's clothes I'd brought back from Vancouver after she died. I had intended to make Mom quilts for everyone in the family but hadn't got around to it. When Raine found the box, she sewed mash-ups of different patterns and fabrics that floated around her growing belly, otherwise known as my mother's eventual great-grandchild. She looked great.

"In an ideal world," Mac said, "I'd spend my money on experiences. Music, shows, things like that."

"Travel," I agreed. "Books, movies, plays. Also non-profits. Charities."

"So why not pay to fix George's foot?" Raine asked. "Being charitable."

"It takes a long time to earn a thousand bucks," Mac said, making Raine flush.

"I think the vet is charging too much," I said. "I was thinking about phoning the Humane Society and asking if they have a feral cat program."

"Remember how we took that lost cat in there once? I'm sure they euthanized it," Raine said. "It was probably the one they found mummified during the scandal with the guy who used to run the place. When the inspectors looked in the ceiling, remember? They found a mummified cat. I don't really mean it was him, but they never called us back, even though they said they'd phone us if they found the owner. I said we'd take him if they didn't, right?"

That part I didn't remember.

"If George comes back," I said, "if he isn't too mad at me, we can see if the antibiotics worked. If they didn't, we can decide what to do next."

Several George-less days followed. The vet had said he might be stoned enough to hide away for a while, and maybe that explained it.

Our yard was busy, though. People who kept their cats indoors all winter started letting them out: the big fluffy orange one who's been coming by for years, the big fluffy grey one.

Stanley dropped by every day, Stanley being the dark grey-and-white short hair who first showed up last fall, a bit of a bad boy with skinny shanks and an unusually long white nose who would wear his trousers crack-riding low if he were a touch more human. Stanley took swipes at other cats and stalked birds at the feeder, but he was absurdly affectionate toward people, rubbing himself tirelessly against your legs. I'd thought he was a lost house cat, and started feeding him while I looked for his owners.

I found them a week later, which is why I know his name. Stanley wasn't lost at all. He's an outdoor cat who lives a block and a half away, although his owners began looking for him when he stopped showing up for dinner. The kid who picked him up said Stanley's sister had just had kittens and kept hissing at him, driving him away. That struck me as reasonable. Being unneutered, he was quite possibly the kittens' father as well as their uncle.

Cue the scene from Chinatown. "She's my daughter. She's my sister. She's my sister and my daughter."

Having registered our backyard as a source of food, Stanley keeps mooching by. Not that I feed him anymore, but he's grown fixated on the birds at the feeders, mainly sparrows, finches and juncos. The feeders hang high on a pole where the birds can ignore him, but Stanley has one notch in his non-existent belt. I didn't see the kill, but afterward he jumped up on the barbecue below our kitchen window to show me a dead starling, the bird's fat black body clenched in his jaws, its neck hanging broken.

Stanley must have taken the starling home and laid it at the feet of his owners. The next time he came by, he wore a bell around his neck.

"Stop it," Raine said once, when I talked about backyard carnage. "I don't need to hear this."

But that's what you saw if you paid attention to nature, even in the middle of the city. A sharp-shinned hawk often hunted here too, its wings outstretched as it soared in wide ellipses. I always knew when the hawk was hunting since the little birds fall silent and hide in the shrubs. Once, I saw the hawk arrow down to catch a male house sparrow, and quickly tear it to pieces. I think it also caught a pigeon last winter, since I came home one day to find pigeon feathers blowing all over the snow. Maybe Stanley was responsible but I doubt it. The pigeons are almost as big as he is.

I've been writing about justice: legal justice, economic justice, how to try to lead a just and decent life in a time of global change. Nature has nothing to do with justice, the hawk hunting its prey. Even Stanley fathering his sister's kittens.

But then you get gradations.

Last fall, when I first put up the feeders, they were swarmed with house sparrows, which chased away most of the finches and managed an uneasy truce with the northern juncos, a flock of five that usually fed on fallen seed after the sparrows had retired. I counted somewhere around eighty sparrows last November, and had to fill the feeders daily.

"Bankrupted by sparrows," I told my husband.

After the ice storm, the flock was immediately sparser. I never again saw more than fifty or fifty-five sparrows and these days, only twenty-five or so hang around. A pair of finches still comes by, and a pair of cardinals, and all five juncos were here until about two weeks ago, when they suddenly disappeared, presumably flying north.

Experts say E. Coli and salmonella outbreaks among flocks of house sparrows can cause a freefall in numbers. I can't help wondering if it's my fault, if I should have been disinfecting the feeders, although I think it's more likely that the harsh weather either dropped their resistance to disease or whacked them upside the feathers in other ways.

Yet—go with me on this—the harsh winter/polar vortices are probably our fault too, since they're related to climate change. It's a complex environmental situation, since house sparrows aren't native birds, but were brought here from Europe. The first imports were freed in New York in 1852 and have subsequently spread wherever people settle, from the Northwest Territories to Tierra del Fuego. They're as invasive as we are, and tend to take over an ecological niche from indigenous birds. If you're going to think in punitive terms, maybe they deserve climate change as much as we do: the planet shrugging us off.

Problem is, indigenous birds are threatened by climate change too, and in complex ways. Journalist Alanna Mitchell wrote about the critically-endangered hooded grebe in the page of the United Church Observer, how the grebe was threatened in the lagoons of Patagonia where it bred. Or, lately, where it hadn't been breeding.

The high concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was drying up the Patagonian lagoons, she wrote, with help from rising temperatures and falling levels of precipitation, snow and rain. That left only a few lagoons suitable for the hooded grebe to breed in, and wind levels rising too, their nests were frequently blown apart.

At the same time, rainbow trout had been introduced for fish farming in the early years of the 20th century. Since then, they've been polluting the lakes with their waste and chasing off waterfowl. Some large trout have even been observed eating chicks. And because kelp gulls are attracted by the fish waste, they've been extending their range to the Patagonian lagoons, where they've been hunting grebe.

So there's natural strife outside human morality, whether it's a sharp-shinned hawk hunting smaller birds or low-riding Stanley getting it on with his sister. But there's also the havoc we're causing even in our own back yards. It's our bad: the harsh winter, the dead sparrows and the limping cat—since George is presumably descended from abandoned house cats, meaning that the collective We put him out there to suffer.

That's what brings up questions of justice and responsibility, including the threatened $1,000 vet bill for George. My new mantra: What is right? What is needed? What is owed?

A phone call told me that the chance of getting help from Toronto Animal Services comes with a threat. They will treat George if his foot isn't too badly hurt. If it is, or if he behaves aggressively, they will put him down.

When I called the Humane Society, the automated switchboard told me to call Toronto Animal Services at another number for help with a feral animal. That number took me to Toronto's overall civic help line where, after I waited on hold for fifteen minutes, an operator took my query to Animal Services, not permitting me to speak to them directly.

Layers of evasion of human contact, and presumably of people having to respond humanely to a sob story. When the operator came back on the line, she told me Animal Services would look at George.

However:

1) If he proved to be severely injured, they would put him down.

2) If he was aggressive, they would put him down.

3) If he had something easily treatable like a broken foot, they would keep him for a couple of weeks to see if he got better.

4) If he didn't get better, they would put him down.

5) If he got better and seemed suitable for adoption, he would be put up for adoption for "a reasonable period of time."

After which, presumably, they would put him down.

I felt reasonably sure George wouldn't be aggressive, the vet having told me he'd behaved better than many house cats when she examined him. But she'd also said his foot wasn't broken, and that he was suffering from either an infection or a tumour. Animal Services might be able to cure an infection in a reasonable amount of time, although the vet's shot of antibiotics hadn't seemed to help much. But if it proved to be a tumour, I imagined they would put him down, even though he doesn't seem sick or in pain, at least not yet.

Too big a gamble, I thought, and hung up. Maybe I should try the vet again and see if she'd cut us a deal?

No, she would not. And a reminder from the receptionist that the initial quote was just for the tests to determine what was wrong.

Third idea of the day: talk to the people in the local pet shop. They had a bulletin board where you could post notices about lost pets, and seemed nice.

"Here's a thought," I said to Raine, who was cooking lunch.

Before I could go on, my phone beeped. Incoming text from Bob in Vancouver: Cherry trees finished blooming. It's summer. Sasquatch spotted in Squamish two years ago.

I texted him back: So now it's not just Instagram, it's texts 2?

A rattle behind me as Mac came in the kitchen.

"I was watching George from the top deck, and it's weird. When he didn't know anyone was watching, he wasn't really limping. Can cats act?"

"His foot's swollen," I said. "The vet had a pretty good look."

"Maybe it's just scarred," Raine said, stirring the soup. "He might have a disability, and sometimes he aches. Like MS? I don't mean that he has MS. I just mean something similar, or feline. You can't let anyone put him down."

"I wasn't planning to," I said. "Although if he starts acting sick, we're going to have to think about Animal Services."

Raine leaned against the counter, looking upset.

"You see what it's done to my diction that you're a writer," she said. "I had to specify I didn't mean an animal could have MS.'"

"Dogs beg for food," Mac said. "Cats are smart. They've got to do it, too."

Instagram from Bob: A photo of azaleas blooming in Stanley Park.

Text to Bob: Oh shut up.

Then I grabbed my jacket.

With the baby due soon, Raine seemed to be feeling tender. Puppies, babies, flowers all made her stoop and coo. I don't remember being like that myself. After a few months of vomiting, I felt on top of things. I was doing something huge and eternal and didn't feel faintly sentimental. When I stopped to think, I suppose I felt awed. But usually I just felt tough.

One memory: I was working for CBC Radio about two minutes before delivering my son. I was huge, wearing a loose retro men's shirt over skinny black sweat pants with lace-up work boots, which is about as much of a look as I can ever manage. And I was running down the hall, a chase producer on As It Happens when we were still working with audio tape. The show was about to go on air and I'd just finished cutting the lead story on one of the old editing machines near the production office. Now I had to deliver it to the studio one floor down.

I can still see the horrified look on the faces of men as I ran down the hall, the stairs, into the studio. Then came the whiskey voice of Elizabeth Grey, who was hosting the show.

"For God's sake, Krueger, are you insane?"

I have absolutely no memory of what the story was about, but I recall feeling both amused and proud of myself. I wasn't going to be subsumed by motherhood.

Which I suppose is another way of not being prepared for your first baby.

Raine didn't normally like cats. Didn't care much for animals generally, except when her friends took them up as a cause. Save the baby seals, save the dolphins, help the fish disappearing from the oceans. She would sign petitions and go to demos. At least she used to, before battling what she insists is a bout of laziness. It isn't agoraphobia, as Mac believes, and isn't low-grade depression, as I fear.

"Will you stop that?" she asks, when I try to talk about it.

"Waiting is hard," I said this morning, as she stood staring out the kitchen window. "I don't just mean waiting for the baby. But with Mac, with MS, it's hard not to wait for the next relapse. Even though he seems so well lately."

"What are those little birds under the feeder?" she asked. "The ones with the white stripes on their heads?"

Distracted, I headed over.

"White-crowned sparrows," I said, feeling a lift. "The spring migration must be heading through."

I'd never seen white-crowned sparrows in the city before, but there were two of them feeding on the ground among the diminished crowd of house sparrows.

"George never goes after birds," Raine said. "Other people must still be feeding him, too. You wonder why they aren't trying to help."

In the pet shop the other day, the pleasant owners gave me a pamphlet from a private animal rescue group that aids feral cats, and we emailed asking for advice. The owners said they might take a while to get back, and they're right. We're still waiting.

"You could put up an Indie Go-Go campaign to try to get money for the vet," Raine said. "I wonder how people would respond to that, versus a campaign to help a homeless person."

Raine spoke without turning. As I stood behind her, a tiny bird dropped down from the lilacs to join the white-crowned sparrows on the ground.

"That's a chipping sparrow," I said. "See its rusty head? I've only ever seen those at the cottage. There must be a mixed flock heading north. That's hopeful, to see them migrating."

Raine didn't seem to be listening.

"You have to wonder," she said, "whether we're getting distracted by helping an individual animal we should be helping bigger causes."

"I never know how you decide what to help," I said, putting an arm around her. "There's so much that needs fixing in the poor old world. Haven't I said that before?"

"If you try to help an individual, you've got more chance of success. You get your victories one by one. On the other hand, that means you don't work on the bigger causes."

"It's true," I said. "But it doesn't mean the bigger things get solved if you work on them."

"What a world to bring a baby into," she said.

Raine was right. What a world. Mothers have probably been saying that forever, and we've always been right. War, famine, plagues. Not to mention glaciers falling off Antarctica and kidnapped schoolgirls used as bargaining chips in Nigeria.

At the same time, we were looking out the window on a beautiful day.

The garden felt new, with daffodils and tulips blooming in clumps and perennials surging through the dark damp soil. A rose-breasted grosbeak had flown onto the platform feeder very early Saturday morning, and an ovenbird touched down briefly on the ground among the tulips. We'd also seen a pair of bright black-and-orange Baltimore orioles on a neighbour's ornamental tree, and a Blackburnian warbler in the lilacs: the spring migration in full flight. Mourning doves are out there now, purple finches, a pair of cowbirds.

Why not bring a baby into the garden? Things are dreadful, and they also aren't.

I squeezed Raine's arm and headed back to my office, on deadline with another script. Yet I was left with our question about how you pick your causes, pick your fights. I still hadn't heard from the cat rescue organization, so I couldn't do much about George. But when I sat down at my desk, I found an electronic petition from one Facebook friend asking me to protest SeaWorld's policy of imprisoning orcas, and soon afterwards received a second about the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram extremists last month.

Another question: Whether online petitions are an efficient way to work on bigger causes while spending your time on small, achievable ones.

What I like to think of as my social media experiment is really a global experiment, and one with extraordinarily mixed results. The Nigerian girls are far from the first young women and children kidnapped by the Boko Haram. (Translation of the name: "Western education is sinful.") But they're the first to become an internet meme, with countless petitions over the past month demanding governments all over the world do something. They've also triggered arguments from cynics that it costs nothing and means less to click AGREE on a petition. It's the lazy person's activism, and what's that going to accomplish?

Well, this:

The White House decried the girls' capture, Western countries lined up to offer military aid and advisors, the Nigerian government finally and reluctantly accepted help—then the Boko Haram tried to capitalize on the attention by demanding a swap: freedom for their imprisoned extremists in exchange for the girls. There was no indication this was their intention before.

Sobering.

It's also macro, huge, rare. What about social media on a micro level?

I looked at my small personal experiment of the past year and didn't see many results. One Monday, I posted a story on my website about how much fun I had playing in a women's hockey tournament that weekend, a fundraiser for the Toronto Furies of the Canadian Women's Hockey League. I thought I'd try to raise a bit more money for the Furies and linked my post to their site.

My website got tons of hits, a huge spike over three days. But few visitors went on to click the Furies site and—to be entirely self-serving—not many more checked out my books and films, while only one person downloaded my e-story, The Hockey Stalker, which I was offering for free.

Of course, some of the visitors had probably already donated to the Furies, and in any case, no blame. But it's clear the majority of people landed on my site (and probably on everyone else's sites) to read something that directly concerned themselves and their people.

It occurred to me that I could make a cat video. Our cat, Archie, hunts a toy mouse every evening, making weird growling noises around the house. We have to warn guests what's going on, he sounds so strange. Then, after he catches his cloth mouse—which isn't all that hard—Archie does his Mouse Dance. It's kind of like a cha cha. He takes one step forward with his left paws, then steps back. Forward on the right, another step back. Forward, back. Forward, back. He always does it four times, then pushes his bum in the air and wiggles it, growling hard, before he repeats the steps over and over.

The Mouse Dance is both hilarious and absurd, and I figured that if I made a video and set it to music, Archie would have a better than a snowball's chance of going viral. But so what? I didn't want to churn out a series of cat videos in an attempt to pull in ads onto my website. I couldn't even be bothered making one. And if I did, most people would probably click on the video, have a laugh, then head off to sign a petition that may or may not have further endangered the kidnapped Nigerian girls.

What a world to bring a baby...

I had no answers, yet as often happened when I'd been asking questions, I ran across writing that reverberates.

I pulled an old New Yorker off the magazine pile last night, and in it was a story called Samsa in Love by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goosen.

Murakami writes: "Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart."

Outside, George was waiting to be fed. I could see him from my study window. In my experience, writers spend a lot of time looking out windows. Then I heard the door open below me and Raine soon came into view, cat food in hand, bent over, cooing.

A week later, the feral cat rescue people still hadn't called back, although I'd left another message. It didn't seem urgent. George wasn't getting skinnier or looking ill, although he was still limping, sometimes quite badly. I was going to get him help, but couldn't stop wondering if he'd just developed a bum paw. Maybe it healed badly from an earlier injury, something that happened during one of his disappearances. Maybe it would always bother him a little, though hopefully not a lot.

"Are you talking about the cat or me?" Mac asked, looking over my shoulder as he came in to grab a pen.

"The cat," I said, not getting it.

"Having a chronic disease?"

It was true. As he headed out, I thought about the way feelings bled from one thing to another. I wanted to help Mac with his MS, which in many ways I couldn't, and I was trying to help George, which maybe I could. Meanwhile, as Mac pointed out, I'd started to see George's problem as chronic, too.

The human mind, always making patterns or looking for them, patterns implying an overall meaning in the universe, some guiding force, Mac's friend God weaving the world.

If that's the case, he had our widesized house hanging on a very long thread, waiting on so many fronts. There was poor limping George, there was the fact I was still waiting to hear from the publishers about my novel many months later, and of course there was Raine, who was sick and tired of being pregnant. She couldn't wait for the baby to be born, but she had another month.

Mac was waiting in a different way, always subtly alert, as if something might be sneaking up on him. Once you'd been diagnosed, you were always waiting for the next attack, the next episode, the next challenge; living your life, but living it in constant awareness of imminent change.

"It was interesting at the neurologist's today," Mac said last night at dinner. "Usually specialists love their drugs. But she was talking about the future of MS being not so much in pharmaceuticals. She said it was in rehab, implants to help you walk. They have braces right now that send electrical jolts to your muscles, but people say they're pretty uncomfortable."

"One of my friends tried those," I said. "He said that wearing them was like sticking your finger in a light socket."

"She says they're going to refine them. They're even going to develop implants. Surgical. I mean, it's not your muscles that don't work, it's your nerves, and she thinks they'll learn to override that."

"You're going to be a cyborg," Raine said.

I would have found that difficult to hear, but Mac brightened up, and the idea seemed to make Raine hopeful. After dinner, they watched the first of the Iron Man films with less irony than Robert Downey demonstrated while playing the lead role (although more than his co-star Gwyneth Paltrow had ever shown in her life).

I thought about the Spanish verb esperar, meaning both to wait and to hope. That seemed to work for them, even though my yoga teacher would say to forget about both and learn to live in the moment.

Trying to live in the moment, standing at the window, I realized that I hadn't seen the chipping sparrow all day. Presumably he was on his way north after chowing down here for a few days. The white-crowned sparrows were still outside, but no other migratory birds had been through for a few days, and I thought I should probably take down the feeders on the weekend.

Remaining wildlife-related chore: sprinkling the tulips with cayenne pepper, as I did with the crocuses. The rain kept washing it off, so I had to make myself ridiculous every morning, massaging cayenne into the tulip stems. I bought such a big bag of it the other day, other shoppers noticed.

"Does cayenne fight cancer?" one woman asked.

"I think that's turmeric," I said. "Although I'm not sure if it really works."

Suddenly an e-mail pinged in from the cat rescue people, a volunteer asking whether I'd like a list of low-cost vet clinics.

Yes, please, I replied.

Finally I was driving George in for treatment. A veterinary clinic in Scarborough recommended by the feral cat rescue people had offered to take care of his injured foot for one-third the price asked by our exorbitant vet.

One slight problem. After I talked with people at the clinic, George pulled one of his semi-disappearing acts. For more than a week, I only saw him when I had such a busy day that I had no time to take him in. Yowl outside, food in the bowl, ear scratch, bye-bye buddy. You'd almost think he knew.

Then the stars aligned. A couple of days ago, I was congratulating myself on getting through a bundle of work when George yowled for his breakfast. Heading outside, I thought he looked a little better, his recent scratches healing nicely, his paw no longer quite so swollen. For a moment, I wondered if George had turned a corner, although he still limped over to the food bowl, favouring his right foot.

In a weird way, I was also conscious of people who had emailed or texted or messaged me after reading what I'd written about poor George online. Treating him had become a social imperative—a social media imperative—even though I might otherwise have watched his paw for a while longer. I thought of George Eliot's Middlemarch: how Dr. Lydgate had used "the expectant method" in treating Mr. Trumbull's pneumonia. In other words, given the primitive state of early 19th century medicine, he had opted not to poison Mr. Trumbull with mercury pills, but monitor his health instead.

In the 21st century, I felt compelled to override the expectant method, skip yoga class, let George finish his breakfast and pour him bum-first into the carrier. Out the Danforth we drove, heading well east before turning north to the clinic, where kind Dr. Singh told me they'd anaesthetize George to do X-rays, take blood samples and vaccinate him against common feline diseases.

As we spoke, George crouched in the carrier, looking frightened but letting me scratch his forehead through the mesh.

"Sorry, buddy," I told him, and left.

Long story short. I picked George up later that day, and learned that the X-rays showed nothing wrong with George's paw or leg. Nor had Dr. Singh had found any significant swelling or signs of infection. Sucking my cheeks, I figured that George's paw must have been infected when the swelling was so noticeable, and the antibiotic injection given by our exorbitant vet must have cured him. He had indeed been getting better. The expectant method would have worked.

"But he's still limping," I told Dr. Singh. "He limps to his food bowl. And I don't think cats fake it and beg like dogs. Or do they?"

Dr. Singh shook his head.

"But we sometimes see declawed cats limping years later," he told me. It was as if they remembered the pain after it was gone, he said. A body memory.

"Or maybe the pain is chronic?" I asked. "And we just can't measure it, or detect it with X-rays?"

Dr. Singh looked dubious, and told me the good news. Unlike most feral cats, George was not feline immunodeficiency virus positive, and his overall health was good. They'd vaccinated him against FIV and rabies, given him an anti-flea shot and, to my surprise, neutered him. The package deal, so to speak.

"Sorry, buddy," I said again, as George crouched there, looking stoned.

So this is what happened: One vet had treated George's problem, curing his infection, while the second had treated a societal problem, preventing a male cat from adding to the feral community that bred in the alleyways and decimated the songbird population (even though George didn't seem to indulge himself).

My pal George hadn't asked for any of this, but he was both helped and—probably in his own estimation, if he could have formed it—not helped at all. Poor George, acted upon by bigger creatures armed with anaesthetic and whatever the vet used to snip. Driving home, I thought I'd done the right thing, but George's feral life wasn't going to be quite as, hum, satisfying as before. Less of an upside? You always get more than you ask for, at least if you don't get less.

Confession: the feral cat rescue people had told me that if we neutered George, we might be able to adopt him as a house cat. I'd been thinking about that, since obviously I was fond of George, but the moment I brought him inside and opened the door of the carrier, George ran out yowling and began throwing himself at the kitchen window, clawing the glass, frantic, trying to get outside. I spoke calmly and tried to pat him, but he hissed and bucked at me, and ran through the kitchen to throw himself at the back door.

Hearing the commotion, Raine came in.

"He's going to hurt himself," she said.

"The feral cat people say to keep them inside for at least three days after they've been neutered," I told her. "Adoption aside."

Yowl. Crash. Crash.

"I don't think he wants to be adopted," Raine said.

I let George out. The receptionist at the clinic had told me I could release him, despite what the cat rescue people advised, and I figured he'd be okay. Dr. Singh had estimated George's age at five years, so he'd been living rough for a while.

Once outside, George ran down on the path, sat by the garage and washed his face, then trotted over to a gap in the fence. There, as usual, he lifted his tail and sprayed, or tried to, and took off.

In fact, the receptionist was wrong. Dr. Singh called the next morning to check up on George, and when I said I'd released him, he suggested that I try to find him and bring him inside, or at least check up on him. George should be monitored for several days.

Luckily, I spotted him immediately in the alley, and George looked fine. Seeing me, he slipped into a crevice in a pile of old lumber beside a neighbour's garage, evidently one of his hidey holes. Moving in, I saw his yellow eyes glaring out. A hiss: Thanks a lot, lady.

But today George returned to the yard for some food, and he's been out on the deck since then, lying in the sun, washing his bum, clearly getting better. So maybe we have one happy ending. 
The Hell Button

A happy ending, I wrote. Then someone pressed the Hell button. Mac was having an awful MS attack, unable to walk, upstairs in bed on punitive doses of steroids as the doctors tried to get him back on his feet. Raine plodded upstairs carrying trays of food, the baby dropped and ready to deliver. She was red-faced in the heat and puffing with stress and effort. This is how bad it was: the neurologist called the house to ask how Mac was doing. The neurologist.

At the same time, a good friend took a call about a routine mammogram. They'd found an area of thickening in her breast where the tissue was normal in her mammogram of two years ago. She worked in health care. She told me this sounded like an aggressive cancer and couldn't help feeling frantic as she waited for an appointment with the oncologist. Why couldn't he call? They told her she'd have an appointment in a week to ten days.

After she hung up, she wondered if they meant they'd book an appointment within ten days or if she'd see an oncologist within ten days. It was driving her crazy, but she was afraid to call back, in case they put her down as needy and annoying. Medical alert: Start rolling your eyes about this one. Be nicer to the patient patients.

When things go wrong big time, you're supposed to count your blessings. Instead, I started bracing myself every time the phone rang, crossing myself whenever I heard an ambulance—and I'm not Catholic, so I was probably doing it backwards—meanwhile fretting about the government's approval of the northern gas pipeline, the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria who'd dropped out of the news, the fact that Mayor Rob Ford was still walking among us.

There was also the fact that George was missing in action, and the publisher who'd had the manuscript of my novel for eight months finally answered two polite emails spaced a month apart and a follow-up phone message by saying they had just started reading the book, apologies for the delay, but the house was experiencing slowdowns in the Current Climate, and if I wanted to send it elsewhere, I should go ahead.

"If we end up liking your book, then you might be in the enviable position of playing one editor off another, working for a better advance."

I'm eliding their difficulties under the useful heading Current Climate, which everyone was struggling with lately. Of course, an editor would make me put it in lower case, but I didn't have an editor, just an additional hit of stress as I fretted about the wisdom of signing with a publishing house experiencing such high levels of Climate, presuming they liked the book.

The neurologist called on the land line, and when I answered, she told me Mac wasn't answering his cell. I walked the receiver upstairs, looking in their apartment to find Raine and Mac curled up napping on the bed, looking as innocent as springtime.

"They're asleep," I whispered. "Do you want me to wake them up?"

"That isn't necessary," the neurologist said. A brilliant woman by all accounts, brisk but thorough. As I tiptoed back downstairs, she paused, one of those thick pauses where you can hear someone's thoughts as clearly as words.

Patient confidentiality. Found two seconds to call in day, week, month, year cut into 15-minute increments. Want information. Hate wasting phone call. Did patient ever mention partner's mother and reliability thereof?

"He's been staying in bed," I said, back on the second floor. "As he told me you advised. He's feeling the MS exhaustion, maybe amplified, but he's taking it philosophically, not acting stressed."

Unlike Raine, but she's not your patient, so we won't go into that.

"He has some heartburn and indigestion, but I gather that's a common side effect of prednisone. He was able to get up to go to the bathroom this morning, one of us on either side. He thinks his legs worked a little better, although it's only been a day. And he's on the pills for five, I believe."

"Five days," the neurologist agreed cautiously.

I wanted to ask, Why has this happened? He'd woken up two days ago and his legs didn't work. Raine batted into our room, crying, panting, making me think she was in labour and panicking, which I wouldn't have expected. When we ran upstairs, we found Mac lying apologetically in bed, paralyzed from the hips down. He wasn't supposed to have such a major loss of function so early after diagnosis, was he? I knew that having an attack means he'd developed a new lesion in his brain. So this must have been a bad one, right? Blocking neural signals to his legs. But why did it happen now? Did Mac tell us the unvarnished truth when he said you felt sure the prednisone would calm the lesion and restore neural functioning, meaning his ability to walk? What about something he mumbled? That you said steroids usually calm one attack, probably two, maybe even a third, but afterwards they stop working. Will he ultimately lose the ability to walk? When? He was only twenty-six. Wasn't this whole thing radically unfair?

I knew the answers to most of these questions, and understood that despite more than a decade of training and another in practice, the neurologist didn't know anything about the cause and prognosis of multiple sclerosis. They knew very little about MS, including what set it off in the first place.

"Is there anything else I might be able to help you with?" I asked.

"If Mac has any questions, he can call the office, but it sounds as if he's doing well."

What does it look like when you're not doing well? Maybe I didn't want to know that. Probably I'd know it if I saw it.

"MS is such an awful disease," I said.

"It sucks," she replied, and signed off.

Day two on steroids. Mac could bend his legs now. They were locked straight out at first, his muscles taut, the skin weirdly shiny. A new word: spastic.

Of course it's not new. I just hadn't had any reason to think about it for years. When I was a kid, it was one of the chief insults. You're a spazz, he's a spazz. Mar-y Brid-ley is a spazz, is a spazz, is a spazz. Mary Bridley is a spazz, all the livelong day.

Magical thinking said this was punishment, childhood insults coming back to bite you. How ridiculous to catch yourself thinking that when, in the first place, I wasn't the one with MS, and in the second, I was often the spazz: a tall, clumsy kid, bad at sports, one of the last to be picked for a team.

"I find the way it really works a lot more interesting," I told Mac. He was lying in bed, bored and wanting company while Raine was at the doctor's. "The way things ping off each other in weird directions. Which is just as well for writers. Otherwise we'd all be writing one story."

"I thought there were two stories. A stranger comes to town, or buddy left home."

"But then you get the pings," I said. "Look, even though I was terrible at sports, I always did my best. Maybe I hoped they wouldn't rag me too badly. So I got in the habit of trying really hard, even though I'd also absorbed the feeling that I wouldn't ever be any good. And it's true, I have no athletic talent. I have a deficit of athletic talent.

"But good habits help. I tell my students that you need good habits—you need discipline—as much as you need talent. With both of them, you're golden. But with only one of them, I'm still playing hockey when a lot of people my age have packed it in. I'm still going to yoga. I've never been able to cross my legs behind my head, and my god, on the ice..."

"No more hat tricks," Mac said.

"Never any hat tricks. But I'm probably in better shape than far more naturally athletic people who quit years ago because they weren't as good as they had been, and they hated that. I don't really care how good I am. I mean, as long as I can help the team, and feel I'm doing my best."

"Negative causality," Mac said. "Kids called you a spazz, and when you're old, you're not."

Old, I thought.

My husband was reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty, one of those hugely-praised bestsellers like Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time that no one but my husband and five other people ever read. Piketty apparently argues that the economy works differently than most academics think. They speak of economic growth as if it's inevitable, when Piketty's data shows that in early modern Europe, for instance, prices remained stable for more than 200 years. When the world economy took off in the 20th century, he thinks it wasn't because of social policy or political factors, but because of the economic weirdness caused by two unprecedented world wars.

My husband wasn't usually the type to read the end of books first—and how strange to flip to the end in a book about economics instead of, say, a mystery. (Guilty, moi.) But he flipped forward to find that apparently Piketty refuses to make any economic predictions.

"He says his data proves what I've always heard, that nothing ever moves in a straight line, meaning you can't predict anything."

"MS isn't predictable," Mac said.

"Good. I mean, that you're thinking that. If I were lying there, I'd probably be thinking that things were going to proceed along some sort of straight line. Or engage in magical thinking, like I say. Calling Mary Bridley a spazz—which I did do—is what made my legs go spastic."

"God is testing me," Mac said.

In the silence, I heard chips from the nest a pair of house sparrows has built every year in the cavity made by a dislodged brick in our neighbours' wall.

Day three. I was heading for the stairs, carrying a mug of tea and a vase of flowers, concentrating on a scene in the script I was writing—should probably put the woman in the car as my man stole it—when I tripped. My feet flew out from under me and I lunged into the newel post, mug and vase flinging, flying, shattering as I fell. I ended up on the floor in the middle of water and glass, my right arm electric with pain.

After the crash, the silence seemed so round, I felt as if I was inside an ear. Then feet pounded upstairs as a friend staying in the basement raced toward me.

"Mac, are you all right?"

She stopped when she saw me on the floor, levering myself onto all fours. Or at least, all threes.

"I can't break my arm," I said. "I need to be able to drive."

Through my dizziness, I realised she was bending over me.

"Mac's been very good about staying in bed," I told her. "I think he prays a lot."

"Did you hit your head?"

My friend was a nurse. I held up my arm, where there was nothing disgusting like a protruding bone, although it hurt like hell and was already turning interesting colours. A brief touch of hand on head, then my friend went into the kitchen and came back with that ancient wise-woman remedy, a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a dish towel.

"Let's get you into a chair," she said, "and put this on your arm."

Nausea joined the dizziness when I got up. I put my head back down, saying, "I think I'm going into shock."

Her face appeared upside down in front of me.

"You're green," she confirmed.

Suddenly I realized that Raine was in the doorway, vibrating with worry. Mother time: I was afraid that the stress would send her into labour.

"I don't think it's broken, though," I said, rotating my wrist. "I'll be all right."

"Could be a hairline fracture," my friend said, and insisted we get it checked.

We were off to the clinic as soon as I could keep myself upright, and as soon as we walked through the door and saw a roomful of people, we knew it would be a long wait. My friend settled into her Sudoku, while I held my throbbing arm to my chest and engaged in my favourite pastimes, rubbernecking and eavesdropping.

Most people in the crowded room were quiet, stoic, a teenage boy periodically getting up to hop on one foot to the washroom. His other foot looked reasonably swollen. Some people came in complaining of fevers and the receptionist told them to wear masks, which they pulled from a dispenser. One man told the receptionist he had shoulder pain after portaging a canoe a couple of weeks ago "and they won't go away." His shoulders? The portage zombies who've been following him ever since? He said pain, not pains.

"That old lady has been in the bathroom for a long time," my friend said, although I hadn't seen her look up from her Sudoku. "I wonder if we should get them to check."

Shortly afterwards, the lady came out, pushing her walker. Behind me, a woman said, "He's not going to win any prizes for thinking."

When I turned, I saw that she was reading a newspaper with Mayor Rob Ford on the front page. The woman showed her husband the photo where Ford spoke from a prepared statement while a shirtless protester raised his hands behind him.

By the time I saw the doctor, the throbbing had subsided, my joints all moved and I was pretty sure my arm wasn't broken. A quick prod from the doctor and two X-rays confirmed this. However, the doctor said I was badly contused, and warned me not to lift anything heavy or type for a couple of days. The swelling meant I would work with my wrist at an odd angle to the keyboard. That could lead to problems later, which the contusion itself would not.

An hour and a half after we arrived at the clinic, my friend, my Popeye forearm and I went home. Luckily, Raine wasn't in labour when we got there. The baby was ready, but it would be better if Mac were back on his feet when the time came, and the midwife with it. Everything looked normal and I felt fortunate, sitting down to my interrupted cup of tea.

Yet I still felt rattled, and stayed that way, perfectly steady on my feet but afraid of falling and really breaking something this time. I grew aware of unevenness in the backyard cobbles, of the tremendous power of cars when I went out to shop. I kept thinking, This is how old people must feel. The last time I'd thought that, I was in the final couple of weeks of pregnancy, puffing my way up stairs that I usually took two at a time. I hoped the feeling is just as temporary, although I kept thinking about Mac saying casually, Old.

I also started thinking about someone we knew in Rio de Janeiro, a Brazilian colleague of my husband's who stood in their office one day looking exhausted. Her brother-in-law, a real state agent, had been murdered two weeks before, shot to death while he showed someone a condo. Shootings like that happened so often in Rio, it hadn't even made the media. Not long before, her apparently-healthy father had complained of a headache. He was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and died six weeks later. This was about the same time that her sister's husband had walked out on the sister and their children, going off with his puta namorada and refusing to pay child support. They couldn't do anything about it, since his family had more money than theirs, and he would pay off the judge to get what he wanted, and would pay off more judges if they tried to appeal.

"Nothing nice ever happens in our family anymore," she said.

The hell button. I had to get them to stop pushing it. The baby was due any second.

I've now been writing about daily life for more than a year. Not just writing my diary but blogging online, although I find the word so ugly, I try not to use it.

Every time I have to type blog, blogged, blogging, it makes me think of a walk I took one morning years ago through the woods of New England. This was outside Newton, Mass. at the cool start of spring, and I remember hugging my arms around a home-knit sweater. The sky was a pale oyster colour and the bare trees were so slender and uniform they looked like palisades. I ambled down a trail that was soft with tattered beige leaves. It felt walked-on for centuries, and the air had been breathed by so many people, it seemed thin and used up.

The trail headed downhill and soon grew more boggy. When it reached a low point, I was surprised to see four or five handsome waxy yellow plants spiralling out of the ground ahead of me. They were pushing the leaves aside to expose the rich damp soil, and in the middle of this exhausted place, they struck me as fresh and cheery.

They were skunk cabbages. The prosaic name sabotaged the romantic feelings I was trying to have about springtime and promise and la la la. Blog strikes me as even more prosaic, truly vomitous. You're spewing, your tongue hanging out. Blawww. A lot of people spew online, but that's not what I intended when I started to write.

Instead, I wanted to record the dailyness of life in a rapidly-changing world. Since I think of myself as an observer, I pictured myself looking out at the world from a stable centre, a battened-down house in the middle of the storm. I was already preoccupied by questions of justice, given the way that hugely powerful commercial juggernauts—energy conglomerates, interweb giants, security bullies like Halliburton—now operate far beyond the realm of national regulation and apparently of human sympathy, allowing the famous One Per Cent to trample the other ninety-nine people as they frack, pollute and grab artistic rights, meanwhile keeping the majority of the money for themselves.

How fascinating, I thought, to live in this hinge time, in such interesting times, to be granted overwhelmingly historic material to write about—and the opportunity to slip in a little mild online promotion of my next novel, preparing the ground for publication within a year, a year and a half. Because isn't that what you're supposed to do these days to have a career?

More than a year later, I know precisely how arrogant it is to assume that you can stand outside historic forces, that you can batten down your house; how presumptuous it is to believe that what happens to other people isn't going to happen to you.

My novel isn't coming out any time soon, even if the editor who's been sitting on it for the past eight months decides to take it. With publishers reeling from the disruption caused by online retailing, I'm far from the only writer in this position, and it's hardly the worst problem facing our family. But it hurts not to be able to reach an audience, and makes me consider a) giving up on publishers and b) fixing up the downstairs apartment where my nurse friend is now happily vacationing. After she goes home, we can consider listing it on Airbnb, making a little more money that way—at least if the conglomerates don't buy Airbnb first, or get it legislated it out of existence.

Far more complex, of course, is the unexpected widesizing of our house, the gathering-in of family in these difficult economic times, the need for succour when illness hits. Even when families aren't living together, we need to rely on each other more than we have for a generation, which proves to be both greatly cheering and unpredictably difficult.

Sorry about your damn arm.

I got that text from Bob only hours after writing about my fall, and it confirmed what I'd begun to suspect. Since moving to Vancouver, Bob has used his new mastery of online technology to read what I wrote when he lived with us. Now he keeps in touch by sending one-line texts and Instagram photos, but he doesn't tell us anything about his new life, whatever job he's picked up or the woman he might or might not be living with, presumably so I won't be able to write about that, too.

The truth is, Bob has been in and out of my life ever since I was ten years old. He'll be around for a few months, then he'll disappear, sometimes for years. I think it upset Raine when she was little, but these days she seems relieved he's not around, and pleased that he's happy somewhere else.

Yet I can't help feeling that I've spewed. Maybe I've been ugly as the word blog. The main thing about life these days? It's getting harder to do what you want while avoiding doing what the insidious They want. We mean to be good, clicking online petitions in protest, but we tend to get lost as they bombard us with ads for things we don't need, spy through our webcams—I'm completely sure they do—send trains loaded with unstable fuels through the world's northern lungs or our own backyards.

How can we fight everything that needs fighting? What difference does one voice make?

What happened to the Nigerian schoolgirls?

So many stories these days end without ending. A book remains unpublished, a brother is lost to friendlier streets, Malaysian airplanes and African schoolgirls go mysteriously missing as we're trapped in the traumatic dailyness of life.

Mac was much better. At least there was that. Day four on steroids and he could walk almost as well as ever, although he said his stomach was sloshing with acid and he liked Ativan a little too much. Prednisone tends to keep you awake so the neurologist prescribed Ativan to help him sleep. He said it gave him splendid dreams where he flew over rivers.

"I don't have an addictive personality," he said, "I'll get off it."

"I think I'm addictive," Raine said. "I'm extreme. That's why it's better for me to give things up than to covet. If I start to covet something, I can't stop thinking about it. So it's better to renounce, then to renounce thinking about renunciation."

Raine has been knitting baby clothes and sewing onesies out of my mother's estate: the light summer sweaters that I kept as part of my abortive project to make Mom quilts for the family. Raine and Mac long ago cleaned out the attic closet at the front of their upstairs eyrie to put in a Goodwill crib, and she made a mobile that stirs lightly in a breeze from the open window. The fashion may be for $500 strollers these days, but when our son was born, he slept in my husband's old footlocker with the lid taken off, and it didn't stunt his growth. The baby will do just as well in his or her eyrie, I nervously predict.

On the one hand, my damn arm still hurts. On the other, we've had more good news. My friend with the suspect mammogram called to say that she never had to see the oncologist. Instead, he sent her for another mammogram, and the radiologist read it while she waited. He called the oncologist, then handed her the phone so the oncologist could tell her it was just a fatty deposit in her breast. No problem. He'd see her in six months.

"I feel like a fifty pound weight just fell off my shoulders," she said.

Raine looked into my study.

"I've decided I don't want you with me while I'm in labour," she said. "I want to do it myself. I mean with Mac and the midwife, but also by myself."

"I did, too," I said, and turned around to see her face. "You don't like me saying that. You want to be different. Which you are."

"There's too much togetherness around here," she said. "Especially with people coming upstairs to see Mac."

"He's bored."

"He's better," she said.

"People stood too much togetherness for centuries. The way the economy is going, we might have to stand it for a few more."

"If we make it that long," she said.

Day five, and Mac had finished the prednisone, back to walking well. A quick trip to the coffee shop tired him out so much that he had to sit on the living room sofa afterwards, but he was still so much better than he had been that I expected Raine to go into labour any second. I didn't really think you could control it that way, but I also believed there was some reptilian under-brain that kicked in.

Nothing happened. Raine's due date passed, and long days after it. Her face grew drawn and her ankles swollen, although not enough that you could leave the impression of a finger in the swelling. She looked peeved, which is what I remember feeling. Maybe nature holds back for a moment too long so you actually want to go into labour, you're avid for it, which would otherwise be insane.

The knock sounded on the door when I was in the kitchen making tea. Opening up, mug in hand, I found the midwife grappling with her gear. Despite having pictured this moment for months, I was shocked to see her, and not just because Raine and Mac hadn't warned me she was on her way.

I'd met the midwife a couple of times before, but now she looked like a slightly different person, as if she were her own sister. I both recognized her and didn't. Was her hair shorter? Maybe, although it was dyed the same raspberry red shade as before. I thought the subtle brown tattoo of an hourglass on her neck might be new, but it was more than that. The midwife struck me as far more attractive, and I wondered if the energy of an imminent birth had electrified her features.

"Sally, right?" I asked.

Footsteps clattered down the stairs. It was Mac, moving far faster than he'd done for a while, although I noticed the clatter was slightly out of rhythm, one leg stronger than the other.

"Come on up," he said, smiling at the midwife, and giving me an apologetic look.

"I'll be here if you need me," I said, which didn't seem to be the correct thing to say in front of a midwife. "Emotionally," I added.

More waiting, this time charged. I called my husband and left a message; he was in a meeting. Paced. Paced.

Sobbing. I heard a child's loud sobbing, uncontrolled and abandoned, yet the timbre said it was an adult sobbing her guts out. Surely that wasn't Raine?

No, it came from outside, from the alleyway out back. I slipped upstairs into my study, with its length of wavery old windows, craning my head out to see what was happening.

The weeping was growing louder but the alleyway was empty. The sight of the sunny, empty alley badly unnerved me badly. I thought about the Weeping Woman of Mexico, who roams the streets and cornfields at night crying for her people, a revenant of the ancient indigenous cultures who is said to weep for the many headless victims of the narcos even today. Now her northern sister was wailing through the alleys of Toronto. A baby coming and this was what I heard. How can we bring children into the world? Raine had asked. When it might be ending.

Then a young man trudged into view, a backpack correctly on his back like a hiker or a schoolboy. Dogging not far behind him was a woman about his age, early twenties, wearing normal athletic clothes but weeping uncontrollably as she followed. The young man stared straight ahead, and picked up his pace just before he passed temporarily out of sight behind our garage. The woman stopped just before it, bending over double and sobbing even harder, although that didn't seem possible. I couldn't see her face, just shoulders wracked by a two-year-old's howling misery.

The young man reappeared on the other side of the garage and continued down the alley. Split screen: the bent-over woman weeping on one side of the garage, the man walking quickly south on the other. Not long after he walked out of sight, the woman sprinted after him, still in a crouch. Seconds later, she vanished, too.

I was still standing there when the vanished woman's sobs suddenly rose in volume and grew weirdly strangled. Was he hurting her? I half turned to run outside when I saw the counsellor from the boys' home on the corner to the south of us standing half-hidden behind the home's garage, staring intently down the alley. The driver's door of his car was open, and I wondered if he'd just got out or had been ready to get in. Seconds later, a middle-aged woman came out of a house across the alley, crossing her yard and a rear parking pad with her arms hugged tightly over her chest. The woman and the counsellor exchanged a glance, and both stepped into the alley to make their presence known. But they didn't seem to see anything that required them to intervene, at least not yet.

As the weirdly strangled wails continued, I realized a teenage boy from the home was hovering behind the counsellor's car. Before long, he slipped forward as if pulled into the alley, not wanting to miss out on whatever was going on. After a long moment, the weird wailing abruptly stopped, the sobs became diminishing gulps, and the teenage boy let out a jeering laugh. The counsellor came over and put his arm around the boy, urging him into the car. The woman walked back into her parking pad and through her back gate, which clicked shut after her. The boy and the counsellor drove away.

Five or ten minutes later, as I sat restlessly behind my desk, the young man and the woman trudged silently back up the alley, walking side by side. They didn't touch each other and stared straight ahead, and in a few minutes they vanished once again.

Labour, hour six. It wasn't long for a first baby, although I didn't know how far along Raine had been when they called the midwife. Periodic grunts and moans fell through the ceiling, and although it wasn't my business to keep track, the pains were now about five minutes apart.

Then came a loud shriek, followed by a wail. "MOOOOMMMMM!"

I batted upstairs, racing into their apartment finding Mac holding Raine as she bent over double from her latest contraction. I was on the other side by the time she straightened up, and she took my hand. Sally, the midwife, had stepped aside for me.

"I can do this," Raine panted.

"Of course you can," all three of us said at once.

"Jinx!" Sally called. "Pinch, poke, you owe me a Coke. Except, not really."

We all smiled, even Raine.

"It's funny how little it hurts in between," she said, leaning against me. I pushed her sweaty hair back and kissed her forehead.

"If you can lie down for a sec, I'll have a look how far you're dilated," said Sally. "Last time she was eight centimetres," she told me.

After Raine lay down, Sally checked and said, "Still eight."

"After a contraction like that?" Raine asked.

"Mmmm," Sally said.

"You mean that wasn't huge?" Raine said, sounding a little panicked.

"Let's see what the next one does," Sally said.

To distract Raine, I asked Sally, "Did you change your hair? Something suits you."

"I had a nose job," Sally said.

That was it. Sally ran a finger along her new nose, which was now an adolescent-style ski jump. I don't remember thinking there was anything actually deformed about her old nose, although it was admittedly a bit of a honker.

"Well, you look great," I said.

I also couldn't help wondering if there was some sort of a trend among midwives, or if plastic surgeons had offered them a deal. In my weekly hockey league, one of the most popular players was a midwife who had disappeared for several weeks. Since she played even when she was expecting one of her clients to go into labour, people grew uneasy, especially since her closest friends were obviously keeping mum.

When she finally showed up at the pub where we have a pint after our games, she looked thinner and moved stiffly. "I had abdominal surgery," she said, which worried everybody even more. Another very popular player had died a year earlier, having fought ovarian cancer for eight years.

"Oh all right," the woman said. "I had a tummy tuck."

She unzipped her jeans and pulled them open, revealing a black, corset-like girdle latched in front that she said extended halfway down her thighs. As she lifted her top to show how far up it went, a man who had been coming into the pub executed a perfect U-turn and headed back out.

"I had a hernia done at the same time, and there's been some fluid build-up, so I'm going to have to wear it for a while. There's a gap like in Spanx where you pee and poo."

"It's actually pretty sexy," another hockey player said.

"I know. The receptionist at the doctor's office says there's a woman who comes in once a year to get a new one. Her husband likes it."

As I told my story, Raine asked the midwife, "Am I allowed to laugh?"

"Whatever works," Sally said, and Raine collapsed into another contraction.

"When we moved to Rio," she said afterwards, as she straightened. "You tell it. I was only a baby. It's your story."

"You know that plastic surgery is popular in Brazil, right?" I asked, and Sally nodded. "When we got there, the plastic surgeons were running a billboard campaign to encourage people not to drive after getting nose jobs. When they couldn't wear their glasses? I can't remember the exact translation, but it was something like, Eyes open!"

"I got laser surgery beforehand," Sally said.

Midwifery struck me as an excellent job for Raine, one of the helping professions, and if you could afford all that surgery, it must have been pretty lucrative.

"One of my friends in Rio got a nose job," I said. "She wore her glasses attached to a baseball cap so they could sit slightly away from her nose."

"How did it look?" Sally asked.

"You know, she did this whole self-improvement thing, so it's hard to separate the nose. She lost a lot of weight, changed her hair, and she got this Brazilian fashion-plate friend to consult on her wardrobe. She was Spanish, from the north of Spain, quite fair, but she was the opposite of the clichéd Euro-sophisticate. Afterwards, she looked..."

I tried to think how.

"Californian?"

"Cool," Sally said. "My nose got me a new girlfriend."

"Isn't she a bit superficial?" Raine asked. "Not to have liked you before?"

She had another loud panting contraction, as if to escape what she'd said, but Sally looked unoffended.

"Yeah," she said afterward. "But she's hot."

Nine centimetres.

Raine let loose a great howl. Her labour was peaking now, and we were all tense. No more talking. Not much respite between contractions. Raine yowled with pain every fifty seconds, huge cries that you would have heard a hundred years ago in houses like ours, perhaps even in this one, but which ring out mostly in hospitals now. I glanced at the door to the deck, but the midwife had already closed it. Someone might have called the police. Birth sounded like murder. As, once, it could be.

Mac crouched away from Raine's agony, looking dizzy. Sally nodded her head curtly to signal him even further away, and Raine made no objection. She probably didn't notice. I swiped back her sweaty hair and put ice chips on her lips.

"Soon?" she asked, coming off the last contraction. "I feel like I have to push."

Sally gave a quick look.

"So push," she said, and Raine gave a great prolonged grunt, holding my hand so tightly I thought my fingers would break off, and didn't care.

"Push!" Sally said, and Raine bore down with her teeth gritted, giving another huge tenor groan.

"You're doing so well, baby," I said, feeling a bone-deep, mystical excitement as she brought a new person into the world.

"Push!" Sally called.

Oh, it was true, life was hard. Wars killed babies, killed innocents each day, while gang violence bloodied the streets. Climate change, pollution, ice storms, droughts—all this bearing down on us. Plastic swirled through the oceans, while huge hungry trawlers fished out its bounty. Years after the Great Recession began, the pundits still talked about worldwide economic volatility. Unemployment rates wouldn't go down, Raine's friends were scrabbling for work, and right here in front of me, Mac still had MS.

What a world, I thought. What a world.

"Push!" Sally chanted. "Push!"

And one so filled with beauty.

"The head's crowning!" Sally called. "What a lot of dark hair!"

Raine hadn't used painkillers. She was unflinching about this, about facing everything, and she paid for it in blood and pain.

"Great job," Sally called. "Keep it up. You're almost there."

And then she was, and a baby slid out, giving a good strong cry. Mac rushed over and reached for the little blood-streaked child, adoration lighting his face.

"Thank God," he said fervently.

"So beautiful," I sobbed, as Raine raised her arms and Mac gently handed her their child. Black hair, a grimace.

Hope was once again born into the world.

A girl.
Lesley Krueger is the author of seven previous books. Her most recent novel was The Corner Garden, called "masterful" by the Ottawa Citizen. It was published by Penguin Canada and is now available as an e-book. She is also the author of the novels Drink the Sky and Poor Player, the short story collection, Hard Travel, and two non-fiction books, Foreign Correpondences and Contender. She is also the author of an upcoming children's book, Johnny Bey and the Mizzenglass World.

Please visit Lesley's webpage, www.lesleykrueger.com or connect with her on Facebook.
