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  October was a hard light, she thought. It found people out and pierced right through them. One time, when she was young, she’d swept up a nest of field mice from under the grain bin by accident and the little babies had scattered over the boards. They’d been naked and translucent and curled like leaves and the hard white light from the window had pierced right through their bodies so she could see their little hearts fluttering inside then her father had come in as she tried to gather them up and said, it’s too late, you can’t put them back now, your smell is on them, what’s done is done, and so she’d gone out behind the barn and crushed them with a stone.

  Dr. Zagar’s mouth moved and words came out. Treatment. Care. Possibility. Annika thought about the mice and how nothing could ever go back to the way it was and how she had to crush them even though she hadn’t wanted to.

  A hand waved in front of her eyes. “Annika? Annika? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She blinked. It was too bright. The silence roared all around her.

  “Can you acknowledge that you hear me? I need to know that you understand.”

  Annika looked into the Doctor’s face and there was a horrible blank feeling and then it snapped to, a kind of knowing, as if the hard light pierced right through the doctor as well, illuminating the most intimate details of her life. For years, Annika had assumed that Dr. Zagar was a lesbian until Hamish, whose parents travelled in the doctor’s circle, informed her that the androgynous German was in fact married to a man and had two children.

  Annika had never been able to picture what this other woman’s life was like, yet now here it was, all at once, right there and so very obvious: Dr. Zagar driving home eating nuts and yoghurt in the car, ordering her kids around as she made dinner, having a glass of wine with a weedy academic husband, going to bed and waking up and coming to work again and going home again. Oh yes, it was right in front of her face, the traffic and the turkey at Thanksgiving and the ageing parents and the phone calls across the ocean. A life full of motion and people and tasks, in the hard light, right there.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  And why is it that one life fills up as another empties? Why is it that one is brimming and bursting at the seams while another winds down and shrinks to a desk and a couch in a tiny apartment, that one goes forward, ever forward into the loud, busy bluster of the world and another is sucked back into a bubble of silence as bright and unforgiving as the pale October sun? “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why?” Annika repeated. Her own voice came from far away. It seemed important that this question be answered although she wasn’t entirely sure what she was asking.

  “Well, it’s hard to say why, exactly,” the doctor began slowly. “In terms of what causes it at the cellular level, it’s the mutation of a proto-onco gene which is the gene responsible for cell division; the mutation causes uncontrolled cell-division, so you get a tumor.” Her voice gained confidence as she entered the certainties of science.

  “As to the why the gene mutates in the first place . . . there could be a whole host of reasons.”

  Annika blinked in the hard-white light.

  “Genetics play a part, certainly. Environment. Certain chemicals. Carcinogens. And then there are the lifestyle culprits: drinking, smoking, stress. But at the end of the day it’s impossible to say, exactly, because our genes are mutating all the time. If people were to live long enough, eventually we’d all die of cancer. At the end of the day, it’s a game of probability. Chance.

  Chance. Genes. Small, scattering things. Like baby mice, like the seeds across the floor . . . Behold the sower went out to sow . . . in her mind she could see the hard light in that old Church with its plain windows. Why did she think of it now? Other Churches had stained glass windows that were beautiful and ornate and threw patterns of colour into the aisles but in Rose Prairie the windows had been bare, and the sun used to come in hard on Sunday mornings and make all the faces ugly and some fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up . . . She shook her head. Stop, she thought. Stop.

  “Just breathing oxygen introduces free radicals into the blood. Highly reactive molecules that cause all kinds of chemical reactions. I sometimes tell people, the number one cause of cancer, is life.” Dr. Zagar barked a short dry laugh, then stopped.

  And others fell among the thorns and the thorns came up and choked them out . . . It was as if the preacher’s voice was still there, twenty years later, alive inside her brain. Why did it come to her now? She didn’t believe those things anymore. She’d left that life behind. Again, she shook her head. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. Focus, she told herself. She looked the doctor in the eyes. “So, what are you saying? I need to know how long.” Her voice came out surprisingly clear and business-like.

  “There are options we can explore but...”

  “Please.”

  Dr. Zagar looked down at the floor, nodded her head slowly then looked back up. “Well, treatment options at this point are quite limited. It’s difficult to predict exact time frames, but this is a very aggressive form. I would say six months to a year, no more. I’m truly sorry.”

  Annika nodded. She didn’t feel much of anything, only this strange whirl of unrelated thoughts and the brightness. She forced herself to sit up straight and nod as Dr. Zagar went on about possibilities, about what to expect. The little doctor was very good at her job, compassionate yet direct. In a far-off part of her mind, Annika recognized this. She admired it. One day, I would like to thank her, she thought. One day, if I get the chance.

  “People often need time to think, and I want to respect that, but if I may give you some advice, I wouldn’t wait too long to come up with a plan,” the doctor said.

  “Yes. I understand.” Annika stood to leave but her knees buckled underneath her, and she had to grab the counter for support. The touch of the doctor’s hand on her back was dry and light and hollow, like a bird.

  “Sit, please. You’ve had a shock. Is there anyone you’d like me to call?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A friend? A family member? Someone to drive you home?”

  “Who?”

  “Do you have any family here?”

  She shook her head. “No, no they’re all still in Montana. We’re not close.”

  “I could call Hamish for you.”

  She blinked. Did she not know? “Hamish and I aren’t . . .” she said slowly.

  “Yes, I know but surely he would . . .”

  She frowned. Surely he wouldn’t. He’d told her that she couldn’t even call since he’d moved in with his new woman. He’d told her it was like ripping a Band-Aid. He’d called it letting go. “No, I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and stood again, determined not to waver. She clenched her guts and steeled herself like she’d learned to do when she’d worked fighting forest fires many years earlier. A person made choices and bore the consequences. A person could suffer most anything if they tried. She believed this. She thanked the Doctor firmly and walked out into the bright and brittle air.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Standing alone beside the buffet in the Sheraton’s Ball Room A, Matt Campbell popped chilled prawns into his mouth one after another and listened to the bright, busy chatter of his colleagues as it rose up on the tinkling air all around him. He wasn’t quite sure what he was listening for: a honk of exaggeration, a squeak of untruth, a rush, a nervousness, something, anything really, that might indicate someone else felt the same way he did; yet the voices rose and fell so effortlessly, the laughter expanded so seamlessly into the twinkling lights and overall buzz of excitement, he was almost convinced that his colleagues’ optimism was genuine. As his eyes shifted from one glowing face to another, he felt his own failures wake up inside him, squirming around like a d
irty secret.

  It wasn’t quite noon yet and already the atmosphere seemed more like a cocktail party than an industry conference. Throughout the wide, elegant room, realtors from across the Northwest, nearly identical in their dark business attire, were gathering in groups of three or four, drinks in hand, chatting excitedly to one another; others had seated themselves around the small tables on outskirts of the room and were leaning towards one another, deep in conversation, while teams of black-clad servers went back and forth, weaving through the crowd, clearing glassware and re-stocking the buffet, a lavish spread of cold meats and cheese boards and bowls of fruit with great ­clusters of purple grapes overflowing onto the dazzling white tablecloth just so.

  It was all so grandiose, so excessive . . . Was he wrong to read a note of desperation into it? But then, looking at the faces . . . they seemed so keen, so sure of themselves . . . He reached for another prawn, but his hand was intercepted. Startled, he whirled around to find himself staring down into the impossibly white smile of Sandy Tagliatti, the year’s keynote speaker.

  “Matt Campbell,” she said, staring meaningfully into his eyes. “How ARE you?” She had a way of making her every word vibrate with knowing and possibility, as if even this simple question were an invitation to conspire.

  “Busy,” he heard himself say, “I’m super busy.” He was still holding one of the wet, papery shrimp tails and didn’t know where to put it. A prickle of heat began at his collar. He was a blusher, a mad blusher, and he hated it.

  Fortunately for him, Sandy Tagliatti wasn’t the shaking type. Seattle’s top sales agent four years running, the pert forty-something dynamo with her bright eyes and flowing red mane knew a thing or two about cultivating intimacy and the fact that they both worked Seattle North put them on terms far more intimate than a handshake, apparently. She leaned in so close he could feel her breast brush against his arm. Lightly, but there. “I KNOW what you mean,” she said, shaking her head as if he’d just offered some profound insight. “I’m just RUN, absolutely RUN off my feet these days. All these rumors . . . I wish someone would tell MY clients there’s a downturn.”

  He laughed. She laughed. Her face was all feature: big lips and big eyes and big hair like one of those Claymation princesses from his son Jacob’s cartoons.

  As their laughter petered off, Matt was aware that it was his turn to speak, to say something witty or charming in return, but he paused, still distracted by the shrimp tails in his hand. He saw Sandy Tagliatti’s smile dim ever so slightly. Her eyes flickered away, scoping out another more beneficial conversation, perhaps. “I saw your talk this morning,” he recovered. “It was great. I mean, it inspired me.”

  She stood, head cocked to one side, the breast still touching his arm, the smile fixed on her face. “I felt like I could relate to the part about overcoming your personal darkness. Being your own worst enemy and all of that,” he fumbled on, each word digging him deeper in a direction that felt at once too personal and yet oddly clichéd; her wide, fixed smile goading him into ever more explanation. “I mean, I’ve been through some things myself and can understand that feeling, like you’ve screwed up and not being able to get out of it . . .” he stammered, then trailed off.

  Her talk, billed on the schedule as ‘How To Be A Top Sales Agent,’ had turned out to be more like an AA meeting or one of those religious revival things he’d seen on TV. There’d been no props, no PowerPoint, just her, Sandy Tagliatti, wide-eyed and sincere at the front of the room, talking about her life. It would have made a good movie: a small-town girl pregnant at 19; an abusive marriage to the local cop; a desperate flight in the middle of the night with three small children in the backseat; a series of dead end jobs that barely paid the bills; several years battling depression; then the great turnaround, the grand redemption after she’d taken her real estate course. Now, at forty-five, Sandy Tagliatti owned her own house. She owned a cottage on the Oregon coast. Her children were all in University, their tuition paid for. Selling Real Estate had saved her life, she’d whispered fiercely to the crowded room, her eyes brimming with tears. “You just have to work hard, you have to beat that pavement till it bleeds then beat it some more,” she’d said at which point everyone had started murmuring and nodding in agreement, while he’d sat with his arms crossed and his face on fire, acutely aware, suddenly, of all the time he’d wasted in the past months: the coffee shops, the driving around, the phone that never rang.

  The blush expanded across his face. He could feel it blossoming over his cheeks like a dirty algal bloom. “You know, the part where you were running from your husband, when you were in the car, wondering what you were going to do . . .” he continued then trailed off.

  Sandy Tagliatti blinked once then patted his arm, “I’m SO glad you enjoyed it, Matt,” she said, then turned to gaze out over the buffet. She shook her head as if in amazement. “What a spread! I think it gets better every year.” She smiled, then he smiled, then she turned, and he watched her bustle off, her perky little rear-end practically shrink-wrapped into an impossible pencil skirt, her high-heels clicking on the floor. A cluster of smiling realtors opened up to receive her and shortly he heard great peals of laughter rise up in the air.

  He looked around again, desperate for a familiar face, for some friendly group he might hide in, and his eyes alighted on the bar.

  The bar was set into the wall in the far corner of the room, a kind of twinkling alcove with the glassware racked up above and the bottles on lighted tiers behind, their browns, blues and greens glowing softly like the stained-glass windows of a Church. In front of the bottles, a strapping young bartender presided, his features stoic, his dark hair glistening in the twinkling light. A long line of would-be drinkers snaked out in front of him, so the young man was busy; his hands were a blur of motion; yet there remained a stillness about him, an aura of calm. Even from across the room Matt recognized it, having been a bartender himself most of his adult life. He knew the feeling, that feeling of being in perfect control, of knowing exactly where everything was, knowing that your hands knew exactly what to do without thinking. He watched the young man working and envied him the solitude of his position; he envied him the neatness, the sureness of that type of knowing.

  Watching, he could practically feel the cool, simple weight of a glass in his own hands. He could feel the bottles, the ice scoop, the calm . . . he let his mind go, imagining himself in the young man’s place and just like that, the desire for a drink bullied its way to consciousness, as if it were always just there, waiting behind a door in his mind, waiting for some small crack in his resolve. A drink! How he wanted, how he needed a drink! That burn, that lovely tingling heat in the back of the throat and then the loosening, the smoothing out of all the tangledness inside . . .

  He shook his head abruptly and turned away. He’d made promises, rules for himself to follow when it came to the drinking; they had to do with his wife and his son and the kind of man he wanted to be, and though they were privately held, though he’d never made a great drama of his renunciation, his rules were still important to him. They meant something. Sometimes he felt like they were all that was holding him together.

  He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and drew himself up tall. No matter how bad things seemed, he wasn’t going to go down that road again. Not yet. He steeled himself, trying to muster what remained of his willpower to the task of networking, then, just at that moment, a scraggly looking young man pulled up next to him at the buffet.

  Matt wiped his hand on his pants. He pocketed the tails. He was about to introduce himself, then hesitated, frowning slightly.

  There was something strange about the man. His brown suit stood out amongst the blacks and greys of the other conference attendees; it didn’t quite fit him right, either, sagging over his lanky frame, gathering in sad puckers at the knees and elbows. He seemed much younger than the others and his face had a wild look; his bulging eye
s darting nervously from person to person; his hair strangely dull and dusty looking, a kind of matte blond that was dead to the lights. An antique looking leather satchel was slung over his shoulder.

  Matt began to turn away, then stopped himself. Was he simply making excuses again? Procrastinating? It was impossible to tell who was worth knowing in this business with so many second chancers and hard-luck stories walking around, he reminded himself. Christ look at me, he thought. He held out his hand. “Hi there. I’m Matt Campbell. We haven’t met yet.”

  The young man started. He looked at Matt’s hand then at Matt. The lanyard around his neck was all twisted up so that Matt couldn’t read the name tag. They stood facing one another for a long moment, then, after what seemed an eternity, the young man held out a strangely weather-beaten hand.

  Matt gripped it. He caught a glimpse of blue ink at the wrist, barbed wire or thorns, something twisted and prickly tattooed just out of sight but chose to ignore it. “Quite the spread, isn’t it?” he offered. “I think it gets better every year.”

  The man’s feral eyes peered at him incredulously from a sallow face darkened by stubble, then a strange expression spread over his gaunt features, like the dawning of a malevolent awareness. “Oh yes, it’s very nice indeed, Mr. Campbell,” he said. “I particularly enjoy these little croissant type things. Aren’t they just fabulous? Don’t mind if I do, actually.” Then, in a motion that seemed more animal than human, the man unslung the satchel from his neck, flipped open the flap and held it against the edge of the table.

  It took Matt a moment to understand what was happening. He watched dumbfounded as the man grabbed an entire tray of sandwiches, croissants filled with roast beef and ham and cheese, and dumped them into the satchel’s gaping mouth. Cherry tomatoes bounced on the floor and rolled away. Matt blinked. The lanyard had untwisted now so he could read the card; the writing was different from the neatly-typed name tags being handed out at the front. In a handwritten scrawl the card read: Uncle Buck.