"You have flirting friends. That's all you have. I barely have friend-friends."

"Oh, I do not. You do so."

At first, deciding to be in love felt to Kim like a process of having to explain to Hart, in different ways, every day, that she was nothing like him. And Hart not believing her, and her having to convince him. Then one day the process came to an end - Hart abruptly agreed to consider each of them as individual people with separate experiences and differing points of view.

"You're not as gregarious as I am," Hart announced one day after failing to drag her to a friend's open mic event. "You don't need as much social stimulation."

"That's right!"

"But I need a lot. I need a lot more than most people."

"It's true, Hart. You do."

"So I can just go out for a few hours, say hi to everybody. And you can just stay here," Hart hypothesized, frowning like he was trying to do math in his head. "And then I'll come back!"

Kim bobbed her head at him - encouraging.

"It'll be all right," Hart a.s.sured himself, fingering the jacket he always hung on the doork.n.o.b when he arrived.

"NOW THAT WE'RE in love we need to have serious conversations. Okay? We really need to talk about real stuff. It can't just be superficial banter."

This was new. This was Hart, heralding an official New Stage.

"What?"

"We haven't really delved."

"I delve."

"No - we've been coasting. And it's been great - so great. s.e.xy repartee. Very Nick and Nora. But we have to get serious now."

"I'm always serious!"

"Don't get angry, honey. Things are changing, that's all. We're evolving as a couple."

And he had started to call her honey.

What was daunting for Kim, and what she was finding difficult to express now that they were supposed to only talk seriously to one another, was that the whole reason she had agreed to be in love had to do with how Hart had behaved previous to the agreement. The way they had been together, at first. It was true that she had not taken Hart seriously for a very long time. "You weren't supposed to," Hart told her later. "That's my M.O." Hart was, by her reading, a walking erection. "I know!" agreed Hart. "I totally am. Was! Tee hee." She would see him at one of the cabaret nights, always insisting on going on first, it seemed to Kim, precisely so he could reap the maximum rewards of his onstage charm via several fulsome hours of female appreciation. As she prepared for her set, Kim would notice him slipping like mercury through the crowd, breastbone-first, a head taller than everyone else. Erect was the only word that fit. At practically every second woman Hart would exclaim in decibels that could be heard even above the sound system and dart forward for a hug - not so much a hug as what Kim came to refer to in her mind as The Great Enfolding.

After a few nights on the same bill, Kim inevitably became one of the enfolded. She didn't mind. She'd done her time with charismatic men, knew enough to enjoy the lingering hug for the warm, physical moment it was, never letting herself settle in too deep. But who was she to turn away a comforting expanse of male chest in the thick of an indifferent crowd?

"You have to teach me to play ukulele like you do!"

She laughed. Hart was a virtuoso. His set alternated between guitar, banjo and violin.

"It's four strings, Hart. I think you can figure it out."

"It's the way you play it, baby. Like you're nursing it. Like you're cradling a man's head."

"Okay, see you, Hart."

"That wasn't a reference to your b.r.e.a.s.t.s, exactly. It kind of was but - HOLY s.h.i.t CONNIE! CONNIE IS THAT YOU? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL SUMMER, GIRL, GET OVER HERE!"

After a few months of more or less identical conversations - ecstatic greeting, Great Enfolding, compliment, innuendo, see you, Hart - she decided one night to change the script. It had been a grim set. Kim had recently decided to go all-ukulele and was discovering how the instrument antagonized a certain demographic. That night, the crowd was especially hostile due to a local Tom Waits wannabe on the bill who wrote songs about accidentally killing hookers during heroin binges in blood-spattered hotel rooms. Kim had it on pretty good authority this guy had grown up in West Point Grey, but his fans made up most of the crowd and some s.h.i.t-faced bike courier with dried mud splattered across his leg tattoos kept shouting up at her: Too old!

So as Hart's friendly breastbone loomed closer, she did the obligatory leaning-in, submitted to the sweat-fragrant enfolding, made the requisite how-you-been small talk until the inevitable moment when she knew he would dangle his p.e.n.i.s into the conversation like the proverbial worm on a hook. She told him, "I'm too old for this, Hart," slouching off toward the bathroom before he could recognize the next beloved woman of his acquaintance and wade, bellowing, in her direction.

Instead, Hart waded after Kim. "Me too!" he was calling. "I'm too old for this too!"

"THAT WAS THE moment," Hart said later. "That was the first real moment between us. When we cut through the bulls.h.i.t. You did. We need more of those moments. It needs to be all those moments from here on in."

Kim was about to tell him she loved his superficial side as much as she loved anything else about him, his mesmerizing charm, his ease with the unnerving force of his own s.e.xuality - the way he kept it at heel like it was nothing, like he was leading around a panther on a leash, but he'd grown up with the panther, the panther was no big deal to him, meanwhile people stood rigid and sweating as he pa.s.sed.

She was about to tell him all that one afternoon as they sat in her apartment teaching themselves Gillian Welch, except Hart started to cry.

He'd been talking about really talking for the last month. It was only their second month of being officially in love. The first few months together had been s.e.xual Disneyland - nothing but endorphins and giddy indulgence. It seemed early to be putting the brakes on that - this was Kim's guilty first thought.

She held his head against her like a ukulele and rocked.

HART DID NOT drink - that should have been her first hint. She had told herself this was refreshing. So many guys in her life did not know how to stop drinking like teenagers, because playing music kept you teenage in so many ways (in her twenties, that seemed like such an upside, and then in her thirties all of a sudden it didn't). Hart drank ginger ale and never remarked upon it, never told people he was "cutting back" or "had to stay sharp"' for his set - none of the excuses of social drinkers. This telegraphed a message to Kim that she ignored: Note how cheerful and upbeat Hart is at all times. How hard at work.

Hart drank only once, he told her, at fifteen, a few days after he ran away from home the first time, and disappeared for a month. He had taken his first sip of a friend's strawberry margarita at one end of Vancouver Island and woken up on the exact opposite end, on a bench overlooking Victoria harbour, almost five hundred kilometres south. There was a man in his sixties sitting beside Hart, a stranger in a yellow golf shirt with white blow-dried hair, his arm around him.

They were on the ferry to Port Hardy and the stories just kept coming. Hart drank one ginger ale after another as he talked. Sugar was his drug now. He told her it used to be cola, but he went crazy for the caffeine. "I have no impulse control," he told her. "Anything that affects my brain, I can't get enough of it." Not two years ago he was downing espressos on the hour. "I was in a state of crisis every minute of the day. Everything was so major! Everything felt crucial! I'd go to my friend's place and they'd say, Oh, we're out of milk and I'd be like OH MY G.o.d! WHAT IS TO BE DONE! And my heart was racing and life was just ... so exciting! That was hard to walk back from. I was so depressed for like a year. Getting off caffeine is the hardest thing I've ever done, honey."

Everything he told her on that ferry ride was a blow to Kim; a shot to the kidneys. Because she understood their s.e.x life now. She had thought they were so compatible. As her body crept toward forty - the way Hart had crept north along the highway, returning home on the Greyhound after his first and only blackout - her libido had gone from polite, to politely insistent, to beseeching, to basically a fire engine's siren. She started to understand the cliches of television - the embarra.s.sing, overs.e.xed Older Woman. She had split up with depressive Malcolm mid-beseeching phase, after eleven years together, five of them essentially s.e.xless, and wanted nothing more than to sleep with anyone she had ever felt the remotest inkling toward. Six months of that kind of indulgence had been enough. There was no room for dignity in this new circ.u.mstance.

Things had been looking hopeless until Hart, man of boundless energy, boundlessly h.o.r.n.y, declared himself to her. For a while, as he sprawled long-limbed around her apartment speaking of moving in together, a musical retreat on a lake somewhere in the interior, even making late-life babies, Kim had let herself imagine it might be possible to set up house in Disneyland on a permanent basis - to spend every day riding the rides, wind whipping your hair, fireworks nightly, gorging on nothing but hot dogs and cotton candy. Never getting sick, or full.

But it was just, she discovered on the ferry, that Hart was an addict; a sensation-junkie. He spoke to a counsellor every week, she learned, a woman he called "my lifeline." And his mother was an addict, too, he told her. And his brother, who lived with his mother, was an addict, also clinically depressed. There had been "a couple of suicide attempts," confessed Hart, though he didn't bother to attach either attempt to anyone in his family specifically. It reminded Kim of her final few years with Malcolm, the monosyllables, the sleep-stink of the bedroom because the bed was never changed, because the bed never didn't have anyone in it, every day a sort of funeral - we are gathered here to say goodbye to our beloved childhood companion Fun; today we bury Careless Youth, taken from us too soon. It reminded her of the vow she'd made: Never this again.

They were on their way to see them - the brother and mother - and then Hart's rock-and-roll father, Wilf, who lived with his girlfriend farther down the coast. Kim and Hart sat on the deck, as close to the bow as they could, watching the ocean come at them, inhaling its molecules. She made herself imagine one vertebra of her spine after another turning into iron with every new family revelation of Hart's, until finally the metal would meet her brain stem and she would be nothing but fort.i.tude.

But before that could happen, just before the ferry docked, he confessed to her the horror of his father and she stood up and walked to the other end of the ship. She didn't run. She told him she was going to buy chips. If she'd run Hart would've chased her.

IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a vacation. That's how he sold it to her. She would meet his family (it had sounded so innocent then, romantic, the next Big Step, another New Stage), but they would also have fun, because the island was beautiful. They would camp on Long Beach and listen to waves the length of city blocks roll in. They would go surfing. There was a weekend yoga retreat run by a friend of his where they could "recharge after the family stuff," said Hart - so lightly, he had said this. Family stuff: childhood photo alb.u.ms, stilted conversation, awkward getting-to-know-you back and forth on opposite sides of the kitchen table - that's what Kim had thought he meant by "family stuff." It had all been a plot. Hart had staged-managed the whole thing.

"We won't stay at my mother's," he a.s.sured her. The plan was to camp down the hill at the town's one campsite, called Ozzieland, after the owner, Ozzie. They checked in at Ozzieland before heading up to Hart's mother's house - there was something unspoken and deliberate about this decision. They were the only campers, and Ozzie - a gnome-like senior citizen wearing the kind of gla.s.ses that used to be called old-man gla.s.ses but now would be hipster, on someone like Hart, at least - was wildly happy to receive them. He hugged Hart, clearly as in love with him as everyone else, and invited them to dinner with himself and his wife that evening, or if not dinner then breakfast. Hart promised they'd stop in for coffee before hitting the road the next morning.

"Not a lot of visitors to Alice lately," Ozzie explained. That was what locals called the town, Port Alice. "Cuz of the mill, and the cougar. Not necessarily in that order."

"What about the mill?" said Hart, before Kim could ask about the cougar.

"Shut down."

"Shut down?" said Hart. "Holy s.h.i.t."

"Holy s.h.i.t is right," agreed Ozzie.

"It's the only thing in town," Hart explained to Kim.

"Mill town," affirmed Ozzie.

"How long?" asked Hart.

"What cougar?" said Kim.

"Just don't go for any walks," advised Ozzie. "Take your rental everywhere you go and you'll be fine. I mean she doesn't come into town, she stays pretty much on the outskirts so far, but then again she's getting bolder. You want to be careful."

So Kim and Hart got in their rental - a Nissan Cube, all that had been available from the Hertz in Port Hardy - and drove two minutes up the hill to meet Hart's people.

BRENDA'S HOUSE WAS mainly jungle. Hart's father had built it for her, for the two of them, twenty-five years ago. It was not the house Hart grew up in - Hart's hometown was Hardy. The bungalow in Alice was meant to be an oceanside retreat - a "love shack," Hart called it, smirking - so the entire front was sunroom, windows from ceiling to floor. Over the years, Brenda stuffed it full of plants, to the point where barely any sun filtered into the main room anymore - the plants made up a dappled, verdant wall and when the sun came level with the windows, as it was now, the living room shone green.

They sat in the green around the coffee table. Brenda had put out Chips Ahoy cookies on a plate and placed a two-litre bottle of ginger ale beside it with two gla.s.ses full of ice. Then she went back to the kitchen, where she took a can of Blue Light from the fridge and poured it into a plastic tumbler for herself. She did not offer a Blue to Kim. Things were feeling stage-managed again, like the visit was unfolding according to certain guidelines.

"No caffeine, right, son?"

"Thanks for remembering, Brenda."

Kim had never met a mother who called her son "son" before. It got downright odd when her other son arrived. She called them both "son" then, and both sons called her Brenda, not Mom.

The two of them, Brenda and Arlo, were diminished versions of Hart. Smaller, paler. Hart minus yoga and running, minus energy and height.

Hart enfolded his brother as he had enfolded those countless women in bars, Arlo's face in Hart's chest. The brother tried to pull away after a moment and Hart said, "No, man." So they stood like that a little longer while Kim stared into the wall of the foliage. The effect was exactly like stained gla.s.s at church, if the gla.s.s was various hues of green.

"I love your plants, Brenda," she said as Arlo and Hart disengaged.

"Thanks, Kim." Brenda stood up and walked over to a grouping of geraniums. "These are my geraniums," she said.

My G.o.d, thought Kim, she's going to introduce me to her plants.

And that was just what Hart's mother did for the next twenty minutes, as Hart and Arlo murmured to one another at the far end of the couch.

THERE HAD BEEN no mention of Hart and Kim ditching Ozzieland and staying overnight at Brenda's, even after Kim had forced a long, exhaustive discussion of the cougar. Ozzie hadn't been lying when he said the cougar ("Or cougars," reflected Brenda) had not yet come into town. But she (the singular cougar was a she, apparently) had been spotted at either end, so the residents of Alice were effectively in prison. The town sat on a road along the ocean; behind them was woods. On either side of them was woods. The minute you hit the woods, you were in cougar territory. Which meant cougar on all sides.

Brenda drank one can after another of Blue Light and Hart kept pouring himself ginger ale as Kim nursed hers. Brenda eventually brought out the entire bag of Chips Ahoy! and handed it to Hart.

"Hart, stop," Kim muttered at one point, his hand in the bottom of the bag.

"How's Wilf?" Hart had asked about ten cookies in.

Brenda smiled and gestured with her plastic tumbler. "Oh - you know Wilf. Life of Riley down in Ucluelet."

"I see him sometimes," whispered Arlo as Kim clenched.

"Do you?" said Hart. "How's the old guy looking?"

"Hale and hearty," smiled Arlo. "You know Wilf."

MY G.o.d YOU PEOPLE, Kim wanted to yell.

"Same hair I bet," said Hart, grinning. "Like Samson. Never changes."

"Not our Wilf," said Brenda. "Ever the hippie."

The three of them laughed together anemically - their broken, family laughter. She had never heard Hart laugh that way before. Hart was the kind of person waiters in cafes had to ask to settle down. He was a head-thrower-backer.

"Kim and I are off to do yoga for a couple of days," said Hart, slinging an arm around her and popping the remaining Chips Ahoy! into his mouth.

SHE HATED HIM. She slept in the Cube. She didn't tell him it was because she was hating him, she said it was the cougar. It was, in fact, partly because of the cougar. But the cougar was a big part of the reason she was hating him.

Brenda had told her the cougar had killed one man, a hiker from the mainland. Dragged him off and his body had never been found. Another man, local fella, she had attacked recently, but did not succeed in killing. The man had a penknife on him, did battle with the cougar, and won - managed to saw at the animal's throat after gouging her eyes. This was impressive, but the unfortunate thing was that the cougar had initially got the jump on the man. Literally, she had jumped on him from behind, from an overhead rock. She had clawed his face off. The man was alive to tell the tale, but would never look the same. You might see him, Brenda told Kim brightly, like they were discussing a mutual friend. Walking around town. Can't miss him, that's for sure. Keep your eye out tomorrow as you're leaving.

IT WAS AN eight-hour drive to Tofino, Hart announced. She couldn't believe it.

"But it's an island," she kept repeating.

"It's a big island. It's the biggest island on the entire west coast."

"It's gotta be the size of a country. Of Australia."

"It's actually pretty close to Taiwan."

"Well, this is ridiculous, Hart," said Kim.

Hart made an effort not to talk for a few minutes. He had that look on his face like he was trying to solve equations.

"Honey?" he said at last. "We have eight hours to hash this out. Then it's two days of yoga and camping and good food and I will not touch sugar and I guarantee you it's going to be gorgeous and beautiful and healing. Then - and only then - do we see Wilf. So let's hash this out."

A week ago she would've thought how much she loved being with a man who uttered words like gorgeous and beautiful and healing with total conviction, with no trace of masculine shame. Because beauty and healing were full-on good, in Hart's cosmology - not ironic, not ridiculous - and should be spoken of with reverence and sincerity. The men in Kim's family were nothing like Hart. To her knowledge, her brothers and father and uncles had never deemed any aspect of their world - not even a sunset, or a woman - gorgeous. Or if they had, they'd rolled their eyes and say it with a drawn-out lisp. After she moved to the west coast in her twenties, men like Hart were scandalous and exotic to Kim - their unembarra.s.sed exuberance. The subtle touches of vanity and primping - a bracelet here, an overgroomed sideburn there, an undone b.u.t.ton exposing a toned, deliberate hint of chest. The deep, s.e.xy joy of it. The fearlessness.

But the word she could no longer use was ease. Not about Hart. It was a studied ease. Which was not, in fact, ease.

And ease was so much what she wanted; what she thought she loved.

"WHAT'S MOST UNFAIR," said Kim, about two hours in, "is I can't even be angry. Being angry makes me a bad person."

"Nothing makes you a bad person," Hart said. "You have every right to feel your feelings."

Kim gulped back a welling clump of rage. Her father and brothers were clamouring in her head - clamouring for Hart's effete, oblivious, hippie-dippy blood. Feel my feelings? Did you just say that?

"No I don't," said Kim. "Because you've suffered. You've suffered things I can't even imagine."

"And I've dealt with it. I've faced my demons."

Did you seriously just say - But why do I is the question.

Why do I have to face them too?