We asked him what he was doing with himself these days. He told us he'd missed the application deadline for Cegep, and for the past year he'd been working, rather pointlessly, at a sleazy magazine store downtown.

"Better than studying for matrics," I said. "Thank G.o.d that nightmare's over."

The matriculation exams, in those days, were the only ones that counted for graduation, and I knew I'd have to pa.s.s them all. I'd discovered that I didn't need Biology to graduate; I only needed one science credit and, with the help of Miss O'Connor's after-school tutoring, I'd been initiated into the esoterica of chemical inclinations.

That left History, which I'd managed to ignore for four years. I had no choice but to cram, and I spent several nights making lists of calamities, for history in the end was nothing but a series of disasters strung together by treaties and agreements. War and more war; there was always someone with an army, ready to fight. My extracurricular reading helped a little. I knew from Lenny Bruce that Hoover was president of the United States during the Depression, and from Hemingway that the Spanish Civil War had Franco on one side and the Republicans, who hid in caves, on the other. Exams were easy back then, and I managed to pull through. The first city in history to be atom-bombed was a) Hiroshima b) Tokyo c) Munich d) Nanking The first city in history to be atom-bombed was a) Hiroshima b) Tokyo c) Munich d) Nanking. Now I wanted to rid myself of the superfluous information I'd been forced to house, exhaustingly, in my brain.

We found Dr. Moore executing an effortless backstroke in a kidney-shaped swimming pool. Rosie and I hadn't noticed the pool before; it was concealed by a high wall of cedar hedges and wasn't visible from Patrick's side of the house. The expression on Dr. Moore's face as she glided through the water-all worldly woes forgot-was one I hadn't seen before. As soon as she noticed us, she swam towards the edge of the pool. She looked like a pink sea plant with her long-sleeved, water-darkened pink leotard and matching cap of jiggling flowers and protruding dots.

"h.e.l.lo," she said with casual courtesy. She lifted herself out of the pool and wrapped a towel around her waist. "Are you both well?"

Before we could answer, Patrick interjected, "Do we still have that country house?" He never addressed his mother by name. He never addressed anyone by name.

"The cottage in the Laurentians?"

"Yeah. Is it in one piece or has it gone to wrack and ruin?"

"The house is intact as far as I know. Were you thinking of going up there?"

"It's us-we're the ones who asked," I explained. "Me and Rosie."

"Ah. So you would like to go into retreat." I saw that she wanted to be invited; or rather that she wished it were all different, that she was part of a large, happy family. I almost asked her to come along, but Patrick would have killed me. And I don't think she would have accepted the invitation; she knew we wanted to be on our own-that was the whole point. "I can understand that," she said evenly, and her controlled, forlorn voice made me think of one of those shipwrecked sailors you read about, who hang on to sanity by repeating the Latin names of trees.

We discussed the practicalities of opening the house, and it became evident that Patrick would have to come along. He didn't mind being roped in-he was bored with his job and feeling restless. For the first time in our lives there was nothing to hold us back, and we decided to leave the following day. Patrick said he wouldn't be missed at the magazine store; the owner, Sam, was insane and wouldn't even notice.

Rain fell intermittently on the morning of our departure, but I wanted to wait for Patrick downstairs. My mother and Bubby came with me; they huddled under two umbrellas and tried to persuade me to join them. Instead, I lifted my face to the fine drizzle. Soon I'd be playing house with Rosie; the two of us would recline on a rug in front of the fire, go for long walks in the forest. In this sylvan setting, Rosie would realize that what she really wanted was me, and on a leafy bed I'd finally do with her all the things I'd been dreaming about for four years ...

I was expanding on these Girl's Own Girl's Own adventures when Patrick's Mercedes appeared like a ship against the horizon, ready to take me on board. My mother sniffed and wiped her eyes as I bounced into the car with my knapsack. But she relied on Patrick, who clearly had resources, and I promised to phone from the corner store every day. adventures when Patrick's Mercedes appeared like a ship against the horizon, ready to take me on board. My mother sniffed and wiped her eyes as I bounced into the car with my knapsack. But she relied on Patrick, who clearly had resources, and I promised to phone from the corner store every day.

Rosie was waiting inside the doorway of her house, with her new guitar-a gift from Avi-by her side, and her arms crossed in front of her as if she were cold or stranded. She was wearing jeans and a black, close-fitting sleeveless top I hadn't seen before. I knew all her clothes, and I wondered whether the top belonged to her mother.

"I'm so glad you're here! What a night-all the rooms creaked, I had to keep the lights on, and I don't think I slept at all. I'm sure there were ghosts."

"You should have called me," I moaned.

"Well, I kept thinking I'd get brave, but it only got worse. I'm never spending a night alone again. Let me get my stuff."

Rosie's stuff turned out to be two enormous, battered suitcases with rusty metal clasps. Her parents had taken to Paris only what they could fit into a small shoulder bag-a change of underwear, T-shirts, their toothbrushes. This eccentric adherence to the bare necessities was in keeping with their usual low-key style, but maybe there were other reasons this time, maybe the old suitcases reminded them of their relocation, or dislocation. They were embarking on a different kind of trip now, a return not exactly in triumph but at least with pleasure in mind.

"The trunk's full," Patrick said. "We'll have to try the back seat." Then, totally out of character, he blurted out, "What do you have in there?"

"Just things we might need. You know. Pillows, sheets, kitchen stuff."

"The house has all that, and my mother gave me sheets. Whatever's missing, I can buy."

We unclasped the suitcases and I helped Rosie remove dishes, cutlery, pots, linen, scissors, rope. "What about games?" she asked hesitantly, pulling out a tattered Monopoly box held together by a rubber band.

"I'm pretty sure we have Monopoly," Patrick said.

Under her black top, Rosie's b.r.e.a.s.t.s announced themselves modestly to the world, and in a rare moment of forgetfulness, Patrick stared at the curved outlines as she repacked. He caught himself with a start.

"I love your top," I said slyly. "It suits you. Very femme fatale."

"I don't know about that! I figured now that school's over I'd look kind of weird wearing white shirts, so Mummy bought me some things."

"Patrick, what do you think?"

"About what?"

"Doesn't that top suit Rosie?"

To my delight, Patrick blushed. "Okay. Yes. I think we're all set."

Now that we'd removed the household items, Rosie found she didn't need either suitcase. She stuffed her things in a plastic bag and headed for the car. I asked her to sit in front so I'd have room for my legs.

We were about to set off when she exclaimed, "Wait! Is there a stereo there?"

"I'm not sure it works. But I brought a radio."

"Hold on." She ran back in and returned with her portable record player and the Mother Goose record. "It helps me fall asleep," she said, a little sheepishly.

"Mother Goose?" Patrick was amused, and I think charmed, by Rosie's open admission.

I stretched out on the back seat with two pillows under my head and Rosie's guitar next to me on the car floor. Even when he was home from the hospital, Mr. Michaeli was no longer up to accompanying Rosie on the piano, and she'd stopped singing arias. The Sat.u.r.day-night parties weren't the same without Rosie's performances, so Avi bought her the guitar and taught her a few chords. Visionary narratives came to life as she sang; her voice echoed subway wall prophecies, rang out from a lonely tower. We were the ones who wanted to travel with her-but no one had touched Rosie, neither her body nor her mind, not really.

Before long we were on the highway that followed old native trails through the great mountain forests of the Laurentians. The only sign of human presence in this primeval landscape was a shorn strip, forged for skiers, slicing down one of the hills. Patrick had to explain what it was.

"Looks sinister," Rosie said.

Patrick chuckled. "Yeah, who knows what those ski runs could be up to."

Marcel, the man who'd been taking care of Vera's cottage all these years, ran a gas station and convenience store at the turnoff from the highway. He was sitting on a stool behind the counter of his store, his eyes fixed on a portable television. I was afraid that when he rose from the stool, the ribbons of yellow flypaper hanging from the low ceiling would stick to his hair, but he deftly avoided them as he jumped up and came towards us.

He was white-haired and slim, and wore denim overalls; I wondered how he felt about the appropriation of his ordinary work clothes by urban youth. He knew who we were and had been expecting us, but a proprietary wariness made him grumpy. "You have to turn on the water," he warned us.

Patrick a.s.sured him, in impressively fluent French, that we'd be fine.

Marcel reverted to French too. He offered us a good price on firewood and said he'd bring it over later if we liked.

"Parfait," Patrick said. I'd never seen him make this sort of effort-he was trying to be affable, and it really was a struggle.

Rosie had wandered over to a long, narrow warehouse with a flat roof and corrugated metal siding, just behind the store. The words Marche aux Puces Marche aux Puces had been painted in fire engine red on the siding. I thought at first that the wavy letters were meant to be decorative, then I saw that the lettering was merely following the furrowed metal. had been painted in fire engine red on the siding. I thought at first that the wavy letters were meant to be decorative, then I saw that the lettering was merely following the furrowed metal.

"I've never been to a flea market," Rosie said. We tried to peek through the windows, but they were dark and dusty, and all we could see was a reflection of ourselves looking in. "Pouvoir regarder?" she asked Marcel, struggling to remember one or two of the hundreds of French cla.s.ses that had led, apparently, to not very much.

"Ferme."

"Quand ... ouvre?"

Marcel took pity on her and switched to English. "That's the affair of my brother-in-law. Ask to him."

While Patrick filled up, I strolled into the miniature store. Four bruised pears, a rusty iceberg lettuce, Kraft cheese slices, chocolate bars, a few tins of soup and baked beans, all looking as if they'd been salvaged from a train wreck. With the ten-dollar bill my mother gave me I bought as much as I could.

As we drove away, Patrick shook his head. "Imagine living in the same small town all your life. The same people day in, day out. How can you not go mad?"

"I'd like it," Rosie said. "I'd like knowing everyone around me. You could see their lives change."

"Yes. The new tires on their car. The postcard from their grandchild in Seattle."

"'There is a place in London town,'" Rosie sang. "' My railroad boy goes and sits down. He takes a strange girl on his knee. And he tells to her what he won't tell me.'"

"Man," Patrick said as we pulled into the unpaved driveway.

I'd expected a simple wood cabin, but Vera Moore's cottage, like her city house, was made of weathered limestone. The prominent pitched roof covered the walls like an orange-pink lid, and its two dormer windows glinted with hooded eyes in the sun. The screened-in porch seemed to have been added on as a concession to summer living.

The area immediately surrounding the house had been cleared, and a patchy lawn sloped downward from the back porch to the lake. The clearing extended on both sides to the edges of a spruce and white birch forest. The slender birch trees were wrapped in brown and white and black-tipped veils of bark. They cast a siren's spell on me, and I walked over, tugged at the curled end of a papery strip. Parchment for a pillow-book.

"I can't believe this place is still here," Patrick said. He was leaning against the hood of his car as if he hadn't yet decided whether to stay. "I was sure it would be a hollow, burnt-out sh.e.l.l."

"But your mother told us it was in good condition," I reminded him.

"She's easy to dupe."

Rosie had strayed meanwhile to the back lawn. "Look at the lake!" she called out. "Our own private beach-there's even a dock! I could stay here forever."

But Patrick ran his hand through his hair and groaned.

"Headache coming on?" I asked.

"No. It's the country. Too much nature." He drew a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. "I don't like the country."

"Now you tell us," I said. "Were you here a lot as a kid?"

"Oh yes, oh yes, we came every summer. G.o.d, what a nightmare."

"Why?"

"No one wanted to be here, but my mother thought it would be good for us. She forced us to go swimming and sailing and canoeing ... I don't like canoes," he added emphatically.

"Did she enjoy it at least?"

"No. We were all miserable. I was miserable because I hate water, which tends to be cold, and nature, which tends to be unpleasant. My mother was miserable because she's allergic to just about everything that grows here. And my father was miserable because he was always miserable."

"Your father was here?"

"Yeah, it was before he left."

"What about Anthony?"

"Tony? I don't know. It was hard to know what was going on in his mind. He went into town a lot, hung out at the local pool joint."

I tried to picture Patrick in a bathing suit. On my bedroom wall I had a print of Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ Baptism of Christ, which I'd found in a library discard. It was a glorious scene: the River Jordan in a Tuscan landscape, three seductive angels quietly watching as John and Christ succ.u.mb to erotic holiness, a convert stripping in the background. The bearded Christ looks atypically casual as the transparent water encircles his white ankles, while the convert, pulling off his shirt, is caught in mid act, his head lost inside the fabric, his body lovely with readiness. I could see Patrick, white and naked, transplanted into this scene, but unlike Christ he was alone: everyone had left, and he stood unbaptized in the shallow water, exposed and chilly. Stoically he would endure the vertiginous sports, the shame, the mosquitoes.

"Poor Patrick," Rosie said. "We don't have to stay here. We can go to an inn or a hotel if you like. It's just as much fun."

"No, no. It's all in the past." He threw his half-finished cigarette on the ground and crushed it with his shoe.

"It won't be horrible this time round," Rosie promised. "It'll be fun. Can we go down to the water?"

"Sure."

I followed Rosie to the beach. If we squinted, we could make out three or four other clearings along the sh.o.r.eline, but they were at the other end of the lake, and the houses were either hidden by shrubs or too small to be visible.

Tentatively I stepped onto the wobbly wharf and inhaled deeply, the way we do when we want to inhale a view. The shaded forest fringed the water like a tufted Afro, and the sky above it was a silk canopy of palest blue.

"I wouldn't walk on the dock," Patrick called out from above. "It needs fixing."

"It's fine!" I called back.

"I really wouldn't walk on that," he repeated, coming down to the beach. "I'll fix it tomorrow. I'll get some wood in town."

"Okay, okay," I said, stepping off. For a moment the three of us stood there, as still and silent as the lake.

"I feel like the first person on earth," Rosie said.

"Or the last," Patrick remarked. "I'm going inside."

Dr. Moore's cottage was a naked manifestation of her quest for family intimacy. Indoors, the layout was all open plan: kitchen, dining area, a study corner with a desk, sofas and a rocking chair around a granite fireplace. A picture-window ran the length of the back wall, and sunshine poured in, landing like a stage-light on the braided rugs and knotted floorboards. Everything was scrubbed clean. Dr. Moore must have instructed Marcel to prepare the house for us, and afraid of losing his cushy caretaker's job, he-or more likely his wife-had even washed the curtains.

"Far out!" Rosie said.

"How far out?" Patrick gibed annoyingly.

"Are the bedrooms upstairs?" I asked. A disquieting sensation had come over me. I felt we were trespa.s.sing on Dr. Moore's house, on her defenceless generosity. Her dreams of family vacations had fallen flat, leaving only this empty house, heavy with her lonely failure. It made you want to tread carefully, as at any burial ground.

"Yeah. I'll bring in the sheets and things."

We fetched the linen and carried it up the creaky stairs to the attic floor. The four bedrooms radiated symmetrically from a s.p.a.cious vestibule. The vestibule was beautifully furnished with antique chests and bureaus, but the bedrooms themselves were small and poky, with steeply slanting ceilings and minimal floor s.p.a.ce, as if to discourage reclusive tendencies.

"Who gets which room?" I asked.

Clutching a folded sheet to her chest, Rosie whirled around, her head thrown back, and for an odd second she reminded me of Sandy Dennis in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?- vulnerable, fragile, and slightly mad. "Anything's fine with me," she said, and my vision readjusted itself. "They're all perfect." vulnerable, fragile, and slightly mad. "Anything's fine with me," she said, and my vision readjusted itself. "They're all perfect."

Patrick seemed to have fallen into a semi-stupor. I tapped him on the shoulder. "I wouldn't mind the one with the bra.s.s bed. Is that okay?"

"Yeah, sure. That was my dad's room." The word dad dad surprised me, and I wondered whether Patrick was being drawn against his will into the house's-or his own-shunned past. surprised me, and I wondered whether Patrick was being drawn against his will into the house's-or his own-shunned past.