I had a little blue car. During my Toronto winters I left it in a snowbank in David Twombly’s back yard. I drove Julie down to Kingman’s Cove.

Your catalytic converter is rattling.

That’s a resettled community.

We walked into the valley that sheltered a blue island. Plum trees grew loose around the foundations of pulled-down houses. There were gooseberries and when you walked over the old gardens you could feel with your feet the potato drills that had been planted for the last time forty years ago.

We kissed on the long grass and horsed around in the sun. She was game. Julie Hazel liked that I wasn’t serious about her. I kept my serious side, the side that was blown apart, tucked into a shoulder blade. We did not have enough time for grief. What she was serious about was enjoying herself. It must have been two in the afternoon and we decided to pull off our clothes and wade in. She was like a piece of furniture that should be pushed against a wall. I was not going to fall in love with her anymore. She didnt look like she was falling for me, either. We were both relieved about that. We were just enjoying ourselves. We kissed and sometimes we did not close our eyes.

There was an operation on the nub of a vertebra which left a coarse range of sutures. She was checking herself out in the mirror. Looks like a hasty repair, she said, on a mail bag.

There was another scheduled operation to explore a fatty tissue in her armpit.

Go to Boston, I said. Go home. Get the f*** out of here.

She was peering at me, as if I were far away. We got in bed and she told me cavalierly, as if she had told numerous people, as though it were a childhood illness and we were walking home after school – a part of a sentence had been said in the Health Sciences Centre – it was about a tumour on the aorta and when that eats through.

She wasn’t gauging how I might consider this. It was selfish of her to tell it like that. But then I realized she was astute. If I’d been in love, she would not have said it like that. She was actually very kind. Motives are often different from what one assumes.

She came home delirious with news. There were noisy packages of cheese and dry sausage, a crisp baguette from the new bakery. I’m refusing radiation, she said. So I’m healthy and I have ninety days my God this bread is delicious.

Please go to Boston. Or fetch your parents.

Let’s look at your horse calendar, she said.

We peeled off three months and that marched us deep into November.

I’m in Toronto then.

Let’s stay here, she said.

I did not say anything because I knew I’d do the same thing. The zest it took to dare the wide open closet of darkness.

She made excuses for not sleeping together. I reminded her we had an understanding. She was not alarmed by this – some nights she did not come home.

I heard a rumour about Albert Carter. Then one day she said can we go to bed. I want to tell you something in bed.

The temperature and weight of her leg on mine, the scent of the dryer on the pale blue pillows. She was often pounding out heat. I tried to get interested and there must have been something of that effort in my face. She said, I know it might be hard for you to have sex with me. What I’d like you to consider is this, my one favour.

She said she’d love to get pregnant.

I want you to think about that. It’s a selfish thing and very wrong of me, but. She pushed me away so that she could see my face better. I have a big face. I want, she said, to know my body could have a child.

She slept beside me and I thought about it. So matter of fact. Julie Hazel was a generous person. She did not get along with her parents. Her father, she said, had never grown a beard. He had once told her not to walk with her hands in her pockets.

I was a man with no religion, with morals surely forged by society, yet I thought this was not a subjective position. I did not consider myself wise or a man with any solid integrity. I did not know what to do.

I called David Twombly. David’s advice would not be absolute, it would be male, but I knew in talking with David Twombly he’d come to a conclusion of his own. There were worse things than being David Twombly.

David pulled one tire over the wet curb to pick me up, then plunged us down Prescott Street towards the harbour. It was raining hard, the defogger on. He listened to the story and said Gabe. He yanked up the handbrake outside the India Gate – it made that clicking traction. Gabe it’s both wrong and right but in the end if ever there was goodness in a bad deed.

He rubbed his face hard with his hands, as if waking up. Now let’s eat.

The rain made our inventiveness damp. We were both comfortable with this and we had nine drinks at the Grapevine. A sick woman, he said, youre bringing a new thing to someone sick.

He did not convince me.

We were flat on the carpet in my rented living room. That’s all right, she said. She understood she’d never get a good deal. Being alive for twenty-nine years was the blessing and who was she to whine.

She said, Do this.

She was stretching her mouth open with her fingers.

The mirror.

Our floating bony jaws, our empty red teeth. Then her eyes, bulging with the frenzy of what death is.

She left while I was playing squash with David Twombly. It was a set-up. I heard from Carol Trask that Julie was staying with David. This pushed a quart of blood into my throat. I drove past the Twombly house and saw David’s wife in one window. Carol was home from Corner Brook on a long weekend and looked insane. Their house, rich and bountiful, needed painting. For three days I heard nothing substantial. Then David phoned and said she was taken away to a cancer clinic paid for by her parents. It was in Boston, he thinks, where Walter Petey could attend her. Or perhaps technically some borough outside of Boston. She had been upset and forced him not to say anything until she’d left.

She stayed with you.

She was here the four nights, David said. Her stuff was here. Then added, Carol was here.

Your wife arrived from Corner Brook on the Sunday morning flight.

Listen, he said.

It was nights, I thought. David Twombly did not say days.

Okay look, I took her down to the Grapevine. His voice had a long piece of wood attached to the sentence, keeping it straight. I tried to find someone for her.

You found someone.

She found Albert Carter.

I flew back to Toronto in October. It was on the plane, sitting next to an old man wearing an emphysema mask. Below us the vast bridge securing Prince Edward Island. It made my own breathing erratic. I massaged my skull. I thought about how David Twombly told me, years ago, how Albert Carter loved anal sex. Loved it. I was thirty-six thousand feet in the air thinking about Albert Carter and the back of a woman I did not know. This moan. I turned, thinking the man beside me is about to die. But he was alert and patient, the clear hose feeding gas from a steel cylinder beneath his feet. It was my own chest, I could hear a sound leaking out from my ribs. Where did that come from. Feeling comes before the event is understood. It was the point that David had made earlier. I felt ruined. I was ruined. 

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Michael Winter has written several novels and short story collections. His most recent work is The Big Why . He lives in Toronto.