Part Three2002: Heather

Saturday afternoon 4:00

I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad, slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister's kid, who never really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there's this sad guy in front of me - no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos - and so maybe I didn't want to leave too quickly after all.

The cashier was changing the paper tape - why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wiseacre had strapped it into a little sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie's gay boyfriends.

I said, "I think our giraffe here is a bit sexually conflicted."

Jason said, "It's that fleece-lined bomber jacket - always a dead giveaway."

"Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment."

"I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes, but he doesn't even understand why he does it."

"The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him."

Jason handed his toys to the cashier. "He's, like, a vice president of Nestlé operating out of Switzerland, but he's totally clueless, and he always misses the parts of the board meetings where they do all the evil stuff to third world countries. He sort of bumbles into the boardroom and everyone indulges him ..."

"His name is Gerard."

Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."

"What does the 'T' stand for?"

" 'The.' "

We rang our toys through the till and kept right on talking. I don't even know who was steering whom, but we ended up in the Denny's next door, and we kept expanding Gerard's universe. Jason said Gerard had this real fixation about being manly. "He wears the sheepskin coat as much as he can. He worships George Peppard, and buys old black-and-white photos and scrapbooks about him on eBay."

"And he decorated his apartment in rich tobacco browns and somber ochers in maybe 1975 and has never changed them."

"Yes. Manly colors. Burly walnut furniture."

"Hai Karate aftershave."

"Yeah, yeah - he still uses words like 'aftershave.'"

"And he invites his friends over for dinner parties, but the food is from some other period in history. Cherries Jubilee."

"Baked Alaska."

"T-bone steaks."

"Fondue."

I asked, "What are his friends' names?"

"Chester. Roy. And Alphonse - Alphonse is the exotic one with a hint of 'the dance' in his past. And Francesca, the beautiful but broke fifth daughter of a disgraced Rust Belt vacuum cleaner tycoon."

"Possibly someone, Francesca even, is wearing a cravat."

I thought Jason was the most talkative man I'd ever met, but I later found out he'd said more to me in those two hours than he'd spoken to all the people in his life in the past decade. He was obviously a born talker, but he needed a ventriloquist's dummy to speak through. Somehow that dorky giraffe on the counter had pressed his ON button, and we had just invented the first of a set of what I would call fusion entities - characters, that could only exist when the two of us were together.

I asked, "What kind of car would Gerard drive?"

"Car? That's simple. A 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, white leather interior and opera windows."

"Perfect."

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where the two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. And our characters were the best banterers going.

When Jason left to go pick up his nephews that day, he took my number with him and called me, and that was that.

* * *

Barb just phoned. She's arrived in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, where she works with Chris - Cheryl's brother. The Cheryl. I'm no dum-dum on the score, but Jason and Cheryl was so long ago. We move on, or rather, Jason sure tries.

Barb's commuting down the coast, and she asked me to baby-sit the twins for a few days. Chris proposed to her last week, and she accepted; the world moves in mysterious ways - I mean, Cheryl Anway's brother and Jason Klaasen's sister-in-law.

Chris creates face-mapping software programs for governments and big business. Chris can take your face, pinpoint your nostrils, the ends of your lips, your retinas, and with a few more measurements generate your unique unchangeable face-map. You can't fake a face, even with cosmetic surgery. It all seems a bit spooky to me. I mean, this could be abused so easily, and I told Chris so when he was over at our place for dinner.

"Chris, what if you took the face of a famous actor, and entered their facial proportions into your database - would you find their . . . duplicate?"

"The term we use is 'analog.'"

"Come again?"

"Your analog isn't your twin or your clone. He or she is the person out there who's maybe a millimeter away from having the same face as you."

"You're joking."

"Not at all. But the weird thing is, an analog doesn't even have to be the same sex, let alone the same hair color or skin color. Put you and your analog into a room together and people are going to assume the two of you are twins. If you're a boy and she's a girl, people will simply assume it's your twin in drag."

"This exists?"

"The government already has face-maps of all prison inmates and other people who float through the judicial system."

Barb was particularly intrigued by this idea. Jason's father had made some very badly chosen comments about the twins at Kent's memorial a few years back, and since then she's been on a crusade to learn everything about twins she can. She began to discuss using face-maps to help twins who've been separated when very young, and where the law prevents them from accessing closed files. She became passionate, and there's nothing sexier than enthusiasm, and boy did Chris respond. First, he got her a job at his company's Vancouver affiliate, and now they're engaged.

There's a lesson there.

I'm sitting here inputting this in Barb's home office beside the kitchen, looking around at all the bits of things that make her house a home: flowers; a regularly culled cork notice board; obviously tended-to IN and OUT baskets; framed family photos (where does she get the energy to frame things - how does anybody get the energy to frame things?); clean rugs - it's a long list. I love Jason dearly, but neither of us is very gifted on the domestic front. We're not quite as bad as those people who plaster a Union Jack or a Confederate flag up on the windows as curtains, and Molly Maid comes in once a month to decontaminate the place with industrial vacuums and cleaning agents perfected during the Vietman War. It's always hard for us afterward to make eye contact with the disgusted Russian and Honduran girls who do the place. Is it so wrong to be a slob?

* * *

Okay, I know I'm using both the present and past tenses for Jason and me. Is he alive or dead? I have no choice but to hope he's somewhere and breathing. He's been gone a few months now. Not a peep. He went down to buy smokes at Mac's Milk and never came home. He walked - no car involved - and, well, the thing about people vanishing is that they've vanished. They haven't left you a clue. They're gone. A clue? I'd kill for a clue. I'd sell my retinas for a clue. But "vanish" is indeed the correct verb here.

It's . . .

The phone. I have to answer it.

* * *

That was Reg, calling from his apartment over near Lonsdale. He just wanted to talk. Jason's disappearance has left him as bewildered as it's left me. And I must say, it truly is hard to imagine Reg as the ogre Jason's always made him out to be.

Okay, Heather, be honest. You know darn well why Reg changed: losing Jason was the clincher. He also got royally dumped, just after Jason disappeared - by Ruth, this woman he'd been seeing for years. And not only was he dumped, but she really laid into him when she did the dumping. The essence of her farewell speech (delivered in a Keg steak restaurant as a neutral space) was that Reg was the opposite of everything he thought he was: cruel instead of kind; blind instead of wise; not tough but with skin as thin as frost. I didn't like Ruth much the few times we met; she had judgment written all over her face. In real life, it's always the judgmental people who get caught robbing the choirboys' charity raffle fund.

I think I'm the sole mortal friend or contact Reg still has, which is odd, as I'm not at all churchy. He sure doesn't have friends at work; the day Ruth dumped him, he was rummaging in the plastic spoon drawer in the coffee room, and found a voodoo doll of himself covered with pins made from straightened paper clips; the head had been burned a few times.

"Heather." The sound of his voice just now - his soul was sore.

"Reg. How're you doing?"

Pause. "Okay. But just okay."

"I haven't heard anything from the RCMP today."

"I doubt we will."

"Don't be so glum. Don't. And you know what? Chris has mapped Jason's face from an old photo. So at least he's in that index now."

"Heather, how many people are in that index, anyway?"

"I don't know. Maybe a few hundred thousand. But it's a start."

"Fah. A few hundred thousand . . ."

"Reg, don't be so negative. It's a start. And the index is only ever going to grow."

"He's gone."

"No, he's not gone, Reg."

"He is."

I lost it here. I said, "Reg, you either have to have some hope here, or you stop calling, okay?"

Reg was silent, and then: "Sorry."

"It's hard on all of us."

"Heather?"

"Yes."

"Let me ask you a question . . ."

"Okay. Shoot."

"If you could be God for a day, would you rule the world any differently from the way it's being run now?"

"Reg, you know I'm weak on religion."

"Well, would you?"

"Reg, have you eaten lunch? You need to eat."

"You didn't answer my question. If you were God, would you rule the world any differently?"

Would If "No."

"Why not?"

"Reg, the world is the way it is because - well, because that's the way it is."

"Meaning?"

"Reg, Jason and I once discussed this. Sometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be. Who would I be to fix that?"

"I forget that sometimes. Me, of all people. I take things too personally." He went quiet again, then: "How are the boys?"

"They're downstairs, wasted on sugar. Kelly from next door gave them KitKats, and I could just throttle the woman."

Reg was fishing here. "Reg," I asked, "would you like to come over for dinner? It's five o'clock already." He paused just long enough to make a dinnertime call seem casual. And so he's coming tonight for dinner, around eight, and I just heard one of the twins crying downstairs . . .

Saturday afternoon 6:30

Sometimes I think the only way to deal with turbocharged kids is to give them even more sugar and lock them in a room with a TV set. As I know zilch about kids, this is my first (and last) means of coping, and it seems to work just fine.

I was setting the table when I heard a cartoon bird character on the TV squawk - and suddenly I was back on my first official date with Jason. I thought I'd jot it down here quickly.

The day after we met, Jason and I were headed to look at birds in the pet shop at Park Royal - he was thinking of buying a pair of sulfur-crested cockatiels - but in the store I had a rapid-onset itching fit, allergies, and I had to get some cortisone for my elbows. I work as a court stenographer and am somewhat in public all day, so my skin needs to be in relatively okay shape, and lately my eczema has been a real problem.

So we were standing at the counter at London Drugs when I burst into tears. Jason asked me what was wrong, and I told the truth, which was that it was the most unromantic beginning of a date with the most lovable guy I'd ever met. He told me I was being silly, and gave me our first kiss, right there in line-up.

He didn't get any birds, but he did buy me three small, anatomically correct rubber frogs, the size of canapes, who soon became Froggles, Walter and Benihana, three more characters for our imaginary universe.

I must be coming across as a basket case here. Frogs and giraffes and . . . Well, we all create our private worlds between us, don't we? Most couples I know have an insider's secret language, even if it's just their special nicknames for the salt and pepper shakers. After a while, our characters were so finely honed that they could have had their own theme parks in Japan, Europe and the U.S. Sunbelt, as well as merchandise outlets in the malls. After his life of silence, I think that our characters were Jason's liberation.

And now I think I have to start preparing dinner. God bless Barb's copper-bottomed pots and her spice rack of the gods.

Saturday night 10:30

Okay, Barb's housekeeper will be in at 8:30 tomorrow to clean up the battlefield. I really ought to have known better than to put the twins at the same table as Reg, who's too old and too set in his ways to be comfortable around young children. He tried to keep it together for my sake, but the twins tonight would have worn out an East German ladies' weight-lifting coach circa 1971. They were monsters. In the end I caved in and gave them Jell-O, then packed them off to watch TV. Barb is going to have my head on a block for teaching them such bad habits.

The good part was that once the kids were bundled off, Reg relaxed and got a bit drunk and picked away at his fettuccine. Jason always told me Reg never drank, but then Jason didn't see his father for so many years. ... In any event, Reg drank white wine, not red, and then tested my grounding in reality by bringing out a cigarette and smoking it as if he'd been born to the task.

"Smoking now?"

"Might as well. Always wondered what it was like."

"What is it like?"

He chuckled. "Addictive."

"There you go."

I bummed a cigarette from him and smoked for the first time in twenty years and got the nicotine dizzies. I felt like a schoolgirl. When you conspire with someone like Reg, you feel as if you're committing one serious transgression.

Soon enough the conversation turned to Reg's sorrow about his lost boys - Kent the minor deity and his awful senseless death, and then Jason, but after three months there's simply no new ground to cover. I had the feeling that what we were discussing tonight is almost exactly what we'll be discussing in a decade.

Reg became morose. "I just don't understand - the most wretched people in this world prosper, while the innocent and the devout get only suffering."

"Reg, you can spend all night - and the rest of your life, for that matter - looking for some little equation that makes it all equate, but I don't think that equation exists. The world is the world. All you can change is the way you deal with what's thrown your way."

Reg sloshed around the last bit of wine in his glass, then knocked it back. "But it's hard."

"It is, Reg."

He looked so damn sad. Jason quite resembles his father; I almost wonder if they'd be analogs of each other, but tonight there was something new in his face. "Reg . . . ?"

"Yes, Heather."

"Do you ever have doubts about . . . the things you believe in?"

He looked up from his glass. "If you'd asked me that a decade ago, I'd have turned purple and cast you out of my house - or whatever house we were in. I'd have seen you as a corrupting influence. I'd have scorned you. But here I am now, and all I can do is say yes, which doesn't even burn or sting. I feel so heavy, I feel like barbells. I feel like I just want to melt into the planet, like a boulder in a swamp, and be done with everything."

"Reg, I'm going to tell you a story, okay?"

"A story? Sure. What about?"

I couldn't believe I was saying the words, but here I was. "About something stupid and crazy I did last week. I haven't told anyone about it, and if I don't tell someone I'm going to explode. Will you listen?"

"You always listen to me."

I twiddled a noodle coated with cold Parmesan cheese, and said, "Last week I phoned Chris, down in California."

"He's a good boy."

"He is."

"Why did you call?"

"I wanted to - needed to - ask him a favor."

"What was it?"

"I asked him to give me the names and addresses of the people who made the closest match to Jason in the facial profiling index."

"And?"

"And . . . there was this one guy who lives in South Carolina, named Terry, who's about seventy-five years old, and then there was this other guy, Paul, who lives down in Beaverton, Oregon, near Portland. A suburb."

"Go on."

"Well, it turns out this Paul guy has a long but minor record - a few stolen cars - and he got caught fencing memory chips in northern California."

"You went down there to meet him, didn't you?"

* * *

Oh, Heather, you knew it wouldn't be a good thing.

I drove down 1-5 to Beaverton, an eight-hour trip in migraine-white sun, my sunglasses forgotten back on the kitchen counter. In Washington state my body started to unravel: my elbows began crusting with eczema just north of Seattle; by the time I reached Olympia, I felt as if my arms were caked in dried mud. I cried most of the way down - I wasn't a pretty picture. People who drove past me and saw me at the wheel must have said to themselves, Boy, sometimes life is rough, and they'd be glad they weren't me.

I found a chain motel on the outskirts of Portland and spent an hour in a scratchy-bottomed bathtub, listening to teenagers party one room over. I was trying to rinse the road trip out of my body, as well as build up the courage to go knocking on this Paul guy's door. I was expecting him to inhabit a mobile home that listed on three wheels, with a one-eyed pit bull and a girlfriend armed with a baseball bat and incisors loaded with vinegar - and this was pretty close. I mean, what was I thinking? I'm just this broad who comes out of nowhere, who knocks on this guy's flaking red-painted front door in the dead-yellow-lawn part of town at 9:45 at night. When the door opened, I was struck dumb, because there before me was Jason - but not Jason - hair too dark, maybe a few years older, and with bigger eyebrows, but it seemed like his essence was there.

"Uh, can I help you? Ma'am?"

I sniffled. I hadn't planned for this moment, and the resemblance to Jason stopped me cold, even though it was the reason for my mission.

He said, "Okay. I know what this is. You're Alex's cupcake looking to get his leaf blower back. Well, tell that cheap bastard that until I see my cooler chest and all the beer that was in it, he's not gonna see his leaf blower." Paul's voice was higher than Jason's; no similarity there.

"I -"

"Huh? What?"

"I don't know anybody named Alex."

"Okay, then, lady, who are you? Because I've got Jurassic Park III on pause, and if I start watching it again right now, I'll have just enough time to finish before Sheila gets back from Tae Bo."

"I'm Heather."

Paul looked back at the TV and zapped it off with the remote.

"Heather, do I know you or something? Wait - are you Sheila's crazy half-sister? Just what I need. She said you were in Texas for good."

I couldn't speak, because I was looking at Jason hidden somewhere not far beneath Paul's bone structure.

He said, "So what's the score here? I stopped dealing years ago, so don't even try me there. And if you're here for money, you're at the wrong place."

"I'm not here for anything, Paul. I'm not."

"Yeah. Right."

"No - " I hadn't given this part any real thought, or rather, I'd assumed it would be magic and not need any planning.

"I'm waiting."

I said, "My boyfriend's been missing for three months now, and I don't know what I'm going to do, I miss him so much, and I'm so desperate, and I was able to tap into the government's database of criminal faces, so I did, and I found yours, because you're the one closest to him, and I came down here to - " I lost it here.

"You what?"

I was crying and looking at the ground where the dead yellow lawn met the concrete. "I came here to see if you were like him."

"Are you out of your tree, lady?"

"I'm not 'lady.' My name is Heather."

"Heather, are you out of your tree?"

I was choking and even more of a mess.

"Heather, sit down. Jesus."

I sat down. He leaned against the railing and lit up a cigarette the same way Jason did. "You can really do that -just go into a computer and find the person who looks like you?"

I honked my nose. "Welcome to the future. Yes. You can."

"Whoa.'" He spent a moment obviously contemplating the social ramifications of analogs. I was realizing what a mistake this had been.

"So," he said, "do I?"

"Do you what?"

"Look like him. Your boyfriend."

My body, drained of stress, went limp. I was already driving back up the coast in my head. "Yeah. Pretty much. Not quite twins, but with different hair, three months of dieting, and some tweezers, you could pull it off."

"Huh."

"I should go."

"No. Don't. I'll get you a beer."

"I'm driving."

"So?"

I didn't argue. Paul went into the house and brought me back a can of something and opened it for me. Chivalry. To be honest, I wanted to see his face again. He'd had acne as a teenager, he'd spent too much time in the sun, he had twenty extra pounds, and he had a Celtic cross tattooed on his left shoulder, but it was all mesmerizingly Jason-ish.

"He dumped you?"

"No."

"Sorry. I've gotta ask these things."

We looked at each other.

"So tell me where it is you're supposed to go to find your twin?"

"Your analog."

"Huh?"

"That's what you are. You're an analog of my boyfriend."

"So where do I go to find my analog?"

"You don't. I just fluked out. I have a friend of a friend who works in the place where the facial data's stored." He sat down beside me - too close beside me - on the crumbling concrete front steps. He touched the small of my back and I jumped out of my skin, at which point a black martial-artsy club smacked him on his forehead. It was Sheila.

"You stinking son of a dog - "

"Sheila - this isn't what it looks like."

I ran for my car, and luckily Sheila ignored me. Paul still must have a goose egg on his forehead, and I doubt Sheila's ever going to believe his story. On the other hand, Reg thought it was kind of funny, which made me feel better.

Saturday night 11:45

It's almost midnight, and the kids have finally passed out from sugar fatigue. They must be diabetic by now.

I spend my life in court hearing people yammer away and for once I want to be on the stand. Forget my crazy trip to Portland. I want to talk about what happened yesterday, because that's what's gotten me to writing here. I'd have told Reg, but I have a hunch he doesn't go in for this kind of stuff.

But first, you have to understand that my life before Jason was dull. Not insignificant, mind you, but not many kicks either. I grew up in North Van, seven years ahead of Jason. Have I mentioned that I'm seven years older than he is? At the time of the Delbrook Massacre I was living in Ontario and had just earned all the papers I needed to be a court stenographer. I was already working part time, in Windsor -a friend got me a job there. I was always a good typist, but stenography? It works by phonetics, not letters, and when it's flowing properly, it's as if the things people are telling each other in court are emerging from my own brain in real time. It's like I'm inventing the world! Other stenographers say the same thing - it's like catching the perfect wave. And it's funny, because one of the side effects of being a good stenographer is that you can tell right away when someone's fibbing. Oh yeah: the presiding judge and jury might miss it, but not this gal. I suppose if you asked me what was the one thing that made me different from all other people, that might be it - that I'm a living lie detector.

That's how I "met" Jason the first time. On TV back in the 1980s; he was at a press conference just after he'd been absolved of any wrongdoing. I was homesick in Windsor, watching TV at my place with two neighbors who were also from Vancouver. We were drinking beer and feeling alienated from the massive quilt of autumn leaves outside. My neighbors said Jason was lying his ass off, but I said no way, and I stuck up for him, even back then. Imagine telling the truth about something as gruesome as that massacre, and having only half the world believe you; I don't think you could ever trust people again. So when I encountered Jason at the Toys R Us, he looked familiar as well as sad, but at first I couldn't peg why.

But I was going to discuss Friday. It's what started me going on this. I was downtown on my lunch break from the courthouse. I was in a drugstore getting a few things for this weekend with the kids. My cell phone battery was dead, so I went to a pay phone and checked my messages, and there was just one, a woman's voice - nice enough, maybe fiftyish - and she had something to tell me she said was both unusual and urgent. And then she hung up, no phone number or anything. Well what was I supposed to make of that? I listened to the message again. She didn't sound evil, and believe me, I've seen and heard so much evil in the courtroom that by now you could use my blood as an anti-evil vaccine. Who was this woman, and what exactly was she on about - telemarketing?

If it had been something to do with Jason, I figured she would have used a different voice with a different tone. Meaning what, Heather? Meaning, this woman didn't sound like the type to deliver ransom instructions or notify the cops to go looking in the Fraser River for a corpse rolled up in a discount Persian carpet. I know that voice, and it wasn't hers.

So I spent the rest of the afternoon slightly distracted, trying to pinpoint the nature of her voice, in the process even making some boo-boos on the court transcript - but it's a dull-as-dishwater property suit, and the chances of anyone consulting the record are zero. I could sit there pumping out the Girl Guide Pledge all afternoon, and nobody would ever know. This is both a plus and a minus of my job: my work is important, and yet it isn't. To be honest, they should just wire everybody up, stuff the room with cameras and fire me, except that the electronics would cost far more to maintain and service. So my job's safe for a while yet.

At five o'clock, I made the dash across the bridge and got to Barb's just in time to take charge of the twins as Barb raced out to the airport. The two boys were ravenous. Dinner became the next thing, and then they wanted to show me their computer games, which was a snoozer for me, and then I headed back to the kitchen for a sip of white wine and my first calm moment since the morning.

I phoned and checked my messages. None. So I call-forwarded my number to Barb's and sat at the kitchen table where I picked at the kids' leftover hot dogs and tried to enjoy the silence. Then the phone rang. It was the woman.

"Hello, is this . . . Heather?"

"Yes, it is. Who's this?" I kept my tone friendly.

"I'm Allison."

"Hello, Allison. You're the one who said you had some information for me?"

"Well, I do and I don't."

"You're losing me."

"Do you have five minutes?"

What the heck. "Sure." I poured another glass and sat on the bar stool by the flecked black marble counter.

"I guess I should tell you right off, Heather, I'm a psychic."

I was about to hang up.

"Don't hang up."

"You're a good psychic. You read my mind."

"No. It's common sense. I'd hang up, too, if some woman saying she was a psychic called me."

"Allison, I'm sure you're a nice person, but . . ."

"Oh, I say."

"What?"

"Oh, I say."

"Oh, I say" was Gerard T. Giraffe's unfunny entrance line, like the ones people have in sitcoms which are supposed to be funny, but really aren't, like when Norm enters the bar on Cheers, and everyone says, "Norm!" She was even using the correct Gerard tone of voice, baritone and bumbling.

" 'Oh, I say' . . . Does that mean anything to you?"

I kept silent.

"'Oh, I say."'

"Who are you, Allison? What do you want?"

"I don't want anything. I don't. But all day I've been getting this voice coming through my brain in the middle of whatever I'm doing, saying 'Oh, I say,' and it's freaking me out, and I'm supposed to be used to this sort of thing."

"How did you connect the voice to my name?"

"That's almost the easiest part. I emptied my head and used a pencil on white paper in a dark room and your name and number came out. It's not too far a stretch to get a phone number when you get such a weird, specific message like 'Oh, I say' delivered in a Rex Harrison baritone."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Heather, I'm sorry you feel this way. But there's no game-playing going on here. I don't want money. I don't want anything. But there's still these words pumping out of wherever. I just want to make sure I'm not cracking up. Oh, I say. Oh, I say. Oh, I say."

I was silent. In the other room the kids were bickering.

"Heather, look. I've never told anyone this before, but I'm not really a psychic. I'm a fake psychic. I look at people's faces, their jewelry and scars and footwear and shirts and you name it. I pretty much feed them what they want to hear. You don't even need too much intuition to do it. I'm surprised there aren't millions of psychics out there. It's a total racket."

So much for me being a living lie detector. "How can you mess with people's lives like that?"

"Messing? Not at all. I give them hope, and I never raise their expectations too high. The only thing most people want is a bit of proof, however flimsy, that people they once knew are thinking of them from the great beyond."

"Most people? What do the other people want?"

"They want a conversation with the dead, but I can't do that for them. Because I'm a fake. And even if I could, a conversation with someone in the great beyond might not be the smartest thing to facilitate."

"But you're a fake. You said so yourself."

"I am, Heather. But this 'Oh, I say' thing - it's the only potentially real signal I've ever picked up on my antenna, and frankly it's scaring me."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Just tell me that it means something - that it means something real."

"Allison, give me a second here."

I put the wineglass down on the counter. There were lipstick stains on it. Why was I wearing lipstick to baby-sit the kids? The icemaker rumbled and stopped, and the fridge's humming entered second gear.

"Okay," I said, "It means something."

"Oh, thank God."

"Wait. Hold on a minute. When you get your messages or whatever, is it a voice in your head? Or is it like a text message on a computer screen?"

"It's sort of both and neither. It's more a thing that passes through you, like when you leave the house and you realize the stove is still on. It defies words, and yet at the same time, it is words."

That sounded real enough. "Do you see his face?"

"No. But I can definitely feel him near."

"So you can't tell me what he looks like - it's not like I want proof - I'm just curious."

"Okay. I'd say he's taller than you - six something -mouse-brown hair, not thinning, gray-green eyes. That's not much to go by. I could have made that up."

"It's close. Very close." It was bang on.

Allison asked, "What does it mean, then? It's a weird message."

"I can't tell you."

"Okay. Fair enough."

"Tell me, Allison, does a person have to be dead in order to send you voices or words?"

"From what I've read, not necessarily."

"Does this voice say anything else to you?"

"No. Not words."

"What do you mean, 'not words'?"

"Just what I said. The voice - male, fifties maybe? - says 'Oh I say,' and then there's this weird laughter. But it's not like real laughter. It's fake."

"Oh, Jesus." I put the phone down. I could hear Allison on the other end calling "Heather? Heather? Heather?"

"Allison, where are you calling from? What's your number?"

She gave it to me. I asked if we could meet soon. She couldn't make it today, so tomorrow it is - in the morning, down at the beach.

It was bedtime. We'd see what tomorrow would bring.

Sunday afternoon 3:30

Oh Lord. What am I to do? I arranged to meet her at the fish-and-chips stand between Ambleside Beach and the soccer field. Jason always liked going there, so I figured it would increase the chance of a Jason vibe. Did I just write the word "vibe"? I hope that doesn't betoken the start of something bad. I was bleary-eyed and freezing, and the twins didn't seem to notice or care - oh, to be young and have a proper thermostat again. So I waited for this Allison woman.

The stand was closed, and we were alone save for a few unambitious seagulls trolling the metal litter drums for snacks. The air was salty and nice, clean smelling. I turned to look at the waves, at the little tips of whitecaps, and I turned around, and there was Allison, older than I'd thought, about sixty, and smaller too, her body like a pit inside a large prune of teal-green fleece and zippers. She wore tight black leggings so maybe she was a walker. Do I care? Yes. I care. This woman was my lifeline.

"Allison?"

"Heather?"

"I'm glad you could come meet me here."

Allison said, "How could I miss it? This is the first interesting thing to happen in my life since my husband died."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Don't be. It was horrible for him. When he went it was a blessing."

"Is that when you first decided to try your hand at being psychic?"

"At first. I missed him like I'd miss sight or taste or hearing — he was an extra sense for me. I felt like I'd been blinded. I wanted him returned to me any way I could manage."

We all walked toward the soccer field. "What happened then?"

"First I went to other so-called psychics; they all checked me out and picked up on the fact that I'd recently lost Glenn. Something in my eyes, or maybe the fact that I hadn't bothered to pretty myself up. I know all the signs now.

These psychics would mostly milk Glenn's death - 'I think it was a quick death - no! It was a slow death. He wanted you to be brave and not to worry.' None of it was of any consequence, but it made me feel good at a time when other things weren't working. You don't need to be a psychic to know that, but when the message comes from the spirit world, wow, you almost swoon from the illusion of contact."

"Why did you decide to do it yourself? Don't you think it's sort of mean for pseudo-psychics to lead people on?"

"Mean? No. Like I told you last night, it's harmless stuff, and even the worst psychic made me feel a heckuva lot better than all the Wellbutrin or Tia Maria I swallowed. Psychics are no different from quack vitamins or aromatherapy or any of that stuff you see ads for. And I'll tell you this: When people come to me, I really do help them. And you'd be amazed at the problems everybody has."

"I work as a court stenographer. I think I see more problems than most people."

It was becoming windy, and our voices were being swept away. Allison said to me, "Heather, please don't tell me anything about yourself. Please. If I'm going to be genuinely psychic here, I don't want the results to be influenced."

Just then the kids found a dead crow and shouted, "Aunt Heather!" and I looked at Allison and said, "Well, now you know at least that much."

I suggested we go talk someplace warm. We went to the café adjacent to the ball pit at Park Royal mall, where the twins romped among filthy colored-plastic balls with germ loads reminiscent of the Black Plague.

Allison said, "I'll be frank with you. I don't know if you're married or single or divorced or lesbian or anything else. And I'll say it again: I don't know where I got these voices, or why."

She paused. I tried to conceal my hunger for more contact from Jason. "Allison, did you get any more, uh, messages last night or this morning?"

Allison said, "I did. One."

"What was it?"

She sighed. "I can tell you, if you like, but I have no idea what it means."

"What is it? What did you hear?"

She screwed up her head as if she was about to sing an aria, but instead she spoke in a high, cartoonish voice: "Hey! I'm in dreamland and I got the best table here." She repeated the phrase and then relaxed her head. "That's what I heard."

"Hey, I'm in dreamland and I got the best table here" was a running gag of Froggles, which we used at night before going to sleep. Hearing the words made me high and low at the same time, like a cough syrup high. My face felt like it was morphing into some other face, and my emotions were trying to escape through my bones.

Allison asked me, "Shall I say it for you again?"

"No!" I fairly yelled. I asked Allison to watch the kids for me and I ran out of the small café area beside the pit and headed to the bathroom, where I sat for ten minutes and cried. It's a credit to the human race that several women knocked gently on the door and asked if there was anything they could do. But there wasn't. I sat on the toilet and finally realized that Jason is probably dead; to keep thinking otherwise is simply delusional. The effort I've been putting in, being the rock, keeping it together for the sake of Barb, the kids, Reg and Jason's mom. Nobody else has to go back to an apartment where there's a man's wallet with credit cards collecting dust on the counter by the banana bowl, or a bar of orange English soap that's begun to crack beside the bathroom window. I've been trying to keep Jason's aura alive, but every night after work I walk into that apartment and it's leaked away just that much more. His clothes don't look like they're ever going to be worn again, but I can't give them away. So I keep his stuff there. I dust his shoes so they don't look . . . dead. I keep his wallet beside the fruit bowl because it looks casual, so when he returns he can say, "Ha-ha, there's my wallet!"

Just listen to me. I'm crazy. I wasn't going to let this happen to me. I wasn't. I was going to be cool, but that's not an option anymore.

Finally, Allison knocked on the stall door. She said she was sorry, but she had to leave. I asked her not to, but she said she didn't have a choice. "I told the girl at the ball pit entry way to keep the kids there until you return."

"Thanks."

* * *

I am not a stupid woman. I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don't feel a part of that world, and I wouldn't know how to join if I tried. I live in a condo in a remote suburb of a remote city. It rains a lot here. I need groceries and I go to the shopping center. Sometimes they'll be rebuilding a road and putting those bright blue plastic pipes down in holes; there'll be various grades of gravel in conical piles, and I almost short-circuit when I think of all the systems that are in place to keep our world moving. Where does all the gravel come from? Where do they make blue plastic pipes? Who dug the holes? How did it reach the point where everyone agreed to be doing this? Airports almost make me speechless, what with all of these people in little jumpsuits eagerly bopping about doing some highly qualified task. I don't know how the world works, only that it seems to do so, and I leave it at that.

Sunday night 7:00

Barb gets home in a few minutes. From now on I'll have to write this using my Soviet coal-powered Windows system. I also phoned Reg, and asked him to come for a late dinner at my place tonight. I feel like I need family. My immediate family's all over the country, so Jason's family will do in a pinch. I'd like to be able to call Jason's mother at the extended-care facility, but . . . when she's on, she's great, but when she's off - which is nearly all the time now - I might as well be talking to a tree with its branches flapping in a storm.

No friends to visit. They're either married and moved away, or single and moved away. I could phone them, but they're spooked by Jason's vanishing. They feel sorry for me. They don't know how to discuss it, and when they phone, I'm wondering if they get a poor-Heather thrill at the fact he's still missing.

Any news?

Nope.

None?

Nope.

Oh. So, um - what are you up to lately?

You know. Work.

Oh.

Well. . .

See you one of these days.

'Bye.

* * *

I've gone through my memory with a lice comb, and I still can't find any evidence that Jason was connected to ugliness or violence that might in some way have led to his disappearance. I've seen killers galore in the courtroom, and despite all of those he-was-just-a-quiet-man-a-perfect-neigh-bor things you hear on TV, the fact is that killers have a deadness in their eyes. Their souls are gone, or they've been replaced with something else, like in a body-snatcher movie. I was always happy to be invisible in a courtroom when a murder trial was happening, but it was always the killers who tried hardest to make eye contact with me. During a month-long trial I'd typically look in their direction just one time, and there they were, meeting my glance head on. So no, Jason was no killer. I knew his eyes. He had a fine soul.

Did Jason have a secret life before me? No, nothing scary. He was a contractor's assistant. He picked up drywall, he cut tiles, and he did wiring. His friends weren't truly friends but glorified barflies. The more they wanted to know about the massacre, the less Jason spoke with them. I'm sure they must have been spooked by this, but nobody was ever surprised. His boss, Les, was a good-time Charlie whose wife, Kim, monitored him like the CIA. We had a few barbecues and company picnics together. Les is about as dangerous as a squeak toy.

I tried asking Jason to open up about his past. This was surprisingly hard to do. I know that most guys aren't talkative about themselves, but Jason, good God, it was like pulling teeth out of Mount Rushmore getting him to tell me what he did before he got hired by Les. He'd been working in a kitchen-cupboard-door factory, it turned out.

"Jason, my two cousins work for Canfor's wood panel division. What's the big deal?"

"Nothing."

I pushed and prodded and pleaded, and finally it turned out he was ashamed because he'd only taken a factory job so that he wouldn't have to speak with people during work.

"There's nothing wrong with that, Jason."

"I went for almost four years without having a real conversation with any other human being."

"I -"

"It's true. And I'm not the only one. Those guys you see driving in trucks and wearing hardhats and all of that, they're doing the exact same thing that I was doing. They want to get to the grave without ever having to discuss anything more complex than the hockey pool."

"Jason, that's cynical and simply not true."

"Is it?"

Was it?

Getting Jason to discuss Reg was easy. All I had to do was say that Jason's mom saw Reg in the magazine shop on Lonsdale. Instantly: "That sanctimonious bastard sold me to his God for three beans. That mean, sour freak. He should rot."

"Jason. He can't be all that bad."

"Bad? He's the opposite of everything he claims to be."

Is he? No.

Sunday night 11:00

The sky was orange-before-the-dark, and I was in the vestibule organizing all of Jason's rubber workboots when Reg showed up. Pathetically, I was hoping the boots' odor might remind me of Jason. Reg's knock was startling, and when I answered the door, Reg looked at my face, and I could see he knew I'd given finally given up hope.

In the kitchen he put on a pot of water for tea and took Jason's wallet from beside the fruit bowl. He removed the contents item by item, laying them out on the countertop.

"So there he is." Laid out were Jason's driver's license, his North Van library card, his Save-On-Foods discount card and some photos of Barb, the kids and me. Reg said, "Heather, something happened today. Tell me what it was." He took the water off the stove before it screamed. He didn't want any extra drama.

I remember reading somewhere that devoutly religious people despise psychics, Magic 8 Balls, fortune-telling, fortune cookies and anything of that ilk, considering them all calling cards of the devil. So I was pretty sure that when I told him about Allison he'd blow up or go into his lecture mode, but he didn't, and yet it was unmistakable that he disapproved. He asked, "Tell me more about the words 'Oh, I say.'"

"It was this character Jason and I had between us."

"And?"

"He was a giraffe. Named Gerard."

"Why did he say, 'Oh, I say'?"

"Because he needed to have a cheesy tag line every time he appeared on our stage, so to speak." It felt uncomfortable, if not obscene, discussing the characters with an outsider. Especially with Reg, who as a child probably spent his Sundays scanning the dot patterns in the weekend funnies with a magnifying glass in search of hidden messages from the devil.

I told Reg about Froggles, too. "Reg, my point is that these were characters shared solely between Jason and me. Nobody on the planet could possibly have known about them."

Reg was silent. This drove me nuts. "Reg, say something, at least."

He poured the tea. "I guess what's strange for me here is to learn that Jason had an inner world that included all these characters and all the things they said."

"Well, he did."

"And that he spoke with them all the time."

"He didn't speak with them, he was them. Or rather, they were us. We both have our own personalities, but when we went into character mode we became something altogether different. You could give me a thousand bucks and I couldn't think up a single line for them to say. Jason, too. But me and Jason together? There'd be no stopping us."

"Do you have any wine?"

"White or red?"

"White."

I took the bottle out of the fridge and poured it for him. He said, "Ahhh, God bless vitamin W."

I asked him if the psychic aspect of these events upset him for religious reasons.

"Psychics? Lord, no. They're all quacks. I don't believe God speaks to humans through them. So if a psychic's sending you messages, either the psychic's faking it, or something ungodly is coming through."

"Yeah, well . . ."

"Look, Heather, I know you're upset that I don't believe in your psychic."

"She gave me evidence, Reg - "

He raised his hands as if to say, Nothing I can do about it.

Meanwhile I had to make dinner. I had no idea what was in the fridge to eat - fat-free yogurt? Limp celery? I got up to inspect. I had this thought: "Reg, is all this supposed to make us better people? I mean, is that why we're going through this - so that our souls can somehow improve?" I found a plastic tub of frozen spaghetti sauce.

"Maybe."

I was so mad that I slammed the sauce onto the counter and the lid popped off. "Will you just tell me why it is that the only way we ever seem to take steps forward in life is through pain? Huh? Why is exposure to pain always supposed to make us better people?"

"Heather, it's grotesque to think for even a moment that suffering in and of itself makes you a better person."

"I'm listening."

"Heather, I'm having one of my good days today. I'm not feeling as full of doubt as last time. Doubt comes and goes. And my thinking today is that it's equally grotesque to think that a lack of bad events in your life means you're a good person. Life is only so long. The whistle gets blown, and "when it does, where you are is where you are. If people lived to be five hundred, that's probably be about long enough for everybody to have experienced most of what there is, and to have done all of the bad stuff, too. But we check out roughly at seventy-two."

"So?"

"So if we assume that God is just - and I think He is, even after everything that's happened - then justice can still be done. Maybe not here on earth, or in our own lifetimes, but for justice to happen then there has to be something beyond this world. Life on this plane is simply too short for justice."

"Huh."

"Some people even give the impression that they've escaped all the bad stuff, but I don't think anybody does. Not really."

"You don't?"

"No."

"I used to be a really nice person, Reg."

"I can't say that about myself."

"But now something's changed and I'm not a nice person anymore. It happened to me today in the mall's bathroom when I was crying. I stopped being nice."

Reg said, "No, no, that's not true."

In any event, I was heating the spaghetti sauce, and I dropped the subject of psychics, evil, Froggles, and Jason, and spoke about those things that float on the surface, things without roots: current events, TV and movies. The moment Reg left I pounced on the phone and called Allison, but she didn't pick up and there was no machine.

I tried again an hour later. Nothing.

I would have called her every three minutes, but then I realized how uncool it would look if Allison came in, looked at her call screening display, and saw that I'd phoned her seventy-eight times. So instead I phoned her three more times, and just now took a sedative my doctor had given me back when Jason first disappeared, but which I've so far refused to take. I'm going to bed.

Monday night 7:00

Work today was hard, and I screwed up several times. I passed on lunch with Jayne from the court next door, and I bought a tuna salad sandwich and some chocolate milk. It sat beside me untouched on the courtyard steps while I began phoning Allison's number once again. How many times had it been, at that point - ten? But I couldn't help it: her number was the combination to a safe, and I desperately wanted in.

By the end of lunch hour, I felt sick - well, more freaked out than sick. I clocked out and drove home, as if home would afford me any comfort. I phoned Allison twice again and then decided at the last minute to visit Jason's mother at the extended-care facility off Lonsdale. She was awake and for an instant seemed to recognize me, but quickly forgot me again. She kept asking for Joyce, Jason's old dog, but I told her about ten times that because I was allergic to her, Joyce was living with Chris down in Silicon Valley.

Then she asked how Jason was. I said he was fine, and then from the innocent expression on her face I time-traveled just a few months in the past to a world where Jason was still here. I felt relief that we'd decided to not tell her the news.

Tuesday morning 5:30

Allison won't answer her phone, and I'm ready for murder. For the love of God, how many times do I have to dial her? I threw all caution to the wind and put her number on autoredial for the entire evening. Then I went and bought a copy of every local newspaper and checked out all the psychics, looking for her.

I went through the Yellow Pages and the Internet, and still nothing. She must have some sort of business alias. I called all the psychics I could, asking who Allison might be, but nobody knew. Some of them tried reeling me in by fishing for what Allison might have been onto. Scum. But all leads went dead. The nerve of this woman - the nerve - she knows darn well what it's like to endure what I've endured, and she doesn't return my call.

I can't sleep. Instead, I just think about her more and more, and then I think about Jason, somewhere out there in the afterworld trying to reach me, and instead all he connects with is Allison in her teal-colored fleece - pilled fleece, at that - who tells me right out of the gate that she's in the business of being a liar. I walk around the condo, talking aloud, telling Jason that he could come directly to me, instead of wasting his time trying to go through this uncommunicative Allison bitch.

I then felt uncharitable and petty. I thought that maybe if I drank a couple of gallons of water, it'd de-gunk anything in my veins or muscles that might be blocking Jason from reaching me directly. Then I figured I was maybe too clear, so I drank a shot of tequila.

Oh, God, I think I'm looped right now - but it was only one tequila shot, and my period was a week ago, so I don't know why I'm so wound up. It's going to be light soon. It'll be a clear, cool day, like summer, but the sun's too low on the horizon.

Seasons have always had a strong effect on me. For example, everyone has a question that assaults them the moment they're awake in the morning - usually it's "Where am I?" or sometimes "What day is it?" I always wake up asking "What season is it?" Not even the day but the season. A billion years of evolution summed up in one simple question, all based on the planet's wobble. Oh, but I wish it were spring! And oh - if only I could smell some laurels in the path outside the building! But then, on the other hand, if I'm honest, I have to remember that it takes bodies longer to decompose in fall and winter. Oh, Jason, I'm so sorry, honey, I'm sorry I just thought of you like you were merely biomass like potting soil or manure or mulch. That's obviously not true. I don't know what happened to you, but you're still just Jason. You haven't turned into something else yet.

And Allison, you evil cheesy witch. You won't pick up the phone. How dare you. I'm going to find you. Yes, I'm going to find you.

Tuesday morning 11:00

I'm writing this directly into the courtroom's system. Who cares?

A half-hour ago the unthinkable happened: my cell phone went off in the middle of a cross-examination. Whole years go by without people even noticing we exist. We're not supposed to draw attention to ourselves - and so there I sat looking like a twit to everybody in the room, phone bleeping away. Granted, it was probably the most interesting thing to happen in that courtroom since the double murder trial back in '97, but people are staring at me, willing my cheeks to flush red, trying to make me know that they know about me. If you were looking at me as I write this, you'd never know that all I want to do in this world is kidnap Allison and tie her to a rack and demand that she tell me what's going on with Jason.

As I turned off the phone, I checked the call display, and of course it was Allison, finally. It's all I can do right now to not climb the walls with my teeth.

Oh, God. Look at these men. What drudgery are these dirtbags discussing now? They're all crooks. You can't imagine all the mining and real estate and offshore crap that wends through this room. You'd be shocked. They'll bankrupt widows and they'll only get a minimum fine and some golf tips from their lawyers. I bet Allison was married to one of these guys. What was his name? Glenn. Uh-huh. Glenn, who probably had a 23 handicap, a cholesterol count of 280, and a handful of semitraceable shell corporations. I've met enough Glenns in my time. Some of them hang around at the end of the day and try to pick me up, which I didn't use to mind because it meant that at least I wasn't invisible. But now? Glenn. Now I hate Glenn, because Glenn is connected to Allison, and Allison is a witch.

Oh Lord, when is this morning's session going to end?

And Heather, aren't you the one who's up the creek, paddle-free, once they read this transcript? Screw it. Nobody ever does.

What has happened to me? I've gone crazy. I have. Allison isn't evil. She's just stupid. She probably forgot to recharge her phone. Why all of a sudden do you accuse her of treachery when stupidity may be her only failing? Wait a second - Allison is way too young a name for a woman aged sixty-ish. She ought to be called Margaret or Judy or Pam. Allison? Only women my age are called Allison. Or Heather. When we all start dying in another forty years, they'll look at the obituaries, see our names and say to themselves, "Isn't it weird? All the Heathers are dying."

A bit later

Okay, there was one time when I suspected something dodgy with Jason, just one time, down in Park Royal maybe two months before he disappeared. We were walking down the main atrium in the south mall, returning a shirt, and in mid-conversation Jason froze. I looked at whatever it was he was seeing; there was just this guy sitting there eating ice cream on a bench with a woman who looked to be his mother. He was a big guy, kind of Eastern European looking, and his clothes - they were like what a nightclub bouncer in Vladivostok might choose, thinking that this was how hip Americans dress. His mother was like something from the tuberculosis ward on Ellis Island circa 1902.

"Jason?"

"Don't move."

"Huh."

"I said, don't - "

"Jason, you're scaring me."

The guy looked our way, and in slow motion put down his ice cream. He then rolled up his pants leg, and I thought he was going to pull out a handgun, but instead I saw that he had a metal prosthesis. The guy knocked on it, looked up at Jason and gave a creepy smile.

The next minute Jason had whisked me away and we were standing in front of the Bootlegger jeans store. He was obviously stressed out, and when he saw that we were in front of the Bootlegger store, he became even more so - he said, "Not this place." So we escalatored up to the next level. I looked down, and the one-legged guy was looking up at us.

By then I was curious but also quite angry. "Jason, what was that all about?"

"A guy I used to work with."

"It doesn't look to me like you were friends with him."

"He burnt me on some money he owes me. He's a crazy Russian guy. Those people will do anything."

"That's racist."

"Whatever. That guy is bad news."

I saw the wall slam down. I didn't bother pursuing the question, as past experience had taught me the futility of trying to breach the wall.

Jason said, "Let's go to the parkade."

"What? We just got here. We haven't even returned this shirt."

"We're going."

And so we left.

And for the weeks after that, Jason was jumpy and tossed in his sleep. Maybe there was no connection to the disappearance. What am I saying? I don't have a clue. But if I ever see that guy again, he's got a lot of questions coming his way.

Tuesday afternoon 1:30

Back in my little stenography booth looking, to all the world, like the picture of industry.

I listened to Allison's message over lunch hour:

"Oh, hello, uh, Heather, this is Allison. I think you might have been trying to reach me. I couldn't find your number because it was in the cell phone's memory and the phone was in the car, which died, and so I've been trying to rustle up some money to get the starter motor fixed, and, well, you know how complicated things can get ..."

Do I? Do I? Allison, stop feebly toying with the trivialities of your life, accomplishing nothing, pretending that your tasks are so complex that only God could handle them. Just go fix your effing car, and shut up. And yes, Allison, I do know how complicated things can get, but they could be bloody well easier if you'd stop pretending to be a cretinous fake helpless girly-girl about matters that take only ten minutes to solve.

". . . Anyway, yes, I did have a remarkable statement for you come through last night, and it was for you, no mistake there. Would you like to get together maybe at the end of the day? I know you work nine to five. Here's my number, give me a call . . ."

Hag.

As if I didn't know her number. I phoned it and got no response. Lunch hour went by in what seemed to be three minutes as I dialed it over and over, for a few minutes from the bathroom because I got a bit dizzy and had to sit in silence. What is it about Allison that has me sitting in public bathroom stalls all the time?

So now I'm back in the courtroom supposedly documenting this frivolous and endless land deal trial. These men should all be tarred and feathered and be flogged as they walk naked down the street for screwing around with the lives of common people the way they do.

In my peripheral vision I'm also noticing that people are looking at me to see if my cell phone is going to ring again. As if. But I have to admit, it's a bit flattering to be the temporary star in the courtroom, instead of these blowhards who drag things out so they can bill for countless hours. The law is a lie. It's a lie. A lie.

Tuesday afternoon 2:45

Back in my little booth stenographing away.

My phone just rang again. Right in the middle of a freighted moment engineered by one of these hawklike balding Glennoids. The judge spoke to me quite harshly -too harshly, really; I mean, it's only a cell phone ringing in front of the court. Professionally it's a huge humiliation, but you know what? I could care less. I told his honor that I'd just signed up for a new cell phone program and that I was unfamiliar with their system. And he bought it.

And so here I am, chastened, and to look at me, I'm beavering away at my job, humiliated and belittled by the powers above. Sure. I just want to get out of this psychic garbage dump.

Tuesday night 10:00

Allison finally answered her phone. I pretended to be all-innocent, as if I hadn't phoned her two thousand times in the past forty-eight hours.

"Allison?"

"Heather. We connect. How are you?"

Like a Ryder truck full of fertilizer and diesel fuel, with a detonator set at thirty seconds and ticking. "Okay. Getting by. The usual. You?"

"Oh, you know - this car of mine. Cars are so expensive to maintain."

"What do you drive?"

"A '92 Cutlass."

Well, of course it's expensive to maintain. It's a decade old - what do you expect? The quality revolution hadn't happened then. It's one big hunk of pain you're driving. Throw it away. Buy a Pontiac Firefly for $19.95 -I don't care what you do, but for God's sake, don't drive the wind-up toy you're using now. I said, "Cars are getting better these days, but they can still be a bother."

"The money I make from being a pretend psychic is so small."

"I could help you out, maybe."

"Could you?"

I said, "Sure. It's probably going to cost less than you thought. I can set you up with my repair guy, Gary, down on Pemberton Avenue."

"That'd be kind of you."

"So can we meet tonight?"

"I think so."

I asked, "What time works for you?"

"Seven o'clock"?

"Where? How about my place?"

"Oh . . ."

"Allison - is everything okay?"

"It's just that seven is when I usually eat dinner."

We agreed to meet at a slightly formal Italian place on Marine Drive. When I arrived, it was evident she'd been there a while, as only the dregs remained in what I already saw was a bottle of the restaurant's priciest merlot. She told me I looked relaxed, which is always a successful ploy, because it invariably relaxes the person you say it to. I asked if she liked the wine; she did - she'd better - and she ordered another bottle, although you'd never imagine such a tiny dragon could hold her booze so well.

Heather, try to be nice to this woman. You're only jealous because Jason chose to speak through her and not directly to you.

As soon as there was wine in my glass I asked her what message Jason had given her, but she raised her hand in a warding-off motion (very professional) and said, "It's not good to mix eating with the spirit world." It was all I could do not to throttle her. She talks about the afterlife like it was Fort Lauderdale.

As Allison didn't want to contaminate her perceptions by asking me about my life, I learned - over the appetizer, the lamb entree, and some Key lime sorbet - about Glenn, who had worked for the Port Authority's inspection division, further details of which make me ache for sleep. She has three ungrateful daughters, all in their twenties, who seem to shack up with anything on two legs. To hear Allison's side of the story, her life has been nothing but person after person abusing her sweet, generous nature. Of course, I don't believe her for a moment, but that doesn't get me anywhere. She's got the sole existing phone line to Jason, and I'll be damned if some passive-aggressive menopausal old bat is going to cheat me out of hearing what Jason's been saying to me.

When the dishes were cleared, Allison did what I used to do back in college, which was keep a sharp eye attuned to the restaurant's till so as to see when the check might be arriving, and once the check was in motion toward the table, flee to the bathroom. When she returned, she found me putting on my sweater and readying my purse.

"Oh, did the bill come?"

"My treat."

"How sweet of you."

"Maybe we could go to a coffee place and discuss, you know - these things you've been receiving."

"That's an excellent idea."

We found a nearby café inhabited by local teens primping and strutting and turkey-cocking, all of which made me feel older than dirt. Allison ordered the most expensive coffee on the menu, whereupon I gave her my most penetrating stare. "Can we talk now about Jason?"

"Of course, dear. But I wish it didn't feel as silly as it does to say these things to you."

"No, not at all. So what did he say?"

Allison inhaled and delivered the words like an embarrassing truth. "Glue."

"What?"

"Glue. Glue glue glue glue glue."

I was floored. It was the Quails speaking. The Quails were yet more characters created by Jason and me - a blend of Broadway gypsies and intelligent children, greatly given to repetitive tasks and themed costumes. But the Quails spoke only their own language, which had only one word, glü, with a jaunty, Ikea-like umlaut on the ü.

Allison said, "After all your kindness, Heather, that's the only message I have for you. I think maybe I am a fraud after all."

I sat stunned.

"Heather? Heather?"

"What? I - "

"I take it this means something to you."

"Yeah. It does."

"That's a relief."

Allison, I suppose, was wondering what kind of genie had been let out of the bottle. I asked her, "Nothing else? Nothing at all?"

"Sorry Heather. Just 'Glue glue glue glue.'"

"When do you normally pick up your messages, so to speak?"

"It has to be during the night."

"So tonight you'll get more?"

"I can only wait and see."

"Will you call me if you get anything?"

"Of course I will. But I think it's because of my car and money worries that I'm blocking more than I could otherwise receive."

"I'll help you out with your car. And of course I'll pay you your normal psychic fees."

"You're very kind, Heather. And after tonight's lavish meal, too."

Oh, brother. I took ten twenty-dollar bills from my bag and gave them to Allison. "This is for today. And also, I'll cover your car's repair bill this time. How does that sound?"

"Such kindness! But really Heather, you - "

I was swept away in the emotion of hearing Quails from the dead. "It's my pleasure. Can I ask you to keep your phone on tomorrow, Allison? It's so frustrating to be unable to reach you sometimes."

"Of course I will, dear."

And so I came home, where I'm sitting now trying to make sense of Jason's happy message from beyond. Glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü glü.

I'm wondering if I should just jump off Cleveland Dam and get to him right away, but that would probably somehow disqualify me.

So I think I just need to sit here, enjoy the glow and then take two sleeping pills because tomorrow's a working day.

Just before I fall asleep . . .

I've been thinking. I'm older. I'm on the other side of thirty-five, and I have a better notion of wasted time and energy than I did even two years ago. If somebody wastes my time these days, I get mad. I'm also seven years older than Jason, but after about thirty-three, we're all the same age in our heads, so it's not the big deal it looks like. At least not from the inside looking out. And as Jason was almost thirty-three, we were almost the same. And anyway, a few decades after your first kiss and your first cigarette, I don't care if you're rich or poor, life leaves the same number of bruises on you. Most people might view Jason as a failure, and that's just fine. Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being. I thought Jason was as pure and bright as a halo, and no, I'm not trying to make excuses for the guy. God only knows he snored through enough morning jobs, and he clocked out early once a week to watch the games down at the pubs. But Jason never curried favor with people he didn't like. He never tried to fake being busy so he'd look good, and he never fudged his opinion to suit the temperature of the room.

In failure, Jason could be truly himself, and there's a liberation that stems from that. Leave that shirt untucked. Wash your hair tomorrow. Beer with lunch? Sure.

I wish I could say that success turns people into plastic dolls, but the truth is that I don't know any successful people. The people in the courts are the closest I might come to knowing success stories, but they're all vermin.

At first I wondered if I should take Jason and clean him up and turn him into a gung-ho PowerPoint-driven success story, but that was never going to happen. I figured that out quickly, so I never pushed him. That I didn't try to force him to change might have been my biggest attraction - that and my manicotti Florentine - and the fact that I never judged him harshly, or even judged him at all. I simply let him be who he was, this sweet, screwed-up refugee from a past that was so extreme and harsh, and so different from my own. And he was so lonely when I met him - oh! He almost hummed with relief in the mornings when he learned we could talk at breakfast. Apparently, that was forbidden growing up. Reg must have been pretty gruesome back then.

Jason also had this thing called the glory-meter. A glory-meter was an invisible device Jason said almost everybody carries around with them, a Palm Pilot-ish gadget that goes ding-ding-ding whenever we come up with a salve to try to inflate our sense of importance. Examples would be "I make the best sour cherry pie in Vancouver"; "My dachshund has the silkiest fur of all the dogs in the park"; "My spreadsheets have the most sensibly ordered fields"; "I won the 500-yard dash in my senior year." You get the picture. Simple stuff. Jason never saw anything wrong with this kind of thing, but when he pointed the meter to himself, the ding-ding-ding stopped, and he'd pretend to whack it, as if the needle were broken.

"Jason, you must have something in you to activate the glory-meter."

"Sorry, honey. Nada."

"Oh, come on . . ."

"Zilch."

This was his cue for me to say how much I loved him, and I'd spend the next ten minutes girlishly telling him all the goofy things I like about him, and he felt so much better because of that. So, if that's fixing someone, yup, I fixed the man.

Wednesday morning 10:30

I ended up needing five sleeping pills to knock me out, and it was all I could do to drag my butt into work this morning. As an antidote, I took some trucker pills Jason kept in the medicine cabinet - heavy duty, but they do wake me up. Fortunately, people will misinterpret my sour, inwardly turned face as contrition after yesterday's cell phone debacle. However, I can barely think properly, let alone transcribe the boring pap being spouted in this current trial, so I'm just going to sit here and do the best I can, given the circumstances.

Oh, it's lovely to sit here and pay no attention to anything these morons in the court are saying. I ought to have tried this years ago. I wonder how many other stenographers across the decades have sat here pumping out their inner self while appearing prim and methodical? Oh, I suppose I'm flattering myself, but we're a good crew, we are, stenographers. On TV, we never get to be a part of the plot twist. A star has never played a stenographer; there isn't even a porn movie with court stenographers in it.

Right now, a lawyer named Pete is prattling on about a property conveyance form that's not been supplied. I smell a recess coming up.

I suppose I can phone Allison during the recess. I thought about her way too much last night. There's something I don't like about her, but what could be her angle? So far she's gotten a good meal, maybe some free car repairs and two hundred bucks from me. Not much.

Who am I fooling? This woman owns me. And she knows it. And I can only pray that I get enough messages from Jason before she bares her fangs and starts upping the price.

Heather, get a grip: she's a North Vancouver widow -which is pretty much what you are, too - a widow who's trying to scam some bucks and hold onto a middle-class facade before poverty sucks her down the drain like some cheap special effect.

Are Allison's actions criminal? One fact I know from being a stenographer is that just about anybody can do just about anything for just about any reason. Crime is what got me into stenography. I wanted to see the faces of people who lie. I wanted to see how people can say one thing and do another. It's all my parents ever did with each other, as well as with all their family members. I thought being closer to liars and criminals could help me put my family's lies into better perspective - but of course that never happened. At least I sometimes had entertainment. Like a few years ago we had this woman, an elementary school teacher, who claimed she was at a baby shower when it turns out she was quite happily dismembering her father-in-law. I wanted to see that kind of lying brio. She maintained total composure while the defense team clobbered her with motive - money, what else? - and intent - she'd bought a kiddy pool a month earlier in order to contain the blood - plus there were receipts for hundreds of dollars' worth of bleach and disinfectants and deodorants, purchased from the same Shoppers Drug Mart where I buy my tampons and microwave popcorn.

Was there a big moral to any of this? Doubtful. But I do know that as a species we're somehow hard-wired to believe lies. It's astonishing how willing we are to believe whatever story we're tossed simply because we want to hear what we want to hear.

I suppose I also thought that being a stenographer hearing it all would somehow inoculate me against crimes occurring to me. Naïve. But then, it was a seventeen-year-old me who made that decision. Imagine leaving your most important life decisions to a seventeen-year-old! What was God thinking? If there's such a thing as reincarnation, I want the nature of my next incarnation to be decided by a quorum of twelve seventysomethings.

What's this? Goody gumdrops - a recess while Joe Dirtbag buys time to find a conveyance form that every person in the courtroom knows doesn't exist. Rich people have their own laws; poor people don't stand a chance; they never have.

Tuesday afternoon 3:00

I was eating lunch in a café near the courthouse, picking at some romaine lettuce leaves while dispiritedly redialing Allison, when some French Canadian girls behind me, tree planters - teenagers with perfect skin and no apparent sense of gratitude for what society has given them - began discussing vegetarianism and meat. Their descriptions of Quebec slaughterhouses were so foul that I almost vomited, though normally such explicit dialogue would only leave me curious for more. I stumbled back to the courthouse, found Larry who does shift planning and pleaded off sick for the remainder of the day - again. I drove home, where all I could do was lie beneath the duvet and think about where Jason's body is right now. Not his soul or spirit, but the meat part of him. Why is this so important to me?

I know he was no prince before I met him; as I've said, that was part of the attraction. As well, my chosen vocation prepares a person for the worst of what can happen to the human body, coroner's photos included, even in happy little Vancouver: bride burnings, and women tossed into wood chippers, then sent to the rendering plant.

God knows Jason had some gruesome images locked up inside him. After I met him, I called in a favor from Lori, who works in the archives. I asked her to pull photo files for me on the Delbrook Massacre - the photos from the cafeteria. Well, all I can say is that the media does both a service and a disservice by not showing the real story there. I suppose there are Web sites where you can go look at this kind of stuff, but . . .

Okay, the fourth photo down was of Cheryl.

I stopped breathing when I saw her.

Her.

So young. Oh, dear God, so young. All of them. Just babies. And Cheryl's face was unspeckled by any gore, despite the battlefield around her. In the photo she looked serene, as if she were alive and suntanning. There was no fear there. None.

I put the photos back in the envelope; I didn't look at the rest.

Would Jason feel better if he knew that she'd died at peace? But he must have known this. If he returned, would I tell him I'd seen the photo? Would that drive him away or bond us closer?

If he returned.

Bastard.

Why couldn't he have left me a clue? A simple measly clue. But no: "Just going out to get some smokes, honey. Want anything? Milk? Bananas?" He's dead. He has to be. Because he'd never simply leave me. He wasn't like that.

I keep on wondering which of his friends might have had some inkling of what was going on, but Jason was, aside from me, alone in the world. His family was one notch less than totally useless. I get so mad at them sometimes. I mean, his mother dragged him off to hillbilly country the moment the massacre investigation cleared him; he never properly faced his accusers, and they must have felt they'd somehow won something in that.

Kent was dead, but he could have stuck up for his little brother instead of hiding behind a wall of midterms and religious hocus-pocus.

And there's Reg - Reg, why did you have to wait for the world to collapse around you before you became a human being? You two would have gotten along so well, you really would have.

And don't even get me going about Cheryl's plastic, mean-spirited parents. Hypocrites.

Even Barb gets a bit clippy when I talk about Jason too much.

Egad - I'm just venting here. It's merely me venting. These are all kind people. And I'm merely venting.

And I also can't get Cheryl's photo out of my head. I'm not the jealous type, but when it comes to her, what's a girl supposed to do? In the eyes of the world, Cheryl's a saint. Who else on earth has a saint for competition - nuns?

But I don't think she was a saint - not judging by what I could learn from Jason. I think she was just an average girl who was maybe missing a sense of drama in her life. Since Jason's disappearance, I've had dinner a few times with Chris and Cheryl's parents over at Barb's; all they talk about is getting deals on cases of canned corn at Costco, the best price they got on Alaska Airlines tickets to Scottsdale, and the new next-door neighbors who don't use English as a first language. I've never heard them discuss an idea at the table, let alone give much thought to where Jason might be. My presence there possibly unnerves them. Jason said that they were vile and that they still suspected him of being the one who videotaped the gunmen and mailed the tapes to the press, but I didn't get any inkling of that from them. If anything, I sensed regret that they'd never gotten to really meet him.

As for Cheryl, I quickly learned that she could pop up anywhere. We'd be watching TV and *blink* there she was, her yearbook photo on the screen and a voice-over talking about crime and youth, or spiraling crime rates or crime and women. This was always jarring for me, but never for Jason. He'd smile slightly and say, "Don't worry." But you know, I saw his face. He was still in love with her. It's there.

What's bizarre is that I (being alive) have the competitive edge over her (being dead). Yet at the same time she (being dead) has the edge over me (alive but aging quickly, and not very well at that).

And then there's religion. Even though Jason said he'd shunned religion, I have this feeling that life, for him, was just a waiting game, and that he believed if he could squeak through the rest of his life, he'd meet up with Cheryl. How do I know that his disdain for religion wasn't short-term? I tried talking to Jason about Cheryl, but his answers were politician's answers: "She was someone in my life so long ago. I was a kid." But she died in his arms in a lake of blood!

Jason also said a few things over the years to make me wonder if the tree, having been chopped down to the ground, was now sending new shoots out from the soil. For example, we saw a childhood friend of his, Craig, on the highway driving a Ferrari or one of those cars. Jason said, "Well you know, you can accumulate all the stuff you want in this life, but stuff alone can't make you happy. Craig there has to go around acting like he's a complete man, now. Right."

"You're just jealous."

"No, I'm not."

And he wasn't.

Reg hasn't tried to convert me in the past months, nor even edge in that direction. He's far too preoccupied with the state of his own soul. Ironically, his honesty about his doubts has made him genuinely spiritual and has made me far more open to his ideas than I might have been otherwise. I don't think Reg has realized this. When I'm around him, I find myself cross-examining my motives for everything I do. I think I'm a moral person, yet I'm always wondering if there's the ghost of Cheryl out there, watching me, saying, "Look out, Heather, don't confuse your morality with God's demands."

So it all comes back to Cheryl and my (let's face it) jealousy. Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal. Around Jason I made myself conceal it, because what else could I do? But I don't know how to kill jealousy. I fully expect it to turn into little steel fangs that'll clutch me like a leghold trap the moment I need to be most tender or forgiving. Jealousy is the one emotion that lies in wait.

Thursday morning 6:00

No sleeping pills last night, and Allison has revealed the full length of her fangs. First, a call came in from my car guy down on Pemberton: "Hi, Heather, it's Gary."

"Gary, hi."

"Heather, I've got some lady came in here, jittery old thing, like a librarian with the clap - got a whole bunch of repairs done on this old boat of a Cutlass, and then she says you're the one who's supposed to be paying for all of it. I'm in the back room right now, and I just have to ask you if this is the case or what."

"How much, Gary?"

"With taxes, just over two grand."

"Holy - "

"That's what I thought."

I paused before saying, "Gary, I'll pay."

"You sure about that, Heather?"

"Yeah, I'm sure."

I put down the phone and tried to appraise my new situation coolly. I was her slave. Trust me, having one's paranoia confirmed can be a relaxing, almost sedative sensation.

The first thing I did was stop phoning her. I knew she'd phone me, and she'd only do so when she knew the time was right to strike. This freed me to do things I'd been neglecting. I cleaned up the place, as though performing an FBI crime scene sweep: I put everything of Jason's that held his smell in extra-large Ziploc freezer bags. All his toiletries - his razors, his brushes: bagged. His wallet by the fruit bowl: bagged. I bagged his dirty underwear and T-shirts and shoes. I also bagged all the clothing that was in his hamper. Once I'd isolated all his personal effects, I opened each bag and held it up to my face and inhaled for all I was worth. I wondered how much longer his odor would last. The smell of his cheap underarm deodorant made me cry. I drank most of a bottle of Bailey's and passed out - much better than sleeping pills. I was woken up around nine this morning by a phone call from Larry, asking if I was okay. I said I was sick. I am sick.

I looked at the pile of Jason's things. I knew I had to start my life all over again from scratch. I could go to work, sure, but I'd be a husk. There was no way I'd ever meet anybody again, and in real life I'd become the invisible blank of a person I pretended to be in the courtroom.

So where do you start when you want to start your life again? At least when you're young you're also stupid. But me? Tick tick tick.

I made coffee and was going to call Barb when the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Heather. It's Allison."

"Hello, Allison." My voice was stripped of spark, a prisoner's voice.

"I thought I'd call. See how you're doing. I had another message come to me."

"You did, did you?"

"Yes. And it was quite a long one."

"That's nice."

"Should we get together?"

"Yes, Allison, we ought to get together. Why don't I come to your office or wherever it is you work."

"I work from home."

"Why don't I come to your house?"

"Oh, no - I never let clients come here."

"How much is your rate for the session going to be, Allison?"

This was the clincher.

"Allison?"

"Five thousand dollars."

"I figured as much."

"So then where do you think we should meet?"

I knew that someplace private where I could wallop the crap out of her wasn't an option, so I suggested a restaurant at Park Royal that catered mostly to older diners who liked buttery European food. She seemed to like this.

"Oh, and Heather - "

"Yes, Allison?"

"Cash, please."

At one in the afternoon I met her there. It was odd pretending to be civil when she was in the midst of vile extortion. Allison said, "All this butter and oil - you'd think pensioners would take better care of their hearts."

"They're just waiting to die, Allison. Give it a rest."

Wiener schnitzels appeared on the table, but I didn't touch mine; Allison's vanished as though eaten by a cartoon wolf. As she downed her last bite, she said, "There. Now shall we get down to business?"

"Yes, Allison, let's."

"Do you have the payment?"

I showed her the money, in twenties, taken from the shared account Jason and I were using to save for a down payment on a small house. It was inside one of the leftover Ziploc bags. "Here."

She appraised it quickly. "Fine. I had a message last night. I don't known what any of this means, but here goes . . ." She then began mouthing the words she'd received. It was one of our favorite set pieces, involving Henry Chickadee, "Heir to the Chickadee Seed Fortune." Henry's story is that he spent his days in Aisle 17 of the local Wal-Mart saying, "Hello! Welcome to Aisle 17. I'm Henry Chickadee, might I entice you to sample our wide variety of Chickadee Seed products?" Sometimes Henry would be in his perch beside a small mirror, and when he went back and forth on his swing, he'd say "Hello!" every time he saw himself. Henry didn't understand what mirrors were, or what they did, and if other characters tried to explain it, he'd just gap out. Pure silliness.

And so Allison sat there, in the middle of this geriatric restaurant reeking of buttery foods, saying "Hello! Hello! Hello." Even though this woman was evil, she delivered the goods.

"Was there anything else added on to that?"

"Well - "

"Yes?" Fleeced or not, I was starved for connection.

"He says he misses you. He says he feels lost without you. He says he tries to speak to you, but he can't. He apologizes for having to speak through me."

My eyes were watering. I'd gotten what I wanted. Allison said to me, "I apologize for being hard to reach, but I have to do what I can to protect my channel into the afterworld."

"Yeah. Sure. Whatever."

"I'll be phoning you soon."

"I'm sure you will."

I didn't say thank you, and she didn't seem to expect it. She and her depressing pilled teal-fleece jacket left the restaurant. I threw some bills onto the table and followed her down the mall and out into the parking lot, where she got into her claptrap Cutlass. I took her license number, went home and called Lori, my mole. She gave me the name and address of one Cecilia Bateman, at an address in Lynn Valley, a 1960s subdivision that had been missed by every scourge of redevelopment since. I waited until dark and I went there. I parked a few houses down from Allison's, on one of the neighborhood's steeply sloping streets. The darkened trees, in silhouette, seemed as deep as lakes. Maybe at some point in its past, this neighborhood was sunny and scraped clean, but now it was a place where you could torture hitchhikers in complete freedom, the loudest of screams never getting past the rhododendron borders. I felt like I was fifteen again, spying with my old friend Kathy on the Farrells who, as teen legend had it, were highly sexed and given to orgies. The most we ever saw was handsome Mr. Farrell in his Y-fronts sucking beer and watching hockey, but to this day, Y-fronts get me going pretty quickly.

But back to Allison . . .

Or rather, back to Cecilia.

I walked up a driveway so steep as to feel dreamlike. From a real estate agent's point of view, chez Cecilia was a tear-down, but so is most of North and West Vancouver. This kind of 1963 house was so familiar to me that I didn't pause to acknowledge its ludicrous existence, at the top of a mountain where nobody should ever live, a yodel away from pristine wilderness, an existence made possible only through petroleum and some sort of human need for remaining remote while being relatively close to many others. Even in the dark, I could see that the house was stained a sun-drained blue, like bread mold, the same color as this Allison/Cecilia woman's car.

So yes, I saw her car in the garage - one car only. There were a number of lights on, and I could hear the dull glugging sounds of a TV in the background. I went through the garage, around to the back of the house. Nothing had been mowed in years, and my clothes were a magnet for leaves and cedar droppings and cobwebs.

Why was I even here? I didn't want to murder her, even though it would have been fairly easy to do so. I didn't want to confront her, because I didn't want to lose my connection to Jason. Cecilia's the only game in town.

I maneuvered closer to the back of the house and looked in the windows with impunity; there she was, rooting around in the freezer, removing a cardboard box containing a TV dinner. She put it on a butcher-block counter and removed the cardboard top. She read the French-language end of the carton, turned it around to the English end, then proceeded to timidly poke one, two, three holes in the dinner tray's plastic film. She opened her microwave's door, put the meal inside, punched some buttons and then - and then she just stood there for maybe three minutes, her arms across her chest, contemplating her existence. This is when I felt the chill. This is when I once more realized that Allison/Cecilia is basically me - an older version of me, but a woman marooned, manless and geographically remote, contemplating a life of iffy labor, a few thousand more microwaveable meals and then a coffin.

She had just removed her meal from the microwave when I heard a noise down in the carport, as did Allison. I could see headlights through the branches of various species of evergreen; Allison dropped (rather than put) her meal on the counter, reached into a drawer, found an amber-brown prescription container and removed one or more pills, which she swallowed without water. The headlights went out; I heard a door slam, and then watched as Allison stood in the center of her kitchen, the plastic membrane not yet removed from her meal's surface.

A youngish woman entered. Twenty-five? I couldn't make out what they were saying, but from my disastrous relationship with my own mother, the bingo zombie, I could tell that this young woman was Cecilia's daughter and that hurtful words were being hurled back and forth. God, how nice to be on the sidelines for this, and to not be the one hurling.

For a moment, my sympathies were with Allison, until I remembered that she was out to hose-clean my bank account while pin balling my emotions to the max.

In any event, they went off into the living room, which was on the second floor, up front, not visible from anywhere I could position myself. I circled the house a few times, decided it was time to quit the stalking and skulked down the driveway to my car. I forgot to brush all of the dead leaves and insects and webs from my outfit first, and discovered a spider crawling across my chest. I had a freakout, madly swiped the thing away from me, and when I got back in the car I was breathing like a dying coal miner as the car door's alarm went ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.

From there I drove to Reg's apartment. Reg was obviously surprised when I buzzed his intercom, but he said come on in. The building's lobby smelled of disinfectant, cooking and dust. The elevator dropped me off on the eighteenth floor, into a muggy, airless little hallway. Jason had once told me how claustrophobic and killingly dark Reg's place was, but it's hard to imagine it being as bad as all that. He was standing at the opened door. "Heather?"

Of course I blubbered, and Reg motioned me into his apartment. Even through the tears and the emotional funk, I could see it was not at all the way Jason had described it. I guess it was Scandinavian modern, interior decor not being something I usually notice. Reg could see my surprise above and beyond what was already on my face: "Ruth made me sell everything years ago. Jason told you it was a mausoleum in here, didn't he?"

I nodded.

"Well, it was. I think most of this stuff came from Dirndl or whatever those places are called. I kind of like it - the removal of excess things from our lives is always a blessing. Let me get you a drink."

"Water."

"Water then."

He brought back a glass of water, a bottle of white wine and some glasses. "Tell me what happened."

"It was her"

"I guessed as much. Go on."

"She's robbing me blind."

"How?"

"She's charging me five thousand bucks a message now."

Reg said nothing.

"And I'm paying it. She knows things that only ever went as far as our pillows. In tiny detail - things you couldn't guess at even if you knew Jason and me our entire lives."

"Go on."

"So I went to her house."

Reg flinched: "You didn't do anything rash, did you?"

"No. Nothing at all. She's a North Van widow living in a junker of a house in Lynn Valley . . . and she owns me."

"Have some wine. Calm down a minute."

He was right: I needed to level out, return to my normal stenographical demeanor so I could at least find some detachment. He changed the subject and we talked about small things, but I must have resembled a troll doll, covered with yard lint, my mascara running. A few minutes later he brought me a hot washcloth and a clothes brush; I scrubbed clean my face and removed the spiderwebs from my sweater. Reg then started the train of thought that has me here at four in the morning typing away.

"Look, Heather," he asked, "have you considered all the angles on this?"

"Of course I have."

"No, really, have you?"

"Reg, you're implying something, but I don't know what."

"Heather, you're the only person I can talk to anymore. Everyone else is either gone or they've crossed me off their list."

"That's not true. Barb still talks to - "

"Yes, I know, Barb still talks to me, but only out of duty and, I'm guessing, loyalty to you."

"What are you telling me?"

"I'm telling you that I don't believe in psychics. I'm telling you that I don't think the dead can talk to us in any way. Once you're there, you're there. I doubt Jason's been kidnapped and is being held hostage, but at the same time I can't help but wonder what some other genuine reason for this might be."

"How could Allison have known such intimate - ?"

"The point is, Allison - or Cecilia or whatever her name is - doesn't speak with the dead. There is a link between her and Jason."

I was speechless.

"I'm not saying they had an affair. Or anything like that."

"The daughter."

"What?"

"The daughter. That's who I saw coming in the garage."

"How do you know it's her daughter? Heather?"

It made perfect sense. Heather, you freaking idiot. "Allison has never had a signal in her life. It's her daughter -Jason was using our characters with someone else. Her."

"That's jumping to conclusions."

"Is it?"

"I think it is. Jason loved you. He'd never have . . ."

I jumped up and told Reg I had to go. He said, "Heather, don't go. Not now. You're crazy right now. Oh dear God, stop where you are."

But Reg couldn't change my mind, and I went right out the door and drove, slightly drunk, to Allison's house. And that's where I am now, parked, typing into my laptop, waiting, waiting, waiting for the lights to go on inside, watching those two cars in the carport. I can wait here all night. I can wait here forever.

It's getting so hard to remember who Jason was, that he had a voice, that he had his own way of speaking and of seeing the world. He's like a character in a book, trying to make sense of the world as it played out for him. My own book is just one more tossed onto the heap. How did he speak? How did he smile? I have photos. I have videos of barbecues with him at Barb's, and a few risque tapes of us together, which I had the wit not to throw away. But I'm too frightened to watch because they're the end. After them there's nothing. His smells are in the little bags, decaying.

What am I to do? Jason was an accident. No - Jason was God coming down and tampering with the laws of nature to effect a miracle in my life. People are hung up on miracles, but miracles are called miracles because they pretty much never happen. So then, who put that dorky little giraffe wearing the suspiciously manly sheepskin jacket on the counter at Toys R Us that afternoon? I was his witness. I made him real, and he made me real. I remember being single for so very long - I remember making mental lists of compromises I was willing to make in order to get me to 76.5 years without snapping. If I only go to see two movies a week, one by myself, one with a friend, that'll make two nights of the week pass without quaking. Don't phone my friends in relationships too often or I'll look too desperate. Don't become godmother to too many of my friends' children or else I'll become a maiden-aunt punch line. Don't drink more than three drinks a night ever because I like drinking, and it could easily plaster over all of my cracks.

When I was eleven I broke my arm investigating a new house being built in our family's subdivision. It spent the summer in a cast, like an itching, tormenting worm burning with pink fiberglass strands, and I thought the weeks would never pass - but then they did, and I remember forgetting about that cast not even six hours after having it removed (Oh, the cool air!) And so it was with Jason.

Once he entered my life, I promptly forgot all my years of putting on a brave face while browsing at bookstores until closing time, and of having one, two, three beers while watching crime shows and CNN. I completely forgot the hateful sensation of loneliness, like thirst and hunger together pressing on my stomach.

A few times my old single friends came over to eat with Jason and me at our dumpy but happy little place, and I could tell that they were planning to politely remove themselves from my life. All those great women who went with me to Mel Gibson movies and two-for-one Caesar night at the Keg - I trashed them out of my life. And I could see the fear in their eyes as they realized that they were, each of them, just one more notch alone in the world. Sometimes my lonely single friends would wait until Jason was out and then they'd come visit me, sitting and ranting for hours about how brilliant they were, and yet the world was screwing them over, and the core of their being was hollowing as a result. I was prideful - I was glad I wasn't lonely. I wanted to insulate myself from lonely people and, to be honest, so many other forms of human suffering.

Heather, you bitch, betraying your friends for some man.

Jason! You're not just some man. You're my only guy, but you're fading on me, like a waning crescent moon going behind Bowen Island around sunset. The next day you may well be there, but I won't be seeing you.

Monday (four days later)

And so here I am at work in court. I'll be quitting this afternoon. I told Larry I'd fill in just this one shift and then I'm gone. God only knows who'll ever read these words. Here's what happened:

I was in the car outside Allison's, nodding off around 8:30 in the morning, when I saw the daughter pull out of the driveway in a red Ford Escort like every other car on earth. In a spasm of efficiency I got my car revved and I trailed her down Mountain Highway, then over the Second Narrows Bridge, where she pulled onto Commissioner Street, which follows the canning factories and docks as they approach downtown: wheat-choked CN trains covered in graffiti, with haloes of pigeons; plastic tubs full of fish offal, scuffed and bloody; forklifts; concrete mixers. Mount Baker was like the Paramount logo in the south toward the U.S., and the gulls and geese were seemingly dancing in the flawless blue sky for my enjoyment. It was a cold, clear October day. I don't think I ever remember feeling quite so alert as I did following Allison's daughter.

The harbor was flat as a cookie sheet, and I had a déjà vu that went on for almost half an hour. Usually a déjà vu, like happiness, vanishes the moment you recognize it, but not during that particular drive. And I didn't feel alone. Someone was in my car with me - a ghost? Who knows? Funny, but whoever it was, it wasn't Jason. It was - oh, hooey. I don't go in for that stuff anymore. Not after what happened.

Okay then, what did happen?

I followed the daughter's car into the small parking lot behind a company that sold marine equipment - a chandlery, to use the correct word - in a 1970s cinder-block structure. The store was in a minor industrial part of town, doomed to be gentrified in a few years; already the artists are starting to invade. Allison's daughter turned off the ignition, got out, stood up, and looked at me from behind her car. I was in the alley, and I turned off my engine and sat there and looked back at her, making eye contact across the cars and asphalt. Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have - forget sex - because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain. Having said that: if I had had a gun - I don't know -maybe I'd have popped her.

So the moment had arrived. She kept staring at me, and then she closed her car door and came over. "She's been lying to you," she said.

I didn't know what to reply.

"She's been feeding you a line."

What could I say?

"My name is Jessica. I know what you're here for. I can give it to you."

Her tone of voice told me that what she had to tell me was neither what I'd expected, nor what I wanted to hear. I was a defeated woman, and she knew it. She held out an arm to me, and I came to it as I might have come to that light you're supposed to see once you die.

"Have a seat. Here. Beside the planter." She motioned me to sit down on a concrete planter that had been poured decades ago and was now crumbling like angry gray sugar. I sat, and she pulled some cigarettes out of her purse. "Do you want one?"

Part of the terror of being told something you know will shock you is that it takes you back to the time in your life when everything really was shocking; for me that was maybe age thirteen, when I was essentially friendless, and being told by my mother that I'd one day blossom. I remember wanting peers; I remember wanting people in my life who could help me make all the fun mistakes. Crime? Maybe that's why I'm a stenographer. I hesitated and then said yes, I'd like a cigarette.

"You don't smoke, do you?"

"This is the second time this week I've had something resembling this conversation. Yes, I want a cigarette. I suppose, yes, I do smoke now."

She gave me one and lit it with her lighter and then lit her own. She said, "Mom's been telling you some pretty wild stuff, huh?"

"She has." I took a drag and I got dizzy, but I didn't mind. I wanted this experience to have a biological component to intensify it.

"It's not what you think it is."

"I started guessing as much last night."

"You think I slept with your boyfriend, don't you?"

I put the cigarette down on the concrete. "I did."

"When did you stop thinking that?"

"A minute ago. When you got out of your car and looked at me across the alley over there. You have a clear conscience."

"I'm sorry I have to tell you what I'm going to tell you. I can shut up if you like."

"No. Don't. I deserve whatever you're going to say."

Two crows landed on the pavement across the street and began cawing wildly at each other. There were needles and condoms on the alley's paving; late at night, this was the sex trade part of town. Jessica put her hand on my forearm. "No one deserves this. Heather, here's the deal: your boyfriend came to my mother about a year ago. He brought this sheet of paper with him. He gave my mom five hundred bucks and told her that if he ever went missing, then she should contact you and tell you these things as if he'd spoken to you from the dead - or from wherever it is he's gone to. He wanted you to be happy."

I sucked in air as if punched. It's the only way to describe it.

"And so my mom did that with you - she saw the story in the North Shore News that he had gone missing - "

"Jason. His name was Jason."

"Sorry. That Jason had gone missing. She called me at work yesterday and told me what she was up to, and I drove to her place and really lashed into her."

I'd seen the fight. I trusted this woman.

"My mom told me how she wasn't answering your calls. She has call display and can count every time you phoned. She's sneaky. She knew exactly what she was doing. She was milking you. And she was going to milk you dry. She has you pegged for another ten grand."

I stared at the ground. Jessica said, "Smoke your cigarette."

So we sat there and smoked. Her coworkers filed in, and she waved to them, and there was nothing really out of the ordinary about two women smoking together outside a workplace on a cold clear Canadian October day in the year 2002.

"What did Jason ever get into that'd make him think he might disappear some day?"

"I don't know."

* * *

Five years ago, before I met Jason, I had a depression or whatever you want to call it, and one morning I felt so dead I called Larry and pleaded bubonic plague. He had seen the clouds accumulating inside me and told me to phone the doctor; bless him, I did. At first they tried out some of the more fashionable antidepressants on me. They either nauseated me or made me buzzy and I had to say no to maybe six of them. There was one, the sixth one - I forget the name - which did this odd thing to me. I took it in the morning, and around lunch I had this impulse to kill myself. I don't mean to shock here; what I'm saying is that people talk about killing themselves all the time, and some people give it a go, and I'd always known that, but this pill, it opened up a door inside me: for the first time ever I actually understood how it felt to want to kill myself.

The drug wore off quickly, and the next prescription did the trick. After about three months I was my usual self again, and stopped taking anything.

The point here is that there are certain human behavioral traits that can be talked about, but unless you've experienced the impulse behind them, they remain theoretical. Most of the time, this is for the best. After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

In a similar vein, I think there is the impulse to be violent. When Jason and I fought, I'd be so angry that my eyeballs scrunched up and I saw black-and-white geometric patterns inside my head, but never, ever, would I consider hitting him, and Jason was the same way. We spoke about this once during a lunch down by the ocean - about anger and violence - and he said that no matter how angry he ever became with me, violence wasn't an option for him; it didn't even occur to him. He confided that there were other situations where violence was an option for him - obviously, the Delbrook Massacre, but who knows what else? I suppose I'll go to the grave wondering what they were - but with me? No.

Why am I saying this? Because Jason simply didn't have the suicide impulse, nor do I think he was a violent guy. So I don't worry that he jumped from a bridge or got killed in some fight.

I should add, that when Jason and I fought, the characters went away. To have dragged our characters into a fight simply wasn't a possibility, any more than suicide or hitting each other. Our characters were immune to the badness in the world, a trait that made them slightly holy. As we didn't have children, they became our children. I worried about them the same way I worry about Barb's kids. I'll be having my day, walking around the dog run down at Ambleside, say, and then suddenly, pow! my stomach turns to a pile of bricks, and I nearly collapse with anticipatory grief as I realize the boys could burn themselves or be kidnapped or be in a car accident. Or I'll be near tears when I think of Froggles alone by himself in an apartment with nobody to phone, no food in the fridge, maybe drinking some leftover Canadian Club, wondering why we even bother going on with our lives. Or I worry about Bonnie the Lamb, recently shorn, lost from the flock, cold and sick with loneliness on the wrong side of a raging river. I probably don't have to say much more on this subject.

And then there is me, sad little me, living in a dream, staring out the window, never again to find love. With Jason I thought I'd finally played my cards right, and now I'm just one more of those broken, sad people out there, figuring out a year in advance where they can have Easter and Christmas dinner without feeling like a burden or duty to others, cursing the quality of modern movies because it's so hard to fill weeknights with movies when they're all crap, and waiting, just waiting, for those three drinks a night to turn into four - and then, well, then I'll be applying my makeup in the morning, combing my hair, washing my clothes, but it's not really for anyone. I'm alive, but so what.

* * *

After my cigarette with Jessica I drove back to Lynn Valley, up to Allison's house. I know her real name is Cecilia, but she remains Allison to me.

Her Cutlass was in the carport. The newspapers were still on the front doormat, so I picked them up and rang the bell. Through the badly built 1960s contractor door, I heard shuffling up the stairs from where I knew the kitchen was. There were three glass slits in the door, and I looked through them and saw Allison, who stopped on the third step up, looked at me, and froze. It took her maybe half a minute to thaw out, and she came to the door and opened it, a tiny brass security chain across the gap.

"Heather. It's awfully early."

"I know it is." She'd have to be a moron not to see a certain level of madness in my eye, but I could tell she misread this as desperation for a message from Jason.

"I suppose I could let you in."

"Please do."

She unclasped the chain and said to come upstairs to the kitchen for coffee. "You look terrible," she said, "like you didn't sleep last night."

"I didn't."

The kitchen was generic North Van - lemon-lime freckled linoleum floor with four decades of wear patterns showing, SPCA fridge magnets, vitamins on the windowsill, and through that window, the primordial evergreen maw that continues from Lynn Valley until the end of the world. She said, "I know it must be troubling to wait for messages to come in from loved ones."

I said, "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response."

She looked at me and at my small insurrection. "Heather, I do the best I can." She handed me a coffee, and I sat and stared at her. She had to be an incredible dolt not to see trouble lurking. "Last night was psychically very active, and I think I received something you might be interested in."

I smiled.

"Again, it's something that makes no sense to me, but these words do seem to mean something important to you."

"How much will they cost me?"

"Heather! No need to be so crass."

"I'm out of money. Yesterday was it."

Allison didn't like this. "Oh, really?"

"I don't know what to do."

"I'm a businesswoman, Heather. I can't just do these things for free."

"I can see not."

I sipped the coffee, too hot and too weak. I placed the mug on the tabletop and looked at my hands. Allison watched me. I began tugging away at a diamond ring on my left ring finger, a diamond the size of a ladybug. Sometimes with Jason, subjects were best left undiscussed. I'd always assumed the ring had fallen off the back of a truck, but then Barb told me she'd actually gone with Jason to Zales to help select it. "I have this ring."

Allison came over and, with the deadened eyes of a Soviet flea marketeer, appraised it in a blink. "I suppose so."

The ring came free. I handed it to her, and as she reached for it, I grabbed her, yanked her forward and with my right arm put her in a headlock. I said, "Look, you scheming cow. Your daughter filled me in on your little prank here, and if you want to live past lunchtime, you take me to wherever you keep the sheet of paper Jason gave you, and you hand it over. Got it?"

"Let go of me."

I turned her around and dug a knee into her back. I've never struck another human being before, but I had size on my side. "Don't screw with me. I've got a brown belt in Tae Bo. I studied down in Oregon. So where is it?"

"I can't . . . breathe."

I loosened my grip. "You bring tears to my eyes. Come on. Where is it?"

"Downstairs."

"So that's where we'll go."

I felt like I'd been given a prescription drug that opened a fifty-pound pair of oak double doors, doors I'd somehow overlooked before. To be even clearer, I felt like a man. It was surprisingly easy taking full control of Allison's body, but I don't think I'd have killed her. Whatever door this new door was, it wasn't the murder door.

The stairs were tricky but doable. We entered a room that must once have been Glenn's office but had, over the years, been converted to a transient storage area for bankers' boxes full of old books and papers. A sun-bleached litho of mallard ducks in flight had been removed from over the desk and leaned against the floor below, leaving a ghostly rectangle on the wall. Straddling this ghost was a brass-framed piece of fuzzily photographed flowers embossed with some sort of poetic nonsense in that casual fake-handwriting font people use on invitations to their second and third marriages. Allison's feminizing touch. The room had an aura of bankruptcy and defeat.

"Where is it?"

"In the middle drawer."

"Let's go fetch it then, shall we?"

We approached the desk with the gracelessness of captor and captive. I allowed her just enough mobility to open the drawer, and once it was open, I yanked back her arm and said, "Let me do a quick inspection here for guns and knives." I mussed through the desk's contents and then I saw Jason's handwriting on some sheets of crumpled pink invoice paper from his boss's contracting firm. On seeing it, I squeaked and let go of Allison and picked it up and held it to my chest. She fell to the floor, was about to rise, and then ended up just slumping against a bookcase. She said, "I suppose you're - "

"Oh, shut up." I looked at the paper and Jason's little-boy printing. His writing was small and efficient, and he managed to cram a lot onto the pages. There were dozens of our characters and their best-known exploits, along with staging instructions:

Froggles is the most important and beloved character. He speaks in a high voice, but if you tell him he sounds shrill, he indignantly shrieks, "I'm not shrill!" He drives a Dodge Scamp he bought at a garage sale. Primary enjoyments include winning spelling bees, twelve-packs of crunchy flies and Law amp; Order reruns.

Bonnie T. Lamb is the crabbiest and most politically correct character. She wears an African beanie and horn-rimmed glasses, has a bleating voice and can easily have her opinion swayed by her personal kryp-tonite, Cloverines. Her other weaknesses include bad arts and crafts and working in B-movies as a walk-on. Her life partner, Cherish, fixes motorcycles.

And so forth. I sat down in Glenn's captain's chair and inhaled Jason's letter like it was cherry blossoms. Allison posed no threat. I'd just heard from the dead.

Allison said, "He's gone. You know it, right?"

"I know."

"I'm not trying to be a bitch here. But he's gone. Glenn went. He went and I was left behind. This big stupid house and me and nothing else, and our savings lost in some idiotic tech stock."

I looked at her.

"The only reason I became a psychic was to try and reach Glenn. I thought that maybe if I pretended to be one I could become one. The things I did to try to become one - diets, purges, fasts, seminars, weekends. All of it just pointless."

"You tried to rip me off."

"I did. But you know what? To have seen your face whenever I gave you some words - it was all I'd ever wanted for myself."

I was appalled. "How could you use extortion when you were doing something so ... sacred?"

Allison turned toward me, amused that I didn't get her punch line: "Well, my dear, I'm broke. When you're my age, you'll understand."

She was still on the floor when I got up and left. I drove home and put Jason's list of instructions inside a jumbo freezer-size zip-top bag in order to protect his pencilings from rubbing away completely. I removed my shoes and belt and fell into bed, holding an edge of the bag up to my face, and sleep came easily.