"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?