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.