“Did he what?”

“Buy you something expensive lately? Between you and me, so that when Walter explains why he asked you …”

I shook my head.

“Okay.” Mel told me to call whenever I wanted. He did not tell me his telephone number. He didn’t need to.

THE OFFICER DROVE ME HOME in the same silence as before. A handful of police and forensics people milled about the caragana bushes under intense lights. I permitted the constable to walk me to the door, thanked him, and entered the house, where I sat alone in the darkness, on a living-room chair, facing the window that looked west, away from the lake and toward the bay.

I watched the sky to the west, above the steel companies along the shore of the bay, begin to glow with the colour of peaches that changed to a redness like roses or perhaps of blood, and I began to relax at the sight, familiar from my childhood.

Those explosions of light had appeared in the night sky above my parents’ house, the one my father would pay for with his life, when I was a child. Their radiance would flood the room I shared with my sister, making the walls blush with a strange, roiling redness. I had no word for that colour, but I thought it might be the same shade of red as blood on the floor of an abattoir.

My grandfather had worked in an abattoir. For thirty-three years, five days a week, he slit the throats of cattle and hogs, calves and lambs and suckling pigs, sometimes a hundred or more each day. What does that do to a person? What does it say about his view of life. Or, more important, of death?

My grandfather did not die in the manner that the animals died. He died asleep on New Year’s Eve. In his own bed, totally sober. On the morning of the first day of 1967, my grandmother awoke and my grandfather didn’t. There was no slitting of throats, no rope of red blood shooting from the carotid arteries, no gasping realization. Just a dream that ended with his death.

Dad showed me his father’s killing knife, which represented most of my father’s inheritance. I remember the scimitar blade, worn with years of honing and stained with blood, like rust. It was all I knew of my grandfather, that knife and the job he held for all those years. Did he not want another job? Was he not qualified to do something besides killing? This bothers me. It did not bother my father, my mother, or my sister. But it bothers me, and I will never know the answer.

When I see the glow blossoming into the night sky from my house on the beach strip, the sight is comforting in the way that snapshots of old friends and lovers can be comforting. The friends have changed with time, and so has the light. It appears less frequently now, and is weaker. Like the people in the snapshots.

My father told me the red light in the sky was caused by molten slag pouring from the blast furnaces of the steel companies along the shore of the bay. Slag, he explained, was liquid stone as hot as the sun. The glow of the molten rock reflected off clouds of steam billowing from the coke ovens nearby. “Hot as lava, the slag is,” he said, “pouring from the blast furnaces like water when you open the tap in the bathtub. Melted limestone and other stuff they don’t want in the steel, all running into pits where it cools. And right next door are the coke ovens, where coal is heated to a thousand, two thousand degrees in sealed ovens, and it turns into coke. That’s what they use to fire the blast furnaces. Sometimes they open the coke ovens at the same time as they tap the slag, and they spray the hot coke with water … see, there it goes now.”

It was a cold day, and I was ten years old, I suppose. Not much older, because my father died on my twelfth birthday. As he spoke, a white cloud ascended into a faded blue sky to the north of our house, along the shore of the bay.

“They spray water on the hot coke so that it won’t burn up when it hits the air, y’see.” He was pointing at a rising white cloud that seemed to be powered from within, rolling as it climbed into the air. “That’s what makes the steam, the water they spray on the coke. That cloud’ll go up maybe a thousand, two thousand feet, and when it gets high like that at night, and they tap the slag in the blast furnace at the same time, it’s the firelight from the hot slag that bounces off the cloud and lights up this whole end of town.” He nodded his head and placed a cigarette in his mouth, watching the cloud of steam. “That’s what wakes you up at night sometimes. That’s the light that shines through your window, all right?” He looked down at me, patting his pockets, searching for his lighter. “All right? So there’s no reason to be scared when you see that light.”

He was wrong. The light never frightened me. It frightened my sister, Tina, but merely annoyed me because it reminded me of where we lived, amid the soot and the noise of the furnaces and mills that made the steel for the factories that were our neighbours. The crimson colour that shone in the night sky fascinated me because when he was a boy my father had visited the killing floor where my grandfather worked each day, standing ankle-deep in blood and water. My father had seen the liquid floor and described it to me, saying it was red, but not as red as blood itself because so much else was mixed with it from the animals that hung by their hind legs and writhed while dying. The image of the writhing, dying animals frightened me. My grandfather’s killing knife frightened me too. But not the hellish glow in the night sky above our house.

Few things frighten me today.

Which is not to say I am brave.

So maybe I’m a coward.

Men fear being labelled cowards in the same way they fear growing impotent, and I suppose Sigmund Freud would say “Precisely!” as though it should be obvious. It has never been obvious to me.

Women escape that particular silliness. Call me a redhead or call me a coward, what does it matter? So it is not difficult for me to use the word, and I felt no shame at my cowardice.

I had not wanted to meet Gabe on the blanket within the shrubs, the ones growing between the water’s edge and the boardwalk behind our home, because I feared what I had promised myself I would do that evening.

I had promised I would confess to Gabe that I had made love to Mel Holiday. That I could count the times and identify the locations and describe the positions, if that was what he wished to hear. That I had been more than foolish, I had been stupid and selfish. That I was sorry, more sorry than I could ever explain. That I promised I would never do it again because I loved Gabe and I would always love him, and I had never stopped loving him. That I wanted to tell him because I could no longer stand the guilt I felt each time we made love, or the fear I felt when Gabe looked at me in a certain way, as though he suspected the truth. I had told myself to deny, deny, deny if he asked, but every denial, I knew, would be another betrayal. Lately, every day that passed without telling him felt like a betrayal.

The truth is, I was still being selfish. I couldn’t stand the pain of guilt anymore, so I would pass it on to Gabe by confessing.

I would never have said it in that manner, in those words. I would have confessed through tears. I would also have confirmed suspicions that I feared Gabe already harboured. He had wanted, I knew, to dissolve those suspicions in the adolescent act of making love in the summer night air, smothering our giggles to avoid alerting passersby, drinking wine, and watching the moonlight and our hands pass over each other’s skin.

Would I have told him as soon as I arrived, there among the shrubs, me in my pants and T-shirt and him naked? It was unthinkable; it would have been unbearable. I wanted him dressed and sitting with me in our living room. I wanted him to see my face and understand how sorry I was, and how much I needed his forgiveness. I wanted to tell him that I would understand if he left me, but I did not want him to leave me. I never wanted him to leave me. So I had delayed returning, hoping he would decide I wasn’t coming to meet him on the blanket and he would wrap himself within it and return to the house and get dressed, and I would arrive home to tell him.