I believed Gabe would forgive me, and I had almost looked forward to the anger, the tears, the shouts, and the cleansing of confession.

But what if, I wondered, and this was why I needed to spend hours alone in the darkness of the house we shared: What if Gabe’s anger knew no bounds? What if his suspicion and rage were stronger than I knew? What if he had taken his gun with him to the blanket, not to kill himself but to kill me? And why did Walter Freeman ask if Gabe had given me any expensive gifts lately? Because he had, of course. And if anyone but Walter had asked, I might have admitted it.

I thought of all these things and more as the steam above the mills dissipated in the evening air, the glow of the slag vanishing with it, leaving the beach strip in its familiar darkness.

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when immigrants were arriving from Italy and Croatia and Ireland and Poland to work in the steel plants and the factories along the bay, the wealthy families who owned the mills and the factories built summer residences on the beach strip. The strand was clean and uncluttered, the bay and the lake were teeming with fish, and air conditioning was an impossible dream. The August breezes that swept off the water and into the windowed towers of the cottages, each several times larger than the crowded homes of the immigrant factory workers who lived in the city, provided natural cooling, and this was where the wealthy families spent each summer. The rich factory owners sailed dinghies on the lake, their privileged children flew kites on the strand, and their pampered wives gossiped beneath parasols in their gardens. Irishwomen cleaned the rooms and laundered the linen, Scotswomen made the cucumber sandwiches and sliced the ham, and Welshmen tended the gardens. God bless the Empire.

They moved to the beach strip, these rich families, every June with their children and servants and steamer trunks, and remained until September. The husbands were here only on weekends. As I grew older and learned about the beach strip and about men, I wondered if the absence of the husbands from their families during the week permitted them to spend time with their mistresses back in the city, or spend money on the girls who worked the side streets near the factories. I suspected the men would tolerate the city air, heavy with smoke and heat and humidity, in return for the freedom to entertain young girls alone in their mansions.

About a dozen of the original Victorian cottages remain on the beach. These gingerbread-trimmed fire traps, restored and winterized, sit crowded between houses like the one Gabe and I purchased, a frame bungalow with a lawn in front and a garden in back. Our house shares nothing with the summer mansions of the Victorians except location. It is dull in design, square in shape, predictable in layout. “Amorphous,” Mother called it when she first saw it, back when she could speak. Mother’s vocabulary was always elaborate and surprising, and the nature of the hell she finds herself in now can be defined by that fact. She used that term herself when she wrote, on the small blackboard, I live in an unspeakable hell!!! When she handed it to me, she smiled at the pun.

Air conditioning changed the beach strip, and perhaps the morals of the wealthy men who deposited their families here for the summer, but that’s a doubtful notion. As the factories grew larger and dirtier, their smoke and dust were carried on the west wind down the shore of the bay to the strip of sand separating it from the lake. In time, the soot and smells became unbearable for wealthy families with cottages on the strip. Luckily for them, air conditioning arrived just as the soot began turning the strip as black as the rest of the city. With air conditioning installed in their mansions, located upwind from the factories and mills, no one needed twenty-four-room Victorian cottages on the beach strip and the cooling breezes from the lake to get a good night’s sleep in summer. Many of the massive summer homes were first converted to rooming houses, then demolished and replaced by spindly three-room frame cottages with screened porches, and these became the belated palaces of factory workers who rented them for a week or two each summer in the years after the wealthy families abandoned the beach strip. The men would sit on their porch and listen to insects buzz against the screens while their children played in the sand and their wives prepared summer salads and lemonade in the kitchen. The men sat like that, their backs to the factories, for two weeks each year, living fourteen days each summer in the manner they wished to live every day of their lives.

I huddled in the living-room chair thinking of the wealthy families who once lived here on the most desirable side of the strip, facing the lake. I was thinking of the wives, and what they thought of their husbands back in the city. I decided they thought very little of them, intent as they were on operating a household free of the interference of men.

I have never been free of the interference of men, and I would not be for some time.

That is what I thought after the red glow in the sky faded and I heard police officers speaking in low voices outside my window, talking about what had occurred that evening among the shrubs, about the naked cop who had shot himself on a blanket beneath the moon.

5.

I slept in the living-room chair and awoke remembering. remembered hearing the sound of the transport trucks on the high bridges behind me as I was falling asleep. I remembered thinking of the men who drove them, and how strange it must be to be constantly moving, without a choice of destination. I remembered what woke me up.

It was our telephone in the kitchen, where telephones belong. Not in cars or purses or pockets or attached to your ear like jewellery. Telephones should be in the kitchen, where lives are lived, and I followed its sound. I had refused to get a cell phone, but I gave in to Gabe’s idea of getting a cordless phone that we could use in the garden, if we chose, although why anybody would want to use a telephone in the garden was beyond me. I called people in the kitchen, and I answered the phone there. Am I stubborn? Do I cling to old ways? Does a shark have teeth?

The kitchen was bright with light from the sun, already high above the lake and shining through the windows facing the water.

It was Mel calling, as I knew it would be. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Yes. In a chair in the living room.”

“I’m going back downtown. I was there until past two.”

I said nothing. I didn’t care where or how long or with whom he had slept.

“There’ll be an inquest. It’s all over the news. People from the newspapers, the TV stations, will want to talk to you.”

I heard voices on the boardwalk along the beach. When I pushed the curtain aside, I saw two television trucks in the lane next to our house, and a woman pointing a microphone like a weapon. I closed the curtain. “They’re here,” I said.

“You don’t have to talk to them.”

“I know.” Someone had seen me and was ringing the doorbell. “I won’t.” Now there was rapping at the back door. I squinted at the clock. Twenty minutes to eight in the morning. How did the woman with the microphone get her hair and her makeup so perfect this early in the day? It was obscene. She didn’t even need it—she was maybe twenty-five years old. Women like me, we need … I began to cry.

“Josie?”

“I’m here.” I thought I would never eat again, and that I would never cease crying.

“Refer them to Reg Gilmour. He handles media downtown. That’s all you have to tell them. They can talk to him at … you got a pen there?”