The ringing of the phone snapped her out of her mood and set her heart racing. It had to be Paul. This call should have come days ago, but never mind. This would make up for it at long last. Her voice was crisp and cool, expertly concealing the chaos that ruled her soul. The coolness degenerated into malice as soon as she realized who was on the line. “Oh, Mike. Yes, what did you want?” A pause. “That sounds dreary even as an alternative to marking lab reports. And that’s what I’m doing.” She held the phone away from her ear a moment. “I’m afraid it’s not something you can do in company, and I really do have to get them done.” Another pause. “No, I have no intention of making next week difficult because I didn’t get things done today. You’ll have to console yourself some other way. Try reading a book, or something. You might find it a fascinating experience.” At that she delicately dropped the receiver back on its cradle.

This was useless. What time was it? Maybe she should go up to the gym and work out for a while. The calming concentration, the quiet narcissism of all those jocks, polite and pleasant, but never paying any real attention to the people around them—that was what she needed. To be accepted and ignored at the same time. A run would be too isolated; the emptiness of her apartment was already beginning to spook her. But she needed to work off some of her restlessness. She jumped up quickly and reached over into the corner for her gym bag. The sudden movement made her lurch for a second or two in dizziness, but she took a determined breath, set her jaw, grabbed her jacket, and headed for the door.

As Jane Conway’s slightly battered old orange VW Beetle moved down the drive from the parking lot behind her apartment building, a nondescript figure in a discreetly commonplace gray Honda that was parked across the street started his engine and pulled out slowly behind her. A group of three girls chattered earnestly on the steps of a house up the street, and as the VW passed them they stared for a moment and broke into fits of giggling. Unaware of car or girls, Jane drove steadily until she came to a stop sign. She pulled over, stopped, and opened her car window. The gray Honda stopped behind her; its driver glanced about him, got out, and walked up to her open window, smiling broadly. She gave him a blankly frozen stare, bent her head to listen to what he had to say, put the car in gear, and carried on.

Sunday should be a good day here, she thought, as she hurried down the steps into the health club. People were usually doing other things on Sunday afternoon: cooking enormous dinners, or dallying with their lovers, or hiking in the countryside. Maybe she would have the women’s locker room to herself, at least.

Damn. There was a tall redhead, looking slightly confused, standing in the middle of the room holding a gym bag. Jane glanced briefly at her, opened a locker, and started to strip off her sweater and jeans. “Excuse me,” said the redhead. “Are these lockers assigned? This is my first time here and I don’t quite—”

“No,” Jane snapped, jerking her workout clothes out of her bag in a gesture which she hoped would discourage further chat. She turned her back and started to dress, suddenly shy of displaying her body in front of a stranger. You’d think I was a self-conscious fourteen-year-old, she thought as she pulled up the pants and dropped the top over her head. Then anger edged out her despair. Why in hell can’t I be left in peace! It gave her the impetus to stride out toward the weight apparatus as though all were normal, fixed, healthy, and even in her life. Outside the facility, time dozed on the quiet Sunday streets.

He sat sprawled in his armchair, in a suburban development far from the centre of town, his long legs spread out in front of him, his handsome face slightly flushed. He was staring at his wife, whose plaintive voice was mixing oddly with the sound that blared from the television set. “Turn the fucking thing off if you’re going to say something, then.” She pushed herself up from the couch and moved slowly over to the set. She turned down the sound, hesitated for a moment, and then clicked the TV off. He continued to stare at her.

“Anyway, that’s what the doctor said. He’s worried about the cramping and spotting and wants me to go to a specialist—a Dr. Rasmussen. He says he’s very good. And probably I’ll have to quit work since I have to stand up all day, and that may be what’s causing it. The store doesn’t have any jobs where you can sit down all day. You know that.” He made no response. She took a deep breath and plunged on. “This specialist charges $250 over OHIP, but Dr. Smith says he can’t handle complications like this as well as the specialist would.” She took another deep breath and looked carefully at him, trying to judge his reaction.

Her words flowed around him, meaningless and ugly, bouncing off the wall and booming erratically into his ears—“quit work . . . $250 . . . specialist . . . complications.” As he looked at her, her body seemed to balloon grotesquely in front of him. The small protuberance of her belly grew larger and larger, threatening to engulf her completely. Shaken, he looked at her face. It floated loosely, puffing out, twisting, turning into shapes of exquisite ugliness, throbbing in accompaniment to the urgency of her words.

“You’re not even listening to me. This is important. I know we can’t afford it, but he says I’ll lose the baby. And I know it doesn’t matter to you, but I won’t let that happen. Will you listen to me!” Her voice rose to something between a wail and a shriek.

He clutched his hands cautiously together. The rage flowing through them made them burn and jump and he held them carefully on his lap so that their spasms would not be visible. Very calmly he said, “Of course I was, Ginny. And we’ll just have to do what the old guy says. I mean, we don’t have much choice, do we?”

“Oh, honey. I knew you’d be reasonable about it. I was just afraid that you’d be awfully worried about the money.” Relief flooded through her, and she made a move across the room as if to kiss him. He got up hastily and headed for the stairs—down three steps, past the kitchen placed cutely at the front of the house, turn, down six steps to the family room, turn, and down five more to the garage dug safely in under the townhouse complex. Smells of dinner cooking drifted up and down the stairways as he passed along them. Almost every room in every unit was on a different level, yet only in the bathroom and the garage did he feel safe and private. He switched on the light and headed for the sole object in his world that was his alone. He unlocked the door and climbed in on the driver’s side. He took large gulps of air to settle himself and reached for an enormous folded map lying casually on the passenger seat. The lights on the walls lit up the brightly coloured array of streets, parkways, parks, and wildlands that make up greater Metropolitan Toronto.

Circled in black was the enormous townhouse development on the northwest edge of the suburbs where he lived with his Ginny. There was an X in the center—“my house.” Scattered about the large green areas on the map were big red circles: one in the top right-hand corner, at Serena Gundy Park; one lower, toward the left, at High Park; one in the center of the map, not very high up, along a strip of green that used to be a railway line, called the Belt Line; and one to the southeast of that, around the Rosedale Ravine. Somewhere inside each circle was a clear, thick purple X. He looked doubtfully at the last one. Perhaps he hadn’t earned it. It had been entered a little prematurely. He reached into the glove compartment and drew out a plastic pouch filled with felt-tip pens in a rainbow of colours; he picked out a red one and let it hover over the map, drawing invisible circles around now this green space, now that one. He seemed to settle on an area, traded the red pen for a yellow one, and made a small mark with it beside another patch of green on the map. That done, he looked critically at his addition, put away the pens, folded up the map, and sat and stared unseeing through the windshield at the raw two-by-fours and industrial-grade plywood that made up the walls of his haven.