She’d imagined strangers as houseguests to introduce to her son, adoring the combination of indifference and tenderness commingling in their faces: a man with a thudding radio perched upon his shoulder like a parrot; phalanxes of businesswomen in imposing shoulder pads and high, fortified hair; a man in red leather pants and futuristic shades like the human version of a sports car; another man rummaging through the trash with a baseball mitt. Even the ugliness was important, the seediness, the homeless, the filth—it needed to be acknowledged, even to children, so they didn’t grow into princes. If she wasn’t with Will and she’d had her Bolex, there wasn’t a single part of it she wouldn’t have loved to capture.

A day of ticked-off errands: produce shopping in the thick compost funk of Kensington Market, the post office to forward Arthur’s mail to his latest PO box in Milan, and a visit to her lawyer. To avoid conflict of interest she’d found her own counsel, a woman that their lawyer (who Arthur kept—old U of T classmates) had suggested. She took the fact that she had toys in her waiting room as both a good sign and something terribly sad.

Had she really just signed those papers? Wasn’t this business the reason they’d remained common-law? Legally, however, it was the same mess. A “trial separation”—whether this meant a tryout or a formal ceremony of judgment and sentencing she was unsure. It was terrifically amiable, almost maddeningly so. She wondered if he was paying full attention. The house was hers. As was Will, whom Arthur adored, theoretically, but had always viewed more as a side dish to the main course of himself, as he had her, she supposed. In truth, she felt nothing: neither longing nor onrush of freedom, only an emotional beigeness, as though hydroplaning on the surface of her life, something close to those reckless months after Charlie died. But she expected life without Arthur would closely resemble life with Arthur, who was either at his drafting table or attending the architectural conferences and colloquia of the world.

Finally the train arrived, and she wheeled a now-napping Will into position. Bodies pushed to line the tracks. All these people, she thought, as the train stormed past their noses, so content to stand inches from their deaths. When the doors parted, casually, with no warning, like the tiniest snag on the otherwise flawless surface of her confidence, she realized that she might be somewhat afraid to step onto this particular car. With this thought a knuckle of fear slipped into her throat, unswallowable.

She chuckled. Afraid the doors might pinch her behind? Of going the wrong direction—as she and Arthur so often had, rapt in the conversation of their early days? Was this feeling even real? She’d ridden hundreds, thousands, of subway cars—though she’d never loved the black rushing of tunnels, she’d always endured them, cheerfully even.

Yet her heart insisted on racing, like an oil-doused bird flapping for its life in her chest. Other sensations, too, unmistakable as neon: a dull pain throughout, a soreness to her blood, a twisting in her gut, stardust in her fingertips. It would pass, a mere miscalculation of an errant brain that found danger where there was none, that saw a lion instead of the lamb before her.

People pushed past as she breathed hard and fought to reset herself. She needed only to regain the mental ground on which she’d stood a moment before, only one step back, a gathering of balance, but the fear—it was fear, she admitted now—would not abate.

She refocused her eyes, saw the car still split before her like an offering. A chime sounded. The doors jumped shut and the train dragged itself away. She laughed, more for those she imagined watching, then glanced around the empty platform. Everyone had done what she couldn’t. She must look lost, or more probably insane, as if she’d remembered her pressing appointment with God in the other direction.

She drew Will away from the tracks. Passengers arrived clueless of how narrowly they’d missed a train. She took a long breath and decided she would simply make herself, through sheer mental force, board the next train, and the inevitability of this comforted her. Soon her heart slowed. Tingling ceased.

She waited with a bullied, yet sturdy, calm. A warm breeze emitted from the tunnel, carrying with it the fragrant innards of the city. Wheel grease had affixed itself to everything down near the tracks, leaving all the mechanics and gadgets a flat black, like the backdrops of those experimental theaters Arthur loved. Only the tracks themselves were clean and silver-smooth, like the palms of hands.

She was composed now, solid even, and her foundation—all she’d done, the dangers she’d braved, places she’d traveled—had returned beneath her. Maybe it was the sight of the steel subway tracks, but suddenly she was a girl looking on the grain cars from the workhouse of the elevator in Thunder Bay, sitting like notes on a musical staff of steel far below. It was those same tracks that brought the cars that both her father and Charlie unloaded. Their weight that broke the cable that swept her twin brother from the world like crumbs from a table—oh, she wished a train would arrive this instant! If the doors opened before her now, she could surely step in and leave all this nonsense behind. This was but a tiny blockage in the flow of her day. The only mercy was that no one would ever know it happened.

She was exhausted. That was it. The lawyer, the heat, the walking, the city, the hectic day with Will—and look, here was another train blaring into the station. They were quick during commuting hours, thankfully. Why was she thankful? Couldn’t she have waited longer?

The train’s wind flicked her bangs from her face and puffed her cheeks slightly, a film of dried sweat tightening her skin. As she pushed Will closer to the tracks, she was forced to admit that this particular train seemed fiercer, more indifferent than the previous. It wept and screeched as it halted like a tortured thing. The doors blew open and people erupted. More passengers this time, nearly rush hour. Will would be starving when he woke.

She would step onto this train, but the fear of another failure stayed her. Figures pushed past. To buy time she searched her purse for nothing in particular, imagining what she’d lost. She grasped her house keys and squeezed them until her hand shot with pain. Then, impossibly, the doors shut, after hardly enough time for people to board. Had there been a mistake? An impatient operator? The train lurched forward, fitting into the dark like a glove.

She retreated. Her knees were water boiling. Her limbs crawling and tingling as though Arthur had slept on them. She could leave, cart Will back up the escalator and hail a cab to deliver them home. But how would she manage without the subway? She’d have to lie, hide, make excuses—it would be dreadful.

She leaned against a plexiglassed advertisement hung on the brown tile wall, inhaling deeply, blowing out her panic like a birthday candle, but it only leapt back, fed by each breath, with a thicker, more lustrous flame.

She could hear her tongue scouring the roof of her gauze-dry mouth. Her throat constricted—how small a windpipe is, she thought, how minuscule an area we must keep clear to survive. Her heart thudded in her eyes. The word pulmonary entered her mind like a cruel rhyme. What word did it usually go with? Ebola? Embolism. What did that mean? Why did she think what she didn’t even understand?

Then someone speaking in an annoying, distant manner. Oh, she couldn’t bear assistance. Not now. She needed to weather this. Alone. But the voice persisted. She decided to listen, only enough to gather what was said in order to properly repel it. The words were a man’s. For how long had men talked in her direction, wanting something? She held the words at arm’s length. Every part of her felt unfounded, jumbled, questionable, open to invasion and disarray. She would not let him alter her, enlist her. He wanted his fingerprints on her organs. If she wasn’t careful, he could tell her that her name was any old word in the dictionary and she would believe it.