So I tried going back to work. Because that’s what people do who have bills to pay, fears to run from, and a life to feign. They brush their hair, put on some clothes, swallow some pills, and pretend everything’s fine. Pretend the drugs that are supposed to make the symptoms go away aren’t actually making things worse. Pretend their brain isn’t a time bomb. I should have known better than to tell anyone at the office what was going on. Maybe I did know better, but I did it anyway.

“Awww, Stacey.” Ami, the product PR guru — who passed for a friend some days — frowned a little when I told her, while her glued-on eyelash fringes fluttered at hyper-speed. “You have to try the Viva Rica Detox Flush.”

I wanted to tell her that she just had to shove a bottle of blueberry juice up her ass. Instead I smiled. Nodded. Fluttered the mascara-clumped stumps that pass for my eyelashes back at her. The next morning, I called in sick. The day after, sicker. Until finally, after ten days of swinging between numbness and dread, there came some clarity. Punctuated by the dumpster top thudding shut on my balled-up silky, pukey bedsheets. I called Mama. Started planning my exit.

Here and now, there’s no point in getting dressed or making any attempt to look as though I’ve done anything other than roll out of bed. That is the beauty of being in the woods. No one to impress, least of all the nosy neighbours who’ll be peering out windows and driving in slow motion to take a good long gander at who’s doing what, where. I slide on a pair of old flip-flops and head down the road to the second-most sacred place on the planet.

The massive U-shaped concrete structure that sprawls out into the deep water is technically “the wharf” where a ferry once docked and crossed the narrow channel in this part of the Bras d’Or Lakes, until they built the big bridge in the sixties. But “The Wharf” is so much more than just the old ferry dock. It is the surrounding beach and woods. A place of myth and memories. A holy site of secret rebellion, and the backdrop for stories you sure as hell won’t hear at church teas and knitting circles. Stories that my generation relives in loud, raucous roars around bonfires and at kitchen parties. Maybe even at funerals. The good ones, anyway. The Wharf is where I built my first sandcastle and had my first swimming lesson. It’s where I had my first kiss, my first cigarette, my first swig of Golden Glow apple-flavoured wine-like product. It’s where Allie and Char and I hosted the infamous annual May 2-4 drunken debauchery camping excursion known as Fucktapalooza. It’s also where I’d go to be by myself and to talk to my father. Not that he ever talked back.

That’s another little scrap of the story I need to stitch into what’s left of my life. Exactly what manner of tragedy befell the eighteen-year-old kid they all called Smart Alec Spenser, who went and knocked up his family’s poor young housekeeper, Scruffy Effie Fortune. Smart Alec was last seen walking this very road twenty-seven days before I was born, headed down to The Wharf to his brand new, freshly christened fishing boat, The Anastasia. Two days later, The Anastasia was found run aground on the far shore of the Bras d’Or. There was no sign of Smart Alec. Except for a broken beer bottle and a bloody T-shirt on board. You can imagine all the whispers that little mystery spawned, what with the Spensers being a pack of ruthless business kingpins on the brink of being scandalized by a bastard baby, and the Fortunes being a bunch of dirt-poor, cursed lunatics. The last person to see Smart Alec alive was my mother. She swears to God her final words to him on that cool October evening were, “You’re a foolish son of a bitch. But I love you.”