Sophie chooses this moment to let off a noisy fart that reeks of today’s vat of chicken korma the Bombay Restaurant donated to the Mission. I have to untie the tent flap and stick my head outside. “Are you saying,” she persists, “that if Miss Lawson had grown old and you saw her next week as an old woman on a park bench, you’d still fling yourself at her feet?”

“Old?”

“If her shell-pale gown’s in tatters and she has varicose veins and has grown extra-large ears and a humongous nose…you do know people’s ears and noses never stop growing?”

“Could you please not…”

“You’d love Miss Lawson the same even then?”

“I’d—yes.”

“There’s one just like that who walks her Pomeranian every morning down Parc Avenue and plonks herself under the lion statue and takes her dentures out to suck a banana. She used to be an ethereal beauty like your woman. Her daughter’s with her sometimes, a younger version of her with identical bone structure. I’ll show you next time I see them. You can let me know which one is sublunary, who sends you over the moon and who leaves you lying under it cold and dead as an avenue of unlit chimneys.”

Sometimes I wonder if Sophie envies or resents women who are delicate and who do not work as janitors in homeless shelters and who have heart-shaped faces and do not swagger around in steel-toed work boots. Instead of arguing with her I lie listening to the night sounds of the park: leaves rustling with that first papery dryness beginning to take over their summer-green softness. The rummaging squirrels, and the soft, heavy raccoons thumping toward their night-market: the rubbish bins lining Rue Olmsted.

Sophie is right. I sometimes use my thoughts of Eliza, and the sadness they bring, to veil other, more recent kinds of sadness. The ones Harold understands about me now. My wretched losses, recent losses that have no gauze of time to soften their edges. Losses caused by my own mistakes. How can I have lost everything?

—

AS SOPHIE SNORES, I RECALL how behind Madame Blanchard’s house whispered a grove of spruce, and in that grove grew timothy hay and in that hay spangled Louis, Lolly and Madarin. I used to go and talk with them—Madame Blanchard made me carry bread in my pocket so as not to get carried away by the fairies as her real-born son had been when she and her Canadian soldier were first married. She did not like it when I came home and told her about my fairies, did not like it at all, but Madame Blanchard was never the kind of foster mother to burn my arm with the stove damper or clip me around the ears with her wooden spoon. This was in summer, and I was alone a lot.