I have seen George Warde and Eliza Lawson many times since they passed, and also my brother, Ned. It has happened, as well, that I’ve seen a person who has not died but who should be elsewhere—I once chased George Warde in Paris, where he could not possibly have been, as I’d just received a letter from him addressed from his mother’s house in Kent.

People have doppelgängers, or the displacement of travelling makes resemblance seem more startling than it is, or the mind and heart miss a person so greatly that they superimpose the loved one’s features and gait and whole mien over an unsuspecting other person, in another country, and, in my case, another time.

I have run after Eliza twice in London when even had it been Eliza, she’d have refused to speak to me, having already said she would not love me through my mother’s disdain.

And Ned, my brother—though his horse and I rode as one dejected beast after we lost him at Ghent, I saw him alive again the following year at Culloden, and then lighting his pipe outside the tavern in Vauxhall Gardens, though Ned never had a pipe. I saw him a third time—and in this case I believe it really was him—calmly firing his gun among Kennedy’s men on the Plains of Abraham.

Now, as Vigneault’s stain of blood becomes a flower, I glimpse through Archambault’s window Eliza, breezing through the crowds on Saint Catherine Street.

I lurch after her with the headphones on—and had the clerk not kept his eye on me, I’d have yanked the sound equipment off its shelf.

He touches my ear with his lips, his grip strong. “Do you not know me?”

The beloved Lawson curls float out of sight. I know it can’t be her but I want to run after her double. I crave that finality when the face dissolves from its illusion of being the face I’ve lost.

The clerk’s grip takes me back to wrestling in the grass with George Warde. He’s muscled for someone so slender and smells like something I remember, something from a moment of abandonment or brotherhood. I feel comforted by his scent and do not fight him. I’ve no wish to attract shop security. They might summon Montreal’s strange police, who saunter around in unconvincing garments that appear to me like mock uniforms but with real guns strapped on.

The clerk’s release is abrupt: he lifts a ceremonial hand toward Archambault’s exit, giving me back to the street.

9 Little White Words

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5.

NOON.

Chinatown. Montreal, Quebec

WHY HAS SAINT CATHERINE STREET no Café Bouleau, a sanctuary where I might find a confidant, a person who can understand? I know from experience that given the right combination of shade and comfort, even a so-called enemy will lend a sympathetic ear.