“Well, I’m gone, and he can do whatever he pleases,” she said. “He owes me nothing, Mrs. Cochrane. Not one thing, and we had a good marriage for a while.”

“The first two years are always good, my girl—it’s the next fifty that stink!”

Annie finally took her drawing pad out of her bag. She placed it on Mrs. Cochrane’s lap and told her she was welcome to flip through it. Mrs. Cochrane and Johnny both were stunned at the drawings of the hummingbirds and seagulls and the flowers that made you sure that you could smell them on the page. They praised her work over and over again until they came to a final sequence of drawings.

The red beards. The naked lady with long, dark hair. The man with the spear in the clouds. Blood splattered everywhere. Dark violence on the page.

Mrs. Cochrane gasped. She held her crooked fingers tight to her lips. She started to cry. Tight tears against her pinched mouth. A moan of desperation. Mrs. Cochrane shook her head and handed the pad back to Annie. Annie reached out her hand and squeezed Mrs. Cochrane’s palm in hers.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Johnny reached across and wrapped his mother’s shoulders up with one arm and glared over at Annie. “This is why. This is why you can’t come here,” he said in the quietest whisper.

“No, no, Johnny. It’s time I tell the story. The story of you.” Mrs. Cochrane drew in a long breath and let it slide slowly out of her from between her teeth. The hiss of remorse.

“When I was a young lady, like that one with the long hair in your picture, I fell in love with a red beard. Oh, I loved a man that I knew I should not have. I knew he was white and that red colour on him was all the anger that came out of him every day. The anger that painted him red. Red hair all over his body. Even on his back it was like thick fur and not soft fur. Hard fur. I went off with him. Took off South, and I met his brother.

“His brother had the red hair too, but his red hair was like a passion. A passion that was filled with love for the earth. For life. For being alive. I don’t even want to tell how it happened, but eventually I was sleeping with both of them. Not under one roof like in the old times when an Inuit woman had more than one husband. I’d sneak here and there.”

Mrs. Cochrane stopped and crushed her eyelids together tight and drained her tear ducts. She did not wipe the tears from her cheeks. Johnny leaned in and brushed them away tenderly.

“Mama, don’t talk. It’s okay. I don’t need to know anything.”