Maybe it would be nice to do something more tangible, I thought, to take a little break from musing on the two horoscopes, on the dreams, on how to position myself with respect to my father’s death. Perhaps I should engage in some of my actual work, the activities I had recently heard so unceremoniously described by Alex Foss. But instead of settling down at my desk, it seemed that I was now pulling my chair over to the shelves on the wall, and reaching for a cloth-covered box I kept in the highest cubby. It had sat there, untouched, for years, and was covered in a layer of gray-brown dust, which now floated in unattractive clumps down to my desk. I sifted through some of the detritus of years past until I found one piece of paper, yellowing with age, folded in three.

Had a very bizarre phone call this morning. A man calling to say you’d drowned yourself in the Ottawa River. I don’t know if he meant to gain entry with shock value, but he soon changed his story to say that you’d only tried to, and that you’d survived thanks to a curious passerby. He used all kinds of fancy psychological phrasing, but on the subject of how you two knew each other, exactly, he was quite vague.

On his name, too. “A friend,” he said he was. Well.

As I have not had any news from the school I will assume you were unsuccessful in your attempt to end your life. It would be a very selfish thing to do, so I hope you got it out of your system. I gave him a good idea of how little I would welcome another telephone call, and I must say that if you find yourself tempted to give out my telephone number to any other of your “friends,” please reconsider.

In other news, we’d hoped to have puppies this spring, but Jack did not take a liking to the neighbor down the road’s bitch as much as we’d thought. I can’t say I blame him. Write and tell me how you are.

Mother

24

An obscenely loud noise turned out to be the telephone on my desk.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hello,” said a female voice. “This is Linda.”

“Linda,” I repeated, my mind a blank.

“In Professor Pindar’s office,” she said. “Are you free today? He’d like to see you.”

I struggled to grasp these new and unwelcome concepts. What could I possibly say? “Today?”

“Yes, today,” said Linda. “Would three work? That would be best for him.”

A long pause followed.

“Three will work,” I said finally.

“Perfect,” she said. I could hear her fingernails clickety-clacking on the keyboard through the line. “I’m putting you down now.”