A few passengers at the front of the bus are singing “I Saw Three Ships.” It occurs to me I could take a bus anytime I want and just head wherever I want, not a destination someone else gives me. My mother would be pleased. My father? Who knows.

My father enrolled me in air cadets and I spent every summer in an air cadet camp program where we did physical training, mandatory outdoor survival courses, and studied celestial navigation. They insisted I learn to fly a plane. I was born for it, they said. My father was overjoyed when I aced my flying test. It never occurred to me I could say no. I just buckled down and endured. And yet I was still happier at home, drinking mint tea and baking with my mother. To survive the fear, I insulated myself and kept floating through life.

I gaze out the window at the glorious mountain peaks capped in sunset-stained snow. I feel nothing. Where is the splendour of nature, I wonder? I’ve got a letter in my knapsack which came a few weeks ago in the mail. I haven’t had the heart to open this letter from Tara, or as I think of her, Back Fat. What does Tara want from me?

You can never escape childhood friends — this floats through my mind. Maybe I read it in a fortune cookie or in one of my self-help books. Maybe it was on a church sign I passed when I drove my pickup truck from Nova Scotia to Vancouver when I was twenty-five, when I was moving out west for university. Or maybe my mother said this once, not to me, but to my father, after yet another person from her past looked her up, someone who had never been her friend, and who remembered their shared childhood differently.

My mother has rheumatoid arthritis. She was late-diagnosed and can hardly use her hands now. That’s the problem with letting autoimmune diseases run wild. They eat away at you until it’s too late. She hid her pain from my father but not from me, when I had those cups of tea and treats with her. It was our secret and it got tucked away inside me along with her baking. My father wants me to be hale and hearty. He thought if he thrust me into a life of activity it would ward off disease. I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. My mother comforted me with cupcakes.

Bob is waiting at the station, unwashed hair, rumpled clothes, bags the colour of tea under his eyes. I can smell hamburger on his breath. There’s a bit of meat stuck between his teeth. No one would ever guess he was a doctor. He is the kind of doctor who does not insist on health food. The boat waits in an industrial park. I can’t believe it. This is the spectacular marina? This is where he expects me to stay, even just part time? This is where I’m going to do my dissertation writing retreat?