THE NEW YEAR

Fireworks, January 2009

THE FIREWORKS WERE moved from the harbour to Quidi Vidi Lake because it occurred to someone to be careful of the oil tanks over on the South Side. Barry said they could park the truck up in the White Hills.

I’ll come get you, he said.

That sounds nice, said Helen.

You know, there by the school, the building, whatever it is they have up there.

The building up there, Helen said.

There’s a good view, Barry said.

I’d say that’d be the spot, all right, Helen said.

Around eleven thirty, then.

Barry had finished the renovations three weeks before. He’d left his tools and said he’d be back to get them. A few days later his stuff was gone and Helen’s house key glittered on the bristly welcome mat.

Imagine if a spark from them fireworks landed on those oil tanks, Barry said. Helen was talking on the phone and looking out her bedroom window. The South Side Hills had long, dangerous icicles all over their craggy cliffs. Snow streaked the smooth bare rock farther up. The five white tanks, fat and implacable against the blue sky.

What if I cooked supper for us, Helen said. She had not meant to say it. She heard something crunch. It must have been an empty pop can. Barry had crunched a pop can in his fist.

I don’t want you to go to any trouble, he said.

If you’re too busy, she said.

What time, he asked.

Everybody in town had the same idea. Helen and Barry couldn’t get near the White Hills because of the traffic. They parked, and it was snowing lightly and the ground crunched and squeaked with new snow. They walked down to the lake. There were long lines of traffic and the snow fell between the crawling cars and shone in the soft fans of the yellow headlights.

There were teenagers hanging out of a van in the Employment and Immigration parking lot. The doors of the van were open and music was thumping into the cold air. The kids had fake ice cubes in their drinks that crackled with light. The girls were shrill. One swaying blonde in a rabbit-fur bomber jacket yelled Happy New Year to Helen and raised her glass so beer slopped over the side and sizzles of light from the fake ice cubes shot out through her fingers.

Earlier, Helen had answered the door after the bell rang and she was dressed up and Barry was not dressed up. He wore jeans speckled with paint and a plaid shirt. They’d sat down to eat almost at once because there was nothing to say. The risotto had been gluey and cold. The beef was grey. Helen had just finished serving herself and she pushed out her chair and it screeched over the hardwood. Barry glanced up, startled and guilty looking. He was wiping his empty plate clean with a chunk of bread before she had even started.

There had been a hole in the centre of the dining room and all the things a man and woman could say to each other had dropped into the hole, and it had closed over, and the new hardwood floor gleamed shiny and mute. It was a silence full of what they expected, and what they expected was turned up on bust, and it was sexual and full of need and too much to expect. Helen had the dryer going at the back of the house and she and Barry listened to the clothes tumbling around. Something with snaps scraped and was muffled and scraped again, over and over.

Then Barry brought up the subject of his ex-wife. He glossed over the subject. He put his hand against the edge of the table and pushed his chair out and ran his other hand down the front of his shirt, and bread crumbs bounced onto the floor, and then he just casually mentioned his ex-wife.

She took up with my best friend, he said. Old story. This was long ago. They collect meteors in Nevada.

Helen’s plate was full of food and she didn’t want to touch it but she couldn’t leave it there. The gravy had congealed with a crackled sheen over the cold risotto.

You mean, like comet tails, she said. She stabbed a limp shred of colourless broccoli, then shook it off her fork.

Worth their weight in gold, Barry said. Chunks as big as your head. The two of them out there, shovelling sand. They got a house built almost entirely of glass. That’s not what they do for a living, he said. That’s what they do for fun.

And this was the wistful closing statement about the ex-wife. The mother of his son. He did not begrudge his ex-wife falling stars.

Helen suddenly remembered to put on music. Something perverse or decadent made her choose Frank Zappa. Barry poured them a second glass of wine.

I’m not kidding, Helen, he said. This is a fine meal.

Helen’s mouth was full. She chewed and swallowed and flapped at the kitchen with her white napkin.

Go, she said. Help yourself.

Do you mind, he said.

She laid her hand flat on her chest and swallowed and gulped wine. Be my guest, she said.

Barry came back with his plate heaped up and he was saying about the journalist who’d thrown a shoe at Bush. Did you see that on the Net? Then he said about the mayor who had thrown up in her purse years ago. He’d done her floors too. She was a ticket, Barry said. And then the new mayor had demanded that a councillor bring him DDT in a cereal bowl with a spoon and he’d eat the whole goddamn thing for breakfast. Because there was nothing wrong with it. DDT wouldn’t hurt a fly, that mayor had told the TV cameras.

Helen said, Shut up. Stop. She was laughing. Barry had worked his hand into his pocket and then he took out a lighter and lit the candles. He walked over to the wall switch and dimmed the lights while he was talking.

Helen raised her hand, clutching her napkin, and lifted one finger to make him stop. I have to show you, she said.

What?

She was already up the stairs and he was following two at a time.

You have to see, she said. Helen stumbled forward in the dark and turned on the gooseneck lamp on her dresser. The wedding dress she’d been working on lay over the arm of a chair. It was finished.

That’s really something, Barry said.

And the girl who is going to wear it, Helen said.

That’s a beautiful thing, Barry said.

Helen had a hundred-watt bulb in that lamp and it hit the white satin and the dress was blazing white. Pearls and sequins sparking, light spilling along the folds, beading up like mercury and spreading in all directions.

Then it struck Helen that they were in her bedroom, and the wine hit too. Her bed was appalling. The pillows were appalling and the personal things on her dresser were appalling: her deodorant; a pair of nylons that still held the shape of the ball of her foot, shiny with dirt, and the rest like a crumpled reptile skin, faintly shiny and lewd; a black patent-leather evening purse with a broken strap. She had come into her bedroom forgetting it was her bedroom. She had come in by accident. She turned off the light to make the bed go away, and Barry said her name.

Then they were in the dark. Just standing in the dark, and Barry was not sure what to do. Helen fumbled around for the light and turned it back on. It was an uncompromising light. Barry looked at his watch.

It’s time to get down to the lake, he said. Or we’ll miss the fireworks.

And now Helen and Barry were in a crowd at the lake. A bang clapped against the low hills and they both turned. The explosion of light seemed to reach through the darkness towards them. It was coming at them fast. Silence followed the bang, deepened and became fathomless. The light flew into their faces as silent as something at the bottom of the ocean. Helen stepped back. The snow crunching under her boots. Then the booms overlapped. The fireworks looked like underwater plants. Starfish, phosphorescent flowers with stamens and petals and seeds. They pushed up out of the dark and were extinguished by it before they could touch or come anywhere near her.

A family of ducks on a pan of ice tried to flee, all huddled together in a pack, waddling fast and then stopping. Staying still. They waited, and with the next bang the ducks turned together and waddled in the other direction. Helen was close enough to hear the ducks, but they didn’t make any noise at all. A red spurting fountain shot up a geyser of white spirals. More flowers over their heads dropping petals.

A girl a few yards behind them was counting down with her boyfriend. Five, four, three, two, one. And then the girl yelled Happy New Year, hopping up and down. Boom, crack, boom crack, boom, and Barry drew Helen into his arms and his mouth was on her mouth and they pressed hard together, and his tongue and the firm strength of his body and his hand under her jacket on the back of her cashmere sweater. They kissed for a long time.

When they drew apart, the dark sky had clouds of smoke and the crowd had started back up over the hill, and Helen said, Do you want to come back for coffee or a whisky or something. And Barry said, Yes I do.

In the kitchen, Helen screwed the espresso maker together and put it on the stove. She had whipped cream in the fridge and a bottle of Baileys, and she set those things out. Barry was on the couch in the living room and Helen went out and flopped down beside him, and it was ordinary. They were friends and it was well past midnight and her thighs were cold.

Then his hand was on her crotch, moving, and she lifted her hips towards his hand. He was looking into her eyes. It wasn’t ordinary. She was mistaken. His thumb on the seam of her jeans, rubbing intently. The reflection of his watch face, a disc of light, was jiggling on the faded pink floral fabric of the couch. It was a frenetic, crazed jiggling.

The espresso maker on the kitchen stove began to bubble. Helen hadn’t screwed down the top canister tightly enough. Steam was escaping through a groove that hadn’t been threaded properly. The metal canister was whistling, high-pitched, and then chugging like an engine. Then it was screamingly high again. Helen pressed hard against Barry’s hand and turned her face into the sofa.

I am going to come, she said. She was not speaking to Barry, and he didn’t answer. The jiggling oval from his watch fluttered over a printed flower on the couch near her mouth. Helen pushed her face into the cushion so he could not watch her. She put out her tongue to touch the disc of light. She could feel the texture of the Scotchgarded couch. It tasted of sawdust.

Then Barry was tearing her jeans down. He was a little rough. Helen held his ass with her hands and their feet hooked together. He was wearing slippery nylon socks. He grimaced during orgasm the way she had once seen him grimace while lifting a sheet of plywood into place, holding it with his shoulder while digging for a nail in his carpenter’s apron. And he grunted. It was a sound so unselfconscious and from so deep inside him that it thrilled her. He said, God almighty. A thrill ran the length of her body like a spill of icy water. Then he said, Goddamn. Goddamn. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath and he kissed her collarbone.

Somebody should turn off the coffee, Helen said. But the espresso maker kept whistling. Finally Barry stood and pulled up his jeans and fastened the leather belt. He walked to the window and parted the curtains. People were walking up from downtown. A cop car went past with the lights on and a few whoops of the siren.

Helen walked into the kitchen and the bottom of the espresso maker was glowing orange as if it were about to melt.

. . . . .

What Did He Say

THERE WERE A lot of men in the water. There wasn’t very much time, Helen. We were trying to get to them.

What did Cal say? Did he say anything? Helen wanted to hear that Cal had said her name. She wanted to hear that he knew she loved him. She wanted to hear: tell Helen this or that.

It didn’t have to be love.

It didn’t have to be her name.

Just some shout to show that he knew what he was leaving behind. Some shout to acknowledge that she would have to raise four children by herself now. That she would have to get through without love. That she was pregnant. She would like to think some part of him knew, or had intuited, or that some paranormal force had let him know, there was a baby coming.

Helen would like to know that Cal understood how dark the rest of the winter would be, and how the fetus in her womb was kicking and making her throw up, and how the baby would have the cord wrapped around her neck and would be blue, bluish, as none of the others had been, and the terror that Helen would lose the baby now, and how she could not lose her.

Helen had not believed in an afterlife before Cal died and she still did not think of it. But she listened for Cal after he died. She listened for his tread on the stairs; she listened for his advice. She listened for him pouring cereal out of a box, the clink of his spoon; she listened for the dog’s nails on the hardwood as Cal set out its food in the back porch. She listened for his breathing at night. If she was lost in sewing and the kettle whistled, she expected Cal to turn it off. She asked him what he thought of the girls.

And then a murmur, a collective gasp went up, and it turned out her baby girl was fine, just fine, what a big girl, and Helen found herself thinking, Look, Cal, look. She would have liked him to tell her certain things, and she knows exactly what they are:

I’m not afraid.

Tell Helen thank you.

Tell the children I love them.

Tell Helen; tell Helen.

All the men were calling out. We had to cut the ropes where they were iced over. The ropes were so cold. The men couldn’t hang on.

What Helen cannot fathom or forgive: We are alone in death. Of course we are alone. It is a solitude so refined we cannot experience it while we are alive; it is too rarefied, too potent. It is a drug, that solitude, an immediate addiction. A profound selfishness, so full of self it is an immolation of all that came before. Cal was alone in that cold. Utterly alone, and that was death. That, finally, was death.

Helen wants to jump into the ocean in the middle of the night when it’s snowing just to see what it feels like.

Sometimes, like tonight, she is so awake she feels she will never sleep again. She feels an acute awareness of the ongoing life of the teapot. The teapot goes on, the gold vinyl sneaker belonging to her granddaughter remains a gold vinyl sneaker, the phone goes on being a phone.

It is very cold out and very dark, and Helen longs for some movement in the dark, for a taxi to go by. Out on the street the asphalt is so solidly itself. It will always be itself. The house across the street is the house across the street with its naked light bulb in the third-floor window. And there is Helen. But Helen is not sure she is herself.

She lifts her sleeping mask and the furniture buzzes and she feels pins and needles in her feet and a mounting wave of terror; she is solidly alone. She is as alone and cold and obdurately dull as the tree in her backyard, as the fender of a car under the street light, as the apple in the bowl on the kitchen table, as the church across the street, as the steeple covered on one side with snow; she is not Helen, and who is Helen? A scrap of a dream, a fragmented, a frayed—and the phone rings, it blasts into the room, it rings and rings. There is a body in the bed with her and she goes cold with terror. It is Cal. Cal is back, but he is dead.

But it is not Cal. It is not Cal.

Barry switches on the light. He is a man who wears slippers and who scuffs his feet. She can hear him pissing in the toilet down the hall. And she answers the phone and her heart leaps. What you have to become. It’s John. What is it, three? Three in the morning?

Mom, John says. He is crying.

Mom, John says. We have a little baby girl.

. . . . .

She Sees It

SHE IS THINKING again about the portal. It had a metal deadlight that could be lowered and secured over the two panes of glass, but nobody lowered the deadlight. If that metal deadlight had been lowered, the water wouldn’t have gotten over the control panel.

Helen has memorized the ifs and she can rhyme them off like the rosary. If the men had the information they needed, if they had lowered the deadlight, if the water hadn’t shortcir-cuited the control panel, if Cal had had another shift, if Cal had never gotten the job in the first place, if they hadn’t fallen in love. If she hadn’t had the children. If.

She wants to believe Cal had time for a game of cards.

Helen knows Cal liked to have a game of 120s after supper if he wasn’t on duty, and there was time for all that. The fist of ocean had punched through, yes, but there’s every reason to believe from the retrieved voice recordings that nobody was too worried.

Helen wants to know exactly what happened because she can’t stand the idea of not knowing. She wants to be with Cal when the rig goes down.

The public address system had short-circuited and maybe there was a subtle absence of sound the men would have noticed. Maybe Cal was dealing a hand at a card table and he would have noticed a silence like when the fridge cuts out. What she doesn’t want is for him to be asleep. She doesn’t want him to have woken up to the panic. If only someone could have told her where he was.

Somebody in the control room said: Let’s get this water cleaned up.

Or: Get someone in here to clean up that glass.

Somebody said: The panel is wet.

Somebody said: Valves opening by themselves.

And a voice said: Working on it.

They retrieved those taped voices later on, and the men didn’t sound worried at all.

Get down there and get it cleaned up, somebody said.

Here’s the funny thing. The sea water hit the panel and it forced a 115-volt current to run in another direction. The current was supposed to run one way but it dug its heels in; it changed its mind.

How different is that current from a human thought or emotion, Helen wonders. A flurry of feeling. A burst of giddy indecision? A filament in one of those bulbs was shot through with an orange line of light that turned blue and then turned to ash. The filament held its shape for an instant and then lost its shape. And that constitutes the first if in a series of sacred ifs that Helen tortures herself with every time she is drowsy or alone in the car or finds herself staring into space: If the current hadn’t run amok.

There might have been smoke or there might not. Maybe a few blue sparks like fireflies hover over the board for a second before they are extinguished. Helen doesn’t imagine smoke, but she hears the crackle inside the teensy-tiny lights, like crunching tinfoil against a filling, a sound more like a touch than a sound. She hears this tiny sound, or feels it, deep inside her head.

The current was nervous energy that panicked and busted all the delicate filaments in its wake, and indicator lights went off on the control panel.

Or they flickered.

The PA system died. One of the guys in the control room might have asked for assistance, but the PA system wasn’t working because of the water all over the control panel.

If you listen to the voices recorded in the control room the men sound relaxed, and there’s every reason to believe that Cal is scooping up a handful of change on the card table with no idea of what’s about to happen. Helen wants him that way, innocent of everything.

A radio handset caught stray sound floating between neighbouring rigs out on the ocean. A line or two of talk crossed wires. The men on the other vessel, the Seaforth Highlander, heard this talk, and they wrote down what they heard. What the men on the Ocean Ranger knew was the weather. They knew the waves were thirty-seven feet and the wind had reached eighty or ninety knots. Or the waves were ninety feet and the wind was gathering speed.

On one of the other rigs, a metal shed bolted to the drilling floor blew away.

We’re going to need every helicopter they got, someone from the Ocean Ranger said. This was the line that came through. Consider the hope in it.

Or the line that came through was: Tell them to send every helicopter they have.

They said: Send everything you have. Someone listening remarked on the calm. It was a calm voice that said about needing helicopters. Of course, there were no helicopters because there was rime ice in the clouds, because of a low ceiling, because helicopters could not fly in that weather, and the men must have known it.

The men on the Ocean Ranger sent out a mayday. We have a list from which we cannot recover. They gave the coordinates. They said, ASAP. They said eighty-four men.

The men on the Seaforth Highlander heard the mayday and they just gave it to her. Full throttle. They were travelling eight or nine knots. They were eight miles away. They came upon the rig before they knew it. They could not see, and then they saw, and there was a lifeboat and—they could see through the murk—wavering rays of light. The men were bailing. The thing was sinking but there were men on board and they were bailing.

Someone said, Don’t tow them.

Someone had been in a similar situation and knew a tow could capsize a boat like that. They’d laid out a net on the deck of the Seaforth Highlander and the net was gone just like that. Washed over. Everything the men did was covered in ice, and they broke through the ice. The ropes were iced over, and the men’s faces. Every grimace, every gesture, broke out of the ice mask of the last yell or scream. Cheeks and eyelashes and mouths and all the folds and wrinkles of their coats and every new gesture cracked out of the shell of the last gesture and broke free to be seized by ice again. They were men in a film shot frame by frame.

But there were men, still alive, in a lifeboat, and some of them were lightly dressed. These men were bailing because there must have been serious damage to their boat, and they had a system worked out and they were doing what they had to do. They were moving slowly and with method. The method was to stay afloat at all costs. And they capsized.

These men were in the water and the men on the Seaforth Highlander had to untie themselves so they could reach farther, and they were in danger of going in themselves, and they threw the ropes, but the men from the lifeboat could not raise their arms. Life preservers floated within reach, but those men could not reach.

The crew on the Seaforth Highlander had to cut the engine because the men in the water were in danger from the propeller, they might be dragged under and sliced to ribbons. But without the propeller it was a matter of minutes before they had drifted away from the men in the water. And that is the last, Helen thinks. He is gone.

BUT THIS IS not a true account of what Cal faces, and Helen knows it. It’s better to keep to the true story or it will have to be told again until she gets it right. She endeavours to face the true story.

A crevasse forms in the cliff of water and it turns, as things sometimes turn, into concrete. Is it concrete or is it glass? It’s mute and full of noise, angry and tranquil.

How like itself and unlike anything else. How unlike a Ferris wheel or a dog whimpering in its sleep or popcorn in the microwave oven or watching your lover have an orgasm, the clench of a foot curled around a calf or a square of sunlight on the hardwood floor. Growing old. It is like none of these things. Not remotely like.

Or trying to hang on to an iced railing during the tipping upwards of the monstrous hunk of metal. How unlike.

This wall of water has always been. It did not design itself or come from anywhere else or form itself. There was never a forming of. It just is.

It is still and self-combusting. Hungry and glutted with love. Full of mystery, full of a void.

Full of God. Get down on your knees before this creature.

It is the centre of the outside.

This wave is death. When we say death we mean something we cannot say. The wave—because it is just water after all, just water, just naked power, just force—the wave is a mirror image of death, not death itself; but it is advantageous not to glance that way. Avoid the mirror if you can. Cultivate an air of preoccupation. Get. Get out.

Death would like to be introduced. It is willing to be polite. There will be no rush. When the wall closes over Cal, he will be like a fly in amber, a riddle of time, a museum piece. He will lose the desire for escape. The obsession with living will seem like a dalliance to him then. Stillness will be the new thing.

The ocean is full of its own collapse, its destiny is to annihilate itself thoroughly, but for a brief moment it stands up straight. It assumes the pose of something that can last.

This wave has been working towards the chewing and swallowing of the world since the beginning of time. Chomp. Chomp. What is the world after all? What are sunlight and love and the birth of a child and all the small passions that break out and flare and matter so very much?

A great guzzling of itself is death, or whatever the end of life may be called, or referred to as, or spoken of. But we don’t know how to name it because it is unknowable.

Except those men know it.

Cal knows it. It is a glittering thing, big and disco-ball beautiful, full of dazzle, and he left her for it.

Here is what Helen has come to think: There must be some promise in death.

If she is in a hopeful mood, sometimes she can believe in more than rot. Sometimes she thinks there must be promise. More promise than the cold ground and a skull and the sprinkle of holy water on a casket and the gold-embroidered robes of the priest and a flock of pigeons and the street gleaming after the rain and snowbanks so bright in the evening gloom after the dark of the church that they hurt the eyes.

She heard Cal in the bathroom that night, brushing his teeth. He spoke to her, but he was not there.

He was passing through. He came to her, Helen believes. Look out the window, he said. Or he said something similar. Look out the window. The rig tips and all the water falls away from its decks and the men hold the rail. They hang on.

It tips and tips and the card table slides sideways and all the silver coins bounce across the floor, dimes and quarters and nickels, and now, at last, she is with him.

Helen is in his skin. She is Cal and she lives through this every night, or sometimes in an instant as she cleans the dishes, and the fact of it is in the faces of her children. It is the doorbell ring and the heat from the oven when she takes out the casserole, it is the smell of ketchup and the noise the ketchup makes coming out of the squeeze bottle, it is the swooshing inside the dishwasher, it is an absolute terror that she wakes to every night. A terror that has invested itself in the microfilaments of her being, in every strand and particle of thought. What will she be without it?

She is there. Helen is there with him.

But she is not there, because nobody can be there.

The dimes roll on their rims and the playing cards slide off the table and the table falls on its side. Cal is making his way up to the deck. He is hauling himself hand over hand up the stair rail. There is a monstrous crevasse in the concrete ocean and it inspires a terror that is full of calm.

They knew all along. It was decided.

One end of the rig tips and it slides in easily. It is there and it is not there.

The Royal Commission said there was a fatal chain of events that could have been avoided but for the inadequate training of personnel, lack of manuals and technical information. And that is the true story. It is the company’s fault.

But there is also the obdurate wall of water, and because of it Helen will finally give up her careful recital of the fatal chain of events.

Cal is on the deck and he is almost gone. Please go, she thinks. Please go, let it be over.

Because his panic is in her skin, just as he has made love to her and just as she has had his four children, and just as she has watched him sleep and cooked his meals and made up a notion of what love might be and followed through with it.

She decided that love might look something like this: a sketch, a thing, a plan. She figured it out and then she brought it into being. Breathed life into it.

She and Cal had stayed up late and said, It must look like this. They agreed, and then they stuck it out.

If they were wrong, nobody ever said. Helen knew Cal’s moods and the two of them gossiped and made up stories and held each other and fought and were careful about what they said, even in anger. And his panic is inside her. The panic of facing death.

That must be part of what they decided: If Cal died out there on the rig, Helen would never forget him. That was the promise. She will never forget him.

. . . . .

An Eclipse on the Honeymoon, February 2009

THE SUN IS a constant. The sun is not moving. It’s going to take fifteen minutes. Total.

Everybody murmurs the word total. Everyone agrees. This is on a street corner in Puerto Vallarta. One man in the group has a toothpick. They are all heading back to their condos after a few drinks in the cafés. A few margueritas. Senior citizens. They are Americans who own time-shares, or they are, some of them, from Quebec.

Not for another thirty years, one woman says. We have to see it now. We’ll be dead the next time.

Long gone, says the man with the toothpick. He lets the toothpick wag up and down.

Last chance, someone says. Everyone chuckles. The last chance was kind of a funny idea.

We’re casting a shadow, a man says.

That’s all, someone says. A shadow.

One man raises both his fists, and one fist slowly circles the other, and he nods to indicate where the sun is, off to the side a bit.

It’s the earth moving between the sun and the moon.

Or the moon between the earth and the sun, a woman says.

It’s going to be total, they all agree.

They have their arms crossed over their chests and their faces tilted skyward, and the taxis, trawling the streets, toot when the crowd absent-mindedly steps off the curb. Where the shadow has already crossed the surface of the moon there is a honey-dark glow.

Helen had married Barry in her own living room. John gave her away; Lulu wept like a fool. Gabrielle had flown in from Nova Scotia and arrived fifteen minutes before the ceremony. Cathy and her husband, Mark, and Claire. Timmy with the rings on a satin pillow. Helen had invited Patience and her mother. Patience was given a wicker basket full of rose petals that she was asked to scatter. The vast importance of Patience’s job caused her to stand rigid, staring at the floor for the whole ceremony. Then she flung big squashed lumps of petal, winding up first like a baseball player. Helen’s girls were happy for their mother, or they kept their opinions to themselves. It was a short ceremony.

As long as the love lasts, Helen and Barry said to each other. Cathy had written the vows. Gabrielle had designed the rings and they’d been forged by a local jeweller. Helen wore blue silk, just below the knee and unadorned because Lulu had said, Simple.

Afterwards John tried to tell Helen how to change a diaper. You’re doing it wrong, he snapped. Then he nudged her out of the way.

Listen here, my son, Helen said. Don’t tell me how to change a diaper.

Jane had a bag of frozen peas clutched to her left breast for the whole ceremony. She had a blocked duct. We’re both exhausted, Jane said.

The baby never sleeps, John said. They had both moved to St. John’s, taking two separate apartments, but John slept on Jane’s couch most nights to help with the early morning feedings.

John wanted them to watch the birth video.

Jesus, not now, Cathy said.

John set up his computer and they all gathered around, except Jane, who had fallen asleep in the guest room, and Barry, who didn’t want to look.

John slipped the DVD in the slot and the black screen turned blue and he hit play. There was a sudden burst of blurred green and a roar of static and the sound of ragged breath and John was saying, Okay, okay, this is it, this is it, now, now, and then he was yelling. And there was blue sky and cloud and a dipping and rising and his hands waving back and forth at the edges of the screen. He hit pause.

What the hell was that, Lulu said.

Wrong DVD, John said. It was the zip ride he’d taken in Tasmania.

After the ceremony the whole family had fish and chips from Ches’s, and then Helen and Barry hurried to catch an evening plane.

Barry had said Mexico because he had never been and neither had Helen. They wanted a place that would be new to both of them.

They got a taxi from the airport in Mexico. The breeze through the window and honking traffic and pollution. The hotel was fine. Helen ripped the blanket down and the sheets were clean, and she and Barry made love and showered. Barry rubbed lotion on Helen’s back and her arms and the backs of her thighs, and she did the same for him. There was loud traffic on the street outside the hotel and it was very hot, and they found their way to the beach although it was already late in the afternoon.

I’m going to get in, Barry said.

Go for a dip, Helen said. I’ll watch. The ocean was green except near the shore, where the stirred sand made it the colour of milky tea. Farther out, the water was like nickel and full of glitter. Afterwards they ate at a sidewalk café and someone said about the eclipse. Someone said, Look.

We’ll be gone the next time this happens, everyone on the sidewalk agrees. The women are wearing white capri pants and embroidered blouses and turquoise and silver jewellery they’d bought at the beach in the afternoon. The men are in shorts—plaid or navy—that come to their knees, and they wear loafers.

There are also buff gay men, tattooed and shiny-skulled and vaguely injured looking, and close to their chests they carry lapdogs with studded collars or bows. Or they are healthy young gay businessmen in crisply ironed shirts, cargo shorts, and gronky sandals. And there are children playing marbles on the sidewalk.

A tanned and elderly woman with a bleached ponytail smokes, and the end of the cigarette lights up orange.

It is boring to stand and watch the moon. A dull event full of majesty. There is a statuesque woman followed by her husband, and he holds the hand of a boy with Down syndrome who looks to be their son. On the corner there is a jewellery store lit up like a fish tank, and the girl behind the counter is reading the paper.

It’s been going on, a man drawls, forty minutes.

I don’t think total, someone says. Then, finally, the moon is gone. Blotted out. Everybody claps. They clap spontaneously. A short, self-conscious burst.

Totally gone, someone says.

But it’s coming back, Barry says. He is standing behind Helen and she leans back and he draws her into him.

It’s coming back.

EARLIER IN THE afternoon Barry had walked out into the water until he was floating. He bobbed up and down and a wave crashed over his shoulders. Here and there people were floating near him, and they all looked like silhouettes. The ocean was a deep navy now, and blasted all over with light. Each wave capped in silver. It was like hammered metal, sparkle-pocked.

Helen suddenly felt a shadow fall over her, and with it a chill. It was a definite shadow and it covered her towel; it was directly overhead, and the chill was uncanny, and she thought of Cal. Four men were strolling together and they had halted in front of her, all at once, and they each raised a hand over their eyes and looked at the sky just above her head. She heard a shrill whistle and it was a parasailer, a man in a harness with a parachute, coming in for a landing, and he was hovering directly over her. A group of Mexican men was running towards him, and they mimed and yelled for him to tug the rope, and the guy did and he dropped towards the ground ten feet from where Helen sat, and the Mexicans caught the man in their upraised arms and lowered him to the beach and folded the parachute as it deflated. And Helen looked out over the ocean and she could not see Barry.

She could not see him.

She looked at the spot where he had been and he was not there.

Then the wave withdrew with a roar, and there he was. He stood and he was dark against the sun except for a gleam down his arm and in his hair, and he flicked his head and the drops flew out like a handful of silver, and he dipped under the water again and waded against its pull towards shore and came back up the beach to her.