her bed, pulling the covers right up under her chin and smoothing Val’s hair away from her face before silently backing out and closing the door softly behind her. Val waited for the sounds of Dawn’s crying to burst through the wall, but heard only the padding of Joan’s stockinged feet as she moved through the apartment. Slowly, she fell into a dreamless and unmoving sleep.
When she woke up, Joan had cleaned the apartment and dressed Dawn in a pretty little pink dress with a white collar. “I brought it with me,” she said proudly. “Of course, I didn’t know if she was going to be a girl or a boy, so I brought a little blue sailor outfit too.” Joan laughed and the trill filled the room; Val winced.
But she felt good. Better than she had in a month. Her joints didn’t feel as if they were grinding together, bone on bone. She was aware, again, of her whole body—the way her legs moved and her neck swivelled—instead of just the soreness in her breasts. At Joan’s suggestion, she drew a hot bath and soaked until lunchtime, when Joan made sandwiches. Dawn slept peacefully, cried out briefly when she was hungry or wet, and settled down again as soon as she was satisfied. Val watched Joan, her serene face, the light way she caressed the baby’s cheeks, the brightness of her eyes when she held her. She was suspicious, but forced herself to think Joan knows how much I did for her baby, and now she’s trying to make up for it. That’s all it is.
The next week, Joan came again. Peter held the baby, and even Val could see that his face softened when he looked into her blinking eyes. Peter—that hard-shelled, incomprehensible man.
Joan made Val a pot of tea and sat with her on the balcony, even though a cold wind was beginning to swirl around them. Inside, Peter sat with Dawn. Val could hear him singing to her, a strange, off-tune version of “Rock-a-bye Baby,” but she didn’t turn to look.
“You’re alone here too much.” Joan’s voice, as always, cut through the air—unmerciful, unlovely. She continued, “I’m alone too, most days.”
Val looked down and pulled at the fabric that bunched over her stomach.
The teacups rattled as Joan shifted in her chair to face Val. “Come home with us. I can help with the baby and we can be company for each other again. It’ll be fun, like when we were little girls.”
Val remembered the river. The way it smelled at the height of summer. The muddy banks where the bodies of fish that had died in the winter were exposed to the hot sun. The saltiness of eelgrass. The faint smell of chemical sewage from the paper mill upriver that was usually hidden by fog and rain the rest of the year. The rumble of trains speeding past every other day. Val and Joan, one small and the other smaller, sitting with bare legs on the steps of their back porch, sniffing the warm wind blowing up from the water and through the bush. Val never loved their house, but the river was something else altogether. It churned with the scraps of canning and logging, yet it still reflected the blue sky on sunny days and winked at Val if she watched it long enough, her chin resting on the rickety railing outside, her mind empty of all the debris from village gossip or a bad day at school. The river could be lovely. You just had to be patient.
As if Joan could hear Val’s thoughts, she said, “Our house isn’t so far from Burrard Inlet, you know. There’s a beach there. Dawn would love it.”
Val met Joan’s eyes and nodded.
Val felt puffy with rest. She woke up before anyone else, her body jerking through the last cobwebs of a dream she couldn’t remember. The baby wasn’t crying yet. The early winter rain dripped off the eaves and onto the wide driveway lined with miniature spruce trees. It was still dark and the warmth of the bed cocooned her. Puffs of down-filled comforter formed in the crook of her elbow and the curve of her waist. Val fell asleep again, dozing as the overcast sky brightened. She was half aware of the wind shaking the Japanese maple on the front lawn, of cars slowly backing out of garages and heading toward the highway.
When she awoke a second time, she sat up stupidly at the sounds of