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it’s as if it is my own heart beating, and heat rose into her cheeks, she felt a quivering start in her abdomen and solar plexus and wondered, Am I ill? What is this?
    Father Dominique turned briskly to her.
    “I’m sure you want to do a little preparation before your class arrives.” Obediently, Christine followed the purposeful swish of his skirts out of the chapel.
    Night had fallen when she began her solitary drive back to the city. The road was deserted; no other headlights disturbed the darkness and no stars were visible; only the rare yardlight on a farm miles back from the road lit a small orange triangle in the sea of black. Christine was exhausted, leaning back in her seat as she drove, her head against the cushioned backrest. The class had gone well, she thought, although only one of her twelve students was a man—strangely, much older than the others, older even than her by at least fifteen years—and extra attentive, not in a studently way, she thought, but rather as if he found her an interesting phenomenon that would bear watching. She smiled nervously in the darkness as she thought of him and the way he held his mouth, sympathetically she found, and for no reason she could pinpoint, she was assailed by the penetrating sadness that nowadays seemed to be always present beneath whatever lightheartedness she might briefly find. Or had it always been this way? Surely in childhood she’d often been purely happy? But she wasn’t sure.
    Her mind circled around and came back, as it always did, to seven-year-old Aaron. Was he happy? she wondered. He did something that might be called play: he walked in circles, he rocked until she stopped him, he banged his head sometimes, although that behaviour was almost eradicated. He would sometimes sit on her knee while she read a story to Meagan, butthen he would hum tunelessly, more a drone really, and usually it would escalate to that high, purposeless, meaningless scream of his, and nothing she said or did would stop it. She thought of his tense little body perched restlessly on her lap. Never an instant of relaxation until he fell asleep, never anything that might be called cuddling. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she refused them relentlessly. Crying had not so far cured him; she doubted it would do so now and sat forward in the seat, grasped the steering wheel more firmly, and accelerated the sooner to escape this darkness through which she drove.
    When she pulled up in front of her house she’d already seen that all the lights downstairs were on, although it was nearly eleven. She stopped with a jerk, grabbed her briefcase, and rushed up the sidewalk and into the house. Her mother was waiting in the hall, her face white, her arms in their unravelling green wool sweater hugging herself tightly.
    “It’s okay, Christine, it’s okay now,” her mother said before she could ask. “He’s back in bed. He’s asleep.”
    For a long second Christine could only stare, her heart was in her throat, choking off her voice. She slumped against the wall, her briefcase falling to the floor.
    “What happened?”
    Her mother was smaller even than Christine and thinner, too, a tiny woman, really, gazing up at her out of large, steady brown eyes, whose colour tonight had darkened to black.
    “I left his door unlocked when I put him to bed. Meagan called me and I went to her—I forgot the door wasn’t locked—and …”
    “I forgot to lock the front door when I went out?” Christine asked and, without waiting for an answer, moaned, “How could I be so stupid?” Her mother shrugged, “Or I did. I think itwas me.” Christine straightened, began to shrug out of her coat.
    “Was he gone long? Where was he? Who found him?”
    “About forty minutes. The police.” Her mother was helping her take off her coat, moving aside the briefcase. “He was running down the centre of Fourteenth, shrieking and flapping his arms, the way he does. Perfectly happy to go with the