February Read Online Free Page B

arms tightly over her chest.
    The other fifteen tourists glanced at one another when John’s phone rang, a techno-drone that brought back offices and subways and busy streets and cancelled the otherworldly whisper of criss-crossing palm leaves. John slapped at his pockets as if he were on fire.
    He thought it must be his mother, but it wasn’t his mother.
    It was a woman he’d slept with months ago. A woman he hardly knew.
    It’s Jane Downey, the woman said.
    John tried to think of her face and drew a blank. There was a hint of eucalyptus in the cloying heat. The smell made him think of Vicks VapoRub, the dark indigo of the glass jar. The plock when the metal lid was unscrewed and the welling aroma that cleared the fog of a half-sinister, seductive dreaminess. His mother had wiped a slick of it over his top lip and smeared it on his chest. Someone had told her to put it on the soles of his feet. This was when he was eleven and had a fever that kept him home from school for three days. He had missed a math test on that occasion. Dysgraphia—that’s what the specialists called his condition later—made him see all numbers and letters backwards and sometimes upside down. John had overcome this, compensated, faked his way through. He could always get to the answer by going the long way around. He took engineering in university out of spite. He’d gained from his mild disability an unshakeable certainty that things were not always what they appeared to be.
    Are you good? Jane Downey asked. John said about the beach and the climb. He talked about a zip ride he’d tried out a few days before—a long cable stretched across the roof of the rainforest, how he’d worn a crash helmet and how it had felt like flying.
    Just so fast, he said. Once you jump off that cliff there’s no turning back. Everything he said sounded as if it were translated from a dying language. Why did he talk about not turning back? The more he tried to keep the conversation light, the heavier it became.
    I had some work in Melbourne, he told Jane Downey, and I took an extra week. A ferry to Tasmania. Thought, I’m here, check it out, right?
    Absolutely, she said. Tasmania. Wow.
    It’s been a tremendous year, he said. And then: I thought you would be my mother. He turned around as he said this, half expecting to see Jane Downey stroll up behind him and tap him on the shoulder. He moved away from the cluster of tourists on the platform but the little Japanese girl followed him. Perhaps she’d heard the mewling tone that had crept into his voice. Like everybody else he had a phone voice, but he was not using his phone voice. His voice sounded guilty.
    He had stopped himself from speaking to Jane about the feeling of accomplishment that came with taming a fear. He did not tell her how the zip-ride cables had squealed and sagged under his weight during the plummet. There was a video camera, he told her instead, in the crash helmet, and he’d purchased a DVD record of his ride.
    They gouged me for it, he said.
    I’d like to see that, Jane Downey said. She spoke with false gusto.
    John could not remember anything false from the week he’d spent with Jane in Iceland six or seven months before. He had a presentiment that she was going to tell him something true and inescapable. He did not want to hear it.
    Jane Downey had perfect skin, John remembered, pale and freckled and lit with honesty. There must be some inner virtue, he’d thought when he met her, to account for the uninjured beauty he saw in her face. He had been reading pamphlets that promised a dirty weekend in Reykjavik, blondes in bikinis cavorting in the Blue Lagoon. Jane was not Icelandic. She was from Canmore, Alberta.
    John had been in Scotland on business and a friend had suggested Finland. He’d only spent a few days there; Finland was too austere for him. The people in Finland were either morosely sober or blind drunk, he decided. But from Finland it was a short flight to Iceland, and