"Good morning."
The apartment is quiet. Bagel appears in the hallway and meows — the morning meow, the one that meansI am awakeand the world should accommodate this fact. Poutine is on the bookshelf. She has not moved.
The coffee is warm. The light is plain. My pillow smells like her shampoo.
We stand in the kitchen and drink coffee and don't say anything important, which is, I think, the most important thing we've done.
16
SPRING ON THE SLOPE
I.
The slope looks different without the ice.
Not dramatic-different — it's still a hill, still the same cracked pavement with the drain at the bottom that catches meltwater in the spring. I walk past it every day. To the dépanneur for milk. To the corner to get air while Ethan does his physio exercises, the ones he still won't do if I'm watching. Past the bus stop. Past the place where the sidewalk cracks and the weeds come through every April.
I walk past this slope automatically, without looking — my feet know the cracks.
Today I'm looking.
The ice is gone. The trees along the curb are doing the early-spring thing — bare but swelling at the tips, the particular tension of a branch deciding whether to commit. The air has shifted from the flat Montreal grey to something with yellow in it, actual shadows, actual warmth if you stand in the right spot and believe hard enough.
Ethan is next to me. Walking — fully, both legs, no crutches. The crutches retired last week with a ceremony that consisted ofhim leaning them against the wall, saying "good riddance," and Bagel sniffing them once as if closing a case file. The cane is still here, though — black, medical, held in his right hand because his physiotherapist has opinions about outdoor sidewalks in March and because I have worse opinions when he ignores her. He walks with a catch now — a quarter-beat hesitation on his left side, the hip remembering what it went through. The physio says it'll fade. He says it doesn't bother him. He's lying, but I've learned which lies to let him keep.
Our arms are touching. Forearms, not hands — we do this thing where our hands are in our pockets and our elbows are close and the contact is accidental-on-purpose, the physical equivalent ofwe're together but we don't need to announce it to the sidewalk.
He stops. Looks at the pavement. At the spot.
"It's smaller," he says.
He's right. In January this slope was a long white tongue of black ice and an angle that ends careers. Now it's just a hill with a city drain and a crack in the asphalt that looks like it's been there since before either of us was born.
"You were bigger then," I say.
He looks at me.
"You were lying on the pavement and you were very large and very inconvenient and I had to kneel in ice and ruin my jeans."
"Those jeans were already—"
"Don't."
A car turns the corner at the top of the slope. A Corolla. Grey. There's a dent in the rear bumper from a parking incident she swears was the other car's fault and refuses to discuss further.
"Oh no," Ethan says.
Sophie parks halfwaydown the slope. The same spot — maybe the exact one. She climbs out with the energy of someone who has arrived at a location and intends to make it everyone's problem.
"Iknewyou'd be out here!" She's wearing a jacket too thin for early spring and boots too cute for slush.
"We're just walking home," I say. "We didn't—"
"Marc texted me. Information ecosystem."
Her door is still open. The car is angled on the slope, tires turned to the curb. Same position. Same angle. I watch her eyes go to the pavement — fast, one beat, the flicker that you'd miss if you didn't know her. She looks at the spot where the car slid. Where the sound happened.
Then it's gone. Sophie converts whatever she's feeling into forward momentum as she always has.
