After completing the same lap for the third time I knew with an unshakeable conviction I was lost. Lost in a vast tract of snowy wilderness somewhere around the town of Ipperwash. I had been looking out for signs to Highway 401 East which would lead me back to Toronto, and home. In the frigid weather, the car navigation system had thrown in the towel. Confused, it kept recalculating. The more I searched for a path to the highway, the deeper I burrowed into intricate dirt lanes of a nameless community.
I was at Top Rate Insurance Brokers to drum up some business for the insurance company I worked for at the time. My meeting with Karen was over within a reasonable time but then she brought up a file and then another until it was clear if initiating a conversation is a challenge for some people, then ending one is no less a test for others. With little decorum, I gathered my purse and laptop and took my leave, promising to address all her concerns at my earliest. When I reached my car, the snow was taking a breather but an early winter darkness slithered around my shoulders like a thin cold blanket.
As far as I could see in the headlights, everything was draped in unbroken white. Fishtailing a few yards more, I saw what looked like streetlights against the horizon but I could not judge how far in actual distance they might be. The fuel light on the dash had been on for a while. I was not sure I could make it to those lights without the car stalling mid-way.
I pulled up to the side, and cutting the engine rested my forehead on my hands folded upon the wheel. A familiar pain shot through my body. The same pain I felt when I lost my baby. I lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs in our Orchard Creek home, drowning in a sea of poppies. The foetus, fourteen weeks old, flung open my body and burst out in a torrent of water and blood and blinding agony as if it had changed its mind about being born into such a violent world.
I refocused, brushing off the crumbs of thoughts from my mind. On my right, about a hundred yards away, a soft glow broke the gloom. The fuzzy light illuminated what looked like part of a porch. I hadn’t seen it before. Had someone just switched on that light? Momentarily, I debated if I should head towards the streetlights in the distance or try my luck at the house.
In the deep snow, I shifted to D2 and scrunched the tires up the slight hill to the house. Through a patch of tattered clouds, a waning moon peeked over the tall spruces. On one side, a clump of bushes huddled in crowded solitude under their burden of dim white.
Fighting back a blast of icy wind I steadied myself on the uneven snow and walked up the shallow steps to the porch. I was about to look for the doorbell when another light inside the house flicked on, and the door opened. Before me stood a middle-aged man, a shock of hair on his head as white as the snow around me but his thin face was unlined, youthful. He was of medium height, his build athletic. He wore a pair of chinos and a dark turtleneck, the colour of which I could not make out. His manner suggested he was waiting for a guest who he was certain would brave the weather and show up.
‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you but do you know if I can find a gas station nearby?’
He pondered a moment, his eyes narrowed as if in his head he were calculating the exact distance. ‘There is one, but it is ways towards those lights, would be a good seven miles, I’d reckon.’
I stole a look over his shoulder. A console table with a lace doily and a pot of poinsettia stood in the foyer and further in, I saw a sliver of a kitchen with half-curtains on the window.
‘It might take you a good half hour to get to that station given the snow has started again.’ Sensing my dismay, he asked. ‘Where are you bound for? The city?’
‘Yes, Toronto.’
‘You’d need a full tank for that alright.’
‘Thank you.’ I turned to leave. I had no choice but to take a chance with the fuel.
‘We have a spare room upstairs you could use for the night. It has an attached bath. It’s entirely up to you.’
Did I hear him right? We didn’t know each other at all and here he was offering a night’s stay. He said ‘we’ so there had to be a woman inside. I wasn’t sure, but after an invitation that coaxed trust, I could hardly RSVP with suspicion. Hey mister, do you have a wife? Impossible, I couldn’t ask that.
He was waiting, I had to decide quickly. My car was already covered with a healthy dusting of fresh snow.
I ungloved and extended my hand. ‘That’s very kind of you, indeed very, very kind. I am Anita, Anita Basu.’
He clasped my cold palm with his warm fingers. ‘You can call me Druk.’
‘Thank you, Druk.’ I stepped inside and the warmth embraced me like an old friend.
‘I was just sitting down to supper, care to join me?’
The ‘me’ stung my ears. Was he alone then?
‘Yes, sure, if it’s not too much bother,’ I answered with the awkwardness of one imposing on the intimate routine of a stranger.
After the entranceway, lay a dining area with an old-fashioned table and high-backed cushioned chairs. He pulled a chair out for me. I draped my coat over its back while Druk stepped into the kitchen beyond. Above the sideboard hung a picture of a bowl of fruits, a bunch of blue grapes spilling over its side. A crocheted runner covered the top of the sideboard with equal overhang at each end. As if someone had used a measuring tape.
Druk poured a can of soup in a saucepan and placed it on the stove. I conducted a surreptitious visual sweep of the space, and the absence of family photos of any sort disappointed me. No human face adorned the walls. A seascape with a cluster of boats and a framed reprint of Monet’s The Garden hung across from each other. To my uneasy mind, the pine kitchen seemed a woman’s kitchen in its tidiness, yet the physical absence of a woman filled the house.
‘What brings you up here on a day like this?’
‘I came to Ipperwash on work.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘I’m an insurance underwriter and I was there to meet one of our brokers. You know a meeting of support.’
He asked me what it was exactly that insurance underwriters did, and the conversation became pedantic. He listened, his head slightly tilted as if recording my words somewhere in his head. Still I felt I might be boring him so after a while I fell silent. He returned from stirring the soup. A deck of cards lay in one corner of the dining table.
‘Do you play solitaire?’ I asked, simply to fill the silence.
‘Not at all, solitaire is for solitary folks. I build houses.’
He reached over and retrieved the pack of cards and took a seat opposite me. Taking out the deck he shuffled it deftly, bending them backwards upwards, until the deck sat on the table plumped up and taller. One by one he began to arrange the cards on their edges, slanting, leaning against each other in triangles, some flat, some in squares of doors and windows, some in rectangular courtyards of possibilities.
‘Every time I work with a different floor plan. The challenge is using all the fifty-two cards. There cannot be any leftovers. If there are, then I have to start over.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Yes, and much more engrossing than solitaire.’ He got up to attend to the soup.
‘See that window, the corner one?’ He stared out into the darkness as if returning from the house of cards to his bricks-and-mortar surroundings. ‘I can see the ocean from there.’
He moved around with the agility of a trapeze artist, laying the table, warming the bread, chopping the salad and serving the soup, all the while carrying on the conversation.
‘Ocean? I didn’t know we were anywhere near an ocean.’ The warmth from the fireplace, the dull yellow light and Druk’s measured movements around the kitchen were playing tricks on my senses. He took his place across from me at the table.
‘Well, if an ocean can become a lake why not a lake an ocean?’ His eyes were shaded, the light from the standing lamp didn’t quite reach them.
‘Sorry, I don’t follow you.’ I picked up my spoon and looked at him.
‘I cannot see the other side of that lake, even on a clear day it meets the horizon in a blurry line. I have no idea where it ends. To me if an expanse of water is endless it’s an ocean.’
What a strange view. I prepared to contradict him with facts about the earth being round where everything, whether endless or not, appears to continue at the horizon. ‘But…’
He held up his index and middle fingers to suggest he hadn’t finished. I quietened, and let him continue.
‘Imagine a love, a huge throbbing love as vast as the ocean. So immense that you cannot see what lies beyond its shore but in truth your love is contained within your heart like a lake, freshened by the breeze of every breath you take. Although you feel its vastness, it is all compressed within your heart. That ocean of love becomes a private intimate lake.’
The time for my dose of Celexa was long past and I began to feel the telltale murmur of anxious butterflies in my head. It may turn out to be a hard night without the antidepressant. I tried my best to hide the tears that coursed to my eyes.
‘And hate, what about hate?’ I found myself asking.
‘Ah! love and hate are the two sides of the same coin. You hate as deeply as you loved. If you didn’t love someone enough your hatred for that person would be half-hearted too. You would simply be indifferent.’
I didn’t agree entirely but instead of responding to Druk, I thought of my baby; unseen, unheard, unborn, that tiny seed of creation that never had a chance at becoming a sapling. My love for it, swollen like a cascading mountain brook, rose in me raw and powerful. And then the father tossing me like a piece of driftwood down the stairs in a drunken rage. Killed his child instead. He, the fountainhead, the life-giver and the betrayer and life-taker. At the very thought of him, a searing revulsion rocked me and the bitter taste of bile touched my tongue.
Druk was right. I had loved him with a love that demanded such a hate.
‘Are you okay?’ Druk was asking from a faraway ocean shore.
‘Yes, yes, I am. Sorry I got a bit distracted.’ I gulped down my soup, wiping the bowl clean with the last piece of the bread.
‘I shall show you up to your bedroom, you are tired.’
‘Druk, do you have any children?’
‘Never been married. Not quite my scene.’
I braced myself for the same question from him, instead, he asked again.
‘Ready for bed?’
It felt bizarre to be escorted up to a bedroom with a strange man who I had no idea even existed when I got out of my own bed that morning.
He turned the handle of the very first room on the hallway and flipped on the light. A lime-green room leapt at me. Wall-papered, with flowered curtains on the windows, it was sparsely furnished but cozy and perfect for a single night.
‘Good night. I hope you have a restful sleep.’ With that, Druk was on his way down. At the end of the hallway was another room, probably Druk’s bedroom, with a small office in between the two bedrooms. The door of the office was open. A table with a computer stood under the window with a filing cabinet on one side and some scattered shelves pinned to the walls.
My bedroom was more squarish than oblong, and at one end stood a well-buffed dresser with a crocheted runner over it. I wondered if Druk was one of those metrosexual males, in self-exile in rural Ontario, with a skill for crochet and maybe even needlepoint or tatting. Next to the door, under the switch panel, sat a small squat bookcase lined with volumes of Marx and Stavisky, and popular works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I tried to picture Druk in my mind. A well-dressed man who lived alone in the middle of nowhere, reading Communist literature and Soviet epics, slurping up cans of soup, building houses of cards and spending the rest of his time with a crochet hook churning out furniture adornments. But that picture did not fit the man. He remained a profile in a photo frame, half of his face uncaptured by the camera. I expected to be afraid of him like I was of my baby’s father.
In the bathroom, I splashed my face with water and squeezing some toothpaste on my finger from the tube on the counter, I scrubbed my teeth. The familiar minty taste relieved my anxiety. I opened the bathroom door but soon realized I had turned the wrong handle, it belonged to a built-in closet inside the bathroom. I stepped back, gasping. Several pretty nightgowns hung inside the closet. Their necklines were trimmed with lace and glossy ribbon bows graced the yoke and sleeves. Beneath the nightgowns, on the floor, lay a pair of bedroom slippers in mauve with embossed lilacs. I shut the closet door and leaned against it panting for several minutes until I found the strength to return to the bedroom.
I summoned all the force in my body into my arms to push the bookcase against the door of my room. The bookcase glided freely despite the heavy books as if it were meant to be moved often. I pushed it as tightly as possible against the door. Turning the cover, I slid into the unfamiliar bed. It felt cold, and the dank smell of linen unused for a long time rose in the air.
I lay listening to the hum, of what I assumed to be the furnace, thinking of Druk. For the first time in eight months, someone else replaced my baby in my thoughts. Who else lived in this house with him? Or did someone visit often? What did she look like? Why wouldn’t he tell me? But why would he? He hardly knew me. He owed me nothing.
It was the silence that woke me. The buzz of the furnace no longer filled the air. I checked my phone, it was seven minutes past two. The intense silence was at once reassuring and terrifying. It implied security but held the chilling possibility of being shattered at any moment.
At first, I wasn’t sure I could trust my ears. I turned on my back to listen more carefully. It came again, muted but distinct, the stillness enhancing it. The unknown sound for which I held an unknown terror. A woman’s laugh, a quiet discreet sound. It came from the end of the hall where I assumed Druk’s bedroom was. I pictured a woman lying on the bed next to Druk, one naked leg draped over his slim hip as he lay facing her. She, slapping his exploring hand away, at once inviting and denying, teasing and censoring. Then again, the laughter, a giggle almost, scattering on the floorboards like pearls from a broken necklace.
My knee was hurting. I realized I had my leg bent at an awkward angle. I stretched out the offending leg and pushing it into the silence, I waited.
The hum of the furnace kicked in and everything returned to normal but a heaviness seemed to emanate from Druk’s room. A strange weightiness that tilted the whole house slightly on that side. Does a bed with two people on it sit more substantially on the floor?
The bookcase remained pressed against the door like a sentinel. I pulled myself up to a sitting position, and lifted a corner of the window drape over the headboard. The moon had travelled while I slept. It was probably perched on top of the house. The snow had stopped, the night was clean. My car, parked in front, was a comforting sight although it looked more like an igloo than an automobile, faintly illuminated in the pale light of the sickle moon.
Druk, stranger that he was to me, had done nothing to compromise the picture of decency he had planted in my mind. Yet, he had hidden something from me with a purpose. Who was in the room with Druk? Who added that feminine touch to his home? Who wore the nightdresses hanging in the bathroom closet?
At some point, sleep crowded these thoughts out and my eyelids grew heavy.
Next morning, the sun was glinting off the snow on the driveway and my car had been brushed clean, its electric blue sparkling like sapphire. I quickly prepared to set out. Soundlessly, I returned the bookcase to its original place, stripped the bed, wiped down the bathroom counter, smoothed down my work clothes that I had slept in, gathered my things and went downstairs where the smell of fried eggs greeted me.
‘Good morning. Care for some breakfast?’ Druk had showered, his silver hair combed back. He wore a pair of well-worn tweeds and a matching brown front-open cardigan. I had already made the decision not to impose on Druk’s hospitality for a single minute more. The daylight, the clear weather gave me a confidence that I sorely lacked the night before.
‘Good morning. Err, Druk, I want to thank you for everything and I would like to pay you for my stay … please.’
He didn’t turn from the stove but there was a squaring of shoulders, an imperceptible stiffening of his being. His hands remained busy.
‘So, you think a price can be put on everything?’ He inserted two slices of bread in the toaster. Filling the kettle, he placed it on the stove. Turning, he faced me. There was no reproach in his eyes, just a quiet resignation as if once again the world and its people had disappointed him.
‘If you tried sleeping in your car last night can you imagine what might have happened to you?’
‘I’d probably have frozen to death.’ I laughed drily.
‘Probably not. Human life is tenacious. But it would have been mighty uncomfortable with pneumonia a given.’
‘That’s why I’m so grateful to you, Druk. And thank you for your offer of breakfast and for brushing my car but I really must get going. Hopefully, the roads are all cleared up.’
I undraped my coat from the back of the dining chair. When I turned, Druk was standing behind me.
‘You carry in your heart a bag of tears. The tears have hardened into pebbles that I hear rattling in there.’
He took me off guard. I fumbled.
‘Yes, I’ve been through a rough patch recently, but I’m okay now. It’s just that I feel bad for encroaching on your time and your kindness.’
‘Don’t feel bad. You already paid your dues when you decided to stay here.’ He smiled. ‘And by doing so, you let go one of the pebbles from your bag of tears.’
He extended his hand. I shook it. In the glass of Monet’s painting, the reflection of my eyes was studded with trembling jewels.
Druk stood on the porch as I threw the car in gear, and punched in ‘nearest gas station’ on the navigation system. He had said it was a good seven miles away. As the engine warmed, I started rolling towards the narrow dirt road. Turning the corner, I rolled down the window to wave at Druk. He was no longer on the porch. The house, looking larger in daylight, rose amidst the snow like an abandoned ship in the middle of a still white ocean.
I peeled my eyes away from the house puzzled, and immediately heard, ‘in three hundred meters turn right, you have reached your destination.’ I gulped. The Husky gas station sign loomed within meters of me.
As far as I could see in the headlights, everything was draped in unbroken white. Fishtailing a few yards more, I saw what looked like streetlights against the horizon but I could not judge how far in actual distance they might be. The fuel light on the dash had been on for a while. I was not sure I could make it to those lights without the car stalling mid-way.
I pulled up to the side, and cutting the engine rested my forehead on my hands folded upon the wheel. A familiar pain shot through my body. The same pain I felt when I lost my baby. I lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs in our Orchard Creek home, drowning in a sea of poppies. The foetus, fourteen weeks old, flung open my body and burst out in a torrent of water and blood and blinding agony as if it had changed its mind about being born into such a violent world.
I refocused, brushing off the crumbs of thoughts from my mind. On my right, about a hundred yards away, a soft glow broke the gloom. The fuzzy light illuminated what looked like part of a porch. I hadn’t seen it before. Had someone just switched on that light? Momentarily, I debated if I should head towards the streetlights in the distance or try my luck at the house.
In the deep snow, I shifted to D2 and scrunched the tires up the slight hill to the house. Through a patch of tattered clouds, a waning moon peeked over the tall spruces. On one side, a clump of bushes huddled in crowded solitude under their burden of dim white.
Fighting back a blast of icy wind I steadied myself on the uneven snow and walked up the shallow steps to the porch. I was about to look for the doorbell when another light inside the house flicked on, and the door opened. Before me stood a middle-aged man, a shock of hair on his head as white as the snow around me but his thin face was unlined, youthful. He was of medium height, his build athletic. He wore a pair of chinos and a dark turtleneck, the colour of which I could not make out. His manner suggested he was waiting for a guest who he was certain would brave the weather and show up.
‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you but do you know if I can find a gas station nearby?’
He pondered a moment, his eyes narrowed as if in his head he were calculating the exact distance. ‘There is one, but it is ways towards those lights, would be a good seven miles, I’d reckon.’
I stole a look over his shoulder. A console table with a lace doily and a pot of poinsettia stood in the foyer and further in, I saw a sliver of a kitchen with half-curtains on the window.
‘It might take you a good half hour to get to that station given the snow has started again.’ Sensing my dismay, he asked. ‘Where are you bound for? The city?’
‘Yes, Toronto.’
‘You’d need a full tank for that alright.’
‘Thank you.’ I turned to leave. I had no choice but to take a chance with the fuel.
‘We have a spare room upstairs you could use for the night. It has an attached bath. It’s entirely up to you.’
Did I hear him right? We didn’t know each other at all and here he was offering a night’s stay. He said ‘we’ so there had to be a woman inside. I wasn’t sure, but after an invitation that coaxed trust, I could hardly RSVP with suspicion. Hey mister, do you have a wife? Impossible, I couldn’t ask that.
He was waiting, I had to decide quickly. My car was already covered with a healthy dusting of fresh snow.
I ungloved and extended my hand. ‘That’s very kind of you, indeed very, very kind. I am Anita, Anita Basu.’
He clasped my cold palm with his warm fingers. ‘You can call me Druk.’
‘Thank you, Druk.’ I stepped inside and the warmth embraced me like an old friend.
‘I was just sitting down to supper, care to join me?’
The ‘me’ stung my ears. Was he alone then?
‘Yes, sure, if it’s not too much bother,’ I answered with the awkwardness of one imposing on the intimate routine of a stranger.
After the entranceway, lay a dining area with an old-fashioned table and high-backed cushioned chairs. He pulled a chair out for me. I draped my coat over its back while Druk stepped into the kitchen beyond. Above the sideboard hung a picture of a bowl of fruits, a bunch of blue grapes spilling over its side. A crocheted runner covered the top of the sideboard with equal overhang at each end. As if someone had used a measuring tape.
Druk poured a can of soup in a saucepan and placed it on the stove. I conducted a surreptitious visual sweep of the space, and the absence of family photos of any sort disappointed me. No human face adorned the walls. A seascape with a cluster of boats and a framed reprint of Monet’s The Garden hung across from each other. To my uneasy mind, the pine kitchen seemed a woman’s kitchen in its tidiness, yet the physical absence of a woman filled the house.
‘What brings you up here on a day like this?’
‘I came to Ipperwash on work.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘I’m an insurance underwriter and I was there to meet one of our brokers. You know a meeting of support.’
He asked me what it was exactly that insurance underwriters did, and the conversation became pedantic. He listened, his head slightly tilted as if recording my words somewhere in his head. Still I felt I might be boring him so after a while I fell silent. He returned from stirring the soup. A deck of cards lay in one corner of the dining table.
‘Do you play solitaire?’ I asked, simply to fill the silence.
‘Not at all, solitaire is for solitary folks. I build houses.’
He reached over and retrieved the pack of cards and took a seat opposite me. Taking out the deck he shuffled it deftly, bending them backwards upwards, until the deck sat on the table plumped up and taller. One by one he began to arrange the cards on their edges, slanting, leaning against each other in triangles, some flat, some in squares of doors and windows, some in rectangular courtyards of possibilities.
‘Every time I work with a different floor plan. The challenge is using all the fifty-two cards. There cannot be any leftovers. If there are, then I have to start over.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Yes, and much more engrossing than solitaire.’ He got up to attend to the soup.
‘See that window, the corner one?’ He stared out into the darkness as if returning from the house of cards to his bricks-and-mortar surroundings. ‘I can see the ocean from there.’
He moved around with the agility of a trapeze artist, laying the table, warming the bread, chopping the salad and serving the soup, all the while carrying on the conversation.
‘Ocean? I didn’t know we were anywhere near an ocean.’ The warmth from the fireplace, the dull yellow light and Druk’s measured movements around the kitchen were playing tricks on my senses. He took his place across from me at the table.
‘Well, if an ocean can become a lake why not a lake an ocean?’ His eyes were shaded, the light from the standing lamp didn’t quite reach them.
‘Sorry, I don’t follow you.’ I picked up my spoon and looked at him.
‘I cannot see the other side of that lake, even on a clear day it meets the horizon in a blurry line. I have no idea where it ends. To me if an expanse of water is endless it’s an ocean.’
What a strange view. I prepared to contradict him with facts about the earth being round where everything, whether endless or not, appears to continue at the horizon. ‘But…’
He held up his index and middle fingers to suggest he hadn’t finished. I quietened, and let him continue.
‘Imagine a love, a huge throbbing love as vast as the ocean. So immense that you cannot see what lies beyond its shore but in truth your love is contained within your heart like a lake, freshened by the breeze of every breath you take. Although you feel its vastness, it is all compressed within your heart. That ocean of love becomes a private intimate lake.’
The time for my dose of Celexa was long past and I began to feel the telltale murmur of anxious butterflies in my head. It may turn out to be a hard night without the antidepressant. I tried my best to hide the tears that coursed to my eyes.
‘And hate, what about hate?’ I found myself asking.
‘Ah! love and hate are the two sides of the same coin. You hate as deeply as you loved. If you didn’t love someone enough your hatred for that person would be half-hearted too. You would simply be indifferent.’
I didn’t agree entirely but instead of responding to Druk, I thought of my baby; unseen, unheard, unborn, that tiny seed of creation that never had a chance at becoming a sapling. My love for it, swollen like a cascading mountain brook, rose in me raw and powerful. And then the father tossing me like a piece of driftwood down the stairs in a drunken rage. Killed his child instead. He, the fountainhead, the life-giver and the betrayer and life-taker. At the very thought of him, a searing revulsion rocked me and the bitter taste of bile touched my tongue.
Druk was right. I had loved him with a love that demanded such a hate.
‘Are you okay?’ Druk was asking from a faraway ocean shore.
‘Yes, yes, I am. Sorry I got a bit distracted.’ I gulped down my soup, wiping the bowl clean with the last piece of the bread.
‘I shall show you up to your bedroom, you are tired.’
‘Druk, do you have any children?’
‘Never been married. Not quite my scene.’
I braced myself for the same question from him, instead, he asked again.
‘Ready for bed?’
It felt bizarre to be escorted up to a bedroom with a strange man who I had no idea even existed when I got out of my own bed that morning.
He turned the handle of the very first room on the hallway and flipped on the light. A lime-green room leapt at me. Wall-papered, with flowered curtains on the windows, it was sparsely furnished but cozy and perfect for a single night.
‘Good night. I hope you have a restful sleep.’ With that, Druk was on his way down. At the end of the hallway was another room, probably Druk’s bedroom, with a small office in between the two bedrooms. The door of the office was open. A table with a computer stood under the window with a filing cabinet on one side and some scattered shelves pinned to the walls.
My bedroom was more squarish than oblong, and at one end stood a well-buffed dresser with a crocheted runner over it. I wondered if Druk was one of those metrosexual males, in self-exile in rural Ontario, with a skill for crochet and maybe even needlepoint or tatting. Next to the door, under the switch panel, sat a small squat bookcase lined with volumes of Marx and Stavisky, and popular works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I tried to picture Druk in my mind. A well-dressed man who lived alone in the middle of nowhere, reading Communist literature and Soviet epics, slurping up cans of soup, building houses of cards and spending the rest of his time with a crochet hook churning out furniture adornments. But that picture did not fit the man. He remained a profile in a photo frame, half of his face uncaptured by the camera. I expected to be afraid of him like I was of my baby’s father.
In the bathroom, I splashed my face with water and squeezing some toothpaste on my finger from the tube on the counter, I scrubbed my teeth. The familiar minty taste relieved my anxiety. I opened the bathroom door but soon realized I had turned the wrong handle, it belonged to a built-in closet inside the bathroom. I stepped back, gasping. Several pretty nightgowns hung inside the closet. Their necklines were trimmed with lace and glossy ribbon bows graced the yoke and sleeves. Beneath the nightgowns, on the floor, lay a pair of bedroom slippers in mauve with embossed lilacs. I shut the closet door and leaned against it panting for several minutes until I found the strength to return to the bedroom.
I summoned all the force in my body into my arms to push the bookcase against the door of my room. The bookcase glided freely despite the heavy books as if it were meant to be moved often. I pushed it as tightly as possible against the door. Turning the cover, I slid into the unfamiliar bed. It felt cold, and the dank smell of linen unused for a long time rose in the air.
I lay listening to the hum, of what I assumed to be the furnace, thinking of Druk. For the first time in eight months, someone else replaced my baby in my thoughts. Who else lived in this house with him? Or did someone visit often? What did she look like? Why wouldn’t he tell me? But why would he? He hardly knew me. He owed me nothing.
It was the silence that woke me. The buzz of the furnace no longer filled the air. I checked my phone, it was seven minutes past two. The intense silence was at once reassuring and terrifying. It implied security but held the chilling possibility of being shattered at any moment.
At first, I wasn’t sure I could trust my ears. I turned on my back to listen more carefully. It came again, muted but distinct, the stillness enhancing it. The unknown sound for which I held an unknown terror. A woman’s laugh, a quiet discreet sound. It came from the end of the hall where I assumed Druk’s bedroom was. I pictured a woman lying on the bed next to Druk, one naked leg draped over his slim hip as he lay facing her. She, slapping his exploring hand away, at once inviting and denying, teasing and censoring. Then again, the laughter, a giggle almost, scattering on the floorboards like pearls from a broken necklace.
My knee was hurting. I realized I had my leg bent at an awkward angle. I stretched out the offending leg and pushing it into the silence, I waited.
The hum of the furnace kicked in and everything returned to normal but a heaviness seemed to emanate from Druk’s room. A strange weightiness that tilted the whole house slightly on that side. Does a bed with two people on it sit more substantially on the floor?
The bookcase remained pressed against the door like a sentinel. I pulled myself up to a sitting position, and lifted a corner of the window drape over the headboard. The moon had travelled while I slept. It was probably perched on top of the house. The snow had stopped, the night was clean. My car, parked in front, was a comforting sight although it looked more like an igloo than an automobile, faintly illuminated in the pale light of the sickle moon.
Druk, stranger that he was to me, had done nothing to compromise the picture of decency he had planted in my mind. Yet, he had hidden something from me with a purpose. Who was in the room with Druk? Who added that feminine touch to his home? Who wore the nightdresses hanging in the bathroom closet?
At some point, sleep crowded these thoughts out and my eyelids grew heavy.
Next morning, the sun was glinting off the snow on the driveway and my car had been brushed clean, its electric blue sparkling like sapphire. I quickly prepared to set out. Soundlessly, I returned the bookcase to its original place, stripped the bed, wiped down the bathroom counter, smoothed down my work clothes that I had slept in, gathered my things and went downstairs where the smell of fried eggs greeted me.
‘Good morning. Care for some breakfast?’ Druk had showered, his silver hair combed back. He wore a pair of well-worn tweeds and a matching brown front-open cardigan. I had already made the decision not to impose on Druk’s hospitality for a single minute more. The daylight, the clear weather gave me a confidence that I sorely lacked the night before.
‘Good morning. Err, Druk, I want to thank you for everything and I would like to pay you for my stay … please.’
He didn’t turn from the stove but there was a squaring of shoulders, an imperceptible stiffening of his being. His hands remained busy.
‘So, you think a price can be put on everything?’ He inserted two slices of bread in the toaster. Filling the kettle, he placed it on the stove. Turning, he faced me. There was no reproach in his eyes, just a quiet resignation as if once again the world and its people had disappointed him.
‘If you tried sleeping in your car last night can you imagine what might have happened to you?’
‘I’d probably have frozen to death.’ I laughed drily.
‘Probably not. Human life is tenacious. But it would have been mighty uncomfortable with pneumonia a given.’
‘That’s why I’m so grateful to you, Druk. And thank you for your offer of breakfast and for brushing my car but I really must get going. Hopefully, the roads are all cleared up.’
I undraped my coat from the back of the dining chair. When I turned, Druk was standing behind me.
‘You carry in your heart a bag of tears. The tears have hardened into pebbles that I hear rattling in there.’
He took me off guard. I fumbled.
‘Yes, I’ve been through a rough patch recently, but I’m okay now. It’s just that I feel bad for encroaching on your time and your kindness.’
‘Don’t feel bad. You already paid your dues when you decided to stay here.’ He smiled. ‘And by doing so, you let go one of the pebbles from your bag of tears.’
He extended his hand. I shook it. In the glass of Monet’s painting, the reflection of my eyes was studded with trembling jewels.
Druk stood on the porch as I threw the car in gear, and punched in ‘nearest gas station’ on the navigation system. He had said it was a good seven miles away. As the engine warmed, I started rolling towards the narrow dirt road. Turning the corner, I rolled down the window to wave at Druk. He was no longer on the porch. The house, looking larger in daylight, rose amidst the snow like an abandoned ship in the middle of a still white ocean.
I peeled my eyes away from the house puzzled, and immediately heard, ‘in three hundred meters turn right, you have reached your destination.’ I gulped. The Husky gas station sign loomed within meters of me.
Ronita Sinha lives in Toronto, Canada. She is a traveler, recipe experimenter, and gardener, tilling her soul for words, images and then she cannot help it. Her work has been published or forthcoming in Sixfold, East of the Web, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Magic Diary, Lemonspouting and The Literary Yard. In August 2020 she was awarded ‘Storyteller of the Month’ by The Magic Diary. Ronita is a Fiction reader for Atticus Review. She writes her personal stories on her blog https://knowingheartblog.wordpress.com/. She holds an M. Phil degree in English Literature from the University of Jadavpur, Calcutta, India. She emigrated to Canada from India in 1999 with her husband and two children.
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