The Divide

She said, “Did it mean anything to you, what that man said about ‘the warehouse?’ ”

“It’s an empty building down by the lakeshore—Amelie told me about it. He might have taken her there. We’ll go tomorrow and have a look.”

“In the snow?”

“In the snow. I’ll be all right.”

The snow fell steadily far into the night. Susan heard it tapping against the pane of the window. Begging admittance, she thought. But it can’t come in.

Neither of them slept. The silence was a vast tapestry, stitched with the sound of their voices.

“Why me?” Susan asked. “Why did you choose me?”

To be with him in this bed, she meant. To touch him in the darkness.

He said, “Because we’re alike.”

“Are we?”

“In a way.”

“What way?”

“Because both of us have lost something. A certain kind of co

“I don’t understand.” The wind rattled the window.

“We’re orphans,” he said. “Isn’t that obvious? We’re feral children. We don’t know how to be human.” He touched her cheek. “That’s what we have in common.”

Susan was too sleepy to explore this in all its nuances.

She said, “What we have in common is what we don’t have.”

“Yes.”

“A father.”

“Lineage,” John said. “Ancestry.”

“A father,” Susan confirmed. In the tranquility of the snowbound darkness she was able to admit it. She had been looking for a father ever since her father died; she had found a sort of father—at least temporarily—in Dr. Kyriakides.

She was embarrassed to realize she had said this out loud.

“But you want more than that,” John said. “Something finer and better.”

She nodded.

He said, “You would have slept with him—if he’d asked.”

“Yes. I guess I would have. I almost did. Isn’t that strange? There was one time … he took me to di

“No,” John said. “I’m sorry, Susan. No, he hasn’t.”

“Not cure you. But he said he gave you a prescription—”

“He gave me dopamine. It’s what they give Alzheimer’s patients. In my case, it’s not much more than a placebo.” Susan turned to face him. He smiled in the dark. “Max can’t do anything to help me. He never could. That’s not why he came looking for me.”

“Why, then?”

“Guilt,” John said. “Remorse. And to finish the experiment.”

Later, he said he was thirsty. Susan brought him a glass of water from the bathroom tap. He sipped it in the dark.

She said, “Do you know everything about me?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly. “And you know everything about me.”

But not really. Not everything.

Curled against him, she whispered: “Will you die?”

She strained to hear his answer against the hissing of the wind.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve thought about it. What’s happening to me is very powerful, a powerful process. I feel it. It’s like an engine ru

He held her against him; but Susan was wordless in the dark, and this time the silence lingered.

24

Amelie knew where her brother had taken her: it was the place they called “the warehouse.”

At least, she and Roch had called it that. It wasn’t really a warehouse. It was a big abandoned building beside the railway tracks, where the CPR line ran along the lakeshore west of the city. Many years ago, Roch once told her, the building had contained a fur-storage business. Now it was a cold, dark warren of cavernous rooms and windowless chambers. And she was confined in it.

She remembered how she had come here—but dimly, dimly.

She had gone into the city to meet her mother, but it turned out that there was no bus from Montreal scheduled at that hour. So she had milled around through the crowded, oppressively hot terminal for almost an hour … and then Roch put his hand on her shoulder, and she knew it was Roch, knew it instinctively and immediately. He took her arm. She wanted to break free but couldn’t. He led her out to his van and then he locked her in the back.

They drove to a vacant lot by the CPR line and Roch parked and climbed in back with her. He had something in his hand: a syringe—

Memory clouded. But she remembered him carrying her through the snow at dusk, his strong arms enfolding her. She had recognized the way to the warehouse, where they used to go when there was nowhere else to sleep. But only in summer. It was winter now, and cold, and the snow was deep and getting deeper. Someone will see us, she thought. The railroad police will see us for sure. But the railroad police, who sometimes parked along these tracks, weren’t here now. The snow was too deep and recent. Everybody had gone home. Everybody had found a warm place to stay.

The warehouse …

The property had been in litigation for years. It was worthless. Someday the building would be torn down. For now, it was abandoned and dangerous. Even when they came here during their time on the street, Amelie would never venture very far inside. There were bats living in the old cold-storage chambers; there were drippy, ancient pipes and wild raccoons and bad smells. Since then, apparently, Roch had explored the building. He had a big Eveready flashlight in one hand, and he pulled Amelie stumbling after him with the other. There were rooms and corridors so deep inside this building that no light penetrated from the outside; cracked linoleum or bare concrete floors drifted with sawdust and animal droppings. Roch put her over his shoulder, took the handle of the flashlight in his teeth, and climbed a narrow wooden ladder to a higher, darker level. In a small room here at the heart of the building, he dumped her against the chipped plaster wall and started a small Sterno fire. The smoke wafted up to the ceiling and dissipated through a hole there, up and up in lazy curls. The room did not warm appreciably.

Amelie was a spectator to all this. She felt abstracted from her body. What had Roch put into her? A drug, she thought. Something lazy, distancing, and slightly nauseating. She lifted her hand and looked at it: it seemed to be floating in midair.

She watched Roch pace the room, checking the entrance and fiddling with the Sterno. There was a question she wanted to ask. It was on the tip of her tongue. She worked hard to recall it.

“Roch … what is it you want? What do you want from me?”

He turned his face toward her, but only briefly. His eyes were blank with indifference. He stood up briskly.

“This isn’t about you,” he said. “You don’t matter anymore.”

25

The snow had paralyzed the city. Overnight, a winter blizzard had accumulated drifts and depths that the snowplows could not shunt aside, at least not quickly or efficiently. The main arteries were reduced to a single lane; the subways were ru

John was in the bathroom—she could hear the shower ru

She went to the window. Outside, the streets were transformed The city was white, unsullied, and motionless. The snow had stopped falling but the sky was a uniform grey.