Inside (37 page)

It was the day before Christmas Eve. He had the following week off, and would spend Christmas itself with Malcolm and his family, returning the next day. It wasn’t, for him, an especially hectic season, but he knew that for others it was.

“Thanks for the card,” he said. “How’s everything?”

“We’re getting by. Leaving tomorrow for Christmas in Vancouver. I don’t know what possessed me to travel. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Vancouver will be nice,” he said. “Warm.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great once we get there. Now I have ten thousand things to get before we go, and no sitter for Sarah. The usual insanity.”

Mitch paused, but only for a second. “Can I help?” he said.

He thought this might provoke an awkward moment, but Grace seized upon the offer.

“That would be
amazing
,” she said. “Can you come by in an hour and pick us up? My car’s having issues, by the way. It’s that kind of holiday season.”

“You got it,” Mitch said.

He put on his coat, grabbed his wallet and keys, and turned off the lights, finding himself humming. He could have stopped to tidy things up in his apartment before leaving, but he didn’t have to. Everything was already in order. He didn’t have a single thing to arrange.

He drove them downtown, heading along Sainte-Catherine so Sarah could see the Christmas displays at Ogilvy’s, and parked in a lot on
de Maisonneuve. As they walked, the winter air bit their cheeks and noses. He followed Grace and Sarah into the stone church facade at Promenades Cathédrale, descending down the long escalators into the underground city. The neon-lit stores stretched endlessly, each a riot of shoppers, the air hot and close. From every store blasted a new carol.
Christmas is coming
, the Payolas sang wearily,
it’s been a long year
. Roving packs of teenagers were jostling around the kiosks. One of them, a boy, almost knocked Sarah over and when Mitch yelled at him he spun instantly away, muttering something. “It’s okay,” Grace said, “let it go.”

Sarah waded through the crowds with her coat unzipped, pointing at the decorations, the gaudy trees, the robot snowman waving his arms and nodding his head, the children lined up to see Santa. After a while she started to get cranky, so Mitch took her to the food court for some ice cream while Grace ran around picking up various purchases.

“What do you think?” she asked Mitch when she came back with a sweater for her uncle. He suspected the man would prefer not to receive a sweater at all, but didn’t say so. He felt a headache coming on and related more to Sarah’s exhaustion—the girl was listing sideways, trawling her plastic spoon through a pool of chocolate sauce—than to Grace’s stress over choosing the right present.

“Listen,” she said, folding the sweater back into its bag. She sat down across from him and put her arms around Sarah, who leaned against her. “I’m sorry about how we left things.”

“It’s okay, Grace. You were right. It was weird.”

She smiled at him. Her coat was open and beneath it she was wearing jeans and an old McGill sweatshirt. She still moved slowly, stepping gingerly as though she were wearing high heels instead of solid, fur-lined, rubber-soled boots. Despite this lingering air of fragility, though, she looked good. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and her long hair fell to her shoulders in smooth waves.

“So how are you?” she said.

“I’m good,” he said.

“Are you going to Mississauga for Christmas?”

“Sure. I have to teach Malcolm’s kids new bad habits for 2007.”

Grace cocked her head. “I’m glad. You’re alone too much, I think.”

He let this pass.

“I feel like I never thanked you enough for helping me out.”

“You thanked me plenty,” he said.

When they exited the stores, the day had fled and the streetlights picked out sparkles on the icy sidewalks. The three of them hurried to the car, backs hunched against the cold, the adults laden with presents they stuffed into the trunk. Mitch turned the heat on high, and within a few blocks Sarah fell asleep in the back, her face practically hidden by her hat and hood.

He drove west on Sherbrooke toward Grace’s neighborhood. Beyond the McGill campus, the rounded shadow of the mountain hulked on the horizon with its illuminated cross. Grace turned the dial to a classical music station, and the soft ripples of a piano concerto filled the car. They didn’t talk. Her face was turned away and she was looking out the window, which grew opaque with condensation. Like a child, she pulled off one of her gloves and with her fingertip wrote some illegible letters on it, then wiped it all away with the flat of her hand and put the glove back on. He kept taking his eyes off the road to glance at her, wondering at her silence, so notable after her animation in the mall. She was probably exhausted too. Drawn to the sight of her strong, thin frame in the passenger seat, her burgundy-colored hat, her dark hair spilling out from underneath, he felt a flicker of unaccustomed energy shiver across his skin. He’d missed her.

Ten minutes later, he pulled up to her apartment building and parked. Sarah was still asleep in the back.

Grace rubbed her eyes, then turned to him. “You saved my life today,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“It was nothing,” Mitch said.

“No, it wasn’t.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, an ex-wife’s kiss, friendly, sexless.

Yet something in it washed over him and he found himself holding her hand, their gloved fingers intertwined. He could just barely
detect the contours of her hand beneath the leather and fleece, its muscles and heat. “I’m glad you’re doing better,” he said.

Grace nodded, her eyes grave and tender in the shadowy interior. Whatever she heard in his voice must have registered on her, because she squeezed his hand. She seemed to know exactly what he needed, and he couldn’t figure out how, unless maybe this was
her
talent. She got out of the car and gathered her daughter in her arms. Mitch opened the trunk, unloaded the many gifts, and stood there in the street, the handles of the shopping bags cutting into his gloves, waiting.

She smiled at him in the winter dark, and then invited him
inside.

I’m grateful to Lafayette College, which provided me with a yearlong leave from teaching during which I completed an early draft of this book, and where my colleagues have been unfailingly supportive of my work. I began the first chapter while at the MacDowell Colony, and was lucky enough to write later chapters during residencies at Djerassi and the Château de Lavigny—all beautiful places whose nurturing of artists is invaluable. Many friends and family members offered perceptive comments on different drafts, including Joyce Hinnefeld, Don Lee, Ginny Wiehardt, my brother, and my parents. Jenny Boyar contributed helpful research on therapy and acting. Thanks to Liette Chamberland, Yves and Christine Cormier, Ann Devoe, and Diane Robinson for their assistance with French dialogue and Montreal details. My grade two teacher, Grace Tugwell, encouraged my creativity as a child, and I have taken the liberty of borrowing her name (though nothing else) for my characters.

My editor, Gary Fisketjon, has taught me more about writing than I can say. Amy Williams somehow manages to be a wonderful, trusted agent and an even better friend. Lastly, I’d like to thank Stephen Rodrick for reading the book, for making me laugh, and for the future.

Alix Ohlin is the author of
The Missing Person
, a novel, and
Babylon and Other Stories
. Her work has appeared in
Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices
, and on NPR’s
Selected Shorts
. Born and raised in Montreal, she teaches at Lafayette College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

The Missing Person

Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin
Reading Group Guide

About This Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Alix Ohlin’s emotionally powerful new novel
Inside
.

About the Book

Alix Olin’s
Inside
gives readers a novel of extraordinary depth and complexity. Following the intertwined lives of several sets of characters,
Inside
explores the often hidden inner life and the many ways it radiates into the external world.

The novel begins as Grace, a psychotherapist, is out skiing when she stumbles upon a man lying in the snow. The man, named Tug, has fallen after a failed suicide attempt. Grace helps him to the hospital and then is increasingly, irresistibly drawn into a relationship with him, driven by the desire to help him and to unravel the mystery of who he really is. Tug keeps his own inner life safely out of reach, barely sharing the mere facts of his past, and certainly not revealing the reasons for his suicide attempt. He is a riddle Grace is determined to solve.

Inside
shifts between different time periods, settings, and characters, exploring their increasingly complex relationships and interrelationships. Throughout the novel, the theme of helping others—or of trying and often failing to help others—appears again and again. Grace tries to rescue Tug from his despair and the posttraumatic stress he suffers after witnessing atrocities in Rwanda. She also tries to help her clients, one of whom, a teenager named Anne, runs away to New York and becomes an actress. With little money or stability of her own, Anne takes in two other runaways, Hilary and Alan, virtually turning over her East Village apartment to a pair of strangers. Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband and himself a therapist, is drawn into a relationship with Martine, partly drawn by the desire to help her autistic son. But when that proves too draining, he heads off to work with a struggling native community in Alaska, where he tries to help Thomasie, a young Inuit man whose mother lies in a coma after falling asleep drunk in the snow with her daughter. Later in the novel, Mitch will help Grace recover after she suffers a car accident.

Ohlin delves into the inner lives of each of these characters with extraordinary sensitivity and skill, revealing their motivations, their fears and vulnerabilities, and the strategies they’ve adopted to cope with their pain. Again and again, she shows how these people push up against the limits of their ability to help or be helped. She explores, as well, the many ways people choose to hide, disappear, or walk away from each other.

And yet the novel—unflinchingly honest about the ways in which our attempts to help others often fail or prove disastrous—is ultimately hopeful. As Ohlin writes near the end of the book: “Witnessing the pain of others is the very least you can do in this world. It’s how you know that when your own turn comes, someone will be there with you” [
this page
]. The novel itself asks readers to bear witness to the pain of others, a request that is amply rewarded by the remarkable insight it offers into the human condition, and by the sheer pleasure of great storytelling.

Questions for discussion