The Better Mother

THE DEBRIS

1959 to 1980


The baby would not stop screaming. Everywhere Val went in her little apartment, she could hear the echo from her cries bouncing off the walls until it sounded like a dozen babies were trapped in the bedroom, shrieking for help. Her milk wouldn’t come in, and she was tired, so tired, of pushing her nipple into Dawn’s mouth and watching her suck until Val started to bleed. No milk, just oozing scabs.

She scorched the bottles, slept fitfully, her body tensed and anticipating the cries from the crib. Every sound, every change of light woke up the baby, until Val took the phone off the hook and kept the curtains drawn at all times. She was trapped in a stuffy cave, with nothing but this squalling child for company.

In the mornings, when Val crept up to the crib to see if Dawn was sleeping, her heart rose and swelled as she gazed at the purse of her mouth, the flutter of her eyelids as she dreamed in her sleep. This was the best time.

One evening, Dawn cried and cried, the wails consuming all of the air inside her small lungs. When she inhaled, she gulped and hiccupped and coughed. Her cries shuddered and skipped. Val walked with her from the kitchen to the living room and back again, whispering, “Shush now. Shhh. It’s all right.” But she knew that Dawn couldn’t even hear her over the screaming, or see her through those tightly closed eyes. She was afraid to leave, afraid that wherever she went, the baby’s cries would alarm passersby until someone tried to take her away. There was no place where the baby’s cries would be muffled by the encroaching bush or the crash of waves. There was this tiny apartment and the two of them, their voices circling and rebounding into their ears. How long before she couldn’t stand it anymore? Before she thrust the baby underneath the sofa cushions until her breath shuddered and stopped? Val wrapped the still-crying Dawn in her homemade quilt, lay her down in her crib and shut the bedroom door. She hurried through the living room, a glass of sherry in her hand, and out onto the balcony, sliding the patio door shut behind her.

The smell of frost rose up from the grass, and Val breathed in deeply, savouring the nip of cold air in her throat and lungs. In the streaky January sky were the remnants of a sunset. On the bare maple in front, a crow sat unmoving, its wings held close, its shoulders hunched. Her glass was soon empty, and she stood up to refill it.

On the other side of the door stood Joan, meticulously dressed in a cashmere sweater and plaid skirt, holding the baby and gazing evenly at Val through the glass. Val pulled her milk-stained robe closed and slid her left slipper behind her right to hide the hole over the big toe. She patted the tangle of hair at the back of her head but there wasn’t anything she could do to fix it. She dropped the empty sherry glass behind her onto one of the chairs.

When she opened the patio door, Joan smiled at her. “The door was open, so I walked in. You should lock that, you know.”

Val stared at Dawn, whose eyes were wide open and fixed on Joan’s pearl necklace. Dried tears stained her cheeks, but she appeared calm, happy even, as Joan rocked her slowly from side to side. “She settled right down when I picked her up. It’s like she already knows who I am.”

In the shadows of the living room stood Peter, his doughy body skulking and blending with the gloom so that he seemed to be a more substantial shadow than the ones surrounding him. He nodded at Val, his face unsmiling.

“I tried calling, but I think you must have ignored the phone,” said Joan. “Understandable, of course, when you have to deal with this new baby all by yourself.”

Val couldn’t move or speak. Her palms rested on the cool glass of the patio door behind her.

“What did you name her, Val? You never phoned when she was born.”

“Dawn,” she croaked and then flinched at the unused sound of her voice.

“Dawn? That’s a modern name, isn’t it? Don’t you think, Peter?”

Peter nodded again and clasped his hands behind his back.

“You look tired, Val. How about I stay for a few hours so you can get some rest?”

Val slumped a little. Her bones felt so full of exhaustion that they were threatening to buckle under the weight of her skin and flesh and hair.

“I can even spend the night, and Peter can pick me up tomorrow on his way home from work.” Joan watched as Val dropped onto the sofa by the window. “It’s settled then. Peter, why don’t you run to the grocery store and pick us up some baby formula? And get a couple of pork chops and maybe some bread and broccoli as well. I’ll make supper before he has to drive home, Val. Don’t you worry.”

That night, Joan arranged extra sheets and pillows on the couch and moved the crib to the living room. She tucked Val into her bed, pulling the covers right up under her chin and smoothing Val’s hair away from her face before silently backing out and closing the door softly behind her. Val waited for the sounds of Dawn’s crying to burst through the wall, but heard only the padding of Joan’s stockinged feet as she moved through the apartment. Slowly, she fell into a dreamless and unmoving sleep.

When she woke up, Joan had cleaned the apartment and dressed Dawn in a pretty little pink dress with a white collar. “I brought it with me,” she said proudly. “Of course, I didn’t know if she was going to be a girl or a boy, so I brought a little blue sailor outfit too.” Joan laughed and the trill filled the room; Val winced.

But she felt good. Better than she had in a month. Her joints didn’t feel as if they were grinding together, bone on bone. She was aware, again, of her whole body—the way her legs moved and her neck swivelled—instead of just the soreness in her breasts. At Joan’s suggestion, she drew a hot bath and soaked until lunchtime, when Joan made sandwiches. Dawn slept peacefully, cried out briefly when she was hungry or wet, and settled down again as soon as she was satisfied. Val watched Joan, her serene face, the light way she caressed the baby’s cheeks, the brightness of her eyes when she held her. She was suspicious, but forced herself to think Joan knows how much I did for her baby, and now she’s trying to make up for it. That’s all it is.

The next week, Joan came again. Peter held the baby, and even Val could see that his face softened when he looked into her blinking eyes. Peter—that hard-shelled, incomprehensible man.

Joan made Val a pot of tea and sat with her on the balcony, even though a cold wind was beginning to swirl around them. Inside, Peter sat with Dawn. Val could hear him singing to her, a strange, off-tune version of “Rock-a-bye Baby,” but she didn’t turn to look.

“You’re alone here too much.” Joan’s voice, as always, cut through the air—unmerciful, unlovely. She continued, “I’m alone too, most days.”

Val looked down and pulled at the fabric that bunched over her stomach.

The teacups rattled as Joan shifted in her chair to face Val. “Come home with us. I can help with the baby and we can be company for each other again. It’ll be fun, like when we were little girls.”

Val remembered the river. The way it smelled at the height of summer. The muddy banks where the bodies of fish that had died in the winter were exposed to the hot sun. The saltiness of eelgrass. The faint smell of chemical sewage from the paper mill upriver that was usually hidden by fog and rain the rest of the year. The rumble of trains speeding past every other day. Val and Joan, one small and the other smaller, sitting with bare legs on the steps of their back porch, sniffing the warm wind blowing up from the water and through the bush. Val never loved their house, but the river was something else altogether. It churned with the scraps of canning and logging, yet it still reflected the blue sky on sunny days and winked at Val if she watched it long enough, her chin resting on the rickety railing outside, her mind empty of all the debris from village gossip or a bad day at school. The river could be lovely. You just had to be patient.

As if Joan could hear Val’s thoughts, she said, “Our house isn’t so far from Burrard Inlet, you know. There’s a beach there. Dawn would love it.”

Val met Joan’s eyes and nodded.


Val felt puffy with rest. She woke up before anyone else, her body jerking through the last cobwebs of a dream she couldn’t remember. The baby wasn’t crying yet. The early winter rain dripped off the eaves and onto the wide driveway lined with miniature spruce trees. It was still dark and the warmth of the bed cocooned her. Puffs of down-filled comforter formed in the crook of her elbow and the curve of her waist. Val fell asleep again, dozing as the overcast sky brightened. She was half aware of the wind shaking the Japanese maple on the front lawn, of cars slowly backing out of garages and heading toward the highway.

When she awoke a second time, she sat up stupidly at the sounds of Dawn whimpering in the next room. Val threw on a robe and slipped out of her bedroom, padding into Dawn’s nursery, which, at the last minute, had been decorated by Joan with just a crib and a white dresser. As Val crept closer to the baby, Dawn began to wail. She kicked out her legs and stiffened her back when Val reached in to pick her up. Val changed her, tried to feed her, even held her to the window, whispering that this same type of tree lined the road where Val and Joan grew up. None of it made any difference. Finally, she screamed over Dawn’s cries. “What do you want? I don’t understand!” She leaned against the wall, too tired with the effort of shrieking to even cry herself.

Joan strode into the room and took the baby from Val. “What are you doing? Shouting at an infant like that,” she scolded. Val stared as Joan wiped Dawn’s face with a tissue from the pocket on her slacks and brushed her pinky against her mouth. Dawn’s lips parted and, as she sucked on Joan’s finger, her eyes closed and Val thought she heard her release a quiet chuckle.

“My car keys are on the hall table. When the store opens, you’ll have to go and buy a soother.” Joan turned toward the window and Val saw that, this time, Dawn opened her eyes wide and stared at the trees outside.


Weeks later, Val kneeled on the floor by her open bedroom window. No sound outside, not even the bang of a garbage can lid. If she listened hard enough, with her head craned to the right, she thought she could hear the swish of the highway, the sound of tires speeding through the rain. But she couldn’t tell if what she was hearing was real or if she was making it all up because, otherwise, she would go mad, choked by Joan’s wall-to-wall carpeting.

There was no music in the house, only a television in the family room that Peter turned on to watch the news. Dawn was asleep. To fill the silence, Val began humming a tune. Soon, her bare feet were tapping the carpet, and she stood up, twisting her hips, her arms above her head.

She closed her eyes, saw pin dots of light underneath the lids that she could trick herself into believing were stage lights, or the lampposts on Granville Street that glimmered yellow in the dark.

Val began to dance by herself every night after Joan and Peter and Dawn had gone to bed, her nightgown billowing around her legs. Her body remembered her old moves: the spin that helped unwind her skirt, the shrug that slipped one spaghetti strap down her arm. She opened the window as wide as it would go, and, as she twirled, the sharp air brushed past the hair on her arms and worked its way between her toes. Branches rustled together in the wind, and she pretended it was the sound of a rowdy crowd, cheering and clapping at every kick, every arched eyebrow. The rest of the house slept while her body vibrated, awake.


Val dressed carefully, sorting through her clothes until she found the right outfit, a grey day suit with navy-blue piping around the lapels and sleeves. She found Joan and Dawn by the living-room window, the baby nestled into Joan’s lap.

“I’m going into town today, if that’s all right,” Val announced, fiddling with the clasp on her purse.

“Oh?” Joan didn’t even look up.

“Yes, I thought I’d go and check on the apartment, maybe bring back a few things that I forgot to pack.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Since it’s such a long drive, I thought I might stay overnight and come back in the morning. There doesn’t seem to be any point to driving into town just to drive right back again.” Val smoothed down a pleat in her skirt to hide her shaking hands.

“That’s probably a good idea. Pick me up some magazines, will you?” Joan bent down to kiss Dawn on the forehead, her pale lips on the baby’s white skin.

Val brushed her hand over Dawn’s fine, floating hair. She swallowed hard and then marched out the door.

In the driveway, Val breathed in the cold suburban air, which smelled like frost. When she was on the highway, she could almost feel the heat from the electric lights on her head and the rise and fall of cracked sidewalks under her high-heeled shoes. The downtown streets were no place for a baby, of that she was certain. She pressed down harder on the gas pedal and smiled as the car surged forward.


The pounding of the drum was undeniable, and it bore its way into her body until her heartbeat was forced to keep pace. Val’s blood rushed upward in waves, and she breathed hard as her fingers, sticky from a puddle of spilled beer, tapped the table-top. Around her, groups of men and women smoked cigarettes in long holders, shouted over the music to the waiters and lifted their drinks in a pool of light so warm that it seemed improbable it could be winter outside, where freezing rain hurled itself downward with such ferocity that it hurt to stand unprotected in the night.

The dancer onstage untied her gingham blouse and shook her breasts in their gingham brassiere at the audience. She wore a straw hat and freckles drawn in pencil on her cheeks. Val smiled. Milly the Country Girl. Young, with a rounded body. The men watched her sling her bra into the wings, wiggle her backside as she walked to the left to pick up a banjo. The band stopped, and she played “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” singing so sweetly Val forgot that her breasts, except for a pair of pasties, were bare, white and full in the spotlight, and that her denim shorts were cut so high the curve of her ass hung past the frayed hems. The crowd stopped talking, their eyes on Milly.

A voice whispered behind her, “Val, is that you?”

She turned around in her chair and saw the manager of the supper club, sleek in a tuxedo, squinting at her through the shadows.

“Jim. Nice to see you.”

“Everyone’s been asking about you. Tell me you’re back on the scene.”

Val laughed and looked down at her hands. “No, honey. Just back for one night of fun.”

An idea flashed across his face. “Come backstage with me. I’ll get you a costume. We can set up a special performance. One night only with the Siamese Kitten!” He took her hand and pulled it in the direction of the stage.

Val remembered the wrinkles in her belly, the loose skin that sagged over the elastic of her underpants. She hadn’t looked at her naked body in a mirror in months and knew the dimples in her bum from touch. Had she even shaved her legs? She pulled her hand back.

“I can’t, Jim. I’m not ready. I haven’t done anything to prepare.”

“Come on, no one will know.”

“Under those lights?” Val pointed at the spotlights and the bright white circles that swirled over Milly’s body onstage. “They’ll see everything.”

Jim stood with his hands on his hips. “How’s this? You come back tomorrow night. We’ll set it up. That way, you have time to do whatever it is you girls do to look pretty.”

“Tomorrow?” Val felt the itch in her legs, the gooseflesh that could only be dissipated by the eyes of men watching her shimmy and grind and strut. “I’m supposed to be somewhere tomorrow.”

He waved his arms around the club. “What could be more important than this?”

She could already hear the suspension of breath, the way a full room shimmers with silence when a crowd waits for something it has wanted for a very long time. She saw the sliver of light between the curtains and felt it slice through the darkness of backstage and burn as it touched her skin. She blinked.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be here.”


It was too easy. Val called Joan and told her that she needed to stay an extra day or two to sort out some financial matters she had forgotten about.

Joan didn’t ask, perhaps because the baby was fussing, or perhaps because she recognized the lie in Val’s voice, the same tone she used whenever she phoned home while on the road. “You can come back whenever you want,” Joan said. “We’re fine by ourselves.”

She returned to the stage that night. Jim introduced her.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a real treat for you tonight. A special one-night-only event. Please welcome the incomparable Siamese Kitten!”

Men jumped to their feet and whistled. Even the women sat up straighter in their chairs, peering over heads for a better view of the stage and the inevitable spectacle of Val’s return.

Before she stepped out through the curtains, she held the palm of her hand to her stomach, felt her breath coming sharp and fast. This was a borrowed costume with a swath of transparent fabric hastily sewn over the belly to conceal the marks her pregnancy had left behind. It had been over a year since she last danced in public. Everything could go wrong. She might ruin her flawless reputation.

She heard the audience fall silent. No impatient hissing, not even the shifting of legs or arms in boredom. No, they wanted her. Only she could deliver what they were expecting. She stepped through the curtains and waited a half-second before the applause started up again and enveloped her. It crawled over her skin in that singular way she didn’t know she had been missing.


When she returned to Joan and Peter’s house three days later, Joan proudly showed her how she had redecorated Dawn’s room.

“Do you see the pink curtains? They’re made of this new fabric, you know, and won’t ever wrinkle. And I couldn’t resist this little table-and-chair set. I thought Dawn could use it for tea parties.” Joan laughed and picked up a tiny cup and saucer. “Who she’ll invite to these parties, I don’t know, but it was all so cute. Oh, and look. I thought we could use a good rocking chair by the window here, for night feedings. I always feel so comforted in a rocking chair, don’t you?”

“It’s beautiful, Joanie, really. Thanks so much.” Even as the words left Val’s lips, she wanted to run from this pink and frilled room to somewhere more familiar, somewhere with sticky floors and hard bar stools that made her ass cold and achy. When they went to the living room, she reached for Dawn, who sat solidly on the sofa, propped up with cushions, but the baby cringed and her lower lip began to tremble. Val pushed her hands back into her pockets and didn’t try to touch her again for the rest of the day.

It didn’t take long for Val’s old agent to find out about her performance at the Cave, and he started phoning the house every day. “You’ve got to come back to the circuit, Val. Burlesque needs you. If you don’t come back, we’ll be drowning in these girls with no skill whatsoever. All they do is strip. You, my dear, have a show.”

Val whispered into the receiver, turning her back to Joan, who listened with her arms crossed in front of her chest, her eyes gleaming palely in the winter sunshine. “I can’t. I told you before: I have other things to do. I can’t travel like that again.”

“You could stay in Vancouver! There are plenty of clubs here. You’d be like the grande dame of burlesque, the resident queen of the strip. Come on, Val. You know you want to.”

And she did, but she couldn’t say it. “No. I can’t.”

“You can’t stop me from phoning again. You’ll rue the day you ever went back to the Cave,” he said, with a note of amusement in his voice, before hanging up.

She woke up every night, itching to run out of this house and down the highway—droplets of mist collecting in her hair, her nose running from the cold breeze—until she reached the city. During the day, she and Joan did almost nothing, just fed and changed and soothed the baby, and then cooked supper for Peter, who only wanted to cuddle with Dawn in the armchair in his den, hardly noticing when Joan called him for dinner.

When she stood at the window one afternoon, looking out at the woods behind the house, her reflection seemed thin and bland. The shrubs in the garden squatted in the grass, substantial and unmistakeably green, while she was leached of colour, a poor imitation of her once green and gold self. The phone rang. It was for her.

At first, she went away for five days every three weeks, always returning on a Monday evening. Then she was away for a whole week and, later, ten days. Finally, she stayed away for two weeks, returning one morning with a bag of gifts for the baby. Val stared at Dawn—her pale skin, her golden hair. She searched for a trace of herself in her chin, her ears, even the line of her chubby jaw, but saw nothing, only a baby she must once have given birth to.

Joan saw Val’s face, the restlessness in her eyes. Carefully, in a measured voice, she said, “Do you want me to keep her?”

It was a simple question, and Val knew the right answer. She was a mother, wasn’t she? Mothers were supposed to be competent, unfailingly loving and calm. Mothers had no needs of their own; everything they did or said was for their children, not to satisfy their disgusting desires for the gaze of men. Mothers were clean and put together.

Val was a mother. But not the kind anyone wanted.

“If you don’t mind, Joan, maybe I could leave her here for a month or so. There are still lots of loose ends for me to tie up.”

Val left Joan’s car to take the bus, bringing nothing except the carefully made quilt she pieced together when she was pregnant. Later, in her small apartment, Val rolled the quilt into a ball and carried it to bed with her, holding it close to her chest while she slept, waking when the afternoon sun flooded the room.


Kelly. That’s what Joan started calling the baby, and soon the name Dawn was totally forgotten. Every third Tuesday of the month, Val woke up, a gnawing in her stomach. She clutched at her belly with both hands, eyes shut to the sunshine sneaking into her bedroom from a crack in the curtains. She knew that Joan was expecting her, as she did every month, and that, even though she was a failed mother, she must go and watch her daughter play and babble happily. There was no use in pretending that seeing Joan wipe the milk off Kelly’s lips or retie a hair ribbon wasn’t painful. Punishment wasn’t punishment unless others could see. Val spent an hour and a half picking out her clothes and high heels and doing her makeup before boarding the bus to Joan’s, shiny red lips on her powdered face. She knew the neighbours were watching, kept their eyes on her ass when she sashayed up the walk. She felt like laughing, until she remembered why she was there.

As soon as Kelly turned two, Joan started cancelling their visits at the last minute. There came a day when Kelly no longer recognized Val, and she cringed when she tried to hug her.

For a while, it was birthdays and Christmas. And after that, only at Kelly’s elementary and high school graduations, or when Joan and Kelly drove into the city and ran into Val at a shop. Most of the time, Val didn’t think about them but, once in a while, she felt that she might crumble, her skin and makeup and clothes nothing more than a thin, brittle veneer that covered up uncountable scars and underground fissures. On bad nights, she stared into space, not daring to look at the studio photographs Joan had had done of Kelly and Peter and herself. The white wall or the black night sky was safer. Emptier.

For almost ten years, she continued to dance, wearing new costumes she had made to accommodate the extra weight around her thighs and hips. As time passed, she noticed how cold and dark it was in the wings, how brusque the managers were when the dancers asked for more light or a portable heater for the dressing room. The new girls seemed unprepared; their costumes looked cheap onstage, and, when they danced, Val could hear seams tearing as they struggled to keep time to the music. She pinned up the rips between sets, rubbed lotion on dry knees and put her arms around the younger girls to warm them up even as the cold seeped into the marrow of her own bones. She wondered if this was how people developed arthritis. When the MC announced their names to the audience, she pushed the dancers onstage, felt their clammy young skin underneath her hands, the fear vibrating off their bodies. Sometimes, she whispered, “You’ll be fine, sweetie. The crowd will tell you what they want.”

And when she looked in the mirrors as she stood beside these trembling, smooth-skinned girls, she could see what twenty-three years of dancing had done to her. She was forty-one, and the other strippers were half her age. Her maturity sat in the droop of her belly button, in the dark shadows under her eyes, in the wing-like looseness of the skin on her arms. She could feel her joints rubbing together, creaking as she tried to high-kick, grinding when she made a quick turn. If she had become a secretary, would there be this same damage? She might have been a woman who looked good for her age, who had spent her adult life in a cushioned chair instead of on stage floors that didn’t give when she stomped through a routine.

Eventually, working nights both tired her and made it impossible for her to sleep through the light of morning. Besides, the circuit had changed again. When did it become titillating to look straight between a dancer’s legs? To stare at the flesh without noticing the face? To scream with impatience if a girl tried to tease by slowly taking off one item of clothing at a time? The club managers told her that full nudity was what everyone expected these days. The province had even caved in and changed the laws so that girls could dance without their G-strings. Val supposed the bigwigs in government wanted more people in the clubs buying taxable liquor, and one sure way of keeping them there was bottomless dancers doing the splits onstage.

“But, of course,” said the squat and bespectacled manager of the Penthouse, “you can keep something on. Your act is old-fashioned, and no one expects to see all your goods anyway.”

When Val turned forty-four, she tried to be an agent for the dancers, but the scene wasn’t the same. The government was giving out different licences to bars, which meant that they could hire girls to dance naked too, except these girls could dance to records instead of live bands and could strip all day if they wanted to. The clubs, working under the old licences, still needed musicians and could open only in the evenings. The cover at the bars was cheaper, the booze even more so, and crowds at the clubs disappeared, taking the dancers with them. More and more girls came to her in desperation, their pupils dilated from dope, their hands shaking because the Shanghai Junk or the Shangri-La was the last stop before they started hooking. Val saw how their stories might end.

“Honey,” she said to one girl who had just turned eighteen and stood, shaking, in Val’s office by the Granville Bridge, “I know a choreographer who can help you get a real act together, something really classy that’ll make you good money in the long term. But you have to get clean, really focus on the dancing.”

The girl sat limply in her chair. “I need a job, Miss Val. Any job. I have some bills that need to be paid.”

And every other girl said the same thing until Val was tired of booking them into bars that played thumping, soulless music over scratchy speakers, and where they met men who paid them for other, more intimate jobs in the back seats of their cars.

So she left this new, raw-edged scene altogether. Eventually, she went to work at Woodward’s department store, behind the lingerie and hosiery counter, where the shopping housewives giggled at her loud voice and the unceremonious way she handled their breasts when conducting a fitting. No one recognized her or seemed to remember the Siamese Kitten. Not the movie, not even her act. The customers saw only Val, with her curly brown hair piled on her head, her reading glasses balanced on the end of her nose. During the day, she was alone among the stockings and girdles. She could pretend she was still working for herself and that this little alcove on the fourth floor, with its peach satin slips that felt like water in her hands, was all hers.

Sometimes, the customers told her about their husbands or, often, their secret lovers—men they met accidentally, men who listened to them in ways their husbands never did, men who lived childless lives and were artists at heart. “Everything would be so much better if we had met fifteen years ago, when I was young and could still change,” the women said. The words were sometimes different, but the meaning was always the same. “We could have had a free life, you know, and not worried about keeping up with the neighbours or whether we should get a new car.” As Val hooked them into brassieres, they took deep breaths. “It could have been so wonderful.”

In these women’s voices, Val heard a small, barely perceptible note of cynicism. They knew that their lovers were as ordinary as the men they had married, and that it was marriage itself that eventually made everybody sexless. Val, a measuring tape around her neck, said nothing. She knew well enough that they didn’t want to hear about Val’s own encounters with men, the ones who were shopping for their wives but whose eyes travelled up and down Val’s legs while she helped them, or the ones she met when she went out for a drink at the local pub. Rough men, sleek men, men who talked during sex.

On the five-year anniversary of her first day at the store, the staff threw her a lunchtime party. “Val,” the store manager boomed, “is some broad.”

He was the sort who would have tried to touch her from his spot in the front row, and she would have kicked him with the toe of her high-heeled shoe. But now, she simply laughed along with the others and raised her paper cup of fruit punch when he called for a toast.

She moved to the North Shore, where she set up a garden on her balcony and took the bus to the beach on her days off. She liked to sit on a particular log—bleached white from years of sunshine and worn smooth by wind and climbing children—and stare at the waves coming in, one after another. The eagles flew over the treetops, and she could see the seawall in Stanley Park across the inlet and the people walking and biking and jogging in the distance. Some days, it was misty, and, when she put her hand to her hair, she felt the tiny drops in the curls around her ears. Other days, it was clear and cold, and the wind bit through her slacks and jacket until she was shivering, her arms wrapped around herself. And rarely, it was muggy and hot, when the only reprieve was the wind blowing off the ocean in gusts too few to be comfortable. But even here, she never stopped missing the thump of the drums that she once bounced to and the shimmer of the spotlight on her skin. Sometimes she would hum an old song until someone passed by and stared at her. She would pull her jacket tighter around her body and fall silent, feet unmoving in the rough sand.

It was at these times she wondered if she was leaving anything behind, if the boxes of costumes she had stored in Joan’s basement or the obscure movie she had made actually counted. If her old life had left any footprint at all, or if it had all evaporated, the years like wisps of steam, the men for whom she danced now tottering in nursing homes, their memories not memories, only threadbare. There was only Dawn, and even she was now someone else.