In the same tone that he used when he congratulated me on good report cards in high school, good exam results in university, my first job at the clinic, my master’s degree, he said, “You saved a lot of lives, dear.”

  I was surprised enough to reply what I was thinking. “Not everyone’s.”

  “Well,” he said.

  I waited for more, but he simply lit his pipe, a cloudy homey smell.

  —

  I called Amelia the next day. She’d hired a replacement for me before I left, but she gave me the names of three other ENTs who might be able to take on an audiologist, and I thanked her and promised to come say hello soon. She didn’t say anything to me about what had happened in New York, but I could tell by the tenor of her voice that she knew.

  A few days after that, I was going through a drawer in my old desk and found an envelope of photos I’d never framed or put into albums. On top was the photo from the ferry, that weekend at the cabin. The four of them ranged along the railing. It was odd to see that they were just kids, still half-gawky, a crop of blemishes I didn’t remember standing out on Ted’s jaw, Annie’s lashes mascara’d into spider legs that made her eyes look like black smudges. I remembered them all as so grown up, but they looked painfully young in the photo—raw and vulnerable. I must have looked the same.

  Distracted, I flinched when my father knocked on my bedroom door. When I opened it, he said, “Connie called. He said he and Ted are going to the Legion for a drink around nine and that you should come if you’re up to it. A friend of yours is going too, I think your mother said.”

  “What friend?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t ask Connie.” Then he added, obviously not part of the message, “You don’t have to go, if you don’t want to.”

  —

  I did go. I put on a good shirt I’d bought in New York, one Ted hadn’t seen, low cut and silky, because Ted was straightforward in his tastes, and I was thinking of him like that, still, stupidly, maybe only out of habit and maybe not. I went to the bar a little before nine. I would fortify myself with a drink, before Ted and Connie arrived, in case Ted wasn’t drinking.

  The Legion was equal parts old men and young men dressed like old men, grouped at the long tables around bottles of Coors Light. I was sitting at the bar, a bottle sweating in front of me, when someone sat down beside me. Someone dressed in black, with long red hair. Someone beautiful. The mens’ heads turned as one.

  “Did you know,” said Sunny, “that your parents are still listed in the phone book? Did you know there still is a phone book? They had one in the nightstand in my hotel. A real paper phone book.” She was talking quickly, her tone unnaturally bright.

  “What are you doing here?” I was so surprised to see her, I couldn’t even tell how I felt about it.

  “Listen,” she said. “My ex-boyfriend showed up in New York. I needed to get out of there, just for a few days. I wasn’t really sure where to go, but I’m still on leave from work. I knew you were going home, and after the other night, I thought…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked at me hopefully. “I’d never been to Canada, and it’s far, and Dan would never expect me to be here. I mean, you don’t have to hang out with me. I just thought it would be silly not to get in touch. To meet Conrad, like you said. I’m not here for long. Just until things with Dan cool down. You know how it is.”

  I got the impression that I was missing something in Sunny’s words, as if I were a child listening to an adult. Everything felt muddled, scenery through the window of a moving car.

  “Of course,” I said slowly. “I mean, of course you’re welcome here. But how did you know—? I mean specifically, the Legion—how did you know where I was?”

  “I called your house. Your parents’ house. Your mom told me you were meeting a friend here. And your brother.” She let the last word hang in the air. “Anyway, they told me where you were.”

  “Hey.”

  I turned at Conrad’s voice. He looked better than I’d seen him in ages; he’d grown his hair long, and it was clean and shiny, swept over one eye, so the scar that parted his eyebrow was hidden. The old handsome Conrad was visible in a sort of flickering way. His nose didn’t even seem as bad as I remembered it. He was wearing a white shirt—linen maybe?—with a collar that was maybe a little too wide but still looked good. He pulled me off my stool and into a hug.

  “How are you?” he asked. His voice was always soft with me, but it was hardly more than a whisper now.

  Ted had followed him in and was standing nearby. Obviously unwilling to interrupt the brother–sister reunion, he turned and introduced himself to Sunny. They shook hands for what seemed like a long time.

  “How are you?” said Conrad again.

  “I’m okay. And I’m so happy for you, both of you. It’s amazing news. I’m sorry it’s been weird, finding the right time to talk about it, with everything that’s been going on. But I am really, really happy for you guys. It’s the best news.”

  “Absolutely,” said Ted, shaking Conrad by the shoulder without really turning away from Sunny. “Unreal. It’s the best.”

  And in a moment of confusion, or some strange paranoia, I pulled Conrad back into a hug and whispered in his ear, “She’s Peter Juric’s sister.”

  As I let him go, Conrad raised his eyebrows, but there was no time to say anything else. Together we turned to Sunny, and I had a feeling like a cool shadow was passing over me on a hot day. Sunny looked exactly the same as she had in New York, but Ted looked different than last time I’d seen him, or his face did; he was looking at Sunny with a kind of luminous awe. Throughout all of our ups and downs, he had never, not once, looked at me like that. He came over then and hugged me tenderly, pressing my face into his neck, where his skin felt looser, rougher, not the neck of a young man anymore.

  When we all moved to sit down, Ted pulled Sunny’s chair out for her and said, “Who’s for beer?”

  I gestured to the bottle I already had, and Conrad shook his head.

  Sunny said, “Me, please,” and Ted beamed at her and headed to the bar. He came back with two bottles, setting one in front of Sunny and the other in front of himself.

  Trying to avoid sounding too concerned, I said, “Ted, are you sure?” gesturing to his beer.

  He looked at me, his face blank, before managing a pained smile. “It’s all good, thanks,” he said, and he turned to Sunny.

  I regulated myself through my single, rapidly warming bottle of slow sips, while Ted offered sightseeing suggestions to Sunny, until Conrad interrupted his long description of Stanley Park.

  “So, Sunny. What brings you to Vancouver?” His voice was easy and light as always, but he was leaning toward me in a way that made me think he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

  Sunny looked at me, her mouth slightly open but wordless.

  “New York,” I said. “We met in New York.” I swallowed the last, flat drops of my beer and said, “Well, I’m pretty tired. Thanks for the welcome home drink, guys” at the same time that Ted said, “Oh, so do you know Al and Marie, then?”

  Sunny looked at me again and appeared to shrink into herself slightly. There were suddenly a lot of sharp angles to her, elbows and shoulders and jaw.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and Ted looked puzzled but kept smiling.

  I stood up, and so did Conrad. Ted remained seated.

  “I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed, being home,” I said. I was invoking the bus, the shooting, and I knew it, but I didn’t care. Maybe I’d start using it to get my way all the time. Last doughnut? I was in a hostage situation. Best parking space? I confronted a crazed gunman. Maybe that was the way to do it, just make it my get-out-of-jail-free card for the rest of my life.

  If they had treated me with kid gloves, I would have been annoyed and told them to be normal, but I was just as irritated by the business-as-usual atmosphere, especially from Ted.

  “If the lightweights are clearing out, how about we stay and make up for them?” he said to Sunny.

  “No,” said Sunny. “If Veda is going, I should too.”

  “Do you need a ride?” Ted asked.

  “Or I could go with Veda,” said Sunny, looking at me expectantly.

  When I confided in Sunny in the restaurant, I didn’t think I’d ever see her again. The awareness of everything I’d said, the things that were so personal they felt like someone else’s secrets I’d betrayed, left me feeling raw. How would I explain to Conrad and Annie why I knew her, why we were—if we were—friends? And she would tell them about my visits to Peter, and I would have to explain that. The now-familiar pain was spreading across my chest. I’d never intended anyone to know that I visited Peter. I didn’t even know how to explain it to myself.

  Conrad closed his eyes slowly, once, as if in pain. “You’re tired,” he said. “Why don’t I drive Mom’s car—that’s how you got here, right?—and take you home? Sunny can catch a ride with Ted.”

  “Sounds good,” said Ted. He was hardly looking at us as we left.

  —

  Conrad came by the house the next day around dinner time, before his poker spot opened for the night, and we called to our parents that we were going for a walk. We headed up Arbutus, the exact same route where Conrad had gone flying off his bike all those years ago.

  “You have to explain it to me. Why is she here? How do you even know her?”

  “The New York therapist thought it would be a good idea. Get some closure, talk to her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I mean. It’s not like I can talk to him.”

  “Sure, but she doesn’t have anything to do with it all.”

  “I know. I just—I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

  “Okay. But why is she here?”

  “She’s dodging an ex. I think he might be abusive; it sounded pretty bad. I don’t know—I don’t think she has many friends. She just moved to New York a little while back. She hadn’t seen her brother in ten years or something. She just up and moved there to be near him.”

  “Have you told Annie?”

  “No,” I said. “Have you?”

  He looked at me. His hands were tucked into the pockets of a hoodie, his elbows akimbo. “No,” he said. “If you want to tell her, tell her. If not, well, then Sunny’s a friend from New York.”

  “I thought you guys had to tell each other everything now,” I said with a smile. “Family values.”

  He didn’t smile back. “I don’t like not telling her the whole story. But whatever you need right now is what you need.”

  We walked in silence past the tennis courts and headed to the playground. It was a warm evening, and plenty of kids were still scrambling around, their parents sitting cross-legged on the ground watching them or staring out over the wrinkled grey water of English Bay.

  “That’s going to be you soon,” I said. It was still strange to picture.

  Conrad looked out at the children. Before he could say anything, an older woman walking in from the street drew up beside us.

  “Is one of them yours?” she asked sweetly. “You make a beautiful couple.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  The woman’s eyebrows went up, and she did the familiar look, back and forth between us. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Enjoy the sunset.”

  “You too,” said the woman, flustered, and she walked on.

  “Does it ever bother you?” I asked Conrad.

  “What, being the ethnic one? Sometimes it sucks, but mostly it’s fine.”

  “I just mean how we don’t look alike.”

  Conrad put his arm around me, something I didn’t remember him ever having done. “It doesn’t matter what we look like,” he said. “It just matters that you’re okay. That you’re here.”

  I put my arm around him, linking us closer. It was pleasant but strange to feel him holding me up. I’d only ever thought of his body as a problem to be solved—scrapes to be cleaned and bandaged, bruises and black eyes to be covered up with my CoverGirl concealer stick, swelling to be iced. But now, as I leaned into him, I felt the strength in him.

  “Sorry,” he said as he let go, smiling his old, impish smile. “I have a theory that Annie’s pregnancy is turning me into a total suck. She must be emitting some pheromone that brainwashes me into an after-school special.”

  “She’s still in San Francisco. You only see her every couple of weeks.”

  “Well,” said Conrad. “Not all my theories are perfect.”

  —

  As I was updating my resumé the next morning, the phone rang.

  “Veda,” my mother shouted from the kitchen. “It’s your friend.”

  “Hi, Veda,” said Sunny, when I picked up the extension. “I hope it’s okay that I’m calling. How are you?”

  I’d turned it over and over in my head the night before, after the bar. Why was Sunny here? Why not? Hadn’t I given her the impression we were intimate, back in the hospital? And hadn’t I told her she could see me, meet Conrad, if she was ever in Vancouver? Who knows what goes through a person’s head, when she’s running from a man like the one I pictured for Sunny’s ex-boyfriend. Maybe when you have nowhere to go, the thinnest thread is worth pulling.

  I’d asked her for something—to visit Peter—and she had said yes, without even knowing me. All she wanted now was some company, while she laid low. But it felt different here than it had in New York. Very different.

  The truth was that after Conrad and Annie’s announcement, I’d felt like some spell had been broken—that because normal, forward-moving things were happening for them, maybe they could for me too. As if my entire time in New York had been some Sleeping Beauty episode, suspended animation, a bad dream, and coming back to Vancouver could not just end that messed-up era, with the finality of closing a book, but erase it all. Make it like it never happened. The whole time in New York now seemed so unrealistic, and everything I’d done there had been so unlike me—from wasting money to barely working to sleeping in Al’s living room, and, of course, the other thing, the bus, and then those interviews, those TV studios, the strangeness of it all—maybe it could be excised, wiped away.

  But not if Sunny was here. Sunny was a living, breathing tether to everything that had happened, had actually happened. Which wasn’t a fair reason to leave her hanging. And what’s more, I still liked Sunny—that odd, magnetic feeling that emanated from her, the same as from Peter.

  I could have asked Annie what she thought, in the way women do, where you’re not really asking for an opinion, just for permission. I could have played devil’s advocate over why it was important to be welcoming to Sunny while she was in town, while Annie argued that I’d been through a lot and needed to have a fresh start and that it wasn’t selfish—it was self-care and positive mental health management and whatever other buzzwords she could pull out of the air, which, knowing Annie, would be a lot. I could be absolved.

  But to do that, I’d have to explain to Annie who Sunny was. And why I felt indebted to her, why I felt connected to her. I’d have to tell Annie about the hospital room, which no one knew about. Which no one could know about.

  On the phone, I said to Sunny, “Sure, of course it’s okay that you called. Call anytime while you’re here. I mean, I might be working soon. I’m trying to find a job, and an apartment, but yeah, for sure, call—definitely call.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “How is Peter?”

  She hesitated for a few seconds. Then, “The same.”

  I waited, wondering if she would say anything more.

  Then, very quickly, like she was reading from a telemarketing script, she said, “Ted made Stanley Park sound very nice, and I thought I’d like to see it, while I’m here. Would you be willing to go with me?”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “Yeah, Stanley Park is great. Yeah, I can go with you. When?”

  “I was thinking now,” said Sunny.

  I looked at the blinking cursor on the screen in front of me. My resumé was short and specialized. It fit into a single page.

  “Where do you want me to meet you?”

  —

  An hour later, I parked my mother’s car off Avison Way after driving into the park past the Robbie Burns statue and the horse-drawn carriages full of chagrined tourists. I headed toward the aquarium and saw Sunny was already there, in a black dress like always, wearing high heels that sank into the grass.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” she said, and I said, “Can you walk in those?”

  “I’m fine.”

  We headed past the aquarium toward the ocean, eventually coming to the seawall. In silence, we walked in the direction of the Lions Gate Bridge, visible in the distance.

  “I want to ask you something,” said Sunny.

  She was as good as her word and, despite her heels, was matching me, in my sneakers, step for step. I moved to be on her right. I knew she’d seen my ear already, but I didn’t like having it toward her. That put me beside the ocean, and I had a sudden, clear vision of Sunny grabbing me by my hair and hip and throwing me over the seawall into the water.

  I snapped back, when she said, “I don’t know how to say it, though.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine. I mean, just to say it.”

  Sunny stopped walking, so that a pair of tube-socked tourists had to shift course abruptly to go around her.

  “What would you think about being my friend?” she said.

  I edged off to the side of the path, so we wouldn’t be in anyone else’s way. “Oh,” I said slowly. “Of course, I mean, I’m happy to hang out while you’re here.”

  “You could just try, see if you like it.”

  “I think Ted likes you. I am sure he’d want to see you too, while you’re in town.”

  “I know he likes me,” she said, and it didn’t seem like bragging. She looked unhappy, in fact. “It’s women I’m not good at making friends with. I’d like to have a woman friend. When we were in the restaurant, I thought…” She paused. “I know it’s a weird thing to ask, to ask you, after everything that’s happened. But.”

 

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