A few weeks after Sasha officially retired from the post office as a letter carrier, her mother, wearing dark sunglasses and silk scarves, arrived at her apartment, telling her there was a taxicab with her father in it waiting for them outside. Sasha had started working full-time as a mail sorter when she was eighteen years old, the summer after she graduated from high school. Before that she had worked part-time at the public library. Sasha’s teachers and principal at the Catholic elementary school where she was a student had advanced her two grades, ahead of her peers and cohorts—because of her superior academic performance, her parents reminded her. When Sasha graduated from grade thirteen in high school, everybody asked her which college or university she planned to attend. She merely told them she had not yet decided. The pay at the post office was impressive, she believed, as were the benefits, and she had job security, which was important to her. When neighbors and fellow members of the Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Polish community asked her parents why such a bright and intelligent girl hadn’t gone to university, her parents merely shrugged in disappointment. “She’s still young,” Sasha’s mother said, in Ukrainian or Polish. “She has plenty of time to decide,” her father said defensively, in Ukrainian. This charade lasted for several years, even a decade. She also believed that deep inside her parents knew that with her regular habits, her love of routine, and her frugality, she would make her paycheck as a post office employee go a long way. Moreover, her job didn’t follow her home in the evening, and it allowed her to read voraciously and vociferously, while she snacked on chocolates and sipped tea. She filled her apartment with shelves of books she ordered, first from book clubs then from online bookstores. Sasha even occasionally read during her coffee breaks as a letter carrier. Sasha loved to deliver mail. She never opened or stole a customer’s mail. Sometimes she misdirected the mail, but always that was an accident, the consequence either of her energetic efforts and hurry during the busy, frenetic holiday season, or when she committed an honest error or as the result of fatigue after she stayed up too late trying to read through a book. A few years before she retired, her mother called her after she suffered what Sasha later learned from her father was an episode of unstable angina pectoris. Her mother called to say she needed to confess: her father had started to wonder if Sasha might have autism. Her mother debated the question with her father after she watched television talk shows and nature and science documentaries on cable TV about various forms of mental disorder and illness. Her mother spoke in a voice that had become raspy from smoking cigarettes for dozens of years. She also sounded as if she had aged decades in a few years. The main reason she called, she said, was that she was truly sorry if she had been hard on her as a girl. Sasha reassured her mother that she had no reason to apologize. Later, when she reflected about it, though, she thought maybe she did, since her mother had urged her to study hard when she was a student. Ostensibly those efforts were rewarded when she was put ahead of her class, but she lost her precious longtime school friends and was not prepared to be with the older students. They thought she was obnoxious, insufferable, a smartie pants, a goody two shoes, and a teacher’s pet. This was her reward for spending every night on homework, diligently completing assignments and readings. Maybe that was the reason she ultimately decided she didn’t want to attend college: she was sick of school after her mother had pushed her so hard to succeed in all her assignments, from science to Canadian history and the catechism. The last of those she actually enjoyed and appreciated, because the spiritual language sounded loving and beautiful, and left her inspired, even though her parents were agnostic. Still, her father and her mother showed up at her apartment several weeks after her retirement, when they hadn’t even called her to congratulate her on the personal milestone, and when they hadn’t even spoken to her much over those past several years. In fact, the last time the family had gotten together was for Christmas dinner a forgotten number of years ago, but the meal had passed mostly in silence, which, Sasha thought, in hindsight was better than the fruitless arguments in which she had engaged with her parents in past years. She was reading a biography of Jane Austen when her parents arrived. Her mother announced that she was to join her and her father in a group therapy session with a mental health counsellor downtown at Mount Sinai Hospital. “The life you lead, Sasha,” her mother tsk-tsked, glancing around her apartment, frowning at the stacks and shelves of hardcover and paperback books. “The life you lead.” Her mother shook her head. Her mother told her that the counsellor had a Ukrainian background herself, and could even speak Ukrainian. Sasha tried to explain that she didn’t need to see a psychologist or psychiatrist. “No, he’s not a psychologist, or a psychiatrist,” her mother said. “He’s a mental health counsellor, a social worker, and he’s worked with Ukrainian families.” Sasha did not comprehend the need for a counsellor, especially one fluent in Ukrainian, even though her classmates, teachers, friends, and neighbors had experienced difficulty understanding her parents’ English. Even though her parents had lived most of their lives in Canada, they still spoke with thick Eastern European accents. Still, she could not perceive what she could possibly discuss with a counsellor. The appointment was in an hour, her mother said, and the taxi was waiting outside. Sasha started to protest again, but her mother slapped her in the face, and open-handed rebuke that left Sasha’s jaw stinging. “Fuck off, ma,” Sasha said as she held a hand to her cheek. Her mother commanded her to never use such language in her house again, except she seemed to have forgotten that she was the intruder in Sasha’s apartment. Her mother wound up to slap her again, except Sasha reached out to intercept her mother’s hand. Instead of swinging again, though her mother turned pale, seemed to quiver with a kind of full-body tremor, then collapsed in the floor, her still-open hand going down last like an angry flag. Sasha rushed downstairs and retrieved her father, who tried to nurse her mother back to health with her nitroglycerin tablets and a glass of lukewarm water while they Sasha called an ambulance. That night Sasha watched her mother die in the coronary care unit. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, like a deathbed scene in the late-night movies Sasha sometimes watched on weekends, and her mother breathed her last breath. Sasha’s father wore sweatpants, a loose-fitting sweatshirt and sweater, and running shoes to the funeral. No one else attended except a few friends and acquaintances, members of the expatriate community, the diaspora, Ukrainian-Canadians, Polish Canadians, and a Ukrainian-Polish Canadian. These Eastern European expats remembered her mother from the days when she was an attractive food server in a restaurant, and later a helper in a hospital kitchen in a border area of Ukraine. The Second World War turned her into a refugee, and she had settled first in Winnipeg, then Toronto. Sasha didn’t understand her father’s attire. He was always so formal and correct, insisting on appropriate dress, respectful manners, but now he was dressed in athleisure, gym clothes, a sweatshirt, and track pants. What was he rebelling against? The authority her mother had exercised over him? Was he angry with her mother? With Sasha? She had not realized he was suffering from cardiac disease and in physical pain at the time, which he masked behind a curmudgeonly demeanor. Several weeks later, her father’s doctor, who also spoke Ukrainian, called her to say her father was dying from end-stage heart failure. He was seriously ill, from years of chain smoking and cholesterol built up in his coronary arteries, with undiagnosed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes complicating the coronary artery disease. Hence his seemingly indifferent, disrespectful dress at her mother’s funeral. As Sasha had performed a vigil for her mother before, she sat vigilantly at her father’s bedside in the palliative care ward of the hospital, a dark but peaceful space. She read from the Bible and the Catholic catechism, which, she thought, contained positive and affirming sentiments and the same spiritual language she had always loved. Her father was weak and had difficulty breathing. He looked grey and wan, but he was conscious and lucied. Her father explained to Sasha that her mother had wanted her to see a therapist because she believed the intervention would help her. She was still relatively young, he said, forty-three. She retired early, too early, in his opinion, even though she had worked for twenty-five years at the same job. She would need extra money to pay for her children’s education, he said. He reassured her that she could still get married, have a second career, and adopt, since she was too old to have children herself. She left unmentioned the fact that she hadn’t yet undergone menopause and continued to menstruate. She thought the situation was absurd. They were having this ridiculous discussion while he was in critical condition, although she was starting to doubt the doctor’s dire prognosis. As they engaged in these animated conversations about her retirement and starting a family, he seemed infused with strength, invigorated. The discussion threatened to spiral into an out-of-control argument, but she didn’t want to make a scene in the palliative care unit or the intensive care unit of the hospital. She tried to explain, with a gentle tone of finality, that she had retired. Moreover, she emphasized, she had retired for a reason. He turned the conversation then, and said her mother had begun to agree that with him that Sasha might suffer from undiagnosed autism. Once again, she didn’t know what to say. Her cheeks became suffused with redness. She could feel the anger rising, like a fire ready to rage out of control, but she held her tongue. No one explicitly told her he was dying, no nurse, no doctor, not even her father himself. She supposed his demise was something implicit, tacit and understood. Nobody tried to feed him or medicate him, beyond the sedatives and painkillers. When Sasha tried to intervene, the nurses told her to leave him be. Her father died peacefully in the hospital bed a few days later, in that quiet ward. At first, after his passing, she felt afraid, because now she was truly alone in the world. Then she felt a sense of relief that her father and indeed her mother were gone. Sasha felt mildly liberated; she celebrated her newfound freedom by eating cashews and almonds and drinking Irish cream coffee for dinner. She was alone at his funeral, as she had been alone at her mother’s funeral, except again for a few funeral home employees and some elderly members of the Ukrainian-Canadian and Polish-Canadian community in Toronto. She remembered how her mother had attempted to explain to her several times, all of them long ago, that she had been born and raised in an area that was Polish during one world war and then Ukrainian the next. Her father was bothered by her questioning about his life in the Ukraine. She thought about the difficult experiences her father must have had as a teenager there. Only after she pried persistently for information about his background did he tell her he had been conscripted into the army as a teenager. He became interned by the Russians, for whom he worked as slave labor before they forced him into combat on battlefields of the Eastern front, where, he said, humanity completely lost its bearings. Then he was captured by the Germans, who forced him to the front lines of a huge battlefield where massive tank warfare was waged. He was injured and re-captured by the Russians, before they retreated and became surrounded. Finally, he found himself a prisoner of war of the Germans once again, before he was finally liberated and became a refugee. Once, when she asked him about concentration camps, he froze. He refused to answer her questions, assuring her she did not want to hear about those horrors. He had married her mother after her first émigré husband, weakened by wounds and diseases he acquired during the war, succumbed to injuries he suffered in a traffic accident as a pedestrian, in a windy crosswalk at the intersection of Portage and Main in downtown Winnipeg. Sasha resumed her peaceful retirement life. She frequented the beach during the summer, because she did her best and most undistracted reading on the sandy shores of Lake Ontario. At the same time, an echo of those last conversations with her father combined with her inclination to feel like a productive member of society. Sasha started to collect recyclables, around the city parks and at the beaches she frequented. One day in late August, while she was collecting aluminum cans at the beach, she came across a handsome man who looked appealing in his swimsuit. He handed her a few empty beer cans as he passed her on the warm, bright sand. Sasha placed them in her blue recycling bag, and they exchanged hellos. He picked up his towel and t-shirt from his beach blanket, then invited her to take a seat beside him. Normally she preferred to spend the latter part of a warm humid evening with a brief swim or finishing up some reading on the beach, but she ended up talking with this well-built, hairy-chested man for hours. She told him about herself, and he told her a great deal about his own life as well. Finally, he said he needed to leave the beach promptly: he needed to work the graveyard shift at the emergency department of a hospital downtown. But he said he would like to take her out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. He also wanted to take her out on a date to see live theatre, which she had not attended for years, since high school. He wrote down his cell phone number on his business card, which had his photo identification, and gave the card to her. She was mildly surprised; he truly was a doctor, affiliated with a teaching hospital downtown, working in the emergency department. He told her he wasn’t in a relationship, had never been married, had no children. She wanted to ask him why he was divulging all of this personal information, but she didn’t want to be rude. He invited to return to the city with him in the water taxi. He even offered to pay, but she coyly explained that she wanted to remain at the beach to finish some reading. Afterwards, she would take the last ferry from Ward’s Island. He shrugged, but just before he turned to go he asked if he could give her a hug. She nodded, and they embraced. When he had departed Sasha read for a while from a hardcover biography of a poet married to a British poet laureate. When she was finished she took the doctor’s business card and tucked it into the back pages of the book, like a little prize she might discover later, or simply forget about altogether. After the last of the day trippers left the beach, walking or speeding along the pathway on their bicycles, scooters, and skateboards to the ferry dock, she walked from the beach back to the ferry docks. She took the longest route, the path to the Ward’s Island ferry. In her bikini and sandals, she strolled on the abandoned laneway along the outer fringes of the island. Sasha understood she should have been afraid of becoming a victim of crime, walking alone, in the evening, through an area of parks and bushes and beaches off the mainland of the city. But she enjoyed the lakeshore at night, the serene nighttime, the lighthouse, the lapping of the waves and the sounds of the freshwater surf on the beaches, the moonlight shimmering on the surface of the lake. When she arrived at Centre Island beach, near the large touristy pier, abandoned by this late hour, she was overwhelmed by the stillness, the calm and the warmth, the sheer serenity of the summer night. She sat down her blue transparent bag of recyclables and her backpack with her day trip gear on the sand. She waded into the water, noticing how the normally chilly water of Lake Ontario had turned unexpectedly warm after a long, hot, dry summer. She swam out away from the shore, from the moonlit darkness of the abandoned beach, perhaps farther than she had ever swum in her life. Floating and drifting in the vast lake, the inland sea of Lake Ontario, in the darkness of the night, she felt strong and alive, at peace with herself and nature. In the far distance, though, Sasha could see a yacht, could hear its music playing loudly on the deck, and her tranquility was interrupted. At the same time, her right leg started to cramp in a constricting and agonizing pain, so she discovered she had limited use of it. With the shoreline far away in the distance, she believed she had swam over a kilometer away from it. She had originally wanted to test the limits of her strength and endurance, but now she turned back in the direction of the island, swimming towards the spot on the beach from which she had waded. With the aching leg continuing to afflict her, she swam slowly, and as she tried to steady her breathing she remembered how, as a little girl, she had loved to steal the neighbors’ letters from their mailboxes and read their personal correspondence, which she later tore up and scattered in the garbage bins along the back alley. Might that explain why she became a letter carrier and jealously protected the privacy of others, trying to deliver the mail perfectly, on time, to the correct address, each item as close as possible to mint condition? She didn’t know or understand, but she thought the point might be moot at this late moment. In place of that memory she set the handsome, friendly doctor, his invitation and her declining of it, the deferred potential of the card slipped into the back of the book. She took slow, deep breaths and long overhand swimming strokes, and as the shore drew gradually closer, Sasha thought that when she reached it, and once the ferry had delivered her back to mainland, a package neither timely nor unmarked, she would head straight to the emergency department of the hospital downtown where the charming doctor was working, and she would seek treatment for this agonizing pain in her leg.
The Life You Lead
The Life You Lead
The Life You Lead
A few weeks after Sasha officially retired from the post office as a letter carrier, her mother, wearing dark sunglasses and silk scarves, arrived at her apartment, telling her there was a taxicab with her father in it waiting for them outside. Sasha had started working full-time as a mail sorter when she was eighteen years old, the summer after she graduated from high school. Before that she had worked part-time at the public library. Sasha’s teachers and principal at the Catholic elementary school where she was a student had advanced her two grades, ahead of her peers and cohorts—because of her superior academic performance, her parents reminded her. When Sasha graduated from grade thirteen in high school, everybody asked her which college or university she planned to attend. She merely told them she had not yet decided. The pay at the post office was impressive, she believed, as were the benefits, and she had job security, which was important to her. When neighbors and fellow members of the Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Polish community asked her parents why such a bright and intelligent girl hadn’t gone to university, her parents merely shrugged in disappointment. “She’s still young,” Sasha’s mother said, in Ukrainian or Polish. “She has plenty of time to decide,” her father said defensively, in Ukrainian. This charade lasted for several years, even a decade. She also believed that deep inside her parents knew that with her regular habits, her love of routine, and her frugality, she would make her paycheck as a post office employee go a long way. Moreover, her job didn’t follow her home in the evening, and it allowed her to read voraciously and vociferously, while she snacked on chocolates and sipped tea. She filled her apartment with shelves of books she ordered, first from book clubs then from online bookstores. Sasha even occasionally read during her coffee breaks as a letter carrier. Sasha loved to deliver mail. She never opened or stole a customer’s mail. Sometimes she misdirected the mail, but always that was an accident, the consequence either of her energetic efforts and hurry during the busy, frenetic holiday season, or when she committed an honest error or as the result of fatigue after she stayed up too late trying to read through a book. A few years before she retired, her mother called her after she suffered what Sasha later learned from her father was an episode of unstable angina pectoris. Her mother called to say she needed to confess: her father had started to wonder if Sasha might have autism. Her mother debated the question with her father after she watched television talk shows and nature and science documentaries on cable TV about various forms of mental disorder and illness. Her mother spoke in a voice that had become raspy from smoking cigarettes for dozens of years. She also sounded as if she had aged decades in a few years. The main reason she called, she said, was that she was truly sorry if she had been hard on her as a girl. Sasha reassured her mother that she had no reason to apologize. Later, when she reflected about it, though, she thought maybe she did, since her mother had urged her to study hard when she was a student. Ostensibly those efforts were rewarded when she was put ahead of her class, but she lost her precious longtime school friends and was not prepared to be with the older students. They thought she was obnoxious, insufferable, a smartie pants, a goody two shoes, and a teacher’s pet. This was her reward for spending every night on homework, diligently completing assignments and readings. Maybe that was the reason she ultimately decided she didn’t want to attend college: she was sick of school after her mother had pushed her so hard to succeed in all her assignments, from science to Canadian history and the catechism. The last of those she actually enjoyed and appreciated, because the spiritual language sounded loving and beautiful, and left her inspired, even though her parents were agnostic. Still, her father and her mother showed up at her apartment several weeks after her retirement, when they hadn’t even called her to congratulate her on the personal milestone, and when they hadn’t even spoken to her much over those past several years. In fact, the last time the family had gotten together was for Christmas dinner a forgotten number of years ago, but the meal had passed mostly in silence, which, Sasha thought, in hindsight was better than the fruitless arguments in which she had engaged with her parents in past years. She was reading a biography of Jane Austen when her parents arrived. Her mother announced that she was to join her and her father in a group therapy session with a mental health counsellor downtown at Mount Sinai Hospital. “The life you lead, Sasha,” her mother tsk-tsked, glancing around her apartment, frowning at the stacks and shelves of hardcover and paperback books. “The life you lead.” Her mother shook her head. Her mother told her that the counsellor had a Ukrainian background herself, and could even speak Ukrainian. Sasha tried to explain that she didn’t need to see a psychologist or psychiatrist. “No, he’s not a psychologist, or a psychiatrist,” her mother said. “He’s a mental health counsellor, a social worker, and he’s worked with Ukrainian families.” Sasha did not comprehend the need for a counsellor, especially one fluent in Ukrainian, even though her classmates, teachers, friends, and neighbors had experienced difficulty understanding her parents’ English. Even though her parents had lived most of their lives in Canada, they still spoke with thick Eastern European accents. Still, she could not perceive what she could possibly discuss with a counsellor. The appointment was in an hour, her mother said, and the taxi was waiting outside. Sasha started to protest again, but her mother slapped her in the face, and open-handed rebuke that left Sasha’s jaw stinging. “Fuck off, ma,” Sasha said as she held a hand to her cheek. Her mother commanded her to never use such language in her house again, except she seemed to have forgotten that she was the intruder in Sasha’s apartment. Her mother wound up to slap her again, except Sasha reached out to intercept her mother’s hand. Instead of swinging again, though her mother turned pale, seemed to quiver with a kind of full-body tremor, then collapsed in the floor, her still-open hand going down last like an angry flag. Sasha rushed downstairs and retrieved her father, who tried to nurse her mother back to health with her nitroglycerin tablets and a glass of lukewarm water while they Sasha called an ambulance. That night Sasha watched her mother die in the coronary care unit. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, like a deathbed scene in the late-night movies Sasha sometimes watched on weekends, and her mother breathed her last breath. Sasha’s father wore sweatpants, a loose-fitting sweatshirt and sweater, and running shoes to the funeral. No one else attended except a few friends and acquaintances, members of the expatriate community, the diaspora, Ukrainian-Canadians, Polish Canadians, and a Ukrainian-Polish Canadian. These Eastern European expats remembered her mother from the days when she was an attractive food server in a restaurant, and later a helper in a hospital kitchen in a border area of Ukraine. The Second World War turned her into a refugee, and she had settled first in Winnipeg, then Toronto. Sasha didn’t understand her father’s attire. He was always so formal and correct, insisting on appropriate dress, respectful manners, but now he was dressed in athleisure, gym clothes, a sweatshirt, and track pants. What was he rebelling against? The authority her mother had exercised over him? Was he angry with her mother? With Sasha? She had not realized he was suffering from cardiac disease and in physical pain at the time, which he masked behind a curmudgeonly demeanor. Several weeks later, her father’s doctor, who also spoke Ukrainian, called her to say her father was dying from end-stage heart failure. He was seriously ill, from years of chain smoking and cholesterol built up in his coronary arteries, with undiagnosed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes complicating the coronary artery disease. Hence his seemingly indifferent, disrespectful dress at her mother’s funeral. As Sasha had performed a vigil for her mother before, she sat vigilantly at her father’s bedside in the palliative care ward of the hospital, a dark but peaceful space. She read from the Bible and the Catholic catechism, which, she thought, contained positive and affirming sentiments and the same spiritual language she had always loved. Her father was weak and had difficulty breathing. He looked grey and wan, but he was conscious and lucied. Her father explained to Sasha that her mother had wanted her to see a therapist because she believed the intervention would help her. She was still relatively young, he said, forty-three. She retired early, too early, in his opinion, even though she had worked for twenty-five years at the same job. She would need extra money to pay for her children’s education, he said. He reassured her that she could still get married, have a second career, and adopt, since she was too old to have children herself. She left unmentioned the fact that she hadn’t yet undergone menopause and continued to menstruate. She thought the situation was absurd. They were having this ridiculous discussion while he was in critical condition, although she was starting to doubt the doctor’s dire prognosis. As they engaged in these animated conversations about her retirement and starting a family, he seemed infused with strength, invigorated. The discussion threatened to spiral into an out-of-control argument, but she didn’t want to make a scene in the palliative care unit or the intensive care unit of the hospital. She tried to explain, with a gentle tone of finality, that she had retired. Moreover, she emphasized, she had retired for a reason. He turned the conversation then, and said her mother had begun to agree that with him that Sasha might suffer from undiagnosed autism. Once again, she didn’t know what to say. Her cheeks became suffused with redness. She could feel the anger rising, like a fire ready to rage out of control, but she held her tongue. No one explicitly told her he was dying, no nurse, no doctor, not even her father himself. She supposed his demise was something implicit, tacit and understood. Nobody tried to feed him or medicate him, beyond the sedatives and painkillers. When Sasha tried to intervene, the nurses told her to leave him be. Her father died peacefully in the hospital bed a few days later, in that quiet ward. At first, after his passing, she felt afraid, because now she was truly alone in the world. Then she felt a sense of relief that her father and indeed her mother were gone. Sasha felt mildly liberated; she celebrated her newfound freedom by eating cashews and almonds and drinking Irish cream coffee for dinner. She was alone at his funeral, as she had been alone at her mother’s funeral, except again for a few funeral home employees and some elderly members of the Ukrainian-Canadian and Polish-Canadian community in Toronto. She remembered how her mother had attempted to explain to her several times, all of them long ago, that she had been born and raised in an area that was Polish during one world war and then Ukrainian the next. Her father was bothered by her questioning about his life in the Ukraine. She thought about the difficult experiences her father must have had as a teenager there. Only after she pried persistently for information about his background did he tell her he had been conscripted into the army as a teenager. He became interned by the Russians, for whom he worked as slave labor before they forced him into combat on battlefields of the Eastern front, where, he said, humanity completely lost its bearings. Then he was captured by the Germans, who forced him to the front lines of a huge battlefield where massive tank warfare was waged. He was injured and re-captured by the Russians, before they retreated and became surrounded. Finally, he found himself a prisoner of war of the Germans once again, before he was finally liberated and became a refugee. Once, when she asked him about concentration camps, he froze. He refused to answer her questions, assuring her she did not want to hear about those horrors. He had married her mother after her first émigré husband, weakened by wounds and diseases he acquired during the war, succumbed to injuries he suffered in a traffic accident as a pedestrian, in a windy crosswalk at the intersection of Portage and Main in downtown Winnipeg. Sasha resumed her peaceful retirement life. She frequented the beach during the summer, because she did her best and most undistracted reading on the sandy shores of Lake Ontario. At the same time, an echo of those last conversations with her father combined with her inclination to feel like a productive member of society. Sasha started to collect recyclables, around the city parks and at the beaches she frequented. One day in late August, while she was collecting aluminum cans at the beach, she came across a handsome man who looked appealing in his swimsuit. He handed her a few empty beer cans as he passed her on the warm, bright sand. Sasha placed them in her blue recycling bag, and they exchanged hellos. He picked up his towel and t-shirt from his beach blanket, then invited her to take a seat beside him. Normally she preferred to spend the latter part of a warm humid evening with a brief swim or finishing up some reading on the beach, but she ended up talking with this well-built, hairy-chested man for hours. She told him about herself, and he told her a great deal about his own life as well. Finally, he said he needed to leave the beach promptly: he needed to work the graveyard shift at the emergency department of a hospital downtown. But he said he would like to take her out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. He also wanted to take her out on a date to see live theatre, which she had not attended for years, since high school. He wrote down his cell phone number on his business card, which had his photo identification, and gave the card to her. She was mildly surprised; he truly was a doctor, affiliated with a teaching hospital downtown, working in the emergency department. He told her he wasn’t in a relationship, had never been married, had no children. She wanted to ask him why he was divulging all of this personal information, but she didn’t want to be rude. He invited to return to the city with him in the water taxi. He even offered to pay, but she coyly explained that she wanted to remain at the beach to finish some reading. Afterwards, she would take the last ferry from Ward’s Island. He shrugged, but just before he turned to go he asked if he could give her a hug. She nodded, and they embraced. When he had departed Sasha read for a while from a hardcover biography of a poet married to a British poet laureate. When she was finished she took the doctor’s business card and tucked it into the back pages of the book, like a little prize she might discover later, or simply forget about altogether. After the last of the day trippers left the beach, walking or speeding along the pathway on their bicycles, scooters, and skateboards to the ferry dock, she walked from the beach back to the ferry docks. She took the longest route, the path to the Ward’s Island ferry. In her bikini and sandals, she strolled on the abandoned laneway along the outer fringes of the island. Sasha understood she should have been afraid of becoming a victim of crime, walking alone, in the evening, through an area of parks and bushes and beaches off the mainland of the city. But she enjoyed the lakeshore at night, the serene nighttime, the lighthouse, the lapping of the waves and the sounds of the freshwater surf on the beaches, the moonlight shimmering on the surface of the lake. When she arrived at Centre Island beach, near the large touristy pier, abandoned by this late hour, she was overwhelmed by the stillness, the calm and the warmth, the sheer serenity of the summer night. She sat down her blue transparent bag of recyclables and her backpack with her day trip gear on the sand. She waded into the water, noticing how the normally chilly water of Lake Ontario had turned unexpectedly warm after a long, hot, dry summer. She swam out away from the shore, from the moonlit darkness of the abandoned beach, perhaps farther than she had ever swum in her life. Floating and drifting in the vast lake, the inland sea of Lake Ontario, in the darkness of the night, she felt strong and alive, at peace with herself and nature. In the far distance, though, Sasha could see a yacht, could hear its music playing loudly on the deck, and her tranquility was interrupted. At the same time, her right leg started to cramp in a constricting and agonizing pain, so she discovered she had limited use of it. With the shoreline far away in the distance, she believed she had swam over a kilometer away from it. She had originally wanted to test the limits of her strength and endurance, but now she turned back in the direction of the island, swimming towards the spot on the beach from which she had waded. With the aching leg continuing to afflict her, she swam slowly, and as she tried to steady her breathing she remembered how, as a little girl, she had loved to steal the neighbors’ letters from their mailboxes and read their personal correspondence, which she later tore up and scattered in the garbage bins along the back alley. Might that explain why she became a letter carrier and jealously protected the privacy of others, trying to deliver the mail perfectly, on time, to the correct address, each item as close as possible to mint condition? She didn’t know or understand, but she thought the point might be moot at this late moment. In place of that memory she set the handsome, friendly doctor, his invitation and her declining of it, the deferred potential of the card slipped into the back of the book. She took slow, deep breaths and long overhand swimming strokes, and as the shore drew gradually closer, Sasha thought that when she reached it, and once the ferry had delivered her back to mainland, a package neither timely nor unmarked, she would head straight to the emergency department of the hospital downtown where the charming doctor was working, and she would seek treatment for this agonizing pain in her leg.