Open by Lisa Moore

the season of the witch, and his friends played Dungeons and Dragons in the next room. Sex in a pickup near a field full of fog and horses. He and the girl were washed in a bath of red light, and before he knew what was happening a cop rapped on the steamed-over window. When Lyle lowered it, the cop stuck a flashlight in and swivelled it around, catching the girl’s breast, her naked foot. In the field beside them, a white horse had tossed its head, snorted, and trotted away into the fog. Once he’d taken some acid with a friend and two sixteen-year-old twin girls in a prefab cabin just beyond the overpass. He and his friend were sitting on one bed and the girls were sitting opposite them, a case of beer at their feet, when the twins’ father crashed through the door with a rifle. The door hit the wall and the cabin shuddered, a watercolour of a moose in Bowring Park swung back and forth from the jolt. The moose’s jaw fell, and moss and water poured into the lake at his knees, gently rippling the surface. The pink wallpaper expanded like bubblegum, stretching until it was a concave membrane, semi-transparent. Lyle hallucinated the trees behind the wall and the path to the mini-golf castle and duck pond, and he was confident he could simply step through to the other side if the screaming father took aim.
    So, up to this point, he’d had lots of sex but he knewnothing about girls. Everything about them — the elaborate knowledge they had of each other’s emotional states, how whole oceans of thought could be traversed in a gesture, the sophisticated designs of cruelty they visited upon each other without prompting — he didn’t understand any of it. This ignorance gave him courage now, walking in the storm toward the university.
    By the time he got to the campus it was deserted. Lyle thought Rachel probably wouldn’t show up. He promised himself that if he escaped this time he’d never take another chance, feeling in one moment that he meant it, promising God, his mother. Knowing in the next moment, watching his body wobble like the flame of a candle reflected in the chemistry building windows, that if he did escape, it was a promise he’d forget instantly.
    Rachel was the only person in the cafeteria, except a janitor at the far end of the room putting the orange chairs upside down on the tables. The fluorescent lights thrummed. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a marijuana leaf on the front. There was a bran muffin in front of her on a Styrofoam plate. A plastic glass of juice with the foil lid folded back. She was wearing dark sunglasses, and when he saw them he knew she wasn’t in love.
    He dragged out the chair beside her and the metal legs screeched like a bird caught in an engine. Before he sat down she said she was pregnant and she wouldn’t consider abortion. He said, Are you sure? By which he meant, Are you sure I’m the father. She knew what he meant and she was hurt by thequestion, and that surprised him more than anything. Their sexual encounters had a different meaning for her. Perhaps every sexual encounter he’d ever had had meant something different to the girl. She had summoned him through a blizzard. He had implicated himself by showing up. He was there.
    The child, a little girl, was three by the time Lyle met Anna. She stayed with Lyle for half the week until she was seven, and then he and Rachel agreed it was easier for everyone if she lived in one place. He paid child support, and drove her to hockey and ballet. She came for supper when she felt like it.
    One day last March I went up to Lyle’s study on the third floor. I pushed Sic’um out of the armchair near the window. It had occurred to me that we might, after twelve years together, split up over this. I wondered what would happen to our house, the summer house in Conception Bay, the car. How would Alex feel. I was still wearing my winter coat. I held the bag from the pharmacy.
    This is it, I said. I rattled the bag. Lyle