My author, L, has made me a character who needs answers, and when answers aren’t readily available, my imagination will conjure them up. I want to know who smashed my window and scrawled an obscene insult across my door. And I want to know what my long-dead Dad was up to as a civilian on the Alaska Highway during World War II. The answers my imagination supplies to both these questions turn out to be wrong in so many ways.
My sense of humour never deserts me, but it faces a challenge in beating back my cluster of anxieties. This is a story about imagination — how to use it and how not. Like my father before me, I need to stop looking over my shoulder for what, or who, is out to get me.
Here’s a look at the first page of the novel-in-progress.
1. My Dramatic Entrance
A Saturday morning in spring, the season of promise, of bursting buds, returning light, resurrection. I stood on the walk in front of my little house looking at two nasty words scrawled across my door and a heap of broken glass that yesterday was a window. The sun was warm on my shoulders, benign, at odds with the vandal’s message. I’d caught a ride with Nick as far as his office, then savoured the fifteen-minute walk from downtown to my place. We had just spent our first overnight together, a fondly chaste event, tangled together but fully clothed. Shoes and socks, that’s all we took off before we lay down (a full-dress rehearsal, as Harriet would later refer to it). I’d ambled along the final block, head down, replaying the feel of Nick’s toes among mine, and I didn’t see the vandalism until I stepped onto my brickwork walk with its fringe of woolly thyme on either side.
Shel from down the street strode up, her usual Saturday morning walk with her sleek-skinned hound. She pulled up short and reeled in the leash. “What’s that about?”
There was a fist around my vocal cords. Shel’s hound shoved his nose at my crotch. I pushed his insistent snout to the side again and again, suppressing my own animal urge to just kick the beast. Finally I managed to make a sentence: “You need to train your dog.”
“He’s a dog, Kate. Dogs do that.”
I gave her a look.
“Sorry,” she said, taking the hound by the collar. “We better call somebody.” She could see I hadn’t recovered the capacity to take myself in hand. “I’ll come in with you.” She hitched the leash to the metal railing of my front steps.
“Shouldn’t we send the dog in first?”
“Don’t see why.” Shel’s running shoe crunched on the glass. She tried the door, which was locked; she reached in past the glass teeth that framed the empty window in the door and flipped the deadbolt. “They didn’t go inside. Just smashed the window, and.” She gestured toward the two words writ large.
I hadn’t moved along the walk. “Why would anyone—?”
“There’s a good question.”
