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By Root 971 0

as a result, it did not take him long to sense her distrust of the place he had chosen. She was thinking about the smallness, the innocence of her own museum, its pioneer tools and Native arrowheads, its one “special” exhibition of labels from the County’s now defunct canning factory. Julia, she remembered, had once asked her for a map of the museum, but she had talked her through it instead. “First case,” she had said, “pine highchair, wood stove, patchwork quilt, hand iron, empire sofa.” Julia had nodded; she had lived with all of this. Even the canning labels had been easy to explain: “three tomatoes, two peaches, an ear of corn.” What had been more difficult had been answering Julia’s questions about why one would put such labels in a museum. “Because they are finished,” she had finally said, “because we are through with them.”

Now in the second museum, the large gallery of art, Sylvia found that she wanted to move closer and closer to the smallest objects. When she came to the apostle, she wanted to reach behind the glass and unfold the delicate figure, to open the tiny arms. She wanted to lift the chin, examine the face.

Several minutes passed, then Malcolm touched her arm, as she knew he had learned to do years ago when he sensed she was starting to disappear. The touch was brief, his hand remaining in place just long enough to get her attention.

“You’ve had enough,” he said. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

Sylvia did not answer but pulled away from the object and followed her husband as he walked through room after room toward the entrance that would now be the exit. She was both mildly relieved and faintly put off by the way he so easily took stock of her levels of energy, as if he carried with him at all times a device for measuring the temperature of her moods. As she emerged into the light and descended the stone stairs she was aware of two things: the sound of Malcolm’s footsteps beside her and the dependency descending like a familiar cloak over her spirit. There was warmth in the cloak, but it felt wrong for this season. She knew that from now on there would be moments when she would want to remove it from her shoulders.

Since she had checked in a few days earlier, Sylvia had turned on neither the television at the far side of the room nor the radio beside the bed. She had been marginally aware of red lights—pulsing on the one hand or deliberately announcing the passage of time on the other—which seemed to insist that something should be done, that the status of the objects they were attached to should be changed in some way or another. But the newness of her rented space had been entertainment enough for her: the framed serigraph of haystacks and distant water that called to mind Tremble Bay near where the Ballagh Oisin had been situated, the reflecting surfaces of furniture dusted by an unseen stranger when she was elsewhere, the pile of the carpet forced upright each day by a vacuum cleaner that she neither heard nor saw, the way each trace of her own occupancy had been silently removed from the bathroom—damp washcloths and wrinkled towels replaced by their pristine doubles, the wastebasket emptied. Each time she opened the door she would stand listening to the low, thrumming noise of the hidden machine that heated or cooled the room—a constant purr that bled into the sound of the city traffic beyond the walls. Were it not for Julia’s map, lying each evening on the desk just as she had left it, she would have barely been able to believe that she had spent the previous night sleeping in the smooth bed or had bathed that morning in the gleaming tub.

All of this contributed to her increasing belief that consciousness began again in the evening, that the dark, not the light, was the new beginning, the awakening, after hours of day-lit dream. It was like an empty canvas on which the same painting could be rendered over and over again. Her grief, especially, seemed to have been washed and ironed during the day so that it could be presented to her again each evening, clean and fresh, the colour of it slick