Free February by Lisa Moore Page B

they took a step back and didn’t even get in the elevator.
    Cal was so tall that sometimes in the kitchen Helen would stand on a chair to give him a proper hug. She would haul the chair over and get up and he’d turn from the eggs frying on the stove and bury his head in her breasts and put his arms around her and squeeze hard, and she’d kiss the top of his head. And then he’d go back to the eggs. He would always have the music blasting when he made breakfast.
    Cal put the key in the hotel room door and opened it; the room was big and they looked out the window and they could see the whole city. It was snowing. Snowing over the harbour and the ships tied up with their rusting flanks and sharply curving bows and orange buoys piled up on the deck, covered with snow; and snowing over the white oil tanks on the south side Hills and the cars on Water street, their pale headlights catching narrow fans of falling flakes; and snowing over the Basilica. And the Christmas lights looped across Water street.
    Then Cal inched her zipper down, all the way to the small of Helen’s back, where he had to jerk it because it was caught. He threw himself onto the big bed. Helen crunched the whole dress down, stamped her way out of the mountains of scratchy tulle with her patent leather spikes.
    And Cal had glanced at the hotel mirror. His face with its freckles and sharp intelligence, and his gangly arms and unfamiliar clothes—he was naked beneath the tuxedo shirt, and he’d dropped the pants on the bathroom floor, the jacket over the desk—and his black curly hair and his big blue eyes, and the gentleness and humour in them, and all the lovemaking to come. Helen remembers the unadulterated energy it took to keep the enterprise in motion from that moment, one baby after another, and the jobs, the bills, snowsuits, dinner parties, disappointments—sometimes she had been immobilized by disappointment—nights on the town, staggering home in each other’s arms, dragging each other up the hill, and the stars over the Kirk, graffiti on the retaining wall; all of that was in the mirror in the Newfoundland Hotel on their wedding night, and— POW —Cal glanced at it, and the mirror spread with cracks that ran all the way to the elaborate curlicue mahogany frame, and it all fell to the carpet, fifty or so jagged pieces. Or the mirror buckled, or it bucked, or it curled like a wave and splashed onto the carpet and froze there into hard, jagged pieces. It happened so fast that Cal walked over the glass in his bare feet before he knew what he was doing, and he was not cut. It was not that the breaking mirror brought them bad luck. Helen didn’t believe that. But all the bad luck to come was in Cal’s glance, and when he looked at the mirror the bad luck busted out.
    They didn’t even think about the mirror then because they were making love, and afterwards they ordered spareribs and put on the terry cloth robes and steamed up the bathroom, soaping each other in a shower so hot they turned pink, and they lay on the bed and tried the TV.
    They were just kids putting on a kind of maturity. Trying it on for size. No idea what they were getting into. Acting big.
    But it was like Helen’s mother said: Get that look off your face or the wind will change.
    Helen and Cal ate the ribs and had sex and let the heavy door close on the world and smashed the mirror or walked through the mirror to the other side, and then they were mature overnight. They had changed overnight, or in an instant. They were married.
    Helen can bring herself to the point of weeping just thinking about Cal’s yellow rain jacket that came to his thighs and the rubber boots he wore back then and the Norwegian sweater with the elbows out of it and how he rolled his own cigarettes for a time, which was unheard of (he had other pretensions: he made his own yogurt and tofu, grew pot, experimented with tie-dye), and how he wanted a house around the bay for the summers, and how the