Free Waiting for Time by Bernice Morgan

for children but is filled with clamourous, unchildlike tales. Stories of how the earth and sky, once one, were torn asunder, how gods and goddesses fell, became vulnerable to pain, to sin, to death.
    All through the blustery afternoon she sits by the fire drinking tea, devouring crackers and cheese, reading of Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite, of how they wreak ungodly vengeance upon one another and upon poor humans. Gods, like humans, seem driven to teach what they cannot learn, succumb repeatedly to the charms of mortals and sometimes suffer endless tortures to help them. Prometheus dares the wrath of Zeus to bring man fire, Pandora opens her cunningly contrived box, Balder the Beautiful dies, he sails out to sea in his fiery ship, “burning like autumn foliage and the earth wept for him and cold and darkness followed.”
    Lavinia wept for him.
    The sound of her weeping shocks her. She had thought herself content, pleased with her own company, with the fire and the book. But she reads of Balder's death and is attacked by sadness. A shroud of despair, all-embracing impersonal sorrow, drops down upon her and she weeps. Beyond the edge of her weeping there is something else, something closer, more personal. But ice and sleet rattling against the window drowns it out and she huddles on the sofa sobbing for all the poor gods and poor humans who must die, their possessions scattered and their stories forgotten.
    When the weeping stops she lies sniffling in misery until dark, until there is not a spark of fire left in the hearth—then she goes to bed.

three

    “After that nothing was ever the same.” People say such things. “That was when it all started,” they say, “From that day on, everything changed,” or “I knew right away.” Conventional, comfortable phrases, phrases that give the illusion of order, of neatness, of one's ability to compartmentalize, to separate event from event, to disentangle.
    But life will not be disentangled, has no pattern, and events are connected only in the random way of pebbles tumbling from a narrow-necked bottle—each pebble nudging the other, each one that falls making room for another to fall. For most of us—barring getting hit by a truck or having the earth drop out from under our feet—there is no moment, no hour, no day, when we can say “after that nothing was ever the same.”
    Yet that is what Lavinia Andrews will say.
    “After that stormy Sunday nothing was ever the same,” she will say “After that night of weeping, events in my life did not wait upon one another, did not politely nudge one another into being. After that everything tumbled helter-skelter—past and present, public and private, reality and imagination melding together.”
    That is the way she remembers the days that followed—but of course, days and events must happen in some order, in fixed time—and we must recall them in that order.
    On Monday morning Lav wears her new scarf, her woven jacket and the tight slit of skirt she bought on Saturday. She takes great care with her toffee-coloured hair, with makeup that must camouflage all signs of last night's weeping.
    Alice O'Reilly, waiting in the lobby, pacing beside the security desk, notices none of this.
    “They're moving us! Moving us! Without a word—without as much as a by-your-leave—we're being carted body and bones up to the top floor! And that's not all,” she rushes Lav towards the spiral walkway. “Wayne Drover and his crowd'll be here before week's end. Won't say which day, of course, just, ‘Arriving mid-week from Ottawa!’”
    Alice pauses to assess Lav's reaction, apparently not as dramatic as she would wish. “You know who Wayne Drover is?” she asks and, when Lav shakes her head, looks shocked, “Sure I thought everyone in the department knew that one! Wayne Drover's special assistant to Timothy Drew—went to Ottawa with the Minister when he was elected. From here, Wayne is—grew up in the Battery—but sharp as a