Free Accusation by Catherine Bush

service centre on the 401, and the jaggedness of something so unexpected. Raymond finished the doughnut and caught the balls and knives, picking up the dropped ball from the floor, but he was not through yet, and, throughout all this, how calm he remained. He set down the knives, pulled out a chair, and, standing on its seat so that he towered over them all, launched the balls again while tipping the chair forward, not falling but stepping backward onto the back of the chair, rotating the chair beneath his feet, growing taller as he moved, feeling his way backward to balance now on the chair’s legs, keeping himself upright, under the shimmering lights, not looking down as the pressure of his moving weight turned the chair beneath him while his hands kept the balls spinning through the air. Joy shone on his face, through a sheen of sweat. At last he caught all the balls in both hands and leaped free of the chair. When everyone clapped, he gave that shy, dimpled smile that Sara remembered from Copenhagen and dipped his dark head. Had she really seen what she’d just seen? As soon as he stopped and righted the chair, it seemed improbable that any of this had happened, or that it had happened like this, despite the surprised murmurings of everyone around her.
    He was conversing with the boys, leaning over them as Sara approached, explaining to them about Cirkus Mirak, the children’s circus in Ethiopia, did they know where that was, it was in Africa. He pulled a folded flyer out of the pocket of his jacket and gave it to them and told them some day they should come for a visit. When Sara came close, Raymond turned to her with a friendly smile, and the boys and their mother also turned and must assume, if she was the companion of this man, that all this was familiar to her. That she knew his secrets. Raymond introduced her to the boys, Ben and Matt, and their mother, Moira, who were on their way from Sarnia to Moncton, days and nights of travel to take up a new life there, and suddenly she was commiserating with the mother, and joking with them all, saying, no, she had none of his talents, could only appreciate his, this complicity, and wishing them a safe trip onwards, while Raymond offered to buy the boys more doughnuts. Their mother said, no, really, they’d had enough, she needed them to sleep. A near-intoxicated glow poured from Raymond, despite his underlying note of distress. Some sadness and bewilderment came from the boys too. He was gentle as he shook both the boys’ hands.
    On the way back to the car, Raymond carried a box of doughnuts along with his coffee, the juggling balls weighing down the pockets of his jacket. Sara was about to ask him where they’d come from but stopped herself: to ask meant the stubborn return to the practical, the stripping away of mystery.
    In the car, he reached one arm behind his seat for a plastic bag that he seemed to know was on the floor, tossed the sand-filled juggling balls into it, knotted the plastic, and dropped the bag behind him.
    You’re incredibly good, Sara said, setting down her own coffee. You must practise a lot.
    Not much, he said. I don’t have time. Have a doughnut?
    Pass me a cruller, please.
    You are sure you don’t need me to drive?
    I’m fine for now. She loved driving, loved the control of it.
    Something had shifted between them, a loosening coloured by her amazement at what he’d done, could do, those hands, those arms, that body now slurping from a cup of coffee at her side as she pulled back onto the highway, glazed cruller on a napkin in her lap. A loosening familiar from other journeys with fellow journalists in stranger places, on planes, in vans, in bars, in the aftermath of something harrowing or exalting, something extreme or risky, the intimacy possible in the intensified chamber of hallucinatory exhaustion and enforced closeness that you know will end.
    Wiping icing sugar from his lips with the back of his hand, Raymond said, This is a thing I