Excerpt

You're depressed, so you tell your friend, Alice, about you and your lover in Rio when she's over at your house. She puts her hand on top of yours as you sit at the kitchen table crying and says with sympathy: "I'm sorry, Chantal, but if either Luc or I was unfaithful to each other, it would be over between us. As I see it, it's over between you and Robert now; it's the end of your marriage as it was. You can only start again at zero or divorce, that's it. Me, I always thought you guys were happy together, but I guess happiness is as rare as a bird that shits on our heads..."

You both laugh at her little joke: she has always known how to come up with the right bon mot. Then Alice looks down, biting her lip hard. "What's wrong, Alice?" you ask, touching her gently on the hand.

"Cancer," she replies in a breaking voice. "It has spread to the uterus..."

You and Alice stand up and hold each other close while you cry, because maybe you're about to lose your closest friend. How can you not cry — how can she not cry? It doesn't seem fair. You want to die — you, not her. Life has lost its sweetness for you, but Alice wants to live more than anything: for her children and for her husband as well as for herself, yet she might be dying.

You wish that you could take her disease upon yourself as you embrace her, so that she might live. You even close you eyes and try to take her cancer away from her. Maybe you could do it, if you only had the faith, but she feels your warmth, your love — she feels a jolt. You feel faint, because of your heart. Alice is aware of the heart murmur that you had as a child, and she sits you back down at the table.

You were considered a strange child, a garçonette who played hockey and soccer with the boys, then put on a long gown to play Mozart on the piano for the adults. (You and your sisters learned from your mother, who was the church organist.) You seldom bathed in the winter, except when you had a piano recital. Then you and Alice ran around the school yard and tried to kiss all the boys; everybody thought you were suddenly "boy crazy." But you and Alice get in trouble at school when you pull a boy into the girls' room and put makeup on his face to make him look like a girl: the nuns aren't very happy about it, and the boy's parents want you expelled, though, in the end, they accept your apology. Then the boys notice how pretty you are, and you start to bathe more frequently: beauty and cleanliness cover a whole multitude of sins, you know.

There were two priests in your parish: Father Gaston, the old curé, and Father Paul, the young priest. Face to face with you in confession over several months, Father Paul falls in love with you; he's ready to break his vows for you. Always, he hears the same confession: "I have not loved God with all my heart, strength and mind, nor my neighbour as myself." He says that it's the most beautiful confession that he has ever heard.

Perhaps the young priest is sincere: you swear your love for each other and agree to a rendezvous somewhere in a field. You want him to be the first, because you're still a virgin, but he never shows up. You are hurt, then angry. Then you see an Aurora Borealis flashing in the autumn sky, and you forget about your lover; he no longer exists for you. There's only you and the autumn sky, flashing all around you, that's it. Then you feel a strange sensation starting in your pelvis and enveloping your whole body. It's extremely painful at first, then extremely pleasant, and you are soon writhing on the ground on your back in ecstasy, before you raise a cry to the multi-coloured heavens, still flashing like crazy. You have never felt such ecstasy, and you don't want it to ever stop, but you wonder afterwards if you haven't become pregnant: you wonder if the young priest wasn't really an angel who assumed another form and met you after all. The experience is otherworldly — beautiful for you — but you don't know how tell anybody about it because you aren't sure what has happened.

Though it's only October, there's already snow on the ground. Still in a trance, you come to a river while on the way home where ice has begun to form and try to walk across it, but you fall in. It's only because you're a good swimmer that you don't drown, because the current is swift and the water is deep. You seize the exposed root of a large tree and pull yourself out, but by the time you come home, you're delirious and almost frozen, with ice clinging to you. Your sisters, Monique and Joëlle, strip you of your wet clothes at the back door and wrap a blanket around you. Then they lead you to the bathroom and help you take a warm shower. An old doctor who still makes house calls arrives and tells your parents that you have pneumonia: "Bathe her in alcohol, if her fever gets too high," he advises.

While recuperating in bed, you overhear your mother say: "Father Rose has left the parish, but he didn't say why he was leaving."

"I don't think the priesthood was right for him anyway," your father replies. "Sometimes you know these things..."

Alice comes to see you while you're in bed recovering from pneumonia, and from the experience of almost drowning; she tells you about her new boyfriend, Luc. It looks like it's serious between them. You want to tell her what has happened, but you don't know how to tell her: you don't what has happened. All you know is that some kind of transformation has taken place under the Aurora Borealis, but you don't know what it is.

You and Alice had made a vow when you were young: "When we are over thirty, if we are still single or widows, I will lie down with you under the stars. I swear by the Aurora Borealis..."

A vow half made in jest, like Don Giovanni inviting the statue of the man that he had just killed to a party in that opera by Mozart. You both thought it stupid to be old and alone when you could have each other after your husbands had died, when no man would want you; that's why you made that vow. You didn't want to sleep alone, but now, many years later, you're afraid that Alice is going to die and leave you alone. Therefore, you feel abandoned — you both feel cheated. In the end, you might one day sleep alone after all, unless Alice isn't dying now, or you die before your husband.

Maybe you were only trying to titillate when you told José that you and Alice were lovers, because you know that some men are fascinated by lesbians — by the very idea of two women kissing and making love. The night that you were alone as teenagers while her parents were out, you didn't really do anything; you were even fully clothed. You had slept together many times as children, without having sex, while spending the night either at your parents or hers — it was no big thing. You have even shared the same bed as roommates at university, sometimes with several others sleeping on the same bed, because winters are cold in Montréal and it was a small room.

You could have had a Boston Marriage, but you both wanted children. You wanted ecstasy when you conceived, not a test tube for a lover. You wanted your cries to wake up the gods at the moment of conception, because of the very painful ecstasy of childbirth afterwards. You have risked your life by having children, you know, so you wanted to enjoy getting pregnant by a man rather than through artificial insemination; it was your right. And children have need of a father as well as a mother: it's through your husband that your son will learn to be a man, you think, through you that your daughter will learn to be a woman. Children have need of both parents — of many parents — and you both love your husbands. You and Alice have both had sex with other girls, but never with each other. Yet when you look into each others eyes, something transpires between you: an understanding, the possibility of something. But to Alice, the love between two women is a parody of the real thing: the love between a man and a woman. On some level, you believe it too, because it's the way you were raised: Catholic. So nobody in your family has ever completely accepted your sister's friend, Brooke, not even you: somebody has always found a reason to dislike Brooke.

Yet Alice was your lover as well as your friend: you had your hand on her heart; she had her hand on yours. Maybe your husbands have sensed a sexual tension between you and her and were jealous, but you were always afraid to do it, because you were afraid of ruining your friendship with her. As well, you weren't sure if you had a desire for her, or if you were only curious. You weren't sure about her either. She understands that you are beautiful, but you have never known if she merely admired your beauty or wanted you; maybe she doesn't know either.

At night, when everyone else was asleep, you would sneak out of your bedroom to go see Alice late at night. You quietly raised the sash of your bedroom window upstairs, climbed out on to the roof, then climbed the down spout onto the ground. It was all a game. Then you wandered the streets or the fields outside your native town. The hooting of the owls never scared you. You were never threatened by the darkness or the shadows cast by the bare trees in the autumn at dusk; the darkness was your friend, your concealment.

Then, during one of your midnight outings, a band of five or six wolves wander out onto the same road as you. You and the wolves face each other, the jaws of the wolves in lascivious leers — you are terrified. Then you shake your head, as if to shoo them away, and the wolves take off when the leader signals to them to leave with a howl. The alpha-wolf is a female, you think, but another wolf — perhaps the alpha-male — is the last to leave. He's the most threatening of all.

You make a few more rendezvous with the wolves, before they leave the area. You're excited, but always terrified as well. Years later in therapy, a Freudian analyst gives you his interpretation of the incident: you had a primal fear of being passed around like a casserole by a band of wolves, but a part of you would have welcomed the experience. You start seeing another therapist.

When Alice asked you about your nocturnal wanderings, you always told her that you were meeting an imaginary aboriginal friend. "And what does your aboriginal friend say to you, eh?" Alice would ask, smiling knowingly.

"She says that I'm a wild one like her," you replied.

You and Alice feel yourselves part of the same soul, because we're all part of the same soul — everybody. There's only one soul, and that's God. Yet if one of you was a man, you might have been married. You tell yourself that homosexuality is a choice, neither good nor bad: what is a question of sexual orientation eventually becomes one of preference. You could march by sail or by steam. Your sister, Joëlle, is a lesbian, but living with another woman and raising children within that context wasn't for you; it wasn't for Alice either.

So you cuddle on the bed in your bedroom under some blankets some years later, before Alice has to go to work, because she has need of you. You place your hand on her heart from behind and hold it there; it's calming for her, for both of you. In her hour of despair, she's content for a moment; she feels your love from the warmth of your hand on her heart. You can feel her heart beating. Then you kiss her on the cheek and murmur: "Maman loves you..."

She starts to cry. Those words have a special meaning for her, because her real mother died when she was a teenager. That's why she was suicidal that night when you were alone together: her mother had died, and her father had run away to Florida, though he came back. (She was an only child, whereas you are one of six children.) So you snuck out of your bedroom at night to be with her, and you didn't come back home until dawn. You climbed up the drain pipe to your bedroom upstairs and went back to bed before anybody woke up. Only the cat seemed to be aware that you were gone.

Before she goes to work, you kiss each other twice and say that you love each other — because you love each other.

Alice is a nurse at a hospital, just like you. You have always had parallel lives, you and Alice.

*****