Adam's Peak by Heather Burt Page A

keeping me here. What about your mom? You’d move that far away from her?”
    It wasn’t at all what she’d expected. It was possibly a criticism, though she wasn’t sure.
    â€œI haven’t planned anything definite yet. It’s just an idea.”
    â€œYeah? Well, keep me posted.”
    They mounted the motorcycle. Adam advanced a few inches with his feet, then he looked back. “I thought I might take a ride up Mount Royal. Would you like to come?”
    Clare stared down at the carton of eggs wedged between the two of them. “I need to get back,” she said. “But thanks.”

    She regretted it, of course. Even before Adam dropped her off at the end of her driveway, she regretted her refusal, but there was no easy way to let him know she’d changed her mind. The parting didn’t seem to be final, however. As she unzipped his jacket, he waved his hand dismissively.
“
Just hang on to it. I’ll come by for it later
,”
he said, smiling, then he sped away in the direction of the Boulevard.

    LYING IN BED THAT NIGH , she tried to imagine Adam’s eyes, but their colour had escaped her. She got up and raised the blind, and the bedroom flooded with the glare of the street lamp outside. It was past midnight, and it seemed that in the dead of night, winter had returned to Morgan Hill Road. “Like a patient etherized upon a table,” Clare recited, though she couldn’t remember where the line came from. Across the street, the Vantwests’ house was dark. Adam hadn’t been by yet for the jacket. It hung in Clare’s closet, secret and exotic as the vibrator.
    Wrapped in her bathrobe, she went to the studio and picked up the phone. She’d been trying Emma’s number all evening, getting the answering machine every time. She’d wanted to tell her about the ride, but strangely the desire was waning. She sat on the loveseat with the receiver in her hand until the disconnect signal struck up its panicky alarm, then she hung up. Falling asleep was out of the question, so she crept downstairs, the sound of her steps muffled by the steady respirator-drone of the furnace. She went to the den and turned on the light.
    Her father’s presence here was unmistakable, especially at night. Clare remembered waking regularly as a child to the squeal of the swivel chair, the click of the desk lamp. She didn’t know what her father did in his den in the middle of the night—it never occurred to her to find out—but she imagined that he just sat, and that in those moments of quiet sitting, he was more himself than at any other time.
    From a crammed collection of buckled hardcover volumes on the bookshelf, she extracted Alastair’s atlas. The dried glue of the spinecrackled when she opened it. Its pages were lumped together in musty parcels, weathered along their edges, though surprisingly unblemished inside. She turned first to the map of Canada at the front and eyed the distance from Montreal to Vancouver. It was at once too far and not far enough. Searching for her next target, she discovered that the book opened quite naturally to page seventy-two, where, next to the pale pink triangle of India, she found Ceylon. It was a tiny green drop, marked only with the capital city, Colombo, and a few other places. She pictured Rudy Vantwest lecturing to a group of uniformed students in a classroom furnished with teak desks and leather-bound books. Then she looked around at the furnishings of her father’s den—Time-Life books, wall-to-wall carpeting, functional shelves. In this room, her ride on Adam’s motorcycle seemed as distant and unreal as the country represented by that tiny green mark on page seventy-two. As irretrievable as the colour of Adam’s eyes.

4

    R UDY SAT AT HIS GRANDFATHER’S DESK with a stack of essays and his brother’s letter. The essays, barring Kanda’s, were tedious. Adam’s letter