February by Lisa Moore Page A

been a bad list on the rig a few weeks before it went down and the men all went running for the same lifeboat. They ran to the wrong boat. Each man had an instinct about the direction to take and it was the wrong instinct. The rig was the size of two football fields, and try to imagine how small in relation to the ocean around it. The crew had scheduled safety drills but they didn’t show up. They slept in. Men who had been on the night shift stuffed towels over the speakers so the announcements about safety drills wouldn’t wake them. They slept through.
    The men were afraid of the helicopter, especially when the fog was thick. If they muttered in their sleep it was about the helicopter. Nobody could imagine the rig going down. The men broke bones or lost a finger. That was common. They were expected to keep on working if it was just a bad sprain or a minor break. A severed pinkie didn’t get a lot of sympathy. That was an occurrence they saw every month.
    There are men who would kill to have this job: that was the wisdom they worked under. And: the helicopter was a terror. But it was impossible to imagine the whole rig capsizing.
    If the men did imagine it, they did not tell their wives; they did not tell their mothers. They developed a morbid humour that didn’t translate on land, so they kept it mostly on the rig.
    Cal patted the potato and told Helen about the men pouring the water through the door so that his feet were wet, but Helen didn’t get the joke.
    That’s not funny, she said. And Cal looked up and saw her and didn’t see her.
    They all knew they weren’t safe. Those men knew. And they had decided not to tell anyone. But it leaked out of them in larks and pranks and smutty puns, and it leaked out sometimes in a loneliness that made phone calls from shore hard to handle. A man would get his wife on the phone and have nothing to say. Great swishes of static and silence.
    Helen was busy with the girls. She could not think about the rig because she could not think about it. And John was a handful. Cathy was having problems with schoolwork too. Helen made sure the spareribs were so tender the meat was falling off the bone. She had a case of beer and she made sure the kids were in bed early. It wasn’t for Cal exactly. It was so she could sit down opposite him and watch.
    This was not a meal they had together, because she’d eaten already. She’d eaten with the kids because she was hungry and because she preferred to just watch him.
    He would look down at the plate before he picked up the fork and he was still on the rig in that moment and he could feel the ocean under him, though it was a kind of motion he never noticed when he was actually on the rig. It was a motion he felt only on land, and usually when he was dreaming. He could feel the bed sway while he slept, but only on land. It was the absence of the motion that he felt.
    He picked up the ribs in his fingers, pulled the meat off, and he licked his fingers. He licked his thumb first and then his index finger and his ring finger, and he took his time. He was mostly absent while he ate, not aware, intent on the food. He put the bones on a saucer.
    Cal had two separate lives, and when he and Helen had the money together they were going to buy a convenience store with gas pumps. They had gone over it, and if they both worked at a business like that they were pretty sure they could make ends meet. They were certainly putting money away. But they didn’t speak of those plans. Because if they talked about Cal giving up the rig, they were admitting the risk. And it was something they had agreed never to admit.
    . . . . .
    Jane, November 2008
    JANE TAKES A bus into Toronto from the airport, and then a streetcar towards a hotel she remembers staying in before, but she goes the wrong way. She gets off and crosses four lanes of traffic, dragging her luggage. It is almost dark and very cold and she has a number of books in her suitcase. The sidewalks are full of