The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

always connected the two events, though she felt too foolish to confess it. The moment she stopped keeping watch over the night sky, he was lost. There were only the two children – my mother and her brother – and they died within three years of each other.
    Avery and Jean walked under the stars. The floor of the lobby was marble and ceramic tile; ornately braided stone archways led to the lift.
    – This is the first ceiling in Canada made of poured concrete, said Jean proudly. The paint is acid-proof with Spar varnish; the heavens will never crack or fade!
    – No one would ever guess the whole of heaven was here, said Avery, inside this stone building.
    – Yes, said Jean, it's like a secret.
    They had driven for hours together, but the night fields had been all around them and, between them, through the open car windows, the cool summer wind. Now in the tiny lift they stood cramped and awkward.
    Upstairs, Jean opened the door to moonlight and street-lamp light; she'd left the curtains open and the living room floor, covered entirely with plants, glowed, the light glinting off the edges of hundreds of jars filled with seedlings and flowers.
    – Here are some good examples of indigenous species, said Jean. And she thought, Here I am.

    They left Avery's car at the edge of the forest. The track was overgrown, not much wider than one's shoulders; how quickly the forest forgets us. There was little to carry, a paper bag of groceries, Jean's satchel. The low canopy of leaves pounded with the sound of the rapids. Mist was caught between the trees, as if the earth were breathing. The cabin was still some way from the Long Sault, yet even here the roar exploded. A handful of cabins had once stood where now only one remained. Inside, a wooden table, three chairs, a bed too old to be worth the trouble of moving. A wood-stove. The forest-shadow and the river-depth had penetrated the cabin for so many years there would always be dampness and the memory of dampness. The same day Avery had found the cabin, while assessing the site of the rapids, he had moved his gear from the hotel in Morrisburg, purchased bedding, a lantern, a supply of mantles.
    Stepping inside, Jean could hardly believe how loud the Long Sault boomed – it seemed an acoustical mirage – as if amplified by the small bare space. Immediately the coldness of the cabin and the smell of cedar and woodsmoke became inseparable from the crashing of the river. She felt she would either have to talk with her mouth against Avery's ear, or shout, or simply mouth her words. When Jean leaned toward Avery to speak, her hair touching his face felt to him unbearably alive.
    – After a time, said Avery, the sound becomes part of you, like the rushing of your own blood when you cover your ears.
    Avery lit the lamps. He built the fire. Jean unpacked their groceries; there was nothing fresh from Frank Jarvis's own garden, and the fact that there would never again be a garden and the reality of the almost empty General Store had unnerved her. They'd bought canned tomatoes instead, carried by ship all the way from Italy, and a long carton of pasta, a small jar of basil, and a shiny white cardboard box from Markell's, containing the same kind of sweet buns her father used to bring home to Jean when she was a girl. These she laid out on the wooden table.
    Because of the noise of the river, neither spoke much; instead they felt intensely their every movement in the small room. Avery watched Jean push her hair from her eyes with her forearm as she washed her hands at the sink. She saw his discomfort as he scanned the cabin for embarrassing traces – the grimy rind of soap by the kitchen sink, his mud-stiff trousers hanging from the back of the door.
    There was little room to move; the table was at the foot of the bed, only a patch of rug on the plank floor separated the kitchen from the bedroom. All was orderly, the axe in its leather sheath by the door, the Coleman water containers