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the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
    I am shattered with clarity. I will myself back in time, twenty-four hours earlier, to my own unattended moment: I lie tangled in bedsheets. Simon stands at the foot of the bed, scowling. The day is warm already. The birds were particularly loud earlier, a disjointed cacophony that started just after four a.m. and that had, with sunrise, gradually become more shrill, more manic. They gather in our cherry tree where, too high to reach, the last of the tree’s abundant fruit has fermented. Birds, keening, trilling, squawking: drunk on cherry wine. It is an annual ritual, this mad song of the birds, one that announces that the fullness of summer has finally arrived. The heat is a balm to my sore back, and as I stretch awake, I am porous, content, gloriously limber, and free of pain. I can smell the dusty, sweaty, sweet cedar of Simon’s work clothes. He rubs his wrist.
    It’s sore.
    “It hurts,” Si says. “But it’s my last week. Shit.” He wavers, irritable and indecisive.
    “Eli’s not here,” I say. “We could play hooky together.”
    “Yeah, but Dave will kill me if I don’t come in today,” he says, resolving our brief discussion. He pulls on his shirt and heads for the coffee machine. If his wrist is still sore, he will take Friday off and give it a full day of rest before the gig.
    This is the moment I return to over and over again. It is so close I can smell it, touch it, taste it. It seems possible, if I think hard enough, to return to it. This moment, before Simon takes his cup of coffee and walks the dog up the lane into the forest; before he gets in his blue and white beater of a pickup truck with the creatively rigged ignition. Before he leaves this moment, this time around, I’ll grab his wrist, the one that isn’t sore, and pull him back into bed. I’ll say,
Don’t go. Don’t leave the house today. Stay here with me.

{ 7 }
WEIRDOS
----
    I MET SIMON AT Orangeville District Secondary School on the first day of grade 10, September 1984. This event has taken on a fabled quality in family lore, but the long-lasting ramifications of that first meeting were not immediately apparent, at least not to me.
    “That’s a great shirt,” Simon said by way of an introduction. He spoke across the width of the third-period history room. He was fourteen, a year younger than me, and his hair was cut in a goofy bowl shape. He was tall for his age, still in what his sister refers to as his Baby Huey stage, a boy grown suddenly to the size of a man. I glanced down at my new T-shirt; it was baggy, to cover up my general scrawniness, the white cotton printed with an 1950s Roy Lichtenstein comic book–style drawing on the front:
Wouldn’t it be wonderful,
a man in a bowler hat was saying to a well made-up lady,
if the world was full of weirdos?
It seemed an important question at the time.
    “Thanks,” I mumbled, a tangle of pleasure and embarrassment at being noticed, typical fifteen-year-old girl.
    “No, really,” Simon said. “It’s a great shirt.” He wasn’t shouting, but his voice was loud and resonant, and it cut through all the pre-class chatter. For one brief, mortifying moment, the entire class glanced my way. The blood in my cheeks came to a slow simmer. Who was this bozo, anyway? New guy, acting like he owned the place.
    “Quiet, class,” the history teacher, Ms. Sodonis, said as she entered the room, thankfully ending my moment of mortification. “Everyone take their seats.”
    From across the room Simon smiled and gave me a thumb’s up. Weirdo, he mouthed and sat down at his desk.
    Hmm. Simon was nice enough, I decided, but in a loud, crude, boy way. Prim and calculating—I was hoping to befriend his sister, Emily—I decided he was, as a boy, not to be overly encouraged but to be politely tolerated, an attitude that lasted maybe half a week, until the day Simon invited me