Read The Find for Free Online Page B

small, his lips tight.
    â€˜I’m sorry for my part in it. I just reacted… I didn’t mean to hurt you.’ Ignoring her, he turned away and joined the line into security. Colin appeared, waved, and pausing to raise a hand, followed suit.
    Why on earth these playground games? she thought, furious all over again. She could be dwelling on the insult of it: I notice you screwed someone else so what about me? But really, who cared? And now what? Would Mike tell Colin on the way home? If so, would Colin tell her he had been told? How far would it all go? How much of her attention was it going to take? She strode through the automatic doors, back outside.
    Cars crawled by, dropping and collecting passengers; she crossed and made for a bench in a small garden area by the parkade: a square pond, some dwarfed conifers and a box of orange begonias: an odd combination, habitat-wise. A small, vivid green frog, Hyla regilla , sat close to the edge of the pond; its whole body, glistening wet, beat with a tiny pulse. She slipped on her sunglasses. Overhead, plane after plane carved up the sky.
    Before long, she would be up there, and then down, out and through to the outside world again, breathing real air even if it was thick with fumes, and climbing into her own car.
    â™¦ ♦ ♦
    Once Calgary was behind her, she stopped for gas and called home. Soon she was on Highway 9; to either side stretched broad, flat fields with their swathes of stubble and rich brown earth, the occasional groups of staring cattle. It appeared to go on forever, but forty minutes later came the familiar surprise: the road’s sudden plunge into an increasingly arid, meandering canyon. The town itself, a straggle of dino-themed hotels, malls and campsites was an irrelevance soon left behind and she drove on and out into a windswept landscape where low grasses and sages had bleached to silvery green and beige, studded here and there with yellow flowers. Prickly pear still bloomed, and on each side of the river was a narrow but lush strip of cottonwood and alder, their foliage just on the turn.
    Home , Anna thought, finally forgetting everything else, and soon she was on the driveway and approaching the cream clapboard house. Her mother had chosen and then decorated it when finally she’d agreed that life would be more pleasant for her (she refused to say easier) — if they lived together again.
    The door was unlocked and the smell of good food cooking filled the house. A note from Janice, their careworker cum housekeeper, mentioned lasagne and that salad dressing needed to be made. Anna found her mother dozing on the back porch, her face in shadow beneath a huge straw-brimmed hat. After all the places she had been, it was sweet to pull up the other wicker chair and sit there a few moments, watching the gentle movement of her mother’s breath. Stuffed between her leg and the chair was a sketchbook, and to the side on the table were a pile of magazines, a jar of pencils, water, pills, the wind-up radio she insisted on using, the phone and one of the photograph albums from her room. Between the hat and her white-framed Jackie O sunglasses her face was more or less invisible. She was wearing a paisley print blouse in blue and turquoise, and a pair of the stretchy pants she had taken to of late because they were easy to deal with in the bathroom. She seemed smaller than ever, though her hands, which lay curled in her lap, were too big for the rest of her and, with their swollen, shiny knuckles and curled fingers seemed almost to belong to some other kind of being. Despite her own ingenious attempts to escape and the mercies of technology, she was increasingly trapped in her body. Yet she never complained. For some reason which was not simple pity, Anna found herself in tears as she leaned in under the hat to kiss her mother on the cheek.

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    GLASS AND TINTED CONCRETE: part warehouse, part church, the museum was a