The Better Wife

Chapter One: The Letter

The canola came off light that year, and Erik Gunnarson knew it before the combine finished the first pass. He could feel it in the way the header floated over the swaths, in how little the hopper filled, in the thin dry rattle of the seed going up the auger. Eleven bushels an acre on the west quarter. Fourteen on the home quarter, where the soil was better. The hail in July had taken the rest, one twenty-minute storm out of the southwest that had turned four months of work into green pulp and then, when the sun came back, into brown paper.

By the third week of October the fields were bare, the stubble standing gray-gold and brittle, and the sky over that part of Saskatchewan had gone the color of an old nickel and stayed there. Erik walked the home quarter every afternoon whether there was reason to or not. He checked the soil probes he'd bought secondhand from a retiring farmer near Brunden, four slim stakes wired to a solar box, and he wrote the numbers in a coil notebook that nobody, including him, would ever read again. Moisture. Temperature. Conductivity. Numbers were restful. Numbers did not require him to say anything.

The house sat in a shelterbelt of caragana and diamond willow his grandfather had planted in 1961, a two-story frame house with white siding that had gone chalky and a porch that needed a new joist on the east side. Beyond it, the land went flat to the horizon in every direction, so flat that a grain truck three miles off looked like it was moving along the top of a table. In summer the flatness felt like freedom. In winter it felt like the inside of a bell.

Sonja was in the kitchen when he came in, which meant she was standing at the counter with a dish towel in her hands, not drying anything. She'd been up when he left at eight. She was still in the same clothes, a gray sweatshirt of his and thick wool socks, her dark hair pulled back with an elastic that had lost its stretch.

"Probes are reading dry," he said. "Two inches down it's like flour."

"Mm," she said.

"There's soup. From yesterday."

"I had some."

He looked in the pot on the back of the stove. The level was exactly where he'd left it, a ring of dried fat marking the line. He didn't say anything about that. He'd learned not to. There was a whole vocabulary of things he had learned not to say, and it had grown so large in the last year and a half that most evenings there was almost nothing left over to talk about.

Eighteen months. That was the measure of it. The second one had come at nineteen weeks, in February, and they had driven to Saskatoon in a ground blizzard with the wipers freezing and Sonja not making a sound in the passenger seat, one hand flat against the window like she was holding the world at arm's length. After that she had put the cello in its case, snapped the four latches, and slid it into the closet under the stairs. That was in March of last year. The case had not come out again.

They were both thirty-eight. They had been married nine years. He still loved her — he was certain of that in the way he was certain the sun would come up, without needing to look at it — and he thought she still loved him, though the evidence had grown circumstantial. She washed his work clothes. She left the porch light on when he was out late in the yard. Once, in August, she had come up behind him at the sink and put her forehead between his shoulder blades and stood there for maybe fifteen seconds, and he had gone still as a spooked deer, afraid that any movement would end it. It ended anyway. She went upstairs. He finished the dishes.

He was cooking that night — pork chops, potatoes, the frozen corn from two summers ago — when the dog they didn't have would have barked. Instead it was the gravel that told him. A vehicle coming up the approach, tires crunching, slow and deliberate. Nobody came up the approach in late October at six in the evening. Not unannounced.

Erik went to the window over the sink. A sedan, dark blue, clean in a way no vehicle in that country was clean, with a small decal on the driver's door that he couldn't read from the house. It stopped precisely square to the porch steps, as though someone had measured. The headlights stayed on for a three-count after the engine cut, then went out together.

"Are you expecting anybody?" he asked.

Sonja was in the doorway. He hadn't heard her come. "No," she said. But she didn't look surprised, and later, much later, he would go back to that moment over and over and pick at it like a scab.

The woman who got out of the car was in her middle fifties, in a charcoal coat that hung correctly, with short pale hair and a leather folder tucked under one arm. She climbed the porch steps and knocked three times, evenly spaced, and when Erik opened the door she smiled at him with her mouth.

"Mr. Gunnarson," she said. "Erik Gunnarson."

"That's right."

"My name is Dr. Greta Moberg. I'm sorry to arrive at supper." She glanced past him, into the house, at the stove, the pot, the two plates on the counter, and her eyes moved over them with the mild interest of a woman reading a bus schedule. "You've had a difficult harvest."

"Everybody has."

"Yes. Everybody has." She said it as though agreeing to a fact she found pleasing. "May I come in? This shouldn't take long and it isn't a thing to do on a step."

He should have said no. He thought about it later a hundred thousand times, the way you think about the second when the truck starts to slide and the wheel goes light in your hands. But she had a federal look about her, and there is a reflex bred into people who farm on land that depends on programs and permits and inspectors, and the reflex is to be reasonable.

He stepped back. She wiped her shoes on the mat, four strokes each, and came in.

They sat at the kitchen table, the three of them: Erik with his back to the window, Sonja at the end with her hands in her lap, Moberg across from him with the leather folder squared to the edge of the table. She refused tea. She refused water. She opened the folder and took out a single sheet of heavy paper and slid it across.

There were two seals on it. One was embossed, raised under his thumb, and one was printed in a green ink that shifted when the sheet tilted. The letterhead said GOVERNMENT OF CANADA and under that, in a smaller face, OFFICE OF STRATEGIC CONTINUITY, and under that, centered: THE LUMEN INITIATIVE.

He read it twice. The sentences were short and the words were ordinary and their arrangement made no sense.

You have been selected for participation in the Lumen Initiative. Participation is not voluntary. You will be relocated to an undisclosed facility for a period of no longer than several months, commencing on or about 9 January. The purpose, methods, and location of the program are classified under national security provisions. No appeal process exists. Failure to comply constitutes an offence.

At the bottthere was a signature that was only a scrawl and, beneath it, a line of numbers.

"This is a joke," Erik said.

"It isn't," said Moberg.

"Selected for what? Selected how? I grow canola." He heard his own voice climbing and made himself stop. "There's nothing here. It doesn't say anything. Several months — what does that mean, several? Three? Nine?"

"No longer than several," she said, and smiled again, that same brief mouth-only smile, like a light switch being tested.

"I have four hundred and eighty acres and two thousand bushels in the bin and a bank in Brunden that would love an excuse. I can't leave in January."

"The bin will keep. January is a quiet month for you." She folded her hands. "Mr. Gunnarson, I understand that this is unwelcome. I want to be clear that I am not here to argue with you, because there is nothing to argue. The letter is not an offer. I'm here because the Initiative prefers that participants hear certain things from a person rather than from paper."

"What things?"

"That you will be well treated. That you will not be harmed. That your property will be protected in your absence and your obligations suspended." She tipped her head very slightly toward the end of the table without looking. "And that your wife will be cared for."

Sonja had not moved. Erik looked at her and felt a spike of pure disbelief — she was going to say something, surely, she was going to stand up and put this woman out of the house — and Sonja looked back at him with a calm, level attention he hadn't seen on her in a year and a half, and said nothing at all.

"Cared for," Erik repeated.

"Ninety minutes to Brunden," Moberg said. "Longer when the grid road drifts in. Last winter, according to the highways record, this stretch was impassable for eleven days in February and nine in March. Your nearest neighbour is Agnes Lofgren, who is seventy-nine and has a hip. Your brother is deceased. Mrs. Gunnarson's parents are in Manitoba, both in care. Mrs. Gunnarson does not currently drive." She recited it without inflection, and each item landed on the table like a coin. "A woman alone in this house for several winter months, with her medical history, would be a liability the Initiative is not willing to accept."

Erik's mouth had gone dry. "Her medical history."

"So we provide a domestic companion," Moberg said. "Standard protocol."

The furnace clicked and began to blow. Outside, the wind had picked up and was working at the loose piece of eave over the porch, and the sound was the sound of a fingernail tapping.

"A what?"

"A domestic companion. For her wellbeing."

"You're going to put somebody in my house."

"I'm going to ensure your wife is not alone." Moberg reached into the folder, produced a small card, and set it precisely beside the letter. "A technician will attend within the week to install monitoring and communication equipment. That's so that you can speak with her while you're away, and so that if she falls on the stairs in February someone knows about it. You'll find that reassuring later, even if you don't now."

"Who is it? A nurse? Do they live here? Where do they sleep?"

"Those questions will resolve themselves."

"That's not an answer."

"No," she agreed pleasantly, and stood, and buttoned her coat. "Mr. Gunnarson, may I say something not in the script? You look like a man who has been holding a door shut with his shoulder for a long time. In my experience that man is usually relieved when someone else takes the weight, though he doesn't say so out loud, and he never says so on the first evening." She turned to Sonja and said, "Mrs. Gunnarson. It's good to meet you at last."

At last.

Erik felt the phrase go through him like cold water down a collar, and by the time he'd registered it Moberg was at the door, and by the time he got up she was on the steps, and by the time he got to the porch the headlights had come on and the sedan was turning in the yard, unhurried, its tires printing careful arcs in the gravel.

He stood there in his socks until the taillights dropped away over the rise a mile off. The cold came up through the boards. When he came back in, Sonja was reading the letter, holding it flat on the table with both hands, and her face had an expression he couldn't name.

"They can't do this," he said.

"There are seals on it, Erik."

"Seals don't mean anything. Anybody can print—" He stopped. He picked up the card. It was matte white and it said only DR. G. MOBERG and a telephone number with an area code he didn't recognize. No department, no address, no email. He turned it over. The back was blank.

"At last," he said. "She said it was good to meet you at last."

"She was being polite."

"That's not polite, that's—" He rubbed his face hard with both hands. "Sonja. Say something real to me."

Sonja looked up. Under the kitchen light her eyes were very dark and very steady, and for a moment he had the disorienting sense of being examined by someone taking inventory.

"The chops are burning," she said.

They were. He got to the pan and got it off the element and stood there with the smoke rising around him, and outside the wind kept tapping at the eave, patient as a visitor who knew the door would open eventually.