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Minna is mid-plié in Crispin's modern dance class when the power goes out. He leads them in some floor stretches, and then they sit in a circle around a plate of candles and share power outage stories. Minna stares at the floor, knees bent, soles of her feet touching, ankles pulled up to her crotch. Carol sits beside her, her patchouli and body stink stronger in the dark.

"I remember one time in the frozen food aisle at the supermarket," Carol says. "I thought to myself, now they're in trouble big time, I mean, that's a lot of frozen food to go bad."

"They've probably got insurance," Marie says. "Try explaining to your kids that they still have to do their homework. It's not like some kind of holiday. I'll bet all of you that Dan's got them making popcorn over the fire, like there's no school tomorrow. Now, he's the good cop, right? Because I'm going to get home and get out the flashlights and make them do their homework and go to bed."

Minna is thinking about two times in particular. The first, she was eight months pregnant with Lucy. Chad had bought a new snowboard and a season's pass to the mountain.

"What the hell, Chad?" Minna ripped a stack of bills off the bulletin board. "What about these, huh?"

"Those can wait." Chad ran his hand over the board. "The snow is perfect right now."

"Chad, there are priorities."

"Exactly."

"You're seventeen aren't you?" Minna flung the bills at him. "I mean, you're thirty-one, yeah, but inside, you're all of seventeen, right? Come on, tell me I'm right, because then at least I'd know what I'm dealing with here."

"You're killing me." Chad propped the board against the couch. "You want that?"

"You're killing me, Chad."

"Oh, the drama," Chad said

And then sudden darkness, the fridge shuddering silent.

"Then I guess we're killing each other," Chad said. Before Minna's eyes could adjust to the dark, he left. The power came on just seconds later. Minna put her hand to where he'd just been sitting. It was warm. He had been there.

Minna picks up one of the candles and pokes at the wax. Crispin is talking about the time he was in a gay bathhouse when the power went out. Minna glances at Marie. Her eyes dart from shadowed face to face, seeking someone who might purse lips in solidarity with her.

"The lights go out, and there I am," Crispin says, "when this enormous man steps in front of me with a dick the size of - "

"I got to go." Marie stands. She tugs her sweaty shirt. "Dan'll be bringing out the marshmallows by now. Got to go be the bad cop. 'Night everybody."

The other time Minna thinks of is when she went to pick up Chad at the police station in North Vancouver, four in the morning, roads deserted. Minna had taken a sleeping pill earlier and was groggy. She kept glancing in the rear view mirror to make sure she'd strapped Lucy in right. She even pulled off into Stanley Park to double check, but then decided against stopping when she thought she saw someone dart out from the bushes. She drove very slowly, marveling that she wasn't particularly angry at Chad.

"It was hardly enough coke for a line!" He screamed at her when he called. "These fucking pigs think I'm some kind of dealer! It wasn't even mine!" He pulled the phone away and hollered. "You hear that? It wasn't even mine!"

"Do we even have a lawyer?" Minna said.

"Just come get me, alright?" Chad hung up.

Minna drove slowly onto the Lion's Gate bridge, nearly stopping altogether when another car passed. And then, North Vancouver suddenly disappeared in front of her. She stepped on the brakes, stopping mid-span. The lights strung along the bridge cut out too, and for a moment it was as if she was magically suspended above the harbour, with nothing but the black waters below.

There was no traffic in either direction. She left Lucy in the car and went to the edge. The water was a roiling dark beast, far, far below. A woman had jumped four days earlier. Tourists from Montana watched her fall and then swam out and brought her in. She was alive when they pulled her out, but she'd died later, in hospital. Minna was pleased to discover that she had no urge to jump; no compelling desire to climb up and teeter precariously, although what a story that would make: Mother jumps to her death, leaves infant daughter in running car on bridge.

The wind drowns out the radio in the car, so Minna turns it off.

"That Marie," Carol says. "She's so uptight. Why does she even come?"

"Maybe she's trying to be less uptight." Minna grips the steering wheel. She keeps her eyes on the road, navigating the forest debris and garbage dancing in the wind. They pass a maintenance truck creeping along the shoulder, two workers in reflective vests walking behind, tossing downed branches into a chipper.

"I can't get used to how dark it is." Carol leans forward, peering out into the night. "It's never this dark in the city. Not even when the power goes out."

"Do you regret moving to the coast?" Minna says.

"No. Not at all." Carol sits back, cross-legged. "I want to raise my kids here."

Minna steers around a large cardboard box shimmying down the middle of the road.

"Do you miss it?" Carol says. "The city?"

It was Chad's idea to move to the Sunshine Coast, a forty-minute ferry ride from Horseshoe Bay, which is a half hour drive out of Vancouver. He said he'd get onto the teacher-on-call list there, although he'd just got onto the one in Vancouver and was only getting called out once every three weeks or so.

"I went up there for the day," Chad said. "The superintendent says there's loads of work."

"You went up there without telling me?" Minna sits Lucy in the playpen.

"I wanted to scope it out first."

"Without me? Without even telling me?"

Chad opened his arms, offering up their tiny West-end apartment, the walls lined with milk crates full of vinyl from Chad's recent days as a DJ.

"You want to bring a kid up in this shit hole? A nation of pedophiles right out our front door?"

"I will never understand why you moved to the West End in the first place." Minna shook her head. "You're so homophobic."

"God, Minna. It was a joke." Chad put heel to toe and crossed the length of the apartment like that, counting his steps. "Fags or no fags, this place is thirty feet long. We've got three humans living in a place that's thirty feet long."

"But I don't know anything about the Sunshine Coast."

"Then go. Go up there for the day. Go and come back and I'll be here to listen to how bad you want to move up there. When you get back, it'll all be about when."

"I could go tomorrow." Minna felt herself slowly opening to the idea. The coast, a ferry, all the graces found in small places. "Could you look after Lucy?"

"Aw, come on, Minna," Chad said. "You're the milk factory. Just take her with you, okay?"

Lucy was teething and newly toddling and full of a curiosity limited to all things perilous; staircases, railings, curbs, bodies of water, fire, strange animals, strange people, strange substances and anything that moved fast, be it escalators, skateboarders, food processors, trains.

Minna only got as far as the first bus stop in lower Gibsons. Back at the ferry terminal, Lucy had started screaming the moment Minna pulled her away from an unleashed dog with its lips curled back, hackles raised, the owner impervious as Minna cursed him and hurried onto the safety of the bus. Everyone else on the bus was so quiet. The quiet seemed larger than Lucy's screams, the rain on the roof, and the whoosh of the giant windshield wiper all put together. Minna didn't want to get off the bus so soon. She had not planned to get off yet. She was kicked off by a collective, disapproving psychic push.

Minna missed the next bus, which was two hours after the first, because she'd read the timetable wrong. Minna had not brought the rain canopy for the stroller, so they'd sat in a café the whole afternoon and didn't see what was up the coast at all. Lucy was happy; the regulars passed her around, feeding her sugar cubes and coffee creamers, and there was a box of sticky, old toys in the corner. Minna watched the foggy harbour, the rain pounding into the ocean, until a man with a briefcase and cell phone came in to pick up an order to go.

"Are you getting the ferry?" Minna asked.

He was, and so he gave them a ride, Lucy's very first ride ever in a car without a car seat, thus bringing to an end Minna and Lucy's first visit to the Sunshine Coast.

"I don't miss the city," Minna says. "I sometimes miss my friends, but none of them have kids, so I hardly saw them after Lucy anyway. Different hours from the beautiful party people. Babies and raves don't mix very well."

"I just can't see it." Carol laughs. "Someday you have to show me pictures, okay?"

"You'll laugh."

"Blue hair, lip ring?"

"And then some." Minna turns down the steep road to Carol's sister's place.

"I'll go get the kids." Carol knots her scarf. "You keep the car warm."

Inside, the living room is lined with candles, illuminating the interior like a chiaroscuro. Minna watches Carol pack her girls and Lucy into their coats. Carol kisses her sister on the cheek and ushers the children out to the car. Carol's eldest climbs in first.

"Auntie Lynn says Lucy is a demon child!"

Then her youngest. "She says Lucy's got ants in her pants!"

"I could've said the same for both of you when you were three," Carol says.

Behind Carol, Lucy is waiting to be lifted into the car. Minna can only see her blonde curls tousling in the wind, until Lucy stands on tiptoe and puts her face to the window. Minna waves. Lucy wiggles her fingers back at her.

"Mommy?" she asks as Carol buckles her into her car seat. "Is it going to be dark all night?"

"Dummy," says Carol's eldest. "It's always dark at night."

After they moved to the coast, Chad rarely came home until the middle of the night, if at all. He was in the loop, reborn into a different breed of beautiful party people: rural, chilled out, pot-smoking hemp fashionistas, margin-frolickers with cutting edge tastes in music.

"You wouldn't want to come," Chad said. "It's loud, lots of drugs. It's not your scene anymore."

The highlight of Minna's scene now consisted of Tuesday and Thursday mornings at Parent & Tot playgroup. All of a sudden Lucy had become un-curious about everything, and would start screaming when anyone approached them, holed up as they were in the corner by the door, never even managing to get their jackets off. Other than that, there was no scene that was any different from the diapers and clean-up and laundry and cooking scene in the city; only now the trip to the laudromat was a half-day affair involving buses that picked her up and dropped her off at the highway - a straight up or down half hour walk at the best of times and positively interminable when lugging laundry and child.

A downed pine tree blocks the road up to Carol's house. Her girls whine at Carol's suggestion that they climb through the branches.

"That's not safe, Mom!"

"Oh, come on," Carol says. "It'll be an adventure."

"But maybe it's not finished falling!"

"Turn your high beams on, Minna."

Minna does. The branches cast angry, blustery shadows.

"See?" Carol points. "There's a perfectly us-sized gap right through the middle."

"I don't know," Minna says. "Why don't you come home with us?"

"Oh, come on! Live a little!" Carol gets out of the car and runs through the gap in the branches.

"Mommy!"

"MOM!"

Her girls scramble into the front. Carol runs back through and flings her arms wide.

"Ta da! It's fine! Come on!"

The girls push each other out of the car and race ahead of Carol through the gap.

"Call me!" Carol hollers, and then disappears.

Lucy has houdinied out of her car seat and is now climbing into the front.

"Where'd they go, Mommy?"

"They vanished. Get back into your seat, okay?"

"What's vanished?"

"When you disappear, like magic."

"But where did they go?" Lucy is about to cry. "Where are they?"

"Home, Lucy." Minna leans into the back and refastens Lucy's straps. "They didn't really vanish."

Chad didn't really vanish either. Minna found out from one of the moms at Parent and Tot that he was staying with some girl named Twilight who lived in one of the shacks on the land way up the mountain where the outdoor raves were held every month.

"So you two split up?" she said one day, over Lucy's screams. This other mother was big, tall, with wide hips and pendulous breasts and a pregnant belly her little boy called 'bump.' Minna wanted the woman to open her arms so she could step in and be embraced by the breast milk honey warmth of this homemade soup momma, this woman who had flung her three children's three fathers out of her life for various Chad-like infractions.

"I don't know."

"You know. Don't bullshit yourself."

Minna tried to remember the woman's name, but she couldn't. It was one of those names, like Twilight. Maybe Sky, or Dawn, or Rain. The woman's little boy patted her belly.

"Go home, bump."

"Yeah, we should." She wrote her number, but not her name, on a scrap of paper and gave it to Minna. "Call me. We can bitch."

Minna's road winds up the mountain. If she were to follow it all the way to the top, past where it becomes gravel, she would come upon the brightly painted shacks of Glory Farm. Twilight's is predictably turquoise, with a bright pink porch, where Chad deejays for the raves and sells the pot he and Twilight grow in a secret patch a ways more up the mountain. Minna only goes to Glory Farm when she needs money. The last time she was up there, Twilight spun Lucy around by her hands.

"That can dislocate a kid's shoulders you know," Minna said.

"Yeah?" Twilight said. "I never met a little person that happened to, and I've hung out with a lot of little people." She put Lucy down. Lucy thrust her hands up.

"Again!"

Chad came out with a wad of cash and walked Minna to the car.

"If the car starts acting up, let me know," he said. "There's a guy up here who can fix it, no problem."

"Lucy!" Minna called. "Time to go."

"Listen," Chad said. "Twilight and I would really like for Lucy to spend some time up here, with us."

"Call me."

"I mean, on a regular basis. We kind of think Twilight is pregnant."

"Call me." Minna buckled Lucy into her seat.

"Yes? No? Fuck you Chad, how dare you, Chad? Get a lawyer, Chad? What, Minna?"

"Look," Minna started the car. "I said call me. I mean call me."

Lucy is asleep when Minna turns onto their gravel driveway. Suddenly, something sweeps into her headlights and cracks the windshield. Minna slams the brakes. She puts a finger to the crack that now snakes menacingly across the glass. She will have to make a visit to Glory Farm to get the money to fix that. She glances up at the swaying trees and then gets out of the car.

There's no offending branch lying in front of the car. There's an owl, a barred owl, on its back, its dark eyes blinking. It doesn't move when Minna bends to pick it up, but it is still breathing. She holds it to her chest and turns in a circle, not sure what to do. She sets it down at the foot of a towering cedar and takes a step back. It's not blinking anymore. She picks it up again, brings it to the car, wraps it in one of Lucy's doll blankets and sits in the driver's seat with it in her lap.

She'll make up a box for it on the porch. She'll give it a tin of tuna. Do owls eat tuna? It will sleep the night, and in the morning she'll tell Lucy about the owl she found, but when they go outside to marvel at its majesty, its mystery, it will have flown away and Minna will comfort Lucy in her disappointment. Maybe they'll hike up to Glory Farm through the woods, hooting for the owl to come out, come out, wherever you are.

Minna glances back at Lucy and thinks she should wake her, so she can see the owl now, before it flies away.

"Lucy," she whispers. "Wake up."

Lucy lets out a puff of air in her sleep. As Minna unwraps the owl from the blanket, it stops breathing. Minna sits there, the car idling, fingers lost in the feathers, until the car runs out of gas and the winds have calmed into dawn.