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My husband has brought me a raffle ticket. "Here's something better than Tylenol," Robin says, letting the ticket drift down onto my belly. I'm in supta baddha konasana, the only yoga position I can do with my back the way it is, supine on my aqua mat, feet together, knees out to the side. The ticket is blue. It says "Win a Dream vacation!" I close my eyes. Painkillers work wonders for meditation: the focused detachment is already there.

***

What woman thinks her back contains, at its base, a bone on the brink of mutiny? Who knows that her body is going to let her down while doing something as mundane as bending for the laundry basket with her knees held straight? My piss smells like an old sachet of potpourri, someone's idea of a drawer freshener without the fresh. Ibuprofen 600 mg, 3 times a day. The Tylenol 3's are doing something different, making my bowels into sausages, a bellyful of bangers and mash. The pain still lives: a sequel to a bad horror flick and the masked man just won't die. I've resurrected my comfort shirt from the floor of my closet. It's an old man of a shirt, a long sleeved black cotton waffle long ago turned green-grey. It smells like my new urine. I haven't taken it off in days.

The worst part is, I can't sit down to work. The computer squats on the desk, mocking me. The icons sit perkily in two rows across the bottom of the monitor's screen. Your activities are being monitored. I imagine an eye, trained on my movements, a camera controlled by a psych hospital escapee. Or, less maliciously, one of the neighbours. The one across the street. The one named Jack.

We met at our building's penthouse party six months ago, back in the summer. With his silvering hair, narrow body and Irish accent, he ambled over on the rooftop patio and offered me a sausage roll.

"That's my little home over there," Jack said, pointing to the window across the street, one floor up from ours and directly across. He kept putting his tanned hand on my forearm, pressing his points. "All I need for myself." His eyes were the colour of the gel inside a hot & cold pack. "My lady friend's trying to decide if she has room for me in her life." He rolled his plastic blues. "'I'm a wee man,' I told her, 'I don't take up that much space.'"

I kept arching backwards to accommodate his lean.
"What should I do?"
I could smell the zinfandel on his breath. His black eyebrows were like marionettes.
"I thought I was too old for this," he said.

Robin was still downstairs in our apartment making the dip for the next party on our agenda. We were on our way to his firm's annual BBQ, a morale-boosting / bonding experience that would leave my face aching from artificial smiles and daiquiri mix. The children of the other lawyers would be running around, bumping into the food tables, giving Robin many opportunities to look at me with smug horror.

"The heart doesn't age," I told him. But Jack didn't hear me, or didn't acknowledge what I'd said. A comment like that, ignored.          "Are you from Sweden, love?" he asked me, his face an inch from mine. He was staring at my blonde hair as if it were a new invention. "Can I get you another glass?"

"No, thank you," I said. "My man's waiting for me." I could see Robin in the car, waving street-side, three stories down. Jack's hand was still on my forearm, pressing a ridge from the edge of the patio's railing into my flesh. He made all animation leave his face, and stared at me with that look of his.

"Another party," I explained.

"Your man," he said.

"Good luck," I said. I didn't know what else to say. The sun was nonchalantly setting over the treetops. Robin leaned on the horn.

"Hit on by an old Irishman again, eh?" Robin said, when I gave him the synopsis. I'd been to Ireland once, before meeting Robin. "Are you trying to make me jealous?"

The computer icons grin like perfect teeth.

***

Cruises have never intrigued me. Spending precious holiday time aboard a boat, captive with other sunburnt tourists, comparing bargains from the afternoon's port-of-call. Judging countries by their cocktails. Wearing bronze flip-flops, white bathing suits with beaded wraps, sparkled strappy gowns: all dressed up with nowhere to go. Robin used to share the same mindset. We honeymooned in Algonquin Park, and now we cycle the Gatineaus on Sundays, wearing co-ordinates from Patagonia and Eddie Bauer. Now, he's dropping a ticket into my lap: fourteen days on the Aegean Sea. Is it the firm that encouraged him to do this? Maybe he's getting desperate, now that we've entered week number two of my sacroiliac nightmare. Maybe he's reconsidering his refusal to have a baby, and this is his way to tell me, hey, what the hay, let's go on a vacation before we do it. I don't know. What makes a man buy a raffle ticket?

A week ago, the day before my back went out, Robin came home from the hair salon holding a bunch of stargazer lilies in front of his face.

"Is the haircut that bad?"

He lowered the bouquet. "I just wanted to, you know, say it with flowers."

Lilies smell like hotdogs to me, boiled wieners in a kitchenette. "I love them."

His ears were red. He wouldn't look me in the eye.

"What is it?" I asked. "The haircut?" I knew it wasn't.

It happened the last time, too. Shelley used the razor on his neck, and Robin got a boner under the navy cape. He came home and acted strange that day: he washed all the appliances, cooked a curry, asked me to go out for a drink on a Wednesday night. Then he told me, after a carafe at the Greek restaurant a block from home, what had happened. It wasn't the shaving, exclusively, he said, but the way she had let her breasts brush against the back of his head. I've seen this woman: red brush cut, long neck, woodpeckerish. I wasn't that worried. The flowers were a new strategy, though. I wanted the equation: how many fantasies equal a bouquet?

"It's not bad," I said. He flipped me his look, a washed-out beach look, a what-the-hell-does-she-mean-by-that kind of look. "A bit short on the sides, though."

He let his held breath out. "Yeah," he said, running his fingers through Shelley's creation. "She got a bit carried away."

***

Jack watched me from the edge of the penthouse's balcony. I could sense him watching me as soon as I reached the sidewalk. He saw me try to get into the car, and waiting while Robin leaned over to unlock it. He watched my left leg going into the car and he watched my right one flex and enter too. He saw my elegant pumps. He saw me being driven away at instant speed in a black BMW. He saw my hand, delicately waving from the open window, fingers fluttering as if they might have had cobwebs on them.

He didn't see anything. There was nothing to see.

***

We live in Ottawa. More specifically, a part of town called the Glebe. Even more to the point, the Glib. We own a condo in an old apartment block: brick and hardwood, big windowsills filled with plants. We eat Lebanese take-out and strawberries on Haagen-Dazs. We swelter in the summer and freeze in the never-ending winter. There are three weeks all year in which you can enjoy breathing.

(I want to bring a child into this?)

(I do.)

The place was more bearable when Sharon lived down the hall. We became friends right after Robin and I moved in. I used to take tea breaks at her kitchen table, get my Tarot cards read, read passages aloud from whatever Oprah book I was into at the time. Now there's a middle-aged realtor in there who painted her celery green walls back to beige.

The street is a cul-de-sac, with the Rideau Canal at its end. Robin skates to work in the winter, carrying his soft-sided briefcase in a backpack along with his boots. He is smug about it, self-congratulatory, sends photographs of himself skating as attachments in his e-mails. He hates that I'm a west coast girl who never learned. I don't understand it, Robin says. Every Canadian should know how to skate. Lacrosse is the national sport, I reply. And I know how to play. Although I don't. How useful is that, he murmurs. It can't get you to work. I don't bother reminding him that I work at home, doing on-line career consulting. He calls it "the blind leading the blind." Is that politically correct? I want to ask him. You could get sued for a statement like that.

Sharon pressured me into buying the slinky black wraparound dress. I can't wear it, she moaned. Buy it and I'll live through you. Six months along, Sharon felt like she'd be pregnant forever. I promised to loan it to her once the baby came. Easy access for the milk. Then she moved to Vancouver three months after Carly's birth, when her mailman of a husband got transferred to that climate of mould and moss. The dress became the item that was never worn but got tried on every time we went out. The last time I did that, Robin came out of the bathroom in a towel and fucked me with the back flipped up over my head. I held onto the bookshelf and the paperbacks inched their way towards my fingers. We were an hour late for his Christmas party: I left the dress on. That night we did it again, on the living room floor, boozy and inexact. "You see what we'd miss if we had kids," he said into my hair. We both smelled like smoke and Obsession from all those seasonal hugs.

Sharon tells me that the living room is the only place they do it anymore, since Carly sleeps starfished between them. I didn't tell him this. "Let me take this off," I said, and tugged at the bow alongside my left ribs. "No," he said, and grabbed my wrists. "I like you better this way."

***

After the yogic aspirin wears off, I examine the ticket again. Two weeks cavorting in the Greek islands. A dream vacation for the lucky couple.

I've been told all my life that I'm one of the lucky ones. The blonde hair, the strong constitution, the brain between thin-lobed ears. A smart choice, Robin Lefabre. A sensible man, studying law when I met him, and now on his way to junior partner in a downtown firm. A smart choice to love him. Did I have other options?

I never imagined myself with a man like Robin. He presented himself to me during the first month I was in the city, like an award I wasn't aware I'd applied for. I didn't even know I qualified. The usual courtship of movies and dinners ensued, a slow progression to the bedroom, a decent interval between engagement and wedding. I never wore Liz Claiborne until Ottawa, never a heel higher than the ground. Never, ever, makeup on Sundays. But these are the kind of things he notices. These are the kind of things he loves.

We look good together, I'll admit it, strolling along Bank Street with coffees, buying raspberries in the Byward Market, throwing extravagantly coloured leaves into one another's faces every fall. The leaves light the city up like flares. Warning, they say. You are about to enter a treacherous season. Warm up your shovelling muscles by raking us into piles. But sensible Robin draws the line at jumping in. He tells me there are hidden objects in there, waiting to hurt me. The children on every street he walks down in autumn get a lecture from him. A few steps back, I collect leaves to press in the dictionary and make the spiral sign at my ear: loony. Never saw the guy before.

***

When Sharon phoned this morning, I heard the baby in the background, playing with her ability to make sounds. "She's in her high chair," Sharon said, "talking to her Cheerios." Carly is nine months old, already pulling herself up at the coffee table, banging her head on the corners when she slips. I've reverted to the same stage now, I tell Sharon, hoisting my body onto its feet by using the furniture, not sure what to do once I get there. I feel like a mermaid, dragging my tail around, not meant for this side of the ocean. Everything below waist height is a mess: I drop something and it remains where it lands. Everything above waist height is in a shambles too, because I have used my limited standing time on other things. Staring out the window at the snow. Throwing out the lilies. Peering into the fridge and cupboards, looking for my lost appetite. And, early this morning, inexplicably, washing the black dress and hanging it over the shower rod. From wherever I am in the apartment, I can hear the water dripping onto the tiles. Little one-syllable drops. Oh. Oh. Oh.

***

Jack reminds me of my trip to Ireland. There, I felt exotic, and foreign, and curious. In other words, according to my own judgement, I was a traveller, not a tourist. I stayed at hostels; I stacked bricks of peat; I developed a taste for bacon-and-egg pie. One afternoon, I picked stones from a field with an old farmer. He asked me to the pub for a pint and I said yes. Travellers are willing to try almost anything.

In Ireland, history mingles with the moment as if the physicists are right: time is irrelevant. There are no signs to the standing stones, the ring forts, the ruined castles. You can picnic on corn chips and Pepsi in the beehive dwellings of Monks from the sixteenth century. You can drink stout while a bodhran entertains you by a peat fire, then get back in your SUV and ramble home. You can bring your brood to the pub for dinner and not worry about bylaws.

The drink with the farmer was simply a pint at the pub. But when I arrived ten minutes late, to find him at the bar, wearing his sports jacket, suede at the elbows, his greying hair combed back from his face, I nearly turned around and left, unnoticed. All that hope in his shoulders, the waiting, the raw edge of his newly shaven jaw. It was more than I had bargained for. Then he saw me, and motioned me over with his head. "Thought you'd gone back to Canada."

At the well on his land, we had shared a tin cup. He looked at me, hair to feet, and told me I should meet his sons. All the girls are gone to Dublin, he told me. There's no one for them to marry. I pictured the life we might have, that sea in the yard, the green fields stitched by stone fences, sheep and children following me through the mist. I felt my face go pink. He was looking at me again. His wife was gone to Galway, he told me. Shopping with the ladies. They'd think you were a sight, they would. My sons.

After our pints were empty I let him kiss me goodbye, on the cheek. I didn't ask about his family. I counted the ridges around his eyes when he smiled and told him I would see him the next morning in the field. Then, just like all the Irish girls, I caught the morning bus to Dublin.

Jack is different from the farmer in County Kerry, other than his age. More like a ferret, less settled in his skin. After that party, before this skeletal interruption, I have kept running into him in the neighbourhood, his child-size red backpack strung over his sinewy frame. He's helped me take the groceries out of the car, and a few times even carried the potatoes up the two flights of stairs. We talk about weather and plans and whatever I'm wearing: he's always handy with the compliments. Once I told him I'd been to Ireland, he became even friendlier, rattling off names of castles and mountains and islands "I'd be daft not to have seen."

When I told him I spent most of my time in the southwest coast, he shook his tinselly hair. "Come over sometime, love, and I'll show you what you missed."

Predictably, his gel-blue eyes flashing. Predictably, my face rushing with blood.

***

The neighbours upstairs wake me up nearly every night with their post-food-service, post-shooter couplings. Now, with my back the way it is, I can only lie there with three pillows beneath my knees, and listen. "You're gonna make me come, you fucking bitch." "You like it hard?" "Do you?" "Yes! Yes!" Robin sleeps with a pillow over his head and he's out in two minutes. I feel our bed shake with every thrust, feel the vibrations in my inflamed hips.

I'm a bit of a moaner too, at least when we go away. I wear the garters he bought, the heels; kneel on the bed with his hands on my hips and let my voice hang loose in my throat. But home is different. It's an old building. I stuff a corner of the duvet into my mouth, swallow my cries along with the taste of fabric softener. He laughs at the noise from above, saying it's a new relationship, that the novelty will wear off.

Today Sharon asked me, Doesn't it turn you on? As above, so below? I wish I could have said yes. But if Robin ever asked, "Who's your daddy?" I can think of only one reaction: hysterics.

What I said to Sharon, with sudden, hot tears, is this. Robin will never be a daddy. He doesn't want to become a family. He can't imagine dinner at a buffet restaurant, or staying at Howard Johnson's because the kids stay free. I didn't do the research. Anyone who knows him says he's always thought this way, but somehow I missed this little point in between the first date and the wedding. I'm afraid that he won't relent, and I'm afraid that I won't be happy, and I'm afraid that this problem I'm having now may be the most dramatic shift my pelvis will see.

***

One afternoon a few weeks ago, just before Christmas, Jack helped me carry an old washstand up the stairs. I'd found it at a flea market, and it was going to be my winter project. When we got inside the apartment, I offered him a blueberry muffin.

"I made them this morning. Robin and I got the berries in the summer, on our trip to see his folks." I rattled on. "Highway 7 is lined with wild blueberry stands. I counted seventeen."

"You're a regular Betty Crocker," he said, winking. "I might get fat with a girl like you around."

"How's your girlfriend then?" The lilt creeping in after only a minute now.

"Now which one would that be?"

I laughed, blushing. "The one who, you know, didn't know if she had enough space -"

"Ah, her. She didn't."

"I'm sorry."

"You've got a good wee memory, neighbour." He lifted a muffin from the plate I was still holding, and held it to his face. "A gift to the senses, you are." His eyes on me, a fleck of purple on his lip.

A comment like that. Ignored?

***

After Sharon hung up from our phone call, I thought about syllables, those little components of words babies say over and over, du du du, bo bo, revving themselves up for the language bit by bit. The sounds first, learning the way the mouth is held, the intention in the breath. All of this unexplained, just occurring with the greatest of intensity until one day - bam - a sentence, then another, then they're talking and there's no going back. Like learning to love. All those stutters, repetitions, until you get it right. Or is it more like washing your hair? Do it once and you've got it, repeat if necessary. Sometimes I wash twice, just because I can. I would give that up, for the thirty-second showers that mothers take.

When I get myself up from the yoga mat, I put the ticket on the fridge with our magnet of two cooks kissing. I notice how much snow has fallen since breakfast, and how the sky looks like it has plenty more to offer. I check the clock: an hour more to myself. Robin has gone to play racquetball with an associate from the firm, his regular Saturday appointment. I never imagined those words being a part of my daily vocabulary. They stick in my throat like a tortilla chip. Associate. Racquetball. The pain in my hip and lower back has eased a degree or two from the stretching - progress, however minor, for the first time since it happened. I take baby steps to the bathroom to run a bath. There's a note on the back of the toilet.

"Guess your back must be feeling better," it says. An arrow, drawn in orange highlighter, points to the dripping dress, a smiley face and a giant, confident R below it. "Meet you at the bookshelf."

***

This is how it will go. Jack will be out shovelling the walkway to his building tomorrow, the first day I venture outside.

"I thought you might've moved," he says, casually, his bare hands on the shovel turning the colour of ground beef. I've had the blinds pulled ever since my back went out. So he is keeping tabs! He catches my eye; I feel the heat from my face spread downwards.

"Been under the weather," I say. "And do you think I'd leave without saying goodbye?"

"Nothing serious, I hope?"

"Just a bad back." As soon as I say this, the ache intensifies above my pelvic crest. "You better watch yours, all this snow."

"Looks like we're in for another shiteload tonight." He's scraped down to the cement, piling the snow on either side of the narrow walkway. The path is a dark scar in the snow.

"Seems like it," I say. I look up at the grey-white sky, the sun muted down to the size of a moon. "But we're going to Greece soon, so I can't complain."

His eyebrows do their surprised ramblings. "Are ya now?"

"In a few weeks." I've got the ticket; it lies in my purse like a firecracker. The draw is not for another week. I hold my purse closer to my hip. "I'm off to buy what we need."

"Aahh. Sounds lovely. My old bod could use a trip like that."

I will book two tickets for a cruise, exact replicas of the ones that will be given to the person with the winning ticket. There are some things I'm willing to take chances on, and others that I'm not.

"It should be mandatory, given all of this." I stretch my arm out, palm up, sweep over the snow-filled yard.

Jack shakes his head, smiling sadly. "Some of us aren't so lucky."

"I'm not lucky, either," I say. "Unless having a Visa card counts."

Then I realize what I've just said, and blush yet again, worried that Jack will tell Robin I'm buying the tickets. But then I get taken into Jack's intensive gaze. I'm suddenly aware of how little it might take for everyone's luck to change. One little twist and every bone goes off kilter.

Eventually, because I am still an optimist, because I am not ready to manipulate more than a fake prize - not yet - I will leave through the untouched snow beside the sidewalk, scalloping it with my boots, like a trail of brackets behind me to hold my words. As I walk away, Jack will watch my bad back turn good, in a light that makes everything that isn't white seem bigger, everything coloured bringing painful relief.

I will feel Jack, watching me, his blue eyes staying on me until I round the corner. Children will be throwing snowballs. Their wet mittens and frozen cheeks will hurt to look at, but I'll look all the same. I've gotten good at pain management.

When I join the fight - what's another few minutes? - and make some of my own ammunition, I will hear Robin's voice in my head as I bend to scoop up snow: use your knees.