Except for a mother and her twin boys, I was alone on the platform at Kipling. The kids were probably about three or four and had curls like apricot foam haloing their baseball caps. At first, I thought the woman had a bad cold. Her face looked blotchy. She leaned against the wall, staring at her feet. She had one of those knotty bodies that put you in mind of trailer camps and empty Budweiser cans full of bullet holes.

I was coming from a session with my therapist in which I hadn't mentioned the fight with Matthew. Instead, I told Leila I thought she was too cold and detached to help me. She burst into tears. It wasn’t the result I’d anticipated. I knew she was touchy but I thought she’d get mad and tell me there was no point then in continuing what she liked to call “our work.”

At exactly 8:17 that morning, shoving his arms into his jacket sleeves, Matthew had called me a callous bitch. I couldn’t speak. I was seriously wondering, Am I a callous bitch? On the subway, all the way to Kipling, I kept hearing his words. But as I got off the train, it hit me that I wasn’t the dead center of our universe. I mean, don’t even try to talk to Matthew about torture or the Taliban or thousands of kids dying in the ghettos of North America. He’ll yawn and start hunting for our copy of TV Guide. But slip Evita! into the Blue Ray and watch him blubber.

As I climbed the steps to Leila’s office, I felt prickles on the back of my neck. It’s so like me to let anger swell up until I explode at the wrong person, like Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face because the sun was in his eyes. The sun’s always in my eyes. That’s an insight I actually got from Leila so maybe seeing her wasn’t a total loss.

A classic case of transference, she’d said, blowing her nose. (For some reason, it sounded to me as if she’d said “transparence.”) Through the tissue, she listed all the caring things she’d done with her life. The list was impressive. She belonged to Amnesty International and wrote letters every Thursday night. She was a member of Therapists Without Borders and supported therapy work in war zones. She volunteered weekly at a soup kitchen. She drove cancer patients to their radiation appointments. What the hell had I ever done? To her credit, she didn’t ask me, but I was asking myself. All I could think of at that moment was that once I took brownies to the lady next door because she had gout and couldn’t get out. Other than that, I couldn’t think of a single unselfish thing I’d ever done. I wanted to talk with Leila about this, but our time was up.

The train clattered into the station and the woman leaning on the wall looked startled. She bent over to pick up the handles of an enormous bag I recognized as coming from Honest Ed’s dollar store. Cracks fissured the plastic, dragged open by the weight of all she carried. I thought she might have everything she owned in that bag.

She slouched toward me, her twins lumbering behind on short chubby legs, their short chubby arms flapping as if they might loft themselves above all the misery dragging their mother down.

The three of them sat opposite me. She wore a light coat, badly pilled and worn too thin for the wintry weather that had settled over Toronto in early November. The boys too seemed inadequately dressed, but their windbreakers and jeans looked newish and clean. They perched on either side of their mother, who slumped over her knees, her head supported on her hands. One twin patted her back in the awkward way small children mimic sympathy. Their mother didn't react. The boy kept asking, "What's wrong, Mommy?" A rivulet of snot drooled from one nostril. He didn’t seem to notice.

His brother said in a quavery voice, "Where are we going?"

I studied the freckles splashed across their belly-white faces, trying to jog my memory. Those splatters looked familiar. When something should be obvious but it doesn’t occur to you immediately, when it hits you, you have to think you’re an idiot.

It was Carol. (And who names his dog after an ex-girlfriend? Matthew, that’s who.) Carol’s a Dalmatian mixed with Chow and she’s covered with splotches pretty much like the muddy splats scattered across the boys’ noses. My dog-authority friend said you couldn’t brew up a more anti-social combination than Chow and Dalmatian. I’d reported this to Matthew, as if the information might mean anything to him. “That isn’t information,” he’d said. “That’s prejudice.”

At that moment, I was dripping blood and he was bandaging my hand. “Prejudice?” I’d said. “Am I bleeding? Or is that just my opinion?”

Glancing at the time, I saw that in less than fifteen minutes Matthew would enter the restaurant. I knew the sour face he would pull because I wasn't there. Imagining him repeatedly checking his watch, I grew anxious. It was his habit to greet me by calculating the precise number of minutes I'd kept him twiddling his thumbs. “Let’s see,” he’d muse. “Eleven forty-five? Wasn’t that the time we agreed on?” Agreed on was something of an exaggeration. Matthew set the time for all our meetings—dates—appointments—whatever. I simply concurred because, after all, his time is valuable and mine isn’t.

“And now?” he’d say, pinning me with those near-black eyes. “Twelve-oh-eight. Twenty-three minutes I’ve been sitting here when I could have been doing something productive. That is, if I’m not mistaken.” He was never, of course, mistaken.

And here I was, making him wait again. I never showed up on time, maybe never in my life. Even though I'd known my appointment so far from mid-town would make it impossible to meet him at noon, I hadn't yet told him I was seeing a therapist. Matthew regarded analysis as somewhat less sound than reports of the Virgin Mary materializing in pizza.

We usually lunched together at a neighbourhood bistro on the days he planned to work late on his book or on the next day's lecture. Matthew had always been conscientious about giving me a fair share of his attention, perennially in short supply since his was a leading voice in linguistic anthropology. Leila had often suggested I suffered from envy of his celebrity.

"Have you ever completed anything?" she'd asked me.

I'd had difficulty settling on a career. Or maybe settling on anything. Matthew had finally stopped asking me to marry him, although that might have been because he too had come to doubt the possibility of our ever living together compatibly. Whether that realization had discouraged him or my refusal to commit had done the trick, I knew my constant waffling exasperated him.

In graduate school I'd studied art history but dropped out when I realized I couldn't spend my life in a museum or an art gallery. So I took up painting, but the instructor advised me early on to return to my day job. Next I'd tried pottery but scoliosis kept my back from bending gracefully to the wheel. And my pots all listed to starboard.

After my pottery ambitions crumbled, I'd enrolled in graduate school in English with plans to teach at the university level. Holding office hours, however, incinerated my interest in pedagogy. Students, who from the lectern seemed relatively bright, routinely asked me questions that left me fizzing like a shaken can of Coca Cola. By that time Matthew and I were getting serious. When I complained that once again I was at a loss for what to do with my life, he'd said for the first time, "So why don't we get married?"

I admit that my first reaction was that this was something I could do. Maybe we'd have kids and all the nagging questions about my career would go away for eighteen years. I did love him, after all. It didn't matter to me that he was fifteen years older. I thought he was everything I wanted to be, if I ever grew up. But now, after four years, I believed that, in his view, I was little more than hired help, a not very competent someone to attend to the irksome trivia of his existence. His proposals had taken on the patina of a job offer.

Even so, we might have overcome our differences if hadn’t been for Carol. When she’d bitten me for the fifth time, I contemplated finding my own apartment. Matthew caught me scanning the listings and I felt my heart sink when he shrugged and, without a word, went into the kitchen.

“So you’re choosing her over me,” I whined. He didn’t reply. A few minutes later, I heard the apartment door close.

"Arriving at Runnymede, Runnymede Station."

The woman sitting across from me stood up and turned to face her little boys. Static electricity rippled up my spine. She was about to abandon them. Their expressions echoed my panic. She turned away from them, toward me, and noticed I was staring at her. Paralysis set in. A moment of indecision, I saw in her eyes. I wanted to tell her, Lady, do I know what that’s like. But she sagged back into her seat and turned her head away from the twins.

“Are you all right?” I said. And if she isn’t? What could I do about it? I made barely enough money to rent the apartment I’d checked out the afternoon before, a dreary little hole above Richmond. Working temp jobs as a secretary, I made barely enough to consider leaving Matthew. The landlady had said, “It’ll go fast. If you want it, better take it now.”  I mumbled something about needing to talk it over, and fled. Without Matthew’s income, I couldn’t help anyone, not even myself.

The woman shot me a perfunctory smile. For the first time, the boys seemed to notice me.

Would you like a puppy? I thought. A nice biting puppy to take your mind off your worries about your Mum?

It all could’ve gone differently, much as anything could. Suppose she had leaped out. Those two darling little boys would’ve started wailing and I’d have been alone with them. Okay, there were other passengers on the train but none of them seemed particularly concerned or even interested. There was a middle-aged woman, reading Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother, the irony of which perhaps was escaping her. Two men in business suits hunched over an iPad, murmuring softly, no doubt from fear that one of us would steal their terrific moneymaking idea. An elderly man dozed, his cane teetering precariously next to him. Two black schoolgirls giggled up front, their heads together and their backs to us. I wouldn’t have counted on any of them to rise to the occasion if these little boys were deserted.

If they’d been left, I would’ve had to make a decision. It was too much to ask. If that decision—the honorable one—the one Leila would’ve made in a nanosecond—slowed me up, I’d lose Matthew. He’d had it with me, I was pretty sure. Not arguing with me over the ads for apartments spoke louder than anything he might’ve said. One more little push from me and I’d be out the door.

The schoolgirls jumped up and flung themselves down the steps. The doors closed behind them.

I turned toward the front of the car, wondering if I could move to another seat without calling attention to myself. But what excuse could there be for such an obvious attempt to get away from a difficult scene? I was already close to the door, so I couldn't pretend I needed to be ready to get off at my stop. What a wuss, I told myself. Just move. But I couldn’t make myself move.

Matthew contended that I thrive on dissent, foolishly imagining that arguing could lead to harmony. "Quarreling," he would say, "doesn't change anything." This remark produced nearly unbearable anguish in me. "What then?" I remember screaming through his closed study door. "Just please tell me what will change anything?"

"You," Leila explained, in a tone she might have used on one of the twins. "That's all anyone can change in this world. You have to take responsibility for yourself."

It wasn't counsel I knew how to follow. It almost seemed as if, when Matthew grew serene, I descended into hysteria. Or perhaps it was that whenever I descended into hysteria, he became serene.

Case in point: I'd made a prawn risotto the night before and Matthew had washed the dishes. His investment in chores always struck me as measured. Secretly, I suspected him of consulting a calculator that spit out the fair-minded number of minutes he should contribute to our household.

That morning I'd gone into the kitchen and spotted my cast-iron frying pan full of water. "I was soaking it," he explained.

I pointed out the orange blot on the white sink and the rust coating the pan.

He said, "What would it cost to replace it, Nicky? Is it really worth getting this upset over?"

"I've asked you and asked you not to leave this pan wet, Matthew. Are you too lazy to spend a few minutes scrubbing it? I scrub it, you know. And when I get it clean, I put it on the burner to dry. So it won't—duh!—rust! Well that was a frigging waste of my time, wasn't it. But, hey, my time’s worthless, right? So no biggie.” Carol dashed into the kitchen, standing at Matthew’s side and growling. “Look at her, would you?” I demanded. “She hates me.”

Matthew went to the hall closet and took out his overcoat. He stopped at his study for his briefcase. I pursued him. "Of course it not a problem if it's my time wasted," I told his back. "The exalted Dr. Matthew Ingram can't be expected to waste his time cleaning a stupid pan. He's far too important!" Carol barked excitedly and started nipping at my legs. I kicked her.

Matthew turned, his eyes fully black. “Don’t you ever kick that dog. Don’t ever kick any dog.”

“She was biting me, Matthew!”

“I don’t care. She’s a dumb animal. You, putatively, are in control of yourself. You presumably understand what is going on here.”

"Mommy! Please! I want to sit there!" Across the aisle, the larger twin was trying to crawl into his mother's lap but her purse blocked his way. She didn't shift the pocketbook, she just continued watching me. What terrible thing had happened to her? Cancer? A parent dead? Her boyfriend gone? Had the bank informed her that her last nickel had vanished from her account? In some sense, I knew that I wickedly envied her. Her grief made her real, substantial. The enormity of it made her, in my eyes, weirdly magnanimous.

"Arriving at Ossington, Ossington Station."

She stood up. The boys each took hold of a sleeve of her coat and together they hobbled from the train. I felt torn. Shouldn't I run after her? I could offer to entertain the children for a bit while she pulled herself together.

Sure. A brain tumor. Take a few minutes to collect yourself.

Anyway, Matthew would be annoyed if I left him cooling his heels while I played Mother Teresa.

The doors closed and, as the train sped forward, my gaze dragged away from the stooped woman trudging across the platform, her crushed little boys dangling from her sleeves.

It could have happened that way. Three drowning people sinking below my sightline. No longer my problem, even hypothetically. But few things in life are that easy. Bodies are always washing up on the shore.

The woman did fix her dead eyes on me. She looked as if some violent wind had clawed everything out of her and left behind only the husk of a mother. I ached to comfort her unhappy infants. But instead I sat with my purse in my lap, my ankles modestly crossed, my gaze averted.

Matthew and I had talked recently about expanding from a couple into a family. But he had grown a bit wiser since offering to cure my career angst with an engagement ring. "My mother," he'd said, "tried to fill up her life with children. It doesn't work."

He had six siblings, five of them alcoholics. In his sophomore year, Matthew had come home from high school to find his eighteen-month-old sister wrapped up in yarn like a top prepared to spin, his mother crumpled on the sofa, grinning myopically.

"Pills," he said. "She lost the last baby in the fifth month of pregnancy, thank god. They advised her not to have any more. I wish they'd done that six kids sooner." I noticed that as the eldest, he had excluded himself from this post-birth abortion fantasy.

"Arriving at Spadina, Spadina Station."

The twins' mother lurched to her feet. She wheeled around to face her little boys, her expression warning them to stay in their seats. Without moving from the bench, the children cried, "Mommy! Where are you going?"

Turning to me, she begged, "Take them. You look like a good person. Please—just take them."

"I can't take them. And you shouldn't talk like that. You're scaring them half to death."

The train slowed and stopped at the platform. "They're good boys. You'll see." The doors opened and the woman, casting one last longing look at her babies, darted out.

I yelled at her fleeing back: "Stop! Wait!"

The wailing twins collapsed into one another's arms. As the doors shut, I crossed over to sit with them. Through the window, I saw the woman cover her face with her thin red hands. She was bent over so far, I felt terrified that she might topple onto the tracks.

But, childless and yearning, nevertheless, I didn't inherit a family on the Kipling line. Children don't arrive without their mother, natural or adoptive, spending some time in pain. What actually happened is this: She was slumped over, oblivious to her little boys and to me.

When the automated voice announced, "Arriving at St. George, St. George Station," she stood like a sleepwalker and the three of them disembarked.

Although Matthew waited for me, no doubt growing more irritated as the minutes ticked off his watch, I understood that I couldn't think about him just then, that his impatience with me couldn't weigh against this sad little family wobbling into the unknown. I followed them off the train, calling, "Please! Stop!"

The woman turned around and looked at me without curiosity. It came to me that she was merely waiting for the next blow to land.

"Look, I can see you're really upset. And maybe it's dumb of me, but I can't let you just walk away, seeing the shape you're in. I'd be happy to sit here with your boys and tell them stories for as long as you like. You could sit on that bench over there and maybe get some sort of start on dealing with whatever it is you have to deal with. I'm not a kidnapper or anything like that, I swear—I'd just like to help."

She hesitated, looked down the vacant platform, and then stunned me by nodding. She walked away, not even glancing back, and it occurred to me that she might hope I would kidnap the boys.

The three of us made ourselves comfortable on the bench. The twins were compliant as whipped dogs, snuggling trustfully close to me. But my mind was blank. I couldn't think what to do or say next. I didn't know any stories. I'd never told stories to children and my own story-listening days were twenty years behind me.

Nearby, the woman hung over her lap and moaned. The boys drew closer to me and their eyes clung to my face.

"Once upon a time," the bigger twin prompted me.

"Yes," I said. "Once upon a time . . . there were two little boys who looked alike."

"Is this going to be about us?" the smaller boy asked.

"Yes, it is about you."

"And does it end happily ever after?"

His brother looked at him gravely. "All the stories end happily ever after," he said, and then turned his face up to me.

"They do," I said. "All the stories end that way."