The late show was on when Jillian Scott’s telephone rang. She listened, then touched the receiver, but didn’t pick it up: not this time. Last year’s crank caller had taught her not to leap with every ring. It was better to sit here quietly than to satisfy some creep’s need for attention. She’d already answered the phone twice tonight, and he’d pretended not to be there, just as he had last night and the night before, so why not step out of the game?

 

Jillian rocked back and forth and waited . . . four rings, five, six. The noise hurt, like a tick burrowing into sunburned skin. Seven. Why didn’t he hang up? Eight. All she wanted to do was watch this woman’s story on TV. Nine.

 

Last summer, the calls had come between midnight and four a.m., and that guy had used his voice. The jerk had been vulgar, smug, and easily amused. She’d slept little during those weeks, until she got an unlisted phone number. How had this creep gotten her number?

 

Last night, somebody rang her apartment buzzer at one-thirty in the morning. After searching the place, the police told Jillian that her “prankster” was gone, and since she lived on the eleventh floor, the threat of real physical harm was remote.

 

Jillian hadn’t told them about the crazy man who, three months ago, found his way to the roof and began jumping down onto balconies to reach his ex-girlfriend’s apartment: the apartment that was now Jillian’s. It was fortunate he’d crashed onto the wrong balcony, just as it was fortunate this caller was mute. Good luck had always approached Jillian this way, although lately she’d been wondering if her luck would run out. Twelve.

 

She grabbed the receiver and brought it back down so hard a wobbly table leg fell on the floor. The table started to topple, and she caught the phone just before it slid off.

 

She quickly placed the phone on the floor. Her hands shook as she screwed the leg back into worn grooves. She couldn’t let him control her life. She focused on fixing her table: a cute, antique walnut piece bought on sale. All of the antiques in her apartment were bargains; this was the only one with loose legs, though.

 

As Jillian carefully placed the phone on the table, she thought about taking the receiver off the hook, but this was Wednesday, Dad’s bowling night. If he stayed out too late Mom would call and want to talk until his return. Anyway, why shouldn’t the line stay connected? This mute little creep wasn’t a threat; hardly worth mentioning to friends or co-workers, not that many would care. A second crank caller in eight months would seem too strange to take seriously.

 

Jillian stared at the phone. She’d never slammed the receiver before. If her caller got mad and changed his approach, if this freak was crazy. . . For a moment she thought about asking a couple of friends over; on the other hand, why bother people when she hadn’t actually been threatened? Maybe the caller was just a lonely twelve-year-old kid with nothing better to do. Then again. . .

 

A plate of soda crackers covered with hardened strips of cheddar cheese sat on the coffee table. She reached for a cracker, changed her mind, and picked up the water glass next to two sleeping pills. She carried the half-full glass to the kitchen and turned on the tap for cooler, fresher water.

 

By the time she returned to the living room, the movie’s heroine had gotten married, given birth to triplets, and been voted woman of the year for good works done for appreciative charities. The heroine wasn’t a secretary, Jillian noticed. She’d never heard of a secretary who’d been voted woman of the year. Not that it couldn’t happen. It just wasn’t likely to happen to her.

 

She picked up the file she’d brought home from the office, stared at the first page without actually reading the words, then put it down again.

 

An issue of New Woman magazine slid off the coffee table as Jillian reached for her personal goals list. She read: “Take trip to England for antique tour; start jogging; enroll in self-defence course.”

 

She sighed, then wandered onto her balcony to gaze at the lights of Vancouver’s North Shore. On the mountains, the lights of the ski lifts dangled like diamond bracelets on black velvet. Further along, she tried to picture the silent impenetrable mountain peaks called the Lions, now blackened into obscurity by the darkness. In daylight, the peaks were plainly visible, encased in massive snow tombs. When the sun appeared, even those who were blind and emotionally crippled sensed their presence, proud and challenging, brimming with mountaintop secrets. Jillian looked for the Lions. She knew they were there, though she couldn’t see them, and she knew an enemy was out there, but she couldn’t hear him. She shivered in her nightgown.

 

The last evening of March was cold and dry. An icy wind swooped past her. Stepping inside, she wished she hadn’t skipped tonight’s walk. It wasn’t necessary to stay home to prove her fearlessness to some jerk with a phone fetish. Jillian knew what could happen to people who stayed inside too long. She’d watched her mother grow petrified of the world as her agoraphobia took root, then deepened to the point where even stepping into the backyard made her scream.

 

She’d begged Jillian not to move out: had warned her about peepers, muggers, and rapists. The more she talked, the smaller the house became, until Jillian felt as if she’d been buried alive in the same box with her parents. To keep similar fears from surfacing in herself, she walked every evening after supper. It wasn’t always easy.

 

She stood in the middle of the living room, hugging herself and sneezing repeatedly. Spring had barely arrived and tree pollen was already on the attack. She reached for the box of Kleenex tissues on the coffee table and wondered if it was safe to take a Seldane tablet with sleeping pills. Suddenly, someone screamed.

 

Jillian turned to the TV and saw the movie heroine in an ambulance while real sirens blared under her balcony. Stepping outside, she looked for smoke or signs of an accident. She looked at the apartments beside her, then cautiously peered at the balcony above.

 

There was no sign of a leaping maniac. Jillian locked the glass door. Then she unlocked it and locked it again. Pressing her nose against the glass, she stared outside. No one was there. No one was waiting to swoop down and maul, mug, or rape her.

 

Quickly, she dialled her mom’s phone number. “Hi, it’s me. How’re you doing?”

 

She relaxed at the sound of her mother’s voice, until Mom said, “So, Jillian, what are you up to?”

 

“I’m trying to psych myself up to finish some work for Les.”

 

“When will you learn to say no to that man?”

 

“Soon.”

 

“You’ve sounded awfully unhappy with your job lately.”

 

Jillian hesitated. “It’s just that after six years with Silby & Morrow, Chartered Accountants, things have gone from boring to demoralizing.”

 

As her mother rambled on about job opportunities for experienced secretaries, Jillian remembered when Les Silby first promoted her from switchboard operator to secretary four years ago. She was surprised and flattered by his confidence in her potential. She worked hard to learn the job and to know his clients. Once, she had been reproached by the eldest partner, Martin Sloane, for knowing too much. To appease him, she played dumb until Martin forgot she knew anything important at all. Now, she was the one who was forgetting things.

 

She’d begun to misplace Les’s correspondence and various office supplies at an alarming rate. Files had been found in the women’s room or next to the postage machine. Any day now she expected to find herself sitting on a street corner, typing on an invisible word processor and asking strangers when they’d be back from lunch.

 

“Listen, I’ve got to go, dear; your dad just came home.”

 

Gently, Jillian replaced the receiver, then wrote “find new career” on her personal goals list. She stared at Les’s file. Overtime had become a regular part of her life. Computers hadn’t eased her workload, and coffee still had to be carried to the boss’s office. Still, she could live with the job a little longer, if Les weren’t so miserable these days. He was the real reason for her insomnia.

 

His worst moods occurred when he lost a client or was about to fire an employee. With the Ice Craft situation, Jillian suspected it was both; yet, whatever he’d held against her lately seemed to remain lodged in his throat until she was afraid he’d spit it at her. Her memory lapses were probably annoying the hell out of him. She’d let him down; maybe she was the one who’d be fired.

 

The other day, he’d glared at her during his meeting with Alfred Lin, though Alfred was the one who’d been giving him a rough time. While Jillian served coffee Alfred had questioned Les about Tony Barker’s relationship with Jerry Margolin. She’d seen the dismay in Les’s eyes as he quietly asked what Jerry, as his tax partner, had to do with Ice Craft’s missing inventory. Alfred had waited until she left the room before he responded.

 

Jillian gazed at the file’s contents. Les wanted a breakdown of services the firm had provided for Ice Craft over the last six months. Their controller should have handled it, but Les didn’t want the guy asking awkward questions. If she got up early tomorrow she could probably finish the work by eight o’clock. Tomorrow was Thursday, April 1, April Fools’ Day; two more days until the weekend, then two wonderful days of sleeping in.

 

In the kitchen, she cut a small slice of chocolate cheesecake she’d made from a favourite recipe, and brought it to the living room. As she savoured the taste of chocolatey cream cheese and sour cream, Jillian gazed at a photograph on the wall opposite her: a picture of herself and three small children. One boy’s head was wrapped in bandages, the second boy was leaning on crutches, and the little girl was bald. The photograph was taken at Children’s Hospital last summer, at a birthday party for the boy on crutches. Jillian had volunteered there twice a week then and had organized parties all the time.

 

She eased herself onto the living room floor and tried to remember who she’d given her phone number to over the past month. Slowly she raised her right leg ninety degrees in the air. The caller could be someone she knew, an acquaintance playing a practical joke.

 

Jillian pointed her foot, then gently flexed it, and pointed it once more before lowering her leg. She repeated the movement with her left leg, then lifted both legs together and flapped her feet back and forth.

 

She missed her ballet days: the sweaty exhilaration as each class progressed from simple warm-ups to grand jetés across the floor. After her mother got sick, she couldn’t drive Jillian to lessons. Her father worked during the day, and as neither parent wanted their twelve-year-old daughter riding buses, she’d had to quit. She’d never stopped exercising, though. A little stretch before bed was a good relaxant: probably better than sleeping pills.

 

Lowering her legs, Jillian’s toes caught the edge of her sewing basket and spilled three small puppets onto the carpet. Quickly, she gathered the puppets together. It was almost Easter and she still had three tiny outfits to finish sewing before they’d be ready for her girlfriend, Donna, and Donna’s kids. She missed spending time with her friend, but since January there’d always been Les’s work to think of, Les’s needs, Les’s wants. She closed her eyes and listened to the TV heroine sob in her wheelchair. Fatigue swept over her body as she crawled to the TV and shut it off.

 

Brushing her teeth perked her up enough to reach for her copy of Pride and Prejudice. In bed, she read half a page before her eyes began to close once more. Jillian placed the book on her night stand and snuggled under her quilt. At last, sleep came easily, until the telephone rang.