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wasn’t eating, she was in the bathroom, primping and painting herself. She never failed to tune into my show though. I’d hear a small tinny version of myself playing on the other side of the door. I’d hear her cackling, talking back to the radio, heckling me or heckling them—it was hard to tell which. For months I was at her beck and call. I brought her what she asked for and never once complained. Anything to keep her happy.
    Sequestered in the world of our apartment, she started to grow: first two hundred pounds, then on her way to three. And while she grew, in equal and direct proportions, I shrank. The day I found the letters, I was down to a hundred pounds, a mere whiff of a man. I’d started to look vacuum-packed, the bones of my face lunging forward while my cheeks and eye sockets sunk inwards.
    I found three shoeboxes full of letters. My Dear Laureen, My Heart, My Darling Lo-Lo they read, every last one of them signed by Jerry. I had to sit when I found them. It was the weight of the boxes against my jutting-out bones and it was something else, too—a memory from my first concert. I hadn’t found tickets in time, so I’d spent the night of the show camped on a garbage-strewn beach at the edge of the concert grounds. I fell asleep feeling sorry for myself. No ticket, no tent, no blanket, no miracles, and all my favourite songs distorted by the distance. Then, the next morning I woke up at an hour when the sky and water were the exact same shade of blue, and in that stillness I got my “miracle” after all—not the ticket kind but that other kind you sometimes hear about. I watched an eagle circle and then dive in front of me—as menacing as it was graceful. It rose up triumphant, with a huge fish in its claws, but that fish wouldn’t quit. It twisted and fought in the air, bringing them both lower and lower until eventually they were thrashing on the surface of the water. They struggled for some time, the eagle beating its wings until its feathers were wet, heavy, the fish muscling its tail into the air.
    Sitting there on the floor, with the box of letters in my lap, I remembered there was a quiet moment, when the eagle stood still on the back of the fish, tilted half in, half out of the water. Then, finally, with a sudden twist of its tail the fish pulled the big, majestic bird under and the water was still again. The thing was, with the lake and sky the exact same colour, they probably both thought they were winning.
    THERE WERE TEN years of letters, about one a week from the last decade of Jerry’s life. He talked about two minds joining in the darkness and all the ways two people can feel like one, even across time and space. He talked about backstage and under-stage and side-stage encounters.
    I asked if there was anything she’d forgotten to tell me, if she had secrets, unfinished business with anyone. No, none, nothing, she said. I started pouring salt onto her food, melted butter. I was loading her up with saturated fat, MSG, ingredients I couldn’t pronounce the names of. I stopped going out for hair dye, contacts, nail polish, sundresses. I refused to buy any more self-tanner.
    Take something away from a person and you’ll see their true colours. Without the tanner, she faded from deep orange right through to grey, and I noticed that underneath all that paint, underneath all that colour and distraction, she looked just like the one she loved most. The bulk of her was hanging off her bones now. Her hair was grey and frizzy, and she started wearing an old square pair of glasses that took up most of her face. She was covered in small curly hairs, on her arms, on her chin, even on her back.
    I started to call her “Jer-een”: “If Jer-een wants her sushi, she’ll have to tell me what happened between her and Jerry,” I’d say.
    You have to understand, she had become so big, so persistent in her needs. You have to know,