by Gail Bowen
“So did our lugubrious friend open up to you?” he asked amiably.
In the enclosed space of the gazebo, I was struck by Zack’s physical presence. As a result of an accident, he had been paraplegic since childhood, and as if to compensate for lower limbs that stubbornly refused to respond to his will, the upper half of his body was a coiled spring. His torso and arms were heavily muscled, reflecting the power of a man who quite literally pushed himself for seventeen hours a day; his head was large and his features were those of a successful actor, memorably drawn and compelling.
He flicked the switch that turned on the gazebo’s overhead light, dimmed it, then wheeled past me to the window that looked onto the lake. When he turned and beckoned me to join him, his voice was silky. “It’s a good night to be alive, isn’t it?”
The view from the glass-walled gazebo was panoramic. Lawyers’ Bay was an almost perfect horseshoe, and the gazebo had been built on the tip of the horseshoe’s west arm. Lights twinkled from the distant shores that enclosed the lake and across the bay the party was in full swing.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a good night to be alive.”
Zack sighed contentedly. “That raises the question that brought me here. On this night of nights, why is Chris Altieri so miserable?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Because I’m interested in your opinion. Chris’s tete-a-tete with you lasted ten minutes.” Zack checked his watch. “Actually, it was shade less than ten minutes. Still, time enough for a man to reveal his darkest secrets.”
I stood. “I’m going back to the party,” I said.
“I’ll come with you.”
“Be my guest,” I said. “But you’ll be wasting your time. This is between Chris and me.”
“No longer an option,” he said pleasantly. “The moment you came through those gates at the entrance, you were part of all our lives.”
“I don’t remember taking a blood oath,” I said.
Zack waved his hand dismissively. “Nothing that dramatic,” he said. “We’re not the Cosa Nostra, just five friends from a provincial law school who enjoy one another’s company and take our obligations to one another seriously.”
“I take my obligations seriously too,” I said. “And it’s time I went back and handled them.”
“You’re going to talk to Chris.”
“If he wants to talk to me.”
“You might want to rethink that decision.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning you’re part of our little community now. Kevin invited you in. Except for those who’ve joined us through marriage, you’re the first outsider to become part of life at Lawyers’ Bay.” He plucked a perfect rosebud from the bowl on the table and handed it to me. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, ours is not a hardscrabble existence,” he said.
“I’ve noticed,” I said.
“And your family has noticed too. It was a real stroke of luck that your son and his girlfriend got that job running the Point Store.”
“You had something to do with that?”
Zack shrugged. “We just got the ball rolling. Kevin said the kids were having trouble getting summer jobs, so we arranged for them to meet old Stan Gardiner, the owner. Angus and his girlfriend did the rest. Stan said they were the only couple he interviewed who knew shit from shinola.”
A mosquito landed on my hand, and I swatted it. “Any more surprises?” I asked.
“Lily Falconer’s nanny has been given a handsome raise to keep an eye on your daughter this summer,” he said. “There, I’ve emptied my bag. No more secrets.”
“Why would you do all this?”
“We wanted to make sure you enjoyed your holiday,” Zack said.
My late husband had been a lawyer, so I knew the value of keeping my lip buttoned. I twirled the perfect rose and listened to the crickets.
“Ah,” Zack said. “The significant silence, forcing your opponent to say more than he intended to.”
“Somehow I doubt that a charter member of the Winners’ Circle would fall into a trap that easily,” I said.
“You’re scornful of our group?”
“Not of the people,” I said. “Just the concept. I’m not a huge fan of elitist clubs.”
Zack’s laugh was robust. “The Circle was hardly elitist. It was just a group of law students who came together because they were scared and smart and socially inept. It was good for all of us. When I was invited to join, I was like a drunk discovering Jesus. Dazzled. Born again.”
Despite everything, I found myself responding to Zack’s candour. I taught at a university, and I’d seen my share of twenty-year-olds who hid their insecurities behind a carapace of brash egotism. “Undergraduate life can be brutal,” I said.
Zack’s profile had the chiselled authority of a king’s on a coin. “I wasn’t trying to elicit sympathy, Joanne. I’ve made a career out of defending lumps of foul deformity. I’ve never seen myself as one of them. Not that the temptation wasn’t there.”
“Because of what happened to you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Accidents happen. Smart people make the most of them. And smart people don’t take no for an answer.”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
“Not when the stakes are this high.”
“Well, if you’re not going to give up, why don’t you fill me in?”
Zack beamed. “All I ever asked for was a fair hearing. So, some context. Guilt is a powerful force, Joanne. It plays havoc with the judicial system. People are always confessing to big things because they’re tortured with guilt about little things.”
“And you think that’s what Chris did here tonight.”
“I’ve caught his act before,” Zack said acidly. His face softened. “Chris is a thoroughly decent man, but at the moment he can’t be trusted. He’s hit a bad patch in his life. He was forced to do something that was necessary but morally repugnant. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s fucking him up. For his sake, for all our sakes, forget everything he said to you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Just like that?” Zack said.
“Just like that,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on. If I involve myself, I could do more harm than good, and Chris said he didn’t want to draw anyone else in.”
Zack’s head shot around. “Did he explain what he meant?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t push it. You surprise me,” he said. “But you also make me understand why Kevin was willing to trust you.” He gestured gracefully at the ramp to the gazebo. “Shall we rejoin the festivities?”
“Sure,” I said. “When it comes to fireworks, there are no second chances.”
By the time we got back, the party was rocking. The bonfire was burning hot and high, the music was pounding, and the dancers’ movements had taken on a shank-of-the-evening abandon. My son Angus and his girlfriend, Leah, were on a bench near the fire. Hair still wet from swimming and hands gripping cans of beer, they were huddled under a beach towel, laughing at some private joke. When he spotted Zack and me, Angus waved and pointed at Taylor and her new friends, Gracie Falconer and Isobel Wainberg. The girls were up to their ankles in the lake, giggling and shrieking as the water splashed their shorts. Rose Lavallee, the tiny ageless woman who was Gracie’s nanny, had planted a folding chair at the water’s edge and was eyeing them fixedly.
“Everybody’s happy. Everybody’s safe,” Zack said. “Now why don’t we get a drink and join the others.”
There were perhaps eighty people at the Canada Day party. No one appeared to be in charge of seating arrangements, yet as the first rocket spiralled into the sky and rained down its shower of fiery stars, my kids and I found ourselves alone with the Falconer Shreve families in what was, indisputably, the choicest location on the beach. It was an exercise in self-selection that would have interested a sociologist. Taylor wasn’t a sociologist, but she was a keen observer. “How come no one’s here but us?�
� she asked.
“Because it’s our party,” Zack Shreve said. “And that means we get the best of everything.”
Maybe so, but as I looked at the faces around me, it seemed that getting the best of everything didn’t bring happiness.
Dressed in a black T-shirt, slacks, and sandals, Delia Wainberg was a striking figure: sapling thin, with pale, pale skin, piercing cobalt-blue eyes, and wiry black hair so wild it seemed electrically charged. When I’d driven through the gates to Lawyers’ Bay for the first time, it had been Delia who had waved me over to welcome me. It was hard to imagine a less likely representative of cottage life. She was painfully intense – even jumpy – but she had a Cheshire cat grin that was infectious.
That night the Cheshire cat grin was nowhere in evidence. As she surveyed the world through the screen of blue smoke that drifted from her cigarette, Delia clearly didn’t like what she saw. As soon as Chris Altieri walked onto the beach, the root of her preoccupation was obvious. She went to him immediately, and when her efforts to engage him in conversation failed, she ground out her cigarette and slid her arms around his waist. It was as if she believed that if she held on tight enough, she could keep him safe.
A stone’s throw away, Noah Wainberg tended the bonfire and listened as his daughter and her friends fizzed with gossip and dreams. Kevin had told me Noah was the unofficial handyman of Lawyers’ Bay, the one to call in the middle of the night if the toilet wouldn’t stop filling or if the new flat-screen TV short-circuited the wiring. In a world fuelled by high-powered, high-paid talent, Noah had made himself indispensable. He was the fix-it man.
He was also an artist. The grounds of every home at Lawyers’ Bay were blessed with Noah’s wood carvings. Large and roughly hewn, these images of animals, real and fanciful, surprised you by their power. To look at his work was to feel, for an instant, the deep and numbing love that can drive a man to make art. His love for his wife also appeared to be deep and numbing. That night, as he piled logs on the bonfire while she obsessed over another man, it was impossible to read the feelings that lay behind his fire-reflecting eyes.
Their daughter, Isobel, was her mother in miniature, tightly wound and passionate. At eleven, she was already a worrier, her young brow knit in a permanent frown. I’d noticed at dinner that she had a number of tics: a need to align her knife, fork, and napkin just so; an obsession with keeping her clothes and her person spotless, and her hair, electric like her mother’s, tightly braided. Despite all this, she was good company: intelligent, articulate, and sensitive.
While Isobel crackled with fretful intensity, her best friend, Gracie Falconer, loped through life with a bounce and a grin. She was, in every sense, her father’s child, big-boned, auburn-haired, ruddily freckled, and effortlessly charming. Like her father, she seemed able to shrug off the slings and arrows without breaking a sweat.
It was a gift Blake Falconer must have been grateful for that night because his wife was clearly and publicly furious with him. At some point between Lily’s water-skiing tour de force and dinner, the Falconers had apparently quarrelled, and their simmering war had drawn furtive glances all evening. Blake’s efforts at peacemaking now were greeted with stony silence, and when he tried an offhanded hug, Lily removed his hand from her bronze shoulder with icy distaste. “I said I’d handle this, and I will,” she said, and she looped her long black hair into a knot and stalked off to join Rose Lavallee.
Gracie watched her mother walk away, then wandered over to her father. Together, they tilted their heads to follow the trajectory of a pink and purple rocket. It was so spectacular that Gracie reached out exuberantly to hug her father.
“Cool,” they said in unison; then laughed at the moment.
“Why can’t she ever just see how nice everything is?” Gracie asked.
Blake shrugged and gave his daughter a rueful smile. “That,” he said, “is a question I’ve asked myself for years.”
As always, the fireworks were over too soon. The last star arced across the sky, the last lovely parabola of light faded, and the night was suddenly dark and cheerless. For a beat, we stood uncertainly, breathing in air wisped with smoke and pungent with bug spray. Then people began to fold blankets, collapse chairs, and say their goodbyes.
“Why does it have to be over so soon?” Taylor asked plaintively.
“Do you like riddles?” Chris Altieri’s voice startled me. I had no idea he’d slipped away from Delia and joined us. He’d caught Taylor by surprise, too.
“Where did you come from?” she asked.
“I wanted to stand where I could get the best view of the big finish,” he said.
“It was neat, eh?” Taylor said.
“Very neat,” Chris said. “But you didn’t answer my question. Do you like riddles?”
“Sure – as soon as someone tells me the answer,” Taylor said. “My brother’s a lot better at stuff like that than I am.”
“Okay,” Chris said. “Here’s one to try on your brother. What three words can make you sad when you’re happy and happy when you’re sad?”
Taylor scrunched her forehead, gave it her best shot, and abandoned hope. The entire process was accomplished in less than a minute. “I give up,” she said.
“I give up,” Chris repeated thoughtfully. “Nope, those are not the three words I had in mind.”
Taylor rewarded him with a laugh. “So what is the answer?”
Chris dropped to his knees so he could look at my daughter face to face. “The three words are ‘Nothing lasts forever.’ Pretty good, huh?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “I bet even Angus won’t be able to figure that one out.” Suddenly her interest was diverted. She leaned close to Chris so she could see his face more clearly. “You’ve got a cut,” she said. She extended her finger tentatively, touched his eyebrow, then examined her fingertip.
“It’s blood.”
Chris touched his eyebrow and checked his finger. “So it is,” he said.
“What happened?” Taylor asked.
“I walked into a fist,” Chris said.
Scuffles that ended in a bruise or a cut were not outside Taylor’s realm of experience. “Well, you should clean it up and put some Polysporin on it,” she said. “It makes it heal faster.”
“Sounds like good advice,” Chris said. “Thanks.” He turned to me. “Are you an early riser?”
“My dog is. He and I run on the beach at five-thirty.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“I’d like that,” I said. I stepped closer. “Despite that accidental walking into a fist, you seem to be doing better.”
Chris grinned and shrugged. “Nothing lasts forever. Remember?”
The cottage we were staying in was at the tip of the east arm of the horseshoe that was Lawyers’ Bay. Built in the 1950s by Kevin Hynd’s parents, Harriet and Russell, it was a dwelling with a thousand charms, and that night after Angus headed for his room above the boathouse and Leah and Taylor had gone to bed, I entered my bedroom with a sense of homecoming. I slept in the bed Harriet and Russell had shared, surrounded by photos of other summers at the lake and shelves of books containing their personal favourites: Virginia Woolf for her, Louis L’Amour for him. Everything I could wish for, yet that night as I slipped between the sun-fresh sheets, I couldn’t sleep. The windows were open, but no breeze stirred the filmy curtains. Oppressed by heavy air and sharp-edged memories, I tossed, turned, and finally picked up my pillow and headed for the screened porch.
Rectangles of light from the other cottages around the bay pierced the darkness. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one struggling with sleeplessness. The opening notes of Bill Evans’s incandescent “Waltz for Debbie” drifted from Zack Shreve’s cottage. As I listened, I took the measure of my neighbours’ blessings: money, success, health, and for troubled nights, a law partner who played piano with fluid beauty. Yet somehow this wasn’t enough. I carried my pillow to the couch, lay down, closed my eyes, and pondered the universal truth t
hat lay behind Gracie Falconer’s question to her father: Why couldn’t people just see how nice everything was?
I don’t know how long I slept before I was jerked awake by a beam of light and the screech of tires peeling along the gravel road that led past our cottage to the boat launch. My first thought was that some kids had fuelled their Canada Day celebrations with one too many kegs, but the explanation didn’t wash. Lawyers’ Bay was a gated community. Nobody got in but us.
My heart pounded as I waited for a sign that the wayward car had headed home. But I heard nothing. When the splash came, there was no mistaking its significance. The car hit the water with a dull thud, and life moved into fast-forward. I jumped up and headed for the lake. It wasn’t long before Angus caught up with me. Standing on the road in his jockey shorts, my son didn’t look like a hero, but he had a hero’s coolness. “I called 911, Mum, but it’s going to take them a while to get out here. You and I will just have to do what we can.”
The red roof of the car was still visible when Angus and I arrived on the scene.
“That looks like Chris Altieri’s MGB,” Angus said. There was no time to check out his assessment. The vehicle had apparently built up enough momentum to sail through the air before it hit. There was a sharp drop in the level of the lake bottom about ten metres from shore. The car had reached that point, and the dark waters were greedily swallowing their prize.
Before I could stop him, Angus dove off the dock and swam towards the spot where the car had gone under. In a heartbeat, he vanished too. Frozen with fear, I stared at the place where he’d disappeared.
When – finally – he surfaced, I could hear the panic in his voice. “I can’t get to him, Mum.”
“Is it Chris?” I asked.
“I guess so. I don’t know. I need help. I can’t open the door. Maybe if you spell me off…”
I didn’t hesitate. I threw off my robe and dove in. The water had a familiar fishy-weedy smell, and in one of those synaptic leaps that fracture logic, I remembered another lake in another time when my friend Sally Love and I, poised on the cusp of adolescence, would go skinny-dipping, thrilled as cold water surrounded the new contours of our changing bodies.
