The Last Good Day jk-9

by Gail Bowen

  After lunch at our cottage, Rose and the girls went over to the tennis court to hit balls, and I cleaned up and took Virginia Woolf out to the rocker on the porch. Taylor’s cats, Bruce and Benny, were already curled up in their cat beds; Willie sniffed them incuriously, then flopped down by my feet. We were all settled in for a lazy afternoon when the first clap of thunder came. The cats ran inside and Willie’s ears shot up. By the time the second clap of thunder sounded and lightning split the sky, Rose and the girls were through the door.

  “Now what?” Taylor said.

  “Dry clothes,” said Rose.

  “And an afternoon off for Rose,” I said. When she started to protest, I raised my hand. “I insist. The girls can spend the afternoon here. I have no plans, and we have a cupboard full of board games. I know I saw Monopoly in there and Trivial Pursuit and Risk.”

  Gracie was towelling off her explosion of curly red-blond hair. She peered out from under the towel. “I’d forgotten about the games,” she said. She tapped Isobel’s arm. “Remember how Kevin used to let us play with all his old action figures when the adults played Risk?”

  “That was before,” Isobel said.

  “Before what?” Taylor said, always alert to nuance.

  Isobel and Gracie exchanged a quick look. “Before the adults stopped having fun,” Isobel said.

  “I’m for Monopoly,” Gracie said quickly. “But if we’re going to get in an entire game before the rain stops, we’d better bounce. Monopoly takes about a thousand years.”

  Willie and I spent the afternoon on the porch contemplating the rain and listening to the whoops of delight and misery that erupted in the living room as real-estate empires rose and fell. We were content. When I glanced up and saw Noah and Delia Wainberg walking down the road towards our cottage, I felt a frisson of annoyance.

  “Company, Willie,” I said.

  His glance was mournful. Seemingly, he was no more eager to entertain than I was. But the Wainbergs were Isobel’s parents and our neighbours, and as they trudged through the rain, it would have taken a harder heart than mine not to welcome them. Delia was wearing the same black slacks and T-shirt she’d been wearing at the fireworks, and she was even more tightly wound than she’d been that night. Her short black hair was spiky, as if she hadn’t thought to comb it. She was pulling nervously on her cigarette, the way serious smokers do when they’re about to enter what they fear may be a no-smoking zone. Clearly, this was a day when it wasn’t much fun being Delia Wainberg.

  As they neared my house, Noah Wainberg extended a large strong hand towards the back of his wife’s neck and kneaded it. At his touch, Delia’s head dropped to her chest and her shoulders relaxed. Husband and wife did not exchange glances, but it was a moment of exquisite intimacy. So often that week it had appeared to me that the awkward, amiable giant, Noah, was simply an extra in the high-powered drama that starred his wife and her partners. I’d been wrong. Noah was an essential supporting player.

  I invited them inside and offered fresh coffee. When Isobel heard her parents’ voices, she came running. “I don’t have to go home yet, do I?”

  Noah held his arms out to her. “No, Izzy. Your mother and I are just here on an errand. You can stay until Mrs. Kilbourn boots you out.”

  Isobel beamed at her father, blew a kiss his way, and ran back to Monopoly. In his gentle presence, Isobel was sunshine, a child of smiles and lilting laughter. With her mother, she withdrew, as if to shield herself from something sharp and spiny that might, at any moment, be flung at her from Delia’s direction. When she left the room without acknowledging her mother, neither of them seemed to notice the slight.

  The Wainbergs turned down my offer of coffee, but when I asked if I could get them anything else, Delia looked so longingly at the tiny shoulder bag in which I guessed she’d stowed her cigarettes and lighter that I volunteered to get her an ashtray. It took a bit of searching, but I finally found one on the porch. It was handmade: a shallow bowl of mosaic tile grouted together not very skilfully with an old silver dollar stuck in the middle.

  Delia smiled when I handed it to her. “Kevin made this when he was a kid,” she said. “Amazing he didn’t pursue a career in fine art.” She pulled out a cigarette, lit up, and dragged gratefully. “God, it’s been a lousy week.”

  Her voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s, and Noah cast her an anxious glance. “We’d better get this over with,” he said. “Delia and the others were going to put Chris’s graduation portrait from law school in the funeral program, but now they’ve decided they’d like to have a photo of all of them.”

  “Of the Winners’ Circle,” I said.

  Delia nodded. “The problem is we can’t find a good one. Everybody’s always been too busy to put things in albums, and of course we thought we had forever.” She ran a hand over her eyes. “Noah remembered that Mrs. Hynd put our summer pictures in her albums. Can we dig around a little and see what we come up with?”

  The albums were stored in a bookcase in my bedroom. I led the Wainbergs in and flicked on the light. “Dig away,” I said, then I went back to check on the girls.

  Interest in Monopoly was waning. The board bristled with hotels, and from the stacks of neatly ordered bills and properties in front of Isobel, her victory seemed imminent. Taylor had already folded. Gracie threw the dice with great sang-froid and whooped when she landed on a heavily built up Park Place. “That’s it for me,” she said. “I’m outta here.”

  “Good,” Taylor said. “Because the rain has stopped and this is getting boring. Let’s get back into our wet clothes and go out and run through puddles.” She looked uneasily at her friends. “Is running through puddles immature?”

  Gracie shrugged. “Not if it’s fun.”

  When the Wainbergs came back, I was glad the girls weren’t in the room. Delia was clutching a photo album, and her eyes and the tip of her nose were red from crying.

  “You found something,” I said.

  Delia placed the album on the table and opened it to a large black-and-white photo. “Our first summer at Lawyers’ Bay. We used to camp out on the beach, and when it rained we’d grab our sleeping bags and head for Hynds’ cottage.”

  I picked up my glasses so I could get a closer look. All the members of the Winners’ Circle were there: Delia, Kevin, Chris, Blake, and, in the middle, Zack Shreve. They were up to their waists in water – Zack, too. He’d wheeled out so far that the lower part of his chair was submerged. Squinting into the sun, their faces suffused with joy, they were incredibly appealing.

  The girls drifted back in and draped themselves around our chairs to look at the photograph. Isobel Wainberg looked at her mother through lowered lashes. “You were beautiful, Mum,” she breathed.

  “Everybody was beautiful then,” Delia said. She shook her head as if to bring herself back to the present. “Beautiful and smart. Why weren’t we smart enough to know that it was too good to last?” Without explanation she pushed open the screen door and walked away.

  Isobel’s eyes didn’t stray from the picture. “Mum looks so different,” she said.

  “She was different,” Noah said simply.

  “What happened?” Isobel asked.

  Noah looked puzzled. “I don’t know. It was like dominoes. One thing went wrong, then everything went wrong.”

  Isobel’s gaze was piercing. “What was the first thing?”

  Noah bent over the album. His big hands were not made for delicate work, and there was something poignant about the care with which he removed the photo from its plastic sheath. “There’s no use talking about it, Izzy. Talk never changes anything.” He brightened. “Look, I’m supposed to drive this picture into town to get it enlarged. There’s a pizza place near the 50 Minute Photo. Why don’t we grab us a pie?”

  Taylor dug her fingers into my arm. “Please?”

  “Okay,” I said. I picked up my purse. “Why don’t you go crazy and hit the Dairy Queen, too?”

  That night, Leah and
Angus decided they needed some quality time. They rented videos and retreated to the room over the boathouse. That left the cottage free for a sleepover, so Taylor and I invited Gracie and Isobel to stay the night. I’d driven into town with Noah and the girls. He had done his best at the pizza joint, but despite the food and the girls’ exuberance, Noah had been distracted. It occurred to me that he and Delia could use a little quality time too.

  It had been a long day, but deep-dish all-dressed pizza and Peanut Buster Parfaits had refuelled the girls. As soon as we got back, they leaped out of the car and raced over to Falconers’ to pick up CDS and Gracie’s stash of gift-with-purchase makeup. They were back in a flash, cranking up the music and slathering on the makeup that transformed them from beautiful sunburned children into voguing young women with purple eye shadow and edge. It was a painful portent of things to come, and I lasted less than ten minutes before I withdrew to my bedroom.

  Harriet Hynd’s photo albums were arranged chronologically. My fingers lingered over several of them, but I settled on the summer of 1973, the year my first child, Mieka, was born. Harriet had arranged the photographs with an archivist’s precision. Beneath each picture, the particulars of the subject and the occasion were described in her small neat hand. In truth, the pictures didn’t require text. Photos like them could have been found in albums in tens of thousands of Canadian homes. A man with shoulder-length hair and a beard grinned as he fired up a Hibachi; a woman wearing a peasant dress and a silver-and-turquoise necklace held up a birthday cake for the camera. A young boy – clearly Kevin – sat surrounded by birthday booty: a pile of action figures for his superhero collection. Moments in time, as ordinary as they were irrecoverable.

  In the living room, Taylor and her friends danced and dreamed to the music of their own time. My camera was slung over the doorknob. I put down Harriet’s album, picked up the faithful Kodak, and headed into the living room. The girls of summer deserved to be immortalized.

  The night of Chris Altieri’s wake, the beautiful cars started arriving just after suppertime. The sun slanted in the sky, picking up the metallic sheen of BMWS, Porsches, Jaguars, and Mercedeses as they purred through the gates to Lawyers’ Bay. The event was being held at Zack Shreve’s home. It was a shrewd choice for a wake. With its large uncluttered spaces painted in cool monochromatic greys, it militated against an overheating of emotion. The furniture in the house was simple and expensive, the art spare, original, and arresting – abstracts in rust and silver. Both furnishings and art had the patina of unobjectionable good taste that only a fine decorator with a blank cheque can bring to a living space. The only personal touches were the piano – a concert-sized Steinway – and, oddly, a collection of moths mounted in shadow boxes on the wall.

  The piano dominated the room and Zack was seated at it, playing, when we arrived. The music was light and unobtrusive, yet it kept everyone in the room aware of the pianist’s presence. Seemingly, Zack’s skill at playing a crowd equalled his skill at the Steinway. When he caught me watching him, Zack winked conspiratorially, and I remembered a lawyer friend’s telling anecdote about an encounter she’d had with him. She was appearing opposite him in court, and when his case began to go badly, he hunched his shoulders and drew back into himself, in her words “defying the jury to kick the cripple.” The tactic paid off. Zack won his case, and the next morning he’d sent my friend a box of the Bernard Callebaut truffles she favoured and a copy of Richard III.

  No doubt about it, Zachary Shreve was a man who knew how to control events. As he moved effortlessly through the tunes in the Rodgers and Hart songbook, I wondered what outcome he was seeking from this party. As it always was at Lawyers’ Bay, the mise en scene was flawless. A brief and intense shower late in the afternoon had cooled the air and left a lingering smell of wet wood. The dinner was planked salmon, and when guests arrived, the barbecues were smoking. In the meantime there were delights: plates of baguettes and thinly sliced black bread to accompany bowls of feta cheese splashed with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh oregano and dried red peppers, marinated artichoke hearts, tangy radishes, crisp and rolled in butter and salt, olives seemingly from every port on the Mediterranean. It was a feast fit for a king, and there was no doubt that Zack Shreve was presiding.

  He announced dinner, directed us towards our places at the tables that had been set on the lawn, then moved among us as we talked of the usual things people talk of at barbecues: the triumphs, tragedies, and love lives of ourselves and others, then, as the wine flowed, the meaning of it all.

  After we’d finished eating, Zack summoned us back into the house where the caterers poured brandy and people steeled themselves for the painful task of remembering the man who wasn’t there. When we all had a glass in hand, Blake Falconer offered a simple toast; then, as we raised our glasses and murmured Chris’s name, Zack began to play a heart-stoppingly poignant song. It, too, was Rodgers and Hart, and it was about a man who brought the sun but didn’t stick around to enjoy it. The title was “He Was Too Good to Me,” and Zack played with shimmering intimacy. When the last note died, the room was silent. Finally, a blonde with a deep fake-and-bake tan, and the unfocused eyes of a woman who had drunk well if not wisely, cuffed Zack on the arm. “How can you be such a bastard in the courtroom and play piano like that?” she asked.

  Zack picked up his snifter, drained it, and smiled. “You know what they say about Miles Davis. He played the way he’d have liked to be.”

  The woman splayed her hands on the piano and leaned towards Zack. “We’ve had enough show tunes,” she said. “I have a request.”

  “I aim to please,” Zack said smoothly. “What’ll it be?”

  “Anything by Paul Anka,” the woman said.

  Zack’s smile grew deadly. “So many possibilities,” he said. “Since your name is Kim, ‘Diana’ doesn’t work. ‘Puppy Love’? Hardly. With respect, I believe we’d both agree that you’ve wagged goodbye to your puppy days. I personally have been present at the kickoff of three of your marriages, so the sheen of ‘I Went to Your Wedding’ has grown a little tarnished. How about that old Frank Sinatra showstopper ‘My Way’?”

  Kim pouted. “I hate that song.” Leaning over the piano, heedless of the breasts spilling out of her silk halter-top, she was visited by inspiration. “Play ‘Havin’ My Baby.’ ”

  Zack bowed to her. “A provocative choice, madam,” he said. “But your wish is my command.” He placed his fingers on the keys and played the opening bars of “Havin’ My Baby.” After a moment of astonished silence, people began to sing along, tentatively at first, then as liquor released inhibitions, lustily. Kim’s choice was cruelly ironic, but it did the job.

  “Havin’ My Baby” was as remote from Noel Coward as it was possible to be, but as one who understood “the potency of cheap music,” Coward would have recognized the phenomenon taking place in that room. An old and cheaply sentimental song was melting the ice of grief and releasing real emotion. When the music was done, people began – finally – to talk about what they had lost. Nowhere in their remembrances was there a hint of the spectral sadness I’d seen in the man in the gazebo. Their Christopher Altieri was a man of joy and shuddering energy, warm, thoughtful, funny, brilliant. As I picked up my coffee cup, I found myself wishing that I had known him.

  The funeral was at three o’clock Saturday afternoon, but I drove into the city just after breakfast. I was alone. Saturdays were the Point Store’s busiest days. It would have been difficult for Leah and Angus to get away, and there was no particular reason why they should. Fate had spun Angus into the vortex of Chris Altieri’s death, but my son had not been a part of Chris’s life. Taylor had stayed behind, too. Rose was bringing Gracie and Isobel into the city, but Taylor had already been present at too many funerals in her young life, and I was relieved when Leah suggested she could spend the day helping out at the store.

  It was good to be alone. I needed to get away from everything and everybody. In the past week, the na
me of an old TV quiz show called Who Do You Trust? had nagged at me. I was growing genuinely fond of my neighbours at Lawyers’ Bay. Despite what must have been a devastating shock, they had made every effort to be kind to my family and me. They had been Kevin Hynd’s friends for twenty-five years. He trusted them, and I trusted Kevin. But try as I might, I couldn’t shake off Alex’s warning to tread lightly among these people. Nor could I dismiss the questions I had about Alex himself. Why had he spent so much time at Lawyers’ Bay the previous winter? And what was the nature of his relationship with Lily Falconer?

  The grass in front of my house on Regina Avenue was too long, the hanging baskets were parched, and the flower beds needed weeding. That said, when I opened my front door I felt a burden lift. It was good to be back on solid ground. I riffled through the mail my neighbour had piled in the basket on the hall table. There was nothing spectacular: magazines, bills, an invitation to a croquet party, and a postcard from Kevin with a picture of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa and a note: “The Tibetans used to believe this country was connected to heaven by a rope. Today the clouds are low and the mountains seem to scrape the sky. Heaven feels close.” Suspecting that in the days ahead I might need a reminder that heaven was close, I dropped the postcard into my bag.

  After I’d soaked the hanging baskets and turned the sprinklers on the flower beds, I called the lawn service I’d hired for the summer. Their phone had been disconnected. I started calling Angus’s friends, found someone with a younger brother who was desperate for money, and hired him sight unseen. Having put my house in order, I went upstairs to troll my closet for a dress suitable for a funeral.

  I read once that Pat Nixon never hit the sack without first pressing and repairing every outfit she’d worn during the day. The image of her sewing on a button while Dick scowled and lusted had stuck with me, but I was never impressed enough to emulate her. That morning I wished I had. The only lightweight black dress I owned looked as if I’d slept in it. I hauled out the ironing board, plugged in the steam iron, and began.