“I was going to call the album Postcards,” Nina said. “But, I dunno, it seemed too obvious. I don’t know if you noticed, but all the songs are sort of based on postcards you sent me.”
I hadn’t. “Am I going to get royalties?”
“Dream on, big fella,” she said.
“Have you been to Ireland?”
“No. I bought the rights to the photograph from a woman who posted it on Facebook after vacationing there. Maybe someday, though. It looks beautiful.”
She took the postcard from me and pinned it back up with the others. She’d been joking about using them to write a book, I knew—hoped, anyway—but as I stood there I realized that I was looking at a haphazard history of twenty years of wandering. A nice collection of stamps, too.
We returned to the other room, where Nina poured two mugs of coffee. She added milk to hers. I spooned a few grains of sugar into mine. We took our coffees to the living room and sat at opposite ends of the sofa, the same foldout bed on which we’d made love four years before. We talked for a few minutes, catching up, until she stood, shedding her jean jacket, and said, “I can’t stand the stink any longer. I’m going to grab a shower. Don’t go away.”
Before I could reply, she turned and, unzipping the back of the vest, went into her bedroom in the new section of the condo. A few seconds later, she stuck her head out the door of the bathroom, said, “Won’t be a minute,” and shut the door. I heard the shower start.
Left to my own devices, and being the nosy sort, I wandered around the room. Nina lived simply. Her only extravagance, besides the studio, was a collection of a couple of hundred vinyl albums in a long shelf below her stereo system, which naturally included a turntable in addition to a CD player and a docked iPod. She had copies of all six of my travel books on her bookshelf.
Nina wasn’t the frilly type, but she was unquestionably female, as evidenced by the feminine touches in the way the room was decorated: the artwork on the walls, the knickknacks—what my mother called “dust collectors”—the paper flowers, the careful selection of fabrics. She had one of Rocky’s smaller papier-mâché sculptures, of a man and a woman in an embrace, both nude. The female figure looked a lot like Nina; I thought the male figure looked a little too much like me, but I may have been projecting.
I wondered if there was an actual man in Nina’s life. If there were, it didn’t appear he’d left his mark. But I probably hadn’t made much of an impression on the lives of the women in my life, either, including Isla Taggart’s.
I heard the shower stop and returned to the end of the sofa. A moment later Nina emerged from the bathroom wearing a thick terrycloth robe that covered her from chin to ankles. She resumed her seat at the other end of the sofa and pulled her legs up under her. I saw the old seahorse tattoo on her ankle. Her first, she got it when she was fourteen, and her parents had not approved. It reminded me that I’d seen a similar tattoo on Terry’s daughter’s wrist. I wondered how Terry felt about it. Perhaps that Nina was not a good influence.
“You’ve got quite a fan in Terry’s daughter,” I said.
“Rebecca’s a great kid,” Nina said, voice warm and eyes gleaming with fondness for the girl. “A good musician, too, but an even better artist. You should see her drawings. They’re incredible. She’s smart, too. Maybe a bit too smart for her own good right now.”
“It must be hard on her that her stepfather is an embezzler and fugitive.”
“A little while ago,” Nina said, “Terry told me that for most of her life she tended to believe that people were basically good. Then the mother of one of Rebecca’s
schoolmates threw an egg at Rebecca as she got out of Terry’s car in front of her school. It was premeditated, of course. I mean, who brings raw eggs to school with her kids, for Christ’s sake? It hit Rebecca square in the chest. Someone called the cops and they arrested the woman, handcuffing her in front of her children, but Terry wouldn’t press charges; she didn’t expect the woman to be grateful and she wasn’t. She pulled Rebecca out of school that same day and home-schooled her until she could find a private school she could afford.”
“Does she still live in Hudson?”
“Uh-uh. With her parents’ help she bought a house in Pointe-Claire.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t leave the province altogether,” I said.
“She thought about moving to Ontario or even the States—she could run her business from anywhere—but she couldn’t really afford it. Her parents are here, and what few friends she has left. On top of which, she hates the idea of being driven away. It would be like admitting guilt. A lawyer representing a group of Chaz’s victims threatened to get an injunction to prevent her from leaving, but Louise doesn’t think a judge would allow it.”
“What sort of business does she have?”
“A small publishing company. Vanity press, basically. E-books and print-on-demand. She also does some website design. She did my website. She’s pretty good. The writers she publishes, on the other hand, not so much.”
“Is Lawrence Thomason her boyfriend?”
“Christ, no,” Nina said. “At least I don’t think so. I hope not. He’s such a fucking clown. Rebecca can’t stand him, calls him Larry the Lizard.”
“There was nothing very clownish about what he did to Fredrick Strom,” I said.
“No,” Nina said. “There wasn’t, was there?”
“How long has he been on the scene?”
“Nine, ten months. He brought Terry a couple of clients who wanted to publish their truly rotten novels and has been hanging around ever since. I don’t know what Terry sees in him. Then again, what did she see in Chaz? I never met him, but according to everything I’ve heard, he was just so goddamn charming you knew he had to be a sociopath. In retrospect, anyway. Which is the problem with sociopaths, isn’t it? You don’t realize they’re sociopaths until it’s too late. Her first husband wasn’t much of a catch, either.” She shrugged inside her bulky robe. “She hasn’t had much luck with men, I guess.”
“Starting with me,” I said.
“I didn’t mean that,” Nina said.
“But it’s true.”
“How about you? A girl in every port. Anyone serious these days?”
“There was a woman in Fort William,” I said. “Her name is Isla Taggart. Her brother owns the inn where I worked and is head of the mountain rescue team. Isla and I were sort of on-again, off-again for a couple of years, but a few weeks ago she informed me that she and her equally on-again, off-again fiancé had finally set a date. She hopes I can get back in time for the wedding.”
“You don’t seem particularly broken up about it.”
“I liked her,” I said, realizing that there was more than a passing similarity between Isla Taggart and Nina. Both were small, dark, and intense. “Still do, I suppose. But I’m not in love with her, although I probably thought I was, till she dumped me.”
“But you are planning to go back, aren’t you?”
“I like it there. It’s pretty much the longest I’ve stayed anywhere. You? Is there a man in your life?”
“Not at the moment,” she said. “I haven’t been having much luck in that department, either. There was a guy a few months ago, but he turned out be married.” She looked at me, a mischievous smile on her face. “How ’bout it, Riley? Wanna make an honest woman of me?”
Something must have shown in my eyes.
“Relax,” she said, with a laugh. “Don’t panic. I was just kidding. Really.”
Chapter 5
It was after 3 a.m. Saturday morning when I finally got back to my mother’s house. It was a brooding, century-old semi-detached with a flat roof and a covered front porch in the area of west-central Montreal known as Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, or N.D.G. Like most of the other houses on the narrow, tree-lined street, it was set only a few feet back from the sidewalk. A neg
lected rock garden struggled to survive in the postage-stamp front yard.
I squeezed the Volvo into the garage, which was crammed full of years of accumulated junk (some of which was mine), let myself into the house, and crept upstairs to my bedroom. It had been my bedroom from the day my parents brought me home from the hospital. Redecorated a few times since, of course, the last time when I was in university. After using the bathroom, I undressed, crawled into bed and was asleep within seconds.
When I woke up, it took me a moment to remember where I was. I found my wristwatch on the bedside table. It read 6:05. I couldn’t recall whether I’d reset it to Montreal time or if it was still on Scottish time. Given that the sun was shining through the east-facing window, I concluded that my watch was more or less correct. I rolled over and went back to sleep, only to wake up again at seven thirty. I got up, pulled on my jeans and went barefoot to the bathroom. The door to my mother’s room was closed. After taking care of business, I returned to my room, took off my jeans and did ten minutes of stretches. My knee felt all right, but I wasn’t sure it was quite up to a run yet. Give it time, I told myself.
Dressed, I knocked gently on my mother’s door. When there was no reply, I went down to the kitchen. It was a few minutes before eight. Rocky was at the sink, washing dishes. She was barefoot, wearing baggy, paste-encrusted sweatpants and a paint-stained man’s dress shirt, tails tied below her ribcage. The sweatpants hung perilously low on her hips.
“Good morning,” I said.
She yipped and spun around, eyes wide, mouth making an “O” of surprise. “Jesus Christ, Ace,” she said, hitching up her sweatpants. “Don’t do that.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Well, you did. I fucking near pissed myself. Christ, if you’re gonna wear those goddamned brothel-creepers”—she was referring to my crepe-soled desert boots—“hang a bloody bell around your neck, will you?” She retied the drawstring.
“Sorry,” I said again.
“Okay,” she said, grinning. “Apology accepted.”
If Nina had been my virtual kid sister, Rocky had, to all intents and purposes, been my big sister. Her full name is Shirley-Jean Matthews. According to family legend, however, when she was seven or eight, after watching a rerun of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, she announced that she would henceforth answer only to Rocky, who was, she insisted, a girl squirrel. Following the death of her parents (my mother’s father and stepmother) in an airplane crash when she was fifteen, she’d lived with my parents and me on and off from the time I was six. She’d recently turned fifty-two, but with a minimum of effort could pass for a decade younger. Her secret, she claimed, was good genes and hard living. She’d been through three husbands and who knew how many lovers, of both sexes, and had been living full-time with my mother for the past twelve years, more or less rent-free. A fair exchange for taking care of Grace, whose osteoporosis had grown worse and who, eighteen months before, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She did help out with expenses, though, when she could: she made some money from her art, occasionally quite a lot, but as with many artists, it was feast or famine, emphasis on famine.
“Can I fix you some breakfast?” she said.
“You don’t have to wait on me,” I said.
“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I’ll be fixing Gracie’s breakfast in a minute. She just has toast and tea. You’ll probably want something more substantial. There are eggs. And some microwavable bacon.” She opened the fridge and took out a large can of Maxwell House dark roast. “You can make the coffee.”
“Sure. Do you still like it strong enough to strip paint?”
“Just one extra scoop these days.”
I made the coffee, adding another scoop in addition to the “one for the pot.” While the coffee maker burbled and hissed, I fried a couple of eggs over easy in margarine and ate them on toast with two rashers of microwaved bacon and a slice of hothouse tomato. Isla Taggart would have used real bacon and fried the eggs, bread and tomato in the drippings. It was a good thing for my cholesterol levels that we’d broken up.
Rocky spread margarine on two pieces of toast and put them on a tray with a cup of milky tea, a glass of watered-down orange juice, and a small plastic cup containing what looked like a dozen pills of various colours, shapes, and sizes.
“I’ll take it up to her, if you like,” I said.
“Finish your breakfast,” she said. “I’ll call you when she’s ready. She doesn’t like surprises. She’s easily flustered, and it upsets her.”
“She knows I’m home,” I said. “I spoke to her yesterday.”
She looked at me, dark blue eyes filled with anguish.
“What?”
“I should warn you,” she said. “Her short-term memory is—well, it’s not completely gone, but she probably won’t remember seeing you yesterday.”
“Nina told me she was getting worse,” I said, throat tight. “But she didn’t say it was that bad.” I wasn’t sure why I was angry, or with whom.
“The last year has been hard,” Rocky said.
“I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?” Like Nina and I, Rocky and I had spoken regularly via Skype while I was in Scotland.
“What would’ve been the point? What could you do?”
“I could’ve come home.”
“And do what?” Rocky said. “Anyway, you’re here now. Look, let me take this up to her and get her decent, then you can visit. We can talk later.”
Without waiting for an answer, she went up the stairs, carrying Grace’s breakfast tray.
“Shit,” I said. How many times had I been home in twenty years of wandering? Five. And how long had I stayed? A few months at most. The previous visit had been the longest, at four months. Over the years I’d called home as often as I could, but it hadn’t always been easy, or cheap, especially from places like Australia or Nepal. During my time in Scotland, however, I’d tried to call home every month or so, using a Skype account that let me make calls to landlines and cellphones anywhere in North America and Europe. I’d noticed that my mother had become more forgetful, repeating herself more often, but I’d written it off as part of the normal aging process. Hell, at forty-three my own memory probably wasn’t what it used to be.
I knew—or had to finally admit—that I’d been in denial about my mother’s decline. Pure selfishness on my part, of course. I hadn’t wanted to deal with it, was not ready to give up my lifestyle, or even face the fact that it couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, I knew, I was going to have to grow up and settle down.
“Okay,” Rocky called from the top of the stairs. “You can come up now.”
I took my coffee up to my mother’s bedroom. She was sitting in her mechanical hospital bed, propped up on pillows. Her hair was brushed, her cheeks were powdered, and she was wearing pale pink lipstick.
“Hi, Mum.”
“Atticus,” she said, face lighting up, washed-out blue eyes shining. “How nice. When did you get home?”
“Thursday night,” I said, heart breaking. She’d asked the same question the day before.
The room was pretty much as I remembered it from childhood. The bed was new, and there was a small flat-screen TV in the corner, but little else—the lace curtains, the flowered wallpaper, old framed photographs and watercolours, the carpets, the doilies and lamps on the dresser and bedside tables—had changed in thirty years. That was when the ensuite bath had been added, sacrificing part of the adjacent bedroom, the rest of which had been converted into a storage and laundry room, saving trips to the dank, unfinished basement.
“How are you, Mum?” I leaned over and kissed her cheek, soft and smooth and smelling of lavender-scented powder.
“Oh, well, you know, dear,” she said. “Getting old isn’t for sissies, is it? Who said that? Bette Davis? I forget. Anyway, I’m fine, all things cons
idered, although my hip’s been bothering me a little. Can’t get around like
I used to. I have to use that silly contraption just to go to the bathroom.” She gestured to an aluminum walker that was parked by the bed.
As I’d noted the day before, she didn’t look as though she’d aged much since I’d last been home. Her hair was cut “old lady” short, but there was still some brown in the grey. Her skin was perhaps a little drier, more papery and translucent, but her face was not overly lined, a classic English “peaches and cream” complexion. She’d lost a little weight. She looked fine, healthy and vital. But looks can be deceptive.
“I’ll leave you to catch up,” Rocky said, picking up Grace’s breakfast tray.
“You’ll come back to help me downstairs,” my
mother said.
“Yes, of course,” Rocky said.
“I’ll help you down,” I said.
“Would you?”
“Whenever you like,” I said, hoping my knee was up to it.
“Oh, thank you, Atticus.”
Rocky smiled at me and left the room.
My full name is Atticus Caulfield Riley. (Don’t worry. I was just kidding about having to kill you. But try to control your laughter.) Until I came along, my mother was a high-school English teacher, and she named me after two of her favourite fictional characters: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. I was teased about it in school, but my response was similar to Rocky’s: I simply ignored anyone, including teachers, who called me Atticus, although I did make exceptions for pretty girls who thought it was cute (there weren’t many). My mother was the only one who still called me Atticus. Rocky has called me Ace, transmuted from A.C., for as long as I can remember.
“How have you been, dear?” my mother said. “How is school?”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “It’s been a long time since I was in school, Mum.”
The Evil That Men Do Page 4
