by Gail Bowen
“I’d better go to my own room,” he said. “Pete’s in there with me, you know. He might want to talk.”
He looked at me, and we both smiled. Pete had never been much of a talker.
“He’ll be glad you’re there, anyway,” I said.
I checked Taylor. She was sleeping deeply.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you settled. At least over there, you won’t have to listen to Greg’s poor grandfather.”
“What’s the matter with him, Mum?”
“I think he’s frustrated,” I said. “I think he’s mad because he has something important on his mind, and he can’t talk any more.”
After I got Angus settled, I went outside. It seemed as if there were as many police as there were guests. There were uniforms everywhere. I walked to the tent and looked in. Peter was there, sitting across the table from a young woman in an RCMP uniform. I went and sat at one of the wrought-iron tables that had been set out around the pool for dinner. If I couldn’t help my son, I could at least be somewhere he could see me.
I was sitting there feeling powerless and sad when Greg came and sat across from me. The lights from the tent leached the colour from his cheeks and knifed lines in the planes of his face. He looked twenty years older than he had when he’d come to the dock to bring the kids their sparklers.
“Thanks for checking on Angus,” I said.
He shrugged. “I wanted to do something.” He looked at me. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?”
“Woody Allen,” I said.
He smiled. Greg’s passion for Woody Allen was a family joke. When his relationship with Mieka started to get serious, Greg had come over one snowy Friday night with an armload of videos. “I think it’s time you met God,” he had said as he loaded Annie Hall into our VCR.
That weekend we had a Woody Allen festival, and Greg, smart enough to know he sounded like a groupie in a Woody movie, explained every frame of every movie. After that, Woody had become a part of all our lives. We teased Greg about him, but it had been terrific for all of us to have a touchstone to share with the man Mieka loved.
That terrible night at the lake Woody seemed to work his magic once again. At the mention of his name, Greg seemed to relax. “For once you’re wrong, Jo. I wasn’t thinking of Woody, but now that you mention him … Do you know what he said about death? ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ ”
“Woody and the rest of the thinking population,” I said.
“Right.” Greg picked up a matchbook someone had left behind, took out a match and lit it. He watched it flame, then burn out. His young face was stricken. “What I was thinking about was Christy. Jo, they found the boat she was in – it was almost in the middle of the lake. It was the red canoe my mother gave me for my sixteenth birthday. There was a half-empty bottle of rye in it. And, Jo, there was an empty pill bottle in the boat, too. My mother sometimes takes these tranquilizers, and Christy must have found the bottle in Mum’s bathroom cupboard. Anyway, it was empty. The police aren’t saying anything, of course, but from the questions they were asking me, I think they’re treating this as a suicide.”
I thought of Christy’s face in the moments after Peter came, when she knew that whatever future they had together wouldn’t include love.
“Oh, God, poor Christy,” I said. Then I thought of my son. “Greg, does Peter know?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I had to go down and identify the boat and my mother’s pills. I just overheard things. I’m sure the police aren’t telling people yet.” He pushed himself back from the table. “I’d better see how Mieka’s doing. This has been a pretty awful night for her, too.”
“She’s lucky she has you,” I said.
He smiled. “That goes both ways, you know.”
After he left, I felt myself slump. When Constable Kequahtooway came over and slid into the chair Greg had been sitting in, it took an effort of will to look up. “P. Kequahtooway,” his badge said. I had heard one of the other cops call him Perry.
Up close, Perry Kequahtooway looked very young, but he was assured and he was thorough. I didn’t find his questions painful; I had already moved into that zone of blunted emotion that comes when I know the worst has happened. I was able to replay the scenes of the evening pretty much without emotion: the time Christy had arrived at our house; the drive down; when I had seen her; when I hadn’t seen her. Constable Kequahtooway took it all down without comment. Then he looked at me and asked a question I wasn’t prepared for. “Did you know that Christy Sinclair listed you as next of kin on the emergency card in her wallet?”
I was dumfounded. “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I’m just the mother of a boy she was going out with. She has family in Estevan. They sent her money regularly. I mean she said they did, and they must have. Christy’s only income was what she earned as a teaching assistant – there’s no way she could have afforded the life she lived on a graduate student’s stipend.” I realized I was talking more to myself than to him. When I looked up, he was waiting patiently.
“And the name of the people in Estevan is Sinclair?” he asked.
“I guess so,” I said weakly. “At least that’s what Christy said.”
“But you didn’t believe her?” Constable Kequahtooway asked.
“She was a complicated young woman,” I said.
Constable Perry Kequahtooway looked at me patiently. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“There’s not much to tell,” I said, “except that sometimes Christy had her own perception of reality.”
“She told lies,” he said softly.
I nodded. Behind him, I could see Peter coming out of the tent, alone.
“Can I go to see my son now?” I asked.
Constable Kequahtooway looked surprised. “Of course, Mrs. Kilbourn.”
“Did you tell him that Christy committed suicide?” I asked.
Suddenly, he was tense. “What makes you think she did?”
“Greg Harris told me about the empty pill bottle in the bottom of the canoe.”
“An empty pill bottle doesn’t make a suicide, Mrs. Kilbourn. I’d appreciate it if you kept your theories to yourself. I really would. We don’t want to muddy the waters here.”
I caught up with Peter at the front door to the house.
“How about some coffee?” I said. “It’s getting cold out there. Or tea?”
He shook his head. “Nothing, thanks. I think I’d like to walk, though.”
He started toward the road, and I followed.
“The beach is pretty crowded, with the police and everybody,” he said.
We stopped at a hairpin turn in the road and walked toward a jut of land that overlooked the lake. Beneath us we could see the police checking the beach. The red canoe had been pulled up on shore.
I touched his arm. “Peter, I know this is a bad time to ask, but the police say that Christy had a card in her wallet that listed me as her next of kin. Do you know anything about it?”
There was a full moon that night. In the pale light, my son seemed alien, not just older but metamorphosed, as if Christy’s death had changed him into a different man.
“She was so fucked up,” he said in a voice tight with pain. “She was so fucking fucked up.”
Then he began to cry. I put my arms around him and held him as he sobbed out his grief. Finally, he wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater. “We’d better get back,” he said.
For a few minutes we walked in silence, then Peter stopped. “I wanted her out of my life, and now she is,” he said. It sounded as if he was speaking more to himself than to me.
“Peter, can you talk about it? What happened with you two tonight?”
“I don’t know, Mum. Everything seemed all right. All we were doing was going up to the house to dance, remember? It was all so quick. Christy said she’d talked to you about us getting married the same day Mieka and Greg did, and I said o
kay. Then that radio Angus was playing with came on, and Christy just bugged out. I went after her, but when I finally found out what room she was in, she wouldn’t let me in. I know you’ll find this hard to understand, but it didn’t really worry me when Christy wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Why?”
He raked his hand through his hair. “She did it all the time. She never needed a reason. Once she told me it was a compulsion – that she had to keep testing me to see how far she could go before I’d stop loving her.”
I ran my forefinger over the lettering on the bracelet Christy had given me. “Did she get to that point tonight?”
“She got past that point a long time ago,” he said bleakly.
“Then what in the name of God were you doing back together?” I asked.
He put his head down and started walking faster.
“Peter, please, I know you don’t want to talk about this, but we have to. This isn’t The Brady Bunch. This is real. A young woman died tonight. If you didn’t care about her, what was she doing here talking about marriage?”
Suddenly the answer was there, and I wondered if I’d been waiting for flaming letters in the sky.
“She was pregnant,” I said.
He nodded. “We would have gotten married. That wasn’t what upset her.”
I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach. “What then? What made her decide to …”
“Decide to what, Mum?”
I could see the pulse beating in Peter’s neck. He didn’t need to hear speculations about Christy’s death tonight. “Nothing, Pete. You look exhausted. What time did you get up this morning, anyway?”
“Five-thirty,” he said. “Animals are early risers.” For a beat he was silent, then he turned to me. “I wish I was back there now. I wish it was still this morning and none of this had happened.”
I slid my arm around my son’s waist, and together we started toward the house. We didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say.
When we got back, the house and grounds were still brilliantly lit. It would have been easy to believe there was still a celebration going on. But as I walked through the silent house I knew the party was over. Suddenly, I was so weary I had to force myself to turn the knob of the door to my room. Taylor had kicked off her bedclothes. I tucked her in, then I went over to my bed and collapsed. I didn’t even turn down the bedspread.
That night was a troubled one for Blaine Harris, and that meant it was a troubled one for me. For hours, Keith’s father seemed to drift in and out of anguish. Close to morning, I heard muffled voices on the other side of the wall, and the old man’s voice was finally stilled. I couldn’t sleep.
Every time I closed my eyes, Christy was there. The last time he saw her alive, Christy had told Peter she had to talk to me, that it was urgent. Why would she tell him that if she’d planned to take her own life? It didn’t make sense.
When it was light enough to read the hands on my watch, I decided to give up. During the night Mieka had come in and crawled into bed with Taylor. As I walked to the bathroom, I stopped and looked at them. They were curled together spoon fashion, rosy, seeking out animal warmth in the time of trouble. It was instinct.
I showered and pulled on a fresh cotton dress and sandals. It was still cool, and I took a sweater out of my bag and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. In the half-light of dawn the kitchen was a ghostly place and shiningly perfect, although I knew the couple who worked for Lorraine Harris had made sandwiches and hot drinks for everyone late in the evening.
I found coffee in the cupboard, and as I waited for it to brew, I wandered into the sunroom next to the kitchen. Lorraine had set up an office in one corner of the room; a pretty rolltop desk faced the windows, and a small filing cabinet was tucked discreetly in the corner. There were two pictures on the desk. In one, Lorraine, elegant in black, her extravagant hair smoothed in a chignon, sat at a head table beaming up at a man giving a speech. I recognized some of the other people at the banquet. Like Lorraine, they were wheelers and dealers in the business community, people I knew because I had seen their pictures on the financial pages of the newspaper. The man who was speaking seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He must have been a major player in Lorraine’s life, because he was in the second picture, too. This one was informal, a holiday picture, someplace where there were palm trees and white sand. In this photo, Lorraine and the man were wearing cruise clothes and they were both deeply tanned. The man was reaching out to touch a spray of flame-coloured hibiscus in Lorraine’s hair. He looked smug and proprietorial, and I was glad it wasn’t my hair he was touching.
I went to the kitchen, poured a mug of coffee and took it down to the dock. The sky was overcast, and mist was rising like smoke from the lake. I had the sense that I was the only person in the world. The morning had the cool menace of an Alex Colville painting. Across the lake was the hill where Peter Hourie and his men had seen the buffalo. A million buffalo. All dead now. Murdered into near extinction. Out of nowhere a phrase came into my mind – “too proud or too dumb to live” – and I thought of Bernice Morin sprawled over the garbage can outside Mieka’s store and of Christy, her generous mouth frozen in a death grin. Two young women dead.
Through the grey mist I could see the yellow police tape marking off the beach where Christy had died. To the south, on the other side of the dock, more police tape marked off the beach where hours before young people had danced and laughed, privileged, enviable.
Suddenly I had the sense that I wasn’t alone. I turned and behind me was Keith Harris. He was wearing a pale blue sport shirt. A shirt for a Saturday morning, except this wasn’t going to be a day for golf and sun and gin and tonic in the clubhouse. His face was haggard.
“I looked for you last night,” he said, “but I saw you were with your family. I didn’t want to intrude. Did you get any sleep?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Of course, your room’s next to Blaine’s. I’m sorry, Jo. That must have been the last thing you needed.”
“He sounded so angry,” I said. “My kids used to sound like that when they were little and they couldn’t figure out how to get from point A to point B.”
Keith sighed. “Most of the time I just deal with the situations that come up. Straightforward stuff, problem and solution. Then, every so often, like last night, I get a glimpse of what it must be like for him. That’s when I go crazy.”
“How long has he been like this?”
“Since Easter Sunday. I was with him when it happened. We were golfing. My dad had a putter in his hand, and suddenly he gave me this odd, preoccupied look and said, ‘I don’t know what to do with this.’ I thought he was kidding and I made some joke. But he didn’t laugh. He just stood there looking baffled.
“One of the other members of our foursome was a doctor. He knew right away. I went to the hospital with them, and I asked the neurologist to let me stay while they did the CAT scan. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared. There was this picture of my father’s brain; on it, I could see a dark stain about the size of a robin’s egg. That was the hemorrhage, and as I watched, the stain started spreading. And the neurologist said, very coolly: ‘He just lost speech,’ and then the stain elongated and spread, and he said, ‘That was mobility. If it keeps augmenting there won’t be much left.’ And I looked at him, and I said, ‘That’s my father you’re writing off, asshole,’ and I walked out of the room.”
Keith had been looking away from me, toward the lake. Suddenly he faced me. “Jo, I’m sorry. Sometimes, I think Blaine’s becoming an obsession with me. I should be thinking about you. Do they know anything more about what happened last night?”
I shook my head. “I had a long talk with Constable Kequahtooway, but I think it’s too early for them to know much for sure.”
“Greg said he told you about the police finding that empty pill bottle in the canoe. You knew Christy Sinclair, Jo. Does that add up? Would she have committed suicide?”
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said no. But now I’m not so sure. In the last twenty-four hours of her life, something went terribly wrong for Christy. I don’t know what kinds of things she was dealing with. Except …” I stopped.
“Except what?” Keith said gently.
Suddenly, I was tired of secrets. I wanted somebody else to share the burden. “Christy was pregnant, Keith.”
He looked stricken. “Poor Peter,” he said, “to lose a child.” It was such an odd thing to say, but somehow it was exactly right. I was feeling that loss, too.
When the wind came up, we walked to the house hand in hand. Keith brought coffee out, and we sat at one of the tables near the pool and talked about life and loss.
When Taylor came running out of the house, the mood shifted from the elegiac. She had chosen her own clothes from the suitcase; they were mismatched, and her blonde hair was tangled from sleep, but she was hotly eager to get the day underway. No one had told her about Christy.
She jumped on my lap and put her arms around me.
“And good morning to you, too,” I said. “This is a great way to begin the day.”
She looked around. “Can I go and get Angus?” she said.
“Let him sleep for a while, T.,” I said. “He was up pretty late. Why don’t you draw him a picture?”
Keith handed her a pen. “Sorry, I don’t have paper,” he said.
“I know where there’s some,” I said. I went into the tent. Lorraine’s clipboard was still on the card table. I ripped a sheet from the pad where she’d written the names of the teams for croquet. I brought the paper out and handed it to Taylor.
“There’s writing on it,” Taylor said.
“Use the other side,” I said. “Angus will be proud of how you’re conserving trees.”
She sat and drew, and Keith and I watched her.
When I’d finished my coffee, I stood up. “I’d better go see what’s happening here. If there’s anything I can do, I’ll stay, but if not, I’m going back to the city. I’m sure Lorraine would be relieved to have everyone out right about now.”
