by Gail Bowen
“We’ve X-rayed it twice,” he said. “It’s a simple triangular break in the tibia.” He touched the front of his leg to show me. “Angus tells me when he saw the dead girl, he started running and his toe caught on something and snapped his foot back. There’s no need for surgery. You can come back with me while I put the cast on, if you like.”
I followed him into the elevator.
“Angus will need the cast for about three weeks,” he said. He looked at me. “Are you all right, Mrs. Kilbourn? The break could have been a lot worse. It was really a lucky break.” Then, shaking his head at his joke, he stepped out of the elevator.
As I followed him down the hall, the words pounded against my consciousness. Lucky break, lucky break. The boy at the Lily Pad had dropped his guard long enough to say that Kim Barilko needed a lucky break. Now my son had one. Who made the decision about who lost and who won? As I stepped into the brightly lit cast room, I knew I didn’t want to know the answer.
When Angus and I went home an hour and a half later, Mieka and Greg were waiting at the front door. Angus was still punchy from the Demerol, so Greg carried him to his bedroom, and Mieka went along to tuck him in.
I was pretty punchy myself. I was trying to decide whether I wanted a cup of tea or three fingers of bourbon when Jill Osiowy walked out of our kitchen. She was ashen, and her eyes were swollen.
“It was the girl I was supposed to be the mentor for, wasn’t it?” Jill said.
I nodded.
“One of our guys lives in your neighbourhood. He took some footage of her. I couldn’t believe it …” Jill’s voice was very small and quiet. “I think you have to back off, Jo. They’re starting to get close to your family now.”
“I think we should both back off,” I said.
Jill raked her hands through her hair. “No,” she said, “I’m not giving up. If the network won’t give me any help on this, I’ll do it on my own time. People can’t be allowed to get away with this.”
I put my arms around her. “No,” I said, “they can’t. But, Jill, I don’t want to think about any of this right now. In fact, for about twenty-four hours I don’t want to think about anything.”
Just then the phone rang. Jill shook her head. “Good luck with that wish,” she said.
It was Peter. He’d just gotten Mieka’s message to call. When he heard the news, he said he was coming home. I told him not to. He said he was coming anyway. Then Keith called from Toronto. He said he was coming back on the four o’clock flight. It was going to be a full house.
By seven-thirty everyone was sitting in the living room. Only Taylor and Angus were missing. Samantha’s mother had called offering to take Taylor for the night, and Angus had eaten a bowl of Cap’n Crunch and slipped back to sleep.
It was an awkward evening. After the initial embraces and reassurances, no one knew what to do next. The wound of Kim Barilko’s death was too fresh for reflection and too overwhelming to make other conversation possible. At nine, the storm knocked the power out, and I think all of us were grateful for the sense of purpose hunting down candles and flashlights gave us. Mieka and Greg took candles to the kitchen and came back a little later with a tray of sandwiches and beer. It was reassuring to know that in a world of unspeakable horror, we could still handle the small stuff.
At eleven, the power came back on, and we watched the local news. Everyone was silent as the image of our house filled the screen. The camera lingered just long enough for the curious to know which house to stop in front of when they came looking, then there was a long shot of our back fence and our cottonwood tree, and finally, the big payoff, our garbage bin. There wasn’t much information, just that there had been a murder and mutilation; that the victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, had been found in a garbage bin beside Wascana Creek in South Regina. Name was being withheld until notification, et cetera.
The next story was the storm. There were shots of trees with severed limbs and scarred trunks, of people being rescued from cars trapped in underpasses, and on the lighter side, as the news reporter said, shots of kids waving and grinning as they canoed down residential streets. When the news was over, I turned off the television. In the sudden silence I sat awkwardly twirling the Wandering Soul bracelet on my wrist till Mieka suggested we all go to bed.
The kids went up to shower, and Keith and I were left alone in the kitchen. I walked to the window that faced the backyard. I’d opened it that morning to let the fresh air in. It was still open; in the distance I could hear a radio playing. I stood for a moment, listening, looking at the soft fuzz of yellow the garage lights made in the rainy night. Keith came over and put his arms around me.
“I’m wondering if anything is ever going to be the same again,” I said.
He pulled me closer, but he didn’t answer.
It rained more that June than it had since our provincial weather bureau began record keeping, but the really bad storms began on the day of Kim Barilko’s death. That night as I listened to the rain falling, implacable, unrelenting, images of Kim kept swimming up behind my eyes. Sometimes the image was of her face the day we had walked to the Lily Pad together, defiant behind the makeup mask that couldn’t disguise the pubescent bumps of a child’s skin. Then, horribly, there was the other face, the appalling mutilation I had seen that morning. Outside the thunder cracked and the lightning split the skies. It would have been comforting to believe the heavens were crying for Kim Barilko. It would have been comforting, but it would have been a crock.
CHAPTER
9
The letter came the last week of June. For three weeks I had made a conscious effort to pull Angus and me back into our old, safe world. The small triangular break in Angus’s tibia that I had seen on the X-ray was just the tip of the iceberg. More than one fragile bone had been shattered by the grim reality of Kim Barilko’s death, and the knitting together of these hidden fractures was not going to be easy.
Kim Barilko’s murder didn’t have much staying power as far as the media was concerned. By the time the weekend edition of the newspaper was published, the story had moved off the front page to page five; the following Monday, it had disappeared altogether.
But for me Kim would not disappear. Our last official visit from Inspector Zaba came late Friday afternoon. He had shaved his moustache, and the pale line of his lip made him look more wounded by life than ever. His news wasn’t much. Forensic evidence seemed to suggest that Kim had not been killed in our alley. She had been murdered somewhere else and dumped there. There were no leads to the identity of her murderer.
“Trust me, Mrs. Kilbourn, this is not surprising in a street death,” he had said. “Most of the time we don’t settle these things. The Lily Pad angle was a blank, too. The board of that place is as close to an elite as you’ll find in a city this size.” He sounded exhausted.
When he left, he warned me again about the need to be careful. “Put this behind you, Mrs. Kilbourn. Put the experience behind you, and put the people behind you. What’s done is done.”
But try as I might, I could not put Kim Barilko’s death behind me because there was no doubt in my mind that I was responsible for it. Keith had tried to reassure me: “Jo, you don’t like it and I don’t like it, but face facts. The day Kim was born a lot of things were already settled for her, and one of those things was that she wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. You know the kind of world she lived in. Violence is always the first option there. You can’t hold yourself responsible for being part of her life when someone exercised that option.”
“That’s the third time I’ve heard that argument,” I said. “I still don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Keith said.
And I tried. I tried, because the alternative was unbearable. In those first days, I was haunted by my guilt. If I had reached out to Christy Sinclair, she wouldn’t have committed suicide; if I had left Kim Barilko alone, she wouldn’t have been murdered.
Saturday morning, Corporal Perry Kequah
tooway came to visit. There had been a break in the weather. It was still overcast, but the rain had stopped. As soon as she got up, Taylor put on her bathing suit and went out to the backyard to run through the pools of standing water with the dogs. I took a towel, dried off the picnic bench and took my coffee outside to watch. When the dogs got tired, they flopped down near the sand pile; Taylor knelt beside them and began building a castle.
Perry Kequahtooway seemed to appear out of nowhere. Suddenly he was there at my elbow. “I rang the doorbell, but I guess you couldn’t hear out back.”
“I wasn’t listening,” I said.
He looked concerned. “I wanted to see how you were doing. After the advice I gave you when Christy Sinclair died, I feel responsible.”
“Welcome to the club,” I said.
He frowned. “Anyway, this is just a personal visit.”
For the first time I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt that said, “Standing Buffalo Powwow, August 9, 10, 11, 1990.”
“Can I get you some coffee?” I asked.
“That would be nice,” he said.
When I came back, he and Taylor were carrying a bucket of wet gravel from the back alley.
“Is it okay to take that from city property?” I asked.
“It’s a very small bucket,” he said, “and I think this land used to belong to a relative of mine. You can accept it as a gift from my family to yours.” He dumped the gravel carefully at the edge of Taylor’s sand pile. “There’s more need for it to be here anyway. Your daughter tells me that no matter how carefully she builds her castle, it keeps falling down. It needs a firmer foundation.”
“I think I learned a song about that at Sunday school,” I said.
He smiled. “Me, too.”
Taylor, happy, smoothed the wet gravel into a base for her castle. Perry Kequahtooway and I sipped our coffee.
“I guess you’re having a pretty rough time,” he said.
“You guess right.”
“Blaming yourself?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I am. But you know I was only trying to help. I just wanted to help her have a better life.”
He was silent. The sun glinted on his dark braids as he looked into the coffee cup between his hands.
“I imagine you’ve heard that one before,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I have. It was at the same place where I learned the song about building my house on a firm foundation.”
He reached across the table and touched my hand. “That doesn’t make it wrong, you know, Mrs. Kilbourn. People have to keep trying. People have to keep trying to do right.”
After he left, I tried to hold on to his words. The problem was that everyone seemed to know what was right but me. The family certainly knew. They were with Inspector Zaba. “Leave it alone,” they said, and I did my best. I put the Wandering Soul bracelet in a lacquered box where I kept jewellery I didn’t wear much any more, and I ignored the pang I felt when I shut the lid. I tried, in the words of the advice columns, to get on with my life. I read and I watched baseball with Angus. I talked to Greg’s and Mieka’s Saskatoon friends about a surprise party they wanted to hold at our house on the Canada Day weekend. I did all the right things, but I still felt as if someone had kicked me in the stomach.
The Monday morning before the long weekend Jill called and asked me to meet her in the NationTV cafeteria. After I got the kids off to school, I drove over. It was another rainy day. This rain was soft and misting. The Inuit people are said to have twenty-three words for kinds of snow; I thought by the time this spring was over, the people of our city would need at least that many words for kinds of rain. The cafeteria was empty when I arrived. I took my tea over to the window and sat looking at the patio that ran along the building. A man and a woman came out of the building and huddled under the eaves. The man was carrying a yellow slicker, and he draped it around both their shoulders. Lovers, I thought, risking the rain for a moment alone. Then they both pulled out cigarette packs and lit up.
When Jill came, I pointed to the couple. “Driven into each other’s arms by the network’s no-smoking regulation.”
Jill glanced at them, then collapsed into the chair opposite me. “It’s been seven years since you and I quit, and I still miss it. Actually, one more phone call from the powers that be, and I may start again.”
“If you have a problem and you start smoking again, you have two problems,” I said. “That’s what they taught us in quit-smoking class, remember?”
Jill narrowed her eyes. “You know, Jo, you can be really obnoxious when you put a little effort into it.” She shrugged. “Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was tonight’s show. How would you feel about discussing street kids?”
“I thought that was a forbidden subject.”
“No, the Little Flower case is a forbidden subject, but I don’t see why you can’t talk in general terms about these kids.”
“As a kind of flesh-and-blood reminder of the rotting infrastructure of our cities?” I said. “That’s a quote from the Montreal Gazette.”
She looked at me approvingly. “Yeah, that’s the angle. I’m going to check with Keith and Senator Sam, but if you’re game, it sounds like good television to me.”
We walked out of the cafeteria together and down to Jill’s office. In the hall outside the news division there was a large portrait. Jill stopped in front of it, pulled a black marking pen out of her purse and drew horns on the man in the picture.
“Childish, but it helps,” Jill said.
I looked more closely at the man. He looked affluent and assured. He also looked familiar.
“Who is that?” I asked.
Jill looked surprised. “That’s my boss. Your boss, too, come to think of it. That’s Con O’Malley, the boss of everybody. The head of NationTV.”
Jill went into her office. I stayed behind looking at Con O’Malley. He was the man in the photographs I’d seen on Lorraine Harris’s desk that morning at the lake, the one reaching out to touch the flame-coloured hibiscus in Lorraine Harris’s hair.
It was a small world.
That night, for the first time, our political panel generated as much light as heat. I accused Keith’s party of Darwinian social policies; he accused me of believing that you can solve any problem by throwing money at it. Senator Sam Steinitz sat back with a cherubic smile, calculating the number of voters Keith and I were alienating with our intransigence.
When the red light went out, Jill was beaming. “Good show, guys,” she said. “I mean that. This is what we should be doing all the time.”
Afterwards, Keith walked me home through the park. “You were good tonight,” he said. “Sometimes you’re a little tentative, but not this time. You really tore a strip off me a couple of times.”
“You seemed to handle it all right,” I said.
“I’ve been clawed at by experts, Jo. I still have the wounds.”
I slipped my arm around his waist. “Show me,” I said.
“Here?” he said.
“Your place might be a little less public.”
We went to Keith’s. He took the phone off the hook and put on Glenn Gould’s final version of the Goldberg Variations. That night when we walked down the hall to Keith’s room, I didn’t have any doubts. I wanted to have sex with Keith Harris. We undressed quickly and without embarrassment, and when we came together on the bed, our lovemaking was everything lovemaking should be, exciting and tender and fun. Keith was a skilled and considerate partner, and afterwards, as I lay in the dark, I felt relaxed and very happy.
“Jill and I were talking about smoking today,” I said. “Right now, I wish I had a cigarette. The one after sex was always the best one.”
Keith pushed himself up on his elbow. “I’ll run out and get you a pack.”
I kissed him. “I don’t need cigarettes, I just need a distraction,” I said.
“I don’t have to be asked twice,” he sai
d.
And he didn’t.
After I’d dressed, I went to the bureau to brush my hair. Keith was sitting on the bed putting on his shoes; I could see his reflection in the mirror.
“When I was at NationTV this morning, I saw a picture of Con O’Malley,” I said. “I didn’t realize he and Lorraine were friends.”
“They’ve been friends for years,” Keith said, bending to tie a shoelace. “I think probably it’s more than that. Lorraine spends a lot of time in Toronto. But she’s so cagey about her life, I don’t know. To be honest, I was never that interested.”
“Do you think she would have asked him to hire me?” I said. “You’ll have to admit I’m not exactly a national name like you and Sam.”
“You will be,” Keith said. “But to answer your question about Lorraine, I’d be very surprised to learn she’d recommended you to Con.”
“I guess I’d be surprised, too,” I said. “Lorraine never struck me as being the kind of woman who would help another woman along.”
Keith came over and stood beside me. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “It’s just that …” His reflection in the mirror smiled sheepishly. “Jo, let’s just let this one drop.”
“Lorraine doesn’t like me, does she?” I said, and I was amazed I hadn’t had the insight before.
Keith looked steadily at my reflection.
“Don’t worry about hurting my feelings,” I said. “I really do want to know. She’s going to be Mieka’s mother-in-law at the end of the summer. If there’s something I’m doing wrong, I should know.”
