by Gail Bowen
Keith put his hand on my shoulder and turned me so I was facing him.
“It’s nothing you’re doing. Lorraine just has trouble with women like you.”
“Women like me? I don’t understand.”
“Jo, your father was a doctor. You lived in a big house, you went to a private school, then to university, and after university you married a lawyer. You didn’t have to work for things the way Lorraine did. She thinks you’ve had a pretty easy passage.”
I was astounded. “Keith, Lorraine has so much.”
“She didn’t always have it,” Keith said, “and I think that still makes all the difference to her.”
When I got home, there was a note from Mieka. Jill had called. Kim Barilko’s mother, Angie, was in town to arrange for the burial. I had told Jill I wanted to talk to her. In Mieka’s careful backhand was the name of the hotel where Angie Barilko was staying. It was a downtown motor hotel that I knew by reputation called the Golden Sheaf. Most often newspaper stories about it began with the phrase, “The victim was found …”
I called Angie Barilko’s room. When she answered, her voice was as flat as Kim’s. Yes, it was tragic about Kim. Yes, Kim had had so much ahead of her. Yes, I could come over if I wanted to. We agreed to meet in an hour in the Golden Sheaf’s coffee shop.
It was in the basement, and it smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and stale beer. The booths were all filled and I sat at the counter. Reflexively, I picked up the menu. The heavy wine leather cover was encased in plastic, and the plastic was sticky.
Angie Barilko had told me she’d be wearing pink; it was an unnecessary identification. I would have known her anywhere. She was Kim twenty years down the line: body bird thin, hair so dead from peroxide and back combing it looked synthetic. She was wearing a hot pink sleeveless blouse, black spandex pants that stopped at mid-calf and three-inch heels. I called her name and she came over and sat on the stool beside me. She lit a cigarette and blew a careful smoke ring in my direction.
“So you knew my girl,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t, but I wanted to. I thought maybe you could tell me about her.”
“You came to the wrong place,” she said. “Me and her kind of drifted apart. She was a good kid and all, I don’t mean that. It’s just nobody ever handed me anything. I’ve had to work pretty hard just to keep myself going. Rent, food, these …” She held up her cigarette pack. “Christ, they really gouge you for these now.”
Her first cigarette was burning in the ashtray, but she still opened the pack. “Empty,” she said sadly. “Listen, I think I musta left my wallet in the room. Would you happen to have a couple of bucks on you?”
I gave her ten. She came back with cigarettes, but she didn’t sit down. Unexpectedly, she smiled.
“Look,” she said, “let’s be up front. I haven’t got a lot to say. Kim mostly stayed at her grandmother’s back home.”
“Where was home?” I asked.
She was suddenly alert. “You don’t want to know that,” she said. Then she smiled slyly. “Look, I don’t want you going away mad, feeling like I didn’t keep up my end of the bargain. Here’s a picture of her.”
She pulled out her wallet. Her subterfuge revealed, she opened her eyes in mock surprise. “Shit, it was here all along. Anyway, here she is.”
In the picture, Kim was perhaps three: blonde, ponytailed, sweet. She was sitting on a man’s knee and holding a beer up to his lips.
“She was a cutie, eh?” Angie said. And then to herself, not me, she said, “I wish I could remember the name of that guy.” She shrugged. “Water under the bridge. Anyways, I’m taking her back to Calgary to bury. We got nobody here any more.”
I went home feeling overwhelmed with sadness, but with a sense that perhaps something was ended. The week after Angie Barilko took her daughter home it seemed possible to believe that the brutal blows that had begun the morning Mieka discovered Bernice Morin’s body had stopped. Lorraine and I had some nice moments together planning and shopping. She was an extraordinarily competent woman, and as I watched her tick off the tasks in Greg’s and Mieka’s wedding plans book, I was filled with admiration. I told her a couple of stories about my childhood that put it in a less enviable light, and I could feel her warm to me. Mieka took to calling us “the mothers,” and the night Lorraine and I addressed the wedding invitations, Mieka snapped a whole roll of film of us. “For the grandchildren,” she said, and Lorraine and I looked at one another and smiled.
Life seemed to be looking up for Peter, too. One night he called, sounding even less forthcoming than usual, but after a few false starts, he told me he had met a young woman. A horse trainer.
“Marriage made in heaven,” Mieka said, rolling her eyes when I told her. “They can currycomb each other.”
Taylor began her sketching classes. I bought her a Sunday New York Times that had a review of a retrospective of her mother’s work, and she carried it everywhere with her for three days, then she asked for some oils so she could get started making real art.
Angus became agile with his crutches. One night when the rain stopped long enough for the league to schedule a ball game for his team, he sat in the bleachers and cheered. Then when the game was over, he ran the bases on his walking cast, laughing like a maniac all the way.
On the last morning in June I drove him down to the hospital and the orthopedic surgeon removed the cast. Unconsciously, I had established a one-to-one relationship between the healing of Angus’s leg and the healing of our lives. As the cast came away and that pale, barely mended leg came into view, the symbolism was pretty breathtaking.
When we got back from the hospital, Jill Osiowy was standing at the front door. She was wearing shorts and an outsized T-shirt with the logo of Frank magazine on the front. Angus had brought his cast home from the hospital. It was an eerie trophy; it looked like an amputation, but Jill was enthusiastic as she examined it. Then Taylor grabbed Jill’s hand and took her into the backyard to show off her bean patch. I followed along, and when Jill had finished enthusing about the beans, I said, “My turn now. I haven’t got anything to show off, but I’ve got beer.”
“You win,” Jill said. “Anyway, I came because I have something for you.” She handed me a letter. “Fan mail,” she said. “I’ll get the beer. Read your letter.”
It had been opened and stamped with the network’s name and the date of receipt. The notepaper was commercial, from a motel called the Northern Lights, Box 720, Havre Lake, Saskatchewan. The writing was carefully rounded, and the writer had used a liner. It looked like the work of a conscientious grade seven student, but it wasn’t.
Dear Mrs. Kilbourn,
I’ve written this letter twenty times and torn it up. My husband says what’s passed is passed, and usually he is right, but sometimes it seems Fate takes a hand. I wouldn’t usually watch a show about Politics. Politics is not for me, (no offence), but I was interested in your topic June 3 when you talked about Street Kids. I recognized you right away. You are the woman who was like a mother to Theresa Desjarlais. When I saw in the paper that Theresa had passed away I thought of you but I had forgotten your name till I saw you that night. It is you. The picture Theresa brought me of the two of you at Christmas was framed. It is on top of our TV, so there’s no mistake.
I know you must be very busy, but Theresa was my friend and I want to know if she was happy before she passed away.
This matters to me.
Sincerely
Mrs. Tom Mirasty (Beth)
Jill came back with the beer.
“I’ve read it, of course. Some of the mail we get isn’t worth handing along.”
I looked at her. “Did you notice the address? Havre Lake. I’m going to be driving right past there this weekend when I take Angus to camp.”
Jill sipped her beer. “I thought you’d decided that discretion was the better part of valour. I notice you’re not wearing the bracelet any more.”
“Maybe it’s
time I put it back on,” I said.
For a long time neither of us said anything. We sat and watched Taylor in her sand pile, building her elaborate city. In the days since Perry Kequahtooway visited, the castle had become a wondrous thing. When there wasn’t room for one more cupola or turret, Taylor had sculpted a wall, high and protective. What was inside was worth protecting. On the grounds of her castle Taylor had created a beautiful world of looking-glass lakes and pebble staircases and tiny forests made out of cedar cuttings. When I was a child, I had dreamed of living in a place like that: a castle with a population of one where nothing could ever hurt me and no one could ever make me do things I didn’t want to do. But I wasn’t a child any more.
I looked at Beth Mirasty’s letter. “This matters to me,” she had written; I knew it mattered to me, too.
I turned to Jill. “I’m going to see her,” I said. “I’m going to see Beth Mirasty. She’s right. Sometimes it seems as if fate does take a hand.”
Jill’s brow furrowed. “Just be sure it’s fate in there directing things,” she said. “I’ve got a feeling about this one. Don’t take things at face value here. For once in your life, Jo, don’t assume the best.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised. “And you can warn me again when we tape the Canada Day show. ‘A Time for Patriotism not Cynicism,’ right?”
She shuddered. “Does that topic make you want to throw up, too? Anyway, taping ahead will give everybody the long weekend off, and nobody will be watching, anyway.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll wear that flowered dress I wore the first night. Get my money’s worth.”
That afternoon I drove to the liquor store to pick up the wine for Greg’s and Mieka’s surprise party. I was just about to pull out of the parking lot when Helmut Keating came out of the side door of the liquor store. He was close enough for me to see that he was wearing his “Let Me Be Part of Your Dream” sweatshirt, but he didn’t see me. He was too busy supervising the employee who was pushing the dolly with his order on it. I watched as the two men unloaded the cases of liquor into a Jeep Cherokee, and when they went back inside, I waited. Five minutes later they came out with another load. They made four trips in all.
When Helmut pulled out of the parking lot, the only part of the Cherokee that wasn’t loaded with liquor was the front seat. Whatever dream Helmut was going to be a part of was going to be a festive one. He drove north on Albert Street, turned off at the first side street past the Lily Pad, then doubled back. He pulled the Cherokee close to the back door of the Lily Pad and unloaded the liquor himself. That didn’t make sense. There had been a half-dozen kids lying on the grass by the plywood frog on the front lawn, and Helmut wasn’t the kind of guy who would feel he had to spare them on a hot day.
It took him half an hour to unload the liquor. When he came out of the Lily Pad for the last time he looked hot and unhappy. He got into the Cherokee and roared out of the parking lot. As he drove off, I noticed his licence plate: “ICARE,” it said. I cared, too. I walked to the back door. It looked as if it had been designed to withstand a nuclear attack. The lock was the kind that was activated by a card; there was a sticker next to it that said, “SLC Security Systems.” High-powered stuff for the back door of a drop-in centre for street kids.
I looked up at the old three-storey house that had been converted into the Lily Pad. There was nothing welcoming about the building from the back. There were no windows at ground level, and the windows on the upper storeys were closed off with blinds. It didn’t look like a place that would give up answers easily.
The sun glinted off my Wandering Soul bracelet. I remembered Kim Barilko saying that she had known Christy Sinclair “from home and then at the Lily Pad. She was going to be my mentor.” Now Kim was dead and Christy was dead.
I began to trace the incised letters on the bracelet with my fingertip. “Wandering Soul Pray For Me.” “What’s happening here, Christy?” I said. “What’s going on?” A cat leaped from nowhere and landed at my feet with a feral scream. I ran to the car and slammed the door behind me. It was broad daylight in the city where I’d lived most of my adult life, but my heart was pounding as if I were approaching the heart of darkness.
“You’re being crazy,” I said, “overreacting.” I locked the car doors and took deep breaths until I was calm enough to turn the key in the ignition. As I drove south along Albert Street, I tried to comfort myself with the familiar. I knew the buildings and trees on that street as intimately as I knew the back of my hand. “You’re almost home,” I said. “You’re safe.” But as I pulled into the alley behind my house, I was still shaking violently. My body knew what my mind wouldn’t admit. The darkness I had felt at the Lily Pad wasn’t something I could lock my doors against or drive away from. It was all around me.
Saturday night was Greg’s and Mieka’s surprise party. I had two jobs: to leave a key in the mailbox and to get the guests of honour out of the way. Keith offered to take us all for an early dinner at a restaurant about fifteen miles from the city. The place was called Stella’s. The decor was 1950s, the music was jukebox, and the food was very good. Everything went off without a hitch.
I’d given Lorraine a key so she could welcome guests, and when we opened the front door, Mieka and Greg were met by a room filled with exuberant friends. It was a great party. Despite the fact that their wedding was two months away, Mieka and Greg were genuinely shocked – events of the past weeks had, I think, undermined their belief in happy surprises. But their friends had pulled it off, and their success made these handsome young men and women more ebullient than ever. Taylor was in her element. She loved excitement and colour and looking at people. Angus had fun, too. He was on the cusp of adolescence, sometimes a boy and sometimes a young man. That night as he helped with food and music and talked about Rocket Ismail and the Argonauts, he was a young man, and a happy one.
Lorraine was enjoying herself, too. In fact, she was so relaxed that when we found ourselves alone late in the evening, I decided to ask her if she’d been involved in getting the job for me at NationTV. Before I was even finished the question, I knew I’d made a mistake. Lorraine’s smile didn’t fade, but her body tensed and her grey eyes grew wary.
I tried to defuse the situation. “I’m only asking because I’m enjoying doing the show so much, and if you smoothed the way for me with Con O’Malley, I wanted to thank you.”
Her manner changed. She became almost stagily coquettish. “Jo, I can’t imagine how you found out about Con and me, but since you have, I’ll tell you this. Our relationship has nothing to do with business. He’s my gentleman friend. We have much more exciting things to talk about than NationTV when we’re together. I think it’s wonderful that they hired you, but the idea didn’t come from me.” Suddenly, her eyes were wide. “I’m not the only member of the Harris family who’s friends with Con O’Malley, you know. Blaine and Keith have known him for years.” She stood up and smoothed the skirt of her white linen dress. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’d like to freshen my drink.”
After Lorraine left, I was edgy. Her behaviour had been odd. Mieka had said once that Lorraine thought of herself as a “man’s woman.” If that was the role she’d been playing for me, I hadn’t liked it. I poured myself a drink, but it didn’t help. Since the night of their engagement party, too much had gone wrong for Greg and Mieka. They deserved a joyous, uncomplicated evening, and I was tense with the fear that my encounter with Lorraine meant they wouldn’t get one. For the rest of the evening Lorraine kept her distance from me, but she held her cheek out for a kiss at the front door when she left. As I watched her walk down our front path, her hair silvery in the moonlight, I breathed a sigh of relief. From beginning to end, the evening had been flawless. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
In the middle of the night I was awakened by the sound of a woman crying out. I lay there in the dark, heart pounding, hoping the cry had been part of a dream. But as I listened the sound came again. It
was outdoors, in the backyard. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window.
Greg and Mieka were in the pool, swimming in the moonlight. The sounds I had heard were the little shrieks Mieka made as Greg dived under her and pulled her toward him in the water. They were naked – skinny-dipping, we used to call it. I could see the pale shapes of their bodies in the dark water. I turned away and then I heard my daughter’s voice. “Hey, watch this,” she said. I looked out the window.
Mieka was swimming across the pool. Suddenly she disappeared under the water, then in a heartbeat, she stuck her bum up. I could see it gleaming whitely in the moonlight. Greg swam toward her and kissed the smooth white curve. Then he disappeared under the water, too. I waited till they were both above the water, safe, happy, in love. Then I turned and went back to bed. As I lay between the cool sheets, listening to the sounds of the innocent summer night, I was smiling.
Good times. There were good times ahead.
The kids and I went to the early church service the next day, and we spent the rest of the morning getting ready for our trip up north. We were all looking forward to it. Angus and Taylor had been counting the days, and now that life seemed to have smoothed out for the big kids, I was looking forward to a holiday with Keith. We hadn’t exactly enjoyed smooth sailing since we met. Jill had arranged for us to do the July eighth show from the network’s northern studio, about an hour’s drive from where we would be staying. That meant Keith and Taylor and I were going to have ten days of sun and sand and the smell of pines.
Sunday afternoon, I met Keith at the TV studio, and we taped the Canada Day program. It went well, and the minute the technician came and took off our microphones, Keith turned to me.
