by Nairne Holtz
“Nice to meet you,” Sam says.
Pagan captures her mother’s T-shirt with both of her hands and buries her face into the cloth so she doesn’t have to look at Sam. How does Pagan manage with her peers?
Tory seems to read Sam’s thoughts. “She doesn’t meet many new people. I’m planning to home-school her.”
“Are you and your partner religious?” Sam spies a spider in her bucket and tips it over, shaking the insect out.
Pagan sticks her head out. “Yuck.”
Tory prods her daughter’s shoulder. “Spiders are good. They eat other insects that feed on the leaves of our garden.” Shifting her attention back to Sam, Tory says, “My husband and I aren’t part of a church if that’s what you mean. We just try to be as self-sufficient as we can. We heat our house with wood, grow our own vegetables, and generally unplug ourselves from consumer culture.”
Behind Tory’s yellow brick house lies a narrow, weed-filled path that runs parallel to the lake. The path is bordered by a fence, and, as the three of them walk in single file, Sam hears what sounds like the pounding of hooves. She looks up to see the emus bouncing towards her. They bob and strain their necks through holes in the fence, shaking their shawls of ratty feathers and making rattling noises. Tory and Pagan ignore them so Sam does the same. The path ends in a large patch of earth, which has been planted with cultivated blueberry bushes. When Sam touches the berries, they fall into her hand. Choosing a spot a few feet away from Sam, Tory gathers the berries in a systematic manner from the top of a bush to the bottom. Her daughter picks berries more haphazardly, eating rather than collecting them. When she sticks out a purple tongue, her mother suggests she go off to play. Pagan wanders up the path a few yards.
Tory says, “Judging from your hair, or lack of it, I guess you’re a lesbian.”
How can Tory just say that to Sam with no preamble whatsoever? People watch too many talk shows. “You guess right.”
“Chloe thought you might be.”
“Did that bother her?” She was afraid to come out to Chloe, to confront her about what she said about Dyna. Chloe tended to shoot first and ask questions later: what if Chloe said something Sam couldn’t forgive?
“Your sister thought you being a lesbian would be one more thing you had in common with your father, one more reason for him to favour you.”
Wrong, Sam thinks. Her father was, probably still is, so uptight about being a fag that Sam being queer doesn’t work in her favour. Not being queer, Chloe wouldn’t understand this. But she obviously worked out that their father was gay long before Sam did.
Tory continues, “I don’t think Chloe would have cared you were a lesbian. I know her politics were all over the map, but she was never a prude. Besides, she loved you more than anyone. In the long run, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Yeah?” Sam supposes Tory is right, that Chloe would have accepted Sam bringing a woman home—except maybe if the woman was Romey. Holding onto Tory’s words, Sam feels a new and shiny freedom. The mid-morning sun radiating her back is pleasant, not too hot for a change. The bottom of her bucket is now covered in berries, although filling it will take hours. A few of the berries she plucks still cling to the bush. Turning over one such berry, she sees it has a pale green underside. Not quite ripe yet.
Tory says, “So why did you come to talk to me about Chloe? Why now, after all this time?”
Good question. “I got this anonymous postcard suggesting Chloe was killed because she was investigating a political conspiracy. Turns out she was investigating a political conspiracy. Something involving a lot of dangerous people.”
“About a month before she died, Chloe called me. We hadn’t spoken for years. She told me if anything were to happen to her, not to believe it was an accident.”
Goosebumps scale Sam’s arms despite the heat. Chloe told Francis the same thing. According to him, coincidences in a conspiracy theory are revelations. But Sam is an agnostic, and for her, coincidence is more like a fortune cookie: when you snap open the shell to withdraw the ribbon within, the result can range from banality to profundity. But which does Sam have? She asks Tory if she thinks Chloe could have been murdered.
Tory sets her bucket down and stretches her neck like one of her emus, checking to see what her daughter is up to. Pagan is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the path constructing a tiny hut using sticks and grass; she’s an astonishingly well-behaved child. Perhaps she’s just cowed by her mother, who waves at her daughter before turning back to Sam. “People like to create conspiracy theories around charismatic figures like Princess Di or Kurt Cobain. I think maybe Chloe thought she deserved a conspiracy theory.”
Sam is not sure what Tory is getting at, but it sounds as if she didn’t like Chloe very much. “Why did you guys stop being friends anyway?”
Shielding her eyes with her hand, Tory squints up at Sam. “Chloe and James had this fight. They kind of broke up, and I slept with him. Chloe was furious. She told him I had herpes when I didn’t. He believed her, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. Maybe… maybe he just pretended to.” Tory’s cheeks, neck, and ears glow pink.
Sam puts a berry into her mouth, tastes wood. Chloe was betrayed in the same way by her two closest girlfriends. She found herself in one triangle of love after another. Even as she changed her life, it had a strange way of repeating itself.
Feeling thirsty, Sam asks Tory where to get water. Tory holds her bucket in the direction of the house. “The door’s unlocked. Just go into the kitchen and pour yourself a glass. If you could bring back a pitcher for me and Pagan, that would be great.”
Sam walks back along the path. The emus don’t pay as much attention to her this time. When she reaches the house, she stares longingly at her car. She wants to get in and drive away but doesn’t. It would be rude to leave Tory’s place without saying goodbye, and Sam was brought up in a home where good manners are expected.
Sam lies awake in bed. The more people she talks to who were close to Chloe, the more Sam is reminded of the Agatha Christie novel, Murder on the Orient ‘Express, where everyone on the train took a turn stabbing the victim. Everyone is the perp, everyone is guilty. Except the people who were part of Chloe’s life weren’t guilty of murder; they were guilty of hurting her. The knives they stuck into Chloe were metaphorical—Suicide on the Orient Express. But then there’s the Ecdysis Conspiracy and the postcard and the Hells Angels and Omar. Thinking about all of it is like looking into a kaleidoscope—it keeps shifting, disintegrating into itself. Now you see it, now you don’t, now you see something else altogether. Was Chloe killed or did she kill herself? Sam still doesn’t know. But she’s getting closer. She just needs to un-peel another layer.
PART FOUR:
ANSWERS
Chapter Eighteen
Summer vacation in Nova Scotia. Snap of the screen door as Chloe and Sam busted out of the rented cabin each morning to race down to the beach. Their father read books and commented on the peacefulness of their surroundings, but for seven-year-old Sam the place was full of adventure. Looking out at the horizon, it seemed to her as if the sky was zooming straight into the ocean. Water shimmered with sunlight she could never seem to touch. She leapt into waves strong enough to hold her aloft and push her to shore. On the shore she found treasures buried beneath the sand: shards of glass bleached and softened by the tides, scrambling crabs, blue-black mussels, and prickly green orbs that turned out to be sea urchins. The wind rising from the water carried the smell of salt, which was cut with the sweetness of the wild roses growing everywhere.
Chloe, at thirteen tottering into adolescence, had another interest: a local boy. His name was Jess and he repaired boats. Every day the girls saw him scraping old paint from a yacht. He was wild-animal beautiful with long tawny hair and golden skin covered only by faded, paint-speckled cut-offs. “He’s got such a hot bod,” Chloe said. When they walked by, he always waved. Sam waved back, but Chloe pretended not to notice him. Down o
n the shore Sam searched under rocks in tide pools for tiny crabs while Chloe lay on a towel, tanning, reading romances, and discreetly ogling Jess.
During the month they were there, Chloe left notes for Jess signed “your secret admirer.” He usually quit work by mid-afternoon, but Chloe waited for nightfall before creeping onto the boat and searching out places where she could cram her notes. To hold them in place against the breeze blowing off the water, Chloe used rocks and shells. Sam usually came with her sister to keep a lookout. She felt like a spy or how she imagined spies felt: exhilarated, part of a pipeline of something greater than she could ever be on her own. She scanned the harbour as if she were expecting German U-boats rather than what she actually saw: the raw red sun falling into the sea.
Chloe’s notes were short, piquant: “I think you’re cute,” “I would like you to take me out on your boat,” and once, “You look good in those shorts.” She could have spent her days talking to Jess, but instead she preferred to watch him, to imagine having conversations with him. As she walked with Sam along unpaved roads to the corner store to buy Popsicles, Chloe constructed an entire world of her and Jess, his love and tenderness. She would point out some small shingled house painted a crazy colour, pink or green with yellow trim, and say, “We’ll live there. We’ll get a dog. I’ll work in the city while he fixes boats. At night, he’ll hold me in front of the fireplace.”
The plan was for Chloe to reveal herself to Jess as the “secret admirer” shortly before they left. She fretted over his being several years older than her; how could she make herself look older? Makeup? High heels? A wig? Where could she get these items? She asked Dad to take her and Sam into the nearest town so they could shop. Their father dumped them off on the largest street with strict instructions to meet him in two hours at the library. They wandered up and down but couldn’t find a wig store. Didn’t all cities have wig stores? They asked some women who worked at a hair salon and were directed to a Frenchy’s, the local equivalent of Goodwill. Bingo. There they found a second-hand blonde wig for ten dollars along with some previously used, grimy green eyeshadow, and a pair of backless spike heels.
Chloe left her last note for Jess. “It is time for me to unveil myself to you. If you can meet me here tomorrow at seven o’clock, take these rocks and spell the word ‘yes’ beside the boat.” She left him a pile of white stones rubbed smooth by the tides. The next day she hid inside the rented cabin, too shy to see him, too scared his response might be laughter, a merciless kick of the stones across the sand. While being careful not to stare at Jess, Sam went about her usual activities. She didn’t find many crabs, but on the sand she found a baby jellyfish, a tiny transparent globe too young to have grown a purple stinger. The sun could dry up the jellyfish, kill it. She waded out into the water with it. Holding the jellyfish in her cupped hands, she let the waves slosh it away. The defencelessness of the jellyfish reminded her of her sister. Sam thought, Jess knows it’s Chloe. After all, who else could his admirer be? None of the other tourists were teenage girls. But Sam also understood Chloe truly believed he didn’t know; her inner world was so powerful she convinced herself it was real.
As soon as she was sure he was gone for the day, Sam ran down to the boat Jess worked on. He had taken a stick and carved the letters Y, E, and S into the sand. Huge, jagged letters like skywriting. Letters everyone could see, letters no one could miss. The rocks Chloe left were dropped into the grooves of the letters.
Back inside the cabin, Chloe had locked herself in the bathroom.
Sam banged on the door. “He said ‘yes,’ he said ‘yes.’”
Chloe opened the door, then went back to viewing herself in the mirror. She was dressed in her cut-offs, a white blouse with embroidery, and the spike heels. Her freckled eyelids were smeared with a line of light green. Sam didn’t think her sister looked older or more sophisticated, just like herself, only with strange footwear.
“Where’s the wig?” Sam asked. Surely the wig would transform Chloe, would disguise her. Then Sam glimpsed the wig curled in a ball like a dead thing on top of the closed toilet seat.
Chloe pulled the wig on, shoving her long red hair under it as best she could. The wig was short, and even Sam could see it looked fake. The hair on it was like fishing line, only beige. Chloe was wearing a Halloween costume.
“I’m Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver” Chloe said.
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
Chloe shook her head furiously. “No! She was a child prostitute.” She ripped the wig off and flung it onto the floor. “This is totally not going to work. I’m not going.”
“But you have to,” Sam said.
Chloe balled up some toilet paper and started rubbing off the eyeshadow. “No, I don’t.” She shut the door in her sister’s face.
After supper, Sam asked Dad if she could go out.
He looked up in surprise. “It’s started raining.”
Right. Sam could hear it patter down. Could see the sequins of rain sticking to the windowpane. But she needed to know if Jess was there. “I left something on the beach. I won’t be long.”
When Sam got outside, she checked her watch: quarter after seven. She was running late for her mission, which was to prove something to Chloe, but Sam couldn’t say what exactly. She crept along the edge of the road, trying to stand in the shadows, but the short fir trees didn’t cast very long ones and besides, it was too dark. She should have brought a flashlight. When she got to the part of the embankment leading to the shore, the foghorn blasted, startling her so much she almost fell down. Below, she could make out Jess in the moonlight. He was standing huddled by the boat, trying not to get soaked from the rain. He was wearing jeans and a windbreaker and drinking a beer. There was an opened six-pack beside him. When he finished gulping down his beer, he lifted the bottle over his head and sent it hurtling towards the sea. The bottle smashed on a rock, didn’t quite make it into the water, although the tides would tug it in eventually. Sam’s father was always tut-tutting about smashed glass. “You kids could get hurt.” Jess didn’t care about that or about the environment. He was pissed off.
Sam went back to the cabin to tell Chloe Jess showed up. “Guess that’s the end of our relationship,” Chloe said. She wasn’t being sarcastic. In her mind, if not in Sam’s, Chloe and Jess had been involved and now it was over. The knowledge that he was interested in her was enough. She would go back to Toronto and tell Tory all about her cute boyfriend. Except it didn’t work out that way. Jess didn’t follow the scripts of the romances Chloe read, romances she was growing tired of. The next day she didn’t read a book but went swimming with Sam. It wasn’t a good day for swimming; summer was coming to an end, and the temperature of the air felt cool. The water was still warm from the daily sun, but when they emerged after the first plunge, the breeze chilled their skin. Afterwards, they trudged up to the road and found Jess waiting for them. He was sitting in his parked car, a beat-up Ford Mustang with a rusted underside.
“Chloe,” he called. “Want a ride to the store?”
“All right,” she said. She looked a little flustered but got into the front seat and gestured to Sam to get into the back.
“No,” Jess said. “Just you.”
Sam stopped. He was older, so she was afraid to contradict him, even though she felt nervous about Chloe going off with him. Dad always said to never get into the car of a stranger, except Jess wasn’t a stranger. They knew him. They watched him every day like their favourite television show.
When Chloe came back from the drive, her face was clenched so tight Sam wondered if her sister had been electrocuted or something. Was she mad, sad, or just stunned? Hard to say. Had Jess known Chloe was the secret admirer? Yes, as soon as she got into the car, he had said, “I know it’s you.”
Chloe began to cry, silently, so their father wouldn’t hear. Her skinny shoulders heaved. “It was just a game, just a game,” she sobbed. He believed her notes more than she meant him to. He thought she was
in love with him, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t at all. In fact, when he had said she was, she thought, what an idiot. Doesn’t he know I’m too young? But he didn’t seem to care about her age. He was big and muscular, he smelled of beer and cigarettes, and he tried to get her to make out with him. He put his hands inside her bikini, inside her. When she started crying, he called her “stuck-up bitch.” But he let her out of his car. Made her walk home from the lighthouse where he had taken her.
Chapter Nineteen
Sam has a reservation at the Chelsea Hotel, where her sister died. As Sam is walking into the Chelsea, a man in an undershirt and jogging pants tries to sell her a pamphlet listing all the famous people who have stayed at the hotel. Sam is about to brush past him when she thinks, why not? Why not find out everything she can about the place? After all, it’s why she’s spent all day driving from Toronto to New York. Digging through her pockets, she finds a crumpled American dollar bill and hands it to the man.
The hotel room is stuffy, so Sam opens a window. She is in New York. She is as close as she can get to her sister’s death. Sam paces around, surveying the room as if some crucial piece of evidence will turn up inside a drawer of one of the pieces of chic teak furniture or clinging to the orange carpet fibres. But being here feels as empty as visiting any popular tourist monument.
She picks up the pamphlet. As she begins to read, she realizes why, when she booked the room, a clerk said so chirpily, “You’re in luck. We just had a cancellation!” Practically every room has been anointed with celebrity, dating back to Mark Twain. A veritable Who’s Who of bohemians have stayed here: Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Edie Sedg-wick. Andy Warhol and Nico made a film about the Chelsea. Leonard Cohen wrote a song about having a fling here with Janis Joplin. Sid and Nancy were also guests.
