Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  21

  When she got back to their island, Diane Kelleher stumbled out of the canoe and tied it up to the dock with trembling hands. On rubbery legs she walked straight up the gravel path, past the flourishing geraniums, to her pottery studio. Inside, everything was the way she had left it just two hours ago, before she had decided to take a break and paddle the back bays. It was always better to be out on the water in the heat of the day.

  She surveyed the studio, numb, taking in the kiln, the long work tables, clean and uncluttered, the crocks that held her glazes. The pails, the plaster bats, the old coffee cans—everything was in order. Everything that wasn’t human and arrogant and full of deceit, that is. There on the wheel head was a clay face, nearly dry, most of the slip having been carefully sponged away. As she rotated the wheel, the face seemed to be turning slowly to look at her over an imaginary shoulder. When they came face to face, she was looking at a clay mask of herself, the thing she had been working on for the last day and a half without knowing why. But it felt strangely like a memento. She touched the eyes, which were still damp. The cool clay formed a membrane across the sockets.

  She stood in the center of her studio, hands hanging useless at her sides. Her mind cast back to that first time, years ago, before they were married, when Martin Kelleher had brought her to Lake Wendaban and walked her around this property for sale. He spoke in that decisive way he had about his plans for what would become the Kelleher estate, pointing to the right, to the left. On the subject of this property, he was no halfway laddie, not ever. And not with Cintorix Corporation, not ever.

  But with everything else in the life of a human being, if that human being was at all lucky, he was forever a halfway laddie. In anything that required Martin to see something beautiful and decent in other people’s needs, especially if they did not coincide with his own, he was a halfway laddie. And for Diane March Kelleher, it had always been enough. Was it the money? Was she just that shallow? Maybe it was security, or routine, or some kind of stupid inertia on her part. Or was it just goddamn misplaced love, all these years? Diane squeezed her eyes shut tight, then opened them wide, and kept them open, forcing herself to picture what had just happened as she eased the canoe around the point of one of the small, overgrown islands just a mile from their own.

  She remembered ducking underneath the branches that overhung the water as she paddled, and in the late morning light Diane could hear the katydids buzzing in the brush. There was a smell to the summer heat, colorless and powerful as it burned away the dew and left the air swollen and wonderful. Below her, where she sat in the canoe, Diane could see a smallmouth bass motionless, down about four feet, its black-striped tail waving lazily.

  Around the bend was a campsite high up on the rock, tucked back into a clearing shaded by tall red and white pines. Two small motorboats were tied up there. Some instinct made Diane halt where she was, without drawing attention to herself. Then she silently paddled close enough to see a blue and yellow tent pitched on the campsite, and a clothesline strung between two trees where some skimpy clothes dangled. Nearby was a fire pit, and a makeshift table made of tree stumps and weather-beaten boards. All the marks of somebody settled in for some long-term camping.

  Diane sculled closer to the shore, where she hoped she was out of sight, when she heard a noisy tent zipper pulled open and soft laughter sail out. Carefully pulling herself up to a crouch, she strained to see what was happening. A girl emerged naked from the tent, her face obscured by dark, curly hair. She stretched in that languid way a girl can when she’s that young and slim and her breasts spend a lot of time in the open air. Then she stepped into a lightweight denim skirt, telling what she thought was a funny story about a boating lesson, a thumb flicking at something by one of her tattoos.

  And all of a sudden Diane recognized her.

  Josie Blanton.

  Didn’t she live in town somewhere?

  Didn’t she clean for Wade Decker?

  And then a hand pushed aside the tent flap and Josie Blanton’s partner started to climb out, awkwardly, on older legs trying to behave like younger legs in the presence of this girl. It was Martin. Diane watched him have to push himself upright—camping was something even money couldn’t make easier—and, if he was a little embarrassed, he covered it by zipping his jeans in a manly way, if there could be such a thing, like he was tucking away his power supply. Which maybe he was. How long could she not breathe, wondered Diane, hidden there in the shallows? Why did she feel absolutely nothing?

  Martin said something declarative to Josie Blanton that brought her, sauntering, over to him, where he fingered her nipples in that way he had, like he was trying to tune to an FM station, that had never done it for Diane. Then Josie ran her arms up around his neck and they sank into a clinch while she tried to wiggle her toes into a couple of negligible sandals. Swaying, she pulled away, and he gave her a fond spank and tried to find the head hole of his green Izod shirt. Sex always confused Martin.

  As Josie Blanton pulled on a pink bandana headband, she said she was sick of doing demeaning work for rich lake people when she should be a supermodel in New York, say, or even running her own business. Diane thought that, from what she could see, the girl was doing just that. Martin murmured reassurances of some sort. Josie sounded skeptical. Martin did something she had never in their lives together heard. He pleaded. Josie seemed airy. Martin wheedled, promising her anything, Diane guessed, up to and including Diane’s Noritake china and pottery studio. Josie seemed coyly unconvinced.

  For this girl Our Lady of Perpetual Help got a new choir loft?

  Diane headed for home. At one point, when she was out of sight, and so were they, she had a moment of acute vision, boring through the easy gauze of the sky. She lay the paddle across her lap, letting the slight breeze rock her when nothing else in her privileged life did, and she knew what she had to do.

  She blamed herself for her inaction in the matter of Cintorix and whatever her husband had up his cheating little sleeve. There wasn’t a person on this lake Diane liked less at that moment—including the dead Leslie Selkirk Decker, who had been dangerous until someone had ended her—than Martin Francis Kelleher. And she was the only one, anywhere, who knew what to look for, and where to look for it, to do right, in some small way, by Wade and Caroline and Charlie and all those others. All those others. Somehow, she’d hack into Martin’s laptop, she’d pack a bag, make a couple of quick calls, and take herself to the landing in their fastest boat, after a quick stop at Camp Sajo. She hoped whatever papers and files she could turn over to Caroline Selkirk would be enough.

  For the 9,646th dinner of these last thirty years, the halfway laddie was entirely on his own. And Diane’s heart lifted when she realized it cut both ways—if he was alone, then so, so was she. If she worked fast, she could grab a Bee Burger in town before she hit the road in the Mercedes that Martin never let her drive. It might actually top the list in the settlement.

  By late afternoon, Val had straightened up the Hathaway family cottage and made some calls. She washed the few dishes she had used and set them in the drainer to air dry. She swept out whatever dirt and pine needles she had tracked inside. She stripped the bed, remade it with a set of clean sheets she found in a blanket chest, happily noting they were heavy flannel. She figured she’d give Peter and the performance artist known as Daria Flottner a head start generating some heat in the bedroom on a muggy night in August. When her mind irresistibly started to play with the image, she picked up a broom and swept some more. There was nothing she could do about whatever Muffy and Lana had left in the fridge that was still there, marching past their expiration dates, so she closed the door to the fridge and left fuzzy green surprises for her former boss. She set back up the framed photos—all shots of the smiling, privileged Peter she had turned facedown. In the ash can.

  She called Rocky Shore Lodge in town and booked a room.

  She
called the Ontario Lakeland train service and learned the train to Toronto came through at nine thirty tomorrow morning.

  She called Caroline who told her, yes, she could certainly come hang out at Camp Sajo before the gala. Be happy to have her. Be nice to see her.

  She called Wade Decker, left a message asking if he could please pick her up at the camp.

  She called Peter Hathaway, left a message that she had a signed contract to hand off to him and that she was giving him her two weeks’ notice. At the end of the day—and this was more a message to herself than to him, so she didn’t include it—she’d be damned if she’d let Peter Hathaway fire her. If she ran into him at the gala, she’d tuck the signed contract into the waistband of his flowing, muslin drawstring pants. If she didn’t see him before she left Lake Wendaban, then she’d set it on his desk at work.

  For an exciting moment, Val wondered if Charlie Cable would follow her to her next editorial job. And would he follow her sooner than later? If Val Cameron was the kind of stand-up gal he’d insist on editing his mem-WAHRS, not to mention his space junk thriller, wouldn’t he and his career come with her? Val’s fingers lingered on the phone, tapping softly while she considered calling Julian Onnedonk and asking him for a job—on the strength of landing The Asteroid Mandate by Charles Cable. She’d let the reality of that coup flop heavy and golden in the Onnedonk boat. How particularly delicious it would be when Peter Hathaway found out that not only had Fir Na Tine not tied up Cable, but Julian the archrival wunderkind had—because of Val. Val the incompetent. Val the smitten sap. As thoughts went, it was just about as diabolical as Valjean Cameron had ever been.

  It was interesting to learn she had it in her.

  And interesting to learn she couldn’t do it.

  At least, not yet.

  The prospect of leaving Fir Na Tine was terrifying. Maybe it was the way the afternoon sunlight slanted through her office window that was always just a little grimy and landed next to her laptop while she worked. Or maybe it was the way she couldn’t tell whether those were cherubs or hollyhocks sculpted into beautiful old millwork running the perimeter of her office ceiling fifteen feet high, and she never wanted to know the answer. And then there were the floor stacks and stacks of colorful Fir Na Tine books that looked like they were trying to stretch all the way up to the millwork.

  Her framed Matisse prints, her old Turkish flatweave rug Aunt Greta had given her for no good reason, her antique walnut credenza she had bought on Craigslist. The humidor where she kept tea bags. The brass coat rack from her grandparents’ old speakeasy on Thompson Street in the Village. Fir Na Tine held the things she loved, and even though Val knew she could cart most of them away with her, wherever she went, it was terrifying to know she was tearing something apart.

  Even when it was required.

  Her fingers slipped off the telephone. There would be no call, yet, to Julian Onnedonk, although there was something sweet about calling him from Peter Hathaway’s phone. No call yet because there was still the matter of Peter and the feelings that never seemed to lessen or change or just plain go away. She and the publisher of Fir Na Tine were a tangle of little gold links like the necklaces in her jewelry box she couldn’t tease apart, and so they stayed—a chain that couldn’t be worn, a heightened glimmer of no practical good whatsoever.

  Val loaded her laptop, briefcase, and overnight bag into the little boat that now had half a tank of gas, thanks to Arlo. Her final act of defiance, once she was seated by the motor, was to slip on her navy Prada heels. They matched her shiner, but could she square dance in them? It hardly mattered. One foot on the battered wooden step the train conductor would set out for her, and she was as good as gone.

  She was just that close to putting the whole unpleasant episode of the last few days behind her. A couple of solitary lunches in the MOMA café, after basking in their Edward Hopper collection, and Deckers both dead and alive would shrink to little pinpoints in her mind that would no longer be jangled. In a year and a half, Charles Cable would be nothing more than a black and white photo on a dust jacket, and now, finally, easy to grab.

  Without a glance at the Hathaway family cottage, where Peter would soon be installing Daria Flottner and letting her love phloem ooze all over him, Val set out west toward the Selkirk Peninsula. There was still plenty of daylight, and the way she had it figured, all she had to do was get herself to Camp Sajo this one time. From there, all her transportation needs were met by Wade Decker, Ontario Lakeland train service, and Air Canada.

  From LaGuardia, she was one Yellow Cab away from her home on E. 51st St. And there wasn’t a cabbie anywhere in the five boroughs that would tell you WE GET YOU THERE AND KEEP YOU WARM AND DRY. They didn’t have to. It was the job, man. She’d be in her own queen-sized bed with the pillow top mattress and Egyptian cotton sheets by bedtime tomorrow night. The heels felt a little snug, because her feet were swollen from the abuse they took on the canoe trip with Wade, but snug only made her love them more. She wanted to feel every leather centimeter of support the brilliant Mario Prada was offering her.

  The clouds that had been bunching ominously while Arlo was sharing gas and providing Charlie Cable with an alibi for the murder of Leslie Decker were thinning out, scattering slowly in a wind she couldn’t see at work. That’s how high up it must be. The unobstructed sun burned up there like an ingot and started a slow descent toward the horizon. When she got close to Caroline Selkirk’s ghost camp, she watched Kay Stanley turn from the garden halfway up the gentle hillside toward the lodge. Kay tossed a handful of weeds into a basket, pulled the gloves from her hands, and started down to the dock.

  “How’d you learn to operate a boat?”

  “Necessity,” said Val. “A big fat absence of Wade persuaded me.” She grabbed the warm, weather-beaten boards of the Camp Sajo dock and held on tight. “He arranged for Josie Blanton to give me a lesson.”

  Kay reared back at the name. “I hear she’s good at lessons,” she said, and then widened her dark eyes at Val. “Only I didn’t know they had anything to do with boating.”

  Remembering Josie’s rip it, rip it, easy, easy, faster, Val laughed. “You hear tell, do you?”

  “I hear tell,” she agreed, smiling at her bare feet. “Mainly from the maintenance crew.” Kay rubbed a tanned forearm across her thick, short hair, and the two of them stood enjoying a silent moment together the way two women do when they’ve most definitely got the number on a third, who’s absent. After Kay tied the line to a silver cleat, she reached for the overnight bag Val was handing up to her.

  Slinging the laptop and briefcase onto the dock, Val grabbed the hand Kay offered and stepped out of the boat. As Kay slipped the white bumpers over the sides of Wade Decker’s little boat to keep it from banging the dock, Val thought about her letter to Trey Selkirk all those years ago. All those years between a baby born in Iqaluit and given up, because she just couldn’t do that to the Selkirks, none of them, and the domestic life here at a dying camp. A garden on Trey Selkirk’s old soil. Loaves of bread baked in Trey Selkirk’s old kitchen. Laundry washed, dried, folded in Trey Selkirk’s old boathouse that had, one day two years ago, been the scene of his daughter Leslie’s violent end. Now Kay Stanley was tending to his sole remaining daughter, Caroline, because she couldn’t tend the inconvenient baby she had given up. In the hardy summer sunlight that still hadn’t slipped between the trees, Val felt inexpressibly sad.

  “Who’s here?” she asked Kay, eyeing the sleek new boat with a motor the size of a doghouse that looked like it could sleep four.

  “Diane Kelleher,” said Kay, the smile evaporating. “Just came.” Between them they carried Val’s things up to the porch of the lodge. Luke Croy, who stood just inside the screen door with his arms folded over his tight blue t-shirt, nodded at Val and opened the door just wide enough for her to slip inside. Diane Kelleher. Martin Kelleher’s wife. Martin, the leader of what he
called “the environmental bloc.” Martin who strong-armed cottagers into signing petitions, running for office, and passing Diane’s excellent shrimp fritters, please.

  What was his wife doing here?

  22

  In the reduced light of the Camp Sajo lodge great room, with its walls lined with framed photos of smiling young campers decades ago, stood Caroline Selkirk in the center of the empty room. Close to where Val herself had been knocked out five nights ago. In a plain green sleeveless shift, Caroline Selkirk looked about as old as the campers in the framed photos. Her fine head, with its tumble of red hair, was tipped as she listened to Diane Kelleher.

  “I can’t stay long,” said Martin Kelleher’s wife. Her brown hair was held back by a pair of sunglasses she had pushed up from her eyes. In the heavy, empty silence of the great room, her words seemed to hang there. Like the pearl drop earrings she wore. She was dressed in gray linen and the kind of glossy black sandals better off on Fifth Avenue than clambering out of big boats in the Northwoods. In an instant, glancing down at her own heels, Val knew this was a woman who was heading south.

  Caroline and Diane both noticed Val at the same moment. At Caroline’s look, Diane answered, “She can stay.” Then Martin Kelleher’s wife slid the hefty messenger bag off her linen shoulder and handed it to Caroline. “This is for you.”

  Caroline looked down at it. “What is it?” she asked, slowly opening the flap, revealing a stack of papers inside.

  At the question, Diane Kelleher fell silent. Then she lifted her chin and said simply, “It’s proof.” And her slender hands, with nothing more to offer, opened wide.

  “Proof?” asked Caroline, shaking her head slowly. “Of what?”

  Diane Kelleher bit her lip and set a hand on Caroline’s shoulder. One sweet little stroke, meant to express something that didn’t seem quite clear to any of them standing there in the late afternoon summer sunlight.