The Winter Wives

by Linden MacIntyre

  Also by Linden MacIntyre

  The Wake: The Deadly Legacy of a Newfoundland Tsunami

  The Only Café

  Punishment

  Why Men Lie

  The Bishop’s Man

  Causeway: A Passage from Innocence

  Who Killed Ty Conn (with Theresa Burke)

  The Long Stretch

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2021 Linden MacIntyre

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2021 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada and the United States of America by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

  Title: The Winter wives / Linden MacIntyre.

  Names: MacIntyre, Linden, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200343793 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200343807 | ISBN 9780735282056 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735282063 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8575.I655 W56 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Text design: Terri Nimmo, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Image credits: Cover images: (couple) PixelsEffect; (smoke) Jose A. Bernat Bacete; (wedding ring) Evgeniya Lystsova / EyeEm; all Getty Images

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  In

  memory

  of

  E.A.T.

  1942–2016

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Linden MacIntyre

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Byron

  Part One: All Fall Down

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two: Malignant Cove

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three: Dementia

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Four: Decluttering

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Five: The Great Chase

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Dust to Dust

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  This is the age of oddities let loose.

  —lord byron, Don Juan

  …human reality is constituted as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

  —j.-p. sartre, Being and Nothingness

  BYRON

  My name is Angus, but almost everybody calls me Byron because I limp.

  Peggy Winter was the first to call me Byron. We were in a high school English class studying Romantic poets. Byron was a poet and he limped. She said that I reminded her of Byron. We were very young when she decided that she knew me better than she knew anybody, knew me better than I knew myself, knew that I was special, which is how I came to think of her.

  We were both so very wrong.

  PART ONE

  ALL FALL DOWN

  1.

  When Allan fell, we were at the tee on the tenth hole of a golf course. It would take a long time to absorb the full impact of what happened there. Up close, death is like a mountain we happen to be standing on. Maybe we can see a piece of it, but the whole remains unreal until there’s distance.

  In the moment, it was almost funny, Allan staggering as if he was clowning. I assumed that he was gasping to recover from a fit of laughter. Then he fell, sort of in slow motion.

  Perhaps I should have noticed what was coming when we were on the ninth green. Three strokes and he was still four inches from the cup. Even his final angry backhand swat, guaranteed to sink the ball, failed. The ball, in defiance of all the laws of physics, not to mention his forty-something years of dedication to the game, swirled around the rim, then lurched away from it.

  Finally, he used his foot to nudge it in.

  –This fuckin game, he said.

  –Nobody’s keeping score, I said.

  He laughed.

  I clapped him on the shoulder as we stored our putters in the golf bags. But climbing back into the cart, his face was flushed and he fell into a deep golfer silence as we raced along. He needed a distraction.

  I remembered the two little bottles I’d taken from the mini-bar in our hotel. It was ten o’clock in the morning, but so what. We were on vacation.

  The day was warm and close, slightly overcast—the kind of day you’d expect a lot of insects. One of the charms of a golf course, I find, is the absence of insects. Absence of almost any form of life, actually. Just grass and other golfers who seem so far away there’s no danger of engagement. And, of course, the inconvenient trees.

  And so it was on that day—no bugs, no other creatures near enough to see or hear, the distant highway sounds of whining cars and snarling trucks the only evidence of the world outside.

  The mini-bottles were in the golf cart’s cupholder. I fished them out and held them up. Allan smiled, finally.

  –Hair of the dog, I said.

  I snapped the caps and handed one across to him and we drove on, sipping thoughtfully.

  I’m not a golfer. I played with Allan to amuse him, so he’d get the practice and the personal satisfaction of humiliating me. But that day on the ninth green I’d accidentally sunk a twenty-foot putt and beaten Allan by two strokes.

  Sometimes I think that partially explains what happened on the tenth.

  Allan went first, while I sat in the cart and drained the little bottle. He positioned himself carefully, stared briefly down the fairway, glared at the golf ball for a moment, then swung. There was a precise click and the ball was gone. I lost it in the haze but knew that it was headed exactly where he wanted it to go.

  We saw it land and then bounce to the edge of the green.

  –I’m back, he said.

  My turn. I struggled out of the cart. One leg is about an inch shorter than the other and slightly weaker. Getting in and out of vehicles can be challenging. I injected a tee in the damp sod and balanced a ball on top of it. Straightened up. Tried to seem like I had some control over what was going to happen next.

  I took two practice swings, then swung mightily. Missed. The ball toppled off the tee.

  I forced myself to smile.

  I repositioned the ball and studied it some more, glanced at Allan. He was standing, kind of leaning on his driver. His face was neutral, as if his mind was a hundred miles away.

 
–This is for real, I said.

  –Just keep your eye on the ball, he growled.

  I stared at it for a few more seconds, then swung again. This time I connected. There was the satisfying click of contact, followed by two quick whacks as the ball ricocheted off some nearby birch trees then shot back between us, narrowly missing Allan’s head, and landed inside the golf cart, where I found it in the cupholder.

  I plucked it out and held it up.

  –A hole-in-one, I said.

  Allan uttered what I thought was a loud guffaw, but when I turned toward him, he was stumbling and then he was on his knees, hands planted palms down in the grass. I assumed he’d lost his balance when he ducked. The sound that he was making could have passed for laughter had he not then rolled slowly onto his side and curled up, twitching, grimacing.

  I dropped down beside him. One of the happier consequences of my disability—or I should say one of my abilities—is upper-body strength from the time I spent periodically on crutches and in gyms. Slinging heavy lobster traps and bales of hay when I was younger. I gently sat him up, held him in my arms.

  His head rolled back, his eyes panicky and wild. He was struggling to speak, but the sounds he made were meaningless. He was drooling.

  I could hear the whine of a golf cart and the sound of someone running. Then there was a stranger crouching on the other side of Allan, clutching at his wrist, fingers on his neck.

  –Lie him flat, he ordered.

  I gently lowered Allan to the grass and struggled to my feet.

  –I’m a doctor, said the stranger. He was already scrolling through a cellphone.

  The ambulance couldn’t have been far away. In what seemed like a couple of minutes, I heard a little whoop of urgency, saw it trundling down the fairway toward where we were waiting. By then there was a small cluster of golf carts gathered around us and a dozen golfers watching silently.

  –What’s your connection with this guy? the doctor asked.

  –We’re family. We’re in business. Our wives are sisters.

  –Maybe you should call his wife.

  –What can I say?

  –It’s too early to say anything.

  –But he’s going to be okay, right?

  The doctor didn’t answer.

  He stepped aside as the paramedics carefully positioned Allan on a stretcher then hoisted him and slid him into the back of the ambulance. The doctor clambered in and squatted down, bent close to Allan’s face, checked his eyes and pulse again. Then he hopped out nimbly, retrieving his golf gloves from his pocket.

  One of the paramedics slammed the back doors, hustled toward the front. The ambulance whooped once more as it started up.

  I watched it roll away down the hill toward the main road. I saw a foursome on a fairway stop to watch it pass. Nearing the highway, the lights began to flash and the siren began its terrifying, urgent screaming.

  I remembered the sensations, being trapped inside an ambulance while the external wailing just goes on and on and on.

  Unknown destination. The future rapidly unravelling.

  * * *

  —

  I sat in the golf cart, struggling to grasp the implications of what had just occurred. The doctor paused beside me to ask if I was okay. I nodded. One by one the other golf carts slowly wheeled away, the unexpected interruption over.

  Then I remembered Peggy, Allan’s wife, and the need to call her, and the potential gravity of what was happening almost took my voice away.

  I managed to call my wife, Annie, Peggy’s sister. It’s been years since we’ve lived together, Annie and I, but I know her number off by heart.

  –I need to get in touch with Peggy. Do you have her number handy?

  –Is there something wrong?

  –Yes, there might be something very wrong. But if you see her before I talk to her, don’t say anything. Allan is in an ambulance, on his way to a hospital.

  –Oh Christ. What happened?

  –He collapsed. I need Peggy’s cellphone number.

  –Should I be there?

  –Sit tight for now. It’s probably just stress.

  When Peggy picked up, I tried to be tactful without diminishing what, from my perspective, was potentially momentous. Peggy has always been unflappable and she seemed to be taking it all in stride.

  –There was a doctor near, I said.

  –That’s a relief, she said.

  –Hey, everything is going to be fine. Okay?

  I was working hard to sound upbeat, but there’s something about falling down. Never a sign of good things to come.

  –What do you think? she asked.

  –Probably nothing serious. He was having a great game. He’s as strong as a horse.

  –I’m on my way, she said.

  –You can find the hospital okay?

  –Yes. And he told me the address of the hotel where you guys are staying. I have it somewhere.

  –I’ll see you there, I said.

  –Or at the hospital?

  –Yes. The hospital. I’ll try to be there.

  * * *

  —

  I returned the golf cart and my rented gear to the pro shop. Everything was starting to sink in, but in a kind of haze. My head was full of vague imperatives. Get back to the hotel. Find the hospital. Figure out the next few days. Perhaps the next few decades. We were getting old, but there was still a future to navigate.

  And then I thought of our hotel room, where all his stuff was still scattered as he left it. The half-full water glass on the little bedside table, beside the half-read book. Things we start, assuming that we’ll finish. The nearly empty liquor bottle. Trousers sprawled across a chair, a sock dangling from an empty leg. Unlived life left messy. A job for someone else.

  2.

  Allan and Peggy had arrived in Halifax from Toronto the day before our golf game. I met them at the airport. Peggy planned to visit old friends first, and then her sister Annie, who, at the time, was still living mostly in Nova Scotia, in her own place, not far from where I live and practise law.

  Allan and I headed off to the golf course, which was several hours’ drive from the city.

  I was the one who checked us into the hotel. Allan had a phobia about signing anything, even something as innocuous as a small-town hotel registry. You could hunt forever, but you’d never find my partner’s name on a bureaucratic document, not even on our letterhead. I handled most of his official business.

  Actually, Allan had many names—inventions he could use when necessary then leave behind, as irrelevant as worn-out shoes. A name is a persona, he’d say, and a persona has no substance. It was one of his many eccentricities, but I had come to understand his reasons. A name is only a name. Identity is something else, something deep and private, shared only with those who, over time, we come to trust. I took for granted that the list of people he trusted was very short. Me and Annie. And, obviously, Peggy.

  I sat down on the bed in the room and searched my phone to find the number for the nearby hospital. But then I realized that if I called to ask about him, I wouldn’t know what name to ask for.

  That was the Allan we knew. Or thought we knew.

  * * *

  —

  I met him during our first year in university, back in the late seventies. I’d seen him around, usually wearing the distinctive dark wool jacket that identified him as part of the varsity football team. I basically ignored him. They were a cult unto themselves, the athletes.

  Then one evening we both found ourselves sitting in a stairwell outside the university dining hall waiting for the place to open. I had a book, and pretended to be engrossed.

  –What’s that? he asked.

  –A book, I said.

  –No kidding.

  I handed it over.

  –
It’s for English, I said.

  –The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle, eh.

  –What are you taking?

  –Science. You?

  –Arts, I said.

  He flipped through the pages, then paused and read for maybe two minutes, then handed it back.

  –So. The pigs were Cedric’s?

  –What?

  He took the book back, flipped it open again, read aloud.

  -Gurth with the brass collar around his neck, tending Cedric’s pigs in the glades of the wood. Catchy.

  –I’m not that far in yet. All I know is that Cedric was Gurth’s master. A Saxon nobleman. He owned the pigs.

  –Gurth was a slave…

  –A swineherd. The point is…

  –I’m Allan.

  –Yes. Allan Chase, I said.

  Everybody knew Allan Chase.

  –The Great Chase, I added, smiling.

  His eyes narrowed. He shrugged. The Great Chase was a middle linebacker. They called him Great because he was very good at chasing people down and flattening them. Halfbacks, quarterbacks. He’d go through an offensive line like a truck.

  –And who are you?

  –Byron.

  –As in Lord Byron.

  –The very same.

  –Let me see that again.

  I handed him the book and he kept flicking through the pages, killing time, waiting for the door to open.

  –Interesting, he said when he handed it back again.

  –Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

  –You play any sports?

  –Not all that interested.

  –A poet.

  –I wish.

  We were teasing each other. I don’t think he was accustomed to that, making personal jokes that were a little edgy but not going anywhere near larger challenges. He seemed to be enjoying the experience.