by Kurt Palka
ALSO BY KURT PALKA
Rosegarden
The Chaperon
Equinox
Scorpio Moon
Clara (originally published as Patient Number 7)
The Piano Maker
Copyright © 2018 Kurt Palka
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request
ISBN: 9780771073816
Ebook ISBN 9780771073823
Book design by Rachel Cooper
Cover art: © Stas Pushkarev / Arcangel
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.1
a
For Heather
and for Christina and Paul, and Melanie and Rob
She followed slowly, taking a long time, as though there were something she had yet to overcome, but also as if, as soon as she had done so, she might no longer merely walk, but fly.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, New Poems (1907)
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Kurt Palka
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Down Here, Among Humans
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
The Children
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
The Deal
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Parents
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Way Home
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Acknowledgements
About the Author
One
THE HOUSE WAS DARK, as she’d known it would be. She thought he was in South America, but she was not certain. In Argentina, maybe.
She unlatched the garden gate and walked down the path, around the main house and down to the cottage, past the roses and the quince bushes all in darkness but the concrete path brighter than the grass and the earth around it. At the cottage she unlocked the door and went in.
She put her briefcase on the counter, and for a moment it looked to her as though a light had come on and gone out again in one of the windows at the main house. She watched a while longer to see if the light came back but it didn’t. The house still dark, a brick mountain looming in the night. Then a light flashed again, but now she could tell that it was only the reflection of the headlights of a car going by in the street. It wasn’t Jack.
She hesitated for a moment, then took the key from her purse and walked back up the path to the house. The bushes were full of their fruit that no one picked any more. When Andrew had been small, they used to make quince jelly together, the boy helping her pick and mash, and later in the coldroom in the basement taking the jars from her hand and setting them on the low shelf with the labels pointing front. In later years an English neighbour came to pick some of the fruit, but that ended too.
She unlocked the back door, pushed it open and listened, then reached for the light switch and stepped inside. Cold, damp. Stairway air. Up she walked, feeling like an intruder, turning on lights as she went: the hallway; the kitchen, all modern and unused like a showroom; the TV room; the living room; her study with the door closed; his study with the door open. She paused for a moment, then stepped inside.
Bookcases, his desk, tray after tray with his rock samples. On two large corkboards maps full of pins with little flags for copper, gold, and silver, all the treasures of the earth. And prominently on the keyboard of his upright typewriter, the thing she’d been hoping for, a sheet of paper with his handwriting on it: Argentina, Río Negro, Aguada de Guerra. And a telephone number. She took the piece of paper, folded it, and put it in her pocket. Over at the southern hemisphere map, she looked for Argentina and Río Negro. There. A little pin with a silver flag in Aguada de Guerra.
At the door she looked back into the room that was so completely filled with him. For a moment her vision shimmered, and she pressed a finger to her eyebrow. Not now, she said to it. Not now.
* * *
—
That night she slept on the couch in the living room at the main house. She got ready in the bathroom, and then in their bedroom gathered pillow and duvet off the bed and dragged them into the living room. She found a nightgown and put it on and crawled into the nest. Light from passing cars brushing the ceiling. Once in the night she thought she heard the telephone and she stumbled to it thinking it might be Andrew, but there was only the dial tone and the receiver cold and heavy in her hand.
Later in a dream she saw him on a canvas stretcher in the desert, and she was his nurse to make him well again. Except that she could only occasionally glance at him through the heat-shimmer before she had to go back to counting grains of sand from one hand into the other. So many grains of sand. When she finally walked over to the stretcher she had exactly the same number of grains in each hand, and that seemed important. She meant to tell him, but he was gone and there was only the empty stretcher.
* * *
—
“Dear Margaret,” Aileen had said to her not that long ago. “He was a good boy and he knew what he wanted and that’s exactly what he did. Stop questioning him and yourself. Let him go. He would want you to.”
They’d been sitting in Aileen’s living room in Sweetbarry and the sun was going down red, red on Gull Rock out there, and red upon the tips of the tallest trees in her father’s little forest, the cedars and the pines.
She and Aileen had been friends and neighbours in Sweetbarry all their lives, and that long weekend she’d flown there simply for Aileen’s strength and kindness and for help with her own thinking, which was like wandering a dark maze with no way out.
It had been several months after Andrew had been killed and his coffin had come home empty, and eventually she had told Jack face to face that she was hoping he’d understand, and that she believed she still loved him, but that she could not live with him right now. Rather than increase her strength, being with him actually weakened and distracted her. From this, she said. From what she needed to learn to do now. From finding her way back to herself. If it was all right with him, she would be moving out of the main house for a while, into the little wooden cottage at the bottom of the garden to be alone.
This had been one morning in the hallway, in the light from the open bathroom door. Jack had stood looking at her, so very careful with her now.
“The cottage,” he’d said. “Really? I don’t know what condition it’s in, Margaret. As you know, Andrew and h
is friends used it off and on but nobody has really lived in it for years. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Jack.”
The place did need repairs, and she decided to take care of those herself. She queried the men at the lumberyard in great detail about what she would need and how to do it, and she made lists and bought tools and supplies, and got on with it: new flooring in two areas in the kitchen and bedroom where the boards were rotten, repairs to plaster where it had come away from laths, repairs to the siding on the south wall, and new roofing shingles in several places.
Altogether the repairs took five weekends. On the last weekend Jack was home, and he watched from the kitchen window and at times from the walkway. She was up on the roof, fitting and hammering, and while getting up there had been relatively easy, coming back down was not. Jack didn’t say anything, asked no questions and knew better than to offer help. But he brought down two electric heaters from the main house and set them on the path not far from the cottage. She would have liked to smile at him but she feared it might make her weep, which she didn’t want to do any more, and so she did not smile. He stood for some time, then he turned and walked back up to the house and stepped inside and closed the door.
* * *
—
In the morning she tidied couch and bedroom and put everything back exactly the way it had been. The night gown she refolded along its creases and put it back in the same spot in the same drawer in the dresser. Like a thief she tiptoed from room to room making sure there were no traces of her having nested there the night. In the hallway she picked up the receiver and listened and put it down again.
She went to work by subway as usual, and in her office she closed the door, unfolded Jack’s note and smoothed it on her desk. She took a deep breath and let it out and then dialled the number and asked for Señor Jack Bradley. Her Spanish was good enough for her to understand that the girl was asking for her name and number so that Señor Bradley could call her back.
When he called, Jenny was in the room taking dictation for the meeting with the Chicago client that evening, and Margaret asked her to come back in fifteen minutes and close the door on the way out.
“Is everything all right?” he said.
“More or less. I have a question. Where was Andrew on that last mission? I know it was in Ethiopia, but was it in a hot and sandy place?”
There was a silence on the phone, and even across these thousands of miles of wire she could feel him shifting down into his careful mode.
“You want to do this all over again? It won’t change with the retelling.”
“Just tell me if it was hot and sandy.”
“Probably. In places, anyway. There are highlands and there’s the Ahmar mountain range but that’s a bit further north. South in the Ogaden region, where he was, there’d be some vegetation but there’d also be stretches of desert.”
“On an airstrip.”
“Yes, on an improvised airstrip. You know that.”
“He wanted to be like you,” she said.
“Like me. Are we back to that now? He wanted to be like me and so it’s my influence on him, again. Or the lack of it. I never wanted to be a pilot or a soldier. Not after I saw how the war messed up my father. I wanted him to become an engineer, and he made a good start at it. He got his first degree and could have gone on, but then he discovered flying. Why are you doing this again? I thought we were done with the blaming.”
“I’m not blaming you. But you know he admired you and wanted to be like you. The military history in your family.” “No, I don’t know that. Not after what my father did.” More silence on the phone then.
“Wait,” she said quickly. “Jack…I don’t mean to…” And he did wait a while, but when she took too long he said, “Take care, Margaret. I’ll probably be home on Monday. We need to talk.” And he hung up.
Two
IN THE AFTERNOON she and Hugh Templeton had a short meeting about the Chicago case, a 120-million-dollar acquisition and repositioning of a Canadian company by an American client. She had written the two-page executive summary, and Hugh read it and they discussed the main points.
“You’ll be the lead,” he said to her then. “You talk them through it. All right?”
Hugh was the senior partner in the law firm, and she worked closely with him. Altogether there were four partners and seven associates, including her. She was the most senior associate, and the understanding was that as long as she kept performing as well as she had been, she was next in line to make partner.
To accommodate the client’s schedule, the boardroom meeting took place after regular office hours. She and Hugh sat side by side, across the table from the client and his lawyer and his accountant. For several minutes while the men sat reading the summary, there was not one sound in the room save for the occasional creaking of a chair. The overhead lights were on, and out the window she could see that the sky was darkening. There had been rain in the forecast. In some of the buildings lights were coming on.
“And this?” the client’s lawyer said. He was a big man in a pinstripe suit, and he had pale eyes that stared at her with the same mocking condescension that she used to get from men as a student and as a young woman lawyer but that she hadn’t seen in a long time. He turned the page her way with his broad finger on a paragraph. “This part, ma’am.” Not even bothering with her name.
But she knew by now how to deal with men like him. She’d learned it in law school and in all the years thereafter, in job after job, and now she gave him her unhurried look, steady and calm, waiting for him to see himself in her eyes, and within a few heartbeats he did. The response was always the same, and it flickered from surprise to embarrassment, and something in his face and even in the way he held his shoulders changed.
“Offshore residency, Ted,” she said. “Is that not clear? It’s set up that way in point three. See? And there’s more detail a few lines down.”
She turned away from him to the client and explained briefly about offshore registration and how, when a corporation bought into Canada through the back door in this way, the tax advantage was actually threefold.
Jenny brought a tray with deli sandwiches and carafes and cups and napkins. She glanced questioningly at Margaret, and Margaret checked her watch and nodded.
The men went back to reading.
Out the window against the sky she saw a flight of pigeons circling. They fluttered and then landed on the windowsills of the bank building at the King Street corner.
The first raindrops tapped against the glass, and abruptly, before the rain became too heavy, she pushed back her chair and stood up and walked there and opened the door for air.
It was an old-fashioned glass-paned double door leading to the shallow ledge of a French balcony enclosed by an ironwork railing. For a long moment she stood there in her business suit and the black heels that pinched her toes, and out of nowhere the smell of rain on warm masonry reminded her of her youth, of her student days so long ago, the ruined postwar streets of Paris and the excitement of a new place so filled with defiance and ideas.
Down in the street, car roofs glistened and people under umbrellas crowded the subway entrance. Car headlights were coming on, rain in the beams of light. A young black dog suddenly darted off the sidewalk and into traffic, where it bumped against a car. The dog rolled and yelped and then stood in confusion. One car nearly rear-ended another and drivers honked their horns and a woman stood and screamed the dog’s name.
For a moment her vision shimmered and her heart pounded and none of what she saw made sense to her. And yet it did, in some lifetime arc wanting completion, standing at that glass wall again at Lakewood, all so long ago. And now this, all this, with her mind free to roam among losses and dangers, and free to see and connect the now with the then, and the young dog and the woman in the wet street, and this feeling again of not being who she thought she was. Of having slipped her mooring and being adrift between worlds.
Down in t
he street the dog found its owner, a woman perhaps her own age who crouched with her coattails on the wet sidewalk and hugged the dog and struggled to snap a leash to its collar. It was a black lab, an overjoyed puppy thrashing its tail, licking the woman’s face and hands, and all the while Margaret stood with her right hand on the iron rail and the fingertips of her left to her eyebrow. She must not let the men see her like this…
“Margaret,” said Hugh Templeton behind her back. “Margaret? We’re ready here.”
* * *
—
She took a deep breath and closed the door and returned to the table. Walking there she concentrated on the way the shoes pinched her toes, on the very pinpoints of pain, to focus her mind. She allowed her feet to slide forward as far as they would go, pushed them hard into the narrow toe box. Zach at the clinic had taught her about that.
Back in her chair she took charge, taking them step by step through the transaction and all the alternatives and consequences. As she talked, it became easier. It always did. She was back in the lifeboat of her profession now, where she felt strong and in control. This was her métier, and with perseverance and hard work over the years she had made herself one of the best in it.
The client and his lawyer picked up on the change in the room and they sat forward and began making notes.
When she was done she took off her reading glasses, folded them, and put them on the table.
“Gentlemen. Any questions?”
They looked at each other, nodded at each other to speak first. There were no questions, the client said, but there was a lot to think about.
Such as? They raised a few points, and she jotted them down, considered them, then went over them in detail.
In the end they asked for a draft agreement to be sent to their Chicago office. And in a few days’ time perhaps a telephone conference, the client said.
It had gotten late.
Hugh, relieved and chatty, walked them to the elevator. And she, alone in the boardroom now, opened the balcony door again and inhaled the sweet air. The rain had stopped. Night out there.
