The Canterbury Sisters

by Kim Wright

  “There was a kidnapping attempt?” Tess says, still trying to coax Jean along.

  Jean nods brusquely and makes an effort to pull herself together. “Of course, of course. Of course that’s where this all has been going from the start. But it didn’t happen the way you think. The attack wasn’t against me or the children. They followed Allen instead, very late one night when he and Antonio were out in the car.”

  “Where were they going?” Jersey girl asks. The short one with the coal-black hair and surprised eyebrows, Angelique, they call her, and I must find a way to remember that name. Angelique. She looks like an angel who has sprung a leak. I imagine her sputtering across the sky like a released balloon, making rude noises and doing loop-de-loops in midair. Not my best mnemonic image, but it will have to do.

  “I was just getting ready to ask the same thing,” Valerie says. “If the city was so dangerous, then why would your husband go out in the middle of the night?”

  The question seems to pull Jean up short. “I really don’t know,” she finally says. “Allen often worked late. And his job took him all over the city. It’s not like it is here . . . not like it is in America, I should say, or here either, probably.” She fiddles with her scarf, which is tied at her neck bandana-style, even though it isn’t a bandana. Even though it is silky and delicate and probably expensive. Jean’s French twist is not so smooth today. We haven’t been walking that long, and the knot of hair in the back is already half undone.

  “We could slow down,” Tess says, “or pull up entirely and have a proper rest, if anyone wants to. There’s no schedule. No particular place we need to be and no particular time we have to arrive.”

  Jean shakes her head impatiently. “The minute you drove through the gates of our enclave,” she says, “you were thrust into immediate poverty. That’s the part I don’t think I’m explaining right, what I’m not helping you to see. Guatemala isn’t like here or like America, where you have to work to get yourself into serious trouble. Down there, one thing is just smashed up against another. You could go from sanity to insanity within the course of a city block, from the school where my children wore their little blue uniforms to a street corner where a woman was trying to sell her baby. I don’t know why Allen went out that night, not exactly. But he was far across the city, somewhere near a bridge . . .”

  At the word “bridge” she falls silent and we walk a bit with no one talking. Steffi finally stops circling us like a border collie and pulls up breathless, ready to hear the end. We’ve come to a bridge, I think. Now something is going to have to go off of it.

  “I’m afraid I’ve left out a piece of the story,” Jean says. It seems to me she’s left out a rather large piece—like the actual story—but she goes on. “When businessmen were robbed, which was a common event, the bandits would take their wallets. Not just for the money or for the credit cards, but so they would have their identification, with their addresses. And then they would know where they lived with their families. Sometimes other things were in the wallets too, like pictures of the children, or the wife. One man was even foolish enough to have written down all the security codes to his house and put the paper in his wallet. That’s how they got that poor teenage girl. Her father had been robbed at gunpoint and within hours, while he was still down at the police station . . . even that quickly . . . even though it was still daylight when they came . . .”

  “Seriously,” says Becca sharply. She has sped up now, is walking slightly ahead of the clump, and she calls back to us over her shoulder. “I thought we agreed not to talk about the teenage girl.”

  “And so we won’t,” says Jean. “But my point is that back then, maybe ten or twelve years ago, if you had a man’s wallet, you had his life. Much like phones are today.” She looks at me apologetically as she says this, but I’ve already thought of everything that could happen. Already imagined whatever London thug swiped my phone happily going through my online banking accounts, draining one after the other, charging meth on my American Express. “And so Allen always said that no matter what happened, they would never get his wallet. He said that he would die before he gave up the wallet.”

  It’s a funny thing about this story, I think. Jean claims she is telling it as a tribute to her late husband, and she furthermore has made the grand pronouncement that she will start off our trip by giving us an image of the perfect man. But nothing she has said so far has given me any sort of image of Allen at all. I can only conclude that he was the sort of person who tried to do the right thing. A man who would probably still be alive if he’d followed his original impulse and left his family back in Houston. Yet, beyond that, he is strangely absent from his own story—a shadow, someone who comes and goes at all hours in a limo with darkened windows. Faceless, voiceless, and I suspect that even his children remember him mostly for the money that he left behind.

  “Two cars blocked off the bridge,” Jean is saying. “One on one side and one on the other. I got all this from Antonio. They roughed him up a bit, but let him live. He was one of them. Once they had the car stranded over the water—and I knew that bridge, you know. I drove over it every day on my way to the dump. The water was so polluted, so full of . . . of things floating down the river. But that’s where they stopped them and pulled Allen from the car. He gave them all his money, of course. He wouldn’t have been that foolish. Antonio said he dropped it at their feet and said, ‘Take everything. Just leave me in peace.’ But when they reached for his wallet—”

  “He threw it over the railing into the water,” Becca says. “And they shot him right there on the bridge.”

  Her voice is dim and cold. It has the slap of finality. The cold dim slap of a wallet hitting the water beneath a Guatemalan bridge, ten years ago, very late at night.

  “Yes, he threw the wallet and they rolled him off after it,” Jean says, her own voice as dreamy as her daughter’s is clear. It’s like she’s watching a movie in her mind. A movie she has seen many times, with dialogue she knows by heart. “It wasn’t until the next day they recovered the body. But by then . . .”

  We have stopped at the crest of a hill and she looks around, as if surprised to find herself surrounded by so much beauty, safe and secure in the middle of an English meadow. “We went back to the States as soon as we could. The insurance money was astounding. Much more than I would ever have dreamed. I remember that when they told me the amount, my head began to buzz. I was looking at the lawyer, who was saying that the payout would be double his normal policy because he’d been killed while on foreign assignment, but the buzzing drowned everything else out. His lips were moving but I couldn’t hear him. And the money from that insurance policy has kept us beautifully ever since. Even my father had to admit this. That Allen did a superb job of providing for his family, even from beyond the grave.”

  And there we have it. A tale of the perfect man. Rich and dead and utterly self-sacrificial. Jean’s face is splotched with tears, but it strikes me that she’s told us no more than the story of a redshirt in a Star Wars movie. A minor character who must die early so the plot can advance. I glance at the others, but it’s hard to read their faces beyond the sort of polite respect that such sudden and violent widowhood would seem to demand. Becca’s hood is pulled low, obscuring her eyes. The moment is awkward. We’ve come to the end of the first story, told by a woman eager to share it. Should we clap? As stories go, it seems like a bit of a failure, since I don’t believe any of us is feeling the degree of emotion we expected to feel. That teenage girl who can’t be spoken of, I think. The one who was kidnapped, likely raped, and maybe murdered. She’s the real story here.

  “Well, okay then,” says Valerie, bringing her hands together in a loud, ringing clap. “One down, seven to go.”

  It’s an extraordinarily glib remark under the circumstances and Silvia recoils as if she’s heard a gunshot. I catch her eye. This fat fool, we both seem to be thinking. What’s she d
oing here? What could Canterbury possibly hold for the likes of her? She will be the pilgrim among us who tells the story with all the farts and belches, that’s for sure.

  “I’m sorry,” Angelique says to Jean, but it’s hard to say whether she’s sorry that Allen is dead or is just trying to cover up for Valerie’s rudeness. The rest of us murmur things. Make cooing sounds, the sort of monosyllabic noises of sympathy that are expected after this sort of confession. We must sound like a chorus of birds.

  The only one who seems utterly nonreactive to Valerie’s crudity is Jean herself. “What are those?” she asks, pointing in the distance. “Those vine things all stacked to look like wigwams?”

  “That’s the remnants of the hops harvest,” Tess says. “We’ll see any number of them along the route. Hops and apples are the primary crops of the region. When we stop at the inn for lunch you will find plenty of beers on the menu that are brewed locally, if you’d like to try them.”

  “They’re lovely, aren’t they?” Jean says vaguely, staring down at the meadow before us, her tears still unwiped. “They don’t quite seem real.”

  Five

  Despite the fact that the main street of the next town seems deserted, the pub parking lot is nearly full. We make our way single file through what Tess calls “the smoking garden.” A dozen men and a couple of women are huddled around picnic tables and plastic chairs, puffing away furiously.

  “As you can see, the structure is humble,” Tess says, making a sort of game-show gesture as we enter the small room. A bar at one end and a bar at the other, low ceilings, exposed beams. “But this is precisely the sort of place where Chaucer’s pilgrims might have stopped along the route. Remember this room when you get your first glimpse of the Cathedral, and it will be easier to understand why everyone who saw it was so dazzled. Why the legend has remained so strong for so many years. Most of the people who traveled there had never even seen a building with two levels, so the grandeur of a place like Canterbury . . .”

  She breaks off, and we all know what she’s implying. We are modern women, accustomed to vaulted ceilings and wide doors, grand spaces encrusted with riches of every sort. Canterbury will not stun us as it stunned the original pilgrims. Mankind will never be quite so stunnable again.

  “I bet we’ll still be dazzled,” Valerie says, choosing a chair at the end of the table, just as she did back at the George yesterday. “I bet the magic of Canterbury is just as strong as ever.”

  “The sticker on the door said they have wi-fi,” Steffi whispers as soon as we’re seated. “Which is hard to believe, considering we’re about twenty-eight miles from nowhere. Do you want to use my phone to check your mail?”

  The question is kindly meant. She’s undoubtedly noticed that all morning I’ve been rifling my pockets for something that isn’t there, as if I were suffering from an electronic version of phantom limb syndrome. Besides, she’s already getting her own little fix, pressing the buttons on her Fitbit, calculating something or another. Her phone is just like mine, and as I pick it up, I see that her wallpaper is a handsome man, running across a finish line with his arms flung wide, evidently at the end of a road race. Of course. The husband would naturally be just as athletic as the wife. My fingers move automatically through the familiar sequence as I go to type in my password. My dog’s name and my year of birth: freddy1967.

  I have 119 emails.

  119. How on earth could I have accumulated 119 emails since yesterday afternoon? But I guess normally I check them so frequently that they never get the chance to pile up past ten or so. I scan through the subject lines quickly, dragging my thumb across the glass. At least a dozen of them are from Ned. Ned, Ned, and more Ned. Where are you? asks the subject line, politely at first, and then he begins to scream his questions in caps. DAMN IT, WHERE ARE YOU? And SERIOUSLY, CHE, PICK UP THE DAMN PHO

  Pick up the damn pho. We aren’t ordering Vietnamese takeout, so he must be calling me as well as emailing. I see another message, this one from Steffi, who is sitting beside me, grumbling as she calculates the numbers from the morning’s walk. She’s already forwarded the picture of me beside the Canterbury pilgrims, taken at 8:29 this morning. I could send the picture to Ned, I think. It’s sort of an answer. It shows him that at least I’m still alive, but then again, an image of me standing beside some big wooden men, frowning uncertainly and clutching a walking staff, might muddy the waters even more. I know that my silence is only prolonging his worry, but maybe that’s a good thing. Would it be such a crime to be unreachable, to hold my silence for just this once? I’ve never kept Ned guessing before. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever kept anyone guessing. I answer every question the minute it’s asked, respond to emails and texts so fast that half the time I’m typing my response before the full message has even downloaded. People compliment me on my speed. I am known for my efficiency.

  But speed and efficiency are the twin horses that have dragged me to this sad point in my life. I look around the table. Not a single woman is talking. No one has even picked up her menu. We are all checking messages, staring into the dark, slick waters of the Internet, hoping for some sort of sign.

  I hand the phone back to Steffi.

  “Nothing pressing?” she asks.

  “Nothing that can’t wait.”

  The menu is a folded piece of paper, no bigger than a grocery list. It reads:

  Large Cod

  Small Cod

  Cod Cakes

  Cod Salad

  “I guess we’re having cod,” I say.

  “We could make a musical out of it,” Valerie says. “Bring it to Broadway. The Ubiquitous Cod of County Kent.”

  Claire laughs.

  Tess looks up from her own phone. “Personally, I’m having a jacket potato,” she says. “They’re always available at the rural inns, even though they don’t bother putting them on the menu. And quiche, of course.”

  “What sort of quiche?” I ask, although I have a pretty good idea what the answer will be.

  “Jacket potato?” Becca says. “Is that another word for a baked potato?”

  As it turns out, you can get a baked potato stuffed with roast beef and cheese, which sounds simple and hearty and damn near unruinable. We order eight of them—Jersey rather surprisingly breaks rank and takes the cod—and then Valerie asks if it would be all right for us to have wine with lunch. Tess says of course, this is our vacation, we can have whatever we want. But of course there’s no wine list, so Valerie disappears into a back room with the elderly waitress and reemerges a moment later with a whole bottle of—God save us—white zinfandel from California.

  “Glasses for everyone,” Valerie proclaims and the waitress creeps off to fetch a trayful of shot glasses. She pours a small amount of wine carefully into each one, and when the tray comes around I accept mine, because it would be rude not to.

  “So all right then,” says Tess, unwrapping the deck so that Jean can put the queen of diamonds back in. “Who’s next?”

  “I have the jack of clubs,” Jersey says. Angelique, I think it is, or possibly Angelica? No, Angelique. Shit, I’ve forgotten already. Angelique. Angelique. The angel who has sprung a leak. Her hairline comes to a perfect peak. Angelique. I won’t know her name at the end of the week.

  “Brilliant,” Tess says. “Can anyone beat a jack? No? Then that means Angelique is up on the afternoon segment.”

  “There’s no telling what sort of story we’re in for now,” Steffi mutters under her breath as the women begin to lift their shot glasses and sip. I raise an eyebrow in question, and she whispers, “Seriously? You don’t recognize her?”

  I study Angelique. At some point in her life she must have submitted to the laser, for her face has been tattooed with permanent makeup—her upper eyelids are lined in black and her eyebrows are sketched into that high, exaggerated arch. Most disconcertingly of all, the shape of her lips has
been traced in a dark brownish rose, but the lips themselves have not been filled in with color, which makes it almost look like she has a little spy mustache. Other than this, her face is bare. She is a sketch of a woman. A caricature you’d have done on vacation, drawn somewhere on a boardwalk or a dock, the more subtle details to be added later.

  Steffi hands her phone back to me under the table and I look down to see she’s googled the name Angelique Mugnaio. Of course. That’s why she looked familiar. She’s one of those reality TV stars on Bravo, the kind of low-wattage celebrity that’s impossible to ignore, even for people who don’t watch TV. She was on a show about prison wives—women married to mobsters, exploring how they pass the time while their husbands are in the big house for embezzlement, extortion, fraud, one of those things. Godmothers, is that what it’s called? Goodladies? The Mezzo-Sopranos? The article says only that she parted ways with Bravo last month, but I can’t imagine why. What would a woman have to do to get kicked off of a show that’s nothing more than nonstop screaming and cursing and the turning over of tables? I wonder why she’s here, and especially why she’s alone. I didn’t think people like Angelique went anywhere without a camera crew.

  “What do you think of the wine?” asks Valerie.

  The question is directed toward me, even though I’ve been discreet about what I do for a living. People get nervous if you tell them you’re a wine critic. They begin to apologize about whatever they’re drinking, or maybe they suddenly try to speak French. I pick the shot glass up and take a cautious sip. It’s even worse than I would have imagined—like someone plunked a cherry cough drop into a cup of hot water—and I want to tell the women that true zinfandel is garnet-red and robust, not pink and weak and sweet like this crap. They do understand at least that much, don’t they? But they probably don’t understand that much, and most of them probably don’t want to. They’ve lived perfectly good lives while drinking perfectly awful wines and I feel a sudden swoosh, a sense of air going through me, like wind whistling through a hollow tube. I have a chance here, I think. A chance to reinvent myself in the midst of these women with all their martyred and incarcerated husbands, their white zinfandel and baked potatoes.