by Gail Bowen
“Nope, your lips are turning blue, and you know the rule.”
“When lips are blue, the swim is through,” she said morosely.
“You’ve got it,” I said. “Now, I’ll race you to the house.”
We grabbed our towels and started to sprint towards the deck. We were halfway across the lawn when Angus and Eli strutted out the back door. It was obvious at a glance that Taylor and I were getting a dress rehearsal of the grad outfits: blindingly white dress shirts, subdued but deadly ties, sports jackets and slacks that still dangled price tags, real shoes.
The boys struck GQ poses. “So do you think Brad Pitt should pack it in?” My son’s words were confident, even cocky, but his eyes were anxious.
“Brad’s lucky he lives in a two-income household,” I said. “You guys are dynamite.” It was no exaggeration. Angus’s resemblance to his father was so striking I could feel my throat close, and Eli looked both handsome and uncharacteristically assured. Alex’s nephew had not had an easy life, but as I looked at him that afternoon it was almost possible to believe that all the valedictory-speech cliches about new dreams and new lives might prove to be true.
The moment was too precious to lose. “Let me get the camera,” I said.
They groaned, but they pulled out their combs.
As soon as I had the boys posed in front of the prettiest of our lilac bushes, Taylor dropped her towel, and squeezed in between them. “This is so much fun,” she said.
By the time we’d snapped photos of every permutation and combination of the boys, Taylor, Willie, and the cats, we had used up a whole roll of film, and it had been fun. Too much fun to keep to ourselves. On our way back inside, I touched Eli’s arm.
“Let’s call your uncle,” I said. “Tell him what we’ve been up to. He should be a part of all this.”
Alex picked up on the first ring. “No civil servants listening in,” he said when he heard my voice. “You can be as brazen as you like.”
“Brazen will have to wait,” I said. “Right now, I’m standing with a shivering seven-year-old and two young men in extremely expensive new sports jackets. We’ve just taken some world-class pictures, and we thought you might want to hear about them.”
“I wish I was there,” he said.
“So do I. But having Taylor describe the scene will be almost as good.”
Taylor had a deft hand with narrative, and she described the photo session in meticulous detail; she also told Alex about Florence Nightingale and about how she, herself, got to sleep with Madeleine all three nights when we were at the lake. When Angus finally wrested the phone from her, she ran upstairs to get changed. The boys gave Alex separate but equal play-by-plays of their team’s last three ball games. When Eli gave the phone back to me, he was grinning. “My uncle says he’s proud of me.”
“He has every reason to be,” I said. “Now, you guys vamoose. It’s my turn.”
Alex seemed relaxed and happy. “The boys sound good,” he said.
“They are good.”
“Anything new with you?”
“I’m one of the parents going on the tour of the Legislature with Taylor’s class on Friday. There’s an orientation meeting tomorrow which I’m skipping.”
“Tell Taylor that if she needs back-up to keep you on the straight and narrow, she can call on me.”
“Taylor is unavailable,” I said. “She finally decided to get out of her bathing suit. She was turning blue and her teeth were chattering, but till the end she maintained she wasn’t the slightest bit cold.”
“Stubborn like you.”
“Inner-directed like me,” I said.
He laughed. “I miss you. Ottawa’s beautiful, but this isn’t exactly my scene. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It’s good to close my eyes and imagine you and the kids at home enjoying the spring.” Suddenly, his tone became grave. “From what Bob Hallam tells me, though, it’s not all blossoms and birdsong there. I take it there’s a reason you haven’t mentioned the Ariel Warren case.”
“It wasn’t because I didn’t want to,” I said. “But every time I weakened, I remembered all the work you’d put into that course you’re giving. And Alex, you know as well as I do that there really isn’t anything you can do from there but listen.”
“Actually, Jo, I can do better than that. I can give you some advice to pass along to Howard Dowhanuik. Robert Hallam is very anxious to talk to Charlie. Unfortunately, both Charlie and his father seem to have pulled a disappearing act. As close as you and Howard are, I’m guessing you can reach him with a message. Tell him to bring Charlie back to Regina. There are a lot of questions that need answers, and Bob Hallam will go easier on Charlie if he’s co-operative.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said. “Alex, I miss you.”
“Think how great it’s going to be when we’re together again.”
“Do you remember what Napoleon wrote to Josephine?”
“We didn’t do much French history at Standing Buffalo.”
“Then it’s time to complete your education. Napoleon said, ‘I’m coming home in three days. Don’t wash.’ ”
“So you’d like a three-day warning.”
“I’ll settle for three minutes,” I said. “Time enough to warm the hemp oil.”
When I hung up, I tried calling Good Shepherd Villa in Toronto. The woman I talked to told me Howard and Charlie left after Marnie had her supper, but she promised she’d have Howard call me. The mention of supper reminded me that I hadn’t done anything about ours. I rummaged through the cupboard till I found a box of fusilli and put on a pot of water to boil. The kids liked pasta salad and I had some ham left over from the weekend.
Just as I dumped in the fusilli, Eli walked into the kitchen. He’d changed out of his sports jacket and slacks into the summer uniform of shorts and sandals. As he came over to the stove, I saw that his mood had changed, too. His exuberance had been replaced by a kind of tense watchfulness.
“I was just talking to your uncle,” I said. “He’s getting anxious to come home.”
“It’ll be good having him back.” Eli’s tone was flat.
“Something on your mind?” I said.
“Charlie D isn’t doing his show today. He didn’t finish it on Thursday and he didn’t do it Friday or yesterday either. I got a buddy of mine to tape the show when we were at the lake. This guy named Troy is doing ‘Heroes’ now.”
“And you’re worried,” I said.
“It’s not just some stupid fan thing,” Eli said defensively. “Charlie D has really helped me. Last fall, when I’d just started going to Dan Kasperski, I felt like such a loser. Not many kids are so messed up they have to see a shrink.”
“Lots of kids are,” I said. “And lots of adults.”
Eli went to the drawer, took out a big metal spoon, came back and stirred the fusilli. As we talked, he kept his gaze on the boiling water. “I know that now,” he said. “But it’s because of Charlie D. I found ‘Heroes’ by accident. I was looking for some hard rock and all of a sudden there was Charlie D talking about how the first law of Buddhism is that life is suffering.” He turned to me. “Can you imagine how great it felt to find out that I wasn’t a freak? That it was the same for everybody?”
“I can imagine; in fact, I can remember.”
His obsidian eyes widened. “You felt that way, too?”
“I felt that way, too.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re so nice now.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s true. And it’s because of what Charlie D says. Once you know that everybody’s suffering, you can get past your own skin, and that’s when the fun begins.”
“He’s right,” I said.
“It worked for me.” Eli’s voice rose with excitement. “As soon as I realized that everybody had garbage to deal with, things started getting better. When I told Dan, he said that a lot of his patients never missed ‘Heroes.’ Dan said life’s a wild and wacky ride, and we all need a lot
of guides to get us through. Then he said I could do a lot worse than to travel with Charlie D for a while.”
“That’s a pretty high recommendation,” I said. “I don’t know many psychiatrists, but I think Dan Kasperski is brilliant.”
“So is Charlie D,” Eli said. “Even my Popular Culture teacher, Ms. Cyr, thinks so. For the last couple of months, she’s been letting our class listen to ‘Ramblings.’ That’s the part at the beginning of the show where Charlie talks about the topic of the day. We’ve had some good discussions about what Charlie’s said.” Eli stirred the pasta mechanically. “He was so sharp and so funny, but lately he’s gotten really bitter. One of the kids said Charlie sounded like he was going through a major meltdown.”
“Did it sound that way to you?”
“Yeah.” Eli made a gesture of helplessness. “You didn’t have to be a shrink to know Charlie was in serious trouble. I can’t describe it, but I’ve got some of the tapes. Ms. Cyr is letting me do my major project on Charlie’s show.”
“Could I listen to the tapes?”
“Sure. I’ll get you some from the last couple of weeks and some from before so you can hear the difference.”
“Good. And Eli, I can put your mind at rest about one thing. Nothing’s happened to Charlie. He just had to get away for a while. He and his dad went to visit Charlie’s mum in Toronto.”
Eli’s shoulders slumped with relief. “I was afraid he might have tried to kill himself.”
“Did he sound that bad?”
“Yeah,” Eli said. “At the end, he did.”
By the time I’d drained the pasta and mixed the dressing, Eli was back with a carrying case. “The ‘Ramblings’ are all in order,” Eli said, “and they’re all dated. Listen to them. You’ll see what I mean.”
I didn’t open the tape case until Taylor had had her bath and we’d read two chapters of Charlotte’s Web. I wanted to give Charlie D my full and undivided attention, and that would have been impossible with Taylor bouncing around. After she and I had said our final good nights, I went downstairs, made myself a stiff gin and tonic, and carried it and the tapes up to my bedroom.
In a house where anarchy and noise are the order of the day, my bedroom is an island. It’s an airy room with ecru walls, flowering plants, and stacks of books and magazines that I intend to read some day. The two stars of my room are the mahogany four-poster that had been in Ian’s family for two generations and the deep, pillow-strewn window seat that was my treat to myself when we renovated the house. From the window seat, I can look out onto our backyard and the creek beyond it. It’s a view that always brings me comfort, and as I slid the first of the tapes into my stereo, and Charlie’s dark-honey voice filled the room, I knew that, in the hour ahead, I would need to draw comfort from every source I could find.
Charlie didn’t interpose a filter between himself and his audience. The stream of consciousness I heard seemed to flow uninterrupted from a deep and private place within him. As I sat in my pretty room, with my children just a touch or a phone call away, the image of this lonely blood-scarred man, isolated by the glass of the control booth, offering up his lonely acts of communion with strangers, broke my heart.
None of the “Ramblings” was longer than three minutes. In all, there were perhaps thirty-six minutes of tape. Not much, but enough to know that when Eli said Charlie was in the middle of a meltdown, he was right on the money. The formula of “Ramblings” was a simple one: Charlie chose a quote, then played verbal riffs on it.
The early “Ramblings” were a lot of fun. Most of Charlie’s sources wouldn’t have made the cut for Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but they were great jumping-off points for his particular brand of edgy wisdom. He played some wicked variations on Kris Kristofferson’s observation that “You should never sleep with anybody crazier than you,” and he went the distance with Roughriders’ quarterback Steve Sarkisian’s musings on mindset: “You can’t get too high or too low. You have to keep chucking.”
But in the two weeks after Ariel left, Charlie began to draw from a well that grew progressively deeper and darker. The emotions driving the riffs described an arc familiar to anyone who had ever been dumped: disbelief, confusion, anger, bitterness. But on the show he did the day before Ariel died, Charlie had found himself in a place the lucky among us will never know.
On that show, Charlie took as his text a poem by a man named Peter Davison. The poem was called “The Last Word,” and in it Davison used the metaphor of an executioner standing axe in hand over his kneeling victim to describe the pain of a lover who wants to become an ex-lover. The image goaded Charlie into a diatribe whose words froze the marrow.
“Hey, all you executioners out there, cringing in horror at having to watch the edge of the axe nick through flesh and creak into the block, do you want to change places? Do you want to be the one who hears the axe singing through the air towards the small bones in the back of the neck? No more crocodile tears, executioner. In a minute, you can wash up and go home to a bed warmed by a new lover. No new loves or new beds for the one on the other end of the axe. He’s finished, sentenced to purgatory, doomed to an eternity of remembering the scent of your perfume as you leaned close to make sure the blow was fatal.”
I reached over and flicked off the stereo. I was numb, stunned by the nakedness of Charlie’s revelations. Little wonder that Robert Hallam had been anxious to speak to him. I put the tapes in the case and walked down to Eli’s room. He was at his desk, reading, but the set of his shoulders told me he’d been waiting for me. He jumped up when he heard my step. “What do you think?”
I tried to lighten the mood. “Charlie seems to have forgotten what Steve Sarkisian says about not getting too high or too low.”
Eli rewarded me with a small smile that vanished as soon as it came. “You can see why I was relieved when you said they were zeroing in on somebody else for his girlfriend’s murder,” he said.
“He’s lucky to have you on his side,” I said.
Eli met my eyes. “I was the lucky one,” he said. “Charlie saved my life.”
As I walked downstairs to let Willie out for his last run of the night, I couldn’t shake the dread that had enveloped me when I listened to the tape of Charlie’s “Ramblings” the night before Ariel was murdered. But whatever his demons, Charlie had been Eli’s saviour; I had to hope that by now he had found a measure of peace.
I was standing on the deck watching Willie chase a moth, when the phone rang. The voice on the other end made me wonder about the power of telepathy.
Howard’s rumbling bass was falsely casual. “So did you find out anything?”
“I found out plenty,” I said, “starting with the fact that Charlie and Ariel knew Kyle Morrissey. Until Christmas, Kyle was their neighbour, which makes it highly unlikely that you needed me to find out about him. Damn it, Howard, if you had told me you wanted me to check the water for alligators, I would have done it gladly, but I don’t like being lied to.”
Howard’s exasperation was apparent. “Put yourself in my place, Jo. What was I supposed to do, ask my oldest friend in the world to find out whether there was evidence suggesting my son killed the woman he loved? Use your head.”
“I did use my head. I followed the leads I had. I asked the right questions. And right now, I wish I could just push the delete key and send everything I’ve learned into the ether.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It may be,” I said. “And Howard, anything I have, the police will have soon – if they don’t have it already.”
“What have you got?”
There was no way to spare him. “Ariel was pregnant when she died,” I said.
There was silence, then Howard spoke two words, filled with grief and wonder. “A grandchild.”
“No,” I said. “Charlie wasn’t the father.”
“How the hell did you find that out?”
“Ariel told Mieka.”
“What else?”
“Ariel and Charlie weren’t together when she died. She’d left him two weeks earlier. The old lady next door saw Ariel leave the house with another man. Apparently, Charlie followed them out of the house and begged Ariel to come back.”
“Shit.”
“There’s more,” I said. “Alex’s nephew, Eli, is a big fan of Charlie’s. He tapes ‘Heroes’ every day. He wanted me to listen to some of the shows Charlie’s done lately.”
“And…?”
“They’re devastating. You have to get Charlie to come back to Regina. I was talking to Alex tonight: he says Detective Hallam has a lot of questions, and it would be better for Charlie if he came back voluntarily to answer them.”
“It’s not that simple. Charlie’s really fucked up, Jo. He blames himself for Ariel’s death.”
“Does he have reason to blame himself?”
In a move I’d seen often during the political days, Howard deflected the question. “I’ve had my arguments with the Church, Jo, but the Pope is right about one thing. Hell is a state of mind. From the moment Charlie found out that Ariel was dead, he’s been in hell, and he’s taken me on a few little side trips with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to like this,” he said grimly. “After his show was over that day you and I went to CVOX, Charlie asked me to take him down to the morgue to see Ariel.”
“And you did?”
“I know it was crazy, but Charlie said he had to see her. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wasn’t hearing me.” Howard’s voice grew low with embarrassment and pity. “He said he had to hold her in his arms one last time.”
“Oh, Howard, no.”
“I pulled some strings. Got him in. It was a big mistake, Jo. He wouldn’t leave her. I had to get an orderly to help me drag him away. When we left the room he was still reaching out to her…”
An image flashed in my mind, but it wasn’t of Charlie being wrenched from his beloved under the pitiless lights of a hospital morgue; it was of the lithograph that had hung in my grandfather’s study. Beneath the picture of Orpheus and Eurydice were the words “Stretching out their arms to embrace each other, they grasped only the air.” When I was a child, those words had seemed to me the absolute incarnation of loss. Fifty years later, they still did.
