“He had it tough growing up.”
“He never talked much about it.”
“He’d get beaten up a lot as a boy,” Duncan said. “Once he asked his dad if he could join a gym so he could learn to box. His dad said, ‘You don’t need to learn to box, you need to learn to fight. Boxing’s a game. Fighting isn’t.’ So his dad taught him how to fight. I guess he remembered.”
“But not enough,” she said.
Duncan produced a bottle. “A little splash?” he offered. She declined. “It might help you sleep.”
She stood. “I don’t think so.” She yawned. “I’m tired,” she said, then leaned and kissed her brother’s forehead.
Later she heard the outside door closing behind him.
Awaiting sleep, she fought the urge to speculate. The safest place, she realized, was memory, where there were no longer any questions of importance. But memories were painful. She left the bed, stood by a window that overlooked the lane. It was a bright night, illuminated by the rising moon. She could see the road, but looming poplars blocked the sightline to the house where she’d grown up. She raised the window, felt the instant breath of cool, moist air and shivered. Then she donned jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater, running shoes, and followed her brother into the revealing night.
Duncan was leaning on the gate, elbows resting on top of it, one foot on the bottom rail. He had the whisky bottle in his hand. “A crime scene,” he said. “Who’d have thought?”
She took the bottle from his hand. The cork squeaked as she twisted. “Depends on what you mean by ‘crime.’ ”
He was staring at her, but she resisted the implicit invitation. “You were right,” she said. “We should have just moved in here. Move in and move on, I say.”
She sipped straight from the bottle and handed it back.
“I was thinking, walking over, that we should just get rid of the place,” he said. “Bulldoze it. But that would be pointless.”
“What’s your plan?” she asked.
“It hasn’t changed,” he said. “One day at a time until I hear the call.”
“Could you be alone, for the duration? I mean, knowing solitude as well as you do, in every sense.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can join the Anglicans.”
“That’s one solution,” Effie said.
“There was a fellow in the seminary, Aloysius Ball, his name was. Used to say that he was going to join the Anglicans just so he could be called Canon Ball.”
“You’re ducking the issue,” she said.
“Who knows what I’ll do? Everyone has needs,” he said. “Including me.”
“JC didn’t,” she said. “He was self-contained. It was what attracted me and scared me at the same time.”
“What scared you?”
“I needed him to need something from me, something that would hold him.”
She heard the plunk of the extracted cork, and a gurgle as he swallowed. “Let’s walk back,” he said, disengaging from the gate.
He draped a heavy arm over her shoulder, and she caught his hand as they walked. “Would it make you feel any better,” he said, “if I was to tell you that he so badly needed something you have that he once did something almost … unforgivable to get it?”
“I wouldn’t believe it, anyway,” she said. “So …”
They walked in silence for the remaining distance to the Gillis driveway. Then he stopped and seemed to study the ground at their feet. “Well,” he said. “I’ll tell you anyway. JC needed to have you in his life. And he needed it badly enough to make up a big bad lie to get you.”
“A lie?”
“He lied to both of us about Stella and Sextus.”
After she had listened and understood, she said, “He didn’t really lie, did he? He never said it in so many words.”
“That’s true. But he intended to make something happen, and he did so by creating false impressions. I told him so.”
“You told him?”
Duncan hadn’t really expected to see JC again that July night in Toronto. And it was late when he reappeared, maybe just past eleven. He seemed preoccupied, lost in thought. He asked if Duncan had anything to drink and, while it was strictly against the shelter’s rules, Duncan was able to produce a bottle from somewhere deep in his personal belongings. “It’s medicinal,” he said. “I keep it for emergencies.”
He poured two drinks. “So you didn’t find your fugitive?”
JC shook his head. “But that isn’t why I’m here. I didn’t come to tell you that.” After a pause, he said, “I owe you an apology.”
And he explained how Sextus, distraught, had been in touch with him just before Easter—Palm Sunday, in fact. He asked JC to intervene with Effie and her brother, to explain a situation. Duncan had misunderstood something Stella had attempted to communicate, then Duncan had compounded the damage by telling Effie. JC had history with everyone, and yet, because he’d been away so long, he had the appearance of neutrality. Sextus wanted him to set the record straight—to tell them that he and Stella were just friends.
Except that JC was anything but neutral. For decades, Effie had represented, in his mind, an ideal that no other woman could ever hope to meet. “At some deep level he was a Platonist.”
“A Platonist?”
“An idealist. They tend to be extreme in their expectations. They aren’t afraid to lie for a good cause.”
“Why did he tell you?”
“He wanted me to get back in touch with Stella. He felt bad about her. And, I suppose, me.”
“And Sextus?”
“He figured Sextus had his chance, years ago. And blew it.”
“It sounds so simple, like that.”
“He wasn’t entirely wrong, about Sextus.”
“So he was asking for your forgiveness.”
“No. He understood that for absolution there has to be contrition. And he wasn’t sorry for anything. They can be like that, Platonists. Kind of rigid.”
“You’re not one?
“Far from it.”
“So this is what he gets for lying. If it wasn’t for that lie, he wouldn’t have been here.”
Duncan hesitated. “I wouldn’t go too far down that avenue. I think you’ve punished yourself quite enough for one lifetime.”
“What about the next lifetime?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.
The night had darkened. Clouds had appeared, and now the damp breeze was gusting gently. Duncan sighed. “There was a time when we knew this place so well that you could make precise predictions based upon the smallest things. The weather, the old man’s mood. You’d see the gulls on a garbage pile and know right away that there was a storm coming from the southeast. The old man would come in the door, half-skiffed, with a certain look in his eye, and it was batten down the hatches. It’s something, to know people and a place that well. Then there are the moments that take you by surprise, no matter how well you know a person or a place.”
“I don’t care how many lies there were,” she said, after what felt like a long time. “They don’t change anything.”
“I didn’t think they would.”
The wind rustled in the trees. “Love and faith,” said Duncan, after a long silence. “Human impulses that have nothing to do with knowing anyone or anything.”
She studied her brother’s face as he stared off into nothingness.
“Don’t ask,” he said.
“You can’t last.”
“I have lasted,” he replied. “More than thirty years I’ve lasted.”
“But it can’t go on.”
He sighed. “We’ll see.”
23
She woke to the battering of wind, the whoosh of trees. The keys to memory are in the subtle senses, the otic and the olfactory, the ear, the nose. She listened to the timeless, unalterable sounds, felt the shifting air around her as the old house creaked and gave up its musty memories of past lives, memories inert a
s attic dust. Silently she vowed, He’ll never be like that, nor the part of life he occupied and energized for all the time to come. Never dust. And he must never be nostalgia, which is, like dust, the wasted memory of loss.
She rose, stretched. Her suitcase was open on the bedroom floor. She rummaged for a warmer sweater, brushed plastic. She picked up the No Frills bag and removed the manuscript, then the title page. She began to read.
PROLOGUE
Jack Gillis had the moral advantage of having come to terms with personal extinction. “There isn’t much to be said for where I am right now,” he declared. “But you get to know what matters. And it doesn’t matter why my brother shot himself. So if there’s nothing else to talk about, just go away.”
“You’re going to listen,” Sextus said. “Maybe then you’ll understand why I’m the way I am.”
“What does it matter the way you are … the way anybody is?”
“Truth matters.”
“Truth isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.”
She stood, then squatted to return the manuscript to the yellow No Frills bag.
She entered a busy kitchen. Janice was at the stove, stirring a pot. Duncan had accepted the offer of porridge and was on the phone. John was in a rocking chair near the sandstone fireplace that dominated the kitchen, balancing the baby on his knee. Then Duncan was saying, “You can courier the ashes? Great.”
When he’d put the phone down, Effie said, “I think I could have handled that.”
“I’m sure you could have,” he replied. “But why would you?”
“When?” she asked.
“They think Friday.”
“I haven’t thought it through,” she said. “I suppose there has to be a funeral.”
“A little service,” Duncan said. “Maybe on the boat?”
Then John said, “That Mountie phoned a little while ago. They want to talk to you again.”
“Oh God.”
“I’ll go with you,” Duncan said. “They want to see you at the office as soon as possible. I think they’ve made some progress.”
Driving by the old house in daylight, she was reminded of her brother’s words the night before. “I was thinking about what you said, about getting rid of it. Maybe not bulldozing it. But maybe passing it on to someone else.”
“Who would want it?”
“I don’t know.”
“The old Gillis place has come a long way,” he said. “Nothing like new blood to bring an old place back.”
“Maybe Ray and Cassie,” she said. “Maybe they’d want it.” Then she remembered: “Did I tell you they’re expecting?”
Duncan laughed. “That old Ray.” Then laughed again.
“And they’re moving to Sudbury,” she said. “He’s joining a new practice there.”
“It would take quite a bit of work,” Duncan said. “It should be jacked up, and a proper basement dug.”
“I doubt they’d want it,” Effie said. “Even if we could forget what happened, it’s ugly here. Nothing you’d want to look at. No vistas.”
“You never know what people see in a place,” Duncan said. “Have you ever been to Sudbury?”
At first the name meant nothing to them. Marguerite Bourgeoys. “There was a famous nun,” Duncan ventured. “That’s the only one I ever heard of.”
“Nun?” the Mountie said, perplexed.
“Founder of the CND,” said Duncan. “The Congrégation de Notre-Dame. Long, long time ago.”
Then Effie said, “I think I know who you mean.”
“She showed up here yesterday with her mother,” the Mountie said. “She gave us the whole story. Then they said they wanted to tell you, face to face. Can I bring them in?”
She might not have recognized the girl, and realized it was because on both previous occasions the face now before her had been contorted by fury. The fury was gone, replaced by fear and what Effie would later realize was hopelessness. The mother’s face was damp and swollen. She’s his daughter, Effie thought, with a sensation resembling distaste. Sylvia. Then she wondered, Should I commiserate? Say, “Sorry for your loss?”
She struggled to contain her anger. Trash, she thought. These people are trash, a blight upon society.
“I want to tell you again,” the policeman said. “You can have a lawyer here if you wish. Anything you say can and will become evidence. You understand?” His tone revealed that he shared her attitude.
The mother shrugged. “What’s the good of a lawyer now?”
“As long as you understand your rights,” the policeman said.
Sylvia ignored him, faced her daughter and said, “Tell them how it happened.”
The girl began to cry, and everybody waited awkwardly as the raw emotion rippled through her.
Their names were Steve and Jason. She’d met them at the rink. She knew them from school, though they were older. They were already high, and she shared a joint with them. They needed money. Someone they knew had a fresh supply of Oxycontin pills, potent oxy-40s. She called it “oxycotton.” She told them that she thought she knew someone who would help them. Her grandfather, actually.
They’d laughed at her and made mean jokes: “We didn’t know you had a grandfather,” they said. “You never even had a fuckin’ father.”
And she had told them that, actually, her grandfather was a famous man, a writer who was also big in television, had been everywhere in the world, been in all the wars, knew important people everywhere. And that he was obviously well to do.
“You don’t even know him,” they mocked.
“I do too,” she replied. “He told me if I ever needed anything, just to look him up.”
“And where does this grandpa live?”
“Out the Long Stretch,” she replied. “My mom showed me where. We went out there to see him one day, but she got cold feet at the last minute and we didn’t go in.”
“That’s true,” JC’s daughter said now. “I thought maybe he could make an impression on her. He really tried to help when she went missing that time.”
“I saw you together, you and your grandfather,” Effie said.
“Maybe,” the girl said. “He tracked me down once. That was when he said if I ever needed anything.”
“That’s crap,” Effie said. “I saw you run away from him.”
The girl went still and stared at her, blinking rapidly.
“It’s okay,” Duncan said. He took Effie’s hand in his. “Just keep on with your story.”
So they drove to the Long Stretch Friday night. It was between nine and ten. They sent her to the door. He opened it and seemed pleased to see her. The guys had told her to ask him for a small loan. They’d pay it back. They had money coming. But before she got a chance to ask him anything, they came charging in and ordered her to go to the car and wait.
“And what was he doing at this point, JC—your grandfather—when these guys barged in?” Duncan asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just standing there, quiet like. He didn’t seem to be concerned. I think he said something like, ‘So what can I do for you guys?’ He even sounded friendly.”
“So you went out?” said Duncan.
“Yes. And then there was a big noise. And I heard one of them calling me back in. So I went.”
“And what did you see?”
“They were fighting. There was blood. Jason, I think, handed me the laptop and told me to run. So I did. Then the other guy came, an older man. I don’t know who he was.”
“So you went to the car.”
“Tell them about the laptop,” her mother instructed.
“It was broke. They hit him with it, and it must have broke something. Steve knows about computers, and he said afterwards that it was ruined and told me to get rid of it.”
“They hit him?” Effie said.
“Yes. They told me afterwards that when Jason came out of the room with the computer, the guy freaked.”
“You mean your grandfather,” Effie s
aid.
The girl put her fist to her mouth and began to weep again. They watched and listened. “Steve tackled him, and they were struggling, and Steve got cut somehow. And that was when Jason hit him on the head.”
“And where’s the laptop now?” said Effie.
The girl turned to her mother.
“Tell them,” Sylvia instructed.
“I threw it off the end of the government wharf. Where the tugboats are.”
The policeman shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, and we can try. But there’s nothing but muck out there. It’ll be lost in the ooze. We don’t really need it, anyway.”
“I want it back,” said Effie. “Whatever it takes.”
“I’m sorry,” the Mountie said. “It would be a waste of time.”
Then the girl said, “This fell out of it.” She was holding up a disc.
“You didn’t tell us about that,” the Mountie said sharply as he reached to take it from her hand.
“I forgot,” the girl said. “I just realized now … I had it in my pocket.”
“Do you recognize this?” the Mountie asked Effie, holding it up.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “It’s his.”
The policeman wrote something on a notepad, then opened a desk drawer and took out an envelope, sealed the disc inside.
“I’d like to have that,” Effie said.
“I’m afraid it’s evidence,” the Mountie said.
“At least a copy,” Effie said. “Please. It’s all that’s left.”
“I’ll speak to the Crown,” the Mountie said. “It shouldn’t be a problem to make a copy. You know what’s on this?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I know.”
When they returned to the Long Stretch, Sextus was in the kitchen with Janice. They were seated at the table, teacups before them, and Effie realized that of all the people in the room, Sextus was the one to whom she felt the closest, the one whose life had most consistently intersected with her own. He came to her slowly, reaching for her hands. She put her arms around him, closed her eyes, felt his arms encircle her, a hand stroke her back and then her hair.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he whispered. “I know.”
Why Men Lie Page 29
