When she got off the phone, she opened the bag he had brought and laughed with gusto.
“If you're going to face your demons, you may as well do it all at once.”
The bag contained a mickey of lemon gin, the poison she'd avoided since high school.
On the Labour Day weekend of her grade twelve year there'd been a bush party to outshine all others in its debauchery. Joan and Daphne Pyle, the prettiest girl in school and one of the nicest, had pitched for a forty-ouncer of lemon gin. Joan had become sicker than she'd ever been in her life. Now, to her surprise, the thought of that perfumed smell no longer nauseated her. Maybe she was more prepared for this journey than she'd believed.
Within half an hour she was on the highway. A small cooler sat in the passenger seat, filled with her travel favourites: fresh fruit, water, Cheezies, and licorice. A thermos of coffee was tucked behind the cooler and the invitation rested on the dash. The dread of going to Madden had been replaced by a tingling thrill. The sky was cloudy and the air signalled approaching rain. It would make the trip refreshing. Once past the stretching suburbs and pungent industrial areas, Joan cracked her window to welcome the spring air, sweet with the first scents of early clover. While the pounding beat of Credence Clearwater Revival propelled her down the highway, she allowed herself to remember.
Those first few months after her dad had died were a blip now. At the time, the long days and nights had passed with aching slowness. Vi, having no skills, had finally taken a job as a chambermaid at the Twin Pines Motel. Despite her inability to deal with the world, her mom refused to go on welfare. Joan put in twelve-hour shifts at the gas bar. Dan Prychenko usually hired boys and had been wary of having her work by herself at night, but Joan hadn't been afraid for a second. What she found more hurtful was the change in the way she was treated by her peers, and the worst was Marlena, Dan's daughter.
Marlena was the main attraction anytime she walked into a room with Candy Dirkson, her shadow, and Peggy Wong. She had a firecracker wit with an atomic kick. While others laughed, someone was always the victim. Marlena sold nickel bags of pot, which she acquired on regular overnight shopping expeditions to Vancouver with her mother. This gave her a worldly caché in Madden. It was after one of those trips that Marlena targeted Joan for the first time. It was a Monday night. The aroma of muddy footwear blended with the stench of gasoline in the confined gas bar. Marlena and Candy pretended to be shoplifting. Joan played along with the joke. Then the bell above the door jingled and two young guys entered, Junior B hockey players who had been at Madden High a couple of years ahead of them. As often happened when Marlena had an audience, especially a male audience, she went for the jugular.
“Nice boots, Parker.” Marlena smiled at the boys. “But I thought your grandmother was buried in that pair.” The boys gave her an odd look and left. But Marlena didn't stop. “How are your new Pine Tree sheet sets fitting?”
Joan stiffened at the suggestion that her mom was stealing from the motel where she toiled as a chambermaid. “Is there anything I can do for you, Marlena?”
“Let me get this straight. Is your mom making beds or getting made?”
Candy laughed and made an obscene motion, poking her index finger through a circle formed with her other hand.
“She paying back all the men your dad screwed?” continued Marlena.
“Get out,” Joan said quietly.
“Do you forget who owns this place?”
She wanted to wipe the sneer off Marlena's smug face but all she could do was stare. Her eyes watered and her throat tensed. The doorbell rang again. A local farmer came in, greeted Joan warmly, and asked after her mom. With a final contemptuous snort, Marlena left. Joan didn't know what had brought on the attack but she knew something for sure. Her family would have to leave Madden.
Joan slowed for the exit from the main highway. The last time she'd been through this way the secondary highway had been two lanes of bumpy pavement that had made the second half of the journey to Madden painstakingly slow. But that was the past. This road was a smooth slash of grey, four lanes of new highway headed north that would cut the travel time. Nothing looked familiar. The old farms that had squatted around this major turnoff were long gone. An industrial park had replaced them. Joan brightened at the thought that she might get into Madden earlier than expected and have time to get her bearings. She wasn't going to let the memory of Marlena ruin this trip. Her mom was right. There had been wonderful times and people.
She smiled as she remembered Gabe and Hazel. She'd admired Gabe who would fight for the underdog and stand up to any authority. Joan had had the desire to be an anarchist, but the courage of a dandelion gone to seed. One puff and her resolve disappeared on the breeze. Gabe was born for a fight; Joan was bred to follow the rules. And then there was Hazel, who embraced her sexuality in a town where adultery was a parlour game but lesbians were vilified. Joan had learned from both of them how to be brave, and they had sown part of who she was. She doubted that either Gabe or Hazel would be at the reunion. Gabe's family moved a year after hers and she'd heard that Hazel's mom and dad had passed away. They had no need to go back, but Joan had to go. She'd never said a proper goodbye. Maybe there'd be a bonus. Maybe someone would have news of her two high school friends. Maybe she'd find them again. Since she and Mort had officially separated, there had been a void, too many lonely nights. She filled her nostrils with the humid air then glanced up at the clouds. Rolling and black, they threatened to unleash a storm. She checked her odometer then sniffed again. If the weather held off another half hour she'd beat the rain.
After Vi Parker had left Madden with her three kids, things became easier. The real estate market was strong when they sold the house and that little bit of equity helped them to rent an East End apartment. They staggered to their feet in Vancouver. Joan still couldn't afford to return to school full-time, but eventually completed high school through correspondence courses. Life had given her a more serious outlook. When she wasn't working she was studying. She knew that university was her way out, her step up, but she was undecided about a major. In a Bachelor of Arts holding pattern, she enrolled in chemistry as a required science class. Proving herself a quick learner, she was offered a lackey job in the chem lab, which worked around her schedule much more readily than slinging burgers.
It was in the dim glow of lab lights that she first appreciated the beauty of chemicals and compounds. They were so simple, yet had the potential to alter the world. She switched faculties and threw herself into chemistry. Above-average grades entitled her to scholarships in her second and subsequent years of study. The first scholarship she received was an unexpected legacy from her father. He'd been a loyal Rotarian and offspring of members could apply to have part of their tuition paid. As time passed, the wound of their Madden exit became a faded scar. She was proud that she'd survived it and chided herself that it had ever bothered her that she had never worn a grad dress.
Her first reaction to the violent thumping from the rear of her Accord was the thought that her back wheel had hit the rumble strip. It took her another few seconds to realize that she had a flat. She veered to the shoulder to avoid traffic. Pulling on her jacket to protect herself from the drizzle that had started to fall, she got out to inspect the damage. Sure enough, the rear tire on the driver's side had blown. She couldn't be more than a couple of miles outside of Madden. Just her luck. It had been years since she had changed a flat and she considered calling the auto club, but she was already racing the clock. Scrounging the jack and spare from the trunk, she clumsily started the job, getting sprayed every time a vehicle drove past.
After giving the lug nuts a final hard twist, she heaved the blown tire into the trunk and threw the jack after it. Her coat and slacks were now splattered with mud. Her hair and skin looked as though she was testing some roadside spa treatment, a shrapnel mudpack. A gleaming champagne-coloured car, with an A-1 Rental sticker on the bumper, reduced its speed as it passed. The driver looked directly at her. There was something familiar about the woman with big, coal black hair, but before Joan could register anything further, the car sped up and was gone. Certainly the woman was too young to be one of her classmates. Joan groaned. What if she had aged worse than everyone there? Should she turn back now, before it was too late?
She climbed into her car, waited for a break in traffic then pulled back onto the highway heading for Madden.
The Twin Pines Motel was the recommended reunion accommodation. It was also the center of activities, including registration. When Joan turned into the parking lot she was taken aback by the changes. In the days when her mother had worked there it had been a respectable but modest establishment. Now it was a full-sized resort. The small cabins, which had formed the original motel, had been completely renovated and re-faced in gleaming logs. The new hotel addition stretched up six stories. Clearly the tallest structure on the Madden skyline, it housed a dining room, conference centre and a cavernous grand ballroom, the location of the evening's Welcome Soirée. The clock on Joan's dashboard read 6:56 pm If she hurried she'd still make it to the registration desk, but wouldn't have time to change out of her muddy clothes. When she reached to grab the invitation from the dash, it wasn't there. Damn it. She felt around the shadows of the seats but could only find loose cheese snacks and a tepid apple core. It must have fallen out when she stopped to change the tire.
A lump rose in her throat as she pushed the lobby door inward and entered a crowd dressed in their casual best. Madden High had served the entire region and there had been over seven-hundred students when she had been here. The huge size of the crowd wasn't the only jarring aspect. Joan had expected people to look older, but not this much. Nobody looked familiar at all. Maybe they were here with some other event, a wedding or powerboat convention? Joan did a quick reality check. Vi and Leo had been her age when they'd lived here thirty years earlier. These had to be her peers. Avoiding eye contact, she braced herself and walked directly to the ornately decorated table below the sign that read MADDEN 30th HIGH SCHOOL REUNION. If she was fast, maybe she wouldn't see anyone she knew until she'd had a chance to change her mud-caked clothing.
A stern woman with salt-and-pepper hair looked up. “Can I help you?”
“Joan Parker.” She felt as though she'd just crawled out of a dumpster, but smiled meekly, wondering if her name would ring a bell. Had she known this stiff-looking woman as a laughing teenager? But Salt-and-Pepper showed no sign of recognition and went directly to the box of registration cards marked NâZ. Nothing. She riffled through the AâM box. Still nothing.
“Would it be under any other name?” There was impatience in her tone.
“No. It's always been Parker.” Joan mentally kicked herself for announcing it so loudly. It had never occurred to her to be sensitive about keeping her own name. She'd never even considered taking Mort's. In Vancouver no one ever raised an eyebrow. In Madden she was sure it would make a difference. Everyone would think she'd never had a date, let alone been married. “My husband has a different name, but he couldn't come.”
The woman was ignoring her and flipping through the cards again. Now Joan was sure everyone would think that she was making it all up. She stopped herself from rattling on that, actually, she and Mort were separated and discussing divorce. “My registration came in a bit late,” was all she said.
The woman pulled a binder out from under a pile of papers, opened it and ran her finger down a column. She met Joan's eyes. “You're not on the invitation list.”
“But I received one in the mail.”
“Do you have it?”
Joan panicked. “No, I don't. I must have . . . ” Stumbling over her words, she realized that she was living her own nightmare. The murmured conversation in the room was becoming overwhelming. Now it looked as though she was crashing the party where she had no right to be. Another woman joined the first. They were both staring at her. “Peg called me.” She couldn't remember Peg's married name but her old one came easily. “Wong.”
The second woman smiled warily. “You mean Peg Chalmers. She came down with the flu. She's going to try to make it tomorrow.”
But Joan was no longer listening. As her eyes grazed the registration list one name leapt out at her. Gabriel Theissen. She caught her breath. Gabe was here in Madden. In this situation he wouldn't care what anyone thought and would seize the moment to let them know it.
The woman examined Joan. “You are a graduate of Madden High?”
She could turn around and head home or do what she came for and face her fears. She knew what Gabe would do. She knew what she'd do if she were on her own turf, in her lab, where she supervised a dozen senior-level scientists. Forgetting her bedraggled hair and mud-spattered coat, she pulled herself up to her full five-foot-eight.
“If I hadn't been invited I wouldn't have driven for eight hours to get here. My name tag, please.”
The woman shrugged, uncapped a black felt pen and wrote on one of the blank badges.
Joan took it from her and read ”June”. “It's Joan,” she said.
Without a word the woman took the name tag, crossed out June, wrote Joan, then handed it back to her with a schedule of events.
Joan examined the blotched piece of pink cardstock. It was a mess, just like her. Without a word she left the registration table and went to the hotel reception desk. She managed to check-in and escape the lobby without running into anyone she knew.
Since she had reserved late, she'd been assigned one of the old motel cabins on the far side of the parking lot. As the wheels of her suitcase jostled across the gravel, she breathed in the air scented by the pine forest that gave the resort its name. Then a flood of familiar smells hit her all at once and a tangle of feelings welled inside her. Here she was, back in Madden after thirty years. When she looked up at the same old moon rising above the hills across the river, it seemed as though time had stopped.