Authors: Gail Bowen
“Not too much information,” Liam Hill said. “Just an interesting sociological nugget. Shall we sit down?” He pointed towards a built-in breakfast nook just off the kitchen. Like the refrigerator, it was a period piece, a restaurant-style booth with wine leatherette banquettes facing one another across a Formica-topped, chrome-edged table. “Incidentally, we’re a little more enlightened about dress codes at St. Mike’s now.”
I slid into my place, and Liam Hill slid into his across from me.
“I feel like I should be ordering a cherry Coke and fries.” I said.
He smiled. “Whatever happened to cherry Cokes?” Then he leaned towards me. “I probably should have said this off the top. I’m not going to talk about Charlie.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Actually, I was hoping to talk to Charlie myself. I thought he might need a friend.”
“How well do you know him?” Liam Hill asked.
“Not well at all any more. He and my kids knew each other when they were growing up. My connection is really with his parents, which, of course, now pretty well means Howard.”
“You and Howard Dowhanuik are close.”
“He’s my oldest friend.”
“For Charlie’s friends, that’s not necessarily a recommendation.”
I could feel my temper rise. “There are two sides to every story, Mr. Hill.”
Actually, it’s Father Hill,” he said, “and you’re right. I do only know Charlie’s side of the story.”
“Charlie was never very charitable about his father,” I said.
“Perhaps his father hadn’t earned charity.”
“That’s an odd comment coming from you,” I said. “Has your order started charging for
caritas
, Father Hill?
He winced. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kilbourn. This hasn’t been anyone’s finest hour.”
“Then don’t prolong it,” I said. “Tell me when Charlie will be back, and I’ll be on my way.”
Father Hill’s face gave away nothing, but the pulse in his neck fluttered as he weighed his decision. Finally, the scales tipped in my favour. “Charlie won’t be back for a while. He went to Toronto to see Marnie.”
I was incredulous. “To see Marnie? Is she better?”
“There’s been no change in her condition. Charlie just wanted to be with his mother. Your friend, Howard, went with him.”
Liam Hill’s words were innocent, but something in his tone got under my skin.
“Howard doesn’t need me to defend him,” I said, “but, for the record, you’re wrong about him. He’s a good man, and he made a real difference in the lives of a lot of people here.”
“And his wife and son paid the price,” Liam Hill said quietly.
“You knew Marnie before the accident?”
He shook his head. “No, she was already at Good Shepherd when I met her. But Charlie told me she was brilliant. He said there was nothing she couldn’t have been, if she hadn’t had to sacrifice everything –”
I cut him off. “Marnie Dowhanuik didn’t sacrifice everything.”
Father Hill shifted his gaze. “We all have our own perception of reality,” he said mildly.
“Don’t humour me,” I said. My voice was loud and angry. When I spoke again I tried to take the volume down a notch. “This isn’t a perception. This is the truth. For many years, Marnie and I were as close as sisters. Father Hill, she wasn’t a victim. She was smart and funny and … she was
Marnie –
driving stubborn voters to the polls, handing out placards at rallies, cooking turkeys for all those potluck suppers. And her cabbage rolls …” I smiled at the memory. “She could make a pan full of sensational cabbage rolls in the time it took me to find the recipe. I remember once we’d been at a constituency dinner in the basement of Little Flower Church. At the end of the evening, when she and I came out to the parking lot, she was carrying this big roasting pan filled with leftovers. Howard was surrounded by men hanging on his every word. Marnie waded through all those fawning guys and handed him the roaster. ‘Howie,’ she said, ‘I made these cabbage rolls, I delivered them to the church hall, I reheated them, I served them, I washed the plates they were eaten off, I paid the party ten bucks for the ones that were left; the least you can do is carry them back to the damn car.’ ”
Father Hill laughed softly. “Nice story,” he said.
“There’s more to it,” I said. “You can imagine how those men were gaping. After all, Howard was the premier, and Marnie was just the missus, but she had this great smile, and she gave those guys the full wattage. Then she delivered the
coup de grâce
. ‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘That speech you’re all creaming your jeans about – I wrote it.’ ”
Liam Hill raised an eyebrow. “She sounds like quite a woman.”
“She was,” I said. “Maybe Charlie never realized that. Kids’ perceptions of their parents’ lives aren’t always accurate. Father Hill, I wouldn’t accept Charlie’s word as gospel on this. He had his own burdens, and they may have distorted his view. But don’t diminish Marnie. The fact that her bike was hit by a car was a tragedy, but her life wasn’t.” I slung my bag over my shoulder. “Now, I
did
have a purpose in coming here. I’m taking over the class Ariel was teaching, and I’m going to need her textbook. It’s called
Political Perspectives
. It’s a quality paperback with a blue and red cover. Could you check her desk for it?”
“No problem,” he said, but there was something halfhearted about his agreement, and I wasn’t surprised when he returned empty-handed.
“No problem, but also no luck,” he said.
“Thanks for trying,” I said.
I pulled up the zipper on my jacket, then glanced at the tomato plants on the table. “Ariel babied those plants from seeds,” I said. “I hate to see them dying. Would you mind if I found a place outside to put them so they could get some of this rain?”
“I’ll give you a hand,” he said.
We were silent as we carried the tiny peat pots outside. We found a place on the deck where they could get plenty of rain, but where, if the wind came up, they’d be protected. As we set the last one in place, Fritz, who was still inside, began barking.
“Sounds like you have company,” I said. “There’s no need for me to trail mud through the house. I can leave by the gate at the side.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m glad you came, Mrs. Kilbourn. It’s always useful to have another perspective.” He offered me his hand. “It’s good you thought about the tomato plants.”
When the back door closed behind him, I sprinted to the hibachi. The fire had sputtered out. I grabbed the charred piece of legal paper, folded it once, and dropped it in my purse.
As I let myself through the side gate, I saw why Fritz had been barking. Two police cars had pulled up in front of the adult video shop next door. The cruisers were empty, so the officers had apparently already gone inside. I was gawking as I walked to my car and, before I slid into my seat, I took a final glance. In an uncurtained window at the front of the second storey, an old woman was watching me. When our eyes met, she lifted her arm very slowly and waved at me. I waved back.
As soon as I was in the car, I took the piece of charred paper from my bag. The acrid smell of smoke hit my nostrils. The handwriting was sprawling and fanciful, not Ariel’s small, neat script. Only one sentence was visible, but the words cut to the bone. “Nothing will ever separate us again.” Then there was a single initial: “C.”
CHAPTER
5
As soon as I got home, I went to the family room and took down
The Divine Comedy
again. I was obeying an impulse I would have had difficulty explaining, but when the book fell open at Dante’s description of the Vestibule of Hell, where the Futile run perpetually after a whirling standard, I didn’t hesitate. I slid the burnt fragment of Charlie’s letter between the pages and replaced the book on the shelf. I might not have been the coldest beer in the fridge, but I recognized symbolism when I saw it.
My son’s room was private territory, and I didn’t enter it without cause. That afternoon, I had cause. I needed to tap into my office mail, and Angus’s computer was the only one in the house with a modem. After I turned on his computer, I glanced up at the bulletin board above his desk. He called it his Zonkboard, and from the time he was ten, it had been a montage bristling with evidence of his deep but shifting passions: skateboarding, the Blue Jays, endangered species, water polo, the Referendum, hiking, Buddy Rich, the women of Lilith Fair. That afternoon, wallet-sized photos of members of the graduating class of Sheldon Williams C.I. were thumbtacked between articles about the perfidy of the New Right and the excellence of John Ralston Saul and Drew Barrymore. The Zonk Factoid of the Day was a newspaper clipping: “The Inuit of Greenland believe that a person possesses six or seven souls that take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.” It was, I thought as I turned back to the computer, an oddly comforting possibility.
I typed a message announcing that on the following Tuesday I would begin teaching Ariel Warren’s Political Science 101 and asking anyone who had a copy of the text
Political Perspectives
to lend it to me until the end of classes. It was only after I hit send that I realized I’d cast my net too wide. Instead of limiting my request to our department, I’d entered the universal address for faculty and staff at the entire university. I discarded the idea of a follow-up message. In spring and summer, there were so many people who never opened e-mail that I would have been clogging the system.
I was rereading my original note when Angus came in. He leaned over and peered at the screen. “I thought you had the summer off.”
“So did I,” I said.
He gave me an awkward pat. “Well, you still have the long weekend, so let’s rock. Taylor’s downstairs saying goodbye to her cats. If we don’t make our move soon, she’s going to fall apart.”
I sighed with exasperation. “I’ve been through this with her a dozen times,” I said. “Sylvie O’Keefe is going to feed Benny and Bruce, and Jess is going to come over to play with them. It’s only three days, Angus.”
He shrugged. “Tell that to T.”
It was raining hard by the time we turned off onto the road to Katepwa. On the highway, we had listened to the drive-home show’s homage to the pleasures of barbecue and summer love. A fiery romance wasn’t on my weekend agenda, but the talk of sizzling meat was a reminder that within the next couple of hours I was going to be surrounded by a cottage full of hungry people. The dining room at the Katepwa Hotel served fine food at moderate prices, and it shared a kitchen with the Katepwa Pub, which served equally fine food that was cheap and available for take-out. As I slowed in front of the hotel, the boys and Taylor strained for a look at the lake. The rain was so heavy we could barely make out the beach, and as soon as I opened the car door I could hear the pounding of whitecaps against the shore.
Jackets pulled over our heads, we raced to the pub. Judging from the crowd inside, it was apparent that others caught in the downpour had felt the pull of a clean well-lighted place. The Katepwa Pub was jumping. Taylor drifted towards a group crowded around a big-screen
TV
that was showing a Jodie Foster movie; the boys headed for the shuffleboard table. The centre of gravity was shifting.
“Everybody back here with me,” I said. “You’re all underage, and we’re here to get food.”
Angus perked up. “What are we getting?”
“The special,” I said. “I don’t want to hang around while they cook dinner for seven people from scratch.”
“I wonder what the special is?” Angus asked.
“Chili,” Eli said. “It’s written on the chalkboard over there.”
“But we had chili dogs after ball last night,” Angus groaned.
“Sometimes the universe unfolds as it should,” I said.
Angus frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I gave him a short jab in the shoulder. “It means there was a cosmic decision that, despite your best efforts, our family was destined to eat chili tonight.”
The road to Ed and Barry’s was winding and muddy. Twice, we were within a hair’s breadth of sliding off the road, and twice, Eli, who had been entrusted with holding the hot food, manfully swallowed his yelp of pain when he got splashed. By the time we got to the cottage, the rain had stopped, but I was still edgy. Two of my children still had to drive that road, and one of them was with her husband and my only grandchild.
Ed and Barry had waterfront property. The cottage was new, built five years earlier, but they had designed it to be timeless, and it had a rambling, wicker-and-wisteria grace, a closed-in porch overlooking the lake, two full bathrooms, and a Jacuzzi. In short, it was perfect, or it would be once everybody had arrived safely. As soon as we parked, Taylor and the boys flew out of the car. Willie was right behind them.
“Can we just look at the lake?” Angus said.
“After you’ve carried everything in from the car, you can look at the lake all weekend,” I said.
There were only two bags I insisted on handling myself; both were paper, and both bore the logo of the Saskatchewan Liquor Board. By the time I walked through the front door with them, the car was cleaned out, and the boys and Taylor and Willie were racing past me on their way to the beach.
When I touched a match to the already-laid fire in the fieldstone fireplace in the living room, it roared to satisfying life. I carried on to the kitchen, placed my paper bags carefully on the table, found the kind of Dutch oven I dreamed of owning before I died, dumped the chili in, and turned on the burner. Dinner was under way. Some nights, I just had all the moves. As a reward, I poured myself two fingers of Glenfiddich and wandered out to the porch, so I could have a good view of Willie and the kids chasing each other along the shoreline. When Willie loped onto the dock, I knew there was nothing between his ears that would allow him to make the correction necessary to avoid disaster. His cannon-ball into the lake when he came to the end of the dock seemed as inexorable as a law of physics. So was the fact that as he splashed to shore, Taylor, Angus, and Eli waded out to greet him. It was a grey day, but I could see their laughter, and warmed by the whisky, my nerves began to unknot. Fifteen minutes later, Peter’s ancient Jeep rolled in, followed closely by the sensible Volvo station wagon that had replaced Mieka and Greg’s bright yellow Volkswagen Bug the week after Madeleine was born. Suddenly, the odds that I would make it through the weekend had turned in my favour.