Deadly Appearances (5 page)

I grabbed Eve’s arm, pulled her along with me and said, “Let’s get out of here. Walk as if you know where we’re going.” Together we strode purposefully toward the heavy glass doors that opened on the parking lot. After the chill of the conference room, the hot city air was like the blast from one of those automatic hand dryers in a public washroom.

Eve is tall, five foot ten or so, at least a head taller than me. As we came to the fence that divided the doctors’ parking lot from the public one, she leaned down and whispered, “Do you know where we’re going?” We stopped and looked around. Not twenty feet away was an old maroon Buick – Andy’s car. Dave must have driven it to the hospital from the picnic. I pointed it out to Eve, and she rummaged in her purse and pulled out some keys.

“Bingo,” she said. We slid into the front seat of that car as coolly as two women driving to the office. Eve slammed her door shut, then put her head on the steering wheel and began to cry great, noisy, racking sobs.

She was entitled. So was I. But it wasn’t my turn. Today I was supposed to be the strong one. I sat beside her and played with the paper coffee cups that were lying on the dash. Dave and Andy and I had driven to the picnic in this car together. Just at the edge of town we’d stopped for ice cream and take-out coffee. These were our cups.

Outside in the heat, barelegged women in bright summer dresses were walking to work. It seemed like such an ordinary thing to do that I felt a stab of envy as I watched them. Inside the Buick, Eve wept and I played with the paper cups. One, two, three – one for Dave, one for Andy, one for me.

As suddenly as she had begun, Eve stopped crying. She reached over to the glove compartment and came up with a crushed box of moist towels. We each took a couple and wiped our hands and faces. Then Eve turned to me.

“Joanne, I’m going home. I hate this city, and if Dave Micklejohn is taking care of the funeral, there’s nothing for me to do here. I should go and see Carey and tell him his father’s dead. We never know how much he understands, but I don’t want him to hear about Andy on television.” She had not mentioned murder. Her mind was protecting itself more efficiently than mine was. She was devastated but she was coping. As she sat there, pulling a comb through her hair, looking critically at her face in the rearview mirror, she was, I thought, more centred than we had given her credit for being. Maybe I’d been too quick to dismiss all the New Age theories about quartz crystals and cosmic harmony.

However she managed it, Eve was a strong woman and a brave one. Her tender and unpitying reference to her son touched a vulnerability in me, because until that moment I had forgotten all about him. He must, I thought, be in his late teens now. It had been more than ten years since the accident. I’d seen those flat, factual lines in Andy’s biography so often that they didn’t register any more.

“Andy and his wife, Eve, have one child, son, Carey, who is learning disabled and lives at the Pines, a special-care facility operated by Wolf River Bible College in Andy’s constituency. Both parents visit their son frequently.”

Did they? How would I know? I never asked. I thought of all the spring evenings Andy had taken my kids out to the lawn in front of the legislature to play baseball in the pale light of the prairie dusk. And I remembered how, when Mieka had broken her leg skiing last winter and ended up in traction for ten days, Andy hadn’t missed a visiting hour. I couldn’t remember ever once asking him about his son, or for that matter about his wife.

Andy was the one. We, all of us around him, had dismissed his wife and son in a paragraph and then gotten on to the stuff that really mattered – the next speech or the next meeting. I looked at Andy’s widow, and I was bitterly ashamed. I knew what lay ahead of her, the empty months and weeks, but I could only guess at the horror of her next few hours. On impulse, I reached over and touched her hand.

“Eve, let me come with you. I wouldn’t mind getting away from the city for a while myself. I can take the bus back later.”

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged. She’d pulled away again. Well, who could blame her? In fifteen years I’d never attempted to get close to her. I could hardly expect her to embrace me now. She snapped her seat belt on, turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the parking lot. She didn’t say another word till we were out of the city and on the highway.

When she spoke, her voice was small and tight with pain. “Am I going to get over this?”

I tried for the easy answer, but it wouldn’t come. When finally I did speak, I told her the truth. There didn’t seem to be much point in lying.

“I don’t know if you’ll get over it, Eve. I haven’t.”

She turned and gave me a curious little smile, then we both drew back into ourselves.

Outside, the heat shimmered above the fields. Most of the crop was off, and as far as I could see the land was the colour of beaten gold. It was a heartbreakingly beautiful late August day, the kind of day when you know in your bones that the long days of light and warmth are over, and the darkness is coming.

I thought about the cold, white, empty months ahead, and panic rose in my throat. Only yesterday everything had been certain, heavy with promise. And now … But if it was bad for me, it was ten thousand times worse for the woman beside me. I turned to ask how she was doing, but the question was stillborn. In an instant, I knew that everything had changed.

On the way out of the city, Eve had driven cautiously and well, but now the little green spear of the speedometer was trembling toward 130 kilometres. She was gripping the steering wheel so hard that the veins that ran from her wrists up her inner arm were rigid; her profile was carved with tension. Even her thick, steel-grey hair seemed charged with wild, kinetic energy. When she turned onto the overpass just west of Belle Plaine the needle on the speedometer moved past 135.

The car and the woman seemed fused. It was as if the little green spear was registering her agony in the numbers on the speedometer. The old Buick was vibrating dangerously.

“For God’s sake, Eve, slow down.”

She looked at me as if she had forgotten I was there. Her eyes were dull with pain. “I’ve tried to believe that we can be in charge of our lives, that if we focus on the desire, we can create miracles.” Her voice broke. “I don’t think that can be true.”

I felt the wheels lose traction, and I reached across and grabbed the wheel. The heaviness of the old Buick kept us on the road as we curved around the top of the overpass. Below us was the junction where traffic from the overpass entered the highway. There were a lot of cars down there for a Monday morning.

“Please, Eve, please …” My voice sounded wrong – whining, not desperate.

But it did the trick. She shook herself, as if she were coming out of a dream.

“I just lost my focus there for a minute,” she said. Her voice came from far away. Then she slowed and drove carefully onto the highway.

Half a kilometre down the road, she pulled the car on the shoulder, stumbled out, bent over in the ditch and retched – terrible, agonizing dry heaves. My legs were shaking so badly I couldn’t go to her. I opened my door to the smell of heat and dust and hot asphalt. It smelled terrific. I was alive.

When Eve came back to the car, her face was yellowy grey, but she seemed in control.

“I think it would be better if you drove the rest of the way,” she said.

I slid over to the driver’s seat, and Eve climbed in and shut the door.

We drove in silence for about ten minutes, then Eve said quietly, “I need you to help me.”

“If I can, Eve, anything.”

“Food.” She opened her hands in a gesture of emptiness. “I don’t think I’ve eaten since yesterday morning. Nobody fed me. I think I need to eat before I see Carey.”

I remembered a doctor I knew who said surgeons were always hungry just after they’d lost a patient. Something to do with the need to connect again with the life force, he’d said. I looked at the woman slumped in the passenger seat, and I thought that if ever anyone needed to be connected again with the life force, it was Eve Boychuk.

CHAPTER

4

Disciples is a restaurant on the Trans-Canada Highway just outside Wolf River. It’s run by the people from Wolf River Bible College, and whatever you think of their theology, they make the best pastry in the province. If you’re serious about food, it’s worth the forty-mile drive from the city to sit at their gleaming white Formica tables drinking coffee and eating the pie of the day.

That’s what Eve and I did. The pie of the day was raspberry, and when we finished the first piece we ordered another. Two women playing at being ordinary, while the overhead fan stirred the smells of good coffee and fresh baking and on the radio in the kitchen, Debby Boone sang “You Light Up My Life.” We didn’t talk, but it wasn’t an awkward silence, and when I looked at Eve after she’d finished eating, she seemed tired but calm.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I ate pie?” she asked. “And I haven’t had a cup of coffee in ten years. I try to stay away from toxins.”

“I guess we should all be more careful,” I said. Even to me, my voice sounded condescending, and Eve, who was unusually sensitive to nuance, caught it.

“Don’t patronize me, Joanne. From what I’ve seen of political people, some cleansing and enlightenment might not be a bad idea.” She turned and looked out the window. Across the parking lot from the restaurant was a small motel. In front of it was a sign: “Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God.” Remote again, Eve sat and stared at the motel; on the table, her hands were busy making neat little nips around the edge of the place mat.

Finally the silence got to me. “You never really knew us, Eve. You never gave us a chance.”

When she turned from the window, her eyes were narrow.
“I
never knew
you
. Listen to yourself, Joanne. That incredible narcissism. You people think the world begins and ends within six blocks of the legislature. I never knew you! Well, none of you ever knew me.” Her voice rose. “Oh, you had your opinions – I heard things. Believe me, people always made sure I knew what you all thought. I knew about your contempt. About how you thought I was a liability, an embarrassment. ‘Keep her out there in her house in the country, throwing her pots or whatever it is she does. Out of harm’s way. Out of our hair. Out of sight, out of mind.’ ”

One by one people at the tables around us fell silent. Even Christians like a little drama, and the late breakfast crowd at Disciples smelled blood. On the radio, Amy Grant was singing about how much she loved her Lord, and in the booth by the window Eve was giving everybody a morning to remember.

“God damn it, none of you ever took the time to know me. None of you ever tried to understand our marriage.” She slid out of the booth, slung her leather bag over her shoulder, then gave me an odd smile. “You never understood me, but you know what’s worse? You never understood my husband. He was the centre of your little world, but none of you knew the first thing about Andy Boychuk.” She walked toward the door, then turned. “Thanks for breakfast, Joanne. Thanks for driving down with me. Now leave me alone. You people aren’t good for me. None of you know shit about anything.” She looked hard at me for a moment, then she was gone.

By the time I’d paid the check, she was walking toward the parking lot, her car keys swinging from her hand. I started after her, but I was fresh out of good deeds. I went back into the restaurant, ordered another cup of coffee and checked the bus schedule posted over the cash register. I had two hours to kill until the bus came.

I took a sip of coffee, but I couldn’t swallow it. A memory came, and I felt my throat close with pain. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I’d been eating ice cream sandwiches at the Milky Way on Osler Street, listening to Andy and Dave argue lazily about whether the Blue Jays had the sand to go all the way this year – good, aimless, hot-weather talk.

I managed to get outside before the tears started. As the door to Disciples slammed shut, Debby Boone’s dad was singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

The sun was climbing in the sky when I turned down the road to the Bible college. The campus had the late-summer stillness that hangs in the air of a college town in the days before students, tanned and reluctant, come back for another year. The smell of pine trees, sharp with memories of cottages and corn roasts, filled the air. In spite of everything, I felt better. Here was a world that still made sense.

To the right I could see a compound of low, flat-roofed buildings that couldn’t be anything but World War II military barracks. Once they must have housed the entire school. Now most of them were student residences with names like Bardon Hall and Wymilwood. One was a grocery store called God’s Provisions. That morning there was a hand-lettered sign nailed to the front door: “Closed for the Summer.”

In the fifties, the college had come into some money, not an extravagant sum but enough to build a cluster of institutional buildings: smug, bland, closed in on themselves. West of the main road was a little subdivision of bungalows – faculty housing. Over the front doors, burned into pieces of cedar, were the owners’ names: “The Epps,” “The Wymans.”

In the seventies the money had really rolled in: a classroom building, a gymnasium, half a dozen dormitories – all made of cinder blocks with slits for windows – Dachau modern, energy efficient, ugly, utilitarian. The campus was made up of the kind of unexceptional buildings any institution that has to answer to its board of governors would build.

Except – and it was an extraordinary exception – northwest of the main road where it was clearly visible from the highway – where it was, in fact, the first thing anyone driving west from Regina saw – was the new chapel of Wolf River Bible College. It was an amazing structure for an institution that prided itself on cleaving to the traditional values. It looked like a high-tech child’s toy – a building made of giant Lego pieces or those intricate metal building sets kids used to play with thirty years ago.