“What?” Paisley demanded.
“He was her last lover! Mom’s.”
Paisley moaned. “Oh, man!”
“You’ve got to be kidding!” said Tai.
“I know,” said Romy. “Isn’t it embarrassing?”
Carmen peered at J.R., then shook her head. “There’s just no accounting for taste, is there? I guess I didn’t know Fern all that well. I thought I did.”
“What do you mean?” asked Verna. “She had terrible taste in men. She always did.”
“I don’t know,” said Granny. “Looks broken. All rusted out.”
“But that’s not all,” said Romy. “This is the real kicker: he gave her AIDS.”
“What?”
“You heard me!”
“Tabernak!” Carmen said. “I never knew that!”
“Nobody did,” said Verna. “I didn’t until tonight. I mean, I knew that Fern was HIV-positive, but I didn’t know that he was the one responsible.”
“Those spots on his face and his chest,” Tai realized. “They look to me like Kaposi’s sarcoma. That’s one of the hallmarks of late-stage AIDS.”
Romy prodded J.R.’s back with her toe. “I’ve never seen a dead person before. Oh, wait! There was Angela at the Birches. Just down the hall. An electrolyte imbalance gone terribly wrong. She was bluer somehow.”
“Dear God,” Verna croaked. “So I really did kill him! I killed a man.” She buried her face in her hands. Was this actually happening? It didn’t seem real somehow.
“Oh, it’s real, all right,” Lionel assured her.
“Do you believe in God?” Romy asked. “I don’t.” She plunked herself down on one of the Bar Harbour chairs. “Besides, you didn’t mean to kill him.”
“You don’t know that! I don’t know that. I think maybe I did. I think maybe I wanted him dead.” Suddenly she felt lightheaded; the porch floor seemed to have taken it upon itself to tilt towards the east. “Dizzy,” she managed. “Glup!”
“Up we go!” Carmen hauled Verna to her feet and steered her through the screen door and out in front of the house. It had begun to rain by this time — plump, loose drops with a slick, thick surface, like Concord grapes. Verna sunk to her knees and vomited a sour stew of vodka and pasta into the elderberry bushes.
“I’m sorry!” she sobbed after a moment. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m so sorry!”
“Come on,” Carmen reassured her. “You’re going to be all right.”
“I am? How? How am I going to be all right?”
“We’re going to take care of it,” Carmen told her. “You’ll see.”
“You’re a good friend, Carmen,” Verna said drunkenly. “Why are you such a good friend?”
“I have no idea,” said Carmen. Helping Verna to her feet, she led her back to the porch. “Come on,” she said to the others. “Let’s go inside. We’re not doing this guy any good standing around here.”
“I’ll start a fire!” Filled with sudden purpose, Paisley headed inside, followed by Winonah and Granny.
Tai took Verna over from Carmen. “Calm down. Stop worrying.”
“Stop worrying? I just killed somebody!”
Tai put his arm around her shoulder and led her into the house. “We’ll fix it.”
“Fix it? How are we going to fix it?”
Once again the porch lit up — a greenish tint, like the light exuded by a lightning bug. It began to rain in earnest now, not in drops so much as wavering sheets of water that broke against the house like waves.
Romy, in the meantime, had spotted the second of the two cigarettes Verna had taken from her pack of Ultra Slims and given J.R.; its filter protruded from the breast pocket of the dead man’s flannel shirt. “Bonus!” She swooped down to retrieve it. As she pulled it free, she dislodged the pocket’s other contents: a penknife, a house key tagged “Fern’s cottage,” and a legal-sized envelope that had been folded in two. She pocketed the penknife and the key and peered at the envelope. “What’s this?”
Carmen took Romy by her stick arm and steered her towards the door. “Lord Thunderin’ Jesus, girl! You’re like a rag bag of bones!”
“And you’re bus-like in your enormity!”
As Carmen closed the door behind them, the darkened porch lit up for a moment, illuminating J.R.’s corpse before letting it slip back into darkness.
Romy plopped herself down in one of the armchairs and studied the envelope she had plucked from J.R.’s shirt pocket. “Provincial Mining Recorder,” she read the address portion, “Ministry of …”
“Let me see that!” Carmen snatched the envelope from her and tore it open. “Application to Record Staked Mining Claims’” She looked up. “It’s the claim! Don’t you see? This is good news!”
Verna stared at her blankly, then closed her eyes and swayed. Somehow she had let it all get away from her, lost control. Things had gone off the rails, run amok, gone asunder. The centre had not held. She had come undone. What was more and possibly even worse was the fact that, now that she had inadvertently murdered J.R., the job of disposing of his mortal remains appeared to have passed to these guiltless others. At least that’s what they seemed to think. How had that happened? Was that fair? What had she gotten them into? Was this fresh sin to be heaped on top of her already overburdened conscience? She didn’t know whether she could handle that or anything else, for that matter. She sagged momentarily against the diminutive Tai, who staggered under her weight before sidestepping over to the sofa and lowering her down onto it. He went to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace next to Jude, whom the imminent thunderstorm had reduced to a cowering mound of jelly.
“This is the claim. Eubanks didn’t mail it,” Carmen explained. “That’s means there’s nothing to link him to this place, to you. No paper trail. Well, at least, not now there isn’t.” She tore the form in two and handed the pieces to Paisley, who tossed the them onto the pile of newspapers and kindling she had been constructing in the fireplace’s grate and lit them with her Zippo.
“Gonzo,” said Paisley.
“Now, where can I park this hunk of junk?” Carmen asked. “The blood’s pooling in my ankles.” After surveying the available furniture, she settled for a place on the sofa, squeezing Verna into its furthest corner. Verna did not mind; somehow it was comforting, being pressed by all that flesh.
Winonah settled Granny in the other armchair and drew up one of the chairs from the card table under the window for herself. “Where’d you get that guy there?” Granny asked. She pointed to the moth-eaten moose head over the door to the study.
“That’s Bullwinkle,” said Verna.
“Looks sad.” Granny shook her head. “Why do white people do that?”
Carmen took charge. “Okay. Let’s take stock. What do we know about this Eubanks guy? I know that he was in and out of jail his whole life. Mostly small stuff — burglary, car theft, getting into fights, but he was also charged with aggravated assault for the sexual transmission of HIV. That was in 1999.”
“What?” asked Paisley. “This creep sexually assaulted Mom?”
Carmen shook her head. “It was another woman who charged him — a Toronto woman. She died later of an AIDS-related illness.” She turned to Verna. “Okay, Verna. What did you find out about him? Don’t fall apart now. That’s not going to help.”
Verna tried to rally herself. “Uh … hmm …”
“Never mind her. I heard it all,” Romy interceded. “He said that he didn’t have a family that he knew of. He bounced from foster home to foster home — four of them. Didn’t work out. You could tell he’d been a real juvi bastard.”
“But that’s good,” said Carmen. “Don’t you see, Verna? That’s good. No family to miss him. No family to go looking for him.”
“He met Mom in ninety-seven,” Romy continued. “At a parking garage in Toronto. He was the parking-lot attendant. They had split by the time he was charged with the assault.”
“He was diagnosed in the mid-nineties,” Carmen put it together for them. “He met Fern in ninety-seven. Presumably he knew he was HIV-positive at the time.”
“Ew,” said Romy. “A parking-lot attendant!” She wrinkled her nose.
Verna found her tongue. “It was her nature,” she said, remembering Fern’s easy empathy, the dwelling in the moment that precluded any consideration of consequences; finally it had been this that had proven to be her great undoing. “She didn’t know that she was not supposed to be friendly with parking-lot attendants. Social markers didn’t register with her.”
Tai shook his head. “Still! I can’t believe she slept with him.”
“I know,” said Paisley, poking distractedly at the resulting flames with the poker. “He looks like a homeless person.”
“Well, apparently he used to be a real hottie,” said Romy. “According to him, at any rate.”
“It happens,” Carmen pointed out. “You should have seen me.”
“Carmen was Miss Greater Gammage,” Granny told them. “And Miss Moose Milk and Miss Congeniality at the Miss Dominion of Canada pageant in … what year was that, Carmen?”
“1974,” replied Carmen, blushing a little, expanding.
“I thought Fern died of cancer,” said Winonah. “Now you’re saying she died of AIDS. Which was it?”
“To be perfectly accurate, she died of putrefaction,” said Romy.
“What?” demanded Tai.
“Sepsis,” Verna said hastily. “She died of sepsis caused by a cancer that was AIDS-related.” Then, looking up and then around the circle of faces, “I didn’t tell anyone. There didn’t seem to be much point and, besides, if I hadn’t kept it under wraps, there would have been all these questions, questions I didn’t know how to answer. That I didn’t want answered, to tell you the truth. How did she get it? Who gave to her? Did she give it to anyone else? Would I have to hunt them down and tell them? Because I had to assume that she had contracted the virus from sex. I mean, that was what Fern did. She’d had no blood transfusions that I knew of, and, for all her faults, she didn’t do hard drugs. No,” she continued, the dam breaking, the words tumbling out, “she slept herself into that particular corner, the way she slept herself into all those other corners over the course of her brief, chaotic life and to tell you the absolute godawful truth, I didn’t want to have to reconstruct the last several years of her bloody mess of a life one man at a time. What happened to her was her fault. Why should I have to clean up after her again? I was always cleaning up after her!”
“Are you finished?” Romy asked. “Because if you are, I have something I want to say.”
“One more thing,” insisted Verna tearfully. “Knowing that Fern died of AIDS would have broken my poor father’s heart. Although, God knows, it should have come as no surprise to him, given her propensities.” She paused for a breath. “Oh, but Fern! Poor, silly, romantic Fern! It wasn’t her fault. Not all of it. I wasn’t good to her. I only saw the bad things. I was so goddamned jealous.” For the first time since her death, Verna experienced her sister’s loss as something real, something visceral; it was as though she had been slit open with a sharp, clean knife from stem to stern. The searing pain took her breath away for a moment. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for it to pass, then, “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I lost it there.” But she hadn’t lost it. She’d found it. Finally she had untangled it from the other. Pulled it loose and free. The love. Because she had loved Fern. She had. She looked around and gulped. “Now I’m finished.”
Romy cleared her throat. “Well, I would like to say that, as far as I’m concerned, J.R. Eubanks killed my mother. Murdered her as sure as if he’d taken an axe to her. And not just her. Who knows how many women other than the one who charged him he might have infected? If you ask me, he got what was coming to him. An eye for an eye. Maybe an eye for a whole lot of other eyes. I don’t think you should worry yourself one bit that you killed him, Auntie Verna.”
“But …”
“And he did have AIDS, Verna,” Carmen said. “From the looks of him, pretty full-blown. The way I see it, he had one foot out the door. You just gave him a teensy, tiny shove.”
“Still …”
“Euthanasia,” decided Paisley, wiping sooty hands on the thighs of her jeans and standing up. “That’s what it was. It’s how they do it in the hospital — just up the morphine drip. That’s what they did with Dad, at any rate.”
“Only you used OxyContin,” said Tai. “Otherwise, same thing.”
“Guys …”
“And lest we forget: that hoser died higher than a kite,” said Romy. “The way I see it, you did him a super huge favour. What a way to go! We should all have it so good!”
“I don’t know what to say,” mumbled Verna and burst into tears. Carmen flung an arm around her and squashed her into her armpit; she smelled like tobacco and patchouli. They sat there for a moment as Verna sobbed and the rain pelted the roof. Then Romy bestirred herself. “So,” she said. “How are we going to get rid of the body?”
Granny tugged at Winonah’s sleeve and whispered something in her ear.
Winonah nodded. “It’s time for Granny to tell you her dream,” she announced.
Lightning struck the Hydro pole outside, triggering a flashover arc that painted the sky a pulsating turquoise for a few moments before consigning it once again to darkness. Jude yelped once, exploded from the room, and took cover under the big oak desk in the study. Then the power went out.
There was a resounding clap of thunder, then another, ending with an emphatic crack. From the sanctuary afforded by the oak desk in the study, Jude whimpered.
“Storm candles!” Verna announced abruptly, galvanized by the sudden, overwhelming descent of darkness. Wriggling out from under Carmen’s vast arm, she stood and stumbled toward the kitchen, groping her way with her hands. She felt beside herself — besonders, as her father would say — literally. It was as though she were tagging along with some grizzly somnambulant whom she was charged with keeping out of mischief. Too late, she thought. That horse, as her father used to say, yes, that horse had already left the barn. She wondered vaguely how long the outage would last. Hours? Days? Power had always been inconstant at this remote edge of the grid. In any blackouts that took place, the Macouns were always the first to lose power and the last to regain it. That was what you got for living on the grid’s periphery, for teetering on its trembling edge. While this had been the source of considerable distress to Verna and Fern growing up, Donald had embraced whatever random opportunities wind and weather afforded him to haul out bags of marshmallows and his stock of storm candles and his Coleman stove and lantern. Indeed, blackouts were his idea of a good time.
And, really, when she came to think of it, what better time for a blackout than this dark and bloody night? “Well, maybe not bloody, but you know what I mean,” she muttered to herself as she rooted in a kitchen drawer for storm candles.
“I do,” replied Lionel.
She looked up and over her right shoulder. Sure enough, there he was — or what could be said to be him — a presence composed of a different, more concentrated kind of gloom than mere darkness, opaque where darkness is sheer, with mass and shape and pull — and he was not on the porch for a change, but here, in the hall.
“What are you doing in here?”
“That guy out there, the one you killed?” Lionel sounded aggrieved. “You know what he just called me?”
“J.R.? But he’s … oh, Lord, you don’t mean he’s …?” But of course, she thought. Why not? Fern was rattling around here somewhere, if Romy and Lionel were to be believed —and Donald, too. If they were here, why not J.R. Eubanks?
“A bush nigger,” said Lionel. “He called me a bush nigger.”
“He didn’t! He referred to a ‘sand nigger’ earlier. I think he meant someone of Arabic extraction. You have to ignore him, Lionel. He’s kind of a scum bag.”
“Kind of? He’s a racist is w
hat he is. The sooner we get rid of that spotted moon-cricket the better.”
“Moon-cricket?”
“You heard me!”
“Auntie Verna!” Paisley called from the living room. “Are you all right? Who are you talking to?”
“Coming!” called Verna. “Nobody! I’m looking for candles. Hang on,” she hissed to Lionel. “We’re working on it.”
“I’m not going back out there, eh? Not ’til he’s gone. By the way, the candles are in the drawer by the sink, but there’s a Coleman lantern in the pantry. On the top shelf, eh? It was stored with some fuel in the tank, but there’s a propane tank in the tool shed if it runs out. And one of them big utility flashlights from Canadian Tire. Next to the Coleman.”
Verna crammed the various pockets of her overalls with stubby storm candles and a box of safety matches and lit her way back to the living room with the flashlight, the handle of the Coleman lantern dangling from her left hand. “Does anybody know how to light this thing?”
“Me,” said Paisley. “Do we have propane?”
“Apparently there’s still some in it,”
“That’s not cool,” said Paisley. “Eventually that causes a buildup on the fuel tube, which restricts fuel flow to the generator and burner.”
“You are so butch!” Romy declared.
“Don’t knock it,” said Tai. “Do you know how to light one of those things? I don’t. One of the things you’ll never see a middle-class Indian family do is camp. It’s like horrible déjà vu.”
“Best to light it outdoors,” Paisley said with an air of solemn, but gratified authority. Fire Maiden, Verna christened her mentally, admiringly. How competent she was! Just like Donald. “In case there’s a leak. These things blow up sometimes.” Taking the flashlight, the box of matches, and the Coleman lantern, Paisley headed briskly for the front door before remembering that J.R.’s body lay just outside on the porch. She did a one-eighty and made for the back porch instead, returning a moment later with the lit Coleman. She placed this in the centre of the coffee table, knelt down to adjust the fuel valve for maximum brightness, and sat on the floor beside Tai. Everyone turned expectantly to Granny.
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