by Gail Bowen
He raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the job of the dominatrix?”
We took our breakfast into the sunroom, so we could eat looking out at the water. The temperature had dipped during the night and when daybreak arrived, the light was weak and the sky was threatening. It was going to be a grey day.
Zack stirred cream into his porridge and peered out the window. “One good thing about weather like this – it makes it easier to leave the lake.”
“Not for me,” I said. “I love it here.”
“It’s a forty-five-minute drive to the city. If you want to, we can live here year-round.”
I shook my head. “Wrong time for Taylor,” I said. “Her school, her friends, and her activities are in the city. Which reminds me about the boy with the pentangle.”
Zack frowned. “The knight in shining armour. I’d forgotten about him.”
“If you’d met him, you’d remember. Incidentally, he does want to meet you.”
“Okay with me,” Zack said.
“I’ll be interested in your take on Ethan,” I said. “Over the years, a lot of kids have wandered through our house, but Ethan’s a standout.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I don’t know. He’s nice-looking. He’s very intense, and he draws his own comic books.”
“Good money in that,” Zack said. “Comic books are the reading material of choice for 80 per cent of my clients.”
“I don’t think they’d go for Ethan’s comics. They’re pretty heavily into moral choice: honour versus lust, self-preservation versus cowardice, integrity versus exigency.”
Zack furrowed his brow. “And this kid is thirteen?”
“Taylor says he reads a lot.”
“That’s a point in his favour. Actually, it sounds like there are lots of points in his favour. Taylor’s smart. She’ll work it out.” He snapped open his notebook computer. “Now if you want to worry about something, check the on-line real estate listings. God, there are a lot of ugly houses in Regina.”
“Want me to call an agent?”
Zack shook his head. “No. I said I was going to find us the perfect house and I will.”
I laughed. “Everything’s a quest with you.”
“Nothing wrong with keeping your eye on the prize.” He yawned. “Unfortunately, this morning, I seem to be having trouble keeping my eyes open.”
“What was on Charlie’s mind?” I asked.
“Same thing that’s on all our minds. The trial. Charlie wants to make sure that justice is done.”
“Did he have any concrete suggestions about how to bring that about?”
“Actually, he did. He read over my opening statement and suggested another approach.”
I was surprised. “You let him read your opening statement?”
Zack shrugged. “It’s not Holy Writ, Jo. It’s just a place where we tell our story and lay out our argument. After I saw Kathryn Morrissey on TV, I had second thoughts about how effectively I was telling our story, and according to Charlie, I was right to be concerned.”
“What was the matter?”
“If I was teaching first-year criminal law, nothing. It was a textbook opening. It was also boring as hell. Usually I come in with everything I’ve got, but I was holding back.”
“Because Sam Parker’s such a lightning rod,” I said.
“Right. The number of calls we’ve been getting at the office is unreal, and they cover the spectrum. Everybody is pissed at us. The Family Values people think if Sam had applied the rod, he wouldn’t have ended up with a kid who can’t decide if he wants to play with the boys or the girls. The granola-crunchers are sympathetic to Glenda, but they hate Sam.”
“ ‘Hate’ is a strong word,” I said.
Zack looked amused. “You just don’t want to think ill of your fellow granola-crunchers. But I’ve talked to the cops over the weekend, and they think that bomb came from somebody who wants to blow me up because I’m defending a Jesus-loving millionaire who believes he has the right to own an unregistered gun.”
“How can they tell?”
“Same way I can. I’ve had dozens of threats from folks who believe in an eye for an eye. The spelling is usually bad and the quotations always come from the Good Book.”
“And your bomb threat had a quote from The Merchant of Venice?”
Zack raised his eyebrows. “How did you know that?”
“Charlie told me.”
“What would we do without him?” Zack said mildly. He looked at his watch. “I’d better get a move on. My eager young associates are going to be here in fifteen minutes.”
“They’re going to be here by 7:30 on a holiday Monday?”
Zack gave me a blank look. “Is that a problem?”
“Not for me,” I said. “What’s in it for them?”
Zack shrugged. “More work,” he said. Then he balanced his empty bowl and spoon on his lap and wheeled off to the kitchen.
I carried in my dishes and went back to our room. If I was going to be neutral about Kathryn Morrissey, I had some research to do. I pulled out my laptop, Googled Kathryn, and steeled myself to read only the most positive articles about her illustrious career.
Zack’s guest room was, like the rest of the cottage, a large and uncluttered space with functional, expensive furniture, art objects that were arresting, original, and executed in rust, plum, and silver – colours that coordinated perfectly with the cool monochromatic greys of the walls. The bed was custom-built, extra large but raised from the floor by the smallest of platforms. The bedding in a palette of warm browns was sleekly inviting. The room was, in short, exactly what a single man would get if he gave a decorator a blank cheque and carte blanche.
The space was so perfectly ordered that it seemed guest-proof, but Taylor and Isobel had unpacked their neon backpacks, slung them over the doorknobs, and fulfilling the manifest destiny of pubescent girls, they had unfurled. On a low square table just inside the door, hair products that promised to tame Isobel’s wild curls fought for pride of place with the gels and sprays Taylor needed to keep her new ’do spiky. Creams, lotions, and splashes distilled from rare flowers of the rain forest crowded a shelf designed to hold a smoky glass sculpture whose sole function was to delight the eye. Scraps of lacy underwear in shades the catalogue described as yellow sunshine, green tea, and English rose pooled on the mochaccino bedspread, and stuffed animals, relics of a more innocent age, nestled among the rust and taupe pillows at the head of the bed.
In the span of a weekend, Taylor and Isobel had created a world that was as richly turbulent as their lives. The girls themselves were in the middle of the bed, side by side on their stomachs, hair tousled from sleep, faces rosy, feet kicking the air, reading.
“I can’t believe you’re awake already,” I said.
Taylor glanced up. “We wanted to finish this book.”
Isobel put her finger in the book to mark their place and turned the cover towards me. “We’ve been reading Too Much Hope,” she said.
Taylor scrambled into a cross-legged squat. “We’d already read the chapter about Glenda Parker,” she said, “but after we saw that interview with Kathryn Morrissey last night, we decided to read the rest.”
I cleared myself a place on the corner of the bed and sat down. “So, what do you think?” I asked.
Isobel put the book face down on the bed and frowned. Isobel’s mother, Delia, had argued several cases before the Supreme Court. Delia’s approach to the law was painstaking with every phrase scrupulously considered; every argument turned like a cube to reveal its facets. Her punctiliousness drove Zack nuts. That morning, as her mother would, Isobel considered my question gravely before she answered. “Well except for Charlie Dowhanuik’s father, we only have the kids’ stories about what happened, but so far it seems as if the parents didn’t care about their kids at all.”
“Olivia Quinn tried to tell her mother that her stepfather was making her have sex with him, but her mother wouldn’t listen,” Tayl
or added. “When Olivia started skipping school and doing drugs and sleeping with all those boys, her mother said she was acting out because she was jealous.”
“And Olivia’s school said she was incorrigible,” Isobel said, pushing herself up to a sitting position. “She was only fourteen years old. Not much older than Taylor and me, but everybody blamed her.”
“All the kids in that book say their parents blamed them for everything that went wrong,” Taylor said.
I turned to Taylor. “Did you read the chapter about your Uncle Howard and Charlie? Howard blames himself.”
“That’s who he should blame,” Taylor said. “Every time he needed to get elected, he made Charlie go out and meet people, but when Charlie needed him, he was never around.”
Isobel ran her fingers through her explosion of black curls. “Glenda Parker’s mother was worse. She was around, but when Glenda tried to tell her mother what was going on in her body, she told Glenda that unless she prayed to be delivered, she was going to Hell.”
“The worst one of all is Kathryn Morrissey,” Taylor said. “Isobel’s mother says she got people to talk about their problems by promising they’d help other people. Then she just used what they told her to sell books.” Taylor’s pretty mouth hardened into a condemning line. “Soul-fire says the worst sin of all is betrayal.”
Isobel’s face relaxed into mischief. “Oh, Soul-fire. I love Soul-fire. He is so wise and so brave and sooooooo cute.”
Taylor reached back, grabbed a pillow, and the discussion ended, as many discussions did with Taylor and her friends, in an old-fashioned pillow fight.
For a while I dodged pillows and shared in the giggles. Then, cognizant of the recreation director’s axiom that it’s best to kill an activity before it dies on you, I called time. “I’ll be the bad guy,” I said. “Hit the showers. Zack has people coming out from the office, and when they get here you shouldn’t be wandering around in your skivvies.”
Isobel shook her head. “Work. Work. Work. Work. Work.” She said, and her intonation was exactly the same as her mother’s.
When I arrived at the cottage where my oldest daughter and her family were staying, the inside door was open. I peered through the screen and saw that Greg was in the living room reading the paper; the little girls were sitting on a blanket in front of him, sharing a bowl of dry Cheerios and watching TV.
I called through the screen, and Greg leapt out of his chair and came to the door. “Caught me,” he said. “Come in, make yourself comfortable, and let me convince you that TV is educational.”
“No need,” I said. “I just came by to score some Cheerios.” I walked over and squatted between my granddaughters. “Hey, ladies, are you sharing?”
Eyes still fixed on the screen, Madeleine picked up the bowl and passed it back to me. “Why, thanks,” I said. I took a handful of cereal, kissed her head and Lena’s, and went back to join my son-in-law.
“So where is everybody?” I asked.
“Mieka and Pete and Charlie decided to squeeze in one last canoe ride,” he said. “You just missed them.”
I looked towards the dock. My children and Charlie were dressed alike in blue jeans and dark hoodies. Outlined against the stark background of lake and hazy white sky, their resemblance to one another was striking. They had put one canoe in the water and were sliding in a second. “They’re a person short,” I said to Greg.
He shook his head. “Those three are never a person short, Jo.” He lowered himself onto the ottoman that faced my chair.
“In a few hours there’ll be 250 kilometres between Charlie and you,” I said.
“True, but Charlie will continue to be a presence in our lives. Did you know that Pete’s moving in with him?”
“Nobody told me,” I said.
“Apparently, they’ve been considering it for a while. Mieka said Charlie and Pete were concerned that sharing a house might put a strain on their friendship. I can’t imagine anything coming between the three of them, but I guess it was a valid concern. Anyway, now that he’s got his clinic, Pete’s short of money, and Charlie never misses a chance to burrow in.” There was a bitterness in Greg’s voice that I hadn’t heard before.
“Greg, the trial will be over in a month. Why don’t you leave the girls with me? You and Mieka could go some place warm and rediscover the magic?”
“What if the magic is gone?”
I smiled at him. “Then you’ll have to find something else to get you through the next forty years.”
The Big Comfy Couch was coming to a close. As she always did, Loonette, the clown, was discovering that in the course of her adventures, she had made a mess.
“Madeleine, here comes our favourite part,” I said.
Madeleine nodded vigorously. “The Ten Second Tidy.”
The four of us watched in silence as Loonette, with the jerky moves of a character in an old-time movie, found a place for everything in the commodious contours of the big comfy couch. When she was done, Loonette and Molly Dolly curled up under their purple silk cover. Harmony had returned to Clown Town.
“Think I could find a couch big enough to swallow Charlie?” Greg said. Then he shook his head in disgust. “Sorry, Jo. I’m becoming a self-pitying asshole.” He walked over, turned off the TV, and scooped up his daughters. As they squealed, he played Falstaff. “All right, my scullions, my rampallions, my fustilarians. Time to get dressed, and if I hear a word of complaint, I’ll tickle your catastrophe.”
Greg and I met the canoeists at the dock. I sent Charlie and Pete up to strip the beds; then Mieka and Greg bundled their daughters into their life jackets and took them for a ride in their favourite red canoe.
I was standing on the dock, watching my daughter and her family vanish around the point, when Taylor and Isobel came down and announced they were going to make certain the Inukshuks they had built this summer were winter-worthy. Each of the Inukshuk had a sight hole in the middle. By peering through it, lost travellers could get their bearings and be guided along the route to the next Inukshuk. As a service to those who would be wandering the shore without a global positioning system in the coming winter, Isobel and Taylor planned to verify the accuracy of the sight holes.
I went with them. There was one particular Inukshuk I needed to visit. As we started around the horseshoe, the wind came up, and the girls and I pulled up the hoods of our jackets and jammed our hands in our pockets. All summer the girls had made it clear that Project Inukshuk was theirs, so that morning I stood aside as they went about their work: packing dirt around a rock that rested on unstable ground; adjusting a flat stone that wasn’t placed correctly; checking the view from a sight hole. When they’d finished their work on the Inukshuk at the tip of the west arm, I stayed behind. Without question or comment, the girls went ahead. They knew I wanted to be alone.
The sight hole on this particular Inukshuk pointed towards an old cottonwood tree across the water at the edge of Lake View cemetery. A man I had cared about deeply had been buried there the previous summer. Alex Kequahtooway had been born a few kilometres away on Standing Buffalo Reserve. He had lived with honour, and my life and the lives of my children had been enriched by knowing him. As I watched the graceful branches of the cottonwood move in the wind, and breathed in autumn’s pungent scent of decay and promise, I remembered him and said a prayer that this good man had found peace.
The electric blue PT Cruiser was still in Zack’s driveway when I came back. Sam’s dream team was still hard at it, so I went over to Mieka’s. Greg had already packed and loaded their car, and he and Pete and Charlie had taken the girls down to the Point store for a final ice cream cone. Unencumbered, Mieka and I set about the bittersweet preparation for our last meal together at the lake.
The menu required no forethought and less effort: turkey leftovers and Mieka’s sweet-potato soup, a recipe born of necessity and, in my opinion, fit for the gods. After the soup was simmering and the plates and cutlery were set out for a buffet, I turned t
o my daughter. “What do you want to do with the rest of the morning?”
Mieka glanced around, spotted a football, and picked it up. “Want to toss around the football?”
“I could stand to burn a few calories,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Outside, Mieka bounced on her toes a few times, then raised her arms towards the sun. “Great day,” she said.
“It is a great day,” I said. “And it’s good to see you smiling.”
“Fake it until you make it,” she said. “And I’m going to make it, Mum. Greg’s right. The business has a great future. We have a great future.”
“And it’s the future you want,” I said.
“It’s the future I have,” she said. “It’s just that every so often ‘I have immortal longings in me.’ ”
I squeezed her arm. “You don’t often quote Shakespeare.”
Mieka’s eyes widened. “That is Shakespeare, isn’t it? Lately, I’ve been wishing I’d paid more attention in English class. Ms. Boucher, my Grade 11 teacher, drilled us in those speeches. But I haven’t a clue where that line about immortal longings comes from.”
“Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra says it just before she commits suicide.”
“Ms. Boucher tried to talk about context, but there were no extra marks, so I dozed.” Mieka’s tone was wistful, but she shrugged off the memory. “Too late now, I guess. Might as well forget about Shakespeare and just throw the ball around.”
And we did. The rest of the family came home and within minutes our mum-and-daughter moment evolved into a game of shirts and skins. Charlie made certain he was on Mieka’s team. For sheer mindless pleasure, few things beat throwing a football around in the cool autumn air, and when the door to Zack’s cottage opened, I called time and beckoned to Zack and his company to join us.
Zack introduced his associates. The man, tall and muscular with the curly hair and sculpted mouth of a Michelangelo angel, was Sean Barton. The woman, a sprite with blonde hair cut boy-short, a snub nose, and clever assessing eyes, was Arden Korchinski. Both were wearing jeans and College of Law sweatshirts.