The Endless Knot

by Gail Bowen

  “The system runs on experts, Jo. The opinion an expert forms now will help down the road when it comes to sentencing.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “The charge will be murder. Because of Ethan’s age, if it’s first degree, the maximum sentence is ten years; if it’s second degree, seven years max.”

  “So Ethan could be back walking among us when he’s twenty.”

  “Do I detect a hardening of your gentle heart?”

  “I’ll get over it,” I said. “Whatever happened to easy answers?”

  Zack laughed softly. “Welcome to my world.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  Taylor was still sleeping when I went back to her room. I pulled her desk chair close to the bed and drank her in. She was beginning to look like herself again. Her cheeks were rosy with sleep, and her breathing was deep. When she awoke, she cat-stretched and furrowed her forehead. “What time is it?”

  “A little after noon. You slept through the cannons.”

  For a moment she seemed confused. “So it really is my birthday,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And all that stuff with Ethan really happened.”

  “Yes.” I moved closer, “Taylor, I think it will help if you tell me about it.”

  Taylor’s usual speaking voice was melodic, but that morning the music was gone. As she described the time she’d spent with Ethan, her tone was lifeless. “Somebody threw something – pebbles, I guess – against my window. I thought it was Gracie and Isobel coming to surprise me, so I ran downstairs. When I opened the kitchen door, Ethan was there. Everything happened so fast. Ethan pushed past me, slammed the door, and grabbed me. He had that knife. He said a bunch of stuff about Soul-fire and Chloe. I was really scared – not just because of the knife, but because of the way he looked. He told me to get my jacket because we were going away together. I said I didn’t want to go. Then he pointed the knife at my heart.” Taylor touched the left side of her chest. “This is where my heart is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s where it is.”

  Taylor moved her hand reflexively over the vulnerable area. “He made me go to this place under the footbridge where he used to hang out after school.” She raised her eyes to me. “He kept his knife pointed at me in case I yelled if anyone went by on the bike path. Sitting still like that I got really cold, and I said I wanted to go home. Ethan said we didn’t have homes any more – we just had each other. I knew I had to get away, so I told him I’d made a painting of Soul-fire and it was in my studio.”

  “Was there really a painting?”

  She nodded. “I was going to send it to him at his new school. I wanted him to know everybody didn’t hate him. We were on our way to see the painting when … when you came.” Taylor closed her eyes, moaned, and turned away from me. I sat on her bed and stroked her back.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “Zack took him to police headquarters.”

  “And he won’t be able to get out.”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “Nothing will ever be the same,” she said.

  She was silent again, and I could feel her drifting from me. I had not given birth to Taylor, but from the day she came to me, the connection between us could not have been closer. She was a girl whose life was filled with passions: her family, her friends, her animals, making and experiencing art, chatting, eating with gusto everything from paella to licorice whips. No matter what her mood, I had always known how to reach her, but that day I was at a loss, and so I waited.

  Finally, responding to one of those inexplicable internal shifts that push us back from the abyss and into life again, Taylor sat up. “Can we go down to the creek? There might be some birds.”

  “Good idea,” I said. Her decision didn’t surprise me. Taylor was four when she became part of our family, but she had already known a lifetime of tragedy. Within a period of six months, every adult in Taylor’s life had died. I adopted her because she was the daughter of the woman who had been my closest childhood friend and because there was no one else to care for her. A frightened child, she was saved by three things: her art, our family, and the creek that flowed behind our house.

  For a body of water in a residential area close to the heart of the city, it was large – twenty-five metres across. In spring, the creek was swollen and tumultuous with runoff from snowy fields on the outskirts of town; in summer and fall it was tranquil, a mirror reflecting the prairie’s living skies; in winter it was ice, thick enough to support skaters and tobogganers. Always, it was a place of rustling indigenous grasses and intense bird and animal life.

  The first spring Taylor was with us, I bought her a sketchbook and she and I had started a bird list. At the beginning, she had drawn pictures of the birds she spotted, and I had written their names. In later years, Taylor had recorded her finds herself, but she continued to draw detailed miniatures of the birds she identified: the rare ones that swooped down for a moment in the course of their great migration, and the usual suspects that were part of our everyday lives: western grebes, cormorants, mallards, mourning doves, thrashers, warblers, blackbirds, and the faithful and ubiquitous sparrows. She began her bird record anew every year – seven books so far. The eighth, pocket-sized and bright orange, was waiting on her plate with the rest of her forgotten birthday gifts.

  Taylor pulled underwear, socks, blue jeans, and a shirt out of her dresser drawers and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she was dressed and she’d run a comb through her hair.

  “Ready to go?” I said.

  She hesitated. I could see the uncertainty in her eyes, but she knew she couldn’t stay in bed forever.

  The world we walked out into was the shade of half-mourning that grieving Victorians used to affect after the blackness of the first grief was fading. Earlier, the sun had sent out a few tentative beams, but they’d been extinguished by the weight of a November sky. Underfoot, the wintry earth was leached of colour. A skim of ice covered the silent creek.

  With no particular plan, Taylor and I sat on the bench we favoured and looked around us. After a while, she pointed across the creek to a tree, leafless and gaunt against the scudding clouds. “I saw a Japanese etching like that at the Mackenzie Gallery,” she said. “Just earth, tree, and sky. Ink and paper. The lines were so simple, but every stroke was right. I wanted to make art like that.”

  “You still can,” I said. “Taylor, that tree is still there.”

  “And it’s still beautiful,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s still beautiful.”

  From the outset, Taylor was determined to go back to her old life, and all the external signs indicated that she had succeeded. The phone kept on ringing, the round of birthday parties and sleepovers continued, and as always, she was diligent about the schoolwork that she saw as a necessary evil to be dealt with before she could get back to her art. But she was edgy, easily startled, with a new and worrying habit of staring into space. For the first time ever, she asked me to sit with her in her studio while she worked. I brought in a folding chair and cleared a place for my laptop at the end of the table where she stored her paint tubes and brushes. Most of the time we worked in comfortable silence, but occasionally she asked about Ethan, and I passed along what I’d heard from Zack. The news was never good, and one afternoon I asked Taylor if she’d rather I didn’t tell her what was happening.

  “I need to know,” she said. “It’s worse just imagining.”

  Creating a mural for the walls that enclosed our new pool was therapeutic. Working at her sketches, Taylor seemed able to transcend the anxiety that had dogged her since the terrible morning of her birthday. When, finally, it was time to start painting in earnest, she was eager. The construction crew put up scaffolding so that Taylor could reach the tops of the walls and the ceiling, and as she climbed it, I could see her
old confidence returning.

  Taylor had made several small paintings of our old pool and I was curious about how the pool would figure in the new mural. As it turned out, it was the vibrant colour of the tiles that had attracted her. Before she began the mural Taylor covered the walls with a gem-bright paint that had the opalescent sheen of sun bouncing off turquoise. To stand in that room with the sunlight pouring through the windows of the room’s west wall was to experience a joy that was uncomplicated and unquenchable. Then Taylor began to add shadows and half-tones, and the mood changed. Some of the areas she shaded were small. Like the missing tiles in our old pool, these splashes of black made the blue around them sparkle with greater intensity. But there were larger areas of shadow too; spaces that seemed to beckon and threaten like the mouths of underwater caves. The fish Taylor painted swimming in the sunlit water were jewel-bright and playful, but the mud-coloured fish that swam through the curling plumes of weeds in the shadows were menacing. More eloquently than words, Taylor’s mural conveyed the truth that the sweetness of life can be taken away in an instant.

  She waited almost two weeks before she painted the human swimmers on the mural, and the figures were unlike any she’d drawn before. Faceless, strong-bodied, wearing simply cut suits in bold primary colours, their powerful limbs propelled them effortlessly through sun and shadow alike. When I watched them come to life, the relief washed over me. My daughter was recovering.

  Taylor had wanted to keep the mural a surprise for Zack until it was finished. When the big day came, she made him close his eyes as he wheeled himself in.

  “This isn’t a joke, is it?” he said. “I’m not headed for the edge of the pool.”

  “No joke!” Taylor said. “And you can open your eyes now.”

  It was the only time in our relationship that I ever saw Zack at a loss for words. He looked around, shook his head in disbelief, and turned his chair to face Taylor.

  “This is brilliant, Taylor. You must know that.” He held his hand out to her. “Could we look at it together?”

  She shrugged, but I could tell she was pleased.

  I watched as they moved around the mural. Occasionally, Taylor would point something out or Zack would ask a question, but mostly they simply examined her work with the care and the seriousness it demanded.

  When they came back, Zack slid his arm around my waist. “How lucky can we get?” he said.

  Taylor was standing on the other side of Zack’s chair, and when I looked into their faces, the words formed themselves. “I was just asking myself that very thing,” I said.

  The weeks leading up to Christmas were full. My research on the values war was coming together, and Jill asked if I’d be interested in writing a documentary on the subject for NationTV. I’d sketched out a proposal, and it was a rush to sit at my laptop and lose track of time because I was having so much fun.

  Zack was busy too, but his work wasn’t fun. Ethan’s case was viciously depressing – in large part because Ethan didn’t care what happened to him. His despair was exacerbated by guilt. Given what we had come to know about Ethan, it wasn’t a surprise when he confessed that, in an attempt to prove his worth to his mother, he had planted the bomb that blew up Zack’s office. Kathryn died without knowing how desperate her son had been to gain her approval. Now her son’s only lifeline was the man he tried to kill, and that painful truth was driving Ethan into a vortex of self-loathing and depression. Zack had managed to get Ethan committed to a mental health facility in North Battleford, but Ethan’s prognosis was a constant source of worry. And, as always with Zack, there were new files: the juiciest involved a government minister who had allegedly harassed, stalked, and then attempted to poison a colleague.

  I had my own distractions: writing a mid-sabbatical report on my work, Christmas shopping, sorting through the dozens of invitations to parties Zack and I were expected to attend, deciding if my good black dress could survive what was shaping up to be a punishing social schedule.

  Then there was Howard. He had pled guilty to obstruction of justice and been sentenced to a month at the detox centre and two hundred hours of community service. He was working off his sentence at the food bank, and I joined him in the warehouse two afternoons a week to pack Christmas hampers. It was a chilly job, and Howard was never without his scarlet, merry elves toque. When the other workers called him Old Saint Nick, he didn’t seem to mind.

  Every night at six o’clock, Zack came home to have dinner with Taylor and me, and afterwards the three of us went over to check out developments at the new house. The renovations were proceeding at a pace that made me wonder if our new home would always be a work-in-progress, but McCudden was unflappable. He assured us that, contrary to appearances, we would be able to move in on January 1, and he spoke with such conviction that we continued to plan as if we would.

  Every Sunday, without fail, Zack came to church with Taylor and me. When we had formally asked the dean of our cathedral to marry us, he hadn’t been quick to agree. He suggested that before we discussed the matter further, he and Zack have a talk alone. I didn’t question James’s judgment. I was a known quantity, and Zack was a very large question mark. The two men met several times. When I asked Zack what they’d discussed, he was circumspect. “Mostly, we talked about the kind of person you are and the kind of person I am. Then James asked me if I knew the difference between a contract and a covenant.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure. A covenant is a contract made with the heart.”

  A week before Christmas, Taylor came back from a shopping expedition with Gracie and Isobel, went to her room, and returned with a package in a gift bag. “Do you think Zack could get this to Ethan?” she asked.

  “Zack always seems to find a way,” I said. “Could you tell me what’s in there?”

  Taylor looked away. “Drawing pens and a sketchbook.”

  When I gave Zack the package, he nodded approvingly. “I’m grateful to Taylor,” he said. “This present takes one name off my Christmas list. And I wasn’t looking forward to trying to find a gift for the kid who has nothing.”

  “Is Ethan making any headway?”

  “Without revealing too much, my client thinks his life is over. He may be right, but he still has another sixty years to put in on this planet, so he’s going to have to figure something out. Taylor’s present was inspired. I’ll see what else I can find to give him a reason to wake up in the morning.”

  My family had always been hidebound traditionalists when it came to Christmas. We always bought the same kind of tree, put it up on the same day, and decorated it with the ornaments we’d used since the kids were little. We always unwrapped one present Christmas Eve and saved stockings and the rest of the gifts until morning. Even the suggestion that we might experiment with the recipe for the Yorkshire pudding we served with the Christmas rolled prime rib was rejected out of hand.

  We were a family who found comfort in settling into the old grooves, but that year, for many reasons, the old grooves were no longer a comfortable fit. Mieka and Greg were still together, but they’d come to Regina at the end of November to tell us they were going to give their girls the best Christmas possible, then separate in the New Year. I was heartsick, but I was powerless to change the situation and so I focused on getting us through holidays.

  It wasn’t easy. Greg had been at the centre of our festivities for thirteen years. He was the one who made the eggnog, led the carol singing, and shook the sleigh bells outside the window to tell us all that Santa was on his way. Knowing that this would be the last time he would be a part of our traditions would be painful for us all.

  Taylor, too, was a concern. When I first broached the subject of moving, she was reluctant. The Regina Avenue house was the only home she could remember, but since the morning of her birthday the bad memories had crowded out the good. When she told me she no longer felt safe at the old house, I realized that Christmas there would be, at best, a mixed experience for her. Finally, t
here was Zack. He was, as Taylor memorably put it, my big sparkly top banana, but he had played no role in the years of Christmases we had celebrated on Regina Avenue.

  It was time to start over, and so we went to the lake. Our decision was a good one. Zack’s partners and their families came out for the holidays too. The weather was cold and bright, and the snow was carol-perfect: deep and crisp and even. We skied, skated, tobogganed, ate too much, and went to bed early. We bought the last tree from a lot in Fort Qu’Appelle. The tree, of uncertain parentage, was frozen solid, and when it thawed, we discovered serious flaws. We strung it with lights that we paid far too much for, turned its bad side to the wall, and decorated it with paper snow-flakes and marshmallows. We all agreed it was the most beautiful tree ever.

  Given the circumstances, it was a good Christmas, and there was an unexpected gift. Over the holidays, Pantera found the owner with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Pete and he had tried to make a go of it, but Pantera was too gregarious to spend days cheering up ailing animals at the clinic and too rambunctious to be left alone. Pantera did, however, love Zack, tolerate Taylor and me, and get along surprisingly well with Willie. And so, Zack and I left the lake to begin our life as a family with our daughter, her two cats, and our two dogs.

  After Zack and I had announced our engagement, there had been no shortage of suggestions about the kind of wedding Zack and I should have. Angus was persuasive about the delights of a destination wedding – preferably somewhere he and Leah could surf and toss around a Frisbee. The idea of getting married on a beach with the waves splashing against the shore was appealing, but travel was difficult for Zack, so Bali was out. Taylor loved the idea of a formal wedding. When we cleaned out the basement, she unearthed the picture of the wedding gown I’d drawn for Katy Keene comics and showed it to Zack. He was fulsome in his praise. He was particularly fond of the way the doves nestling on Katy’s breasts reached towards one another to exchange a beaky kiss over her cleavage. But in the end we decided on something less elaborate.