by Gail Bowen
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 fo
r 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.
The central building was an octagon, and four lozenge-shaped wings angled off it in an X shape. Everything was there in plain sight: steel beams, trusses, ducts, huge concrete planks, transformers; and everything was painted in primary colours, red, yellow, blue. Only the cross, which soared from the centre of the octagon, was unpainted. In the sunlight it glinted with the soft glow of anodized metal. The chapel was a brazen and innovative building as out of place in the midst of the comfortable mediocrity of the campus as a Mies van der Rohe chair in the middle of a K-Mart. I wanted to get a closer look.
The first thing I discovered was that the building had a name. A sign encased in Lucite pointed the way to the Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre. The construction was recent enough that the area around the chapel hadn’t been landscaped. Clumps of earth turned over by machines baked hot and hard in the sun. Someone had thrown down a makeshift path of concrete blocks; and when I looked in the direction of the chapel, I saw a man and a woman walking toward me. The man was pushing a wheelchair, and the woman had a stroller. When they got closer, I realized that I knew the young man. He was Craig and Julie Evanson’s son, Mark. Seeing him brought a rush of memories – memories of the time before the leadership race had divided us, and Craig and Julie and Ian and I had been young together.
We had met seventeen years before – the year our party, to everyone’s surprise, formed the government. This was the election we weren’t supposed to win, and the months that followed were heady times – at least for the men.
The wives saw a lot of one another that first term. It was a time of birthday parties and car pools and earnest discussions about preschools and free schools and French immersion. No one was more earnest than Julie Evanson. She and Craig had one child, Mark, the same age as our daughter, Mieka. He was the centre of Julie’s existence. She planned her days around him, and there wasn’t an hour in the day when Mark wasn’t being instructed or challenged or enriched by his mother. Once, at the deflated end of a birthday party, all the parents began talking about the unthinkable: the death of a child. Julie had been passionate: “Can you imagine if, after all the hours and hours you put in to make them into something really special, it was over just like that?” And she had snapped her fingers defiantly at the disease or the drunk driver or the act of fate that might end her boy’s promising life.
Mark Evanson hadn’t died. He’d done something worse. He’d turned out to be ordinary. By the time he hit high school it was apparent, even to his mother, that Mark was average, perhaps even a little below average. Betrayed and baffled, Julie floundered for a while. Then, to everyone’s amazement, she, who had had only the most perfunctory interest in her husband’s professional life, threw herself headlong into advancing Craig’s career.
It was, for her husband and son, as if a hurricane had suddenly changed direction. The lives of both men were thrown off course. Craig, who would have been content to be the Member from Regina-Little Flower for the rest of his life, suddenly found himself speaking at strawberry socials and annual meetings all over the province. Julie had decided her husband was going to be the next premier, and the first step was winning the party leadership.
Julie’s son’s life had taken an even stranger turn. He was confused at first by the sudden withdrawal of his mother’s attention and affection. Then Mark linked up with a group of kids from Wolf River Bible College. At sixteen, Mark was born again. At seventeen, he became a husband and, in short order, a father. I’d bumped into Mark and his baby at an outdoor crafts show earlier in the summer. At nineteen, Mark Evanson was a solid, good-looking young man with a solid, good-looking baby. When he said he was happy, I believed him.
Craig and Julie were not happy. If he hadn’t loved Julie so completely, losing the leadership to Andy Boychuk would, I think, have been a relief for Craig. He could have accepted defeat gracefully and eased into the life he had wanted all along. Except he did love Julie. Passionately, uncritically, Craig Evanson loved his wife, and her pain at losing gnawed at him. Long after the votes were counted, Craig was haunted by the knowledge that he had failed his wife.
Julie was haunted by demons of her own. Losing seemed to be like a slow poison seeping through her system. She was sullen with those of us who had worked on Andy’s campaign, and she was jubilant when, late in June, Andy had answered a question whimsically and had been forced to issue an apology. Before the six o’clock news was over, she was on the telephone. “Well, Jo, what do you think of your blue-eyed boy tonight?” she had asked.
Now summer was almost over, the blue-eyed boy was dead, and Julie’s boy was standing in front of me, his face glowing with pleasure.
“Mrs. Kilbourn, what are you doing here? I mean, God loves us all and everybody’s welcome at Wolf River, but what are you doing here?” Mark’s face was as open and without guilt as a newborn’s. He stood on the path, smiling, expectant, waiting for an answer.
“I came down with Mrs. Boychuk – you remember, Andy Boychuk’s wife. They’re friends of your mum and dad’s. I guess you heard what happened to –”
The smile vanished. Mark cut me
off. “We heard, but we didn’t want C-A-R-E-Y here –” he spelled carefully, then rested his hand on the shoulder of the boy in the wheelchair “– to sense that anything was wrong, so we’ve been walking him all morning. He loves the new chapel – all the bright colours, I guess.”
For the first time, I noticed the boy. I looked into his face. It was hard to imagine him responding to anything. He was dressed neatly, even whimsically, in shorts and a T-shirt that had a picture of Alfred E. Neuman from MAD magazine on the front and the words “What, Me Worry?” underneath. He would have been a handsome boy. His head was shaped like his father’s, and his hair was the same red-brown, but Carey’s head, too heavy for his slender neck, lolled to one side like a flower after a rainstorm. His features were regular but they were slack, and his mouth gaped. A little river of spit ran from his mouth to his chin. Mark reached down and dabbed at it with a Kleenex.
I held Carey’s hand and smiled at him, but he didn’t respond. When I straightened, I found myself face to face with Lori Evanson. She had stepped out from behind her husband, and she was looking at me with wonder.
“Mrs. Kilbourn, we saw you on television,” she said. “Such a terrible thing – an evil thing! You were very brave to save Mr. Spenser’s life.” Her voice was light and sweet, with a lilting singsong quality, like a child’s reciting something she’s learned by heart. Lori was holding a baby I knew was her own, but there was a quality about her, a sense that somehow she would never move much past adolescence.
It wasn’t her body. Physically, she was mature and beautiful. She looked the way we all wanted to look when we were eighteen. She was wearing a sundress the colour of a cut peach, and her arms and face were golden with tan. Up close, she smelled of suntan lotion and baby powder. Her shoulder-length hair was dark blond and streaked from the sun. She was incredibly lovely but in her eyes, which were as blue as forget-me-nots, there was such vacancy. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Lori Evanson’s soul was spotless.