The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  When I hung up, I didn’t even bother going upstairs to get a blanket. I grabbed my coat and, like a transient in a bus station, I covered myself with it and fell asleep where I was.

  CHAPTER

  19

  The gastroenterologist’s office was the top floor of a medical building so old it had an elevator operator. The waiting room was oddly comforting although it took me a while to understand why. There were the usual stacks of magazines with cover stories about things that had once seemed important and pages soft with use, and there was the standard office furniture, Naugahyde and steel tubing. But there wasn’t that heart-stopping medical feeling, and as the receptionist, a young Chinese woman, exotic as a forties’ movie villain, raised a perfectly manicured hand and flicked a lighter into flame, I recognized why. The whole place smelled of cigarette smoke. No signs from the cancer society. No cute cartoons. There were ashtrays, and people were using them. I closed my eyes and that smell, acrid and familiar, mixed with the alien smell of things plunged into sterile baths and ripped from sterile wrappings, carried me back to doctors’ waiting rooms when I was young, and to doctors who measured and weighed and made jokes about school and husbands and the future.

  When I stood to follow the receptionist into the examining room, I felt my stomach cramp, but safe in the smoky air, I said, “Nothing bad can happen here.”

  The beautiful Chinese woman raised a perfectly waxed eyebrow and, in the flat accents of small-town Saskatchewan, said, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” Then she turned and glided out of the room on her stiletto heels.

  The examining room had a spectacular view of the city, and as I stood and watched the late afternoon traffic, I heard in the next room a man’s voice talking on the telephone about some property he had bought. I heard the name “Little Bear Lake” and then, after a while, the word “developer.” The conversation was heated. Someone hadn’t checked something and now the building couldn’t start “till spring if ever,” I heard the voice say. Then something muffled and finally, very distinct and loud, “You can tell those rubes I’ll drag them into the tall grass on this one.” A phone slammed down, then the door to the examining room opened and Dr. Philip Lee walked in.

  Physically he was as unlike his brother, Mort, as it was possible to be. Mort was a teddy bear of a man – “A Panda bear,” Ali said once, “after all, the man was born in Hong Kong and half the family’s still there.” But there was nothing cuddly about Dr. Philip Lee. He was tall, balding and scholarly looking. He bowed slightly toward me.

  “I apologize, Mrs. Kilbourn, for the delay – a consultation.”

  “Well,” I said, sitting on the examining table, “if the developers fall through, you can always build yourself a cottage. Little Bear Lake is beautiful, especially in the spring.”

  He looked at me sharply and nodded. “Mrs. Kilbourn, in your estimation, what seems to be the trouble?”

  I went through the whole dismal history, starting with the first attack in the middle of the night after the boys and I ordered pizza and ending with my performance at Mieka’s the day before. I finished by saying, “I have no opinion – I’m the patient. In the other doctor’s opinion, the problem is stress. It’s all in my head.”

  Dr. Philip Lee gave me a wintery smile. “That is, of course, one possibility, but let’s eliminate the more interesting possibilities of the body first.”

  The physical examination he gave me was gruelling, “from mouth to anus” as he told me gravely when he began. After it was over, I dressed and the receptionist led me into the doctor’s office.

  “I see nothing,” he said, lighting a Marlboro and inhaling deeply. “We must, of course, await the test results, but everything appears to be entirely normal.”

  “So you agree that there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “At this point, I would agree with my colleague that there appears to be no physical cause for your symptoms.”

  “It’s all in my head, then.”

  “That possibility cannot be ruled out,” he said judiciously. “I’m going to write you a prescription for a little nostrum of my own. You are extremely tense and you appear not to be eating well.”

  “What’s in this little cure of yours?”

  “Something to relax you and some vitamins. Since you are not a medical person, the names would mean nothing to you.”

  I shredded Dr. Philip Lee’s prescription into the old brass ashtray in the lobby of the medical building. On the way home I stopped at a strip mall and bought a quart of milk, some dark rum and a dozen eggs. “Just what the doctor ordered,” I said, lifting my glass in a kitchen filled with the good smell of rum and eggnog, “something to relax the patient.”

  The doctor called four days later. I was in the granny flat sorting through some of the early press clippings about Andy. He attempted to be genial, and I had a strong suspicion that Dr. Philip Lee had talked to his brother in Winnipeg, “the one with the charm.” He was certainly trying harder.

  The test results were negative.

  “Good,” I said, “wonderful news.”

  Had the prescription helped?

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  Then I was feeling better?

  “Right as rain,” I said, but I had to hang up because a spasm hit and I doubled over with pain.

  Pain – that was one of the new constants in my life. The other one was fear. Entry after entry in my daybook began with the single word “sick,” and then the symptoms: “cramps, diarrhea, metallic taste in the mouth, have to spit all the time.” The last words were underscored in exasperation. And there were the symptoms that couldn’t be neatly categorized: the increasingly frequent times when I had problems getting air in and out of my lungs; the sense that there was a band of steel wrapped around my chest; the strange and terrifying tricks my heart was playing, pounding when I was sitting idle at my desk in the granny flat, skipping beats when I did something as simple as walk across the room.

  The pretty young woman with the curly hair who was one of the family practitioners in Ali Sutherland’s old practice made an appointment for me with a cardiologist. The cardiologist taped disks to me and hooked me up to a machine.

  “Good news,” she said, smiling, “nothing is wrong. Perhaps a short-term use of tranquillizers?”

  Craig Evanson called me one morning to ask me to go to the correctional centre and visit Eve, and I promised I would go soon. He had thrown himself into Eve’s case with a passion that surprised me. The floppy man had been superseded by a tense, driven stranger. “The shrink who pops in and out of there is worried about her, Jo. He says she’s shutting down. The way he explained it to me was it’s like closing off rooms in a house. First you close the public rooms and then the guest rooms, until you box yourself into one little room. The problem is Eve’s run out of rooms to shut down.”

  I knew how Eve felt. I was running out of rooms to shut down, too. Except for the boys, I stopped seeing people. November had settled in grey with misery. The easy, communal times when you stand out on the front lawn and visit with neighbours and people riding by on bikes or pushing babies in strollers were gone till spring. The focus of life had turned indoors, and indoors it was easy to say no to people. Everyone was understanding. The leadership convention was set for December fifth, so there were phone calls soliciting support and phone calls asking me to help write rules for the rules committee or to chair the balloting committee or to buy a ticket to the leader’s dance. I told everyone the same thing. I’d been ill, and on doctor’s orders I was resting and recuperating and getting back my strength. “And besides” I would add, clinching it, “I’m working on a biography of Andy.”

  For a few weeks Mieka called every day, but after I’d relayed my passing grades from Philip Lee and the cardiologist, she followed my lead and wrote off the episode in her kitchen as an understandable if unendearing reaction to stress.

  I did the best I could with the boys. I sat down for breakfast with them in the morni
ng, had lunch ready at noon, sat around for an hour or so with them at dinner time, took them to the Lakeshore Club on Saturday mornings. But children get used to most things, and the boys simply grew used to my being sick. They were kind always, but they had lives of their own: school and friends and football and hockey.

  And, I had to admit, precedent was against me. They had seen this pattern after their father’s death. Then as now, I was short-tempered and withdrawn. Then as now, the granny flat had become my refuge.

  One windy day I drove out to see Eve. We sat in the pale sunlight of the visiting area in the hospital wing, two women who had been defeated, and played a listless game of double solitaire. The irony of our choice of game struck me on the way home, and I had to pull over because when I laughed, I started the bands tightening in my chest again.

  Yes, I understood about shutting down rooms. By the second week in November, I had pretty well shut down all the rooms but one: the big room over the garage where I could close out the world, my clean, well-lighted place. Except keeping it clean had become a burden. Every so often the heating ducts would gather their strength and belch out a fresh dusting of summer pollen, and I would have to fill a bucket with hot sudsy water and scrub everything down.

  One day when I was carrying the pail my legs began to twitch uncontrollably, the way an eyelid sometimes twitches spasmodically, for no reason. I had to sit down with my bucket until the twitching stopped. That night in bed the twitching started again. The next morning I added twitching to my list of symptoms.

  Twitching and double vision. I had begun to have difficulty reading. The first time it happened I’d been reading some photocopies of old newspapers. The print was small and pale, so when my vision blurred, I wrote it off to eye-strain. I was still doing that, still looking for a reasonable excuse, still searching out a logical explanation for my symptoms, but the careful list of symptoms in my daybook was defining a profile that couldn’t be ignored. I was either sick or crazy. I was also terrified.

  I said that sickness and fear were the two constants of my life. There was a third – Rick Spenser. Every night, wherever he was, he would call, and we would talk. We had gone beyond the Andy book, he and I. In fact, he rarely mentioned the book any more. He was more interested in me and in my days. What was I doing? Who had I seen? How did I feel? I am not a vain woman but with every call it became increasingly clear that Rick Spenser was as attracted to me as powerfully as I was to him.

  Sometimes late in the evening when I sat in front of the television and saw his face, round and clever and knowing, my heart would pound and, sitting in my old jogging pants and sweatshirt, I would feel like a fool: a forty-six-year-old housewife watching her heartthrob, a newsroom groupie, but ten minutes later the phone would ring and it would be him. How was I? What was I up to? Who had I been talking to? And, always, had I seen him on the news? How had he done? Had he been clear, witty, insightful?

  This Rick Spenser, the vulnerable man behind the persona, touched something in me. Often when I would hang up the phone, I would feel as intimately connected to him as I would have if we’d made love. And so Rick became the third constant in my life, one of the few fixed stars that lit up the darkness of those early winter weeks. And that was the pattern until Remembrance Day.

  The call came early on the morning of November eleventh. It couldn’t have been much past six. It was Craig Evanson, sounding strained to the point of breaking. The correctional centre had called him a few minutes before. Somehow in the night Eve had gotten hold of a surgical knife and slashed her wrists. The morning nurse had found her. Crafty Eve had been lying with her blanket pulled up to her chin, innocent as a sleeping child. But the nurse noticed a stain in the middle of the blanket and, when she bent to look at it more closely, she saw that the stain was spreading. She pulled back the blanket, and there was Eve, covered in blood, still clutching the knife and near death. Eve was alive, and she was in the hospital wing of the correctional centre.

  That whole morning had a dreamlike, surreal quality. It was still dark, and light snow was falling on the empty streets. The stores and office buildings were lit, but when we pulled onto the Ring Road, there wasn’t another car in sight.

  “Do you have the feeling we’re the last two people left on earth?” Craig asked.

  His voice came from a place I didn’t ever want to go, and his words made my heart pound. There didn’t seem to be much logic left in the universe. I would not have been surprised if I had turned in my seat and found that Craig had vanished, just as I would not have been surprised to go home and see a charred and smoking ruin where twenty minutes before my home and children had been. I didn’t answer him. I didn’t trust my voice.

  The process of being admitted to the correctional centre was, by now, grimly routine. We drove up to the gate and waited as the harsh orange security lights swept the exercise yard and shone into our faces, leaching them of colour, turning them into death masks. The guard, enveloped in a yellow slicker, checked our names against a list, and somewhere somebody activated something that opened the electric gates.

  Inside it was the familiar rite of passage: doors unlocking to reveal other locked doors, which opened to reveal still more locked doors. A Chinese puzzle.

  The guard took us through double doors at the end of Eve’s old ward. As we passed Eve’s old bed, I noticed that the mattress was gone, and just the bare frame of the bed was left.

  “That’ll teach her,” I said aloud, and Craig looked at me sharply. Eve was in a small room lit by a powerful overhead light. “Does the light have to shine right into her face that way?” I asked.

  The nurse who was standing at the head of Eve’s bed stopped writing on his clipboard and gave me a warm and surprisingly human smile. He was wearing a poppy, too.

  “It’s regulations, but they don’t notice it or, if they do, they don’t mind. Some of them, afterward, even convert. They remember the light of heaven shining down upon them.”

  Eve looked past caring. She was hooked to tubes that put things into her and took things out of her, and she was connected to machines that measured the beat of her life. Something out of a sci-fi movie – “The Mechanical Woman – only her face is human.”

  Human, but not Eve. Not gallant Eve who tried to transcend cruelty and betrayal and death with crystals and colour therapy and a cleansing diet. Poor, poor Eve.

  Her wrists were heavily bandaged. I reached down and carefully took her hand and held it between my own, warming it. (“Think of all the hands you have known. Your father’s hands … your mother’s hands … Experience my hand. Grasp it tight … now release it. The touch is gone, but the imprint will be there forever. Forever and ever in your heart.”)

  After a while, I felt Craig Evanson touch my shoulder. “I think it’s time to go, Joanne.” Then he took my hand from Eve’s, but he didn’t let go.

  When the guard came to lead us out of the prison, Craig Evanson and I followed him, hand in hand, like children in a fairy-tale.

  CHAPTER

  20

  “Double solitaire,” I said.

  Craig turned the key in the ignition and looked at me.

  “Double solitaire. The last time Eve and I were together that’s what we played.” My legs began to tremble. “Oh, God, Craig, when is this going to end?”

  He reached over and gave me an awkward hug. “I don’t know, Jo. I just don’t know.”

  We sat for a while, isolated, thinking our own thoughts. It began to snow, and the banks of orange security lights turned the snow orange.

  Finally, Craig said, “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink.”

  I looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Craig, it’s not even nine o’clock yet.”

  “Fine,” he said absently as he backed out of the parking spot, “we’ll go to the Dewdney Club. I’ve belonged to that place for twenty years. If they can’t find me a bottle of whisky on a holiday morning, I’ll break every window in the place.”

  I
looked at him in amazement. “Whatever you say, Craig.”

  After the harsh realities of the correctional centre, the elegance of the Dewdney Club seemed like another dimension. There was a fire in the fireplace and in the background, discreetly, Glenn Gould played Bach. Craig led me to a table for two by the fire, took my coat, then disappeared. When he came back he was carrying a bottle of Seagram’s, and a waiter was dancing around him trying to intercept him.

  “Mr. Evanson, I’m certain I can make you a drink you’ll find quite palatable.”

  “I find this palatable, Tony,” said Craig, brandishing the bottle.

  The breakfast on the sideboard was the kind you see only in magazines and men’s clubs: grapefruit halves sectioned and dusted with brown sugar; silver chafing dishes of sausage and bacon and kippers; hash browns and toast and oatmeal kept warm in warming trays; eggs scrambled fresh in a copper pan.

  “Do you want food, Jo?” Craig asked.

  “Maybe some coffee to put the rye in.”

  Craig laughed, but there was no fun in the laughter.

  “A lady doesn’t drink liquor before noon. That’s what” – a flash of pain crossed his face – “that’s what the lady in my life always says.”

  I thought of Julie, guilty of God knows what, but not a lady to drink before noon. I sipped my coffee. The rye was smooth, and it felt good to be by the fire, but I couldn’t get warm.

  Across from me, Craig had filled his water glass with whisky. He raised it. “To you, Jo. A good person.”

  I lifted my cup, to return the toast.

  “No, don’t,” he said, holding up his hand to stop my toast. “At the moment, I would welcome a lightning bolt to blast me and mine out of existence.”