The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn

by Gail Bowen

  Planning the funeral had brought us face to face with all the unanswered questions of Christy’s life. Who were the people who cared about her? Beyond a few colleagues at the biology lab, there didn’t seem to be anyone. We had put a photo at the head of Christy’s obituary notice in the Saskatoon and Regina papers, hoping that someone who had known her before would see it and come. But it seemed a slim hope, and we had chosen the smallest of the chapels at the funeral home to avoid the depressing symbolism of empty pews. What were her favourite flowers? Her favourite pieces of music? No one knew. Pete remembered a couple of songs she’d commented on when they’d been listening to the car radio, but they were songs for the living.

  What, if anything, did Christy Sinclair believe in? She had never said. Greg went down to the library and came back with two pages of quotes about the endurance of the human spirit.

  “Is there anything there we can use for a eulogy?” he asked after I finished reading them.

  I shook my head.

  “That’s what I thought, too,” he said. “My high-school coach said stuff like that when he sent us back into a game where we were really getting nailed.”

  “Thanks for trying,” I said. “I’ve got an idea about something that won’t sound quite so much like Vince Lombardi.”

  I pulled down my volume of Theodore Roethke and looked for the poem with the image of the pickerel smile that I had always connected with Christy. The poem was called “Elegy for Jane”; Roethke had written it for a student who had died from injuries when she was thrown from a horse. I copied the poem out, and it was in my purse the day I walked through the door of Helmsing’s Funeral Home.

  We had done our best. Still, as we filed into that tiny chapel with the empty pews and the tape of “Amazing Grace” whirring lugubriously in the background, there was no denying that Christy Sinclair’s leave-taking of this world was going to be a pretty lonely affair. But as the tape changed to “Blessed Assurance,” there was a stir.

  Four young women had come in. Two were native, two weren’t, but they all shopped at the same store: stiletto heels, stirrup pants tight as a second skin on their slender legs, nylon jackets with their names embroidered on the sleeve and crosses around their necks. They were, without exception, pretty, but their hair, gelled and curled, frizzed and sprayed, was too extravagant for their young faces, and their eyes were too wary for girls who weren’t far along in puberty. They sat behind me. All during the readings I was aware of them; I could feel their presence, and I could smell the sweet heaviness of their hairspray, overpowering in the humid chapel air.

  When it was time for me to read, I felt the familiar clutch of panic, but Keith smiled encouragingly and Christy’s bracelet was warm around my wrist. I walked to the front of the room and took a deep breath. I had read “Elegy for Jane” many times in the past twenty-four hours. I knew it by heart. As I said the lines, I looked at Christy Sinclair’s small band of mourners: at Jill Osiowy, head bowed, red hair falling forward to curtain her face; at Keith, whose eyes never left mine; at Greg, whose arm rested on my daughter’s shoulder as if by his touch he could protect her; at my adult children, backs ramrod straight but sitting so close together you couldn’t have passed a paper between them, reassuring one another as they always had that, no matter what, they had each other.

  Behind them, the four young women listened to Roethke’s words with closed faces. The final stanza of “Elegy for Jane” had always seemed to me to be heartbreakingly beautiful.

  If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

  My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.

  Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

  I, with no rights in this matter.

  As I recited the words, one of the girls began to cry.

  She wasn’t the only one. When I came to the last line of the poem, I was crying, too – for Roethke’s Jane and for Christy Sinclair who had no one but me to speak the words over her grave.

  The rain hadn’t let up when we left the funeral chapel. There was a kind of portico outside the entranceway, and the young women were there in their thin jackets, looking up at the sky.

  I went over to them. “Can we give you a lift anywhere?” I asked.

  They stepped back from me as if I were an infection, but one of them, the tiny blonde who had wept during the poem, stood her ground.

  “We’re okay,” she said.

  I looked at her. Her peroxided curls were dark at the roots like Madonna’s, and her skin beneath its heavy makeup had the telltale bumps of pubescence. There were streaks of mascara down her cheeks from her tears. I took a Kleenex from my bag and held it out to her.

  “Your mascara has run a little,” I said.

  She grabbed the tissue and began scrubbing at the area under her eyes.

  “Every time I wear this goddamn stuff, somebody makes me cry,” she said.

  “Same here,” I agreed.

  For a beat, the mask dropped, and she looked at me with real interest.

  “Were you a friend of Christy’s?” I asked.

  The girl’s face closed in on itself again, and she turned on her heel and stepped into the rain.

  “Please, could we talk just for a moment?” I called after her.

  She didn’t look back. The others followed her, and I was left on the steps of the funeral home watching the four of them clip along Cornwall Street in their perilously high heels. The rain kept on coming, plastering their stirrup pants to their legs, soaking their thin jackets, bouncing impotently off the gelled curls and the hard-sprayed frizz of their elaborate hairdos. Finally, they turned a corner and vanished into the mist of the rainy city.

  There are 180,000 people in Regina. Chance encounters are not unheard of here; still, running into Kim Barilko less than twenty-four hours after talking to her outside the funeral home seemed like a cosmic stretch.

  I had dropped Taylor off at nursery school and come downtown to do a couple of errands. Later I was going to pick Taylor up, help Pete get organized for the trip to Swift Current, then meet Mieka and Lorraine Harris at the bridal salon for Mieka’s first fitting on her wedding dress. A highstress day.

  I’d taken care of my business, and I was walking along Scarth Street toward the place I’d parked the car. The wet weather had continued. It was a grey muggy day, coast weather. There was a bridal shop on Scarth; in the gloom, its window, bright with paper apple blossoms and summer wedding gowns, was an appealing sight. I stopped to look. There was something surreal about all those mannequin brides in their virginal white. I could see my reflection in the window: a flesh-and-blood imperfect middle-aged woman in the midst of all that synthetic flawless youth. And then there was another reflection, just behind me: a young woman with the hips-forward slouch of a street kid and Madonna hair. I turned. For a split second she didn’t notice me, and I was able to see her face as she looked at that fairy-tale dress. Her mouth curved with derision, but her eyes were filled with terrifying hope. I didn’t want to see any more.

  “Remember me?” I said. “We talked yesterday after Christy Sinclair’s funeral.”

  She was wearing yesterday’s stirrup pants and a sleeveless blouse the colour of an orange Popsicle; her lipstick was that same improbable orange, but frosted. A cross hung between her small breasts.

  “I remember you,” she said and she smiled. “You’ve got the same problem with Maybelline that I have.”

  There was a Dairy Queen next to the bridal shop. “Could we have a cup of coffee together – my treat?” I asked. “I’d like to talk about Christy Sinclair a little if it’s okay with you.”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Sure, I’m not going anywhere. But her name was Theresa, not Christy.”

  “Theresa?” I said.

  “Like in Terry,” she said, “or the saint. If you hadn’t put the picture in the paper we wouldn’t have known it was her because of the wrong name.” She opened her bag and pulled out the obituary. She tapped at it with an orange fingerna
il.

  “That’s Theresa,” she said.

  “What was her last name?” I asked.

  The mask fell over her face again. “Look, I don’t think I’ve got time for a coffee, after all.”

  “Can I drive you somewhere or just walk along with you?”

  “It’s a free country,” she said, and then more kindly she added, “I have to get to the Lily Pad and help with lunch. It’s my day.”

  “Is the Lily Pad a restaurant?”

  She laughed, a short, unpleasant sound. “Yeah, it’s a restaurant, a restaurant for people with no money.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?” she said. “You don’t have to eat there.”

  We both laughed, and when she began walking toward Albert Street, I fell into step with her. “My name’s Joanne Kilbourn,” I said.

  “I’m Kim Barilko,” she said.

  She made good time, despite her stiletto heels.

  “So,” I said, “how did you know Theresa?”

  “From home and then at the Lily Pad,” she said. “She was going to be my mentor, but with my luck, of course, she goes and dies. I should have known better.” Kim’s lip curled with contempt at her gullibility.

  “You’re going too fast for me,” I said. “Could you fill me in a little?”

  “The Lily Pad is a place for runaways, street kids?” At the end of the sentence, her voice rose, and she watched my face for a sign of comprehension. When she saw what she was looking for, she continued. “They serve food and coffee and you can go there and watch TV or have a shower or just hang together. There’s a lot of system stuff, crafts and counsellors and programs to help you learn a job. It’s a hassle-free zone. Nobody’s allowed to dick you around, not your parents, not your old man, nobody.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  She shrugged. “And there are mentors. Girls who have good jobs and great clothes and great lives, and they come in and talk to us and then they choose someone to kind of help along the way. Terry chose me, because she wanted to help a girl from home. Besides, she said she saw something in me.”

  “I can see it, too,” I said. “Incidentally, how old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” she said.

  A year older than Angus.

  The Lily Pad was on Albert Street, not far from the city centre. It was an old house with the graceful lines of a building designed in the first years of the century. On the front lawn a wooden frog sunned himself on a lily pad. No words. On the grass and on the front steps, kids sat smoking. I had spent my life surrounded by children, but kids like these still tore at me. The dead eyes, the defiance, the sure knowledge that they were just putting in time before they entered their life’s work as members of the permanent underclass. When I thought about what lay ahead of them, it was hard to believe we’d inched very far along the evolutionary scale.

  They moved aside to let us pass as we went up the front steps, but whether we were there or not there was obviously a matter of indifference to them. Kim didn’t comment about them or about anything. There was a bulletin board on the wall of the entranceway. Pinned to the top was a sign: “The Sharing Place.” The board was empty. A door to what must have been the upstairs was blocked off by an old pine sideboard.

  “Don’t you use the upstairs?” I asked.

  “No,” Kim said, “they’re afraid we’ll set the place on fire. You know, from our unhealthy habit of smoking.” She gave me a deadpan look. “When you’re dealing with a dysfunctional population, you can’t be too careful.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “That was a joke,” Kim said. “Come on. I gotta get lunch started.”

  I followed her through a large front room filled with overstuffed furniture that had obviously been rescued from a dozen different basements. In the corner Big Bird was singing about his neighbourhood on a large-screen TV. No one was watching. We walked down a dark hall to the kitchen. Money had been spent here. The floor shone, and the industrial-sized appliances were new and expensive. Kim went to the sink and washed her hands, then she took a slab of hamburger meat from the refrigerator and threw it in an iron frying pan on the stove.

  “Chili,” she said. She began breaking up the meat with a fork. “I never knew anybody like Theresa in my life. She was like a person on TV, pretty and smart, and she had such great clothes, and that little red convertible of hers was so amazing.” She jabbed at the still frozen centre of the hamburger viciously. “Maybe she liked me because I admired her so much.”

  “There are worse reasons,” I said.

  The meat sizzled and Kim stirred it. A splash of grease flew up onto her Popsicle-coloured blouse.

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit on a stick.” She looked at me sadly. “Theresa would never say anything like that. She was a lady like Julia Roberts in that movie Pretty Woman. I musta rented that video twenty times.” Her voice fell. “Anyway, Theresa wanted to make me a lady, too.”

  Kim began opening tins of kidney beans and tomatoes and throwing them into the pan with the meat. She stirred the mixture with a wild, hostile energy.

  “She told me she was going to teach me about clothes and hair, and we were going to talk about going back to school. She had this business and she was going to, like, train me …”

  Behind me a voice, smooth, professionally understanding, said, “Kim, you know the rules about visitors.”

  The first thing I noticed about the man in the doorway was that he had the kind of unvarying mahogany tan he could have achieved only in a tanning salon. “Fake-and-bake tans,” Mieka called them. In fact, he looked like a fake-and-bake kind of guy: he was about Keith’s age, mid-fifties, but he was dressed like a fashion magazine’s idea of a college kid, UBC sweatshirt, designer jeans, white sport socks, white cross-trainers. His hair had been professionally streaked, and whoever did it had done a better job than the hairdresser who did mine.

  “No visitors in the kitchen, Kim,” he said pleasantly. Then he turned his smile on me. It was as dazzling as the gold chain around his neck. “I’m sorry Kim forgot to share our rule with you.”

  “You run a tight ship,” I said.

  “We have to,” he said.

  Kim turned away without a word. Her face as she stirred the chili was impassive. She had withdrawn again. She was back in that detached and distant zone where nobody could dick her around. I touched her on the shoulder.

  “Thanks for telling me about Theresa,” I said. “I still can’t get used to calling her that. I never told you my connection with her. She wanted to marry my son, and she felt very close to me. I never knew her.”

  Kim took a bag of chili powder from the cupboard and began shaking it into the pan. “You blew it,” she said.

  The man raised his eyebrows. “I think we should let Kim get on with her cooking. There are a lot of us looking forward to her famous chili. We all have our jobs here at the Lily Pad.”

  “What’s yours?” I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kim grin. I was glad she knew I was on her side.

  His smile widened, but as he looked at me his eyes were appraising. “Why, I’m Helmut Keating, the co-ordinator,” he said. “If you’d like to step into my office on your way out, I can share some information with you about how we operate here at the Lily Pad.”

  Behind Helmut’s back, Kim carefully mouthed the word “asshole.” I nodded in agreement. Then I smiled at Helmut.

  “Let’s get in there and share,” I said.

  When I left, I was carrying a manila folder with some photocopied diagrams of the administrative structure of the Lily Pad and a half-dozen slick brochures to hand around to people I thought would be interested in making a contribution. “We rely on our friends,” Helmut said smoothly as he walked me out the door and down the front steps.

  It was a little after eleven-thirty. It was still muggy and overcast, and the kids were still sitting on the lawn smoking. None of them looked as eager to have their lives transform
ed as the attractive kids in the Lily Pad’s four-colour brochure.

  I drove to Taylor’s playschool. She was waiting in the doorway with her teacher. When she saw me, she came running, and I felt a rush of pleasure. She was carrying a cardboard egg carton.

  “Look,” she said breathlessly. “The other kids started theirs before I came, so I was late, but teacher says it’s never too late. Look at them. They all sprouted.”

  There were twelve bean plants in the dirt that filled the indentations.

  “Do you know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, Jo?”

  “Maybe you could tell me while we plant those. If we hurry, we’ve got time before lunch. I thought we’d make something special. Pete’s going back to his job today, remember?”

  “Holding cows for the animal doctor,” Taylor said seriously.

  “Right,” I said.

  An hour later, beans planted, the kids and I were sitting down to gazpacho and warm sourdough bread. Pete had always been strong and resilient – “Peter is unflappable,” his kindergarten teacher had written in a report-card comment that became a family joke. But that day as I watched him eat lunch, I wondered if there’d been too many blows. The visit to the people he and Christy knew in Saskatoon had been painful; the funeral had been worse. But it was the news that Christy had committed suicide that devastated him. He felt he was responsible, and nothing any of us said could convince him otherwise.

  I didn’t believe in keeping secrets from the kids. Most of the time, I thought it was best to know the truth and work from there. But as I looked at Pete across the table, pale and unnaturally quiet, I knew this wasn’t most of the time. I decided not to tell him about my visit with Kim Barilko. And so we were both quiet, and I was glad Angus and Taylor were there to fill up the silences.

  When Angus went back to school, Taylor went out to sit with her bean garden, and Pete and I were alone.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But it’s the best thing. You’ll be busy doing something you like, with people who didn’t know Christy. And you’ll be in those beautiful, beautiful hills. That’s healing country down there.”