by Trevor Cole
When Cheryl finally lifted her head she came only partway, letting the water drip from her nose and chin onto the porcelain. And it was a close call for Jean. She tried to calm her breathing because she’d nearly blown it, nearly jumped forward at the first Cheryl twitch. She told herself to wait, wait – swish, crack, over the fence! – she knew Cheryl would look up eventually.
And, eventually, she did.
Cheryl stood and stared into the mirror, and reacted with surprise to her friend looming behind her at the moment Jean swooped in. And everything went according to Jean’s mental rehearsal. She wrapped her free arm around Cheryl’s waist in a tight and loving embrace. She held her close as she pressed her cheek against Cheryl’s damp ear. She looked into the mirror to watch the dying light in her friend’s eyes. And then … well … then it all went crappy.
Before Jean could lift her knife hand to execute the twinned motion she’d planned – which, zip, zip, was sure to have worked perfectly – she took a last look at Cheryl’s face, and saw just what Cheryl saw. The dark pouches under her eyes, the sallow sag of her cheeks, the general shadow of despair. There was no happiness there, Jean realized. Not one little bit.
“I’m really a mess, aren’t I?” Cheryl said.
“Oh,” said Jean, trying to hide her disappointment. “No, you’re not.”
“Be honest, Jean. I remember you being honest with me before.”
Jean sighed and loosened her embrace. “All right, Cheryl. I admit that you’ve looked better. But I honestly think that’s true of anyone our age.”
Slowly Cheryl dipped her head, and her shoulders began to shake. Jean could hear the rise of her first, choking sobs. And so, before her friend’s pain took irrevocable hold, Jean did what she had to do. She laid her knife hand on Cheryl’s shoulder, turned her, and wrapped her friend in her arms. She held her and let the tears soak into her blouse and tried to absorb the shaking. And she apologized. She said all the things she’d wanted to say, about how wrong she had been to abandon her friend, from that day by the weeping willow, about how childishly she’d behaved, letting petty hurt and jealousy keep her from giving Cheryl all the love and support she deserved, and about how sad she was, how awfully sad, for Cheryl’s terrible loss all those years ago. She said everything to Cheryl. In fact, she said it more than once, because Cheryl’s extreme sobbing was making it hard for her to hear. “What?” she kept saying. “What?” It wasn’t ideal, actually. But Jean just kept on apologizing, as often as she needed to, as loudly as required, even as she dropped her knife to the bottom of the waste paper bin. And she pledged to herself that she would always be there for Cheryl, for as long as it took, until the day she was deeply, unshakably happy. Even if that meant the two of them almost certainly getting old, which … well, looking at Cheryl, it wasn’t even a question.
A moment later, as Cheryl was mopping her eyes with toilet paper, the washroom filled with the sound of frantic banging, and the voice of Fran, crying, “Jean! Jean! Are you in there? Jean!”
Jean went to unlock the door. And when she pulled it open, there was Fran. Or sort of Fran. Her face had been remade, as if by another artist, into an expression of exaggerated horror. In her hand, she held Jean’s phone and, seeing Jean, she seemed not to be able to move.
“Have …” A whisper was apparently all the voice Fran could now muster. “Have you done something bad?” The noise of footsteps sounded behind Jean and Fran turned, her eyes fixed wide, to see Cheryl coming forward, wadding toilet paper into a tight, damp ball. She blinked and gaped again at Jean. “Milt called,” she whispered. “I saw his picture so I answered it. I didn’t think you’d mind. He told me I should run for my life.”
“Milt said that?” said Jean.
“Why would Milt say that?” said Cheryl.
“He said …” Fran swallowed. “Well, he said that Jean was very dangerous at the moment. Or words to that effect.”
Jean sighed and shook her head, and took the phone out of Fran’s hand.
“Nothing at all is going to happen to you, Fran,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you and I are just not that close.”
Jean paid their bill and the three women left, although no one had eaten a thing. They climbed into Fran’s SUV without a word. Fran in particular strapped herself in very gingerly.
As they made their way out of the parking lot and headed toward the highway, Jean thought about the people she was close to in Kotemee. Milt was first on her mind, of course, and not because she was annoyed that he’d upset Fran. Mostly she wondered whether this whole business would change the way he felt about her, because there were times when Milt was not very understanding and this was probably going to be one of those times. She thought about Welland, too, and worried about how this might affect his career, whether it would give him a bad feeling about police work, just when he was starting to get the hang of it. Andrew Jr. flashed through her mind as well, but she thought he would manage just fine.
As Fran merged onto the highway, Jean looked over her shoulder at Cheryl in the back seat. She still had the wad of toilet paper in her hand, and seemed confused but not distraught, as if she thought she might have misheard what Fran had said, or that she’d had some sort of alcoholic hallucination. At least she didn’t appear to be jumping to any conclusions, which Jean thought was very fair of her.
In the driver’s seat, Fran had the wheel in a firm grip. Her lips were pressed tight together, she directed a fixed glare at the road in front of her, and for once, Jean was pleased to see, she was driving in the fast lane at an appropriate speed. Jean thought the word that might best describe Fran just then would be determined. But she knew Fran well enough now to know there was probably a good deal going on under the surface. Fran had a lot more substance to her than she’d realized, and her mind was always working, and right now Jean figured it was probably swirling with all sorts of conflicting thoughts.
“Fran,” she said, “if you need to listen to Céline Dion all the way home, feel free.”
Fran turned her head slightly. “Really?” she said. “You won’t mind?”
“No,” said Jean. “It’s absolutely fine.” And she opened the glove box to let Fran choose.
EPILOGUE
PEOPLE LIKE TO KNOW how a story ends, so it seemed a good idea to say a few words about what happened to Jean, after she got back to Kotemee.
She was arrested, of course. That didn’t take very long. Fran dropped her off at Jean and Milt’s house, where the driveway and the curbsides were lined with police cars and dozens of silent onlookers, many of them people Jean knew. And when she walked into the house, Detective Rinneard, who had sharp blue eyes and a shaved head and didn’t look anything like Serpico, arrested her for the murder of her three best friends. Jean didn’t make any sort of fuss and “went along quietly,” as they say, not even objecting to the use of the word “murder.”
Jean’s arrest, and the trial that followed, filled the Kotemee Star-Lookout for months. It was front-page news in the city for a day or two, and a bunch of TV reporters came and nosed around a bit, and did their reports standing on the sidewalk in front of Jean’s Expressions. Milt kept the store locked, but they took some video of her display pieces in the window, and on the Internet there was lots of discussion of Jean’s ceramics: “The art of the serial killer.” Some people, including one prominent art writer from the city, said she was a genius, and if Milt had wanted to sell any of her pieces he could have made a small fortune. But he didn’t seem to want to. Eventually, one night, someone put a brick through the front window of Jean’s shop and tried to steal all of her ceramics. No one knows how many they made off with, but judging from the amount of dust and crumbled bits on the floor of the shop and the sidewalk outside, most of the pieces likely disintegrated as soon as the thieves picked them up.
For the trial, Jean said she didn’t need a lawyer; she was content to plead guilty because she wasn’t ashamed of what she’d done. But the court assigned her one anyway, a n
ice enough man who, because he was greying and had a bit of a belly, looked something like Milt, except with a nicer suit. He rounded up some psychiatrists from the city who testified as to Jean being temporarily insane at the time of the killings. But when Jean got on the stand she said that was all nonsense. She stood up and told the courtroom that after what she’d learned about growing old, if anybody thought she was crazy for giving her friends a fast, happy way out, then they didn’t know much about friendship.
Cheryl Nunley stayed in Kotemee, and it was kind of funny how that worked out. She got herself into a twelve-step program, which seemed to do her some good. And when she sold the winery, she wound up with a parcel of money. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to buy a cozy little house, and the house she ended up buying was Natalie’s. She got it as cheap as could be, too, because nobody else wanted to buy a house where somebody had been gruesomely slain. Cheryl, however, bought it without any qualms whatsoever. She told people that whatever Jean had done, she’d done out of love, and so there weren’t any strange feelings or vibrations in the house. The only problem was that it was a bit cramped. She thought she might put on an addition.
As for the men, well, let’s see: Milt finally got a full-time teaching position, because without Jean’s income from her art, he needed the money. And he didn’t see Louise again; that decision stayed firm. Andrew Jr. carried on being chief of police at Kotemee, which was no big surprise. Nobody thought it strange to have a police chief with a sister serving time for multiple murders, because in a small town lots of people have relatives who do strange things that everybody knows about, and life just goes on. As for Welland, he quit the Kotemee force, applied for a patrol job in the city, and got it. The day he started, he enrolled in special training to become a detective constable. It meant coming in early and staying late every shift. But he was pretty determined.
Jean was sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after fifteen years. They trucked her off to the federal penitentiary for women in Mainsview, about a day’s drive from Kotemee, and she took to prison life rather well, although she found it a little hard to make friends. She got lots of time for her ceramics, though, and after asking for nearly a year, she even managed to get the prison to install an extra-large kiln. There wasn’t much greenery around the prison yard, of course, and her access to books was restricted mostly to what the prison library kept on its shelves, so the inspiration for her pieces had to come from her imagination, and from whatever her visitors might bring. And that’s where Fran Knubel came in.
One day, a few months after the trial, Fran kissed her husband, Jim, on the cheek, climbed into her SUV, and drove up to see Jean. The two of them had a good long visit, or as long as the guards would allow, which was about twenty minutes the first day. Eventually they snuck that up to half an hour. And now Fran drives up about once a month. Usually she takes with her a little package of leaves, plants she’s picked from the garden or weeds from the roadside, or even greenery she’s cut from supermarket produce, like kale and celery leaves and basil, because these days Jean is happy for whatever she can get. Fran wraps them in a damp cloth laid inside a Tupperware container to keep them supple, as per Jean’s request, and presents them proudly after the guards have given them the once-over to make sure they’re not drugs.
Of course, people want to know why she goes up there. “Why are you going out of your way to see that killer?” people ask her. Fran just holds herself very tall and says it’s hard to make friends these days, and anyone in her shoes would do the same thing. “Aren’t you afraid?” people ask her. And Fran assures them she’s not. Jean killed only the women who were closest to her, she explains, and she would not presume that level of friendship, certainly not on the basis of monthly visits. But then, Fran will become lost in her deepest thoughts, and she’ll get a peculiar look in her eyes. It’s what you might describe as a sad and hopeful expression.
Tina Dooley
Acting President
Kotemee Business Association
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At times, the novelist is a scavenger, rooting among the weathered memories and dog-eared details of other people’s lives in search of the piece that will fit his imagined construction, or the bean that will sprout something wholly new. My heartfelt thanks to those friends and acquaintances who, by sharing the stuff of their lives in conversation, seeded important elements of this story long before there was a story.
I’m grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their crucial support. Thanks also to Tara for her ceramics knowledge, to Miranda and Krista for their reading and insights, to Lara Hinchberger and Ellen Seligman for their encouragement and guidance, and to Bruce Westwood and Carolyn Forde for joining me in the leap of faith.
Copyright © 2010 by Trevor Cole
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cole, Trevor, 1960–
Practical Jean / Trevor Cole.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-2327-9
I. Title.
PS8605.044P73 2010 C813’.6 C2010-901558-4
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The poem referred to on pp. 64-65 is “My Last Poem” by Manuel Bandeira, in a translation by Elizabeth Bishop published in An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, NH, 1972.
The line on p. 179 is from the song “Mele Kalikimaka,” written by R. Alex Anderson. © Bibo Music Publishing.
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