They left on the hottest day of the summer in1971.
The flat dry world lost its colours in the midday heat. Nora was a drab cardboard cutout in the front seat of Dougwell’s Buick 6. She smoked and tapped her fingernails against the outside of the passenger door. The red of her nails was the only colour in the day.
Dougwell fussed with tarp straps—several suitcases were fastened on the roof of the car—and Pete leaned against an elm tree on the boulevard, waiting for the last minute before getting in. His oily blond hair fell past his shoulder blades. I thought I caught a whiff of his unwashed body but it could have been my imagination, like with Myrna and her embalming fluid. Joanne insisted she couldn’t smell anything on Myrna.
I didn’t know what to do, how to handle this strange goodbye. So I did nothing. Pete also did nothing; Nora reached out a hand to me, but retracted it as I began to move forward. Dougwell came around the car and gave me a one-armed hug.
“You can change your mind any time and join us,” he said.
“Thanks, Dougwell,” I said, knowing there was no chance.
The car was idling now. It had the strangest sounding engine I ever heard. I couldn’t imagine it completing the trip to the coast, but it did.
Pete got in the back seat and rolled down the window. I thought he winked at me, but I could have been mistaken about that, too.
I looked away and saw Joanne walking towards me with the Avery family dog, Boo, at her side. She still lived at home with her folks. I was so glad to see them. I wished they had been there in time for Pete’s wink. Joanne would have been able to tell me if it had happened or not; I hoped it hadn’t.
They drove away and The Beverley Hillbillies’ theme song ran through my head as I waved goodbye to the flapping tarpaulin.
The bleached-out stop sign at the end of the block did nothing to stop the car; it drove clear through. The pale day swallowed my family; they were gone.
“I wonder if I’ll ever see any of them again,” I said.
We sat on the front steps with Boo a short distance away on the grass. He was an elderly dog who liked to sit back a bit so he could keep his eye on the whole picture, the whole herd, which in this case was just Joanne and me.
“Of course you will,” said my stout-hearted friend.
“It’s funny.” I said. “Of the three of them I’ll miss Dougwell the most. We were just kind of getting started.”
Joanne threw a tennis ball for Boo and he stumbled to his feet.
I didn’t say it out loud, but I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see Nora again. As it turned out, I didn’t.
CHAPTER 19
Nora continued to surprise me with the words in her journal. I found myself leaving her distant past and leaping ahead to the second last entry. It was written early on in the Vancouver years.
1972 winter
If only it was the girl here with her on this dreary coast. And the boy the one she left behind. He has grown so morose. At least the girl made her laugh.
I didn’t know what to do with this information.
“When did I ever make my mother laugh?” I asked Spike.
He stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard a cupboard door close. That is what he often does when his suppertime is drawing near. He gently closes any open doors with his nose.
It wasn’t quite time. I stared into space and thought about the past.
One of the first things I did after my family left for the coast was put Murray’s picture back on the mantel. He looked so young. I remembered thinking that in not too many more years I would be as old as my dad was when he died. Then I would be older than he ever was. I left his ashes in the closet, but I didn’t forget about them, as Nora surely did.
A letter came to me now and then with a return address from North Vancouver. The Nora who wrote letters was not my mother. The way I finally figured it was, she was writing to someone else in her mind. If she had been writing to me she wouldn’t have used phrases like “majestic mountains,” “gay old time,” and worst of all, “silly me.” She came across like Anne of Green Gables or maybe Emily of New Moon writing home to a simple friend.
Dougwell sometimes added a line or two at the bottom, often encouraging me to come for a visit.
They seldom mentioned Pete. There was one line about him having a little trouble finding his niche—this from Dougwell—and an ecstatic note from Nora saying he was working part time at the post office for Christmas. Part time is good, she wrote, because it leaves him time for his poetry. She was sure he was the next Leonard Cohen. This infuriated me for some reason. I loved Leonard Cohen; I didn’t want Nora smearing him with Pete dirt.
It was hard thinking up topics when I wrote back, so mostly I just talked about school and the house and Joanne. And Henry, how we were together again.
I hate to compare Henry to a pair of comfortable shoes, but that’s how it was. He pursued me again and the fit was just so good. Even sex was easy with Henry and he was technically very able. I had to pretend he was someone else sometimes, but often just his being Henry was enough. I didn’t mention those sorts of things in the letters, just that we were together again and some of the things we did: movies, concerts, Henry’s gigs.
There was a dog in my life by then, so I wrote about him and how great he was. He was a beagle named Diesel. I had never had a pet before because of Pete’s allergies. Plus, Nora hated dogs; she was afraid of them.
I was back in university, as planned. As long as I stayed in school, Murray’s money kept coming. That was the deal and it was okay with me. I liked school. By 1973 I had an honours degree in history and I was working on my master’s.
Less than a year after Nora wrote that puzzling entry about my making her laugh she called. It was a gray afternoon in November. She rarely phoned, so I knew something was up.
“Pete hanged himself,” she said. “He’s dead.”
“Oh Lord.” I pictured his distorted face hovering beneath the branches of Mr. Whitall’s willow tree. “Are you sure?” I asked. My heart pounded in my ears.
“Of course I’m sure. It was that masturbatory thing boys do, you know, that sexual gratification thing. It went wrong.”
“So it was an accident.”
“Yes. But it’s not necessary for anyone but the family to know the details.”
Of course, more secrets.
My first thought had been suicide. I didn’t know about the thing that Nora was talking about. And I didn’t want her to explain it to me. I hated what she was saying and the way she was saying it.
“When?” I asked.
My cold blood was turning my brain to ice. I stared out the dining room window and watched two sparrows find disappointment at the empty bird feeder.
“Sunday night.”
Today was Wednesday.
“Sunday night? And you didn’t let me know till now? My brother is dead and you don’t tell me till now?”
I knew not to expect much from Nora, but this was insane. My brother had been dead for days and I hadn’t known.
“Aren’t you even sad?” I wailed into the phone.
Nora was quiet.
“Cherry? Dougwell here. Your mother’s pretty upset.”
She had handed me off.
“Why didn’t you phone me sooner?” I asked.
“I thought it was up to your mother,” he said. “I didn’t want to butt in.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Should I come?” I didn’t want to go, but who was looking after Pete, after his arrangements?
“I don’t think it’s necessary, unless you want to,” said Dougwell.
“What about the funeral and everything?” I asked.
“We’ve had Pete cremated. Nora doesn’t want a service.”
Pete was gone.
“May I speak to my mother again, please?”
When Nora was back on the line I asked, “How could you have let all this happen without letting me know?”
“We’re letting you know now,”
she said. “It hasn’t been easy on us either, Cherry.”
“Why wasn’t there a service of some kind?” I asked.
“I didn’t feel up to it,” Nora said.
“People never feel up to funerals,” I went on, conscious of my voice rising. “They have them anyway. It’s what people do. Why do we have to be so different from everyone else in the universe?”
I wanted my dad’s arms around me now more than anything. More than Henry.
“Dougwell has been a tower of strength,” Nora said. “I was the one who found Pete. He was still alive. I tried to lift him up and cut him down to get some breath back into him, but it was too late. I watched him die. It was a horrible death.”
I remembered running toward Pete, across Mr. Whitall’s lawn, running to lift him up. But I felt no sympathy for my mother. She didn’t love Pete; she didn’t love anyone. She was only telling me this to make her own part in his death more dramatic.
“Thank you very much,” I said. I didn’t want to hear any more from Nora. The grieving mother bit made me nauseous; she hadn’t practised enough for it to ring true. Even from Dougwell it would have been better. Why on earth did he not shorten his name to Doug?
“I was here alone,” Nora said. “Dougwell was at the shops.”
How I hated her. I hated the words she used. That masturbatory thing! What an ignorant, stupid thing for her to say. At the shops! What, was she an Englishwoman now?
“Where are Pete’s ashes?” I asked. “In a closet? In the garbage?”
Nora hesitated. “Please don’t be nasty, Cherry.”
“Well?”
“We haven’t received them from the crematorium yet,” she said.
“I have to go,” I said.
Just as I hung up the phone, the doorbell rang. It was a young man, there to read the gas meter in the basement. I let him in and he did his thing. I considered telling him that my brother had hanged himself, but I didn’t want to become part of a story he told at the end of his day. Also, maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe the phone call hadn’t happened or Nora got it wrong. Perhaps it was important that I keep it to myself until I felt more certain about it. I looked at the black phone on the hall desk, for some sort of evidence that it had rung.
The young man left and the phone rang again as I was staring at it. It was Dougwell.
“Cherry? Are you all right?” he asked.
“No.”
“I’m so sorry about this. And I’m sorry I didn’t take the bull by the horns and phone you sooner.”
“It’s okay, Dougwell.”
“Who are you talking to?” I heard Nora’s voice in the background.
Dougwell didn’t answer. I guess he was misbehaving by calling me.
“Who is it?” she hissed, closer now. I hung up.
A sick feeling pressed outwards from behind my eyes. It came with the knowledge that I had failed my own brother. I hadn’t been able to love him enough. I had feared him. And that fear along with my laziness and not being able to figure out how to know him… I never even imagined there wouldn’t always be time.
The doorbell rang again on that November afternoon. This time it was Henry. It was almost five o’clock. We had planned on having a bite to eat and then going to see The Exorcist.
I stepped outside and shivered in the cold. There was a misty rain falling.
Henry kissed me. He buried his face in my hair and inhaled. We went inside to bed and I cried while we were doing it. Henry didn’t question it; I often cried during sex. I don’t know why; it’s rare for me to cry at any other time.
“Pete’s dead,” I said as soon as our breathing returned to normal.
“What?”
“Pete’s dead. Nora phoned. He hanged himself,” I said. “It might have been an accident.”
Henry sat up and stared at me. “You’re not kidding me? This isn’t some kind of twisted Ring joke?” He didn’t believe in the normality of our family any more than I did.
“No.”
“When did it happen?”
“On Sunday. Nora phoned me this afternoon.” I started to cry again.
“I can’t believe we had sex,” Henry said, “when you knew that Pete was dead.”
“Why?”
“Because. That’s why. And I knew Pete too. Christ! Even if I didn’t!”
Henry’s cruelty stunned me.
“I even had conversations with him,” he said. He was comparing his relationship with Pete to the non-relationship I’d had with my brother as though his was superior, which maybe it was.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about the right thing to do. I just wasn’t in the mood to talk, you know? Maybe I was just craving comfort.”
I didn’t know if this was true or not, but I did know I didn’t want Henry yelling at me.
“You shouldn’t have had to think,” said Henry, looking at me as if I was all wrong, somehow. “You should have just told me. Christ.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. But I no longer meant it.
“You sucked my dick,” Henry said.
“Yes.”
“Was that a comfort to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was in your head as you were doing it?”
“Nothing,” I said. No, that wasn’t right. “I don’t know. Pete, I guess.”
“Oh, God, Cherry. This is making me sick.”
Henry stood up and began to pull his jeans on. His penis was the smallest I’d ever seen it.
I didn’t see him again for twenty-two years after that night, except for a few times from a distance at the university and from behind the living room curtains as he pounded on my front door. He tried to make it up with me; even later that same evening he tried. But I wouldn’t have it. I couldn’t forget the look on his face when I told him Pete was dead. He looked at me as though I were a different species, one that didn’t know human rules.
But man, I wasn’t thinking straight or I wouldn’t have behaved the way I did. I was so hurt and freaked out in my own way. I felt that Henry treated me very shabbily, after all those years of loving me. And I needed to be away from him. It was myself I really wanted a break from—but that wasn’t possible, so I took a break from Henry, the next best thing.
I wished I could ask him about the masturbatory phenomenon that Nora had mentioned, but I’d have to find that out from someone else.
Spike was standing expectantly by his dish now so I got up to feed him and think about making something for myself. He squealed and made clicking sounds on the spot with his feet.
A good memory came to me as I mixed up Spike’s concoction of wet and dry food.
Nora had told me to find Pete for supper. I must have been thirteen or so, Pete, ten. I went to the river and there he was, crouched down by the edge, watching a beaver repair its home. He was humming something, the theme from The Rifleman, I think, (daa daa da da daaa, daa da da daaa) and the breeze lifted his fine blond hair. I sat with him for a while before mentioning that it was suppertime. The beaver gnawed and nosed and whapped his tail. Pete laughed once; I think it was at the size of a log the industrious animal was trying to haul. I laughed too, quietly, not wanting to wreck anything about the moment.
I remembered too, that I found a quarter on the walk back from the river. For a second, like I always do when I find money, I believed that this was it; I’d hit the jackpot. I searched the ground for more and there wasn’t any, of course. So the disappointment started to set in. It was only a quarter. It would barely buy me a movie. Not even a Walt Disney at the Met; they cost thirty-five cents. Oh well, Sodom and Gomorrah was playing at the Lyceum. My spirits picked up again.
The last page of my mother’s journal was just gibberish and I gave it no more than a glance. It didn’t seem odd to me that her journal ended when and how it did, considering what happened in November of ’73.
CHAPTER 20
On a windy warm November evening, not long after Nora’s phone call, I walked
over to see Eileen, Pete’s old girlfriend, at her home on Lloyd Avenue. I wanted to let her know about my brother’s death soon after I found out, so I wouldn’t have to spring it on her at the Safeway or the drugstore where we sometimes ran into each other. She never failed to ask me about Pete.
I could almost pretend it was a spring night, with the wind and the warmth; I wore a fall jacket and left my parka at home.
Eileen lived in a tiny house with her elderly dad. The doorbell was broken. She gaped at me with her mouth hanging open when she answered my knock. I had never called on her before. She was wearing a nurse uniform made out of what looked to be nylon; it suited her.
The front door opened up directly into the living room. There was no hall there to ease visitors into the house. A gust of sweet November air burst into the room and Eileen yanked me inside.
“Close the door, Cherry. Quickly.” She pulled me further into the room by the sleeve of my jacket. “Daddy, this is Cherry Ring, Peter’s big sister.”
The old man didn’t bother with me and I was okay with that. He sat in a wheelchair in front of the television, watching a rerun of The Brady Bunch. Part of a meal, maybe breakfast by the look of it, had spilled down the front of his maroon robe and dried there. He favoured one haunch and I wondered if he’d had a hip replacement, like me. For just a second, I envied Pete and the peace of death.
It was a house of closed windows. The smell of urine and elder-sweat mixed with Pine-Sol thickened the stifling air. I wanted to make short work of this chore.
I took off my boots, hoping that Eileen would stop me, but she didn’t. When we walked between the wheelchair and the TV, the dad grunted, but that was all I heard from him other than a couple of horking sounds. There were sticky patches on the linoleum and I wished I had worn different socks, darker ones that wouldn’t be stained from their experience in this house.
“Excuse the mess,” Eileen said. “It’s hard to keep up with everything sometimes.” She gestured back toward the living room.
She looked exhausted. Looking after the old guy was taking it out of her. He oozed a dank filth that was like another complete presence. Once we were away from him, in the kitchen, things seemed cleaner and tidier, if on the dingy side.
The Pumpkin Murders Page 10