The snow stopped just as dawn was breaking. Ben fired up Nathan’s snowplow, a blade attached to Ben’s farm tractor, and went into the village to plow out his neighbours. The villagers had bought the blade and paid the gas, so it was an obligation to clear them out first, no matter his personal problems. The villagers paid what they could for Nathan’s labour. After he’d plowed everyone out, Ben edged down The Way, making a lane across the causeway.
When Ben got back home, he went to the shed, rolled out the snow tires, and put them on the Matrix. Annabelle had her coat on already, and had packed food for Lili. Nuts and seeds. Some dried fruit. Not enough to feed a bird. But it’s what Lili had requested. She wanted to keep her body and mind clean through this difficult time with Nathan – as if by starving herself he would recover. It wasn’t starving she sought, but purity, an open route for the life energy to flow from her to him.
If Ben and Annabelle hadn’t been so troubled, they might have appreciated the beautiful winter world, the sun gleaming on white drifts, multicoloured diamonds sparkling on the snow. The wind had whipped it up like meringue or April Dewey’s thick white icing, carving sculptures, creating a world of dark and light, blue shadow on snow tinged with pink – the red clay that the wind scraped up and mixed with it. It was a different world, The Shores in winter.
Ben and Annabelle drove across the causeway. After that it was slow going, because no one had come to plow the provincial highway, not at this end. They never hurried. It could be two or three days, even a week.
Who would be going to The Shores?
Chapter Twenty-Four
As soon as Ben had plowed her out, Jamieson went down to Ian’s. She knocked on the door, and was surprised when Hy answered. The kitchen smelled of fresh-brewed coffee.
“Jane. Jane. Insane. Pain.” Ian’s bird went into a squawking gale of laughter, amused by herself, or pretending to be. Jasmine wasn’t parroting anyone now. Jasmine had started spouting poetry and rhyming when Ian had left the TV on one afternoon, and she’d watched non-stop children’s shows.
Jane? Jamieson looked at Hy. Hy avoided her glance and poured two coffees.
Jane? Where had Jasmine heard that? It rankled Hy. Pain. Insane. She smirked.
Insane? Jamieson declined the cup Hy offered her.
“Ian’s still asleep, if you’re looking for him.”
Jamieson lifted an inquiring eyebrow.
“I was at Sullivan’s last night,” said Hy. There she was, talking just like the locals, calling a house by the name of the previous occupants instead of the present ones. Still, there was a Sullivan there – Rose.
“She had a baby.”
“Mrs. Fitzpatrick?”
“Yup. Rose. A little girl. A miscarriage really. Four or five months.”
Was there a softening in Jamieson’s face? If there was, it didn’t last long.
“Why wasn’t I called?” They always come in storms, these difficult babies.
Hy took a sip of her coffee.
“No phone.”
For once Jamieson didn’t know what to do. Was it a police matter?
Hy knew Jamieson well enough to guess what she was thinking.
“I really don’t think you should worry about it. I was there. Gus was there. There was no foul play. Simply a baby born dead, poor little thing. You’ll have to shortcut procedure, whatever it is.”
Jamieson stiffened. She didn’t like to be told that she had to do anything.
“I’ve just called Dunn.” It was the funeral home in Winterside.
Jamieson looked dubious. Hy pressed her lips together. Disappointed. Jamieson was always disappointing her. With the disappointment came stubbornness.
“To get a death certificate. The baby can’t be kept in a house full of rats until the coroner manages to make it out from Charlottetown.”
Jamieson nodded slowly, thinking it through.
“The son, Duncan, has a snowmobile. He’ll come out and pick her up.”
Jamieson looked shocked. Somehow it didn’t seem quite right – carrying a dead baby on a snowmobile.
“He’ll carry her in his arms.” Hy sensed Jamieson’s objection. “Besides, what else can we do?”
“Can they afford it?” Surprising compassion from Jamieson, who, until now, had written the Fitzpatrick family off as a bunch of lowlifes.
“I don’t know. But I’ll pay if they can’t. I’ll call Dunn now.”
“Dunn? Didn’t you say you’d phoned already?”
“I phoned Dunn, the undertaker, but not Dunn, the doctor. Same family. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the doctor.”
“They got you comin’ and goin’,” Gus always said. “When one Dunn’s done with you, the other will be as well.”
But Jamieson had already forgotten about the Dunns. The thought of the snowmobile had grabbed her attention. A snowmobile would be perfect. She’d buy one herself. She could have justified it as a police vehicle, but Jamieson didn’t want to have to account for every time she used it. Sometimes, when she wasn’t on duty – which was rarely – she’d like to use it to explore the capes, the fields, and the woods. The Shores was growing on her.
“Will the doctor come then? For the death certificate?”
“Dr. Dunn’s too old to get on a snowmobile. Nearly ninety. He’ll be going for the family discount soon. But they’ll take the baby right to him, and he’ll do what’s necessary.”
“What about her?”
“Rose?”
A curt nod.
“She says she’s fine. If she is, there’s no need, in these conditions, to move her. If she’s not fine, the trip would do her no good.”
Jamieson nodded, some kind of agreement.
Moira didn’t know what sleeping in was. She had no experience of it. But this was surely what her guest was doing now, unless he was… She paled. Dead, not dead. Bitten by that rat and eaten by those cats. He’d come in so late – or early? – he may have been asleep only a couple of hours. Still –
She tapped at the door, so silently it wouldn’t have scared a mouse.
She opened the door a crack, and could see, by the light coming in the window, that great lump of a man, sunk into the too-soft mattress, head propped up on pillows, cats asleep on his stomach. No sign of the rat.
She edged in, and came up close, to make sure he was alive. A book lay open on his chest. Murder, she read.
And then she saw the rat, curled up with the cats, and did something she’d never done before. She screeched.
It woke Oliver, of course. His eyes opened and he was instantly alert.
“Good morning,” he said. “Can I help you?”
After Hy had made her phone call to Dr. Dunn, and Jamieson her call to the snowmobile dealership, Jamieson had returned to the purpose of her visit.
“Is Ian here?”
Ian, she’d called him Ian. Rose was Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Hy herself was McAllister. Jamieson had never called her Hy. Hy didn’t know the reason: Jamieson thought it a ridiculous name. More like a greeting.
“Ian?” She’d called him Ian. And Ian had called her Jane. He must have, for Jasmine to pick it up.
“He may be asleep still. I’ll go check. Have that cup of coffee. Make yourself comfortable.”
Jamieson didn’t respond to either suggestion. Was she capable of making herself comfortable? Hy shrugged and went upstairs, calling: “Ian! Someone here to see you.”
He still had sleep in his eyes when he finally appeared, and his hair – what there was of it – was sticking up. He was smoothing it down as he came into the kitchen. He was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. He’d put on a few pounds since the previous year, when everyone in The Shores had been on a fitness craze, but he was still a pleasant-looking man.
“I’d like your version of events last night.” J
amieson’s pen was poised over her notepad.
Hy looked at him sharply. What events? He’d been awake when she arrived last night, but she had been so full of news of the baby, he hadn’t had a chance to say anything.
“Ohmigod,” she said when she heard, hands flying to her mouth. “Annabelle. I better go see Annabelle.”
“Just wait a minute,” said Jamieson. “You were at Fitzpatrick’s last night, when Ian dropped him off.”
“Yes, but – ”
“But what?”
“He never came in the house, not while I was there.”
Jamieson had a feeling. She didn’t trust them, but she couldn’t stop the feelings. Something didn’t feel right.
Nathan was still unconscious, the usual high colour in his cheeks a disturbing white. He showed no sign of coming to, even though Lili was gripping his hand so hard the pain alone might have brought him up from under.
“In his own good time,” said Dr. Diamante, lifting the line of his single black eyebrow. It was thick, but not bushy, neatly trimmed, and seductive above his big dark eyes.
When the doctor lifted Nathan’s lids to look at his eyes, they were glazed. They were without life, energy, vibrancy to warm them. Lili shivered from the awful sense that Nathan wasn’t there.
“In his own good time,” Dr. Diamante repeated. Small, dark, foreign, he clung to those five words as his prescription for his patients’ friends and families. Five of the words he knew best in English, and he liked the sound of them.
They gave Lili little comfort. Nathan’s own good time was as soon as possible. Nathan was always in a hurry. If Nathan were there, inside that immobile body, he’d be itching to get up and out of here.
Lili wasn’t herself either. If she had been, she’d have been floating on a sea of calm, aided by her chanting of “om.” But it had given her up. Her charm hadn’t been working for her. She hadn’t been able to utter the sound “om” and make it swell into that beautiful vibration that felt and sounded as if it were circling the world. When she’d tried, it came out as a grating, halting sound that refused to go anywhere – not even around the room, much less the world.
For once, “om” had abandoned her.
Or she it?
And Nathan? Had he abandoned her, too?
There were six other words Dr. Diamante knew well in English: “It’s time to call the family.” He hadn’t voiced that death sentence yet, but he was thinking about it, rehearsing the words in case he needed them.
One more word he was learning. It was coming from that room – suddenly, finally, after a night of guttural attempts. A deep soothing sound, out of that tiny girl. Lili had finally found herself.
“Ommmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
What did it mean? How did she hold her breath so long? He played with the sound, softly, tentatively, as it swelled, surrounded him.
“Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm.”
He felt strange, dizzy. He hummed a little louder, joining with her. The sound began to vibrate. The specimen containers on Ed the nurse’s tray rattled as he came down the hallway. He stopped, staring at the tiny Italian doctor making the weird noise.
Was this foreign medicine, this incantation? The deep hum throbbed and absorbed Ed into it. From the tiny girl in the room down the hall, the threads of it had reached out and entangled the doctor. Ed felt its tentacles reach out beyond the hospital walls, clutching at and finding other such sounds spinning in an orbit of sound, circling the Earth, swirling into the whirr of the galaxy, blending with the song of the universe.
Ed had been smoking dope last night. A lot. He caught up the sound and joined in with Dr. Diamante and Lili.
“Ommmmmmm.”
“Mmmmmmmmmm.”
Two snowmobiles buzzed back and forth across the causeway in tandem that day. One driven by Duncan Dunn on his sad mission. The other, by an employee of the Winterside snowmobile dealership. He’d come to deliver the vehicle, bought sight unseen, to Jamieson. Such is the collegiality of the island that the undertaker had agreed to give the salesman a lift back to town.
Rose was shuffling around the kitchen, after a visit from Gus to see that she was all right – not bleeding excessively. Gus was very matter-of-fact about it. They’d never had doctors to attend to these things at The Shores and women like Gus had become skilled in watching for warning signs.
It was perfect snowman snow, sticking itself together when rolled, but Jamie had made only one halfhearted attempt at one ball of snow. Rose could see him through the window, kicking at the snow, turning around in slow circles.
The baby, she thought. He’s upset about the baby. In the morning, he had touched it on the cheek, looked up.
“My little sister.”
Rose had nodded mutely. She now looked over at the basket on the kitchen table. Little Angel, she’d named the baby, because how could she not? Her little Angel, too good for life. This life wasn’t good enough for any baby who came into it. So why was she in it? Why Jamie?
Rose was sad, but not overwrought. She hadn’t wanted the baby from the start. Especially not after the way it had been conceived. Fitz – roaring drunk, slobbering all over her, pushing her down – if it wasn’t rape, it was close to it. The next day, she knew she was pregnant. Her breasts had swelled and so had she – with rage. She could have killed him.
No, she hadn’t wanted the baby, but that didn’t mean she’d wanted her to die. She felt she should look at her, little Angel in the basket, to do her some honour, to recognize her existence before she was gone. But she couldn’t. The tiny perfect eyelids, the nearly non-existent nose, the pink lips, so sweetly closed. She didn’t have to look. That face was burned into her brain, a memory that would always be there when her mind sorted through its miseries.
Numbly, she handed over the child, still wrapped in her mohair scarf, to the undertaker when he came. If only he had not looked quite so much like a corpse himself. Skeletal thin, cadaverous, long hollow lines down his face where there should have been flesh, was only skin. Chunks of brittle hair on his head, as if it had rotted off in the grave. Long boney hands as he took the tiny bundle. And then his face transformed. It was a professional trick, but it appeared heartfelt. Perhaps it was. A slow, gentle, comforting smile on that corpse-like face, before he turned, got on his snowmobile, and roared away.
Rose would never forget that face, that smile, the sight of the child, so briefly hers, taken away on the snow. A snow angel.
She might have wished she could forget both those faces, but she knew she never would, not even when she stopped torturing herself with them. For the rest of the morning, they were all she could see.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jamieson was in love. With her brand-new snowmobile. She’d asked for black, but they had only red. She resigned herself to it, but the more she looked at it, the more she liked it. It made her feel…happy. Yes, happy. A strange sensation, one she wasn’t used to.
She’d waited with impatience as the salesman explained all the features of the vehicle. She was already on it before he pulled out of her driveway on the back of Duncan Dunn’s black vehicle. Jamieson had tried not to, but had seen the tiny child, snuggled into the man’s sheepskin jacket. Tiny, too tiny for life, looking merely asleep.
Now she was buzzing across the winter landscape, the vehicle vibrating under her, the sound isolating her, so that she was in the machine, a part of it, humming across the snow.
“I see a man.”
That’s what he always said when a woman asked him for a reading. And since that first one, Moira was constantly asking.
Her lips parted in a half smile.
It always worked.
Oliver believed in the cards, but he could be cynical about them, too. Otherwise, he never would have given a reading, short one card.
That he would be called to account for that soon, he kn
ew. For now, he was content to lay out the cards for Moira and watch the warm glow spread across her usually dull grey complexion, bringing a small joy into a thin life.
There would be a man. The cards told him that, and though he’d been prepared to cheat, was pleasantly surprised to find out that he didn’t have to.
There would be a man. Not right away, but soon. Not the man she thought of all the time.
Poor man, thought Oliver, looking into Moira’s hungry eyes. Not the kind of hunger that pleases a man. The kind that consumes him. And as he laid out the cards, Oliver felt as if he were condemning the man. There would be muffins and smiles for a while, then Moira’s offerings would be laced with expectation and bitterness.
“This crosses you.” It was a card of desolation, homelessness, the man and woman huddled against the cold, outside a warm and inviting home where they could no longer go.
Not that Moira would ever be homeless, Oliver knew, but her home would always be cold and unwelcoming, man or no man.
And then came the surprises. There were the cards that showed the man and the union, but another card now, The Lover. So the other would not be out of the picture. The other would remain foremost in her mind. And the young one would escape. The little bird would fly the nest, and leave Moira and her man here in their tight distrust and disappointment.
The honeymoon would barely begin and it would be over.
He couldn’t tell Moira that.
But the reading could have been worse, if, say, the Hanged Man had appeared in it. But he didn’t. The Hanged Man was not in the deck.
Fitz did not show up the next day. Nobody noticed. Everyone was thinking of Nathan, still in a coma. Nathan, the bright young lad who’d done so much for so many of them, the volunteer paramedic who’d saved lives, the lad who took seniors without transport into town once a week in his taxi – a large SUV that seated eight. He donated the day, charging only a nominal amount so the elderly could afford it, but wouldn’t feel as if they were receiving charity.
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