by Bill Rowe
I caught Suzy’s eye, and we registered our agreement with Nina and our disgust. Rosie answered her quietly, “Mother, it is not all your fault. Not everything is your fault.”
“But why? Why did she do it? My little girl. Why? Why? Why?” She began to wail and continued non-stop, like a mortally wounded animal. Rosie and Suzy helped Nina up over the stairs to her room, where she lay down on the bed and faced the wall in fetal position, continuing her moaning and wailing without let-up. I asked if we shouldn’t call Dr. Rothesay.
“I’m not calling him,” said Rosie. “Do you think maybe your mother could come over and have a look at her?”
I called Mom, described what had happened, told her Rothesay was gone, and asked what she thought we should do. While Mom paused for a moment, I said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have told her about Pagan taking her sleeping pills.”
She didn’t answer that. She’d be right over, she said.
Coming into the house, Mom said to Rosie, “Sweetheart, you did the right thing. Don’t blame yourself. She had to be told what happened.”
“Thank you, Auntie Gladys,” said Rosie. Tears flowed out of her eyes, and she put her head down and pressed her tissues to them. Mom put her arms around her and stayed there for several minutes, as Rosie’s body shuddered and went still, shuddered and went still. Then Rosie straightened and said, “You should have a look at poor Mother.”
“If you’re okay,” said Mom.
“I’m okay,” said Rosie. Suzy and I went and stood on either side of her.
Upstairs, Mom walked into the bedroom alone. Nina’s ruckus increased in volume. But it contained a note of hope now, as she repeated, “Oh Gladys, oh Gladys,” over and over. When Mom came out she said, “I think she’s suffering from acute depression and anxiety—what people call a nervous breakdown, which she’ll come out of—but I’m going to call an ambulance and go with her to St. Clare’s for some tests. What medications is she on, do you happen to know, Rosie, besides the sleeping pills? We wouldn’t want to inadvertently make her go cold turkey in this state while we’re waiting for the results to come back. It’s hard to pull someone off the ceiling when their fingernails and toenails are really dug in.”
I was half embarrassed by Mom’s tough nurse’s humour in these circumstances. But Rosie smiled and took her hand in both of hers. “I think Valium, for one—she probably carries it all around in her purse, if you want to look. But he would know for sure.”
“I’ll call him after we get her to the hospital.”
THE HOSPITAL ADMITTED NINA to the psychiatric ward for observation and testing. She stayed there for five days. The test results and medical report confirmed that the patient was already receiving a regimen of prescribed medications for her conditions of depression, anxiety, and insomnia from her family physician and her physician husband, and cautioned that there may have been in the past, and may continue into the future, a risk of accidental overdoses of medications and improper combinations of medicines at wrong times. Therefore, the patient herself and her family and caregivers should be very vigilant in monitoring dosage amounts and their accurate diurnal timing.
“Accidental overdoses,” said Rosie to Suzy and me in her kitchen, shaking her head. “Improper combinations. What a surprise.” She had stayed in her own home, with Suzy moving in as company, rather than going to Suzy’s house during her mother’s absence. She wanted to be there, she told me, to answer all telephone calls from Toronto.
Her conversations with Pagan’s school and the Toronto and St. John’s police provided Rosie with some facts of the case. Pagan had never spent a night away from her residence unless she was going out for a weekend with her mother and stepfather. Then they always stayed in a suite at the Park Plaza. To Rosie’s specific question, it was ascertained that Pagan had never spent a night at the Victoria and Elizabeth Arms, although she had sometimes met her stepfather there by taxi during the day, or had dropped in there with him after he’d picked her up at school. Sometimes she would go up to his room with him for a short time if they were getting ready to go out somewhere. Both the doctor and the stepdaughter had been very open and chatty with staff about all that. Once or twice Pagan had made a reservation by phone from her school residence at the request of her stepfather, the doctor, who would be arriving later. On those occasions, if she arrived earlier than him, she would, by prior general arrangement with the hotel, get a key and wait for him in the room. That’s exactly what the hotel desk thought she was doing this time. Phone records obtained by the police over past months showed that each time the doctor had been there, phone calls had been made from his room to Nina’s home phone number in St. John’s. The doctor said he encouraged Pagan to use the room phone to call home and say hello to her mother, who, of course, knew about and very much encouraged such visits by Pagan with her stepfather. Her mother had never stayed at the hotel.
The only communication from Pagan before her death had been the note found in her residence. No note was found in the room with Pagan’s body. Rosie asked the police if there was any evidence of anything having been moved or removed from the room. No, said the police, for example, the empty pill bottle was on the bed in plain view. Then Rosie asked if there was any indentation on any hotel notebook or letter paper that might indicate the writing of something—a note, perhaps—that was no longer in the room. Knowing her sister, it would be highly unlike her not to leave a final note, in addition to the earlier one in her residence. The police responded that there was no writing paper in the room, either on the desk or in the drawers, which was not surprising in that the hotel, while homey and comfortable, was by no means high end. Did the hotel confirm that they did not normally keep a supply of writing paper in the rooms? Rosie asked. And, for instance, was there a pen there, and if so, could they check for Pagan’s fingerprints which might indicate if she had used it or not?
The police got a little irritated and queried whether she had some reason for asking these questions. The death had been ruled a suicide—did she suspect foul play? If so, that would send the file in a whole other direction. She was not denying the suicide, she said, but she was curious because her stepfather had found the body, having come all the way from Toronto in secret. The police said that that had originally struck them as unusual too, but the doctor had explained his action as based on a pure gut-feeling without enough foundation in fact to share it with anyone.
Didn’t it strike them as strange, she asked, that the doctor hadn’t acted on his gut-feeling by calling the hotel from Ottawa to inquire if Pagan happened to be there? The police stated that not everyone, even trained professionals, acted entirely logically in such anxiety-producing situations, and if she persisted in this line of vague, unsubstantiated suspicions, they’d have no choice but to advise the doctor so that he might have a fair opportunity to answer them for the police. There was absolutely no evidence of any communication having taken place between the doctor and Pagan, by, for example, telephone calls between Toronto and Ottawa. Everything pointed to the fact that she didn’t even know he was in Ottawa, in that the only use of the phone by Pagan was a half-dozen apparently frantic attempts from her hotel room to reach the doctor at his private line at home in St. John’s on the night she ingested the sleeping pills.
The disclosure of this last fact knocked the wind out of Rosie, she told me. She did manage to ask the police if it struck them as strange that Pagan had been fixated on the doctor’s private phone but did not once call the regular line to talk to her mother or her sister, to which the police replied that it did not seem one bit strange—the young girl was having second thoughts and was panicking and was trying to reach her stepfather, the doctor, for help.
Rosie did not persevere in her questions to the police. That might have been because I kept asking her why she was pushing the Rothesay angle so hard. I got a little mad when she would only reply that there seemed to be some holes. She told me also, with an anguished look on her face, that if she had only answered
the phone that night as I had been urging her to, she might have been able to save Pagan’s life. She said three or four times that she felt responsible for Pagan’s death. Each time I tried to persuade her otherwise, but I knew I was not succeeding.
FOR A MONTH AFTER Pagan’s death, Rosie and I were together almost constantly, in school during the day or at our homes during the evenings, and although we said I love you to each other all the time, we did not contrive to make love. Neither of us pushed beyond some tender kissing and embracing. Then one day in school, Rosie came up behind me at my locker and said, “Suzy’s mother is working four to midnight and I’d love to lie in your arms in my bed there tonight.” Trying to keep my arms from going around her right there in the school corridor was my biggest challenge.
That night Suzy went to the supermarket and Rosie and I lay quietly on our sides in a naked embrace kissing gently for half an hour. Then I put my condom on and pulled her upon me, where she lay stretched out as if she were lying on a mattress. We made quiet love with minimal movements. “I love this, just lying on top of you like this,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong.” She hoisted her head and smiled down at me. “I love it all—but I love this best for right now.” And that’s the way our lovemaking was for weeks, slow and gentle and infrequent compared to the early days. Sometimes she would just stretch out on top of me and we wouldn’t make love at all as she lay there, sometimes even falling asleep for twenty minutes. Rosie seemed to have a lot on her mind, which was stealing away energy and motivation from everything else. Then she got a telephone call that altered everything in our lives forever.
Rosie told me that a friend of hers from their summer tennis school near Toronto of two years before had called in great excitement from Vancouver where she lived. “Are you really moving to BC?” her friend asked. “My God, that would be great.”
“No,” Rosie replied. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, as you know, my mother is a doctor and she heard through the grapevine that a physician from out east was applying to the College of Physicians for a licence to practise here in British Columbia, and his name, Dr. Rothesay, rang a bell with her from when I was talking about you and your family. I was hoping it was the same person.”
“It must be someone else,” said Rosie and continued the conversation with small talk, though dazed and shocked. Then she confronted her mother and asked if she and her husband were separating.
“Not that I know of,” said Nina, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to—not after Pagan, and the way he’s treated like a dog around here by his other stepdaughter.”
“Why don’t you ask him if he applied in BC?” I asked Rosie and, to my irritation, received no real reply.
The next day, Rosie was absent from school. And so was Suzy. She hadn’t told me she would be, and I figured they must have come down with something together. When I called her home, her mother said she was staying at Suzy’s, and when I called Suzy’s, there was no answer the first three times, and then Suzy’s mother answered and said neither of them could come to the phone right now, but, no, they were not sick, and Rosie would get back to me soon.
Rosie called me that night. She was sorry for going incommunicado, she said, but she had too much to think about. She and Suzy would not be at school tomorrow either, but could I come over to Suzy’s after school? Mrs. Martin was working four to midnight, so we’d have the place to ourselves. I didn’t hear the usual tryst-planning smile in her voice, and as she went on, she sounded strangely indistinct, as if she was exhausted. We had to have a serious discussion about something, she concluded, almost mumbling into the phone. I told her I’d be over right after classes.
ROSIE MET ME AT the door with a quick cheek-to-cheek hug and words: “I have a serious problem about something very personal and confidential. Normally, I wouldn’t burden you with it, but Suzy and I have been talking about it for two solid days and we both believe I have to force the issue somehow and that first I must tell you.”
I followed her into the kitchen, where Suzy was sitting at the table gazing out the window at the Narrows of St. John’s harbour and smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes. “Yeah, I know I quit,” she said to me, blowing out a billow. “But this is one of those days where I feel like taking a boat out through those Narrows to the ocean and disappearing over the horizon for good, let alone having a few drags.”
“What is going on?” I asked. “Wouldn’t burden me with what, Rosie? What’s the big mystery?”
“Anyone want a Coke?” said Rosie, going to the fridge. “Okay, let’s all sit down. Suzy, why don’t you give Tom the background, like we talked about, first? That’ll make it easier for me, too.”
“Okay,” Suzy answered. “No point beating about the bush, Tom. This is going to hurt before we’re finished. But we don’t think we have any choice, even if it means Rosie is afraid she’ll lose your love.”
“What?” I squawked. I swallowed a couple of times and tried to speak normally. “What are you talking about, lose my love?”
Rosie looked at Suzy, who said, “She’ll speak for herself when the time comes, but right now I’m going to tell you some things about myself that only a few people have any idea about, and that only Rosie knows all about. She has always trusted you, ever since you were kids, and so I trust you too to keep everything absolutely confidential.”
Nodding solemnly, I lifted my Coke bottle towards my lips with an air of confidence. My hand was shaking so much I had to put it back on the table before I knocked my front teeth out.
“I’m making you nervous,” said Suzy. “I don’t blame you.”
“What, me nervous? No-o-o. Scared shitless is more like it.” I felt myself flushing: they so serious and I such a flippant clown.
The tension in both their faces changed to fleeting grins. Rosie glanced at me, but her eye contact didn’t linger.
“Rosie has never really told you how she and I became good buddies.”
“No, it seems so normal now, but I used to wonder about it a bit at Smearies.”
“Yeah—from mortal enemies to deathless friends in one ‘foul’ swoop. It turned out that we had enough in common to keep each other from destroying ourselves.” While I was unsuccessfully trying to untangle that one, Suzy looked down at the floor for a few seconds and then out the window and said, “Jesus, this is harder than I thought.”
“You should stop,” said Rosie. “You don’t have to go on. It’s not a good idea.”
Suzy smiled. “Yes, it’s a good idea.” She sat up straight in her chair. “Tom. What’s your very first memory of life?”
“Ah, I think it would be eating cotton candy at the Quidi Vidi Regatta when I was three or four. Or maybe someone just told me about it.”
“And mine is also from when I was three or four,” said Suzy. “And I can guarantee that no one told me about it. My first memory is the smell of my grandfather’s semen. And the feel of it—the feel of Grandpa’s come all over my face.”
From my normal slouch, I shot up perpendicular in my chair. My mouth opened of its own accord, but nothing came out.
“Grandpa started so early with me as a child that I cannot remember a time when he did not sexually abuse me. He kept me quiet for years with a combination of threats and bribes. If I told anyone, he would kill me. To give me an idea of what it would be like to be killed, when I was three or four, he pressed his thumbs into my windpipe until I nearly went unconscious. To this day I have nightmares in which I wake up strangling to death. He was a lay preacher in church and he told me no one would believe someone as evil and sinful as me anyway. God hated evil and sinful kids who did the dirty, filthy things I was doing, and God would see to it that no one would believe me, and that when I died I would burn forever in hell. And he was forever showering money on me.
“My mother, his daughter, would complain to him about it, but he asked her to humour an old man’s love for his first and favourite granddaughter. I had money for
everything and if I told anyone, the money would stop. Till I was eleven I was a little walking pustule of fear, guilt, and greed. Then when I was eleven, I was rushed to the hospital in Gander hemorrhaging. I was pregnant. But because my body was so immature, I had a miscarriage. They put me on painkillers and sedatives at the hospital, and in my stupor a nurse wormed out of me who had done it.
“A big police investigation was launched against Grandpa, but he denied everything. He was seventy-three at the time, and I could see that everyone knew a nice, gentle, religious old guy like him could not be the culprit. Yet they couldn’t bury the fact that someone had made me pregnant. The police grilled me unmercifully to discover, as one policeman put it, if I was protecting someone else. My father came under suspicion, and my oldest brother, who was fifteen—they were both given the third degree by the police day after day. They even questioned my little brother to see what he knew.
“Finally, my mother, the more she thought about the details of time and place I’d given—all the drives in the car, the walks in the woods to his cabin—and God knows what was in her own background with him, the more it all started to click in her head. She went down the road to Grandpa’s and told him in front of his wife, her own mother, that she believed me. Then she went to the police and told them she could corroborate material parts of my story. Charges were laid against him, and the same day he confessed it all and agreed to plead guilty. They sentenced him to two years less a day so that at his advanced age he could serve his time at the prison farm in Salmonier instead of a federal prison on the mainland. He spent eight months there and they released him on parole and sent him back home.”