Sussex Drive: A Novel

by Linda Svendsen

  “Including me,” Becky said.

  “Clearly,” Nina said. “Do you mind if I smoke?” Her hand reached for the Dunhills in her coffee holder.

  “I do mind,” Becky said. “Sorry.”

  Nina laughed. “I respect that.”

  “You see,” said Becky, “there are competing versions.”

  “Yes,” Nina said. She was enjoying her power just a little.

  “Serious depression versus restraining orders,” Becky prompted.

  “I know,” she said. She looked out the window and absently reached back to pat the snout of the no-name pooch. “Look, I have to have a smoke.” She grabbed a cigarette from the pack, a lighter, and got out. She headed to the sidewalk by the lake and lit up.

  Becky waited a minute and then got out of the car and came up beside her.

  Nina punched her key fob and the Beamer beeped.

  “This is what I want to tell you,” Nina said. “Here’s your take-away. I’ve watched you and Gregory over the years. You have a beautiful family—”

  “Thank you for affirming that.”

  “—two of your own and that sweet little boy from South America. You’ve stuck by Gregory through thick and thin.” She took another drag. “He’s a politician. As are you. It’s always about spinning a story. Even if the story is saying, hey, by the way, blue is red.”

  Becky nodded and moved out of the exhalation of smoke.

  Far behind them, the motorcoaches roared up to the casino to deliver loads of day gamblers, dreamers and seniors.

  “So,” Nina said. “He was a man who made up a story. It happened to be about me. It was a story he needed to tell because he was so hurt.”

  To Becky she sounded protective. Revisionist.

  “Hurt that you ended it,” Becky said.

  Nina ignored her. “The story allowed him to survive to carry on. To meet you, keep you and have a beautiful family.” She flicked the ash. “To live happily ever after.”

  Becky stared out at Gatineau. So he’d lied. Not only had there been a restraining order, he’d disparaged his lover.

  “They took care of me,” Nina said.

  “Excuse me?” Becky said.

  “Covered my airfare, six months’ rent and change. Pastor Grant still sends me a Christmas card.”

  She felt ill. “I really have to go,” Becky said.

  Nina crushed her cigarette under her Cole Haan pump. Becky had the very same pair. “Well, that was fast.”

  Becky had already turned around and was walking back toward her Jeep. As she passed Nina’s car, the Maltese started to yap; it was just a cute face in a cone. She kept walking. “Your dog needs to pee.”

  Taylor was late. She waited in yet another parking lot, the deserted one at the Mackenzie King estate near Kingsmere Lake. Nobody was here except for Mackenzie King’s ghosts and herself.

  Out in the bush, she could see the green creeping out onto the trees.

  Which would be worse—the history that Nina Pearce had been carrying for two decades or the information Shymanski wanted to unload?

  The tongues of Ottawa were wagging. The Parliamentary Committee was scheduled for tomorrow and there was internal wrangling about parameters and redactions. She’d also heard on the news that the Afghan ambassador, Jabar Khan, had been recalled to Kabul and President Karzai wasn’t disclosing any details. Colvin’s detainee case was also on the boil.

  Where was Taylor? She phoned him.

  “Becky.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on the Champlain—”

  “You’re late.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Just get here.”

  “I’m sorry, the Governor General, I had to—”

  Trust Lise to have her fingers in this. “Hurry,” Becky cried.

  He wasn’t far. There wasn’t even time for her to walk up the hill to the house, closed now, and wander through the ruins. What had that prime minister been thinking with his seances? And how well Ottawa had kept its secrets over the years. Imagine if any relatively current PM was dabbling in the dark arts!

  She heard the car. And then it was visible on the stretch of Chemin Mackenzie King. A green compact, an eco-rental, an Honour-Car: she could see the familiar logo on the driver’s door. It was Shymanski, and she wondered what she could possibly have been thinking. Meeting this wild card, this publicly accused ANP murderer, trafficker and daughter deflowerer, in the middle of the wilderness.

  She stayed in the Jeep while Shymanski pulled into the parking lot. She watched him fiddle with something in the car and then her phone rang.

  “Becky—Mrs. Leggatt, do you want to walk?”

  “Yes,” she said. “In the ruins. Up the hill and to the left. Join me in five minutes.”

  “D’accord.”

  She threw on Greg’s Tilley hat and her black scarf. She wondered if by appearing here she gave credence to Taylor’s notion that he’d been set up with Martha. There was too much to think about.

  It was a gentle climb. She was up by the cottage. Not far away, she saw the colonnaded ruins, suitable for a performance of the Scottish play. A soft mist choked the lawn.

  She heard the blast. It shot right through her, a battle, and then she found herself and she was running back to him as fast as she could.

  The Honour-Car had been tossed. It rested upside down in flames. Acrid black smoke was already towering high. She screamed his name and ran past a leg, real or prosthetic. He’d been expelled in the driver’s seat, with the door attached, and it seemed absurd to be trying to open a door to reach him when he wasn’t actually inside. She hunted by feel. She didn’t dare breathe. There was no logic to it. She had to unfasten his seatbelt, but it seemed to have melted into his hoodie, which became his torso, and then her hand seemed to be inside his cooking lung. He had to be dead. Then her hands reached up to the seatbelt clasp and fused.

  By the time the operatives stepped out from behind the trees, the hands were ice. What were they doing there? Who were they? In seconds she was dragged from the explosion and rolled, under their heavy guy weight, to extinguish her jean jacket, her flaming hair under the smoking Tilley.

  Then she heard the ambulance.

  At the Gatineau Emergency, where she was attended by the very same Pakistani physician who’d treated Greg the previous fall, Becky thought she’d been granted a do-over.

  She saw his familiar face, and that’s where she went in her brain.

  They prepared her for an airlift, working to minimize the impact of smoke inhalation and to reduce her heart rate and vascular resistance, assessing her TBSA, her fluids. Her hands, with second-degree partial-thickness burns and some third-degree coverage, were raw under the cling film. She tried to find the right words.

  “You turned back time.” She was deliriously grateful. “He’s alive.”

  “She’s in shock,” he said.

  EX-MOUNTIE AMPUTEE BURIED

  IN QUEBEC

  The funeral for ex-RCMP corporal Taylor Shymanski, 26, of Sherbrooke, Quebec, was held in his hometown today.

  Shymanski died just hours before his scheduled appearance at the Military Police Comission in Ottawa after his rental vehicle spontaneously exploded in Kingsmere. No one else was injured in the blast. Shymanski served with CAF in Afghanistan, 2005–2008, where he lost a limb in an IED incident and was awarded the Medal of Meritorious Valour. He also served within the PMSS (Prime Minister’s Security Service) and had recently resigned from the RCMP. Shymanski is survived by his parents and a younger sister.

  (STAFF, CANADIAN ATLANTIC PRESS)

  May 2009

  19

  AT WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST BURN CENTER, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Becky was registered under her maiden name, Holt. The administration knew how to protect Canadian privacy. For morale and more, though, she’d adopted a brunette wig, shoulder length, the Julia Roberts.

  Greg visited once, briefly, not wanting to run up costs for suffering t
axpayers. She discussed her treatment: the skin graft, the infection she’d incurred, the cosmetic prognosis for her hands as a whole, and certain digits and her right thumb specifically. Greg nodded appropriately.

  Her parents had been taking care of the children, staying at Sussex Drive and flying down to spend time with her on weekends, but had recently left for a long-awaited trip to China. Glenn had told her he was sending Greg daily texts: “Wish you were here.”

  “And how are the kids?” Becky asked.

  “Don’t ask,” Greg said. Pablo wasn’t causing any trouble, but Greg had had to punish Peter for insolence and various transgressions. And then Greg was infuriated at Martha’s hysterical reaction to his disciplining of Peter.

  Becky’s hands almost took on a life of their own; they wanted to wring her husband’s neck until he was unconscious and softly compliant on the floor.

  “Greg,” she said. She had to ask. “Did Taylor’s death have anything to do with our daughter?” She wasn’t referring to suicide; she knew Greg knew that. She was so far past the posthumous spin touting the young Mountie’s PTSD and his expertise with incendiary devices.

  And while she waited for him to speak, Becky admitted, if only to herself, that the alternative theories would be too hard for her to live with and also make it impossible for her to continue living with him.

  “Do you think I care about two kids in the bush?” he said. “About an illegitimate bun in the oven?” He stood up and towered. “I am working for a—”

  She heard Ma emerge from pressed lips like mother, maman, ma belle.

  novembre 2009

  20

  AT THE PREMIERE OF Nun from Bucharest, by the writer-director of In Bruges, Lise sagged in her rhinestone-and ruby-barnacled bolero, heavy enough to serve as an in situ workout. Her palms sweated. She sat thigh by thigh with her distant ex-consort in the darkened Paris, a retro art house cinema near Central Park in Manhattan (which they’d entered on a red carpet not her own, to the scent of buttery topping and fresh merde from the horse-and-carriage rides). It was the birth of the cerebral movie season, the week before American Thanksgiving.

  René’s role was award jailbait: priest, death, derrière. There was already an Oscar hiss; he was reputedly a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nod. Advances in the trades were rapturous: “Claude is Cinematic Catnip from Canada,” “René-nian Rhapsody!” And they were in the same row as Benicio del Toro and Penélope Cruz, along with their significant plus-ones, such as Javier Bardem.

  Niko sat on René’s other side.

  It had been months since Lise had hung, so to speak, with René. Hollywood was all over him and he was stewing about a stack of features, an AMC series. Not only that, but he’d spent months with Niko in the North, Mistassini, last spring, embedded in the Neeposh family, bonding in a complex form of Cree Outward Bound, and running, reading, talking and ruminating. They were both stronger, infuriatingly spiritual, and lean.

  The Romanian threat to René hadn’t played out, at least not yet; the Canadian public had adapted to his resignation, almost a year ago, with either a mature detachment or vicarious interest. Lise had just missed him.

  Niko had returned to his mother in midsummer, and they’d drifted away from Dr. Pelletier—pas vraiment un pique-nique, particularly after Niko learned about the tragic, terrible, gruesome death of Corporal Shymanski last April. But he’d become even closer, to Lise’s surprise, in mutual bereavement, to Martha. Lise was partnering again, reluctantly, with Becky, recovering from a bad barbecue burn, on the next ArtsCAN! Martha tagged along with her mother to Rideau Hall and Niko lurked, listening to her rehearse Greg’s misogynist songs on Glenn Gould’s piano. Afterwards, he’d lead her out, in her black leggings and Juliet blouse, her cumbersome silver cross hanging like a middle breast, to his all-season tent, behind the tennis court.

  Martha was around beaucoup.

  As the final credits started to roll, Nun from Bucharest received an ovation like a cannon shot. René and Niko clung; Penélope Cruz’s bodyguard fist-humped with Lise.

  The Sony Classics after-party was held twenty blocks north in a Byzantine ghetto at the Met Museum. The guest list ran the gamut, a méli-mélo of the Broadway A-list, the LA elite and boring politicos from the Beltway. She met René’s new agent from WME, and his newer manager from wherever, both short, loquacious juice guzzlers. Javier pumped Niko about sleeping naked under the northern lights on stacked spruce boughs.

  “You must be so pleased, René,” Lise said. “With how things have turned out.”

  “Oui, vraiment. Mais il y a quelque chose qui manque.”

  She waited, hopeful.

  “I realize that by pushing you into accepting the GG position, I sublimated my own need. Denied my heritage.”

  Before she could pursue this further, he left with Niko for a loft in Nolita. Bye bye.

  Lise sat up when her BlackBerry buzzed. She had to squint to decipher the caller ID. It was the middle of the night back at the Waldorf Tower.

  “Prime Minister,” she said.

  “Sorry to call so early,” Greg said. “Can we talk?”

  “Certainement. What’s the matter?” She realized she hadn’t checked in with her secretary, Noel, since the screening of Nun from Bucharest.

  “I want to prorogue.”

  “Prorogue what?” It was late.

  “Parliament.”

  “Again?”

  “Been a year.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “Nope.”

  “What about protocol? You don’t just phone me. That’s not the way it’s done.”

  “It is when the Governor General isn’t in the country. As usual.” Prime Curtness.

  “I’m back in Ottawa tomorrow.”

  “Will you or won’t you?”

  “Why do you want to prorogue?”

  “This Parliament has run its course.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yup.”

  She gathered her wits. Documents requested from the government by the media about high-level RCMP involvement in the Kandahar drug and prostitution ring, all supposedly under Freedom of Information, were being withheld by the PMO for national security reasons. Even the embattled Leader of the Opposition wasn’t allowed to take a peek. Then it dawned on her.

  “Does this have anything to do with my scheduled appearance at the Parliamentary Committee on the Military Police Commission matter in Afghanistan?”

  She heard Greg breathing.

  “My upcoming testimony regarding Corporal Shymanski and the Lieutenant-Colonel?”

  “That’s an insult.”

  “Does it? Because if I give permission to prorogue, I’d be postponing my own testimony.”

  She hung up on him.

  Last April, before his car spontaneously combusted, or he committed suicide, Shymanski had phoned her private number. “Your Excellency.” Taylor’s voice was low and shaky.

  “Where are you?” She locked her study door.

  “I just quit the force.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Here. I testify in two days.” He paused. “Your Excellency—”

  “We have to meet,” she said. “Privately.”

  “Where?”

  “Niko’s school.” He knew it, of course. He’d sometimes driven Niko there or picked him up, or met him at his locker. “This time tomorrow.”

  “D’accord.” And he was gone.

  The next morning, she went unaccompanied; the principal and secretary were used to her dropping in to collect Niko’s homework. So she headed down the hall right into the gymnasium, which was pitch-dark, and hit the switches, but felt his presence. He was right by the door.

  Corporal Shymanski was gaunt in his civvies—jeans, a hoodie. If he’d seemed disturbed, haunted, in Afghanistan four months ago, he was a different person now. He had a frenzied beard and looked older, defensive, and in
some way as desperate as he would have had to have been to carry out all the criminal activities he was being accused of. He said to her, “I have been framed.”

  “I know.”

  “That woman isn’t Aisha.”

  “She’s an imposter,” Lise said. Then, “Where’s the real one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We were with her in Panjwai. What happened? Did she even get to Canada?”

  “I don’t know. Can you help me?”

  “I want to.” She paused. “But what about the Prime Minister’s daughter? Martha?”

  “That was a mistake.” His face softened. “But she was so kind. So sweet. I can’t imagine what she must think of me now, with all this—talk.”

  “Who abducted you from Rideau Hall?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “CSIS?”

  He shook his head.

  “The force?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Because of Kandahar?”

  “Yes. I’d finally submitted a statement to the Commission about my superiors. I blew the whistle. And later I found out that because Aisha had been found—the real Aisha, in Afghanistan—the RCMP couldn’t keep it covered up. The Afghans told her she could talk to anybody about what she knew—even Al Jazeera.”

  “Mon Dieu.”

  “Oui, or Iran—Afghanistan needed leverage. They needed to keep NATO troops. And she knew a lot. She’d been undercover. And I knew what she knew but had been too scared to talk. For a while.”

  Lise shivered.

  He handed her an envelope, disc-size. “Find her,” he said. “You’re the only one who can.”

  She was suddenly worried for him. “Where are you going, Taylor?”

  “I’m meeting Mme. Leggatt now. I’m late.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?”

  “Yes,” Shymanski said.

  “She’s treacherous.”

  “She’s also Martha’s mother.”

  Lise presumed, then, that this had to do with Martha, perhaps giving her a message.

  She hugged him tightly. “Bonne chance. I hope it all goes well at the Committee.”

  “Moi aussi,” he said.

  “You leave first,” she said.

  And he did. She could hear his footsteps going down the hall, and then the bell rang and his distinctive pattern disappeared in the rampage of the boys.