by Annabel Lyon
They chatted for a while about a TV series they had both enjoyed, a Swedish thriller. While Marcel puttered about tidying the kitchen, Christine loaned her a collection of poetry in French by a Senegalese writer. “Do you ever think about resuming your studies?”
Saskia shook her head. “I’ve had trouble reading since Jenny died. I watch TV instead.” The slim volume in her hands had a worn cover, cardboard showing through the threadbare green fabric, and looked quite old. Saskia guessed it was one of Christine’s treasures, and her mind flickered briefly to Professor Taillac and the book he had given her. “I’ll enjoy this, though,” she said quickly.
Christine laughed. “There’s no shame in watching TV! I just thought you might ease back in with some poetry. Just a little at a time, a page every now and then. Your parents always imagined you teaching at a university one day.”
“They wanted me to have status. They wanted to be able to brag about one of us to their friends.”
Christine leaned forward. “And why not? Parents want to be proud of their children. They want to see them succeed and make fine lives for themselves. And, yes, they want to brag to their friends. If that’s all you have to hold against your parents, you’re lucky.”
Saskia now realized that Marcel had been instructed to remain in the kitchen while Christine had a chat with her. They were going to get to the heart of something, now, here tonight. Fun!
“You’re angry, petite puce. You try so hard to hide it because you’re polite and well brought up. But don’t you think it might feel good to talk to someone about—everything? All that you’ve suffered, all that you’ve lost?”
“A psychiatrist?”
“A counsellor. Someone to guide you, a little. Not too much. I don’t think Saskia is ever one to be guided too much.” She smiled.
Saskia took a deep breath. “Of course, you’re right. I should work through—everything. With someone.”
“Anger is okay. But letting go is okay too. And so is agreeing with me so I’ll change the subject.”
Saskia laughed dutifully, and Christine laughed, too, and Marcel took this as a signal to return to the living room. He offered cognac with the coffee, but Saskia and Christine both refused and he left the bottle on the table without opening it. Tomorrow was a workday for him and it was getting late. Saskia rose and thanked them for the supper, and the company. Christine invited her to brunch on Christmas Eve, two weeks hence, and she couldn’t quickly think of an out. Would eleven work? They all three pulled out their phones.
“What is this update?” Marcel asked Christine, squinting at his phone. “Do I need to do this right now? Where are my glasses?”
“Useless, I tell you,” Christine said to Saskia. It was unclear whether she meant the update or the man.
Saskia took a few steps back into the hall and dialled her sister’s number, almost automatically, as she waited for the couple to figure out how to access Marcel’s calendar. It rang.
It rang.
Christine looked up first, and met Saskia’s gaze. Saskia held her phone away from her ear, listening to her sister’s phone ringing somewhere in the house. Then it went to message.
Now Marcel was looking at her too. She dialled again.
The phone rang again.
“Where is it?” Saskia asked.
Marcel’s home office, it turned out, was just off the foyer. Jenny’s phone was in Marcel Bouchard’s briefcase, in Marcel Bouchard’s office, in Marcel Bouchard’s home.
“I can explain,” Marcel Bouchard said, just as Christine said, “We can explain.”
Then they were sitting in the living room again with the phone on the coffee table between them. Marcel reached for the cognac but Christine touched his wrist. Saskia felt cold.
Marcel said, “After the accident I went with your father to the police station to reclaim her effects. Her—things.”
Effects, Saskia thought, analyzing automatically. The effects one left on the world once one was gone. The ripples as one sank. A word from the book of the dead, effects.
“They gave your father everything in a clear plastic bag. He became…emotional, and went to the washroom. He left the bag sitting on the chair next to mine in the lobby.”
Her father crying silently in a washroom cubicle as the uniforms came and went. Saskia could picture it. “The lobby of the police station,” she repeated when Marcel paused to make sure she was hearing him. He knew her moods well enough, knew her numbness, her withdrawal, her grief, her rage. Her hot-and-sour soup of those.
“The phone rang. In the bag. I saw the screen light up. I saw…” He looked at Christine, who made a minute movement of her head, almost as though she needed to stretch her neck. Saskia read distaste. “I saw something your father didn’t need to see,” he said. “I didn’t really think. I just put it in my pocket.”
“We looked and looked for it,” Saskia said. “We took the house apart trying to find it. He thought he was losing his mind.”
Marcel looked at his hands. “I put the phone in a drawer at work and tried to forget about it. It rang sometimes.” He looked guardedly at Saskia, and she knew how often he must have seen her name light up the screen. “I brought it home tonight because you were coming, but Christine was worried you weren’t ready.”
Saskia reached for the phone. They didn’t try to stop her, but Christine said, “You don’t have to, petite puce. Let us carry this one for you.”
“What could be so terrible?” Saskia looked from her sister’s phone to her parents’ friends and back. Rose-gold, with a nick in one corner she had forgotten she knew. She might never have thought of it again, that nick, and that would have been another fragment of her sister lost. “What could be so terrible that you would steal from us?”
They said nothing. Shame and sadness made them children, heads bowed before her anger. “You were a judge,” she said to Christine.
Christine lifted her chin and met Saskia’s gaze. “Look, then,” she said.
But Saskia put the phone in her bag and stood up. It would have something to do with the dog collar, of course. “My sister had a private life. You think I didn’t know? A private life that wasn’t yours to police. Or disapprove of. Or—judge—in any way.” She leaned punishingly on the word. “You think I didn’t know?”
Christine looked down. Her father’s colleague put his hand over his eyes.
At the door, Saskia turned to Marcel one last time. “You’ve had this phone for almost two years. How is it still charged?”
“What?” Christine asked.
“The battery would have died long ago. You charged it.”
Christine turned to her husband with incomprehension. He said nothing.
“You looked at it every once in a while.” It was one of those rare moments in life when thought and speech walked perfectly in step, neither preceding the other. Saskia indicated Christine with her chin. “She didn’t. But you did.”
She left them there: pride and prejudice, sense and sensibility, horror and humiliation. She would never see them again.
She got in her car and drove to a neighbourhood she had never been to before and would probably never return to. She parked on a quiet street and pulled the phone from her bag. Of course she knew Jenny’s password, as Jenny had known hers. Twins, after all.
The photos were more or less as she had expected, whips and gags and so on. The accompanying texts were terse: Don’t be late. You loved this. You bruise easy. Moments before the accident, with no photo and no context: Right now, I dare you. After that were more pictures, what Marcel must have seen in the lobby of the police station.
Skipping work, drinking and driving, speeding through a red. It could have been any of these, all of these. Jenny had never been one to refuse a dare.
Saskia clicked to Contacts and stared at the name of the man who had sent the last text
Jenny ever read, who had taken those photos and caused Jenny so much pain (obviously) and even, perhaps, some hellish pleasure. Robert Dwyer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
January 2018
Saskia learned of the death of Mattie Landow from Google. She had been searching Robert Dwyer’s name, trying to summon the courage to contact him directly. She clicked on an article from two summers ago, eight months after Jenny died: Addict implicated in death of developmentally disabled woman. The funeral, she learned, had been held at the Anglican church in her parents’ neighbourhood. Mattie Landow was survived by an elder sister, Sara Landow, a UBC professor.
The professor’s contact info was on the website for the UBC Centre for Applied Ethics, an interdisciplinary program that brought together philosophers, nurses, sustainability experts, lawyers, journalists, and geneticists. Her bio listed her expertise as medical ethics. Her most recent published paper was on capacity and consent in adults with special needs. The accompanying photo showed a plain woman in her early forties, Saskia guessed, with fine, dirty blonde hair pulled back. She wore a black sweater that looked soft, even on the computer screen, and a pendant on a chain so fine it was almost invisible.
After considerable deliberation—call every Landow in the phone book to find her at home? make an appointment during her office hours?—Saskia decided to email her work address. She received an automated response letting her know that Professor Landow was away from the University on a personal matter and would reply upon her return. There was nothing to do now but wait.
A week after she reached out, she received a brief email from Sara Landow, asking if she was free to meet at a coffee shop on Granville Street, downtown.
In person, Sara Landow was less poised than her photo had suggested. She looked both puffy and haggard in a way that was viscerally familiar to Saskia. A drinker, then. They shook hands.
“I’m sorry about your sister.”
Sara Landow inclined her head, accepting the condolence. “You said in your email you had information about—him. If it’s regarding a criminal matter, you should give it to the police.”
“But here you are.”
What must she look like to this professor of applied ethics, in her expensive trench coat and glossy boots? A graduate student, probably, frozen in time two years after she had ceased to be a graduate student. Jeans and a blue rain jacket from MEC, Vancouver camo. She chewed not her nails but the skin around them, leaving the cuticles scabbed.
“I had a sister. Her name was Jenny. She died too. But you wouldn’t have heard about it on the news.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sara Landow stared at the table between them as Saskia related the story of her twin’s car accident and subsequent medical condition. She raised her eyes when Saskia told her about that last text.
“It doesn’t sound like the same man,” Sara said when Jenny was dead and Saskia was finished speaking.
Of all the things she might have said, Saskia had not anticipated this. She blinked.
Sara touched her fingertips to her temples. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “What do you want? From me?”
“Whatever that last text meant, whatever the dare was, it caused Jenny’s accident. The police might not have put it together, but I know. He only got a year in your sister’s case. He got nothing for mine. It’s not enough.”
“What do you do for a living?”
Saskia waved this away. “It’s not enough,” she said again.
“I agree.” Sara touched her fingertips to the tabletop near Saskia’s hand. “I’m sorry for all you’ve been through, Saskia. But I don’t think I can help you. It’s a legal matter, surely.”
“Aren’t you angry?”
At this Sara started pulling on her gloves. Her black butter leather gloves. Saskia felt a flare of hatred for the older woman. “Why did you say it didn’t sound like the same man?”
“Right now, I can’t imagine a day in my life when I don’t think about him. When I don’t wonder what I might have done differently, and how much I’m to blame. I want to move on. I need to move on.” Sara stood. “I’m very sorry for your loss.” She left the coffee shop.
Saskia lifted her mug, put it down again. The woman is grieving, she reminded herself. It’s too soon, that’s all.
She caught up to Sara across the street, where she was waiting for a bus. “Why don’t you think it’s the same man?”
“He never hurt my sister. That way.” The bus came. “Please don’t contact me again.”
“You have my email,” Saskia called after her as she boarded. “If you change your mind.”
CHAPTER NINE
Spring 2018
After meeting Saskia, Sara quit drinking. David Park approved. He told her his wife, a senior administrator with the City of Vancouver who was also a major fundraiser for the hospital where David worked, wanted to put on a concert to buy the hospital some piece of equipment for the children’s wing. He remained a spectacular amateur violinist, and wanted Sara to accompany him. He said practicing again would give her something healthy to focus on.
“No. I haven’t played in years.”
“It’s like riding a bike.”
David outlined the program he’d already chosen: Bach, Beethoven, and a forbidding contemporary work excreted by the Dutch composer Claes deWinter. Sara knew he had folded his heart inside that last one.
She scanned the score, which he had brought with him to coffee. It was too big for the tiny round table, and too loud in the Granville Street café for her to hear it properly in her head. Still. “It’s awful. You know I hate prepared piano. It’s stupid.”
“It’s just corks.”
“Wedged into the strings.” She shook her head. “Piano rape.”
“Don’t knock it till you try it.” David flashed the grin that had raised his hospital millions over the years.
“What does Alice think?”
Petite, lovely Alice, whose parents were in the Communist Party stratosphere back in Beijing, who car-pooled to yoga with the mayor’s wife, who was raising their children without animal proteins or television. “She thinks she can get Claes over for the performance.”
“Claes?”
“We met him at that conference last year, in Bern.”
“Who don’t you know?” Sara turned a page of the score. “I thought Alice told you to stay away from me.”
“She knows it’s over.”
Sara didn’t know, but pretended not to react.
“Please, Sara. It’ll be good for both of us.”
“I’ll need at least six months.”
“You’ll have eight. I’m thinking November. The University will donate performance space in the Chan Centre. We’ll have the summer to rehearse.”
She gave herself over to the sensations of the coffee shop to still her thinking for a moment. She opened herself to consciousness of the uneven wood floor, the chocolate-smoke smell of the coffee, the hiss of the machines and the voices raised over them, even the humidity on her skin from the hot-milk steam, the many bodies and their furled wet umbrellas in this overheated space. The image of a glass of Malbec came. She allowed it, considered it, and turned away from it. She had been doing this for a few weeks now, and was careful never to let herself think it was something she was good at. She had to decide every time as though for the first time.
“I thought you’d be pleased.” David tapped the score. “At the coincidence.”
Sara looked at him.
“DeWinter,” David said.
Sara looked at her hands.
“Do you still have it?”
The image of the glass returned, bashful, fetching. She allowed it, considered it, turned it away. “No.”
“Liar.”
“Yes, I still have it. It’s in storage.” She closed the score and p
ut it in her bag. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to start rehearsals.”
* * *
—
Sara had gotten rid of her mother’s piano when she sold the Kerrisdale house. There was no room for it in the apartment and she wouldn’t have been allowed to play it at any rate because of the noise bylaws. She wouldn’t have wanted to play it. But now she needed to practice, so she went to Long & McQuade on Terminal Avenue and bought a keyboard with headphones. It had weighted keys to imitate the action of a real piano, and was so compact she took it home that same day in a taxi van. The thing was violently expensive, but Sara had money. While they fetched it from the stockroom, she browsed the sheet music and added a Hanon exercise book, the complete Beethoven sonatas, and several volumes of Bach to her purchase. She hesitated over the Romantic and twentieth-century repertoires, but found in herself no emotional traction there. No longer, or not today.
She turned Mattie’s old bedroom into a music room. Though she and David had cleared the room out together a year ago, she had never comfortably repurposed it and tended to throw things in there without much thought. The rest of the apartment was spare and stylish, but that room was a jumble. She called another taxi van and took a load to the Sally Ann, and then there was room to set up the keyboard. She filled the bookcase that used to hold Mattie’s movies with scores and CDs.
On another excursion she had found a CD of a different deWinter, an orchestral work. She didn’t listen to it for a long time but often looked at the cover, an unremarkable white and grey abstract painting, with the composer’s name and the title of the work, Grijs Licht, in unobtrusive type. There was something so clichéd about it—the dull painting, the tasteful font, the title, which translated as “Grey Light”—that it made her want to giggle. As though it had been decided by a committee in a corporate boardroom somewhere. Or in a university—that would be it—by achingly clever people making pronouncements to each other about Sound Art.
She tired quickly during her first few days of practice, and her old weaknesses reappeared immediately: the tightly cocked fifth fingers and the consequently aching elbows, early signs of tendonitis. She slowed down and spent a couple of weeks on scales and Hanons, forcing herself to relax her jaw. She had a tendency to clench her teeth when she was concentrating, which tightened everything in a downward domino trail. She practiced with the propped CD on the stand in front of her. Smiling unknotted her fifth fingers.