by Gail Bowen
Jeff glanced towards Fraser expectantly.
“Not there yet,” Fraser said. “But definitely within field-goal range. Keep working on it.”
As Jeff sprinted past me towards the doors that would release him into the world of sunlight and scrimmages, his relief was palpable, but I knew my ordeal was just beginning.
Fraser Jackson was slumped in a seat in the front row with a script, but as soon as he spotted me, he smiled and stood up. “Did you catch the performance?”
“I did.”
“There’s still a perception among the jocks that Theatre is an easy credit. I’m doing my best to get the word out that it’s not.”
“If the entire Rams team transfers into Poli Sci, I’ll know who to thank,” I said.
His laughter was deep and reassuringly warm. “What can I do for you, Joanne?”
“You’ve already done it,” I said. “I came to thank you for sending me Ariel’s copy of Political Perspectives.”
He exhaled heavily. “How did you know it came from me?”
“You used an inter-office envelope. Your department was the last addressee, and I knew you and Ariel were close.”
His eyes were wary. “I wouldn’t have made much of a spy,” he said finally.
It was now or never. “Maybe not,” I said, “but Ariel believed you’d be a good father.”
Pain knifed his face, but he was an actor who had learned strategies for containing emotion. He shifted his gaze from me to the empty pool of light on the darkened stage. “She told you?”
“It must have been a terrible loss for you,” I said.
“It was,” he said huskily. “It’s been hard not being able to talk about it.”
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
In the half-light of the theatre, Fraser Jackson’s profile had the power that made me understand why Bebe had called him an African prince. “Can I trust you?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“A conflict of interests,” he said, “because of your friendship with Charlie Dowhanuik’s father?”
“Yes.”
“I need to talk,” he said, “so I’ll have to take my chances. Would you mind if we went outside? I could use a cigarette.”
On our way through the lobby we passed a display of origami and a young woman crying at a public telephone. The origami was clever, and the young woman’s tearful iteration, “I gave you five fucking months of my life,” was plaintive, but Fraser was oblivious.
As soon as we passed through the doors, he lit up and dragged deeply. When he walked over to an arrangement of large rocks that the students had designated an unofficial smoking area, I followed. Fraser chose a slab of marble large enough for us to sit on side by side. He finished his cigarette, and pulled another from the pack. He shook his head in disgust. “I don’t need this. Grabbing the nearest prop is a trick incompetent actors use when they’re trying to think of their next line. They believe it distracts the audience.”
“You have an audience of one,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes met mine. “Okay,” he said. “No tricks.” Unexpectedly, he smiled. “Did you ever hear that song ‘I Feel Ten Feet High and Bulletproof’?”
I nodded.
“From the moment Ariel told me she wanted me to be the father of her child, that’s the way I felt.”
“But you must have been surprised.”
“Any man would have been.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Of course, you are too polite to say your next line.”
“Which is…?”
“Which is that I must have been more surprised than most men would have been because I’m black.” He spread out his hands in front of him as if to check the reality of his statement. “Not tan or cafe au lait or pleasingly brown, but black – black as sin or pitch or Toby’s proverbial ass. What’s more, my features are distinctly non-Caucasian. I’m sure these sobering facts would have given you pause, Joanne.”
“Yes,” I said. “If I’d been looking for a father for my child, I would have considered the donor’s background.”
“Rightly so,” he said. “A woman would be a fool to leave such matters to chance. I’m sure you remember the old limerick students in genetics class used to help them remember Mendel’s Law. “There was a young lady named Sarkey,
And she fell in love with a darkey,
The result of her sins,
Was quadruplets, not twins,
One black and one white and two khaki.”
There was no anger in Fraser Jackson’s voice; he was travelling a path he’d been down a thousand times. Nonetheless, I found myself flinching at the old poem and eager to distance myself from its casual racism. “Fraser, if we were talking about love here, genetics would be irrelevant. I could understand Ariel falling in love with you. I could understand any woman falling in love with you. But Ariel’s decision wasn’t about love, was it?”
He shook his head and put the unlit cigarette back in the pack. “No,” he said. “What she wanted from me wasn’t love. She came to my office one Friday afternoon last February and asked if I was up for a walk. It was a crazy idea. It had been snowing all day, and the temperature was dropping. By the time we got down to the boardwalk by the bird sanctuary, the wind had come up and the snow was swirling. We were hanging on to one another’s arms and laughing like eight-year-olds. The university and the Parkway were five minutes away, but we couldn’t see a thing except one another. Ariel said it was like being inside a snow-globe. Then all of a sudden, she just stopped laughing and asked me.
“She told me I was her first choice, but if I said no, she’d find someone else. She said there would never be any obligation, financial or emotional, to her or to the baby, and that the only ‘condition’ she had was that she wanted her baby’s conception to be a natural one – no visits to the lab for sperm donations; no sexual encounters dictated by basal thermometer temperatures. She wanted us to make love on a regular basis until she became pregnant.”
“And you agreed.”
“I was honoured.”
“But she stayed with Charlie all the time you and she were…”
“That wasn’t the plan,” he said tightly.
“Then why did it happen that way?”
“Charlie,” he said, and it was hard to imagine how a single word could be infused with such contempt. “Your friend Howard’s son is a consummate games player.”
“In what way?”
Fraser shook his head. “He made her the centre of his life. For a woman like Ariel, that was a heavy obligation. Whenever she tried to leave, there were threats.”
“He threatened her…”
“That would have made her choice easy. No, Joanne, he threatened to kill himself. She couldn’t leave.”
“But she did leave. Two weeks before she died, she moved out…”
“It was after she saw the ultrasound photograph of the baby. Seeing our child made us both realize there were larger obligations.”
“Did Charlie know about the baby?”
“Watching a woman as closely as he watched Ariel – I don’t see how he couldn’t have.”
“Fraser, did it ever occur to you that one reason Ariel chose you to father her baby might have been to prevent Charlie from convincing himself the baby was his.”
“I’m not a stupid man, Joanne. The thought occurred to me. I also realized that Ariel wanted to make her decision irrevocable. That didn’t make me love our child any less.”
He stood and took out his cigarette pack, but instead of lighting up, he arced the package through the air so that it landed in a garbage bin ten metres away. “At least I can do this for them,” he said.
I watched him walk away a big man who, for a few magical, ardent weeks, had been ten feet tall and bulletproof. But even as Fraser Jackson had gloried in his good fortune, there had been a silver bullet waiting. As I rose to walk back to my office, my limbs were heavy, made leaden by the weight of
evidence that seemed to link Charlie Dowhanuik to the sequence of events that had resulted in the deaths of Ariel and her baby. Whether or not to convey what I’d learned to Howard Dowhanuik was no longer an option, but it wasn’t going to be easy to tell my old friend what I had learned about his son. I needed time and quiet; what I got was Kevin Coyle in full manic mode.
As he approached me from the hall outside his office, his eyes glittered huge and intense through his thick glasses, and his grin, a dentist’s nightmare of ancient silver fillings, was fearsome.
“You look like you’ve been mainlining locusts and honey,” I said.
“A Biblical allusion,” he sneered, “and as such, increasingly irrelevant. Who needs God now that we have the Internet? Come have coffee, and I’ll show you my new toy.”
I followed Kevin into his office. He poured our coffee – mine into the orange and brown striped mug that was apparently now reserved permanently for me. He gestured to the low tables that had once held his prized games of Risk. The board games were gone now, replaced by a high-end computer system with all the bells and whistles.
I sipped my coffee. “Impressive,” I said.
“The coffee or the Complete Home Office?” he asked.
“Both.” I raised my cup to him. “Kevin, I have to hand it to you. When you commit, you commit.”
He caressed his seventeen-inch monitor. “The whole world appears on this screen,” he said solemnly. “Anything I want to learn about, buy, own, peruse, discuss – it’s all here for me.”
“Eden,” I said.
“Another Biblical allusion,” he said, “but this one is acceptable because the metaphor works. My machine can conjure up Eden, but it also brings serpents.” He dropped to the floor, knelt before his computer, and logged on to the Internet. Then he called up the Web page devoted to Ariel and clicked from it to “Red Riding Hood.” “They haven’t taken it off. Worse yet, the Friends of Ariel have undergone a metamorphosis. They are now the Friends of Red Riding Hood, a name change which allows them to focus on fresh atrocities.”
I looked over his shoulder at the monitor. The role of Red Riding Hood #1 had been taken over by another hideously mutilated woman. I tried to keep my voice even. “When it comes to abuse, there are always fresh atrocities.”
He peered up at me. “But aren’t we supposed to be remembering Ariel Warren?”
I thought of the young woman who had been so moved by the shining idealism of a single line in the Hippocratic oath. “They’re just using her,” I said. “I’m going to make Livia put a stop to it.”
Rosalie wasn’t in her customary place in the outer office, but Livia’s door was open, a sure indication that she was inside. She wasn’t alone. As I walked towards the door, I could hear raised voices. When I stopped to listen, I discovered that the topic under discussion was me.
Ann Vogel’s voice was harsh. “Joanne Kilbourn is not one of us. You remember who she sided with in my attitudinal-harassment case.”
“I wasn’t here,” Solange said calmly, “so I don’t remember. It wasn’t my battle, and it wasn’t Ariel’s. Until the vigil, I never had any feelings one way or the other about Joanne. She’s certainly easy to dismiss: middle-aged, middle-class, middlebrow… middle-everything. But that night she said exactly the right thing. Perhaps there’s more to her than we thought. I’m beginning to think she might be right about allowing Ariel to become just another morality tale on ‘Red Riding Hood.’ ”
“Which, of course, implies that I’m wrong.” Ann was beyond fury. “What has Joanne Kilbourn ever done for you? Did she get you a job? No. We did. Livia and me. I was the student representative on the committee that hired you. There were male candidates who had much better paper qualifications than either you or Ariel, but we made sure the department hired women this time.”
Solange’s response was icy. “We were qualified.”
“Being qualified is never enough for a woman. You know that. What Livia and I did wasn’t pretty, but it was necessary.”
“Naama, stop.” Livia’s voice was a little light on New Age empathy. In fact, she sounded downright threatening. “You’ve said enough.”
“We’ve all said enough.” Solange sounded weary. “Let’s leave this for another time.”
When Solange emerged from Livia’s office, Ann Vogel was right behind her. She grabbed Solange’s arm and spun her back before either of them had a chance to see me.
“I reinvented myself for you,” Ann said. “I…”
Solange cut her short. “This isn’t high school. No one asked you to become someone else. That choice was yours, and this choice is mine. I’m going to delete the link to ‘Red Riding Hood.’ ”
Livia appeared behind them. Her eyes widened when she saw me. “You should have let us know you were here, Joanne.”
“I just got here,” I said.
Flanked by the two women, her poppy shawl clutched tightly across her breast, Livia Brook looked anxious, a mother separating warring twins she can no longer control. She had reason to look uneasy. Naama’s reinvention of herself was proceeding apace. Since I’d last seen her, she’d added a triple ear-piercing, a smudge of black eyeliner beneath her lower lids, and a wrist full of delicate silver bangles. She was forty years old. Her transformation of herself into an imperfect imitation of an idol thirteen years her junior was both sad and scary. I wasn’t surprised that Solange looked ready to bolt.
“You’re obviously in the middle of something,” I said. “I came to ask about ‘Red Riding Hood,’ but from what Solange just said the issue’s settled, so I’ll let you get back to your discussion.”
Solange broke away from the others. “I’ll come with you, Joanne. There’s something we have to talk about.”
“So you’ve defected,” Ann said bitterly.
“A difference of opinion doesn’t mean a defection,” Solange said. “I’m surprised at you, Ann. Aren’t women allowed to disagree? And anyway, what I need to talk to Joanne about has nothing to do with you. Ariel’s ashes are being buried at a small service, and her parents have asked me to help with the planning.”
Ann Vogel was galvanized. “I’ll get on the e-mail. I can make sure every woman at this university turns out for Ariel. I belong to other groups, too. This can be city-wide.”
“No!” Solange’s response was adamant. “That’s exactly what the Warrens don’t want. When they’re ready, they’ll have a public memorial service for Ariel, but they want this ceremony to be private. They have a place on an island at Lac La Ronge.”
“The Political Science department should be represented,” Livia said.
“It will be,” Solange replied. “I’ll be there, and so will Joanne if she chooses to come.” She turned to me. “Will you come?”
“If the Warrens want me there, of course.”
“Joanne’s invited!” Ann Vogel’s words had the biting fury of a child shut out of a birthday party. “Livia and I were both closer to Ariel than Joanne was. Why was she invited instead of us?”
Solange was placating. “You’d have to ask the Warrens. They made up the list, and they had to deal with logistics. The only way to their island is by private plane – the seating is limited.”
Livia bit her lip. “I have a right to be there,” she said. She seemed close to tears.
“You can’t keep us away.” Ann Vogel’s voice was thick with menace. “Ariel was a Red Riding Hood. We have every right to be there. We have every right to avenge her.”
As we walked down the hall towards my office, Solange filled me in on our travel plans. “We’ll meet at the airport at seven Thursday morning and fly to Lac La Ronge. Of course, there’ll be a couple of stops along the way. From Prince Albert, we take a float-plane to the island. Molly said she thought we’d just spend a little time together with Ariel, then bury the ashes and come back to Regina. We’ll be home before dark. Sound okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m giving my mid-term Thursday, but I know Ed Mariani will inv
igilate it for me.”
“It’s settled then,” Solange said, then she looked away. “Joanne, I wasn’t honest about the number of seats on the plane. There’s room for one more. Molly didn’t want a circus, so she told me to use my discretion about whom, if anyone, we ask to take the extra seat. I honestly can’t think of anyone who won’t make matters worse, but if you know of someone who should be there…”
“I do,” I said. “But I’ll check with Molly Warren before I say anything to him.”
When I phoned Molly from my office telling her I needed to talk with her about something that was best dealt with face to face, she was apologetic.
“I hate to ask, but would it be possible for you to come down to my office?” she said. “I’m booking off Thursday, so we’ve rescheduled patients today and tomorrow. I won’t be able to get away.”
“I can come down there easily,” I said. “Is there any time that’s better than others?”
She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “All times are equally bad. And now is as good a time as any.”
Parking was usually next to impossible in the streets around the glass tower that housed Molly Warren’s offices, but that afternoon I was lucky. I found a spot half a block away, plugged the meter with enough quarters to let me languish in the waiting room for an hour and a half if need be, and took the elevator to the eleventh floor. The Delft-blue waiting room was standing room only, but when I announced my presence to Molly Warren’s nurse, Katie, she ushered me directly into Molly’s office. I was grateful. That day I didn’t have the heart to share couch space with the bountifully pregnant and the anxious-eyed.
“Dr. Warren will be right with you,” Katie said. “She’s with a patient, but she should be finished soon.”
Katie was an attractive woman with brown eyes, dimples, a passion for pastels, and a professional manner that managed to be warm without being cloying. She gestured to a chair in front of the desk. “Make yourself comfortable. There’s coffee if you’d like.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve had a busy morning. It’ll be good just to sit.”
Katie didn’t leave. “People think if you work in health care you get used to death. But you don’t. At least I haven’t. I can’t believe Ariel’s gone. She was in the office last week. She was going to take her mother out to lunch, but Dr. Warren had an emergency and she had to cancel.” Katie shook her head. “I hope the two of them managed to find time to talk.”