by Gail Bowen
“How long have they been here?” I asked.
Gert adjusted her ball cap. “Nobody knows for sure – a thousand, maybe two thousand years.” She laughed. “Those old ones, they knew how to make paint.”
“What did they use?” Solange asked.
“Ochre,” Gert said, “mixed in with whatever oil they could find. It was before the days of Home Hardware.”
Fraser stepped out into the water to get a better look. “You can feel the power.”
Gert chuckled softly. “It depends on who’s doing the looking.”
No one spoke, but I sensed we all felt a link to the people who had mixed red ochre with the oils of animals and fish. Their paintings were evidence that, like us, they had grappled with the questions that came in the small hours: what does it all mean, and where do I fit in? Molly Warren was beside me. Cradling the pine box and midnight-blue cloth in her arms, she wore her grief like an amulet. As she stared up at the rock paintings, she seemed mesmerized.
Finally, Drew walked over and took his wife’s arm. “Time to leave,” he said. “Time to do what we came here to do.”
Molly shook him off and turned to address the rest of us. “Drew and I have decided on the place for Ariel – not here, although she loved this spot, but closer to our cabin in this clearing that looks out on the water.”
We walked back to the cabin in silence. Gert undid the padlock on a small toolshed and took out a shovel. Drew walked to a spot under a spruce tree and, in a lonely act of love, began to dig. After a few minutes, Fraser took the shovel from him and continued. Each of us took our turn. It was surprisingly hard work, but we managed, and when the hole was deep enough, Molly knelt and put in the box. Gert dropped to her knees, took a cigarette from the package in her breast pocket, broke it open, and placed the tobacco beside the pine box. “It’s tradition to give something back,” she said simply.
After that, it was over quickly. We handed the shovel around, replaced the earth, and knelt in a circle. Molly Warren smoothed the dirt and covered it with the midnight-blue cloth. “I’ve been trying all morning to think of the right words,” she said. She held out her hands, palms out, empty. “Does anyone have any?”
The sun picked up the gold- and silver-lame appliques of the moon and the stars, blossoms, flowers, fruit, fish, animals. Against the midnight blue, the figures that Ariel had cut out seemed to pulse with independent life.
“There’s a line from Dante,” I said. “ ‘Oh, the experience of this sweet life.’ ”
Every face in our circle betrayed a tightening of the throat, but the silence was absolute. We were enveloped in a moment as fragile and self-contained as a teardrop. And then – horribly – the sound of a plane’s motor sliced the silent air.
Mr. Birkbeck howled. Solange breathed a curse and a single name. “Naama.”
That was the name on my lips, too. As I watched the small plane descend and its pontoons slap the surface of the lake, I remembered Naama’s fury in Livia Brook’s office. You can’t keep us away. Ariel was a Red Riding Hood. We have every right to be there. We have every right to avenge her. As I waited for the plane’s door to open, I knew I had no resources left to deal with Naama and her unquenchable rage. Neither did anyone else. Faced with this new challenge, we stumbled to our feet. We were all running on empty.
Not surprisingly, it was Gert who made the first move. She snapped her fingers, brought Mr. Birkbeck to heel, and the two of them set off to meet the plane taxiing towards the old dock. When the motors cut, the door opened and a short, grey-haired man emerged. He and Gert pumped hands, then turned towards the open plane door. I steeled myself, waiting for the assault of Naama and her cohorts. But the passengers who stepped onto the dock were even more of a nightmare than Naama would have been.
Howard Dowhanuik and his son were both in full mourning: black suits, white shirts, dark ties. They looked like the Blues Brothers on vacation. Shocked, I almost laughed, but as they came closer the anguish on Charlie’s face killed the laugh in my throat.
It didn’t take Charlie long to read the situation. His eyes passed over the mourners and rested on the gravesite, then he went straight to Molly and Drew. “You can’t leave her there,” he said simply. “She shouldn’t be in the dark. Let me take the canoe out on the lake. I’ll scatter her ashes.”
Molly’s face was bloodless, her lips a line thin as a surgical scar. “It’s a bad idea, Charlie. Ashes from a human body are dense. If you try to scatter them, they get under your fingernails, into your skin. You can’t get them out.”
“I don’t want to get them out,” Charlie said.
Solange’s pupils were pinpoints of loathing. “Are you hoping her ashes will cover her blood?” she said.
“You were the one she was afraid of,” he said.
Solange’s mouth shaped itself into a cartoon-like O. “Never,” she said. “I never would have hurt her.”
Howard grabbed his son and pulled him away from Solange. “Coming here was a mistake, Charlie. Let’s just get back on the plane and go home.”
“Your father’s right.” Fraser Jackson’s voice was powerful and assured. “This has been a terrible day for all of us. None of us should do anything to make it worse.”
Charlie looked at Fraser without comprehension. “What are you doing here?”
Fraser didn’t flinch. “Like everyone here, I just came to say goodbye. It’s time to let Ariel rest in peace, Charlie.”
“Peace.” Charlie repeated the word as if it were a noun from an unknown language, then broke from his father’s arms and sprinted towards the plane.
Howard’s voice in my ear was urgent. “You gotta come back with us, Jo. I don’t know how to handle this.”
I didn’t hesitate. I walked over to Drew and Molly Warren. “I’m going to fly back with them,” I said. “I hope you understand.”
“Do what you need to do,” Drew said. And then, a prisoner of his immaculate manners, he patted my hand. “It was good of you to come all this way, Joanne. I hope it wasn’t too hard on you. Molly and I keep telling people we’re all right, but we’re not, you know. I don’t think we could have handled this alone.”
I embraced Molly. When Fraser Jackson kissed my cheek, I promised I’d call him later in the weekend. Gert was over on the old dock talking to the pilot of the other plane, so the only farewell left was to Solange. When I reached out to her, she spun away.
“Not so evolved after all,” she said. “A man asks, and Joanne Kilbourn scurries after him.”
“Not every encounter between a man and a woman is a power struggle,” I said.
I tried to walk away with a purposeful stride, but Howard had long legs and a determination to get the hell out. As usual, once he’d exacted the agreement he needed, he was dealing with the next problem. I could feel Solange’s eyes burning into my back as I ran along behind him. It was going to be a long flight home.
The plane we flew back to Prince Albert on was called the Silver Fox, after its owner, who on closer inspection turned out to be a banty rooster of a man with vulpine features, hair moussed into a silver sweep, and dentures that dazzled. Gert handed me over to Silver without any time-wasting sentimentalities.
“I noticed you’re a nervous flyer,” she said, “but Silver here has been in the business as long as I have.”
Silver took his comb and perfected his sweep-back. “Haven’t lost a passenger yet. At least not a good-looking one.”
Gert shot him a dismissive glance and held out her hand to me. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said. “Happy landings.”
Charlie was slumped against the window in the seat behind the pilot. He was wearing the earphones from a Discman and, as I walked past him, I could hear the tinny overflow of rhythm that comes when someone is listening to hard rock at full volume.
Except for the two seats opposite Charlie, the plane was filled with cargo. I sat down next to Howard, and I didn’t cut him any slack. “What in the name of God were you thinki
ng of, bringing him up here?” I said.
“Jo, I’ve been a lousy father his whole life. He wanted to come. Marnie said it was my turn.”
“Marnie! Howard, you know Marnie’s judgement hasn’t exactly been reliable since her accident. Did she understand what she was saying?”
Howard balled his hands into fists. “Jesus, Jo. Will you lay off? I know I made a mistake. Do you want to see what I was dealing with? Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of his funeral suit, pulled out a hand full of photographs and thrust them at me.
“These are for you,” he said. “From Marnie. She liked the picture you sent from the old days so much she had me stick it up on the wall next to her bed.”
The image deflated me. “I’m glad she liked it,” I said weakly.
“She loved it,” Howard said, “and of course the sisters at Good Shepherd are getting a real kick out of those words of wisdom you wrote on the bottom of the picture.”
Remembering, I cringed. “ ‘Screw them all!’ Howard, it never occurred to me that the photo would be on display.”
“It doesn’t matter. Actually, not much of anything matters any more in that quarter.”
He was right. The pictures in my hand were of Marnie. There were vestiges of the Marnie I had known in this woman’s face, but she was a stranger. Her hair had grown back grey and surprisingly curly. She was carefully made-up – another surprise, since the Marnie I had known said makeup was for clowns. She was wearing a pink tracksuit. Someone had put a matching pink ribbon in her hair. Suddenly I was furious.
I turned to Howard. “How could you let them do that to her?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Turn her into a doll.”
“The sisters are very kind to her, Jo. They try to make her happy. I don’t give a good goddamn if they want to play dressup with her. To be honest, she doesn’t seem to mind.”
“I’ll bet.”
The Silver Fox revved the engines and we skimmed off the lake. I leaned across Howard to look out the window. We were moving across the cobalt-blue waters, lifting above a hundred islands. Once, a glacier had covered the whole area; when it retreated, this was the topography it had left behind. I thought of the misery at the Warrens’ cottage, and in our plane. “Maybe we were better off when all this was a glacier,” I said. “Better off frozen solid, before the big meltdown when somebody had the bright idea to climb out of the slime.”
Howard gave me a look of disgust. “Save the existential crap for somebody who cares, Jo. We gotta figure out a way to deal with what’s happening. How much trouble is Charlie in?”
“You tell me. The woman he loves to the point of obsession leaves him, and she’s pregnant with another man’s child.”
Howard rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I take it the baby’s father was that black guy who was at the service today.”
I nodded. “His name is Fraser Jackson. He teaches in the Theatre department at the university.
Howard didn’t flinch. “So Ariel met him at work and fell in love with him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“What was it like?”
“She wanted a child, and she chose Fraser Jackson as the biological father.”
True to form, Howard travelled straight to the heart of the matter. “She needed to make a choice where there was no turning back,” he said. He leaned across me to look at his son. Charlie was sprawled across the seat, with his eyes closed and earphones in place, blasting their tinny sound, shutting out the world. He seemed closer in age to Angus than to Mieka. There was an adolescent narcissism about his grief that I found unsettling. It couldn’t have been easy for Ariel living with that juvenile intensity.
Howard straightened, leaned his head against the headrest, and stared at the plane’s ceiling. “Did she hate him that much?” he asked.
“I don’t think she hated him at all,” I said. “I think she just needed to break away.” Suddenly, the plane dropped through the sky and spun. Howard draped an arm around my shoulders. “Just an air pocket, Jo. Our pilot is responding with a little loop-de-loop. My guess is it’s for your benefit.”
“He doesn’t need to impress me,” I said tightly. “If he can keep this in the air, I’ll be dazzled.” The plane regained altitude, and I removed Howard’s protective arm.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m okay.”
“So,” he said, “she didn’t hate him. She just needed to break away, and he couldn’t let her.”
I nodded.
“Was she afraid of him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“ I know.” At the sound of Charlie’s voice, Howard and I both snapped our heads towards him. Charlie’s dark hair was tangled, and the earphones dangled from his neck. “She wasn’t afraid of me,” he said. “How could she be? She was the centre of my life. She was my life.”
“You were smothering her, Charlie.” I could feel my blood rising. “She wanted her own life. Why couldn’t you get it? The day she died, you recited a poem by Denise Levertov. Remember it, Charlie? ‘Dig them the deepest well,/Still it’s not deep enough/To drink the moon from.’ Anyone who heard your show that day knew how angry you were.”
“Leave him alone, Jo.” Howard was angry, too.
“No,” I said. “Howard, you dragged me into this. You said you needed my help. If I’m going to help, I need some answers. Another thing – the police are going to want to talk to Charlie. He has to be prepared for the kinds of questions they’ll be asking.”
Howard’s face sagged. “She’s right, Charlie,” he said quietly. “You need to level with us.”
“About what?” Charlie voice was wary.
“For starters, about the baby,” Howard said. “You did know Ariel was pregnant, didn’t you?”
Strangely, Charlie seemed almost proud. “You can’t love a woman the way I loved her without being aware of every nuance in her voice, every change in her body. Of course, I knew.”
“And you knew it wasn’t your child.”
Charlie tightened. “It wasn’t a concern for me,” he said.
“Was it a concern for you when Ariel moved out?” I asked.
“She would have come back,” Charlie said. “It was only a matter of time.” He put his earphones back on and cranked up the sound on his Discman, sealing himself away, closing us out.
For a few moments, Howard and I were silent as strangers. Then he turned to me. “Maybe you were right,” he said.
“About what?”
“Maybe we were better off when all this was frozen solid,” he said, rapping on the window of the plane. “Maybe we were happier before the big meltdown when that first wise guy had the bright idea of climbing out of the slime.”
I glared at him. “Save the existential crap for someone who cares,” I said. “We gotta figure out what to do next.”
CHAPTER
11
“I can’t offer you a lift,” I said. “I took a cab this morning.”
Howard looked at his watch. “It’s almost five. Do you want to go someplace for a drink?”
Rumpled, weary, and blinking in the sunshine, Howard, Charlie, and I were standing outside the main entrance to the Regina airport. We were home, but there was no cause to break out the ticker tape. Coming home meant facing up to the hard questions we’d been able to dodge from the moment the Silver Fox had deposited us on the tarmac at Prince Albert airport, and we had boarded the first of the two public planes that flew us out of the boreal north back to the short-grass prairie. Surrounded again by coffee-carrying bureaucrats and business people, Howard and I had talked listlessly, and Charlie had wrapped himself in a blanket of impenetrable solitude. Circumstances had demanded discretion, but now circumstances had changed. The prospect of a drink and a private conversation in a dark restaurant was appealing, but it was also unrealistic. In our province, drunks and idealists still considered an ex-premier fair game, and Charlie’s blood-m
arked face made his anonymity unlikely.
“It might be easier to talk at my place,” I said. “Why don’t you come back for dinner?”
“What’s on the menu?” Howard asked.
“Gin,” I said.
“Sold,” he said, grinning wearily. Charlie smiled, too, and I felt a faint stirring of hope.
When we got there, the kids and the animals were in the family room watching an Adam Sandler movie. Howard was a familiar figure in our home; normally, his presence wouldn’t have merited much beyond a glance and a grin. But Charlie was another matter entirely. Taylor, who knew enough not to stare, said hi, then busied herself pretending to check her cats for fleas. Angus offered Charlie a laconic wave of acknowledgement, but Eli was transfixed. His idol was in the room.
“I don’t think you’ve met Eli Kequahtooway,” I said to Charlie. “He’s the nephew of a good friend, and he’s a big fan of yours.”
Charlie extended a hand and Eli took it.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” Eli said softly.
“Thanks,” Charlie said. There was an uncomfortable silence, then Eli gestured towards an empty armchair. “This movie’s pretty cool if you haven’t got anything better to do.”
“I haven’t got anything better to do,” Charlie said. He sprawled in the chair and, within an instant, seemed wholly absorbed.
Howard looked at me. “There was a mention of gin.”
After considerably more than a mention of gin, we ordered take-out from Peking House. Howard’s treat. It was, he said, the least he could do, and I didn’t disagree.
Our order was extravagantly large and expensive. When the last of the cardboard containers had been emptied and Willie and the boys had run off their dinner, Angus and his girlfriend, Leah, went to hear the newest, hottest band, and the rest of us gravitated towards the backyard. Eli asked Charlie if he wanted to swim, and Charlie surprised me by accepting the invitation. He came back wearing one of Angus’s suits. His skin was the blue-white of skimmed milk, and his body was very thin; he projected an aura that was both vulnerable and achingly sexual. The exposure of self was disturbing, and I was relieved when he dove into the pool and his pale body disappeared beneath the water. Without exchanging a word, he and Eli began to swim laps, moving through the water with the methodical rhythm of channel swimmers headed for a distant shore.