Текст книги "Beach Strip"

Автор книги: John Lawrence Reynolds

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

7.

That afternoon I made tea and walked through the house with the cup in my hand, looking at things that reminded me of Gabe. They were everywhere, especially in our bedroom. A piece of jade I had bought to help him relax. He was to rub it in the palm of his hand when he was tense. I picked it up and stroked it now. It may have worked for Gabe. It did not work for me.

A favourite mug for his coffee, garish yellow and red, with a picture of a hand-painted chicken on the side and a small chip on the rim. His collection of jazz CDs, a nail clipper he had owned since he was sixteen years old, and an earthenware plate we had brought from Mexico. Gabe used the plate to hold spare change from his trouser pocket when he got undressed at night. I counted the amount in the plate, penny by penny, nickel by nickel. Eight dollars and sixty-three cents.

And his shirts and his ties and his underwear, hanging in his closet and folded neatly in the drawers of his dresser cabinet. I touched them all with one hand and held my teacup in the other, alternately smiling and crying at the memories and images they created. What was I to do with them now? I would decide some other time. Maybe in some other life. Then I returned downstairs, poured the cold tea in the sink, climbed back up to our bedroom and fell on the bed. I believe I cried before falling asleep. Yes, I did.

I woke in the summer dusk greyness that I have always considered poignant, thinking of Mother and remembering I was to visit her and explain what happened. The clock said it was almost eight. It wasn’t guilt about not seeing Mother that had awakened me. It was knocking, fast and light, like a drummer in a marching band. But I awoke feeling guilty anyway.

I managed to stand up, fluff my hair, and open the front door. Tina gave me barely a glance before turning to the limo driver, whom she had left standing at the open trunk of the car, and said, “She’s here. Bring them up.” Meaning her luggage, four matched pieces in caramel-coloured leather. “Oh, Josie.” She hugged me and I counted to three before she released me. “Are you sure you’re okay?” She stood back, glanced over her shoulder to ensure that the limo driver was on his way with her luggage, smiled her approval at his progress, then looked at me again, tilted her head, and let her eyes fill with tears. Tina is several interesting people.

“Sure.” I walked back to the kitchen, aware that the house Gabe and I had loved so much, the bungalow we believed looked funky and real, was basically shabby and plain. “Want some tea?”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Alex,” Tina said from the front door.

I turned to see the oversized limo driver, handsome in the way an oak armoire can be handsome, enter with Tina’s luggage, carrying one piece under each arm and another in each hand. “Is the guest room upstairs?” Tina asked.

“There’s a pullout couch in the room on your left, just off the landing,” I said. Tina was already climbing the stairs, swinging her ass at Alex, the limo driver, who was following her. From the expression on his face, Alex was enjoying the view. There is comfort in continuity, I suppose, and Tina, bless her cold Prada heart, was providing some for me.

I have never seen an airport limo driver carry luggage into a house and up the stairs. From the expression on his face, it was apparent that Alex had never seen a woman quite like Tina either.

When they came downstairs, Tina and Alex returned to the limo, where, I assumed, they discussed his fee and the price of tomatoes.

“HOW CAN YOU MAKE IT HERE from Vancouver so fast?” I said. We were seated in the kitchen, sipping tea from earthenware mugs dating back to my first marriage. I refused to apologize for the absence of Royal Doulton. “I talked to you barely eight hours ago. It takes me that long to pack. And how did you get to know your limo driver so quickly?”

I knew how. Tina is an outrageous flirt.

“I always talk to limo drivers.” Tina dampened her lips with the tea. She had changed from her black pencil skirt and pink blouse into rhinestone-encrusted jeans and a cotton sweater that ended precisely halfway between her hips and her knees. I had to admit she looked terrific in both outfits. “I refuse to sit silently in the back of a car, like cargo. I asked him about his life. Alex is a hard-working guy from Lebanon with two sons and a shrewish wife. Do you have cream for the tea?”

“No.” I rose and walked to the bar in the living room. “But I have some brandy for it.” I returned with the bottle and offered it to Tina, who shook her head.

“You really should cut your hair, you know,” Tina said after I had poured enough brandy in my cup to kill the taste of the tea. “You’re getting too old for long hair.”

My hair is toffee-coloured with a natural wave and a hint of red. It, plus the fact that I inherited our mother’s bosom, has always made Tina jealous. Tina inherited our father’s thin black hair, which she keeps short, and more of his chest than Mother’s. Maybe even the hair on it. I haven’t looked lately. Until a few years ago, Tina’s revenge had been to suggest I was adopted.

“Gabe likes it this way,” I said.

I waited for her to correct me, telling me I should be using the past tense now. Instead, my sarcastic older sister was replaced by a solicitous friend, who reached her hand across to enclose mine as her eyes flooded with tears. “Tell me what happened.”

I told her. I told her almost everything. When I had to pause and release my own tears, Tina placed her arm around my shoulder and dabbed my eyes with a tissue. When I gathered myself together again, she sat back and watched me.

“You guys did it on a blanket?” she said when I finished. “The two of you out there on the sand? Were you drunk?”

“A little.”

“I mean, teenagers do that stuff, but at your age …”

“My age? Thanks, Tina.”

“Actually, it sounds kinky and romantic.”

“The truth is, I got bitten by mosquitoes and washed sand out of my hair for a week.”

Tina looked out the window toward the lake. “Gabe was nice. I didn’t know him as well as what’s-his-name.” Meaning my first husband, the one married to Miss Lemon Hair, the aerobics instructor.

“His name was Danny. My first husband’s name was Danny.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Probably saving his money to buy his wife new tits when the old ones wear out.”

“Why do you do that?” She fixed me with a look on her face that I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen and dating Dale somebody, a boy on the next block with perfect teeth, curly hair, and the personality of a tree stump. Tina lusted after him, tried to hide her jealousy when he ignored her, and covered it with the look of distaste she wore now.

“Why do I do what?”

“Make wisecracks all the time. Your heart is breaking, I know it is, and you act like you’re …” She pursed her lips and shook her head, looking for the analogy. She found it. “Like you’re a stand-up comedienne in Las Vegas.”

“I cry in private, Tina. I laugh, or try to, in public because it protects me.”

“From what?”

“Whatever you’ve got. Look, Tina, I love you for coming here, I really do. Gabe and I …” The lump was rising from my heart into my throat, squeezing tears from my eyes on the way, making a liar of me about not crying in public. “Gabe and I kept to ourselves down here. So I don’t have many people I can call on, and I’m just glad you came. Really.”

Tina rose from the chair and held me in her arms. I cried this time not for the absence of Gabe but for the presence of Tina and the touch of her arms on my back, pulling me to her. Sometimes the worse-tasting the medicine, the more you need to take it.

“WE’LL GO SEE MOTHER and then eat at one of those cute little restaurants down by the lake.” Tina had planned our evening for us. A week ago I would have resented it. Now I welcomed it.

I had had a bath, put on a blouse and skirt, tied my hair back, slipped on a ring Gabe had given me, and returned downstairs. Tina had unpacked her clothes and moved a chair from the dining room into the downstairs bathroom to hold her perfumes, shampoo, nail polish, blush, skin cream, anti-fungal spray for her feet, and cosmetics.

“Your hair looks nice,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t cut it after all.” Then, looking down at my hands, “Where did you get that ring?”

“Gabe bought it for me,” I said. “A long time ago.” Which was a lie, unless two weeks is a long time on your calendar. It was on mine.

She lifted my hand and looked at the ring, then at me and back to the ring again. “It’s a black opal,” she said. “They’re expensive.” She twisted my hand to catch the light from the lamp. “Looks like diamonds around it.”

That’s what they were. Twelve perfect diamonds positioned around the opal in a yellow-gold setting, the stones elevated on a series of round concentric steps. I knew every facet of every stone and the swirl of every mark on the opal.

Tina brought her eyes back to mine. “This ring cost a fortune.”

“Maybe new.”

“He didn’t buy it new?”

“I don’t know.” I withdrew my hand and began twisting the ring to take it off. This had not been a good idea. I had been childish, the kid wanting to show her older sister something more spectacular than anything Tina’s wealthy husband had given her.

“Was it a special occasion?” she asked. “Your birthday?”

“No.” I removed the ring and walked to the stairs. “I don’t think I’ll wear it.”

“He just shows up one day with a ring like that and says, ‘Here’s something for nothing’?” She was speaking to my back.

“Yes.” I began to climb the stairs.

“How much do they pay cops in this town anyway?” she shouted, but I had turned the corner on the landing, heading for my lingerie drawer, where I had hidden the ring after Walter Freeman asked if Gabe had purchased anything expensive for me lately.

“SHOULD’VE PUT IT IN A POPCORN BOX.” That’s what Gabe said the night he gave me the ring, sitting on a bench on the beach, facing the lake. He pulled a tiny brown felt bag from the pocket of his windbreaker, the blue one with the police department crest, withdrew the ring, and handed it to me. “Let’s see if it fits.”

When I found my voice, I asked where he got it.

“A jeweller,” he said. “Here.” He took my right hand and slid the ring onto the third finger. It was a little loose, but I didn’t care. Gabe had given me a small diamond solitaire before we were married. I loved it and never asked nor even thought about owning more jewellery beyond it and my wedding band. I detest the idea that jewellery and clothes and expensive shoes make a statement. I didn’t want to make any damn statement. I wanted to wear that ring, though.

“Gabe,” I said, “we have a problem.”

“What’s that?” He was sitting back with his arms resting along the top of the bench, watching the cormorants pass. It was early evening, the time of day when the black cormorants return from their journey to the lake, when they come home to the bay and nest on the north shore, across the water from the factories and the steel mills.

“We can’t afford it.”

“Yes, we can.”

“This ring is worth thousands.”

“Probably.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“It didn’t take much.”

I closed my eyes. “Was it stolen?”

I felt Gabe’s hand grip my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw him watching me with an expression I had not seen before, one that made me think either he had not considered that possibility or he had not prepared an answer. “No, Josie,” he said. “It is not stolen. I gave it to you because you are a beautiful woman. That’s why a man gives jewellery to a woman. Because she is beautiful and because he loves her.”

I EXPECTED MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE RING from Tina when I came downstairs, but Tina, as she often does, surprised me by not mentioning it. “Did you make the funeral arrangements yet?” she asked.

I sat at the table. Funeral arrangements? That’s what you do for dead people, isn’t it. “No,” I said. “I’m still getting used to things.”

“We’ll need to find out when the body will be released. Where’s your computer?”

I told her I didn’t have a computer.

Tina looked at me as though I didn’t have a nose. “Don’t you know about the Internet?” she said. “Don’t you use email?”

I explained that yes, damn it, I knew about the Internet and email, and we even had a toilet and running water in the house, if she cared to notice, and that Gabe used a computer at his office and I used one at the retirement home to keep the books and at the library whenever I wanted to look up the name of the last king of Albania, but we didn’t own one because … well, because Gabe and I liked the idea of being contrary, I guess.

Tina shrugged and began opening cupboards. “Have you got a pad and pencil somewhere?”

“I think so.” I held my head in my hands. No, we didn’t. Not anymore. Not one I could find. Gabe would know where the pad was, the one we used to write things down. Shopping lists. Telephone numbers. Notes to each other.

“Where is it?”

“Don’t know.”

“I have one upstairs.” Of course Tina would travel with a notepad in her luggage. Tina is always prepared. When she returned, we began making a list of things to do. My life was getting organized.

TINA DROVE OUR HONDA TO VISIT MOTHER, crossing the lift bridge and skirting the water’s edge to Mother’s retirement home, where she and Mother greeted each other like two soldiers from an old war who had nothing in common beyond their regimental badges, and staff members came to tell me how sorry they were to hear about Gabe. When I approached her chair, Mother clung to me and we both cried over Gabe.

“MOTHER LOOKS GOOD,” Tina said when we left. “I feel like pasta. Where’s a good place for pasta?”

“Italy.”

“I didn’t realize new widows overflowed with humour.”

“It’s not humour, it’s irony. Tina, this is WASP country. They only know two spices here: salt and pepper. Pepper is the exotic one.”

“Every town has at least one good Italian restaurant.”

“Yes, and a war memorial and a whore.”

She found a strip-mall Italian bistro with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths on small tables and a waitress who, together with the restaurant decor, made me think we had encountered two out of three of every town’s traditional attractions. After she ordered for both of us—spaghetti bolognese for me, veal parmigiana for her—Tina leaned across the table wearing her listen-to-your-older-sister expression. “Sweetheart,” she said, “I want you to consider something.” When I did not respond, she said, “I want you to consider moving to Vancouver when it’s over.”

“When what’s over? My life?”

“This. Do you want to keep living where you are? Breathing smoke and dust from the damn steel companies? Living under a couple of expressway bridges, tracking sand into your house every day?” She sat up again. “Do you know that one of your neighbours keeps a helicopter on his porch and a swamp buggy in his driveway? We passed it on the way in.”

“I’ll bet you don’t see that in Kitsilano.”

“I’m not suggesting you live in Kitsilano. I mean, you can if you want.” She meant I could if I could afford it. “It would just be nice to have you nearby, downtown or Burnaby or somewhere. What’s wrong with wanting to have your sister live near you?”

“Mother too?”

I had caught her off guard. It had taken her twenty minutes to forget about Mother. Her jaw tightened. “Mother could have another stroke, a major stroke, any day.”

“Then better she has it here, with me near her. When Mother goes, I’ll consider coming to Vancouver. How’s that?” I had no intention of moving to British Columbia.

Tina thought about that. Then, “How long had Gabe been depressed?”

“He wasn’t depressed.”

“It tends to be depressed people who commit suicide.”

“Gabe did not commit suicide. He did not put his gun to his head and kill himself.”

“Isn’t that what the police are saying? Aren’t they saying it was a suicide?”

“They’re wrong. I know they’re wrong. Gabe never put his gun together unless he was going on duty—”

“What’s that mean, ‘put his gun together’?”

“You take your weapon apart …” I sounded like a police procedure manual. “… when you’re at home. You put the clip with the ammunition in one place, making sure there’s no bullet in the firing chamber, and put the other part somewhere else. So the gun’s never ready to fire, in case somebody finds it or …” I wasn’t sure of the other reason for making a gun unable to fire. I just felt better about it. “Everybody puts their weapon in kitchen drawers. It’s a cop thing, around here at least. You put the weapon in the kitchen drawer and the ammunition clip beside the cereal boxes, or some other place. Cops joke about it. Cops joke about everything. Don’t reach for the cornflakes and come up with the Glock. Gabe would not put his gun together and carry it out to the blanket when he knew I was on my way to meet him.”

“Unless he planned to use it.”

“I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it.”

“What’s a Glock?”

“His gun. I don’t know what happened to Smith & Wesson. One made cough drops and the other made cooking oil.” It was Gabe’s joke. Most people don’t get it. Tina was most people, so she thought it over before reaching across the table and putting her hand on mine.

“Okay, I understand,” she said. “About the gun.” The waitress arrived with two glasses of Chianti and a basket of bread sticks. “What’s with all that yellow tape wrapped around your tool shed?” Tina asked when she left. “Wasn’t Gabe found on the beach?”

“Some pervert’s been in there playing with himself,” I said. “That’s what Mel thinks.”

“Mel? Who’s Mel?”

“A cop who used to work with Gabe.”

“What’s he like?”

I shrugged. “A nice guy.” I had to say something.

I looked up to see Tina staring at me with one eyebrow raised. The waitress brought our food, and when she left I expected Tina to say aloud what I had just read in her expression, but we ate in silence until Tina began reminiscing about Dad and various aunts and uncles. I ate barely half of my pasta. Tina devoured her meal, then flashed her American Express card, and we drove back to the beach strip in silence.

TINA WAS STANDING AT OUR KITCHEN WINDOW, looking out at the garden. Beyond the fence and above the boardwalk, the horizon was lit with the white silken promise of a moon preparing to rise over the lake. “I can see the attraction of living here on the lake,” Tina said. “Except for everything else.”

I was sitting at the kitchen table. I had poured a finger or two of brandy into an old glass but had not touched it yet. I was waiting for my sister to leave. Some sins need solitude. “What’s ‘everything else’ mean?”

Tina waved her hand. “The traffic on the bridge, the stuff from the steel companies, some of your neighbours … and, you know, it’s not the cleanest beach in the world.”

“That’s why Martha Stewart keeps turning down my invitations.”

She turned from the window, her arms folded across her chest. “Did Gabe appreciate your sense of humour?”

“As a matter of fact—” I began.

“Does Mel?”

Someday, Tina will have a verbal ambush named after her. In high school, Tina claimed she joined the debating club because a couple of cute boys were members, which was a lie. The only man in my lifetime who was both cute and a good debater was Bill Clinton, and the combination was so rare that it got him elected president. Tina joined the debating club so she could learn to cut people up with her comments. If she had joined the choir and learned to sing as well as she learned to win arguments, she’d be Céline bloody Dion.

Hearing her mention Mel was enough to overcome my reluctance about the brandy. I took a long swallow and closed my eyes while it burned its way toward my stomach. When I opened them, Tina was still staring at me. “What do you want to know about Mel?” I asked.

“What makes him a nice guy?” She began walking and talking, moving around the kitchen, closing cupboard doors and picking crumbs off the counter. “When women like us, you and me, when we say a man is a nice guy, it means more than he opens a door for you or buys his wife expensive trinkets, stuff like that. That’s what I think.”

“He’s not married.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“He’s also younger than me.”

“How many years?”

“Four or five.”

“Tall?”

“Kind of.”

“Lots of hair?”

“A bunch.”

“Wavy?”

“Sure.”

“Blue eyes, right? You always fell for guys with blue eyes.”

I refused to give her the satisfaction.

“Am I going to meet this Mel?” She sat across from me.

“Probably.” I looked up at the clock. It was past ten. “I’m going to bed. Hang your breakfast order on your doorknob.”

“Josephine.”

My sister had become my mother. I hadn’t changed. I refused to answer and climbed the stairs to my bedroom, finishing the brandy on the way.

I HAVE A THEORY that time moves at different speeds in darkness. I don’t know if it moves faster or slower when the light is out. Only that its pace changes. The first night with a new lover always passes at a speed you never expect, sometimes long and leisurely, sometimes swift and fleeting. Never normal.

Lying in the darkness, I heard the television set in the living room below me and the traffic passing on the highway bridges above the roof. From out on the lake, I heard a freighter’s horn announce that it was approaching the canal, and a moment later the air horn on the bridge warned everyone it was about to rise. From another place, I heard Gabe in the bathroom, brushing his teeth and then whistling under his breath in that tuneless way he did. Lying on my side, my back to the bathroom, I heard him pad across the floor and felt the bed sink behind me with the weight of his body, and I awoke.

I rolled over. No one was next to me. The house was silent, the traffic from the highway bridges distant and intermittent. I rested my arm across my eyes until the tears stopped. Then I rose from the bed, wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and crossed the hall to the guest room, where I stood at the open door and called Tina’s name until she stirred and said, “What?”

“I want you to know …” I began. There was an old steamer trunk near the door. I’d bought it from the junk shop down the beach strip last year. There was nothing inside. I sat on it now. “I want you to know that whatever happened, or whatever you think happened, I never stopped loving my husband. Okay?”

“Why are you saying this?” Tina’s voice floated at me from the darkness.

“I just want you to know.” I was clenching my fists so tightly in my lap that they hurt. “I never stopped loving Gabe. Not for one minute, okay?”

“Okay.” Tina’s voice was sleepy and frightened. I had intimidated my older sister. It did not make me feel good about myself.

I think I mumbled something about seeing her in the morning. Then I returned to bed.