It didn’t matter. I had so many things in my head, none of them good, that I just wanted a few days away. Let someone else worry about the meals and the dishes and the dusting and Walter Freeman and perverts. Tina and Andrew had a house you could park a jetliner inside, and a full-time maid. It would do.
I found a noon-hour flight the next day at a price that wouldn’t convert my credit card into an improvised explosive device, then called Tina, who became appropriately hysterical.
“I love it! I love it!” she said, and I pictured her almost jumping up and down. “We’ll go shopping, we’ll do lunches, we’ll gossip.” Tina is as predictable as a perpetual calendar. “We’ll cruise Robson Street. There’s this sweet little café where the waiters are athletes, two of them from the Winter Olympics—and I think a couple of them are gay, but who cares—and Andrew would love to talk to you, he always loves talking to you, and the only problem is my bridge club.”
I asked why her bridge club would be a problem.
“Because this week it’s my turn to host it, but if you don’t mind … you play bridge, don’t you?”
I asked with whom I might play bridge, here on the beach strip.
“But you know how? I mean, I know Daddy taught you. He taught both of us. Anyway, sometimes we need a fourth hand for one of the tables, and maybe you can fill in. I promise not to ignore you.” She took a deep breath, long overdue, and a new Tina was speaking, the quiet, solicitous one. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so glad you’re coming, really. I can only imagine what you’ve been through, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more help when I was there with you.”
“You were all the help I needed, Tina,” I assured her. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve been the perfect sister.” And she had been. From time to time.
I could almost feel her tears through the receiver. “That’s lovely, Josie. Really. Thank you. What time does your plane arrive?”
The officious Tina returned. She told me not to bring too many clothes because we would buy a whole wardrobe, and besides, I shouldn’t have a bag big enough to check, carry-on was always better, and she was going to tell Goldie to put new sheets on the guest bed, Andrew’s brother had slept there last, he was a carpenter in Moose Jaw, and those sheets just wouldn’t do, she had some flowered 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets in the prettiest pattern with lilacs at the edge—
I cut her off before I changed my mind and cancelled the trip in the interest of self-preservation. And who the heck was Goldie?
I RETURNED TO TRAFALGAR TOWERS, driving this time, and avoiding eye contact with staff members when I got there. Mother was alone in her room, reading an Elmore Leonard novel. For her birthday two years earlier, I’d bought her a leather-bound set of The Collected Works of Jane Austen, which she kept displayed on a side table like a family heirloom. Good writer, but a prude, Mother wrote to me on her blackboard. She preferred tough talk over sense and sensibility.
Good! Mother wrote when I told her I was going to spend a few days with Tina. When you come back, they’ll have done their audit and will know the truth!
She was pleased to hear I was visiting Tina because it was preferable, I suspected, to having Tina visit her.
Mother loved Tina, because Mother was a good woman who loved her children, which is what mothers are supposed to do. But there had been too many clashes between them over too many years, and I honestly believe that when Tina announced she and Andrew would be living in Vancouver and would keep in touch one way or another, Mother was relieved. Her daughter was married to a successful doctor. They would be living two thousand miles away. And they would not be having any children, meaning no grandchildren for her. Well, two out of three …
We didn’t discuss this, Mother and I. “I’ll be back within a week,” I explained. “I just need a break, somebody to do the things for me that you always did,” and I began to cry.
Mother reached her arms to me and I bent into them, her sitting silent in the wheelchair and me, for the second time that day, becoming ten years old again, just for a minute, to enjoy the feeling.
MY DECISION TO VISIT TINA may not have been profound, but it was popular.
“Josie, you don’t know how good this makes me feel,” Mel told me. We were in a café down the lake toward Toronto, the remains of our dinner in front of us, the lake shining beyond the window. I had suggested we have dinner together. I didn’t want to meet Mel in my home or his apartment. I just needed a bit of normalcy, or as much as you can have with an ex-lover.
He wasn’t surprised to hear about Walter Freeman’s visit to Helen Detwiler or his suggestions that I might have been stealing from the retirement home. “He’s fixated on that expensive ring and where Gabe got the money for it,” Mel said. “But more than that, he’s really upset with you. Walter’s not used to people standing up to him, not treating him with the respect he wants. He’s getting back at you in the best way he knows how. Maybe the only way.” He reached across the table and took my hands in his. “This will all blow over, and when it does …” He searched for words. “I’ve been worried about you, and confused about what happened between us.”
“Confused?” I had expected guilt.
He looked out at the lake, gathering more words. Plastic surgeons could use his profile as a template for every male patient who wanted his face corrected—the perfect squared chin, the full mouth, the straight, ideally proportioned nose, the narrow eyes, the uncreased forehead …
“I’m sorry about the pain it caused Gabe.” He turned from the window to face me again. “But you know what? I don’t regret it completely, because of what you came to mean to me. That’s why, sometimes, I might appear tongue-tied or say the wrong things or not say the right things.” He lowered his head and leaned toward me. “Do you understand?”
I told him I did. I told him we both shared whatever amount of guilt needed to be passed around. I told him I would love to talk about what we had done, and how, when enough time had passed, when all the mystery and questions surrounding Gabe’s death had been resolved. At that point, we might renew our relationship, if we were both comfortable. “Do you know what I would like?” I added. “I would like you to play some of that music you played for me once, that nice bluesy stuff, and tell me who it is and what became of the musicians.”
He smiled and said, “Sometime soon,” then looked at his watch and told me he had to check on a stakeout team down on Barton Street. “Things are coming together,” he said.
I drove home pleased that I was going to Vancouver and even more pleased about what I would be returning to.
24.
The warm Tina and the cool Andrew awaited me at the airport in Vancouver, Tina running toward me with arms outstretched and Andrew hanging back, clutching a bouquet of flowers. I felt like a bride arriving at her honeymoon resort.
I survived the hugs and took the flowers and Tina’s arm, and we all walked out of the airport and into Andrew’s Lexus, Tina boasting about the Vancouver weather and the dinner that she and her new maid, Goldie, were planning for us, while Andrew drove us past glass walls and greenery. Everything in Vancouver is green from rain, and maybe from misplaced envy.
An hour later I was sitting in the den on Point Grey Road, the den’s picture window framing a view that the local tourist bureau no doubt approved and had perhaps even created. We looked across English Bay to the downtown core, its office towers and condominiums shining in the sun. Beyond them, marking the horizon, mountains shone, capped with enamel-white snow. I have been jealous of few things or people in my life, but the view through that window made my dream of living on the beach strip seem about as ambitious as putting on socks in the morning.