12 Rose Street (6 page)

As I turned the question over in my mind, the only sound in the room was the ticking of the grandmother clock. When the silence between Brock and me grew uncomfortable, I said, “I’m sure Zack would have done exactly what you did, and I’m sure I would have been as hurt and confused as Michael is.”

“But you would have stayed with Zack.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “There are a lot of years ahead and I want to spend them with him.”

Brock’s gaze was level. “That’s how I feel about Michael.”

“Then talk to him,” I said.

“I’ll try,” Brock said. “But I’m not optimistic. These days, Michael is not the man I knew.”

After Brock and Zack left, I put the dogs in the Volvo and drove over to Mieka’s. It was 8:20, and the girls left for school at 8:45. Plenty of time for photos. When I saw Madeleine and Lena, I remembered a
New Yorker
cartoon I had put up on the fridge one September. A little girl is staring with loathing at the clothing laid out on her bed. The caption read “That outfit just screams ‘first day of school.’ ”

Our granddaughters were dressed in matching black watch tartan skirts, white turtlenecks, and dark green tights. Their bangs were trimmed; their hair was neatly braided; their faces shone. By the end of the week, they’d be wearing T-shirts and shorts; if they were lucky they would have found socks that matched. Their hair would have the
wild abandon of hair that had been washed before bed, dried fitfully and slept upon, and unless Mieka caught them before they went out the door, there would be a smear of jam on at least one girl’s face.

But today was the day the girls posed on the front steps for the family album, the way Mieka, her brothers, and, later, Taylor, had posed on other first days of school. The house in which Mieka now lived had been mine before I married Zack. When her marriage foundered and Mieka and her daughters moved back to Regina, we all agreed it would be best for Mieka to buy the house that held so many memories for us all.

Zack, Taylor, and I had decided to start afresh in the first house we would live in as a family. The three of us had a lot of fun poring over paint chips and quibbling about furnishings and drapes. Two hours after our New Year’s Day wedding, Zack and I moved into our newly retrofitted house. We brought our daughter, our dogs, Taylor’s cats, and our clothes. Everything else was left behind. The house Mieka and her girls shared was substantially the same as the house in which I’d raised my children.

As I snapped pictures of Madeleine and Lena with my phone and sent them off to Zack, my mind was crowded with memories. Like my own children years before, the girls were beyond excited. Equipped with new backpacks, pens, notebooks, pencils, and erasers, they were ready for a great adventure, and they couldn’t wait for it to begin.

When the yellow school bus came, they raced towards the street. Standing on the porch, Mieka and I could hear the shouts of kids welcoming them. After we waved them off, Mieka waited until the bus disappeared, then she turned to me. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

I nodded. “Do you remember Zack’s client, Cronus?”

“The creepy slumlord? He’s pretty hard to forget.”

“He was murdered last night. Cronus was the one who alerted us to the possibility that a child would be abducted at the opening.”

Mieka’s hand rose to her throat. “Oh God. When nothing happened yesterday, I thought we were in the clear. I assumed the warning was just a hoax.”

“We thought everything was okay too, then this morning Debbie Haczkewicz called to ask Zack to identify Cronus’s body. He’d been tortured and stomped on. Whoever killed him had left him lying face up on the hood of his car, so we’d know what they were capable of.”

Mieka put her arms around me. “Come inside, Mum. Let me get you some tea.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I was going to take the dogs for a run along the levee.”

“Give yourself some time,” Mieka said. “You look a little wobbly. Why don’t you get the dogs out of the car. They can run around in the backyard while we visit.”

“Sold,” I said. Mieka’s backyard was familiar territory for Willie and Pantera, and they bounded after each other happily. Mieka and I usually visited in the kitchen, but that morning she shooed me into the living room. “The girls wanted the fireplace on this morning. I turned it off before they left for school, but it’s still cozy in there. Put your feet up and I’ll bring the tea. Daughter’s orders.”

Fifteen years earlier when I’d purchased the living room furniture, I had three criteria. The furniture had to be sturdy, stain-proof, and comfortable. It had cost twice as much as I’d budgeted for, but it still looked and felt good, and as I settled into the couch, I was glad I’d splurged. As Mieka had promised, the room was toasty and I was pleasantly drowsy by the time she came in with the tray of tea things. Mieka and I both believed that tea should be served in china cups and saucers, the thinner the better, and that
morning she had chosen my favourite Aynsley for the Earl Grey. The tray also held a plate of buttered scones and a bowl of sliced peaches.

“You’re spoiling me,” I said.

Mieka poured the tea. “You’ve spoiled me a few thousand times. Besides, you look as if you could use some
TLC
.”

I sipped my tea. “I’m fine. There’s just been too much lately. Until yesterday I was climbing the walls trying to get the campaign on track, and Zack was climbing the walls because it didn’t look as if there was any way Racette-Hunter would open its doors on Labour Day. Then we had the abduction threat. When that was put to bed, Cronus was murdered. Now the campaign has to switch into high gear. I feel as if someone is pelting me with stones.”

Mieka’s cell rang. She looked at the screen. “I’d better take this. It’s from April’s Place.”

April’s Place was a café/play centre that Mieka and her business partner, Lisa Wallace, had opened in North Central. It was the twin of UpSlideDown, the original centre they had opened in the Cathedral District four years earlier. UpSlideDown was an uncomplicated gold mine. April’s Place was proving to be neither.

Mieka listened intently to the conversation. “Okay, I’ll be right there,” she said.

She broke the connection and groaned. “After three days on the job, our new manager just resigned. Mum, I hate to leave you, but I really have to stay on top of this.”

I sat up. “I’m fine, Mieka. I have food to eat, tea to drink, and I’ll bring the dogs in to keep me company. I’ll lock up when I leave.”

Mieka bent down and embraced me. “I worry about you,” she said.

“Don’t. Take care of the problem at April’s Place and let me luxuriate in a morning off.”

After Mieka left, I poured myself a second cup of tea and gazed at the impossibly delicate cup that held the Earl Grey. My marriage to my late husband, Ian, had taken place in the time of cup-and-saucer showers. The cup in my hands had a narrative that I’d always found difficult to unravel. The focal point of the cup is a dark-haired Victorian lady in a full-length blue gown with a rose peplum. She appears to be doing nothing but enjoying the tranquility of her world, but the setting of her world is perplexing. A fragment of a building that appears to be the Palace of Westminster in London is prominent. Big Ben is easy to identify, but the river that flows past the palace is seemingly the Yellow River of China, and the illustrations on the teacup place the dark-haired lady in a land of Roman columns and Oriental paper lanterns. The handle of the cup is a beautifully rendered blue and yellow butterfly whose name I once knew.

I gazed at the serene lady. With the Yellow River flowing past Big Ben and all those Roman columns and paper lanterns, her life must have been complex, but she seemed to be handling it. I envied her.

I carried the tray back into the kitchen. Through the screen door I saw that rain was coming down, soft and dense – the kind of rain that would last awhile. I let the dogs in, went back to the living room, turned on the gas fireplace, stretched out on the couch, and covered myself with an afghan. The house was fragrant with the scents of memories: morning pancakes, marigolds, wet dog fur. It wasn’t long before I drifted off to sleep.

My dream had no beginning and was quickly over. I was holding on to an old rubber inner tube – the kind children used to float on at the lake when I was young. In the dream, I was an adult and I wasn’t floating. A rope attached the inner tube to a slick red speedboat that was moving so quickly that the inner tube to which I was clinging was periodically lifted out of the water. The ride was exhilarating but terrifying.
On the shoreline, cottages and docks sped by in a blur. People on shore were waving, but I couldn’t let go of the inner tube to wave back. Finally, the red speedboat turned towards the centre of the lake, and the driver opened the motor full throttle. The water in the lake’s centre was black and deep. There were weeds there that I knew could ensnare me and pull me under. I couldn’t hold on any longer. I let go of the inner tube and the red speedboat kept on without me. The ride was over. I was safe. I could swim back to shore, but I was overwhelmed by an existentially deep sense of loss. When I awakened, I was still numb with grief.

I pulled the afghan close. Always sensitive to my moods, Willie moaned beside me. I reached down and stroked his head. “It’s all right,” I said. “It was just a dream.”

If, as Carl Jung believed, dreams offer solutions to problems people are facing in their waking lives, the message in my dream was simple to interpret. All I had to do was let go of the rope that tied me to the red speedboat. But I knew that, in the curious logic of dreams, Zack was the driver of the speedboat. And I knew that, no matter what, I would never separate myself from him.

I picked up my cell and hit Zack’s number on speed-dial. His voice was deep and warm. “Hey, telepathy,” he said. “I was just about to call you to thank you for the pictures of the girls.”

Still caught in the web of my dream, I couldn’t speak. “Is everything okay?” Zack said.

“Everything’s fine. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve loved you from the night we went to the Stone House and looked down on the valley together. I don’t want a different life, Zack.”

“Has something come up?

“Fear,” I said. “But I’ll get over it.” I cleaned up the dishes and went into the hall where Mieka had taken my jacket
and the dogs’ leashes. On the cobbler’s bench by the door there were some old photo albums. On special days, like the first day of school, Mieka brought out the albums to show Madeleine and Lena their grandfather, Ian. Mieka had idolized her father, and she wanted her girls to know the kind of man he’d been. I picked up the album on the top of the pile and leafed through.

I had taken most of the photos. There were a few of Ian and me together, looking impossibly young as we unwrapped presents on Christmas morning or cross-country skied, but most were of Ian and our children.

I had never doubted that Ian loved our kids, but he was an absentee father. I looked at the picture of Mieka’s Grade Eight farewell ceremony. Ian and I were flanking her, as proud parents do, but Ian had missed the bonfire for the Grade Eights and their parents after the ceremony. There was some crisis at the legislature, and he’d had to go back to the office. I wondered idly if Ian’s absence had hurt Mieka or if she even remembered.

The second album was filled with photos of Ian and me in the first heady days after we surprised Saskatchewan and ourselves by winning the provincial election. Howard Dowhanuik was premier and Ian had become Attorney General and second-in-command.

The album seemed to contain another life. In the early days, all of us connected to the new government had been like family, but ambition, time, geography, and mortality had separated us. Most of the people in the photos were now just names on my Christmas card list, but there were two with whom I’d stayed close. Our party had had a good run – almost fifteen years in government, but like most politicians, Howard went to the dance once too often. After we lost the election, Jill Oziowy, the ebullient redhead who had handled the party’s communications during our years in
power, stayed around for a while, but when Ian died, she left Saskatchewan and moved to Toronto to work for Nation
TV
. She’d been in New York City or Toronto ever since. Jill had been like a member of our family and I missed her, but over the years she’d sent a number of plum assignments that required a background in politics my way, so we had stayed in touch, albeit mainly electronically.

Howard Dowhanuik and I had stayed close too. The events of the past twenty-four hours had spooked me. Logic suggested that Cronus’s death was somehow connected to Zack’s campaign for mayor, but I couldn’t connect the dots. Howard had the old politician’s passion for political gossip, and it occurred to me that he might have heard rumblings about what was going on inside Scott Ridgeway’s campaign.

Howard’s condo was on a cul-de-sac five blocks from Mieka’s. I’d called ahead, and he was waiting at the door for me. During his college days, Howard had boxed professionally. His time in the ring and his time in politics had given him the battered wariness of an aging eagle. I reached out and touched his cheek. “You shaved for me,” I said. “I’m honoured.”

“You’ve always been worth shaving for,” Howard mumbled, then, embarrassed at his display of sentiment, he shifted his focus to my car. “Why don’t you bring in the dogs? Give us time for a real visit.”

“Fine with me,” I said. I pointed to elections signs on his lawn. One read SHREVE; the other read GINA BROWN. “Nice signs,” I said. Gina Brown was running for city council in Ward 3. She was a nurse-practitioner with innovative ideas about community-centred health care and a take-no-prisoners approach that I found appealing.

When the dogs and I came into the house, Howard was already in the kitchen, pouring coffee. I picked up my mug and took a sip. The coffee was good but very strong. “This should clear away the cobwebs,” I said.

“I sure as hell need something,” Howard growled.

“Troubles?”

“Boredom,” Howard said. “Never get old, Jo.”

I put my hands over my ears. “Can’t hear you,” I said. “Howard, there are a dozen things you could be doing. Writing that book you’ve been going to write for twenty years. Volunteer work. Teaching. The university would be thrilled to have you teach that class in Canadian politics again next semester.”