Burying Ariel (25 page)

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 thinking 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-marked 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.

Taylor plunked herself next to Howard. My old friend was only marginally better with children than he was with women, but he had one party trick that Taylor loved. He told Tommy Douglas’s old political parable about Mouseland with immense panache. Taylor had always been fascinated by the story about the little mice who, every four years, walked to the polls and blithely cast their ballots for an all-cat slate of candidates. That night, however, as Howard moved towards the story’s climax, my daughter was squirming. Howard had barely described the scene in which one little mouse proposes electing a government made up of mice and is locked up as a Bolshevik when Taylor streaked out of the room.

“Losing your touch,” I said to Howard. “She didn’t even stick around for ‘You can lock up a mouse or a man, but you can’t lock up an idea,’ and that’s the best line.”

“Maybe Bruce and Benny got to her,” Howard said gloomily. “Any more of that gin left?”

Luckily, my daughter was back before I had to tell Howard that, as far as he was concerned, the bar was closed. She was struggling under the weight of a canvas almost as big as she was. Howard jumped up to help her, and she sighed dramatically. “This was supposed to be a surprise, but when you told the story I knew I couldn’t wait.” Her eyes caught mine. “Jo, I won first prize in that Social Studies contest. Ms. Cousin wanted to tell you, but I thought it would be so neat if you thought you were just coming to the Legislature as a parent-helper, but it was really because I’d won.” She looked up at Howard. “Could you turn the painting so we can see it?”

Howard dropped to his knees and held the canvas out in front of him. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s Mouseland. Look, Jo, there’s the Legislature and there are all the mice, running the show. It’s great, Taylor, but who’s that old mouse – the tough-looking one with the snarl?”

“You!” Taylor crowed. “You’re in charge.”

“Maybe I’ll do a better job this time,” Howard said. He turned to me. “So fill me in. What’s this all about?”

“Actually, it was an idea Ben Jesse had to get kids thinking about studying government. All the grade twos from the city were eligible to submit projects. Livia chaired the committee that judged the entries. I knew she was going to be at the presentation tomorrow, but she didn’t breathe a word about Taylor winning.” I looked at my daughter. “Neither did you. I can’t believe you didn’t spill the beans.”

Taylor clenched her fists in triumph. “Angus says I can’t keep a secret. I kept this one right till the day before you were supposed to find out.”

“A record,” I said.

She ignored me. “The prize is you get to meet your Member of the Legislature and then you and your parent have refreshments with her or him.”

Howard hooted. “So, Jo, you’ll be breaking bread with Bev Pilon. That’ll be nice for you.”

I had tried hard to defeat Bev Pilon in the last election. She was smart, rich, and unswervingly committed to the proposition that the sleek should inherit the earth. In a real-life Mouseland, she would be Queen of the Mean Cats.

“My cup runneth over,” I said.

Taylor scrunched her face. “But you are glad I won.”

I reached out and touched her cheek. “I couldn’t be more proud. Now we’d better get that painting in the house before the mosquitoes splat into it.”

When I returned, I thought for a moment that Howard was asleep. He was stretched out on the lazy lounge with his eyes closed, but when he heard my step, he turned his head towards me. “There
are
good times,” he said.

I reached over and took his hand. “Plenty of them,” I said. “And there will be more.”

Across the yard, Charlie and Eli were getting out of the pool – Eli picked up a towel, tied it around his waist in the way of teenage boys, then threw another towel to Charlie. Charlie wrapped himself in his, instinctively covering as much of his body as he could.