A Chill Rain in January Read online

  He came across a small shopping mall and discovered a flower shop there that was still open. He chose something called a gloxinia for the old folks and decided he had to get out of the shop then, because the fragrances in there were suffocating him. He’d get Maura candy, he thought. But then he wondered if she might be on a diet. Maura was naturally thin, and he’d never known her to go on a diet before, but everybody seemed to be doing it, so maybe she was, too.

  He stood there, holding the damned gloxinia, looking worriedly at an African violet, and wondered what to do. He thought about buying her a kite. He saw her standing on top of a hill, the wind blowing her skirt and her hair, and she was holding on to the kite he’d given her; it was sailing high in the sky above her, and she was laughing. He stood there holding the gloxinia and looking at an African violet and tried to remember how it was that he’d gotten to be divorced.

  The door opened before he got a chance to ring the bell, and there were his daughters, both of them. As soon as he saw them he felt a terrible pain in his heart that he guessed must be joy, because he certainly didn’t feel sad, seeing them standing there. They were smiling and holding out their arms, and then they were hugging him; he felt their hair against his cheeks; they smelled sweet and young. He closed his eyes and let them hold him. He thought he would have been content to stand there forever, seeing nothing, protected by the encircling arms of his daughters. He realized that beneath his closed lids his eyes were watering. He blinked several times, then, shit, who cares, he thought, and looked at them defiantly, Diana and Janey; so he was their hostage, so what, he thought; and then he saw that they were crying, too.

  “Oh dear, look at us,” said Diana. “My God, Janey, he’s brought plants. Are they for us?”

  “He knows we’d kill them,” said Janey. “They must be for Mom.” She gave him a tender, approving smile.

  “One of them is for your mom,” said Alberg. “This one,” he said, holding out the violet. “The other one’s for your grandmother.”

  “Nothing for us,” said Diana resignedly, and took the plants from him.

  Janey took Alberg by the arm and led him inside. “Mom,” she caroled, “Dad’s here,” and she gave him a sideways smile that he couldn’t decipher.

  Maura appeared at the end of the hall. She was instantly familiar to him. This happened every time he saw her, and he was always surprised. Even when something about her had changed—the way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, something about her makeup—he noted this and in the same instant felt an intimacy with her that he had never known with anyone else. Seeing her made him smile and caused his bones to ache, all at the same time.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi, Karl. Come on in. Do you want some coffee?”

  She led the way into the kitchen. Behind him, his daughters danced and shuffled.

  His mother-in-law sat at the kitchen table, cradling a mug of coffee between her hands. There was a magazine open on the table in front of her, and she was wearing her reading glasses. She didn’t take them off, so he knew she didn’t intend to stand up and give him a hug. He bent to kiss her cheek, murmuring hello, and she said, “Hello, Karl,” in that limpid, melodious voice he liked so much. Her face was wrinkled and leathery; she had always loved the sun.

  Alberg backed away from her and sat down. “How have you been, Peggy?”

  “I’ve been reasonably well, Karl. And you?”

  “Oh, thriving,” he said, looking up at Diana and Janey. “Thriving. Well, you know. Maybe not thriving.”

  “Look, Grandma,” said Diana, setting the gloxinia on the table. “Dad brought it. And Mom, this one’s for you,” she said, offering the violet.

  They each said thank you, and Alberg said it was nothing.

  “It’s really very good to see you, Karl,” said Maura, smiling at him, and Alberg smiled back, cleared his throat, stammered something—and thought suddenly, inexplicably, of Zoe Strachan, appearing, backlit, at the top of her basement stairs. Maura was wearing a gray sweater and a red-and-gray plaid skirt, and shoes with high heels. So of course she’d be wearing pantyhose, too. Or stockings. He acknowledged that it was possible she might be wearing stockings. But never, he thought, gazing at her fondly—surely, never—a black garter belt.

  Then Maura’s father came into the kitchen. Alberg stood up, and they shook hands.

  “Pop,” said Diana, “look at that. Grandpa’s smaller around the waist than you are. I thought policemen were supposed to stay fit.”

  “I quit smoking,” said Alberg feebly.

  “Well, that’s good,” said Arthur Lobb.

  “That’s very good,” said Maura. “How long has it been?”

  “Six months.”

  “Well, look, the worst is over, then,” said Arthur. “Or so I’ve heard.”

  “Diana smokes,” said Janey. “I wish she wouldn’t.”

  “Shut your mouth, sweetheart,” said Diana.

  “I hear you’re taking us out for supper,” said Arthur.

  “Yeah,” said Alberg heartily. “Where would you like to go?”

  “I took the liberty,” said Maura, “of making reservations.”

  “Ah,” said Alberg.

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, no. Of course not.” He beamed weakly at them all, struggling for equilibrium against a sudden and powerful attack of déjà-vu.

  Chapter 28

  THERE WAS a bidet in the bathroom.

  Ramona hadn’t seen a bidet since she and Anton took their only trip to Europe, back in 1956.

  She stood in the bathroom and stared at it, and decided that every time she felt a bit fuzzy about where she was and what she was doing, she’d go have a look at that bidet, which was bound to snap her back into reality.

  The bidet wasn’t the only funny thing in the place, either, not on your life.

  “Dear Family,” she wrote, in pencil, on the lined paper she’d brought from Marcia and Robbie’s house. “Dear Family: I’m staying in a lovely little cottage just outside Sechelt. It’s surrounded by trees that make nice soft swishing sounds. There are a lot of birds, too, starlings and sparrows, robins and blue jays.”

  She was sitting in the tiny kitchen, at a table that was round, made of wood, painted white, and had two sturdy matching chairs. The curtains were closed. Ramona had found a box of tacks in a drawer and covered the broken window with a piece of cardboard.

  “It’s very cozy here,” she wrote. “Although I must admit it’s an odd sort of place.”

  The cottage consisted of the kitchen, the bathroom, a living room, and a bedroom.

  “They keep the television set in the bedroom,” Ramona wrote to her brothers and sisters, “and they have a video machine, too, and a big collection of movies.”

  Almost the first thing she’d done after she moved in was put in a movie and turn it on. She watched for a minute or two, then sank onto the bed, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. She’d heard about movies like that, of course. Now she’d seen twenty-five of them.

  “I am house-sitting here,” she wrote, “and the owners have provided all the food and household supplies I need.”

  In the cupboards Ramona had found jars of macadamia nuts, tins of smoked oysters, boxes of English crackers, cans of peaches. In the fridge, several brands of imported beer, and many bottles of mineral water. In a cabinet in the living room, just about every kind of liquor and liqueur imaginable, plus a few bottles of wine.

  Under the sink in the bathroom she had been relieved to discover three four-roll packages of toilet paper and several boxes of Kleenex.

  “House-sitting is a very easy and pleasant job,” Ramona told her family. “I wish I’d thought to do it years ago.”

  There was a film of dust over everything when she arrived. The cottage obviously hadn’t been inhabited for months. Ramona had given it a thorough going-over, but she hadn’t used the vacuum cleaner she found in the closet, because of the noise.

  �
�It’s very interesting, staying in other people’s houses,” she wrote. “What with the television, and the VCR, and all the books they’ve got here, I have a great deal to entertain me.”

  Every single book in the bookcase, which was in the living room, next to the Franklin stove, was about sex. One or two of them she recognized. She was amazed that some of them had been allowed to get printed.

  “It’s an extremely comfortable little house,” she told her sisters and brothers. “I think that everything in it must have cost quite a lot of money.”

  She couldn’t make a fire in the Franklin stove, of course. But luckily there was a space heater in the bedroom.

  The brass bed was huge. When she got into it at night Ramona felt like an island adrift in a sea of bedding. She was certainly snug and warm, though, as she sat there sipping gin and watching television.

  In the bedside table she’d found something she finally decided must be a—well, she wasn’t sure exactly what it was called. But she thought she knew what it was for, by the shape of it.

  “I’m writing so that you won’t worry about me,” she told her brothers and sisters. “Maybe Horace or Martha called one of you and told you I left the hospital. Well, this note is just to let you know that I’m just fine and enjoying myself a lot.”

  In the bedroom she’d also found ladies’ underwear made of black lace, which was fine if you liked that sort of thing, but these pieces of underwear had great chunks missing from them, so that parts of the body could stick right out of them.

  “I’ll say goodbye now, and I’ll drop you another line when I know where I’ll be going next.”

  And most peculiar of all the peculiar things in this peculiar little house were the pieces of rope—soft rope, but rope just the same—that were tied onto the posts at the four corners of the bed.

  Ramona had stood in the bedroom and looked at those pieces of rope and thought, and thought, frowning, chewing delicately on the inside of her lower lip…

  She considered untying them, getting rid of them.

  But she decided to leave them there.

  She folded her letter carefully and put it in the pocket of her dress, ready to be mailed just as soon as she came across an envelope and a stamp.

  She stood up and opened the cupboard, looking for something to have for dinner, and then she heard a car.

  Ramona hurried into the living room and pulled back the curtain just a smidgen. She watched as the sound of the engine got louder, and then she saw the Strachan woman’s car pass slowly along the driveway, heading for the house, and it was thirty feet away and there were tree branches to peer between, but she was almost positive that in the seat next to the Strachan woman, who lived in that house all by herself, was a child.

  Chapter 29

  ALBERG woke halfway through the night, feeling in the palms of his hands the shape of Zoe Strachan’s ass.

  He sat up in his bed and took his dream in his mind and looked at it.

  In his dream they had been emerging from something, a room, a grove of trees—he wasn’t sure, now, from what, exactly. He stood behind her. They faced, together, another person, maybe a group of people. They were emerging from privacy into the public world, but they carried, eloquently, their new intimacy with them.

  Her hands were clasped in front of her. He stood behind her. His hands rested on her hips, a light embrace, casual, his hands bracketing her waist, lightly, and then he saw in the dream, and felt, his hands flex and trace the curve, of her buttocks.

  It was an intimate caress; and she was accepting of it. And the fact that he did not whisper to her, did not touch her neck, her temple, with his lips; the fact that he looked straight ahead at the person, or thing, or aspect, that they both observed, serenely, with almost all of their attention—this was the thing most sexually stirring to Alberg when he awoke.

  He stroked her ass. She was letting him do it. And he knew that if he turned her around, her eyes would be bright, there would be a smile there for him; her mouth would open for his tongue. He knew it. He had experienced it, in his dream; and he knew, in his dream, that he would experience it again, the lustful appetite of Zoe Strachan.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Alberg in his bed; shaken.

  Chapter 30

  APOTTED yellow chrysanthemum sat on the counter of the second-floor nurses’ station; it sported a dusty red bow, and a small card with “Thanks!” scrawled on it was attached to a metal spike that had been stuck into the soil.

  “That thing’s dying,” said Cassandra to the nurse. It was lunchtime on Sunday.

  Doris Moon looked at it hopefully. “Do you think so?”

  “Is Mom still in her room?”

  The nurse nodded. “Won’t budge. Not for me, anyway.”

  Cassandra’s mother was the only occupant of a four-bed ward. She lay propped up on two pillows, and the bed was slightly raised, too, so that she could look out the window at the lawn sweeping down to a gazebo that in summer was covered with climbing roses. The pathways that swirled lazily across the landscape were empty, glistening in the rain. In fine weather wheelchairs perambulated, nurses pushed IV stands, the walking wounded tottered from flower bed to flower bed.

  “I hear they’re going to tear that thing down,” said Mrs. Mitchell, staring out the window at the gazebo, “and take the gardens out, and build an extended-care wing out there. Is that true?” She turned her head and saw that it was Cassandra standing there. Her face crumpled, and she began to cry.

  Cassandra hurried to embrace her. “Mom. What’s the matter?”

  “Nobody told me you were coming,” said her mother. “You didn’t tell me you were coming now.”

  “I thought I’d see if they’d let me have lunch with you.”

  Her mother pulled away and fumbled at the box of tissue on the table beside her bed. “You should have asked me first,” she said.

  “Okay, Mom. May I have lunch with you?”

  Her mother blew her nose into a handful of tissues.

  “Maybe we could get them to give it to us in the solarium,” said Cassandra.

  Mrs. Mitchell made a sound of derision. “You call that a solarium?” She dropped the tissues into a metal wastebasket.

  Cassandra sat in the chair next to the bed. Her mother wasn’t wearing her reading glasses, and her face looked exposed and vulnerable. But her skin, though wrinkled, glowed, and her gray hair was soft and shining. “You’re looking pretty good,” said Cassandra. “When are they letting you out of here?”

  “Alex is going to let me know today.”

  Cassandra reached out to stroke some hair away from her mother’s cheek. Mrs. Mitchell pulled back, lifting a hand as if in self-defense. They looked at each other. Mrs. Mitchell lowered her hand.

  “When I was little,” said Cassandra, “you used to wash my hair in the sink, and then you’d rinse it, and then you’d fill the sink with cold water and add some vinegar and rinse it again in that.”

  “I remember.”

  “It got out all the leftover soap, you said. So that my hair could shine.”

  “I remember.”

  “But I always wondered—why did it have to be cold water?”

  “It didn’t have to be cold water.” Mrs. Mitchell pushed the bedcovers back. “But it didn’t have to be hot water, either.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “And we were always counting our pennies. Come on, then. Hand me my robe. Let’s go, if we’re going.”

  The solarium had many windows, grand and wide. But all that could be seen through them was rain, heavy and tangible. It looked capable of entangling anyone trying to walk through it, of packaging him up in its thick wet strands. Through the skylights came a dense gray leakage of something purporting to be light.

  In one corner sat an old man, thin and knobbly. He was wearing brown trousers, baggy at the knees, and a white shirt with the top button undone, both too big for him, and brown socks and a pair of worn leather slippers. Wide red plaid suspenders held up his
pants. He sat with his knees apart, holding a cane, tilted forward somewhat, leaning on the cane, and his gaze was aimed at the floor. He didn’t move when Cassandra and her mother entered the room.

  In another corner a slim young woman wearing a blue terry-cloth robe over her hospital gown sat on a sofa with a man Cassandra thought was probably her husband. He was holding her hands and talking to her quietly. She listened intently; every so often she nodded.

  There was a console television set near the elderly man. It was tuned to a gardening program from Victoria, but the sound was off.

  Mrs. Mitchell moved away from Cassandra and headed for a large schleffera that sat in a plastic pot near the windows. She reached down and stuck a finger in the soil. “Look at this,” she said, as Cassandra approached. She rubbed some of the soil between her fingers. “Completely dried out.” She looked around the room for support, but nobody was paying attention. “I didn’t bring my glasses,” she said, peering at the leaves of the plant. “Can you see any dust?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Cassandra.

  “And they call it a damned solarium,” said Mrs. Mitchell violently. “No damn sun; one plant, nobody looks after it.” She shook her head. Her eyes glittered with tears.

  “Who’s for lunch?” said a voice from the doorway.

  “We are,” said Cassandra gratefully. “That is, my mother is.”

  “I’ve got coffee and sandwiches for the visitors,” said the nurse, wheeling in a cart. “Can’t let you go home hungry.”

  The elderly man raised his head. “When are they coming for me, then?”

  “It’s the doctor that’s coming, Mr. Simpson,” said the nurse. “He’ll be along soon.” She pulled a TV tray from a stack leaning against the wall and set it up in front of him. “Meanwhile you might as well have your lunch.”

  “I can’t stand this,” Mrs. Mitchell hissed in Cassandra’s ear. “I want to go back to my room.”

  “Let’s eat first, Mom,” Cassandra whispered. “She’s gone to all the trouble of bringing it here. Have lunch, then I’ll take you back to your room.” She nudged her mother gently down onto the sofa and sat next to her.