A Chill Rain in January Page 12

  Mr. Simpson regarded the food being arrayed before him with an expression of amazement, as though he couldn’t imagine what its purpose might be.

  “There you are,” said the nurse. “Dig in.”

  “I’ll wait for my brother,” said Mr. Simpson. “I told him to meet me here.”

  Mrs. Mitchell stood up. “I’m going back to my room,” she said, and Cassandra hurried to follow her. “You can’t get a moment’s peace in this place,” said Mrs. Mitchell angrily, “unless you keep to your own room, your own bed.” She hurried along the hall, past the nurses’ station and into her room.

  “There you are!” Alex Gillingham beamed. “I thought you’d escaped!” He leaned toward them. “Did you hear about Ramona?”

  Helen Mitchell looked at him and began to cry again.

  “Mom,” said Cassandra, helpless and exasperated.

  Dr. Gillingham put his arms around Cassandra’s mother. “There, there,” he said, giving Cassandra a reassuring nod. “I’m sending you home tomorrow, Helen. It’s too damn depressing around here.”

  Cassandra felt suddenly exhausted. She slumped into the chair.

  Mrs. Mitchell pressed her lips together, wrapped her robe tightly around her, and clambered back into bed.

  “All you need now is rest,” said the doctor. “And you don’t get a hell of a lot of that in a hospital.”

  “What on earth’s wrong with you now?” said Helen Mitchell accusingly. “You’re limping.”

  “Took a spill on a climb last weekend,” said Gillingham proudly. “Nothing serious.”

  “I saw Marjorie the other day,” said Mrs. Mitchell. “Crank this bed up a bit more, will you, Cassandra? She’s looking well. Very well, as a matter of fact.”

  “That’s good,” said Gillingham indulgently. “I’m glad to hear it. I remain very fond of Marjorie.”

  “Dyed her hair.”

  He looked at her in astonishment. “Who, Marjorie?”

  “Blond.”

  “Marjorie?”

  “Suits her very well.”

  “Blond?”

  “She’s a pleasant woman, Marjorie. I always liked her.”

  “How’s that, Mom?” said Cassandra. “High enough?”

  “Just fine, thank you, Cassandra.”

  “I can’t imagine Marjorie with blond hair,” said Gillingham, frowning. “I keep seeing Jean Harlow in my head.”

  “She looks as she always looked,” said Mrs. Mitchell. “Except that her hair is blond. And she’s lost about thirty pounds.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “She’s got a boyfriend, too, or so I hear.”

  “Good Christ.” Gillingham limped back toward the door. “That’s enough. Don’t tell me any more.”

  “You’re not going to find another woman the likes of Marjorie up on top of some mountain, you know, Alex.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he goes up there looking for, Mom,” said Cassandra. She took a furtive peek at her watch.

  “It’s no way for a man your age to be spending his spare time. All you’re going to do is find a way to maim yourself for life,” said Mrs. Mitchell with relish. “Or kill yourself entirely.”

  “It can be more dangerous indoors than out, Helen,” said Gillingham. He leaned casually against the doorframe. “You know I do some work for the Mounties? Well, I was out on a call the other day. A chap fell down some basement stairs. Deader than a doornail.”

  Helen Mitchell looked shocked. “Who? I haven’t heard a word about it. Who was it?’

  “You know that Strachan woman? Her brother. Visiting her from West Vancouver.” He made a plunging motion with one hand. “Down the stairs, right onto his head.”

  “The poor woman,” said Mrs. Mitchell sympathetically. “How awful for her.”

  “Actually,” said Gillingham, “it didn’t seem to bother her a whit. Not one whit. Decidedly unsisterlike she is, that one.” He glanced at Cassandra. “I think Karl noticed it, too,” he said, and Cassandra’s heart gave a gentle lurch.

  Then they were both looking at her, her mother from the bed, Alex Gillingham from the doorway. Cassandra, sitting, felt overweight and frumpy. She was afraid she was going to blush.

  “I forgot to tell you, Mom,” she blurted. “Karl said to say hello.”

  “Karl who?” said her mother coldly.

  “Karl Alberg, Helen,” said Gillingham, grinning.

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Mitchell vaguely. “The policeman.”

  “Now, I don’t want you to be on your own just yet,” said the doctor. “Can you stay with Cassandra for a few days? Say, ’til the end of the week?”

  “Oh I’m sure that won’t be convenient, Alex,” said Mrs. Mitchell. “My daughter leads a very busy life.” She looked appraisingly at Cassandra. “Too busy for her own good. I worry about you, Cassandra, really I do. Here you’ve been back from England for—what, a week? Two weeks? And already you’re off somewhere else. She’s going to Victoria,” she said wearily to Gillingham, “for a few days. Oh I can’t keep up with her, this one.”

  Cassandra sighed, picked up her shoulder bag, and stood up. Shit, she thought.

  Chapter 31

  ALBERG, tying his tie in his Calgary motel on Monday morning, studied his receding hairline with dismay. Blond hair was good, at least it didn’t show the gray, but at this rate he soon wouldn’t have hair of any color at all up there.

  In July he would be fifty. His stomach did a kind of flip whenever he thought about that.

  Still, he knew that a lot of women preferred men who’d reached a certain level of maturity.

  He had to lose some weight. Fifteen pounds anyway. Maybe twenty. No muscle there anymore, he thought, distractedly hitting himself in the diaphragm—he’d always prided himself on his ability to take a blow to the stomach. He was pure fat now, pure damn fat. Of course that wasn’t true, he thought, staring into the mirror. There was muscle there. Of course there was.

  A guy like Sanducci, girlfriends strewn all over the peninsula…that was all well and good, fine, but what did a guy like that have to offer a real woman, an adult female, someone seductive, yes, and attractive, sure—but someone who was discriminating, as well.

  He squirted something called European Styling Foam into his hand and rubbed it on his hair and combed it and patted it until it decided to stay down. Now he had a wet spot on the top of his head. It’ll dry, he told himself, long before I get there. He realized that he wasn’t looking forward much to the afternoon, and this dismayed him.

  He had enjoyed spending the previous day with his daughters. But it had made him sad, too, and resentful. Who the hell knew when he’d see them again?

  Why couldn’t all of them have ended up in Central Canada, near his parents, instead of way the hell and gone out here in the West, near Maura’s? It wasn’t fair to Diana and Janey not to have the steadying influence of their other grandparents, who possessed a bit of damn dignity, who saw things clearly, as they really were, not as they damn wanted to see them. His kids had grown up thinking of themselves as Westerners, just because they were born here, and this despite the fact that they had a whole damn clutch of relatives in Ontario, despite the fact that their own damn father had been born out there.

  He washed his hands and dried them and put on his jacket.

  On a day like this everybody should be there, he thought. All four of their grandparents should be here, not just half of them. But Alberg’s father wasn’t well, and his mother wouldn’t travel without her husband.

  Alberg placed another call to Sechelt.

  “She hasn’t turned up yet,” said Sokolowski. “We’ve been checking the house. No sign of her.”

  “Damn,” said Alberg. “We better do another search of the area, Sid. Maybe she went for a walk, fell down, broke her hip or some damn thing.”

  “Yeah. I’ll get on it.”

  “Any word from Gillingham?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s got a bee in
his bonnet over this Strachan thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, hell, nothing. There’s a wound, there’s a bruise or some damn thing; Gillingham’s got it into his head maybe it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Sokolowski hesitated, then said, “Well, I don’t like the guy, you know that, Staff. But I gotta admit, he’s good.”

  “He’s good, yeah. But he’s full of shit on this one.”

  “You’ll be back this afternoon, right?”

  “It’ll be evening by the time I get to Sechelt.”

  “If Gillingham gets the report over here today I’ll make sure it’s on your desk.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Sid.”

  Alberg buttoned his jacket, looked at himself in the mirror, unbuttoned it, turned left and right, put his hands casually in his pockets, took them out, buttoned the jacket and straightened up, studied himself some more. Shit on it, he said, finally, and undid the buttons. He patted his pockets, checking for his wallet, and collected car keys and room key from the top of the dresser.

  Then he took two small gift-wrapped boxes from the desk and put them carefully in one of his jacket pockets. He was ready to go.

  Hundreds and hundreds of students were graduating that day from the University of Calgary. Hundreds and hundreds of cars, it seemed to Alberg, were trying to find places to park there. Maura and her parents had decided to travel by cab and had offered to pick up Alberg on their way, but he had declined. Now he wished he hadn’t.

  It was still cold and gray—though at least, thank God, it wasn’t snowing—and he hoped his daughters would be warm enough in their graduation robes as they walked in the procession to the gymnasium.

  Somehow in the crowd Maura spotted him and waved and shouted until he saw her. He had hoped to sneak in unobserved and bury himself among the hordes, but when he saw her he was glad. She led him to a seat somewhere near the rafters of the building, shouting, “We should have gotten here a good hour ago. I had no idea people would come so early.”

  When the ceremonies finally got under way Alberg realized that the place was an acoustic disaster. It was impossible to hear anything being said on the stage below. Appreciative laughter washed upward from time to time, apparently in response to witticisms emitted by the various honorary-degree recipients, the president of the university, and God only knew who else.

  Alberg had missed his own graduation, having opted to pay a hasty visit to his parents instead, before reporting to the RCMP training center in Regina. So he had imagined being overcome at the graduation of his daughters; he had expected to have to struggle not to let tears spring to his eyes; he had thought he might have to put an arm around Maura, comforting her as she wept. Now he was chagrined because Maura was calm and dry-eyed and he himself didn’t feel a single damn thing except irritation because he couldn’t hear the names as they were called out.

  His mind wandered. To Cassandra. To Benjamin Strachan. To Zoe. He wondered what she did for a living. Maybe Isabella was right. Maybe she was a model.

  When the ceremonies were over, Maura and her parents went ahead by cab to the restaurant where they were all to have lunch and present Janey and Diana with their graduation gifts. Alberg said he would wait for his daughters to get rid of their gowns, and take them to the restaurant in his rented car.

  He stationed himself at the foot of the steps that led down from the gym. People were still spilling out of the building, and all around him graduating students were being embraced, wept over, smiled upon, and photographed. Alberg had forgotten to bring his own little point-and-shoot.

  He waited impatiently, shivering in his too-light jacket, wondering what the hell could be keeping them; after all, he had a plane to catch. He glanced at his watch, looked up again—and there they were, just a few feet away from him, standing on the steps and scanning the faces in the crowd below; they had stopped moving down the stairs, and people had to go around them, but nobody seemed to mind.

  Janey stood on the step behind Diana, the fingers of her right hand resting lightly on Diana’s shoulder. They wore black robes and mortarboards, and their faces were unexpectedly grave. They were looking for him among the throngs of parents; he was astonished at how beautiful they were.

  He knew that he was living one of those moments that freeze themselves forever in memory; how much better this is, he thought, than a photograph.

  When they saw him their faces became so radiant that he held out his arms, helpless, and they ran down the rest of the steps and he hugged them and offered them summer jobs in Sechelt.

  Later, feeling melancholy, he drove his rented car to the airport. He was standing in the Air Canada check-in line when he felt a hand on his arm.

  “Maura,” he said, delighted.

  “I decided I wanted to see you off,” she said. She was wearing a long gray coat with a red scarf around her neck, black boots, and a black handbag slung over her shoulder. “The kids wanted to come, too. But I wouldn’t let them.”

  Alberg reached the counter and handed over his ticket. He checked his bag, even though it was small enough to fit under the seat, and got a boarding pass.

  “Maybe there’s time for coffee,” he said, taking Maura by the arm. They went upstairs to the cafeteria.

  “So you’re going to give your daughters jobs this summer,” said Maura once they were seated.

  “Yeah,” he said, beaming. “I haven’t a damn clue what they’ll be. But I’ll think of something.”

  Maura had dark eyes and a dark complexion. She wore her hair short and straight, and she was tall and elegantly thin. Alberg gazed at her fondly. “They’re good kids, aren’t they,” he said.

  “Yes, Karl. They are.”

  Janey, who looked like her mother, had travelled for a year after graduating from high school. That was a year Alberg would never forget. He was constantly on the phone to Maura, wanting to know where Janey was, and what she was doing; what trouble she’d gotten herself into. She didn’t get into any trouble at all. At least, none that Alberg had been made aware of.

  Diana, who resembled Alberg’s Aunt Dorothea on his father’s side, was two years younger than her sister. She had skipped a year in elementary school, and she went straight from high school to university. Thus it was that the two of them had gone through university together.

  “They loved your gifts,” said Maura. He had given them silver jewelry, a locket for Janey and a bracelet for Diana, created by a West Coast Indian artist.

  “Oh, yeah? Do you think so?” But he already knew, from their reactions, that he had pleased them.

  “What are they going to do between now and the summer?” he asked their mother.

  “They’re coming back with me. Diana says she’ll be my housekeeper. Janey’s going to help in the shop for a few weeks.” Maura owned a women’s clothing store in Kamloops, a small city in the interior of British Columbia. “Then I think she’s going to go to California with a friend.”

  “What?” said Alberg “What friend? Why haven’t I heard about this?”

  “You’re hearing about it right now. And I’m sure Janey will be happy to tell you anything I’ve left out.”

  “What kind of a friend?”

  “You mean, is it a boyfriend? No.”

  “Damn good thing, too,” said Alberg, relaxing slightly.

  “How are you doing, Karl?”

  He opened his mouth to say a few hearty things, reassuring but impersonal, but he found that he couldn’t.

  Maura’s face reflected the serenity that had always haunted him. It was her private possession, precious and unshareable: an inner strength, a self-assurance that he deeply envied. He often thought that their marriage had been sacrificed to Maura’s serenity; that when it came to the crunch, her tranquillity was more important to Maura than he had been.

  He saw her regarding him, quite openly, with great affection, and he sighed and said, “Well. Let’s see. I like the job, of course. I like Sechelt. And I like th
e people there. I’ve got a couple of cats. I’m kind of lonely,” he said bravely, “from time to time.”

  “I thought you were seeing someone,” said Maura. “A librarian. Or is that over with?”

  Alberg, flustered, said, “Over—no, it’s not over; it—” Upon a screen somewhere in his mind flashed Zoe Strachan’s face, pensive and luminous. He opened his mouth to say something that would replace her image with Cassandra’s; he just needed a minute, only a minute, to find the right words.

  “Good,” said his ex-wife warmly. “By the way, Karl. I want you to know…I’m getting married again.”

  He gawked at her. His hand gave a convulsive jerk, striking his cup, which overturned and spilled black coffee all over the tabletop. He sprang to his feet, to avoid getting it on his good pants. “Shit.” He looked at Maura in despair. “Oh, good,” he said.

  She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up.

  “That’s grand, Maura.”

  She brushed coffee from the front of her gray coat and put her arms around him, firmly.

  “Oh, I’m happy for you.”

  “I know you are, Karl. I know you are.”

  Chapter 32

  IN THE PLANE Alberg mulled and fretted and worried; who was this son of a bitch she was going to marry? Marry! He shuddered. How had this come about?

  While driving from the Vancouver airport to Gibsons he regretted, lamented, and grieved. He didn’t even get out of his car on the ferry; he was too weak with self-pity. He refused to remember the guy’s name. Maura had said he was an accountant. Also divorced. With no children of his own. Christ, thought Alberg. The accountant might have had children of his own. Maura might have become somebody’s stepmother. Janey and Diana might have acquired stepbrothers, and stepsisters. Alberg was aghast.

  All night long, it seemed, he brooded, he languished, he mourned. He began seeing Maura in his mind with a shadow at her shoulder. At first the shadow was tall, broad, ominous. Pitilessly, Alberg cut him down to size. Still he remained there, no longer ominous but stubborn as hell, right at Maura’s shoulder; Alberg could almost hear him panting and slavering back there, refusing to leave her, clinging to her neck. Jesus. Then he became indignant. When Tuesday dawned he was sitting up in bed, mad as hell, waiting until it was no longer too early to phone Calgary. What the hell was she up to, getting married? What did his kids think about this, he’d like to know.