A Chill Rain in January Read online

  Zoe imagined herself putting her thoughts through a sieve. “I remember looking out the window at night,” she said. “Sometimes I couldn’t see any lights anywhere. I thought all the bulbs in the world had got burned out at the same time.” She glanced at her mother, and saw that she was smiling.

  “There, you see?” said Zoe’s mother. “You have lots of things to write about.”

  Zoe wrote those things and Miss Warren said what she had written was very good.

  Zoe thought hard about this for a long time.

  She decided that it was okay if she showed other people little tiny bits of what she thought and felt about things. But that it was really important to pick the right bits.

  She started writing down things for herself. First just on loose pieces of paper, trying things out.

  For example: Was it all right to say the thing she thought about Benjamin? she wondered on the paper.

  Then she said them, to her mother.

  Her mother became very upset and scolded her in a piercing voice and rushed from the room.

  Zoe then said the same things to her father. For a minute his face looked as if it was caving in. Then he leaned forward until his arms were resting on his knees and he was staring at the rug.

  “It’s perfectly normal,” he said, “to get angry with your brother. He gets angry with you sometimes, too.”

  He said a lot of other stuff, too, but Zoe wasn’t listening anymore. There were many things that people didn’t like to hear. When you said them they might pretend you didn’t mean them, or they might try to persuade you not to mean them anymore, or they might just get mad. Either it was very boring or, if you got them mad, you could get yelled at, or slapped.

  Eventually Zoe used her allowance to buy herself a scribbler, a notebook, where she could say things other people wouldn’t want to hear. And gradually, with the help of the scribbler, she got things sorted out.

  When she was little and had seen something she wanted very badly she had always just taken it, even when it belonged to somebody else. But this led to uproar and punishment. So she made a rule about it: “Don’t steal anything unless you can be sure nobody’s going to find out who did it.”

  When people asked her questions, she was in the habit of saying whatever came into her head. A lot of times these were made-up things. This got her into trouble, too. So she wrote in the exercise book: “Don’t say anything about anything unless you have to, and then try to say just a little bit, and make at least some of it true.”

  When something made her angry she struck out at it, whether it was a person or a thing, because this used up the anger. She disliked being angry. It was a hot, tight feeling which was very uncomfortable. But hitting, it seemed, was even worse than stealing; especially when she broke things. So one of her rules said: “When you get angry go away where nobody can see you and hit things that won’t break. And if your angriness still won’t go away, figure out a way to get back at the person you’re angry with so that nobody knows you did anything to her. Or him.”

  She made up an outside Zoe who was able to live by these rules. This was Zoe Number Two.

  Zoe Number One lived safe inside her head, and came out only when she was alone, and spoke aloud only in the scribblers.

  Chapter 5

  “THERE’S a car parked out by the Strachan woman’s place,” said Sandy McAllister, tossing the day’s mail on the counter. He was a small, wiry man of about forty who wore the postal worker’s summer uniform of shorts and knee socks all year round. Today he had also donned the winter cape, hooded and waterproof.

  “So what?” said Isabella Harbud from her desk.

  “Took her some mail today.” He leaned over the counter, to watch Isabella type.

  “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

  “You’re sure fast on that thing,” he said admiringly, scratching the back of his calf with the front of his other foot. “She’s one of the few people in town, most days they don’t get any. Makes you wonder.”

  “You ought to mind your own business, Mr. Sandy McAllister, that’s what you ought to do.” She whipped the paper from her typewriter and scrutinized it critically.

  “Nice car it is, too. Not many people visit that one, I’ll tell you,” said Sandy, hoisting the mailbag farther onto his shoulder.

  “You stop your gossip and get on about your business,” said Isabella. She slapped the letter on top of a pile of completed correspondence and cranked another sheet of paper into the typewriter.

  Sandy shrugged, hurt. “I’m just trying to make conversation. You got time for a coffee?”

  Isabella shot him a disapproving look. “Of course I don’t. What would my hubby think, if I were to go off for a coffee with the likes of you?”

  “Hoo hoo hoo, he’d be plenty worried, all right.” He gave her a wink and headed for the door.

  A small, furtive-looking woman darted into the reception area from the hall. She shook her head vigorously at Isabella and rushed outside, one step ahead of the mailman. Isabella looked after her and sighed. She glanced doubtfully over the counter at the woman who sat in the waiting area. “You’re next,” she said, getting to her feet.

  Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg of the Sechelt detachment, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, studied a list that lay upon the desk in front of him. He picked up a pencil and laboriously stroked through the first name that appeared on it. “Come,” he said when Isabella knocked on the door. She ushered the candidate in without looking at Alberg, and left quickly.

  Alberg stared at the woman who had planted herself firmly in the middle of his office. She stood five feet one inch tall, weighed over two hundred pounds, and had very little hair.

  “So,” he said finally, glancing down at his list. “Mrs.—Stratidakis, is it?”

  “It’s a good Greek name.”

  “Greek, yes, that’s what I thought it was. Tell me about yourself, Mrs. Stratidakis.”

  “I brought up eight kids, looked after all their wants, and my man’s, too.” Her small black eyes darted uneasily around the office. “I’ve never been in a police station before in my life. I’m a decent woman.”

  “Do you do any cooking? Or just cleaning?”

  “I do it for none, now, but my man and me. And I would do no cooking, no, sir.” Alberg noticed that the small amount of hair she possessed clung to her scalp in sparse outcroppings that looked rather like feathers. “And I would charge you considerable,” she said darkly, “for coming in here every day, to this police station.”

  “It’s not my office I want cleaned,” said Alberg. “It’s my house. In Gibsons.” Gibsons Landing is a town about twenty miles south of Sechelt.

  She gazed at him curiously. “You got no wife, huh?” She was perspiring a lot.

  “I’m divorced,” said Alberg. Her face clouded instantly with suspicion. “Oh, well,” said Alberg to himself. He stood up. “I don’t need to keep you any longer, Mrs. Stratidakis. Thank you for coming. Isabella will be in touch with you.”

  He closed the door after her, counted to thirty, opened it, and thundered, “Isabella!” When she appeared he said, “What the hell happened to that woman’s head?”

  “I hadn’t met her myself,” said Isabella. “She’d be a good hard worker, I’m told.”

  “She doesn’t like police officers,” he said sullenly. “She doesn’t approve of divorced men.”

  “My hubby gave me her name. He treated her son.” Isabella’s husband was a chiropractor.

  “Promise me, Isabella, that you won’t usher in another single damn candidate unless you’ve seen her first with your own beautiful golden eyes.” He crumpled the list and tossed it in the wastepaper basket.

  “You can trust me,” she said. Then, solemnly, she handed him a telephone message. She thrust some wayward strands of long auburn hair into the makeshift bun at the back of her head. “I heard she was back,” she said, nodding, and eased herself out of the office.

  Alberg picked up the phone an
d dialed the library.

  “You’re back,” he said, when Cassandra Mitchell answered. “Jesus. Finally.”

  “How are you, Karl?”

  “A whole lot better than I was a couple of minutes ago. How was England?”

  “Great. Terrific. But I’m glad to be home. It feels like I’ve been gone for years.’

  “You have. Years.” Actually she’d been away only four months, but it had felt like years to Alberg. “When am I going to see you?” She sounded incredibly sexy, over the phone. “How about tonight?”

  “I have to see my mother tonight. But I wondered, do you want to have lunch?”

  His office door opened and Isabella stood there, white-faced, wringing her hands.

  “Yeah. Lunch. That’s great.”

  “Karl,” said Isabella. She never called him Karl.

  “I have to go, Cassandra. I’ll see you at noon,” said Alberg, and hung up.

  “What is it?” He went to her quickly, thinking about car crashes, and Isabella’s seventeen-year-old son.

  But it wasn’t Isabella’s son.

  It was Ramona Orlitzki.

  Chapter 6

  THERE WAS no facility in Sechelt designed to look after elderly people incapable of caring for themselves. So they were housed on the top floor of the hospital. And that’s where Ramona Orlitzki ended up.

  Ramona was in her mid-seventies, tall and thin, with scrimpy hair and quick hands.

  Her husband, whose name was Anton, had died in 1980, and for several years after that Ramona lived happily by herself in a cottage next to the sea. The cottage was too cold in the worst days of winter, but there weren’t many of those, and she had a good, reliable heater.

  Ramona read voraciously. She particularly liked books with a lot of robust, juicy sex in them and would ask Cassandra Mitchell, the librarian, to keep her eye peeled for the kind of thing Ramona would enjoy.

  She was fond of saying, when her health was inquired after, that at her age she could expect anything but pregnancy; and then she’d laugh, squeezing up her face and wheezing, producing no actual laughter, just a lot of wheezing, and people watched, smiling but tense, and were relieved when Ramona recovered, wiped her eyes, and winked. She wore many layers of clothing all the time, all year long, and in this she resembled her friend Isabella Harbud.

  Ramona’s husband, Anton, had been a perfectly nice man, the town was agreed upon that, but he was painfully shy, and when he and Ramona moved to Sechelt upon their retirement, he burrowed himself a refuge and with exquisite stubbornness refused to leave it, except when absolutely necessary.

  Ramona had expected that retirement would bring him out of his shell, but that was clearly not to be. He never wanted to go bowling, or to a movie, or even to the restaurant on the corner for a bite to eat.

  Anton said he didn’t begrudge Ramona her going out and about, but she knew that deep in his heart his feelings were hurt; he had been hoping that in retirement Ramona would become more of a homebody, just as she had been hoping that he would want to go out more.

  So Ramona began keeping herself at home. She loved Anton, no doubt about that, after all, she’d lived with him day in and day out for fifty years, what’s that if not love, she’d say with a shrug. But she began to get pretty tired of staying in. “I’m chafing at the bit, is what I am,” she confided to Isabella, and then one day Anton got sick, and zap, just like that, the poor man was gone.

  And Ramona discovered that she had more friends than she’d realized; it was this discovery, rather than grief, that moved her to tears. They rallied round, her friends and neighbors. Bringing food, as people always do when there’s been a death. Inviting her to stay with them until she was over it. Taking her off to church and suchlike.

  For the next several years Ramona lived what she herself called a blissful life. She tended her garden, went for walks, spent time with her friends, did household chores—laundry, watering the plants, making the grocery list, paying her bills, that sort of thing.

  Every week she wrote notes to her children, and every two or three months she prepared her contribution to the Family Letter that circulated among her five brothers, two sisters, and herself. She joined the Old Age Pensioners and went to bowling, and dances, and sing-songs, and on the twice-yearly bus trips to Reno. She started to have her hair done, short and curly, a perm four times a year, regular as clockwork. She discovered a fondness for gin. She worked a little bit at the library, for Cassandra, as a volunteer, and threw the fear of God into careless people who thought only of themselves and never could be bothered returning books on time. She had lunch every Wednesday with Isabella and went out clamming from time to time with her friend Rosie, who lived four doors down. Every year in the summertime one of her children came to visit, Horace and his wife, Ella, from Cache Creek, or Martha and her husband, Jerome, who lived in Regina. And the grandchildren, two each. Ramona wasn’t all that fond of the grandchildren.

  Anyway, she was a fixture in the town, and her many friends and acquaintances were genuinely distressed when it turned out that there was something wrong with Ramona’s innards. She had an operation, and lots of people visited her in the hospital, bringing flowers and fruit, and knowing that she liked a nip or two of an evening, they smuggled in little bottles of gin, too, the kind served on airplanes or offered for sale as stocking stuffers at Christmastime.

  Eventually Ramona had recovered enough to totter on home. The Meals On Wheels people brought dinner right to her door, and other volunteers from the community took her shopping, and did her laundry, and gave her floors a sweep. But it turned out that the operation hadn’t done the trick, so she had to go back and have another one, and then a third one, and by the time it was all finally over, she had, as she put it to Isabella, “about half a mile of synthetic tubing inside me and a heavy weakness upon me that just won’t go away no matter how many vitamins I take.”

  And her mind began to wander. She knew it was wandering, too. She would start to tell Isabella something, maybe something from her Family Letter, and then she’d stop and say, “Have I already told you this?”

  She liked to sit in her rocking chair, by the window in her tiny living room, where she could see the garden and, beyond it, the sea and the Trail Islands and the shallow bay that curved off to the right and the promontory at the westernmost stretch of it, where the lights of the Strachan woman’s house could be seen; when Ramona sat in darkness looking out upon the night, the Strachan house looked as if it must be a boat at sea, so remote from other lights it seemed.

  Sometimes Ramona would get up, pushing herself out of the rocking chair and hanging on to the easy chair that sat next to it—that was where Anton had liked to sit, thumbing through the newspaper and looking out from time to time at the ocean and the sky. Often she’d seen him smile contentedly—she had that knowledge to comfort her, the man had died happy; she’d done her duty by him, and then she’d gotten to enjoy life, too; she’d galloped through the next few years with the fervor of a filly, God help her, it was true…

  And now look where she’d ended up, hauling herself out of her chair and into the kitchen, then looking around, wondering what in the world she was doing there.

  Strange things happened. One time, for instance, she didn’t recognize the wallpaper in the bedroom: “Did I just put that up, then?” she said to herself, and she went close to the wall to have a look-see, but no, the paper was worn and faded here and there, and when she pulled a picture away from the wall and peered in behind it the paper was much brighter in there, where light hadn’t been able to get at it.

  Then of course she couldn’t remember why on earth she was inspecting the wallpaper so intently.

  A big circle, she swept slowly around in a great big circle, couldn’t get out of it, it kept changing, looking different, but it was the same circle, she knew it.

  In the evenings she sat quietly in the rocking chair and looked out the window or watched television and sipped her gin. The television
usually made sense to her, and as time passed, it became more comforting company than real people; it stayed pretty much the same from day to day, but not entirely completely the same, so that if it looked familiar, that was good and if sometimes she didn’t recognize something, that was all right, too; it didn’t necessarily mean she’d forgotten anything. But real people—they often looked at her pityingly now, and she felt the heat of humiliation sweep up her neck and across her face and she felt exposed and vulnerable and then she got snappish. When visitors left she was relieved but very depressed, too. She knew she’d been rude, she hadn’t been able to help it, and she felt terrible about it.

  Finally her doctor, who was Alex Gillingham, came to her house and talked to her like a Dutch uncle.

  “You’ve got to come and live in the hospital,” he told her, straight out. “There’s lots to do there,” he said. “Maybe you can teach some of the other people there how to knit. You can go out in the garden. You can go to the library when you feel like it. Dammit, Ramona, the place isn’t a jail.”

  Well, she told Isabella, he went on and on like that, ranting and raving, and really, she didn’t have any choice. And maybe, secretly, maybe she was even a little bit relieved, at first. There were some things that scared her; like forgetting to turn off the stove.

  When she had to write it in the Family Letter she started to cry, telling her brothers and sisters what was happening to her. Tears got all over the page—and that brought her up short; she crumpled that piece of paper and started all over again and tried to put a better face on the situation than it deserved. There wasn’t any point in worrying them; they were too far away to do anything useful.

  She wrote her children, too, although she knew they wouldn’t be surprised to get the news. They’d been clucking over her for a couple of years now, wanting her to move into the hospital. She’d certainly noticed, she certainly wasn’t that far gone, that neither of them had said a single word about whether she might want to go and live with them. But she wouldn’t have wanted to go to Cache Creek or Regina anyway; colder than Siberia it was in both those places, and she didn’t know a soul in either one except her lugubrious children.