26
JEANIE
Salt Spring Island
december 10, 1972
“you don’t seem very happy,” Kay says, skipping a stone across the flat water of Southey Bay.
“I can’t stop thinking about that letter Pat wrote to you.”
“Don’t waste your time.” Kay’s hair is still wet and gleaming in the morning light. She’s become one of those hardy souls who, even in December, enjoy getting up with the birds for an early swim in frigid water.
We’ve just followed Tuna’s dear, wagging bottom down the path to my crushed-clamshell beach. Rafts of seaweed, a few crab carapaces, and waterlogged driftwood form an ever-changing still life artfully designed by the tide. A mid-winter sun climbs the sky, casting shadows across the shores of the Secretary Islands, less than a kilometer north of us in Houston Passage; the air is liquid and golden, like it might have looked at the beginning of time.
“I remember you and Pat coming into my hospital room right before I was discharged, trading insults. Didn’t she call you a Cornish Sow? That’s why I wonder why she wrote you that letter.” I regard Kay thoughtfully. “You two hated each other.”
She runs her fingers over a large boulder, its dark gray surface etched with divots and circles and channels carved by the waves of many storms. “Pat has always been deluded. And that letter proves it—writing to the ghost of a nurse she once worked with?” Kay snorts. “Terribly sad when you think about it.”
“She does enjoy the sound of her own voice,” I agree, looking back up at the house. But there was something off about the tone of Pat’s letter. “Had she written you before?”
Kay turns with a smile. “Pat wrote me letters over the years, but I always threw them in the bin. I moved halfway around the world to get away from her.” She shields her eyes and watches Tuna with a grin. “Crikey, if she really did succeed at jumping off this headland, I’d join you in dancing over her bloated drowned corpse.”
We cackle joyfully at the image, horrible I know, but it feels so good to finally be part of a team—me and Kay against evil Pat. No one else in the world seems to know or understand how awful she really is. I still think of braving my way back into her room again, but Kay insists that Pat’s obsessive letter writing is an exercise in futility, so I let it go. I wind up and throw an old tennis ball into the ocean. Tuna splashes in, furiously paddling out, droplets beading on his dark head. If you live by the water, you must own a Labrador. It’s almost a rule. The dear old soul is thirteen years old and crippled with arthritis, but I can’t bear the thought of life without him. Despite his age, it’s impossible to keep him out of the sea. I still get a thrill seeing him retrieve the ball and turn on the swim, with that profoundly resolute look on his face. Besides Kay, he’s my only friend.
Kay squints out at the water. “You never swim?” she says, in the same tone someone might ask why you didn’t breathe or eat. “I would think the ocean would be your friend. Are you afraid of drowning?”
Now I’m positive that she’s here to recover from something terrible. What had Pat said in the letter? I can’t imagine any other reason why you might leave that damn place you liked so much. I slip an arm around Kay’s waist. “You can trust me with whatever happened in that jungle.”
Her eyes take on a hooded quality. “What?”
“I don’t know, but it was something. I mean, those rebel soldiers—I’ve heard they harbor little mercy for Western peacekeepers in the Congo. You weren’t a victim of…a victim of violence—”
“You always had a wild imagination,” she says dismissively.
Tuna emerges from the ocean, more sea lion than dog at this point. Kay breaks away from me and reaches to take the ball out of his mouth, but he shakes himself vigorously and walks right past her. She laughs, yet her eyes harden in a flash of emotion.
“Rudeness doesn’t suit you, Tuna,” I say, throwing the ball farther this time.
A double kayak that Pat uses to take me out on sketching trips lies at the far end of the beach, near the tree line and an impressive thicket of blackberry bushes. An old aluminum rowboat reclines beside it, a relic of Aunt Suze’s time. Kay glances up at the headland to our right, which rises in a sheer, moss-covered cliff face, stunted arbutus and fir trees growing from any foothold of earth they can find. A great blue heron stands like a sentinel in the shallow water below. I think of him as my heron, for he’s been there every morning for years, the bay his exclusive fishing territory. “It’s so beautiful here,” Kay sighs. “You’re lucky.”
“My French penal colony?” I say, glumly. “I’ll never escape.”
“Why would you want to? If I owned this place, I’d never leave.” Kay shades her eyes and stares up at the house, surveying the surrounding garden and trees with the proprietary eyes of a real estate agent. “It would fetch a good price in today’s market.”
I hesitate before speaking again. Kay read Pat’s letter; she deserves to know why I drew up a last will and testament. “You understand why I’m leaving Gladsheim to the Salt Spring Historical Society, don’t you, Kay?”
“Of course.”
“I thought of leaving it to you, but Pat would be furious. It’s best left to the island that embraced Aunt Suze with such love.” When Kay nods sympathetically, I decide to finally tell her more about Dan Rys. “He asked Pat about a missing person he’s investigating. She freaked out.”
Tuna returns, shaking his coat and thoroughly soaking us, and Kay laughs, saying, “What missing person?”
“A man named Marko Kovacs.” I clasp my hands under my chin like a smitten teenager, seized by a wonderful idea. “I’ve got Dan’s number, I can call and invite him out, Kay. Maybe you’ll remember the man who disappeared off our ward.”
Kay’s eyes go cloudy. “Tell me more about this journalist.”
I smile, remembering his stern, immovable face. “He’s…inhabited by a great stillness, as though he’s purposefully withdrawn from life.”
“Sounds rather like an enigma.”
“Pat said he was a foreign hulk of a man who loped out of the woods like a stray dog.” I roll my eyes. “Just because he’s got tattoos.”
There was a droll little smile at the corner of Kay’s mouth. “And you happen to like stray dogs…”
I blush furiously. “I only saw him once.”
“He could be a murderer for all you know!” she says, almost gaily. Her last few words are drowned out by the distinctive shuddering cry of a bald eagle. I look up into the treetops, the word murderer dropping like a lead weight on my heart. How disappointing that Kay doesn’t get how very special Dan has become to me.
Her head is down as she bends to examine the beach, searching for the odd skipping stone among the crushed shells. “Can I see his business card?”
“He didn’t have one, but he wrote down his telephone number,” I say, watching a sailboat that’s appeared farther out in Houston Passage, tacking south toward the long, low profile of nearby Wallace Island, the sun glancing off the limestone cliffs along its shore, shading them a dusky orange.
She licks her lips and smiles. “What journalist doesn’t have a card?”
I decide to ignore Kay’s contentious tone. It’s so not like her. “I’ve had a memory since then—I think this missing man appeared in the doorway of my hospital room.”
“You were drugged up to here,” she says, shaking her head. “And wheeled into surgery for skin grafts almost every week.” Kay stoops lower to study the tide line, as if she’s searching for buried treasure. “You can’t have remembered anything.”
I’m silent for a moment. The sun’s rays on the beach have released a distinct ocean smell of seaweed left behind at high tide, and it’s like ambrosia to me. “I do remember seeing…this man, in my doorway. Why was he there?”
Finally, Kay palms a suitable rock and straightens. Maybe it’s the blood flow to her face, but she looks decidedly bothered. I chide myself for pushing. This conversation about men lurking in doorways has obviously brought back awful memories for her.
“You’re remembering a visitor,” Kay says, distractedly, then winks. “And you had so many of those.”
I’m hurt by her insensitive joke—I had no visitors besides Aunt Suze and, on occasion, mother—but decide to dismiss it as a little gentle sarcasm between friends and watch as she leans to skip the rock she’s found. It dances only briefly across the surface before plummeting straight to the bottom. She glares after it with a stormy expression, as though the rock has somehow failed her. “If this so-called journalist was disrespectful to Pat,” she says at last, “never speak to him again. You can’t live out here without her.”
I’m dumbstruck. “Didn’t we just agree how awful Pat can be?”
Kay looks around at me, eyes bright, like she’s trying to prove she isn’t sad or gloomy, that maybe her years in Africa didn’t break her. “I’d never defend that woman. What does she do in Vancouver, anyway?”
“I always thought it was just to buy my art supplies and deliver paintings that sold occasionally to a gallery. But now I know she couriers them to my dealer in Brussels and goes to see Dr. Reisman.”
Kay raises an eyebrow. “Reisman? Did he leave New Westminster General?”
“He’s now a GP,” I tell her, “in private practice.” He trusts Pat’s knowledge of my medications, which means I don’t have to face real people. She never fails to remind me that, over time, full thickness burn pain becomes increasingly complex to control. Dr. Reisman started me on hydrocodone last year, but it gave me insomnia, which meant I needed stronger sleep medication. “I imagine she’s telling him that I lunged at her, my craft scissors becoming a Bowie knife. She’ll probably show him the stitches she gave herself.”
“Pat was always one to exaggerate.” Kay’s face is a mask, like someone who’s recently come out of a war zone. The bright light dims, wind off the water suddenly colder, and the two of us look up at the same time. A small cloud—the only one in the sky—has obliterated the sun.
“She’s hidden everything from fondue skewers to garden shears. I had to steal a screwdriver from the shed in case I need to protect myself.” Kay might be different than the beloved nurse I once knew, but it’s such a relief to share all of my Pat secrets. “She’s started locking me in my room at night.”
Kay looks shocked. “Why on earth would she do that?”
“The other day she told me I’d stay locked in until I could prove to her I hadn’t gone insane.”
“That’s rather dodgy. I’ll have a little chat.”
“Would you?” I look gratefully into Kay’s eyes and without warning, a vision descends—her leaning over my hospital bed. As the image comes into focus, I see Pat standing next to her. They’re whispering in hushed tones, complaining bitterly about a stint they’d been forced to do while in nurses training at the only mental hospital in Vancouver. Riverview. Disturbing words drop out of my memory: padded rooms…lashed out in rage…lay in their own filth.
The image fades, and I shudder, uncertain if my brain can be trusted. Wind ruffles the water, and I can taste salt at the back of my throat. “She drives me too hard,” I say, determined that Kay hear the truth.
“Jeanie, you took her in when she had nowhere to go.”
I nod. “Yep, saved her from the poorhouse.”
“If you hadn’t it would have meant she’d never work as a nurse again—” she breaks off.
My heart stops for a moment, attempting to process this declaration. “Why exactly wouldn’t she work as a nurse again?”
Kay looks around at me, wide-eyed. “I’m jetlagged and spouting rubbish.”
I step toward her. “You’re not getting off that easy.”
She snatches up another stone and pitches it into the waves, taking out her unnamed frustration on the natural world. “You deserve to know the truth, Jeanie,” she admits, watching as the rock dribbles weakly across the surface. She sighs, then turns to me. “There was a little episode on the ward near the end of your stay. Pat made a mistake—”
“A mistake?” I lean closer. “She gave too much of something to someone, didn’t she?” Kay doesn’t answer immediately, and my nerves are suddenly on high alert.
“Perhaps you should ask what you would have done if she hadn’t been available at the right time, the right place.” Kay finally says with a brave smile. “You would have had to hire a stranger as caregiver. Imagine that.”
“I have imagined such a scenario, and my life with a stranger comes out on top.” My heart now thuds alarmingly against my ribs. “What kind of mistake are we talking about?”
“Pat was caught siphoning off some of your morphine—” When I let out a startled squeak, Kay hurries on. “Just incremental amounts, for her bad back. I forgave her—”
I can barely breathe for the dagger in my chest and the swirl of conflicting emotions there—despair, rage, hopelessness, and something else I can’t identify. “My morphine?” I finally manage, staring blankly down at the crushed clam shells beneath my feet. How can the waves go on lapping at them, as though a quake has not just riven the earth? I can’t look at Kay, who abandoned me to a criminal without telling me, because she forgave her transgressions.
But she’s telling you now, a voice intercedes on her behalf, and that means something, doesn’t it?
Kay looks out at the sea, hands on her hips. “I’m going to take another swim—clear my head.”
A steely resolve washes over me. “I’ll need your help,” I say, my reckless plans finally crystallizing. “When Pat returns from Vancouver, I’m going to fire her.”
I turn to go back up to the house, but Kay loops her arm around my neck and hauls me in for a hug. I can smell alcohol on her breath. Not wine but something stronger. Gin or whiskey, it doesn’t matter. This is Kay, that voice again, her strong shoulders beneath your hands, shoulders that have squared off against Pat in the past and will do so again.
“You don’t realize how very much we love you,” she whispers into my hair. “We nursed you back from the dead. Do you know that? Watching you suffer—you have no idea what it did to us.”
Tears spring from my eyes as I return her embrace. Kay is here to save me from Pat.
I drag myself up to the house, fatigued, my scars aching, but I’m too devastated at Kay’s news to think straight. I peer out the living room windows. She’s stripped off her slacks and sweater and is standing on the beach in her navy one-piece bathing suit. Donning a pair of swim goggles, she wades in a few feet, performing a lovely, shallow dive and surfaces, water dripping from her hair. As she eases into an overhand crawl, my heart swells with so much love for her. Kay knows that Pat’s the real monster. I might not have enjoyed her blunt delivery, but my old nurse had some good points to make.
What journalist doesn’t have a card?
Maybe Dan ran out? I’m not sure, just that I really need to speak to him. Now. Without this obviously traumatized version of Kay listening in. My fatigue forgotten, I head for the hallway, digging out the piece of paper with his number on it and pick up the telephone, fumbling with the rotary dial. I hold my breath when a man answers on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Danek Rys?” I exhale in relief. But his voice is gruffer than I remember.
“You have the wrong number.” He hangs up and I stare at the wall, stunned. I dial the number again. The same man answers and slams down his handset the moment he hears my voice.
I dart into the living room and glance anxiously out of the windows. Kay is still doing laps across the bay like an Olympian. Pat isn’t here to stop me, but I have the sense that Kay, if she knew what I was doing, would disapprove.
Looking at the paper again, the numbers jump off the page, raffish and impertinent: 735-2390. When I scribbled them down from memory, chlorpromazine—a drug meant for the mentally ill—was still smoking its way out of my system. Tears prick my eyelids. In the few moments between looking at the number Dan wrote out so carefully, having Pat take it from me, and getting to the kitchen to write it down, my brain messed things up. I might as well accept it. Now I’ll never talk to him again. Why am I so eager to speak to him anyway? What do I really know about Danek Rys?
He stood up to Pat for you.
Then it occurs to me. Perhaps I transposed the numbers. Surely I can figure out the true combination. Dashing back to the hallway, I yank open the side table drawer and find a small pad of paper. I sit cross-legged on the floor and jot down different variations of the number, the musty smell of carpet that hasn’t been vacuumed regularly wrinkling my nose. Dragging the phone down onto my lap, I dial now with purpose, crossing out each combination as I get a wrong number. One woman mistakes me for her husband’s mistress and calls me a hussy. Another man tries to keep me on the phone, claiming he’s lonely and needs someone to talk to after his wife died.
When I check on Kay again, she’s heading to shore with dedicated strokes. There’s time for one more try, I think, and fly back to the phone. I quickly dial another combination of numbers and a man answers.
“Hi,” I say, waiting for whomever is on the other side to tell me I can take a long walk on a short dock.
“Hello.” A slightly foreign accent.
“It’s Jeanie!” I can hardly keep the excitement out of my voice.
“The artist,” he replies. Is it my imagination, or does he sound happy to hear from me?
I close my eyes in relief. An awkward silence ensues, and I rush to fill it. “It was lovely meeting you last week. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy?” The line hisses. “Because I’m not.”
“Pat—she is suspicious, guilty,” Dan says finally. “But of what?”
“Maybe from years of telling me I’m an average artist?” I say, gripping the handset. “My other nurse just told me Pat was stealing my morphine—she’s probably still siphoning it off. If that’s not a burden of guilt, I don’t know what is. Pat should never have worked as a nurse again, not taken a job as my caregiver.” I hear him take a deep, careful breath.
“What does she sacrifice for you?”
Good question. “Pat thinks me an idiot to throw myself on my husband’s funeral pyre. She said if it had happened to her, she would have watched him burn, maybe run for the fire extinguisher, but not attempt to put out the flames.” I pause, thinking Dan might ask for details, but he remains silent after my little rant. “That’s the story of my life. I don’t think things through.”
“But you remember something?”
“You asked me if I saw anyone the night Marko Kovacs disappeared, if I saw anyone in the hospital. I thought I was hallucinating, but I think I did see him standing in the doorway of my room. He was tall—he wore a dark coat and a hat.”
I can almost hear his disappointment. A tall stranger in a dark coat and hat is hardly enough to go on. Then another memory imprints itself on my retinas and I speak without thinking. “I can see his face, Dan. There was a scar—a jagged line that went from his mouth to just below his eye.”
There’s a pause on the line, static and another deep breath. I brace myself for a sudden click and the dreaded dial tone, or an admonition—don’t waste my time—but he sounds excited.
“Jeanie.”
“Yes?”
“I need to see you.”