Salt Spring Island
december 12, 1972
“if you’ve hurt him, I’ll kill you!” I can hardly breathe at the sight of Taras, out cold and lying crumpled and helpless on the driveway. His dear head is turned at an awkward angle on the gravel, as if he broke his neck falling to the ground. The wind has changed direction since he arrived, and the palm tree fronds are rattling, the cedar and fir trees lining the bay lashing back and forth like mad ghouls. Numb with shock, I turn to Kay, who stands looking down at Taras, a serene smile on her face. In her element, one could say. She almost seems to be enjoying herself. “You’ll never get away with this…” but my voice dies on a terrified whisper, as Pat begins to pace the driveway, looking pale and stunned. “Let Taras go. Let me go.” I face my old nurses, fists determinedly clenched.
Pat pulled on her new green coat before she came out, but I’m shivering in my overalls and sweatshirt. She turns to Kay. “Get me another ampule—”
“No.” Kay is still looking down at Taras, as if he’s a lab rat she means to dissect. She folds her arms across her chest. “It’s time she hears the truth.” Her hair, normally combed flat over her ears, has been rearranged, courtesy of the wind. Her eyes are wild. My old nurse regards me with something akin to pity. “Do you want to go to prison?”
The sky above us seems to darken another impossible degree. I shake my head. “Why would I go to prison?”
“It was you, Jeanie.”
I’m confused and glance at Taras again. Wake up! “I have no idea what you mean.”
“You killed his father.”
As though Taras has heard, his curled fingers twitch, and he groans in drugged oblivion. My guts twist into a knot. It’s strange and terrible to be told you’re guilty of a crime you don’t remember committing. Most people would deny such an accusation immediately. But I’m not most people. My first instinct is to believe Kay. Did I kill the father of the man I love? The two of them regard me with expectation, waiting for me to confess, but I’ve gone rigid with shock and I’m speechless. Grief or guilt? I don’t know.
“Of course, you can’t remember, Jeanie,” Kay says. “We came into your room that night and found Marko Kovacs laying on top of your bed, the trapeze bar bloodied. You were delirious.”
Suddenly I’m back in my old hospital bed, exhausted from a long day working with a physiotherapist that Dr. Reisman had arranged, painfully learning to walk again. To strengthen my arms, an ancient trapeze bar had been attached to my bedframe—it seemed to have been made in the previous century—and I’d been getting stronger every day. How many times had I reached up to grab the cold, steel handle? My fingers would roam over the chain, ensuring it was clipped in before applying my weight. Despite this precaution, the bar would often come loose. I can still hear the grating sound of the chain links’ clank and rattle, like a prisoner’s shackles.
“You were helpless,” Pat adds, her voice at a treble, “and high on morphine. Marko Kovacs must have been pawing at you.” She points to Taras. “Trapped by his father. You had to make him stop.”
“No,” I croak, hand to my head. “He just stood in the doorway.” I try to sound certain, but what if my brain has blocked the truth? I feel it somewhere inside me, like a flashing beacon warning of hazards at sea, showing me only fragments that shimmer and rise out of the fog, just out of my reach. A crippling doubt enters my mind. I’d completely blocked out entire months of my life. But Marko Kovacs disappeared just before Dr. Reisman had discharged me from the hospital. Had I been strong enough to break through a morphine haze to find someone “pawing at me,” and murdered him?
There are too many missing pieces, I think, glancing up at Pat. “How did you come into possession of Marko Kovacs’s gun?”
“After you beat him to death,” she explains, “we held on to it for safekeeping.”
I look at Taras, horrified. His eyes are still closed, but his lips move slightly, as if he’s fighting his way back to consciousness. Did he somehow hear Pat’s accusation, that I’m the one who killed his father? But if I’d committed such an abhorrent act, I would remember, wouldn’t I?
“He already knows,” Kay says, noticing my glance at Taras. “Why do you think he put you in his car? To take you to the police and turn you in.”
“Wait,” I say, holding up my hand in a vain attempt to halt the progression of this conversation. I don’t like where it’s going. “That night you’d given me my evening medications—my sleeping pill—how could I have moved after that?” With the pressure of accusation goading me forward, I close my eyes, make a concerted effort to climb the brick wall my brain has erected against me. To my surprise, the ghost images firm up, and I see the man standing against the wall near the door. Like a clip from a black-and-white movie, he walks slowly toward me in the shadows. “Marko Kovacs came toward my bed,” I whisper. “It was dark. I thought it was one of you.”
I open my eyes, not wanting to see the rest, and sink to my knees on the gravel drive beside Taras, placing a tentative hand on his arm. Is it possible I killed his father?
Suddenly Pat is behind me. “Don’t do this to yourself. Kovacs did an awful, horrible thing to you. And you fought back.” She sneezes violently, the cold she’s been fighting finally taking hold. “The trapeze bar was unclipped from the chain, and you reached up in a panic as he lifted your sheets,” she says, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “You hit him again and again, then blocked it out.”
“I didn’t kill him.” My voice rises in sudden fury. I tear my hand off Taras’s arm and leap up, turning on Pat. “How could I have had the strength?”
“You were filled with rage at Michael,” Kay says quietly, “how he left you after you’d been burned so horribly, after you’d suffered the devastating loss of your baby. You were delirious, ready to take out your grief and anger on the next man who mistreated you. That man happened to be Taras’s father.”
“We found you in a dither and gave you more morphine,” Pat adds. “You can’t remember. How could you?”
“You wanted me to forget!”
And then Kay says something that chills me to the bone. “Your little friend has to go.”
I spin to face her. “Go where?”
“Do you want him to tell the police? Jeanie, you’d be sent to prison for life.”
Pat frowns briefly, seemingly unaware of Kay’s plans. “What are we going to do with him?”
“That ampule held a dose meant for Jeanie,” Kay says, her voice sharp, “not someone fifty pounds heavier. He won’t be out for long. Grab him.”
Taras groans as Pat takes his shoulders, and Kay his feet. When they hoist him, I notice his eyes flicker slightly and feel a rush of hope. “Where are you taking him?”
“Down to the ocean,” Kay orders. “He’s going for a little swim.”
“No,” I scream.
“We’ve protected you all these years,” Pat shouts back. “We protected you from life in prison. Are we going to stop now?”
Crab-walking across the drive, Pat and Kay swing Taras around to the path that leads down to the beach, me stumbling desperately behind them. Kay walks backward, Taras’s booted feet in her hands. Wind sweeps in from the sea, wrecking Pat’s salon coiffure. I choose the moment to lunge at her, grabbing a good amount of her hair in my fist. “Let him go!” I shriek.
Pat scrambles to tighten her hold but drops Taras’s upper body against her knees. “You bitch!” she cries, as I jerk her head back and Kay drops his feet, scrambling to pull me off Pat. Kay tries to get me into a headlock, but I twist away, too aware that I must stop them here. Taras won’t have a chance in the water unconscious. He’ll sink like a stone.
But Kay grabs my ear, wrenching it mercilessly. I yelp and lose my balance, sprawling across the dirt path behind them. Pat and Kay pick up Taras again and continue down, as if I’m merely a mosquito buzzing around their ears.
Kay’s sweater has ridden up in the back and I see the handle of Taras’s father’s gun stuck in the waistband of her trousers. Mollify Kay, I plot, pretend you agree with her plan, then snatch the gun. Do I have the courage to use it?
I run ahead of them onto the beach and stand swaying in the wind, as if I can somehow stop them from drowning Taras in the rolling waves that crash against the rocks on the headland in plumes of white. Gusts of wind tear across the water and the air smells of fish and rotting seaweed, it smells of death.
“I remember hearing Russian words,” I try to convince them. “Someone followed Marko Kovacs into my room. An assassin—you saw him yourself.” I pause for a moment, my pulse quickening. “Why did you come into my room anyway? You’d already given me my medications.”
Pat and Kay drop Taras onto the beach. “I went down the hall,” Pat says, her nose red and congested. “Making sure Kovacs’s Russian brother had gone down the back stairs—”
“She doesn’t need a bleeding explanation.” Kay’s voice contains an ominous warning, but Pat takes no heed.
“I thought I’d check on you,” Pat says, rummaging in her coat for a handkerchief. “When I opened the door, I found that bloody arsehole Kovacs lying across your bed, groaning and flailing about.” She loudly blows her nose. “You can imagine how upset I was—a girl I’d looked after for two years beating a man half to death.”
The nurses are facing the ocean and I have my back to it, looking up toward the house. “The Russian assassin did it, not me,” I cry, fighting my way out of the dark to some kind of clarity.
I flinch at sudden movement from the driveway.
Two men have just come out of the trees and are running toward the beach path, guns in their hands.