Making the final break with the physical remains of a being who once glowed with spirit is never easy. But those of us who had gathered to bury Ariel Warren were, for a while at least, part of a farewell that was appropriate, honest, and stamped with the acknowledgement of what she had been to us all. Gert proved to be our salvation. At the Prince Albert airport, she had struck me as a person with the crisp compassion of the basketball coach at the girls’ school I’d attended. When a player was injured or humiliated, our coach had a way of catching the girl’s eye and communicating a message all the more powerful because it was unspoken. I know you’re hurting, the look said. But cry later. Get on with the game.
Gert, too, seemed to be a person with a natural talent for sizing up a situation and dealing with it. After she’d landed her plane beside the dock and we had all climbed out, only Mr. Birkbeck showed evidence of a sense of purpose. He found a patch of sun and then, in what appeared to be a physiological impossibility, flattened himself until his bones disappeared, leaving only his head and his hide. The rest of us looked hollowed out too, like survivors of an accident, dazed and uncertain about what to do next.
Gert took charge. “Misery hates a full stomach.” She turned to Drew and Fraser. “There are two coolers stowed in the back of the aircraft. Why don’t you get them off while the ladies and I go up and air out the cabin?”
Relieved at being issued marching orders, we set to work.
The cabin was made of logs, and it was very old. “My father built this place,” Molly Warren said. “He was a physician, too. He’d seen so many children with polio.” Her lips tightened. “He thought he could keep us safe.”
Gert knew a bad moment when she saw it. “Better get moving,” she said. “That cabin won’t air itself out.”
The wooden shutters were still nailed in place. When we unlocked the door, we were met with the musty gloom of a room that only rodents had called home during the long winter months. As my eyes grew accustomed to the shadows, I made out a wood stove, a couch piled high with Hudson’s Bay blankets wrapped in heavy plastic, and, incongruously, a lipstick-red canoe, hull side up, in the centre of the floor.
When she spotted it, Molly slumped. “Ariel’s,” she said. For a moment, she was silent, then she turned to Gert. “What was that joke she liked about the canoe?”
Gert swatted at a blackfly. “Not a joke,” she said. “A true story. They say that one day God was fooling around, the way He does, and son of a gun if He didn’t make a canoe. Well, He’d made a lot of stuff, but that canoe really blew Him away. ‘Helluva boat,’ he said. ‘But where am I going to paddle it?’ All of a sudden, it came to Him.”
Molly smiled as she supplied the punchline. “ ‘I know,’ He said. ‘I’ll make Canada.’ ”
Drew and Fraser appeared in the doorway, each carrying an old metal cooler. Drew’s eyes found his wife. “Nice to see you cheerful,” he said.
“The canoe story hasn’t failed yet,” Gert said. “Now, the two of you are going to have to do an about-face. It’s too dusty to eat in here. Let’s get back to the dock.”
The men traded glances, then started back towards the water. The easy camaraderie that had sprung up between Drew Warren and Fraser Jackson seemed to strengthen them both. Carrying out the ordinary tasks associated with Ariel’s last trip north appeared to give them a way to share the burden of their grief.
Molly Warren, too, was working hard at focusing on the mundane. “I’ll get the tablecloth,” she said. She went into the cabin and returned almost immediately with a zippered plastic storage bag. “Let’s go,” she said, and we headed for the lake.
Up the shoreline, the old dock, mugged by one too many winters, bellied low in the water, but the dock we had landed beside was new, a T-shaped structure in which the top bar of the T had been widened to ease the loading and unloading of passengers and provisions. The men had taken the coolers to the end of the dock and were unpacking the lunch in the shadow of the plane.
Molly looked thoughtful as she watched. “Maybe it’ll help to eat on the water.”
It did. Under a sun so intense it glazed the pebbles on the lake bottom, Molly lay down the box containing her daughter’s ashes. Then she removed the tablecloth from its protective case and shook it so that it fluttered down over the new wood. The cloth was astonishing: midnight-blue velvet, appliquéd with gold- and silver-lamé cut-outs of suns, moons, stars, buds, blossoms, fruits, birds, fish, and animals.
Fraser knelt down to scrutinize the cloth more closely. “This belongs in an art gallery,” he said. “Where did it come from?”
“Ariel made it,” Solange said. She turned to Molly questioningly. “She was how old …?”
“She turned thirteen the day she finished it,” Molly said.
Solange looked thoughtful. “Thirteen – a time of great power for girls.”
“It was a time of great power for my daughter,” Molly said. “When she was working on this cloth, she thought she’d discovered what she wanted to do with her life.”
“She wanted to make art?” I asked.
“Something like that,” Molly said. “Of course, it was out of the question.”
The gaze Solange shot Molly was lancing, but Gert headed off trouble. “Time to eat,” she said. “There’s a point past which I don’t trust homemade mayo.” She handed around the sandwiches. The choices were egg salad or bologna and mustard. Both were on white bread, generously buttered, and both were very good. The tea Gert poured from the Thermos was good, too, strong and sweet. Our talk was not casual. The presence of the pine box upped the ante, provided a subtext of tempus fugit that made idle chatter impossible.
Fraser Jackon traced the edges of an appliquéd crescent moon on the midnight-blue cloth. “The only other time I saw something like this was at a magic show. My dad worked for the CNR. Every Christmas, the company had a party for employees’ families. One year they had a magician. Looking back, my guess is the poor guy was a serious boozer. He kept dropping things, and just before his big finale, his dove escaped.” Fraser laughed softly. “For most of the kids that was the highlight of the party, but not for me. He might have been a drinker, but that old man had a cape that had the same quality this cloth has – it transported you into another dimension.”
“And you decided to create your own cape by going into theatre.” The words were vintage Solange, but the tone was warm and urgent. She wanted this outsider who had somehow been an intimate of her friend to reveal himself.
He did. “I’d never thought of theatre as a magic cape,” Fraser said slowly, “but as metaphors go, that one’s not far off the mark. I’ve been able to make a lot of ugliness disappear through my work; I’ve also been part of some astonishing moments.” His eyes never left Solange’s face. “How about you?” he asked. “What’s your metaphor?”
She surprised me. Solange was, by nature, guarded, but that morning she didn’t shield herself. “The Ice Capades.” She shrugged. “Ridiculous, no? And ugly, too.”
Fraser’s expression was grave. “You don’t have to elaborate.”
“Why not?” she said. “We’re looking for truths about one another. And one truth about me is that all of my childhood stories are ugly. This one is particularly ugly because it’s about a man. Shall I continue?”
She glanced at each of us in turn, defying us to shut her down. No one did.
“Good,” she said. “This is a story that should be heard.” The warmth that had been in her voice when she had encouraged Fraser Jackson to talk about his past had vanished. Once again, her mask was in place.
“Most of the men my mother brought home left me alone. I’d always counted that as a blessing, but there was one man I liked. His name was Raymond. He was a milkman, and he brought us treats: ice cream, butter, cheese. One day he showed up with two tickets to the Ice Capades. A customer of his had been unable to go. She gave him the tickets, and he invited me. Raymond told me our seats were up with the gods. Naïf that I was, I thought that meant they were the best; of course, it just meant they were cheap, situated at the very top row of the arena. We had to climb and climb. I’d never been in such a crowd. All those people – like a tide, carrying me along.” Reflexively, she rubbed her strong, sculpted arms, her insurance against being a victim ever again. “I was pressed against their bodies. I thought I’d suffocate from the smell – wet wool, cigarette smoke, and cheap perfume. By the time we’d found our seats, the blood was singing in my ears. During the national anthem, I had to put my head between my knees to keep from fainting.
“Then the music started, and a girl came onto the ice. Her costume was covered in silver sequins. As she skated on that smooth, perfect rink, little arcs of ice shavings flew from her skates into the air. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I’d never been so happy.” Solange gnawed her lip. “Then I felt Raymond’s hand moving between my legs. I was paralysed. When he made me caress him and he grew hard beneath my hand, I felt a coldness in my heart. I knew that if I didn’t get away, I would die, that my heart would just freeze and crack open. So I stopped being me. I willed myself into the body and mind of the girl on the ice. The silver sequins on her dress became my armour, protecting me, drawing the light to me, repelling the darkness. It was the first time in my life that I felt safe. Of course, the feeling didn’t last. It didn’t take me long to learn that women are never safe.”
Solange picked up the crust of her sandwich and threw it angrily towards the water. Mr. Birkbeck rose from his sleep, snapped the bread in mid-air and collapsed. Solange turned to me. “You have to play, too, Joanne. We all must take our turn. What’s your metaphor?”
Her fierce vulnerability caught me off balance. “I don’t know,” I said. I touched the midnight-blue cloth. “I guess I was like Ariel. I wanted it all – the sun, the moon, the stars, blossoms, buds, and fruit – everything. What I got was a marriage that was good most of the time, terrific kids, dogs, a house. Naama would say I was an unevolved woman, but it was enough.”
Solange had revealed too much to let me get away with less. “You compare yourself with Ariel, but she wanted more than a house with a picket fence. That’s your true metaphor, Joanne, and when your husband died the little fence came down and you had to go out into the big world and become a person in your own right.”
“I was always a person in my own right,” I said loudly, hoping Solange would mistake vehemence for the ring of truth.
She didn’t buy it. “I disagree,” she said flatly. “Perhaps I’m wrong. I didn’t know you then, but when you’re with your old friend Howard Dowhanuik, I see vestiges of the woman you were. You defer to him. You’re not the person I saw at Ariel’s vigil.”
I was at a loss; so was everyone else. There was no way the game could go forward. Three of us had revealed ourselves, three were left. But asking Molly or Drew Warren to come up with the metaphor that encapsulated their early dreams was beyond cruel, and Gert struck me as a woman who would rather gut a fish than float a flight of fancy.
Unwittingly, Solange gave us another focus. When she attempted to toss the rest of her sandwich to Mr. Birkbeck, her throw was clumsy. The crust hit the water, and after a lazy catcher’s dive, so did Mr. Birkbeck. The splash he made flushed out a bald eagle that struggled briefly then caught an updraft. Absorbed, we watched as the eagle soared, became an infinitesimal speck, then vanished in the cloudless sky.
“My daughter always said that if we saw an eagle the weekend we opened the cottage, it would be a great summer.”
An aching silence followed Drew’s words. Gentleman that he was, he recognized his gaffe and tried to put us at ease. He fingered the top button of his golf shirt, straightening the knot of the necktie that wasn’t there. “I don’t know if you remember back to the mid-sixties when there was such concern about the bald eagle becoming extinct,” he said. “They discovered that bald eagles that summered here in the north weren’t declining at the same rate as other eagles. It was because northern Saskatchewan wasn’t being sprayed with pesticides – DDT and the like – so the population of bald eagles remained constant.”
On the day of his daughter’s burial, Drew’s earnest drone about why the eagles of northern Saskatchewan had escaped extinction might have seemed bizarre, but it did the trick. Despite ourselves, we were diverted. My mind went into free fall, stopping at a memory from twenty years before. Mieka’s grade-two class had held a career morning. My daughter, always a foot-dragger when it came to school projects, had been too late to sign up for a visit to one of the glamour-job sites like the courtroom or the pizzeria. She and the rest of the stragglers had been stuck with visiting the offices of Drew Warren’s investment firm, and I had been the parent-volunteer. Drew had tried hard to engage the children. He asked them how much allowance they were given and pointed out that, by depositing even the smallest sum each week, they could make their money grow. He had shown them how to make images of their hands on his photocopier. He even brought out Monopoly money and some outdated stock certificates to let the kids build their own stock portfolios. Nothing worked. The children were eye-rollingly bored. Crestfallen, Drew walked us to the elevator. Then inspiration hit. He ran back into his office and returned with booty: two pencils and a stenographer’s notepad for each child.
Drew’s discourse upon eagles on the day of his daughter’s burial might have struck a stranger as insensitive, but it came from the same impulse as his last-minute gift of pencils and a notepad twenty years before. He was what my son Angus characterized as a pleaser – a person driven by an almost pathological need to avoid wounding others. “First, do no harm.” Apparently, the chromosome for stunning blond good looks hadn’t been the only inheritance passed from father to daughter.
Eager to put an end to another awkward silence, Gert jumped up and slapped her right hand against her thigh. “Come on. Let’s walk off those sandwiches. May’s a pretty time for the island. The new moss is soft as a baby’s bum. And who knows? We might see another eagle. They’re always on the lookout for easy fishing and a nice air current.” She leaned towards Molly and lowered her voice. “You’ll want to see the rock paintings today.”
Molly nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll want to see the rock paintings today.” She pulled herself to her feet, bent and picked up the box that contained her daughter’s ashes. Quick as a recruit in an honour guard, Fraser retrieved the cloth, folded it the way flags are folded at military funerals, and handed it to Molly. She looked at him levelly. “I’m glad Ariel found you,” she said.
Drew led us single file along a trail that bore the marks of nature’s effort to reclaim it over the winter. The path was blocked by rocks and fallen tree branches, and melting snow had eroded the line separating trail and wilderness. New moss was everywhere. Idly, I wondered what Blake, who had seen “a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,” would make of vegetation which, flowerless and rootless, still managed to carpet the harsh terrain of a northern island in a green of surpassing tenderness.
To see the paintings, we had to scramble down an embankment and walk back along the shoreline. The lake was high, so most of the beach was underwater. As I leaned back to look up at the rock face, I could feel the water seeping into my boots, but a soaker was a small price to pay for seeing the rock paintings.
There were three of them. One was of a thunderbird holding a bolt of lightning; one was a circle that appeared to hold clouds and an animal, perhaps a bear; the third was on a part of the rock that had been cleft. The circle that framed the picture inside was broken, the drawing inside beyond interpretation.
“How long have they been here?” I asked.
Gert adjusted her ball cap. “Nobody knows for sure – a thousand, maybe two thousand years.” She laughed. “Those old ones, they knew how to make paint.”
“What did they use?” Solange asked.
“Ochre,” Gert said, “mixed in with whatever oil they could find. It was before the days of Home Hardware.”
Fraser stepped out into the water to get a better look. “You can feel the power.”
Gert chuckled softly. “It depends on who’s doing the looking.”
No one spoke, but I sensed we all felt a link to the people who had mixed red ochre with the oils of animals and fish. Their paintings were evidence that, like us, they had grappled with the questions that came in the small hours: what does it all mean, and where do I fit in? Molly Warren was beside me. Cradling the pine box and midnight-blue cloth in her arms, she wore her grief like an amulet. As she stared up at the rock paintings, she seemed mesmerized.
Finally, Drew walked over and took his wife’s arm. “Time to leave,” he said. “Time to do what we came here to do.”
Molly shook him off and turned to address the rest of us. “Drew and I have decided on the place for Ariel – not here, although she loved this spot, but closer to our cabin in this clearing that looks out on the water.”
We walked back to the cabin in silence. Gert undid the padlock on a small toolshed and took out a shovel. Drew walked to a spot under a spruce tree and, in a lonely act of love, began to dig. After a few minutes, Fraser took the shovel from him and continued. Each of us took our turn. It was surprisingly hard work, but we managed, and when the hole was deep enough, Molly knelt and put in the box. Gert dropped to her knees, took a cigarette from the package in her breast pocket, broke it open, and placed the tobacco beside the pine box. “It’s tradition to give something back,” she said simply.
After that, it was over quickly. We handed the shovel around, replaced the earth, and knelt in a circle. Molly Warren smoothed the dirt and covered it with the midnight-blue cloth. “I’ve been trying all morning to think of the right words,” she said. She held out her hands, palms out, empty. “Does anyone have any?”
The sun picked up the gold- and silver-lamé appliqués of the moon and the stars, blossoms, flowers, fruit, fish, animals. Against the midnight blue, the figures that Ariel had cut out seemed to pulse with independent life.
“There’s a line from Dante,” I said. “ ‘Oh, the experience of this sweet life.’ ”
Every face in our circle betrayed a tightening of the throat, but the silence was absolute. We were enveloped in a moment as fragile and self-contained as a teardrop. And then – horribly – the sound of a plane’s motor sliced the silent air.
Mr. Birkbeck howled. Solange breathed a curse and a single name. “Naama.”
That was the name on my lips, too. As I watched the small plane descend and its pontoons slap the surface of the lake, I remembered Naama’s fury in Livia Brook’s office. You can’t keep us away. Ariel was a Red Riding Hood. We have every right to be there. We have every right to avenge her. As I waited for the plane’s door to open, I knew I had no resources left to deal with Naama and her unquenchable rage. Neither did anyone else. Faced with this new challenge, we stumbled to our feet. We were all running on empty.
Not surprisingly, it was Gert who made the first move. She snapped her fingers, brought Mr. Birkbeck to heel, and the two of them set off to meet the plane taxiing towards the old dock. When the motors cut, the door opened and a short, grey-haired man emerged. He and Gert pumped hands, then turned towards the open plane door. I steeled myself, waiting for the assault of Naama and her cohorts. But the passengers who stepped onto the dock were even more of a nightmare than Naama would have been.
Howard Dowhanuik and his son were both in full mourning: black suits, white shirts, dark ties. They looked like the Blues Brothers on vacation. Shocked, I almost laughed, but as they came closer the anguish on Charlie’s face killed the laugh in my throat.
It didn’t take Charlie long to read the situation. His eyes passed over the mourners and rested on the gravesite, then he went straight to Molly and Drew. “You can’t leave her there,” he said simply. “She shouldn’t be in the dark. Let me take the canoe out on the lake. I’ll scatter her ashes.”
Molly’s face was bloodless, her lips a line thin as a surgical scar. “It’s a bad idea, Charlie. Ashes from a human body are dense. If you try to scatter them, they get under your fingernails, into your skin. You can’t get them out.”
“I don’t want to get them out,” Charlie said.
Solange’s pupils were pinpoints of loathing. “Are you hoping her ashes will cover her blood?” she said.
“You were the one she was afraid of,” he said.
Solange’s mouth shaped itself into a cartoon-like O. “Never,” she said. “I never would have hurt her.”
Howard grabbed his son and pulled him away from Solange. “Coming here was a mistake, Charlie. Let’s just get back on the plane and go home.”
“Your father’s right.” Fraser Jackson’s voice was powerful and assured. “This has been a terrible day for all of us. None of us should do anything to make it worse.”
Charlie looked at Fraser without comprehension. “What are you doing here?”
Fraser didn’t flinch. “Like everyone here, I just came to say goodbye. It’s time to let Ariel rest in peace, Charlie.”
“Peace.” Charlie repeated the word as if it were a noun from an unknown language, then broke from his father’s arms and sprinted towards the plane.
Howard’s voice in my ear was urgent. “You gotta come back with us, Jo. I don’t know how to handle this.”
I didn’t hesitate. I walked over to Drew and Molly Warren. “I’m going to fly back with them,” I said. “I hope you understand.”
“Do what you need to do,” Drew said. And then, a prisoner of his immaculate manners, he patted my hand. “It was good of you to come all this way, Joanne. I hope it wasn’t too hard on you. Molly and I keep telling people we’re all right, but we’re not, you know. I don’t think we could have handled this alone.”
I embraced Molly. When Fraser Jackson kissed my cheek, I promised I’d call him later in the weekend. Gert was over on the old dock talking to the pilot of the other plane, so the only farewell left was to Solange. When I reached out to her, she spun away.
“Not so evolved after all,” she said. “A man asks, and Joanne Kilbourn scurries after him.”
“Not every encounter between a man and a woman is a power struggle,” I said.
I tried to walk away with a purposeful stride, but Howard had long legs and a determination to get the hell out. As usual, once he’d exacted the agreement he needed, he was dealing with the next problem. I could feel Solange’s eyes burning into my back as I ran along behind him. It was going to be a long flight home.
The plane we flew back to Prince Albert on was called the Silver Fox, after its owner, who on closer inspection turned out to be a banty rooster of a man with vulpine features, hair moussed into a silver sweep, and dentures that dazzled. Gert handed me over to Silver without any time-wasting sentimentalities.
“I noticed you’re a nervous flyer,” she said, “but Silver here has been in the business as long as I have.”
Silver took his comb and perfected his sweep-back. “Haven’t lost a passenger yet. At least not a good-looking one.”
Gert shot him a dismissive glance and held out her hand to me. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said. “Happy landings.”
Charlie was slumped against the window in the seat behind the pilot. He was wearing the earphones from a Discman and, as I walked past him, I could hear the tinny overflow of rhythm that comes when someone is listening to hard rock at full volume.
Except for the two seats opposite Charlie, the plane was filled with cargo. I sat down next to Howard, and I didn’t cut him any slack. “What in the name of God were you thinking of, bringing him up here?” I said.
“Jo, I’ve been a lousy father his whole life. He wanted to come. Marnie said it was my turn.”
“Marnie! Howard, you know Marnie’s judgement hasn’t exactly been reliable since her accident. Did she understand what she was saying?”
Howard balled his hands into fists. “Jesus, Jo. Will you lay off? I know I made a mistake. Do you want to see what I was dealing with? Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of his funeral suit, pulled out a hand full of photographs and thrust them at me.
“These are for you,” he said. “From Marnie. She liked the picture you sent from the old days so much she had me stick it up on the wall next to her bed.”
The image deflated me. “I’m glad she liked it,” I said weakly.
“She loved it,” Howard said, “and of course the sisters at Good Shepherd are getting a real kick out of those words of wisdom you wrote on the bottom of the picture.”
Remembering, I cringed. “ ‘Screw them all!’ Howard, it never occurred to me that the photo would be on display.”
“It doesn’t matter. Actually, not much of anything matters any more in that quarter.”
He was right. The pictures in my hand were of Marnie. There were vestiges of the Marnie I had known in this woman’s face, but she was a stranger. Her hair had grown back grey and surprisingly curly. She was carefully made-up – another surprise, since the Marnie I had known said makeup was for clowns. She was wearing a pink tracksuit. Someone had put a matching pink ribbon in her hair. Suddenly I was furious.
I turned to Howard. “How could you let them do that to her?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Turn her into a doll.”
“The sisters are very kind to her, Jo. They try to make her happy. I don’t give a good goddamn if they want to play dressup with her. To be honest, she doesn’t seem to mind.”
“I’ll bet.”
The Silver Fox revved the engines and we skimmed off the lake. I leaned across Howard to look out the window. We were moving across the cobalt-blue waters, lifting above a hundred islands. Once, a glacier had covered the whole area; when it retreated, this was the topography it had left behind. I thought of the misery at the Warrens’ cottage, and in our plane. “Maybe we were better off when all this was a glacier,” I said. “Better off frozen solid, before the big meltdown when somebody had the bright idea to climb out of the slime.”
Howard gave me a look of disgust. “Save the existential crap for somebody who cares, Jo. We gotta figure out a way to deal with what’s happening. How much trouble is Charlie in?”
“You tell me. The woman he loves to the point of obsession leaves him, and she’s pregnant with another man’s child.”
Howard rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I take it the baby’s father was that black guy who was at the service today.”
I nodded. “His name is Fraser Jackson. He teaches in the Theatre department at the university.
Howard didn’t flinch. “So Ariel met him at work and fell in love with him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“What was it like?”
“She wanted a child, and she chose Fraser Jackson as the biological father.”
True to form, Howard travelled straight to the heart of the matter. “She needed to make a choice where there was no turning back,” he said. He leaned across me to look at his son. Charlie was sprawled across the seat, with his eyes closed and earphones in place, blasting their tinny sound, shutting out the world. He seemed closer in age to Angus than to Mieka. There was an adolescent narcissism about his grief that I found unsettling. It couldn’t have been easy for Ariel living with that juvenile intensity.
Howard straightened, leaned his head against the headrest, and stared at the plane’s ceiling. “Did she hate him that much?” he asked.
“I don’t think she hated him at all,” I said. “I think she just needed to break away.” Suddenly, the plane dropped through the sky and spun. Howard draped an arm around my shoulders. “Just an air pocket, Jo. Our pilot is responding with a little loop-de-loop. My guess is it’s for your benefit.”
“He doesn’t need to impress me,” I said tightly. “If he can keep this in the air, I’ll be dazzled.” The plane regained altitude, and I removed Howard’s protective arm.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m okay.”
“So,” he said, “she didn’t hate him. She just needed to break away, and he couldn’t let her.”
I nodded.
“Was she afraid of him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I know.” At the sound of Charlie’s voice, Howard and I both snapped our heads towards him. Charlie’s dark hair was tangled, and the earphones dangled from his neck. “She wasn’t afraid of me,” he said. “How could she be? She was the centre of my life. She was my life.”
“You were smothering her, Charlie.” I could feel my blood rising. “She wanted her own life. Why couldn’t you get it? The day she died, you recited a poem by Denise Levertov. Remember it, Charlie? ‘Dig them the deepest well,/Still it’s not deep enough/To drink the moon from.’ Anyone who heard your show that day knew how angry you were.”
“Leave him alone, Jo.” Howard was angry, too.
“No,” I said. “Howard, you dragged me into this. You said you needed my help. If I’m going to help, I need some answers. Another thing – the police are going to want to talk to Charlie. He has to be prepared for the kinds of questions they’ll be asking.”
Howard’s face sagged. “She’s right, Charlie,” he said quietly. “You need to level with us.”
“About what?” Charlie voice was wary.
“For starters, about the baby,” Howard said. “You did know Ariel was pregnant, didn’t you?”
Strangely, Charlie seemed almost proud. “You can’t love a woman the way I loved her without being aware of every nuance in her voice, every change in her body. Of course, I knew.”
“And you knew it wasn’t your child.”
Charlie tightened. “It wasn’t a concern for me,” he said.
“Was it a concern for you when Ariel moved out?” I asked.
“She would have come back,” Charlie said. “It was only a matter of time.” He put his earphones back on and cranked up the sound on his Discman, sealing himself away, closing us out.
For a few moments, Howard and I were silent as strangers. Then he turned to me. “Maybe you were right,” he said.
“About what?”
“Maybe we were better off when all this was frozen solid,” he said, rapping on the window of the plane. “Maybe we were happier before the big meltdown when that first wise guy had the bright idea of climbing out of the slime.”
I glared at him. “Save the existential crap for someone who cares,” I said. “We gotta figure out what to do next.”