A Chill Rain in January (3 page)

“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.

T
HERE 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.

Horace said he guessed she'd be selling the house now, but Ramona was having none of that.

“It could be just a temporary stay,” she said firmly, “it could be I'll be back there in a jiffy; meanwhile I'm going to rent it out,” and she did.

For a while, after she moved into the hospital, her friends thought Ramona had rallied.

Isabella went often to visit her, and so did Rosie, and Cassandra stopped by before she left for England, and they all went away feeling relieved. Ramona seemed brighter, more confident, more like her old self.

Several months passed.

And then Ramona began complaining to Dr. Gillingham about the treatment she was getting. Nobody was ever available when she wanted to be taken someplace, she said. She hadn't had a perm in six months, she looked terrible, and there wasn't anybody to take her to the hairdresser.

“What are you talking about? You've got all sorts of friends to take you places,” said the doctor.

“I've got no right burdening my friends with things like that,” said Ramona angrily. “It's one of the nurses ought to take me.” He tried to reason with her, but she waved her hands in his face, shooing away his words. “That's what they're here for,” she insisted.

And she had other complaints, as well. Her room looked out over the roof of the adjoining wing; she didn't have a view. It was too cold outside to garden, or walk, and besides, those stupid nurses wouldn't let her out without they put her in a damn wheelchair, if you can believe that. “And on top of it all,” she concluded bitterly, “they won't let me have my gin here.”

This, it seemed, was the crux of it.

The nurses remained obdurate. Ramona wasn't to have her gin.

It's hard to know how much the one thing had to do with the other, but it is true that the nurse who came to summon her for breakfast on that Wednesday morning in January found Ramona's bed empty, and Ramona gone.

B
ENJAMIN
had had the temerity only once before to appear uninvited at Zoe's front door.

The other time had been on a summer day more than seven years earlier. Zoe had just moved into her house. She hadn't gotten to know the place yet; she hadn't arranged the furniture or set up her workroom. She'd even been beset by doubts that she'd made the right decision, buying the property, having the house built. On the day that Benjamin came, she was unpacking boxes in the kitchen, scolding herself, telling herself to have the strength of her convictions; reminding herself that if for whatever reason it didn't work out, she could always move.

Oh, but she did not want to move. Not again.

Both sets of French doors were open wide to the patio, and the front door was open, too, allowing the summer breezes to sweep through and make the whole house cool. Zoe was wearing shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers.

She had driven into Sechelt, to the supermarket in the little mall, first thing in the morning to buy a pail, some Mr. Clean, several rolls of paper towels, a couple of sponges, plain white shelf paper, and two inexpensive tea towels, which she tore in half to use as rags.

She had cleaned the countertops thoroughly, and the cupboards. They were already pretty clean, since the house was brand-new, but Zoe wiped them out and then laid the shelf paper. The fridge and stove and dishwasher were all new, too, and didn't need cleaning, but she cleaned them anyway.

Around noon she made herself a cup of tea and heated a can of soup. She sat at the kitchen table to eat lunch, and as she ate she could hear the sound of the sea coming in through the open doors and windows, and it was the only sound there was. Zoe began to feel confident again. She had her own fortress, so to speak. A solid, sturdy house out on a promontory, its face to the sea, its back to the rest of the world. It had precisely the amount of space she required: a bedroom with two closets, so she had plenty of room for what she thought of as her costumes; an office in which to do her accounts; a laundry room; and a living room; and in the basement, lots of space for a workroom and for the storage of food and supplies. In the workroom, she would refinish furniture. This was Zoe's only avocation. Restoring good pieces to their original beauty was, she had discovered, conducive to achieving tranquillity. Oh, yes, Zoe thought with satisfaction, she was going to thoroughly enjoy this house, feel thoroughly safe here, in the first brand-new, unsullied house she had ever lived in.