Practical Jean (22 page)

This news so widely missed the mark of
encouraging
that Jean pulled her arm back.

“It's upsetting, I know.”

“Yes,” she said. What could have gone wrong? She retraced in her mind those crucial moments with Adele, when she had spread glob after glistening glob of narcotic into her skin. How could someone so skinny have survived? Part of Jean thought she should admire Adele for that, but she couldn't because it was so disappointing. She had worked so hard to make those final moments beautiful . . . and final . . . and now there was a chance it would all be shattered. There was a chance that at any second Adele would wake up and demand to know what Jean had been thinking. And undoubtedly other people would want to know as well.
Jean Vale Horemarsh, what could possibly have been going through your mind?
And then it would all get so complicated, and she might not be able to give Natalie or Cheryl their Last Poems . . .

“I wish I hadn't had to be the one to tell you,” said Welland. “It's just so rotten. Because you've already lost Mom, and your friend Dorothy. And now you might lose another.”

Jean leaned forward. “She might still die?”

“Well, maybe.” Welland pressed his wide thumbnail into the soft, damp wood of the picnic table, and Jean could tell, as his sister, that he had something else to say. She waited. Welland wasn't very good at handling being rushed. She waited as he lifted off his cap and used the bill to scratch his scalp through his sweat-damp hair. And she waited as he watched a father run by the picnic table in pursuit of his little tomboy daughter. She could just wait and wait if necessary, without ever letting Welland know how urgent her situation was . . .

“The thing is,” Welland finally continued, “the circumstances are suspicious. There were drugs in her system, but no sign of her taking anything. So, according to the report, they suspect foul play.”

Welland kept talking and Jean tried to listen, even though she found the phrase
foul play
distracting in its implications of fedoras and whisky and snub-nosed .45s, and even though her imperatives pressed down harder with each passing minute. Welland mentioned that Jean's name had been listed in the report as one of Adele's contacts—probably it had been lifted from her address book—and so, just as a routine matter, she was probably going to get a visit from some city detectives. It was no fun talking to city detectives, Welland told her, his face full of concern.

“Welland,” she said, stretching her arm across the rain-spotted picnic table, “I don't want you to be too upset about Adele.” She laid her hand on his wrist. “If she
does
die—and what are the chances of that, by the way?”

Welland made a helpless flaily-arm gesture. “It didn't say in the report.”

“Well, assuming she does, we can just think of her as being lucky. She's already had a mastectomy. There's no telling what awaits her. If she dies this way then at least she won't have to die like Mom did. She'll have been spared all that pain. And that's good, don't you think?”

Welland looked at Jean and squinted with one whole side of his face. It was similar to what would happen to Drew's face when he was trying to noodle a thing out, and Jean was sad for her brother that it was just about the only part of their father that he had gotten.

“She's young, though,” he said.

“Not so young, really,” said Jean. “My age.”

“But you're young, Jeanie!”

She shook her head. It was obvious to anyone who looked, without the veils of affection, that she was getting on. When she focused a clear eye on the mirror she saw nothing of the girl she'd been, only the wearing, dragging, unforgiving work of age. Just as when she looked at her friends, the ones she had known the longest, she saw not just who they were but how much they had changed. Their faces and bodies were billboard advertisements for the passage of time, explicit proof of how old she was getting, and therefore how close to her mother's fate. She was never going to convince Welland of this, though; he was too big-hearted, which made his judgment unreliable.

But she couldn't waste any more time. She patted Welland's hand and stood.

It must have been that abrupt motion that attracted the attention of Fran Knubel because, from the other side of the Picnic Basket Zone, separated by perhaps twelve or thirteen tables, she could be heard calling out, “Jean!” The sound of her voice reached Jean at roughly the same moment the clouds above gave way and the chubby drops began to fall, hitting the ground with their fleshy thuds and knocking the paper cups and bags and wrappers off the picnic tables into the mud and under Jean's feet as she began to run.

And as Jean ran to find Natalie, ran to her responsibility, ran through the Kotemeean refuse as fast as she possibly could, it would have looked to Fran as though she were merely dashing to get out of the rain.

It was a desperate sound, a frantic yelling, that finally drew Jean to Natalie. She found her, to Jean's great surprise, at the dunk tank.

The Activity Zone was mostly deserted. Rain pooled in the awnings, slammed down on the lids of coolers and the game tables being folded and packed away by librarians' husbands slopping through the mud. Natalie stood in front of the dunk tank, hair smeared to her forehead and neck, a spout of water running from her nose, her white blouse showing pink where it stuck to her skin. She had three baseballs clutched to her chest, and one more in her hand, which was raised to fire.

“Stop! I'm
begging
you, Natalie!”

The yelling came from Tina Dooley, who was in the dunk tank. It was an old and very poorly designed dunk tank. There seemed to be only one way out of the Plexiglas surround filled rib-high with gray, sloshing water; that was to stand on the triggered platform on which the dunkee sat, and step from there to a wooden ledge, which led to a set of descending stairs. Natalie seemed to have discovered this design flaw, and every time poor Tina Dooley tried to step on the platform to get out of the tank, Natalie hurled a ball with the accuracy of a sniper toward the padded target, triggering the platform to swing away and dropping Tina into the drink.

“Natalie!” cried Tina as she was knocked sideways by the wave she had created. “For God's sake! What's the
matter
with you?”

Natalie seemed not to hear, or perhaps the sound of Tina's pleading only fed whatever revenge-lust gripped her. In her blue-and-lime one-piece bathing suit with ill-advised frills around the hips, Tina struggled once more onto the platform on her knees. Natalie waited for the precise moment and whipped another ball, sending her tumbling backward into the rolling water with an enormous glunking splash that climbed the sides of the tank and sloshed over the top. There were no organizers to intervene; all of them were scrambling through the rain to dismantle and pack away other displays and pieces of equipment. Tina, her coppery hair clinging to her skull like seaweed, her eye makeup trailing down her cheeks like squid's ink, clutched herself as she rose to her feet. Hands trembling, teeth chattering, she leaned back, exhausted, against the Plexiglas wall as the water lapped at her.

“I
hate
you!” she wailed. “I hate you, you
cow
!”

Jean tugged on Natalie's sleeve. “Natalie,” she said, “let's go.”

“One more!” Natalie shouted. She was as wet as Tina, but something inside her cooked with a kiln-like heat. She spun the ball in her hand like a pitcher as she watched Tina struggle onto the platform. “It's her own fault. I told her last month if she sent one more of her goddamn memos I'd get her.”

Jean heard sloshing behind her and turned to see Fran charging through the slop, her prim tennis-shod feet launching little tsunamis of murky rainwater with every step.

“
There
you are! Oh, thank God!”

One whole hemisphere of Fran—from the left isthmus of her designer jeans straight up to the tectonic plate of her jaw and cheek—was slathered in a layer of mud, and she followed Jean's gaze to the disaster zone of her own body.

“I took a spill by the pony rides,” she explained. “But it doesn't matter because I found you!” She squelched up to where the two women were standing and reached to clutch Jean's dripping elbow. “Jean, I feel terrible,” she said, blinking against the rain. “I should have asked you before and I hope it's not too late. Would you come for dinner tonight at our place? I just think you shouldn't be alone right now, and I know Jim has been dying to meet you.”

“Oh,” said Jean. She looked at the splendid mess of Fran—her hair, half her blouse, most of the yellow sweater around her shoulders iced a rich mocha—and tried not to imagine what Fran could have said to make Jim so desperate for an introduction. “Actually,” she said, “I think Natalie's already made plans for us this evening.”

She turned toward Natalie for confirmation, but Natalie's attention was all on Tina Dooley as the woman hauled herself from the water onto the shaky platform like an air crash survivor mounting a fragment of fuselage.

“Natalie,” piped Fran over Jean's shoulder, “would you like to come over to our place for dinner tonight?”

“Nope,” said Natalie, lining up her target.

“Do you mind if Jean does?”

“Nope,” said Natalie, cocking her arm for a throw.

“See?” said Fran. “It's all set.” The teeth of her smile gleamed bright against the mud mask sliding down her cheek. She thumbed muck off the crystal of her watch. “Try and come for seven, okay?”

With a great woof of exertion, Natalie threw her last ball. It sailed a foot above the target and bounced off the trunk lid of a departing Fire Department cruiser.

“Ha!” yelled Tina Dooley as she climbed to safety on the wooden ledge. She thrust a middle finger in Natalie's direction. “Eat it, Skilbeck.”

“Damn,” Natalie muttered, shaking her head. “Wanted it too much.”

Chapter 17

C
heryl came to her decision in the western end of the vineyard. Then she made her way back to the house. Before she arrived in the large, mahogany-cabineted kitchen of her house, a bottle of Riesling disappeared. In the kitchen, she took a twelve-inch carving knife from a woodblock, waved it like a flag as she got its heft, and used it to cut up an apple for Buzzy, largely but not entirely avoiding her fingers. As she pushed the bloodied apple slices one by one through the bars of the cage, Buzzy made his whistling kettle noise, and each slice as it landed sent up a cloud of seed husks and feathers from the disarray on the cage floor.

She wandered through the empty house for a while, through echoey hallways that n
o longer featured artistic travel photographs on the walls, past rooms that no longer contained exercise and computer equipment, Chinese heirlooms, and the smell of Partagas cigars. She was lost between the soothing idea of her end and the inspiration for how to achieve it, until she remembered the knife and went looking for it.

The knife was . . . there, on the counter where she'd left it. She picked up the knife and considered it for a moment, considered the knife and its function as an idea . . . could not quite get the whole, messy picture of the idea in her head all at once, to see what she would do, how it would happen, what it would mean. If she couldn't think it, she couldn't make it occur. No knives.

Between the kitchen and the basement, a second bottle of Riesling disappeared. In the basement, Cheryl considered electrical cords. There were short white ones and long orange ones, swaying from nails on the wall. The long orange ones with ribbed sheathing seemed promising. She could tie one end of an orange electrical cord to something high, tie the other part around her neck, and then fall. That might work, she thought. Okay, she thought, she would try that.

There was nothing high in the basement, so she dragged the coil of orange electrical cord up the stairs. A tree maybe, Cheryl thought. Between the thought of the tree and the discovery of a suitable oak at the edge of her yard, most of a bottle of Cabernet Franc disappeared. The remainder was lost when the bottle slipped out of her hand and the wine dribbled out and seeped into the earth.

The large oak tree at the edge of her yard had many branches, and looking up at them to try and choose one made Cheryl woozy. So she spent some amount of time attempting to fling the plug end of the electrical cord over one of the branches above her without actually looking up. She made more than a dozen attempts and, each time, the cord fell uselessly to the ground. For some further amount of time, Cheryl stood beneath the oak tree and wept until her shoulders shook over her inability to get an electrical cord over a branch.

When she was done weeping, Cheryl heard the sound of a car with a blaring radio and lifted her head. From where she swayed, she could see the paved two-lane road that passed in front of her property. The car roared past, right to left, and she thought about that for a while. Then Cheryl looked into the distance, where the road narrowed to a point. There was some kind of truck approaching. She watched this truck, saw that it was a pickup, and followed it with her eyes as best she could, until it too sped past, the tires howling over the pavement.

Then Cheryl started walking toward the road.

Chapter 18

T
he storm drummed on Corkin Park, and the lakeshore, and the pretty avenues of Kotemee for another half an hour or so. While it did the gutters coursed and the sidewalks danced, and hissing cars along Howell Road carved plumes through puddles big as lawns. One of those cars, Jean saw as she walked toward home with Natalie, was Jeff Birdy's orange Barracuda, and the sight of it disappearing into the downpour was almost nostalgic for her, although she gave the boy inside little thought. She concentrated instead on the problem ahead of her. Because the terrible news of Adele's survival brought with it the prospect of detectives at her door at any moment, and the chance that she might never be able to give another friend her beautiful, practical gift. If that happened, she didn't see how she could live with herself. So she walked through the rain, hardly saying a word to Natalie, hardly lifting her gaze from the grass encroaching the limits of the sidewalk, and felt the pressures of her obligation building with each soggy step.

Natalie wasn't like her other friends. Jean couldn't help but dwell on that fact. The whole foundation of her gift was a last moment of joy, and yet Natalie was someone who seemed to
reject
joy, to refuse it and its consolations on principle. How could such a person ever be fulfilled?

As she walked, Jean riffled through the easy options like someone thumbing through paint chips. Sex? No, that one was easily dismissed. Unlike for Dorothy and Adele, sex didn't appear to be a priority for Natalie. She snickered with contempt whenever other women ogled a handsome man, or leaned in during pairs figure skating as the male skater lifted his partner and clenched. Perhaps that was a camouflage, a way of protecting herself from disappointment. But even so, it seemed clear to Jean that sex was not the thing Natalie needed. For the same reason she rejected any ideas relating to food that wanted to push into her brain. The notion of some kind of grand last supper for a woman who occasionally liked to indulge; it was just too cheap.

A spa treatment, glorious and relaxing? Hot stones? Pedicure? Mud bath? No, no, no, thought Jean. These were paltry, make-do ideas. They showed no imagination, no specificity, no truth. The beauty of the moments she'd made for Dorothy and Adele was that they had just happened. They were real, and so the joys were authentic.

She sensed she was searching in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. For this friend, Jean reasoned, the experience of complete, immersive happiness took an entirely different form. To anyone else, it wouldn't even
look
like happiness; that's how different Natalie was. If she needed a reminder of that, she got it on the walk home. By the time the two women had reached the north end of Calendar Street the storm had largely abated, the grand elms and beech trees were shaking off more rain than the clouds, and light filtered into the sky like an afternoon dawn. Jean's feet were squishing in her running shoes and she stopped to take them off so that she might pour the excess water out. As she stood barefoot on the cold, wet sidewalk, she looked back where the sky was brightest and saw an immense rainbow arching over the outskirts of Kotemee.

“Look, Natalie!” she said, pointing. “Isn't it exquisite?”

Natalie squinted up at the arc of color. “Sandeep used to go gaga over rainbows. Something about Allah and His Holy Last Messengers.” Her upper lip kinked into a sneer. “He kind of ruined them for me.”

Who on earth didn't like rainbows? What kind of person sneered cynically at something so magical? She almost chided Natalie until she seized on the answer. Someone who pushed against the world. Someone for whom everything was fraught and complicated and sharp-edged. Someone who called timid old ladies terrible names and stood in the teeming rain firing baseballs to feed a lust for revenge. Someone who relished conflict.

In that moment, Jean realized what she needed to do. She needed to give Natalie something to struggle against, something to fight. And for it to be worthy of Jean's goal, and of Natalie, it couldn't be just anything . . . it had to be the ultimate thing.

The rest of the walk toward Natalie's house felt much lighter to Jean. There was a moment when she saw a police car coming along Calendar and froze. But then she saw it was Bill Courtly behind the wheel; Bill was just an ordinary constable and sort of dopey, and Jean thought if they were going to send somebody to arrest her it wouldn't be him. But she didn't wave or attract any attention to herself just in case.

With not far to go, she announced to Natalie that she needed to make a quick stop at her shop. So they turned at the corner of Main, passed under the ornamental street lamp, its wrought-iron curlicue still dripping, and walked up the street past the pots of flattened geraniums. When they arrived at the shop, Jean paused as she put the key in the front door, and wondered out loud whether Dilman's was open.

“I'd say they'd better be,” said Natalie. And off she went to buy an assortment of cupcakes, which gave Jean time to stand before her wall of tools, consider the array of options, and make the very best choice.

At Natalie's, each of the women spent a while under the spray in her tiny shower, where turning around meant being careful not to hit your head on the little metal shelf of shampoos, and Jean no longer wondered why her friend had chosen such a small house to live in after her divorce. It was the sort of house that made everything—bathing, cooking, entertaining guests—much more difficult than it needed to be, and it was clear now that was just how Natalie liked it.

When they were done it was about three in the afternoon, and bundled warm in their terry-cloth robes they met downstairs in the little kitchen. Natalie had already set out the cupcakes on a plate and was in the middle of making coffee when Jean joined her. For a brief moment Natalie struggled sliding in the basket that held the grounds, and when she swore at the coffee maker and gave it a whack with her hand, Jean smiled to herself.

As she sat at the kitchen island, she set a small paper bag by the foot of her stool.

“What's that?” asked Natalie.

“It's what I wanted to get at the shop,” said Jean. “A little surprise for you.”

“A ceramic?”

Jean shook her head and gave Natalie an admonishing look. “No guessing.” She passed her gaze over the assorted cupcakes. Was there chocolate? Yes, but only one, and she knew that was Natalie's favorite. On another day, she might have invoked guest's privilege and taken it, but not today. Instead, she took a lemon with white icing and sprinkles, which she didn't mind.

“Natalie, I want to thank you again for being there for me and letting me sleep here during this whole stupid Milt thing.”

Natalie was reaching up to grab two mugs from the cupboard. “That's what friends are for, kiddo.” She set the cups on the counter and tugged open the fridge. As she brought out a carton of milk, she giggled.

“What's so funny?”

“I just think it's pretty hilarious you're going to dinner at Fran Knubel's.”

“Yes, and thank you so much for your support,” said Jean. “That's one instance where you were
not
there for me.”

“You could have just said no, like I did.”

Jean tore off a piece of cupcake with her fingers and held it like a cotton ball ready to dab a puncture wound. “But that's your way. I'm not like you. I accept invitations that I don't particularly want, because I can't bear to hurt someone's feelings, even someone like Fran. You're different. You do things and say things that most people would never do or say.”

Natalie batted her eyes. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“It makes you a challenge.” Jean popped the pinch of cupcake in her mouth. She pointed down at the plate and joggled her eyebrows expectantly. “I left the chocolate one for you.”

Natalie made the face of someone quite unimpressed. “You can have it. I'm off chocolate.”

Jean just looked at her friend, saying nothing but invisibly shaking her head. Because wasn't that typical? That was
so
typical. Really, Natalie Skilbeck was the most difficult, most challenging person Jean had ever known. She thought to herself that it was amazing they had remained friends for so long, because, looked at objectively, Natalie's personality could be very off-putting.

“Well, which one do you want?” said Jean. “Which one are you craving?”

Natalie sighed. “I dunno, maybe the carrot.”

“Then have the carrot. Have the one you want. This is your chance.”

“I'm not sure I even want it.”

“Then why did you buy it?”

“Why are you pushing me?”

“I'm
not
.”

Jean held up her hands and let out a big breath, because suddenly they were both in a bad mood and this was not how she wanted things to go. Natalie turned to face the counter and began pouring coffee into the mugs, and Jean adjusted her robe and cinched the belt. It was, perhaps, a subconscious action but she caught herself doing it, and that focused her mind.

“Natalie,” said Jean, “do you have any gloves?”

“What kind of gloves?”

“Any kind, it doesn't matter. But probably not little knit ones.”

Natalie handed Jean her coffee. “What do you want gloves for?”

“They're for you, to put on.”

Natalie brought her coffee mug to her mouth and took a careful sip, looking the whole time at Jean with a furrow across her forehead.

“Why, though?”

Jean made a sound of mock exasperation, which really wasn't so mock. “It's for the surprise!”

The crease in Natalie's forehead eased a little. “So you
are
giving me a ceramic. It's one of those prickly ones with the thorns.”

Natalie meant the
Bramble Berry
series of ceramics Jean had done a few years before: one each of
Raspberry
,
Dewberry
,
Blackberry
,
Loganberry
, and
Tayberry
, in which a single bright berry glazed in purple or red or blue was surrounded by a thatch of spiny branches and leaves. Even though Jean had used these dabs of vivid color, which was rare for her, the series had not sold well. One visitor to the shop had actually called them “wicked,” and not as a compliment.

Jean looked off noncommittally and smiled.

“I probably have some leather ones somewhere,” said Natalie. “I usually pack all my winter stuff away.” She set down her coffee and left to go rummaging in her front closet. Within a few minutes she came back flapping a pair of brown lambskin gloves.

“Good,” said Jean. “Now put them on.”

“Is it really necessary?”

“Yes, I think it is.”

Natalie sighed and pulled on first the left glove and then the right. Standing in her bathrobe, she held up her hands to show that she was ready. “You know, Jean,” she said, “you don't have to give me something just because I'm giving you a place to stay. I'm your friend. That's what friends do.”

“I
know
,” said Jean. She found her voice going strangely hoarse and had to clear her throat. “I
know
you're my friend. It's not a thank-you present.” She felt flushed. She looked at Natalie holding up her gloved hands and a wave of emotion that was quite unexpected washed through her. For twenty-three years she had known this woman, and she could see all of that time, all those shared memories, all those spent days spread through every inch of Natalie's face, every slight discoloration, every crease and fold of skin and every coarse gray hair sneaking past the battlements of tint and curl. For Jean, looking at dear Natalie was like seeing her own hand clutching the ledge that kept her from falling into the abyss, and watching it lose its grip, finger by finger.

She patted the stool next to her. “Sit here,” she said. And when Natalie sat, facing her, Jean made a twirling motion. “The other way.”

“Do you want me to close my eyes?”

“Good idea.”

Natalie repositioned herself with her hands in her lap. “This is actually kind of exciting.”

“I know. Now the next part is going to seem odd, but no arguing. I want you to hold your hands a little higher, and together, kind of like you're praying. Even though neither of us believe in that.”

Natalie glanced back at Jean. “Who says I don't?”

“Oh,” said Jean. “Do you?”

For a second, even two, it seemed as if the answer to that question should make a difference. But even before Natalie gave her answer, which was squishy and equivocal, Jean had decided that, no, it didn't really. Age and pain affected everyone, regardless of their beliefs. And with Natalie's hypertension and penchant for sweets, it was only a matter of time.

“Ready? Eyes closed?”

“Ready.”

Jean bent and picked up the paper bag she had placed by her stool. She opened it and took out a coiled wire. This was her heavy-duty cutting wire, a strand of thin stainless-steel cable, which she used to slice her twenty-kilo blocks of clay into manageable one-kilo hunks. Uncoiled, the wire was less than a meter long and secured at each end to a sturdy hardwood handle. At a cost of about four dollars, it was one of Jean's least expensive tools. And yet, after the storm, when she'd made her side trip into the shop to look at her wall of cutters and shapers, she'd known immediately that it was the perfect choice. Because it gave Natalie a fighting chance.

She stood up and pushed away her stool, unwound the wire, and got a firm hold of each of the wooden handles. After a delay to make sure Natalie was still holding her hands in a prayerful position, she reached out and eased the wire over her friend's head.

“Now you can look.”

Jean didn't give Natalie time to gather the full significance of the situation before her—the shining gray wire twisting across her field of view, Jean holding it from behind the way she might have held a ribbon she intended to wrap around a present, the fact that the wire was vibrating an inch from her gloved hands, the gloves themselves and their greater meaning. Jean said, “Now you can look,” and then she pulled the wire tight and cinched hard, hard as she could, as if Natalie were an old and very difficult block of clay.