Practical Jean (7 page)

With the light outside fading, and the living room settling into darkness, Milt switched on the iron standing lamp by his chair. The glow caught the wine in Adele's hand as she swirled it and sent golden baubles scooting across the carpet.

“Losing someone close,” said Adele, “it's very hard. Can be.”

“Oh,” said Natalie, finding a seat on the couch. “Can it?”

“Mmmm,” said Adele.

“But,” said Jean, and she cleared her throat, “it's not losing my mother that was hard. I was saying this to Milt the day I got home, after the funeral. I was just happy she was out of pain. Do you remember, Milt?”

“Yes,” said Milt. He was only saying yes.

“There was no reason for her to suffer like that,” said Jean. “I mean, the pain she went through, the indignity of it, the cruelty . . . it was inhuman.” Jean put her hand to her forehead. She wasn't about to cry again, that crisis had passed. But her heart was racing, and her thoughts were going smoky again, swirling in confusing ways, and it seemed comforting, somehow, to press her eye with the heel of her palm, even as she felt everyone watching her. She pressed and willed her heartbeat to slow.

“I don't think any of us can imagine,” said Natalie. She was concentrating on the fabric of her skirt, brushing at it softly with the tips of her fingers, the way she might brush flies from the sores of a starving child. “My only hope, when it comes time for me, is that something else takes me. Something fast.”

“Maybe you'll choke on a cupcake,” offered Adele.

“Well, you know what?” Natalie leaned toward her. “It would be better than going through what Jean's mother went through.”

“I envy guys,” said Dorothy.

Jean blew her nose with a tissue. “How so?” she said.

“It just seems they go quick. Soldiers . . .” Dorothy made a shooting gesture with her thumb and forefinger. “Accidents. There was a guy Roy fought against once. Bill Powell. It wasn't the next fight but the one after, he died in the ring. One punch.” She made a fist and held it to the back of her jaw, showing where the fatal blow had landed, as everyone took in a breath. “But if you're talking about natural causes, usually it's a heart attack, right? I mean, look at all the guys who go out shoveling snow and—” She snapped her fingers. Then she glanced at Jean. “Isn't that what happened to your father?”

Jean nodded. “It was something like that.” She didn't actually know what had caused her father's heart attack. One winter's day her mother had simply announced that it had occurred.

“Have you noticed,” said Adele, “only men seem to die in the act of sex?” Everyone seemed willing to wait for Adele to elaborate. “If they're our age,” she continued in her low, vowelly tones, “they'll go off to a hotel room to cheat on their wives with their secretaries, and then keel over as they orgasm.” In her chair, Adele pantomimed a man so violently thrusting his hips that her hair bounced, and then she suddenly grabbed her chest and collapsed with a choking sound. Everyone laughed. “Poetic justice, perhaps,” she said, “but not a bad way to go, I should think.”

“Why can't women have that?” demanded Natalie. “Fatally penetrated by a six-foot-four bricklayer.”

Milt caught Jean's eye and motioned to his empty glass, then eased out of his chair and began to edge toward the kitchen.

“Why don't you pour Louise another one of those,” said Jean, nodding toward the empty tumbler at Louise's feet.

“Oh, sure,” Louise giggled. “Thanks.”

“And I'll have one too,” Jean said. “Just to see what the attraction is.” She held out her wineglass and waited for Milt to take it.

“You know what I think would be nice?” said Louise.

Milt hesitated in the midst of retrieving glasses, sort of crouching on the carpet like prey hiding in the tall grass.

“I'd like to die with someone reading poetry to me,” she said. “Maybe something by Elizabeth Bishop. Or that translation she did of that Manuel Bandeira poem.”

Everyone waited, except for Milt, who resumed his flight to the kitchen.

“Do you know it?” said Dorothy.

“Well, the one I'm thinking of, it's called ‘My Last Poem,'” said Louise. “It's about a poet who wishes his last poem could be as beautiful as a scentless flower, as ardent as a tearless sob, and have the passion . . . What was it? . . . The passion of a suicide who kills himself without any explanation.”

For a moment the only sound in the living room was that of Milt stirring Mojitos in the kitchen, his spoon knocking ice against glass.

Jean, sitting in her chair by the window, wiped her eyes with the crumpled, snotty tissue she gripped hard in her hand. “Everyone should have a last poem,” she said. She said it more to herself than to anyone else. But then she looked to see if the others understood. “I mean, as a metaphor, not literally. I mean, everyone should have a last moment of beauty in their life. Because life can be so hard and dismal, why can't we end with something absolutely pure and sweet? Something wonderful? We earn that, don't we? I mean, that should be our right, as human beings.” All her friends nodded, watching her. “My mother deserved a last poem,” she said.

“Sure she did,” said Natalie.

Jean's hand felt stiff, rusty; her muscles seized as she wiped her nose again with the old, balled-up tissue. She was alone now. She hardly noticed Milt setting a tall green glass on the little table beside her; he was merely a shape in the shadows. Sitting by the window, she was all alone when her mind filled with an image, sudden and unstoppable, like gas being pumped into a chamber. She could tell this was what she'd been waiting for, since the day of the funeral. This was how the best plans and most intricate designs came to her; they rushed in at her, fully formed. She'd been waiting for just such a revelation. She knew to let it come.

She saw her mother lying in bed, head wrenched back, neck roped with pain, and the vision caught her breath in her throat. But then . . . then . . . as she watched her dying mother, she imagined something quite fantastic. Oh, it was quite wonderful, and terribly sad, too, as a truly artistic vision can often be. She imagined offering her mother a last . . . sweet . . . moment of beauty, a last poem, in exchange for the pain she'd been given. Who could resist such a trade? Oh, it was so tragic, Jean thought, to know it had been within her power to grant her mother that gift, if she'd only thought of it in time. Because she knew how it could be done now. She looked at her friends gathered about her in the room, her friends and their shadows, and she could picture it clearly. And how tragic it would be for her mother—though her mother was dead and beyond knowing—to see her daughter giving that gift to someone else. Someone else and not her. Yes, that would be tragic, in its way. But now that she knew, Jean thought, what kind of monster would she be, what kind of friend, to deny that gift to these people she loved?

Death didn't have to be slow and agonizing and bleak. Suffering was not a given. A person could have a last poem. And it wasn't something that had to come by chance. That was the revelation. It could be guaranteed. Jean breathed deeply, deeply, and felt her muscles relax. This always happened when she was sure of her vision, before she started work. She became calm.

And it was an added joy for Jean to know that this vision she had, this gift, this plan, wasn't ridiculous or scoff-able at all, but entirely practical. Exquisitely practical. Had she not been dead, had she not been buried and beginning to rot, Marjorie Horemarsh would have been so proud.

Chapter 6

J
ean gave her mind over to thoughts of blood. It was the morning, and she sat drinking English Breakfast tea across from Milt in their bright dining area, with a daisy light from the bay window painting the far wall and the antiqued china cabinet. She watched him eat his crusty toast with marmalade—an oddly bitter taste with which to begin the day, she'd always thought—and knew that blood was not going to be a problem.

This was the great benefit, the singular one, really, of having been raised by a veterinarian mother wholly oblivious to a young daughter's sensitivities. Watching Marjorie in her white coat cut into tabbies and Labradors, even once a Great Dane—anaesthetized and splayed out larger than either of her little brothers on the kitchen table—had inured Jean very early on to the sloshy, lurid aspects of organs and vessels and bodily fluids. She was more accustomed to it, at the age of seven or eight, than the first-year veterinary students who were sometimes assigned to work with her mother, who would often observe Marjorie slicing open a pink, shaved belly and faint with a crash at the first scarlet trickle.

“That was nice last night,” said Milt. “Everyone seemed to have a good time.”

“Mmmm,” said Jean. Her eyes were set without seeing on the first done button of Milt's Lacoste golf shirt, which had been purple when she'd bought it for him twenty or so years before and had since faded to a lavender-tinted gray. Milt wore this shirt when he had no substitute teaching assignments and planned to idle the day away in the house, reading how-to books he'd bought at the hardware store, as if reading about how to do something forgave never managing to do it.

And he had never once golfed.

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

She wiped splashes of red out of her mind and lifted the teapot to freshen her cup. “Nothing to concern you.” He was still nervous about the night before, Jean could tell. Worried about her mood or her attitude regarding his encounter with Louise. Husbands, she thought, or hers at least, monitored their wives for trouble the way pioneers once watched their dry goods, checking for mold in the wheat flour, weevils in the corn. But the fact was that she couldn't have been less concerned about anything happening between Milt and Louise. She almost wished something would happen, if that's what would make Louise happy. Because that was all that mattered to her now, the happiness of her closest friends. That was the vital thing. That was the point.

“You're not thinking about Louise, are you?” said Milt.

“No, not Louise. Not specifically.”

“I mean Louise and me. Because there's nothing to think about there, Jean. That's all over. That's history. The whole Mojito thing was just a total, weird coincidence.”

“Stop worrying about it, Milt. It's not even in my mind.”

“Okay.” Frowning, he began to spread marmalade on a second piece of hard toast, dry, the way he preferred it lately. “So is it to do with your work? That kudzu piece?”

She lifted her tea. “It's an idea. Something a little different.”

He bit into his toast, watching her, and began jabbing at the air with his half-eaten slice. “Yeah. I should've figured it out. You've got that faraway idea thing happening in your eyes. Oh, jeez, sorry.”

A bit of marmalade had flicked onto her cheekbone, and Jean wiped at it with a finger and then licked it off. Foul, bitter, rindy taste. No, marmalade was not for her.

Milt kept his head down for a while, chewing his crust, his mouth emitting sounds of walking on gravel. When he looked up he said, “Is it something I could help with?”

“I don't think so.”

“Remember I used to help you? Remember that time you needed a bigger kiln and I helped you build it?”

She sipped at her tea. “I think I hired someone to do that.”

“But I read up on it.”

Jean set down her cup, reached across the table, and laid her hand on his wrist.

“I took out all those books from the library so I could advise you.”

“Milt, darling,” she said, smiling as sweetly as she could but letting him see her eyes. “I'll slice my wrists if you don't stop talking.”

“Okay, you're concentrating, sorry.
Artist at work
.” He popped the last bite of toast into his mouth. “It's nice to have you home, though.”

She had so much to do. So much to think about. Jean took their little Hyundai to the Sobeys for a shop, partly because the house was low on just about every staple—Milt's own shopping while she'd been gone had apparently centered on milk, bread, and a rotation of frozen stir-fry dishes—but also because she knew it would help her. Ever since living as a student on her own she'd found that walking up and down the aisles of a supermarket, when it wasn't too busy, really cleared her head.

Inside the store she grabbed a cart, picked out the old flyer that was lying in the bottom, and made her way into the produce section. There she felt the ceiling's full cathedral height above her, and let the cool, humid air hit her face and neck like a breeze off the lake and bring goosebumps to her sleeveless arms. She went slowly through the mixed greens, the herbs and packaged salads, the fennel and snow peas showered with mist. And then, finally, past the tomatoes, amid the citrus and the pineapples, Jean nudged into the question that was plaguing her most at the moment. The question was:
Who should be first?

That dilemma sat on her as something stressful and fraught because, having had the vision, she had to act. She was compelled. An idea unexecuted was no better than a daydream; it did nobody any good. Yet acting on her vision required making a choice, and to choose one friend before the others suggested she liked one best, while the others would have to follow in some sort of ranking, next to least. To Jean that didn't seem right at all. It was possible to have a best friend, she supposed, one who resonated in one's experience more deeply than anyone else. But after her experience with Cheryl she had always tried to avoid making judgments like that. Even when girls in her class wanted to be granted that status, wanted exclusive access to her secrets, or sole rights to the cafeteria seat beside her. No, she wouldn't do that. She loved all her friends equally.

It was another reason for her mother to shake her head in exasperation. “You have to find your strongest allies, Jean,” she would say, frowning at the irritation of her as she scratched through her paperwork. “You have to form a circle of support. It's ridiculous and unnatural not to. If you try to make everyone your friend you won't have any real friends at all.”

Well, somehow she had managed, and she had cultivated a group of friends that she cared about deeply. Through the years, of course, the numbers had diminished. People got busy with their careers, raising their families. Some of them died—Margy Benn getting her head split open by a mare's hoof at thirty-two had been a shock. (Quick for her, though, Jean now considered; so much better than Jane Tiller and her cervix. Oh, if only she had thought of this
sooner
.) And of course, saddest of all, she had lost Cheryl's friendship—not just lost it but thrown it away.

That was a mistake she couldn't take back, Jean knew. It was a piece that had shattered in the kiln. But what she could do, what she
had
to do, was try again. She could do the best thing now, for all of her friends. And pushing her cart past the baskets of peaches, Jean realized that meant she had to find a way to put an order to her plans. Someone had to be first, and someone last. That was just how it was.

“Oh, Jean!”

Jean turned to see Fran Knubel hurrying a cart toward her and felt a weight press the air out of her chest, because this was exactly the sort of encounter she didn't need at the moment. Fran lived with her retired husband on Jolling Crescent, which was one of Kotemee's better streets. Some said “the best” but Jean preferred to avoid those distinctions. Fran had obviously just had her hair done; it was all wisps and waves. She'd decked out her hip-heavy frame in summery-designery things, from fashion houses Jean had never heard of and didn't care to, and presented herself in full makeup, with opal earrings. Oh, and Jean could see now an opal dolphin brooch. All this for a morning trip to the grocer's.

“Jean, did you see they had California oranges on sale back there?”

“No, Fran, I wasn't looking for oranges.” Jean glanced into Fran's cart and saw several flimsy plastic bags stuffed with fist-sized vine-ripened tomatoes and Chilean peaches and some disturbingly large zucchini. But no oranges. “Looks like you weren't, either.”

“No, I never buy those,” said Fran. “Jim loves them, but they're all skin as far as I'm concerned. Peel them and there's nothing left. I prefer the satsumas, you know, those little mandarins? They're really, really nice and you can get them in those big organic stores but they hardly ever stock them here. This is such a terrible grocer's. Terrible. I wish we had one of those organic stores, don't you? But they'll never come here. Why would they? Nobody in this town would appreciate them. Well, besides us.”

Jean nodded and looked off toward the breads. Implicit in Fran's helpful alert about the sale-priced, all-skin navels was the understanding that Jean-and-Milt had less money than Fran-and-Jim, and might appreciate a heads-up on the opportunity to save a few precious cents on produce. Fran Knubel was just full of the sort of help and counsel that made you feel like a total fool who'd stumbled into all the wrong choices in life. It was one of the few drawbacks of living in the sort of pretty, small town to which people retired that once someone like Fran arrived, as she had some years before, you could never fully be rid of her—every time you turned around she was at the grocer's, at the bookstore, at your mother's funeral—and every year was one more year of wishing that she and Jim would unretire and move back to wherever they had come from. And what made it that much worse for Jean was the fact that Fran did genuinely seem to like her and enjoy her company. She would come into the studio-shop two or three times a week, apparently just to chat. The curse of having a shop open to the public was that the public could be anybody; you couldn't jump up from your stool when she was about to walk in and rush to shut the door going, “Oh, sorry, Fran. Not you.” Although she had also, over the years, bought several expensive ceramics by Jean and seemed quite delighted with them, which made Jean feel even more guilty. Really, the dismay of seeing Fran was always multilayered. Maybe that was why it felt so heavy.

“So,” said Fran, “are you doing a full stock-up or are you just getting something special for dinner? We could go 'round together. And by the way,” she leaned in and touched Jean on the wrist, “I read they have chicken wings for two dollars off a pound.”

“I'm so stupid,” Jean blurted.

“What?”

“I left my wallet in the car.”

“You have your purse, though,” said Fran, helpfully pointing.

“I know.” Jean leaned her cart into a hard U-turn around a barrel of dried figs. “But when I paid for gas I left the wallet on the seat. Isn't that dumb? You go ahead and maybe I'll catch up.”

The morning sun wasn't that hot, but Jean thought she would bake sitting in her car in the parking lot, so she rolled down the two front windows before she pulled out her phone. Then she punched in Welland's direct number. It rang only once.

“Constable Horemarsh.”

Jean knew it killed Welland to have to say
constable
when his brother got to say
chief
. Even
sergeant
would have been better. “Hi, there,” she said. “It's Jean. Just calling to see how are things coming on finding Cheryl Nunley. Any luck yet?”

“No, no luck yet. No. Sorry. No.” Welland's voice had the tone he got when he was saying only part of what he wanted to say, and the part he wasn't saying was the much bigger part. It was a quality of compression, as if his voice were a grilled cheese sandwich being pressed into the pan.

“Oh, well, is there any trouble? I mean, is there something you need from me? I tried to tell you everything I know but maybe . . .”

On the other end of the phone Welland sighed, and through the phone it sounded like a sudden windstorm in Jean's ear. “I haven't even started looking yet.”

“Oh, but—”

“No, I want to look. I wish I was doing it right now, instead of packing up Billy Walker for one more kindergarten cookie bang.” Billy Walker was Welland's little dummy boy, made out of foam and clothes from the Goodwill, which he stored in a suitcase and took into classrooms to talk about traffic safety. The younger children loved Billy, and they always got to eat cookies when he and Constable Horemarsh visited; that's what Welland was referring to with the mention of
cookie
. As for
bang
, that was just Welland expressing his frustration. “But I can't,” he continued. “Before I start working on this I have to get trained on the system, and they haven't had time to train me yet.”

“What system?” said Jean.

“It's a system. Does it matter what system? Do you need to know the name of it? CPIC. There, does that help? Does that make things clearer? I haven't been trained on the CPIC system, which ties into the RMS and the PIP and the NCIC. All those are cross-border data-archive and info-retrieval systems. And I haven't been trained on any of them, and I'm not doing anything until I'm trained. Because this might be my only chance to
get
trained.”

Jean watched people coming out of the Sobeys in case one of them happened to be Fran Knubel, although it probably wasn't time just yet. “Isn't there anything you can do, though? Until you get trained, I mean.”

“Like what—checking on the Internet like some fourteen-year-old kid? That's not really police work, is it? That's not what I've been waiting all this time for.”