The Geranium Girls (15 page)

“Later in the week I have to go away for a couple of days,” he said, “to a conference in Brandon. Just for part of two days — out on Thursday, back on Friday.”

“Oh.” Beryl didn’t want Frank to go away, even if it was just for a short time. And even if he did gaze into the distance too much. He had something on his mind that had nothing to do with Beatrice Fontaine or Diane Caldwell. There was an underlying sadness about him. But that could probably be said of almost anyone. He just didn’t hide his very well.

“I thought I should let you know in case you try to get hold of me,” Frank said.

“Thanks.”

“If anything comes up, you could phone Sergeant Christie. Do you have his number?”

“He gave it to me, but I threw it away,” Beryl said. “I don’t like him.”

Frank wrote the number down on a piece of paper from his notebook.

“Did you steal a photograph off his bulletin board?” he asked.

“He told on me?”

“Yes.”

“Steal is kind of harsh,” Beryl said. “I think removed is more the word to describe what I did. It was a well-intentioned thievery at the very worst.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Well…I don’t know really. It just seemed wrong, her picture being on display like that. I guess I just wanted to sort of give her some privacy. Or something.”

“Mm hmm…yes. I kind of figured it was something like that. I probably would’ve done the same thing if I’d seen it. Gregor shouldn’t have had it up there in the first place.” Frank turned the key in the ignition. “He’s a jerk.”

“Yeah, he is a jerk. I don’t want to phone him,” Beryl said, taking the slip of paper from Frank. “I will if I have to, but I hope nothing happens while you’re out of town.”

Beryl phoned Poulin’s, described the problem at Clive’s, and set up an appointment for later in the week. Then she went next door with the key to sniff out his drugs and paraphernalia. The place was still a sticky nightmare but she couldn’t find anything that would incriminate him in any way. Clive must have gone through the place himself and taken care of things, in anticipation of a visit from the exterminators.

On the kitchen table, stuck to it actually, there was a business card for an outfit called “Long-stemmed Beauties,” so Beryl put that in the pocket of her dress, unaware of the legalities of places with names like that. She locked the door behind her. Clive’s place was ready for a visit from the cops. She hoped, if it came to that, Clive wouldn’t hate her forever. Surely, if she explained everything, he would understand.

When Beryl stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine and heard the birds chirping and the squirrels chattering, the idea that these simple household oddities could be connected to two horrible deaths seemed so far-fetched that she wished she hadn’t gotten Frank involved. But she knew that when she woke up cold in the middle of the night, she wouldn’t feel that way.

Rachel was on a ladder washing her upstairs windows. They waved at each other. Beryl was reminded of all the house and yard work she had to do herself and she decided that this was a good time to get started.

She went inside the house and came right back out again. It was too dark in there. She got out her weeding cushion and started in on one of her flower beds, but the sight of the Chinese elms turned her stomach and she quit.

Beryl didn’t know what to do. She wanted some breathing space, which she usually found at home. But these days her home didn’t feel safe; it felt more like a place from which she needed to escape.

She thought about Dhani. She wanted to see him, yearned to see him, but she needed to sort out her thoughts first, to separate the different areas of her life into manageable sections that made sense.

Are the events of this summer going to ruin what we have? she wondered. Is our relationship going to be forever tainted by the gruesome actions of a psychopath?

Beryl went for a walk by the river. The river had been there her whole life and usually it was a comfort to her. But today all she saw were Chinese elms and purple loosestrife, the beautiful weed that was running rampant along this section of the Red River, choking the life out of the other vegetation.

At Wally’s funeral Beryl sat near the back of the church and tried not to laugh. She recalled the Chuckles the Clown episode of the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
— the one where the clown was dressed up as a peanut and an elephant stepped on him and killed him. At least that’s the way Beryl remembered it. Mary was disgusted with her co-workers for treating Chuckles’ death in a light-hearted manner. And then, when it really mattered, during the solemn funeral service, the sensible Mary started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Couldn’t have stopped if the minister had shot her in the foot; if Lou Grant had keeled over and died right there, she couldn’t have stopped laughing.

Wally’s death was not funny. He had choked on a bone in a fried chicken joint and no one noticed in time to save him. No one noticed till he was on the floor, blue in the face, dead.

It definitely wasn’t funny, especially not for Wally. Beryl swallowed her laughter and worried about hiccups. She tried to feel sad and couldn’t. Just shaken. And guilty because of her growing dislike of Wally, which had kept her from approaching him on Sunday night. It wasn’t her fault that he had died, but it still felt that way, just a little.

She was a bit awkward with Stan because she’d made no secret of her dislike for the dead man.

“Jesus, Stan,” she could remember saying. “How could you be related to such an asshole? Are you sure he isn’t dangerous?”

“Okay, firstly,” Stan had said, “I’m not related to him. Raylene is. And she’s pretty sure he was adopted so there’s no actual blood tie at all. And secondly, shut up. He’s not dangerous. He’s just a pitifully neurotic loser who’s really lonesome, so we’re trying to include him in the odd thing. Raylene likes him and so does Ellie. In fact, my daughter is crazy about him.

“You didn’t used to mind him so much, did you?” Stan went on. “You were nice enough to him at the folk festival.”

“That was before I knew him very well. Like, I can’t believe he came over to my house that day. And he thinks Hermione’s weird.”

“She is weird,” Stan said.

“He called her a lesbian.”

“She is a lesbian.”

“Yeah, well, she is and she isn’t. But Wally called her that as though it were a bad thing.”

Stan had laughed and continued sorting his mail, faster than seemed humanly possible.

That was just a few days ago and now Beryl sat next to Stan at the funeral, feeling really bad.

“I’m so sorry, Stan,” she’d said when she first sat down. And leaned over him to where Raylene sat quietly, red-eyed, her arm around their young daughter, Ellie. “I’m so very sorry, Raylene,” she said. And to the kid, “I’m sorry about your Uncle Wally.”

She hoped that Stan hadn’t told his wife all the nasty things she had said.

Settling in beside him, Beryl looked straight ahead at the coffin which, thankfully, was closed.

“I’m really sorry,” she whispered again, “for all the things I said. And did.”

Stan smiled at her and patted her hand. “Not to worry.”

She looked at him, her pale face pinched with anxiety.

“I mean it,” he said, and squeezed her fingers. “Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

Beryl was so relieved when he said that that she almost cried. She’d seen Raylene noticing Stan touching her and worried a little about that. She didn’t want Raylene to think anything untoward was going on between her and Stan.

Now, as she struggled to squelch her laughter, she tried to get those tears back. She was so afraid she was going to laugh out loud. She thought of unpleasant things: the mushroom girl, Diane Caldwell, the ruined face of Hermione’s customer, Jane. None of those worked, so she thought about the beach scene in
Saving Private Ryan
, the way she had felt what the soldiers must have felt when they pulled up in their boats. That knocked the laughs out of her.

She sat and worried about Stan. He seemed fine, but how could he not be disgusted with her? For how she behaved at work, the day after Wally’s death, when she had been a blabbermouth and a terrible friend?

Ed had already given her a notice requesting her presence at a counselling session for what he had labelled “insubordination.” She accepted it from him meekly, without question, and he seemed surprised by that.

“It’s for telling me to fuck off,” he said.

“Yeah, I figured that,” she had replied and stuck the notice in her mail-bag.

Beryl’s gaze wandered over the sparse gathering of people who had come to say good-bye to Wally Goatley. Stan and Raylene were the only ones she knew.

Once the service began, she found herself staring at the back of one man’s head. It was so familiar. He turned to catch her staring, as though he felt her eyes on him. An icy spider crawled its way up the length of Beryl’s spine. It was Joe Paine. He gave her a slight nod and turned back to the words of the minister.

“What the hell is he doing here?” she whispered to Stan.

“Shh!” said Stan who was listening attentively to the minister’s ideas on a very odd man he had never met.

Beryl came to understand something new on the day of Wally’s funeral. She learned it from a seven-year-old girl. And Raylene. It was about the wherefores and the whys of angels and heaven and what you do for yourself and others when people you love up and die on you.

It was an automatic thing, but one with which Beryl had no experience. She realized it must have been all around her, but she had never seen it or even thought about it till Wally died.

People invented things: beautiful truths of their own that suited them and that they hoped would soothe the ache inside the child who asked the inevitable questions.

“Why did Uncle Wally have to die?”

“God took him, honey, because he needed another angel in heaven.”

“Is Uncle Wally an angel?”

“He sure is, Ellie. God looked all over Winnipeg till he found Uncle Wally and then he said, ‘He’s the one I need.’”

“When I die, will I be an angel?”

“Yes, you will.”

“Will I be able to be an angel with Uncle Wally? Will I see him in heaven when I die?”

“Yes, you will.”

“For sure?”

“Yup, for sure. You and Uncle Wally will be side by side in heaven.”

Then later, “Why did God have to pick Uncle Wally?”

And it would begin again: a variation on a theme. One that was old, but brand new; one that tried to ease the pain on a shiny little face that had never known suffering like this before; one that was almost, but not quite, acceptable.

There was a part two to this thing that Beryl learned. She saw suffering on the mother’s face as she tried to protect her daughter. Ellie’s misery was Raylene’s own. Beryl envied her that misery.

The reception that followed the funeral took place in another room in the church, where fancy sandwiches and dainties were piled on plates, and bustling church ladies tended giant urns of coffee and tea. They had never heard of Wally Goately. But Raylene was a churchgoer and Ellie went to Sunday school here.

“Did you know that Joe Paine knew Wally?” Beryl asked Stan when they stood alone at the table of dainties.

“What?”

“Didn’t you see him upstairs at the service?”

“No.”

“Well, he was there. That’s what I was trying to tell you when you told me to shut up.”

“I didn’t tell you to shut up.”

“Well, as good as.”

“Anyway, are you sure?” Stan asked. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t know he knew Wally. Are you sure it was him?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. He even nodded at me.”

Raylene motioned to Stan from across the room and he moved off to join her and Ellie.

Beryl wondered if the sight of Joe Paine upstairs had been a hallucination. She wondered, not for the first time lately, if maybe she was going insane.

Fancy sandwiches were one of her favourite things but she couldn’t enjoy them under the circumstances. She kept thinking Joe was going to creep up behind her, or an imaginary Joe, so she found a chair against a wall and sat.

There was no reason for her to be here any longer. It was time to go, but a huge tiredness held her in the chair. It seemed as if death was all around her. She had gone through life with someone dying every few years, like most people, she supposed. But now it seemed there was no reprieve. Every time she woke up someone else was dead. Every time she turned around there was a girl with mushrooms growing out of her mouth or a man with a chicken bone lodged in his throat.

It was dusk by the time Beryl left Stan and Raylene’s house on Eugenie Street. Not wanting to be alone, she had followed them to their place and stayed too long, colouring with Ellie in her Cinderella colouring book.

She walked by Hermione’s shop on the way home and saw that the shades were down and the lights were out. It was dark upstairs too, where Hermione lived, but Beryl thought she heard a man’s laughter coming from the open window. She crossed the street, cut through the park and walked on to her own house where she locked herself inside.

There was a message from Frank. “Just checking in. Phone, if you like.” A reminder that he’d be going to a conference in Brandon for the better part of two days.

Beryl opened her bedroom window, the one that faced Lyndale Drive and the river, straining to hear more laughter from somewhere, straining to hear anything at all. But it was quiet now, except for the odd car swishing through the puddles left from today’s rain. The damp soft air felt cool against her hot face. There was warm in it too, in the middle of it for a second. She lay on her bed, trying to think of something good, something in her life that felt as hopeful as that trace of warm air running through the cool.

Dhani came to mind and she tried to hang on to him as she drifted off, willing her dreams to be of him.

But instead she dreamed that she was having a party.

When the day arrives, no one can get in. They try to come, they arrive carrying bottles of wine and trays of fancy sandwiches and wearing smiles from ear to ear. But they can’t get up her steps and in her door. They slip and slide and fall right down. Some people hurt themselves. And Beryl can’t get out to them. She has an idea that if she can just make it out to the deck, they can have the party out there. If anyone has to go to the bathroom, they can use the bushes; she has lots of bushes. But she can’t get out. Her guests mill around outside for a bit, and every now and then someone has another go at getting in, but before long they up and leave. And they are no longer happy. Beryl calls to them from a window but they can’t hear her; they can’t see her either.

Beryl woke up lonesome and depressed and wished she could stop thinking and dreaming about having a party. No one would come. And if they did come, what if they couldn’t get in? What if she couldn’t get out? What if people fell and hurt themselves and sued her?

Hermione’s light was on upstairs and there was no man’s laughter coming from the open window. Beryl took a chance and, passing the pots of sickly looking geraniums, climbed the outside steps to her friend’s apartment. Worry scrunched up Hermione’s wide forehead, making wiggly vertical lines between her nicely shaped eyebrows.

“What is it, Beryl…sweetheart…what?”

Beryl began to cry and Hermione hugged her close and led her over to the couch. She poured brandy into a tea cup and held it out to Beryl. The fire of the brandy licked through her. Her friend’s comfort brought more tears and a feeling so strong Beryl wasn’t sure she had ever felt it before.

Hermione moved the hair out of Beryl’s eyes and hugged her for a long time. I love you, Beryl thought, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t want to scare this precious gift out of her life and maybe words of love would do that.

This was the second time lately that she had to force herself not to say
I love you
and she supposed that was a good thing. Words of love straining to escape.

“What’s the matter with your geraniums?” she said instead.

Hermione sighed and took a short swig of the brandy straight from the bottle.

“I don’t know. I have an appointment with someone at the university tomorrow. I’m taking in some plants and the dirt surrounding them to see if they can help me get to the bottom of it. I have a feeling somebody poisoned them or something.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. It’s terrifying, really.”

“Do you feel safe here?” Beryl asked.

“No.”

“Would you like to come and stay at my house?”

“Do you feel safe at your house?”

“No.”

Hermione smiled.

“At least there would be the two of us,” Beryl said.

Hermione drank again from the bottle. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you like.”

“Thanks, Herm, but I think I’ll get on home. I have to be at work in a few hours.” She sighed. “God, I’m so tired.”

Beryl walked home, avoiding the park, sticking to the well-lit streets, wishing she were in bed asleep already. She wondered if wishing she were asleep all the time was the same as wishing she were dead.