took in the empty room. “I thought there’d be more people.” She looked back at me. “So will you? Sit with me, I mean? I’m Mandy Avilia – Cristal’s sister.”
I moved to the place beside her. At first I couldn’t detect a family resemblance. Cristal had been slight, doll- like, and ethereal. This young woman was unabashedly carnal. Her sleeveless black dress was cut low to showcase the peachy skin of her arms, throat, and breasts. Her shoulder-length hair was dark and springy with life, and her mouth was wide and sensual.
“Were you a friend of my sister’s?” she asked.
I thought of Blake. “A friend of a friend,” I said.
“Well, that’s nice,” Mandy said. She held the funeral program in front of me. “Do you like the picture I chose?” she asked. “When Cristal was little, the photographer in our town had a beautiful baby contest. Cristal won. The prize was a picture on her birthday every year till she turned sixteen.” Mandy gulped. “After she turned sixteen, Cristal still got her picture taken every year for her birthday. That’s the last one. I just love it.”
It was a professional photograph, soft-focused and romantic – the kind of portrait a girl might give to her lover or use to announce her engagement. Cristal’s hair was blonder and longer than it had been in the DVD with Zack. She’d grown out her bangs and added a soft wave that framed her heart-shaped face. A swath of ivory chiffon was draped around her bare shoulders. Her lips were slightly parted, but she wasn’t smiling. There was a private sadness about her. Underneath were the words
Out of nowhere I remembered the stillness and grace of Ned Osler’s apartment at the Balfour – how the fire had burned low as he and I talked. That was how Ned saw Cristal, that chameleon woman who could become any man’s fantasy.
“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Mandy said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“That day when the man from the lawn service found her, she was holding a book called
“I don’t know.”
Mandy turned her eyes to me. “There is so much I don’t understand. I loved my sister, but I never really knew her. I never knew what it was she wanted. When I saw the book, I thought maybe that was it.”
“To be a lady.”
Images of Cristal thrusting her body against Zack’s crowded my mind, and I turned away from Mandy’s large and trusting eyes.
There was a murmur of voices at the back of the room, and I saw Zack and Blake. Zack beckoned to me.
“The man in the wheelchair is my husband,” I said. “I should go back and sit with him.”
“There’s plenty of room in the aisle right beside me,” Mandy said. “I don’t want to sit alone.” That seemed to end the discussion.
I went back and bent close to my husband. “That’s Cristal’s sister. There’s no one to sit with her.”
Zack muttered an expletive under his breath, but he turned his wheelchair and came up the centre aisle. Blake followed. They positioned themselves so they were on either side of Mandy and me. The portrait of Cristal was on a table beside an urn whose purpose was unmistakable. A spray of purple cattleya orchids drifted between the portrait and the urn. When he took in the arrangement, Blake flinched, but he remained composed.
Zack leaned towards Mandy. “I’m Zack Shreve. I’m a lawyer. Your sister paid me to represent a homeless woman who’d run into some legal difficulties. It was an act of real kindness.”
Mandy’s eyes welled. “Cristal was a good person.” Blake held out his hand to Mandy. “She helped a lot of people.”
Mandy looked around. “Then why aren’t more people here?”
“I don’t know,” Blake said.
The funeral director who had led me to my seat came and reminded Mandy gently that it was two o’clock – time to begin the service.
“Could we wait five minutes?” she asked. “There might be other people.”
She was right, there were other people – four of them. The first two – an imposing woman in grey and a younger man with a powerful body that appeared to strain the seams of his black suit – arrived together. When I caught Zack’s attention, he mouthed the word cops. Francesca Pope required no identification. Her appearance at Cristal’s funeral seemed inevitable. Like a persistent and troubling image in a Fellini film, Francesca seemed destined to appear and reappear until her role in the drama became clear. The final mourner was a surprise to everyone but Mandy. Just as the first lugubrious notes of “Amazing Grace” filled the chapel, Margot Wright joined the party. She came straight to the front and took Mandy’s hands in hers.
The tears streamed down Mandy’s face, but she was beaming. “I knew if you could possibly make it, you’d be here,” she said.
Margot’s own eyes were welling. “Hey, Cristal was a Wadena girl, and Wadena girls stick together, right?”
Margot pulled a pocket pack of tissues from her bag. She took one and handed the pack to Mandy. Beside me, my husband was, for once, speechless.
The service was generic and mercifully short. The minister, who introduced himself as “the Reverend Kevin,” had an overbite and a gentle manner. When he offered the standard apology for “not having had the privilege to know Cristal in life,” Zack and I exchanged glances. The Reverend Kevin didn’t dwell on the specifics of Cristal’s life. He talked about the mystery of human existence – a topic with which no one could take issue – then he led us through the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. The service concluded with the children’s hymn “Jesus Loves Me.”
When the service was over, Francesca and the police vanished, Zack and Blake and I shook hands with Mandy Avilia, and Margot offered to take Mandy out for a drink. We walked outside together, then we went our separate ways. Blake went back to the office, and Zack and I got into my car to go home. As soon as we were inside the car, I exploded.
“Why weren’t there more people there?” I said.
Zack’s jaw was set. He was trying to control his anger. “Jesus, Jo, you’re not twelve years old. You know the answer to that.” He lowered his voice. “You’re not going to like this, but I’ve seen the DVDS that were sent to Cristal’s clients. She gave each of those men something they weren’t getting anywhere else.”
“Sex?”
“Intimacy. I know you think Cristal’s clients were self-indulgent pricks, but if you’d been at our house the other day, you might have a different opinion. Those men lost something precious, and they were grieving.”
“Privately,” I snapped. “Away from the prying eyes of their wives and children. Did it occur to any of them to do the hard work of finding intimacy in a real relationship? You know, the kind where you don’t pay to get your own way, where you ask the woman about her needs?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Zack said.
Dinner that night was a tense affair. After we’d cleared the table, and Taylor went to her room to do homework, Zack turned to me. “Do you want to go over and see the avocets?”
“It’ll be too muddy for your chair,” I said.
“Fuck it. If I get stuck, I get stuck. You can leave me there.”
I felt my throat close. “I’ll never leave you, Zack.”
He pulled his wheelchair closer to me. “Then why are we sitting here making each other miserable? Jo, we’re not kids. If there were an actuary here, do you know what she would say?”
“No.”
“She’d say, ‘Look at the numbers – they’ll give you an idea of how much time you have left together. Go and see the fucking avocets.’ ”
And so we put on our jackets and drove to the south side of the Broad Street Bridge. The slope that led down to the sandy shoreline was slick, and Zack needed help with his chair, but we made it. We found a spot where we could sit and watch the avocets and the willets and the sandpipers without intruding in their world. The heart of the city was five minutes away, but that cool, misty evening, the only noises we heard came from waves slapping against the sand and shorebirds going about the business of their lives.
For the first time since Cristal Avilia’s murder, we were at peace, and when Zack reached out and took my hand, I felt something broken in me slide back into place.
