“It would be nice to stay here forever, wouldn’t it?” he said. “No phones. No problems. No fights.”
“Just us and the birds.” I said. I smiled at him. “You’d miss your martinis.”
“You’d miss the kids,” he said. “Actually, there’s a lot we’d miss. I think we’re going to have to face it, Ms. Shreve – becoming the bird people by the Broad Street Bridge may not be in our future.”
“We’ll have to figure something else out,” I said. I moved closer to him. “Do you remember what the dean said at our wedding?”
Zack nodded. “I remember everything about that day, Joanne. I remember everything about all our days. James said that marriage is a leap of faith, but we’d make it if we remembered to hold on to each other and never let go.”
I raised our linked hands. “I guess we just have to keep holding on.”
“That’s no problem for me.” Zack gazed at the sky. “It’s getting dark. Time to call in the dogs, piss on the fire, and saddle up.”
I looked at the muddy slope we had to climb, pushed myself to my feet, and took the handles of Zack’s chair. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go home.”
In the next week, Zack and I slipped gratefully back into our old and comfortable ways. We stopped using words as percussive instruments with which we could set each other vibrating, and the silences between us were no longer heavy with things unsaid. Life went on.
The campaign moved into warp speed, and for Ginny the signs were good. Experienced politicians don’t need a psephologist to know how an election is going. If the candidate is dogged by a persistent cold; if the campaign literature arrives from the printers late and with a typo stating the candidate has given his life to pubic service; if the bus breaks down; if the heavens open up on the one scheduled outdoor event; if the crowds dwindle; if the media’s attention wanders; and if the staffers are snarling at one another, a campaign manager knows without checking Decima or Ekos that the candidate is tanking.
I had worked in campaigns like that. I knew what it was like to wake up in the morning with my stomach in knots because there was no way to stop the grim downward spiral of loss. That’s where Ginny’s campaign had been the night of Zack’s birthday, but after Jason Brodnitz withdrew from the custody battle, the public’s assessment of Ginny underwent a tectonic shift, and Ginny knew it. I could see it in the way she strode up front walks to knock on the doors of her constituents. She was sniffing victory. As we criss-crossed Palliser, the riding that I knew better than any, visiting the cafes with the chrome tables filled with farmers in John Deere caps who met every morning to discuss what needed discussing, and showing up at all-candidates meetings with attendance swollen by Ginny’s sudden possibilities, the campaign became fun.
One sweet May day, after ordering Monaghan Maple-Walnut at the Moose Jaw ice-cream shop where the proprietor had labelled an ice cream with each candidate’s name and tallied votes on the basis of how much of each ice cream sold, Keith and I sat outside on a bench, and he talked about his next big push.
He had decided to look past this election towards the big leadership challenge – the one that would rout the social conservatives and return his party to the principles Keith espoused. He wasn’t looking for a squeaker in Palliser; he was looking for a big win that would turn the party around.
In the days after she gained custody of her daughters, everything broke Ginny’s way. Momentum – “the big Mo,” as politicos and sports announcers call it – was with her. Media stories became soft focus, crowds swelled, and senior party people, scrutinizing her anew, liked what they saw: a smart, affable, seemingly tireless candidate. When, at Sean Barton’s urging, Ginny’s daughters agreed to campaign with their mother, Keith shook his head. “I don’t know what dark magic Sean used, but having the twins out there with Ginny is the best thing that could have happened for us.”
Indeed, the sight of these three powerfully built women with the identical engaging smiles silenced the cynics. Suddenly, family values, the two most semantically loaded words in modern politics, was Ginny’s issue, and the Monaghan campaign milked it. Three days before Mother’s Day, Sean arranged for a friend on the local paper to photograph Ginny and the twins bicycling in Wascana Park. The chokecherries were flowering, and the three women were positioned against a tree that had exploded in blossoms. It was the best of photo ops for the ad-fat Mother’s Day edition of the paper, and sister papers owned by the same chain in big markets picked it up. But Ginny’s campaign was more than just pretty pictures. She ended all her speeches with the same sentence; “We are the real party of the people.” The message was simple, positive, and utterly meaningless, but it was catching on, and the pundits had noticed.
One of our national newspapers published a story under the headline “NOTHING BUT BLUE SKIES FOR GINNY MONAGHAN,” and indeed the consensus seemed to be that it was smooth sailing all the way for Ginny. Those of us closer to the centre of the campaign knew better. Francesca Pope’s appearances at Ginny’s events became almost hallucinatory, like the troubling presence of a mysterious figure in a dream. More significantly, something was terribly wrong between Ginny and her ex-husband.
Ginny, who had seemed so indifferent to custody, suddenly was demanding full custody, and her demands had nothing to do with politics. She seemed genuinely concerned about allowing Jason to see the girls without a third person present. I heard her on the phone with him one night. “I’m getting these anonymous phone calls about you, Jason. They’re frightening. They say you’re a pimp. We both know what we know, but this is new, and it’s ugly. We’ve got to talk.” Seemingly they never did. Ginny watched the girls carefully, and whenever they saw their father, no matter how busy her schedule, she went along.
When I told Zack about the conversation I’d overheard, his reaction surprised me. “You know the woman at the centre of this is going to be Cristal.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a leap?”
“I don’t think so. According to Debbie Haczkewicz, the cops are getting nowhere trying to identify Cristal’s boyfriend. This guy was a genius at covering his tracks. They’ve talked to everybody – including Cristal’s sister – all they’ve got is that Cristal’s boyfriend was a mystery man who had to protect his reputation at all costs.”
“Vera Wang told me the relationship Cristal had with her pimp was a troubled one.”
Zack raised an eyebrow. “Those relationships are never made in heaven. And Jason Brodnitz would have solid reasons for keeping the relationship with Cristal secret.”
“Both professional and personal reasons,” I said. “Until a year ago, he was a pillar of the community. He must have wanted to get back his reputation.”
“And he wanted his daughters,” Zack said. “Being exposed as a pimp would put the kibosh on both those dreams.”
I thought of Jason’s abrupt change of heart after he encountered Sean in the men’s room of the courthouse. “Zack, would Sean have known that Jason was involved with prostitution?”
“Ginny was his client. If she was aware of the situation, she should have told him.”
The image of Jason watching with dead eyes as his counsel announced that he no longer wished to pursue custody flashed through my mind. “Zack, when Jason came back into court that day, he was in shock. If there was some secret between Ginny and him, it wasn’t that.”
Zack shrugged. “It’s possible the truth came to light after the hearing started – some kind soul might have dropped Ginny an anonymous note.”
“Regina’s a gossipy town,” I said. “You must have heard rumours about Jason.”
“Actually, in the last year I heard a lot, but they weren’t about Jason’s love life, they were about his business.”
“And what were people saying?”
“Pretty much that he was a guy to avoid. When he was working for Tatryn-Mulholland, he was hot stuff – a stockbroker with the Midas touch. He decided he was good enough to go it alone.”
“And it didn’t work out?”
“Nope. As soon as he was on his own, Jason lost his magic. He also lost a hell of a lot of money for his customers.”
“I hate stories like that. I’ve chosen mid-risk investments all my life, and I always get a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach when the quarterly report arrives in the mail.”
“I’m glad you weren’t watching our investments the first couple of months we were married. Luckily for us both, Ms. Shreve, I had a stock fraud client who gave me some solid advice about what to hold on to and what to sell. You and I are in good shape.”
“But Jason isn’t? His finances came up a couple of times during the custody suit, but Margot gave the court the
