The engines roared to life, and we were in the air. My composure shattered, and my pulse began to race. The gin had worn off, and I had alienated my travelling companion. It was going to be a lousy flight. But angry as she undoubtedly was, Solange didn’t abandon me. “Take some deep breaths,” she said. “I’m sorry. I lose reason at the mention of that man’s name.”
“He really isn’t that bad.”
“You and Ariel,” she said. “Always looking for the diamond in the pile of excrement.”
Despite everything, I laughed. So did Solange. Then her expression grew pensive. “Ariel was so good to everyone but herself. Did she ever talk to you about the Hippocratic oath?”
“The recitations in front of the mirror when she was little?” I smiled, remembering.
“Not so funny,” Solange said. “She took those words to heart. It’s a stringent code, Joanne – sensible enough for a medical practitioner, I suppose, but suicidal for anyone simply wanting to live a decent life.”
“You think Ariel held herself to unreasonable standards?”
“I know she did.” Realizing the closeness of our quarters, Solange lowered her voice. “ ‘First, do no harm.’ A pensee perfect for framing and prominent display in the office of an idealistic young M.D., but for Ariel it was disastrous. She was pathological about not hurting others. So self-denying. In the historic way of females, Ariel always held on too long. Relationships that should have been severed weren’t.”
“But at the end, she had changed,” I said. “She did break away. Remember what you said that night at the vigil? When Ariel died, she was ‘fully alive.’ You were right. I saw her that last morning. She was radiant.”
“And her joy enraged someone to the point where he felt compelled to kill her. A competent, functioning woman is always a threat. If you don’t believe that, think back to l’Ecole Polytechnique.” Solange’s voice was glacial. “Our friend was a gifted teacher, Joanne. Isn’t it a pity she wasn’t spared? Who knows, given a few more years she might have been able to bring the violent ones to understand the principle that informed her life.”
For the rest of the flight, we were silent: Solange lay, eyes closed, with her head against the headrest. I gazed out the window, watching the shifts in light and topography that indicated we were moving from the Interior Plains into the southern edge of the Precambrian Shield and wondering what the world would be like if man, woman, and child alike lived by the dictum “First, do no harm.”
At Prince Albert airport, we moved from a public to a private plane, and in an oddly analogous process, we seemed to leave behind our public selves. For Molly Warren, the transformation began the moment she stepped off the plane. From the time we left Regina, Molly had been inching into a carapace of stoicism and self- containment. Her face bloodless, her hands resting on the small wooden box, she seemed beyond words of comfort or gestures of intimacy, and so, in respectful, baffled silence, we left her alone.
But in Prince Albert, the woman who ran across the tarmac towards Molly Warren broke through Molly’s terrible self-imposed isolation. The woman was accompanied by a dog who looked like a wolf, and she herself was what my grandmother would have called “an odd duck”: bowl haircut, barrel chest, orange windbreaker and matching ball cap. Odd duck or not, she was obviously the one person Molly Warren wanted to see. When she opened her arms, Molly allowed herself to be enfolded; when the two women moved away from one another, Molly handed her the rectangular wooden box. Even from a distance, it was apparent Molly was grateful this particular burden was now being shared.
The two women walked arm in arm towards a small bush plane, the wolf-dog following at their heels. Molly climbed inside but the woman and her dog waited to greet us. I liked her on sight. She had a broad Cree face and a ready smile. She embraced Drew Warren wordlessly, then turned to us.
“I’m Gert,” she said. “This is my plane and this is my flying service.” She pointed to the dog at her feet. “This is Mr. Birkbeck,” she said. “He’s been with me since he was a pup. He goes everywhere with me. We always take the Warrens up to their place on the island.” Her voice was warm and husky. She patted the box with a square-fingered hand. “I never would have dreamed that I’d be the one to fly her up this last time.” She gestured with her head towards the inside of the plane where Molly and Drew had already taken their places. “Hurry up and get in there,” she said. “They’ll need to get this over.” Then, as if as an afterthought, she said, “I hope they make it.”
As I gazed at the endless, unknowable sky, I wondered if any of us would make it. Gert’s plane was ridiculously small, but the motto painted on its side was reassuring: GERT GETS YOU THERE. I climbed on, found my seat, and watched Mr. Birkbeck amble aboard. The moment Gert closed the plane door, he curled up and gave every appearance of falling instantly into a deep sleep. As the engine coughed to life, I closed my eyes. Mr. Birkbeck would not be sleeping if he sensed danger. Somewhere in his marrow he knew that against every law of physics, Gert could keep this small metal tube aloft until we reached our destination. I had to believe he was right. I had to trust Mr. Birkbeck’s atavistic wisdom that somehow Gert would, indeed, get us there.
CHAPTER
10
Making the final break with the physical remains of a being who once glowed with spirit is never easy. But those of us who had gathered to bury Ariel Warren were, for a while at least, part of a farewell that was appropriate, honest, and stamped with the acknowledgement of what she had been to us all. Gert proved to be our salvation. At the Prince Albert airport, she had struck me as a person with the crisp compassion of the basketball coach at the girls’ school I’d attended. When a player was injured or humiliated, our coach had a way of catching the girl’s eye and communicating a message all the more powerful because it was unspoken. I know you’re hurting, the look said. But cry later. Get on with the game.
Gert, too, seemed to be a person with a natural talent for sizing up a situation and dealing with it. After she’d landed her plane beside the dock and we had all climbed out, only Mr. Birkbeck showed evidence of a sense of purpose. He found a patch of sun and then, in what appeared to be a physiological impossibility, flattened himself until his bones disappeared, leaving only his head and his hide. The rest of us looked hollowed out too, like survivors of an accident, dazed and uncertain about what to do next.
Gert took charge. “Misery hates a full stomach.” She turned to Drew and Fraser. “There are two coolers stowed in the back of the aircraft. Why don’t you get them off while the ladies and I go up and air out the cabin?”
Relieved at being issued marching orders, we set to work.
The cabin was made of logs, and it was very old. “My father built this place,” Molly Warren said. “He was a physician, too. He’d seen so many children with polio.” Her lips tightened. “He thought he could keep us safe.”
Gert knew a bad moment when she saw it. “Better get moving,” she said. “That cabin won’t air itself out.”
The wooden shutters were still nailed in place. When we unlocked the door, we were met with the musty gloom of a room that only rodents had called home during the long winter months. As my eyes grew accustomed to the shadows, I made out a wood stove, a couch piled high with Hudson’s Bay blankets wrapped in heavy plastic, and, incongruously, a lipstick-red canoe, hull side up, in the centre of the floor.
When she spotted it, Molly slumped. “Ariel’s,” she said. For a moment, she was silent, then she turned to Gert. “What was that joke she liked about the canoe?”
Gert swatted at a blackfly. “Not a joke,” she said. “A true story. They say that one day God was fooling around, the way He does, and son of a gun if He didn’t make a canoe. Well, He’d made a lot of stuff, but that canoe really blew Him away. ‘Helluva boat,’ he said. ‘But where am I going to paddle it?’ All of a sudden, it came to Him.”
Molly smiled as she supplied the punchline. “ ‘I know,’ He said. ‘I’ll make Canada.’ ”
Drew and Fraser appeared in the doorway, each carrying an old metal cooler. Drew’s eyes found his wife. “Nice to see you cheerful,” he said.
“The canoe story hasn’t failed yet,” Gert said. “Now, the two of you are going to have to do an about-face. It’s too dusty to eat in here. Let’s get back to the dock.”
The men traded glances, then started back towards the water. The easy camaraderie that had sprung up between Drew Warren and Fraser Jackson seemed to strengthen them both. Carrying out the ordinary tasks
