Charlie.”
“Peace.” Charlie repeated the word as if it were a noun from an unknown language, then broke from his father’s arms and sprinted towards the plane.
Howard’s voice in my ear was urgent. “You gotta come back with us, Jo. I don’t know how to handle this.”
I didn’t hesitate. I walked over to Drew and Molly Warren. “I’m going to fly back with them,” I said. “I hope you understand.”
“Do what you need to do,” Drew said. And then, a prisoner of his immaculate manners, he patted my hand. “It was good of you to come all this way, Joanne. I hope it wasn’t too hard on you. Molly and I keep telling people we’re all right, but we’re not, you know. I don’t think we could have handled this alone.”
I embraced Molly. When Fraser Jackson kissed my cheek, I promised I’d call him later in the weekend. Gert was over on the old dock talking to the pilot of the other plane, so the only farewell left was to Solange. When I reached out to her, she spun away.
“Not so evolved after all,” she said. “A man asks, and Joanne Kilbourn scurries after him.”
“Not every encounter between a man and a woman is a power struggle,” I said.
I tried to walk away with a purposeful stride, but Howard had long legs and a determination to get the hell out. As usual, once he’d exacted the agreement he needed, he was dealing with the next problem. I could feel Solange’s eyes burning into my back as I ran along behind him. It was going to be a long flight home.
The plane we flew back to Prince Albert on was called the Silver Fox, after its owner, who on closer inspection turned out to be a banty rooster of a man with vulpine features, hair moussed into a silver sweep, and dentures that dazzled. Gert handed me over to Silver without any time-wasting sentimentalities.
“I noticed you’re a nervous flyer,” she said, “but Silver here has been in the business as long as I have.”
Silver took his comb and perfected his sweep-back. “Haven’t lost a passenger yet. At least not a good- looking one.”
Gert shot him a dismissive glance and held out her hand to me. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said. “Happy landings.”
Charlie was slumped against the window in the seat behind the pilot. He was wearing the earphones from a Discman and, as I walked past him, I could hear the tinny overflow of rhythm that comes when someone is listening to hard rock at full volume.
Except for the two seats opposite Charlie, the plane was filled with cargo. I sat down next to Howard, and I didn’t cut him any slack. “What in the name of God were you thinking of, bringing him up here?” I said.
“Jo, I’ve been a lousy father his whole life. He wanted to come. Marnie said it was my turn.”
“Marnie! Howard, you know Marnie’s judgement hasn’t exactly been reliable since her accident. Did she understand what she was saying?”
Howard balled his hands into fists. “Jesus, Jo. Will you lay off? I know I made a mistake. Do you want to see what I was dealing with? Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of his funeral suit, pulled out a hand full of photographs and thrust them at me.
“These are for you,” he said. “From Marnie. She liked the picture you sent from the old days so much she had me stick it up on the wall next to her bed.”
The image deflated me. “I’m glad she liked it,” I said weakly.
“She loved it,” Howard said, “and of course the sisters at Good Shepherd are getting a real kick out of those words of wisdom you wrote on the bottom of the picture.”
Remembering, I cringed. “ ‘Screw them all!’ Howard, it never occurred to me that the photo would be on display.”
“It doesn’t matter. Actually, not much of anything matters any more in that quarter.”
He was right. The pictures in my hand were of Marnie. There were vestiges of the Marnie I had known in this woman’s face, but she was a stranger. Her hair had grown back grey and surprisingly curly. She was carefully made-up – another surprise, since the Marnie I had known said makeup was for clowns. She was wearing a pink tracksuit. Someone had put a matching pink ribbon in her hair. Suddenly I was furious.
I turned to Howard. “How could you let them do that to her?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Turn her into a doll.”
“The sisters are very kind to her, Jo. They try to make her happy. I don’t give a good goddamn if they want to play dressup with her. To be honest, she doesn’t seem to mind.”
“I’ll bet.”
The Silver Fox revved the engines and we skimmed off the lake. I leaned across Howard to look out the window. We were moving across the cobalt-blue waters, lifting above a hundred islands. Once, a glacier had covered the whole area; when it retreated, this was the topography it had left behind. I thought of the misery at the Warrens’ cottage, and in our plane. “Maybe we were better off when all this was a glacier,” I said. “Better off frozen solid, before the big meltdown when somebody had the bright idea to climb out of the slime.”
Howard gave me a look of disgust. “Save the existential crap for somebody who cares, Jo. We gotta figure out a way to deal with what’s happening. How much trouble is Charlie in?”
“You tell me. The woman he loves to the point of obsession leaves him, and she’s pregnant with another man’s child.”
Howard rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I take it the baby’s father was that black guy who was at the service today.”
I nodded. “His name is Fraser Jackson. He teaches in the Theatre department at the university.
Howard didn’t flinch. “So Ariel met him at work and fell in love with him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“What was it like?”
“She wanted a child, and she chose Fraser Jackson as the biological father.”
True to form, Howard travelled straight to the heart of the matter. “She needed to make a choice where there was no turning back,” he said. He leaned across me to look at his son. Charlie was sprawled across the seat, with his eyes closed and earphones in place, blasting their tinny sound, shutting out the world. He seemed closer in age to Angus than to Mieka. There was an adolescent narcissism about his grief that I found unsettling. It couldn’t have been easy for Ariel living with that juvenile intensity.
Howard straightened, leaned his head against the headrest, and stared at the plane’s ceiling. “Did she hate him that much?” he asked.
“I don’t think she hated him at all,” I said. “I think she just needed to break away.” Suddenly, the plane dropped through the sky and spun. Howard draped an arm around my shoulders. “Just an air pocket, Jo. Our pilot is responding with a little loop-de-loop. My guess is it’s for your benefit.”
“He doesn’t need to impress me,” I said tightly. “If he can keep this in the air, I’ll be dazzled.” The plane regained altitude, and I removed Howard’s protective arm.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m okay.”
“So,” he said, “she didn’t hate him. She just needed to break away, and he couldn’t let her.”
I nodded.
“Was she afraid of him?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“ I know.” At the sound of Charlie’s voice, Howard and I both snapped our heads towards him. Charlie’s dark hair was tangled, and the earphones dangled from his neck. “She wasn’t afraid of me,” he said. “How could she be? She was the centre of my life. She was my life.”
“You were smothering her, Charlie.” I could feel my blood rising. “She wanted her own life. Why couldn’t you get it? The day she died, you recited a poem by Denise Levertov. Remember it, Charlie? ‘Dig them the deepest well,/Still it’s not deep enough/To drink the moon from.’ Anyone who heard your show that day knew how angry you were.”
“Leave him alone, Jo.” Howard was angry, too.
“No,” I said. “Howard, you dragged me into this. You said you needed my help. If I’m going to help, I need
