I had tried all day to banish the images of Evan MacLeish’s wives by busying myself with the Mrs. Dalloway rounds of a woman planning a party, but the agony of these two very different women had burned itself into me. As I stood by the front door waiting to meet Jill and the man whose camera had captured those images, I had moved beyond concern to dread.
It was the night before the winter solstice. When I had offered to hold the rehearsal dinner at our house, my eighteen-year-old son, Angus, who was habitually short of cash but long on inspiration, put himself in charge of producing a seriously great event. It had taken him many hours at the computer to ferret out traditions that weren’t flaky, but as I watched him sprint down the walk in his cut-offs and Mr. Bill sweatshirt, igniting the pine tar and paraffin torches that he had wrapped and hand-dipped, I knew that at least one of his decisions was a knockout. Within seconds, a dozen flames licked hungrily at the thin winter air and the scents of smouldering pine tar and peat smoke drifted towards us.
My eight-year-old daughter leaned over the porch rail to watch the flames. “Angus says people used to build bonfires and light torches on the longest night of the year, so the spirits of the dead would stay away and the sun would remember to come back, but Mr. Kaufman says the dead don’t have spirits and the sun just appears to come back because the earth starts to tilt the right way.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
Taylor traced a pattern with her toe in the skiff of snow on our front porch. “I kind of like Angus’s story better,” she said.
“So do I,” I said. “But, of course, I still believe in gnomes and pixies.”
Taylor grinned. “Is that why you stayed in the garage with Angus when he was making his torches?”
I drew her close. “Nope,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure there was someone there to drag him out if that tar and paraffin he was heating exploded.”
“I heard that!” Angus twirled his torch triumphantly in the air. “As you can see, I’m still here. You worry too much, Mum.”
“Just about the people I love.”
“And that includes Jill,” Angus said. He peered down the street. “Hey, there are two taxis headed our way. This party is finally ready to rock and roll.”
“Not without me, it isn’t.” Taylor jumped off the porch and ran down the walk. I followed her.
As the first cab pulled up, Angus gave me a searching look. “You could try smiling,” he said. “You’re so weird about this wedding. Is there something the matter with this Evan guy?”
“I hope not.”
“Give him a chance. That’s what you always tell us.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep an open mind.” But the power of positive thinking was no match for the lingering intensity of the images captured by Evan MacLeish. Clearly, he was one hell of a filmmaker. As the second taxi slowed in front of my house, I knew in my bones that neither science nor dancing flames would keep the spirits of Linn Brokenshire and Annie Lowell from the party celebrating the marriage of one of my oldest friends to the man who had once been their husband.
As Evan MacLeish eased out of the taxi, I felt my nerves twang. There was no denying the fact that he was a stunningly attractive man, but he had the kind of physical presence that intimidates. He was tall, well over six feet, with a body so powerful that the exquisite tailoring of his handsome winter coat couldn’t disguise it. He bent to help Jill out of the car, then stepped towards me. His mane of greying hair curled onto his collar, a Samson image of potency, and his features were strong: heavy eyebrows, a large nose, full almost feminine lips, a cleft in his chin. For a beat, he looked around, taking in the scene, then his gaze settled on me. He had a sentry’s eyes, icy and observant. “The matron of honour,” he said, and he opened his arms to me.
My response was atavistic and unforgivable. I froze, drawing my arms against my sides like a child steeling herself against the embrace of a loathsome relative. It was a gesture of stunning rudeness; one of those jaw- dropping episodes that offers no possibility of a graceful recovery.
Evan raised an eyebrow. “Fearful of the villain’s clutches?” he said.
I was fumbling for an answer when Jill joined us. Tall and lithe, Jill was born to wear clothes well. She was not a classical beauty. Her hazel eyes were a touch too close together, and her smile was endearingly crooked, but that night, in her full-length hooded cloak, she had the timeless elegance of the heroine in a medieval romance.
Her face glowing with cold and excitement, she threw her arms around me. “Jo, it is so good to see you. And look at those torches! Absolutely spectacular!”
“You’re looking pretty spectacular yourself,” I said shakily. “That cloak didn’t come from Value Village.”
“My soul is still Value Village, but this is a gift from my mother-in-law-to-be. She wore it to her wedding.”
“A woman who appreciates you,” I said. “I can hardly wait to meet her.”
“Maybe some day,” Jill averted her eyes.
“She’s not coming?”
“She doesn’t travel,” Jill said.
“Not even for her son’s wedding?”
“Caroline MacLeish is a complicated woman,” Jill said. “But let’s not talk about her now. I just want to enjoy being here in Regina with you and your family. I know you must be swamped this close to Christmas.”
“That’s why I stepped in,” Angus said airily. “So Mum could just do all that cooking and stuff she likes to do at Christmas.”
Jill rested a hand on each of his shoulders and gave him an assessing look. “You know when you were a kid, you were a wild man, but you’re improving with age.”
“How about me?” Taylor said.
“Still a question mark,” Jill said with mock gravity, “but definitely showing promise. Now, let me introduce you to my prize.” Jill brushed past her husband-to-be and held out her hand to the girl still waiting inside the taxi. “This is Bryn MacLeish,” she said.
I was watching my son’s face as Bryn got out of the car, and I knew that while the calendar might say we were on the cusp of winter, Angus had just been struck by the summer lightning of love at first sight. At seventeen, Bryn made the cut when it came to the criteria for junior goddess: shoulder-length raven hair, centre- parted, pale translucent skin, huge watchful eyes, wide generous mouth. She was wearing a vintage A-line coat, claret with a black Persian lamb collar – demure, yet sexy, the kind of outfit Audrey Hepburn might have worn in Roman Holiday.
Jill touched my arm. “Wasn’t she worth waiting for?”
I was surprised at the tenderness in her voice. “Discovering the joys of motherhood?” I asked.
Evan MacLeish answered for her. “As if she’d invented it,” he said. “But to get the child, Jill must take the father.” His tone was matter of fact, that of a man stating a simple equation.
The three other members of the wedding party had sent off their cab and trailed over to the sidewalk, waiting to be introduced. Jill was oblivious. Her eyes hadn’t left Bryn’s face. “She’s worth it,” she said. “In twenty- four hours, I’ll have a daughter.”
Jill’s intensity about Bryn unnerved me, and I tried to lighten the moment. “Without stretch marks, labour pains, or jeopardizing your status as a size six,” I said.
For a split second, the mask of the radiant bride slipped. “Nothing good is free, Jo. You know that.” Jill gave me a thin smile, straightened her shoulders, and turned to the other members of her wedding party. “Time to get festive,” she said. “Everybody has to meet everybody else, and given what’s ahead, we could all use a drink.”
Angus, who had never made a halfway commitment to anything in his life, had transformed our house into an oasis of New Age serenity: yellow and white candles dispelled darkness and promised new beginnings; pine and cedar boughs filled the air with the sharp green scent of renewal; crystal bowls glittered with chips of quartz for courage and chunks of rich blue sodalite for old knowledge. Taylor, a skilled artist and a romantic, had made place cards in which exotic birds carried laurel wedding crowns in their beaks. My contribution to the bliss had been Bill Evans’s Moonbeams, my personal conduit to transcendence. As far as I could tell, we had made all the right choices, but five minutes into the party I didn’t need Angus’s Enlightened Web sites to tell me the energy in the room was spirit-suckingly negative.
Our party was small, just six people besides my family. There had been a mix-up about luggage at the
