Taylor scrunched her forehead. “Is that one of your jokes?”
“Apparently,” I said.
“Good,” Taylor said. “Anyway, I am here on serious business. Today’s the day you and Julia and Erica and me go to see The Nutcracker. It was part of my birthday present, remember?”
“I remember now,” I said. “So what time do we pick up the ladies?”
“The ballet doesn’t start till two, but Erica says the GAP is having a big sale – butterfly shirts for ten dollars each. She thought it would be neat if we all got shirts the same and wore them this afternoon.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Let’s take everybody to the mall around eleven, battle our way through the crowds, eat at the food court, and come back here so you can get into your butterfly shirts.”
Taylor stretched luxuriously. “This day is going to be so great.”
“You bet,” I said. “Starting right now because I have two whole hours all to myself.”
“What are you going to do with them?” Taylor said.
“See where they take me,” I said.
Within fifteen minutes I had the house to myself. Taylor was spending the morning in her studio out back painting; Angus and his friends were cross-country skiing, and Jill and Bryn were taking a walk to talk things over. As soon as the door closed behind them, I went into the family room and slipped the tape of Black Spikes and Slow Waves into the VCR. I was convinced that the scenes Gabe Leventhal had been so intent upon the night before he died were key, but tense with the awareness that a single frame might illuminate the mystery, I was on the edge of my seat from the opening credits.
If ever I’d needed proof that context is all, revisiting Black Spikes offered it. The first time I’d watched the movie I’d been seeking evidence that would nail Evan MacLeish to the wall – prove to Jill conclusively that he was a rotten choice for a marriage partner. That one had been a no-brainer, but as I watched Black Spikes, I knew that in my eagerness to indict Evan, I’d missed much that was significant about the film itself.
First was the consummate skill with which the movie had been made. Using only a hand-held camera and available light, Evan had shown how life looked from inside the eye of the hurricane. The view was seductive. Annie might have been hurtling towards death, but there was an antic, reeling joy about her decision to fuel her passage with a high-octane mix of drugs, booze, and sex. Through the eye of Evan’s camera, we saw Annie’s refusal to capitulate to her illness as somehow heroic, a braver decision than choosing to live a life that would be measured out in careful teaspoonfuls.
Second was the sensitivity with which Evan revealed the primal bond that linked his wife to her twin. The sisters’ constant need to reach out to one another as if for tangible reassurance that they were not alone was both powerful and poignant. When Annie had a seizure, it was Tracy who kept her sister’s windmilling limbs from damaging themselves; Tracy who touched her lips to the forehead of the blue-tinged face; it was Tracy who threw her own silk scarf over the urine-stained crotch of Annie’s expensive pants.
And when Annie gave birth, it was Tracy who held the ice chips to her sister’s mouth, smoothed oil onto the mound of her belly, urging her to breathe deeply, and it was Tracy who held out the arms that caught Bryn as she came into the world. It took a moment for the significance of what I was seeing to register. When it did, I stopped the film and rewound it to the birth scene. The characteristic broad bracelet was on the arm of the woman who caught the baby; the arms of the woman giving birth were bare and flawless.
The phrase “my mind swam” has always struck me as a cliche, but in the moment, I could feel my thoughts fin out in a dozen directions. Some things suddenly made sense: Tracy’s reference to herself as the third rail in Evan’s life on the night of the rehearsal dinner; the fact that she had shared a house with her dead sister’s husband and family for seventeen years; her fury when she discovered that Evan and Jill were taking Bryn to New York City; the curiously symbiotic relationship Tracy shared with Claudia MacLeish.
But there were as many questions as answers. For me, the most pointed of them centred on Gabe Leventhal. When he had asked to see the ending of Black Spikes, he was searching for a piece that would complete an old puzzle. The realization that Tracy, not Annie, was Bryn’s birth mother had been that missing piece. But where had he taken that knowledge? What had happened to him between the time he kissed me goodnight and the moment when the delivery truck drove over his already-dead body? Seemingly, like X in Last Year at Marienbad, I had wandered into a world in which there were “always walls, always corridors, always doors – and on the other side, still more walls.” Like X, I had no idea how I was going to find my way out.
Watching Taylor and her friends dart in and out of stores, trading news of bargains, giggling over feathery hair clips and necklaces made of plastic flowers, helped combat what my grandmother called the “grabbers,” the painful stomach knots that come with the onset of deep-seated fear. By the time we stopped for lunch, I wasn’t in fighting trim, but I was up for an Orange Julius and a Nacho Dog. The girls were still savouring their food court options when, tray in hand, I started looking for a table. Space was at a premium, and when a table cleared, I swooped. So did Angus’s old girlfriend, Leah Drache.
Her face lit up when she saw me; mine lit up too. Of all the girls my sons had dated, Leah had been my favourite.
“This is serendipitous,” she said, placing her tray on the table. She shrugged off her pea jacket and pulled off her stripy knitted hat. “I’ve been trying to come up with a non-pathetic excuse to call your house.”
“Since when did you need an excuse to call our house?”
Leah squeezed mayo onto her poutine. “Since Christmas Eve. I dropped something by for Angus. It was just a compilation tape I’d made for him. The songs weren’t ‘deeply significant.’ ” She made air quotes with her fingers. “Just stuff I knew he’d like.”
“He didn’t call to thank you?” I said.
“Nope, and that’s not like him,” Leah said. “I wondered if he was angry with me.”
The little girls had found a table across the room. Taylor waved. I gave her the thumbs-up and turned back to Leah. “No, in fact, he’s said a couple of things lately that made me think he’s really missing you.”
“Even with the drop-dead gorgeous new girlfriend?”
“Bryn’s not his girlfriend,” I said.
Leah raised an eyebrow. “That’s not what she told me.”
I took a sip of Orange Julius and winced.
“Brain freeze?” Leah said sympathetically.
“It’ll pass,” I said. “When did you meet Bryn?”
“Christmas Eve,” Leah said. “I dropped by your house with the tape and asked to see Angus. She said he wasn’t in, but she was his new girlfriend and she’d give him his package.” Leah leaned towards me. “You’re sure they’re not a couple.”
“Positive,” I said.
Leah grinned broadly, then she pulled a paperback from the pocket of her jacket. “So I reread Madame Bovary for nothing. When you’ve been dumped, Flaubert is absolutely perfect. You need to know that one woman has suffered more for love than you have.”
“Were you contemplating arsenic and a miserable death?” I asked.
“Not for me,” Leah said. She hugged herself. “I am so relieved. I think Angus and I are really good together.”
“I agree.”
“Did you ever see The Matrix?”
“Actually, Angus made me watch it a couple of weeks ago.”
“So he’s still into it,” Leah said. “A good sign, because The Matrix was our movie. We really connected with the part where the Oracle tells Neo that ‘Being the One is like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love. You just know it, through and through, balls to bones.’ ”
I nodded.
Surprisingly, Leah coloured. “Maybe that’s not the kind of thing a mother likes to hear about her son.”
“You’re wrong,” I said, appropriating one of her mayonnaised fries. “That’s exactly the kind of thing a mother likes to hear about her son.”
I had lost count of the number of times I’d been to a performance of The Nutcracker, but that afternoon, as always, Herr Drosselmeyer’s gift to Clara worked its magic. Watching three little girls in matching pastel butterfly shirts discover the lyrical power of ballet and Tchaikovsky soothed my soul. By the time the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Cavalier danced their final pas de deux, I was as rapt as the eight-year-olds beside me.
