A Fatal Grace (8 page)

‘Bitch,’ muttered Ruth.

‘Slut,’ said Gabri.

‘Look at that.’ Myrna sat on the other side of Ruth, her bulk almost catapulting the other two off the sofa. Myrna motioned her plate in the direction of a group of young women standing by the Christmas tree critiquing each other’s hair. ‘Those girls think they’re having a bad hair day. Just wait for it.’

‘It’s true,’ Clara said, looking around for a chair. The room was full, people yakking away in French and English. She eventually sat on the floor, putting her overflowing plate on the coffee table. Peter joined her.

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘Hair,’ said Myrna.

‘Save yourself,’ said Olivier, reaching out to Peter. ‘It’s too late for us, but you can get away. I understand there’s a conversation on prostates at the other sofa.’

‘Sit down.’ Clara pulled Peter down by his belt. ‘Those girls over there all think they have it bad.’

‘But wait ’til menopause,’ confirmed Myrna.

‘Prostates?’ Peter asked Olivier.

‘And hockey,’ he sighed.

‘Are you guys listening?’

‘It’s so hard being a woman,’ said Gabri. ‘There’s our periods, then losing our virginity to you beasts, then the kids leave and we no longer know who we are—’

‘Having given the best years of our lives to thankless bastards and selfish kids,’ nodded Olivier.

‘Then, just when we’ve signed up for pottery and Thai cooking courses, bang—’

‘Or not,’ said Peter, smiling at Clara.

‘Watch it, boy.’ She poked him with her fork.

‘Menopause,’ said Olivier in a sonorous CBC announcer voice.

‘I’ve never told a man to pause,’ said Gabri.

‘The first gray hair. Now there’s a bad hair day,’ said Myrna, ignoring the guys.

‘How about when the first one appears on your chin,’ said Ruth. ‘That’s a bad hair day.’

‘God, it’s true.’ Mother laughed, joining them. ‘The long wiry ones.’

‘Don’t forget the moustache,’ said Kaye, creaking down where Myrna offered her seat. Gabri got up so that Mother could sit. ‘We have a solemn pact.’ Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. ‘If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it’s pulled.’

‘The plug?’ Ruth asked.

‘The chin hair,’ said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. ‘You’re off the visitors list. Mother, make a note.’

‘Oh, I made that note years ago.’

Clara took her empty plate back to the buffet and returned a few minutes later with trifle and brownies and Licorice Allsorts.

‘I stole them from the kids,’ she said to Myrna. ‘Better hurry up if you want some. They’re getting wise.’

‘I’ll just eat yours,’ and Myrna actually attempted to take one before a fork menaced her hand.

‘Addicts, you’re pathetic.’ Myrna looked over at Ruth’s vase of Scotch, half gone.

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Ruth, following Myrna’s gaze. ‘This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.’

‘I’m addicted to meditation,’ said Mother, eating her third helping of trifle.

‘There’s an idea.’ Kaye turned to Ruth. ‘You could visit Mother at the center. She can meditate the crap out of anyone.’

Silence met this statement. Clara scrambled for something to replace the repulsive image that had sprung to her mind and was grateful when Gabri picked up a book from the stack under the coffee table and waved it around.

‘Speaking of crap, isn’t this CC’s book? Em must have bought it at your launch, Ruth.’

‘She probably sold as many as I did. You’re all traitors,’ said Ruth.

‘Listen to this.’ Gabri opened
Be Calm
, Clara noticed that Mother shifted in her seat as though to get up but Kaye laid a claw on her arm, stopping her there.

‘Therefore,’ Gabri was reading, ‘it stands to reason that colors, like emotions, are harmful. It’s not a coincidence that negative emotions are given colors, red for rage, green for envy, blue for depression. But, if you put all the colors together, what do you get? White. White is the color of divinity, of balance. The goal is balance. And the only way to achieve it is to keep the emotions inside, preferably beneath a layer of white. This is Li Bien, an ancient and venerable teaching. In this book you’ll learn how to hide your true feelings, to keep them safe from an unkind and judgmental world. Li Bien is the ancient Chinese art of painting from the inside. Keeping the colors, the emotions, in. That is the only way to achieve peace, harmony, and calm. If we all kept our emotions to ourselves there would be no strife, no harm, no violence, no war. In this book I am offering you, and this world, peace.’ Gabri snapped the book shut. ‘She didn’t exactly have Li Bien coming out the yin-yang tonight.’

Peter laughed with the others but was careful not to catch anyone’s eye. Privately, beneath his layer of white skin, Peter agreed with CC. Emotions were dangerous. Emotions were best hidden away beneath a calm and peaceful veneer.

‘But this doesn’t make sense,’ Clara said, flipping through the book and puzzling over a particular passage.

‘And that other stuff did?’ asked Myrna.

‘Well, no, but here she says she got her philosophy of life in India. But didn’t she just say Li Bien was Chinese?’

‘You’re actually looking for sense in there?’ Myrna asked. Clara had buried her face back in the book and slowly her shoulders started heaving, then her back, and finally she raised her face to the circle of concerned friends.

‘What is it?’ Myrna reached out to Clara, who was crying.

‘The names of her gurus,’ said Clara between sobs. Myrna was no longer sure whether she was crying or laughing.

‘Krishnamurti Das, Ravi Shankar Das, Gandhi Das. Ramen Das. Khalil Das. Gibran Das. They even call her CC Das.’ By now Clara was roaring with laughter as were most of the others.

Most. But not all.

‘I see nothing wrong with that,’ said Olivier, wiping his eyes. ‘Gabri and I follow the way of Häagen Das. It’s occasionally a rocky road.’

‘And one of your favorite movies is Das Boot,’ Clara said to Peter, ‘so you must be enlightened.’

‘True, though that’s Das backward.’

Clara fell laughing against Peter and Henri came over to leap on them both. When she’d regained herself and calmed Henri Clara was surprised to see that Mother had left.

‘Is she all right?’ she asked Kaye, who was watching her friend walk toward the dining room and Em. ‘Did we say something wrong?’

‘No.’

‘We didn’t mean to insult her,’ said Clara, taking Mother’s place beside Kaye.

‘But you didn’t. You weren’t even talking about her.’

‘We were laughing at things Mother takes seriously.’

‘You were laughing at CC, not Mother. She knows the difference.’

But Clara wondered. CC and Mother had both named their businesses Be Calm. They both now lived in Three Pines, and they both followed a similar spiritual path. Clara wondered whether the women were hiding more than their emotions.

Calls of ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘
Joyeux Noël
’ faded into the cheerful night as the
réveillon
broke up. Émilie waved to the last of her guests and closed the door.

It was two thirty on Christmas morning and she was exhausted. Putting a hand against a table to steady herself she walked slowly into the living room. Clara, Myrna and the others had cleaned up, quietly doing the dishes while she’d sat with a small glass of Scotch and spoken to Ruth on the sofa.

She’d always liked Ruth. Everyone had seemed stunned more than a decade ago by her first book of poetry, stunned that such an apparently brittle and bitter woman could contain such beauty. But Em knew. Had always known. That was one of the things she shared with Clara, and one of the many reasons Em had taken to Clara, from the first day she’d arrived, young and arrogant and full of piss and talent. Clara saw what others couldn’t. Like that little boy in
The Sixth Sense
, but instead of seeing ghosts, Clara saw good. Which was itself pretty scary. So much more comforting to see bad in others; gives us all sorts of excuses for our own bad behavior. But good? No, only really remarkable people see the good in others.

Though, as Em well knew, not everyone had good to see.

She walked to the stereo, opened a drawer and delicately lifted out a single woolen mitten. Beneath it she found a record. She put the record on, reaching out to touch the play button, her finger crooked and trembling like a feeble version of Michelangelo’s
Creation
. Then she walked back to the sofa, delicately holding the mitten as though it still contained a hand.

In the back bedrooms Mother and Kaye slept. For years now the three friends had stayed together on Christmas Eve and celebrated the day in their own quiet way. Em suspected this was her last Christmas. She suspected this was Kaye’s last too, and perhaps Mother’s. Two thirty.

The music began and Émilie Longpré closed her eyes.

In the back bedroom Mother could hear the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto in D Major. Christmas Eve was the only time Mother ever heard it, though it had once been her favorite piece. It had once been special to them all. Em most of all, but that was natural. Now she only played it once a year, in the small hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It broke Mother’s heart to hear it and to think of her friend alone in the living room. But she respected and loved Em too much to deny her this time alone with her grief and her son.

And this night Mother had her own grief to keep her company. She repeated over and over, be calm, be calm. But the mantra which had comforted her for so many years was suddenly empty, its power to heal stolen by that horrible, twisted grotesque of a woman. Damn that CC de Poitiers.

Kaye creaked over in her bed. Even the act of rolling onto her side was unbearable. Her body was giving up. Giving up the ghost, it was called. But it was really the opposite. She was actually becoming a ghost. She opened her eyes and allowed them to adjust to the darkness. Way far away she heard Tchaikovsky. It was as though it entered her body not through her failing ears, but through her chest and straight into her heart, where the notes lodged. It was almost too much to bear. Kaye took a deep, rattling breath, and nearly cried out for Émilie to stop. Stop that divine music. But she didn’t. She loved her friend too much to deny her this time with David.

The music made her think of another child. Crie. Who called their child Crie? Cry? Names mattered, Kaye knew. Words mattered. That child had sung like an angel tonight and she’d made them all divine, more than human, for a brief time. But with a few well chosen words her mother had made ugly what minutes before had been exquisite. CC was like an alchemist, with the unlikely gift of turning gold into lead.

What had Crie’s mother heard that could have provoked such a reaction? Surely she hadn’t heard the same voice. Or maybe she had and that was the problem. And maybe she heard other voices as well.

She wouldn’t be the first.

Kaye tried to shove that thought away, but it kept intruding. And another thought, another voice, appeared, lyrical and Irish and masculine and kind.

‘You should have helped that child. Why didn’t you do something?’

It was always the same question and always the same answer. She was afraid. Had been afraid all her life.

Here it is then, the dark thing,

the dark thing you have waited for so long.

And after all, it is nothing new.

The lines of Ruth Zardo’s poem floated into her mind. Tonight the dark thing had a name and a face and a pink dress.

The dark thing wasn’t CC, it was the accusation that was Crie.

Kaye shifted her gaze, her fists balled in the flannel sheet under her chin, trying to keep warm. She hadn’t really been warm in years. Her eyes caught the red numbers on her digital clock. Three o’clock. And here she was in her trench. Cold and trembling. She’d had a chance this night to redeem herself for all those moments of cowardice in her life. All she had to do was defend the child.

Kaye knew the signal would soon be given. And soon she’d have to crawl out of her trench and face what was coming. But she wasn’t ready yet. Not yet. Please.

Damn, damn that woman.

Em listened as the notes of the violin visited familiar places. They played around the tree and searched for gifts and laughed at the frosted window looking onto the brightly lit pine trees on the familiar green. The concerto filled the room and for a blessed moment, her eyes closed, Em could pretend it wasn’t Yehudi playing, but someone else.

Each Christmas Eve was the same. But this was worse than most. She’d heard too much. Seen too much.

She knew then what she must do.

Christmas dawned bright and clear, the dusting of snow from the day before balanced finely on the branches of the trees outlining the world in sparkles. Clara opened the mudroom door to let her golden retriever Lucy out and took a deep breath of frigid air.

The day moved along at a leisurely pace. Peter and Clara opened their stockings full of puzzles and magazines and candy and oranges. Cashews spilled out of Peter’s stocking and Gummy Bears didn’t last long from Clara’s. Over coffee and pancakes they opened their larger gifts. Peter loved his Armani watch, putting it on immediately and shoving the sleeve of his terrycloth robe up over his elbow so it would be visible.

He rummaged beneath the tree with great drama, pretending to have misplaced her gift, and finally emerged, face flushed from bending over.

He handed her an orb wrapped in reindeer paper.

‘Before you open it I want to say something.’ He flushed some more. ‘I know how hurt you were by that whole Fortin thing and CC.’ He held up his hand to stop her protests. ‘I know about God too.’ He felt unbelievably stupid saying that. ‘What I mean is, you told me about meeting God on the street even though you knew I wouldn’t believe it. I just want you to know that I appreciate that you told me and trusted I wouldn’t laugh at you.’