Ashes (30 page)

Finally he said, “It’s been good, hasn’t it? Us, I mean.” Sean hated himself for using the past tense. But what else could he do?

“Yes, it has been.” He heard no reproach in her voice. But what did he hear? Regret? Relief? Both? Yes, both.

Neither said anything for a while. Then she asked, “When do you go?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Well then,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow and smiling at him. “We’d better make tonight memorable.”

They kissed, and made love one more time. The last time.

* * *

T
he next morning they stood on the sidewalk. “I’m going to miss you,” he said, reaching out to stroke her dark hair. A few strands of gray in it now.

“I’ll miss you, too.” They embraced, held each other tightly. Then stood gazing at each other; he felt her looking into his eyes for something.

“Be careful,” Monique said. It was not until later Sean realized it was the first time she had ever said that to him. Strange that she should say it when he was going not to some danger zone halfway across the globe but to Florida.

“I’m always careful,” he said.

They said goodbye, and he turned and walked away. He did not look back, much as he wanted to.

Sean hadn’t seen Monique since, though they had exchanged letters and postcards over the years, and the occasional phone call. The last time he’d spoken to her was the New Year’s Eve before the Los Angeles bombing. There were thunderstorms in Florida, and he was alone, and bored, and a bit tipsy. He called, and on the other end he heard Monique’s voice, along with the babble of voices and music in the background. Sounds of a party. A small one, by the sound. A get-together with friends.

“Here, let me get you in the other room,” she said. A clunk, the party noise was gone, and it was just the two of them, an hour or so until midnight. They talked, asked after each other’s health and welfare, feeling well, staying busy. Then she said, “I’m glad you called, Flint. I have some news I think you might like to hear.”

Sean knew what she was going to say. It was in her voice, a special note that could only mean one thing. It hurt him for some reason but he let her say it because it made her happy. “I met someone last year. His name’s Michael. He’s a wonderful guy, and on Christmas he proposed. We’re getting married.”

He meant it when he told her he was happy for her. Because Monique deserved that sort of love. “Be happy, Moni,” he told her before he hung up. He watched the New Year come in while thunderstorms lit up the sky with lightning, and thought,
Yes, be happy, Monique. One of us should be.

* * *

T
he movie over, he and Anna sat at the Hot Plate, decaf and pie in front of them. Sean was happy to see that, tired or not, Anna’s appetite was fine. She put away a slice of blueberry pie and two scoops of vanilla ice cream with no problem. He asked about the tree farm, how one went about raising a Christmas tree. Although he was interested, and listened to her, part of him was realizing why he had been thinking of Monique this evening. It was not the laughter, nor being at the movies. It was that feeling of ease he had in the presence of these women.

Strange that this should be so, for his feelings toward Monique and Anna were entirely different. If he’d had a sister, he supposed he would have felt toward her the way he felt about Anna. And more — he saw in her eyes a simplicity and honesty that he had thought long gone from this world. She was what she was, a nice young woman from a small town in Minnesota, who’d been crowned the town’s Shamrock Queen in high school, who was content with her husband and her life, who kept her house and kitchen and who led half the charity committees at her church. Who knew such a person existed any more? The only thing that puzzled him was why she and Richard did not have children; he would have expected Anna to have half-a-dozen at least. But then, she was mother to all the stray dogs Richard brought home. Maybe that was enough.

“Did you like the movie, Sam?” she asked him as he drove her home. “You were kind of quiet during it.”

“Oh yeah. What do you think, another Oscar for Tom Hanks this year?”

“If I were a betting woman, I’d put up a dollar.”

Sean walked her to the door, and she said, “Just a minute.” Came back with an apple pie. “Here you are. Thank you for a nice evening.”

Why did she do this to him? She treated him like a friend, gave him pies and lasagna; at the Labor Day party she’d even asked if he would like to meet her newly single cousin Deirdre. But he was no friend to her. How could he be?

He felt like breaking something. Because he wanted to be Anna’s friend and never would be. Just as he had wanted to be more than a lover to Monique and never would be. Whatever he needed, that bit of humanity he had never missed until now, had been destroyed years ago. Taken from him by all the deception, the lies, the killings, all the years and deeds that had done things to his soul. No, not taken — he'd given it away freely.

“Anna.” Sean found it hard to speak. “I have to tell you something.”

He wanted to say,
Anna, you have to understand that people aren’t what you think they are. They seem nice, may even
be
nice, and yet they can do terrible things. They kill people in the name of a cause, say that it’s justified. They lie, they deceive, and they say it’s all right if it serves their cause.

But was it Richard he was talking about, or himself?

He looked into Anna’s eyes, and saw innocence. Not stupidity, not naiveté. Innocence.

I won’t say it. Let there be something innocent left in this world.

“Sam?” she asked. “You were going to tell me something?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It slipped my mind.”

“Well, you know what it means when you forget something you were about to say. It must have been a lie.”

“Must have been,” Sean said.

J
ennifer felt a kind of peace fall on her after the talk with Gene. After the TV movie aired, as far as she could tell no one noticed or cared, no one made the connection between her and the girl on TV. Once, at the grocery store, she felt eyes trained on her. But when she got home she realized it was for a very different reason. There had been a small party at the library that day, one of the high school assistants had made the honors list, and Jennifer had gone to the store still wearing her party hat, her hair speckled with confetti.

As if to give its blessing to her newfound peace, the weather began to warm and sometimes there was an entire week without rain. Imagine that. She took her coffee outside in the mornings, gazing out at the sea. Sometimes she took a pair of binoculars, scouted the horizon, and her vigilance was rewarded one May morning when she saw a pod of whales, huge and yet graceful, sending plumes of spray into the air with their exhalation. She let out a delighted cry, hoisted her coffee cup aloft in a toast, as if congratulating the cetaceans on their performance. Her last glimpse of the whales was a tail fin that seemed to wave at her.
Hi Jen,
the whale seemed to say.
Good to see you.

* * *

S
he told Gene about seeing the whales the next evening. After their talk on the park bench they’d been passing more and more time in conversation when she dropped off Matthew, and one night he invited her to stay for dinner. She found herself more curious than she would have thought to see the inside of the Tally house. Having shared dwellings with men — her brother Jim, several college roommates, a failed attempt at cohabitation with her last boyfriend — Jennifer had an idea of what to expect. There would be shoes and socks under the coffee table. The fridge would be full of heat-and-eat food and carry-out leftovers, perhaps an empty pizza box on the dining room table, which would be a card table surrounded by folding chairs.

She had seldom been so pleased to be wrong. Instead of dour bachelor adequacy, there was a ramshackle charm to the place. The sofa and chairs were all clearly secondhand, a hodgepodge of different colors and styles. But what should have been a disordered jumble was more like a patchwork quilt, almost festive. The shelves were the planks-and-bricks design favored by broke college students, but Gene had stained the planks a dark cherry color and used red brick instead of homely gray cinderblock; the result was striking. Likewise, the end tables in the living room were cable reels, any paint sanded off, then stained and varnished to a deep glowing gloss. She felt some of the pride she’d taken in her own decorating fall away; she’d bought hers, Gene had made his.

Matthew, giving her the tour while Gene was busy in the kitchen, did not share her interest in the living room. It was old news to him. “Here, look at these,” he said, pointing at the framed photos in the hallway. “Dad took these.”

The photos were black-and-white, which had always bored her before. Black-and-white was for distant relatives whose names she could not remember, snapshots of old houses long sold off. Once, when she and Cindy were looking through a photo album of their grandmother’s, they’d found the black-and-white photo of a five-year-old girl laid out in a coffin, her lacy dress and the photo's sepia tone giving her the appearance of a mummified angel. Cindy had nightmares for weeks.

But these pictures were different. There was a faint silvery quality that made them look like a glimpse into some other, better world, and yet the clarity showed every detail. Every wrinkle in clothes, every strand of hair, every ripple of water. The glass and frame were not to protect the photo but to protect her, to keep what was in the photo from reaching out and pulling her into its reality.

She saw a boat deck piled with fish and a cat sitting above the pile, looking smug, as if he thought the catch was his doing. The harbormaster, dozing in his chair with his head back, a cigarette burned down to ash in one hand and the handset of his radio in the other. The main commercial row of Haven Cove, washed by rain and empty of people, above it a single shaft of sunlight peeking out through a hole in the clouds.

Jennifer walked into the kitchen as Gene was sliding a tray of breaded fish fillets into the oven. There was a pot of macaroni on the stove, and as he said “Hi, Jennifer. Matthew give you the tour?” he began mixing cheese (the real stuff, not the fake orange powder) into the macaroni.

“Indeed he did. I love what you’ve done with the living room, and I still can’t find words for your photos. And dinner smells great, too.”

He gave her his quick smile, shrugged. “I can make about five meals, and this is one of them. It’s good, or at least Matthew says so.”

“How long have you been into photography?”

“Becca bought me a camera, our first Christmas. I wanted to try developing them myself, so I talked to the kid who does the photos for the high school yearbook, learned from him. Built the darkroom,” he pointed. “It’s just past the pantry there.”

“You’ve got a lot of photos. I mean, as busy as you are, it must be hard to find the time.”

“Most of those are from the last few years. Becca said the smell of the photo chemicals gave her a headache. Got so I could only work on photos if she was out of town.” He said this without rancor, the calm tone of a man who’d accepted a past mistake. She envied that calmness, wondered when she would be able to feel that way about her own mistakes.

“When I look at the pictures, I don’t know, it’s like you’re looking at things not the way they are. But the way they should be.” This wasn’t coming out right at all. “Sorry, I’m babbling.”

He gave her a long look, stood there with salad tongs in his hands. “No, that’s exactly how I feel about it.”

“Really?”

“Really. Here, can you take this in to the table?” he asked, handing her the bowl of macaroni.

“Sure. Have you ever tried selling any photos to the local paper or anything? Hell, I bet some galleries down in Vancouver would pay for them. That would be neat.”

“No, haven’t done that,” he replied.

“Why not?”

He looked up at her. “Not interested.” She could tell that he
was
interested, but he didn’t want to hear them say no. She started to protest, then thought better of it. Gene had enough rejection in his life already, let him be ready to risk it again when he wanted to. God knew she couldn’t blame him.

Over dinner she told him about seeing the whales, and he and Matthew looked at each other and grinned. “What’s with you two?” she asked.

“Dad takes people out whale watching when the gray whales come up here.”

“It’s a nice supplement to the income,” Gene said. “But I’ll do a special trip for you. No other tourists, and at friend prices.”

“What might that be?”

“Some of those chocolate mint brownies Matthew’s always going on about.”

“Done.”

The first weekend in June she found herself on the
Tally-ho
with Matthew and Gene. She had never been on the
Tally-ho
before, and was unsurprised to find it much like Gene’s house, neat and cozy with more than a few of Gene’s photographs on the wall. “Matthew, put on some tunes,” Gene called out as he began to guide the boat out to the harbor. Matthew obliged, and soon Steely Dan began declaring that Guadalajara wouldn’t do. Curious, Jennifer went into the cabin, where she found a boombox and a drawer full of tapes; more Steely Dan, the Pogues, the Chieftains, the soundtrack to
The Commitments.

She was worried that she might get seasick once they left the harbor, but her stomach was fine, and by the time they were out on the open sea she was enjoying it tremendously. It was a clear, calm day, the sunshine warm but the breeze cool, and the boat sped along the water’s surface like slow flight. Behind them the green slopes of British Columbia and the kite that Matthew had sent aloft, dipping and soaring, waving its long red tail. Above them the blue of the sky and below them the deeper, cobalt hue of the ocean. She had that same feeling she did when she paid her visit to the ocean in March, that the wind was cleansing. Only now it did not seem to blow through her but to lift her up. She thought if she fell off the boat it would not matter, the wind would carry her aloft.