Grave Concern (5 page)

Kate pressed into an unseen corner of the little room. She put her hands over her eyes, like a child counting for hide and seek. She did, in fact, count to twenty. Then thirty. Then forty. Tears pricked, but Kate would not relent. For Marcotte's benefit, Kate pulled away from the wall and ran some water in the sink. She banged a couple of cabinet doors, as though in quest of Aspirin. She counted another ten before returning to the outer office, holding her cheek.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Marcotte,” she said, avoiding his gaze as she sat down. “Looks like I'll have a date with the dentist when we're done here.”

“As I was saying,” Mr. Marcotte went on, slowly. “J.P. left instructions for the ashes. They were not to be bury at the cemetery. ‘Too creepy,' he says. Too creepy for a creep!
Pis
. He want to be bury in the bush, we shouldn't put nothing there to mark it — the very most, initials cut in a tree. Also, they should not tell me — his father! — where he was.”

There was a little silence.

“Then I could never ‘
stomp all over
'
him again,” Marcotte explained. “Whatever that mean,
mon Dieu
.
Pis
. I know it's not by the law, but Rita and a couple of kids took the box into the forest somewhere out west there. You know, by the High Street. I'll say it, for a very long time I don't care where they went. They could throw him to the bear in the dump for all that mattered to me. But now I'm old. Rita's gone. I like to know before I die. I've try to look, but the ground in there is rough, eh, and my bad knee … Too hard to walk for me. He — J.P. — he's the only one left here now. The others, eh, all far away, busy with family, career. Won't tell me nothing. And Rita, she took her secret under the ground.”

Kate had long quit listening. She was focused on her yogic breathing, slowly, in and out, trying to keep it together until he mercifully stopped talking and left her alone. She thought of her yoga teacher and occasional lover back in the city — “Whatever you're doing, whatever has happened,” he would say, “wherever you are in the world or in life,
focus on the breathing
.
It all comes back to the breath
.” A tall, chiselled bachelor of exquisite sensitivity — and not half J.P.'s vitality.

“ … So what I want is you to find that grave. Can you do that, you?”

Kate had always liked the French way of emphasis, by pronoun repetition. Still, he could say every word twice, a hundred times, and she would still struggle to believe what she was hearing. Had there been some cosmic reversal during her time away that had overthrown the comfy existence she'd known here? Had a new hellish order risen up in her absence, singling out Katherine J. Smithers of Pine Rapids for special tortures?

Kate's more rational side, the side still trudging through a day's work a week before Christmas, recalled that some grave services indeed offered such searches as Marcotte was requesting, mainly aimed at genealogists looking for ancestral graves. So, the answer to Marcotte's question — did Kate locate graves? — was no. She'd deliberately not included it in her business. Too time-consuming and frustrating, too poorly paid for the resources and effort consumed. And here was Marcotte demanding diversification — but not remotely in the way Kate had envisioned.

“Yes, we can do that,” Kate said, and stood up to shake his hand. “I wonder if we could work out terms tomorrow. Over the phone. My tooth is really quite painful. If you don't mind, I think I'd better get to Dr. Werner before close.”

Reluctantly, Marcotte wound his scarf around his neck. Tucked it under his lapels, right side, then the left. Worked on his gloves. It was all Kate could do not to grab his wiry frame beneath the armpits, haul him up from his chair, and throw him out.

As Marcotte coddled the bad knee along the icy walk, Kate smiled and waved through the glass. Then wheeled around and expelled a sound that could only be described as half wheeze, half howl.

The wind that Saturday night had been steadily rising, throwing tufts of snow here and there, as fifteen-year-old Kate drove with her dad to the curling rink. Monsieur Marcotte, the antiques guy, was there, skipping the opposing team. Kate sat in the warm-up room, watching through the glass. Outside, the wind screamed to get in.

Around the fourth end, the lights went out, plunging the world into darkness. No darkness quite as total as an unlit indoor rink. What to do? Kate continued to sit. Never one to be afraid of the dark, even as a small child, Kate reasoned either the lights would come back on or the power outage would last a while, in which case her dad would come and collect her. Together, they and the others would blunder out through the main doors and head home.

A wet wool smell, and next thing Kate knew, her arms were pinned. Held from behind, she was tugged from the table where she sat, pulled backward across the floor. Mute with shock, Kate felt a dangerous kinship with her captor, as though they had an understanding, a pact. The clack of a latch, a high whine of the wind, and now Kate felt sudden cold as the steel door nearly flew off its hinges. Glancing back, she saw the lights flicker back on. Understood it was
he
who had fiddled the main switch and culled her from the herd all at once. Here they were, out in the storm. Predator and prey. He pulled her around a freezing corner and behind a giant fan breathing great gusts of heat into the sky. The moon was nowhere, but a spot rigged over the parking lot diffused light on the snow. Strong hands on her upper arms turned her slowly around. Large, green, almond-shaped eyes. Full lashes. Auburn curls blowing wildly from his head. Prominent cheekbones. Oblique jaw. Syrup-coloured skin. Good shoulders, and, under the coat, a hint of barrel chest. Kate had never seen anyone so beautiful in her life.

With slow deliberation, he moved his bare hands, one at a time, from her upper arms to her exposed wrists, which he then drew toward him, forcing her to shuffle forward. When their lapels met, Kate put her cheek against his throat. The scratch of wool on her chin. A smell of skin and something else. Tobacco? Cinnamon? The scent was foreign, ephemeral. Still he didn't let go, but lazily drew her wrists around him. Her limbs surrendered what little flesh and bone was left. He folded her arms in as though retracting wings. At the small of his back, Kate's surprised hands met. A tingle at the bottom of her throat trickled down inside like a cold drink. The trickle became a torrent as he leaned in …

Now, Kate picked up the phone and dialed. “Mary, you free?”

“Lucky you. I'm after having a coffee between disasters. What's up, dear?”

As no words came, Kate just breathed. Heavily.

“Hang on a minute,” said Mary on the other end. Kate could hear Mary walking to a quieter location.

“Is this some kind of crank call? Kate, is that you? Stop hyperventilating! What the hell is wrong?”

Through a windpipe aching with grief and desire, Kate tried to make her words clear.

“Party's over,” she said. “When I came back to Pine Rapids, life looked all absurd and amusing, you know? A bit surreal. But cute, you know? Like, uh, everyone was playing ‘town.' Well, that's all shot to hell.”

As Kate walked blindly in circles around her desk, Mary teased out the basic story, then offered her diagnosis: “Well, dear, sounds to me like a case of teenage falling-in-lust. I prescribe a couple of stiff drinks, and a hearty toast to the dead. Look Kate, I gotta get back to the circus here. Call me later at home.” And hung up.

“No!” Kate insisted to the dial tone. “No, it's not like that at all.”

Kate collapsed into reverie: J.P. had leaned in, his face so close she'd lost sight of his features. She closed her eyes, reclining into what might come. A slight tickle on the sensitive spot between her eyes turned out to be the tip of his nose, now tracing a line down the side of hers and drifting off across her cheek, as an artist might draw a tentative first stroke. Then, just where his nose had left off, his cheek brushed hers — his was smooth and smelled of toast.h

“Close your eyes,” he whispered, completely unnecessarilyh — Kate's lids were lead. Something touched the half-moon of her eyelid.
Trrriik trrriik
, like a miniscule fluttering wing. Could it really be … his eyelashes? She thought briefly of Peter Pan. Wendy's kiss, that Peter called a thimble. What would you call this?

“What, you never made
bisou lutin
?”

Kate, eyes shut tight, utterly helpless, shook her head. “Wha — ?” she croaked.

“Pixie kiss,” J.P. said.

As Kate took this in, she felt a sudden mild suffocation. Gasped. But breath was stopped, her mouth covered by his, now busy switching on every circuit along the million deep, dark corridors of her body.

2

The Party

A week after the caresses behind the rink, Kate knew as much about J.P. Marcotte as stealth and persistent sleuthing would reveal. Being an only child, with no older siblings to quiz, Kate had to rely on the goodwill of others in her research. Annabel, next door, was an encyclopedia of town gossip and information. Kate had hated Annabel ever since Annabel “borrowed” Kate's favourite doll in Grade 2 and tortured her, leaving her broken body, like some kind of Mafia message, on Kate's back step. Annabel was a year older than Kate, and Kate had an idea her nameless lover was, too. In order to determine the most basic information — his name — Kate would first have to humble herself. One school day, Kate approached Annabel, who lingered with some others by the chain-link fence, sharing a smoke before heading home for lunch.

As she drew near, Kate was surprised to see Greta Krebs, daughter of the local undertaker and consummate goody-goody. Puffing on a smoke, no less.
Too scared to inhale, I'll bet
, thought Kate to herself. Kate pictured them all naked, as she'd read somewhere would help in such situations. What next? She asked for a drag. No one spoke or made any move until someone, Greta, handed her what was essentially a butt.

Kate took a long pull as though she'd been smoking all her life and flicked the remaining filter to the ground, grinding it under the ball of her foot as she'd seen smokers do.

“Got a question for you guys,” she said.

Nothing.

“Asshole flashed me his privates the other night. Gonna nail his butt to the ground, just like that,” she said, indicating with a small toss of her chin the just-crushed cigarette. She described him neutrally, keeping as cool as possible under scrutiny of the zombie faces. “You guys know who he is?”

Silence. A necking couple pulled apart. Annabel raised an eyebrow. “Were his balls round or square-shaped?”

Someone laughed. A few smirks trickled round. “Was his dick about
this
long?” The long-haired speaker held his index fingers about an inch apart.

“Yeah, if so, I think I know who it is!” Annabel said, and this time everyone laughed.

After a few more minutes of banter, and more sharply rendered details of dress and features on Kate's part, Annabel spoke wearily, as though having patiently waited out a tedious tirade. “Yeah, yeah. His mom used to clean our house. Prob'ly dirtier when she left!” Another ripple of mirth. “Marcotte. Anyone know his first name? There's a bunch of them. Lots. Ten or twelve, I think.”

“Six,” Greta said, and everyone looked around. “His name's J.P. — Jean–Philippe. Whaaat! I just happen to know, that's all,” she said to their snickers and giggles, her face beet-red.

JEAN-PHILIPPE, PHILIPPE, PHIL, J.P.
At school, Kate fiddled around with her brown-noser biology partner's multicol-oured pen, snapping the different colours down and doodling his name, like a girl half her age. She ached to run into him again. She probably wouldn't.
DAMN SHIT HELL FUCK
. He was at the Catholic school across town. He didn't ski at the local hill. He didn't bowl. Nor was he a regular at the pool. He didn't curl, like his dad … had been at the rink only by accident, having ducked in from the storm while walking home from a friend's. He had nothing to do with hockey, so she couldn't stealthily spy on games she had no interest in.

The fact was J.P. Marcotte did nothing to assist Kate to reacquaint herself now they'd been intimate. Only occasionally, he alighted — a curly-headed, green-eyed, tobacco-skinned angel — in front of the drugstore where the smokers hung out. Her glimpses of him were seldom and inconvenient: shopping with her mother for fabric for Home Ec; greasy-haired and sweaty (“you may experience an increase in perspiration during this special time” chirped the film in Health class), picking up a box of Kotex; shepherding a pimply visiting male cousin around town while the aunts and uncles quaffed gin and tonics and talked taxes back at the house.

And when she did see him, greasy and goose-fleshed as she invariably was, he wasn't looking. Why did she bother? Angrily, Kate scribbled over his name.

And then wrote it out again in full.

That evening, Mary turned up at Kate's door, clutching the selfsame bottle of screech by the neck.

“I saved the rest,” Mary said, shaking off her boots and walking through to Kate's kitchen. She pulled a couple of glasses from the cupboards Kate still thought of as new, though they had in fact been part of the great parental partial-renovation in '82. They sat in the kitchen nook Kate's father had built circa 1956. Mary didn't bother hiding her impatience.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Kate fished around in a low cupboard. “Want some crackers?”

“No, I don't want crackers. I want you to explain this nonsense about some druggie loser you've got up your arse.”

“There's not much to explain. I fell in love. He didn't, or not for long. Unrequited, sort of. Unfulfilled. Un. Un and more Un. I still get goosebumps over his picture in a yearbook. And now he's dead. And I never knew. Maybe that's the worst of it. Nobody told me, Mary.
I never knew.
”

Mary said nothing. Put her feet up on the bench. “Sorry,” she said. “Can't sit with my feet down. Brains dribble down there and get squashed. So it was a shock, is what you're -saying.”

“That's putting it mildly. And more than that, betrayal.
No one told me
. And I'm here still thinking maybe he's out there and grown up and maybe …”

“And maybe there's still hope? Oh Kate, you're a hard case. Okay, I can fathom the shock. Even the betrayal. But I can't fathom what you're still doing thinking about the son of a bitch, pardon my French. Kate, dear, you've been around. You've lived out there in the world. You're an independent woman. What is this all about?”

Kate put her head down on the table, hiding her face.

Mary put her hand on Kate's hair. Gently she said, “Well, dear. Maybe you could reframe it. Well, let's see, as in: Teens don't fall in love. They fall in
lust
. How long did you know the guy — a few months? Weeks? Kate, Kate. You're a grown woman. The real world isn't the movies, girl. That movie-love is a crock. Seems to me like you're Ali McGraw, stuck back in
Love Story
, and you can't get out.”

“Exactly!” whined Kate. “Where's the escape hatch?”

Conversation continued in this vein, until Mary took a spoon and scraped some screech along Kate's tongue. “Here, have some of this here special-formula Newfie medicine. Now let's change the subject, dear. What're you doing for Christmas?”

“I don't know. Working, I guess.”

“Working! You're not hanging out at a graveyard on Christmas Day, I don't care what your loony-tune clients are thinking. And surely old geezer Gwyneth isn't going to make you deliver flowers on the day itself. Give us a break, girl. Come up to my place. You'd be a welcome face. Well. Not with those bruises for eyes. But you know what I mean. It'll just be me and Ned Nickers.”

Mary lived on a small acreage just west of town. Ned Nickers was Mary's horse.

Christmas dawned bright and sunny, but the sky soon clouded over, and large snowflakes began to fall. Kate lay in her childhood bed in her old bedroom (she still couldn't bring herself to move into the master) a long time, staring out the window, thinking about Ned Nickers. Mary had rescued him from certain glue-dom when, on an office visit, an old farmer up the highway had hinted his intentions for the horse. The name, Ned Nickers, kept knocking about in Kate's mind. Why so familiar? Every time Mary said the name, it struck a faint note, but Kate could never chase the echo down. Now she had.

Ned Nickers … son. Nickerson! Of course! Nancy Drew's boyfriend, that fine, upstanding lad. The one who showed up conveniently when needed, but otherwise obligingly buggered off. How did Miss Drew do that? How did she snag the rich lawyer father, the sixteenth-birthday convertible, the low-maintenance boyfriend? You had to give it to her. Miss Drew, though blonde, was never dumb.

Okay, Miss Drew,
thought Kate.
I, too, have an absent boyfriend, absent in fact if not in my head. So maybe you are not so much better off, after all. And, despite the recent blip on my emotional radar, with the recent-ancient demise of that same one-true-love, I have to tell you, Miss Drew, my life overall is pretty good.

Kate reviewed the positives in her head. She had Mary as a friend. She had her parents' mortgage-free house, bequeathed to her on their demise (if you could ignore the permanent shadow of the demise itself). She had a kind-of career, a “casual” job to break even, and a plan for business diversification and expansion. What more could a girl (okay, middle-aged woman) want? Well, except for a way to stop the leakage of her pitiful nest egg to incredible property taxes, criminal wine prices, and outrageous repairs on her parents' ageing house, the latest a full retrofitting of plumbing occasioned by a leak under the bathroom floor?

What more, other than these, could a person want? To belong. That's what. Kate had to admit she still felt something of a stranger here, the place had changed so much while she'd been gone. Yes, it still looked much the same physically. But unlike in Kate's day, the roads were largely empty of kids aimlessly roaming or noisily playing kick the can. Too, the place had lost its air of pulling together. Leadership, clear direction, seemed to be lacking. Recreational clubs were struggling. Ditto the local merchants — everyone roared off down the highway to city malls. The town council's collective IQ seemed to have fallen by some exponential degree, the most obvious and urgent solutions to the town's meagre tax base perennially overridden by crucial concerns such as bylaw syntax, the cost of refreshments for subcommittee meetings, and the renaming of streets. Unlike the prank-driven follies of Kate's youth, Hallowe'en now was a quiet affair, as Kate had learned to her disappointment last fall. And New Year's Eve, once an arm-linking, street-strolling night of revelry and happy inebriation, was quieter still. Now people mostly huddled in small family groups around screens in their living rooms, watching Netflix. It was at such times that Kate felt oddly out of time, as though she'd crawled through a black hole to a twilight zone exuding a town-imitation.

Of course, Kate knew it was the same everywhere. It had been so, out West. All symptomatic of the new millennium, new century. Still, a part of her had hoped Pine Rapids would be the exception. But no. Pine Rapids had insisted on changing
without her knowledge or approval
.

It all just made a gal want to scream, “No one told me!”
No one told me
J.P. quit school and drifted down to the city (until the overheard exchange between Greta and Annabel).
No one told me
he'd returned a decade later and paid cash for the dilapidated old King's Hotel.
No one told me
he dealt pot on the side to local kids.