Grave Concern (9 page)

There was much more to it than Kate had told Nicholas. There'd been, in fact, a second assignation. A mild April evening, snowmelt pouring from every rain gutter, roadside ditches full of dark earth-smell. Kate had just curled a full ten ends, persuaded by her father to fill in for the vacationing Third on his team. She'd done all right, but still wasn't that enamoured of the game.

Kate left first and stood outside the arena, waiting for her dad. The night was dark, no moon or stars. Not a breath of wind. Out of the quiet, an echo of male voices, guys swaggering along the road below the hill. Big flapping army coats, f-word frequent, boot steps loud on the dank air. Behind Kate, the arena door opened and closed for no apparent reason, briefly illuminating a rectangle of ground — and Kate herself. On the road, an explosion of laughter, lowered voices. Her father still had not emerged. Kate continued to stare blindly into the night. The voices and footsteps softened and faded out.

Then he was there. Somehow, in Kate's eye-dark, J.P. had materialized. Left his friends, she supposed, and returned, climbing the silent, snowy hill to where she stood on the gravel drive.

“My dad'll be out any second,” she said, glancing worriedly behind.

“Tell him you got another ride,” J.P. said.

Kate smiled and went inside. When she emerged from the arena, J.P. was gone. She groaned and clenched her fists. He stepped from the shadow of a cedar, barely touched his lips to hers and took her hand. Kate was electrified.

They descended the hill J.P. had just climbed, flailing through the crumbling snow. Once down on pavement, they swam through pools of street light. House after house glided by. People watching TV. People eating. Someone pumping iron. Someone holding a baby, playing peek-a-boo. But these activities were of another world. Nothing looked the same to Kate as before.

They'd walked along quite a while before Kate was able to follow a single line of reason in her head. When she did, it wasn't comforting:
My dad'll be expecting me when he walks in. And my mom will wonder why I'm not with him.

“Tell your folks a friend asked you to sleep over,” J.P. said, reading her mind.

Kate began to shake. With love or fear, she couldn't tell.

“I'm shaking,” she said, and hearing herself only made it worse.

J.P. stopped, took off his wool army coat and held it while she got in. He took her hand again, and they continued. Down to a jean jacket, J.P. stopped and shook himself violently, like a dog after a swim. Pulled a cigarette from somewhere and perched it on his lower lip. Tore a match from a matchbook. Suddenly, he ducked at a tree-stump by the curb and swiped the match on it. With a little grunt, he shook the match out again, removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth, and stuck it behind his ear.

“What was that all about?”

No response. Kate continued to shake, and now she knew why: the gravitational pull of J.P.'s body. She was close to breaking point.

J.P. began to talk about his little brother, a whiz with numbers who had made his math teacher's life so miserable, he'd called it quits mid-year, quit the priesthood and moved to Maui. “He's a professional surfer now. Even plays the ukulele.”

Kate noticed J.P.'s knuckles: red. The one cheek she could see was mottled with cold. “I never knew surfers got paid,” she said, amazed.

“Damn right,” J.P. said. “As many pineapples as they can eat. Oh, and Speedo bathing suits. Plus, as an extra bonus, they get free baby oil rubbed all over them daily by a gorgeous broa — uh,
girl,
wearing nothing but a lei. So they get a good tan.”

“The surfers or the girls?”

“Both.”

Kate laughed. Who cared that he was making it all up? She could walk along listening to him make up stuff for hours.

“Speaking of girls, you ever see my sisters? Tennis nerds. No shit, they're lopsided.” He slumped over sideways and began crookedly stumping along, one arm swinging limp. “Got one gigantic arm and shoulder, one spaghetti-arm. Both of them, no kidding — like, uh, who's that guy in Phantom of the Opera?”

“Quasimodo.”

“Yeah, him.”

“They got humpbacks, too?” Kate said now, getting into the spirit.

“Nah. Well, sort of.”

“So they're more like
quasi
-Quasimodos.”

J.P. pulled back and looked her over like a coach sizing her up for a team. “Heh, yeah. I guess you could say that.
Quasi
-Quasimodos. That's good.”

Kate got braver. “Okay, so what do your sisters haunt? No opera around here.”

“No kidding. No, I'll tell you what they haunt. What they haunt is the ‘All-Ontario Youth Blackfly Open Circuit.' ”

“Right, that's a good one.” Kate was hoping to sound sophisticatedly skeptical.

“No shit. That's really what it's called.”

They walked on. Kate was glad for the coat and pulled it tighter.

J.P. began talking again, still on the tennis-sisters theme. “You should see them practising after school with Sisters Lucy and Marguerite, running around the court in their black habits. It's fuckin' Phantom meets giant mutant bats.”

Picturing this, Kate began to laugh. And laugh. Just when she seemed laughed out, the image would return to set her off again.

“Did I mention the nuns?” J.P. said, smiling. “I finally figured out how they decide which ones to hire. So the thing is, they specifically hire every nun for two things.”

Weak with laughter, Kate declined to ask what.

“What, you ask?” J.P. said. “Hey, since you're so cute,” he winked, “I'll fill you in. So first they bring them in from some nun factory on a trial basis to find out how much they hate kids. They hire whoever comes up to ten on the scale, that's the highest. And then, the other thing they check” — here J.P. slipped his arm around Kate's shoulder, which set her aquiver — “the other thing is how ugly she is. If you like kids and yer ugly, they don't even give you a chance. If you hate kids but yer pretty, that's no good either, they throw you out immediately if not sooner.” Kate's laughter escalated and she collapsed into his side.

“Hey, my arm's bouncing up and down like those cement drills,” J.P. said. “Anyway, as I was saying, if you're good-lookin' you're out for sure, but if yer ugly as sin, you're in like a dirty hair shirt. The very meanest and ugliest get shipped automatically up here to St. Mary's. And, for sure you didn't know
this …
”

Kate, helpless now with laughter, managed to shake her head. “See, there's a secret list. It's titled, “Schools Hiring Hideous Nuns That Torment Kids,” and St. Mary's is on the very top of that list, meaning it'll take the absolute worst. So anyway, that's when us kids have to take over,” he said.

Kate could no longer speak she was laughing so hard, and her legs felt weak.

“How, you ask?” J.P. went on. His grip tightened on her shoulder to hold her up. “Well, let me tell you. The very first thing you got to do with a nun is get on her bad side. You want to get her rattled enough so she'll leave voluntarily. Otherwise, it's just a lot of work. You gotta start getting your hands dirty, y'know, like tying the hem of her habit to a heating grate when she's not looking. Or, or a better one is you steal the strap from her desk, then sometime when she's kneeling down praying in the chapel, you sneak up behind her, wrap the belt tight around her piss-ugly ankles — they always have piss-ugly ankles — and cry ‘Fire!' Shit like that.

“It's way better, though, if you can drive them out before it gets that far. Not saying that stuff can't be fun. But you get beyond it. You know, snakes under the wimple. Frogs in the collection box. Kid stuff. Although I gotta say I'd like to tie the fuckin' rosary to the shoelace one more time before I die.” J.P. slapped his thigh. “She was hopping along like a three-legged skunk!”

Kate was now pretty much crying with nervous laughter, and J.P. fed the fire, piling the fuel higher and higher.

But now they were nearing Kate's house. J.P. slipped into the garage before Kate knew he was gone. Kate flew up the front steps on adrenaline.

When she re-emerged from the house, half-thinking he would have split, J.P. re-appeared. He steered them down the hill toward the log cabin by the river. Everyone called it “the old Indian cabin” and indeed that's what it was, having been lived in by an extended Algonquin family before the dam-builders came along.

Officially the cabin was boarded up against just this kind of thing. But J.P. knew a way in, through a loose section of roof. Kate stood before the daunting prospect of climbing a vertical wall, looking up at the cabin roof through the light steam of her breath in the fast-cooling night. Before she had licked the dryness from her lips, they were smothered by his, her whole body likewise pressed between J.P.'s torso and the hands that had materialized at her back, holding her against him. His lips were not full but were firm, if a little chapped, willful yet pliable, yielding as hers gained confidence.

“For luck,” he said, and smiled. His smile was impish but open, like a child's.

Climbing up the chinked logs and around the overhang was the hardest physical work Kate had ever done. On top, they had to lift the loose plank and jump down blindly, hoping not to land on anything dangerous. Finally they stood in pitch dark on what felt like a wood floor. J.P. slid his coat from Kate's shoulders and laid it down. He kicked her gently behind one knee and held her as she buckled.

“What'd you tell your folks?” he asked, folding them down together.

“They think I'm at Kathleen's. I had to make up a bit of a story, about stopping for a Coke with my ‘ride' and running into Kath at the drugstore.”

J.P. said nothing, but pushed her gently from sitting to lying down. The cabin was chilly but warmer than outside.

“You're shaking like a leaf,” he said, and spread himself like a blanket on top of her. Even his legs mirrored hers, the only difference being his boots extended out further. Something hit a wall, his boot or knee. Propping his chin in his hands, J.P. started up on the nuns again, making her laugh until Kate told him to stop, she was going to pee herself.

Until now, the vaguely unnerving fact of his actual presence had kept a growing physical urgency in check. But lying blind under J.P.'s weight, her body became hollowed-out — like a bead strung on wire. Moreover, Kate sensed a more specific pressure, against her pubic bone. Kate's grasp on male anatomy, let alone its workings, was basic. Statues she'd seen here and there in the city taught only the fundamentals. (On the whole, she'd thought, relative to body mass, the male organ seemed comically outsized.)

But this new pressure could not be ignored. Kate felt herself respond. Should she be embarrassed? Or worried? Which of them should do something about it? And how, exactly? To forestall the avalanche of feeling — an occurrence that by all indications in health class led only to a girl's doom — Kate ignored what her body was clearly demanding, scraped up her last scraps of self-restraint, and determinedly refocused her attention.

“He was a virgin!” crowed Mary, when Kate paused. They were drinking hot mochaccinos at the Beanery, trying to thaw out after a second unsuccessful attempt to find the grave.

“As was I,” Kate shot back. Surely that wasn't the point.

“He didn't know how to proceed!” Mary enthused, as if this proved some universal truth.

“That's not what I'm saying,” said Kate. “I think we were both just shit-scared.”

“Same thing,” said Mary.

“No. No, it isn't. Remember back then? We maybe knew the basics, but taking precautions wasn't easy. You had to get past a pharmacist. The pharmacist knew your parents. You had to communicate with the partner. Think of it, Mary. Who talked in those days? Girls and guys were on different planets. Completely. And the consequences if you screwed up! You, of all people, Doctor Know-It-All, should be keenly aware of that.”

“Okay, okay, I concede. Where I come from, dear, sixteen-year-olds never had such heroic self-restraint. I can think of numerous examples of Juliets and Romeos married with kids well before they'd cleared teenage-hood. I myself was barely twenty when I tied the fateful knot.”

Kate looked down at the decorative cream-swirls in her cup. How could she be so stupid, going on about this? Forgetting Mary, who'd lost everything — husband and fourteen-year-old son. A terrible business. It was the spring of 2004. Matt and Joss had been part of an impromptu flotilla trying to rescue some sealers on an icepan drifting out to sea. Somehow, father and son got separated from the group, not much, but enough that when their boat was swamped by a rogue wave and they froze in the icy water where they sat, the rest failed to get there in time. Mary had been in a neighbouring village at the time, delivering a baby. She was whooping it up, joking around with the local midwife after a difficult but successful delivery, when the news came in.