Practical Jean (27 page)

Jean opened her mouth, and a second later formed the word, “Hello?”

“Is this Jean Horemarsh?” said a man's voice.

“Yes?”

“This is Detective Rinneard again. You hung up on me before.”

“I'm sorry,” said Jean. She cleared her throat. “That was a mistake.”

“I would like to speak with you in person, Jean. It's very important. Can you come to the police station right away? We can meet in your brother's office.”

“Do you mean Welland's office? Or Andrew Jr.'s?”

“I mean Chief Horemarsh's office. I don't know any Welland.”

Jean straightened in her seat. “I have two brothers,” she said. “Welland Horemarsh is also a police officer. Which obviously Andrew Jr. forgot to tell you.”

“Where are you now, Jean?”

“I'm on the road. About to eat a nice meal.”

Beside Jean the waitress appeared and pulled out a palm-sized pad. When she saw that Jean was on the phone she turned to leave, and as she did, Cheryl lifted her glass and made pinging noises against it with her fingernail. “Actually, make it two,” said Cheryl.

“Are you alone?” said Rinneard.

“No, I'm with friends.”

There was a very deep silence at the other end of the phone.

“Jean, listen to—”

She snapped the phone shut and set it down on the table's glossy surface.

“Lose the connection?” said Fran. She shook her head sympathetically. “We're probably not close enough to a city.”

“Why don't you just turn it off?” said Cheryl.

Jean looked up and smiled at them both. She realized what it meant now that the detective had called from another phone. “I might get a call from Milt,” she said. Her husband's face had been returned to her.

“Milt?” said Cheryl. “Do you mean Milt
Divverton
?”

“That's right.” Jean beamed. “We started dating after you left, and then we got married.”

“But,” Fran leaned in and spoke in a showy whisper, “they're not together anymore.”

“No, Fran, that's not true,” said Jean. She patted the phone. “I think Milt and I are working it out.”

Fran flopped back against her vinyl seat in a display of utter relief, like someone who had learned her house had not been crushed by a mudslide. “How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “That is the
best news
. Because those two,” she directed this at Cheryl, “they are made for each other.”

For a moment, the three women in the booth seemed to glow in the warmth of Jean's announcement, and Jean exercised forgiveness regarding the presumptuous thing Fran had said.

Shortly, the waitress returned with Cheryl's second and third glasses of wine, and the women made their orders. Jean didn't have much of an appetite, and she thought a spinach salad would be more than enough, because salads at steakhouses were always paradoxically large. Fran ordered a strip loin, cooked medium, in peppercorn sauce with a baked potato, and Cheryl chose a simple pasta. Jean thought she probably had a queasy stomach.

The waitress stopped at the serving station and picked up a grisly-looking bone-handled steak knife, which she set proudly beside Fran's other cutlery.

“I'm surprised you're only having a salad,” said Fran.

Jean drew her fingertip through the condensation beading against her glass of white wine. “Not very hungry,” she said. Her bright mood had been short-lived; in the last few minutes she had slipped from her lovely Milt thoughts to more of her miserable Cheryl ones. Because her mind had drifted back to the tragic situation, which was that the friend she wanted to help most in the world, the friend to whom she deeply wished to make amends, was the one friend she was going to disappoint yet again. You couldn't escape thoughts like that. They were like water finding its level, like sad condensation trickling down the side of a glass. It seemed to Jean that the knowledge that she had failed Cheryl was going to be with her forever, like a puddle on the floor of her mind, and that whatever happened once they got back to Kotemee, and whatever happened with Milt, she could never be truly happy again.

And did she feel a tiny bit sorry for herself, as she sat in the orange vinyl booth? Probably. No one knew more vividly than her what a great blessing was the bliss that she had provided for Dorothy and Adele and Natalie, a joy that was pure and sweet and that would never dissolve into anguish and pain, the Marjorie sort of pain, just thinking about which made Jean shudder. And so as she dwelled on the misfortune of Cheryl, still drinking beside her, always drinking, she allowed herself to consider her own plight, which was almost as bad. Maybe worse in a way. Because as sad and disastrous as Cheryl was, she really had no idea how bad it was going to get. But for Jean, the knowledge was luridly clear. And in the face of it she was left to wonder, where was
her
moment of pure beauty, where was
her
gift of unalloyed bliss? Who was going to save
her
from the ravages to come? No one was, that was the answer. She was all alone. She was as alone, and as doomed, as Cheryl. Their fates were entwined. Indeed it seemed to Jean, as she glanced up and caught sight again of the logs burning gold against the blackened surround of the fireplace she could never have, that the only thing that could give her true joy now, a joy worthy of her own Last Poem, would be giving the same to her friend. And because Cheryl was miserable and there was no time to do anything about it, that could never happen.

And that was when Cheryl set down her wineglass, let out a deep breath with her eyes closed, and said the most remarkable thing. “Oh, God,” she said with a sigh. “I'm so happy to be going home.”

“I'm sure you are,” said Fran.

The little hairs on the back of Jean's neck began to prickle.

“What did you say, Cheryl?”

“I said I'm so
happy
.” She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at Jean, and leaned over to wrap her arms around Jean's shoulders. “Thank you, thank you,” said Cheryl, giving her a sloppy, urgent squeeze. “I don't know what made you come looking for me, Jean. But I'm so glad you did. I've been so miserable, for months. And now I'm not anymore, because you're here, and . . . I'm going
home
.”

When Cheryl leaned back again she used her napkin to wipe the tears from her cheeks. “Excuse me,” she said. “I'm a little emotional. Maybe I should just visit the loo.”

Jean was so lost in thought and possibility that she didn't twig, immediately, that she needed to move to let Cheryl out of the booth. It was Fran giving a little cough that prompted Jean to slide clear. And as she stood, watching her good friend, her rediscovered friend, making her way a little unsteadily to the washroom, Jean racked her brain and looked around, searching.

“Jean?” said Fran.

“Everything's fine,” she said. Her eyes drifted, still searching, to the place setting in front of Fran, to the glass of cranberry juice with traces of lipstick on the rim, to the side plate and the salad fork and the bone-handled steak knife.

“Fran,” said Jean, grabbing the handles of her bag, “you stay here. I'm just going to check on Cheryl.”

“That's a good idea.”

Three tables away, their waitress was busy taking orders from a young family with a black-haired infant in a high chair. A manager dressed in a stiff shirt and striped tie stood twenty feet away near the entrance to the kitchen. The serving station was deserted, so no one saw Jean pick up a steak knife as she walked past, and slip it into her purse.

It wasn't the perfect solution, she knew. But this was likely her only chance. Cheryl had actually said she was happy – for Cheryl, this was surely something of a peak – and the situation called for improvisation.

She pushed open the heavy door of the washroom. A short, dim passageway led to the main area lined with stalls on one side and sinks on the other, where the walls were covered in a mottled gray tile, and a cool, unflattering light fell from bulbs recessed in the ceiling above. A silver-haired woman—about Marjorie's age, Jean guessed—leaned against the sink counter with her face close to the mirror and applied a dark pink to lips drawn tight over her teeth. Jean scanned the rest of the echoey room, dipping her head slightly to check under the four stalls, and saw Cheryl's feet at the far end. Jean knew she couldn't just stand there, the old woman was already glancing at her through the mirror, so she entered the near stall, removed the serrated knife from her purse, and perched on the edge of the seat.

The old woman took an inordinate amount of time at the sink. And she made a lot of hum-humming noises as she finished her lips, noises that she probably couldn't, herself, even hear. Jean tried not to imagine the disease that had very likely already begun eating its way through the woman's insides, but it was too easy to picture her face, mere putty over bone, when the final days came, and the inhuman sounds she would make then. All Jean could do was hope for the woman's sake that whatever took her would be quick, and that her children would be spared the duty of witnessing her agony.

Sitting there, waiting, Jean girded herself. It was going to be different, the thing she planned. It was going to be quite tricky. She wished she'd had time to practice, because it was the sort of thing you didn't want to get wrong. Closing her eyes, she tried to do what athletes did, which was to visualize success in her mind. Her stance, that was easy—a warm embrace from behind, her cheek pressed against the side of Cheryl's head. She tried to picture the motion she would use, the way a baseball player might imagine his swing. And her version of the ball going over the fence . . .
hurray!
. . . that was a vision of happy Cheryl, her eyes going suddenly wide, and the light within them dimming, softly but certainly, even as Jean's own sight—an instant, a stroke behind—began to fade.

Milt . . . she thought of Milt, even though he wasn't part of her vision, and her brothers, too, all of them saddened and confused.
What could possibly have been going through her mind?
Well, never mind. This was one time she didn't have to explain or justify. Nobody needed to understand but her. Was it too much to ask for a moment of pure elation, and then nothing else?

The old woman's heels finally sounded a diminishing clip-clip against the tile floor, and the heavy door's hinges groaned. And when a sudden roar of flushing water came from Cheryl's stall, Jean slipped quietly out of hers, hurried down the little passageway to the washroom door, and locked it.

When she returned, with the knife's bone handle in her grip, she found Cheryl already at the far sink. As Jean watched from a few feet away, she washed her hands and then bent to splash water on her face. That was the perfect opportunity, and Jean recognized it as such. She came up behind, squeezing the handle of the knife, her heart jumping in anticipation of what she was going to do, for both of them. To the sound of running water she ran through it all one more time in her mind, a quick replay of triumph—stance, swing, home run,
yay!
—and waited for her friend to rise.

When Cheryl finally lifted her head she came only partway, letting the water drip from her nose and chin onto the porcelain. And it was a close call for Jean. She tried to calm her breathing because she'd nearly blown it, nearly jumped forward at the first Cheryl twitch. She told herself to wait,
wait
—swish, crack, over the fence!—she knew Cheryl would look up eventually.

And, eventually, she did.

Cheryl stood and stared into the mirror, and reacte
d with surprise to her friend looming behind her at the moment Jean swooped in. And everything went according to Jean's mental rehearsal. She wrapped her free arm around Cheryl's waist in a tight and loving embrace. She held her close as she pressed her cheek against Cheryl's damp ear. She looked into the mirror to watch the dying light in her friend's eyes. And then . . . well . . . then it all went crappy.

Before Jean could lift her knife hand to execute the twinned motion she'd planned—which,
zip
,
zip
, was sure to have worked perfectly—she took a last look at Cheryl's face, and saw just what Cheryl saw. The dark pouches under her eyes, the sallow sag of her cheeks, the general shadow of despair. There was no happiness there, Jean realized. Not one little bit.

“I'm really a mess, aren't I?” Cheryl said.

“Oh,” said Jean, trying to hide her disappointment. “No, you're not.”

“Be honest, Jean. I remember you being honest with me before.”

Jean sighed and loosened her embrace. “All right, Cheryl. I admit that you've looked better. But I honestly think that's true of anyone our age.”

Slowly Cheryl dipped her head, and her shoulders began to shake. Jean could hear the rise of her first, choking sobs. And so, before her friend's pain took irrevocable hold, Jean did what she had to do. She laid her knife hand on Cheryl's shoulder, turned her, and wrapped her friend in her arms. She held her and let the tears soak into her blouse and tried to absorb the shaking. And she apologized. She said all the things she'd wanted to say, about how wrong she had been to abandon her friend, from that day by the weeping willow, about how childishly she'd behaved, letting petty hurt and jealousy keep her from giving Cheryl all the love and support she deserved, and about how sad she was, how awfully sad, for Cheryl's terrible loss all those years ago. She said everything to Cheryl. In fact, she said it more than once, because Cheryl's extreme sobbing was making it hard for her to hear. “
What?
” she kept saying. “
What?
” It wasn't ideal, actually. But Jean just kept on apologizing, as often as she needed to, as loudly as required, even as she dropped her knife to the bottom of the wastepaper bin. And she pledged to herself that she would always be there for Cheryl, for as long as it took, until the day she was deeply, unshakably happy. Even if that meant the two of them almost certainly getting old, which . . . well, looking at Cheryl, it wasn't even a question.