Beach Strip Read online

  “Your hair looks nice,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t cut it after all.” Then, looking down at my hands, “Where did you get that ring?”

  “Gabe bought it for me,” I said. “A long time ago.” Which was a lie, unless two weeks is a long time on your calendar. It was on mine.

  She lifted my hand and looked at the ring, then at me and back to the ring again. “It’s a black opal,” she said. “They’re expensive.” She twisted my hand to catch the light from the lamp. “Looks like diamonds around it.”

  That’s what they were. Twelve perfect diamonds positioned around the opal in a yellow-gold setting, the stones elevated on a series of round concentric steps. I knew every facet of every stone and the swirl of every mark on the opal.

  Tina brought her eyes back to mine. “This ring cost a fortune.”

  “Maybe new.”

  “He didn’t buy it new?”

  “I don’t know.” I withdrew my hand and began twisting the ring to take it off. This had not been a good idea. I had been childish, the kid wanting to show her older sister something more spectacular than anything Tina’s wealthy husband had given her.

  “Was it a special occasion?” she asked. “Your birthday?”

  “No.” I removed the ring and walked to the stairs. “I don’t think I’ll wear it.”

  “He just shows up one day with a ring like that and says, ‘Here’s something for nothing’?” She was speaking to my back.

  “Yes.” I began to climb the stairs.

  “How much do they pay cops in this town anyway?” she shouted, but I had turned the corner on the landing, heading for my lingerie drawer, where I had hidden the ring after Walter Freeman asked if Gabe had purchased anything expensive for me lately.

  “SHOULD’VE PUT IT IN A POPCORN BOX.” That’s what Gabe said the night he gave me the ring, sitting on a bench on the beach, facing the lake. He pulled a tiny brown felt bag from the pocket of his windbreaker, the blue one with the police department crest, withdrew the ring, and handed it to me. “Let’s see if it fits.”

  When I found my voice, I asked where he got it.

  “A jeweller,” he said. “Here.” He took my right hand and slid the ring onto the third finger. It was a little loose, but I didn’t care. Gabe had given me a small diamond solitaire before we were married. I loved it and never asked nor even thought about owning more jewellery beyond it and my wedding band. I detest the idea that jewellery and clothes and expensive shoes make a statement. I didn’t want to make any damn statement. I wanted to wear that ring, though.

  “Gabe,” I said, “we have a problem.”

  “What’s that?” He was sitting back with his arms resting along the top of the bench, watching the cormorants pass. It was early evening, the time of day when the black cormorants return from their journey to the lake, when they come home to the bay and nest on the north shore, across the water from the factories and the steel mills.

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “Yes, we can.”

  “This ring is worth thousands.”

  “Probably.”

  “Where did you get the money?”

  “It didn’t take much.”

  I closed my eyes. “Was it stolen?”

  I felt Gabe’s hand grip my shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw him watching me with an expression I had not seen before, one that made me think either he had not considered that possibility or he had not prepared an answer. “No, Josie,” he said. “It is not stolen. I gave it to you because you are a beautiful woman. That’s why a man gives jewellery to a woman. Because she is beautiful and because he loves her.”

  I EXPECTED MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE RING from Tina when I came downstairs, but Tina, as she often does, surprised me by not mentioning it. “Did you make the funeral arrangements yet?” she asked.

  I sat at the table. Funeral arrangements? That’s what you do for dead people, isn’t it. “No,” I said. “I’m still getting used to things.”

  “We’ll need to find out when the body will be released. Where’s your computer?”

  I told her I didn’t have a computer.

  Tina looked at me as though I didn’t have a nose. “Don’t you know about the Internet?” she said. “Don’t you use email?”

  I explained that yes, damn it, I knew about the Internet and email, and we even had a toilet and running water in the house, if she cared to notice, and that Gabe used a computer at his office and I used one at the retirement home to keep the books and at the library whenever I wanted to look up the name of the last king of Albania, but we didn’t own one because … well, because Gabe and I liked the idea of being contrary, I guess.

  Tina shrugged and began opening cupboards. “Have you got a pad and pencil somewhere?”

  “I think so.” I held my head in my hands. No, we didn’t. Not anymore. Not one I could find. Gabe would know where the pad was, the one we used to write things down. Shopping lists. Telephone numbers. Notes to each other.

  “Where is it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I have one upstairs.” Of course Tina would travel with a notepad in her luggage. Tina is always prepared. When she returned, we began making a list of things to do. My life was getting organized.

  TINA DROVE OUR HONDA TO VISIT MOTHER, crossing the lift bridge and skirting the water’s edge to Mother’s retirement home, where she and Mother greeted each other like two soldiers from an old war who had nothing in common beyond their regimental badges, and staff members came to tell me how sorry they were to hear about Gabe. When I approached her chair, Mother clung to me and we both cried over Gabe.

  “MOTHER LOOKS GOOD,” Tina said when we left. “I feel like pasta. Where’s a good place for pasta?”

  “Italy.”

  “I didn’t realize new widows overflowed with humour.”

  “It’s not humour, it’s irony. Tina, this is WASP country. They only know two spices here: salt and pepper. Pepper is the exotic one.”

  “Every town has at least one good Italian restaurant.”

  “Yes, and a war memorial and a whore.”

  She found a strip-mall Italian bistro with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths on small tables and a waitress who, together with the restaurant decor, made me think we had encountered two out of three of every town’s traditional attractions. After she ordered for both of us—spaghetti bolognese for me, veal parmigiana for her—Tina leaned across the table wearing her listen-to-your-older-sister expression. “Sweetheart,” she said, “I want you to consider something.” When I did not respond, she said, “I want you to consider moving to Vancouver when it’s over.”

  “When what’s over? My life?”

  “This. Do you want to keep living where you are? Breathing smoke and dust from the damn steel companies? Living under a couple of expressway bridges, tracking sand into your house every day?” She sat up again. “Do you know that one of your neighbours keeps a helicopter on his porch and a swamp buggy in his driveway? We passed it on the way in.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t see that in Kitsilano.”

  “I’m not suggesting you live in Kitsilano. I mean, you can if you want.” She meant I could if I could afford it. “It would just be nice to have you nearby, downtown or Burnaby or somewhere. What’s wrong with wanting to have your sister live near you?”

  “Mother too?”

  I had caught her off guard. It had taken her twenty minutes to forget about Mother. Her jaw tightened. “Mother could have another stroke, a major stroke, any day.”

  “Then better she has it here, with me near her. When Mother goes, I’ll consider coming to Vancouver. How’s that?” I had no intention of moving to British Columbia.

  Tina thought about that. Then, “How long had Gabe been depressed?”

  “He wasn’t depressed.”

  “It tends to be depressed people who commit suicide.”

  “Gabe did not commit suicide. He did not put his gun to his head and kill himself.”
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  “Isn’t that what the police are saying? Aren’t they saying it was a suicide?”

  “They’re wrong. I know they’re wrong. Gabe never put his gun together unless he was going on duty—”

  “What’s that mean, ‘put his gun together’?”

  “You take your weapon apart …” I sounded like a police procedure manual. “… when you’re at home. You put the clip with the ammunition in one place, making sure there’s no bullet in the firing chamber, and put the other part somewhere else. So the gun’s never ready to fire, in case somebody finds it or …” I wasn’t sure of the other reason for making a gun unable to fire. I just felt better about it. “Everybody puts their weapon in kitchen drawers. It’s a cop thing, around here at least. You put the weapon in the kitchen drawer and the ammunition clip beside the cereal boxes, or some other place. Cops joke about it. Cops joke about everything. Don’t reach for the cornflakes and come up with the Glock. Gabe would not put his gun together and carry it out to the blanket when he knew I was on my way to meet him.”

  “Unless he planned to use it.”

  “I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it.”

  “What’s a Glock?”

  “His gun. I don’t know what happened to Smith & Wesson. One made cough drops and the other made cooking oil.” It was Gabe’s joke. Most people don’t get it. Tina was most people, so she thought it over before reaching across the table and putting her hand on mine.

  “Okay, I understand,” she said. “About the gun.” The waitress arrived with two glasses of Chianti and a basket of bread sticks. “What’s with all that yellow tape wrapped around your tool shed?” Tina asked when she left. “Wasn’t Gabe found on the beach?”

  “Some pervert’s been in there playing with himself,” I said. “That’s what Mel thinks.”

  “Mel? Who’s Mel?”

  “A cop who used to work with Gabe.”

  “What’s he like?”

  I shrugged. “A nice guy.” I had to say something.

  I looked up to see Tina staring at me with one eyebrow raised. The waitress brought our food, and when she left I expected Tina to say aloud what I had just read in her expression, but we ate in silence until Tina began reminiscing about Dad and various aunts and uncles. I ate barely half of my pasta. Tina devoured her meal, then flashed her American Express card, and we drove back to the beach strip in silence.

  TINA WAS STANDING AT OUR KITCHEN WINDOW, looking out at the garden. Beyond the fence and above the boardwalk, the horizon was lit with the white silken promise of a moon preparing to rise over the lake. “I can see the attraction of living here on the lake,” Tina said. “Except for everything else.”

  I was sitting at the kitchen table. I had poured a finger or two of brandy into an old glass but had not touched it yet. I was waiting for my sister to leave. Some sins need solitude. “What’s ‘everything else’ mean?”

  Tina waved her hand. “The traffic on the bridge, the stuff from the steel companies, some of your neighbours … and, you know, it’s not the cleanest beach in the world.”

  “That’s why Martha Stewart keeps turning down my invitations.”

  She turned from the window, her arms folded across her chest. “Did Gabe appreciate your sense of humour?”

  “As a matter of fact—” I began.

  “Does Mel?”

  Someday, Tina will have a verbal ambush named after her. In high school, Tina claimed she joined the debating club because a couple of cute boys were members, which was a lie. The only man in my lifetime who was both cute and a good debater was Bill Clinton, and the combination was so rare that it got him elected president. Tina joined the debating club so she could learn to cut people up with her comments. If she had joined the choir and learned to sing as well as she learned to win arguments, she’d be Céline bloody Dion.

  Hearing her mention Mel was enough to overcome my reluctance about the brandy. I took a long swallow and closed my eyes while it burned its way toward my stomach. When I opened them, Tina was still staring at me. “What do you want to know about Mel?” I asked.

  “What makes him a nice guy?” She began walking and talking, moving around the kitchen, closing cupboard doors and picking crumbs off the counter. “When women like us, you and me, when we say a man is a nice guy, it means more than he opens a door for you or buys his wife expensive trinkets, stuff like that. That’s what I think.”

  “He’s not married.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “He’s also younger than me.”

  “How many years?”

  “Four or five.”

  “Tall?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Lots of hair?”

  “A bunch.”

  “Wavy?”

  “Sure.”

  “Blue eyes, right? You always fell for guys with blue eyes.”

  I refused to give her the satisfaction.

  “Am I going to meet this Mel?” She sat across from me.

  “Probably.” I looked up at the clock. It was past ten. “I’m going to bed. Hang your breakfast order on your doorknob.”

  “Josephine.”

  My sister had become my mother. I hadn’t changed. I refused to answer and climbed the stairs to my bedroom, finishing the brandy on the way.

  I HAVE A THEORY that time moves at different speeds in darkness. I don’t know if it moves faster or slower when the light is out. Only that its pace changes. The first night with a new lover always passes at a speed you never expect, sometimes long and leisurely, sometimes swift and fleeting. Never normal.

  Lying in the darkness, I heard the television set in the living room below me and the traffic passing on the highway bridges above the roof. From out on the lake, I heard a freighter’s horn announce that it was approaching the canal, and a moment later the air horn on the bridge warned everyone it was about to rise. From another place, I heard Gabe in the bathroom, brushing his teeth and then whistling under his breath in that tuneless way he did. Lying on my side, my back to the bathroom, I heard him pad across the floor and felt the bed sink behind me with the weight of his body, and I awoke.

  I rolled over. No one was next to me. The house was silent, the traffic from the highway bridges distant and intermittent. I rested my arm across my eyes until the tears stopped. Then I rose from the bed, wrapped myself in my bathrobe, and crossed the hall to the guest room, where I stood at the open door and called Tina’s name until she stirred and said, “What?”

  “I want you to know …” I began. There was an old steamer trunk near the door. I’d bought it from the junk shop down the beach strip last year. There was nothing inside. I sat on it now. “I want you to know that whatever happened, or whatever you think happened, I never stopped loving my husband. Okay?”

  “Why are you saying this?” Tina’s voice floated at me from the darkness.

  “I just want you to know.” I was clenching my fists so tightly in my lap that they hurt. “I never stopped loving Gabe. Not for one minute, okay?”

  “Okay.” Tina’s voice was sleepy and frightened. I had intimidated my older sister. It did not make me feel good about myself.

  I think I mumbled something about seeing her in the morning. Then I returned to bed.

  8.

  The first hour after sunrise was the time my father believed he was most likely to see angels. My father was not a religious man, so he didn’t mean it literally. He simply loved mornings because mornings held promises, and evenings held something else. I agree with him. If angels exist, I expect to meet one at sunrise.

  I was up with the sun. Tina would remain sleeping for hours, still on west coast time. I made coffee, poured myself a cup, and carried it to the back door, where I stood looking out at the lake. Joggers were already passing on the boardwalk, some alone and wearing headphones, others in groups of two or three, chatting as they bounced past, a couple with dogs trotting alongside. I watched them all, silhouetted against the sun, and I looke
d up to see cormorants flying east across the lake. I looked at the tool shed last, wrapped in yellow plastic tape printed with crime scene. I imagined a man inside, watching while I moved about the kitchen or dressed or undressed in the upstairs bedroom with its window overlooking the lake, where Gabe and I slept and talked and made love.

  Some people saw angels in the dawn. I saw perverts.

  I finished the coffee and morning paper and almost walked to the telephone to call Gabe at Central Station. That’s what I did after I finished my coffee and the newspaper. I would call Gabe to talk to him, if he was available. When I reached him, Gabe and I would discuss everything except the case he was working on at the time. When the case was closed and Gabe had moved on to the next one, he might reveal some of it to me, leaving out the gory details. But when he was in the middle of an investigation, especially a violent homicide or child abuse case, he left his feelings on the beach. If he were involved in something horrific, he would park the car at the side of the house when he arrived home, walk to the boardwalk, and stand looking at the lake. Then he would come through the garden to the back door and into the house, leaving life’s crap outside.

  He learned how to do this while getting over the death of his children. A therapist taught him about places where he could leave things he didn’t need or want. He had a place like that in his mind while he lived alone. He called it his white room. Wherever he was, he would close his mind and erase images of all the furniture, the pictures, the books, the carpets, the lamps, everything. In his mind, the room around him would be totally plain and white. Nothing could intrude. He would be Gabe Marshall for a while, without connections or pain.

  After we married and moved to the beach strip, he found another place, which was the lake. He did not need to be Gabe Marshall, free of everything including pain this time. Just free of things he didn’t need, and he would stand staring at the water long enough to leave the things he didn’t want to burden me with out on the water until they sank from sight. I’m a little sceptical of that stuff, but then I’ve never been in therapy or worked at a job that involved stepping over somebody’s intestines. All I know is that Gabe never failed to walk through our back door with a smile for me, no matter how upset he might have looked when he got home and parked the car at the side of the house, before he walked to the beach and stood looking at the lake until all the bad stuff was sent out there to sink to the bottom with the other pollution.