Beach Strip (5 page)

O
ne of my neighbours has a helicopter on his front porch. It has sat there for more than a year. Not the whole helicopter, just the part you ride in that looks like a large white plastic egg on skis. The rest of it, the blades that spin on top and the long tail with the small propeller on the back, are missing, but Gabe assured me it’s a real helicopter. We would pass the house with the helicopter on the porch during our walks along Beach Boulevard on summer nights, when we wanted to avoid the boardwalk crowded with skaters and skateboarders and bicyclists and joggers and retired people and vagrant hoodlums. We would stroll past the few remaining Victorian-era cottages and the tar-paper shacks and the new prefab homes with goldfish ponds in the front yard and hot tubs in the back, and we would be happy doing it.

The neighbour with the helicopter on his porch also keeps a Florida swamp buggy in the lane next to the house, in front of an army machine that Gabe said looks like an APC, which he translated as Armoured Personnel Carrier. I don’t know what the man who keeps this stuff looks like, because I have never seen him.

The beach strip is peppered with misfits and eccentrics living among young professionals winding themselves up and retired people winding their lives down. They start out in Porsches and end up in golf carts.

If misfits and nonconformists can be catalogued, I do not know any faction that is not represented among our neighbours.

Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach with the schnauzer, have been building their stone castle since Gabe and I moved here. Along with the rooftop parapets, it includes narrow windows set deeply into the walls—the better for archers to aim their arrows, I guess—and a heavy oak door studded with rivets. I expected to see gnomes in lederhosen at work on a moat someday. Most of the neighbours think it’s quaint. Nobody considers it out of place.

A motorcycle club converted a cottage at the south end of the beach, the scuzzy end, into a clubhouse, adding steel bars to the windows and drawing weekly visits from the police. Near them, over the dusty upholstery shop, lives a woman who for the past month had been stalking the boardwalk and glaring into our garden, her mouth moving without any words emerging.

Compared with the people, the homes on the beach strip are almost conventional. Some are abandoned, others nearly so. It is a community, as the sociologists say, in transition. A few custom homes are being built among the decaying cottages. The new homes feature cedar shake shingles, bay windows, and something called a great room, which is what you get when you don’t put a ceiling on the living room. They sit among the cheap frame cottages and the trailer park and the retirement homes. There are many distractions on the beach strip. There is little boredom.

AFTER SPEAKING TO TINA,
I looked out the kitchen window and into my garden, where two police officers were standing near the gate. The news reporters had moved on to some other disaster, I assumed. The air was already warm and heavy. It was going to be one of those August days they invented air conditioning for.

I opened my door and almost tripped over two jars of marmalade and a plastic-wrapped loaf of banana bread with a note taped to it.
Call us if you need to
, the note said. It was from Maude
Blair, of course. There are many people like the Blairs living on the beach strip. They keep no helicopters on their front porch or bars on their windows. They always nod and smile, and they do not gossip. They care for you, but they find no need to tell you about it except when necessary.

I set the bread and marmalade in the kitchen and returned to look out at the garden shed. The door was closed, but I could see the hook dangling free. “Somebody’s been in our garden shed,” I said to Gabe the first time I found the hook unlatched earlier in the summer. “We should start locking the door.”

“What’s to steal?” he said. “If we’re lucky they’ll take the old lawn mower, maybe the rusty rake and the bag of topsoil.”

“You’ll do anything to get out of gardening,” I muttered.

The shed door was normally held closed with a simple hook and eye. “How much will a padlock cost?” I asked when I found the door open again a day or two later. “Three dollars? Five dollars?”

Gabe said if we hung a padlock on the door we would have to keep the key somewhere, and he was always losing keys.

“Get one with a combination,” I suggested.

Gabe said we would forget the combination and never be able to get back in. So the garden shed remained unlocked. Someone had been in there last night. It might have been a police officer. Or one of the reporters. Or someone could have been hiding in the garden shed when Gabe came out the garden door wrapped in the blanket and carrying the bottle of wine. They could have followed him into the bushes and shot him there.

I walked to the shed and looked inside. It was, of course, empty except for some dusty garden tools.

Why would anyone, assuming they had a need to kill Gabe, follow him onto the beach? It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Gabe was gone, whoever had been in the garden shed had gone, and I needed time in the sun. I needed to heal.

I sat in one of the garden chairs, my back to the beach. Traffic
soared along the high bridges spanning the canal, and beyond them the steam and smoke of the steel companies rose through a still-clear sky. I heard the warning blast from the lift bridge down the strip, and geese calling to each other as they passed overhead. I smelled the roses growing against the fence. None of the sounds and smells reached me the way they might have a day earlier. I was untouchable. I was distant. I was in free fall, waiting to land on solid ground. I was something else as well, but I didn’t want to think about that at the moment. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, feeling nothing except a sudden hand on my shoulder.

I jumped at the touch, spilling my coffee. I screamed as well, and I’m sure I swore before looking around to see Mel Holiday holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have said something—”

“You should have knocked at the damn door,” I said.

“I did.” Mel lowered his hands. “Then I came around the side and saw you out here—”

“And decided to scare the hell out of me.”

“How are you doing?” Mel looked toward the shrubs behind the house. The two cops, their attention attracted by my scream, turned away.

“My sister is coming to stay with me. She’s arriving tonight.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it’s not. You asked me how I was doing. I just told you that my sister is coming to stay with me, probably for a week. That’s how badly things are going. And it looks like somebody was in the tool shed last night.” I pointed at the open door. “One of your guys?”

“I doubt it.” Mel walked to the shed and looked inside. The shed has two small windows. One faces the garden, the other faces the house. I watched Mel scan the interior, then the shed’s wooden floor. He bent to examine the area beneath the window facing the house, then stepped inside and looked through the
window and up at the house. “Have you noticed anybody in the shed?” he asked when he returned.

“No, but I come out here some mornings and find the door opened or unlocked. I told Gabe about it. He didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Mel looked back at the shed. “It might be.” He looked at me. “You have a secret admirer. A pervert. Somebody’s been standing at that window and masturbating. That’s what it looks like.”

“Some mornings I lie on the cot over there,” I said, nodding my head toward the corner of the garden. “Sunbathing. People going by on the boardwalk can’t see into the corner because the trees and the shed block the view.”

“Anybody standing at the window in the shed could watch you,” Mel said.

“Great.” I felt sick.

“I’ll have a technician take samples from the stains on the floor. We might get his DNA profile from them.”

“See if you can get his phone number too. My sister’s on her way.”

Mel knelt next to the chair. “I know why you’re making jokes. Makes it easier to handle things.”

“You think it’s a joke? You’ve never met Tina.”

Mel took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Josie, there are only so many things I can do for you.”

“One thing you can do for me is tell Walter Freeman that Gabe did not shoot himself with his own gun.”

Mel stood up. “We’ll send the bullet that the coroner took out and another one from Gabe’s gun to forensics, and the paraffin test from his hand. We’ll get the results back next week.”

“Won’t prove a thing.”

“Hey.”

I looked up at Mel and was reminded how good he looked when he was angry. Some men are like that.

“If it makes it easier to believe somebody murdered your husband,
go ahead and believe it,” he said. “But the rest of us, the people who have to deal with this stuff every day, we know a suicide when we see one. And I’m sorry if it’s painful for you.” He walked to the gate opening onto the boardwalk. “The technician should be here this afternoon. I’ll tell him to knock first.”

After Mel left, I went inside and had a slice of Maude’s banana bread with a spoonful of her marmalade on it. It made me feel so much better that I had another one. I had resumed eating. I had not ceased crying.

I answered the messages from friends who had called, beginning with Hans and Trudy, building their German castle on the beach strip as though it were on the Rhine. Gabe and I had enjoyed their company the few times we got together. Hans likes the same kind of jazz as Gabe, and Trudy bakes a killer strudel, which she always brought along. What wasn’t to like? “You come by, have strudel and tea,” Hans said in something between a command and an invitation. I promised I would.

Debbie, a friend from my days at the veterinary hospital, called from Toronto, inviting me to stay with her in her high-rise condo on Bloor Street, thirty-six floors above the muggers. I politely declined.

I called Dewey Maas, the last man I dated before I met Gabe. Dewey burst into tears at the sound of my voice. He had heard the news about Gabe and called once, but didn’t want to bother me by calling again until … well, until I called him. Dewey is a sweetheart of a guy for whom I felt every attraction but sexual. I have never fully understood that. Neither has Dewey, whose name is actually Byron, which is silly enough to make a nickname like Dewey preferable.

I met Dewey while working at a veterinary office, as receptionist and bookkeeper. Dewey was an animal groomer, working out of a storefront beneath his condominium. In the morning, people brought Dewey their dogs to be washed, trimmed, brushed, and
manicured, and Dewey spent his day talking to animals and listening to opera. Most people assumed Dewey was gay, which made some of the older women warm up to him in ways they wouldn’t if they believed he was straight. Dewey was neither gay nor straight. He dated both sexes, which made him more interesting but, as far as I was concerned, somehow less appealing. I mean, a divorced woman in her thirties has enough competition as it is from her own gender. Why double the odds against you?

Dewey had cried on the telephone when he heard I was marrying Gabe, which was the last time I had heard from him, and he cried into my ear now that Gabe was dead. “Please tell me you’ll let me help you through this,” he said between sniffs.

I told him I would.

“I’ll come and see you whenever you say,” he added.

I explained that my sister was on her way, and that she would be all the company I needed. Then I thanked him for his concern and said goodbye.

Humans engage in a lot of silly things, but platonic relationships between two single people of similar ages and different genders has to be among the silliest. Or maybe just the most uncomfortable.

THE FORENSICS TECHNICIAN ARRIVED
after three o’clock, an overweight man with a fringe of hair that, in his dreams, might have been as thick as his moustache. I led him around the house to the shed. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, scraped the floor in front of the window, sealed the shed door with a strip of plastic tape with
crime scene
printed all over it, and left me alone to face Tina.

T
hat afternoon I made tea and walked through the house with the cup in my hand, looking at things that reminded me of Gabe. They were everywhere, especially in our bedroom. A piece of jade I had bought to help him relax. He was to rub it in the palm of his hand when he was tense. I picked it up and stroked it now. It may have worked for Gabe. It did not work for me.

A favourite mug for his coffee, garish yellow and red, with a picture of a hand-painted chicken on the side and a small chip on the rim. His collection of jazz CDs, a nail clipper he had owned since he was sixteen years old, and an earthenware plate we had brought from Mexico. Gabe used the plate to hold spare change from his trouser pocket when he got undressed at night. I counted the amount in the plate, penny by penny, nickel by nickel. Eight dollars and sixty-three cents.

And his shirts and his ties and his underwear, hanging in his closet and folded neatly in the drawers of his dresser cabinet. I touched them all with one hand and held my teacup in the other, alternately smiling and crying at the memories and images they created. What was I to do with them now? I would decide some other time. Maybe in some other life. Then I returned downstairs, poured the cold tea in the sink, climbed back up to our bedroom and fell on the bed. I believe I cried before falling asleep. Yes, I did.

I woke in the summer dusk greyness that I have always considered poignant, thinking of Mother and remembering I was to
visit her and explain what happened. The clock said it was almost eight. It wasn’t guilt about not seeing Mother that had awakened me. It was knocking, fast and light, like a drummer in a marching band. But I awoke feeling guilty anyway.

I managed to stand up, fluff my hair, and open the front door. Tina gave me barely a glance before turning to the limo driver, whom she had left standing at the open trunk of the car, and said, “She’s here. Bring them up.” Meaning her luggage, four matched pieces in caramel-coloured leather. “Oh, Josie.” She hugged me and I counted to three before she released me. “Are you sure you’re okay?” She stood back, glanced over her shoulder to ensure that the limo driver was on his way with her luggage, smiled her approval at his progress, then looked at me again, tilted her head, and let her eyes fill with tears. Tina is several interesting people.

“Sure.” I walked back to the kitchen, aware that the house Gabe and I had loved so much, the bungalow we believed looked funky and real, was basically shabby and plain. “Want some tea?”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Alex,” Tina said from the front door.

I turned to see the oversized limo driver, handsome in the way an oak armoire can be handsome, enter with Tina’s luggage, carrying one piece under each arm and another in each hand. “Is the guest room upstairs?” Tina asked.

“There’s a pullout couch in the room on your left, just off the landing,” I said. Tina was already climbing the stairs, swinging her ass at Alex, the limo driver, who was following her. From the expression on his face, Alex was enjoying the view. There is comfort in continuity, I suppose, and Tina, bless her cold Prada heart, was providing some for me.

I have never seen an airport limo driver carry luggage into a house and up the stairs. From the expression on his face, it was apparent that Alex had never seen a woman quite like Tina either.

When they came downstairs, Tina and Alex returned to the limo, where, I assumed, they discussed his fee and the price of tomatoes.

“HOW CAN YOU MAKE IT HERE
from Vancouver so fast?” I said. We were seated in the kitchen, sipping tea from earthenware mugs dating back to my first marriage. I refused to apologize for the absence of Royal Doulton. “I talked to you barely eight hours ago. It takes me that long to pack. And how did you get to know your limo driver so quickly?”

I knew how. Tina is an outrageous flirt.

“I always talk to limo drivers.” Tina dampened her lips with the tea. She had changed from her black pencil skirt and pink blouse into rhinestone-encrusted jeans and a cotton sweater that ended precisely halfway between her hips and her knees. I had to admit she looked terrific in both outfits. “I refuse to sit silently in the back of a car, like cargo. I asked him about his life. Alex is a hard-working guy from Lebanon with two sons and a shrewish wife. Do you have cream for the tea?”

“No.” I rose and walked to the bar in the living room. “But I have some brandy for it.” I returned with the bottle and offered it to Tina, who shook her head.

“You really should cut your hair, you know,” Tina said after I had poured enough brandy in my cup to kill the taste of the tea. “You’re getting too old for long hair.”

My hair is toffee-coloured with a natural wave and a hint of red. It, plus the fact that I inherited our mother’s bosom, has always made Tina jealous. Tina inherited our father’s thin black hair, which she keeps short, and more of his chest than Mother’s. Maybe even the hair on it. I haven’t looked lately. Until a few years ago, Tina’s revenge had been to suggest I was adopted.

“Gabe likes it this way,” I said.

I waited for her to correct me, telling me I should be using the past tense now. Instead, my sarcastic older sister was replaced by a solicitous friend, who reached her hand across to enclose mine as her eyes flooded with tears. “Tell me what happened.”

I told her. I told her almost everything. When I had to pause and release my own tears, Tina placed her arm around my shoulder and dabbed my eyes with a tissue. When I gathered myself together again, she sat back and watched me.

“You guys did it on a blanket?” she said when I finished. “The two of you out there on the sand? Were you drunk?”

“A little.”

“I mean, teenagers do that stuff, but at your age …”

“My age? Thanks, Tina.”

“Actually, it sounds kinky and romantic.”

“The truth is, I got bitten by mosquitoes and washed sand out of my hair for a week.”

Tina looked out the window toward the lake. “Gabe was nice. I didn’t know him as well as what’s-his-name.” Meaning my first husband, the one married to Miss Lemon Hair, the aerobics instructor.

“His name was Danny. My first husband’s name was Danny.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Probably saving his money to buy his wife new tits when the old ones wear out.”

“Why do you do that?” She fixed me with a look on her face that I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen and dating Dale somebody, a boy on the next block with perfect teeth, curly hair, and the personality of a tree stump. Tina lusted after him, tried to hide her jealousy when he ignored her, and covered it with the look of distaste she wore now.

“Why do I do what?”

“Make wisecracks all the time. Your heart is breaking, I know it is, and you act like you’re …” She pursed her lips and shook
her head, looking for the analogy. She found it. “Like you’re a stand-up comedienne in Las Vegas.”

“I cry in private, Tina. I laugh, or try to, in public because it protects me.”

“From what?”

“Whatever you’ve got. Look, Tina, I love you for coming here, I really do. Gabe and I …” The lump was rising from my heart into my throat, squeezing tears from my eyes on the way, making a liar of me about not crying in public. “Gabe and I kept to ourselves down here. So I don’t have many people I can call on, and I’m just glad you came. Really.”

Tina rose from the chair and held me in her arms. I cried this time not for the absence of Gabe but for the presence of Tina and the touch of her arms on my back, pulling me to her. Sometimes the worse-tasting the medicine, the more you need to take it.

“WE’LL GO SEE MOTHER
and then eat at one of those cute little restaurants down by the lake.” Tina had planned our evening for us. A week ago I would have resented it. Now I welcomed it.

I had had a bath, put on a blouse and skirt, tied my hair back, slipped on a ring Gabe had given me, and returned downstairs. Tina had unpacked her clothes and moved a chair from the dining room into the downstairs bathroom to hold her perfumes, shampoo, nail polish, blush, skin cream, anti-fungal spray for her feet, and cosmetics.

“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.”