Beach Strip (8 page)

She frowned, pointed at her lips, and shook her head.

“I know you can’t speak,” I said. “But you know us, right? Tina and me?”

She nodded, then pulled me to her again.

“
HOW LONG DO YOU THINK MOTHER HAS
?” Tina asked on the way back to my house.

I was driving. “Until what?”

“Until the next stroke, the one that’ll kill her.”

“Jesus, Tina.”

“Don’t get angry with me. It’s a legitimate question. Andrew told me that when someone Mother’s age has a stroke like that, she’ll have another, and we had better expect it. The difference between you and me is that I’m a realist and you’re a dreamer.”

“Yeah, well, the reality is that my husband’s dead and yours isn’t.”

“Which reminds me. I should call Andrew.”

She pulled the smallest cell phone I had ever seen out of her purse and dialed it, right there in the car. “Got his voice mail,” she said. We were crossing the lift bridge over the canal, the tires growling against the textured steel road surface. When we were
children, crossing the bridge in Dad’s car, he would tell us a troll lived under the bridge, and the troll grew angry whenever anyone drove over him, and it was the troll we heard growling, not our tires on the rough steel. I smiled at the memory and would have mentioned it to Tina, something we could share between us, but she was continuing her extended conversation with her absent husband.

“… know you’re busy, but I want you to look at that dining-room suite I mentioned at Dorsey’s. I left you a note on it—did you get the note? Stop in on your way home from the hospital tonight. I think we should have it for Thanksgiving, but it may be a special order, so we should do something about it now, all right? Josie says hello. She’s driving, or I would hand her the telephone. She’s bearing up so well, the sweetheart, and I’ll give her your love. Call me when you get time, and speak to the landscapers, will you? They still haven’t trimmed the hedge at the back the way I like it. You’re going to have to give them hell, Andrew. You’re too nice to them. I think we should change them, the maintenance people, I mean.”

She pecked a few kisses into the telephone and snapped it shut just as we pulled into the driveway. I switched off the engine and lights and sat staring at the darkened house and the eastern sky behind it, over the lake. The high clouds were lit in that dying pink shade of summer dusk.

Tina spoke my name twice before I looked at her.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“About what?”

“About …” She waved at the house. “This. Your life. You stayed home while Gabe worked, right? Except for afternoons doing the books where Mother lives?”

“That’s how Gabe wanted it,” I said. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the house, Tina trailing me. “And so did I. We paid cash for the house—”

“Why?” Tina asked.

“It didn’t take that much money. Real estate prices here are cheap. You can probably buy our house for the same price you’d pay for a parking spot in Vancouver.”

I unlocked the front door, tossed the keys on a table, and turned to face Tina.

“Why didn’t Gabe want you to work?” Tina asked. “At a full-time job?”

I didn’t like her tone. “Hey, I didn’t want to work either. Not full-time. I’d been fired from my job just after we moved here—”

“Is that when you worked at the veterinarian’s?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“And you told some woman who brought her little dog into the animal hospital that the dumbest bitch in the room wasn’t the one with four legs and an infected paw but the one wearing the cheap dress and the dumb hairdo?” She’d always enjoyed telling that story. I’d assumed she was proud of her little sister’s wit. Now I thought it was something else, and it made me angry.

“What the hell, Tina?” I said. “You haven’t worked a day since you married Andrew, you tramp.”

“Of course not!” she shouted. “Unlike you, I have social commitments.” That almost inspired me to pour turpentine into her underwear again, this time while she was wearing it, but just then the telephone rang. I seized it as an opportunity to end the battle, or maybe as a weapon, and barked, “Hello!”

“Josie?” It was Dewey. “Should I call some other time?”

“Yes,” I said, then “No,” because this seemed like a good way for Tina and I to stop arguing gracefully. “Hi, Dewey,” I said and looked across at Tina, who mouthed “Dewey?”

“I’ve been reading about Gabe and you in the papers,” Dewey said, “and feeling terrible, but I didn’t want to make a pest of myself, you know, unless you wanted to see me.”

I thanked Dewey and said I would love to see him, I needed
all the friends I could get, and asked him to call me next week. He promised he would, we said our goodbyes, and I hung up and turned to face Tina, both of us calm.

“Dewey?” Tina said, aloud this time. “As in Huey, Louie and?”

“He’s a friend from way back,” I said.

“How far back?”

“Before Gabe.”

“And now he thinks the coast is clear?”

“There’s nothing romantic about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen him since Gabe and I were married. Now give me a hug, shut up for five minutes, and I’ll tell you about him. If you’re interested.”

Tina lowered her head, looked at me with a smirk, and said she was interested in any man who had known me for years, who wasn’t a gnome, and who had never parked his shoes under my bed. Then she opened her arms and we hugged and patted each other’s back. What would I do without the little snip?

I explained that I had met Dewey while I was working at the veterinarian’s. His business name, Dewey Does Dogs, was the least attractive thing about him. All day long, while he washed and clipped and manicured hairy little creatures, his stereo belted out Mozart and Beethoven or Renée Fleming and Maria Callas. At the end of the day, when the dog owners had rescued their little sweetums and paid Dewey, he pocketed a couple of hundred dollars and smelled like a cocker spaniel.

“That’s two things I can imagine you not liking about him,” Tina said. “His name and his aroma.”

“There’s more,” I said. “He’s bisexual.”

“I hear it doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night.”

“What,” I said, “were we talking about before we started fighting?” I didn’t want to talk about Dewey. I wanted only to think about Gabe. I wanted to wallow in the memories of him. And I wanted Tina’s shoulder to cry on when I needed it.

“We were talking about your finances,” she said. “Unless you’ve got a big stash of money hidden away somewhere, or Gabe qualifies for a bank president’s pension … I mean, what are you going to live on? You’ll need to get a real job.”

“A real job?” She might have said I needed to buy a camel.

“Do you have any savings?”

“Like I said, the house is paid for. I guess there’ll be pension money …”

“So, what are you going to do, even if there is? Sit here the rest of your life, looking out at the lake?”

It was a classic big sister question. One I hadn’t thought of. Now that Tina had spoken it aloud, I chose to answer it aloud, and I answered it with the reply I had kept hidden since talking with Mel that morning. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I will. I think I’ll sit here and stare at the lake, and when I get tired of doing that, I’ll look for whoever killed Gabe. I’ll look for the rest of my life, if I have to.”

T
ina left two days later, catching an afternoon flight to Vancouver. She rushed through breakfast and sat in the living room, looking beyond Beach Boulevard through the arches of the highway bridge toward the bay and the steel factories, waiting for her limo to arrive.

“Here’s Alex,” she said, standing up. Her luggage was at the front door.

“You called the same limo driver?” I asked.

“He asked me to. He’s lonely.”

I looked out the window. Alex was lumbering toward our front door, straightening his tie and beginning to suck in his stomach, which promised to be an extended journey. “He’s horny, Tina.”

“Being lonely and being horny are the same thing with men.” Tina leaned to look at herself in the hall mirror, smoothing her hair. Then she hugged me, and another Tina, the concerned sister, spoke in the concerned sister’s voice. “I hope I helped. I hope I wasn’t a problem.”

“You’re never a problem,” I said. “A pain in the ass sometimes, but never a problem.”

I kissed her on the cheek and looked over her shoulder to see Alex peering through the door window at us. “Your lonely driver’s here,” I said, and she turned and showed him Tina number three. This one smiled with wide eyes and squealed with an eight-year-old’s voice when she opened the door, “Alex, you’re so
good.
Here they are,” pointing at her honey-coloured luggage. She glanced at
her watch. “I’ve got three hours before my flight, so we can drive slow and talk.”

Alex showed a series of gapped teeth and touched the brim of his cap.

“You two go straight to the airport,” I called from the door as Alex carried Tina’s luggage to the limo. “And don’t forget—”

I stopped at the sight of a small, shiny black van stopping in front of the house. In place of windows it had a silver hinge-like affair, as though the top could fold back like a baby carriage. A grey-haired man emerged from behind the wheel. He carried a plain metal box in one hand and a clipboard in the other. While Tina, Alex, and I watched, he glanced down at the sheet of paper on the clipboard, up at the house again, nodded to Tina and Alex—I almost thought of them as a couple—and walked toward me.

“Mrs. Marshall?” He had a voice acquired by older men of a certain stripe, as though they had been smoothing their vocal cords with paste wax for forty years.

“Yes,” I said.

He handed me the clipboard and a pen. “May I ask you to sign here, please?”

I signed the bottom of the sheet of paper and handed it to him. He thanked me, bowed his head, and with two hands gave me the box, which was about the size and weight of three pounds of coffee. Then he bowed again, took three steps backward, and returned to his shiny black car.

Tina walked toward me, concerned. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the box in my hand.

“This,” I said, and I was so glad I did not begin to cry, not there, not then. “This is Gabe.” Then I turned before Tina could hug me and closed the door, waving through the glass at her and nodding when she blew me a kiss.

THEY COULD HAVE PUT GABE’S ASHES
in a china urn “suitable for placing on a mantle or in a display case,” the young undertaker had told me. He had shown me a sample: deep blue, with small white flowers at its base and white birds soaring near the rim. It cost seventy-five dollars and qualified as a piece of china because that’s where it was made, which meant it was probably worth eight-five cents when it was crated on a ship out of Shanghai.

I wasn’t being cheap when I said the metal box would be fine. I didn’t want Gabe on a mantel, which I don’t have anyway. I wanted Gabe in my bed. I wanted him holding my hand while we strolled the beach strip. I wanted him inside me on winter nights when we could hear the lake water crashing against ice-coated rocks along the pier.

Tina was gone and Gabe was in a small metal box, and neither event was making me happy, so I poured myself some brandy neat and drank it while staring at the metal case. I had a little cry, poured myself more brandy, and drank it too. Then I curled up on the sofa and slept, waking when the telephone rang. I refused to get up and answer it until it rang four times. Telemarketers never wait longer than that. Sisters do.

“I’m at the airport,” Tina said, a little breathlessly, I thought. “I’m taking a later flight, got a couple of hours to kill. Listen, I’m worried about you. I wish you would come and stay with me and Andrew.”

“We’ll see.”

“What are you going to do with … you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“That package the man in the black car delivered.”

“Gabe’s ashes? I’m going to look after that tonight.”

“What do you mean, look after it?”

“I’m going to deal with it. Do what is right. Do what I want to do, which I know is not always the same thing, but I’ve made up my mind.”

“Josephine, you have to tell me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’ll keep calling you until you do.”

I said, “Goodbye, Tina,” added, “Goodbye, Alex,” and hung up. Then I curled myself into a ball and went back to sleep.

I WOKE AGAIN
in that same melancholy greyness of summer dusk that never fails to make me nostalgic. It made me feel that way even when Gabe was alive and we were walking along the boardwalk to Tuffy’s for hamburgers and beer. I have never been afraid of the dark. There is beauty to be found in darkness—the moon rising over the lake, making diamonds on the water, the shimmer of northern lights, the lights of ships in the distance. It is not darkness I fear. It’s greyness, the in-between, the dying.

I made coffee and sipped it, feeling the caffeine doing battle with the alcohol and winning, until the telephone rang again. It was Mel.

“Just called to see how you’re doing,” he said.

I told him the widow Marshall was doing fine.

“Why do you call yourself that?” he asked.

“Because it gives me intrigue. Widows are always more intriguing than married women, don’t you think?”

“I think you have always been intriguing.”

“And I think you’re a nice guy. So does my sister, by the way.”

“Tina’s an intriguing woman. She still there?”

“No, she’s either in a Boeing over Manitoba or in a limo under the chauffeur.” I heard a truck in the background. “Where are you?”

“On a watch.”

“What, a Rolex?”

“I was sitting here and I started thinking about you, wondering how you were doing.”

“I don’t need you to come and see me.”

“That’s not why I was calling.”

“Sure it is. I’m alone in the house. We don’t even need a motel room now, do we?”

I heard him breathe out slowly.

“Okay,” I said before he could speak. “I appreciate you calling, I really do. But there’s something I have to do tonight.” I looked at the clock. It was almost ten. “Call me from your place at midnight if you’re still up.”

“You’re not going out.” It was a command, not a question.

“I have to.”

“Did your sister tell you how many convicted perverts we’ve identified living on the strip? We’ve been interviewing them—there must be a dozen of them.”

“Mel, I can find more than that on the bus into Toronto.”

“One of them has been watching you from your garden shed.”

“They’re tied in, aren’t they?” I said.

“What are?”

“The guy in the tool shed and Gabe’s death.”

He thought it over. “It could be.”

“I knew it.”

“We don’t know for sure. Just don’t go out until I get there.”

“You’re not coming here, Mel. Not tonight. Not anymore.”

“Then wait for the morning.”

“No.” I knew what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it now.

He grunted. Something had distracted him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Something going on where you are?”

“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “I’ll call you later.”

“Sure.”

I was used to this. Gabe would call me while he was on a stakeout, or a watch, as Mel called it, especially late at night.
He would tell me he was calling to see if I was safe, alone in the house on the beach strip. I knew that was a crock. Gabe had seen something that had shaken whatever faith he had in the goodness of human nature, and he needed to talk with someone he cared about. Someone, I suppose, he trusted. He would call and ask how I was, and I would say I was fine, I was watching television or reading a book, and ask when he would be home. And he would say, “Oh, soon. I have a couple of things to do yet, a couple of reports to write.” And I could tell from his voice, from the amount of shake in it and the way it sounded pinched and higher than normal, that something had upset him.

“You’re a cop,” I said to him once. “You spend time around murder scenes. You should be used to it by now.”

“I’ll never get used to some things,” Gabe said. “Some cops do, but I never will.”

“Then find something else, Gabe,” I told him. “You don’t have to be out on the street all the time.”

“Yes, I do,” Gabe said. I remember he smiled at me in the way that could break my heart, and he reached his hand, one of his lovely bear-paw hands, toward me and curled it around the back of my head. “How about a coffee with some brandy in it?” he said. “And then I’ll tell you the joke about the bald-headed Swede who worked in the pickle factory.”

There was no joke about a bald-headed Swede and a pickle factory. Talking about a non-existent joke was a joke in itself. We were silly like that. His mention of the joke about the Swede was our signal that we would fool around later, starting on the sofa in front of the television and finishing in the bedroom. Or, as we had done one warm evening, among the caragana bushes on the beach. God, some of us remain children when it comes to sex, as though we can restore its mystery and fascination to the same level as when we were teenagers. Perhaps that’s what Tina meant when she said men have affairs because they are afraid of death.
The only way to hold off dying is to grow younger, not older. Maybe sex fools men into believing they are growing younger.

I pictured the way Gabe looked when he made me smile, how pleased he appeared when he saw me laugh at his jokes, his fun. That’s the expression I remembered, along with the strong body and the bear-paw hands. I looked at the metal box delivered to me that afternoon. Gabe was not in there. I didn’t know what the hell was in there, but it was not Gabe, and I didn’t want it with me.

The onshore wind would be cool, I knew. I slipped on a sweater, picked up the box, took my keys from the hall table, and left the house, locking the door behind me.

SOON AFTER WE MOVED HERE,
I told Gabe about the amusement park, the one that had stretched from the canal along the bay side of the strip across Beach Boulevard from our house. It had been built as an attraction for the wealthy families from the city who spent summers on the strip, Victorian classy with lawn bowling, a concert stage, and elaborate wrought-iron benches set beneath willow trees. When the wealthy people left for their air-conditioned mansions in the city and the workers moved in, the park became cheap and tacky the way amusement parks are supposed to be, with neon signs, carnival rides, arcade games, greasy french fries, and even greasier guys with cigarettes in their mouths and combs in their back pockets. The park was still operating when I was a teenager, although most of the rides were closed and things that once had been merely shabby were now a little scary.

My father said that when he was a boy in the 1950s, excursion boats steamed across the bay from the city during the summer, carrying people to the beach strip amusement park, where picnic tables were set among trees near the shore and kids played on a safe, sandy beach. No one we knew went to Florida in the winter or to the northern lakes in the summer. No one we knew
could afford it. Everything they needed for fun was on the beach strip. I suspect many of the old people who live on the strip today were once kids who rode the excursion boats to the amusement park back then, giddy with anticipation for rides on the merry-go-round, the ponies, the Octopus, and the Ferris wheel. The rides are gone, but the people remain, maybe because their goal as children was to always be near those long-gone amusements on the strip, and living here in rented rooms and peeling-paint cottages is the only ambition they truly achieved in their lives.

The amusement park had been separated from traffic by fancy cast-iron fencing set between concrete posts lining the shoulder of the road. Each post was topped with an electric light inside a white globe, and the line of posts and lights extended all the way from the canal to the farthest end of the amusement park, across from the house that Gabe and I shared. I remember how attractive the line of shining globes appeared in the night air when I was a child, glowing soft against the glare of the neon and fluorescent lights of the rides and arcade. When the amusement park was demolished, so was the string of lights. The cast-iron fence was carried off to be melted down in the blast furnaces across the bay, and the light standards were shattered and carted away.

All but one. The last one in the line, the one opposite our house, had been merely decapitated, and whenever Gabe and I walked on that side of the road and passed the waist-high stub of the post I would touch it, trailing my fingers along the pebbly surface. I don’t know why this one was permitted to remain. Perhaps because it marked the most distant corner of the parking lot that the amusement area had become. Boaters, dragging their toys on trailers behind their SUVs, drove through the parking lot to a launch ramp beneath the highway bridges, and others parked their cars there while they strolled the boardwalk or fished in the canal. There were always cars in the parking lot, and there were several now as I crossed Beach Boulevard with the box containing
Gabe’s ashes under one arm and walked to the stubby post and dragged my fingertips along its surface.

Ahead of me, the lift bridge grumbled with each car passing over it. To my left and two hundred feet above me, the high bridges roared with traffic. The steel mills flared, the waves on the lake whispered, and I walked in silence, my head down, carrying the ashes of my husband in my arms.