Howard Dowhanuik and his son were both in full mourning: black suits, white shirts, dark ties. They looked like the Blues Brothers on vacation. Shocked, I almost laughed, but as they came closer the anguish on Charlie’s face killed the laugh in my throat.
It didn’t take Charlie long to read the situation. His eyes passed over the mourners and rested on the gravesite, then he went straight to Molly and Drew. “You can’t leave her there,” he said simply. “She shouldn’t be in the dark. Let me take the canoe out on the lake. I’ll scatter her ashes.”
Molly’s face was bloodless, her lips a line thin as a surgical scar. “It’s a bad idea, Charlie. Ashes from a human body are dense. If you try to scatter them, they get under your fingernails, into your skin. You can’t get them out.”
“I don’t want to get them out,” Charlie said.
Solange’s pupils were pinpoints of loathing. “Are you hoping her ashes will cover her blood?” she said.
“You were the one she was afraid of,” he said.
Solange’s mouth shaped itself into a cartoon-like O. “Never,” she said. “I never would have hurt her.”
Howard grabbed his son and pulled him away from Solange. “Coming here was a mistake, Charlie. Let’s just get back on the plane and go home.”
“Your father’s right.” Fraser Jackson’s voice was powerful and assured. “This has been a terrible day for all of us. None of us should do anything to make it worse.”
Charlie looked at Fraser without comprehension. “What are you doing here?”
Fraser didn’t flinch. “Like everyone here, I just came to say goodbye. It’s time to let Ariel rest in peace, Charlie.”
“Peace.” Charlie repeated the word as if it were a noun from an unknown language, then broke from his father’s arms and sprinted towards the plane.
Howard’s voice in my ear was urgent. “You gotta come back with us, Jo. I don’t know how to handle this.”
I didn’t hesitate. I walked over to Drew and Molly Warren. “I’m going to fly back with them,” I said. “I hope you understand.”
“Do what you need to do,” Drew said. And then, a prisoner of his immaculate manners, he patted my hand. “It was good of you to come all this way, Joanne. I hope it wasn’t too hard on you. Molly and I keep telling people we’re all right, but we’re not, you know. I don’t think we could have handled this alone.”
I embraced Molly. When Fraser Jackson kissed my cheek, I promised I’d call him later in the weekend. Gert was over on the old dock talking to the pilot of the other plane, so the only farewell left was to Solange. When I reached out to her, she spun away.
“Not so evolved after all,” she said. “A man asks, and Joanne Kilbourn scurries after him.”
“Not every encounter between a man and a woman is a power struggle,” I said.
I tried to walk away with a purposeful stride, but Howard had long legs and a determination to get the hell out. As usual, once he’d exacted the agreement he needed, he was dealing with the next problem. I could feel Solange’s eyes burning into my back as I ran along behind him. It was going to be a long flight home.
The plane we flew back to Prince Albert on was called the Silver Fox, after its owner, who on closer inspection turned out to be a banty rooster of a man with vulpine features, hair moussed into a silver sweep, and dentures that dazzled. Gert handed me over to Silver without any time-wasting sentimentalities.
“I noticed you’re a nervous flyer,” she said, “but Silver here has been in the business as long as I have.”
Silver took his comb and perfected his sweep-back. “Haven’t lost a passenger yet. At least not a good-looking one.”
Gert shot him a dismissive glance and held out her hand to me. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said. “Happy landings.”
Charlie was slumped against the window in the seat behind the pilot. He was wearing the earphones from a Discman and, as I walked past him, I could hear the tinny overflow of rhythm that comes when someone is listening to hard rock at full volume.
Except for the two seats opposite Charlie, the plane was filled with cargo. I sat down next to Howard, and I didn’t cut him any slack. “What in the name of God were you thinking of, bringing him up here?” I said.
“Jo, I’ve been a lousy father his whole life. He wanted to come. Marnie said it was my turn.”
“Marnie! Howard, you know Marnie’s judgement hasn’t exactly been reliable since her accident. Did she understand what she was saying?”
Howard balled his hands into fists. “Jesus, Jo. Will you lay off? I know I made a mistake. Do you want to see what I was dealing with? Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of his funeral suit, pulled out a hand full of photographs and thrust them at me.
“These are for you,” he said. “From Marnie. She liked the picture you sent from the old days so much she had me stick it up on the wall next to her bed.”
The image deflated me. “I’m glad she liked it,” I said weakly.
“She loved it,” Howard said, “and of course the sisters at Good Shepherd are getting a real kick out of those words of wisdom you wrote on the bottom of the picture.”
Remembering, I cringed. “ ‘Screw them all!’ Howard, it never occurred to me that the photo would be on display.”
“It doesn’t matter. Actually, not much of anything matters any more in that quarter.”
He was right. The pictures in my hand were of Marnie. There were vestiges of the Marnie I had known in this woman’s face, but she was a stranger. Her hair had grown back grey and surprisingly curly. She was carefully made-up – another surprise, since the Marnie I had known said makeup was for clowns. She was wearing a pink tracksuit. Someone had put a matching pink ribbon in her hair. Suddenly I was furious.
I turned to Howard. “How could you let them do that to her?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Turn her into a doll.”
“The sisters are very kind to her, Jo. They try to make her happy. I don’t give a good goddamn if they want to play dressup with her. To be honest, she doesn’t seem to mind.”
“I’ll bet.”
The Silver Fox revved the engines and we skimmed off the lake. I leaned across Howard to look out the window. We were moving across the cobalt-blue waters, lifting above a hundred islands. Once, a glacier had covered the whole area; when it retreated, this was the topography it had left behind. I thought of the misery at the Warrens’ cottage, and in our plane. “Maybe we were better off when all this was a glacier,” I said. “Better off frozen solid, before the big meltdown when somebody had the bright idea to climb out of the slime.”
Howard gave me a look of disgust. “Save the existential crap for somebody who cares, Jo. We gotta figure out a way to deal with what’s happening. How much trouble is Charlie in?”
“You tell me. The woman he loves to the point of obsession leaves him, and she’s pregnant with another man’s child.”
Howard rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I take it the baby’s father was that black guy who was at the service today.”
I nodded. “His name is Fraser Jackson. He teaches in the Theatre department at the university.
Howard didn’t flinch. “So Ariel met him at work and fell in love with him.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I said.
“What was it like?”
“She wanted a child, and she chose Fraser Jackson as the biological father.”
True to form, Howard travelled straight to the heart of the matter. “She needed to make a choice where there was no turning back,” he said. He leaned across me to look at his son. Charlie was sprawled across the seat, with his eyes closed and earphones in place, blasting their tinny sound, shutting out the world. He seemed closer in age to Angus than to Mieka. There was an adolescent narcissism about his grief that I found unsettling. It couldn’t have been easy for Ariel living with that juvenile intensity.