“What was she like with you?”
“She was exactly what I wanted. All business,” he said wryly. “Your turn now.” Zack pushed himself to a sitting position, then used his arms to inch himself back so the pillows piled against the headboard supported him. It was an awkward process, and once at the beginning of our marriage, I’d offered to help. He’d been curt, and I hadn’t offered again.
When Zack was settled, he took a deep breath. “I’m ready. Move on in.” He picked up the massage oil I’d given him for his birthday. “Okay if I use this stuff or do you want something else?”
I sniffed my fingers. “Rosemary, jasmine, and a hint of wood and ocean breeze. At least that’s what the website promised. Can’t ask for more than that.” I removed my pyjama top. Zack kissed my shoulder. “Wood and ocean breezes aren’t as sexy as the perfume you’re wearing.”
“I’m not wearing perfume,” I said.
Zack kissed the hollow of my neck. “I hope you know I feel like shit about that relationship with Cristal.”
I reached over and turned out the light. “It was another time,” I said. “Everything’s different now.” I kissed him and slid down in the bed.
Zack moved beside me and caressed my breast. “You’re going to miss out on your massage.”
I slid my hand over his nipples. “A massage is only a massage,” I said. “But a good cigar is a smoke.”
Our lovemaking that night was urgent, as if we thought the heat of physical passion could burn away the ugliness of the last two hours. Usually, when the sex was that good, we both fell asleep afterwards, but that night, sleep did not come easily to me. I lay watching Zack’s chest rise and fall and thought about our life together. We had both embarked on middle age when we met, but perhaps because it had been the right time for us both, we had negotiated the tricky labours of day-to-day life together with surprising ease. My first husband had been a politician, whose star was still rising when he was killed on a snowy Saskatchewan highway. We had a young family, and before his death, I was the woman behind the man. Suddenly, there was no man for me to stand behind. Initially, I was devastated, then I was terrified, but ultimately, I’d learned to stand alone. Zack had always been a lone wolf. Abandoned by his father, dismissed by his mother, until we met, his emotional life began and ended with his work and with the legal partners he’d known since their first year together at the College of Law. No one had been more surprised than we were when we fell in love.
Six months after we met, we were standing in front of the altar at St. Paul’s Cathedral exchanging vows and wedding bands. As the dean pronounced us husband and wife, the old wives’ warning crossed my mind: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” For once, the old wives had been wrong. Until we met, Zack had travelled through life unencumbered, and I feared he would chafe at family life, but he gulped up domesticity like a starving man. Having kids, owning dogs, learning how to run a household were new adventures for Zack, but he wanted to be part of everything. Grateful for the sweetness of our new existence, we were careful never to let everyday contentment slip through our grasp. But that night, it wasn’t the sweetness of the day that I remembered, it was Zack’s bleak statement that we are hanged by the loose threads of our life. It was a truth I had seen played out too often, and despite the afterglow of lovemaking, I felt a thrill of existential terror. I moved closer to my husband, put my head on his chest, and listened to the rhythm of his heart until I, too, fell asleep.
The next morning when the dogs and I got back from our run, the newspaper was in the mailbox. I picked it up and headed for the back lawn so Willie and Pantera could rub some of the mud off their feet. While they chased each other around the yard, I scanned the Leader-Post. As they would for more days than anyone could have anticipated, Ginny Monaghan and Cristal Avilia dominated the front page.
The story about Ginny focused not surprisingly on her daughters. The paper had printed side-by-side photos of the girls with each of their warring parents. The picture of Ginny and her daughters had come from her campaign literature. The twins were immaculately groomed, but their smiles were tight, and I remembered the misery of getting our kids to pose for the requisite family campaign portrait. The photo of the girls with Jason Brodnitz was a candid shot of the three of them skiing, ruddy with cold and pleasure. In the battle of the photo op, Ginny had lost round one.
There was no picture of Cristal Avilia, and the story was sketchy on details – a thirty-four-year-old woman had become the city’s sixth homicide victim of the year. Cristal Eden Avilia had been found dead outside her condo in the warehouse district shortly after 6:00 p.m. Wednesday. The police were not releasing the cause of death. Anyone with information about her death was asked to call police.
I dropped the newspaper on the picnic table. No use starting the day with a reminder of the complexities of the outside world. I called the dogs. “Come on, you two, let’s go inside and say good morning to our big sparkly top banana.”
When I walked into the kitchen, it seemed the universe was unfolding as it should. The coffee was brewed; the juice was poured; the porridge was made; and Zack was sitting at the breakfast table thumbing his BlackBerry, wholly absorbed. I never tired of my husband’s face. He was a handsome man: balding, thick-browed, and dark-eyed, with a generous, sensuous mouth and a vertical fold, like a bloodhound, in his right cheek. In court he could freeze an opponent with his barracuda smile, but at home his mouth softened and his smile was melting. The dogs loped over to him, and I kissed the top of his head. He flicked his BlackBerry off. “Breakfast is ready, our daughter is safe in her bed, and you and the dogs are here. Life is good.”
“You bet,” I said. I filled the dog bowls.
Zack watched with awe as Willie and Pantera inhaled their food. “Imagine loving any food as much as they love that stuff,” he said.
“And it’s the same thing, day in, day out.” I read the label on the sack. “Ground yellow corn, poultry by-product meal, animal fat preserved with mixed-tochopherols, animal digest…”
Zack frowned. “What the hell is animal digest?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.” I brought our coffee over to the table and began ladling out the porridge. “Mmm,” I said. “Cashews – my lucky day. So what’s with all the messages? It’s only a little after seven.”
Zack sipped his coffee. “It seems that Cristal had many clients. Judging from my messages, a lot of them are lawyers.”
“If they’re lawyers, why don’t they talk to someone from their own firms?”
“Because the lawyers in their own firms are respectable, and they’ve done something they’re ashamed of. Sometimes only the Prince of Darkness will do.”
“Is that why Ned sought you out at the end?”
Zack sipped his coffee. “I guess, and isn’t that a hell of a note? He’d been partners with Doug Meinhart and Gerry Loftus for fifty years, but when he decided to end his life he couldn’t go to them because he’d indulged in a common sex act and some desperate fantasy.” Zack drained his juice. “Not nice stuff, according to the rigorous standards of Osler Meinhart and Loftus. Do you know that every Friday for fifty years the partners and staff there have gathered in their boardroom to have a glass of pale amontillado sherry. Ned told me once they look forward to it all week. Jesus, what a bunch of bloodless sticks.” Zack dug his spoon into his porridge. “Anyway, that explains why Ned came to me.”
“Does it ever bother you that you’re not Atticus Finch?”
Zack’s spoon stopped in mid-air. “No, because I don’t know who he is.”