Uncontrolled flight, p.31
Uncontrolled Flight, page 31
Rafe’s murderer: that’s how I thought of Nathalie for months, convinced that she and her fake complaint were what pushed him over the edge. Then this fall Sharon told me she and Rafe had reconciled, and it undid every conclusion I had reached. If Rafe was going home to Sharon, he should have been ecstatic. No way would some trumped-up harassment charge overshadow the joy of returning to the woman he loved — the same woman who slept beside me last night, her face serene, safe for once in her world of dreams.
I didn’t follow Sharon to dreamland, not till dawn. I thought of Ernie and his insomnia as I lay awake, tormented by helplessness and bewilderment. Why’d you do it, Rafe? What the fuck? The same old question loop that’s been plaguing me since the letter. It doesn’t add up. An affair, a breakup, an accusation, a reconciliation. I shuffle them around like Scrabble tiles, but no matter what order I put them in, they don’t spell suicide.
Before that goddamned letter I’d have sworn on my mother’s grave that Rafe Mackie, jovial weightlifter, unrivalled pilot, loyal friend, fixer of broken things, could ride out any misfortune that came his way, could deal with any sadness.
He could not.
He took his own life, and the hardest thing for me to accept is that I will never know why. His letter gave the how. The why went down with him.
Thirty-Four
December
For sheer festive fervour, little rivals an airport in late December. People wait in a way they don’t at other times of year, not sullen, stressed, or bored, but alight with anticipation. In the arrivals hall people shout and laugh, kids scoot around unscolded, lovers bestow bouquets of flowers and balloons, relatives hopefully scan each knot of travellers on the escalator. Families hug and kiss openly, friends clap each other’s backs and brush much-missed cheeks and smile with their eyes. Men relieve women of their carry-on bags and feel joyously useful.
Sharon waits alone, taking in the others’ excitement, her attention drawn repeatedly to three unclaimed suitcases circling on the nearest carousel. She’s as eager as anyone to greet her visitors, but she’s also jittery. More precisely, afraid. Since asking Will to stay with her for the holidays, an invitation he accepted with the caveat that he’d spend Christmas Day at his father’s, she has failed to devise any strategy, effective or flimsy, that might clarify for Rafe’s brother and sister-in-law how she has come to have a man in her house — and, more to the point, in her bed — and how that man was once the closest friend and partner of Rafe himself. In the end she gave up, hoping an approach would materialize at the appointed time. Now here she is, minutes away from her own round of hearty hugs and laughs, with nary a clue.
Again she tears her gaze away from the revolving luggage. Off to one side, near the bottom of the escalator, a man and woman cling to each other as if life must never divide them. The woman, a fall of blond hair down her back, presses into the man; his arms circle her waist and his chin rests on her head; and they sway as if to the slowest of songs. They telegraph love, pure and solid. Sharon thinks of this morning, dropping Will off at his apartment. She knows how it feels to be held that way, as if she were the tenderest, dearest prize.
Then she sees Sheldon, and her thoughts bloom with guilt.
He steps off the escalator, Nancy close behind. Together they weave through the crowd, waving wildly. The big man who barrels toward her, wide and powerful as a polar bear, face creased with happiness, looks so much like Rafe that time wrinkles backward. She has forgotten — how could she? — how alike the two brothers are, despite different lifestyles and a continent between them.
Sheldon drops his sports bag and folds her in an enormous embrace. His thick arms and broad back feel so different from Will’s. And so familiar. The imprint of Rafe’s body will be on her forever.
Sheldon lifts her off her feet as if twirling a child. “Lord thunderin’, Sharon! It’s good to lay eyes on you. Don’t you look lovely.”
Nancy takes her turn, giving Sharon a lingering hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Oh, sweetie. It’s so good to see you.” The sympathy is unmistakeable.
“I’m so glad you could come.” Sharon is relieved to discover that she means it. “You’re already dressed for Vancouver.” Both wear Gore-Tex rain jackets, navy blue for Nancy, slicker yellow for Sheldon.
“Halifax was minus ten and snowing like a bastard. They weren’t sure we’d get off the ground, eh Nance? The locals were givin’ us the eye, wondering who are these half-dressed nitwits.” Sheldon flings one arm around his wife’s shoulder. “Must’ve thought we were from away. From Tarrana.” He glances at Sharon to see if the jibe has hit, Toronto-bashing a well-worn joke between them.
She smiles. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. They’d have you pegged right away as a crazy Cape Bretoner who wouldn’t listen to sense if it was shouting in his face.”
“Oh, the claws are out, eh Nance? Where’s the Christmas spirit? Where’s the love and respect I flew all this way for?”
Nancy’s smile is one part affection, three parts forbearance. “You flew all this way for the booze and the food. And the booze.”
“Anyhow, Tarrana girl,” he says, squeezing Sharon’s shoulder with his other arm, “one look at me and everyone knows I’m a godforsaken mainlander now. After all these years the Cape Breton’s beat right outta me.”
Nancy laughs. “Except for every summer when we drive back for a visit. This one cries like a baby the minute he sees the causeway. By the time we’re back in Halifax a week later, he’s a Caper all over again, the accent, the foul mouth, the sweets, the binge drinking. The whole shebang.”
“You’re a sauce-box,” Sheldon tells his wife. “The pair a youse. It’s hardly fair. You got me outnumbered, not an ally in sight.”
The memory of Rafe looms suddenly and achingly. Sheldon shifts from one foot to the other, searching the busy arrivals area for the one who will never arrive.
He gives Sharon another squeeze. “It’s not gonna be easy, girl. We know that, eh Nance?” Nancy nods and reaches for Sharon’s hand. “You know,” he says, “people ask me now, you got brothers and sisters? And I say sure, a brother. Then I remember.”
Sharon’s fingertips are numb despite Nancy’s warm grip. The baggage area has grown cold.
Soon the three unclaimed suitcases are joined by two more, then four, as the luggage from the Halifax flight topples onto the conveyor belt. Sharon breaks away from her visitors. “Come on,” she says over her shoulder. “Let’s get your bags and go home.”
* * *
The moment of truth, when it comes, is both more and less momentous than Sharon imagined.
After forty-five minutes of nudging through traffic stalled by holiday shoppers and early-evening rain, the streets a technicolour blur of taillights and Christmas bulbs, they pile into the townhouse, stretching their cramped legs. Sheldon and Nancy unpack in the spare room and wash up. Sharon frets. She has to tell them before five tomorrow, when Will is due for drinks and dinner. She’s given herself a whole day, but now it seems unfair to wait that long. Her in-laws will need time to process the news before Will appears. So she decides: tonight they’ll order in, and before the food arrives she will tell them. The certainty of a plan lightens her mood, and she smiles when Sheldon and Nancy emerge. “Drinks?”
“Lord, yes.” Sheldon settles himself in Rafe’s chair. “As many as you got.”
Minutes later Sharon brings in a tray: three cold beers and an assortment of takeout menus. “There’s plenty of home cooking in our future, so let’s order in tonight. It’s too miserable to go out.”
“Sounds good to me,” says Nancy, sitting cross-legged on the sofa. “All day long we’ve been going somewhere. It’s nice to just be somewhere for a while.”
Sheldon picks up a beer, still in the bottle, the way he likes it. The women follow suit. “A toast,” he says. “To being with family at Christmas.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Nancy tips her bottle.
“Cheers,” says Sharon, taking a long swig for courage. She offers the menus to Nancy. “Here, you pick something.”
“We’re not fussy. Order your favourite and we’ll be happy to have it.” Nancy yawns and arches her back like a cat. A phys-ed teacher her whole life, she is as lithe and athletic as a girl.
“You must be tired,” says Sharon. “It’s four hours later for you.”
“All the more reason to stay in.” Sheldon studies his beer bottle. “Some kinda local brew, eh? Not too shabby. For the west coast.”
“On behalf of the west coast, thank you.” Sharon smiles, the competition between oceans another long-standing joke.
She phones the local Szechuan place and returns to the living room to find Sheldon wandering, eyeing the furniture, the table of photos beside the sofa, the gas fireplace, the Christmas tree framed by the wide front window. “You like it out here any better now?” he asks.
She hesitates. Toronto will always be home, with its big-city hustle and culture, its brick houses and lakeshore and distinct seasons. Yet there are aspects of Vancouver that she’s growing used to. The sea, the soft cloud that buffs the harshest lines, the year-round green — they have their muted appeal. And now, of course, there is Will.
She has to tell them. The food will be here in half an hour. “I’m staying put for the moment. That’s all I know.”
“You ever get the urge to head east and live by the real ocean” — Sheldon winks — “we’d love to have you. Halifax is a great town, the finest kind. The past decade or two she’s really come along.”
“I’d love to see more of you, the boys too, but I think there’s enough going on now without throwing a move into the equation.”
Nancy shoots her husband a look so pointed Sharon practically sees it arc through the air. Don’t go there, it says.
Sheldon inspects the Christmas tree. Its boughs give off the heady scent of fir; tiny blue lights reflect off the ornaments Will helped her hang yesterday. “Decent-size tree you got here. You put it up yourself?”
Sharon’s pulse speeds. “I had some help.”
“You must’ve. It’s what, seven feet?”
“About that.”
He circles the tree slowly, admiring the decorations. He touches one with his forefinger, a pink glass ball, concave on one side, a tiny crèche painted inside the hollow. “By God, would you look at that. That’s one of Ma’s old ornaments. We used to put that one up when we were boys. She’d always yell at us to make sure it was hanging right. ‘The baby Jesus has got to face out,’ she’d say. ‘Don’t hang him with the arse-end of him to the world.’ Huh. I didn’t know Rafe had this.”
“Sheldon —” Sharon stops.
He turns, waiting for the rest.
“Ready for another beer?”
“I was born ready.”
In the kitchen she takes three more bottles from the fridge. Get a grip, she tells herself. What’s the worst they can do? Accuse you of being unfair to Rafe? Call you an unfaithful slut? Storm out, vowing to never see you again?
Less than reassured, she re-enters the living room, where Sheldon has returned to his chair. Rafe’s chair. She places the tray on the coffee table and sits on the sofa beside Nancy. They all reach for the dewy bottles. “The Christmas tree,” she begins. “Like I said, I got some help with it.” She clears her throat. “It was Will Werner who gave me a hand. You remember Will? He flew with Rafe.”
“Sure I remember,” Sheldon says. “Bird dog pilot. Damned good one from what Rafe said. Helped with your hot water tank a few years back too, right around the time Ma died.” He takes a long pull of his beer. “Sounds like a helpful kinda guy.”
“Yes, he is. Helpful.”
“You sure went all out with that tree,” says Nancy. “I hope it wasn’t just for us.”
“He’s more than helpful.” How to say it? “He —” Why didn’t she practise this beforehand? “Will has become a friend, a close friend. Over the past month or so. He, I mean we …” She looks at Nancy, hoping comprehension will dawn, but her sister-in-law’s face shows nothing but mild curiosity. Sharon plunges ahead, her stomach falling. “We’ve started seeing each other.”
Sheldon leans back in his chair. His beer bottle clunks down on the side table.
Here we go, Sharon thinks. She braces herself. In the distance a dog yips, the high pitch of a townhouse-sized animal.
It’s Nancy who breaks the silence, Nancy who has absorbed the confidences of a generation of wholesome girls who play sports and also battle misfortune, heartache, family conflict, pregnancy, addiction, and abuse. Nancy, who meets all crises with equanimity, says the last thing Sharon could have predicted. “So that’s why you look so different. We were talking about it in the bedroom. Your hair, clothes, everything. You perked right up. We haven’t seen you that way since … well, for a long time. Right, Sheldon?”
He scowls.
“You better tell us about it,” Nancy says mildly. “How did it happen?”
Sharon focuses on Nancy, hoping to expel her anxiety. “He came here about a month ago, in rough shape. Really rough. He needed to talk to someone about what happened, about Rafe.” She glances at Sheldon. “He saw the crash. He was guiding Rafe that day, watching him come in for the drop.”
“I know that,” he says.
“We just — we talked a couple of times. One thing led to another.”
A noise comes from Sheldon, something between a grunt and a cough.
“Sheldon,” Nancy says.
“No, he has every right to be upset. You both do. I don’t … I can’t explain it myself.”
Another snort from Sheldon. He chugs the rest of his beer.
“You know,” Sharon says, “all summer, for weeks and weeks, I’d wake up every morning and think, he’s dead. What do I do with this day? How do I fill the time until I can go to bed again? I’d visit all these different stores to use up the hours, get produce in one place, bread somewhere else, cheese at this special deli. I’d go to exercise class, see my friend Rachel sometimes, wander around the library. Try to read. But it wasn’t enough. There were still so many hours with — nothing.” She pauses. “Then Will showed up and it just seemed … He needed help. Helping him started to fill the time.”
“Help,” Sheldon mutters. “That’s one way to describe it.”
Sharon clasps her hands tight in her lap. She hasn’t known whether to tell them everything. She decides she will.
“Sheldon, I still love your brother and I still miss him, every single day. But things were not good between us at the end. They hadn’t been good for years.”
“We know a little about that, don’t we, Sheldon?” says Nancy. Her husband looks off at the tree. “He didn’t tell us much. You know Rafe, always putting on a happy face no matter what. But he did say you’d hit a rough patch.”
“Rough, yes. You could call it that. He …” Sharon’s throat is so dry it catches, yet she can’t drink her beer, not now. “We were both to blame. We’d fight and make up, but every time, the fights got worse and the making up got harder. Finally he left me. He moved out two months before the crash.”
Sheldon turns back to her, surprise all over his face. “Ah, no. Don’t say that.”
“We didn’t tell anyone. Rafe, well you know, he was private about things like that. And me, I just wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened.” She grips her hands, which are somehow sweating and freezing at the same time. “I’m not telling you this to make excuses. I know it’s too soon for me to be with someone, and it’s worse because that someone is his friend. But you need to know. The truth is, I lost Rafe a long time before he died.”
Sheldon’s great head droops and her heart goes out to him. She knows this is a version of his brother that’s hard to accept.
“Jesus, Jesus.” Sheldon stands up and starts to pace. “I can’t believe he’d leave. Was there nothing you could do to stop him?”
“Sheldon, don’t —” Nancy begins.
“No, it’s okay. At that point, when he left, I don’t think either of us knew how to fix it.” Sharon allows herself a sip of beer.
“But couldn’t you see a counsellor or something? Nancy and I did that once, back when the boys were in diapers and I was working extra shifts all the time. It saved us, it really did.”
“There wasn’t much to save.” Sharon looks away. “You see, he’d found somebody else.” She has never said it out loud before, and the words detonate inside her.
“Jesus Murphy.”
“There’s no way,” Nancy says at the same time. “That man loved you like he loved his own life.”
Sharon picks at the label of her beer bottle, fighting to stay calm. “I suspected it for a while. You live with someone that long and you know. He’d come home late and not say where he’d been. He’d go out for long walks and take his cell phone, when he always used to leave it at home. Finally I confronted him and he admitted it right away. You know him, he never liked to lie.” She looks at Sheldon. “That’s when he left. As soon as it wasn’t a secret anymore.”
“But who?” Nancy says. “Do you know?”
“I didn’t at first. I never asked him. It was easier not to think about it, not to think about … them. But I found out later. At the funeral.”
“What?” Sheldon is incredulous. “We were there with you, the whole day. You mean someone came up to you and —”
“It wasn’t quite like that.”
The doorbell startles them.
“Jumpin’ Jesus,” says Sheldon, running a hand over his forehead.
Sharon carries the bags of food into the kitchen. She wonders, as she returns to the living room with cartons spread out on a tray, if any of them will be able to eat.
“Let me give you some money for that.” Nancy stands up.
