Bursting Bubbles (17 page)

“Of course we are. We’re going out. Why wouldn’t we be going out?” Mrs Kilgour’s smile is the smile of the ogre. “It isn’t raining, is it?”

“I just thought … you know…” The Incident at Bargain World unnerved Georgiana so much that she nearly mentioned it to Alice Einhorn. The only reasons she didn’t were: 1. Alice Einhorn would probably laugh and say, “So what else is new?”; 2. If Alice didn’t shrug it off but took it seriously, Georgiana would get the blame. “Because of what happened the other day…”

“Nothing happened,” says Mrs Kilgour. “I fell asleep, and you actually did the right thing for a change.”

“I did?” Mrs Kilgour has never accused Georgiana of doing anything right before. Maybe she really did have some kind of stroke after all.

“Yes, you did. You didn’t let them ship me off to the hospital. At my age, if you go into the hospital odds are you’ll come out in a box.”

“Oh, I…” mutters Georgiana.

“And anyway, it was pretty funny.” There is, as usual, a smudge of lipstick on Mrs Kilgour’s front teeth. “Didn’t you think it was funny?”

“Well…” It’s really funny when Georgiana recounts the Incident at Bargain World to her friends, but she didn’t think Mrs Kilgour was particularly amused – and it wasn’t very funny at the time. Not with all those panicking adults ready to call an ambulance but not prepared to listen to Georgiana.

“Of course you did. I’m sure you have your friends in stitches over it. It’s a wonder I didn’t wet myself. Those men all rushing around like Hawkeye Pierce at a helicopter crash. They’ll be dining out on that story for weeks.”

“Like who at a helicopter crash?”

Mrs Kilgour’s sigh is almost a groan. What patience she once had didn’t live as long as she has. “Never mind. Before your time. The thing is that we’re going out.”

“But I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. I mean, if you haven’t been feeling very well—”

“And who told you that? That big mouth Alice at reception, or one of those nosey nurses? Not any of them could mind her own business unless she was locked in a tower.”

“You did.” It was Alice. Alice said they called the doctor in. “Last week you said you were feeling peaky.”

“That was last week,” snaps Mrs Kilgour. “This week I’m dandy as candy. I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”

“I didn’t know you cared,” Georgiana mumbles.

“Don’t flatter yourself. Not because I was going to see you.” Mrs Kilgour’s hearing is clearly not as bad as Georgiana thought. “You may smell a lot better, but you’re less company than a dead cat.”

I’m not the only one
, thinks Georgiana, but she gives a little laugh, so Mrs Kilgour will think that Georgiana thinks that Mrs Kilgour is joking.

Mrs Kilgour couldn’t give a dead cat for what Georgiana thinks. She adjusts the bag on her lap; it’s time to move. “Well, don’t just stand there, girl. Shake those shapely legs of yours and let’s get out of here.”

They start off on their usual route, but today Mrs Kilgour wants to go left towards the river instead of right towards the town.

Leave it to Mrs Kilgour to find something even less interesting than this busted town with its one shopping street and cheap stores. “But there’s nothing there,” argues Georgiana. “Don’t you want to get some chocolate? Or some wine?”

“What I want is to see the river,” repeats Mrs Kilgour. “I used to go there all the time when I first moved here. But I haven’t been there in years.”

“I’m sure it hasn’t changed much,” says Georgiana. “I’m sure it’s still made of water.”

“And I’m sure there are plenty of small towns in Hell,” says Mrs Kilgour. “I want to see some of the things I’m going to miss when I’m gone from this world while I still have the chance.”

Scowling, Georgiana turns the chair to the left. When she’s as old as Mrs Kilgour, if she hasn’t seen them already, what Georgiana will want to see is the Taj Mahal or Venice or the Eiffel Tower or Hawaii – the things most people dream about seeing. Most people, but not Margarita Kilgour, of course. She wants to see dead leaves – dead leaves in the trees, dead leaves along the side of the road, dead leaves on the ground. It would be boring enough pushing the chair past houses and stores with nothing else to do, but pushing it along the narrow, unpopulated river road that is only woods and more woods brings boredom to an entirely new level.

The result of being stranded dead centre in the middle of nowhere with nothing at all to distract her is that Georgiana has no choice but to listen to Mrs Kilgour’s ramblings as they walk along. Since God chose this day to make her phone disappear.

Tucked up in her wheelchair, occasionally breaking her monologue to shout out a direction – turn here, or go down there – Mrs Kilgour babbles on. She starts out talking about most towns being pretty much the same. “Doesn’t matter if they’re made of brick, wood, bamboo or mud,” says Mrs Kilgour. “They’re like crocodiles. If you’ve seen one, you have a good idea of what the rest of them look like.”

As if the great river-watcher has ever seen a town made out of bamboo. Or a crocodile.

She then moves effortlessly from mud huts and reptiles to communication. According to Mrs Kilgour, the world used to be more fun and a hell of a lot more interesting. None of this instant this and instant that. Everybody on their damn cells every minute of the day. In her day you only talked on the phone when you had something to say. “Like you,” she says, the red hat bobbing. “Always taptaptapping like some damn woodpecker. I’ve known alcoholics who were less addicted to hard liquor than you are to that stupid phone.”

Georgiana says nothing. Putting aside the fact that she didn’t think Mrs Methuselah was aware of her emailing and texting, she is not going to argue with someone who was probably born before the telephone was invented. In her day they used tin cans joined by a string, or drums.

“I used to do a lot of communicating in my day,” Mrs Kilgour jets on, “and believe me, it wasn’t about telling everybody what I had for lunch.”

Yeah, of course she did tons of communicating. Every year she sent out a slew of Christmas cards, birthday cards and vacation postcards. Practically the one-woman NBC network.

“Left or right?” asks Georgiana.

The gnarled and bony hand points left.

“And travel,” Mrs Kilgour rolls on. “Look at the way people travel nowadays. A week here. A weekend there. Moving all over creation like car parts on an assembly line. It’s not natural. Thousands of miles in a few hours and all you see is a movie or the people sitting next to you. Everybody knows it’s the journey that’s important, not the destination.”

She’s right about that
, thinks Georgiana as she stops the wheelchair. They have reached their destination. This is not the grand old Mississippi. It’s a ribbon of water, more stream than river, running between two banks littered with beer cans and plastic bottles and bags. If ever a place was crying out for some community service, this is it.

Only that isn’t what Mrs Kilgour sees.

She throws back her head and raises her arms. “Look at those trees!” she cries. “Aren’t they magnificent?”

Georgiana looks. They’re regular, old, everyday trees in late autumn. Most of their leaves have already fallen. Through the twisting branches she can see cars flash past on the old highway.

“You know what this has always reminded me of?” Suddenly, Mrs Kilgour’s voice is unnaturally soft and almost warm. She might be speaking to someone else. She might be someone else speaking. “It’s always put me in mind of that cabin we had in Oregon.”

Oregon? Georgiana has heard about the late Mr Kilgour from Alice, the big mouth receptionist. He was born and raised in the town, and Alice heard that he didn’t like to leave it very often. “I can’t imagine how they ever hooked up,” Alice confided. “I know she doesn’t come from around here. I guess he must’ve left sometime.” Alice, who also doesn’t come from around here, didn’t know what Mr Kilgour did for a living. Some kind of family business, she thinks. “Maybe a hardware store or something like that. He kind of looked like that type.” He died at St Joan’s after a severe stroke that left him paralysed, for which Mrs Kilgour must have blamed herself. She’d talked him into going for a weekend in New York to celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. They never got there.

“We wouldn’t see or talk to anyone else for days when we went there,” Mrs Kilgour is saying now. “No radio, no telephone, just the sounds of the woods and the river. At night we’d sit on the porch and listen to the wolves howl and watch for shooting stars.” Her sigh sounds the way a broken dream feels. “Like they would bring us luck.”

“Oregon?” Georgiana tries not to sound too incredulous. She can’t quite picture the skinny, balding, dull-looking man in the wedding picture on the dresser watching for shooting stars in the wilderness. “You and Mr Kilgour had a cabin in Oregon?”

“What?” She starts as if she’d forgotten Georgiana is there. “Oh, not Mr Kilgour. He loved cities. It was Anderson’s cabin. His retreat.”

At last, in the millions of words that have flowed from Mrs Kilgour like water from a broken fire hydrant, she has said four that grab Georgiana’s interest. “Anderson?” She steps out from behind the chair to stand beside it. Curious. “Was that your first husband?”

“Husband? Oh no, no, no. Anderson wasn’t the marrying kind.” Georgiana isn’t sure, since she’s never heard it before, but she thinks the sound the old lady makes is a chuckle. “Neither was I. Not then. You couldn’t have gotten either of us to the altar if you’d called in the Marines.”

“Oh.” Georgiana kicks at the leaves at her feet. “Oh, right. So Anderson was like your boyfriend.”

“Very like. If things had been different, I suppose he might’ve been my first husband. If he’d been different.” Mrs Kilgour stares at the sunlight, shimmering over the water like a ghost. “I was head over heels in love with him for a while there. Completely bewitched.”

Georgiana looks at the old hag in the wheelchair – her thin, dyed hair; her dull, rheumy eyes; her sagging, shrivelled skin – trying to fit the words “head over heels in love” and “bewitched” to her. Trying to imagine what she was like fifty, sixty years ago retreating into Oregon with the man who was obviously the love of her life.

The two of them are silent, listening to the burble of the water and the rustle of the trees. A leaf drops into the river, lost as Mrs Kilgour’s long-ago love.

“So what happened?” Georgiana asks at last. Expecting to hear that he left her. That he found someone nicer, or prettier, or more exciting. That he got tired of her and went away.

“He was killed.”

“Killed? You mean like in a car crash?”

“No, it was nothing like a car crash.” Mrs Kilgour’s hands rub against the arms of her chair. “It was in Vietnam. He always was reckless. And fearless, I guess. Which amounts to the same thing.” She closes her eyes, and when she opens them the river is still there. “The damn fool got himself blown up.”

Georgiana knows two things about Vietnam. She knows that there was a war there (because it was mentioned in American history); and she knows that it is near Thailand (because, when they were on vacation there, her parents talked of going to Vietnam for a few days while they were so close, but in the end they chose to stay where they were. “Better the beach you know, than the one you don’t,” as Mrs Shiller put it).

Georgiana stares at the debris on the opposite bank. “He was a soldier?”

“No, not Anderson. He only shot things with a camera. He was a photographer. One of the best damn combat photographers there was. Won more awards than Westmoreland had medals.”

A person would have to have a heart as hard as a diamond not to be moved by such a bittersweet story of love and loss, and when it comes to romance Georgiana’s heart is about as hard as a pat of butter left out on the table on a summer day. Georgiana doesn’t see the garbage along the riverbank, or the gnarled old trees any more. She sees Anderson dying on a foreign field, alone and forgotten in the cries of war. She imagines a beautiful, young woman, thousands of miles away, nervously waiting through the long, dark, lonely nights for the return of her one true love. Imagines her making plans and weaving dreams. Imagines Margarita anticipating her lover’s knock on the door. Home at last, and safe in her arms. Heartbreak tears fill her eyes. “So I guess you got one of those telegrams,” she whispers.

“Telegrams?” Mrs Kilgour looks over her shoulder at her. “What telegrams?”

“You know, saying how they regretted to inform you that Anderson was dead.”

“No, nothing like that.” Mrs Kilgour, imagining things of her own, shakes her head. “Anderson died in my arms.”

Later that night, Georgiana finds her phone in her book bag. Where she put it.

Because
Marigold knows only slightly more about mystery novels than she does about Iroquois culture and history (which is absolutely nothing), she asked around for recommendations. And was surprised at how many people she knows who are fans of the genre of cloaks and daggers. And, unlike Marigold’s mother, they didn’t mind parting with books they’d read years ago and were never going to read again. Which was totally unexpected. She asked for suggestions, not donations. Merry Christmas!

Byron sets his lunch on the table, pulls back the chair next to Asher and flops down. “Geebus, María and José.” He eyes the stack of books beside Marigold. “What’s all this? Somebody starting up her own library?”

“Not even close,” says Will. “Marigold’s looking for inspiration to commit the perfect crime.” He grins, waggling his eyebrows. “She may act like she’s all sweetness and light and God’s answer to the discouraging word, but it’s just a fiendish disguise. Behind that mild manner and angelic smile lurks the heart of a master criminal.”

Asher’s head has been busily bent over his notebook, but now he looks up. “Only they’re not really perfect crimes, are they? They all get solved. By definition, no one would ever be able to crack the perfect crime. It might even never be detected. That would be a perfect crime. One no one ever knows has happened.”