Practical Jean (23 page)

As sure as she had been that this was the right choice for her friend . . . as sure as she was still . . . Jean found it very hard. Unbearably hard. Not the physical struggle, that was only to be expected. Indeed, it was the point. And she was strong, after all those years of working with clay, hauling the twenty-kilo blocks from the car to the back of the shop with no help from Milt, dividing them up into chunks, pressing and pounding and molding the lumps into something unique, something worthwhile, and doing it over and over again after each failed attempt. Working in ceramics was an odd amalgam of artistry and dumb manual labor, and Jean was inured to it. So no, her muscles weren't the issue.

It was just that she would not have chosen this end for herself, and it was upsetting. Violence had never formed any part of the picture she'd imagined in that first ecstatic moment of inspiration. Thanks to her mother she was not afraid of blood, and it didn't bother her now, except that it suggested pain and pain had always been the very thing she'd wanted to avoid. But she knew that her own expectations and sensibilities were beside the point, and that her notion of joy and Natalie's were very different. She believed that with this deeply important, deeply Natalie-affirming conflict, she was honoring the true essence of her friend. And Jean knew too, so vividly, that there was no fighting a disease like the one that had taken her mother. There was no fighting age. It claimed you and pulled you and there were no ledges to grab, no wires to fend off. So you had to give in. And for someone like Natalie, that would just be a terrible way to die.

“This is better, Natalie,” she said as she heaved on the wire. “I promise you, this is so much better.”

When it was finally over, when she was done and sure there would be no Adele-like surprises, Jean collapsed back on the kitchen floor, wholly spent. She stared up at the ceiling, sucking for air, letting the muscles of her hands and arms release and unclench, enjoying the cold, unyielding compression of the tiles beneath her, absorbing the stillness around her, the utter silence. She lay back for the longest time, eyes on the stucco above, feeling the weight of Natalie's head in her lap, but most conscious, most appreciative, of the silence. It was a lovely silence, complete and clean and weightless. It was uncluttered by the distraction of misgiving or apprehension, the disquiet of expectation, of anger or guilt. It was nothing like the silence that surrounded her those three months of nights in her mother's house, when she lay awake in the spare room waiting for her mother to die. It was a silence without pain. It was a silence without hope. It was rare and full and perfect.

But after some time, as Jean lay quiet, she became aware of a sound pressing at the edges of this stillness. It knocked at the shell of the hush, tentatively, and gradually grew louder and more insistent. At first it was a sound without context, it agitated the air she breathed but had no connection to her. She was annoyed by this spoiling sound, and she tried to push it away. As far as Jean was concerned, the sound had no business being there and she refused to decode its meaning. Until suddenly she realized: someone was knocking at the door.

She raised her head off the tiles and looked. From where she lay, she could see the edge of the front door and a shadow coming through its beveled glass window. Someone was there. And as she took hold of this fact, like plucking a grape from a vine, another few facts tumbled with it. The person had a voice. The person was calling her. The person was Milt.

“Jean!” he was saying. “Jean! Please, come to the door. I know you're there.”

She sat up and pulled her robe tight to her chest. It was Milt, hammering on the door! Milt had come, and she didn't know why, but it thrilled her!

“Milt?” she called. The hammering continued. “Milt!” she called again, and it stopped.

There was a second's pause and then her husband—her
husband
—called out, “Jean?” He rattled the doorknob and began to knock even harder. “Jean? Are you there?”

“Milt, stop!” Jean called from the kitchen floor. She put a hand to her forehead. “Stop banging!”

Milt did as he was told, and the reverberations shimmered off through the house. “Jean,” he shouted, “can I come in?”

Jean looked down at Natalie's body, her head still heavy in her lap. She touched Natalie's hair, the dark curls at her temple. “No,” she said. She tried to lift Natalie's head and shift her body so that she could get out from beneath it.

“What?”

“No!” she yelled. “You can't come in!” Natalie's head was like a great, packed bag of bread flour, a brick, a bowling ball—already weighty in itself. But it wasn't just itself; it was joined to another, greater weight. It was a bowling ball yoked to a sofa, and so it was almost impossible to move. And from her position on the floor, Jean had no leverage. The only way she could get herself free was to set her hands on the bloody tiles around her and shift herself backward until eventually Natalie's head was between her knees, and when Jean tugged her robe free, Natalie's head skipped over the hem and hit the tile with a musical
thunk
.

“Please, Jean,” Milt was saying. “I want to talk to you! Don't you want to talk?”

The pools of blood on the floor were turning sticky. As Jean moved away her palms made smacking noises on the tiles.

“Milt, this is not a good time.”

The blood stretched from the far kitchen wall to the fridge and speckled the hallway beyond. Once Jean got to her feet she did her best, in her slippers, to step around and over it. Once in the hallway she could see Milt's fuzzy silhouette on the other side of a sheer fabric panel that covered the leaded glass of the front door. She stood back, at the edge of the shadow he cast on the floor.

“Milt,” she called, “you have to go away.”

Milt's fuzzy hand pressed against the glass. “I was wrong, Jean. I was wrong and I'm sorry. I saw you at the picnic today, talking to Welland, and right there I knew I was making a mistake. It wouldn't work with Louise. It was just a fantasy. It was stupid and I love you and I'm sorry.”

Jean pulled her blood-damp robe tight. There were things she wanted in the world and a husband was one of them, and her husband was Milt, Milt who knew her, Milt who had confessed his sins, Milt who had come back. She knew that it was weak, and she hated her weakness, but after all she had been through she needed some comfort and she wanted this man. She didn't want to grow old, and she didn't want to die in pain, but worse than either of those was to die alone. Even her mother had not died alone. Even Marjorie had had someone. She'd had her. And now here, Jean saw, was her own answer, here was her own practical solution. Here was her Milt.

“Jean?”

She looked back at Natalie's body on the kitchen floor, the coils of the cutting wire looped lazily under her chin, the steel strand embedded here and there in the blood-glazed skin of her neck. She looked down the hall toward the door where Milt stood waiting. Was it even possible, Jean wondered, for a woman ever to be purely happy?

“Milt,” she said as she went toward the door, “I'm afraid I've made a bit of a mess.”

Some hours later, shortly after seven o'clock, Jean was sitting with her hands folded in her lap in the champagne-carpeted ostentation of Fran Knubel's living room. Fran was carrying in a silver tray bearing glasses of Chablis she'd bought at the liquor outlet on Primrose Street—or, as Fran had put it, “the best white wine I could find at that dinky little store.” She ferried the tray to a mahogany tea table, which stood ready between a turquoise-upholstered wingback chair and a burgundy, flock settee, and with a free hand pulled out a sliding shelf on which to set it.

“Well,” said Fran as she handed Jean her glass of wine, “wasn't this an eventful day?”

Jean, reaching for the wine, flinched.

“Arthritis?” asked Fran.

“No,” said Jean. “I must have pulled a muscle somehow.”

Chapter 19

“D
on't you just love Celine Dion?”

It was a seven-hour drive to Bier Ridge, New York. And as Jean watched the strategic highway-side vegetation roll past, the thin line of brush and trees that suggested miles of wilderness but veiled untold atrocities of development—conglomerations of Big Boxes and strip mines and fields sown with corn that would never touch a plate—she still struggled to accept the reality of her predicament: that she was making this trip, spending these hours, venturing at last to see her long-lost friend Cheryl, in the passenger seat of Fran Knubel's Cadillac SUV.

“Don't you?” said Fran from behind the wheel. “Don't you love her?”

“She's very good,” said Jean, her eyes on the lying foliage.

“She sounds like angels to me.” Fran reached down and pushed Celine's volume a smidge higher. “I could die listening to her singing.”

Jean turned her head slowly to look at Fran. Part of her knew that she didn't really mean what she'd said, because people joked about death all the time without realizing how close it was, and how final. Another part of her thought that if Fran expected her to do for Fran what she was doing for her friends, the woman was sadly mistaken.

They were skirting the limits of a town called Marshall, about the size of Kotemee, and here and there through the trees Jean caught glimpses of the rooftops of subdivisions, which didn't surprise her because there were few small towns that really wanted to stay small, but which made her sad for the same reason. Years brought change, some of it good but most of it bad, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. You couldn't stop the change; all you could stop were the years.

Fran seemed determined to share her whole library of Celine Dion, one disc after another, so she was occupied for a while and mostly quiet as she drove, which Jean viewed as the one true bit of grace granted her by Celine's stentorian talent. Unlike an hour ago—when Fran wanted to wrench Jean out of her thoughts every few minutes with a detailing of the extensive plans she and Jim had for their kitchen, master bedroom, and basement media-room/wine-cellar reconfiguration—Jean was able to concentrate. She was able to replay in her mind, as a car-accident victim might relive the seconds before impact, the events that had led to Fran's offer to drive Jean to Bier Ridge, and her own unthinking answer of “Sure,” which had bound her to Fran as certainly as a pair of handcuffs had bound Tony Curtis to Sidney Poitier in that movie . . . what was it called? . . .
The Defiant Ones
.

She thought back to the moment when she'd picked her way toward the entrance of Natalie's house in her bathrobe, intending to open the door. She had intended to, because she was shaken after her ordeal with Natalie, quite shattered actually, and needed someone to hold her, and like a miracle there was Milt, and he loved her and wanted to be with her,
her
and not Louise. Because he was her husband—by no means a perfect one, which hardly needed to be said, but her husband nevertheless. Because they had shared twenty-nine mostly happy years together, so that by now their memories were entwined like bindweed and neither of them could look back on his or her own life without thinking of the other, which was, this accumulation of reminiscence, the only,
only
benefit of age.

So Jean walked to the door as Milt stood waiting on Natalie's front step, his fuzzy silhouette visible through the sheer panel over the beveled glass of the door. She reached for the handle, certain that Milt would be getting ready to swallow her in a big bear hug the way he used to, that he would look at her with love in his sad gray eyes and reassure her that whatever years he had left would be spent with her.

And then she stopped.

She looked down at the blood-soaked front of her robe, at Natalie's drying blood on her hands. She glanced back at the spray of red that reached into the hall like strewn cinnamon candies from all the flailing—Natalie had fought so ferociously!—and thought of her friend now splayed out on her own kitchen tiles. And she realized that Milt could not possibly be allowed to see any of it. He would not understand. He would not know how to cope. He would make everything so much more complicated. And Jean knew that seeing what she had done was sure to change how Milt looked at her, that it would erase the love in his eyes and put worry and confusion, perhaps even fear, in its place. And she knew that would break her heart.

So Jean did not open the door. With two clean fingers she pulled aside the edge of the sheer panel and peeked out at Milt, so that he could see nothing but her face. And though it was the hardest thing she had ever done, though it made her throat ache to say the words, she told Milt to leave.

“Go away, Milt,” she said.

“But Jean . . .”

“I mean it. I don't . . . I don't want you here right now.”

Milt put his pudgy face close to the window, so there was only a pane of glass and an inch of air between his nose and hers and she could almost feel the bristles of his beard against her cheek. “Jean, I don't understand. I
love
you.”

Jean saw his eyes welling up and she bit her lip. “I want you to go.”

“Let me in!” he begged. “Let me in or I'll break the door down!”

She closed her eyes and kissed the glass, and let the sheer fabric fall back into place. Milt was making so much noise at the door that she felt it was safe to cry, so she sobbed loudly as she walked back to where Natalie lay. On the front step Milt continued to rage about busting down the door, but Jean had lived with him long enough to know he would never do any such thing.

After Milt finally gave up and trudged off, Jean realized that she had barely enough energy and time to get herself ready for dinner at Fran's; she'd have to leave the cleanup of Natalie till later. Upstairs in the cramped bathroom she didn't bother with another shower but scrubbed her arms and neck clean, and washed the tear streaks from her face. She fixed her makeup and dressed. Then she had to call upon all of her reserves of willpower to walk out the door.

Fran and Jim's white-brick residence was located on Jolling Crescent in the same elevated section of Kotemee as Blanchard Avenue, where Jean had grown up, although it had to be said that Jolling was an even nicer street, with even handsomer houses. Jean had walked along Jolling plenty of times as a child, but this time, as she made her way in the fading light, she noticed that many of the houses were new. A lot of perfectly fine older homes had been knocked down and replaced with houses that were bigger and grander, with larger garages. Jean usually found that offensive, but now she couldn't summon the indignation.

At the apex of the crescent she came to Fran and Jim's house, which was set back from the sidewalk to make room for the circular driveway where the Cadillac SUV sat as if it had been put on display just for her. The house itself featured a roof that started high and swooped low toward the street, and halfway down the slope of the roof two large gables jutted out, looking big enough to be sizable homes in themselves. Staring up at these gables, Jean didn't have to think very hard to imagine the spacious second-floor rooms behind the windows, and for a moment, she found herself wondering if Fran and Jim slept in their own separate bedrooms. Then she realized that was the very sort of thing Fran might wonder about
her
, and she pushed the whole unseemly subject from her mind.

At Fran's door she sighed and put her thumb to the buzzer, resigned to an awkward few hours before she would be able to make some excuse and leave. Her dramas with Natalie and with Milt had left her feeling rather fragile. It was that fragility, she decided later, that underlay what happened over the next couple of hours and, since she could never blame Natalie, that meant, more or less directly, that it was Milt's fault.

What happened was that Jean found herself drinking Fran and Jim's wine, and not really minding sitting in their formal living room, and enjoying, frankly, being a little pampered for once. Jim had a nice, manly presence about him, an aura of power deferred, and Fran just seemed so pleased that she had come, nothing was too much trouble for her. Another glass of wine? More nuts? Different nuts? How did she like her chicken cooked? Was chicken all right? Maybe they should have done fish. They could
do
fish. It went like that. Fran ordered Jim around so much, to get nuts and wine and check on the chicken and
the potatoes
,
the potatoes
, Jean briefly feared for his health. He was a large man, he had a torso like a loaf of bread, and he was sweating . . .

But it was all right. And eventually the three of them sat down to dinner. Fran had set a lovely table, using heavy silverware and, as she put it, her “historic” china, which featured a delicate blue-and-gold forget-me-not pattern around the rim, and which she seemed to want to make a topic of conversation because of Jean's work in ceramics. Nothing about the china interested Jean, but she didn't say that, and she tried not to show it, because for once she didn't mind Fran talking. From the way Fran behaved all night, it was as if Jean was something of a star in her eyes. Perhaps that had always been true, but somehow it had never been apparent to Jean before. Fran spoke about how much she admired and envied Jean's artistic ability and, not only that, her courage in offering her work for sale. She admitted that she could never do that. “Isn't she brave, Jim?” Fran asked her husband. “And so talented.” And Jim, who seemed to defer to his wife in everything, at least everything of a household nature, agreed.

The only awkward moment that occurred during the first part of the evening, and it was only slightly awkward, came when Fran bustled around the table to point out to Jean something about the china pattern—a flecking in the gilt that she considered significant for some reason—and then paused. After a second Jean realized that Fran was staring at something, and it was something in her hair.

“What is it, Fran?” she asked.

Fran frowned as she peered closer. “It looks like a spot of dried blood . . . with a piece of skin in it.”

Jean reached up, feeling for the spot, and found it, and so wished at that moment that she had taken the time for a proper shower. She dragged it crumbling out of her hair and looked at what remained on her fingers.

“It's glaze,” said Jean, wiping her fingers in her napkin. “And a bit of clay.”

“The glaze is red, though. Dark red. You almost never use red.”

Jean merely smiled at Fran. “I'm working on something new.”

Things proceeded very amiably after that. The chicken Jim brought out was done in a nice oyster mushroom sauce that was obviously made from scratch, and it was accompanied with fiddlehead greens, which Jean loved, and buttered carrots and roasted new potatoes. Jean mentioned that she had once done a ceramic of fiddleheads sprouting from the fingertips of a half-submerged ceramic hand—
Fiddlehead
Resurrection
she'd called it—which delighted Fran but left Jim looking rather mystified. Jim wasn't an art appreciator, that much was obvious. Or a conversationalist. He seemed perfectly content to let his wife run the show, just as Fran seemed quite content to run it. They appeared, all in all, to be a very happy couple.

And then, at a certain point during dinner, Fran got a little agitated. Somehow they had gotten onto the topic of friendships. Fran referred to Jean's recent loss of Dorothy and how hard that must have been, and then she turned the conversation to herself. She admitted that since retiring and moving to Kotemee from the city, she and Jim had found it hard to make new friends. “People in small towns aren't what I expected,” said Fran, fussing with her linen napkin. “I thought we'd be part of a
community
. I had some silly idea we'd be
welcomed
. But it hasn't been that way. Everybody here is just as insular as they are anywhere, except for you.” She touched the napkin to her nose as Jim leaned over and put his big paw on her arm, and Jean became aware of a sudden weight pressing on her, which was obligation, and the need to assure Fran that friendships didn't always come easily to her, either.

And that was how she got talking about long-lost Cheryl Nunley, and her apparent trouble, and Jean's deep regret over losing that friendship, and her frustration at not being able to visit Cheryl. And that was what led Fran to exclaim, with an almost phosphoric burst of certainty and fervor, that she would drive Jean herself. She would drive her tomorrow. She would
insist
!

And Jean, realizing too late that her fragility from the day's events had lulled her, indirectly but inexorably, into a trap, said . . . “Sure.”

It was her cellphone that finally brought Jean relief from Celine Dion. She heard the ringing in her purse as if it were calling to her from another room, reaching her through the wall of voice. She dug out her phone and waved it to get Fran's attention, then pantomimed placing it to her ear.

“Sorry!” said Fran. She leaned forward to kill the stereo. “I just get so caught up sometimes.”

Jean could tell that it was Welland calling, from the picture she'd assigned to his number. It was her favorite picture of him, looking very handsome in his uniform, but also smiling in a brothery way and not like a police officer. “Hello, Welland.”

“Jean?” said Welland. “Where are you?”

There was something decidedly off about the tone of Welland's voice. It was more police officery than his picture, and it made her back stiffen. “Why are you asking?” she said.

“Remember I told you yesterday the city detectives might want to ask you some questions? About Adele Farbridge? Well, now they're trying to reach you. Nobody said anything to me, I only know because I'm on the system.”

The system, the system. Jean was starting to regret ever getting him onto it. “All right, Welland,” she said. “Thank you for telling me.”