The Last Secret, page 20
Kay pulls away and studies me. “What are you doing in her room?”
I watch, heart in my throat, as she picks up the gun from the bed and cracks it open. I didn’t know she knew how to handle weapons. To my horror, there are bullets in the chamber. “It’s loaded?” I gasp. “Why would Pat keep a loaded gun in the house?”
“To protect you, of course.” Kay rubs her thumb contemplatively over the initials cut into the stock. “Nice Webley IV. Where did you find it?”
I point to Pat’s bedside table and Kay opens the drawer to sling it back beside the ammunition. When she closes the drawer, it seems to throb with danger.
“Don’t you think you should unload it?” I ask, gnawing at my cuticles.
“You never know when you might need a gun,” she says, with a smile. “Especially out here—no one around.”
I frown, thinking of the newspaper articles I’ve read about brutal unrest in the Congo, but I never stopped to consider that Kay may have experienced violence. For all I know, she may have had to use a gun there. Then I remember that Pat’s letter to Kay is still in my hand. I try to slip it quietly into my pocket, so I can read the rest of it later, but I’m not fast enough.
“What’s that?” She takes the letter and scans it briefly, an amused expression on her face. “Pat always did like talking to herself,” she says, before folding the paper and throwing it beside the gun in the drawer. She slams it closed then holds a finger to her lips. “We don’t want her to know we’ve been in here, do we?”
I drag her into Pat’s bathroom and show her what I found. “Kay, someone who’s giving me antipsychotics without my knowledge would not keep a loaded gun for my protection.” I search her face. “Right?”
“Chlorpromazine,” she mutters, reading the label on the bottle. “I’m not familiar with this medication.”
I’m damn paranoid by now, my trust so thoroughly eroded, I can’t resist adding, “Please don’t tell Pat—”
Kay returns the bottle to the cabinet and catches my hands. “I’m the last person to tell Pat anything.” She was never fond of my zookeeper, either. “Why do you think I stayed away so long?”
* * *
it’s clouding over by the time we’re lounging in the living room drinking red wine that Kay has brought, which is a real treat. Since my disastrous art show in Vancouver six years ago, Pat hasn’t let me touch a drop. Kay sits in one of the yellow-patterned wing chairs flanking the couch, where I’m curled up, my scarred legs tucked under me. During the day, ethereal ocean light suffuses this space; at night, a floor lamp with a fringed scarf draped over the shade emits a moody vibe that never fails to delight me. It’s a room built for parties, for conversation. In Aunt Suze’s day, beatniks sat around playing bongos and smoking grass on the colorful carpets and floor pillows she’d brought back from Istanbul.
While we work our way through the bottle, I get a little tipsy and pester Kay with too many questions. “What was your life like in the Congo? Twelve years. It’s such a long time.” She answers with hesitation, but I slowly get a picture of her early days in a jungle medical clinic and her relief when a Canadian medical team arrived to build a field hospital. How Kay became the head nurse there.
The lines in Pat’s letter float at me in fragments. I can’t imagine any other reason why you might leave that damn place you liked so much… “Why did you leave?” I ask Kay.
A shadow passes over her face. “I was frustrated at the political situation, the warring gangs, and…troubles getting medical supplies.” She looks away, toying with a loose thread on her sweater.
I laugh nervously. The Kay I knew years ago was forthright and honest; this Kay is cryptic and a little cagey. “You haven’t accepted another job?”
The shadow vanishes as quickly as it appeared, and she looks at me brightly, as if banishing unpleasant memories. “I’m afraid I don’t know where I’m going next, darling.”
I’d explained the Pat situation in my last letter, but Kay obviously wants to hear it in person. “Kay, you know how impossible Pat is. Come live here.”
Kay stands and takes her glass to the bank of windows facing the sea. Aunt Suze designed the space so you can come through from the kitchen and feel as if you’re on the deck of a ship. Outside, the sun is now a blurred facsimile of itself, shrouded with fog and hanging low in the sky. The days are getting shorter; it’s almost four o’clock and within an hour it will be dark. “Living on a small island in the Strait of Georgia,” she muses, gazing out at the ocean. “Sounds bloody perfect to me.”
“Our lives here must seem small after all the good you’ve done—saving the world.”
To my surprise, Kay seems annoyed. “I went to save the children, but they couldn’t be helped…not in the end.” She turns from the window and smiles at me—the dearly loved closed-mouth smile that hides her crooked teeth. “Let’s talk about sunnier things, Jeanie, shall we?”
I really want to know more about what wasn’t so sunny about her time in Africa but am reluctant to press her. “Come live with me,” I repeat.
Kay wanders the room, pausing to scrutinize the bookcases. “Pat got here first. I won’t depose her.” She takes one volume from the shelf and cracks it open, and suddenly there’s a delicious smell of old books in the air mingling with the dreadful undercurrent of spent ashes in the wood stove, and fumes emanating from a half-finished glass of Irish whiskey that Pat left after one of her benders, on a drink trolley in the corner.
“You don’t know what she did.” I take a deep breath. “Would you be surprised to learn I’m supposedly a pretty good landscape painter? That my commissions are in demand?” I lean forward, elbows on my knees and look up at Kay. “I really need you—an actual sane person who isn’t going to sell my paintings behind my back and pocket the proceeds.”
Kay shakes her head and tsks as I tell my little story, but she seems too distracted by a pair of antique Buddha heads on the mantel. “Were these your Aunt Suze’s? I liked her—a proper character.” She turns to look at me. “I learned years ago to never be surprised at anything Pat does.”
“Then be my caregiver,” I say, swinging my stocking feet onto the massive black lacquer chinoiserie coffee table. “Save me from the beast.”
She finishes off her wine in two practiced gulps. “I despise Pat, too. But I couldn’t do that to her.”
I groan in frustration. “But I could. She hates me. It’s a strange thing to be despised so vehemently by someone you’re forced to live with.”
Kay laughs. “Sounds like most marriages.”
“If it is, I want a divorce.”
“Poor love,” Kay says, picking up the bottle of wine off the coffee table. “Did Pat ever tell you about her childhood?”
“Thankfully, no.” I watch her pour herself another glass. “We don’t share meaningful moments.”
“Her father liked his whiskey. Pat answered to him and his drinking, answered to her mother, too…” Kay trails off almost reluctantly and gulps at her wine. “Everyone has their secret pasts,” she adds in a moment. “Did you know Pat ran away from home when she was only fifteen?”
The idea of Pat on her own at such a young age makes me feel a little more sympathetic toward her, but I usher the feeling aside. I won’t let anyone, least of all myself, forget what she’s doing to me. I tell Kay about Danek Rys’s visit—omitting, of course, the embarrassing bit about my staged death-scene art installation. “Pat told him she’d call the police if he came back—imagine calling the police on a journalist.” My eyes fill with tears, and I swipe them away. “She told him about my accident, Kay…she mentioned the baby.”
Kay frowns. “The bloody cheek. It must have felt like a betrayal.”
Three months after I awoke from the coma, doped up with enough morphine to stun an ox, Aunt Suze was tasked with the unenviable job of telling me what had happened the night of the accident; a night built on a series of beautiful disasters—a teen pregnancy, and a boy two years older than me, coerced by his parents to do the right thing. Apparently, the wedding ceremony at the church was perfect, no signs of the tragedy to come only hours later. How young you were, Aunt Suze had whispered as I hung upside down in the Stryker frame, my tears puddling on the floor. And how horribly mismatched you were, too, but willing to make a go of it, for the baby’s sake. Michael made a mistake. But you survived, dear heart. If only your new mother-in-law had not been a religious freak with an unnatural love of candles, she added, trying to make sense of life and its series of what ifs.
What ifs worked both ways. What if my wedding dress had been long-sleeved, like many in the late fifties? What if I hadn’t removed my veil before we cut the blasted cake? Perhaps some part of me can still smell the singed material of Michael’s suit sleeve as it caught fire on one of the candles, can still hear my own screams as I hit at the flames, the tulle of my dress acting as kindling. What I do remember is the unbearable agony as fire burned through French lace, skin, and muscle. Smells fused with sound, fused with images, in a cacophony of tortuous, ruinous, entangled memories.
It was Aunt Suze who told me that Mother had sold the wedding photos to the Vancouver Tribune. One photo made the front page—a pretty girl, dark hair pulled tight in an Audrey Hepburn chignon, the full skirt of her dress successfully hiding her four-month pregnancy. Me, as I once was. All directly beneath the headline:
Fire Bride Not Expected to Live.
Kay is studying me, and I let my eyes meet hers. How wonderful it is to gaze upon a sympathetic face. She sits down beside me and takes my hand, the other still holding her wine glass. “You were so brave, Jeanie. Six months on that Stryker frame. I don’t know how you did it.”
“Brave,” I scoff, gazing down at her dear hand, which seems so much more wrinkled than it used to be. “You mean a putz, don’t you? Trying to save the unsaveable.”
I watch Kay finish her wine and stare into the empty glass, as if it might hold the answer to her life. “There wasn’t much alcohol in the Congo,” she says softly, releasing my hand. “I thought I’d never want another drink again, but really, I missed it, that feeling you get, your blood burning…like you’re the best thing that ever happened on this earth.”
The look in her eyes as she peers into that wine glass sends a chill up my spine.
“Remember,” Kay says, “how inconsolable you were, over the baby…?”
The baby. My baby. This memory is literally burned into me—I can still hear my screams in those first few months, waking from a drugged stupor and calling for my daughter, only to be given more drugs that sent me straight back to a murky underworld. Several months passed before I truly understood I’d lost her. Pat’s voice intrudes, even louder, from a few nights ago, standing outside my locked bedroom door. I don’t think you’d want anyone poking around, would you? Not after what you did. I’m hit with a devastating realization. “I literally set my unborn child on fire,” I whisper, my lips quivering. “I destroyed a life.” This was the terrible, awful thing Pat has alluded to over the years. I look up into Kay’s kind brown eyes. “Do you think I’m a monster?”
“Of course not—” Kay’s cut off by a sudden coughing fit, hacking until sweat breaks out on her forehead.
“Are you okay?” I ask, worry for her immediately consuming my grief.
“Just a bit of malaria,” she chokes. “Comes and goes.”
“Malaria?” I practically shout. Her face, usually so composed, has taken on an odd expression. “What did Africa do to you, Kay?”
She glances up, a contemplative finger running along the rim of her glass. “Africa did not appreciate the lengths to which my duty drove me…”
I always thought she had a face worthy of a Brontë heroine—pale skin and downcast eyes, a doe-like expression—but now that face looks haunted. Besides the worrisome malaria issue, there’s something different about her, something I can’t quite put my finger on. “You were always such a good nurse.”
She fixes me with a curious stare. “They didn’t understand my genius is what I’m saying. Whereas you do. You always did.”
25
SAVKA
Vancouver
october 16, 1950
on the second floor of the Museum of Vancouver, Savka trailed down a long hall to the Antiquities gallery, her wet umbrella leaving a drip trail across the floor behind her. The climate in Vancouver had been a surprise—a damp cold so cyclically pervasive it made her bones ache. Two years after leaving England, Savka still felt like a displaced refugee, but Canada was a reprieve, an escape from Belyakov and the USSR’s growing power in Eastern Europe. Stalin had tested his first atomic warhead only last year, and the Western allies had closed their borders. Neither her Russian handler nor his toughs could reach her here, where she was safe, where she’d begun to live again.
A tall young man came out of the gallery, and she felt the breath go out of her lungs. There was something about the flop of blonde hair over his forehead as he lingered at a statue in the hallway, stepping close to read its description, and, unthinking, she sprang forward. Taras! She was sure of it. As she hurried down the hall toward him, her heels clicking, he looked up in surprise, eyes dark as ink, and she came to a dead stop. Taras had blue eyes. Like his father. This was not her son. It could never be him, for Taras would toil in a Gulag infirmary until she could find someone to help her get him out.
Blinking back tears, Savka smiled politely at the young man. “I am sorry,” she said to him in pained English. “I thought you are someone else.” I thought you were my son. She turned away, thinking of the many applications she’d made to Ottawa, after her local member of parliament claimed he had no jurisdiction in the USSR. Marko knew nothing of her efforts. They had a large two-bedroom apartment in West Vancouver, and Marko was considered a leader in the Ukrainian Immigrant Association, a group of émigrés that had formed an underground government, operating in different cities across North America. For a reason unknown to her, he’d changed their last name to Kovacs and instead of working in potato fields, she was now a stay-at-home mother and wife. It should have been a luxury to lounge all day, but not when Marko continued to refuse Zoya and make their lives a living hell.
Most of the people she’d met at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre had either been sent to Germany as slave laborers during the war or had slipped away as refugees to western Europe when the Red Army advanced. After the women heard she’d recently come from Ukraine via Poland and England, they begged for news. Savka suffered their desperate hands on her arm, claiming she knew nothing of her own family, how would she know of theirs? Her father and brother had surely been killed by the Red Army in Germany, but she still held out hope that Mama, Lilia, and Sofiy had survived the Soviet onslaught and would somehow find her.
Savka entered the Antiquities gallery. The museum had become a surrogate home of sorts. Rather than wait among the women while Zoya was at rehearsals for the children’s dance troupe, Savka came to visit relics of history. Here, she could hold the past close, even as she struggled to accept that some things were fated to disappear forever.
She crossed the room to her favorite exhibit: a mummified boy who had been discovered near the Valley of Kings in 1915.
Penechates, son of Hatres, the card read.
“Beloved son,” she whispered. The boy looked so sad and alone lying there, bound in his linen wrappings. Savka placed her hand reverently upon the display case. She’d adopted the Egyptian child as her own, and when she visited, showered him with affection, and a mother’s love. Filled with a renewed sense of peace, she moved on to the display of animal mummies. This museum did not compare to those she’d visited in Kyiv, but somehow a damp, rain-soaked city at the end of the earth had managed to acquire the gruesome remains of cats and crocodiles. She bent to study a mummified cat. An ancient Egyptian artist had drawn a stylized version of the creature contained within, its whiskers and huge, soulful eyes. The cat had sustained a skull fracture and broken neck, evidence—the note card informed her—that it had been beaten to death as an offering to Bastet, warrior goddess of the sun. Savka straightened, remembering the cats that starving Ukrainians were forced to eat during the great famine, when from behind her, a man said, “Slava Ukraini.”
She gasped at a sudden, blinding pain in her old shoulder wound. Was it someone from the Ukrainian Cultural Centre? No. That voice. It buzzed up the center of her spine like a saw. She would know it anywhere.
Slowly she turned to find Belyakov feigning interest in a nearby display case, hat in hand.
If she opened her mouth to speak, the pain in her heart would flow out like water from a broken dam and drown her. But she composed herself and forced a scornful laugh past the stone in her throat. “You.”
He smiled, gazing off into the middle distance. “Savka,” he said. “Have you missed me?”
It was a declaration of ownership, nothing more. Tears smarted in her eyes. “Heroiam Slava,” she said ruthlessly. “Glory to the Heroes!” It seemed impossible, but somehow, this man had found her in Vancouver, thousands of miles away from the USSR.
Belyakov laughed and turned to admire the gallery. “How fitting we should meet again in a museum. A far cry from the Pergamon.”
Two figures sauntered into the room and Savka’s skin crawled at the sight of them. Belaykov’s men skulked toward the far corner where they could keep an eye on the door. They wore matching dark coats and failed miserably at affecting a Western nonchalance. Ilyin wore a fedora slanted over one eye, obscuring his handsome face. He sent her a brazen glance and looked away.
A security guard had followed them into the gallery and stood with his arms crossed just inside the entrance, eyes magnified by a pair of thick, black-framed glasses. He studied Belyakov, this small man in the long, tan-colored trench coat speaking Russian on his watch. The Cold War between America and Britain on one side, and the USSR on the other, had made everyone—even this museum security guard—fearful of an impending nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
