A Chill Rain in January (8 page)

It would come to her.

When she had showered and changed, she stood by the living room window, looking out at the rain. Killing Benjamin, it occurred to her, might be considerably more complicated and difficult than the only alternative, which was to kill herself.

What if she killed him but got caught, and ended up going to jail for the rest of her life? Dying would be far preferable to that.

She wasn't fond of pain. But she knew she could find a way to do it without causing herself physical suffering.

She would have to decide how to dispose of her money, though. She certainly wouldn't want Benjamin, or the government, getting any of it. Perhaps she ought to convert everything she had to cash, transfer it to her checking account, and divide it among the listings in the Sechelt phone book.

She roamed uneasily through her house, stroking her favorite pieces of furniture, turning television sets on and off. There were all these possessions, too. What would become of them? How on earth could she dispose of all her belongings—her car, her house, for heaven's sake? Could she get rid of all these things without calling attention to herself?

Her house. Her fortress.

She had chosen the Sunshine Coast as her home because it was made remote from metropolitan Vancouver by the need to get there by ferry.

She chose Sechelt because it was in the middle of the Coast, halfway between the ferry at Langdale, which crossed Howe Sound to Horseshoe Bay, and the one at Powell River, which crossed Georgia Strait to Vancouver Island.

She had looked for a long time, and then bought the waterfront property, and then she bought the lots on either side of it, and the lots on either side of them, too; she bought the whole promontory. It wasn't a huge area—less than two acres. Manageable in size. The highway formed its eastern border, so she never had to worry about acquiring neighbors.

She'd had a plain house built, with exactly the amount of room in it that she needed. And a garage.

And halfway up the driveway, a small guest cottage. It wasn't used often. Just once or twice a year.

One of the things she'd had to check out before deciding to move here was whether there were enough bars. She found four up and down the Coast that would do, not counting whatever there might be in Sechelt; that would have been too close to home.

Sex, to Zoe, was a hunger, the satisfaction of which depended not on appetite but on need. She felt it first when she was fourteen and a boy three years ahead of her in school began following her home. One day he caught up with her and took her into a park. What followed was not a particularly pleasant experience for Zoe, but it proved in the end an adequate introduction to the gratification of sexual desire.

Every few months she dressed up in one of her costumes and went to a bar. She found someone, took him to her guest cottage, and they had sex. Zoe did it thoroughly, and with energy, the way she did everything. Afterward, she sent the person on his way.

She told these men that her elderly parents lived in the house by the water.

Everything had worked out extremely well. Each aspect of her life was precisely as she had planned it.

She was damned if she was going to let Benjamin destroy it.

Late that afternoon, the skies cleared. Zoe sat in her office, in an enormous round chair made of bamboo, which had a huge, sumptuous rust-colored cushion. She sat cross-legged, holding a glass of chardonnay. The sun was in the process of setting, preparing to sizzle itself out in the waters of the ocean. Zoe watched it burning in her wine.

It was time to insist upon some single-minded exertion from her brain.

Zoe had complete confidence in her brain, and treated it with respect. She tried to understand it and anticipate its needs. She kept her body healthy so as to spare her brain the distraction of worrying about disease or injury to its host. She kept herself as tranquil as possible, thereby providing a close to ideal environment in which her brain could work. It was like maintaining a greenhouse for an exotic plant, or a climate-controlled garage in which to house a fine automobile.

The sun set; the wineglass warmed in her hand. She closed her eyes and rocked gently back and forth and thought about accidents. Car accidents, boating accidents, industrial accidents, skiing accidents; accidents with farm equipment, accidents with chain saws, accidents with sharp knives, or long-bladed scissors, or drugs; accidents that crushed, or pierced, or punctured, or impaled. She imagined him bleeding, suffocating, choking. She imagined him crumpling to the floor, collapsing into coma, fluttering into death. She saw him crumple…collapse… She saw him fall.

She thought she knew just how it would feel to place the palms of her hands against his shoulderblades and push, strongly. She thought she knew just what he would look like, plummeting through the air, his scream a wisp, a thin stream of white breath that might even continue to hang in the air for a second or two after his body had struck the rocks, and she would bend over, carefully, to see if any part of him was still moving, down there on the rocks where he had crashed…

Zoe opened her eyes and smiled.

She would push him off the cliff right outside his own front door.

They would meet at the house in West Vancouver. He would give her the scribblers, and she would turn over the stock certificates, ensuring that he put them somewhere other than in his pocket. They would have a drink, and she would make certain that he got thoroughly drunk, if he wasn't drunk already, which he probably would be. After a while she would get up to leave. When she got to her car she would pretend that it wouldn't start. She would ask Benjamin to look at it, and when he got out of the elevator in the parking area at the top of the cliff, she would push him over, retrieve the certificates, and head for Horseshoe Bay and the ferry.

Zoe got out of the big round chair and went to the window. There was still a faint glow in the sky. The days, she thought, must be getting longer. Soon it would be spring again.

H
ER BROTHER
was
already on the scene when she arrived, his place in the household comfortably staked out
.

They named her with the very last letter in the alphabet. He'd probably had something to do with that.

None of the ordinary names had seemed right, they told her. So they'd had to go right to the end of the alphabet. The last name in the world, that was the name they'd given her. Zoe.

Benjamin was four years older, and sometimes he made her so mad she hit him. Usually he'd just shrug his shoulders and go away then, but sometimes she hit him so hard that it hurt him, and he started to hit her back. Once be made her nose bleed. So she leaned over the sofa and shook her head bard so that the blood would go all over the sofa and he'd get into real trouble, which he did.

Zoe didn't like him, and she didn't dislike him.

She had private places indoors that he didn't know about, and she wanted one outdoors, as well. A place from which she could survey the world without being seen, by Benjamin or anybody else
.

In her yard there was a pool to swim in, a gazebo to sit in, but nowhere to play. There were rose gardens and vegetable gardens and rhododendron plantings beneath the trees and a little brook that cut across the property at its lower end—spring bulbs bloomed here in great profusion. But there wasn't a tree fit for climbing or a secret place fit for hiding herself in.

So when she was eight, just after she'd gotten her first scribbler, she went poking around on the neighbors' property, which was just as big as hers but a lot less tended. It rolled up and then down again at the very back, and on that little hill were several fruit trees. Zoe climbed the back fence and sneaked up through the brush to the top of the hill, where the orchard began. From there she could see the whole back part of the property, and over the fence at the side into her own yard, as well.

This became her secret place. She would climb a tree and wedge herself in between a thick branch and the trunk, and if it was the right season she'd stuff herself with cherries or apples while she sat there, feeling like a big strong bird in its nest.

Four years passed, and Zoe grew and grew, but she didn't grow too big to nestle in the branches of a tree, and she didn't grow too old to need a secret place.

Two old people lived in the big old house at the front of the property. They never bothered picking the cherries or the apples, but sometimes their grown-up children came for a visit, and they'd take some of the fruit away with them.

One day when she was twelve, Zoe was sitting in an apple tree. It was July, and the apples were pretty well ready to eat; they were larger than a tennis ball, not as big as a softball, still green but starting to look yellowish.

Zoe was digging her fingernail into the treetrunk and scooping away little pieces of it, which she then flicked toward the ground. She'd been doing this for quite a while. She had dug through all of the tree's layers of skin and was now picking away at what she figured must be muscle
.

From time to time she wrapped her arms around the tree and rubbed her cheek hard against its trunk. Her cheek had begun to sting, and when she put her fingers on it they came away with a small amount of blood on them, as well as dirt, so the next time she hugged the tree she did it with the other side of her face against the trunk.

It had always been very important to Zoe that things be even. Sometimes at the dinner table she might catch herself tapping her right toe against the floor, for instance, and then she had to try to figure out how many times she'd done it without noticing, so that she could tap her left toe the same number of times.

After a while from her perch in the apple tree she noticed that the old woman, whose name was Mrs. Nelson, had come out of the house and was standing on her back porch, holding a straw hat in her band. She put the hat on and tied its brown ribbons under her chin—and then she looked up the hill into the orchard.

Zoe became motionless.

Mrs. Nelson went slowly down the steps, holding on to the railing, and walked through the wildness of her flower garden, which didn't have any neat edges, toward the fruit trees. She stopped every so often to look at one of the flowers, but she always started to walk again, straight toward the apple tree where Zoe crouched.

The old people never picked the fruit from these trees, never; what did she think she was going to do, anyway, that old woman: get herself a ladder and climb up here to get herself some apples, or what? Zoe tried to move behind the treetrunk but couldn't find a branch in the right place to sit on. The leaves of the apple tree rustled when she moved, and she was afraid that Mrs. Nelson had heard them, even though she was still pretty far away
.

Mrs. Nelson was wearing a brown-and-white dress, and she had white sandals on her feet. She stopped at the bottom of the little hill and sat on a wooden bench that faced the house. After a while she reached down and over and picked up an apple that had fallen from a tree and rolled there. She rubbed it on the skirt of her dress and took a bite of it and sat there for several more minutes, eating the apple. Then she put the core on the ground and stood up.

When she got too close, Zoe threw an apple at her.

Even though it didn't hit her, it made the old woman glance up into the trees. So Zoe threw another apple. This one struck Mrs. Nelson on the arm and surprised her a lot; Zoe watched it happen on her face when she had the idea that maybe the apples weren't falling on their own, maybe somebody was actually throwing them.

Zoe could see that this was hard for Mrs. Nelson to believe, so she threw another one, which hit the old woman on the shoulder. It must have landed harder than the first one because Mrs. Nelson said “Uh,” and bent over, one hand fumbling out to the side until it came in contact with a treetrunk. She hobbled over and leaned against it, holding on to her shoulder.

“Who's there?” she said in a quivery voice. “Is there somebody up there?”

Zoe wanted to shout, “No there's nobody up there it's God throwing apples at you!” But instead of shouting she threw another apple. This one struck the brim of Mrs. Nelson's hat, making it go all crooked on her head.

Then Zoe got very angry with herself. Why had she done this? Now Mrs. Nelson was squinting hard up into the trees, her little eyes poking into all the branches, sniffing and poking into every single apple tree, and—there! They hit Zoe right in the face, those beady little old-woman eyes
.

“Zoe,” said Mrs. Nelson, sounding amazed.

“Zoe Zoe Zoe!” yelled Zoe.

She climbed fast down from the tree and ran to the top of the hill and down the other side and over the fence into the Bradleys' yard, where Henry Bradley was mowing his father's lawn. She ran clear across the Bradleys' property, screaming, “Damn you Henry damn you Henry!” until she reached the road, and then she ran along the road until it curved and went in front of her own house. She ran inside and up the stairs to her room, where she opened her windows wide and threw herself onto her bed and, hot with humiliation and rage, thought about putting a curse or something on old Mrs. Nelson.

That night then was another Zoe meeting. They always had them right before dinner.

“Mrs. Nelson said you were throwing apples at her today,” said Zoe's mother, sounding tired and sad.

Zoe shrugged. “I was up in a tree. Maybe some apples fell off it.”

“You mean it was an accident?” said Zoe's father.

Zoe shrugged again. “They could've hit her. I don't know.”

“She says you yelled at her,” said her mother.

“I don't remember. I might have. She scared me.”

“How did she scare you?” said her father.

“By sneaking up on me.”

“I can't imagine Mrs. Nelson sneaking up on you, Zoe,” said her mother.

Zoe didn't say anything.