Gail Bowen - The Last Good Day

Delia nodded. “The problem is we can’t find a good one. Everybody’s always been too busy to put things in albums, and of course we thought we had forever.” She ran a hand over her eyes. “Noah remembered that Mrs. Hynd put our summer pictures in her albums. Can we dig around a little and see what we come up with?”

The albums were stored in a bookcase in my bedroom. I led the Wainbergs in and flicked on the light. “Dig away,” I said, then I went back to check on the girls.

Interest in Monopoly was waning. The board bristled with hotels, and from the stacks of neatly ordered bills and properties in front of Isobel, her victory seemed imminent. Taylor had already folded. Gracie threw the dice with great sang-froid and whooped when she landed on a heavily built up Park Place. “That’s it for me,” she said. “I’m outta here.”

“Good,” Taylor said. “Because the rain has stopped and this is getting boring. Let’s get back into our wet clothes and go out and run through puddles.” She looked uneasily at her friends. “Is running through puddles immature?”

Gracie shrugged. “Not if it’s fun.”

When the Wainbergs came back, I was glad the girls weren’t in the room. Delia was clutching a photo album, and her eyes and the tip of her nose were red from crying.

“You found something,” I said.

Delia placed the album on the table and opened it to a large black-and-white photo. “Our first summer at Lawyers’ Bay. We used to camp out on the beach, and when it rained we’d grab our sleeping bags and head for Hynds’ cottage.”

I picked up my glasses so I could get a closer look. All the members of the Winners’ Circle were there: Delia, Kevin, Chris, Blake, and, in the middle, Zack Shreve. They were up to their waists in water – Zack, too. He’d wheeled out so far that the lower part of his chair was submerged. Squinting into the sun, their faces suffused with joy, they were incredibly appealing.

The girls drifted back in and draped themselves around our chairs to look at the photograph. Isobel Wainberg looked at her mother through lowered lashes. “You were beautiful, Mum,” she breathed.

“Everybody was beautiful then,” Delia said. She shook her head as if to bring herself back to the present. “Beautiful and smart. Why weren’t we smart enough to know that it was too good to last?” Without explanation she pushed open the screen door and walked away.

Isobel’s eyes didn’t stray from the picture. “Mum looks so different,” she said.

“She was different,” Noah said simply.

“What happened?” Isobel asked.

Noah looked puzzled. “I don’t know. It was like dominoes. One thing went wrong, then everything went wrong.”

Isobel’s gaze was piercing. “What was the first thing?”

Noah bent over the album. His big hands were not made for delicate work, and there was something poignant about the care with which he removed the photo from its plastic sheath. “There’s no use talking about it, Izzy. Talk never changes anything.” He brightened. “Look, I’m supposed to drive this picture into town to get it enlarged. There’s a pizza place near the 50 Minute Photo. Why don’t we grab us a pie?”

Taylor dug her fingers into my arm. “Please?”

“Okay,” I said. I picked up my purse. “Why don’t you go crazy and hit the Dairy Queen, too?”

That night, Leah and Angus decided they needed some quality time. They rented videos and retreated to the room over the boathouse. That left the cottage free for a sleepover, so Taylor and I invited Gracie and Isobel to stay the night. I’d driven into town with Noah and the girls. He had done his best at the pizza joint, but despite the food and the girls’ exuberance, Noah had been distracted. It occurred to me that he and Delia could use a little quality time too.

It had been a long day, but deep-dish all-dressed pizza and Peanut Buster Parfaits had refuelled the girls. As soon as we got back, they leaped out of the car and raced over to Falconers’ to pick up CDS and Gracie’s stash of gift-with-purchase makeup. They were back in a flash, cranking up the music and slathering on the makeup that transformed them from beautiful sunburned children into voguing young women with purple eye shadow and edge. It was a painful portent of things to come, and I lasted less than ten minutes before I withdrew to my bedroom.

Harriet Hynd’s photo albums were arranged chronologically. My fingers lingered over several of them, but I settled on the summer of 1973, the year my first child, Mieka, was born. Harriet had arranged the photographs with an archivist’s precision. Beneath each picture, the particulars of the subject and the occasion were described in her small neat hand. In truth, the pictures didn’t require text. Photos like them could have been found in albums in tens of thousands of Canadian homes. A man with shoulder-length hair and a beard grinned as he fired up a Hibachi; a woman wearing a peasant dress and a silver-and-turquoise necklace held up a birthday cake for the camera. A young boy – clearly Kevin – sat surrounded by birthday booty: a pile of action figures for his superhero collection. Moments in time, as ordinary as they were irrecoverable.

In the living room, Taylor and her friends danced and dreamed to the music of their own time. My camera was slung over the doorknob. I put down Harriet’s album, picked up the faithful Kodak, and headed into the living room. The girls of summer deserved to be immortalized.

The night of Chris Altieri’s wake, the beautiful cars started arriving just after suppertime. The sun slanted in the sky, picking up the metallic sheen of BMWS, Porsches, Jaguars, and Mercedeses as they purred through the gates to Lawyers’ Bay. The event was being held at Zack Shreve’s home. It was a shrewd choice for a wake. With its large uncluttered spaces painted in cool monochromatic greys, it militated against an overheating of emotion. The furniture in the house was simple and expensive, the art spare, original, and arresting – abstracts in rust and silver. Both furnishings and art had the patina of unobjectionable good taste that only a fine decorator with a blank cheque can bring to a living space. The only personal touches were the piano – a concert-sized Steinway – and, oddly, a collection of moths mounted in shadow boxes on the wall.

The piano dominated the room and Zack was seated at it, playing, when we arrived. The music was light and unobtrusive, yet it kept everyone in the room aware of the pianist’s presence. Seemingly, Zack’s skill at playing a crowd equalled his skill at the Steinway. When he caught me watching him, Zack winked conspiratorially, and I remembered a lawyer friend’s telling anecdote about an encounter she’d had with him. She was appearing opposite him in court, and when his case began to go badly, he hunched his shoulders and drew back into himself, in her words “defying the jury to kick the cripple.” The tactic paid off. Zack won his case, and the next morning he’d sent my friend a box of the Bernard Callebaut truffles she favoured and a copy of Richard III.

No doubt about it, Zachary Shreve was a man who knew how to control events. As he moved effortlessly through the tunes in the Rodgers and Hart songbook, I wondered what outcome he was seeking from this party. As it always was at Lawyers’ Bay, the mise en scene was flawless. A brief and intense shower late in the afternoon had cooled the air and left a lingering smell of wet wood. The dinner was planked salmon, and when guests arrived, the barbecues were smoking. In the meantime there were delights: plates of baguettes and thinly sliced black bread to accompany bowls of feta cheese splashed with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh oregano and dried red peppers, marinated artichoke hearts, tangy radishes, crisp and rolled in butter and salt, olives seemingly from every port on the Mediterranean. It was a feast fit for a king, and there was no doubt that Zack Shreve was presiding.