Gail Bowen - The Glass Coffin

Felix’s voice was gentle. “Don’t ask a question when the answer can only cause you pain, Joanne.”

“Are you saying that Gabe left town because of me?”

He looked away. “I’m saying that Jill’s wedding is scheduled to begin in twenty minutes, and you might be wise to let this go.”

“I’ll let it go,” I said. “But only for the time being.”

“Fair enough,” Felix said. “The time being is all we have.”

Angus had already taken Taylor to the room where the wedding was being held, but Jill had waited, and we took the elevator to the second floor together. When the doors opened, Evan, like some apparition from a Gothic novel, was facing us.

I could hear Jill’s intake of breath. “So much for the idea that it’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding,” she said.

“Like all superstitions, that one is nonsense,” Evan said. “You look beautiful, Jill.” He nodded to me. “Your dress is lovely too, Joanne.”

Jill and I are both on the tall side of average, but Evan dwarfed us. It wasn’t just his height; he exerted a powerful undertow that seemed to draw those around him into his sphere. In his cutaway, striped trousers, pearl grey waistcoat, and grey-and-black-striped four-in-hand, he had the larger than life quality of a stage actor, but there were two jarring notes. Ms. Manners would have approved of his gloves, but every man I knew would have stuffed the gloves in a pocket until the last minute, and Evan was wearing his. He was also wearing makeup of the heavy-duty concealer type about which Jill and I had joked earlier.

When he caught me eyeing his face, Evan’s response was a preemptive strike. “Bridegroom’s jitters,” he said. “Surely even you can’t see anything Machiavellian in the fact that I nicked myself shaving, Joanne.”

“Of course not,” I said, but I kept looking. His jaw was slightly swollen and even beneath the makeup I could see discolouration.

Jill stepped closer to examine the bruising. “That must be painful,” she said.

Evan raised his hand to cover the area. “It’s nothing,” he said.

“How does the other guy look?” I asked.

Evan’s eyes widened. Clearly, I’d shaken him. “There was no other guy,” he said. “I told you I cut myself shaving.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You did.” I touched Jill’s arm. “We should go in now. It’s almost time.”

Once, during the early years of my marriage, I saw a production of Richard III in London. The designer had created a stage world as bloodless as a chess game: the actors were costumed in sculptured robes of white or black and the set was a series of harshly geometric metal backdrops. Until Clarence was beheaded, we were in the stark, greyscale universe of absolutes, but the beheading introduced a new element. The trough that caught Clarence’s head filled quickly with blood, and the bleeding never stopped. As Richard’s brutal march to power continued, the blood poured unabated. By the time the final curtain fell, the stage dripped red.

The memory of that production washed over me as we walked down the aisle towards the place where Jill’s husband-to-be and his best man stood waiting. The wedding guests, shimmering in their bright outfits, fell silent as they took in our austere monochromatic gowns. It was a dramatic moment, made even more dramatic by the setting. Jill and Evan would be exchanging their vows in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that comprised the west wall of the gallery. Jill had hoped for a pretty snowfall or for the soft glow of a late-winter afternoon, but the light that seeped through the glass had the dull sheen of pewter. The only splash of colour in the area came from the cranberry miniskirt of the replacement judge, Rexella Sweeney. Rexella’s words would set the action in motion. Like the characters in that long-ago production of Richard III, the members of Jill and Evan’s wedding party seemed to be chess pieces moving inexorably towards an endgame of sacrifice and checkmate.

Rexella, a sixtyish blonde with a whisky rasp, dagger acrylic nails, and legs that wouldn’t quit, was an unlikely catalyst for tragedy. Earlier, when she introduced herself to Jill and me, she sensed Jill’s tension and wheezed, “Relax. This won’t hurt half as much as a Brazilian bikini wax.”

The moment came for Evan and Jill to exchange rings, and I knew that, worldly as Rexella was, she was wrong about the Brazilian bikini wax. When she pronounced that Evan and Jill were now husband and wife, tears stung my eyes. Watching my friend enter into a disastrous marriage was more painful by far than anything a cosmetician at The Sweet Hairafter had ever done to me.

Felix and I walked back down the aisle arm in arm, each of us grateful for the other’s presence. “Keep smiling,” Felix said through gritted teeth, “it’s almost over.”

But there was still the reception. While the caterers set up the tables for the buffet, we gathered in the crush area outside the gallery. Servers with trays of champagne circulated, fostering cheer. Felix handed me a glass. “Flawless performance,” he said. “Did you know that bridesmaids were originally intended as decoys to lure evil spirits away from the bride?”

“Finally, an explanation for all those hideous dresses,” I said.

We exchanged smiles and raised our glasses. The Cuvee Paradis Brut was everything champagne that cost eighty-five dollars a bottle U.S. should be – light, crisp, and astonishingly good, but only a magic elixir could have lifted me above the sticky mud of anxiety and trepidation that had been dragging me down all day. As I looked at my fluted glass, I knew I had two options: keep the champagne coming until I had blotted out the memory of a shambling man with a taste for strong tea and morality or find out what had happened to him. The decision was easy. No other man had ever compared me to Sam Waterston.

I surveyed the room to check on the kids. Taylor was chatting happily with Rapti Lustig’s son, a ten-year-old named Sam who was too kind and too suave to ever compare a young woman to a Chia Pet. Angus and Bryn were silhouetted against the window, holding hands, watching the storm that had begun to rage outside with a force almost as powerful as the hormones of the young. Safe as churches.

There was a pay telephone in the lobby. I took the elevator down, found a quarter in the mad-money pocket of my evening bag, and dialled home.

For the first time that day, there was a new message, but the voice on the other end was not one I wanted to hear. Alex Kequahtooway had been my lover for three years, and to paraphrase the nursery rhyme: when our relationship had been good it was very, very good, but when it went bad, it was horrid.

Alex had always distrusted words, and his telephone message was succinct: he had to talk to me, and I knew his number. I did know his number. I also had no intention of calling it.

Then, as if I needed further proof that when man makes decisions, God laughs, Alex himself walked through the front door of the Mackenzie Gallery. As he stood in the foyer, stamping the snow off his boots, surveying the scene, my mind raced through the kaleidoscope of possibilities that might have brought him out in a blizzard. None of them was good. When his eyes found me, they betrayed nothing, and as he walked towards me, my heart began to pound. “Has something happened to one of the kids?” I asked.

Alex’s obsidian eyes were warm. “No. Your family’s fine, Jo. This is about another matter.” He gestured to a stone bench in the lobby. “Let’s sit down.”

The gallery had a number of benches upon which the weary could share space with a sculptured figure that, reflecting our politically sensitive times, represented the full spectrum of our citizens: male, female, young, old, aboriginal, non-aboriginal, executive, worker. Alex had pointed to my favourite, a pregnant woman in a sundress and sandals, reading a book. He knew that particular bench reminded me of a good time in my own life, but his first words made it clear that chance not memory had determined his choice.