Louise Penny - A Fatal Grace

‘Menopause,’ said Olivier in a sonorous CBC announcer voice.

‘I’ve never told a man to pause,’ said Gabri.

‘The first gray hair. Now there’s a bad hair day,’ said Myrna, ignoring the guys.

‘How about when the first one appears on your chin,’ said Ruth. ‘That’s a bad hair day.’

‘God, it’s true.’ Mother laughed, joining them. ‘The long wiry ones.’

‘Don’t forget the moustache,’ said Kaye, creaking down where Myrna offered her seat. Gabri got up so that Mother could sit. ‘We have a solemn pact.’ Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. ‘If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it’s pulled.’

‘The plug?’ Ruth asked.

‘The chin hair,’ said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. ‘You’re off the visitors list. Mother, make a note.’

‘Oh, I made that note years ago.’

Clara took her empty plate back to the buffet and returned a few minutes later with trifle and brownies and Licorice Allsorts.

‘I stole them from the kids,’ she said to Myrna. ‘Better hurry up if you want some. They’re getting wise.’

‘I’ll just eat yours,’ and Myrna actually attempted to take one before a fork menaced her hand.

‘Addicts, you’re pathetic.’ Myrna looked over at Ruth’s vase of Scotch, half gone.

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Ruth, following Myrna’s gaze. ‘This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.’

‘I’m addicted to meditation,’ said Mother, eating her third helping of trifle.

‘There’s an idea.’ Kaye turned to Ruth. ‘You could visit Mother at the center. She can meditate the crap out of anyone.’

Silence met this statement. Clara scrambled for something to replace the repulsive image that had sprung to her mind and was grateful when Gabri picked up a book from the stack under the coffee table and waved it around.

‘Speaking of crap, isn’t this CC’s book? Em must have bought it at your launch, Ruth.’

‘She probably sold as many as I did. You’re all traitors,’ said Ruth.

‘Listen to this.’ Gabri opened Be Calm , Clara noticed that Mother shifted in her seat as though to get up but Kaye laid a claw on her arm, stopping her there.

‘Therefore,’ Gabri was reading, ‘it stands to reason that colors, like emotions, are harmful. It’s not a coincidence that negative emotions are given colors, red for rage, green for envy, blue for depression. But, if you put all the colors together, what do you get? White. White is the color of divinity, of balance. The goal is balance. And the only way to achieve it is to keep the emotions inside, preferably beneath a layer of white. This is Li Bien, an ancient and venerable teaching. In this book you’ll learn how to hide your true feelings, to keep them safe from an unkind and judgmental world. Li Bien is the ancient Chinese art of painting from the inside. Keeping the colors, the emotions, in. That is the only way to achieve peace, harmony, and calm. If we all kept our emotions to ourselves there would be no strife, no harm, no violence, no war. In this book I am offering you, and this world, peace.’ Gabri snapped the book shut. ‘She didn’t exactly have Li Bien coming out the yin-yang tonight.’

Peter laughed with the others but was careful not to catch anyone’s eye. Privately, beneath his layer of white skin, Peter agreed with CC. Emotions were dangerous. Emotions were best hidden away beneath a calm and peaceful veneer.

‘But this doesn’t make sense,’ Clara said, flipping through the book and puzzling over a particular passage.

‘And that other stuff did?’ asked Myrna.

‘Well, no, but here she says she got her philosophy of life in India. But didn’t she just say Li Bien was Chinese?’

‘You’re actually looking for sense in there?’ Myrna asked. Clara had buried her face back in the book and slowly her shoulders started heaving, then her back, and finally she raised her face to the circle of concerned friends.

‘What is it?’ Myrna reached out to Clara, who was crying.

‘The names of her gurus,’ said Clara between sobs. Myrna was no longer sure whether she was crying or laughing.

‘Krishnamurti Das, Ravi Shankar Das, Gandhi Das. Ramen Das. Khalil Das. Gibran Das. They even call her CC Das.’ By now Clara was roaring with laughter as were most of the others.

Most. But not all.

‘I see nothing wrong with that,’ said Olivier, wiping his eyes. ‘Gabri and I follow the way of Häagen Das. It’s occasionally a rocky road.’

‘And one of your favorite movies is Das Boot,’ Clara said to Peter, ‘so you must be enlightened.’

‘True, though that’s Das backward.’

Clara fell laughing against Peter and Henri came over to leap on them both. When she’d regained herself and calmed Henri Clara was surprised to see that Mother had left.

‘Is she all right?’ she asked Kaye, who was watching her friend walk toward the dining room and Em. ‘Did we say something wrong?’

‘No.’

‘We didn’t mean to insult her,’ said Clara, taking Mother’s place beside Kaye.

‘But you didn’t. You weren’t even talking about her.’

‘We were laughing at things Mother takes seriously.’

‘You were laughing at CC, not Mother. She knows the difference.’

But Clara wondered. CC and Mother had both named their businesses Be Calm. They both now lived in Three Pines, and they both followed a similar spiritual path. Clara wondered whether the women were hiding more than their emotions.

Calls of ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘ Joyeux Noël ’ faded into the cheerful night as the réveillon broke up. Émilie waved to the last of her guests and closed the door.

It was two thirty on Christmas morning and she was exhausted. Putting a hand against a table to steady herself she walked slowly into the living room. Clara, Myrna and the others had cleaned up, quietly doing the dishes while she’d sat with a small glass of Scotch and spoken to Ruth on the sofa.

She’d always liked Ruth. Everyone had seemed stunned more than a decade ago by her first book of poetry, stunned that such an apparently brittle and bitter woman could contain such beauty. But Em knew. Had always known. That was one of the things she shared with Clara, and one of the many reasons Em had taken to Clara, from the first day she’d arrived, young and arrogant and full of piss and talent. Clara saw what others couldn’t. Like that little boy in The Sixth Sense , but instead of seeing ghosts, Clara saw good. Which was itself pretty scary. So much more comforting to see bad in others; gives us all sorts of excuses for our own bad behavior. But good? No, only really remarkable people see the good in others.

Though, as Em well knew, not everyone had good to see.

She walked to the stereo, opened a drawer and delicately lifted out a single woolen mitten. Beneath it she found a record. She put the record on, reaching out to touch the play button, her finger crooked and trembling like a feeble version of Michelangelo’s Creation . Then she walked back to the sofa, delicately holding the mitten as though it still contained a hand.

In the back bedrooms Mother and Kaye slept. For years now the three friends had stayed together on Christmas Eve and celebrated the day in their own quiet way. Em suspected this was her last Christmas. She suspected this was Kaye’s last too, and perhaps Mother’s. Two thirty.

The music began and Émilie Longpré closed her eyes.