Deadly Appearances (6 page)

The central building was an octagon, and four lozenge-shaped wings angled off it in an X shape. Everything was there in plain sight: steel beams, trusses, ducts, huge concrete planks, transformers; and everything was painted in primary colours, red, yellow, blue. Only the cross, which soared from the centre of the octagon, was unpainted. In the sunlight it glinted with the soft glow of anodized metal. The chapel was a brazen and innovative building as out of place in the midst of the comfortable mediocrity of the campus as a Mies van der Rohe chair in the middle of a K-Mart. I wanted to get a closer look.

The first thing I discovered was that the building had a name. A sign encased in Lucite pointed the way to the Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre. The construction was recent enough that the area around the chapel hadn’t been landscaped. Clumps of earth turned over by machines baked hot and hard in the sun. Someone had thrown down a makeshift path of concrete blocks; and when I looked in the direction of the chapel, I saw a man and a woman walking toward me. The man was pushing a wheelchair, and the woman had a stroller. When they got closer, I realized that I knew the young man. He was Craig and Julie Evanson’s son, Mark. Seeing him brought a rush of memories – memories of the time before the leadership race had divided us, and Craig and Julie and Ian and I had been young together.

We had met seventeen years before – the year our party, to everyone’s surprise, formed the government. This was the election we weren’t supposed to win, and the months that followed were heady times – at least for the men.

The wives saw a lot of one another that first term. It was a time of birthday parties and car pools and earnest discussions about preschools and free schools and French immersion. No one was more earnest than Julie Evanson. She and Craig had one child, Mark, the same age as our daughter, Mieka. He was the centre of Julie’s existence. She planned her days around him, and there wasn’t an hour in the day when Mark wasn’t being instructed or challenged or enriched by his mother. Once, at the deflated end of a birthday party, all the parents began talking about the unthinkable: the death of a child. Julie had been passionate: “Can you imagine if, after all the hours and hours you put in to make them into something really special, it was over just like that?” And she had snapped her fingers defiantly at the disease or the drunk driver or the act of fate that might end her boy’s promising life.

Mark Evanson hadn’t died. He’d done something worse. He’d turned out to be ordinary. By the time he hit high school it was apparent, even to his mother, that Mark was average, perhaps even a little below average. Betrayed and baffled, Julie floundered for a while. Then, to everyone’s amazement, she, who had had only the most perfunctory interest in her husband’s professional life, threw herself headlong into advancing Craig’s career.

It was, for her husband and son, as if a hurricane had suddenly changed direction. The lives of both men were thrown off course. Craig, who would have been content to be the Member from Regina–Little Flower for the rest of his life, suddenly found himself speaking at strawberry socials and annual meetings all over the province. Julie had decided her husband was going to be the next premier, and the first step was winning the party leadership.

Julie’s son’s life had taken an even stranger turn. He was confused at first by the sudden withdrawal of his mother’s attention and affection. Then Mark linked up with a group of kids from Wolf River Bible College. At sixteen, Mark was born again. At seventeen, he became a husband and, in short order, a father. I’d bumped into Mark and his baby at an outdoor crafts show earlier in the summer. At nineteen, Mark Evanson was a solid, good-looking young man with a solid, good-looking baby. When he said he was happy, I believed him.

Craig and Julie were not happy. If he hadn’t loved Julie so completely, losing the leadership to Andy Boychuk would, I think, have been a relief for Craig. He could have accepted defeat gracefully and eased into the life he had wanted all along. Except he did love Julie. Passionately, uncritically, Craig Evanson loved his wife, and her pain at losing gnawed at him. Long after the votes were counted, Craig was haunted by the knowledge that he had failed his wife.

Julie was haunted by demons of her own. Losing seemed to be like a slow poison seeping through her system. She was sullen with those of us who had worked on Andy’s campaign, and she was jubilant when, late in June, Andy had answered a question whimsically and had been forced to issue an apology. Before the six o’clock news was over, she was on the telephone. “Well, Jo, what do you think of your blue-eyed boy tonight?” she had asked.

Now summer was almost over, the blue-eyed boy was dead, and Julie’s boy was standing in front of me, his face glowing with pleasure.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, what are you doing here? I mean, God loves us all and everybody’s welcome at Wolf River, but what are you doing here?” Mark’s face was as open and without guilt as a newborn’s. He stood on the path, smiling, expectant, waiting for an answer.

“I came down with Mrs. Boychuk – you remember, Andy Boychuk’s wife. They’re friends of your mum and dad’s. I guess you heard what happened to –”

The smile vanished. Mark cut me off. “We heard, but we didn’t want C-A-R-E-Y here –” he spelled carefully, then rested his hand on the shoulder of the boy in the wheelchair “– to sense that anything was wrong, so we’ve been walking him all morning. He loves the new chapel – all the bright colours, I guess.”

For the first time, I noticed the boy. I looked into his face. It was hard to imagine him responding to anything. He was dressed neatly, even whimsically, in shorts and a T-shirt that had a picture of Alfred E. Neuman from
MAD
magazine on the front and the words “What, Me Worry?” underneath. He would have been a handsome boy. His head was shaped like his father’s, and his hair was the same red-brown, but Carey’s head, too heavy for his slender neck, lolled to one side like a flower after a rainstorm. His features were regular but they were slack, and his mouth gaped. A little river of spit ran from his mouth to his chin. Mark reached down and dabbed at it with a Kleenex.

I held Carey’s hand and smiled at him, but he didn’t respond. When I straightened, I found myself face to face with Lori Evanson. She had stepped out from behind her husband, and she was looking at me with wonder.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, we saw you on television,” she said. “Such a terrible thing – an evil thing! You were very brave to save Mr. Spenser’s life.” Her voice was light and sweet, with a lilting singsong quality, like a child’s reciting something she’s learned by heart. Lori was holding a baby I knew was her own, but there was a quality about her, a sense that somehow she would never move much past adolescence.

It wasn’t her body. Physically, she was mature and beautiful. She looked the way we all wanted to look when we were eighteen. She was wearing a sundress the colour of a cut peach, and her arms and face were golden with tan. Up close, she smelled of suntan lotion and baby powder. Her shoulder-length hair was dark blond and streaked from the sun. She was incredibly lovely but in her eyes, which were as blue as forget-me-nots, there was such vacancy. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Lori Evanson’s soul was spotless.

“We’re so glad you’re all right. ‘Praise the Lord.’ That’s what Mark said when he heard you were fine.” She stopped for a second and looked gravely at her husband, at this man who could say just the right thing; then she directed those incredible eyes at me. “You’ve always been so good to us – that toaster oven with sandwich grill when we got married, and the cheque for twenty-five dollars when Clay was born. Look, isn’t he a precious lamb?” She turned the baby toward me for inspection. The baby was handsome and reassuringly alert. “So kind,” his mother continued. “If ever there’s anything we can do for you.”

“No thanks, Lori. I was just looking around. Perhaps I’ll go over to the prayer centre. Are visitors allowed?”

Her perfect brow wrinkled. “Gee, Mrs. Kilbourn, I guess so, but you know, I don’t know if anyone ever asked. I mean we’re all, like, very proud of the chapel. It was designed by Soren Eames in consultation with a prize-winning Regina architect.” Her brow smoothed. “The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre seats 2,800 people and is a multi-purpose area that can be converted for other uses. The building also boasts four radiating modules: a cafeteria, a gymnasium, a faith life centre and a complex of state-of-the art business offices.” Her innocent blue eyes shone with happiness. She was on home ground again. I saw the care with which those vacant blue eyes had been made up – peach eye shadow blending into mauve and then a soft smudge of grey eye liner beneath the lower lashes. Suddenly, those perfect eyes focused on something behind me, and they lit up. I turned to see what she was looking at.

On the main road that led through the campus, a man was getting out of a black Porsche. He was dressed like a university kid – denim work shirt and blue jeans – but even from this distance it was apparent that he wasn’t a kid. He was tall and boyishly slender but there was something defeated about the set of his shoulders that suggested this man’s worries went deeper than a conflict in his class timetable. When he began to walk toward us, I recognized him. He was the James Taylor look-alike, the one who’d run after Roma Boychuk to console her after Andy died. Lori grabbed my hand.

“Here’s Soren now. Oh, Mrs. Kilbourn, you have to meet him. He is so kind and good. He understands everything, and I mean everything.”

But the man who understood everything walked past us with a curt nod for Lori and Mark and not even that for me. Lori’s face fell, but she was quick to defend him.

“Mrs. Kilbourn, that is just not like Soren Eames. He is usually so friendly. I think he must be mourning Mr. Boychuk’s passing, too.”

“I suppose he met Andy when Andy came to visit Carey.”

She stood very straight and looked directly into my face. “I don’t know about that. All I know is that Mr. Boychuk came to see Soren almost every week, and lately a lot more than that. They were very close.”

“Lori, I don’t think we should be talking about this – even with Mrs. Kilbourn. When a man talks to his pastor, that’s just like when he talks to his doctor. There’s a trust there, like an oath.”

Lori looked so shattered that I jumped in. “I guess,” I said, “that he came to talk about Carey.”

Mark was silent. “I guess if you two are going to talk about this, Carey and I better go down to Disciples and get a Popsicle. Lori, I’ll see you and Clay at home for lunch.” He kissed his son and wife and pushed the wheelchair toward the road to the restaurant.

Lori was solemn. She was attempting to analyze something, and it went against the grain. “Mrs. Kilbourn, please forgive me but I think you’re wrong. Mr. Boychuk never really spends – spent much time with Carey. I mean he was like good to him and all that but, you know, Mrs. Boychuk would spend like hours with Carey – watching
TV
with him and talking to him about the programs and reading to him and telling him about things, but Mr. Boychuk – well, you could tell he, like, loved Carey and everything, but it just seemed real hard for him to stay with him. He’d come in and he’d sit and hold Carey’s hand for a little while and then it was like he couldn’t take it any more. He’d kiss him and he’d just leave. No, Mrs. Kilbourn, Mr. Boychuk didn’t come for Carey. Anyway, Soren is the spiritual head of Wolf River Bible College and all, but he wouldn’t have been the one to like talk to about Carey – that would have been …” Suddenly a laugh as musical as the tinkle of a wind chime. “Well, of course, it would be Mrs. Manz. She’s the matron for special care – sometimes I can be so dumb.” She smiled shyly, waiting for approval.

I gave it heartily. “Well, thanks, Lori, that’s good to know. It was kind of you to go to so much trouble.” We both smiled – neither of us seeing a barb in a comment that equated human thought with trouble, and we parted friends.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to call on Soren Eames. It just happened. I’d turned down Lori Evanson’s invitation to have lunch at their trailer and walked down the path that led to the chapel. Close up, it seemed to change, to reveal itself. Somehow up close you didn’t notice the hard-edged bravado of the building as much as the simple fact that everything fit so well.

The Charlie Appleby Prayer Centre was a fitting building in both senses of the word. The parts fit together with the cool inevitability of a beautiful and expensive watch. The result, as I discovered when the front door opened to my touch, was a building where form and function meshed smoothly. It was a fitting building in which to worship God.

The heart of the building, the octagon-shaped chapel, was a beautiful room. No stained glass or groined wood or silky altar cloths – just a room in which everything was practical and workable. All eight walls were glass – eight walls of windows filling the room with natural light. In the centre of the room was a simple circular altar. Suspended above it was an unpainted metal cross. Arranged in octagons around the altar were bright metal pews, covered in sailcloth cushions. The sailcloth was vivid: red, green, yellow, blue. I walked down the aisle and sat in a pew. From there I could see how pieces of pipe had been joined together to form the cross. It looked functional and heavy. Suddenly, everything caught up with me. Exhaustion and grief and the familiar clutch of panic. There had been other deaths: my grandparents, my best friend from high school, my father, my husband. I had survived, but as I watched the play of light on the cross, I began to tremble.

I sat for perhaps half an hour. There were no tongues of flame. No pressure of an unseen hand on my shoulder. But after a while I felt better – not restored but capable of functioning.

“I am going to make it through this day,” I said. There were no thunderbolts, so I picked up my bag and walked.

I don’t know which I heard first – the man’s voice or the sobbing. But as I stepped outside the chapel, squinting against the harsh midday light, I heard someone in distress. The sound was coming from one of the wings – modules, Lori had called them – that radiated from the chapel like spokes from a wheel. The crying was terrible. It seemed to spring from a pain so pure and so private that I knew there was no help I could offer.