Rebecca cold. A voice from the past. Rebecca remembered the cousin and the photo of the duck. Suddenly she wished she’d gotten a better look at the picture when Mrs. Kochinsky had waved it around in the office. It hadn’t been among the papers near the phone in the den. The purse. Mrs. Kochinsky had brought it out of her purse.
Rebecca tiptoed toward the bedroom as if her steps would disturb someone. She could see everything from the doorstep of the small room. All the drawers from the white dresser stood open, the clothes from inside dumped in heaps on the peach broadloom. On the nightstand, strangely untouched, lay a grey doll in a striped dress, a crude shabby thing for someone as elegant as Mrs. Kochinsky. The police would be there any minute. She took wary steps toward the emptied purse on the dresser. She touched nothing but scrutinized the papers lying nearby. A few things had fallen to the floor. A chequebook, a recipe, some store receipts, a shopping list. The picture wasn’t there. Crouching in a clear area at the foot of the bed, she gingerly lifted the bedskirt. There was nothing underneath. She didn’t want to disturb evidence but she had to know. She poked her foot into the clothes on the floor. She inspected the piles of shoes in the closet. Nothing. It was as clear as day to her now: whoever had killed Mrs. Kochinsky had taken the picture. The inexplicable photocopy of the duck was missing.
chapter eight
Wednesday, April 4, 1979
Nesha smiled inwardly at the discomfort of the welldressed woman seated next to him on the plane. He found, since growing his hair and beard to an unruly length, that people sitting beside him in moving vehicles were less likely to engage him in conversation. He kept himself clean but untidy, no longer able to take seriously the usual daily precepts of personal grooming. He reminded himself of Howard Hughes. Yet there had been a time, many times, before he had turned eccentric, that he had found himself on a plane beside a middleaged woman who wanted to talk.
He had married a woman who was attracted to his melancholy. She said she wanted to help him forget, not realizing she was aiming to eliminate the trait that had attracted her in the first place. They had a son and Nesha had once considered himself satisfied with life. The son, Josh, was a good student, would be the scholar Nesha would have been — had he been given the chance. Josh had fine dark hair, like his father, that lay in loose waves around his head. Nesha feared for his son because he knew how easily the world could fall apart. Josh would tire of his father’s paranoia and say, “Don’t worry so much Dad, this is America.”
Over the years Margie learned she would never be able to make Nesha forget. She knew his obsession would always take precedence over her and resentment became disaffection, then finally indifference. When Josh was twenty and had been away at school for a year, Margie decided there was no longer any reason to stay. She had had a stomachful of her husband’s rage and melancholy and was ready for lighter fare. The ironic thing was that when she left, Nesha lost interest in everything, including all thoughts of vengeance.
It was still daylight when they flew over Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. For vast miles they gleamed beneath him in a kind of flat blue he had never seen on the ocean, a clear mirror of the sky, an almost blinding light in the eyes. He had looked up the Great Lakes on a map before he left and found to his relief that Toronto sat comfortably on the north end of Lake Ontario, a port city. What would he do without his precious water?
At the front desk of the hotel they eyed him suspiciously with his ragged hair and beard, but his money was as good as everyone else’s. One link with his former life he had held onto was his American Express card. It reminded him he could afford to do anything he wanted, only he chose to do nothing. Until now.
From the days when he used to travel, Nesha knew which hotels had good pools. Margie had never failed to complain about the rooms but he didn’t care about where he slept, as long as the pool was deep and long. Well, he didn’t have to worry about Margie anymore; let a new husband have the pleasure.
On such short notice he couldn’t call around for information and had to settle for whatever there was. Late that evening, long before he would be able to sleep, he visited the indoor pool in the bowels of the hotel. The place was candy-coloured, pastel green and yellow and pink, perhaps to make one forget it was a basement. And the pool wasn’t what he was used to — he took in the trendy, impractical curve — but it would do. He needed his swim the way some people needed drugs or TV — to obliterate the world, to blank out a mind that ran the same murderous pictures over and over.
Unwilling to let the old newsreel begin, he let the water take him over. He luxuriated in the kiss of the water as he plied an easy graceful breast-stroke down the middle of an empty pool. His mother wept soundlessly, her long hair unravelling from the bun. Dust whorled into the air, hid the sky. But Nesha turned away. He let the green-yellow-pink of the pool take him somewhere simpler, somewhere on a different page of history in a different millennium. This must have been the very first stroke, he thought, when hyphenated creatures slid through the primeval oceans before memory, troutlizards and carp-toads and semi-dinosaurs, this stroke where the arms pulled the body forward by pushing the water down and away, laying open a channel as welcoming as a lover. This stroke could be sweet and soothing under an ancient sun, a movement so natural you could almost sleep in it. Suddenly the dust sifted down, down, the sun blazed a path through the dust until it became a cloud of smoke, a plume of fire in the little wooden synagogue of his nightmare. Nesha shook his head. He needed something faster.
He lowered his head and shifted his arms up into the butterfly, once a knockoff of the breast-stroke, but years ago now, promoted to its own competitive category. And what a category! If this didn’t kill him, nothing would. His hands traced a fast strenuous S back to his hips, then out again, back and out again at a pace that created a corridor of foam. The once voluptuous water was now violently forced open as both his legs kicked together behind him as one, like a primitive tail. He gulped and expelled air in the trough behind the bow-wave, keeping his head low and his body flat to offer the least possible resistance to the water. He didn’t care what he looked like in his goggles and his long hair tied back in a ponytail.
When he had learned to swim, the breast-stroke was strictly for sissies. He had spent more time in the water than on his grades. Even then, young as he was, he recognized the water’s allure: it made him forget. Like the River Lethe crossing into Hades, he learned at school; all would be forgotten on the other side. And what could be more natural. It was, after all, California. It was more like heaven than any place he could have imagined: the brightly painted, columned houses, the high sweeping vistas of the sea, the purple and turquoise and gun-metal of the water, sometimes separate, sometimes all at once, that reminded him he was at land’s end, the farthest point on the continent and a million miles away from the village that haunted his dreams.
Back and forth Nesha swam the length of the hotel pool, the muscles in his body sang with pain and he knew he would have to stop soon. Pretty good for an old geezer, he thought. Forty-eight. Where did it all go? Since Margie left he’d been forced to look at himself and he didn’t like what he saw. He had to hand it to her, he would’ve gone on like that forever if she hadn’t left, then not realized how wrong things really were till he was on his deathbed. Yeah, thanks Margie, thanks for nothing. He didn’t know how to love anymore, she had said. He had no love left. Well, how wrong she was. He could love. What he loved was feeling the water all around him, the water pulling at his memory, submerging it all into a deep corner of the pool. Wasn’t that love?
If he could have done what he wanted when he was eighteen, he would’ve swum. Instead, he studied numbers. Numbers had always been magical for him and it might have worked. But the commerce and finance courses turned numbers into ciphers and sent him down to the pool at the university in search of comfort. After two years he realized he would make life easier by apprenticing himself to an accountant.
It wasn’t until Nesha was married and a father that an American pup named Jastremski, coached
