Later on, Jude Turner would look back on December thirty-first as the last morning her life had been firm, graspable, all in one piece.
She’d been sleeping naked and dreamless. She woke at six, as always, in the house in Ireland, Ontario, where she’d been born; she didn’t own an alarm clock. In her old robe she gave her narrow face the briefest of glances in the mirror as she splashed it with cold water, damped down her hair, reached for her black rectangular glasses. The third and eighth stairs groaned under her feet, and the stove was almost out; she wedged logs into the bed of flushed ash. She drank her coffee black from a blue mug she’d made in second grade. As Jude drew on her second cigarette it was beginning to get light. She watched the backyard through a portcullis of two-foot icicles: Were those fresh raccoon tracks? Soon she’d shovel the driveway, then the Petersons’ next door. The neighbour on the other side was Bub, a cryptic turkey plucker with a huge mustache. Usually her mother would be down by now, hair in curlers, but since Boxing Day, Rachel Turner had been away at her sister’s in England. The silence trickled like oil into Jude’s ears.
She’d walk the three blocks to the museum by seven so she could get some real work done before anyone called, or dropped by to donate a mangy fur tippet, because this afternoon was the postmortem on the feeble results of the Christmas fundraising campaign. At twenty-five, Jude—the curator—was the age of most of the board members’ grandchildren.
The phone started up with a shrill jangle, and though she was inclined not to answer it, she did. It was the accent she recognized, more than the voice.
“Louise! Merry Christmas. Why are you whispering?” Jude broke in on her aunt’s gabbled monologue. “Not herself, how?”
“I just don’t think—” Louise interrupted herself in a louder voice: “I’m only on the phone, Rachel, I’ll be right in.”
As she stubbed out her cigarette, Jude tried to picture the house in England—a town called Luton—though she’d never seen it. “Put Mom on the line, would you?”
Instead of answering, her aunt called out, “Could you stick the kettle on?” Then, hissed into the phone, “Just a tick.”
Waiting, Jude felt irritation bloom behind her eyes. Her aunt had always liked her gin; could she possibly be drunk at, what—the morning?
Louise came back on the line, in the exaggerated style of a community theatre production: “Your mother’s making tea.”
“What’s up, is she sick?”
“She’d never complain, and I haven’t told her I’m ringing you,” her aunt whispered, “but if you ask me, you should pop over and bring her home.”
Pop over, as if Luton were a couple of kilometres down the road. Jude couldn’t keep her voice from cracking like a whip. “Could I please speak to my mother?”
“The yellow pot,” Louise shouted, “the other’s for herbal. And a couple of those Atkins gingernuts.”