Charades by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

simply goes. “It was reading week,” he says, as though this explained everything.
    â€œYou go to Toronto, don’t you?”
    He doesn’t answer.
    â€œYou see,” she says, “I understand about that. The way you worry about your ex-wife. It’s the way Nicholas was about Verity. Do you see your son and daughter too?”
    â€œNot my son,” he says, the knife turning inside.
    â€œSometimes,” Charade says dreamily, “I pretend Nicholas does that too. That he, you know, keeps tabs on me. Sometimes I feel absolutely certain that he’s walking just behind me and that if I turned suddenly … but of course I don’t turn because that wouldn’t be fair.”
    A long silence drifts across them. They fall asleep in each other’s arms. Koenig dreams he is at La Guardia airport and his son is just ahead of him, turning a corner. Koenig quickens his step, he breaks into a run. Charade dreams that someone is about to tap her on the shoulder. They both cry out, waking, reaching for each other.
    â€œSay something,” Koenig says urgently. “Tell me another story. Tell me about your mother.”
    â€œAll right,” Charade says. “I was always trying to make her talk about Nicholas and Verity, but I had to trick her, I had to get to them via Aunt Kay, I had to …”
    â€œKay and me,” Bea says. “We were peas in a pod to start with, and then we were chalk and cheese. Never figured each other out and couldn’t do a thing apart. Then one day we just didn’t have anything in common. Well, those two came between us, that’s what did it. That was the beginning of the end.”
    â€œWhat two?”
    Bea is rolling scone dough, her wrists flip and snap. Ritual is important: the forward roll, vehement, involving shoulders; the pause, the lift, the backward arc; and the dough fanning out like a flood plain from the confluence of Bea’s thighs and the table.
    â€œWhat two?” Charade persists.
    Bea frowns, pulls in all the dimples and valleys of Bea-flesh for an instant, tightens some knot of muscle-nerve-sinew in the top of her head.
    â€œWhat two?”
    â€œYour father and that Ashkenazy woman.”
    â€œSee …” Absentmindedly Charade trails her fingers down Koenig’s body. “A moment like that, it felt like D-Day. If I could just make her say it. It felt like chipping away at some great … some vast mountain of rubble.
    â€œYour father and the Ashkenazy woman. Tap, tap: they were inside there somewhere, under the rubble, still faintly alive, still sending out signals, still waiting to be dug out.
    â€œSeems like I spent half my childhood thinking up ways to catch Mum out. I used to keep score, I used to … I would ask her about Aunt Kay, it was bait, it was my decoy, because all the stories led back to Nicholas and to Verity Ashkenazy. And so Aunt Kay … but how can I explain Aunt Kay?”
    â€œIsn’t this where we came in?”
    â€œWhat?”
    Koenig closes his eyes. In the beginning was the hologram, then the girl in his bedroom and … “Something about your Aunt Kay, that’s where you began. Katherine to me, you said. It seems ages, weeks, since you mentioned her.”
    â€œYes, well.” She frowns. “You’re the one who’s been away.”
    Something has been evoked that bothers her. She seems to remember a need for caution. She slides away from his arms and huddles in his armchair again.
    â€œAunt Kay …” she says, and he has to wait out another lengthy silence. If he moves when she is in these suspended states, she may take fright and leave. He waits.
    â€œWhat I’m doing here, you know,” she says, “is stalling … hanging on to you as though … and talking, talking … Of course I’ll have to go back eventually —”
    â€œGo