They were going to watch Scorsese’s The Departed after dinner. “Not the pirated version,” Peter had told her. “I paid full price for the real thing, with all the extra interviews and stuff.” That was one of the things that she and Peter had shared — a love of movies. They sometimes saw two or three a week, either on DVD at his place or in one of Singapore’s ultra-modern movie theatres with widescreen, THX sound, and super-comfortable seats with nobody in front of you blocking the screen.
That was one thing they did well in Asia: movie theatres. There wasn’t anything comparable in Vancouver. Not even close — and for a quarter of the price. And shopping malls: luxury shopping malls that sold all the designer labels, the real ones. You could get the knock-offs on the street and who could tell the difference? Of course, you knew that the shopgirl with the Gucci bag and the Prada T-shirt was probably not wearing the real thing. Maris looked down at her Versace handbag. Thank God she’d remembered to grab it on her way out the door. She’d paid about twelve bucks for it … worth every penny, too.
What was she sitting here for? Wasn’t she supposed to be doing something? Then she saw Dinah and she remembered.
“Oh God, Dinah,” she said, getting up and moving toward the small, slender woman with the Chinese face who was Peter’s half-sister. Maris put her arms around her and hugged her tightly for a few seconds before letting her arms drop to her sides. They felt like dead weights. She had no energy, as if she’d run all the way to the hospital instead of coming in the ambulance with Peter and the paramedics.
“Peter’s dead,” she said, but Dinah already knew. Her eyes were red from crying. I haven’t cried yet, Maris thought. What’s the matter with me? “He had a stroke,” she said. “I couldn’t save him. I didn’t know what to do.” And then she sat down on one of the yellow plastic chairs and cried.
Chapter Two
She and Dinah had gone back to Peter’s apartment that night so Maris could find his glasses and put the fish in the fridge. She couldn’t stop thinking about that fish. She’d half expected to smell it when they opened the door. Luckily Dinah had a copy of Peter’s key; otherwise they wouldn’t have got in.
“I wasn’t thinking too clearly,” Maris told Dinah. “I meant to bring Peter’s glasses because he’d been wearing them when he had the stroke. I should have brought his wallet and his keys, but I didn’t want to waste time looking for them. They didn’t tell me he was dead until we got to the hospital. It was all such a big rush, like maybe the paramedics thought I would hold them responsible.” She knew she was babbling, but she had to dispel that awful silence that still filled the apartment like stale air inside a balloon.
The apartment didn’t smell of rotting fish; instead, it had the cool, dank smell of the sea: slightly salty and a bit chilly. The air conditioning, she remembered. Peter always kept it a couple of degrees below her comfort level. Probably because he was always on the move and couldn’t sit still for more than a few minutes before he’d be jumping up to do something or check something in the kitchen. Or he would show her his latest find, a book or a piece of furniture or some artifact he’d scooped in Chinatown or Little India. He was always shopping, always looking for something different, some hidden treasure. It was probably why the gallery had been so successful, right from the beginning. He had an eye — he always said he had a nose for a bargain — but it was his eyes that did the work. They never stopped searching.
They found his glasses on the floor behind the sofa. The paramedics had probably thrown them there when they’d pulled back his eyelids. What value did a pair of reading glasses, even Armani, have compared to a human life? Maris picked them up and felt grief grab her heart like a fist. One of the arms was bent and there were fingerprints on the lenses. Peter would have been furious. He valued his possessions and took such good care of them. He didn’t take anything for granted. He’d worked hard for what he had; he’d never felt entitled to any of it. It had all been earned.
Maris looked over at Dinah, who was picking up the yellow buttons from where they’d scattered across the sofa. She counted them, then looked to see if there were any wedged between the cushions.
“I’d better put that fish away right now,” Maris said, “or I’ll have nightmares about it.”
“Maybe you should take it home,” said Dinah.
“What am I going to do with a whole fish?” she said.
“Then throw it out. It’ll only go bad in the fridge.”
“I can’t throw a whole fish away,” said Maris. “It’ll stink. Maybe I should freeze it.”
“Good idea,” said Dinah. “We can deal with it later.”
Maris went into the kitchen and looked for some plastic wrap. She found it right where it should be: third drawer down on the right. Peter was so predictable. She stared at the fish. Why can’t you just disappear? she thought. The fish was beginning to exhaust her. She tore off a length of the plastic wrap, which immediately began to cling to itself at the corners. She laid one end against the fish and realized it wasn’t wide enough to cover the whole fish so she picked up the wrap and laid it lengthwise. She tried to pull the corners free so it would lay flat and then thought, Why? She shoved the wrap under the fish, unrolled another metre and wrapped it around the fish. She did this three times until all of the fish was covered in plastic wrap. It looked like a postmodern acrylic sculpture of a fish. Then she put it in the freezer.
“Goodbye,” she said. “I never want to see you again.”
She tidied up the counter and put the sliced lemon, ginger, and onion Peter was going to poach the fish with into the fridge. She noticed he’d already made a salad and she put that in the fridge, too. A nice meal that nobody was ever going to eat. But she didn’t have the heart to put any of it in the garbage. Not tonight.
She went back into the living room and saw Dinah sitting on the sofa, staring at the buttons in the palm of her hand.
“We have to call Angela,” Maris said.
“Oh, God,” said Dinah. “Do we have to?”
“Yes,” said Maris. “It’s still daytime in Germany. She’ll have to arrange a flight and all that. It’s going to take her a couple of days to get here.”
“Peter wanted to be cremated,” said Dinah.
“How do you know that?” asked Maris.
“He told me. We talked about it after our father died. He said he definitely didn’t want to be buried in the ground in a box.” She shivered. “He was adamant.”
“I guess you and I will have to take care of all that.”
“Yes. Angela won’t care one way or the other whether he’s buried or cremated.”
“They are divorced, aren’t they?” Maris asked.
“Yes. But legally she’s still his business partner,” said Dinah. “I’m not a partner. I just work for them.”
“Do you think she’ll want to keep the gallery going?” Maris thought of her own paintings that had sold so well under Peter’s careful auspices.
“I don’t know,” said Dinah. “I hope so. She makes a lot of money from the gallery and we have such an established customer base. Although, I don’t know. Without Peter …” She didn’t finish her sentence. She looked down at the six yellow buttons in her hand, and then slipped them into her jacket pocket.
“Why?” she asked softly. “He was only forty-five. He seemed so healthy.”
“I don’t know,” said Maris. She sat beside Dinah on the sofa and ran her hand over the soft suede. “They’re going to do an autopsy. Apparently they have to when it’s a sudden death like this.”
Dinah shook her head. “He wouldn’t like that,” she said. “People cutting him open and looking at his insides. You know how fastidious he was about everything,