Beach Strip by John Lawrence Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page A

a small mansion in Kitsilano, and spends his days cutting people open and examining their innards, and I have no idea why.
    When I visited Tina and Andrew before marrying Gabe, Tina introduced me to her country club friends. They were so gracious and warm that by the third day I feared I would throw up on the next woman who gave me an air kiss before handing me a glass of Chardonnay. On the fourth day, I flagged a cab near the university and had the driver take me to East Hastings Street, the skid row of Vancouver. I sat in the cab, parked at the curb, for twenty minutes while I watched hookers stumble into alleyways to give twenty-dollar quickies, and guys with vomit on their sweatshirts wash windshields at stoplights, and druggies pick up their fixes, and people in tourist buses stare open-mouthed at the carnival freak show. Then I had the driver take me back to Kitsilano forcanapés and pretension. The few minutes on the other side of town set me up for the rest of the week. Everything, my father used to say, needs to be rebalanced from time to time. My father was rarely wrong about anything.
    Now, at the sound of my sister’s voice on the telephone, something terrible happened to me: I became my mother, unable to speak.
    She said “Hello?” three or four times, growing angrier with each delivery, until I finally got the words past the lump in my throat. “It’s me,” I said.
    “Who’s me?” Tina said. Then: “Josephine Olivia? Josephine?”
    Some people hate their names. I don’t hate mine. I just think Josephine Olivia is perfect for somebody else. Anybody else. By the time I reached puberty, I insisted that everyone call me Josie. Not Josephine. Not ever. Tina would tease me about it, calling me Josephine and then saying “Oops!” as though she’d forgotten how much I disliked it. She said “Oops!” so often she began calling me Josephine Oops until I poured a can of turpentine in her underwear drawer and told her why. Her full name, by the way, is Christina Abigail. The second time I called her Abigail, she hit me on the head with a book.
    “Gabe’s dead,” I managed to get out.
    “Oh my god. How? At work?”
    “Outside our house. On the beach last night. They say …” I swallowed the lump. “They say he shot himself.”
    “Oh my god.” Tina is not much on originality about anything, including her expressions of surprise. “Are you okay?”
    “Well …” I didn’t have an answer for that.
    “Oh my god. I’m coming down.”
    “That’s not necessary, Tina—”
    “I’m catching a plane this morning. I’ll call you from the airport. Oh my god. What are the funeral arrangements?”
    “The what?”
    She was losing her patience. I was supposed to be the cooperative victim, I guess. “
The
arrangements.
Who’s taking care of them? When’ll he be buried?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “That’s what I figured. I’ll be there tonight. Don’t bother coming to the airport to pick me up.” The thought had never entered my mind. “I’ll take a limo. We’ll stay up and talk all night if we have to. Gabe’s killed himself. Oh my god. Love you.”
    “Me too,” I said. And she was gone.
    I slumped back in the chair. My husband was shot to death practically in our own backyard, and my sister was coming to stay with me, maybe for a week. How much punishment could one woman take?

6.
    O ne of my neighbours has a helicopter on his front porch. It has sat there for more than a year. Not the whole helicopter, just the part you ride in that looks like a large white plastic egg on skis. The rest of it, the blades that spin on top and the long tail with the small propeller on the back, are missing, but Gabe assured me it’s a real helicopter. We would pass the house with the helicopter on the porch during our walks along Beach Boulevard on summer nights, when we wanted to avoid the boardwalk crowded with skaters and skateboarders and bicyclists and joggers and retired people and vagrant hoodlums.