Don't Forget You Love Me Read online

  DON’T FORGET YOU LOVE ME

  Rosemary Aubert

  ISBN: 978-1-927114-97-1

  Copyright Rosemary Aubert 2014

  Smashwords Edition

  Carrick Publishing

  Cover Photo by Gord Jones

  Cover Art & Design by Sara Carrick

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  CONTENTS

  ACCLAIM FOR THE ELLIS PORTAL SERIES

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Critical acclaim for Ellis Portal and the Ellis Portal mystery series:

  The New York Times

  “…in Ms. Aubert’s sensitive treatment, a character with great dignity and unusual moral depth.”

  Washington Post

  “Rosemary Aubert has a touch of the poet.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “Heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge.”

  New Brunswick Reader

  “An absorbing read that stays with you long after you put it down.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “Aubert has done a fine job…taking on some of the social issues that bedevil a big city…”

  I’d like to acknowledge the assistance of Peter Moon and Pat Capponi during the early stages of research for this book. And I’d like to thank Donna Carrick for her invaluable help during the preparation for publication of the manuscript, including her help in recruiting the excellent cover artist, Sara Carrick.

  As always, I thank my husband Doug Purdon for his continuing support in all ways at all times.

  This book is a work of fiction and all references to people, places, institutions, organizations and events are fictional and not intended to be taken as factual in any way.

  This book is dedicated to my sister, Linda Proe.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s nothing but a skeleton now. If you look up from the parkway at just the right moment, you’ll see a ten-story curve of concrete, its insides gutted. That’s the latest thing here. Take an old building, eviscerate it, plunk something new inside and call it restoration. But if you haven’t got the patience for that, build fresh. Beside the old Riverside long-term-care facility, is the brand-new building, a twenty-story wedge of shining glass. I don’t know how they’re going to keep all the sadness inside from the view of cars stalled in traffic in front of it on the highway.

  I knew Queenie had gone over to the other side long before the day she died. She lay motionless in bed, no longer asking me to wheel her to the window of the old building, where she had been one of the last patients.

  We had spent her final days of full consciousness looking out over the lush green park below, reminiscing about our days in far wilder parts of the valley of the Don River that cuts through downtown Toronto the way the blood system cuts through the body.

  “I’ll never go down there again, will I?” She asked me.

  “No,” I said, keeping my voice as light as I could, “and a good thing, too!”

  She laughed. It nearly broke my heart to realize she had got the joke.

  “I liked running the tent city best,” she said. Her voice, always deep and throaty had grown so faint that I had to bend close to hear her. She paused, as much to catch her breath, I thought, as to let the memories flow over her, memories of the time she spent catering to the poorest of the city’s poor, people who had nowhere to live but in rough canvas hovels set up at the very brink of the Don in its lowest reaches.

  “And I liked sleeping under the stars,” I responded as if the years I’d myself been homeless in the valley had been some kind of glamorous camping trip.

  But all those days were gone. Our days in the valley. Our last days by the window.

  The day she died, there was so little left of her! Silent, tiny, pale. I felt as if I were trying to hold smoke in my hand.

  There were no visitors now. At first there had been so many that I had considered asking the hospital to put some kind of hold on them. There were well-dressed people from Queenie’s church and from among her co-workers at the downtown shelter of which she’d eventually become the administrator. There were Native friends from the Cree reserve in Moosonee, the settlement far north of Toronto near James Bay, an offshoot of Hudson’s Bay. These were people among whom Queenie had spent her childhood and to whom she returned for a while to heal herself after her long bout with homelessness and despair. They uttered what sounded like prayers over her in a language I couldn’t understand. And twice they were kicked out for burning sweetgrass in Queenie’s room.

  And there were clients of the shelter who came, too, shabby unfortunates who, I could tell, had polished themselves up the best they could to come and pay their respects to the woman who had always respected them. At first the hospital staff was appalled at the appearance of these people. But after I lost my temper and set the record straight with the head nurse as to who they were and why it was essential to Queenie that they be allowed to visit, they came unimpeded.

  But they were all gone now. No one was left except the Reverend Kathryn Whittaker, the pastor of St. Ambrose, the Anglican Church of which Queenie had been a member for a longer time than I remembered.

  Kate, as her parishioners called her, was the nearest thing to an angel I’d ever seen, patient, kind, gentle and still beautiful with silver curls framing her smiling face.

  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

  Kate glanced at Queenie, who lay still, her eyes closed as if they’d never open again. She waited.

  And then, as if breathed rather than spoken, Queenie’s voice responded, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

  I felt the hot sting of tears and fought to hold them back. Still waters. There had been a time, only a few short years it seemed now, but there had been a time when Queenie and I had been the still waters beside which each of us had finally found peace.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t suppress a sigh. Without looking up from Queenie, Kate reached over and squeezed my hand where it lay on top of the covers of Queenie’s bed.

  They proceeded that way through almost the entire psalm until they reached the phrase, “mine enemies”. It was there that Queenie opened her eyes, raised her pale, thin hand and stopped Kate.

  “Your Honor,” she sai
d. It was her nickname for me and she had always called me that in my years of disgrace as a former judge and in my years of triumph as one having returned to the bench. “Your Honor, you gotta make a promise to me before I meet the Lord.”

  I would have promised Queenie anything, not just in this sacred moment of our final goodbye, but at any time I’d ever known her.

  I was afraid to touch her, afraid I would break the fragile thing that she had become, but she reached out and touched me. Even in her so lessened state, her touch brought back a physical memory of all we had shared as husband and wife despite the fact that we had never been young together.

  “Anything.”

  “You ain’t gonna like this,” she said, her voice becoming stronger. When I had first met Queenie, she spoke the language of the streets. She was tough, illiterate and a master at the slang that the people of the street spoke. But we had worked together to help her to learn to read and then she went back to school and became a professional and learned to speak like one.

  But in the past few days, I’d noticed, she’d slipped back to her old way of talking. It just wrenched my heart, thrusting me back to our earliest days together, our days of sleeping in doorways and eating out of the trashcans behind McDonald’s…

  “You heard about the Juicer?”

  I’d heard, over the years, about a great number of the reprobates that Queenie had saved in her work at the shelter. I assumed that this was just one more, that her mind was wandering back to the days in the not-so-distant past before she had retired from her position there.

  “What about him, Queenie?” I asked gently, willing to hear whatever she had to say whether or not it made any sense.

  She gasped then, terrifying me, making me fear that that terrible sound might be her last. She looked up at Kate, who, by the grace of God, seemed able to read Queenie’s mind.

  “She means the homeless man they called the Juicer because he practically lived on orange juice,” Kate said, making a face that made me think this was not as strange as some things she’d heard about. “He’s the man who died recently after being briefly apprehended by four Toronto police officers. There’s some question as to whether the so-called take-down was the cause of death….”

  “Murdered.” Queenie gasped again.

  “Sweetheart,” I said, not hesitating to take her hand this time, “You don’t have to worry about these people anymore.”

  “Promise me,” she said, so feebly that I wasn’t sure I heard correctly.

  “Promise what? What do you want me to do?”

  “Find out who killed him.” And this time her voice was as clear as it had ever been.

  “Don’t worry, my love, the police will look into it if there’s any question of…”

  She terrified me by struggling to rise up, lifting her head and shoulders from the pillow. “Your Honor, you gotta. You gotta promise me.”

  I touched her shoulder and she lay back down. I glanced at Kate. She nodded.

  “All right, Queenie,” I said, “I promise.”

  I didn’t really care what I was saying, but the sense of relief I felt when she lay back down, smiled and closed her eyes seemed about to equal the relief she felt at having elicited this ridiculous promise.

  Kate nodded again, picked up her Bible, though I was positive she didn’t need it to continue reciting the 23rd psalm.

  “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

  “Amen,” Queenie responded.

  It was the last thing she ever said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I forgot about the promise. The days after Queenie’s death were at first filled with the busy tasks that, I have come to think, are designed to distract from the coming pain of grief, the way an aspirin will push away a throbbing headache for a little while.

  First there was the arranging of her funeral, which had the biggest turnout of mourners that little St. Ambrose church had ever seen.

  Rev. Kate kept it simple: traditional prayers, a short, sweet sermon, a number of touching testimonials. Queenie’s Native friends performed several rituals, and this time, nobody stopped them. At the burial on a late summer day when the earth was still as soft as in full summer, I felt the rare urge to pray and I gave into it.

  At the gravesite, I was surprised to see quite a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been. One person who turned up was a considerably cleaned-up Johnny Dirt, an old reprobate that I had sparred with on the street for years. One of the counsellors from Queenie’s health center leaned over and whispered to me, “Isn’t it amazing how far Johnny has come? He works with us now.” When I went over to Johnny and thanked him for coming, I commented on the changes he had made in his life. He sneered at me and spat out, “If you could do it, what makes you think I couldn’t?”

  Another person who came to offer her respects was a mysterious middle-aged woman, quite attractive in a mature way, whom I didn’t recognize at first. I caught only a glimpse of her and when I tried to recall her name, dizzied by the events of the day, I failed.

  When the funeral was over, there was the straightening out of Queenie’s financial affairs, which took nearly no time at all, since all her assets were in my name.

  Ordinarily, there would have been family matters to deal with, but Queenie had no one and my own family, my brother and sister, my son and daughter, though they offered, could do nothing to really help.

  So it was a couple of weeks before I got down to what I have since learned is often the gateway to grief: deciding what to do with Queenie’s possessions.

  Neither she nor I had many. Our long years of living on the skid had robbed us of the need for anything but essentials.

  I gave her clothes to a women’s shelter. I asked my daughter Ellen if she wanted Queenie’s jewelry, but except for the golden wedding ring with which she had been buried, she’d had nothing of monetary value, and the beads and feathers of Queenie’s necklaces and earrings did not appeal to a young woman whose own jewelry was modern combinations of silver and stone. In the end, the jewelry had been taken by Angelo, my precocious grandson, who used it in a school project on Native creative arts.

  It wasn’t until I discovered, at the very back of Queenies closet, a box made of quills that I came upon Queenie’s most treasured belongings.

  The feel of the quills against my fingers as I lifted the box reminded me so strongly of all that was Queenie—the exoticness of her, the evanescent beauty, the combination of strength and vulnerability—that I burst into tears.

  I was so grateful that I was alone in her room, that there was no one else in the apartment nor likely to visit anytime soon. I felt I was alone with her, that I somehow held her in my hand, that for this moment, I had her back.

  I sobbed. It had been years since I’d cried. I couldn’t even remember the last time.

  I had been through the disgrace of being removed from the bench because of criminal charges. I’d been in jail. I’d seen my worst enemy end up with my exquisite first wife. I had lived in a cardboard box in the valley of the river. I had survived shame and storms, regret and revulsion, but I had never cried.

  Until now.

  When I finally managed to calm myself, I put the box back where I had found it.

  I made myself a cup of tea. Sat down. And stayed seated for six hours.

  Then I got up and got back at it.

  I recovered the box, lifted the lid, took a deep breath and peered in.

  On top there was a copy of Queenie’s and my marriage license. We’d only been married ten years, so the paper was crisp and the signatures on it bold and dark. I set it aside and lifted another paper, a little older. This was Queenie’s first license as a nurse.

  The real treasures were further down in the pile. There was a long, curled thatch of beautiful still-shiny black hair. I knew at once that this must have been from the head of Queenie’s daughter, Moonsta
r, who had died at an early age, violently on the street. And, to my amazement, I found a lock of my own silver hair. How Queenie had gotten that, I had no idea.

  At the very bottom were various tokens of Queenie’s life—gifts of the street we used to call them. A colorful button, a little iron beaver, more feathers…

  And then I found something I was astonished that she had saved. I found the index cards that she and I had used when I taught her how to read. They were carefully tied in a faded red ribbon. As I thumbed through them, I felt I held in my hand the history of our progression toward literacy. The first card in the stack, printed boldly in my handwriting and beneath that in an awkward scrawl in Queenie’s, said. “I am Queenie and you are Ellis.” The last card, in her hand only, now confident, said, “Between you and me, a promise made is a promise kept.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Juicer.

  I vaguely remembered the man. On the whole, I had stayed away from the shelter where Queenie worked. There had been a few reasons for this. I had street people I was helping on my own down in the valley, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to mix the two groups. Also, Queenie and her staff had their own routines, their own rules. I didn’t want to step on any toes.

  And of course, for reasons of confidentiality, Queenie didn’t talk about her clients or their problems.

  Except that once in a while she mentioned with gentle laughter that the Juicer had said this or done that. She found him amusing, charming, even. I was soon to learn that she had probably been the only person in the world who did.

  I saw him a couple of times, too. He was pale and he was pudgy and he was hairless. Not Native. Not at all like everyone else Queenie’s shelter served. The times I had run into him, he had made a great show of bowing and calling me Your Honor. It wasn’t, of course, affectionate like when Queenie used the term, but nor was it colored with tones of disrespect like it was when Johnny Dirt sarcastically called me that.