Dead Cold (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #2)(16)

‘It’s true,’ Clara said, looking around for a chair. The room was full, people yakking away in French and English. She eventually sat on the floor, putting her overflowing plate on the coffee table. Peter joined her.

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘Hair,’ said Myrna.

‘Save yourself,’ said Olivier, reaching out to Peter. ‘It’s too late for us, but you can get away. I understand there’s a conversation on prostates at the other sofa.’

‘Sit down.’ Clara pulled Peter down by his belt. ‘Those girls over there all think they have it bad.’

‘But wait ’til menopause,’ confirmed Myrna.

‘Prostates?’ Peter asked Olivier.

‘And hockey,’ he sighed.

‘Are you guys listening?’

‘It’s so hard being a woman,’ said Gabri. ‘There’s our periods, then losing our virginity to you beasts, then the kids leave and we no longer know who we are—’

‘Having given the best years of our lives to thankless bastards and selfish kids,’ nodded Olivier.

‘Then, just when we’ve signed up for pottery and Thai cooking courses, bang—’

‘Or not,’ said Peter, smiling at Clara.

‘Watch it, boy.’ She poked him with her fork.

‘Menopause,’ said Olivier in a sonorous CBC announcer voice.

‘I’ve never told a man to pause,’ said Gabri.

‘The first gray hair. Now there’s a bad hair day,’ said Myrna, ignoring the guys.

‘How about when the first one appears on your chin,’ said Ruth. ‘That’s a bad hair day.’

‘God, it’s true.’ Mother laughed, joining them. ‘The long wiry ones.’

‘Don’t forget the moustache,’ said Kaye, creaking down where Myrna offered her seat. Gabri got up so that Mother could sit. ‘We have a solemn pact.’ Kaye nodded to Mother and looked over at Em talking to some neighbors. ‘If one of us is unconscious in the hospital, the others will make sure it’s pulled.’

‘The plug?’ Ruth asked.

‘The chin hair,’ said Kaye, eyeing Ruth with some alarm. ‘You’re off the visitors list. Mother, make a note.’

‘Oh, I made that note years ago.’

Clara took her empty plate back to the buffet and returned a few minutes later with trifle and brownies and Licorice Allsorts.

‘I stole them from the kids,’ she said to Myrna. ‘Better hurry up if you want some. They’re getting wise.’

‘I’ll just eat yours,’ and Myrna actually attempted to take one before a fork menaced her hand.

‘Addicts, you’re pathetic.’ Myrna looked over at Ruth’s vase of Scotch, half gone.

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Ruth, following Myrna’s gaze. ‘This used to be my drug of choice. In my teens my drug of choice was acceptance, in my twenties it was approval, in my thirties it was love, in my forties it was Scotch. That lasted a while,’ she admitted. ‘Now all I really crave is a good bowel movement.’

‘I’m addicted to meditation,’ said Mother, eating her third helping of trifle.

‘There’s an idea.’ Kaye turned to Ruth. ‘You could visit Mother at the center. She can meditate the crap out of anyone.’

Silence met this statement. Clara scrambled for something to replace the repulsive image that had sprung to her mind and was grateful when Gabri picked up a book from the stack under the coffee table and waved it around.

‘Speaking of crap, isn’t this CC’s book? Em must have bought it at your launch, Ruth.’

‘She probably sold as many as I did. You’re all traitors,’ said Ruth.

‘Listen to this.’ Gabri opened Be Calm, Clara noticed that Mother shifted in her seat as though to get up but Kaye laid a claw on her arm, stopping her there.

‘Therefore,’ Gabri was reading, ‘it stands to reason that colors, like emotions, are harmful. It’s not a coincidence that negative emotions are given colors, red for rage, green for envy, blue for depression. But, if you put all the colors together, what do you get? White. White is the color of divinity, of balance. The goal is balance. And the only way to achieve it is to keep the emotions inside, preferably beneath a layer of white. This is Li Bien, an ancient and venerable teaching. In this book you’ll learn how to hide your true feelings, to keep them safe from an unkind and judgmental world. Li Bien is the ancient Chinese art of painting from the inside. Keeping the colors, the emotions, in. That is the only way to achieve peace, harmony, and calm. If we all kept our emotions to ourselves there would be no strife, no harm, no violence, no war. In this book I am offering you, and this world, peace.’ Gabri snapped the book shut. ‘She didn’t exactly have Li Bien coming out the yin-yang tonight.’

Peter laughed with the others but was careful not to catch anyone’s eye. Privately, beneath his layer of white skin, Peter agreed with CC. Emotions were dangerous. Emotions were best hidden away beneath a calm and peaceful veneer.

‘But this doesn’t make sense,’ Clara said, flipping through the book and puzzling over a particular passage.

‘And that other stuff did?’ asked Myrna.

‘Well, no, but here she says she got her philosophy of life in India. But didn’t she just say Li Bien was Chinese?’