Phone Calls After: The Bonnard Family Series, #1

By Gwen Enquist

Anna Bonnard, newly widowed, is staggered by phone calls revealing secrets about her husband, Mathew’s, life and death. With other family members needing support, Anna is crumbling under the weight of secrets.

Mitch, Mathew’s brother, uses reckless speed and motorcycles to cope with his depression and anger.

Marta, Mathew’s sister, stressed by a fledgling business and her 14-year-old daughter, has to compete for a space in Lauren’s life with Mitch’s friendship and a stray dog that claims Lauren’s heart.

Sylvie, Anna’s sister, lives with bouts of depression cycling through her life. Mathew’s death and her own secrets threaten to topple her fragile mental balance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gwen Enquist
• Release date: Sep 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781425112950

Gwen Enquist

Gwen Enquist discovered the fun and satisfaction of writing fiction in retirement. Enquist holds a Bachelor's degree in Nursing and a Masters' in Adult Education and has drawn on her 35-years of nursing experience to create believable characters who could be your relatives, your neighbours or yourself. She lives on Canada's west coast.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Anna

Nothing good ever comes from a phone call in the night. Drunks dial wrong numbers, teenagers are being held at the police station, or people die. Anna sat against the headboard, trembling, the down comforter clutched tightly around her neck. People die. Then hospitals call you in the darkest hours and you stumble through their doors and come face to face with your ruptured life.

The insistent ring of the telephone had roused her, first to confused wakefulness and then quickly to heightened alarm. A blind swipe for the telephone had connected with the nighttime water glass, soaking the unread novel lying closed and face down on the bedside table. Now, fully conscious, grief punched through her leaving a hole through her middle that was achingly empty. Mathew. Anna’s trembling hand reached to stop the ringing. It was another assault and it reverberated against her head.

The answering machine kicked in, halting her movement, as a tentative female voice, softly French-accented, spoke.

‘Allo. My name is Adrienne Duprès. I am try to locate Mathieu Bonnard. Mathieu who travel to Paris many times for work. This is the uh … correct number? I, uh, I, .uh, wish to talk to ‘im? Please ask ‘im to call me?’ A question, more like a plea. ‘I am home … he know, in Paris.’ The machine clicked off.

Anna stopped holding her breath. Her breathing was ragged as the memory of that night three weeks ago and that other phone call brought tears once again. She had been wakened at midnight by a call from the hospital telling her there had been an accident and that she needed to come. The caller was Irene, an ER nurse Anna worked with. She said that Jim, an R.C.M.P. officer known to them all, would come to pick her up. All the nurses in the ER called him Sweet Jim, partly because of the pocketful of Werther’s butterscotch candies he always carried, but also because of his sandy curls framing a round, gentle face. His appearance belied the tough core that permitted him to function in a job that often meant scraping parts of people off roadways. Irene’s message was solemn and kind. Jim is going to pick you up and take you to the hospital, Anna. They had called her sister to meet them there. The ER nurses knew Sylvie and insisted she could help.

When the horror of identifying Mathew’s body was over, Jim and Sylvie had brought her home. Soon there had been a house full of people, highly tense and tiptoeing around the tragic fact of sudden death. Even as they tried to ease her pain, there were many questions, endless pots of coffee, and consoling words while she sat in solitary numbness. She knew everybody was being so kind, so kind. But very little penetrated the barrier of denial that was keeping her from shattering into pieces.

Mathew was dead. Breathing more deeply and more slowly, she scrubbed at the tears and gathered the silky down duvet around her again. Mathew. Each new day and night added to her grief. And now someone was asking for Mathew. How can they not know?

She passed her hand listlessly over her lank hair. It needed washing. Maybe she’d do it today if she could summon the energy. Maybe not. Her hands had stopped trembling. The comforter was a warm cocoon, removed from the cold reality of her empty bed. She sat back against the headboard and gave the phone call a fleeting thought. Mathew had many acquaintances in Europe, especially Paris. There had been a lot of international travel opportunities with his work that had enriched both their lives. They had always brought back tangible memories – a rug, a porcelain, a painting – something to look at and remember the trip and the joy they had had. Such joy.

God! She groaned softly but audibly. She wanted a cigarette! She worked to suppress the urge with deep breathing. Five months after quitting cold turkey, withdrawal still twanged her nervous system. She knew the cigarette wasn’t going to happen. If she could handle Mathew’s death without smoking again, she wasn’t going to cave in because of a phone call.

With sleep an impossible hope, she moved the duvet aside and shrugged into Mathew’s blue terrycloth housecoat that she kept on the bed. It swamped her small compact frame and dragged on the floor. She thought about Mathew wearing the housecoat on weekends. He loved lazy Sunday mornings. They both did. She headed towards the kitchen. Tea in the night. Tea, the universal pacifier.

Shadows followed her through the hall to the kitchen door, murky greyness broken by a streak of light along the floor from the nightlight. The wood floor creaked with each footstep in the chill air. She wished she had put on the fuzzy slippers Marta had given her for Christmas. She hurried down the hallway on tiptoe where she stopped to turn the thermostat higher. She could at least have that comfort. She flipped the light switch in the kitchen and the glare hit her eyes like a headlight’s beam. Anna settled for the counter task lighting by the stove. The shadows didn’t bother her. In fact they felt like a type of shelter wrapped around her, obscuring the emptiness of the house.

When the kettle whistled its readiness, Anna played out the ritual of heating the pot and adding milk first to the cup. The ritual learned from her Welsh-born mother had a familiar sameness to it that soothed her, kept her focused in the present. She sipped the tea’s warmth and thought again about Mathew and how they had often shared tea in this kitchen when he arrived home late from a business trip.

While she smoked her last cigarette in the softness of the night, he’d gently chide her about the paradox of her working as a health care professional and being a smoker. He’d save stronger admonitions for the brightness of daylight.

They usually talked about the many events in their days apart, especially of hers at the hospital. Her work was emotionally draining and Anna, long ago, realized that when Mathew was home she coped better. He helped her to see the positives in many difficult situations. Once, he even likened her aid to people as a way of generating immortality. He pressed home the point that without her help perhaps they would have had no future. So by default, wherever their life took them, she became part of their immortality. She teased Mathew about being too intellectual. He countered that he wanted no dull thinking here. But now, he was gone, his own mortality decided in a fast slippery skid into a granite mountain. She was left to find her own direction – no easy task when the lights seemed to be out.

Memory-filled silence surrounded her. The kitchen clock ticked its unfaltering rhythm. Outdoors, late-season snow had started to fall in large flakes. Its floating waves of softness echoed the silence. She eased into her grandmother’s rocker and started a gentle rhythmic roll. She was out of sync with the clock, which irritated her, so she stopped. She settled the housecoat around her and let Mathew’s essence lull her to sleepy stillness.

Marta

At 6:30 in the morning the house was still wrapped in the pewter morning. Skiffs of late winter snow dusted the trees and lawn and muffled any intrusive sounds. But not the ones within the house. Marta stood at the bottom of the stairs, covering her ears with her hands, trying to block her daughter’s moans and shrill complaints.

Lauren’s daily tirade about getting up was wearing thin this morning. Marta didn’t like early rising either, but a newly launched coffee shop business meant starting the day before sunrise. If she didn’t ensure that Lauren’s feet were on the floor before she left for work she couldn’t be sure Lauren would get to school for morning classes. Indifference to attendance and sleeping late had happened often enough lately that another tactic had to be tried.

‘Lauren, I can’t leave you with covers wound around your head.

Enough already! Up! Now!’

The abrasive tone was set for another day. Marta was thankful to have the shop to go to. If she stayed home with time to think, she would fume about Lauren until she exploded. Were all mother/ daughter relationships this volatile – or just hers? The fact that Lauren’s father, Angus, never showed up for weeks on end didn’t help anything. Angus had been a passive presence in their lives when he still lived there, going about his job and leisure pursuits with solitary disregard for other activities of the household. Now, divorced from Marta, he saw no reason to hang around. He couldn’t handle Lauren either. So Marta was coping with her many roles with diminishing forbearance as Lauren’s adolescent willfulness gained strength.

Marta brushed her shoulder-length brown hair with forceful strokes. Everything she did was fueled by the energy of desperation. Her business had to make it. She had to be able to support Lauren and herself. She looked in the mirror to check her appearance. Without makeup she looked pale and stressed. Her freckles stood out in stark contrast to her bleached skin. She rarely used makeup but today she attempted some camouflage with foundation and a little blush and slashed some pink lipstick across her mouth. At least she looked more alive. She pulled her last pair of Dockers and a peasant blouse from the closet and had trouble closing the zipper on the pants. ‘Ahhg!’ She’d been hitting the fridge too much lately. Eating and stress were natural partners. And when the pastries at her shop beckoned, their instant gratification was too hard to pass up. She had to stop eating and promised herself that today, no matter how loudly scones and croissants called out to her, she wouldn’t answer. And tonight she’d take care of the clothes problem and do laundry. Maybe Lauren could be talked into helping. If only

…. But it was difficult enough just to get her to school and keep her out of the principal’s office, or worse.

Lately Lauren was pushing lots of emotional buttons. The awful fact of Mathew’s death was crushing down on them both, grinding away at the small reserves of patience and kindness remaining. But she couldn’t let disrespectful, strident and truant behaviour continue too long or it would become the new norm. She’d skipped school one day and Marta had had to go to the school to talk to the counsellor and try to work out a solution to Lauren’s current problems. That hadn’t been very successful. The daily disagreements and shouted abuses continued to create an atmosphere as brittle and cold as an icicle. The most recent argument was over green-streaked hair. Then there was the plea to have another piercing. Threat is more like it. She had finally agreed to a third piercing on her left ear. Lauren was becoming extremely strong-willed and Marta was reeling under the assault of pent-up grief and teenage hormones. There had to be a better way of coping with anger and sadness that wouldn’t destroy their relationship for years, perhaps forever.

Lauren had been turning to Mitch for comfort. She kept calling him and having long, chummy talks. The fact that her younger brother could console Lauren when she, her mother, couldn’t irritated her, fed the jealousy that Mitch and Lauren’s mutual admiration had always generated. Just two years older than Mathew, she had been closer to him than to the much younger Mitch.

Well, Mitch might be helping Lauren but who was helping Mitch? He didn’t seem emotionally close to anyone. You can’t count on a 14-year-old. She knew he talked to Anna sometimes but Anna had enough to deal with. The two of them still hadn’t returned to work, each languishing in grief too deep to climb out of. Anna, of course, would take time. A 17-year marriage was almost half of Anna’s lifetime.

Mourning for your husband was expected and sympathized with.

Mitch, on the other hand, was a brother. A manly man who rode motorcycles, had a taste for rebellion that Mathew’s steadying influence helped curb. Marta, too, had a hand in shaping Mitch’s life. But he was younger then and needed protection from their mother’s harsh discipline. Marta, ten years older than Mitch, had established her own strict routines and Mitch had been spared the severity of their mother’s anger.

She vividly recalled the time when he was three years old and she was thirteen. He had mastered toilet training but in his enthusiasm for playing ‘dump-truck’ with the neighbour’s little boy, had ‘forgotten’ and soiled his clothes. Marta had snuck him into the house and changed him and secretly washed his soiled jeans so that their mother wouldn’t bring the full weight of her harsh reprisals down on him. That was just one incident. There was the time when he was five and had found Mathew’s camping gear and had decided to set up ‘camp’ in the backyard. With the ground soaked from recent heavy rains, the gear unbound, the tent and sleeping bags were soon coated with mud. Marta had gathered everything up and hidden it in the garage until Mathew got home and she could talk to him without their mother knowing what had happened.

Now Mitch needed help and she had to do something. Together, she and Mathew had handled Mitch. Now he was becoming too self-absorbed, sinking into perpetual gloom and making statements about never returning to work, what’s the use? Mathew’s absence cast a depressive pall over Marta too. His loss as a brother was large. But his loss as a friend and mentor was monumental. He had been her prop through rough episodes in her marriage, then the divorce and through the faltering steps into entrepreneurship. She was just gaining ground with Café Matin when Mathew suddenly died. She had felt her confidence shake and shudder for a few weeks. But now she could see that life, business, was going on as before. Needed to, in fact. Café

Matin would not only provide financial security but was also releasing her from the stultifying effects of her narrow life. It was renewing her spirit and making her realize that life was full of possibilities. There was one less light burning without Mathew but she could still find her way. Sure, Marta had problems, but she was dealing with them. Sort of. But so far Mitch wasn’t dealing with his.

‘Lauren! Are you up?’ Marta shouted up the stairwell. Her answer was the bathroom door slamming with a sharp finality that meant Lauren was up but conversation was not on the agenda. At least she was up.

Sylvie

Sylvie had just wrapped her small body in a brocade dressing gown and had made her way to the kitchen for that first energizing cup of coffee when the phone rang at 7:10 a.m. She’d been up for over an hour now, using the workout equipment and planning her day. Family members always said that Sylvie had so much energy she should be running a company, be a CEO of some major operation. She kept up a frantic pace. Few people knew she was running equally fast on the inside. So fast that outside images were getting harder and harder to keep in focus. She was getting very tired.

‘Hi, Sylvie. Sorry to ring so early.’ Marta’s voice lacked enthusiasm and held no cheer for the start of a new day. Sylvie knew she wasn’t