Mary Lou Dickinson - Would I Lie to You

Would I Lie
to You?

Would I Lie
to You?

a novel by

Mary Lou Dickinson

INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

TORONTO, CANADA

Copyright 2014 Mary Lou Dickinson

Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund.

Would I Lie to You? is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Cover design: Val Fulla rd

eBook development: WildElement.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dickinson, Mary Lou, 1937, author

Would I lie to you? : a novel / by Mary Lou Dickinson.

ISBN 978-1-77133-164-7 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS8607.I346W69 2014 C813.6 C2014-905025-9

FSC PLACEMENT

Printed and bound in Canada

Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

210 Founders College, York University

4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca

For A. R. and a lifetime of friendship

ALSO BY MARY LOU DICKINSON

Ile DOr

One Day It Happens

Courage is what it takes and takes the more of Because the deeper fear is so eternal.

Robert Frost

T HE SOUND OF VOICES came through the wall beside her, but Sue could not make out what they were saying. She picked up a magazine from a small table, glanced through it and set it down again. The voices grew louder and she could hear people moving around. A woman came out into the waiting room and pulled a tan jacket off a hanger. Sue watched her push her arms into the sleeves as if she were punching holes in them and, sighing, head quickly to the stairs down to the main floor.

Had the woman made her appointment because she imagined it could change her life in some way? Sue wondered. Her own life was now determined by her husbands illness and that left her in ongoing fear that any breath might be his last. Who would not want to change that? She had seen the psychics name in Toronto Lifes recent list of bests that had gone on for pages. Best chefs, paint stores, physiotherapists, yoga teachers, hardware stores, and the best bakeries. Then had come the psychics. Just one was listed. Hans Jonker: A make you feel good psychic.

The woman who had just left had not looked as if she felt good. Sue wondered if she should leave before she was called into the inner sanctum. Still, she was curious. It seemed unlikely that she would see a crystal ball or tarot cards. But beyond images of reading palms or tea leaves, she could not picture how a psychic might work.

A man with a tawny beard and long hair peered around the door frame of the office. His eyes perused her speculatively. About her age, mid-fifties, and tall, his rugged hands looked as if he worked in the fields or with tools or engines.

Hello, he said. You here to see me?

Why am I doing this ? Sue wondered. She used to go to art galleries to find solace. Or walk on wooded paths in ravines . Instead, she had told the woman who returned her call that she wanted an appointment as soon as possible. Nothing else could make her feel good. Just as nothing else could take away the fear of losing Jerry. She had left only her first name on the answering machine. Not Sue Reid. Or Mrs. Reid. She was just plain Sue for this appointment.

Hes very busy, the woman had said.

I suppose he would be. Anyone who on the previous Saturday had been listed as the best of anything would have a rush of phone calls on Monday. But what did that mean? That he was popular, maybe. And if not, he soon would be.

The first available appointment is in two months, the woman had said.

Thats far too long. Sue was irritated.

I could call if theres a cancellation.

All right.

Sue had not expected to hear at all. She had thought about his name. Hans Jonker. It might well have been Joker. At least she had known it was a Dutch name. She had visualized him, on skates, with his finger in a dike. She had pictures of people from their voices on answering machines and they inevitably turned out to be older or younger, to have a different colour skin, to be shorter or taller, almost nothing she imagined turned out to be so. Although once in awhile, there was some uncanny resemblance to her fantasies.

I assume so, she said now. But if youre the psychic, youd know that, wouldnt you?

She waited for his reply without any of her initial enthusiasm. Of course, she hoped he would tell her that Jerry would suddenly regain his health, proving all the doctors wrong. She wanted to have this man put his finger in that dike that was being overwhelmed the more ill Jerry became. The more he was in pain. But she knew no one could say anything that would change that. It would not be true. At the very least, she wanted to know what to expect.

Well, that would be me, Hans Jonker smiled. I ought to know. He gestured for her to follow him and began to move back into his office with an exuberant swagger.

Sue sat still and watched him, as if frozen to the chair. She should not be here. It was too bizarre.

Come in, he said more gently.

As she stood up, Sue felt dizzy. Putting one foot in front of the other deliberately, she followed him slowly into his office. Gesturing to a chair, he sat down in an armchair on the other side of a small table. The room was not at all as she had pictured it, full of paraphernalia for his work. Instead, there was no hint of what happened here. It was more like a studio she might have created for herself. A place where she could paint and ponder.

Sue glanced out the large bay window where she could see the leaves of a tall maple, then at a Chagall painting that hung on the wall behind his desk. It was titled Peasant Life. The scene was of a man in a red cap with a yellow horses head beside him and in the background was a red house with two tiny figures dancing in the vibrant sky around a horse-drawn carriage. She knew it from an exhibition of Chagalls works she had found when travelling one spring in Europe near the Riviera . Why does the idiot have to have yellow chickens on rooftops ? she had wondered at the time . Even so, it had been then that she had begun to observe art more keenly and to think of putting brush and paint to a canvas of her own. Her glance moved to another wall where there was a large photograph of a yellow canoe in what looked like Algonquin Park, a canoe similar to the one she and Jerry had taken on numerous trips.

I dont know why Im here, she said finally, sitting down in the easy chair across from him. I know I dont want to hear bad news. Theres enough of that already.

First of all, let me introduce myself. Im Hans Jonker. Call me Hans. And you must be Sue.

Yes. She did not intend to give him her last name and he did not seem to want it. She was Sue Walters before she married Jerry. Odd to have changed her name so late in life, especially with her feeling that it was important to retain ones identity in a marriage. And yet, she supposed at that time, she had actually wanted to lose her earlier one and what went with it. All those things she was never supposed to talk about that she had managed to keep quiet. She watched Jonker press the button to start a tape recorder on the table between them.