Mckenzie glanced briefly across the dark water. Illusions, he thought, all illusions. The surface beauty only camouflaged the ugliness that lurked below. Theft, death and pain. The reality of the city contained that and more. If you forgot that for an instant, it would devour you. A man had to keep his armour in place.
The slap of water against wood drew his attention. He looked down at the sloshing waves pushing against the wooden columns supporting the deck. It was too dark to make out details but the image of an abyss leaped into his mind - a swirling maelstrom ready to swallow up any who ventured too close.
“Oh get a grip you weepy, romantic fool.” His father’s harsh sarcastic voice filled his mind. “It’s only water and you have had far too much to drink.”
Mckenzie shook his head, trying by physical action to banish Marcus’s critical spirit. He turned and looked through the glass door back inside the restaurant. The impromptu party seemed to be breaking up. Everyone was standing around the table in the process of taking their leave. Eric and Angela had already started toward the door while Sandy was busily engaged in gathering up dishes and empty wine bottles.
What the hell am I doing here? Mckenzie began his own self interrogation. I don’t belong with these people. “Right,” Marcus’s voice was back in his mind. “They are all young, breathing and enjoying their lives. You don’t want to be around them. You want to be sitting alone in the dark back at my old apartment mourning a dead woman you have never even met.” Alex could hear the same scathing contempt Marcus employed in court when crushing an opposing witness. Now, it conveyed utter disgust with his only son.
Mckenzie had not spoken with Marcus for nearly two years before his father’s death. It seemed supremely unfair that now some six years after their last bitter exchange, he had to endure once more his father’s incessant hectoring. Perhaps he truly was mentally unbalanced just as Marcus had repeatedly suggested.
“Alex?” Brenda Stewart’s gentle and warm tone restored an element of concrete reality to the world. “Are you all right?”
“ I am getting a little too old to stay up so late. I just needed to clear my head.”
“Oh quit,” Brenda chuckled as she walked over and took his arm. “You make yourself sound like someone ready for a rocking chair, a comforter and a warm cup of cocoa.”
Alex sighed - a deep, if silent, groan of resignation. “Why Brenda?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you and Peter working so hard to be my friends?”
“Isn’t enough that we both like you? That we like you a lot?”
“I don’t think that I’m that likeable. Certainly not enough to justify the effort you two have been putting forward.”
Holding his arm, Brenda gently turned him until they were both leaning on the deck rail looking across the bay toward the glittering lights of the city. Brenda’s voice dropped into a conspiratorial tone.
“You under-value yourself Alex. When Peter and I were first married, he would come home and tell me stories about his cases and about this incredible police detective he had met- smarter, more dedicated, harder working than anyone else in the department. The detective who solved all his cases, caught every fugitive he chased, and was absolutely unshakeable as a trial witness. When I first met you, I expected you to have an S on your chest.”
Mckenzie could not suppress a chuckle. “Then you found out that there was absolutely no S.”
All the humour left Brenda Stewart’s voice. “No, you aren’t Superman, but when I met you I realized what Peter already knew. Alexander Mckenzie, you are the loneliest man that either one of us has ever met.”
Mckenzie tried to protest. “Living a solitary life is not the same think as being lonely.”
“It is for you Alex. You can’t fool us. We care too much about you to let you go on the way you have. I watched you tonight. You were having a good time, you enjoyed the company, the conversation, the food. Until something in that music disturbed you, you actually looked happy.”
Brenda turned her head to look directly into his eyes. Mckenzie almost flinched from the emotional intensity of her gaze. He had stared without reaction into the faces of profound evil on more than on occasion as a policeman. At this moment, however, the affectionate expression of a young pregnant woman, the caring look of compassionate nurse, bored directly into his heart.
“So here it is Alex. Peter and I care about you. I won’t say you can’t chase us away but you are going to have to work at it really hard. Like it or not, you are our friend. Peter and I don’t give up our friends without a fight.”
There was a sudden silence on the deck as if Brenda had expended every bit of the energy she possessed in her declaration. Then she hugged him, wrapping her arms around him and resting her head on his chest. For a moment Alex stood frozen into an immobile pose before he awkwardly, hesitantly patted her shoulder.
The male voice broke the silence. “So what do you think you are doing Mckenzie? Hitting on my wife?”
Mckenzie looked over Brenda’s shoulder at Peter, who was standing in the doorway, arms crossed against his chest with a broad grin shining on his face.
Alex dead-panned his reply. “I was just explaining to her that if you continue to be such an absolute disappointment, she could always move in with me.”
Peter laughed once again relishing the Mckenzie dry wit that regularly passed over the head of his co-workers. He took Brenda’s arm and mimicked a show of pulling her away from Mckenzie’s embrace. “Come on Brenda. We had better take this guy home while our marriage is still intact.”
Mckenzie felt a furtive sense of pleasure sneak back into his consciousness. It was the same aura of affectionate companionship that had enveloped him at the table, conversing with these two young people, their friends and their acquaintances. Laughter, teasing, and the occasional serious discussions had abruptly created an atmosphere of shared community. The carefully built walls of isolation with which he had surrounded himself for years had cracked. Perhaps he could rebuild them and regain the austere reserve that he had always seen as a key part of his character. But walking between Peter and Brenda, Mckenzie realized that even if those barriers were replaced, the Stewarts were going to be at the gate pounding incessantly, demanding entrance.
Back in the restaurant the goodbyes and good nights were brisk but still warm and well punctuated with firm handshakes and soft kisses on the check. “Come back and see us soon Alex” Sandy whispered into his ear. Mckenzie realized with no small portion of surprise, that he was nodding a smiling acquiescence to a request that might have sounded like a trite cliche in another mouth. It seemed that neither Sandy nor Mathew could exhibit anything except genuine sincerity in their farewells.
As they walked across the now empty parking lot toward the Stewart’s vehicle, Peter looked at him with an expression of tentative hope. “Did you enjoy your dinner?”
What am I supposed to say? Mckenzie thought. No, it was agony and I never want to do this again. Say something like that and watch Peter and Brenda’s faces collapse like children being told that Christmas had been cancelled.
“Yes Peter, I had a very good time. I liked your friends.” One again, to his surprise, Mckenzie realized that he was being truthful. Or maybe he had just drank too much wine.
“Matt and Sandy are great people” Brenda agreed. I’m just afraid their restaurant isn’t going to make it.
It probably won’t Mckenzie thought as he settled again into the Escalande’s back seat. A new restaurant was always a problematic enterprise and the competition along the waterfront was fierce. Still they might yet succeed. Even if they didn’t, he had sensed a strength in the Yeungs that drew on their relationship with each other. Like Brenda and Peter, they were sustained by a foundation to their lives they had constructed together. They