Ride on a Unicorn

"Ginny?"

It's amazing how one minute you're leafing through an old Stephen King novel you never finished and then you turn and see the woman who was there when you put the book down decades before.

Almost like something out of Stephen King.

You know it's her because, in a blinding flash, your brain runs some kind of wet algorithm and figures, "Yeah, that's pretty much what she should like after all that time" and you're able to identify her with some degree of accuracy.

An enduring archived image of an unlined, taut, youthful face from the '90s is instantly replaced with the lived-in visage from the here and now. Those eyes, that mouth. It's her, alright.

Sometimes, for all that inborne wizardry, you still blurt something stupid like, "You haven't aged a day!" when both of you know, and possibly secretly hope, that isn't true at all.

From the other side of the shelf of the second-hand bookstore I could tell her mind had run the same program. We had a match. "Pete! It's really you!"

Impulsively we reached out to each other, but so much separated us. Barbara Kingsolver. Ken Kesey. Rudyard Kipling. Herman Melville (misfiled). Laughing, we hurried to the front of the store and there embraced warmly. I lifted her off the ground and we inadvertently knocked over a display of Best Books to Hold Up Furniture. The proprietor, who watched our reunion with some bemusement, didn't seem too fussed, especially when he saw I had that Stephen King novel still under my arm. A destructive, but paying, customer.

As I put the book on the counter, I apologized for the mess and started babbling to this stranger who couldn't care less about our chance encounter so many years later and he smiled as he rang through the sale. "Ah, books," he said as he packaged my purchase. "Bringing people together since 1455...while creating more introverts than we know what to do with."

In a moment Ginny and I were out on the street, away from unflattering fluorescent lighting, and got a good look at each other. There was so much to say and so much life lived to catch up on, we both suggested at once that we sit down for an early dinner at a pub we both knew around the corner.

We didn't know where to begin, but Ginny furnished me with my opening: "So how's Maeve?"

"She's gone," I said and in spite of myself and after all the months since it happened, I still got a catch in my throat as I reported it. Ginny's face crumpled on hearing the news and she reached cross the table to take my hand. "Oh Pete, I am so sorry. She was a beautiful and brilliant person."

She was. My foundation was suddenly gone and that had a lot to do with all the nonsense to follow, dear reader.

Trying to lighten the mood, I put the spotlight on Ginny. I smiled as I continued soaking her in, still processing the fact she was sitting in front of me. We spent maybe four full days together in our lives but they still shined as a beacon in both my and Maeve's lives. We thought and spoke of her often.

I wondered what Maeve would make of Ginny 2.0. Her face was older, of course -- softer perhaps, with a few lines carved by time and experience. The smoothness of youth was gone, her beauty a little more subtle, the sparkle in her eyes undiminished. Her hair, once chestnut brown and cascading past her shoulders, was now shorter and carried the hint of age, strands threaded with silver and grey.

"You're checking me out, aren't you?" she laughed. Maybe I could have been a little more subtle.

"Sorry," I chuckled. "I guess I can't believe it's you."

"I know! It's freaky! That I decided to walk into that store maybe a minute before you did to stand across from you at the same shelf. What are the odds -- a million to one?"

Trust me to pour cold water on perceived miracles.

"Actually it's more like 500 to 1. A U of T prof named Jeffrey Rosenthal wrote a book about our skewed view of probabilities and the thing you should ask yourself with chance meetings like ours is, 'Out of how many?' If you think about it, you've known hundreds of people over the course of your life, so the odds of meeting me are the same as bumping into your high school history teacher at the grocery store checkout or your gynecologist at DisneyLand. Equally mind blowing."

"Except I never did it with my high school history teacher."

Ginny smiled at me slyly. Now that hadn't changed at all. I had been wondering how long it would take to get even a cursory recollection of That Night.

I blushed. "Yeah, well, I would hope not."

I'm not sure what I expected when I finally got Ginny talking about her life. By the third drink it was getting pretty surreal. I had no idea the last time Maeve and I saw her, at that guy's posh villa in Saint Lucia, she had begun her slide into the darkest journey I could imagine.

She started with Carl, and Maeve's instincts at the time were correct. He was crooked, up to his neck in the Caribbean drug trade, his speedboats racing up the chain of Leeward Islands. Ginny said at first the life frightened her, but Carl was careful to keep her well away from the business, flying her to London or Paris when things got hot in the islands. The high life agreed with her, she looked the other way, rationalized the nasty stuff and focused on sailing, scuba diving and dinner parties.

Then Carl got busted and last she heard, he was doing time in a supermax penitentiary in Colorado. He must have been a very, very bad dude but he treated Ginny alright. But if Carl was very, very bad, Guillermo was the absolute worst.

Guillermo Hernandez was an associate of Carl's, based out of Colombia, and Ginny always got along with him when he came to visit their places in Saint Lucia and Mustique. He was sweet and charming and showered her with baubles. Once Carl was out of the picture, Guillermo swept her off her feet and whisked her away to the mountains of Colombia. There she became a mom and buddy to Guillermo's flock of kids from previous relationships; she learned Spanish and always looked on the bright side of life. For a while anyway.

Everything changed with a cartel civil war. Once you're ducking under a table clutching kids while gunfire renovates your living room, your perspective on life sort of changes. Ginny knew then she had to get the hell out of there. She packed a bag and made for the airport in Bogota. She got as far as the departure gate before two of Guillermo's goons grabbed her from under the noses of the security agents and threw her into the back of an SUV.

Ginny got quiet for a moment. She was never tearful as she told her story, it was a straight, undramatized recitation of cold facts. But here she stood up, looked around to ensure no one was looking, and then gingerly pulled up the back of her blouse. I saw the sickening burn marks from the red-hot cattle brand they pressed against her flesh as payback for her audacity in trying to get away from the kids. And from Guillermo.

I leapt to my feet. "Ginny, jeeeezuz! What the fuck?!"

Ginny hushed me and frantically begged me not to draw attention. She didn't want anyone to know she was there. I sat down, both angered and protective at once.

"What did you do then? And how did you get away?"

Ginny told me she was a good girl for maybe five years before she finally got her lucky break. Her mother died. Not the death itself -- it was an opportunity to get out of Colombia and as the only child, she had to go home to settle family affairs. Of course Guillermo knew better than to trust her to fly back to Canada alone. His nastiest goon was welded to her side all the way.

The next lucky break was that it was in the dead of winter and her minder Gilberto was a weenie when it came to sub-zero temperatures. He would insist on staying in the warm rental vehicle while she entered the law offices to deal with her mom's estate, and to plot a successful escape.

"You learn a few things from osmosis when you hang with despicable people," she told me. "My mom left me quite a pile -- who knew a Scarboro bungalow alone would yield a small fortune? But it was enough and I was able to set up offshore accounts to hide it. And once I was set -- I was gone. It was almost too easy." She smiled. "I'm hoping Gilberto got branded for fucking up his assignment."

"So...you're on the lam?"

Ginny reached into her purse, produced a passport, and pushed it across the table. It was of British issue and when I opened it I saw her grim face with the name ANNE SEDGWICK beside it. I returned the passport. "So you're Anne now."

She nodded. "I'm Anne. And Julie. And Huguette. I've got a number of bogus IDs. I keep moving, stay in hotels, Air BnBs, hostels. Sometimes I come here, the last place Guillermo would expect me to dare show my face." She pulled the mask out of her pocket. "Say what you want about the epidemic, it's a boon to people who have to worry about facial recognition technology. And trust me, I worry about it."

"How long now?"

She sighed. "Coming up seven years."

I puffed my cheeks and released it. "Man! But surely by now--"

"He'll never stop looking," Ginny said with a weary shake. "I know too much, seen too much, and worse, I humiliated him. We're talking machismo culture here. Cartel culture too. I also know they're looking because I still have a good friend on the inside. She keeps an eye out for me so I can stay at least a step ahead of them."

I frowned. "And you can trust her?"

"With my life."

It was getting dark and we didn't have anything left to say. Our reunion seemed drained of its joy, just the numb soak of reality on both sides of the table.

"Look," she said finally, breaking the silence. "It's been wonderful to see you again but I've become the girl your mom would have warned you about. I don't want to get you involved in my troubles. I am fine, I am smart and I've learned how to stay in the shadows. But it's no life to drag anybody into -- especially if you care about them. I just want you to know when I look back at my life before all this crap, I think of you and Maeve and the warmth you showed me."

I took her hand again and smiled. "Hey, you were our unicorn. Always in our thoughts. I really don't want you to disappear again."

She withdrew her hand. "Oh Pete...if Maeve were here, bless her, she'd grab that hand and hustle you into the street."

I shook my head. "No, you got that wrong. If Maeve were here, she'd say, 'Ginny is our friend. We have to help her. We have to think of something.'"

Ginny smiled wanly. "There's nothing to do about it."

"Come home with me. Just for tonight." It was out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

"Pete..."

"You look like you're sick of room service and could use a night in a normal house with an old friend. No one will have any idea where you are. I'm fairly sure the busybody old lady in the townhouse next store isn't connected to the mob, just a sewing circle that traffics in cheap wine. What do you say?"

I could tell I was winning her over. Facing another an evening alone in an empty hotel room with just the tube to keep her company, the prospect of getting poisoned by my still-evolving culinary skills must have seemed a little more appetizing.

"You got a deal," she sighed. We got an Uber.

I know what you're thinking. I sweet-talked Ginny back to my place so we could take a stroll down memory lane followed by one more ride on The Unicorn for old time's sake. But I'm not that kind of guy. Surely by now you appreciate I'm awfully slow on the uptake and have absolutely no game when it comes to women.

Yes, I did break out the photo albums, and we laughed and cried as I told story after story connected to the pictures of Maeve & I over the years, both of us hams for the camera. And Ginny finally got to see the pictures we took of the vacation in Saint Lucia, how she bowled Maeve over when she landed on the dock after her ill-fated parasailing ride and her wide-eyed glee after the dive we took together when I was falsely credited for rescuing her from being eaten by the six-foot blacktip shark.

"It must have been 15 feet long," she gasped at the memory.

"Oh please, Ginny!" I scoffed. "Twenty feet at least."

We had too many glasses of wine and when the clock struck midnight, I made up the guest room and got a hug for my troubles. We put aside The Other Stuff for now and took a short breather from our cares.

When I got up the next morning I found her in the living room peering out the window, the curtain gathered up around her as she scanned the street in front of my townhouse. I startled her when I flicked on the coffeemaker and I could tell we were back in the real world. People were determined to find her and I was determined to prove they'd never discover her down a dead-end street in Summerhill.

I blew off my meetings in the afternoon and after concealing her under a blanket in the backseat of my car in my private garage, I took her to a conservation area north of town and we went for a long walk on a wood-chip trail that wound gently through the lush, greening woods. The trail was flanked by budding trees and the air was crisp, carrying the scent of damp earth, fresh leaves, and the faint sweetness of wildflowers. Above it all a pale blue spring sky stretched above us, dotted with wisps of cloud, and the sun, just warm enough, filtered down in patches, casting a serene light across the forest floor.

It was a perfect day to get out and clear our heads. We heard the faint rustling of birds in the treetops, which did get Ginny a little skittish. I'd catch her looking over her shoulder now and then, eyes darting to the trees and underbrush, a tightness in her expression that didn't match the placid situation. Her fingers were curled a little too tightly around the strap of her bag. At one point she turned suddenly to look back down the trail, and I looked too.

The trail was empty. Not a soul in sight. "It's just the wind," I said soothingly.

We moved on to a raised boardwalk through a marsh and saw herons and turtles and began to encounter people as we neared a subdivision. But on a workday afternoon, there was only the occasional cyclist or couples pushing prams or old men walking their dogs. At first I could tell Ginny was doing a threat analysis on each of them -- a poodle wearing a Burberry coat with matching boots sure looked suspicious to me -- but eventually she began to relax and breathed deep the cool breezes of freedom.

Out of the blue she took my hand and instead of assigning any erotic intentions, I remembered the dive in Saint Lucia when she grabbed my mitt after the shark sighting. I suppose I was making her feel secure. When we got back in the car she decided to ride back to town in the passenger seat. "Thank you," she said with a shy smile. "I needed that."

Once home I put on my grease and blood-spattered (don't ask) apron and made Ginny a hearty dinner after our 20-kilometre stroll in the wilds. Since Maeve passed I was determined not to become one of those widowers subsisting on Kraft dinner and beans, although I have to admit those remained my go-to most nights. I served up filet mignon with a red wine reduction and roasted Brussels sprouts with pancetta and sautéed asparagus. For dessert: chocolate chip cookies, because hopefully the lady is impressed enough by this point and should be trained not to have totally outsized expectations.

We repaired to the couch and started watching Serendipity, my favorite John Cusack movie and perhaps a little too on the nose for two people fallen out of touch who come back together in the most unlikely of circumstances. I then threw on Top Gun, the movie we saw in a small theatre at the Saint Lucia resort but it was getting late and I could tell Ginny wasn't going to make it to the closing credits.

About halfway through she lay her head on my shoulder and looked up at me like Carole gazing up at Goose and whispered, "Take me to bed or lose me forever."

What could I reply but, "Show me the way home, honey."

Okay, THEN we had sex. I carried her into my room and regretted not making my bed (see Kraft dinner and beans above -- I'd become a bachelor, again) and hoped I hadn't left yesterday's underwear hanging from the bedpost because it would clearly be needed for hers.

I lowered her onto my fairly clean sheets, her arms wrapped around my neck, and my lips touched down on hers, like Maverick sticking the landing of his F-14 on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Our kiss began in soulful tenderness, but soon our hunger increased its intensity and danger to our dental work.

When we pulled back she smiled and said, "You knew this was going to happen." I sorta did.

As I began opening her blouse and she began fumbling with my ridiculously small buttons, both of us panting in anticipation of all the sexy sex we were going to have, she thought it fair to warn me that Ginny 2.0 had added a few new features while dispensing with others that may have been favorites with the earlier version.

"Just so you know my boobs are still fairly big but like me they kinda went south," she gasped as I finally broke through to her brassiere.

"No worries, I'll catch them," I assured her.

She also outlined a series of scars and puckers, in addition to the mean burn, and a tattoo of a boar just north of her vagina which I couldn't wait to see but otherwise didn't want to know more about. As she opened my shirt and began kissing my nipples, I thought it fair to note some of the changes in my landscape.

"You're perfect," she said breathily.

"Well, you say that now, but I have to warn you my penis has put on a lot of weight," I cautioned. "We may need extra lube and call the fire department for the jaws of life."

I got my good look at the boar -- I guess it's a rule to get a Brazilian when you live in South America -- and was thrilled to learn that my oral alphabet technique, much derided by experts as an idiotic gimmick designed to further frustrate women, still had the desired effect. Later when I entered her we looked deeply into each other's eyes but in spite of the bliss, we both began to tear up and by the time I popped we had both begun to cry.

"Why are you crying?" I sobbed.

"I found myself looking for Maeve," she whimpered, which made me cry harder, because that's what I was doing too. She was haunting the both of us and I hoped she'd taken a little pleasure in our lovemaking, wherever she was.

In the morning and with the sun streaming through the bedroom blinds, and still cuddling under the sheets, we began talking about the day ahead. No nature walks in the woods or strolls along the waterfront were on the agenda -- I'd been putting off meetings, necessary discussions with my former partners to sell my share in the small pharmaceutical supply company we'd run since the turn of the century. There were still a few I's to dot, t's to cross, papers to sign before I could move on with my suddenly changed life.

Ginny, for her part, needed clean underwear and fresh clothes and had to check out of the downtown hotel. As a precaution she rarely spent more than a week in a single location and was pondering a train ride to Halifax because airports were danger zones as well.

But I had another idea. "What about Hornby Island?"

She turned to face me. "Where's that?"

"It's off Vancouver Island," I explained. "It's an artist colony. It's remote, too -- you have to take a ferry, another ferry, and then another ferry to get there. It's got hiking, beach combing, even diving. I've got a place there and was thinking..."

Ginny sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes before getting up and heading to the bathroom.

"What? Did I say something wrong?"

I could hear a brief tinkling followed by running water and then silence. She padded back to the bed, arms folded across her still magnificent but gravity challenged breasts.