In the First Early Days of My Death (13 page)

I watched while Felix cooked dinner. He was making curry. From scratch. As if he had all the time in the world.
Well, you don't
, I wanted to scream. A horrible thought struck me. What if Evelyn got away with it? What if she wormed herself back into Alika's life and took my place? It was too terrible to imagine.

Felix, oblivious to this possibility, chopped up everything with excruciating care — onions and garlic and carrots and cauliflower and a big zucchini that looked awfully familiar. What was the matter with him? He had work to do, and instead he was forever cooking dinner and reading newspapers — he was a newspaper addict, this guy–and mooning after his wife. He heated olive oil in a pan and sautéed the onions with the garlic. Then he sprinkled cayenne pepper into a bowl of yogurt and stirred it up. When that cayenne-flavoured yogurt hit the frying pan, a rapturous, pungent aroma suffused the air, and a fierce hunger cut through me.

I felt very keenly all the things that I'd lost. All I had left was my dream of revenge on Evelyn, and now that seemed to be evaporating, too. Here I was, the victim of a gross travesty, the wronged party in a fatal love triangle, and nothing was being done about it. Was it possible that justice was merely an earthly thing? Nothing more than another possession, like a book to read or a bowl of vegetable curry? Would I be forced to surrender it, too, along with everything else?

Evelyn's boss telephoned to see if she was feeling better, and she said she was. He sounded sincerely concerned and remarked on the early onset of flu season this year. Evelyn hadn't caught the flu, of course, but she
was
feeling better. She hadn't seen or heard from that detective again. He seemed to have forgotten all about her. Like her boss, he must have believed her lies.

She'd been lying when she said she couldn't remember her activities the night of August twenty-first. It was true she'd been home that evening, but she remembered exactly what she'd been doing. It was the day after she'd found the new binding spell. When she first came across it, on a new magic web site, she'd been delighted. It was elegant and clean. She had all the necessary materials right in her apartment, and she resolved to cast the spell right away. But back at home, she had second thoughts. Even though the spell seemed simple, she didn't want to take any chances. She would practise, test it out on someone else first. Now, who else was sapping her energy? Who was else was harassing her, refusing to leave her alone, making her life miserable?

She drew a picture of a mosquito on a piece of paper, copying it from her old biology textbook. She folded the paper three times, tied it up with black thread, and put it in an old marmalade jar full of water. She repeated the words of the spell, which were eloquently sparse and easy to remember, even a little silly: “Do as I please, stay there and freeze.” Then she put the marmalade jar in the freezer compartment of her fridge.

That very night, the fogging trucks drove down her back lane and up her front street, spraying the neighbourhood with insecticide. In the morning, Evelyn had a dry, sore throat and a headache. But when she stood outside and offered her bare arms up to be bitten, only one mosquito appeared. It flew toward her, weaving wildly as though drunk, then fell dead at her feet. There was not another one in sight. The courtyard outside her apartment block was mosquito-free.

When she opened the freezer again, she saw that the ice had expanded, cracking the glass. She wrapped the broken jar in newspaper and threw it in the garbage. Searching among her cupboards, she found a plastic yogurt cup with a lid. She planned to use it that very night, when the timing would be most fortuitous. That evening, August twenty-first, a full moon would rise, lending its womanly powers to any spell cast beneath its light. Evelyn hurried home from her late shift at the convenience store. She lit a few candles, just to set the right atmosphere, get herself into the mood. Then she ripped a scrap of paper from her notebook and wrote Wendy's name on it carefully, in blue ink. She placed the scrap in the yogurt cup, filled it with water and snapped on the lid. At midnight, she recited the magic sentence as she placed it in the freezer behind the vanilla ice cream. Take that!

Before Completion

At night, while the world of the living slept, I could hear the dead whispering, calling me, coaxing me toward them. At these times, I took shelter in the library. I feared their siren songs, feared my own despair, the great temptation to surrender. And books were the only refuge I had ever known from such strange longings.

I'd always wanted to be all alone in the library at night, and now I could be. During the bustle of the day, surrounded by books that I didn't have time to read, I'd often imagined sneaking in after hours, stealing the luxury of time. I had time now, in abundance.

The dark rows of shelves were beautiful under the dim night lighting, as I'd always imagined they would be, tall monuments, like rows of gravestones in a cemetery. I'd always thought that if I could get in at night, I'd finally have a chance to explore the library thoroughly, to browse through history, biography, cookbooks, atlases. But now that I was here, I found myself drawn back to the children's section, to the bulletin board that should have been changed last week, to my own desk, my unfinished paperwork.

I saw all the tasks that needed to be done. The unshelved volumes in the back room, where no child could ever find them. A box of shiny new animal books that hadn't yet been catalogued. A forgotten stack of paperbacks about the weather, left over from the display we'd made in spring, when we studied the wind and made those kites.

I wandered into the fiction section. My favourite shelf was the one with the Children's Classics, the hardcover collection. The broad spines of the books were blue, green, deep chocolate brown, and ruby red, the titles stamped in golden, Gothic script:
Treasure Island
,
Alice in Wonderland
,
Heidi
,
Anne of Green Gables
,
Peter Pan
.

Peter Pan!
I would have given anything to open that volume and look at the watercolour illustrations, read that story again. To get past the covers to those thick, creamy pages, those letters, words. Sometimes I thought this was the very worst part of it all. The saddest. The least bearable.

When Noni drove Alika home from the hospital that evening, Evelyn was standing in the shadow of the lilac bush. As she watched him emerge from his sister's car, she stepped behind the branches, so that Noni wouldn't see her. Noni hated Evelyn. It must have been Noni who'd told that detective about her. Evelyn had been terrified for days, but now that she'd calmed down, she reasoned that Noni had probably sent the detective to her door just to harass her. He probably didn't suspect her at all. He hadn't even looked in her freezer. She was starting to relax. She was going to get away with it. She could barely believe her own power.

She watched as Alika searched his pockets, looking for his keys. He entered the house and turned on the kitchen light. Evelyn moved into the backyard, so she could see him through the window. She noted that Wendy's garden was full of weeds. So, Wendy was truly gone. She was lying in the hospital, defeated, and Alika was alone, or almost alone. Evelyn's things lay strewn throughout the house, unseen but surely emitting their scent, beckoning him.

She watched Alika's silhouette pace from the table to the sink and back again. He seemed smaller, somehow, but Evelyn didn't want to think about that. She thought instead about the curtains in the window, how sheer they were. Wendy had bought them. Evelyn would never choose curtains like that. She wouldn't want anyone lurking around, spying on her. No. If Evelyn moved in with Alika, she'd buy thick curtains, dark ones, and she'd change the kitchen bulb to a lower wattage. Better yet, they'd dine by candlelight.

Alika sat at the table in his usual chair and looked across at Wendy's empty place. He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands. For the past year, Evelyn had watched him through this window with a keen jealousy, adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream. It had been a painful year. But it was over now. Evelyn had won. So why didn't she feel like celebrating?

Alika began to pace again. His shoulders, once so broad and upright, sagged. Evelyn felt a soft pang rush through her body. She didn't recognize this feeling right away, but gradually, as she stood there among the mosquitoes, with the tall blades of the uncut lawn tickling her bare legs, she realized that it was pity.

Alice was in her study, conversing leisurely with her daemon lover. She would tap out a five- or six-letter word and then pause, as though waiting for him to answer. The closer she came to the end of the book, Felix thought, the more slowly she wrote. She was delaying, lingering, loitering sensuously. Unwilling to depart.

Felix put on his jacket and slipped quietly out the front door. He had taken to walking down to the hospital on those evenings when Alice was writing. He'd tell the nurses that he wanted to interview Wendy Li, and the nurses always told him she was still unconscious. But Felix would sit beside her bed and speak to her anyway, asking her questions and, lately, telling her things. About his cooking and Alice's book, and the goings-on in the neighbourhood.

Tonight, he hesitated on the threshold of her room, uncertain whether to enter. Wendy's husband was there, pacing the floor in front of the window. The hospital lights were dimmed at night, and the dark window revealed nothing except a reflection of the cold, white room, the sterile machinery, their own two bodies standing there, useless and bereft. Felix coughed and Alika looked up. The two men acknowledged each other without speaking.

Felix had spoken to the doctor. He knew it was foolish to hope for a recovery, that the machines Alika refused to turn off were only delaying, only prolonging, his loss. And yet at times it seemed to Felix that it might be possible to reach through and touch Wendy Li on the other side, the way he had once reached through the dark waters of the lake and retrieved that drowning boy. Pulled him by the hair up into the oxygen and returned him to his parents. Whole. A miracle, Alice had called it. Maybe it was.

“Any change?” Felix asked.

Alika shook his head. He turned away and faced the window, straining his eyes against the black glass, as though trying to penetrate the film that lay across the surface of things.

Alika was still unaware of me. I followed him as he forced himself to dress and eat and drive to and from the hospital. I worried that he hadn't watered the garden. He hadn't even entered it, and the weeds were taking over. A Canadian thistle had sprouted among the cabbages and was thriving — four feet tall, blooming bristly purple flowers full of bumblebees.

At night, Alika collapsed onto the living room couch without bothering to shower. I stayed close and listened to him breathe, longing to hold him, to feel the movement of his lungs, his heartbeat. I often used to suffer from insomnia over some trivial problem — the library budget cuts or one of Evelyn's hairpins. I'd lie awake and press my ear to his chest and feel his beating heart reverberating through his body and through mine. I hadn't even minded that he snored. I was glad to remember that. I'd have been ashamed, now that I was dead, to think I'd ever been so petty.

I left my sleeping husband and wandered out to the garden. It was dark now, and the bees had returned to their hive, but the mosquitoes were congregating. A new swarm had hatched in the bird bath, and they were hungry, looking for blood. Their high-pitched whining surrounded and enclosed me, and it was strangely comforting.

The night was muggy and dark under the new moon, and I longed for company. I rose with the mosquitoes into the air that was thick with the dusky smell of tomato plants — Alika should have been picking those tomatoes — over the lilac bushes and down the lane to the river bank, where they would feed on crows and sleeping sparrows. They didn't feed on me. I floated in the swarm with impunity, as if I were one of them, free at last of their itches and stings.

It was bad luck to voice any negative thoughts about Wendy, Rosa scolded Noni. It was tempting the gods.

“You've got it backwards, Mum,” Noni said. “It's hubris that tempts the gods, over-confidence.”

Rosa eyed her suspiciously. “Is that what they taught you in college?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Noni said. “But all I'm saying is that we should be prepared. The doctor says — ”

“The doctor!” Rosa said. “I suppose he went to college, too!”

“I certainly hope so.” Noni sighed. She was exhausted. She didn't know anymore what caused good luck and what caused bad luck. It seemed to her that a wild undercurrent of total randomness snaked and bucked beneath their everyday lives. And what use was luck now? According to the doctor, the worst thing that could possibly happen had already happened.

Rosa insisted that she'd have some intimation if Wendy was going to die, and Noni had always trusted in her mother's premonitions before. But now it seemed to Noni that if there was a veil between the present and the future, it raised and lowered itself at meaningless intervals, revealing the most inconsequential things, like the arrival of the garbage truck, and concealing the answers to crucial questions, as if it didn't understand, or care anymore, about the difference between life and death.