In the First Early Days of My Death (3 page)

According to family legend, it was only Rosa who possessed the power of second sight. Rosa could often predict disasters. She'd had ominous intimations just before the Challenger spaceship exploded, before Mount St. Helens erupted, before the assassination of John Lennon. These powers manifested themselves shortly after her marriage. Alika's father was booked on a flight from Maui to Molokai, on one of those tiny, dangerous planes that belong to small, disreputable airlines. Rosa had a feeling about this, a sinister feeling. She begged him not to go, and finally, he relented — not that he believed in premonitions. He thought she was making it up because she wanted him to stay home. In any case, the plane crashed, spectacularly. For no apparent reason, the fuselage cracked in two, right down the middle — a stress fracture, they called it later — and the tiny aircraft burst into flames, went down and sank beneath the Pacific waves. Noni's eyes had been dark and wide and serious when she told me this tale. Her mother had a gift, she said.

Why, then, I wondered, had they had that terrible car accident? Why had Rosa not seen, or felt, the truck approaching on the highway, not sensed the sleepiness of the driver? Why had she not been warned that her children would be traumatized, disfigured? That she would suffer that unspeakable fear, searching for her daughter in the ditch by the dark side of the road, finding her with her knee torn and twisted in that impossible way?

Alika had not been thrown from the car. He remained in the front seat, where metal and glass flew at his face like shrapnel from an explosion, piercing his shoulder and neck, breaking his jaw, perforating his right eye and destroying it completely.

You'd think a mother, a psychic mother, could have seen that coming.

The locksmith was supposed to come at three, but at six o'clock, he still had not arrived. Alika came home from City Hall, and we ate gelati for dinner and smoked a couple of cigarettes, but he didn't stay long. He had to work the late shift at the portrait studio. There was a backlog of orders for graduation and wedding prints, and Gino wanted Alika to process them all by the weekend.

“How was the rally?” I asked.

“Hot,” he said. “But a huge crowd turned up. Mrs. Kowalski was happy.”

“Get some good pictures?”

“I think so. The light was fabulous, and I used Gino's zoom lens.” He took his camera out of his bag and laid it on the kitchen table. “I'll develop these tomorrow,” he said. “Right now, I'd better go.”

“How late do you think you'll be?”

“Late,” he said. “Don't wait up.” He kissed the top of my head and left.

I put the ice-cream bowls in the sink and walked to the window to watch Alika drive away. He was sitting in his car at the curb, waiting for me to appear. I waved. Alika started the engine and drove down the street without even looking at the road, smiling and waving to me out the window. I didn't know it was the last time I would ever see him like that, so confident in his own luck.

I spent the evening cleaning. First I washed all the windows with vinegar and newspaper. Then I dusted and vacuumed the entire house. Next, I took Alika's camera up to his darkroom. I hoped he'd taken some good shots of the protest at City Hall, shots he could sell. Sometimes his photographs seemed to miss the point. He'd covered a friend's wedding last autumn and come away with more shots of the trees outside the church than of the people. A pile of these pictures lay scattered on his counter, a series of close-ups in which all you could see were two brittle veins of a yellow, translucent leaf. They were beautiful, but you couldn't even tell what they were unless he told you. I stacked them neatly and set them aside. I couldn't do anything about the rest of the mess in the darkroom. It was full of equipment I couldn't put away because I didn't know what it was. I just cleared a space on the counter, so I could leave the camera in plain sight, where he could find it, and closed the door on the chaos.

I got the silver polish from the upstairs closet, and a few soft rags. I went back into the bedroom and took out the photo of Alika's family so that I could clean the silver picture frame. The photo had been taken a few short months before the unlucky car crash, and Alika was small and unscarred, sitting high on his father's shoulders. I often studied the face of Alika's father, who I knew only through his infrequent letters. I'd never met him. Even Alika barely knew him.

The car crash had broken the family apart, extinguishing a marriage that was already growing cold. Rosa had become increasingly self-sufficient during her husband's long absences, but his failure to stand by her side while Alika and Noni were in hospital was the final straw. As soon as the children were well enough to travel, Rosa had brought them to Winnipeg to visit her parents. And, with their financial help, she'd stayed in the city ever since.

She had rarely taken her children to visit their father in Hawaii, and their father never came to Canada — he'd developed a fear of flying — so Alika and Noni had known him mainly through cards and letters, telephone calls and birthday presents. But as I knew very well, those things were much, much better than nothing.

I polished the frame and replaced the photograph. Then I laid out my silver brush and mirror and my silver music box, which had been a Christmas present from my mother Mrs. Keller. I kept a number of small, personal items in this music box. Nothing valuable, really. Unless you wanted to count the letter from my birth mother.

Mrs. Hill, my social worker, had given the letter to me when she retired. I was about twelve then, and fascinated by my mother's handwriting, sometimes tracing over the letters with my fingers, making the same curves and loops that she had made so long ago. The letter was written on two pages of foolscap in ballpoint pen. It was double-spaced and single-sided. You'd think she could easily have crammed in a few more words, but no. She came to the end of the second page and just stopped, signing the letter,
love, Your Mother.

The letter was mainly about my father, how handsome he was, etc. Unfortunately, however, “circumstances prevented” their marrying at the time, by which I understood, when I grew to be older, that he was married to somebody else. My mother had been too young to raise me on her own. But she'd had great hopes. She and my father would eventually be united. Then she would come for me. We would all be together.

That was why I had so many foster parents — because my mother believed for too long in the eventual triumph of romance. By the time she finally let me go, signed the papers and made me eligible for legal adoption, I was nearly four years old. Too big. Nobody wanted me for keeps.

My father, the letter said, was my mother's heart, her life. “You were not the product of some casual fling,” my mother wrote. “You were born of my first, my last, my most precious love. It is very important to me that you understand that.”

I understood, all right. I got the picture. A great drama had surrounded my conception and birth. A grand, greedy, voluptuous, star-crossed passion had occurred, and I had been left out of it.

I was the residue.

After I polished the music box, I planned to tackle the silver in the kitchen. We didn't have much — just the cake knife from our wedding, a tea tray, and half a dozen teaspoons. All of it was tarnished, tinged with a milky blue, and I wanted to make it gleam again. But first I decided to take another shower. I was sweaty from gardening and doing housework in the heat wave. My clothing stuck to me as I peeled it off. I walked naked to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and stepped into the tub. Then I heard a knock on the door. The locksmith, I thought. Wouldn't you know it? I dried myself as quickly as I could. The knocking didn't let up.

“Hold on,” I muttered. The knocking continued. Then I heard the front door open. Alika, despite his promises, had forgotten to lock it. I stepped out into the hall, intending to grab some clothing from the bedroom. But when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, I panicked. I dived naked into the hall closet and closed the door.

The footsteps came up the stairs rapidly and lightly — a small person, I thought. Probably a woman. Evelyn! Of course. She had let herself in with her key. Noni's question about Evelyn raced through my mind: “Do you think she's dangerous?” I wasn't about to find out, especially with me naked and her fully clothed. I heard the footsteps enter the bedroom, drawers opening and closing, a rustling sound. Then a feeble, dramatic sigh. She's obsessed with Alika, I thought. She's stalking him. She has — what was it called? Erotomania.

The footsteps left the bedroom, and I trembled a little as they approached the closet where I hid, but they passed on by, and I heard the door to Alika's darkroom open. Then there was silence for a long time. Too long.

There was no room in that closet. It was stuffed full of things we didn't need at the moment, like winter jackets, and things I couldn't bear to part with, like the lace veil I'd worn at my wedding last fall, and the butterfly kite I'd made with the kids at the library in the spring. We'd taken that kite out during a strong wind, and on its maiden flight it smashed into a tree and broke its frame, tearing one of its wings and losing its string. Alika said he was going to fix it, but he never got around to it. So it sat in the linen closet, along with all the other junk, preventing me from moving. My legs were filling up with pins and needles. The muscles in my calves began to cramp. I shifted my weight an inch, and the buckle of an old snowshoe bit into my bare heel.

I took a chance. I pulled a parka off the hook inside the closet and put it on. I reached for the doorknob and, as quietly as possible, I turned it.

I have never remembered opening that door. All I knew was that later in the evening, as I wandered the empty rooms of my house, I felt strangely detached. My head hurt, and I couldn't seem to get anything done. I'd planned to finish the housework and make a borscht from the beets, then maybe bake a special treat for tomorrow's dessert. I saw the cookbook lying open on the table to the recipe for chocolate kiwi pie. I felt a brief pang of hunger when I looked at the photograph, but I didn't do anything about it. I didn't even begin to tidy up the kitchen. The tarnished silver sat out on the counter, waiting to be cleaned. The breakfast dishes and the ice-cream bowls floated listlessly in the sink, the soap bubbles long since gone flat, the water cold. My sense of purpose had left me entirely.

I drifted into the living room and watched out the window for Alika to come home. There was something important I had to tell him, but I couldn't remember what it was, exactly. The shadows were lengthening across all the lawns in the neighbourhood. The sun had beaten down ferociously all day, shrivelling the roots of the plants. I thought that I really should water the garden. But I couldn't seem to leave the house. The sky darkened and a fat moon came up. After a while I could hear thunder rumbling across the prairie toward the city and then the lightning started and finally the cool, hard rain beat down. I knew I should close the window, I should close all the windows in the house, but instead I stayed there watching as the rain turned into hail, trying to understand what was happening to me.

Darkening of the Light

Evelyn James woke up with the unsettling knowledge that she was not alone. For years now, she'd been haunted by her twin brother, Mark, who was killed on a trestle bridge at the age of thirteen when he tried to outrace a freight train on his bicycle, and sometimes he'd appear outside her window at dawn, usually wearing his black and red magic cape, waving his fifty-cent magic wand in long swoops as if writing words in the air, some message Evelyn couldn't decipher. But this wasn't Mark. This was a thin white streak, a flickering presence that could barely sustain itself.

She tried her usual cure for insomnia, reciting in her mind long lists of the most monotonous things she could imagine, like the rows of overpriced canned goods at the convenience store: condensed milk, devilled ham, kidney beans, creamed corn. But it wasn't working. For some reason, her thoughts kept turning compulsively toward the garden in the backyard of the house that should have been hers. The pink roses that bloomed where her own had withered and died. She tried listing the names of the plants she had seen when she passed by: marigolds, zinnias, snow peas, leafy potato plants in straight, weeded rows, and cabbages, their outer leaves so wide and delicately thin it seemed they might flap their green wings and fly away.

Ever since that woman had moved into Alika's house, the ground had shifted, the earth had opened up and turned over, revealing a dark, fertile loam beneath its surface. Evelyn had dug out there herself, dug until her back nearly cracked in two, and she knew the soil was marbled through with clay like streaks of fat in a cheap pot roast.

But that woman had dug and the yard had yielded up its vitamins, surrendered itself with plump tomatoes and waxy yellow peppers, bumblebees and butterflies and poppies and even carnations — carnations! In Manitoba! And early this spring, the bulbs — dark, purple tulips and crocuses — no, this was not going to put her to sleep. It only made her angry.

She turned over and pulled the chain of her bedside lamp. In the darkness, she tried again. The jars this time: horseradish, mustard, mayonnaise, jam…

Felix Delano lay in bed with his wife, Alice, and his chow chow, Poppy. He was trying to wake his wife up slowly, beginning with her feet. He slid his calloused heel across her slim arches, across her ankles, hoping to tickle her. The dog woke up and looked at him, but Alice did not stir. Alice lay facing her husband, her mouth half open as if she were about to say something in a dream. Felix slid his foot up over her calf and wrapped his arm around her waist. He blew into the hollow of her throat. The dog whimpered softly and hopped off the bed. Alice smiled, but she was still asleep. Felix began to stroke her hair. He spoke into her ear. He named the things he would make her for breakfast if she would wake up.

Alice had always loved to sleep. But lately she threw herself into it with such great pleasure that Felix wondered if she were trying to avoid him. Every evening, early, she'd wriggle under the covers and snuffle into the pillow like a burrowing animal. Then she'd lie motionless for nine or ten hours. This morning, she was engaged in a particularly dedicated slumber. Felix gave up. He swung his legs out onto the floor and stood. Poppy followed him into the kitchen.

It was August twenty-second. The heat wave had been broken by the storm the night before, and the birds were chirping. Felix tried to focus on the day ahead, tried to put his wife's sleeping body out of his mind. He opened all the windows, letting in sunlight and air and the undulating whisper of thousands of delicate poplar leaves rising and falling with the morning breeze. He put the kettle on and walked to the front door to retrieve the newspaper. The whole street looked clean and quiet, relieved of the oppressive heat that, for weeks, had woken everyone at sunrise. He carried the paper back to the kitchen and spread it open on the table. On the front page, below the fold, the mayor's face looked up at him, smiling.

Felix had seen the mayor yesterday, trying to evade the protesters at City Hall, and he wanted to read about the rally. But first he glanced at the top story, illustrated by the photo of a smiling man in a white coat, the city entomologist. The mosquito count was levelling off due to the lack of rain. The entomologist announced that the worst of the plague was over. Felix smiled grimly, thinking of the rain water that had collected overnight in bird baths, ditches, old rubber boots and pails that people left out in their yards. Since yesterday, the city had become one gigantic mosquito breeding ground. He turned his attention to the story with the big picture of Mayor Douglas. The mayor was shaking hands with a large bald man in a dark suit, but the men were not looking at each other. They were beaming at the camera in a celebratory way.

The caption identified the bald man as the president of All-Am Corporation. According to the story, All-Am was ready to go ahead with the new casino complex that would revitalize downtown Winnipeg. The old buildings were already empty and ready for the wrecking ball. One brief paragraph mentioned that a citizens' group had persuaded a judge to sign an order preventing the demolition until they could make a presentation at a public forum. But the reporter implied that the citizens' group was a small fringe element, the order an insignificant hitch, a temporary delay. Felix read the article twice, but he saw no mention of yesterday's rally. Typical journalism. The reporter had probably spent the day at the beach.

Felix made his tea and carried it out to the screened porch. He sat on the couch and set his cup on the wicker table, next to the
Book of Changes
, which was lying open where he'd left it yesterday morning. The three coins in their jade box gleamed in the sunlight.

He held the box in both hands for a moment, contemplating the intricate morning shadows cast by the porch lattice and the poplar trees, the small slivers and crosses of sunlight that mottled the walls and wooden floor of the porch. A slight breeze came up, and the branches moved; the pattern shifted. He rattled the jade box gently and opened his hands, letting the coins fall through the air.

The mayor's office was on the sixth floor of City Hall. Not high enough for the mayor when he was in one of the majestic, proprietary moods that seized him unexpectedly from time to time. When such a mood came upon him, as it did this morning, he would saunter briskly down the corridors, descend to the basement, and follow the underground paths that snaked beneath Portage and Main until he was directly under the Commodity Exchange Building. Then he'd enter the elevator and rise to the thirty-third floor, where he'd pretend to require a consultation with the accountants of his construction firm — his former firm, that is — he'd had to sign it over to a blind trust when he was elected. Today, the accountants were not yet in their offices. It was far too early. The mayor nodded to the security guards, then used his key to let himself into the empty suite. He stood alone before the magnificent bank of windows that ran the entire circumference of the building. He savoured these moments, his whole city spread out below him like the toy towns he used to build as a child. He felt he could reach down and pluck up a tree, or a whole forest of trees, move a church or two, a department store. Maybe push the whole North End of the city a little farther north.

He smiled as his eyes passed over the site of the future casino. The publicity in today's paper was good, and it would only get better, thanks to his wife, Louise. He glanced at his watch. Where
was
Louise? She'd promised to call him after her morning jog through Assiniboine Park. She was on a fitness craze these days, and kept up her daily exercise religiously, despite the vicious heat, and despite the fact that she didn't seem to be losing any weight.

Noni's leg ached more than usual this morning. She wondered if her lost knee was developing arthritis. Stiffly, she sat up in bed and grabbed the crutch beside the dresser. Then she swung herself down the hall of her apartment and into the kitchen, where she prepared a breakfast of coffee and Aspirins.

She'd dreamed last night that she was flying a kite in Happyland Park, with Wendy. It was Wendy's red butterfly kite, the one that, in reality, had a crack in its frame and a broken string. In the dream, the crack had healed, and instead of a string, the kite was attached to a red dog leash, and Wendy was running across the grass beside the stream, trying to launch the kite into the air.

“Wait up!” Noni called, but Wendy ran farther and farther away, toward the little fork where the stream entered the Seine River. Noni couldn't keep up. Soon, all she could see was the kite ascending above the trees. It fluttered its way along the banks of the Seine, north, toward the Red. And then she'd woken with her knee on fire.

Noni rubbed her eyes, trying to clear away the wisps of the dream that lingered in her mind's eye. She had work to do. The pattern for a customer's new dress lay spread on the sewing table in her living room, still pinned to its tangerine silk, and the woman was coming tomorrow for a fitting. Noni would have finished the dress yesterday if Wendy hadn't called. She could have begged off, saying she was too busy. But Wendy, usually carefree and casual, had sounded worried, so Noni had gone. Not that she'd been much help, she reflected. She'd intended to set Wendy's mind at ease, but the story about the stocking had been sinister. How in the world could Evelyn's stocking end up under Alika's pillow? Noni couldn't think of any but the most obvious answer.

She gulped another Aspirin. She had to control the pain if she was going to accomplish anything today. She had to finish that dress and then start on the growing pile of mending and alterations. And she needed supplies. She glanced at the clock. The sewing shop wasn't open yet, but she could start a list. She needed pins, orange thread, two bobbins…

The telephone rang. Noni waited for the ring to come to a full stop, so she could pick up the receiver with no danger of bad luck. As she waited, a vague image of her brother began to form in her mind, but Alika didn't seem like his usual self at all. There was something odd about the image, something contorted, as if he, too, was suffering.