In the First Early Days of My Death (4 page)

Felix knew his peaceful morning was too good to last. Just as he tossed the coins for the third time, he heard the telephone ring. It was his partner, Paul, alerting him to an emergency right there on Felix's own street.

Minutes later, Paul briefed Felix as they drove one short block down St. Catherine. “Caucasian female. Unconscious. They're trying to revive her.” He pulled up in front of a white frame house. The street pulsed with the flashing lights of a rescue unit.

Inquisitive neighbours had gathered on the boulevard. One lady, still in her nightgown, stood on the sidewalk, peering with blatant curiosity into the open door. Felix pushed her aside, and suddenly he recognized the white picket fence, the morning glory, the lilac bush. He ran ahead of Paul into the house.

In the front hall, at the bottom of the stairs, two paramedics worked frantically over a small figure on the floor. A young officer crouched in the entry to the living room, watching. She recognized Felix and straightened up.

“Detective Delano,” she said.

“Who found her?”

“The husband. Came home and found her lying right there.” She pointed. “Says he didn't move her.”

Felix nodded. “What else?”

“Well, it's weird. Lady's wearing nothing but a parka. Looks like she fell down the stairs. I don't see how. There's no smell of booze. Christ, she's young. I don't know.”

“Anyone else here?” Felix asked. “Other family?”

“The husband's sister's here. They're in the kitchen.”

“I'll go talk to them,” Paul said.

Felix circled the medics, staying well out of their way as they worked. One of them pounded the woman's bare chest with a force that threatened to shatter her rib-cage. Felix stood as close as he dared and scanned the body for signs of violence. All he could see was a thick lock of pale brown hair, matted with blood, and a sunburned cheek, incongruous against the fur of the parka hood. He looked at the face. Yes. It was Wendy Li. The girl from the garden.

It was like one of those nightmares, those recurring dreams in which I was never prepared. In which I was lost or had lost something essential — my clothing or, worse, a puppy or an infant that was in my care.

At first, all I could think of were the dirty dishes in the sink, the fact that I hadn't made any pie, that we were out of coffee, and the house was full of people. What would they think? Noni was there, and our neighbour, Felix the cop from down the street, and a pile of strangers, and here we were with nothing to offer them. There was some kind of project going on in the hall, something urgent that I knew I should have been involved in. Everyone was expecting me to participate, but I couldn't remember how. I tried to concentrate on what they were saying, but there were other voices, calling from some other place as well, and my consciousness stretched thin as cheesecloth, a torn and threadbare sheet through which I wavered, glimpsing the scene in hazy, disconnected images.

Then, in a moment of clarity, I saw myself lying there, naked in a crowd of strangers. So I relaxed. I was obviously dreaming, after all.

On the evening of their eleventh birthday, Evelyn James and her brother Mark went swimming at Happyland Park. They were giddy and full of birthday cake, not caring that the sky was overcast and the air was cool. Mark shivered uncontrollably by the side of the pool, drops of chlorinated water dappling his thin shoulders, his lips bright blue. “Are you cold?” she asked him, and he dropped to his knees on the hard tiles, suffered his first seizure, fell unconscious into the deep end.

Sometimes, the spirit of Mark appeared to Evelyn wearing a bathing suit, as if Mark had become confused and thought he died by drowning. But he hadn't died that day at Happyland. The lifeguard pulled him out and called an ambulance. At the hospital, the doctors took Mark away, and Evelyn sat in the waiting room until her parents arrived. She ran to them, crying, throwing her arms around both of them at once, but they peeled her gently away from their bodies and told her to wait. It was daylight by the time they remembered her. They came to the waiting room and sent her in a taxi to a neighbour's house. They stayed with Mark for three days while he had a lot of medical tests. That was how they found out about the tumour in his brain.

As it grew, Mark's tumour caused all kinds of strange behaviour, like roller skating off the teeter-totter, or trying to parachute, with a beach towel, from the highest limb of the crabapple tree. Or racing freight trains. Evelyn and her family had always believed this final, foolhardy act was another symptom of his dementia, but now that Evelyn was older, she wondered if it wasn't simply suicide.

Evelyn hoped that the tumour wasn't a genetic thing, like the blonde hair and the brown eyes she shared with Mark. Sometimes she thought she could feel it growing there, small and gelatinous, on the left side of her skull, behind her ear. Her left ear rang sometimes, a high sound, like a tinny sleigh bell, and sometimes she saw things that weren't really there.

Like this morning, just before the sun came up, that pale, uncertain smudge of light outside the window. A hallucination or a dream.

High in the Commodity Exchange Tower, the mayor thought of his wife with tenderness. This past year, Louise seemed to be emerging from the ennui that had enveloped her since the boys had grown up and moved away. She was taking an interest in the mayor's work again, in his city, and even, it seemed, in the mayor himself. Louise used to complain that Winnipeg was a hick town, but these days, she was enthusiastic about its future. A five-star, top-of-the-line casino would put Winnipeg on the map, she predicted, turn it into a tourist mecca. Especially with the exchange rates being what they were. Winnipeg would become famous and Mayor Douglas would be a celebrity.

Louise had even helped to facilitate the deal. When All-Am first proposed the development, City Council had hesitated. It was Louise who carefully researched the corporation's history and reported that they were reputable. It was Louise who discovered the loophole in the Historical Preservation Act that would allow them to demolish the Walker Theatre. And it was Louise, or rather, Louise's friendship with the newspaper's chief editor, that was responsible for the positive press the project was receiving now. The mayor's councillors were all — or almost all — convinced that the public wanted the casino, and a good majority of them had voted to provide All-Am with the forgivable loans and tax relief they needed to complete the project. The mayor hoped Louise could persuade her editor friend to give them even better press now. Their
PR
had
to get better, if the mayor was going to beat that ragtag band of protesters with their rhetoric about history and their damned injunction against the demolition. Somehow, he had to get that order rescinded. That was the only thing All-Am was waiting for now. As soon as the judge lifted the injunction, All-Am would light the fuse, detonate the dirty old Walker, and history would be history.

The mayor strode across the reception area, entered the empty boardroom on the east side of the building, and surveyed the Forks, where the rivers met. He had heard this land was once an Aboriginal graveyard, but he didn't believe it. In any case, it was a shopping mall now, with a blue steel tower. It reminded the mayor of the plastic turrets of the toy castle that had been his childhood favourite. He had long wanted to expand this mall, but the area had unfortunate limitations. It was bounded on two sides by important downtown businesses, and on the other two sides by the banks of the Red and the Assiniboine. The mayor sighed. If only it were feasible to reroute the rivers.

As the paramedics continued to work over the body of Wendy Li, Felix tried to interview her family. Alika sat slumped in a kitchen chair, elbows on his knees and head in his hands, silent. His sister, the young woman Felix had met yesterday in the garden, was hovering over her brother, caressing his bent shoulders and cooing phrases that sounded like French to Felix.

Felix began with preliminaries, their names and addresses, dates of birth. Each time he posed a question, Noni answered for them both.

“And you were born — where?”

“Lahaina.”

“China?”

“Hawaii. We're Canadian citizens now.”

“I see,” said Felix. “And, ah, your occupation?”

“I have my own business — I'm a seamstress,” Noni said. “Alika's a photographer.”

Felix pointed at Alika. “Doesn't he speak English?”

“Oh yes,” she said.

“But you were speaking to him just now in — what?”

“French,” Noni said softly.

“I see,” said Felix, again. He didn't. But in light of Noni's confrontational stare, he thought he'd steer away from the subject of their origins. “So, ah, you came here this morning because your brother called you?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly did he tell you on the phone?”

“He said he worked all night and when he came home, Wendy was lying at the bottom of the stairs. He couldn't rouse her, so he called me for help. I told him to phone an ambulance.”