In the First Early Days of My Death (6 page)

“Tell me,” she said, as she approached the two men.

The doctor looked up. “Wendy sustained a fracture to her skull,” he said. “An injury we might have been able to treat, if we had seen her sooner. But now — we're just doing what we can, trying to relieve the pressure, reduce the swelling.”

“Can we talk to her?”

He shook his head. “She's still unconscious.”

“Is it — how bad is it?” Noni asked.

“It's not good,” the doctor said. “I can't promise you anything.”

Alika stood up then and walked away from them.

“We're doing all we can,” the doctor said quietly. He stood up, too, and Noni could see how weary he was.

“I know you are,” she said.

I watched over my grieving husband, wanting to comfort him, but we were on two different planes. I could only follow him as he paced the tiled floors, silent and expressionless. He walked down one corridor and up another, turning corners or retracing his steps only when he met an obstacle. He was restless, the way he always was when I was late and he didn't know what to do without me. Left on his own, he was helpless. I wasn't sure how much he understood about what was going on. I tried to explain to him what had happened, to describe the way things were now, but it was an impossible task. Alika just kept striding through the halls, as if he believed he could walk his way back to me. He couldn't hear me. Unlike Noni, he didn't seem to be aware of me at all. He paused at the fourth-floor window and looked out across the river. What was he thinking? He was as unreadable, as deliciously dense and closed to me as ever.

Whenever the mayor's wife went downtown to play the video lottery terminals at Casey's bar, she wore a disguise. In the ordinary course of any day, all she had to do was take off her hat in order to disguise herself, because everyone recognized the mayor's wife by her hats. In summer, she wore a floppy straw affair, with a wide brim that concealed her face. Always. With a matching bag. Without the straw hat, nobody ever recognized her. She strolled the streets downtown, shopped and ate in restaurants alone, completely incognito. Nobody knew what she really looked like. Nobody had ever bothered to take note.

But when she went to Casey's, Louise took extra care to change her appearance. She tied her hair back tight, placed a brown wig on her head, and covered it up with a baseball cap. Then she dug in her gym bag for something casual. Sweats, maybe. Something baggy. She painted her face, heavy on the eyeliner and mascara. She placed a cigarette behind her ear, kicked on some beat-up runners. Then she raided the joint savings account or sometimes, when she'd run that into the ground, the retirement bonds.

She went alone, on a bus, so that nobody would notice her. None of the people who really knew Louise would be caught dead on a transit bus. And there were few enough who really knew her, anyway. Aside from the society functions she was forced to attend, she kept to herself. She often repeated that. “I wouldn't know,” she'd say, when pressed for gossip. “I keep to myself.”

One of Louise's favourite ways of keeping to herself was to fake a migraine. In fact, she was faking one this afternoon. She was, at this very moment, as she placed another load of coins into the slot, supposed to be lying down in her dark, locked bedroom with a cold cloth across her brow.

This morning, when she'd said she was jogging around Assiniboine Park, Louise had been lying in Mr. Bradley Byrnes's bed, with Mr. Bradley Byrnes. She had let him seduce her one night in the back seat of a limousine after a charity ball. That was three long years ago, and she'd been sleeping with him ever since. At first, she'd been thrilled by his attentions. She admired his impeccable taste in clothing and fine wine, revelled in his generosity. He was always willing to help out with a loan when she was short. He was a prominent citizen with his own consulting firm, so she'd been flattered when he asked for her advice on business matters or her opinion on municipal affairs. Lately, however, she was growing uneasy about Bradley Byrnes. His constant questions about City Hall bored her, and his increasing demands alarmed her. Yet she was unable to refuse him. After three years, she owed him a lot of money.

So much money that she could never hope to pay him back. At least not in cash.

Unless she got lucky. Extraordinarily lucky. And she knew that wasn't going to happen on these crummy little machines. All she was hoping for today was to win enough to replenish the household account before her husband decided he needed another summer suit. He'd been complaining lately that his green linen was getting worn. And last month, he'd started in about a new car. A convertible he wanted! Did he think he was twenty years old again?

She punched the buttons on the
VLT
with determination. Today was a lucky day. August twenty-second. August was the eighth month, and the two twos made four, and Louise was forty-eight, so she just had to win.

Rosa's grey eyes peered sternly over her glasses at her daughter. “If something terrible was going to happen, don't you think I'd sense it?” she asked.

“I guess so,” said Noni. She was a little doubtful on that score. She looked at the silver cross on the wall of the hospital chapel and wondered what it felt like to have faith. She closed her eyes and tried to commune with God, or at least to visualize Him, but she was receiving nothing. Only a dull throb where her knee had been, and a sickening ache in her near-empty stomach.

Rosa hadn't spoken to Alika yet. She'd wanted to light a candle for Wendy first. Noni watched her mother's stout body bending to the task, selecting the candle, murmuring the prayer in French.

“I want to be able to tell Alika I've done something, at least,” Rosa said. “Then, if we can't see Wendy, we'll take him home. Has he eaten anything?”

“Nothing. And he hasn't slept. He worked all night at the studio.”

“Then we'll go home and cook. He has to eat,” Rosa said. “We all have to keep healthy. Wendy is going to need us.”

“Mum,” said Noni. “I think you should know. The doctor says Wendy might not make it.”

“Might not make it? Make what?” Rosa began to walk toward the door, but Noni put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“Mum? I mean it. He said it doesn't look good.”

Rosa stared at her daughter. “You should know better than to talk like that,” she said. “Didn't I teach you anything?” But instead of leaving the chapel, she returned to the altar to select another candle.

As Noni watched her mother's broad back bending again over the thin flame, she was overcome with tenderness for her, and with a feeling of abandonment. Who would listen to Noni's fears? Behind her, the chapel door swung open, but no one entered. The door swayed back and forth and then stood still. Noni felt a sudden urge to leave the chapel. It was cold in here, and the silence was suffocating.

I drifted down to the chapel to look for my mother-in-law, because I thought that at least Rosa, of all people, would believe. But no — there she was, lighting a candle and concentrating so hard on her prayers she couldn't hear me. I adored Rosa. She was my favourite mother of all, the one I'd hoped to keep forever. But it annoyed me to see her lifting her eyes to the ceiling in supplication, when I was right there beside her. I felt ignored.

I wished I could leave the building, and the minute I made that wish I discovered how effortless it was. The ground dropped out from under me like a trap door, and I rose as if filled with helium. The air parted before my open arms, buoying me up as if it were water, and I swam, I sailed, I flew through the stained glass window of the chapel, over the forks of the rivers and above the trees. I knew I could keep on rising forever, through the clouds and beyond the sky. The whole earth fell away from me, relieving me of my house, my work, my entire city, even my own name, and for a long moment I floated free of it all, letting the story of my life unravel behind me. But then suddenly I wanted to gather it up again. I wanted to tell someone what had happened to me. It was a sad story, and the sadness pulled me down, back among the rooftops and the lampposts downtown. I could see the traffic in the streets. It was rush hour, everyone going home from work, except for me. I didn't have a home anymore.

To comfort myself, I visited all of my mothers — Mrs. Kowalski and Mrs. Keller and Mrs. Richards and even old Mrs. Lamb in the nursing home. Mrs. Lamb was close to the end of her life and she could see me. She smiled and nodded when I entered her room. But she was deaf now, and senile, and hadn't recognized me for years. I looked in on a few old friends I'd neglected since my marriage. I dropped by the library and listened to my substitute reading the children
The Little Mermaid
— the Disney version, of all things. I wandered through the city. I eavesdropped. I spied on everyone.

But it was Evelyn I was really interested in. She was the one who had murdered me.

The Wanderer

I went over to Evelyn's apartment and checked to see what she was up to. She was sitting at her kitchen table, wearing a pair of green flannel pyjamas and filing her nails. When she finished, she pulled a cigarette out of her package and placed it between her lips. I was dying for a smoke. I waited for her to light a match, so that at least I could smell the burning tobacco, but she was taking her sweet time. She pulled a movie magazine out of her purse and flipped through the pages. She picked up the matches and tore one from the paper book.

Then she changed her mind. She removed the cigarette from her mouth and laid it on the table. She stood up and stretched. She opened the freezer and took out a carton of vanilla ice cream. The cardboard was lightly frosted with little crystals misting the picture on the package, two pale, creamy scoops in a blue bowl. Memory shot through me like a toothache. Ice cream. Cigarettes. I used to keep our cigarettes in the freezer, and they always tasted best when they were cold.

Evelyn dug a spoon deep into the carton and stood over the kitchen sink, licking at it delicately.
Eat it
, I wanted to say, s
coff it up for heaven's sakes
, but she ate like a kitten. She didn't appreciate anything she had. What could you expect from a murderer?

She put the ice cream back in the freezer, drank a glass of water, and sat down to light the cigarette. I watched her inhale, imagining the circulation of the smoke through the lungs, the gathering of nicotine into the bloodstream. I thought I'd go crazy if I couldn't get some nicotine into me. I thought about her crime and how she'd be punished for it. Alika would see, finally, what she was really like. Noni had been right. Evelyn was dangerous. She was one of those grasping, lethal little people who didn't know when to let go. She was greedy. I might have felt sorry for her if it weren't for everything she'd stolen from me. I had nothing, and Evelyn still had everything. I'd heard that she had no family, and I knew she'd lost Alika. But she still had flannel pyjamas and vanilla ice cream. She had a stove and a refrigerator and a huge poster on the wall of the Rocky Mountains, snow-capped peaks and a little stream running down the mountainside. An ad for beer. She probably had beer in the fridge, too. She was smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine, and I was exiled out here.

I watched her get ready for bed. She brushed her hair slowly, at least a hundred strokes. It was revolting. I consoled myself with the thought that she would be arrested soon. I had a detective for a neighbour, and he liked me. I could tell. He didn't suspect her yet, but he'd soon catch on. She was so obvious. She had a picture of Alika right beside her bed.

“Mark?” said Evelyn. She whirled around in her chair. But she knew it wasn't her brother. Not tonight. Some other entity was prowling in the dusk outside her window. Something she couldn't see. She jumped into bed and pulled up the covers. What was out there? A mere wisp of a thing, too insubstantial to be glimpsed, was watching her. Was it malevolent? Evelyn hoped she hadn't summoned it herself, by mistake somehow. She remembered Sister Theresa's warnings about the occult arts, about fooling around with the dark side. She kept her bedside lamp on all night long, and all night long, the weak, invisible presence hovered at the glass.

Evelyn knew what it was like to be invisible. She'd been invisible herself, when she was a teenager. After Mark's death, she'd come home from school every day as usual and said hello to her mother, but her mother's eyes were always turned toward the window or the television, or she'd stare at the clock, astonished that her daughter was home already, that so much time had passed. Evelyn tried to engage her mother in conversation, but her mother always wandered away, muttering that she'd be right back. If she sought her out, she'd find her lying on Mark's bed, in a deep sleep. Evelyn was old enough to take care of herself, so she did.

It was only at bedtime that Evelyn grew insistent. At bedtime, she begged her mother to tuck her in, even though she was fourteen now, too old for such baby rituals. She would turn out the light and then take hold of her mother's hand, drawing it close to her, inhaling the scent of lavender bath salts on her skin. Evelyn held the hand tightly, kept it tethered to the bed while she talked, relating every detail of her day, because in the dark she could pretend that her mother was listening. In the dark, she couldn't see that blank face, that preoccupied glaze across her mother's eyes.

Shortly after Evelyn's fifteenth birthday, her father moved away to live with another woman, a colleague of his, who'd been transferred to Vancouver. He requested a transfer too, and the bank gave it to him. He spent two days packing and then he was gone.

During those two days, Evelyn's parents didn't speak to each other at all except to argue about Mark's things. Her father wanted a lot of photographs and some of Mark's books, but her mother wanted his room to remain exactly as it was. One day when Evelyn came home from school she heard them fighting over Mark's magic kit, her mother screaming that she had bought it for him and her father claiming that he was the one who'd taught Mark how to do the tricks. Finally, Evelyn's father called her into the bedroom and thrust the magic kit into her arms.

“Let her have it, then,” he said, as if he'd forgotten his daughter's name. “That'll settle it.”

Evelyn took the magic kit into her room and opened it up. Its various compartments held coins and cards, foam rubber rabbits, interlocking cups, colourful scarves, ropes, handcuffs. When Mark was alive, she'd tried to learn some of the tricks, but she'd been hopelessly inept, and he had only laughed at her. The one trick she had longed to master — the one that Mark performed with easy grace — was making the coins disappear in the magic box. Mark could place a dime in the slot and close the box. Then open it. Gone. But no matter how long or how hard Evelyn tried, the dime remained. She could not get rid of it. She could never understand the inner machinations of things, the way her brother could. He had taken the box apart once, to discover how it worked, and she remembered the way he nodded his head as he examined it, as if to say,
ah ha!
But he'd glued it back together again without disclosing its secrets. He kept the knowledge to himself, bragged of it. If he could build a box big enough, he said, he could make himself disappear.

Evelyn's parents divided up the photographs of Mark, his sports pennants, his toys. Not a word was said about the custody of Evelyn. She stayed with her mother. Not because her mother had won any arguments about it, but because nobody said anything about her. That was the way it was.

Her father called a taxi to take him to the airport, and he hugged Evelyn before he got into it.

“I'll miss you,” he said. He was facing in Evelyn's direction, but he was seeing right through her. She had become transparent. She was made entirely of glass now, and she could feel a crack opening up inside her chest, beginning to split her in two.

The three coins lay scattered on the table top where he'd left them yesterday morning. Felix hesitated at the entrance to the porch, tempted to gather them up and toss them, to continue from the moment when Paul's call had interrupted the reading. But instead he returned to the kitchen to put on the kettle. There was no way to complete the reading now. The wind had shifted, the patterns of change had done their work.

Felix kept the loose green tea in a tin canister which Alice had given him because she knew he liked Chinese art. Felix liked Chinese everything, although he'd never been to China. He lifted the canister from the windowsill and admired it while he waited for the kettle to boil. On a black background, a scene had been etched and coloured in fine lines. An ancient Chinese gentleman in a gold and red robe sat at the foot of a blossoming tree, while a chubby little boy hurried toward him, bowing as he ran, carrying a red bowl with golden chopsticks peeking out at the top. Two elegant ladies in silver pyjamas fanned themselves gracefully with ornate folding fans, and gazed at Felix with mild interest. They inclined their heads slightly toward each other, as if they were gossipping about him. The scene was interrupted on one side by a label providing instructions for the proper preparation of the tea. Felix liked to read these words: “Be sure your teapot (an earthenware one is best) is clean and warm. Add fresh drawn water that has been brought to a furious boil.” He also liked to lift the tin and read the words stamped into the bottom: “Container Made in England.”

The water came to a furious boil, and Felix removed the kettle from the stove. In the silence, he could hear the clicking of the keys from Alice's room.

Alice was writing a book. Every morning from nine until noon she sat before the keyboard in her study, typing and ceasing to type in a completely unpredictable rhythm. Felix found this comforting. It was like listening to the private movements of her brain. He could tell when she was seized with an idea or when she was hovering, hesitating, trying to coax the right word to surface in her memory. Sometimes at these moments he would hold his breath, waiting for the noise to begin again.

Alice had been an unexpected gift. She was an ambitious young journalist when Felix first met her, back in the days when he'd never dreamed she'd look at a man like him, ten years older than her and already prematurely aged with weariness. But he looked at her. And about five years ago, when she covered a case he was working on, he fell irrevocably in love with her. The case was a double murder out on the Perimeter Highway — almost a triple murder, for Felix had very nearly been killed during the car chase. He likely would have died, he thought, if Alice hadn't come to the hospital every day, bringing him cards and soup, encouraging him to walk again. The sheer surprise had kept him alive.

Now, Alice had taken a leave of absence from the newspaper so that she could write a true-crime book about the case. She was writing about the year of Felix's deepest trauma and his deepest joy, and she was doing it without him. He had hinted, several times, that he was willing to read her drafts, but she always just smiled, as if she didn't even hear him. And lately it was getting worse. She spoke to her husband, when she spoke at all, in an absent-minded tone about trivial matters — the insulation, the life insurance. When he spoke to her, she seemed utterly absorbed, as if listening with intense concentration, but not to him. She seemed to be keeping a secret that he couldn't crack.

Sometimes Felix wondered if he really had died that day on the Perimeter Highway, and everything that followed — the pain, the convalescence, recovery, his life with Alice — was a kind of happy afterlife. Because sometimes he felt tenuous, as if he were not really here or as if he'd woken up inside the wrong body. There seemed to be an awful lot of room inside his body now. He felt he barely filled it up.