Vanishing and Other Stories (8 page)

 

AFTER THREE WEEKS
of watching that woman deal cards, he follows her outside. It's nine o'clock and she's being relieved for a break. A muscular, bald man takes over the game and she walks away from the table. Tom follows her past the roulette wheels and the slots. Down a dim hallway and out a streaked glass door marked No Exit. She must sense him, but she doesn't turn around and she doesn't look at him when they're outside. She watches the heavy, drowsy rain fall onto the cement. This must be the staff parking lot: cars are parked next to a Dumpster, and there are two metal chairs against the building, sheltered from the rain.

She sits in one chair and puts her feet up on the other. She wears practical shoes—black and thick-soled—and she loosens the laces. It occurs to Tom that her feet must ache. She's not young and
has been standing for hours. She closes her eyes and he sees that her makeup has begun to crease and flake. She lights a cigarette and offers him one, which he accepts.

She's the one who talks.

“You could be doing better than you are.” Her eyes are still closed, and she rubs her shoulder with one hand.

“Pardon?”

“There are strategies.” For the first time, she looks at him. “It's mostly luck. But there are ways of increasing your luck.”

“I don't care about that.” It's been years since he smoked a cigarette and his voice comes out gravelled and dry. “I'm not here for the reasons you think.”

He would like her to be curious about his reasons. He would like her to ask, the way barmaids in movies do, “What's your story, mister?”

Instead, she closes her eyes and rolls her shoulders to get the kinks out. “Most people aren't.”

“You have beautiful hands.”

She smiles like she's used to this from men like him.
Men like him
. He's not sure what kind of man he is, or what kind he is becoming.

She pulls a deck of cards from the inside pocket of her blazer. “Choose a card,” she says. “Memorize it, but don't show it to me. Then put it back in the deck.”

He pulls out the seven of hearts then slips it back.

She shuffles, and the sound of cards landing one on top of the other merges with the sound of falling rain. She fans the cards out on the chair beside her, face down. There is no flourish, just her usual professionalism, as she brushes her hand over the deck and
pulls out the seven of hearts. “Here.” She hands it to him. “Keep it. Maybe it's lucky.”

Then she lifts the sleeve of her blazer—a stiff navy jacket that all the casino employees wear—and exposes her slim wrist and a cheap, plastic-strapped watch. He can tell from her face and the tired way she lifts herself out of the chair that her fifteen minutes are up. She stands and strides past him. It's not only her hands that are graceful—it's every movement of her lean body. She leaves him outside, and he watches through the clouded glass as she slips away.

 

 

HE WATCHED HIS WIFE
disappear piece by piece. First, the exterior that had attracted him: her left breast, then her right. Her hair, eyelashes, eyebrows. Then her insides: her lymph nodes, her lungs. Death progressed with slow, methodical determination.

He took a leave from work to nurse Kelly, and lived off the savings they'd meant to spend on a vacation in Italy. He bought her magazines, cooked whatever she felt like eating, administered morphine when she needed it, and even read to her from the Bible—a book he'd always studiously ignored. In the last months he washed her with a sponge and hot, soapy water that ran down her skin and onto the towel he'd laid over her bed.

During this time, he kept a record. He wrote down her symptoms, pain levels, and the drug side effects in a lab book he'd taken from work. He took her temperature three times each day and he monitored her heart. He did it because it might help the oncologist. He did it because he believed in accuracy and rationality and solutions. He did it because it was the only thing he could do.

 

 

THE CARD IS NOT LUCKY
. The next night he keeps it in his breast pocket but loses more than ever. It's nothing spectacular, just steady losses, hour after hour. Twice he stands up to leave but never makes it to the door. She watches him with something that might be empathy.

On her break, he follows her outside.

“What do you do? In your other life?” She speaks too loudly, as though she's in front of a crowd. “How do you make all that money you lose?”

“I'm a doctor.”

“Ah.”

“Not the kind you're thinking of. A researcher.” He pictures himself at work, his eyelashes against the microscope's glass. He has spent his life developing drugs for diseases even more aggressive than the one that took Kelly. The job used to consume him, but now he shows up late and is careless. The work seems too hopeful, too optimistic. He no longer believes that inevitabilities can be staved off. “I run a lab,” he says. “I don't deal with people.”

“You remind me of my ex-husband.” She pulls the deck of cards from her pocket. “He hated people too. And he gambled too much.”

“I don't gamble too much.”

“Paul and I used to have this exact conversation.”

“I don't hate people either.”

“What's your name?”

“Tom. What's yours?”

“I feel like I've known you my whole life, Tom.” She flirts like a woman who has practised and mastered the art. “It's like we've been married for decades.”

“That's probably not a good thing.”

“You must not be married.” She shuffles, Vegas-style. “Or you'd know that marriage isn't good or bad. You just fall into it, like any habit.” She holds the deck on her palm like a waitress holding a tray of drinks. “See this? A regular deck, right? But I bet I can find all four aces in the next half-minute.”

“That accent—where are you from?”

She fans the cards and two of the aces are face up. One appears in her hand when she snaps her fingers, and the last one—the spade—he finds in his shirt pocket.

“How did you do that?”

“A party trick,” she says. “Always goes over well.”

“Where did you learn this stuff?”

“I used to do it for a living.” She tucks the cards back into her pocket. “I toured the country with my husband. My then-husband.”

“A past life.”

“It wasn't much of a life. The show never did well. People didn't like the reversal—a woman magician and her husband, the assistant.”

He can imagine her onstage. She is all angles: ribs, slim hips, long tendons of the neck. He can imagine her in a sequined jacket, her hair slicked back, face covered in a mask of makeup.

“I used to cut people in half. Pull roses from my sleeve.” She speaks as though she is remembering a former lover. “My stage name was Miranda. Miranda the Conjuror.”

“That suits you,” he says. “Miranda.”

“If you think so, then that's what you should call me.”

He recognizes this as an invitation. That night, for the first time, he follows her home.

 

 

HE STAYS FAR BEHIND HER
and keeps his headlights off. It rains and her car's lights are blurred by the water. She turns down a badly lit street and parks in front of an apartment complex that looks nothing like the tall glass building where he lives. From a distance he watches her walk from her car to the lobby, and a few minutes later a light flicks on in a room on the third storey.

From that window, she must have a view of the highway and not much else. He imagines that her apartment is small and tidy, and smells of air freshener. The walls are painted a pale blue, and they are bare. The kitchen is simple and clean. There are dishes in the dish drainer and no magnets on the fridge. A fluorescent bulb gives off a bright, blue-tinted light.

But despite the apartment's cleanliness, there would be details that prove she is not the kind of woman with whom he would normally associate. The carpet in the hallway lifts in the corners, and the kitchen linoleum has yellowed. He can imagine what Kelly would say about Miranda's place. She would notice unmatched dishtowels, cheap kitchen cabinets, worn carpeting. He can imagine, too, what Kelly would think of this card dealer—when he is honest about her memory, Kelly wasn't always sweet. But if there is an economic disparity between himself and this woman, it's being slowly eroded by his habit. And if there is an emotional disparity, he hasn't seen it yet.

 

 

THE LIFE HE SHARED
with Kelly has begun to slip away. The friends they had—mostly other couples—are busy with jobs and young children. His parents live in another province and they call on weekends, but Tom is no good on the phone. Then there's the church where he went each week because Kelly asked him to. He had never been a religious man but had secretly enjoyed the Sunday routine. He liked the readings, the music, the sermons delivered by a good-natured rector. The tea and muffins afterward.

But it wasn't until Kelly was admitted to the hospital that he prayed. It took him a while to get the hang of it. He tried to pray to the God of Light that Kelly favoured, but as her condition worsened, that god satisfied him less and less. The god Tom knew was a darker thing. A murky, underwater god. A god who said,
Sometimes there is light
. A god capable of beauty and cruelty and—Tom prayed for it, every night, on his knees—magic.