In the First Early Days of My Death (16 page)

Evelyn gave her notice at the convenience store and asked for a letter of reference. She gave away her furniture to a women's shelter. She had stayed up all night packing and now it was nearly dawn. The only chore left was to finish cleaning the kitchen before she called a taxi to take her to the bus depot.

She unplugged the fridge and set about clearing its contents, tossing out shrivelled lemons and leftover pizza. She took the ice cream out of the freezer and saw the yogurt cup. She'd forgotten it there when she stopped believing in the spell. It seemed irrelevant now. She set it on the counter. Then she stood at the sink, eating every last spoonful of French Vanilla out of the carton. She mopped the floor lightly one last time and then surveyed her empty apartment. She had no one to say goodbye to.

She thought about walking past Alika's house, knocking on his door, telling Alika that she forgave him. She decided that wasn't a good idea. Still, she felt the urge to make some final gesture. And she had the time. She picked up the yogurt container. Clear, tiny beads of condensation were forming on its plastic sides.

When the Greyhoud bus pulled out of the depot, the sun was just beginning to rise. Evelyn arranged a pillow under her head and settled in to enjoy the ride. Outside the window of the bus, the faint outline of her brother moved his hands through the air, practising some conjuring trick. What was it he was trying to do? Evelyn smiled. Mark had always wanted to become invisible. Maybe if she let him go, he'd finally learn to disappear.

When Rosa saw the running shoe on Alika's kitchen table, she turned pale.

“Noni! What are you thinking?”

Noni entered the kitchen. “What?”

“This!” Rosa plucked the offending runner from the table and shook it at her daughter. “A shoe! On the table! In this house of all houses!”

“Oh, Mum,” Noni said. “I just laid it there for a second.”

“A second is all it takes for bad luck to enter the house. I've told you that.”

Noni took her shoe and walked out of the kitchen, straight down the hall and out the front door. She stood on the steps, aware that it was a glorious autumn morning, but unable to enjoy it. Rosa was driving her crazy lately with her rules and esoteric codes. She seemed to believe that she was the only one who could read the world, decipher its secret injunctions, keep them all safe. Noni didn't believe she'd ever feel safe again, no matter how careful she was about where she put her shoes.

Rosa followed her out onto the steps. “Alika's up,” she said. “Come in and have coffee. We'll burn some sage and purify the house.”

Noni whirled around. “Will you stop it? Honestly, do you really think it makes any difference what we burn, or what we spill, or whether or not we break a mirror?”

“Of course it does.”

“Well, look what happened to Wendy,” Noni cried. “Wendy didn't do anything. Look what happened to Alika. What did he ever do to deserve this?”

“Maybe they did something and they don't know it,” Rosa said thoughtfully. “They're careless sometimes. But from you —” Rosa pointed at the runner Noni was holding. “I didn't expect this from you.”

Noni threw the runner onto the grass. “I suppose that's bad luck, too,” she said. “Throwing one shoe — one left shoe. Oh! And look at that — maple seeds on the lawn. Isn't that bad luck? And look, a bottle cap on the sidewalk. And this — what's this?” She reached down and picked up a plastic container from the bottom step. “A yogurt cup. That's bad luck for sure — a yogurt cup on your front steps. That spells certain doom!”

Rosa turned away. “I don't know what's the matter with you,” she said as she went back inside.

But Noni was staring at the cup. “It's frozen,” she said. “How could that be?”

She pried off the lid and looked inside. Nothing but white ice, with a scrap of something embedded within it. Noni squeezed the container until the ice began to crack, then she drew out the scrap. Just a torn piece of paper with a smudge of blue ink across it. She sighed. She didn't even want to try to understand this one.

Alika opened the door and said, “Mum says to come to breakfast.”

“I know,” said Noni. “I owe her an apology.” She thrust the cold container into his hand and entered the house.

Alika barely glanced at it. A clutch of floating silver maple seeds had caught his eye. It touched down on his open palm, delicate and light. He closed his fingers around it for a moment, then opened them and let it blow away.

Rosa called from inside. “Alika! The coffee's ready.”

But Alika wasn't listening. He was watching the silver maple. A gust of wind lifted its branches, pulling hundreds of white seeds from its limbs at once. He watched them coasting through the air, drifting across the lawns of the neighbourhood.

Warmed by his hand, the ice in the yogurt cup began to melt.

Alika sipped his coffee, grimaced, and decided to add sugar. He could never remember that he wanted sugar until he tasted the coffee and found it bitter. It was the same with milk in his cereal. Every time he lifted a spoonful of cereal to his lips, he was surprised to find it dry, lacking. He was a man with too many expectations. I guessed he wasn't stupid, after all. He was extraordinarily hopeful.

He seemed to be eating, finally, but it was hard to tell. The whole scene before me was disintegrating. Alika's face was smudged, his movements blurred, or perhaps it was my own vision that was failing. For a long time now my vision had been failing. My thoughts were disconnected, thinning out across the room, becoming watery. Nothing was holding together.

Alika lifted his spoon and suddenly, for a second, I could see the dull, unpolished silver, just as though it were real, and then everything began to pull apart as easily as cotton candy. The kitchen stretched wide, it wavered. And just before it all dissolved, I felt the insides of my body turning outward, entering everything.

Felix didn't know why he went to visit Wendy Li again. He hardly knew her as a neighbour, and her case was solved. But he went. Today she seemed the same as ever. Felix sat down beside the bed and said, “Hello there.”

He didn't know whether she could hear him or even, if she could, whether he should tell her all the things he told her when he sat beside her bed. He felt a little guilty about telling her the story of Marty Smith the other day. Maybe that wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to hear when you were in a coma. So today he kept it light. He told her about Alice and the baby, about the silver maple at home, dispensing its seeds until they carpeted St. Catherine Street like early snow.

A faint movement of the muscles on Wendy's cheek startled him. He wasn't sure, but he thought he saw the eyelids flicker.

“Wendy?” Felix took her hand in his and squeezed gently. He thought he felt a pressure in return.

“Nurse?” Felix called. “Nurse!” He tried to rise, but Wendy's white hand had gripped his own and would not let go. He stared at her face. Her features were still and pale, impassive. But her grip was so strong that he couldn't wriggle his fingers free. He tried again to call a nurse, but his throat had gone dry.

And then Felix saw the eyes open completely. The blue-green eyes. Looking right at him.

Rosa was rolling out dough for a pie crust and Noni was patching a rip in a pair of blue jeans. Alika sat silently, doing nothing. A faint scratching sound came from the direction of the door. Noni glanced up. Rosa and Alika made no sign that they'd heard anything. They were both absorbed in their own thoughts. Noni put down her needle and studied the wrinkles on her mother's forehead, her brother's scars, her own leg, lying propped up against a chair, all the way across the room from her. She thought about all the things they had lost, the ways they had all been marked. But she saw now that they had barely been touched. Not before this.

“What's that noise?” Rosa asked.

“What noise?”

“That. Listen.”

They all listened. A faint sound, like a delicate moaning, wavered thinly into the room. It stopped. Then the scratching began again, a soft rasp, like the steady scraping of fingernails on sandpaper.

Noni shivered. If Rosa and Alika could hear the noise, too… She strapped on her leg and walked out of the kitchen. She opened the back door and stepped onto the porch. There she saw the source of the noise. Alika had forgotten to bring Wendy's kite inside. It was leaning up against the side of the house, under the window, scraping against the stucco with every gust of wind.

Noni took the kite inside and propped it against the wall beside the back door. She returned to the kitchen, where Alika and Rosa waited.

“It's just the wind,” she said.

And then the telephone rang.

What I'd wanted was drama, the astonished release of suspense, crescendo, an ending that would crack the air like lightning after a humid day.

But it was all very quiet. Just before I came back, I saw the whole continent spread out below me; my vision widened until I could see the Arctic regions and the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and even Hawaii, way off to the side.