In the First Early Days of My Death (7 page)

I supposed I was partly to blame for my own condition. I should have read the symptoms, figured out what she was up to. After all, I couldn't claim to be ignorant about obsession. When I was in grade seven, I'd been followed for months by the man who delivered groceries from the supermarket. He came by one Saturday with a box of charcoal briquettes, when I was home alone. It was raining that day, and he was wet, so I made him a cup of hot chocolate. He was interested in the poems I was writing
 — 
a task my English teacher had assigned. They were spread out across the kitchen table and he sat there and read them while he drank his cocoa, and asked me a lot of questions about them, which I couldn't answer. When my foster father came home, he wasn't pleased. He told me afterwards I shouldn't talk to strangers, I shouldn't let them into the house. I didn't argue, I never argued, but I didn't obey him either. I was too young to understand why I should. I let the delivery man in again several times, on Saturday afternoons when no one was home. He liked my poems and told me that I had real talent and that he should know, because he'd studied literature at the university. My poems were mostly about squirrels and lost mittens and those kinds of things. But he said I had a way of rhyming words that moved him. I'd never moved anybody before. He also helped me with math, explaining negative numbers and repeating decimals so that I actually comprehended them, and my grades began to improve.

The delivery man's name was Danny. He was a lumbering, awkward fellow of twenty-five, too old to be hanging around the kitchen with me when my parents weren't home. Gradually, I came to realize this. There was something wrong with Danny. I stopped letting him in. I hid when he knocked on the door, pretending not to be home. That was when he started to send me his own poems. He printed them out with coloured pencils on foolscap, using different colours in order to emphasize certain words, like
breasts
and
blood
and
the blade of the knife
. He stashed these poems among the groceries he delivered, and one day my father found one under a sack of potatoes.

My parents complained to the grocery manager, and Danny was fired, but this only made things worse. He started to call on the telephone, so that my parents had to change their number. He showed up at my school, followed me on my paper route, stood on my parents' front lawn in the middle of the night, demanding to see me. The police spoke to him, but it did no good. Nothing deterred him.

Finally, my parents hit on the only solution. They called my social worker, and after a serious conference, decided to transfer me to another home. I ended up in another house in another neighbourhood, attending a new school all the way across town. Danny never found me.

But how could I have avoided Evelyn? Even if I'd seen how crazy she was, I couldn't have escaped her. It wasn't possible to move out and find a new husband, the way you could find new parents. Marriage didn't work that way, or at least I didn't think it should. I'd been stuck with Alika, wanted to be stuck with him. We'd been married almost a whole year, and I'd wanted to stay married the rest of my life. I loved him, terribly. And I loved his house. I loved the garden, with its fragrant, terrible disorder. I loved the earthworms, the bumblebees, even the weeds and the mosquitoes. I loved Noni, with her round, serious face and her artificial limb, and Rosa, with her flawed psychic power. Come to think of it, here was another disaster Rosa had failed to foresee. It was Noni who'd warned me, who'd shivered.

By the time Evelyn was sixteen, it was clear that her mother could no longer look after herself. In one of her rare lucid periods, Evelyn's mother realized she had better return to the home of her own parents, in England. But first she arranged to have Evelyn boarded at St. Bernadette's School for Girls in St. Boniface. “Of course you don't want to leave home, dear. You wouldn't want to leave your friends,” she murmured.

Evelyn didn't have any friends, but her mother didn't know that. She took Evelyn down to St. Bernadette's and introduced her to the principal, Sister Theresa, who assured them both that Evelyn would be very happy there.

St. Bernadette's was housed in an old convent that was no longer active, due to a lack of nuns. It was a beautiful old stone building, close to downtown, with spacious grounds, manicured hedges, and a soccer field. The dorms were clean and bright, and the girls they saw seemed happy, but Evelyn hated it. There was a yellow plaster Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall right above the bed that was reserved for her. His ribs stuck out, and he was bleeding bright red drops from the wound in his emaciated side.

“Don't make me go there,” she begged her mother later when they were back at home. “I want to go with you.”

Evelyn's mother patted her back and said, “I know, dear.” Then she had to go and lie down again, in Mark's room.

Evelyn phoned her father in Vancouver and explained the situation, but he didn't offer to rescue her. “Your mother's right,” he said. “It's not fair to uproot you. And her parents can hardly be expected to cope with a teenager at their age.”

Paul and Felix tried to recreate the event at the Li residence. Had Wendy been assaulted? Had she surprised a burglar? According to the locksmith, she'd been worried about someone trespassing in her house, but she hadn't filed a police report.

Paul had theories. Maybe Alika had staged an earlier break-in to make it seem that his wife was being stalked, to throw suspicion off himself before he tried to kill her.

That didn't make sense, Felix countered. Otherwise, Alika would have mentioned the break-in to the cops. He would have played it up.

Maybe Alika hired someone to kill his wife — someone whose previous attempt had failed, Paul speculated. For her money.

Felix shook his head. He doubted Wendy Li had any money, and he was pretty sure this wasn't a case of premeditation. If Alika was guilty, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, the usual domestic violence.

When they finally caught up with Alika at the hospital and drove him downtown for an interview, the results were inconclusive. Paul took the aggressive role, firing personal questions about the marriage, the finances, whether there was a history of violence, whether Wendy was seeing another man. He was trying to rattle Alika, get a rise out of him, but as far as Felix could tell, Alika showed no guilt. He didn't even seem to grasp the intent of the questions. Once or twice, a quizzical expression passed across his features. The question about Wendy's possible lover provoked a wrinkle of the forehead and a sudden excess of politeness, as if Paul were inquiring whether she'd ever been abducted by aliens. But otherwise, Alika was passive — still stunned, Felix guessed, by the consequences of Wendy's fall.

But had she fallen? Could such a thing happen? An ugly panorama of accident scenes flashed through his memory — chainsaws, automobiles, rifles, electrical wires, deep, deep water. Surely Wendy would recover. Felix couldn't imagine anyone so young and healthy simply stumbling to her death in her own home.

I'd never really been religious, even though I'd been baptized twice. Once by Mrs. Keller, who was Catholic, and once by Mrs. Richards, who got born again one summer and had all nine of her foster children baptized at a revival meeting one Sunday just before they took us all away from her. I didn't think Alika's family was religious either. But it seemed that whenever I looked in on Rosa, she was praying for me. I guess she was trying to cover all the bases, and I appreciated it, though I wasn't sure exactly what she was asking for. Watching her, I wondered what she hoped to accomplish. Did she want me to come back? Or did she want me to move on?

I knew I could move on, leave the earth. I had nearly done it that first day when I rose into the sky. But every time I flew too high, saw the earth so far away from me, I heard those other voices calling, and I grew uneasy. I came back to my home, my husband. I had responsibilities. I couldn't leave Alika. And there was no way I was going to let Evelyn get away with this. So I stayed close to the old neighbourhood. I patrolled St. Catherine Street, roaming from house to house, checking up on my family and on Felix. With so much time on my hands, I realized there were a lot of beautiful things in my neighbourhood, things I'd passed by every day when I was alive and never appreciated, like the tree on the corner.

At the very end of St. Catherine Street, in front of Felix's house, a huge silver maple spread out over the sidewalk, so that pedestrians had to push aside its lower branches to pass by. The first day I visited Felix at home, he was contemplating that tree from an upstairs window of his house. I could barely see him through the forest of poplars in his yard, so I rose higher, into the limbs of the silver maple. I saw a squirrel's nest there, and a pair of squirrels running up and down the trunk with seeds and acorns in their mouths. I remembered reading that squirrels worked so hard because half the time they forgot where they hid their acorns. I'd found that funny once.

Felix looked very serious, almost morose, and I imagined that he was thinking of me, of my demise. I watched him rub a palm across his forehead, pondering the problem deeply. He seemed intelligent. Dedicated to his job. Upholder of law and order. I was confident that he would set things right. But I wished I'd mentioned Evelyn to him before she got me. I wished I could report her crime like a normal person would, sitting in a police station filling out forms, pointing her out in a line-up. I'd have to leave that to others.

The wind was growing stronger. Black clouds were filling the sky. Felix Delano turned away from the window and disappeared somewhere inside his house.

I rose above the silver maple and looked down upon its crown. Its leaves were dark as iron in the evening light, and when the wind passed through its branches, it swayed and tossed, revealing the underside of its leaves, shimmering like pale sage. I had never seen it it for what it truly was — a giant being, rooted to the planet, rustling and breathing. It bent its great body with the wind, bowing sometimes toward the grass and reaching sometimes toward the sky, but always it remained, anchored deep below the surface of the earth.

I envied it.