In the First Early Days of My Death

by Catherine Hunter

  There was the mayor, trying to maintain his dignity before the crowd of hecklers. There was the mayor’s wife, slipping into City Hall. She was trying to conceal her face with a newspaper, but Felix recognized her. He’d seen her that day in that mauve dress and matching shoes, the straw purse like a beach bag that she carried in the summertime. Felix had been standing just inside the glass doors of the City Hall as she’d slipped past, murmuring something about a migraine, her need to find a cool place to lie down. Yes. In the next photograph, Felix could see the back of his own head, and his own arm holding the door open for her. “I was there that day,” Felix said.

  “It was the day Wendy got hurt.”

  Felix looked up sharply. That was true.

  Alika nodded. “I took these pictures, took my camera home that afternoon, but never took the film out. I didn’t have time. I had to get to Gino’s. I was working the late shift. And when I got home — ”

  “I know.”

  “So I never realized my camera was missing until my mother found it the other day. When I developed the film, and saw what I had, I thought I’d better show you right away.”

  Felix wondered where all of this was going. “Your camera went missing?”

  “Yeah — since the night Wendy fell. But I never knew — I never looked for it. And then my mother found it.”

  “Where?”

  Alika was distracted, searching for a particular picture. “En-dessous d’un chou,” he said.

  “What?”

  “In the garden, under a cabbage. Look at this one.”

  Felix looked closely. City Hall from the outside. He recognized the windows of the boardroom, where the mayor’s wife had been resting in the darkness. But there was a light on in the window.

  “Then I used the zoom,” Alika said. He handed Felix the next shot, a close-up. Through the boardroom window, Felix could clearly see a man kissing a woman.

  A woman with a straw hat and purse. The mayor’s wife.

  “What else have you got?” he asked.

  Alika pushed the stack across the table.

  Felix flipped through every shot. In one, a man was exiting the building from the back, a man looking straight at the photographer. Someone very small and slim. Marty Smith. The kid he’d seen that morning in Wendy’s bushes. Not very far from the cabbages.

  Martin Dexter Smith gave Felix the fastest, most complete confession he'd heard in his entire career. The kid seemed relieved to be arrested, and was all too eager to paint himself as a victim. He simply caved, and the whole ugly story came out.

  Marty worked as a courier and file clerk for his mother’s boss, Bradley Byrnes of Byrnes Consulting, who had taken Marty under his wing and promised him a steady job as long as he remained discreet. It was Byrnes who was kissing the mayor’s wife. He’d seen Alika snapping shots and sent Marty after him to get the film. Marty had bungled this simple job badly. He’d followed Alika home and waited until he left again, without the camera. Then Marty drove his own car several blocks away before returning on foot. He knocked on the door, to make sure no one was home. Then he entered the unlocked house, looking for the camera, which he’d found, very quickly, upstairs in a darkroom.

  Felix winced at the pride in Marty’s voice.

  The sorry tale continued. As Marty had hurried down the hallway with his find, a door suddenly opened, right in front of him, and Wendy Li had appeared out of nowhere. In his rush to get past her, to get out of the house, he’d knocked her over. He didn’t mean to push her down the stairs. He fell, too, he hastened to add. He’d have probably been killed, if he hadn’t landed on top of her.

  “What did you do then?” Felix asked.

  “What do you think I did? I ran!”

  “Through the garden.”

  “Yeah! I went out through the back and I tripped — all those plants and stuff — and I dropped the thing — the camera. It must have rolled. I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “So you came back the next morning.”

  “Yeah. But you were there. Then once you’d seen me I stayed the hell away.”

  “Byrnes didn’t ask you for the film?”

  “I told him I destroyed it.”

  Felix rubbed his aching head. “And all of this just so Byrnes could cover up his affair with Louise Douglas.”

  “Well,” said Marty, slyly, “I don’t think it was just the affair.”

  The mayor’s wife checked herself into a treatment centre for problem gamblers, to avoid the growing scandal. The centre was newly renovated, and though it was a very old building, it was modern inside. It used to be a school for girls, the director told her. St. Bernadette’s.

  “I’d give you a tour,” the director said, “but we have Group in five minutes.”

  “Group?” said Louise.

  “You’ll see.”

  Group turned out to be an embarrassment, with women standing up and telling the most dreadful stories about the messes they got into. Louise had nothing in common with any of them. Some of them had become thieves to support their habit, and Louise took careful note of those ones, planning to avoid them at the dinner table.

  Louise hadn’t expected to find any friends at the centre. She’d always kept to herself. But there was one decent sort there, a woman named Betty, a housewife and mother, like herself. Betty seemed to like Louise, and as the days went by, Louise found herself chatting, even laughing sometimes, with Betty. There was also a very respectable volunteer named Mrs. Kowalski, who sat in the lounge in the evenings, knitting and dispensing advice to the residents. But she wouldn’t play cards.

  Cards were not allowed in the centre. No Monopoly, no games of chance of any sort. Betty tried to persuade Mrs. Kowalski to bring some checkers, arguing that checkers was a game of skill, but Mrs. Kowalski merely smiled and brought out the jigsaw puzzles.

  “I’ll bet I can finish mine before you finish yours,” Betty said.

  6

  Dispersion

  So.

  I wasn’t at the centre of this story after all.

  I was way off on the periphery, and I didn’t like it. When I heard Felix explaining to my family what had happened, I didn’t believe him at first. I’d wanted it all to mean something, my death, my so-called murder. I’d thought it meant I was beloved, envied, wronged, and soon to be avenged.

  But when I heard all the evidence, I realized it was indisputable. I wasn’t the victim of passion at all, but merely of panic, clumsiness. Sure, I’d been wronged. I had even been murdered, in a technical sort of way. But it was all so impersonal. Incidental. My death, like my birth, had been a slip-up. It was humiliating.

  There was another point as well. Along with everything else, I would have to give up my haunting of Evelyn. I would miss her sorely. For I’d been attached to her, as deeply as I’d been attached to anything else on earth.

  I couldn’t resist a last visit to her apartment. There she was, reading the newspaper and eating a snack. She bit daintily into a piece of green apple. The apple looked crisp and cold, its white flesh cut into fresh slices, fanned out on a blue plate beside a triangle of soft cheese. And she was drinking a yellow wine that sparkled in its glass. But as I watched her drink, I realized I didn’t begrudge her this pleasure. I wasn’t at all thirsty.

  All I could think of was the word: thirsty. Whatever had it meant?

  Felix took home the growing file on Marty Smith. He hated to bring police work home, feeling it contaminated the house, and ordinarily he didn’t. But today he’d come home early at Alice’s request. She had something to tell him, she’d said, but she wasn’t home yet. She’d left a note promising her swift return from the grocery store. Some last-minute item.

  Marty’s file was pathetic, as Felix had known it would be. Marty had suffered a hard childhood. He had a juvenile record for shoplifting, uttering threats, and attempted extortion. He’d learned early how to trade in information. He’d already given Felix a lot of details about errands he’d run for Byrnes
, and hinted that there was “a lot more where that came from.” Felix didn’t know what the “lot more” was, but he expected to hear all about it when the prosecutor sat down to deal with Marty’s lawyer.

  Felix closed the file, depressed by its contents. Poppy was rubbing against his leg, begging for a treat, and he stood up to get her a biscuit. He locked the file in his briefcase, out of sight. As he followed Poppy to the kitchen, Felix stopped once again to marvel at the dining room. Fresh flowers, linen napkins, candlesticks. It made him nervous. Whatever Alice was going to tell him, it must be important.

  Evelyn read the unfolding news stories with awe and disappointment. And a sense of relief that came as a surprise to her. She was not the cause of Wendy’s coma. She was not the cause of anything, she realized. And she should have known it. She had never, in her whole life, made anything happen at all.

  This petty thief, this wretched, lamentable Martin Dexter Smith, had made something happen. He had created an uproar in the city, an outrage at City Hall, front page headlines for three days running.

  Yet he’d done it all by mistake, if Evelyn understood correctly. With a single stumble, he had ruined his boss and the mayor’s wife and even the mayor himself, though the mayor denied all knowledge, ridiculed the accusations. Evelyn read the accusations — blackmail, influence peddling, kickbacks, conflict of interest. She didn’t understand all those terms very clearly, but she got the general idea. These people had tried to fix the odds behind the scenes, pulling strings as if they were puppeteers. But powerful as they were, they’d been no match for Marty Smith.

  Maybe it wasn’t possible to control anything with certainty.

  Evelyn felt the familiar stab of fear this thought had always brought her. But instead of jumping up and doing something to contain it, she let it spread throughout her body, let it split her wide open. It was worse than she’d ever imagined, like a surgeon’s hacksaw breaking her breast bone in two. But this time she lay there and took it.

  Felix went to visit Louise Douglas at the treatment centre, hoping to convince her to testify against Byrnes, so that the prosecution wouldn’t rest solely on Marty’s credibility. Louise was in Group, so Felix sat down in the lounge to wait until she filed in, along with five other women, all of them looking tired and dissatisfied.

  Louise admitted to her affair. But that was as far as she’d go.

  “Look,” she said to Felix. “I admit I made mistakes. I had a problem. But I’m moving forward now, I’m getting help.”

  As he listened, Felix could see the story of her innocence taking shape, becoming smoother each time she rehearsed it. Becoming believable, becoming a sure thing. Because Louise Douglas, despite the games of chance she played, wasn’t a person who believed in taking chances.

  He looked around the lounge. Six sad, ordinary women. Gamblers. But probably none of them believed in taking chances. Who would throw the dice, believing that the outcome would be arbitrary? No one. These women must have believed that a deep and unseen justice structured the world, that it ordered the outcome of their games. Maybe they still believed it. Like everybody else, they had been robbed, and they expected someday everything would be restored to them. They deserved it. And suddenly Felix had a vision. He was struck by the certain knowledge that this strong, abiding faith was everywhere, that it would swell forth from the bowels of the city and propel the great casino plans to victory. The clouds of scandal would eventually disperse, and he could see the casino rising high above the city, its glass and emerald tower gleaming on the skyline like a beacon.

  Evelyn was exhausted, emptied out from sobbing. And her lungs ached. She’d always thought that if she gave in like that, she would die from the pain. But here she was, eating another apple. The grieving had made her hungry. She’d keened for her mother, her father, her brother who she couldn’t save, who she couldn’t bring back completely. She wasn’t capable of bringing anybody back. It was a harsh truth, and it still hurt.

  But if she couldn’t bring anyone back, she thought now, then maybe she wasn’t responsible for losing them in the first place.

  She looked at the poster on her wall, the cool, clear stream pouring down the mountainside. If she wanted to want something, she thought, she might as well want something she could have.

  Alice admitted that she couldn’t finish the book because she didn’t want their story to end, and Felix promised her that it never would. Especially not now that they were going to have a baby. No wonder she was sleeping so much, he said.

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?” Alice asked him. “Do you think our baby has an old soul?”

  Felix looked up from his newspaper, where he was reading about a proposal for a new arena. He smiled. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I do,” Alice said. “I believe we’re all, well, rotating, sort of, on a giant wheel. We go around and around, getting on and off here and there.”

  “So you believe in karma, then?”

  “No. Not exactly,” she said. “It’s more like, I don’t know, like a giant roulette wheel.”

  Felix laughed. “Do we have any choice when we get on and off?”

  “Yes, I think we do,” Alice said.

  “You mean we decide when to die?”

  “Maybe.” She stroked her belly. “But I was thinking, more, you know — that we decide when to live, to come to earth.”

  “You mean we chose to be here?”

  “I did,” Alice told him. “I chose to be right here. With you.” She moved closer and placed her hand in his.

  Felix didn’t know anymore what he believed in terms of chance and the randomness of his own life, the lives of others. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew he was a lucky man.

  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?”