She walked down the stairs and I heard the front door open, then click shut behind her. The same door that flew off its hinges during the storm. The one I replaced with a tarp the next afternoon, the afternoon my wife left. The tarp didn’t do much to keep out the cold. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the wind catch and snap it all day. As I waited for the school bus to pull onto the highway’s shoulder. As I wondered what I would tell my daughter, when she came home.
e s c a p e
WHEN HIS WIFE DIED, Tom started going to the casino. The first time, it was by accident. He’d driven for hours, past the stylish downtown condos that resembled his own, the Costco and the Home Depot—where he would never shop—the suburban houses and then the patches of rainforest that had yet to be developed. He didn’t know where he was going. He only knew that he didn’t want to sit in a bar or restaurant—that would make too pathetic a spectacle. He drove out of town, along the highway, and into the small city where his wife had been raised. She’d escaped this place as soon as she could, and he could see why. It had a casino, a mall, and a bus station. He pulled into the casino’s lot, went in to use the urinal, and ended up at the blackjack table for three hours. This is how he lived his life now: everything was accidental. Everything was inevitable.
These days, he goes every night. He knows the roads well, and can make it in less than an hour. He could go to the casino in town, but he likes being far from home, far from colleagues and well-meaning friends. And he likes the drive: the rain-darkened highway, the sudden light from passing cars.
He leaves work at six and arrives at the casino at seven—seven-thirty if he remembers to stop for dinner. He parks in the north side of the lot, and it’s never difficult to find a space. It has been nearly a month, and he goes to the same cage at the beginning of each night. But the cashier—a young man with eyes the colour of kelp—never treats him like a familiar. Tom appreciates this disdain for small talk. The staff deal with people the way they deal with money: with immunity, without judgment. Tom buys a hundred dollars’ worth of chips and, as he walks to the tables, enjoys the feel and weight of them in his hand. He stays an hour, two at the most. This is a habit, not a compulsion. Other than a few poker nights he participated in as a student, he’s never been a gambler, and he has no special talent for it. He simply wants company in his solitude.
He craves a certain kind of crowd, the kind that cares nothing for him, and he feels at ease with the people in the casino. They are not the kind of people he’s used to: he doubts that they know what a polypeptide is, or care about cellular receptivity. Most are quiet, habitual gamblers. Many are older and less fortunate than he is. Men at poker tables who wear sunglasses and stare at screens. Elderly women who wear cards around their necks and plug these into the slot machines, like patients taking oxygen from a tube. These people don’t seem to hear the dinging and beeping of the slots, or mind the dry air. Tom likes the way their worn faces look under the blue-tinged light. They remind him of a school of basslets, shy but aware of each other.
His favourite card dealer works the blackjack table. She is from China, or maybe Japan or the Philippines—someplace Tom rarely gives any thought to. She looks to be a few years older than he is; he guesses late forties. She rims her eyes with blue makeup and has a perm in her hair that’s growing out. She’s professional but not friendly, and she runs her table with a serious efficiency. It’s a fast, rhythmical game, and she speaks only in service of it. When she says certain numbers—eleven, thirteen, and seventeen in particular—he can hear a slight accent in her voice.
He knows little about gambling, but enough to know that it’s a waste of time and money to play at her table. She uses four decks, accepts only high bets, and a quick calculation tells him that he loses approximately seventy percent of the time. He knows he should stick to poker—he has a good instinct for the game, and lately his expression has hardened into a permanent poker face. But he likes her. He especially likes her hands. They’re not a young woman’s hands: the skin is creased, and veins reach down her wrists like dark ropes. And it’s not that these hands are capable of anything remarkable; she is not, for example, a surgeon or a concert pianist. But her hands are slim and bare—she doesn’t wear jewellery—and he likes to watch them pull cards from the shoe and drop them on the table. It’s pleasant even to watch them sweep his chips away from him. Her hands, he decides, are golden damselfish—understated, graceful. But he would never tell her that. She probably wouldn’t know what a damselfish was, and if she did, she might not like the comparison. And he doesn’t want to ruin his routine by offending her. She works every night, from Tuesday to Saturday. She is a relief and a pleasure he can count on.
KELLY HAD BEEN SICK for four years, and for much of that time they believed she would recover. She was thirty-six when she died. Tom was thirty-eight.
In the months after, Tom dismantled the bed they’d set up in the living room so she could look out the window. The condo was on the fifteenth floor, and she’d had a view of the sky, the distant ocean, the gulls that occasionally rose that high. Now, he rarely takes in the view. He moved the couch and coffee table back into their normal positions, cleared away her magazines, and gave her clothes to charity. He keeps up with work, goes to the gym, and cleans the condo himself. He continues to put money away for retirement and to pay his credit card bills on time. And he remains fastidious about the aquarium.
Each day, he sprinkles food onto the surface of the water, and watches the fish nudge each other as they open and close their mouths over the pellets. He also cleans the inside of the glass and replaces the evaporated water. Once a week, on Sundays, he removes the waste. He tests the calcium, magnesium, alkalinity, iodine, phosphate, salinity, and nitrate levels. Once a month he changes the filter’s pouch, and once every four months he checks the components of the skimmer, lights, air pump, heater, and hydrometer. This allows him to maintain emerald and sea corals, a hermit crab, a blue damselfish, a jawfish, two mated gobies, a flamefish, a convict tang, a blue Linckia sea star, and seventy-five pounds of live rock. He keeps the temperature at seventy-seven degrees and maintains the pH at 7.8. He records any changes in the water’s parameters in a log, which Kelly used to call Tom’s Bible. As a joke, she’d hide it around the house—sometimes under the bed, once inside the fridge.
“You have to find it.” She kissed his neck. “That’s the game.”
“I hate games, Kelly. You know that.”
Memories this clear are rare. Kelly’s presence in his mind is shadowy: she drifts in and out, but never in any form that he can smell or touch. That part of his mind has gone dark, and is lit only in patches, like the highway at night. It’s as though Kelly disappeared in a puff of smoke or stepped behind a curtain. She must have passed easily into some sort of afterlife, which is what she would have wanted. He’d expected grief to be engulfing. He’d hoped that she wouldn’t vanish so quickly. He’d hoped that she would haunt him.
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 ar
e.” 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 worsene
d, 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.
THIS BECOMES THEIR ROUTINE: for fifteen minutes each night they take shelter from the rain and wind, and she performs. She changes aces into kings. She makes a ten-dollar bill disappear, then reappear sticking out of the collar of his shirt. She asks him to kiss a card, and when she shuffles, the card his lips have touched is at the top of the deck. He’s seen most of these tricks before, but that doesn’t matter. When she performs them, there is nothing of the usual weariness around her eyes. None of the boredom that slackens her features while she works. And nothing of the poker face she wears when they speak. She is full of cunning and joyful underhandedness. She is alive.
“How did you do that?” He asks this each night, and each night the answer is the same.
“A magician never reveals her secrets, Tom.”
On his part, there is an easy pleasure in being had. And there’s something else too. He can recognize bereavement in others now. Miranda was once a performer and he imagines that a life dedicated to this kind of artistry is not always kind. It results in a jackpot or in great loss—nothing in between. Whether a person is rewarded or punished is a matter of luck. He can tell by looking at Miranda’s hardened, tired face that her luck has been bad.
So he allows himself to be seduced by her grace, her hands, and what she calls magic. This is his kindness to her. He allows her to be onstage again, to wear a glittering suit and white gloves. He allows her to pull doves from her hat.
Vanishing and Other Stories Page 4
