In the First Early Days of My Death (10 page)

Finally! A woman at the far right cashed out and Louise made a bee-line for her machine. It wasn't the machine she'd wanted, but by now Louise didn't care. As long as she could get on any machine and set the process in motion. It was the only thing that kept her sane. It was better than yoga or Valium. When she was sitting in front of the
VLT
s, lulled by the wide bank of blinking lights, the colourful spinning fruits, the hypnotic sound of coins dropping and buttons clicking, she entered a state of serenity that lowered her blood pressure, emptied her mind. It was the only sure way she knew to keep her thoughts from circling endlessly around her marriage and her money problems — and the ungrateful children she'd raised. The two tall boys who didn't need her any more, who'd turned their backs on her and boarded airplanes to American colleges where they'd quickly turned into men like their father. Her lost babies. She couldn't bear to think about them. She gave the button a vicious jab. Come on, come on. It was her turn, goddamn it.

Evelyn's stomach knotted and turned over, making her groan. She was ill, too upset about that detective to be able to do her shift tonight. She couldn't stop worrying that he'd come back; she had no alibi for the night of Wendy's fall, and she knew her fingerprints must be all over Wendy's house. She called in sick to the convenience store, speaking in a raspy voice and faking a few coughs. She hoped her boss would believe she had the flu. She couldn't afford to lose her job, no matter what happened.

She'd been lucky to find this job right after she graduated from St. Bernadette's. As a graduation present, her father had offered to help with university tuition. But Evelyn had had enough of school. She didn't think she could concentrate on studies, anyway, with Mark keeping her up at night the way he did. She wished she had never called him back. He would stand outside her window, waving his wand or performing, in elaborate pantomime, the tying of knots, the palming of coins. It seemed he never tired of upbraiding her for losing the magic kit. No, she couldn't possibly muster the solitary discipline that studying required. She needed distraction. And the convenience store provided plenty of that.

The convenience store, in fact, was nothing but an endless series of distractions, urgent, trivial tasks that interrupted each other in an unbroken chain from morning to night, so that nobody who worked there could ever string together two coherent thoughts. Evelyn liked it that way. She also liked the anonymity of the place. There was a pleasant illusion of intimacy in the store, never authentic enough to be mistaken for true intimacy, and far more comforting than the real thing. Customers told her the most surprising details of their private lives, then took their newspapers or milk or coffee and simply left. Nobody asked her much about herself. She lost touch with Jo and Betty and the other girls from St. Bernadette's, most of whom went on to university. She rented a small apartment near the store and settled into a small, circumscribed life in which there was little hope and therefore little disappointment.

Among the regulars, Evelyn had a few favourites. There was the elderly widow who shoplifted tins of cat food, while Evelyn made sure to look the other way, and the firefighters from the fire hall down the street who called her “Sweetheart” and complained about their wives. Her favourite customer of all was a young man with golden skin and a glass eye, who was forever leaving behind his sunglasses or his cigarettes or his keys. Evelyn would place these objects into the lost and found box, a little off to the side, apart from the ordinary jumble of lost things, because they were special. And because she knew he would be coming back. She recognized it as a form of flirting, this constant pretense at forgetting. A way of seeing her again and again. A way of making her think of him when he was not there.

Evelyn felt a warm rush of regret, almost pleasurable, as she remembered the afternoon Alika left his wallet on the counter and changed her life forever. A wallet was a necessary item, and Evelyn expected him back any minute, but he didn't come. She opened it up and found his identification, his address — he lived in a house close by — and his telephone number. So she called him. But first, she turned the wallet inside out, perused his business cards, driver's license, gym membership, his receipts from the drycleaner and the hardware store.

“Thanks,” he said, as soon as he arrived. “I didn't even notice it was missing.”

Evelyn handed the wallet back to him, and he put it in his pocket without looking inside. That meant he trusted her.

“You're very kind,” he said.

Evelyn tried not to show her surprise. She tried to act as if people said such things to her all the time.

“Thank you,” she said. “You're very — you're beautiful.” She blushed. What had possessed her to say such a thing?

Alika was looking at her intently. He was seeing her.

“When do you get off?” he asked.

“Not until eleven.”

He smiled. “Should I come back at eleven?”

“Yes,” she said.

For the rest of her shift, she flew through her chores, dusting and ringing up purchases and counting out change with a grin. He had noticed her. He had really seen her.

Alika didn't know how to cook. He was aware that cabbages and lettuce and basil and tomatoes grew in the backyard. He had, occasionally, purchased lemons, salt, and other necessities from the supermarket. But how these ingredients came together to create his meals, his home, his daily, unnoticed comforts, was a mystery to him. I watched him sadly as he ripped a piece of bread from a stale loaf, then looked at it as if he didn't know what it was for.

Now that I was gone, the house was reverting to the chaos of its bachelor state. The drain in the kitchen sink was full of tiny objects — grains of rice, twist ties, noodles, the little leaves from the Brussels sprouts. Everything that resided under the furniture — socks and books and bits of string and unpaid bills — was accumulating a thin veneer of greasy dust. And there was nothing I could do about it.

I lingered by Alika's side, longing to touch his beautiful black hair, his dark eyebrows, to trace the contours of his damaged ear. He closed his eyes, began to snore. I watched his temples, his smooth, high forehead. What on earth went on in there? I pictured the interior of my husband's mind as a dimly lit space, crowded with tangled bits of string, dusty old noodles and leftover Brussels sprouts, their tiny leaves unravelling, seeking the light.

Seated at Alice's desk, Felix moved his finger slowly down the pages as he read.

This wasn't him. This fearless, swift-thinking hero. He read about a decisive, risk-taking Felix, a Felix who squared his jaw and looked danger in the face, barely wincing when the bullet came searing through his chest.

Felix knew he'd screamed when the bullet hit him. Just like a girl. And he'd cried in the emergency ward, while a beautiful young doctor worked feverishly to staunch the wound, and a nurse held onto his hand. He'd wept, remembering he hadn't taken Poppy for a walk that morning, that he'd neglected to feed her, that his morning had been erased, and there was no way he was ever going to recover it.

As he read further, Felix noticed that Alice couldn't seem to keep the story on track. She kept going off on tangents, or adding details that had nothing to do with the murder case. In the third chapter, in the middle of a scene about Felix's physiotherapy, she began to describe the time he'd swum out into the middle of Falcon Lake to help a drowning boy — an event that occurred when Felix wasn't even on duty. It had happened long before the double murder, long before he'd even met Alice. It had merited only two inches of newsprint at the time, but Alice, an assiduous researcher, had found them. She had gleaned the bare facts of the incident and embroidered them wildly.

Felix remembered the occasion very well. He was on vacation and it was his birthday. Early in the evening, as the sun was sinking in an overcast sky, he'd been waiting for his friends to arrive to take him into town for a birthday dinner. He'd been hungry and a little impatient, barely paying attention to the crowd of boisterous, splashing teenagers cannonballing from the off-shore diving dock. But he happened to be watching, idly, as one of them attempted a one-and-a-half off the three-metre board. Felix saw the boy go up and up and then tuck his head into his chest, and he knew something was off. A miscalculation had been made. Felix started running even before he saw the diver's head graze the edge of the board as he came down. He was in the water before the other kids yelled for help. When Felix saw the boy in danger, Alice wrote, his first thought had been to save a life. But that wasn't true. Felix's first thought had been that the water was cold, that he didn't want to get wet, that he'd just dressed for dinner. He dived off the boat dock and swam about a hundred yards and then began to surface-dive, while the boy's parents paddled frantically in their canoe toward the spot where their son had vanished. Alice spent two long paragraphs describing that hundred-yard swim, putting all sorts of thoughts into Felix's head, about not giving up, about the value of the boy's life. The only thought Felix remembered having spared for the kid was “you idiot!” He had dived and dived again until he caught the boy by the hair and dragged him to the surface. It was an ugly business. The kid had vomited, and so had Felix. The mother had been hysterical. Felix's birthday plans were ruined. But Alice made it sound like a miracle.

Felix read again the description of his own heroism. He wanted to be fearless and swift-thinking. But he knew he wasn't. No. Alice had dreamed this story. She had made it all up, out of some deep, Irish corner of her imagination. He ran his finger lightly across the description of this other Felix, this distorted reflection. Who was this man his wife had created? Whoever he was, it was clear that Alice was falling in love with him.

Evelyn curled up on the couch with a hot water bottle and a quilt, just as if she really were sick, and thought about Alika. Her first date with him had been her first date ever. He picked her up at the store at eleven o'clock, just as he'd promised, and took her to an all-night doughnut shop nearby. Evelyn was too excited to eat her walnut cruller, even though Alika had bought it for her. She just sipped her soda and asked him questions about his family and his childhood in Hawaii.