In the First Early Days of My Death Page 2

  Alika looked at me. He picked up the pillow and looked underneath, then fluffed it and tossed it aside. “Under there?”

  “Under there. And I changed the sheets yesterday morning, so how did it get there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Alika,” I said. “Has Evelyn been here? Was she here yesterday? Just tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “I didn’t see her,” he offered.

  I sighed. “Did you forget to lock the door yesterday?”

  “You know I always lock the door,” he said.

  “How could she get in without you seeing her, then, if the door was locked?”

  He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Maybe she unlocked it?”

  “Alika! She has a key to the house?”

  “Well, of course she has a key,” he said. “She practically lived here last summer.”

  “For God’s sake,” I said. But I knew there was no point explaining to him how foolish he was, so I just said, “I’m getting the locks changed. Today.”

  Alika lay down on top of the bedspread and rested his cheek on the sheet where Evelyn’s stocking had been lying less than ten minutes ago. I shuddered.

  “It was in our bed,” I groaned.

  Alika turned and looked at me studiously, as if he’d finally decided to take this issue seriously.

  “But how did it get there?” he asked.

  I scrutinized his expression. Nothing but the same blank density he offered to the water pipes. He seemed genuinely, maddeningly, nonplussed.

  That was when Mrs. Kowalski called and invited me to the protest rally. I talked to her on the phone for a while, listening to her concerns about the city and giving her excuses why I couldn’t go. When I hung up, I felt a little guilty about not helping her out. So I suggested to Alika that he go downtown and shoot some pictures of the event. Sometimes he made a little extra money by selling local photos to Uptown Magazine.

  I also wanted him out of the way so I could phone his sister Noni. I needed to talk to someone who could think clearly.

  Noni wore a pink plastic prosthesis which she strapped to her thigh with a complicated leather harness. It was uncomfortable, and she frequently removed it in the privacy of her own home, or in ours. That last afternoon, as she listened to my tale of Evelyn’s stocking, Noni sat on my back porch, her chin in her hands, shaking her head in disbelief. I was pulling beets and swatting at mosquitoes. It was hot, and my bare legs were streaked with sweat and dirt. Noni lifted up her cotton skirt and untangled the harness. She leaned the leg, with its little pink foot in its pink running shoe, against the wooden steps.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her. Noni’s amputated leg still hurt her sometimes, even though it wasn’t there. Her doctor claimed this was perfectly normal. The nerves were gone, but the receptors in the brain were still alive and waiting, like telephone receivers, for messages. Sometimes they became confused and thought they were hearing from that long-lost leg. The doctor called this “phantom pain.” It wasn’t dangerous, he said. He recommended Aspirin, and Noni took two, extra-strength, when the invisible leg began to ache. But there was nothing else she could do about it. There was no known cure for phantom pain.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “But you’re going to get heatstroke.” She poured two glasses of lemonade and told me to sit down for a minute.

  I laid the beets down on the porch in the shade and picked up the glass of lemonade, listening to the ice cubes clink and fizz. I held the glass against my damp neck. Then I drank it down and poured myself another.

  We sat in silence, surveying the garden.

  “Do you think she’s dangerous?” Noni asked.

  I looked at the flaming yellow poppies, the tall zinnias stuffed to bursting with surreal orange and russet petals, the cabbages fat as green planets, and the nicotiana flowers bending over them like white stars. Everything had grown too large, too quickly, that summer. The morning glory had topped the fence early in July, climbed across the rough shingles of the tool shed walls and up the telephone pole, where it bloomed a bright continuous blue against the sky. The yellow beans were plump and ready to be picked, their stalks out of control, strangling each other. Great bushes of crackerjack marigolds exploded among the tomato plants. It was only the twenty-first of August, but the pumpkins were already round and symmetrical as beach balls, and the zucchini were so numerous I had taken to leaving them on neighbours’ doorsteps, like abandoned babies, in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I got up and returned to the beet patch, thinking about Evelyn. Of course she was dangerous, in an obvious way. She was interfering with my marriage, disturbing my peace of mind, making me crazy. But that’s not what Noni meant, and we both knew it. Noni meant, was she violent? Was she likely to throw rocks through the window, threatening notes attached? Would she show up at the library, a pipe bomb in her backpack? Slit her wrists in my bathtub one day, so that I’d come home to find bloody water trickling under the door, seeping into the hall carpet?

  “What can I do, anyway, even if she is dangerous?” I asked. I braced myself in the mud, struggling to pull up a particularly fat beet.

  “There has to be some way to get rid of her,” Noni said.

  “How?”

  “There has to be a way,” she said.

  But before we could formulate any sort of plan, we were interrupted.

  A fat little chow chow came streaking through my open back gate and tore right through the garden, with no regard for the vegetables and flowers.

  Noni, who was afraid of dogs, grabbed for her leg and scrambled to tie the harness to her thigh.

  “Hey!” I shouted. But the dog paid no attention. It trampled the romaine lettuce and raced straight through the oregano, trailing a red leash from its collar.

  A moment later, the dog was followed by a burly red-faced man, who was a little more careful about the garden. He rushed down the path, then stopped when he saw me.

  “Pardon us,” he said. He was panting slightly. “My dog seems to have taken a liking to your cat.” He gestured toward the elm tree, where the dog sat expectantly, waggling its rear end. Its ears were rigid, its nose pointing toward the sky.

  I looked up and saw a yellow cat sitting calmly on a low branch. “That’s not my cat,” I said.

  He approached his dog from the side and slid his hand into the handle of the leash. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “Poppy is a little, ah, undisciplined.”

  “I see that,” I said. I looked at the crushed, muddy leaves of the romaine. “What a mess.”

  “Sorry,” he said again. He seemed mortified.

  He was surprisingly timid for his size. He must have been six-foot-four, with thick, powerful arms, and a bit of a beer belly. He was in his early forties, I guessed, but his face was as freckled and sheepish as a little boy’s. He was sweating profusely, and I wondered why he was wearing a suit jacket on such a humid day. Then I recognized him.

  “Say, you’re that cop, aren’t you? I mean, aren’t you the police officer? In that brick house with all the trees?”

  “That’s right. Felix Delano. I’m a police detective.”

  “I’m Wendy,” I said. “Wendy Li. And this is my sister-in-law, Noni Li.”

  Noni had recovered her composure, but she stayed on the porch, away from Poppy.

  “Li?” Felix asked. He looked with interest at Noni. “That’s a Chinese name, isn’t it?” He peered through the shadows of the porch, trying to see her face more clearly.

  Noni didn’t answer. She had no patience for that particular question, which she’d heard too often.

  I’d carried the name for a year, but nobody ever asked me if it was Chinese. They just misspelled it, Lee, and I constantly had to correct them. This didn't bother me one bit. I loved being a Li. I had belonged to a lot of different families in my life, but the Li family was the only one I’d had a say
in choosing.

  “Do you want some lemonade?” I asked Felix.

  He coughed, a little embarrassed by Noni’s silence. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.” Then he offered me his hand to shake, and I took it. His grip was strong, and he held on for a long moment, even though my fingers were caked with dirt.

  After Felix left, with a bag of zucchini and broken romaine, I walked Noni out to her car, and we stood for a while, talking. We hadn’t quite finished with the subject of Evelyn.

  “She’s probably harmless,” I said. I was in a better mood by then. Felix had cheered me up. It made me feel a little safer to know I was friends — well, friendly — with a detective.

  “Do you think so?” Noni asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “And anyway I’m getting the locks changed today.” I looked at my watch. Where was that locksmith?

  “I don’t know,” said Noni, as she got into her car. “I have a bad feeling about her.”

  “A premonition?”

  Noni blushed. “Not exactly.” Then she shivered suddenly, though it was still a sweltering day.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention to me.” She waved as she drove away.

  I couldn’t dismiss Noni’s bad feeling so easily. And I didn’t like that shiver. But I tried to reassure myself by remembering that Noni wasn’t the clairvoyant in the family.

  According to family legend, it was only Rosa who possessed the power of second sight. Rosa could often predict disasters. She’d had ominous intimations just before the Challenger spaceship exploded, before Mount St. Helens erupted, before the assassination of John Lennon. These powers manifested themselves shortly after her marriage. Alika’s father was booked on a flight from Maui to Molokai, on one of those tiny, dangerous planes that belong to small, disreputable airlines. Rosa had a feeling about this, a sinister feeling. She begged him not to go, and finally, he relented — not that he believed in premonitions. He thought she was making it up because she wanted him to stay home. In any case, the plane crashed, spectacularly. For no apparent reason, the fuselage cracked in two, right down the middle — a stress fracture, they called it later — and the tiny aircraft burst into flames, went down and sank beneath the Pacific waves. Noni’s eyes had been dark and wide and serious when she told me this tale. Her mother had a gift, she said.

  Why, then, I wondered, had they had that terrible car accident? Why had Rosa not seen, or felt, the truck approaching on the highway, not sensed the sleepiness of the driver? Why had she not been warned that her children would be traumatized, disfigured? That she would suffer that unspeakable fear, searching for her daughter in the ditch by the dark side of the road, finding her with her knee torn and twisted in that impossible way?

  Alika had not been thrown from the car. He remained in the front seat, where metal and glass flew at his face like shrapnel from an explosion, piercing his shoulder and neck, breaking his jaw, perforating his right eye and destroying it completely.

  You’d think a mother, a psychic mother, could have seen that coming.

  The locksmith was supposed to come at three, but at six o’clock, he still had not arrived. Alika came home from City Hall, and we ate gelati for dinner and smoked a couple of cigarettes, but he didn’t stay long. He had to work the late shift at the portrait studio. There was a backlog of orders for graduation and wedding prints, and Gino wanted Alika to process them all by the weekend.

  “How was the rally?” I asked.

  “Hot,” he said. “But a huge crowd turned up. Mrs. Kowalski was happy.”

  “Get some good pictures?”

  “I think so. The light was fabulous, and I used Gino’s zoom lens.” He took his camera out of his bag and laid it on the kitchen table. “I’ll develop these tomorrow,” he said. “Right now, I’d better go.”

  “How late do you think you’ll be?”

  “Late,” he said. “Don’t wait up.” He kissed the top of my head and left.

  I put the ice-cream bowls in the sink and walked to the window to watch Alika drive away. He was sitting in his car at the curb, waiting for me to appear. I waved. Alika started the engine and drove down the street without even looking at the road, smiling and waving to me out the window. I didn’t know it was the last time I would ever see him like that, so confident in his own luck.

  I spent the evening cleaning. First I washed all the windows with vinegar and newspaper. Then I dusted and vacuumed the entire house. Next, I took Alika’s camera up to his darkroom. I hoped he’d taken some good shots of the protest at City Hall, shots he could sell. Sometimes his photographs seemed to miss the point. He’d covered a friend’s wedding last autumn and come away with more shots of the trees outside the church than of the people. A pile of these pictures lay scattered on his counter, a series of close-ups in which all you could see were two brittle veins of a yellow, translucent leaf. They were beautiful, but you couldn’t even tell what they were unless he told you. I stacked them neatly and set them aside. I couldn’t do anything about the rest of the mess in the darkroom. It was full of equipment I couldn’t put away because I didn’t know what it was. I just cleared a space on the counter, so I could leave the camera in plain sight, where he could find it, and closed the door on the chaos.

  I got the silver polish from the upstairs closet, and a few soft rags. I went back into the bedroom and took out the photo of Alika’s family so that I could clean the silver picture frame. The photo had been taken a few short months before the unlucky car crash, and Alika was small and unscarred, sitting high on his father’s shoulders. I often studied the face of Alika’s father, who I knew only through his infrequent letters. I’d never met him. Even Alika barely knew him.

  The car crash had broken the family apart, extinguishing a marriage that was already growing cold. Rosa had become increasingly self-sufficient during her husband’s long absences, but his failure to stand by her side while Alika and Noni were in hospital was the final straw. As soon as the children were well enough to travel, Rosa had brought them to Winnipeg to visit her parents. And, with their financial help, she’d stayed in the city ever since.

  She had rarely taken her children to visit their father in Hawaii, and their father never came to Canada — he’d developed a fear of flying — so Alika and Noni had known him mainly through cards and letters, telephone calls and birthday presents. But as I knew very well, those things were much, much better than nothing.

  I polished the frame and replaced the photograph. Then I laid out my silver brush and mirror and my silver music box, which had been a Christmas present from my mother Mrs. Keller. I kept a number of small, personal items in this music box. Nothing valuable, really. Unless you wanted to count the letter from my birth mother.

  Mrs. Hill, my social worker, had given the letter to me when she retired. I was about twelve then, and fascinated by my mother’s handwriting, sometimes tracing over the letters with my fingers, making the same curves and loops that she had made so long ago. The letter was written on two pages of foolscap in ballpoint pen. It was double-spaced and single-sided. You’d think she could easily have crammed in a few more words, but no. She came to the end of the second page and just stopped, signing the letter, love, Your Mother.

  The letter was mainly about my father, how handsome he was, etc. Unfortunately, however, “circumstances prevented” their marrying at the time, by which I understood, when I grew to be older, that he was married to somebody else. My mother had been too young to raise me on her own. But she’d had great hopes. She and my father would eventually be united. Then she would come for me. We would all be together.

  That was why I had so many foster parents — because my mother believed for too long in the eventual triumph of romance. By the time she finally let me go, signed the papers and made me eligible for legal adoption, I was nearly four years old. Too big. Nobody wanted me for keeps.

  My father, the letter said, was my mother’s heart, her life.
“You were not the product of some casual fling,” my mother wrote. “You were born of my first, my last, my most precious love. It is very important to me that you understand that.”

  I understood, all right. I got the picture. A great drama had surrounded my conception and birth. A grand, greedy, voluptuous, star-crossed passion had occurred, and I had been left out of it.

  I was the residue.

  After I polished the music box, I planned to tackle the silver in the kitchen. We didn’t have much — just the cake knife from our wedding, a tea tray, and half a dozen teaspoons. All of it was tarnished, tinged with a milky blue, and I wanted to make it gleam again. But first I decided to take another shower. I was sweaty from gardening and doing housework in the heat wave. My clothing stuck to me as I peeled it off. I walked naked to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and stepped into the tub. Then I heard a knock on the door. The locksmith, I thought. Wouldn’t you know it? I dried myself as quickly as I could. The knocking didn’t let up.

  “Hold on,” I muttered. The knocking continued. Then I heard the front door open. Alika, despite his promises, had forgotten to lock it. I stepped out into the hall, intending to grab some clothing from the bedroom. But when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, I panicked. I dived naked into the hall closet and closed the door.

  The footsteps came up the stairs rapidly and lightly — a small person, I thought. Probably a woman. Evelyn! Of course. She had let herself in with her key. Noni’s question about Evelyn raced through my mind: “Do you think she’s dangerous?” I wasn’t about to find out, especially with me naked and her fully clothed. I heard the footsteps enter the bedroom, drawers opening and closing, a rustling sound. Then a feeble, dramatic sigh. She’s obsessed with Alika, I thought. She’s stalking him. She has — what was it called? Erotomania.

  The footsteps left the bedroom, and I trembled a little as they approached the closet where I hid, but they passed on by, and I heard the door to Alika’s darkroom open. Then there was silence for a long time. Too long.

  There was no room in that closet. It was stuffed full of things we didn’t need at the moment, like winter jackets, and things I couldn’t bear to part with, like the lace veil I’d worn at my wedding last fall, and the butterfly kite I’d made with the kids at the library in the spring. We’d taken that kite out during a strong wind, and on its maiden flight it smashed into a tree and broke its frame, tearing one of its wings and losing its string. Alika said he was going to fix it, but he never got around to it. So it sat in the linen closet, along with all the other junk, preventing me from moving. My legs were filling up with pins and needles. The muscles in my calves began to cramp. I shifted my weight an inch, and the buckle of an old snowshoe bit into my bare heel.