In the First Early Days of My Death by Catherine Hunter Page B

only at bedtime that Evelyn grew insistent. At bedtime, she begged her mother to tuck her in, even though she was fourteen now, too old for such baby rituals. She would turn out the light and then take hold of her mother’s hand, drawing it close to her, inhaling the scent of lavender bath salts on her skin. Evelyn held the hand tightly, kept it tethered to the bed while she talked, relating every detail of her day, because in the dark she could pretend that her mother was listening. In the dark, she couldn’t see that blank face, that preoccupied glaze across her mother’s eyes.
    Shortly after Evelyn’s fifteenth birthday, her father moved away to live with another woman, a colleague of his, who’d been transferred to Vancouver. He requested a transfer too, and the bank gave it to him. He spent two days packing and then he was gone.
    During those two days, Evelyn’s parents didn’t speak to each other at all except to argue about Mark’s things. Her father wanted a lot of photographs and some of Mark’s books, but her mother wanted his room to remain exactly as it was. One day when Evelyn came home from school she heard them fighting over Mark’s magic kit, her mother screaming that she had bought it for him and her father claiming that he was the one who’d taught Mark how to do the tricks. Finally, Evelyn’s father called her into the bedroom and thrust the magic kit into her arms.
    â€œLet her have it, then,” he said, as if he’d forgotten his daughter’s name. “That’ll settle it.”
    Evelyn took the magic kit into her room and opened it up. Its various compartments held coins and cards, foam rubber rabbits, interlocking cups, colourful scarves, ropes, handcuffs. When Mark was alive, she’d tried to learn some of the tricks, but she’d been hopelessly inept, and he had only laughed at her. The one trick she had longed to master — the one that Mark performed with easy grace — was making the coins disappear in the magic box. Mark could place a dime in the slot and close the box. Then open it. Gone. But no matter how long or how hard Evelyn tried, the dime remained. She could not get rid of it. She could never understand the inner machinations of things, the way her brother could. He had taken the box apart once, to discover how it worked, and she remembered the way he nodded his head as he examined it, as if to say, ah ha! But he’d glued it back together again without disclosing its secrets. He kept the knowledge to himself, bragged of it. If he could build a box big enough, he said, he could make himself disappear.
    Evelyn’s parents divided up the photographs of Mark, his sports pennants, his toys. Not a word was said about the custody of Evelyn. She stayed with her mother. Not because her mother had won any arguments about it, but because nobody said anything about her. That was the way it was.
    Her father called a taxi to take him to the airport, and he hugged Evelyn before he got into it.
    â€œI’ll miss you,” he said. He was facing in Evelyn’s direction, but he was seeing right through her. She had become transparent. She was made entirely of glass now, and she could feel a crack opening up inside her chest, beginning to split her in two.

    The three coins lay scattered on the table top where he’d left them yesterday morning. Felix hesitated at the entrance to the porch, tempted to gather them up and toss them, to continue from the moment when Paul’s call had interrupted the reading. But instead he returned to the kitchen to put on the kettle. There was no way to complete the reading now. The wind had shifted, the patterns of change had done their work.
    Felix kept the loose green tea in a tin canister which Alice had given him because she knew he liked Chinese art. Felix liked Chinese everything, although he’d never been to China. He lifted the canister from the windowsill