The Day She Died

by S. M. Freedman

  “We should get cake every day for the whole week.”

  “Yeah! And presents.” Sara jumped onto her bed and started bouncing. “We need secret princess names.”

  Eve climbed onto the bed and bounced beside her. “My name is Princess Doodlebug. My superpower is that everything I draw comes to life!”

  “You’re a superhero and a princess? Cool! Um, my name is Princess Gumdrop, and my superpower is that everything I touch turns to candy!”

  “All right!”

  “Eve, it’s time to go,” Donna called from below.

  “Aw, so soon?” Sara said.

  Eve knew better than to argue, so she jumped off the bed. “Coming, Donna!”

  “Why don’t you call her Mom?” Sara asked.

  She grinned up at her new friend. “Because she’s not really my mom, she’s an evil queen who wants to keep me locked in a dungeon.”

  “Cool,” Sara said. “Is your dad an ogre?”

  Button and Donna argued a lot when Eve was supposed to be sleeping. Once she’d heard an argument about her dad where they called him the Donor. She didn’t know if that was his name or if it meant something else, but whatever it was, it didn’t sound good. She liked Sara’s idea of an ogre better. “Yeah, he’s a big green one with black teeth.”

  “Woah,” Sara said.

  “Eve!” Donna called again.

  “Coming!”

  Sara jumped down from the bed. “Can you come play some other time?”

  “For sure.”

  “Sorry you got stuck with my brother for so long. I couldn’t find Fiona. Maybe we can play dolls next time?”

  “Yeah! And it’s okay. He’s really cool.”

  Sara rolled her eyes. “He smells like socks.”

  THREE

  “EVE, CAN YOU HEAR ME?” The man’s voice warbled somewhere in the distance, and she moved toward it.

  For either hours or decades, she’d been lost in a field of quicksilver plants just like the one she’d avoided for most of her childhood. It was foggy, icy water dripping onto her head and the back of her neck. It hurt her lungs to breathe and made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead.

  A woman walked nearby, calling out to her from time to time, trying to get her attention. Eve wanted nothing to do with her. All she wanted was to find a way out.

  As she moved, silver leaves left slug-trails across her skin. Branches loomed out of the fog to snag her clothing. She yanked herself free and kept going, not caring if her clothes tore. If she continued downhill, she should come out near the pond.

  “Eve, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” His voice was a soft rumble, which brought to mind the St. Bernard in those cold-medicine commercials, the one who braved snowy nights just to help someone battle the sniffles.

  At the sound of his voice, tendrils of fog drifted up toward the sky.

  “Urrrrrr …”

  “Don’t try to speak. Your jaw is wired shut.”

  The world around her came to life, like those slick moments just before dawn.

  “Do you know where you are? Squeeze my hand once for yes and twice for no.”

  Did she have hands? She felt like her body was a balloon. It swelled with panic, and the fragile shell bulged with explosive threat. What would happen if the pressure mounted? Would she burst right out of existence?

  “Ouch! No need to break my hand.” He chuckled, and she felt a pinprick of relief. If she’d hurt him, she must still be real.

  “You’re in the ICU at St. Vincent’s,” he continued.

  “You’ve been in a medically induced coma for almost three weeks.”

  His voice was familiar. It was like the kiss of cool water on sunburned skin, and mud between her toes. It was the taste of strawberry milkshakes and tears.

  “Don’t try to move! You’ve still got casts on, well, just about everything. Do you remember the accident?”

  Accident? Eve remembered the smell of bitter coffee and coconut cake. And was there something about a man in a fedora?

  “That’s okay, some things are worth forgetting. There was a storm, and this guy was driving while on drugs. But what’s important is you survived. It was touch and go there for a while. They’re doing everything they can to put you back together.”

  A chair squeaked and she sensed he’d moved closer. “I’m doing everything I can, too. We’re going to get through this.”

  His voice. Recognition seared her skin, awakening her from fingertips to heart and spreading like brushfire down her broken body. It also awoke the pain, which ripped down the fault lines of her mending bones. For the moment it didn’t matter. She knew the man behind that voice, could taste his name on her tongue, could feel the thrill it had given her to let it escape her lips — so quick and breathless the syllables blurred together: Leigh Adler, after all this time.

  He must have felt her jolt of recognition, for he squeezed her fingers in acknowledgement. Her hand still felt so small within his grip. She could picture him standing before her, not as he must have looked now, but as she’d known him years ago. Before what happened to the man in the forest fused them together. Before Sara’s death tore them apart.

  “You remember,” he said.

  Instead of squeezing his hand, she opened her eyes.

  FOUR

  Sara’s Twentieth Birthday

  “YOU’RE DRUNK.” Button’s arms were crossed over her bony chest, her lips pressed together so tightly they’d turned white.

  “My art history teacher’s a sexist ass,” Eve said as she took off her coat. It took several tries to snag the hook on which to hang it. She leaned against the wall to kick off her boots, picked them up, and dumped them on the shoe rack.

  “Hmph,” Button said.

  Avoiding her grandmother’s piercing gaze, she walked with slow deliberation to the kitchen. She pulled a beer from the fridge and slid onto the bench at the Formica table.

  “You’re not supposed to mix alcohol with your medications.”

  Button stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her silver curls glowing in the overhead light and her face twisted into THE LOOK. It was usually enough to keep Eve pretending that all was well, but not tonight.

  Twisting the cap off the bottle, she said, “It’s just one beer.”

  “And how many before that?”

  “I’m celebrating Sara’s birthday.” Her voice echoed back to her from the mouth of the bottle, rounded and warped. A laugh gurgled up her throat and escaped on a bubble of beer, leaving fire in its wake.

  “Eve.” Button placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’s a hard day for both of us. But we’re all we’ve got left. We need to stick together.”

  She ran a finger over the ring of rust where Donna’s tin of maple syrup had sat for the first seventeen years of her life. It had never occurred to her before this moment that the rust was the same colour as Donna’s eyes. She yanked back her hand and wrapped it around the bottle of beer, as though trying to soothe a burn.

  “Are you listening? I’m tired of watching you turn your back on everything you have.”

  “I have nothing except you.”

  “You think so? Come here.” Button grabbed her hand and pulled.

  She slid along the bench and allowed her grandmother to lead her into the hallway.

  “Kuk arop, vest du visn vi hoykh du shteyst. You forget how far you’ve climbed. How much you’ve overcome, even in this past year.”

  Button had hung Eve’s paintings along the hallway. Over the years, she’d filled every inch of available wall space.

  “Look at this.” Button stabbed her finger at a painting. “Really look. What do you see?”

  “A better life.” A time before Donna bounced her tuition cheque and Eve had to spend her first year at community college instead of Emily Carr.

  Button let out a breath. “But what did you paint?”

  “Paris. The cobbled street of the Rue Crémieux after a rain shower.”

  “One of my favour
ites. I love how the light from the street lamp bleeds into the shadows. It’s very fluid, very dreamlike.”

  Button pulled her along the hallway. “And this one?”

  “A café on the Rue Saint-Honoré. I’d paint it differently now. Tighten the focus to that scatter of bread crumbs, and where the coffee splashed into the saucer. Highlight the imperfections.”

  “Yes,” Button said. “You should try that. And what’s this one?”

  “All right. I get it.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the field of quicksilver plants in the Crook, where Sara and I used to play. The leaves look like tinfoil.”

  “They do,” Button said. “And see how the tiny yellow flowers seem to glow, as though lit from inside?”

  “They look that way at dusk, in the spring. The flowers smell like honey.”

  Button nodded. “You really captured something. It’s haunting and whimsical. Sad, too.”

  “I painted it the year after Sara died.”

  “Yes,” Button said.

  “I wish you’d take it down.”

  “That won’t change the past. It won’t hide you from the truth.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  Pulling her down the hall, Button pointed out each painting, highlighting the parts she thought were particularly good, and reminiscing on the story behind each. When they reached the end of the hallway, they stopped in front of Donna’s bedroom door. It hadn’t been opened in three years.

  The painting was of the Adlers’ backyard in early summer. Leigh stood in the driveway with a basketball tucked under his arm while Sara picked flowers that looked like daisies. Button touched Sara’s painted cheek, traced the flowers clutched against her chest, and ran her finger over the blood-red soil at Sara’s feet.

  “Button, don’t.”

  “You still miss her, don’t you?”

  “She was my only friend.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You understand that, don’t you? No matter what people might have said.”

  Eve didn’t bother arguing.

  Button sighed, turned back to the painting. “My Frida. My beautiful artist. Since you were very small, you always dreamed so vividly. With so much colour and detail. To have the talent to paint those dreams, to share them with others, that’s a gift from God.”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “Who said that?”

  “You did. You said you didn’t care how you were raised, you had trouble believing in a God that would let children die before their parents.” Button was born in the Warsaw Ghetto. She’d seen more atrocities in her childhood than Eve could ever imagine.

  Button waved a hand, looking flustered. “Ignore what I said. Atheism is a luxury afforded the young. At my age, I’d be foolish not to hedge my bets.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You’re going to live a long time.”

  “I’ve already lived too long. My point is, don’t use your heartache as an excuse to give up.”

  “And my guilt?” Eve asked before she could stop herself. “What should I do with that?”

  “What do you have to feel guilty about?” Button turned away before hearing the answer, as she always did.

  For a moment Eve paused on the cliff’s edge, staring down into the abyss. She imagined unburdening herself, speaking of everything Button pretended not to know. But her grandmother looked so small and fragile in her threadbare bathrobe, and the lines etched around her eyes looked like cracks in an old foundation.

  And despite all the evidence to the contrary, Button believed she was a good person. She needed that.

  Stepping back from the edge, she said, “Nothing. Let’s eat. I’m starving.”

  She pulled her grandmother away from the painting of the Adlers’ yard, and led her back to the kitchen.

  FIVE

  “YOU KNOW IT’S A LIE.”

  The woman had been speaking to her for a long time, but her voice was muted and warbling in the thick air, as though she spoke from a great distance. Eve kept losing track of the words.

  “Are you listening?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a dark splotch somewhere to her right. It kept pace with her as she moved downhill. She knew that if she turned her head she’d be able to see it more clearly, or at least the shape of it, but she didn’t want to know what it was. She needed to get to the pond, where there was sunlight.

  “Eve? You need to listen to me.”

  She saw a faint brightening ahead of her, and moved faster. Wet leaves slapped her face while branches tore at her skin and snagged in her hair. The fog lifted, steaming up toward a lightening sky. The sun rose ahead of her, a delicate lemon yellow.

  From somewhere in the glow, a woman said, “How long will you be staying?” Her voice was clear and familiar.

  “Button.” Eve started to run.

  “I’ve put in to transfer my medical licence.”

  Leigh?

  She slipped and slid over wet leaves, through fog and tinfoil, and into a light so bright it blinded her. She fell backward, landed on something soft, and her body stopped working.

  “What does that mean?” Button said from somewhere to her right. She could hear the tension in her grandmother’s voice.

  Where were they? It was so bright. Had she gone blind? She’d always thought that blindness was like being lost in the dark, but she felt like her eyeballs were cooking. And she couldn’t move. Did the rest of her body still exist?

  “It means I’m staying.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Eve needs me.”

  Her grandmother didn’t answer, but Eve knew that silence well. She imagined Button’s lips tightening like purse strings.

  What had happened to her? Had there been an accident? Maybe she was paralyzed. She focused on her neck, picturing the muscles than ran up the sides of her spine. She willed them to life, and with enormous effort managed to turn her head a fraction of an inch in their direction.

  “Eve?” Leigh’s face emerged like a black spot on the sun. “Welcome back.”

  Button’s face appeared next. Her eyes drooped with exhaustion, red and raw. Her skin hung like that of an emaciated Shar-Pei. She looked older, and no wonder if she did. Whatever had happened was clearly very bad.

  “Hello, bubbalah,” Button said, and promptly burst into tears.

  She tried to reach for her grandmother to pat her hand or give her some kind of comfort, but it was no good. She was no more than a floating head, disembodied and useless. And her eyes were on fire.

  “Liiights.”

  Her voice shredded her throat. Her jaw hinges throbbed and ached. Her face felt swollen, her tongue like a rotting plum cramped behind the jail of her teeth.

  “Liiights.” Her voice was clearer this time.

  “Is it too bright?” Leigh said, and a chair scraped. The lights flicked off, and she blinked in relief.

  “Waaater.”

  Button brought a straw to her lips, and she sipped gratefully at the tepid liquid. It soothed her throat and seemed to bring every cell of her body to life.

  When the cup was empty, she eased back against the pillow. The back of her head felt numb and tingly, as though cushioned in tight wrapping. She could feel her body now. It hurt in a million different ways, but every part of it felt present and accounted for. She filled her lungs and thought how glorious it was to be able to breathe, even if there was an elephant sitting on her chest.

  But her grandmother’s face was pinched with worry.

  “Button,” she paused to pull in a breath, “are you ready?”

  Button furrowed her brow. “Ready for what?”

  “To go dancing.” It was a poor joke, but all she could manage. And it had the desired effect.

  Button smiled and some of the tension left her shoulders. “Rain check?”

  “You bet.”

  Her grandmother bent to stroke the hair off her forehead. “Mir zol zayn far dir, mayn kind.�
�� I wish I could take your pain for myself.

  Button’s hand felt feverishly hot against the chill of her skin. It was soothing, and Eve’s eyelids grew heavy.

  “Button?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Where’s Donna?”

  “What?”

  “Why isn’t she here? Is she still mad at me?”

  “Oh, Eve.”

  As she drifted away, she wondered why her grandmother looked so sad.

  SIX

  Eve’s Seventeenth Birthday

  EVE HAD SPENT her whole life trying to understand her mother.

  Publicly, Donna Gold was a saint. She was the founder and CEO of a charity organization called Under Our Wing. It was a coalition of lawyers, therapists, and medical experts, dedicated to helping abused and exploited children. When it came to her cases, Donna had endless time and passion. She made regular appearances on news stations, at schools, and in the courtroom. She fought the good fight, determined to save children from abuse everywhere except under her own roof.

  On Eve’s seventeenth birthday, Donna was presenting closing arguments in a molestation case at the downtown courthouse. Eve waited in the gallery, sucking icing off her fingers. Court was supposed to break at noon, but her mom wasn’t working at her usual hair-trigger pace. Sweat dampened the back of Donna’s silk blouse. She could practically hear the nausea in Donna’s voice, and doubted her mom would feel up for lunch.

  She wedged a finger through an opening in the cake box and scooped out a mouthful of icing, hoping the sugar would ease her anxiety. Her mother did not look well at all.

  On court days, Donna always wore a crisp suit and styled her hair into a perfect black helmet. But now she looked rather wilted. Though her high heels cracked like gunfire against the tile floor as she paced, she clutched the table for support.

  Watching her mom caused Eve’s chest to tighten with unease. She turned her focus to the reflection of rain droplets sliding down the crimson locks of Donna’s client’s hair. It made her curls a living thing, like snakes coiling around her shoulders.

  Eve itched for her coloured pencils, imagining the swift, bold lines she would draw. She’d make that hair coil from her head like Medusa, hissing and biting, and play up the contrast of red to black in the coils.