Mentally setting aside the drawing, she turned her focus to the judge sitting at the head of the room. His face was heavily lined, with the sagging jowls and drooping eyes of a basset hound.
In her mind, Eve began once again to draw. She deepened his sad brown eyes, weighted the sides of his face with heavy black strokes, softened the tufts of hair into velvety ears … and yes, a tinge of yellow along the cheeks, and a sturdy red collar around his neck, blending into the black of his robe.
Perhaps she would call it Dog Justice, Eve mused, filling in the desk below him, imagining watercolour splashes of red and white and then blue and yellow to signify the flags behind his head. Her mind was lost to her surroundings while the scene came to life before her.
At the age of six, she’d used Donna’s expensive makeup in their hallway, smearing eyeshadow and lipstick into the blank wall to create a lush meadow where fairies lived with pet unicorns, and rainbows danced across a velvet sky. She’d sprinkled the whole scene with Donna’s gold eyeshadow, to create fairy dust.
Donna had been furious.
“She’s an artist,” Button had said in her most matter-of-fact voice, the one Donna dubbed “Button knows best.”
“Buy her some real art supplies and you’ll see.”
But it was Button who bought Eve her first art kit, perhaps so she could be proved right. There was nothing Button loved better than being right.
On canvas or paper or even on the sidewalk in front of their home, Eve gave birth to the things that lived behind her eyes. Button plastered the hall with her artwork, praising each one as masterful.
Donna had a different reaction. Her eyes wouldn’t rest for more than a second on a piece of Eve’s artwork, as though afraid her retinas would burn. Moving away, she’d shake her head and mutter, “Well, she didn’t get it from me.”
Of course not, Eve had wanted to say once she was old enough to understand the circumstances of her becoming. She must have gotten it from file #7543, the thirty-two-year-old anonymous sperm donor. Button accused Donna of doing it that way so she could create a mini version of herself, without any of the complications an actual father would bring to the picture. Her grandma was usually right.
Eve had buried herself in her studies and managed to escape high school a year early, happy as a convict released from prison. She’d spent that summer painting in Paris — much to Donna’s consternation and Button’s delight — and returned ready to start the fall semester at Emily Carr, only to discover that her seat had been filled because Donna had bounced the tuition check. By accident, she’d said.
Trying to salvage the year, Eve had enrolled in art classes at the community college. And she hadn’t spoken to her mother since, unless it was to yell. That morning, Button had made a teary plea for a truce. So she’d agreed to meet Donna for their customary birthday lunch. There were two people she couldn’t refuse, and one of them was her grandmother.
After stopping at La Dolce Vita Bakery, she’d headed to the courthouse instead of going home to her art studio. The Gold family tradition was coconut cake, homemade birthday cards, and reruns of The Golden Girls. Button related to Sophia, the sly old mother, while Donna pretended to relate to Blanche.
Lost in her own thoughts, she didn’t know something had happened until the woman on the next seat stood and pushed past her to the centre aisle, knocking a hip into the cake box and stomping on her foot.
“Hey!” Eve grasped the box before it toppled from her lap. All around her, people stood to get a better view. Some pushed into the centre aisle, crowding near the gate that led to the front of the courtroom.
“What?”
The word clogged her throat. Her skin prickled with heat. Pushing herself up onto legs that felt suddenly wooden, she turned in the opposite direction and squeezed past the other people in her row, tripping on bags and stepping on feet as she went.
The outside aisle was unoccupied, and she moved to the front of the courtroom. Every step revealed more of the scene before her. The judge’s desk was empty. So was the court clerk’s.
A couple more steps revealed Donna’s client, whom Eve had previously seen only from behind. Her face was a pale moon, marked with the healing scabs of a drug user. Her mouth gaped open to reveal blackened teeth and a shockingly pink tongue. Another step, and there was the judge. He issued orders to the court clerk, his arms waving so the black sleeves of his robe looked like the wings of a giant bat taking flight.
The clerk nodded and pushed toward the crowd forming at the gate, her meaty hands raised above her head with fingers splayed. In response, they surged forward, excitedly vying for the best view of the action. They clearly weren’t going anywhere.
Dreamlike, Eve moved forward until she met the resistance of the railing separating the gallery from the front. It hit her at hip height. Clutching the cake box to her chest, she lifted her leg over the railing, straddled it for an awkward moment, and then swung across. She moved past the empty defendant’s table and around the bellowing clerk.
“Everybody back!” the clerk said. “Everybody back!”
Eve slipped past her, shoved through the wall of lawyers huddled like crows on a line, and came suddenly into open space.
The smell assaulted her nose and sent her reeling back a step. Mixed in with the scent of hot bile she caught the bitterness of half-digested coffee and the sweet tang of maple syrup.
That damned maple syrup, Donna’s weakness. She ordered it by the case from a supplier on the east coast and slathered it on everything. Perhaps in reaction, neither Button nor Eve could stand the stuff. At home, the tin of syrup sat in its appointed spot on their kitchen table. Over the years, a ring of rust had formed on the yellow Formica, marking its home.
There was another smell, one that was horribly out of place inside the dignified walls of a courtroom. It was a septic kind of smell, acidic and feral.
The first thing she saw, or that her brain was able to process, was a shoe. It was a shiny black high-heel with a scuffed red sole. It lay on the grey tile as though casually tossed aside, the gel insole hanging out like a strange blue tongue.
Her mind fixated on the shoe, familiar and yet so out of place, to avoid looking at the foot just inches away, at the red polish on the toenails, at the pale ankle visible through a ladderlike rip in the stocking. She wouldn’t have to see the blue suit skirt pushed up to expose the bruise on Donna’s thigh, evidence of yet another encounter with the corner of the kitchen cart. Or how Donna’s body twisted at an odd angle, her right leg curled under and her arms flung wide. And most of all she wouldn’t have to see how Donna’s mouth gaped open to spill a trail of vomit from rosy lips down powdered cheek.
“Oh my God,” she wheezed. “Mom …”
The shock swept through her, exposing memories like bones.
She’d crawled right over him, not knowing he was there. A tuft of black hair was still attached to his skull.
The room tilted sideways and she went with it, head hitting the floor just feet from where her mother lay. The tile felt cool and slick against her cheek.
She’d clung to the log, fighting the pull of the icy current. Splinters pricked her skin, and Sara’s tears were salty on her lips.
The bakery box hit the floor and split open in a splatter of cake and icing. It sprayed Donna’s blouse, her cheek, and her hair. A large chunk hit her perfect black eyebrow, paused for a moment, and then slid off. And her eyes …
When she looked up, the stars were bleeding.
“You have the eyes of a cat hunting in the moonlight.”
The women in Eve’s family all had the same distinctive amber-coloured eyes, wide-set with a downward tilt at the outer edge, so they looked perpetually sad. It was the only trait she’d inherited from her mother, or so she believed. Donna’s pupils were dilated, the amber swallowed by black holes. They fixed on her with blank accusation, as though everything Donna had merely suspected was at last confirmed.
There was blood in the gro
und, if you knew where to dig.
“I’m sorry,” Eve whispered. But it was too late to ask for forgiveness.
SEVEN
“IT’S A BRAIN INJURY.”
Leigh’s voice pulled Eve from the quicksilver. She blinked away the fog, and the sterile walls of a hospital room came into focus.
The first thing she recognized was Leigh’s right hand. It was rough-knuckled, the fingers long and lean and currently drumming a nervous beat against his thigh.
“What?”
Eve was wrapped in a fleece blanket in an armchair by a window. The pale light from outside didn’t warm her at all. When she turned her head she could see a parking lot below. People moved to and fro, and near the exit cars lined up for the pay booth. The yellow arm went up and down with regularity, releasing one car at a time.
“I said it’s a brain injury. The blacking-out that you’re experiencing. And the memory loss.”
“What happened to me?”
“There was an accident.” He said it as though they’d had this conversation before — perhaps many times. “You were hit by a car. It shoved you through the window of a Starbucks.”
“Starbucks?”
“It’s a coffee shop.”
“I’m not a moron.” She turned her narrowed gaze in his direction. “I know what Starbucks is.”
“Of course.” He seemed uncomfortable with her scrutiny, and she wondered why. He wore faded jeans and a fitted button-down shirt. His hair had thinned a bit at the top; his sideburns had dimmed from dark blond to grey. He’d grown a beard. No ring on his finger, she noted.
All in all, he didn’t look much different from the last time she’d seen him. Was that after Donna’s funeral? A flash of memory, yet another jagged piece of bone unearthed from an old grave — something about rain and maple syrup, and that detective. What was his name? He’d had a big, booming voice. The memory slithered away, leaving her empty and confused.
“There’s one last major surgery to go, and then you’ll be transferred to a rehab facility,” he said, bringing her back.
“What surgery?”
“To repair your craniectomy. They’ve stored the bone flap in a freezer until your brain swelling has —”
“Fuck, stop talking. I don’t want to know.”
“You asked,” he said, and then more contritely he added, “Sorry.”
“Hopefully my brain will hit delete on this memory, too.”
“Hopefully not on all of it.” He reached for her hand.
She pulled away. “Why are you here, Leigh?”
He hesitated, his eyes flicking to the side before coming back to meet her gaze head on. “Where else would I be?”
“Anywhere else but here with me.”
“No. That’s where I’ve been.” He gave her a look that was dangerously earnest. “But I’m tired of living that lie.”
“It’s not a good idea.” Truer words she’d never spoken. Yet hope bubbled within her like cream soda.
“Have you told anyone?” Leigh asked.
Her heart jumped inside her chest, causing her to let out a short, barking cough. He handed her a cup with a plastic straw. She sipped, watching him as she did.
His eyes were the blue of a winter sky, impossibly innocent. They made her feel the way Alice must have felt falling down the rabbit hole. But instead of Wonderland, she would land back in her own childhood. Would Leigh still be as good at getting to the secret places inside her? At being the only one who could cross her barricade of insecurity and willfulness? That, at least, she remembered.
“Does your grandma know?” he prompted.
“Does she know what?”
He didn’t answer, and after a time she wandered back to tinfoil leaves and the woman who waited for her in the shadows.
EIGHT
Eve’s Ninth Birthday
IN LATER YEARS, Eve could pinpoint the afternoon of her ninth birthday as the moment her life made a seismic shift. Standing on the before side of the fissure was a girl who had once peed herself when Annabeth O’Neill and Myra Knottsworth — Snottsworth, the kids had called her behind her back — challenged her to a fight after school. On the after side, someone very different began to grow. Someone better, or so she believed for a long time.
She awoke before dawn, eager to plow through her Sunday chores so she’d be free to go to Sara’s house once her mom gave her the green light. Sara lived on the other side of Fraser’s Arm, a small neighbourhood on Vancouver’s southeastern edge that had been named for the way the land jutted into the Fraser River. The Arm was five blocks wide and ten blocks deep, and four half circles of newer houses filled in the hand.
Sara lived in an old three-level house near the wrist joint. It had peeling green paint, a giant front porch, and, according to Sara, had been built before the invention of straight lines. She’d helped Sara and her dad wallpaper Sara’s bedroom last summer and learned that Mr. Adler, usually the calm eye of the family storm, could cuss in five different languages. She’d enjoyed the education.
She and Donna had moved into Grandma Button’s home after Grandpa Max died. Their house was where the base of the thumb would have been if the hand had been complete. Built in the fifties, it was a one-level pale pink leftover with Formica counters and exposed brick. The best thing about it was the yard, which rolled to the river unimpeded, save the train tracks. Trains carried drums of oil past their home three times a day, rattling the windows and causing the lights to flicker.
Waiting for her toast to pop, she opened the curtain above the kitchen sink and was relieved to see the day looked fine. The sky was grey, but not heavy with impending rain. Sara had planned a picnic in the Crook to celebrate Eve’s birthday, and though neither girl minded wet weather, rain would make it harder to convince Donna that Eve should spend the day out of the house.
The Crook jutted into the river a block east of Eve’s home, like an angry green finger accusing the industry on the south bank of destroying the previous century’s farmland.
A boggy mess at most times of the year, it was a place where rain boots got sucked into mud swamps and spiders grew fat off mosquitoes and other winged creatures. This made it an undesirable place for adults and a sanctuary for local kids.
Dotted with blackberry bushes and tangles of vegetation, the Crook slowed tugboats roaring up and down the river and trapped log booms against its marshy beaches. A small pond nestled into the fattest part, surrounded by marsh grasses around the curve of the river, and an explosion of evergreens and blackberry bushes on the opposite side.
On the west side of the Crook, a giant army of quicksilver plants marched to the pond’s edge in a fabric-tearing tangle. Everyone called this area the Foil, because the leaves looked like strips of tinfoil. When the wind picked up, the Foil rattled and hissed like an angry snake. It was pretty creepy.
Though she wasn’t usually much of an adventurer, Sara was the only one who would go into the massive silver mess. She liked to hide there during games of Seekers, mainly so she could snicker about how she was foiling everyone by hiding in the Foil. Eve didn’t get the joke, but there was a lot about her friend that she didn’t get. Sara read at an adult level and finished the crossword puzzle every Sunday without help. According to Donna she was too smart for her own good, whatever that meant.
When Donna shuffled into the kitchen that morning, Eve was munching toast with chunky peanut butter and sliced banana, enjoying the mixture of salty crunch and soft sweetness on her tongue. In anticipation of her imminent release, she’d leaned her backpack by the kitchen door. It was stuffed with her sketchbook, coloured pencils, a bottle of water, and a bag of pretzels. Sara had promised to bring everything else.
“Coffee?” Donna said.
Her mouth was full, and Donna had already reached the counter and could see for herself that there was a fresh pot, so she didn’t answer. Watching her mother grab a mug and pour coffee, she searched for signs of Donna’s mood.
Donna sipped, t
hen grimaced. “How many scoops did you use?”
“Two. Like you showed me.”
“It’s weak.”
She took another bite of toast rather than answer.
Donna scooped a blob of cottage cheese into a bowl and sprinkled almonds on top. “Where are the bananas?”
Her scalp prickled with heat. “This is the last one. Sorry.”
Donna muttered something unintelligible, in which Eve only caught the word potassium, and plucked a package of dates from the cupboard. She chopped them into her bowl and slid onto the bench across from Eve, grabbing the tin of maple syrup from its accustomed spot. She poured about a gallon of it over her breakfast, and Eve stifled the urge to wrinkle her nose in disgust.
“So, you’re nine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s hard to believe.”
It didn’t seem like a difficult concept, so Eve shrugged.
“So, who are you?” Donna asked.
“What?”
“At nine.” Her mother looked like a cat calmly stalking its prey. “Who are you?”
“Um. I’m Eve?”
“But who is Eve? What does she stand for? What does she believe in?” Donna leaned forward, trapping her with the intensity of her amber gaze.
“I don’t know.”
“By the time I was your age, I was volunteering at the soup kitchen twice a week and reading to the elderly at the Louis Brier.”
“I know.” She dropped her toast back onto her plate. There wasn’t enough room in her throat to cram in both food and air.
“So, you should believe in something.” Donna spooned cottage cheese into her mouth.
In desperation, Eve said, “Equal rights?”
“Hmm.”
“Global warming,” she said more firmly.
“What about it?”
“Well. It’s bad? And people should do something about it.”
“Who should do something about it?”
The Day She Died Page 3