3

The Wanderer

I went over to Evelyn’s apartment and checked to see what she was up to. She was sitting at her kitchen table, wearing a pair of green flannel pyjamas and filing her nails. When she finished, she pulled a cigarette out of her package and placed it between her lips. I was dying for a smoke. I waited for her to light a match, so that at least I could smell the burning tobacco, but she was taking her sweet time. She pulled a movie magazine out of her purse and flipped through the pages. She picked up the matches and tore one from the paper book.

Then she changed her mind. She removed the cigarette from her mouth and laid it on the table. She stood up and stretched. She opened the freezer and took out a carton of vanilla ice cream. The cardboard was lightly frosted with little crystals misting the picture on the package, two pale, creamy scoops in a blue bowl. Memory shot through me like a toothache. Ice cream. Cigarettes. I used to keep our cigarettes in the freezer, and they always tasted best when they were cold.

Evelyn dug a spoon deep into the carton and stood over the kitchen sink, licking at it delicately. Eat it, I wanted to say, scoff it up for heaven’s sakes, but she ate like a kitten. She didn’t appreciate anything she had. What could you expect from a murderer?

She put the ice cream back in the freezer, drank a glass of water, and sat down to light the cigarette. I watched her inhale, imagining the circulation of the smoke through the lungs, the gathering of nicotine into the bloodstream. I thought I’d go crazy if I couldn’t get some nicotine into me. I thought about her crime and how she’d be punished for it. Alika would see, finally, what she was really like. Noni had been right. Evelyn was dangerous. She was one of those grasping, lethal little people who didn’t know when to let go. She was greedy. I might have felt sorry for her if it weren’t for everything she’d stolen from me. I had nothing, and Evelyn still had everything. I’d heard that she had no family, and I knew she’d lost Alika. But she still had flannel pyjamas and vanilla ice cream. She had a stove and a refrigerator and a huge poster on the wall of the Rocky Mountains, snow-capped peaks and a little stream running down the mountainside. An ad for beer. She probably had beer in the fridge, too. She was smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine, and I was exiled out here.

I watched her get ready for bed. She brushed her hair slowly, at least a hundred strokes. It was revolting. I consoled myself with the thought that she would be arrested soon. I had a detective for a neighbour, and he liked me. I could tell. He didn’t suspect her yet, but he’d soon catch on. She was so obvious. She had a picture of Alika right beside her bed.

“Mark?” said Evelyn. She whirled around in her chair. But she knew it wasn’t her brother. Not tonight. Some other entity was prowling in the dusk outside her window. Something she couldn’t see. She jumped into bed and pulled up the covers. What was out there? A mere wisp of a thing, too insubstantial to be glimpsed, was watching her. Was it malevolent? Evelyn hoped she hadn’t summoned it herself, by mistake somehow. She remembered Sister Theresa’s warnings about the occult arts, about fooling around with the dark side. She kept her bedside lamp on all night long, and all night long, the weak, invisible presence hovered at the glass.

Evelyn knew what it was like to be invisible. She’d been invisible herself, when she was a teenager. After Mark’s death, she’d come home from school every day as usual and said hello to her mother, but her mother’s eyes were always turned toward the window or the television, or she’d stare at the clock, astonished that her daughter was home already, that so much time had passed. Evelyn tried to engage her mother in conversation, but her mother always wandered away, muttering that she’d be right back. If she sought her out, she’d find her lying on Mark’s bed, in a deep sleep. Evelyn was old enough to take care of herself, so she did.

It was 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.

“Let 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.

“I’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 and admired it while he waited for the kettle to boil. On a black background, a scene had been etched and coloured in fine lines. An ancient Chinese gentleman in a gold and red robe sat at the foot of a blossoming tree, while a chubby little boy hurried toward him, bowing as he ran, carrying a red bowl with golden chopsticks peeking out at the top. Two elegant ladies in silver pyjamas fanned themselves gracefully with ornate folding fans, and gazed at Felix with mild interest. They inclined their heads slightly toward each other, as if they were gossipping about him. The scene was interrupted on one side by a label providing instructions for the proper preparation of the tea. Felix liked to read these words: “Be sure your teapot (an earthenware one is best) is clean and warm. Add fresh drawn water that has been brought to a furious boil.” He also liked to lift the tin and read the words stamped into the bottom: “Container Made in England.”

The water came to a furious boil, and Felix removed the kettle from the stove. In the silence, he could hear the clicking of the keys from Alice’s room.

Alice was writing a book. Every morning from nine until noon she sat before the keyboard in her study, typing and ceasing to type in a completely unpredictable rhythm. Felix found this comforting. It was like listening to the private movements of her brain. He could tell when she was seized with an idea or when she was hovering, hesitating, trying to coax the right word to surface in her memory. Sometimes at these moments he would hold his breath, waiting for the noise to begin again.

Alice had been an unexpected gift. She was an ambitious young journalist when Felix first met her, back in the days when he’d never dreamed she’d look at a man like him, ten years older than her and already prematurely aged with weariness. But he looked at her. And about five years ago, when she covered a case he was working on, he fell irrevocably in love with her. The case was a double murder out on the Perimeter Highway — almost a triple murder, for Felix had very nearly been killed during the car chase. He likely would have died, he thought, if Alice hadn’t come to the hospital every day, bringing him cards and soup, encouraging him to walk again. The sheer surprise had kept him alive.

Now, Alice had taken a leave of absence from the newspaper so that she could write a true-crime book about the case. She was writing about the year of Felix’s deepest trauma and his deepest joy, and she was doing it without him. He had hinted, several times, that he was willing to read her drafts, but she always just smiled, as if she didn’t even hear him. And lately it was getting worse. She spoke to her husband, when she spoke at all, in an absent-minded tone about trivial matters — the insulation, the life insurance. When he spoke to her, she seemed utterly absorbed, as if listening with intense concentration, but not to him. She seemed to be keeping a secret that he couldn’t crack.

Sometimes Felix wondered if he really had died that day on the Perimeter Highway, and everything that followed — the pain, the convalescence, recovery, his life with Alice — was a kind of happy afterlife. Because sometimes he felt tenuous, as if he were not really here or as if he’d woken up inside the wrong body. There seemed to be an awful lot of room inside his body now. He felt he barely filled it up.

I supposed I was partly to blame for my own condition. I should have read the symptoms, figured out what she was up to. After all, I couldn’t claim to be ignorant about obsession. When I was in grade seven, I’d been followed for months by the man who delivered groceries from the supermarket. He came by one Saturday with a box of charcoal briquettes, when I was home alone. It was raining that day, and he was wet, so I made him a cup of hot chocolate. He was interested in the poems I was writing — a task my English teacher had assigned. They were spread out across the kitchen table and he sat there and read them while he drank his cocoa, and asked me a lot of questions about them, which I couldn’t answer. When my foster father came home, he wasn’t pleased. He told me afterwards I shouldn’t talk to strangers, I shouldn’t let them into the house. I didn’t argue, I never argued, but I didn’t obey him either. I was too young to understand why I should. I let the delivery man in again several times, on Saturday afternoons when no one was home. He liked my poems and told me that I had real talent and that he should know, because he’d studied literature at the university. My poems were mostly about squirrels and lost mittens and those kinds of things. But he said I had a way of rhyming words that moved him. I’d never moved anybody before. He also helped me with math, explaining negative numbers and repeating decimals so that I actually comprehended them, and my grades began to improve.

The delivery man’s name was Danny. He was a lumbering, awkward fellow of twenty-five, too old to be hanging around the kitchen with me when my parents weren’t home. Gradually, I came to realize this. There was something wrong with Danny. I stopped letting him in. I hid when he knocked on the door, pretending not to be home. That was when he started to send me his own poems. He printed them out with coloured pencils on foolscap, using different colours in order to emphasize certain words, like breasts and blood and the blade of the knife. He stashed these poems among the groceries he delivered, and one day my father found one under a sack of potatoes.

My parents complained to the grocery manager, and Danny was fired, but this only made things worse. He started to call on the telephone, so that my parents had to change their number. He showed up at my school, followed me on my paper route, stood on my parents’ front lawn in the middle of the night, demanding to see me. The police spoke to him, but it did no good. Nothing deterred him.

Finally, my parents hit on the only solution. They called my social worker, and after a serious conference, decided to transfer me to another home. I ended up in another house in another neighbourhood, attending a new school all the way across town. Danny never found me.

But how could I have avoided Evelyn? Even if I’d seen how crazy she was, I couldn’t have escaped her. It wasn’t possible to move out and find a new husband, the way you could find new parents. Marriage didn’t work that way, or at least I didn’t think it should. I’d been stuck with Alika, wanted to be stuck with him. We’d been married almost a whole year, and I’d wanted to stay married the rest of my life. I loved him, terribly. And I loved his house. I loved the garden, with its fragrant, terrible disorder. I loved the earthworms, the bumblebees, even the weeds and the mosquitoes. I loved Noni, with her round, serious face and her artificial limb, and Rosa, with her flawed psychic power. Come to think of it, here was another disaster Rosa had failed to foresee. It was Noni who’d warned me, who’d shivered.

By the time Evelyn was sixteen, it was clear that her mother could no longer look after herself. In one of her rare lucid periods, Evelyn’s mother realized she had better return to the home of her own parents, in England. But first she arranged to have Evelyn boarded at St. Bernadette’s School for Girls in St. Boniface. “Of course you don’t want to leave home, dear. You wouldn’t want to leave your friends,” she murmured.

Evelyn didn’t have any friends, but her mother didn’t know that. She took Evelyn down to St. Bernadette’s and introduced her to the principal, Sister Theresa, who assured them both that Evelyn would be very happy there.

St. Bernadette’s was housed in an old convent that was no longer active, due to a lack of nuns. It was a beautiful old stone building, close to downtown, with spacious grounds, manicured hedges, and a soccer field. The dorms were clean and bright, and the girls they saw seemed happy, but Evelyn hated it. There was a yellow plaster Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall right above the bed that was reserved for her. His ribs stuck out, and he was bleeding bright red drops from the wound in his emaciated side.

“Don’t make me go there,” she begged her mother later when they were back at home. “I want to go with you.”

Evelyn’s mother patted her back and said, “I know, dear.” Then she had to go and lie down again, in Mark’s room.

Evelyn phoned her father in Vancouver and explained the situation, but he didn’t offer to rescue her. “Your mother’s right,” he said. “It’s not fair to uproot you. And her parents can hardly be expected to cope with a teenager at their age.”

Paul and Felix tried to recreate the event at the Li residence. Had Wendy been assaulted? Had she surprised a burglar? According to the locksmith, she’d been worried about someone trespassing in her house, but she hadn’t filed a police report.

Paul had theories. Maybe Alika had staged an earlier break-in to make it seem that his wife was being stalked, to throw suspicion off himself before he tried to kill her.

That didn’t make sense, Felix countered. Otherwise, Alika would have mentioned the break-in to the cops. He would have played it up.

Maybe Alika hired someone to kill his wife — someone whose previous attempt had failed, Paul speculated. For her money.

Felix shook his head. He doubted Wendy Li had any money, and he was pretty sure this wasn’t a case of premeditation. If Alika was guilty, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, the usual domestic violence.

When they finally caught up with Alika at the hospital and drove him downtown for an interview, the results were inconclusive. Paul took the aggressive role, firing personal questions about the marriage, the finances, whether there was a history of violence, whether Wendy was seeing another man. He was trying to rattle Alika, get a rise out of him, but as far as Felix could tell, Alika showed no guilt. He didn’t even seem to grasp the intent of the questions. Once or twice, a quizzical expression passed across his features. The question about Wendy’s possible lover provoked a wrinkle of the forehead and a sudden excess of politeness, as if Paul were inquiring whether she’d ever been abducted by aliens. But otherwise, Alika was passive — still stunned, Felix guessed, by the consequences of Wendy’s fall.

But had she fallen? Could such a thing happen? An ugly panorama of accident scenes flashed through his memory — chainsaws, automobiles, rifles, electrical wires, deep, deep water. Surely Wendy would recover. Felix couldn’t imagine anyone so young and healthy simply stumbling to her death in her own home.

I’d never really been religious, even though I’d been baptized twice. Once by Mrs. Keller, who was Catholic, and once by Mrs. Richards, who got born again one summer and had all nine of her foster children baptized at a revival meeting one Sunday just before they took us all away from her. I didn’t think Alika’s family was religious either. But it seemed that whenever I looked in on Rosa, she was praying for me. I guess she was trying to cover all the bases, and I appreciated it, though I wasn’t sure exactly what she was asking for. Watching her, I wondered what she hoped to accomplish. Did she want me to come back? Or did she want me to move on?

I knew I could move on, leave the earth. I had nearly done it that first day when I rose into the sky. But every time I flew too high, saw the earth so far away from me, I heard those other voices calling, and I grew uneasy. I came back to my home, my husband. I had responsibilities. I couldn’t leave Alika. And there was no way I was going to let Evelyn get away with this. So I stayed close to the old neighbourhood. I patrolled St. Catherine Street, roaming from house to house, checking up on my family and on Felix. With so much time on my hands, I realized there were a lot of beautiful things in my neighbourhood, things I’d passed by every day when I was alive and never appreciated, like the tree on the corner.

At the very end of St. Catherine Street, in front of Felix’s house, a huge silver maple spread out over the sidewalk, so that pedestrians had to push aside its lower branches to pass by. The first day I visited Felix at home, he was contemplating that tree from an upstairs window of his house. I could barely see him through the forest of poplars in his yard, so I rose higher, into the limbs of the silver maple. I saw a squirrel’s nest there, and a pair of squirrels running up and down the trunk with seeds and acorns in their mouths. I remembered reading that squirrels worked so hard because half the time they forgot where they hid their acorns. I’d found that funny once.

Felix looked very serious, almost morose, and I imagined that he was thinking of me, of my demise. I watched him rub a palm across his forehead, pondering the problem deeply. He seemed intelligent. Dedicated to his job. Upholder of law and order. I was confident that he would set things right. But I wished I’d mentioned Evelyn to him before she got me. I wished I could report her crime like a normal person would, sitting in a police station filling out forms, pointing her out in a line-up. I’d have to leave that to others.

The wind was growing stronger. Black clouds were filling the sky. Felix Delano turned away from the window and disappeared somewhere inside his house.

I rose above the silver maple and looked down upon its crown. Its leaves were dark as iron in the evening light, and when the wind passed through its branches, it swayed and tossed, revealing the underside of its leaves, shimmering like pale sage. I had never seen it it for what it truly was — a giant being, rooted to the planet, rustling and breathing. It bent its great body with the wind, bowing sometimes toward the grass and reaching sometimes toward the sky, but always it remained, anchored deep below the surface of the earth.

I envied it.

When she sat in the hospital room, watching Wendy’s chest rise and fall with the mechanical rhythm of the respirator, Noni couldn’t feel Wendy’s spirit at all. She could only sense it if she was all alone — like that first day in the cafeteria, when she felt Wendy so close beside her she imagined her breath on her neck. Or when she heard the low moaning at the window — summer wind, she told herself, she should buy weatherstripping. But she knew the summer wind didn’t sound like that, not unless there was a storm. And there had been no storms since the night that Wendy fell. At these times, Noni feared her sister-in-law had left her body. Had passed on.

Sometimes, early in the morning, Noni dreamed that Wendy was standing at the foot of her bed. Often the dream was so vivid it terrified her, and she woke trembling. One night she rented the movie Hamlet and afterwards dreamed that Wendy was spurring her on to avenge her death. Even after waking, Noni found it hard to shake the eerie sensation that Wendy was present in her apartment. She could hear Wendy’s voice in her head, whispering urgently, but she couldn’t make out the words.

Was there anything to avenge?

Detective Delano seemed to think so. He came to the hospital and questioned Noni about her brother and his marriage to Wendy. Noni answered truthfully. Her brother was a gentle man, he loved his wife, they all loved her.

He assured Noni that the questions were routine. It was just that it seemed unlikely, he said carefully, that Wendy’s fall had been an accident. He had examined the scene and doubted she could have tripped in the first place, he said, let alone fallen with such force, even if she’d been unconscious. He suspected Wendy had been pushed from behind, probably by a burglar.

Noni said she didn’t think anything had been stolen from the house. Alika hadn’t mentioned that anything was missing.

“Then is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to hurt her?” he asked. “Anyone at all?”

Noni started to shake her head. Then she remembered.

Almost as soon as Evelyn James opened her door for him, Felix decided that she was probably innocent. She was tiny, for one thing, not strong enough to have committed such an assault. And it seemed she knew nothing of Wendy’s fall or her coma. When Felix told her about it, she placed both hands over her mouth and stared at him with wide eyes, while the blood drained from her face. Felix thought she was going to faint.

But he still had to question her. Noni had told him about the stocking, along with some crazy theory about Evelyn breaking in and leaving it there. If Alika had his wife and his sister believing that, he was a pretty slick liar.

“Sit down, sit down,” he said. He ushered Evelyn into her own kitchen. A pot of tea sat on the table and a full cup steamed beside it. Felix guided her into a chair. “Drink your tea,” he said. “It’ll do you good.”

She drank the tea, holding the cup with two shaking hands.

“When did this happen?” she managed to ask.

“Last Thursday. August twenty-first.”

Evelyn lost her grip on the cup and it crashed down into the saucer.

Felix pulled out a chair for himself.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked. “The cups are behind you, there, on those hooks.”

He reached up and took one. “Thanks. Do you have milk?” He moved toward the refrigerator, but Evelyn jumped up and stood in front of it, blocking his way.

“I’ll get it,” she said. She poured the milk from the carton into a tiny pitcher and set it on the table.

“Did you see Wendy on the twenty-first?” Felix asked.

“I haven’t seen her for months.”

“You haven’t visited her house?”

“No!”

“Where were you that night?”

Evelyn glanced at the calendar on the wall. Thursday the twenty-first was marked with a circle to represent the full moon. “I worked the late shift until eleven and then I came home to bed.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing? Watching television?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you talk to anyone that night, on the phone, maybe?”

“I don’t remember.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

Felix looked hard at the girl’s pale face. She was definitely shocked by this news. Even if she was having an affair with the husband, she honestly didn’t seem to have a clue about Wendy’s fall.

“How is Alika taking it?” she asked.

“Not very well,” said Felix.

Alika stood at the living room window, watching the empty street. He often stood staring at nothing, and sometimes I used to stand behind him, trying to see what he was looking at.

I could never tell, especially when he was taking pictures. He’d hold the camera to his eye, look at the world through that one hole. What did he see?

This morning, he had dressed carelessly. His collar buttons were crooked, and I wanted to reach out and put them right. I wondered if he’d misbuttoned his shirt all the way down, and I moved closer to the window, trying to see his whole body. I pushed up close against the glass and then I found myself inside the house. I was right there in the living room with him. I was back!

“Alika,” I said. “I’m home.” But he didn’t believe me. He placed his right palm against the pane and leaned forward, gazing across the lawn, as if he were looking for me, waiting for me to return.

I pressed myself against his chest, the way I’d pressed against the window glass, but I could not enter him. I had never been able to enter him fully.

The pile of clothing next to Noni’s sewing machine remained untouched. She couldn’t face it yet. Like Alika, she was finding it hard to focus on the details of her regular routine. Gino had granted Alika a leave of absence from the studio, but Noni had no one to give her time off. Her work just sat there — bundles of torn dress shirts, jeans that wanted hemming, skirts that needed letting in or letting out. This morning, Noni barely glanced at them. She’d spent the night at Alika’s house and this morning she’d come home only to shower and change while her mother shopped for groceries. Then they were going back to Alika’s for brunch. Rosa was determined to keep on cooking. As if cooking would help. That’s what people did during disasters.

Alika seemed relieved to see them. Noni couldn’t tell what he’d been doing before they arrived, but he certainly hadn’t made any preparations for brunch. Rosa set to work cracking and beating the eggs, while Noni washed dishes and set the table. The kitchen was small and they bumped into each other as they worked. Still, the room seemed empty without Wendy. The whole scene felt artificial. Rosa chatted with forced cheer, suggesting that Alika pick some flowers from the garden. They would take a bouquet to Wendy this morning, she said. It had been a week, now. Surely Wendy would wake up today. Alika looked out at the garden. He made no move to go outside.

Rosa whipped up a mushroom omelette and served it with toast and jam. Nobody ate much, not even Rosa, though she made a pretense, pushing the food about on her plate. After an interminable silence, she rose and began to gather the plates. She briskly washed and rinsed them, scoured the pan, wiped the counter. Noni remained at the table, beside Alika. She tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t turn away from the window. She reached out and pressed his hand. He responded with a slight, distracted pressure.

“You need to take out the garbage,” Rosa told her son.

He didn’t move.

“Alika,” warned Rosa. “I’m talking to you.”

“It can wait, Mum,” said Noni gently. “The trucks don’t come until tomorrow.”

Rosa lifted the bag from the trash pail, twisted it shut, and held it toward her son. “They might come early,” she said.

Noni sighed. She took the bag and carried it through the garden. She dumped it in the can and placed the lid on firmly, to keep the dogs away during the night.

The storm clouds that had gathered the night before had blown over before it rained, and the garden was dry. Noni stopped to run her hand through the long stems of the poppies. They were long past blooming now, and their seed pods rattled in the morning breeze. She ripped one from its stem and held it in her hand. She could feel how frail it was, and it made her angry. She crushed it to powder.

The wind was gathering strength. It moaned through the neighbour’s elm trees, causing the leaves to murmur with the cadence of a human voice. Noni shuddered.

As she hurried back toward the house, she heard the grinding gears of a city garbage truck as it turned into the lane.

I could see Noni out in the back lane. She was bending over the tall stalks of the poppies, examining their round seed husks. She plucked one and crumbled it between her fingers, letting the half-formed seeds fall to the ground.

“Noni,” I said, and she looked up.

“They’re not ready yet,” I told her. “Wait for the fall.”

She turned away from me then and started toward the house, the wind whipping her short, dark hair across her face.

“Wait!” I called, but this only seemed to make her move faster. She limped quickly, awkwardly, up the back steps and then paused for a minute, listening nervously, before she went into the house.

I didn’t want to scare Noni, but I missed her. She was the only one who would understand about Evelyn. And she was a good friend, a sister. My only sister. I’d had a few foster sisters and brothers along the way, but they were always coming and going. I’d learned pretty early that it wasn’t wise to get too close to them. One or another of them was always getting returned to their real parents. I knew that was never going to happen to me. My real parents had given me away. The trouble was, they hadn’t given me to anyone. I was sort of adrift.

So I had given myself to Alika and his family. I’d thought it was safe. But after one short year, Evelyn had taken me away from them.

The beauty of the Book of Changes was that Felix could never understand it. The verses were all about crossing the great water and foxes getting their tails wet, and who could make any sense of that? Every once in a while, he’d have a glimmer of comprehension, like the day he tossed a hexagram that warned him to pay attention to small, seemingly insignificant details. As a detective, he understood that. But mostly, Felix considered the tossing of the coins a kind of telling of the weather. It wasn’t a guide. It was more like a barometer.

A very stoned girl in a cotton dress had given Felix the Book of Changes at the first Winnipeg Folk Festival — the free one, back in the seventies. Felix was taking an Eastern philosophy course then, and he was interested in the book’s introduction. But he hadn’t been tempted to toss the coins to read the hexagrams. His mother used to perform a similar rite in times of crisis or indecision, using the New Testament and a bobby pin. When Felix was in college, he’d considered that to be primitive nonsense. He believed in logic and relied on his reason to guide him. When he decided to join the police force, he welcomed the chance to put those beliefs into practice. But once he got out on the streets, once he’d been spat on and sworn at and punched and finally shot in the chest, he asked his mother to pray for him once in a while. It couldn’t hurt. And now and then he tossed the coins, just to give himself something to meditate on for the day. The process had come to interest him more and more. For one thing, he’d never, in all the years he’d been reading the book, thrown the same hexagram twice. This was mathematically impossible, he knew. Yet it was true. Because every time Felix threw the coins, the wind was blowing from a different direction, the sun was shining from a different angle, and Felix was a different man.

He threw the coins six times and recorded the lines. They led him to “Innocence,” which sounded good. But when he turned to the verse, the first words he saw were “Undeserved Misfortune. Misfortune from within and without.” Shit. There was no mistaking the meaning of that.

He stood up, leaving the book on the table, and listened. Where was his wife? She’d promised to join him for dinner tonight, but he didn’t believe her. She’d worked straight through dinner every night this week. He walked down the hallway, listening harder. Yes. Typing again.

Evelyn’s heart had hammered in her chest when that detective gave her the news, and it was still beating faster than normal. A coma! Dear God, what had she done? Would she be arrested? She sat at her kitchen table, chain-smoking, and tried to decide what to do.

Her first instinct had been to get out of town immediately, to get away from the detective’s questions and his prying eyes. But she feared that would only draw more suspicion on herself. And she had no confidence in her ability to escape. She’d tried to run away before, and she had failed.

When she was sixteen, two days before she was supposed to start classes at St. Bernadette’s, Evelyn had made the first impulsive move of her short life. She stole ninety dollars from her mother’s purse, packed a few things in a cardboard suitcase, went downtown and boarded a bus to Vancouver. Right up until the moment the bus pulled away from the terminal, she wasn’t sure if she was really going to do it. She was nervous, worried that someone might think she was too young to be going all the way to Vancouver by herself. But nobody questioned her. Her invisibility had settled over her completely now, and no one noticed her at all. Even the driver forgot to take her ticket as she boarded the bus, and she had to thrust it at him twice before he saw it. The bus headed west down Portage Avenue, all the way to the Perimeter Highway, the farthest west she’d ever been, and just kept right on going.

Evelyn got off the bus at Brandon and then got on again, because everybody else did. All the way across the country, everybody got off every two hours to smoke or buy potato chips and stale sandwiches wrapped in plastic — even in the middle of the night. She learned to stay close to the coach and keep her eye on the driver while he drank his coffee, so she wouldn’t get left behind. Sometimes she dreamed about exploring the little towns they passed through. But all she ever saw of Regina and Moose Jaw and Swift Current and Medicine Hat were the bus depots.

The bus arrived in Golden, BC, just as the sun was climbing over the horizon. Evelyn had never seen a place so cool and clean before. She’d never seen snow so white, water so clear. When she stepped off the bus she felt as if she were ascending into the blue air and the white clouds, because the sky was everywhere around her; she was inside it.

While the driver unloaded luggage and freight, Evelyn walked to the edge of the parking lot and looked into the dense brush and trees of the wooded mountainside. High above, she could see a stream rushing at white speed down the mountain, spuming into a clean blue pool below. She was mesmerized by the morning light, its pale, porous quality, the way it seemed to slide up the mountain from below, until the snow was bright as fire. She stayed so long, just looking and breathing, that she nearly missed the bus.

In Vancouver, she called her father from the depot and he came to get her in his car. He seemed angry and uncertain and wouldn’t look directly at her. At home, his new wife made up a bed for Evelyn in a spare room — they had a lot of spare rooms — while her father phoned her mother to say that Evelyn was all right. Long into the night she heard her father and his new wife discussing things in serious tones and sometimes they hissed at each other.

In the morning, after her father explained that she had to go home, Evelyn went for a long walk along the seawall. She considered jumping into the Pacific, but she didn’t. She went back home and repacked her suitcase, and the next day she let her father give her a lot of money and drive her to the depot and put her on the bus. It was the same bus, with the same graffiti on the backs of the seats.

It was noon when she arrived in Golden again, and the light was more intense, more spectacular than it had been the day before. The driver opened the luggage compartment and took out two bags for the two people who had reached their destination. Then Evelyn performed the second impulsive act of her life. She asked for her own luggage. She pointed to her suitcase, and the driver leaned in and hauled it out.

“It’s tagged for Winnipeg,” he said, but he gave it to her.

Evelyn walked across the parking lot, carrying the cardboard suitcase. It was light enough. There wasn’t much in it besides a few clothes and the magic kit. And she was feeling strong, strong and light and happy to be living in the sky. She spent an hour traipsing the thin trails though the brush on the mountainside, inhaling the pure, blue air, exhilarated.

Nobody knew where she was. True, she had been alone for years, and no one had ever cared where she was, but at least this time she had chosen to be lost. Suspended high between the prairies and the ocean, between her mother and her father, she was severed at last, cut loose, unattached as her brother Mark. She was liberated.

She would stay here, she thought. Get a job, maybe at the bus depot coffee shop, or one of the stores in town, and live in the mountains, breathe this air for the rest of her life.

All afternoon she trudged through the streets of the town, asking for work. But she had no experience. She hadn’t even finished high school. Nobody would hire her.

“What skills do you have?” the man at the lumberyard asked, and she couldn’t even think of an answer. The afternoon wore on, the suitcase grew heavier, and she began to worry about the night. She must have been mad to get off the bus. As the sun sank lower in the sky, the mountain air grew cold. She headed back toward the depot.

The lady at the wicket told her there was an eastbound bus passing through in an hour. Evelyn sat down on the bench outside and waited. The sun was setting over the mountains. Orange flames licked the snow at the top of the peaks. She tried to tell herself she’d accomplished something unique, something valuable. She’d had nearly one whole day in Golden. She could hear the ticket agents talking in the booth behind her. One of them clucked her tongue in disgust and said, “Runaways!” in a bored, dismissive voice. And then Evelyn understood that she was not even original. She was a speck in a vast and nebulous galaxy of losers.