Beth
My memories lead me back and back, past Mr. Duncan and the magic tricks, all the way to the start of Grade Four, when I first realized something was wrong. That was two whole years after Dad was diagnosed. Before that, I just thought he went for treatments for some sickness, like when I got the flu or something.
I waited for him to get better. I asked him to play games with me or listen to me read as I learned how. He hardly ever said yes. And when he did let me read to him, he didn’t really listen. He sat in his big chair with his eyes closed. If I stopped to test him, his eyes would open after a few seconds and he would look over at me, and I would carry on. When I stopped altogether, he would nod and smile and say thank you. But he never commented on what I was reading or asked me questions about it. And Mom just never had time for it at all.
No one mentioned the word cancer. Not until a girl I hardly knew sidled up to me at school one day.
“I’m really sorry about your dad,” she said, stretching the word dad out long and sad.
I almost didn’t answer. I almost walked away. A cloud of dread rose inside me.
“Sorry why?” I said, even though I did not, did not, want to know the answer.
The girl’s eyes widened. “I don’t know. I guess I made a mistake …”
I watched her gather momentum for flight, and was surprised by what my arm did then, shooting out and grabbing the girl’s wrist, hard. She gave a loud squawk.
“Sorry why?” I said again.
“Let go of me.”
I let go. “Tell me,” I said.
The girl scrubbed at her bruised wrist and raised large, damp eyes to my face. Her lips quivered. “Cancer,” she said. She rubbed at her arm some more. “My mom says your dad’s going to die.”
Up until then, I wasn’t a bad student. I wasn’t brilliant, that’s for sure, but I wasn’t bad. After the girl spoke the C word, school changed.
At home, Dad seemed all right. Things went on the same, more or less, for the rest of the year.
But at school, the other kids just kind of drifted away. I saw them whispering about me; I felt their soft drifts of pity. When they came close, I saw the fear in their eyes and felt my own fear unfurl and send tendrils up my spine and into my brain, along my veins and into my heart. School became the place where my dad was dying.
In January, the new teacher came: Mr. Duncan. He was new to the school, not just to our class, so he didn’t know about my dad. Or so I thought at the time. He smiled at me, and his smile was bright and kind. His expectations were high. When he found out that I still had not mastered parts of Grade Three math, he sat down with me to work out how I would get caught up.
Hope stirred in my heart. Maybe Dad wasn’t dying after all.
Then Mr. Duncan did the magic trick. It was a simple one, really. With cards. You had to take a card from the pack, and Mr. Duncan told you which card you had pulled. Every single time. The whole class surrounded him as he did it, watching from every angle. They examined the cards over and over again. They quizzed him mercilessly. But Mr. Duncan just smiled that bright smile and put the cards away until next time.
I had seen magic tricks on TV, but I had never seen anyone do one for real.
After the first time, I lay awake in bed, running through it in my mind: the teacher splaying out the cards, Ben hesitating and finally sliding one out, looking at it and holding it face down against his chest, the teacher putting the cards down in a stack and asking someone to cut the deck. After that, it was hard to get the steps quite right, except for the last one, the one where Mr. Duncan said, the first time, “Is it the nine of hearts?” and Ben’s whole body gathered itself into a whoop of joy. “It is!” he said, flourishing the card so that the whole class could see.
And it was.
I knew it was just a trick. But it seemed like something else. It seemed like the magic of Narnia or Middle Earth. It seemed like Mr. Duncan had special powers. I dug an old deck of cards out of the games cupboard and set myself to learning how to shuffle.
Kaya hovered. “Can I try?” she begged.
“Your hands are too small,” I said. “You’d just drop them.”
Kaya stuck around long enough to watch me drop the cards myself, not once but three times.
“My hands aren’t that small,” she said at last.
I was about to tell her to find her own deck of cards, when the doorbell rang. It was Kaya’s friend Diana, collecting her to play in the ravine. Off they went.
“Beth, why don’t you go too?” Mom called from the kitchen.
Why would I hang out with a couple of little kids? Besides, I had work to do.
I should have been studying fractions instead of trying to master the art of the shuffle. I was going to be tested on Tuesday, my very own private test.
On Monday morning, Mr. Duncan stopped by my desk. “Have I got a deal for you!” he said jauntily.
I glanced around the room, but various projects were underway and no one seemed to be listening in. I managed a small smile. And waited.
“You have an important math test tomorrow,” Mr. Duncan said. “I’m going to set you up back there to do it.” He gestured toward a small round table under the window. “And I’d like to offer you a reward.”
I was curious now.
“If you pass the test, you will join the rest of the class in the Grade Four book.” He paused. I already knew about that. Mr. Duncan was leading up to something else. I guessed that if he had a drum set handy, he would ask for a drum roll, or perhaps he would beat one out himself. “If you pass the test, I will teach you the card trick I did last week.”
“Really?” I said. “Do you … do you think I could do it?”
“Of course you can, Beth. The question is, Can you pass the math test? I believe that you can. That’s why I’m making you this very special offer.” He smiled again, but there was a challenge in it this time. A show me what you’re made of kind of challenge.
I pulled the Grade Three math book out of my desk. Shuffling would have to wait.
The test the next day was tough. I spent an hour at that back table, working my way through two whole pages of questions, using up sheet after sheet of scrap paper, trying to show my work and get the right answers. Getting the right answer didn’t matter much to Mr. Duncan if you didn’t show the steps, and they couldn’t just be scribbles either.
When I was done I looked over my work and shrank a little inside. It was smudged and scrinchy with lots scratched out. Oh well. It was over now. I put the messy pages into Mr. Duncan’s hands. He announced a free period and settled down to mark the test right then and there while the class erupted in excitement and organized itself into groups for games. I got my cards out of my desk and cut the deck in two. I hadn’t learned to do that flippy thing yet, where you divided and shuffled all in one long, smooth motion, but the shuffling itself was going pretty well. Not so many chunks of cards now.
I didn’t really notice that any time had gone by when Mr. Duncan pulled a chair up beside my desk. “You did it,” he said. “You got eleven out of twenty right. And you showed all your work!”
I looked at the paper Mr. Duncan had placed in front of me. So many Xs down the side of the paper, even though they were small. Mr. Duncan made his checks bigger than his Xs, but that didn’t make the wrong answers right. His hand lighted on my shoulder.
“You got five out of twenty on the last one, if you remember,” he said. “You figured out more than twice as many this time! I’ll meet you here after lunch when everyone’s outside, and we’ll do some magic.”
I sat perfectly still for a long moment after he stood up and told the class to return to their desks. I was caught in the glow of that light touch, those kind words, the anticipation of the session at lunch, and of what I would learn.
When I got home that day, Dad was in the den as usual; I could see him from the front hall. He didn’t turn his head. He never did. He never seemed to hear me enter over the TV, which filled the room with sound and glare all day and all night. I usually walked on by, into the kitchen looking for a snack. Today, though, I went and stood in the doorway.
He had a magazine open in his lap and he did not look up. On the TV, someone was talking on the deck of an enormous ship.
I took another step into the room. “Dad,” I said. “Dad.”
He heard me the second time.
I pulled the battered cards out of my pocket.
“Pick a card, any card.” I smiled as I said it, or tried to.
He smiled too, but his smile looked as stiff as mine felt. “What’s this?” he said.
“A trick,” I replied as I fanned the cards out in front of him. “Pick a card.”
His smile grew. His eyebrows crinkled together. He reached for the remote and silenced the man on the deck of that ship. “Don’t I get to cut the deck first?” he said.
My next breath filled my lungs right up, and I realized that I hadn’t been breathing. I let him cut the deck; I fanned the cards. He picked one. And my story sprang out of me then, long and joyous: the trick, the deal, the test, the eleven check marks down the side of the page, the Grade Four math book, the magic lesson. While I talked, I was reviewing the next steps of the trick in my mind. The story, I realized, was the perfect distraction, and distraction was the key.
“Are you holding the jack of clubs?” I said at last, tying the question to the story, making it the grand finale.
He was.
Kaya slipped into the room not long after that, and Mom followed soon after to find the three of us sharing milk and cookies. I watched my mother look for something wrong with the scene, and I saw her tiny huff of acceptance when she realized that Dad was fine. Better than fine.
Then, “Show them, Beth,” Dad said.
“I’ve got groceries to put away,” Mom said.
“Come on, Margaret. Five minutes.”
I flinched. I hated those exchanges between Mom and Dad, all sharp edges.
“Yes, show us!” Kaya said, spraying bits of cookie as she spoke.
And I did. I let Kaya pick the card. I prattled on a bit about how I had learned the trick, but I was nervous now, and it didn’t come out right. I tried to follow the steps as I talked, but in the end I knew I was guessing when I said, “Is it the six of clubs?”
Kaya’s face got sad, and my stomach turned over as I looked at the card face up in Kaya’s hand: the queen of hearts.
“Hmm,” Mom said. “More practice, I guess.” She was heading for the kitchen as she said it.
“You’ll get it, Beth,” Dad said quietly, tipping Kaya off his lap. “You only just learned it today.” He reached for the remote.
I shoved the cards into my pocket and went to my room, followed by my little sister. “Show me again,” Kaya said. “I’ll bet it works this time.”
“No,” I said shortly. “I’ve got homework.”
It wasn’t just the cards that showed up the holes in my life. The other kids shying away from me at school, Dad buried in his big chair, Mom, her whole body so tense she could have been made of stone, Kaya with her sad, crumpled face. It seemed as if Dad’s cancer swirled everyone off somewhere far, far away, leaving me alone at the centre of a vortex.
For an hour or two I had thought that the magic would close the gap. But soon, off they went, swirling away again. I was discouraged, but I still hoped. I still imagined. In fact, I loved the cards, even though I couldn’t make the trick work more than that one time.
Two weeks later, Mr. Duncan did another trick for the class. And the next day, he offered me another deal, science this time. I knew by then that Mr. Duncan was singling me out because of Dad. Or I was pretty sure. I didn’t like that idea much, but I did want to learn the new trick. I had practised the first one quite a bit since the failed attempt with Mom and Kaya, but it was hard to work the kinks out all alone, with no one to try the trick out on.
I passed the test and learned the trick (sort of), but it turned out that Mr. Duncan only knew two. There wouldn’t be a third. And the second trick was a lot harder than the first. I didn’t have the guts to try it out on anyone, not even Dad.
Slowly, hope faded. What was a magic trick or two in the face of the C word anyway? I put the cards away in a drawer, and didn’t shuffle another deck for a long, long time.
Dad lived for another five years, and the gaps and the hollows in our household grew and grew, even though he was in remission for a big part of that and he went back to work and everything.
He got sick again just as I started Grade Eight. Right around then, the girl who had told me about Dad’s cancer in Grade Four marched up to me one day in the hall. Another girl was behind her, almost shadowing her.
“My mom says your dad’s sick again,” Jane said. I knew her name by then, of course. We’d been in school together for four years. “Want to sit with us at lunch?”
“I’m Samantha,” the other girl said.
Samantha was new to the school and Jane had taken her on, like a pet. I was pet number two, I guess, a poor downtrodden creature who’d been rotting away all alone at the Humane Society.
I looked at them and considered Jane’s question. I couldn’t see any reason to say no.
“Sure,” I said.
That’s how I got to have friends.
I didn’t like Jane’s bossy ways, and often wished Samantha would stand up for herself, but it was kind of nice to have people to eat lunch with, and hang out with sometimes after school. Jane was always asking how Dad was doing. I didn’t tell her much, even though he did worse and worse all through Grade Eight. He died at the start of Grade Nine.
Within days of Dad’s death, Mom brought home a great big gangly collie puppy that she had bought all on her own without saying a word to Kaya or me first. Kaya fell in love with Sybilla instantly. They were always all wrapped up together on the couch or in her room. I couldn’t help feeling hurt that Mom went off and bought that dog all by herself, and that Sybilla loved Kaya so very, very much.
Another day, perhaps a month after Sybilla came home, I was on my way down the stairs, all dopey from a nap, when Mom and Kaya came in the front door. Kaya was alight in a way that I hadn’t seen for a long, long time. A kitten. She had a kitten in her arms. Behind her, Mom grinned.
I took a step forward, stopped and swayed, almost weak-kneed. Jealousy snaked through my legs and my skull and met and tangled in my chest. First a dog, now a kitten.
“Kaya came with me to get groceries and look what we got instead!” Mom said.
Now, at the lodge, I dream of magic tricks and dying fathers, with Sybilla and Coco, Jane and Samantha, thrown in.
On Sunday morning, Mom heads off to her last workshop and I make my way to the lodge’s gift shop in search of a deck of cards. Back in our room, with our bags sitting side by side on the bed, I pull out the chair at the small round table under the window and set down the brand new deck precisely in the middle of the black surface. I look at it and breathe.
Excitement burbles inside me, small, like the tiniest brook, enticing. I pick the deck up again—it’s red with one of those patterns that serious cards have, no pretty paintings or lush landscapes, just simple geometry in red and white—and run my fingers over the smooth cellophane, find the thin blue line that encircles the deck. I take the tiny tab between my thumb and forefinger, and pull. In one smooth motion, the clear wrapping comes away from the top of the box. I have only to slide the bottom part off, and I’m in.
The cards are slick in my hands, and after my first attempt at a shuffle I have to scrabble on the carpet to salvage a fallen queen and a three and a seven. They are beautiful, though, and, slippery though they may be, I love them, every one. I try another shuffle. And another. I start up a patter in the empty room, engaging an imaginary audience, and slide a card out of the deck, almost convincing myself that my own hand is someone else’s.
For a moment I wish I had a subject, an audience, but it’s too soon. Way too soon. Still, the morning passes in a flash. I almost forget to watch the clock. But not quite. When Mom comes back from her session just before noon, I’m sitting on my unmade bed, reading Sundry’s Book, cards tucked out of sight.