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

staunch the wound, and a nurse held onto his hand. He’d wept, remembering he hadn’t taken Poppy for a walk that morning, that he’d neglected to feed her, that his morning had been erased, and there was no way he was ever going to recover it.
    As he read further, Felix noticed that Alice couldn’t seem to keep the story on track. She kept going off on tangents, or adding details that had nothing to do with the murder case. In the third chapter, in the middle of a scene about Felix’s physiotherapy, she began to describe the time he’d swum out into the middle of Falcon Lake to help a drowning boy — an event that occurred when Felix wasn’t even on duty. It had happened long before the double murder, long before he'd even met Alice. It had merited only two inches of newsprint at the time, but Alice, an assiduous researcher, had found them. She had gleaned the bare facts of the incident and embroidered them wildly.
    Felix remembered the occasion very well. He was on vacation and it was his birthday. Early in the evening, as the sun was sinking in an overcast sky, he’d been waiting for his friends to arrive to take him into town for a birthday dinner. He’d been hungry and a little impatient, barely paying attention to the crowd of boisterous, splashing teenagers cannonballing from the off-shore diving dock. But he happened to be watching, idly, as one of them attempted a one-and-a-half off the three-metre board. Felix saw the boy go up and up and then tuck his head into his chest, and he knew something was off. A miscalculation had been made. Felix started running even before he saw the diver’s head graze the edge of the board as he came down. He was in the water before the other kids yelled for help. When Felix saw the boy in danger, Alice wrote, his first thought had been to save a life. But that wasn’t true. Felix’s first thought had been that the water was cold, that he didn’t want to get wet, that he’d just dressed for dinner. He dived off the boat dock and swam about a hundred yards and then began to surface-dive, while the boy’s parents paddled frantically in their canoe toward the spot where their son had vanished. Alice spent two long paragraphs describing that hundred-yard swim, putting all sorts of thoughts into Felix’s head, about not giving up, about the value of the boy’s life. The only thought Felix remembered having spared for the kid was “you idiot!” He had dived and dived again until he caught the boy by the hair and dragged him to the surface. It was an ugly business. The kid had vomited, and so had Felix. The mother had been hysterical. Felix’s birthday plans were ruined. But Alice made it sound like a miracle.
    Felix read again the description of his own heroism. He wanted to be fearless and swift-thinking. But he knew he wasn’t. No. Alice had dreamed this story. She had made it all up, out of some deep, Irish corner of her imagination. He ran his finger lightly across the description of this other Felix, this distorted reflection. Who was this man his wife had created? Whoever he was, it was clear that Alice was falling in love with him.

    Evelyn curled up on the couch with a hot water bottle and a quilt, just as if she really were sick, and thought about Alika. Her first date with him had been her first date ever. He picked her up at the store at eleven o’clock, just as he’d promised, and took her to an all-night doughnut shop nearby. Evelyn was too excited to eat her walnut cruller, even though Alika had bought it for her. She just sipped her soda and asked him questions about his family and his childhood in Hawaii.
    â€œWhy did you move to Canada?” she asked.
    â€œMy mother grew up here, in Winnipeg. She met my dad in Hawaii when she took a vacation there. So then, when she left him…” He shrugged.
    So, he was a child of a broken home, too. They had something in common. A