Magic Tricks for the Blind

by

Chris Kuriata

STRIPPING TO MY UNDERWEAR while standing at the foot of a hospital bed belonging to an elderly woman is both embarrassing and nerve wracking – worse than trying on clothes in the store aisle when the change rooms are full. The thin sheets hang tight to the husk of her body. She appears to have passed. Father doesn’t seem to notice as he hands me the red and green jumpsuit from his satchel. I keep one eye on the door, terrified we’ll be discovered by doctors or family members who will blame us for the old woman’s death. Could you blame them?

Oblivious to my anxiety, Father (already in his long tailed tuxedo) whistles a jaunty tune while he cracks open makeup tubes and decorates my face in the Auguste style – just around the mouth and eyes. He excuses himself into the woman’s private bathroom to do up his own face, leaving me alone with her corpse.

How sad to pass in an empty hospital room, with nothing but dust mites floating in the sunbeam and the hum of the radiator to bear witness. If allowed to do it over, I believe the woman would have chosen a ward room, giving up privacy for the comfort of being surrounded by roommates when she curled up and ceased inhaling.

The rubber sheets squeak. The woman’s body shifts and her head lolls in my direction, eyes open. I’m mortified, frightened the woman has made the same mistake as I, and believing herself to have passed is now opening her eyes on her first glimpse of the afterlife, expecting to see an angel in a glowing white gown resting a golden harp against their breast.

Instead, there I stand, already sweating in my clown costume, my lips exaggerated with a red grin curling halfway across my cheeks. Square Groucho Marx eyebrows squat on my forehead and in my hand is not an angelic instrument but a battered ukulele, two of the strings broken and curled up at the bow. I hope she isn’t disappointed.

Clown face complete, Father emerges from the bathroom. “Come on, let’s go.”

He opens the door and skips into the hallway. Light spills across the woman’s bed and I catch a glimpse of her eyes, glazed over with a milky lens of cataracts.

I don’t know if she saw us or not, a pair of clowns skipping past her deathbed.

1978 WAS KNOWN AS “the year of three popes.” Pope Paul’s successor, John Paul, only lasted a month before curling his toes and making way for John Paul II. The new Pope’s picture hung everywhere in the hospital. Father scorned this idolatry, choosing to revere Copernicus. In conversation with Dr. Ted, Father asked the good surgeon to name the greatest Polish man to ever live and was astounded when Dr. Ted replied, “The Pope.”

Religion made me leery, seeming to be good for little else than providing opportunities for people to unintentionally offend one another. I remember multiplying silver balls for a little girl only to be chased away by her irate mother, whose head covering I’d failed to notice. Father said you couldn’t use the word “magic” with the Hutterites, you had to say “illusion” and ask them to guess how the trick was done, which I felt took away all the fun. The secret behind every magic trick is something mundane – misdirection and false bottoms. The point of magic is to make you doubt your rational mind and suspect you’ve witnessed the breaking of natural law, thus making all hopes possible.

Father cherished our tricks, inherited from his brother, who spent years toiling in Niagara Falls nightclubs for disinterested patrons. Little applause, mostly drunken chatter and clattering silverware. It’s a shame Uncle Ian couldn’t just once have basked in the warmth of a blazing, appreciative crowd.

The hospital offered nothing to supplement Father’s “therapeutic clowning program” as such activities are referred to these days. His GM income paid for our makeup tubes and gasoline. A couple of fledgling magician friends of poor Uncle Ian donated tricks after they retired their top hats to better concentrate on careers at Simpsons-Sears. Father resented the hospital never throwing a few dollars our way, especially after a donation by the family of a young boy who succumbed to pneumonia was squandered on a television set. Bolted to a wheeled cart, this beast rolled back and forth between the children’s ward and the ICU. Father hated that noisy box. The reception never came in proper – the soap operas and Flintstones rolled in snowy black and white – yet the glass teat sapped the attention out of any room you parked it in. Father hated the competition and I’m sure dreamed of draping his silky scarf over the damned set and making it disappear.

WHEN THE LOCAL CKTB STATION held a telethon to buy a new incubator for the General, Father signed us up to perform. Untrusting of the TV cameras, afraid they might spoil the majesty of our best tricks, Father decided to use the opportunity to premier his Al Jolson routine. Instead of clown makeup, he pasted our faces with burnt cork, leaving a wide uncovered slot for exaggerated lips. A rusty high school orchestra accompanied him for two songs. Under the studio lights he sweated in a curly fright wig. Our patter of corny old jokes got big laughs (Father: What has four legs and flies? Me: Everybody’s heard that old one. A dead horse! Father: Nope. Two pairs of pants!) and his rendition of “Mammy” received waves of applause. His picture was on the front of The Standard, kneeling beside a young wheelchair girl, his gloved hands raised and his mouth gaping wide, showing off all his teeth.

I was caught off guard when the routine was not universally beloved. At the hospital, expecting congratulations and gratitude, I was cornered by Shirley Bellows, the overseer of the children’s floor.

While she favoured administrative tasks – scheduling, directing charts – she was ready to roll up her sleeves and splatter them with vomit and piss at a moment’s notice. One time, a nurse suffered difficulty removing the catheter from a boy, and Mrs. Bellows came bounding from her office, slipping into a pair of emergency gloves she kept tucked in her sweater pocket. She neatly pinched off the boy’s pain, flooding his face with relief and didn’t flinch when the catheter released and sprayed her chin with urine.

Father impressed upon me how important it was that we get along with everyone at the hospital, but Mrs. Bellows unsettled me. Her eyes were forever penetrating and accusatory. Whenever she and I were in close proximity, I felt as though I was enduring having my tongue pressed to a battery. She had never once laughed or even smiled during any of our performances for the children.

“You must be real proud of yourself,” she said, catching me in front of the elevator. “Making fun of coloured people like that.”

I could only stammer a reply of ignorance. I hadn’t been making fun of anybody.

Her eyes narrowed beneath her tightly braided hair. She looked so angry, I expected the coils to come loose and sway like Medusa. “You mean to tell me that wasn’t you and your daddy on TV with dirty faces, acting like fools?”

My back pressed against the elevator doors. If the metal slabs slid open I’d fall four stories down the dark shaft. Desperate to escape, I swore to her I had no idea who those racist clowns on the telethon were – a ludicrous denial.

She walked away disgusted, like I was too pathetic to waste any time lecturing. Dad appeared from the nurse’s lounge, where he’d been waiting for Mrs. Bellows to leave. He patted me on the back and pressed the button for the elevator.

Thirty years later, I’ve never lost the feeling of shame for what we did on the telethon, but I’ve also never lost my resentment over Mrs. Bellows confronting the child instead of the grown man whose idea it had been in the first place.

REVEREND DANIEL WAS A FRESH MAN, his cheeks swollen with stubborn baby fat. He dressed clean and formal, clearly never having toiled a single day in a factory. All his skin looked pink and smooth.

Priests and pastors were not an unusual sight on the children’s floor. Invited by parents, they led bedside prayers, offering comfort and administering blessings over tiny prone bodies. Generally, they waited to be invited, but Reverend Daniel appeared unsolicited, coming into the children’s ward and hopping from child to child like a bird dancing across a bough of branches looking for nourishment. He had a good bedside manner. The children responded to his cheerful face and gentle voice, though he wasn’t above keeping a roll of fresh Lifesavers in his pocket.

“What’s your name?” he asked, offering his hand.

When I answered, “Sam,” he looked disappointed in my handshake, perhaps expecting to get zinged with a joy buzzer.

“I love what you and your dad are doing, Sam. To provide a light for the unfortunate, no matter how small, is a blessing.” He pulled the roll of Lifesavers from his pocket, snapped it in half and gave me a section headed by butterscotch.

On the drive home, Father quizzed me about Reverend Daniel. “Why did you tell him your name was Sam?”

I didn’t understand the question. “Because that’s my name.”

His white gloves sprung from the steering wheel to knock the rear-view mirror on a downward angle. “Look at your face.”

I understood his drift. So long as I wore my painted grin and thick eyebrows I wasn’t myself; I was Strawberry. Telling my real name was revealing one of the magic tricks. It shattered the illusion.

“He’s a grown-up. He knows my name isn’t ‘Strawberry.’ It’d be weird telling him a pretend name.”

Father chuckled. “Hey, he’s telling you a pretend name. His parents didn’t name him ‘Reverend.’”

FATHER APPEARED AT MY CLASSROOM DOOR in his tuxedo, rapping on the frame with gloved hands.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Schneider, may Sam be excused for the rest of the day? We have personal business to attend to.”

Wednesday was our regular hospital shift, but parents would sometimes request us for a Special Occasion. “Special Occasion” is misleading because it sounds celebratory, and doesn’t communicate the fact we are off to see a child who is going to die.

Our patient was bald, lying in the middle of a bed too big for her. Even with the child’s mother sitting on the side, wiping bits of crust from the corner of her eyes, the bed looked large enough for the entire hospital to climb aboard and snuggle close to her disappearing body.

The patient’s father stood next to the window, his face pale and slack. The brother crouched on the floor, a mixture of sad and bored. Sitting in a chair in the corner was Reverend Daniel, available should the family wish to pray hopeless prayers.

The drastic change in temperature Copernicus and Strawberry hauled into the room was remarkable. We painted this quiet pocket of desperation and suffering with bright colours and smiles. Within seconds of our loud, comical entrance, the spectre of Death departed from the room. The brother got to his feet, attentive. The mother grinned, and whispered into her daughter’s ear, “Open your eyes. Look who came to see you.”

Father and I engaged the family for close to an hour. We ran through our vaudeville patter and performed magic tricks, calling on the entire family to take part as assistants. There was great applause, and most amazing of all, inside this room, from these people, there was happiness. For an hour we made these people happy.

Because of my age, because I was thrust into their company before I fully understood the ramifications of permanent loss, the dying children left little impression on me. In the guise of “Strawberry” I didn’t have to deal with them as “Sam.” This was the case until the birth of my own son, when these forgotten children overwhelmed me with grief. They must have rested at the base of my spine like a sack of spider eggs that finally hatched, spilling eight legged specks of sorrow coursing through me.

After a Special Occasion, Father kept quiet. While I effortlessly washed Strawberry off my face, he would sit in the backyard, still in makeup and his long tailed tuxedo, alone with his thoughts and staring at the sky. Sometimes for as long as an hour.

FATHER DRANK SO RARELY I didn’t understand he was an alcoholic.

Four or five times a year he would indulge, slugging home a case of Millers and sitting at the kitchen table, piercing one after another with a church key and guzzling them down. I think he was testing himself, seeing if he had improved to the point where he could have just one or two. But once he got started he rode a fizzy amber wave of insatiable thirst until he crashed into early morning rocks, late for work with a fragile skull. Crumpled cans would overflow the trash beside the sink. At the end of the night, before shambling off to bed, he would pierce however many were left and pour them down the sink.

Drunk, he offered to show me Uncle Ian’s favourite trick. But it was a bad trick, one I had to promise never to perform.

Father took a cloth napkin and had me place a salt shaker in the middle. He folded the ends into a knot and asked me to keep my fingers clasped around the object inside. He lay the bundle in his lap and burbled a few magic words.

“Now, your uncle would ask a young lady to close her eyes and reach inside for the salt shaker.” He grabbed my wrist, stopping me from reaching for his lap. “I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want you to do this trick ever.”

He undid the knot and the napkin unfolded like a blooming flower. Lying across the fabric, jutting from his fly like a sleeping snail, was his flaccid penis.

“I only show you this for educational purposes,” he said.

I’ve never told anyone about this, knowing it’s impossible to make this lesson not sound unforgivably wrong. I think I’ll cut this part out if this ever gets published because it paints an inaccurate picture of the kind of man Father was. I place this drunken trick in the same category as his blackface routine; I understand it was wrong but refuse to judge him for a one time act of un-malicious ignorance.

“HOLD ONTO THIS CUP. Use both hands.”

Undoubtedly, our best trick was the magic water cup. I played the role of the oafish assistant – inattentive, bumbling and subsequently receiving a verbal berating from Copernicus. Finally, fed up with his tyranny, I move to douse him with a cup of water but it’s empty. I pat the bottom, I look at it upside down, but the cup is bone dry. Copernicus tells me perhaps the child will have better luck finding water. Confident I have proven the cup empty, I invite the child to turn it over my head, which they always do eagerly, giggling, gushing cold water down my crown and back. Father taught me to do a good sputter, sending a fine spray of mist from my lips, which was always good for another laugh.

“Do you ever switch roles and dump water on your father?” Reverend Daniel asked. Water still trickled off my jaw and down the back of my neck. My cherry grin stayed intact but my eyebrows melted, running down my cheeks like rainy mascara. I smiled goofily, as Strawberry, keeping mute.

For the first time, Reverend Daniel intruded onto our stage, patting his palms together.

“Boy, I had such a wonderful time watching that with the children. Thank you both for a fantastic show.”

I hastily fumbled our props back into Father’s satchel. The children weren’t supposed to see us stop being Strawberry and Copernicus just because the show was over. Reverend Daniel spoke to us as who we really were and was revealing the trick.

“Did you know children, there was a man who could do real magic? Not tricks, but honest miracles. It’s true. He lived a long time ago and he was the son of God.”

On the ride home, Father gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, his sarcasm searing.

“I’ll have to bring extra makeup next week now that we’re a trio instead of a duo.”

Reverend Daniel stayed on Father’s mind well into the evening. As I cleared away our foil trays after dinner, he said, “Doesn’t he have more dignity than to be skulking around waiting to pounce on our warm ups? He has all the tact of an undertaker passing out business cards.”

“THERE IS NUT CAKE IN THE NURSE’S OFFICE, come have some.”

Father graciously accepted Mrs. Bellows’ invitation to partake of some homemade dessert. I hoped her gesture meant to bury the hatchet between us over the telethon.

Mrs. Bellows performed her role of host perfunctorily. She handed us two squares of cake and allowed us to eat half, dusting the corners of our mouths with crumbs before proceeding with her agenda.

“There’s been complaints about your messes. Please stop playing with water.”

Father passed his remainder of cake to me. “I’m sure I don’t understand the root of this misunderstanding.”

“One of the children was soaked.”

The dampening of the bedding was something we should have copped to. There had been an accident during the water cup trick when I passed the “empty” vessel to the patient for examination. It was my fault, I hadn’t secured the hidden water properly and the patient only had one arm free (the other being entombed in plaster of Paris). The child fumbled the cup between their legs, spilling cold water.

“Soaked is an exaggeration. It was a glass of water, not a bucket.”

“It was irresponsible of you to leave him sitting in the damp. He could have gotten ill.”

“I apologise for underestimating the severity of the situation. If I had known I would have stripped the bedding myself.”

“That is not your job. Don’t interfere with the children.”

The game on the ride home became guessing who made noise against us. I was hesitant to name suspects, unwilling to compile a list.

“I cannot accept the accusation the bed was soaked,” Father said. “It was a sprinkling at worst. They’re prepared for accidents, they use rubber sheets.”

“Maybe the boy peed the bed?”

I thought Father would lunge at this fiction like a drowning sailor to driftwood but he tutted me and said, “I know who tattled. A certain holy man who doesn’t want to go on second anymore.”

FATHER POPPED OPEN THE SATCHEL and told me to ready the snake ropes.

After performing in the big room, Father often felt elated and full of extra prestidigitation to burn off, so we popped into the private rooms, seeking lonely children to toss a little magic at. Sometimes, if necessary, he would wake them.

We found a young girl, only a few years my junior, propped up in one of the iron gated beds. Germs must have been a concern, because she lay beneath a plastic tent suspended over the bed like mosquito netting, but at the moment the flap hung wide open.

Her mother beamed with approval upon our entrance. Father often said that was the difference between us and Reverend Daniel – we were welcomed where we had not been invited.

“I bet you’ve heard worms are so full of brains you can cut one in half and both ends will continue to live,” Father said to the little girl. “Did you know the same is true of rope from the furthest reaches of India?”

I held up my wrists, bound by our snake rope, holding them into the plastic tent for the little girl to see. Father produced a long pair of pinking shears from his sleeve and snipped our rope. I pulled my wrists apart and the rope began to writhe, twisting back and forth, swaying through the air like hissing snakes.

The mother sat up in her chair, clapping and saying, “Oh Jenny, the rope is alive. Reach up and feel.”

Instinctively, I stepped away from the bed. The rope was delicate and didn’t appreciate physical contact.

“Uh uh uh,” Father said. “Look with your eyes, not with your hands.”

Our patient, Jenny, remained reclined in a white alps of pillows. The expression on her face was devoid of excitement. She looked yet to be entertained.

“I’m sorry,” Jenny’s mother said. “She can’t see.”

Misunderstanding, I stepped towards the bed to give her a closer view, struggling to keep the ropes pretending to be snakes without giving away the trick.

“She’s blind.”

Father’s reaction belied his years of experience and made us look bush league. Normally, nothing threw him off kilter. He easily managed bad audiences – kids shouting out how the minor tricks were done – as gracefully as he taught me to dance a silver dollar across my knuckles. But the blind girl left him looking like he’d dropped a cake on the floor icing side down. The mood of the room turned to mercury. I waited for him to cue our next bit of business, but he was busy imitating a statue.

Jenny’s mother tried to mop up our embarrassment. She urged us to do another trick. The first one was so wonderful, she wanted to see more.

We ran through our satchel for Jenny while her mother kept a running commentary. She ooh-ed and ahh-ed like the dream audience. Our intended target smiled and clapped along with her mother, but Father took his bow with defeated posture. He knew this went terrible.

Exiting the room, I bumped the thighs of Mrs. Bellows, who charged towards Jenny’s bed, pulling down the plastic tent, roughly zippering the little girl inside as though she were a slippery animal threatening to get loose and contaminate the rest of the hospital.

She caught up with us and demanded to know what we were doing.

“We were providing comfort as we are supposed,” Father said. He pulled the silver ball out of his pocket and began passing it through his fingers, but clumsily, without his usual finesse.

I thought Mrs. Bellows was going to slap the ball to the floor. “You have no business going into these rooms. You go into the big room and that’s it.”

“I suppose if I was a young preacher man I’d have carte blanche to traipse into whatever room I’d like.”

Mrs. Bellows said she had written a letter, highlighting the problems created by the volunteer clowns and her inability to solve them by engaging us directly. She was asking for the hospital administrator to reconsider our presence.

Father wouldn’t leave yet. He stalked to the big room, ambushing Reverend Daniel at the side of a praying boy. Less than an hour ago, this same boy had laughed and clapped for Father. The boy now looked horrified by Father’s pale face, his clown mouth red not with bright makeup but the blood of whatever child he’d just been feeding on.

“We were here before you,” Father hissed. “Don’t meddle in our act. These children are not yours!”

Reverend Daniel was astounded. He trailed after us in shock, shuffling his feet like a man walking with their pants around their ankles.

“Jim!” he called, but Father stayed in character, refusing to answer to a name that was not his.

FATHER SAT UP LATE INTO THE NIGHT. He made some rare phone calls, querying Uncle Ian’s circle of former magicians, asking if any of them could offer up a magic trick for the blind. The results were unsatisfactory. One friend recalled a blind girlfriend and how he used to delight her by using a plastic wand to blow soap bubbles past her ear. That was no good. It was amusement, not magic.

“I’m gonna pull you out of school tomorrow. We’re not done yet.”

We used the back of old milk bills to jot down ideas, diagrams, whatever came to mind as we brainstormed ideas for a custom trick for Jenny.

“It has to be a trick she can touch,” I said, still feeling bad over the way I yanked the snake ropes out of her grasp.

“Yes,” Father said. “What is pleasing to the touch?”

THE HOGAN FAMILY KEPT RABBITS. Hideously inbred, they were brainless things that did nothing but rest on their haunches and twitch their noses, as though they knew they were bred for meat, so there was no sense cultivating personalities.

“I’d like to buy a rabbit,” Father told Mr. Hogan. “May we select one?”

The patriarch led us into the backyard. The rabbits stirred upon our approach, twanging the cage floor with their leaps. I don’t know if they were trying to draw attention to themselves to be picked or if they were trying to get away.

The rabbit selecting task fell to me. Mr. Hogan opened the top of the cage and I reluctantly lowered my arms into the swirling, furry mass below, wishing for a pair of gloves.

“That’s a plump one,” Mr. Hogan admired, like his backyard was some fancy restaurant and I was choosing lobster. Freed from the cage, the rabbit kicked its legs and broke the skin over my thumb with its buck teeth.

“No, not that one,” Father said.

It took several dips before I lifted a rabbit who didn’t struggle, bite or shoot hot urine at us. This one was content to sit in my arms, tickling my wrist with its whiskers.

Father recognized my good choice and said we’d take it. For payment, we agreed to return to the Hogans for one of the children’s birthday parties.

THOUGH THE RABBIT WAS DOCILE, his coat wasn’t of the desired textile quality, so Father had me scrub it down in the kitchen sink, lathering the body with shampoo to make the hairs vibrant and silky. At the very least the animal smelled better.

You should know the tradition of the magician’s rabbit goes back centuries, to a peasant couple telling the tale of a giant rabbit emerging from the woods to ravish the wife. Nine months later, after she gave birth to a litter of rabbits, the horrific story of bestial rape spread across the land. Even King George sent representatives to investigate the validity of this abomination of nature and the King’s men were astonished to witness the woman give birth to a baby rabbit. It was all a trick of course – the woman had been secretly loading her private cavity with baby rabbits to “give birth” to them. Believe it or not, this disgusting fraud is the genesis of the rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick.

Father and I proceeded carefully into the hospital. Mrs. Bellows had laid down a clear prohibition on bringing animals into the children’s ward, once refusing to allow the family of a child dying from leukemia to bring in his beloved dog. She unapologetically believed animals presented a threat to the health of the entire ward. The last thing Father wanted was an additional letter shooting out of Mrs. Bellows’ typewriter to the hospital administrator, so we needed to sneak the rabbit in under her nose. Because of our other props, the rabbit wouldn’t fit in Father’s satchel, so I carried it beneath Strawberry’s jumpsuit. The animal’s talons traced around my navel, leaving a highway of pink scratches.

“Are you ready?” Father asked in the elevator.

My confidence was shaky. Unable to forget how I fumbled the water cup trick, I envisioned myself as the weak link who allowed the rabbit to drop from its cloth restraints and go scampering into the sterile hallways, kicking its legs and braying “Look what the clowns have done! I’m not supposed to be here! Neither should they!” My stomach churned ground glass the entire trip to the children’s floor.

Our audience, patient Jenny, still rested in her room, the plastic tent down and zippered shut. Even before we could introduce ourselves, I feared the trick already blown. Discombobulated beneath the smothering of my jumpsuit, the rabbit pissed himself. The liquid dribbled down my right leg. Warm at first, then cooling as it soaked into the jumpsuit, pulling the fabric close to my skin. I wanted to cry.

Jenny stirred, attuned to the arrival of visitors, leaving me no time to calm the rabbit. Once inside the room I was on stage. I was Strawberry and couldn’t reveal the trick.

Father also needed a moment to screw his head on straight, startled no doubt by the presence of Reverend Daniel. He sat in the corner, a yellow National Geographic spread across his lap. “Well, sleepyhead, look who’s here.” He unzipped Jenny’s plastic tent and waved us closer. “She told me all about your visit and was hoping you’d come see her again.”

Father ignored Reverend Daniel and poked his head into the tent. “Good afternoon, Sweetie! Strawberry! Get over here and say hello to this special little girl!”

I poked my head through the plastic flap. “Hiya Jenny! Wow, look how long your legs are!”

“What about her legs? How long are they?”

“Long enough to reach the ground!”

Reverend Daniel’s smile faded. Concern crossed his face as he studied the fabric of my costume, perhaps identifying the bulge of verboten animal. I pretended not to notice.

“We’re going to do a magic trick for you,” Father said. “Do you believe in magic enough to help us?”

“Yes,” Jenny said.

I unsnapped the moorings of her plastic tent and raised it to the ceiling while Father asked her to pick an object. Jenny swung her hand to the nightstand and patted the box of tissue. Father led her through the instructions of a familiar trick.

“Wrap the box up in your blanket, and keep a tight hold of it on your lap.”

Jenny quickly trussed the box up in her sheets, locking both arms together, but leaving Father with the access he’d need.

Placing his hand on her shoulder, Father said, “I want you to think of a magic word. And shout it out.”

Jenny thought for a moment before saying, “Open sesame.”

“Again!”

With full, boisterous confidence, “Open sesame!”

Father gently lifted his hand from Jenny’s shoulder. My intense focus on the trick elevated all of my senses; I could hear Reverend Daniel’s breathing behind me, I could see a few threads of fibre from Jenny’s pyjamas clinging to Father’s gloved fingertips. She could still feel the phantom impression of Father’s fingers against her shoulder. We had only a moment before the heat of his touch faded and she would realize his hand had moved. This was my moment to pass him the rabbit – but I hesitated. Reverend Daniel’s eye line beamed into the pocket of space where we were most exposed. It shouldn’t have mattered, we weren’t doing the trick for him. Who cared if he saw me pass Father the rabbit? But I wanted the trick to work for everyone in the room, not just Jenny. I wanted the trick to work beneath even the eyes of God.

So I usurped Father’s role and made the rabbit switch myself. Thinking back to the napkin trick from Father’s drunken evening, I copied his move and deftly replaced the tissue box Jenny grasped in the blanket with the rabbit. No one saw. Not even Father, who began to panic, waiting for me to cross his palm with hare, until the swaddle of blanket in Jenny’s lap began to quiver and twitch.

Jenny exploded with delight as she pulled the sheet aside and laid her hand on the rabbit’s soft fur. This borderline feral animal I’d plucked from a filthy cage only hours earlier scampered up her chest and nuzzled its whiskers into her cheek.

“Strawberry! You were supposed to make the box disappear, not turn into a rabbit!” He spoke in Copernicus’s voice but sounded legitimately upset I had done something he wasn’t expecting.

Jenny giggled and stroked the rabbit’s pelt, her palms dying to drink something soft and affectionate. We had made her happy. I turned to Father, wanting to savour the moment with him, but he looked angry.

“Is this how you honour your father, by disobeying his orders?”

He raised his empty hand – the one I was supposed to have put the rabbit in – and might have slapped me for forgetting my place, but we were soon distracted by a familiar form filling the doorway: Mrs. Bellows. How long had she been standing there?

The shame of being caught froze me in place. Paralyzed, I couldn’t reach for the blankets to cover up the rabbit. Mrs. Bellows pushed me aside and reached for the plastic tent. “The covering needs to be down.”

I braced myself for the volcano that would erupt once she saw the rabbit nestled into Jenny’s arms. Mrs. Bellows lowered the plastic tent and zipped it shut, but not before plucking the yellow issue of National Geographic out of Jenny’s hands. She held the magazine suspiciously, knowing its presence was wrong as she dropped it on the bedside.

Ignoring Father, Mrs. Bellows turned to gaze at me, as though I were the lone culprit responsible for this disturbance. I stepped away from the bed and my heel squeaked in a drop of rabbit piss. When Mrs. Bellows looked at the liquid staining the cuff of my jumpsuit the storm crashing behind her eyes immediately passed. She released her anger with a lengthy sigh. Suddenly looking sympathetic, she offered me her hand and said, “Come with me, sweetie.”

We walked hand in hand to the little lounge where the nursing staff found moments of private respite. In the bathroom, Mrs. Bellows directed me to sit on the toilet and opened the cabinet over the sink to remove a wide, white sanitary napkin.

“Are you okay to put this on?”

I looked at the legs of my jumpsuit. The inside seam of the right was dotted with pebbles of my first menstrual blood. I was too aghast to say anything. Such a transformation was out of character for Strawberry, and definitely would have spoiled the trick had anyone noticed.

“That’s okay,” Mrs. Bellows said, gently unbuttoning the front of my jumpsuit.

While she helped me clean up, my mind floated back to Jenny’s room. I knew at some point Reverend Daniel untucked his shirt and handed Father the rabbit he swapped for an issue of National Geographic, but what words were exchanged between them I had no idea. Did they shake hands, finally coming to a place of mutual respect for one another? Did Father angrily snatch the rabbit back like Reverend Daniel had lifted his wallet? Or did Father ask Reverend Daniel how he made the switch, only to be told a magician never reveals their tricks?

I TRIED RESCUING STRAWBERRY’S JUMPSUIT from the trash.

“Leave it,” Father said.

“Let me wash it out. You can barely see –”

“Put it down. It’s ruined.” He said he’d find a new suit for me but somehow never got around to it.

At the hospital, I didn’t feel much like Strawberry in my regular clothes. Father still painted my face, but my primary function in the act became to hand Copernicus props. He adjusted for my diminished presence by inflating his personality. He made bigger gestures, told cornier jokes. The children ate it up, laughing louder than ever before. I stood off to the side with Reverend Daniel, watching Father perform. He radiated bliss as he soaked up every drop of the children’s attention. Now that he’d gotten a taste of going solo, I knew he’d never return to sharing the stage.

Father stopped pulling me out of school. No more Special Occasions. Somewhere between my first drop of blood and the moment I switched the rabbit on my own, he’d decided I’d outgrown the act. I never protested my shrinking role, painfully aware of how badly Father needed the children’s laughter and applause. Even if his stage-lust made him selfish, I couldn’t find it in my heart to judge him.

My visits to the hospital grew further and further apart, until one afternoon, as I painted my lips bright red, giggling with the other girls at the beauty counter, I realized it was the first time I’d worn makeup in months.