All My Puny Sorrows (25 page)

I dropped them off at the hospital, told them that my mom was in the psych wing with Elf and Tina was in cardio waiting for them. I’d call my mom on her cellphone in a couple of hours and then come and pick everyone up again and we’d go somewhere and have dinner.

Righto, boss, said my uncle Frank hobbling off to see his wife, while Sheila, like her mother, grabbed me hard and told me we’d get through all of it, we’d fight our way through. I have fifty-six first cousins alone on this side, most of them male, not to mention all of their various spouses and kids, but Sheila is the toughest of them all. She could easily saw off your arm in the wilderness if it was caught in a trap and that was your only way to escape. She fell off a mountain once and lay there with a crushed left leg for an entire day and night until the rescue helicopter figured out how to drop his ladder into the tiny crevice where she had fallen. She told the pilot that she fought
off unconsciousness by alphabetizing the first names of every one of her cousins and then going through each one in her mind and describing them to an imaginary audience. She told me she had put me in the
S
category, for Swivelhead. Sheila’s family and my family are part of the Poor Cousin contingent. We have Rich Cousins who are extremely rich because they are the sons of the sons (our uncles, all dead) who inherited the lucrative family business from our grandfather, the father of Tina and my mother. In the Menno cosmology that’s how it goes down. The sons inherit the wealth and pass it on to their sons and to their sons and to their sons and the daughters get sweet fuck all. We Poor Cousins don’t care at all though, except for when we’re on welfare, broke, starving, unable to buy cool high-tops for our children or pay for their university tuition or purchase massive fourth homes on private islands with helicopter landing pads. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build
empires
with that, gentlemen.

Julie came with me to the track at Kelvin High but we couldn’t see Benito Zetina Morelos there, just students sitting on the track smoking pot and acting cool. When do you have to pick up your kids? I asked Julie. I don’t, she said. Mike has them today which is why I allowed myself the smallest of pleasures at the Legion this afternoon.

Let’s go to Garbage Hill, I told her.

Garbage Hill used to be a garbage dump until they planted grass on it and now it’s a place where you can hang out in the
summer and toboggan in the winter even though there are giant signs saying No Tobogganing! It had been given some pretty name but nobody remembered it and the sign had been graffitied over. Everyone called it Garbage Hill, even the mayor who wasn’t much of a mayor but more of an auctioneer selling off bits and pieces of the city to the highest bidder. It’s not very high, not much of a hill really, but it’s the highest point in Winnipeg and I thought I needed to get as close to God as I could though for what I wasn’t sure, either to pray to him for mercy or to crush his skull. Or to thank him. This last piece was advice given to me by my aunt Tina when my father died. She told me that even if I didn’t wholeheartedly believe in the existence of God it felt good to close your eyes and make a mental list of all the things you were grateful for.

Julie and I sat cross-legged on the top of the hill in the prickly brown grass and reminisced about a photo shoot she’d done there four hundred years ago when we were triumphant high-schoolers.

Are you tired? she asked.

I’m making a list in my head, I told her.

Of what?

Things I’m thankful for.

Am I on it?

Are you on it! I said.

She closed her eyes and made her own list.

Can it be something as small as discovering that your bread isn’t mouldy after all so there’ll be toast for the kids for breakfast? she asked.

Yes, I said. My eyes were still closed. Right now I’m thanking God for twist-offs.

Oh, good one, she said. And prehensile thumbs.

Are you still drunk? I asked her.

No, she said.

So, I googled it and it’ll cost me—

What did you google?

The Swiss clinic in Zurich.

Oh! Okay.

I googled it and it’ll cost five thousand two hundred and sixty-three dollars and sixteen cents for the treatment and another nine thousand two hundred and ten dollars and fifty-three cents for related costs.

What are related costs? she said.

Medical costs and official fees and a funeral.

But you wouldn’t have the funeral there, would you?

No, that’s true, I’d bring her body back.

But cremated? she asked.

Yeah, definitely. So that costs too, I imagine.

How much does it cost? she said.

I have no idea.

I still don’t think you should do it, she said. I think it’s only for people who are dying anyway.

No, I said, it’s for mentally ill people too—it’s called “weariness of life” and they have the same rights as anybody else who wants to die according to Swiss law. You can argue that she is dying. She’s weary of life, that’s for sure.

We looked at the city, the sky, ourselves. Julie smiled and said my name. I said hers. I don’t know, she said.

I don’t want her to die, I said, but she’s begging me. She’s literally begging me. What do I do?

Julie shook her head and said she didn’t know. Then she
suggested that I wait a bit, see if the treatment or pills would work for her this time, just wait it out. I could do that, I agreed, but was afraid they’d let her go and that would be it, she’d be gone.

But this whole Zurich thing seems so improbable, said Julie.

I know, I said, but it’s not, it’s possible, and I could do it for her. I should do it for her.

Well, not necessarily, said Julie. Just wait a bit, see what happens.

Twenty-one percent of the patients at the Swiss clinic are patients who aren’t physically terminally ill but who are weary of life.

Do you think you could live with yourself if you did it? she asked.

Or if I didn’t? I said.

Either way, she said.

I had to get back to the hospital to pick up the crew and forage for food somewhere because we had to eat after all, again, eating—it seemed so embarrassing and ridiculous at this point— and Julie was going to see her Jungian therapist. Don’t tell him about this conversation, I said. Don’t worry, said Julie, everything is confidential. No but seriously, I said, they can report things to the cops if they think there’s the possibility of a crime or whatever. She hugged me. She promised not to tell anyone about our conversation, including her therapist. You’re trembling, she said. I can feel your heart banging away at your rib cage. We heard voices in the distance. A woman saying okay, you know what, seriously? Fuck you. And a guy saying oh, okay, seriously, you know what? Fuck
you
. Then the woman: Do you know how much money I spent? And the guy: Do you know how much money
I
spent?

Wow, said Julie. You’d really want that guy on your debating team. Amazing rebuttals, dude.

Just then a Frisbee came sailing past our heads, missing Julie by a hair.

Oh my god, she said, do you realize that the word
dude
could have been the last word I spoke on earth? Would you promise to tell people it was something different, for my sake?

I would, I said. You can count on me. Like what word would you like?

Oh, I don’t know, she said. Like
presto
or something.

You mean like as in now you see me, now you don’t?

Yeah, she said.

Okay, I said. I’ll tell your kids and parents and everyone that your last word was
presto
.

Thank you.

We had dinner in a tiny café on Provencher Boulevard close to the hospital and then we all went back to my mom’s place and played our Mennonite-sanctioned Dutch Blitz card game, screaming the word
blitz
when we won. My mom and my uncle Frank swore in Plautdietsch and everyone hollered and shrieked and cards flew, and my mom had to stop to catch her breath and use her nitro spray and my uncle had to shoot up with insulin. Afterwards I found enough clean linen and blankets to make up beds for Sheila and my uncle—I’d sleep on an air mattress—and I bid them all good night, we’d rally in the morning at five. Before she went to sleep Sheila and I sat on her bed and talked about our sisters, Leni and Elf, and their unfathomable sadness, and about our mothers, Lottie and Tina, and their perpetual
optimism. What’s holding your leg together now? I asked her. Nuts and bolts and scrap metal and baling wire, she said. She showed me the scars that ran up and down the entire length of her crushed leg. She brought out a box of chocolates and we each had two. I’m sure your mom will be okay, I told her. She’s unbelievably tenacious. That’s true, said Sheila. She’s the Iggy Pop of old Mennonite ladies. We ate two more chocolates each. And then I zipped back to the hospital to see Elf.

I took my dad’s old bike, which my mom kept in her storage cage in the basement, and sped along the path that ran next to the exploding river. At the hospital I didn’t even bother locking it up, just flung it onto the grass next to the front doors of the Palaveri ward like I was a kid all over again and running late for the six p.m. start of
The Wonderful World of Disney
. The nurse at the desk said it was too late but I told her that I had some very important news that couldn’t wait. She didn’t believe me, that was obvious, but told me to go ahead anyway, she had no backup staff for fighting and was deep into the final chapters of
The Da Vinci Code
.

Elf was asleep on her side, her face to the wall, and I lifted the blanket and crawled in next to her. She had her back to me but her hand was resting there on her shoulder, like she’d been hugging herself as she fell asleep, and I touched it. I squeezed it softly and held it. I thought how strange it was that this limp, bony piece of flesh could produce such powerful music. I timed my breathing to hers, slow and steady. I closed my eyes and slept with her for a while, I think it was an hour or two or maybe only twenty minutes.

When Elf was a kid she walked and talked in her sleep all the time. My parents had to rig up booby traps by the doors
so she wouldn’t leave the house altogether. I hummed a song about ducks swimming in the sea, a little song she had taught me when I was a kid. A song about bravery, about being a freak. She didn’t wake up. I don’t think she woke up. I didn’t want to leave but I knew I had to. When I left the nurse asked me to please respect the visiting hours in the future and I told her yes, I will. In the future I will respect everything. My dad’s bike was still there, damp in the dewy grass, and I picked it up, it seemed lighter than it had been and I looked to make sure it was the same bike, a faded red CCM three-speed, and it was the same one—how could there be two? it wasn’t a parade—and I hopped on and rode off into the rest of the night.

Everyone was asleep in my mom’s apartment waiting through dreams for tomorrow. I lay on an air mattress on the living room floor. There was a small blue bookshelf beside me. There was the obligatory collection of my Rhonda books (all inscribed with love and gratitude) on one of the shelves, stiff and quirkily CanLitty with their signature spines, and a slew of whodunits crammed in there next to them, well read and better loved. Some of them, the fatter ones, were cut in half or even threes and held together with rubber bands because my mom didn’t like to haul entire giant books around with her all over tarnation and she didn’t go anywhere without a book, or a partial book, in her big brown bag. Next to the whodunits were a few books written by other people she knew, sons and daughters of friends, people in her church, old classics and a book of poetry by Coleridge, Elf’s ex-boyfriend. I took it from the shelf and read a few poems, including this one:

I had found Elf’s Coleridge poem! The one she’d taken her signature AMPS from. All my puny sorrows. I lay on the air mattress. I fell asleep, but not fully. It wasn’t a deep sleep and somewhere in the spaces between sleep and lucid dreaming and full consciousness I had an idea. An idea came to me. I would invite Elf to Toronto to stay with me for a while when she was released from the hospital. I’d be there to take her home with me for a visit. We could walk and talk and rest and there would be no pressure and I would be at home, working, sort of, so she wouldn’t be alone. And Nora would be there too. Then we could really examine this Zurich thing at length and if she still wanted to go it would be so easy to leave from Toronto instead of Winnipeg. Nobody else would have to know until it was over and then I’d figure out how to deal with all of that then.

In the morning we all crawled out of our beds and clustered like baby birds at the dining room table, poking at our food, hopping up and down for jam and salt and cream, goading one another on with fake enthusiasm. Piled into the car—Jason had dropped it off in visitor parking with the keys under the mat, the driver’s door opened now—and took off for our new clubhouse, the Ste. Odile Hospital. It was too early to see Elf but we all gathered around my aunt’s bed and hugged her and kissed her and told her this surgery thing would be a snap, a breeze, a walk in the park. Yeah, yeah, she knew that, good grief, enough of these morbid pep talks, let’s get the show on the road. Sheila gently massaged Tina’s arms and legs. My mother held her hand. My uncle Frank promised he’d have her Starbucks coffee ready and waiting for her after the surgery and she told us to go somewhere and relax for Pete’s sake. The anaesthetic was beginning to take effect. Tina’s eyes were glassy. Her words came more slowly. She had a mysterious expression on her face. They wheeled her into the operating room and we stood together under a fluorescent light, praying maybe, or maybe not, and not moving one way or another.