All My Puny Sorrows (28 page)

I sent an e-mail to my publisher and told him Rodeo Rhonda number ten would be on his desk in less than a month. I wrote like crazy. I had a bit of money left from an arts grant I’d received for the harbourmaster book and a really tiny amount left from the sale of our house in Winnipeg. Every day I called Nic and my mom for updates. Nic went to the hospital, usually twice a day, and said as usual not much had changed, Elf’s psychiatrist is never available to talk, and my mom had stopped going quite as often because she just couldn’t bear it, there was no change, the staff berated Elf continuously for not following the programme and lectured my mother on tough love and threatened to electrify my sister’s brain with shock therapy—and I called the nurses’ desk to beg them and to be reassured
that they wouldn’t let her go. The truth was, though, that she was dying in the hospital. The nurses told me they wouldn’t let her go. They told me to make myself some tea and calm down. I asked if I could speak to Elf and they said only if she comes out of her room and answers the phone herself in the rec area. Sometimes I would call the nurses’ desk late at night and ask if Elfrieda was there. One time they told me yes, she’s here, you need to go to bed. I was trying to tell the nurse over the phone don’t tell me I need to go to bed but somehow managed to stop at don’t—and then apologized.

I made arrangements with Nic to call me from his cell when he was visiting Elf, and he put the phone to her ear and I talked about our plan, that I was still figuring things out, what to do, that either way I’d see her soon, I had a bit more work to do and then I’d be back in Winnipeg. While I talked she breathed, I think, but didn’t speak. Then one time I called and she spoke, suddenly. Her voice was clear and strong.

When are you coming to get me, Yoli? she said.

I lay in bed a lot during the days trying to work on my Rhonda book. I wondered if maybe Mexico would be a better option, a better place to die. It would be cheaper to get there. I imagined a hammock swaying gently like a cradle, a return to infancy, to the void, and then to nothing. Mexico was more about death than Switzerland was, in my mind. It was an earthier place, more chaotic and mysterious. It was a country that celebrated the Day of the Dead by partying in cemeteries. Switzerland was about sharp pocket knives, marking time and remaining neutral. Nora made us smoothies and we ate paleo meals, her new fad
diet, a lot of meat and nuts, like cavemen. Her recital was sweet and elegant and moving. On the way home afterwards she and Anders spilled Slurpees and dropped things and groped at each other awkwardly in the back seat of the car. If Will had now “reached the shores of manhood” as my father would have said, Nora was still riding that gloriously messy wave of adolescence out there on the open sea, the shoreline only barely visible to the naked eye. It was spectacularly hot in our apartment and the branches from the cutaway trees were beginning to grow back and engulf us once again in green. We were moving backwards in time, into the darkness.

I called the hospital relentlessly at all hours of the day and night. She’s there? She’s here. She’s there? She’s here. You won’t let her go? We won’t let her go.

I CALLED ELF AND TOLD HER
over the phone that soon I’d have the money to go to Zurich. I’d use credit cards. But the next morning my mother called to say they were giving her a day pass. They were letting her go home to celebrate her birthday, a concept I found curious in these circumstances. Or maybe Elf hadn’t regretted being born, necessarily.

I was so obsessed with making sure she stayed in the hospital until I had scraped together the money I needed to take her to Zurich that I’d completely forgotten about her birthday. My mother said that Nic was on his way to the hospital
to pick her up and she was going to order a birthday cake to be delivered and buy some champagne and some flowers she could take over to their house, and it was going to be good. She said this emphatically, as though she were an oracle. It was a decision. I got off the phone with my mother and sat down in the palm of a moulded plastic hand-shaped chair that Nora had found in somebody’s garbage and said well, then she’s gone.

Nora came home later in the morning and I told her that Elf was going home for the day to celebrate her birthday. That’s so nice, said Nora. It’ll be hard for her to go back to the hospital though. I agreed. Very hard. I phoned Nic on his cellphone but there was no answer. I phoned my mother’s apartment but there was no answer. Nora asked me if I wanted to play tennis with her so we roamed around the apartment looking for balls and rackets and put on our ratty shorts and T-shirts and headed off to the court with the droopy net a few blocks down the street. We played many games, running far too much, missing almost everything, apologizing like girls and gasping for air. We had played four or five games and were almost done, sitting on the sidelines sharing an ice cream we’d bought off a truck, “It’s a Small World” blasting from its rooftop speaker. I had been trying to remember the words. It’s a world of what and a world of what? My cellphone rang and it was Dan. Oh no, I thought, not now. I answered it and he asked me if I was okay, where I was, what I was doing, and I answered all his questions accurately. Aren’t you in Borneo? I asked him. He said yes, he was. But Nic had called him in a
panic when he hadn’t been able to reach me. Yoli, he said, I’m calling with bad news.

I asked him if my mother knew and he said no, Nic had tried calling her at home and on her cell but there was no answer.

She’s out looking for a cake, I said.

Ah, said Dan, okay. And he said that Nic had tried calling me but there was no answer.

Yeah, because of tennis …

Yoyo, he said. I handed my phone to Nora.

Please hold this, I said. I don’t want it.

Nora and I walked back to our apartment. She carried both rackets and the balls and I held her other hand, the free one. I thought it was strange that I could hear the subway rumbling there beneath the ground and then realized it was only my thoughts smashing against one another and attempting to rearrange themselves into something new.

The hospital called me several times. I didn’t answer at first because I was busy booking a flight to Winnipeg and calling my mom every minute with no success. Finally I answered the hospital’s call. It was somebody I’d never met. She called herself the executive director of something. She asked me if I’d received the news and I said yes. She told me she was very sorry. I hung up. She called back and asked if she could talk to me, if she could explain what had happened. I told her I knew what had happened. She spoke in a soft voice, very professional, no pauses, no openings, no debate. I watched Nora move around the apartment getting our things ready for the trip to Winnipeg. The woman asked me if I was alone and I said no. I told her I
was sorry but I had to go, I had arrangements to make and I still hadn’t managed to get a hold of my mother. She told me that she understood but that she needed to explain some things.

How shall I frame this? she said.

I asked her: why did you let her go when every day and every night you promised that you wouldn’t? Were we playing a game? Was I not supposed to believe you? She asked me if I would hold for one tiny second, she had a call coming in from the police relating to my sister’s situation. Situation? I said. I sat on the floor and waited and waited and heard Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady,” the same song being played over and over so that I had lost track of how many times a lady she was, and then eventually realized that I didn’t have to hold, that I didn’t have to do anything that the executive director asked me to do. That was the situation. I pushed the end button on my phone and stood up and went to help Nora with the packing.

I phoned Will but he didn’t answer his cell. I phoned his dad in Manhattan and explained what had happened. Would he please try to get a hold of Will and buy him a ticket to Winnipeg immediately. I’d pay him back. He told me he was sorry, that he’d pay for the ticket, that he’d leave work now and go and find Will who was probably at his landscaping job in Queens. He and I hadn’t really spoken in years. He’d known Elf, of course, way back. Now he was crying on the phone. I waited. I’m sorry, he said again. She was an iconoclast, he said. She was kind to me. She was so
into everything
. I thanked him. We said goodbye. I phoned Julie and told her what had happened and asked her to go to my mom’s apartment and wait for her there. I phoned two
of my mom’s friends and told them what had happened and to go to my mom’s apartment and to wait for her there. I still couldn’t get Nic on his cell. I tried my mother again. She was at her apartment. It was too soon.

Are there lots of people there? I asked her.

No, why? she said. I’m here alone.

They’re on their way, I said. She asked me what happened.

Tell me, she said.

LATE IN THE EVENING
we were all together in Nic and Elf’s living room. Nora and I were still wearing the clothes we’d played tennis in. Do we have other clothes? I asked Nora. Yes, she said, we have dresses for the funeral and underwear. Will had arrived in a cab from the airport. Now he was in the bathroom. He was there a long time, crying by himself, the way young men and old women prefer to do it.

Nic told us that he had picked Elf up at the hospital and they went home and then she asked him to go to the library for her. Let’s have lunch first, he said, and she agreed. He said
the lunch was wonderful. It was normal. It was nice. Just sitting across from her at the table like old times. Then he went to the library to get the books that she’d requested, it would only take twenty minutes, the library was nearby, and when he came back the house was empty.

What books did she want? Will asked. He’d come out of the bathroom now. Nic said books from her past, the ones she remembered had changed her life in some way or had given her … that made her feel alive, I don’t know … His voice trailed off. Will said like which ones? Nic said like D. H. Lawrence, Shelley, Wordsworth … I don’t know. They’re over there.

He waved at a sloping tower of books beside the computer table. We all eyed them, briefly, then looked away. They had failed. We couldn’t look at them. We sat in the silent, yellow living room, my son and daughter on either side of their grandma, close, like sentries. They had their arms hooked through hers as if to keep her from floating upwards and disappearing like a helium balloon.

My mother was saying one thing a lot. Ain’t that the truth, she said, when Will said she should sit. Ain’t that the truth, she said, when Nora hugged her and said Elf was out of pain. Ain’t that the truth, she said, when Nic thanked her for giving birth to Elf, his one and only. Ain’t that the truth, she said, when all of us answered, quite in unison, with the word
breathe
after she had posed the question what now?

It was a beautiful house. I looked at Elf’s piano books piled neatly on top of the piano. I looked at the pieces of glass she’d collected over the years arranged neatly on top of one bookcase. Well, Elf, I thought, you’re so clever. Getting him to leave you alone on the pretext of getting books. Of going to the
library. Of course he’d do it. Books are what save us. Books are what don’t save us. The library. Of course. Elfie, you’re unbelievable! I almost laughed then. What had she said about libraries and civilization? Because you make a promise, she’d said. You promise to return the book. You promise to come back. What other institution operates in such good faith, Yo?

The doorbell rang. None of us moved. It rang again, twice. Oh, said Nic. Wait, I said, I’ll go. It was the guy from Tall Grass Bakery with the birthday cake my mom had ordered for Elf’s party. I thanked him and brought it into the living room and showed it to the gang. It was a delicate white cake, moist and light at the same time. There was a message for Elf written in icing, an emphatic wish for happiness. We all had a piece. Nic cut the slices carefully and served them to us on Elf’s plain white china and we ate the cake and watched the evening sun sparkle and refract on the blue glass bowls.

At the end of the evening when there was no more cake or sunlight, we left. Nic saw us all out and stood on the front step in his khaki shorts and old punk T-shirt, his weekend clothes, meant for relaxation and comfort. My mother asked him if he’d be all right and he opened his arms to her, his head bent very low to rest on her shoulder. Will asked him if he should stay, sleep over. Nic said no, no, waved it off, but thanked him. His parents, his brother, his friends from other places, all would be arriving in the next couple of days. Tonight he was alone.

Later at my mother’s apartment I opened up the package that Nic had given me as I left. It was a copy of a story Elf had written. I had no idea she’d been writing a book. She called it
Italy in August
. I peeked at a random page and read a short paragraph in which the protagonist expresses her all-consuming passion for Italy, that she wants to go there because it’s where her “fictional sisters” went. Then she listed some of these fictional sisters and the books they appear in, and how each one of them protected her in a way, pulled her up and out of life’s quicksand moments, the bullshit, the agony of being alive. Ah, so Elf had other sisters! For a second I felt jealous. They had helped her and I hadn’t. She loved these books and they loved her back. The jealousy passed. I had a strange feeling then, as though my grief could be diluted a bit, spread out amongst all of us women, us sisters, even though only one of us was real. I flipped through the manuscript to the end and read the very last paragraph.