by Amy Spurway
“Last meal was twelve hours ago, nasal mucus is clear, and the only travel was flying back here from Toronto three and a half weeks ago.”
Then, a less cranky but equally terse woman leads me to the prep room and gives me a johnny coat.
“Why do I need to wear this if they’re drilling my head?” I say.
Mama, again with the pinch that says, Shut up. Stop being so contrary. These people are just doing their job. Put on the damn dress. And I do.
Next comes a little paper cup full of drugs to “make me more comfortable during the procedure.” Within twenty minutes of tossing those babies into my system, Mama’s got fuzzy grey kittens playing hide and seek in her hair, the monochrome blue concentric rings that pattern my johnny coat ebb and flow in sync with my breath, and the nurse’s words are the colour of Dijon mustard. Now I am definitely more comfortable, assuming “more comfortable” means “tripping balls.”
“Gosh, I hope you didn’t shave your head just for this!” the nurse says as she marks up my head with a ballpoint pen. “We only would have taken off a tiny bit of hair. The size of a stamp.”
“Nah, I did it ’cause I’m such a badass,” I hear myself trill. “And I needed a new do.”
They rig the cage contraption to my head and neck, screw me down to the table, run me through the MRI, and then wheel in the fancy Skype screen, upon which the face of a friendly neurosurgeon in Halifax appears to direct the guy with the scalpel, the drill, and the big, long, hollow needles. But I’m not paying attention to any of that. I’m too busy blabbering on about naming my tumours. Parry Homunculus lives way deep in my parietal lobe, where he fucks with my sensory processing. Ziggy Stardust is a wild one, dancing all over my occipital lobe making me see crazy shapes and colours. And the other one . . . fuck, I don’t have a good name for that one. Let’s call it Fuzzy. Fuzzy Wuzzy was a tumour. Fuzzy Wuzzy heard a rumour. I hum loud and tunelessly to drown out the whir of the drill and the drone of the doctors — who are not nearly as jazzed about the tumour names as I am — and watch the fluorescent lights on the ceiling explode into billions of light specks that scamper madly around the room like baby spiders newly hatched from their silvery scale egg, then dissolve.
I don’t know if time flew by or stood still, but before I can figure that out, the biopsy is done. As terse nurse removes the head contraption and gets ready to wheel me to the recovery room, the robot video neurosurgeon tells me that the results will be sent to Dr. Divyaratna early next week. The drill-wielding orthopedic surgeon tells me that I have the thickest, lumpiest skull he’s ever seen. And Mama tells me that she could hear me butchering the bejesus out of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” all the way down the hall. Somewhere en route to the recovery room, I fall into something like sleep.
In my doped-up, post-procedure, post-nap stupor my eyes flicker, then fall on the carefully preserved old fossil of a woman in the bed next to mine. Tiny eyes peer out from beneath her pencilled-on shiny black brows and folds of alabaster wrinkles. Thinning coils of blue-tinted hair have been coerced into co-operation by too much Aqua Net. A frail frame is smothered in a burgundy velveteen dressing gown. Nobody has the heart to make the old fossils wear johnny coats.
I notice her giving me the hairy eyeball. Is it my relative youthfulness? My baldness? My quasi-stoned blaséness over the mouthful of yellow slime I just spit all over my bed?
“Whatever you were dreaming about certainly tickled your funny bone,” she says in a voice dry and dusty, but not unpleasant.
“Damn drugs,” I say with a groggy grimace.
“Cancer?” Her voice is still not unpleasant.
“Just had the biopsy. Probably.”
“Shaving your entire head wasn’t necessary, you know. They only take a patch about the size of a postage stamp. Nothing a little creative hair styling can’t hide.” Her craggy hands flutter nimbly to her own curls, reassuring them of their beauty with a tender pat. They spring back obediently. I fix my glassy gaze on her hair in a vain attempt to distract myself from the blackened grey and bile-yellow splotches now crowding my field of vision.
“Bald is my creative hair styling.” Trying not to sound like her intrusiveness is starting to get on my nerves.
“It’s unbecoming on a lady with your husky bone structure,” she says, her brow furrowed and her mouth pulling into a puckered half-smile. “My friend Joan makes gorgeous wigs. With real hair. Blonde is quite fetching. Gentlemen prefer fair hair, especially once a woman has passed her prime. You should call Joan. She could even make it work with your ruddy skin tone.” There’s an unmistakable smack of scorn in her passive-aggressive benevolence, and my head can’t handle anymore sage advice.
I turn to face the wall, and moan. “This sucks. I feel like a bag of smashed assholes.”
“Mouth like a mine rat. Also unbecoming.” The old bat sharply enunciates each word with the precision of an icy-eyed, strap-wielding Catholic school nun.
“Better a mine rat than a heartless old vulture,” Mama’s voice snarls from the doorway.
Even through my post-op distorted eyesight I can clearly see the old woman’s face change. The tightly pursed lips part ways, the lower one slipping down in disbelief, drooping over the puckered chin. Her eyes are wide open and alive, crackling with something nasty as she stares down my mother.
The room starts to spin and my head starts to pound. Mama and the old woman are talking to each other, but I can’t hear a word on account of the rumbles and clangs in my ears. The details of their faces and the space between them gets swallowed by a jumbled cloud of colour. Piney greenish-grey bands with streams of piss-yellow mash into jagged swaths of maroon, with intermittent black-red spirals shooting out in all directions. My stomach turns, my teeth start to chatter, and for a minute I can’t remember who anyone is or what we’re all doing here. Then the incision site on my skull starts to throb, the auditory cacophony subsides, and my eyes lay off on the technicolour trip just in time to see the stone cold fury on Mama’s face as she yanks a wheelchair into the room, throws my coat onto my bed, and says, “C’mon. The nurse said you can go.”
She takes a couple of quick strides toward me and pulls off my blanket.
“Ma, I’m still in the johnny coat —”
“Keep it as a souvenir. We’re leaving. Now.”
She hustles my coat over the hospital gown, guides my shaky frame into the wheelchair, plops my bag onto my lap, then breaks for the door. But she stops short, half-turning to face the dumbfounded old biddy in the other bed. Slowly, clearly, with glaring narrowed eyes and a feral smile tugging on the left side of her upper lip, Mama speaks.
“Hope the cancer gets you this time, Lady Rosalind. And may it hurt like the hot horrors of hell.”
And out the door we go.
Rosalind Spenser. My father’s mother.
[…]
Mama talks about my father with as much love and warmth as she can muster, which admittedly isn’t a ton. The rest of his family, though? She says their names like she’s spitting out shit: Saint Sarah, Lady Rosalind, the Other Old Bastard. My one and only memory of ever meeting them still sits vividly in my mind, despite Mama’s insistence that I’d be best off forgetting they existed, because that’s how they’d treat me and we’d never darken their door again.
It was Christmas Eve. I was eight. Mama wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but she scrubbed my face and fingernails until they were raw because only streels went around with dirty faces and fingernails. She dressed me in an itchy, starchy green dress with red smocking and a big, floppy, white lace puritan collar. She wrestled my hair into too tight, too high pigtails, tied them with pieces of thick, fluffy red yarn, and jammed my poor duck feet into a pair of stiff, narrow Mary Janes that would leave gaping, bloody blisters on both heels. I remember looking at myself in the mirror in abject horror. I wanted my hair pulled back with a headband. I wanted to wear my orange corduroy jumper. I wanted my duck feet in warm, wide winter boots. But no. We wer
e going somewhere.
Somewhere was a gigantic Victorian house on a hill, in the wealthy west end of the Northside, out in Town. Far removed from the dirty slushy streets in The Mines, where the air was permeated by the smell of gas and coffee and the sounds of people yelling, “Hey dere buddy, how she goin’?” Even distant from the nice parts of Town, the land of tidy split levels, with honeysuckles on trellises and stone bird baths in the yard. That was where the ordinary rich people lived. People who called the likes of Mama when they needed their house cleaned for a dinner party. But the somewhere we visited that night had a sprawling lawn edged in cold, naked oak trees. Rhododendron bushes wrapped in red and green lights. A life-sized nativity scene with hand-carved and painted wise men, angels, and animals, each under their own bright white spotlight.
Mama murmured, “Don’t worry about paying the power bill here, now do they?” as we drove up the driveway. That was the first time I realized that Mama did have to worry about paying the power bill.
Inside, somewhere smelled like oranges and cinnamon and baked ham. An enormous ostrich feather fan hung on the wall. Glittering crystals dangled from a chandelier. Delicate horse figurines and tiny tea sets were carefully arranged on the shelves of two giant glass cabinets. Nothing here came from the Bargain Store. A fire roared in a big stone hearth, making the whole place too hot for my comfort, but clearly not for the small throng of unfamiliar adults. Men in blazers and sweater vests sipped amber drinks from little glasses, while women in velvet dresses held wine glasses in jewelled hands. Beneath the layer of chatter and guffaws, Bing Crosby crooned “I’ll be Home for Christmas.”
Mama marched me through the crowd until we stood in front of an older couple. The woman leaned against the man, clutching the sleeve of his suit jacket with her diamond-laden fingers when she saw us. Mama introduced me with ice in her voice and fire in her eyes, and said we didn’t come to make a scene. We just came for some hot chocolate and a plate of cookies, like the boys got.
At a table in the corner sat two boys, both younger than me. A tall, thin woman with long blonde hair and a porcelain face ignored me completely, but dusted crumbs from the fronts of their navy blue suits as they nibbled cookies and sipped hot chocolate. The older man simply raised an eyebrow at me, shook his head, and walked away laughing to himself in a way that wasn’t really laughing, and wasn’t really to himself. The older woman stood, staring a hole through Mama for a long while. When it became clear that my mother wasn’t going to budge, the woman flashed me a dagger of a smile, bit her bottom lip as she thrust out a furious “Fine,” and waved us toward the table.
A waiter came out with a cup of cocoa and a plate with two star-shaped cookies. Mama stopped the waiter and said that my hot chocolate needed whipped cream. And chocolate shavings. And my cookies needed white icing and silver candy balls. Like the boys had. The waiter looked at the old woman. She nodded once, slowly, in a way that filled me with both glee and terror. But I wasted no time in slurping thick gobs of cocoa-tinged whipped cream from that cup, and letting the buttery sweetness of icing-slathered shortbreads melt on my tongue, while the thin blonde lady and two boys watched in horror.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Mama and the older woman standing almost nose to nose, speaking in tense, hushed tones. When I saw Mama squat in a mock curtsey and heard her sneer, “Yes, Lady Rosalind!” I knew my time in this weird Heaven was running out.
“Hey buddy, you gonna finish those cookies?” I asked the younger of the two boys. “Because I —”
Mama’s voice boomed, “Crow. Time to go. Now.”
I wolfed down the rest of my cookie, plus the one the kid in the suit had gingerly shoved toward me, and glugged the last half of my hot chocolate. Mama buttoned my coat, took my hand, and ushered me to the door. The old woman followed us, perching in the door frame as we walked down the steps, bidding us Merry Christmas and good riddance.
I smiled, curtsied, and said, “Good riddance to you too, ma’am,” thinking it was some kind of rich person holiday greeting.
My mother turned to look the old woman square in the eye, then smiled so that every last one of her false teeth were bared, and said, “Lovely glass house you have, Lady Rosalind. Be grateful I’m not one for throwing stones.” Mama hustled me down the walkway. And just past the spotlit nativity scene, my traitorous gut expelled all of that hard-won decadence, all over the walkway of my father’s fancy family home. I’ve had a knack for a timely upchuck ever since.
[…]
I am too scared to turn around to see the precise quality of the look on Mama’s face right now, but judging by the way she is steering my wheelchair at breakneck speed down the hall and turning the rickety bugger on a dime, the old doll is livid. Now is not a good time to ask questions about my father’s family. Then again, there may never be a good time to go dredging through that toxic pool of old stories, even if there are uncharted islands of truth and revelation somewhere in it.
There’s also never really a good time to get the results of a brain tumour biopsy, but within days, the call comes. Congratulations Crow Fortune, you are the proud host of moderately invasive, extremely unpredictable, totally inoperable triplets, a trio of grade two-ish astrocytomas! They grow long, nebulous tendrils that infiltrate surrounding tissue and are near impossible to cut out in any kind of clean way, especially when they have snuggled nice and deep into the grey matter of three separate brain lobes. Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, Fuzzy Wuzzy, and I are bonded for life. And although they grow slowly and are technically considered low-grade and not yet cancerous, that could change in a wink. It usually does. Grade two astrocytomas are unpredictable little fellas. One day, they will just wiggle their little starry tendrils at each other and say, “Hey boys! Let’s get our cancer on!” Then, bam! Brain cancer. Inoperable. Terminal.
The treatments sound worse than the disease, which will most certainly come back bigger and badder. If the tumours behave themselves, I’ve got a few years of pounding pain, whacked-out visual disturbances and generally feeling like I’ve been hit by the honey wagon. Radiation and chemo might give me a year or two more, but the side effects will probably make me wish I were dead. Once they start changing, I’ve got about eighteen months. And that’s with aggressive treatment and a hefty dose of luck of which I’ve never had any.
Dr. Divyaratna seems delighted to tell me that this is not as bad as it could be. “We will just have to wait and see.”
Which only makes me feel worse. I didn’t come all this way to wait and see. To wither into helpless, snivelling clod-dom while my mother’s hands tremble to hold my aching head and her own breaking heart together for years on end. To slowly disintegrate. I came here to say my goodbyes, sum up my life, and go down in a blaze of glory. Like a firework, screaming up into the backwoods darkness, shattering the night and the silence with my burning brilliance. If only for a moment. The idea of a swift and certain death held an odd comfort. The prospect of an uncertain life is far more unsettling. And even though on paper, I may now stand a faintly greater chance than that of an average ice cube in hell, there’s a familial pattern and a gnawing feeling in my gut that says I’m still pretty doomed. It’s just a matter of degree.
[…]
My Going Home To Die plan did not include a high school reunion on Thanksgiving weekend. But here I am, rifling through my old jewellery box trying to find earrings big enough to distract people from my bald and now slightly scarred head. When Allie picks me up, I wait for her to comment on the gaudy silver stars dangling from my earlobes, but she doesn’t. The drive over Ceilidh Mountain to Loch Bhreagh is remarkable in its silence. Allie keeps her eyes on the road. I take in the scenery.
This is the part of my downhome tale where I’m supposed to gush about what I see from where I sit, and maybe be grateful I even get to witness all this. The land and the sea. The turning leaves and the glorious colours. How it is all just. So. Beautiful. I’m supposed to draw the reader into my world with vivid
descriptions of the landscape and the natural beauty, and then somehow draw a poignant connection between the rugged beauty of the simple land and the rugged beauty of the complicated people.
Well, you know what I see now when I look at those trees with the colourful leaves? Death. We glorify the bejesus out of the dying leaves. We’re all ooh and aah and gasping words like gorgeous and majestic while the poor leaves are just trying to eke out a few more sad weeks of being. By October, the leaves know. They know that one good night of wind, one lashing rain storm, and they’re gone. Unceremoniously flung to the ground to rot. Fall is a season of letting go. Of grief. Even though they manage to put on a bit of show for a while, what the leaves are really telling us is that those merciless, cold, dark days are coming. Pretty colours don’t stop you from becoming a corpse. So the mountain isn’t beautiful. It’s coloured with a hundred shades of dying.
Allie and I roll into the postcard-perfect village of Loch Bhreagh, which is all decked out for the annual Celtic festival. More tartan and fiddles than you can shake a stick at. Throngs of tourists in search of an authentic Cape Breton experience. I should charge these visitors money to take them on a little tour out behind the rink and get them drunk, stoned, beat up, or pregnant. That’s why I couldn’t put my marketing skills to use here. If I had, you’d be seeing brochures that said “Cape Breton: Give Us Your Money and Git Out Before We Puck Ya in the Teeth.” Or as they say in the fake Gaelic, “Ciad Mille Fáilche Áielfs: One Hundred Thousand Fuck Offs.”
Over where the high school wing used to be there’s now just a pile of rubble. They tore it down the day before yesterday. The elementary and junior high sections and the common gymnasium are still there, but the asbestos-ridden building where we spent our formative years is no more. The industrial arts workshop where Char gave impromptu table-dancing lessons is gone. The AV room where Allie gave a highly acclaimed and delightfully ironic performance of a Peer Education play called Hugs Not Drugs after eating a handful of magic mushrooms at lunch hour is gone. The janitor’s closet where Willy Gimp found me hiding on Valentine’s Day, crying over Weasel Tobin when I should have been in biology class, and where he held me and let me blubber all over his good shoulder, and where we had our first sober kiss, is gone.