We finally reached my stop, the stop on Birchmount where Ba had gotten off a million times, every week for years. I broke into a jog across the road towards home. Traffic was light at this time of the morning, and there were no cars in either direction, but I sprinted anyway, running lightly on tiptoes across the place on the road where Ba had died, hoping to touch it and avoid it at the same time.
A smattering of leftover plastic reindeers and Santas greeted me as I passed. The crabapple trees lining the streets were skeletal and had grown taller, a bit thicker. When Darwin was little and wanted to climb these trees, Ba had said he had to wait for both his and the trees’ bodies to grow big enough. Time suddenly felt suspended. This was the street where I had learned to ride a bike. This was the spot where Sophia had punched a kid for stealing Darwin’s lunch and made his nose bleed. This is where Sophia and I had sat and woven dandelion necklaces. My neck grew tight. We had wreathed Ma in bracelets, necklaces, even rings made of the bright yellow flower, and she had worn them until the flowers wilted and fell apart. She had said we were so clever to make such lovely things out of weed. There were so many good times like these with Ma — true, real times when we laughed and loved one another. All that had not been a lie. I remembered them now.
Finally, I reached our bungalow. The paint was peeling along the eavestrough and the curtains were drawn. I went up the front walk. The metal “25” on our mailbox still listed slightly to the left as it always had. I straightened it.
It felt awkward to ring the doorbell of my own home, but I was not sure it was mine anymore to just walk in. I pressed it, and heard the chimes, then footsteps. Not too fast, nor too slow. I measured the beats between the foot drops, trying to gauge whether they were excited or dreaded my coming.
Finally, Sophia opened the door. She was still as pretty as she ever was. She had cut her hair, and it reached her chin in layers. I was happy to see that she was wearing one of her Flashdance sweatshirts. She moved aside, expressionless.
“C’mon in,” she gestured listlessly.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. Home always had this smell. I had never really considered it consciously, but as soon as I stepped in, I smelled all the meals that had ever been cooked, the familiar laundry detergent, the dusty rugs, and the scent of everyone I loved. I inhaled deeply.
“Don’t just stand there. Take off your boots and coat,” Sophia said. Her voice was flat. She wasn’t going to let me off that easily. I slipped off my boots and unzipped my coat. From the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow in the hallway.
“Darwin?” I said gently.
He emerged, a fully grown person, almost taller than me. “Darwin?” I said again as if he were a ghost that might disappear. He walked towards me tentatively. His face was the same, perhaps more elongated. But the eyes, nose, mouth were all Darwin. I rushed at him. I didn’t care if he was mad or wanted nothing to do with me. I needed to touch him.
He stood still as I tackled him and hugged him to me. After a moment, his arms reached around me and he hugged me back. I let out a sigh of relief then started to cry. Finally, I pulled away to look at him. He was smiling.
“I’m sorry, Darwin, I … there’s a lot I want to tell you, both of you…” I began. They didn’t say anything, but something told me there would be lots of time to get into it all.
“Come on. You want something to eat?” Sophia said as she walked into the kitchen.
“I’m starving.“
I followed them into the kitchen slowly, trying to recapture my old home on the way in. Everything was the same. How could it have just sat here like this all this time? I imagined the house without us, and it gave me a pang of sadness.
When I saw the table, my throat seized up again. In the centre was a plate of towering pancakes next to a bottle of maple syrup, some butter, and glasses of orange juice. It was set for three. They sat down, and then looked at me to join them. I pulled up a chair, and we picked up our forks and filled our plates like nothing had ever happened.
Darwin went first. “It happened in October. I was rehearsing with the symphony. It was Sibelius, and I had a solo. Cello. Anyway, me and this guy Marcel were rehearsing together late one night when suddenly, my fingers just stopped working. It was like they got mummified or something. I couldn’t move them fast enough to catch the strings. But not only that, my brain shut off. The music was right in front of me on the stand, but I couldn’t understand the notes anymore. It just stopped like that.” He snapped his fingers. His voice was lower, having lost that ungainly squeak that had plagued him the year before.
“Mine disappeared more gradually,” Sophia interjected. “I was giving a lecture in a grad seminar at McGill. I was explaining Cantor’s theorem. I know, child’s play, right?” I raised one eyebrow and smiled. “Anyway, I started working it out on the board, and I hear this student call out how I had made a mistake. That had never happened to me before. I’d never made a mistake. But he was right. Right there, smack in the middle of the proof, I had taken a wrong turn with the assumption of infinite numbers….” Sophia paused and saw that Darwin and I were blank. “Okay, okay. To simplify, I fucked it up. It was a stupid mistake. And that was the first time. Then, no errors for a few days, and suddenly, I messed up again. And again. It started happening pretty regularly, so Professor Gorky took me to a psychiatrist. I got a CAT scan, and everything looked normal. The only thing was, I’d lost my Gift.”
“Then what happened to you two?”
Darwin said, “They took me to doctors too. I also got a CAT scan and a bunch of other stuff. Like, they made me do puzzles and take tests. And I had to talk to a therapist and tell him my dreams. Then, that was it. They sent me home.”
“They did all that stuff with me too, then they sent me home,” Sophia said.
“When? Where was Ma? Was she—”
“I got home in mid-October, and Darwin came soon after that. Ma was already in the hospital, so her friends came to check in on us. We’ve seen her….” Sophia started to scratch her arm. Trails of red welts ran up and down her skin.
“Yeah, but she’s like Han Solo in the deep freeze. She’s awake, but she’s not there. Catatonic. That’s what the doctors call it,” Darwin finished for her. I could tell from their faces that it was bad. When Sophia got scared, she had a habit of twirling her hair with her fingers, and she was doing that now, furiously.
“Where’s William?” I asked.
“Pssssh, William! He’s gone. Once Ma got all deen all over again, he split. Couldn’t handle it,” Sophia said, with a scowl on her face. The image of William as an evil warlord vanished, and I recognized him for what he was: scared. In other words, human. I actually felt bad for the guy.
“What’s happening now? What are you doing for money and stuff?”
“They didn’t take away the money we had already earned. And Ba’s estate money is still there. Since I’m not a minor anymore, I can get access to Ma’s accounts because I’m her power of attorney. But there’re these doctors who are still studying Darwin and me. We are still going to therapy and getting tested and whatnot. They’re not sure what happened or if we’ll get The Gifts back.”
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“Okay, your turn,” Darwin said, interrupting my thoughts.
It struck me as utterly stupid to have to catch up these two people, my brother and sister, on the details of my life, as if we were on a blind date. But I had to start or we would not ever find our way back to normal. I took a breath, then said, “I live downtown. I’m working. At a community centre. I like it. It’s with new immigrants. Um … what else? I made a new friend. His name is Mouse. And….” I did not know what else to say. “I’ve missed you both very much.”
“Are you coming home now?” Sophia asked me, a hint of the anger from the night before flickering in her voice. She had shoved the sleeves of her sweatshirt up to her b
iceps, and the scabs went all the way up, like healing chicken pox. It hurt me to see them.
I looked around at the plywood cabinets, the worn linoleum floors, the pea green stove that matched the pea green fridge. I nodded. “Of course I am,” I whispered.
“Good,” Darwin said, and for some reason, I felt as if I had passed a test.
After breakfast, Sophia watched music videos on MuchMusic, and Darwin played a video game while I toured the house. I lingered in Ma and Ba’s bedroom, fingering the clothes that still hung in the closet. Perhaps Ma was in such a hurry when The Gifts came, that she had not bothered to put all these things away. Or maybe she had not been able to do it without us. I took out a suit of Ba’s. He only had three that he had alternated for work. They were identical, except in different colours. He had bought them at Woolco at a “Buy one, get two more at half price” sale. This one was dark brown, double-breasted. The other one had been navy blue. That was the one he had died in. The third one was light grey. That was the one he was buried in. I brought the remaining suit up to my face, hoping to find Ba’s scent. There was a faint hint of Old Spice, but that was all. I hung the suit back on the rail and took out one of Ma’s dresses. It was her best dress, the one she saved for special church events. It was black with small red, purple, pink, and blue flowers printed on it, and the collar was edged in lace. I hung the dress back into the closet so it faced the brown suit.
I laid down on their bed stripped of linen. The naked mattress felt cold against my body. The sounds of Darwin’s game and Sophia’s videos permeated the house. The Talking Heads’ song “And She Was” played over the chuuu chuuu sounds of Space Invaders. The words drifted over me.
That night in the darkened bedroom, as I lay in bed on my side of the room, and Sophia lay in hers, she asked, “Miramar, were you ever jealous that Darwin and I got The Gifts and you didn’t?”
I turned the question over before answering, “Yeah, I was.”
Her breathing was even. “I thought so.” She paused. “Is that why you left?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it had to do with The Gifts. Mostly, it just had to do with me.”
“You know, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The Gifts, I mean. I didn’t choose mine. It chose me.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first, it was great. Everyone treats you like you’re hot shit. But then, they just expect you to be a superstar all the time, and they keep raising the bar. After a while, I was just a trained seal. To tell you the truth, there were moments when I wanted it all to end. For one thing, the stupid Gift meant I had no friends. I was like a freak show. Who wants to be friends with a freak show?”
“What about Iris?”
“Iris was nice. And I think she understood me, but a sixty-year-old woman wasn’t going to hang out at the mall with me, ya know?”
“And all those boyfriends … the Gorky’s son, the deli man?” I said.
“I made them up.”
“Why?” I was perplexed. I had been hooked, lined, and sinkered. I had even worried about her.
“I was bored.”
“Geez, Sophia.” I sighed. After considering it all, I could not blame her too much. “So you must have been glad when you lost your Gift, huh?”
“Not really. Mostly I was scared. Who was I if I didn’t have my Gift? Where was I gonna go? You were all gone.”
I had no answer for this. I sat up and reached for her.
“Sophia,” I said, wishing she would sit up too and look me in the eye. “I am sorry. I will never leave you again.” I held up my hand.
She waited a second then hooked her pinky with mine.
Chapter 32 ~
Zhen knew all the herbs to be found in the woods. She recognized the roots that cooled the blood and the flowers that warmed it. She could cure water in the lungs by rubbing her concoctions to the chest. She made old woman Chu walk again with her specialty soup. But as talented as she was, and though there was much demand for her healing, Zhen had never found the remedy for a broken heart.
THE NEXT DAY, I went with Sophia and Darwin to see Ma. The psych ward at Scarborough General was different from the one downtown. It was older, with big cinder-block walls painted an institutional grey while the corridors were lit with fluorescent tubes. It was deathly quiet except for a constant drip, like maybe someone had not tightened the tap in a sink. The nurses did not seem to speak, only nodded at us. Sophia and Darwin led the way to Ma’s room.
Ma lay in the hospital bed, slightly tipped up so she was partially sitting. Her gaze was fixed on the wall straight ahead of her. Her cheeks looked hollow, and the lines of her bones were prominent. Her lips were dry and the skin was flaking off. Much of her hair was completely white now. I went up beside her and whispered, “Ma?” She didn’t even blink.
“It’s me, Miramar. I’m back, Ma.”
It felt risky to stand so close to her in case she startled and clawed at me with her hands. I wondered vaguely whether she was faking and now that I was this close, she would scream bloody murder at me for dropping out of school.
But she just sat there, staring at the grey wall. A tray was attached to her bed. Some untouched mound of chicken à la king and a pudding cup sat on a pink plastic plate.
“Who feeds her?” I asked Sophia and Darwin.
“The nurses eventually do it. They leave it for her in case she gets hungry and does it herself. She hasn’t yet,” Darwin answered.
Sophia sat down on the chair while Darwin perched himself on the edge of the bed. “What do you guys say to her when you come?”
“Nothing much. We just sit with her for a bit,” Sophia murmured. The dripping water from down the hall now seemed deafening. Sophia’s hands absently went to her sleeves. “Okay,” I said, settling into the other chair. Ma’s face and those stone eyes unnerved me. I studied her hands, the purple veins that popped up from her flesh. They looked like they belonged to someone else, someone ancient. I had been so angry at her. I had felt betrayed and lied to for all those years, all those supposedly miserable years she had spent with us in that house in Scarborough. As I sat in the room with its hums and tinny smells, I saw the bigger picture. If a lie included omission, then she had lied. I had thought she was happy. She had given up so much, almost everything that meant anything to her. She’d done it for us. It was the most precious unaddressed gift I had ever known. I saw it now, laid out here in her.
I didn’t bother going back into town for my things; I called into work and they gave me time off for my “family crisis.” I continued to see Ma every day. At first, it felt like penance. I was so sorry and had so much to make up for.
Some days, it was comforting to be close to her. Other days, I wanted to shake her and scream in her ear to break her out of this world she seemed to have succumbed to. I did not, of course. Instead, we waited and listened to the clock in her room count the seconds, minutes, and hours that marked the widening distance between us. With the nurse’s help, I washed and combed her hair. I clipped her finger and toenails, and was surprised to see we shared the same feet: square, with the second toe longer than the big toe. Why had I not known this before? I had never touched my mother this much. Or at all, really. I imagined Ma having done all this for us for years and regretted not remembering how it felt to be cared for by her.
As the days passed, we fell into something of a routine. Darwin was being home-schooled because the Board of Education did not know what to do with ex-child geniuses, so until they could figure out another course of action, they were sending a tutor to the house every morning. Sophia had earned her doctorate in Mathematics while she still had her Gift, but since she couldn’t do simple algebra now, McGill was considering stripping her of her title. Mainly, she sat at home and watched TV. Sophia and Darwin also had weekly meetings with a therapist who worked in the same building Ma was in.
One day, Soph
ia told me the therapist wanted to talk to me.
“Why?” I asked. I certainly did not have any Gifts to lose.
“I dunno. But she’s nice. You’ll like her,” Sophia told me.
So the next week I found myself sitting in Dr. Fey’s office, a room so unlike Ma’s room just a few floors up. It had a large window that overlooked the ravine. Even as I was sitting on her couch, I could see the icy branches of the trees.
Dr. Fey followed my gaze. “Nice, eh? I think the best thing about this whole building is this window and the view.” I liked this doctor. She had closely shorn black hair with spots of grey, and a pair of cat-eye glasses with small rhinestones at the corners. Her voice was smooth and warm, like honey.
“Yes, it’s nice.”
“So, you’re probably wondering why I wanted to see you?”
I crossed my legs and waited.
“I’ve been talking to Darwin and Sophia for these past few months, and we’ve been trying to get to the bottom of why they seemed to have lost what you all call The Gifts.”
I nodded.
“I was hoping that maybe you could fill in some blanks for me, so I can continue helping them.” She took her glasses off. Her wide brown eyes had so much concern in them. I wondered if she had learned how to make that expression in school or whether she actually cared about people that much. “What do you think was the cause of The Gifts?”
I fumbled for something to say. Could I tell her what I really thought? Why not? If she thought I was crazy, at least I was in the right place. Ma and I could be roommates.
“My father died right before Sophia and Darwin got The Gifts. I think … I think … that maybe, he had something to do with it.” There. I said it.
Dr. Fey leaned forward. “Go on.”
“Darwin had this dream that Ba said he was going to take care of us. And then, a couple of days later, Darwin started playing the violin and piano and drums. Then it happened to Sophia right after.”
The Wondrous Woo Page 18