by Louise Ells
Making a mess on her brand new sofa cushion, that was worth a head-bashing. Nowhere to go but back down the road to the lake, to hide from her anger for as long as possible. I took the cushion with me in my school knapsack, thinking - thinking-who knows what I was thinking? Maybe I was going to confess. Maybe I planned to hide it. But on the way to the lakeshore I passed Ma and Pa going home and they smiled, and I smiled, and I said nothing.
When I got there Dwight was leaving, heading home in the last of the light, and everyone else was gathered around the bonfire; only Aaron was out on the ice. He said he needed me to skate with him and at first I said it hurt too much, I didn’t like it anymore, I wasn’t any good, I had a big bruise on my bum. But he asked me what was in my knapsack and when I showed him he said perfect, the solution and tied it around me with the belt from my snowsuit.
“Try falling now!” he urged and so I did, sitting back and landing with a gentle poof. It was so much fun I fell again, and once more, and then we set off, him dashing ahead and me chasing, both of us laughing. I remember the laughter. The entire lake to ourselves and the laughter. And we had the last of the fire to ourselves too at the very end of the day, so we stood close, turning like hotdogs to toast both font and back.
It was only as we started up the road home he noticed what I’d done - what had happened - to the cushion. Ripped, stained with far more than peanut butter and jelly, holes burned into it from flying ash, it was no longer pale green but grey and black. All its newness gone away. He untied it and held it out and we both knew this was the worst thing we’d ever done, worse than the eggs, worse even than losing Pa’s wallet as we’d once managed to do.
“Ruined,” I said. I too scared to think about crying. “What can we do?”
“Run away,” Aaron said. “Skate all the way to the end of the lake.”
I’ve no idea what possessed him to suggest that, but I trusted him and followed him back on to the ice, not complaining when I stumbled in the dark, or when my legs grew so tired I could barely move them. On we went, past the marina, past the public swimming beach, until I saw the lights of Robillard Pulp and Paper coming into view. I knew we’d truly run away by then, that was where Pa worked, a bus ride away from town.
We had to stop once we’d passed the plant. It was too dark to skate on and it was starting to snow. I was cold, I was hungry, I told Aaron. Haven’t we run away enough, I asked.
We made our way towards some flickering lights where, Aaron said, there must be people. First we passed a cluster of fishing huts, then the ice went on a bit farther than I expected and I got scared again, worried that we’d got turned around and were heading the wrong way across the lake. But it was just the bay; the lights were those of the community where Dwight lived. Had this in fact been Aaron’s plan all along? He knew where to go, found Dwight quick enough, and space was made for us at the dinner table, the fish dinner shared out on to two extra plates.
We were lucky we turned in to the shore. The weather turned and the snowfall became a blizzard with winds that took down telephone poles and knocked out the power. Dwight’s father went outside to get wood for the fire, came back in and said we’d have to stay the night, he’d drive us home in the morning.
And in the morning, the silence. That thick silence. Eerie. More fish for breakfast, and then we went outside to a new place, a world fresh and transformed. Every branch, every twig, every needle covered with inches of bright white possibility. The largest skating rink in the world was gone, and all the yards in the street were blanketed over. We were driven back to town through white tunnels of snow, in a pickup that had no seat belts in the back. Aaron and Dwight up front with the father, the mother and three girls and me in the back. What I didn’t know as we drove through the magical landscape was how the friendship between Aaron and Dwight would last beyond the holidays. How Aaron would lie to my parents about after school clubs and band practice and pick up hockey games to come back here. How the two boys would hunt and fish together. How much - but how little - this boy and Aaron had in common.
But all that was to come. Then, I was being driven through a town so transfigured that I didn’t recognize our house until Pa stumbled out the door, equally changed. This too I didn’t understand until many years later. When the snowfall became the blizzard visibility narrowed down to a few feet and there’s no way we would have found our way off the lake. Then the temperature dropped and, had we been outside, we would have died. The police had been called, searched by snowmobile with lights and gone out again at dawn with dogs. But they had assumed the worst, warned our parents to prepare for bad news. Ma had been medicated and when we arrived home and Pa came towards us he was crying - something I had never before seen.
The missing, ruined cushion, the catalyst for our running away, was never mentioned.
They quizzed me, then, and later, and later still when Aaron had his first accident. But I couldn’t help, I had no answers. Had Aaron eaten a lot of fish? I didn’t like fish, had I eaten less? I couldn’t remember. Had he fallen and hurt his head when he half-carried me when my legs couldn’t skate any further? I couldn’t remember.
By the time I turned eight, it was clear something had happened. His walk was odd, sort of a lopsided lurch, and he started to slur his words. Then he fell on the way to school; the school bus driver who witnessed the accident said his legs had just crumpled, he’d flopped and gone down. The doctors asked if he’d been hit in the head, with a hockey puck maybe, and I believe Ma never forgave herself for the way she’d tried to knock some sense into us, certainly she never did it again.
The following year the school put him into the annex, out back of the main building. Poor Ma. So many of my childhood memories are of her as emotionally distant, sad at what she saw as the loss of Aaron’s future, for which she always blamed herself. But he was my hero then, he is my hero still.
This year the conditions are right: the lake froze over on a day with no hint of wind, no snowfall then or later. Yesterday evening Ma rang to tell me the schoolchildren were out skating. “What fun we had that Christmas you were five,” she said. “Remember? Remember.”
“I do,” I said. “I do.”
So I’ve taken today off work and have driven up north, stopping just before town at the site of the abandoned reserve. The bay has vanished, replaced with an alder-filled swamp, unnavigable in any season. Impossible to imagine the ice, the fish huts, the skating. Up the road is the plant, long closed. Pa joined the protest, carrying a placard calling for compensation, justice for job loss and payments to those suffering Minamata disease, then took a janitorial job at the high school.
I drive away from those haunted sites to my childhood home, where Aaron and Ma are waiting. I lace up his skates at the edge of the lake and give him the toe of a hockey stick to hold on to.
And we set off, one push at a time, and I hear the sharp sound of our blades, mapping our story across the ice.
Push
Pushing. Pushing up through- Thick green water, sludge, weeds, algae. Surfacing. Breathe, breathe. Focus.
Focus.
Her eyes are open. Aren’t they?
“Here you are!” A young female voice.
Who’s speaking? Where’s here? There’s no water. She tries to turn her head to make sense of her location, but can’t twist her neck.
Opens her eyes wider. White plaster rose, chandelier. Her ceiling. Montreal.
“That was a bad one, but it’s over now. Let’s make you comfortable.”
Not comfortable. Everything hurts, a dull ache. A whirring sound and the chair jerks up, forcing her into what’s called a sitting position. She tries to shift. Can’t.
Blankets are tucked around her legs. “There we go, Marie. Better now. And I have your meds. Would you like water or juice?”
Gabrielle. Giving her the illusion of choice. Two years ago, when she could still control her swallowing she should have refused medication and food. Too late now.
“Her
e’s the pink one.”
The one that causes the hallucinations. Caught in a fire, buried alive, drowning in mud. Terrified, then always coming back to discover she’s not dead. If she could make herself understood, she’d tell this girl she’d prefer the dyskinesia.
“And here’s the blue one. And some more orange juice to help you swallow.”
But her head jerks at the wrong time. She feels liquid on her collarbone, a drop of it running from the soft cloth that wipes her mouth, her chin, her neck.
“Let’s try that one again, shall we.”
The drugs. Anti-nausea, anti-indigestion, antidepressants. She can’t feel her throat swallow the pills, but the taste of the reconstituted concentrate lingers on her tongue. A brief sense of her mother’s hands on hers as they squeezed oranges for juice.
Do her hands look like her mother’s did at the end, paper thin and tinged with blue?
“Your hands? I heard that very clearly.” A gentle touch. “Ooh, icy cold. Here, I’ll give them a rub to warm them up.”
Just as she used to rub her mother’s hands and feet each morning. And every afternoon in the park she’d wrap her hands over her mother’s around the thermos of hot chocolate as they watched the world. Her mother, when she could still speak, shared stories of harsh Maritime winters and thin boots stuffed with newspapers.
“Papers, was that? Would you like me to read you today’s newspaper?”
No. But that word doesn’t make it from her mind, through her throat and out into the room. Gabrielle has already gone in search of the newspaper, which she’ll read cover to cover if she thinks that’s what Marie desires. Kind, really. And it fills time.
She feels the drugs pulling her away from clarity.
Something she wanted to say.
Can’t recall.
Her window of words, for today, is over.
Her eyes open. Dull, pre-dawn shadows. She’s in the room they call her bedroom. Except it’s not, not any more. Her sleigh bed with its soft mattress replaced by this narrow, hard hospital contraption. Her Edwardian side table displaced by the hoist. Her collection of vases bunched to one end of the mantlepiece to make room for rows of pill bottles.
Opens her eyes and watches light move across the wall. Late afternoon then, that’s when this window catches the sun. Weekday or weekend? She listens for children on their way home from school and the start of rush hour traffic clogging up Westmount. Buses, horns. A jigsaw puzzle of sounds to piece together. And closer, two sets of footsteps.
“The rain’s stopped and it looks lovely out there. Let’s get you wrapped up and we’ll go for a walk.”
Wrapped up. The carers’ euphemism for the hour-long process to transfer her from bed to electric chair via hoist, wheel her into the wet room for a sponge bath and force her body into clothes. Then move her outside by way of a series of ramps. The bone-shakers, her mother had called them.
“I didn’t catch that. Can you try again, please?”
She doesn’t understand how it is that she has no idea when she’s speaking aloud and no way to differentiate between words and nonsense sounds. The hoist swings her above the wheelchair and she sees the stain, notices one girl mouthing ‘dry’ to the other.
Her mother’s wheelchair, stained with blood, sat in the front hall for three months after the police returned it. She left it where it was until the day she walked into it, couldn’t catch herself in time, and fell over. Knew she was lucky not to have broken a hip. She put it out on the curb by the trash and the next morning, long before the garbage men came, it was gone.
The girls take turns pushing her along the sidewalk towards Mount Royal. She knows this hill is hard work. They reach the pond and stop beside a bench, sit next to her and throw leftover cake to the ducks.
Just as she and her mother used to do, every afternoon. Isn’t this nice, she always said, trying to make it sound as if they were the lucky ones, the pair who could afford to sit and relax while everyone else rushed by. Once, her mother answered her. “Not enough.” She’d heard her, but hadn’t known what to do with the words.
A child runs past, stops and looks up at her, runs off again. “Papa, l’avez-vous vu? La vieille dame bave comme un bébé.”
Old? I’m sixty-three.
Gabrielle leans over and wipes the line of drool from her mouth. “So many ducks,” she says. “Look at that beautiful black and white one. I wonder what it’s called.”
I was a partner in a law firm. My interests were antiques and gardening, never bird watching. Barrow’s Goldeneye.
“Garrot d’Islande,” says the other carer at the same time. Followed immediately by, “Sorry, I spoke over you. What is the name in English?”
But the two words won’t come again.
So the carers talk about a movie, pretending the conversation includes her.
She isn’t ungrateful. Lucky to be able to afford private care. In a home she’d be left in front of a television all day, no one would push her here to feel the sun on her face.
“We’ll stop for groceries on the way home, shall we? What do you fancy for dinner?”
-pasta fagioli. She discovered it on Sicily. That walking holiday with . . she’s lost his name. But the thick, rich soup, sweet with garlic and the seaside patio where they ate bowlful, after bowlful of it.
“Pâté? Sure.” Something that can be puréed, fed to her by teaspoon, but she can’t make the word ‘pasta’ clear enough to be understood.
Banging on the front door. Now they’re coming for her; she won’t fight, she always knew they’d find her guilty. No sound then, no protest.
“Shh, shh, it’s OK. You’ve just had one of those nasty hallucinations.”
Darkness. Disconcerting, this constant loss of time. Never knowing the hour or day or sometimes even the month.
“There aren’t any police, you haven’t murdered anyone.” It’s not a voice she recognizes. A new carer.
I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.
“Emmeline, but everyone calls me Emmie.”
Emmie. Would you be so kind as to plump my pillow?
“Of course I will!”
Lovely. Thank you. And it truly is.
“A conversation, what a treat. I’ll plump your pillow for you any time, and do anything else you ask. I wish I could always understand you this well.”
But it’s plain from Emmie’s face that the next words are just a jumble. The clear speech, an after-effect of the hallucination, has worn off. She wishes she could close her eyes and curl into her pillow.
Pillows. At some point it had stopped being a joke when her mother begged her to put a pillow over her face and it had ceased to scare her that she took her mother’s requests seriously. But they had filled the evenings watching murder mysteries on television, and they both knew that murder by smothering left too many clues. A face imprint, skin cells.
Wakes to: “The first snowfall! Let’s go to the park.” She’s being hoisted, put into a winter coat, hat and gloves. The girls hurry. She knows why; any change in routine is exciting.
It was the same when she was the caregiver. Guess who’s come to visit you? she’d ask her mother in a voice, artificial even to her own ears. As if the community health nurse, Mathis, was worth the fuss of finger sandwiches and homemade butter tarts on fine china. But he was their only visitor for weeks at a time and generous enough to spend an extra half hour chatting over tea. It was Mathis who took her aside to ask her about her own health although she insisted the shaking was caused by stress, exhaustion. Even in denial she was just like her mother.
The park is full of children. “I love this,” says Emmie.
“I don’t remember snow this early in the season when I was their age,” says Gabrielle. She points. “Look at them all, Marie. Tobogganing and snowmen. So much fun to watch, eh?”
Not enough.
No response. Have they not heard her or has she not spoken? Or do they, too, think it’s best to ignore the words?
&
nbsp; “It’s rare that a mother and child are both struck with Parkinson’s,” Mathis had said. “We don’t even know if there’s a genetic link. But please, consider a check up.”
So she’d gone. But when the results came back she couldn’t share them with her mother. As best she could, she’d hidden the stumbling, imbalance, moments when she froze. She hid her own medication and looked away from her mother’s gaze.
“We came out so early we nearly forgot your morning meds,” says Gabrielle. “Look, Emmie’s bought us some hot chocolate. With whipped cream no less.” She blows on it to cool it, then offers a tiny spoonful of cream with tablet. “Here you go. Good. One more. And, last one.”
The last one. If only I could be sure it was.
“Have another sip. Isn’t it lovely?”
Mother and I on this same bench, drinking hot chocolate. That day.
A small girl, blonde curls and bright pink snowsuit runs past, flops into the snow and waves her arms about. She jumps up, giggles at the shape she’s left in the snow and dashes away.
“Shall we?” Emmie laughs. “I wonder what people would say if the three of us lay down in the snow and started making angels.”
I’d like that.
“Would you?” Emmie turns to smile at her.
The drugs must have kicked in quickly. Her speech is strong and sure. This is her chance. Today, with the sun on the snow. Please, could push me up the Olmsted Trail?
“You want us to work off that hot chocolate and whipped cream, don’t you?” Gabrielle says. “Sure, it’ll be a great view from the top. We’ll be able to see all of Montreal and along the Saint Laurent.”
Emmie points to the sky. “Look at those clouds moving in. More snow, I bet. I hope this means we’ll have a good ski season.”
Hope. I live in hope.
“Oh. Marie.” Emmie looks at her. “One day, you know. One day they’ll find a cure for this shitty disease. God willing it will be in your lifetime.” She kneels to tuck the blankets around her. “And I saw from your photo albums that you were a skier. Me and my big mouth, I’m sorry.”