Notes Towards Recovery

by Louise Ells

  Emmie has misunderstood. It’s not a cure she’s hoping for, or a day of skiing. Her chair’s wheels slipping on the snow or a frozen patch on the shady sidewalk; a momentary loss of control.

  A moment. That’s all it was that day, between the holding of the handles and her mother’s chair in the road, a car unable to swerve or stop.

  That day.

  Mathis had met her at the hospital, sat with her in the beige room when the doctors spoke to her, and again when the policewoman interviewed her. A tragic accident, Mathis said. Tragic, the policewoman agreed.

  The medication is affecting her memory. She isn’t sure. Was it just an icy patch? Had her hands started to shake uncontrollably? Or had she, perhaps- Was it possible she had given the wheelchair the merest touch of encouragement?

  How about that view? she had asked her mother when they finally reached the top of the Olmsted. How about that?

  “Enough,” her mother had said. “Enough.”

  Northern Lights

  You might not notice her if you were under the overhang, not exactly the regulation nine meters away from the building but out of the worst of the slanting sleet in order to light a smoke. She doesn’t draw attention to herself; she’s driven a small, older car which she has to park in the back row. The other drivers arrived several hours earlier and their cars are already coated with the morning’s ice. She hunches into the wind as she navigates the slippery path to the entrance, clasping her hood around her chin with one hand, with the other holding her backpack to her front like an extra belly.

  It’s difficult to see her, features hidden by the fake fur which is already matting in the wet and body disguised by the knee-length down jacket. And it’s a grey January day - slate sky, charcoal trees, even the red brick building looks smoky through the sleet. What you might think, even without realizing it, is that she too is grey. Nondescript. She lacks the authoritarian bearing of a staff member but nothing about her suggests a patient. No slightly off-kilter gait, no facial tics, no muttering to herself.

  When the wind extinguishes your third match you’ll focus on scrambling through your inside pocket for another book of matches, swearing at your lack of a lighter, and miss the nervous smile she gives you as she walks by and pulls open the heavy doors. Finally, your first drag and before the doors have fully closed, you’ll have forgotten all about her.

  She pauses before the next set of double doors, and then she does whisper to herself. “Joy? Yes? I love you. Good.” Several times a week this same conversation with herself, so close to a mantra that she barely hears the words as she thinks them. It started - she thinks it started - the summer she was fifteen. The end-of-season canoe trip, once her favourite part of summer camp. That was the year a gulf had appeared between her and every other girl her age; the books she read and games she played and clothes she wore were wrong. Everyone else in her cabin had moved on to dances and boys and Judy Blume, experimenting with French kissing and words Joy couldn’t even translate. It was a three-week trip, right across the park. By lunch on the first day Joy knew it would be the longest three weeks of her life. (She was wrong about that. But.)

  She tried to pretend, she canoed hard and carried more than her fair share over the portages, but this did nothing to bridge the gap. All the other girls were buddies with the counsellors, sharing cigarettes and contraband beer. To stem the tears, she whispered to herself when she was away from the group, gathering kindling or looking for blueberries. “I love you,” she told herself. Some years later she started confirming that she’d heard herself. “Good,” she’d say.

  All the years since that summer, all the therapists and doctors and psychologists and she’s never shared this tiny nugget of information about herself with anyone. She wonders sometimes if it could be a key, the key, the one thing that would unlock something, fix what it is that needs fixing. Thirty-two and she is still looking for a magic cure.

  “Physician, heal thyself,” Dan had joked when she told him about this new gig. She thinks - she hopes - he was joking. She laughed. But it is something she might actually be good at. And it pays, pays well. Comparatively.

  So here she is, shaking off the worst of the snow, stamping her boots on the mat and unzipping her coat to show her staff badge to the security guard at the front desk. She signs in and he reaches under the counter to press the buzzer that will open the doors. Although she knows she can leave at any time, the sound they make as they click shut behind her makes her uneasy. She clutches her backpack and looks straight ahead.

  It takes her a moment to remember she has to swipe her badge again to call the elevator, and once more inside to activate it. Maybe she’ll take the stairs next time. Three flights twice a day, that would be good for her.

  She’s been asked to start each day by leading fifteen minutes of stretching exercises. Only three people take part, all the others watch from where they are slumped on sofas and in easy chairs. In the background the muted television plays a game show, someone spinning a wheel then jumping up and down. As Joy reaches above her head, behind her back, touches her toes, a janitor takes down the last of the Christmas decorations from the walls and squashes them into a plastic bin to make them fit. The room looks tired, and the dull light seeping into the room only illuminates the dust drifting towards the worn floor tiles. The whole ward appears to be settling in for the cold weather doldrums.

  Her first group is Art Therapy. Easy. She’s done this before and is well prepared with magazines and glue sticks to make collages. Vision boards, she calls them, what the future could hold. The men rip out pictures of expensive cars and skinny bikini-clad models, the women choose houses with neat-as-a-pin kitchens and tables with a good-looking family tucking into a roast turkey dinner, or women in groups in spas or lunching in expensive cafés, or the same skinny models as the men. No one chooses a picture of a newborn baby. The two hours pass without incident and then the Tea Lady comes through the common room pushing a trolley with lukewarm drinks and saran-wrapped rice krispie squares. Clearly the highlight of the morning.

  Then the real challenge, facilitating the peer support session. That’s the title of this job: Peer Support Facilitator. She spent hours looking up websites for structured plans and ideas, came away with little. The room is at the other end of the floor, away from the noise of the television; two sets of double doors to be unlocked and then locked behind them. It’s pale green and dull. Three lamps on empty bookcases cast only the suggestion of light. She fusses a bit with the hard plastic chairs, making as friendly a circle as she can in the limited space. One of the women helps while she finishes eating, her marshmallow-sticky fingers marking the back of each of the chairs she moves.

  “Good morning,” says Joy. She chooses a non-sticky chair and smiles. “I’m Joy.” She had stood, walked around the room, for the art therapy session. Now, sitting, she sees how ill-fitting this navy suit is. Bought from Walmart last night in a sudden panic that the baggy sweaters and elasticated skirts she owned wouldn’t look professional enough. The cheap pants bunch at her waist, stretch across her thighs, and the sleeves of the jacket reach to her knuckles. “Perhaps you could introduce yourselves to me and each other?”

  A silence; she should have prepared a more formal ice breaker. Finally the woman scrunching saran wrap into a ball, wiping her hands on her jeans, meets Joy’s gaze. She half-stands, hesitates, sits again. “Hello. My name is Chardonnay and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hello, Chardonnay.” This from everyone in the room. The woman relaxes.

  Joy keeps what she hopes is an encouraging smile on her face. She signed several forms, ticked the data protection box, but she may tell Dan about the alcoholic whose parents saw fit to name her after a kind of wine. “And what would you like to talk about today?”

  “I need to look at the guilt and loneliness that makes me want to lapse backwards. I have suffered from the disease of alcoholism. There is no disgrace in facing up to the fact that I have a problem, but I know if I
do not drink today I cannot get drunk today.” She nods, as if pleased with the answer she’s given. Quoted word-for-word. Joy has read all the AA Pamphlets in waiting rooms over the years.

  How long until her smile starts to fade? She thanks the woman for her honesty, then looks towards the man on Chardonnay’s right. “Hello. You are-?”

  “Jesus.”

  “No he’s not. He’s Kenny.” This from an older man across the circle.

  “I’m happy to call you Jesus if that’s the name you prefer,” says Joy. Is that what she’s supposed to do? Or is it more helpful to use the name mainstream society will use when Jesus . . Kenny is released? “Are there any specific issues you’d like to raise in this group?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “Hate talkin’. Only here ‘cause I have no choice.”

  Friendly, open, but no pressure. She knows this much. “Well, I’m glad you’re here and if you choose to join in we’d love you to.” Should she be using a more professional-sounding jargon, or would it sound as fake to them as it always did to her? How to communicate. She thinks about the lack of communication between her and Dan. Lack of effective communication.

  After three more people decline her offer to share, to talk about anything at all, she says, “Communication is always about choices.” So easy to suggest. She runs through a list of techniques she’d never dare suggest to Dan that they might try, even though she knows she’ll arrive home to the breakfast dishes unwashed and no sign of supper despite it being his day off. He has other strengths, she reminds herself, she could list them by rote as she often does to her mother. He is kind. Generous. He has a job. He didn’t leave her when many other men would have.

  And communication isn’t one of her strengths either. Far easier to cook dinner and wash the dishes and then watch television together.

  They reach the man who busted Jesus. Andrew. She thinks she might recognize him, she isn’t sure. His first few sentences sound prepared, he wants to discuss the problems he’s having sleeping next to someone who snores, and how he’s only allowed four smoke breaks a day and that’s not enough. But then he starts to ramble, launching into a story about travelling through northern B. C. “back when I was well,” and hitchhiking across the border into Alaska.

  Joy should probably rein him in, move the discussion on to other topics. But he’s enjoying the reminiscing and no one else seems to mind and - she’s completely out of her depth. There is nothing real she can offer these people; listening might be the best she can do.

  “-and the salmon. You should’a seen them salmon.” He winds up his travelogue by holding his hands about four and a half feet apart.

  “It sounds like you have lots of good memories from that time in your life,” says Joy. “Who else would like to share some good memories?”

  Chardonnay holds up her hand. “I suffer from false memories oftentimes,” she says, “as a result of when I was drinking I thought I was the life of the party and had friends and good times, but looking back I know that wasn’t me at all but what the alcohol I drank made me into. They weren’t my real friends and when the chips were down and I needed to lean on people for support that’s when I looked up and there was no one there.”

  “And do you have good friends to support you now?” asks Joy.

  Chardonnay nods, gestures around the room. “You cannot pick your family, I learned that, but you can make a family around you from friends and that’s what I’ve done here with these good folks.”

  “I am not your family,” Jesus mutters. “And I hate salmon.”

  “What about moose?” Andrew asks. “I ate some good moose up there. Nothing like moose grilled over a campfire. And the sky, them things that light up the sky, whatcha call ‘em.”

  “Stars?” offers a plump girl who must be eighteen but looks about twelve. Very soft voice, but helpful, no hint of sarcasm.

  “Nah, more like lasers,” says Andrew. “You’d love ‘em, Char. All pretty colours, like being drunk but no booze, no hangover.” He details an experience of watching the multi-coloured sky above a pine forest, the colours shifting and turning to silent music.

  “The Northern Lights,” says Joy. “You’ve described them beautifully.”

  “Wataway. Aurora Borealis,” says Jesus.

  “That’s it,” says Joy. “I’d forgotten the proper term. And I’ve never known what causes them.”

  “Our ancestor spirits dancing, forming a path to the next world for our souls.” This from Jesus.

  Joy blinks. Thinks of her baby dancing through the sky.

  “You could look it up on the internet,” says Chardonnay. “There is no disgrace in admitting you do not know something. You have the power to choose what you change about your life situation and acquiring knowledge is a source of power.”

  Joy pulls her cell phone from her coat pocket before she remembers there’s no Wi-Fi here. “I’ll make a note to do just that,” she says, shoving her phone away and writing on the blank sheet of paper on her clipboard.

  One of the other women watches her write. “Is that all you do? Look stuff up?” A pause. “You’re not even a psychologist, are you?”

  “No. No I’m not,” said Joy. She’s struggles to think of the woman’s name, can’t. “My job title is Peer Support Facilitator.” The words sound even more ridiculous out loud than they looked on the contract.

  “And what’re you doing here?” the woman demands. Her voice is hard and her face suggests years of heavy drug abuse. “What training do you have to help us?”

  Joy was expecting this question, had an answer ready which she’d practiced in the car as she drove in this morning but it would sound as phoney as her job title. “I need the cash,” she says. “This pays. Better than part-time shifts at Tim Horton’s and Canadian Tire, which is what I was doing over Christmas.”

  “Your coat is Mark’s Work Wearhouse,” says the teenage girl. “Did you get it free?”

  “Not free, but I had a staff discount,” Joy admits. “Twenty percent. On top of the markdown price because it’s last season’s colour.”

  “I think it’s a pretty colour,” says the girl.

  “So you’re not here for our sake. You have no experience.” The hard woman again.

  Joy chooses truth. “I was sick,” she says. “And I got better. I guess they think that gives me something called lived experience.” She notices she’s put her hand on her stomach and pulls it back.

  Andrew has finished coughing. He leans forward. “I was a rigger in Alberta, back in the boom days,” he says. “Never held a tool in my hand before my first day on the job. Learnt more in one morning than days of book-reading in the classroom. Sometimes you just gotta do stuff to get the hang of it.”

  Joy smiles at the older man, grateful for his support. It’s enough to give her a way in, and she finds herself leading a conversation about means of learning, how to think about making healthy choices. Everyone contributes at least one sentence. Useful? She couldn’t say. But the following week Chardonnay will have a new set of slogans to parrot back, try to live by.

  She catches herself staring at the teenager, and looks away. Overweight? Or starting to show? When she’d been pregnant - thought she’d been pregnant, she reminds herself in a tired tape-recording of a voice she doesn’t believe, even now - whenever she’d seen another mother-to-be she always smiled, patting her own belly at the same time. She thought they’d been sharing congratulations, pride. Had she looked unhinged, even then?

  The hour is over, which means standing, walking back the length of the hall through both sets of security doors - click. click. - to the common room where lunch will be served.

  “I appreciate your honesty, Joy,” says the hard woman, walking beside her. “Being here for a pay cheque an’ all. That’s rent, that’s groceries.”

  She doesn’t smile but Joy hears a hint of grace in the woman’s voice. “Thank you,” she says.

  “You do know about Andrew, eh?” the woman continues. />
  Leslie. Her name is Leslie, Joy remembers. “Know about him?”

  “All that bullshit about northern B. C., Alaska, working the rigs in Edmonton. He’s never been outside Sudbury city limits.” Leslie snorts, walks ahead.

  Caught off guard, Joy loses her balance, reaches to the wall to steady herself. Real or imagined, truth or fiction, does it matter?

  Staff members are encouraged to eat with the patients, so she’ll sit wherever there’s a space for the mac and cheese, bread and margarine, lettuce with cucumber and tinned pears, served in a yellow plastic tray, some of the pear juice slopped over the edge of the compartment making the bread soggy.

  This afternoon… she doesn’t even know what she’s leading, facilitating, this afternoon. Whatever it’s called, she’ll make it art therapy again. Black construction paper and pastels - they’ll draw the Northern Lights and talk about things that shift, can’t be pinned down and she’ll ask Jesus to tell them more about the dancing spirits. It comes to her then, some memory of a high school science class, particles and atoms in the upper atmosphere, their colours a reflection of the sun. Maybe. She prefers the image of dancing.

  When she gets home Dan will ask her about her day, and he’ll listen to any details she chooses to share. She knows now she won’t say much because these aren’t her stories to tell.

  She thinks of B. C. and Alaska and all the other places she’s never been. The canals of Venice, the zig-zag hills of San Francisco, Walt Disney World, Legoland. Why shouldn’t Andrew embellish if he wants to? She edits her life story every time - too often - she has to sit in a circle like that, paring back all but the most necessary details.

  When the workday ends, in the late afternoon of darkness and cooling temperatures, and you go outside for your precious fourth smoke break of the day - too early, you’ll be anxious after dinner when you’re stuck inside - she passes you again. You hear her hacking at the ice which has blurred and rippled over the windshield, using one of those crap dollar store scrapers. Finally she starts the engine and lets it run, melting a patch on the window just big enough to peer through.