by Katia Rose
Matt nods. “Although they weren’t really what you’d call ‘parents’ to him. When he was a kid—”
He cuts himself off, and I can see his head spinning as fast as mine. I watch his jaw drop open as he tips forward, bracing himself on Ace’s bed.
“Wait.” He swallows. “Wait a minute. ‘She’s the girl. It was her mom. I didn’t know.’”
We blink at each other. When I speak, it’s with a tremor.
“Last night, he sent me a text. It said: ‘I didn’t know it was you. I swear I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry.’ The day before, I took him to meet my mom. My mother is a paraplegic.” I stop to swallow. “When I was ten, she fell down a flight of stairs while she was working as a cleaner for the Thompsons. I was there. There was a boy watching in the—the window.”
The lump that’s been sitting in the back of my throat morphs into a sob as I choke on the last word.
“God, Stéphanie...”
I’m already backing away from the bed.
“He didn’t do anything. He just watched.”
I thump against the wall on the other side of the room.
“He didn’t do anything!” I wail. “None of them did! NONE OF THEM!”
I run. I turn on my heels and run, but I don’t make it out of the room before I hear Ace start to mumble something from the bed. My vision blurs with tears and Kay is shouting my name, but I don’t stop. I don’t even turn my head. I slam the elevator button over and over until it opens, and when I get to the ground floor, I start running again.
My Keds hit the pavement outside, and it’s a long, long time before I stop.
21 Got To Lose || Hollerado
STÉPHANIE
“Of course if it’s not working for your schedule anymore I understand, but... Stéphanie, are you sure there’s not something else going on here?”
Guita and I are sitting at the kitchen table in the AMM house. I’ve just told her that I can’t keep giving lessons to Ace anymore, and I’ve also resigned from teaching my Sunday class. It’s not fair to be pretending to guide people when I can’t even guide myself. I haven’t been able to sit still for more than thirty seconds since I visited Ace at the hospital, and that was almost a week ago now. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to find ‘inner peace’ again. If I’m being honest, I don’t know if I ever found it in the first place.
“I’m sure,” I tell Guita, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
My face probably gives me away, though. My eyes have been puffy and red for days. I didn’t know that I could cry so much for so long. I feel so weak every time I let the tears spill onto my cheeks, but the emotions boiling inside me are too strong to keep bottled up. My choices are either tears or screaming, and at least I can cry quietly.
“You know you can talk to me, right, ma belle?” Guita reaches across the table and places her hand on top of mine. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
The concern on her face threatens to make me start sobbing for the third time today. I have to look away before I can answer.
“I’m just busy with the studio, and I’ll have to start taking more shifts at the grocery store now that the summer dance classes are over.”
She pats my hand a few times. “If you’re sure, then of course. It will be getting cold outside soon, anyway. We’ll have to stop the park sessions in a few weeks, and I think Luc can fill in until then. About your private class...”
I tense up and Guita pauses. I’m sure she noticed my reaction.
“Ace Turner sent an email just yesterday saying he can’t make it to his sessions anymore, so that’s that problem solved. I thought he might have told you?”
I got a text and a missed call from Ace a few hours after I left the hospital. All the text said was for me to call him so he could explain.
What the fuck is there to explain? You watched my mother fall down a staircase and then you went back to playing in your rich boy bedroom.
I didn’t text him that, though. I didn’t say anything. There are no words for a situation like this. There’s only pain, and pain doesn’t speak any language besides the tears and screams I refuse to let him witness. If he’s cancelled his classes here, the futility of trying to fix this must have sunk in for him too.
“That’s that problem solved,” I repeat.
Guita takes her hand away and stands up beside the table.
“Will you meditate with me?” she asks.
I start to scramble for excuses. “I should get going. I have to...be...”
“Please, Stéphanie, if you’re able to stay, I would appreciate some company.”
I can’t say no to her, especially after I’ve just dropped out of teaching a class. It’s the least I can do to sit in the meditation room with her for awhile, even if she’s the only one meditating.
We’re alone in the house right now. The worn out floorboards groan as we pad on our socked feet to the circle of pillows in the next room. I settle myself down on one while Guita lights a stick of incense.
“Sandalwood,” I say, after catching a whiff. “It’s my favourite.”
Guita smiles. “I know.”
She tucks her feet under herself on her pillow and smoothes out her long skirt. After giving my knee a quick pat, she closes her eyes and starts to hum. I close mine too, trying to focus on the rhythm of the sounds she’s making.
Usually the scent of sandalwood brings me an instant sense of calm. No matter where I am when I smell it, it brings me back to this room and seems to clear all my muddled thoughts away, like the drifting clouds I’m always telling my students to visualize.
Today the smell just makes me frustrated. I should be able to let go. I should be able to hum along with Guita and unleash all this tension inside me before moving on with my life.
You’re not there anymore. You’re here. You’re here.
That’s not true, though. I’ve been trying to use that mantra as a rock, sculpting it into a foundation to support my future, but it’s wrong. The words are a lie, and I watch them crumble into dust as everything I’ve built on top of them crashes to the ground.
I might be here now, but even after all this time, I’m still there. Here is there. There’s no distinction between my present and my past. There’s never been a day where everything just stopped hurting, where I could draw a line and point to a definite ‘before’ and ‘after.’ The only lines in my life are the deep gouges made by the claws of trauma and pain. They split me open that day I watched my mother fall, and the scars they left shaped me into who I am.
“Stéphanie, ma belle, tu pleure.”
I open my eyes and find Guita crouched down in front of me, watching me with a mix of concern and pity. I raise a hand to touch my cheek and find that she’s right: I’m crying.
“What’s wrong?” Guita asks, in a voice that suggests she’s not letting me avoid giving her an answer. “You can tell me. I promise you no matter what it is, you’ll feel better if you tell me. You can trust me, Stéphanie.”
She reaches out to clasp my shoulder, and it’s that simple gesture that undoes me. I was a teetering wall just waiting for an excuse to collapse. The weight of her tanned, sturdy hand and the concern that moved her to place it on me is what finally sends me toppling over.
“I think...”
My voice is clearer than I thought it would be, but I still have to swallow down a lump before I finish my sentence. “I think I was starting to love him. I really think I was.”
The whole story comes out after that. Guita moves her pillow in front of mine and sits there silently throughout the entire thing, offering me a pat on the knee or my shoulder whenever I falter and feel like I can’t go on. I start at the beginning, with the day I watched my mom fall and saw my life shatter along with her spine.
Speaking the words out loud helps me see patterns I never noticed before. So much about the way I think and feel can be traced back to that accident. I let the way one family saw my mother shape the way I thought t
he world saw me. I spent years sabotaging my own future because that was easier than accepting how much of it I lost when my mother lost her legs.
I feel something shifting inside me—a tilting axis, a reversal of my north and south poles. It leaves me dizzy and scrabbling, grasping for something to hold onto while the world as I know it lurches beneath my feet.
I’m not ready to let go of the way I’ve been living. I can’t. It’s all I’ve ever known. The boy in the window represents everything that went wrong in my life. He’s the starting point of all that pain. It’s not possible for me to see him as anything else.
“So you see now, don’t you?” I finish. My cheeks feel tight with dried tears. “Why I can’t be with him?”
Guita’s face remained gently sympathetic throughout my story, but now I see a trace of confusion cross her features. She gives a little shake of her head.
“I think you need to explain that part to me.”
“He’s the boy in the window!” I nearly shout. I don’t know who I’m trying hard to convince: her, or me. “He could have saved her. He could have done something.”
Guita just sits there, and I squirm under her gaze.
“Do you believe that?” she finally asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t what might have happened. All I know is that he could have done something, and he didn’t. That’s the kind of person he is.”
Guita’s eyebrows shoot up. “Do you believe that?”
“Well, he was that kind of person!” I sound desperate even in my own ears. “Does it matter that he’s changed? It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t give my mom legs.”
“Have you talked to him about it?” Guita asks me softly. “Have you asked him about that day?”
I shake my head. “What is there to say?”
“If you’d like my honest opinion”—Guita pauses and then continues when I nod—“there’s probably a lot more to say than you think. Stories never have only one side.”
“You’re saying I should let him apologize,” I answer flatly. “What happened isn’t something you can say sorry for.”
Of that I’m sure. The words would be so inadequate they would wound far more than they could ever heal.
“What I’m saying,” Guita urges, taking my hand in hers, “is that you’re facing this situation as if you don’t have a choice, but you know what I taught you, don’t you? The same thing that meditation has taught me: you always have a choice. You don’t have to keep being angry. You don’t have to keep feeling hate. You said you might love him. Isn’t that worth more?”
I don’t have a response to that. My brain is spinning so fast I can almost hear it turning.
“Do you know who Edgar Allan Poe is?”
I’m jolted back to reality by the sound of that name.
“Yes,” I answer.
“One of my favourite meditation teachers is a big fan of Poe. She has a whole lesson based on something he wrote in one of his stories. The quote goes, ‘The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow.’”
Guita is speaking quietly, but the air in the room still seems to reverberate with the sound of her voice, like she’s just rung a meditation bell. As I listen to her, my breathing slowly begins to deepen.
“When we’re sad, we see sadness everywhere,” she elaborates. “When we’re hurt, we think everything wants to hurt us. Our suffering makes us attach meanings to the things around us. Perspective shapes our perception. Sometimes that makes it difficult to see what’s really there.”
She shifts on her pillow, finding a more comfortable position, but I stay glued to the spot.
“You know some of this story already, but when I was still in Lebanon, my husband got into trouble. We were good people, honest people, but there are so many threats in that country. Hamees got tied up with some bad men. We gave them so much, but they always wanted more. Eventually there was nothing left to give but our lives. Going to the police wasn’t an option; we needed to leave if we wanted to survive. Hamees sent me to Canada first. I lived with his cousin while he stayed behind until he could raise the money to come himself.”
Guita has shared some stories from her life in Lebanon with me before, but she usually focuses on the good things: the market where she bought her groceries, the crowds of nieces and nephews her sisters always brought to her house, the bakery her and Hamees owned together just like they do in Montreal.
“When I first arrived in this country, I hated it,” she admits. “I hated how different it was. I hated the cold. I hated how no one understood me, and how unintelligent that made me feel. Sometimes I was so scared for Hamees I could barely breathe. I had never been so lonely in all my life. I was taking English classes at a community centre, and my teacher was the one who told me about the AMM. At first I only came here to escape the hostility outside, all the people who thought I was stupid and didn’t belong, but eventually I found this place brought me peace. I learned to take that peace with me wherever I went, and I realized the world outside wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. When Hamees finally arrived, the first thing I did was take him to see all the parts of this city I love.”
She closes her eyes for a moment and smiles.
“Prespective shapes our perception, Stéphanie,” she repeats, “but the good thing about perspective is that you can change it. Just a small step in a new direction and everything looks different. You only have to choose to take that step.”
I must look as blown away as I feel, because she smiles and pushes herself onto her feet before offering a hand to pull me up next to her.
“I think that’s enough meditation for today.”
I answer her smile with a weak one of my own. “Yeah, maybe that’s enough for today.”
We walk into the hallway. Guita follows me to the front door, waiting as I pull my shoes on.
“Merci, Guita,” I thank her once I’m ready to leave. “Merci beaucoup. For everything. It felt...very good to have someone listen, and I know I’m going to be up all night thinking about your advice.”
She laughs. “I didn’t mean to make you lose any sleep, ma belle, but I’m glad you found it helpful.”
I pull the door open, and she asks me to wait.
“Stéphanie, I am glad I could help you,” she repeats, “but I’m only here to help you as a friend, and sometimes we need more than a friend when we’re hurting. I hope you know I don’t mean to offend you, but have you ever thought about seeing someone? For therapy?”
“Therapy?” I repeat.
Do I seem crazier than I thought?
“You’ve dealt with a lot,” Guita rushes to explain, “and you said talking today really helped. Talking to someone who does this professionally might help even more. I saw a therapist for a few months after I came to Canada. It’s just something to think about.”
“I will,” I tell her, “think about it, that is.”
She clasps her hands together. “Good. Very good.”
“Thanks again, Guita.” I move out onto the doorstep. “The AMM is lucky to have you around.”
“The AMM is lucky to have you around, ma belle. Prends soins.”
“Take care,” I repeat.
She shuts the door behind me. I make my way up the street, staring down at the faded tops of my Keds as they skip over cracks in the sidewalk.
22 All My Heroes || Bleachers
ACE
“I don’t think this has ever happened before in the history of Sherbrooke Station,” Cole muses, claiming one of the faded armchairs in our basement rehearsal room.
“I know it hasn’t happened before,” Matt adds. “This is an unprecedented event.”
Now that Cole has arrived, all of Sherbrooke Station is currently assembled to take part in a band meeting that I called. I even posted it in the Facebook group.
“There’s been a lot of those lately,” I reply. “Unprecedented events.”
Matt and I lock eyes. I know he’s silently aski
ng me if anything has happened with Stéphanie. When I shake my head slightly, the corners of his mouth turn down.
“I think life has been one clusterfuck of an unprecedented event ever since we went platinum,” Cole summarizes.
JP nods. “I don’t know what unprecedented means or why the hell you guys can’t stop saying it, but clusterfuck—that I agree to.”
I slap my hands against my knees. “Okay, enough shooting the shit. Let’s get this over with. I, um, have some announcements to make.”
I keep bouncing my palms against my legs as the guys all stare, waiting for me to go on. It takes a few moments before I do. The words I have to say next feel unnatural, like a new language that makes my tongue heavy and slow.
“I found a therapist,” I eventually manage to blurt, “and I’ve been to see her twice.”
JP gets up and thumps me on the shoulder. “Way to go, man!”
“That’s great. That’s so great,” Matt agrees, while Cole nods along with him.
“I still don’t know how I feel about it, but if it makes you fuckers happy...” I groan, trying to save some face. This moment is getting way too touchy-feely for my tastes. “But the second someone asks me, ‘And how does that make you feel?’ I’m getting the fuck out of there.”
I don’t have much to compare her with, but I think I scored big time when I found Doctor Elizabeth Lacroix. I walked into her office expecting to have to lie on one of those weird couch things while a woman in a white coat sat there clicking her pen.
Instead, Elizabeth greeted me in jeans and a blazer with the sleeves rolled up just high enough to show a flash of ink on her arms. Her office felt more like a living room. We sat on identical grey couches—not the weird lying down kind—and just talked. I noticed a Radiohead poster on the wall, and we spent almost the whole first half of the session discussing music. There were whole minutes that passed when I forgot about where I was or why I was there and just let myself relax.
The second session was harder. That’s when the questions began, but it all happened so gradually, like I was the one leading the conversation. If I didn’t want to talk about something, we didn’t talk about it. If I wanted to change the subject, then we changed the subject. By the end of that second hour, I was steering us back to topics I’d wanted to pass over before.