by Terri Favro
“You’re up,” she says, and gives me a hug. “I’m sorry for going on the way I did. Jasmine reminded me that we all cope with trauma in our own ways. Mom and Dad banishing you is unforgiveable — I get that. Given everything that’s happened to you, it’s no wonder you fell into your own little fantasy world. Forgive me.”
In her world, I’m the fantasist; she’s the steely realist. Yet, her eyes keep sliding away from me. I see something unfamiliar in her face. Guilt.
I stare at her. “Linda. Look at me. Do you remember Duff?”
She ignores me. Looks down at her coffee cup. Then, “Yes,” she mumbles.
“What about Billy? And the baby they took away from you?”
I watch her spoon brown sugar into her coffee. Since when did she sweeten anything?
“Why do I think I’m so pissed?” she asks the tablecloth. “Look at what you took away from me.”
My hands turn into fists on either side of my placemat. I struggle to remind myself that my sister is a typical Normal of Earth Standard Time. Smug. Blind. Closed-minded. Her comfortable existence depends on denying truths that unsettle her.
“Because of me, you have your musical career. Your house. Crazy Lady Island,” I remind her. “You’re better off in this timeline, no matter who you lost. Look at what I lost.”
Her hand is shaking. The spoon clatters against the rim of her cup.
“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you,” she says to the tablecloth. “I wish you’d stop making me remember things that couldn’t possibly have happened.”
“Like what?” I ask quietly.
Still not looking up at me, she answers: “Growing up in that other . . . place. Billy. The baby. Duff. The Z-Lands.”
I open my mouth to say something like, You may not like thinking about that other world, but at least you are fully part of this one. Unlike me, you have a home and you have a past, even if you remember it unfolding in two different ways.
But there is no point in badgering Linda. Like so many people, she simply chooses to forget memories that do not make sense. And why should she? Earth Standard Time is full of curators of the past: teachers, filmmakers, TV producers, novelists, content providers, speechmakers and Tweeters. Even if Linda hadn’t existed in an alternate timeline, others would be constantly snipping and spinning the tattered threads of her memories into the fabric of accepted history. It’s amazing anyone trusts their own memories about anything, really.
“At least you’ve still got Dad,” I remind her.
“I lost Dad a long time ago. I’m as lonely as you are,” she answers.
Sensing that she’ll say nothing further on the matter, I finish my coffee and leave the kitchen.
* * *
One Saturday, Dad and I sit down together at Linda’s kitchen table with pencils and sketchpads. I show him how to draw horses, the Walter Foster way. He’s not bad.
I tell Linda that I’ll find an art therapist to work with him, one on one, after I go. “I’ll pay,” I volunteer.
She nods, washing the dishes. “That’s quite nice of you,” she says very, very stiffly. Which is when I realize that Linda is angry with me.
“I’m sorry, what did I do this time?”
She slams down a pot in the draining rack. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s the problem. You have nothing to do with Dad ninety-nine percent of the time and then show up and be Miss Congeniality.” I’m caught in the headlights of her ten-thousand-foot stare, so much like my mother’s disapproving look that I feel as if I’ve time hopped back to our kitchen in Shipman’s Corners.
I have no idea what to do now, so I say, “Do you want me to leave?”
She goes back to washing dishes. Again, just like Mom — faced with conflict, she cleans something.
“No. That would upset Dad.”
There’s really nothing I can say to that. Linda’s feelings about me don’t factor in. Nor do my feelings about her. There is only one priority in her life: Dad.
* * *
One good thing is that while I’m sitting at the drawing table in my bedroom, the origin story practically writes itself. For the first time, it feels safe to own up to where the Girl With No Past actually came from; it’s just a version of my past, after all. Not that anyone would believe it.
Just before my birthday, I call my editor at Grey Wizard Comics back in Toronto. The relief in her voice travels down the line, all the way to the Gulf Islands.
“Scan and email me the pages,” she says. “I’ll book you for the next ComicFanFest.”
I almost say that I’m not coming back. That I’m hanging up my inks and retiring to Crazy Lady Island. At the same time, I realize that would be like a living death. So I decide to do nothing at all except sleep in most mornings, draw with Dad and do yoga.
The second very good thing is that I kick lorazepam. Not by myself, mind you. Linda finds me a therapist specializing in prescription drug addiction. Retired, of course. Someone who used to work on the mainland and decided to do something artistic, like everyone else who lives here. Her name is Cynthia: a tiny, wrinkled, Yoda-like woman. Although she has the face of a boomer who has spent too much time in the sun, there’s something childlike about her. Something unfinished. When I mention this to Linda, she explains that Cynthia suffers from Turner syndrome. “She’s had medical issues all her life, poor thing. She’s wonderful with Dad.”
She comes to Linda’s house every day, helping me get clean after over thirty years on this drug — my replacement for the Valium I was hooked on in the late ’70s. With Cynthia’s professional help, meditation exercises with Jasmine, large doses of health food–store melatonin and many sleepless, sweaty nights, I’m finally ready to face life as it really is, unfiltered by emotional cheesecloth.
* * *
November. Just when I’m starting to think it’s time to return to my own version of real life in Toronto, a surprise visitor arrives on Crazy Lady Island. Linda waves him into my bedroom, as if he wanders into her house every day at six a.m. I open my eyes at the sound of the doorknob turning, and there he is. Bum Bum.
“Hey, Sunshine,” he says, and sits down beside me on the bed.
I smile at him from my pillow. “What are you doing here, Bum?”
He pushes my bangs out of my eyes. “Why can’t you call me BB, like everybody else?”
“Because I know you better than everybody else.” I reach up and touch his face. “Your scruff is going grey. How is that possible?”
He grins at me. That beautiful, kind face. “I’ve decided to start aging gracefully.”
We sit for a few minutes, quietly, holding hands in the morning light. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved most about Bum Bum. He isn’t afraid of silences, to just be with me, enjoying one another’s company. I sometimes think of all the people I’ve loved in my life, I’ve loved him best of all.
“I’ve brought someone who wants to see you. The Maytag man.”
I sit up. “Darren? Why?”
He laughs as he shakes his head. “The Miele went on the fritz. I called the number on the sticker on the door and Romeo showed up. While he was fixing the machine, he told me quite the tale of woe, you running out on him without explanation in the wilds of Northern Ontario. I gave him a drink, then dinner. Seems like a nice guy. Bit of a philosopher. Not an asshole. Sense of humour. Well educated. Comic book fan. A little young, perhaps, but perfect for you, actually.”
“Kendal was perfect for me, too. Look what happened.”
Bum Bum snorts. “Do you really want to be First Lady of Canada? Not much chance to do that and be a comic book creator with street cred.”
I shake my head. “Okay, I get your point. But Darren and I shouldn’t meet again, Bum. Some complicated genetic connections there that I really don’t want to have to explain to him.”
“Why don’t yo
u explain them to me?” he suggests.
“He’s Linda’s lost baby boy from Atomic Mean Time. Which means he’s my nephew. There are some pretty strict taboos about that kind of thing.”
Bum Bum crosses his legs. “My spidey sense tells me that you may actually be slightly off-base here. As you yourself have told me umpteen times, just because something happened in one timeline, doesn’t mean it happened in the other.”
I stare at him, sensing something. Déjà vu. I don’t get it as often as I used to. And I’ve learned to listen to Bum Bum’s hunches. He’s an exceptional Exceptional, after all, one who can actually own money and property. He’s like the king of the Exceptionals.
“Okay,” I tell Bum Bum. “You get to play matchmaker, just this once.”
Darren and I meet on neutral territory, a local bar-restaurant called Grizzly’s. After a polite kiss, we sit looking out the window, watching the seaplanes come in. The atmosphere between us is a little tense.
Finally, I jump in: he is the wronged party, after all. I apologize for the Lake Superior vanishing act. I explain my concerns about his rare genetic blood anomaly and mine, the lost nephew, his date of birth, even his appearance and technical skills.
Darren sits back in his chair and shakes his head. “Coincidence.”
I sip my vodka martini, dirty and wet, just the way I like it. What a relief to taste alcohol again.
“There are no coincidences. You and I are closely related. Simple as that.”
There’s a moment of silence between us as this sinks in.
Darren takes a gulp of wine and frowns. “Anyway, who says I want to get back together with you? I just thought you owed me an explanation. Thank you for that, at least.”
I feel sudden embarrassment and disappointment. And here I thought he came to Crazy Lady Island to get me back. How stupid can you get?
“How’s your origin story going?” says Darren, mercifully changing topics.
“Finished, finally. Turned out to be a revenge tragedy, just like you said. Jealousy, betrayal, conflicted emotions, all that. Just like life here on Crazy Lady Island.”
“Congratulations,” he says, topping up his glass. “Mine’s finished, too.”
From his jacket pocket, he takes a folded printout and hands it to me. It’s an email from Adoption Services Ontario. As I read it, he tells me what it says.
“My biological mom died five years ago. Her background: Greek-Canadian. Dad: still unknown. I was born in Sarnia, Ontario. The genetic anomaly is something called malignant hyperthermia — and I don’t have it. What’s the one you’ve got?”
“Pseudocholinesterase deficiency,” I murmur, examining the report. Doesn’t appear to be a forgery. I look hard at Darren and realize: he doesn’t look like anyone in my family. That Nordic face. That blond, blond hair. His dark, dark eye colour is really the only thing that suggests an Italian, and how many people have that? A lot of Greeks, apparently.
He smiles and picks up my hand. “Look. You and I both know we have a connection. Let’s give this another try. Take a trip to Vancouver. Check into a bed and breakfast or rent an RV and head south. See where the road takes us.”
I lean across the table for a kiss. “Forget B and Bs and RVs. I prefer hotels.”
As our lips meet, I think maybe, just maybe, Linda’s right and I imagined our lives in Atomic Mean Time. Maybe it was the lorazepam, and before that, Valium. The trauma of New York. Electroshock. My own restlessness and frustrated desire for adventure. An overactive imagination. Time to breathe the clean, fresh air of truth. Linda’s truth. Everyone else’s truth. I can forgive myself and move on with my life. And not be a crazy lady anymore.
As I turn over these thoughts, sheepish but also relieved to finally find myself living in the same reality as everyone else, a small, blonde head appears in the window. My therapist Cynthia is coming into the Grizzly with a determined look on her face. Almost bossy. A look I’ve seen before.
When she spots our table, she rushes over. “There you are, dear. I need you. Or rather your friend here.” She turns to Darren and extends a hand. “Cynthia McClintock. I understand from Linda that you’re a repair whiz?”
“Did your washing machine break down, Cynthia? Dishwasher?” I ask.
She laughs and shakes her head sadly. “Oh, no, no, sweetheart. Something much more challenging than that.”
I’ve never been to Cynthia’s house before. It’s a tiny bungalow with a spectacular view and a slumbering garden out front that I’ll bet is a showpiece in the summertime.
“Anne-Marie didn’t tell me ’til this morning,” she says, as if I already know who Anne-Marie is or what she might have revealed.
“I’m sorry, Cynthia, but who is Anne-Marie?”
Cynthia laughs. “Oh, what am I thinking? She’s my partner. And she’s an artist like you, dear. Whenever I was working with you at your sister’s house, Anne-Marie’s students were always here with her.”
She leads us into a solarium, full of plants, where Anne-Marie is painting. She has a head of grey hair, wound into a stylish updo. She’s lying with her head on a pillow, a paintbrush between her lips as she dabs at a seascape on a small canvas bolted above her face.
Cynthia removes the brush from Anne-Marie’s mouth to make introductions. I try to act as if there is nothing odd about meeting a mouth painter in an iron lung more than fifty years after the last polio epidemic. As we chat about the weather, and the sea, and Anne-Marie’s latest work, I find myself wondering how two people could have any type of life together when one of them is encased in a steel box.
Finally, we get to the point of the visit. “The respirator is breaking down again. I can feel it,” says Anne-Marie. “Sorry to be such a bother.”
Cynthia puts a hand on the metal body of her partner. “No trouble at all, dear.” She looks at Darren. “They keep wanting her to switch to a tracheotomy tube, but what’s the point? They can cause their own complications. Infections and such. We’ve had other repair persons tune up Lisette but it’s become almost impossible to get parts for her.”
“Lisette is the respirator,” clarifies Anne-Marie. “Our pet name for it. Nicer than iron lung.”
“I give names to machines all the time,” laughs Darren. “I’ll need to do a little research about parts availability. Do you have Wi-Fi?”
I watch this scene unfold before me with a combination of detachment and astonishment. How could I not have recognized Cynthia before? The blonde Doris Day pageboy. The odd body shape. Most of all, the bossy attitude. I don’t bear her any ill will for the stolen Wonder Woman comics, but as Duff always said, there are no coincidences.
While Darren googles “replacement parts for iron lung” on his smartphone, I tell her, “I just realized that you and I were in the hospital together when we were kids. You were called Cindy in those days. We played fallout shelter under the cribs and one of the nursing sisters let you keep my comic books when I went home. Remember?”
Cynthia laughs and shakes her head. “I’m afraid that’s a false memory, dear. I did meet a little girl named Debbie in the hospital who loved comic books, but it was a very popular name in those days. That Debbie died having her tonsils out, poor thing. Something to do with the anaesthesia. You must be thinking of another Cindy — there were millions of us, too.”
I stare at her, not sure what to say. She turns her attention back to Anne-Marie.
Linda is wrong after all: I’m no crazy lady. I’m the Girl With No Past, alive and dead at the same time.
I go out to the deck. Watching the waves, I feel myself sinking into an unfamiliar feeling. Contentment. Perhaps even happiness. I could stop checking in to hotels and live in an actual house, with high-end appliances that Darren would keep in working order despite the manufacturers’ warranties and a guest room for Linda. Maybe she could bring Dad for visits.
I could grow old with Darren. Retire to a farm or a little island like this one. And when we are very old, and one of us gets sick, we could move to a retirement home with a view of the sea and sit quietly together, holding hands, waiting for the sunset.
As I spin out this narrative in my head, I hear the distant sound of a motorcycle downshifting gears. I turn and sure enough, there it is, tearing along the road at the end of Cynthia’s property.
A white blur. White as cocaine. White as an angel.
I think about running into the house or jumping into the sea, but what’s the point? You can’t escape your destiny. No matter where I go, he’ll find me. I wonder what it will be this time? Climate change, no doubt.
I didn’t recognize you at Superior, he’ll say. When I told my buddies about you, they said, you idiot, she must have been your Tagger. That’s why she almost fainted when she saw you. Go find her.
I wish you hadn’t bothered, I’ll say. I’ve met someone. I’m not going anywhere.
Ten years from now, this island will be under water, he’ll tell me gravely.
I guess all the crazy ladies will have to move to the mainland, I’ll shoot back.
It’s no joke, Debbie. We’re facing an environmental disaster on a global scale. So you’ve found some guy to hold hands with in the retirement home while the two of you starve to death due to massive crop failure. Big deal. We’ve located a clean, safe time spectrum, just one short hop over from this one. Earth Savings Time. Now it’s all up to you.
You’re a hallucination, I’ll tell him.
He’ll look hurt. Or amused, perhaps. Why do you say that?
Because you died. You melted away of timesickness.
He’ll shrug. What’s dead anymore? If you want the details, they uploaded my consciousness into a neural network, then a biomechanical body. MIT’s been doing that on the quiet for a while now.
You’re a cyborg?
He’ll shrug. Grin. Call it what you will. I could arrange the same for you. Gets around the whole timesickness-and-death thing. Let’s discuss it after the hop. Shake a leg, we’ve got a planet to save.