All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  Steffin, Splash, Georgia, and I sat in my living room listening to Roberta Flack, sipping wine and holding on to each other. It was the last time we would be together.

  “Splash, you gotta change your name to something else,” I said. “Splash sounds like the name of a dolphin or something.”

  We all laughed, including Splash. Fish face. Crabby cakes. Sharky. Flipper.

  “Call yourself Flipper,” Georgia snorted.

  I was going to miss this group. Georgia and I cried and held on to each other.

  “We’ll always be sisters,” she said.

  “Yeah, we’ll always all be sisters,” Steffin joined in.

  Splash was almost a “sister,” and people called Steffin a girl because he was gay. We all just accepted the insults from horrible people. We thought they were small-minded idiots. We were arrogant teens, luckily, or else the pain of our lives would have taken each one of us down.

  We stayed on the couch and held each other like a family of animals, limbs over limbs, bodies entwined. I kissed Georgia on the lips and she kissed me back, gently, my favourite part of goodbye.

  “I’m going to have to visit you,” Steffin said the next morning as I carried my luggage to the car and hoisted it into the trunk.

  It was hot out. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand after closing the trunk and stared at Steffin. “I can’t imagine not being able to cruise the streets with you,” I said, smirking.

  My mother was still in the washroom, so we sat on the curb for a minute.

  “I got you something,” he said and pulled out a picture of himself. “Oh, and this …” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a few pills wrapped in foil.

  “Not sure how I’ll cope without waiting for you outside seedy bars, Steffin.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out, though not sure how you’ll get along without me,” he said.

  “I’m not so sure either, Steff. Please visit soon. I mean, a couple of cocks and you should have enough money for a bus ticket, right?” We laughed and hugged.

  My mother came out of the door in her floral-patterned dress, with full makeup on, carrying her purse and a flash camera, which dangled from her wrist like a bracelet.

  “We have to go. I didn’t know you would be here, Steffin,” Mother said with disdain as she made her way around us to the driver’s door. Steffin and I both noticed that her dress was tucked inside her pantyhose at the back, exposing a large portion of her backside.

  “Hey, Helen, honey, I can see your moon,” Steffin said.

  “Don’t honey me, Steffin, it’s rude,” she said. She had never liked him, but couldn’t rip us apart no matter how hard she tried. “Come on, Joanne, get in the car, please. We have to go. Say goodbye, and lord, isn’t one goodbye enough? How many days in a row do you need to say goodbye?” she said in a mini-rant as she pulled her dress out of her pantyhose.

  I hugged Steffin.

  I would see him soon enough. I would travel on the overnight train from Toronto to Montreal on weekends to continue rehearsals for our play. We were going to be heading out across Canada on tour, and the Adelaide Court Theatre in Toronto would be the first stop after Montreal.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said, and pulled away from our embrace.

  “Yeah … get laid, will ya, Jo?” he said as he walked away from me, flipping his hair like Cher as he walked down the road.

  I sat in the car with my mother, and for the first time there was no bickering as we listened to music on the radio from Montreal to Toronto, knowing it would be our last couple of days together. The transition was strange. I kept waiting for my mother to say something like “If you need me just call,” or any number of things, but she said nothing. It was as if she were dropping me off at a rehearsal or a lesson. I was the last to be deposited, falling off like a button from a shirt — all four of her children would be gone, and she would have nothing left to hold her in. She would be free. I was almost fifteen and this was it. Lou and Sadie had been removed and she didn’t shed a tear. There were never any tears, only tiny victories for her, it seemed. We were the weight of her suffering somehow, reflections of her younger self perhaps, and for whatever reason, she wanted us gone.

  With my departure she was able to tell people how her daughter had been accepted into an arts school in Toronto, but it was only a facade. This had been a year in the making, my exit, her flight.

  There was little more to say except goodbye. Strange, I felt nothing.

  Goodbye, Mother.

  PART TWO

  Broken

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  2002 — Princess Margaret Hospital

  MOTHER SITS UP in her hospital bed talking with her social worker. The sound of the ocean comes from a CD in her beat box. I stop just outside her room, away from them. I don’t want to interrupt, and I don’t want to be part of something intimate. I can hear them talking about her journey from the West Coast. My mother is telling this woman about the people she lived with on Indigenous land in British Columbia, her home before she came here.

  I hide around the corner and think about the circuitous route Mother took to get to Toronto. It began only months ago as I looked down over the wing of the plane, sunlight bounced off the snowy pines of the Rocky Mountains in the heart of British Columbia. I was going to see my mother for the very first time in fifteen years. I wondered what it had been like for my mother to fly nearly five thousand kilometres west when she left us. I was no longer the fourteen-year-old she had left, but a thirty-one-year-old woman. She was no longer forty-seven, but sixty-two. She had adjusted to a life so far removed from the early days, from my youth.

  I imagined her home in Bella Coola by the river in Nuxalk territory. I’d only seen it in pictures: the salmon stream, old-growth forests, and grizzly bears. Three thousand people lived in that beautiful valley. There were only two ways into it. One, on a small plane that holds no more than ten people, and the other, on a long road, built by the locals back in the 1950s, where one wrong turn of the steering wheel could send you to the bottom of the valley. This killer highway in and out of the reserve was called Freedom Road.

  My mother had left Montreal after she met an Indigenous man, and after she pilfered five thousand dollars from the plastic factory she worked for as the accountant. She also stole the cash from a pyramid scheme after getting friends and family to invest. She left unpaid telephone and electric bills and just vanished. I learned about the pyramid from Martha because she had gone in on it, as did another friend of hers, a well-known news anchor at the time. I felt guilty for that and ended up giving fifteen hundred dollars from my earnings to Martha to give to the journalist.

  Mother was apparently working for the Nuxalk, collecting government grants on behalf of the band. She founded her own company, New Era, and created programs for children, teaching dance lessons from our old vinyl albums, the same records I had learned from with Miss Kristy. It was a wonder how she could do it. She hadn’t been able to walk very far when I was a kid because she would struggle for breath, but somehow, after never having danced, she was able to teach. She knew all the steps, the shuffles and flaps and time steps. She had instructions and old lesson books with diagrams. She had memories of all those years watching us. Her desire to dance had never faded; she just found a way to plant little tapping dreams into other children.

  Remarkable, really.

  She had created a whole new persona in BC, a woman I didn’t know who seemed to be held in high esteem for her efforts on the reserve. She lived tax free and lied about her Indigenous status, claiming to be half Mohawk. Maybe she did have some Mohawk in her, but it was news to me. She lost the man but continued to live on the reserve, taking twenty percent of the government grant funds as income, with the rest going to the band, chief, and town.

  While I knew the community she lived in and the people she served in Bella Coola appreciated her, they did not know the woman who had escaped Montreal with other peop
le’s money, the woman who got rid of her children, one by one, and created programs for a village of kids while her own still struggled to survive.

  I was flying in to see her, in spite of everything, because she had stage four cancer. She had waited five years before seeking treatment for her symptoms, hemorrhaging, losing large quantities of blood. She was afraid to go to doctors, maybe depressed or on her own suicide mission.

  I checked in to my hotel, aware that I would be seeing Lou and Diego, who had also flown out. Not Sadie. She didn’t want to see our mother, and no one blamed her. Mother was having an operation at Vancouver General Hospital and had been airlifted out of the valley of Bella Coola. I wouldn’t see her home on the reserve, and she would never see mine. I didn’t want her to see how I lived, in an apartment cluttered with belongings I had dragged along from my adolescent years — a trunk, a vintage wine-stained table. Books were scattered about, papers everywhere — notes to self, quotes that motivated, art from friends. It was personal, my nest.

  After a long embrace and rounds of hellos with Lou and me, my brother stayed downstairs on the main floor of the hospital to find his lost wallet. Upstairs, Lou and I linked arms outside our mother’s hospital room door. We stared at each other. My stomach was sore with that familiar feeling of dread. Our mother would be in a bed, vulnerable. I had no idea what to expect, only that I didn’t want to lose myself.

  Lou squeezed my arm. “Let’s do it.”

  We paused to stare at the door once more before pushing it open.

  Mother cried and stretched out her arms for us. I didn’t know how to ignore her physical request for affection, and it was too late to run. We hugged her briefly, then stood on either side of her bed.

  “Look at you both. Lou, your hair is the same, red and curly as ever.”

  “Yours too,” Lou said.

  Mother looked the same: her hair was shoulder length and chestnut brown, and her large frame was wrapped in blankets. I breathed in that distinctive and familiar body odour, the decaying smell of unbathed adult skin.

  “Look at you, Joanne. You’re so pretty and thin.”

  Of course she mentioned my weight. Mother was frail but not fragile; she still weighed hundreds of pounds. Being thin was not a conversation I wanted to have with her. There was silence in the room. No one knew what to say, but I was seething. It had taken thirty seconds for her to focus on my weight. It had been so long since we had seen each other, and yet maybe she didn’t know how else to bridge the divide.

  I took a deep breath, closed and opened my eyes as calmly as I could while I screamed Get off me! in my head. I exhaled, looked at her without expression, and reminded myself, I am grown; she has cancer. I would give her nothing but these moments of my time. My body weight would not be a topic of discussion. In fact, I was off-limits entirely.

  We shifted in place. Lou took a seat as far from our mother as possible. I stayed standing, trying to come up with a reason to bolt. But this was what it was — awkward moments, talk of hair, weight, illness, until she was wheeled away for a dangerous operation.

  Five hours later the doctors came to talk to us in the waiting room. They had removed the tumour successfully, but the cancer was advanced. It had metastasized, spread to other organs. The most they could do was treat the symptoms with radiation or chemo-therapy. Give her a year, two at most, to live. She was dying. After a fifteen-year separation. Fifteen years was a long time.

  Fifteen years is a long time.

  There’s a common belief that the cells in our body regenerate twice in fifteen years. In those fifteen years, 185 full moons had risen and the twentieth century had turned into the twenty-first. In those fifteen years my mother had left behind a series of disasters in Montreal, left behind her family, embedded herself in a new community, created a new life. She had escaped the law. But in the end, she hadn’t escaped her children.

  I stood right in front of her, with a history visible on my flesh and body, in the spaces where time got stuck, halted, and in the scars and lines that developed over time.

  Mother packed up her life in Bella Coola with the help of friends and Diego. She left her surrogate daughters and sons on the reserve, her students and programs, so she could live close to Diego and me in Toronto, where she would live out the remainder of her days.

  I hear my name, which calls me back to the present. She is talking to the social worker about me. I try not to hear what is being spoken, but I know it’s about those early days, of tap shoes and lessons, when Mother ingested it all for her future role as teacher. I back up even farther, trying not to be seen, but it’s too late. They see movement and call my name. I step inside the door frame as if I’ve just arrived.

  “I can come back if you’re busy or need more time,” I say.

  “No, we’re done. I’ll leave you two to visit,” the social worker says. “You can call me anytime. I’m right down the hall,” she says to my mother.

  Mother, wiping tears from her eyes, thanks the social worker as she leaves. I don’t ask if she is okay. I fidget with my bag and wind my earphones, putting them away.

  “I told her a little about the dancing days and how much I loved it, how good you were.”

  I try to steer the conversation away from me, “You taught dance, right, to the children in Bella Coola? How did you teach them?” We both know I am asking how it was possible since she never danced and could barely move. She couldn’t even walk a block back in the day.

  “Mostly I just played those old albums and taught them how to flap and shuffle and even time step. I suppose I danced,” Mother says, “but not much.”

  I have a hard time imagining her teaching dance to a cluster of kids, but she did it. It was a little absurd, but nothing with my mother is unthinkable. She is quite brilliant, really, savvy. She even, it turns out, ran her own restaurant on the reserve in BC, called Homesteaders, serving lasagna and french fries in a place where people fished for wild salmon and picked mushrooms from the land.

  “I did dance, and those records had fantastic instructions.” She smiles.

  I have to give it to her. She is smart, courageous even, and somehow found the confidence to teach dance to children, though she weighs at least four hundred pounds by now.

  “Well, that’s something, especially given that your mother wouldn’t let you dance,” I say as we look warily at each other.

  “You were a good dancer,” she says.

  I think of the days when she carted me everywhere for shows and lessons, or when she needed me, when she would not let me go and I couldn’t get away. I am not ready to speak about this, not yet. Instead I ask about my father once more.

  “How old were you when you met Domenic?” I ask.

  “My father knew your dad, you know, from a construction site. It’s how I met your father. He was so handsome then. He looked like he could have been a model in a magazine, with his black hair and those green eyes.” Mom sits up in her hospital bed. “I was seventeen and I got pregnant. Your grandfather wanted me to get married.”

  “What happened when Sadie was a baby?”

  My mother’s face drops as she fiddles with her blanket and slowly exhales.

  “I didn’t want to marry anyone and I didn’t want to have a baby,” she whispers. I wait through the silence, allow it, hope it will carry us to a common space where we can hear each other. I sit close to her and wrap my arms around my waist for comfort.

  “What happened after Sadie was born?”

  My mother picks up one of her teddy bears and holds it on her belly as she continues to speak calmly. “I told everyone that Sadie died at birth.… But I couldn’t stand it and wanted her back, so I picked her up from the foster home. There were six babies in that home. So cute.” She speaks in a slow measured tone.

  “How long was Sadie there?”

  “Six months.”

  “People thought she was dead for six months?” I ask.

  “Yeah, and then I had to explain to my cousins
and parents what happened, why I suddenly had a baby.”

  “Is that why your father wanted you to marry Dad?”

  My mother coughs and reaches for her water glass. I grab the cup and hold it close to her mouth while she drinks from the straw. She clears her throat and continues.

  “Your father and I lived with my parents for three years after we got Sadie back.” She looks at me, her eyes glossy, filled with such sadness.

  “I didn’t know you told people Sadie died.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I should have left her in the foster home. Maybe I should have left.”

  I don’t tell her that she did leave, though not before shoving us out the door like a once-loved Christmas tree stripped bare of all the bells and baubles, tinsel and lights, and left on the curb.

  “We were just kids,” I say under my breath, more to myself than to her.

  “You were so cute. You were a good girl …”

  She looks too closely at me. I want to run now, but I stay. There is a pause. We look at each other, and somehow it’s as if she knows what I am about to say.

  “I need to know, Mom. Why?” I call her Mom, but I don’t mean to. It slips out. “Why did you do what you did to me?”

  She knows exactly what I mean even though I don’t know how to get the words out. But she doesn’t skip a beat. Her face hardens with defensiveness, and that wagging finger flies up into the air, pointing right at me. And before she speaks, I also know what she is going to say, so I close my heart very quickly to avoid the toxic, dismissive response.

  “I never touched you.”

  I shut down, look away. I know she is not inside herself. I can’t reach her. I want to; it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, understand, make sense of my life, but she will not meet my needs. She will not come clean, ever. I ask a new question.

  “Why did you let him beat us?” I look right at her again. This time I am prepared for her slippery reply.

  “I didn’t let him. He was … I should have stopped him. You’re right.”

  Not good enough. Sadist, she set it up most of the time. She must think I can’t remember my own history, as she tries to rewrite it and wipe the slate.