by Casey Plett
“I got your message. Thank you. Can I come up to visit this Thursday?”
“Well! Can’t see. Why not. Yes, why don’t you come up for lunch?”
“That sounds lovely. Noon then?”
“I’ll make sandwiches. Do you like ham and cheese? I can also—”
Wendy felt herself about to cry. “Love it. Thank you, Anna, I’m sorry to cut and run, but I have to go. I’ll see you in three days. I’m looking forward to it,” she choked. “See you then.”
She put a hand on her heart, made coffee, and called Lila.
“Hey, can I borrow your car?”
“Oh, cool lady, it’s nice to talk to you too.”
“Sorry. Look. Tell you a quick story?”
Wendy filled her in on the whole thing with Henry and Anna.
“Damn, girl.”
“Yeah.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“I found out, like, a month ago, I think? A month.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Sorry.”
“What day you going? I’ll need a ride to work.”
Wendy was emotional and exhausted and still a little drunk. So she only noticed by touching her first mug of coffee that her wrist was hurting.
Like, hurting a lot.
She set the mug down and turned her hand. There was a bubble on her wrist, like an amniotic sac. The skin on her wrist had opened up around it, and there was a clear, grey film with fluid inside. Away from the heat of the mug, it didn’t hurt anymore, but it ached.
“What the fuck,” she said numbly to no one.
She looked at the rest of her hands. Two parts of her palm had cracked and there were flat round red sores on some of her fingers and dead skin. Her joints had been hurting—for a few days, now that she thought about it. With everything happening, she’d kind of subconsciously written off the pain.
The medroxy, she thought with a chill.
How long had it been? She pounced on her phone and found her text history with the dealer. Three weeks. (Jesus, only three weeks.) Still in a window where the drugs could be making new and fast changes to her body.
She frantically Googled everything she could about the synthetic hormone. She’d done it before, but she did it again. She found a warning about the possibility of cracking skin. That was all. She’d go to urgent care after work.
Hours into her shift, the red sores on her fingers had also turned into bubbles, smaller ones. They also hurt to touch. It hurt to do things with her hands. The big bubble on her wrist was growing too, the skin splitting further to make room for it.
Wendy worked uncomplaining through the pain, and mid-shift ran over to the LC. It was so big and calm when she walked in, mid-afternoon on a weekday; usually she came in after work, and it was packed. But now it was quiet. Bottles for miles. She walked past the sale rack—the province’s idea of discounts made her depressed—and past the half bottles and into the main part of the floor.
Usually she headed for her vodka or her whisky and maybe a chilled king can of something. But today, when it was so quiet, she really noticed how big the store was.
It could be strange to disturb a routine in a store where you have consistent habits. Regular customers in her own store could have no idea where certain things were. Wendy moved down the rows. There was cheap Russian vodka beside Alberta Ice. Expensive ryes a foot above her usual shelf that she had not known existed.
The Manitoba Liquor Control Commission’s raison d’être was to make money off booze and curb its consumption at the same time. They trumpeted eleven-percent ABV craft beers and ran Be Undrunk ads under the same roof. They had a Twitter account. There was this one TV ad with these soused seniors bopping around at a party—old guys without shirts, an old lady with a lampshade on her head. The idea was to shame them with the final message, Act Your Age, but Wendy and her friends all took it the other way: Those old people rule! That ad’s not working at all!
Her dad once said this province had one of the higher rates of alcoholism in the country—which, considering all the abstaining Mennos, was impressive. Or extra bleak, depending on your point of view. Was that true? It was the kind of stuff her dad would look up. But her dad said a lot of things. She did remember reading in the paper that the MLCC pulled in a profit of close to $276 million for the province last year. Only 1.2 million people lived here. And $276 mil was the profit. The profit.
Wendy knew it was childish to be bothered by any of this—she was an adult, she knew what she was doing to her body—but it was something she remembered.
Right, I’m supposed to be counting my drinks. In the bathroom at work, slugging long from a mickey of Forty Creek, she felt the pain in her hands ebb and a fuzzy glow warm her brain. One.
As Wendy bussed home, she wanted to collapse—from the lack of sleep, from being on her feet for eight hours, which was getting harder day by day—but her hands, her freakish bubbled hands. She had to go to urgent care. The hospital was a reasonable walk away. Wendy got off the bus and thought Just go. But she was so, so, so tired.
She’d nap! Duh. She climbed up the stairs, set the alarm for half an hour later, and fell into bed.
When she woke up, it was two in the morning. God damn it.
She had slept in her clothes with no blankets. She was cold, and by now her hands were in incredible pain. An EMS vehicle went down the back lane, strobing red and white around her room then vanishing and leaving the room dark and soundless but for the dripping of a tap.
She turned on the lamp and put her feet on the floor with a creak of wood.
The bubble on her wrist was huge now, a golf ball cut in half. There were bright air bubbles in the lake of fluid sloshing around inside. And there were more bubbles on both her hands. She counted. Six on her left, eight on her right, one more coming up slow and visible on each of her thumbs. And another on the heel of her right palm. And they hurt.
They really, really hurt.
She felt tears. “Stop it,” she whispered. It looked like a horror-movie virus. “Stop it,” she whispered again. A big hulking cracked monster who would only grow like this more and more, and it would spread to her arms and the rest of her body. She would infect her friends, her loved ones—
Wait. Could she?
She wanted to wake up Raina. She wanted to say, Raina, I don’t know what’s happening to me, I’m so scared, these illegal hormones made this happen to my body, I feel like I’m dying, I’m so tired and I can barely walk, please, please, please help me …
The hospital wasn’t far. She could go to urgent care. She wished she had something more to drink. She’d finished her mickey by the end of her shift. But the vendor closed at two-thirty, if she hurried … What the fuck, Wendy, just walk to the fucking hospital!
The wind was brutal and loud, like a shrieking person she had to push through. Her headphones flew out of her ears. She put them back in, and they flew out again right away. It was so loud. It had hurt to pull on gloves, and now they were rubbing on the bubbles. Her mind simplified and descended like it did in these temperatures: I am in pain, and soon I won’t be. I am in pain, and soon I won’t be. I am in pain, and soon I won’t be. She thought about literally nothing else until she walked through the door.
Everything in the hospital was orange and brown. The triaging nurse was nice. “Yup, that’s strange. You’ll probably need a dermatologist, but I’ll get you in with the doctor anyway.”
An hour clicked by. Eventually Wendy asked for the washroom and was directed around the corner, near the patient rooms. She passed by a room with the door half-open. A tall Black doctor with his back to the door moved his hands over a person she couldn’t see.
“And how did this happen again?” said the doctor.
“I smashed a plate in someone’s face.”
The doctor must have sensed Wendy as he then turned around. They stared at each other for a few seconds before Wendy said, “I’m just going to the washroom.”
“Probably?”
“Forgive me one second,” he said to the other patient.
“No problem.”
The doctor took his gloves off and sat down at his desk. “I can tell you right now no one here will know what’s wrong with you. You’ll see a dermatologist. Call this number tomorrow morning. I’ll leave a referral message for them in the next hour so they’ll know to get you in right away. And I am sorry about the wait.” He handed Wendy a slip. He seemed only a few years older than Wendy and had specks of a tattoo sleeve poking out from the arms of his lab coat.
“Thank you, doctor.”
“You’re welcome. Have a good night.” He turned around to the patient Wendy couldn’t see. “I apologize.”
“Hey, that’s okay.”
She went back home. It was almost five in the morning when she got there. She was sober now and wide awake. She sat in a chair, read a little, played with her phone.
Maybe this was it. Maybe she wanted too much.
It wasn’t enough to transition, to get bottom surgery; she had to have this too. And now look at her. There were two more bubbles growing on her hand since she’d woken up! It wasn’t stopping! She hadn’t taken her medroxy that day, of course, but the bubbles were still growing …
She’d been ignoring her phone too—she couldn’t do calls like this.
Wendy sat in the dark, in the cold, staring at her knobby, bubbled hands. The only sounds were a tap dripping and a car every few minutes in the back lane. Someone screamed in laughter, maybe a block away, then a primal “Whooooo!” then quiet.
The ache was getting worse. If it kept going like this, she couldn’t even work at the store. She already had a small stockpile of savings from these past couple weeks of ho-ing, but …
What’s going to happen to me?
She sat there for hours until nine o’clock, the sun peeking and shining through the upstairs window.
She had sat there not thinking and letting her brain go beyond overdrive.
Then the door flew open and Raina yawned and stretched in her pyjamas. “Wendy! Are you alright?”
Wendy numbly held up her hands. “No.”
“Shit!” Raina said uncharacteristically. “What is …”
“I don’t know,” said Wendy. “It’s time for me to call someone. I’ll tell you in a minute.”
Raina padded downstairs, and Wendy dialled the dermatologist. Raina’s girlfriend poked her head into the room and waved. Wendy nodded.
“Hi, my name is Wendy Reimer. I have a referral to come see you urgently. Oh, excellent. This afternoon? I have to work. I could come right now. Can I come right now? Oh. Tomorrow morning? Okay, ten-thirty, you got it.”
Raina came back upstairs with coffee and Wendy gingerly accepted a cup, leaning over the table to sip it. “Have you ever heard of anything like this happening before? With any kind of hormones?”
Raina shook her head. “Never.”
“You don’t know anyone who’s taken medroxyprogesterone, do you?” Wendy said desperately. “Anything?”
“I read something on a message board,” Raina said slowly. “Years ago. I doubt I could find it now.”
Raina’s girlfriend emerged with a frown, and Raina looked pained. “Could you give us a second, love.” The girlfriend’s face turned to ice. She retreated and loudly closed the bedroom door.
“Look at me,” whispered Wendy. She had her hands flat on her knees like a punished child. She felt like a monster.
“You have your appointment soon?” said Raina, still looking uncomfortable.
“Tomorrow morning. How the fuck are they supposed to fix me—how will they know what to do?”
Raina stood up, bent over, and kissed Wendy on the head. She put her arm around Wendy and hugged her fiercely with her lips near her ear. “You are beautiful, and I have every faith you will press on and remain.”
Wendy couldn’t move her hands.
Raina stood up. “Whatever happens after tomorrow, my dear, I’ll be here.”
Their eyes locked and Wendy whispered, “Thank you. I love you.”
Raina looked away bashfully and went back into her room.
Wendy worked another shift. She tried it sober, gulping T1s like Pringles. Michael wasn’t around, so she fobbed off most of her work, but still barely made it through. Got off shift at eight. She didn’t want to be around anybody, didn’t want to try to work. She bought a two-six and bussed home staring out the window. You had to have it all, didn’t you? The bubble on her wrist was truly huge and couldn’t be covered with a glove without extreme pain. The temperature had fallen off a cliff in the afternoon. Minus-forty wind-chills on her walk back to the bus.
At home—sweating, freezing, swearing—she drank down two, three, four booze-and-water bombs, followed those with melatonin, and slept for twelve hours without dreaming.
Raina was knocking at her door before her alarm went off. “Wendy?”
“Hafsdhf. Huh? Hi.”
“My dear, I’m afraid I have to tell you something.”
“NONONO who is what is it—”
“Nobody is dead,” Raina said gently. “Nobody is hurt. Come upstairs in a minute if you would. I just need to talk to you before I go to work.”
Wendy got up and made a coffee, tied her hair back, spent a solid sixty seconds emptying her bladder, then put on her slippers and housecoat and trundled upstairs.
“What’s happening?” Wendy said, using pot holders to carry her coffee. “I have my appointment in an hour. It’s still fucking freezing as balls out, isn’t it?”
“They’re not renewing our lease. We have to leave this house soon.”
“Are you fucking kidding me!?”
“I’m not, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t—what the—I’m sorry, I’m yelling.”
“Yes. I imagined you would.”
“You did? Why is this happening?”
“Our super is getting fired, and apparently we’re fired along with him.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t, does it? You know how our lease expired a few months ago, and he kept saying he was going to get a proper new one?”
“But we’ve been paying rent to that fucker!”
“Yes, and for reasons mysterious to a law-hating social-service worker like me, apparently that doesn’t matter and we have no valid claim to living here and we can be evicted basically any time with thirty days notice. That would be January fourth, of course, but they’re offering us half a month’s rent plus deposits right away if we can be out before month’s end.” She handed Wendy the letter. “They delivered it about half an hour ago and explained the whole thing.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God, those goddamn motherfucking sons of fucking bitches.”
“Yes.”
“What do we do?” Wendy said, sitting down on the floor with a creak. “Can’t we … can’t we … aren’t there tenant’s rights organizations? There have to be. There’s, like, a million of those, aren’t there? You know this shit, right? I can’t … isn’t there some kind of organization that helps us? Isn’t that why we pay taxes?! Do you know someone?”
“Indeed, there are many. But you need to at least currently be on a lease. And legally we are not.” Raina was sitting on her bed with her head cupped in her tiny hands. “We could try to fight it, I suppose. We would have some standing. But I wouldn’t be confident about it. Or, we can each take our precious four hundred dollars and find a new place. If we sign this other thing they gave me, we get our cheques immediately.”
“Shit.” Wendy breathed out deeply. She took a sip of coffee and rubbed her forehead with her clear thumb. “Well, hey, lady, you got surgery coming up. You can probably get off this rock after that, hey?”
“I’m sorry?”
“… Leave,” said Wendy after a beat. “I always thought once you got surg
ery you’d leave.”
Raina looked out the window and made a quizzical sound with her lips that was halfway between a buzz and a horse snorting. “Yes. Me too. That was the original plan.”
“So?”
“Well, there’s Genevieve to consider, obviously. If she were to leave, it wouldn’t be for some years, not until she’s finished her master’s.”
“Right, of course.”
There was an awkward silence until Raina said, “I think I may have also moved around enough. In my life.”
“Sure, that makes sense,” said Wendy.
Raina clapped her hands. “Anyway! I would still like to live with you. Do you want to still live with me?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll start looking on Kijiji tonight. I don’t know about the other girls. I haven’t spoken with them yet.”
“Barely ever notice those two,” Wendy said abstractly.
Raina raised her eyebrows. “Who can figure out cis people, no?”
“Ha!”
Then Wendy looked at her globuled hands. A wall of anger appeared in her. She wanted to hurl her coffee mug at the wall. What the fuck is next, huh?
21
“Ms Reimer? Geez, you’re tall.”
“That’s me.”
“Ms Reimer, I’m Dr Freedman. How are you?”
“Awful. Look at my hands.”
“Yeah, that’s some stuff you got there. Do you have them anywhere else on your body? Your armpits?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? Absolutely none on your armpits.”
“I’m sure.”
“Weird. Any changes to your health recently? Or new medications.”
“No and no.”
“Okay, let’s take more of a look here. I’m not gonna hurt you.” The doctor strapped on gloves. “Tell me more about yourself—what do you do?”
“I work at Tammy’s Gifts and Books.”
“Tammy’s! My mother loves your store. You probably know her.”