We Are All Perfectly Fine

by Dr. Jillian Horton

  I asked myself over and over, with an increasing sense of panic, “What is my way out?” I didn’t want to go back to the prison experiment.

  Some things in my life were different than they’d been a few years earlier, when I was still a resident. I didn’t have to sleep over in the hospital anymore; I took overnight call from my own bed, and there were weeks when I didn’t look after patients at all. But the whole experience of training had changed me forever. Wherever my body was, my head was always at the hospital. And the truth is that every time that pager went off, as it did several times a night for about a fifth of the year, that single electronic note took me back to my formative medical years, the ones where every page could mean a nuisance or it could mean disaster. Or it took me back to other sudden awakenings, in the middle of the night years earlier. Kenny Rogers on the radio at 4 a.m. Wendy fallen out of bed on her way to the toilet. Shattered plate glass. A broken mirror. A towel rack pulled out of the wall, Wendy lying there unconscious. The fear of not knowing what you’d find in the seconds before you got to her.

  Once, when I was in high school, I was supposed to be looking after her while my parents went for groceries. I was doing homework and suddenly realized the house was eerily silent. I looked for her all over, my panic rising. I checked closets, bathtubs, the bottom of the stairs. Shouting her name, not a word of an answer. Frantic, crying, barely able to breathe. She had to be unconscious or dead somewhere in a corner. Then: I happened to look out the window. She was in the backyard. Somehow she had crawled down the stairs and dragged herself to the garden on her bum. She had picked five or six potatoes. She was washing them in the pond. In her pink tracksuit, propping herself up, baptizing each potato in the dirty water. She gave me a tremulous wave when she saw me running out.

  Jilly! I found some potatoes!

  All of it still there, replaying in my mind on an endless reel. I needed to write it all down. I had to record it somewhere. None of it ever really over. I had to bear witness to my own life.

  Writing was always the thing on my mind at the end of the day, lying in bed and listening to the tree branches scrape against the gutter, thinking and thinking with a hint of desperation, and then, finally, writing, feverishly, trying to preserve everything I could after so much had been lost, convinced that somewhere there was a bigger story that would help me make sense of everything, if I could only find it.

  * * *

  I WAS HEAVILY influenced by another doctor writer. I don’t even remember his name. In the years after she left the rural hospital with the head-injury unit that never materialized, but before we moved Wendy to her own house, a little wheelchair-friendly bungalow at 81 Falcon Crescent, she lived in a nursing home. At that home, somebody basically wrote in her records that she was a spoiled brat. I was in medical school by then, and my parents asked if I could read her chart. I came across these words in a typewritten consultation:

  I gather from speaking to the nurses that this young lady was simply allowed to do whatever she wanted at home, which has led to a host of behavioural problems.

  The author was a physician, a specialist. He had never spoken to my parents. He had just talked to a nurse who didn’t know anything about Wendy, or brain injuries, and suddenly, instead of cancer, Wendy’s family became the origin of all her problems.

  God, that hurt. That casual, inaccurate sentence, written in haste, taking a split second to put us and our whole life out on the curb with the rest of the trash. I knew I would never write like that. I would never forget that particular betrayal, how it felt, like a random mugging. When physicians write, we say we “take” a history. And then we do literally take it, a sacred object, the story of your life, and we hammer it with something blunt until it’s depersonalized. Until everything sacred about you, all you’ve done and overcome and lived, is bashed into a single, simplified thread. You thought you were a professor of linguistics who overcame a childhood of dyslexia and the loss of a parent at an early age, but no, you’re just the kidney stone, and, by the way, the chart says you’re obese, and you drink too much.

  Well, I can’t write like that. I don’t have one more word of it in me, one generic line to say that you struggle to pass urine, that or your father died of coronary artery disease when he was fifty-three. Fifty-three! That made you thirteen on the last night you ever saw him, when you rushed up the stairs to finish the latest volume of your latest comic in bed, reading urgently, grunting at him when he came to turn off the light, telling you it was late, there was school tomorrow. Defying him after the door was closed by turning on a book-light under the covers so you could finish up with Spider-Man.

  You didn’t go to school that next morning. You would never have another chance to tell him good night.

  That was your true story. I’ve forgotten your name, but I’ll remember that story until I die. It’s one of the stories people tell me, one of the histories I take in a way that is different from those of a lot of other doctors I know. But then I’m left holding them. I don’t know how to hold them lightly, don’t know how to let them go.

  I’m with that boy, under the covers, turning pages, when there’s an unmistakable thud on the stairs, like the time the movers dropped our sofa on the way to the basement. Calling out for Dad. Dad? But there is only silence.

  This is your story, but somewhere along the way it’s one more that became entangled with mine. And now, here I am in a room at Chapin Mill, still holding it.

  16

  The Perfect World of Jillian Horton

  I can’t sleep tonight. Something about this stupid bed. It’s comfortable but so narrow. The last time I slept in a single bed was in a hospital room. Is that where all this uneasiness is coming from? Or is it Ron and Mick, pushing us towards all the rooms in the house we sealed off long ago?

  I put on my housecoat and slippers. I move through the dark halls, stepping on hardwood illuminated by occasional fingerprints of moonlight. I trace my way to the dining hall. It’s open, airy. The ceilings are high, tables set in front of picture windows that face the stream and the mill. Nothing is visible out in the dark. I see my weird reflection in the closest thing at the Zen centre to a full-length mirror: the window. There I am. Ghost-like. Shapeless.

  The music room is just on the other side of the dining hall. I pass the empty tables, push open the heavy door. There’s a full-size grand piano, like a beast in the darkness. I fumble with the switch, turning on a single lamp in the corner. The piano illuminates. Tentatively, I reach towards it. A hand on its greater curvature. Is that even what it’s called? That’s what it would be called if it were an organ. Like, a human organ.

  Just touch it for a while. That won’t bother anybody. I pull the bench out, sit down at the keyboard. One finger on middle C. The key drops. The hammer hits the string. It makes the softest, muted sound. I put my foot on the sustain pedal, push down. The quivering of the strings. An eruption, like a muffled gunshot.

  I notice my breath. Fast, shallow. It’s weird that I’m here, looking like a high school play version of Lady Macbeth in an ugly nightgown that I just now notice literally has a piece of gum stuck on it.

  It’s after midnight. I won’t wake anyone up. I won’t do anything.

  I won’t do anything.

  Words I’ve said to myself at other times. Reassurance. A hint of bitterness, a slick note of something awful at the bottom of a drink. As if I could. As if I even have that much agency in my own life.

  Do I have that much agency in my own life?

  I play the G above middle C. Do to sol. A perfect fifth.

  What’s it like to be perfect, Fifth?

  Once, a headline in a newspaper, an article about me when my album came out: THE PERFECT WORLD OF JILLIAN HORTON.

  It was my short-lived folk/pop music career, just after residency, the one I was naive enough to think could turn into anything more than a few months on the radio and low-paying gigs in places where I’d normally be scared to use the bathroom. Not only
is Jillian Horton’s world perfect, but so is Jillian. Well, all she has to do, as that kid in grade eight pointed out, is lose some weight. Then she would be perfect. Jillian Horton practises medicine perfectly when she is not tinkering perfectly at the piano, despite all those people she may or may not have killed; but that is why they call it a teaching hospital. Also, it turns out her family has a genetic condition called Lynch syndrome, which makes them more likely to get cancer. But don’t worry, Jillian didn’t get that gene, because she’s perfect! Footnote: she has sister who had a CT scan of her brain showing she had no brain left, a sister with key parts of her neural network rearranged like Mr. Potato Head’s face. That sister is just the faintest shadow, really, a beauty mark on the Perfect World of Jillian Horton.

  That sister, my deepest scar. The origin of all the best parts of me.

  I press the sustain pedal again: cataclysmic sound of all the strings releasing. The softest cacophony.

  I could be back in Toronto right now, cowering on a pew in a hospital chapel, like when I was an intern on call. Sitting there in stunned, miserable silence. How many more hours? Minutes passing more slowly than the drip of a leaky faucet. Pager clipped to my waist, like a bomb that might explode any moment. Sometimes I’d play the old organ in the corner, flipping the coloured levers down, layering the sickly-sweet vibrato, writing my own music, singing as I blocked out chords.

  Where’s my knight in shining armour?

  Shouldn’t he be here by now?

  How’d you like your happy-ever-after?

  (Jeers and laughter)

  And then I’d play Joni Mitchell, “Blue” or “A Case of You,” the same two songs over and over, the pager vibrating at every tender moment, reminding me I didn’t even have jurisdiction over these few minutes in the middle of the night. This was right around the time Joni released the “favourites” album, with her smoke-eroded, barking voice, not a hint of the sweet songbird of years past. Everything slowed down and gummed up, orchestra crawling through all those sensuous lines. I’d go home, pull down the blinds, put on that album, curl up in bed, fall asleep in my work clothes on top of sheets I hadn’t changed in weeks. Sometimes I’d get woken up by parties at the row of frat houses across the street, would open the blinds to see lines of stumbling, inebriated young men—men who occasionally watched porn on the second floor, curtains wide open, screens fully visible from the street. Everything had a cotton-ball quality, like a lucid, alcohol-fuelled dream, the kind you have when you’re not used to drinking but one night you don’t give a damn and make a show of getting drunk in front of your friends to prove you’re a bigger mess than they originally thought, but they don’t want to make you uncomfortable by wondering out loud if you’re all right, so they have the courtesy not to ask.

  When I started writing after God’s First Man was born, when I promised to give up the periodic starving and all the other dysfunction if I could just be all right, I managed to write a book. I said it was fiction. But somehow, in hiding behind that label, I watered down the most important part of the story. That my patients were real people. That the terrible things that happened to them couldn’t be recast as tidy parables. That my sister wasn’t a metaphor. That my training had disfigured me and done me real harm. Me, a real person, living real, lasting consequences of it, not a fake, triumphant heroine whose story would end with the last page. The fictional story of my life wasn’t even fit for a Dubble Bubble comic when I was done rearranging the panels. Because I couldn’t write honestly about all the not-perfect things in my life, not just the Mr. Potato Head parts but also the Ugly Doll parts. The years of swimming the river to the Buddha-that’s-not-a-Buddha-but-a-column-of-stone part. The periodic wish to slip under the brown water and never surface. The blue whale.

  Dubble Bubble. I love how the spelling condescends to me on the wrapper. What was it one of my colleagues said to me, about the students? It’s time for somebody else to be their Mommie. Spelling the word that way for the same reason the cereal box says Froot Loops. Because the froot is fake.

  Why do we let other people decide what the truth is about us? That can’t last forever, not if you’re going to have children. I mean, you can still abdicate that responsibility to the kid in grade eight or the teacher in the schoolyard or whoever, but then you have to make a very conscious decision to put no effort into bursting out of that prison, to writing the real story of your life. Failing to do that work is putting yourself last in the worst possible way, condemning the little people who spilled out of your body to another generation of dysfunction, to a mother who will never really be able to give them the gift of her full attention, to a lifetime of wondering why they weren’t enough for Mommy. Spelled right this time, because there’s no substitute for the real thing. Nothing will ever come close to me, and really being there for them means dealing with my own issues, really dealing with them. Otherwise, the legacy of that conditional love will plague them like a chronic virus, one they’ll never be able to get rid of. I want them to be able to get rid of it. I want them to have a good life.

  Can I have a good life?

  There it is again, that ripple of exquisite pain, that very tender spot, the part of the iceberg below the water, so much bigger than what the eye can see.

  One night, years ago, as I was helping her get into her pyjamas, Wendy said to me: “I have nothing to look forward to.”

  “Oh, Wendy, you do!” I remember telling her, a lump already forming in my throat. “There’ll be vacations, and concerts, and maybe you can go to Nashville someday, and maybe you could even get a cat or a dog.”

  Could you say that with a straight face, to a woman in her late twenties, without guilt throttling you as you remembered the moment? Hey, having a brain tumour sucks, but . . . you might get a cat!

  She never got a cat, or a dog. Never got to go to Nashville. She got sicker, had more seizures, lost what was left of her vision and hearing, had endometrial cancer, once ended up on a ventilator because she aspirated a hot dog, had a refractory antibiotic-associated infection that pretty much finished her off. She developed dementia, probably from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, because she had fallen on her head so many times over the years, because she never remembered or believed or accepted that she couldn’t walk, and would go head-first into everything. Walls, doors, furniture. Losing consciousness, cutting her scalp open, breaking her nose. Blood on the carpet. Holes in the wall. Nothing compared to the holes in our lives.

  Wendy, you do! You have so much to look forward to.

  I have a burst of longing to talk to Roy right now, to tell someone about this part of my life. I’ve taken the tiniest sip of the grief I used to get drunk on all those years ago, crying in the chapels. Then laughing ruefully in the dark. Drawing Joni’s map of Canada in permanent pen on my hospital greens. Thinking to myself, Nobody knows about any of this. Not even knowing what I meant by this.

  I had a nightmare once, a dream that shocked me awake because it was like a sharp flavour, something pure and basic. My parents in a car, with Wendy, at the top of an enormous hill. The brakes failing. The car sliding backwards, down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, a cliff that ends in oblivion. I’m standing there at the bottom, watching the car as it plunges over the cliff. I wake up screaming, not because I couldn’t save them. Screaming because I’m not in the car with them.

  The psychiatrist said: “That doesn’t sound like a dream.”

  Two children lived down the street from us. Twins. Something had gone wrong at their birth. One had cerebral palsy, the other was perfectly fine. One day my mother and I were out for a walk. She gestured towards their house. “I always think of what it’s like for that child,” my mother said, shaking her head. Yes, I nodded, relieved to be able to talk about it. Me too! That child, the one that got away, watching her sister suffer, struggling to eat and talk, throwing things in anger when she couldn’t communicate, the deformed limbs and the slurred words, and that healthy child infected forever with guilt,
thinking, Why? Why wasn’t it me?

  But before I could speak, my mother said, “I just imagine her watching that perfect version of herself, stuck in her wheelchair while her sister is running around and having a normal life.”

  She meant the other child. Of course she did. Who wouldn’t see it from that point of view?

  Do you even know how lucky you are? How many people had said that to me over the course of my life? Well-meaning teachers, friends, extended family, every time I won a prize, every time they thought about Wendy slumped over in her wheelchair, my brother in the mental hospital, Heather just barely scraping by, struggling to find her way. And me, dancing around with my Midas touch, winning an increasingly absurd array of prizes, the perennial collector of good fortune. All those people clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. How could one child have so much and the others so little? How could anyone miss that disparity? Wonderful things were always happening to me. But just to me. Never to my family.

  I did know how lucky I was. That was the problem. I didn’t want to be that lucky if that luck set me apart from them. I didn’t want to be apart from them. I wanted to be in that car, even if it was going over a cliff.

  I just wanted to be with my family.

  Three

  17

  Shattered But Still Whole

  We start at 6:30 again today. The windowpanes behind Ron and the others are black, opaque. Shoes come off outside the Zendo. Doctors shuffle in. One after another, we arrive, padding into the room in sock feet, finding a place to settle. We take our seats on raised cushions in total silence. It’s damp again here this morning. Lots of wool sweaters, a few commandeered blankets.