I sat down with my mom and her friends and told them a colourful story of our time on the road. I made them laugh. Elf stopped playing the piano and came to the kitchen to find out what was going on. I told her what had happened. She didn’t laugh at all. She said oh no, oh no, that’s awful. Is he okay?
Who? I asked her.
Dad!
She went to her bedroom too, and closed the door on us for a long time. I think it was dark before she came out because the fire station siren had sounded twice, once for kids to go inside for dinner at six o’clock and once for them to go inside for bed at nine o’clock. I’m not sure how long my dad stayed in his room.
My father forced the town hall to give him money to open up a library. They didn’t want to. They thought it was a waste of money and dangerous and unmanly of my father to talk about it. He tried to convince them. It was forty degrees below zero. It was dinnertime. I asked my mom: hey, where’s dad? She told me he was out knocking on people’s doors to try to get them to sign the petition for a library. For weeks my father would walk the streets of East Village with his clipboard and ballpoint pens knocking on doors and begging for support. He went out at dinnertime when everyone was at home. It was dark. He went to every house in town. Sometimes my mom helped him. When he came home his glasses would fog up as soon as he stepped into the house. My mom tried to convince him to wear long johns, it was the coldest winter in history, but he refused to. She had to karate-chop his legs to get the blood circulating. Why do you hate long johns so much? she’d ask him.
Finally he had enough signatures and he brought them to the town hall and they said all right already, go start your little library. They gave him a tiny, mildewed room in an old abandoned school and enough money to get some second-hand shelves and books to fill them. He was the happiest man in the world. He hired my sister to be the librarian and she was very thorough. She made an index card for every book. She included many details. She was a teenager with long straight black hair and enormous glasses and she kept things very organized. The two of them went off to work together. They had a million plans.
I look at Elf through the glass wall of the ICU and wave. She is watching me and Nic talk about her internal organs. She’s wearing an Alarm T-shirt that I gave her years ago one summer when we were both living in London, me in a dirty house full of punks and she in a pristine flat in Notting Hill with a diplomat of some sort who wasn’t Italian but liked to call Venice Venezia and Naples Napoli.
So she’ll live, I say to Nic. He nods and takes a deep breath and in the space of that breath is framed the question we need to ask ourselves.
I’m sitting on concrete steps outside the hospital and talking to my kids on the phone with the latest on Elf. Will has finished classes now and tells me he is willing to go back to Toronto to stay, again, with Nora whose big school dance recital is coming up while I’m in Winnipeg. But he’s starting a job in Queens in a couple of weeks doing landscape work for a guy his dad knows so he can’t stay forever. And he says he’ll do it, but asks me: can you please just give N a pep talk about not living like an animal?
Julie has gone back to work. She left me two cigarettes wrapped in tinfoil. Just then I get a text from Dan from Borneo. I need you. I text him back. What? Are you okay, Dan? He texts me back. Sorry, pushed send too soon. I need you to sign the divorce papers.
I delete it and light one of the cigarettes that Julie gave me and blow smoke gently, concentrating on my breath, on soft shapes. I tell myself to think, to focus. I briefly consider texting Radek but I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I get up and walk to the river for a look. The ice is gone now. The river is quieter. It’s probably okay to put a canoe into it now if that’s your only way home.
Now I’m sitting in the “family room” with my mother and my aunt. Nic has gone to get some food. My mother is recommending a book to my aunt. I know of the book. She is describing it as delightful. She asks me if I’ve heard of it and I say yeah, but I don’t want to read it. My mother tells me it’s a feel-good book, sometimes we need them, and I don’t say anything. What are you currently reading, Yoli? asks my aunt. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, I tell her. A French writer, dead, not the singer from Quebec. Where’s yours? my mother asks. And I say my feel-good book? And she says no, your manuscript. Still in a plastic Safeway bag? I nod and roll my eyes. My aunt asks me how many words I have and I tell her I don’t know, I can’t remember how to check on my computer. I don’t want to talk about it. My mother tells Tina that she doesn’t like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she’s sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it! Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place. My cellphone vibrates and I look at the text. It’s Nic telling me that he’s in the cafeteria and that he just talked to Claudio. Claudio’s dealt with everything, the venues, the insurance, and just generally calling off the tour. Tina jumps in with her own variation on the theme of sadness. I text Nic back and say good, angry? Nic texts back no, concerned, helpful, stressed maybe, coming to Winnipeg from Budapest to see her.
My mother says that when she reads my rodeo stories she gets sad thinking that I have so much sadness in me that I make all those teenage heroines so sad. Why can’t they ever get the first-place ribbon? she asks. I tell her no, no, everyone has all that sadness in them, it’s not just me, and the writing helps to organize it, so no big deal. I text Nic back: When? He texts back immediately. Tomorrow. Claudio’s putting out a press release, saying it’s exhaustion and a request for privacy. My mother says ah, okay, but still … I wonder about you carrying that sorrow around with you, where it came from … and I finally understand what she needs to hear and that she’s talking about not just me but Elf too and I tell her that my sorrow was not created by her, that my childhood was a joyful thing, an island in the sun, that her mothering is impeccable, that she is not to blame.
I’m alone with Elfrieda. The sun is disappearing. The day before the day before my father killed himself he took my hand in his and said Yoli, it feels to me as though the lights are going out. We were sitting by a fountain in a park at noon.
Nic sat with Elf for hours and has gone home now. He’s furious because a neighbour of theirs saw Elf being loaded into the ambulance covered in blood and told a few other neighbours and now a reporter has called Nic asking about Elf’s condition. My mother and my aunt are also at home, resting. I tell Elf that we’re all meeting for dinner at Colosseo and that I wish she could be there with us. The tube is still in her throat and she can’t answer but if she could what would she say? I ask her if she can imagine life getting better. I ask her if her heart is broken. If life is torturing her. I tell her that I would help her if I could but I can’t. I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t want to kill her. I put my hands over my face in the half-light of her room. I’m afraid and when I think of my fear my knees start shaking again but the sound of her breathing machine is comforting and rhythmic. I offer to sing and a corner of her mouth moves, barely. I don’t know what to sing. I think for a minute and Elf looks at me as if she’s saying well? What’s it gonna be? I sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar. I’m dying of fear. Elf and I used to belt this one out together, a passionate ballad sung by Mary Magdalene about her new crush, Jesus. She’s a prostitute, jaded, and can’t believe how this barefoot, bearded guy undoes her. She wants him and she tries to normalize the idea of wanting to date Jesus by claiming he’s just another man, after all. I sing it quietly while the light fades and Elf disappears into the darkness of her glass room. Finally it’s completely dark in the room and I’ve stopped singing and the only sound is the artificial breathing of the respirator. Elf picks up the pad of paper lying on her stomach and writes something on it and passes it to me. How do you go on? she has written. I squint at the words for a minute or two. I hold them up to the tiny red light on her respirator to get a better look. I pass the paper back to her. She shakes her head and I return the pad of paper to her stomach. We both close our eyes and time passes. Five minutes? Half an hour?