Oh god, Thebes, I said. She’s on so much medication, you know? And she’d probably been fast asleep, like in the middle of a dream or something of when she was young, and probably right after she hung up she thought to herself, wait, hold on! That was Thebes! Not Hattie! But she couldn’t call you back because she didn’t know where you were calling from and probably the nurse made her go back to bed, and tomorrow when we call her it’ll all be clear and we’ll just…laugh, right?
Thebes didn’t think anybody was going to be laughing. No, she said, well, maybe. Well, no. She said she guessed she should have that bath I’d been talking about before. Wash her hair, all that.
Logan came out of the washroom and I asked him for just two more minutes alone with Thebes. Yep, he said, and turned around again.
So, then, after you talked to Min…you did this? I said. I touched her wrists. She said yeah, but she wasn’t serious. She was just fooling around and bored and didn’t know what else to do. She hadn’t meant it. I thought of all the times Thebes had pretended to be somebody else on the phone and now when she was being herself it hadn’t worked out.
Hey, come over here, I said, and led her by the hand to the window. See, I said, look at that. I pointed to the sun the way Adam had earlier directed me to the moon. Over there, I said. I didn’t know what to say but I kept talking. It’s coming up, I said. It’s shining like a champ. I didn’t know what to do besides pointing out something that was constant in her life, even if it was only an uninhabitable ball of fire that you couldn’t look at without flinching or experiencing pain.
Yeah, so? said Thebes.
Yeah, I said, you see? See what? What was I trying to accomplish? I told Thebes about how when Min and I were kids we got to see a solar eclipse and the whole world went dark. We wore welding helmets, I said. Min got them from some body shop guys she knew. We were out in a field with these giant black things on our heads, they covered our faces, we looked like Darth Vader, we were laughing, Min was standing there all, Luke, I am your father, you know, and waiting for it to happen, it only happens once, maybe twice, in a person’s lifetime. Min was super-excited about it but I hadn’t really cared. Oh, the sun gets obliterated, day turns to night, big whoop, but she forced me out there, she came to my school and dragged me out of class, and we lay on our backs in this field and watched the whole thing, it was so wild, it was amazing, and Min told me that she loved the sun, that if the sun was ever permanently erased she wouldn’t know what to do, but as long as the sun was around, you know, she was okay, and the thing about the eclipse for her was not about the sun being covered up and the uniqueness of that but about it coming back. You know? So…there it is, again, you know?
Sure, said Thebes. She patted my knee.
Think it’ll rain? I asked her.
Why should it? she said.
I understood what my mother had gone through with Min. How she’d tried so hard to come up with something, anything, to jar Min’s thinking, to get her to laugh or to hope or to live.
It’s an illness, she told me one afternoon in the car, it’s not rational. I don’t know what to say to her any more. Sometimes I pray that God will take her, that she’ll die, and this will all be over.
I hadn’t known what to say to that. If I’d had a knife at the time I’d probably have been carving random thoughts into the dash too, like Logan.
Later that evening she apologized for scaring me. She told me she didn’t really want to kill herself, she was just so tired and desperate and afraid of losing Min and of not understanding what it was she was supposed to be doing to help her.
Help me to die.
No, never.
I thought of those cheesy Love is…cartoons. Love is…killing your sister when she asks you to? Love is…refusing to kill your sister when she asks you to? I had trouble deciding between leaded and unleaded at the gas station and skim or 2 % at the 7-Eleven, how was I supposed to choose the definition of my love for Min?
One day I came home from school and found Min taping up the windows of the car in the garage. I asked her why she’d waited until four in the afternoon, when she knew I’d be coming home, to tape up the windows. She told me it had taken her some time to get going that morning and she started laughing and I got really mad and shoved her against the car and told her I wished she was a dog because dogs don’t kill themselves and she said she wished she was a dog too, and then she started to cry and I told her I was sorry for shoving her against the car and she went in and I peeled off all the tape from the windows and made a big ball out of it and threw it on the roof of the house. When I went inside, she handed me two bullets. Here, she said, take these too. I asked her why she had bullets, did she have a gun, and she said no, she didn’t have a gun. I went outside and threw the bullets on the roof and then went back in and watched TV with Min for a few hours until dinner. Min tried to say a few things to me but every time she started to talk I’d put my hand up and say, I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I should have listened to every word she had to say but I was so freaked out that even the stupid, predictable words coming from the TV didn’t make any sense to me.
Thebes, I said, do you want to have a pillow fight?
Do you?
Well, I don’t know, it could be fun…do you?
I guess, if you do.
So for the next half-hour or so, while the Dickwad family in the room next to us pounded on their walls and told us to shut up, I fought the kids with a Polyfil pillow and eventually let them beat me into a fetal position on the floor. It was maybe seven-thirty or eight in the morning. I had to get the van into a shop, but this time we were all going together.
First, though, Thebes had a long, hot bath and I washed her hair and tried to dig the chunks of dirt out of her scalp without removing her brains. How long before this dye comes out? I asked her.
I don’t know, she said. Ten or twelve washes.
Well, shit, I said, you’ll be like twenty-two years old before it’s gone.
Your mama, she said.
No, yours, I said and she splashed water in my face.
fourteen
WE WERE PACKED UP, READY TO GO, Thebes was clean and shiny, in her secondary white outfit, and Logan was making a Herculean effort to be charming in spite of having had no sleep that night and no access to the remote control. There was a knock at the door. I thought it would be the cops, the front desk woman with a registered complaint, or the people in the next room waving nunchuks and cans of mace, but then I remembered that this was the United States and all that would happen was that we’d get our faces blown off and die instantly.
See who it is, Lo, I said. He peered through the peephole and said it was some dude in a toque and he was carrying a ton of stuff.
Like, weapons? I said.
No, said Logan, like casseroles.
It was Adam. I was so happy to see him. I was inordinately happy to see him. I threw my arms around him and all the stuff he had and hauled him into the room and introduced him to Logan and Thebes, who were looking slightly perplexed. I told them how I knew Adam and Adam told them that he’d seen both of them last night without them seeing him.