“Shane? He got flown down to the hospital in Kingston,” Eva says. “He stabilized enough for the trip. Brain’s probably fried, though.” She suddenly looks guilty. “Don’t repeat that.”
Eva goes through the routine with Uncle Will as I stand behind her and watch. “How’s he doing tonight?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“He’s getting really skinny,” I say.
“We’ve been feeding him extra drips,” Eva says. “He’s still not responding much to anything.” She looks at me. “Wanna talk?”
I sit down.
“Dr. Lam plans to send him south,” Eva says.
“What’s that mean?”
“He’s worried your uncle is atrophying. That he’s basically become vegetative.”
My voice hitches when I open my mouth. “What do you mean when you say ‘send him down south’?”
“I don’t think there’s much we can do for him here anymore. Dr. Lam thinks he’s stable enough to be sent south. It’s for the best.”
“Nothing good happens to us down there,” I say, standing. My words are loud in the quiet room. “Look what happened to Suzanne! Look what happened to me!” I sound stupid.
“I think it’s your mum’s call, ultimately,” Eva says. She heads to the door. “I’ve got to get back to work now. With a dance over in Moosonee, we’re in for a busy night later.”
When I’m alone with Uncle, I look at his face, actually reach my hand out and touch it. He’s still warm. He’s still alive. “I bet if you had your say, you’d want to stay here in Moose Factory,” I tell him, “not be sent to some strange hospital down south.” I won’t let it happen. I know what he wants as surely as if he’s spoken the words. “I’ll fight to keep you here with us.”
I get up and pace the room. This long cold snap has become depressing. I don’t want to be here anymore, but I can’t leave, either, not until something happens one way or another. I want to nurse Uncle back to life with my words, and then I’ll be able to move on. But do I truly believe my words have any effect at all? Don’t doubt, Annie. Not now. Just talk to him. I sit back down beside him.
Butterfoot and me, we’re inseparable those first couple of weeks in Montreal after we get together. He takes me out to restaurants, shopping, even home to meet his mother. I’m surprised to find out his mother is Mohawk, from Kahnawake. Like mine, his father’s long gone and probably dead. When Butterfoot tells me his uncle is a famous musician, one I’ve loved for years, Butterfoot’s stock goes up even more.
I fret about my lost purse and all my ID, and Butterfoot promises he’ll help me get it replaced. But we’re having too much fun getting to know one another.
Like a good protector, Gordon sticks around. He spends more and more time on the streets of Montreal, though, rather than in my hotel room. Although I never remember Gordon seeing me and Butterfoot together, I think he must know. But still, he stays, keeping an eye out for me from a distance.
Butterfoot leaves one weekend to play a gig in New York. He’s getting pretty famous as a DJ, I think. Violet invites me over to her place, but I tell her I should spend some time with Gordon. Sitting in our hotel room, I ask Gordon if he wants to go get some lunch. He shakes his head and picks up the new notebook I bought for him. I’ve got something I need to do, he writes. What can this guy possibly need to do in this city?
When he pulls on his sneakers, I decide to see if I can follow him. I want to know what he does when he’s not around me. I take the stairs the few floors down once he gets on the elevator. Outside, I follow his lope from a good distance, keeping an eye on his long black hair. He turns onto St. Urbain. I wait a minute so he can get some distance, but when I turn the corner, he’s nowhere to be seen. Did he know I was following? I walk down St. Urbain, trying to make a plan as to what to do next. Maybe I will give Violet a call. She and her friends always have something fun on the go.
I glance inside an internet café as I walk past it and stop. I can see the long hair of Gordon near the back. I slip in.
The place is brightly lit. An old Asian man stands at the counter and ignores me when I walk lightly down the aisle to where Gordon taps away on a keyboard. Who the hell is he writing?
It never ceases to amaze me. I can barely turn on one of these things, and here’s Mr. Homeless working away like he’s Bill Gates. I stand just far enough behind him that I won’t spook him, but it’s too far to read the words on the screen. It’s email. Screw it. I walk right up behind and begin reading. Whoever he’s writing to is named Inini Misko, and I see that Gordon has only written ten lines or so. He turns his head to me and almost jumps out of his chair just as I see my own name on the screen.
“Who you writing to?” I ask. Gordon looks down like a punished schoolboy. “Can I read it?”
The bugger clicks the send button.
“I saw my name. Who are you writing to? It’s my right!”
People stare. I tone down my voice.
“You’re going to tell me or …” Or what? I’ll kick him out of the hotel to live on the streets?
Gordon tries to stand, but I push him back down. I pull up a chair beside him. “Open a fresh page,” I tell him. He hesitates but then does it. “Type out for me who you were writing and why my name was in it.”
I was writing Old Man in Toronto. Gordon’s fast on the keyboard.
“You got to be kidding me!” Again my voice goes loud. “You’re telling me that old fart who lives on the streets has an email account?” Gordon nods. This is ridiculous. I don’t even have one. “And what did you say about me?”
Gordon turns to the keyboard. I said you had met some people who knew your sister and you seem to like them. He pauses. But you are no closer to finding anything out than when you got here.
“What do you know?” I say. “I’ve learned lots of things.”
He looks at me, questioning.
“For instance, I found out that Gus got involved with bikers.”
Gordon leans back to the keyboard. I knew that in Toronto.
“I’ve met some of Suzanne’s friends who might have seen her last.” I think about this one for a second. “Some of them say she headed to New York City last.”
Will you go there, too?
“Ever! Too scary. I don’t know anyone.”
What else?
Suddenly he’s turned this around. He’s now the one questioning me. There isn’t much else. And this pisses me off. “I learned that you are a drunk,” I say and regret the words as they fly out of my mouth. I’ve hurt him.
He taps at the keyboard. I was telling Inini Misko that I drank when you surprised me.
“Is that his name?” I ask. “I’ve only ever called him Old Man.”
Gordon smiles. It is not his real name. Just his internet handle.
“What’s it mean?”
Ojibwe for Red Man.
What a joker.
“I’m going now,” I say. “Should I ever expect you back to the hotel?”
He looks at me, then away. If I am allowed.
I nod my head and walk out.
Butterfoot has an easy way about him. He’s like one of those slackers from the movies, but at least he has a job. I’m finding out he’s a real celebrity, too. He takes me to lunch down by the river, in the old part of town. I’ve noticed in the last while that I’m not in much of a rush to go home anymore. Summer in Montreal. A handsome man to keep me company. My funds will last a few more weeks.
He orders us a bottle of wine, and I choose some ridiculously fancy-sounding salad that, when it comes out, looks like it might feed a child. That’s all right. I’ve not been this thin in ten years and love the way my face is tighter and high cheek-boned again. Suzanne would understand me, my transformation. I was always the older, tougher one, but now I’ve slipped just a little into her world. Her skin.
I have an admission to make. I was often such a bitch with her because I was jealous of her, the way she made friends so easily, the way
she fit into clothes so perfectly. Christ. She could put on an extra-large T-shirt, a baseball cap, and baggy jeans and look like she was in an ad for Ralph Lauren. I hated her for that, loved her for that, at least loved watching from afar as the boys, the men, the elders swooned at the sight of her, how the girls flocked to her, the ones out of earshot spitting out their jealousy in little circles until it was their turn to bask in her warmth. All of it so easy. She never seemed to have to work for anything in her life. All of it just appeared at Suzanne’s feet.
Until Gus came along. Funny to think he liked me first. But I didn’t like him, not a lot. Cute? Oh yes. But he was missing something important inside.
Butterfoot and I talk of music. I admit to him I don’t know much. He orders a second bottle of wine and the afternoon spreads out before us in sunshine and sparkling water.
“Did Suzanne ever come to this part of town?” I ask.
“Oh sure,” he says. “We’d have lunch here. Sometimes a lot.” I feel the burn in my throat. I’m gonna ask while my head is still light. “Did you two have a relationship?”
“Do you want the truth, or a lie?”
“You already answered my question.” I light a cigarette, the pretty sheen of the afternoon gone.
He tells me how it didn’t last long, how it feels good to tell the truth now. He tells me how Suzanne and Gus, their relationship seemed over. How everyone in their circle talked about it. He tells me the problems between Suzanne and Gus weren’t for the reasons you’d expect when a guy has a girlfriend who is beautiful and becoming famous. I wait for him to speak again.
“Gus never seemed jealous,” Butterfoot says. “The opposite, actually. He basically ignored Suzanne most of the time. Like I told you, he was running with that Danny guy and some other serious characters. He got a habit, too. At least that’s what they say.”
I look right in his eyes now. “What kind of habit?”
“The stupidest one of all. He started smoking rock. A lot.” He tells me how Gus even started getting all gaunt and dark around the eyes. I watch Butterfoot talk, and I listen as carefully as I know how. “But even before that,” Butterfoot says, “he never paid any attention to Suzanne. She and I, we used to talk about that. One thing led to another. Then she packs up one day and splits to NYC.”
I ask him how long ago that was. I hold down the anger that bubbles just below the surface. Is there nothing I can have that she hasn’t already? He tells me he last saw her a few months ago, when the weather was still cold. “I was heading down to do a show in the Caribbean. She text messaged me that she was in New York for a couple of shoots. I asked if she had time to come down my way but didn’t hear back from her.” He stops and puts out his smoke. “Then I got paranoid that Gus had heard. I never found out.”
A few months ago Butterfoot last talked to her. This is months after she stopped talking to my family, months after we thought she’d already disappeared. Suddenly, she’s closer to me than she’s been in years. I can suddenly believe the worst hasn’t come to her.
The sun is setting, and my head spins. Butterfoot asks if I want to come back to his place.
I almost tell him to piss off, but I swallow it down. I’m drunk. He should have told me about him and Suzanne when I met him. “I’m tired,” I say. “I’m going to go spend some time with Gordon.” Two can play this game.
He pays the tab and, outside the restaurant, flags a cab for me, hands the driver a twenty before I can stop him. He speaks quickly to the driver in French. The directions to my home, my hotel, I guess. We look at each other before I climb in back. His eyes smile, but not his mouth. He leans to me, and without my wanting it to happen, we kiss. He tastes of cigarettes and white wine.
And so I’ve had a small taste of what Suzanne once had. My driver speeds me through the city, and the sun is dropping into night and the lights are coming on and my stomach feels woozy, but I still keep thinking of her. I try to conjure her and what she did here in this city. Yes, I’m jealous. I’ve had a sampling of a life I never thought I wanted or dreamed of. But it tastes of something I know, something beyond the cigarettes.
Gordon’s sleeping on top of his bedspread, all of his clothes on, when I stumble through the door. He startles at my loud entrance.
“I hope you got some beer!” I shout.
He stares at me. I flop on the bed beside him. “Long day, my friend.” I pat him on the shoulder. “Good to see you back. What’s new?” I smile, lean in, and kiss him on the cheek, then push myself up off his chest. I pace the room, see a can of pop on the dresser. “Mind if I drink this?” I open it and take a gulp. What’s come over me? “Cigarette, s’il vous plaît.” I hold out my hand and wiggle my fingers.
He shrugs.
I dig through my knapsack and find a crushed pack of Player’s Light. Two left. I offer him the broken one. He takes it, even though I’ve never seen him smoke.
I awake with a start on my own bed, the lights off and the TV on to a late-night news program, all in French, the world’s events only making sense from the pictures. I look over to Gordon on his own bed, stretched out long and lean, handsome in the TV light flashes that are like camera flashes off his thin face. Good profile. Flash of a car bomb in the Middle East. His face is relaxed. He must be asleep. TV flash again. The local weather calls for partly cloudy days. Another bright blip of TV light as the host of the program speaks in harsh tones about what looks like Africa. I look to Gordon again. Yes, he must be asleep, his chest rising and dropping slowly. The flash again of TV light. Oh, such a nice profile. His body on the bed wants me to wrap around it. My body jolts more awake, tingling, my eyes wide open. Two can play this game.
I want to sit up, put my feet on the floor, close the distance between us, and crawl into his bed. My hand moves to him at the thought of it. I imagine my mouth on his smooth torso. His jutting ribs. His scars. I picture being under a blanket with him, our limbs wrapped around each other, not wanting to let go. He wouldn’t let go. It wouldn’t be hard to lift my leg up and off my own bed. First leg would go, the other following easy. Body follows. Bodies follow.
I lift my head from my pillow. I’m going to do it. My chest rises up from the bed, and I feel the tension of my left leg making its move to allow my foot to touch the carpet and carry me to him. That’s when the TV belches a woman in a bikini, purring like a cat, lounging on a lawn chair. All light now, my own body in the harsh white glow. She coyly calls out a number in French, removes her top to expose her melon-round breasts. Makes a kiss to me. I feel caught in her sick aura and look down at myself, my body through the thin T-shirt. Other women appear on the screen, dancing with one another and kissing each other lightly on the cheek, on the lips. Giggling. I look over to Gordon, and he has rolled onto his side, away from me. Now the girls are topless, still giggling, wiggling their fingers tipped with long fake nails to the camera. Is this what men fantasize about when they think of us? My body collapses back onto the bed.
I turn the TV off, my head tired from so much wine, my hormones back into their winter slumber, the ghost light of the television behind my eyelids. I see my sister, walking down what has become a brightly lit runway. She wears a thin gown, so thin it is less than gauze, and she’s more gaunt than I’ve ever seen her. She’s starving herself. I once believed our people could never purposely starve themselves. Our winter world did it for us. Maybe this is one of the great jokes of our people, one of our clan choosing not to eat in order to become skin and bones. What elder would understand it?
My scalp tingles, and my skin’s cold, my body pushing sweat through my pores that makes me colder. I clench my teeth. Is it because I think of my sister so much in one day that this disease returns to threaten my body? Or is it my disease that beckons her to me? The light behind my eyelids dims a little, and my hands shake. A tremor. A warning. No. Not now. Why now?
My body will quake or it will relax. Calm pictures. I need calm pictures in my head. I reach for the corner of my sheet and take
it in my mouth. My body begins to tense then loosen then tense harder. I try to stop what’s coming. I allow my head to leave my body and the pain that begins to drill into it.
I float outside the window of our hotel room, float up above Montreal, and stare at the lit buildings against the dark of downtown, the giant white cross of Mont Royal. The city is an island, a twinkling iris below me. I float here at this height, then float higher when the white pain is almost splitting my skull.
The big river, I can see it through the lightning cracks in my head, this river that halves itself in two around the island of Montreal. The water promises to cool. It pulls me down to it. Violent quaking on land is just the rocking of waves when I’m on water. The rivers always call me to them. I float just above the black.
Nighttime. A speeding boat. No running lights. It’s crossing the big river, a dark-haired man at the wheel. Suzanne’s long black hair streams behind her as she stares into the pitch, her eyes watering from wind. When she turns her head to see where she’s come from, lights of the far shore wink, but the wind whips her black hair into her eyes. The wind forces her to turn her head back into it. A weak, thin man huddles beside her in the seat of the fast boat. This is all his fault. Now the two of them are running from the beasts that chase them. Suzanne wants to believe that these beasts can’t swim across big water, that they can’t cross borders. And this is what she is doing. Crossing the border. Crossing with her weak, huddling man in the hopes of making him stronger.
Her boat heads straight for me, and like a loon, I dive into the water. I want to wave to Suzanne as her boat crosses above, its wake gently rocking me. But she won’t see my body down here. She won’t see my raised arm as the swishing propeller passing above leaves a glowing trail in its path.
I wake with a start, drenched in my own sweat, but my mouth is so dry I can’t open it to moan. The blackness of this place is complete, and it takes me long moments to remember where I am. The first waking seconds are panic, but then I hear the rhythmic draw and escape of his breath close and to my left. It is the breathing of a person awake, and calm. The calm breathing of my protector.