—You're so pathetic. . .
—I did what you wanted, just leave me alone now, please go.
Her jaws open, I insert my head between the shiny incisors, rest my head on her warm tongue before blackout—teeth crashing down on my skull.
—You knew it'dendup like this. I go when you go. That's the problem, don't you see?
chapter 25
I'm playing pick-up with some older guys at the schoolyard when Roy yells, "Time out. Hey, Holly! Your boyfriend's here." And when I turn to see what they're laughing about, I see him, his arms stretching over the diamond-shaped spaces between the metal on the fence. And I'm embarrassed for him, looking so diminished somehow by the large grey fence that separates us. I take my bandana off my head and retie it as I walk towards him. I hear the tinny sound of the basketball reverberate in my head and feel the guys' eyes follow me to the fence. I aim my own eyes above the hill, beyond him, so I do not catch a glimpse of his beauty or worry.
"Hi, Sol."
"Hi."
"There's nothing to say, there's nothing."
"I know, but I can't sleep, not even a couple of hours anymore and my eyes were hurting from not seeing your sister or you."
"I don't care! You never sleep! Jesus, you come here to tell me your eyes are hurting?"
I don't want to think about his damn eyes. I don't want to talk about them even though he is wearing the sunglasses Giselle bought for him and I couldn't see his eyes if I wanted to. I remember him mock-complaining that the glasses were too dark. But he was impressed by her gift, I could tell.
"How is she?"
"She's OK . . . " I pause, and then decide that, despite everything, Sol deserves to know the truth. "Actually, she hasn't got out of bed for a week."
"She sick?"
"Yeah, sick. Listen, I gotta go, we're losing." I kick at a pile of gravel. One of the rocks bounces off Sol's knee.
"OK. Sorry, Hoi," he says, dismissing me. I look at him, open and shamed. Then he says something funny in a quiet voice, almost a whisper.
"This one time we were walking in the park and there was a plastic bag on the ground with a cherry pie in it. She scooped it up as if she just left it there and forgot about it and we walked some more and then sat down on a little hill. She ate that whole pie. Didn't say, 'Gee, that's weird finding a pie on the ground' or anything, just opened it up like she bought it herself, and ate the whole damn thing. No fork. No spoon, nothing. Just broke the crust with her fingers and started in. Didn't even offer me some. Not that I wanted any. I don't like sweets. And I hate cherry-flavoured anything. . . ." He pauses, kicks some more gravel, and then lights a cigarette and sighs.
"I think about her all the time. Can you at least tell her that?" he asks, stuffing his hands in his pockets. As he turns and makes his way back up the hill, part of me is running around the fence clinging to his side and not walking back to the court.
And that part of my heart, which is tangled and blurred and pawing at his back, is not breaking at all. My sister's heart is not breaking either. I swear I didn't break it when I held it in my hands again.
. . .
The next day is Sunday and Mom and I spend an hour and a half pulling Giselle out of bed and trying to make her look presentable for church.
"You promised me," Mom says through fuming, closed teeth, while yanking clothes off Giselle's floor.
"What?"
"You promised me this bullshit was over, Giselle." Mom grabs Giselle's arm and clutches it to demonstrate how thin she has become. Giselle whips around with surprising strength, snatches the clothes out of Mom's other hand, and throws them on her bed.
"Leave it!" she shrieks, hysterical suddenly, tearing herself away from Mom's grip.
At breakfast Giselle eats a piece of toast, an orange, and a soft-boiled egg, then says to Mom, "Happy?"
"Do I look happy, Giselle? I'm putting you back in clinic if you keep losing weight."
Giselle looks up at Mom, her eyes big, scared.
"No."
"Yes."
"You can't do that, I'm an adult."
"Really? Do adults have to be badgered to eat properly? Do you know any adults that need to be constantly monitored?"
Giselle gives Mom an icy look and snatches the last piece of toast from the plate.
"OK."
"No, I'm serious, this isn't a game, look at yourself. You look like-—" Mom says, pulling on her summer coat.
"All right! I get it. I'm eating, I'm eating!" Giselle yells, tears welling up in her eyes as she tries to swallow the dry piece of toast as fast as she can.
By the time we get to church, Giselle looks almost normal although her hair is still matted and puffy at the back like a guinea pig's and her tanned stick-arms are poking out of the blue dress Sol bought her when they first started dating, but she looks better than she's looked all week. It's the first time she's left the house in a while.
Mom likes to go to church about once a month. "For your father," she says, though he never came with us when he was alive. He liked to spend Sundays, instead, in his pyjamas, reading the paper and then, later, if it was nice out, puttering around all day in the garden, by himself.
We all stand straight but Giselle's got the side of her hip pressed against mine and she's pinching me with her long slender fingers, pulling at my skirt, trying to make me laugh or scream out in pain. "Stop it!" I hiss, arching my back even straighter. "I said stop!" Mom gives me a dirty look.
When the priest finally settles into his sermon, Giselle collapses on the pewr like a drama queen and starts picking old pistachio nuts from the bottom of her Sunday purse. She opens an old tube of lipstick and collects the fluff from the bottom of her bag between her fingers. After prying a closed pistachio nut open, she offers me the green nut by pushing it onto my lap. Mom stares straight ahead, ignoring her. I pick up the nut and chew it slowly, as the priest's voice takes me far away from our small neighbourhood church.
I think about my dream last night where Giselle covered me with leaves and then snaked her hands through the musty-smelling pile. In the forest we saw giant blue swallows, the size of watermelons, and bees so heavy with pollen they looked like they were about to burst, but instead they floated harmlessly through the air and smiled at us with cartoon faces.
God, I don't know you, only in feelings like that dream. Dear God, I try to pray but I always get distracted. Dear God, please help us, keep us three together, I think, falling down slowly in my head, in a pile of red and brown leaves with Giselle. God? Should tell her about seeing Sol? What he said?
The priest is talking about the time Jesus threw all those blasphemous people out of the temple and how Much Music and TV are kind of like those merchants in the house of God. I open my eyes, see Giselle with her mouth open, slouched over the pew. She looks thin today, too thin to hold up her long body in that blue dress. Giselle wraps her coat around herself, though the church is humid. I meet Mom's eyes. She's getting worse, her worried look transmits. I promise myself to take Giselle to the park for a picnic tomorrow. Giselle's eyes wander over the Stations of the Cross—her favourite thing about church. She stares at Jesus' Fall. Poor old Jesus, lugging that cross around, falling all over the place and everyone trying to talk to him at once. Then Giselle kneels down before the pew, before it's time to, and clasps her hands together like some pious little girl—her second favourite part of Church: looking pious.
I try to get back into my prayer, so I close my eyes. See, this is what always happens, I get lost, too lost in the world to concentrate on believing, too caught up in counting Christ's ribs or Giselle's ribs or worrying about my shoelaces breaking before Friday's game.
Dear God, forgive my sloth. Dear God I can't talk right now because Giselle is poking me with her pointy little finger again and laughing into her hands.
. . .
Giselle comes into my room at night when she can't sleep. Lately she's been on this quest to find out about Dad from me, as if I know somethi
ng she doesn't, even though she was older when he died. She picks up objects from my dresser: a piggy bank, a sweat sock, a St. Sebastian ballpoint pen with a picture of a flying eagle on it. She contemplates each item and rolls it around in her hand before putting it back in place.
She sits on my bed and pulls the curtains open a bit to look outside. Then she tugs my ankles into her cool palms and massages them gently.
When it is late and I am half inside the womb of sleep, ready to part with the day, why, why is she so full of questions? She wants me to tell her.
"Explain it to me."
"What?" I shift in my pretend-sleep.
"Why do you get to see Dad and I don't."
"I can't," I mumble.
"It's because he loves you more, isn't it?" She shakes my arm. Then she hides her face in her hands, says, "I keep dreaming he's trying to do something to me. He straps me down on a hospital bed with all these wires, and attaches this machine to me. Like he's trying to electrocute me. Like he's trying to—" She opens her eyes wide and stops talking.
"Nobody's trying to kill you, silly, it's just a dream," I say Nobody. Except you.
"I didn't say that he was trying to kill me," she says slowly, turning to face me.
"I know, it's just that, well, you made it sound like that."
"He would never do anything to hurt me, right, Hoi?"
"Right," I say, holding her tired body up against the fading shadows of the room. "Never."
chapter 26
Many patients coming to surgery have associated nutritional disorders.
Something evil is happening to my stomach. That's the only word for it. It has turned in upon itself like an animal beaten for so many years. Sheets soaked, cramps all the way up to my neck. The pain is bright and hot and numbing, fomenting in the centre of my womb. The blood flows out of me like waves of loose ribbons.
—This is the part. . .
Shhhhh, I say. For once I'm the strong one. The pain ebbs and I feel myself rising.
—This is the part where everyone says "I love you" and pretends they mean it.
chapter 27
Every day I watch her frame shudder at the sight of food and the blue veins take root in her face. I watch her fade. Watch her eyes grow darker.
Mom prepares Giselle's breakfast tray in the early morning. On it is a large plate of eggs, tomatoes, cheese, jam, toast, yogurt, and a steaming cup of coffee laced with brandy and cream. She stirs sour cream into the yogourt to make it richer, and adds an extra pat of butter on each slice of toast to sneak in calories where she can; she's been reduced to tricking Giselle this way. I watch her silently, eating a piece of cheese, and when I take the tray from her hands she says, "No, I'll do it."
"Please, let me, Mommy, let me talk to her."
Mom's hands clutch at the tray and then let go. A fat tear rolls out of one of her golden-brown eyes as she turns back to the sink.
Giselle's sitting up in bed looking particularly white under her slight tan, as if she's been up all night. I sit next to her and braid her dreads. She groans and picks at her eggs, and, after getting her to take a couple of bites, a sip of coffee, some of the yogurt sour-cream concoction, and a couple of spoonfuls of jam, I give up.
I roll her over, sit on her back, push my hands into her spine, and start massaging her gently.
"So many people love you, Giselle, so why can't you, just a little?"
I close my eyes and start to rub her neck, but then I feel something wet and I look down at the bed and there's chocolate-coloured blood soaking the sheets, the blankets around Giselle's waist, everything, soaked in it.
"Holy shit, Giselle."
I leap off her and run to the door, my pyjamas covered with her dark blood. "Call 911," she says without even lifting her head to watch me go.
. . .
After settling Giselle in the back seat of the car, I sit up front and I sneak peeks at Mom, thinking, for the first time, that she looks older. Mom's hands are shaking as she puts them on the steering wheel. The lines round her eyes and lips are creased and her hair is floppy and grey where it used to be full and auburn. I think about a beautiful photo of my parents that I found tucked in an old cloth-book in Giselle's bag that fell out (I swear) when I was sorting her stuff out for laundry. Vesla and Thomas, Canada, it says on the back, in my mother's proper right-leaning handwriting. There were all these letters and official-looking yellowed papers in another language. I tucked them all away into a white pillowcase. I'll bring it to Giselle later, maybe, if she asks for it, or else maybe I'll keep the picture for myself.
The photo looks like it was taken at Niagara Falls. Dad's wearing his long brown coat, his hair is short, fifties-style, although it's the seventies. Papa, why are you always decades behind and still manage to look so good? Mom's wearing a red and black polka-dot dress, with a big sash across the front of her stomach, and is holding her large belly. New immigrants, happy and exhausted, and a little proud, too.
Giselle, we will name her Giselle, after no one's mother.
What if it's a boy?
It's a girl, I know it is.
The falls are hazy white in the background; Mom and Dad are squinting from the spray, the sun. They are leaning together on the rail and she's tired and striking, in an exotic heavy-lidded way. Looking at Thomas in that picture, I get a funny feeling like I drank too much water and it can't make its way down the pipes of my stomach properly. It's nothing, or almost nothing, the emptiness in the back of his eyes despite their happiness. It's nothing.
I turn around to look at Giselle in the back seat as she opens her eyes to see the blood blooming in swatches on her blanket. Her pupils widen, they look so huge in her small white face. Then I remember how Giselle is one of those people who can't wait for things to be over, even fun things, like concerts, or camping. I'm afraid she might just tear through her life without ever enjoying anything, except this, except pain. Still, Giselle's misery is terrible and beautiful, like stained white cotton dresses.
chapter 28
Intra-peritoneal haemorrhage results in a huge internal bleed which reveals the importance of taking menstrual/sexual history into account when examining females of reproductive age.
"Intravenous! You're on intravenous?" Sol says, pinching the tube lightly.
The last time I was in the hospital being fed by a tube it kind of freaked me out, but it doesn't anymore. People act all shocked about it, so I blink my eyes at them and manage a sick little smile but, really, the idea of having something hooked up to me has lost its novelty.
Sol looks penitent, and I mean to reassure him, but when I try to whisper I discover there's a tube in my mouth making speech impossible. He brings his face close to mine. I can see the-hairs in his beard growing in, covering the smooth white texture of his clear skin. His breath is warm and his lips feel soft on my brow
"We're going to get through this," he says in his whispering way, like the time we hit a cat on the highway and drove it to the nearest vet and Sol sighed all the way while it lay dying in the back seat. He takes my hand gently and I fall into sleep before I can wonder at those tears, wonder at these new ones now.
The occasional case of endometriosis produces such intense symptoms in a woman who wishes to maintain childbearing potential that bowel or bladder resection is necessary.
It's August, 5:00 a.m., the first summer without Dad and the three of us are trying to sleep in Mom's bed. The heat from the floorboards is rising up and floating over me in hot unending waves, barely dispelled by the fan mixing up the air. From the hallway, I hear Holly's child-feet beating out an uneven patter on the floor.
Thump, thump, bwaa.
Thump, thump, bwaa.
Of course, Holly's deaf in one ear; half the world is muted to her, so she doesn't even know she's waking us up. Mom groans and rises, calling to her.
"Holly!"
Thump thump thump thump bwaa.
I pull a pillow over my head; the cool material is soothing f
or almost ten seconds before it becomes suffocating.
"Shut up!" I scream, throwing the pillow towards Holly's little silhouette, which has appeared in the doorway.
With the heat wave has come a contagion of lice that has swept the grade-one class. Holly's head has been shaved completely. She ducks my pillow and rubs her hand over her little old-man head. Then the click of her turning her hearing aid on. Ah.
She tap dances for a moment, lifting up the bottom of the long cotton nightshirt she has decided to wear for this evening's performance. I growl at her but collapse on Mom's lap, too hot to pursue my attack. Our bodies stick together in the shallow air.
Mom yawns, and runs a hand through my long hair. "What are you doing, honey?"
Holly talks out the side of her mouth, like she's trying to be a wise guy: "Hopscotch."
"Oh, you're being a very funny-guy! You're coming back to bed now," Mom says, and, as if coaxing the cat from under the porch, she pats the place beside her.
"OK, but first! A puppet show!"
Holly yammers with her hands in mouth shapes, an incomprehensible mesh of gibberish and cackling and high-pitched titters.
I look at Mom.
"Listen to me, I'm being very serious now, come back to bed or be quiet."
Holly stops and jumps on the bed, tearing off her nightdress. She sits before us, cross-legged, her arms folded against her flat, naked chest.
"Mama," she says seriously, her head shining in the night, tilting towards the fan's breeze.
"What's a Black Widow?"
She turns the volume up in anticipation of the answer.
The nature of pelvic pain caused by endometriosis is variable. Minimal endome in the cul-de-sac is generally much more painful than a huge endometrium within the ovary that is expanding freely into the abdominal cavity.
Every night at the hospital it is the same dream: everything is quiet. I am in a small hole in the earth. A young man finds me in the forest under the wet, mossy rocks. I'm wrapped in pink butcher paper, the kind that's waxy on the inside. I'm sleeping and there's something sticky in my hand.