All My Puny Sorrows (21 page)

No, I said, the sisters part is in his imagination as he sits on the deck staring at the sea.

Oh! Okay … memories of sisters.

Sort of, yeah, he just has thoughts— Hey, do you hear that?

What?

That clanking. Hang on.

I pulled the car into the parking lot of an “ice crematorium” called the Marble Slab (Jesus Christ!) and turned off the engine. I got out and walked around the car, staring and unsure, like I was
looking at the latest Damien Hirst installation. I got back into the car and tried to start it again. Nothing. The engine wasn’t turning over. That’s odd, said my mom. Don’t worry, I said. I thought of Anatole France angrily telling his
amour
that he would bite his fists until they bled. I tried again. And again. Nothing.

The car’s dead, I said.

My mother shook her head and grinned. She started to laugh. I looked at her. I took her hand and plopped the useless key into her palm. I smiled and she kept on laughing for a while.

Oh boy, she said. Her body shook. This is getting really funny.

She suggested that we get out of the car and walk to Kristina’s, the Greek restaurant next to Fresh. Yeah, I said, good idea, especially the walking part.

At the restaurant we had a surprisingly upbeat conversation about men and sex and guilt and children. Is there anything else? We drank an entire bottle of red wine. We also talked about Nic. Do you think he’s okay? I asked my mom. Well, that depends on what you mean by okay, she said. He’s holding up.

I guess he is, I said. I just don’t know how.

How? said my mom. How are
you
holding up?

I guess, I said again. How are
you
holding up?

We laughed at ourselves, then stopped. Breath, energy, emotion, self-control, all too valuable right now to squander. My cellphone rang and my mom picked it up and said questions without answers, how may we help you? (She may have been a little drunk.) It was Jason, her mechanic at River City Auto, and he said he’d have the car towed to the garage and figure out what was wrong.

We walked back to my mom’s apartment hand in hand. She taught me the military way of synchronizing our strides. It’s a
little skip, see? she said. She showed me. Then when we’re out of sync, you do it again. She made me try it. When we got back to her apartment she talked to people on the phone about Elf and Tina (Yes, they’re both in the hospital. The same hospital, yes) while I researched Nembutal online. If you “erase history” does that mean the police can’t see it?

Jason called me back on my cell and said the transmission was fatally compromised and that there was no point in saving the car, it wasn’t worth it. He suggested that an organization of “youth at risk” teens be allowed to pick up the car to use as a guinea pig in their classroom at a school that tried to help them pick a career other than petty criminal. They’d pay fifty bucks for the car and haul it away for good. I told him to hang on for a sec and asked my mom if she was prepared to say goodbye to her car forever. She was on the phone and nodded and shrugged yeah, whatever. I told Jason fine, let them keep the cash. He asked me to come and get the stuff that was in the car before he called up the troubled teens.

I sat on the balcony with my laptop and read that pentobarbital is Nembutal and that the brand names are Sedal-Vet, Sedalphorte and Barbithal. They’re used to put animals to sleep and you have to go to Mexico to buy them but not to the border towns like Tijuana because the cops are suspicious now of these “death tourists” as they’re called. You have to go deep into Mexico, into the interior, to out-of-the-way places. And then you just find the nearest pet store and go in and ask for it. I thought it was funny that some of the people writing about their efforts to purchase the drug were warning readers to avoid
dangerous back streets. What’s the worst that could happen? I wondered. You’d be killed?

A dose of Nembutal is about thirty bucks and you need two one-hundred-millilitre bottles to ensure speed and death with absolute certainty. And you have to take some anti-nausea pills beforehand, “travel sickness” pills, so that you don’t throw up when you take the Nembutal. They’re anti-emetics. You take one every hour for twelve hours before taking the Nembutal. They’re sold over the counter and have brand names like Compazine or Dramamine. After you take the Nembutal you’ll die in half an hour, unless you’re a large person in which case it might take forty-five minutes to an hour. It will be painless. You’ll fall asleep quickly and there will be no time for speeches or to finish your drink.

The problem, I read online, was not getting the drug but bringing it back over the border. So then, I thought, I had to get Elf to Mexico rather than the drug to Elf. Also, just opening the bottle for Elf would make me guilty of manslaughter. Some of the anonymous writers said that even a suggestion to the person wanting to die—all right, well how about we get that bottle now—could make you an accessory to manslaughter.

I switched off my computer and closed my eyes. I heard sirens on the Osborne bridge but I imagined a beach, a thatched roof hut, palm leaves gently undulating in a Caribbean breeze, my sister finally getting her wish, Nic, my mother (my father too, even though he’s dead, because this was a fantasy and I could have dead people in it if I wanted), me, my kids, holding her, touching her, smiling, kissing, saying goodbye, saying Elfie, you, you have made an incredible difference to our lives, you have filled us up with joy and kept our secrets and made us
laugh so hard and we will miss you terribly, adios, CIAO! saying it properly, together, and Elf drifting off so peacefully on a soft cloud of eternal love.

I phoned Nic but when he answered I lost my nerve entirely. I had been planning to ask him if he’d be interested in a trip to Mexico whereby we kill his wife. Instead I asked him if my mom and I could borrow his car for a few days because hers had broken down for good. He said she could keep it for as long as she needed to get to the hospital and all that, because he preferred to ride his bike. I asked him if he was still at the hospital. He said yeah.

And? I said.

Same, he said. She had some dinner. Her throat is better. And Tina’s asleep in her ward. All quiet on the western front. He asked me if I was okay and suddenly I was choking. Yoli? he said. I’m okay, I said, sorry about that.

Then he told me that he was planning to go to Spain after all. I hadn’t known that he’d been planning to go to Spain at all. He said he hadn’t known if he should cancel or not but now he was definitely going to go—tomorrow.

Tomorrow? That’s soon.

I know, he said. Elf said I should go. She said I had to go. Just for … you know.

Yeah, no, you should …

And I can’t get a refund on the ticket now. I’m going with my dad, you know, he had this idea for years to go to the …

For how long?

Ten days.

Well, cool, okay …

I know, the timing is weird. But it’s his dream. And she’s not coming home before that, the doctor was clear on that.

Well …

You’re planning to stay in the city for at least that long though, right, Yoli? I mean, so you’ll be here—

Yes, I am. No, you should definitely go. God knows, you need a break.

You do too, everyone does, but …

No, go! Definitely! Definitely.

Though it just seems absurd to me to be wandering around Barcelona taking pictures of Gaudí stuff while Elf is in the hospital.

I know but everything is absurd right now and if you don’t get a break soon you’ll crack right up, my friend.

Well, he said. I suppose.

I mean it’s not just you, it’s all of us, I said. It’s like how we’re told to give ourselves oxygen first on planes and then give it to our kids.

I guess … he said.

You have to go, for the same reason we forced my mom to go on the cruise. We have to tag off periodically or we’ll all end up in psych in bed with Elf.

I’d like that, said Nic. Did you see the paper today? There was a thing in the arts section about Elf bailing from her tour due to exhaustion. It said her family has asked for privacy.

We did? I said. Is anyone talking to them?

The press? said Nic. No, not as far as I know. Claudio’s the only one dealing with it. He’s the one who told them she was exhausted. His press release.

He had to tell them something. Nic, you really should go. Seriously. You have to go.

But that guy, Danislov or whatever, that Slovakian oboe guy who lives in Winnipeg … he went to the hospital yesterday to visit her.

Oh, so everyone’s gonna know now, I said. Did he talk to her?

It doesn’t really matter, said Nic. I mean the truth is the truth. I just want … I was hoping to protect her.

You have been, I said. You’ve been protecting her. You’ve always protected her. He was crying now. He was crying like a man, gulping everything back.

It’s okay. I was trying not to cry too—we have to take turns breaking down or everything is lost. It’s okay, I said. I drove my fists into my eyes.

It could be anywhere, he said. I don’t care about Spain. I could go to Montana or something right now, just about anywhere. Sometimes I want to be four again, in Bristol, walking down the high street with my mudder.

That was how Nic said
mother
. When he said it I was lost too. We just hung up finally without saying goodbye.

JASON HAD SUGGESTED I COME
to the garage that evening before they closed at nine p.m. I waved goodbye to my mother who was still on the phone and she blew me a kiss. I walked the three blocks to the garage and found a man peering into my mother’s car. All I could see was his curved back and some thinning brown hair. I said hi and he stood up. He was wearing a T-shirt that had an old copy of Jack Kerouac’s
The Subterraneans
emblazoned on the front of it. Then I realized that he was the Jason I’d known in first-year university at the University of Manitoba, the guy from my CanLit class who borrowed my notes
all the time and wore yellow cords and gave me pot as payment. We called him Sad Jason then because his girlfriend had broken up with him and he couldn’t concentrate on anything.

I thought it might be you when you said your name was Yolandi on the phone, he said. It’s not like there’s a plethora of them around.

And then all I could think of was my younger self, the person I was before I’d become all of these other selves: a soon-to-be-divorced woman in her forties who’d clumsily left her husband even if for reasons I’d thought were valid at the time, a grotesquely undiscerning lover, an adult daughter who nagged her elderly mother about the use of clichés, a sister who couldn’t say the right things to save a life and thereby was flipping over to becoming homicidal, a writer who bogusly claimed to know about ocean freighters and a “death tourist.” I stood there in Sad Jason’s garage and wept until he awkwardly came over to where I was standing and gingerly put his greasy arms around me and said hey, it’s okay, don’t cry. It’s just a car.

Jason was in the process of getting a divorce from his wife who had stopped seeing him in a romantic light and he was currently sort of dating a clown who worked for the Calgary Stampede luring bulls away from fallen cowboys. I told him that I’d been involved in rodeos too, in a way, and that I was also divorced, almost, living in Toronto, here to see family and things weren’t going too well at the moment but you know, tomorrow and tomorrow and … He suggested we pick up a six of something and drive out to the floodway to catch up and to watch the river rise and the northern lights that the CBC had said were happening tonight at the edge of town. Well, they’d
be happening elsewhere, he acknowledged, but we had to get away from the lights of the city in order to see them.

Jason and I had within a moment become something we hadn’t foreseen back in that CanLit class a hundred years ago. We were so old. The word
no
flooded my senses and all of my better instincts and I said yeah, sounds good. In his car I asked him if he still smoked pot and he said no, not so much. Well, lately, because of the relationship thing, but otherwise not really. We drove into the darkness of southeastern Manitoba.

We parked by the floodway, under the stars, and drank beer and talked about the past. Does it all kind of kill you? he said. It does, I agreed. We tried but failed to see the northern lights. I sat back in the passenger seat and put my legs up on his dashboard and I closed my eyes. It smelled like vanilla in his car. He had a million air fresheners hanging from his rear-view mirror. He told me he was sorry about all the dog hair in the car. It was really dark. We weren’t listening to music. He sat with his hands on his thighs and peered out the windshield. He rolled down the window and then asked if it was too cold. I asked him if he’d ever been to a port city like Rotterdam. He said yeah, actually, he had, good times, good times.

I apologized for being strange. He told me it was okay, it’s how he remembered me. He kissed me very softly on my cheek. I kept my eyes closed and smiled. I took his hand and put it on my leg and he asked me about my boyfriend or my husband or you know. He stroked my leg. Same as you, I said, this is nothing. He stopped touching me and kissing me. I opened my eyes and apologized again for saying the wrong thing, a stupid thing. I told him it was nice to talk. He didn’t say anything but he nodded and then I started kissing him and he didn’t stop
me. I asked him if he remembered coming over to my squalid apartment in Osborne Village with a suitcase full of knives. He said oh, was I planning to carve you up? I said no, you were cooking! Oh, yeah, he said, he remembered. We were clumsy and straightforward. I sat on his lap and then felt around for the lever on the side of the seat and pulled it up so that he fell backwards fast, horizontal now, and the moon lit up one corner of his face. Sorry, sorry, I said. I imagined that we were young and horny and very happy.

Afterwards he asked me why I’d asked him about Rotterdam. I told him that I was trying to write a book in which, at the end, one person was marooned at sea, helpless, and the other person was standing on the shore, hurt and mad. He told me that sounded really good, interesting, and I thanked him. Then, driving back into the city, he said no offence but wouldn’t he be able to explain to her that he was trapped on this boat? In these times with technology and stuff? A text or whatever? I know, I said, but for some reason he can’t. Okay, said Jason, but what reason? I told him that I was having structural problems and he said he told me he thought my structure was amazing and worked really well and I said ha ha, thanks, yours too. (Oh boy.)