Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

That was the first time I met Janice. I had been standing next to Elf’s stretcher in the emergency room. Her broken backpack hung on the IV unit next to her. I was sliding my hands back and forth on the steel railing that held her in and I was crying. Elf took my hand, weakly, like an old dying person, and looked deeply into my eyes.

Yoli, she said, I hate you.

I bent to kiss her and whispered that I knew that, I was aware of it. I hate you too, I said.

It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other. We held each other tenderly, awkwardly, because she was in a bed attached to things.

Janice — she had that furry creature hanging from her belt loop even then — tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could talk to me for a minute. I told Elf I’d be right back and Janice and I walked over to a little beige family room and she passed me a box of Kleenex and told me that I had done the right thing by calling the ambulance and that Elf didn’t really hate me. That feeling can be broken down, she said. Right? Let’s consider the components. She hates that you saved her life. I know, I said, but thanks. Janice hugged me. A close, hard hug from a stranger is a potent thing. She left me alone in the beige room. I tore away at my fingernails and cuticles until I bled.

When I went back to Elf she was still in Emergency. She told me she’d just overheard a great line, just great. What was it? I asked her. She quoted: We are very much amazed at what little intelligence there is to be found in Ms. Von R. Who said that? I asked her. She pointed at a doctor who was scribbling something at the circular desk in the middle of all the dying people. He was dressed like a ten-year-old in skater shorts and an oversized T-shirt like he’d just come from an audition for Degrassi High . Who the hell did he say that to? I asked. That other nurse, said Elf. He figures that because I’m not grateful for having my life saved I must be stupid. Asshole, I said, did he talk to you? Yeah, sort of, said Elf, it was more of an interrogation. C’mon Yolandi, you know how they are.

Equating intelligence with the desire to live?

Yeah, she said, or decency.

This time her method wasn’t starving, it was pills. Elf had left a note, ripped from the same type of lined yellow legal pad she had used years ago to design her exceptional signature AMPS, expressing her hope that God would receive her, no time left for making one’s mark, and a list of names of all the people she loved. My mother read out the names to me over the phone. She told me that Elf had written them with a green marker. We were all there on the list. Please understand, she’d also written. Please let me go. I love you all. My mother told me there was some quote on the page as well, but she couldn’t make it out. Somebody named David Hume? she said. But she said it like whom which didn’t make any difference anyway. Wait, I thought, so Elf does believe in God?

Where did she get all those pills? I asked my mom.

Nobody knows, said my mom. Maybe she called 1-800-PILL. Who knows.

My mother had found her unconscious at home in her bed and by the time Elf came to in the hospital I had already flown from Toronto and was standing next to her when she opened her eyes. She smiled slowly, fully, like a child comprehending the structure of a joke for the first time in her life. You’re here, she said, and told me we had to stop meeting like this. She introduced me in a formal way, like we were at a consulate dinner, to the nurses in the emergency ward and to the woman hired to sit beside her bed on a chair and watch her every move.

This, she said, thrusting her chin out at me because her hands were tied down with cotton ribbons, is my younger sister, Yoyo.

It’s Yolandi, I said. Hi. I shook the woman’s hand.

She told me I looked like the older one. That happened all the time because Elf has curiously escaped the erosional side effects of living. Then Elf told me that she and the woman hired to watch her were having a discussion about Thomas Aquinas. Weren’t we? my sister said, smiling at the woman, who smiled grimly at me and shrugged. She wasn’t hired to make small talk about saints with suicide patients. Why Thomas Aquinas? I said, sitting down in the chair near to the woman. Elf strained to make eye contact with her, the guard, in the chair. There was still a lot of medication in her system, said the woman.

But not quite enough, said Elf. I began to protest. I’m kidding, Swiv, she said. Good grief.

When Elf fell asleep, I went out into the waiting room to find my mom. She was sitting next to a man with a black eye and reading a whodunit. I told her that Elf had been talking about Thomas Aquinas.

Yes, said my mom, she was talking about him to me too. In her delirium she asked me if I’d “Thomas Aquinas her” and later I thought about it and I decided that she must have meant would I forgive her.

And will you? I asked.

That’s not the point, said my mom. She doesn’t need forgiving. It’s not a sin.

But fifty billion people would disagree with you, I said.

Let them, said my mom.

That was three days ago. Since then my mother has shipped off to the Caribbean because Nic and I forced her to. All she had in her tiny suitcase were heart pills and whodunits. She keeps phoning from the ship to find out how Elf is. Yesterday she told me that a bartender on the ship had prayed for our family in Spanish. Dios, te proteja . She told me to tell Elf that she had bought a CD for her from a guy on the street. A Colombian pianist. It might be a fake, I said. She told me she’d had a conversation with the captain of the ship about burials at sea. She told me she had been tossed out of bed on a stormy night but it hadn’t woken her up, that’s how tired she was. In the morning she woke up to discover that she had fallen and rolled all the way over to the balcony of her little cabin. I asked her if she could conceivably have rolled right off the balcony into the sea and she said no, even if she had wanted to the railings would have stopped her. And if the railings hadn’t stopped her she would only have fallen into one of the lifeboats hanging on the side of the ship. My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.

On my way out of the hospital I stopped at the front desk and asked Janice if it was true that Elf had fallen in the washroom that morning and Janice said that yes, she had. This was after she’d been moved from the emergency ward to the psych ward. They’d found her lying on the floor bleeding from her head and clutching her toothbrush in her fist the way you’d hold a paring knife if you were just about to plunge it into someone’s throat. Just then Janice had to go running off to restrain a patient who was using a pool cue to smash the television set in the activity room. Another nurse peered at Elf’s file. The nurse said that Elfrieda needed to start eating and then she’d have the strength not to fall down, and that she needed to be somewhat more aware of her surroundings.

I wanted to go back to Elf’s room and tell her this last thing the nurse had said in some attempt to get her to roll her eyes with me, to forge a small bond of mutual disdain at least. I also wanted to tell her that there was a guy in the ward who hated TV as much as she did and maybe she could be friends with him. But she had asked me to leave and I wanted her to know that some of her requests were reasonable and that they could be granted, that I respected her wishes (sort of) and that in spite of being a psychiatric patient with her name misspelled and scribbled messily on a white board behind the nurses’ desk, she was still my wise albeit alarming older sister and I would listen. I walked away and crashed into a stainless steel trolley full of plastic trays of food. I apologized to two people shuffling past me in housecoats.