Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

The phone rang. Thebie answered it. Bonjourno! she said. Oh yeah, hang on. It’s for you, loser, she said. She slid the phone along the floor to Logan.

Oh hey, he said, all tender. He tried to lower his voice. How’s it going? Oh yeah, sorry about that, I was gonna but uh…what? I know. Yeah, he said into the phone, I’m really sorry. I was going to, but…what? Thebie threw an empty Coke can at Logan. Yeah, he said. Did you get that colour you wanted? Logan threw the can back at Thebie and missed. Yeah? I bet it looks good. Yeah? That’s nice.

It’s a girl, Thebie told me. She pretended she was kissing someone and then she started hugging herself and moving around like she was dancing. Logan turned his back on her.

How many washes before it comes out? he asked. Yeah? Oh, nice. Yeah, I will. I promise. Okay. Take it easy. He hung up.

Thebes, you’re a fucking retard, he said.

Who was that? I asked. Deborah Solomon?

Yeah, he said.

It was this girl who wears a Batman sheet as a dress and rides an old-lady bike, said Thebes. Min says she’s besotted with Logan. Sounds like a bedwetter. She’s emo.

Shut up, said Logan.

You didn’t tell her you were going to be gone for a while? I said.

Nah, it was too hard to explain, he said. Plus, we’re supposed to be in a cooling-off period.

We loaded all our stuff into the van and left. On the way out of town we dropped the invisible plecostomas off at one of Thebes’s friends. I had no idea what Thebes had packed but her suitcase was bulging and she had various backpacks filled with other stuff and a big cardboard box of art supplies.

Should we stop at the hospital and say goodbye to Min? asked Thebes.

No, I said. She’ll be okay. She’s getting better. We’ll call her from the road. I couldn’t guarantee that Min would answer the call, probably not, considering she’d just said she didn’t want to see or talk to us. Thebes seemed satisfied.

Word, she said. Logan looked at her. What? she said.

Logan would have the front seat for the first hour and then it would be Thebes’s turn. We’d take turns playing our CDs and Logan would keep track of whose turn it was. He was not allowed to drive. We were heading south towards the border, and then we’d stop and figure things out from there.

On the way out of town we saw this guy standing by the side of the highway holding up a sign that said There are Three Eternal Destinies. And beneath it was a web address. Logan wondered if the guy was real. Let’s see if he moves, he said. He pretended to grab the steering wheel and I yelled at him not to do that and he apologized and then I apologized for yelling and he said it was okay, Min never yelled any more and it kind of made him feel more normal to be yelled at every once in a while.

Let’s remember that website, said Thebes. I want to find out which of those three eternal destinies is mine. She crawled into the back seat to get some of her art supplies. She was back there for a while. I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. But then she popped her head up and passed me a piece of paper with some writing on it. It said:

In Scrabble you’ve got a certain amount of time to make sense of your randomly picked letters, to make words, not necessarily to know what they mean, but to score points, to bluff, to bingo, to win.

What is this? I asked her.

Grandma’s last words, she said. I write them down at least once a week so I don’t forget them.

I wasn’t sure that those were, in fact, my mother’s last words. I’d been with her when she died, and just before she slipped into unconsciousness she held my hand and told me that whatever happened, I was not responsible for saving Min. But did she mean it or was dying similar to Scrabble in that you had a finite amount of time to bluff. My mother was an eternal optimist when it came to Min. Every few months she’d come up with some new diagnosis, one she’d make on her own with help from library books, and new hope for Min’s recovery. Our own family doctor had given up on Min. He said there was nothing wrong with her that a little maturity wouldn’t straighten out. She needed to grow up, basically, was his theory.

We talked for a while about Grandma, how she’d once been rescued at sea and dragged onto some Jamaican beach by a group of fishermen. She had taken Thebes to Jamaica for a short holiday after her brain surgery and they’d gone banana boating. My mother fell off and was laughing so hard she couldn’t climb back onto the boat.

She was also really fat, said Thebes.

So a bunch of guys saw her laughing and bobbing way out in the sea and swam out to rescue her.

One guy on each extremity, said Thebes. Grandma looked like a starfish, a laughing starfish. Even though salt water was splashing into her mouth, she couldn’t stop laughing, said Thebes.

Yeah, I said, remember when she was almost trampled to death by that herd of elephants?

Yeah, said Thebes. At the last second some Kenyan shepherd yanked her out of the way.

Hmm, I said, she liked to travel around the world getting into trouble and being rescued. In that way she was a little like Min. In that way she was a little like all of us. Once, I mentioned off-handedly to her that I was sometimes afraid of Min, that I wished I didn’t have to share a room with her because I was tired of staying up late, night after night, waiting for Min to fall asleep first so I wouldn’t have to worry about her stabbing me in my sleep. I’d kind of been kidding, but I’d wanted my mother to know that although I was young, and although I loved my sister, and although I usually trusted her, I didn’t always trust her. My mother scooped me up in her arms and laughed and said I didn’t have to worry, really, Min was only a danger, and a slight danger at that, to herself. I hadn’t known exactly how that was supposed to be reassuring. I put bubble wrap on the floor around my bed, just in case, so I’d be able to hear it popping if she walked towards me late at night with a butcher knife in her hand. Nothing that crazy ever did happen.

We were zipping along the highway towards the U.S. border. Not a single cloud in the sky, just a jet stream that resembled arthritic vertebrae and a few bossy crows swooping around up high, plotting some sort of attack. We were quiet now, for about six seconds, staring out the windows of the van in three different directions.

Then Thebes said, Min told me a story about you.

Yeah? I said.

About you guys renting scooters in Corfu and riding on a road that circled and circled and rose and rose until you were finally at the highest peak of the island, said Thebes. Nothing but blue sky, rock and sea. Kids threw pomegranates at you and old men laughed. On the way back down you took a turn too sharply and wiped out and scraped layers of skin off your legs.

We had such a hard time getting off that island, I said. Our parents had paid for that trip after one of Min’s melt-downs. Logan was just a baby and Cherkis took care of him while we were gone. Cherkis brought us to the airport and waved to us from the observation deck with Logan all curled up against his chest in a Snugli.

Why? Weren’t there boats? asked Thebes.

Well, yeah, I said, but the one we wanted to take left every morning at six and we could never get up on time. That went on for days.

Well, did you have an alarm clock, like a tiny travel one? she asked.

No, we didn’t have anything at all, I said. We were counting on the sun.

That’s flaky. What about a rooster? Did you have any roosters?

No. Just the sun. If we’d had a rooster, we’d have eaten it.

Well, why didn’t you stay up all night? she asked.

We tried that, I said.

And?

And it didn’t work either, I said. We couldn’t stay up past three or four.