Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

The woman turned around and started fiddling with the fax machine. The sun was coming up.

All right, I said. Can I just…okay, thank you, really, thank you for not calling the cops. I appreciate it.

Checkout’s at eleven, she said.

Thebes was sitting on the edge of the bed. She’d changed out of her dirty white suit and back to her old royal blue terry cloth outfit. She was looking at the TV but it wasn’t on. Her hands were folded in her lap and she didn’t say anything when we came in.

Thebie, I said. I sat down beside her and put my arms around her. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? You got my note, right? Are you hungry?

Logan came over and put his hand up for five but she didn’t lift hers. Thebes? he said. She began to cry. Logan sat down on the bed and said he felt so bad, this was all his fault, he would let her sit in the front of the van and do poetry with her if she wanted him to. Or crafts, or whatever. She could have permanent control of the remote.

I took her hands in mine and saw thin red scratch marks on the inside of her wrists. Thebie, I whispered. I kissed her hands. Thebie, I said again.

Logan hadn’t noticed. He got up and said he was going to have a shower and went into the bathroom. Then he came back out.

Thebes! Dude! he said. You found my knife! Thanks! He went back into the bathroom.

Thebes, I said. What did you do? She didn’t say anything. Please, Thebie, talk to me, I said. Tell me what happened, okay? I won’t tell anyone, I promise. Not even Logan. I won’t tell a soul.

She told me she had woken up and we were gone and she was afraid and worried. She had noticed that the van was gone too. She hadn’t seen the note until later. She didn’t know what to do at first. Then she decided to call the hospital to see if she could talk to Min. She phoned the front desk to ask for help, and eventually, after six or seven tries, managed to get through to the hospital. The nurse told her it was the middle of the night and Thebes said she was sorry to be calling so late but Min was her mom and she really needed to talk to her. Somehow, for some reason, the nurse had said all right, she’d see if she could wake Min up. Then a few minutes later Min was on the phone. She said hello. Thebes was so excited she was jumping from bed to bed. Min! she said. It’s me! At that point in the story Thebes started crying again. Logan came out of the washroom.

What’s up? he said. What’s wrong?

I told him I needed to talk to Thebes, alone, and asked him to go back into the washroom. He said no problem and left.

What did she say? I asked Thebes. She was crying too hard to answer. I bet she was so happy to hear your voice, I said. I held her some more and let her cry. What did she say? I asked her again. Finally, Thebes had stopped crying long enough to speak.

She kept calling me Hattie, she said. She thought I was you.

She did? I said.

And every time I’d say no, no, Min, this is Thebes, it’s Thebie. Theodora. Remember? But she didn’t know who I was and she just kept calling me Hattie and asking me if I had the tickets for some show she wanted to see and I didn’t know what to say. I kept saying this is Thebes, this is Thebes. And then she’d say like, oh, Hattie, what are we going to wear or stuff like that and then finally I just said no, I didn’t have the tickets but I’d get them and I’d call her back. And that was it.

Oh god, Thebes, I said. She’s on so much medication, you know? And she’d probably been fast asleep, like in the middle of a dream or something of when she was young, and probably right after she hung up she thought to herself, wait, hold on! That was Thebes! Not Hattie! But she couldn’t call you back because she didn’t know where you were calling from and probably the nurse made her go back to bed, and tomorrow when we call her it’ll all be clear and we’ll just…laugh, right?

Thebes didn’t think anybody was going to be laughing. No, she said, well, maybe. Well, no. She said she guessed she should have that bath I’d been talking about before. Wash her hair, all that.

Logan came out of the washroom and I asked him for just two more minutes alone with Thebes. Yep, he said, and turned around again.

So, then, after you talked to Min…you did this? I said. I touched her wrists. She said yeah, but she wasn’t serious. She was just fooling around and bored and didn’t know what else to do. She hadn’t meant it. I thought of all the times Thebes had pretended to be somebody else on the phone and now when she was being herself it hadn’t worked out.

Hey, come over here, I said, and led her by the hand to the window. See, I said, look at that. I pointed to the sun the way Adam had earlier directed me to the moon. Over there, I said. I didn’t know what to say but I kept talking. It’s coming up, I said. It’s shining like a champ. I didn’t know what to do besides pointing out something that was constant in her life, even if it was only an uninhabitable ball of fire that you couldn’t look at without flinching or experiencing pain.

Yeah, so? said Thebes.

Yeah, I said, you see? See what? What was I trying to accomplish? I told Thebes about how when Min and I were kids we got to see a solar eclipse and the whole world went dark. We wore welding helmets, I said. Min got them from some body shop guys she knew. We were out in a field with these giant black things on our heads, they covered our faces, we looked like Darth Vader, we were laughing, Min was standing there all, Luke, I am your father, you know, and waiting for it to happen, it only happens once, maybe twice, in a person’s lifetime. Min was super-excited about it but I hadn’t really cared. Oh, the sun gets obliterated, day turns to night, big whoop, but she forced me out there, she came to my school and dragged me out of class, and we lay on our backs in this field and watched the whole thing, it was so wild, it was amazing, and Min told me that she loved the sun, that if the sun was ever permanently erased she wouldn’t know what to do, but as long as the sun was around, you know, she was okay, and the thing about the eclipse for her was not about the sun being covered up and the uniqueness of that but about it coming back. You know? So…there it is, again, you know?

Sure, said Thebes. She patted my knee.

Think it’ll rain? I asked her.

Why should it? she said.

I understood what my mother had gone through with Min. How she’d tried so hard to come up with something, anything, to jar Min’s thinking, to get her to laugh or to hope or to live.

It’s an illness, she told me one afternoon in the car, it’s not rational. I don’t know what to say to her any more. Sometimes I pray that God will take her, that she’ll die, and this will all be over.

I hadn’t known what to say to that. If I’d had a knife at the time I’d probably have been carving random thoughts into the dash too, like Logan.

Later that evening she apologized for scaring me. She told me she didn’t really want to kill herself, she was just so tired and desperate and afraid of losing Min and of not understanding what it was she was supposed to be doing to help her.

Help me to die.

No, never.

I thought of those cheesy Love is …cartoons. Love is…killing your sister when she asks you to? Love is…refusing to kill your sister when she asks you to? I had trouble deciding between leaded and unleaded at the gas station and skim or 2 % at the 7-Eleven, how was I supposed to choose the definition of my love for Min?

One day I came home from school and found Min taping up the windows of the car in the garage. I asked her why she’d waited until four in the afternoon, when she knew I’d be coming home, to tape up the windows. She told me it had taken her some time to get going that morning and she started laughing and I got really mad and shoved her against the car and told her I wished she was a dog because dogs don’t kill themselves and she said she wished she was a dog too, and then she started to cry and I told her I was sorry for shoving her against the car and she went in and I peeled off all the tape from the windows and made a big ball out of it and threw it on the roof of the house. When I went inside, she handed me two bullets. Here, she said, take these too. I asked her why she had bullets, did she have a gun, and she said no, she didn’t have a gun. I went outside and threw the bullets on the roof and then went back in and watched TV with Min for a few hours until dinner. Min tried to say a few things to me but every time she started to talk I’d put my hand up and say, I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I should have listened to every word she had to say but I was so freaked out that even the stupid, predictable words coming from the TV didn’t make any sense to me.