Alix Ohlin - Inside

The next day he decided to find out where Thomasie lived, which wasn’t hard. Iqaluit was small, and almost everyone was related or connected somehow. One of the night nurses turned out to be Thomasie’s father’s cousin, but when Mitch told her he’d heard he was down in Sarnia, she pressed her lips together and shook her head. She was a smart, competent nurse who’d earned a degree at McGill before returning to the north, and they’d talked about her time in Montreal. She’d been chatty about life in the city, but her family was a different story.

“Thomasie’s been to see me a couple of times,” Mitch said, as casually as he could.

She looked up at him. She was short but strong, with long black hair kept off her forehead by a headband that made her look incongruously girlish. “He lived with me for a while growing up,” she said. “George and Gloria, they always drank too much, so we had Thomasie sometimes. And three of my sister’s, after she took off with her second husband. But the kids grow up and they have to learn to take care of themselves.”

Mitch flushed, not wanting her to feel that she was being accused. “Of course,” he said, “I didn’t mean—”

“He’s a sweet boy,” she said, her eyes softening, and gave him the address before picking up a stack of charts and moving quietly down the hall.

So on his day off Mitch set out carrying a bag of cookies. He couldn’t think what else to bring. Like most houses in Iqaluit, Thomasie’s was tiny, and scattered in the front yard were dolls, a beach ball, a white tricycle with pink ribbons hanging limply from the handlebars, all smudged with dirt and bleached from exposure. In the constant sunlight it was impossible to tell whether anybody was home. He knocked on the door but heard nothing inside. There wasn’t a car parked on the street, but he didn’t know if Thomasie’s family even had one. He knocked again, and this time heard what sounded like something being dragged across the floor. He knocked a third time, and finally, a minute later, Thomasie opened the door.

He was wearing sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt, and, draped over his shoulders, a blanket he’d apparently pulled off the bed. Mitch, never having seen him without his red windbreaker, was shocked at how thin he was. He stared at Mitch without a trace of recognition, his eyes not even seeming to focus, his hair a riot of tangles around his head. He was enormously stoned.

From behind him came a girl’s voice. “Who is it? Who’s out there?”

“I heard about your mom. I came to see how you’re doing,” Mitch said. When he didn’t get any response to this, he held out the cookies, which Thomasie took without a word. Still clutching the blanket around himself, he opened the bag and started eating, crumbs falling to the floor.

“I said who is it?” the girl called again, impatient and stern. “Don’t just stand there with the door open.” Mitch heard footsteps, then she pushed Thomasie aside and stood there looking at him. “Oh,” she said, evidently knowing who he was. She was a teenager, around Thomasie’s age, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, her hair neatly combed back into a ponytail.

“This my girlfriend,” Thomasie said. “Fiona.”

“Hi,” Mitch said stupidly, and she nodded at him.

“He brought cookies,” Thomasie said.

“Invite him in,” Fiona said. “God.”

She pulled Thomasie back by the blanket and gestured for Mitch to come inside, pointing him to the couch and Thomasie to the facing chair. Her movements were strong and martial, somehow all the more convincing for her thinness and youth. She was in charge here. Mitch had been expecting a chaotic mess, but the house was clean and well cared for. All around them was the evidence of the missing mother and daughter: finger paintings tacked up on kitchen walls, a calendar with days circled on it next to the door, above a pile of little shoes and boots.

“What do you want?” Fiona asked him, sounding more curious than confrontational.

“I came to offer my condolences,” Mitch said, but she looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken in English. Or maybe she just couldn’t imagine why he’d thought this would be helpful. When, after a long pause, she still didn’t speak, Mitch tried again. “Do you live here?”

She glanced at Thomasie, who was looking down at his lap, fixated on the cookies. Her expression was equal parts disappointment, concern, and affection. “I’m his cousin,” she said, then registered the look on Mitch’s face. “Second cousin. My parents live down by the hospital. After his mom got hurt I came over to help take care of him.”

“Fiona takes care of everybody,” the boy said.

“Be quiet, Thomasie,” she told him, but fondly.

“She’s got the best grades at school. She’s going to be a lawyer.”

Fiona sighed; it was a sigh of having heard all this before, of wishing he had the expectations for himself that he had for her.

“That’s great,” Mitch said. “I was worried about you,” he said to Thomasie. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Fiona kept looking at him, a straight, direct gaze he couldn’t quite interpret. He wasn’t sure if she was blaming him for not doing more before or asking him to do less now. Maybe both.

“He’s not alone here,” she finally said.

Mitch could tell she felt reproached. He seemed to make everybody feel bad, all these women doing their best to hold the lives around them together. “He’s very lucky,” he told her, also the wrong thing to say, because she frowned and Thomasie snorted.

Fiona stood up and, with an air of weary responsibility, offered him some tea, then went into the cramped kitchen to prepare it. Thomasie had put the cookie bag on the floor but was chewing contemplatively, looking up at the ceiling. His condition had deteriorated rapidly, and it wasn’t just that he was high, more that he had given up on communicating — given up, it seemed, on everything.

Mitch sat forward, wanting somehow to break through. “I’m so sorry about your mother,” he said. “What was she like?”

Slowly and with evident effort Thomasie lowered his gaze to Mitch, his eyes unfocused, red-tinged, and made a vague gesture with his hands, as if holding a watermelon. “She was small,” he said.

Fiona came back into the room carrying two mugs. She gave one to Mitch and the other, after shaking him none too gently by the shoulder, to Thomasie, seeming as much his mother as his girlfriend. As he faded in and out, Fiona and Mitch managed to have a conversation. He learned she’d worked since she was thirteen at a general store in Iqaluit and was an honors student who planned to earn a bachelor of laws degree at Akitsiraq Law School. Her mother worked at the general store too, and her father mostly helped around the house. She presented these facts directly, assuming they were what Mitch had come for, sounding neither shamed nor boasting.

Thomasie fell asleep in his chair.

After twenty minutes or so, Fiona looked at her watch and said, “You should go now.”

Mitch nodded, thanked her for the tea, and paused at the door to shake her hand.

As she held his hand in her cool, dry palm, Fiona’s eyes suddenly glistened. “He’s not doing too good,” she said, and at last she seemed like a teenager, her body slight beneath her hulking hooded sweatshirt, her shoulders curved. “Maybe you can help him?”

“Of course,” Mitch said, automatically. He was walking down the street before it sank in that no measures he took would bring back Thomasie’s sister, or his mother, or the life he should have had. He hadn’t meant to lie to the girl; he just wanted her, for that one moment, not to feel so alone.

That evening, he called Martine. They had finally spoken a couple of times over the past week, but she’d been in a hurry, eager to get off the phone. There was too much to talk about, or too little. He had already filled the air between them with explanations, and now there was no room for anything else. He talked, as he had before, about the people of Iqaluit, how much they needed him, how fulfilled he felt, all lies or at the very least exaggerations.