The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

  “You didn’t think it was true,” she’d said afterward. “You thought you’d have to jump in and save me.”

  But after the exacerbation she didn’t mention the swimming anymore. It was only from Lenny that Alex learned Esther’s physio had actually been pushing for her to go back to it, and she was resisting. This was a new Esther, a scary one.

  “I’m just so tired, Alex,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

  “Just try it. It can’t hurt to try it.”

  Alex stood watching from the pool deck the first time Lenny took her in again. At one point she slipped from Lenny’s grasp and went under and came up hacking and panicked. Alex hurried over to help Lenny lift her to the side of the pool, crouching there at the pool edge while she clung to him, clammy as a sea thing, her coughs merging into her sobs.

  “It’s hopeless,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

  But she went back afterward, using a kickboard to help her, and slowly she began to get a feel for the water again. After a couple of weeks, with the board, she could manage a lap or two entirely on her own, and some of her old spirit began to return. She started using a walker sometimes to get around her apartment, though she didn’t talk about fighting the chair anymore—it was real, it was part of her life. Sometimes it happened after exacerbations that people made total recoveries, Alex had read about it in one of Esther’s pamphlets, but he never heard her give voice to that hope. Something had shifted in her, gone underground. She didn’t use her hands much around people now, as if to avoid the embarrassment of some mishap, but the old Esther would never have cared about that, would simply have surged on like a freight train.

  Then there was Molly. It occurred to Alex that you couldn’t possibly help feeling like a sick person when you had someone treating you like one eight relentless hours a day, cutting your food up for you, scolding you for every little bit of initiative, forever reminding you of your limitations and prohibitions and special ailments. But a symbiosis had developed between Esther and Molly that Alex couldn’t quite figure; what looked like mere bullying to him seemed to function for Esther as a sort of cult-like catechism.

  “She only lets me watch an hour of TV every day,” Esther boasted. “And if I want to sleep in, I have to do it on the weekend, she says my father’s not paying her to watch me sleep.”

  When Esther returned to her swimming, Alex wondered at first if it wasn’t Molly Svengali who’d somehow been behind it. But no: it turned out that Molly, pigheadedly, would have nothing to do with Esther’s swimming. Alex put it down to sheer resentment, that Esther had dared to have something beyond Molly’s control. But the one time Molly agreed to come to the building’s pool to watch Esther swim, at Esther’s repeated bidding, she hugged the walls the entire time, clearly scared out of her wits of the water.

  “You see?” Esther called from the pool. “You see? Alex didn’t believe it either!”

  Molly stood clucking and shaking her head like an old mother hen.

  “You never tell me you are a fish,” she said, letting a grudging smile escape her.

  Esther was beaming, happier than Alex had seen her in weeks.

  The truth was that Alex’s irritation with Molly was probably just his way of not admitting his abiding gratitude to her. Molly’s shifts with Esther were like a daily vacation for him from any sense of personal obligation; the rest of the time, even if days went by without his seeing Esther, was all subject to appropriation, never quite his own. It was like his Amnesty work: he could have written letters every hour of every day, organized fund-raising campaigns, pitched his tent at the very gates of the world’s despots, and still the work wouldn’t ever be done. With Esther, five minutes quickly became thirty, which then became an entire afternoon or evening, if Alex should ever be so rash, say, as to pop his head into her apartment as he was passing. Her life was like a quicksand he fell into, full of contingencies and wants and agendas. Then, nowadays, there was a never-ending parade of other visitors he had to contend with: lifelong friends Esther had often talked about who, however, came once, were overly friendly and loud, then never appeared again; new friends she’d met hours before, people who reeked of need, and who seemed impossible to get rid of. Then there were the nurses who came by to give Esther her cortisone shots or her B12 or her interferon; and there was Esther’s family.

  Alex had had only glancing contact with Esther’s family before the exacerbation. Sometimes Esther’s mother had been at her apartment when Alex had gone by, this staunch, sour-faced woman, utterly unlike her daughter, with a body like a block chipped off a mountain face.

  “It’s all right, don’t bother, I’ll do that,” she said if Alex made the least effort to help out. Invariably her eyes would go to the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket—he was the one, she seemed to say, he was the tempter, poisoning her daughter with nicotine and who-knew-what.

  But when Esther was in hospital he went by once to find the whole lot of them huddled in a little semicircle at the foot of her bed, her parents, Lenny, her sister Rachel, all of them standing there so silent and still he could hear the rise and fall of Esther’s breath.

  “She’s asleep,” Lenny whispered to Alex, and the whole group quietly shifted to accommodate him. For several minutes they stood there, in that same silence, making no effort, it seemed, either to bring Alex in or to close him out.

  Esther’s mother started to cry and her husband, with surprising gentleness, ushered her into the hall. He wasn’t the brash wheeler-dealer Alex had expected but a little gnome of a man, with the same slow, measured diction as Esther.

  Lenny had moved in close to Alex.

  “It’s great of you to come. It means a lot to us. Esther talks about you all the time.”

  So the door had opened and Alex had felt obliged to go through it, stuck trying to live up to the wildly inflated billing that Esther had given him. Lenny and Rachel, though they didn’t have a life-threatening illness to excuse it, had the same disconcerting tendency to praise that Esther did, so that the pressure only kept mounting.

  “It’s so great, everything you do for Esther,” Rachel said, when in his heart Alex knew that he was just a shirker. Rachel, meanwhile, who was all of seventeen, spent most of her evenings with Esther, and slept on her couch to be there when Molly arrived, and rode fifty minutes on transit every morning to get out to her CEGEP in Ville St. Laurent.

  Sometimes if Lenny spent the night, Alex stayed up with him after Esther had gone to bed to share the tail end of a joint.

  “I guess you didn’t know that Es used to be a real pothead,” Lenny said. “Mom used to find pot in her room all the time. Then one day she dropped out of school and moved out, just like that. You’d never think it was the same Es. She used to work at a jeans place on St. Catherine and hang around with this whole hippie crowd.”

  Lenny was an utterly regular guy, had gone to work for his father’s little investment firm straight out of university and was already balding and growing thick around the middle. But there was an unflappability to him that seemed somehow more than the sum of his parts. Esther treated him like her manservant whenever Alex was around, as if he was still the menial younger brother, though if Lenny took any umbrage at this he never showed it. He used to come around after work and on weekends to take Esther down to the building’s pool, though when it closed and they had to resort to the Y he’d have to take her out during the workday, since that was the only time the pool there wasn’t crowded with power swimmers or screaming children.

  “It’s fine, he can take the time,” Esther’s mother said, but it made more sense for Alex to take her out. He never got any work done during the day anyway—he’d piss around until mid-afternoon and then finally admit to himself that the day was a write-off and put off to the evening any plans for real work. Thus the Y had become his particular bailiwick. Esther, of course, was thrilled at the arrangement, which made him feel, each time he showed up for her, like the Gentleman Caller, come to show the youn
g cripple all she would know of romance.

  She sat patiently while Alex released the lock on her chair and maneuvered her out of the apartment, taking care not to bang into the walls. He was hoping Molly had already gone but she stood holding the elevator for them like a reproving parent. He miscalculated his distances angling Esther through the elevator door and ended up wedged into the corner with Molly. He had long ago given up trying to make conversation with Molly. Once he’d tried to talk to her about Filipino politics and she’d looked at him as if he was insane.

  “She doesn’t like to talk about that,” Esther had said afterward. “About politics. One of her brothers had to go to prison or something.”

  Fine. So she had secrets, then, she had complexities. That didn’t mean he had to be nice to her. It wasn’t as if she needed him—she seemed to have a whole network of so-called cousins that she was part of, women with whom she might or might not share actual genetic material but who seemed to function like a vast mutual aid society, passing children around, chasing off difficult husbands, preparing, for all he knew, for the Domestic Workers’ Revolution.

  “You can put her lotion after swimming,” Molly said, when they’d reached the street. “I put in the bag.”

  He didn’t dare set off until she had rounded the corner toward the metro and was out of sight.

  “Isn’t she great?” Esther said.

  Alex tried to clear his head. Lois was still jangling around in there, Jiri, his paella. When Jiri had gone, he’d got into the shower and the water had come out a trickle—he’d wanted to scream, to take a hammer to what remained of his mirror tiles, to Richard Shapiro’s head. He’d hurried down to the laundry afterward to throw in his sheets, reduced to putting dish detergent in with them because he’d run out of laundry soap, then had gone back up to his apartment to get a start on the paella only to discover that he’d forgotten to pick to up any saffron, the crucial ingredient.

  “What do you think she lives for?” he said of Molly, not especially kindly. “I mean, stuck here with no family or anything.”

  “Oh, she has children back in the Philippines,” Esther said.

  Alex, irritated, wondered why he hadn’t known this.

  “Who would leave their children like that?”

  “I know, it’s awful. She showed me pictures of them.”

  He could see them in his head, Molly’s little chiquillos, plump-cheeked from being overfed by their aunties and grandmas, but with that bit of hardness to them, because their mother had left them. It was depressing, that she’d had to abandon her kids on the other side of the globe to come and look after the kids of strangers. But then maybe she loved her life—she was free, had escaped her husband, her parents, her children, every expectation of what she should be.

  The sun was still out, but already the air had started to cool. Alex steered past the shops on St. Catherine, trying to stay out of the shadows. He could feel distinctly now the treacherous breath of the coming cold. It was hard to believe he’d been sweating like a workhorse only hours before.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Esther said, inhaling. “I love the smell of the fall.”

  The Y building on Stanley had the not unpleasant feel of a hospital or mission house, of a place where you could not actually be turned away. Alex resisted the urge to ask at the residence desk if Jiri had checked in, knowing in his gut that he’d gone back to bunk in his office. No matter: not his problem. He handed over Esther’s membership card and an attendant, this was the drill, followed them to the women’s change room to stand guard while Alex and Esther went in.

  He helped Esther shimmy out of her dress. She could manage most of this on her own except for getting it over her backside. Alex had to reach down the back of her wheelchair and pull while she raised one cheek, then the other. It felt intimate and wrong, all this tussling. Sometimes she stood, using her cane, though there was the danger then that she’d twist an ankle or slip on a patch of wet or simply crumple. None of these things had happened yet, but Alex felt the premonition of them.

  He was always relieved when she was finally in the pool. It wasn’t just that she was more in command there, but that the whole pool area was always crawling with trained professionals. That saved Alex actually having to suit up, which in any event would just have been a way of misleading people, like aping a few words of a language you didn’t otherwise understand. Unfortunately there was a new girl around lately, maybe all of nineteen, who was a real Ilsa-of-the-SS type, with a body like the bulked-up mutations you saw on Eastern bloc Olympic teams. Alex spotted her at the far end of the pool as he wheeled Esther out, surveying her dominions. Before he could look away she had caught his eye and laid claim to him with a peremptory nod.

  She took her time coming over, walking past them to the equipment area to grab a reach pole.

  “Give me a minute.”

  Esther, Alex imagined, was aware of Ilsa—whose name tag read “Sandy,” clearly a mistake—only as this pole, which Ilsa insisted on holding inches from Esther’s face the entire time Esther was in the pool, following her with punctilious attentiveness from the pool edge as if training a slow-witted seal. Alex had never seen Ilsa herself in the water, or so much as a speck of damp on her sexless East-bloc-issue one-piece.

  Alex went over to get a kickboard.

  “You know, she can’t keep coming here like this,” Ilsa said, fussily adjusting her pole.

  “Sorry?”

  “We’re not staffed for this. Sometimes she can barely make a lap.”

  The arrogance of it, Alex thought. The arrogance of health.

  “What exactly are you here for, then?”

  “I’m just saying we can’t take responsibility.”

  She had already turned to take up her position at the edge of the pool. Bitch. At least Esther hadn’t caught any of this.

  “Is everything all right?” she said.

  “She was just saying we’re a bit late, that’s all.”

  He helped her into the shallow end of the pool, crouching to steady her.

  “You okay?”

  “Actually, I have a disease. Ha ha.”

  He felt an instant’s panic when she pushed off, that her body would fail her. Then, on account of Ilsa, he could hardly bear to watch as she thrashed her way forward, though Ilsa had only said what he already knew. At some point, a ways back now, Esther had plateaued, had made whatever recovery she was likely to make from her exacerbation and then had started to slide again. Surely everyone knew this, even Esther, though he could see that in her heart, which she kept secret now, she had yet to stop hoping.

  There, she had made a lap. Maybe her will could still save her, maybe if she kept believing, if she kept her mind clear like some sort of Zen master, she could defeat this thing. But Alex knew that was bunk. Surely no one had believed as wildly as Esther had, as unreasonably, and still her illness had progressed.

  He ought to tell Esther’s family about Ilsa’s warning. But one hint of it to Esther’s mother, and that would be the end. He didn’t want to be the one to take this last thing from Esther, this last fight.

  “Pull up! Pull up!”

  It was Ilsa. Esther’s hand had slipped off her board, and right off Ilsa had started screaming at her like a banshee. God forbid she might actually have to get down into the water and do her job.

  She’d grabbed Esther’s arms and pulled her to the side of the pool.

  “Sir!” Every head in the room turned to him and knew his guilt. “I think you’d better give me a hand here!”

  It was like getting some huge fish out of the water, landing it trembling and wet. Alex had to struggle to avoid any sort of fleshly contact with Ilsa.

  “I had a spasm,” Esther said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” Alex said.

  To her credit, Ilsa had the good grace, at least, not to allude to her earlier warning. When they had Esther wrapped in a towel and back in her chair she abando
ned them with another tight nod. She was right, of course, he shouldn’t be bringing Esther here, forcing others to make decisions he hadn’t the courage to make himself.

  Esther was sitting hunched and shivering in her chair.

  “I guess we should go,” she said.

  “We just have to wait for the change room.”

  By now children of various sizes had started to come out for the after-school kiddie lessons, roving in indeterminate gangs around the pool deck or huddled up against the walls, pasty-skinned and shivering. In a matter of minutes the whole mood of the place had changed from no-nonsense adultness to the carnival air of a camp, kids squealing or flicking towels or hollering out in quick staccato to hear their voices echoing back in the cavernous chill. Around Esther, however, there remained a little island of empty terrain as if a force field protected her, the hallowed space of affliction, fascinating and terrible.

  Alex wheeled her toward the change room. A scrawny boy-geek came along not watching where he was going and practically ran right into them.

  “Oh!” He stared up wide-eyed into Esther’s wheelchaired eminence.

  “It’s all right,” Alex said, suppressing the urge to reach out to him.

  They had a hard time with Esther’s suit. He had to squeeze into her little cubicle with her, averting his eyes while he helped her.

  “It’s sticking. Just raise yourself up a bit.”

  It happened sometimes when she was tired like this that her flesh would lose all definition, become just a quavering mass.

  “There. I’ve got it.”