by Alix Ohlin
A few days later, Thomasie appeared in Mitch’s doorway. He was wearing the same outfit as last time, and his lips were just as chapped.
“Come in, sit down,” Mitch said calmly. “How’s it going?”
“My mom’s worse,” the boy said. “She’s like in a coma or something. I think she doesn’t want to wake up.”
“I don’t know if that’s how it works,” Mitch said.
“It seems that way to me,” the kid said.
“What do the doctors say?”
Thomasie seemed not to register the question, intent instead on telling Mitch what he’d come to say. “They said I should stop visiting her so much. That maybe I should go stay with my dad.”
Mitch wasn’t sure why anybody would tell a kid to stop coming to the hospital, but maybe getting out of town for a while wasn’t such a terrible idea. “What about that?” he said. “Going down south for a little bit.”
Thomasie rolled up the sleeve of his windbreaker and held out his forearm, where there was a whorl of white scar tissue, raised and bumpy, in the crook of his elbow. “My father,” he said.
Mitch’s heart sank. “Did you tell any—”
The boy was shaking his head. “That’s family business,” he said.
Mitch sat there gathering his thoughts. When he was here last time, Thomasie must have been one of those little kids he’d seen running around, apparently joyful. And his father, whom Mitch didn’t remember, would’ve been a teenager with a family, playing basketball in the local league before going home to take out his anger on the children he’d had too soon. Mitch had been inside a number of homes in Iqaluit, and met people who’d drawn close together despite having no jobs or money, who cared for their families and sheltered relatives in need of help, who scraped together enough to buy school supplies for their kids. He’d also seen homes that weren’t so lucky, where things had gotten out of control. All it took was one haywire generation and sometimes there was no coming back from that—especially for the kids. Thomasie’s home must have been one of those, but it was pretty rare to come out of a place like that as well spoken and personable as he was, and rarer still to appeal to someone like Mitch for help. To have the wherewithal, or the desperation.
“Could you tell the doctors I don’t have to go?” Thomasie was saying. “Maybe you could talk to them.”
“Why?” Mitch said. The question came out sounding unkind, even cruel, but he just didn’t know what the boy hoped he could accomplish. He instantly felt ashamed, with Thomasie’s bright black eyes searching his face for a response. “All right,” he said.
The boy nodded, then abruptly ran out of the room, maybe afraid that if he stayed too long Mitch might change his mind.
There was a lull before Mitch’s next appointment, and he looked out the window, thinking, his gaze fixed on nothing. There was a febrile quality to the boy, a stoppered intensity no doubt born of grief. Mitch knew he was walking into an explosive situation, something almost impossible to handle easily or well, and it gave him the same sense of excitement and danger another person might find in hang gliding or drugs. In falling in love with the wrong person. In falling in love with the right person.
He sat daydreaming of Martine and Mathieu in happier times, the long weekends of dinosaur trivia and Frisbee playing. He missed them, but his longing had less to do with geography than with his demonstrated ability, in spite of all his best intentions, to fuck things up. They still hadn’t spoken. She was punishing him for leaving, and for everything that had happened before he left. It was like they were having a conversation. His leaving and her not calling when he was reachable were remarks, just as surely as if they’d been talking it through. In this back-and-forth, it was only a question of who would budge first—and he had a feeling that it wouldn’t be Martine.
Mitch had been with them for over two years when it happened. It was March, with winter still holding on tight and squeezing out one snowstorm after another, as if trying to build to some grand finale. Mitch’s coworkers took turns going on vacation to Florida or the Bahamas, returning five days later with sunburns and airs of grim disappointment that winter hadn’t given up and vanished while they were out of town. But Mathieu loved snow and playing in the park and never seemed to feel the cold, even when his lips were turning blue and his teeth were chattering. When Martine told him it was time to come in, he would tremble with rage, as if she were robbing him of his most precious possession, then slip loose and run away. And when she finally caught up with him he’d flail his fists, hitting her wherever he could, and Mitch could tell that it hurt her both emotionally and physically. Afterward, when she finally got him home and in bed, she would be exhausted. Mitch brought her tea and stroked her hair, and sometimes held her while she cried.
With him, Mathieu was calmer. He had moved on from dinosaurs to particle physics, and to Mitch he seemed like a genius. He could explain the principles of nuclear fission for an hour, describing its various complexities, and it didn’t matter whether Mitch responded or not. If, however, he left the room, Mathieu would get upset, so he took to reading the newspaper in the boy’s room while these lectures were delivered.
This wasn’t a perfect life; he knew it wasn’t what Martine had once imagined; but it had its own warmth and pulse and pleasures.
Then, one Saturday, the three of them went to the Biodome, an indoor zoo that featured four different habitats, with corresponding flora and fauna, and visitors could walk from one to the next, trading tropical humidity for frigid Arctic air. As ever, Martine was hoping that this new experience might open Mathieu up, move him beyond physics. And at first, things went well. After the cold outside, the warm, wet air made them feel like they were on holiday. They walked through the rain forest, glimpsing birds high above in the trees and enormous capybaras in the streams below. Mathieu held Martine’s hand without complaint. Then he spotted something in the thick leaves overhead—a tamarin monkey, scampering, just barely visible, its golden-brown fur flashing against the trunk of a tree. Mathieu wanted to touch it, to play with it, for his mother to buy it for him and take it home with them. Martine patiently explained that the monkey wasn’t a pet or for sale, that it was happy in this rain forest but wouldn’t be in their apartment, which was too cold and didn’t have any trees.
None of these arguments made sense to him. “Singe! Singe!” he screamed, and Mitch wondered if Mathieu not only wanted the monkey but somehow identified with it, seeing himself up there, loose and wild and uncontained.
Around them families scurried away, eager to distance themselves from the howling boy, lest his behavior prove contagious. Mitch tried to distract him by talking about the snakes in the next room, but that didn’t work. Then he made the worst mistake of all, a gesture he replayed in his mind for weeks to come: he took hold of his shoulder, hoping to steer him toward a new attraction and change the scene. But Mathieu screamed even louder, wrenched himself free, and darted away. When Martine reached out to catch him, he pushed back—in a fit like this he was curiously strong—and knocked her right over the railing behind them, onto a steep, rocky slope. Unable to break her fall, she slipped and then rolled on her side, her hands grasping at air, down to the bottom. People were yelling and pointing, and Mitch instinctively grabbed Mathieu. When the boy tried to pull away, Mitch yanked his arm and heard—over the commotion of the crowd and the upset chattering of the monkeys—the soft pop of his shoulder dislocating.
Mathieu’s pretty face went white with shock and pain, and then he fainted.
Later, in the hospital, they popped Mathieu’s arm back into joint and bandaged Martine’s sprained ankle. Despite the relatively minor injuries, all of this took hours, and Martine refused to leave Mathieu alone with Mitch, who told her, over and over, “I’m so sorry, it was an accident.”
Each time she just shook her head, as if trying to clear her ears, without saying a word. She didn’t tell him to go, and by the end of the night he realized why. Because of her sprained ri
ght ankle, she needed him to drive them home. She was very practical, Martine. When they reached the apartment, she said, “I think we need to be alone tonight,” and he walked back to his place in what turned into an ice storm, the freezing rain pelting his coat.
Though he called Martine the next day to apologize yet again, and swore he wouldn’t let the incident dislodge him from their lives, things did change; cracks soon filtered across the surface of a situation that had been delicate to begin with. But they weren’t the cracks he’d anticipated.
The next weekend, he went over to cook them dinner. He hadn’t seen Martine, but they had spoken on the phone, their conversations scattered and filled with pauses that she blamed on the pain relievers she was taking for her ankle. When he showed up, it was Mathieu who came to the door. In Mitch’s thoughts the boy had loomed larger, stronger, and more demonic, and it was a shock to see how fragile he was, so clearly a child.
“Hey,” he said.
“Je peux faire un ruban de Möbius. Venez voir,” Mathieu said, turning around and walking back to his room as if nothing had ever happened. Mitch watched him twist the strip of paper for a while, the accompanying recitation high-pitched and breathless, and then said, “I’m going to say hi to your mother for a minute.” Mathieu didn’t respond, though he stopped talking, his small hands still turning the paper around.
In the kitchen Martine was drinking what looked to be, given her violet smile, a third or fourth glass of wine. She waved at him sloppily, hopping around to set the table. As he leaned over to kiss her cheek, she banged her hip against a chair and said, “Ow. Shit.”
That was their hello.
He told her to sit down while he made the pasta Bolognese, and she sat there chattering about their follow-up visits to the doctors and funny things Mathieu had said about her sprained ankle—a performance so untypical that it filled him with dread, and he sank into silence when she called Mathieu to the table. She kept it up all during dinner, joking with Mathieu and tousling his hair until he solemnly told her to stop. After five bites he asked to be excused, and she let him go. She didn’t eat much either.
Mitch washed the dishes and prepared to leave, the sorrow of endings pressing down on his heart. He felt sure he would never see any of it again: the tiny, cozy kitchen with its tomato-red walls, Martine’s handwriting on refrigerator-hung lists, Mathieu’s science books stacked on the counter.
Martine was in the bedroom, and when he went in to say good night she kissed him with her wine-dark mouth. He tasted the salt of tears. She dragged him to the bed and down on top of her, her hands under his sweater scratching his back, her good leg slipping over the back of his jeans. In all the time they’d spent together, she’d rarely initiated anything, and never had she shown such pulsing lust and desperation. She had his sweater and shirt off now and was trying to remove her own, but her elbow got snagged in the sleeve of her cardigan and caught him squarely in the face, knocking off his glasses.
“Fuck me,” she said. She was still crying.
“Martine, my love,” Mitch said, kissing her wet, crinkled cheek.
He was slipping in and out of her without rhythm or traction, trying and failing to match the jerking, spastic motion of her hips. She was crying harder now, practically choking, so Mitch slipped out and put his arms around her. He didn’t know what else to do. It was as if the Martine he knew was dissolving. She shifted until her back was to him, then curled into herself, her knees meeting her chin. He was shushing and comforting her, muttering gentle and meaningless sounds, when he heard a small noise behind him, lifted his head to look, and saw Mathieu silhouetted in the doorway.
The boy stared at him, his blue eyes open and frightened. Mitch watched anxiously, waiting for him to explode, but he just stood there, his gaze never once moving from Mitch’s face, even to examine his mother’s hidden, shuddering figure. Then he padded back down the hallway to his room.
Martine was whispering to her knees. He bent closer, curling himself around her protectively, bark on her tree. Only when he pressed his cheek against hers could he make out what she was saying. He’d thought she was talking to herself, but she was speaking in English and, therefore, to him.
“Please don’t leave me,” she said.
It was the last thing he’d expected her to say. What could he do? As her tears dried, he curled even closer. He didn’t leave. He told her he never would.
If only he could have stayed right there with her forever, inside that moment of calm. But life wasn’t like that; it was work and cooking and mothering and chores, and Martine went back to all these things, soldiering through. He did his best to help her, but something had shifted between them. A dam had broken and he understood only now that she had kept him at bay for so long because behind that dam was a raging torrent of water that could swamp them both. She needed him. She started calling him every night at ten, after Mathieu had gone to sleep, to talk about her day. This he loved, but she never wanted to get off the phone. What she wanted, he finally realized, was to drift into sleep with the phone against her cheek, with him murmuring reassurances. Before long he was spending Wednesday nights, and then Thursday nights, at her apartment, where he would murmur those same reassurances in person.
That crying fit was never repeated, but he sometimes woke up in the middle of the night to go to the washroom, and when he came back he’d notice, in the bedroom’s dim light, the glint of tears on her face. The idea that she was crying in her sleep broke his heart.
Soon he was spending all his time at their place, his own apartment gathering dust.
They talked about everything, constantly hashing things out. They discussed what had happened in the zoo, how angry she had been at him and Mathieu and how oppressive that anger was, how much he regretted what he’d done, how sorry he still felt. She said she forgave him. All he had to do to stay in her good graces, it seemed, was to listen. Martine could talk about the stress of raising Mathieu for hours, could dissect the minutiae of his sentences and gestures and bowel movements. After the first of these sessions, she put her arms around his neck and thanked him.
“For what?” he said.
“For listening. For being here. I need you so much.”
These were exactly the words he’d been aching to hear for so long; but now that he heard them, the effect wasn’t what he expected. This had to do with Mathieu. Mitch couldn’t get over—and would never admit to Martine—how, that afternoon in the zoo, he had been so blinded with rage and protectiveness that in another second he would’ve knocked Mathieu to the ground. He’d thought he loved the child, but in that instant recognized the truth: he only put up with him, for her sake.
He was so disappointed in himself, so ashamed, that he began to crave escape. All through April and into May, nestling into the apartment while spring came, taking Mathieu to the park on weekends, attending the year-end concert at his school, lying in bed with this lovely, heartbreakingly vulnerable woman in his arms, he thought constantly about getting away.
He told Martine that the call to come north came out of the blue, and this was true enough—but only after weeks of dropping subtle hints and sending friendly e-mails to acquaintances he hadn’t spoken to in ages, just to keep his name in their minds. And when he told Martine he was thinking of going but wanted to talk it over with her first, even as he said it he knew that he’d already made up his mind.
On a gloomy Thursday morning he met Thomasie Reeves outside the hospital where his mother lay in a coma. They had arranged this over the phone, the boy’s voice slow and stilted, as if it were coming from another continent. He seemed to think that Mitch could convince the doctors of what he couldn’t, and that everything would change once Mitch had seen his mother for himself. As he approached that morning, sidling up the street in the same sideways, loping stride Mitch had noted from his office window, the smell of marijuana was almost overwhelming. Thomasie seemed bathed in it, his eyes red, his expression muted, his whole personality turned dow
n a notch. Mitch’s heart went out to him; if this were his mother, he would’ve wanted to numb himself too.
He reached out his hand and Thomasie stared at it for a second, in confusion or fascination, before shaking it; then they went inside. The nurses walking past smelled the pot, and one of them grimaced in disapproval. Mitch shot her a look, and she rolled her eyes. In the waiting room, a father sat cradling a sick girl maybe two or three years old; his face was impassive, the child’s cheeks flushed a dark, unhealthy red. Opposite them, an old woman had fallen asleep with her round face dropped against her chest.
Thomasie, his face intent, led Mitch down a dim linoleum hallway without saying anything. He was wearing the same windbreaker, over which he’d slung a blue backpack. Beneath the pot was another, gamy odor, and his hair hung limp and thin. Mitch wondered if anyone was taking care of him—telling him to bathe, making sure he got something to eat. Every time Mitch had seen him there were dark circles under his eyes.
Thomasie stopped at a closed door, then opened it. Inside there were two beds, one of them empty, and the woman in the other had to be the boy’s mother. According to the newspaper, Gloria Reeves was only thirty-nine, but she looked much older, her face mottled and creased. Mitch glanced at Thomasie, who had wanted so desperately to come; he was standing uncertainly at the foot of the bed.
His mother’s eyes were closed, and she was hooked up to an IV and a monitor that indicated her heartbeat. It took Mitch a moment to register that the index and third fingers of her right hand and a chunk of her ear were missing, lost to frostbite. The tip of her nose was black. Though her breathing was labored, she seemed composed and too still, like a wax figure someone had arranged into position.
