by Alix Ohlin
Mitch saw a doctor passing by outside and, after nodding to Thomasie, stepped out in the hall. He had met him a few days ago, a genial, outdoorsy young man from Victoria who was just out of medical school and on a year’s rotation in the Arctic.
“Bobby,” Mitch said, “how are you?”
In response, the doctor not only shook his hand but also grasped his upper arm, his eyes flickering with concern. “I see you’re here with Thomasie,” he said. “You know, we asked him not to come by so much.”
“Why would you tell a kid not to visit his mother?”
“He’s disruptive,” Bobby said. “He comes here stoned, even gets in bed with her. Sometimes he’s drunk and yelling at the doctors. It upsets the other patients. And God knows it’s not helping his mother, no matter how out of it she is.”
“What’s her condition?”
“Bad,” Bobby said flatly. “I mean, of course there’s a one-in-a-million chance. But her brain was probably damaged irreparably by those hours in the snow.”
“So she’ll stay in that bed forever?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. She’s deteriorating, and I don’t think there’s much functioning neural activity. Thomasie gets excited because her eyes open sometimes, but that’s just muscle reflex. It doesn’t indicate anything significant.”
When Mitch nodded, Bobby clapped him on the arm and strode off down the hall, whistling a little, young and vigorous.
When he stepped back inside he was surprised by what he saw in the dim light. Thomasie was half lying on the bed, with his legs on the floor and his upper body pressed against his mother’s, his head buried in the crook of her neck. Then, sensing Mitch’s return, he got up, keeping his eyes averted, and tucked something under her pillow—a small bottle of rye he must have had in his backpack. He glanced over at Mitch but didn’t say anything, and they left the room.
Once they were outside, Mitch said, “Maybe you shouldn’t visit quite so often, Thomasie. I’m not sure it’s helping her.”
The boy shrugged bashfully, as if he’d been complimented. “I don’t mind,” he said, “I don’t have much else to do.” He finally looked Mitch in the eye. “Talk to them,” he said. “Tell them I like coming here.” Then he walked away, his shoulders hunched against the wind.
A few days passed in which he didn’t see or hear from Thomasie. Then, one windy Friday afternoon, in between appointments, he got a call from the doctor.
“Just thought you should know,” Bobby said, “that Gloria Reeves died this morning. Her organs finally shut down. Thomasie was with her.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Mitch said. “How’d Thomasie seem?”
“He took it very quietly. Didn’t say much. Maybe he’ll do better now that she’s not just hanging on.”
“Maybe,” Mitch said, and hung up, finding the doctor’s optimism so misplaced as to be offensive. He sat there alone in his office thinking about the woman asleep in the snow, her tiny daughter shivering against her cold skin. The world was white. It made him ache for Martine and Mathieu, but when he called, there was no answer in Montreal. She was probably just screening his calls.
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.
“I’m happy for you, Mitch,” she said wearily.
They’d stopped calling each other by their first names long ago, using nicknames and endearments instead, and his name falling from her lips now sounded strangely formal, distancing, even bruising. He sighed. “How’s Mathieu?”
“He’s made a friend.”
“Really? How did that happen?” Friendship wasn’t a social need Mathieu understood.
“At camp. His name is Luc. He comes over and plays on his PlayStation while Mathieu plays on his Xbox. They never talk. But they like sitting there together. Mathieu even asks me to invite Luc over.”
“Martine, that’s great. Really amazing.”
There was a pause on the other end. It could have been that she didn’t believe him, or that hearing him say “Martine” instead of “sweetheart” was as jarring to her as it had been to him. And possibly she was thinking, You should be here to see it.
“I have to go,” Martine said. “I need to get dinner.”
“Okay,” he said. “I can’t wait to see you—just three more weeks.” He was sticking to the fiction that theirs was a difficult but necessary separation, enforced by external circumstances over which he had no control, to be followed by a romantic reunion at the end of his rotation.
“I have to tell you,” she said, “I’m seeing someone else.”
“No,” he said without even thinking. He couldn’t imagine this. “I don’t believe you.”
She laughed. “You don’t have to. It’s true whether you believe it or not.”
“Is it that guy Michel at your office? Because you know he’s an asshole, Martine.”
“It’s not Michel. It’s Dr. Vendetti, actually.”
This was a name he’d never heard. “Who?”
“He’s my gynecologist.”
This information silenced him. There was so much to take in, all of it bad. That he had never once thought, in all their time together, about Martine even having a gynecologist made him dizzy with remorse. There was so much in her life he hadn’t paid attention to. And then there was the image, undesired but fully resolved, of Martine with her legs spread in stirrups, leaning back while this man put his hand inside her. He would have done anything, in that moment, to have her back, to have never left her—and this, he knew, is why she had told him.
“I have to go now,” she said. “Dinner, like I said. Take care.”
He was formulating exactly what to say next when he realized she’d hung up.
Mitch was a man of moderate habits. He didn’t smoke, rarely overate, walked as much as he could. So it took very little, when the need arose, to obliterate him.
To accomplish this goal, he bought two bottles of whiskey and invited Johnny to play cards. A short hour later he was twenty dollars down and felt the room temperature rising, so he took off his sweater. Seated across the table, Johnny smiled enigmatically, his freckled cheeks flushed red, the smoke from his continual cigarettes wreathing him cloudily, so that he looked like a magician or a wizard.
“You don’t drink much, do you?”
“I drink a regular amount.”
“You’re drunk now, and you’ve only had one drink.”
“Didn’t I have two?”
“And it isn’t easy to lose twenty bucks at gin rummy.”
“You,” Mitch said drunkenly, “are a damn card shark.”
Johnny shrugged and poured him another drink.
Mitch fought the urge to weep and tell him that he was his only friend. But it was true; in this place, right now, he was. Johnny won another twenty dollars before Mitch passed out.
It had been so long since he was hungover that he didn’t recognize the terrible commotion in his bloodstream. He thought he had food poisoning, then remembered he hadn’t eaten dinner. There was a terrible smell in the room, and when he opened his eyes he saw he’d thrown up into a bucket that Johnny must have left by his bed for just that purpose. Aching from his neck to his knees, he felt like he had a fever, so physically terrible that he couldn’t even think about Martine. Disgust—with himself, his body, and his behavior—was the closest thing to an emotion that he could summon.
Which was to say that things had worked out perfectly.
He had the day off and thought he might lie around in bed all morning, go for a walk in the afternoon, then see if Johnny was up for another night of drinking. If he could drink himself into oblivion for a couple of nights, his mind and heart might start healing, and he could sober up feeling better about Martine and Mathieu and himself. Or feeling nothing at all.
The light streaming through the thin white curtains hurt his head, and he thought about turning over, then decided this was too drastic a course of action, with potentially awful consequences. His stomach wavered unhappily, and he closed his eyes.
“You did a number on yourself,” a voice said.
He looked up to see Johnny standing next to the bed,
silhouetted in the window, whose curtains he’d just thrown open.
“Get up,” he said. He seemed towering, mountainous. He left the room—for good, Mitch hoped—but was back all too soon with a can of Pepsi and several pills, which Mitch swallowed without asking what they were.
“You’ll feel better soon,” Johnny said.
“Thanks.” He was sitting up in bed now, pillows propped behind his back, feeling a sense of accomplishment for having made it halfway horizontal. Johnny sat by him for a while in silence. Every few minutes he handed him the can of Pepsi and told him to take a sip, more solicitous than Mitch would have imagined possible. As his headache slowly ebbed, Mitch realized that Johnny was waiting for the pills to take effect.
The can was half empty when Johnny said, “Heard the news this morning. About the kid you were telling me about last night. Thomasie.”
Mitch opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He closed it again, tasting on his tongue the sick trace of whiskey, the sugary bite of Pepsi. It was too early for him to feel anything yet, and he let this moment linger, knowing that soon he would feel altogether too many things. “What has he done?”
“He drank a pint of vodka and stepped onto the highway in front of a truck in the middle of the night. The trucker’s in the hospital. No note or anything.”
And there it was. Another terrible thing in a world already sick to death of terrible things. I should kill myself too, Mitch thought. His shoulders shook, and he welcomed the coming sobs—but what happened instead was a shudder of his stomach, and the Pepsi and pills lurched back out, strands of spittle webbing the bucket and his sleeves.
“I know you tried to help him,” Johnny said, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“I didn’t do any good.”
Johnny took him by the hand, as if he wanted to hold it, but then curled his palm around the still-cold Pepsi can and said, “I’ll let you get dressed,” and left the room.
