by Annabel Lyon
Her mother stared into her wine.
“What are you suggesting?” her father said.
Saskia didn’t know what she was suggesting. She knew that as she crossed the parking lot to her car after she came out of the mall, a man had taken one look at her and tripped over his own feet. Not something that had ever happened to Saskia.
Thank you, Jenny.
You’re welcome, my little chrysanthemum.
In the kitchen, the phone rang.
“That’ll be the office,” her father said. “Marcel’s held the fort as long as he can, but some of my files are getting urgent.”
Her mother reached for his hand, then Saskia’s. Saskia reached for her father’s other hand to close the circle. They sat at the table, listening to the phone ring.
“I’ll get it,” her mother said finally.
Saskia and her father let go of her hands, but continued to hold each other’s. They listened to her mother walk to the kitchen, pick up the receiver, and say her quiet hello.
“She’s drinking again,” her father said. “Well, I mean, she was before all this. Started again about a year ago.”
Saskia nodded.
“I’ve been looking at clinics.” He took her hand in both his, then spread her fingers to study her nails. He was carefully avoiding her eyes. “Detox. I think it might be time.”
Saskia nodded again. “That’s a really good idea, Daddy. I’ll help, any way I can.”
“You’re not going off the rails on me, are you?” He touched her nails gently, one by one, as though brushing away invisible dust. “Trying to turn yourself into your sister? I can hardly look at you.”
“I don’t want to be her,” Saskia said slowly. “But I want to—live for her. Look at me, Daddy. It’s me. It’s Saskia. I’m still here.”
Slowly he raised his eyes to hers.
“I know,” he said finally. “I’ll always know my Sassy.”
“Hugh!” their mother shouted.
“Damn that Marcel.” Her father let go of her hand.
Their mother appeared in the doorway. “Get your coats. Both of you.” The colour in her cheeks was high and her eyes were blazing. “Now, now! Where are the car keys?”
“Mom?”
“Mary. Mary, calm down.”
“I will not calm down.” Her mother’s face flowered into an incredulous smile. “That was the hospital. Jenny opened her eyes.”
* * *
—
Jenny’s hospital room was filled with white coats, which parted to let the family approach the bedside. Their mother cried out softly, and her father surged forward to take Jenny’s hand. She hadn’t moved, but her eyes were open. She seemed to see their father, but Saskia couldn’t tell if she recognized him. He stroked Jenny’s hair back from her forehead and leaned down to kiss her cheek. Their mother kissed her also, and then they moved aside for Saskia.
“Hi.” Saskia leaned down for her own kiss. “Welcome back.”
Jenny blinked. Her eyes moved—she was looking around the room—but there was no recognition, no light or spark there.
“Don’t be scared,” Saskia said.
Jenny looked at her.
“She may not recognize you right now.” A voice behind them; the family turned to this new authority. He shook each of their hands in turn. “Dr. Zhang, neurology. Opening her eyes is a great sign. We’re hopeful she’ll start to put things together over the next few weeks.”
“Weeks?” their mother said.
“In situations like this, nothing happens overnight.” This doctor looked not much older than Saskia. “Patients coming out of a coma usually experience a period of disorientation. It’s like waking up really slowly, and you’re not sure what’s still a dream and what’s real.”
“Can she move?” Saskia asked.
The doctor shook his head before she’d even finished the sentence. “But if she wakes up all the way, physiotherapy will start.”
“If?” their father said.
“Well, she could close her eyes again.” Doctor Zhang approached Jenny’s bedside. “I know in this moment it’s hard, but you have to manage your hopes. Sometimes the movement of the eyes is just a biological function, like a reflex. But her other vital signs are promising.” He spoke to Jenny directly. “We haven’t given up on you, not by a long shot, gorgeous.”
Jenny blinked.
“What do we do now?” Saskia asked.
“Well, we wait. And if she does close her eyes again, she might just be sleeping normally. Don’t expect, and don’t despair.”
While their father shook the doctor’s hand, Saskia leaned close to her sister. “I’ll come every day.”
* * *
—
The next morning, for the first time in a month, Saskia got in her car and drove to the University. Her parents had spent the night at the hospital, and she had promised to relieve them after lunch. She was wearing the new grey dress and Jenny’s blue leather jacket.
September’s gold had yielded to raw October. The leaves were coming down, and the weather had turned drizzly. Still, Saskia felt calm and focused in a way she hadn’t since the accident.
On 10th Avenue, just before the University gates, Saskia stopped at a patisserie for breakfast. Usually she had tea and toast at home, but this morning she wanted to celebrate. She took her almond croissant and café au lait to a table. Normally she would have pulled out a book or her laptop and eaten without noticing, putting the necessary calories into herself while she worked. This morning she forced herself to notice the sensations of eating: the shattering crispness of the croissant and the smoky, chocolaty taste of the coffee. Good coffee had many flavours in it, like wine—how had she never noticed this before?
“Saskia?”
She looked up from the tiny, sensual feast of her breakfast. It was Madame Brossard, who hesitated by her table with her own coffee and croissant.
“Is that you?”
Saskia touched her hair. “I got it cut.”
She made room at the table and gestured for her advisor to join her.
“You went missing,” Madame said reprovingly. “I almost sent out a search party.”
Saskia explained that her sister had been in an accident and she had spent the last couple of weeks at the hospital. Madame’s face hardened a little even as she reached for Saskia’s hand to give it a squeeze. It was a kind of French stoicism Saskia had noticed before, a sternness in the face of emotion.
“I will pray for her,” Madame said.
They talked then, with an intimacy that had never existed between them before. Madame described her father’s lingering death, the year before, from stomach cancer. She knew the hospital well. Saskia thought, but did not remark, that she had taken classes with Madame all last year and never suspected a thing. Saskia, in turn, confessed her profound unhappiness with her studies, her inability to articulate what she felt most passionate about, and the frustration of this.
“I thought you were lazy,” Madame said.
“I read and write and nothing comes together.” Saskia fiddled with her new bracelet, a simple silver chain. “I feel more and more like the books I’ve been reading aren’t the right ones. Camus, Sartre—I don’t know if I’m interested in despair or meaninglessness anymore. Is that awful?”
Madame laughed, a surprisingly low, sexy laugh, enhanced (Saskia guessed) by years of cigarettes. “Two-thirds of my graduate students want to read Camus. It is a stage they have to grow out of. Like, when you are a parent, the diapers.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“Me, I adore Camus. But true scholarship isn’t just admiration. One must be willing to turn the critical eye. Tell me, what perplexes you most in life?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Always I have thought that is an odd expres
sion in English. You mean to say I don’t understand, but instead you say I’m sorry. There is no shame in ignorance. No reason to apologize. What perplexes you? What do you not understand, such that you are driven to read so many books?”
“Loneliness,” Saskia said without thinking.
Madame clapped her hands. “Bravo. Now we are getting somewhere. You have made some changes to yourself. In the last few days, I think. Since I have last seen you. Since your sister’s accident, non?”
“Oui.” Saskia gave her a tiny, wry smile.
“Alors. Your sister’s condition leads you to thoughts of the body, pleasure, sensuality. I see your hair, your clothes, I watched you eat your croissant before I came over. Loneliness sends you into your body instead of your brain, now, and this is new for you, I think.”
“Very new,” Saskia admitted.
“I was once the mistress of an older man.” Madame rested her chin in her hand and Saskia saw in her face the ghost of a much younger woman. “In Paris. He was an intellectual, very famous. If I said his name to you, you would know it. Academically, it was the most fruitful period of my life. Incredibly productive. We fought about everything, like a pair of lobsters. After, I utterly changed the course of my thesis.”
“Because of him?”
“Because of me.” Madame tapped a fingernail on the tabletop. “I am remembering a paper you wrote me two years ago, while you were still an undergraduate. A paper on Laclos. Do you remember it? You still have a copy?”
Saskia nodded.
“You will give it to Professor Taillac. He, too, is interested in loneliness. He will be interested in meeting with you.”
* * *
—
When she got to Jenny’s bedside that afternoon, her parents told her that Jenny had slept for a while, then opened her eyes again. They had tried to get her to communicate by blinking—one for yes, two for no—but so far she didn’t seem to understand.
“Brain damage is a real possibility,” their father said.
“Are you wearing Jenny’s jacket?” their mother said.
“She gave it to me,” Saskia said.
After they left, Saskia sat in the teal chair. “My thesis advisor wants to drop me. She wants me to go to Taillac. You remember I told you about him?”
Jenny didn’t move.
“Because of an undergrad paper I wrote after we rented Les Liaisons dangereuses. I’m so screwed.”
Jenny blinked.
“She thinks I need to abandon existentialism all together. She thinks I should focus on the erotics of loneliness.”
Jenny blinked.
“Erotica, sure. Taillac? Stab me in the eye with a fork.” Saskia dug in her purse and produced the chrome tube. “Look what I brought you.” She uncapped it and waved it under her sister’s nose. Jenny closed her eyes, then opened them. She blinked.
“I miss you,” Saskia said.
Jenny blinked again.
“Are you doing that on purpose?”
Jenny blinked.
Saskia felt the breath go out of her. “You can hear me?”
Jenny blinked.
“Can I have your jacket?”
Jenny blinked twice. Saskia laughed so hard the nurses came running.
* * *
—
In the days that followed, they learned—finally—the true nature of Jenny’s condition. She was “locked in”; that was the medical term. Her brain, her mind, her consciousness, her soul, whatever you wanted to call it, was intact. But because of the damage to her brain stem sustained in the accident, she couldn’t speak, eat, move, or do anything by herself. She could communicate only by blinking, a process so painfully slow that Saskia got used to seeing tears creep down Jenny’s cheeks as she struggled to make herself understood. A feeding tube pumped nourishment directly into her stomach and a ventilator helped her breathe. She drooled constantly. Her lips and chin became chapped and sore.
One day a hospital speech therapist came by and taught the family a code to make communication easier. The therapist had rearranged the letters of the alphabet in the order they most commonly appeared in English: E-T-A-O-N-R-I-S-H-D and so on. Now Jenny could spell out words. They would read the code to her, slowly, until she blinked at a letter. They would write that letter down, and start again.
The first word Jenny spelled was love. The second was pain.
CHAPTER FOUR
At first, Saskia’s conversations with Jenny were frustrating. She had to learn not to try to finish words for her sister, to distinguish purposeful blinks from eye-clearing blinks, not to rush through the alphabet, not to ask her too many questions at once. Some days Jenny refused to cooperate, and in the hallways the nurses would whisper to her that Jenny was depressed. On those days, Saskia would hold up books and magazines until Jenny blinked her consent, and then she would read to her. They’d leaf through Vogue together and the New Yorker—Jenny’s subscriptions—and Saskia brought in travel guides to Italy, Jenny’s favourite country. She was well aware that to the nurses this looked like a kind of cruelty, but Jenny had told her once—blinked at her—that her imagination was all she had now, and when she had no visitors she would travel in her mind.
Saskia asked what she remembered about the accident; nothing, Jenny claimed. It was hard at the best of times to tell when Jenny was lying. Impossible, now.
Their father had gone back to work the way a pit bull goes back to a mailman’s leg—grim, ferocious, unrelenting, joyless. He used work, now that Jenny’s condition appeared fixed, to avoid the hospital. Their mother continued to visit regularly, but was refusing rehab for herself. She would sit at Jenny’s bedside, but couldn’t get the hang of the alphabet code and would only read children’s books to her, because she didn’t want to “upset” Jenny. Most often she would sit holding Jenny’s hand and staring into space, sipping from her travel mug, until it was time to take a taxi home. She no longer drove.
On Jenny’s orders, Saskia resumed her classes. You need something else to do, Jenny said. It was hard enough babysitting you when I wasn’t like this. That had been a bad day: Jenny depressed and cruel, Saskia crying in the hospital washroom. But Saskia quickly realized the time apart was good for them both. School was different now. Saskia wore her sister’s clothes, spent less time in the library, and even went on a date.
Saskia told Jenny about how she had met Joel in seminar—he was a recently arrived transfer student from Moncton—and how after their second class they had made their ways, separately, to a campus café, where Saskia was emboldened to approach him by the prospect of entertaining Jenny with the story later. How long his eyelashes were, and how he had stuttered, actually stuttered, when he asked her to go to a movie with him.
“A matinee.” Saskia smiled wryly. She could almost hear Jenny’s voice: Ah, matinees. The quickest way to a girl’s chrysanthemum.
“I think I might actually have to make the first move,” Saskia said.
It was one of Jenny’s better days. Saskia held up the code board and eventually Jenny spelled out, $10 no kiss xmas.
“You’re on.” Saskia pulled a ten from her purse and tucked it into the book they’d been reading, for a bookmark. She took a tissue and wiped Jenny’s mouth, then took up the board again.
Bracelet.
Saskia held up her arm to show her—a jade bangle. “Do you like it?”
Jenny blinked. Saskia took it off and clasped it around Jenny’s wrist. Now Jenny owed her.
* * *
—
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear the same thing twice,” Joel said to her, the second time they went out. The matinee, a documentary about a little-known jazz musician, had led to this second date, beer and burgers at a pub just off campus. Joel, endearingly, had dressed up, in a black shirt, black sweater, and brown cords. Saskia wore jeans and a bla
ck silk top artfully slashed with deep, narrow v’s between the breasts, over one shoulder, down her spine. Over this she wore Jenny’s softest, demurest pink cardigan, as well as knee-high black patent-leather boots.
“A lot of what I wear is my sister’s,” she admitted.
Joel smiled. “I have sisters. I’ve seen them fight over clothes. She doesn’t mind, your sister?”
Saskia looked at her lap.
“Did I say something wrong?”
She looked up again and saw that Joel looked stricken. This was the moment, the cusp. She could be honest with him, or she could pretend, the way she’d been pretending with everyone else who looked at her and saw her sister, and she hadn’t set them straight.
“Hey.” He reached across the table, tentatively, and touched her hand. “Are you crying?”
“Little bit.”
He gave her his napkin, and didn’t let go of her hand while she dabbed her eyes and nose. When she was able to speak again, she told him the whole story.
“My god.” He shook his head, again and again. “Saskia, my god. I had no idea.”
“It’s been five weeks. We’re still figuring out how to—I don’t even know what. How to carry on, I guess. My parents aren’t doing too well. And I’m wearing my sister’s clothes, so whatever that says about me—”
“That says you love her.”
Saskia felt a flash of weary irritation. She had spent her entire life being told how close she and Jenny were, how much they loved each other, how she was Jenny’s rock. The truth was so much more complicated than that. Of course she and Jenny were closer to each other than anyone else. That closeness didn’t shield her from Jenny’s manipulations, her cruelty. Of course Saskia loved Jenny. That didn’t mean she wasn’t also frightened of her, and frightened for her, even before the accident. Jenny was the kind of person who could fly away or go up in flames at any moment. It was exhausting to be her counterweight, her rock, her extinguisher, her control. Not to know—when she didn’t come home—whether that meant an all-nighter at work, or a date, or an impetuous trip to San Francisco because Jenny had been driving to the dentist and got distracted by the signs pointing to the airport.
