by Annabel Lyon
“I hated her,” Saskia said. “Sometimes. We always knew something was wrong, but the doctors wouldn’t diagnose her until she was an adult. They said she might outgrow her symptoms. She never cared about other people, about pleasing them or hurting them. She stole both my high school boyfriends just because she could. She could be violent when we were little, but that faded away.”
Joel shook his head.
“She’s no danger to anyone but herself. She’s always had trouble controlling her impulses, trouble staying with one thing—one job, one relationship. She doesn’t much care about anyone’s feelings but her own. But she’d been doing really well, keeping her appointments with the therapist and holding a job. She was even talking about moving out of our parents’ house, getting an apartment somewhere. Before the accident.”
Joel shook his head. “I don’t know what to say.”
No one ever knew what to say; she was used to that too. “You could tell me about your sisters.”
They talked for another hour, Joel idly stroking her fingers. Outside, though, he didn’t try to hold her hand. They got in Saskia’s car and she offered to drop him anywhere he wanted to go.
“Oh, anywhere on Granville. I can grab a bus home from there.”
She reached across him, opened the glove box, clicked it closed, and started the engine.
“Why do you do that? That thing with the glove box.”
“Nervous habit, I guess.”
“Are you worried it’s going to fall open while you’re driving?”
“No.” Saskia rolled her window down, but didn’t pull out of their parking spot. “It’s a trick my dad taught me, okay? To control your emotions. You put what you’re feeling in a box, and you close it firmly. Then you can function.”
Joel laughed. “You know that’s pretty neurotic, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
While she drove to Granville, they planned their next date, a bike ride along the beach the following weekend. At the bus stop, he leaned over and kissed the top of her head, then blushed pink and hopped out of the car before she could respond.
* * *
—
Professor Taillac was an asshole.
“Cécile is giving me her dregs again.” He looked over Saskia’s plan of study. “I’m not interested in this existentialist shit.”
“Neither am I,” Saskia said. Taillac raised his eyebrows. “I need to start over.”
Taillac might have been sixty, but he wore it like forty-five. He had the decaying looks of a fading movie star, and a reputation for sleeping with his students. Saskia knew she had nothing to fear from him, though: he liked them dumb and pretty. To him, Saskia was work, only work.
“I’m interested in the intersection of solitude and physical sensation in literature, particularly eighteenth-century literature. Prévost, Laclos, writers like that.”
He stared at her for a long time across his big oak desk. She forced herself to meet his gaze.
“Well, what?” he said finally. “Go write me a paper or something. I’m interested in oysters for lunch. That doesn’t give us anything to talk about right now, either.”
* * *
—
When Saskia arrived at the hospital the next day, a man she’d never seen before was sitting at Jenny’s bedside with the code board. He wore light blue hospital scrubs.
“You must be Saskia.” He rose and held out his hand. “Jenny’s told me about you.”
Saskia channelled Professor Taillac, and raised her eyebrows.
“I’m her speech therapist. I’ve been assigned her case. Mostly we’re working on swallowing at the moment. We tried a little yoghurt this morning and that didn’t go so well, did it? But we’ll keep trying. You’re twins?”
“Hi,” Saskia said to Jenny. “Sorry I’m late. I had a meeting with Taillac. Yes, twins.” She turned to the speech therapist. She saw his eyes flicker across Jenny’s monitors, then back to her. “She has a feeding tube.”
“She told me she wanted pudding.”
Saskia looked at Jenny, who blinked once. Pudding had been her favourite dessert when she was little.
“Typically, when we’re reintroducing solids, we start with yoghurt and work our way up from there. Even if she still gets the bulk of her nourishment from the tube, it’s nice to taste a bit of something.”
When the speech therapist had left, Saskia said, “You’ve made a friend.”
Jealous?
“Surprised.”
He’s all right. Doesn’t talk down to me.
“I’m sorry the yoghurt didn’t work out.”
Next time.
* * *
—
Professor Taillac was an asshole. “I’ve read this paper a dozen times,” he said at their next meeting, tossing it across the desk. Unlike Madame Brossard’s barbed wire overlay of red ink, he had written nothing. “Boring,” he added, in case she’d missed his point. “Next you’ll be writing about Babette’s Feast. Do you know the difference between sensuality and pornography?”
Saskia, furious, inclined her head with elaborate courtliness. Do tell?
“Expand your reading. Try again.”
* * *
—
“He wants me to write a paper on pornography,” she told Jenny. “He says I’m boring.”
Jenny blinked twice, no. She seemed tired today.
“Well, my work. I have no idea what he thinks of me.” Saskia wiped Jenny’s mouth, adjusted her blanket. “I guess some people would say I’m lucky. I have to read porn for school. Every student’s dream, no?”
Jenny closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry. All I do is talk about me. Did the speech therapist come back? Did you try the yoghurt again?”
But Jenny’s eyes stayed closed.
* * *
—
French pornography. Where to start? Saskia decided on Pauline Réage’s Story of O from 1954. Definitely not eighteenth century, but linked to de Sade—the author’s lover, the intended audience for the book, admired de Sade and told the author he didn’t believe a woman could write like that. She had accepted the challenge.
“I don’t know,” she told Joel. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t find it sexy. It bores me, actually. But, then, so did Lolita.”
“That’s because you’re a normal, healthy, well-adjusted person.” Joel was less interested in literature than foreign policy, and wanted to go into journalism. French linguistics class was their intersection. “Your whole thesis confuses me, if I’m being honest. How is pornography about solitude?”
“It’s a metaphor,” Saskia began.
“How’s your sister?”
“Changing the subject.”
Joel shrugged.
“Okay, I guess. I don’t know. The last couple of visits she seemed to tire a little faster than usual. Didn’t want to communicate much.”
Joel hesitated. “I’d like to meet her sometime. If that’s not—if your family—”
Saskia leaned across the table and kissed him, so quickly that she half missed his mouth and caught his cheek, sandpapery with a day’s growth of stubble. He looked down at the table and then up at her, pleased, blushing again.
In the back of Saskia’s mind, O sat leashed, knees wide, in her owl mask. Go away, Saskia thought at her, but of course she wouldn’t.
* * *
—
She came home to find a dark sedan with a discreet emergency light in the rear window parked in the driveway. Inside, two plain-clothes cops sat at the dining table with her mother, who was drinking frankly, for once, with a proper wineglass and an almost empty bottle open on the sideboard. The cops had full glasses of water. They looked up when Saskia came in.
“Oh, it’s not Hugh.” Her mother smiled hazily at Saskia.
“Well, he’ll be home next.”
The cops were an older woman and a younger man. Saskia could see their caution.
“Jenny?” Saskia said.
“She’s fine.” The female cop stood to shake Saskia’s hand. “Your mother—we thought we might wait for Mr. Gilbert.”
“Mom, why don’t you let me take care of this?” Obediently her mother rose from her chair and let Saskia lead her upstairs to her bedroom.
“You’re tired today,” Saskia lied as she steered her to her bed. “You should rest a bit. Dad and I will take care of everything.”
Her mother’s eyes were already closed. She would sleep for several hours, now, and wake deep in the night with a headache, calling her hangover insomnia.
Downstairs, Saskia took her mother’s place across the table from the cops. “Jenny,” she repeated. It wasn’t a question this time.
“We understand your father will be home shortly?” The younger cop, the man, spoke this time.
“Is this about Jenny’s accident?” Saskia asked the woman cop.
They heard the front door and all three stood up. Saskia’s father appeared, looking frightened and exhausted. His eyes found Saskia’s face.
“Mom’s upstairs, lying down,” she said quickly. “Jenny’s the same.”
“What is this?” her father asked the male cop.
“Please.” The female cop gestured to a chair, Saskia’s chair as it happened. She was sitting in his usual place. “We’re here to fill you in on something that occurred earlier this evening at the hospital. Your daughter is unharmed. We’re not even sure how much she’s aware of.”
As she was speaking, Saskia’s father gestured to the sideboard. Saskia got up and found him a pad of paper in a drawer, and he took a pen from his shirt pocket. The female cop waited while he turned to a clean page. “Please,” he said curtly, pen poised.
There was actually very little to tell. At 4:45 p.m., a nurse performing a routine check on the ward found a man in Saskia’s room. She called hospital security, who tried to apprehend the man on his way out of the building, but he ran. By the time the police got there, he was gone.
“Gone,” her father repeated. He looked up from his notes.
“He was masturbating,” the female cop said. “He had pulled the bedclothes down and exposed your daughter’s breasts. We don’t believe he assaulted her otherwise.”
* * *
—
In the days that followed, her father made decision after decision. Too quickly; too quickly for any of them to fully absorb. He worked in a fever, a rage. He quit his job to focus exclusively on the daughter he’d neglected, the daughter he’d failed. He brought a lawsuit against the hospital. He had the smaller sitting room, next to his home office, fitted with a bed and monitors. He arranged for twenty-four-hour nursing care and booked the hospital transfer.
“Talk him out of it,” Dr. Zhang told Saskia bluntly.
But there was no talking him out of it. He believed only in himself, now, and thought he could protect Jenny, heal Jenny, through sheer force of will.
“Talk him out of it,” Marcel Bouchard begged Saskia. But she didn’t try.
That first night, after the appalling scene with the police officers, her father had asked her to go to Jenny.
“Come with me, Daddy,” she had said, but he could not. He was ashamed, he was crying, but he could not, just then, look at his little girl. Saskia felt the pressure of the great bubble of academic knowledge that filled her brain, that informed her understanding of her father. Historical context, literary examples, even deep-seated religious influences warped and wefted in her head to explain his revulsion. Academically, rationally, she could read him. He blamed Jenny, knowing she was blameless. He believed Jenny changed, though she lay changeless in her hospital bed. The child/woman, virgin/whore, daughter/stranger. He was not very original, her father. All this wove itself in her head on the cab ride to the hospital. She had no idea, herself, what to expect from her sister.
Dr. Zhang met her in the hallway outside the room where a security guard sat in a plastic chair. The nurses watched from a distance. When she went in, Jenny’s eyes stayed closed. Saskia hugged her and kissed her smooth, warm cheek. Dr. Zhang said something about the hospital reviewing its protocols.
“Did she tell you anything?” Saskia asked.
“She’s been sleeping. We think she might have slept through the whole thing.”
“She’s not sleeping,” Saskia said softly.
When Dr. Zhang left the room, Jenny opened her eyes. “Are you all right?” Saskia asked.
Jenny blinked once. She blinked twice. She closed her eyes.
* * *
—
“Talk him out of it,” her mother whispered, just once. Her big blue eyes swimming, pleading. Five days before the transfer, a week after the incident, her father was downstairs bullying the movers who were setting up Jenny’s room. Her mother lay in bed, painfully sober and self-aware. “I can’t cope. I’m useless.”
“Jenny is stable. Go back to Shelby for a few weeks. Come home when you’re ready. It was so good for you last time.” Shelby was a private clinic outside of Kelowna, discreet and expensive. Every few years her mother went there for a month and returned pinker and plumper and changed forever.
* * *
—
Jenny came home one rainy afternoon in November. The sky was charcoal and the streetlights were butter. The paramedics eased her stretcher out of the van and up the front steps and into the room her father had prepared. Saskia and her father stayed back, letting them do their work. Saskia had dropped her mother at the airport the day before. The flight to Kelowna took less than an hour, and she would be met at the gate by an attendant from Shelby, who would see to her bags and everything else. Her mother would be fine.
When the paramedics left, the wise old owl of a night nurse checked the monitors, touching each one, and straightened the bedclothes. Then she took her seat in the chair next to the bed and pulled out some knitting. Saskia went around the house closing the blinds and turning on lights. Her father poured himself a cranberry soda and sat in his office, next to Jenny’s room, reading a magazine. Jenny slept.
* * *
—
The second-to-last time Jenny opened her eyes, it was to meet Joel. Saskia had not mentioned the incident to him, had only told him they thought Jenny would be more comfortable at home. After class they got in her car. Saskia watched Joel take in the neighbourhood, old Vancouver money, and the mansion her family called home. She watched him not remark on her father’s Jaguar when she parked her shitty Corolla next to it, not remark on their half-acre or so of kitchen, all brushed steel and teak (she had brought him in the back way, as was her habit, through what her father only half-jokingly called the servants’ entrance), not remark on the art or the rugs or the sheer scope of the place.
“Jenny, this is Joel,” Saskia said. “I’ve told you about him.”
The nurse had stepped out to give them some privacy, abandoning her knitting in the chair. Jenny opened her eyes.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” Joel said. “Saskia’s told me so much about you.”
They pulled chairs up next to the bed and made awkward small talk for the next fifteen minutes or so, not bothering with the board. Joel made an effort to speak directly to Jenny, though she was uncommunicative. She slept almost all the time now, but Doctor Zhang had warned them to expect this after the stress of the move. He hoped she would become communicative again once she had adjusted.
Saskia took Joel to meet her father, who shook his hand and thanked him for visiting Jenny. Saskia pitied Joel, pitied the seriousness with which they were all forced to accord this visit, when they had yet to even, seriously, kiss. How was he not squirming under it all like a bug under a pin?
The doorbell rang. Saskia left
Joel and her father to answer it. Marcel Bouchard stood at the door with a bouquet of iris for Jenny and a bottle of wine for the table. He had resumed his habit of dining with them weekly, and Saskia had purposely chosen his night to bring Joel around. Marcel Bouchard would be a buffer.
“How is she?” he asked, ritually, and Saskia answered, “The same.”
“That’s good.” He hugged her briefly. “Now, where’s this young man?”
Saskia had calculated correctly: Marcel Bouchard provided the warmth her father could not, and Joel relaxed visibly as the supper progressed. Her father’s colleague spoke French with a broad Québécois twang, Joel with anachronistic Acadian charm, and soon they were laughing and arguing loudly about the Habs. Saskia had made salad and pizzas with arugula and goat cheese and prosciutto. Pre-made crusts, pre-washed greens, a few fancy deli items, and it was all presentable enough. Good, even.
Her father didn’t speak French. “You were cruel to bring him,” he said quietly to Saskia, as the other two carried on. “You remind her of everything she can’t have. Is this some kind of revenge?”
They had had this conversation already, when she had first proposed bringing Joel to meet Jenny, when she had first mentioned to her father that she was seeing someone. Her father poured himself another glass of Marcel Bouchard’s wine.
“I think she’s happy for me,” Saskia said. “She was always trying to get me to meet someone.”
Her father reached over and caught her hand. “Selfish, just like your mother,” he murmured. Joel, catching the gesture but not the words, smiled at Saskia.
At the end of the evening, Joel insisted she remain in the warm house with her family rather than drive him home. He would get a bus. It was no problem. On the doorstep, Saskia apologized for her father, but Joel shook his head. “You guys are so strong,” he said, and kissed her hair as had become his habit. “Thank you for tonight. I’m so glad I got to meet her. Maybe I can come back again sometime?”
