Swan Dive

by Brenda Hasiuk

  Budgie wasn’t smiling anymore. Her beaky nostrils were kind of flared out, almost like she was trying not to cry. It was not a flattering look, as Elle would say, and I pretended not to notice. I told her when the doctors finally pulled the plug on Dajdža Drago, Mama and Sharon moved on to arguing about where he should be buried. Mama said it would kill her poor ailing parents in Serbia if he was not buried “back home” and Sharon said Canada is his home, not some war-ravaged cauldron of racial hatred and so on.

  In the end Mama won, maybe because coming from a war-ravaged cauldron of racial hatred makes you tougher.

  By the end of February she and Tata and Sharon and Dajdža Drago’s body-in-a-box were on their way to Belgrade and Sara moved back into the apartment to make sure I didn’t burn the place down. She was not happy to be there and I wasn’t exactly happy either so we mostly minded our own business.

  Budgie asked if my parents were hesitant to go back because wasn’t it just last spring when NATO began its attacks against Serbia? I told her Mama convinced Sharon that the Western powers talked big but they’d have Dajdža Drago long buried before the UN or NATO would raise a stink about Serbia attacking its own little province of Kosovo. Which was true enough for Sharon, who got the hell out of her in-law’s clutches before NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy and the Ministry of Defence and the radio tower got blown to bits.

  All I knew was that Mama winning that war with Sharon and ending up stuck in Belgrade was the first nail in my fake coffin.

  The next was Elle catching up with me on the way home from school. I remember it was March 1st and still -22 C with the wind chill, and we were walking fast and talking into our parka collars, which is a stupid way to have a conversation.

  She asked if I was okay because I looked like shit and I said, Thanks.

  No, I mean you look pale.

  It’s March. Everyone’s pale.

  No, I mean more than usual. And you’re so skinny.

  I thought skinny was good.

  You know what I mean. More than usual.

  Whatever.

  Okay, you don’t have to be an ass. I’m just worried about you.

  I’m just freezing. There’s icicles in my chest.

  How can you be such a suck, Cris? I thought you were a Winter Olympics baby.

  She knew perfectly well that there is cold and then there is cold and Sarajevo barely ever dips below -5 C. But she never used to act all worried about me and I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t okay. Mama had shown Dr. Mustafa a bruise on my hip and he’d frowned and made a low humming noise. I was pretty sure it was from walking into a desk following Elle out of math class but then he asked about other bruises and there were two small ones on my biceps we couldn’t figure out.

  That’s when he said we should check my blood to rule out abnormalities such as leukemia, and that’s when Mama started checking off boxes. Yes, his appetite is bad. Yes, he is sleepy. Yes, he keeps getting colds.

  And so I started to wonder. The second set of results said everything was okay but sometimes they made mistakes, didn’t they?

  Then it all came spilling out like that old slapstick scene where someone’s shoved way too much junk in a closet and then someone else opens the door. I told her I think maybe a part of me actually believed it was true.

  I told Budgie how I went to the library and looked up the kind of leukemia most teenagers get and made a checklist of other symptoms that I was suffering from or maybe had suffered from. Before the mid-term English exam I got sores in my mouth. I had diarrhea every time I came home from Dajdža Drago’s. When the temperature dipped below -25 C sometimes I had dyspnea, or trouble breathing.

  I made myself believe, at least for a while. For a while it was like the only thing that made me feel like getting up in the morning was the fact I might be dying.

  Budgie said I was on my own and the lonely mind does amazing things to survive.

  If Elle was there, she would have said that was the biggest fricking pile of BS she’d ever heard.

  December 9, 1999

  Budgie looked at me and said, You haven’t been sleeping. A couple of months ago I would have wondered if she was reading my mind but that was before I knew she was just Budgie, with her addict mom and retarded daughter who doesn’t talk. Elle gets mad at Ivan when he says something is retarded because it’s ignorant and offensive, but he says she’s ignorant because the word is now divorced from actual people, who are now referred to as special needs.

  Either way I guess I’m an a-hole for writing that about Budgie’s kid, except I wonder if it’s still offensive if you only say it to yourself.

  Budgie said she has used sleep aids herself and would prescribe me something if I was still having trouble next week. Apparently it was tricky sometimes to find something that would make me not too sleepy and not too awake and it might take some time to figure out what worked best.

  I said I guess it’s just like magic cloaks or magic wardrobes, there are no magic pills. And she might think that I had some big plan for what I did but I didn’t. Amina said that from the moment Slobodan Milošević turned his back on trying to fill Tito’s giant Yugoslav shoes, he never went off script preaching the story of tragic downtrodden Serbs rising up like phoenixes out of the ashes of their country. Maybe he believed in that just like my Deda Ilić believed in the Orthodox Jesus. But I didn’t even believe enough to have a plan.

  Tell me about how it started, Budgie said.

  I told her Ms. Gulliani chose Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for the spring musical and Elle said any show that starred plastic-haired big-toothed Donny Osmond on Broadway probably wasn’t worth our time. Plus they always give the lead role to someone in grade twelve.

  I didn’t think any of us were trying out for a part until Ivan told me they’d picked him to be Joseph.

  But where were you, Cris? You could’ve handed me my ass on a platter.

  Then it just came out.

  I’ve got some health stuff going on.

  Then, as the classes changed in the music room.

  Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Ongoing anemia…. dyspnea and pallor. Quarts of blood … bone marrow exams … lymph node biopsy.

  Wait. Are you telling me you have cancer?

  Chemo course of vincristine, doxorubicin and cytarabine. Possible bone marrow transplant.

  Cris, holy shit. I had no idea.

  I just found out.

  Holy shit, Cris.

  Don’t tell anyone.

  Don’t tell anyone? You’re going to need support, dude. We’re here for you.

  I can still hear Ivan saying dude, hear the class buzzer going off like an air raid siren.

  Just like that, I was back in a place where all bets are off and how things will end is anybody’s guess.

  I signed myself out at the office and I went home and puked up my lunch and hoped it was another sign that maybe the blood tests had lied and not me.

  After school Elle showed up and it was like she couldn’t decide whether to punch me in the face or hug me until I couldn’t breathe.

  Why didn’t you tell me? All this time I’ve been asking how you are and I have to find out from somebody else? You make me crazy. We’ve been best friends for how long? And sometimes you act like you’re off in la-la Crislandia and you don’t even give a shit. This is serious, Cris. You can’t do this alone. We love you and you can’t shut us out. We’re going to fight this together every step of the way.

  She wanted to know where Mama and Tata were, why I was by myself in the apartment when I looked like I might keel over any moment and I told her they were both at work. I didn’t tell her about Dajdža Drago’s corpse on a plane or Tata needing to go so Mama and Sharon didn’t kill each other or Sara moving back in but spending all her waking hours at her friend Bianca’s condo with the fitness facility.
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br />   I’ve been trying to figure out why I didn’t tell her and all I can think of is, lies are maybe like cancer cells, spreading just for the heck of it. It’s like the first one goes rogue and takes on a life of its own and then the rest keep going because they can’t help it, they’re cancer cells and that’s what they do.

  Because after she calmed down, Elle took me to the couch and she made me put my head in her lap and she ran her fingers through my hair, the pot-scrubber she hated so much and that I would probably lose soon anyway. She told me she was skipping her visit to Jimmy’s this spring so she could be there for me, and Mindy was already buying a frozen lasagna to bring over because knowing Mama she was probably in no state to cook. Then she sang Cher’s “Believe,” except for the second verse because she couldn’t remember it.

  Ms. Champagne called me in the next day and said not to worry about my classes, especially math, we would work at my pace, see how things went, and I must, I absolutely must, let her know at any time if there was anything, anything at all, that the school could do to make things easier. Guys who never even looked at me before held up a fist in the hall and said, Stay strong, man. Amanda-P started carrying my backpack and praying for me.

  Before Budgie could ask, I told her.

  I said I was thinking, that whole spring, it wasn’t like old times. It wasn’t like watching Star Wars in our old cinema.

  It was like a wild and crazy dream that you can’t wake up from because you don’t want to.

  December 10, 1999

  Amina just phoned and wanted to talk to me but I didn’t feel like it. She told Mama that Ratko Mladić, the fatherless tinsmith turned general who ordered the siege of Sarajevo, was still hiding out but it was only a matter of time before they found him and hauled his ass to the war crimes tribunal in some Dutch place called the Hague.

  Mama said that it was shameful I wouldn’t come out of my room to talk to my own sister.

  I think maybe with a name like Ratko you don’t stand much chance of becoming one of the good guys.

  December 13, 1999

  Budgie says your life is like a story but I didn’t dream up being a kid in a war. I always thought a story is when you imagine things like in English class, the way Mr. Wenzel and Ivan got each other off talking about fairytales and myths and the heroic journey. Last year I asked Elle what get each other off meant and then she wouldn’t shut up about my face getting as red as Wenzel’s shirt.

  But my question is, where do heroic journeys end and lies start?

  I can’t sleep and thoughts are pouring into my brain like a soaker in April. The first time my runner filled up with ice-cold muck when we were crossing the track field Elle said, You’re not a real Canadian until you’ve had your first soaker.

  But I haven’t thought about our time in the mall this past spring at all. Not once. I couldn’t. Or I wouldn’t. Only now I can’t stop.

  Because during spring break, after I shaved my head, I had to keep Elle out of the apartment in case Sara dropped in. So I told her the one thing she could do was help me escape from Mama’s sniveling. I told her the chemo made me kind of weak and dizzy and maybe we could hang out with Mindy’s collection of small appliance boxes and Betamax movies with no Beta machine to play them in.

  But then Mindy got a wheelchair from a friend at work whose husband died from some muscle-wasting disease. Except it was March and the melt and freeze left big slushy ice ruts everywhere. So we ended up hanging out with the fast food and fake plants at Polo Park.

  And now it’s all playing in my head like a movie stuck in its montage scene.

  Elle is eating in the food court with me because life is too short to treat celery as more than a chewing exercise. She has two fries hanging from her upper lip like tusks and is waving her arms like walrus flippers to make me laugh until Coke comes out of my nose. She is holding my hand and finger-painting little stripes of make-up tester, trying to find one that will make me look less scary pale but not trashy fake tan. She is standing in front of the wall of magazines at Shoppers Drug Mart and reaching for a magazine that says America’s Sweetheart Julia Roberts might be getting back together with pit-faced singer Lyle Lovett. There is a gap between her jeans and her T-shirt and I hold her steady by putting my hand on the bare skin where her waist curves and she laughs like it tickles. We are waiting for the elevator with the grumpy moms pushing strollers and grumpy old ladies pushing walkers and Elle is massaging my bald head and my ear lobes and my temples and everyone is staring at us but we don’t care. It’s still March so I’m wearing a jacket and no one sees that my kurac isn’t bothered by the chemo.

  It all keeps coming, blending one into the other while Ali Campbell’s smooth reggae vocals keep telling me what wise men say. Elle is sitting on my lap as we roll down the perfectly clean tiles of the not-too-hot not-too-cold mall and she is not noticing that I suddenly have strength enough for both of us.

  * * *

  —

  The thing is I think Elle maybe liked pushing me around in that folding wheelchair. When we first met she told me teachers were always cutting her slack because she was the bastard child of an absent stoner and a scatterbrained packrat. She said people felt sorry for her fatty self and since I was a sad-sack refugee we were a good match.

  But later when she started to look like the daughter in a commercial where the whole family sits down together to eat frozen pizza that tastes like delivery, that wasn’t true anymore. Like how you look can actually change how you are.

  Only maybe it’s like they say, old habits die hard, and maybe she kind of missed her old sad-sack self. Because I swear, she loved to talk about how we were battling this cancer together. At the mall, she was always talking about my diagnosis to some mom pushing her crying baby in the elevator or some old guy nursing the same cup of coffee for the second hour in a row. She told our teachers more about my treatments than I did. They were my lies, but she was the one who polished them and spread them and made them her own.

  Ivan was the opposite. After that first day, after he told Elle and my fate was sealed, he would come up to me in the hallway sometimes and just stand there looking like a little kid who’d lost his parents in the grocery store. Then he’d ask me how I was holding up and I’d tell him, Taking it day by day and he’d shake his head and say, How do you do it, dude?

  It was kind of creepy to see Ivan at a loss for words.

  * * *

  —

  Elle and I are at the Cineplex watching She’s All That, the one where the handsome jock’s friends dare him to ask out the icky brainiac girl, and Elle keeps whispering in my ear, Do they think we’re stupid …That girl is not ugly …That girl was never ugly …They stuck some big glasses on a fricking fashion model …What a crock of horseshit. The guy behind us is telling her to shut up and she is hissing back at him, He has cancer, shitface. Leave us alone.

  Elle and I are in the back of Mindy’s crappy car and she was up late last night after some choir event I skipped due to “fatigue” so her head drops on my shoulder and her nose is slightly stuffed and so there is a little whistling sound when I touch those soft hairs at the back of her neck and she pretends she doesn’t notice but I know she does.

  You do something and things happen because of it. Or things happen and you do something because of it. And sometimes you lose track of the difference between the two and before you know it life isn’t a story, it’s a perfect storm.

  So I tell Sara I’ll be out a lot doing sound for the school musical and she tells me I look like a concentration camp survivor with my head shaved but she eats up my lie like it’s a maple donut and goes on her way because she’s more normal than the rest of us. Elle says Hana tries too hard and Amina doesn’t try at all, but from the minute we got here Sara was a regular old Canadian.

  Then Mama calls from Belgrade to say Deda Ilić has vascular dementia and she has to stay and move the stubbor
n dete into some place where he’ll get the care he needs and I tell her the same thing, that I’ll be busy with the musical. And she believes me too, because she has no choice.

  What I want to know is, would things have gone on so long if someone had been there to stop me?

  December 14, 1999

  Elle and I are sitting up front by the driver in the area reserved for the baby strollers and disabled people. She is sweaty from pushing me across the street at a run to catch the bus and elbows me in the face when she takes off her scarf. I laugh even though it hurt and she wraps the scarf around my bald head like my Deda Ilić used to when he had a toothache. It’s the same butter yellow as the dress she wore to Hana’s wedding. The guy across from us is blind and we watch his poor guide dog, who wants to sit down and take a load off, stand there obediently because the bus floor is covered in about an inch of grit and snow slop.

  Don’t leave me, okay, Elle says, and I am going to tell her, but then our stop comes.

  Ivan’s musical practice is canceled at the last minute and we’re at Mindy’s watching Blast from the Past where the Brendan Fraser character grows up in an underground bomb shelter, then comes out when he’s thirty years old and has to try and figure out modern-day LA. That’s what Cris was like when he came to Canada, Elle says, and Ivan expects me to be offended but I’m not because the guy, whose name is Adam, gets Alicia Silverstone in the end. Also Ivan is acting like a beach ball with a slow leak, still round but without much bounce.