by Dennis Bock
Next in February 1976 came the national qualifying meet. When she flew. Ruby’s new uniform arrived early in the new year. Despite our insisting, she refused to try it on for fear that it carried a spell that wore off with each donning. It was red with white stripes down the side, a small Maple Leaf stitched into the right shoulder. A woman from the local paper came to our house two weeks before she left for the Tate-Mackenzie Gymnasium at York University. She asked my sister what a crack at a medal in Montreal would mean to her. She said her ambition was to fly like she’d seen Olga Korbut do four years earlier in Munich.
The first day of the women’s competition we watched her walk across the mats and mingle with the other gymnasts. She bounced up and down on the floor mat a few times, then at the vault, testing the air. The gymnasium was at half capacity. We were near the floor, beside a couple from Red Deer. I told them my sister was down there. “The blonde ponytail,” I said, pointing. “In the red suit.” As she warmed up, the hair fastened at the back of her head bounced like a bird’s wing.
“She must be good,” the woman said. “She can really fly.”
My mother was wringing her hands. She’d left the knitting bag she usually carried back home. My father was talking a mile a minute to anyone in earshot, sometimes looking down at his fingers as he fed film into his camera. He leaned across my mother’s lap.
“Doesn’t she look grand down there,” he said to the couple beside me. “Look at her!” and they both nodded generously. “The little Olympian.”
Before her first event, Ruby fidgeted on the bench. I knew she was rerunning her routines over and over in her head, perfecting each twist and arch in her mind one last time. I prayed she’d repeat those routines she’d mapped out in her head so perfectly. I watched her small heaving chest fill with anticipation when her number was called. There was flight in her step, more elegant than any of us had ever seen before. Boris smiled, nervously running the zipper of his tracksuit up and down over his chest. He loosened his neck as she walked across the floor. Other events continued around her. She paused at the top of the runway, stepped one foot back, bent a knee, waited, then exploded down the mat. She hit the springboard with a bang and rose to meet the vault, twisting, touched the horse leather, popped once again into air as my father’s camera clicked, then nailed a one and a half. She straightened her back and threw her head towards us, smiling.
There were no new medals on the fireplace mantel that winter. She didn’t make the team. She was barely thirteen. I reminded her that she’d been training for under four years; she’d gone up against the best in the country. She’d still have a shot at the Moscow Games. She was depressed through the spring and into summer. Sometimes she came out of it. But it would settle over her again, as if she’d lost more than anyone knew. That year brought a warm fall, but Ruby hurried my mother in the preparation of more handknit sweaters. “Make it thicker,” she’d say of a sweater-in-progress, testing the angora wool against her cheek. She wore my mother’s sweaters when the rest of us were still wearing T-shirts. In the heat of that summer she’d sat huddled under a blanket in front of the TV watching the Games unfold in Montreal. Into the third week of an Indian summer, a boy from up the street told me that girls wore baggy clothes to hide their flat chests. That fall Ruby did her homework in front of the fireplace. She went to bed early almost every night.
“She had her hopes up, that’s all,” my father said. “She just needs time.” I heard him talking to Boris on the phone. “I remember feeling like that after Rome, after we were edged out of the medals.”
But she was losing strength. It was more than not making the team. She’d taken to sitting out practice. The day of the first snow a teacher called, hinting at family problems.
On a Tuesday in December, back for lunch, I found my mother slouched over at the kitchen table. She got up and held me in her arms. Tears ran on her cheeks. “We were at the doctor’s this morning,” she said. “Ruby’s sick.”
I waited a moment. “With what?”
“Ruby’s got something wrong with her,” she said angrily in a voice that surprised and frightened me. Her left hand started to shake. I took hold of her arm and sat with her. I poured her out some tea. Then she told me what they’d found.
I watched my mother’s eyes as she spoke. She was looking around herself for strength. I knew I wasn’t what she needed right then. I went to the living room and called my father at work but they told me he was already on his way. I replaced the receiver and went upstairs. Ruby was in her room, sitting upright against the headboard of her bed, the pink duvet my mother had made for her the year before pulled up over her legs.
“Booby?” I took her hand and rubbed the leather pads on her palms. She was looking out the window at the sparrows in the maple trees. “Tell me the story again about the first time you flew.”
Nothing was confirmed until the spinal tap that night. In her hospital room, I held Ruby’s hand when the doctor stuck her with the butterfly needle. She already had an IV hooked up to her right arm. She cried out and pulled my arm into her chest. My mother touched her forehead. “It hurts now,” my father said, wincing. “But they’ve got to find out what’s wrong.” There were coloured posters of Big Bird and Aquaman on the wall across from the bed. I watched the white liquid slowly fill the cylinder the nurse had attached to the needle.
My mother stayed with her in the hospital that night. My father and I drove home in silence. It was before eight when we pulled into the driveway. I went straight to the Centennial Public Library and got out all the books I could find on dinosaurs and the evolution of birds.
The chemo started the next day. Every morning she was given drugs with prehistoric names like vincristine and prednisone. They were trying to get her into remission. “Ruby,” I said that first afternoon, The Riddle of the Dinosaur cradled in my arm. “You wanna hear about archaeopteryx?” Without waiting for her answer, I sat down beside her on the bed.
“‘Stonecutters in Bavaria’—which is where we were three summers ago—‘made one of the most fascinating discoveries of all time.’”
I paused and looked up at Big Bird. Ruby was staring out the window into the trees.
“‘They found the fossil remains of what looked like a reptile, possibly a small dinosaur, that in some respects bore a resemblance to a bird, for it had feathers. Darwin had hypothesized that birds must have developed from reptiles, and there was the evidence, so it seemed, in the reptile-bird known as Archaeopteryx. Evolutionists could scarcely believe their good fortune.’”
After school I visited and read to her about the emergence of flying creatures. She was losing weight fast. Soon most of the veins in her arms had collapsed from the IV. By the end of the first week, the nurses were forced to move to the veins in her feet to hook her up. She had nothing left in her arms. After I read to her about the existence of the archaeopteryx, the bird-reptile, I read to her the accounts of the discoveries of the London, Berlin, Maxburg, Teyler, and Eichstatt specimens. At night I remembered the evolutionary charts we had drawn in, the winged angel she always drew beside my frog-man.
I tried to get her to talk. To bring her out of her pain. To give her somewhere to go.
“It’s about us coming back together again,” I said. “The same evolutionary path.”
After thirteen days of intensive chemo, Ruby came home. She’d lost close to fifteen pounds. There were poke marks in her back from the repeated spinal taps. Her skin looked like the mottled hide of an ankylosaur. Within a month, she ballooned. The vincristine kept her eating all day long. I wondered if I was the only one to see how they were hurting her. I found clumps of hair on her pillow. By evening, transparent blonde balls of hair tumbled across the living-room floor at the slightest push of air. She had sores on her face. The smallest infection could send her back to hospital. Whenever she went outside, she wore a surgical mask. The doctors said she had
to wait until her poly count reached one thousand before she could move freely in crowds.
Three times a week, we drove for half an hour to Toronto Sick Kids for chemo and blood tests. We began to think numbers. We sat in the waiting room for the hour it took Ruby to go through the procedure. The doctors said she was in the group they called “average risk,” which was someone her age with a white blood cell count of less than fifty thousand. My father, the optimist, said the best minds in the world were on top of this one. “She’s being cured right now, as we speak,” he’d say. Near the end of the session he’d leave and come back with a dozen Tim Horton’s doughnuts for us to eat on the way home.
That winter, the house grew brittle with sickness. We were all cold. Ruby seemed to bruise at the mention of touch. The muscle that had once helped her fly was now gone. I saw in her eyes and the way she walked what the last few months had done to her, her back hooked like an old woman’s to match her leathery hands. There was no bounce in her step. Her small body, once clean and powerful, was now frightening to look at. Wherever she went she left clumps of hair like balls of tangled transparent fishing line.
Quilts floated like magic blankets from my mother’s sewing room. The fire blazed that winter, but somehow it couldn’t warm the chill in our veins. Early spring storms came and went without my father’s notice. Someone from the weather centre called to ask why we’d missed the tornado that had ripped up the bridge over the Ganaraska. When my father told them what was happening, no one called again.
In March, after three months of chemo, the maintenance therapy started. Just before Ruby’s fourteenth birthday. I would turn eighteen that summer. Things began to level out. Most of the time Ruby was fine, except for the few days a month when she had to take her drugs. I began to read books on leukemia. It was called the children’s cancer. I’d hoped an understanding of the disease would give us the upper hand. I left the books on my parents’ bed before saying good night. I remembered my father’s refrain from our storm-hunting days. In scientia est salus. In knowledge is safety. It had been proved wrong already. But it was the only thing I could do. Study and learn. My mother made blankets to keep Ruby from more harm. They covered her like a protecting skin. My father sat by her bed from the moment he returned from the shop until she fell asleep. My grandfather came on the train from Kingston as often as his failing health permitted. Among the books I signed out from the library were more studies of evolution.
I had already applied to the University of Chicago, where I hoped eventually to study advanced meteorological sciences under the eminent weather theorist, Professor Fujita. But by then I’d dropped severe weather as a hobby and turned to paleontology. I’d dissected Darwin’s The Origin of Species and considered every theory and counter-theory that it had spawned over the last one hundred and nineteen years, hoping that a pattern in our small lives would emerge against the backdrop of time.
And, for a time, it worked. Within a year, Ruby responded to her treatment. She was strong again. Her hair came back, a blonde curly mass. By mid-winter, it seemed she was on the road to complete remission. The count of leukemic blasts seemed to be bottoming out. Every week she went in for blood tests. The chemo was tapered off to nothing. I felt magnanimous. I wanted to celebrate. Into her second spring as an outpatient, I resolved to raise money for the March of Dimes. The same day I started working on a plan to break the world drown-proofing record, I went canvassing for sponsorships.
The River
A week after I recalled the history of Ruby’s cancer, I went for the record in the public pool on the banks of Joshua Creek. The spring rain that ended up flooding our small town for the first time in over a hundred years started early that morning. The creek soon began to rise. I had a list of sponsors as long as my arm willing to pay good money if I walked away with a new record. I’d been in contact with Guinness. The time to beat had stood since 1967 at thirty-one hours, twenty-five minutes. All I had to do was to make it through to Sunday afternoon. I’d done the math. My pledges stood at just under eight thousand dollars, almost double if I beat the going record. But the flood was something I hadn’t factored into the equation.
My parents came to wish me and my sister well that morning. Alicia was there, too, a friend from school, and half a dozen of my sponsors. Dressed in street clothes, they all stood on the cement deck under an overcast sky, looking down into the pool, shaking their heads in wonder and patting me and Ruby on the back. I was already in my bathing suit, a pair of red-tinted goggles hanging from an elastic around my neck. A warm breeze passed over us as my mother leaned forward and kissed me.
“Good luck,” she said and kissed me again. “It’s okay if you don’t make it all the way through. We’ll figure out something else if we have to.”
But I would make it all the way through. It seemed natural that I should do this. My father worked for Oakville Sailing Ships, a company that built yachts down by the harbour. He hadn’t sailed competitively for years; but now and then he took down a trophy from the fireplace mantel and told me its story, how a twenty-knot wind had come from the west on such-and-such day and practically lifted his two-man schooner right out of the water. There were always the stories of sailing the Dragon class in Rome. Anything that had to do with water and wind, he loved. On vacation, he sought out the sea. At a lake, he was the first to dip his toes in. At home, he was the last to get out of the pool before supper. I had taken after him, I thought. The drown proofing was just a natural extension of that. It was something carried in the veins.
But we knew Ruby carried something different in her veins. My parents worried about an anaemic reaction. Ruby had gained back the weight she’d lost and her hair had grown in again. She would be going to summer school to make up for time lost. Doctor Lee had told us physical exercise was an essential component of her therapy. My parents planned to come by every couple of hours to see how I was doing. Ruby was going to stay with me, act as a spotter along with three friends from school. This was part of her recuperation—becoming involved in life again after being apart for so long.
“Look out for your sister,” my mother said into my ear, and hugged me. She knew this was too big for all of us to break off because of an overcast sky. I knew she wanted to release her into the world again. Maybe this was the final step to that. She pulled Ruby into her chest and held her there while my father and I shook hands.
“Don’t forget—controlled breathing,” he said. “And keep a clear head.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “You’re thinking for two,” and raised his eyebrows in Ruby’s direction.
An official from Oakville Parks and Recreation was there that morning, a large man in a blue tracksuit with a whistle around his neck. He was supposed to stay with me until he was relieved by another official, five in all over the space of the thirty-odd hours I was to be here. They were there to verify that I didn’t touch the side or the bottom of the pool or cheat in any way.
I saw the first drop roll over the surface of the water as I stepped into the pool and swam out to the middle. It began slowly. Then when my parents and the sponsors all finally left, the real rain started. Big shimmering globes beating down on my head. The fat man retired to the slice of dry cement under the lip of the roof that overhung the entrance to the change rooms and read a newspaper for half an hour. From the middle of the pool I watched him polish the silver whistle against his sleeve. He looked up at the clouds, hesitated a moment. Then folded the newspaper over his head and ran out to his car in the parking lot and drove away.
Joshua Creek snaked through Valley Park barely a hundred feet north of the pool. From the change-room entrance you could see it winding its way down through the valley until it disappeared behind a bend. Somewhere a mile or so downstream it drained its slow dark belly into Lake Ontario. From the water that morning I looked to the bridge that crossed over the creek just down from the pool to where half a dozen boys chased spawning suckers
with sharpened hockey sticks. Crashing through the water under the bridge, they would stab one through the body, then throw the poor fish up onto the road to get squashed by a passing car.
Just Ruby and Alicia were left that morning after the man with the whistle drove away. Alicia was from my grade thirteen calculus class. She’d gone to the hospital with me a few times that winter to visit Ruby. Sitting side by side on the diving board, they caught raindrops on their tongues and sang to me, swaying back and forth against each other’s shoulders. My sister walked around the deck sometimes, jumping up into a handstand, and let the rain drench her. Alicia read from Wuthering Heights and scooped out grass clippings and wind-blown leaves from the pool with the skimmer. Then Alicia would move the hand on the cardboard-and-plywood clock that Ruby had made so I’d always know where the countdown to the record stood. The clock sat to the right of the diving board. The wheel, where the numbers zero to thirty-one were pasted, spun under a bright-red stationary arrow at the top of the clock face. The final thirty-one was the record to beat. Ruby had placed an umbrella over the clock to keep the construction-paper numbers from washing away in the rain.
