In Case I Go Read online

  I finish my breakfast as she takes each of the empty bottles out to the bin under the carport. She’s not saying anything or looking at me at all, so I pick up my bowl and drink straight from it, listening to the heavy clank of each glass bottle.

  When she’s done, she looks better. Her face pulls up, instead of down. “There,” she says. “Are we good?”

  I hold her eyes, saying nothing, waiting for more.

  “You’re right, Eli. We are making our problems your problems. We’re done with that now. And Nicholas and I are not G-Ma and Grandpa. We will never end up like them, I promise. I should never have said that.”

  I am glad the vodka is gone, but I don’t want this. The way I always have to be right. I’m ten. I do look at her now, though. She tries. When she sits down, I reach across the table and put my hand on her hand.

  Dear boy—a letter I’ll never send:

  I hate myself when I drink, Eli. Afterwards, I wake at three in the morning, lips stuck to my teeth, tongue heavy, sour, and slow, a hot blade of pain slicing my temples. When I manage to open my eyes, I’m greeted by a rising rush of nauseous shame. I’m fifty-two years old: that’s what I think each of those mornings. I am no longer young, and I am not stupid. I know better. My debilitating hangovers embody my humiliation, give it form and life. I deserve to feel this horrid, I know I do. You, Eli, do not have to look at me with those old, sad eyes to make me realize that. Your eyes, like my hangovers, give my humiliation solid footing in this sober world.

  Before we left the city, I met for one final time with my psychiatrist, Dr Laird, the man upon whom I’d bestowed responsibility for my happiness, a responsibility nobody else wanted.

  “Bipolar.” That’s the label he tried to pin on me. Bipolar 2.

  I don’t like it. “I get excited about things. I get sad about other things. I have a lot of energy. When I’m done having energy, I get tired. Why do we have to name it? Or why can’t we call it ‘personality’? At my age, I’m rather attached to that personality. I don’t want to medicate it away. Who says everyone needs to be the same?”

  He stared at me and I fell, as I always do, for this trick, filling his silence with my words. “So, sure, I’m moody,” I said. “A personality is not a disorder.” I tried not to think of my dad, so moody he slowly drank himself to death. Not an easy thing to do, but he used a hunting rifle to finish the job.

  “Lucy, you have a mood disorder. It’s only a problem if you suffer. Do you suffer?”

  A kinder man might have looked away as I cried.

  Near the end of our final appointment, Dr Laird put his hands on his knees—I remember noticing the small silver braid circling his left ring finger, jewellery far too delicate for such a big man. He leaned toward me, his head jutting out past his feet, his belly pressing into his lap. If I could have done so without being rude, I would have leaned away.

  “Lucy,” he said. “Please quit drinking. It’s bad for your body. It’s bad for your brain. It doesn’t help.” He waited until I lifted my gaze to his face before he added, “You know what happened to your father. You know how wrong this thing can go. You can make choices with that knowledge.”

  There’s an off-putting intensity about Dr Laird that usually stopped me from taking him too seriously. I made appointments with him solely for the opportunity to hear myself say certain things aloud. To hold myself accountable, I guess. To try, at least, by the following week to have new neuroses to dwell on, new changes to commit to. Only crazy people talk to themselves, so I talked to Dr Laird.

  My response to Dr Laird’s parting advice surprised me. When he said “Stop drinking, it doesn’t help,” you know what I felt?

  Not shame. Not resentment. Not resistance. I felt gratitude.

  It filled me—a warm relaxed sensation, as if I’d finished a vigorous yoga class followed by a hot bath. I felt my body relax into that advice, like I’d earned it. Yes, I thought. I will quit drinking. You’re right: drinking does not help. It’s a strange world when a grown woman needs permission to stop drinking. And that sharp moment felt like a new beginning. Not so much Dr Laird’s words but my response to them.

  Well, Eli, you’ve seen how that new beginning has turned out. I didn’t leave the pomegranate vodka behind in the city after all, did I?

  Quitting is hard. I wish I had someone to blame. I could blame Nicholas—he’s given me reason—but I won’t. I’m an adult. Dr Laird and I have talked about that too—adulthood and the responsibility that comes with it. The futility of “naming and blaming.”

  This morning you saw me dump the last of the bottles. Maybe that will be my new start. Finally and for good. I would love to promise, to swear to you with confidence, that we’re done. But you’ve already seen too many of my failed new starts to believe me. For that, I am sorry, my beautiful, special boy.

  Sorry: another word I’ve emptied of meaning through sheer repetition.

  I write to you here so I can tell you the things I can’t say directly to you, not yet. I won’t send this. You are, after all, only a boy. A sensitive boy. When you were two, Nicholas took you to the library, giving me a quiet house to work on my dissertation. You sat on his lap and listened to the local Story-Time Lady read her tale of the mother duck whose ducklings grow up and disappear, one by one.

  Five little ducks went out one day

  Over the hills and far away

  Mother duck went quack quack quack

  But only four little ducks came waddling back.

  You refused to leave the building without that book. At home, you steered me to the couch, climbed into my lap, and pushed the book into my hands. The intensity with which you stared at each page as another duck went waddling off, never to return—no two-year-old should have that look in his eyes, Eli. I felt sick as I read the last line: “... and no little ducks came waddling back.”

  You didn’t cry the way a toddler cries. Your eyes brimmed with tears, as if you understood loss. Yours were tears of true despondence, an ancient despair at the loneliness of human existence and the many ways humans fail each other.

  Of course I want to protect you, Eli. Eventually, I will fail. I cannot save you from this world. The continual trying, the continual falling short—that’s the striving that defines motherhood.

  Whether these words will ever make their way to you, I don’t know. Perhaps I write them only for myself. Maybe, now that I’ve abandoned university life, writing remains my only way of making sense of the world around me.

  But I don’t know anymore if there’s sense to be found. Let’s hope there is. We both need it. All three of us. Soon.

  Love, Mama

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lucy feels better by mid-afternoon. I say I’m glad she’s getting over her “flu” and use my fingers to make pretend quotations in the air, but I’m the only one who laughs. Lucy pours herself a tall glass of orange juice—the expensive, fresh-squeezed kind—and spreads The Coalton Free Press out on the kitchen table. “Pure dross,” she would mutter to Nicholas if he were here. Reading it, cover to cover, has become a kind of penance, she says. Today, though, she’s all sunshine, talking about the great weather and promising me adventures on our day of hooky. Lucy believes moods are contagious. Maybe she hopes I will catch this happy-fast one, so we can both forget about last night.

  “Let’s see what the writers have to say today, Eli.” She props her chin in her hands scanning the titles.

  I repeat the word “writers” and make quotation marks in the air again. This time she laughs.

  “I need to care about the things this town cares about—the boil water advisory, the lack of affordable housing, the effect this year’s low snow fall will have on local businesses.” She points at each of the headlines, smiles up at me. “I no longer need to care about medieval literature. I don’t need to care about performative language and thick description and New Historicism and the linguistic politics of power. I don’t need to care about Derrida, Foucault, Geertz, or Bakhtin.”


  She’s hyper, but the stuff she talks about is normal for her. Lucy always told me about her university writing. She says that if she can’t explain her work in a way that makes sense to an “exceptionally bright boy” like me, it must not be very worthwhile. She says too many people bury their ideas in fancy language until you can’t even tell if there’s still a real idea hiding somewhere in all those big words. She uses me to practice unburying her ideas. Lucy explained this performative language stuff to me back when she was still at the university. The idea is this: some people’s words can do things, but other people’s words cannot.

  I described Lucy’s idea to Mary one day. I like saying ideas aloud. That’s how I can tell if I understand them. Mary didn’t seem confused at all. She kept her face blank, kneeling on the ground behind Sam’s house, her hand tracing perfect rings in the dirt. “My people’s words didn’t do anything at all once your people took over. Not any more, they didn’t. Not for long.”

  I thought of the Chief’s curse, but didn’t dare argue.

  “God, Coalton has changed, Eli!” Lucy stares at an advertisement for fancy condos on Main Street. “For fifteen years, Nicholas and I have been coming here. It was a different place back then. So different it could’ve been a hundred and fifteen years ago.”

  I’ve got my paper and markers spread out on the table next to Lucy. I pull my chair farther away from hers. I hate the smell of coffee. She’s back on coffee and has been drinking it all day. I don’t look up while she talks, just keep drawing even squares, eight blocks on each page. I’m going to fill six pages and then I’ll go back and put a story in each square. That’s how I make my comics: squares first. Then I pencil in rough drawings. Then I go by colour, starting with the most important. This one will be red.

  I know what Lucy will say next: so much has changed, but Elijah’s old shack is exactly the same. She loves to tell me about the first time she visited Coalton. She and Nicholas ate borscht and homemade bread in a diner with chrome tables and fake leather chairs. She said it was “the type of place that had six different kinds of pie displayed behind glass at the front register.” The men in their oil-stained workpants and wide-brimmed ball caps drank coffee at the front counter looking as though they’d been sitting there for a century. Lucy expected a tumbleweed to blow through the town.

  “We don’t call it Slow Valley for nothing!” That’s what the men used to say to her. She thought they directed their laughter at her, the outsider who would never adjust to this strange place with its odd pace. Lucy can be sensitive like that. Nicholas says that’s where I get it from. They like to blame each other for the things they don’t like about me.

  I’ve pieced together the adult version of their story, listening at night from my little bedroom off the kitchen. Coalton was also the place she and Nicholas could run away from her husband, the one she married before Nicholas. I surprised her the first time I mentioned this other husband, but she shook it off. “That was just a practice run, Elly Belly. That’s what first tries are for: getting out the glitches.”

  “Aren’t I a first try, actually?”

  Lucy looked sad when I asked, but she never did answer. She doesn’t tell me much about love and dating and marriage. We watch her girl movies and eat popcorn and she laughs. “If only real life were so easy.”

  “Don’t you believe in love at first sight?”

  “Oh, Eli, it’s the only kind of love I do believe in. But that’s just the start of the real story, not its end.”

  I grab a ruler to make the lines on my comic-book squares perfectly straight. Perfect is hard.

  Lucy can’t look away from her page full of ads for Hummers and condos, mostly. That’s what has changed in Coalton, she says: the oil-money people coming in their Hummers, buying big houses on the ski hill, or people who can work on their computers instead of in an office moving here to get more exercise and be outside. Nicholas says they escape from the city, but they also bring the city with them.

  Lucy smooths the page. “Every time Nicholas and I came back to Coalton, it was a new place. The first time, we couldn’t go out for a hamburger after eight at night. On a Sunday, we couldn’t buy any food, not even at a grocery store. Now there’s a steakhouse, a sushi restaurant, a Thai place, and Pho, Asian fusion, Latino tapas, vegan gourmet. Back then, Sorrels and a pair of Carharts could get me through any Saturday night function. Not anymore.”

  “You said change is good.” I finish the last of my squares, set my ruler back neatly in its tin, and begin to draw the people in pencil.

  “It is,” she says a little too fast. “I did say that. I don’t know why, though, but I can’t help resisting this change. I miss the old Coalton, the place apart.” She slides her fingers up my neck to make up for her missing smile, and weaves them into my hair. Leaves them there. “I miss even the idea of a place apart.”

  “Elijah’s house still feels like that,” I offer. I gather six sheets of paper neatly together, fan them in front of my face, and hold my nose close to breathe the smell of pencil. It smells like new art. “I’ve always liked it here.”

  I slide my chair closer to hers and reach for the red marker. I will do all the red first, on all six pages, on all forty-eight squares. Red is a good colour to start with, but not for the obvious reasons. Not red like blood. Not this time.

  “You look good, Eli,” she says. “The Coalton outdoors has improved you.” She flips the page of her paper, careful not to study me too closely. “You’ve got colour in your cheeks. Dirt under your fingernails.” She makes a disgusted face in her exaggerated jokey way and pushes my hand as far away from her as she can. “What’s today’s comic about?”

  “Wikipedia says redheads will soon be extinct. This story’s about a mountain town with lots of redhead kids. A Ginger Population Explosion.” I lean forward in my seat and press my thumbs into each other, my two pointer-fingers pushed tight together, aimed at Lucy. It’s my thinking pose. I copied it from Nicholas. “I have a theory about redheads, actually.” I pull my pointer fingers up to my chin.

  “God, you look like your dad!” There’s a kindness in her eyes, and I wonder if maybe she doesn’t hate Nicholas as much as it seems, or at least she will maybe one day go back to not hating him.

  “Here’s my theory.” I love to say that. I learned it from Nicholas too. “The shadow of the mountain actually makes the perfect habitat for redheads with our low sun tolerance.”

  Lucy makes her thinking face, two deep lines like valleys between her eyes.

  “That’s what my comic is going to be about: the story of a dark planet inhabited entirely by redheads.” I grab the black marker and scroll CREATURES OF THE SHADE! across the top of the first square while Lucy turns back to her newspaper.

  “Not going outside this afternoon?” Lucy makes her voice soft and sweet. She doesn’t want to think of her only son as a creature of the shade.

  I shake my head, squinting up into the rays of light as I look in her direction. She wants me with her, but she also wants to see me out in the world making friends. It’s what Nicholas calls a no-win situation. Lose if I stay in, lose if I go out. He complains Lucy is a glass-half-empty person. He doesn’t understand that her sadness comes and goes in a way she can’t control. Her anger too. I want to explain to Nicholas that we can’t tell Lucy to be happy any more than she could tell us not to catch a cold. Or tell the planet not to have the summer. Lucy’s moods just are, but Nicholas doesn’t like that—the idea that something so important falls outside of his control.

  “Come here, Eli, look at this: the new museum is open.” She knows this will interest me. Museums present so many possibilities for new theories. “We could go there now,” she says, as if she hasn’t noticed I am still dressed in pyjamas, even though it’s a Wednesday afternoon and I should be in school. Lucy told Mrs Evanhart I will finish the school year with alternating days to ease my way in. (We already talked about adults and their lies. There are many examples.)


  “We cannot have different rules for every student, Mrs Mountain.”

  “Oh please, Mrs Evanhart, no need for Mrs Mountain with me,” Lucy said with a smile. Later she told me she wanted to add, “You, Mrs Evanhart, can call me Doctor Mountain.”

  Lucy told Nicholas she would send her own son to school whenever she damn well wanted to send him to school.

  Lucy pulls me into her lap, and I let myself go soft against her body. The sun has warmed my skin, and Lucy pushes her cheek into mine. I try to hold my breath so she doesn’t notice I still have the morning breath. My mouth tastes like the spray of my inhaler, all sour mist on the back of my back teeth. I’ll brush my teeth before the museum. I read the headline aloud to please Lucy: “Coalton’s Museum Opens—First Exhibit Pays Homage to Town’s Mining History.” The new museum has a two-page spread. I scan the pictures, looking for one of Elijah. The town’s historical pieces usually talk about Elijah as an early settler of the town, and I’m very curious about him, especially the story about him pulling his men out of the mine after an explosion, going in again and again, even after he’d been hurt.

  Lucy holds me around my waist and gives me time to take in all the images—the old church, the hotel, some families playing baseball in the field where the school stands now, a few pictures of the mining disaster of 1902, and, of course, some of the 1908 fire, a few of the 1916 flood. The opening of the residential schools in the 1920s. The hard days in the thirties, when everyone looked hungry. Fire, flood, and famine—that was the Indian Chief’s curse coming true.

  The picture that most catches my attention shows three women sitting on a bench outside the hotel. The two on the outside look as old as Lucy. They wear loose work dresses and have their hair pulled back from their faces. Between them sits a girl of about twelve or thirteen. Her skin looks dark, and her dark hair falls messily to her bony shoulders. She stares straight into the camera but doesn’t smile. It’s like she’s daring the photographer, but not as if she doesn’t like him. Not exactly.