Faerie (10 page)

I was giddy with fear and couldn't make myself speak to Mother or Dad on the phone. I thought of them only superficially, as something from the past that didn't belong to me. I felt little or nothing for them. Why was that? Had the inevitability of my death not sunk in? Had my mind, my heart, gone dormant in order to save me from sabotaging my suicide?

“You don't have to, y'know.” Alyssa's grey eyes glimmered, eyebrows raised.

“If I didn't have to, I wouldn't. But I want to.” I reminded her that months before she was admitted to Four East, I had fled the hospital on the coldest day of February and attempted to end my life.

“Maybe it wasn't time for you yet. Like it wasn't for me.” She sat back and put her arm around me and drummed her frail nail-bitten fingers on my shoulder.

During lunch hour in the cafeteria, the swirl of faces and voices and the thick Saltine odour were brush strokes that were beautiful and repellent. My tray was already in my hand. How did it get there? I couldn't remember the sequence of real-time events that led me to the long line-up at the food counter and
being served by Sam the Somalian who always looked upon me with pity. (“So sad, so skinny. Will never find a husband.”) I would pass on dessert—lemon cream pie with its tart, pungent perfume. I looked at the Thursday lunch of red tomato soup, leafy side salad toppled with garlicky croutons, and a tangled pile of cold spaghetti.
My last meal
, I thought, and it wouldn't be my mother's cooking.

I sat next to Alyssa, who was staring at the lunch as though she'd never seen food before. I suddenly realized that not once since the morning had I worried about weight or calories. I told Alyssa, saying, “Isn't that amazing?”

“See?” she said knowingly. She was right; this must be divine destiny.

We were minutes away from art therapy. Alyssa looked at me and reached out, extending her hand. Her wrist was exposed, her wounds raw. I looked up at her.

“Wait. I have to pee,” I said.

I headed to the bathroom. Once on the toilet, I couldn't go. The urge felt pressing and real, but it was merely a ghost sensation, brought on by a weak bladder, cold drafts, jumpy nerves—preparation for a suicide.

What was going on? What was I about to do? My mind went blank, then my gaze landed on the garbage bin. I stared at it for awhile, recalling how I'd stuffed food deep into it, day after day. I replayed this action in my mind and chuckled—it seemed crazy now. I sensed something missing, a crucial sound. Had my heart stopped beating already? I looked up. My feeding bag had gone dry, and its steady drip had stopped. I was about to go to the nursing
station to get a refill, then caught myself. Wasn't I supposed to be doing something important just about now? I had to make a choice. And suddenly I realized that I didn't want to do this. I wasn't ready to die.

I rushed out, but Alyssa was gone. A wave of panic followed by a sense of angry betrayal came over me. I ran to the nursing station and screamed, “Alyssa! She's going to kill herself!”

A cavalry of nurses raced down the corridor with me on their tail. When we got to the art therapy room, Nurse Jean pulled me back by the shoulders and barked, “What the heck is going on?”

I twisted out of her grip and looked into the room. Nurses and aides were moving about frantically, shouting orders at each other. Nurse Jean pulled me away forcefully, backed me against the wall, and shook me.

“How did you know?” Shook me again, harder. “How did you know?!”

“She, she, she …” I sucked up air as I sobbed. A stretcher whizzed by, and I caught a glimpse of Alyssa. Her face was blue and bloated. I remembered the first night I'd seen her; she'd been wheeled in the same way. I told Nurse Jean about our plan. She held me as I wailed, “I was going to do it too!”

“The poison got to her. She couldn't be saved.” Jean's voice was steady, but she was trembling as she delivered the news to me. When she saw that I'd noticed, she pursed her lips, stood taller, and busied herself replacing my feeding bag and bustling
about, being my nurse. My eyes followed her around the room, watching her every move, hungry for comfort. I wondered if she blamed me, held me responsible for Alyssa's suicide. As the thought crossed my mind, she gave me a look of disappointment, as though she'd read my mind.

“My shift is over. I'm off till Monday.” She left swiftly and shut the door. A hush fell in the room. I held my breath, feeling Alyssa's absence. I wanted to weep but told myself that I had no right to. Alyssa was dead. I was not. And nothing would bring her back. Guilt sucked me into its quicksand.

Within twenty-four hours, Alyssa's room was cleared and another patient had moved in. I stood and stared at the bed where Alyssa had sat digging into her skin, picking at her wounds. Now it was occupied by an old woman with wild auburn hair. She shuffled around with a shampoo bottle in her hand, unsure where to put it, as though it meant the world to her. How strange, I thought. How fleeting. Who
does
care if you live or die? You take your life, and life goes on.

I heard voices down the corridor. A nurse was greeting a couple who had just come in. I saw that the woman was tall and delicate. The sturdy man next to her had his arm around her firmly, as if she might fall over at any moment. Alyssa's parents? The woman's hands clasped her face; I recognized that gesture. I could vaguely hear the nurse as she told them what had happened to their child.

“Who?” asked the woman. The nurse paused and looked down the hallway at me. My instinct was to duck back into my room and hide, but I held my ground. The woman's gaze fell on
me. She broke away from her husband's grip and approached me. To my surprise, she put one arm around my shoulder and cupped her other hand against my cheek.

“Lila? It's okay. It's not your fault. It's not your fault, understand?” Then she pulled me into her arms and held me. I don't know how long she held me, but it wasn't long enough to convince me that I had not, in the act of not intervening, been responsible for Alyssa's death as though I had killed her myself.

Perhaps I felt that way because … Alyssa's mother didn't utter those words. Nor did she hold me, let alone look at me.

The following day, I didn't leave my room after getting weighed. I'd lost three pounds, but it meant nothing to me. I curled my feet up into my chair and pulled a blanket up to my chin. Nurses came and went, trying to console me, distract me from my anguish, and refocus my attention on my weight gain. But I couldn't stop crying. In my mind, I repeated over and over,
I could've saved her. I should've saved her
.

Eventually I remembered that moment in the bathroom when I made a clear decision to live, to part ways from my faerie sister. It meant something. It
had
to mean something. Alila, our clay sculpture, sat on my bedside table, hideous and incomplete. I had spent hours in the art therapy room trying to beat it into a shape, resuscitate something that was getting hard and solid quickly. It was a race against time. But I had failed to save my friend's life, let alone her art. I wanted to smash the object to pieces, but it was the only souvenir that I had of her.

I could start a new piece, I thought, an object unencumbered with our history. It felt crucial for me to do so. I remained in that
chair for hours until light turned to dark, when I looked up to see a figure in the doorway. It took a moment to recognize her. The translucent vision of Alyssa floated in and passed through me like a spring breeze. By morning I awoke on my bed with my chest open and filled up with air. My breath was full again. I knew then that my sister's soul had crossed over peacefully.

“Why didn't you do it?” Dr Bélanger stood by my bed, her hands in her trouser pockets. I found it hard to look her in the eyes.

“The question is, why did I let her do it,” I replied.

“That's not the question I asked.”

I sighed and turned to the window.

“You blame yourself,” she said.

“A hundred percent.”

“You're giving yourself way too much credit.”

Her words were beginning to ring true. I wasn't convinced that I was responsible anymore. I could no longer hide behind another story of guilt, a reason to sink into self-pity.

“I didn't do it because of what you said!” I blurted out. “Choice is power, you told me.”

“Oh, Lila. Come here.”

I looked up at her; her arms were held open for me. I got up and collapsed into them, crying. After I'd calmed down, she said, “If you'd put as much focus and determination on creating the life you wanted as you did in losing weight, girl, you'd be flying.”

19
. Blank Beautiful Slate

Day 362. Three days short of an earthly year is how long I had been on planet Four East. On this notable triple-digit day, I weighed 100 incredible pounds but was told that I would not be discharged until I could maintain this weight for a period of two weeks. On this auspicious day, which I mentally called “Fat Friday,” Dr Messer put me on Phase Three and cut the umbilical cord to my medical mother. The feeding tube was slid out of my esophagus and the feeding bag put away.

I was also allowed a weekend pass, the first since admission. A weekend pass was given to patients so they could experience the pleasures and terrors of the world outside the ward for an experimental two days. I was in a state of fragile bliss—and panic. I would be going home and spending the days with family and nights in my cosy bedroom on rue Bordeaux.

Strangely, I could barely remember what my bedroom looked like. A girl's bedroom was supposed to be her palace, her shrine, where she could be allowed to blossom. But I was not blossoming, and my identity didn't have a clear form. I could hardly remember the details, the hues and objects that I had carefully arranged, the books on my shelves. Aside from my photographs, what was meaningful to me? I couldn't recall.

I watched Nurse Jean prepare for my weekend visit. I hadn't seen her this chipper and chatty since the Four East Christmas
party, when (after a few spiked punches) she had performed a bouncy “Jingle Bells” in the rec room before the zombie-like patients with their frothy mouths and unblinking stares.

“You got to keep up the eatin'—and no cheatin,' alright?” she said as she packed. If I started to lose weight again, she reminded me, the feeding tube would go back in. Her West Indian accent became stronger when she got tough on me and when she was being extra kind to me. I responded to this because I was the child of a Punjabi mother who did exactly the same thing. Perhaps all ethnic mothers shared the distinctive linguistic code of communication that guaranteed desired results: Punjabi for scolding, nagging, and complaining or for sweet and endearing cooing, English for all else.

“What's this?” Nurse Jean bent down to reach into my locker. She pulled out a small square box, the blue wrapping paper still covering it. My heart skipped a beat as I took it from her.

“Am I allowed to have it now?”

She shrugged as she folded and tucked clothes into my suitcase. “Don't see why not.”

I opened the box. My Leica. I felt at once both perfectly alive and absolutely afraid. “I'm taking this.”

My heart raced as I stood at the double door on the main floor waiting for Dad's car to pull up, feeling the crisp morning wind on my skin for the first time. I wore my real-world uniform, clothes I hadn't had on for months. My jeans were snug now and rode up my thick thighs, pinching my waist, reminding me of my disease, and the brassiere poked into new folds of flesh
that had formed under my ribcage. How would I endure living with this weight? What would I eat?
How
would I eat?

It was impossible. I wanted to spin around and return to my cell, to the great institutional indoors, where it was predictable and stale and where nature could not, with its shapeless, unyielding power, obliterate me. But I didn't give in. I stood upright, my camera hanging around my neck, a talisman that protected me from my maddening fear of the world. I convinced myself that I could, with the power of this apparatus, project my life as I willed it to be. I would point and take aim at the world.

I madly snapped a hundred images with my hungry neglected camera. Imaginary snapshots, as the camera had no film in it. I tried to ignore the tremendous fear that was building each second that I waited for my father to arrive. The earth rose slowly, devouring my ankles as my weight pushed against gravity. Wingless, I waited in the body of a grownup woman. And then Dad arrived, perfectly punctual in his new metallic-blue Ford. As he stepped out of the car, I darted toward him and threw my bulky woman's body into his unsuspecting arms.

When Dad and I arrived home, Mother was out grocery shopping with Mina. We stood silently in the doorway to the living room, side by side. This was the right address, but the house seemed to belong to someone else.

Velvety red wallpaper covered the walls, and our couches were now embellished with pillows and throws with Indian designs,
squiggly paisley patterns in saffron and mustard. A saccharine sandalwood-incense odour hung in the air; I could hardly breathe. Dad explained that this redecoration was a part of something bigger that had taken place with Mother. When I was admitted to the hospital, she'd fallen into a deep depression. After months of listless melancholy, she found solace at the Gurdwara and in the holy teachings of the Sikh gurus, and she began to embrace her faith and culture. Mother's surge of spiritual devotion inspired her passion to redecorate the house. I thought the room looked like a mobster's den in a '70s Bollywood movie and silently prayed to the sixth guru that her inspiration hadn't led her into my bedroom.

“Don't worry,” Dad said, seeming to read my mind. “Your room is safe.” He grinned.

My room was as it always had been—a work in progress. The walls were winter white, with ash-grey wall-to-wall carpeting and the light, inconsequential Ikea furniture found in so many suburban North American homes. The room was an incongruent appendage to the rest of the house, as perhaps I had been to this family.

I walked in and sat on my bed. The space seemed indifferent to me, and in some way, that was comforting. I stood up, raised the camera to my face, and panned around the room, hoping to discover something original, startling, and special that my naked eye could not detect.

“Lila? Are you here?” Mother's soft heels quickened as she came down the hall. Her head peered in, her wide eyes searched around, then she noticed me in the corner and came toward me.
She took me in her arms, and then I felt at home. The home I had returned to was her.

That afternoon, I watched my mother's gleaming face as she pulled from her closet a wardrobe of clothes she'd bought for me. She was unearthing months of hope and longing for me to return home and be where daughters ought to be and not in lonely hospital rooms raised by psychiatrists and their expert rules. Suddenly I was longing for the expert and his rules, for the impersonal foster care of my nurses—and I'd been home for only a few hours. I had grown accustomed to the sonic universe of the hospital, which like a fairy tale castle, had shielded me from the movement and bustle of the ordinary world, the drudgery of day-to-day survival. But I no longer belonged there. Everything that was solid in me was turning soft and fluid. My skin's pores were opening and the new reality seemed to be gushing in and flooding my body with its meaning. Who was I? Where was I? Mother could see that I was getting anxious, so she closed the closet doors and said three magical words: “We have time.”

And the time had come. The aroma of Indian cooking had been building like a pressure cooker all day. Mother had spent the day busying herself in the kitchen—I could hear the orchestra of clanging pots, closing cupboards, and ringing timers. Meanwhile, I had sat stiffly next to Mina in the den watching TV, with hardly a word to say. Her new frock flared like petals on the couch and I noticed that her fingertips glistened with a fresh coat of frosty pink nail polish. Did she dress up especially for me?

“Are we expecting anyone for dinner?” I asked.

“No.” She looked at me. “Just you.”

I obsessed over the sensation of my blouse seams pressing into my upper arms as I considered the upcoming meal and its unwanted calories. The thought unnerved me, so I shook it off.

I turned to my sister. “Hey, can I see your graduation pictures?” I asked suddenly.

Mina turned to me, surprised. “Sure.” She sprang up, pulled an album from the shelf, and sat on the couch next to me. Pointing at photo after photo, flipping page after page, she recounted a rambling story of the day still fresh in her mind. In one photo, she posed in a stunning satin teal gown with a hand on her hip, flashing a proud grin at the camera. Next to her stood her prom date—a lanky, freckled, red-headed boy with a full set of braces.

“Isn't he hot?” She turned to me with bright eyes. “He's Robert. We're going out now.”

Definitely not a Punjabi boy
, I thought to myself. I looked at her, choked with feeling, and said, “Sorry I couldn't be there, Mina.”

“No big deal. You would've been a drag anyway,” she said, winking.

Mina sat across from me at the dinner table. The usual spot but with a new perspective, for we were no longer little girls but young women. The space next to me where Monika once sat was still empty. Her chair had been pushed back against the wall next to the window, furbished with a fancy cushion. I was dying to know about her and her new baby, whom she had named after me. An uneasy excitement lingered as the family gathered around the table. Mother circulated copper serving dishes and platters of rice and succulent chicken.

“I didn't put in a lot of oil,” she said pointedly, as she held the rice platter over my clean unsoiled plate. “Say when.”

“When!” I blurted almost immediately. She frowned at the scattering of rice on my dish. I raised my plate again and let her serve me another spoonful. I looked over at my dad and noticed that he had gotten trimmer. He sat taller and sturdier, his belly had flattened out, and his weathered complexion was replaced with a youthful sheen. Mother explained to me, as she served us, that her cooking had undergone a change. She had cut back on ghee, used less spices, and added more fresh herbs. I was convinced that my illness and hospitalization were what had caused her to become more conscientious of the health of her family. Cooking had always served to fill her hours of loneliness, but now seemed to be a source of pride and pleasure.

“Eat what you can, okay?” she said. Once the pressure was off, I could allow my taste buds to reacquaint themselves with the vibrant spices and juicy seasonings that I hadn't eaten in over a year. The flavours came alive on my palate and produced nervous excitement—and exceptional guilt. Another nibble slid off my spoon and into my mouth, a piquant and creamy morsel of meat under my tongue. The slippery grease coated my lips, causing me to perspire as I began to estimate the calories I'd consumed. I shuffled the peas around on my plate, unable to take in more. As Dad helped himself to another serving, I stopped him. “Take mine. I can't finish it.”

He froze and looked at Mother. She nodded. I was relieved, but I could see a hint of concern in her eyes as she let out a deflated sigh.

“Mother, really, it was tasty … I just”—my voice dropped—“I'm getting there.”

“It's alright, Lila.” She tapped my hand. “Next time, if you don't eat, I will redecorate your bedroom.” Dad and Mina roared with laughter.

After dinner, I helped Mina and Mother with the dishes, while Dad wiped the table.

“How are Monika and her baby?” I asked, without looking up from the dish I was drying. I could feel Mother's movements slow down momentarily.

“They're fine,” she said. “They've moved to Vancouver.”

I put down the dish, stunned. “Why didn't anyone tell me?”

Mina brushed past me with a container and opened the fridge. “When did you ever bother to ask?”

Mother wiped her hands, reached for an envelope, and passed me some photos. “Here. Lila is almost two now.”

Dad came over and shook off his rag in the sink. “And she's as stubborn as you are,” he snickered. Monika had invited the family over on little Lila's first birthday, a few months after I was admitted to hospital. Since then, they had been in regular contact. I was stunned. Lila, the guileless little child, had charmed the entire family.

I realized, as I lay in bed that first night, that while I had been fighting time and age and life, my family had been embracing them with equal tenacity. A family, like any organism, seeks balance. It seeks to make up for the mad daughter and her belligerent disease.

I watched the curtain breathing, exhaling against the baseboard
heater. The fabric danced as tremors of light from the street communicated secret symbols and cryptic messages for my hallucinating mind to decipher. As night crawled into the still depths of the morning, images slipped through the crack of the curtain, flickering onto the shades of my consciousness: Mina's shiny brown skin in the glimmering lake when we camped as kids; the sturdy nook of my father's shoulders where I rode so high I could touch heaven with my nose; the warm and tender flesh of my mother's arms. The curtain continued to breathe graciously as a ghostly breeze thrust inside it. It spread its lepidopteran wings into the room and possessed all my senses and obliterated my entire mind with the fullness of wonder. Those were my wings. They were full. They were strong. They were new.

Moments before the misty dawn of morning, I got up, took my Leica in my hands, and stood at the window with the camera's eye pointed to the uncertain day ahead. And I took flight.