Consumption (44 page)

Marie walked south down Sherbrooke Avenue and studied the rows of fifty-foot-high elms arching over that street. The sidewalk was busy and the traffic hurtled past her six feet away and it seemed to her incomprehensible that the people sharing the sidewalk with her were not more frightened.

When she came to the bridge over the Assiniboine River, she studied the water flowing under it and felt for the first time that urge to leap that city dwellers became accustomed to. She had seen bridges before, but she had not walked over one of them, these enormous arching concrete ribbons, nor had she understood how real the rivers they crossed were, or how comparable the Red and Assiniboine Rivers were to the great rivers of the tundra, the Kazan, the Thelon, the Back. Somehow she had imagined that a river that brooked bridging so easily could not itself be of any substance. There were no bridges where she lived, and none within five hundred miles, though there was a frigid river emptying into Hudson Bay every ten miles along the coast, all flowing east. What a person, or a caribou, has to do when confronted with one of these is walk across, or swim. In spring and early summer, the current is formidable and the caribou calves die in raven-glutting numbers whenever a herd resolves to cross deep water. Children died too often in water like this; every family had a list of names of wee daughters and grinning boys who fled this world in a swirling eddy of seabound river water.

Marie levitated above the Assiniboine on the Maryland Street Bridge, walking effortlessly over the thick green water from the north bank to the south and then onto Wellington Crescent. She passed houses the size of Rankin Inlet airport hangars, lawns like rolls of green velveteen laid upon their yards with nails and a spirit level. On one such lawn, after looking around to see if anyone was watching, she lay down on her back, stretching her arms widely and studying the sky. The clouds rolled over her, the heat rising up off the grass. Perspiration rolled down her face as the sun found purchase and really began to light into her. The sun looked exactly the
same as it did in the north, but she could never remember feeling heat like this. It was like looking closely into a fire. Even with her eyes shut she could see it. How did people bear to work outside? She opened her eyes, squinting, and looked at the trees towering over her. The mosquitoes had found her. She reached between her shoulders and swatted one. Then she noticed someone observing her through a curtained window. She rose, not looking, and walked over to the sidewalk and continued east, the houses growing grander as she went.

She crossed back to the north bank of the Assiniboine over the Osborne Street Bridge. She was not certain where she was, relative to the hospital. She did not know where she was going, had no real idea where she would spend the night. She was lonely, as she had been for years, and she wanted both to get as far away as she could from Rankin Inlet, which had become a torment for her, and to run into the arms of her mother, her sister, her family, crawl into her room, put Joy Division on her Walkman and not emerge, and not be bothered. As they had not bothered, or been bothered about her, for years.

She asked a woman where Portage Place was and she was directed to the mall abutting the downtown length of Portage Avenue, just a few blocks from the Osborne Street Bridge. When she spotted the glass arcades of the building she gasped; it was more beautiful than she had imagined. She could not have guessed that a building in the city could seem so light; there were real live trees growing inside, and sparrows flying among them.

She found the HMV quickly and lost herself among the CDs: here was music she had read of but never heard, and there were headphones with which to listen to sample CDs, as long as you wanted, no charge. She had never heard XTC before, or the Beastie Boys, Tone Loc, or Public Enemy. She listened to
Appetite for Destruction
in one stretch, glancing away every time the cashier looked at her. She gathered together a mound of disks she longed to own: R.E.M.’s
Eponymous
, the Monks’
Bad Habits
, Marianne
Faithful’s
Broken English
, and then she set them down in front of the skeptical-looking cashier. She began ringing them in and then Marie pretended to have misplaced her wallet. “I’ll be right back,” she assured the girl and left, aching to hear that music.

In the courtyard she sat at one of the little tables and smiled at the knots of boys and girls sitting all around her. One clique dressed entirely in black, the boys in eye shadow, the girls like princesses of the undead: Marie assumed they were in a band and was certain she would like their music. She was too shy to approach them; instead she concentrated on willing them to acknowledge her, yearning for one of them to catch her eye. She could not have known how she looked to them, like just another Indian kid tossed out of home and destined for trouble. She could not have anticipated how far short of her own hopes she was falling, falling, falling, as she sat there and felt sadness lapping over her like water, green and pungent in the middle of an unseasonable spring.

In the diner around the corner from Kat’s room they sat together and blinked. They had slept twelve hours and were still exhausted—from the dope trip, and the sex, and the hot restless sleep that supervened for irregular stretches through the night, never more than a couple of hours at a time before one of them was rolling over and sighing. Now they were waiting for their eggs, the moment almost familial in its intimacy. What each of them wanted now was to be among people who knew them well and approved of them. They settled for this.

When the food came, they tucked into it without comment. The toast and the sausages slid over their tongues with textures of unanticipated complexity and nuance. The orange juice and the coffee were perfect complements, and the sound of the foil covers being peeled from the wee marmalade packages tasted itself like orange peel. In the light of this early afternoon moment, it was dazzling.

When the ambulance pulled into the children’s hospital emergency room, it was dawn and the sky was glowing purple, radiant streaks of prairie sky shooting out from the east. She had been spotted by an early morning jogger, face down among the reeds along the river, motionless and pallid, her preposterous-looking and stolen clothing hanging over her like drapery. She was already cold, her sodden lungs full within minutes of striking the water. Even if she had been able to swim, it would not have mattered, she had knocked her head on an edge of the bridge as she fell and she had known nothing more.

Ten seconds before the last of her thoughts, she had not contemplated ending them. She had been standing on the bridge, stung by the unfriendliness of the mall, and by her unprecedented anonymity. The water looked just like it does in the north, except greener maybe, more algae. She could not buy the music she wanted, she could not make her way in this place, the only alternative to Rankin Inlet, not without help. There was no help. Her father had gone from her, despite all his promises. He was the only one who ever looked out for her, really. She could not picture an end to this that would be bearable. Locked in the hospital room. Locked in Rankin Inlet. Alone and fighting tears in the Portage Place food court, with nothing to eat and no money to buy anything.

She had wanted to read a comic book, and had stopped at a newsstand, but hadn’t the nerve to flip through one under the dour gaze of the man behind the till. Some Cree boys saw her there, members of Indian Posse, with emblazoned jean jackets, and invited her to go to a party with them. She walked quickly away and they had followed her for a short while, hooting derisively. They had frightened her.

She wanted company and she wanted to be safe. She wanted to be sitting at the supper table, her dad and her mom passing around the food. That was gone from her. This is what it would be from here on: just her, in the world. The wind picked up. It was getting
darker. She didn’t have enough clothes on. She swung one leg over the side of the bridge. Then, the other, and she was sitting on the edge. Cars drove past. One honked its horn. It was dark enough that she couldn’t see the people inside, only the headlights. There were lights everywhere in the city. Apartment high-rises lit up like monuments. As she fell, they streaked out into serpentine blurs against the night sky.

When Balthazar got to his office the phone was ringing. He set down his jacket as he reached for the handset. It was Sara Miller, the head of paediatric psychiatry. She outlined the events of the evening before and that morning, and as she did, Balthazar’s throat tightened to the point where he wondered if he was having his first episode of angina. It let up a bit as he sat down. “Of course, there will be an inquest into this, into how she got out of hospital, how thoroughly her suicidality had been assessed, what could have been done differently, better,” Miller said.

“This is just awful,” was all he could croak.

“I agree. On behalf of my department, I apologize to you. I’ve already spoken with Mrs. Robertson and conveyed the same sentiment.”

He detected her indignation in that statement and heard a flash of the conversation that had erupted in her office over Marie’s death. His every instinct was to calm her, to settle things down, to assure her that she ought not to feel too bad, suicidal ideation is hard to assess, especially among Aboriginal teens, the most suicidal demographic ever studied, and if he could predict it, there wouldn’t have been four teenaged hangings in the last five months up here.

Miller listened and felt disdain for the man, for the ease with which he accepted this travesty that had led to the death of his patient. She formed an opinion in that moment about his dedication, and the quality of his work. The sureness of her instinct was
largely responsible for her professional success, and she was not wrong, in this instance—or at least, her opinion was broadly shared. As her respect for him declined, she felt her own sense of embarrassment and failure fade. “Well, part of what caught everyone flat-footed was the unusual nature of the case—it’s the first instance of a serious eating disorder diagnosed in an Inuit child that I’ve ever heard of. As a patient population, these young women are prone to self-injury, of course, and in the context of an Aboriginal patient, in the future such patients will have to be considered at maximally high risk for self-injury.”