Holding Still for as Long as Possible (11 page)

[ 7 ]

Billy

What I think while having a panic attack:

My mouth is dissolving. My eyes take in too much light. My eyes are open wider than any eyes have ever been. I no longer have eyelids. They were cut off. I should touch them. I can't uncurl my fingers. Uncurl your fingers, asshole. God, I'm a fucking loser.
LOSER
. Maybe I should just punch myself with this fucking fist I can't uncurl. I'm going to jump out of this cab. It's 3 a.m. but I'm still just going to jump. Breathe, just breathe. Take a deep breath. Inhale. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? This is it. This is a sign. That lady is a sign. My hands are shaking. I'm having a stroke. Who has a stroke at twenty-four? People who live in toxic cities. Maybe I should move home. I don't have a skeleton. No, I have one, and it's going to break through my skin. When I get home I'll be able to gauge if I am really dying or if I am just panicking. It's probably just panic. But it might be the flesh-eating disease. It might be meningitis. It's an aneurism!
ANEURISM
. Stop it. Of course it's an aneurism. It's a sign. Everything about today makes sense now. The day will end with an exploding blood clot. Of course! They will play the wrong song at my funeral and only people I hate will talk. Dad will go on and on. He will show off my track and field trophies. Okay. Shut up.
SHUT UP
. I've been through this before and lived. You're going to live. What did that fucking book say? Change your thoughts. Change your thoughts. I am Fine. I am Fine. I am Totally Fine.

[ 8 ]

Josh

“Kids show up either dead or alive, and there's not much we can do about it.” This is what the
ER
nurse said to me at 7:30 a.m. in the Toronto General Hospital Atrium. Starbucks was open, filled with the early-morning dreary. I nodded. I was trying not to say the nurse's name because I wasn't sure if it was Anna or Angela.

She spoke so matter-of-factly. Wearily. She could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. Smoker's lines, night-shift skin, but still young in her eyes. She had taken a liking to me a few weeks ago. I wasn't sure why.

“Adults can fight, but sometimes with kids they just can or they can't and there's not much of a grey area. But it was your first dead baby?”

“Yup.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'll have a double espresso. What do you want?”

“Tall mild.”

The baby was dead when we got there. Dispatch would've sent an
ALS
crew, but Mandy and I happened to be on standby two blocks away. Mom fell asleep breastfeeding. Must have rolled over onto Baby. Fire got there first, and one of them looked like he had no blood left in his face. He was about twenty years old, the body of a linebacker. I told him to go outside and get some air. His eyes were out of focus.

Sometimes I liked it when other people reacted, so I didn't have to.

Mandy said, “Maybe we should book off on stress
.”

We contemplated it, sitting in the truck after the coroner arrived. We stared ahead through the window at absolutely nothing. No radio, no late-night joking. Our phones didn't buzz. Eventually, I heard Mandy unwrap one of her many vegan green-veggie energy bars. I usually made fun of them, but this time I just listened to her chew and swallow, fold up the wrapper. She leaned her jacket up against the passenger-side window, and cradled her head against it. She looked like she was a tired eight-year-old on a family drive.

We cleared with Dispatch and had started driving back to the station when we got another call.
Delta chest pain; female 52
. We took it, and now we'd been waiting on offload for four hours at Toronto General.

The baby call felt like it had happened years ago. The nurse and I were chatting in the atrium to stay awake. I paid for her tall mild and my double shot, and walked slowly down University Avenue and back towards the
ER
. I was practising nonchalance. It occurred to me that if Amy and I did break up, I really would have no idea how to start dating. It made me sad to think I'd even want a new girlfriend. I kept feeling surprised that we'd got to a place where we were even contemplating it.

Driving back to the station, I saw Billy paused at a red light on Bathurst, leaning against her handlebars, smoking. I leaned out the window and whistled like a jerk. She scowled and looked up, and then smiled. Winked.

“Hey, hottie!” she yelled.

“You're blushing,” said Mandy.

“Shut up.”

When I got home, I sat on the back porch. The autumn sun warmed my face and I could hear the sound of kids playing in Trinity Bellwoods Park on the other side of the fence. I drank from a glass of whiskey and smoked a cigarette, and played around with all the possible things I might have said to Billy, actual words that would've been better than a cat-call.

Inside on the fridge, I found a note:
Your mom called, said to remind you it's your dad's birthday tomorrow.
I hadn't called my dad on his birthday for about five years, but my mom still tried. Her capacity for forgiveness was nothing short of astounding.

Amy slid open the porch door, dressed for work in a long blue jacket over a brown dress, and high-heeled boots. Her red hair curled perfectly. When she reached out to hug me, I cringed slightly. She smelled like strawberry oil.

“Nice to see you for at least forty-five seconds today.”

Amy took a drag from my cigarette, exhaled. She was able to smoke sometimes and not become addicted. It made me really jealous, her ability to abuse substances for about five minutes, without them taking their toll on her. We sat side by side on the picnic table, and watched the tall red wooden fence that squares off our yard, as if it were a
TV
. The sound of the children playing on the other side rose and fell.

The sound reminded me of how we'd been living together for just over a week when September 11th happened. We'd been out of high school for three months. We were both revelling in first-time independence and playing adult. I'd woken up with a fever and hadn't gone to school. Amy was getting over a similar flu, so we threw back capfuls of NyQuil, stayed in bed, and unplugged the phone. We didn't know anything had happened until the evening, when we stumbled downstairs to the living room and turned on the
TV
to watch our 6 p.m.
Law & Order
rerun. We were aghast at what we'd missed.

We watched the news until we couldn't bear it, then opened the windows and stared outside at the ordinary day. Switched channels and watched the fires, the people walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, the horrified faces. Amy tried in vain to call friends in New York, flipped from news story to news story to try to catch every angle. She reacted by pacing, exclaiming, seeking out more information.

I reacted with calm. I'm sure it's something about the way I'm programmed, but when something shocking happens I tend not to dwell anxiously on it. I sliced up a long loaf of bread, and reheated the chicken soup Amy's mom had dropped off. I placed a pot of ginger tea and mugs of soup on the coffee table while Amy made phone calls, cold cloth on her head. When I called my grandmother in Guelph she said
,
“If it gets bad in the city, come here. Bring all your friends.” The sound of fear in her voice shook my calm.

Amy and I both suddenly felt hollow, and through the haze of my fever and our combined disbelief we took off our clothes and grabbed at each other, passion fuelled by sorrow. Sex didn't really make sense, but nothing else did either. Like when you laugh out of shock at a funeral, or grasp towards joy after someone you know dies.

Roxy called and left conspiracy messages on the voice mail. “Bush did it himself. It's so obvious. His approval rating is going to skyrocket.”

As the sun went down, we watched
TV
again as the emergency workers laboured in the rubble, their faces dusty and sometimes caked in blood.

“I worry sometimes, what if something happened here? You'd have to be right in the middle of it. What if we lived in New York? That would be you,” Amy said, eyes wide, rocking back and forth under the white wool blanket.

“Well, you can't spend your whole life worrying,” I said.

But we were both shaken by what we'd seen. It was as though someone had peeled the mask off certainty and our first-world assumptions about safety. Bombs happened halfway around the globe, not nearby. We were used to abstract faraway injustices and violence. We'd been cushioned our whole lives, had no idea how to act or what to think when faced with this disaster.

Today that episode felt like ten years ago, not four. I felt so much older, drinking whiskey in the morning so I could sleep. The things I'd seen since then. The gnawing in my bones of a kind of tired I knew wasn't healthy. But I was so used to it, it didn't matter any more.

“I guess I'd better get going. I wish I could call in sick and sleep next to you all day,” Amy said.

“Do it,” I said, and poked her in the side, then yanked at her skirt like a child.

“Can't. Grants due tomorrow.” She pulled my face into her breasts and kissed the top of my head.

I turned my head to breathe, and felt calm and sunny, and ready to sleep. It was the most affection we'd shared in weeks.

“What are you doing tonight?” Amy asked.

“I don't know. Might hang out with Roxy and Billy again.”

“Oh yeah?” she said.

I couldn't be sure, but I thought I saw her roll her eyes. I shrugged.

“Okay, well, I have to go. I love you,” Amy said.

We'd agreed long ago always to leave each other with love, because you never know, right? But her face looked different when she said it, as if she were actually saying
cooked green beans
or
don't forget to buy milk
.

“I love you, too,” I said back to her, rotating my glass and watching the syrup swirl and wave.

[ 9 ]

Billy

On Halloween I was dressed like a zombified French maid.

My body, still mine and moving when I told it to, was splayed like a thrown jack on the kitchen floor of the Parkdale Gem. My left foot on a polished black square and my right foot on the adjacent white tile. Two of thirty-eight tiles. My toes pointed ballerina straight like,
yes yes yes
. I sat up partway, spine flat against a cupboard. I closed my eyes like,
no way.

Between the open scissors of my legs: an upside-down plate of spaghetti. Sauce seeped out from under the bright blue dish. I brought my knees up to my elbows and placed my head in my hands, fingers messing up the gory makeup Roxy had worked so hard on. Roxy was going through a special-effects phase, making her own fake blood and scar tissue in the kitchen sink.

Good
Will?
More like: no will. Anxiety had turned into deep sad. Boring, awful sad.

Something had been broken, something that connected my body and brain. I had read somewhere that most human problems come down to the fact that we are living beings made up of non-living chemicals. I was just tired of being afraid all the time. My fears had become so pronounced, and there were so many of them, it made the most sense just to stay at home. Fewer fears here. Comfort. The floor, grounded.

Roxy had gone out and I'd lost track of how long I'd been lying on the floor. Smoosh was curled around me, looking almost accusatory, as if I'd taken her spot on the floor. She licked at my feet and fell over on her back.

I could have blamed my mother. On the phone the day before, she'd asked about Maria.

“Why don't you get back together? I saw her sister at the store the other day. She tells me Maria got a full-time job at a crisis centre. Such a hard worker, that Maria.”

My mother liked to pretend that she had taught her kids to have a strong work ethic, but in truth she taught us to follow our whims and not settle for something we didn't really want to do. Hence my waitressing and telemarketing career, and my plan to fail out of university. The last time I sat through class was two weeks ago.

“Maria and I broke up three months ago. We are not reuniting anytime soon.”

Lately the anxiety had slowed, to be replaced with a colourless glaze over both eyes. I didn't even bother with
Good Will
or counting things. My heart was still beating, but never fast enough to cause alarm. “I am having a quarter-life crisis
,”
I announced to my mother.

“My generation never had those, we just had babies and thought about killing them from time to time.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Oh, not you, Hilary. You were an angel. I meant your sister. I left her at the mall one day when you were in kindergarten and I almost didn't try to find her. I went crazy. She wouldn't stop crying.”

“Well, none of my friends are giving birth. I don't think any of us could quit smoking long enough to have a kid.”