Inside (12 page)

“What do you want?” Fiona asked him, sounding more curious than confrontational.

“I came to offer my condolences,” Mitch said, but she looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken in English. Or maybe she just couldn’t imagine why he’d thought this would be helpful. When, after a long pause, she still didn’t speak, Mitch tried again. “Do you live here?”

She glanced at Thomasie, who was looking down at his lap, fixated on the cookies. Her expression was equal parts disappointment, concern, and affection. “I’m his cousin,” she said, then registered the look on Mitch’s face. “Second cousin. My parents live down by the hospital. After his mom got hurt I came over to help take care of him.”

“Fiona takes care of everybody,” the boy said.

“Be quiet, Thomasie,” she told him, but fondly.

“She’s got the best grades at school. She’s going to be a lawyer.”

Fiona sighed; it was a sigh of having heard all this before, of wishing he had the expectations for himself that he had for her.

“That’s great,” Mitch said. “I was worried about you,” he said to Thomasie. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Fiona kept looking at him, a straight, direct gaze he couldn’t quite interpret. He wasn’t sure if she was blaming him for not doing more before or asking him to do less now. Maybe both.

“He’s not alone here,” she finally said.

Mitch could tell she felt reproached. He seemed to make everybody feel bad, all these women doing their best to hold the lives around them together. “He’s very lucky,” he told her, also the wrong thing to say, because she frowned and Thomasie snorted.

Fiona stood up and, with an air of weary responsibility, offered him some tea, then went into the cramped kitchen to prepare it. Thomasie had put the cookie bag on the floor but was chewing contemplatively, looking up at the ceiling. His condition had deteriorated rapidly, and it wasn’t just that he was high, more that he had given up on communicating—given up, it seemed, on everything.

Mitch sat forward, wanting somehow to break through. “I’m so sorry about your mother,” he said. “What was she like?”

Slowly and with evident effort Thomasie lowered his gaze to Mitch, his eyes unfocused, red-tinged, and made a vague gesture with his hands, as if holding a watermelon. “She was small,” he said.

Fiona came back into the room carrying two mugs. She gave one to Mitch and the other, after shaking him none too gently by the shoulder, to Thomasie, seeming as much his mother as his girlfriend. As he faded in and out, Fiona and Mitch managed to have a conversation. He learned she’d worked since she was thirteen at a general store in Iqaluit and was an honors student who planned to earn a bachelor of laws degree at Akitsiraq Law School. Her mother worked at the general store too, and her father mostly helped around the house. She presented these facts directly, assuming they were what Mitch had come for, sounding neither shamed nor boasting.

Thomasie fell asleep in his chair.

After twenty minutes or so, Fiona looked at her watch and said, “You should go now.”

Mitch nodded, thanked her for the tea, and paused at the door to shake her hand.

As she held his hand in her cool, dry palm, Fiona’s eyes suddenly glistened. “He’s not doing too good,” she said, and at last she seemed like a teenager, her body slight beneath her hulking hooded sweatshirt, her shoulders curved. “Maybe you can help him?”

“Of course,” Mitch said, automatically. He was walking down the street before it sank in that no measures he took would bring back Thomasie’s sister, or his mother, or the life he should have had. He hadn’t meant to lie to the girl; he just wanted her, for that one moment, not to feel so alone.

That evening, he called Martine. They had finally spoken a couple of times over the past week, but she’d been in a hurry, eager to get off the phone. There was too much to talk about, or too little. He had already filled the air between them with explanations, and now there was no room for anything else. He talked, as he had before, about the people of Iqaluit, how much they needed him, how fulfilled he felt, all lies or at the very least exaggerations.

“I’m happy for you, Mitch,” she said wearily.

They’d stopped calling each other by their first names long ago, using nicknames and endearments instead, and his name falling from her lips now sounded strangely formal, distancing, even bruising. He sighed. “How’s Mathieu?”

“He’s made a friend.”

“Really? How did that happen?” Friendship wasn’t a social need Mathieu understood.

“At camp. His name is Luc. He comes over and plays on his PlayStation while Mathieu plays on his Xbox. They never talk. But they like sitting there together. Mathieu even asks me to invite Luc over.”

“Martine, that’s great. Really amazing.”

There was a pause on the other end. It could have been that she didn’t believe him, or that hearing him say “Martine” instead of “sweetheart” was as jarring to her as it had been to him. And possibly she was thinking, You should be here to see it.

“I have to go,” Martine said. “I need to get dinner.”

“Okay,” he said. “I can’t wait to see you—just three more weeks.” He was sticking to the fiction that theirs was a difficult but necessary separation, enforced by external circumstances over which he had no control, to be followed by a romantic reunion at the end of his rotation.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “I’m seeing someone else.”

“No,” he said without even thinking. He couldn’t imagine this. “I don’t believe you.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to. It’s true whether you believe it or not.”

“Is it that guy Michel at your office? Because you know he’s an asshole, Martine.”

“It’s not Michel. It’s Dr. Vendetti, actually.”

This was a name he’d never heard. “Who?”

“He’s my gynecologist.”

This information silenced him. There was so much to take in, all of it bad. That he had never once thought, in all their time together, about Martine even having a gynecologist made him dizzy with remorse. There was so much in her life he hadn’t paid attention to.
And then there was the image, undesired but fully resolved, of Martine with her legs spread in stirrups, leaning back while this man put his hand inside her. He would have done anything, in that moment, to have her back, to have never left her—and this, he knew, is why she had told him.

“I have to go now,” she said. “Dinner, like I said. Take care.”

He was formulating exactly what to say next when he realized she’d hung up.

Mitch was a man of moderate habits. He didn’t smoke, rarely overate, walked as much as he could. So it took very little, when the need arose, to obliterate him.

To accomplish this goal, he bought two bottles of whiskey and invited Johnny to play cards. A short hour later he was twenty dollars down and felt the room temperature rising, so he took off his sweater. Seated across the table, Johnny smiled enigmatically, his freckled cheeks flushed red, the smoke from his continual cigarettes wreathing him cloudily, so that he looked like a magician or a wizard.

“You don’t drink much, do you?”

“I drink a regular amount.”

“You’re drunk now, and you’ve only had one drink.”

“Didn’t I have two?”

“And it isn’t easy to lose twenty bucks at gin rummy.”

“You,” Mitch said drunkenly, “are a damn card shark.”

Johnny shrugged and poured him another drink.

Mitch fought the urge to weep and tell him that he was his only friend. But it was true; in this place, right now, he was. Johnny won another twenty dollars before Mitch passed out.

It had been so long since he was hungover that he didn’t recognize the terrible commotion in his bloodstream. He thought he had food poisoning, then remembered he hadn’t eaten dinner. There was a terrible smell in the room, and when he opened his eyes he saw he’d thrown up into a bucket that Johnny must have left by his bed for just that purpose. Aching from his neck to his knees, he felt like he had a fever, so physically terrible that he couldn’t even think about
Martine. Disgust—with himself, his body, and his behavior—was the closest thing to an emotion that he could summon.

Which was to say that things had worked out perfectly.

He had the day off and thought he might lie around in bed all morning, go for a walk in the afternoon, then see if Johnny was up for another night of drinking. If he could drink himself into oblivion for a couple of nights, his mind and heart might start healing, and he could sober up feeling better about Martine and Mathieu and himself. Or feeling nothing at all.

The light streaming through the thin white curtains hurt his head, and he thought about turning over, then decided this was too drastic a course of action, with potentially awful consequences. His stomach wavered unhappily, and he closed his eyes.

“You did a number on yourself,” a voice said.

He looked up to see Johnny standing next to the bed, silhouetted in the window, whose curtains he’d just thrown open.

“Get up,” he said. He seemed towering, mountainous. He left the room—for good, Mitch hoped—but was back all too soon with a can of Pepsi and several pills, which Mitch swallowed without asking what they were.

“You’ll feel better soon,” Johnny said.

“Thanks.” He was sitting up in bed now, pillows propped behind his back, feeling a sense of accomplishment for having made it halfway horizontal. Johnny sat by him for a while in silence. Every few minutes he handed him the can of Pepsi and told him to take a sip, more solicitous than Mitch would have imagined possible. As his headache slowly ebbed, Mitch realized that Johnny was waiting for the pills to take effect.

The can was half empty when Johnny said, “Heard the news this morning. About the kid you were telling me about last night. Thomasie.”

Mitch opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He closed it again, tasting on his tongue the sick trace of whiskey, the sugary bite of Pepsi. It was too early for him to feel anything yet, and he let this moment linger, knowing that soon he would feel altogether too many things. “What has he done?”

“He drank a pint of vodka and stepped onto the highway in front of a truck in the middle of the night. The trucker’s in the hospital. No note or anything.”

And there it was. Another terrible thing in a world already sick to death of terrible things. I should kill myself too, Mitch thought. His shoulders shook, and he welcomed the coming sobs—but what happened instead was a shudder of his stomach, and the Pepsi and pills lurched back out, strands of spittle webbing the bucket and his sleeves.

“I know you tried to help him,” Johnny said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“I didn’t do any good.”

Johnny took him by the hand, as if he wanted to hold it, but then curled his palm around the still-cold Pepsi can and said, “I’ll let you get dressed,” and left the room.

At the clinic, for the first time, everyone wanted to talk to him. To know what Thomasie had been thinking, what he had told Mitch about his mother. A helicopter had flown in reporters from as far away as Montreal, eager to report on Inuit problems and the crises of addiction, poverty, and fractured families. Mitch was supposed to be an expert on these issues, and his phone rang so incessantly that he finally pulled the cord out of the wall. He had nothing to say.

They held a combined service for Thomasie and his mother at the community center, where an elder delivered the eulogy and no one from the family spoke. A friend of Thomasie’s from high school played the guitar and sang a John Denver song. There was no sign of Thomasie’s father. The nurse from the clinic was there, and so was Fiona, with her parents, but when Mitch expressed his condolences she looked right through him and said nothing. He pressed his card into her palm and told her to call if she needed anything, and she crumpled it into her pocket like some useless receipt.

When he asked to be released from his rotation, the request was
granted immediately. What he wanted most was to get away from all the understanding looks and forgiving glances. Another fragile southerner, the community seemed to think. They’d never expected him to last long, and didn’t condemn him for wanting to leave. If only someone had blamed him, he might have been able to stay.

He returned to Montreal in August, and the city was turgid with heat, empty of people. His apartment felt like it belonged to someone else. Several times he picked up the phone to call Martine but always put it down again. Though he was due a vacation, he reported to work anyway, knowing how much he needed that structure and company to get through the days. He’d always been like this in difficult times, working weekends even when he didn’t have to, sculpting his hours to make everything else fit neatly into place.

On Sunday evening he went for a long run on the mountain, the familiar, muffled beat of the tam-tam drums by the Cartier monument matching the rhythm of his pulse. After the cold nights of Iqaluit the dense, humid air felt good against his skin, his muscles unclenching as he sweated out the poisons inside.

He’d thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep, but he fell into a dreamless, blanketing state and woke at dawn feeling like he’d been deep underwater. At six thirty the phone rang, and he raced to answer it.

“You’re nothing,” a woman’s voice said on the other line. It wasn’t Martine.

“Who is this?”

She was crying in rhythmic sobs and wheezes. “You were supposed to help.”

“Please, who is this?”

“I hope you lose somebody you love.”

“Fiona,” he said.

“You’re nothing,” she said again, and hung up.

He stood in the living room in his underwear, still holding the phone in his hand, the early-morning sun bright behind the curtains, birds chirping outside. He thought of nothing except Thomasie Reeves: his chapped lips, his red windbreaker, his face as it must have
looked when he stepped out onto the highway, firm and unblinking, into the brilliance of those headlights, massive as planets, barreling toward him in the pale Arctic night.

The dial tone sang, then switched to a higher beep. Mitch was happy. He was satisfied that someone hated him as much as he deserved, and was willing to tell him so. At least there was one person in the world who told the truth.