Hellgoing (6 page)

He found her at a table drinking with a couple of interns from another house. He had to lean past her chair and insert himself into the frothy, college-girl conversation, which was mostly gossip about older — but not too much older — colleagues where they worked. I think it's time to go, said Marco, sounding as if he was the one minding Sam instead of the other way around. She got up without a word — busily draining her drink as she stood — and followed him to the parking lot.

I shouldn't drive, I am completely shit-faced, explained Sam. But how about I call you a cab.

She grabbed her phone and saw there was a voicemail from her brother.

Actually, she told Marco, it's pretty easy to flag one down.

He gazed down the street. The hotel sign was blazing in the distance like a signal fire. It might be nice to walk, he said.

Oh, they'd kill me if I let you walk home by yourself.

Then, Sam, said Marco. Please don't let me walk home by myself.

They walked. Sam hobbled along for a moment, taking off her high heels, and went from being about even with Marco's armpits to meeting him at mid-chest. Now she was at nipple height. Psychic text to Marie —
Hey Marie: nipple
height
.

I want to say, Marco told her once Sam had worked her shoes off. I appreciate your care these past couple of days. I'm sorry, if I ever seemed distant at all.

Oh — distant, repeated Sam.

These junkets, continued Marco, they actually require a great deal of energy and concentration for me. I'm an introvert by nature. To be chauffeured around, speaking into microphones, getting up in front of crowds — it's wearing. I feel I have to conserve energy at every spare moment.

Uh-huh, said Sam.

Marco turned his liquid eyes toward the looming hotel sign, which didn't seem to be getting much bigger as they advanced. I'm saying if I was rude to you at any point. Or inconsiderate.

Sam waited. But Marco had stopped talking. He was just stopping there. He wasn't even going to finish the sentence.

Rude, repeated Sam.

Or inconsiderate. Of your feelings.

Sam sounded a giddy little snort.

Then I apologize, finished Marco at last, frowning like invisible fingers were actually pulling at his face; like it was painful, but he was helpless not to do it.

Sam noticed they were walking alongside a police fence. She fell against it briefly just to feel the metal and hear it jangle.

There is insult, Marco, said Sam. Insult is no problem. I am insulted every day, by all sorts of people, because that is what it is to be short. That is what it is to be
human
, as you would say — ha ha. There is insult, and then of course there is full-scale attack.

Attack, repeated Marco.

I shouldn't say full-scale attack, no. I should say covert attack. Which is secret and dirty and vicious. And cowardly.

You think I, said Marco.

Sam's phone jumped in her purse, nuzzling away at her thigh through the leather.

It's all
couched
, Sam shrieked, piercing the night with the chipmunky, short-woman's voice she acquired whenever she became upset. She jerked a little when she shrieked, bouncing against the fence again and causing the three bottles of hot sauce, which she still hadn't taken out of her purse, to clack together like bones. Now Marco looked like he wanted to throw his hands over his ears. You sit there, said Sam, on the other side of the glass,
accusing
me while
pretending
I'm not there.

Not at all, said Marco, blinking his great eyes as rapidly as someone with such big eyes was capable.

And I started reading your book. I know I was supposed to read it before now, but I didn't. But I started just today, once I realized what you were doing. And I just can't believe it, Marco.

Something wet and warm fell into her cleavage. Sam knew it was her own saliva. She was drooling. She was drooling she was so angry.

Can't believe what? Marco pleaded, sounding distant and terror-struck.

He'd never imagined, perhaps, that Sam would ever settle down to thinking long enough to put it all together. He never dreamed she'd hold her ground, let alone come rampaging at him through the fences in full revolt.

TAKE THIS AND EAT IT

W
ell, I keep seeing this girl now. The first time I saw her was terrible — her parents brought her in because she had stopped eating and she was in one of the rooms having a tube worked down her nose. I had paused on my way down the hall to visit Sylvia Embree dying of lung cancer because I could hear the doctors and nurses shuffling around, barking orders and crying out whenever one of her flailing limbs connected. And the girl, this little fourteen-year-old girl was shouting with great authority that Our Lord would bring down his wrath upon all their heads. She had such a deep and outraged voice for a child. I have to say I was impressed and stopped to take a peek.

The moment I stuck my nose in the door, young Dr. Pat looked up and told me, “Sister, you could help.”

They'd never asked me to help before. I stepped over the threshold like a kitten.

“No, really, Sister,” said Dr. Pat. “Please.” He took his hand off the girl for a quick instant to wave me over. “Now this is Sister Anita!” he yelled down at the girl, who was trying to yank the tube out of her face as Dr. Pat and a nurse kept hold of her arms.

She stopped struggling for a moment to take me in. Then nodded, all business. “Jesus is Lord,” she said. Tried to butt the doctor with her forehead, then.

How about that, I couldn't stop my mind from saying.

Now she's a regular, like Sylvia Embree. I keep seeing her laid out there like an invalid, taking up one bed after another — in and out all the time. “For pity's sake,
Catherine
,” I tell her, “this is getting ridiculous, a young girl like yourself. Have a bite to eat and get on with it.”

For the most part, she ignores me. We spoke a little the first time she was admitted, and I think she's decided I'm a fraud or some such thing. Too low on the totem pole for the exalted likes of her. She told me she was fasting, just like the nuns do, and I asked did she want to become a nun. She just snorted at me like I'd asked did she want to become a clown in the circus, like she was insulted. Well, I was insulted too so I got up to go talk to Sylvia. Sylvia needs a machine to do her breathing for her and still she wouldn't quit the smokes if she had anything left to say about it. In a way, she and the girl are the same sort of specimen.

“Now, Sylvia,” I tell her sometimes. “There's a girl down the hall who won't take a bite, she's starving herself. Killing herself deliberately.”

“Well, the foolish thing.”

“Yes, but will you look who's talking?”

But I only say that sort of thing when Sylvia's going on and on about her cigarettes.

“Why don't you just ask me to bring you a gun?” I'll tell her.

“One of these days I might,” she's answered once or twice.

I should leave Sylvia alone about it. She's old and she's dying. But a fourteen-year-old girl — there's little excuse.

Still, it's none of my business. I don't want it to be. Once every few months I'll pass a room and there she'll be and I will call as I go by: “Not again!” But that's about all I have to say to her these days. I didn't particularly like her after that snort.

But then Dr. Pat takes me aside one day when
Catherine
's back on the ward and asks if I'll meet with him and the social worker, a woman named Hilary. I dart my eyes around for a moment, perhaps in the hope that someone else is going to step forward and say, No, no, no, I'll do it — what in God's name are you asking Anita for. But nobody does, so I say I suppose that I could.

This Hilary and I pass each other in the hall at different hours of the day. She carries her folders and I have my beads. She's young, but wears her glasses on a chain like someone's grammy. We nod on occasion.

“Catherine's condition is fairly bound up with her religion,” Dr. Pat explains like I'm some kind of simpleton. Hilary and I sit side by side in front of his desk. Hilary swivels her chair around and looks at me the moment he says
religion
.

“So it would seem,” I remark. Even though I don't need to, I untuck a piece of tissue from my sleeve and lightly blow my nose before the two of them. I suppose I'm a bit nervous.

“Have you spoken to her at all?” the social worker wants to know.

“I told her I found it ridiculous.”

“Really?” says Hilary.

“Yes — and I do,” I say.

“Well, would you mind talking to her a bit more?”

“I'd be happy to talk to her,” I say. “But I thought that was your job.”

“I thought it was your job too —” says Hilary.

We smile at each other. Two nice women.

“Well,” interrupts Dr. Pat. “She's really quite obsessed with religion. We're hoping you could explain things to her. That, you know, God doesn't require she starve herself, basically.”

“Well, I told her I thought it was nonsense. To be honest, she doesn't seem to have much respect for me. I expect she sees me as a bit of an anachronism.” I look at Hilary and smile again.

“To be honest, Sister,” she says, echoing me, “I find I just can't speak to Catherine on that level. I don't have the background. I don't have your expertise. She challenges me on all these points of doctrine, and what am I to say?”

“You're not Catholic,” I say.

“I'm not religious at all,” says Hilary. And the quick way she straightens her back shows me a woman who was baptized, took communion and knows the Act of Contrition by heart. She might as well be making the sign of the cross.

“In that case,” I say — and I don't know why I am making this so hard for poor Hilary — “why not just tell her it's a bunch of hokum?” I twiddle my beads.

Hilary looks pained. “Sister,” she appeals. “Catherine comes from a very devout family. Who am I to assail her faith?”

So off I go to talk to the little fanatic.

“So here we are,” I say. “I'm supposed to sit here and talk to you about God.”

“Whoop-de-shit,” says the girl.

“Oh goodness the language,” I say. “I'm certainly appalled.”

She laughs a bit. Isn't this going well.

“So what do you want to starve yourself for?” I say. “Who told you to do that?”

“Nobody,” says Catherine.

I'm surprised because I was sure she was going to tell me God did. “Well? What's the good of it then?”

“Well, that is what religious people do, isn't it?” says Catherine, reasonably enough.“Don't nuns fast?”

“You're not a nun.”

“Jesus fasted.”

“Well, you're not him either now, are you?”

“I'm devout,” insists Catherine. “I'm just being devout.”

“But you're hurting yourself, dear, just look at the size of you.”

“Well, I don't care, I want to be the empty vessel. I want to be filled with God. I want him to fill me.” She gets this look on her face. She rubs her concave stomach.

“Stop it,” I say. “Smarten up. Where did you hear this nonsense?”

“It's in the Bible,” says Catherine.

“Well, don't read the Bible,” I tell her. “That's what Protestants do and look at them.”

I did a poor job with Catherine, I know it. I didn't like to be there in the room with her.

Dr. Pat is waiting to talk to me.

“How'd it go?” he asks.

“Well, I'm no psychiatrist, I've discovered.” I'm embarrassed. I peek around him, into the waiting room, where people sit wearing identical looks of annoyance.

“Will you keep trying?” he asks.

“I suppose.”

He stands in front of me and gazes around. That glazed look the doctors sometimes get in moments of stillness. He sighs.

“I'm going to release her. If the parents won't let us send her up to Halifax there's not much we can do. Next week she'll faint in school again, we'll put her on IV and on and on it goes.” Dr. Pat's eyes do a lazy sweep across the corridor and then land on me again. “Maybe you'll talk to her parents?”

I'm starting to wish he'd leave me alone. What I do is, I sit with old ladies and pat their hands.

Dr. Pat heads into Catherine's room to give the girl a final once-over before setting her free. I stand by the door. I see her lie there as he picks up her hand, turns her arm around to check the IV. She watches him take the stethoscope from his pocket, uses her free hand to pull aside her gown, offer him what's left of her chest.

SYLVIA'S HUSBAND IS
called Ducky. They'd like me to call him Ducky. I try calling him Mr. Embree a couple of times but they won't let me get away with it.

“He's just old Ducky, Sister — that's what he answers to.”

“Just call me Ducky,” says Ducky, head bobbing.

I didn't know about Ducky, am surprised by Ducky. He works in the sawmills, and so disappears into the woods for most of the summer. Now it's fall and therefore he's back.

Sylvia wears a ring, but I assumed her husband was dead. I don't know why I assumed that. I think I must have believed that Sylvia is older than she is because of the way she looks. But look at Ducky — a woodsman, a good six feet to him, grey but nowhere near retirement. He infects us with his good health. Sylvia glows in his presence, and I keep ducking, flinching, imagining he's going to knock me over somehow.

He tries to dance with Sylvia, who is bedridden. “No, just watch,” he says over our protests. He picks up her flaccid, see-through hands in his. My instinct is to call on Dr. Pat or someone.

But Ducky just begins to dance by himself, holding Sylvia's hands. He hums “In the Mood,” closing his eyes. Manages to raise one of Sylvia's arms high enough so that he can even twirl himself underneath it, crouching low, almost going down on his knees and looking foolish.
Sylvia
wheezes laughter. Ducky lets one of her hands drop, and reaches his out toward me.

“How about it, Sister?”

Size of a baseball mitt.

Now that it's fall, Ducky visits every day. He's there during visiting hours, when I am. I still poke my head in the door, but there's only one chair in Sylvia's room. Or maybe there's two or three but with Ducky in there it hardly matters. He takes everything up. Sylvia waves to me, like a girl from a car window.

FALL GIVES ME
the worst kind of dreams. All colour and sick sunlight. Crabapples rotting under trees, being reclaimed. I wait for Catherine to come back. Two weeks is all it takes.

She's grey. “You look like death,” I tell her.

“I feel beatific,” she says.

“Well, that's a hundred-dollar word.”

“That's how I feel. I am shining my love out into the world.”

“My goodness.”

“Don't make fun of me,” she says.

I'm startled. I have been imagining this whole time that she was making fun of me. I assumed we were speaking to each other in the same way my sisters and I always did — the hostility frothing up around the edges of our every sentence like scum on soup. We could spend entire holidays in a single house together, talking to each other like that, without a second thought, like picking and picking at your cuticles and being surprised when they start to ache and bleed.

We sit in dull silence for a moment or two.

“Can you bring me communion sometime?” Catherine asks.

“Would you take it?” I say, surprised again.

“Of course I would take it. It's all I would take. The Body. I will have the Body.”

Well, I'm thinking, maybe we could sneak some peanut butter on there or some such thing.

“There's a priest who makes the rounds,” I tell her. “I can bring him this week.”

Catherine makes a face and writhes bonily under her sheet. “He's old!” she protests. “I don't want him.”

It's difficult to hide my exasperation but I do because won't Hilary eat her hat if I'm the one to get this girl to swallow something of her own accord. Dr. Pat will wonder what they're paying her for.

“Well, you know I can't do it, Catherine,” I say.

“Will you be there at least?”

My. I blink down at her. Am I touched?

“Of course,” I tell her.

“Will the doctor be there?”

What to say about that? I suppose he will, if I tell him what's happening.

“What do you need the doctor for, to check your pulse?” I joke. “You plan on keeling over?”

“Don't make fun of me!” she yells.

I hurry down the hallway to find him, but run into
Hilary
instead. She stops dead in her tracks because, I realize, I'm smiling at her. Differently than I did in the office, I assume. She unruffles herself and cocks her head at me like a bird.

“She's going to eat something,” I blurt.

Hilary blinks and blinks.

“She's going to take communion.”

“Kah,” says Hilary.

“Communion. The sacrament.”

She keeps her bird-expression for a while. Bird-flown-into-a-window. Finally: “Oh,” and exhales. “It's not much,” she adds.

“Well, I was thinking we could . . .” I look down and witness my hands darting around in front of me. “Bulk it up somehow.”

Hilary nods slowly, the fluorescent lighting playing across her wiry red hair. “Sister,” she begins. No more blinking. “It's a very good start. But of course you see the problem. Again, it's all about religion for her. It's symbolic. It's not about eating.”

“Well, it is, because she'll actually be eating something.”

“Yes of course, but we're, we're, what we're trying to do is break down some of these psychological barriers. It has to mean something when she takes a bite — to Catherine. It has to mean she wants to eat. Do you see what I mean? It can't just mean more of the same thing — I want God, I want God, I don't want food. She has to want food, you see? For food's sake.”