Ten eighty, p.14
Ten-Eighty, page 14
Suddenly his face drained pale, as though his heart had stopped pumping. He seemed to be looking off somewhere, maybe at his regrets. He reached up to slap at the air, as though the maggots from Mom’s coffin had flown over to show him the way to the cemetery.
Now he was doubled over in his chair. Now his breath rattled in his lungs as he clutched at his stomach. But she did not get him up out of his chair to put him in a storage room, because Comrade Ivan had never put her in a storage room. She left him in his chair. As soon as he’d stopped jerking around, she took off his shoes and socks and started with the big toe of the right foot. But not in proper order starting with one and ending at ten but, to annoy him, painting this toe here on this foot and then one over here, at random, like Moms would do. Either way, Moms would say, what’s the difference? You still end up with ten black toenails.
Then she took his knitting needles from the kitchen drawer and bent them crooked. Then she wiped away her prints. Then she dialed 911. Then she hurried out the door and along to the corner. Then she waited for the sirens and the blinking lights. Then they pulled up to the front of the house. One paramedic, a woman, got out of the ambulance and stood on the front lawn. She seemed to be double-checking the house number. Ivan’s not going to like her standing on his grass, now walking across the lawn and up to the door. His last dying breath will be spent asking her doesn’t she know better than to walk on the lawn. The paramedics wheeled in the gurney, then returned in a few minutes with the body. Ha. Let me get the door for you.
Chapter Thirty-One
In Dr. Enright’s office in the Monroe Institute, dressed in a heavy blue coat, baggy jeans, and baggy T-shirt, in the chair opposite his desk, his nemesis sat. With sunken, listless eyes, she stared at her feet, not looking at him.
They looked alike, obviously sisters, but Katria was no Renata and he knew immediately that for the length of the interview, Katria would be sullen, withdrawn, and non-communicative.
“Ready to get started?” he asked.
She didn’t look up at him.
“Would you like to take off your coat?”
“No.”
Not unusual: the coat, for a teenager, was often, in a threatening situation, a security blanket.
Dr. Enright opened the top drawer of his desk. He handed her a picture of a man standing at a window staring out. Inside the man’s chest was a vulture with piercing eyes pecking at his heart, stripping it away one piece at a time. Underneath it said: Write down the name of the vulture and the name of the person. He handed her a pen. She studied the picture, then she curled her free hand around the writing hand. Then she gave the picture back.
He said, “You have named your aunt, your nana, and your father as the vulture, and yourself as the person.”
She shrugged.
He handed her a picture of a person with a hole in the chest. “After the vulture has consumed the heart, what’s left?”
She shrugged.
“Guess.”
“The empty body?”
“I think so. Yes. The empty body remains but the vulture has spread its wings and flown off. With the heart. Who is this person?”
“Me.”
“So who has won?”
She looked up at him. “The vulture?”
He handed her a third picture. In this one, the person was at the window with heart intact and the vulture was off in a tree. “Who is the person?”
She rounded her shoulders and huddled under her coat, emotionally curled up in her head. She stared at her shoes and then, with the toe of one, she slipped off the other to reveal her naked foot with black nail polish.
Dr. Enright said, “Katria. Help me find your heart.”
She looked up, straight at him. “Why did they become vultures?”
“I don’t know, Katria. I would like to ask you that question.”
She slipped off her other shoe.
“I sucked my thumb. So Nana glued my thumb to my finger with crazy glue.”
“What?!”
Startled, Katria looked up.
Dr. Enright said, “Sorry. I shouldn’t be surprised. Go ahead.”
“First, she showed me a picture of a guy hanging upside down from his feet that were glued to the ceiling, and then she glued my thumb to my finger.”
“In other words, she threatened to glue you upside down to the ceiling? Did you report that?”
“I told my father. He said ‘A lot of things around here need gluing.’”
“Why didn’t you tell your counselor at school?”
Katria shrugged. She stared at her naked feet.
“Why? Give it a shot.”
“Whatever I told the counselor, my father would deny.”
Dr. Enright wrote it down. “All right. Let's make some sense out of this. Why did they not want you to suck your thumb?”
“They said it would give me buck teeth.”
“So there’s some logic in there. Logic mixed up with crazy.”
“When he took my mother to the dentist, Comrade Ivan — that’s what we call my father — said to fill the cavities but don’t use freezing. She’s sneaking donuts. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have cavities.”
Dr. Enright wrote it down and frowned. “I’m surprised the dentist didn’t give her freezing anyway.”
“He refused to do her teeth if he couldn’t give freezing. He said he wouldn’t charge. But Moms thought she deserved it because she ate too many donuts.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. The perfect victim. For the abuser, a match made in hell.”
Dr. Enright showed her a picture of the person with a heart, no vulture anywhere. He laid it beside the other three pictures. “Which picture should you start looking at?”
Katria shifted her feet. When she reached down and pretended to take off her socks and put them in her pocket, Dr Enright stood and leaned over.
“Why did you take off your socks when you weren’t wearing socks?”
She jammed her socks further into her pocket.
He said, “Your traumatic childhood memories are like an invisible vulture pecking at your heart. You need to get them out where you can see them and look at them and then get rid of them. And I know you know that because I just watched you take off your socks and try to get rid of them.”
Her eyes came up to his. She reminded him of one of the two girls who came into the coffee shop he sometimes stopped at, about twelve years old, very quiet and mousy looking, not one of the popular kids, but he could tell they were inseparable. They weren’t alone, no matter how terrible their parents were, these two girls had one another.
Tears began to trickle down her cheeks. Katria stared at her bare feet.
“I noticed you’ve painted your toenails black.”
She nodded.
“Why are you staring at your shoes?”
“I’m staring at my socks.”
“Your socks are in your pocket.”
“No. They're still on my feet. I can’t get them off.”
“Ah … Brilliant.” Dr. Enright wrote it down.
She glanced at him, waiting for his next question, but instead, he set his pad aside and leaned back in his chair. “Everyone has a knitter, Katria, and everyone is knit, one stitch at a time. If you were knit by your parents, you’ll be the same as your parents or the opposite. Either the same sock or the opposite sock. But either way, you’re knit to be what they made you. A sock can’t be something other than a sock. If it tries to become something else, like a scarf, it has to unravel itself, which is what you’ve been doing and why you’re here talking with me. But now it’s time to reknit yourself.”
Silence.
Dr. Enright watched her withdraw into herself and pause for a moment’s self- reflection as she considered what he said.
“Our hearts speak to us, but not always in words. What is your heart telling you?”
She shrugged.
“Katria. Your mind is telling you lies. But your heart is telling the truth. The rattle of those knitting needles in your mind will turn you into a skeleton of dry, lifeless bones with black toenails if your heart doesn’t get help.”
Dr. Enright glanced at his watch. His time with Katria was up. He had a meeting to attend. But he needed to get an answer to the question he had been asking himself since he met Renata.
He asked the question. “Which Boscov is evening the score?”
He watched her slip her feet back into her shoes. She got up and closed the door and was gone.
Several weeks earlier, Dr. Enright had chaired a session of the Gatekeeper Program, designed to alert front-line subway staffers to watch for possible jumpers, individuals who loitered on the platform, many of them teenagers. He had learned that, for some unknown reason, they would take off their shoes before they jumped, hence the name the media had given the phenomenon: Empty Shoe Suicides.
Dr. Enright stared at his notes. Without intending to start a file, he had started a file. Dr. Enright picked up the phone and dialled the number of The Cutting Corner. When Renata picked up, he asked the question, “How did Katria get here and how will she get home?”
“By subway,” said Renata. Then she added, “Ivan has had a heart attack. He’s in a coma.”
Dr. Enright hung up.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Katria had been in the Bloor-Yonge subway station hundreds of times, but never until this day had she seen the sign on the subway wall: “Thinking of Suicide? Call 142. Let’s talk.” The arrow pointed to a phone beneath the sign.
What would they do if she dialed the number? Stop the train just in time? What if she didn’t dial the number? Stop the train too late? Send her father a bill for cleaning her up off the tracks? Ha! She liked that idea.
She stood by the newspaper box and waited for the train.
What would the driver think? A driver like her father would say, The stupid kid jumped in front of the train. A driver like Moms would curl up on the couch and not talk to anyone for days, maybe go jump off the subway platform herself. A driver like Renata would go to a bar and drink Russians. A driver like Emma would sit down and bawl her eyes out.
Katria had taken off her watch and set it to an incorrect time of ten-twenty, her third-last act of defiance. Comrade Ivan always needed the clocks set to the exact correct time; like a cuckoo bird, every two days he checked his clocks. Her appointment with Dr. Enright had been at two o’clock, so by now it must be about three o'clock. There were not many people on the platform to look down and say, She was so young, her life had just started, why would she do such a thing?
She was thinking, I’ll pretend I’m Algernon and climb down off the platform and into the tunnel where no one can see me, in the maze with walls on all sides looping around and back to the beginning. Algernon could follow his tracks, so he’d know after one time around that all the tunnels looped back to the beginning. They were dark but that would not bother Algernon. He followed his nose, which was smarter than Katria’s brain. She’d get lost in five minutes and Algernon would win. But still, providing she followed the train tracks, she’d eventually loop back to the beginning, round and round until the train came.
Katria sat beside the newspaper box to wait for the train. The headlines in the newspaper box said, “Brampton Mayor Has Stroke but Lives.” They showed a picture of him in his hospital bed, flowers at his bedside. She read the write-up: the stroke that went right through his brain had turned him into a Charlie, dumber than a mouse.
Katria remembered Emma had brought Algernon flowers from the store. She’d set them up on the dresser and arranged them nicely, but she didn’t tidy up Katria’s things like Ivan did. She left Katria’s things the way they were, clothes all over the place, and books and homework, all of it a big mess, but then right in the middle, an arrangement of flowers. Algernon liked that.
Katria should’ve written Emma a card saying she was sorry, explaining it wasn’t Emma’s fault, she had done all she could. She’d have written it like Charlie, with all the words spelled wrong. She’d discovered the book Flowers for Algernon after she had gotten her essay back and the English teacher had corrected her spelling. She’d been afraid to take it home, so rip, tear, gone into the library garbage. She checked the book out and showed it to Renata, who said Ivan did the same to her with the spelling. “So,” Renata said, “I spelled everything wrong on purpose.” The next day, Renata had brought home a white mouse for Katria, who named him Algernon. That was around the time Renata had stopped cutting Ivan’s hair because she was having trouble resisting the urge to slit his throat with a razor. Then Emma bought Katria a copy to read to Algernon.
Katria wished she had long legs like Renata. Katria wished she had a hospital bed like this man in the newspaper who’d had a stroke. And was paralyzed, it said. But they were going to do therapy to see if they could get his brain to work a little better. So that instead of being dumber than a mouse he’d be smarter than a mouse, and might even be able to spell right.
She could feel the platform shake and she could hear the screech of the iron wheels on the rails. She took off her shoes. She laid them down side by side, left-right. Then she turned one backward, her second-last act of defiance.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The nearest subway was Bloor-Yonge, a five-minute walk — or a two-minute run. Dr. Enright descended the subway stairs two at a time and emerged onto the platform. There were no gawkers, no awestruck bystanders peering down onto the tracks or into the tunnel, which meant no “unsafe platform” condition had been issued by the TTC.
He found her huddled in one corner of the concrete wall, hiding under her coat, her shoes lying beside the newspaper box. Dr. Enright sat beside her. When he reached out to take her hand, which was stuffed in the pocket of her jacket, she looked at him, startled. Her eyes were empty: no sadness, no anger, nothing.
He said, “The coat is covering the body, Katria, but it doesn’t cover the hand. Give me your hand.”
She gave him her left hand. He took it in his right and covered it with his left.
“Hands, Katria, are like feet. There’s a left and a right. But unlike feet, hands are magical. They’re capable of knitting, yes. But they’re also capable of leading. And of helping. And of holding. And of protecting. I know you can’t believe in words, but maybe you can begin to believe in hands.”
From the tunnel he heard the screech of the subway train. It rattled up to the platform and stopped. They waited for the passengers to get off and get on. They waited for the tunnel to swallow the rumble and rattle of the subway.
“Think of the knitter, Katria. The knitter takes fine virgin wool, pure and untouched, and works it into narrow bands of one particular colour, carefully stitched and pressed and woven. But sometimes, so preoccupied with the knitting is the knitter that the knitter fails to see what her hands are knitting.”
Katria said, “I don’t think you know how to knit, Dr. Enright.”
Dr. Enright let go of her left hand and with the tip of his finger wiped away the tears which were welling up into Katria’s eyes. When he put his arm around her, he could feel the bones of her shoulder blades shivering through her heavy jacket.
They waited.
New faces emerging onto the platform cast casual glances his way, a man in a suit comforting a teenage girl, probably father and daughter.
Dr. Enright waited, either for the next train so that he could accompany her home and leave her to whatever fate she might create for herself, which from now on as he lay awake at night would be like waiting for the predator vulture of guilt to start pecking at his mind, like waiting for the telephone to ring and on the other end hearing Renata say, You managed to make time to spend three hours getting drunk with me, but all you could give Katria was an hour, with no repeats.
Now under his arm, he felt her body relax as she settled herself against him. She lifted her hand from his and used it to wipe at her tears. Dr. Enright reached over with his free hand and picked up her empty shoes. He slipped the left one on her left foot and the right on her right. The imaginary socks he took from her pocket and threw out onto the far side of the subway tracks where she could see them. They waited for the next train. The train rumbled out of the tunnel and into the station. After it had gone, they saw that the clickety-clack of the wheels had so torn the socks to pieces that they were gone. He held out his hand for her and together, hand in hand, they left the subway platform.
* * *
“We have no beds, Dr. Enright. Where are we going to put her?”
“Put a gurney in one of those assessment rooms. And get her on an IV. Even if she wants to eat real food she probably can’t. And get her on one-to-one monitoring her food intake. She’s top priority.”
Dr. Enright went down the hall to his office and phoned Renata. “I’ve had her committed. She can’t leave until I say so.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The nurse waited while Katria took off her street clothes and put on hospital PJs and a housecoat. She lay on the gurney. The door swung open and a second nurse appeared. She wheeled the IV into the room and attached the bag.
“I need your arm, Katria. This won’t hurt. Just a little prick.”
She poked in the needle and taped it down and got it started.
The nurse sat down on the gurney. “I’m Miss Finn. Might as well get to know one another while we’re waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I can’t leave until the IV is finished.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll pull it out.”
“Oh,” said Katria.
“I saw you when they brought you in,” Miss Finn continued. “Do you remember? I looked at you and you looked at me.”
"No.”
“Do you want to hear what Dr. Enright said?”
“What?”
“Like empty shoes, she walks without a heart.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know what I saw? I saw a teenage girl with a child’s eyes. I’ve worked before with binge dieters, revenge eaters. Diet fanatics. Everything about the body is shrinking, but not the eyes. The eyes get so big and so empty and so desperately hungry. That’s what those eyes say to me, loaves of bread everywhere but not a slice in sight. The mind can lie to the body but it cannot lie to the heart, and the heart cannot lie to the eyes.”
