It takes six days for my headache to go away and I’ll probably never be able to blanket stitch as fast as I could pre-asbestos. Seriously. But brain damage was helpful the morning after the fire because that’s when it all came down – the Plan, the special account, the credit card, Toronto. Low verbal ability was an asset.
I’m hoping there’s a total lifetime amount of remorse everyone must have, which would make me advanced in one area of life. Driving to Timbley with Joan for the Talking Circle, actually a Talking Rectangle, takes care of a decade’s worth of sorries. The signal light’s broken again, so Joan rolls down her window to hand-signal, and the window gets stuck. We drive for two hours in silence and icy wind.
In the basement of a generic square building, Jessie and Rose are already at the table. I keep my eyes on the industrial carpet. A middle-aged guy sits at each end of the table, Man 1 mountainously still, Man 2 twitchy. A frizzy woman in teal sits beside Rose and Jessie, and a woman cop with incredibly precise bangs sits on the other. Joan points to the chair beside her.
We have the power says a poster of workers in hardhats and I go all mitochondrial because that’s the perfect title for our bio presentation. I can draw a cute little mitochondrion doing a power salute.
This is amusing, Dree?, says Man 1, and I look up to serious disapproval all around. Let the executions begin.
I say an unfortunate What? which requires more, so I launch right into being really really sorry, especially for hurting Joan when things were really hard for her but also for putting Jessie at risk in the hospital especially once we knew Dr. Rinkel was there. Man 1 nods and turns to Jessie. ‘The key here,’ he says, is complete clarity.’ He reads something official about breaking and entering and generally makes us sound evil. Jessie apologizes too, but he won’t leave her alone, keeps bringing up ‘the key thing,’ then teal woman goes at her about responsibility and boundaries, then Rose comes down like thunder.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It was my idea.’ Everyone ignores me. While Jessie cries in big choking sobs, I run my fingers over small gouges in the table.
‘What the hell were you thinking,’ booms Rose. ‘You think your father wanted this?’
When the torture finally stops, something shudders in my chest. The big wall clock spasms another minute. Papers are moved, pens clicked, coffee sipped, legs recrossed. Please let it be over. How much sorrier can we be, for god’s sake. And, hello people, what about Rinkel?
Man 1 puts his papers into a file folder and takes others out. Joan’s voice is so soft the haircut cop paraphrases everything, sometimes twice, as in, ‘I feel so betrayed,’ ‘You feel betrayed, Joan?’ ‘Betrayed,’ ‘Hmm, betrayed.’ They talk about me like I’m not there, teal woman telling the guys that what concerns her is the series of deceptions over a long period of time, haircut cop says she counts five chargeables, Man 2 says they’re possibly dealing with pathology here given the family history. That gets an Excuse me? from Joan and a lot more volume. ‘When will the hospital be taking responsibility for Dr. Rinkel, who is not even here?’ she says. He is not the issue, say both guys in different ways, and Joan’s hands fly up. ‘Excuse me? That worm has been the issue for fifteen years.’ The room pretty much crackles as everyone tries to read everyone else, eye contact criss-crossing the table. Ha. There’s something they don’t want us to know.
Man 2 says, ‘Dr. Rinkel has retired.’ Joan says, ‘Meaning you fired him,’ and Man 1 snaps questions at me until everyone joins back in. Everyone except Joan, and that’s what gets me, how she sits there not hating me, how she says another Excuse me? after Man 2 says I’m pathologically selfish, how she says, ‘Actually, Dree has been working very hard on her biology presentation,’ after Man 1 says perhaps I’m amotivational. I don’t care what I look like and anyway it’s what I’m supposed to do, be so sorry I forget myself. As mucous floods my face, I feel their relief. The teal social worker nudges the Kleenex box to me then bonks it against my elbow.
‘I thought you were dead,’ Joan says. ‘First I didn’t know where you were, then Grandma called in a complete state.’
‘Damn,’ says Rose. ‘Should have called you myself.’ She called Grandma after the fire guys called her, and Grandma heard wrong and thought we had inhaled smoke and were unconscious in the hospital, not Rinkel, and because of her whole fire thing, Grandma was basically incoherent when she phoned Joan and Joan completely freaked and thought I was dead so Paige freaked and told her everything.
The social worker shoves a Kleenex into my hand. There’s a lot of crying. Lots and lots. But eventually things get quiet and sniffly, probably because I run out of bodily fluid.
Man 1 tugs on his tie. ‘The key in this case is complete clarity.’ We are back to key number one. I press the key around my neck and have a severely anti-climactic moment. The kind of discovery that oozes instead of sparks. Teal woman asks her how-crazy-are-you questions like what did I feel as I took the money from Paige’s account. Man 1 and cop go one-two one-two about all the laws I broke, how next time will make this look like Brownies, which is actually a poor analogy because Brownies was so lethal I thought about walking into traffic and I was only eight.
Everyone except Joan and Rose has to make an official statement about how my life and Jessie’s will basically be over if we do anything less than saintly for the next fifty years. There are agreements about school and how I’ll pay back Paige. After a weighty pause, Man 1 asks us what we have to say. Jessie shakes her head. I have my eyes closed. I’m trying to remember every inch of the little plaid suitcase. ‘I have been a complete moron,’ I say.
‘Well, you can make new choices for the future.’ Teal woman couldn’t be more pleased.
‘My suitcase,’ I say. ‘Does anybody know what happened to the little plaid suitcase?’
‘Oh yeah,’ says Jessie. ‘She de finitely had it in the old hospital. Maybe she left it there?’
‘Girls, the hospital burned to the ground,’ Rose says.
Everyone looks confused or maybe just done, cups and papers gathered, chairs pushed away from the table.
The key is for the suitcase. I had thought jewellry box, ironically cheap piggy bank, or maybe a secret diary. Rita must have too. Otherwise, why did she care about a dumb little key. But no. Duh. It’s for the suitcase. The envelopes were in the suitcase, the suitcase was for me, Leonard wanted me to take it to Toronto. Could there have been anything in the side pockets? I had looked. No way I could have missed anything. No way.