Chapter 3

I woke up on Saturday with an aching throat, and when I sat up, my temples pounded. I downed a glass of water, praying, “Please don’t be sick. Please don’t be sick.”

Ryan was driving up from Ottawa, and the last thing I wanted was to sneeze on him. I hadn’t seen him last weekend, because I’d done Saturday call and had to sleep it off the next day. Today was my only free day this week.

I checked my phone to see if Ryan had messaged me since last night, when he’d stayed late at work. Nada from the Wu-ster, but Tucker had more than made up for it.

I got us the best seats! (5:45 a.m.)

When are you going to get here? (7:31 a.m.)

Wear a raincoat! (8:04 a.m.)

ELVIS LIVES! (8:46 a.m.)

I checked the time. 9:09 a.m. I called Tucker from my cordless landline before he could text-bomb me some more. “Have you really been there all night?”

“Hope! I knew you couldn’t resist me!”

I ignored the bait. “First of all, I am resisting you because I’m not coming. Secondly, you didn’t answer my question.”

“No, not all night. They have weird rules about vagrancy, so they don’t want you hanging out at night time. But I got here on the first train!”

“I bet you did.”

“You sound funny.”

“I have a sore throat.” I walked to the kitchen to down some more water.

“Aww. Wanna come to the Old Port? I’ll give you some Vitamin C. I do a great massage. Shoulders, back, legs. You name it, I massage it.”

I gulped down a second pint glass of water, wishing I had orange juice. Maybe I’d grab some before Ryan got in. “No, Tucker. Not only is the evidence for Vitamin C pretty weak”—I ignored the massage part—“I see people almost kill themselves every day. I don’t need to watch it for entertainment.”

An engine rumbled on Tucker’s end. He raised his voice. “Hope, Elvis Serratore is the real deal. He’s nothing like a sixteen-year-old girl who comes to the emerg because she took four Advils after her boyfriend left her.”

“I’m sure—”

“No, wait. Listen. Have you ever heard this? ‘[M]edicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for!’”

I caught my breath and my heart thumped twice in my chest before I told myself to calm down. “It sounds kind of familiar. I know that one’s not the Bible.”

“It’s from Dead Poet’s Society. But isn’t it true?”

I thought of Ryan, an engineer who plays the guitar, and me, a doctor who…well, I took drawing lessons once upon a time and still kept “Henry,” a wooden artist’s doll, around for company. I used to write in a diary before medicine sucked all the poetry out of my skull. “It’s possible to do both. William Carlos Williams was a doctor who wrote poems on his prescription pads.”

“But which one do you think inspired him more? Which one makes sure he’s remembered through the ages?”

I checked my cell phone to make sure Ryan hadn’t messaged me silently. “Listen, Tucker, I gotta go.”

His voice brightened. “You’re coming to the Old Port?”

“No. I…have plans.”

“Ryan.” Tucker sounded flat and angry now.

“I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for…thinking of me.” I hung up. My hands shook a little. I didn’t enjoy playing my guys off each other, but I couldn’t lie worth a darn, either. And right now, both Ryan and Tucker played starring roles in my life. Too bad they’d never learned how to share.

Right away, my cordless phone rang in my hands. I was too cheap to get caller ID, but I knew it was Ryan. He understood that I liked to use my land line at home, to save my cell phone minutes for an emergency. “Hello?” I said.

“Hope.”

Just from the curt way Ryan said my name, I decided to sink into a chair and rub my temples. My headache had reappeared. “What’s wrong?”

“My grandmother was standing on a chair to water a plant. She fell off and hit her head. She must have hit her hip, too, because my dad and I had to pick her up and lift her on to the couch.”

“Oh, no.” Ryan is very close to his grandparents, especially his mother’s mother, who helped raise him.

“She doesn’t want to go to the hospital.”

“She has to. She needs X-rays and maybe a CT scan of her head.”

“I know.” His breath gusted through the receiver.

I folded my head on my hands. “I wish I could help. I don’t have an Ontario medical license anymore. I could see her at St. Joe’s, but…”

He half-laughed, half-snorted. “Didn’t you tell me the wait time is, like, twelve hours?”

“Not always. Sometimes, we get it down. But I think it’s better in Ottawa, and especially if she needs hip surgery or anything.” I left off mentioning any possible brain bleed from hitting her head. Like I used to say as a kid, Never trouble trouble ’til trouble troubles you. “Do you want me to drive down? I could wait with you.” I left unsaid that sometimes, if you mention that you work in the health care field, you can cut down the wait time. It’s not guaranteed, though, especially if you don’t work in that hospital, let alone that province.

Ryan sighed. “Naw. By the time you get here and turn around, it’ll just waste your day. And you’re on call tomorrow, right?”

“Right. But I could still do it. You do stuff like that for me all the time.”

He almost laughed. “Yeah, but I don’t work all night. Usually. And you sound sick.”

I cleared my throat. It did still ache, although not as badly. “I’ve got a sore throat.”

“Okay, so you just sleep it off. You’ve got less than 24 hours before you’ve got to work for over 24 hours. I think Pau Pau will be all right. She’s just scared.”

And maybe has a broken hip. “Thanks, Ry.”

His voice softened. “Miss you.”

My throat tightened, and not just because of a cold. “I miss you.” I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Okay, don’t make me lose it. I’ll see you for your birthday for sure. You’re coming for the whole weekend, right?”

“I’m coming to the big O.” I stopped, realizing I’d made the world’s worst Freudian slip. “I mean Ottawa. I mean, you. I mean…”

“I know what you mean, Hope. See you soon.” I could hear his grin through the receiver, and it practically raised the room temperature ten degrees.

I blushed even though he couldn’t see me. Good thing we weren’t Skyping. “See you, Ry. I hope your Pau Pau is okay.”

“Me too.”

After we broke the connection, I decided to warm up some milk for breakfast. Then I remembered reading that buckwheat honey helped a cough more than cough syrup with dextromethorphan, so I took a tablespoon of honey straight before ladling more in my milk.

I felt edgy and unsettled. Ryan’s grandmother would be in limbo for the next few hours. And I was curious about Elvis Serratore, despite myself.

Well, it wouldn’t hurt to read about him on the Internet.

The top hit was his website, ElvisEscapes.com. I tried to ignore the live countdown to 1:23 p.m. (3 hours, 47 minutes, and 50 seconds!).

I already knew that Elvis was from Winnipeg, two provinces west of Quebec, so I mostly ignored his blog about his 2300-kilometer truck ride east with his brother/stage manager. I did smile at the picture of them eating their first poutine. That’s a Quebec classic—French fries smothered in cheese curds and gravy. I also paused to compare their looks. Elvis wore sunglasses like his namesake, which made it harder to make out more than his black pompadour and sideburns, but he looked small and lean, almost like a gymnast, whereas his brother, Archer, was tall, with a big nose, full lips, and a thick-set build.

I clicked through the bio and press links and hit the motherlode in a radio interview with CBC’s show DNTO. Elvis had inadvertently started his escape career when a police officer visited his high school and Elvis wouldn’t stop “smarting off.” The cop decided to teach him a lesson and chained his wrists behind his back with a pair of handcuffs. Elvis somehow managed to escape, and boom! A star was born.

Hm. I wouldn’t have antagonized a police officer. I don’t think it would even cross Ryan’s mind. Tucker, on the other hand…

My mind drifted. I never understood people who risked their lives for fun. Some of my friends skydived, climbed mountains, and tended to sick children in the Himalayas. I would do the last one for the good of humanity, but just for shiggles? Nah. I smiled, though, remembering my med school friend Ginger explain that the word shiggles comes from “you know the expression, the S bomb and giggles.” She and Ryan would get along fine.

To be fair, though, I got more than enough of an adrenaline fix as an inadvertent detective in July and August. Since then, I’d hung up my non-existent badge and been “retired” for over two months.

Just long enough to get bored.

Uh oh. Once I’d thought it, I couldn’t un-think it. I was bored. And for me, boredom is the root of all evil.

I didn’t understand why Elvis risked life and limb. But I understood why the crowd cheered him on. They were bored. They wanted their bread and circuses.

I texted Tori to see if she’d go with me. I like to save my cell phone minutes, but I didn’t want to wake her up if she’d managed to catch some all-precious Z’s. She messaged back, I’m working a day shift.

Huh? I double-checked the call schedule for family medicine, Tori and Tucker’s rotation, and wrote, I thought you had today off.

It took her a few minutes to text back, I switched with Mireille.

I replied, Okay. Have fun.

She didn’t answer, and I didn’t expect her to. Texting from the emerg had been pretty chatty for Tori. She used to not answer at all while she was working. I think she makes an exception for me because I almost bought it twice and she’s secretly afraid I’ll chase down random murderers. Near-death has its privileges.

I surfed some more about Elvis and Houdini before I checked the weather outside. Rain, rain, and more rain. Speaking of Mireille, a fellow first year resident and frenemy, I’d temporarily moved into a sublet on the fifth floor of Mireille’s fancy-schmancy building, so now I had a great view of the Côte-des-Neiges cemetery. My grandmother flipped out when she came to visit and realized that the nice green space across the street was full of gravestones. She was not at all comforted by the fact that I now have a security guard and that the building doors lock automatically instead of getting propped open because it’s more convenient for tenants to move in and out that way.

I downed some more honey, filled up a stainless steel water bottle, and checked for my keys. Then I e-mailed Ryan the link to Elvis’s website with the message, I’m feeling better. I might go see this.

It took him a few minutes to answer. Go. One of us might as well have fun.

That was all the blessing I needed to hop on the subway.

After I took the orange métro line to Place d’Armes, I walked south to the Old Port and followed the ELVIS LIVES! signs to a fenced-off quay. I’d never made it here before and felt secretly thrilled to spot not one, but two horse-drawn carriages trotting along the narrow, cobblestone streets. Over 350 years ago, the Old Port had been a major hub for French fur traders who would canoe up and down the St. Lawrence River with several bundles of fur, each bundle weighing nearly as much as I do. Now, I hear, the Old Port of Montreal is a great place to bike and watch tourists eat ice cream in the summer.

Or, on a rainy Hallowe’en, you could gawk at a guy trying to cheat death.

I had to fork over $25 admission to get through the gate, even with a student discount. Phooey. But I suppose escape artists have to eat. In this case, they even eat poutine.

I’m terrible at guessing crowd sizes, but it didn’t seem that crowded, probably because of the rain and because we still had a few hours to go. Maybe 500 people had showed up, which isn’t that much for an outdoor venue, although I don’t know what kind of draw escape artists have these days. It definitely wasn’t the turnout Houdini must’ve gotten at his peak. George Bernard Shaw had declared Houdini the third most famous man in the world, after Jesus Christ and Sherlock Holmes.

I knew which of those teams Ryan would play (and pray) on. Tucker clearly had Houdini covered. And I…well, actually, I’d been tiptoeing on Mr. Holmes’s territory. I had to throw back my head and laugh, which made an oncoming woman pull her two little daughters away from me.

As I continued toward the quay, into the thick of the mob, I kept my eyes skyward in case they’d set up a big screen TV. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t see a thing. I’m 5’2” and a quarter, or 158 centimetres, which means that most people are just too darn tall. Their head and shoulders block my vision.

A woman in a navy blue rain slicker heading in the opposite direction did a double take. She drew close to me and said, “Hope?”

It took me a second to recognize her broad features, since her brown curls were tucked under her hood. “Hi, Mireille. Are you here to see Elvis?”

“I was.” She made a face, a self-mocking downturn of the lips that the French have perfected. “I think I have the flu.”

“Oh, no.” I wondered if she’d gotten the flu shot. We’re all supposed to, but it’s early days yet, and I, for one, hadn’t gotten around to it.

She nodded and coughed, covering her mouth with her elbow. “You should find Tucker. Follow the fence. He’s right at the front.”

“Oh, I’m not planning on seeing Tucker.”

She gave me a strange look. Her cheeks were bright pink, probably from fever instead of rouge. “I’m leaving. You might as well take my place.” She waved at me and headed for the métro, weaving only a little bit.

“Are you okay to get home?” I shouted at her back. She flipped a hand up in the air and kept going.

At the edge of the crowd, I focused on the giant TV. A countdown banner across the top now read 2 hours, 19 minutes and 58 seconds, while videos of Elvis played on-screen. He was wearing an eye-hurting bright red jumpsuit cut down to the navel, but soon he held out his arms and someone laced in him a straightjacket and handcuffed him. They cut to a shot of red Elvis suspended upside down, freeing his hands and wriggling out of the straightjacket within seconds.

The real, live crowd in Montreal whooped its approval. I surveyed the tall, broad frat boy types forming a ring at the back. Good thing Elvis had sprung for the flat screen TV. I might as well have stayed home.

Except it was kind of fun, feeding off the group adrenaline. A young guy was hawking T-shirts, DVD’s, buttons, and even cheap plastic bracelets that spelled out ELVIS LIVES. A cluster of girls jumped up and down in time to the music, which was “Moves Like Jagger,” by Maroon 5. One woman pulled up beside me with a two-seated stroller. Her baby was fast asleep under the plastic drape, but the toddler in the second seat surveyed the scene with wide eyes.

My phone buzzed. I picked it up, somehow totally unsurprised to see Tucker’s name flash across my screen, along with his text. Saved you a seat.

I decided that it was dumb to avoid Tucker just because I’d planned to see Ryan today. My ex was otherwise engaged, and Tucker and I were in public and therefore in no danger of ripping each other’s clothes off.

One of my cousins can cut through a crowd faster than a sneeze. She told me it’s a survival skill from visiting Hong Kong. I’ve never set foot in Asia. Maybe that’s why I’m a bit more self-conscious. I manoeuvred along the fence line, repeatedly murmuring, “Excuse me. Pardonnez-moi.” Fortunately, most people were too busy singing along with “I’m Glad You Came” and watching Elvis’s escape movies. This time, the film showed him tied up and dunked upside down in a water tank.

The crowd cheered for Elvis again just as I finally spotted Tucker jumping up and down right at the fence along the southern tip of the wharf. He was wearing a green rain slicker and some sort of shiny, rainproof black pants, but his face was speckled with raindrops. He grinned wide enough to split his face.

“Hope!” he shouted. His wave in the air nearly knocked over a woman’s umbrella. I saw him mouth an apology at her before he turned back to me. “Hoooope!”

I hustled up to him, the crowd parting for me once they saw I was legit. Tucker had stationed himself right at the edge of the harbour, only ten metres away from a yellow crane.

“The party’s just getting started!” Tucker hollered.

I cut around a cluster of young women taking pictures of each other with their phones and finally ended up at his side.

“I saved you a spot!” Tucker said, barely turning down the volume. I realized that, for him, this was the equivalent of a Beatles concert in the ’60s, or attending Will & Kate’s wedding for my monarch-loving friends.

“Thanks,” I murmured.

“I knew you’d come! How could you resist it! Me and Elvis! You’d have to be crazy!” He pumped his fist in the air. “This is gonna be epic! Now, say cheese.” With barely a pause, he pointed a giant camera lens at me. Not your friendly neighbourhood phone camera, but one of those professional-looking monsters, encased in some sort of transparent plastic bag to protect it from the rain.

I barely had time to muster an “eek” expression before he snapped a few pictures and cackled. “That’s one for the record books.”

I socked him in the arm. “You’d better delete those.”

“Yeah, yeah. You get veto power.” He showed me all three shots, and even I had to laugh at my horror-struck face before he trashed them. He said, “I’ll take better ones later.”

“No sketchbook today?”

His eyes flickered. We hadn’t talked about the time he’d sketched me on the train. But he just shook his head and pointed at his backpack. “I brought a small one, just in case. But right now, I’m going digital.”

I shouldn’t have brought up the sketch. The vibes had altered. I cleared my throat. “Sweet. So how did you know I was here?”

His eyebrows shot up under his hood. “Mireille texted me.”

That didn’t surprise me. McGill residency felt a lot like high school sometimes, always getting up in each other’s bizness. You’d never know we lived in a city of almost four million people, the way we kept tabs on each other. Tucker played with the zipper on his rain jacket, and I squinted at the shirt he wore underneath. “What’s that?”

He ripped the zipper open and pushed out his chest so I could peruse the black-and-white photo emblazoned across his pectorals and abs. The resolution wasn’t great, but I easily made out two guys tugging on a chain in order to lift a third man upside down over a water tank. That man’s ankles were chained into a block of wood. He was suspended head-first above a tank of water, much like Elvis Serratore had just done on-screen, except this guy wore a short, white unitard instead of sequinned jumpsuits.

I nodded, but before I could correctly identify him, Tucker burst out, “It’s Harry Houdini! Doing his Chinese water torture escape!”

“Nice. But I bet Elvis’s people would prefer you to wear his gear.”

“I’ve got a T-shirt in my backpack. I bought one for you, too!”

Oh, no.

He pulled out two shirts, one black, one dark blue, both with ELVIS LIVES emblazoned on the front, with each letter made out of gold circles that reminded me of sequins and spotlights. On the back, it said Elvis Serratore, Escape Artist, with a list of tour dates, like a concert T-shirt. “Wanna put them on?” said Tucker.

“It’s raining,” I demurred.

Tucker held out his hand to test the air. “It’s stopped. I’ll do it if you will. On the count of three.” He shoved his camera in the backpack and held the bag between his knees. “One. Two. Three!”

He tossed me the blue shirt. He was already ripping off his rain slicker and popping his head inside his shirt before I’d unzipped my jacket.

Okay. It was a little trippy that Tucker was so heated up, but I respected it, in a way. First of all, I’d rather he got hetted up about something instead of yawning and saying “Whatev” at everything. Apathy is boring. And secondly, no offense to Ryan and the rest of his crew, but I’d rather he got excited about Houdini than Jesus.

A minute later, I smoothed the blue shirt over my midriff. It was about twenty sizes too big, and made out of real cotton, so it just hung on me and made me look like I was playing dress-up in my dad’s clothes, if my dad wore T-shirts that screamed ELVIS LIVES.

“You look fantastic!” raved Tucker, shrugging his jacket on, but leaving it unzipped to reveal his T-shirt. “Now we match!”

It was better than an “I’m with stupid” shirt, anyway. I smiled at Tucker. It was my day off. No one knew me here. No one knew or cared if I were a doctor, a baker, or a candlestick maker. I could wear a shirt and look dumb and watch a man tempt death in front of a crowd. I left my jacket unzipped, too.

“You know what I love the most about Houdini?” Tucker said, stringing his camera back around his neck and taking a few shots of the crowd.

I shook my head. Houdini was still a murky figure to me, a black-and-white photo of a guy instead of a real person.

Tucker lowered the camera and looked directly at me. “He never gave up.”

I felt a bit uncomfortable with the intensity of Tucker’s brown eyes. I twitched and stared at my cherry-brown rain boots. “You told me that when he was on his deathbed, he said, ‘I can’t fight anymore.’”

“Right. When he was out of his mind and the bacteria had ravaged him. But basically, he was one of the biggest fighters I’ve ever heard of. When he first started out on the circus circuit, he was ‘Harry Houdini, the King of Cards,’ basically doing tricks for pennies. No one gave a crap about him. He got so low that he decided to sell his entire act for twenty bucks—and no one would buy it!”

So he’d tried to give up another time, too, and fate wouldn’t let him. I tried to imagine how desperate and humiliated Houdini must have felt before he turned it around. “So what made him change his mind?”

Tucker smiled. The rain started up again, as did Britney Spears singing “Till the World Ends,” but he ignored both. “I’m not sure. I heard his wife helped him with his act. And he got a good agent. But I know Houdini reinvented himself when he was 24.”

Only two years younger than I was now. Three, if you counted my birthday next weekend. Interesting.

“He dropped the card routine and went with his escape act all the way. He would just strut into a new town, book a theatre, and say that no man could contain him. He started off with ropes.”

Tucker. Ropes. Tying up. Mm. My mind started to wander, and not in a Houdini kind of way. I tuned back in when Tucker said, “He was famous all over the United States. But they didn’t know him in Europe. So he walked into Scotland Yard and told them he was an escape artist. A police officer handcuffed him to a pillar and said, ‘We will see you in an hour, young man. This is what we do to Americans who come over here and get into trouble.’ The officer and the Superintendent busted their guts laughing, until Harry Houdini threw the cuffs at their feet and said, ‘And this is how we Americans get free.’”

I smiled, but I said, “You know, I read a little about Houdini before I got here. I heard he actually said, ‘Wait, I’ll come with you’ and threw the handcuffs on the floor.”

Tucker slapped his thigh. “Ha! You caught the Houdini bug.”

“A little.”

“Either way, it’s an amazing story, right? He sold out his show. Packed the theatres for six months. People couldn’t get enough of him. But he had a brilliant mind for lots of stuff. Did you know he invented a new diving suit? And he was the first person to fly a airplane in Australia.”

That made sense to me. The daredevil, the constantly teeming brain. I liked it. But I was aware that the university students behind us had stopped playing with their phones so that they could hang on Tucker’s every word. They whispered stuff like, “That guy knows everything!”

“I know!”

They burst into giggles.

Ew. That made me play the devil’s advocate one last time. “Okay, okay. So Houdini was a brilliant guy. But that’s what I don’t like about history, I guess. It’s over. He’s dead.”

Tucker grabbed my arm. “It’s not! Elvis Serratore is alive and well. So are dozens of escape artists. Have you seen the video of the suburban mom who lets people chain her up and then she has to escape from the bottom of a swimming pool?”

As usual, I hadn’t. I sighed.

“Let me show you!”

“I believe you.”

“I’ll send you the link. The point is, we can all do this! We can all fight hard and escape whatever it is we need to.”

That hit home. So many people had lost their jobs, their homes, and their dreams in the 2008 financial meltdown. Maybe they needed to see someone like Elvis, or Houdini, beating seemingly impossible odds.

Heck, maybe I did, too.

When I went to Paris in the summer before medical school, I read a few lines in the Lonely Planet guide that stuck with me: métro, boulot, dodo. Subway, work, sleep (only, like most things, it sounds better in French). It means all Parisians do is work and sleep, basically. What better way to summarize the life of a resident?

The only times I deviated from that pattern, I ended up risking my neck, my heart, or both.

So yeah. I needed to escape, too. I wanted fun in the sun, lounging in a bikini, where the biggest danger was a stray ball from the beach volleyball court. But failing that, I was so glad I’d made it today, where Elvis could play a real-life game of jeopardy while I clapped and cheered safely from the sidelines. I smiled at Tucker. “You win.”

He raised his eyebrows.

I said, “I get it now. It’s cool. Thanks for inviting me.”

He hugged me to his side, hip to hip. “I knew it! Elvis lives—and Hope Sze knows it!”

I rolled my eyes, trying not to enjoy the firm length of his body against mine. Next thing I knew, he was trying to dance by my side, singing along with Jennifer Lopez’s monotonous dance hit of the summer, “On the Floor.” Excruciating. I tried to extract my arm from around him, and he just sang louder and danced worse.

The pretty brunette in McGill yoga pants looked at me and said, “He’s cute.”

I called, “Take him. He’s yours.”

She laughed.

“Hey, you’d have to buy me dinner first,” said Tucker, but all of a sudden, his body froze and his hand tightened on my shoulder. “He’s here.”