MEG
COMPETITIONS, AT LEAST, ARE MORE EXCITING THAN STANDING AROUND AT THE archery club watching Grayson shoot his arrows, then collect them, then shoot them again, like playing fetch with himself. I ran to grab them for him once, but he still had one last arrow left and he just missed shooting me in the arm with it and somehow it was my fault, not his, so I didn’t try that again.
Late Saturday afternoon, we ride across the city to the other club with Grayson’s parents, and I hold Grayson’s hand the whole way, even though it’s all clammy with sweat—serious girlfriend points there.
The club bustles with competitors, from a tiny blond girl with her hair in pigtails and a pink grip on her miniature bow, to a burly ape of a white guy with a red bandanna atop his head who probably shoots arrows off the back of his Harley. I don’t see any black competitors, but as always, that’s no surprise. Though actually, the whole place is disproportionately white. It’s like I’ve left Edmonton and landed in . . . I don’t know, some place that’s way more white. I want to ask Grayson why he thinks it is that I can count the number of nonwhite competitors on one hand, but he looks too nervous for that kind of discussion.
Grayson’s division is the third group—probably not up for an hour or two, he reports—so we buy nachos and sit on the chairs at the back, chomping our cheese-coated chips as we watch the bow-wielding warrior tots.
The pigtailed girl claps and giggles every time she shoots, like this is the greatest fun she’s had since she mastered the potty, and she shoots better than the grim-faced kid with an arm brace, whose parents hover around him, clucking advice and reprimands.
My phone vibrates in my pocket—it’s too loud in here to hear it—and I lick the gooey orange off my fingers before wriggling it out.
It’s a text from Kat. A text. From Kat!
SOS! Please come. Now. Please.
And it’s not even an angry text! I shove the nachos at Grayson and tap out my reply.
Your house?
I pull on my coat as I wait for her response. Grayson grabs my arm as I stand. “Where are you going?”
I pat him on the head. “Sorry. It’s an emergency. I have to go.”
His brow softens. “What kind of emergency? Are Kenzie and Nolan okay?”
“Yes. I mean, I assume so. It’s not them—it’s Kat.”
“Kat?” The furrow returns. “I thought you guys weren’t talking. What’s the problem? Can’t it at least wait until after my group?”
I just shake my head. Kat wouldn’t text me an SOS unless she meant it, especially not after two weeks of silence that’s been growing louder and louder every day.
My phone lights up with the one-word response:
Yes
I lean down and kiss Grayson on the forehead. “I wouldn’t go if it wasn’t an SOS. Get your mom to film your round for me, okay? I’ll watch later and cheer lots, I promise.” Then I whirl out of the bustling hall and into the winter night.
It takes three different buses to navigate across the city to Kat’s house, but I manage it in only forty-five minutes. Her house is dark, except for one light shining from the tiny basement window, but when I ring the doorbell, she swings the door open like she’s been sitting right there.
“You came,” she breathes. Even in the shadowy darkness of her front hallway, her eyes look red-rimmed.
“Of course I came, sillyface. It was an SOS.”
Then she throws her arms around me and collapses against me in a very un-Kat-like show of affection, or maybe desperation.
“What’s the SOS?” I ask once she pulls away.
She pushes a few loose strands of hair back toward her ponytail, as if trying to glue them into place.
“It’s Granddad,” she says, hand still atop her head. “He’s had a stroke.”
KAT
IT’S MEG’S TURN TO SMOTHER ME IN A HUG. “OH GOD!” SHE BREATHES, WORDS tangling in my hair. “Is he okay?”
In other words, is he dead or not dead? I shrug as she pulls away. An hour ago, when the nurse called, he was not dead. Or at least, not dead yet. Since then, I’ve sat in my dark living room, looking over questionnaire after questionnaire, spreading them across the floor, counting them, searching them for some strength that, I have determined, I definitely do not have. Since then, anything could have happened.
“ICU,” I say, shrugging again.
“Which hospital?” she asks as she starts rummaging in the front hall closet.
“Royal Alex.” I think. After the nurse said Granddad had collapsed of a stroke at the grocery store, everything else she said was muted by the roaring of a waterfall in my ears. Maybe she said the Misericordia. Or the Grey Nuns. I should’ve written it down, recorded her words in black pen strokes on lined paper as if preparing for a school final. Except in this case, it’s a life final.
My stomach lurches as Meg winds a pink-and-purple-striped scarf around my neck.
“Well, that’s easy, then. The 125 will take us right there.” She stands on her tiptoes and shoves a plain green toque onto my head.
I shake my now-green head. “We should wait for my parents.”
“Oh, are they on their way?” Her face brightens as she lifts my coat off the floor at her feet. I don’t know when she put it there. Perhaps it walked there on its own.
I clench my phone tightly and shake my head for like the umpteenth time. “Not answering. Date night. They’re at a movie,” I force out, my voice breaking. When Granddad said he was going out to run a few errands, I didn’t think twice about it. He goes out a lot, and he’s been so much stronger lately.
Meg nods. “Which one? What time did it start?”
I shrug for about the fiftieth time. I don’t know. I don’t even know what theater. Normally, I would ask. In the past, I would have asked. I’m getting sloppy. I’m never letting them go anywhere again without telling me all the details first. I’m never letting Granddad go anywhere again, ever. If he even comes home in the first place.
One . . . one . . . I try to count, but I can’t even remember what I’m counting about.
“Did you leave them a message?” Meg holds up a phone—my phone, which she has somehow pried out of my fingers without me noticing, in some sleight-of-hand magic trick.
I shake my head, unable to find words again.
“I got this,” Meg says. She unlocks my phone with a swipe, types in my passcode, and taps the speed dial button that, if it was a real button and not a touch screen, would be completely worn through after the past hour. Puts the phone to her ear. Waits. “Hi, Mrs. Daley? This is Meg. Kat got a message from the Royal Alex that Granddad is in the ICU there from I think a stroke, so when you’re done with your movie, you should head straight there. We’ll catch the bus and meet you at the hospital. We’ll call again if we get any more news. Ciao.”
She hangs up, shoves the phone into my pocket, pulls my coat out from where she’s been holding it between her knees, and continues to dress me just like she does Kenzie—one arm, wind around, other arm, zip up right to the neck, pat on head.
“Okay,” she says, “you’re ready. Let’s go.”
I shake my head again, perfecting the part of the speechless Neolithic cavewoman I’ve apparently devolved into. “I can’t,” I say, and Meg furrows her brow, clearly confused. Perhaps if I grunted and pointed, she’d understand me better.
“Can’t what?” she asks.
Just can’t. I reach up and tug at my coat’s cold, purple zipper pull, flipping it up and down and up and down.
One . . . one . . . one . . .
I can picture him now—face battered and bloodied from the green bean cans he bounced off of as he pitched in slow motion to the grocery aisle floor. Left side of his mouth sagging with the weight of the words his brain no longer knows how to speak. Eyes wide and expectant as he waits for me to murmur some meaningful, poetic thing that will comfort his soul as it slips out of this world into the darkness only absence brings.
“Kat?” The word’s full of impatience—Meg’s always impatient—but it’s full of worry, too.
Meg’s concern is enough to start the words flowing.
“I just can’t,” I say. “What if he doesn’t look like himself? What if I say something idiotic and insensitive? What if he dies? What if he dies in a fit of coughing and blood and beeping monitors and there’s nothing I can do? What if he dies while I’m right there?”
Meg reaches out and takes my hand like we’re five years old, fingers interlocking with my own. She puts her other hand firmly on my wrist and looks me in the eyes. “Kat. What if he dies and you’re not there?”
Then she marches out the door, pulling me behind her.
When I was little, maybe six or seven, Granddad took me to a carnival. I can’t remember if he was visiting us or if we were visiting him, but I only got about ten feet inside the gates before I started crying. I don’t know why. The flashing lights, the hiccuping music, the shrieking children—could have been anything. Granddad scooped me up, kissed me on the top of my head, and murmured, “It’s okay, Katharina. It’s okay.” Then we went out for ice cream instead.
I want to go for ice cream now. I want Granddad to walk into this waiting room, dapper and tall, and tell me, “Katharina, don’t worry about these fluorescent lights, or bustling noises, or contagious patients. Let’s blow this joint and nab us some two-scoop chocolate cones.”
Though would Granddad choose chocolate? What’s his favorite ice cream flavor? What does he usually have? I can’t remember. I’m losing him already.
Meg turns from speaking to the front-desk nurse and looks at me expectantly, as if waiting for the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
“What?” I ask.
“Your granddad. What’s his name?”
I tell her, and she continues chatting with the nurse, and then we are following a nurse—the same one or a different one, I couldn’t say—down flickering beige hallways, and I’m trying not to look in any of the rooms at the puking and the monitors and the bruises and the dark, sunken eyes.
Then we’re standing in front of heavy black double doors. And the nurse turns to us and says, “I’m sorry, family only. You’ll have to wait out here.”
I start to sit obediently in one of the gray plastic chairs lined against the wall, but then Meg grabs my hand and pulls me back up.
“Not you, silly. You’re family. She means me.” She taps me lightly on the back, nudging me in the direction of the big, black entryway to hell.
I reach out and grab Meg’s hand, and she looks fiercely up at the nurse. “Look,” she says, “she’s—can’t I—”
“No,” the nurse says. “Family only. No exceptions.” She’s tall and broad, like you’d expect a prison warden to be. She frowns at us, compassionless. I bet it’s not even a real rule. I bet she just doesn’t want a pair of teen hooligans set loose in her ICU.
Meg slides off my coat, undoing her previous work, and lays it over a chair. “I’ll be right out here,” she says, as if I’m Kenzie, except that Kenzie would just go roaring right in and start dancing with every patient, even the ones in comas.
I can’t get my feet to move an inch, let alone dance.
Meg unzips her coat, revealing her favorite black cardigan with the oversized purple plastic buttons. Out of nowhere, she grabs one of the buttons and pulls. There’s a snap, and then she’s pressing the button into my palm and folding my fingers around it.
“There,” she says. “Now it’s like I’m with you.”
Heat from our sweaty rush from sidewalk to bus to lobby in downy winter garb seeps from the button into my palm, and my eyes prickle with tears. Before I can dissolve into full meltdown sobs, Meg grasps my shoulders and turns me around, pushing me through the hell-door that’s now being held open by the prison-ward nurse.
Then I’m trotting after her through a sea of curtains with Meg’s button pressed so deep into my palm I can feel my heart pulsing through it.
I would count, I should breathe and count, except I can’t remember the numbers.
Curtain. Curtain. Nurse. Cart. Monitor. Curtain.
And then, Granddad is there.
There’s no blood, at least not on his face, but his eyes are shrunken into his head, and there are tubes and needles taped into his hands, and he takes up so little of what is already a tiny bed. I look away, find the nurse’s face instead.
“He’s lucky he collapsed in a public place,” she says. “Ambulance got there and got him on TPA real quick, which breaks down the clot. And it’s the right side of his brain, not the left, so his speech and language should be fine.” I nod at her, barely hearing her words. I can still see Granddad’s skeletal frame out of the corner of my eye. “Well, go on,” she says, waving at the chair beside his bed. “Go talk to him.”
The gray chair is hard and cold, and I perch on the edge of it, leaning forward to rest my hands on the bar along the side of the bed.
“Hi, Granddad,” I say, softly, so whoever’s on the other side of the curtain behind me can’t hear.
His eyes flutter open just a crack, eyelids struggling against fatigue or drugs or maybe even another stroke. I sit back, surprised. “My Katharina,” he murmurs.
I still clench Meg’s button in one hand, but I reach out my other hand and slip it into his, trying to ignore the IV piercing his paper-thin skin.
I squeeze, gently. With his bony, fleshless hand, he squeezes back.
And I realize, with relief, that we really don’t need to say anything more than that.