(no subject)
The People Who Love her
By Amy Jones
Under Sephie’s arms there are red marks where the tops of the crutches have rubbed against her armpit skin. She’ll get used to them, the nurse at the hospital told me last night but maybe at first she’ll get a bit of a rash. Tell her to use some lotion and wear long-sleeved shirts. But it is summer and Sephie only wants to wear tank tops; she is stubborn like that. Plus she has really nice shoulders, all soft and freckly and covered in fine, silky hair.
Sometimes I am surprised at how easily things break.
We are going to Cosy’s for breakfast because I have no food in my apartment and even if I did it would be too hot to cook. Last night Sephie slept in my bed and I slept on the couch, which is not really a couch but a loveseat and so this morning my legs are cramped up and tired, as if I spent the entire night crouching in a corner. I was supposed to prop Sephie’s leg up on pillows before she went to sleep but I don’t have many pillows so I ended up propping her leg up on a stack of magazines. Now my bed smells like plaster and perfume.
At Cosy’s Sephie bumps into an old man sitting at the counter when she is trying to squeeze between the tables. She is not very good at maneuvering her crutches yet or maybe she is still a bit drunk. The old man glares at her, but secretly I think he is happy that someone has touched him, that he is sitting on that stool with his butt pushed way out just so someone will.
Sephie once lived in London with a man named Jonah who loved her more than anyone has ever loved anyone. They lived together in a small, cold apartment with rats and did a lot of drugs and Jonah painted pictures of Sephie - Sephie sleeping, Sephie eating, Sephie lighting candles, Sephie in the bathtub - hundreds of pictures on huge canvases at first, then on loose-leaf when he had no money left to buy canvases, cheap copy paper, napkins.
Sephie never left the apartment and Jonah only went out to buy bread and soup. Jonah loved Sephie so much that he would cry the whole time he was apart from her and when he came back his tears would be frozen to his face, tiny icicles dangling from his eyelashes.
The last portrait of her he painted in his own blood on the classified section of the newspaper, pictures of sad-faced real estate agents peeking out from the dried-brown flakes of her eyes. By then they had only four slices of bread left and one can of chicken noodle soup. Sephie let Jonah eat the bread and they shared the soup, sitting and staring at each other until their last candle was burnt out. Jonah was beautiful, Sephie said; he had kind eyes and pale parchment skin that crackled in the London winter.
When the candle had burnt out Sephie came home. She still had a five pound note sewn into the lining of her backpack and a return ticket to Halifax. She said she waited until it was dark because she wanted Jonah to remember her sitting there in the apartment, her face lit by candlelight; she didn’t want him to think of her leaving him. She said she wanted to stay burned on the back of his eyelids. Sephie could be dramatic like that. When I asked her if she was happy in London with Jonah she told me that when someone loved you that much it was impossible to be happy.
Sephie is visiting me from Calgary, where she lives with a man named Albert who owns four cars and is much older than her. Albert is an architect and they live in a brand new house that he designed himself in a brand new subdivision in Calgary, which Sephie says isn’t a big deal because most of Calgary is brand new, hard and sparkling like the edge of a knife. Two of his cars are sports cars of some type and one is a regular car and one is a truck.
Why would anyone need four cars? I asked her once. There’s only one of him. He can only drive one car.
I drive the truck sometimes, Sephie said.
Okay, that’s two.
Sephie rolled her eyes, Jill, you have more than one pair of shoes, don’t you? From the way she says it I know it’s something Albert said to her once. Albert and Sephie have been living together for almost two years and the most I know about him is he’s the kind of man who changes cars to match his outfits.
At Cosy’s Sephie orders the breakfast special and a chocolate milkshake and a side order of onion rings. Pain makes me hungry, she says, spreading peanut butter on a slice of toast that is already drowning in regular butter. I’ll probably just throw it up later. When she sees me staring at her she says for God’s sake Jill. Where’s your sense of humour?
Last night at the hospital the doctor told me something about Sephie’s ankle. Sephie was playing with the controls on the side of her little hospital bed, raising it up and down, the slick paper sheet crinkling like old newspaper. She had one of the nurses in the room with her, a young woman with short blond hair and rosy cheeks. The nurse took Sephie’s blood pressure and then Sephie took the nurse’s. The nurse gave Sephie a lollypop and a tongue depressor and Sephie stuck both of them in her mouth.
Josephine can take these in the morning, the doctor said. When she sobers up. He kept talking. Sephie and the nurse were laughing about something, and then there was an older man in the room, a technician of some kind, and he was laughing too, and I wanted to be in there laughing with them instead of listening to this old doctor talk about pills. I took the bottle and shoved it in my purse but by then Sephie was up on her crutches yelling yee-haw, baby, let’s go, and the nurse and the technician were gone.
Before last night, the last time I was in the hospital with Sephie was in high school. She had been starving herself almost as long as we had been friends. When she started having seizures her mother called her doctor, who sent an ambulance to take Sephie to the hospital. By then she weighed 96 pounds and had lost two of her teeth but it still took three paramedics to strap her to the stretcher.
The doctors put her on suicide watch and gave her an intravenous feeding tube, which she named Jean-Claude. Her roommate in the behavioral ward was another tiny girl named Jules with bulging eyes and short hair like straw who was an arsonist and a cutter. Sometimes, Sephie told me, she would wake up to find Jules in bed with her, trying to curl up to her like a kitten. Another time, Sephie found Jules in the bathroom with a lighter trying to burn her own nipples.
When they found Sephie’s name carved into Jules’s stomach they moved them both to private rooms. Everyone assumed that Jules had done it to herself but when I went to visit Sephie the next day she told me how Jules had given her the blade, which she kept hidden in a shampoo bottle, how she had touched the tip of it to Jule’s belly and watched the blood bloom beneath it, how easily Jules’s belly had yielded, how it vibrated as the razor skimmed across the surface. How Jules had stared at the ceiling, her tongue poking out between her chapped lips, her eyes bright and feverish, how afterwards she lay on top of Sephie and pressed into her bare skin, staining her with blood in the shape of her name.
After we finish our breakfasts and share the onion rings, Sephie divides the milkshake into two glasses and tops them both off with brandy poured from a flask she pulls out of her purse. I haven’t had a brandy-shake since Sephie and I lived together in second-year university. No one sees Sephie pour the brandy except a couple at the next table who are busy getting their baby to eat some baby mush from a glass jar. The baby has orange hair and a long face and likes to spit out the food his parents try to feed him and chew on the rubber end of the spoon.
Sephie props her foot on the seat next to me and I can see that her toes are turning purple. I suddenly remember the pills in my purse so I pull them out and Sephie takes three and I take two and we wash them down with our brandy-shakes. One of Sephie’s crutches clatters to the floor.
I wish they had given me a wheelchair instead, Sephie says. You’d have to push me around. Think of all the fun we could have.
I imagine pushing Sephie up to the top of Citadel Hill, then sitting on her lap and pushing off, rocketing to the bottom like two kids on a toboggan. My stomach drops to the floor.
I might have to throw up, I say.
Sephie leans back, looking at me like she’s daring me. Go for it, Jill, she says. I’m here for you. She laughs. I swallow, concentrate on the patterns on the tabletop. Beige Formica, flecks of green, flecks of brown. A stain that looks like ketchup. There’s no pattern. Just flecks of green, flecks of brown.
We’re all here for you, Sephie, the doctor in the behavioural ward had told her back in high school. You’re surrounded by all the people who love you.
Sephie stretched her long, bony legs in front of her, brittle and crooked as twigs. I know that, Doc, she said. And that’s the problem.
Ever since Sephie arrived from Calgary I noticed things about her. She was quieter than usual, she looked tired and she had this new way of staring at me, like she was reminding herself why we were together. She laughed at me when I suggested going to our old favourite Irish pub, said she’d rather go dancing.
I hate all that f***g fiddle music, she said.
Me too, I said. I just thought…
It had only been six months since I’d seen her. There was a new club where all the Toronto kids liked to go, with two big muscular guy sout front wearing tuxes and headsets over their bald, fat heads, where you couldn’t wear sneakers and had to pay ten bucks at the door. We drank a bottle of Jaeger at my apartment while we were getting ready and then stumbled into a cab. At the club we drank martinis that looked like antifreeze and then we lost each other on the dance floor. At one point I looked up and saw Sephie dancing on a speaker, sandwiched between two Asian girls wearing matching silver miniskirts. She was much taller than them, and they slid up and down her, as if they were strippers and Sephie was the pole.
When I found Sephie again she was on her knees on the wet bathroom floor, retching into a clogged toilet while the two Asian girls sat on the counter smoking cigarettes. One of her shoes was missing, and her ankle was purple and swollen. I held her hair back and since there was no toilet paper I found her some paper towel, which she wiped across her mouth and then tossed on the floor. I took a drag from one of the girls’ cigarettes while Sephie splashed cold water on her face. When I looked in the mirror I realized my makeup looked like a drunk person had done it.
What happened to your ankle? I asked Sephie. She stared at me blankly, an open tube of lipstick shaking in her hand. Your ankle. It looks like it’s sprained.
She raised the tube to her mouth. Sometimes Albert hits me, she said. The two girls giggled.
Albert? I said stupidly. I never thought of Albert as a hitter. Albert was old. He designed houses. He drove four cars at once. Not Albert.
Yup. That’s how crazy I make him. She stared at the lipstick for a second, her eyes out of focus. Then she bit off the tip. When she opened her mouth again her teeth were caked with red.
Gross, one of the girls said. They giggled again.
Sephie looked down at her feet. My ankle really hurts, she said. Maybe I should go to the hospital.
We sit in Cosy’s for three hours until the waitress tells us she’s closing. I pay the bill while Sephie struggles with her crutches. My heart is beating very fast and my mouth is dry. I cough loudly and the waitress gives me a dirty look along with my change.
Once we’re outside, Sephie leans against a tree and lights a cigarette. I sit down on the grass next to her, looking up at her. I’ve just always done that. I wonder how I would know who I was without her.
Are you going back to Calgary? I ask.
Sephie stares at me. Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I? She takes one drag of her cigarette and then butts it out against the tree.
When we get home we each take two more of the pills. I start to feel calmer. Sephie hops around the apartment; her stuff is everywhere. The cat follows her, batting at her foot bobbing in the air.
Your flight’s not until Tuesday, I say. You don’t have to pack yet.
I know, Sephie says, zipping up her suitcase. I was just feeling, I don’t know, scattered.
I’m sinking into the couch. There is a show on TV about sharks and I watch very closely until the rest of the world fades away. Sephie sits on the couch next to me, propping her feet up on the coffee table. I pull a blanket over us, even though it is still so hot. Under the blanket I can feel Sephie’s hip bone pressing gently against mine. On a chair on the other side of the room, the cat follows something with her eyes that I can’t see. It suddenly feels as if the room is teeming with things I can’t see, thick in the air around us, and, as usual, I am oblivious.