Katie Bickell emigrated from England to northern Alberta in 1990. Her fiction has been published in the Tahoma Literary Review and Alberta Views, and her essays have appeared in WestWord Magazine, HERizons Magazine, and on The Temper. Chapters from Always Brave, Sometimes Kind have received the Alberta Literary Award’s Howard O’Hagan for Short Story, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Emerging Writer Award, and won the Alberta Views Fiction Prize. Katie lives in Sherwood Park, Alberta, just outside of Edmonton. Find out more at katiebickell.com.
Copyright © 2020 by Katie Bickell
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Brindle & Glass
An imprint of TouchWood Editions
touchwoodeditions.com
Edited by Claire Philipson
The newspaper article referenced on p. 51 is drawn from the CBC News story of March 20, 2018, “Creator of Sixties Scoop adoption program says it wasn’t meant to place kids with white families” (https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/creator-of-sixties-scoop-adoption-program-says-it-wasn-t-meant-to-place-kids-with-white-families-1.4584342)
Cataloguing Information Available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 9781927366929 (electronic)
TouchWood Editions gratefully acknowledges that the land on which we live and work is within the traditional territories of the Lkwungen (Esquimalt and Songhees), Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke and WSÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) peoples.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Always Brave,
Sometimes Kind
A Novel
For Amy and Miranda and Jordan,
and Jenna Jewel and Jarrett Jude,
and all the children we do not know.
1995
An aura brightens the dark staff room and wakes Rhanji. The doctor gasps upon his rush to consciousness. He had dreamt of skin—skin as blue and translucent as water in Nanni’s dyeing vat: cadaverous, pallid, with indigo residue. In the last moments of the dream, the flesh had melted into a liquid in which Rhanji began to drown. In that blurred place between slumber and reality, he’d thought the fluorescent light was the sun as seen from under the sea; the girl in the centre of the glow, an angel. High notes had sounded her arrival, like the bracelets that used to chime on his late wife’s arm.
Sunita?
No.
Only young Carrie Quentin, a first-year nursing student, peppering him with nervous apologies in singsong pitch. “Sorry, doctor! I’m so sorry!”
Her regret only confuses Rhanji more. Sympathy? Why?
“The child’s body has been found?”
“No!” Carrie gasps. “I just didn’t mean to wake you!”
Rhanji massages the deep lines of his forehead. Canadians.
He pulls himself from the couch and stumbles into the hall, squinting under the hallway lights. The night’s charge nurse leans out from room 112. Sandra resembles a Q-tip wand dressed up in white scrubs, that tight mass of bleached spirals on her head. The thought is unkind; Sandra is a dear friend and a skilled nurse. Likely, Rhanji would not have had such a dislike for the hairstyle had it not made her resemble the silly woman on the Lamb Chop’s Play-Along program. The show had polluted Rhanji’s formerly quiet home for nearly a year, his daughter arguing the correlation between preschool rhymes and early developmental growth.
The nurse scans left to right before spotting the doctor and summoning him to the room. Inside, a little girl moans a singular phrase at sharp volume, a phrase from a language Rhanji does not know. She cries the unknown word without hope, her small head lolling from one side to another, heavy eyes blinking wide when fear presents itself more acutely than her pain. She is feverish, dehydrated, and, if further tests confirm Rhanji’s suspicions, suffering appendicitis. Worst of all, the child is alone.
“Her name’s Miranda,” her foster mother spat before abandoning her to the emergency room earlier that day. “She’s from up north, and boy, she’s got some pipes.”
Beside the child, a man stoops under wild hair and a well-worn toque, swatting away the red-scrubbed hands that pull on the sleeves of his too-large jacket. Wilf. A bunker bag hangs from Wilf’s shoulder, the kind firefighters use to carry gear. Likely, the bag is a thrift shop find.
“Nikâwiy wants you too, little one! She wants you to be brave. Hush, niece. Stop crying.”
The man sways as he speaks. Is Wilf really the child’s uncle? The girl cowers, brown eyes bottomless with fear. Doubtful, Rhanji thinks. Still, it would be better if Wilf were actually a relative. Rhanji’s heart aches at the sight of the lonely little girl. His own daughter was the same age when Sunita died.
Wilf has no right to trespass, Sandra scolds. She’s right, of course; the man is merely a patient himself, though perhaps a favourite of the doctor and becoming something of a fixture, as days grow colder. Rhanji guides Wilf from the bed to the hall.
“You know our patients require privacy, Wilf. If this happens again, I will ask you to vacate the hospital.”
Wilf nods repeatedly, listening as intently as a parent in consultation until he grasps the meaning of the doctor’s words. His face falls, eyes lowering to the toes of his worn boots. He’ll go back to the waiting room.
“I’m sorry, doctor. I heard her crying, all alone. I just wanted to help.”
Rhanji nods. Of course Wilf would want to help. When Rhanji began practising in Canada in the early seventies, he was appalled by the number of Indigenous children removed from their homes, and entirely bewildered to find the majority of his young patients in fine health and without any obvious signs of neglect or disclosed history of abuse. He scanned intake forms for details explaining their removal and found reasons so petty they’d make more sense justifying a school detention: truancy, poor grades, pilfering candy bars. The younger ones were often taken upon birth for such common things as a family’s poor economic standing, or the marital status of the mother, or even whether delivery staff deemed a labouring woman uncooperative during her child’s birth.
However, Rhanji soon discovered that even if the children had left their mother’s arms or wombs strong, rarely did they stay that way. Most moved from foster home to foster home so frequently that Rhanji was unable to track their medical needs; some were transferred as far away from home as the southern states. The ones he was able to track seemed to shrink in size and, seemingly, in spirit; their bodies growing gaunt, skin yellowing with mysterious bruises, shoulders pulling inward in near-constant stances of cowering. These were the ones he may have assessed as needing intervention, these children showing the signs of abuse, neglect, failure to thrive. How could this outcome have been preferable to the lives they had previously led?
There was no sense to it.
Once, Rhanji had performed a wellness check on a sunny, beautiful boy slated for adoption by a local Mormon couple. The boy and his siblings had been taken from their mother because her husband was recently deceased.
“There’d be no way she could afford them on her own, y’know?” the boy’s social worker said during Rhanji’s examination, as though the three-year-old weren’t in the room. Upon the loss of her husband, the child’s mother had applied for financial aid. Family services waited until the family had buried their breadwinner and removed the children the very next day.
The social worker snapped chewing gum in his mouth as he spoke. Rhanji was taken aback. Silently, he stopped his work and sat in his office chair, hiding his eyes by massaging his temples, pretending to make notes in the boy’s file. He thought of his elderly Nanni bent over the dyeing vat in the years that followed his own parents’ deaths as he, then a small child, played nearby. He thought of tiny, beloved Yasmin and the life Rhanji carved out for her in a new country after they lost Sunita. If misfortune were reason enough to steal children, both Rhanji and his daughter might have been prime candidates. As soon the terms of his immigration allowed, Rhanji transferred out of childhood health. Until then, he did his best to get through, developing the mantra that made his medical performance possible for more than two decades:
I do not know this child. This child is not mine.
“Just don’t kick me out,” Wilf says, clutching his stomach. “Appendicitis must be going round, eh? Ten outta ten for pain.”
Rhanji watches the man limp toward the waiting room.
“Wait,” he calls. “Wilf!”
Wilf turns and Rhanji moves closer to him, lowering his voice as he speaks. Rhanji tries to match a tone of casual friendship; he attempts to fix his face into an understanding smile. Male camaraderie never had come easy for him, but he knows the numbers: those suffering addiction rarely recover without social support.
“My friend, have you been attending the meetings I found you?” he asks. “You look strong.”
Wilf laughs. His steady hand moves as though batting the doctor’s words from the air. “Oh yeah, yeah,” he jokes. “I’m a He-Man now, doctor.”
“If the meetings aren’t the right fit, we can find another group—”
Wilf shakes his head. “No, no. One Fourteenth Street, nine- thirty, every morning.”
Rhanji nods. “Okay. Okay, that’s good, Wilf. We don’t want you in withdrawal again, do we?”
Wilf’s smile doesn’t falter but instead becomes static, only a mask of mirth. He looks away, his shoulders slumped. Rhanji cringes. Why would he say such a thing? Shame, he knows, is more poison than the drug itself. He searches for words to heal the connection.
“Wilf,” Rhanji tries again, “We need you to be well. The whole world does, but especially little ones like her.” He nods to Miranda’s room. “Your life . . . well, you can draw a roadmap home for her, for children like her. Do you understand? You can heal them in a way that I can’t.”
Wilf swallows hard. He turns from the doctor and shakes his head, a small, sad smile forming, and waves with one big swoop of his arm as he retreats to the waiting room. Rhanji watches the man for a moment before re-entering room 112. He is just about to step inside when the lonesome wail of a harmonica cries out.
“Not indoors,” Rhanji calls without turning. He has already requested that Wilf refrain from panhandling. Wilf’s noise ceases at high pitch.
“Sorry, doctor!”
Rhanji purses his lips, hiding the first smile he has felt in weeks.
Carrie calls to Rhanji from triage. She leans into the hall, covering a phone’s receiver with her palm, tethered to an office desk by its black cord. She is the picture of inexperience: young and nervous in teddy-bear print scrubs. But Rhanji is biased; he remembers a time when professionals wore only white. The hospital is lucky for the free labour of university students. The rest of the Sandras, those steady nurses—militant in their confidence, expertise, and technique—have gone to the picket line or elsewhere, their positions more than halved by government cuts made by a premier who refuses to blink.
“Um . . . Dr. Rhanji? Trauma incoming via Northern Air. They say five minutes.”
Rhanji shakes his head. “We’re at capacity.” Ambulances have been refused all day, sent to taxi patients throughout the city and beyond in search of beds.
Carrie lifts the phone and relays the message before dropping it to her palm again.
“Everywhere else is full too. There’s a collision north of Fort Mac. Two intensive-care patients but one’s going to the Royal Alex. They say that’s the last bed in the city.”
“The trauma room’s free,” Sandra shouts from 112.
“We don’t have a bed in it!”
“We’ll have to treat him on the stretcher, then. Figure the rest out later.”
Rhanji and the nurses meet the aircrew at the elevator’s steel doors. The stretcher carries in November’s bitter chill and a pungency of urine, oil, alcohol. Medics share details as quickly as the team moves the patient through the hall: a thirty-year-old male in a half-ton truck, broken right humerus, broken right femur, fractured sternum. Signs of significant spinal injury.
“Let me guess,” Sandra asks, rechecking vitals en route. “Shoulda seen the other guy?”
“Something like that,” the lead responds. “Girl in a Toyota four door, seven months pregnant. Hit just a few kilometres from home. Her dad was first on scene.”
In an instant Rhanji imagines the father’s discovery as if it were his own: his own heavy footsteps breaking a highway snowbank, a steering wheel pressed into the rounded womb of his daughter, her thighs coated with sticky black ice. Rhanji’s throat tightens.
Sweetu!
No.
I do not know that child. That child is not mine.
Rhanji refocuses to the patient at hand. The man roars. He can’t breathe, can’t feel his legs. The doctor palpates the abdomen as they rush the stretcher into the trauma room. Over the heart: a deep internal sore. No, not a bruise, no bleeding. A tattoo, dark red. A maple leaf, bolded black lettering above and below: Fuck Off, We’re Full.
Something thick and warm and wet hits Rhanji’s eyes.
“Get a spit guard on him!” Sandra shouts.
Stop, turn, hands up. Rhanji feels a friend’s hand on his shoulder and a rush of saline pours over his lids.
“Don’t talk,” Sandra says. “Keep your mouth and eyes shut.”
A new voice joins the chaos. Dr. Anderson has arrived to relieve Rhanji’s fourteen-hour shift, his voice clear and calm, steady with the optimism of his youth.
Rhanji dries his face with a towel and opens his eyes, trying to ignore the thought of sinister microbes seeping into his ocular membrane, en route to poison his blood or seize his immune system. Sandra, pushing morphine into the drip, jokes above the noise of their frantic patient.
“Savour the terry cloth, Rhanji.”
It’s black humour, funny because it’s true. The laundry workers went on strike that morning. A year ago, all non-essential hospital staff had accepted pay cuts with the promise of continued job security, but now the Alberta government had announced plans to annihilate laundry-worker positions in favour of hiring a private contracting facility. Scoffing at the idea of helping those who betrayed them make a clean transition, the workers walked off the job and were soon joined by cafeteria workers, janitors, and administrative staff. Clean linens were quickly becoming as rare and valuable as available hospital beds.
“I don’t know where we’ll put him,” Rhanji tells the younger physician. Rhanji’s hands are shaking. Is his anger as obvious as it feels?
“No worries, mate.” Anderson’s thick Australian accent is unable to sound anything but unworried. He ushers Rhanji away from the trauma room.
“There’s an old cot in basement storage,” Sandra calls behind the men. Carrie’s already left to retrieve it. They’ll get the little girl into a wheelchair and the new patient off the stretcher, put him in her place in 112. Miranda can stay on the army duck canvas in the hall until something better opens up.
“Time to go home now, eh? You ’right?”
Rhanji nods. He will go home but not before completing a final task. The doctor takes the medic’s clipboard to his office and transfers the Northern Air patient’s information to official intake papers: name, injuries, healthcare card.
Patient’s birth date: the day and month are the very same as Yasmin’s.
Rhanji hears the man shout again in a weaker voice now: cracking, begging, pleading for his mother.
“Nikâwiy,” the little girl matches in desperation. “Nikâwiy! Nikâwiy!”
I do not know this child, Rhanji repeats and repeats. This child is not mine.
***
Rhanji parks on the street in front of his house. He kills the vehicle’s ignition and silences the radio’s rabid arguments for and against the hospital worker’s strike and its majority of protesting widows, mothers, and immigrants.
Outside, skin freezes within thirty seconds of exposure. The sky is as though Nanni pours her shade over the whole world, all homes awash in Rhanji’s drowning dream. In Alberta, in November, four o’clock is a desolate time of day.
The doctor thinks of the old joke, a child’s double entendre: Your hands are blue, Nanni.
Her palms were always stained indigo.
Yearn. Your hands yearn.
It is the truest thing in all the world.
Three houses over, a man is doubled in size by Gore-Tex, gloves, and balaclava. Clumsily, he drags a string of holiday lights up a ladder. Twelve weeks ago, this street was bright with porch lights, a gesture of hope for Yasmin’s missing child. The community herded around Rhanji’s daughter: private groups organized citywide searches and volunteer transit check-stops. Dr. Anderson’s young girlfriend, Kelly, filled Rhanji’s freezer with so many casseroles and bags of soup that Rhanji had to ask his colleague to tell her to stop. Sandra spent countless hours at Yasmin’s side. The nurse had been at the boy’s birth, picking up extra evening hours at the Grey Nuns, the former hospital recently downgraded to a perpetually short-staffed clinic. Sandra’s hands had been the first to hold the boy, and she had been the one to discover the abandoned child in the room his birth mother had laboured in. She’d been the one to name him, in fact, after a favourite song.
But now Jude is just one more gone in a system so many vanish from. Houses are no longer lit. Inside the front window of Rhanji’s home, his daughter’s silhouette holds the last glowing tribute in the form of a cigarette raised and lowered from her lips. It is a terrible scene and one Rhanji is powerless to heal.
Rhanji had not approved of the child’s impending adoption and had made his feelings clear even up to the very night before Jude was taken. Yasmin was too young, Rhanji insisted, only twenty- two, still unmarried. She’d just started her career the year prior, and the hours of a social worker were so long and so difficult for such little pay. Had she not already given enough without assuming the responsibility of a child?
But Yasmin argued she owed the boy. Sometime before his birth, she had placed a teenager and her two-year-old sister—two of the first case files Yasmin had inherited when a senior co-worker walked off the job—in a less than ideal home. The night after the older girl had run away from the foster mother’s care, Yasmin had confessed to Rhanji that she’d never trusted the woman. Too often Mariam had passed judgment on biological families, and, at times, she seemed almost fanatical. Yasmin described how once, when she had outlined the important role a foster family could play in preserving a child’s culture, the woman had laughed in a blurting, chilling, singular spurt, exposing her most defining feature: a discoloured front tooth, dark and dead as dirt on snow. “That laugh, the tooth—it made me want to run, too, you know?” Yasmin said.
Weeks later, Yasmin showed Rhanji a notebook filled with carefully jotted information. Yasmin had travelled far north to interview the girl’s grandmother, a woman in her late fifties. Until Yasmin reached out, the woman hadn’t known her eldest granddaughter was pregnant, never mind lost. Her own daughter—the girls’ mother—had also gone missing before the children had gone into care.
“She had this huge binder,” Yasmin said, flipping through the pages she’d copied off the woman, so Rhanji could see. “It was filled with newspaper clippings, details about each time she’d asked about her daughter’s case, a timeline of the disappearance itself. Organized, like she’s the lead investigator.” Yasmin shook her head. “Honestly, at this point, she probably is. She said she reads papers and calls hospitals and shelters and watches the news for ‘clues’ every day, but that no one will return her calls anymore, or, if they do, they say she’s too rural when she asks to meet with them. She’s even travelled to offices only to have appointments cancelled minutes before they’re supposed to begin.
“But you know what’s really terrible?” Yasmin continued. “Apparently, she had applied for kinship care as soon as they were placed in care. All this time she’s been trying to get custody of her own grandchildren, and I didn’t even know. She’s even begun working with a child’s advocate. I just sat there like a dummy when she told me. Like, I know the system’s a mess. We’re totally underfunded, and it feels like every time we get things organized there’s another staffing change-up. Still, those girls could have been with their grandmother this whole time, and now one’s missing.”
Rhanji placed his hand on the back of Yasmin’s head as tears dropped from her eyes to the front of her sweater. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist and took a breath.
“She told me to write everything down, and asked if I’d draft a statement of support, which, yeah, of course. But Dad, the paperwork hadn’t been processed. There was no application to attach my statement to when I looked through files, so I mailed her another but, of course, that hasn’t made it in yet, either. And then all this information still has to go to a committee that’ll consider it anywhere up to a year from after it’s submitted. It’s this system—I can barely navigate it, and I’m in it! This family has so much stacked against them. She made me promise I’d do the best I could, and I will. I’ll do everything to help her get custody of her youngest. But, honestly . . . there’s no quick or easy route to take here.”
A couple of months later, after the boy was born and assigned to Yasmin’s roster of young clients, Yasmin chose not to place the newborn in a temporary home and instead applied for emergency guardianship herself. Sandra had reported to her a physical description of the boy’s mother that matched Yasmin’s runaway, and while there was no way to know for sure if they were one and the same, Yasmin was convinced.
“Then you already know this child’s family,” Rhanji said the night Yasmin brought the child home. He had been chopping carrots but stopped when she arrived, balancing the handle of a bulky carseat on her arm. “Why did you bring him here?”
Yasmin shook her head. Privacy laws were clear: Yasmin had no right to tell the woman the details of a newborn who may or may not be related to her.
“Besides,” she said, resting the carseat on the floor to unbuckle the infant from his harness, “even if we could confirm the relationship, there isn’t a caseworker employed who’d place a newborn and a two-year-old in solo kinship care at the same time. It would be asking her to choose between the granddaughter she’s been fighting for, and an infant that might not even be her great-grandson.” She ran a finger down the side of the baby’s cheek. “It’s too cruel. I’ll take care of him.”
Rhanji didn’t understand. He lay the knife on the chopping block and crossed his arms. “How is it fair that you should end up with an unwanted child?”
“He’s not unwanted,” Yasmin scolded, lifting the child to rest against her chest.
“This is not your problem!”
“This is my obligation!” Yasmin deepened her voice in response to the rise in Rhanji’s. She held the infant tight against her body, cradling his head in her palm. “I promised to do my best, Dad. This is what that looks like right now.”
“These people are strangers, Yasmin.”
“No. Jude is my son. Your grandson.”
Rhanji shook his head. “He is only a stranger to me.”
And then he left the room.
In the months that followed, Rhanji’s heart had not softened. To him, the child seemed parasitic, growing larger and louder as circles darkened around Yasmin’s eyes, as though he siphoned youth as hungrily as he took formula from the bottle. When Rhanji looked at the baby all he saw was a wide-open mouth, insatiable hunger, and manipulating tears. Small limbs that kicked and struck, fists that fought for more comfort and attention than a young single woman could ever possibly give. His wails were those of an emergency siren, a warning of how badly things had gone wrong. In his presence, nothing was right.
I do not know this child. He is not mine.
And Yasmin, Rhanji’s own child, his sweetu, had not forgotten or forgiven his resentment. She had not spoken to him in kindness since the child was taken.
Cold claims the vehicle and Rhanji opens the car door, its hinges whining. The air is biting but the muffled noise of the suburban street is preferable to the silence of Rhanji and Yasmin’s house. Rhanji shuffles along the icy driveway to the garage for a shovel and ice chipper. Once his home had enjoyed unending conversation, music, and easy laughter. Father and daughter had tested one another’s English at breakfast, compared Canadian customs at lunch, shared fading remembrances of Sunita in the quiet evenings that followed soccer practices, drama club, piano lessons. When Yasmin reached adulthood, they had renovated the basement and she moved into the underground suite. They spent evenings together, taking in the daily news as they had in her childhood.
But these days all Rhanji hears of Yasmin’s voice are the awkward attempts at Hindi that drift up through the floorboards as she seeks solace in a grandmother a whole world away instead of her own father waiting only a floor above. Why didn’t Yasmin simply go to her, Rhanji wondered. He had asked her as much.
“The boy is gone. Go now and discover your roots. Have adventures and find love. I will buy you the ticket, and no one will judge, sweetu. You are so young. You have surely done more for the child than most would.”
But Yasmin only shook her head. “I’m not going to give up on my son.”
She left the room and Rhanji paced it as though the empty steps could cover the distance between his heart and hers. Perhaps Yasmin believes she knows a loss that he does not, he thought, but it is she who does not understand.
All grieve children. No one is immune.
Yearn, your hands yearn.
Now the doctor steadies himself over the ice of his driveway and grips the chipper’s handle. He lifts the pole above his shoulders and brings the blade down hard, thinking of the boy, not killed or beaten or abandoned like so many other children in this world but simply taken. Witnesses who had been in the parking lot that day described the woman who had slipped into Yasmin’s running truck as young, calm, careful. The act happened so quickly that she must have watched as the child and groceries were loaded into the vehicle, she must have waited for Yasmin to return the cart to the corral. Police didn’t say so outright, but after no immediate leads, Rhanji sensed that they had given up.
“Women just aren’t prone to violence,” an officer said only days after the disappearance stopped making headlines. There was every reason to consider that the child belonged to the woman who had taken him. She could be the birth mother, regretful of a decision made in great pain and fear. “Even women who chose their kid’s adoptive parents change their minds. It happens all the time.”
Please let that be the truth, Rhanji asks of the sky, of Nanni’s gods, of no one at all. Let the boy be with his and me with mine and all will be as it should be again.
The ice does not chip. Rhanji juts the blade and tries to recall the heft of the child in his arms. Had he ever held the boy? He thinks of Yasmin, in high school. She had been tasked with protecting a raw egg for two weeks, the project a metaphor for the necessary vigilance of parenthood. Careless, she had left it on the couch where Rhanji sat and crushed it. He imagines the boy like this now: alone, helpless, fragile. The child had not yet taken his first steps. Would a teenager know how to care for someone so young? How long will a baby call if no one picks him up? Rhanji doesn’t know. He never let Yasmin cry.
Over and over, the blade bounces, leaving only superficial lines. A Chevy roars into the cul-de-sac, spitting out clouds of black smoke before fishtailing back onto the street from which it came. Rhanji flinches and slips, falling hard on his back, winded on the ice.
Dusk has given way to night, but Rhanji imagines a frozen field at high sun, its purity marred only by the smouldering of a truck, plastic bags melted to singed upholstery. He imagines the eager yelps of thick-haired dogs and sees them, leashes taut.
A child’s car seat, overturned in the snow.
Skin as blue as a garment dyer’s vat.
“Dad?”
A door creaks and booted feet shuffle toward him as quickly as the ice underfoot will allow. Yasmin’s voice is a weak thread to a bitter reality. Rhanji imagines what it would be like to go this way, exposed. Hypothermia causes the release of an excess of endorphins, the body mercifully softening an otherwise painful death. It would be quick, euphoric even, in the end.
Above, Nanni’s gods spy through pinholes in the sky, laughing or crying or disinterested in the lives of those living on a frozen prairie so far from home.
***
The day is frigid and bright, the entrance to the hospital a hive of activity. Rhanji is greeted at the main doors by protestors arriving with food-bank donations and placards:
Jobs with Justice!
Tell Us Where It Hurts!
Food-service workers and housekeeping staff from other facilities have joined the laundry workers’ ranks, as well as work-to-rule nurses, out-of-work social workers, overworked teachers. Senior citizens and a variety of union reps add to their masses. In another life, these women could have been Nanni and her contemporaries, the female labour force used and abused, underpaid and unseen. Rhanji is surprised by the support from those who drive by, but mostly he just wants to go inside. Crystallized piss coats the wall by the entrance doors.
Rhanji stops at the triage desk to overlook the waiting room. Wilf sleeps with his legs spread over three plastic chairs, his red bunker bag occupying another two. In fits, the man startles and flinches before pulling his large jacket tighter around his shoulders, resuming loud snores. The noise of his harmonica would almost be preferable, Rhanji thinks. He checks his watch: 9:28 am. Wilf will miss his daily meeting.
The doctor considers waking the sleeping man, but it’s too late now. Besides, the waiting room is surprisingly quiet and sleep is one of the most important parts of recovery. Still, there is an uncomfortable worry in the forefront of Rhanji’s mind: Is this sleep natural, or has Wilf been drinking again?
Rhanji feels the disappointment well but dismisses the thought. Yes, it is possible, but with so much wrong in this world he needs something, someone, to hold out hope for. He retrieves a folded blanket from behind the triage desk and walks into the room, unfolding the material and draping it over the snoring man.
“Oh, doctor,” Wilf says, suddenly wide eyed before recognizing Rhanji. “I’m sorry, doctor. I’m just tired. I promise. Just very, very tired.” He closes his eyes again and immediately his breathing sinks into the sounds of sleep.
“It’s alright, Wilf,” Rhanji tells him. “Rest, my friend.”
“All electives and non-emergency care have been cancelled,” Carrie reports from behind the desk as Rhanji returns, her hand over the telephone receiver. Hold music hums from the earpiece, a top-forty song, Alanis Morissette. Rhanji raises his brows. So the minister of health has acknowledged frontline’s problems. Will he fix them?
He flips through patient folders, scanning the file notes Anderson made the night before.
“Did you see on the news about that girl our drunk driver hit?” Carrie asks.
Rhanji shakes his head and frowns as he reads. Appendicitis confirmed for the pediatric patient; an aggressive course of antibiotics is prescribed. In the next folder, injury to the lumbar vertebrae and fifth sacral vertebrae confirmed for the drunk driver, definitive evidence of cellular damage.
“Well,” Carrie continues, “you know she lost her baby, right? And only nineteen years old! Anyway, she was heading home from the Alberta Vocational College up in Slave Lake, studying to be a social worker. Just like your daughter. The news said she was studying for a job in child services because her dream was to help prevent kids in her own community from being, like, you know, automatically taken. And only a month from graduating . . . isn’t that sad?”
Rhanji ignores her. “Someone has urinated on the entrance walls.”
“Oh.” She blushes. “But janitorial’s on strike, remember?”
Rhanji looks at her until she blinks and smiles, finally taken off hold with whoever is on the end of her line. Are new staff members unversed in the rules of seniority? Then again, he remembers, Carrie is a volunteer.
Down the hall, the pediatric patient howls like a crisis siren. Rhanji checks the little girl’s saline and vitals: her temperature is high but her urine bag is clear. Mucus crusts Miranda’s mouth and nose and she screams when Rhanji tries to wipe it away. A nurse skirts around them, en route to the front desk.
“Has anyone heard from this child’s guardian?”
The nurse barely slows her steps. “Her caseworker was recently let go and her foster mom is adamant the child is going into kinship care and is no longer in her custody. But as far as I know, Kohkum is still only petitioning for it. So, beats me. Miranda won’t be assigned to another worker until Monday, at least, so I guess . . . she’s ours until then?”
Rhanji shakes his head. “Can we at least get her passages cleared?”
“Not if she won’t let us, we can’t.”
Rhanji attempts to comfort the girl with a friendly nod. The child hides under her sheets as rcmp officers exit 112. Inside, the spinal patient stares at the ceiling, the fragility of his paper gown in stark contrast to the large biceps underneath. The space is dark but for a lamp on the far side of the room.
Rhanji ignores the patient’s wince as the doctor lights the lamp above his bed. “How are we this morning?”
“Best kind,” the man whispers. “Yourself?”
“Relieved to discover a lack of communicable diseases in your system. Any complaints?”
The patient attempts to shield his face from the bulb but stops short, his right hand brought to the fault in his chest. “Jesus Mary,” he whimpers. “This. And some bad head.”
“Fractured sternum,” Rhanji explains. “And a hangover, I suspect. Probably competing with the concussion.”
The man points his jaw to the hall where Miranda has increased in pitch, screaming as if in competition with their conversation. “Or that.”
“Anything else?”
“The other fella, the Aussie? He says I won’t be wanting no surgery.”
The injury is severe, Rhanji explains, surgery is not viable. “With or without treatment, it is unlikely you will ever regain the use of your legs.”
Rhanji waits. He expects the man will weep, or beg, or pray. A better person might accept the paralysis as comeuppance for the woman he injured, for the death of her unborn child. But this man is silent until he screams at the small child in the hall.
“Shut up! Shut up yer prate!”
Rhanji replaces his pen cap. Silence.
“Well, they can’t bloody well put no cripple in no prison now, can they?” the man whispers. “They’ll have to fly me home.” He chokes at the end of his words and begins to sob.
Rhanji turns to leave. “All government buildings are wheelchair accessible.”
***
Rhanji returns home to find Yasmin looking like a corpse before the pyre, skin ashen in the television’s glow. “Alberta’s hospital crisis reaches critical condition with 2,700 workers on the picket line and another 3,000 poised to walk,” Peter Mansbridge reports on cbc. “Alarming new details emerge on André Dallaire’s attempt on the prime minister’s life. The Princess of Wales admits to adultery. A woman with the tattoo of a bird vanishes from the streets of Edmonton.”
“What kind of world is this?” Yasmin asks. A cardboard box is set on the floor beside her, overpacked with coffee mugs, books, a half-dead plant.
“What’s this?” Rhanji asks, nudging the container with his foot.
“Stuff from my office,” she says. She does not look up, the tone of her voice flat, deadpan. “I don’t work there anymore.”
Rhanji’s heart sinks. “Since?”
“A few days ago. Government cuts.”
Rhanji reaches for the remote and the screen flickers to dark. “Let’s talk.”
His daughter moves from couch to kitchen still clutching the blanket around her shoulders. Red and gold bangles sound upon her wrist, the treasured jewellery that once upon a time belonged to her mother.
“You can’t live like this anymore, Yasmin.”
She pulls open a drawer and lights a cigarette. “No?”
“I know it feels like everything has ended, but there will be other jobs, sweetu. And you can still be a mother, but do it right next time! Fall in love, get married, have a baby all your own.”
She takes a drag, eyes hard and dark.
“You don’t have to squeeze out a kid for him to be your own, Dad.”
The hard woman before Rhanji is a stranger in their home, completely unknown to him. But then her chin trembles under a stream of smoke as she exhales and, as if by magic, Yasmin is once again the baby girl he loves, the one for whom he can make everything right. He lifts his arms and steps forward, but she stops him, the cigarette end burning the space between.
“And he was your own, too.” Her voice breaks and she wipes a tear from her face with the heel of her hand balancing the cigarette. “Emphasis on ‘was,’ I guess.”
She does not look back when retreating downstairs.
He rests his head on the back of the couch and waits to hear the language of women he has lost. He lifts the remote. Men combing white fields replace the image of the Grey Nuns’ hospital and then: a smouldering truck, a police officer in front of a microphone.
The news is bad, and good, and meaningless.
The pregnant girl is dead.
Yasmin’s stolen truck is found.
The missing child is still gone. No leads.
On the coffee table, he is shocked to find a plane ticket in his daughter’s name.
His daughter has broken, Rhanji thinks. Yasmin has given up.
What kind of world is this? Yasmin had asked.
One Rhanji can barely stand anymore.
***
By morning, protestors have multiplied. Rhanji is in no mood to deal with the mounting drama. Local 18 machinists have joined the noisy ranks, as well as top union dogs. Children have been dragged from school and into their parents’ public tantrums. A woman flanked by two boys in ratty snowsuits smiles through her tears.
“They see us now,” she sobs to a news camera as Rhanji walks past. “They finally see us!”
Who sees you? Alberta doesn’t give a shit and neither do I, Rhanji thinks. Let the goddamn hospitals crumble for all he cares. Give the voters what they asked for. He just wants to do his goddamn job.
There’s another night’s worth of frozen piss sticking to the entrance wall. Behind the glass doors, Rhanji can see Wilf sitting on the floor, red bunker bag behind him like a pillow propped against the wall. Why has he set up camp in there?