Olympia (10 page)

At seven that morning Mike passed me a granola bar and some juice. He joined me for breakfast and looked out over the park. “This is incredible,” he said. “The whole valley's under. I must have dozed. You okay?”

I released the juice bottle in the water and watched it float out of the pool, over the deck and through the broken section of fence. It rode the current like a toy boat and met up with more junk: bundles of newspaper, an old chair, plastic bags, branches, and a dead seagull. I saw Ruby's clock caught against a tree a hundred yards downstream, just before the bend in the river. It was too far away to make out what time it was set at.

“Without the change house, I'd be gone.”

“I'm sorry for dozing,” he said, shaking his head.

“Just let me finish what I started, that's all.”

Junk drifted past on the current just outside what was left of the fence. Mike waded over the deck and woke up the girls. They walked out in water up to their knees, speechless, rubbing their eyes. They climbed onto the picnic table. After breakfast Ruby went back into the change room, came out again in her bathing suit, and jumped in with me.

“How are you doing?” she said, swimming up close.

I told her I was okay. She swam to the side and paddled back holding some trail mix above the water.

“Think it'll count after this?” I said. “The record, I mean.”

“Of course.”

“No one other than us is here.” Our feet and hands were spreading in calm water-pushing circles below us. “There's no neutral bodies.”

“They'll believe us. Four witnesses.”

“But we're a bunch of kids,” I said. There was a pause.

She was considering that when Mike yelled some obscenity about his guitar floating away.

“The clock, too,” Susan said, pointing to where I'd seen it wedged up against the oak. I let another bottle go and Ruby and I watched it spin in the current and leave through the hole in the fence. I pushed back against the current again, up closer to the change house. Ruby came up behind me. “Has it been pulling you like this all night?”

“It's getting stronger,” I said. I was breathing short breaths. “Time check.”

“Seven-thirty-five,” Susan called out. “That's about six more hours to tie. Anything after that's gravy.”

As the dimmed sun rose I saw the colour of the pool had changed. The water was brown now, not the perfect chlorinated blue of yesterday. I could still see the bottom, but it was murky. Colder, too.

“Are you up to it?” Ruby said. We were drifting faster now. I could feel the water pulling us. On the deck, the water was almost as high as the picnic-table seats. Mike brought out three chairs from the men's change room and stacked them against the eaves-trough spout that ran up the side of the building. First he climbed up onto the roof. Then he lay on his stomach and reached his arm down and helped Susan up, then Alicia.

“Don't think we're abandoning you,” he called down.

“Lifeguards have to have a superior vantage point.”

“Ruby, you should get up there, too,” I said.

But she just lifted her arms above her head and went under. For the first time I followed her all the way down, still careful not to touch bottom. I didn't want to disqualify myself. I hovered down there, inches from two bent beer caps and a knot of drowned worms, cupping upwards to keep myself under. Ruby arched and tilted back her head and rolled upside down. She did a one-arm handstand. I clapped in slow underwater motions, my cheeks puffed. Then I felt myself bump against the bottom, pushed and dragged. There was a sudden shift. Ruby lost her balance and went over. We looked at each other as we kicked for the surface but the pool had suddenly deepened. The distance to air had lengthened in an instant. We were deeper than we'd been hardly seconds before, as if a great sluice had been opened at the top of the valley. We grabbed each other's hands and fought upwards, spinning and twisting. I felt my back scrape against cement and we were carried out over the broken fence, out beyond the perimeter of the pool, hanging together as we were pulled into the broad sweep of the river until we came up gasping and clutching. “Keep holding,” I said. My mouth was grainy with river water. In a moment the current had driven us out to the middle of the flooded park. I felt for the bottom but there was nothing. Houses sat up on higher land, unaffected by the flood. There wasn't anything we could swim for, just a Javex bottle and small planks of wood and bundles of garbage.

When we turned the bend in the river we saw the time clock wedged against a tall oak. The construction-paper numbers were washed away now. The red arrow indicated nothing, like a finger pointing in the dark. When we reached the oak we joined hands and pulled ourselves up onto the clock. It would offer some support, I thought. But once we'd partly dragged ourselves up onto the plywood, the clock came free from the oak and we began moving with the river again, swirling in small, gentle circles. Up on the embankment, houses drifted past like remote, unreachable islands. After the bend where Rebecca Street ran parallel to the river, the water grew calmer still, the floodplain broadened. Street signs looked down through the maples into the valley. At this rate we'd be at the harbour in a few minutes. I knew that we weren't going to drown. But I was worried about Ruby. I imagined my mother when she found out about this, fearful that this flood would send her daughter back to another series of spinal taps and intensive chemo.

On a Tuesday morning we buried my grandfather in a Kingston cemetery. For a time, his health had seemed to improve. But the sudden second build-up of fluids in his lungs came and he died before anyone could help him. Now, except for us, my father was alone. All his people were gone.

We buried him beside my grandmother. My aunt was there that day, up from California, awkward on her crutches as she stood above the grave. The pastor spoke and then we each followed behind my father and dipped a silver spoon into a small bucket and sprinkled my grandfather's coffin with earth. After my turn I stood beside my father.

Marian took Ruby by the arm and pulled a strand of hair away from her face. My mother took Ruby by the shoulder, steadying her. She let the earth slip and fall into the hole. I lowered my head. The hair on the back of my neck pricked up as the falling earth spilled over the belly of the coffin like a slowly filling hourglass. I heard the clicking of my aunt's leg braces as she turned from the hole and started across the lawn.

Ruby returned to school that fall, and in October she was back at the gym. I was working at my father's shop now, saving money for the following year, when I would be leaving for Chicago. It was a quiet winter after my grandfather's passing. But by December Ruby was back on a modest training program. She was talking about Moscow again. Our family began to breathe freely. There was no reason she couldn't go. She had more than two years before they'd be choosing the next Olympic team. Boris talked to my parents about it, and to the doctors at Sick Kids. He wanted to know how hard he could push her. My mother bit her lip and frowned; the doctors assured her that it was best for a recovering patient to get back into the routine of his or her normal life. Physical exercise would just help the process along. Her red blood cell count was normal; there was little or no fear of anaemic reactions.

There were small gym meets that winter. Ruby watched from the bleachers. She still wasn't a hundred per cent. Her friends spun through the air over her head, twisting. She wasn't jealous. It made her work harder. Before she could take to the uneven bars, she remapped her routines over and over in her mind, flew higher than she'd ever flown before. “I'm refuelling,” she'd say. Clouds raced through her head.

Her spirit soared in anticipation of her body. In June she took to the air again after almost two years of treatment and recovery. My parents and I sat at the picnic table before supper and watched her perform a tentative flip or a handstand, then lower herself into the splits, beaming up at us as if she was performing these moves for the very first time.

“Careful,” my mother would say, more out of habit than fear.

“Look, Boobs,” I said when she finally sat down at the picnic table. “Do either of us have any excuse now?”

“
Nyet,
”
she said, leaning into my father's chest. We were back on track after some minor evolutionary setbacks. Our mother began making clothes again after a year and a half of blankets. There hadn't been any problems with my father's sailboats since the disappearance off St. Lucia more than two years before. Our summer hummed with the sound of a Laser cutting through perfect wind and water, the jib finely tuned to the world.

That summer she competed for the first time in two and a half years. In the Ontario championships, Ruby took gold in floor and vault and pulled in the bronze for total points. We were all there to watch. Even my mother started thinking about a trip to Moscow. The doctors at Sick Kids predicted a complete remission. I'd be leaving for the University of Chicago in a month.

In July, a week after the meet, Ruby developed a sore throat. For two days we watched the cough. They took her to Toronto for her weekly tests. I saw them off that morning, then got into my bathing suit and dove into the pool. After a hundred laps I stopped in the middle of the deep end, filled my lungs and relaxed my arms. I looked down through the water. I thought about what it would be like to be dead, maybe something like this, floating just above and below the surface of things. Being in more than one place at a time. I watched my feet hanging below me, motionless as waterlogged sticks, as if they were no longer a part of me. I hadn't broken the record, but I'd raised over three thousand dollars. I wiggled a toe and saw it move. The thinking man's game, I thought. Floating between life and death.

Two hours later I heard the car pull into the driveway. I was warming down now doing slow lengths of the pool. Ruby came around back and kicked off her sneakers and sat on the grass. She was singing a Bee Gees song. Then she went upstairs to get into her bathing suit.

My mother and father came out into the backyard and sat down on the deck. My father leaned over and touched the water with his finger. “Warm,” he said, considering something. “Peter. She's out of remission.”

“But they said they got all the blasts.”

“There's been a relapse. They said it takes only a few leukemic cells to take over the whole body again. Her red cell count's taken a nosedive. She's having an anaemic reaction. That explains the cough. Dr. Lee says there's an operation she has to have if they can get her into remission again. It's a transplant. It's the last option. He needs to take something out of your hip and give it to Ruby.”

I rested my chin in my hands on the wooden deck, the noon sun warming my shoulders. I'd read a dozen books on leukemia by now. I knew what was going to be asked of me. I kicked my feet behind me and raised my body parallel to the surface.

“That's where the blood's made,” my mother said. “It's called bone marrow.” She touched my arm. “They kill all of the bone marrow cells in Ruby, and give her some of your healthy cells. Not just the leukemic ones. They destroy everything. It's best if it's from a brother or a sister. That's the best chance she's got. Then she starts producing her own. But they have to test your blood to see if you're compatible. If you are, you could do it.”

The screen door slid open then and Ruby walked onto the patio in her bathing suit. She didn't look sick to me. She looked tanned and healthy. She still didn't know about the relapse. I climbed out of the pool.

“Ruby, it's back,” my mother said when she came up to the three of us. She understood, just from that, and sat down at the edge of the pool, her feet hanging motionless in the water, and cried.

The next morning she was back at the hospital and on chemo again, hooked up to the IV, her head sideways on the pillow, turned towards the sky on the other side of the window. There was another spinal tap that night. When they pulled out the big butterfly needle, a nurse called me into the next room for my blood sample.

Within a week they determined we had nearly identical HLA antigens. There was a match.

Then, the radiotherapy. We watched her on the video monitor, her head strapped down to the flat surface to prevent any movement. Beside us in the booth, the technician gave Ruby some last-minute instructions over the microphone. “Remember, honey. Absolutely still, okay?” The hum of heavy, slow-moving machines. On the lead-covered door a sign read CAUTION—HIGH RADIATION AREA. The woman looked at me and mouthed,
All right.

I brought my face close to the microphone and began to read.

“‘One day in 1802, a college student named Pliny Moody, while plowing his father's field in South Hadley, Massachusetts, turned up a sandstone slab bearing the imprint of a large three-toed foot. It looked like the footprint of a giant turkey or raven.'” I looked up at the screen and said, “You copy? Over.” I waited.

Over the speaker we heard her thin, metallic voice. “I copy.”

“‘Those who saw this wonder decided, in a moment of pious fancy, that the print must have been made by the raven that Noah had released from the arc to search for dry land.'”

“Only a few minutes, honey,” my father said, his face pressed against mine. They'd said there was no pain involved. She was laced to the earth like a helpless Gulliver. When the hum of the machines died, the technician went into the chamber and turned Ruby over. She came back out and started the radiation again.

“‘Other tracks of Noah's raven were found over the years, always in the Triassic sandstone that would become the source of the “brownstone” favoured in the construction of Manhattan townhouses.'”

“Would you like to see that someday, Ruby?” my mother asked into the microphone. “Go to America to see dinosaur fossils in the houses there?”