Suitable Precautions (18 page)

Mr. Cowley took a step into the room and when he saw Shel in a ball and the stains on the carpet, he rubbed at one eye and the white of it went bloodshot.

“Shel?”

Shel's head lolled back and his eyes rolled around, seeing everything and nothing.

“You clean your mess,” Mr. Cowley said. “Then you get yourself gone.”

Shel burped. Paul Cowley rubbed at his eye again and made to leave, half turning to look at Luke.

“Your parents are staying for a bit. Your dad said you can walk home if you want.”

Luke watched him leave the room before he found his coat and zipped it up, tying his scarf tight as Shel moaned and covered his eyes with his arm. Luke promised himself he wasn't going to be afraid. He was just going to have to be careful. It wasn't that far home.

M
Y MOTHER HAD NO IMAGINATION. She said her condition was an unusual form of brain damage caused by an accident that happened at her parents' annual First Day of Spring Party in March, 1956.

Though my mother's parents had been born in Toronto, as had their parents before them, both my grandmother and grandfather claimed to have a memory of the seasons of their homeland, the location of which they disputed. My grandfather was adamant that the family came from Koryakia, while my grandmother swore they were actually from Magadan. The possibility that my grandmother and grandfather might come from different places was never raised. For my grandparents, marriage fused histories in the same way it joined destinies.

“Your grandfather wouldn't know his homeland if it sat down and had a drink with him,” my grandmother said in Russian, leading me around by the wrist while we shopped for
kovbasa
at Mike's Meats. Likewise, my grandfather, rolling
cigarettes at the kitchen table, said my grandmother couldn't be trusted on this matter. “Sure,” he said in English. “That woman couldn't find Russia on a map of Russia.” To my knowledge, neither of them ever went any farther east than Montreal, and only then to a lung specialist who told my grandfather that there was nothing to be done about his dying. When it came to their origins, the one thing my grandparents could agree on was the issue of weather. The weather there, in Koryakia or Magadan, was tediously the same, different across the year only in the sense that one month might be slightly less cold than the month before, or the sun a little longer in the sky. The weather in Canada, and Toronto in particular, was a wondrous variety—vibrant budding, heat so flat it made you sleepy, storms that turned sky the black of rotten fruit. Though they were not literary or philosophical people, my grandparents understood Toronto weather as a metaphor for life. It was the inevitability of change they enjoyed. It gave them comfort, I think. They were not religious but they believed in celebrating their blessings, and this meant that every equinox and solstice, or the closest Sunday after, they packed up the family and headed to Grenadier Pond for a picnic.

At the winter parties my mother and her siblings, two sickly twin sisters and one fat little brother, skated until their cheeks burned, and my grandmother made them hot chocolate over a small fire, counting out marshmallows according to their ages, one for each year. In the summer there was lemonade, lawn chairs, the roasting of hot dogs that blistered and split, falling into the coals. Even in the fall the children had fun, collecting bouquets of brightly coloured leaves that they presented to their mother, shyly, as though she were a visiting dignitary or magistrate. Their father smoked
cigarettes, offering his wife a drag now and again. The spring parties, however, were always miserable.

Usually there was still snow on the ground, and my grandmother's new spring hat, something with a gauzy half veil and artificial flowers, seemed sad against the slush of the parking lot, garish against the white of the shoreline as she marched back and forth, trying to keep warm. While she was out of earshot, my mother's sisters, Eva and Marlene, huddled together and bugged Larry, the spoiled brat, to make a fuss about leaving. But my grandmother insisted that they weren't leaving until they enjoyed their spring picnic, and they should be happy that they were born in the wonderful weather of Toronto and not back in Magadan where it was a thousand times colder and the sun never shone and things were still hard, unbearably hard, because of the war.

“Koryakia,” my grandfather said.

On the day of her accident, my mother helped my grandmother spread out rubber tarps and cover them with knit afghans. They smoothed out the linen placemats, arranging them in a circle. They folded the cloth napkins into clams. My grandmother unleashed steam from each insulated foil package. She dished out cabbage rolls and
kovbasa
, potatoes and squash. “Hurry,” she said to my grandfather as he passed her the plates. “You like cold sausage?” There was chicken soup from a thermos, chocolate pudding for dessert. There was even a cupcake for Larry, who was picky and despised pudding. My grandmother cajoled everyone into eating, and for a while it seemed as though the picnic might be the only successful First Day of Spring Party in the history of the Vosmak family.

My mother asked to go play. “Yes, of course, be careful,” my grandmother said. My grandparents sipped their coffees,
my grandfather convincing my grandmother to let him splash a little brandy into her cup. It was not often that they had this kind of tranquility, and certainly a rarity to have it at a First Day of Spring Party. My grandmother worked at Campbell's during tomato season, Christie's the rest of the year. My grandfather worked at Continental Can, the highest-paying factory in North America at the time. Their children all had new shoes, but my grandfather and grandmother were thin and tired. They understood the keen pleasure of a cup of coffee at a picnic, and they were hungry for that pleasure when it presented itself. They sat there thinking about what a beautiful spring day it was, despite the cold. They did not pay much attention to their second youngest, who, at six years old, was very well-behaved. There was simply no reason for them to watch her as she walked up the hill to play with her doll. I don't think you can blame them.

My mother told me what she remembered, which was not much. She said the picnic tables were leaned up against the various trees and covered in ice and snow. She had crawled between one table and a tree trunk, feeling safe and snug and somewhat proud of herself for finding this lookout. Her mother was resting on her elbow and her legs were both out to one side, like she was on a beach. Her father was teaching Larry how to strike a match. Her sisters, giggling for once, were making sodden snow angels.

“It was,” she said, “a very happy moment.”

My grandmother told me about the noise, which she said was like a tree screaming. It was a horrible shriek of wood on wood, and it made her remember a story from her childhood that she had not thought about in years, a story about hell and the way the devils there cheered when a new soul came to them. Watching that picnic tabletop score the tree
trunk as it slid down to her daughter was the worst moment of my grandmother's life. Worse, she said, than seeing the table teeter like a perverse playground on top of my mother, her one wildly shaking boot the only part of her body not smothered and smashed.

“It was the slide,” my grandmother said in Russian, ashamed. “When there was still time for it to be my fault.”

My grandfather ran towards the sound before he even turned around. He tripped over a thermos and the spilled coffee burned Eva's hand, though it was Marlene who screamed. My grandmother followed him. They fell over and over again as their feet sank through the crystal-fine crust of the melting snow on the hill. My grandmother crushed the flower on her new hat, trying to keep it on her head.

My grandfather reached my mother first. He bent down low and heaved his body under the edge of the tabletop that jutted up slightly like an expectant diving board. Thick ice coated the splintery wood, encasing the table legs, black against the bright sky, in an uneven layer of solid dead weight. The table was like a massive overturned beetle. The skin around my grandfather's eyes went white as he strained. My grandmother threw herself beside him and the two of them pushed, shifting the table several inches. It slid backwards in the snow and caught a corner of my mother's red jacket, tearing the sleeve away from the shoulder. They pushed again until they heard the cracking of bones. The table dipped to one side as my grandmother fell back, crying and slapping at my grandfather as he kept working. “Stop it, stop it,” she screamed. “You're killing her.” My grandfather called to Eva and Marlene. “Your sister,” he yelled as they stumbled up the hill. The four of them tried to lift the table, but the two girls were small for their age and Eva's hand was
badly burned. My grandfather screamed as he let the table down gently. Eva and Marlene sat in the snow and cried as they watched him run to the road, his arms wheeling, looking like a drowning man.

Larry was already there, waving his stubby arms at a car as it drove by. The car stopped and Larry ran to the driver's window, my grandfather far behind. Larry, who was not even five years old and too fat for any of his cousins' clothes.

It took a long time for the ambulance to get to the pond. My grandmother waited with her hand on my mother's foot. She tried to keep it still.

The courts concluded that the melting of the snow, combined with my mother's clambering, dislodged the picnic table. It was essentially an accident. But regardless of these natural, unavoidable, and admittedly contributive facts, the judge still found the City of Toronto negligent and ordered it to pay my parents damages, which went towards my mother's care. She suffered a compressed spine, a fractured skull, a concussion, a broken wrist, a dislocated shoulder, deep lacerations to her face that would leave scars, and a punctured lung. Several of her ribs had splintered like chicken bones. Part of her liver had to be removed. The picnic tables should have been chained up, the judge said. “There is no excuse for there not to be chains, considering the tables each weigh several hundred pounds,” he went on, “and while it is a tragedy that your daughter suffered, it is a miracle that no other persons, child or adult, have yet found themselves at the mercy of one of these picnic tables.” My grandmother cried into a freshly ironed handkerchief. Today if you go to a Toronto city park in winter, you will find that any picnic table leaned up against a tree is chained. The bylaw is the legacy of my mother's injuries, which left her
in hospital for the better part of a year, the first half of it in a coma.

She awoke after months of artificial light and intravenous food, but my grandparents' joy was tempered by the discovery that their little girl had become a baby again. My mother had to relearn how to talk. Then walk. Then feed herself. Each new milestone was celebrated with a cake and pictures. “Look,” my grandmother said to the nurses, “look at how well our little Anna is doing,” and she got out the album to point out pictures of my mother mashing oatmeal into her mouth.

Over time it became clear that the treatments my mother received were extraordinary—there is a significant article about my mother's recovery in
The New England Journal of Medicine
—but they were also expensive. Even with the settlement, my grandparents sold their house and moved into an apartment that forced Eva and Marlene to share a room with Larry, who was instructed to wait in the hallway when his sisters were changing clothes. My mother came home just after her seventh birthday. She had her own room. Nobody complained.

My mother had been a solitary child before the accident. She was content to play with her doll or make up stories for herself while her sisters fought over hairpins and Larry tried to wheedle extra sweets out of my grandmother. As a result of her ability to entertain herself, my mother had been my grandfather's favourite child. “Look at Anna,” he said, ruffling her hair as she poured pretend tea for her doll, Marguerite. “See what a good girl she is, what a quiet girl she is.” It was as though good and quiet were two halves of some unnamed, indivisible quality that children worthy of love possessed. As I said, he worked very hard.

The accident did not change my mother's nature; she remained a good, quiet girl, but she was unable to occupy herself with the imaginative play that had come so easily to her before. If my grandmother passed her Marguerite, for example, my mother examined the doll as though it were a strange artifact from another culture, the significance of which she couldn't quite determine. She gently passed Marguerite back to my grandmother, respectful of that which she did not comprehend. If my grandfather began a story while he rolled his cigarettes, perhaps something about the family history in Koryakia, and he asked her, “And then, little Anna, what do you think happened to your great-great-grandfather?” Anna, instead of launching into an elaborate story of her own as she had once been fond of doing, simply shrugged her shoulders and said she didn't know. My grandmother and grandfather exchanged looks, but they were just glad to have their Anna back, and this version that walked about blankly, standing confusedly in front of the pictures on the walls, would do.

My mother's inability to think abstractly became much more obvious in school. Her teacher was a slim British woman named Miss White. She was sensitive to my mother's healing process, and she often encouraged her with her schoolwork. “Pull up your socks, Anna,” she said to my mother, who wanted to give up on a frustrating math problem. My mother misunderstood. She put down her pencil, stood up from her desk, and pulled up her knee socks. If one of her classmates remarked that it was “raining cats and dogs,” my mother rushed to the window in hysterics. Symbols were cryptic for her. My grandmother packed napkin notes in her children's lunches that said, I
♥
you, and I don't think it's hyperbole to say that it broke her heart when my
mother asked her to explain it. Even the explanation proved futile. Love is in the abstract, it seems, not the details.