Excerpt

The pool was a choppy sea of bouncing children. I gripped the rough cement and edged closer to my sister who was looking in my direction from the deep end. She didn’t wave back. Water covered my shoulders, my neck and then my chin. Standing on tiptoe, I reached for the floating line of red and blue flags. A tidal wave from a human cannon ball ripped my other hand from the edge and my toes could no longer touch bottom. I flapped my arms and screamed, but the cry was drowned out by squealing children. My sister’s face flashed before me. She had moved closer to the red and blue floating flags and was treading water effortlessly, the usual blank expression on her face. Didn’t she see that I was in trouble? My heart sank with the possibility that she mistook my wild thrashing for swimming. I swallowed more water and slipped below the surface.

Someone grabbed my armpits, pulled me back to the shallow end and nudged me up the steps. Cold, damp fingers steered my wobbly body towards a grassy area next to the pool, where I collapsed face down on a towel. My ears were buzzing; I couldn’t understand what the person leaning over me was saying. I pushed up to my knees and swayed for a second or two, then folded forward into a crouch, resting my forehead on the towel that reeked of Coppertone lotion, a fake flowery smell I’d never cared for. Without warning, my stomach started to pump. I raised my head seconds before the resort’s all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast gushed out of my mouth. A second eruption followed, then another. Emptied, I rolled onto the grass, away from the stinky mess. My sister was standing over me, motionless and silent, her face a dark outline against the blue sky.

I assumed a cross-legged position, wiped the spit off my chin and adjusted the bathing suit strap that had slipped down my right arm. She sat beside me, legs bent to one side in her girlish style, and stared at the pool full of bouncing children, a slight frown on her face, perhaps because of her vomit-soaked towel.

I jabbed her with my elbow. “How come you didn’t help me sooner?”

“I saved you, didn’t I?” Her voice was low, monotone.

I poked her again, harder.

“You took your time. Mom and Dad told you to watch over me.”

She rubbed her side, the one that I had poked.

“Mom and Dad told you to stay in the shallow end,” she retorted.

I was too weak to argue. My throat was burning from puke and pool water. The sun was beaming, but I was sitting next to a block of ice. I hugged my shoulders and squeezed myself into a ball. In the end, neither one of us would tell our parents about the near drowning, a rare act of complicity.

***

In July 2019, on a similar sticky summer afternoon, I sat in a hard vinyl chair next to my sister in Dr. Byrne’s waiting room at the External Clinic for Psychotic Disorders, a white-walled space with a forty-inch television and a window looking onto the sprawling grounds of Montreal’s Douglas Hospital. Nancy had first met Dr. Byrne in the 1980s, during her extended stay on Perry 2C, a locked ward that has since been shut down. A budding psychiatric doctor at the time, he was now in his early sixties like us.

The man across from us in the clinic was slumped over in his chair, possibly asleep. His clothes reeked of nicotine. Thankfully, Nancy had quit smoking, a rare feat for someone with a schizoaffective disorder. A testament to her determination.

“Do I know you?” Nancy asked the slumped-over man.

A long time ago, my sister was reserved. Now she spoke to everyone. The man lifted his head in slow motion. His mouth was open, and a bit of drool had escaped onto his unshaven chin. He was younger than I had expected, a baby face with cloudy blue eyes. He stared at me as if I’d asked my sister’s question. I scrolled through my phone, in no mood to converse with strangers, mentally ill or otherwise. An old email from a friend caught my attention, an invitation that had never been answered. I started to type. Sorry for not answering sooner . . . then stopped, distracted by Nancy’s fingers tapping against the arm of the chair. Her uncontrolled shaking was from years of taking lithium, a distressing side effect of a drug meant to stabilize mood.

“That gadget’s more important than me,” she growled loud enough for the receptionist behind the glass window to hear.

I saved the email along with the other unfinished emails and turned to her.

“I’m trying to catch up with my life and work. Not easy to do with all the phone calls and problems you want me to fix.”

“What problems?”

“How about the ones from yesterday? The window latch, the television. There was a third one . . . I can’t remember what it was now.”

“Darling, if you don’t remember, then you didn’t take care of it.”

I dropped the phone into my bag.

“Let’s not argue, okay? I’m still recovering from your blast on the sidewalk. Go home to your sucker husband. Real nice, Nance.”

“You hung up on me last night.”

“Do you remember why?” I asked.

“You had better things to do than talk with your sick sister.”

“I hung up because you were disrespectful.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re the one who was disrespectful.”

The man across from us was no longer slumped over. We had his full attention, the sister sideshow being more interesting than the swirling lines on the clinic’s linoleum floor.

“Keep your voice down,” I whispered.

Nancy stood with great effort, weighed down by medication and bitterness. She accidently knocked over one of her dollar store shopping bags. A spiral notebook slid onto the linoleum.

“Did you write another poem?” I asked.

Nancy often picked up the pen following our arguments, her way of having the last word. Her poems were riddled with clever rhymes and innuendos only a sister would understand. Unfortunately, the prose was transient. She’d rip out the page and throw it away, as she did many things. Understandable, her brain was cluttered enough.

The notebook was pressed against her chest. She was glaring at me.

“These are my notes for Dr. Byrne. Private notes.”

I had no interest in her written complaints that she would read and rip out, then crumple in a fist and cast into Dr. Byrne’s garbage can with surprising aim. I had my own grievances. My presence at the clinic usually signaled a problem, and today was no exception. But before speaking up, I would have to wait for her to finish talking. After all, she was the patient, not me.