“Vanya fell.”
“Fell from where? Did you go diving again?”
“No. We just fell.”
“Daniil, that’s enough. I’m talking to Vanya. Vanya? We need to know what happened so that we can get you the appropriate treatment.”
“I fell.”
“Stop with this stupid game! Where were you?”
“Outside.”
“Seriously, I’ve had enough of this. You’re going to obey me and answer my questions this time!”
“He was outside, and he fell.”
“Fuck, Daniil!”
“Gregory, please, I think they’re tired.”
I sat in the leather chair beside the bed and decided to spend the night there. Gregory had to go home alone with Daniil. It was already late, but Daniil refused to leave.
“He’ll be home tomorrow,” said Gregory, not knowing whether that was true.
Daniil hesitated. “I’ll stay and you go home,” he said, looking at me.
“That’s impossible, Daniil. They won’t let you be responsible for your brother.”
He finally, reluctantly followed his father.
I looked at Vanya, spent, sound asleep despite himself. His features had softened and looked suddenly fragile and childlike. I stopped myself from caressing his pale cheek, concerned I might wake him, or disgust him. I contented myself with bringing my nose close to his face so I could smell his breath, like I’d done when he was a baby.
We wake up nauseous with a pasty mouth. Our back doesn’t hurt, as we’re stuffed with medication. We want to touch the scar on our chin, but we can’t feel anything under the bandage protecting the sutures. We turn our attention to Emma, asleep with her mouth open in the chair beside us.
The IV coming out of our hand aches with a kind of sickening pain. We don’t dare move so as not to displace the needle, and we don’t know what to do now that we’re awake. What time is it? Sun is coming in through the window, but we wouldn’t know if it was eight, noon, or two in the afternoon.
Emma stirs suddenly.
“How do you feel?” she asks, instantly worried.
“I’m okay.”
She wants to touch our forehead, but we recoil.
“I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake,” she announces, leaving the room.
The doctor has a guttural laugh that we hear from way down the hospital. Emma is standing with her arms crossed when Gregory arrives.
“He’s a tough one. The hematoma is already healing and there are no complications. He can leave this afternoon, once he’s downed one of our delicious meals and used the bathroom.”
Turning toward us: “You understand what I explained to you? It’s important to make sure that everything is working inside, eh?”
“Yes.”
The doctor gives us a quick wave and walks out, his nose already in the next file.
“We’ll leave you for a moment, boys. We’re going to get a coffee,” announces Gregory. “Do you want anything?”
“No.”
Our grey night shirt smells like antiseptic. We have an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. Something about the atmosphere of this hospital makes us uncomfortable. The green walls are choking us. The odours are seeping in through all our pores. This hospital is haunting us. We need to leave. Right away.
As soon as we return to the house on Grace Street, we tell Gregory and Emma that we’re going out. Gregory hesitates, looking us up and down. We’re nearly as tall as him.
“I’ll give you thirty minutes, only because the doctor said that walking would help the bruising to heal, but Vanya can’t overdo it. No nonsense this time, okay?” he decides to add.
We head straight for the vacant lot. This time we survey the surroundings extra carefully to make sure the girl isn’t there. We hunch over as we walk toward the silo, to make ourselves look smaller so we can pass unobserved. Digging in the grass, we find the bag right away, and make sure all our goods are still in there. They are.
“Are you going to give back my bag and my money?”
We jump! Where had she come from? We were looking over our shoulder the whole time and didn’t see her coming.
Mathilde stands next to us, her arms resting beside her thin body, her eyes planted on us. She has long eyelashes and a delicate mouth, but it’s hard to see a girl in the hardened creature with the shaved hair.
“We don’t have it.” We’re lying. To change the subject, we add, “What’s all this for?”
Mathilde sits in the grass not far from us and scans the horizon. She explains that she spent a lot of time playing in the empty field when she was young and it became a kind of refuge. She’s been fighting with her parents. She’s planning to run away and stay here while she thinks of a solution.
“I know how to get in the door,” she says, pointing her chin toward the sky.
A hollow appears between her collarbones, and her esophagus protrudes. It’s this thinness that makes her look masculine.
“Can you show us how to climb up there?”
Mathilde smiles.
“Maybe.”
She shoots us a dirty look.
“If you give me my money back… Plus forty dollars.”
With this, she gets up, grabs her bag, and disappears into the woods surrounding the lot. We watch her as she goes. When she walks, the top of her body seems immobile under her oversized clothes.
“They don’t respect you, Emma.”
August was well underway, and the boys hadn’t read a single one of the books I’d given to them. I insisted that the accident had upset our lessons, but Gregory didn’t accept the excuse. He was just passing through Toronto and felt that things weren’t going well in his absence. He worried now that I didn’t have the authority to make sure the boys passed English.
I had to be tough. But making those two big young men obey me was not so easy. I was intimidated by their height, but nonetheless I couldn’t let them dominate me. I was still their mother, after all.
I would mend our relationship by force. I ordered them to help me with the gardening chores—mowing the lawn, trimming
