jiggling itself loose from these wretched bones. My inner beauty could shine and soar! But no, my body is my test in life.
William hustled the boys out after I finished the tale of the body. For once in their lives their Aunt Liz had, for a moment or two, fascinated them. I suspect that for a time Hunter and Chase thought I was a sorceress, too, albeit a boring sorceress with no food in her fridge.
My relief that they’d gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal: it was one of those few moments that being by myself didn’t mean I had to feel lonely. When I think about it, I’ve never actually told another person I’m lonely. Whom would I tell—Donna? Everyone in the coffee room? Leslie and William, who feel duty bound to keep checking in on their spinster sister? I maintain a good front. I imagine the people in my life driving in their cars discussing me …
Is Liz lonely?
I don’t think so.
I think she’s like one of nature’s castoffs.
She genuinely enjoys not being around people.
She’s very brave in her own way.
Books always tell me to find “solitude,” but I’ve Googled their authors, and they all have spouses and kids and grandkids, as well as fraternity and sorority memberships. The universally patronizing message of the authors is, “Okay, I got lucky and found someone to be with, but if I’d hung in there just a wee bit longer, I’d have achieved the blissful solitude you find me writing about in this book.” I can just imagine the faces of these writers, sitting at their desks as they write their sage platitudes, their faces stoic and wise: “Why be lonely when you can enjoy solitude?”
Gee, in a lifetime of singleness I’ve never once toyed with the notion of locating solitude for myself.
I’ve checked out all the books on the subject, books ranging from the trailer park to the ivory tower: Finding Your Achey-Breaky Soulmate to Deconstructing the Inner Dialogue—Methodologies of Navigating the Postmodern Self. The writers of these books that tout loneliness cures universally trot out a dusty list of authors through history who have dared to discuss loneliness as a topic, but they could never just say loneliness. It has to be a tree or butterfly or pond—dead nineteenth-century gay guys who wrote about trees and lakes and who probably had huge secret worlds that they never wrote about. Or …
It occurs to me that I sound like a bitter old bag.
But when your central nervous system is constantly firing away like a diesel generator, relentlessly overpowering subtle or fine emotions, how are you supposed to derive solace from stories of oneness with nature written by those old-fashioned writers, about hiking and breezes in the trees? If they were alive today, they’d all be in leather bars.
A day passed. I was still drugged, but it wasn’t fun or verklemptish any more. By Friday morning my face had shrunk back to its old shape. I’d run out of videos, and I was tempted to phone Liam and ask to come back to work for the day. But then, around seven in the morning, the phone rang. It was the RCMP, asking if I could come to Lions Gate Hospital.
“Excuse me?”
“There’s been an incident, Ms. Dunn.”
“An incident? What? Who?”
“Do you know a Jeremy Buck, Ms. Dunn?”
“Jeremy Buck?” It’s not like my memory bank of contacts is very big, so I was quick to say no. “What does this have to do with me?”
“If you could just come to the hospital, Ms. Dunn. We had a young man brought in here last night, an overdose case with some bruising and a few cuts.”
“What?”
“He had no ID on him, but he had a MedicAlert bracelet around his wrist saying that, should anything happen to him, you were the person to be notified. It had your phone number on it. Which is how we came to contact you.”
In one searing moment it dawned on me who Jeremy was. This was the phone call I’d never allowed myself to imagine.
“Ms. Dunn?”
“Sorry …”
“Ms. Dunn, can you—”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
The officer told me the hospital room and wing numbers.
I’d always wondered if this day would ever come. It felt like the fulfillment of a prophecy. My mind was blank while I went through the motions—dressing, going to the car, driving along Marine, Fifteenth, St. George’s, then entering the parking lot, walking in through the automated hospital doors—the elevator, the smell of disinfectant, the harried staff.
When I asked the reception desk nurse about which hospital wing was Jeremy’s, she signalled an RCMP constable toward us. He told me his name was Ray Chung, a nice man who shook my hand and asked me to follow him. And so I did, down a yellow-lit hall and around a corner, mostly staring at his feet marching ahead of me on the polished aggregate flooring. We entered a darkened room, passing through a veil of thin and overly washed blue curtain.
A doctor stood in front of some Venetian louvre blinds. She was clearly impatient, and her head was haloed by the dozens of hair wisps that had escaped hours ago from her bun. “I’m Valerie, Dr. Tyson. I’m the duty doctor. This guy here related to you?”
Constable Chung nodded toward the man on the bed—a handsome guy, early twenties, large, fair skin, with dark, slightly curly hair and just enough of my family’s head shape to quash any doubts about who he was. This was him. This is who he turned out to be.
I walked over and touched his hand. This woke him up, and he started: “It’s you.”
“Yes, it’s me.”
He sat up and looked around the room. “Wait—something kind of weird happened here.”
“What?”
“I think I was dead.”
What was he talking about? “As far as I could tell, you were only asleep.”
“No. I was dead. I know I was.”
I looked at Dr. Tyson, who said, “Technically, Jeremy, you were dead, for maybe a minute or so when you first came in this morning.” She looked at me. “Around five.”
I was surprised. “He was dead?”
“We used the paddles on him.” She made a hand gesture like a defibrillator.
I looked back at Jeremy, who seemed disturbed. “I didn’t see the light—you know—that light you’re supposed to see when you die. I just saw a blob of darkness, and I was being pulled into it.”
None of us in the room knew what to say to this, so Dr. Tyson used medical science to stabilize the mood, to make it clinical. “We found traces of cocaine and Rohypnol in your system. That might account for anything unusual you may have seen.”
Jeremy
