it’s got to be done, if I’m gonna take over.’
‘You ready for a life at sea?’
‘For two fisheries a year, anyway.’
‘I can think of worse ways to earn a living.’
I said it the way Albert might have, which got her laughing. When we finished with the unloading we stood leaning against the truck, jawing for a time. She asked – as casually as possible – about the cabin. I looked down at a coil of rope in the skip, really considering it. I mentioned my brother, and him maybe needing my help. It sounded about as vague and suspect as it no doubt was.
‘But I’m not sure yet,’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard from him since the other night. If I do have to stay around here, though, I could always come meet you up there a couple days later.’
She nodded, but I couldn’t really tell what she thought, of any of it.
‘You don’t talk much about your brother.’
I pushed away from the truck, and picked up the rope. I started knotting a bowline – just to be doing something. ‘You remember how bad off I was, when I first started working with your dad?’
‘No shame in that. You’d lost your sister.’
‘Well, Jake took it even harder than me. He was younger. Our pa died when we were kids and our ma didn’t always have it together. Sandy, well, she was like a parent to the both of us. And after what happened, Jake just got on the wrong track, if you know what I mean.’
‘He went to jail.’
I nodded.
‘Is he getting back on track, now?’
I grunted, snugging up the bowline, and then held it at eye level, checking my work. Through the loop, I could see gulls circling above the cannery, lured by the stench of roe. They went around and around, white scraps in a whirlpool, slowly going down.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t reckon so.’
The night Sandy died Jake got to the hospital first. I don’t remember much of my own drive over there, or finding the emergency room where they were operating on her. It’s all just impressions, really. The glare of those fluorescent tube lights. A hallway lined with white tiles, shiny as a sheet of ice. At that time I didn’t know much. Just that she had been in an accident and had been rushed to Vancouver General, which was the closest hospital to the scene of the crash. They hadn’t told me it was bad or that she was not likely to survive, and I suppose those are the kinds of things they don’t tell you over the phone. She had both our numbers and the home phone number in her emergency contact details on her cellphone and that was how they reached me at work, and Jake, who was with Maria. Our mother had her phone off – she was at a movie with a friend – and so they couldn’t get a hold of her. She had a few more hours before she found out, and in a way I envy her that extra time.
When I got to Emergency, Jake was standing alone and staring hard at a glass window that was covered by venetian blinds. He was staring at the blinds as if he could see through them. Looking back now, the intensity of his expression – the tightness in his jaw, the hard look in his eyes – seemed to signify the beginning of the change that occurred in him. I grabbed him by the shoulder and asked him what the hell was going on and he told me that she’d been T-boned by a drunk driver, and I asked him if it was bad and he said that it was – he said that it was very bad and after that we didn’t say anything.
I went over to a coffee machine in the corner and stared at it. I suppose I went over to it because I’d seen people do that, in TV and films, but I didn’t want coffee or anything else. I went back to Jake and we took up the vigil together, staring at those blinds. Everything that happened to Sandy happened out of sight and out of our realm of knowledge and understanding. I didn’t know what the regulations were at the time about relatives being in the emergency room, but in retrospect I wish we’d forced our way in there to at least be by her side. As it stood we were excluded, relegated to the role of bystanders during those final and definitive moments.
People passed us and at some point a nurse asked us if there was anybody else we should contact and we both looked at her, dazed. I had to think of the question again, going over the words in my head, before I mentioned our mother and that she ought to be called but that one of us could do it. The woman moved away and Jake said he’d already tried Ma. I was fiddling with my phone, thinking I ought to try again, when the door to the operating theatre opened and a doctor came out. He had taken off his gloves and cap and mask but still had his scrubs on and the front was spattered with blood. I knew that it was Sandy’s blood and knew, too, by his expression that she was dead even before he came over and opened his mouth and said words to that effect. For a few minutes I shut down and was vaguely aware of Jake talking to the doctor in intense, terse tones, and when I tuned back in Jake was asking if we could go in and see her. The doctor said it would be okay but asked us to wait while they cleaned up the operating room. He stepped away from us gently, cautiously, moving backwards and keeping his eyes on us, as if he had a feeling that in our grief we posed a potential problem.
The door shut for a few minutes and opened again and the doctor came back out, and the rest of the trauma team came with him this time. They looked at us with sympathy and timidity and the doctor said we could now go in to see our sister if we wanted. He also said something about needing us to come talk to him afterwards but I don’t think we ever did.
The room was smaller than it had looked from the outside and darker than I expected. They had left the overheads off and turned out the surgical lights and the only illumination now came from a bedside lamp that cast a grim yellow glow. Jake closed the door behind us, shutting out the noise of the ward. Any surgical tools and instruments had been removed, and the machinery all around her that had presumably been working to keep her alive, or monitor her life, was still and quiet. The dim silence had a dense and murky underwater quality to it, as if we had locked ourselves in a submersible and were slowly floating down, away from the world of light and warmth that we had always known, towards some place else.
Sandy lay on the operating table in the middle of the room. Her lower half had been covered by a sheet. The sides of the sheet were bloodied. We went to stand on either side of her and we each took one of her hands and the one I held felt as warm as my own, as warm as it always had. Her face was bruised and one cheek swollen into a grotesque bulge but she was still recognizable as her, or what had once been her. Jake reached down for the sheet. When I saw that he was going to raise it I looked up and away, at him, so I never saw what happened to her legs. But I sometimes think that seeing the reaction on his face was worse, in a way.
After that I did something odd. I walked over to the corner of the room and sat down and sort of curled up, like a child or a wounded dog. Jake, he stayed beside her. I could hear him talking to her in low and tender tones and even though I couldn’t make out the words I knew what he was saying and just wished she could have heard it. Through all of this I’ve never been tempted by any notion of comfort in another life and have no doubts that what was lying on the table was no longer our sister, and in that state had meaning only to us.
The door opened. I thought it would be the doctor coming back, but when I rolled over I saw it was somebody else – a younger woman about our age. She wasn’t in the OR scrubs and instead wore some kind of blue uniform. She stopped and made a startled sound and put her hand to her mouth. I couldn’t stand but managed to sit up, facing towards her.
She said she hadn’t known anybody was in there and I explained that we were family, that we were her brothers. Then she started
