Emilie by Nina Trifan

Who is the woman living inside me, under this marmalade skin sagging at the seams, with calcified hands darkened by chocolate-brown spots like charred shells of over-ripe walnuts? How did she end up trapped in my body?

A man dressed in electric blue nursing scrubs pops his head through my door to let me know someone is here to see me, “Émilie, you have a guest. Your daughter, Maria, is here to see you.”

Daughter?

“Hi, mom. Sorry I’m late. Traffic downtown Toronto was crazy. I’m so glad you’re not asleep. Do you want me to sing your favourite lullaby? ‘Somewhere over the rainbow, / Way up high / There's a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby’.”

I recognize her voice, but who is she? Maybe she knows more about the woman living in my body, but I’m afraid to ask. A guest who comes every day. And she sits in the kombu green chair by the window. Then she stares at me. I hope she won’t stay long. Sometimes she does. And she talks. Too much. She tells me about her childhood, her husband, her work. She’s not very smart. Otherwise, she would take my yawn as her cue to leave.

She acts as if I were a baby who needs to be put to bed. “Brush your teeth, Mom. Put your pajamas on. Let me grab your blanket.” Please stop.

What is she going to talk about today? Why is this stranger unloading her banal stories on me? Last time, she told me about the cinnamon bread that we used to bake together for Christmas, our trip to Benalmádena on the Alboran Sea coast, our family vacations in Cape Breton, the sienna cardigan that I crocheted for her when she turned twelve, the red cabbage that I pickled every fall to have it ready for Thanksgiving dinner, and a myriad of other fabricated memories that she’s forcing me to believe that were once part of my life. I don’t remember any of that.

“Do you remember when dad threw a surprise party on your fortieth birthday? Uncle Jeff came from Philly, auntie Lindsay from Regina, even your little brother from Montreal, ton petit frère Antoine. He didn’t want to come. Dad threatened him that he would tell his wife about his affair. Pauvre Antoine. Je le plains. I don’t blame him. His wife, Marie-Jeanne, was such a stuck-up snob. Their marriage fell apart soon after that. It was doomed from the day he proposed. Do you remember, Mom?”

She’s calling me mom again. How can I tell her to stop? Doesn’t she know that it’s bothering me?

“Dad bought forty pink peonies. He put them in a blue and white Meiping vase with a trailing peony design. He placed forty balloons on the front lawn. Neighbours came over to take pictures, even strangers stopped on their walk to chit-chat and show their envy for the lucky woman. Were you happy, Mom? Did dad make you happy?”

Is she talking about Conrad? We’re not married yet.

“Oh, he was such a good man. You were so lucky. I wish I had a husband like him.”

Why is she still talking? Stop. Please stop. Just put a sock in it, will you? I turn my head on the pillow and look out the window. The autumn blaze maple tree across the street has turned fiery-red orange, like wildfires illuminating the sky on a parched summer night.

She looks like my baby sister. But older. Maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s someone who got lost. Lost in her mind and she found me to tell me her stories. I look at her and shake my head brusquely, pushing my chin up and to the side to show her the door. Leave. Leave now. Go away.

“What are you trying to tell me, Mom? Are you expecting someone?”

I close my eyes and start counting. Counting backwards always works for me. Eighty-five, eighty-four, eighty-three…

“Mom, I should get going. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

She leans over and hugs me. I hear her footsteps trailing off. Eighty-two, eighty-one. I hope she’s gone. I open my eyes just in time to see that the door is still open.

“Hola, Émilie. Was that your sister? She looks like you.”

A short woman, a tad taller than four feet, makes her way to my bed and touches my hand.

“Let me tell you. These young doctors here know nothing. Nada. I was walking my dog Bibi this morning. You know how I like to take her out before seven, right? It was a short walk, took her over to that bush, you know which one.”

The boxwood shrub, moron.

“As I was coming back, I tripped and fell. Oh, it hurt so much. It hurt and it hurt. And this young nurse ran over and asked me if I wanted him to call the doctor. Don’t ask me, I said, that’s your job to know. So, he grabbed my arms and pulled me up, but my legs felt like lead, unable to carry my body anywhere. Helpless. This is the end. Eso es.”

When she leaves, I’m going to tell myself a story. It helps me fall asleep. A story like a lullaby. Or like a Christmas memory when I was waking up before everyone else to open my presents, but my mom asked me to wait for my siblings. I used to sit by the window and watch millions of snowflakes sifting through the air before touching the ground. My mom told me about the pink snowfall in Prince Edward Island. The red clay from the soil was blown into the air and absorbed by the clouds turning entire towns into Barbie lands swathed in rosy feathers. A pink heaven for little girls whose moms dressed them in bubblegum silk dresses, fuchsia shoes, and sparkly jeweled headbands. Mini outfits that mimicked the Barbiecore universe they were longing to conquer. My mom never bought those. The clothes that I wore were as forgettable as I. Ordinary. Dull. Plain. She also taught me about the different kinds of snowflakes, the science of classifying them based on their shape and size: prisms, stellar plates, stellar and fernlike dentrites, columns, needles, stars, bullet rosettes. My favourite was the twelve-sided snowflake, a rare form of crystal twinning where two crystals grow joined, like Siamese twins.

“Émilie, are you listening? It might snow soon. What happens then? How will I be able to go for a walk? Should I get a walker? Or a cane? Or one of those hiking poles that will make me look like I’m going for cross-country skiing. ¿Qué te parece?”

She’s still here. I wish she melted away like snow on heated pavement. People are like snowflakes. No two are alike. I read somewhere that at least one septillion snowflakes fall from the sky every year. In the entire world. And each of them is unique. This woman looks like a hollow column or a needle. Not a stellar dendrite – these are large snowflakes, plate-like snow crystals with lots of branches. Please go.

The snowflake lady pulls out a box from the bag that she carried behind her back.

“My son brought me postre de natas, cocadas, arequipe, and milhojas. Here, try some. Te gustarán. The cocadas are the best. I know you like coconut. Una cocada?”

I take the one that she calls cocada. The nutty flavour makes me think of edible grasshoppers and crickets. I nod and put it back in her bag after one bite.

“No, no, no. Que haces? Don’t put it back. No nice, no nice, Émilie.”

She pulls her bag away and scrunches it up to her chest as if it were the lost treasure of the Irish Crown Jewels. The elevens on her forehead are the last thing that I see as she walks away. I imagine her as a baby coming out of her mother’s womb with two vertical lines already etched between her eyebrows like train tracks: a newborn already suspicious about the world she had entered against her will, curious about the intentions of this adult towering over her.

It’s late now. I should go to sleep, but not before I tell myself a story. No more Christmas memories. They make me feel like one of the two orphans who survived the Titanic, “a fare-dodger of life, a gleaner of time”.

“Salut, Émilie! Quoi de neuf ?“, a man’s voice startles me as I’m racking my brain to find a new story.

Why is everyone barging in, turning my room into some kind of Italian piazza used to share, commune, and vent? He keeps talking.

“Who was that woman who visited you today? Une amie ou une parente? No, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter. So, nothing new,” he pauses, looking for a signal from me that could resemble a reaction to his question.

I f I had any news, how would I tell him? If I have no news, is he going to leave? I shake my head.

“I just popped in to let you know I’m leaving. My daughter Isabelle asked me to move in with her. Julien left her, but she kept the house. Now she has an extra room. At first, I didn’t want to go. You know she lives in Westport. That’s not even a town. It’s a village. It’s not far from Ottawa, which I like. You know Isabelle works at the Royal Canadian Mint on Sussex Drive. Elle fait la navette tous les jours, pauvre d'elle !”

Why would I care about Isabelle’s commute? People complain about the most mundane aspects of their lives. It’s like objecting to breathing or drinking water.

“Émilie, Westport is a tiny place. Like a minuscule pushpin on a map. It may be the smallest town in Ontario. Less than six hundred people live there. That’s fewer than how many residents we have here in our nursing home. Fishing is good there, though. Northern pike and pickerel. I can join a local fishing club. J'aimerais que tu viennes avec moi."

I don’t know this man. Even if I knew him, I wouldn’t go with him. His unshaven beard, the dirt under his nails that haven’t been touched by a clipper in weeks, the grey hair sticking out of his nose, a battered plaid shirt that looked like it’s been run through hundreds of drying cycles.

“Good night, Émilie. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

He left the door open. I’m praying no one else will come to my room.

The cuckoo clock, a gift from Conrad when he went hiking in the Black Forest before our engagement, strikes six. Cuck-oo. Cuck-oo. Is it story time yet? Cuck-oo. Cuck-oo. Its intricate design with a miniature chalet featuring two beer-drinking men raising their Steinkrugs reminds me of the pictures Conrad showed me when he came back from his trip. Cuck-oo. Cuck-oo. After we get married, we’ll move to Freiburg and rent a historic home close to Freiburg Münster, the medieval cathedral that took centuries to build. We’ll live like tourists among millions of visitors until we find a place at the foot of the Schauinsland mountain, surrounded by wind-bent beech trees that look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I should get ready for my wedding soon, but I don’t remember where I put my dress. Maybe the woman who comes to visit me every day knows. Maybe she’s the one who put it away. Where is Conrad? Why is it taking him so long? I can’t wait to be with him, to share a silence that will fill our days like cake layers sandwiched together by strawberry cream that will remind me of the pink snow from my mom’s stories.

Stories and lullabies. Conrad likes them too. “Somewhere over the rainbow, / Way up high / There's a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby.