Fight Night(31)

Chapter One, said Grandma. She looked at me. She smiled.

You don’t have to say chapters, I said. Just say it. Okay, said Grandma.

I pushed record on my phone.





10.

So when was it? Let’s see. I seem to recall that I’d just returned home from Knipstja’s funeral in Rosenort—she was old, so it wasn’t unexpected … And your mom was waiting for me in the lobby of my apartment block, that one by the river in the shape of a milk carton, with that awful landlord. Momo had died. Yes, she had already died that spring. It was summertime when Knipstja had her funeral. Your mom and I were … not ourselves. Of course! We had lost Momo. Oh … well, Momo fought so hard. She made all those jokes. Do you remember that one joke? I mean, you were young. Maybe you were too young to remember … And your mom and I were in shock. Well not shock, really, we could see this coming but … we had all been fighting hard. Momo most of all. But we lost. We lost! Did Momo make a decision to stop fighting? Was it a conscious decision? Well, we don’t know. I’d say it was. I’d say it was and we can honour that. We can accept that. Well … But the doctors weren’t fighting hard. They were clueless. Don’t make them deal with mental illness. They don’t have a clue. They don’t listen! Read Virginia Woolf instead. But I could tell that your mom was … what’s the word … well, just decimated. Momo was her … I’d say her best friend. I mean they were really in cahoots. We were all … not ourselves … I mean good grief, Charlie Brown! But there was something else with your mom. This loss was … I mean there’s loss and then there’s loss … and this loss … it altered something in her. She was full of fear, I think. She was afraid it would happen to her, too. Like a contagion. First your grandpa, then Marijke, then Momo … So your mom became very anxious. She became very afraid that she would, well, lose her mind too, and … it would happen again. To her.

If you lose your mind can you find your mind again? Of course you can. That’s life! So … then it seemed as though your mom began a process of … well, really of killing herself. I mean, not killing herself, no, no, no, Swiv … that’s not what I’m saying … but in a sense killing off her self, so that … she couldn’t kill her physical self. In a sense, ending her life as she knew it. Not ending her actual life, of course, but … ending something inside herself in order to protect herself. Does that make sense? And that’s about survival.

Hooooooo … so where was I? Right, your mom met me in the lobby after Knipstja’s funeral. I remember thinking that she was so thin. But she had these skinny jeans. Stovepipes! And she had that cast on her arm! Remember, from falling off her bike that night when it was raining so hard. And she had these red blotches around her eyes. They were different than your Nike swooshes. I hugged her so tightly then, in the lobby … I felt her bones. I was afraid I’d break them. We sat down on one of the couches. Those stupid couches that were so soft you couldn’t get back up. I knew she was suffering, so deeply sad, so lost and so afraid. She was sad and she was afraid, but she wasn’t crazy, Swiv. I shouldn’t use that word, crazy, I know. She was fighting, fighting. She was fighting on the inside. Sometimes when we fight … sometimes we’re not fighting in quite the right way … we need to adjust our game. But still, the main thing is that we’re fighting … your mom’s a fighter. We’re all fighters. We’re a family of fighters. What can I say! And then she told me that she had been offered a part in a movie being shot in … some corner of Albania! I remember feeling very surprised by that but also thinking, Oh, great! That sounds interesting. Your mom needed to get back into life, back into work … it was something to look forward to and to focus on … well, I had mixed feelings about it but mostly I thought … good! What’s the worst thing that can happen? That’s what I thought then. Well … silly me.

And we talked about it for a long time that day. She talked about how hard it was to get roles now at her age, and being a woman … She told me about the movie, although she didn’t really know too much about it … But it was some European director, you know, and it could be a good break … could lead to other work. And she said she’d talked about it with you and your dad and her friends and it seemed to her like it was a good idea … She said you and your dad could go and visit her and stay with her there … not that they could afford it … it was summer so you didn’t have school … although you and school have always had a … tepid relationship. Anyway … and she said she’d only be gone for six weeks at the most. Well … it didn’t turn out quite that way … as we know … but in the lobby that day she was excited about it. Her eyes were … they were flashing again! It was just so good to see her excited about something, so I … I said good! Do it! It seemed like a good idea. Just … to keep working. And to go away for a while. So then … she went!

But strange things happened on that set … First of all, somebody took that cast off her arm … sawed it off … and it was too early, her arm hadn’t healed but the people there said no, she couldn’t have it on her arm in the movie … I remember her telling me that on the phone … she had somehow managed to get a signal on her phone … she was standing on a big hill when she told me that they’d taken the cast off … some farmer had taken her into his barn and sawed it off … and then later that day in a scene they were filming she had to use that hand, the one the cast had been on, to smack a bunch of mosquitoes on the wall … she used, you know, the heel of her hand … and it was still broken! That was very painful for her … very painful … But that was nothing in the scheme of things, that was only the beginning … It was so hard for me to communicate with her because the crew were off in a remote place … I don’t even know where, exactly … but in the north of Albania … It was hard for her to get her phone to work and I could never get through to her … even e-mail was touch and go.