Especially difficult for Rebecca to deal with was the dream. Though described to Rebecca often, it was like a jigsaw that fluctuated with each unexpected fragment of memory, a space filled in here, another there. At first Rebecca hoped that once completed, the puzzle would lose its terror. On the contrary, the more Mrs. Kochinsky remembered, the closer she came to concluding the picture. Rebecca realized that the sum of such parts would add up to a whole that few people could bear.
Whatever details dropped out of her memory, the dream always began the same way: waking up, startled in bed. The door exploding with shouts. ¡Abra la puerta! ¡Abra la puerta! Her face on the floor of the car, the guard’s foot on her back. Mrs. Kochinsky intoned the events like a well-worn article of faith, a shadow religion that held her captive on the darkest of altars. Rebecca listened as the older woman repeated the dream in pieces that she could endure on this side of memory.
The odd thing was, when David died in September, Mrs. Kochinsky was the only patient Rebecca told, the only one she felt could understand. The older woman observed Rebecca with empathy for a while, commenting on the shadows beneath her eyes. Rebecca felt close to her then. It was a bond between them that grew like a dark flower.
Rebecca read over some of her notes from January, Mrs. Kochinsky’s last visit: “Presented in somewhat agitated state. Well-dressed. Excited, unable to calm herself. Thought content disordered. Elevated BP. 160 over 100. Still upset over sister who has entered nursing home. Sister stopped speaking. Mrs. K. feels abandoned though visits almost every day. Furious with brother-inlaw for quick decision to send sister away. Mrs. K. restless during session. Sleep disrupted, loss of appetite. Recommended Rx: moderate dose chlorpromazine. Still refuses meds.”
Rebecca flipped through notes on Mrs. Kochinsky’s previous visits. Last July her patient had missed an appointment. This had never happened before. Iris interrupted Rebecca’s examination of another patient so she could take the phone. Mrs. Kochinsky muttered, between wails, that her only living relative, her younger sister Chana, had suddenly gone mad. Mrs. Kochinsky had moved to Toronto to be with Chana who had now retreated into herself, unwilling or unable to live in the world. Mrs. Kochinsky was not going to come for her appointment then or ever again, she had outlived the rest of her family. What is there left to live for? Chana was all she had, and now even she was gone. I’m only alive because I’m not dead.
Rebecca had abandoned a waiting-room full of patients and driven the few blocks to Mrs. Kochinsky’s duplex to find her anything but elegantly dressed. Her patient lay in bed, wrapped in a cotton housecoat.
“Mrs. Kochinsky....”
Her eyes opened but would not focus. Rebecca checked her wrists. No blood. Then her eye caught the empty pill bottle on the nightstand. “Mrs. Kochinsky! What have you done!”
She swept up the bottle: Chana Feldberg. Take one tablet at bedtime when needed for sleep. Valium. 15 mg. 30 tablets.
Rebecca had waited in the busy emerg while Mrs. Kochinsky’s stomach was pumped. She knew the ER nurses would be curt and perfunctory with a suicide attempt, preferring to expend their energy on patients who actually wanted to survive. They’d been waiting for a psychiatric assessment for two hours when Mrs. Kochinsky suddenly sat up in the bed, grey-brown hair fly-away, and announced she wanted to go home. Nothing Rebecca said would deter her from getting dressed. Rebecca, perturbed by the possibility that a psychiatrist might hold her for lengthy observation, accompanied her patient through the crowded ER where nobody took any notice of them.
At Mrs. Kochinsky’s, Rebecca called social services to arrange for a visiting nurse. She sat on the edge of Mrs. Kochinsky’s bed and looked into eyes that were vacant with pain. She took gentle hold of the limp hands. “You mustn’t let them have this victory,” she said, and a lot of other things she couldn’t remember. Mrs. Kochinsky wept long tears as Rebecca spoke, listening more, it seemed, to the steady rhythm of her words than the words themselves. There was a primitiveness in Mrs. Kochinsky’s need for the sound of someone’s steadfast heart, like the need of a newborn for the beat of its mother’s pulse. Rebecca was willing to be that heart, that pulse, as long as it kept Mrs. Kochinsky alive.
chapter two
Goldie
Wednesday, March 28,1979
As soon as Goldie stepped onto the Bathurst Street bus she knew she was in trouble. The strangers around her stared with cold faces. The familiar palpitations began in her neck, her chest, as she determined to find the one she was looking for: it was in the eyes, the way a person held his head. This bus was why she didn’t go downtown, this danger to her survival that the doctor hadn’t counted on. Oh why had the doctor moved so far away! Goldie preferred to walk everywhere she could. The area around Bathurst and Eglinton where she lived proliferated with every kind of store. There was little she could not buy within a three-block radius of her apartment.
Today was her first appointment in the doctor’s new office. If she made it. On the bus now, all her energy polarized to keep her standing in the aisle without bolting out the exit at each stop. In her head she tried to reproduce Dr. Temple’s calm voice telling her that she was in Toronto, she was safe. Most of the seats had filled and more people got on. Gripping the bars, she moved further down the bus when suddenly she saw a young man who reminded her of Enrique. Mama, you’re a big girl, he would’ve said. You gotta try. It’ll be all right. Besides, you look great. She pushed Enrique from her mind.
She looked into each face to make sure she was not being followed. Most of the passengers avoided her eyes; Torontonians were so reserved. But she continued methodically row after row, face after face: immigrant women with their tightly curled hair, students with books, old men and women, their surfaces like maps of forgotten places.
Did Dr. Temple understand how hard it was for her to just go out on the street, her own familiar street, never mind all the way down to the new medical office? Goldie didn’t thank the doctor for saving her when she’d finally mustered the courage to swallow the valium. She did thank her for caring, for understanding her pain. Ah, there was nothing else to be done; she had to go.
Now this new thing, this cousin’s voice from so long ago on the phone suddenly. She didn’t like to think about that time. She had escaped from Poland when she was twenty, left behind everyone she loved. Only her sister Chana survived. Poor Chana, who had ended up in a camp. Thin and frail after typhus, she finally joined Goldie in Argentina after the war. And now this forgotten cousin from Poland who had somehow escaped. The rest of her family had become dust and ashes. She owed them this much, to help the cousin find what he was looking for. They would meet soon, he said, after all these years. Where was he living now? California? They had only exchanged a few letters now and then. Maybe she could find the address he needed. Give him something of importance when they finally met. She had to work up her stamina for that kind of adventure. Maybe she would go next week.
Dr. Temple’s voice, if she had managed to hear it at all, popped like a balloon when the young man Enrique’s age stood up and looked at her directly.
“Please,” he motioned behind himself. “Take my seat.”
Goldie was too shocked to understand what he wanted.
“Sit down. Go ahead.”
She looked into his face to see if this was a trap, but his voice was English, his manner Toronto. Not taking any chances, she nervously moved further down the aisle, leaving the young man to fall back into his seat, embarrassed.
A block below St. Clair, a short, dark-haired woman walked to the exit and stepped down on the stair. She was thick as a sausage in a cheap ski jacket over her home-made paisley dress. A group of teenagers in fashionably ragged jeans had gotten on at St. Clair and still held the driver’s attention. When the woman pulled the cord at her stop, the bus careened past. The students were so noisy that it was possible