The Dreamless Void
[one]
You can feel a mother’s lament in her voice. The tone of her words penetrates the skin and hits bone, it hits something deeper than bone, it hits spirit. The chest feels as if someone is pushing on it with brute force and that breath, that one breath, is a struggle to get in and get out. Remorse shapes the sounds leaving her mouth and they become a rough-edged grief-filled symphony, a mixture of wailing and words that cannot be unheard.
You wince.
You attempt to display no signs of your internal reactions to the shame that gets caught in her throat, but every hesitation in her story proves that silence can be a tangible beast as it forcibly pulls your head to a lowered position. You feel every struggled sentence as she speaks, or maybe you have to be a mother to feel it? Or maybe you have to be a mother who once neglected her own to feel it.
They almost lost me that time.
I almost lost myself.
I shivered as my sweat seeped through my clothing. I damned the light that intruded into the darkness of the room. The pillowcase that hung in the window frame was pinned sideways and the afternoon light came in across the room slanted. The same way my world felt.
Dust particles danced in the broken light. Laughter erupted from somewhere downstairs. The smell of stale cigarette smoke enveloped me. I clenched my eyes tightly, shifted, and moaned.
My detoxing body had me contracting into a tight ball one minute and expanding like a starfish the next. The floor was covered in clothes, some mine, some his. The mattress was on the floor, my heaped-up body on the mattress. My body pulled into itself. I wondered what it would be like to go through withdrawals somewhere pretty, somewhere clean. Somewhere where the outside didn’t match my insides.
I was dying a slow self-inflicted death.
If I could get my hands on another bottle and a couple of lines of coke, I’d feel enough—or rather, not feel enough—to get out of the bed and catch a bus somewhere. I would go south to Revelstoke, where an old friend lived, or to the east where I knew some people.
Saskatoon. Winnipeg. Toronto. Somewhere.
I spent the days before trying to locate men who had known me when I was human. When I was sober. Men who had fallen for me when I was feminine and tender-hearted. Would they even recognize the woman I had become? I thought I could compel them to take care of me by appealing to their better nature or their long-standing urges to sleep with me. I would slip into arms that I knew could never hold me at my best. At the rate I was going I knew I couldn’t possibly take care of myself. I was terrified.
I was eight hours from home, in Edmonton, a city more than thirty times the population of my small hometown, Fort St. John. I could easily slip into line with the nameless, the faceless, and the voiceless. That’s why I went there. To erase myself. To crash into the other non-existents and melt into their ever-changing formation. People disappeared every day. Native women like me disappeared every day. Becoming an invisible Indigenous woman was a goal of manifest destiny that I was no longer willing to fight against. I had to vanish from the landscape of life and let myself become a missing poster, a candle lit at a Sisters in Spirit vigil, a single exhale of relief from white men on Parliament steps. I had no more fight left in me and I had convinced myself that everyone would be better off without me.
My mother, my dad, my son.
All of them would be better off with my absence rather than be scarred by my self-destruction. I would soon shape-shift into a black-hearted monster. I had seen this monster before. It looked like hidden mickeys of vodka in bookcases, perpetual bleeding noses, and bedside beers to keep the shaking hands and nightmares away.
I contracted. Expanded. Contracted.
I twisted the stained sheet around my body. I became a bed-bound aerial dancer performing without grace and with only my conscience for an audience. I pulled on it tight as if the tension of the sheet snaked around one leg and up around my neck could hold my body in place. It couldn’t.
Contracting. Expanding. Contracting.
“Helen,” Alex said, with a soft knock on the door. “You need to eat,” he whispered, as he sat down beside me and placed a plate of chicken and berries by my head.
I only wanted a beer but I was too ashamed to ask. I didn’t think Alex would have understood. I ate a handful of berries but my throat outright denied the chicken no matter how small of a bite I took. It lodged itself in my throat and I reached for the glass of water he had brought me earlier. My body trembled and when Alex noticed it, he looked away.
“You need sleep,” he said, softly.
I felt my body contract and tensed my muscles to hold myself in position.
“Hold me?” I asked.
I was scared of losing my grip on reality. Scared to be alone. Terrified of the nightmares that were sure to follow.
Alex lay down beside me and wrapped his long pale arms around me.
Arms white like snow, my asu (grandmother) would say. White like yuss, she would say it in our language. I vibrated, and he held me tighter. His body became a straitjacket attempting to restrain my body’s need to convulse. I felt as if my spirit was trying to break out of my skin. Maybe it was.
Minutes rolled by. An hour passed.
“Helen?” he whispered.
“Mmmm,” I moaned in reply. Even full syllables and words were not without effort.
“Did you sleep at all?”
“No.”
“Helen?”
“Mmmm.”
“My shirt is soaked from your sweat.”
After another hour of restraining me, and comforting me, with still no luck at sleeping, he left me to fight my own battle.
Contracting. Expanding. Contracting.
[two]
Five days before I was starfishing in Alex’s bed, I was sitting at home, which also happened to be my parents’ home. The house where I spent most of my teenage years. I had moved back in to their home after I had gotten accepted into a national Indigenous women’s leadership program. It was supposed to be a new beginning.
But stories have a way of coming unearthed, no matter where you call home.
At that time, I was managing to keep the shifting ground beneath me still for long enough to catch my breath. My asu had been living with me for about a year by then, so when my son and I moved to my parents’, she moved in too. After my papa had passed, Asu stayed alone in her large cream-coloured house an hour and a half outside of town at the Halfway River Reserve. The house sat on top of a hill on a dead-end dirt road and was the epicentre for our family functions. Their home was the heart from which we flowed and to which we found our way back. We never quite recovered from the loss of it as a family. It had a woodstove that kept it warm in –40°C winters and Papa forever had cords of wood stacked beside the house with endless rows continuing in the shed. Papa was a man of preparation. There were bird feeders scattered about the property that were filled even though Asu swore every single year that she was done feeding the birds. An old whisky jack would come along in the winter, cawing and such, and Asu just couldn’t bear the thought of him going hungry. Poor magpies, poor whisky jacks, poor birds—but those chipmunks and squirrels had it rough. Asu always had a skinny log leaned up against a tree behind the house with copper wire wrapped and looped around it.
“What is all that for?” I asked her once, pointing at the brass-coloured circles of wire.
“It’s to snare those damned squirrels. They’re no good, they just chew up car wires,” Asu replied scornfully as she waved her hand in dismissal of the now-obvious tiny looped snares.
Their house was one of the only homes on reserve that was fully fenced. Asu and Papa built that fence themselves over the course of a season. Papa would make them a lunch to go, a thermos of coffee and a sandwich with mashed potatoes and tomatoes (a union of food I never understood) or Spam with some butter. They would load into one of the trucks Papa had revived from somebody’s backyard automobile cemetery and off they would go in search of thin trees that they would later peel and stain by hand for their fence.
They were tough old people.
When they knew we were coming for a visit, they prepared for our arrival. When we started driving up the dirt-road hill to their house and broke the first bend I could see a wisp of smoke rising up and I knew that the warmth of a home fire was waiting.
Reaching the top of the hill I would see Papa first in one of his striped long-sleeved shirts and suspenders moving things around in the yard. He would see us approaching and yell out to Asu, “Mom, they’re here!”
Asu was usually out in the yard too, poking the fire with her long wooden pole. They would stop what they were doing and watch us pull up. A moment of stillness. A welcoming.
The firepit was at the mouth of a long narrow shelter structure they put together from wood, sheet metal, and thick plastic. Papa would take out old car seats from busted-up ancient automobiles and place them in the shelter with some old blankets to cover them. We would sit out there by the fire on our GMC seats and tell stories until all the stories were emptied on out of us and the lingering silences told us it was time to go to bed. I remember watching the fire’s shadows dance on Papa’s pale face as he stared at the flames trying to think of another story. He always looked so handsome, especially when he would emerge from the bathroom with his white hair slicked back, donning a plain white tee and black suspenders with the smell of Old Spice wafting from him.
When Papa was dying of cancer and finally got placed in the hospital for good, his face held that blue colour just beneath the skin. It was the kind of blue you catch when you are stuck outside in one of these northern winters for too long but that wasn’t comparable by any means to his bright blue eyes. Those eyes held fast and bright through the entire sickness.
When he couldn’t shave his own face anymore, I brought a razor and some shaving cream to the hospital and wheeled him to the bathroom. I spread the shaving cream out carefully over his stubbly jawline while Papa’s eyes inspected my every move in the mirror. I grabbed the razor and heeded his warning not to use hot water on it because it would dull it “right quick boy.” I pressed the razor to the outer corner of his jaw and dragged the blade a couple of inches toward his chin. I did this a few more times, cautious and conscious of the blade. Papa watched me politely but when he realized I was not going to pick up the pace and put any pressure to get that close shave he liked he huffed, “Push harder, you’re not going to break me, goddammit.”
We laughed and his blue eyes lit up.
We did not acknowledge that he was already broken.
I pushed harder and continued making maps across his face much like the backroads we used to criss-cross on our adventures when I was a little girl. Several of us kids would be jammed in a three-seater pickup, ducking when the police were spotted. We would stop somewhere and go trailing off into the bush. Papa would roll a cigarette and Asu would decipher animal tracks with us as we looked for berries or scouted for empty beer cans to be cashed in. Other times we’d perform bear watch when we went to the dump to rummage. One honk = a bear was spotted. Two honks = the bear was getting brave. Dump rummaging was one of my favourite things to do with Papa and Asu because you could find some really cool things as long as you didn’t mind the smell of rotting stuff mixing with the earth. There were books, toys, Faith Hill cassette tapes. People threw away things that still served a purpose.
Papa was a tough smart-mouthed man who doubled as Asu’s chauffeur and cook. Asu never drove a day in her life. Well, once—except she almost ran over Papa and never got behind the wheel again. Not long after he passed away, I drove up to Asu’s one autumn day and told her she was going to come live with me in town. She agreed. A year later, when I decided to make the move to my mom’s, we had a hell of a time. Both Asu and I had to downsize our lives to fit into a small room. We were figuring out what items we could move into storage and what was necessary to take and Asu sat in her room overwhelmed by the years of items accumulated.
She, a devout Catholic, had various styles of crucifixes, Virgin Mary statues, and even the odd bottle of holy water floating about just in case someone was in need of a blessing or of a warding off of some spirits. One time, my youngest auntie and cousin accidentally drank her holy water. Asu always had it in inconspicuous bottles. A bottle of Buckley’s turned into a sacred container. The only telling sign it was blessed water was usually small black writing somewhere on the bottle. Holy water. They drank that bottle dry before they saw the marking. All Asu had to say was that maybe they both had to stop swearing now on account of their mouths being blessed.
One of her crucifixes was big enough for a dwarf-sized Jesus to be on it. She had snagged it at a flea market years before, and it took up a good space of her bare white wall. Asu never bothered to close her blinds, either, so Giant Jesus could be seen hanging on her wall from down the block. With windows unobstructed and a lamp flicked on every single night, lit-up Jesus provided spiritual blessings and protection for all the neighbours.
“Helen,” she said, sounding like a small girl, looking up at her wall at the huge cross.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Can I take Jesus?”
“Asu, you can take Jesus wherever you want!”
I laughed, she laughed, and Jesus probably smiled. We packed up and moved ourselves a couple of blocks down.
My son and I shared a room in my parents’ swelling brown house. His toys and my clothes were all jumbled together in the closet, spilling out onto the floor just a little on good days. A lot on most days. Asu had the room across the peeling-linoleum hallway and my parents’ room was beside us. My youngest brother, who is the same age as my son, shared my parents’ room. My oldest brother still occupied a room downstairs.
At least the house had a furnace then.
My son was born a few years before in mid-winter and was brought home into the swelling house. There was no furnace when he was an infant.
Winter is six months of the year in the North and the house was a bitter cold place to be. The floors would bite your feet and the rooms’ chilly air would nibble at your cheeks. The oven door would be flipped down and glowing like the mouth of a hungry beast. That is, until the oven’s element burned out too. Then, we would boil big pots of water on the two working burners for the warmth of evaporation. We knew all the tricks of in-house heat production. We spent a lot of our time trapped in our small rooms with a plug-in heater going. I joke about having thick skin after being raised in the North, but it was probably the winters in that house that did it.
A year after moving back with Asu, I was still there. I was fucking up six ways until Sunday and then skipped Sunday and added six more sins.
I sat listlessly on the couch as my son and youngest brother went for an overnight visit at one of my aunties’.
That’s when the addict in me started to whale on the walls of my flesh and began rattling my bones.
I could feel my anxiety begin to pulse throughout my veins. It was Friday night and I had just spent the week at my job as the Aboriginal Education coordinator at the local college. I thought about the conversations that I’d had with two older students. Both of them had recently been through a treatment centre and I made a point to ask them about their red road journey and to encourage them. I would still be sick on Monday from a three-day-straight coke and alcohol binge and saying shit like “Sobriety is never easy, but you know what you need to do when you need to do it,” or “Pray for the guidance you need and Creator will hear you.” It was a ridiculous and incongruent ordeal but I still believed in sobriety, even after my relapse. I just didn’t believe that it was possible for me anymore.
I was messing up—and I had no capacity to feel, let alone to have faith.
The weekend before, I had disappeared on Friday night, like many weekends before that. I’d come back sometime Sunday morning without sleep and without feelings. I’d passed out and woken up to Mom screaming at me and hitting my body.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you know how many times your son comes into this room to check if you fucking made it home? Do you even care?!” she yelled.
I didn’t know how to care anymore.
I cared even less since the incident.
The fuckin’ incident. The blood. The voices that followed the blood. The tears that I didn’t cry.
The death I carried inside of me since then.
It was something I still hadn’t talked about.
But it was all I thought about at night and I couldn’t lay in bed with those thoughts next to me.
The memories haunted me so much that I ran away to Edmonton—leaving my son behind.
Thinking I could appease them with my complete self-destruction.
I sat on the couch and flicked through the channels, watching my mom enter and exit the living room as she gathered her things. I left it on a black-and-white movie and stared at the dreamy face of a young Cary Grant. I had always wished I could live back in that era. But to live in that era and love it, I would have to be a middle-class white woman.
You couldn’t be a poor Indian girl and experience anything these movies depicted.
I don’t know if it is the dramatic romance that I loved about black-and-white classic movies but I would sometimes watch them when I was drinking alone. And I did this too often. A hopeless alcoholic addict and a hopeless romantic. Doubly fucked.
At least I wasn’t drinking alone and watching horror and thriller movies. I’d be a hopeless alcoholic addict and a hopeless future cult leader and conspiracy theorist.
Drink the Kool-Aid. It’s not poisoned, just spiked with a gallon of rum, and the communion is dusted with cocaine.
So I watched Cary Grant rattle off one of his well-articulated long script lines and I did not swoon. My internal feelers were definitely broken.
“Come to the casino with me,” my mom said as she sprayed a citrusy-smelling perfume in front of her and walked through the mist. Her brown hair was teased, coiffed, and ready for a night of gambling.
“No,” I shook my head.
“Why not? It’ll get you out of the house.”
“I’ll drink.”
“Oh Helen,” she chided me. “You can do it without drinking. It’s as simple as not having one.”
“Okay, I’ll go,” I said, as I rose off the couch with every intention of having a drink when I got there.
My mom is an ex-alcoholic. You would think that she would know it was never that simple.
We arrived, and I spotted my friend Jennifer with her bright dyed-red hair, dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned low. I hadn’t seen her since St. Patrick’s night when we’d gotten greened up and I’d introduced her to my drug-den gang. She had left before morning while I had stayed perched on the couch for two more days.
That was the difference between her and me. She knew when to go home. She remembered she was a mother.
The moment we arrived at the casino, my mom drifted off into the maze of binging and blipping slot machines as I walked toward Jennifer.
“Hey girl, what’s up?” I said, pulling a stool to the table she was perched at.
“Just got off work,” she said, raising her glass. “Waiting for my mom to come pick me up in an hour.”
“Where you working?”
“The restaurant next door, total joke if you ask me but low shirts equal more tips. Didn’t do half bad today,” she said with a wink and we both laughed at the truth of it.
“Game of pool then?”
“Let’s do it,” she smiled.
We walked over to the pool tables and I was already eyeballing the waitresses, so they would come and take my drink order. I couldn’t walk up to the place where the drinks were sold because it jutted out in the middle of the small casino and my mom would definitely see me. My drinking would not be spoiled—I couldn’t have that, nor the agony of having only one rye and Coke.
As the Alcoholics Anonymous saying goes, one is too many and one hundred is never enough. I was aiming for one hundred. The pool tables were tucked away and private. I could drink there with ease.
Jennifer set up the pool balls and I pretended I was actually interested in playing pool.
Finally, the waitress walked over.
“Can I get you ladies anything to drink?”
“Rye and Coke please,” I answered. “Actually, you better make that a double.”
“I’ll have another vodka with cranberry juice,” Jennifer said as she cracked the cue and the balls split up across the table and two disappeared into the pockets.
“Oh snap, someone has her game face on,” I said.
“That’s right, bitches, I’m going to own this table!” she laughed.
Just then “I’m Real” by Ja Rule and JLo came on the speakers. Ja Rule’s raspy voice yelled out something about his name and “the game” while JLo’s smooth voice answered back. Jennifer’s body swayed to the beat before her mouth opened.
“Girl, you remember dancing at the Galaxy to this track?!” she squealed.
The Galaxy was a teenage dance club that we used to go to. It had a short life in Prince George, where we both had lived when we were young. I heard it closed down after repeated fights and bricks being thrown through the window, but I did get to dance my heart out in it a few times before it shut down.
“Yup, that place beat dancing at that city youth centre place with the pat downs and sock checking for drugs,” I replied. “That place was rough as fuck.”
We weren’t close friends at all, but we had history. Jennifer had just moved to Fort St. John but she was the first girl I met when I’d moved to Prince George years ago. I was living in that city because some sideways shit went down and I needed to disappear from Fort St. John. My life has been full of disappearing acts, and violence has always inspired them. I moved in with an auntie from my dad’s side. I was thirteen.
My adolescence was riddled with turmoil and shaky soil.
I was in Grade 9. By this time, my addictions had become so pronounced they could no longer be called a habit. Addiction was my lifestyle and it manifested in hideous ways.
One night, after partying, I woke up in a hospital bed. I didn’t know how I had gotten there. I blacked out. Again. The police officer asked for my name and I didn’t want my mom showing up there so I said I was Abigail Johnson. They asked me how to get a hold of my mom. I told them I didn’t know.
I didn’t know why there were so many police officers around me. Or why I was in a hospital gown. I didn’t know what was happening.
Abigail Johnson’s mom showed up.
Abigail Johnson was a real person. A girl I went to school with. Drunk me should have thought that one out.
I can still picture Mrs. Johnson and her worried face at my bedside. Her wild unruly 4:00 a.m. hair, with a look of confusion and then a face of relief when she realized I was not her daughter. The police took the confused mother back on the other side of the curtains.
I saw my opportunity and tried to jump out of the bed while the police were distracted with her. I was still really drunk and had to grab onto things to make it down the hall.
I stumbled into the waiting area and I saw three boys sitting in some of the chairs. I walked closer and realized I recognized them.
“What are you guys doing here?” I said, completely oblivious that I stood there in a hospital gown.
“Helen,” said Jack.
Jack was a boy from school. All three of them were Native boys that I knew from school. Jack looked concerned, his brow furrowed.
“I need to leave here, help me leave,” I said, looking behind me. The policeman would be there soon.
“Helen,” Jack said softly, “we found you. You were out by the railroad tracks, in the ditch. We thought you were dead, Helen.”
“What? No,” my head spun harder and I grabbed onto a chair. “No, that makes no sense.”
Blackout.
I was in the hospital bed again when I came to, and this time my mom was beside me. She was crying. I clenched my eyes shut. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want to know what had happened. When she stopped crying I opened my eyes.
“My girl,” my mom said, as she reached for my hand and squeezed it.
“Mom, can we go? I want to get out of here, take me out of here,” I pleaded. I was scared.
“Just a second,” she said as she got up and walked out into the hallway.
I could hear muffled voices outside.
“Just make sure you contact us this afternoon. We have questions for her,” a man’s voice said.
“Yes,” replied my mom.
“I brought you clothes, my girl,” she said as she pulled a bag onto the bed.
My body was sore and I moved slowly into my clothes while my mom helped dress me. I kept my eyes on the floor as we walked out. I didn’t want to see people looking at me.
“Helen, what happened last night?” my mom said once we got into the car.
“I don’t know,” I said as I stared out the window.
“You have got to remember something, Helen,” my mom’s voice begged me.
“No, Mom,” I said, my voice cracking. “I don’t.”
“They found you lying out in that ditch. If those boys didn’t find you they said you would have died.” My mom paused and took a deep breath. “You could have died, Helen. They said they think you were raped.”
I heard her voice catching. She was crying. I wanted to disappear into the car, into the cement below, slip into the earth. I wanted to stop existing, to not hear the rest of the story.
“You were naked. Naked except for a sweater that was draped over you.”
I said nothing. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
“Take me home,” I whispered.
My feelings left my body. My spirit sat outside of me like an unacknowledged apparition. I didn’t know whose life I was living, whose body I inhabited. This wasn’t my story, my life, my reality. I felt like I could float away at any moment, but a vague awareness kept me nailed to the ground. It’s a weird thing to disconnect from your body and your experiences and yet be present almost as a bystander. I was scared that if I tried to lean into my feelings I would fall off the emotional edge and I didn’t know what I would do to myself.
I learned later in life that this is called dissociation.
I sat silently in the vehicle. The silence was harder to withstand than my mom’s probing questions.
I had a hot shower when I got home, then a hot bath. I lay in the water motionless and silent. My tears rolled into the bathtub. I didn’t want to come out. I hated myself for letting this happen to me.
I did this, I thought as I blinked back my tears.
Save the fucking tears for someone who deserves them.
I heard a soft knock at the door. I didn’t answer. Another knock.
“What?” I murmured.
“We need to go back to the hospital, my girl. You need to come and get ready.”
“For what?”
“They need to do some tests.”
I dunked my head underwater. If only I could keep my head under long enough, I wouldn’t have to come out. Another knock. I raised my head and swallowed air, then rose slowly from the water. My thighs were sore, my body ached. My mom had laid out clothes for me and I dressed myself.
“What kind of tests?” I asked when we got into the vehicle again.
“Some swabs and stuff. Just to, you know, check it out, and make sure you’re okay.”
“Some swabs? Where?”
“Down there. I don’t know what else they’re going to do but the police need it. You have to do it, my girl.”
I stared out the window. Tears burned my cheeks, my chest roared as if a wildfire had been lit in its cage. I didn’t know if I could survive being in my own body.
Stop crying, bitch, I scolded myself. Fuckin’ stop it.
They put me in a small room. There was a lady officer there and she was cold, distant, and formal. The metal table gleamed. I could hear the chattering of the doctor and the officer and my mom. The door shut.
“You need to change into the gown,” my mom said, holding it out to me. Her eyes held a fragile sadness and she held the gown out weakly. She helped me undress and tied the back of the gown for me. I lay down and she put a small knit blanket on me.
“Mom,” I said, “I don’t want to do this.” This time my voice pleaded with her. “Mom, please.”
My mom lowered her head and started to cry as well. Then she stopped crying and put on that brave face moms put on for their children and she grabbed my hand. “I know, my girl,” she strained to get the words out. “But you need to, and Mommy will be right here. I’m right here.”
The cop and the doctor came in. I turned my head toward the wall. They did what they needed to do. I heard the words “rape kit” and “vaginal-wall bruising.” They confirmed among themselves that there was evidence of sexual violence. I flinched when they pulled pubic hairs out. I lay there silently. I gritted my teeth, clenched my jaw, and tried to blink my tears back.
“Did she have a shower?” the police officer asked, ignoring my presence.
“Yes,” my mom answered.
“She really shouldn’t have done that. We needed her to stay as she was. I don’t even know if we will get anything from these swabs now,” the officer reprimanded my mom, her voice distant.
“We didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to make her stay like that all day waiting for you to get this done,” my mom said sternly.
Silence.
I stayed at home after that, but a few days later I wanted to go and get homework from school because I didn’t want to fall behind. My mom drove me to the old brown-stone junior high, pulled into the dirt parking lot, and asked if I wanted her to go in with me.
“I can do it,” I said.
I was halfway to the cafeteria when I realized that everyone knew what had happened to me. Small towns leave no room for secrets.
People stopped beside the aging orange lockers to stare at me as I walked past. Their whispers zipped through the air and broke down whatever loose barrier I had placed around me before coming in. My skin stung with shame.
A kid I had known for years came running up to me. “Helen!” he said loudly, “is it true?” His face was more amused than concerned.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you get raped?!”
I lost my breath and the world started to twirl.
I pushed past him and into the cafeteria. A hush fell over the room and every eye turned in my direction. I started to hyperventilate and I wanted to disappear into the floor, disappear beneath the floor into the concrete, slip further down and into the earth. I became dizzy and made my way into the bathroom, pushing into people and pushing past them. I collapsed in a bathroom stall and began to cry.
I don’t remember how long I sat there. I stayed in the stall until one of my friends came and found me and escorted me out. My mom was pacing outside.
We got into the vehicle and I broke down crying.
“I need to move, Mama,” I howled. “Take me elsewhere, I can’t live . . . I can’t live here.”
My body was shaking, and tears and snot flowed down my face.
My emotions forced themselves on me all at once and I wasn’t capable of taking the inward assault.
I began hitting the dashboard and the windows as if hitting something would take me out of my body and stop whatever I was feeling. I thrashed about in the car seat. It felt like my spirit was trying to jump out of my body. I screamed. Mom’s eyes were wide with terror.
“I can’t fucking do it, I can’t,” I sputtered as my body crumpled into a ball and shook.
That is how I came to live in Prince George when I was a teenager.
This is how I had come to meet Jennifer.
It was not the beginning of sexual trespasses on my body and it was not the ending of rape in my life.
I had six drinks to Jennifer’s four drinks before my mom left the slot machine long enough to find out what I was up to. I was a grown-ass woman who needed babysitting. She instantly started screaming at me and calling me names in front of anyone who was within earshot, which just happened to be all of the casino patrons. I shut down and numbed myself. Her words became meaningless blobs vacating her mouth.
I knew I was a fuck-up.
“Can’t even stay sober for your own fucking son!” she yelled.
Before the comments registered, I walked away.
I needed obliteration.
So, I shifted into autopilot, got into a cab, and went to a seedy stripper bar downtown. The Condill, one of Fort St. John’s buildings, was the end-of-the-line kind of bar where you could drink by yourself and not feel out of place. LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” was playing when I walked in, and the music was the only thing lending life to the overall ambience of hopelessness. This was not a place for Party Rocking. This was a place for at-the-table drug deals, fist fights, and sexually hungry oil and gas workers. The room smelled of urine and shame. The floor was stained, the stools wobbled, and the men were questionable.
I drank hard.
My phone buzzed and I read a text message from my auntie who was watching my son.
Your son wants you to come home now. Go home.
I’m a fucking loser, I thought as I put my phone back in my jacket pocket. A fucking grade A loser. I accepted it as fact and set out to forget it.
Jimmy, a guy I knew from way back, came and sat beside me. We hadn’t seen each other in years and I wasn’t surprised to see him here of all places.
“Want a drink?” he asked, with his small squinty eyes smiling at me.
“Always fuckin’ do,” I replied.
He was there with his girlfriend, who looked like she was there with three other men across the bar. We sat and bullshitted for a bit when he bought me a second drink and ordered himself a pop.
“What the fuck, Jimmy?” I said, pointing to his pop.
“Nah, I gotta stay sober to watch over my girl tonight. If you need a ride later, call me.”
He gave me his number before he chased after his girlfriend, who had walked outside with another man.
“Hey.” A guy approached me. “Don’t I know you?”
It always starts that way with these kinds of men in places like this. You never know the character but it’s easier for them than saying, “Hey, I’m a creep and I want to know you.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.
“Let’s just do a shot together,” I replied.
“What kind?”
“Tequila—is there any other kind?”
“Tou-fuckin’-ché.”
He bought the shots and let a growl out after downing his, like the tequila threatened his manhood. Apparently there is nothing more redeeming of one’s masculinity than a primitive growl.
Then, a moment of truth.
My son’s face flashed in the back of my mind. I felt a twinge in my stomach but I decided to drown it. I would never be the mother he deserves.
“One more,” I said to the bartender.
“Hardcore, huh?” Don’t-I-know-you guy said, smiling at me.
I shrugged my shoulders and took the shot.
I called Jimmy for a ride at closing but he didn’t answer. Don’t-I-know-you guy hovered nearby with predator-like skill and told me to come to his place. I wasn’t ready to go home yet, so I went home with him. When we got to his place he poured me a drink and before the drink was done we started kissing. I knew he would want to have sex and I started to panic.
I had not had sex since my most recent rape. So now, even when I was drunk, I remembered to be worried. My phone buzzed. It was Jimmy.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at this guy’s place . . .” I answered.
“Give me the address,” he said. “I’m coming to get you.”
I was relieved. I was grateful for Jimmy. I didn’t want to lock lips anymore with Don’t-I-know-you guy. I downed my drink and then stood outside in the cold, waiting for Jimmy. I stared at the soft, smooth cover of freshly fallen snow and the way that it caught the street light. The cold sparkle that would kill you if you decided to give yourself to it. I wanted to be swallowed by the stillness of it all.
My great-uncle was swallowed by it.
I remember looking for him with my mom on cold winter nights like this one.
We would drive up and down alleyways in our old pale blue Pontiac Bonneville as if we were playing a perpetual game of hide-and-seek. When we found him down some back alley he would always sing us a song at the top of his lungs and make me laugh.
“Livin’ doll! How you doin’?!” he’d ask me in his thunderous voice. “You know why I call you livin’ doll? Because when you were just a baby that’s what you look like. A livin’ doll, yep. My niece, the livin’ doll,” he’d say and I would giggle some more.
Mom would dig into her purse and give him some money, and then he would disappear down a quiet, blackened alleyway. I remember staring at his figure growing smaller from the back window until I couldn’t see him anymore. He used to be a guide for hunters in the mountains, a damned good one, so I’ve been told. They called him Johnny Biscuits on account of all the biscuits he would eat up in the mountains.
“Oh Johnny Biscuits is stayin’ out here for longer,” the camp cook would say. “I better whip up double the biscuits now. Boy, that man can eat!”
I remember seeing a picture of him when he was young. He was holding up the head of a bighorn sheep he had shot, a smile on his beautiful brown face that boasted the sharp Bigfoot family nose. The streets and the liquor, though, they swallowed him and the mountains he left unconquered inside of him whole. I wanted to disappear like that. The moment broke when Jimmy pulled up and I walked over to his beat-up brown chariot and jumped in.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Cocaine,” I said.
“Cocaine it is,” echoed Jimmy.
We drove off into the night on a mission.
A handful of dashboard lines, some cheap whisky, and three hours later we were sitting with another buddy from way back named Michael in his basement suite. Michael was still wiping the sleep out of his eyes when he handed me a Budweiser. The sun was up at that point and I could hear the birds chirping outside one of the windows. I cringed. The sound of life continuing on made me want to smash something. Not the beer, though. That would be an alcoholic sacrilege.
I drank the beer quickly and deliberately. It gave me the courage for what I knew I needed to do. I needed to leave town. I wouldn’t keep fucking up. This was my fuck-up finale.
I went to the fridge and grabbed myself another bottle of beer. I had checked my bank account before we arrived. I had just over one thousand dollars and then another five hundred on my credit card. I had managed to keep two good jobs so far, but carrying on like this, it was bound to end sometime and the time was now.
“I’m going to Edmonton,” I declared, as I popped off the top of the beer on the counter edge.
“For what?” Michael asked, his head cocked sideways.
Michael had had a crush on me since we were thirteen years old. I used to do silly things to make him blush, because he blushed so easily. He was a good guy but I had always seen him as a friend.
“I need to leave town,” I said as casually as I could.
We all knew people who had to “leave town,” so not a lot of explanation was needed but I wouldn’t have given one even if they had asked.
“We could both go,” offered Jimmy.
“I have to go there in a few days to pick up some parts,” Michael said. “If you can wait, I’ll drive you.”
“Fuck that, I need to leave now.”
Michael and Jimmy started talking out details while I cut up a couple of lines of coke.
I knew Michael had been trying hard to stay clean. I felt a stab of guilt as I leaned my head over the table. The guilt was gone as soon as the line was. Within a few hours we were on our way with a case of beer in the back seat and some old-time rock blaring on the stereo of a beat-up car.
We drank. We sang songs and joked around, rustling up decade-old stories and taking them for a spin. I reached my hand out the window and pushed the rear-view mirror inwards.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jimmy asked.
“I can’t be looking back anymore,” I said.
“You’re a fucking trip, you know that?” he said, laughing and shaking his head.
“Where’s your girlfriend anyways?” I asked.
“She’s getting the last of her shit out of her system, you know? She’s been hooked on a lot of different drugs, you fucking name it. It’s been fucked up.”
I snorted.
“What?”
“Well, Jimmy,” I said, waving my hand around the vehicle, “we’re kind of fucked up ourselves.”
“Guys,” Michael said from the back seat.
“Yeah?”
“You’re kinda killing my buzz back here.”
We all started laughing. I reached for the volume and turned up the boys of CCR singing about the Midnight Special shining a light on some shit or other. Michael lit a smoke. Jimmy bobbed his head. I motioned for Michael to pass me another beer.
“Don’t you have fuckin’ music that my mom didn’t party to?” I quipped.
“Shut yer goddamn mouth. This is classic,” Jimmy said as he turned it louder.
[three]
When we got to Edmonton, the boys took me to the mall. I had left with nothing, and although the last place I wanted to be wasted at was a mall, I had no choice. I only had the clothes I was wearing and I wasn’t ready to fully let my appearance metamorphose into the classic unkempt, un-showered alcoholic addict. If that was to come, it would be later down the line.
I was scared, though, because I knew I would eventually be at a street level of addiction.
I wasn’t one of those fancy functioning alcoholics whom I heard stories from at Alcoholics Anonymous. The ones who could keep a job for thirty years and still drink themselves into a stupor every other night. I actually mildly envied that ability, because for me, when the beast came a-knockin’ it would take everything. The fear of what would become my life gnawed at the back of my mind but I refused to answer to it.
“Well, fuck,” Jimmy croaked. “We’ll be waiting in the food court. I ain’t pickin’ out clothes with you, and hurry up, will ya?”
I nodded and drifted into the constant flow of people clutching bags and going in and out of shops. I felt dirty and didn’t want their eyes on me. I entered a store and began weaving in and out of the aisles, apathetic to what I was going to buy. I didn’t want to be there. I wandered into another store and thumbed the blouses. What the fuck am I doing? I thought, as my body swayed ever so slightly. I’d had too much drink and not enough coke.
A short brunette girl approached me. “Can I help you find anything?” she asked.
“Dress me,” I said.
I walked out of the store fifteen minutes later with two bags of clothes and a double rye and Coke on my mind. Time blurred. I stopped reading my text messages because all of them said the same thing.
You’re a fucking loser.
How could you do this?
We are keeping your son. You will never get him back.
Selfish bitch.
The cops are looking for you now. Call home.
Are you okay?
Call home.
Call . . . home.
Each time I read one of the texts, I fell further away from being able to be revived from my walking drug-and-alcohol coma. Delete. Delete. Delete. They only confirmed what I knew: I was fucking hopeless. Now my only task at hand was to forget what a selfish bitch I was so that I could live with myself, which in fact made me a selfish bitch.
We checked in to a hotel room at the Ramada, the same one I had stayed at the year before with my family because I was a creature of habit. The boys went downstairs to have a drink while I got ready. I hopped out of the shower and wrapped the towel around me. My hair was wet. My toes pressed into the linoleum. The mirror was fogged—my reflection was hidden from me just like my emotions. I knew if I allowed myself to feel I would kill myself. I would open the fucking patio door of my seventh-floor hotel room and jump. I clenched my teeth.
Thinking about suicide made me think of my mom.
Mom taught Sunday school when I was a child. When she was around children, she came to life. She created all these interactive songs that would get every six-year-old and their brother hyped on Jesus. We went to church every Sunday in rooms that were swollen with the spirit and full of gospel songs that we sang in Cree. Mom was a proper woman who bent over backward for her kids. She tended gently to other people’s children. And those kids flocked to her. Mom had a knack for knowing how to make them feel special. She showed the troublemakers extra attention and an extra dose of gentleness. It made them take a liking to her and they smartened up real quick in her presence. On school trips, Mom always sat with the class outcasts. The ones who were poorer than us and had stringy unwashed hair. I remember being upset about sitting alone in a school bus seat while Mom sat with Gladys and Todd behind me. Mom knew those kids needed some additional love and she didn’t let my pouting get in the way of her giving it to them.
When I was in kindergarten, she made me clothes and matching accessories by hand. I was the object of adoration for many years because Mom always went above and beyond when dressing her little princess. Mom grew up poor and she told herself, “No white people will ever look at my children like dirty Indian kids.”
Those are good memories.
But the memories of my mom shape-shifted into something else entirely for a period of time.
My first year as a teen and I was enough trouble to have to be shipped away to Prince George. That was also the year my mom started to drink.
I know she spent too many late nights stressing over whether I would be alive in the morning when I took off drinking. She would spend hours combing the streets to find me. She tried to be strong for me and broke under the weight of it all.
When I returned home from Prince George six months later my mom had disappeared.
Instead, I found an angry drunken woman living in her skin.
Us Native women know how to disappear. It’s an art, really—we can disappear even when we are right in front of your face. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes out of safety, sometimes by force, and sometimes because we can’t see ourselves anymore.
Most of the women in my family have battled with depression. Most of the women in my family have lost this battle at some point in their lives and vanished somewhere deep inside themselves.
This was Mom’s era of defeat.
My dad was absolutely consumed by work. His desire to give us what he never had took him completely away from us. Funny how that works. His presence in the household was a rare sight. Mom disappeared and Dad pulled a vanishing act. That separation only deepened the divide between my mother and sobriety. When he was home and she was drunk, which was often, she would follow him around the house screaming obscenities at him.
“Bastard,” she would yell. “You’re a fuckin’ bastard.”
My dad would cuss a few times back at her before I would hear the clinking of his keys and the slamming of the front door. I always wondered where he would go. I would wait to hear the door open again and to hear his voice calling us, so we could leave with him. But, he never did come back for us and it always hurt to be abandoned by him and left with my mom. I knew that sometimes he didn’t go anywhere. He just slept in the truck in the driveway. Even so, I still wanted him to take us away, even if it was just ten feet outside of the madhouse in which we lived back then.
My littlest brother would always be the one to de-escalate Mom and speak soothing words to her. I disliked her during those moments. It’s because I saw so much of myself and my inability to stay sober in her and her life. I think she saw the same in me and she damn well didn’t like it either. We were each other’s reflection of our own failures. So, when Dad left I became the target of the whisky death machine that controlled her. She would then follow me around the house and call me names until I locked myself in my room or my brother whisked her away.
My struggle wasn’t isolated.
I remember staying at a friend’s house one time and the same scenario broke out. Her father locked himself in the bathroom and I could hear her mom calling him a bastard while she pounded on the door. We snuck out of the house when they moved the argument downstairs. We put her little brother in the back of my mom’s car, which I had borrowed for the night. I was sixteen and finally had some freedom in the form of a licence. We all slept in my bed that night because my home, for once, was actually quiet.
The fighting and yelling seemed like normal behaviour among a lot of the Native friends I had. I didn’t have any white friends once I became a teenager, so I didn’t know what their homes were like. I had naïvely imagined that their homes were the kind that served cups of hot cocoa on the kind of days when you needed them. Their homes were the kind that had hot water year-round and a working furnace. In these homes they probably had a family game night where the mom made turnovers or popovers, or whatever shit white people make for their kids. The dad would chuckle, “You little rascal,” while he messed up his son’s hair with his hand. The dad would let his son win the board game. In my mind, white homes had the monopoly on family happiness.
One time I came home from school at lunch to find her drunk and as angry as a woman scorned ten times over. She was eating the hamburgers she had made the night before without a bun, and with the kitchen island between us I was feeling pretty tough.
“Just go to bed,” I spat my words at her.
“Don’t tell me what the fuck to do! I’m your mother,” she yelled as she swayed and took another bite of her hamburger.
“Then act like it,” I muttered.
Her eyes went large and she threw the half-eaten hamburger at my head and I had to laugh because a hamburger was being thrown at my head. My laughter set her off. Rage filled her eyes.
“Do you think this is fuckin’ funny?” she questioned. Her words were pointed but her legs were wobbly as she moved toward me. I was instantly scared and regretted saying anything.
My mom is not a woman to be fucked with. Drunk or not. She could clean the floor with any man’s head if she wanted. I grabbed the house phone off the counter and headed down the hallway. I heard her heavy footsteps coming behind me, so I moved quickly until I reached the bathroom. I locked the door behind me, pulled out all of the drawers in front of the door, and called my dad. She stood on the other side of the door banging on it and taunting me.
“Go ahead, you big fuckin’ baby. Call your dad. Cry, cry, cry.”
My dad did not answer.
I sat in the bathroom until I couldn’t hear her stumbling around the house anymore. Then I made my escape. I walked to my auntie’s, the winter air biting my cheeks as tears rolled down.
Liquor seeped into every aspect of our family’s lives.
Before Mom started drinking, she was damned near a saint. She was a woman devoted to her family who went the extra mile in church and for others. She made the best apple pies for miles in any direction. No one had seen it coming. I guess no one ever does.
My cousin on my dad’s side once made the remark, “It’s funny how Helen grew up going to church and we didn’t. But she’s the one who turned out to be the alcoholic.”
Estranged cousin irony points: 1.
Another irony? Dad was a preacher on the odd Sunday when there was a vacant pulpit. And if he wasn’t at the podium, he would testify to strangers on street corners. It earned me the nickname “the Rev’s Dev,” short for the Reverend’s Devil.
I was a living oxymoron.
It wasn’t the usual case of preacher’s daughter gone wild where the daughter was given no trust at all and finally grows a pair and rebels. I was given a lot of trust and I just chose to do shady things. And my mom? Well, her addiction swallowed her and drank her up until she was bone dry. My brothers and I would comb the house for her stash when she was passed out. We’d empty vodka bottles until only an inch of liquor remained and refill them with water.
“You think she’ll notice?” my youngest brother would ask nervously.
“Who cares!” my other brother would say as I’d screw the cap back on.
We would hide beer bottles and pray that she thought she drank it all the night before. Not that it mattered because she would just buy more. There was a limitless supply of liquor out there. I learned to hate the sound of clinking beer bottles and the song “Moonlight Eyes,” by Nazareth. It meant she was going on a bender.
To this day, there are ’80s songs that still trigger me.
Mother eventually became full of her grief. Too full. Her cup runneth over. She became suicidal.
My youngest brother would always try to calm her down and put her to bed. He would find the knife that she’d hidden under her pillow and put it away. Or he would grab the giant plastic bag full of pills she had amassed earlier and place them back in the medicine cabinet. He was a ten-year-old doing palliative care work. He did it all alone. I had my own issues with addiction and my other brother isolated himself.
He would plead with me not to react to her when she was inebriated and angry.
“Please, Helen,” he begged, his big brown eyes filled with tears. “Don’t say anything back. It’ll only make it worse.”
Sometimes I would bite my tongue just for him. Other times I would un-rein it and let it lash out at her, which resulted in more yelling and me locking myself in a room with her fists on the other side of the door. Really, though, I was so fucked up. I wanted her to be there for me, but I was never there to protect my brothers. We all absorbed the shocks of her alcoholic tremors in different ways. And when it shook the house, we fell divided.
There would be bouts of sobriety and all would be well in the house. There would be a surplus of money for groceries and Mom would make elaborate meals with desserts prepared from scratch. We ate at the kitchen table like a real family, like we had always done throughout our early childhood. My brothers would be happy, and I would be able to focus a little more clearly at school. We would all quietly wonder if this was a turning point and sometimes we dared to hope it was.
But the dread always crept back in.
The night would take on the ambience that we had just spent the last week trying to forget existed. Music would play, cigarette smoke would waft into our rooms, and she would cry if she couldn’t get angry at anyone. Mom cried a lot. I think she just wanted to be loved and to truly love herself. Sometimes an auntie or someone else would come over and eventually they would end up crying together. It was a 3:00 a.m. moonlit family revival where people got redeemed and cried the tears they couldn’t acknowledge when they were sober.
I was seventeen when I watched her being wheeled off on a stretcher.
I had to call an ambulance after finding her lying in her bed, more incoherent than usual. I scanned the room and noticed pill bottles that were tipped sideways and lay empty. She had swallowed them all. A rainbow of death. I sat beside her while I screamed for my dad. Her hands felt cold and damp like a winter-kissed window. Her lips blushed blue and grey. She said she could see her uncle who had passed away years before. He wanted her to go with him. Great-Grandpa was there too, she said. She was talking to them.
“I’m ready to leave,” she said, her eyes looking past me.
“Mama!” I yelled through my tears as I shook her. “Mama. Stay with me. Stay with me please.”
“Uncle. Grandpa.”
“Nooooo!” I screamed as I gripped her hand. “No, no, no. Look at me, Mama. Look at me! You need to stay here. Stay with us, Mama.”
Her eyes would slowly close and I would shake her till they opened again. Her body was so cold.
“You can’t take her. You. Can’t.” I choked the words out as I held onto my mother and cried. I could barely catch my breath as my anxiety rose higher and higher. It couldn’t end like this.
“No, no, no, no . . .” I repeated over and over.
Dad was beside me yelling words at her, trying to get her to stay up. Finally, the medics arrived and I left the room while they hauled her out.
My dad and I stood at the window as the ambulance drove away. The sun was just rising. The world was quiet. And the silence that was left in its wake? It was deafening.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” my dad whispered.
That was years ago. And these memories lifted my own fog.
And, as I stared back toward the hotel mirror, I could see myself now. I shook my head. No. I could never commit suicide. I know the mess it leaves behind.
Editor’s note: excerpted from In My Own Moccasins, forthcoming from the University of Regina Press, August 2019. Helen Knott will join us at the Wild Writers Festival, the first weekend in November, to speak about her work.
Photo by Brandon Erlinger-Ford on Unsplash
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