Illustration by Drew Shannon
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There was an incessant ringing in my bedroom. It didn’t sound like my phone but I checked that anyway, in addition to the smoke alarm and the fridge, as it makes a wonky noise sometimes. I had been asleep and was now in that twilight land, on the threshold of both consciousness and unconsciousness but attached to neither. Naturally, I put my glasses on so I could hear better.
Eventually it dawned on me that my iPad was ringing; I did not know an iPad could make such a sound.
After some difficulty, I managed to turn the thing on, and then in front of my eyes was my 11-year-old grandson who had just left that morning for Mexico with his father, mother, aunt, two sisters and other grandparents. Did he miss me already? Highly unlikely.
I liked this new form of communication – Facebooking, facetiming, whatever it was called. The kid looked good. I did wonder why he was calling so late at night, but it was vacation after all.
“Nanny!” I hear him call, with a particular pitch to his voice. “Did you hear what happened?”
Perhaps he had gone deep-sea fishing and had caught a marlin.
Suddenly into the screen popped his other grandmother, who, I assumed, was there to greet me, as we get along famously. Incorrect.
She addressed our grandson with, “You are to tell Nanny nothing!”
There is nothing that intrigues a grandmother more than the idea of not being told something.
Before I could formulate a question, granddaughter No. 2 hopped in front of the screen. Now, she was only 7 at the time and I did wonder why no one had put her to bed.
She began to speak “But can I tell Nanny that Eve is in the hospi ... ?”
The machine went dead. With a bit of difficulty, I found the redial button but all that happened was that I got a message informing me that my call could not go forward at this time. It did not choose to mention what time would be good for it.
My granddaughter was referring to her older sister.
My adult children were on holiday. The last thing in the world that they need is their mother calling them. That said, I did have some concern about why Eve was in the hospi ... .
My daughter is known throughout the continent for never answering her phone. Indeed, she has been crystal clear about the fact that, in an emergency, call her husband, who answers in a distinctly timely fashion. But he is a son-in-law – and a terrific one at that – but I don’t want to bother him on vacation, especially as it now approached midnight. Mind you, I wanted to know what happened to Eve.
I call him. Perhaps his mother had warned him that I might do so, because he was cool, especially under the circumstances.
I learn that my three grandchildren were on a small sailboat with their grandfather and aunt, that a parasailing vessel behind them got its cord caught in the mast of their sailboat, causing the mast to fall on Eve, crushing her skull.
As we were speaking, she was having cranial surgery to remove a bone from her own head that had poked into her brain. He promised to call me when the surgery was over.
I was, all of a sudden, completely awake.
What is the mechanism that takes over and causes a thousand thoughts to come at once? I wish it were I who had been hit. I guess that is a classic grandmotherly reaction; I am already old and have lived some while she is just beginning.
On the other hand, the chances of my agreeing to set foot on a sailboat are worse than the chances of my daughter answering her phone. My daughter was, no doubt, wandering the halls of a hospital in Mexico, trying to be strong but dying inside.
And I could not wish away the pain.
I wondered how they chose seats in the boat, and which other child would wonder what if…
I knew that, as a family, they could never go back to before.
Throughout the night I did what any sensible person does when worried: I baked tons and tons of cookies. I sang a song from one of Eve’s favourite shows, Matilda, quite unconsciously I might add. “Even if you’re little, you can do a lot, you mustn’t let a little thing like, ‘little’ stop you.”
I saw Eve as an infant, looking the image of her father until she morphed into her mother.
As promised, my son-in-law called many hours later to assure me that Eve was out of surgery, if not quite out of danger.
The next morning, I played an odd game on the phone with one of my sons. He called, asking if I had heard anything from the family in Mexico. Not knowing what he knew, I said that they seemed to have arrived. He said good, and to let him know if I heard anything further. It turns out that he knew exactly what I knew but neither of us wanted to alarm the other.
In the months to come, there were other operations, she wore a hockey helmet everywhere (non-negotiable) and a cessation of a normal routine until that itself became the new routine. I never saw my daughter cry until she signed the discharge papers after the final surgery.
Eve didn’t let being little stop her.
She is fabulously well and travelled to Paris with her mother to celebrate her 10th birthday.
No day but today.
Virginia Fisher Yaffe lives in Montreal.