Which was the “Darkie Doctor,” since she was a young, brown-skinned physician tending to a slew of culturally cloistered old white people. Now she’s the Island’s only neurologist. Everyone’s terrified she’ll up and leave like so many have, so she’s downright revered. People bring her homemade bread and fresh-from-the-boat lobster. She never pays to have her car fixed or her driveway plowed. But they don’t call her the Choco-Doc to her face, now do they? A name like that’s only said in whispers, the same way folks refer to a local farming family as the Chickenshits. Everybody calls them that, but nobody ever says it right to them.

You’d think my mother would know better. They still call her Scruffy Effie behind her back, and she pretends she doesn’t know. My nickname is not a whispered-behind-my-back kind of thing. I’m forever Crow because I stole a piece of gaudy costume jewellery from the Bargain Store when I was five and a half years old, and Peggy caught me. She thought it was a riot, and couldn’t wait to tell the world: “That one, snatching the shiny things. Just like a little crow!” The story fell away as I got older, but the name stuck. So I embraced it. Even though it’s a reminder that I’m part criminal.

Right now, I feel more like a complete lunatic, standing in the kitchen blubbering like a baby because my doctor thinks that having photogenic tumours that are “clinically interesting” and getting a dead guy’s appointment slot somehow constitutes “good news.”

Mama wraps her mighty arms around me, cradling the back of my head in her hand. My snot and tears stream all over her broad shoulder as she tries in vain to smooth my hair with her chapped and calloused palm, managing only to snag and pull it. I hug her back harder than I’ve ever hugged anyone before. It’s like hugging a rock. I hope she won’t crumble and crack under the weight of grief when I’m gone. Maybe my twenty-year absence was good practice for what’s to come.

“Listen, missy,” she says, giving my head another squeeze before prying herself out of my death grip, “you need to go down to The Wharf. Blow the stink off of you.” Then she dumps her floor-washing water down the kitchen sink, puts the kettle on to boil, and stomps off down the hall.

The housebound hermit stink that needs blowing off now first crept in while I was still in Toronto. In the days after my diagnosis, I called in sick to work. I was scared shitless to leave my condo in case I had another neurological malfunction in a sea of indifferent strangers. But when the pile of greasy food delivery containers and the stench of my own armpits reached a certain point, a different dread set in. What if something ruptured, or my brain short-circuited while I was all by myself, my door locked and my phone out of reach? What if it happened while I was all scuzzy and sad like this? Or while I was on the toilet? What if I just died alone there, and the cops only found my body because the dude next door complained about the smell?