I reach for her, to hug her, to hold her, to stop myself from seeing or hearing or feeling any more of the sorrow I should have seen and heard and felt with her all along. Allie recoils.

“So this is what I get” — her voice swells in volume and intensity, as the bruise on her soul deepens and darkens and spawns a new sea of cold blue anguish — “for trusting Char MacIsaac. It’s like karma, right? I faked wanting to die, thinking it would help me get on with my life, and now I still can’t get on with my life and I actually wish I was dead. Meanwhile, Char, Queen of Conniving, doesn’t have to grow up. Screwing the same guy as your friend, Char? Oh well, just pretend you’re helping her but wreck her life instead! Got a kid? No worries. You just keep being your crazy little self, Char! Somebody else will deal with it. Then there’s good old responsible, sane Allie! Her mother’s dead and she’s stuck out in the woods, like Snow Fucking White in a house full of lazy entitled man-babies who can’t even put down the toilet seat!”

She is yelling now. A nurse comes in, armed with a compassionate smile and a syringe full of calm. Allie juts out her arm with no hesitation. The landscape of pain around her dissolves in tandem with the rate of the nurse’s injection into her rigid arm. A soft blue halo materializes, gently undulating around her head as she dutifully slides beneath the blanket and turns her face to the wall. The nurse assures me she will be fine. I tell the nurse they’d be wise to make sure she can’t get her hands on anything sharp, no matter how fine they think she’ll be.

As I make my way to the door, I hear Allie call out over her chemically unburdened shoulder, “Hey Crow, wanna know what Dad’s last words to me were, while they were putting me in the ambulance?” Her voice takes on a deep tone of paternal concern, each word spoken with weight and bewilderment: “‘Uh, Allie, sweetie? Do you think that turkey is done yet?’”

On Boxing Day, Mama gets called into work because half the girls at the Gale called in sick. I sprawl out on the couch, eating leftover broc-o-glop and watching Golden Girls reruns. Until Peggy shows up to drop off a couple of gifts, keen to tell me how she heard that Chrissy and Willy showed up together for midnight Mass at St. Pius’ on Christmas Eve. And that Shirl Short saw Chrissy Parsons buy two tickets to the New Year’s Eve dance at the KoC, them control-top pantyhose, those stick on bra-cup things that are supposed to make your boobs look perkier, massage oil, and — ahem — cinnamon-flavoured intimate lubricant, down at the drugstore.

I don’t even have the energy to tell Peggy to fuck off, let alone absorb what the local trash talkers say regarding the movements of my former booty call and his newly knocked up rehab project. I have better things to concern myself with. Like stalking people I don’t give a shit about on Facebook. Watching funny cat videos. Doing online quizzes and pretending that they give me deep insight into my shallow self. What Star Wars character are you? Yoda. What Harry Potter character are you? Voldemort. What food are you? Pizza. What decade do you belong in? The ’00s. What arbitrary thing are you? A hill of beans.