Instead—what I do remember, sort of, is a dream. Very vivid, bright; all the details sharp enough to cut, as though they’re etched in pain. The kind of dream you have when you’re sick, or maybe drunk—hung over, sinuses alight and hammering hard, though you’re not quite awake enough yet to realize it. When you’re high on a fever, when everything shrinks and the world starts to blur, and you know just enough to understand that if you could only get your brain to work the way it should, you’d probably feel like you’re going to—
—like you want to—
—die.
Thinking: Hurts. Thinking: Just make it stop. Thinking: Oh God, please, I don’t know what I did. I’m sorry, so sorry. I’m so, I’m so, so, so . . .
(Sorry, sister)
(I tried, though. I did try. I warned you. But you, you simply wouldn’t)
(listen)
Safie’s notes say she was coming back from the maze when she saw me go down, right over Axel Beckenbauer’s shoulder—keeled over and fell with a flump, like a sack of wet laundry, right into Val Moraine’s arms. She took off running, and by the time she got there I was already having some kind of full-on attack; Moraine was yelling at Axel to get his belt off, stuff it between my teeth before I started choking, as Safie grabbed my phone from where it’d fallen, thankfully only slightly cracked across its face. Stabbing 911, she was redirected to the Quarry Argent Fire and Rescue dispatch centre:
DISPATCHER: 911, what’s your emergency?
CALLER: This is Safie Hewsen, calling from the Vinegar House—that’s Whitcomb Manor on Stow-apple Road, off RR #10. I’m on Val Moraine’s tour, and my friend is having a seizure or something. We need help!
DISPATCHER: Okay, Safie, we’re hooking you up with ambulance services now. Where are you, exactly? At the front of the house, the driveway?
CALLER: Uh, no. We came that way; the bus is still there, but we’re out back now, near the glass house, that old greenhouse. At the bottom of the field.
DISPATCHER: Near the maze with the garden?
CALLER: Just past it—oh man, she’s really not doing well. I think she’s throwing up. Should we try to move her?
DISPATCH: No! No, don’t do that. I got an ambulance on the way—they’re on speakerphone. It’s Mickey Vu and Loretta Coy. You can talk to them directly now, Safie.
PARAMEDIC: Safie, this is Mickey. Can you describe the symptoms?
CALLER: Val was there when it happened, not me. Val?
NEW CALLER: Yeah, okay—hey, Mickey, this is Val. She was taking a video in the greenhouse and then she just fell down, it was like—um, she dropped the phone she was using, put her hands up over her eyes like her head hurt, and she kind of yelled “ow,” stumbled back, and then she fell.
PARAMEDIC: On her head, she hit her head?
NEW CALLER: No, I mostly caught her, but there’s some blood still—ground out here’s all covered in stones and some of them are sharp. There’s glass, too, and metal, but I don’t think she got cut anywhere except the back of her head. We tried to put a belt in her mouth—
PARAMEDIC: Don’t do that either! Just hold off, okay? [To other paramedic] Tetanus shot, for sure. A seizure, you said?
NEW CALLER: I don’t know, I don’t. She’s just lying there trembling, you know? Shaking all over. Her friend’s with her. She’s like yelling, then making sounds like she wants to puke—
PARAMEDIC: Okay, Val, we can see the house now. We’re maybe two minutes away, so hold on, just make her comfortable.
NEW CALLER: Thank you, thank God. Thank you.
PARAMEDIC: What’s her name, the patient? You know her name?
NEW CALLER: Yeah, sure. Lois, from Toronto. Her name’s Lois Cairns.
According to Safie, the ambulance rushed me to the clinic in Chaste, because Coy and Vu judged it to be both marginally closer than Quarry Argent’s own and more easily accessible by transport back to Toronto, if necessary. Safie caught a ride back to the Quarry in Moraine’s bus with the rest of the tour, picked up the rental car we’d arrived in, and drove over, where she wound up playing middleman between the clinic staff and Simon, who she’d gotten hold of en route.
To Doctor Ustan Souk, who examined me first, I insisted I couldn’t say exactly what was going on just before my seizure, let alone what might have set it off—a viewpoint experts at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto later endorsed, claiming what Dr. Souk diagnosed as a “stroke-like episode” might well have left me with limited partial amnesia. But as Safie told me later, she didn’t believe this could be entirely true. Apparently, she’d heard me whispering something over and over while I lay there in Moraine’s grip, eyes wide and fixed and streaming tears:
“It was her. I saw her. Just like in the film.”
I saw.