Our Precious Bond

Our Precious Bond

Marlene F Cheng

Copyright 2017 by Marlene F Cheng

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 by Marlene F Cheng.

Cover Design is by Danny Cheng

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017914499

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5434-5251-8

Softcover 978-1-5434-5252-5

eBook 978-1-5434-5253-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For my mother

Marjorie Routley Gladdish Milne

1913–1990

She held fast all family bonds and strung unbreakable strings to many, many friends while she raised her children on the farm in rural Manitoba and added even more when she moved to the big town of Fruitvale, British Columbia. She was truly a remarkable human being.

Contents

Our Precious Bond

Thanks

About the Author

Our Precious Bond

Y

To emergency, I was taken. A strange-looking sight, for sure. I arrived, strapped on a gurney, with my injured leg elevated on a board. My skate, a razor-sharp weapon, was sticking up in the air, threatening anyone in the way. You would think that I had suffered a heart attack and was about to take my last breath the way the attendants whipped me through the doors and got me signed in.

You see, when elite hockey players get hurt, trainers and medical personnel take over, and we are given the royal treatment. No waiting in line, no delays. It hinges on the ridiculous, the special treatment we get. Jumping cues for imaging, when some patient with a life-threatening illness has been waiting for months, is just one of the more obvious embarrassments.

I wasn’t even oriented to the sanitized air when I was assured that the emergency doctor would be with me—in a moment.

She was treating a patient on the other side of the room. The curtains were open. She was dressed in scrubs, not sexy or even attractive, yet I couldn’t help staring. Her movements as she used a stethoscope to listen to the patient’s chest, closed his shirt, and assisted him back down in the bed seemed perfectly in sync with the soundless rhythm of the room. The power of her presence captured my full attention. I couldn’t look away. She looked delicate but strong.

Why was I thinking such fancy thoughts? I knew I had a leg injury. I must have also hit my head. A nasty concussion, for sure. She was just another chick, probably only a student standing in for the real doctor.

She seemed to sense my attention, waited, and then lifted her head and returned my gaze with a confident smile and immediately turned back to what she was doing. I was used to idolizing fans and young women flirting outrageously, but there was nothing of that in her look. She was doing her job, earning her living, being professional.

I turned to ask my attendant why I still had to have my skate on, and just at that moment, she had crossed the room and was asking me my name. All she heard was my why, and with quick wit, she answered, "Well then, Mr. Y it is. I have had many Xs for patients, but you’re my first Y. By the way, Mr. Y, did you miss the sign? There is ‘no skating’ on this floor."

I can assure you, Dr.—and I turned to read her ID pin but could only see the first initial—G., my skates haven’t been within three feet of your precious floor, I answered, not meaning to be as cheeky as it sounded. And I felt an embarrassing flush start up my neck.

Touché was her comeback, and then she was concentrating on my leg.

The calmness of her took over, and I felt pleasure in giving my body for examination. I succumbed to her touch, and then only too soon, they whisked me off for imaging.

When I was drafted into the NHL, my mormor, mother’s mother, sent me a letter. I keep it with me and read it when I think I need a reminder.

Don’t forget where you came from. We Swedes are egalitarian by nature. Don’t go getting any high-hatted ideas that you are better than anyone else. Many people made a lot of sacrifices to get you where you are, none more than your wife and your two little girls, not to mention all the years of support you got from your parents and both sets of grandparents.

I know that everything is up in the air at the moment, so uncertain, but if it looks like you’re going to be in North America for the long term, then you and Karin must consider making your home there. A hockey marriage is already very difficult, but to live on different continents would be disastrous.

Time enough to figure those things out.

For now, keep well and don’t forget your manners, especially if you are invited to someone’s home. Don’t be late and take a small gift. Chocolates or a small bouquet would be nice.

And Mormor always adds, lagom, meaning everything in moderation. This advice makes me smile. I can hear her voice over the miles, just as clearly as I had heard it all my growing-up years. Secular practicality well steeped in Lutheran values.

When I got home from the hospital, my leg in a cast, I took out Mormor’s letters. I needed to touch home base. I longed to hear her voice. I definitely needed some guidance.

Geneva

I had been forewarned about which injured hockey player was on his way and had steeled myself not to fall prey to the gilded ebullience that surrounded a giant hockey hero and his entourage, not to mention their pushy arrogance vying for attention.

So I was aware of his presence the moment they wheeled him in, and kept myself calm by staying with another patient—longer than what was really necessary.

I was also sensitive to a certain vibration circling the room as if a wind had blown in with him and hadn’t yet settled.

After I had felt his eyes on me for some time, I slowly looked up and simply stared back unflinchingly and, to ground myself, turned back to my patient for a few extra minutes before crossing the floor to examine the celebrity.

It wasn’t my usual style of bedside manner, and I was shocked at how I flirted; however, all my bravado didn’t help disarm the butterflies, nor did it strengthen my knees, but once I put my hands on his injured leg, calmness took over.

When he was off for imaging, I went to the cafeteria for a cup of tea, something with a little spice.

As I sat there, I thought of my sister. We had, many times over, discussed professional sports and, in particular, the mad hockey culture that exists in our city.

The fervent fans bestow upon the players a celebrity status and reward them for bad behavior, clapping wildly whenever they fight. We thought that this was bound to stifle the moral development in many of these very young men who already had an inflated masculinity and lived off the adrenaline high of danger.

And mainly because we were jealous, we constantly lamented the many years and the zillion bucks we had spent getting an education and how little we got paid in comparison to these sports jocks.

However, times were changing. A few players had played varsity hockey and had earned their degrees. Some were well-spoken, and most were eloquent ambassadors for the local charities that the team so generously supported. Kirk McLean, the longtime Canuck’s goalie, came to mind. But mostly we still labeled them studs, who would have no idea what a mutually respecting relationship was, and we agreed that neither of us was in the market to test out our theories.

I thought I might tell V., my sister, about how patient Y had affected me tonight but, in the end, decided against it. She never minces her words. She would call me a puck bunny. No doubt about it.

Venice

I had read somewhere that life satisfaction, the cognitive rating of your life, was one component to a feeling of well-being.

Giving it much thought, I decided that I was very satisfied with my life. I had earned my BA and my LLB (law degree). If I wanted to serve people, law was, for me, the ultimate service industry.

After law school, being very proactive and aggressive, I had obtained an articling pupilage with the provincial department of justice, for which I would always be thankful. It was the best place for me to come face-to-face with the hard-core business of law. The department provided a rotational system. I spent time in civil, criminal, and family law as well as in appeals. The crown attorneys gave weekly seminars on criminal law, which I wouldn’t miss for anything. My dream was to become a defense attorney. And the department made skills training—in all the disciplines—their priority. Thank goodness, it was what helped when it came to the bar exams.

During my articling, I was impressed by the firm H, H, and E and took every opportunity to talk to their lawyers—at social events, conventions, or just around the courthouse. And now what is there not to be satisfied with? I am an associate at the firm, and by working hard and diligently, most often overworked and frayed, I have been able to challenge the complainant’s evidence and bring success to a few of my own clients—successfully resolved, charges dropped, stay of proceedings, no criminal record, case closed. Who knows, maybe one day the firm will make me a partner. H, H, E, and O has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?

I often wonder if I achieved what I have because I had to struggle, had to find a way around adversity to succeed. Or maybe it was because as far back as I can remember, I had an unrelenting passion to be a lawyer. I really don’t know, but what I’m totally certain of is if it weren’t for G., none of it would have happened.

Geneva

I had, for all intents and purposes, put the case of patient Y behind me. Then one evening, probably a couple of weeks after he had been in emergency, the admissions desk clerk handed me a letter.

He was charmingly persistent, she said teasingly, but I held fast to the rules and didn’t give out your phone number. I don’t think that he even knows your last name. He called you Dr. G., but I was on duty the night he came in, and I remembered that you attended to him . . . the hockey player.

I thought that she was expecting, or at least hoping, that I would open the letter and share the contents, but I simply said, Thank you, and put the envelope in my pocket. I couldn’t imagine what he might want to say and decided to wait for my break, to have some privacy, to find out.

When I opened the envelope, I found two hockey tickets and a note that read,

The security surrounding you in this hospital is as tight as the security at my hotel. I just wanted to say thank you for the excellent treatment you gave me on my visit here, but you weren’t on duty, and I was refused your phone number. If you go to the game, meet me at your exit gate after the first period so I can offer my thanks in person, or if hockey isn’t your thing, call me at the Vancouver Hotel. The code to get through to my room is 3336. That’s security for you.

P.S. Don’t fear for your floors. My skate wouldn’t fit over my cast.

Y

I thought about it for a few minutes and then tore up the note and dropped it in the waste can.

For some reason, I kept the tickets. I might give them to someone. Outrageously expensive, I thought, outrageous on all accounts.

I wondered whether I should tell my sister about Y. She wouldn’t be able to contain herself. At my expense, she would kill herself laughing.

Although we still live together in the same two-bedroom apartment that our parents bought for us, when we left home in the valley and moved into the city to go to university, I see very little of my sister these days. I suppose that it’s a natural progression and something to be expected.

We had often joked about who would be the first to find someone else that they preferred living with. Neither of us has found that other person yet, but our careers and busy lives have started to get between the closeness we shared over the years.

We are identical twins. Our father claimed that there is no way could we be identical because I was born with a clubfoot and Venice was perfect.

Apparently, I was tested thoroughly, and no syndrome or any genetic link was identified. My diagnosis was idiopathic postural clubfoot. This meant cause is unknown, probably the result of overcrowded conditions in the womb.

Yet our father always insisted that we were not identical. Geneva is passive, he would say. Venice has an attitude.

Our different dispositions may have had more to do with what happened to us after our birth than from anything that we inherited. Maybe Venice didn’t feel the same kind of love that was lavished on me by Grandma, and she found it necessary to act out the need for attention. Therefore, she got Father’s attitude label.

You see, after our birth, Mother suffered from a severe postpartum illness. Apparently, it wasn’t just the new baby blues but a deep and ongoing depression, and she was unable to make the many trips into the city, to children’s hospital, for my treatments.

My clubfoot was flexible, and the doctors wanted immediate intervention with positioning, casting, and bracing to bring my right foot into normal position. This meant ongoing visits with recasting as I grew.

Our grandparents, Father’s mom and dad, lived on the same farm property as our parents. Grandma decided that she would look after me in her house and make the trips to the doctor with my father. A nanny/housekeeper was hired to help with Venice as Mother had to spend most of her time in bed. Mother’s overwhelming fatigue and mood swings persisted, so the nanny was kept on indefinitely, and I lived with my grandparents.

One day when we were not much over two years of age, Venice, on her own, made her way from her house to Grandma’s. She went along the path that wound through a cranberry patch down a hill to the creek. She had to cross over the bridge and go up the hill on the other side, following a path through another cranberry patch to get there. Needless to say, Grandma was shocked when she answered a knocking at her door and found little Venice standing there—alone.

After Venice’s first visit, she was allowed to come often on her own but was watched over by the nanny, standing on the clothesline bench so she could see over the bushes, and Grandma, waving and shouting across the divide.

Grandma would have a tea party for us, and then we would play.

Grandma, many times over the years, talked about how she was sorry that she hadn’t found time earlier to bring the twins together to play. They finally had time to bond, she would say. And imagine, Venice took it into her own hands to make it happen. That girl knows what she wants, and no one is going to stop her from getting it.

In the afternoon, she read to us, and Venice, much to everyone’s surprise, memorized what she heard. She could repeat, almost verbatim, many, many children’s stories. She loved to tell the story of the big bad wolf, even adding her own twist. She would make me choose the brick house, and she would be in the straw one. She took great delight in having the wolf blow her house to pieces so that she could run, frightened to death, up to my safe place.

When we were older, at the age when children like to have a tree house or some structure away from the parents, we built two houses in the old orchard down by the creek. One was made from bales of hay and the other from some old bricks that we found at the back of the barn.

As is true for most families, I suppose, there are childhood stories that are repeated over and over through time until they become a part of family history—the stories they eat with every get-together meal. Father’s repeat story was how Venice, at a very young age, learned to take off my brace and pull me up on my feet, helping me walk. Venice was persistent and very patient with Geneva, he would claim, until they got tired, and then they both got down on their hands and knees and played that way.

Every time Father told that story, I was reminded how it wasn’t from lack of determination on Venice’s part that I didn’t become a ballerina. After our ballet classes, she would help me practice and practice, sometimes holding my foot in position until I got a movement correct.

My right foot was smaller than my left, and my right leg was thin and short, but that didn’t stop me from dreaming. My sole ambition was to be a ballerina. With special lifts in my slipper and with Venice’s constant encouragement, I couldn’t help but succeed.

However, somewhere along the way, reality struck, and we hung up our slippers for other pursuits. If I remember correctly, it was about that time that we were given horseback riding lessons and were encouraged in that direction. Venice flourished; me, not so much, but that’s another story, and I get ahead of myself.

I just don’t want to concentrate on our physical development, or my lack thereof, but I also want to give some insight into how things went for us at school, academically.

When we were in kindergarten and learning the alphabet and a few words by sight, Venice was by far at the head of the class. She surprised the teacher when she belted out all the words to O Canada at the school assembly.

And Venice was determined to teach me everything that she so easily memorized. Even after lights-out, she would have me reciting the alphabet or trying to count to one hundred. She would say twenty, and then I would rattle off twenty-one, etc., until she would have to say thirty and on and on.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I moved back into our parents’ house and Venice and I shared a room.

Our mother, one day, maybe because it was spring or maybe because she was drawn by the wafts of cumin, cardamom, and lemon grass coming from the kitchen—the nanny, who, by the way, was called Sui Yee, had slowly spiced up the usual household’s menu of bland meat and boiled potatoes—simply got out of bed and picked up her life where she had left it after our birth. Not just picked it up, but she also now took it on with a flurry as if to make up for lost time. And because she could now manage, I left Grandma’s house and was brought home.

Mother and Sui Yee, tired of putting up with all the mud bees building nests in the eaves, decided to do something about the muddy yard that surrounded the house. They planted a backdoor herb garden and had the handyman build a walkway covered by repeating trellises, over which they trained heritage roses, and they laid stepping-stones everywhere, surrounding them with wooly thyme. Venice and I ran over the thyme so often in bare feet I’m sure the smell penetrated our soles and still cushions our hearts.

Mom learned to drive, and she and Sui Yee would pack a picnic lunch, and off we’d go exploring, by way of the Albion Ferry over the Fraser River, to visit the old fort at Langley, even all the way past Chilliwack, to eat under the view of Bridal Falls.

It didn’t seem to be much of an adjustment for me to move back into our parents’ house. The entire family had always shared the evening meal at either one of the houses. If Sui Yee was doing the cooking, Grandma, carrying her basket and with me in tow, would stop by at the vegetable garden and pull some carrots or pick a few peas or beans. Or she might chop the head off a cauliflower. I helped her put everything into her basket, and we took them to Sui Yee.

Then after I moved back home, Venice and I would spot Grandma coming and race down to meet her. She let us carry the basket, each holding a handle and swinging it sky-high between us. She taught us to rub the soil from the newly pulled carrots, and we ate them raw, hanging on to the curly tops.

Venice and I shared a room at the top of the stairs. It was overheated in the oven-hot days of summer and chilly in the winter. Our parents left the door at the bottom of the stairs open so the heat from the kitchen could rise. The ceiling was slanted, giving the space a womb-like coziness. That room became our sanctuary. It was home to our Barbie dolls and our books; it was where we studied and made secret plans. It was there that we finally, after a babyhood of separation, bonded completely.

Although Venice had been the star pupil in kindergarten, when we were in the first grade and were being taught to read by phonics, she struggled. She could read the words that she had memorized, but she couldn’t sound out a word. The whole concept was confusing for her. She was very good at arithmetic but had trouble reading the written instructions.

Even at that young age, we knew that we had to do something about Venice’s problem. We asked to bring home our workbooks and every available reading book.

It was now my turn to help.

She read very slowly, with me helping to sound out the unknown words, and by the time she got to the end of a sentence, she had lost its meaning. We went through the process over and over.

She became a good listener, and even her already very good memorizing ability improved.

In the end, her sounding-out ability didn’t amount to much, but she had memorized a huge number of words by sight. Her vocabulary was astonishing. And she could somehow, by deduction, after repeated exposure, determine what was required by the arithmetic questions.

Reading was always difficult for Venice, and memorizing, especially all those senseless dates in history class, was a struggle for me, but by helping each other, we managed to get through school with good enough grades.

Venice loved drama. She went from Sour Sauce to Drama Queen in Grandpa’s eyes after he had watched one of her plays. She particularly enjoyed Shakespeare. Oration was her forte. Needless to say, she memorized everyone’s part and often was a prompter.

To be with her, I volunteered to do the makeup. I had enjoyed doing makeup during our ballet days, and my enthusiasm, which was probably greater than my technique, was appreciated.

Fortunately, we both took our studies seriously, and I can’t remember many school nights, especially in high school, that we didn’t spend on the floor of our room, doing some kind of school project or helping each other study or just talking about life.

Not much of the hippie, flower children, free love, or feminist movements made its way to our isolated rural living in the Fraser Valley, and our parents and grandparents on both sides were hardworking farm people, and they had strict secular values that were well intertwined with those of the Lutheran Church.

I want to interject here and tell you that it was during high school that somehow Venice became V., and I became G.

Our isolation and our upbringing notwithstanding, our names got shortened, and we became implacable feminists.

By that, we meant that we were entitled to the same opportunities as men, to study and work in any field that we desired.

We were not going to play any passive role as females were still expected to do.

We were not going to be shackled by the limitations society placed on the female sex. We abhorred the social hypocrisy that said, What was good for the gander was not right for the goose.

Even if we had to live on the edge of society’s and, most particularly, our family’s disapproval, we would live in with our boyfriends, have babies out of wedlock, and be single parents, even if it meant going through that weird thing called artificial insemination, if we chose.

Artificial insemination, indeed! That’s how they breed horses, isn’t it?

What bravado from two rather shy teenagers who had few boyfriends, most of whom were shared, and would be soon off to university—still virgins. And as far as our parents were concerned, virgins we would stay until some nice boy asked our father for our unblemished hand in marriage.

And V. and I spoke often of the straw house and the brick house of our younger years and wondered out loud if they might be metaphors for how our lives would turn out.

Venice

G. and I helped each other get through high school, and we continued to help each other at university.

Social sciences were usually high on a prelaw student’s choice of subjects, but good marks with no strictly required subjects were the prerequisite. Forget the social sciences; they required too much reading. I would take courses that I could excel in.

And for G., premed had a number of science requirements.

We decided to take as many of the same subjects as possible, and in that way, we could help each other. For instance, we both took English for the first three years. G. read out loud to me all the required reading. I listened and remembered. I read all the Coles Notes. That was the most I could get through.

In all the courses that we took, we collected old exams from previous years and discussed the questions over and over. Any questions that we knew were for certain, I wrote out answers and memorized what I had written.

And as for the sciences, I had G. repeating formulas, theorems, chemical compositions, life cycles, etc., ad nauseam. She never counted sheep; she fell asleep repeating the Krebs cycle.

And during summer breaks, we went to secondhand stores and bought the books required for the next year’s studies. We were required to spend some time at home in the valley, but we spent most of our holiday on our living room floor in the apartment, getting a head start on the coming year, or we went to Kit’s Beach, blanket, towels, and beach bag of books in tow.

What nerds, you might say, but we were determined to do whatever it took. We had set our sights on getting accepted into professional schools.

Y

I hadn’t heard from G. Even though I