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make any difference anyway. Wait, I thought, so Elf does believe in God?
    Where did she get all those pills? I asked my mom.
    Nobody knows, said my mom. Maybe she called 1-800-PILL. Who knows.
    My mother had found her unconscious at home in her bed and by the time Elf came to in the hospital I had already flown from Toronto and was standing next to her when she opened her eyes. She smiled slowly, fully, like a child comprehending the structure of a joke for the first time in her life. You’re here, she said, and told me we had to stop meeting like this. She introduced me in a formal way, like we were at a consulate dinner, to the nurses in the emergency ward and to the woman hired to sit beside her bed on a chair and watch her every move.
    This, she said, thrusting her chin out at me because her hands were tied down with cotton ribbons, is my younger sister, Yoyo.
    It’s Yolandi, I said. Hi. I shook the woman’s hand.
    She told me I looked like the older one. That happened all the time because Elf has curiously escaped the erosional side effects of living. Then Elf told me that she and the woman hired to watch her were having a discussion about Thomas Aquinas. Weren’t we? my sister said, smiling at the woman, who smiled grimly at me and shrugged. She wasn’t hired to make small talk about saints with suicide patients. Why Thomas Aquinas? I said, sitting down in the chair near to the woman. Elf strained to make eye contact with her, the guard, in the chair. There was still a lot of medication in her system, said the woman.
    But not quite enough, said Elf. I began to protest. I’m kidding, Swiv, she said. Good grief.
    When Elf fell asleep, I went out into the waiting room to find my mom. She was sitting next to a man with a black eye and reading a whodunit. I told her that Elf had been talking about Thomas Aquinas.
    Yes, said my mom, she was talking about him to me too. In her delirium she asked me if I’d “Thomas Aquinas her” and later I thought about it and I decided that she must have meant would I forgive her.
    And will you? I asked.
    That’s not the point, said my mom. She doesn’t need forgiving. It’s not a sin.
    But fifty billion people would disagree with you, I said.
    Let them, said my mom.
    That was three days ago. Since then my mother has shipped off to the Caribbean because Nic and I forced her to. All she had in her tiny suitcase were heart pills and whodunits. She keeps phoning from the ship to find out how Elf is. Yesterday she told me that a bartender on the ship had prayed for ourfamily in Spanish.
Dios, te proteja
. She told me to tell Elf that she had bought a CD for her from a guy on the street. A Colombian pianist. It might be a fake, I said. She told me she’d had a conversation with the captain of the ship about burials at sea. She told me she had been tossed out of bed on a stormy night but it hadn’t woken her up, that’s how tired she was. In the morning she woke up to discover that she had fallen and rolled all the way over to the balcony of her little cabin. I asked her if she could conceivably have rolled right off the balcony into the sea and she said no, even if she had wanted to the railings would have stopped her. And if the railings hadn’t stopped her she would only have fallen into one of the lifeboats hanging on the side of the ship. My mother was so confident of being rescued in life, one way or another or another.
    On my way out of the hospital I stopped at the front desk and asked Janice if it was true that Elf had fallen in the washroom that morning and Janice said that yes, she had. This was after she’d been moved from the emergency ward to the psych ward. They’d found her lying on the floor bleeding from her head and clutching her toothbrush in her fist the way you’d hold a paring knife if you were just about to plunge it into someone’s throat. Just then Janice had to go running off to restrain a patient who was using a pool cue to smash the television set in