December, 1937 - onwards


The thing Elizabeth Ford never told anyone – not even Jims – was how reassuring that great metal lung had been. Oh, it had been big, and noisy, and it had been hard to lie still, but she'd had a mirror to observe her world through, to break up the monotony of the ceiling cracks. She didn't tell anyone that, either, because Grandmother would only have compared it to The Lady of Shallot and Elizabeth Ford couldn't be doing with romanticised renditions of her time in the Charlottetown Hospital. So it had been dull, and the machine had been noisy, but oh, the relief of not having to try and breath! It was like a weight had been lifted off her little chest and handed over to the rattling, clicking, clanking machine. She had dreaded the doctor with the pocket watch, trying to make her breathe on her own. It was terrifying. Elizabeth had lived in dread that one day they'd wheel her out of the machine on her cool metal tray and her lungs would just give up on her. The pocket watch would tick away the seconds, one, two, three, four…and then suddenly, five, six, seven, her overworked lungs would fold up like Christ on the Cross and, as He was supposed to have done, nine, ten, give up the ghost. It is finished. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, etc, etc.

Only Elizabeth would probably never know, because in her imagination, her lungs would collapse, or burst or otherwise betray her and it would be like someone snapping their fingers. Click! Exit Elizabeth pursued by Death. Or led by him, maybe. That seemed more likely. Either way, it would be an instantaneous thing. No slow fading lights or lingering goodbyes. Click!

Only it hadn't worked like that, and gradually the seconds of the pocket watch had grown interminably longer, the doctor looking ever more pleased, and all the while Elizabeth's throat was getting tighter and tighter because the longer she was out of her lung the more likely it was she would really, truly die. Did no one understand? The pocket watch man was a doctor, for God's sake! Wasn't he meant to be in the business of knowing that she would die without her wonderful, rattling, clicking, clanking machine? Years later she would hear Marvelous Little Toy over the radio and conclude the man behind it had also lain in a lung, because how else could he have understood it so well? But that came later. Much later.

Presently she was installed once more in her little spare room at Ingleside, what had once been Miss Abby's room, counting ceiling cracks and trying not to panic because she was alone and there was nothing to breathe for her except her little lungs, and oh God, what would she do if they failed? She couldn't scream, because her throat wouldn't work and anyway, you couldn't scream without breath. And her hands were too clumsy, too much the ghost of what they had been, to ring the bell someone had thoughtfully left on the bedside table. She began to cry. Something warm and damp crept under the covers and for a sickening moment she thought she'd had an accident. But no, the warm dampness was nosing at her fingers. Dulce, Sissy thought in a burst of relief. Dulce had wormed her way under the log cabin quilt vintage the first Miss Abby, Grandfather Gil's mother, and was washing Elizabeth's fingers, not caring, or else not noticing that they weren't really functional fingers any more. They couldn't even muster up the dexterity to administer scratches. Dulce did not admonish her. She did not whimper the way the Grant dog would have if and when Elizabeth denied her attention; Dulce just wormed incrementally closer, so that eventually she was flush against Elizabeth's body, nose thrust deep under her elbow.

'You're Hector's dog,' said Elizabeth muzzily. Dulce snuffled, much to say, I thought you needed looking after more. Just this once. Elizabeth fell asleep like that, the dog warm against her, and dreamed of metal lungs. There was no click.


The other thing Elizabeth never said was how much the gift of the puzzle hurt. Worse even than Miss Abby's offering of dolls and cuddly toys. Dad hadn't meant it to, obviously, and Jims had probably left it out on the lap desk for her to combat the inertia he knew the dolls and cuddly toys would induce. Elizabeth appreciated it, really, she did. Her family knew her.

But that first morning with the puzzle…Elizabeth reached for it gratefully, sluggishly, her arms acting as if they were sleep-heavy, but worse. Someone – she suspected Jims – had anticipated the box would give her trouble and had thoughtfully removed the lid. All Elizabeth had to do was pick up the pieces and assemble the thing. Only it wouldn't assemble. Or she couldn't pick it up. Take your pick. She sat there for half an hour working mulishly at it, her fingers betraying her at every turn. Like this she might pick up a puzzle piece but then, just like that, it was in the box again. Maybe the pieces were made of soap. Or maybe her hands had fallen off while she'd been ill and been replaced with model ones, and no one had got round to telling her. Or maybe it was just that Elizabeth had lost her ability to construct a puzzle along with her hands and her working lungs. She shoved the puzzle off the lap desk, and then, for good measure, sent the lap desk after it. It all made for a very satisfying racket. Enough of one that no one would notice right away when she reached for one of Miss Abby's beloved, babyish dolls and cuddled it close, the better to cry into it. Somehow, that was worst of all.

Afterwards she lay on her back and counted ceiling cracks to forget about the puzzle's maliciousness and how probably, now they'd taken her beloved metal lung from her she would die in her sleep of asphyxiation. God, how had He done it, all alone up there on that terrible Cross? Elizabeth couldn't imagine it; He'd been older than her by lots, and still she kept thinking of all the things she hadn't got to do. Probably wouldn't do now that they all expected her to go on breathing the way she had before. And of course she wouldn't, all alone and left to breathe by herself, for herself.

Jims swept the puzzle pieces up uncomplaining. Deposited them back in their battered box. 'Sorry,' he said as the pieces pinged against each other in cardboard cascade, 'I didn't think. None of us did.'

Elizabeth became aware she was still cuddling the doll. It was damp with tears. The whole thing was mortifying. If she had to die without her lung – click! –why must it be like this, clutching a toy she didn't even much care for for comfort?

'May I?' said Jims, gesturing at the bed. Elizabeth only hummed, reasoning she should save her breath for the really important final conversations. Jims lay down beside her and got his arms around her, pulled her close. He didn't say her hands would come back, which was nice of him. Everyone else did, talked about how it would be slow-going but eventually she'd be able to do things with them again. Elizabeth was convinced it was an elaborate ruse. They could afford to tell her that since she'd have died of asphyxiation without her metal lung long before her hands were remotely recovered. And anyway, cousin Hector never got his legs back, did he?

'What can I do?' said Jims, his arms snug against her ribs, head resting lightly above hers.

Elizabeth seriously considered asking for her lung back. Maybe he could build her one. If anyone could, it would be Jims.

Maybe she did, or maybe Jims just heard the ratchetting of her breathing and got concerned. Elizabeth had this terrible feeling that just like her hands, and her lungs and her puzzle-building, she had also lost Jims's unconcern to polio. This seemed monstrously unfair, when you considered Jims hadn't even been sick. Whatever it was, she woke up to Grandfather Gil sitting by her bead and trying to offer reassurance about her recovery. Someone – Jims? – had replaced the artistic rendition of the Parisian café puzzle with one of the Canadian Rockies. Elizabeth forcibly levered the box open and commenced shuffling the pieces for the edges, if only to have something to focus on that was not her Grandfather. He meant well, of course, but he was only a country doctor at the end of the day. It wasn't his fault he didn't realise she would die without her metal lung. And anyway, thought Elizabeth viciously, Jims had never thought Grandfather infallible the way the rest of the world did. Elizabeth did not feel she had to have faith in things Jims did not. The edge pieces of the Canadian Rockies puzzle were as damnably elusive as the previous puzzle had been. She thought of The Scarlet Pimpernel, who was also elusive, and which book she had filched last summer from the aunts' library and read under the covers of a summer evening. She did not mention it because of said illicit acquisition and also because that way just invited idiotically poetic comparisons to Elizabeth's current life, which was dull and mundane and probably doomed to end prematurely anyway. It occurred to her she probably couldn't even turn pages, forget manage puzzle pieces. She didn't know for sure because she hadn't tried, but it tracked with her current circumstance. Elizabeth threw this puzzle on the floor too.

Grandad was asking something idiotic about hand exercises and was Elizabeth doing them. As if hand exercises would make a difference! As if it mattered, when probably her lungs would give out on her, anyway. Who knew? They might give out faster if she tried the exercises. Her throat began to close. Her chest hurt.

'We could do them together,' said Grandad, 'if that would help.'

Would he breathe for her, too, Elizabeth wondered? Pump air into her lungs like the metal lung had done? Her throat felt painfully conscripted. Black dots swam in front of her eyes.

She began to panic. Possibly she had been panicking for a while. She tried to explain about her hands and the lung and how she was dying and had to go back to Charlottetown Hospital.

'It doesn't work like that, angel,' Grandad said, infuriatingly calm. He began some elaborate explanation. All Elizabeth could think was that he couldn't even get the nickname right. Little Fords were cherubs, just ask Aunt Cass. So Elizabeth was a particularly vexed one presently. So nothing. She had a right to be, given how calmly oblivious Grandad appeared to be to her dying of asphyxiation.

'But I can't breathe!' she screamed at him to prove she could still do it. It hurt her throat. Her chest tightened still further and the dots in front of her eyes multiplied. So this was dying.


Elizabeth woke up. She woke up and the puzzle of the Canadian Rockies was gone. The lap-desk, great omnipresent thing that it was, was still on her lap. A tray of food had replaced the monstrosity of a puzzle. She thought of the parrots she and Jims had pieced together months ago and began to cry. Great, shuddering breaths that hurt her throat and made her gasp. Her poor, overwrought lungs weren't even up to a good cry. It was beyond infuriating.

Worse, whatever nitwit had assembled her tray had stuck a jelly on it. It wobbled defiantly in front of her, daring her to eat it. Mocking her. Elizabeth made a bid for the spoon, because she was hungry, when it came to the point, but it fell through her fingers. It was like trying to hold water. Cold, solid, metallic water. Laws of physics be damned. And whose stupid idea was jelly anyway? Why was it always jelly? Jellied salads, jellied sardines, jellied everything. Well, never eel. Apparently that was a bridge too far for everyone except Jims.

The spoon clattered traitorously onto the lap desk again and Elizabeth gave up on it. She gave up on manners too, and tried scrabbling at the stupid, wobbling jelly with her hands. That was even worse. She wondered idly what would happen if she threw the lot onto the floor. They would have to get angry with her then, surely. Take her seriously about how she would die for lack of breath. It might be worth the noise and the mess if it earned her that much.

But then there was a knock at the door and it was Jims's knock. He had evidently taken in the scene – Elizabeth poised ready to bring about culinary Armageddon – because he said, 'The doctor said to keep you on soft stuff. You're probably sick of it by now, are you?'

Elizabeth wondered if this was the same doctor that had sent her home and away from the safety of her metal lung to die of asphyxiation. Probably it was. She gave Jims what was left of her smile.

'Here,' he said, coming into the room, 'May I?'

'Do you like soft food?' asked Elizabeth, which made Jims laugh. She hadn't actually meant it to, but she didn't mind that it did. Maybe the polio hadn't completely killed Jims's unconcern after all, just paralysed it, like her hands but less severely.

'I've been known to,' he said and gave her a smile. 'Fancy sharing?'

Elizabeth didn't, not really. But Jims made such a comedic face over the awful jellied salad, that she let him do it. He alternated feeding her and eating spoonfuls himself, which should have made her feel more like a baby than ever, but didn't, because they were both laughing over the absurdity of the jellied salad in all its awful glory.

The laughing left Elizabeth short of breath, though, and it all rushed back about how she had to save her breath so that she wouldn't asphyxiate. She wondered again about asking Jims to build her that lung. Then she wouldn't have to ration breathing. But Jims was grinning and Elizabeth was enjoying him grinning. So she let him get out the Canadian Rockies puzzle again.

'I picked that one out,' he said.

'I like it better than the Parisian Café scene,' she said loyally. It was true, anyway. Art was all very sophisticated, Elizabeth was sure, and just the sort of thing Dad would want stamped on a puzzle, but it was all so much of a muchness to Elizabeth. But the Rockies…she liked their vast sprawling range and the sea of pinks, corals, even dark streaks of blue in the picture; she liked the challenge of the puzzle.

'I can't do the sticking-down thing,' she said to Jims, now.

'Yeah, well, I was never very good at the figuring out where they went thing,' said Jims. He wasn't even saying it to be nice, really. Jims was mostly good at puzzles because he turned his pieces six ways from Sunday until they found where they fit. Click! Elizabeth was good at it because they just made sense to her.

'I'll tell you where they go if you do the laying out,' she said. So they did. It helped pass the time, for one thing. And it helped stave off the deep-rooted conviction that she would probably choke on her own lungs, little malformed things they now were. Poor lungs. Poor hands. But at least Jims could be her hands, sometimes.


Of course, Elizabeth couldn't tell them any of that. Not about her hands, and how she missed them, which seemed anyway redundant. Not about how hideous the soft food was, since anyone with brains could see that. And most of all not about the great gnawing space inside her now she was out of the safe embrace of her metal lung. Rattle. Click. Clank. They thought she was all better, needed time, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Frankly, Elizabeth was too tired to explain. Besides, she needed to ration her breath.

So she told them instead that they weren't to call her Sissy any more. Explained that Sissy had quick hands and was good with puzzles and could feed herself without first contorting her hands in awful, parodic contortion of what hands should do, thanks ever so much, Dr. Meredith. (She did not put it quite like that. She really did like Dr. Meredith.) Sissy had been able to do more than twitch her fingers in imitation of petting her cat. (It was a lovely, stripey cat from Bay Silver, and the best Christmas gift Elizabeth had ever had; she felt sorry it had never known her when her hands were functional.) She was Elizabeth now, she made this very clear to them. It sounded all wrong, and half the time she forgot to answer to it, but she stuck to it doggedly anyway. Elizabeth had to have an elegant name to compensate for the fact she couldn't do anything with her hands, and because if she did die prematurely of asphyxiation (highly probable) it was a better name for a child saint. Much better than Sissy.

She sensed strongly that this hurt them. Not Mum so much, who if you believed family myth, had picked the name out months before she was born. But it stung Dad a little, she could tell.

'You're so grown-up,' he said, stroking her hair before bed. 'More seraph than cherub. All that refiner's fire, I guess.' He went on stroking her hair just the same, but Elizabeth could tell he was sad about it. His forehead was creased and his eyes were sort of funny. If Elizabeth didn't know better she'd suppose he was trying not to cry, only Dad never cried.

Grandmother – Mum's mum, that is – didn't even try not to look sad about it. She said all the same things as Dad about it, except with extra poetry and more fuss – and she forgot that Sissy had gone out of fashion more than he had. Most of Ingleside generally did, and it was vexing. How was she supposed to outlive the polio if, in addition to her lack of metal lung, they couldn't even get her name right? Not that they were related, not really. But Elizabeth couldn't shake the superstitious belief that if she could change her identity, become Elizabeth and not Sissy, she might survive sans lung after all. She did not say this.

She petted Mehitable the cat, and cried into her silvery fur. She tried to hug Hector for understanding – because he did– and fell over on the window seat instead. He got an arm clumsily around her and said that they should get Jims to build a machine that could send voice-messages back and forth so that they could keep in touch without her having to write.

He said, 'I don't understand why they can't get your name right, you know. You don't sound at all like Sissy. Completely different.' She cried over that, because it was true, and it was more true for being noticed, but also because Hector didn't try not to notice. The way he said it was neither good nor bad, it simply was.

She made an exception for Cass, because Aunt Cass had christened her Sissy, and had gone out of her way since the beginning of time to make it abundantly clear she didn't care what Sissy did or how she did it. Climb trees like the boys? Aunt Cass would spot her. Throw mud at tormenting brothers? Aunt Cass would join in. It seemed reasonable to suppose she wasn't going to change on Elizabeth now, just because of her twisted hands. So Elizabeth let her keep the pet name. But no one else. Not even Jims.

And Jims, to his credit, made the transition fastest, anyway. Sometimes she could see him opening his mouth to shape her Before Name, lips together for the syballant S. But then he'd catch himself in time and get it right, and all the while he went on feeding them both the terrible jellied stuff and doing the terrible, painful exercises alongside her. Sometimes she thought he got it wrong on purpose, to make her laugh. He shouldn't, because it completely undermined her careful ration of breath, but somehow, back in Toronto, she worried less about that.


Then it happened. Click! It wasn't in a snap of the fingers. It wasn't even anything to do with Elizabeth's overworked, underperforming lungs. It was a hazy Toronto afternoon in summer; the kind that had started this whole misadventure in the first place. The sun was streaming through the windows and drenching the sunroom, so that she and Jims had to squint at the cat-themed puzzle they were supposed to be attempting. It was a stupid, saccharine thing, and it featured any number of uncatlike cats. Beribboned cats, cats with bows, cats in baskets; cats dozing lazily under Christmas trees and placidly lapping milk from saucers. All of it was in bright, lurid colour and had been constructed by a man who had never met a cat. Mehitable and Elektra, the Maple St cats just wanted that on record. Elizabeth didn't blame them a jot.

And suddenly - Click! Elizabeth wasn't dead. She was even still breathing, because she could feel her lungs working away under her ribs. It was the clicking of a puzzle piece into place – just the one, but she had done it. She beamed at Jims, and then, ration of breath be damned, crowed triumphantly. She thought contentedly that even if it never happened again, or never for another year, that at least it was doable. It wasn't impossible. And if puzzles weren't theoretically impossible, then maybe it was just possible Sissy could survive without the metal lung after all.