by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North
Senior Editor
As the holidays approach, bringing with them colder weather, loneliness, and isolation for everyone—especially folks in need of mental health support or experiencing homelessness—the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS) “provides free, confidential, in-person mental health supports city-wide from mobile crisis worker teams. TCCS supports Toronto residents 16 years of age or older and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” All you need to do is dial 211. “The service provides a non-police-led, community-based, client-focused, and trauma-informed response to mental health crisis calls and wellness checks.”
Please engage with the TCCS website for further resources. Please also view this illustration for examples of support offered by TCSS. This story was inspired by the profound impact TCSS has on the Toronto Community, with the hope that services like this will continue to expand across Canada. Across Ontario, please see these resources if you need non-police-led mental health & social services.
Please note: this short story discusses suicide attempts, ideation, loss, and grief. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.
***
I turned eighteen last December 23rd, the same day Oscar Peterson died in 2007 and a week before my parents died in a house fire. It’s almost cruel that it wasn’t our house, mostly because I might have been home. Or maybe it feels premeditated that our home was still there for me to face.
My parents took the bus a few blocks over to feed a coworker’s cat, near where I was attending veterinary school classes that evening. They were going to meet me afterwards.
My parents were firefighters.
***
I’m sorry this is written between the lines of old sheet music. Jona gave it to me. I know it’s jazz music, but I’m not sure what song it is. It belonged to her partner.
I heard Jona in the back office of the laundromat—where I live and work now—over the rhythmic thumping of the machines. Jona’s red nails clicked the keys of her archaic typewriter with the fierceness of a novel’s climax, so she tells me. Jona immigrated from Jamaica decades ago and owns this vintage laundromat. She hasn’t changed it at all—the walls are still half wood panelled and half mint blue wallpaper; the machines are still orange; and the tile still looks like a cracked checkerboard. The washers and dryers stare each other down with their frontload-door-eyes, forever at the beginning or ending of a game.
Jona’s old, warm, and not always friendly, but unfailingly kind. And a bit too impatient. The place has been wreathed in cedar boughs and frankincense taper candles since early November.
“O’scary McCloud!”
If you’re wondering, yes, that is in fact my name. I’ve grown to appreciate it. My parents loved Oscar Peterson, and I love him because they did. When I was born, and the nurse asked about my name, my mom said, “Oh, scary!” It just stuck—a fun take on Oscar and the best example of what my parents were like. Later, when I was a toddler, and my mom was braiding my hair, she always said she was braiding pathways for sadness to leave my brain—like special scars for my fear to escape.
“How does your sadness escape, Mommy?”
“When Daddy and I put out fires, sweetheart. We help the hose with our tears.”
I’ve gone by Scar since. Jona’s just sort of formal, if you feel me? In the best way.
“Yes, Jona?” My voice rattled a bit—I was perched cross-legged on my favourite dryer in the back corner of the laundromat.
“Did you check again?”
I smiled involuntarily. “Yes, Jona, it’s still coming. Supposed to start at 4:06 p.m.”
“It’s about damn time. I’ve been waiting for snow for a month!”
I laughed so she could hear it as a response, but it was hollow. I ran my thumbs over the harmonica in my lap, and watched the clothes and bedding spin in the washers and dryers. I’d stopped feeling the waves of sadness coming. Now, it just leaked. Unlike my parents, I didn’t have a hose to channel it with. Had they been keeping this fire of pain at bay my whole life? What about their own? My nose started to run, but I didn’t snuff it back up; the air was thick with cotton and dryer sheet fibres. And I hoped, maybe, like blood from a shocked wound, it wouldn’t stop.
The laundromat was one of the few places that still took change without it being weird. I know that’s when I first fell in love with music—hearing the change jingle in my parents’ pockets when they tossed my small body in the air. I’ve felt small again since they died, like I could fit into those machines, barely, tumbling over on myself with nowhere to go, stuck behind a locked door I always have to pay to open, waiting for someone else’s cycle to finish.
***
They say you need a lot of water to put out a fire. So I jumped.
But last February’s water wasn’t cold enough, and the Humber bridge wasn’t high enough. The burn just seared, bone cold as I lay on the raw rocks, hoping my blood, too, would dry out.
But the cops found me partially conscious. Cuffed me. Asked invasive questions. Someone had called, saying I looked suspicious. They locked me in a burning yellow room in the hospital, so bright with artificial light I felt like I was looking directly into the sun. Or another irreversible fire. The cops hovered outside the door, pacing to some militant beat.
I’m not sure I consented to anything, if I’m honest. As a young Black man, I never would’ve called 911.
And I won’t now. I won’t call anyone.
There are 547 unread texts on my phone. All from my freshman year friends at veterinary school. I stopped opening them the day I left the program. I’m afraid even knowing what they’ve said is a burden for someone else to carry.
I let my head fall back against the corner, crashing into this dead White guy Jona likes. I think she likes him because his last name is Frost and he wrote about snow a few times. I’m positive she’s the only Canadian immigrant who worships winter. But there’s this poem she has framed, behind my head right now. It’s beautiful, stamped into my brain, and I can’t bear to look at it.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
I do have a few miles to go, but I’ve decided only as far as Biidaasige Park, where I could be both inside and outside the city at once without being found.
***
The temperature drops fast this time of year. I wait for the blizzard to build my disguise before I slip into it.
At 4:10 p.m., I yell, “Jona! I’m going to get a coffee. I’ll be back—”
“Don’t be too long, I need you to empty the coins from the machines tonight! We’re closed tomorrow!”
I didn’t answer, but I know she heard the front door chime like a bell tower as I left, ringing in the dark.
***
The park was desperately quiet—stopped. When I was a kid, any prolonged or encompassing quiet felt like noise. It felt misplaced. But now, I wanted it to absorb me. The snow kept falling as if God were pouring it. Wires, cables, and branches slumped under the weight. I lost the internet as I wound deeper into the woods, past picnic tables, ziplines, and buried plant spines. The snow hid whether I was on a trail or not, but I couldn’t see street lights anymore. I stopped when all I could smell was animal bodies and pine, and all I could taste was the metallic cold.
Jona had stitched an extra layer into my dad’s bunker jacket so I could wear it as a winter coat. I peeled it off and dropped it. In my t-shirt, I dropped my body beside it.
My parents had taught me how to cry, but I’d forgotten. Now, I wondered if sitting under a tree in a blizzard was another way to put out a fire.
At least it might be another way to drown.
I fell asleep.
***
My phone rang too soon and woke me. I couldn’t feel my fingers, and I don’t know how or why I answered. I was so cold.
“Scar? Where are you?”
“Jona?” My voice crumpled like tissue paper.
“Where are you?”
I was delirious, my brain churning the last thing I’d thought of—the poem. “It’s filling up fast. So lovely and dark and deep, Jona.”
“Scar, my dear, where are you? Can you get to my house?”
“There’s no house. I’m far from the village.”
“Not that far. Hold on to that harmonica.”
“But I can’t keep my promise.”
***
I wasn’t surprised that she hung up. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t think at all. I was so sleepy and somehow warm, my muscles fizzing. Honey light spilled across the woods. It hadn’t soaked through to me yet, but I could see it dripping in the air, dancing with the snow like golden ghosts. I was afraid of getting stuck to its strings—of getting pulled like a lasso, plucked like a guitar. My parents’ blonde wood guitar.
Somewhere at the edge of the park, the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS) dispatch team was afraid they wouldn’t find me in time. Jona had called 211. No police.
“On the Trail” by Oscar Peterson trickled weakly from my harmonica. I couldn’t feel my mouth or my fingers. I closed my eyes. Let me be music. The last sense I was conscious of was my hearing. And my ear training—my judge of trust—was tuned.
The last thing I heard was a disembodied voice, “Keep playing, honey! We hear you! We’re coming!”
***
As I started to warm up, I felt two bodies sitting on either side of me in the back of a truck, ready with hot water and food. Warm clothes and blankets were layered across my shoulders, and a sleeping bag was pulled up to my torso. The two bodies came into view—two Black women with kind eyes. They asked, tenderly, if I’d like to be connected with Afrocentric support, a shelter bed, or crisis services. They outlined every available option for me. In this little cut out of warmth, amid one of the darkest nights of the year, I felt safe enough to tell them where I needed to be.
The TCCS team drove me back to the laundromat, listening intently the whole way as I told them what had happened. They helped me climb the fire escape to my rented room, and told me they’d wait if I felt I still needed them. I thanked them and said I’d love a ride somewhere to be with a friend so I wouldn’t be alone. They smiled and waited for me to grab something I needed to bring with me.
***
A few minutes later, I knocked on Jona’s front door. It was bedazzled in dollar-store lights and decorations that illuminated the front stoop in pools of colour, as if the night had broken apart into the rainbow it’s made of. I turned and waved to the TCCS team, who waved back as they drove away.
I’ll never forget the look of relief on Jona’s face when she opened the door. Cooking, cigarette, and fire smoke spilled out with her, filling the space between us like suspended snow, melted into steam.
She grinned and said, shakily, “Well, thank you for stopping by my house, this snowy evening.”
I held out a cardboard storage box, filled with coins from the machines, and smiled. Surrounded by heat, I didn’t feel afraid—I didn’t feel the urge to put anything out.
Jona hugged me and kissed my cheeks now stained with tears.
“Oh, my dear.” Jona’s eyes scanned me before she added, “Your hair. No sir. Not in such beautiful frost and snow.”
I’d tied my hair into a large bun, now soaked and astray.
“Would you let me do your braids?”
I paused for a moment, but nodded. My heart remembered how to fight fires, and it had been a long time since I’d let my fear escape.
