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Chapter 10: Lou
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Break, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Resilience
Racism and Prejudice
Community and Family
Female Solidarity
Inherited Trauma
Summary
Analysis
Emily’s hospital room is packed with family and hospital staff, and Cheryl starts to feel gross and queasy from last night’s drinking. Emily is asleep, hooked up to an IV. Pete is sitting in a chair beside Paul. Lou rushes in, looking horribly tired. Cheryl’s thoughts drift to the dream she’d been having before Pete’s phone call woke her. In the dream, Cheryl was with Lou back at Joe’s house in the bush. Then Lou turned into Rain, and then she morphed into a stranger. Cheryl tried to call out to the stranger, but she didn’t know which name to shout. The strange woman pleaded with Cheryl to hurry up. Then Cheryl awoke.
Readers can’t know the exact meaning of Cheryl’s rather opaque dream, but it at least points to how often Cheryl thinks about her family: even in sleep, her family is on her mind. There is an ominous quality to the dream, with Cheryl trying and failing to call out to Lou, then Rain, then the unnamed stranger. It’s hard to say for sure what this means, but it perhaps conveys Cheryl’s frustration at wanting but being able to help the various women in her life.
Active
Themes
Back in the present, two police officers enter the hospital room. One is an older White man (Christie), and the other looks to be Métis (Tommy). The Métis officer asks the family if they noticed anything strange about Emily’s behavior earlier that night. Identifying Paul as the mother, he asks if she knew where Emily was last night. Paul, in a terse voice, retorts that Emily was sleeping over at her friend Zegwan’s (Ziggy) house. “She’s a good girl,” she adds. The officers asks some more questions, and then they leave.
Paul’s clarification that Emily is “a good girl” reads as defensive. This suggests that she expects, perhaps from personal experience, that the officers will question her capabilities as a mother. The subtext here is that the officers are biased against Paul due to her Indigenous background, her economic class, the fact that she is a single mother, or perhaps some combination of the three.
Active
Themes
The afternoon drags on slowly. Cheryl still hasn’t been able to reach Rita. Pete has begun to pace again, so Cheryl suggests he and Paul go for a walk. Pete, sensing that Cheryl wants to talk alone with Lou, urges Paul to go for a stroll with him. Finally, at Kookom’s urging, Pauline agrees. Alone, Lou immediately voices that she suspects Pete. Cheryl is aghast—Pete is a good man. He’d never hurt Emily. “You have to trust someone, Louisa,” Lou, angry and unyielding, says nothing. Inwardly, Cheryl laments how cold and tough Lou has become—Rita has been that way for a long time. Cheryl knows they have to be that way—social workers have to assume the worst in people.
Cheryl dozes off and thinks about wolves. She decides to paint a wolf-skin coat around Emily’s shoulders in her portrait of her small, fragile granddaughter, “to keep her safe.” Wolves, Cheryl knows, “teach humility.” They remind us that “we are all in this together, all a part of the same whole.”
Active
Themes
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