Away From Everywhere (28 page)

I remember, painfully, how on the second attempt to hear you in there, I heard a thumping noise and shrieked. I thought it was your heart beating, but it was my own. The nurse was right, it wasn't the typical swooshing noise I'd heard before.
The swooshing noise of an ultrasound for a healthy baby. That sound wasn't there at all, there was only the sound of my own broken heart thumping away. Do-dah, Do-dah, Do-dah, KKSSHHhhh…

Placental malfunction. I don't know. All those stupid medical terms I heard that day go way over my head. You'd have to ask your father what the real problem was termed. My placenta failed us, so it was technically my fault. It separated from me and you weren't getting enough blood, which meant nutrients and oxygen. How did my womb support two eight-pound girls, and not you? I carried you for seven months. I imagined you into existence. Then I had to explain to your sisters that they would never get to meet you. They never really understood and don't seem to remember. Maybe I am a little jealous.

I love Callie and Lucia, but you were going to be my little boy.
I had a few names ready and I was going to choose the one that came to me the moment our eyes met. I was going to give you the name I saw myself calling you for the rest of your life.
The name I would write on all your birthday cards and Christmas gifts, or what I'd yell when I scolded you for getting into trouble at school.

During the seven months we shared my body I developed an idea of who you might be. A month before you died we moved into a new house so you could have your own bedroom, the one Owen has been sleeping in. I think that maybe you'd have liked animals, nature, been an environmentalist and guilted us into composting and recycling everything possible. I think you'd have the presence and dignity not seen in men these days. I think your words, because of their sincerity and your nobility, could convince anyone you were right, even if you were wrong. You'd have all the strengths of your father and uncle combined, and without their wretched weaknesses and childhood scars. I think that you would have had only serious long-term relationships and treated those girls like they dreamt of being treated. You would rebound from heartbreak with a lesson learned, not a wound carried along into the next relationship, like your father or his brother. Hair kept short so it wouldn't tease your forehead or your ears, corduroys would
feel more comfortable than denim. I picture you telling me all about your important job and using words I don't understand, but I'd nod my head to keep you talking to me, just because I love the sound of your voice.

And now I'll never know what that voice would have sounded like. Now I'll never get to hold you, feed you, comfort you. I never even got to take you home. All I ever did for you was sign your death certificate. The one with no name on it, just Baby Collins.

As they took you away from me, your arms swung from your body like a hypnotist's pendulum. I couldn't bear to look at your face. I wanted instead to keep my own image of you, to at least not have that shattered too. But I saw those little hands of yours, perfectly formed and ready to touch life. And now.
Now those little hands will never hold anything.

I first felt you kicking in my belly while standing in line at Toys R Us. I was buying a car seat. Alex was at work of course, but I called him, thriving with excitement. He was in the middle of a surgery. The memory and sensation of that firm little kick is all I have of you now. Alex called me back a few hours later. He wanted to name you Ross, after some uncle of his he admires, but I wouldn't have it. You wouldn't have been a Ross. I could tell from the way you kicked me. Like you were trying to communicate, asking for companionship, ready to come out because you couldn't wait two more months to meet me.

They stuck a black ribbon on the door to my room so everyone would know I was a grieving mother, not a happy one, not a new one. They sent a grief counsellor who encouraged me to cry and name you, even though I was already crying and couldn't name you because I never got to look in your eyes and see who you were. The counsellor was a nice man, but who can really help someone in a situation like that, and in one brief
meeting?We were given the option to let the hospital deal with your “disposal,” and I am sorry to say we did. I regret that now. I wish you had a headstone. I wish I could go visit you like Owen does his mother, if only to be alone in the world and clear my head sometimes. But there is no headstone, just tears falling from my aged face onto the bright white sheets of this childish diary. And don't worry, none of these tears help shed the memory of you.

Happy Birthday, and goodbye for another year. I love you.
And even if it makes me crazy, I miss you. I hope you are happier than your mother is right now, wherever you are, and I hope you are smiling and laughing and not even thinking of me.

NO STEADIER FOOTING

SUNLIGHT WAS FUNNELING IN THROUGH the ferry's circular windows like spotlights, illuminating its dated, vomit-orange carpet. Carpet that had been trampled by thousands of feet, by thousands of people heading in thousands of different directions through life. Not many of them, Owen imagined, had sat alone in the bar, waiting for someone to serve them at 11 a.m. He thought of helping himself to the whiskey, only an arm's length out of his reach, because the world at least owed him that much. One free glass of Glenfiddich to wash down a life thrown away. The glasses were there, right beside the whiskey no one had an eye on.

He limped away from the bar. He hated knowing that the bartender wasn't simply in a washroom or out for a quick smoke. There just wasn't a bartender in the bar at 11 a.m. He hated what that said about him, sitting there expecting one. A little surprised there wasn't one.

He hadn't rented a room, and decided to spend the rest of the ride on the deck, leaning into the railings, watching the black water, waiting to see land in the distance. Leaning over the rail and watching the water was calming, pacifying. It lulled him into a meditative state.

It wasn't the idea of dying that enticed him, of suicide, but about halfway back home, he wanted to be surrounded by one thing and one thing only: cold, black, salty water. To feel himself sinking deeper and deeper into cold black nothingness. He wanted to be consumed by it, disappear into it, forget about everything but it. It was a brief and fleeting moment, but in it, he simply felt that drowning would feel like escape, relief, and redemption all at once. There would be no fear or guilt or pressure to survive, just his lungs filling with water. There would only be those final thoughts, and he wanted to know what they'd be. He was thinking of Virginia Woolf, his father's favourite writer, who filled her pockets with stones and walked stoically into a river. It seemed romantic, fitting, everything at once. The right balance between right and wrong. He didn't have the courage or conviction to jump and he knew it. He could only hope the railing he was leaning against, with all his weight and strength, would snap and drop him overboard. That nobody would see him fall, that the sound of the boat would drown out the sound of his splash, and that it would be as tranquil a death as he imagined.

He took a step back from the rail, shook his head, and looked around to see if someone was watching him.

He'd originally walked outside onto the platform of the ferry to watch it approach Port aux Basques. He wanted to spend the last hour outside so he could watch a tiny, insignificant dot in the distance become Newfoundland, his home, the place where he belonged.

His hands were buried in his pockets but still numb from the cold, and his face and tongue were drying out from the salty air off the Atlantic. Normally he would notice the salt on his skin, and as a compulsive writer he would normally take out his notepad and write out some metaphor about how the salt was exfoliating his
old
skin, his
old
self. The metaphor could've been good – the rejuvenating return to home. He could've lent it to one of his characters, but Owen had spaced out too much to notice any of this, including the fact that the ferry was docking and he'd missed the hour-long approach. He'd been staring into the ocean for exactly one hour, as if it was a wishing well and he was rich.

He'd been spacing out like this often enough lately to be concerned about it. It was like he was awake and dreaming, and only certain elements of reality, someone's voice or a sudden unfamiliar sound, could wake him from his daydream fantasies.

Owen was
still
forgetting about his limp. When he'd sit for too long it would slip his mind and he would try to stand on his leg as if his tibia and patella weren't full of screws and still healing. The flash of pain and ground teeth never helped to prevent a subsequent lapse of memory. When he woke up in the mornings, he'd roll out of bed and absentmindedly put all his weight on the bad leg and fall back into bed, clenching his jaws. The occasional pain he felt reminded him of Hannah, and the newfound inconvenience of stairs reminded him of his brother.

As he descended the wobbly metal staircase that bridged the boat to Newfoundland, he took in one long exaggerated breath of that famous, fresh, Newfoundland air. He flung his father's duffle bag onto a weathered bench and searched through its contents until he found the tattered, blue-and-yellow bus information guide. He read the bus schedules with a false sense of optimism. The bus he was looking for was the one heading to Port Blandford, where his father's cabin was, but he let himself consider it the bus that would take him from his old life to his new one, from the past to the future. The idea of rejuvenation felt better than the alternative, and it gave some vague sense of purpose to his return home.

He had an hour to waste before the bus would arrive, so he sat on the bench to put another dent in his novel, but was distracted by a woman's concerned shouting. “Jacob, too close to the water! Jacob, don't chase your sister, one of you'll trip and fall!”

The kids, like any kids, were absolutely fearless because their mother was there, so nothing bad could happen. They peered out over the wharf, throwing snowballs into the ocean, and running away from the water each time, as if a shark might leap up to exact some biting revenge. He liked the devilish kid in the baby-blue jacket, laughed at him. He peeled open a granola bar and found himself watching the red-haired mother of two. She had freckles, the type the sun would draw out, and the sunlight was doing something beautiful to her face, the right balance of light and shadows highlighting all her features. She had a magazine crumpled up in her mittened hand, the pages buckled and blowing in the wind. She looked a little too cerebral for the magazine, but with two kids, maybe she was just looking for fluff to turn her mind off, something to glance at in between watching out for her kids. Not
her
, not necessarily this woman in particular, but someone like her, and he could let go of his past. Move on. There was hope in that much.

She glanced briefly at Owen, saw the deep red cuts embedded in yellow bruises, the ones his brother had left there. She looked equally wary and sympathetic, and stepped closer to her children.

He found himself hoping the redhead and Jacob and his sister were waiting for the same bus. Maybe he'd sit behind them and pretend. Maybe it only felt like an uncanny notion, the innocent vicarious experience.

A man in a lime shirt and black peacoat walked into his field of vision, hoisting ice creams over his head. Jacob and his sister came running, all smiles, towards him. They grabbed air trying to get them, laughing at their father's teasing them by keeping the ice creams just out of reach. “C'mon, kids, take your ice creams, c'mon.” The redhead laughed. It was in her smile how much she loved him. The way she smiled at him when he wasn't even looking. He gave the kids their treats, and then slid an arm around his wife, knew right where to lay it.

The father yelled jovially, “Jacob, stay away from that wharf! If you fall in you'll lose your ice cream!”And she hit him with the rolled up magazine, laughing, okay with their good cop, bad cop parenting routine.