SSC (2012) Adult Onset (11 page)

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… unless there is something wrong with her visual cortex. She googles “involuntary rapid sideways eye movement, symptom of stroke?” It takes less than thirty seconds to confirm that she has experienced a series of Transient Ischemic Strokes. It is unlikely they will kill her. They mimic the effects of déjà vu and “a sense of unreality” that is symptomatic of depersonalization, depression and psychosis. Otherwise they are asymptomatic. “Autopsy can confirm the presence of neural scar tissue.” If only she could be present at her own autopsy to exclaim, “I knew it!” She decides to keep it to herself: why worry Hil?

For some reason, Mary Rose told Hil she had done laundry tonight, which was untrue but only according to the rules of this universe wherein we recall the past but not the future; she had no reason to lie about laundry. Is there a tear in the amniotic sac between worlds? Memories leaking, mingling … she’ll make a note of this just as soon as she’s put in a load.

She heads upstairs, picks up the children’s overflowing hamper and, on the way back down, steps on the hem of her housecoat and
nearly pitches headfirst to the bottom. She needs to be more mindful or she’ll wind up painting calendars with her mouth. In the basement rec room, she switches on the baby monitor, puts in a load of teensy T-shirts and tiny Y-fronts, and tunes into a rerun of
Law and Order
. Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth barge into a Manhattan boardroom and collar some fat cat—her favourite type of episode. She reclines on the shameless La-Z-Boy couch and relaxes, kind of wishing Hil were here with her, kind of glad she isn’t. On the walls, framed show posters and book jackets have been upstaged by laminated crayon renderings of murky flora and fauna and various wheeled objects, along with family photos—including an Olde Tyme portrait of the four of them dressed as outlaws with Daisy in a bonnet.

Chris and Jerry have just stopped at a hot dog stand in midtown Manhattan when the monitor emits the first tinny snufflings that Mary Rose knows will shortly become a full-blown—“Mumma-a-a!” She runs up the stairs. After she has changed Maggie, brought Matthew a glass of water, rewound his unicorn and settled Maggie with yet another bottle, she goes to her bathroom, takes another Advil—four in a day is hardly an overdose—and hauls up her sleeve.

Down the front of her left arm, from pit level to a few inches above her elbow run the scars, one superimposed upon the other, layered—sedimentary scars. Like limestone, they tell a story. The longer scar is the older one, having grown with her from the time she was ten. Her father told her she would be getting bone from the bone bank, and she pictured a metal safety deposit box with a bit of bone in it. “Probably a piece of someone’s kneecap,” he added with a grin, making it sound quirky and mischievous. She thought of her Halloween skeleton costume and grinned back. The base of the shorter scar widens into a slight depression: site of a post-op infection that she understood to be serious when her mother calmly said, “Tsk-tsk,” as she dabbed at the ooze with a sterile Q-tip. This shorter scar dates from the second bone surgery, when she was fourteen. She was her own donor that time.

Mary Rose is O negative, which means she is a universal donor. As such she can donate tissue to any human on the planet, but only someone with her blood type can donate to her. So the second time round, the surgeon harvested bone from her iliac crest—which sounds more important than “hip bone”—thus there is a third scar down there at her “bikini line” that tends to mind its own business unless clipped by the corner of a countertop, at which it kicks up a scintillating sort of pain like a vampire awakened at noon.

The bone grafts were done to repair bone cysts. Unlike other kinds of cysts, which are the presence of unhealthy tissue, bone cysts are an absence: cavities in the bone that fill with a yellowish fluid. Sometimes they contain bone fragments—bits that flake and fall from within, so-called “fallen leaf fractures.” If the cysts go untreated, they can invade the growth plate and you end up with one limb shorter than the other—a limb that will just go on breaking. Mary Rose was lucky and she has the scars to prove it.

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Mary Rose does not dwell on her time in hospital—it seldom comes up unless she is required to enter one. The memory, while vivid, is stored in a separate file, such that were she to have a near-death experience,
the repeated injuries and surgeries would not be included in the movie of her life that would flash before her eyes—though they might play as a blooper reel. The whole experience exists outside her personal timeline, because it is an anomaly: bone cysts are ahistorical. “Idiopathic, likely a congenital flaw,” said the surgeon. “That means you’re born with them,” said Dad. “It doesn’t mean you’re an idiot.” Bone cysts are a singularity, like a meteor strike: a good story on their own but unlinked to the main narrative. She was past thirty before an old slow penny dropped: the bone from the bone bank hadn’t come from some plucky donor’s kneecap, as cheerfully shared as a pint of blood. It had been cadaver bone. That may be why the tissue failed to grow with her.

She cannot remember a time before the age of ten when she did not have a “sore arm.” It was normal for her, she thought everyone had one. It was an artifact among her and her siblings: “Mary Rose’s sore arm.” Even Andy-Patrick respected her
sorearm
and would punch the other one. Hot and searing, or cold grey thudding; one kind of pain had more blood and bruise in it, the other more bone. It came and went.

Her first memory of the searing dates from the summer she was four. They had moved from Germany to Canada, and were “down home” on Cape Breton Island in the broad bosom of Dolly’s family on the beautiful Bras d’Or lakes. Cabins called bungalows dotted the clearing on a hill above the shore. A brook ran pure and cold through the trees, spanned by a tiny footbridge and lined with moss-cushioned rocks, the ground itself springy with life. It wasn’t the Black Forest—you were more apt to meet a fairy than a talking wolf—but it was enchanted in its own way. Down on the shore, dozens of cousins sprinted and leapt from the rickety wharf, the older ones drove the boat, and there was always pop. At night, she counted her mosquito bites and wondered where to sleep. Her sister was housed with the older kids, her mother with her own sisters, and her father had yet to arrive—he would join them when his leave started.

Dolly was beloved in her family but, being both junior and female, reverted in their company to the status more of a younger sister than a mother, with the consequence that, while food was celebrated, luscious and Lebanese—spits turning on the fire, picnic tables groaning, coolers overflowing—Mary Rose at times went to bed hungry. At four, she felt it would be rude to ask for food, it would be like saying, “You haven’t fed me,” and that would be rude. The men and boys were served first
—sah t’ein!
—and by the time Mary Rose understood that it was suppertime, somehow it was over. It would be all right when Dad arrived. She would sit on his lap and eat from his plate, and at night he would tuck her in, somewhere. In the meantime, she was free to roam, the salt water healed all scrapes and the green world of the woods beckoned.

One afternoon, he arrived. “Dad!” Like a prince, strolling down the winding dirt drive beneath the canopy of pines and birches. Like a movie star, a god. He gave all the kids airplane swings, grasping them by ankle and wrist, all the cousins lining up, “Unca Dunc!” His was the only blond head in a sea of ebony, his the only blue eyes amid lustrous brown, “Swing me, swing me!” Tirelessly he swung them. He swung her round and round and it was tummy-thrilling, until fire broke out inside her arm. Snapped into flame like a twig, it leapt and spread. When he set her down, she held her arm by the elbow. She did not throw up.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it your arm? Let’s see. Is it okay?”

She didn’t want to hurt his feelings by making him think he had hurt her. “Yes.”

“Can you bend it?”

She did not want him to go away and stop playing. She bent it. And asked for another airplane swing because he looked worried. She offered her right wrist this time and, too late, realized her mistake, for
while the right arm was fine, the left one swung out; round and round it flew, unable to make its own way back to her side. She waited for the swing to end.

She did not cry.

“Want another one, sweetie?”

“No thanks, that was fun.”

Then they went swimming. The cold felt good. Like an injured dog, she hid the pain as though it were to do with shame. But by nightfall she could not conceal her need to support the arm by holding it against her body with the good one and her mother asked what she had been up to. “Nothing.”

The Bras d’Or lakes are not lakes at all, but an inland sea where fresh and salt water merge. The name means Arm of Gold.

The next day, her mother fashioned Mary Rose’s first sling from a colourful nylon scarf. It stopped hurting after a while and they forgot about it. Until the next sling.

The bone cysts were diagnosed in the nick of time thanks to another miracle. On the frozen waters of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School, ten-year-old Mary Rose MacKinnon slipped and fell the first time. It was a fall that would eventually lead to a doctor, a diagnosis and cure. Our Lady made her break her arm.

It was during recess. She was in grade six, a good student, excelling at History, her ostracism now to do with high marks—no one could have suspected she used to be slow. She had one friend in class, a somewhat sinister bookish girl named Jocelyn Fish, but when it came to recess, it was more fun to play with the younger kids. She was among a group taking running slides on a strip of ice beside the yellow brick wall of the school, and was on her third turn when she fell and the burning broke out. It went swiftly from red to black, became V-shaped and loud. It grew bigger than she was, like a monster in a dream, until she was within a kind of enclosure looking out at the throbbing air; with something hard lodged in her arm, something that
did not love her, something that did not know who she was or that she was anyone. She leaned against the wall and waited for it to stop. She held it by the wrist. The bell rang.

The arm was heavy, and after recess could not take itself out of her jacket on its own. She looked down at her hand, limp and yoked to the pain farther up. The hand looked worried. It looked rather ashamed too, for feeling fine—like a friend who is with you when you get run over. She sat at her desk but could not concentrate on the Boston Tea Party. When the hand moved, it made the pain wake up and scream, so it kept its head down. The pain would not go away. It made her have to go to the bathroom, pressed against her like a scary mentally retarded kid, getting heavier like a wet coat, getting darker, it gave her no choice but to go to the teacher and say, “I hurt my arm.”

The teacher knew her mother was away in Cape Breton visiting family, and she remarked to the new principal that Mary Rose was “just looking for some TLC.” Mary Rose did not know what the initials stood for, but smiled and nodded in order to make up for the bad manners of her arm, and the principal sent her home. “Tell your father you pulled a muscle.”

Sister O’Halloran might have called the doctor, but she had been transferred to Africa where they needed her more. The muscle refused to heal, despite the massages administered by her father, and by her older sister, Maureen, when he called her in to help, “Maureen, I need you.” There was a bit of a lump where the muscle was swollen, he gave it special attention. She stayed very still. This was what a pulled muscle felt like. She did not cry, sissies cry, crying feels like throwing up through your eyes.

“Thanks, Dad, that feels better now.”

He did not know how to tie a sling, so he used a length of duct tape to secure her arm to her side. “How’s that?”

“Way better.” And it was.

When her mother came home, she fashioned one from a nylon scarf—paisley this time—which made it feel even better because Mum, being a nurse, was an expert and Mary Rose got her second sling.

It was still tender a few weeks later when she fell again. It was now Christmas holidays. She tripped on the picks of her new skates—they had appeared under the tree, her first pair of “girl’s skates.” White, high-heeled and treacherous, figure skates nonetheless spared one the shame of being seen in “boy’s skates.” They were brand new and she had smiled hard to ward off the pathos occasioned by the thought of how sad her parents would be to see her disappointment. Andy-Patrick got a set of Hot Wheels complete with carrying case.

The “Waltz of the Blue Danube” was playing when she hit the ice face down at Kingston Memorial Arena. She was with a friend of sorts—a nice girl whose parents knew hers via the air force. She nearly threw up when she smacked to her stomach, but as long as you don’t cry, nothing will be wrong. Still, the darkness flared in her arm and she knew she had pulled the muscle again. She took the arm out of the sleeve, tucked it inside her fuzzy jacket and went to the friend’s home as planned. It was a two-storey house with a family room, in a subdivision on the other side of Kingston. They had a colour TV set.

By bedtime, the pain was cold and metallic like an aircraft wing, but quiet as long as she lay still. She felt very rude the next morning when she failed to eat the Lucky Charms and asked the friend’s mother if she could go home. It was inconvenient—the dad had not planned on driving her till after lunch. Mary Rose said, “I forgot, I’m supposed to go home for lunch.” She felt the disapproval of the mum and the annoyance of the dad. She could tell they thought she was lying—she was, but she was also at a loss to explain that she was not a liar. It did not occur to her to tell them her arm hurt.