Read SSC (2012) Adult Onset Online
Authors: Ann-Marie MacDonald
Tags: #short story collection, #general, #Canada
SSC (2012) Adult Onset (12 page)
She was not invited back. But she had known she had to go home at all costs. The friend’s kitchen was too bright. There were too many
echoes, the ceiling was crooked. And the shape in her arm was a black triangle. Her mother was home this time.
But her father resumed first aid duties.
“I think I pulled the muscle again.”
She did not move during the massages.
Get mad at it
. Still, it seemed unfair that it should hurt more this time. After a while she said, “It’s okay, you can stop massaging now if you’re tired.”
“I’m not tired, sweetie.”
“You can stop now, Dad. It feels better.”
Another scarf, another sling. Her third. It did not get better.
“I guess I’ll call Dr. Ferry,” said her mother.
He came to the house. Mary Rose liked him, he always treated her as if she was a cool kid and it didn’t matter if she was a girl or a boy. Dr. Ferry examined her arm and said, “I thought I told you to quit jumping off the roof.” She grinned and felt better.
He took her mother aside in the front hall—they often joked together, both being medical types, but this time Mary Rose felt giddy as she heard his tone and caught some of the words, “… you telling me she’s … and you didn’t … till now? … what can happen? … what it could be?!” He was scolding her mother. No one did that—except, occasionally, her father, with a smack of his hand on the kitchen table, “That’s enough, now, Missus.”
An X-ray was ordered and it turned out she had bone cysts; her arm had been special all along, but too modest to boast. Her mother liked to tell the story. “Dr. Ferry really gave me what for. It turned out her arm was broken all along! But how could we know? She never cried, she never complained!” Mary Rose basked in the account of her own heroism, humbled before the majesty of her “high pain threshold,” so chose not to remind her mother that even Andy-Patrick knew about
sorearm
.
“Good news,” said Dad. “You’re going to have an operation.” The miracle was accomplished.
Rise and go forth!
•
This section of the Canadian military cemetery is reserved for dependants—wives and children—a tranquil corner, closer to the forest, dotted with stones and crosses, none older than the Peace itself. There is no snow, though it’s less than a week til Christmas, but the ground is hard and dull; he carries the casket across the welted grass, staring straight ahead—the mass of firs less green than grey, a dense blur.
He stands looking into the small grave. He can see roots, severed white, the earth still a living network for the trees that have been cleared in recent years to make this section of the cemetery. He hands over the casket, and they bury his son.
•
The mirror tells her there is indeed no bruise, just the faint green vein that snakes at right angles beneath the scars and disappears round the back of her arm. Mary Rose has come to see her scars as a guarantee that, should she get amnesia and wander off without her tweezers one distant demented day, she nonetheless, like Odysseus, will be recognized if she makes it back home—unibrow notwithstanding.
She lies in the dark, thinking about Hil thinking about her … but her mind keeps wandering. Has her libido fallen temporary victim to motherhood, or is this perimenopausal decline?—the descent into “even more meaningful intimacy,” to quote the earnest book that her sister Maureen sent her.
I don’t want meaningful intimacy, I want sex
. Or is her inability to concentrate an effect of the cobwebby plaques that even now are colonizing her cortex? Hil reassured her, and it is true: what does it matter precisely where out west
she is? Mary Rose’s world is a circumscribed domestic one at the moment, a multitasky maelstrom wherein Hil is a mere binary function: here/not here. Still … it was an odd mistake. She should google it. No. That really would be demented. To google “early onset Alzheimer’s” in the middle of the night with two sleeping children and an asthmatic pit bull. She switches on the light, reaching for a book from the stack on her bedside table—she is a slow reader but always has four or five on the go—is that a sign too? She tries to focus on
Drama of the Gifted Child
, but her eyes rove the page. She ought to call her family doctor in the morning and see about booking a memory test—the kind where they ask you what the date is and who’s the prime minister … although the latter is something she’d prefer to forget. She trades childhood anguish for
Guide to Healthy Lesbian Relationships
and dozes off.
•
She was discharged from the base hospital this morning. Her husband opens the door to their apartment and extends his hand for her to precede him. He is carrying her bag. She is wearing the moonstone ring to please him. Her big girl is sitting on the couch in a velvet party dress, her hair in awkward braids parted crookedly down the middle. “You look lovely, Maureen.”
“We kept the tree up for you, Mummy.”
She opens her arms and her daughter comes to her. She tries not to let the child see she is crying.
“Mummy, are you sad because the baby boy died?”
“Don’t think about that, now,” says Duncan.
“I’m crying because I’m so happy to see you, Mo-Mo.” She releases the child and stumbles, her husband steadies her.
“I’ve been lying down too much.” She smiles. She is thinner, but she’s done her hair, and has her lipstick on. A record is playing on the hi-fi, Nat King Cole. On the coffee table are the silver tea service and a plate of store-bought ginger cookies. “Isn’t this nice,” she says.
She’s not old, she’ll have another baby. Maybe even another boy
.
In the corner of the living room by the glass door to the balcony stands the tree decked with paper chains and, atop it, a homemade star. On the floor, a scattering of dry needles encircles the stand. She looks at her husband. He is pale. No one has been feeding him. “Mumma could feed an army on one chicken,” she says.
He looks at a loss for a moment, then says, “Do you want to see the baby?”
What is he telling her? She feels sick. It is her badness coming out in her if she is crazy now, and it serves her right. Is she awake?
The baby died
.
He is staring at her.
He is going to send me away
. He turns toward the hallway and calls, “Armgaard.”
And with that, she understands what he means by “baby”. She watches as the same German woman, with her neat bun and capable arms, emerges from the hallway and sets down a child whose hair, at two, is not long enough to braid. It is black and thick like Dolly’s own. The child looks at Dolly and smiles. Dolly sees something in that smile … something bad is looking out from those big dark eyes … mocking her. Dolly frowns, already asking God to remove the thought from her mind—no wonder she is so bad at having babies, she does not even deserve the one she has. The child hides its face in the German woman’s apron.
“Geh zu Mutty,” says the woman with a little push.
“Nein!” yells the child.
Her husband laughs and swings the baby up into his arms. “Go ahead, Mister, give Mummy a kiss.” She clings to him, screaming, as he tilts her toward her mother. “She missed you,” he says.
But Dolly knows the truth. Her baby still doesn’t like her.
•
She wakes an hour or so later with an old clammy feeling: guilt—as though she had killed someone or molested a child and it slipped her mind. A brew of shame and pathos, it feels like a car crash in her stomach … dead father at the wheel, head flung back, mother’s face obscured, pregnant belly buckled against the dash, innocent family belongings pitifully strewn, exposed. The feeling used to greet her regularly upon waking, her own brand of morning sickness. She gets out of bed to pee—and a good thing too, because she is bleeding again. She rifles the drawer for a super jumbo tampon—so stout is it, one hardly knows whether to insert it or strap it on. She is suddenly roasting hot. Downstairs, she makes her way across the darkened living room, gouges her bare foot on a piece of Lego, knocks over Tickle Me Elmo who busts out singing, and turns the furnace off. It ceases with a sigh. In the kitchen, she gets out a box of ancient grains that failed to prevent the extinction of an entire people, and opens her
Cooks Illustrated
… “Rethinking Macaroni and Cheese” …
Andy-Pat gave her a fridge magnet of a dead clown with
X
s for eyes that says, “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me.” She gave him one of a haggard cartoon train slouched over a beer at a bar, “The little engine that didn’t give a rat’s ass.” Just because there are no dents in Andy-Patrick’s fridge does not mean he is less dysfunctional than she is—and just because he once got the belt does not mean Dad was worse than Mum.
True, Mum was often funny. She tumbled backward off reclining chairs, did bellyflops from the wharf when the rest of the womenfolk were beached in stretch pants on the shore; committed whopping faux pas and was always the first to laugh at herself. But her rage was not funny. Unvariegated with humour. Unmarbled with the fat of mirth. “C’mere till I smash you!”
Besides, Mary Rose was merely following orders: her father always said, “Get mad at it.” Whether a math problem, hurt feelings or parallel parking. It worked for a long time.
Her mother always said, “Do your best. Then do better than your best.” The immigrant credo.
She threw the stroller at the fridge because she couldn’t find her yoga mat. Then she phoned Hil in the middle of rehearsal to ask where it was. Hil said, “It’s probably right in front of you.” And it was. It’s their joke now. Whenever she can’t find something, that is usually where it is.
Journey To Otherwhere
Kitty McRae had always played well alone. Not that she was disruptive or unpleasant to play
with
, it was just that since her mother’s death, when Kitty was still a baby, she had had to learn to amuse herself. She had never been much for toys, especially dolls—there had been one long ago, but she grew out of it and never missed it. Kitty McRae did not need toys because she had something infinitely better. She had her father.
And he had a very important job that required him to be on the move at a moment’s notice. Kitty had grown up travelling with him to the ends of the earth. There were many wonderful things about Dean McRae, but one of them was something people might not notice from the outside: he always made his daughter feel as though she were absolutely necessary.
Eleven is a powerful age. Kitty had mastered the logarithms that allowed her father to track winds and weather patterns; alerted him to shifts in the earth’s crust and the formation of tsunamis long before they swept ashore with obliterating force; enabled him to predict the path of fires and floods. She had seen many futures on his laptop, scenarios that played out over a millennium, merely by adjusting one of a multitude of factors—the level of plankton in the St. Lawrence River, a drop in the population of midges in the Great Rift Valley—watching as deserts swept continents, and jungles squeezed whole cities in their coils. But there was nothing “virtual” about the helicopters in which she had flown, palms pressed to the glass, grazing houses submerged to their rooftops or rendered skeletal with flames; over land-slid highways, buckled bridges. And
each time, the fires subsided, the waters retreated and, step by step, life went back to normal. Her father had even credited her as a research assistant on his latest submission to the
Journal of Geo-Engineering
. “Do it your way, Kit-Kat”—whether it was a math problem or an ice cream sundae. Dean McRae was a Disaster Relief Expert, and Kitty couldn’t think of anything she would rather be when she grew up.
Now that she was almost grown up, Kitty could see the situation clearly: her father, being the kindest of people, had always made her feel necessary even when she must so often have been in the way. This gave her a mighty, not entirely comfortable feeling in her chest, as though her heart were hot and outsized. She identified this as a surplus of love, a form of energy that could be harnessed. She was eleven. She was in her prime, ready now to be really useful.
“Kitty,” he had said, “would you mind coming with me into the study, I’d like to have a word.”
The study was her favourite room in the world. In contrast to the hi-tech tools of her father’s trade, this room contained objects that were powered entirely by history. There were gyroscopes and sextants that dated back to Columbus, and lethal-looking mathematical instruments that had belonged to her grandfather. On the wall over the desk hung an antique map. According to the cartographer of the time, the world consisted of a thin strip of Europe, a dollop of Africa, a blob of Asia and a sinister rind of
Terra Incognita
. At opposite corners, puff-cheeked Zephyrs blew the winds across the globe, while a tentacled sea monster bobbed amid the waves and fire-breathing dragons lurked at the uncharted edges. Presiding over it all was a big roll-top desk complete with pigeonholes that resembled
a nesting wall for ocean birds, each harbouring a treasure: the tooth of an ichthyosaurus, a two-thousand-year-old lotus seed that her father meant to plant one of these days, a twenty-million-year-old whorl in stone called a trilobite, a vial of volcanic ash from the latest eruption in Iceland … The desk top was perpetually awash in papers, for her father said he still thought best with a pen in his hand.
On the one clear corner of her father’s desk stood a photograph in an oval frame. It was the only picture they had of Kitty’s mother, and for Kitty it was the sole image, for she had no memory of her mother’s face. Asha Singh. So pretty, so lively looking; if it were a yearbook photo, the caption would be,
Least likely to die young
. There was something wistful in her mother’s smile. It almost seemed to say,
I’m sorry
.
Kitty was good at math but, try as she might, could not keep straight just how old she had been when her mother died. She did not like to ask her father because it caused him pain … he seemed to shrink and Kitty could almost see the energy departing from him. She feared that every time she brought up the subject of her mother, he lost a little more of whatever it is that keeps a person alive. And she could not shake an uncomfortable feeling that it was up to her to keep him alive. Why had she not simply written the information down when she had the chance? Worse than embarrassing, it was weird, for who in their right mind forgets when their own mother died? She had asked Ravi, but he too seemed uncertain. He said, “That is a question for your father, Kitty.”
Ravi had spoken only Hindi and was barely more than a child himself when Dean McRae hired him off the street in Lucknow and sponsored him. Ravi was now more
Canadian than Sir John A. Macdonald, a fan of the deep Montreal winters, alchemist of spices with which he seared away Kitty’s coughs and colds. In the early days he would oil her hair and braid it, and while she put a stop to that when she turned nine, to this day it was thanks to him that, while Kitty refused to be seen in a dress, she did consent to wear a sari at Christmas. His strong, lined hands, the colour of smooth wood, were synonymous with safety, and next to her father, Kitty loved Ravi most in the world.
Over the fireplace hung a gilt-framed round mirror like a big eye, which reflected the whole room as though through the wrong end of a telescope. It had been salvaged from the wreck of her great-great-grandfather’s ship and was speckled with age where the mercury had begun to eat through. Kitty did not like to look in it because it made her eyes go funny, as though flakes of silver were drifting down the glass like snow in a paperweight. It was a symptom of the “atypical idiopathic migraines” the doctor said were behind her “spells.” They didn’t hurt, which was why they were not “typical.” And “idiopathic” did not mean she was an idiot, “It just means you were born with them,” said her father. Kitty did not think much of the diagnosis—it was a grown-up-sounding name for something grown-ups did not understand. She stole a look at herself now, however, small and distant where she stood on the carpet, ready to receive her “marching orders.”
This room and everything in it would be hers one day, but the carpet already was. It had been woven for her by a Bedouin elder in gratitude to her father for putting out a fire that had raged for months, fed by a sea of oil beneath the desert. Every handwoven carpet is special, but this one had a band of scarlet snaking through in the shape of her initial:
K
.
Their adventures always started in the same way, with Kitty standing at attention on the carpet and her father relaxed in the leather armchair. So it was with a pleasant tingle of anticipation that she saw him settle into it. And a modicum of surprise when he said, “Have a seat, Kitty.”
She hesitated, then sat down cross-legged on the carpet, brushing a thatch of hair from her eyes. Her hair might be described as the physical manifestation of her brain’s energy field: growing in all directions, fractal and increasing in complexity every day—why bother brushing it? “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it,” Ravi always said. He had given up trying to make her brush her hair, but he did insist upon teeth and she could see his point. Ravi had looked after her as long as she could remember, and it was thanks to him that she could speak a little and understand a lot of her mother’s first language. She enjoyed the response she got when she introduced him as “my manny”; and of late there had been plenty of opportunity, for a parade of girls her age had been produced as though via some marketing magic by her “Aunt” Fiona. A partner at the public relations firm Tullimore-Spinx, Fiona Tullimore wasn’t really Kitty’s aunt but her father’s girlfriend, and it was in both capacities that the wonderful woman brimmed with plans to “improve” Kitty’s life. But Kitty’s life was already perfect. She had her father, she had Ravi, and she had her secret.
“What’s up, Dad?”
“How are you feeling today, Kit-Kat?”
“Great.”
He hesitated, as if he didn’t know whether to believe her, before saying, “Good.”
“Don’t worry, Dad,” she reassured him.
He had taken her to a specialist for her spells, though Kitty had tried to tell him there was nothing to worry about. She liked Dr. Quinn, he gave her tests but not like the ones in school. The only thing that frightened Kitty was the hospital smell. It made her stomach chilly and put her skin on alert, as though at any moment someone might stick a needle into her or worse. But it was worth the smell and even the wasted worry on her father’s part just to have slid bodily into the big clanking tube that took pictures of her brain, layer after layer. She got to see them afterwards, on the doctor’s computer, blue maps and shadowy shapes …
“Where are we going this time?” she asked her father.
“Kitty, there is a trip in the offing, but I’m afraid I can’t accompany you on it.”
For one queasy moment, Kitty feared he was about to tell her that she was going to have to return to the Hospital for Sick Children for an operation … what if there really was something wrong with her brain? What if they had to cut open her head? The next instant, he interrupted what she thought was her worst nightmare, only to surpass it with one that involved no scalpels but nonetheless entailed a severing that she feared she could not survive.
He was sending her away.
