SSC (2012) Adult Onset (44 page)

Is she in the sky over the prairie? The vault of the heavens that holds us all, cherishes us all. Energy energy everywhere, endlessly returning love in the form of life, even mineral life. In the guise of time. Is the train part of her? Is the grass part of her? The sound of the horn, the cattle ignoring the rude blast, the car parked at the level crossing, family inside waiting to drive safely on, all part of her? She is everywhere now. Like God.

Dolly looks up from the depths of her purse.

“Give me your postal code again, Mary Rose.”

She hands back the Best Western pen and Dolly writes it in the mini address book.

Duncan says, “I see where they’re touting the new head of the World Bank as a woman, as if that’s her only claim to fame.”

“I think Andy-Patrick is seeing someone.”

She sees her father contract like a salted oyster, while Dolly compresses her lips and stares out over the tabled expanse.

Duncan is pained but polite. “What about … what was her name? Nice gal …”

“Renée,” states Dolly.

“Shereen,” says Mary Rose. “They broke up.”

“We haven’t heard from your brother.”

“We didn’t hear from Andy-Patrick the entire time we were away,” says Duncan, his voice reedy.

“He’s been super busy,” says Mary Rose, feeling some compunction.

Her parents will be reassured to know that she and her brother have seen one another, so she makes the recent contact sound like the
norm. “He was over playing with the kids, having supper with us the other night.”

Duncan disappears behind the business section.

Dolly polishes off her doughnut and asks, “Have you heard from your brother?”

Mary Rose decides that it might indeed be wise to learn Mandarin—it could be a way to stay neurologically spry.

“Did you get the packeege I mailed you yet?”

“Mum … No, not yet.”

“Dammit, what in the name of time is going on?” She is getting worked up.

“Mum, the mail has been—”

“Duncan, do you remember the packeege I had for Mary Rose?”

“What packeege?”

He is getting cranky too—time for their afternoon nap.

“Forget about it, now,” he says.

“Forget what?”

“The packeege.”

“I did forget it, that’s the problem!” Tears in Dolly’s eyes, a candy sprinkle at the corner of her mouth.
Oh Mum, please don’t cry at eighty-one in the Tim’s, I can’t bear it …

“Relax now, throttle back,” Duncan instructs his wife, making a calming gesture that makes Mary Rose want to bark like crazy. Like Daisy.

Dolly goes to say something, bites it back, sighs elaborately, and suddenly the sun comes out. “Look who’s here!”

It’s Andy-Patrick, strolling toward them in hair-tipped splendour.

“Well, hello, stranger!” says their father, gripping the table, rising, whacking him on the shoulder. Andy-Pat leans down to his mother, who hugs him tightly then pretends to slap him.

He gives her a chocolate Scrabble game.

“Where the heck did you find something like that?” Duncan smiles broadly.

“Let’s all play, come on!” cries Dolly.

“I don’t know if you have time before your train,” says killjoy Mary Rose.

“We’ve got time,” says Andy-Patrick.

“Wait now,” says Dolly, unwrapping the game, “I thought this was—oh, I’m all confused. I thought this was, this isn’t the, this is, this isn’t in German, or isn’t it?”

Sister and brother hesitate in unison, as though syntactically stalled in the effort to sort out which of their mother’s questions is answerable.

“Why would it be in German?” asks Duncan, as though trapped in a play by Ionesco.

“I gave you the German Scrabble, Mum,” says Mary Rose.

“What’s the difference?” says Duncan.

“There are umlauts in German,” says Mary Rose, “as well as the classical extra letter—”

“It’s German
chocolate
,” quips Andy-Pat, helping with the plastic wrap.

“You gave me a German Scrabble, didn’t you, Mary Rose?”

“That’s right, for Christmas one year.”

“Why?” asks Dolly.

“Because … we lived there.”

“I know we lived there—” Dolly sounds petulant.

“Temper down now,” says Duncan.

“Don’t tell me to temper down.”

“Would you like more tea, Mum?”

“Tea nothing, listen to me now.”

For a moment, Mary Rose’s mother is there. The one who cast her out. The one who always walked faster than she could, who got an extra ten percent off everything and always had room for one more at the table. The one who swept into her hospital room in a leopard print
coat and hat and turned the figure on the bed back into Mary Rose with one bold look.

“Mum, I gave you the German Scrabble game because I was born there.”

“No, Mary Rose, you were born in Winnipeg.”

Andy-Pat glances up from the chocolate game board.

“No, Mum. That was Other Mary Rose.”

Dolly’s eyes narrow, her mouth forms a small
Oh
.

“I’m the second Mary Rose, Mum. The first one died.”

“Did she?” Dolly’s face slackens. Not quite sad clown. Perplexed. “Why? What did I do to her?”

Mary Rose watches darkness opening up behind her mother’s face; not the rolling thunderhead of days gone by, but a steadily oncoming darkness, close to the ground. “Mum, you didn’t do anything. It was the Rh factor, do you remember what that is?”

“Of course I do, dear, I’m a nurse.”

Andy-Patrick says, “Who wants to play?”

“That’s what happened to the others too,” says Mary Rose.

“And what happened to you, Mary Rose?”

“…  I don’t know, Mum. Did something happen to me?”

“I did something to you, what was it now?”

Dolly’s brow contracts, the corners of her mouth turn up with effort, like a toddler on the potty. Mary Rose stays very still, lest she startle her mother off the scent of whatever memory is nosing onto the path. In the Black Forest. Dolly’s lips part. Then, finally, “I guess it’s gone.” She leans back in her seat and chuckles. “Your mother’s losing her marbles, Mary Rose. Dunc? Dunc’re you asleep, dear?”

“I musta bin.” He blinks, but does not meet her gaze. Andy-Patrick places chocolate tiles on chocolate trays.

Her mother has so much unmoored guilt, she is ready to believe she baked her own children into pies. Truth is not going to come this way. Will not yield to direct inquisition. Is unspeakable. The whole fabric of
Mary Rose’s life is stained with the dye of what can never be stated, a skein from which she spun stories while she still could—fee-fi-fo-fum, ready or not here I come, can you guess my name? If you are going to forgive, you have to forgive what you don’t know. What you can only half see. The rest is dark matter, exerting a pull, making itself known only by the degree to which you wobble off course. Because you don’t get the whole story.

Love is blind. Forgiveness is blind in one eye.

“I don’t remember, Mum.”

Dolly reaches out and places a hand on Mary Rose’s cheek. Gentle. Warm.

“I love you, Mary Rose.”

Your mother is leaving. Learn her face
.

“I love you too, Mum.”

She has said it from the Tim’s and from the concourse outside the Tim’s; from the PATH and the train station above it, from the top of the CN Tower and out beyond transmission range. She has said it from a story long ago and far away across an ocean; from a living room with a coffee table and a couch and a balcony. And she knows, across the miles of underwater cable, through mists of anaesthetic, behind walls of glass and within a cave on a sunny day, from before she was born and after she died, as the message rises from one side of the bolted Formica table, ascends to the blue, the black, the forever, and descends to the other side where her mother sits, that it is true.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m grateful to be here.”

“I know what you mean.”

Andy-Patrick is staring at the game board. Duncan’s hand is resting on Dolly’s; his, parchmenty with age and pale with a dusting of freckles, the tip of his ring finger gone; hers, light brown and lined like seasoned wood.
So many miles …

It occurs to Mary Rose that this is the first time, outside infancy, that she has cried in front of her father. Then it occurs to her that it is the second time, because there was that time in the bathtub … It is not that she forgot—it is more a trick of filing; as though she had tossed the bathtub memory on the hall table along with the mail twenty-three years ago and there it has lain, unregarded, like Poe’s purloined letter.

Suddenly Dolly looks straight at her.

“I know about your mail situation, Mary Rose.” She opens her purse, and withdraws the
Living with Christ
pamphlet. “How do you like that, I never mailed it at all. I’ve been carrying it around this whole time.” She takes the brown “Sunday Offering” envelope from between its pages and hands it to Mary Rose.

Mary Rose opens it. A creased black-and-white photo.

“I meant to frame it before I sent it to you,” says Dolly.

In the photo, Mary Rose stands between her mother and her sister, looking down at the stone, flush against the grass. It is etched with letters and numbers that are fuzzy and will be likely fuzzier under magnification. Mary Rose’s dress is white like the stone, while draped across her left shoulder is her mother’s sweater. And resting there, offering comfort along with the warmth of the sweater, is her mother’s hand. It strikes her suddenly: the sweater is covered in a floral pattern. Tulips.

“Thank you, Mummy.” Mary Rose is more surprised by this word that has slipped out and shown its tail,
Mummy
, than by the photograph. After all, she already knows what is written on the stone.

“The dates’ll be there,” says Dolly, putting on her reading glasses, leaning forward to look. “Although you might need a magnifying glass.”

“It’s okay, Mum. I’ll look when I get home.”

“What’ve you got there?” asks Duncan, putting on his glasses, reaching for the photo. Mary Rose hands it to him. He looks at it and nods slowly. “Well, well. I remember taking that.”

“What time of year was it, Dad?”

“We placed the stone in springtime,” he says, and closes his eyes.

Dolly pipes up. “I found it in my jewellery box! What was it doing there?”

“Did you take it from the photo album, Mum?”

“I must have. Unless—Dunc. Dunc, dear, did you take this photo out of the album?”

“Why would I do that?” he asks, his voice a little husky.

“Because it’s … a sad picture?” says Mary Rose.

He doesn’t answer.

“Dad, Maureen sent me a link to a site … Canadian military graves abroad, I’ll forward it to you. Dad?”

He opens his eyes, his brows elevate congenially, his lips compress in a good-natured upside-down smile. “What’s that, sweetie pie?” He turns his blue eyes to her.

I love you, Dad
.

“How’s the genealogy going?” Her heart is shredding.

He sits forward. “Well now, there’s a fella in Boston, name of
Jerome
MacKinnon, he’s an
accountant
with Deloitte, and it turns out he and I share a marker on the
Y
chromosome, which puts us
right
back to the
Clearances
.”

Dolly’s eyes narrow, she speaks slowly. “You know, that must have been a hard time, when I think about it.”

“Don’t think about it,” says Duncan.

Andy-Patrick helps himself to a chocolate tile and offers the tray to his mother.

“Mmm, ever good,” says Dolly, her mouth full of vowels.

“Let’s go, Doll Face, we got a train to catch.” Duncan helps his wife to her feet and she steadies herself on his arm.

“Did you want the moonstone, Mary Rose? Here, you have it.”

“That’s okay, Mum, I’m really happy to have the photograph, thank you.”

“I’ll take it,” says Andy-Patrick.

“What do you want with a lady’s ring?” says Duncan.

“He can give it to Mary Lou,” says Dolly.

Andy-Patrick opens the velvet box and slips the ring on his pinky. Duncan rolls his eyes and shakes his head, but grins and slaps Andy-Patrick on the shoulder.

“Bye, Dad,” says Mary Rose.

He bonks her on the head. “Thanks for coming to see us off, Mister.”

The redcap greets them by name and laughs at something Dolly says. Duncan beams with pride, and they mount the narrow escalator up to the platform. Two little old people in bright clothing. Near the top, they turn and wave, then disappear.

Somewhere, a train has disgorged a tide of commuters that washes past them now. She goes to slip the photo back in its envelope.

“Can I see?” asks Andy-Patrick.

She hands it to him.

“What’s that you’ve got on?” he asks.

“Mum’s sweater.”

“Looks more like a scarf.”

She looks over his shoulder.

It’s a sling.

Because she fell, or was pushed, punished, rescued. Or it was a cold day. Or it was warm.

“What’s the matter?” he says.

She speaks before she is aware of formulating the words. “You helped me.”

“What do you mean?”

“That time when Mum called and asked you to come for supper? You said, ‘I can’t, Mary Rose and Renée are here.’ ”

“Yeah?”

“And then …” We can’t know which words will undo us. She waits until she can trust herself to speak. “It was over. The whole bad time.”

He hands her a hanky. “It’s clean.”

“I’m sorry.”

“At least you’re not crying and driving.”

“I mean I’m sorry for being a shit to you, A&P.”

“You’ve never been a shit to me.”

“Yes I have.”

“I’ve deserved it.”

“I’m bored with being a shit to you, I’m bored with you deserving it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m amazed you carry a hanky.”

“Chicks love it.”

“You carry it because you cry.”

“Chicks love it.”

She puts the photo in her pocket.

He says, “Can I ask you something? Don’t be mad.”

“What?”

“Would you call me Andrew from now on? Or at least Andrew-Patrick?”

“Sure.”

The streetcar rattles up Bathurst Street past Toronto Western Hospital and she notices Balloon King is gone, in its place a Starbucks. At the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, she glances out the window for a trace of herself—this happens quickly, such that it slips into consciousness as “normal.” Is that all there is to insanity? Slow it down: she has just turned her head, looked out the window and searched the crowd at the intersection to see if she was among them holding a bunch of tulips. She was not. She pictures swift faeries, a legion of puckish creatures chuckling as they trip through the regions of her mind. Is this what happens when you stop being angry for a moment? The light turns green.