SSC (2012) Adult Onset (7 page)

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The next baby lived long enough to be baptized, so his name really did belong to him. Alexander. Mary Rose saw the grave when they
visited it one day in spring; remembers looking down at it, with her hands folded. She was wearing white—it matched the stone tablet, flush against the grass. Her mother’s sweater was draped comfortingly over her shoulder—she recalls the gentle pressure of her mother’s hand, holding it in place. Mary Rose broke the silence: “Why is he down there?” Her father replied just as gently, “Shhh.” And she realized her question had been shamefully rude. She also realized she was supposed to know the answer already. But again, perhaps she merely remembers the photograph; a black-and-white snapshot in the old album that she used to pore over secretly. At the time her father took it she could not have been more than two—three?—even so, she knew the difference between a bunker and a grave. Hitter was in one. Her brother was in the other. At the edge of a forest full of Christmas trees.

With the passage of years, he became Alexander-Who-Died. His myth remained static, like his reddish hair and yellow receiving blanket—details her father never fails to include. Yellow, perhaps, for the jaundice that killed him. “There was nothing wrong with him that couldn’t be fixed nowadays …” In Mary Rose’s mind he is suspended, wrapped in his yellow blanket, like a setting sun. There is no date, no season, nor any sense that the image might belong to a sequence. A single station of the cross. Like myth, it is outside time, where it endures, as mute as the graveside photo to which she returned over and over as though hoping each time to see something new. Until one day she opened the album and it was gone.

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Mary Rose was shy of her fourth birthday when they were posted back to Canada, across an ocean of time. They left him behind. Just as they left behind the sky, the treetops, the balcony and the big hot sun going down. Time was severed, and began again. “We’re home, kids.” Snow. English. Bold seasons, big roads. Different smell. School. “Pay attention!” Trenton air force base, with not a honey wagon in sight, and the air full of the clumsy rumble of Hercules supply planes. Always in view was the vastness of what in most countries would be called a sea but in Canada was known simply as “one of the Great Lakes.” Ringed with industry, home to “the Thousand Islands” and divided lengthwise by the US border, Lake Ontario was a burial vault for shipwrecks and waste, or an azure immensity, depending on the season and where you stood. They lived on a base again but graceful lindens and glistening apartment buildings had given way to three styles of serviceable houses, immaculate with not a garden to be seen—gardens were long-term propositions. “One of these days, I’ll plant a tree,” mused her father. Her brother was born there—her brother-who-lived—and then they were posted again, three hours west down the 401 to Hamilton.
See Jane run!
Different city, same lake. New school.
See Jane fall!

With each move the MacKinnons left something behind: broken toys, outgrown clothes, babies. What they left they did not remember so much as mythologize. Mary Rose left her tonsils in Hamilton. Though less lyrical than a heart left in San Francisco, they did, according to her father, enjoy the distinction of being flushed into the Niagara sewage system and going over the Falls. “Now you can say you’ve been
over the Falls without a barrel,” he said with a grin. It made her feel quirky and brave, took the edge off the fiery sword in her throat.

She got older and realized her tonsils had more likely been incinerated as hospital waste and gone up the smokestack. In any case, they were somewhere. Everything was. Each night in her prayers: “God bless Mum and Dad and Maureen and Other Mary Rose and Alexander-Who-Died and Andy-Patrick and the other Others …” The latter were the souls of her would-have-been siblings. They accounted for Dolly’s frequent, “There would have been seven of you kids, not three. Or wait now, you might have been eight.” The miscarriages. Nameless “others” who became part of family lore, like Other Mary Rose and Alexander-Who-Died.

The Rh factor was responsible for all the deaths: the first pregnancy is fine, but after that if the fetus’s blood is not Rh negative, the mother’s antibodies attack it. Mary Rose has always thought of herself as a lucky person, a belief rooted perhaps in having been born between two dead siblings: she won the blood-type roulette. It is why she is here—that, and the fact that her older sister didn’t drop her from the balcony back in Germany.

There is a cartoon she once came across in the
New Yorker
: A kangaroo stands on a busy street corner. At its feet, face down on the sidewalk lies a man in a business suit, a bullet hole in his back. The kangaroo’s eyes are shifted guiltily to one side. The caption consists of its thought:
That was meant for me
.

Whenever the past started piling up behind Mary Rose, threatening to collapse, the family would move and presto, she would get another second chance. She got good at being new. They all did. The MacKinnons were always new, always almost just like everyone else. Always next door to normal. It was like growing up in the witness protection programme without changing your name.

It isn’t just luck—her shiny life despite the cold draft at her back. Although she will not say it aloud, Mary Rose MacKinnon believes
herself to have been the beneficiary of divine intervention. A feat for an atheist. Her grade one teacher had written “slow” on her report card back in Trenton. It was a designation that dogged her through two schools and was set to blight the third when they were posted four hours back up the shore of Lake Ontario to Kingston.

It was known as the “limestone city,” with its historic forts and prisons, its universities and hospitals. Numbered among the latter was the loony bin, which was what everyone called The Ontario Hospital—itself a name that had acquired, by its very blandness, a sinister aspect. Kingston was where Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s “Father of Confederation,” had hatched the plot that would become a country, and the older buildings harboured a trillion stories, constructed as they were of the fossilized remains of plants and animals that had gone to sediment and turned to stone.

She was set to enter grade four at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School when Duncan made an appointment to see the principal.

Mary Rose was, by then, accustomed to being slow. Other kids would unaccountably take books from their desks and turn to page seventy-nine, or produce potatoes they’d brought from home and commence carving them into letters, dipping them in paint. She could neither draw a simple circle nor colour inside the lines. These were yardsticking offences. The blows were not severe, it being more about the humiliation factor: boys got the yardstick. To be a girl and get the yardstick meant you were outcast. Mercifully, she was already so otherwhere, she was unaware of being cast out. It began in kindergarten when she failed nap, and went downhill from there.

She focused on faces, tones of voice, on the pulsations of air around the speaker, the shape and texture of sounds, colour and character of numbers and letters
—a
was red,
e
was green, 4 was brown, 5 was red, 3 was female, 7 was male,
b
was dumb, 3 was mean, 4 was kind,
m
was blue,
q
was yellow,
j
was a loner, 7 was sexy, 8 was orange, 2 was white like a stone tablet … She missed a great deal of what was actually said.
“Pay attention!” Letters traded places, words vaulted the page.
See Jane fall!
Did the universe cease to exist each time she blinked? Black void, yawning for one second. Or, if not, was everyone eating chocolate cake each time she blinked then hiding it the moment she opened her eyes?
See Jane run!

The principal of Our Lady of Lourdes was Sister O’Halloran—a modern nun in boxy skirt suit, her crucifix and lipstick-free face the only clues that she was a bride of Christ. Duncan met with her and together they cooked up a plan to have Mary Rose skip grade four. A new mythology put forth its petals: her problem was not that she was slow, it was that she was smart.
“I’m not an ugly duckling. I’m a beautiful swan!”

She had been bored, her father told her, merely in need of a challenge. “Like Einstein,” he said.
No pressure
. “You’re going to be accelerated.” She was eight, she took it in:
I am going to be excelerated
. He framed it as an experiment in which either outcome would be honourable: If, after a trial period, she wished to fall back to grade four with her own age group, she could. No harm done. But if she thrived in grade five, then … “The sky’s the limit.”

Time opened up and swallowed grade four (which was brown). It was a change so entire that all that had come before was Chaos, and all that followed was Light. She entered grade five (red) and went from Dunce to Brain. It was a miracle on the order of Lourdes itself: Our Lady made her skip a grade. She paid attention, and got used to being the youngest.

These days she is getting used to being the oldest, hanging out in playgrounds with women a good ten or fifteen years her junior. There are worse things than having a free pass to the yummy mummy club. Not that she flirts. From her living room come strains of her mother singing
Carmen
through the phone.
“Toreado-rah don’t spit on the floo-rah, use the cuspidor-ah, that’s-ah what it’s for-ah …!”

She leaves the bathroom, returns the scissors to the knife block—and remembers where she last saw them: in her own hand, opening the box with the Christmas tree stand. She must have left them on the kitchen floor amid the packing materials, and Maggie dropped the car key in exchange for them. Though it crosses her mind to blame Jesus for having invented Christmas, Mary Rose knows it was her own fault that her child was playing with scissors. Scissors that could sever a finger, sink through the soft bone of a child …

In the living room, Maggie is now demolishing Matthew’s wooden tracks while Sitdy sings “Hello, Dolly!” indefatigably through the phone receiver face down on the floor. Mary Rose bends and picks it up.

“Hi, Mum, thanks for entertaining Maggie.”

“Where’s Hilary?”

Listening comprehension has never been her mother’s strong suit.

“Mum, she’s in Winnipeg, she’s—”

“Have you heard from your brother?”

“What? Not recently, no.”

She is starting to get that old familiar hazed feeling—why try to keep hold of a train of thought when it is bound to be derailed?

“What in the name o’ time is goin’ on, we haven’t heard from him in—”

“He’s fine, Mum, he’s alive, he’s busy.”

She follows Maggie into the kitchen—the child needs a diaper change. The mid-morning sun intensifies, flooding the kitchen with light. Soon the windows will be framed with ivy and it will be like looking through an enchantment … maybe they should skip the morning nap and go to the park.

Dolly speaks in a stage whisper, suddenly coy. “Do you think he and Shereen will have a baby?”

“I hope not.”

“Why not? He’s the last of the MacKinnon line.”

What are we, kings?
“Mum, there’s loads of MacKinnons in the world.”

Her mother is a Mahmoud, an ethnic Arab
—not Arab, Lebanese!
—and yet the self-appointed keeper of the MacKinnon clan. Like the Jews in Hollywood who made
White Christmas
. Like the gays who made … everything else.

“He’s the last of your father’s line”—adamant now, a warning in Dolly’s tone.

“Maybe they will, Mum.” It is nothing against her brother’s fiancée, there’s nothing wrong with Shereen—which is actually the only thing wrong with her.

Dolly is coy again. “Maybe they’ll have a boy.”

It is that Andy-Patrick already has two children: grown daughters from his first marriage who, though beloved, do not count in Dolly’s eyes when it comes to “your father’s line,” any more than Mary Rose and her sister did—although it has never seemed to bug Mo; she married a nice Pole, took his name and became safely fenced round with
zs
and
vs
. “Maybe they will, Mum.” Maybe the much younger Shereen will demand fifty-fifty on the domestic front. “It could be wonderful for him.”

Dolly is suddenly solemn. “I wasn’t good at having babies.”

Here we go … “Yes you were, Mum, you were great.”

“How old were you when your brother was born?”

“Five.”

“Were you that old in Germany?”

“What? No, I was going on four when we moved back to Canada—”

“I mean Alexander-Who-Died.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Mum, one or two, I guess. Three?”

“Was that before or after my mother died?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mum. Maybe Dad can—”

“Do you remember what you said when I was pregnant with
Andy-Patrick and I told you we were going to call him Alexander if it was a boy—”

“Yes, Mum, I remember.”

“You were just five years old and you said”—Dolly imitates Mary Rose’s toddler voice—“ ‘Don’t call him Alexander, if you call him Alexander you’ll have to put him in de gwound!’ ” Dolly laughs.

Mary Rose wonders if she really sounded that much like Tweety Bird but asks, “Mum, what’s in the package?” Maybe she can get her mother off one loop by nudging her onto another.

“I’ve sent you a packeege.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“You told me.”

“Did you get it yet?”

She winces. When did her mother start using such execrable grammar? “No, I
have not yet received
it. When did you mail it?”