The Unfinished Child (10 page)

“What?” Ron tried to look interested. Did he ever think about Marie and remember their romantic times together? His lips had kissed hers. Their hands had undressed each other. He’d taken her to his bed. At times like this it annoyed Elizabeth that Ron had once been intimate with her best friend.

“She’s pregnant.”

The news sucked the air out of the room. Elizabeth watched him closely.

“Good for her,” he said, taking his cold coffee to the sink. “But I don’t wish it was me.”

“Ron?”

He turned and looked at her, hopeful and sad.

“I’m still leaving.”

“What can I say?” he asked, his arms spread wide, taking in the room and the house and the years they’d spent together. “What can I say? I don’t want you to go.”

A few minutes
later Ron disappeared downstairs to mark student assignments. Elizabeth stood at the sink and rinsed the dinner dishes. Then she took a warm cloth and wiped the counters and the kitchen table. She was surprised to not feel a greater relief now that the conversation was over. Instead, she felt annoyed. Why hadn’t Ron put up more of a fight? She had steeled herself to have a lengthy conversation, but it had ended in less than fifteen minutes. Fifteen years of marriage disintegrating in a short conversation on a frigid winter evening. Maybe that’s what she’d remember in the years to come, the wind howling, the ice crystals shimmering, the furnace kicking on again and again. Being housebound.
What can I say?
he had asked. But in the end he had said nothing but the obvious,
I don’t want you to go
, and disappeared into the basement.

The evening wore on. By bedtime the temperature had dropped to minus forty with wind chill. Ice fog hung in thick clouds beneath the street lamps.
Stay inside if you can
, weather announcers warned.
Exposed flesh will become frostbitten in seconds.
Elizabeth sat at the kitchen table and made a list of things she’d need for her new apartment. Were there blinds on the windows? Did the kitchen have a double sink? What colour were the bathroom tiles? It was almost as if she hadn’t been there at all. In truth, her thoughts kept returning to Marie and the baby that was growing in her belly. Could she possibly fake her way through another baby shower? Marie had said she knew Elizabeth would be happy for her. Well, she was wrong. She wasn’t happy at all. Maybe their friendship had run its course.

Finally it was bedtime, and Elizabeth and Ron, shy now with each other, slept side by side, their thighs lightly touching in the middle of the bed.

Six months passed without a
word from anybody at Poplar Grove. Every day Margaret thought about Carolyn, her little child that she’d wrapped up tight in a pink flannel blanket to keep her warm and safe when she’d let her go. Christmas lights decorated city hall and the legislature grounds, and all around her people prepared for holiday festivities.

She was free to visit now, but she was afraid. An entire building, like a deserted island, filled with castaways and a baby who didn’t know her own mother. She had only held Carolyn once, and she’d been so tiny. Had that moment been imprinted on the child’s brain? Was she patiently waiting for her mother to return?

Margaret tried to act as if everything was normal. She put up a Christmas tree and hung two stockings on the mantel. Neither she nor Donald mentioned the missing third stocking. They also didn’t mention the new baby growing within her because they’d learned the danger of becoming excited too soon. This new baby grew in a mother who held her breath. In a mother who held joy at bay, who looked full into the sun until she felt her eyes burn. Who returned to an old childhood habit of pulling nervously at her nose as if she could control her fate by altering her appearance.

Six months of silence in which she was supposed to forget and move on. Act as if nothing had happened. That’s what her mother had finally said when she gleaned the truth about what the doctor’s son had done to Margaret. But before that, she’d used strong words to berate her daughter, who’d been discovered in bed in the middle of the afternoon.
How did she think a farm would run? Did she think they had hired hands? Did she think at all?
Then she’d noticed her child’s red-rimmed eyes, saw the shame and devastation therein, and suspicion lodged in her gut. They’d passed that boy on the way home from Doc Jenkins’s. She stood rock still for some time. Margaret could see her mother’s mind racing to process the situation. Then she sat on the corner of the bed, her voice low and un-tender. “Don’t you dare breathe a word of this to your father. To
anyone
! Do you understand me?” She reached out a claw hand and shook Margaret’s arm. “Am I right in what I’m thinking?”

Margaret’s mind raced with confusion. Could there be anything worse? She nodded and fell to crying again.

“You clean yourself up and get back to the chores immediately, you understand? This never happened.”

She’d seen him
once in town, after that day on the farm. She’d turned the corner from the post office and there he was, sitting in the shade outside the general store, sipping a cold soda straight from the bottle, looking cool as could be in a linen shirt white as a gauze over a wound. Her heart teemed with a mixture of panic, dread, anger, and hope. It was the latter that turned her stomach the most. The hope. For deep down, a part of her hoped he’d notice her, be kind to her, offer to buy her a soda and make everything right. It wasn’t too late for him to somehow make amends, to make what happened at the creekbed a moment of insanity from which he’d begged forgiveness. He would be a gentleman after all and acknowledge his fault. He would be good to her parents. They would have a proper life together.

But Stuart Jenkins had sipped his cold drink and smiled with his perfect teeth. He’d looked right through her.

This was the boy who had stood over her and buckled his belt. “Remember,” he’d said. “You never once told me to stop.”

In her mind she’d been screaming, but out loud she hadn’t made a sound.

She never visited the creek again.

But six months
of not loving her daughter was a greater shame even than this. What kind of a mother was she? She’d lived through the years on the farm when the rain never came and her parents lost the ability to laugh. She knew that a body didn’t just bounce back when times suddenly got better, just like the ruts in a road didn’t disappear when the weather improved.

In spite of her terror that another pregnancy would result in a similar shame, she allowed her husband to love her. She’d picked this man. She’d walked self-consciously down the aisle at the church Donald’s parents had been married in, wearing a white dress chosen by her mother-in-law. She’d said, “I do.” So when he slid beneath the covers and reached for her, she fulfilled her duty. It wasn’t long before her belly gently swelled with her second child, yet her thoughts remained on Carolyn.

One year, almost to the day, after kissing her daughter goodbye, she delivered a healthy baby boy. They named him James, after his paternal grandfather. And Donald, after his father. James Donald Harrington. And when she placed her nose to the infant’s head, the spice cabinet swung wide open again.

Dr. Morrison was all smiles when he congratulated her. “What did I tell you?” he said, as if the earth had righted itself at his suggestion. “What did I tell you?”

It was only after she brought her infant son home and experienced his constant need to drain her breasts every two hours that she began to fear for her first-born child. Baby James demanded her constant care. Hold me. Rock me. Feed me. Change me. Hold me. Rock me. Feed me. Change me. Who was holding Carolyn? Who was feeding and loving her girl? The bathroom mirror did not answer her questions. Instead, it reflected back the image of a young mother—exhausted, uncertain, proud, afraid. Guilty. When she looked closer, stretching so her face almost touched the glass, she saw it in the lines marking her forehead and surrounding her blue eyes—guilt. A caught-in-the-act, split-second reflection that disappeared as soon as she noted its presence. A woman leaving a child in a basket on the stairs, ringing the bell and running.

But still she didn’t pick up the phone, and nobody from Poplar Grove did either. Would they call if Carolyn died? Was no news good news?

Eighteen months after
James’s arrival, Margaret gave birth to another daughter, Rebecca Constance Harrington. She weighed eight pounds even and brought a flood of pink into their home—booties, hats, blankets. Like her brother, she, too, required much care and attention, and Carolyn remained a ghostly presence in Margaret’s peripheral vision, the shadow in the corner of every room she entered, the echo that came back louder than the soft query sent into the midnight air.

Then, as if overnight, Margaret fell into a deep depression. Her husband stood by helplessly and watched his wife’s industrious, farm-girl nature dissolve into lethargy and darkness. Margaret gave in to the crushing weight of grief and the knowledge that she, herself, was motherless. Her brother, Johnny, had married Ethel Boyko from the neighbouring farm. They now had two boys. Margaret’s mother baked fresh bread for them and delivered eggs fresh from the coop. Women from the community also dropped by with offerings because that’s what they did in Mayburn. But Margaret was alone in the city. She wasn’t really a part of any community, so no one dropped off meals or offered to mind a child. Life here was built on an etiquette guide she’d never read. She was as alone in her rocking chair while nursing her child in the middle of the night as she was while feeding her in the middle of the day. A person could go crazy from loneliness.

Donald took time off work when his wife failed to get out of bed one morning despite the children’s cries. She didn’t eat, she stopped bathing, and her beauty faded like fresh-cut flowers without water. If she was lucky, she slept for three-hour stretches. More often than not, she wandered the house at night, staring out the window into the winter darkness, aware that there was something she should be doing but having no clue as to what that might be.

The winter of 1950 was a terrible one for Margaret. Donald would bring the children into her bed and sit with her, hoping their small faces, their absolute need, would jar the melancholy from her bones. They were beautiful children. She could see that, but her heart was unmoved, and the new silence she inhabited hardened into stone. What right had she to love and be loved? When Margaret had left the farm, her mother’s dry-eyed goodbye could not hide that she welcomed the separation. But it wasn’t natural. Not natural at all.

Just as it wasn’t natural to give up a child. Margaret could not live anymore with not knowing that child’s fate. How far was it to Poplar Grove? The depression clawed at her attempts to connect to her life. If ever she could get away . . . 

Just one visit to be sure she was being taken care of. To see how her hair had grown in, to hear her laugh.

One morning the
light returned and her heart became right-sized again. There was no explaining the transition. Depression came; depression went. Margaret returned to her duties with a raw gratitude. How good it was to feel again. To see her children and know that she loved them. Yet it was clear to her now that if she was going to hold on to her slim wedge of sanity, she would have to rescue Carolyn by a great act of imagination. She would dream a life for her, one surrounded by stuffed animals and light. Pancakes and syrup. Birdsong and flowers. By a profound act of concentration, she would float her child on a cloud toward a place of lemonade and fresh-cut lawns. Toward a playground with enough swings for every child.

In 1951, when
James was three and Rebecca was a year and a half old, Margaret finally found the courage to step onto the asylum bus and make her first visit to Poplar Grove to verify that her daughter was indeed receiving the special care she needed. Four years had passed since she and Donald had signed the institutionalization papers and handed over their child.

It was a Wednesday. It was summer. Donald wouldn’t be home until five-thirty. Margaret arranged for a babysitter, her neighbour’s live-in mother-in-law, and carefully kept her plans to herself. “I’m going shopping,” she said.

The asylum bus. That wasn’t its official name, but someone on the phone at Poplar Grove had called it that. “The asylum bus leaves twice a day from the south terminal on the first and fifteenth of every month,” the voice that had answered the phone said. “It’ll bring you here and take you right back after an hour.” Then the anonymous woman had laughed as if Margaret had told her a joke, but she hadn’t. “Just between you and me,” the woman added, “an hour’s enough!”

The bus pulled out of the terminal right at the scheduled time. From the bus window Margaret saw a dark bank of clouds gathering on the eastern horizon. She’d left laundry on the line and silently hoped it wouldn’t rain. She turned her gaze to the single red rose lying in her lap. It was her favourite flower. She imagined meeting Carolyn and extending her hand to the little four-year-old who would look upon her with curious chestnut eyes, without understanding that the woman before her had abandoned her and been too cowardly to visit. Margaret didn’t think about the thorns on the rose’s stem because this girl was special, wasn’t she, so maybe normal rules didn’t apply.

The bus headed directly to the highway from the transit terminal. Margaret realized that she did not know the way. Someone else had delivered her child to Poplar Grove. But who? Donald? No, he couldn’t have. He would have told her. Wouldn’t he? How had they never discussed it?

The bus gathered speed as it merged onto the highway and left the southernmost suburbs of the city behind. Almost immediately the landscape changed and the cramped houses buttressed against one another on small city lots gave way to a vast openness of country fields. Margaret felt her eyes relax as her sightlines lengthened in the open country. Most of the fields had been tilled and planted, but a few horses and cows could be seen grazing in the occasional fallow field. Her father and brother would be out in the fields this very moment. Her mother, as Wednesdays were wash days, was likely hanging laundry.