The Unfinished Child (19 page)

“This might sound kind of strange,” Marie said, “but can you please take extra care to see if everything’s okay? I’ve had a terrible feeling for some time now that something’s wrong with the baby.”

The technician nodded. “Mothers are incredibly intuitive when it comes to their own babies. I’ll just take a good close look,” she said. “But ultrasounds can’t show you everything; they can often pick up neural tube defects, like spina bifida, and they can pick up obvious problems like missing limbs and, depending when the ultrasound is done, heart defects and other organ problems. But what they can’t do is detect most chromosomal disorders. There might be what we call some ‘soft’ indicators, but amniocentesis is really the test you need for that.” She paused and examined an image closer.
Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

After a few more minutes, the technician rose. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call your husband in now.” The air in the small, dark room rushed about when the door opened and closed.

A moment later, Barry sat beside her and watched the image of his baby on the screen. At first, everything looked blurry, non-descript.

“Here is the baby’s spine,” the technician said.

A tiny string of pearls floated up from the cloudy depths and ran up to join with the baby’s head. How like a fish spine, Marie thought, so fossil-like and tidy.

“And here’s the heart.”

On the screen it looked the size of an olive. Inside the tiny skull cavity a shadow indicated a brain cushioned like a bird in a nest. The baby had all of its limbs and organs. Marie could tell that Barry had entered the room expecting the worst, but now she saw relief relax his features. There was nothing obviously monstrous about the baby. It didn’t have two heads, or eight arms, or no arms at all. The brain wasn’t growing independently outside the skull. The baby seemed to be okay.

In the car,
Barry pulled out of the medical building’s underground parkade. They both squinted when they hit the full sunshine. He turned right and drove along a road that was lined with old houses and new condominiums. “I feel like celebrating,” he said, and reached over and gave Marie’s hand a squeeze. “Let’s go for lunch.”

Marie stared straight ahead. She saw her baby’s chalky image on the screen. Everything
seemed
okay, but her dread hadn’t lifted.

It wasn’t noon yet. She felt the heat from the sun through the windshield.

“Marie?” Barry said, squeezing her thigh. “Did you hear me?”

She turned toward him. He was leaning forward over the steering wheel, smiling at her.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Barry swerved to miss a pothole. “I said, don’t you feel relieved?”

She quelled the impulse to lie. “I’ll feel relieved when we get the amnio results back.”

“That’s a month away!” The car jerked forward. “I don’t get it, Marie. You never worried like this when you were pregnant before.”

“I never had a feeling that something was
wrong
before, otherwise I’d probably have wanted more information then too.”

“More information,” he said derisively and tapped his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Then his voice softened. “Look, we’ve been lucky twice before. Why don’t we just go for it?”

Marie wavered. Maybe if she allowed herself to believe in
his
belief, then everything would be okay. “So, let me make sure I understand you. You want me to cancel the amnio appointment. We’ll just go for it, like you said. And we’ll take what we get. If there’s something wrong with the baby, we’ll deal with it when it happens.” It would feel good to be reckless for a change, to live boldly and without fear.

Barry braked at the next intersection and squinted into the sun.

Marie saw the baby’s little olive heart beating. She saw its tiny hands curled into fists and knew that when they opened they’d have all their digits. The ultrasound hadn’t shown any obvious abnormalities, and the technician had used the male pronoun when she pointed out the baby’s bladder. Was it a boy, or was she just using “he” as a generic pronoun? Still, as Barry slowly manoeuvred the car down the back streets of Garneau, she pictured a fair-haired boy with a thick-lipped smile and upturned eyes, a gentle boy who loved to throw a ball for his dog. She could handle that part. The baby. The boy, assuming it was one. But her son would age. And as he aged, his disability would become more visible. He’d be less loveable to strangers as puberty thickened his neck and he developed hairs and body odours.

And who would come to his birthday parties? Kids with Down syndrome were integrated into public school now. Would the “normal” kids from his class ever come? Or just kids like him? Marie had seen the Special Olympics on television; all those volunteers helping the athletes couldn’t be involved simply to look good. But if she was honest with herself, she’d admit that she felt sorry for them and everyone else whose lives were touched by that one child. Yet she admired them too.

And if she and Barry had a child who wasn’t quite right, people would feel sorry for them too. They’d be “poor Barry” and “poor Marie.” How would they handle that, the double takes from strangers? It made her mad just thinking about it. And who would care for their son when she and Barry were gone? Nicole and Sophia? How would they feel, once they were adults, when they learned that their parents could have known in advance about the Down syndrome?

Marie repeated her question, more softly this time. “Do you want me to cancel the amnio?”

“I don’t know,” Barry said, a tone of defeat in his voice. “What are the odds that he’ll have something like Down syndrome?”

They were speeding south now. The windshield was speckled with grime from the melting snow. She looked around her. The entire city was in need of a good wash. A two-day downpour would do the trick. But it was too early for that. February rains meant freezing rain, thin sheets of ice covering everything, a hazard to drivers and pedestrians alike. Old people, in particular, with hips brittle as dried wishbones.

“It doesn’t matter what the odds are,” she responded. “If it happens to us, it’s one hundred percent.”

It was mid-July, and Margaret
looked forward to having her children home from school during the holidays. James would be fifteen in a week, and Rebecca was already thirteen and a half. The children were more interested in their friends now than they were in their parents, but Margaret was determined that they’d have a nice summer holiday together. If Donald agreed, they’d take the train from Edmonton to Montreal. She’d never been to Montreal before.

The sun was high in the cloudless sky. Donald had put the screen door up again over the weekend so Margaret could open the door without letting bugs in. She enjoyed having the windows and doors open and feeling the cross draft in the kitchen, the room in which she spent the most time. What she loved most about her kitchen was the window over the sink. Every woman needed a window above her sink, one with a long sightline that could take her away from the never-ending domestic tasks.

The doorbell rang and Margaret dried her hands on a dishtowel as she walked to the front door. A postman stood on the front stoop with a letter in his hand. He extended a pen and a piece of paper on a clipboard. “Sign here, please.”

“What is it?”

“A registered letter, ma’am. I just need your signature here.”

He pointed to a line on the page, and she signed. Then he handed an official looking letter to her and told her to have a nice day.

The blood rushed from her face. In her trembling hands Margaret held a creamy beige envelope with the Poplar Grove Provincial Training Centre return address in the upper left corner. What if Donald or one of her children had been home when the letter arrived? She hadn’t heard anything from that place in almost sixteen years, and suddenly a registered letter. She closed and then locked the front door.

Margaret, in the weeks since her last visit to see Carolyn, had found it necessary to go over it all in her head, as thought this dreadful process of repetition could somehow alter the events. But she could not now, weeks later, remember it all; there were particular images that stayed with her—the red flush on her daughter’s neck, the slip of white skin that showed above her elastic waistband, the look of surprise on Dr. Maclean’s face. And waking suddenly on the couch in the pale afternoon light.

She’d only missed one of her monthly visits to Poplar Grove. Was Dr. Maclean checking up on her? She’d left Carolyn in his care. It was up to him and his staff to fix the mess that place had caused. Now that Margaret knew how bad things could be there, she couldn’t go back. Over the years she had resigned herself to the stench and neglect, but to know that some person had done this to her daughter? No. That couldn’t be reconciled in
any
world in which a loving God was supposed to be present.

The letter brought the familiar feeling of impending doom that she’d been trying to shake since Carolyn’s birth.

She returned to the kitchen and sat down, placing the letter on the table before her. The stone of anger that had once been jagged and rough had been smoothed to perfection over the years. It sat like a polished worry bead in her gut and she worked it over and over and over again.

With shaking hands she opened the envelope.

July 12, 1963

Dear Mrs. Harrington,

I am writing to inform you that on July 10, your daughter Carolyn gave birth to an apparently normal baby girl. To my knowledge, this is the first case of a healthy child being born to a mongoloid, although I may be mistaken. Your granddaughter weighed five pounds, two ounces at birth and has a good appetite. We have separated her from her mother and are keeping her under close observation. As you are her lawful guardian, we await further instructions as to the placement of the child. Obviously, she may go home with you. However, if you wish her to be placed elsewhere, you must inform us of this decision. It is my hope that you do so in a timely manner. Believe me when I say that Poplar Grove is not a viable option for the child. I look forward to discussing this matter with you at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Michael Maclean

Margaret put the letter on the table and held her head in both hands. A granddaughter. Another tie to the past that she was trying to run from. Would the pain never stop? Would it go on, year after year like newspaper stories on wars and natural disasters?

An apparently normal baby girl? How was that possible?

She paced the kitchen floor. Who could she talk to? She wanted someone to take care of her, tell her what to do, tell her it would be okay. But she was alone at the helm of a disastrous journey. Never in her life had someone stood in her corner, rooting for her all the way. Someone who loved her no matter what. A mother who looked past her own resentments to see a daughter in need. Mayburn was only four hours from the city, but it might as well have been a country away. Her parents’ lives were still dictated by the farm. And in her mother’s world there was no room for self-pity. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to work. She’d forgotten about Carolyn as soon as she heard the baby was a mongoloid. The silence on the end of the party line was deafening. Who might be listening in? But maybe that stopped her from saying,
Did you want your father to get the gun?

No one from her family ever came to the city. Once she’d left the town, her ties had been cut.
Margaret’s too good for us
, they might as well have said. Their not coming to her wedding made clear their estrangement. But Margaret had also been relieved. Her mother next to Mrs. Harrington? Calloused hands next to white gloves? Even now, twenty years later, Margaret had trouble believing she had lived a childhood with parents and a brother. Its abrupt ending made it all feel like a lie. Even now, twenty years later, she found it difficult to believe that her family experienced emotions as strong as her own. They were oxen, steadily plodding through their days. No peaks. No valleys. Nothing like this. Surely nothing as dramatic as this.

She glanced at the clock over the stove. She had two hours before her children came home, enough time to get to the post office and back. And with the decision came action. She would not visit. She had been cut from her own family, and she had survived. She could cut too. If she refused to see the baby, her heart could not be moved. Dr. Maclean would never understand her decision, and she had no intention of filling in the history that might make him understand. Still . . . she hesitated for a moment. A little girl. Five pounds, two ounces. Tiny fingers and big, trusting eyes. This was another turning point in her life. She stood at an intersection, and whatever road she’d take would have grave ramifications for the rest of her life. Was this her second chance to do the right thing? To break the silence of Carolyn’s existence? If she didn’t have Donald, James, and Rebecca to think about then she could be brave. But she
did
have them, and she was not about to destroy their lives by dredging up the past. They would never trust her again if she pulled her past into her present. She had made a commitment to this silence.

Her pen flowed smoothly over the page. She slipped the letter into an envelope and copied the address onto the front. Now it was two o’clock. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to stop at the store too.

A week passed. Seven days
of slush and thaw and sun and flurries. Marie’s appetite returned, along with her energy, but sleeping still proved to be a problem. Always in early pregnancy she suffered from insomnia. This time was no exception. At four o’clock she woke up and was unable to get back to sleep.

It was March now. Lying in bed the previous night, she had lain her palm flat on her belly and felt her uterus extended like a hard stone from the surrounding softness. Usually small as a kiwi, it was now the size of a large grapefruit. Already it had expanded beneath her skin to reach almost to her belly button. Obviously her body had done this stretching before. Marie felt she was twice the size that she’d been with Nicole. At thirteen weeks she was having difficulty zipping up her jeans. That hadn’t happened with her first pregnancy until she was at least seventeen weeks.