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?”
“Right before Christmas, wait now, right after Christmas, right before we saw you right after Christmas.”
“Before your after-Christmas visit here after Christmas?”
“That’s right, Sadie, Flo, Mo—”
“That’s almost three months ago, mum.”
“It is? Well what in the name of time is going on, dammit?”
“It’s okay, Mum, it’ll turn up.”
“Turnip? You cooking turnip? I love turnip!”
“TURN UP. THE PACKAGE. IT WILL TURN UP.”
“You don’t have to shout.”
“Sorry, Mum, I better go, Maggie needs her nap.”
“She still has a nap in the morning?”
Sigh.
“Where’s Hilary?”
“She’s in—”
“What’s she doing in Winnipeg?”
“The Importance of—”
“We’re coming on the seventh.”
“Oh okay, what time?” Mary Rose opens the telephone drawer in search of a pen.
“At seven.”
“At seven on the seventh? Seven in the morning?” No pen. Broken pencil—
“Eleven.”
“At eleven on the seventh?” That will be easy to remember.
“Did I say that?”
“I … don’t know, Mum, did you?” Where are all the pens? “What day of the week is that?”
“You’ve got me all confused now. W
here’s the calendar I gave you?”
“Sorry, Mum, is Dad there, do you want to put him on and—” She excavates the calendar from the corkboard where it’s been pinned since her parents’ visit in January.
“Wait’ll I get my purse—”
“No! Mum, don’t get your purse, it’s okay, call me when you know when—”
“Call someone in to help you with the kids, you’ve earned it, dear.”
“Mum, I have Candace.”
“Get her full time!”
“I don’t need help.”
“Live a little, Mary Rose!”
Whenever her mother does say her name right off, Mary Rose sees quotation marks around it, as if Dolly were saying a line from a play.
“Thanks, Mum.”
She hangs up and looks at the calendar pinned to the corkboard—an island of clutter in her otherwise streamlined kitchen. It features a series of watercolour flowers painted by an artist who is limited to the use of his foot. There is nothing to say about the pictures except that they are foot-painted. A caption in the bottom left-hand corner thanks her for supporting the Catholic Women’s League. Are her parents coming on the seventh at eleven? Or on the eleventh at seven? Mo will know.
She eyes the dead chicken on the counter, suddenly out of love with it. “The thrill is gone,” she says, avoiding the wing, picking it up from underneath so it rests in her hand—disquieting in another way, resembling as it does a baby. Maybe she ought to take another stab at being vegetarian. She drops it into a zip-lock bag, and a penny drops too—the Fort Garry Hotel is in Winnipeg, not Calgary. It was in Winnipeg that she bought the knives that will stay sharp longer than you will! Prairies versus mountains. Vertigo versus claustrophobia …
She bends to the freezer drawer and tucks the chicken between a package of organic frozen peas and an ice cube tray of puréed sweet potato. She admires once again her icemaker bin full of freshly laid cubes, and congratulates herself on not having colonized it for food the way some people do. How can they live like that? There is a mysterious object toward the back; she reaches for it, then steps away—investigate one frost-bearded lump in your freezer and before you know it you’re cleaning the whole fridge. She has a list of things to do today and “clean fridge” is not on it. Is her brother really thinking of starting a second family with Shereen? It isn’t that she does not wish happiness for him—if he wants another baby at his stage of advanced boyhood, then good luck to him, it’s just … it is annoying to hear her mother flaunting an old-world pride in her son’s reproductive prowess. And Shereen is not good enough for her brother. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.
She closes the freezer and registers a fresh twinge at the dents in its drawer front. The fridge was the stainless steel jewel in the crown of their kitchen renovation, and she has allowed Hilary to believe that Maggie made the dents with her doll stroller. She would spend the money to replace it if she didn’t know how logistically challenging it will be to orchestrate the necessary service call.
“Maggie, no, poo stays in your diaper!” Summoning her core strength, Mary Rose grips her daughter and carries her at arms’ length up the stairs like hazardous waste.
She does not usually damage things anymore, the fridge was an anomaly. At worst she might punch her own head or slam it into a wall. Back in the day, before she got together with Hil, she used to go into the kitchen, open the drawer, take hold of the biggest knife by the blade and squeeze it just shy of the point where her skin would break. But she never crossed the line into pathology—out-and-out “cutting.” And there is no chance of any knife tricks for her these days, she is far more self-aware. Besides, she would not dream of keeping her good knives in a drawer.
•
She wakes up. They have kept her in. Moved her to a different floor—a quieter ward. Something is in the room and taking up space, a presence … it knows something about her … She falls back asleep.
She wakes up. Through her half-open door she sees tinsel decking the corridor … It was a boy. He is dead.
•
It is downright balmy as she pushes Maggie in the stroller with Daisy trotting alongside, off to pick up Matthew in time for lunch. The last crusts of brown ice are trickling into storm sewers, while overhead, trees are tight with buds; every year she promises herself she will catch the moment when they open and every year she is taken by surprise when the city is suddenly in full leaf. Sounds of traffic bulge as they near the intersection with busy Bathurst Street, but as they arrive at the lights in front of the corner store, strains of Albinoni’s stately Adagio bathe them along with the plants that the owner is placing outside on racks.
“Hello.” The lady almost sings it. “How are you?”
“Hi, Winnie.”
The music and plants create a buffer between the sidewalk and gritty Bathurst Street and as she waits for the lights to change, Mary Rose is held in a bubble of time, puffy and soft. No sooner has she turned her face to the sun, however, than she experiences a pang. She ought to phone her mother right now and just plain listen while the old darling loops on. Her mother has taken to talking about the lost babies, repeating stock phrases—Mary Rose noticed it last summer, and more recently when her parents visited in early January. Perhaps it is a feature of aging; tightly packed cargo from the past coming loose, sliding about below decks, making itself felt after decades—Mary Rose could understand if her mother’s need to tell and retell were evidence of a grief deferred. But what is disconcerting, even eerie, is the degree of animation that has crept into Dolly’s accounts. She tells them almost as if they were funny stories.
She never recollects the events in reliable order and neither does Duncan with his steel-trap mind. At the mention of Alexander’s name, there ensues a customary muddled working back through time in an effort to determine whether Dolly’s mother died before or after he was born, and how many days he lived, was it eight? Three? … As though it had all happened in wartime and, after the bombs had fallen and the sirens were stilled, fragments of events had been put back together in the wrong order, with gaps.
The light turns green and they push off—she coughs and feels a sudden kink in her throat—she mustn’t get sick until Hil gets home. The stroller grinds to a halt in the middle of the intersection where cars are paused like snorting horses at the lights. Maggie has managed to kick off one of her boots, which is now lodged in the undercarriage. Mary Rose bends to retrieve it, sustains a sandpapery smooch from Daisy and rises in time to avoid being run over by some idiot in a Smart Car.
“Back off!” she bellows.
Already repenting the adrenal expenditure, she shepherds them to the other side of Bathurst.
She is uncertain how many “others” there were, but she does know, thanks to Maureen, that one of them went down the toilet in Kingston. Their house was new and therefore, she told herself, unhaunted. Although who is to say an embryo is not robust enough to haunt a house—even a suburban split-level? It had a soul, according to the Church. And yet that soul was not welcome in Heaven any more than Other Mary Rose’s had been. What did God do with all those souls in Limbo? Were they recycled? Harvested like stem souls, capable of conferring immortality? Heroes often enter the Underworld in quest of a lost soul, but Mary Rose cannot think of any who have entered Limbo—“The Other Place”—for the same purpose. She ought to make a note of this. For the third novel.
She’ll jot it down later, they’re at the school. And there is her beautiful boy, lined up with his classmates on the other side of the glass door, waiting to be dismissed. Waiting to run to her.
•
She does not remember her husband having brought it, but it is sitting open on her bedside stand: a grey velvet jewellery box. In it is a ring. Milky blue, hint of iridescence, a moonstone. The box is open, so she must have opened it. This keeps happening. It is as though she opens her eyes on a scene from a movie, then the movie skips, sometimes backwards sometimes forwards. It is di
fficult to get hold of the story. In between the bits the screen goes black. This is probably due to the drugs they are giving her. Why are they giving her drugs? She is not sick.
This is her second time on this ward, she was here after she had Mary Rose—the second Mary Rose, the one who lived. She is not crazy, she knows this is Germany not Winnipeg, she knows it is Christmas. The ring in the box is blue. Like a stillborn baby. This baby wasn’t stillborn though, so why has he given her a stillborn ring? This baby was born alive. She heard him cry. They did not let her hold him—“Best not to,” they said. They took him away and called a priest.
She opens her eyes. Her husband is here, sitting by her bed behind a newspaper. He is in his uniform, he must have come from work. The ring is now on her hand.
“It’s pretty,” she says.
He looks up. “So are you.” He rises and leans down to kiss her on the forehead.
Her face is wet. This keeps happening. She squeezes his hand so he won’t worry. He looks thin. “Who’s feeding you?”
“Armgaard.”
She lets out a dismissive puff of air through dry lips.
“And Eileen and those gals have been around,” he adds. “They brought a stew. Wasn’t as good as yours, though.” He smiles. “And don’t worry about the baby, she’s fine.”
It takes her a moment to understand that he means Mary Rose, who is, after all, still the “baby” of the family—the baby at home, not the one in the morgue. He closes his hand around hers and she feels the ring bite against the neighbouring fingers. He is so good to her.
When she wakes up, it is dark and he is gone.