Once he arrived on the landing of the main floor, Gaetan tried to stand straighter, to square his shoulders so that he would look like a visitor, not a patient. He stared blankly at the community bulletin board while he tried to compose himself. There were dozens of coloured posters pinned to the cork: bake sales and walks for several kinds of diseases, a missing wallet, a litter of kittens free to a good home and a second litter of kittens available for five dollars a piece, a patient on the fifth floor was trying to sell a tuxedo. Gaetan felt dizzy. He turned and stood with his back against the board, the push pins digging into his shoulder blades. He was incredibly thirsty. An orderly wheeled a very pregnant girl down the hall. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The girl waved at Gaetan like she was on a parade float. He waved back.
Once the orderly and the girl had turned the corner, Gaetan ripped off his blue plastic hospital bracelet and tucked it into his pocket. He stepped into the gift shop, which used to be an old cloak room. They hadn’t even bothered to remove the brass hooks that lined the walls. Every inch of the room was filled with things to distract: cheap novels, magazines, crosswords, yarn, every kind of gum.
Gaetan stared at the stand-up glass cooler that was filled with tightly bundled bouquets. Small white “Get Well” cards were wedged into the leaves like kites in trees. If he shut his eyes, it smelled like a funeral home. For Gaetan, walking past a cooler of gift shop flowers, a florist, or even the old Chinese woman, who walked through the bar every Saturday to sell single roses wrapped in cellophane, was like having a black cat cross your path, or walking over someone’s grave. It was bad luck. It smelled of injury, of funeral, of apology.
He dug into his pocket for money and was surprised to find a folded twenty-dollar bill. Apparently, the thieves had been amateurs. The elderly cashier, who looked like she could have been a patient, or soon would be, put a hand over the cotton-soft bill he put on the counter even before he’d said what he wanted.
“A book of stamps,” he said.
She nodded and smiled, her thin white lips pulling back to reveal an oversized set of dentures.
Outside the hospital, six nurses stood in the middle of the painted perimeter of where they were allowed to smoke. The ashtray stand was overflowing with stubbed cigarettes and garbage. The nurses were trying to get in a quick smoke before their next shift started. They sucked back on their filters as if they were trying to pull their next breath in through the eye of a needle. Gaetan walked over and leaned up against the clear Plexiglas of the partial enclosure. It felt like a bus stop or a penalty box. The nurses didn’t acknowledge him, the gently panting patient, until he spoke.
“Any one of you got a pen?” he asked. “Please?” He peeled a stamp from the packet and affixed it to the back of his hospital bracelet. There were no postcards of the hospital, so it would have to do.
One of the nurses, an older woman with a faded green rose-and-dagger tattoo on her forearm, took a final drag and tossed her cigarette onto the ground. “Sure. You don’t mind red, do you?”
The other nurses stopped to watch the exchange. They didn’t like patients in their space. Gaetan smiled and accepted the pen and wrote an address on the back of his bracelet.
______________
2:08 p.m. 24°C. Wind SE, breezy.
Class mascot belly up in the aquarium.
When Ferd saw his Aunt Bay through the window of his classroom door, his heart thudded like a tire gone flat on the highway. He prayed the door wouldn’t open. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy don’t open the door.
“Mom’s dead,” he whispered into his open math textbook and then immediately pinched himself for thinking that at least he wouldn’t have to do his geometry homework.
For months, he’d had a recurring dream. In it, he held a black egg speckled with white dots. The egg would begin to crack and he would watch the pressure cracks snake through the shell. By the end, he would be left with a fistful of broken shell that cut his palms and streaming blood he could not staunch. The rest of the dream would be spent searching through the blood and shell for the hatchling he could never find.
Bay tapped the window with her manicured index finger and waved at him. She was smiling. Ferd relaxed a little and hoped his mother had only hit her head again. Maybe she had broken something. An arm or a leg. He crossed his fingers and his toes for good measure and whispered the prayer a second time. At least he would be able to write on the cast. He thought about which marker he would use and what he would say.
Bay opened the door and spoke with Ferd’s teacher who looked back over her shoulder at him and nodded. His stomach was knotted, his mouth dry. After Bay was finished talking, Ms. Prevost put down her piece of chalk and motioned toward the door.
“Go now, Ferd,” she encouraged. “Go with your Aunt.”
“Now,” Bay said.
As he put his books away, his teacher called out to remind him not to forget his homework.
Ferd smiled. If his mother was dead, his teacher wouldn’t be asking him to do his homework. For the first time ever, he happily put his textbooks into his backpack.
Illegally parked in a drop-off zone across from the hospital, Bay and Ferd ran across the street. Bay’s thick braid slapped against her back as she ran unfazed by the swerving cars and hurled insults.
“Nice thing to teach your kid,” a driver yelled from the open window of his rusting Reliant.
Bay responded with her middle finger. She turned to Ferd once they reached the sidewalk, “C’mon, kiddo, your mom’s gonna pop.”
The waiting room was small, but it had a vending machine and a television, which was enough to keep Ferd occupied for at least an hour. After he had flipped through the channels a dozen times, he asked Bay for quarters.
“There’s nothing on,” he whined. “I’m bored and hungry.”
She gave in and a few minutes later, he needed more change.
“I pressed the wrong buttons,” he explained holding up two packages of black licorice.
“I’ll take those,” Bay said and plucked the packages out of his hands. “My blood pressure is too low anyway.” Bay knew the medicinal and caloric value of everything.
Two by two, Algoma’s sisters began to show up in the waiting room. It quickly became apparent that the small room had not been designed with families the size of the Belangers in mind. Port, wearing pink and yellow checked pyjama bottoms and a black hoodie was the last to show up to complete the set. They instantly fell into old alliances, teasing and chastising one another for decades-old mistakes.
“Mr. Bernard used to hit on everyone.”
“Especially you, hot stuff.”
“Might’ve been those short skirts.”
“Shut up.”
“Remember when you cut Lisa D’Alosio’s pony tail?”
“Snip, snip.”
“She wanted short hair.”
“All I remember is Mrs. D’Alosio pounding on Mom’s front window while holding up Lisa’s chopped pony tail. I thought someone had knifed a horse.”
“Someone did.”
They all laughed.
Algoma had been away from home when her water broke. Instead of doing the laundry, which desperately needed to be done, towels and T-shirts overflowing onto the floor, she’d decided to spend what little money she had left on a matinee. She knew it was Lake’s day off. While she wanted to be around people, she didn’t want to be around people she knew. She wanted to have the comfort of company, but not the obligation to talk.
Seated with a bucket of popcorn coated in extra butter and salt, Algoma settled into her seat. Her water broke as soon as the curtains went up. The liquid pooled on the tacky floor beneath her seat, drowned the M&Ms someone had dropped. The teenager seated beside her was horrified to find the hem of his jeans soaking up the spill.
“Oh gross, lady,” he said as he stumbled toward the aisle. He ran to the washroom without asking her if she needed help.
Algoma turned to the woman to her right. “Would you please get someone to help me to my car?” She was smiling.
Two panicked employees escorted Algoma out of the theatre and into the parking lot. She refused their offer to call an ambulance, insisting she could drive herself. “I prefer it,” she told the shortest of the two who had turned ashen at the sight of her wet skirt. “It’s not an emergency. I’m just having a baby.” Algoma wanted to be in complete control of this birth. She would not allow anyone, with the exception of the doctor, to have access to her baby. It would be all hers.
Algoma had known for months that her suspicions had been correct, that she was carrying a girl, but had refrained from correcting Ferd’s defiant statements that it would be a boy—that it would be Leo. She was grateful for his calm moments, when he took over, entertaining her and the unborn child with stories the way Gaetan had. She felt that once her new child arrived, everything would be set right, that Ferd would understand.
Once at the hospital, just after her contractions started, Algoma made one phone call to Steel knowing that one call to her would be enough to let everyone know what was going on. Within minutes of arriving in the emergency room, she was being wheeled to a delivery room. While the doctor and nurse assessed her progress, Algoma kept a watchful eye on the door, hoping to see Gaetan walk through it. With the arrival of each sister, she was both happy and saddened. She slid in and out of pain and refused the constant company of any one of her sisters, instead relying on one of the nurses to guide her through the birth. She didn’t want Gaetan to show up and feel replaced.
Ferd slipped out of the waiting room while his aunts rehashed the details of another gruesome childhood scandal. Something involving a crowbar and a rabbit. He walked down the hall until he reached the glass that separated visitors from the newborns. The glass was already heavily fingerprinted, and he added his to the mix. Fourteen. He tried to read the tiny name tags on the clear plastic bassinets: BOISVERT (girl). BEAUMONT (girl). GRAVEL (boy). He looked at one of the empty bassinets and pictured Leo’s angry red newborn face, his tight fists waving in the air.
BEAUDOIN (boy). Leo.
Ferd continued down the hallway, passing a number of delivery rooms on his way. He stole glances into the rooms with open doors. Inside each was the same configuration, but with different faces. A pained mother lying on the white hospital bed. A panicked father standing close by, or at the window. An efficient nurse taking care of the details without a degree of misplaced emotion.
When he happened upon the last room, his mother’s, he stood outside the door and peered in. Algoma was alone with a coaching nurse who sat at her bedside. Her hair, tangled and matted with sweat, was ghastly against the bleached white hospital sheets. Ferd longed to see his mother surrounded by bright colours and warmth. If he had some of his allowance money, which was tucked beneath the carpet in the basement, he would have bought her a bouquet of the orange and red flowers he had seen in the hospital’s gift shop. Something for her to look at.
In between contractions, Algoma caught sight of Ferd at the door. She smiled and motioned for him to come in. “Come here.”
The nurse turned her head and addressed Ferd sternly: “Wash your hands.”
Ferd washed his hands in the bathroom and then launched onto this mother, hugging her as if she might drift away like a birthday balloon if he didn’t hold on tight.
“How much longer?” he asked. “Can you hurry it up?” He looked hopeful.
Algoma looked at her son, “Could be an hour, could be a day.”
Ferd frowned. “But you’ve already been here for forever.”
As she was about to reply, her mouth open, Algoma was overcome by a contraction. The nurse tersely insisted Ferd go back to the waiting room.
“We’ll tell you when it’s over,” she said. “Alright?”
Ferd walked back to the waiting room and kicked one of the chairs.
“There you are,” said Port. “Let’s get you some dinner.”
Together, Ferd and Port managed to kill twenty minutes trying to figure out how to use the ancient vending machine in the hospital cafeteria. The cafeteria had closed at 4:00 p.m., so they had to rely on the rotary machine for their dinner. Ferd marvelled at selections of food behind the glass: lunch meat sandwiches, little plastic bowls of soupy coleslaw, an assortment of chips, sweaty tablets of cheese and stale crackers on Styrofoam plates, containers of chocolate milk, and single-serving cereal boxes. After a lot of thought, he settled on a ham and cheese sandwich and a small container of chocolate milk.
“Can we get something for Leo, too?” he asked. “He should be here soon.”
Port stared at him. She pulled out a handful of quarters and snapped her gum. “You want some chips, too?”
By early morning, Algoma had still not given birth to her third child. Exhausted, she vowed to pledge allegiance to whatever higher power could make it happen faster. Some of her sisters were still in the waiting room, while others had gone home for a few hours. Ferd was one of the few who were left. Algoma had encouraged him to go home with one of her sisters, so that he could sleep and eat, but he’d refused and she didn’t have the strength to fight him. Despite the nurses’ efforts to keep him out, he stood there, arms heavy at his sides, a mustard stain on his shirt collar.
Delirious with pain, her judgment skewed by drugs, Algoma looked at Ferd’s face with a dreamy expression and called out, “Leo.”
Ferd’s eyes grew wide. Leo had returned, just as he had prophesied.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Algoma smiled, put her head back into her pillow and shut her eyes.
“Yes.”
______________
3:03 p.m. 18°C. Wind unknown.
Recycled air. Dull roar of a thousand parts.
Gaetan stared down at the dense land of northern Ontario below. The mottled forest was punctuated by kettle lakes and winding rivers that looked like mercury when the sun hit them. From this altitude, the clear-cut lands looked inverted, like islands rising above the trees. He could see where the workers had tried to hide the damage, leaving up thin ribs of trees along the roads. The appearance of undisturbed land. And behind the scrub, logging trucks hauled away lumber, like organ thieves emptying a body.