Kalila (14 page)

Hunting teaches you that life is chance. There's a winner and a loser. That's just the way it is.

Dr. Vanioc looks in the rear-view mirror. He can see the top of Whit's crate. This may well be Whit's last year. The smartest dog he's ever had. He remembers so many years ago, Whit flushing out his first pheasant. He went on point, just a little bit of a thing, not yet a year, quivering, not even knowing what a pheasant was. He shook for two minutes after the whole thing was over, the bird flushed out and shot. He didn't know what had happened to him. Just stood there, trembling. Dr. Vanioc praised him and that little thing looked into his eyes, so full of a feeling he didn't understand. Dr. Vanioc feels a ripping in his rib cage. Why does this move him more than his own child's first steps? By instinct, that dog did everything perfectly the first time. Whit makes a snuffling sigh. It's sad to see the decline of a dog. And of the men puffing along. They're no longer twenty, any of them. Dr. Vanioc had his first child at thirty-nine. What was he thinking? Diane only thirty. It was money. No money until he specialized. Now he has no time. You feel time's passage, hunting. The ranchers' children grow up, start to tag along. Carry a gun for the first time. Dr. Vanioc looks out over the darkening prairie. All this landscape to move in, like an old familiar song. And the stories. All the stories of pheasants and kids and dogs. He stretches in his seat and listens to the tires hum.

Here on the sunlit river path we climb, the outside air a sharp surprise, push into the flesh of the afternoon, into silence shoved by a ripping northeasterly, this outdoor room of wind.

Brodie pulls at my scarf, fixes it around my ears, turns up my collar, protecting me from weather. The clouds riotous above. A deer starts, bounds away, a red fox glides through the underbrush and disappears in a bend of trees.

When I open my eyes, Brodie and the world are back in view. Whipped bushes, bobbing branches, chilled grey sky. The deer appears over the crest, ready to bolt.

The water's lapping rushes. A woodpecker needles a sharp staccato against a fir. Everywhere, nature in song. A helicopter's rap-beat rises and recedes. Brodie enfolds me against his thick coat. What's this? Brodie is talking.

Voice muffled in my hair. Maggie, she isn't — the doctor says — she isn't getting better.

We look at each other, breathe in wood smoke, river water, the damp smell of the trees.

Cogs click into place.

There are four clocks in neonatal. No direction we can face without reminder. Time is ticking down.

A crazy possibility thrusts its head up on this windblown path.

Let's make a break.

The great escape.

Stop thinking. It only drives you crazy.

Stop thinking. Act instead.

The woodpecker hammers out an exclamation.

Dare we? Just cart her off?

Said aloud, the thought hovers, like quotation marks in air. Words cannot be undone.

If she stays, her days are numbered.

No baby could flourish in that atmosphere!

Damn it. Let's take charge.

The doctors have given up.

They rarely come to see her.

She scares them.

We can't stop looking at each other.

We can't sit back, wait for a happy ending.

Help won't come from the hills; you have to climb, find it yourself.

She's wasting away.

She needs parents.

She needs a home.

She's ours. She's ours to take!

There on the windswept path, the idea formulates.

Because a photon responds to a momentum experiment doesn't mean it has momentum. To these doctors, she will never be greater than the sum of her parts.

Hope opens like the glimpse of a surprise zipper in the folds of a pleated skirt. Hope, a lid screwed off a jar. A lid pitched off a box.

Brodie paces, wind pulling his hair. If a person desires certainty he has to create it himself. We'll create her future, Maggie! Brodie's face shines boyish, lines etched round his eyes these last few months erasing. The idea expands like light, rushing ahead. It will take concentration. It will take belief.

We have to believe the things that matter are going to survive
.

Two wheels spin in two chests.

There is one choice.

Take Charge.

You make your way, Mr. and Mrs. Solantz, into the small and stuffy side room. Maggie has the glow that luminesced her pregnancy, a fairy story blossoming within.

The doctors wait in a semicircle. One you've never seen. Mr. and Mrs. Solantz have requested this meeting. Highly irregular. Fingers tap. These are busy men. The clock reads 1:03.

Dr. Vanioc offers Maggie a chair, then you. Whatever the doctor puts in his hair, it holds its form. You sit. The doctors stand. The meeting begins.

Introductions. The new one's Dr. Fezner, the kidney specialist.

Yes, there are problems at the hospital, as at all hospitals, as in all institutions, Dr. Vanioc says.

True, no one is coordinating, the doctors nod, solicitous.

We're working in the direction of changing that, Dr. Byars says.

You feel those extra cups of morning coffee swooshing to your heart. Maggie slides forward on her chair. We can't tell if she's getting better here. If we could have some kind of guarantee that she's not fallen between bureaucratic cracks.

Mrs. Solantz, we can't just …

Watson.

You clamp Maggie's hand. We simply cannot go on knowing there is nothing being done.

A pause. There is a lot of breathing.

The doctors confer: they feel bad about the situation. Yes, they're still attempting to find out what's wrong with the baby. She's not an easy case. No, they aren't just letting her vegetate.

Dr. Showalter glances at his watch. Well, we're here if you want to talk. You can always catch us individually.

We prefer not to push parents, chimes eager Dr. Fezner.

We wish we could tell you we could change this and this and this, says Dr. Summers.

Maggie stands. Her chair scrapes the brown linoleum. You rise with her. We want to take our daughter home.

A shocked and fragile silence trails on a fine silk thread. The doctors shift their eyes onto one another. All come to rest on you. They're men. They want you to acknowledge common ground. Separate yourself from your emotional wife.

This may not be the time, Dr. Vanioc says after a bit of throat clearing.

Oh, Lord. You got the time wrong.

Maggie squeezes against you, hair smelling of vanilla. We've talked this over. We've thought it through. We want to take her home.

More glances exchange.

It's just, we don't have the whole picture — Mr. Solantz — it may not be in the best interest —

Mistakes have been made, Dr. Vanioc takes over, carefully confident. Leaning on the passive tense. A position is needed. Dr. Summers spoke to Dr. Sinclair about the heart. There was a medical decision made not to operate.

And we weren't told?

It went back to the committee.

So many experts, working in isolation. Lungs. Kidney. Bones. Heart. Sinew. Pieces of baby.

What will be the next step to take her home?

Dr. Vanioc clears his throat. This is highly unprecedented — You should give it more thought. Only babies —

We have. That's why you're here.

How could I force the referring pediatrician to come in? Dr. Sinclair says with sudden and irrelevant intensity.

Everyone looks at him. You picture particles dissolving into waves that build and rush, bowling these perfect-postured doctors over. They're trying to keep the focus, keep things within their control. Well, there's not enough room for everyone on this stage. It's the doctors' turn to get off.

Dr. Vanioc says again, quite gently, Parents' memories depend on the final outcome. You must use common sense.

When has common sense been a reliable guide to understanding the universe? Light cracks the small window. We will take our daughter home.

You have a field of view, you tell your grade ten science class in your sun-dappled winter classroom. The sounds of shouts and a smacked volleyball resonate from the gym. You can measure this field with a microscope.

The students gather their rulers and crowd in. The smell of teenagers. The smell of gum and salami sandwiches, sweat and hair gel.

We start off on low power, you say. This is magnified forty times. Put your rulers under your microscopes. Your students comply. See the millimetre lines? Your job is to determine your circle of vision. How many millimetres it is from one side of the circle to the other?

The students measure.

Now increase the power by ten times to four hundred. What's your field of vision compared to what it used to be?

One-tenth the size it was before.

What does this mean?

Your students look at you.

The more power you use — ?

— the more detailed the observation of your specimen.

The more power you have, the narrower your field of vision.

Exactly, you say. The more power you have, my friends, the less you see of the whole.

A dinner invitation.
Dinah Engagement
, Brodie calls it. A British couple twice our age from church. We barely know them. A sympathy invite, clearly, but what the hell. They invited us months ago, again just before Christmas, though they hadn't in the four years we knew of them before Kalila's birth, so we politely and firmly turned them down. But suddenly, I'm up for anything. A chinook has blustered in this Friday afternoon, the air is heady, teasing, gusty, defying anybody not to feel flirtatious. Our first outing since Brodie's school dance. Celebration in the air. Children, pumped on the wind's energy, race, chasing caps, laughing, pushing each other down Calgary's melting streets. A chinook brings “miracle” into the realm of belief: There's a chinook out there. Anything can happen.