Kalila (4 page)

But did they say more about her enlarged liver, Brodie? Does she still have the rash on her buttocks? Is her temperature up? What about her gastrostomy? Well, is it leaking? What yellow drainage? Her alarm went off three times? What for, Brodie? What do you mean, you didn't check?

I berate him for holding Kalila too much, for not holding her enough. For what he didn't say, did say to the doctors, until, worn out from all their movement, my cold sores crack and weep. Brodie, ghost-faced, rises and goes to bed, his lab reports unmarked. I stand at the window, my womb an ice wind blowing.

When I sleep, I dream dogs. A dog fettered to a schoolyard fence. A dog stuffed in a burning fireplace. A dog with his chest cavity ripped open. A dog falling out of a speeding van door. A dog with diarrhea on Brodie's mother's rug. I wake, dreaming of Houdini, of magical escape. Toss until dawn burns crimson the morning sky. Magicians, the doctors. They hold the big trick in the bag.

I look around my house this banished week, at my novels, my vases, my mismatched towels, my photo albums, my knickknacks from our trip to Venice, my scented candles, my paintings on the wall, with the frightening clarity of someone who could just walk out. Abandon. Leave it all behind.

For seven days Brodie dutifully gathers information, accumulates detail, speaks. We were just wondering, um, if there is any news?

The doctor stands in light, skin smooth and fine, eyes bland, waiting for this new dad to finish so he can pick up sushi, make a phone call, carry out another procedure, attend the Philharmonic, work on his stamp collection, watch his daughter's soccer game, practise his Italian, sleep.

There are moments, rare, but moments when we forget. Me, on waking, Brodie, shovelling the walk. The phone rings. A friend, a minister, a second cousin on my mother's side.

Hello?

Maggie
.

The pregnant pause.

How
are
you?

And I turn and look out on bleak November streets, the threads of my dress sucking through my skin to infiltrate my cells, my tissues, bloodstream.

I learn not to look ahead. There's nothing out there. My body belongs nowhere, not at the hospital with the baby, not at home without the baby. My body has betrayed me, thinned. I want its outline to say, I have a baby, and for that to be an ordinary sentence. Instead, I look out on a snow-fused world from this body that bears no inscriptions of punishment, no sagging stomach, no rounded milk breasts, no angry stretch marks. My father, shortly before he died, the cancer diminishing his body until he took up no space at all, opened his eyes one evening and said so quietly, I'd like to live. He insisted on clearing the rolling table on which he kept his books and papers for the hair-netted worker each time she brought his meal, as if affording her a kind of pity for witnessing his demise. He lost his life, people say. Misplaced it.

To lose.
Webster's New Ninth Collegiate
. To loosen and dissolve. Almost six weeks have passed and the detail is all wrong. The baby's lungs won't breathe without pumped-in oxygen, her heart won't course blood into the proper arteries, her muscles won't summon the strength to lift her head; her skin is blue. My body perfects itself while the baby's scars and bruises write themselves on skin.

My body isn't acting like a mother's body. Mothers don't cry, they take care of the crying. Mothers hold babies in their arms. I shouldn't have had that second piece of chocolate cheesecake in my third month, I shouldn't have jogged so much, I should have jogged more, I should have read more books on birthing. The hooks behind the kitchen door fill me with empty rage. I'm tied to people I wouldn't look at twice. Receptionists. Lab technicians. Doctors. Nurses. An early winter.

Snow crying to the ground.

It's not a question of lowering our expectations. On the radio, driving to the hospital, a man says, Humans have to have a culture in order to survive. You don't have to be cruel to be a torturer, he says, you just have to be obedient. Seven p.m. A long, bleak night. The baby's intravenous went interstitial again. She's aspirated again. They've had to turn up her oxygen. Babies go blind from too much oxygen. Mottled green bruises lace her scalp and hands. Six needles plucked from her scalp in a twenty-minute period. Let's try this again! the hearty nurse says.

The man on the radio said, We have to
believe
the things that matter to us are going to survive.

I remember studying the word
believe
for a spelling test, mixing the
e
and the
i
.

There's a lie in believe, Maggie, my mother said.

You tuck your blue-and-green checked shirt — a Brodie shirt, Maggie's sisters call it — into your green flannel pants and say, Okay. Question number ten. What concept does this question deal with?

Uniform motion, a scattering of voices calls.

And uniform motion is?

Motion at a constant speed.

Thank you, Eileen. And speed, as not many of you have learned, judging by the number of you who got this test question wrong, equals distance over time. You scribble the equation on the blackboard. Harold, read the question.

Hey, Mr. Solantz, is Maggie your wife?

Mr. Solantz, you have a dog?

What kind is she?

Mr. Solantz is married? I never knew he was married. You're married, Mr. Solantz?

She is, I do, I am, and she's a he. And details of Skipper's daily habits, or mine, are not going to help you pass your physics departmental.

Skipper! Is he a mongrel?

You sigh. Last question, Anita. Promise? He's a springer spaniel.

Awwwwww, echoes around the classroom. They're so cute.

And smart, Anita says. I read that —

Anita, Skipper's smart. He could probably pass this physics exam. The question is, Could you? Now help me work out this question. Where do we begin?

Well, says a gum-snapping Anita,
I'd
begin with the character of Brodie. Why the hell would he leave Maggie to lock up the car like that? He just walked off on her? Why would Maggie even want to catch up with the jerk? Anita slumps back in her chair. I tell you what I'd do. I'd drive right off and leave him!

You pull at your hair in mock anguish. This is about speed that
doesn't
change, okay? They all have to move at their own rate so you can work out the problem. Forget the character of Brodie. I'll work on his manners for the next exam. Come up here, Anita, and solve the problem.

I was only trying to
express myself
, Anita says, eyes feigning innocence, blue and sparkling.

You want to take these happy people in your arms.

Suzette and Francine, dripping costume jewellery, wiggle up beside me at my kitchen table in their dress-up clothes. Francine hiccups and inhales two snuffly breaths. I pour my nieces pretend green tea. Skipper rams his head under my elbow. Kool-Aid splashes.

Remember this tea set, Maggie, when we were little? Marigold wipes up the spills. Skipper, shoo! Auntie Maggie and I drank from this set when we were little girls. We had a wooden-egg-crate table in that red peeling granary.

What's an egg crate? asks Suzette, licking her green-stained mouth.

What's a granary? mutters Francine.

Skipper helps himself to the Nanaimo bar hanging squished between Francine's dangling fingers.

City kids! Marigold scoffs. A granary is a square little building where a farmer stores his wheat. That's what bread is made from, only this granary was empty — except for chaff. Grandpa gave it to us for a playhouse.

And Grandma sewed us curtains out of flour sacks —

Out of
what
?

Really, I give up! Marigold laughs. She tweaks Francine's brunette braids. It's what flour came in, great woven bags; you use flour to make bread.

You said wheat makes bread, Francine says sulkily.

I'm sorry your rabbit died, Francine, Marigold says cheerily, but let's not be rude. Grandma made us a floursack-tableclo —I miss To-oo-ops, Francine quavers, knocking over her lime Kool-Aid. Suzette lets out a sympathetic howl.

Honey, rabbits die when they get old. Marigold helps herself to a scone. To mitigate their grief, the girls go for thirds of my quick-thawed Nanaimo bars.

He didn't suffer. Marigold curls Francine's damp bangs around a finger. Come, sit here, sweets, to Suzette.

Suzette curls against her mom and takes a bite. We found Tops this morning with his teeth like this — head against Marigold's breast, Suzette bucks her teeth, chocolate oozing. He was flopped in his cage, ears stuck straight out. Suzette falls sideways against her chair and holds the pose. Plum dead and gone. She takes a gulp of Kool-Aid. Coughs.

Francine swallows a cranky belch. Auntie Maggie, is your baby going to die? She isn't even
old!

Time pushing out like kilometres. Cousin Danny's grade ten photograph perched on his coffin at the front of the country church, his smile a light shining on the congregation as they looked back and wept. Uncle Ty leaning heavy on Auntie Prue's arm, his countenance wild and in motion. Farmers, wives in Sunday best, pouring like a river into our country church.

We sang, the Watson girls. Marigold and I, soprano, Rose, high tenor, Iris carried the alto. June galloping the piano.

Danny had drawn a picture in art class, a flock of wild geese rising in blue sky. The teacher drove it out to Uncle Ty's farm and handed it over, one last gift from Danny,
the least that she could do
. The minister taped the drawing behind the pulpit. Later, Auntie Prue and Uncle Ty had it transcribed onto Danny's gravestone. Engraved above the birds's flight,
Safe under the shelter of thy wings
.

I believed it.

Marigold, gently gathering up their things and ushering out the girls. Come, honey, come on, girls, no, Auntie Maggie needs to be alone.