Kalila (6 page)

The radio is playing,
I want you to tell me why you walked out on me
.

The morning sun a cheerful flush against Nose Hill, the barren trees.

I'm so lonesome every da-ay …

Are things any better? Is there any news?

The doctor says she has right ventricle hypertrophy.

What?

Her heart is enlarged, Iris. And she has pulmonary hypertension.

Maggie, you have to speak my language.

Her lungs aren't working right, okay? Her blood pressure is way too high. She has too much fluid. They don't know why. And now they've found her left kidney's not developed.

Skipper shoves against me.

I am crying, and Iris begins to cry, and we chalk up tears at thirty-seven cents a minute while outside people scrape their sidewalks and enter taxis, light cigarettes, someone holds up a bank on Centre Street, a woman murders a man in an apartment complex, and children dash along the river hand in hand.

I cart language around this foreign landscape.

What's that tube doing up my baby's nose? Why is a neurosurgeon checking her out? She's not #524010. She's not Baby Solantz. This baby has a name. Kalila. Why didn't someone say she needed a hearing test? Why can't you find the vein?

The nurses chat among themselves. The mother-in-law of the redhead dislikes her, always has. The big one with the neck scar touts the merits of microfibre cloths over paper towels. The freckled one orders shoes online. You can do returns if they don't fit.

Dr. Vanioc strides down the hall. I feel the urge to break and enter, take an axe, smash barriers down. Can we talk?

Dr. Vanioc skids to a stop.

What's apnea?

When a baby forgets to breathe, Mrs. Solantz.

Watson. What are bradys?

Severe apnea can lead to bradycardia, a dangerous slowing of the heart rate. He glances at his watch.

You mean it might stop?

He looks at me.

What's interstitial?

Fluid sometimes seeps into the tissue. We're careful as we can be.

You mean the skin?

I mean the tissue.

Will that kill her?

Mrs. Solantz, it just swells up the tissue.

She's doing
relatively
well,
but
… She's
some
better today,
although …
Today's results are
somewhat
optimistic,
yet …

I cling to intensifiers and conjunctions. What's wrong with her? It's been nine weeks. Can you just give it a name? Didn't have my hand up. Spoke out of turn. I'll be sent back to the social worker's office. Nope. Not going there. Babies airlifted here from Brooks, Nanton, the Porcupine Hills, from Field, B.C., dropped down in Calgary sunlight from place names that conjure pure spring water, fresh earth, mountain streams, healthy outdoors. Babies spin down corridors past oatmeal-coloured walls, a collection of nurses bagging on the run, heralding another birth, a forlorn father staring from the birthing room door.

Don't expect a forecast. The weather here is unpredictable.

I turn my back, walk out the hospital doors, drive to a bookstore, buy myself
Cartright's Medical Home Dictionary
. A thousand pages. Four pounds. To hell with them, I'll learn the language myself.

I stop at the bank, mail electricity and gas bills, fill the car, wind tearing at my clothes, pay library fines, pick up a windshield scraper, renew
Maclean's
, buy Brodie garlic pills. The airwaves resonate with heartache: a gang of teenaged boys' tough bravado, a woman in an electric wheelchair hailing a cab, a couple standing in Mark's Work Warehouse, fighting about jeans. I head for the grocery store. My gaping heart. Like Jesus's, it has no protective cover.

You help Maggie chop carrots for the stew. Her arms, their sculpted outline, their scattering of freckles. Her neck muscles clenching. You're lonely for her, even though she's here. She reaches for an onion and soon begins to cry, bent over, fists stuffed in eyesockets, laughing, It hurts. It hurts. You want to buy her a silver necklace you cannot afford, a pair of ruby earrings, something to draw her breath in, clasp her hands together. Something to make her forget, if only for a little while. Her arms make angular shadow puppets against the wall. Winter dusk brings sadness, a despondency you have to fight. Pushes you to silence. Maggie gets pissed off that you don't chat, but these days you're holding up the world.

She hands you celery. You begin to chop. You are an outsider; you've always been. Your parents use words to inflict damage, like the side of an axe to drive a point home. Words frighten you. A phrase falls like Newton's apple, drops and explodes before you get it out; words shift into shapes, intents you never meant. In the classroom this doesn't happen, only here, where words are too important. Galileo left words altogether. In the late 1500s he disappeared into the Camaldolese monastery; attracted by the quiet, studious life, he joined the order.

You start in on the Chinese cabbage. People in ancient times believed the earth stood still, and the sky moved around it. That's how they explained the changing position of the stars, movement from night to day. Strange, the earth's steadfast rotation. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five days, six hours, nine minutes, and ten seconds. One revolution around the sun. You'll put that on the grade ten science exam. You pick up a zucchini. A trivia bonus question.

Maggie climbs a chair to reach a serving bowl. You want to say, I'll tell you anything, but Maggie doesn't ask. Beside you, your Cross pen, three red marking pens, your calculator, a stone you picked up by the river, your labs, a book called simply
Physics
, as if that says it all. Maggie moves to the light switch and, without asking, gathers up your pens and papers, sets a place for two.

She's using few words these days. You miss her chatter, her foolish endless lists of who she lunched with, a joke one of the old men in the Home told her — why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine — how some of the old ladies are forever chasing Fred Regier. Those times seem relics of an ancient world that you strain to remember.

Throughout dinner neither of you says a thing.

Your silence, and the rhythm of the lifting of your spoons.

Foothills Neonatal ICU becomes a separate country. With its own time zones, population, weather. Well-behaved mothers are allowed inside its borders only after passport inspection, the ritual washing, the donning of the gown.

The hospital gown: that barrier, that disguise. A yellow gown that forces mothers to look like invalids, not real mothers at all. What does a mother bring to neonatal? Nothing. I flip open the Mother File in the filing cabinet of my head, watch my own, bent weeding in the garden, moving under loads of wash, sprinkling clothes, making soap, cutting noodles, gutting chickens, canning fruit, alive with the energy of chores. My mother fed her children from the soil. I pushed my child, soiled, into the world. She slid out in her own feces, meconium-stained. A sign of distress, the doctors said. Kalila made some pick of a mom. I look around the huge warehouse of a room, designed for optimal efficiency. Isolettes jut from the walls. Panels of wall plugs. Blinking, beeping monitors. Hell of a nursery I've created for my daughter. The nurses told me yesterday they'll take no more breast milk. Kalila cannot swallow. Just give up the breast pump. There's no work I'm allowed to do. Not even fold clothes. Kalila has none. My work experience in a seniors' residence doesn't translate to this place. The neonatal nursery doesn't want a program coordinator to set up crafts, exercise classes, book displays for two-pound babies the size of a hunk of cheese. It doesn't want parents who stick their noses in the doctors' business. I pass through the quarantine room, sidestep a large basket of soiled gowns. The mothers' job here in Foothills Neonatal is to stand around in yellow gowns like a hospital choir. If nothing else we are clean. What would the nurses do if we broke into song?

The smell of camphor salve, digoxin, formaldehyde, wet diapers, fear.

I fight my way this morning among the babies and equipment to find Kalila, awake and waiting, left hand ballooned and purple.

What happened?

Her intravenous went interstitial.

Interstitial: occupying the place between.

Nothing serious, nurses cry over their shoulders, bagging, resuscitating, administering physiotherapy and drugs.

I look through glass at my child. #524010 with the swollen hand.

You'll have to leave now, Mrs. Solantz.

A bird, long-beaked and blue, soars by the high window and wheels away. I have a sudden image of my flock of sisters: Marigold, Iris, Rose, June, crowding, chattering, interrupting, talking while they chew, their language tumbling, intimate, inclusive. Someone has opened the door to the hall, but still, the bleach-tinged air. The closed-up smell of things unsaid. The doctors here navigate the crowded aisles in a choreographed line dance to avoid questions. They bend over procedures, backs turned, faces guarded. Where dancers open their bodies, the doctors shut theirs off, their movements exclusive, circling inward. It is always high noon here, always glaring light. When forced, the doctors speak in codes of graphs and charts, prescriptions, lab results.

Your daughter has multiple problems, Mrs. Solantz, many undiagnosed at present.

There is a swallowing disturbance (a disturbance? like a fucking cold front?) and abnormal electroencephalogram.

How do you spell that?

A startled doctor spells.

At this time, your daughter appears to have pulmonary dysplasia and so is in danger of potential sepsis.

I scribble.

She has intermittent cyanosis. We hear rhonchi and rales in her chest.

Her presence reminds them they are failing.