Kalila (7 page)

I want to see her.

I'm sorry, Mrs. Solantz, you'll have to leave this morning.

I long for emotion from them; what they want from me is none. This is a research hospital. My baby is useful.

Ma'am, the doctors have their rounds to do. All case information is confidential.

I imagine myself one day fading toward the exit, melting out the sliding doors, vanishing to nothing. I feel it coming, my body, dissolving into light.

Pretend you're not here, I tell myself.
They
do.

Before I can grab my purse, say my goodbyes, the march of the white coats begins. Bona fide doctors in long coats lead trailing residents in short. They swing from isolette to isolette, their cryptic voices. They stare at the babies, comment, prod, confer. Move to Baby Hargreaves, the size of two blocks of butter, sparrow legs dry, the tendons showing, to Baby Mueller, a fourteen-pound elephant, brain damaged as he ploughed his way through his diabetic mother's birth canal, to Baby Leung, born without an anus.

I take a last look at their white backs and file out with the other parents, passive as babies. Two go home, one walks the halls, I look up words in my dictionary in an empty waiting room.

Electroencephalogram, EEG: records the minute electrical impulses produced by the activity of the brain. Indicates the alertness of the subject.

Pulmonary dysplasia: any abnormality of growth. She has abnormal lungs, then. No one's said.

I wait. That's all. I wait. Day after week. Emigrant turned immigrant, yoked to this hospital.

Yoked to this dreaded family of sick babies, prim receptionists, smoking relatives, green-suited floor polishers, anxious nurses, taciturn doctors.

A mother enters the waiting room, a runny-nosed three-year-old whining at her leg. Hands smoothing her daughter's fruit-embroidered dress, she tells me the hospital is threatening foster care if she doesn't visit her baby more often.

They're telling me my constant presence is getting in the way.

Sepsis: infection of a wound or body tissues with bacteria.

Cyanosis: a bluish colouration of the skin and mucus membrane. A sign of heart disorder, lung damage, fluid in the lungs.

I want to strike at the thick smoke of their secrets.

The mother stands, watching me write. The child wants to colour in my dictionary.

My dictionary won't transform itself into pretty pictures.

What's wrong with
your
baby then? the child says.

What a question! Let's fill in the blanks. Give us an E, Vanna. Are there any Es?

Does she look funny? Does your baby smell?
Ours
does. Today …

The mother takes the child's arm, turns her away, covers the child's eyes.

What kind of psycho made up a disappearing baby game?

Rhonchi: a rattling.

Rales: an abnormal sound heard on auscultation of the chest.

Auscultation: listening to the heart, lungs, organs with a stethoscope.

Once, I was safe. Once, I owned myself. Now, not even my grief is mine. The hospital owns it. I can rent, make withdrawals, like books on a library card. Time's up. Hand it over. Bear it. Buck up. Grow up. Quit snivelling. A headache at the centre of the storm. I want to strike at them. Instead I put my arms into my coat and carry my four-pound dictionary out into the ordinary world, into the harsh cold swell of winter. Ache in the gut. Pretend you chose this. Pretend you deserve this. It makes the explosions in the lungs easier to bear.

You walk the railroad tracks while Skipper bounds into the bushes, scares out birds, and splashes into the river, barking. You throw a stick. Sunlight travels the water. Skipper, tail spinning propellerlike, retrieves, and, coughing, gagging, throat-clearing, aims his bedraggled self toward shore, but the current carries him downstream and, thrashing sideways, he disappears. After some time you hear him crashing through the bush and here he is, stick clamped between his teeth. He drops it at your feet, shakes himself all over your shoes. When you make to throw the stick again, Skipper snatches it up, and there ensues a tug-of-war, Skipper growling, tail wagging, till you wrest it free and fling the stick again.

The path here in Edworthy Park is lined by caragana bushes, dying with autumn. The intensity of a light wave follows the inverse square law. It radiates out from the source, the intensity decreasing as it travels through space. Science is how you separate truth from ideology, from foolish, unproven beliefs. Physics governs the world you used to know. That world has shifted, tilted off its orbit. You have stumbled into a universe of uncertainty. What porthole will see you through? The wind sings in the trees. You read somewhere that Australian aboriginals believe the world was sung into existence, that their belief system holds song lines, pathways that connect the landscape to a story each life tells. You picture yourself standing in these caragana bushes, lifting your voice to the stars. You smile ruefully. You can't carry a tune. The article said each geographic contour emits its own unique song. You stand still, listen to the grasses. Once, you knew what questions needed asking. Science brought you that. Wind shushes in the trees. The splash of water. Skipper dives for the stick a woman has thrown for her dog. That poster in your study:
Things You Can Learn From A Dog: Allow the experience of fresh air and wind on your face to be pure ecstasy. Take naps and stretch before rising. If you want what's buried, dig until you find it
. A fish jumps. A bald eagle swoops from nowhere, skims the water, snatches, and glides up a tree branch to feast. The sun climbs the sky. Because we circle the sun, it shows us all its faces. Skipper crashes out of tangled bush and grasses. Unlike the moon, which, circling, shows us the same side. Maggie says you hide parts of yourself from her. You don't, no more than you hide them from yourself. Depression twists down your esophagus like a funnel cloud. You turn abruptly, head back, the wind a whistle in your ears. You bend into its force, crunching and slushing the wet and brittle leaves that scatter in your path while the dog tears through them, skidding in wet decay.

At the van, Skipper whines in anticipation while you hunt for your keys, impatient for life's next experience, no matter what it brings. You give his coat an affectionate ruffle and he leaps inside, heads for his mat, paws and paws it, turns four times in a circle, and, satisfied, slumps down. You check your pant legs. Not that dirty. You drive to the hospital, leave Skipper snoring, ride the elevator, scrub your hands, slip into the yellow gown, seat yourself by the baby.

Once upon a time a small glass castle sat high on a windy hill. The castle lodged a little princess, and its walls and ceiling winked and caught the light. The castle and the countryside around stayed lit up night and day, and whenever the little princess wished, she could gaze out her glass walls to what lay on all sides. Dotting the countryside were other tiny glass castles, each with a little prince or princess lodged inside. But like all glass slippers and glass hills in fairy tales, each glass castle was under a spell: each little prince and princess held captive inside the tiny castles unless the Great Sorcerer decided to set them free.

Few escaped to live outside their castle walls. Day after day the little princess languished alone in her glass castle, high on the windy hill. If visitors came, it was to prod or stare or wave or shout Hello outside the castle fortress. Each castle had two small round portholes that opened to the outside, and from time to time a curious visitor would push a hand through, but this happened so rarely that when it did, the little princess recoiled from the touch.

Imagine the princess's loneliness for no human, only food and drink appeared inside her castle walls. She awoke each day to stare wistfully across the landscape …

Kalila's eyes stay closed.
The Little Prince
is sprawled where someone left it, on the shelf under a neighbouring isolette. You pick up the book, press your face against one armhole, flip through its pages:

Spinal tap; lumbar puncture: a procedure in which a hollow needle is inserted in the lower part of the spinal canal to withdraw cerebrospinal fluid. To diagnose and investigate disorders of the brain and the spinal cord.

Infusion: slow introduction of a substance into a vein.

I lug my dictionary and think of Brodie's hands, which are always travelling, caressing a science book's cover, meandering through his hair, tracing an onion's paper skin. 6:05 p.m.. Brodie stays at school to plan his lessons, mark his labs, comes home in darkness, gulps down his supper. Fingers clenching, unclenching on his knee.

Were the kids good, Brodie?

Fine.

Even his jaw works; the core of his emotion resting in a cheekbone. So small a movement. As if a blizzard blew between us and snatched away our words. He starts the car, drives to the hospital, hearts running on empty we sit beside our child, drive back in silence; Brodie goes to bed.

Desire tingles into nerve endings that reach out my hands to walk the inner seam of his pants just above the knee.

Touch me.

I feel so guilty.

His mouth. The brush of finger against that lower lip. I want to slip my hand into his pocket, remove his wallet, play my fingers in that hidden place between materials, search out the cotton twill of his pants.

I awaken on the couch, back stiff, move to the window, a pool of street light, a lone dog trotting down a sidewalk. Skipper emerges, groggy, from his spot under the table, stretch-yawns, regards me gloomily. We stare out at the darkness of Nose Hill.

There's no help coming.

Maggie, you're on your own.