Kalila (9 page)

Fact is, I only have hours, I say.

Don't we all, sighs LaFlèche. We sit at the window of the Heartland Café, this winner and me. This redheaded stranger. This woman with the ten-stroke. With the trump card. This woman who defied them all and marched her baby home. Brodie has taken his parents to the mountains. The aroma of bean soup steams the room. Beneath it, the scent of soaps and candles from the adjoining shop. I stare at my face reflected in the steamed-up window. Now that I have the woman here, I can't think what to say. I'd hoped to see the child, but she left her at her mom's. Teething. Screeches bloody murder. She's a pain in a restaurant too.

I go to court Monday. LaFlèche snaps a fingernail. Mace wants time-sharing with the dog. Baxter's
my
dog.

A woman says earnestly at the adjoining table, Denial is a form of protection.

I twist to peer at her. That's what they say. They say that at the hospital. How did you do it? I ask LaFlèche.

Mag, mind if I call you that? I'll be frank. LaFlèche digs muffin from between her braces. It isn't pretty. We're not talking the Gerber baby dying.

I squash a crumb. But you didn't lose — I haven't —

LaFlèche flaps a hand and flops back in her chair. Dead easy. Two-step program. One. Say fuck off to the doctors, and Two. Cart your kid home.

It's as easy as that? And she's doing all right?

Eats like a lumberjack. Melissa's fine. For Christ's sake, hospitals
carry
disease. Once you're in, you're up shit creek. Events escalate, Mag, until you're one, LaFlèche makes quotation marks in air,
of those!
Suddenly a woman blames any occurrence in the next thirty years on having lost that baby. I gained weight. You know it all started when I lost that baby. I lost interest in my job when I lost the baby. In the end we lost the house, you know. Spent all our money on the baby. Lost. Lost, LaFlèche waves a muffin, I turned lazy, fat, dull, I had no business sense. Maggie, I know you're skinny. I'm just saying. Losers. You're on that road. I need to clean my cupboards. Do you want your fortune told?

People keep opening the door. I'm getting chilled.

LaFlèche takes another bite, says, I swing open a cupboard door to grab a can of soup and everything spills out. The mess'll kill me. It was me who named him Baxter. Melissa? Gained three pounds. She's eating like a pig. LaFlèche tips her wrist. Got to skedaddle, honeybunch. Mom goes to work at three.

I'm going back to the hospital this afternoon, I say.

I tell you, Mag? My mom named me LaFlèche cuz I was conceived in the back seat of a Chevy II in the gravel pit outside LaFlèche, Saskatchewan. Mace used to call me Flesh. LaFlèche sucks cider up her straw. Did you know that dragonflies are promiscuous? Like totally.

You had slight scoliosis as a child, a doctor said once, fingers climbing my eleven-year-old spine
.

Will it get worse?

The curvature is very small. You're lucky
.

He said, You're lucky
.

So Melissa's perfectly okay? She's perfectly okay?

She's hunky-dory. Fat. She has three teeth. Forgets she ever saw a hospital. LaFlèche is heading back to the counter for a raspberry yogurt muffin to go. She holds up two redpimpled ones. I signal no.

Right, whatever, LaFlèche calls.

She bursts back to the table, undoes her coat, dabs butter, talks lawyers and dogs.

… was drowning, Maggie, LaFlèche smudges pink crumbs. Both marriages. Suffocating. I was, she leans forward, palelipped, I was breathing water. LaFlèche crumples her napkin, rises.

I say, My cupboards are in order. It's my in-laws that need organizing.

If I was on Prozac, LaFlèche throws her scarf over her shoulder, maybe I'd like my job. Did you see the fire on Brisbois? A laundromat. Hell, fire, Maggie. I need fire. She takes a long last drag of apple cider, head thrown back. Baby, I need flames.

I take the bus home from the Heartland Café. Poetry scrawls its walls. Chinook wind. The river's melting.
Ask anything in My name and I will grant it
. I float the two blocks from the bus stop to our little yellow house. I've wasted all the salt water I am going to waste. A light-filled day. See-through to the sky. Kalila's lungs are breathing without fifty per cent oxygen. It's down to twenty-three per cent. The doctor says that she could catch up to her enlarged heart. And her
right
kidney's fine. Women with only one kidney have been known to give birth. I can live with scars, can live with a child who may have to sit out phys ed.

I let the dog into the yard, but soon he's back, scratching at the door. There's so much heaven. It's not so far away. I pick up the morning paper, arrested by page three. An article advertising a faith healer, in town for seven shows. A week of miracles, the paper fairly shouts. My heart does one big flip-flop.

Something's stuck to my shoe. I look down. Skipper has dragged in a sea of leaves and a bloody pawprint. Cut on the ice. I am tending his foot when Brodie walks in the door. As he bends to untie his shoes, light catches the small scar on his forehead. When he was a kid, he barked at a neighbour's dog, who jumped and bit him. One childhood event Brodie remembers. His past, for the most part, has forgotten him. When we first married, I would find Brodie's notes scribbled to himself around the house.

Brodie! I hold up the loosened sheets of the morning paper. There's a faith healer in town!

You set your physics labs on the table and look at Maggie clutching the newspaper like news could save the world.

You try to formulate an imaginative position. Your imagination can't take you that far. You pick up Skipper's foot, he yelps but shakes a paw.

He was chasing the neighbour's cat, says Maggie. Ripped a toenail on the ice. The radio is crooning,
something about a rubber ball and everything turning out okay
.

66 CFR is giving away free tickets, Brodie.

You hold the bloodied paw, dab with a paper towel.

Brodie.

Don't be silly, Maggie, you say gently. Faith healers are con men. Bogus. Maggie has a way that makes the absurd seem plausible. You disappear into the bathroom and return with a cold wet washcloth, blood flecking your hands.

Brodie, you've always said, even scientists know that there is power in unexplained phenomena.

Scientists know nothing of the kind. Now that she comes out and says it, it just sounds foolish. Was your day okay? You lean over Skipper's paw. Did you go to the hospital? It comes to you that you are craving licorice.

Brodie! I'd do anything for her.

You go tight-lipped. It's hogwash. The doctors will bring her round. You feel your our-child-is-secure-in-the-service-of-medical-science face. Your hands sudden and light against Maggie's hair. Touching her, you think with sharp-edged longing of the women at the school who chat about unimportant things: haircuts and cruises, meat loaf and buns for supper, the latest movies, the opera, closets to be cleaned.

Skipper, finding himself
not
the centre of attention, whines. Sits on his haunches in the beg position. Barks, though no one suggested he speak. Extends a hopeful paw, though no one said shake. Whips over in a jaunty roll, though no one has said, Play dead! He scrambles to his feet, looking expectant and happy.

A memory. You were ten when your rabbit gave birth to five babies. The rabbit lived on lettuce and carrots, but the day after the birth, you brought her oatmeal: a festive brunch for achieving Motherhood. You came home from school that night and she was dead. Diarrhea. Pooped herself to death.

That's when you lost what little faith you had.

You lay the washcloth against the pad of Skipper's foot. Okay, Skip. Skip! Shake a paw! Skipper flaps his paw, whining delight, and licks your hands, grateful once more.

Let me take you out for dinner tonight. You feel you owe her something, but no. Maggie doesn't want to step into that world. So you make Pan. She sets the table while you fry two slices of bread, turn them over, break an egg on each and scramble, careful to keep the runny mixture safe atop each slice. Maggie slices tomatoes. You salt and pepper the eggs. The refrigerator motor cuts in.

Maggie's silence.

I long to race out, start the car, drive to the hospital, kidnap my baby, escape on a healing pilgrimage to Lake Manitou. Brodie pours himself some milk, me water. My head bobs in the seaweed slap of Lake Manitou's waves. Manitou. Saskatchewan's saltwater lake. Saltier than the Dead Sea. A lake with magical powers. Manitou, which means intelligent, mysterious, invisible, and whole. The lightning storms that lit the lake, a hundred disparate zigzags, beckoning, signalling one another, me a child, crowded with my sisters at our summer cabin door, sweaters peeled off, shivering skin inviting the moist chill air, clutching each other at every thunder clap. Needles of rain stabbing the bent plants.

Rain's a miracle, our father said.

Ask anything in My name
.

When I was a child people came from across the province, even from the United States, to immerse themselves in Lake Manitou's healing waters, cure their skin sores, arthritis, aching muscles, warts. Summer Bible Camp at Manitou Beach. Each morning we herded up the camp house steps, lustily belting,
Onward Christian so-old-iers, marching as to war …
We coloured pictures of Jesus gathered with his disciples at the seashore, pasted pictures of Jesus healing the sick into our Bible school booklets, the glue rolling into terrific balls that begged to be chucked against walls, stuck in one another's hair. Afternoons, we swam in the lake's cold waves, wrapped in green seaweed, eyes stinging, buoyed up to the surface by supernatural salt. When we read the story of Jesus walking on the water, Dougie Staganofski, at church camp to get out of doing dishes, said, I'll bet Jesus walked on
salt
water. That's all. Right then and there I stroked him off my potential-husband list. Trust a Catholic. Relying on works. No faith.

But Brodie is another story. He's a lapsed United Churcher. This is worse. Lapsed United Churchers don't count on faith
or
works to get them into God's good graces. United Churchers count on themselves; they count on order in the world; they count on natural science.

Brodie scrapes back his chair, disappears into the kitchen, and brings out my mom's home-canned pears. I spoon fruit into the cut glass fruit dish. The wind in the branches tonight sounds like an Aeolian harp. My father had one. Who knows where it is. Gone with the wind, my father said of things that disappeared. An instrument sounded by natural wind. David in the Bible had an Aeolian harp, sounded by the breath of God.

Brodie rises to make tea.