Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

  I’m upstairs with the headache pills in my hand when I hear screams. So piercing, I can’t tell who they’re coming from. By the time I reach the kitchen, Mariko has Jonah down on the floor, the tablecloth has been pulled off the table, scattering dirty dishes all over, and the room is filling up with acrid smoke. He’s screaming beneath her and I rush to pull her off. Norah is screaming too.

  “Mom, Mom, do something. He’s on fire.”

  Mariko has him wrapped in the tablecloth rolled tight beneath her, holding him down, her arms around him. I can’t see any flames. He’s still sobbing, but starts to quiet down as she says over and over, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Floating in the air and settling on the kitchen floor are wispy black ashes, some in the shape of squares floating down to the floor and then I understand what has happened. Norah is closer than I am. I tell her, “Turn off the stove, Norah. Don’t touch that melted cup.” The filled kettle still sits harmlessly on the counter where I left it.

  Jonah’s pink face emerges from beneath Mariko’s shoulder. Some of his hair has been singed, but he doesn’t seem to be in pain.

  “I think he’s all right now, Mariko. The fire’s out,” I say, calmer than I’ve felt in days.

  Ian has rushed into the kitchen and gently moves Mariko aside. He unwraps Jonah from the tablecloth, slowly, carefully. Most of the toilet paper has burned away. He peels away the pieces that remain. Here and there whole lengths of toilet paper are untouched, but most of it falls away, charred ashes in his hands. Jonah’s pajamas, covered with shooting rockets, seem to be intact although sooty. The fire retardant permeating the fabric has done its job. Ian holds Jonah on his lap on the floor, checks his hands and feet, moves Jonah’s sleeves up, finding nothing but pale flawless skin.

  “Does it hurt anywhere?” he asks.

  “Here,” Jonah says, holding his palms to his eyebrows.

  We all breathe again. I move to open the window and a limitless world of cool oxygen starts to make its way into the smoky kitchen.

  “A miracle,” Ian says. “You are one lucky kid.”

  “That paper burned so fast, it saved him,” I say, but then consider how ungrateful this sounds. “With Mariko’s help.”

  The shirt Mariko borrowed from Norah the night before has melt holes in it and she’s pulling it away from her chest in vague attempts at modesty.

  “Get Mariko the comforter from your bed, Norah. Are you burned anywhere?” I ask her. She looks at me uncertainly, shakes her head no, but reaches up and touches her burnt hair. She half smiles at me wistfully.

  “How did you know what to do?” I ask her.

  “I didn’t. Everything happened so fast,” she says and I realize that this is the first thing she has ever said to me directly. Her hair is burned on the left side, singed inches shorter than it was, melted like dolls’ hair near her shoulder. She adds, “I was waiting for Norah to come upstairs and Jonah dragged the chair over. He climbed up to get something out of the cupboard and then his costume went on fire. Just like that.”

  “I was frozen. I was so scared, Mom, I was frozen,” Norah says.

  THE SNOW STARTED to fall in the morning. By lunchtime, the world has transformed into a swirling white void, the sky a deeper grey than all that lies below, as though the world is reversed, a photo negative. The ground, the lawn, the trees, the usually dark street are a vivid intense white. All the ugliness of the morning and the days before have receded and the house is full of a holiday atmosphere, a joyful excitement. An unexpected storm rages outside of this safe house. Fire has not claimed any one of us. The girls are high-spirited, dancing with abandon in the living room, their music, Our Lady Peace, turned up loud. Mariko’s newly shortened hair, from the haircut I gave her this morning, whips around her face. Ian sees that the house cannot contain them much longer and sends them out for milk we do not need, giving them an excuse to confront the elements directly.

  “Your mission, if you choose to accept it,” he tells them, “is to traverse this unknown land. There will be dangers—barrens where only the strongest survive. Polar bears will lurk behind every mailbox, fierce storms continue to rage. You will be tested by the harshest conditions known to man. Oh sorry,” he says, “known to girl. You will have to find your way without maps or the protection of the motherland. You will be alone, your very mettle tested. Are you up to it?” he asks them as they giggle, and Norah jumps up and down saying. “Yes! Yes!”

  I expect that they will walk to the store, meandering from yard to yard, tasting snow in their open mouths. But, too late to stop them, I see them skidding down the driveway on their bicycles, howling like wolves, circling around in the street, whooping, hollering, careening crazily in front of the house until they set off, leaving serpentine trails behind them. This is the way it will be from now on. I will sit by the window and if they turn around, they will not be able to see me. I will pray for safe passage as they reach the corner, their shapes dissolved by blowing snow, and disappear into the storm.

  Endowment

  A HAND SOFTLY ALIGHTS ON MY SHOULDER when I’m standing in a shopping mall listening to a children’s choir switch tracks from the Huron Carol to the schmaltzy It’s a Marshmallow World. Good thing, too, because I always feel tears rising when I hear a children’s choir at Christmas. Their red satin robes sway in unison. I turn to see who has touched me. So familiar is the exact weight of the touch that I think it must be my first love, whom I haven’t laid eyes on since he left me exhausted at a Metro stop in Montreal twenty years ago. But it’s not. It’s his mother.

  I smile and his mother smiles back at me. We’ve both been swept up by time and set down miraculously here in this ugly cavernous slush-stained corridor looking shockingly changed. Instead of her lush, thick, pageboy haircut, she’s wearing a white turban-like hat and pale wraparound coat so that she seems to be here, in a public place, mistakenly in her bathrobe. Her face is thinner and more haunted and her eyes seem larger and darker than I remember them. Maybe it’s the ghastly light that’s taken the colour out of her face. But her voice is exactly the same.

  “Marylee! Merry, Marylee, quite contrary, how are you? Who are you now?”

  I hug her hard, my heart pounding with the surprise of it, thrilled by her directness, which was part of her subversive charm when I was little more than a child.

  “That doesn’t rhyme properly, you know.”

  “Oh, who cares? How are you?”

  And I find myself listing my accomplishments as though I’ve been waiting 20 years for the opportunity to graduate from the basement of her home where the only accomplishment I cared anything about was having an orgasm without getting pregnant—not always a given when your partner is also seventeen. A simple pill would have remedied this but I never did seek out that liberating prescription for reasons he just couldn’t understand. And neither could I, not really.

  This is how the list goes and I tick off things in my mind as I talk: University. India, doing good. Law school. All the immigration stuff. Pro bono.

  “Darling, you’ve been wonderfully productive. I always knew you had that in you. Any children?”

  I shake my head and pause. The choir has been singing O Little Town of Bethlehem and I tear up. Then one lone boy’s voice rises above the rest on the words “the hopes and fears of all our years” and I feel a catch in my throat, then, horrified, I emit a little sob.

  “Sorry. It’s the Christmas carols and children’s voices.”

  She’s hugging me again, stroking my hair, then cupping the back of my skull as though I’m an infant with a wobbly neck.

  “Yes, we all need to watch out for the children. I’m sorry I asked you that. Please forgive me,” she murmurs into my ear.

  We pull apart and I look into her eyes, realizing why they look so different. Just wispy pale eyebrows and dusky-coloured eyelids. Half-moons of delicate violet rest under her eyes. But there’s nothing sparkly in the colour, not makeup, but a buildup of
pigment in the cells around her brown eyes.

  I can see that she’s sizing me up for my femaleness, an appraising glance I remember well from her son. Will she give me what I want? is what that gaze means. This last thought has only occurred to me now, decades after my relationship with her son is over. I’m in the process of extricating myself from yet another relationship game of “come here: go away” and thinking about where the pattern started. With her son, of course,

  “Well, you’ve been busy. No wonder. It’s not too late.”

  We both turn back to listen to the choir, now singing In the Bleak Midwinter in complicated harmony, children concentrating hard, watching their conductor with unblinking eyes. Then the audience around us breaks into applause and I jump a little. I have been so focused on her, that’s all I could ever call her, even though she asked me to use her first name, Janine, years ago. Her, she, the mother so unlike my mother. Why would she need a name? The world shrinks to the two of us and that choir of children’s voices. I forget we are discussing such intimacies in the midst of Christmas shoppers.

  The dispersal of the crowd seems to make both of us more inhibited. We establish a few essential facts about our lives, quickly, in telegraph form. That I’m back in Ottawa, a special human rights position at the university. No need to mention the man in Toronto who didn’t ask me to reconsider my move.

  She’s still living in the family home but Joseph is in long-term care. Dementia, I must have realized how much older than her he was back then, too hard for her to handle, first he was volatile, angry at her, and she couldn’t take it, now he loses himself in the slow lapping enjoyment of a vanilla ice cream cone, if she can get it to his room before it melts. She hates to see his tongue coated with it but it’s worth the peaceful visit. But not chocolate. He throws chocolate against the wall. She laughs.

  After a minute of us looking at each other and smiling, almost conspiratorial, she adds, “Oh, and ovarian cancer. I almost forgot, thank God. Just for one minute I like to forget.”

  Too shocked to address this bleak fact yet, I continue with the questions.

  “And Shae, how is he? Is he here for Christmas?”

  “No, dear, he never is. He’s in Nigeria. You know what a traveler he is. We wanted him to feel free, but I guess the leash was a little too long. He’s lived abroad for over 15 years and really can’t stand the Canadian climate any more. He never comes home just to visit, but sometimes for work. Should have put flypaper on the threshold, if I wanted my family to stick.”

  So this is how I end up promising to come visit her on Christmas Eve, in the late afternoon, before the onslaught of nieces and nephews and talk of breastfeeding and too much food that increasingly characterizes my own family at Christmas. Last year, they even bundled up the kids and created an ad hoc caroling group to blitz their friends in the neighbourhood, something I definitely want to miss.

  IT’S ALREADY DARK when she opens the door to welcome me in and I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia, the smell in her house is so familiar. A little musty, but alive. It smells like Shae did all those years ago. I feel an echo of longing to slip down the basement stairs to the old couch next to the good sound system, the loom like some fantastic torture device standing off in the dark recesses of the unfinished basement, with its strings all open and waiting for the shuttle tossed back and forth to create the weft of the fabric, the nubbly, animal-smelling bumps and lumps of the final texture. Something purple and red half-made, stretched out tight. What do I remember of those nights of my adolescence? That he smelled like a river, wet stone, cold currents. He smelled like freshness and life, and his feet were warm against my legs, his mouth so sweet against my chilled skin as my top came off.

  We sit together on the couch, with my mother’s lemon squares on a bone-china plate untouched. She’s unwrapping a present I had originally wrapped for my mother—a large silk scarf of reds and yellows in a traditional Indian design that I picked up at the Bangalore airport. It was meant to be worn as a head cover with a salwar khameez and although my mother would have exclaimed with pleasure that she loved my exotic gifts, she wouldn’t have been up to the complicated length, the loose loops several times around her neck she would need in order to wear it well. She would have left it abandoned in the back of a drawer.

  Janine, the name I’m forcing myself to call her, pulls the pale turban-like scarf from her head after shaking the silk free of the wrapping paper.

  “Oh, how beautiful,” she says. “I love red.”

  I’m trying to keep my face blandly pleasant, as though her bald head is the most natural thing in the world, the bumps, grey bristles here and there, the way her elfin ears seem to stick out, the cartilage along the tops so thin it is almost completely unrolled.

  “I remember that piece of weaving you were working on in the basement all those years ago. Mostly red. Did you ever finish it?” I ask.

  “It took years, but I did. Shae has it now, but his wife, Karen, won’t hang it. She says it would be a hatchery for moths and beetles in Lagos.” She’s frowning a little, but starts to wrap the silk expertly around her head, the layers of it gently softening her skull. She tucks in the end and it’s perfect.

  “I’ve had plenty of practice,” she answers before I’ve even asked the question. “Going on two years of chemo now. I forget what it feels like to brush my hair. But it won’t be too much longer.”

  “So, you’re almost done treatment. Two years is an awfully long time.”

  “I’ll never be done.”

  I’m confused, but leave it.

  She reaches across and hugs me hard again, forcing my chin into her bony shoulder, almost cutting off my breath.

  “It’s so good to see you again. You’re just as beautiful as you were at 17.”

  We’re sitting side by side and I look at my hands in my lap, reluctant to meet her eye. Then she’s stroking my hair. Her hand pulls my hair into a gentle ponytail, slides along to the ends near my collar before settling again, gently, near my crown.

  SOON SHE’S SHOWING me a photo album and I squint to see how my first love, Shae, has aged since I last saw him. The red hair seems brown now, not so luxurious and certainly not so long. Now he looks as world-weary as the rest of us. Ordinary, with dull receding hair and thin forearms.

  “After he had the baby, he changed. He started to wonder about the other children he might have fathered. You know how he was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know he had a wild side. When he first got to Nigeria, he was single. And the women he met had no inhibitions.”

  That sounds a little racist, which surprises me. She was such a down-with-American-imperialism type, so my mother told me, when it started to be more about the banks than bombs. She seems to be reading my mind, anticipates my reaction before I’ve decided if I actually want to express it.

  “Yes, some African women, but I really meant other aid workers. International development work is like the war was for the older generation, but you must know this from your own travels. Life is short and they’re all in it together so why not give it a whirl?”

  She turns the page and I see a photo of a blonde woman with Shae, delicately smiling, definitely shy. She’s leaning into Shae’s underarm and he grasps her protectively. He’s smiling frankly, with none of the evasiveness of adolescence. He looks happy.

  “That’s Karen. She wasn’t exactly an aid worker. She was a secretary here in Ottawa. They married fast, before he went back and he took her with him.”

  This last part leads her to flip quickly through some pages of the album she doesn’t care to show me. Does she think I’ll be hurt by his wedding photos? I’m surprised something like that could even occur to her after so many years.

  “Oh, I’m being politically incorrect. They’re not secretaries any more. They are administrators. Or assistants. Something like that.”

  She closes that album, and pulls another from the shelf.

  “Here, let’s l
ook at this one. I have a few photos of you and Shae. Remember that weekend we skied into the cottage?”

  WE PARKED AT THE WIDEST part of a dirt road, just before a little bridge that spanned a mostly frozen stream. The forest across the field was smoky blue, a solid wall of spruce and snow. His Dad was going to pull a sleigh of food and supplies—the dried beans, odd lumpy vegetables with names I didn’t yet know, bottles of red wine and heavy brown breads that were unfamiliar. My mother still liked white bread with the crusts cut off. There was no trail into the cottage. In summer, they came by canoe, the smaller-sized yellow one I saw hanging in their garage and a large one, almost a war canoe, that I had only seen in photos, with his mother standing at the prow with her arms raised like a conductor. In the photo, she looked as though she was singing.

  His parents conferred in the front seat with a contour map and compass, working out a route to the cottage. His mother, Janine, whose name I couldn’t bring myself to use as I was directed to, was high-spirited and argumentative about the best route.

  “We have to climb here,” she jabbed at the map, “or else we’ll end up stranded in the swamp.”

  I was delighted by all this drama because it made our outing seem more like an expedition with inherent dangers, a true adventure with risks although I had the feeling that they always followed the same route every winter, that the map and compass and passionate debate were part of heightening the experience, undertaken for the sake of an audience. I’m pretty sure I was the first girlfriend, but it could have been anyone they bestowed this gift on.

  They folded up the map, resolved on the route, made a production of waxing the skis, with purple under the foot and blue to the tips. His father leaned into the corking of the skis as I stood near the car, trying not to let them see me shiver, wanting them to believe that I could be as worldly as they were, up to anything the day threw at us—swamps, dead ends, the need to be rescued in a blizzard by helicopter. Finally, I was snapped into an old pair of his mother’s skis, and we set off, wobbly at first but it didn’t take long before I got the hang of it. And before I knew it, we left the forest and crossed the frozen lake, the cold wind in our faces. The cottage stood alone on the far shore and there wasn’t another sign that any other human had ever even found this lake on a map. Then the cottage, more of a house really, stood tall above us. His mother had told me in the car that the cottage had been lovingly reconstructed from logs from an old farmhouse in another county.