SOMETHING RATTLES IN her pocket like keys, but she pulls out a heavy rusty link of chain that was once attached to a crane, some monolithic machine that moved earth. I remember the chain but haven’t thought about it in decades. I found it in a construction site where we weren’t allowed to play. Imitating the saints, instead of a scapula, I wore it under my uniform. And then it became a compulsion and I was never free of it—this heavy rusty link on a scratchy piece of twine, bruising my tender chest, the smell of iron rising from my clothes when I sat at school, head down, doing my work.
“You think I don’t know what is under your clothes? And it makes such a mess of the sheets. Rust on white cotton can leave a permanent stain. I scrub and scrub.”
“So you did take it away. One morning it was just gone.”
“Yes, I did,” she says, challenging me. “What a strange child you are.”
“You should talk,” I say. “What’s with all those holy cards and prayer books in your secret drawer? I never hear you refer to religion.”
She waves her hand dismissively. “Those are for my mother. She needed to give them to me so she could rest in peace. What can I do? Throw them away?”
FORCED AND UNCOORDINATED, her body persevered. The chest rose jagged, the soul dragged behind this cranky machine. Hard, painful work that cannot be refused. The gowns and masks were discarded. We were nakedly ourselves because we could not hurt her any more.
“You should write more comic stories,” my sister told me as our mother slept. She was so pallid and glassy-eyed herself, she could have been the one in the bed. When she entered the room and put her bicycle seat and helmet down on the spare chair, a strange smell of sweat and desperation spread like damp spores over our mother’s clean sheets. I wanted to sweep it off my shoulders.
“Why should I?”
“You could be funny if you wanted to be.”
“But funny wouldn’t be worth the hard work. Writing is really hard work. I guess I’m in it for something else.”
“But there’s no resolution in your stories. Great composers always resolve the tension in their work. Mozart … ”
“Mozart is over. Long gone.”
But our mother was still dying and nothing was resolved. Her chest resisted breath and her abdomen, made of softer stuff, rose spasmodically. There was a little huff at the end of each exhalation. We glanced across the bed, at a loss at how to move from this point onwards. The hospital curtain drifted against my neck and I shivered.
“A short story is not a novel. A poem is not a short story. The forms are different.”
“ Isn’t that convenient. It’s over when you say it’s over, right?”
My mother could not rise and walk out of the room as she did when any conflict was imminent. I said it for her, just once, for my mother who was angered by what I created.
“Literature that I care about reveals what’s hidden and leaves it luminous or illuminated, not resolved. Maybe I don’t believe that tensions resolve.”
Our mother did not break us up, send us to our rooms. She did not turn towards one side or another. Suddenly, I felt more solid in the chair. I could breathe a little easier. My sister must have noticed this.
“Don’t you feel guilty being here, after five years? Mom just wanted privacy—the one thing you couldn’t give. She didn’t want her life used like that, for fodder.”
“Music is easier, I know. It skips the gossip.”
MY MOTHER REACHES behind her, shifting heavily on my uncomfortable wooden chair. Her arm is straining. She’s wearing her pale lilac dress with the permanent crinkles that stretch to smoothness over her right breast, and three strands of plum-coloured artificial pearls. She places the purple Crown Royal bag on the table between us.
“This is your chance,” she says. “No more playing dress-up. Now you take my jewelry for good.” She laughs. When I don’t answer, she says, “Yes? Or no?”
The bag is rolling a little on the table, churning with something caught inside. I’m afraid to touch it.
“Go on,” she urges. So I lay my hand on the soft flannel and suddenly the bag is quiet and inert. I loosen the gold silky rope, the tassels tickling the tops of my hands, the sensation of a fly bothering the surface of my skin, but I don’t sweep it away.
My hand slips into the bag, which is moist, warm and muscular, tunnelling tighter, constricting my hand, almost crushing my fingers. Yet, I know to push further.
When I withdraw my glistening hand, I’m holding a painted egg, weightless.
“It’s beautiful,” I gasp.
She smiles, maybe a little smug. “I painted it myself. With hot wax, and dipped it in dye baths, blue after green, after blue, then black.”
“I didn’t know you could do this!”
“There are plenty of things you don’t know about me.”
The egg lies on its side in my hand, the top half a stormy slate blue, the bottom half a rough ocean of sea-green, turquoise and black waves. Around the circumference are three leaning ships, their billowing white sails the only place where the colour of the egg is unadulterated.
“Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria,” she says. “You know your brother is getting the piano, and your sister will take all the albums and CDs, but this is for you.”
“Thank you so much! I’ll treasure it. I’ll keep it safe.” I turn the egg to examine the south and the north poles. The axes are tiny pinpricks where the liquids were blown out.
LET HER DREAM, I told the cough that roused her. Let her be, as I removed her mask and put the tissue to her mouth where it blossomed dark red like her favourite roses. I dipped a swab in clear water and cleaned her mouth, a whisper of water and soft pink foam. Her face mottled then, a blueness spread around the mouth and eyes. When I put the mask back on, the blue retreated, letting us know it was waiting and patient.
“You almost killed Mom,” my brother said, meeting my eye. We both looked away and quietly laughed.
SHE LIFTS THE LID on her sewing box. It’s angled so that I can see the pins stuck into the swollen red cushion of its silk lining. Sharp silver needles without heads, frozen sleet. The tin of buttons rattles but what she lifts from the box, one by one, are pill bottles. She places them between us, some squat and glass, others tall with tinted orange plastic and childproof lids.
“You’re old enough to open these yourself,” she says. “I don’t have to worry about you any more, finally!”
I read the bottles: coated aspirin for her arthritis, antihistamines for allergies, oxycontin for pain.
“But I have no pain.”
“Yes, you do,” she says, sizing me up.
THE NURSE’S SKIN was black and glistening as though it wasn’t November in the northern hemisphere. Water was not enough, so he swabbed her mouth with white cream, the oxygen mask on the pillow beside her.
“Last Friday, she told me about her son, the musician. And she talked about her daughter, “the spy”. She was so proud of her daughter.” He smiled at me.
“That’s my sister. She’s a mathematician and a decoder.”
He looked at me quizzically, holding the swab in his broad warm hand. I could see that he had no idea then who I was.
“I’m the writer. She wasn’t particularly proud of me.”
“Stop talking to him,” my sister said. “Stop distracting him. I want that mask back on.”
“He knows his job. He wouldn’t harm her.”
“I want that mask back on right now.”
MY MOTHER PLACES a blue construction paper Mother’s Day card on the table between us. The flower on the cover is three-dimensional, made with crushed little pieces of red tissue paper, glued in the shape of a sunburst flower with a black crayon heart. I remember the smell of the glue, its crusty snuffling pig’s nose pressing flat against the paper and the way the tissue paper stuck to my fingers, staining them bright red. I peeled a thin layer of red off my hands as though removing my own fingerprints. Only the flower stands stiff and upright�
�the stem is flat green and waxy crayon. The card will not lie closed on the table. I pick it up and it falls open in my hand. I read out loud, having no inkling of ever having written the contents.
Children’s Need
I know you have to get mad at me,
But if you didn’t I don’t know what I’d be.
But then again if I didn’t have you,
I just don’t know what I would do.
My voice quavers a little by the last line. My mother smiles at me a little triumphantly. “Oh, it isn’t as bad as all that,” she says.
I laugh. I’m starting to catch on to her little jokes, double entendres, this new directness.
“Oh, but it is horrible poetry. I do you so much better in the writing you refuse to read.”
“Yes, I’m ‘done’ all right. All done up and nowhere to go. My mother will be so disappointed when I don’t arrive.”
SLEEPING, OUR BREATHS were a disjointed syncopation. Go to her, resist, go to her, resist, and I slid into wakefulness when the nurse stood at the curtain to listen to my mother’s breathing. Gentler breathing, like waves at night, one wave in seven so soft, there was silence. The nurse’s white shape withdrew and the light from the door narrowed to a slit. She breathed and then she stopped. I held my breath and waited and she did not resume although I had to, after a slow exhalation. I stood beside her bed. Her eyes were closed, the mask empty as a shell that I lifted from the sand, and I heard a soft roar in my head.
“YOU WERE BORN too sensitive,” my mother says. She’s not holding anything for me, but maybe this admission is the gift.
“Or maybe allergic to me. You came out mottled and red, screaming, covered with a rash.”
“Maybe you were the one allergic,” I say. “Allergic to me inside you.” My heart beats fast, expecting her wrath, but she only shrugs.
“Either way, you looked like a burn victim. I thought, this poor child, going through life with skin like that. All inflamed and sensitive.”
“It went away.”
“Not completely. When you cry I can see the red marks. A horseshoe of red between your eyes. Of course, I haven’t seen you cry in years.”
“I cry. Believe me, I cry.”
LIQUID SOAP, green as spring and her fingers slipped between my hands but the rings could not move past the arthritic joint. So later that night, when it finally happened, she would go to the morgue wearing only her wedding rings. And the next day, the rings delivered to me from the undertaker in a sealed envelope that I tore open like a looter, intact, not cut where the gold was thinnest. What had to be severed to give these to me so unflawed?
“We’re not going there,” my brother said. All the strength of her hands released now, the staccato left hand cut free from the pattern, the passion of her alone in a room, thunderous throughout the house.
SHE PICKS UP THE OPAL RING that has been sitting between us, ignored all this time. She tries to slip it on her own finger, but it can’t pass the arthritic joint.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” I say and she laughs.
“A little late for that!”
“All I mean is don’t force it.”
“You’re right. I don’t need it now. “ She places it on her palm, empty of lines, and reaches across the table. The ring tumbles from her hand and falls into mine.
“Give it to your daughter.”
“Your granddaughter.” I insist.
“Yes, my grandchild. Her memories are few and far between but this is something.”
I STAYED THE COURSE, the dim lights elongating as they swept along her inert shape, relieved finally to be alone with her, her cooling foot in my hand. The tranquilizer I’d taken in the bathroom dissolved time. There was the sound of drills in the floors above, construction until past midnight. Light and shadow, light and shadow, and remembered the construction too on the hospital where I gave birth to my daughter. Alone at night, throbbing from the rent in my belly. Unable to shake the sensation of a man’s hands inside me, pulling life from the split pod. Daughter arriving, mother leaving, the same.
And again, she seemed to rise as I dozed, leaning over me and slipping her hands softly around my throat, gently, but with the press of need. As though insisting another time because I missed it the first time, notice me, notice me.
She was blessing your voice.
That was her parting shot.
Just a hallucination caused by being overtired and stressed.
There was no other place you would rather be.
Five years of absence made this last moment the only moment possible.
Your last challenge before the relationship is fixed and static and finished.
You brought her no comfort and should have left.
Nothing else mattered; she wanted to touch you purely, without language.
Why did you need to create this image for yourself?
A mother’s hands speak of the needs she can’t express verbally.
Her desire to hang onto you …
Her desire to hang you …
Her desire …
THE SKY BEYOND the window lightens to November grey. It’s the first dawn she isn’t here. She and I are both tired from the long night of the hard labour of dying. She stirs in her bed, lifts arms that lost all strength days ago and admires their cool long length. She turns her palm over, opens her fingers and offers me her silver lipstick. I take it, twist the base, bend towards her as though to whisper in her ear. But instead, I reach out and gently glide the colour over her lips and the dark plum turns blue when it touches her skin. She smiles at me with her vivid cold mouth, and unafraid then, I kiss her.
Acknowledgements:
The following stories have appeared in publication previously: “The Story of Time” (Prairie Fire), “Heart of Blue, Glowing” (Prairie Fire), “Blood Secrets” (Prairie Fire), “Where All the Ladders Start” (The New Quarterly), “Bare Bones” (Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Fiction Writers), “Persephone Without Maps” (Prism International) and “Lucky” (Best Canadian Stories: 2012).
The author would like to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa and The Banff Centre for financial assistance that allowed her to complete this book.
About the Author
Nadine McInnis is the author of seven books, the most recent being Two Hemispheres (Brick Books, Fall 2007), a book-length poetic exploration of illness and health partially inspired by the first medical photographs of women patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in 1850, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award, the ReLit Award, the People’s Choice Award and the Lampman-Scott Award. Her other books include First Fire / ce feu qui devore, a bilingual selected and new poems, Quicksilver (short fiction), Hand to Hand (poetry); Poetics of Desire, a critical study of the love poems of Dorothy Livesay, The Litmus Body (poetry) and Shaking the Dreamland Tree (poetry). Her last collection of short stories, Quicksilver, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of short stories by a Canadian, The Writers Craft Award for best book of short stories by an Ontario author and the Ottawa Book Award. She’s also a past prizewinner in the CBC Literary Competition. She is currently coordinator of the Professional Writing Program at Algonquin College.
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