by Iman Verjee
They had begun trying for a baby soon after his visit to Stolleri. He’d had no other option; he knew Marienne would have left him if he had refused and that would have been worse than anything. So he bore his trepidation well; the idea of a child still seemed like a faraway thing and it was easy not to be afraid of only his wife’s simple hope. So he watched her wait and pray for weeks, followed by days of her disappointment and his relief.
‘I don’t know why it’s not happening,’ she said to him once, after. ‘Everything feels right—ready. We have to keep trying. These things take time, right?’
‘I guess they do,’ he had replied, lost in his own thoughts. Despite not wanting to have a child, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like; to have something so closely linked to him. A daughter as lovely as his wife, with dark hair and the sweetest eyes. Or a son he could teach how to play baseball; whom he could form into a good man. A better man than himself.
‘It’ll happen,’ she said, rolling back on top of him and kissing his neck. ‘We’re going to make it happen, no matter what.’
Two months passed in this manner until she contracted a urine infection and had gone to see Dr. Banes. She told him about her difficulty getting pregnant and he had referred her to Dr. Grayson. You will never have a child together.
‘I’m sorry, honey.’ He gladly took the blame for her infertility, sick with guilt because he was free now and she was trapped within the confinements of her deficient biology.
‘That’s not going to make it any better,’ she said, getting out of the car and leaving the door swinging open. ‘A sorry isn’t going to make us a family.’ He followed her into the house where she went straight to the living room, bending over the coffee table and pulling out a pile of magazines. Babies. Babies. Babies, motherhood, family. Her desperation hit him too hard and he fell into his armchair, watching as she tore pages from one magazine and threw others at the wall. ‘He must be wrong,’ she said. ‘He has to be wrong.’
James fell to his knees beside her, catching her frantic wrists, forcing her to stop. ‘I was so sure…’ she gave up then, growing slack in his arms and he stretched out his legs, leaning against the couch and pulling her onto his lap. She brought up her knees, curling into him.
He rubbed her back and whispered in her ear. ‘We’re going to be alright.’
‘I have nothing,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I’m nothing now, James. Everyone—all of them—they have families. What do we have?’
‘Don’t say that.’ His breath was hot and angry. ‘I don’t want to hear you say that again.’ He kissed her face, collecting her tears with his mouth. There was a slow, snaky happiness expanding in him. The guilt was only a tickle in his chest and he could live with that, knowing everything had turned out for the best.
They visited three more hospitals after that first meeting with Dr. Grayson. They spent long, tired minutes in three different rooms, all with the same stinging smell that stuck to their clothes and lingered in their noses for days after, before Marienne decided not to do any more tests. All the doctors produced the same results, found the same shriveled womb grown old too early. All three were extremely sorry to say but Dr. Grayson’s initial diagnosis had been correct and Marienne was unlikely to ever have children of her own.
On their last trip, having seen all the doctors in and around town, they drove three hours to Calgary to meet with a doctor that Lynette had suggested. They left early in the morning, the flat greenness and occasional signposts simmering and flashing by them in the solid heat that had already covered the road by ten o’clock. Her hope seemed stronger that day, as if by driving so far and trying so hard, she was entitled to get something back.
‘I have a good feeling about this one,’ she said to him, leaning in to nibble on his neck. She was light and young again and he wanted to drive on forever. ‘I’m telling you, this doctor sounded really positive.’
So when they got the disappointing, yet bitterly expected news, she took it harder than the last times. They left almost immediately and she fell into an angry silence as they drove slowly and tiredly through what seemed like a different landscape from the one that morning. Dusty pink creased the fading blue of the sky, folding it into a darker purple, and the air had turned thick with the promise of a steamy evening thunderstorm. The fields they had passed dozing in the morning sun now stood erect and, having cooled down, swayed slightly in the humid wind. They stopped at a diner whose neon sign announced that they were open and a bell rang loudly overhead as they stepped through the door. Once they had settled in a booth in the almost empty place, James tried to console his wife.
‘Are you okay?’ It was a pointless question and the look she gave him told him he should have known better than to ask.
‘What do we do now?’ She sidestepped his concern and moved onto hers. She picked up a napkin and began to shred it; hard rips that tore it into clean, neat strips. He drank his lukewarm coffee, dark rivers of liquid leaking through the slight cracks of the already stained mug, sticking to his fingers.
‘There are still two more doctors we can see and we’ll find others—’ he started but she shook her head.
‘No.’ She crumpled the frayed strips of napkin into a ball and pushed it into the space between the booth and the window. ‘I can’t do those tests anymore. I can’t face any more doctors.’
He heard the bell in the front of the diner go off and watched as a young couple, not much younger than him and Marienne, when he thought about it, walked past them, whispering to each other; bleary eyed and so happy.
‘I’ll do whatever it is you want me to do,’ he turned back to her but she wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was staring out of the window and into the almost empty parking lot.
‘Bet that’s their car over there,’ Marienne said, referring to the couple who had now taken a seat at the far end of the room. Their loud chatter, ringing with occasional laughter, seemed heartless and he wished he could tell them to stop. Marienne gestured with a tilt of her head to the dusty car parked outside. Their bags were pushed up against the backseat windows and the ones that hadn’t fit were sat on the roof, carelessly tied down with cheap rope.
‘We have other options, Annie,’ he said. There was a long pause as she continued to stare out at the darkening sky. As she let out a long sigh, he wondered why he had said it; he couldn’t have asked for an easier way out than this, yet her world had fallen apart around her and picking up the remains of her happiness seemed more important than anything else.
‘No, we don’t.’ She took his cup and sipped at the coffee, although her own sat just beside her elbow. She stayed that way for some time, coffee mug to her mouth, her eyes turned outside. When she finally put the cup down, he saw that her chin was trembling. ‘You don’t get it. I want it to be mine.’ He followed her eyes out to the car. The couples’ unhinged license plate faced the diner, revealing how far they had come.
‘All the way from BC,’ he said, to fill in the silence. Exhaustion overcame him so that it hurt to even pick up his mug. The fear and anxiety of the past few months were now running out of him, pooling down at his feet and when she said, ‘I can’t believe we’re never going to have a family,’ he felt the last of it drain away from him. He saw, just within his grasp, those happy, easy days on which his marriage had thrived.
‘I wonder where they’re going,’ he murmured, not to her although she heard him.
She leaned her body against the wide glass, looking through him. ‘I guess we can do that now, if we wanted.’
‘Do what?’
‘Just pack up and leave and no one would care.’
The rain had started to fall; long, silverish droplets, cold and steady, streaking down the window and leaving sad stains behind. The kind of stinky rain you get only after an incredibly hot summer day. Marienne craned her neck upward to watch it fall, as if she could hear it through the glass. ‘There’s nothing keeping us at home any longer.’
After they returned from Calgary, she told him again she didn’t want to see any more doctors.
‘I won’t be poked and prodded again,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘The chart said—’
‘I know what the chart said, James.’
Although she refused to go to any more hospitals or talk to any friends about their situation, she was adamant that they keep trying and went about it with a grim determination. It was emotionless and quick and he didn’t like it. Over the two years of their marriage, he had grown used to having her body beneath his. The boyish, flat canvas of it. The burnished, olive skin and her black hair that sometimes smelled of butternut, especially at night, tickling his cheek as he pressed down close to her. It was never something he longed for, but he enjoyed giving it to her; watching her face and body writhe beneath his hands, her short breaths steaming the crevices of his ears. It helped keep his desires at bay. He could close his eyes with Marienne beneath him and imagine he was elsewhere, with someone else. Only for that small window of time and it was never a betrayal because he would be back with her soon, sprung into reality by the convulsing of his own body and it would be over, and most importantly, no one would be hurt.
Now, she took no pleasure from him and in turn, he could take none of it for himself. It was frustrating to see her trying fruitlessly, each night a reminder of what she was incapable of, each first day of her period, a stark and terrible insult.
She had never been particularly religious, but she prayed all the time in those hard months. Before they went to sleep, when he would wake up, she was on her knees, her elbows resting on their bed. If you give me this, if you could only give me this, take anything else that you want.
‘It’s not going to work,’ he said to her one day, stirring to see the morning light at her back, the tiny hairs on her arms like spun gold. She squeezed her eyes tightly closed and continued. He reached out, the covers slipping off his naked torso, prying her fingers away from each other. ‘Stop it, Annie. You’ll just end up disappointed.’
‘This is all I can do,’ she snapped, rising from the floor. ‘And a little support from you wouldn’t be so bad.’
He knew how she felt because he had been that way once. A young boy begging for the thing he wanted the most; a guilt-ridden teenager bargaining with a God he had to believe in because it was the only thing obscure enough to give him hope. If you could only make me stop feeling this way. Just make me normal, like everyone else. I’ll give you anything you want.
She would figure it out eventually, though for her sake, he hoped it wouldn’t come too soon. There was nothing so hopeless as coming to terms with the awful simplicity of it all; she could pray as much as she liked, for as long as she felt was needed, but what was the point when there was no one there to listen?
19
Whitehorse, Yukon.
October–November 1992
It’s a strange, new kind of loneliness without him. My body seems to lose its balance, as if missing a limb or some vital organ. I stumble through the corridors in school, blind and unsure of my movements. Sometimes, when I am called upon in class, I open my mouth and he floods my senses and nothing comes out. I have forgotten how to do everything; pushed it all out in an effort to create more space for him—filling every pocket of my mind with his images. I miss him so fully that I can’t imagine he doesn’t feel the same way.
When he doesn’t call for two weeks, and then four, I convince myself that he sits by the phone all day, picking it up and putting it down. Dialing the numbers and then replacing the receiver. It’s unimaginable that he has gone on living while I am stuck in the same moment, with those same five words racing through my mind. I don’t want you here.
I spend a lot of time looking at myself, trying to make sense of what I see. A slim face and a mouth that is too full for it, but he has always liked that. His sea-like eyes and eyebrows, strangely dark for someone with my hair color. Perhaps I got that from my mother.
‘You look like a swan,’ he told me once, his nail scraping tenderly down to the place where my collarbones stick out. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen anyone with a neck as long as yours. It’s something amazing,’ and when I touch the taut, sensitive skin there, I find that it isn’t mine; he claimed it long ago.
‘There’s just something—I can’t figure out why I don’t like her.’ I overhear someone saying this about me as we enjoy the last of the summer heat in the garden. The warmth has stayed well into October and it’s made us all lazy; most of the girls are lying in the grass, their hair and skirts splayed around them. It’s evening, just before dinner and the birds are starting up and the air is just beginning to cool. A wind carrying the traces of distant poplar trees makes us all heady with dreaming.
‘Why do you think she’s here?’ I heard another one ask.
‘She probably had an affair with a teacher.’
Excited giggling all around. They couldn’t have imagined how close they were grazing to the truth. ‘Maybe she threatened to kill his family if he didn’t leave them for her. She looks the type to do something crazy, doesn’t she?’
I keep tidy and stay silent. I grow invisible, disappearing into the structure of the Academy and this is even worse than being hated. I do it because he has asked me to and I don’t want to disappoint him anymore. In the first few days after the phone call, I make up a calendar for the year. I scrawl down the remaining days in large, red numbers on a writing pad I find and each night I cross out the day passed. Every time I slash an end to those long, empty hours—for the few seconds it takes the marker to cross from one end of the page to the other—I allow myself to hope. In a year, it will be over. In a year, everything will go back to how it used to be and I can forget this ever happened. I retreat into myself, get lost in the sleepy world I created long ago for the two of us, the place where I am the happiest, and pray for time to pass quickly.
I watch out for Joseph more now, compelled by something outside of myself. Some late afternoons, I even sit on the veranda, hoping to see him striding down the gravel with the silver keys shining at his fingers. I don’t want to speak to him. When he approaches, when I see the glint of his polished shoe, or the white of his smile, I let his eyes rest on me before I turn around and walk the other way. His gaze puts a temporary stop to the emptiness in my stomach. It’s direct and always kind and I make space for it—but that is all I want from him.
One evening, he appears around the side of the building unexpectedly. I see that his hands are soiled, black streaks down to his elbows, and he takes a green rag from his back pocket and starts to clean himself carefully. He swipes it across the back of his neck then pushes it once more into his pocket. He is too close and I know that if he spots me, he will come over to talk to me and I’m not ready for that. So as soon as his eyes meet mine, I turn and nearly run down the hill that leads from the back of the Academy into the forest, in the direction of the river. Once I reach past the line of trees, I pause to catch my breath, holding onto my knees and sucking in the potent smell of forest. I hear a rustle and then a sob; long and loud somewhere to my right. Making my way down toward the river, I catch a flash of a blue-and-red plaid skirt—the school colors. Two long legs covered up to the knee in navy socks, and black hair that is falling free from a loose ponytail.
‘Victoria?’ I say her name softly at first, and then louder when she angles her face toward me and I’m certain it’s her.
‘Leave me alone,’ she says, wiping hard at her face.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Like you care.’ She tries to breathe but her nose is blocked and her eyes are puffy. ‘You said you didn’t want to be my friend, remember?’
‘I’m sorry.’ I say it sincerely because ever since I have been forced to stay here, I’ve been lonely and looking for a way to apologize to her. I promised him I would make friends here and she is the only one still willing to speak to me.
‘I was angry that day and I didn
’t mean it.’ I pat her shoulder awkwardly, unused to comforting anyone. ‘What happened? Was it Judy?’
She laughs, a short bark. ‘Of course not.’ Then her face slackens. ‘It’s Leo.’
‘Your boyfriend?’
That laugh again. ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘That’s it,’ she turns to me, suddenly heated. ‘That’s the problem. He didn’t show up today and I’ve been waiting for hours.’
‘They didn’t notice you missing?’ I ask.
‘I pretended I had cramps,’ she shakes her head. ‘I can’t believe him.’
We stand side by side, leaning against the rough bark of a tree. I push my toes through a pile of dead leaves and kick them into the air. The crickets are beginning to sing, a horrible hum that fills my entire skull. I look up to see the sun fading and my chest constricts. It’s in the evenings that I miss him the most and already I feel it; that stretching emptiness in my abdomen that makes me want to double over and scream.
‘Have you ever been in love?’ she asks me so directly, so eagerly, but I feel like she is accusing me. ‘Like really in love, when it just makes you feel like shit, and everything, a book, a song, even this ugly tree, reminds you of him?’ She grabs the roots of her hair and groans. ‘I haven’t slept in fucking years.’
I want to tell her yes. I want to share my secret with her because at her words, it’s beating in my chest, ready to take flight, straining to be acknowledged. Because I miss him so much and talking about him might make me feel better. Instead, I shake my head.
‘That sounds terrible.’
‘It is.’ She sighs but I can see that she is enjoying some part of it; it makes her feel grown up and I want to tell her that I understand. I hand her a tissue from my pocket and she takes it gratefully, blowing her nose. ‘I hate him,’ she declares loudly. Then she takes my elbow and links her arm through it. We start walking back to the school.