SSC (2012) Adult Onset

by Ann-Marie MacDonald

  Andy-Pat gave her a fridge magnet of a dead clown with Xs for eyes that says, “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me.” She gave him one of a haggard cartoon train slouched over a beer at a bar, “The little engine that didn’t give a rat’s ass.” Just because there are no dents in Andy-Patrick’s fridge does not mean he is less dysfunctional than she is—and just because he once got the belt does not mean Dad was worse than Mum.

  True, Mum was often funny. She tumbled backward off reclining chairs, did bellyflops from the wharf when the rest of the womenfolk were beached in stretch pants on the shore; committed whopping faux pas and was always the first to laugh at herself. But her rage was not funny. Unvariegated with humour. Unmarbled with the fat of mirth. “C’mere till I smash you!”

  Besides, Mary Rose was merely following orders: her father always said, “Get mad at it.” Whether a math problem, hurt feelings or parallel parking. It worked for a long time.

  Her mother always said, “Do your best. Then do better than your best.” The immigrant credo.

  She threw the stroller at the fridge because she couldn’t find her yoga mat. Then she phoned Hil in the middle of rehearsal to ask where it was. Hil said, “It’s probably right in front of you.” And it was. It’s their joke now. Whenever she can’t find something, that is usually where it is.

  Journey To Otherwhere

  Kitty McRae had always played well alone. Not that she was disruptive or unpleasant to play with, it was just that since her mother’s death, when Kitty was still a baby, she had had to learn to amuse herself. She had never been much for toys, especially dolls—there had been one long ago, but she grew out of it and never missed it. Kitty McRae did not need toys because she had something infinitely better. She had her father.

  And he had a very important job that required him to be on the move at a moment’s notice. Kitty had grown up travelling with him to the ends of the earth. There were many wonderful things about Dean McRae, but one of them was something people might not notice from the outside: he always made his daughter feel as though she were absolutely necessary.

  Eleven is a powerful age. Kitty had mastered the logarithms that allowed her father to track winds and weather patterns; alerted him to shifts in the earth’s crust and the formation of tsunamis long before they swept ashore with obliterating force; enabled him to predict the path of fires and floods. She had seen many futures on his laptop, scenarios that played out over a millennium, merely by adjusting one of a multitude of factors—the level of plankton in the St. Lawrence River, a drop in the population of midges in the Great Rift Valley—watching as deserts swept continents, and jungles squeezed whole cities in their coils. But there was nothing “virtual” about the helicopters in which she had flown, palms pressed to the glass, grazing houses submerged to their rooftops or rendered skeletal with flames; over land-slid highways, buckled bridges. And each time, the fires subsided, the waters retreated and, step by step, life went back to normal. Her father had even credited her as a research assistant on his latest submission to the Journal of Geo-Engineering. “Do it your way, Kit-Kat”—whether it was a math problem or an ice cream sundae. Dean McRae was a Disaster Relief Expert, and Kitty couldn’t think of anything she would rather be when she grew up.

  Now that she was almost grown up, Kitty could see the situation clearly: her father, being the kindest of people, had always made her feel necessary even when she must so often have been in the way. This gave her a mighty, not entirely comfortable feeling in her chest, as though her heart were hot and outsized. She identified this as a surplus of love, a form of energy that could be harnessed. She was eleven. She was in her prime, ready now to be really useful.

  “Kitty,” he had said, “would you mind coming with me into the study, I’d like to have a word.”

  The study was her favourite room in the world. In contrast to the hi-tech tools of her father’s trade, this room contained objects that were powered entirely by history. There were gyroscopes and sextants that dated back to Columbus, and lethal-looking mathematical instruments that had belonged to her grandfather. On the wall over the desk hung an antique map. According to the cartographer of the time, the world consisted of a thin strip of Europe, a dollop of Africa, a blob of Asia and a sinister rind of Terra Incognita. At opposite corners, puff-cheeked Zephyrs blew the winds across the globe, while a tentacled sea monster bobbed amid the waves and fire-breathing dragons lurked at the uncharted edges. Presiding over it all was a big roll-top desk complete with pigeonholes that resembled a nesting wall for ocean birds, each harbouring a treasure: the tooth of an ichthyosaurus, a two-thousand-year-old lotus seed that her father meant to plant one of these days, a twenty-million-year-old whorl in stone called a trilobite, a vial of volcanic ash from the latest eruption in Iceland … The desk top was perpetually awash in papers, for her father said he still thought best with a pen in his hand.

  On the one clear corner of her father’s desk stood a photograph in an oval frame. It was the only picture they had of Kitty’s mother, and for Kitty it was the sole image, for she had no memory of her mother’s face. Asha Singh. So pretty, so lively looking; if it were a yearbook photo, the caption would be, Least likely to die young. There was something wistful in her mother’s smile. It almost seemed to say, I’m sorry.

  Kitty was good at math but, try as she might, could not keep straight just how old she had been when her mother died. She did not like to ask her father because it caused him pain … he seemed to shrink and Kitty could almost see the energy departing from him. She feared that every time she brought up the subject of her mother, he lost a little more of whatever it is that keeps a person alive. And she could not shake an uncomfortable feeling that it was up to her to keep him alive. Why had she not simply written the information down when she had the chance? Worse than embarrassing, it was weird, for who in their right mind forgets when their own mother died? She had asked Ravi, but he too seemed uncertain. He said, “That is a question for your father, Kitty.”

  Ravi had spoken only Hindi and was barely more than a child himself when Dean McRae hired him off the street in Lucknow and sponsored him. Ravi was now more Canadian than Sir John A. Macdonald, a fan of the deep Montreal winters, alchemist of spices with which he seared away Kitty’s coughs and colds. In the early days he would oil her hair and braid it, and while she put a stop to that when she turned nine, to this day it was thanks to him that, while Kitty refused to be seen in a dress, she did consent to wear a sari at Christmas. His strong, lined hands, the colour of smooth wood, were synonymous with safety, and next to her father, Kitty loved Ravi most in the world.

  Over the fireplace hung a gilt-framed round mirror like a big eye, which reflected the whole room as though through the wrong end of a telescope. It had been salvaged from the wreck of her great-great-grandfather’s ship and was speckled with age where the mercury had begun to eat through. Kitty did not like to look in it because it made her eyes go funny, as though flakes of silver were drifting down the glass like snow in a paperweight. It was a symptom of the “atypical idiopathic migraines” the doctor said were behind her “spells.” They didn’t hurt, which was why they were not “typical.” And “idiopathic” did not mean she was an idiot, “It just means you were born with them,” said her father. Kitty did not think much of the diagnosis—it was a grown-up-sounding name for something grown-ups did not understand. She stole a look at herself now, however, small and distant where she stood on the carpet, ready to receive her “marching orders.”

  This room and everything in it would be hers one day, but the carpet already was. It had been woven for her by a Bedouin elder in gratitude to her father for putting out a fire that had raged for months, fed by a sea of oil beneath the desert. Every handwoven carpet is special, but this one had a band of scarlet snaking through in the shape of her initial: K.

  Their adventures always started in the same way, with Kitty standing at attention on the carpet and her father relaxed in the leather armchair. So it was
with a pleasant tingle of anticipation that she saw him settle into it. And a modicum of surprise when he said, “Have a seat, Kitty.”

  She hesitated, then sat down cross-legged on the carpet, brushing a thatch of hair from her eyes. Her hair might be described as the physical manifestation of her brain’s energy field: growing in all directions, fractal and increasing in complexity every day—why bother brushing it? “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it,” Ravi always said. He had given up trying to make her brush her hair, but he did insist upon teeth and she could see his point. Ravi had looked after her as long as she could remember, and it was thanks to him that she could speak a little and understand a lot of her mother’s first language. She enjoyed the response she got when she introduced him as “my manny”; and of late there had been plenty of opportunity, for a parade of girls her age had been produced as though via some marketing magic by her “Aunt” Fiona. A partner at the public relations firm Tullimore-Spinx, Fiona Tullimore wasn’t really Kitty’s aunt but her father’s girlfriend, and it was in both capacities that the wonderful woman brimmed with plans to “improve” Kitty’s life. But Kitty’s life was already perfect. She had her father, she had Ravi, and she had her secret.

  “What’s up, Dad?”

  “How are you feeling today, Kit-Kat?”

  “Great.”

  He hesitated, as if he didn’t know whether to believe her, before saying, “Good.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” she reassured him.

  He had taken her to a specialist for her spells, though Kitty had tried to tell him there was nothing to worry about. She liked Dr. Quinn, he gave her tests but not like the ones in school. The only thing that frightened Kitty was the hospital smell. It made her stomach chilly and put her skin on alert, as though at any moment someone might stick a needle into her or worse. But it was worth the smell and even the wasted worry on her father’s part just to have slid bodily into the big clanking tube that took pictures of her brain, layer after layer. She got to see them afterwards, on the doctor’s computer, blue maps and shadowy shapes …

  “Where are we going this time?” she asked her father.

  “Kitty, there is a trip in the offing, but I’m afraid I can’t accompany you on it.”

  For one queasy moment, Kitty feared he was about to tell her that she was going to have to return to the Hospital for Sick Children for an operation … what if there really was something wrong with her brain? What if they had to cut open her head? The next instant, he interrupted what she thought was her worst nightmare, only to surpass it with one that involved no scalpels but nonetheless entailed a severing that she feared she could not survive.

  He was sending her away.

  TUESDAY

  If a Leaf Falls in a Fracture, Does Anyone Hear?

  She has just returned with Maggie from a harrowing parents-and-tots swim class in the tepid pool at the community centre. The pallid dads and moms all bobbed about, clutching their eighteen-to-twenty-four-month-olds in controlled chaos under the eye of a teenaged instructor wearing nose plugs. Those parents with a hint of colour in their heritage looked especially unhealthy, any pigment-imparted gloss dulled by chlourescence—the Libyan dad got the worst of it. They all sang “Wheels on the Bus” and swam the gauntlet of “London Bridge,” chest hair streaming, arm flab jiggling and, in Mary Rose’s case, middle-aged sinews straining, while the tiny future-adults screamed or rejoiced according to their allotment of nature-nurture. Finally, the red plastic slide was produced that really separated the stamp collectors from the venture capitalists. Maggie dutifully waited her turn then clambered up the two steps—itself a risk-barnacled undertaking for any toddler—as Mary Rose slipped back into the water, poised to catch her. “Okay, Maggie!” And instead of going down on her bottom, Maggie dove straight at Mary Rose’s head. They went to the bottom butt-first, Mary Rose hanging on to Maggie and scrabbling for purchase on the slippery tiles. They finally shot to the surface with a sputtering laugh from Maggie, a heart-barfing gasp from Mary Rose and the stunned looks of the other parents.

  “Maggie, you must go down on your bum next time.”

  “Okay.”

  She climbed the slide and did it again.

  It is now 9:30 a.m. on that most innocuous of weekdays, Tuesday, and Mary Rose is safe in her kitchen. Her skin smells like chlorine and she has a bad case of hat-hair, but she is basking in gemütlichkeit—that untranslatable but universally recognized sense of well-being. The one that arises when you’ve cleared your inbox or survived a plane crash. Maggie is on the floor rearranging the Tupperware cupboard—it isn’t really Tupperware and Mary Rose will have to replace it all with BPA-free stuff anyhow. Perhaps she oughtn’t to allow Maggie to play with it, but she isn’t putting it in her mouth, so … Daisy appears and goes to her bowl where she hoovers a late breakfast with a series of grunts—the pooch is keeping dowager hours these days.

  Mary Rose leans against her soapstone counter in front of her big kitchen windows and reads the Toronto Star—in the food section is an article about an ordinary woman who makes her own ricotta … and runs a corporation. Tuesday is Candace’s morning, she’ll be here soon—Mary Rose ought to get down on the floor and play with Maggie before she arrives. She closes the newspaper and in glancing up her eye is caught by a woman standing on the corner. She has a toddler by the hand and a baby in a stroller weighed down with grocery bags. She is trying to cross the street, but her toddler refuses. He sits. He cries. The mother waits—she is doing the right thing. The hard thing. Mary Rose has been there.

  Recently she read in the paper about a woman who killed herself and her husband, and tried to kill their three young children. This happened a ten-minute walk away, on Harmony Street. The article mentioned a dog “found wandering at the scene.”

  She looks at Daisy, out cold now in front of the sliding door to the deck, legs twitching—chasing a dream squirrel.

  The article quoted a neighbour saying she saw the woman, “a nice, quiet young woman, they were a nice couple,” walking down the street from the Loblaws store, pushing her baby in the stroller, laden with grocery bags, her toddler and six-year-old in tow. “She had a blank look on her face.” Mary Rose recalls something her friend Andrea said—Andrea is a midwife, the one who “caught” Maggie. In the flush of that first hour when bliss had kicked in full force and they were still hugging and weeping and laughing, Andrea turned to Hilary. “I’m going to say to you what I say to every mother post-partum: three months from now when you want to throw that baby out the window, call me.”

  What if someone had come up to the nice young woman from Harmony Street and said, “Can I help you with those bags?” Or was she already too far gone?

  The children survived. The dog probably had something to do with that.

  The mother tried to cut their throats.

  It occurs to Mary Rose to go out there and help that woman; maybe she isn’t patient, maybe she is depressed. Maybe she is going to go home and murder those children, and it will be Mary Rose’s fault—she hears a rattling behind her. Maggie is shaking something in a plastic container … a penny! Hil was sorting pocket change before she left and dropped some on the kitchen floor. She swore she had picked it all up and now Maggie has it in her hand, halfway to her mouth, poised to choke on it.

  “Here, luvvie, give the penny to Mumma.”

  “No.” She closes her fist over it. “Mine.”

  Mary Rose pries open the little hand and Maggie bops her in the face with the container.

  Mary Rose rips the container from Maggie’s hand and hurls it down the hall, regretting the action even before the thing bounces harmlessly off the front door. The child screams as though she has just witnessed the evisceration of a pet rabbit.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart, Mumma didn’t break it.”

  She retrieves the container and returns it to Maggie, who promptly hurls it back down the hall. So much for the teachable moment. Hil is a worse mother for leaving penni
es on the floor. Mary Rose lies down suddenly, pretending to be asleep, and lets Maggie wake her up over and over again. Soon the big brown eyes are wet with laughter and Mary Rose catches the child as she flings herself repeatedly at Mumma—the closest thing to a hug Maggie will consent to from her.

  The back door opens, Daisy mwuffs and Candace walks up the four steps to the kitchen, already pushing up the sleeves of her skintight, long-sleeved T and exuding the air of cheerful authority that owes less perhaps to her training as a professional nanny than to her years as a Manchester barmaid. Daisy’s back-end fishtails in greeting, Maggie deserts her and runs to hug “Candies!” She watches as Maggie buries herself in Candace’s ample embrace and reflects that if she spent only hours a week with her child, perhaps Maggie would love her too—then catches herself; after all, she wants Maggie to love Candace. Mary Rose is just jealous—though whether of Candace or of Maggie, it is hard to say.

  Candace addresses her charge in forthright full sentences. “Hello, Maggie, how are you today?”

  Maggie responds in kind. “I fine, Candies, I will go to the park with you.”

  Mary Rose follows suit. “Maggie, what would you like to do at the park?”

  “No.”

  Mary Rose laughs in order to show Candace how easygoing she is, then takes charge. “By the way, Candace, we’re going to try phasing out Maggie’s morning nap.”

  “Oh, I thought we’d already done with that, I’ve been keeping her up my mornings, sorry, did you want me to put her down now?”

  “No, no, yeah, we’ve done with it, I just didn’t know if I’d mentioned it. Great, thanks.”