Vital Signs

by Tessa McWatt

  I believe Dr. Gottlieb is now stepping—no leaping—over a line that should not be crossed. I sit up straight. If Anna doesn’t belt him, I will.

  “The first operation I had was to correct my knees; they were crooked at birth, and I had to wear callipers for years. The other children laughed at me,” and here Anna’s accent changes and instead of clear Canadian sounds, her speech becomes slippery with a tropical laziness, an accent that sounds South African or Australian. I’ve heard her imitate accents before—her mother’s Turkish-inflected stammer, the Queen of England’s posh pronouncements when she’s in a silly mood, but this is not a joking matter and it feels as though the accent has her and not the other way around. “But I had to have the second operation in Marrakesh,” she continues in the same thick tone, “and thaayre thy didn’t hayve the right machinery, so my legs stayed crooked.” This is not the open sluicing of previous confabulations; this is a body snatch. Anna has never been to Marrakesh, as far as I know, and her knees and legs are aligned and strong. I have seen her ski and remember her trying out Sasha’s skateboard many years ago. No, this is someone else’s life. “I had to take painkillers for seven years,” she says, then mercifully stops.

  Gottlieb looks at me, then back at Anna. “There’s no reliable drug treatment for the kind of frontal lobe damage that is associated with this disorder,” he says and turns back to me. “But there is an alternative method to deal with it.”

  She understands what you’re saying, you moron; look at her, not at me.

  “Endovascular coiling—it’s not fully invasive. A platinum coil is inserted through the vascular system, into the head, and more coils are threaded through to block the blood flow into the aneurysm.” He finally looks back at Anna. “Not all patients are equally suited to it. It depends on the position of the aneurysm. We need the results of this scan first.”

  “Doctor, what are you saying, exactly?” I ask, irritated.

  “I’ll have my colleague do more tests, Mike, and we’ll see,” he says flatly before turning to Anna again. “There are other patients you can talk to, assess the outcomes yourself.”

  Anna nods, indicating that she might like this, but then says, “I’ve spoken to the other patients; they don’t know.” She looks anxiously at me. “They haven’t had the same window problems I have.” As I pull the cuff of my shirt down over my wrist, I know she’s not confused. She believes in these memories that have possessed her.

  “We’ll discuss it,” I say to Dr. Gottlieb.

  A few hours later, at home, Anna sits on our porch in the chair she chooses when she wants to be left alone. But I can’t—I can’t leave her alone. I get up from the kitchen table where I have been doodling, and I go, taking my marker and pad, and sit in the chair beside her. I look out to where she is looking, to the hills in the distance. Some days we see deer lying at the edge of the woods at the end of the road, but today we can’t see much. The corn has grown more without my noticing, and it waves at me from beyond the driveway, as though chastening me for being unobservant.

  There’s so much I haven’t told you yet, things I need language for. Like the time I ran away from my grandmother’s calls, “Mike, Mike, Michael!” Into the corn. Four-month-old corn and eight-year-old me, corn that hid me, stalk and leaves like bodies making me one of their crowd, which minded me, didn’t call me, allowed me and the wind to rustle it then pass, leaving it simply to grow.

  “Anna,” I say timidly. She looks at me, but her look says she’s not ready to risk another conversation. But I need to tell her things—that one particular thing—and to have her know-it-all-ness pronounce upon me and damn me or forgive me. I want to be open, like she’s always wanted me to be. Maybe like the man she dated before me, during her MA studies. What did I have to say back then about my feelings? Say that I feel itchy? Say that I feel unable to concentrate when you’re asking me how I feel all the time? Say that I need space away from your questions? Because there’s a problem I need to solve that has to do with objects in space, don’t you see? Say what, exactly: that after three years of marriage, a toddler at home and you waddling pregnant through a suburban mall, that I didn’t love the look of the ass on that woman who walked past us? Those were my feelings. Then. They are different now.

  “I know you know what’s happening,” I say, and want to add, and what has happened and what will happen. She’s so finely tuned to events and feelings that it’s almost impossible to tell her anything; she’s there miles before I am. I try to keep the conversation simple, and I am desperately trying to be honest. For once.

  “But I need to know how you feel about all of this,” I do add. I remember the couple in the subway, their dance of abandonment. “As far as I’m concerned,” I try, but I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Should I talk about my day? Should I shut up and hold back so that she’ll talk to me?

  “I feel locked out.”

  There. A feeling. A real, true and undeniable feeling. Surely she knows this, along with every small act of disloyalty that ever passed between us.

  She looks over at me, her eyes wide open.

  “Yes,” she says. And then I wonder if she is telling me that I’m purposely locked out or merely conveying that she understands how I feel. “Three words,” she says.

  “What three words?”

  “I can manage.” And I want to take her by the neck and shake her. I know she can manage. She can manage the world if given the chance. And this is what I think now: that she is always one step ahead of me. And yet she chose to teach; she chose to put her talents aside and teach. And in doing so she made me look even smaller for my ambitions. I want to tell her this.

  “Three at once,” she says, and I think I have them: I love you, I love you, don’t you see that I love you? But this couldn’t be what she means, not really.

  “Please, Anna …”

  “At a time.”

  “Three words at a time?”

  “Yes. Otherwise, I …”

  “I see.”

  “Help me, please.”

  And I will die doing so, I vow to her with my eyes.

  I try to think of the questions, the right ones, posed just the right way. We are silent for several minutes while the corn grows.

  “Do you feel like you have enough information from the doctor?”

  “Yes, I do,” she says.

  “I want you to take your time to decide, but on the other hand it needs …” and I am about to blow it, I know.

  “I have decided,” she says.

  “Good, good,” I say, and wait. She will tell me.

  “I want life,” she says, and at first I am relieved, but then I wonder if she is saying she’s not going to risk the operating table, because the chance for life is higher, in her estimation, if she doesn’t go ahead with it.

  “Does that mean that you will have the operation?”

  “There are so many operations that I’ve had, especially in the navy, that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between them. You go down, you come up, it’s all the same. And in Marrakesh—”

  “ANNA!”

  And she stops. I look down at her feet and see the dried skin and lines like cracked clay at the base of her heel. The hard callus that juts out at the curve of the bone looks as though it is expanding the big toe into a grotesque, witchy appendage with several black hairs sprouting from its skin. What has happened to her feet since the last time I saw this callus and wanted to lick it smooth? What is happening to me?

  “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. She looks back out towards the field. The sun is beginning to turn everything mauve, as though recognizing it has given off too much bright yellow light and must now soften.

  When you were at home with the three of them, all still under the age of five, I stayed at work on purpose, trying to gain space. There was another one, not the blonde. A woman darker than you, fiercer, heavier, and so much freer than you. And I blamed you as we chatted over dinner even as you struggled with fe
eding and weaning. I blamed you.

  I pick up my sketch pad and marker. I don’t know it while I’m doing it, but I draw something for Anna. As I draw, I think about a woman. A dark woman with strong arms, who is picking up a heavy object shaped like a bucket that is almost twice her size. I think about her, but I do not draw her. Something else comes from my hands. This new kind of marking, like the one I want to make to capture the effect of Sasha. I think of the effort in the woman’s brow, the sweat that marks her desire to give up. I think of all that I want to dispose of right now. When I’ve finished, I hold the drawing up in front of her and keep it there, waiting for her reaction.

  She giggles and then laughs harder, holding a hand over her mouth, as though not wanting anything else to escape with the laughter. I think that perhaps she’s making fun of me and that she knows something about what has inspired this drawing—the other woman, not the blonde, but the dark fiery woman all those years ago—but that’s impossible. Perhaps she sees Marrakesh, toasters, callipers in there. This drawing is what is happening to us all now, and I think her laughter is some kind of acknowledgement.

  I think I have found the way to talk to her in the present.

  The past takes too much language.

  FOUR

  “What time does she finish?” Charlotte asks with the rehydrated contempt she’s shown for me since we got the news. She clicks in her seatbelt. I start the engine.

  I’ve picked her up in front of her office on Bay Street. My middle child works in a tower block, wears a power suit and works out at a gym every evening. My middle child dislikes being out in the sun for long periods for fear her naturally olive skin will darken even more. She has friends who own properties all around the world, while she struggles to pay the mortgage on a luxury lakefront condo she purchased two years ago, after Scott, her boyfriend of eight years, left her for his dental hygienist. My middle child is a cliché of a modern urban woman, and it’s probably this fact, if I can admit it now, that keeps me at a distance. The truth is that her choices embarrass me.

  “We’ll have to be quick,” I say as I glance over at her. She is not wearing her power suit today; she is in slim-fitting jeans and a T-shirt that show off her fine figure. “Why are you dressed like that?” My question sounds more accusatory than I intend, and if I were being honest I’d say it was a refreshing change to her usual angled and buttoned look. She doesn’t answer as I pull out along Bay Street and get stopped at the traffic lights. We are meeting Fred in Yorkville for lunch. Sasha might be able to join us for dessert, once her rehearsal is finished. “They have casual Wednesdays too now in the corps, do they?” I try to joke, but she looks straight ahead at the road in front of us, and I think I detect a rolling of her eyes.

  “Has she booked in for the op?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say in defeat, and turn on the radio.

  Anna is having another cerebral angiogram at St. Michael’s to determine whether a coil embolization is possible, or whether the traditional and more invasive route of clip ligation surgery will be her only option.

  “Thank God,” Charlotte says, and throws her long chestnut hair over her shoulders, triumphant.

  At lunch, Fred is generous, ordering a fine bottle of wine from our French waiter and telling me I’m looking well, when I know that my skin is sallow and caked like thirsty soil. He has on his doctor’s demeanour—all confidence and impenetrability.

  “Remember when Mom had to spend weeks in the hospital with Sash,” he says, thus acknowledging that this particular grouping of the Williamson family is unusual. When Sasha was three years old, she developed pneumonia, with a fever that burned so high she glowed. Anna would not leave her side, slept beside her in the hospital, and we remaining three carried on without them as though we were a special unit in the family army, offering support to the front line by not drawing attention to ourselves, trying to reconstruct the feeling of Sasha without her there.

  She was very ill for a month but recovered and has barely been sick a day since then.

  “What are all of these words that Mom says?” Charlotte asks.

  “Confabulation,” Fred answers. “Damage to the anterior communicating artery, which affects the—”

  “I know that much, Fred. I have been paying attention,” she says, “but where does it come from?”

  “We don’t understand enough about false memories to explain why they happen,” Fred says.

  “She doesn’t believe they’re false,” Charlotte says.

  “That’s right. For her they’re real, true. She’s right there in the moment with them as she’s telling them.” Fred lifts up his glass of merlot and stares into it as if through skin into blood.

  “Maybe she’s onto something,” Charlotte says, and there’s more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Charlotte, what is it?” I ask, my voice harsh.

  “What is what?”

  “What you need to say.”

  She looks down into her chèvre salad and a smirk plumps her lips.

  “Go on.”

  “Nothing, Dad,” she says as she takes a forkful of the cheese. As she’s chewing, she looks up at me. “Maybe Mom doesn’t want to remember things; maybe she’s chosen other memories because hers are disappointing.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Fred says, piercing the last of his steak with his fork. He has eaten so quickly that I think this might be the first food he’s had all day. But then Fred has never stood on ceremony with food or anything else.

  “Dad? What do you think?” Charlotte asks. That sarcastic tone again. She is not too old for smacking, is what I think.

  “Does anyone want coffee?” Fred asks, and it’s clear he wants us to hurry up.

  ‘Aren’t you waiting for Sasha?” I ask.

  “No, I have to get back.”

  Fred’s residency in family medicine at Mount Sinai has been arduous. He is rarely available, his naturally curly hair has gone straight, looking like it has been cut with a bowl and clippers, and he looks twice his age of twenty-nine. I worry that he is bored with the lack of specialization, and I silently reproach him for not being ambitious enough to have pursued funding, for giving up once I pulled the financial plug.

  “I have to get going too,” Charlotte adds. “We don’t have Sasha’s boho schedule.”

  “Why are you so angry?” I shout, and I startle her into looking me straight in the eye. Her brow creases as though she will cry, and I see the little girl again.

  “Dad,” she says and, despite my very real animosity, I want to hold her. She says nothing more, and I wonder if she finds my need for her to be kind to me right now repulsive.

  “I don’t think she feels this like you’re imagining,” I say. “Dr. Mead said that confabulators believe what they’re saying. She’s not confused; she doesn’t think she’s making anything up. She just reacts to our faces looking confused, like we don’t believe her.”

  “That’s right,” Fred confirms. “It’s only because we look like we don’t believe her that she has trouble.”

  “But she’s so far away.” Charlotte’s voice is strained.

  “No, no, she’s not,” I say, remembering the way the lust rose between us as I lay beside her, and I picture her face against her pillow—a face asking for all dreams to come true. Anna had been closer to me then than she’d been in years.

  “You like that she has the wrong memories,” Charlotte says finally, and I feel the clawing of family spiders at our necks: the net-casting tricksters whose silky threads never let us forget for long just how strongly we are bound to one another. Finally I understand what Charlotte has been getting at.

  “I’ll ask for the bill,” Fred says.

  “And I’ll meet you outside,” Charlotte says, standing up.

  “And I’m waiting for Sasha,” I tell Fred.

  But Sasha doesn’t arrive before I need to leave to pick up Anna from the hospital. I find myself taking Charlotte’s side about my daughter’s bohemia
n schedule.

  “You look beautiful,” I say to Anna as I glance over at her in the passenger seat. The traffic has come to a halt as we turn onto the ramp for Highway 400 to head north. In the summer, even on weekdays, this highway is crammed with people headed to cottages or campsites.

  She looks over at me, smiles and nods.

  I took her skating once, at City Hall. She didn’t know how to skate and held onto me for balance. I made a show of teaching her, and forced her to loosen her grip, as I checked around us to see if anyone was watching.

  I notice that the hair at Anna’s temple, and a swash of it from her forehead up along the part, is grey. Her roots are overtaking her monthly tint and I wonder if she has noticed and doesn’t care about hair anymore, or about eyebrows or waxing, or her weight, which has stayed a perfect 135 pounds even after three children. She is toned for a woman her age, and up until a few weeks ago was cycling and swimming regularly.

  She rushes, on the inside, my Anna. She surges with the force of a current—not water and not electric, but like air: the updraft that carries a wing.

  The traffic begins to move again and we pick up speed.

  “Are you disappointed?” I say.

  She looks at me with a furrowed brow that asks, by what?

  And now I regret my question, but I have to follow through. I try to give her the question and answer together. “That the embolization can’t be done in your case because of the position of the aneurysm.”

  “I’m disappointed that they didn’t give the anaesthetic, though. It hurt a great deal, that operation, and when the goat knocked over the fence and the pole fell on me, it really stung, and so it would have helped if they’d given me the proper medication. They never do, though, this is what I’ve heard. The rain comes and the goats just trample over everything.”

  “Goats? How many?” I ask. The animals are back, and I don’t know what gets into me—whether it is perversion or honest pleasure—but I want to follow her words. I want to be out there with her and her goats in the rain.