by Tessa McWatt
“You’re kidding, right?” said Charlotte.
“Char, please,” said Fred, embarrassed and trying to keep his professional composure. “It’s not uncommon, right?” His tone contained a plea to Gottlieb.
“It’s not common, but it does happen. The methods for preserving the bone flap sterilized and intact are exceptional. She’s through the worst of it now. She’s in recovery. You can see her within the hour.”
Dr. Gottlieb stood silent. I could see from his face that he thought his duty was done, and that the people in his office should be grateful that he saved this woman’s life and they should now leave him alone. He told us he knew we had a lot to discuss and, guiding us towards the door, said that the nurse would let us know when we could see Anna. We stumbled out of the consulting room like lost tourists.
There have been times in the past when I have seen people in wheelchairs, in vegetative states, when I accidentally have said “sorry” out loud, in a moment of uncontrolled there-but-for-the-grace-of-God empathy, or fear. Anna was superstitious about accidents, though, and would not discuss with me her wishes, not the “do not resuscitate” of a living will, nor the organ donor registry, which she found morbid. The kind of outcome that Charlotte fears is not something I have prepared for.
Perhaps Charlotte has overreacted.
But if she hasn’t, my trembling bottom lip tells me I have not equipped myself sufficiently for this outcome. Until now I have not considered what it is that my wife wants. I remember what she said to Susan that day when I overheard them in the kitchen: “I won’t be like her. I won’t.”
What is a mind?
While Charlotte and Fred argue like husband and wife in the waiting room, I am like the child with my hands over my ears. I close my eyes. Come on, come on.
And there, it’s faint, but … She is on a hillside. She is wearing a short, colourful skirt. I hear birds: a parrot’s caw and the twirp of a small red-beaked, turquoise Roller. A Dollarbird. We are in Indonesia. The hill is terraced, and her tight cotton vest makes my wife’s back a curve of crimson against the jade paddies. I walk towards her. She’s barely more than a girl, and so I look down at my own hands and see that they are not marked by years of futile, meaningless work. They are strong, smooth.
“Mike, this is where we will raise our children,” she says softly, with a clarity that is youthful and wise all in one. “Over there, see that land, down below the temple?” she says, and I follow her slim, firm arm to her fingertip and out toward the next hill, where the shimmering, terraced rice fields are like a stretched, swollen Greek amphitheatre. “I’ve asked them if we can build there,” and she unfolds a set of architectural plans she has been holding in her other hand. These are indecipherable to me with their elaborate lines and foreign characters, but Anna seems to know exactly what they all mean. “It’s important that the main room faces the sea—this way,” and she points again.
“What will we do here?” I ask.
“We’ll raise them properly; we’ll learn how to cultivate our land; we’ll grow old with grace,” she says, and her voice is like a wind I want to lie down beneath. “And you’ll do your art,” she adds. At this I stop myself. The ego’s interception of the fantasy has made it all feel contrived.
What is it that I have wanted?
“Dad,” Sasha says as she touches my arm. “Come, sit down.”
She leads me to the couch. Fred and Charlotte are nowhere to be seen, and I am embarrassed, because I know I have been standing in silence for too long.
“Is Charlotte okay?” I ask her sister. I don’t sit down. Sasha shrugs. Her hazel eyes are moist and red. She stands with me, but looks towards the couch.
“She’s okay.”
“But she—”
“She’s worried.”
“We all are, but—”
“She’s got stuff going on too.” Sasha shrugs again, looks at me and finally sits down. “She wanted to tell Mom stuff before the operation, and I told her she shouldn’t.”
My stomach lurches. I remain standing. “Tell her what stuff?” I ask.
“Stuff,” she says sadly.
I examine her face to see where she bears the weight of stuff, where the pain of what she knows about her parents resides. Her cheeks are not drawn; her eyes don’t droop; her lips are full and sure. It could be that my youngest child is not marked in any way by my failings.
“Tell me,” I say. She looks up at me, and in her cheek is a tinge of regret. “Tell me,” I repeat.
“Charlotte lost her job.” She takes a breath. “A couple of weeks ago. She didn’t want anyone to know because she felt humiliated.”
I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that I’m relieved it isn’t about me, or the fact that I do not feel more stirred by my daughter’s suffering.
“What happened?” I manage to say. I remember her casual clothes, the jeans and T-shirt when I picked her up for lunch. Why did she have me meet her there and not at home? How did I become so heartless, so unforgiving in their eyes? I think about this morning and my insistence that she should get a new car.
“She fell out, big time, with her boss, and after months of torturing her, he found a way to fire her.” Sasha grabs my arm. “You can’t let on that you know. She’d kill me, Dad, please.”
“But …” and I am slipping into a cold gulf.
“Sit,” Sasha says.
I do as I’m told.
“Fred has gone to find out more about the bone flap,” she says. “They said it really wasn’t that unusual, it happens sometimes.” She fidgets, crosses her legs, scratches her wrist. Sasha’s body choreographs her distress. “I don’t know why Charlotte flew off like that.” She scratches her wrist again, uncrosses her legs. “I’m scared.”
I wrap my arms around her and hold on tight. “It’s all going to be okay,” I say, as I rub her back and she starts to cry. I feel the tiny eruptions up my daughter’s spine, the heaving of her breath in my hands.
“The thought of losing either of you …” she whispers, but it gets caught in her throat.
“Sshhh …” I offer, and stroke her back.
“Oh, never mind,” she says, composing herself, wiping her nose on my shirt.
“Darling, please, if you want to talk about—”
“No, it’s fine.” She straightens up.
“You’ve been worried about losing us?”
She takes tissue from her pocket and shakes her head. “More about you losing each other.”
I am momentarily confused, and then the shame rushes back in.
“Mom told me, a few years ago … I wish people would stop telling me things,” she tries to joke, and blows her nose again.
“What did Mom tell you?”
She shakes her head, fixes her hair quickly with her hands, scratches her wrist again.
“Please,” I say, not wanting to speak before I am certain, but feeling a rising relief that perhaps everyone, even Anna, already knows, and that my family has been more gracious than I have.
“You know,” she says.
“I do?” My cheeks are on fire.
Leave me alone, Christine finally said, one spring day, when I called, late, desperate, begging to see her after telling her only a week earlier that I was devoted to Anna and that we couldn’t continue.
“Mom’s affair.”
No air. A rush of sharp blood to my chest.
My mind slips into reverse, scrambling to find an image that corresponds to these words.
“I know, she told me you didn’t want to talk about it,” Sasha says.
My burning cheeks begin to twitch as I engage my lips to play a role I haven’t rehearsed. “When did she tell you?”
“A few years ago, way after it happened.”
Way after it happened.
Again my mind rushes to calculate, to add up and subtract where in the calendar of Christine this might fall. Should I be relieved? But relief is not supposed to feel like sharp metal churning below my
ribs.
“And what did she say exactly?”
“Sorry, Dad, if you don’t want to talk about it …” she waves her hand, as if to clear the air of unease.
“No, no, I do,” and I have to lick my dry, lying lips to stop them from sticking together.
“She didn’t say much, just that it’s what can happen in relationships and that you and she were just ordinary people who sometimes found it hard to be together, like everyone else.”
“Of course.”
No, it’s not relief I feel. What’s raging in my ribs is more complicated than that, and it includes an untender lust, an arousing image of my wife straddling a faceless man. I rub my palms hard against my brow. Sasha touches my arm.
“Dad, I’m sorry, you didn’t need me to bring that up. I’m sorry.”
And when I look up I can see the weight of stuff on her face that I couldn’t see before. The slight downturn of her mouth and the trembling lip that resembles mine after all.
“Not a problem,” I say, drawing her nearer to me. “We’re past that. Now, I wonder if it isn’t time to go in and see her.”
“She’s probably still sleeping,” she says.
“You go check, let me know.”
She doesn’t budge.
“Please, darling.”
Sasha stands and hesitates, but I will her with all my might to leave. She eventually walks off. I have no feeling in my feet, but there’s a tingling at the end of my earlobes. And Anna is still unconscious.
I despise her.
I slouch back on the couch. It hurts. I stand up. This is worse. I sit back down, but on the floor this time, with my back pressed up against the couch. Way after it happened. I stand up again and begin pacing. The water cooler gurgles. I raise my foot, whack it with my heel and walk out of the room.
When you fucked him … you opened your legs and guided him into you and you fucked him. Or was it your ass you raised, pumping it, pink and spanked … you fucking fucked him …
There are so many people in the ward—the two women visiting their epileptic friend; the Chinese family is back and waiting for news on their son; the nurse with the beard and tattoos; the fee-fi-fo-fum throng of illness. I walk towards her room at the far end of the hallway. I picture myself ripping the tubes from her arms, delicately lifting her head, but then letting it fall back—hard—against the stiff hospital pillow.
In the corridor there is a door marked Janitor. I try the handle, surprised when it turns. I don’t even check around me to see if anyone is watching. I enter the walk-in cupboard packed full of cleaning solutions, bleaches, liquids in large plastic bottles marked with skull and cross-bones. My legs buckle and I slouch down against some giant rolls of paper towel, accidentally knocking over a spray bottle of tile cleaner in the process.
There’s an elaborate floor polisher in front of me, and my shoe rubs against the felt of its polishing disc. I try to focus on the construction of this disc, the mechanics of the machine—imagining intricate pulleys and levers, where the engine clicks in, and how it propels the pad over the floor. I realize I know nothing about how things like this are built; not even the mop, there—the long strands of cotton strings that slop up the puke, shit, and blood of this ward and then get squeezed into the trough that rings out the water. I don’t understand the simplest of mechanisms.
Who had been Anna’s lover? Another teacher? A man whose words flowed to please her, tease her, whispering as he entered her? I picture them and my stomach churns. Why did she stop seeing him?
My head slumps forward. I am embarrassed by the janitor’s uniform, which hangs on the door to my right, as though it is observing me at my most ridiculous. Which version of our past has Charlotte been privy to, after all? Anna felt no need to confess; she wasn’t concerned about leaving me with false memories of my wife.
Eventually I focus on the crisp cobalt blue coveralls hanging on the hook. They look as though they would fit me and I consider putting them on.
And then I am back in Bali, on that terraced hillside with Anna, her back to me, her arm outstretched as she points towards something down in the the terraced, jade valley. I think it’s our home, the place where we will grow old together.
“We’re ordinary people,” she says, as she turns and looks at me. I see that her face is as beautiful as ever, her language unflawed, no sign of any damage from the operation. Her head is perfectly shaped. Strands of her hair are rising and falling in the breeze like the shoots of new rice that make the hill an undulating green ribbon that we’re carefully balancing on.
THIRTEEN
If they’ve changed the bed then someone will have left the drawing for her on the side table, or it’s been bundled up in the soiled sheets and will be laundered with them, its ink bleeding into the cheap cotton.
When I arrive at the door to the room she is surrounded. Rosie is arranging something near the bed; the children are gathered in a semi-circle. I catch sight of my wife’s face framed by the white gauze turban and almost do not recognize her. My eyes flicker to the ventilator, the IV, the tubes in her arm. When I look back up at her face I see that her eyes are sunken, with dark circles underneath, as though she’s been beaten.
She sees me. The children notice the shift in her gaze, and turn around, their tear-stained faces puffy like wet cardboard. I force myself closer, then almost skip towards them in a jolt of confusion. Anna looks at me with what could be concern, but I smile.
“Sweetheart,” I say, and sweep my fingers under the pillow near her head, feeling for the paper, before bending my face to hers, resting it against her cheek without pressure. The gauze around her head is slightly moist, and I smell something like mould masked by disinfectant and a lemony balm. I stay longer than feels appropriate and do another sweep with my fingers.
“Dad,” Charlotte says, sounding irritated. I push myself up on my hands and glare at her, then look back at Anna, whose eyes search mine. I don’t know how to look at her. She opens her mouth as if to speak, but doesn’t.
“Has she said anything?” I ask Fred as I stand up straight.
“Her throat is sore as hell, I bet, from the breathing tube,” he says, “so I doubt she’ll want to for a while, but they did neurological tests in the ICU, and they’ve found no evidence of damage. If she’s here, it means she’s answered their questions, like ‘what is your name’ and ‘what day is it?’ over and over. So, she can speak to us, she just hasn’t felt up to it yet.”
I’m amazed by the depth of my relief.
Anna stares blankly, and I wonder if Fred is right. Does she understand us? I want them to leave us alone now. Please go, I repeat, over and over in my head, as Charlotte strokes her mother’s hand. The knuckles of my daughter’s fingers flow smoothly, up and down. Each articulation of the bones is purposeful, almost dangerous. I remember all the times I told Charlotte how crucial it was to be self-sufficient, no matter what she chose to do and how she had to work hard and not be dependent. But that was not real life I was talking about. I keep my eyes on her knuckles.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I say. They glower at me. “And then I’d like to be alone with her. Is that okay?” I notice that Rosie has disappeared from the room. Sasha nods at me first, then Charlotte and Fred nod in unison. I kiss Anna on the cheek and pick up my briefcase from the floor.
I walk briskly out of the ward, down the elevator, through the crowded lobby and onto the street.
I find a patch of grass near the corner of Queen and Church streets, in front of the hostel for men in a wing of the Metropolitan United Church. I open my briefcase, take out paper and a new Staedtler, and I begin.
After a few strokes, I falter. I look around me. There is a group of young men gathered on the corner, all of them with their belts so loose their pants sit midway down their asses. A woman pushing a shopping cart loaded with her valuables passes me and glares, paranoid no doubt that I am sketching her. I’m sorry, I think to myself. I’m sorry.
A
young man goes by—he’s attractive, in jeans and a white T-shirt: a simple, well-honed look. He is the shape I still like to imagine myself to be, even after so many years. He is the body double for my stale ambitions.
More people pass me. I try to determine what makes one different from the other. It isn’t their sex: many of them, male and female, are dressed the same. It isn’t their race: there are black, white, brown and pink faces, all with the same unhappy glare. Is it their minds? No, not that either.
I begin again.
In the figure that takes shape, I begin to understand how my own mark has been dull and feeble for so long.
I sketch and shadow.
When I’m finished, I look up at the clock in the church tower. I’ve been gone for over an hour. I fold up the drawing and tuck it into my pocket. My legs feel limber as I stand and hurry across the grass.
Once back in the neurological ward I realize I’ve left my briefcase on the grass, but never mind. I see the children down the hall, talking to Rosie, taking in her instructions like good kindergarten pupils. I duck into the room unnoticed.
Anna’s eyes are closed. I think about the bone flap that lies sterilized in the surgeon’s jar, and the gaping hole that exposes what it is that keeps my wife alive.
My imagination has been poor. I touch the paper in my pocket. I take it out and delicately unfold it.
She opens her eyes. “How are you feeling?” I ask. I’m fully aware it’s a stupid question, but I mean it. I want to know. I want to hear her voice.
“Mmm,” she murmurs. There’s a voice there, and I hope there will be clarity and precision to the words that come. She touches her neck and tries to smile, but I see that she’s in pain.
“Anna,” I say quietly, as I lay out the sheet of paper and look again at what I have done.
It is a different kind of shape—a shape without bulk. One that I hope holds truth in its throat, like the bone of song or the cartilage of a scream.
“For you,” I say, as I hold up the paper, smoothing out its creases, careful with its edges.