The Cuckoo's Child

  “Yes,” said Ella firmly, “but what we need to do right now is get you home, isn’t it, love?”

  The weakness had evaporated more or less. All I wanted to do was escape. Think what to say to you.

  “I’m okay now,” I insisted. “I can drive myself. Perhaps if you drove behind me, Ella? I’ll be all right, really.”

  The faces were doubtful, but I prevailed finally and hurried to fetch my coat. Ella went with me down the hallway where the custodians were already sweeping the day’s debris into long, dark lines, flotsam left by a receding tide.

  “What gives?” she asked quietly. “It was that phone call, wasn’t it? It wasn’t anything about . . . Daniel, was it?”

  “No. Oh no,” I said, amazed at myself for that possibility had not occurred to me, “just almost as bad.”

  Not much later, I sat by the phone and steeled myself to pick it up. Much depended, I thought, as Maisie cast herself across my lap, rolling onto her back and peeping coyly at me from underneath her right foreleg, on saying the right thing. But what was the right thing? What do you say to somebody who has just been told he has a life-threatening disease?

  You must have been sitting by the phone, for your voice cut off the first ring.

  “Can you talk?” I asked immediately. “Are the kids around?”

  “No, they’re watching the box.”

  “Tell me, exactly what sent you to the doctor in the first place?” Cautious, feeling my way.

  “Just feeling tired. All the time, for no reason, but absolutely flattened if I went running. Then I started getting these huge bruises, but I could never remember hitting myself or bumping into things. And nosebleeds! Real gushers. I haven’t had nosebleeds like that since I was small. But it was chiefly the exhaustion, aching in every joint.”

  I could hear it in your voice, monotone, dreary, as if even inflection were too much effort.

  “Okay, now what exactly have you got?”

  “Oh, it’s got a grand-sounding name. Acute myelogenous leukemia.”

  “Sounds bad enough to scare the living daylights out of anyone.”

  “Well, Liv, it’s not good. Bloody death sentence, in fact.”

  “But they can treat it, right?”

  “Oh yes, they can stretch things out a bit with chemo and stuff, but it’ll just postpone the inevitable a few years.”

  “And if they did nothing?”

  “Three or four months.”

  That hit like a punch in the stomach.

  “Then it’s worth a fight, isn’t it?” I asked sharply. You hesitated. I could hear it.

  “I’m not sure, Liv. I’ve only got about a twenty to thirty percent chance of long-term survival. Not very good odds. And I’d need a bone marrow transplant. I don’t even know if that’s possible yet. I don’t know if it’s worth putting Holly and the kids through all that, years of it perhaps, when I could just check out in a few months.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Don’t you think Holly and the kids might have different thoughts about losing you the day after tomorrow? I stuck around for you, kiddo; now it’s your turn. You said you’ll probably need a bone marrow transplant. Well, I’m the likeliest donor—siblings are the best bet, I think—and I’m ready and willing, so there you are.”

  “Yeah, I know I’ll go through all the treatments they can dream up. You do, don’t you, if there’s just a little bit of hope, but it doesn’t stop the little voice inside saying, ‘What’s the use? You know nothing’s going to work. You’ve had it, mate.’ It’s hard to ignore. There doesn’t seem much to look forward to.”

  What do you say? You can’t agree, can you?

  “Perhaps you’re being too long-sighted. Perhaps you have to be a bit myopic, and look at the nearer things if you want to see clearly. What I mean is, perhaps it would be better to look forward to Jason going into high school soon, rather than graduating from med school fifteen years from now. Lower your sights, you know. Fill your life with little steps rather than brooding over the big ones that might be unattainable.”

  “Could be.”

  “So your first one will be telling Holly. And don’t forget to say I’m queuing to donate.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then the next one will be having the first lot of treatment. What’s on the cards?”

  “Chemo.”

  “So the first milestone could be remission after the chemo?”

  “Right.”

  “Then that’s what we set our sights on. Go for it, Tiger! Nobody ever had to prod you to stick up for yourself.”

  “Well, that’s true, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

  A small joke. It felt like a victory.

  “Shall I come up there?”

  “No, no point. We’ll keep you posted. I don’t think I’ll be a very gracious host for a while.”

  “Host be damned! We don’t need entertaining! If you need anything, you’ll ask? Ring me tomorrow, okay? Any time, when you feel like it.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  “It’ll be all right, Stephen. It will. It has to be.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll say goodbye for now, then.”

  “Yes. Goodbye, Liv.”

  “Go and hug your kids. Talk to you soon.”

  “Yes. Goodbye.”

  I held the receiver to my ear, listening to you listening to me, until I heard the clatter from your end as you hung up. The quiet of the room was punctured by the soft tick of the clock as the second hand swept the face. The fluorescent light hummed to itself. I could see myself reflected in the kitchen window, a stranger’s sombre face turned outward as if weary of imprisonment. Beyond the glass, like a negative image, ghostly snowflakes drifted, trickled over the windowsill and clung, weightless as down, to the bare branches of the apple tree.

  TEN

  For the most part, life is undistinguished. We move through our days on fixed tracks, like the little players in a foosball game, not expecting surprises and rarely causing any, mechanically following the routine because that’s what we’ve always done and it’s easier to keep doing it than to think of something original. What percentage of our lives, I wonder, is dedicated to stodgy status quo? If we include sleep—and there’s a third gone right there—eighty-five percent? Ninety? More? And I don’t suppose it’s any different if one is famous or a genius or a hero. A prima donna may sing in every opera house from Sao Paulo to Beijing in the course of a year, but then travel is her norm: living out of a suitcase, booking in and out of palatial hotels, fighting with conductors, worrying about her vocal cords, wearing outlandish costumes, and upstaging the tenor merely the daily trivia of her life.

  In retrospect, she will probably find it very hard to differentiate between successful performances, but just let Mimi have a sneezing fit after she’s died, or let an overly dramatic member of the chorus fall into the kettle drums during an aria, and the event takes on an indelible flavour all its own. Memories may just be our five percent of the extraordinary: the little foosball man twirled too hard, detaching himself from the rod, performing a graceful arc across the crowded bar, and landing slam dunk in a pint of Guinness on the far side of the room.

  And if that sounds a trifle inebriated, hallucinatory, unreal, that was definitely the Flavour of the Year. Mum called that time “When Stephen Was Ill,” as if it had defined limits and was succeeded by another period called “When Stephen Was Well.” The capitals were appropriate, though. Our first exposure to acute illness, watching as you were caught up in the sprockets and rollers of the medical machine, reduced all our ordinary concerns to nothing. We lived and breathed Stephen. Work, shopping for groceries, marking, keeping dental appointments were simply ways of negotiating the voids between visits to the hospital, or bulletins on your progress, or detailed analysis of your doctor’s latest pronouncement. We learned the disease; words like leucocyte, platelets, anaemia, nonlymphocytic fell nonchalantly from our lips. We discussed blood transfusions, bone marrow aspiratio
n, chemotherapy, and WBC counts as if they were on special at Safeway.

  In the end, of course, life with leukemia stopped being an extraordinary visitation in our dull lives and became the norm, a spectacularly trying one but routine nonetheless.

  Even so, there are memories from When Stephen Was Ill that flare out of the darkness like the silhouettes of trees startled by lightning at midnight.

  The lurch I felt, as if all my insides gasped as one, when I saw you soon after you told me you were ill. I hadn’t seen you for six months, but I was completely unprepared for the change in you, your pallor, your panting at the slightest exertion, the way you’d shrunk inside your clothes.

  Vanessa in tears after she had briefly visited the isolation ward, where you were suffering the ravages of nausea, wailing, “He doesn’t look like my daddy any more.”

  Mum awkwardly folding her arms round Holly and patting her like a horse that has to be soothed, crooning, “There, there, poor girl, poor girl, he’ll be all right, you’ll see.” That was the night we thought we’d lose you to pneumonia.

  The ICU that same night, lights blazing, machines winking and bleating, rubber soles squeaking on the composition floor. How busy illness is, I thought, how noisy; you could only put up with it if you were so sick you weren’t aware of anything.

  The day I walked in on Holly when she was taking a pair of shears to her long blond hair. She had just cut a hank off one side and looked like Barbie making a change to Raggedy Anne.

  “I worked it out,” she said seriously. “It takes me about an hour a day at least to keep my hair looking decent. Too long—I’ve got better use for the time. Wash and wear from now on.”

  When I asked why she didn’t just go to the hairdresser to get it cut, she looked at me as if I were stupid.

  “That would be another hour wasted.”

  It didn’t seem the moment to point out that she looked awful. Instead, I took the scissors from her and finished the job.

  The best one, perhaps, is the sight of you through the glass of your isolation ward on the day they first reported you were producing normal cells again. You were sitting up, bald as an egg, a pallid Gandhi against the pillows. When you saw Neil, your face creased in a smile, the first I’d seen for weeks, and you slowly raised an arm and punched a triumphant, defiant fist in the air.

  Remission. That was the new word of the moment, whispered at first as a faint hope that might be scared off if confronted too directly, but later said out loud, more confidently. It’s a temporary kind of word, one you use with your fingers crossed behind your back, one that shakes its finger at you in a minatory way and says, “Now don’t go getting all excited, there’s no guarantee I’m going to last, I could leave any time,” as if you need a reminder of the odds with cancer.

  It allowed us to think of the next step, though. It was time to search for a bone marrow donor. My moment had come. I no longer had to be satisfied with occasional visits and second-hand reports, or gnash my teeth at my own impotence.

  Tests, tests, and more tests. Unearthing of medical history that would have made a forensic anthropologist proud. Information overload. Serious discussion to ensure I knew what I was committing myself to. More tests.

  Then, I waited.

  We were all set to go up to Mum and Dad’s for Thanksgiving. The whole works, it was going to be. You were back home at last, back at work even, part-time at least. You and Holly and the kids would be there for dinner, the whole family round the groaning board sort of thing. But for once there didn’t seem to be anything sentimental about it, nothing contrived. Something to give thanks for, Mum said predictably, but then, what are clichés if not absolutely true, absolutely right on the mark? Which all goes to show Fate is a cardsharp, never without an ace up his sleeve.

  I don’t think I ever told you about the next bit, not in detail. And then there were the other revelations, so much right on top of it all, and suddenly the moment for filling you in was swept away, and there was no going back to it. All you knew was the fallout.

  Just before that long weekend I got a call from the doctor’s office. The test results were in, the receptionist said, and the doctor would like to discuss them with me. No, she couldn’t tell me what they were, she didn’t have that information, I would have to talk to the doctor. I couldn’t wait, although for the first time there was a tremor of apprehension, a tiny qualm. What if the news was bad? I hadn’t allowed that thought before, and it left me queasy. Ironic, looking back.

  So there I am. The nurse has plucked me out of the sullen stew of streaming noses, coughs, plaster casts, swollen stomachs, and evasive teenagers chewing their nicotine-stained fingers in the waiting room and ushered me into a cubicle at the far end of the hallway. I sit facing a desk, a warning about STDs, a poster depicting a man, flayed to reveal muscles tightly wrapped as a mummy’s bandages, and an illustrated letter of thanks from the kindergarten class of Sechelt Elementary. Dr. Wilson breezes in, plucking a file from the holder on the door. He welcomes me cheerfully as if I’m just another minor ailment needing a quick fix, but his face sobers with a glance at the now open folder on his desk.

  “Yes, well,” he begins. Abruptly, he gets up. “Hang on a minute.”

  He pokes his head into the hallway and hails the receptionist. I hear a mumble and one clear word—“uninterrupted.”

  “Just wanted to make sure we weren’t disturbed,” he says bracingly, replacing himself behind the bulwark of his desk. Once there, he pauses, gazing at the pages in front of him, pursing his lips. He eyes me consideringly, as if he’s contemplating a risky jump from one rooftop to the next. He’s gathering himself, I think in alarm. It’s something awful. I’ve got it too. He doesn’t know how to say it. A clammy sweat is beading my upper lip.

  “What is it?” I blurt out. “Am I sick too?”

  The doctor looks up quickly, surprised.

  “No, no, nothing like that. You’re in excellent health. But the tests have revealed something a little puzzling. You realize, of course, there are no perfect matches, apart from identical twins, but we can get pretty close with children of the same parents.”

  “I know all that,” I say impatiently. “I’m the best chance.”

  “Well, yes, you should be.”

  Should be?

  “But the fact is . . .”

  Yes?

  “The fact is . . .”

  He’s going to jump!

  “Mmm,” the doctor finishes with a rush, “the tests show that biologically—genetically—you are no match at all. There is hardly any point of comparison, certainly not nearly enough to be considered a donor.”

  He’s just landed right on my lungs. I can’t breathe.

  I gape at him. The enormity of what he has just said hangs in the silence. Dr. Wilson waits, toying self-consciously with a cutaway model of a hip joint standing on his desk.

  “But that’s impossible,” I stammer. “He’s my brother. There has to be some similarity. We’ve got the same parents, for God’s sake!”

  The doctor pauses delicately. “Are you absolutely sure of that?” he asks.

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “No possibility, for example, that you were adopted as an infant?”

  “I can show you my birth certificate if you like. How could I have a birth certificate with my name, and my father’s and mother’s names, and where I was born, if I wasn’t their daughter? Are you suggesting it’s a forgery?”

  “No, no, that would be most unlikely. And let’s see, you would remember when Stephen was born?”

  “I remember it vividly, going to see Mum in hospital, holding the new baby, Boxing Day, we never did get the turkey cooked. I was eight years old.”

  “Yes, well, the tests bear that out. Stephen is unquestionably the son of your parents. So we have a mystery, Livvy. Because those same tests prove conclusively that you cannot possibly be their biological daughter. Quite apart from anything else, the blood groups give us incontrovertib
le evidence that your mum and dad had nothing to do with your conception. D’you know anything about blood groups?”

  “Yes,” I mutter.

  “Well,” he continues as if I haven’t spoken, “your father is type A. Your mother is AB. They could only produce children with type A, B, or AB. Stephen is A. You, on the other hand, are type O. It just doesn’t fit. It’s impossible.”

  I can’t take this in. Who . . . ? And if . . . ?

  “Oh my God! What about Stephen? If I can’t help him, who will?”

  “That is a problem, but you must let us worry about that.”

  “But his children are so young, and Mum and Dad are too old, surely?”

  “We’ll see. There are other family members in England, I understand?”

  “Well, yes, I think so. But we’ve never had anything to do with them. I don’t think my parents—” I break off, catching myself up with a humourless bark of laughter. “I don’t think my parents have ever been in touch with them, not since we came to Canada in 1947.”

  The doctor looks at me kindly. “I think you will have to talk to your parents. And don’t forget, whatever the story, they’re still the only parents you know, despite the biology.”

  That was a thought I forced myself to repeat like a mantra in the hours following the detonation of the bomb. I left the clinic in a daze, surprised to find the sun still shining, for it seemed as if hours must have passed, as if everything should be different. Just like coming out of the cinema in the middle of the day, you know the feeling. Mechanically, I unlocked my car and sat behind the wheel, staring blankly through the windscreen at a filthy plastic bag dancing in an eddy of dust trapped in a corner of the building.

  I scared myself on the way home. Half a mile from the house a blaring horn shocked me back to the right side of the road. How many other narrow escapes had there been? I had driven right through town, across pedestrian crossings, past school buses and loaded logging trucks, all apparently on autopilot.

  Neil was making a pot of tea when I walked into the kitchen. He turned to greet me, still half absent in his studio, and froze, kettle in hand, at the sight of my face. He pushed me into a chair and leaned over me anxiously.