Kalila

by Rosemary Nixon

  You pull at your hair in mock anguish. This is about speed that doesn’t change, okay? They all have to move at their own rate so you can work out the problem. Forget the character of Brodie. I’ll work on his manners for the next exam. Come up here, Anita, and solve the problem.

  I was only trying to express myself, Anita says, eyes feigning innocence, blue and sparkling.

  You want to take these happy people in your arms.

  Suzette and Francine, dripping costume jewellery, wiggle up beside me at my kitchen table in their dress-up clothes. Francine hiccups and inhales two snuffly breaths. I pour my nieces pretend green tea. Skipper rams his head under my elbow. Kool-Aid splashes.

  Remember this tea set, Maggie, when we were little? Marigold wipes up the spills. Skipper, shoo! Auntie Maggie and I drank from this set when we were little girls. We had a wooden-egg-crate table in that red peeling granary.

  What’s an egg crate? asks Suzette, licking her green-stained mouth.

  What’s a granary? mutters Francine.

  Skipper helps himself to the Nanaimo bar hanging squished between Francine’s dangling fingers.

  City kids! Marigold scoffs. A granary is a square little building where a farmer stores his wheat. That’s what bread is made from, only this granary was empty — except for chaff. Grandpa gave it to us for a playhouse.

  And Grandma sewed us curtains out of flour sacks —

  Out of what?

  Really, I give up! Marigold laughs. She tweaks Francine’s brunette braids. It’s what flour came in, great woven bags; you use flour to make bread.

  You said wheat makes bread, Francine says sulkily.

  I’m sorry your rabbit died, Francine, Marigold says cheerily, but let’s not be rude. Grandma made us a floursack-tableclo —I miss To-oo-ops, Francine quavers, knocking over her lime Kool-Aid. Suzette lets out a sympathetic howl.

  Honey, rabbits die when they get old. Marigold helps herself to a scone. To mitigate their grief, the girls go for thirds of my quick-thawed Nanaimo bars.

  He didn’t suffer. Marigold curls Francine’s damp bangs around a finger. Come, sit here, sweets, to Suzette.

  Suzette curls against her mom and takes a bite. We found Tops this morning with his teeth like this — head against Marigold’s breast, Suzette bucks her teeth, chocolate oozing. He was flopped in his cage, ears stuck straight out. Suzette falls sideways against her chair and holds the pose. Plum dead and gone. She takes a gulp of Kool-Aid. Coughs.

  Francine swallows a cranky belch. Auntie Maggie, is your baby going to die? She isn’t even old!

  Time pushing out like kilometres. Cousin Danny’s grade ten photograph perched on his coffin at the front of the country church, his smile a light shining on the congregation as they looked back and wept. Uncle Ty leaning heavy on Auntie Prue’s arm, his countenance wild and in motion. Farmers, wives in Sunday best, pouring like a river into our country church.

  We sang, the Watson girls. Marigold and I, soprano, Rose, high tenor, Iris carried the alto. June galloping the piano.

  Under His wings, I am safely abiding,

  Though the night deepens and tempests are wild …

  Danny had drawn a picture in art class, a flock of wild geese rising in blue sky. The teacher drove it out to Uncle Ty’s farm and handed it over, one last gift from Danny, the least that she could do. The minister taped the drawing behind the pulpit. Later, Auntie Prue and Uncle Ty had it transcribed onto Danny’s gravestone. Engraved above the birds’s flight, Safe under the shelter of thy wings.

  I believed it.

  Marigold, gently gathering up their things and ushering out the girls. Come, honey, come on, girls, no, Auntie Maggie needs to be alone.

  My stomach skidded with strange excitement at the sadness that engulfed the congregation, like a shiver without release, as we sang, the Watson girls, to a church chock full, intent, grief-stricken faces, the overflow crowd pressed together in the foyer, down the stairs, and out the door into the churchyard.

  Under His wings, under His wings

  Who from His lo-ove can sever …

  I breathe in the pulse of Danny’s funeral, the gusty hymns, the storm of sobbing, heat rising like a fever. Marigold and I played frozen tag with Danny’s sisters between the funeral and lunch. Warm comfort of mini cabbage rolls, buns and sausage, cherry squares, and bundt cake, which migrated us all together in Auntie Prue’s cheery sunlit kitchen. The church women bustling, counting teacups, clucking, sighing, arranging cheese and salami platters while Marigold and I and Danny’s little sisters dashed through the kitchen, stealing lemon meringue tarts on the run. Over the years we climbed on Danny’s gravestone, played leapfrog over it, drank Freshie and ate homemade cookies on it during vacation Bible school. It never made me sad. This gathering before the dead seemed natural, sustaining, like the expectation of pale shoots in the potato bin’s dim corner of the cellar. We ran barefoot through the tended grass, stopped to read the gravestones: Orkney Island Schallhorn, 1923–1925, Little Lamb of God; Ida E. Alberta, 1935–1967, Loving wife and mother; Cyrus Persida, In Him We Have Our Rest. Joseph Callan, June 1914–September 1914, Tread Gently. A Dream Lies Buried Here. And I imagined extraordinary lives in extraordinary worlds. Death a mere curiosity, an intriguing step beyond.

  While Uncle Ty moved through that July and August in a kind of stunned persistence, his love for his remaining children grew desperate, each earache a potential deafness, each sore throat, meningitis. Stuffed full of vitamins, antibiotics, antihistamines, the cousins played.

  I cheerfully killed off my dolls one by one: drowned Hazel in the water trough, climbed the windmill and flung Rosella, suffocated Betty in the woodbox. Marigold and I held funerals on the cellar stairs, which made great church pews. Iris and Rose joined in when they had exhausted themselves in tag, anti-i-over, and scrub. The coveted roles gravitated between the grieving mother and the chorister. It was heart-rending to quaver,

  Our path strewn with stones, We cry in despair

  Lord do not forsake us, Oh Lord, are you there?

  So thrilling that by the chorus end, the Watson girls were sobbing,

  Kneel at the cross and feel His arms embrace us

  Kneel at the cross and our burdens He’ll bear …

  The lovely melodrama. Mom would appear at the head of the cellar stairs, Och, what do I do with the lot of you? Assuaging the headaches and achy throats that accompanied such blasts of grief. She’d make us honey ginger tea and vinegar punch. I’ve never seen the like, she’d scold. I’ve never seen the like. And my sisters and I, delighted we’d played our parts so well, would dash off for a game of alley alley home free on the front lawn, leaving little stashes of soggy tissues on the cellar steps for Mom to scoop up when she went to the basement to fetch a jar of peaches or to check the cheese. That fall, I raised every doll from the dead.

  The baby is seven weeks old when we attend a party for Brodie’s high-school staff. Maggie, Brodie begging. Please? We need to get out.

  A woman at the party pops a strawberry in her mouth, says, Well, I would have sworn someone said you’d had a baby.

  I did, I say. I do.

  You’ve had a baby? The woman stares at my flat stomach. God! Milt. Come look at Brodie Solantz’s skinny wife. She’s had a baby!

  I say, I have the afterbirth to prove it.

  The woman loses her next sentence, has more wine.

  I stand alone on the edge of the dance floor, reciting book titles in my head: My Heart is Broken, Setting Free the Bears, Politics and the English Language, The Angel in the House, October Light, To All Appearances a Lady. I think of fairy tales, where good mothers die before the story starts.

  Unmother. I spilled my blood onto the birthing table, then someone whisked away the baby: nineteen hours and I haven’t seen her. The first fourteen strapped to my bed by two intravenous needles, one in each hand, to stop the bleeding. There are babies everywhere. I peer beneath small blankets on the rolling cribs that cruise the hall.
People steal babies from hospitals. Mothers stare. I’ve taken two sitz baths today. I feel a fraud when I occupy the sitz bath, when I enter like a thief its enclosed heat. There are the mothers, and then there’s me. Nothing dislodges their identity. What right have I to complain of bleeding stitches in my episiotomy? Mothers have episiotomies. I’m an aberrant, like being two sexes at once. A mother, not a mother. A nurse buzzes my bedside. The intercom crackles. Your kid’s crying in the nursery, a frazzled voice comes through. A small intake of breath. Sorry. Wrong number. Could you tell your roommate her kid’s crying in the nursery?

  Here comes Brodie across the gymnasium floor, heading from the bar carrying an offering of translucent garnet punch. My breasts sting. Guest. Host. Parasite. The doctors the host, me the parasite. Kalila, their unwanted guest. I can hear her hoarse and whispered cries over the slap of the woman’s slippers from the adjoining bed as she pushes past her husband.

  Well, why don’t I just do every goddamn thing myself? The woman flings over her shoulder and sweeps out the door.

  The husband shoots me a look of such resentment. Maggie Watson, hospital soap star. My body tightens around a cramp. It’s too late for love at first sight. How sick is my baby?

  A nurse checks the drip. Come on now, Mrs. Solantz. You’ll be back to normal in no time.

  Normal. My pleasure body has brought everything to this.

  Roses. Brodie brings me roses. Their sad and choking smell hangs in hospital air. Before the child was born, I said, And you must buy me roses. A dozen of them bloom with mad abandon in this sterile room.

  Brodie bumps my elbow, hands me the punch. Around us dancers bebop, forty-year-old balding men, trying for cool. An open window. The stuffy air creeps damp under my skin. Outside on the street a truck gears down, rolls by, and we’re wrapped in sudden diesel fumes, eyes smarting in dim and raw fluorescent light. Brodie takes me in his arms. We step into the music. We have ignored the dessert table, with its chocolate-dipped strawberries, its petit fours, its custard tarts.

  Tonight we dance the two-step, side by side, alone.

  Your mother is not ten minutes in the house before she tells you the child did not sprout from your genes. Not her Irish genes, anyway.

  She’s scrubbing out the sink that you scrubbed out this morning. Her coat flung over a chair. Your parents stay for days. Our genes are strong, your mother says.

  You look at your face in the hallway mirror. I thought Aunt Betts had a baby born without a chest.

  I don’t know how you deal with this disorganization, your mother says. Will somebody put out the damn dog? He keeps tramping on my feet. His breath is terrible! Where do you keep the teapots? That wasn’t Aunt Betts. That was on your father’s side.

  Right, Joyce, your father says. Blame the Solantzes.

  On the counter, Maggie says. We keep them on the counter.

  You’re not putting green pepper in the chicken? Green pepper gives your father gas.

  You say, Real gas or ideal gas? and when no one gets your physics joke — I’ll get the car out.

  At the hospital, Joyce is put out by the smallness of the scrub room. There is a jar of flowers, daffodils and daisies, sitting on the coffee table in green water, as if someone got mixed up and thought it might be spring. Your father needs help getting the string tied on his gown. He makes jokes about being in a nightie, about the pretty nurses.

  We have to wash up, Dad.

  Larry’s hand rests on the door handle. What are we? Contaminated?

  You herd them in and along the crowded aisles.

  The child’s awake today.

  Say hello to your grandma and grandpa, you say gently to the baby.

  Joyce and Larry stare. The baby closes her eyes.

  They’re so wrinkled! Joyce, eyes flitting everywhere at bodies covered in tape, tubes sticking out of throats. At least yours looks kind of normal.

  They’re the size of goddamn roasting chickens, your father breathes.

  Hi, baby! Joyce shouts through the armholes, jolting the baby, startling nearby nurses. She eyes the tubes and needles. Hi, baby! It’s Granny! How the hell do you get her out?

  You open the isolette lid, arrange the tubes that bind her, hold your child out to your father, whose feet don’t want to move.

  Larry! Joyce says, and Larry’s feet unglue.

  You snap pictures of Larry, arms filled with the tiny lump of blanket. The oxygen tube slips from the baby’s nose onto the floor. Her skin is chafed and raw around her gastrostomy site.

  Joyce rescues Larry. You snap more pictures, hand the camera to Maggie, who shoots photos of you and your father flanking your mother, baby clamped against her. Say pickle! Joyce says into the baby’s face. A family moment.

  Okay, here, Joyce thrusts at you the swath of blanket. Larry needs to keep on schedule for his diabetes. Let’s go home and eat. Goodbye! Goodbye! she sings, flapping her arms inside the isolette. The baby breathes a rattly sigh.

  On your way out, a floor washer causes you to make a detour past the normal nursery. Joyce peers through the window. Look at that Pakistani baby crying.

  Mom, you say wearily, babies don’t cry because of the colour of their skin.

  You step through the sliding doors and into endless winter.

  Iris phones from Ottawa. Her concern crackles down the wire. She and Ed drove to the Gatineau Hills this weekend. The colours were spectacular. This morning she’s been making playdough for her preschool class. Emily’s caught the flu. Yesterday Iris took her to the doctor. She’s home from school today. They are forecasting high winds. Maggie, what can I do to help?

  The radio is playing, I want you to tell me why you walked out on me.

  The morning sun a cheerful flush against Nose Hill, the barren trees.

  I’m so lonesome every da-ay …

  Are things any better? Is there any news?

  The doctor says she has right ventricle hypertrophy.

  What?

  Her heart is enlarged, Iris. And she has pulmonary hypertension.

  Maggie, you have to speak my language.

  Her lungs aren’t working right, okay? Her blood pressure is way too high. She has too much fluid. They don’t know why. And now they’ve found her left kidney’s not developed.

  Skipper shoves against me.

  Walk right back to me this minute,

  Bring your love to me, don’t send it …

  I am crying, and Iris begins to cry, and we chalk up tears at thirty-seven cents a minute while outside people scrape their sidewalks and enter taxis, light cigarettes, someone holds up a bank on Centre Street, a woman murders a man in an apartment complex, and children dash along the river hand in hand.

  I cart language around this foreign landscape.

  What’s that tube doing up my baby’s nose? Why is a neurosurgeon checking her out? She’s not #524010. She’s not Baby Solantz. This baby has a name. Kalila. Why didn’t someone say she needed a hearing test? Why can’t you find the vein?

  The nurses chat among themselves. The mother-in-law of the redhead dislikes her, always has. The big one with the neck scar touts the merits of microfibre cloths over paper towels. The freckled one orders shoes online. You can do returns if they don’t fit.

  Dr. Vanioc strides down the hall. I feel the urge to break and enter, take an axe, smash barriers down. Can we talk?

  Dr. Vanioc skids to a stop.

  What’s apnea?

  When a baby forgets to breathe, Mrs. Solantz.

  Watson. What are bradys?

  Severe apnea can lead to bradycardia, a dangerous slowing of the heart rate. He glances at his watch.

  You mean it might stop?

  He looks at me.

  What’s interstitial?

  Fluid sometimes seeps into the tissue. We’re careful as we can be.

  You mean the skin?

  I mean the tissue.

  Will that kill her?

  Mrs. Solantz, it just swells up the tissue.

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nbsp; She’s doing relatively well, but … She’s some better today, although … Today’s results are somewhat optimistic, yet …

  I cling to intensifiers and conjunctions. What’s wrong with her? It’s been nine weeks. Can you just give it a name? Didn’t have my hand up. Spoke out of turn. I’ll be sent back to the social worker’s office. Nope. Not going there. Babies airlifted here from Brooks, Nanton, the Porcupine Hills, from Field, B.C., dropped down in Calgary sunlight from place names that conjure pure spring water, fresh earth, mountain streams, healthy outdoors. Babies spin down corridors past oatmeal-coloured walls, a collection of nurses bagging on the run, heralding another birth, a forlorn father staring from the birthing room door.

  Don’t expect a forecast. The weather here is unpredictable.

  I turn my back, walk out the hospital doors, drive to a bookstore, buy myself Cartright’s Medical Home Dictionary. A thousand pages. Four pounds. To hell with them, I’ll learn the language myself.

  I stop at the bank, mail electricity and gas bills, fill the car, wind tearing at my clothes, pay library fines, pick up a windshield scraper, renew Maclean’s, buy Brodie garlic pills. The airwaves resonate with heartache: a gang of teenaged boys’ tough bravado, a woman in an electric wheelchair hailing a cab, a couple standing in Mark’s Work Warehouse, fighting about jeans. I head for the grocery store. My gaping heart. Like Jesus’s, it has no protective cover.

  You help Maggie chop carrots for the stew. Her arms, their sculpted outline, their scattering of freckles. Her neck muscles clenching. You’re lonely for her, even though she’s here. She reaches for an onion and soon begins to cry, bent over, fists stuffed in eyesockets, laughing, It hurts. It hurts. You want to buy her a silver necklace you cannot afford, a pair of ruby earrings, something to draw her breath in, clasp her hands together. Something to make her forget, if only for a little while. Her arms make angular shadow puppets against the wall. Winter dusk brings sadness, a despondency you have to fight. Pushes you to silence. Maggie gets pissed off that you don’t chat, but these days you’re holding up the world.