Kalila

by Rosemary Nixon

  So very well, in what, I’m sure, are difficult circumstances. Does your husband help?

  Of course, I say icily.

  Yes? the women beam and nod. Everyone is smiling.

  As you know, Mrs. Solantz, the Upjohn woman slips her shoe off and on her foot in a kind of foolish shuffle, we were just discussing, this service costs the taxpayer a lot. I’ll be frank. An awful lot.

  There are needy children, the heart monitor woman says compassionately, in this very city.

  I’ll be in touch, says Noreen Marks while Jasmine Forester faces pleasantly forward, intent, as if listening to a speech. I’ll be in touch with the doctors at the Foothills — she clears her throat. But, she coughs here, really, you’re doing well, so very well, that at the end of the next two-week period, I will recommend that Upjohn services are no longer needed. In your case.

  Light fogs. What do you mean?

  Why, you’re so very competent. You’ll do fine on your own.

  But — how will I do the shopping?

  Your husband? the heart monitor lady suggests.

  But we don’t — who’ll pay for the equipment?

  After some time Noreen Marks says, I believe —

  There is a lie in believe.

  — there are other people, less efficient. Frankly, they need it more.

  Jasmine Forester, who has nothing to do with Upjohn, nothing at all, excuses herself and checks the heart monitor, which, she declares gleefully, is working. The Upjohn woman, with whom she has struck up a bosom buddy friendship in my tidy living room, hangs about the house until Ms. Forester’s work is finished, and they head out together.

  A lovely little house, the heart monitor lady says, as they step into the porch, down my lovely little stairs, and into cold March sunshine.

  The house is golden with late-afternoon light when I make my way back to Kalila’s room. I pass my untouched scones. The drying homemade jam. The cradle, abandoned in a dusty sunbeam, Kalila sucking on her tongue. Tsk tsk tsk. Her palms are flat open, one lying upon the other, as if interrupted in a hand game. Her eyes follow me. She has a tiny double chin. I look at the bones in Kalila’s hands, hands stained brown and blue from intravenous lines. Twenty-three days. Twenty-three days I’ve had with you. Just fourteen more.

  A discordant scale slides backward, forward, backward. My breaths come through a gaping hole. How will we suction the baby without the machine? How will we know if, during the night, Kalila slips into a bradycardia, suffers cardiac arrest? Kalila stares at me, one hand curls into a fist. The fist slides to her mouth. Tsk. Tsk. I’m slapped with sudden knowledge. The baby’s hungry. I’m thirty-four minutes late with feeding. What kind of mother doesn’t feed her child? An unmother. That’s who. My hands shake as I secure the tube, pinch the tag that slows the feeding to a slow drip, pour 4 cc of Prosobee into the test tube attached to Kalila’s stomach tube.

  Kalila, I cleaned the house for you.

  I cleaned too well.

  I grope for the child who expels a little breath of air. Haaa.

  We work out a system after Brodie phones Upjohn for the seventh time. We’ll lose the night nurse but keep the equipment. I stop walking Skipper altogether. I clean tubes, scrub floors, bake bread, tell Kalila stories. Damn every-fuckingbody. We will not give in.

  BEEE-BEEEE-BEEE. You are on your feet and running before either of you is awake. A red light blinks in the semidarkness where Kalila thrashes. 96-94-92 reads the heart monitor printout. Turn her over! Shake her! Brodie! Flex her arms! 84-82-80. For God’s sake! 77-74. Press on her ribcage!

  You stand in grey predawn. The clock reads 4:04 a.m.

  Kalila, colour restored, breathes the quick breaths of a baby.

  You replace the oxygen tent around her crib, ensuring the plastic is tucked within the bumper.

  In bed, not touching, you listen to the dawn: dog bark, birdsong, repeated squeal of tires in the street.

  For three days the baby gags, coughs phlegm, croons thickly in her throat.

  It’s because her lungs are congested, the cardiologist says over the phone. Bring her in at month’s end.

  Domestic rituals abandoned, I turn to the Yellow Pages. Phone a new cardiologist. Beg an appointment. Turn on the radio. The days are getting longer, the announcer says. I cannot take longer days.

  Brodie takes the afternoon off school. The new cardiologist, Dr. Rosewood, thin, blue sweater, no static cling, no doctor’s coat, examines Kalila with long fine fingers, examines her as if the only thing in the world is this small dusky baby. At her touch, Kalila stills. After some time, the doctor sets her stethoscope aside, regards us, stuck together like glue.

  What is a baby this blue doing out of the hospital?

  We stare at the floor, two misbehaving school kids, caught in the act.

  This babe needs heart surgery. Dr. Rosewood sits down on her stool. She contemplates us. Now.

  There is an ordinariness about Dr. Rosewood. Her face is frank, not moral, not sealed up. Look at her. A doctor who sees possibility, who dares to see the whole.

  I fall in love with Dr. Rosewood then and there. It is a fierce and angry love: in love with her skinniness, her saggy sweater, her pale and freckled face. Her sharp insistence.

  Brodie looks like he’s caught hold of something he didn’t know he’d lost.

  In this way, it is settled. No fanfare. We relinquish Kalila back into the glare of lights, this time to the Children’s Hospital. March 30. The child is five months, twenty-four days old.

  No worries, the doctor says. She’s not a newborn. Go home. Get some rest.

  The glass house cradled the princess as an oyster cradles a pearl. Then one day her glass walls shifted, and the princess knew the caress of wind, the wheeling touch of sun, the melody of rain.

  This little princess tasted hope, salty on her tongue.

  Day four. Go home and pack a suitcase. The nurses’ strike is on. Only one hospital in the province performing heart surgery.

  Everything happens at once. Snatching up scattered clothes, the goodbye kisses, suppressed excitement, the taxi ride to the airport. Kalila loaded on the little plane.

  Bucking headwinds, the draughty airplane arrows north. Sun in my eyes, squashed against a frozen window, I stare down at patchwork quilts of white, mouse-brown, glacier-blue, snagged through by frozen tinsel. Kalila’s isolette takes up most of the space behind the pilot. The hospital staff hovers, backs to me. We speed through the sky toward icy Edmonton.

  An ambulance screams onto the runway as we bump down, doors flung ajar, the baby, then I, deposited inside. Doors barely closed, it skids off in a flash of lights and wailing sirens.

  Cut the melodrama! What’s the fuss? It’s no big deal. A routine operation. I don’t want my baby a star. I just want life to reconvene. But the ambulance driver is a lunatic, careening corners, whizzing red lights. Watch me! Watch me! And thanks to Mr. Friggin’ Action, the people of Edmonton do. They stand on street corners and stare at two lives streaking past. Kalila wheezewheezewheezing on the ride.

  An orderly waits as the ambulance screeches to a halt. He wheels her through the doors. The baby disappears. I leap out in pursuit, suitcase banging my legs. The wards are in disarray. Patients mixed up in every unit. Beds stuck in any bit of space. The hospital staff ignores me. Sorry, god knows where a baby might have gone.

  I locate her finally on the seventh floor in a wing of seven patients. With the exception of Kalila, all are adult. The doughy man beside Kalila’s isolette tried to kill himself last night. Nurses run bleating in all directions, annoyed at inconsiderate Donald, whose six-foot-four frame hangs off the bed like his knee joints and elbows belong to someone else.

  Come on, Donald.

  Turn over, Donald.

  You’re a big man, Donald, feed yourself.

  Sit up, Donald.

  Donald, for Pete’s sake, lift your arms.

  Donald’s placid body doesn’t want to cooperate. The nurses prod him, shove him, ro
ll him over, roll their eyes, force down his medication. Donald squeezes his eyes tight against the stares.

  I plunk my suitcase down beside Kalila’s isolette. It and the end of Donald’s bed are lightly touching. I discreetly push her the last few centimetres toward the wall. Is this grab for death catching? I eye Donald’s muddled sheets. Park at your own risk.

  I locate a washroom, throw up. The frigging ambulance driver’s fault. When I return, the nurse says, Oopsie-daisy! Honey, please wait in the hall.

  What for?

  Your baby. We have to suction her. This nurse with a rubber band around her ponytail lowers her voice clandestinely. It’s not pretty to watch.

  The prim young woman disappears into the chaos. I stand in the hall until the light turns grey. I haven’t been punished so since elementary school. Home lies like a book abandoned, three hundred kilometres away. Brodie on a kitchen chair in the dim light, grading physics papers, back bent in a hopeful question mark.

  On the third morning I walk into that hospital room, Kalila isn’t there. An empty hole looms where her isolette sat. Donald squints against the world. A kind nurse deposits me in a chair. She’s gone for tests is all, Mrs. Solantz, there now — laughing — Honey, she’s only gone for tests.

  All sadness flaps out the window as if it had a pair of wings. I am left strangely rattled, but in a lovely sort of way. Donald opens his eyes, nose whistling, and stares at the empty spot.

  You can try to die in here.

  Donald’s eyes shift vacantly toward my voice.

  But you’re not going to. This is a hospital. And it’s equipped to save.

  It’s past noon when Kalila returns, asleep on the ride. An hour passes. Wind wheels against the building. I sit by the window. Snow devils. A scarlet running shoe tossed against the snow. An overturned shopping cart. Lines of streaking cars. An agitated orderly is elbowing me aside. The tests are good.

  What?

  They’re going to operate.

  The baby already hurtling out of sight.

  Go back to the hotel. We’ll call you when it’s over. You have the best heart surgeon in Western Canada. Get yourself something to eat.

  Two little sausages frying in a pan, Donald says to the empty square of floor. One went pop, the other went BAM!

  Cold slices my neck. Minus twenty-eight degrees and dropping. I leap from the taxi, race through the hotel’s reception area, sprays of snow clumps draining on the carpet. I jab the elevator button. Take the stairs two at a time, hurl myself into the room.

  Brodie! They’re doing it! Now! They’re fixing her now! She’s in! I am laughing, crying, falling off a cliff, the pages of the book no longer stuck. Our lives at last are lurching out of stall.

  I flop against the headboard. Whew. Pick up the Gideon Bible from the dresser’s top drawer. Hold in my hands my mother’s faith. I crack it open. I Kings.

  Then came there two women that were harlots unto the king and stood before him. And the one woman said, I and this woman dwell in one house, and I was delivered of a child with her in the house.

  And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also … And this woman’s child died in the night because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead; but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son which I did bear. And the other woman said, Nay, the living is my son, and the dead is thy son.

  Thus they spake before the king … And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O Lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. Then the King answered and said, Give the first the living child, and in no wise slay it, for she is the mother thereof.

  Unmother. Mother.

  I have kept my child whole.

  I lift the receiver. Picture my mother, in the quiet of her bedroom, feeling for the phone.

  That quiet calm. Hello?

  Mom? She’s in the operation. Mom. The baby’s finally strong.

  And my mother, awakened to her darkened world, feels her bedroom flood with prism colour, birdsong.

  Maggie. Och yea. You don’t know how I’ve prayed.

  Ask anything in My name.

  Desire spurts like anger. You have to want enough.

  I slide the space between the hours. The slipping lights of cars. My body aches as if I’d run for miles. Love happens to you. There’s nothing you can do. You fall headlong, chaotic, buckling. Your childhood dislodged, life a lost and found. Film looping years, moments, a tumbling slide show.

  The phone rings, three sounding notes.

  Hello?

  Mrs. Solantz.

  Watson. Laughing — Yes, it’s — Mrs. Solantz. The words sail toward me. The operation’s over.

  Oh. Thank God.

  Your baby’s attached to a support system.

  Sure.

  … blood circulating through a machine — heart patched —

  Yup.

  — isn’t breathing on her own — surgeon’s concern — blood tainted —

  There is light. There are voices. Someone says words. More words.

  Words say themselves:

  We can’t hold her. She’s gone.

  A sound like water

  Wind in the eaves

  Snow shower sliding from a spruce

  An open bracelet

  She merges with the storm.

  Hell of a night, the taxi driver says.

  University Hospital, please. My chest corroded calcium, scraped inside of a kettle.

  Somewhere a telephone wire hums, one beautiful clear tone.

  You sick? Yea, goddamn nurses strike. Hell of a night to — Good luck! the driver shouts against my closing door.

  Mrs. Solantz.

  The surgeon walks the light-filled corridor to meet me.

  I try to make this moment last.

  I try to hold the future out.

  The future hurtles toward me.

  — fixed her heart. It was the lungs —

  Notes rests sharps flats.

  Tenuto.

  Kick of wind.

  A body chopped by air.

  We stand in an empty corridor.

  His eyes are hazel.

  I see he hasn’t slept in days.

  He jolts awake. Reaches for the phone.

  The dog makes three small yips from its closed mouth.

  He breathes the silence.

  They stand, a man, a woman, connected by a wire, trying to contain this knowledge, trying to keep it small.

  Light waves stab, deflect around him. The world rockets away. The night is a tight hem. Outside, the wind, the hills, the dirt, the rocks, the trees. The ice.

  The galaxy.

  A needlework of stars.

  She rises

  scattering, plunging mist

  absence, presence

  Ne me quitte pas.

  April 2: Patient pronounced dead at 19:48.

  The flick of a light switch.

  Gone.

  11:02 p.m. She enters the frozen plane. Enters a frozen plain.

  Harsh light inside the cockpit.

  Glazed windows. Airport lights. Cold stars. No moon.

  The sun shall not smite thee by day nor the moon by night.

  A life of Braille.

  She places this life on top of her life. And now begins forever.

  And a voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachael weeping for her children, and would not be comforted.

  He changed her diaper.

  He told her a story.

  He sang
her a lullaby.

  A child made it halfway round the sun.

  There was a baby.

  She died.

  The sisters arrange a phone fan-out.

  She’s gone. The baby’s gone.

  One organizes flowers: wisteria, lily of the valley, sunflower, bird of paradise. Another chooses Scripture readings. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help — And Jesus said, Suffer the little children to come unto me.

  Hymn books scatter at yet another’s feet.

  “As a Mother Comforts Her Child”; “Under His Wings”; “My God and I.”

  The oldest will fly home from Australia.

  They will do special singing. It’s been how many years since they’ve sung together, but they will do this for her.

  The man and woman push themselves into the gaudy pink funeral home on Centre Street. No. Cremate her. Fist searing the woman’s chest. She wants the baby warm.

  Strange sobbing women arrive on her doorstep, letting in streams of pale and frigid light, the dog in a skidding bark each time the doorbell rings. Women laden with cinnamon buns, tuna noodle casseroles, three-bean salads, fresh-baked dinner rolls. The woman leaves these gifts to dry out on the counter. Her sisters bake them, heat them, freeze them, bustle, eat them, put meals on the table.

  The April wind sings.

  Go outside. It will do you good. Her sisters send her out into the sunny gusts, into the chill of the day, like they used to do when she was little. She walks the Bow River, sightless, slashed by wind. Thinks of Moses bringing down the Ten Commandments. Naming them. Breaking them. Abandoned in the wilderness, wandering for forty years.

  The man sits alone in the darkened bedroom and thinks transforming lead to gold.