We were called into an examination room right after the time-out; it had been only ten minutes. The nurse who saw us first was patient with Peter’s fidgeting and nervous chatter. She took him for a new lung X-ray; the tiny one they’d had on file in Ukraine never made it to Canada.
A few minutes later the doctor arrived with the new X-ray and Peter. Peter wanted to go into a long description of the X-ray machine, but I held his hand and asked him to let the doctor talk first. Bohdan sat on my lap shifting his position every few seconds.
The doctor said Peter had only gotten a three-month regimen of the powerful antibiotic isoniazid in Ukraine. I knew that positive skin tests weren’t unusual — my father and his brother Helmut both had positive tests in 1948 when they came to Canada, although they did not have TB antibiotics then. Peter, however, had to go back on the drug, this time for the standard nine-month period. A public health nurse would visit our house every week to administer the pill.
The public health nurse who brought Peter’s medication every Monday at noon was Rose, a blonde with a cheerful dimple in her chin. Peter had no trouble swallowing the two kinds of pills, even the capsules bigger than his thumb. He and Bohdan both enjoyed taking medicine of any kind. In the orphanage, visits by the doctor had been one of the few times they got sustained individual attention from an adult. Both of them hugged and kissed me and Betsy when we administered routine cold remedies or children’s aspirin.
Peter became very attached to Rose. He would sit on her knee and describe his morning and his lunch, then happily dispatch the inch-long white pills, smiling with a look of rapture on his face. He would wait a few seconds to prove his mastery and then stick out his purple tongue, and then he’d wash the medicine down with a glass of milk.
IV
In September the boys started school, Bohdan in nursery and Peter in kindergarten. That year seems like a mostly-forgotten dream now, shimmering and in soft focus around the edges like a tacky studio photograph. The boys were affectionate, grateful, rarely angry, seldom whining. They ate astonishing amounts of food. Apart from the occasional rambunctious outburst, they were compliant.
I walked the boys to school in the morning and picked them up at noon. The walk took about ten minutes for a grownup alone and about half an hour with the boys. Since Bohdan was barely two feet tall and I was over six, I had to list over like a sinking ship to hold his hand. If I did not hold his hand he’d wander into people’s yards, approach animals regardless of size or menace, investigate parked cars at close range, or suddenly dart across the street.
I held Peter’s hand too, but as he was older I tried to control him by gently asking him to stay close. At some new sight, though, he would yank hard on my arm like a leashed dog who suddenly sniffs an exotic scent.
Holding the boys’ hands I felt protective and proud, and I noticed new things about my neighbourhood: the orange tabby cat on Palmerston who did happy-rolls on the sidewalk, the crows who lived in one particular back alley squawking like academics at a conference, the young couple who cursed at each other every Tuesday at 11:50 am in a parked Saab from the 1980s.
Every day when we got home I prepared the same lunch: for the boys, two hot dogs cut in half-inch lengths and simmered in generic chicken noodle soup, and for myself, scrambled eggs and coffee. The boys drank milk and talked about what they’d seen on the walk. I tried to be more like Betsy, taking part in the conversation, but most of my energy went into crowd control, since food flew and limbs flailed around the table.
Three days a week at one o’clock the babysitter, Ruth, arrived in her ten-year-old white Cavalier. She was a matronly woman in late middle age, a widow with a hoarse voice who had done childcare for one of our neighbours. Ruth took the boys to movies and to McDonald’s play structures, new activities for Peter and Bohdan. When she stayed home with them they played in the basement together, on the far side from the water heater, pushing toy trucks around and building Lego structures, while I worked upstairs.
Every few weeks Betsy would say, you need to play with the boys when they ask, and occasionally I did. But I lacked Ruth’s patience; the boys’ enthusiasm level included stamping on my hands, or sitting by accident on someone’s else’s toys, or shouting “Dad, Dad” at rock concert decibel levels to ensure my attention. Sometimes Peter even yelled “Mom” at me, as if indifferent to my exact identity. I loved their intensity but it was like the equatorial sun: only a few minutes of exposure and you had to withdraw. My father had withdrawn as well, to his study, to his violin, but Betsy said he’d had better reasons than I did: a past that shut him down in some crucial way, a career that went off the tracks, and now an ailing wife. She was right, but I was still angry to hear her say it.
On Saturday mornings I’d play basketball outside with some of my friends. The boys tagged along so Betsy had time to make meals for the week. One Saturday we drove to the north end for a game. I had a deal with Peter and Bohdan: they were to play quietly and not interrupt my game — unless one of them started bleeding; I would buy them each two dollars’ worth of candy at 7-Eleven after one hour of basketball.
Back in the car to begin the sugar festival, Peter noticed an old Buick in the parking spot beside us, up on jacks with the tires missing.
“Why is that car there? Dad, why don’t you move it?”
I looked at his face in the rear-view mirror. No sign of joking.
“How would I move the car?” I asked.
“Dad, leeft up,” said Bohdan, fists clenched like a cartoon character and making a lifting motion.
“You guys know that car weighs a lot, right?” I’d spent the last decade striving to put five pounds of muscle weight on my angular frame, and I felt touched by their faith in me.
“Dad, you can do it!” Peter insisted.
“I’m not Superman. I’ll just have to leave that car alone.” They both looked stunned at my refusal to even try flexing my giant biceps.
For the past two months I’d been doing commercial writing as a contractor for a virtual advertising company. What made the company virtual was that it consisted entirely of a stylish young woman who told her clients that she was “100% cheaper” because she had no office. That discount included my hourly rate. The copy I wrote luridly described a miracle construction product for insulating walls. But most of my billable time was taken up by meeting with the client at a Boston Pizza in north Winnipeg, where I drank bottomless Sprite and peed every ten minutes or so. Once when the client, a large jocular man with red hair, said that I could probably go to Hawaii on all the work he would give the virtual agency, I made the mistake of saying that my real work was writing poetry and what I did for him was just an interruption. The stylish young woman from the virtual agency stopped calling me.
One night a week I took Jeremy out for fast food so we’d have some time on our own to talk about school, the band he’d joined, the music he listened to. Betsy had the idea; she worried that Jeremy might feel neglected. Jeremy was Sid Vicious-skinny and almost six feet tall now, with his hair long and duck-tailed around the edges. His band had recently renamed themselves the Fops. Before that they were Orange Pendek, which according to Jeremy meant nothing, and according to Google meant Malaysian bigfoot. I told him how Peter and Bohdan screamed on the plane when we landed in Winnipeg, and suggested they consider the name Screaming Ukrainians. He laughed, the first time in at least two years he’d laughed at anything I said. Then he invited me to his gig on Friday night.
Jeremy’s gig was in the small gymnasium of a Chinese community centre downtown. The audience was me, Betsy, and two dozen teenagers who pretended they were somewhere else, maybe an airport in a foreign country. The lead guitar player for the Fops was husky and tall, with dark hair falling on his face and shaggy eyebrows, his mouth open in a slash while he flailed at a guitar and screeched off-key into a microphone. He had two amplifiers stacked up and the noise bounced painfully off the concrete floors and walls. Between songs he made cryptic remarks that
Jeremy and the bass player laughed at.
The fact that Jeremy could play the drums, any instrument at all, delighted me, since he hadn’t practised much in the four years I’d taken him to drum lessons, or the year of piano lessons before that. It had been an area of conflict between me and his mother — she hadn’t wanted to be the parent who said YOU MUST PRACTISE. But neither did I, and since Jeremy lived mostly with her, that’s where his drum kit stayed.
Jeremy’s band played only original tunes, and I couldn’t understand any of the words. Where my father had played lyrical, romantic music on the violin, reaching for a lost world, Jeremy’s music sounded like a series of car bombs. Now Dad spoke to Jeremy on the phone, and said to me that I was too hard on my son; was that the message in the echoing industrial noise of the gym?
We stayed until the bitter end, and I clapped Jeremy on the shoulder by way of a compliment. In the crisp fall air walking back to the car, I remembered playing half-clever parodies of the blues at an art gallery twenty-some years ago with my own band. The music Jeremy played was not clever. But it spoke without words, in the deafening shimmer of his crash cymbal above the tangle of snare, guitar noise, and angry screams.
At our weekly dinners, Jeremy never really told me what was on his mind. Of course, there were lots of things I’d never told him: that I’d hated high school as much as he had, or that I felt sorry for ignoring him so much when he was a kid, or how it felt when he held my finger in his baby incubator, born six weeks premature, his face indented and yellow. I never told him that fatherhood had not been in my plans when he came along. These were things I couldn’t talk about, although I tried to in my poems, the same way my father had with his violin, and Jeremy did with his band.
One afternoon I was in my study while the boys played downstairs with Ruth. Shouting broke out and Bohdan ran up from the basement.
“My tooth!”
I gazed into his mouth. He’d lost a molar on the right side.
“Where is it?” I asked. I had a little plastic tooth container from the dollar store with a carrying string at the ready.
“I don’t know,” said Bohdan, with his elegant old world shrug, as if I’d just asked him for an explanation of general relativity.
“OK, we’ll call Mom, and then we’ll find it,” I said, knowing Betsy would want to share the moment. It was a brief call; Bohdan still tended to nod on the telephone without speaking.
Downstairs, Bohdan said that the tooth was in the bathroom but he didn’t remember where. Ruth confirmed that when the extraction took place he’d been in the bathroom with the door closed, at least she thought so. I began the search under Bohdan’s direction while she kept playing with Peter. Bohdan pointed under the clawfoot bathtub, so I got down on my hands and knees on the hard floor and peered under the tub. Then I got a flashlight: nothing but dust bunnies and abandoned toys.
Then Bohdan pointed under the sink. The pipe went straight into the wall and the drain into the floor. I went on all fours again, minutely searching every square centimetre of the rock and pinewood floor, a very uneven surface. Nothing. I put the plastic tooth container around Bohdan’s neck and he kept inspecting the floor.
Something like ten minutes had elapsed from the start of the search when Bohdan began elaborate head-scratching gestures. He pointed behind the toilet, in the corner where the toilet brush sat undisturbed amid archaeological spider remains. My optimism faded.
I took Bohdan by the shoulders and put my face close to his. “Do you really remember where you put the tooth?” His expression was serious and he went to the sink.
“I wash my hands,” he said, narrating a sequence. “I go here.” He walked to the bathtub. “Oh, I go out here.” He left the bathroom into the play area, where a huge mess of toys sprawled on the dingy indoor-outdoor carpet.
Again I bent down to his head level and asked him to tell me what he remembered. He smiled with the same angelic look the baby Jesus has in religious paintings of the Italian renaissance. I was starting not to trust this expression. After a few more minutes of futile searching, I gave up and called Betsy again. We agreed that even though it was upsetting not to have his first baby tooth, we’d just have to live with it. And the tooth fairy could come anyway.
Just as I got off the phone, Bohdan came pounding up the stairs. “I find eet!” He was holding a large, yellowed molar.
“Where did you find it?” I asked.
“I show,” he said, grabbing my hand. He took me to the toy shelf in the basement and pointed triumphantly eastward, at the wall.
“Did you know all along it was here?” He responded with his shit-eating grin again, like Bertie Wooster coming out of the Drones Club with someone else’s umbrella, and nodded slowly.
“And you just let me keep looking and looking?”
Bohdan widened his eyes and bobbed his head just once. He smiled and my mouth also relaxed into a grin. I put the tooth in its plastic holder, told him we’d put it in his special box. I called Betsy to give her the good news. She was delighted and made me promise not to tell Bohdan about the tooth fairy until she got home.
We held off taking the boys to the dentist for several months because we wanted them to have enough English to understand what would happen. We’d seen no toothbrushes in either of their orphanages, and in that absence we didn’t worry much for several reasons: Peter had no experience with brushing, he had a voracious appetite, and we believed he had a mouth full of fillings, since many of his teeth were a gunmetal grey colour.
When we did get to the dentist, Betsy and I stood beside the big white chair while Peter flipped switches and grabbed equipment. He refused to be still. The dentist wanted X-rays, so the assistant had Peter bite down on a piece of rubber. Peter couldn’t keep his mouth closed. No X-ray was possible.
The dentist said that Peter’s grey teeth, and the dark splotches on the biting surface of his molars, were actually abscesses. Most of Peter’s baby teeth were rotten, he couldn’t say exactly how many. Our dentist, possibly the gentlest and kindest person in the profession, referred us to a specialist in children’s dentistry “who uses restraints when necessary.”
A few weeks passed before we could see the specialist. At night Betsy and I talked with fear about restraints when necessary, and with guilt for all the months we didn’t know Peter was in such pain.
When I shook the specialist’s hand he had the vigour and bonhomie common among athletes and those who work with pliers and drills in people’s mouths. Peter chatted away unworried, making the chair go up and down and gawking at the construction crane out the window.
The dentist encouraged Betsy and me to leave the room, and soon had an X-ray of Peter’s mouth. All twenty-four of Peter’s teeth had decay, but the eight molars were particularly bad, needing root canals and caps. The dentist said Peter likely had a high level of pain tolerance, because all his eating must have been hurting him. He didn’t think anyone had ever brushed Peter’s teeth before we adopted him.
He recommended doing the work with Peter under general anesthetic, at the hospital. The alternative was six or seven excruciating visits to his office, with restraints in use every time.
The day of the surgery Bohdan and Peter played on the floor in the hospital waiting room with toys intended for infants. This embarrassed me even though I understood why kids who’d missed part of their childhood would do that.
The dentist was behind schedule. We read stories to the boys and they sprawled on our laps. An extra hour passed and it was mid-afternoon. Finally the dentist appeared, wearing scrubs but with that air of sportiness about him. He shook my hand, nodded at Betsy, and chatted with Peter. Like me, Peter gabbed even more than usual when nervous. Betsy, Bohdan, and I gave Peter hugs. Bohdan pinched him on the bum. Then Peter climbed on a gurney.
I stared at the Assiniboine River, muddy and swollen still, no sign of the winter ice that would cover it in the coming months with a thick layer like a massive, multilayered blanket. Behind me
Bohdan jumped on Betsy’s lap. Every few minutes he asked for his brother. They were so attached to each other that Bohdan disliked being separated from him even at school.
Then Peter came wheeled out to us on a hospital bed, beginning to awaken. His face was puffed up purple with swelling, like a tabloid celebrity after plastic surgery. He tried sitting up and the nurse gently eased him down again. He smiled when I held his hand.
The nurse handed Peter a Beanie Baby. A tag pinned to its chest said Courage Dog. He held the plush cotton to his face.
“He hasn’t complained about anything,” said the nurse. Betsy and I both held his hands, and Bohdan stood as close as possible, staring fearfully at his brother’s face. Within half an hour of arriving home Peter was already eating crackers. When we expressed some concern, he said this was the first time he’d been able to chew food without his teeth hurting.
When I was four I had my tonsils out. I woke up on a gurney high off the floor in the hallway of the Baptist Hospital in Ogbomosho, Nigeria. My throat burned, head thick with sleep. My stomach felt wrenched inside-out. I looked down and around. No one. I didn’t see my parents or any nurses. The big, bright red tiles got closer. I was falling. Then my father appeared, holding my hand, singing to me, the tune he played on his violin. I wasn’t scared anymore. It hurt too much to talk.
I fell back into sleep. When I woke again Dad was still there, and he’d made a plasticine animal for me to play with when he’d gone. When he left I cried.
Dad said in his diary that I only shed tears on the operating table “till the ether took over.”
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