“Ack – Brigs, did you see that?” you demand as you pull your cardigan off your shoulders and try to press the fabric to Benny’s wound.
“What?”
“The blood comes spurting out the back of his head every time his heart beats.”
There’s no time for me to feel sick or sad or even to stop to get a good look at my baby’s issue of blood. Benny is still fully conscious – even feisty. That will have to be enough for now. “Keep the sweater on it. Apply pressure,” I say because that’s what they always told us in Boy Scouts. It’s all I can say before I order the rest of the kids into the minivan so we can get Benny to a hospital.
In the back of the van, Benny has stopped crying and he’s fighting to keep your sweater away from his head. “You have to leave it on, baby,” you’re saying. But Benny keeps swatting and ducking, complaining and cursing in his broken toddler-English it’s probably best we don’t understand right now.
We drive right past the town’s hospital – the one where I had my appendix removed when I was a kid. The building’s been turned into a long-term care residence for seniors so we head out to highway. In ten minutes, we’ll be at the hospital in the nearest town – the town where you lived while you were in high school.
“You can probably slow down a bit,” you call from where you’re holding onto Benny in the backseat. “It’s just regular bleeding now. The horror movie’s over. Right, Levi?”
Levi shudders behind the little hands he still holds pressed over his closed eyelids. He won’t believe any of it.
I know I won’t be able to see Benny’s wound from the driver’s seat but I glance at you in the rear view mirror anyway. You tell me later that the blood had been bright red and kind of thick – living blood oozing out of our baby’s head like it was getting squeezed out of a tube, pulsing and pulsing. In the back of the van, between all our boys, your hands and arms and clothes are covered in blood. And I remember a scene from a movie that used to make us laugh – the one where a character in bloody clothes turns to alarmed onlookers and says, “Oh, it’s okay. This isn’t my blood.”
And this blood isn’t yours either. All of our kids’ blood is full of Rh antigens – those harmless little blood proteins that make your immune system freak out. You don’t have them in your blood, but the boys inherited them from me. That’s why you needed to get all those shots of immunoglobulin right in the butt every time you got pregnant. We needed to make sure your body didn’t start trying to melt down our babies. But Benny’s blood isn’t my blood either. It’s steeped with the B antigens you gave him – the ones that would make me sick if anyone tried to pipe your blood into me, no matter how much you might say you love me.
Benny is calm and even pleasant by the time we get to the hospital. “Do you still think we need to go in?” I ask.
You purse your lips and squint into Benny’s head. “Uh – it’s pretty flappy and oozy. We’d better have someone check it out.”
We’re the only people in the small town, weekend emergency room. You and Benny look dirtier and gorier than ever, now that you’ve been seated on a clean, white-sheeted gurney.
You hold the little boy against your body, I clamp his legs together so he can’t kick, and a nurse with a warm, damp washcloth swabs Benny’s scalp, looking to see the full extent of the cut. It isn’t nearly as big as either of us expected – not quite two centimetres long – and it isn’t bleeding at all anymore. The nurse comforts Benny with a gift of the most ludicrously over-dyed purple Popsicle I’ve ever seen. She leaves us, promising the doctor will be coming soon.
“I know,” you say – which is a strange response. But you’ve already heard the doctor’s voice through the curtains drawn around us. It wasn’t his loud, authoritarian talk that gave him away. Within all the contrived officiousness of his voice is a sound you’ve known even longer than you’ve known me.
“It’s Dan, isn’t it?” you ask the nurse as she’s trying to leave us.
She startles and starts to stammer. It’s like she’s trying not to answer, like she knows it’s her duty to hide the secret first name of the doctor from all the bleeding riff-raff.
“Dan,” you repeat. “Dan is the doctor here today, isn’t he?”
“Uh, yeah,” she admits.
When the nurse finally gets away, you breathe out an enormous sigh. “Brigs, Benny – you are about to meet Mummie’s prom date.”
I bend at the waist and laugh at you as you sit on the clean sheet, looking like an expendable extra from a slasher movie. We know this doctor – or, at least, you do. We are now at the mercy of one of your ex-boyfriends. Benny’s been dying for a break in the tension and he laughs with me.
“Hey, that’s Doctor Prom-Date, to you guys,” you interrupt me through a little laugh of your own. There’s still half of a smile on your mouth, and your eyes haven’t quite finished their roll, when a thin but ordinary hand parts the curtain. And there he is in a white lab coat that fits him about as well as a Halloween costume: the boy you used to write letters to after you left that cousin of mine who wouldn’t call you his girlfriend. That was years before you’d ever met me. They were long, handwritten letters like people used to write all the time – only the ones you sent to this boy usually had Joni Mitchell lyrics scrawled all over the outsides of their envelopes.
Here in the hospital, the stethoscope slung around his neck actually looks real. He’s already read your name on the chart in his hands so there’s no surprise left in his manner when you meet. You introduce me to him. We shake hands and everything, but we’re both kind of stiff about it.
“It’s not personal. He’s like that with everyone,” you’ll tell me later. “And so are you, Brigs.”
There are professional duties to be done, so the doctor starts trying to talk to our injured little boy. Benny knows not to trust him and sits stonily gripping his Popsicle while it melts into streams of indelible purple ink, dripping down his fist and onto your arm.
There’s nothing at all left in either your or the doctor’s voices to suggest what you must have meant to each other when you were both eighteen. He says, “That’s no ordinary Popsicle. That’s a special medical Popsicle. It cost the taxpayer about ten dollars.”
You snort.
“No really, we have people eat them when they have chest injuries. If they start coughing up purple dye afterwards we know they’re aspirating their fluids. It means they’re in big trouble.”
“Not like you, Benny.”
“No, no. Not like Benny.”
Benny’s cut does need a stitch – but just one. Dr. Dan the prom date explains that we have a tricky parenting decision to make – one of those choices where no matter how we choose, everyone loses.
“If we try to anesthetise the area with a needle, it’ll mean one more poke in the head – and it might not even work very well. Benny could end up feeling every bit of the stitching process anyway.” If we’ll agree, Dr. Dan will go ahead and sew up the breach in Benny’s scalp without bothering to try to numb the skin first.
You sigh. “Okay then. Luckily for all of us, Benny here is one extremely tough little kid. Aren’t you, Benny?”
The nurse wheels in a shiny steel tray full of equipment before the four of us – you, me, the doctor, and the nurse – start closing in on Benny. In your arms, he squirms and yells and throws his head back into your sternum, transferring a new smear of blood onto you and hurting his tender scalp. He’s loud but so small there isn’t room for all of us to grapple with him at once. I look at you over the top of his head.
“I’ve got this one, okay?”
You nod as you pass the little boy to me and step away. “I’ll go check on the other kids.”
The older boys are sitting mesmerized in a corner of the hospital foyer set up like a forest of fake rubber trees. They’re slouched on chairs arranged around a television tuned to the all-c
artoons-all-the-time station that we refuse to subscribe to on our TV at home.
Before the emergency room curtain drifts closed, you look back at Benny and the rest of us. You look back to see me and your prom date – me with my arms closed around Benny and your date bearing down on the child with a thin, curved needle like the one Nanny used to use for quilting. In the doctor’s powdery, latex-gloved fingers, the needle is totally sterile, right up until it passes through Benny’s hair. By the time we’re all near enough to get the stitch into Benny’s scalp, my own head is so close to the doctor’s it would have been nothing for me to tip forward and kiss him, right on his face.
Benny yelps – once, twice – and drops the mushy medical Popsicle onto the clean floor. The stitch is in – blue nylon thread tied in a knot on the back of Benny’s head. The nurse swoops up the Popsicle in a paper towel and pitches it in the trash right away, but it leaves a long purple stain on the white floor tiles anyway.
“I’ve got a few minutes before the ambulance gets here with a rogue diabetic who needs fluids and scolding,” Dr. Dan says as we walk out of the empty emergency ward together. By now, I’m pretty sure he’s a dork, like you and me. But he’s a nice guy – nice enough for Benny to have already forgiven him and taken him by the hand as we go to find you and the rest of the boys. “Your boy’s got his Mom’s hair, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah, they all do at this age. But they seem to outgrow it pretty quickly.”
Dr. Dan hums. “She let me cut her hair once – at least, I’m almost sure that was her. It’s a long time ago now, eh? That would have been during our first year at university. She’d run out of money and it ended up growing way out of control – nearly all the way down her back. But I was too freaked out to cut off any more than just a little bit.”
I grin and kind of laugh – because there’s nothing to say. And what is funny is that I know I’m not jealous of Dr. Dan, the prom date. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I know it’s true.
“Not that it would have mattered much,” he goes on. “Whatever hair I cut off has probably grown back a hundred times over since then. Right?”
“A thousand times over. Right.”
I’m actually smiling when I look at him. He still has most of his hair but it’s got a lot of grey in it. In a minute, you’ll go ahead and tell him so – because you know that’s the kind of awkward teenaged candour he’ll still be expecting from you. And even then I won’t be jealous. The prom, the scissors in your hair, all the letters, the fact that you already know what his hand would feel like if it were to touch you – none of it matters.
Maybe you’re like Benny, who will always have a small scar on his scalp, underneath his thick blond hair, carved by the hand of Dr. Dan himself. In all this time, I still haven’t lifted up every single hair on your head to examine all the skin underneath every one of them. Maybe if I did, I’d find that you have the same kind of scar. Only it wouldn’t be all red and inflamed and puckered around a suture like Benny’s is today. It would be smooth and flat and white – a little dead around the edges.
Fifteen
I’m still finishing university when I learn to tell by the way the phone rings before eight o’clock in the morning that someone we know has had a dream that freaked them out.
It’s happening again this morning, just as I’m closing the door behind me to leave for school. You wave goodbye to me as you plant our second-born son, baby Aaron, on your left hip and walk toward the telephone. The call will be a dream report from one of your girlfriends – or maybe Janae.
The dream could be anything.
“I’m at this barbecue, all normal and everything, but then I realize I’ve got a fiddler crab hidden inside my stomach. And I know if I move it’s going to spaz out and slice me up.”
It sounds weird but it’s no mystery to you. The dream means the girl still hasn’t come to terms with the miscarriage she had, years ago.
Then there are these ones:
“There’s this shallow pond with a really thin layer of ice on its surface. And there’s a big, red octopus lying at the bottom of it, like it’s asleep or something.”
And you know this girl needs a date.
That, you say, is how women usually dream – all in relationships and internal organs and fresh blood.
Men are different. We dream in phalluses. You say it’s getting really, really boring – turning into the kind of thing any hack with one semester of undergraduate psychology or a copy of that 1001 Dreams Revealed manual from the bookstore can unravel for himself.
Usually, all you have to say to the phallus dreamers is something like, “You’re harpooning red octopuses? Really? Come on, dude, don’t make me say it.”
But you say what’s really sick is how much men dream about money.
“I dream my Dad’s dragged me out golfing with him. But I can’t find the first tee so I have to start at the second one. So he’s flipping out at me because we know there’s no way we’ll ever finish the round before it gets too dark.”
So, someone’s suspecting maybe he shouldn’t have taken a whole decade to goof off before going back to school.
Sometimes, when the phone rings in the morning like this, it couldn’t be any easier for you to show them what they’re trying to tell themselves. All you have to do is repeat word-for-word what they just said to you.
“We’re on this big hike through the jungle together, like a safari or something, and I’m carrying everything – ”
“You’re carrying everything.”
“Yeah. Do you know what it means already? Because I’m not done –”
“YOU’RE CARRYING EVERYTHING.”
“Oh.”
But some people don’t like it when girls like you – little student wives from the crummy walk-up apartments off Whyte Avenue – come storming into their dream worlds, kicking over all the cardboard set decorations. It’s embarrassing. Your Dad knows it. He’s become something like your dream interpreting agent – not that anyone would ever pay you for what you do. And maybe if you started accepting money to interpret dreams, you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone anything anymore.
Anyways, your Dad gets all kinds of men to tell him their phallus-money dreams – the dude who works on his furnace, the other government guys at work, strangers on airplanes, it doesn’t matter. Of course, he doesn’t get them on the phone to talk to you themselves. Your squeaky white girl voice on the other end of the line, the sounds of our kids’ cartoon videos playing on the TV in the background – that’d obliterate whatever mystique any of this might have. And, since you can’t make money at it, your Dad is left with just the mystique to appreciate – that and being in on the secrets.
There are plenty of secrets here. When they tell you their dreams, they always tell you way too much – and it’s dang awkward sometimes. The girl with the fiddler-crab-miscarriage dream? She told you about the dream over the dinner table at your parents’ house.
“Did you hear that, Brigs?” you demanded in the car on the way home. “What was I supposed to say to her?”
I squinted down the road, trying to remember exactly what she’d said. “Tell me again.”
When you repeat the dream yourself, I can tell what it means too. There’s something about hearing it told in your language and voice that makes it perfectly clear to me.
“So if you didn’t call her on the miscarriage, what did you end up saying to her?”
You throw your hands up. “Well, I panicked and just made up something stupid and generic about body image before I got the heck out of there.”
The dreams always tell the truth. But sometimes you need to lie – and I’m always glad when you do. “You shouldn’t tell people you can interpret dreams unless they’re going to stay strangers to us forever,” I’ll say as we slink out of another nearly ruined dinner party where you stopped just short of telling so
meone her dream about running a struggling roadside produce stand actually means she doesn’t trust her husband anymore.
“I know, I know.”
Maybe your Dad’s way of handling the dream interpretation business is smarter. When your Dad’s got a big dream from a big man that needs interpreting, he’ll have them type it out in an email and then he forwards the whole thing to our address. You’ll tease it out, fire it back, and wait – always so smugly – to get the reply about how you were right on. It’s funny – when the big men write back to your Dad about what you’ve told them, they always refer to you, the unknown interpreter, as “he.” And the last thing your Dad would ever do is correct them. I guess he figures it shouldn’t matter to us if the phallus-money-dreamers are happier picturing you all skinny and shorn and flat, sitting in a lotus position on top of a mountain somewhere.
As far as your Dad is concerned, the highlight of your dream interpreter career came when you analyzed that dream his boss had about losing all his teeth. Your first reply in the email thread was just one line: “Ask him how long it’s been since his braces came off.”
That blew their minds. You knew it would. You did it on purpose because showmanship is important in an endeavor like this one. It doesn’t actually matter to you when his braces were removed. But it seems like all orthodontia survivors have nightmares about their teeth – even you. You’ll be deep in it, dreaming you’re bent over a stainless steel sink, spitting out blood and saliva and pretty white teeth. When the psychic parachute finally opens, you wake up, feeling around inside your mouth with your tongue, so relieved you could cry. If anyone knows what the tooth dreams mean, it’s you. They’re about dreading the inevitability of other people finding out what you really are – finding out you’re a sham.
It’s time for you to pick up that ringing, early morning phone. It is Janae – just like I said it would be.
“Okay, so I dreamed there’s this ghost in my house. First it takes over my cat, then my oven, then my computer.”
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