by Lucie Wilk
“Those are not for you to take.”
The voice behind him is male, familiar. In this moment Jakob imagines the future as it will unfold before him and it involves shame, hunger, and then death—first his mother’s, then soon after, his own dissatisfying and premature end. He turns around because that is all that he can do and sees Dr. Ellison standing in the doorway looking at him with a grim face.
“What have you been doing with them? Have you been taking them yourself?”
“No.”
“Have you been selling them?”
“No.”
“Who have you been giving them to?”
“My mother.” He stares back at Dr. Ellison. He dares him to question his motives, this man who just took things away from his mother. He just took and took.
But the doctor just heaves a large sigh. “They won’t help her. Your mother doesn’t have HIV. Those pills treat HIV. You can’t cure her with those.”
Jakob clenches his hand around the capsules in the bottom of his pocket.
“There’s a hundred people in this place you could help with those. But not her. You can’t cure her.” Dr. Ellison repeats.
Jakob throws the seven blue and white pills at Dr. Ellison. They hit him on his chest and then scatter to the floor.
“Help the other hundred then.” He thinks this, but doesn’t say it. His throat has closed up and no sound will come out.
Jakob waits for the dismissal. He waits for someone to come, tap him on his shoulder and send him on his way. But it never happens. The rest of the day after his run-in with Dr. Ellison passes uneventfully. And then another day passes. And another. He looks for evidence that it is being discussed in the nurses’ faces, or the other doctors’. But the hospital staff go about their days like they usually do: expressionless, voiceless.
He even looks for some judgement on his mother’s face, especially when he stops bringing her the extra tablets, as if somehow she would know. But his mother just interacts with him like she has since they entered this place—with her eyes closed.
So it is, he thinks. He strokes her hands. He hides her missing foot under the thick blanket even though she won’t be looking for it. He pulls the blanket up over her narrow shoulders and lets her rest.
*
Iris pushes her cart through the ward. The wheels have by some miracle been recently oiled, and it glides silently between the cots. It is stuffed with needles and intravenous line and bags of fluid. Bottles and vials of medication fill the lower shelves. She stops near a woman who looks to be about her mother’s age. By the chart she is two years younger. The woman sleeps deeply as though this room is hers alone, and the shutters are pulled, and it is quiet. Iris tries to imagine her mother in her place, lying exactly here in this bed. She would not sleep like this. She would be sitting up, glaring at other patients, glaring at the nurses and avoiding the eyes of the doctors altogether. She would complain about the intravenous that would have to be stuck in her arm, and the food, and the smells, and the shared toilets or worse, the bedpan.
Her mother asked her something recently, about Mapiri. She said: did you feel at home? Her answer had come quickly to mind but Iris had been unable to form a reply, not sure which answer would hurt more. She has already decided that she will allow herself brief visits to see Alile and her grandfather and her grandmother’s kachisi. She will arrange the trips in wide intervals, allow herself just a little of this strange bliss, in pieces too small to have much effect on her life here in Blantyre, here in the hospital. The aftermath of these indulgences is too disturbing, like a tremor in an earth that should by all rights be stable. Visits to Mapiri encourage too much contemplation, raise too many questions. Questions about her decisions. The choices she has made. What she has and what she lacks. She has come to the conclusion that choice encourages doubt. And doubt encourages regret. And there is too much that still needs to be done here to allow herself any kind of regret. There is no room in her life for this sort of nonsense. Just a look around the ward affirms it.
And, in the silence following her mother’s last question while Iris was turning all of this over in her mind her mother spoke again. Her mother said one more thing. Bring me home.
Iris pushes the trolley on, not wishing to disrupt the woman’s deep sleep. She pauses next by a man who lies on his side, fully awake, caressing his enlarged belly like a woman with child. The doctors are still sorting out whether this belly grew from Carlsberg or malnourishment. Or both. She is to draw blood for this, to check the liver and count the blood cells and the protein floating through his bloated body. What has been discovered by modern medicine through the invention of the microscope and other technologies is what her people have always known. That the answers lie in what ordinarily can’t be seen.
To her mother who now has no more questions she said yes. Yes, mama. I will bring you home.
*
“Jakob. I think you’d better come.”
The nurse who said this to him was Neva, the one who used to work in the ICU and who would give him such angry stares. But the look in her eyes when she beckoned him was something else, and then it was gone because she looked away, she couldn’t meet his gaze. And then he knew.
His mother when he found her was lying as usual on her bed and she looked as thin and frail as she always did. But there was something different about her. It was her eyes. They were open. She was looking for him and when she saw him enter the ward and come toward her, she smiled.
She died later that same night when the hospital was quiet under a moonless sky. Jakob went outside afterwards and he saw nothing when he looked up at the black. It had emptied itself out earlier that evening, all the stars and moons and planets poured into his mother’s body where he had caught a glimpse of them shining there before her eyes closed forever.
*
When did Sarah stop coming here, to the forefront of his mind? When did she stop running her nails down his back, secretly, so only he knew why he was shivering? Perhaps she hasn’t. Perhaps he can handle it better now, all those memories, all his regret, all her anger. Did she blame him? Odd, now he is not sure. It may have been all him, phantom blame created exclusively out of his guilt.
Henry has nearly picked up the phone many times. That slippery, yellowed plastic. He still knows the numbers; they are etched in his mind like the code for a lock. And then one day he does. He watches his finger punch down each numbered square. He listens to the strange and distant ring, feels the round earpiece hard against his right ear. When the phone is picked up on the other end and he hears Sarah’s voice again it is like he just arrived here and they have just said goodbye and Emma, Emma has only just laid down to sleep.
Somehow Sarah knows. She says his name and it is said without anything else. No judgement. Only loss.
“Sarah, I…”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes I’m fine.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, Henry.”
“So much has happened.”
“You’ve been gone a long time.”
“It’s more than that. More than time passing.”
“I’m sure it’s difficult there. I can only imagine.”
“Can you?” He wonders what she imagines, all the way over there.
“What happened to that boy? Juma.”
She remembered.
“I sent him to a healer.”
He hears a sound on the other end and at first it sounds like laughter.
“Oh, God. I wish we had those over here. Healers, I mean.”
“Me too.”
Alile. He thinks, suddenly, of her hands.
“We need to touch more.”
Quiet.
“I should have touched her more.” He thinks of them in that room with Emma. Always a distance away, on opposite sides of her bed.
She is crying, on the other end. In Toronto. He never intended that. He wanted to make it better and then he recognizes it again: his inept desire to fix everything. Everything can’t be fixed. Some things will stay broken.
“I miss Emma so much.”
“She’s your daughter. You can’t stop being a father.” As though the answer lay in these truths all along.
“Yes.”
“Too bad you had to go where you did to find all this out.”
He wipes his eyes and laughs. “God, if only you knew just where I had to go.”
“So when are you coming home?”
A pause.
“I already am. For now. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
After this, they talk for a long time and when they say goodbye, they agree to talk again.
Sometime soon.
*
It shames Jakob. That his mother’s death has released him. But it has; her death made any chance of a deal with Miss Makombe the witch-woman an impossibility. If his mother had improved, Jakob would have wondered what he had paid, and when the mfiti would come to collect. Every morning until she died he checked for both his feet and they were always there, the right one no uglier than usual. When he thinks of the kiss, he cannot remove the threat of it, some darkness in her moving into him like a sooty wind. After it, he walked through the days like a thief, sneaking backward looks, waiting to be caught, waiting to be forced to pay. But then his mother opened her eyes and smiled on him. And since then something has lifted from his shoulders and the anger, even the anger, has lessened, buried under the brightness of the cosmos that poured out from his mother in those final hours.
*
Maria said: a baby is another chance. This was when one of them came, wet and bawling, needing to be rubbed into pinkness, rubbed into life.
She said it as she massaged vigorously, moving the towel all over the brand new skin, massaging each limb and each finger until the creature stopped his indignant cries, became quiet and ponderous.
Jakob isn’t sure if she said it because she thinks about it every time a new baby arrives (and they come often, many a day, more in the night). Or did she say it because of his mother, and his loss, and the need to console him in some way, by saying little things like a baby is another chance?
Whatever the reason, it did make Jakob feel better because it put into words the thing that keeps him in the labour and delivery room watching it all happen in a flurry around him. Also what he sees in the babies’ eyes when they lie curled up on their backs in the incubator, wrinkled arms and legs springing back like rubber bands to the position they held in the womb; they are still tightly folded secrets, not yet ready to blossom. When their petal-limbs have been rubbed until the blood flows freely through them, when they are warm under the sunshine lamp, when the shock and violence of their arrival is forgotten: this is when their eyes peek open just enough for them to experience, for the first time, the brightness of this world’s light. And he can feel the wonder as their eyes look with such solemn quiet, still containing all the darkness and boundlessness of the night sky, or the deepest ocean, or the place from where they came. He has whispered things to them. He can tell they are listening, already taking it into their new bodies, their new minds and hearts what all this is, what all this means.
Maria turns around and spots Jakob where he stands beside the incubator in which another recently delivered baby lies blinking, looking right at him.
“Jakob,” she says, “can you pass me my stethoscope? It’s over there, on the table in the corner.”
Yes, anything, he thinks, anything for you.
Maria has one hand on a labouring woman’s swollen belly, the other one squeezes the patient’s hand. She is saying something to the woman, probably words of encouragement, or reassurance. It is the time of labour when things are not yet frantic, and the mother has moments, in between contractions, to breathe, to listen to things like Maria’s soothing voice. Maria has a rounded figure with just the right amount of fat in just the right places. If she were pregnant, her belly would swell out, first to balance her buttocks, then to surpass them, and it would assume the beautiful, asymmetric profile of a mother with child, a baby upside-down inside. His seed, if planted inside her, would flourish, he has no doubt. It would grow and grow and its heart would be so enormous and strong that he would be able to feel it all the way through the tight, thick skin of Maria’s belly that she would rub every night with the sweet-smelling coconut oil he would buy for her, special from the market. He would walk miles a day to collect it for her and sometimes she would let him rub it in, rub it on that swollen brown belly and he would run his fingers over it afterwards, still slippery with the oil, and feel her folded navel and imagine the navel of the baby before it is a navel, still tethered to Maria, still serving as a bloodline, a lifeline.
Chapter 30
Across the table in the pub, Ellison peels away the label from a sweaty bottle of Carlsberg. It is green and gold and the paint sticks to his fingers. They have been coming here after work, to Ellison’s favourite restaurant. Ellison has been keeping an eye on him. He seeks Henry out wherever he happens to be in the ward at the end of the day and coaxes him out the doors, down the hill. They have a meal, share a drink. Henry has obliged. He feels better in company these days, a side effect of the attendance he always had in the village. He was never left alone.
There is a man watching them from the bar. After a time, the man approaches. He wipes at his shiny forehead and smells of sour, anxious sweat. He manages a smile.
“Hello Doctor.” He looks at Ellison. His smile falters.
Ellison looks up, waves lazily. He returns his gaze to his glass of beer. The man waits for a moment, uncertain, then turns and walks away, out of the pub. Ellison glances at Henry.
“His sister’s on the ward. Resected a Kaposi’s off her leg. No good. It’s metastasized. She’s done.”
Henry watches him for a moment, then speaks.
“Aren’t you going to talk to him?”
He swirls his beer, doesn’t look up. “Hm?”
“Him. That man. With the sister in hospital. Aren’t you going to say something?”
Ellison is casual but attentive. “What could I say. Tell him the truth?”
“What would you do in Sydney.”
“Hm?”
“What would you do in Oz. If a dying patient’s brother showed up in your pub. What would you do then?”
“What’re you going on about, mate? I’d do the same thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I’d do the same damn thing. What difference would it make where the hell in the world I am?”
“You tell me.”
“Stop speaking in fucking riddles, mate.”
Ellison half rises out of his chair. His eyes are vague, but he isn’t drunk. He is more irritated than drunk. Henry clenches his thighs, feels his bad leg tighten painfully. He picks up his glass then puts it down again.
“All I’m saying is we owe them something. As their doctors. If we can’t save them. We still owe them. They’re suffering.”
“We’re all suffering! The whole world is suffering!” Ellison throws his hands up in the air, spills some beer on the ground then finishes off what remains in one long swallow. “Look, all I’m saying is you need to keep your distance. To keep your sanity, you need to keep your distance.” He shoves his chair backwards and stands up, strolls over to the bar where a shapely woman leans, chatting with the barkeep. He puts his hand on her waist and she turns to him warily then smiles widely in recognition, touches his arm. He places his order with the barkeep then looks over at Henry. Speaks loudly across the tables. “You don’t keep your distance, you’re no use to anyone. You should know that better than anyone, Bryce. Am I right?”
Henry downs his glass, places it back on the table carefully
. “No.”
Ellison leaves the bar. The woman sizes him up as he walks back over to their table.
“You know, Bryce, it goes both ways.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“It goes both ways. You think they treat us the same?”
Henry stands. “So what does that mean.”
“That means you do what you can and then you call it a day. I’ve called it a day.” He points in the direction of the hospital. “That was my day.” He plants a thick finger on the table. “This is my night. I owe myself that.” He looks at Henry. “You ever think about what you owe yourself, Bryce?”
Henry gets up and limps out of the bar. He hears Ellison calling after him. “Have a drink, share a fuck. You owe yourself at least that. Beneath it all, you’re still a man, Bryce. You can’t forget that. It’s an important detail.”
Henry limps all the way home.
*
Henry found the boy. For awhile, he wasn’t sure he was real. He could have as easily been a dream, appearing at his bedside at a time when he still drifted between waking and sleeping states involuntarily. But he found him in the TB ward, passing out pieces of some yellow crumbly bread or cake he held wrapped up in a napkin to patients in the ward. Henry tapped him on the shoulder.
“Where is your mother?” He asked him when he turned around.
The boy gazed up at him with large, unfathomable eyes. Henry couldn’t place his age. He had features of a child, a teen and an adult, all in one lean body. It was his strong, stubborn jaw and his testy quickness, though, that placed him as an adolescent. Henry put him at seventeen, give or take a couple of years. At Henry’s question, the boy turned and pointed at a woman in a bed directly behind him.
“She used to sleep there,” said the boy. “That used to be her bed.”