The Unfinished Child

by Theresa Shea

  The orderly stopped beside a crib in which a small child lay curled into the corner. He rattled the bars and the girl jumped and rolled her head sideways to have a look. She had dull brown eyes, flat as pennies and equally inexpressive. Margaret looked away for a moment, hoping to see something better, but the crib beside Carolyn’s was filled with two small babies who appeared in desperate need of a bath.

  “That’s her,” the orderly’s husky voice interrupted. “I’ll be back for you in fifteen minutes.”

  Margaret stared at his retreating back with panic. Fifteen minutes? What was she supposed to do here? She felt the rose in her hand and realized how inappropriate the gift was. This child, although older than her two at home, was younger in so many ways. She seemed barely able to sit up on her own. Margaret watched mutely as Carolyn struggled to shift her balance. When she finally reached an upright position, balanced solidly on her bum, her head lolled to one side as if someone had put a heavy barrette in her hair and unbalanced her. Drool ran from her slack mouth and down her chin, yet the child made no effort to wipe it away. Although she was four years old, she was still in a diaper, and from the looks of the brown stains on her bare upper thighs, she’d been wearing it for some time.

  Margaret took it all in and almost buckled under the weight of her shame. She shouldn’t have come. The life she’d tried to imagine for her daughter, the one with goodness and light, was non-existent. No one brought ice cream cones to these children. No one made them laugh. It was better to have imagined Carolyn well taken care of and happy. She glanced around the room. There must have been forty cribs all told, positioned in rows with narrow walkways between them, and all of them were full. The age range appeared to be infants right up to ages six or eight. It was hard to accurately say because the children looked so small in the cavernous room with its high ceilings. How cold it must be in the winter, she thought, gazing at the old, tall windows high up on the walls.

  She felt something touch her arm and instinctively pulled away before realizing it was Carolyn’s hand reaching through the crib bars. Margaret looked at her child and experienced a host of emotions. Revulsion was one of them. Gaining steadily, however, was a fierce and immense compassion. This was her child. She reached out and took Carolyn’s small hand in her own and saw that her nails were overgrown and broken. Margaret made a mental note to bring nail clippers next time. If there was a next time.

  The child kept reaching, and soon Margaret realized she was after the rose. Margaret pulled the stem off and handed the flower head to Carolyn. For a moment her daughter sat motionless, absorbed by the newness of the soft petals in her palm, thin as a layer of skin pulled from a sunburned shoulder. Then she lifted the flower to her mouth and began to chew.

  The bus trip home felt twice as long as the initial drive to Poplar Grove. Margaret rested her forehead against the cool window and stared flatly out at the tilled farm fields that now looked ravaged. She saw a falcon dive low over the ground and pull up with something struggling in its claws; she could relate to the small animal caught in a grip far stronger than its own. She could relate to the struggle and the shock.

  Something had been set into motion four years ago, and she had gone along with it, trusting that the doctors knew best. After all she’d been through, she should have known not to be so trusting. Look at the boy Doc Jenkins had raised. Obviously the good doctor knew nothing about children. And Dr. Morrison too. She hadn’t even asked him if he had kids. What kind of a father would he be if he thought Poplar Grove was any kind of a place for a child? His words echoed in her mind, It’s for her own good. Rage simmered in her bloodstream. She had been completely misled.

  The bus turned off the highway and headed to the south terminal. She couldn’t tell Donald what she’d found—their tiny, undernourished daughter, still in diapers, left to rot in a crib. Abandoned, really, in a foul place where there was no love. Thank God she’d come without telling Donald. What would Donald think if he saw this? No. She would never tell him what she’d discovered. She had to protect him from knowing more about this horrific place. She had to shower the grime of that place from her skin.

  She needed to hold James and Rebecca in her arms. Maybe, if she tried, she could forget this visit entirely.

  ELEVEN

  2002

  January, the coldest month of the year, came to an end. The hours of daylight slowly began to extend—but even so, the city’s inhabitants walked in a dreamlike state, fearful that the dark season of cold and snow would never end. The calendar days passed, but the snow continued to fall.

  Winter, with its extended hours of darkness, is the season for sleeping. Windows stay closed; snow muffles the neighbourhood noise. Marie didn’t often have difficulty sleeping, but on this cold, late-January night, she woke with her heart hammering. She sat upright in bed and listened. Had one of her daughters called out? She strained her ears and waited. Nothing.

  Disoriented, she lay down again and closed her eyes. Then the dream came back to her. In it, her newborn was fully swaddled. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. All she knew was that it was hers to care for and she’d forgotten it somewhere. At the store? The bus stop? No—the beach! Down the steep cement stairs to the waterfront she ran to find her baby resting on a huge piece of driftwood. It was a pebbled beach, and the small stones kept pulling at Marie’s feet so, despite great effort, she never got any closer to her child. She could hear the baby’s thin cry and she dug harder for traction. She flailed and dug and flailed some more.

  And then she woke up.

  She’d had these dreams before, with her girls; she’d wake with her breasts hard and leaking and walk barefoot to find them quietly sleeping in their rooms. But this time there was no baby to check on in the room next door.

  Barry snored quietly beside her, the duvet tucked beneath his sleeping form. Shadows of naked tree limbs moved rhythmically on the bedroom ceiling from the light cast by the lamppost at the sidewalk’s edge. Aside from the usual household noises—the furnace softly humming, the alarm clock clicking as the numbers turned over on the bedside table—the house was quiet. It was too early for the neighbours’ dog to begin his customary howling. And it was a weekday, too early for anyone to be up and too late for anyone not to have gone to bed.

  Marie stared at the shadows on the ceiling and tried to calm her pounding heart. She wasn’t even at the quickening phase yet, when she could detect fetal movement, so how could she check on her baby?

  Maybe there was something wrong with it. She’d been lucky to have two healthy children, but she was older now. Her doctor would stamp a big fat RISK on her file when she went in with the news. She worried the thought, turning it over and looking at it from every angle, until it became a premonition. Her foreboding became a certainty. The hunch a reality.

  There is something wrong with my baby.

  Shortly after four she heard Mr. Jantz’s car start up when he left for the bakery. Then a long silence punctuated by a car idling along the avenue as the morning’s paper was delivered.

  She climbed quietly out of bed and walked to the window. Snow had fallen in the night and was still falling. Thick flakes floated heavily to the ground. The neighbourhood glowed as if under a fresh coat of paint.

  The mountain ash stood in stark contrast to the blanket of whiteness, its red berries delectable treats for the waxwings that visited by the hundreds, cooing and trilling and leaving a trail of red droppings in their wake.

  She returned to bed and stared once again at the ceiling. The shadow of naked tree branches was gone now. She thought of the Dutch elms in the city, seasonally engaged in a fight against disease. She thought of her baby possibly warring against its own cells. She thought of her mother, eating sparingly and watching her figure under a hot Arizona sun. She thought of her father, teeing off with other white-haired men after a long career in an unfulfilling job that paid the household bills. She thought about what to make for breakfast. She thought of Elizabeth pac
king her belongings and carving out a single life.

  Finally, at five-thirty, she reached out and shook Barry’s arm. She rolled closer to him and curled her body against his warmth.

  “Barry,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Wake up. I need to talk to you.”

  “What time is it?” He squinted into the dark and ran his tongue over his chapped lips.

  “This is serious, Barry,” she said. “I need you to listen.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m awake.” He rolled onto his side and propped himself on one elbow. His right cheek was deeply lined with pillow creases. White flakes of saliva had dried onto his bottom lip. “Okay,” he said again, suppressing a yawn. “I’m listening.”

  “I think there’s something wrong with the baby.” She put her hands over her face to stifle her sobs.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Something woke me up and suddenly I had this feeling that something’s wrong.”

  He looked dazed. “Are you in pain?”

  “No, it’s nothing physical. I mean, it is physical, but there’s nothing specific that happened. I just feel it, that there’s something wrong.”

  Barry sat upright in bed and let the covers slide from his bare chest. He rubbed at his eyes. “Jesus, Marie. What do you mean by wrong?”

  Marie couldn’t pinpoint the problem. It was free-floating and unidentifiable.

  “I don’t know. I just know something’s not right.”

  Goosebumps formed on Barry’s arms. Marie drew him back under the covers and rested her head on his chest. His heart beat a strong rhythm. He put his arm around her and held her close.

  “How far along are you?”

  He should know this, she thought. He shouldn’t leave it all up to me.

  “I’m not exactly sure. If this had been planned, I’d know, but I’m guessing it’s eight weeks. Give or take a little.”

  They lay quietly together. A car drove by, its headlights straffing the bedroom ceiling.

  “You should call Dr. Cuthbert.”

  “And tell her what? That I’m pregnant?”

  “No, tell her you think there’s something wrong. Maybe she could run a test or something.”

  Marie didn’t respond. She knew it was too early for tests.

  “But there’s no sense getting worked up about this. We don’t have any real evidence to say we should be concerned,” Barry added.

  “Other than I never had this feeling with the other pregnancies.”

  She cast her mind back to the early years of having an infant. Changing soiled diapers and walking with a crying baby seemed like a lifetime ago. Nicole had been such an easy baby; she’d just nursed and slept for the first few months of her life. And two years later, when Sophia was born, they realized just how lucky they’d been. Suddenly, when she was ten days old, Sophia started to cry. At first, Marie assumed she had eaten something she shouldn’t have, and that the offending food had worked its way into her breast milk. But the crying didn’t stop. Day and night Sophia cried, her face red and scrunched up, her legs kicking in anger and pain. A week went by. And then another. Dr. Cuthbert shook her head in sympathy. We don’t know what causes colic, exactly, but we do know that it usually ends at the three-month mark. Give or take a few days. She and Barry had gone home and marked a big red X on the calendar on a date three months down the road. Then they continued to take turns passing the screaming baby.

  It had been the longest three months of her life. When Barry left for work in the morning, Marie cried because she was afraid she might harm the baby. She remembered holding Nicole in her arms, tears streaming down her own cheeks, while Sophia screamed in another room. And she remembered how mad she was that no one in her family offered to help. Frances, still single at the time, was busy at university and never thought to drop by and relieve her sister. Her brother, Joe, was already married and had two kids of his own. She didn’t expect any help from him. Or from her father, for that matter, who was in his final years of working and preparing for retirement. But she was very disappointed that her mother never stepped in to offer a hand. Mothers were supposed to mother, but Fay had made it abundantly clear that she’d already done her parenting. It was unspoken, but she had raised three children, with little help from her husband, or anyone else for that matter, and her job was done. Finally she was free to travel and do things for herself.

  Elizabeth had been the only one to show up with a meal.

  No, the baby stage wasn’t easy. Seen in the distance it loomed like Everest.

  “We need to talk,” Marie said, glancing at the clock. “Do you know what you want?”

  “I was slowly getting used to the idea of having a baby in the house again. But if there’s something wrong with it . . .” He hesitated. “If you said you didn’t want this baby, then I’d say don’t have it.”

  Tears stung her eyes. “And if you said you really didn’t want another baby, then I’d say the same thing. Or at least I would have, but it’s a bit late now, isn’t it?”

  Barry had closed his eyes. The whiskery half of his face had disappeared into the shadows.

  “Remember how easy it was with Nicole?” she said. “We couldn’t wait to have a baby.”

  Barry smiled and nodded.

  “And it was the same with Sophia.”

  “We wanted Nicole to have a sibling,” he said.

  “Yeah, someone to talk about her parents with. But maybe now, if we’re both so ambivalent, then maybe we’re not supposed to have another child.”

  “Being ambivalent doesn’t mean we won’t love it,” Barry said.

  “I know,” Marie said, but she was older now. She didn’t have as much energy. And she was scared now too.

  Barry laughed softly. “We’ve jumped rather quickly into imagining ourselves with a disabled child.”

  “It’s not funny.” She bristled as she stepped out of bed. “Anyway, it’s not like we’re deciding whether or not to get pregnant. That part’s already done.” She had always been so careful in her life. What insurance would cover this? Genetic mutation insurance? Fear of having an imperfect child insurance? Your life has been wrecked insurance?

  She shivered in the chill air. She felt caught in someone else’s life, having the kind of conversation that teenaged lovers have when they discover an unwanted pregnancy. But she was almost forty; she wasn’t supposed to be talking about aborting a child. She pulled her robe on and knotted the sash at her waist. She already had two children. And she loved her husband. Good people didn’t talk about terminating pregnancies under such conditions, did they?

  It was still dark. She felt Barry’s eyes follow her across the room.

  “You’d better hurry up,” she said over her shoulder. “We’re running a bit late.”

  “Will you call the doctor?” he asked.

  She turned back to the bed. Barry sat with his knees drawn up, his eyes deep hollows in his face. He looked like a child ready to spit up in a bowl. She walked back to him and placed her palm on his forehead. His arms circled around her waist.

  “I’ll phone later.”

  She knew there was little a doctor could tell her now. But maybe he was right. The doctor should be informed at each step.

  Downstairs at last, Marie scrambled some eggs for her daughters and set out the cereal, toast, coffee, and juice for Barry’s breakfast. Then she made cheese sandwiches and put them in Ziploc bags inside the girls’ brown paper sacs. She added an apple to each bag, two homemade cookies, and a juice box.

  The girls zipped up their winter coats, and she kissed them goodbye. The fresh snow muffled the sounds of their boots and the cars driving slowly by on the unplowed road. The snow continued to fall. At the front window she watched Nicole and Sophia make tracks in the unmarked snow. They walked a large circle in the yard and then started to cut across it as if to make a maze. Marie looked at her watch and tapped on the window. She gestured toward the corner. The g
irls stared at her for a moment and then stepped out onto the freshly shovelled sidewalk before walking down the middle of the road to the corner. A group of kids already stood there waiting, throwing snowballs and making snow angels.

  The sky was grey and low. Snow swirled from its murky depths. The naked elm trees looked as if they were single-handedly keeping the sky from falling.

  Minutes later, the school bus pulled to a stop at the corner. The kids automatically lined up, their snowsuits bright as gumdrops. Then the bus and the children soundlessly disappeared.

  Marie returned to the kitchen and began her morning cleanup. This was the favourite part of her day, when the house was completely empty and she could return things to their proper place and remove every finger­print from every surface. She rinsed the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher. With a fresh dishcloth she wiped the counters and the table. She sprayed the toaster with Windex and heard her sister’s voice, “Is that the same toaster you got at your wedding? It looks brand new.” Or, “Hey, Marie, I see a fingerprint on your toaster.” She said it as if it were a criticism, as if nobody else in the world took good care of their possessions. Marie stood back to survey her work. She was pleased to be in control of the standards in her own home. It had been a long time coming. Growing up she’d had to battle against her sister’s slothful ways. Cleaning the kitchen together had been unbearable. Frances always wanted to wash instead of dry the dishes. So Marie would wait, towel in hand, and Frances would plow through the dirty pile as if the house was on fire. Dish after dish filled the drying rack, all with some kind of crud left on them. Marie would refuse to dry them if they were dirty, and Frances would refuse to wash them again after a second rinse. “It’s good enough!” she’d hiss through clenched teeth, and then she’d drain the sink and leave the greasy residue to set into a hard crust.