Just Pretending

by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  When the head is born, she cries out, relief washing her in a chill. She guides the baby from her body and quickly wipes mucus from its face, looking for signs of life. She lifts the floppy infant to her stomach, pulling at the corner of a towel to work it free, wiping at the baby’s nose and mouth, desperate to clear its airway. She scoops mucus from its mouth with her finger while images of her lifeless first infant threaten to choke her. She lifts the baby to her face as though she’s going to kiss it and bends her head forward to place her mouth over its innocent nose. She sucks out the mucus, spits it to the side and sucks again. She’s rewarded by a sputter; the baby’s face contorts with the effort. Then its chest moves, heaves, and it takes its first real live breath. It gives a small cry, at first only sputtering, but as she rubs its body with the towel, the faltering sounds finally give way to a tiny bawl.

  All at once, Ray is there. When she looks up into his eyes they aren’t hard and suspicious, as she’s come to expect. Instead, she reads concern.

  “It’s okay,” Ruth Ann says. “Listen to her,” she laughs, cupping the baby close. “She’s alive. Look. She’s a girl.”

  Ray reaches out to run a finger lightly over the baby’s hair, ruffling it back. He looks intently at the infant, who lies wide-eyed and alert on Ruth Ann’s chest. For an instant Ruth Ann is hopeful. Together they look into the mystery of those deep, fluid eyes.

  “That’s great, babe,” he says.

  Ruth Ann wants him to say more. She wants him to show some emotion, maybe cry; she wants him to be moved by this miracle. She watches him for a sign that he has empathy, for a sign that maybe she can trust him. She wants it to be different – a new start for all of them. And for just one moment, while she and Ray look at their new baby together and he tenderly touches her soft head, Ruth Ann believes that this new beginning might just be possible.

  Ruth Ann’s legs begin to shake. Ray leaves the room and is back within seconds with towels from the hall closet. He wraps her legs with them and places towels over the baby to keep her warm.

  A sharp knock at the back door causes Ray’s eyes to narrow and the line of his jaw tightens.

  Ruth Ann’s scalp prickles as Ray strides from the bathroom. She shuffles her hips, blood gushing as she moves, so she can see through the bathroom door – across the hallway into the kitchen, where she can just get a glimpse of Ray at the back door. He has it open, and she hears Old Man talking but can’t see him. Ray steps forward and pushes Old Man with one hand, likely on Old Man’s chest, from the angle of Ray’s arm. Pushes him back firmly, but not violently, out the door. She hears Ray say, “No, she’s not,” as he closes the door on Old Man.

  Ray returns to the bathroom and as Ruth Ann meets Ray’s gaze, her face turns hot. She gives an involuntary shudder. She knows by his look that he’ll make her pay for Old Man’s presence. She knows Ray well enough to understand that he’s calculating, now, just how to do this.

  Finally, he curls his lips back and says, “Clean this mess.” His gaze takes in the bloody and fluid-soaked towels; his look implies that this detritus from having the baby is something foul and obscene. He makes sure to only look at her and the surrounding scene in the bathroom – he purposely ignores the baby. He leaves the bathroom doorway and goes to the bedroom, where Ruth Ann can feel his presence, his keyed-up anger, radiating through the thin walls.

  Her breath comes in panicky waves. What now, what now? she asks herself. She shifts, the baby still in her arms, trying to get up to her knees. As she rises, a strong contraction delivers the placenta. She feels the cramping pain in her stomach as hot blood rushes between her legs. She realizes that her bleeding is more than what’s normal and lies back again, hopeful that reclining will help staunch the flow. Her muscles go weak and every bit of strength leaves her body.

  “Ray,” she calls out faintly. He should be able to hear her, even though her voice is small. “Ray, please. I need an ambulance,” she tries again.

  Another crisp knock at the back door brings Ray striding out of the bedroom and across the hallway. “That mother-fucking – I’ll kill him,” Ray barks at her as he stomps to the door. He grabs the doorknob and jerks the door open, ready to strike. But then his tense and sure body recoils.

  Ruth Ann can only imagine what he sees on the other side of the door. Does Old Man have a weapon? Is he threatening Ray just outside of her sightline?

  “What?” Ray demands, defiance in his voice.

  Ruth Ann thinks about Ray’s baseball bat, behind the speaker in the living room. She wants to warn Old Man. “Don’t,” she tries to call out, but there’s no power in her voice.

  There are loud male voices, more than one. She can’t make out their words. Has Old Man brought friends? Her neck muscles are painfully tense as she strains to see and hear what is happening. Her trembling arms fall to her sides and she’s too weak to raise them again, to protect the baby, still lying on her chest. The blood is thick, congealing on her legs but still moving in a steady stream from her uterus.

  “…Some sort of problem,” a male voice, closer now, cuts into the house.

  Ray takes a step back as the back door is pushed open. Ruth Ann expects to see Old Man enter. Instead she sees a volley of blue and grey; a yellow stripe down a dark pant leg makes her think of the track uniforms the older kids wore in school. For a second, she wonders why Old Man would wear his old school tracksuit to her house. She closes her eyes for a moment.

  “I have rights. I can say no,” Ray says.

  “No, sir. You can’t.” The male voice is firm.

  She opens her eyes as the yellow stripe comes through the kitchen and across the hallway, toward her. The black boots look familiar but she can’t quite place them. They’re speckled with small, perfect raindrops. Ruth Ann desperately tries to raise her arm, to tell the person to take the baby to a safe place, but she’s too weak.

  She hears static and a beep, followed by a woman’s radioed voice: “Unit twelve, we have confirmation.” The radio crackles and clicks. A hand is raised to turn the volume low.

  “Are you alright? Can you hear me?” the officer asks, standing over her, his hand still on the radio at his hip.

  “I want to go home,” Ruth Ann whispers. She closes her eyes and tries to listen. Through the ringing in her ears and the voices that make no sense to her now, Ruth Ann hears sirens, far away. Her mind drifts to a time when she was young, at home with her parents: warm amber light, a quilt made by her Kokum, and her father’s strong, wide hands around a chipped mug of hot tea with honey. The baby’s movements, its heartbeat next to her own, force Ruth Ann back to the present. The sirens seem closer now.

  Almost there, she thinks, willing her spirit to stay strong.

  She opens her eyes to see Old Man bending down by her side. He places one warm hand on her shoulder and the other on the baby’s back. Almost there.

  billy bird

  “You can stay if you like.”

  But Billy doesn’t like the curtain zipping shut, the drawers being yanked open, and Billy’s grandfather throwing his head from side to side on the pillow – bloated eyes, neck craning, my things my things – just before the nurse whips the sheets off to expose his stick limbs. She tugs the gown away and Billy’s Mooshum lies stiff in silent protest, as if to say he won’t do a thing to make this easier on any of them. Turned on his side, a patch of white gauze just above the buttocks is peeled back to show where the pressure of lying all day has broken open the old man’s skin to a crater the size of a grapefruit. Billy can see the hole goes right to the bone, edges raw and inflamed. Billy wonders when things got this bad, as if it might be possible to pinpoint a moment over the past twenty years when the decline started in earnest.

  The nurse gone, the woman in the next bed begins her scream again. Thigh-high stumps thrash beneath a thin white sheet and Billy doesn’t need to see it to know it’s happening just the way it’s happened every day for the last how many months or years. And the woman is ignored, her flacc
id grey hair pushed away from an afflicted full-moon face; her eyes search and of course no one comes. Billy’s grandfather groans low and deep and Billy wipes the old man’s crusty tears with a damp cloth. No less than eight beds, this is a mixed ward where modesty has been presumed irrelevant. Women and men are stripped and sponged, and when no family is present there seems little reason for privacy curtains. His grandfather’s silent weeping isn’t new. He’s been doing it for years – around the same time he stopped wanting to eat. Sometimes he used to laugh – slyly, like someone had told him a dirty joke.

  Billy Bird heard his Auntie call his grandfather an ugly word. A vegetable.

  Convince me, Billy thinks, that this is the man, the same man who, as a boy, saw his own beloved grampa attacked by a demented muskwa. The story Billy knows so well.

  “Tell me again Mooshum,” Billy whispers, his lips close to Mooshum’s ear.

  Billy’s been mad at his Mooshum for twenty years for not being able to tell him the stories.

  Tell me who I am Mooshum. Billy thinks.

  A Mooshum should tell a grandson the stories.

  Billy sees himself as part of a circle, part of a never-ending circle he shares with the grampas and grannies of his past. Each of them holds a fine red thread that reminds him of a fresh-spun spider silk, but a red one, and one that can’t be broken. His whole family is there sharing the circle with him, people he looks like, people he’s connected to, people whose traits he shares, people whose history is his own, grannies and grampas, Nêhiyaw and Métis, all connected by that silky red thread. Because of the circle, Billy grew up thinking of the muskwa story as being about himself and his own Mooshum – a whole two generations removed from the facts but not so removed from the truth in the mind of Billy.

  When his Mooshum was a boy, he saw his own grampa killed by a bear. In the season miyoskamiki, when the frogs will start their singing right before dusk, a great sickly bear burst into the small cabin the boy-Mooshum shared with his grampa. An enormous noise, followed by a great stink, entered with muskwa – the noise of wood splitting and hinges tearing, along with an angry bawl from the maddened bear. The stink was musky fur and something else that Mooshum didn’t know yet but later would identify as desperation. Boy-Mooshum crouched behind the wood box, and sent spiders scurrying. The scent of sap and fresh-cut wood enfolded him as the murderous look in muskwa’s eyes chilled his scalp like a sudden winter wind. The bear rose up ten feet in the air, towering over his grampa, the big man who boy-Mooshum had known all his life, now kiseyinisis, old and small in muskwa’s shadow.

  Grampa lashed out at the bear with a first pre-emptive strike. It seemed to boy-Mooshum that his grampa had himself turned into a muskwa, rising to slash the bear with the razor-sharp claws of a fire poker that tore half of muskwa’s face away with a single blow, sending him reeling. The animal shook his snout with such furious wonder that little Mooshum was splattered with a warm red cascade. Muskwa swiped one massive paw, belting out his fury in time with Grampa’s bodily thump as he was flung across the room easy, like an old muskrat pelt. The bear pounced and set to work, throttling Grampa until it seemed the bear would tear Grampa’s head off. Finally the bear stopped after seconds that seemed like forever, great steaming breaths escaping from his massive snout. Boy-Mooshum watched as muskwa turned to look directly into his eyes. It was then that Mooshum felt the fiery surge spread as he wet himself and muskwa lumbered his way before hurtling through the open cabin door and into the woods. The onipahtakew, murderer, was gone.

  Mooshum remained behind the wood box until well into the night, unable to loosen his grip on the rough-hewn boards, tiny red spiders zigzagging across his fingers. The door of the cabin was torn clean off, and it was the angry buzzing of flies around Grampa’s body that brought Mooshum to his senses enough to be afraid of other animals who might come for the smell of fresh blood. He found the courage to move from his hiding place and fix the battered door over its frame and build a large fire. He spent the first lonely night sitting beside the body, vainly trying to prevent ugly blue-black flies from laying eggs in Grampa’s flesh. In the morning, boy-Mooshum prayed to the east and the eagle, as his grampa had taught him, before dressing the body in a shroud made from some of Grampa’s clothing. Finally, he left to follow the road that led to his parents and siblings. They returned together and held a three-day wake before burying his grampa behind the cabin.

  It was this story of his Mooshum’s grampa that made Billy so mad to watch the bit-by-bit, year-after-year stripping down of Billy’s Mooshum. Tell me the stories Mooshum. A Mooshum should tell the stories. For twenty years, this plundering had been occurring, sometimes while Billy had been away in jail where he couldn’t see it, and other times right under his nose.

  At night, after one of his visits, Billy would consider the turns in his own life – his name well known by local cops and JPs, an unhappy drunk to be counted on to smash a few skulls after last call at the Prairie Inn or the Embassy. But then a thing had happened between him and Shelby. First, Shelby made it known she was special, different from the girls he usually went with. There was no question about that and just because she knew about his past in jail didn’t mean he ever wanted her to have to visit him there. Second, Billy heard one night he was going to be a father, and it was what he needed, not as an excuse to slop away another twenty-six, but to find himself tired of bar rooms and split-knuckle hangovers. He got a punishing job on a construction site that offered all the overtime he was willing to take and he worked his body into submission until he no longer craved a drink, was too exhausted to lust after any fight. He resolved that he would be a good father and when that unborn baby died one night in an oily hemorrhage, he still denied it as an excuse to pick up a bottle. All that time, his Mooshum was there in the Watershed Rehab Centre, mashing his head into the pillow and laughing slyly.

  In the public bathroom down the hall from Mooshum’s room, Billy Bird looks through the slits of his fingers and sees his knees wrapped in the denim of his jeans, the toes of his runners, ordinary, as if they’re patiently waiting for him to be finished. Billy’s run himself down, run it all out in throaty sobs that caught and choked like barbs tearing up his insides, and he thinks he might be finished now.

  Looking through his fingers, he thinks about putting his hand to a light, like a flashlight, and how a person can see through it to blood and dark and creases, crimson fingers laced with veins and nerves and what else Billy can’t remember. But he knows as he sits on the toilet with his pants on and looks at his fingers from this close-up view, mashed against his face, that he hasn’t done that flashlight trick since he was a little boy and he should, because he couldn’t feel more like a child than he does right now, helpless in this public toilet, looking through his fingers, no idea what he’ll do next.

  The usual thing is to go home, to his woman, to the home he’s made, at last, with one woman. Where he can finally finally convince himself that she’ll be there when he gets back, patient and calm. He wonders what he ever did in his life to deserve Shelby, besides nothing. Seven years they’ve been together and he hopes he won’t go fucking it up.

  But these times with Billy’s Mooshum, they make him low, and Shelby is just intuitive. She knows how to wait him out like a bad cold or bitter weather while he hides his head under the hood of the Chev. He tinkers and slams and mutters and bangs at the altar of the Chev and pretty soon her lack of intervention soothes the sore, hard lump in his chest, below his throat that’s raw, and the little boy inside Billy slowly loosens his grip like he’s had him by the balls all this time and Billy didn’t notice until the moment when he got let go. And then Billy can go inside and take a sip of Shelby that eases the knot down to a softer spot, where it doesn’t pinch and bind so bad.

  A little earlier, he watched his Mooshum watch him as he touched Mooshum’s stuff. Mooshum growled at Billy but that was okay because by now Billy’s used to it. And Mooshum pitched his head about on the pillow. Billy knows
his Mooshum likes to keep a close eye on his things, the dozen or so things that belong to the old man in this whole world. Pyjama tops and bottoms, folded neatly into the drawers, plastic framed eyeglasses, twenty years out of date, and a framed photo of Billy’s family lined up in his Auntie’s backyard, smiling into the sun, the brown fence behind them like a backdrop. Billy touches and messes with all of Mooshum’s worldly possessions to agitate the old man, to see if Mooshum is still in there, somewhere. And then Billy comes in here to the public toilet to do his secret weeping thing that’s probably not so secret. Those nurses must have seen it all before.

  In the early days at the Rehab Centre, Billy’s Mooshum would masturbate earnestly, making deliberate eye contact with the nurses, his one good hand working furiously.

  convince me convince me convince me

  (Convince me I’m still alive convince me I’ve something to live for, even this.) Hopeful good eye casting about.

  convince me convince me

  “That’s enough now, Mister Bird,” the nurse’s singsong pleasant voice suggesting you’re not shocking me, little-boy-old-man as she took his hand from under the covers, his one good hand, while he giggled and grinned so she had to wipe the drool. Tucking him in, straightening him out, keeping him tight, smoothing wrinkled sheets and applying comfort like a salve with cool, competent hands to hover over and offer blessing to a big full-grown-man-child.

  That’s what’s become of his Mooshum, Billy’s grandfather, one arm frozen for all time in a rigid bend, hand a down-turned claw, skin so fine his bones can be seen right there by anyone who cares to look. None of it made any better by the nurses who try to feed Mooshum as he clamps his lips shut to the mush. Billy tries to get him to eat too, but hasn’t had much luck, though he’s willing to stick with it longer. Some days the old man will take the water, but Billy can’t deny the dry smell of tepid breath, and now they say he’s lost another twelve pounds.