by Ann Eriksson
Marcel washed up the dishes, stooping over the low sink I had installed when I bought the house. “You want to talk?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” I answered, my body drained of energy. “I need to sleep.”
On my way to my bedroom I paused outside the study and pushed open the door a crack. The light from the hallway spilled across Rainbow’s sleeping form. I tiptoed inside and sat on a chair, gathered her pathetic pile of clothes into my lap, and wondered how to explain abandonment to a six-year-old.
Discrete inquiries revealed Rainbow Cassidy did not exist; no certificate on record. The grandfather as tangible as Santa Claus. Grace bought her a wardrobe. “I never had new clothes before,” Rainbow said, admiring a pair of brand new overalls in the mirror. We fixed up the study into a make-shift bedroom. Marcel, Rainbow, and I became an odd unit, drawing more stares than usual when we walked along the waterfront near my home. Rainbow delighted in my miniaturized kitchen and the preponderance of stools arranged about the rooms for reaching high shelves.
“It’s like playing house.” She giggled at Marcel, who was perched on a small chair at the kitchen table. “Marcel’s like the giant with the little Putians.” We went out the next day and bought him an extra-big chair at a thrift store.
On the third morning at breakfast she asked me point-blank, “Am I going to live with you until Mary comes back?”
I stopped spreading butter on my toast. “Yes,” I answered cautiously.
“Is she going to come back?”
“Of course she is,” I said, guilty for the lie, but unprepared for the conversation I had intended to broach at the opportune time.
Rainbow broached it for me. She swirled her spoon through her milky porridge. “What if she doesn’t?” she said quietly.
I pulled Rainbow’s chair toward me across the floor. Precocious child. I tipped her chin up with a finger. She deserved the truth. I breathed deeply. Could I keep the commitment I was about to make? “I don’t know where your mother’s gone. I don’t know if she’s coming back. But you can stay here as long as you want.”
Rainbow slipped from her chair, threw her arms around my neck, and burst into tears. “Can I go to school?” she wailed.
“Yes, but—”
“With books and pencils and a lunch box?”
“Books and pencils and paints and a ruler too,” I said, feeling Marcel’s attention on me. “But no lunch box. You’ll have to home-school, like you did with Mary.”
Rainbow pushed away. “But why?” She rubbed her wet cheek on her shoulder. “Home-schooling was boring. Mary never taught me how to do anything.”
“Marcel and Grace and I will try to do it better,” I said. “You can learn whatever you like. But, honey, to stay with us, you have to home-school.”
She scowled, but indicated her agreement with a dip of her head.
“And you must not tell anyone your mother has gone away.”
Rainbow didn’t ask why, didn’t protest; she fixed her gaze on me and dipped her head once more. She didn’t mention Mary again.
Marcel and I took Rainbow out and bought her a secondhand desk and two bags of school supplies. She spent the rest of the day organizing her school room, singing while she worked.
19
I listened to the doctor’s blunt announcement with disbelief.
“No nasty viruses, no STDs”—she checked the clipboard in her hands—“but it appears you’re pregnant.”
“I’m what?” I managed to choke out the few words I could muster at the news. I gaped at the doctor, then at my abdomen, which was draped in a flowered print gown. What did I expect? A hand-shaped bulge, my belly inflating like a balloon as I watched. “How?”
“I expect the usual way,” she said wryly. “Are you in a new relationship?”—she examined the chart in her hand—“Is that why you asked for these STD tests?”
I was unable to tear my attention away from my flatter-than-flat stomach. “Are you sure?”
“We found traces of hormone in your urine. If you want, you can confirm it with a home test. Come in next week and I’ll do a prenatal physical. Any questions?”
Of course I knew how babies were made, for people, for trees, for mites. The union of a sperm and an egg; in plants: pollen and ovule. The process similar no matter how big or how small the species. The sperm of a blue whale and the sperm of a human were both invisible without the aid of a microscope. An African elephant started life the same way as a deer mouse. The largest species of trees on earth, the sequoia and the redwood, both developed from gametes that could sit undetected by the naked eye on the tip of a human finger. A male mite deposited a small packet of sperm, the spermatophore, which the female collected at her leisure. Fertilization in an old-growth conifer happened high up in the canopy. Windblown pollen from the male cone settled on the female seed cone, and over an entire year’s span of time, the sperm moved in through the pollen tube to the ovule where it met with the egg. When released, the fertilized seed drifted to earth where it landed on a rock and dried up, or fell into a swamp to rot, or, if lucky, settled on a decomposing log, a patch of soil, or a gravel bank and when the time was right, the temperature warm enough, the humidity high enough, the ground fertile enough, the embryo opened and a seedling emerged.
The doctor rose and opened the door. “And once we’re sure, let’s set up an appointment to discuss your options.”
My brain felt like mush.
“You might want to consider genetic testing.”
“Testing?”
“You must know it’s possible to test the fetus for achondroplasia. And”—she consulted the chart again—“if you are considering an abortion, you’ll want to make a decision soon.”
She left and I sat on the examining table, staring at the purple print flowers sprinkled across my lap. I hadn’t needed a year for the microscopic sperm to wriggle its way to the microscopic egg but a few seconds of folly on a dark night in a rainforest. The fertilized egg didn’t wait dormant until the substrate was wet enough, warm enough, or fertile enough. I was all of the above and the single egg divided once, twice, again and again to form an embryo, implanted in the wall of my uterus, growing and developing minute by minute. A silent secret mystery. I could imagine the miniature seedling of a spruce producing a fifty-tonne giant taller than a twenty-storey building, but couldn’t bring myself to picture a fetus, another human growing inside my body. I counted back to the unmistakable moment of conception. Summer solstice. Four weeks and six days.
How could the beginning of life be a silent event? One would think this significant affair would at least send up a brief trumpet blast or a bar from Mozart. A girl in my high school gave birth at fourteen. Her family assumed she was gaining weight. How could they not know? Grace claimed she knew of her pregnancies within two days of conception with all three of her children.
How could I not know?
I sat with the thought until the nurse knocked on the door, needing the room for the next patient.
• • •
I waited outside the elevator on the main floor of the hospital. My stomach churned, my head ached with a thousand doubts and questions.
“Faye Pearson?”
“Yes?” I turned toward the voice, dazed, and tried to place the face of the man.
“Sergeant Lange from the Duncan RCMP.” He held out his hand. “Remember?”
“Oh yes,” I replied. “I didn’t recognize you. You’re not in your uniform.” He seemed more like a grandfather in a casual golf shirt and tan cotton pants than an officer of the law.
“My mother had surgery on Monday,” he said. “Listen, I’d like to talk to your partner, Mr. Taylor.”
“He’s in a coma.” I punched the button again, reluctant to get into a conversation where I needed my wits.
The sergeant stepped back to allow an orderly to manoeuvre a wheelchair toward the next elevator. “Do you mind if I call you Faye?”
I shrugged.
“I h
ave to apologize.”
“About what?” I said, taken aback by the statement.
“I checked you out. Other than the blockade you’re clean, more than clean. I’m afraid I didn’t believe the story you told me. We examined the arrow that was used to shoot him. The bolt, I mean.”
“And?”
“The rubber tip was sawed off and the end sharpened.”
I steadied myself, horrified at the thought of Paul’s assailant methodically whittling the tip away to a lethal point, the crime premeditated.
“Do you have any more information?”
I shook my head. I felt nauseous, wanting to escape, and was relieved when the bulb above the elevator lit up and the door opened with a ding. “I need to go,” I said.
He fished a card out of his pocket. “Call me if anything new turns up.” I stepped into the elevator. “One more thing”—he propped the door open with his foot—“about the picture in the newspaper. The constable’s behaviour was out of line.”
Heat crept up my neck and into my cheeks. “Thank you.” I stood on my tiptoes and pressed the top button, feeling less than vindicated, my thoughts more focused on the future than the past.
“Nobody deserves treatment like that,” he said as the elevator door rumbled closed between us.
I silently filled in the rest of his sentence. Not even a dwarf.
I sat in the corner of Paul’s room and watched his chest rise and fall. I pressed the palm of my hand to my stomach. How big was a thirty-four-day embryo? Did it have fingers, a nose?
Corrie came in to check the monitors and change the IV bag. “Hi, Faye,” she said. I wondered if a nurse could sense the momentous alteration in my body, but Corrie chatted about Paul’s vital signs and the weather while she worked, then departed with a wave, leaving me alone again with Paul in the hiss and beep of the monitors and my own private earsplitting shock.
I chewed on my bottom lip. “I’m pregnant,” I said aloud to the silent room. His featureless face didn’t flinch. “What do you think?”
Of course he’d be staggered by the news. Urging for an abortion. What man in his position wouldn’t? He’d always talked about having children one day when he met the perfect woman. I moved to the end of the bed and peered over the edge of the crisp white sheets at the traction apparatus on his leg. I wasn’t that woman. I had never anticipated having children, let alone a life partner, a husband. What if the baby was a dwarf? Destined to a life of being different. Of teasing and stares. Of not being able to reach the elevator buttons. Or sit on a chair without making a production of it. I’d marched through life acting like none of those things mattered. But could I put a child into the same position? I paced the room, then climbed on the stool and studied Paul’s face. What if the baby was like its father? With a mother who couldn’t lift and carry her own child past infancy? I tried to imagine parenting with Paul, our child toddling on unsteady legs back and forth between us, but the image evaporated before I could hold it steady in my mind.
On the way home, I bought a pregnancy test. The clerk lifted her eyebrows as she put the package in a bag, as if dubious about the implications of my purchase. After dinner, I locked myself in the bathroom. Rainbow haunted the hallway outside the door like a restless wolf, her radar uncanny. Without a doubt she would know the instant of conception of her own babies when the time came. I sat on the toilet lid and read the instructions on the box. Simple. One didn’t need a doctorate in chemistry to pee on a stick. Arms longer than my own would help. I tried to ignore the intermittent tapping on the door.
“Dr. Faye?”
“I’m busy. Go find Marcel if you need help.” Rainbow flopped onto the floor outside the bathroom with a thump and a sigh. The scoundrel. Did I want a child of my own? One I couldn’t give back? I climbed half-naked into the bathtub, set the water glass in the bottom, hitched up my shirt, squatted and peed. Five minutes later my answer appeared, a faint flush on the end of the stick.
Pink . . . for pregos. Up the stump.
In trouble.
20
When I stepped through the door, the chatter and laughter in the classroom fell into silence. I heard the crinkle of newspaper being shoved into backpacks. My famous cover photo, no doubt. A blaze of scarlet filled the view outside the window, a Japanese maple in the university commons. Deciduous trees were rare in the rainforest. It was a splendid tree, but I missed the giants, missed my time in the field with Paul. I faced the group of summer seminar students from the biology department who had gathered to hear me speak about my research. The chair of the department had moved the date for my seminar up to allow me to squeeze it in before my trial, my fall courses cancelled. I hadn’t been in front of a class in months.
All eyes were on me. No question they knew about my arrest. Many of the two dozen faces were familiar; a number had taken my undergraduate level entomology classes. I recognized Matt, a tall, thin, overly earnest boy I’d supervised for his master’s thesis on ants, and Margie who worked on soil beetles up north. A few students were new to the department, doubly curious about their dwarf professor. At least I was certain they were in the dark about my pregnancy, a secret between my doctor and me. I intended to keep it that way.
I moved the podium aside, the stand far too tall. The room assigned to me was not the usual lecture theatre where the desks cascaded upward in a fan and all the students could see me with ease. This room was an older traditional classroom, small and square, the floor a single level. When I began teaching in classrooms like this, I had used a step stool, but it proved problematic, too limiting to my movement around the room, to the blackboard, the overhead projector, to engage with my students. Instead, I usually sat on my desk to lecture. But today I would stand, not caring if the students had to make an effort and peer around the bodies in front of them, crane their necks to see over the heads of their neighbours. I could imagine the gossip. University Prof Arrested at Anti-logging Standoff.
My slides were already set up by the audio-visual technician. I collected the laser pointer from the desk and asked the student nearest the door to dim the lights, another to pull the blinds. I flashed a slide up on the screen. “My team and I have worked in Otter Valley for three . . .” I choked up at the photo of Paul in climbing gear ascending WR-3-3 on a rope. I paused to compose myself, to steer away from the onslaught of tears that seemed to be waiting in the wings ever since I’d left the doctor’s office two days ago. An embarrassment I didn’t need. “We’ve been in Otter Valley for three seasons,” I repeated. “Our main focus of study is oribatid mites in the canopy of ancient rainforest western redcedar trees. Ancient, in the temperate west coast rainforest, is defined as two hundred and fifty years or older.” I could hear a rustle of papers, the click of pens.
“No notes today. You’re not going to be examined on this,” I said testily, then regretted my tone. “Sit back and listen. I’ll take questions later.” I flipped to the next slide, a frontal view of a mite. “And for those of you who don’t already know or who have forgotten what I taught you in your Bugs 340 class”—a smatter of laughter—“oribatid mites are a group of soil-dwelling mites in the order Arthropoda. Why are they important ecologically?”
Margie raised her hand; the girl was one of the brightest students I had encountered in my career. “Oribatid mites break down old plant material and recycle the nutrients back into the soil.”
“Correct.” I paced back and forth as I talked, not usual for me, but today I seemed unable to stand still. “Without oribatids and other mites, living plants would not have access to nutrients and could not survive, and we all know what that would mean. Plants as primary producers support all other life.”
The next slide was one Paul had taken of me in the crotch of a cedar, my arm buried up to the shoulder in a deep pocket of suspended soil. “My primary study in Otter Valley,” I explained, “focused on mites in suspended soils. Suspended soils are accumulations of decomposed plant debris over time in depressions and crotch
es in trees.”
“How old is the suspended soil in the picture?” a student I didn’t recognize asked from the back row.
“An accumulation of suspended soil like the one in this slide is deeper than my arm is long.” I held out my arm to demonstrate, suddenly conscious of the attention on my shortened limb and the whispers from the back of the room. I raised my head and the whispering ceased. “This one’s built up over a period of hundreds of years. In fact, we don’t find appreciable accumulations of soils until the trees are well into the ancient category.” I bent to fish a soil corer out of my briefcase and felt a sharp pain below my navel. I straightened slowly, my hand over the spot. The baby? I waited but nothing more. I pushed my concern aside. It can’t be bigger than an almond.
I turned back to the class to find the students all gawking at me again. I cleared my throat and held up the corer. “This is a homemade soil corer, used to take samples from suspended soils in the canopy and from the ground. What did we find?” The next slide showed a series of charts and graphs. “One hundred and thirty-eight species of oribatid mites in ground and suspended soil samples. This bar on the graph”—I pointed at the chart with the laser—“are the ground mites and here the canopy mites. The top section of the bars show those exclusive to that particular habitat. Forty-two out of ninety-four canopy species were found only in the canopy. The remaining species found in both canopy and on the ground were collected from the lowest branches down. Not in the upper canopy. What does this tell us?”
“The soil conditions in the canopy are different than those on the ground?” a girl in the back called out.
“Yes. What else?”
No one answered.
“How did the canopy mites unique to the canopy get into the canopy?” I prompted.
After another brief silence, Margie ventured an answer. “Well, if the canopy mites aren’t found on the ground, I guess they couldn’t have crawled up? And they don’t fly. Wind?”