Falling From Grace

by Ann Eriksson

  “I wouldn’t miss one for the world,” she said, then winked. “Great place to meet men.”

  The hotel restaurant was crowded and noisy with little people, many who called out greetings to Bryan as we made our way to a vacant window booth. I was aware of the eyes of several women following my every move. Did I have to stand on a table and make an announcement? Leah seemed like a talker. She’d set them straight.

  “They all think we’re a couple,” I said irritably, sliding onto the padded bench.

  “Who cares what they think?” he said. “Besides, it’s great to be in the company of an accomplished and elevated intellect.”

  I grimaced. “Are size jokes popular at these things?”

  He lifted his eyebrows and smiled. “Huge.”

  I groaned. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your chances.”

  He handed me a menu and sought my eyes. “What are my chances?”

  “You have to ask?”

  He frowned, then spread his hands in contrition. “Can’t fault me for being an optimist.”

  “You’re a nice guy—”

  He finished my sentence. “But you’re not attracted to me.”

  “I didn’t say that,” I said, “but I am pregnant.”

  He dipped his head apologetically. “Point taken.”

  “Leah told me you wanted children.” Did I detect a flash of regret across his face? “Under any circumstances?” I continued. “With the risk of the health problems associated with dwarfism?”

  He sat back and pondered my question carefully before answering. “Any child can have health problems.” He paused. “A dwarf baby would make me the happiest man in the world.”

  “A dwarf baby?”

  “I would abort a normal-sized fetus.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, shocked. “Why?”

  He paused again. “I couldn’t handle having a child who’s not like me.”

  “Let me understand this,” I said. “If your partner got pregnant and the fetus tested to be average height, you would want to abort?”

  “Yes.”

  The certainty in his voice infuriated me. “But there are lots of people here—little people—with average-height children.”

  “That’s their option,” he said. “Some dwarf couples terminate if the fetus is a dwarf. Genetic testing has given us choices.”

  “What about the mother? What about her choices?”

  “We’d have discussed it before we ever got seriously involved,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Was that why Leah hadn’t married him? I felt sick. The waiter was on his way over to take our order. Heat surged through my body. I leaned in toward Bryan. “What if she didn’t realize how she’d feel? What if she changed her mind once she was pregnant?” I said sharply. “What if she discovered she didn’t care one way or the other if her baby was a dwarf or a giant. That the fetus growing inside her was what she wanted after all.” I must have been shouting. People had turned in their seats to stare. I lowered my voice. “Would you leave her?”

  Bryan watched me carefully. He placed his hands on the table in front of him and focused on them for a long moment. When he met my eyes, his cheeks were moist with tears. “No”—his voice cracked—“no, I wouldn’t.”

  • • •

  The conference room was packed, wheelchairs lined up along the walls. Dr. Sanford, an orthopaedic surgeon from New York who worked exclusively with people of short stature, spoke from a podium at the front of the room, a PowerPoint presentation projected onto a screen behind him. Bryan and I stood at the back and listened to the doctor outline the pros and cons of limb lengthening, a painful, drawn-out procedure involving the breaking of bones, and a metal brace called a fixator that reminded me of a medieval torture device and involved the gradual turning of screws. Bryan shifted beside me. I was still shaken by our lunchtime conversation. I wasn’t sure what had happened. After my outburst, we had ordered and eaten our lunch in silence. But I no longer felt angry, more of a confusion at my own words. What the mother wanted.

  When he finished, Dr. Sanford announced he would hold office hours in an adjacent room. People rushed for the door. “Here’s your chance,” Bryan urged.

  By the time I got there, people were lined up down the hall. I stood behind a young average-height couple with a baby.

  “You fine here alone?” Bryan asked. “I’ve got a floor hockey game.” We made plans to meet before the banquet and he hurried away from me toward the elevator. I leaned against the wall. What was I going to ask this doctor? He was a surgeon, not an obstetrician. The baby ahead peered at me over his mother’s shoulder. Or a paediatrician. The child had sky blue eyes and blond curly hair that reminded me of Cedar. His flat face, high forehead, and large head tagged him as an achondroplastic dwarf. I waved at him and he chortled happily in response. His mother turned around. She couldn’t have been more that twenty.

  “Cute,” I said.

  “His name’s Josiah,” she answered swinging the baby around to her hip to talk. “I’m Carly.” Carly and her husband, John, had joined Little People after they had Josiah. Josiah needed an operation to correct spinal stenosis, a spinal column too small to carry the spinal cord. She brushed her hand over his curls. “He’s the best baby.”

  All around were wheelchairs and crutches, misshapen legs, hopeful faces. I brushed my abdomen with a finger. Would my baby have problems? I scanned the long line of people. I’d been wrong earlier in the lobby, these people weren’t clones. Many had other forms of dwarfism. The woman behind me was as well proportioned as Paul, the height of Rainbow. She was talking to a man in a fancy electric wheelchair, his head the size of a baseball. Dwarfism occurred in more than two hundred forms, many of them here at the conference, in this hallway. The people around me were as different as creek gravel. Individuals with unique characteristics, personalities, quirks, passions, and values. Like any gathering of people.

  Carly was sitting on the floor, nursing Josiah, love and dedication radiating from her like a sun. Genetic testing had the potential to decrease human diversity; how many of these people waiting here with me might not have been born if their parents had known what they were before they knew who they were. Would a world without little people be a better world? Without Josiah? Leah? Bryan? Without the baby I carried? I sucked in my breath. Without me?

  I wished Carly and John the best of luck and left the hotel in search of trees. I found a neighbourhood park a few blocks away with a few squat ornamental spruce, a handful of birch, but trees nonetheless. I sat on a bench under their thin canopy. I thought about Paul, the damage he had endured, the long recovery ahead. I couldn’t bring myself to add death to injury. I’d have to confess. To Grace. Paul. I couldn’t imagine the implications for my work. But lots of women did it. And on their own. I placed both hands over my belly. Still too early to feel anything. “What do you think, baby?” I whispered. “Will I do for a mother?”

  • • •

  Dinner was a lavish affair, banquet seating, lots of wine flowing, everyone dressed to the nines. If Bryan cared about my fashion sense and lack of exposed skin, he didn’t show it. He sat beside me through the meal, attentive, guiding the conversation with his friends at the table. Dan was black and a proportionate dwarf taller than I. “Call me what you want, but never call me midget,” he said when introduced. Leah, his date for the night, poked at his leg with a crutch. “Dan’s our resident comedian.” Leah looked stunning, makeup, turquoise earrings, her dress showing her curves. “I can’t believe you can walk in those shoes,” I had teased earlier as we’d dressed for the evening. “I ski, don’t I?” She had drawn a line of lipstick across her mouth, then looked askance at my conservative pant suit. “You didn’t have anything else to bring?” “My high school prom dress?” I had laughed. She’d unbuttoned my jacket and draped a slinky red silk scarf around my neck.

  Next to me sat Phyllis, an accountant originally from White Rock who was married to Mark, six feet tall and a nur
se at a seniors home in Tacoma. They had five children, three average-sized, two dwarfs. Word must have spread about Bryan’s availability; woman flocked to the table to claim dances, in dresses that made Leah’s look like a nun’s habit.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the conversation; the banal familiarity distracted me, the gathering no different from a group of my colleagues at a scientific conference, with their talk of personal issues, politics, sports, their last vacation. By the time the music started, I was wiped. I watched the parade pass by, the giggling girls in their backless dresses, all bums and boobs, the men in tailored tuxes.

  Bryan leaned over. “Dance?”

  I cradled my cheek on my palms. “Too tired.”

  He dropped his lower lip in a pout, but before he could say anything more, a hand reached in and grabbed his. He smiled apologetically. I dismissed him with a wave. “Go.” The woman, a big-haired blonde in a mini-skirt that showed her bowed legs, towed him onto the dance floor. Gutsy. I hadn’t shown my legs in decades. The lights dimmed, a disco ball lit up sending out undulating flashes of colour. Out on the dance floor couples gyrated and swayed, short couples, mixed-height couples, a woman the size of a doll sat in the lap of a man in a wheelchair, spinning around in circles. Leah shuffled side to side with her crutches, face aglow. A terrible beauty. The music slowed and the dancers moved together, arms not reaching, hips rocking. Phyllis leaned her cheek on Mark’s stomach, his hands tenderly on her shoulders. Another man picked up his date and they swayed together in an intimate embrace, her feet dangling at his knees. I watched Bryan guide his partner in an elegant twirl. He was a good man. Easygoing, kind. He’d make someone a fine husband. But not me. I gathered my bag. The disco lights were giving me a headache. I missed Paul, Rainbow, even Marcel. I craved the smell of trees. I pushed through the pulsing crowd toward the door. As I waited for the elevator I watched a pair of short-stature teenagers necking in a doorway. Their sweet raw passion made me turn away. I knew I couldn’t live in Bryan’s little world.

  I woke the next morning to find Leah’s bed hadn’t been slept in. I left her scarf and a note on the side table. Best of luck with Dan. Bryan was in the dining room eating French toast with the blonde woman who now wore jeans and a blouse, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Bryan introduced her as Michelle. I pulled him aside. “I need to go home.”

  His eyes searched mine. He glanced over at Michelle, who watched us intently, then turned back to me. “Did you find what you came for?”

  I kissed him on the cheek. “In more ways than one,” I said. “Thank you.”

  On the ferry home, I took an aisle seat, oblivious to the passing islands. I neglected to scan for whales, watch for seabirds. I’m going to be a mother. A journey into the unknown. My head spun with a mixture of dismay and yearning. I’d once climbed in the California redwoods with a colleague from Humboldt County. Monty introduced me to secret trees known only to a select few researchers who feared a fascinated public and the recreational tree-climbing community would love the giants to death. They’d named the Titans after the Greek gods—Atlas, Pleiades, Kronos— redwoods more massive than any other living organism on earth, older than Christianity. Their canopy crowns supported complex ecosystems of interwoven limbs, where trees lived on trees, sprouting in the deep suspended soils high up in the crotches and crevices of the mammoths. I took a break at the hundred-metre marker on my way up Atlas and snacked on a handful of blueberries. A bumblebee buzzed past my head. Not far above, a Douglas-fir seedling taller than Paul grew from the redwood trunk, its roots drilled deep into the bark for nourishment. A pocket garden of moss and lichen the size of a birdbath hung beyond my reach. Above the fir, I unclipped from the main rope and entered the thick crown assemblage, swinging like a monkey from branch to branch, tree to tree on a length of rope and carabiners called a motion lanyard. I threaded my way through the dense tangle of wood and greenery that housed a whole community of species that never touched the ground: salamanders and squirrels, birds, epiphytic lichens and fungi. Millions of bugs. The redwood canopy overwhelmed me with excitement mixed with apprehension, the possibility for new discovery, fear of the unknown. A golden cache of biodiversity, an enchanted forest, a mysterious realm, a dangerous and wonderful place. After a time I stopped to get my bearings and realized I could no longer tell what direction I’d come from, my point of entry out of sight, and realized, in the tangle of life, I could easily become lost.

  24

  Paul came home. He moved into the guest bedroom, Marcel bunking with friends from jail. My focus shifted from hospital to home; my days spent observing Paul, his slow recovery like the opening of a bud.

  We walked. Paul and I, sometimes Rainbow. Paul on crutches in a shaky, swinging gait from the guest bedroom to the bathroom and back to the bed. When able to make the circuit—living room, kitchen, dining room, hallway—without collapsing, forehead covered with sweat, he ventured out into the yard and sat for long hours on the garden bench watching the juncos and finches at the feeder. At times he retreated to the darkened bedroom complaining of headaches, but always game to try a few steps more the next day. I thanked the universe his spirit hadn’t gone missing in the limbo-land of his coma. When tired, he garbled his speech, his thoughts confused, and it worried me. As he became more aware of the world, I told him stories about the forest activists and events at the university. I described the tardigrades, the water bears, and how Rainbow wanted to pour water on him to wake him up. His expression dazed, he smiled because I smiled and I stopped trying to make him happy. After a couple of weeks, he walked and talked with greater ease, and we left the yard to hobble back and forth along the street.

  When he graduated to a cane, we went in search of trees. The bigger the better. Up the road to Beacon Hill Park, where garden specimens of redwoods towered in the middle of manicured lawns. Paul rested his cheek on the stringy rust-coloured bark; tears streamed down his cheeks and for the first time since his injury he said my name. “Faye.”

  I held on to the moment like treasure.

  I waited until we walked in Mt. Douglas Park among the old second-growth cedar and fir to tell him about my arrest and sentencing, the loss of the research site, the buffer logged. He stretched out on his back in the middle of the trail and squinted up at the spreading branches of the canopy high above until the pain in his head subsided. He sat up and snapped a branch in two. “Bastards,” he said, although the “ards” trailed off in a slur, which made him stab one of the sticks into the dirt.

  Who shot Paul? The investigation had stagnated. “We’re working on it” was the response I received from the police. I suspected the magnitude of the protest, the subsequent arrests, and the mass trials had overshadowed the shooting, another detail in a river of lawlessness teeming with chaos.

  Sergeant Lange showed sympathy but little encouragement. “We haven’t got much to go on,” he explained. “No weapon other than a broken arrow, no fingerprints, no suspects. I’m sorry.”

  No sign of the crossbow. I had confirmed that the bolt belonged to me, its blunt rubber tip neatly sawn off and carved to a point with a knife. The few loggers questioned produced alibis. The majority of forest defenders suspected the crime was committed by Don Ransom, the disgruntled logger who threatened them with the wrench, the man who’d tried to fall Jen’s tree. His wife suffered from an undisclosed illness—cancer, M.S., the doctors weren’t sure—the fellow famous for his short fuse. He insisted he was home in bed at the time of the attack, the claim corroborated by his wife.

  “He’s lying. The guy’s crazy,” Jen insisted. “I saw his face when he attacked my tree with the saw. He didn’t care if I died.”

  “It makes sense, he must have done it. Trashing the camp, stealing the crossbow, harassing the tree-sitters, shooting Paul, all of it,” Chris added.

  I doubted Ransom knew Paul’s location, kilometres from the tree-sit. I hadn’t told a soul about our plan to film the murrelets.

  On Remembrance Day, Paul
threw his cane in the trash and Rainbow and I took him in search of ancient rainforest. We packed a picnic and drove west through Sooke along the coast road to China Beach. The public trail led through old spruce and hemlock forest to the sea. The weak fall sun competed with the shifting cloud cover, the sea frosted with white caps. Paul limped along the trail, stopping frequently to rest. “I can’t wait to get back up there.” He pointed into the canopy high above his head. “Out of purgatory.”

  “Your leg might heal enough to climb by spring.” I offered up the tidbit of hope.

  “The doctor says it’s doing well, but he thinks climbing will be too painful. I’ll use the other leg.” He worked his fingers into his shoulder. “This hurts like hell.”

  I had observed him in the basement working out: leg lifts, pull-ups, face streaming with sweat and contorted with pain. Difficult to watch but his determination was heartening. At Paul’s last medical assessment, the doctor had expressed amazement at the speed of his recovery. “Head injuries often take two to three years before the patient regains fluent speech, the ability to think through issues,” he’d explained. “Paul’s already talking well.”

  We hunkered out of the wind in the shelter of a huge driftwood root wad high on the beach. Paul and I huddled under a blanket and ate sandwiches while Rainbow played barefoot along the edge of the surf, running onto the shimmering wet sand with each receding wave, scampering back toward land as the next wave crested and bubbled and boiled after her. Small polished stones clattered and tumbled in the surf. In spite of the cold, she stood in the retreating water, the sand sucking her feet down, body reflected in the shiny film of moisture remaining.

  “No water above your ankles,” I warned, although I had a pack of spare clothes in the back of the car.

  “Nothing from Mary?” Paul asked.

  I was unsure whether he wanted to know for Rainbow’s sake or for himself. “Not a word.”