Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“Oh yeah?”

“You’re beautiful,” says Hil. “I hope you don’t mind … I’ve been using you.”

“Be my guest.”

Warm silence.

From upstairs comes a sleepy cry.

“Maggie’s up, I should go before she wakes Matthew.”

“She’s still waking up at night?”

“Yeah.” Martyred sigh .

“Even without the morning nap?”

“I better go.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too.”

“Wait, when’re your parents coming?”

“I don’t know, soon.”

“Let me know.”

“Why? It’s like early next week sometime. Or late this week.”

“I know, but … I know it’s not nothing when you see them.”

They’ve had some of their worst fights on the heels of visits with her parents, no matter how nice a time it has been — why does Hil have to dredge that up now?

“Don’t worry, Hil, you won’t even be here.”

“That’s not what I mean, love.”

She has braced herself for archness, but Hil’s tone is … kind. She stiffens. “I better go.” Upstairs, Maggie has started singing. “It’ll be fine, really, my mum’s so jovial now, it’s bizarre, it’s almost worth it that she’s losing her marbles.”

“You think she’s got some dementia?”

“No, I don’t know, not like that, it’s just, she’s starting to come loose like an old sweater.”

“… She doesn’t seem that different to me.”

“Well, she’s not your mother. I can tell, she’s looping.”

“She’s loopy?”

“Looping, you know, round and round, the package, the babies, the package.”

“What babies?”

“The dead ones, plus she asked me twenty times today where you were, I kept saying, Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnie-the-Pooh Peg!”

Silence.

“Hil?”

“… I’m in Calgary.”

Upstairs, Maggie is quiet again — perhaps she was singing in her sleep, Hil sometimes laughs in her sleep. Mary Rose swallows. Does she have early onset?

Hil is saying, “Sweetheart, you’ve got a lot going on—”

“You’re in Calgary. Jesus Murphy.”

“It doesn’t matter where I am, the point is, I’m not home and—”

“I knew that, I know you’re at ATP.” Alberta Theatre Projects. Mary Rose lives in Toronto, smack in the middle of the country if not the universe, but she does know the difference between the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. “God.”

“They’re both west,” says Hilary kindly.

“God.” Mountains versus Prairies.

“You’re focused on the kids and that’s all you need to—”

“I better go, I can hear Maggie.” Lie .

“I love you.”

“Love you too.”

Her arm was not bothering her when Hil asked, but it is now. Her large bag is hanging over the railing post at the top of the back steps. She digs out the tube of Advil she has taken to carrying and swallows one. That makes three today, but it’s best to get the jump on pain because once it starts it creates its own momentum. There is nothing actually wrong with her arm — she consulted an orthopaedic surgeon last fall; the pain is apparently merely a nuisance. He called it something … not “phantom” per se, something else … she can’t remember. She ought to go to bed now, but the imp of the perverse lives in her laptop — how else to explain why a tired adult who needs to get up early with children lifts the lid on that glowing box of ills?

She refrains from googling “Adult Onset Pediatric Bone Cysts,” less due to the absurdity of the search words than to the certainty that she will diagnose herself with bone cancer in minutes. Over Christmas she innocently researched home remedies for a sinus infection and wound up with a rare paranasal tumour.

There is an e-mail from Kate confirming the movie Wednesday night — it’ll be good to get out for the evening — out of her own head before she goes out of her mind. Bridget and Kate are rich and really fun — in the intervals when they’re not on the rocks. They donate a lot of money to women’s health causes, and renovate a great deal. There is an e-mail from her old buddy Hank, who is somewhere in Mexico — he’s sent a photo, “Does this Harley-Davidson chopper make my prostate look big?” Best friends from back in their twenties, Hank is the last of the very few guys she ever more or less slept with, Mary Rose having approached heterosexuality rather like math: she worked at it until she achieved a C then felt justified in dropping it. While she might prefer to forget the awkward episode, the fact of their once, long ago, having “kissed with tongues” has injected a companionable wry note into their friendship. Hank cooked his way to the top of the Toronto food chain during the culinary explosion of the nineties and now has his face on bottles of sauce, but claims, “If I could write like you, Mister, I’d trade it in a heartbeat.” He has also advised her that she could make a fortune writing lesbian porn. “But tastefully, you know,” he added. “Fifty Shades of Gay.” He got some iffy results on his last checkup, and went out and bought the bike.

Bing!

Duncan MacKinnon, we have found 454 3rd degree relatives!

It is from Origin-eology.com in Texas. She ordered her father a DNA kit online for his eightieth birthday and is now the regular recipient of special offers to do with the Y chromosome. Duncan has been working on a family tree for years now, tracing the first of their forbears to board a plague ship from Scotland for the New World. Why are people so pumped about nth degree relatives they’ve never met, when they can barely cope with the ones they know? Bing!

RE: Some things really do get batter

Dear Mister,

Well that was a heck of a cliffhanger! You ought to try your hand at writing;-) (I just learned how to do that winking face!) What were you going to say? You’ve got me in suspense now.

Love,

Dad

She glances down the thread.

Dear Dad,

I

And hits reply .

Dear Dad,

Sorry, Maggie hit “send” then the doorbell rang at the same time as the phone, and Daisy just about ate the mailman! Do you think Mum may be experiencing the early stages of

Delete .

Mum tells me you’ll be leaving Victoria and heading east again in the next few days. I’m really looking forward to seeing you both at the station for the usual “stopover.” I’ll alert the Tim Hortons! Would you mind dropping me a line to let me know when your train will be arriving? By the way, did Mum mail a package for me? — speaking of “cliffhangers” (hey, can you do that?!)

What kind of “reply” is that? She has written two books and she can’t even write one lousy e-mail to her father. She is evading his touching e-mail of this morning. No she isn’t, she is tired — her eyes skitter side to side again as though to prove the point. She is not a retired management consultant, she does not have time to compose touching e-mails. She will call him on the phone tomorrow and have an actual conversation.

Delete .

… unless there is something wrong with her visual cortex. She googles “involuntary rapid sideways eye movement, symptom of stroke?” It takes less than thirty seconds to confirm that she has experienced a series of Transient Ischemic Strokes. It is unlikely they will kill her. They mimic the effects of déjà vu and “a sense of unreality” that is symptomatic of depersonalization, depression and psychosis. Otherwise they are asymptomatic. “Autopsy can confirm the presence of neural scar tissue.” If only she could be present at her own autopsy to exclaim, “I knew it!” She decides to keep it to herself: why worry Hil?