Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

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She ought to go to bed now. But first: she removes the child lock from the toilet lid — it really is unlikely that Maggie will dive in there. And if she does, she would haul herself out again. In the kitchen, she unlatches the bin drawer and drops the ingenious bit of landfill into the garbage — Hil need never know it was in the house. Mind-buggeringly long ago, when Earth was in its infancy, chemical changes were afoot that would result in the human ability to fashion the plastic toilet-lid lock from the complex bounty of this, our planet. How long will the return journey take?

Last summer, in her parents’ Ottawa home, she watched Dolly search frantically for her train tickets so that she would be able to tell Mary Rose exactly when she and Duncan would be stopping off in Toronto on their way out west. It was many months before their departure, but they are seniors and plan everything well in advance. She watched Dolly rifle her purse. She watched Dolly disappear into her bedroom. Heard drawers opening and closing, accompanied by the occasional, “So that’s where that is.” Finally Dolly returned to the kitchen, brandishing a green folder, “I found them.”

She handed the folder to Mary Rose, who opened it and stared.

“This isn’t a ticket, Mum. It’s a receipt for your cemetery plot.”

Dolly grabbed it back—“So that’s where that is!”

Duncan looked up from his newspaper and observed dryly, “It’s a ticket, all right. It’s a one-way ticket.” He caught Mary Rose’s eye, his face tightened to a grin, turned red, and he laughed till she saw his gold tooth. Dolly doubled over in her chair and almost peed her pants.

The train tickets turned up soon after, just as the currently lost tickets will. Besides, replacements are easily downloadable from the VIA Rail website. Unlike the elusive packeege, which is an actual object in space, travelling at the speed of matter.

She turns off the kitchen lights but for the one in the range hood over the stove. Now she can plainly see the school across the way and the quiet street itself, lined with parked cars, and, at the end of the block, the blinking red light at the school crossing. A young man rides past on a bike. A neighbour is out walking his aging greyhound — he rescues them, retired racers. She watches him wait patiently as the dog sniffs and ponders whether to leave a “message,” and reflects that she has lived in this house for three greyhounds.

Upstairs, she takes an Advil before climbing into bed — she wouldn’t really call it pain but knows that any discomfort intensifies the moment one tries to sleep — and resolves to phone her mother tomorrow and be nice. She is too hard on her mother — her funny little mother with her big brown eyes and snowy old-lady hairdo. And now Mum has sent her something — a gift, however kooky or misconceived … Maybe something Dolly has made herself, another quillow — pillow-quilt combo that folds into itself like an airbag. She brushes her teeth and avoids her reflection — she does not like looking in mirrors at night. Especially when Hil is away.

It is three hours earlier out in Victoria, she could phone her funny little mother right now, lately so much like the child she must once have been … lost amid siblings in the apartment over the barbershop in Sydney, Cape Breton. Child of a child. Little Dolly, singing for her supper … Pathos takes up residence in Mary Rose’s chest and makes room for Guilt beneath Her dark cloak. They merge. A hump on the highway at night you hit with your car, only to stop in horror and find … nothing. You drive off convinced that, contrary to all evidence, you have killed someone. A child.

She stands in her tank top and silk boxers with lavender lipstick prints and braves the mirror — Dolly always said if you stared too long in one, the devil would appear behind you, his horns framing your head. Avoiding her own gaze, she steals a look at her arm — still no bruise.

When she went under the knife the second time, her parents told her that when she recovered she could have plastic surgery to hide the scars, including the new one on her hip, so she could wear a bikini and not feel bad. But she had soldiered on with her arm like a wounded comrade by her side since before she could remember. It had suffered. How could she strip it of its badge of courage? She had earned her stripes. Perhaps that is why she has never been tempted to get a tattoo — apart from the prospect of sagging geriatric body art — she has her scars. Carved into her skin, through muscle down to bone, sewn, sealed.

The third scar, the one on her hip, is bravest of all, because it is the donor scar. I was a teenage bone donor . Like a B movie. Perhaps, too, the surgeries explain her failure to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs despite her status as a “boomer”: having tripped elaborately in hospital, she associates the magic carpet with pain and the frequent vomiting that racked the edges of the incision, set it to seeping, and quaked the jaundiced expanse of her chest. Not that she dwells on it.

She opens the mirrored cabinet to put away her toothbrush and catches a movement behind her in the gloom of the walk-in closet. She freezes. The children are in the house. If there is an intruder, she has to find out. She forces herself to turn around. She switches on the light.

Nothing.

Ridiculous. If there were someone, Daisy would have heard them and made a meal of them by now. Still … she enters the walk-in closet and her heart leaps painfully even as her peripheral vision identifies the shrunken head of the yellow balloon. She seizes it by the ribbon as though to throttle it and drags it downstairs. Daisy’s tail thumps as she passes.

She is reluctant to pierce it, so she stuffs it into the garbage. Shrivelled though it is, it takes up a lot of space, bulging with the pressure of her hand as though fighting for breath, squeaking. She feels suddenly appalled, as though she were committing some sort of bizarre infanticide. Finally, she takes a knife and puts the thing out of its misery with a pop .

The message light on the phone is blinking in the darkness. With each pulse she experiences a spurt of adrenalin. She ought to dig out the Canada Post form right now and put it where she can’t miss it tomorrow morning when they leave to take Matthew to school. The mail devilry will resume, the freaking packeege will arrive and her mother can stop calling her about it.

But the form is not on the kitchen table where she put it — did Candace take it? Did Maggie “clean it up”? There is no number she can phone for a new form — unless you count the call centre in New Delhi. It’s got to be somewhere — everything is — and not just in the cosmos, in this house. She hunts. Behind the piano, under the couch, in the freezer … She prowls, turning her ankle on perpetually disgruntled Percy, and lopes upstairs. Under the crib, behind the curtain, in the toilet …

She should not be looking for the form at night. She should never look for anything at night. Sit and breathe, stop walking — like a shark, she is feeding on movement, escalating alone in the quiet house. Part of her agony is that she cannot blame Hil for the lost form. She forces herself down to the basement because she has to hit something, “Mother-fucking Jesus Christ on the cross where is that fucking piece of paper, you fucking postal fuckheads!” She assaults the metal pole in the basement with a bright orange couch cushion, but that is unsatisfactory. She grabs an empty Rubbermaid laundry basket and swings it against the pole, breaking its ergonomic handle. She needs to hurt something without breaking anything valuable like the TV, so she gives in and punches her own head as hard as she can until she sinks to the couch in relief and catches her breath.