Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“No, me do that.”

“Nope. You’ll be in the back seat with your sister.”

“No!”

“The boy will be up front with me.”

“NO!”

He laughed until she saw his gold tooth. The rage tore up her throat like grit — gone was the horizon over the dash in the blur of an eye, she was turning into a tangle, as if she were scribbling over herself with black crayon, until finally, “I HATE THE BOY!”

Clotted words, flung like ink, she was black but she was back.

His voice was suddenly sad. “Don’t say that, Mister, he’s just a baby. He’s going to be your little brother.”

He looked sad and bewildered. She had hurt him. And she had hurt a poor dear baby. Her own brother. Shame engulfed her, rising from within like the warm, wet odour of pee. “Sorry, Daddy.” Tears.

Back then it was not possible to know the sex of a fetus, so while her father’s certainty must have been wishful thinking, he was right. The baby she cursed was a boy.

Mary Rose does not need to pay a psychotherapist to know that deep down she is convinced she killed Alexander, robbed him of his birthright and deserves to be punished for her place in the driver’s seat. It is right there in the pages of her own book: Kitty and Jon McRae are twins who, in their respective worlds, absorbed one another in utero and were born as singles. Each has one blue eye and one brown, a vestige of their missing sibling. And each, merely by having been born, has robbed the other of that which could heal their respective worlds … Even if she failed to see it until she had written the second book.

Perhaps that is why she used to pore over the graveside photo in secret. She was returning to the scene of a crime, stealing away with the album to the bathroom or the crawl space — almost as if it were a dirty picture; limiting her viewings so it would retain its “power.” Closing her eyes, she would turn to the correct page, count to three then open them … as though to catch the photo in the act. Of what? She once enlisted Andy-Patrick in a furtive viewing, but cut it short. “You’re too young,” she said, closing the album. Then she scuttled from the crawl space and held the door closed on him in the darkness until he stopped crying.

Is it her fault Andy-Patrick is a mess?

She was five when she heard her mother make the call to Cape Breton, a catch in her voice as she cradled the phone receiver in both hands and told her own father, “Pa? Pa, I’ve had a son! I’ve had a son, Pa!” She was nine when her father took to sitting her and Maureen down and regretfully laying at their feet their brother’s inability to stay out of trouble at school or get along at home — not to mention his taste for playing dress-up: “You have to remember he’s a boy in a family of girls. He doesn’t have a brother . He is outnumbered by sisters.” He spoke in the ultra-expository tones he reserved for math problems and travel directions. But with a plaintive note. “You can’t expect him to act like a little girl . He’s a boy.”

There would be a pause. She would feel shame seeping warm and sickly. “Mary Rose, you’re closest to him in age, you have the biggest influence.” Whenever he used her actual name, she felt pinned. This is what is behind the tomboy nickname and the carefree wink from Dad: a girl’s name. You can hurt yourself on it if you forget it’s there. “You’ve got to let him be a boy.”

Few things were more shaming than knowing you were preventing your brother from being a boy — like barging into a bathroom lined with urinals, who do you think you are? Molesting his masculinity, that sacred, powerful, delicate thing that was none of her business yet her business to protect. This seemed to mean that Andy-Patrick was to be supported in wreaking havoc, lest he grow up weak and effeminate. Mary Rose robbed her dead sister too, of course, but only of a name.

She opens her dented freezer to put away a container of cut-up bananas for smoothies, but it is a tight fit. She reaches into the back, extracts an opaque brick and sets it on the counter. Wrapped in layers of what looks to be surgical dressing, stained with something dark … her mother’s Christmas cake.

It has to be eaten before next Christmas. It must not be discovered intact next January when her mother brings another Christmas cake … unless her mother has died by then and this Christmas cake turns out to have been the last one. Her throat thickens painfully at the thought of her mother’s busy brown hands stirring the batter in the white vat set atop the banged-up freezer out in the garage, “C’mere kids and give the Christmas cake a stir for luck!”

Who is going to look after her parents if the emergency comes while Dolly and Dunc are at their home in Ottawa? Mary Rose is four and a half hours away by car, and even if Andy-Patrick gets posted to RCMP headquarters there, how will he cope if — when — something happens? He will shatter. He will swallow his tongue and pee his pants. She and Maureen need to find him a solid, capable woman they can rely on to find their parents dead one day. Otherwise it will be a nice neighbour. “We noticed the mail piling up, dear, and your parents hadn’t mentioned they were going out of town, so I used the key they gave me, and …”

As it is, the best she can hope for is that her parents drop dead in Victoria, where people are used to scraping seniors off the sidewalk and defibrillating them in malls. Her father, a poster-senior for successful bypass surgery, is still a candidate for heart attack. What if he infarcts behind the wheel, mounts the curb and kills a pedestrian pushing a stroller?

Dolly had wanted to call the new baby Alexander, but Mary Rose said, “If you call him Alexander, you’ll have to put him in the ground.” She thinks she remembers this, but it is so much a stock part of family lore that perhaps she merely remembers having been told the story. No wonder she clung to the old graveside photo; it was a moment captured in time, unlike the unstable atoms of memory. Considering the intensity with which she examined the photo, every detail ought to be burnt into her brain, including the dates on the stone. But memory plays tricks, recording the flotsam of a flowered sweater and erasing the lifespan of a lost baby boy. In any event, thanks to Mary Rose Andrew-Patrick got a fresh name.

He would have been around a year old, and she would have been six, back on the air force base at Trenton. He was sitting in a heap of baby fat at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in a plaid jumpsuit, crying. Clear baby drool mixed with tears. Mary Rose was consoling him when her father came and crouched next to them. She expected him to pick Andy-Patrick up and comfort him — Dad was patient and loving. But Duncan looked straight at fat little Andy-Pat and said, “What’re you crying for like a sissy girl?”

Mary Rose went hot. She felt dreadful for her father for having said this in front of her. For a moment it was as though the air were made of sheet metal, searing like the sun on the wing of a fighter jet. How could she stand up for herself while allowing room for him to have meant something different?

“Dad? All girls aren’t sissies.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” he said in his harmless voice. “It’s perfectly normal for girls to cry, but what you have to understand is, we don’t want anyone giving your brother a hard time when he’s older.”

“I’m a girl and I don’t cry.”

“I know, little buddy.”

She never cried, whether she fell off her bike or was facing shots in net in exchange for playing road hockey with the boys. She thought, but would not say, “I didn’t even cry when you gave me the airplane swing,” because that would be like saying, “You hurt me, Dad.”