Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Mary Rose goes into the house and returns with the water dish, then stands back while Daisy laps up a tidal wave.

“Do you want to go in the house?”

Daisy wags her tail and hauls herself to standing. The morning’s excursion actually must have tired her out — good to know it’s possible. She opens the door and watches Daisy haltingly ascend the four steps to the kitchen and disappear round the corner. She turns. “Let’s go, Maggie.”

The boots are off. How did the child manage it? Maggie stares up at her — a hint of triumph in her face. Mary Rose withdraws into the house without a word and returns with a roll of duct tape. She has the advantage, Maggie is a prisoner of the stroller. She puts up her hood so the child can’t claw her hair, and withstands the rain of blows while she calmly duct-tapes each winter boot back onto each little foot.

•

Somewhere down the hall was a baby that cried all night. Dark, etching cries that woke her, full of diesel and desperation, like a car spinning its tires in a snowbank. She would forget him during the day when his distress was either lost amid hospital clatter or soothed by visitors. She saw him once.

She’d been making her way down the hall for the first time since the surgery — her mother said she had to because one day you might lie down and never get up again. Her arm bound and slung, hip bandaged — the incisions this time were sutured with a wire that rippled beneath her skin — she inched along the wall. She heard him wailing. She got closer and realized the cries were issuing from her old room. It took her several minutes to pass the open doorway, so she could not help but see.

He was lying on his back in her old bed, eyes squeezed shut, profile blue with strain. Tears stood stiff on his cheeks, as though they’d erupted straight from his face. He appeared to be no more than a year old, but his anger was fully grown, as though, too young for words, he nonetheless KNEW, and would not be soothed. His legs were elevated in stirrups rigged to a metal frame, he had no feet.

•

When she gets to the corner near the school, she pauses and considers whether to remove the duct tape before arriving. If she does, will that be like saying she was wrong to have applied it in the first place? It isn’t as though she has taped the child’s legs to the stroller. She presses on toward the school, ready to make a joke at her own expense should anyone comment or give a look.

Time plays tricks. It feels to Mary Rose as if it has taken hours to cover the final block. The grey of morning has turned to glare. A stillness is forming within her like a bulge, slowing her down. Heavy, unmoving. She arrives at the school door.

The cheerful cacophony of parents and children becomes a cardboardy jumble all around her like empty boxes filling the air. She is part of it, chatting with Philip and Saleema. She feels a smile manipulating her face in socially appropriate ways. Hears her mouth making socially appropriate noises. She is not quite behind her eyes — she is set back a ways. Probably hungry.

She reflects that this is the retail counterpart to a sugar crash; she shopped voraciously and now she is as spent as her money. “Hi, sweetheart!”

Matthew is running up the steps, proudly thrusting something at her.

“It’s for you.”

“Matthew, it’s beautiful.”

“I made it.”

A macaroni necklace. She puts it on.

Sue nabs her before she can escape. “MacKinnon,” she says with jockish good cheer. Mary Rose turns to her and smiles but keeps the stroller pointing away — don’t let Sue, of all people, see the duct tape.

“Come for supper tonight,” she commands, straddling her bike with the kid cart hitched to the back.

“I’d love to, Sue, thanks so much, I can’t, I thought I could, but …”

“Chicken pot pie.”

“Wow, that sounds amazing, it’s just, I promised my friend Gigi …”

“Let’s make it happen.”

“Absolutely.”

Mac ’n’ cheese ’n’ peas.

The message light …

“It’s Mum, you’re not there. You know we’re coming on the seventh at …” Mary Rose digs her cinder block of a datebook out of the diaper bag, is poised with a pen— “Dammit, where’s my — did you get the packeege yet? It’s something you wanted. Did I give it to you last time? I can’t remember now what it was. Check and see if I already gave it to you.” Click .

Hi there, and happy Thursday … She turns off the radio, closes her datebook, and stands staring out the window, on momentary neurological overload, while Matthew clears his lunch plate, and Maggie follows suit, loading her bowl, spoon, cup and everything in sight into the dishwasher, including the placemats, the ketchup …

“Good job, Maggie,” she says absently.

The last time she saw her parents was in January when they stopped off in Toronto for three days on the way from Ottawa to Victoria on the west coast.

She bundled Maggie up and went to meet their train.

She had left in plenty of time but wound up late with the effort to find parking — the station was being “renovated to serve you better!” By the time she got there with the stroller, her parents were nowhere to be seen. She waited at Arrivals next to the deserted Traveller’s Aid counter, but that was no guarantee; at Union Station nothing guided the traveller toward Arrivals, itself an undefined limbo, whereas an imposing granite ramp drew them up into the heroic main hall where two sets of brass doors opened, she knew, onto a perilous moat of perpetual construction where the sidewalk used to be. Who knew how many elderly people had already pitched into that polyurethane tangle never to be seen again? Maybe her parents were out there now, drifting toward a beeping backhoe — was her father wearing his hearing aids? Worse, she dreaded lest they had ventured down an escalator and into the PATH: a twenty-seven-kilometre maze of weather-indifferent retail. She pictured them: two little old babes in the wood, jostled mercilessly … Nonsense, they had travelled the world, Dolly had fended off muggers in Red Square with the centrifugal power of her purse, wielding it like a mace — Duncan still told the story. But that was back in Dolly’s glory days of rage and roses. Now she would simply fall, break a hip and die of pneumonia, and it would be Mary Rose’s fault for having been late to the station.

She checked to make sure her cellphone was on, though she knew her parents would not call it, regarding it with equal parts reverence and mistrust. They too had a cellphone but never turned it on. It was for “emergencies.” She risked venturing up the ramp, and emerged into the hall where a throng eddied about the base of the soaring digital display. If she called Andy-Patrick, perhaps he could have her parents’ cellphone located by the RCMP. Maggie cried out, “Sitdy!”

She hung up to see her mother cannoning from the crowd, all four-foot-eleven-and-a-half of her, jaunty in her beret, her bling, her snow-blindingly new running shoes, hurrying toward them with a funny splay-foot walk that reminded Mary Rose of Maggie. Was that new?

“Hi, doll!”

Duncan came into view behind her, walking stolidly as though over rugged terrain, his mouth set in the Highland perseverance that peopled the globe and its boards of directors, dapper in his peaked cap, yellow windbreaker and rubber-soled brogues.

“Hi, Mum.”

Dolly’s brows arched above her big dark eyes, her mouth formed an O! of astonishment, she raised both hands, framing her face with delight, and swooped down on Maggie, assaulting her with “Sitdy kisses”—this used to make Matthew cry, but Maggie screamed with laughter. Duncan looked on, amused, then after the first flurry he crouched, took Maggie’s hand and said softly, “Hi there, Maggie, how are you, sweetie pie?”