Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Hil just looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” said Mary Rose.

Hil got up and went into the bathroom, quietly closing the door behind her.

“Hil? Hil, I’m sorry. Hil?”

Patricia wasn’t a snob. Yes she was, but a nice one. At least Mary Rose hadn’t said “drunk.”

The bathroom door opened suddenly and Hil came out. “Get out.”

“What do you mean, what are you talking about?”

Mary Rose knew it was bad because Hil was not crying and she herself sounded like a guilty robot. She felt numb, she knew most of her brain was shut down — she even wondered what an MRI would show in terms of which areas were lit and which were in darkness. Where was the switch? Words issued from her tin mouth. “Don’t get hysterical, Hil.”

Hil smacked her fist into her own mouth—“Hil,” said the robot, “don’t bite your hand.”

The robot attempted to remove the hand— thwack! “Don’t touch me!”

“Hil, don’t scream.”

Hissing, eyes wide, through her fist, “Get out, get out, get out—”

“I’ll go. I’m going now.”

She spent the night on Matthew’s trundle bed and woke up feeling as though someone had swung a cat inside her. It could have been worse. It could have been What did you get for Christmas? Divorced .

Mary Rose having successfully held off Maggie’s nap until this afternoon now steals into Matthew’s room and lays out all his new Baby Gap outfits on his bed, arranging them in action poses, before fetching him up.

He stares. “Who are they?”

“They’re your new clothes.”

“Where’s Bun?”

“He’s right there.” She points to where she has nestled the stuffed bunny in the embrace of a striped rugby shirt.

He solemnly retrieves Bun from the phantom “child” on the bed and pops his thumb in his mouth.

“Matthew, it’s not thumb time, sweetheart. If you’re tired, you can have a nap.”

“No, I can’t. Those kids are on my bed.”

“Matthew, they’re clothes.” She scoops them up and starts folding and putting them in his drawers.

He watches her. “Matt, honey, right now you’re showing me you’re too tired to do anything but suck your thumb.”

Silence. The stare.

“Hey, sweetheart, I forgot to show you the best thing. I fixed your unicorn.”

She draws his attention to the window ledge where the tiny glass creature stands, a milky cicatrice at its neck the only indication that it was ever decapitated. She winds it and it commences its slow pirouette, tinkling out its query. He stares at it.

“Why don’t you snuggle down with Bun and I’ll call you when Diego’s on.”

He abruptly withdraws his thumb, drops Bun to the floor and casually treads on him on his way out the door.

“Matt?”

“I’m not tired,” he says without turning.

Maggie wakes up, Mary Rose changes her, then gets her into her boots and jacket, then waits while Matthew gets himself into his own, then she gets them out the door and down the street then and then and then she wades through conjunctions all the way to the park, over Maggie’s protests, “I do not want to go to the park, Mumma. No park. No, no, me no park!”

The mud has frozen into welts. Two or three other toddlers are at play while a couple of nannies sit auditing the sandbox, alongside an actual dad whose tempered enthusiasm and steady pace peg him as a stay-at-home parent. He displays neither the compensatory jubilance of the divorcé nor the studious distraction of I-happen-to-be-working-from-home-today. He displays nothing, even his coat is a version of Mary Rose’s standard-issue quilted down, so thoroughly has he donned the drab feathers of the female. Mary Rose is the only mum. “Hi,” she says. The dad nods, the nannies regard her warily, as though she might be an immigration officer. The children play Sand-in-Eye. Howls . Five tranquil minutes of Montessori-minded categorizing of shovels and sieves, followed by shovel-whack-on-the-head. Screams . “Maggie, come help Mumma with the sandcastle.” Cat poo captured in sieve. Matthew assembling trucks and backhoes from differently scaled universes. Fifteen minutes. Maggie on the slide, Maggie on the swing, Maggie falling on the concrete of empty wading pool. “Five more minutes, guys.” Matthew not ready to abandon his roadworks. Maggie nowhere in sight! Found in orange sliding tube. “I do not want to go home, Mumma. No home. Me no home, no! NO!” Feet going like a circular saw as Mary Rose picks her up.

“Matthew, please leave the truck in the sandbox, it doesn’t belong to you, sweetheart.”

He throws the truck. “Why can’t you buy me a brother?”

At home, she helps them off with their outdoor clothes and then makes hot chocolate and then wipes it up from off the over the out from under before and after and thenandthenandthen creeps in this prepositional pace from day to day … What day is it? What month, what year? Behold the foot calendar, breeding tulips out of the dead … April. Thursday. The fifth. She blinks … this week is hurtling by. Right, Hil is previewing tomorrow night.

A text from Gigi.

Mister, did you get my message? It’s even better the second day — can I come over?

She’ll have to go through the skipped phone messages and find out what Gigi is talking about before replying. On the other hand, she has to head her off—

Love to, but early bedtime tonight, scratchy throat.

xomr

It isn’t a lie, she will have a sore throat if she doesn’t go to bed early tonight — the missing morning nap has begun to take its toll on her if not Maggie.

She dials.

“Hi, Mum.”

“You’re there! Did you get the—”

“No, the mail is suspended.”

“Still? What about Hilary?”

“She’s in …” If she tells her mother that Hil is actually in Calgary, not Winnipeg, will that start a whole new loop? But her mother can’t even remember that Hil is away, so she may as well adhere to reality. “She’s in Calgary.”

“What’s she doing there?”

Sigh . “I thought I mentioned, she’s directing The Importance of Being Earnest .”

“You said she was doing that in Winnipeg.”

“… Did I?”

“That’s where your sister was born.”

“Maureen was born in Cape Breton, Mum.”

“Not Maureen, Other Mary Rose!”

It is difficult to determine which is more arresting: her mother’s sudden reference to “Other Mary Rose” as “your sister” or the stage-farcical tone she has employed.

“Oh right, thanks, Mum.”

“She was born dead.”

“I know, Mum, is Dad there? I need to know when you’re arriving.” Stop . For God’s sake, Mary Rose, listen behind the tone, the woman is elderly, drifting into dementia, her manner may be offhand but the words, the words …

“Let me get my purse.”

“Mum? Mum, before you get your purse.” Go for it, robot. “That must have been a hard time.”

“What time?”

“When you lost Other Mary Rose.”

“Oh … Well, you know, I popped into the Hudson’s Bay store on my way home, I didn’t get into Winnipeg that often, and the saleslady said, ‘When’re you due?’ And I said, ‘The baby’s dead,’ and she started crying, and I said—”

“Did you hold her?”

“Hold her? No, no.”

“What … did they do with her?”

“Oh, I think she was incinerated, listen now, we’re stopping over at eleven on the seventh, have you got a pin?”

Mary Rose pauses while her neocortex tries to sort out the difference between the two halves of the sentence her mother has just spoken, for Dolly’s tone has given no indication that they are anything but twinned, when in fact they are as different as … Winnipeg and Calgary.