Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

“Hi Wochewwe.”

“Hi.”

“I know she looks like me, but I adopted Maggie, but all babies look like me, and if all babies look like Winston Churchill, then I must look like Winston Churchill.” A smile has landed on her face like a space alien.

Rochelle says nothing.

Perhaps that’s because she knows she is talking to a crazy lady . “We’re going to walk all the way across town to Postal Station E and then drop off a form because Daisy almost bit the mailman, she didn’t bite him, she bit the box with the Christmas tree stand because I was writing an e-mail to my dad, and now they’re coming on the train and my mother sent me a packeege but I didn’t get it yet.” Has she said all this with an English accent? Mewwy Wose is going to start waffing. She sucks her cheek between her teeth, bites down, and tears flood her eyes. We shall fight on the beaches … Has she said it out loud?

Rochelle says, “I can take the form in for you.”

“Really? Are you going by there?”

“I work there.” Voice like a canvas mailbag.

Don’t laugh. One day you may start laughing and never be able to stop. “Thanks.” She hands the form to Rochelle.

Rochelle gets into her car. “Need any stamps?”

“Ha-ha-hahahaha—” She bites her cheek. “I don’t think so, no, hahahahah. Thanks, Rochelle.”

“You’re welcome.”

They go to the park. She pushes Maggie on the swing. They play in the sandbox. They do all the things that can be expressed by sentences suitable for a beginner reading level. Three other toddlers are there. One goes hysterical. His mother has no nice snacks. Mary Rose has nice snacks. Mary Rose opens her bag and offers a fruit strip.

“Thanks!” says the woman. “I feel like such a terrible mother!” And she laughs.

Matthew is alive.

“Hi, Sue, thanks.”

“What for?”

The bus did not roll over — at least not in this world. There is a world in which this same crowd of parents is gathered in front of the school, keening. A world where a spot on the highway is heaped with flowers and teddy bears …

“Have a nice weekend.”

As the day progresses, a parallel reality plays itself out, as though the world were bifurcating with every move Mary Rose does not make. When it turns out the cap on the Thermos of chocolate milk she is shaking has not been fastened. When she sees from her driveway that she has missed the recycling truck by one second and the driver ignores her. In another world, the Thermos cracks the window, a crazy woman pelts down the street pushing a big blue bin on wheels, shrieking obscenities.

She does not swat Maggie on the head when the child shoves her bowl to the floor, she does not grab Matthew’s ear, cheek, hair, she does not tell him to “shut up and quit whining or I’ll give you something to whine about!” She does not hit his head or his little hands, and then she does not seize Maggie by the arm and yank, does not yank her down the hall and up and over the side of the crib, IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?! She makes lunch and then she cleans up andthen she does not smash them.

“Thank you, Mumma.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Would you like to watch a video?”

“Yes!”

For all that she abstains from doing, the capsule bursts in the pit-drip of her stomach and she feels the dark chemical release, re-blazing neural trails. It will pass and so can she; as normal in a world where she might lose touch with reality in ways that would never land her on a psychiatric ward or even on antidepressants. She would not be arrested or even questioned for any of the raging she did this morning, or even the squeezing. She has committed no crime. Yet she knows that she is full of crime.

“Would you like to watch Bob the Builder now?”

“Yes!”

Play all .

By late afternoon, the undone possibilities cease to flash like old-fashioned Kodak cubes in her peripheral vision, and their place is taken by a movie that begins running in her mind. It is of herself and Maggie on the steps this morning. But it does not end with her letting go of Maggie’s arms, it continues, the movie of what she did not do: She does not let go, she gets up. Shegetsupshegetsupshe jerks Maggie up by the arm, hauls her up the steps and across the kitchen; close-up on raw wing tip, straining, toddler feet fill the frame, scrabbling for purchase as though in an attempt to become airborne …

Somewhere, someone is watching this, providing commentary — it is the mother’s own voice, but the voice has been left behind on the steps, the mother is now merely a motor function, a set of impulses moving through space — who will stop this? Again and again, like a scene untethered from a movie, Mary Rose sees the thing she did not do, the thing she knows so well how to do, as if she had done it already many times, as if she had trained for it. She looks down at her hands. They know something. But, like a child who won’t reveal who it was that gave them the candy, they are not telling. They can taste the tang of it, though, and they are craving satisfaction. They clench and unclench. She slips into the powder room, leans against the door and lets them batter her head as hard as they want to while she watches herself assault her two-year-old over and over again.

Out in the living room, the children know nothing of this, they are watching a different movie.

•

He loved her into language. She would curl up with him and “read” the newspaper. They read the funnies together. His body was safe and gentle. His hands were patient and precise, his voice calm. Within the circle of his arms — around the newspaper, around the steering wheel, around her when he held her on the balcony — was all the time in the world.

“Do you hear that? That’s the cuckoo bird.”

Huge egg yolk sun streaking the sky red. So free out here. So safe.

“Good night, sweetie pie. See you in the morning.”

•

Everything will look better in the morning. She was sleep deprived when the whole boot kerfuffle happened earlier today. She ought to have had a good cry last night over the stillborn baby pictures. Suppressed sorrow for her mother and her “inadequately mourned” deceased sister was bound to surface as rage — if it had been anyone else up till all hours googling grief, Mary Rose could have told them what would happen if they failed properly to discharge their feelings. Reassured by this insight, she heads upstairs with a mug of Sleepytime tea. She overreacted today, but it isn’t as if she battered her child.

She looks in on Matthew, curled asleep with Bun in his arms. She kisses his forehead — is he a little hot?

In Maggie’s room, a subdued thwack-thwack tells her Daisy is lying on the floor in front of the crib. “What are you doing there, Daisy?” she whispers. She leans over and looks into the crib by the dim light from the hallway. Her daughter is breathing evenly, baby lips puffed with sleep, lashes stirred by a dream.

She bends to pat Daisy. The dog lifts her eyes and regards her from beneath a furrowed brow and Mary Rose understands as plainly as if the animal had just spoken: Daisy is protecting Maggie. From her.

Remorse rides in like the cavalry, too late. All the unknown crimes are upon her now, the ones that draw no distinction between doer and done- to or wanted- to and did-do.

Big tears roll down her face as she watches her beautiful baby. Something threatens to pierce her heart, like a shard of glass. She stands weeping and loving her child, but it is the love of a remorseful devil, it is not a safe love. She withdraws as quietly as possible, and smacks the tears away.

Children are forgiving, yes, and resilient, so long as you don’t try the evil spell of “nothing happened” on them.