Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Daria sees everything. If something were to happen to Mary Rose, Daria would be able to tell the police exactly when she left her house — it has shaped up to be a nice day.

Passing the park, she notices a cluster of crocuses in the bruised turf — they weren’t there this morning. Her children are safe. She has made them safe. Hil is right, it doesn’t change anything; time to let go of the balcony.

Archie’s Variety. Should she buy the flowers now or wait till after she’s had a walk? “Hello, how are you ?” Winnie practically sings it.

“Hello, Winnie.” Mary Rose smiles back. Classical music is playing. What is Winnie’s Korean name? Would it be rude to ask? Maybe it is Winnie.

“How is your mummy?”

“She’s fine, Winnie, thank you for asking.”

Just inside are several tubs of tulips, red, white, and only one yellow bunch. She takes it and places it on the counter.

“You pick yellow, pretty.”

Mary Rose reaches into her pocket but comes up empty. “I’m so sorry, I forgot my wallet, I’ll be right back.”

But Winnie will not hear of her leaving without the tulips, saying, “You trust me.”

Out on Bathurst Street once more, Mary Rose is a bit lightheaded but that is unsurprising, she keeps forgetting to breathe. She looks down at her feet to steady herself as she walks. This sidewalk could be anywhere, this could be any time in the last hundred years. Speed up the frames and see all the feet through time, hers among them, her mother’s appearing alongside for a moment, likewise her children’s, and all the others, feet like schools of fish, her own recurring but less frequently until they fail to reappear, then fewer feet. Then disintegration, ash, grass, forest, sand. She will still be part of it, though unimaginably diffuse. She looks up. Bathurst is a dingy glare, Saturday traffic zooming in a spray of grit. Without her wallet, she is without ID; were she to be killed today how long would it take for the information to reach her friends at home with her children? This is why it is important never to just “pop out” and leave one’s child alone in order to track down the source of a car alarm … of course one might just as easily die in one’s own home — best, really, never to be alone with a child who cannot yet dial 911.

Nothing has ever been hidden, she is merely putting the bits together. Like a dinosaur skeleton at the ROM; not all the bones come from the same animal, still you get an idea of what the beast looked like. Unless it was mythical and none of it ever happened. Unless it was mythical and something like it is always happening.

She could ask.

“Dad, did you know? Is that why you took her to a psychiatrist?”

“I took her because she was blue.”

“Did you see her do it?”

“Did I see her … what, break your arm? Of course not.”

“No one sees what happens between a parent and a child in the middle of the deserted day.”

“I would have known.”

“No one can know.”

“You just answered your own question.”

The day has dulled. Poetry is gone from the sky, nothing is like anything else, everything is merely what it is. Did it happen?

An ambulance is parked outside the subway station, silent lights flashing, a streetcar squeals past. She feels oddly light, her limbs seemingly in a process of distension; without pain to staple her to the present, her head is floating upward. It is as though the whole of her has only ever been held together by a string, slackening now like a faulty puppet. All of it happened, none of it happened, it is still happening …

The package is somewhere. Other Mary Rose is somewhere, when I die I will be everywhere … She needs an angel to carry a message from the top of her mind way down to her darkness where words waver and go out or else ignite the air. What angel, what bird of pray or ebony elf will volunteer to carry this message? Which of them is small enough to squeeze between yet bold enough to go behind the lines, below the words — down, down to the bottom of the well with the message: “War is over. Peace now. I’m coming for you”?

Victim of a victim … Crime continues to be played out until it is understood, at which point, like a spinning chunk of kryptonite, it slows, ceases mid-air and drops to the ground with a harmless klink . Is that all there is to a trauma? A sad mother, a father who wants everything to be okay. Damage bred in the bone; a bone with holes, like the stops on a flute doomed to sing the truth. Depressed mother. Crying baby. Closed door. Why is it not a truth universally acknowledged that an absence of trauma under these conditions is remarkable? Why is it anything but ordinary that Mary Rose’s mother might have injured her, then sought to bury it along with the dead babies? And why is it surprising that truth makes its way out through the body like a vine invading from within? What you mistook for sinews now revealed as sprouts from a seed swallowed long ago, creeping, pushing, straining toward the light, ensnaking arteries, choking heart and lungs; vines disguised as veins, forcing blindly out, I’m going to smash you!

Or that truth should sing like a flute fashioned from a bone whose holes determine not only its tune but its nature as an instrument of song? It does not mean you are crazy if you can hear the song, or read the entrails. And suddenly the spell is broken. No fairy-tale vine, no magic flute. An injury, sad and small. It hurts .

At the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, so many people. Flowing past and amid one another, human currents adhering to the laws of physics, not tripping into turbulence — how do we do that? How do birds know when to turn as one in flight? She watches all the people, all the people, and sees them collapsing one by one like expertly demolished buildings, disintegrating from the inside; all the perfectly normal people falling down inside their nice coats. And the coats stay standing. Knowing a thing is not the same as believing a thing — they are twins but not identical, parallel thoughts that can veer apart like a cartoon train track … She stands still, letting the crowd break past her, risking turbulence. The feel of people’s coats brushing her shoulder, her cheek, the smell of hair, chattering of words and motion, if she unfocuses her ears she can imagine she has just arrived here and does not understand the language. Where is everyone going? Wohin gehen sie? They are all on the way somewhere, on the way to work, on the way to the store, on the way to a friend, on the way, on the way, on the way home …

A bridge is the way to do it if you are going to be sure. Also, it is simple and inconveniences the fewest people. Netting has been erected along the bridge over the Don Valley, but there are others. There is the Skyway bridge in Hamilton, forty-five minutes away. She does it in her mind’s eye, and perhaps this means it really happens somewhere — just as, somewhere, Maggie’s arm was broken yesterday morning, and somewhere else, Mary Rose’s never was. She mounts the railing at the crest of the bridge. Far below is Lake Ontario, great slab of water. She leans forward and commits her body to the air. The wind bears her up at first, then gives way and she falls headfirst — the water will be like concrete — on the way on the way down her heart breaks open like the palms of two praying hands to reveal her children cupped within; they were there all along. Too late, she knows she loves them.

On the other side of the intersection, Honest Ed’s winks and flashes. Only the flowers are crooked! Secrets from Your Sister is having a sale. I’m not crying, don’t you cry . The light turns green, she stays still. People bump past, one or two look back irritably over their shoulder — hint of turbulence. This is how it starts. If you survive, you return with swollen ankles and a shopping cart full of plastic bags, another spare loony. What is the difference between me and them, the marginal ones? Streetcar wheels rattle past, car tires hiss, the difference between slicing and crushing, slicing is better. It is important not to have hit her children or cast them out. But, standing at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor across from Honest Ed’s, here on this tide-deserted beach, pocked with shells, scribbled with seaweed, is this what is left? It has caught up to her, her mother’s curse. She cannot see a future. She sees what is right in front of her, the traffic, and she craves it. Not so much death, though that is a by-product, but injury, and with it something certain. Pain. She tastes the impact, yearns for the relief of it, metal slamming into her, smashing her. It has been on its way to her for her whole life. The light is yellow.