Ann-Marie MacDonald - Adult Onset

Dolly looks up from the depths of her purse.

“Give me your postal code again, Mary Rose.”

She hands back the Best Western pen and Dolly writes it in the mini address book.

Duncan says, “I see where they’re touting the new head of the World Bank as a woman, as if that’s her only claim to fame.”

“I think Andy-Patrick is seeing someone.”

She sees her father contract like a salted oyster, while Dolly compresses her lips and stares out over the tabled expanse.

Duncan is pained but polite. “What about … what was her name? Nice gal …”

“Renée,” states Dolly.

“Shereen,” says Mary Rose. “They broke up.”

“We haven’t heard from your brother.”

“We didn’t hear from Andy-Patrick the entire time we were away,” says Duncan, his voice reedy.

“He’s been super busy,” says Mary Rose, feeling some compunction.

Her parents will be reassured to know that she and her brother have seen one another, so she makes the recent contact sound like the norm. “He was over playing with the kids, having supper with us the other night.”

Duncan disappears behind the business section.

Dolly polishes off her doughnut and asks, “Have you heard from your brother?”

Mary Rose decides that it might indeed be wise to learn Mandarin — it could be a way to stay neurologically spry.

“Did you get the packeege I mailed you yet?”

“Mum … No, not yet.”

“Dammit, what in the name of time is going on?” She is getting worked up.

“Mum, the mail has been—”

“Duncan, do you remember the packeege I had for Mary Rose?”

“What packeege?”

He is getting cranky too — time for their afternoon nap.

“Forget about it, now,” he says.

“Forget what?”

“The packeege.”

“I did forget it, that’s the problem!” Tears in Dolly’s eyes, a candy sprinkle at the corner of her mouth. Oh Mum, please don’t cry at eighty-one in the Tim’s, I can’t bear it …

“Relax now, throttle back,” Duncan instructs his wife, making a calming gesture that makes Mary Rose want to bark like crazy. Like Daisy.

Dolly goes to say something, bites it back, sighs elaborately, and suddenly the sun comes out. “Look who’s here!”

It’s Andy-Patrick, strolling toward them in hair-tipped splendour.

“Well, hello, stranger!” says their father, gripping the table, rising, whacking him on the shoulder. Andy-Pat leans down to his mother, who hugs him tightly then pretends to slap him.

He gives her a chocolate Scrabble game.

“Where the heck did you find something like that?” Duncan smiles broadly.

“Let’s all play, come on!” cries Dolly.

“I don’t know if you have time before your train,” says killjoy Mary Rose.

“We’ve got time,” says Andy-Patrick.

“Wait now,” says Dolly, unwrapping the game, “I thought this was — oh, I’m all confused. I thought this was, this isn’t the, this is, this isn’t in German, or isn’t it?”

Sister and brother hesitate in unison, as though syntactically stalled in the effort to sort out which of their mother’s questions is answerable.

“Why would it be in German?” asks Duncan, as though trapped in a play by Ionesco.

“I gave you the German Scrabble, Mum,” says Mary Rose.

“What’s the difference?” says Duncan.

“There are umlauts in German,” says Mary Rose, “as well as the classical extra letter—”

“It’s German chocolate ,” quips Andy-Pat, helping with the plastic wrap.

“You gave me a German Scrabble, didn’t you, Mary Rose?”

“That’s right, for Christmas one year.”

“Why?” asks Dolly.

“Because … we lived there.”

“I know we lived there—” Dolly sounds petulant.

“Temper down now,” says Duncan.

“Don’t tell me to temper down.”

“Would you like more tea, Mum?”

“Tea nothing, listen to me now.”

For a moment, Mary Rose’s mother is there. The one who cast her out. The one who always walked faster than she could, who got an extra ten percent off everything and always had room for one more at the table. The one who swept into her hospital room in a leopard print coat and hat and turned the figure on the bed back into Mary Rose with one bold look.

“Mum, I gave you the German Scrabble game because I was born there.”

“No, Mary Rose, you were born in Winnipeg.”

Andy-Pat glances up from the chocolate game board.

“No, Mum. That was Other Mary Rose.”

Dolly’s eyes narrow, her mouth forms a small Oh .

“I’m the second Mary Rose, Mum. The first one died.”

“Did she?” Dolly’s face slackens. Not quite sad clown. Perplexed. “Why? What did I do to her?”

Mary Rose watches darkness opening up behind her mother’s face; not the rolling thunderhead of days gone by, but a steadily oncoming darkness, close to the ground. “Mum, you didn’t do anything. It was the Rh factor, do you remember what that is?”

“Of course I do, dear, I’m a nurse.”

Andy-Patrick says, “Who wants to play?”

“That’s what happened to the others too,” says Mary Rose.

“And what happened to you, Mary Rose?”

“… I don’t know, Mum. Did something happen to me?”

“I did something to you, what was it now?”

Dolly’s brow contracts, the corners of her mouth turn up with effort, like a toddler on the potty. Mary Rose stays very still, lest she startle her mother off the scent of whatever memory is nosing onto the path. In the Black Forest. Dolly’s lips part. Then, finally, “I guess it’s gone.” She leans back in her seat and chuckles. “Your mother’s losing her marbles, Mary Rose. Dunc? Dunc’re you asleep, dear?”

“I musta bin.” He blinks, but does not meet her gaze. Andy-Patrick places chocolate tiles on chocolate trays.

Her mother has so much unmoored guilt, she is ready to believe she baked her own children into pies. Truth is not going to come this way. Will not yield to direct inquisition. Is unspeakable. The whole fabric of Mary Rose’s life is stained with the dye of what can never be stated, a skein from which she spun stories while she still could — fee-fi-fo-fum, ready or not here I come, can you guess my name? If you are going to forgive, you have to forgive what you don’t know. What you can only half see. The rest is dark matter, exerting a pull, making itself known only by the degree to which you wobble off course. Because you don’t get the whole story.

Love is blind. Forgiveness is blind in one eye.

“I don’t remember, Mum.”

Dolly reaches out and places a hand on Mary Rose’s cheek. Gentle. Warm.

“I love you, Mary Rose.”

Your mother is leaving. Learn her face .

“I love you too, Mum.”

She has said it from the Tim’s and from the concourse outside the Tim’s; from the PATH and the train station above it, from the top of the CN Tower and out beyond transmission range. She has said it from a story long ago and far away across an ocean; from a living room with a coffee table and a couch and a balcony. And she knows, across the miles of underwater cable, through mists of anaesthetic, behind walls of glass and within a cave on a sunny day, from before she was born and after she died, as the message rises from one side of the bolted Formica table, ascends to the blue, the black, the forever, and descends to the other side where her mother sits, that it is true.

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m grateful to be here.”

“I know what you mean.”

Andy-Patrick is staring at the game board. Duncan’s hand is resting on Dolly’s; his, parchmenty with age and pale with a dusting of freckles, the tip of his ring finger gone; hers, light brown and lined like seasoned wood. So many miles …