Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

“What do you think?” she said.

He didn’t answer, which was typical. When Jennie was a teenager — fighting with them constantly over curfews, boyfriends, grades — George tried for the first few minutes to reason with her as if she were one of his colleagues and they were negotiating labor costs or shipping charges; but then he’d check out of the conversation and sit stonily at the dinner table, his hand curled around his water glass. Ruth was the one who’d kept soldiering on, while he sat waiting mutely for the war to be over. She’d fight with Jennie and then, once they were in bed, harangue George for not helping. “I can’t do this all by myself,” she’d say.

“But you are ,” he’d say in return.

And years later, when he was moving out, she asked what, precisely, he thought he’d find elsewhere that was better.

“Peace and quiet,” he told her.

So now she gave him his peace and quiet. She didn’t care anymore. She arranged her purse on the seat next to her and watched the curtain rise on act 2, which provided a wealth of further complications: deaths and marriages, both real and fake; old people pitted against young; and the Mikado himself, whatever he was. All this was conveyed through trills and patter and high-pitched chortling. During one song she glanced sideways at George, and the look of pain on his face mirrored exactly how she felt inside. She almost laughed, knowing at least they agreed on one basic fact: this show was terrible.

But then, while the Mikado was presiding over some major disagreement, George turned to her in the dark and whispered, “I have to go to the hospital.”

“What?”

“I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“For God’s sake, why didn’t you say something earlier?” She bolted out of her seat and people all around them turned their heads to watch. George stood up shakily and she offered him her hand, but he ignored her and limped, as if cramping, up the aisle. The expression she’d thought was a frown had deepened into actual pain. She followed him uselessly out of the building.

Once they were in the parking lot, she said, “Give me the keys.”

“I can drive.”

“Over my dead body,” she said, and he closed his eyes and handed them over.

In his unfamiliar Subaru she spent a moment adjusting the mirrors and seats before shifting into gear; it had been a while since she’d driven a standard, and the car stalled when she pressed on the gas.

“God, Ruth,” he said.

“Don’t talk,” she said sharply, and turned the key again. She switched on the heat as he lay back in his seat and closed his eyes. His taut skin now looked haggard and deathly. “Hold on,” she said.

Under the streetlights, the avenues glowed palely with salt. They’d come to the city together in the late sixties as graduate students, she in history and George in engineering. After Kingston, Montreal had seemed exotic and glamorous, and the times were glamorous too, everything in tumult, the world remaking itself. She’d thought that their lives here would lift them into some entirely different sphere. Now she knew that not even Montreal could have that effect. They’d moved to the suburbs and started a family and then dissolved it, as they probably would’ve done in Kingston or Halifax or anywhere else.

In the passenger seat George moaned slightly, involuntarily.

At the hospital she filled out the paperwork while he was rolled into an observation room. Then she went to a pay phone and called Marlena, explaining as briefly as possible what had happened and where they were. Finally she called Jennie’s cell phone and left a message. She decided to wait to call Matthew until she knew how serious it was. After all this had been accomplished there was nothing left for her to do, so she sat in the waiting room, reading a knitting magazine she’d found in a stack on a table. She’d always meant to take up knitting. Now would have been a good time for it.

A green-robed doctor walked in and spoke her name, her married name, in accented English. “I am Dr. Vasanji,” he said. “Your husband will be having emergency bypass surgery. We won’t know anything for the next few hours.”

He nodded and left even before she could think of what she was supposed to ask.

Twenty minutes later, Marlena came rushing down the hallway, her eyes wide with anxiety and her scarf trailing behind her. Marlena was what Ruth called an artsy-fartsy. She wore jewel colors and long skirts and dyed her hair dark red. “Where is he?” she demanded.

Ruth stood up. “In surgery,” she said, and then explained everything. But Marlena kept asking questions she couldn’t answer — What room was he in? How long would the surgery take, exactly? How bad had the pain been? — and Ruth brusquely told her to speak to a nurse, which she finally did, engaging one in a conversation Ruth couldn’t hear.

When she came back, her face was pale beneath her red hair. “They won’t tell me anything, either,” she said, sitting down next to Ruth. She took off her coat and ran her hands through her hair, then she looked at her. “Thank you for calling me,” she said stiffly. “It’s late, and they won’t tell us anything for a long time. You can go home.”

Ruth closed her eyes for a second, not wanting to leave. George was in surgery, and she needed to know what was happening. She could feel the other woman staring at her, willing her to clear out of the waiting room. Too bad, she thought. “I called Jennie,” she said.

“Oh, dear,” Marlena said.

Ruth knew that Marlena would not want to be alone with Jennie. “I left her a message, and I’m sure she’ll be right over, after her performance.”

“Oh, God, The Mikado, ” Marlena said. “I bet that’s what did him in.” Her lip curled in a smile, and she looked at Ruth, as if expecting her to go along.

Ruth looked at her coldly. “It was really very good,” she said.

Marlena nodded, her expression knowing and ironic. “I’m sure it was.”

They sat together watching the news, and the nurses chattered and ran around. Marlena asked them more questions, her voice louder and more confident now, carrying back to where Ruth sat. Her French was far better than Ruth’s would ever be — she’d grown up in Montreal — and she wrangled with the staff fearlessly, pressing them with yet another question every time they shook their heads and tried to walk away. As Anglophones, George and Ruth had always found it somewhat difficult to deal with hospitals, government officials, even store clerks; no matter how many years they lived here, they’d never lost their self-consciousness. Not Marlena, though. At times Ruth wondered if this was what George liked about her, that she was at home in Montreal in a way he’d never been.

“What did they say?” she asked when Marlena finally came back.

Marlena shrugged. “No news,” she said, although she’d talked with one nurse for at least five minutes. Ruth shifted in her seat, annoyed. Just then Jennie came walking down the hallway, still in her stage makeup, though it was smeared and thin and patches of her skin showed beneath the white.

“What’s going on?” she said, and burst into tears. She sat down next to her mother, who held her in her arms as she cried a couple of dry sobs, her blond head shaking.

“It’s going to be fine, honey,” Ruth said. “We just have to wait, that’s all. He’ll be okay.” Marlena was looking at her with an expression of doubt, clearly displeased by these reassurances. Marlena had raised her own children with rational argument, talking to each as one adult to another; she never offered bribes or made false promises or exaggerated claims. (Ruth had heard about all of this from Jennie.) One worked for Stats Canada, another was an elementary-school principal, and the third was in jail for mail fraud. Ruth pitied them, these adults who’d never had a mother tell them everything was going to be okay, who’d never had the comfort of lies.