Mad Hope (19 page)

New Country: Don't listen to these assholes with all their flaming fire and brimming brimstone. I also dreamed about your baby. He was small and dead. I held him in my palm then laid him on the ground. With my wings, I formed a kind of canopy overtop of him. I wove my feathers together to give him shelter. I protected him.
–
Wings

New Country: Are you still there? Please don't go away because of a couple of kooks with some internet savoir faire and too many holy axes to grind. We're still here. And we love you.
–
Spiral

Oh
NC
! I had to have a smoke when I read your news. About six ‘ladies with handbags' (you know the type) gave me the dirtiest fucking looks as they passed me on my stoop, knocked up and sucking on a cig like my life depended on it. I'm so sorry,
NC
. Is someone with you? Where can you go? I hope you have pals there besides us, all stuck in our virtualness.
–
Craving City

NC
: This is probably not the right time to tell you this, but just the fact that you could conceive in the first place, well, that's a good thing. You'll have more chances, you will. Take good care.
–
Straight Shooter

New Country: You should crank your old music – as loud as possible – until the neighbours make 911 calls. Then you should beat on things – your own breast, tabletops, the fridge door. Do not stop until you are entirely spent. Once you've had a rest, turn up the volume again.
–
Wings

It is not fair that your baby died. It happens more than people like to admit or talk about, but it is in no way fair. DO NOT let anybody tell you any differently. Stay away from parks and avoid schoolyards. Maybe take a vacation.
–
Straight Shooter
PS
Table Reserved?!?

Thanks, everybody, for all your props and kind words. I know that you are all speaking from your own truth, and that's what's important, even if it is difficult for me to absorb. I am writing to say goodbye as I don't quite fit in around these parts anymore. I wish you all the very best with your challenges, your joys, your wonderful tumult, the times when your faces are not lit by these crass, compelling, miraculous screens. Remember to talk to and touch each other whenever you can. As Faith would sing: ‘The secret of life is there ain't no secret/And you don't get your money back.'
Peace and Punk Rock,
–
NC

New Country – I'm guessing you are in Toronto ... If you are, would you like to meet me for tea (or something stronger) one of these days? That is, if you're still listening …
–
Wings

Wings: I'm still here. I tried but I can't turn off my laptop. I don't want to believe ... I just don't want to. So Wings, I want you to keep doing your crazy-assed, lyrical, love-me-or-leave-me thing, I really do, but I don't want to meet you. I don't want to know you. It's just that – even though we're networked, connected, I guess – you're really NOT my family, are you? I don't even know what you look like, or what your voice sounds like or what hair products you use … And, to be honest, I'm just not sure I could deal with it – with you and your, well, your CONDITION, I guess, and by that I mean no offence I really don't –
–
New Country

New Country: I know I am probably the last person you want to hear from – but I don't judge you, I don't! Gosh, just saying that makes me sound so sanctimonious, doesn't it? I am so sorry for your loss. I've been praying for you. I didn't want to jump into the fray before, with all those loony-tunes giving us God-fearers a bad name. I don't know what God wants us to do, or why He might have chosen your baby, or why He'd want to ‘redact' anyone's post. I just believe in Him, and His Great Good Grace is all. I just have to believe in Him. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you, before you left, in case you didn't know, that I am also a Faith Hill fan!!! Especially the songs ‘A Baby Changes Everything' which is totally not about what you might think – it's Jesus who is the baby! – and also ‘You Bring Out the Elvis in Me' (not sure if you're really into Elvis ... ). Take care of yourself, and God Bless.
–
Christian Mom!

Drowning Doesn't Look
Like Drowning

FOR A LONG TIME MY FATH
ER
refused to talk about the accident. That he considered me at fault was obvious and how to integrate this feeling seemed puzzling to him – although, of course, not to me. I had lost him as surely as I lost my mother, lost him to a recklessness that had been mere frivolity in the past. My mother's risk-taking had always been extravagant but well-ordered, but my father grabbed at dangerous opportunities as if at bullets zinging past him. He had dropped out of the Superior trip because a gig had come up, a friend who needed help moving some ‘cargo.' Drugs? Maybe. Not weaponry, that was not his style. But that there was a hard edge, a large possibility of capture or injury, was a given. Sometimes wilderness trekking was too purely animalistic for him. Too distant from the intricacies of human infrastructures. Was my mother angry that he had cancelled – last minute – a trip that was meant to be my initiation into this type of adventuring? If so, she never showed it. In the days leading up to our departure, the expedition became ours alone – we gathered supplies, rolled and cubed clothes and gear into knapsacks built expressly for this purpose. She was a winker, my mother, and in those days she winked at me often, while reaching for a canister of propane, smoothing out a map, pointing out a buckle or clasp. Hugging me, the two of us wearing only our underwear and neon-orange life preservers.

I do not wink at my own children, or at other children, no matter how urgently the gesture seems called for. A slyness, a secret, an apology, an invitation, a harmless salaciousness, an embrace from a distance – I do understand it, its appeal, its charm. I wanted to wink at Nathalie, my first, the moment I laid eyes on her, such was my understanding of the great and serious joke we had shared, but I had broken blood vessels in my cheeks, torn my perineum in two places, my eyes were dry, Bruce was holding my hand too tightly. I could not seem to muster the necessary combination of muscle coordination, will and lightness of spirit required. I felt so sure she would have winked back. And then the moment passed. The little cub was on my chest, her oily face tipped up fiercely towards mine, then latched on to one of my nipples, attached.

If I tell you my mother winked at me while the plane was going down, would you believe me? Could you? It's not real, it's not serious, the wink said. I love and loathe my mother for that wink, a wink I may myself have imagined.

Yesterday was a hot day, the type that can only happen on the edge of the Great Lakes here in Toronto, the humidity a heavy canopy over the city, tamping down energy, smog, aspirations. I took the kids to the indoor pool, frightened of the soaring
UV
index, and I guess the combination of airborne moisture, nasty pollutants, the fumes from the chlorine – all were too much for James's little bronchioles to bear. I saw it coming: the too-­deliberate breaths. A seven-year-old child paying attention to how he breathes is rare and wrong. The slowing of his physical movement and the slow turning inwards, the strange soul-quiet that follows ... But before he got in the water he fished his puffer from his bag and sucked on it like a pro, and I thought, The cool water will help. I thought, He can handle this; modern medicine can handle this; I can handle this. It is the mother's pendulum that swings constantly between sheer panic and willed competence. But then he was dog-paddling weakly to the side while Nathalie and Sarah took turns dunking each other, emerging with bangs plastered over eyes like monsters or pop stars, pretending the bubbles they blew were farts, lifting ballerina legs to the sky.

I got an e-mail message the other day; it arrived in my inbox with a happy ping and the subject line
Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning
. A forward from a well-meaning fellow mother; the type of dire instructional counsel that circulates amongst us clucking hens. I try not to open them as a rule. I know the gist: Watch out for your kids. There are strangers, spiders, poisons, tornadoes, faulty slides, baddies lurking everywhere. Save them from their own stupid kid selves. But this one I read, eyes skating across the screen without my sanction, the rapid click and the blooming text.
Drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs
.

James could not pull himself out of the pool; I saw him gasp, then lower himself back into the water. I watched his eyes widen and his legs thrash as I scooped him – a fish tired of fighting – up and onto the deck. It's okay, kiddo, I said, it's okay. Let's get your puffer. He nodded, his eyes like leashes hooked on to mine. But the puffer did nothing and once they were all dressed – the girls' hair tangled pelts down their backs, the whining and wheezing from the back seat, the smell of chlorine and kid sweat – I drove him to the clinic at St. Joe's and called Bruce from my cell to come pick up the girls. And then I told James again how okay it really was, as the er nurse tested his blood for oxygen, and gave me the look that said
Not okay
, and, somehow,
Your fault
, and
Hate this fucking job
. James had stopped wheezing then; his lips were turning blue around the edges, a terrifying resignation growing in his eyes.

I am tired. And I allow myself, through the scrim of my despair, moment of irritation with James. There is a particular type of work that goes into achieving the harmony we have reached in my household. I remember what Bruce will not: Nathalie's volleyball practice after school, that Sarah will eat green beans only if they are dipped in mayonnaise. This is me, keeper of schedules and child foibles. Bruce is in charge of the jolly in our house: getting us up and out, treating the children like the physical, rough-and-tumble beings they are. Pushing them over, pulling their pigtails – our very own benign schoolyard bully. They adore it, even James, who is treated differently, it's true – gentle!

I have no illusions regarding my relative importance. I am thirty-three years old, a part-time baker, mother to three children. Still, I don't think it is unfair to say that it is the mother's calendar and not money that makes the world go around. I am an ordinary person who does not believe in diesel trains (I have demonstrated), honour killings (I have written letters) or blood diamonds (we wear plain platinum bands and I have signed online petitions). I believe in bread and certain uncalled-for forms of beauty. And I believe in the potential – I do! – of every human to effect a shift, some small change in the world. I volunteer in an after-school program for at-risk youth. The program is designed to teach them real-world coping skills. I bake bread with them, which – who's kidding who? – is nowhere near a survival skill; there
are
these things called supermarkets. So yeah, it's a weird, bourgeois, anachronistic luxury, I know. But, I tell them, it makes your house smell
really fucking good
. That scores me some points mainly because I curse but also because they can tell that I mean it. The smell of bread baking means safety and warmth, a cocoon-like protection they have never known.

It is possible I feel my children's vulnerability more keenly than other mothers, although we all have dark bruised spots on our pasts that never seem to heal. Instead of fading, they pass through the colours of the rainbow, shining dully, differently, on each and every moment in our lives. In my twenties, I searched for and found love everywhere. I was an intimacy junkie, and eventually my drug of choice stopped providing comfort – those sweet, cuddly highs – and my partners, sensing my need, either left or began to hurt me, pressing, pressing, on my bruises. A therapist at the time – wiry frame, wiry glasses, patchouli, geranium scent – explained myself to me. She said I was searching for the love I had lost, a mother's embrace like air or water, a mother's protection that surrounds, versus a father's more belligerent affection – the love that takes on all comers. I've often wondered if this is why I chose to have children, to provide that love that was stolen from me. If I could, I would submerge James in my love, provide healing through benediction, the iron clasp of my embrace.

We call Nathalie, our oldest, The Gnat; it is her nickname, superhero moniker, alter ego. There are times when you want nothing more than to slap her away, forcefully, to make her listen instead of speak, to silence her whine with a quick backhand swoosh. She is persistent, relentless in her demands; she will not go away. And there are times when her very presence, its drone and reliability, brings the most powerful form of reassurance. When Bruce picked the girls up from the hospital, Nathalie lifted the hair away from my ear. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, she said. James has good lungs, just broken for now and he will breathe better soon, breathe better soon, breathe better soon. She grabbed me around the neck, choked me lightly, then let go, and when I gasped with relief her eyes said, See? Sarah was already clamped into her booster, looking out the window. Crisis embarrassed her, wounded her sense of invincibility and frayed the forcefield she wore like a cloak. I knew that when James pulled through –breathebettersoonbreathebettersoon – and they were back home, lying like lizards on the floor, head to head, whispering secrets and incantations, Sarah would hurt him deliberately, a discreet pinch or tug at his hair. And when he winced, she would smile – her brother was back. She understands that the vulnerable cannot muster the energy to react to pain or feign indignation.

The hospital room was small and shabby; it had the feel of the Third World, or one of those crowded strip malls at the edge of this city. Something provisional and patched about it. None of the slick sanitization of one of the more monied downtown research facilities. But never mind. The nurses, unlike the harried intake nurse in
ER
, were bosomy and matter-of-fact. I curbed the urge to follow them to their storage rooms and efficient phones, to somehow absorb the secret of their large proficiency. I wanted to be near James when he woke up. I wanted to answer his questions with my own calm truth. I wanted him to know that although his breath might elude him, I would not.

It got worse before it got better – his lips still blue, an
iv
in his arm. I watched the tube carefully – for what? – air bubbles, blood, a sign. Then I buzzed the nurses, who were beginning, and rightfully so, to become cross with me. I loved them even for their crossness. James was sleeping fitfully, his breath still laboured. I have always considered my children in light of the age I was when my own mother died. It is the year – the seventh – that stands alone as crucible. Some superstitious part of me believes if they can get through that year unscathed they will make it through the rest – the fevers, the driving tests, the battered hearts, the scabs and shitheads in the playground. And if they survive, somehow I will, somehow I
can
also. But James! It would be a lie – and so inequitable – if I said I loved him best (oh, I love him best!).

And now here we are, steroids pumping into his arm, oxygen mask over his little helpless mug. And I am thinking about my mother and yearning for her and so glad she is not here to see this.

From a young age, I believed God was less Spirit than Sas­quatch, a mythical figure very much of this earth – not quite human, although possessed of wise Neanderthal-like qualities. A creature perched alone and unique on its very own evolutionary limb – what it would be to glimpse this creature! Not something you could share widely; who would believe you? And would you really want to share? You didn't share God or trumpet him to the masses, nor did you hoard him – you acknowledged him when He emerged. And if you searched for him you were likely to be endlessly frustrated or attacked by his sham of a likeness around every corner. This was a philosophy I had arrived at mostly through my parents' use of the phrase ‘God's country,' which they used to describe remote spaces – uncaring, oblivious spots on the globe where humans had little dominion. I understood that to visit these places was a privilege, that to even breathe God's air, to track him by his prints and scat, was a great and awesome thing. So that when we took off from Thunder Bay in our float plane, Michipicoten Island in our sights, all eleven of us and our various gear, I knew immediately, from that first glance out the window, from the hush that fell over us as we looked down upon the impenetrable forests, their variegated greens, smoky browns, the great sky squeezing up around us, that we were entering God's country and that to acknowledge it was both sacrilege and necessity. My mother nuzzled my head. God's country, she said, and we nodded slowly in solidarity.

Sarah, my youngest, is five now and, strangely, already the one who needs me least. I watch her sometimes while she is playing – building a tower or drawing castles or cats. Her concentration, her focus, would be the envy of most adults. And I think, yes, she would make it fine if I were gone. She would feel the loss as something sudden and violent – a bullet that came out clean – then she would pick herself up and carry on. There is something of the stoic cowgirl to her, in the way she has, already, learned to curse: quietly, authentically. Oh, shit, shit, shit, she mutters when the tower tumbles, when the cat's ears have the look of odd antennae. Then she carries on.

James is finally sleeping soundly, quietly, his breaths less rasp than whisper. We can be forgiven for believing it is angels or fairies – ridiculous, exquisite-winged creatures – who ride on rafts of air composed of children's sleep-sighs. It took me weeks before I could turn my back to Nathalie, even while she slept. I was convinced the very fact of my gaze was keeping her alive – how easy it would be for her, so tiny, so mysterious, to be spirited away.