SSC (2012) Adult Onset (23 page)

“You shouldn’t be talking while driving.” She swerves to avoid a cyclist and turns onto her street. Maggie renews her protest. “I’m not talking to you till you pull over.”

“Okay. I’ve stopped.”

“Are you in park?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Now what’s wrong?”

He has been triggered—by what, he does not know—and cannot find the off switch. Maureen has her comfy autoimmune disorder, while the two younger MacKinnons are united in pointless panic: the garden-variety plunge into an “I”-free zone of bowel-searing fear. For no reason. Occasionally accompanied by visual phenomena, elevated heart rate and esophageal spasm,
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. “Where are you?” she says. “I’m coming.”

“I’m on the 401 at Cobourg.”

He must have flown! “I can’t come there. I have to pick up Matthew at noon.”

She turns into her driveway and puts the car in park, jams the phone between her face and shoulder, leans into the back seat to undo the five-point restraint buckle, and Maggie knuckle-punches her in the ear. She carries her brother and her child to the back door, both of them crying.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Mary Rose, I’m going to get out of my car and walk into the road, I can’t—I can’t—can’t—

“Stay in the car.” Six lanes of superhighway. “Do you hear me? Answer me.”

“Okay.”

“Now breathe through your nose, it’s going to be okay.”

She listens to his convulsive breathing as she makes it inside and up the four steps to the kitchen. Maggie allows herself to be consoled by Daisy, who goes to work on the salty toddler cheeks, while Mary Rose goes to the fridge for her daughter’s drug of choice, mango juice—it’s organic, but the mangoes come from China, so …? “Andy-Pat, are you still in counselling? Are you still seeing that therapist? What was her name?”

“Amber.”

“Is she a real therapist? She sounds like a stripper.”

He chuckles. That’s better.

“She’s real,” he says.

“Are you still seeing her?”

“No. Yeah, but …”

He has slept with her—oh for God’s sake—Mary Rose does not want to know, she wants to hunt Amber down and get her tax money back. Pin it to the corkboard next to the dead clown magnet:
Amber, five thousand dollars
.

“Mary Rose? How come I’m such a fuck-up?”

“You’re not. Well, you are somewhat, but I think you’re within the normal range. For a straight white male cop.”

“You know what?” She hears him clear his throat, staving off more tears. “I love you and Maureen more than anyone in the world, I’d be dead without you guys.”

“No you wouldn’t, but you might be less screwed-up.”

“That’s what Dad always said.”

“He was afraid it would turn you gay, having sisters and no brother.”

“How ironic. I wish I was gay.”

“No you don’t.”

“Mary Rose? How come—” He breaks off, crying in the choked way of a boy fighting the humiliation of tears.

“It’s okay, Andy-Pat. Andy-Pat? I love you. Maggie’s here. You want to say hi?”

“What’s the matter with me, Mister?”

“Shereen left.”

Perhaps all their panic attacks are this simple, a choreography of chaos designed to avoid the quiet thing behind the curtain: loss.

He whimpers. She starts singing “Boom Boom, Ain’t It Great to Be Crazy?” They used to sing it on family car trips—in between her bouts of carsickness. She sings it softly now, as though it were a lullaby, wondering dispassionately as she does so, How did this get to be my life? But he says, “No. The other one.”

She sings the whole thing. Somewhere around the verse about the soldiers who have all gone missing, she hears him blow his nose. His voice is ragged but steady. “Mister, how come you always help me, but I can never help you? I never help anyone. Dad was right, I’m a ‘useless shit.’ ”

“That’s not true. He was probably jealous of you.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you had a father.”

“…  Wow.”

“That’ll be a hundred and twenty-five dollars plus HST.”

“See?” he moans.

“You’ve helped me.”

“When?”

But she can’t think of an example. Maggie spills her juice and starts fingerpainting with it. Daisy starts licking it up—she will have diarrhea later, her system is that sensitive. “You help just by being my brother.” She has spoken like a Hallmark card but suddenly it hurts, like a splinter in her throat, the word:
brother
. She mustn’t cry too. Through her kitchen window she sees a stolid middle-aged man jog by. He is in the here and now.

“I better go,” he says. He is back. “I look like I’ve been crying.”

“You probably just look hungover like all the other cops.”

“I’m a man.”

“Yes you am.”

He is off to Kingston to stand next to the premier at the dedication of a new monument to “the fallen” in Afghanistan—as if they’d tripped on something.
See Jane fall
. He asks if they can meet for coffee tomorrow morning at nine. “Sure, I’ll come right after I drop Matthew at 8:45.” She feels a pang of remorse over how ticked off at A&P she was for standing her up at the salon. Hil was right, he was actually in crisis. His binge of shopping and primping on the heels of a breakup ought to have tipped her off that he was heading for a crash. He was on the rebound, falling for himself all over again, getting infatuated only to find there was no one on the other end of the embrace—existential
horreur
! Why can’t she and her brother just be sad when it is sad? Sad = Cry = Feel Better. Even Maureen cries. Why do she and A&P need to go through so many hoops? Krazy Klowns.

They hang up. It will be good to see him tomorrow, they will have an unfraught coffee. She tears off a wad of paper towels and
swipes through the mangoey mess on the floor, having broken a rule from
The Parents’ Guide to Survival:
never pour more than you plan to wipe up.

“No!” shrieks Maggie.

Mary Rose forgot it was art. Maggie laments bitterly, sticky hands clawing the floor in Trojan Women–sized despair. Mary Rose leans down to pick her up from behind, just as the child jacks to her feet and Mary Rose sustains the toddler head-snap to the bridge of her nose. “Oh my God.” No blood, just pain.

These are the wages of cold turkey—there is forty-five minutes before she has to go get Matthew, time enough for Maggie to have a mini-nap—a methadone nap. Mary Rose herself could do with a twenty-minute “sizz.” What would Hil do?

She turns on the faucet, puts it to “spray” and pulls it from its retractable base. “Here you go, Maggs … Aim into the sink, that’s right. The sink!” Mary Rose moves out of range to the small utility sink where she unpacks the produce and starts the wash along the rind.

She buys organic but avoids the subject with her mother, who scorns the term—“I don’t buy anything organeek!” Her father is fond of inquiring with MBA-ular skepticism, “How do you know it’s organeek? Where’s the proof?” She has explained to her parents that organic is not new, it is what they grew up with. It is one reason why their generation will probably wind up having been at the apex of human longevity. “Just think of it as food. It’s all the other stuff that should be hyphenated. Why do you think cancer rates are soaring, along with allergies and obesity?”

“ ‘By your children be ye taught!’ ” declaimed Dolly, and pretended to slap her.

Mary Rose tries not to rant, but her parents must enjoy baiting her. Why else would her mother see a rejection of her own values in Mary Rose’s healthy choices when Dolly herself paved the way with
Lebanese cuisine and a refusal to waste money on processed “fog”? Why would her father persist in making right-wing remarks when he is in fact well left of many people far younger?

He likes to wait till the end of a visit. “I see where there’s a new auto mechanic shop opened up downtown and their claim to fame is that all the mechanics are female. Why are they making such a big deal of their gender, it just begs the question, if you’re so great, where’ve you been for the past two thousand years?”
Mechaneek
.

He knows the answer, he taught her the answer, coached and rooted for her till she breached every last barrier
—Do it your way, Mister
—to the point of coming out of the closet long before anyone thought “it gets better,” at which point he stopped cheering. Still, it is nothing new, it goes all the way back to Germany and one of her earliest memories.

She is sitting on his lap, steering the car—before the days of seat belts and child safety laws. It does not get better than this: you may not be fully toilet trained, but you can steer the car. “That’s it, Mister, nice and easy, turn the wheel.” His hands halo hers as the wheel spools beneath her fingers. There is the smell of diesel and leather. I AM STEERING THE CAR. Over the red dashboard is the horizon of windshield, the clown nose at the centre of the wheel is the horn. “You’re a good driver, Mister.” I AM A GOOD DRIVER. “Now let’s shift gears.” She feels his leg tighten beneath her as he steps on the clutch. She cups her palm over the ball of the gear stick with its strange carved symbols, and feels the force of his hand bearing down on hers as he thrusts them through the thunking. DON’T BE SCARED OF THAT. “Good stuff, now we’re in second.” The shaft of the stick is impaled in a soft leather pouch, like the wrinkly snout of an animal that is getting wrenched about the nose, but it doesn’t hurt it—it is just a thing—and you’re not supposed to look at that part of the car anyway, KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. It was a cream-coloured VW Beetle with red leather interior. At
some point he took to teasing her. “When the boy is born, you’ll have to sit in the back seat and he’ll steer the car.”

“No, I steer.”

“Boys sit in the front, girls sit in the back.”

“No, me do that.”

“Nope. You’ll be in the back seat with your sister.”

“No!”

“The boy will be up front with me.”

“NO!”

He laughed until she saw his gold tooth. The rage tore up her throat like grit—gone was the horizon over the dash in the blur of an eye, she was turning into a tangle, as if she were scribbling over herself with black crayon, until finally, “I HATE THE BOY!”

Clotted words, flung like ink, she was black but she was back.

His voice was suddenly sad. “Don’t say that, Mister, he’s just a baby. He’s going to be your little brother.”

He looked sad and bewildered. She had hurt him. And she had hurt a poor dear baby. Her own brother. Shame engulfed her, rising from within like the warm, wet odour of pee. “Sorry, Daddy.” Tears.

Back then it was not possible to know the sex of a fetus, so while her father’s certainty must have been wishful thinking, he was right. The baby she cursed was a boy.

Mary Rose does not need to pay a psychotherapist to know that deep down she is convinced she killed Alexander, robbed him of his birthright and deserves to be punished for her place in the driver’s seat. It is right there in the pages of her own book: Kitty and Jon McRae are twins who, in their respective worlds, absorbed one another in utero and were born as singles. Each has one blue eye and one brown, a vestige of their missing sibling. And each, merely by having been born, has robbed the other of that which could heal their respective worlds … Even if she failed to see it until she had written the second book.

Perhaps that is why she used to pore over the graveside photo in secret. She was returning to the scene of a crime, stealing away with the album to the bathroom or the crawl space—almost as if it were a dirty picture; limiting her viewings so it would retain its “power.” Closing her eyes, she would turn to the correct page, count to three then open them … as though to catch the photo in the act. Of what? She once enlisted Andy-Patrick in a furtive viewing, but cut it short. “You’re too young,” she said, closing the album. Then she scuttled from the crawl space and held the door closed on him in the darkness until he stopped crying.

Is it her fault Andy-Patrick is a mess?

She was five when she heard her mother make the call to Cape Breton, a catch in her voice as she cradled the phone receiver in both hands and told her own father, “Pa? Pa, I’ve had a son! I’ve had a son, Pa!” She was nine when her father took to sitting her and Maureen down and regretfully laying at their feet their brother’s inability to stay out of trouble at school or get along at home—not to mention his taste for playing dress-up: “You have to remember he’s a boy in a family of girls. He doesn’t have a
brother
. He is outnumbered by
sisters.”
He spoke in the ultra-expository tones he reserved for math problems and travel directions. But with a plaintive note. “You can’t expect him to act like a little
girl
. He’s a
boy.”

There would be a pause. She would feel shame seeping warm and sickly. “Mary Rose, you’re closest to him in age, you have the biggest influence.” Whenever he used her actual name, she felt pinned. This is what is behind the tomboy nickname and the carefree wink from Dad: a girl’s name. You can hurt yourself on it if you forget it’s there. “You’ve got to let him be a boy.”

Few things were more shaming than knowing you were preventing your brother from being a boy—like barging into a bathroom lined with urinals, who do you think you are? Molesting his masculinity, that sacred, powerful, delicate thing that was none of her
business yet her business to protect. This seemed to mean that Andy-Patrick was to be supported in wreaking havoc, lest he grow up weak and effeminate. Mary Rose robbed her dead sister too, of course, but only of a name.

She opens her dented freezer to put away a container of cut-up bananas for smoothies, but it is a tight fit. She reaches into the back, extracts an opaque brick and sets it on the counter. Wrapped in layers of what looks to be surgical dressing, stained with something dark … her mother’s Christmas cake.

It has to be eaten before next Christmas. It must not be discovered intact next January when her mother brings another Christmas cake … unless her mother has died by then and this Christmas cake turns out to have been the last one. Her throat thickens painfully at the thought of her mother’s busy brown hands stirring the batter in the white vat set atop the banged-up freezer out in the garage, “C’mere kids and give the Christmas cake a stir for luck!”