SSC (2012) Adult Onset (39 page)

She looks in on Matthew, curled asleep with Bun in his arms. She kisses his forehead—is he a little hot?

In Maggie’s room, a subdued
thwack-thwack
tells her Daisy is lying on the floor in front of the crib. “What are you doing there, Daisy?” she whispers. She leans over and looks into the crib by the dim light from the hallway. Her daughter is breathing evenly, baby lips puffed with sleep, lashes stirred by a dream.

She bends to pat Daisy. The dog lifts her eyes and regards her from beneath a furrowed brow and Mary Rose understands as plainly as if the animal had just spoken: Daisy is protecting Maggie. From her.

Remorse rides in like the cavalry, too late. All the unknown crimes
are upon her now, the ones that draw no distinction between doer and done- to or wanted- to and did-do.

Big tears roll down her face as she watches her beautiful baby. Something threatens to pierce her heart, like a shard of glass. She stands weeping and loving her child, but it is the love of a remorseful devil, it is not a safe love. She withdraws as quietly as possible, and smacks the tears away.

Children are forgiving, yes, and resilient, so long as you don’t try the evil spell of “nothing happened” on them.

No one knows, no one sees. But the body will tell. Act out in illness or in violence.

She brushes her teeth, this woman of forty-eight who has everything. Mary Rose MacKinnon puts on kissy boxer shorts and a tank top.

It is when she turns out the light that she becomes aware of the pain. Like the sound of a fridge humming, it isn’t until all else is still that she “hears” it. It is just present enough to disrupt sleep and she needs her sleep, tomorrow is another day; another day another pair of boots …

In the bathroom, she switches on the light, opens the mirror and reaches for the Advil. There is nothing wrong. It is merely memory lodged in her arm.
That’s your badness coming out …
She knows what “badness” means. She knew at age five. Badness was hot, as her arm so often was. Badness had to do with what were called “impure thoughts”: sins you committed with your mind whether you wanted to or not. Sins you committed with your hand by touching yourself “down there.” The constant pain in her arm was not only a punishment, it was a beacon of her badness. Throbbing red light of badness, its pulsations occupied the same frequency as sexual excitement. Best keep that sort of pain to oneself.

She closes the cabinet with a prickle of fear lest the devil appear behind her. She relaxes suddenly and looks directly into the mirror—if Satan is there, let him show his face. But there is only her own face,
sheet-wrinkled and bloodshot.
Hi there, and happy Friday
. She swallows two pills.

Pain blooms in her arm like a time-lapse hothouse flower. What is happening? It’s okay, you know what this is. “Remembered pain.” Phantom pain. Back-from-the-grave pain—

“It hurts.”

She has said it aloud and scared herself—she sounds too young, as though a child has spoken through her mouth …

Get a grip
.

Am I having a panic attack? No, because there is still an “I,” a rind of self around the pain. Cancer.
I see no indication of that
. But that was six months ago. Throbbing now. The cysts have come back.
I know of no research to support that
. Electrical pain signal, pinging from a transmission pole in her arm up to her back teeth, shorting-out her vision. She ought to have filled the prescription for Tylenol 4s when she had the chance.
You want fives? We’re talking bone pain, right?
She swallows another Advil and chases it with two regular Tylenols. She holds the mirror in a staring contest; pain is something she can do.
You get an old pathway that kicks up …
A pathway overgrown with vines. It has slumbered for decades, but someone is hacking open the entrance. Where does it lead? There is no glimpse of a castle, just a tangle of thorns … Mary Rose steps away from the mirror, and into the path of an oncoming narrative.

Downstairs, she opens the freezer and presses a bag of frozen organic peas to her arm. She retains sufficient self-possession not to start with “bone cancer.” Still, her hands are cold as she googles “pediatric bone cysts.”

Smiling doctors in white coats, soulful children gazing into the camera. This is the real world, not just the world in her head.

Check

Check

See Jane fall
.

“It hurts. That’s your first clue.”

“How many times did your mother make a sling for you out of an old scarf?”

“
As
girls,” not “
than
.”

“How could we know? You never cried.”

“If you’d had a broken leg, we’d have taken you to a doctor.”

“
Required only
if,” otherwise
only
is modifying
required
.

See Jane fall the second time
.

While the pills have distanced the pain, they have not doused it. Of course not, it is phantom pain!
“When I reach for this glass of Scotch, what stops my hand from passing right through it?”

“A piece of someone’s kneecap.”

Thanks to the Tylenol, someone is feeling pain, but it is not me. Not-Me is feeling it. “Mary Rose, do you read me? Come in, Mary Rose, this is Armpain, I am being held prisoner on the Planet Zytox …”

A view of the hospital smokestack, as seen from Dr. Sorokin’s window, captured in a calendar of beautiful watercolours painted entirely with the artist’s foot.

Jane is crucified the first time
.

See Jane swing like an airplane
.

Even Andy-Patrick respected her sore arm …

“You can stop massaging it now, Dad. It feels better.”

Nothing, you’re born with them. Her feet are freezing and sweating inside her slippers. The pain is gone. Cancer does not behave like that, is not vanquished by over-the-counter analgesics—she is either neurotic or among a minority of normal people who experience neurological pain feedback loops. If she met herself now, she would not want to be her friend. It is time to go to bed.

That should read, “none
has
been definitively proven,” not “have,” because the subject of that clause is the collective noun “none,” not the plural noun “theories.”

Wait. Bone cysts cause repeated trauma, yes. Wait.

Wait. She tries to turn the information around in her head, like a midwife reaching into the uterus when a baby goes breech.

Dr. Ferry scolding her mother in the front hall …

She follows the thread through a labyrinth of websites, and at 1:48 a.m. meets the Minotaur in New Zealand.

At 2:00 a.m. she is shocked to see it laid out frank and unfreighted:

She scans the banner at the top of the page:
VET SURGERY CENTRAL INC
. She gets up and puts the kettle on.

Even assuming the fractures caused the cysts, anything at all might have caused the fractures. She may have rolled off the couch, climbed over the bars of her crib and fallen. A two-year-old can break their arm without an adult realizing it. It is called a green-stick fracture: the bone bends then heals, perhaps not perfectly. Or a mother grabs her toddler by the arm to prevent them touching the stove, the handle of a boiling pot—grabs the non-dominant arm, likely the left that lags behind its mischief-making twin—and, with the force of her fright, she wrenches. The small bone breaks more easily the next time. And the next.

If the fractures caused the cysts, then what caused the first fracture? If the airplane swing was a pathological fracture, there must have been at least one before it. Before Canada. An accident of some kind. If so, why is it not part of family lore? “Mary Rose’s first sling.” She can easily believe her mother was too depressed to see what was right in front of her, but what about her father? Where have all the fathers gone? To work. The mothers stayed home at the epicentre of that mid-twentieth-century invention, “the nuclear family.” Alone with a crying baby in the crib. And one in the grave … and one up in flames.