The Unfinished Child (20 page)

The baby was growing inside of her, oblivious to the uncertainties that plagued its parents’ waking hours. It existed. It was feeding from her.

At five o’clock, she quietly made her way downstairs to the kitchen. The noise from the coffee grinder sounded like a wrecking ball in the still-quiet house, but everyone slept on. It would be another two hours before Nicole and Sophia reluctantly rolled out of bed, sleep crusted in the corners of their eyes, hoping it was Saturday and they didn’t have to go to school.

She poured the water into the coffeepot, flicked the on switch, and sat at the table to wait. It was Wednesday, her day off. Her shopping day. She could make a list and get a head start on things. Normally the idea of getting her pantry and fridge organized excited her, but this morning she sat idle at the table, occasionally lifting her coffee to her mouth.

Daylight was still an hour away, but the days
were
getting longer.

She heard the shower upstairs and glanced at the clock. Barry was right on schedule. Maybe she’d surprise her girls and make blueberry pancakes for them. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of eggs and some milk.

The shower turned off. She removed a box of Raisin Bran from the cupboard, put on a fresh pot of coffee for Barry, and set a place at the table for him before turning back to the mix the pancake batter.

A few moments later, Barry kissed her cheek and wordlessly helped himself to a cup of coffee. Then she heard light footsteps descending the stairs.

“What’s for breakfast?” Nicole asked as she rounded the corner.

“Good morning,” Marie said.

“What’s for breakfast?”

“
Good morning, Mom, nice to see you
,” Marie said with an exaggerated sweetness.

Nicole mumbled a good morning and sat down. Sophia arrived a minute later, her hair a tangled mess.

“Not pancakes,” Nicole said with disgust.

Marie tried to ignore her daughter’s surliness. “I thought you liked pancakes.”

“Not on a school day,” Nicole whined. “They’re too sweet. My mouth is sticky until lunchtime.”

“I’ll eat hers,” Sophia piped in.

Nicole stood and grabbed a bowl from the cupboard. She helped herself to some cereal.

Peace descended immediately
when Barry and the girls left. Marie stood at the front window and watched her daughters standing amid a group of children at the street corner. Marie liked to watch her kids come and go, and at such times she tried to pretend they weren’t her children in order to see them as other people might see them. Often when she looked at them she thought of herself and Elizabeth as children: two dark-haired girls standing closely together. Only in this case, two years separated her girls and part of their closeness came from a natural blood bond. Nicole intuitively watched over her younger sister. She had been doing it for years. They hadn’t chosen each other as Marie and Elizabeth had done all those summers ago when they found themselves at a playground looking for a friend.

She lingered at the front window until the school bus disappeared around the corner. It worried her that lately she enjoyed her children more when they weren’t around. Grey clouds hung low in the sky. In the middle of the front yard a thick crust of ice was all that remained from the maze the girls had made after Christmas. Clumps of dried berries littered the ground beneath the mountain ash tree. The bits of lawn she could see were brown and in need of a good raking. Many of last fall’s leaves were rotting in clumps along the perimeter of the flowerbeds. She had meant to tidy the yard before winter, but an early snowfall had caught her off guard.

The window was cool against her forehead. A furniture delivery van sped down the street and stirred up the grit and dirt that lay beside the curb. A moment later, a gold minivan followed. She stepped back from the window and the white sheer curtains fell back into place. She had seven hours to herself before her children returned home. Maybe Elizabeth would be free for lunch.

She went upstairs to get dressed. She’d sound casual,
Hey, Lizzie, are you free for lunch?
Or,
I’m coming downtown. Can I buy you lunch?
That didn’t sound too needy, did it?

She pulled on a pair of jeans, surprised to find herself rehearsing a call to her best friend. Elizabeth used to rely on her, but she hadn’t even asked for help moving, and she’d been in her new place for almost two weeks and still hadn’t invited her over. In fact, they hadn’t talked since the day Elizabeth had been over for lunch. How was that possible? Marie was beginning to have the feeling that there was a big party going on somewhere and her name had been left off the guest list.

Elizabeth used to need her, and Marie enjoyed being needed. Maybe she’d even enjoyed being envied.

She deferred the call until later.

By nine-thirty, Marie
was ready to go. She backed the van down the driveway and into the street. A light breeze moved the branches of the pine tree in the neighbours’ yard. They swayed in a gentle rhythm, as if inhaling and exhaling. A skiff of snow fell slowly to the ground. It was hard to believe that somewhere behind the greyness a brilliant sun waited for its turn to shine.

She drove as if on autopilot. Occasionally, Marie noticed her surroundings and was surprised to see the distance she’d already gone. She was thankful not to have had an accident given that she barely noted the blocks she was passing. She continued north, thinking she was heading to the grocery store. Traffic was steady. Soon she was in Frances’s Strathcona neighbourhood of coffee shops and cafés. She passed the low brick building that housed the farmers’ market on her left. Before she knew it she was going down Scona Road and crossing the Low Level Bridge. She gazed at a high-rise perched on the riverbank. It was the colour of sandstone and had balconies facing the valley. That’s where Elizabeth lives now, she thought, and felt a momentary pang for her single life long ago, when the only person’s day she planned was her own.

The next thing she knew, she was pulling into the parkade beneath the downtown library. Minutes later she was standing before a computer terminal. Under subject, she typed
Down syndrome
. Immediately, as if the person before her had been searching the same topic, a screen full of references appeared.
Newborn Babies and Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome Today. Everything You Need to Know About Down Syndrome. Down Syndrome: The First Year.
How Children Learn. From Institution to Integration. Becoming an Advocate for Your Down Syndrome Child.
She scrolled up and down the screen and jotted down call numbers on a recipe card in a thin, dark scrawl.

Subject: Amniocentesis. See genetic testing.

Subject: Genetic Testing. See Human chromosome abnormalities.

When her index card was full, Marie moved tentatively to the stacks. Was she tempting fate by educating herself about Down syndrome? She scanned the spines of the books and felt new fears as a host of other maladies presented themselves: cerebral palsy, childhood leukemia, spina bifida, autism.

It doesn’t hurt to know, a voice inside her said. She breathed deeply: dust, paper, mould.

It was still early, and the library was quiet. Only three people sat at the dozen or so tables that occupied the Quiet Zone. A librarian pushed a squeaky wooden cart laden with books down the aisles.

Grey light filtered in through the tall windows on the outside walls. A dishevelled man with dark, greasy hair and flapping running shoes wandered over to a chair in the corner and dropped his weight into it. He began a conversation with himself.

Marie picked up a book and gazed at the cover. A young girl was swinging on a swing. Her blond hair was pulled into two braids that were fastened with pink ribbons. She wore a frilly dress. Her mouth was open wide in laughter, and her teeth were sharp and crowded. She wore thick glasses. Her small hands clutched tightly at the chains that held the swing to the metal set. The picture caught her in mid-swing.

From Institution to Integration
. She turned the book over, read the back cover, and noted with interest that the author was a local doctor.

Marie opened the book and began to read.

Kids with Down syndrome are kids first. Thankfully, these children are no longer automatically condemned to institutions where, segregated from society, often ignored, and given little education, they fulfilled the low expectation held for them. Today, babies born with Down syndrome are more likely to be raised in their own loving home environment which, by contrast, helps them to be integrated into the everyday communities which will nurture and guide them as they move through all the physical changes of adolescence and into adulthood.

Marie stopped reading and flipped to the chapter on newborns. She read of parents’ initial disappointment in discovering their child was not “normal,” and the grief and anger that often followed.
How will we tell people? Will my child reach adulthood? And if so, who will care for him when we’re gone?
She read of the gradual acceptance that followed when the parents began to focus on their baby’s tiny features and their soft, soft skin. She read of the improved educational opportunities, the better health care practices, and the new laws designed to protect these children. She read that some cultures in the world had no word for babies with this condition.

Facts and figures jumped out at her. Trisomy 21. The babies have one extra chromosome. It occurs evenly in boys and girls. The babies tend to have low muscle tone and slightly irregular facial features. They have smaller than normal heads. Their eyes may appear to slant upward. They have mental retardation.

Marie closed her eyes for a moment and willed herself to continue.
The degree of mental retardation varies tremendously
, she read.
Your baby WILL learn. A normal
IQ
is 70–130. Most children with Down syndrome score in the moderate to mild retardation range, with
IQ
s of 40–70.

She picked up another book of personal stories and read of women who had decided to keep their babies and who had never looked back. Stories of personal triumph and joy. She also read of women who had terminated their pregnancies when a positive test for Down syndrome returned.
It’s a lose–lose situation
, one woman confided.
It’s like choosing between being stabbed or being shot. Either way, the pain is immense.

She read of ethicists who believed that, once a fetus could survive on its own, at roughly twenty-four weeks, it should have the same right to life enjoyed by any human being. She read of surveys that showed seventy-five percent of people in Canada and the
US
believe that legal abortion is acceptable in cases where the fetus has an abnormality. She read and she sifted, skimming just enough information to learn something while simultaneously remaining aloof from the potential reality.

Her stomach growled. Suddenly the room brightened. Marie looked up. The sun had burned through the clouds and was shining in the tall, south-facing windows. A thick coating of dust on the window revealed a winter of neglect.

She thought of Nicole and Sophia, healthy and happy. But what about tomorrow or the days after? If something happened to one of her girls now, nothing would ever stop her love. Having a healthy baby was not a guarantee that it would have good health and fortune for life.

She’d be damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. The stack of books sat before her, thick with human experiences. The weight of their burdens was stifling. She stood up quickly and put her coat on. The word trisomy rolled off her tongue, familiar in its rhythm. Try-so-me-fa-sol-la-ti-do. It was contagious, the small syllables that felt fun in her mouth. Try-so-me-fall-so-let-me-go.

She crossed the carpeted floor and dust rose in small bursts from beneath her feet. It danced in the shafts of sunlight and then gradually settled once again on the many flat surfaces.

What had she accomplished here? Nothing. She needed to go shopping. She would load her cart with all their necessities then return home and line the canned goods evenly on the pantry shelf. Lunch with Elizabeth no longer looked attractive. She was tired of being the one who always called first. She had her family to keep her busy; maybe she didn’t really need Elizabeth that much anyway.

Elizabeth awoke on Saturday at
home in her apartment with nothing on her calendar. She made oatmeal with wheat germ and toasted sunflower seeds for breakfast and enjoyed the contrast of textures and the way the brown sugar melted into a dark glaze that swirled on top of the white milk. The presentation was beautiful, almost like a well-designed floral arrangement.

This weekend was already better than the last one, when she’d woken Saturday morning with the worst hangover of her life. Her mouth had felt like someone had stuffed it full of cotton balls while she’d slept, and her pulse beat like a giant drum in her head. The last time she’d been so hungover had been in university, when Gillian had invited some friends to spend the night at her parents’ cabin at Pigeon Lake. She and Marie had gone without knowing that Gillian had opened it up to a much larger crowd. It was a loud party. People had skinny dipped late into the night. A window was broken. The bathroom the next morning looked as if food poisoning had blown through the guest population. She and Marie both drank too much and basically fell asleep in the chairs they’d last been sitting in before oblivion overtook them.

But what Elizabeth most recalled as she put her breakfast bowl in the dishwasher and ran some hot water into the pot to soak was the similar feeling of hunger/nausea that persisted throughout the day. She and Marie had groaned from morning to mid-afternoon until they finally started to feel human again.

Marie. Elizabeth hadn’t called her since moving into her new place. It had been hectic, getting packed and then getting organized in the apartment. Marie could have helped, but Elizabeth had wanted to be alone. It felt cathartic to build a new life without someone giving her advice on where she should put her furniture. But Marie was probably upset that she hadn’t called yet. Thankfully she hadn’t picked up that night Elizabeth had phoned when she was drunk. Elizabeth probably would have ended up crying at some point and getting all maudlin about Marie’s pregnancy. Would Marie have felt vindicated that Elizabeth had made the wrong decision in moving out?