In the Clear (2 page)

Once upon a time, I could walk and run.

For me, there's a huge mountain in my childhood. Everything that happened – all that I was before the mountain – is once upon a time.

Does everyone have a mountain in their lives, a before and after?

The mountain fills my sky and I will never cross its peak, never go back to that other time, before I got polio. But I remember everything.

My legs moved perfectly then. I didn't have to think about what they did. If I felt like running, I ran. If I wanted to get to the top of a tree, I climbed. In my memories, I ran ahead of Mom everywhere we went. “Slow down, Pauline,” she'd call behind me. Even then, she never spoke French to anyone, except to Grand-mère. Not in Don Mills. She wanted to belong.

Henry lived next door. He was better than a brother or a cousin because we never fought. My parents liked him too, especially Dad.

A year older than me, Henry was bigger and his legs longer than mine. He led the way wherever we went. On rainy days we built dams in the sewers and recreated big storms. We played that our world, Don Mills, was in danger of being flooded and washed away. But no! Henry and I would knock out those dams. We were heroes, saving the world and everyone in it.

Billy Talon and Stuart O'Connor – they lived further down Chelsea Street – always wanted to play with us. But it was way better without them; they wrecked our play with their wrestling and fighting. Henry and I were a team: a dazzling duo. So, if Stuart and Billy followed us as we played, Henry would make the gesture with his thumb. Go away: you can't be part of our brave deeds.

On sunny days our favorite game was chasing bad guys off our street. My father even made wooden stick-horses for us to ride. I chose the red one. Henry's was blue. We rode up and down the green lawns saving old Mrs. Hankenstein, the widow, or Mrs. Dickson with the twins who cried all the time. I was allowed to run as many lawns as I had years. I counted them – one, two, three, four, five, six – as Henry and I chased all the bad guys off our street, keeping Don Mills safe.

One, two, three, four, five, six … then came the summer I turned seven.

For several days before my birthday, I felt light-headed and tired. The morning of my seventh birthday, I was hot and my throat hurt, but I didn't want to tell my mother, because it was my birthday. Henry knocked at the front door, calling on me to come out and play. I splashed cold, cold water on my face and followed him outside.

Henry suggested we chase bad guys on our horses. I didn't say anything. I felt sick. I dragged out my red horse and began to ride. Because it was my birthday, Henry let me take the lead. I rode dizzily. Strangely, the lawns had turned into a mountain and I was struggling up toward a distant peak, getting hotter and hotter. I had to prod my horse to keep going. Maybe I was too close to the sun. Maybe it would burn us up.

A terrible hurting went right through me, beginning in my head, right down to my feet, and then …

I fell off my horse and lay on the ground, feeling like a deflated balloon, waiting for Henry to find me and help me.

He did. He stood over me, upside-down, laughing as if I were playing a joke. “Wow. How'd you fall like that?” he asked.

I didn't answer. He seemed a long, long way away, on the other side of a mountain.

Henry must have sensed something was wrong, for he put his hand on my forehead, just like our mothers would.

“Hey, Paulie. You're really hot. Are you okay?”

I shook my head. No. I wasn't okay. I'd never felt sick like this before. I'd had chicken pox in the spring, but this was way worse.

Henry ran to get my dad. It must have been a Saturday because Dad was home, cutting the grass. I heard the buzz of the lawn mower stop … there was a long silence … and then I saw the shiny top of Dad's bald head bobbing toward me as he ran behind Henry.

Scared and confused, I lay on the seventh lawn away from home, aching like crazy, my red horse fallen on the green grass beside me. I was scared and confused because I felt too sick to get up.

Dad knelt beside me. I could see flecks of fear in his eyes when I whispered, “Can you carry me home, Dad?”

• • •

I went to bed and slept right through until the next morning. My curtains were open and sunlight flooded my room, rousing me. It was hotter than yesterday, and my throat felt like I'd swallowed burning rocks. I had to get to the bathroom.

With an effort I sat up dizzily and swung my legs, letting my feet drop to the floor. I started to walk across the room, but instead toppled against my dresser, my left leg buckling under me.

Something was the matter with my left leg. It didn't want to move or hold me up. I tried to drag myself toward my open door, holding onto the dresser, but it was too hard. I collapsed on the floor.

“Mom!” I called out weakly. “Dad!”

They came running into my room. The bright yellow daisies on my mother's housecoat were bobbing and swaying crazily.

“I can't move my leg,” I said.

A look of helpless panic came over my mother's face. Even my dad couldn't hide his fear as he immediately cradled me in his arms and swept me off the floor. “Go call Dr. Shinobu,” he ordered Mom into action. “This isn't a flu.”

She ran and phoned our family doctor. Dr. Shinobu seemed to appear within minutes to check me over. Then the three of them left my room and I could hear their urgent voices out in the hallway. Mom came back in my room and yanked a few clothes from my drawers, helped me get dressed, then packed a bag for me. “Dr. Shinobu says we should get you to a hospital for some tests,” she explained in a tight voice. “Don't worry, dear. You're going to be all right.”

Dad carried me outside and put me in the back seat of the car. We drove downtown to the hospital. A quiet fear rode in the car with us and though they wouldn't name it, I knew its name.

Everyone was terrified of polio. We called it the summer plague. The summer before had been the worst epidemic in years. People told stories at school, at church, at the corner store, everywhere. Someone always knew someone who had it. One of Dad's best friends at work lost his wife and new baby to it. And my mother had taught students at the university who caught polio and never returned. Magazines showed pictures, too, pictures of sad-looking kids lying sick and helpless in those iron lungs. A huge poster showing one of those kids hung in the waiting room of Dr. Shinobu's office, and I cowered with fear beside my mother whenever I had to look at it. Those poor kids! Locked inside those tin-can prisons.

Dr. Shinobu had kept his voice quiet in the hallway after he checked me over, but I heard two words, plain as day: paralysis and breathing.

Buildings and statues sped by outside the car window. Dully I looked at the signs, trying to read them. I loved reading, maybe because I read so much with my mother. I was counting the days until grade two started in September. Only ten days left. I had to get better for school. I was the best reader in my class. When Dad pulled up in front of a big building downtown, I looked up to see several words above the wide front doors. The first word was long and unfamiliar. It began with “H.” But the last three words, I read easily. I sounded them out and felt a tremendous sense of relief wash over me. I guessed at the first, long word: “Hospital for Sick Children.” This was the place that would get me better for the first day of school.

But in the hospital, the doctor took one look at me and growled at the nurses, “This child needs a spinal tap. Get her up to the infectious ward. I hope there's a space left.”

I overheard the nurses explain the spinal tap to my parents – the need to draw out some of my spinal fluid to test for polio. No one bothered explaining anything to me. I was just a kid. But I heard the nurses warn my parents that I'd feel a sharp pinch when the needle went in. Ha! They'd have been more honest if they'd said, “It's going to feel like a knife in her back.” And even if they had, I could hardly jump up and run away. By then, I couldn't even crawl. Already I was so weak and achy all over, I could barely roll over for them when they wheeled me, alone, into a little room. They tucked me into a fetal position on my side, exposing my back. When that needle stabbed into my spine, I screamed for all I was worth.

Out in the hallway again, I saw my mother. Her eyes had a new, wild look. Had she heard my scream? Why did she let them do that to me? She looked as terrified as I was beginning to feel. Two nurses had to hold her back as they wheeled me by. “No, Mrs. Teal. You can't kiss her or touch her. She's highly contagious.”

They wheeled me into an elevator, down a hall and into a ward which had a long hall with glass walls showing many rooms. Each room was big enough to hold four children. They wheeled me into one and stopped. I saw the tin-can prison, the one I'd seen in those pictures and the poster in the doctor's office. It was an empty iron lung – it was for me. Why did I need one? I could still breathe, couldn't I?

There were three other iron lungs in the room. They made me think of coffins, only there were real live girls inside each one. Just their heads stuck out near the glass wall, and I saw the reflection of their eyes, watching me, in the little mirrors fixed above their heads.

The other girls didn't talk to me. We were too sick to talk. Besides, the room was noisy with the sound of the bellows sucking air in and out of the airtight iron lungs. Whoosh, whoosh. “Sixteen times a minute,” one of the nurses explained loudly. “The iron lung forces air in and out of your lungs. It will do the breathing for you until your muscles work again.”

The kind nurse who explained this had red hair and freckles, and looking at her I thought of Anne of Green Gables, from my mother's favorite book. “The iron lung will keep you alive,” Nurse Anne continued.

I shook my head, terrified, sure it was a coffin.

“You're lucky,” the other nurse interrupted impatiently. She was young too, but she had enormous bulging eyes and appeared to have no hair beneath her starched white cap. I called her Nurse Toad in my mind, for I was afraid of toads. “There's an epidemic. This is the last iron lung available in the hospital. The next child who comes in here will be out in the hall without one.”

Nurse Anne ignored her and continued to explain how the iron lung worked as she opened up one end and slid out my bed. Then they lifted me onto it and pushed me inside. Only my head stuck out the hole, through a rubber collar. They clamped the bed shut and turned it on.

“You'll feel better soon,” Nurse Anne said with a smile before she turned away to help another girl.

Whoosh, whoosh, went the bellows. In and out. Whoosh, whoosh.

I looked around me at the other girls. Did I look like them?

Someone in the room was crying. Or was it … me?

Whoosh, whoosh. I could feel a strange pressure on my chest as the air was forced out and then drawn into my lungs. In and out. Slowly, amazingly, I began to feel a little better. I'd had no idea I'd been fighting to breathe.

Whoosh, whoosh. In and out. Tired. I was so, so tired. Finally I slept.

3.
D
REAMING WITH
T
ANTE
M
ARIE,
1959

First thing I do every morning when I get up is check the calendar. I'm counting the days until Tante Marie's arrival.

I write B a letter. He lives up north so I haven't seen him since we both left the rehabilitation hospital four years ago. He's still a great fan of Tante Marie's and will be happy for me that she's coming. I also finish two more books from the pile to make the time pass quickly, but I read them in secret so my mother won't know. Last year, the summer I turned eleven, we had a family reunion in Québec. My two aunts called me spoiled and self-centered, thinking I wouldn't understand when they whispered gâtée in French. Maybe they're right. I don't care.

I can't wait to see Tante Marie. She never speaks a word against me, not in any language.

My father brings Tante Marie and Grand-mère home from Union Station. My mother has welcoming hugs and kisses for Grand-mère, but when she turns to Tante Marie, she freezes and pulls herself back stiffly. She's the ice queen.

Tante Marie kisses her cheeks anyway and asks how she is. “Agathe. Ça va bien?”

I am so excited. Tante Marie is here. I want to jump up and down.

My turn! Tante Marie gathers me close and calls me beautiful. “Ma belle.” She kisses both my cheeks and she is soothing and electric, all at the same time. I feel special. Even the scent of her perfume embraces me. “You've grown so tall. Come, get your coat and we'll walk and try to get caught up.”

My mother protests, “Outside? It's too icy; she could fall.”

“Ridicule!” Tante Marie laughs and gently brushes my perfectly bobbed, chin-length hair back from my face, behind my ears. “Pauline can't stay in all day.”