Kalila (10 page)

Samuel Coleridge said the harp was a tragic sounding of the experience of mankind. Dad quoted Coleridge:
It pours such sweet upbraiding … Such a soft floating witchery of sound … A light in sound, A sound-like power in light
.

What confounded me as a child was that the harp would sing its soft hum only when it chose, as if it had a mind. My father's harp wouldn't, for instance, show off on demand when my friends came to play. He laughed as my girlfriends and I gathered, breathless, in the open window.

Nothing tragic's happened, my father would say. No story to sing today.

One winter morning, I ran in from play, gasping that the power line had started an eerie bounce of its own accord. No wind. A ghost is shaking it! I cried.

That frost-thickened line is acting as an Aeolian harp, my father explained, drawing me against his rough overalls. Even wires and clotheslines sing, inspired by a tiny breath of air.

I look at the scattered pages of the morning paper on the table. People saved from plane crashes, birth mothers finding their adopted children, explosives refusing to go off, drowning victims revived, harps bursting into song. Miracles are everywhere.
Ask anything in My Name
.

Heal my baby. We do the dishes. Somewhere in the darkness a dog barks. Skipper answers, a nervous whine.

Inexplicably, Brodie pulls me, hands still wet, against his flannel shirt. A Brodie moment. Relying on silence.

I'm at the front door in my nightgown retrieving the morning paper when I look up and there is my sister Rose. Rose! Whatever are you doing here?

There she stands, eight o'clock on a Monday morning with sponges and mops and disinfectant in a pail. Flew in last night. I'm bunking at Marigold's. I'm here to do winter cleaning.

Winter cleaning? Whose?

Yours.

Rose! Who does winter cleaning?

Maggie. You won't have done fall.

This is what my sister offers grief. Rose steps through the door and peers under my couch. Maggie. You can't just let things go.

Rose is a cheerful thump and slap of mop and soapsuds, window cleaner and rug shampoo. When did I last vacuum? I plunk myself on the ottoman, shame twisting my esophagus. Maggie Watson. The lazy, spoiled baby her sisters always said she was. Shoving her way to the front of the line. Me first! I want my baby whole.

What a hog! The other parents are settling nicely for parts. Missing kidney. No brain. No anus. Who do you think you are?

Rose sings as she dusts down the door frames. I grab my coat and head into winter. Skipper bounds ahead of me, shovelling a path with his nose. Netted snowflakes sashay to the ground. Metal scrapes cement, a boy in a Dr. Seuss toque shovelling our neighbour's walk. Skipper barks and leaps at each mouthful of snow. I plough through snowdrifts. Maybe faith is nothing more than works. Could I, could all mothers perform for better service? Tie back our hair in ponytails? Tie our yellow gowns mid-thigh. Positions, ladies. A-one and a-two and a-one two three.

What is faith if not yearning for reward for those who act? Let's teach those babies to demand their rights.

By the time I've circled the neighbourhood, Dr. Seusshat-boy has finished shovelling a second driveway. He waves. Somewhere a siren wails. The boy bangs the shovel against the doorstep and rings the doorbell to collect his pay. He's still standing there in cement-shadowed dusk when I thump inside.

How do I find the shape of faith? Something to count on?

You drive to the hospital after supper, leaving Skipper, restless, whining in the closed-in porch. Step into Neonatal ICU imagining the moon broken by trees, rain-drenched November sky, the sheen of silver ice, to find your child awake. So rare in this place of organized air. You sit down so the impassioned parts of you do not move on, through, out the window, back into rain and wind and moving objects. You reach for that little hand.

Sometimes the little princess gazed out across the landscape and imagined that all the little glass castles housed her own big family. Brothers and sisters, all hers, spilling down the hill. Sometimes their small sounds reached her ears: a cry, a cough, a shifting in a cot. On rare occasions The Sorcerer would appear in a great white cloak. Then he would poke and prod the little princess. Sometimes he brought other Sorcerers and they stood around her glass castle and talked and argued, as if she were the star of a great drama unfolding beyond her walls, and her observers could not agree on which part she should play. On these days, long into the afternoon, the little princess watched The Sorcerers touring the castles dotting the countryside, pausing to debate at each one, though never conferring with those inside.

Oh, how the little princess longed to venture out into the world beyond the hill of castles.

A stiff north wind blows me through the parking lot, Foothills Hospital rising against a barren landscape. I have the urge to march around the fortress seven times, like Joshua did Jericho, singing “The Song of the Captives,” and the walls will come tumbling down. A strange mélange of patients cowers against the building, smoking. Two clutch their intravenous poles as though the wind might lift them, a woman with a broken foot, grounded by her cast, two bundles in wheelchairs wrapped against the wind. They stare, flicking their cigarettes and their heads, like horses, to sail the smoke away.

I plunge in the door. The foyer cold. Take a breath to prepare myself for Dr. Martens, Dr. Vanioc, Dr. Whoever. Dr. Norton, whose eyes filled with tears the few times she spoke with me, quit two weeks ago. She wasn't cut out for this, a nurse said. She left to write a book.

We're still trying to understand what the baby's problems entail, the doctors say, shifting from foot to foot.

It's too early to tell.

It's only been a week, ten days, a month, six weeks, ten weeks.

Isn't this their
job?

I take the elevator to the fifth floor, ride it with a man and a sullen child who glowers and sucks his thumb. On the fourth floor, the two exit, the child wailing, Are they gonna hafta kill me?

No one in the scrub room this morning.

I step into the hum of motors and activity. Dr. Vanioc and a doctor I don't recognize step out. They hold the door open for a mother. First-timer. No eye contact. Lowered head. Stunned. Like a caught criminal entering the light of jail.
I don't belong here!
No words, no parole. I have the urge to slap the woman's bottom. You're IT. Run! You're the loser! The way Winnie Peters used to flee the classroom hyperventilating, and hide in the bathroom, her mind a dyslexic nightmare, trying to straighten out the letters of a spelling quiz.

Na na. You birthed a preemie
. The power of a label.

Lately life-away-from-the-hospital is a tie for moments of hospital life. Friends, mere acquaintances trying for really nice. Their gusty breaths, their strapped-on smiley faces.

Good thing she's just a baby. If she goes, you won't have had her long enough to get
too
attached.

I bet you'll be glad when
this
is over. As if
this
is a minor irritation, like a traffic tie-up.

We're praying. Though we're not sure what to pray for.

Well, we sure wish we could have seen her. Past tense.
Too late now
.

Does your baby make strange?

Ha. No, she reaches out. She
loves
the needle stabs, the hole chopped in her stomach, oozing fluid that shouldn't ooze, the tube stuck up her nose, another jammed down her throat. Tough love. You know? Just part of growing up.

I wind through the crowded aisles, past ragged babies with taped-up noses, tubes disappearing in and out of openings, arms bound against chests, arms flung over heads. So much laboured breathing. Babies on their backs. On stomachs. Drawn knees. Furrowed foreheads. Their old-man faces. Bee. Beebeebee. Their lives played out to their beeper soundtracks. I imagine all these babies crying, Mom! how heads would turn, pass a new dad holding his baby. The baby's tongue darts from between his lips, as if testing his environment, or trying to escape. His palms and the soles of his feet are purplish. The dad slides off his wedding band and slips it on the hand. The baby's whole fist fits within it.

Down's syndrome, one nurse says, low, to another, nodding. Came in last night. You learn to read the signs.

Down's syndrome! Someone found a name!

Skipper threw up on the floor this morning. Regarded me drearily. Turned and sat humped, back to me, while I cleaned it up. He's mourning the days when each sunrise held promise of a romp on Nose Hill. A dad sits holding a baby in the oak rocking chair against the far wall, an orange braided rug beneath his feet. He's staring into space, seeing another landscape. A row over, a mom arranges a tape recorder inside an isolette. The parents here don't talk much. What is there to say?

Just finished chest physio.

I turn toward the cheerful voice, a young nurse tripping over a cord. She grins and lays it against a neighbouring isolette. I haven't seen this one before. Gangly, a little klutzy. Maybe twenty-five. She holds in her hand a yellow toothbrush. I hold my dictionary. Face off.

Are you by chance Jewish?

Behind me, two nurses argue about the colour of Smarties. No, says one, the brown ones taste the same.