The Blondes (30 page)

I still didn’t know what he would do with me. I saw his eyes roll up to look at me—and my arm shot out with all my might. I punched him in the face, right in the eye. I kicked him in the chest. I almost scrambled away but he took barely a second to recover. Then he had me again and he climbed up my body from the knees and pinned my arms down with his.
He weighed more than I could have imagined and all that weight was on me, pressing down. I could barely breathe, let alone scream, but I did manage to yelp, “You bastard! You fucking bastard!” I gathered up what little energy I had left and spit in his face. I tried to knee him in the groin, but he put his own knees on my arms on either side of my head. I tried to buck him off using my body, but I couldn’t shake him. He didn’t say a word. He just breathed hard above me.

I thought that maybe I would miscarry after being tackled, because of the fall, but I couldn’t feel anything happening. I couldn’t feel anything at all.

After a few more seconds I realized August’s crotch was in my face, and there was blood in my mouth, and I couldn’t move. I knew I wasn’t going to jostle him loose, and I gave up trying. I thought I might run again when he let me up, but by then someone else was at the fence, calling out, “Do you need help out there, major?”

“No!” August yelled like it was a matter of pride. “You knew I would catch you. Why didn’t you stop?” he asked me between hard breaths, like he was truly perplexed. My glasses were in my pocket but he was close enough that I could see his face. He moved one knee and it hurt, fastening me down. I thought my shoulder might be dislocated. I started to tear up. His own eye was red where I’d punched him, and I could see, even in the dark, that it was going to swell.

“Let me go,” I begged him. But it was too late and we both knew it. The other soldier had jumped the fence in spite of being told not to. We could hear him jogging over, boots
pounding the earth. “You could have—” I told August. “You could have let me go.”

My arresting officers took me into the school between them, waking up both nurses, or “Band-Aid techs,” as they called them. Against August’s protests, one of them made him read an eye chart on the wall, which he did fine. The nurse gave him an ice pack and said, “Major shiner”—which I guess was a joke, although no one laughed—before going back to bed.

Nurse Ben cleaned the cut on my lip—my teeth were fine. So was my shoulder. I located my glasses in my shirt pocket, and found that one lens had been crushed and splintered. That was what had been under my ribs. Later, I would break the lens into a garbage can and keep the frame so I could at least have the one good eye. Nurse Ben swabbed the bottom of my foot where I’d run through the picker and put ointment on it. He handed me an ice pack for my ankle. Then he pulled up my jean leg and made a sucking sound in his mouth.

“How long have you been like this?”

“A couple weeks.” I told him about the two stitches I was supposed to get that I didn’t, then about popping another one while running during the fountain attack in New York.

“You finished off the job tonight. It will scar. But I can sew it back up for you,” he said, swabbing at it. It stung and I winced. “You’re lucky it’s not infected. You haven’t been treating it with any kind of antiseptic. Why didn’t you come see me about this?”

I could feel my face turn red, and I started to hiccup more than cry. “I had … other things … on my mind.”

“Yes.” He pushed thread through a needle. “That’s clear. Hold still, and don’t cry until it’s done.”

Michelle Morell was ordered to get up and go take my bed for the night, and they put me in the stock closet. As I lay there, I was glad she’d had extra tests done, because no one offered me clean linens.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I said aloud to myself, because I was in my own room and no one could hear me, and I didn’t care if they could. “What’s going to happen to me?”

The next day, after only a few hours’ sleep, August looked like I’d really pounded him. He had a black streak under his eye like a football player and his cheek was as swollen as an apple. He was not a small guy, and I hadn’t known I possessed that much strength. I must have gone crazy. He bit his lip when I walked by, as if there was something he was trying to keep in. I didn’t apologize.

One of the other soldiers glared at me when I was hobbling to the library for my regularly enforced head shave. “He should have lit you up, bitch,” the guy seethed as I passed. His tone gave me a good indication of what it might feel like to be riddled with bullets.

The private who cut our hair always jerked me back and forth with his needle fingers, but that morning it felt as though he was doing it all the more. The clippers had fangs,
and my shoulders throbbed from where August had pinned me. My body hurt in strange places, places I didn’t know a person could hurt, like my elbows, the muscles under my armpits all the way into my boobs, my hip bones, even the front cords of my neck. I watched the red dust of my hair powder the inside of a plastic bag, like swept-up grass trimmings in the wrong colour. I didn’t wear my broken glasses and everything was blurred.

After the head shave, the commanding officer, with whom I’d never spoken, stuffed the door of my little room. He went up one side of me and down the other, at the top of his voice, it seemed—although truthfully his voice never seemed to reach its full volume; there was always another level it could hit. The wooden door had been left ajar so the others could hear. He informed me that I had not only disobeyed the rules and regulations of the Women’s Entry and Evaluation centre to which I’d been assigned, but also broken the laws of my country by attempting sedition. In trying to leave the quarantine, I had knowingly put my countrymen at risk. There would be serious consequences to my actions. I would be punished, and my privileges taken away. The federal government of Canada had invoked the Emergencies Act—this was a time of natural disaster, and how could I think that any one person should exist above the law? The invoking of this act by the Cabinet and by Parliament had been given full and total consideration. Did I know better than the fine men and women serving on those bodies? Did I really think that my individual rights meant more than the safety and security of my countrymen
and our nation at large? Did I?
No, sir
. Did I believe I had the right to assault an employee of that nation, an employee who had been engaged to follow orders, to do everything within his power to serve and protect?

I didn’t say “No, sir” that time. The commanding officer closed the door for effect, trapping me with him in that closet space. I remained seated on the cot, which made me feel even smaller. This man, he had eyes the colour of a mountain. He lowered his voice, which made him even more frightening. He asked what I would have done if I had managed to escape, and reminded me I didn’t even have a health card. He told me he understood my thoughts, and he was not wrong.

“You mistakenly think the major was preventing you from receiving health care. This man was preventing you from contaminating others. This man has been trained and is paid to keep you here at all costs. This man was doing his job.”

I must have said “Yes, sir,” because I don’t think he would have left until I agreed with him, but if I did, I honestly don’t remember. I didn’t have much voice at all by that point. And I was physically quaking at the idea that he might lay formal charges against me. My outdoor privileges were to be revoked. From then on, I could exercise only in the gym. I would be locked into the storeroom at night. The bathroom window would be nailed shut, and as if that wasn’t enough of a security measure, henceforth anytime I had to shit or piss, someone would be there to listen.

Maybe it was a terrible coincidence, but the ultrasound arrived promptly that day at 10 a.m.

The ultrasound technician was a woman, and unlike us, she had hair. It was lush and black and piled up on her head under a paper cap, but I could see the curls above her ears threatening to escape. She squeezed jelly on me, which was cold and lube-like, and moved the head of an instrument around my belly button. It felt like some kind of rubber sex toy and looked like a barcode scanner. Nurse Ben had said I needed to drink twelve ounces of water for the ultrasound, but I didn’t know how much that was, had drunk probably twice that amount from the water fountain, and needed to pee. The technician spoke gently and gave no indication of knowing about my escape, my desperation. In fact, she barely acknowledged our unfortunate surroundings.

We were in what was meant to become the kindergarten, and it had its own bathroom. The technician rubbed the juice off my belly with Kleenex and pointed, and said, “Go let a little out.”

I did what she said, then I came back into the cloakroom, where we had set up to perform the ultrasound. I climbed back onto the table she’d wheeled in when she arrived, and she re-squirted and started rubbing me with the instrument again, moving it in circles across my bloated abdomen. I had gained weight at the WEE. Baby weight.

I couldn’t see the screen. It was turned toward her. She asked if I wanted to see, but I didn’t say anything, so she didn’t ask again. We were in close proximity and she smelled like
jasmine and honey. I remember that because, aside from the cleanser they used to scrub down the halls and the classrooms, everything—everyone—at the WEE smelled salty and sour. Beside me, and just behind her, were two rows of little pegs, one at knee-height, the other at eye level to where I lay, about four feet off the ground. The pegs had been painted barn red even though the room was institutional green.

“What’s happening out there, in the world?” I asked her.

“Nothing so interesting as what’s happening in here. Everyone thinks they’re sick. But not everyone is, of course. The hospitals are full up, half with people who need to be there, and half with people who don’t. Halloween is going to be something. There’s a magazine in Toronto that’s holding a blonde ball, or a peroxide party, or some such thing. I read a very controversial piece about it in the
Spectator
. You have to wear a wig to get in. Somehow it’s very chi-chi—don’t ask me. I guess maybe they’re doing it in New York and now Toronto’s copying.”

“But … what about the rest of the world? I know we’re in a state of emergency, but how are other countries reacting?”

She stopped talking, squiggling the device back and forth until it became clear she wasn’t going to tell me anything more. Or maybe she was concentrating. I could hear clicking from the computer.

“This all looks fine,” she said, as if someone had told her it might not. Her brow scrunched. “Ah, there,” she remarked finally, in a satisfied manner, pushing down hard on my abdomen with the barcode scanner. “Hold it, that’s it,” she said, as if she were a school photographer.

After the technician was done, Nurse Ben called me in for counselling. He was grim. He’d lost his charm and sat awkwardly, as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands. They lay there on his desk, long and white. He looked at them as though they were two fish that needed to be skinned and he wasn’t sure where to start—head or tail. I would have trusted him if I’d needed a limb amputated or a bullet dug out of me. But with this, he was out of his element.

“Your pregnancy has progressed to fourteen weeks,” he said.

“It
was
twelve—not even—when I came here. The outbreak makes this a special circumstance,” I argued.

“You know I agree,” he said, and stared at the folder in front of him without opening it.

“In a special circumstance …”

“Yes.” But he did not mean
yes, he could help me
. He meant
yes, that was true
. Technically. “Have you been following legislation on this issue in the last three to five years?” Things had changed under the Conservative government, he said. And with the added burdens of the viral outbreak, he explained, our hospitals were overcrowded, overloaded. Medical personnel and almost every health resource was being used for other efforts. In other words, I was fortunate to have had the ultrasound. Then he said something I didn’t expect: “I can put in an order and we can arrange to terminate it for you. But you need to know that it may not happen quickly—especially under this government, and especially given the current crisis. I can put in the request, but I cannot promise that we would see results
this week. It might be next, or it might be longer. I want you to consider if that is what you want, and come back to see me tomorrow. If it is, I will put in the request—and then, we wait some more and see.”

Through the window behind him, I could see the orange orb of the basketball lying at the edge of the painted blacktop court. It blurred, but this time not because of my missing glasses lens. I watched it lose and regain its shape, softening and then coming clear again, as the minutes passed. I knew I should ask him to put in the request, but I also knew that I couldn’t. I had waited too long already—and that part was no one’s fault but mine.

As a kid and then a young adult, I had wondered what my mom wanted from me, what she wanted
for
me, why she’d brought me into the world. I remembered slamming my bedroom door at age twelve, hollering, “Why did you even have me?” Now I know there was no big dream. She just wanted to see me grow.