The Journey Prize Stories 21 (19 page)

A few days later, the husband's at the stove.

The mother forgot to turn on the oven. The meatloaf's been sitting in there raw for two hours. She noticed it about a half hour ago. Let it continue cold as she sat at the kitchen table. When the son came in for dinner she told him to get himself some cereal. He went right for the sugar stuff. She had
forgotten they still had some. Maybe from his birthday, or the child's. He knew she wouldn't protest. Everyone just another person to take advantage of. The woman at the bank didn't give them the loan because she saw that they had nothing left to take.

It was difficult to explain to the husband.

“She's deaf.”

“What?”

“Funny.”

He doesn't take off his overcoat. He wants to hear this.

“The doctor said she's deaf.”

He shakes his head.

“The ear infections,” she says.

“She hasn't had an ear infection in over a year.”

“Eleven months.”

“She's not deaf.”

“She's deaf.”

“Qualify it. How?”

“They need to do more tests, but at this point he says it could be as much as a seventy-five per cent deficit in the right ear.”

“So she's not deaf. She can hear.”

“Can you do math? Seventy-five per cent means she only hears twenty-five per cent of noises that every other child hears.”

“But that's the right ear. The left ear. Fine, right?”

“No. Probably half.”

“Half deaf, then.”

“Goddamn you.”

“Swearing at me because you know our daughter can't hear you?”

“Goddamn you.”

The husband puts his hands on the sink and stares through the window. It looks onto the brown, blank stare of the neighbour's wood-panelled house. Better than looking through one of their windows, he'd said when she had complained about the view, years ago. It wasn't so bad, after all. In between the houses was a deck, instead of a yard or a cement walkway. The kids from both families charged down it in the summer. A sandbox lay hidden under removable boards, off to one side of this kitchen window. If the mother stood on tiptoes, she could watch her children play.

“I don't want to lose the house,” she says. “I just think you need to consider this first, that you've got your priorities mixed up here.”

“I'm tired of hearing ‘I just think' come out of your mouth.”

“You didn't marry me because I was an airhead, John,” she says, though at that moment she's not sure why he did marry her. Beauty, a girl who laughed at his jokes, circumstance. Good things are so easy to forget late on a weekday evening. The house is cold with good memories past remembering.

He seems about to say more but perhaps he too feels the chill of a home turning back into a house. He shrugs off his overcoat and escapes downstairs to his leather armchair, to a movie, to two hours of no thinking whatsoever.

The father is angry when she says “Hawpital.” “Hosssspital,” he says through the rearview mirror. She tries not to shrink
into the car seat because he'll be more mad. “Hopstill,” she tries again. She knows her words don't sound the way he wants them to. Since the booth, the father does this more. Makes her speak for food. No pointing. The mother sometimes looks into her face and asks with her own if she's okay. But today the mother leans against the car window. She looks for the mother's face in the side mirror but the reflection's wrong. “Hossssssspital,” he says, even louder. They go again to the Children's for a second set of booth tests. She must have done something wrong the first time. Looks down from his face in the mirror.

“Gen-!” the beginning of a shout but the mother's hand goes out and onto his hand on the gear stick.

The child sees him flick off the hand and yank on the stick and under her the car pulses forward into the exit and her neck bends and the father's mouth in the rearview, thankfully closed, and the mother's head tucked tight against the seat. The little red car holds onto the off-ramp, the white
H
of the Children's coming into view. The car stutters underneath her. She feels the car speed up and the mother's head leaves the headrest in surprise. The child watches the mirror but she can't see the mother's mouth.

“John, for Christ's sake.”

She drops her head. Hands in her lap. Wishes she couldn't hear anything at all.

The mother's parents had come. Her mother ran around with the son all day and in the evenings rubbed her feet with lemons. The child took her time. The due date came. Went. They waited.

The night before the child's afternoon birth, she couldn't sleep. Her father was still alive then. Every ten, sometimes fifteen minutes the contractions. She took the couch downstairs. Each time she woke, she found him looking at her with tears in his eyes.

They broke her water in the delivery room. No epidural this time, she felt it all. And they didn't know then, people didn't know. She had hoped for a girl and out the child came, a girl so perfect, her heart rate right. The child came out perfect. The husband took the first photo and in it, the child's smiling. Rolling to the right, gums wide at her mother, the doctor smiling at them both.

But eighteen days later, a scare. She came home from her first evening out to find the husband pacing and the child screaming.

“She's been crying all night. And she has these bumps.” His fear so quiet and intense she could barely hear him. At the child's crib they watched her squirm, her ovaries sticking out of the tiny groin. In emergency, the chart read “abdominal mass.” As if hernias could be called such a thing. The mother cried. And when the child came out fine, the almond-sized organs pushed back in and the abdominal wall stitched by a surgeon with hands as big as the child herself, the mother cried more. The husband cradled his three-week-old as if she were new, his face etched with a terrible relief.

“Nothing so small should bear so much pain,” he had said. The mother had seen tears for the first time in his blue eyes. She had cried herself out, wondered if there would be enough fluid in her body to breastfeed.
“She's not hurting anymore,” she said to him then. But a family is designed to bear a continued series of hurts. The ear infections of months ago had abated, but they left damaging traces behind. Now, myringotomy. A scary name for something simple. A minor surgical procedure in which a small slit is made in the eardrum, allowing fluid to drain from the middle ear. All of it was very minor, yet the word minor meant nothing to the mother of an almost-four-year-old girl she had long suspected was going through life in a daze of half-heard sounds, the angry mouths of her parents moving in patterns of loathing.

The mother wondered what was worse: hearing yelling or seeing it? She wondered if it looked like the melodrama of a silent film and if the child played a tiny piano in her head to accompany the action on screen. If the surgery was successful, what would happen to the child when she woke up? Would the world crash and bang into her head, alienating her? Would she cover her ears and demand back her silent world? The child had never complained, had not asked to hear.

The group of sick kids sit in a circle and the nurse shows them on a bear what the needle will do. She is not scared. She hopes the other kids aren't scared either. The nurse gives them a colouring book and inside it is a bear like the needle bear. He is going to the hospital too and he's worried, but the hospital is a good place and he smiles in other pictures. No crayons though. She will colour in it when she goes home. She likes the hospital. The group of children breaks up. She says goodbye to her new friends. She waves at them. She is happy, she will see
them soon. Another nurse leads her to the room she started in, this morning. The mother stands and holds out a coat. She puts her arms in. She is confused. Why isn't she staying? The other children are staying overnight. She imagined a slumber party. They would all put on hospital pyjamas and sit on their beds, separated by curtains. She doesn't want them to be too scared.

They will be okay.

The mother takes her hand to leave. As they walk through the corridors ribboned with yellow and blue and red, she looks for the faces of the boys and girls in her group. She is the only one leaving. The mother pulls harder on her hand. They go down stairs, out a door, into a parkade. Their little red car waits for them. “No,” she says, pulling her hand free. The mother continues. She stops walking. The mother stops, turns around. “Let's go,” she says. Loudly. “No!” I don't wanna go home. I don't wanna go! She screams, high-pitched like a baby. And the mother grabs her hand and pulls. The child wants to stay. The mother doesn't understand. She doesn't understand. She wants to stay. She doesn't understand.

Family dinner.

The mother has made pork chops. The child likes the apple sauce. Caesar salad on the side, not too much lemon in the dressing. She serves the child first, pausing at her seat to cut the chop into bites. And then the son. And then the husband. She considers telling him, “Get your own goddamn pork chop,” which would be an expression of the mood that made her put an expensive steak in the cart at Food for Less. Stay positive. Put back the steak. Got the good pork chops, on sale.
Took absolute care with the oven, adjusting the temperature on a whim, seeking for once not to make the bloody things dry as pemmican.

She sits down. The son watches her and then the husband. The child picks a leaf from her salad and puts it in her mouth. Then she puts a finger in the apple sauce and puts the finger in her mouth.

“Eat,” the mother says to the son. He pauses, not convinced. She smiles. Smiles again, real. He picks up his utensils, begins to saw. The meat oozes some moisture, but it might be, once again, too dry.

She speaks to the son, and looks between him and the child. “Tomorrow your sister will go into the hospital for surgery. When she comes out, she'll be able to hear much better than she can now.”

“How deaf is she?” asks the son, voice laced with scorn. Does he get this attitude from the father?

“Deaf enough that she probably can't hear what we're saying right now,” she says. The child chews and watches the wall.

“Oh.” The son looks at the child. Puts his fork down. The light reflects off his forearm scar. Last year's compound fracture a perfectly reasonable injury for a young boy, a passing worry for her, a cast he waved with pride. He studies the child. He squints, opens his mouth as if to speak.

The child looks up. “Eat,” says the father.

The mother sighs. Fuck it.

“Honey, your sister is going to be fine. Don't worry.”

The husband grabs his glass of water and slurps. She hears the liquid wash around the bits of pork chop in his mouth. The son returns to his duty. The husband claps the glass back
on the table. The child pushes a bite of pork chop through apple sauce. The family returns to silence.

The room is bright with people and lights. The nurses are very nice. There are two, a man and a woman. When they speak to her, they curl over the bed and look right in her face and talk. She is not scared. She is the bear at the end of the colouring book. She is surrounded by yellow curtains. She knows sick kids are in beds like hers on both sides and beyond the curtain at the foot of her bed. It is a room of boys and girls like the boys and girls from her group. She wasn't allowed to play with them today.

The man has dark curly hair and glasses. He leans close on the good side. Smiles and says, “Sweetheart, we're going to put a mask on you and there is air in it that will put you to sleep. The gas tastes funny.”

“Like what?”

“They tell me it tastes like pop.”

Her father doesn't like pop. She nods.

“We're good to go then,” he says and clamps his lips together like he's a monkey. He's making fun. She looks to the curtain.

“So we just put this –”

And the mask descends over her face like a black toilet plunger and it's chocolate that hits her throat.

“I don't know why they gave her so much. I told them she's sensitive. Maybe they're used to all these fat kids or something.”

The mother stands with her head against the wall beside the pay phone. The hospital has a high ceiling and the midday
sounds echo. She could be in an atrium or the Devonian Gardens downtown. She listens for bird calls.

“But she'll come home today?” asks the husband. This morning he asked her to call him as soon as she could.

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm just waiting though. They said she'll sleep the rest of the day.”

Silence. She can't hear his office, either. He must have shut the door and turned off the speaker phone. She can't remember the last time she spoke to him in the middle of the day.

“Did it work?” His voice is a weight holding down his end of the phone. He is exhausted.

“Doctor says she'll hear as soon as she wakes up.”

“Easy.”

“Not really, John.”

“I know.”

“I feel –” She stops. Sighs into the phone. Rolls her head against the wall. The brick cools her forehead like a cloth for a fever. The buzz of voices in the hallways surrounding her and over the
PA
system remind her of the many lives she is not living right now.

“It's not your fault,” says the husband.

“I never said it was. Even now you still can't say the right thing.” She says it with nothing but the matter-of-fact tone it deserves. She coils the heavy phone cord around her wrist, pulling it tight, palming the brick wall.

“Oh Sheryl,” he says. And then, “Sorry.”

For the first time in months, she cries. She drops her hand and it pulls the receiver down with it, yanking her head. She cries into her chest, tears dripping onto the black phone receiver and then to the floor. And the mothers and the fathers
who walk by the row of phones on their way to the wards where their children are much sicker probably think she's losing a child but she hasn't lost a child at all.