Falling From Grace (21 page)

She left and I sat on the examining table, staring at the purple print flowers sprinkled across my lap. I hadn't needed a year for the microscopic sperm to wriggle its way to the microscopic egg but a few seconds of folly on a dark night in a rainforest. The fertilized egg didn't wait dormant until the substrate was wet enough, warm enough, or fertile enough. I was all of the above and the single egg divided once, twice, again and again to form an embryo, implanted in the wall of my uterus, growing and developing minute by minute. A silent secret mystery. I could imagine the miniature seedling of a spruce producing a fifty-tonne giant taller than a twenty-storey building, but couldn't bring myself to picture a fetus, another human growing inside my body. I counted back to the unmistakable moment of conception. Summer solstice. Four weeks and six days.

How could the beginning of life be a silent event? One would think this significant affair would at least send up a brief trumpet blast or a bar from Mozart. A girl in my high school gave birth at fourteen. Her family assumed she was gaining weight. How could they not know? Grace claimed she knew of her pregnancies within two days of conception with all three of her children.

How could I not know?

I sat with the thought until the nurse knocked on the door, needing the room for the next patient.

• • •

I waited
outside the elevator on the main floor of the hospital. My stomach churned, my head ached with a thousand doubts and questions.

“Faye Pearson?”

“Yes?” I turned toward the voice, dazed, and tried to place the face of the man.

“Sergeant Lange from the Duncan
RCMP
.” He held out his hand. “Remember?”

“Oh yes,” I replied. “I didn't recognize you. You're not in your uniform.” He seemed more like a grandfather in a casual golf shirt and tan cotton pants than an officer of the law.

“My mother had surgery on Monday,” he said. “Listen, I'd like to talk to your partner, Mr. Taylor.”

“He's in a coma.” I punched the button again, reluctant to get into a conversation where I needed my wits.

The sergeant stepped back to allow an orderly to manoeuvre a wheelchair toward the next elevator. “Do you mind if I call you Faye?”

I shrugged.

“I have to apologize.”

“About what?” I said, taken aback by the statement.

“I checked you out. Other than the blockade you're clean, more than clean. I'm afraid I didn't believe the story you told me. We examined the arrow that was used to shoot him. The bolt, I mean.”

“And?”

“The rubber tip was sawed off and the end sharpened.”

I steadied myself, horrified at the thought of Paul's assailant methodically whittling the tip away to a lethal point, the crime premeditated.

“Do you have any more information?”

I shook my head. I felt nauseous, wanting to escape, and was relieved when the bulb above the elevator lit up and the door opened with a ding. “I need to go,” I said.

He fished a card out of his pocket. “Call me if anything new turns up.” I stepped into the elevator. “One more thing”—he propped the door open with his foot—“about the picture in the newspaper. The constable's behaviour was out of line.”

Heat crept up my neck and into my cheeks. “Thank you.” I stood on my tiptoes and pressed the top button, feeling less than vindicated, my thoughts more focused on the future than the past.

“Nobody deserves treatment like that,” he said as the elevator door rumbled closed between us.

I silently filled in the rest of his sentence.
Not even a dwarf.

I sat in the corner of Paul's room and watched his chest rise and fall. I pressed the palm of my hand to my stomach. How big was a thirty-four-day embryo? Did it have fingers, a nose?

Corrie came in to check the monitors and change the
IV
bag. “Hi, Faye,” she said. I wondered if a nurse could sense the momentous alteration in my body, but Corrie chatted about Paul's vital signs and the weather while she worked, then departed with a wave, leaving me alone again with Paul in the hiss and beep of the monitors and my own private earsplitting shock.

I chewed on my bottom lip. “I'm pregnant,” I said aloud to the silent room. His featureless face didn't flinch. “What do you think?”

Of course he'd be staggered by the news. Urging for an abortion. What man in his position wouldn't? He'd always talked about having children one day when he met the perfect woman. I moved to the end of the bed and peered over the edge of the crisp white sheets at the traction apparatus on his leg. I wasn't that woman. I had never anticipated having children, let alone a life partner, a husband. What if the baby was a dwarf? Destined to a life of being different. Of teasing and stares. Of not being able to reach the elevator buttons. Or sit on a chair without making a production of it. I'd marched through life acting like none of those things mattered. But could I put a child into the same position? I paced the room, then climbed on the stool and studied Paul's face. What if the baby was like its father? With a mother who couldn't lift and carry her own child past infancy? I tried to imagine parenting with Paul, our child toddling on unsteady legs back and forth between us, but the image evaporated before I could hold it steady in my mind.

On the way home, I bought a pregnancy test. The clerk lifted her eyebrows as she put the package in a bag, as if dubious about the implications of my purchase. After dinner, I locked myself in the bathroom. Rainbow haunted the hallway outside the door like a restless wolf, her radar uncanny. Without a doubt she would know the instant of conception of her own babies when the time came. I sat on the toilet lid and read the instructions on the box. Simple. One didn't need a doctorate in chemistry to pee on a stick. Arms longer than my own would help. I tried to ignore the intermittent tapping on the door.

“Dr. Faye?”

“I'm busy. Go find Marcel if you need help.” Rainbow flopped onto the floor outside the bathroom with a thump and a sigh. The scoundrel. Did I want a child of my own? One I couldn't give back? I climbed half-naked into the bathtub, set the water glass in the bottom, hitched up my shirt, squatted and peed. Five minutes later my answer appeared, a faint flush on the end of the stick.

Pink . . . for pregos. Up the stump.

In trouble.

20

When I
stepped through the door, the chatter and laughter in the classroom fell into silence. I heard the crinkle of newspaper being shoved into backpacks. My famous cover photo, no doubt. A blaze of scarlet filled the view outside the window, a Japanese maple in the university commons. Deciduous trees were rare in the rainforest. It was a splendid tree, but I missed the giants, missed my time in the field with Paul. I faced the group of summer seminar students from the biology department who had gathered to hear me speak about my research. The chair of the department had moved the date for my seminar up to allow me to squeeze it in before my trial, my fall courses cancelled. I hadn't been in front of a class in months.

All eyes were on me. No question they knew about my arrest. Many of the two dozen faces were familiar; a number had taken my undergraduate level entomology classes. I recognized Matt, a tall, thin, overly earnest boy I'd supervised for his master's thesis on ants, and Margie who worked on soil beetles up north. A few students were new to the department, doubly curious about their dwarf professor. At least I was certain they were in the dark about my pregnancy, a secret between my doctor and me. I intended to keep it that way.

I moved the podium aside, the stand far too tall. The room assigned to me was not the usual lecture theatre where the desks cascaded upward in a fan and all the students could see me with ease. This room was an older traditional classroom, small and square, the floor a single level. When I began teaching in classrooms like this, I had used a step stool, but it proved problematic, too limiting to my movement around the room, to the blackboard, the overhead projector, to engage with my students. Instead, I usually sat on my desk to lecture. But today I would stand, not caring if the students had to make an effort and peer around the bodies in front of them, crane their necks to see over the heads of their neighbours. I could imagine the gossip.
University Prof Arrested at Anti-logging Standoff.

My slides were already set up by the audio-visual technician. I collected the laser pointer from the desk and asked the student nearest the door to dim the lights, another to pull the blinds. I flashed a slide up on the screen. “My team and I have worked in Otter Valley for three . . .” I choked up at the photo of Paul in climbing gear ascending WR-3-3 on a rope. I paused to compose myself, to steer away from the onslaught of tears that seemed to be waiting in the wings ever since I'd left the doctor's office two days ago. An embarrassment I didn't need. “We've been in Otter Valley for three seasons,” I repeated. “Our main focus of study is oribatid mites in the canopy of ancient rainforest western redcedar trees. Ancient, in the temperate west coast rainforest, is defined as two hundred and fifty years or older.” I could hear a rustle of papers, the click of pens.

“No notes today. You're not going to be examined on this,” I said testily, then regretted my tone. “Sit back and listen. I'll take questions later.” I flipped to the next slide, a frontal view of a mite. “And for those of you who don't already know or who have forgotten what I taught you in your Bugs 340 class”—a smatter of laughter—“oribatid mites are a group of soil-dwelling mites in the order Arthropoda. Why are they important ecologically?”

Margie raised her hand; the girl was one of the brightest students I had encountered in my career. “Oribatid mites break down old plant material and recycle the nutrients back into the soil.”

“Correct.” I paced back and forth as I talked, not usual for me, but today I seemed unable to stand still. “Without oribatids and other mites, living plants would not have access to nutrients and could not survive, and we all know what that would mean. Plants as primary producers support all other life.”

The next slide was one Paul had taken of me in the crotch of a cedar, my arm buried up to the shoulder in a deep pocket of suspended soil. “My primary study in Otter Valley,” I explained, “focused on mites in suspended soils. Suspended soils are accumulations of decomposed plant debris over time in depressions and crotches in trees.”

“How old is the suspended soil in the picture?” a student I didn't recognize asked from the back row.

“An accumulation of suspended soil like the one in this slide is deeper than my arm is long.” I held out my arm to demonstrate, suddenly conscious of the attention on my shortened limb and the whispers from the back of the room. I raised my head and the whispering ceased. “This one's built up over a period of hundreds of years. In fact, we don't find appreciable accumulations of soils until the trees are well into the ancient category.” I bent to fish a soil corer out of my briefcase and felt a sharp pain below my navel. I straightened slowly, my hand over the spot.
The baby?
I waited but nothing more. I pushed my concern aside.
It can't be bigger than an almond.

I turned back to the class to find the students all gawking at me again. I cleared my throat and held up the corer. “This is a homemade soil corer, used to take samples from suspended soils in the canopy and from the ground. What did we find?” The next slide showed a series of charts and graphs. “One hundred and thirty-eight species of oribatid mites in ground and suspended soil samples. This bar on the graph”—I pointed at the chart with the laser—“are the ground mites and here the canopy mites. The top section of the bars show those exclusive to that particular habitat. Forty-two out of ninety-four canopy species were found only in the canopy. The remaining species found in both canopy and on the ground were collected from the lowest branches down. Not in the upper canopy. What does this tell us?”

“The soil conditions in the canopy are different than those on the ground?” a girl in the back called out.

“Yes. What else?”

No one answered.

“How did the canopy mites unique to the canopy get into the canopy?” I prompted.

After another brief silence, Margie ventured an answer. “Well, if the canopy mites aren't found on the ground, I guess they couldn't have crawled up? And they don't fly. Wind?”

“Wind is a possibility. Or hitchhiking on another animal,” I said. “The important thing our study shows is that the oribatid mite community within suspended soils in the canopy are formed mainly by dispersal and colonization within the canopy system. In other words, canopy species originate within the canopy”—I waited for the revelation to sink in— “and”—I raised my finger to punctuate the point—“at least one-third of the canopy species we identified are undescribed or species new to science. Questions?”