Vital Signs (5 page)

Charlotte glares in my direction, as if Anna’s two keenly whispered words support her accusations against me. Charlotte is the one who most resembles her mother.

“Dad,” Fred mumbles, and begins to walk towards the kitchen.

I push my chair back and follow my son.

“I spoke to Dr. Mead,” he says, in a hush like a cop-show coroner. “Jargon aphasia is what it’s called. It’s semantic jargon, but not yet neologistic or even phonemic.” He nods like one of those toy puppies in the rear window of cars whose necks are suspended on springs.

I have no reply.

As the blonde Tuesday turned into three months of Tuesdays, I watched my stomach flatten, my arms tighten; I felt my senses return to their peak
.

“It means it’s not just confabulations, but something associated with aphasia—the temporal gyrus or the posterior parietal operculum … it means that it’s possible there’s more pressure than Gottlieb can fix.”

It’s not that I don’t want to speak. I do. But I can think of absolutely nothing to say.

Charlotte comes into the kitchen and pats Fred on the shoulder as a signal that they should leave. Another thing that my daughter blames me for is the drive back to the city. If I hadn’t insisted we needed a simpler, back-to-nature life, just at the time when Charlotte was needing a more complicated, teenage one, she’d be travelling a few blocks instead of an hour down Highway 400. She’s right to blame me. I was the only one who needed this return to the expanses of corn that dominated my childhood. As I look out the kitchen window, I see that the stalks have grown even since yesterday.

When they have all gone, Anna and I sit in the living room in front of the evening TV—our choices being the home video shows filled with doggy mishaps and baby surprises, or the perpetually dismal news magazine shows.

“Leave this,” Anna says when I choose
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, and I revel in her clarity. “It’s hard,” she says after a few minutes.

“Yes,” I say, alert to her every jitter, her flapping baby finger, her twitching foot. Maybe with these few, controlled utterances she is telling me that this is the way she needs to talk to me now: simple constructions, a few syllables at a time. So I take her up on it and decide to do the same:

“Can I get you something?”

“No.”

“How do you feel?” God, I’m as bad as the doctors.

“Frightened.”

I inhale.

“Would you rather be somewhere else?” And then I realize it’s not a clear enough question. What I want to ask is if we should risk leaving, if I should take her to the mountains, which she loves, or do something that will get our minds off all of this, but of course there is no getting her mind off all of this. Her mind
is
all of this. “I mean, is there anything you’d like to do, to help this all be easier?”

“The baby will need changing and then there’s all the clouds, and the dam on the highway that will only get worse,” she says and I see that I’ve asked the wrong thing again. I hold my breath.

“What about the baby?” she asks me.

“What baby?”

“The one in the corn.”

I don’t ask her what she means. It’s my job to know. I am her husband.

I wait.

But then my doubt and guilt grab me by the collar and I think I might choke. I wonder if Anna is finally
confronting me, and I think that I now must face losing her.

“What baby in the corn?”

“Yesterday’s,” she says softly, in a tone that seems forgiving. I feel the urge to lay my head on her lap. I must be very tired. None of us has slept much this last week.

“Are you tired, Anna?”

“No, no,” she says and smiles. She stands up and holds out her hand, beckoning me to join her. I take her hand, stand, and she leads me out of the house into the backyard that looks out on the field we’ve given over to the horses owned by the farmer next door. The night is warm and the punishment of the recent rainy days seems to have let up.

“Smell it,” she says as she drops my hand, steps forward and looks up to the stars. I am beginning to see a beauty at work in Anna’s brain. I toss my head back and smell and see and even lick the air, which tastes candied. Anna turns and steps back toward me. She puts her head on my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her and we breathe in tandem. I dare not ruin this by telling her all that needs to be said.

When Charlotte was eight and wanted to ride horses, you pretended it didn’t frighten you; you pretended for her sake that you didn’t know that a beast as powerful as a horse did not need to take commands from a tiny, if agile child who wanted the world at her feet. You told her that the horse needed her to tell it where it should take its wild energy. Charlotte blamed me
when she finally did fall, years later, because I hadn’t allowed her to ride the horse of her choice, the biggest one, the one with the blackest mane
.

Later, when I am beside Anna in bed, her calf touching my shin as we spoon, I feel her breath quickening. Its rhythm reignites the urge I felt in Gottlieb’s office. I touch her back, but worry that the force of this impulse to love-making will frighten her. I stroke her very gently. I feel our lust take its shape between our bodies, a memory becoming physical again. But then I think I hear something in her breathing. A rattle. I stop my stroking and raise myself up on my arm to look at her. Her eyes are closed, she is waiting, hoping, wishing, but I can’t continue. I am afraid if I penetrate her that her head will explode.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” Gottlieb asks Anna, who is now out of the MRI tube. He has explained to us what surgery will entail for a brain aneurysm like hers. There’s a chance that the confabulation will disappear within a few weeks, but there’s also a chance that it won’t. And even if it does, the aneurysm won’t go away by itself. Clipping the balloon so that it doesn’t get full to bursting is the wisest option, in Gottlieb’s humble and oh-so-calm opinion. He lauded the appearance of the speech disorder as something that alerted us to the aneurysm that we can now monitor. Why is it that Gottlieb is so easy with these words—the who-knows-what of my wife’s body?

Anna shakes her head: no, there’s nothing else she wants to know.

“There’s one last thing I would like to know,” Gottlieb says.

Anna looks at him and waits.

“Why wouldn’t you choose it?”

She stares blankly ahead.

“What could possibly make you want to live with the risk?”

I believe Dr. Gottlieb is now stepping—no leaping—over a line that should not be crossed. I sit up straight. If Anna doesn’t belt him, I will.

“The first operation I had was to correct my knees; they were crooked at birth, and I had to wear callipers for years. The other children laughed at me,” and here Anna’s accent changes and instead of clear Canadian sounds, her speech becomes slippery with a tropical laziness, an accent that sounds South African or Australian. I’ve heard her imitate accents before—her mother’s Turkish-inflected stammer, the Queen of England’s posh pronouncements when she’s in a silly mood, but this is not a joking matter and it feels as though the accent has her and not the other way around. “But I had to have the second operation in Marrakesh,” she continues in the same thick tone, “and
thaayre thy
didn’t
hayve
the right machinery, so my legs stayed crooked.” This is not the open sluicing of previous confabulations; this is a body snatch. Anna has never been to Marrakesh, as far as I know, and her knees and legs are aligned and strong. I have seen her ski and remember her
trying out Sasha’s skateboard many years ago. No, this is someone else’s life. “I had to take painkillers for seven years,” she says, then mercifully stops.

Gottlieb looks at me, then back at Anna. “There’s no reliable drug treatment for the kind of frontal lobe damage that is associated with this disorder,” he says and turns back to me. “But there is an alternative method to deal with it.”

She understands what you’re saying, you moron; look at her, not at me.

“Endovascular coiling—it’s not fully invasive. A platinum coil is inserted through the vascular system, into the head, and more coils are threaded through to block the blood flow into the aneurysm.” He finally looks back at Anna. “Not all patients are equally suited to it. It depends on the position of the aneurysm. We need the results of this scan first.”

“Doctor, what are you saying, exactly?” I ask, irritated.

“I’ll have my colleague do more tests, Mike, and we’ll see,” he says flatly before turning to Anna again. “There are other patients you can talk to, assess the outcomes yourself.”

Anna nods, indicating that she might like this, but then says, “I’ve spoken to the other patients; they don’t know.” She looks anxiously at me. “They haven’t had the same window problems I have.” As I pull the cuff of my shirt down over my wrist, I know she’s not confused. She believes in these memories that have possessed her.

“We’ll discuss it,” I say to Dr. Gottlieb.

A few hours later, at home, Anna sits on our porch in the chair she chooses when she wants to be left alone. But I can’t—I can’t leave her alone. I get up from the kitchen table where I have been doodling, and I go, taking my marker and pad, and sit in the chair beside her. I look out to where she is looking, to the hills in the distance. Some days we see deer lying at the edge of the woods at the end of the road, but today we can’t see much. The corn has grown more without my noticing, and it waves at me from beyond the driveway, as though chastening me for being unobservant.

There’s so much I haven’t told you yet, things I need language for. Like the time I ran away from my grandmother’s calls, “Mike, Mike, Michael!” Into the corn. Four-month-old corn and eight-year-old me, corn that hid me, stalk and leaves like bodies making me one of their crowd, which minded me, didn’t call me, allowed me and the wind to rustle it then pass, leaving it simply to grow
.

“Anna,” I say timidly. She looks at me, but her look says she’s not ready to risk another conversation. But I need to tell her things—that one particular thing—and to have her know-it-all-ness pronounce upon me and damn me or forgive me. I want to be open, like she’s always wanted me to be. Maybe like the man she dated before me, during her MA studies. What did I have to say back then about my feelings? Say that I feel itchy? Say that I feel unable to concentrate when you’re asking me how I feel all the time? Say that I need space away from your questions? Because
there’s a problem I need to solve that has to do with objects in space, don’t you see? Say what, exactly: that after three years of marriage, a toddler at home and you waddling pregnant through a suburban mall, that I didn’t love the look of the ass on that woman who walked past us? Those were my feelings. Then. They are different now.

“I know you know what’s happening,” I say, and want to add,
and what has happened and what will happen
. She’s so finely tuned to events and feelings that it’s almost impossible to tell her anything; she’s there miles before I am. I try to keep the conversation simple, and I am desperately trying to be honest. For once.

“But I need to know how you feel about all of this,” I do add. I remember the couple in the subway, their dance of abandonment. “As far as I’m concerned,” I try, but I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Should I talk about my day? Should I shut up and hold back so that she’ll talk to me?

“I feel locked out.”

There. A feeling. A real, true and undeniable feeling. Surely she knows this, along with every small act of disloyalty that ever passed between us.

She looks over at me, her eyes wide open.

“Yes,” she says. And then I wonder if she is telling me that I’m purposely locked out or merely conveying that she understands how I feel. “Three words,” she says.

“What three words?”

“I can manage.” And I want to take her by the neck and shake her. I know she can manage. She can manage the world if given the chance. And this is what I think now:
that she is always one step ahead of me. And yet she chose to teach; she chose to put her talents aside and teach. And in doing so she made me look even smaller for my ambitions. I want to tell her this.

“Three at once,” she says, and I think I have them: I love you, I love you, don’t you see that I love you? But this couldn’t be what she means, not really.

“Please, Anna …”

“At a time.”

“Three words at a time?”

“Yes. Otherwise, I …”

“I see.”

“Help me, please.”

And I will die doing so, I vow to her with my eyes.

I try to think of the questions, the right ones, posed just the right way. We are silent for several minutes while the corn grows.

“Do you feel like you have enough information from the doctor?”

“Yes, I do,” she says.

“I want you to take your time to decide, but on the other hand it needs …” and I am about to blow it, I know.

“I have decided,” she says.

“Good, good,” I say, and wait. She will tell me.

“I want life,” she says, and at first I am relieved, but then I wonder if she is saying she’s not going to risk the operating table, because the chance for life is higher, in her estimation, if she doesn’t go ahead with it.

“Does that mean that you will have the operation?”

“There are so many operations that I’ve had, especially in the navy, that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between them. You go down, you come up, it’s all the same. And in Marrakesh—”

“ANNA!”

And she stops. I look down at her feet and see the dried skin and lines like cracked clay at the base of her heel. The hard callus that juts out at the curve of the bone looks as though it is expanding the big toe into a grotesque, witchy appendage with several black hairs sprouting from its skin. What has happened to her feet since the last time I saw this callus and wanted to lick it smooth? What is happening to me?

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. She looks back out towards the field. The sun is beginning to turn everything mauve, as though recognizing it has given off too much bright yellow light and must now soften.