Vital Signs (6 page)

When you were at home with the three of them, all still under the age of five, I stayed at work on purpose, trying to gain space. There was another one, not the blonde. A woman darker than you, fiercer, heavier, and so much freer than you. And I blamed you as we chatted over dinner even as you struggled with feeding and weaning. I blamed you
.

I pick up my sketch pad and marker. I don’t know it while I’m doing it, but I draw something for Anna. As I draw, I think about a woman. A dark woman with strong arms, who is picking up a heavy object shaped like a bucket that
is almost twice her size. I think about her, but I do not draw her. Something else comes from my hands. This new kind of marking, like the one I want to make to capture the effect of Sasha. I think of the effort in the woman’s brow, the sweat that marks her desire to give up. I think of all that I want to dispose of right now. When I’ve finished, I hold the drawing up in front of her and keep it there, waiting for her reaction.

She giggles and then laughs harder, holding a hand over her mouth, as though not wanting anything else to escape with the laughter. I think that perhaps she’s making fun of me and that she knows something about what has inspired this drawing—the other woman, not the blonde, but the dark fiery woman all those years ago—but that’s impossible. Perhaps she sees Marrakesh, toasters, callipers in there. This drawing is what is happening to us all now, and I think her laughter is some kind of acknowledgement.

I think I have found the way to talk to her in the present.

The past takes too much language.

“What time does she finish?” Charlotte asks with the rehydrated contempt she’s shown for me since we got the news. She clicks in her seatbelt. I start the engine.

I’ve picked her up in front of her office on Bay Street. My middle child works in a tower block, wears a power suit and works out at a gym every evening. My middle child dislikes being out in the sun for long periods for fear her naturally olive skin will darken even more. She has friends who own properties all around the world, while she struggles to pay the mortgage on a luxury lakefront condo she purchased two years ago, after Scott, her boyfriend of eight years, left her for his dental hygienist. My middle child is a cliché of a modern urban woman, and it’s
probably this fact, if I can admit it now, that keeps me at a distance. The truth is that her choices embarrass me.

“We’ll have to be quick,” I say as I glance over at her. She is not wearing her power suit today; she is in slim-fitting jeans and a T-shirt that show off her fine figure. “Why are you dressed like that?” My question sounds more accusatory than I intend, and if I were being honest I’d say it was a refreshing change to her usual angled and buttoned look. She doesn’t answer as I pull out along Bay Street and get stopped at the traffic lights. We are meeting Fred in Yorkville for lunch. Sasha might be able to join us for dessert, once her rehearsal is finished. “They have casual Wednesdays too now in the corps, do they?” I try to joke, but she looks straight ahead at the road in front of us, and I think I detect a rolling of her eyes.

“Has she booked in for the op?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say in defeat, and turn on the radio.

Anna is having another cerebral angiogram at St. Michael’s to determine whether a coil embolization is possible, or whether the traditional and more invasive route of clip ligation surgery will be her only option.

“Thank God,” Charlotte says, and throws her long chestnut hair over her shoulders, triumphant.

At lunch, Fred is generous, ordering a fine bottle of wine from our French waiter and telling me I’m looking well, when I know that my skin is sallow and caked like thirsty soil. He has on his doctor’s demeanour—all confidence and impenetrability.

“Remember when Mom had to spend weeks in the hospital with Sash,” he says, thus acknowledging that this particular grouping of the Williamson family is unusual. When Sasha was three years old, she developed pneumonia, with a fever that burned so high she glowed. Anna would not leave her side, slept beside her in the hospital, and we remaining three carried on without them as though we were a special unit in the family army, offering support to the front line by not drawing attention to ourselves, trying to reconstruct the feeling of Sasha without her there.

She was very ill for a month but recovered and has barely been sick a day since then.

“What are all of these words that Mom says?” Charlotte asks.

“Confabulation,” Fred answers. “Damage to the anterior communicating artery, which affects the—”

“I know that much, Fred. I have been paying attention,” she says, “but where does it come from?”

“We don’t understand enough about false memories to explain why they happen,” Fred says.

“She doesn’t believe they’re false,” Charlotte says.

“That’s right. For her they’re real, true. She’s right there in the moment with them as she’s telling them.” Fred lifts up his glass of merlot and stares into it as if through skin into blood.

“Maybe she’s onto something,” Charlotte says, and there’s more than a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“Charlotte, what is it?” I ask, my voice harsh.

“What is what?”

“What you need to say.”

She looks down into her chèvre salad and a smirk plumps her lips.

“Go on.”

“Nothing, Dad,” she says as she takes a forkful of the cheese. As she’s chewing, she looks up at me. “Maybe Mom doesn’t want to remember things; maybe she’s chosen other memories because hers are disappointing.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Fred says, piercing the last of his steak with his fork. He has eaten so quickly that I think this might be the first food he’s had all day. But then Fred has never stood on ceremony with food or anything else.

“Dad? What do you think?” Charlotte asks. That sarcastic tone again. She is not too old for smacking, is what I think.

“Does anyone want coffee?” Fred asks, and it’s clear he wants us to hurry up.

‘Aren’t you waiting for Sasha?” I ask.

“No, I have to get back.”

Fred’s residency in family medicine at Mount Sinai has been arduous. He is rarely available, his naturally curly hair has gone straight, looking like it has been cut with a bowl and clippers, and he looks twice his age of twenty-nine. I worry that he is bored with the lack of specialization, and I silently reproach him for not being ambitious enough to have pursued funding, for giving up once I pulled the financial plug.

“I have to get going too,” Charlotte adds. “We don’t have Sasha’s boho schedule.”

“Why are you so angry?” I shout, and I startle her into looking me straight in the eye. Her brow creases as though she will cry, and I see the little girl again.

“Dad,” she says and, despite my very real animosity, I want to hold her. She says nothing more, and I wonder if she finds my need for her to be kind to me right now repulsive.

“I don’t think she feels this like you’re imagining,” I say. “Dr. Mead said that confabulators believe what they’re saying. She’s not confused; she doesn’t think she’s making anything up. She just reacts to our faces looking confused, like we don’t believe her.”

“That’s right,” Fred confirms. “It’s only because we look like we don’t believe her that she has trouble.”

“But she’s so far away.” Charlotte’s voice is strained.

“No, no, she’s not,” I say, remembering the way the lust rose between us as I lay beside her, and I picture her face against her pillow—a face asking for all dreams to come true.
Anna had been closer to me then than she’d been in years.

“You like that she has the wrong memories,” Charlotte says finally, and I feel the clawing of family spiders at our necks: the net-casting tricksters whose silky threads never let us forget for long just how strongly we are bound to one another. Finally I understand what Charlotte has been getting at.

“I’ll ask for the bill,” Fred says.

“And I’ll meet you outside,” Charlotte says, standing up.

“And I’m waiting for Sasha,” I tell Fred.

But Sasha doesn’t arrive before I need to leave to pick up Anna from the hospital. I find myself taking Charlotte’s side about my daughter’s bohemian schedule.

“You look beautiful,” I say to Anna as I glance over at her in the passenger seat. The traffic has come to a halt as we turn onto the ramp for Highway 400 to head north. In the summer, even on weekdays, this highway is crammed with people headed to cottages or campsites.

She looks over at me, smiles and nods.

I took her skating once, at City Hall. She didn’t know how to skate and held onto me for balance. I made a show of teaching her, and forced her to loosen her grip, as I checked around us to see if anyone was watching
.

I notice that the hair at Anna’s temple, and a swash of it from her forehead up along the part, is grey. Her roots are overtaking her monthly tint and I wonder if she has
noticed and doesn’t care about hair anymore, or about eyebrows or waxing, or her weight, which has stayed a perfect 135 pounds even after three children. She is toned for a woman her age, and up until a few weeks ago was cycling and swimming regularly.

She rushes, on the inside, my Anna. She surges with the force of a current—not water and not electric, but like air: the updraft that carries a wing.

The traffic begins to move again and we pick up speed.

“Are you disappointed?” I say.

She looks at me with a furrowed brow that asks,
by what?

And now I regret my question, but I have to follow through. I try to give her the question and answer together. “That the embolization can’t be done in your case because of the position of the aneurysm.”

“I’m disappointed that they didn’t give the anaesthetic, though. It hurt a great deal, that operation, and when the goat knocked over the fence and the pole fell on me, it really stung, and so it would have helped if they’d given me the proper medication. They never do, though, this is what I’ve heard. The rain comes and the goats just trample over everything.”

“Goats? How many?” I ask. The animals are back, and I don’t know what gets into me—whether it is perversion or honest pleasure—but I want to follow her words. I want to be out there with her and her goats in the rain.

“Six or seven. They’re cunning, but you know, so sweet, almost like dogs. The black fur barking digging dogs in Harewick.”

“Harewick?”

“In Sussex—headless dogs.”

“And the goats? Are they headless?”

“You’re being silly,” she says angrily and looks over at me. She thinks I’m playing with her damaged frontal lobe. “Make the cart less heavy and shuffle the wheels so it runs straight, with bright pink magnifying glasses. There’s no poem for the poor old foot.”

I nearly step on the brake, but there is too much traffic. I have to keep going. No animals, but she has said something that feels obscenely familiar. Then she’s off again.

“The fleecing child came back. The one with the yellow hair and the slanted eyes. Do you remember her? She wanted to take our cake that day at the picnic. She was so thin. Her cold eating bones, her makeshift chariot. She brought the beans—it was her.”

“Anna,” I say to interrupt her, and to stop my dreadful feeling of shame for having started this.

“Wet, sarcastic hibiscus,” she says, and when I glance over at her I see that she has three fingers up, having counted each of the words. Wet. Sarcastic. Hibiscus. Confident she has been successful, she peers out the window. I wonder if she’s seeing something I should take note of.

The bubble in my wife’s brain has put her in the very act of living rather than the ordering of it. Language is the action itself. I am desperate to be as alive as that. But I am a slave. Guilt—not gilt—chains. If I tell her, then maybe they’ll drop away from me. If I tell her, there might only be us, together.

We finish the drive in silence and arrive home to the quiet of our land, which hums with insects and the reach-reach of the growing crops and the weeds that surround them. It’s only five o’clock, and the endless July evening stretches out awkwardly before me. My desire to toy with Anna’s mind is as strong as my wish to understand it, so it’s best to avoid her.