The Unfinished Child (11 page)

There were half a dozen adult passengers on the bus and two babies, yet nobody spoke, let alone made eye contact, despite their all having the same destination. Under normal circumstances Margaret might have drawn someone into conversation by commenting on the weather.
This is my first visit
, she wanted to confess.
What’s it like? How bad is it? Did I do the right thing?

Margaret noted the growing distance between the city and her first-born child. Ten minutes passed. Was there no place for a child like hers within the city limits? Then the bus turned from the tarmac onto a gravel road. And the gravel road disappeared from the highway, and then, finally, the bus turned up a rutted driveway beside a stand of poplars and Margaret held her breath.

From the outside Poplar Grove looked like a private boarding school. The red brick building was three storeys high and had a wide front porch that ran almost the entire length of it. The bus pulled right up to the front door and came to an abrupt stop.

“One hour ’til departure,” the driver called out and promptly turned off the ignition and unfurled a newspaper. Margaret found the sudden quiet unnerving. She looked around her, not sure what to do next. Clearly some of the other passengers had made this trip before. They immediately got off the bus and made their way single file up the front stairs to the main door. Margaret stood and followed slowly behind them.

Six wooden stairs painted grey took her to the porch. There, she hesitated. The rest of the passengers had already gone inside. The front door was heavy. She needed to use both hands to swing the wooden door open. Then she walked thirteen more steps over a worn brown carpet to the front desk.

A woman sat behind it, talking on the phone. Margaret waited to be noticed. Even though the sun shone brightly outside, the lobby was underlit and dreary. She cleared her throat and the heavy-set matron looked up over her wire-rimmed glasses with a furrowed brow. Patience was not present in her demeanour.

Margaret’s voice shook. “I’m here to visit Carolyn Harrington.”

“First visit?”

“Yes.”

“Wait here.” The woman heaved herself to her feet and shuffled down a dimly lit corridor.

Margaret’s heart was beating at an alarming rate. What was taking so long? Was the staff giving her daughter a quick bath to make her presentable? Changing her clothes? Brushing her hair? Why had there been no children playing outside on such a lovely afternoon?

Finally the receptionist returned with an oily-haired orderly who nodded at Margaret and turned on his heels. That was her cue to follow.

When the heavy
metal door to Ward B, building number 2, slid open, the stench almost brought Margaret to her knees. Stepping into the thickly fouled air she instinctively lifted the silk scarf wrapped around her neck and covered her nose and mouth with it, certain that the poison in the air would penetrate the soft pink tissues of her lungs and burrow deep like a sharp splinter.

“This way,” the orderly said, putting his hand on the small of her back.

Margaret felt the heat of his hand through her cotton blouse and imagined it left a dark stain that ran down to her hemline. Filth everywhere, and he was a part of it.

The hallway was painted an institutional green—dull except for the shiny spots where some liquid, she didn’t dare imagine what (certainly not bleach), had splashed against the baseboards and up to waist level, leaving intricate paisley-like dots and splotches in the flat paint.

A steady moaning came from the end of the corridor, drowning the sound of her low heels clicking on the grey linoleum floor. She jumped when a piercing scream rent the air behind her, followed immediately by a dull thud like a watermelon dropped from a height and then silence. She kept her eyes focused straight ahead, allowing what happened in her peripheral vision to stay blurred. A doorway opened suddenly on her right. She jumped and gazed into a crowded room of bodies. Many were lying on the floor. Half were partially dressed.

She kept moving, stunned by her surroundings. Tears stung her eyes, and she rubbed them roughly to keep herself from breaking down. She and Donald had been far too trusting. What
was
this place? Nothing but a trap for forgotten people. No matter what they called it—a school, or training centre. Nothing worth learning happened here, only things worth forgetting. Poplar Grove. She snorted. Such a name was more suited for a lakeside resort. No name could possibly mask the horror of this place. Margaret felt a quiet rage building within. She had signed papers based on a name! A fault in nomenclature! Purgatory’s Place was a far more apt name. Or Hell’s Haven. Why hide the truth?

The sound of children crying pressed in from all sides. The orderly led her through a maze of locked doors, disinfected hallways, and crowded wards until, finally, they arrived at her daughter’s ward.

Margaret could smell her own armpits in the mix of ripe body odours. She felt as if she’d left the civilized world where she operated instinctively and entered a place where the everyday code of conduct no longer applied. How else to explain the assault on her senses? The sounds were magnified, horrific, and not always identifiable. The smells were heady and putrid. The sights, rude and vulgar. Her feet kept moving as she narrowed her vision to reduce her disgust at the surroundings. To think that she’d showered and put on makeup to make a good impression! To think that her doctor had recommended this place. How had she not come first, with Donald, to be sure their daughter would be well cared for here? How trusting they’d been, taking pen in hand and signing away their daughter’s life without even making a visit.

The orderly stopped beside a crib in which a small child lay curled into the corner. He rattled the bars and the girl jumped and rolled her head sideways to have a look. She had dull brown eyes, flat as pennies and equally inexpressive. Margaret looked away for a moment, hoping to see something better, but the crib beside Carolyn’s was filled with two small babies who appeared in desperate need of a bath.

“That’s her,” the orderly’s husky voice interrupted. “I’ll be back for you in fifteen minutes.”

Margaret stared at his retreating back with panic. Fifteen minutes? What was she supposed to do here? She felt the rose in her hand and realized how inappropriate the gift was. This child, although older than her two at home, was younger in so many ways. She seemed barely able to sit up on her own. Margaret watched mutely as Carolyn struggled to shift her balance. When she finally reached an upright position, balanced solidly on her bum, her head lolled to one side as if someone had put a heavy barrette in her hair and unbalanced her. Drool ran from her slack mouth and down her chin, yet the child made no effort to wipe it away. Although she was four years old, she was still in a diaper, and from the looks of the brown stains on her bare upper thighs, she’d been wearing it for some time.

Margaret took it all in and almost buckled under the weight of her shame. She shouldn’t have come. The life she’d tried to imagine for her daughter, the one with goodness and light, was non-existent. No one brought ice cream cones to these children. No one made them laugh. It was better to have imagined Carolyn well taken care of and happy. She glanced around the room. There must have been forty cribs all told, positioned in rows with narrow walkways between them, and all of them were full. The age range appeared to be infants right up to ages six or eight. It was hard to accurately say because the children looked so small in the cavernous room with its high ceilings. How cold it must be in the winter, she thought, gazing at the old, tall windows high up on the walls.

She felt something touch her arm and instinctively pulled away before realizing it was Carolyn’s hand reaching through the crib bars. Margaret looked at her child and experienced a host of emotions. Revulsion was one of them. Gaining steadily, however, was a fierce and immense compassion. This was her child. She reached out and took Carolyn’s small hand in her own and saw that her nails were overgrown and broken. Margaret made a mental note to bring nail clippers next time. If there was a next time.

The child kept reaching, and soon Margaret realized she was after the rose. Margaret pulled the stem off and handed the flower head to Carolyn. For a moment her daughter sat motionless, absorbed by the newness of the soft petals in her palm, thin as a layer of skin pulled from a sunburned shoulder. Then she lifted the flower to her mouth and began to chew.

The bus trip
home felt twice as long as the initial drive to Poplar Grove. Margaret rested her forehead against the cool window and stared flatly out at the tilled farm fields that now looked ravaged. She saw a falcon dive low over the ground and pull up with something struggling in its claws; she could relate to the small animal caught in a grip far stronger than its own. She could relate to the struggle and the shock.

Something had been set into motion four years ago, and she had gone along with it, trusting that the doctors knew best. After all she’d been through, she should have known not to be so trusting. Look at the boy Doc Jenkins had raised. Obviously the good doctor knew nothing about children. And Dr. Morrison too. She hadn’t even asked him if he had kids. What kind of a father would he be if he thought Poplar Grove was any kind of a place for a child? His words echoed in her mind,
It’s for her own good
. Rage simmered in her bloodstream. She had been completely misled.

The bus turned off the highway and headed to the south terminal. She couldn’t tell Donald what she’d found—their tiny, undernourished daughter, still in diapers, left to rot in a crib. Abandoned, really, in a foul place where there was no love. Thank God she’d come without telling Donald. What would Donald think if he saw this? No. She would never tell him what she’d discovered. She had to protect him from knowing more about this horrific place. She had to shower the grime of that place from her skin.

She needed to hold James and Rebecca in her arms. Maybe, if she tried, she could forget this visit entirely.

January, the coldest month of
the year, came to an end. The hours of daylight slowly began to extend—but even so, the city’s inhabitants walked in a dreamlike state, fearful that the dark season of cold and snow would never end. The calendar days passed, but the snow continued to fall.

Winter, with its extended hours of darkness, is the season for sleeping. Windows stay closed; snow muffles the neighbourhood noise. Marie didn’t often have difficulty sleeping, but on this cold, late-January night, she woke with her heart hammering. She sat upright in bed and listened. Had one of her daughters called out? She strained her ears and waited. Nothing.

Disoriented, she lay down again and closed her eyes. Then the dream came back to her. In it, her newborn was fully swaddled. She couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. All she knew was that it was hers to care for and she’d forgotten it somewhere. At the store? The bus stop? No—the beach! Down the steep cement stairs to the waterfront she ran to find her baby resting on a huge piece of driftwood. It was a pebbled beach, and the small stones kept pulling at Marie’s feet so, despite great effort, she never got any closer to her child. She could hear the baby’s thin cry and she dug harder for traction. She flailed and dug and flailed some more.

And then she woke up.

She’d had these dreams before, with her girls; she’d wake with her breasts hard and leaking and walk barefoot to find them quietly sleeping in their rooms. But this time there was no baby to check on in the room next door.

Barry snored quietly beside her, the duvet tucked beneath his sleeping form. Shadows of naked tree limbs moved rhythmically on the bedroom ceiling from the light cast by the lamppost at the sidewalk’s edge. Aside from the usual household noises—the furnace softly humming, the alarm clock clicking as the numbers turned over on the bedside table—the house was quiet. It was too early for the neighbours’ dog to begin his customary howling. And it was a weekday, too early for anyone to be up and too late for anyone not to have gone to bed.

Marie stared at the shadows on the ceiling and tried to calm her pounding heart. She wasn’t even at the quickening phase yet, when she could detect fetal movement, so how could she check on her baby?

Maybe there was something wrong with it. She’d been lucky to have two healthy children, but she was older now. Her doctor would stamp a big fat
RISK
on her file when she went in with the news. She worried the thought, turning it over and looking at it from every angle, until it became a premonition. Her foreboding became a certainty. The hunch a reality.

There is something wrong with my baby.

Shortly after four she heard Mr. Jantz’s car start up when he left for the bakery. Then a long silence punctuated by a car idling along the avenue as the morning’s paper was delivered.

She climbed quietly out of bed and walked to the window. Snow had fallen in the night and was still falling. Thick flakes floated heavily to the ground. The neighbourhood glowed as if under a fresh coat of paint.

The mountain ash stood in stark contrast to the blanket of whiteness, its red berries delectable treats for the waxwings that visited by the hundreds, cooing and trilling and leaving a trail of red droppings in their wake.

She returned to bed and stared once again at the ceiling. The shadow of naked tree branches was gone now. She thought of the Dutch elms in the city, seasonally engaged in a fight against disease. She thought of her baby possibly warring against its own cells. She thought of her mother, eating sparingly and watching her figure under a hot Arizona sun. She thought of her father, teeing off with other white-haired men after a long career in an unfulfilling job that paid the household bills. She thought about what to make for breakfast. She thought of Elizabeth packing her belongings and carving out a single life.

Finally, at five-thirty, she reached out and shook Barry’s arm. She rolled closer to him and curled her body against his warmth.