The Unfinished Child (6 page)

After each in vitro cycle she rested and pampered herself for the two weeks leading to the ultrasound. And on that day, she and Ron would show up holding hands like high school kids on a date. Such a brave face they put on. And then the disappointment when the technician looked for some small sac suctioned like a snail to her uterine wall and found nothing but a Vacancy sign again and again. Once, after two failed attempts, and knowing the odds were declining with each cycle, she and Ron decided to implant five fertilized eggs—five!—knowing that multiple births could be a factor. Still nothing.

Unexplained infertility. That’s what the experts determined after all the tests she had endured, all the pills, blood tests, ultrasounds, injections, and urine samples. Unexplained infertility. The experts had no idea why she didn’t conceive.

Elizabeth poured herself
a cup of coffee and went to the fridge to get some cream. Magnets held pictures on the fridge door of her and Ron in happy moments: at Christmas smiling in front of their tree, Ron with his perfectly straight, cavity-free teeth and fabulous grin, his arm draped casually over her shoulder. On their friend’s boat at Pigeon Lake. Next to the stage at Shakespeare in the Park. Her eyes roamed over the photos and stopped at one that Marie had taken of her daughters. It was a couple of years old now. Sophia had recently lost some teeth, and her pink tongue poked through the gaps in her smile. Nicole stood beside her, engaged in an equally funny grin, her fingers hooked into the sides of her mouth and pulling wide. She took a big gulp of coffee and burned her mouth. When she was finally able to swallow, the scald continued down her throat.

She was turning forty this year. For whatever arbitrary reason, forty felt like a firm transition point—either have children
before
turning forty, or don’t have them at all. Elizabeth had been on the verge of talking with Ron about a trial separation at least three times during the weekend, but she couldn’t speak the words out loud.
I just need some time to myself
. It wasn’t his fault they hadn’t had a child; she couldn’t blame him. But how had it happened that making the life she wanted was all up to her?

On Sunday they’d cancelled their plans to go cross-country skiing at Elk Island Park because of the high wind chill. It was the perfect time to start the conversation. They spent the entire afternoon at home, catching up on household chores, but still she stayed quiet. She couldn’t remember the last time they had just hung around the house together. She’d made sure to keep herself busy because she preferred not to have time in which to think. It didn’t do any good. One of the women in her infertility support group had summed it up perfectly: “My head is like a bad neighbourhood,” she’d said. “I shouldn’t be in it alone.” Elizabeth had laughed along with the rest of the women in the room, but it was true, wasn’t it? She shouldn’t be in her head alone.

It had been over a year since her last treatment, and she missed some of the women she’d become close to. Audrey had been fun. “If you think your brain feeds you negative messages,” she’d said, “you should hear my mom.
Be patient, Audrey
,” she mimicked. “
Remember poor Abraham and Sarah
.”

Abraham and Sarah?

Audrey nodded. “Yep, they’re in the bible—the first couple plagued with infertility. They were married and childless for seventy years, but they kept their faith.” At this point she lapsed into her old lady’s voice and shook a crooked finger at her listeners. “And when Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah was ninety, their son, Isaac, was born!”

A sad laughter filled the room. All the women were done with being patient.

“My mother’s been quite wonderful,” Elizabeth said. “But she does question the lengths I’m going to. More than once she’s said, ‘You can change your mind, you know.’ She means well when she talks about adoption. I mean, I was adopted, but I wish she’d just support me one hundred percent.”

She was one of the older women in the support group. One gal, Jennifer, was twenty-five, the same age Elizabeth had been when she’d gotten married. The woman’s youth made her feel negligent, like she hadn’t paid enough attention to her predicament. But she and Ron hadn’t wanted children right away, and by the time she’d thrown away her birth control pills she was already twenty-eight. If she’d started earlier, like Jennifer, might things have gone differently?

Some of the women had been together for years, bonded by their own failures to conceive. Others, the lucky ones, like Audrey, who’d had healthy twin boys, disappeared into the much-sought-after chaos of mothering.

But Elizabeth wasn’t one of the lucky ones, and after seven years of treatment, the emotional toll was eventually too great. She finally admitted defeat.

She hurriedly made
the bed and threw some clothes into the hamper. Thank goodness for the luncheon date at Marie’s. She needed a destination, but suddenly she was late. All that useless standing around in the shower hadn’t helped at all. Before lunch she had an appointment to view an apartment she’d seen advertised in the weekend paper; the price was right, and it was within walking distance to her downtown shop. If she was serious about leaving, she would need her own place to live. She was just going to look. But if she did leave, she wanted to move as far from her life in the suburbs as possible. Far away from the baby strollers and playgrounds and girl scouts and ice rinks and soccer fields and trick-or-treaters and anything remotely connected to what she couldn’t have.

Margaret was fifteen years old
in the summer of 1940, and even though the long years of drought had finally ended, on hot days she could still feel dust crunching between her teeth like tiny shards of glass. Impending doom, some called it. But it certainly wasn’t right to have endured and survived the long years of drought and then to go directly into another war. A few years of peace and prosperity was all they’d have needed to erase the deep memories of hardship. Bumper crops of wheat golden in the fields. Corn that grew fat on the stalk. New equipment. Straggling out of debt. Just a few good years to stop taking it all so personally.

Instead, that summer her brother, Johnny, sliced off four fingers on his left hand while trying to fix the thresher for the upcoming harvest. Their father wasn’t home that day; he’d taken the truck to help Mr. Boyko on the neighbouring farm. Johnny came stumbling in, already pale from loss of blood, and their mother quickly took charge. “Get the wagon,” she commanded, “and bring it to the front.” Farm injuries were just another chore to add to her endless list of things to do. Gutting chickens would have to wait.

Margaret drove the four miles to town as quickly as the road allowed while her mother crouched in the back, holding Johnny close for comfort and absorbing the shocks from the road with her body. Margaret would always remember the image of her mother, black skirt spread out over the wagon floor, rocking on her heels over the hard bumps, her arms firmly around her first-born and only son.

The sun had already passed over the midday mark and was slowly making its way toward the western horizon. When they pulled up in front of the doctor’s office their horse, Anvil, was lathered in sweat, his neck slicked an oily black, and Johnny’s face was white as the full moon. The towel wadded around his hand was soaked through with blood and dripped a trail from the wagon into the house. Dr. Jenkins had just returned from delivering a baby. They were lucky to catch him, said his lanky son, Stuart. He stood by and watched his father sever Johnny’s mangled fingers from his hand with a sharp blade and stretch the ragged skin into a flap that he sewed over the swollen palm.

“It’s a good thing you kept your thumb out,” Dr. Jenkins told Johnny as he stitched the flesh together. “That thumb will come in handy. You’ll be able to use that hand for something, anyway.”

Johnny’s numb face didn’t register a thing.

Stuart Jenkins held the light for his father. He threaded the needle and he held the light. He glanced at Margaret, seated across the room from him, and smiled. She’d never seen teeth so white and straight before, and she couldn’t stop herself from staring.

When Margaret was
a little girl, the creek that ran through their property had seemed like a small river. Her father would sometimes bring her to a spot by the cottonwoods he’d planted as a shelterbelt to keep the soil in the open fields from drifting away in the wind. “One day you’ll have shade here,” he’d tell her. “Cottonwoods grow like weeds. And like children,” he added as an afterthought. “You kids grow like corn in the night.” Margaret fixated on the
belt
in
shelterbelt
and imagined what one might look like holding up a pair of pants.

It was two weeks after Johnny’s accident, and the water in the creek had been reduced to a small trickle, insistent but inconsequential. The midday sun beat directly onto Margaret’s dark hair, searing her scalp where her hair was parted. She could feel the freckles on her arms and face rising to meet the sun. Johnny had gone into town again with her parents to have the doctor examine the mound of flesh where his fingers used to be. An infection had been sidestepped, but often when she looked at Johnny, she saw the way he grit his teeth to keep the pain at bay. Exhaustion was etched into every expression and movement he made. Margaret had even more work to do with Johnny healing in the house, but now, with her family gone, the house stood empty. It was a rare moment, and she couldn’t resist the urge to sit by the creek to cool herself, if even for a few minutes. She’d be sure to work extra fast at cleaning the chicken coop to make up for the lost time.

It was a short distance from the house to the creek. In the cottonwood’s shade the temperature was at least five degrees cooler. She removed her shoes and socks and stretched her toes into the cool water. The wind lifted the loose hair around her face and she tucked the errant strands behind her ears while she wiggled her toes. She closed her eyes and tried to hear the heat waves rising from the earth in the way that yeast raises bread. No. She couldn’t hear it. Just wind, the sound of grass rustling against itself, and a drone of insects. Somewhere nearby a snake rustled through the dry grass. A pebble turned and rolled. And another. She swivelled her head and he was there. Stuart. The doctor’s son. Quickly she reached for her socks and shoes.

“What’s your hurry?” he asked. Dark red hair cropped close. Large hands too white to be farm hands. Pants pressed from his mother’s iron. She’d never known a boy who wore pressed pants. It wasn’t right here, like church clothes worn to muck out the barn.

“What’s your hurry?” he repeated, moving closer. His head blocked the light and for a moment his silhouette was outlined in black as if his body had swallowed the sun. When he moved again the sun was released and he stood beside her. “How’s Johnny?”

“He’s fine,” she said, rushing to get her shoes done up. “He’s up at the house,” she lied. “Did you want to see him?”

She tried to stand but he put a firm hand on her shoulder and lowered his body beside her.

“I like your hair,” he said. “It’s beautiful.” He had a phony voice, sing-song, like he was trying to convince her that he liked her. She moved her head to one side as his fingers parted and combed through her hair. “It’s nice to be alone here, isn’t it?” He smiled and rested his hand on her knee.

Margaret tried to stand again but Stuart wrapped his hand around her wrist. “My mother’s waiting for me,” she said. “I have to go, she’ll be looking for me.”

“No one’s home,” he said. “I know your folks are in town with Johnny to see my father. I left the house when they came in.”

She felt the dust drying on her bare arms, melting and disappearing into her damp skin like snowflakes on an outstretched tongue. Why was Stuart Jenkins here? Aloof and untouchable he was, thinking better of himself than the country kids. Eighteen going on thirty and off to study medicine in the fall. Even though he was three years older, she’d seen him in school. Everyone knew everyone in Mayburn. Plus, all the girls talked about him. Stuart this and Stuart that. The one most likely to get a girl to the big city. Dogs didn’t like Stuart Jenkins and took a wide path around him, but none of the other girls seemed to notice. They all believed catching a ride on his coattails could only be good. He was going places, and most of the girls wanted to go places too.

But she was a country girl, and he barely gave the
town
girls the time of day. Why was he here? She had chores to do, and here she was in the middle of the afternoon trying to cool herself at the creek. How disgusted her mother would be to see her daughter dangling her toes in the cool water and enjoying herself in the middle of the day.

“I have to go.”

Stuart reached out a hand and stroked her cheek. His fingernails were square and clean, his palms white. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said.

She closed her eyes to his lie. If she didn’t see him, maybe he’d go away. She would become invisible, cast no shadow, and fade into the sand-coloured stones at her feet.

She felt the warmth of his breath on her cheek as he leaned closer. It only added to the heat of the day, scorching the fine hair along her jawbone and down her neck. Maybe he would go away if she kept still. Invisible and still. His breathing grew quicker, his hand moved with greater determination, and still she maintained her silence, closing her eyes to the picture that God must see from above.

“Lie back,” Stuart said, and he pushed her down.

His hand was on the hem of her dress. She tried to push it away, but he was persistent. He wasn’t going to go away, and she wasn’t disappearing. For a town boy unused to physical labour, he had surprising strength.

Grasshoppers whirred in the fields around her. The creek’s small trickle could barely be heard. Stones pushed deep into her back from the weight of Stuart’s body on hers. She turned her head sideways. A short distance away her house shimmered in the heat, rising like a mirage. The cottonwoods strained deep into the earth and pulled hard for moisture.