Vital Signs (11 page)

Anna wipes her nose into my shirt. “You want me to die,” she says gently, clearly, raising her face now, which is tear-stained and snotty.

Dear God. I hold onto her and feel the slippery wetness on my shirt.

“Anna, please, I’m frightened.” And I take her face in my hands and see that there’s no fear there. Her eyes say that she wants me to do better than that.

“Let’s go to the market,” I say, thinking I’d like to cook something special for her tonight. As we walk towards the car, I feel how death has made my every action suspect. Either I have a duty to tell her everything or no right at all to taint her memory with my version of reality. I have no idea which of these choices is the right one.

Later, Anna’s shallow breathing tells me that she is only pretending to sleep in order to be left alone. And I am at work again. The corn feels close, like hair curling at my neck. A hot breeze blows through the rows tonight and the moon is growing back its broken face. The horses in the field are running, and their canter beats a rhythm in my head. When I close my eyes, filaments of light behind the lids dance like the aurora borealis. I’m desperate to get it right, but it isn’t yet.

The question of duty brings me to this point: where what I am meets what I say I am. And here be dragons, as the map-makers used to write. I can tell Anna what she doesn’t know, or tell her more of what she does. Does she know I was a man who split his life in two for fear of ending up with nothing? Does she understand how such cowardliness can last so long?

“Dad, there’s toast—take some toast,” Charlotte says as I nibble on the scrambled eggs she has prepared.

“Good eggs,” Fred says, his lips making that wet-smacking sound that convinces me he cannot be my son. I push away my plate. My children are vulgar, devouring food in front of their mother when they know she has been on “nil by mouth” since midnight. Sasha has at least taken hers outside to eat on the porch.

I touch my pocket and feel the crumpled sheet there. It’s shit, this drawing. It will not do. The head is all wrong, the feet out of proportion. If these selfish children would just get out of our way, I could find the time to get it right. And maybe even convince Anna that the whole trip to
Toronto isn’t necessary. If I’m to lose her, I want it to be here, on my turf, in our own house, with enough time for both of us to speak, or not to speak, or—

“I’ve just heard from Rosie, she’ll be on shift by the time we get there,” Fred says.

Fred, I must admit, has been stellar about dealing with the hospital. He’s made special arrangements for a particular attendant at St. Michael’s, a nurse named Rosie, who will give Anna that extra bit of care.

Sasha comes back inside with her plate as Charlotte scrapes some charring off a piece of toast. I hear Anna upstairs in the washroom, preparing to come down.

“Finish up and clear the table,” I say generally to these overgrown bodies. I feel Charlotte’s eyes on me. I look up at Sasha, who has traced the agitated motion inside me to the trembling in my cheek.

Dear Anna, when we returned from Egypt the shadows on the rim of my eyelids made shapes like the leaves of all the varieties of lettuce on earth. The leaves were veined with all the lies of my life. I watched them, and followed
.

“Dad, Uncle David called; he wants you to call him after the operation,” Sasha says, picking up my plate from the table. Charlotte rises with her own plate and joins her sister at the sink. “He sounded like he meant it,” Sasha adds, and looks at me with daughter-pity for her old dad who doesn’t know how to maintain a relationship with his only brother. They both lean on the counter, facing me.

“Suzanne called me yesterday,” Charlotte says, and coils a ringlet from Sasha’s hair gently around her finger so gently that I wonder if she feels like I do, like anything we touch right now will snap. “She said David wanted to come, but I told her that wasn’t necessary.” When she drops the ringlet she runs the back of her fingers along Sasha’s neck the way a lover might, and I feel ignorant of my own flesh and blood.

“Come on, hurry up,” I say, crotchety. Since when does Charlotte have the right to stop putting Aunt and Uncle in front of Suzanne and David?

“Dad, relax,” Charlotte says, and she stops caressing Sasha’s neck and throws her own straight mane over her shoulder in a gesture so like her mother’s that I feel dizzy. “We’ve got two hours.”

“That’s not that much time, with traffic down the 400 …”

“Chill, Dad,” Fred says, and I know he never uses that word in his daily life but is performing for his sisters.

“Since when are you so easygoing about time?” I ask, tasting the grit in my own voice. I imagine the hatchet, its glistening blade sharp as a guillotine, which I would take now to some living thing. Fred rolls his eyes at me and picks up his plate as he rises and takes it to the sink.

“What?” I ask.

Fred doesn’t answer me, but I see how he shakes his head at Charlotte as he clears space for his dishes.

“Charlotte,” I start, but I have no idea what it is I need to say. I grasp at an old idea. “What is the latest on the car? Have you made a decision?” These are the kinds of
things I used to attend to for them, the things they count on me for—the car, tax returns, mortgages. For them I have no inner life. Charlotte needs a new car to replace her old Lexus, a gas guzzler, and she should know better, but it’s up to me: “A hybrid is the best bet with the price of oil—” and I stop myself because I haven’t been following the price of oil, but I know it’s outrageous, and the idea of a car, of getting one, of putting my wife in one to take her to this operation, makes me feel so nauseated that I have to hold my head up with my hands.

“Dad,” Charlotte is at my side in a flash. “Dad, are you okay?” I stare at her. “You were swaying.”

“Don’t you go on us now,” says Fred in a cheery, I’ll-have-to-do-everything-then voice.

“Who the fuck said anyone was going?” I say.

There is a putrid smell coming up from between my legs. I am revolting.

“Who said anyone was going anywhere?” I repeat, and Charlotte must smell it too because she backs away from me. There’s a rodent silence now, a skittering away to stillness.

“What?” I ask, looking up at each of them. First Fred, with his air of casual control that says he will never be the fool of a man I have become. I wonder who he is fucking these days to make him feel so smug. For him I gave up mornings alone with my wife, where I was safe, when the crow of day meant that all I had to do was roll over and plant myself inside her. For him I put on a tie. Then Charlotte, second born and yet the first to make me want
to keep secrets: petty secrets like leaving half an hour early for work, just to be away from home half an hour longer, or pretending to read the paper so that no one would talk to me.

But when I look at Sasha … the hatred is rightfully aimed at my own breast.

I stand.

“Map the tunes in the hairbrush,” Anna says over my left shoulder, startling me as I dry my hands on a dish-towel. The cloth is filthy; it hasn’t been replaced for weeks. I turn to face her and see that she is indeed holding a hairbrush, and I see, with this new way of knowing, that Anna is perfectly fine, and right to want to examine the wave capacity of important objects as she prepares her head for the assault that is about to take place.

“Mom,” says Fred, walking towards his mother, his voice a pinwheel of fear. I see him as he was: the little boy who made airplanes out of matchbox covers and napkins at restaurants to which he’d been dragged because his father had insisted upon civilized evenings out as a break from the tedium of domesticity. But Fred knew then what I am only beginning to comprehend. He knew that the best moments are silent, and unmeasured but for the task at hand.

Charlotte comes up behind me and runs water in the sink as she starts the dishes, so I don’t hear what Fred says next, but a moment later Anna laughs. She reaches out to her son, who is standing between us and blocking my view. Her hand rises up to touch his face; her fingers push back the hair at his temples and caress the side of
his head. I struggle to remember the last time Anna touched my face.

The kitchen smells cheesy; there is filth in the corners.

“Take your time, Mom,” Fred says as he grabs her hand and holds it. “You’re not scheduled until noon. I’ll call them if you want …” and his voice trails off in that pinwheel flutter, and I am surprised that reliable, punctual, rule-abiding Fred would put his reputation at stake for his mother’s comfort.

But surprise feels normal now.

How did I get here?

“Sweetheart.” I walk to Anna, not knowing what else to do. She must be starving, parched. There’s nothing to offer but my presence beside her. “Let’s go upstairs. I’ll get your bag and you can lie down for a few minutes if you need to.”

“Not lie down,” Anna says. She looks at me, flustered, and then looks around as though she’s searching for something I haven’t brought with me. “I need those nozzles, the ones they put on the juniper bush.” She points to my drawing pad on the table, and I realize that she expects us to talk in that new way. My heart sinks; I have nothing to show her. “Magnum feebleness popping—”

“Right,” I say, cutting her off, taking her arm and leading her upstairs. I leave Fred and the girls staring at one another in the kitchen.

“Told you, it embarrasses him,” Charlotte says to her siblings.

The skin on my face prickles.

I remember a day in Cairo.

Anna was out in the shops, searching for fine cotton and linen. I had made an excuse of the heat, saying she would get more out of the shopping if I wasn’t there to complain. I told her I would finish the book she had bought me, Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
, in the quiet cool of our room and then meet her for lunch. But I had been irritated with the book from the moment I had begun it on the airplane, and had only skimmed it during those Luxor afternoons by the pool. I couldn’t face it again, so went down to the hotel front desk, where I chatted with the concierge about a restaurant for lunch. He told me about a café in old Cairo where Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s
Nobel Prize-winning author, used to write. I remember feeling disloyal to Anna as I stood listening to the man describe the great writer’s Cairo Trilogy and the profound influence the novels had on him, because, after all, books were her territory. I asked him where I could buy a copy, and he directed me to the hotel gift shop. I tucked the copy of
Palace Walk
under my shirt as I left the shop, as though I had something to hide—not from the authorities who had banned it in many Arab countries, but from Anna. I walked up the four flights of stairs to the rooftop terrace, where I sat alone in the scorching sun, prepared to be entranced by the book.

It was 11:55; I know because I had just checked my watch to see how much time I had before our planned lunch at one. I would enjoy this hour alone. As I began to read—”She woke at midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock,”—there came in successive waves from all directions in the streets below, a sound whose horn-like crescendo made me think of a battle cry. It was the clamouring voices of men, the marauding bellows of invaders riding on horseback over the desert, surrounding the city, and descending upon Cairo in a moaning tide of agony and elation to take its citadel and rejoice in its women.

I realized that the sound was in fact the rising call to prayer from all the mosques in the city, the chorus of voices amplified up on the terrace, their elation swelling inside me, drawing me forward. As I looked at the clear blue sky, containing only a single cloud, and as the call got
steadily louder, I imagined the mosques filling, the muezzin’s call herding the sleepy market traders and toiling farmers, rescuing its lonesome slum dwellers. At that moment, the lone cloud passed before the sun. I sat up straight in my lounge chair and took the occlusion as an ominous sign, and suddenly felt smug in my skepticism among these believers.

Three minutes later the sound was gone. I put down
Palace Walk
with a hunger in me that felt like a weapon. I wanted to find something that would take me out of myself, out of my marriage, out of this thing that was sharp and hot and grinding inside me. I walked out into Cairo’s streets.

Now, I make my way through the stale, pale hospital corridor in search of her again, feeling blunt, harmless. I find her room, pause, then enter.

She is bald.

I put my briefcase down on the floor beside the door and go to her. My wife is sitting up in the bed. Her hospital gown is the tint of a faded asparagus fern, and she is now a shaven captive of Ontario’s sandy soil, not the dark banana-leaf princess I first met.

“It’s fine,” I say, stupidly, as I lean down and kiss her cheek. She hasn’t asked me, hasn’t even indicated that the baldness is an issue for her. She pats my hand. There is a small bubble of skin at the nape of her neck that I have never seen before and it reminds me of a wet, shivering animal.

Rosie, the Filipino nurse that Fred arranged for, comes in to take Anna’s blood pressure. She has been carefully monitoring every one of Anna’s vital signs and has given her the final Hunt and Hess assessment. This scale is the neurological indicator of the severity of the condition based on the patient’s symptoms. It allows the doctors to prepare for the operation; to know how they will deal with the aneurysm and the pressure on the brain as a result of swelling. Anna is at Grade 2-, which is a good sign. She has not suffered paralysis, although she seems to have a stiff neck. She is alert, aware of her surroundings, and her speech is not any worse than it has been in the last week.

“Feed the dogs,” she says to me and pats my hand again. I stare at her. We haven’t had a dog since our family retriever, Miko, was run over on Highway 12 almost fifteen years ago.

“I will.” I return to my briefcase, which has fallen over. I set it right and consider getting out the pad, a fresh piece of paper, as I’m not ready yet to show her the one I’ve been working on. A creeping foolishness wakes me up. Who do I think I am kidding? What did I think I would accomplish with this little gesture? My absolution? This is possibly the most cowardly act of all. I should have completed that letter, written down the exact words, and been a man while I awaited the consequences. At the very least I should have strung together those snippets of words in the drawer and tagged on the appropriate conclusion: forgive me.