Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
My sister unhooks the chart from the foot of my mother’s bed and reads.
My mother is not in the bed. My sister takes her pen, which is always to hand, around her neck or poked into a pocket and, with the air of entitlement of a medical professional, writes “MMA” in large letters at the bottom of the chart.
MMA.
Mad as a meat-ax.
My sister learned this expression from me yesterday. She has latched on to it like a child wresting a toy from another.
We have come to visit my mother, in rehab for a broken hip in this prairie hospital, a place that could be far worse than it is. It is set down here, plain and brown, on flat farmland, but the foothills start rolling westward just outside town and you see them from the windows. They roll on, smooth, rhythmic, and comforting, until they bump into the stern and inscrutable face of the Rockies eighty miles thataway.
In summer the fields are sensible, right-angled squares of sulfur-yellow and clean, pale green, rapeseed and young wheat. In winter the cold will kill you. Nothing personal. Your lungs will freeze as Christmas lights tracing the outlines of white frame houses wink cheerfully through air so clear and hard it shatters.
MMA, I say. They won’t know what that means. You don’t say that here in Southern Alberta, even in urban centers. It’s a down-underism, an antipodeanism. Maybe they’ll see that on the chart and give her some medication called MMA and kill her.
Do we care? my sister asks. She hangs the chart back on the foot of the bed as my mother wheels into the room, gaunt, her favorite look, with a black fringe and bobbed hair. Hats off for carrying that off at ninety. Her sinewy hands coerce the wheels of her chair forward faster than you are supposed to go if you need this chair.
She is wearing a hospital gown and a pair of fuchsia boxer shorts. Not hers. Obviously not hers.
She remarks that it is strange that she cannot have her own things to wear, that she must wear this strange outfit. We don’t think to question. We believe in strange. We believe whatever. There’s no other way to go at this.
We have run the nurses’ station gauntlet to get to her. We have announced ourselves at the counter as her daughters, on our first visit to this rehab ward. We are her daughters, we say, when challenged about why we are in this corridor.
No, you’re not, the nurse says, not even looking up from her papers.
But we are. We’re sure.
No, she insists. She only had one daughter and she died a long time ago. Now she has none.
My sister cries out from the heart, startling me. Look at me, she cries. Do I look dead?
I don’t think she is looking too good, but there is something more pressing. Why, I ask her, are you the daughter who gets to exist? Even if you’re dead now. Not to put too fine a point on it but if anyone should get to be dead, it’s me. I was born first.
The physio strolling by stops to ask who we are and what the matter is. We stare at her, wanting to say all that is the matter, wanting to unroll the whole carpet of what is the matter and smooth it out, drawing attention to the motifs, combing the fringed edges into some order, vacuuming the patterned surface until clarity emerges. We wonder how to begin.
They are saying, the nurse tells the physio, that they’re the duchess’s daughters. But she has no children.
You’ve got it wrong, the physio says. Little bird of a person, you’d never know it of her, but she had eighteen kids. Imagine, eighteen. And only one boy. Heartbroken she was. Told me herself. In tears. Oh, she had kids all right. Nobody around when you need them though.
I draw breath. I can work with this. See, I say to the nurse, there you go. We can’t speak for the others, but we’d like to see her.
Just in case we’re having too much fun with this, let’s go back a notch in time. Only a little while, don’t be afraid, not far enough to get caught in the starry wheeling vertigo of the slow-mo free-fall no-up-and-no-down that is the more distant past. We will go there—chronology has its uses—but not just yet.
Some weeks earlier then. The beginning of winter.
When winter comes, summer is the memory that keeps people going, the remembrance of the long slanting dusk, peonies massed along the path, blossoms as big as balloons, crimson satin petals deepening to the black of dried blood in the waning light, deer on the lawns, stock-still. Some people here, not transplants from the city like my parents, still make preserves in the summer, crab apple jelly, tomato chutney, apple butter. They keep the jars safe through the autumn months, when the hay is rolled and the young coyotes practice yipping at the moon from the edge of the stubbled fields, to eat from when the snow flies.
My parents live in paradise, twenty acres with a ranch house on a rise, nothing between you and the sky and the distant mountains. Overlapping cedar shingles on the roof that will last for generations or until the house falls down.
No near neighbors.
The house is paradise in the same way the Hotel California is: a fortress with many bedrooms, a wine cellar, a mud room, a huge windowless library, a grand piano in the great room, two furnaces, and a bomb shelter dug five meters deep into the hill in case Cuban missiles are ever aimed at the Turner Valley oilfields or the trout in Sheep Creek.
The doors of this house open to no one. The phone rings unanswered, unheard by my father, who finds his life livable if he takes the batteries out of his hearing aid, and ignored by my mother, who knows the world is out to get her. The leaves of the trembling aspens can shake all day like gold coins in air as clear as cider, but this is not a welcoming place.
So, early winter in the house a mile from the six-lane highway running straight south to the States. On this day a solid ribbon of eighteen-wheelers is gunning it full throttle for Great Falls, Montana, or Boise, Idaho, making the most of the open roads and hardly believing their luck, just a drift of powder across the road when you gear up, like icing sugar from a doughnut.
In the kitchen, my mother’s hipbone crumbles and breaks and she falls.
They must have phoned someone. They must have opened the door to strangers who came to help. These strangers will have walked into this time-capsule house sealed against the outside world for a decade. The breaching of the no-go zone must have made a sound like a crowbar splintering wood.
