by Jo Walton
It is five years after they marry, 1972. Steve comes home from work one day and finds Sylvia sitting at the stripped pine kitchen table, staring into space, the breakfast dishes still unwashed in the sink, a cold cup of coffee half drunk in front of her. “You have nothing to do but keep yourself and the house nice for me, so why can’t you do it? Have you spent the whole day reading one of your ridiculous books, or pretending you can write one when you’re too stupid even to clean up, which you’d think even an idiot from the slums could do? A girl from Griffintown, a Catholic? You fooled me, Sylvia, like you try to fool everyone, putting on airs, a first-class degree from McGill, going to write a book, but you’re just one generation from barefoot peasant! All those brothers and sisters, living like animals! But I won’t have you doing that here, do you understand me?”
She looks up at him, trying to find words to say what she has to say, but entirely incapable of it. She has been looking for words for most of the day, since she came home from the doctor that morning. She is an animal in a trap, and she recognises that. She knows he will hit her when she tells him. And she associates the way he will hit her with the way her mother hit her the day she killed me. But there is no father now to come and rescue her, no protection. She knows he will hit her now whether she says anything or not. So she says nothing, she sits passive, the way he prefers, except that by now anything she does is wrong, anything, everything, and he strikes and strikes. She doesn’t try to defend herself.
It isn’t the first time he went too far. When he broke her arm she agreed with him in the hospital that it was her clumsiness, with a little laugh that she despised herself for later. Her clumsiness, always tripping over her own feet, not looking where she is going, and she has such pale skin, she bruises so easily. These are lies he tells about her. It is her own complicity that makes her angry. If this had happened later, if it happened now, then the broken arm might have been an intervention point, the doctor might have looked at the break and the contusions and joined the dots of old bruises to draw the correct conclusions. But it was 1970 and domestic abuse cases were barely on the horizon. But this time, whether because her passivity excited him or angered him, or just by chance, he knocks out a tooth, a bottom tooth on the right. There is a great deal of blood, and an astonishing amount of pain, so that she can’t keep from crying, even though she knows it makes him angrier.
He is still angry driving her to the emergency room, cursing her every time she whimpers. “Stupid bitch, making a huge fuss about nothing.” But she knows that by the next day he will be repentant, offering her love, and she will have to forgive him, because he loves her and this is his way of showing it, and besides, there is the baby. Steve didn’t want a baby yet, and he will blame her for getting pregnant, not that she wanted to, but she knows he will make it her fault and punish her for it. But when she thinks about it, she thinks about him hitting a child. He is a tall man, broad-shouldered, imposing, strong. A child will be so small, and it will be uncontrolled, and cry, and make messes, and do things he won’t like, and it will not be its fault. He has convinced her that when he hurts her it is her fault, but the child, she is utterly sure, is innocent, and won’t be to blame, not for anything, not for years, it won’t understand but Steve will punish it anyway. Steve will be unjust, she says to herself, looking out of the car window at the whirling snow. He will be unjust to the innocent child, and perhaps she doesn’t deserve it either. It is her first actual rebellion for a long time.
He drives her to the Jewish General, because it is both the closest and the best hospital. The snow is thick on the ground, and more snow is falling, but the streets are well ploughed, as usual in Montreal Steve drives carefully. There was enough money for a new car the year before, but not to go to Europe, which he keeps promising and dangling before her then snatching away. She has no idea how much money he has. She can’t stop crying, and she knows it isn’t just the pain. He is unjust, and it is his fault, not always and only hers. She is desperate. He has deliberately and carefully got her into a position where movement in any direction feels impossible. But the child—she knows the child will be another tie, binding her ever tighter to Steve, that she will have to protect it, and will time and time again fail to protect it, until it is harmed, either physically damaged by Steve or until it learns to despise her as he does. She imagines a son hitting her because she is slow and stupid, and she imagines Steve towering over a daughter, fist raised. “Above all else, guard your heart,” I say, fast, from the back of her head, through the tiny crack that she has opened up. She starts and looks around, but there is only Steve, and the snow visible in the streetlights and the headlamps of the car.
In addition to Quebec’s free healthcare, Steve has insurance for them both, from his work. It makes it easy in the hospital. “She fell,” he says. “She hit the corner of the carved table, and somehow knocked out half of her tooth.” He sounds so confident that she nods agreement, then winces with pain. They examine her, and then the doctor says he’ll admit her overnight. Steve doesn’t like this, but he has to accept it, and he leaves her there. The dental work is slow and uncomfortable. “Do you want an extraction or a reconstruction?” a man in a white coat asks. She just shakes her head. They leave her, to confer and make decisions for her, or perhaps to call and ask Steve, she doesn’t know.
She is wearing a grey paper hospital gown, open at the back, and she is cold. The little cubicle where they have left her has one smoked glass wall, with equipment behind it. On the other side there is a high window, and she can see that snow is still falling, whirling down in huge flakes her grandmother used to call chicken feathers, filling the space outside. She is sitting on an orange plastic chair. She leans forward slowly to rest her forehead on the glass panel. The cool glass is soothing. The doctors, or dentists, whatever they are, have given her something for pain. The window reflects in the dark glass, and the snow, and the medical equipment is there behind, and her reflection, of course, except that she really is desperate, and so am I. I am in there. I don’t know whether I have always been in there, pushed down and down in the bone cave, unable to get out or speak, buried since her mother tore me apart, but not truly dead, or whether some chance or change has let me be reborn now. I believe I am alive because I do not want to die. There isn’t much of me, at that moment, in the hospital. But there isn’t much of Sylvia either, and the space she has been pushed into is so small now that we’re almost overlapping.
“This can’t go on,” I say, quietly.
Tears come to her eyes, and through them she can see me clearly in the dark glass. Her mouth opens as she tries to say my name, but it is gone beyond recall.
“There won’t be anything left of you,” I say.
“I thought you were dead!”
“We need to get help right now,” I say.
She nods, and winces at the pain. “I couldn’t tell him. About the baby. He’ll hurt it.”
A woman in a white coat comes back into the room. “Are you a doctor?” I ask her, through Sylvia’s mouth.
“Yes,” she says. She has freckles and a broad face, she looks exhausted, either because it is the middle of the night or because they make interns work ridiculously long hours as part of their journeyman ordeal. She is younger than Sylvia, who is twenty-seven now, almost twenty-eight. “I’m Doctor Shainblum.”
“Is my husband still here?”
“No, he left. I can have reception call him if you need him.”
“No, quite the opposite,” I say. “He hit me. I was dazed, before, and couldn’t understand what was going on.”
“Corner of the table, I never believed a word of it,” Dr Shainblum says.
“Have you admitted me?” I ask.
“Yes. You’ll be here overnight and you can go home in the morning. We need to do something about your tooth.”
“Take it out,” I say, because that will be fastest, and I am focused on that night, not the next forty-five years in which Sylvia will have a gap bes
ide her front teeth. “And while I’m here—I had a pregnancy test this morning, and I’m pregnant. I have to have an abortion. I have to. He could kill the child, if I had one. He’d hurt it, I know he would.”
“We can’t legally perform an abortion unless there’s a risk to your life or health,” Dr Shainblum says, calmly.
“There is,” I say.
“And even then we have to have three doctors agree,” she says. “I take it your husband would oppose it?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He’ll blame me for it, I’m sure of that. Whatever I do will be wrong. He’ll hit me. He can’t know.”
“How far along are you?” Dr Shainblum asks.
“My period is two weeks late,” I say.
“When beating you, did your husband hit you in the stomach?”
Sylvia is ashamed, hearing this question, because she still thinks of it as her fault, and that nobody else should know. But I am in charge now, and I don’t let her speak, apologise, deny. “I can’t remember,” I say. “Probably. He usually does.”
The doctor winces. “Then you might lose the baby anyway, naturally. Let me examine you and make sure. Hop up on the table.”
We don’t know what she does, but she announces that yes, Sylvia is bleeding, and that she will need to do a quick procedure. It might or might not be an abortion—legally it isn’t, but the practical results are the same. Sylvia weeps, for the baby she would have loved, for the husband she cannot trust and cannot love anymore, for what she sees as her own stupidity. “You’re not stupid,” I say, fiercely, and the doctor agrees.
They take the tooth out, too.
When it’s over she is bleeding heavily into pads, like a very heavy period, and she feels exhausted. It is now very late at night. She lies in a hospital bed, in a private room (Steve’s insurance), staring at the wall, where there is a sink and a mirror. She is lying down so she can’t see me in the mirror. “Would I have lost it anyway?” she asks me in the darkness.
We still don’t know the answer to this question. Sometimes she thinks about this child, so different from the children she did have, later, with Idris. It’s February, and she works out that he (she is sure it would have been a boy, because the girls are girls) would have been born in the end of October or the beginning of November. “Would I have lost him?” Sometimes she imagines him at that time of year. He would be forty-five now, if he’d been born, he’d be a precious human person with a complex life and desires. Perhaps he would make art, and certainly he could look at it and be moved. Steve would have warped his childhood, but lots of fine people have warped childhoods and survive it.
She lies there in the hospital bed under the thin turquoise coverlet, weeping and bleeding. She has stopped going to church in the time with Steve, and mostly stopped believing in God, but she prays for the child’s soul as she lies still in the darkness.
If there is reincarnation the child lost very little. If it went to Limbo—if it is suddenly thirty-three years old in Limbo, then that is not so terrible, and surely unborn babies go there. But Limbo was abolished by Vatican II, and unbaptised babies are said to go directly to Heaven. The worst is if there is no afterlife, if that was the only chance that bundle of cells ever had to be a person. But she found Idris and had the girls, so there are two new people where there would have been only one, two loved and wanted people, and their children, her three grandchildren, who would never have existed.
She did not make the decision to abort the child. I did. I fought for both of our survival, and won. “I couldn’t trust Steve,” she whispers, to God, to me, to the flat pillow.
“You can’t trust him,” I agree.
“He would have been unjust. He would have hit the child.”
“He is unjust to you,” I say. “It’s not even the violence that’s the worst, it’s the lies he tells.”
“… lies…?” she says, into the darkness, the bright darkness of Ginnungagap in her head, where I am, the space in the bone cave that is expanding, where the mists of creativity swirl, where she considers who she is for the first time for a long time.
“Above all else, guard your heart, everything you do flows from it,” I say again, quoting the Book of Proverbs. “You have to get away.”
“Away? Where to? How?”
Her own feelings are only just coming back to her at a distance, fear and anguish and anger, like telegrams sent to her from far-off destinations, not felt emotions but emotions relayed. “Don’t go home until he’ll have left for work. Pack a bag, just the things you have to have. Draw out a cheque at the bank, say he asked you to and it’s for a trip. Then buy the Gazette and find a room to rent, find a job,” I say. “People always need secretaries, and you can type. Then we can work on the rest of it.”
“You make it sound so easy!”
“It won’t be easy. But it’s possible, one step at a time.”
There is a long pause before she answers, as she processes the waves of emotion and begins to think thoughts outside of the circumscribed space Steve has allowed her. “If I’m leaving Steve I could have kept the baby.”
It would have been terribly hard, in 1972, but it would have been possible. The baby would have been alive. It would have complicated the divorce terribly, and the courts might even have judged her an unfit mother for running away from Steve’s abuse—her mother thinks this even without the child. Her brother Matthew tells her the church says there is no such thing as divorce, and that she and Steve should pray together. Her brothers and sisters never recognise her marriage to Idris as a real marriage. With a child, she might not have been able to get away. To go back to the image of the wolf in the trap, the baby, the cluster of cells that might have been a baby, was the paw she had to gnaw off, or more likely the fellow prisoner she could not bring with her in her escape into the light.
The next day, when she is leaving the hospital, the orderly gives her a paper from Dr Shainblum—a scrawled list, with numbers of two therapists, a divorce lawyer, and the women’s shelter. “Please use these,” it says simply. And she does.
“You got me away,” she says now, in Firenze. “I couldn’t see a direction to move, and you saw one. You saved me. And whatever happened, I couldn’t lose you.”
She would never have written a word. She would never have met Idris or known what love was. I might have suffocated in the dark, dissolved into the mist, and the mist itself that is the stuff of creation would have leaked away. Steve would have quashed her entirely, even if he didn’t kill her. The violence is the easy thing to talk about, in many ways. It’s much harder to say that he circumscribed her soul. And maybe she was losing the baby anyway, maybe he had already killed it. We’ll never know. And yet, and yet …
27
BACKSTORY
Orsino cannot remember a time when his parents lived together. He was born in 1472, two years after his parents married, and from his earliest memories he lived with Miranda in Thalia while his father lived in Syracuse. His parents paid each other visits, but did not cohabit. His mother, Miranda, was the duchess of Thalia, a very important person with not much time for little boys. He knew as early as he knew anything that he was a prince, a prince of Syracuse. He knew he would one day be King of Syracuse, and people tell him that a king is greater than a duke, and as he learned the hierarchies of feudalism he saw that they were right. Kings come on top, the only thing greater than a king is an emperor, and there isn’t an emperor any nearer than Xanadu. But Syracuse, the court of his grandfather Alfonso, was a place of stiff formality that they visited only for particular festivals—the state marriages of his aunts, or for Christmas or Pentecost. In Syracuse young Orsino always had to be on his best behaviour while surrounded by strangers who seemed somehow too interested in him. His grandfather was never satisfied by the reports of his tutors, and was always asking why he doesn’t try harder at Greek, or swordplay, or riding. He complained that Orsino isn’t as tall as Ferrante was at his age, and wanted to know what he eats. He piled
Orsino’s plate with more meat than Orsino wanted and insisted he finish it.
When they go out hunting in Syracuse, everyone wants to know what’s in Orsino’s bag, and comments on it, and whether it’s good or bad it never seems to be right. Even Miranda, who in Thalia ruled supreme, seemed muted and diminished in Syracuse. Maybe it was the presence of his father, Ferrante, who was always in Syracuse and very seldom visited Thalia. Or perhaps it was just that everything was heavier and slower and more formal. “I will change this, when I am king,” the child Orsino said to himself, and then escaped back to Thalia where the guards are his friends and he knows all the secret ways in and out of the palazzo.
Alfonso was terrifying, but Ferrante was horrible. Orsino grew to despise his father, who had a bad temper and drank too much, who lurched as he walked, kept mistresses openly, and fought in tournaments and lost. Orsino liked to watch tournaments, but he heard Miranda complain about how much they cost and how the amount that Ferrante loses could rebuild the city walls. She said this to other people, not to Ferrante. Their relationship was icy. In Syracuse they greeted each other as husband and wife, and she and Orsino were lodged in his quarters, but since he didn’t live there but with his mistress, this didn’t mean much. A dead pigeon that five-year-old Orsino concealed under his bed at Pentecost was still there, mummified and stiff, when they returned at Christmas. There were paintings of Ferrante’s mistresses in the rooms, which Orsino found useful for identification purposes, especially when there was a new one, which was often. It was almost never the same woman from one visit to the next. Sometimes Orsino could identify them from their paintings, but other times they looked too different with clothes on and their hair bound up. Ferrante was big and boastful and drunk, but worst of all, Orsino realised when he was six, Ferrante was stupid.
“Am I like my father?” he asked his nurse one night at bedtime.
