by Sarah Moss
the year pauses, turns
By Christmas, life beyond and before Bear Mountain Ridge seemed like a story he’d once heard. Even the child, Indigo, slept late every morning. Rainbow woke first, slipped out of her bag as if the frost were not seizing her heels and snapping around her neck, moved almost leisurely towards the bundle of clothes she’d left by the dying fire the previous night, as if they might hold the memory of flame through the silence and deathly cold of the early hours. She knew he watched her, would let a small smile flicker towards him as she went out into the snow to the privy. When he heard her come back and light the stove, he’d force himself out of his sleeping bag and find her already busy in the kitchen, spooning leaves – not always what he would recognise as tea-leaves – into the pot, adding milk powder and water to a pan of oatmeal. Her face was pink from the outside air. Wind and frost clung in her clothes and sometimes she’d pause long enough for him to wrap her in his sleep-warm arms, to blow his warm breath on her chilled ears while she stirred oatmeal, peered into the cauldron of water heating for washing. When he heard Joan on the stairs, coming down from the room where she and Eagle and Indigo slept huddled like bears on an old mattress, he too would step outside, following Rainbow’s footsteps over a fresh snowfall. The house, he noticed, grew warmer as the snow rose. He had begun to wonder if the day might come when they needed a tunnel.
There were no rules about mealtimes, they hadn’t gone that far, but everyone gathered for breakfast. Oatmeal, tea. Hot and filling, plenty of both, and a little cinnamon on the oatmeal doing duty for stewed fruit or honey or syrup, all of which he imagined every morning. They discussed the day ahead. They’d agreed on consensus government, which in Eli’s experience meant that the loudest person won, but in practice they pretty much did what Eagle said and in practice, at least now with few people and not so much to do, that worked well enough. Once a fortnight, someone hiked down the hill to the road where they kept Joan and Eagle’s old truck, and drove six miles into town for the food stamps and a haul of canned goods. There was washing, cooking, chopping and stacking wood, filling the water buckets with snow because the pipes were indeed frozen, the daily work of getting eight people from dawn to dusk. Eagle took Indigo out every day, to build snow forts or climb trees or track animals. Joan made sourdough bread. Scott tried to teach Indigo his letters. It was the child, Eli thought, who held them together. Where there is a child, there are needs to be met, and things you cannot say.
It’s nearly the solstice, Joan said. I know we agreed none of that Christian shit, big daddy God, but this is Mother Earth, the turning point of the year, the hinge. And kids need festivals. You could tell she had to get herself ready to say ‘shit’, especially so near ‘God’. Sure, said Eagle, we did Midsummer. Scott looked up; something shifted in the room. Joan fiddled with a hole in her sweater. Not like that, she said. That wasn’t what I meant. Rainbow stood up and began to gather the bowls. No, she said, you’re right, everyone in the northern hemisphere marks the turning of the year, we should do it. He remembered Hanukkah, the candles in the window. It was never a big thing, his mother said every year, only we had to make it into our version of Christmas, and now look where we are. We should light candles, he said. We could make ice lanterns. Bring in a tree, said River, nothing Christian about that. Do you think we could have candy, asked Indigo, just for once? Sugar’s cheap, Rainbow said, we have milk, I’ll make fudge.
He and River had wanted to make a bonfire, a big one that they could dance around in the snow, but Eagle was right, really, that they didn’t have enough wood to be burning it for fun. They compromised, took Indigo into the woods to gather fallen sticks and twigs for a child-size fire, and Scott came back from town with marshmallows for him to toast. The child should have friends, the young man thought, he should not be only the plaything of all of us, should not be living out the lost childhoods of seven young adults. He showed Indigo how to jump off a stump and land outstretched, to make a snow angel. He should come into the woods more often, should come alone sometime and listen to the deep silence of winter trees, note as Eagle did the movements of the remaining birds and the footprints of small creatures. Before they went back to the house, the two men and the little boy stood looking through the scribble of black twigs to the blue sky, feeling the dark earth beneath the white snow under their feet, hearing the blood bounding in their ears and the quiet of tree and hill as the year paused, turned, inclined once more towards the light.
Later, after they had linked hands and danced around the knee-high fire, after they had sharpened sticks and toasted marshmallows, the smell of sugar rising into the darkest winter night, after they had tasted the fudge – their appetites for sugar flagging now, their eyes flickering towards the box in the corner, because if the child can have sugar on this one day then the adults can also get a little high – after they had repaired the latest snowman and given him stick arms and a paper hat, they returned to the real fire, the one in the hearth. Indigo curled up in his mother’s arms and she bowed her head over his, smelling his hair, rubbing her cheek on him, feeling his growing weight against her shoulder. He saw her arms tighten, saw her thinking that the child would not always be hers as he was that night, saw her wanting to stop the spinning of the world just for a short while.
For this night.
Later, he led Rainbow away from the fire, up the creaking stairs to the old, cold room at the back of the house, where he had left sleeping bags and cushions earlier in the day. Later, for the first time, in the darkest hours of the longest night, they gave each other warmth.
I found myself running back up the stairs to the ward, thinking as I always did about all the feet that had hurried up and down those steps in the hospital’s fifty years. Nurses in starched caps and nylon stockings, doctors in tweed suits, five decades of parents out of their minds with fear, bargaining furiously with God for this not to be happening. Make Miriam be all right, I’d said, and I’ll give up anything else, I’ll never read another book in my life, I’ll never climb another mountain, but of course I continue to read, because there is no connection between Miriam’s immune system and my reading, because our lives are not furnished with such contingencies. I banged through the doors at the top, had to hold my hands behind my back not to ring the ward’s bell a second time. The nurses come when they can. They were there, of course. Miriam still in her provocative pyjamas, but now cross-legged on the bed with a cup of tea in her hands, her hair falling over her face. My father in the chair, leaning forward, talking, maybe telling her about the latest village gossip or what he saw from the train, maybe not telling her about Bear Mountain Ridge at all.
the way out
Suddenly, they let her go. An ordinary Sunday afternoon, inasmuch as the idea of ordinariness is intelligible on the children’s ward. Sundays were always quiet, the list of names on the board at the nurses’ station as short as they could make it; some children even went home on Saturdays and returned on Mondays, as if the weekend had some protective quality that made it safe for them to go out. Yes, Emma said, it does, but it’s the relative not the absolute risk that changes, everyone knows that hospital outcomes are better during the working week. It’s not safer at home on a Sunday, it’s less safe in hospital. Well done Mimi for arresting at lunchtime on a Tuesday. Yep, said Mimi, I thought you’d be pleased.
It was a bright winter day and Dad had taken Rose out to catch the last of the afternoon light. Can’t have you getting rickets, he said, children need to photosynthesise, there must be some kind of park or playground around here. I saw Miriam’s gaze follow Rose down the ward and through the first set of doors and realised that even in her imagination she could not follow her sister down the vinyl stairway, under the boards painted with the names of previous matrons and physicians, because she had not left the unit since arriving on a trolley twelve days earlier. She did not know that the hospital chapel, the black hole in the institution’s geography, lay below her bed. At that time, it seemed to me
that the visitors’ book in the chapel was the most terrible thing I had ever read, a minute catalogue of parental fear and grief whose exact specificity made it harder to bear than accounts of greater suffering. People wrote notes to God there, as if he might pop by at a quiet moment and be moved to grant the life of a particular child whose mother made her petitions in blue biro with old-fashioned ‘s’s. As if there were things that might not be allowed to happen. Emma and I had ventured there almost as tourists, asserting our interest in architecture and history, as if we expected the hospital chapel to be a simulacrum of the village churches where we used to potter. I did not wish to go there ever again, and at the same time felt drawn to it every time I passed.
Emma’s sister Clare had sent knitting wool and needles and Emma was trying to remember how to knit so that she could show Miriam. It’s an ancient women’s craft, Emma said, it’s sisterhood in material form. No, said Mim, fuck that, it’s time-wasting for girls, it’s to keep women’s hands busy so they don’t go out and man the barricades, next you’re going to have me doing macramé or cutting pictures out of magazines and sticking them into scrapbooks like some under-occupied Victorian waiting to get married. OK, said Emma, fine, but another way of seeing it would be that you’re rejecting the garment industry and investing in your own skills instead, come the apocalypse you might be glad if you could make warm clothes. Come the apocalypse, Mimi said, we’re not going to be knitting, sister, but meanwhile she allowed Emma to put the needles into her hands and show her what to do with her fingers. Teach her anatomy instead, I thought, show her how to read an ECG, explain calculus or the table of elements. She still has her future. I started tidying up, picking up the three books Mimi had left open-winged on her bed, folding the newspaper through which my father had been flicking, fishing a pair of socks from under the bed so I could take them home to wash. My turn, now, to sleep in my own bed, take a long hot shower and try to answer Rose’s questions. Why did Mimi stop breathing? Why did she lie down in the field? What if it happens again? Why do I have to go to school when she gets to lie in bed playing all the time?
‘Hello, Miriam, Mum.’
Janet, the only nurse apparently over the age of forty. Short, steel-grey hair, brisk and silent on her feet. I trusted her.
‘Mum and Dad, the doctor wants to have a word, if that’s OK? He’ll be up in a minute.’
On a Sunday afternoon? Emma and I looked at each other. Bad news, I thought, worse than we already know. I remembered Erica saying things could be much worse, that sometimes paediatricians have to tell people that their child’s condition is degenerative and there is nothing they can do. Probably not, though, on a Sunday. They would wait until all the henchmen were there.
Emma gave a tiny shrug. ‘That’s it, Mim. Now slide the next stitch along.’
Miriam put the knitting down in her lap. ‘Is there some reason why the doctor can’t talk to me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Emma. ‘We don’t know what he’s going to say.’
He appeared at the end of the bed like anyone else, wearing jeans and a rugby shirt. He must have come in on a Sunday, I thought, to see a few special patients, and I could feel unwelcome gratitude spreading in my chest. Come in, doubtless, leaving his partner alone with the children again, perhaps when his parents had come for the weekend, and at that low point on a Sunday when homework collides with cooking and the late revelation of dinosaur costumes and unusual items of sporting equipment required by tomorrow morning. Miss Khalil said we’d get an after school detention if we didn’t bring in goggles this time.
‘How are you doing, Miriam? Knitting, is it?’
She didn’t look up. ‘It’s a sign of despair.’
He glanced at me. ‘Well, your sats have been good for two days now. How would you like to go home instead?’
She flicked him a glance. ‘Obviously I’d like to go home. Or anywhere, frankly. Are you saying I can leave?’
‘Mim—’ I said. Don’t be rude. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t offend the gods, or the doctors.
I met Emma’s eyes. No, not now. Not today. Keep her safe here a little longer, with the resus trolley waiting at the door and the emergency bell above the bed. Of course we can’t take her home.
Dr Chalcott looked at us. ‘Mum? Dad?’
I felt my head shaking. ‘No. Not tonight. I’m sorry, Mim, but we can’t just do that. In the morning. We can get everything ready.’
As if I’d slapped her. ‘What ready? What do you mean?’
I mean no. I mean I’d rather you were safe than happy.
Emma leant forward, pulled the ball of wool from under the bed. ‘What if we all go out, Mim? For dinner, if you like? And then have one last night here, no monitors, no wires, but we’ll all know that we’ve still got the call button if we need it. And then home tomorrow. When we’re all a bit more used to the idea. And we’ve had another night without wheezing.’
‘Good plan,’ said Dr Chalcott. ‘I’ll sort it out with the nurses. Maybe ask them to go through the epipen with you one last time?’
Miriam looked from one adult to another. Her mouth opened. Fuck you, I heard her think, fuck the whole lot of you. ‘Mim,’ I said. ‘Mim, it’s one night. Twelve hours. We’ll take you out to dinner.’
Dr Chalcott looked from Emma to me and back. ‘I’ll leave you to it. You’re good to go in the morning. I’m off to a conference tonight but we’ll send you a follow-up in about six weeks. After Christmas.’
Rose and my dad came back and we persuaded Miriam to get out of bed, have a shower and put on street clothes. There’s no point, she said, if you’re only going to bring me back here afterwards, you’re trying to buy me off with dinner. Yes we are, I said, so go put your clothes on so you can make the most of it. Go on, the pyjamas have done their work, we get the message, now you can exploit our guilt. Come on. Any restaurant in town, whatever you want from the menu. She eyed me. Well OK, I said, not L’Auberge aux Jardins, not that they’d have a table at an hour’s notice. Come on, Mim. Emma had her phone out. There’s a branch of Zucchini, she said, or there’s Spanish or Thai or a new Japanese place, you choose, Mimi. Miriam rose, at last, from her bed. Thai, she said, I’m sick of bland food, and she stalked off to the bathroom, past the other families who had heard every word and who wouldn’t be going to restaurants any time soon. Rose was fiddling with the buttons that made the bed go up and down. I don’t like all that spicy stuff, she said, and before Emma could speak I said I know, don’t worry, we’ll get lots of prawn crackers, you can have those deep-fried dumpling things, ice-cream, anything.
Miriam, it turned out, didn’t have a coat, someone had taken it off her somewhere between beginning CPR and removing the defibrillator pads and it had vanished into the world, had only black school shoes which she didn’t want to wear with her jeans. They’re too small, she said, I must have grown in here, I can’t wear them. I think you’ll find, I thought, that you can, but I said they won’t damage your feet in a couple of hours, Mim, and you can’t have grown that much in ten days. Twelve days, she said, twelve days and counting. Wear my coat, said Emma, and I’ll borrow your cardigan, getting cold can trigger asthma. No, thanks, said Miriam, I wouldn’t be seen dead in your coat, and annoyance fuelled her off the ward, past the fish and through the double doors to the corridor where she hesitated because she was, now, at the boundary of her known world, as far as she’d been since she was wheeled on the trolley from Resuscitation. I felt my dad’s hand on my shoulder. It’s going to be OK, Adam, he said.
No-one knows that. It’s just a prayer. I know it in my bones, they say, but your bones, your blood and your marrow, have a different script, and it will not be OK, not in the end, not for any of us. It is the one thing we know, that it will not be OK.
Rose hurried to Miriam and took her arm. It’s this way, she said, the way out, and I watched them, arm in arm, hair moving on their backs, leaving the hospital.
with paper umbrellas and sparklers
&n
bsp; The restaurant was in a restored warehouse at the back of the old industrial quarter, which has now been regenerated by boardwalks along the canal and plane trees still spindly on ‘piazzas’ where once bales of cotton and silk lay piled. There were box hedges and outbursts of bamboo into which people had pushed crisp packets and ketchup-smeared polystyrene trays. The water lay flat in the darkness, too dirty to reflect clearly the Christmas lights swinging in the wind: like much post-industrial regeneration, it was all set up for a party that wasn’t happening. The restaurant was empty and bright as a stage-set, two waiters lounging like extras against the bar, looking at a phone. I saw Emma feeling in her bag for the epipen. We’d have to get a proper handbag for Miriam, and see that she carried it; the epipen would end up in the washing machine if she kept it in her pocket. And a medical alert bracelet, Erica had said, so that if Mimi ‘became unwell’ in public, the paramedics would know what they were dealing with. The windows were covered with plastic transfers of elephants and onion domes. My father accepted a table by the window, where we would be mannequins if there were anyone out there to see us, and the girls claimed the banquette. Seafood, peanuts, eggs, sesame – what if – but they had tested her for all the obvious things, all the substances known to antagonise the blood, and found nothing. City centre, I thought, Sunday evening, the ambulance response time should be well inside ten minutes. Miriam gazed out at the dark-windowed Party Boat moored to the quay opposite, at the outline of the city against the brown sky.
