Bob closed up at three o’clock and I walked back to the house through the falling snow. It was sticky enough to make a snowman. I had a pork chop to fry up and I made instant mashed potatoes and a can of creamed corn to go with it. Dark already, the snow coming down steadily, I felt like I was being buried. I turned on Bea’s silver Christmas tree on top of the TV, although I hated it, both its chintzy falseness and the fact that she put it on top of the TV. It just reinforced how pathetic her life was, the TV the centre of her world. Jenny once asked Mom why we didn’t have a TV and Mom said, “You mean overlooking the fact that we don’t have a fridge or a dryer either? We could have a TV, if it was important enough to us.”
But I liked the coloured light that Bea’s tree threw. Not a fire, but a memory of a fire, Christmas Eve playing cards by the light of the lantern and Mom bringing us a plate of biscuits with fresh cream and blackberry jam. Where did she get the cream? What plans did she make for the day, following some dream she had for all of us together on Christmas Eve? The woodsmoke perfume. Snow angels later, all four of us, Dad giggling. Looking up at the stars, the night so clear and cold. I don’t know how old I was, but even then I knew to hold on to it. I understood how fragile it was.
I looked out the window at the quiet street. Fallen snow had turned the neighbours’ cars into weird tall shapes. More was falling, and it blurred under a porchlight like a cloud of insects hovering.
I went to the phone and dialled information. “I’m looking for Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Vancouver,” I said.
“I’m sorry? What is the name you’re looking for?” said the operator.
“Our Lady of Perpetual Help. That’s the name.”
“Hold on please. There’s an Our Lady of Perpetual Help church. Is that the number you want?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry miss, that’s the only number I have. Merry Christmas,” said the operator.
Bea’s backyard was a bowl of deep snow capped by sky thick with reflected light. It was only a city backyard and Christmas was all wrong but I couldn’t help seeing how beautiful it was. I put on my parka and went out the door. I found the snow shovel and began a pile right in the middle of the yard. Music floated from a neighbour’s house. I hoped they didn’t know Bea was away and that they wouldn’t see me, alone out there. I piled and packed, piled and packed, took off my parka and worked in my sweatshirt. I stopped to make hot chocolate, sat on the back step and drank it, thinking of Vern, who had gone to his Mom’s for the holidays.
Voices on the street, happy shouts and car doors slamming. Then the commotion of revved engine and spinning tires and shouted directions. “Straighten your wheels. Okay, put her in reverse. Give her some juice. Again.” Then quiet, deep, even here. It must be late.
I began to dig a tunnel into the pile. After a while, I got the flashlight and went to the shed for a smaller shovel. Sweeping the dark corners with the flashlight beam, I saw her travelling fast, too fast on a snow-plugged road, her muscular hands gripping the wheel, headlights cutting through thick falling snow. She’d like a cigarette. There’d be no one there to roll it for her and you couldn’t stop on a road like that or you’d get stuck for sure. Her thermos of tea would be between her legs, the tea only lukewarm by now.
I locked the shed. If anything came down the street, I’d hear it. But nothing was moving. Not even out on the highway.
It was early morning, not yet light, by the time I finished the snow cave. I found a candle, stuck it on a little snow shelf inside and lit it. It was better in here. Christmas day had come. No one in the world knew how my arms ached, or how pale the light of the candle was against snow crystal walls.
I wonder now how deep a person’s grief can go. Jenny never mentioned that Christmas, not in the letters she wrote afterwards, not ever. But I wonder if leaving her alone there like I did altered her, and if it led to what came later.
[ TWENTY-FOUR ]
THERE SHOULD BE different words for giving birth than the ones we have. “Giving” should at least be “undertaking” or “undergoing.” I remember in church how the priest said, “Mary bore Jesus,” and I always thought of it as “bored.” But now that I know what “bore” means, and now that I’ve seen what Jenny went through, it’s a much better word than the passive “the baby was born,” like it’s as easy as growing fingernails.
Sister Anne said if men gave birth there would be different words, and we thought of some, sitting around the card table playing Scrabble and waiting for Jenny to come back from the hospital. I had left school three weeks early to be with her. Sister Anne had a visitor’s room beside her own where she let me stay. We came up with “disgorge,” “disburden,” “unship” and, my favourite, “disembogue,” which we found in the thesaurus. It means a pouring forth of waters.
Jenny was sleeping like the dead when I left her, the baby, a girl, as Jenny had predicted, sleeping peacefully in a little plastic bassinet beside her bed. Jenny had just had time to name her before she passed out. Sunshine. That’s her name. I thought it was too hippy at first, but it’s the kind of thing Jenny would think of. It’s what she should have been named herself. “We’ll call her Sunny,” she said, closed her eyes and was gone, abandoning herself to sweet relief from the drugs, the blood, the panic and the forceps.
When Jenny came back to Our Lady of Perpetual Help with Sunny, she didn’t behave the way I expected. I had pictured a soft-eyed, red-haired Madonna, cooing over her baby and gazing lovingly down at her. Instead, she was nervous and irritable.
“I’m so tired,” she kept saying. “I just want to sleep.” She claimed she hadn’t slept an unbroken hour in the hospital, and because of her complaining, they let her go early.
“They don’t want someone messing up their schedules. Honestly, the nurses think if you don’t wake up at seven a.m. raring to go, you’re a negligent mother. They should try sleeping in a room with three other girls all snoring and crying and moaning like ghosts. And then they kept threatening to give her the sugar water if I didn’t nurse her often enough. And they were yacking about bonding and whatnot. You can tell they’re just waiting for me to fuck up so they can say I told you so.”
“No one thinks you’re going to fuck up,” I told her. Sunny was asleep on her chest in the upstairs nursery and I was keeping her company. The idea was that I would stay with Jenny and, as her primary support, learn how to help her with the baby and then we’d go home together. “Home” was another story.
“Oh yes. They do think I will fuck up,” said Jenny, “and they already have a list of people who want my baby. Look how beautiful she is.” She moved her arm aside to let me see Sunny’s face. She was beautiful. She had a fuzz of pale hair, an angelic, heart-shaped face and perfect little lips that moved in her sleep. But Jenny’s voice was angry.
“Do you know I actually prayed for an ugly baby? I prayed it on my rosary. I asked Our Lady of Perpetual Help for it and look what I got. I’m being punished.”
“Jenny, that’s ridiculous. She’s beautiful because you’re beautiful. She’s even got your green eyes. What did you expect? A pig nose and three eyes?”
“Very funny.” She laid her head back against the rocking chair and closed her eyes. In a moment, her mouth dropped open and she started to snore lightly. I lifted Sunny gently off her chest, but Jenny woke with a start.
“Where are you taking her?”
“I’m just putting her in her bassinet so you can sleep.”
“That’s another thing. Why is her bassinet set off to the side like that? And why does it have that strip of tape on it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because she’s a newborn. Why don’t you go to your room and nap for a while? She’s sleeping now. They say you should sleep when she does.”
“Will you watch her?”
“If you want. But you know there’s always someone here.”
She snorted drily. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
“I’ll watch her,”
I promised.
That night with Jenny in her room trying to sleep, I asked Sister Anne, “Is it true that there’s a waiting list for Jenny’s baby?”
“No, Maggie, it’s not true. Her decision will be respected. We’ll do everything we can to help her be successful.”
“But who decides if she’s successful?”
“She’ll be fine. It’s always hard at first and not just for the young mothers. She’s doing fine.”
I believed her, but Jenny’s fears didn’t seem unfounded. She was in a place, after all, where babies were regularly given up for adoption. The mothers were watched, helped for sure, but also watched. I trusted the nuns more than the social workers. We knew kids in Williams Lake who were in foster homes because they’d been taken away from their families by social workers. Mostly Indian kids, but not only.
And Jenny was not doing fine, no matter how much I wanted to believe her behaviour was normal for a new mother. She told me things that she wanted me to keep between her and me. “A girl came to my room last night,” she said, one morning. “She had long black braids and she was wearing a long white nightgown. It was soaked in the front. When I turned on the light, I could see that it was soaked with blood.”
“You were dreaming.”
“I wasn’t dreaming, Maggie, I talked to her. She even knew my name. She had been at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She told me that her baby had been chosen, and now mine was chosen, and that I better protect her. Her baby was taken away from her because she hemorrhaged and she was too weak to care for her. She was warning me.”
“That’s weird, Jenny.”
“I know. But this place is weird, you’ve got to admit that. The stories that go around. There’s got to be some truth to them.”
“Not really. They’re just a bunch of worries. You’re becoming a worrier like me.”
“It wasn’t a dream, Maggie, I’m telling you. I wasn’t even asleep. I don’t sleep. I can’t.”
The detail in Jenny’s dream unnerved me and I spoke to Ginger about it. Ginger had a room on the third floor, down the hall from the nursery. She’d had her baby, a curly headed boy she named Jamie. She was breast-feeding him when I came to her door. She seemed older than Jenny, and completely at ease as a mother.
“Where does she get this stuff?” I asked her. “Where would she have heard it?
“Get her to talk to Dr. Robert.”
“She won’t. She swears me to secrecy about all this stuff. Maybe I should talk to Dr. Robert.”
“I don’t think so. You can’t betray her trust.”
So I kept quiet, too. But it didn’t matter. Dr. Robert figured it out by himself.
“He wants to know why I didn’t name the baby Irene,” Jenny said to me one evening after she’d seen him.
“What do you mean? Just out of the blue, he asked you that?”
“He thinks there’s something wrong with me. As a mother. I know it.”
“Because you didn’t name her Irene?”
“He knows about Mom.”
“What about her?”
Jenny laughed, this dry laugh she had developed that was nothing like her real, happy laugh. It was sarcastic and full of bitterness and although I was trying to be mature and helpful, it hurt me. It was a “you are a naive idiot” kind of laugh.
“I’m not following,” I said, with just an edge of impatience.
“I told him way too much about myself. And Ginger’s in on it, too. I confided in her. I saw a file in his lap with Ginger’s name on it. Everything I told her is in there.”
“You’re scaring me, Jenny.”
She laughed again. “That’s good. You need to be scared. You need to get a grip on what’s happening here.”
Two days later Sister Anne ushered me into the room that served as Dr. Robert’s office. He looked up and smiled at me, but it was not an easy, genuine smile. It was the pained and crooked, trying-to-be-sympathetic smile of someone about to deliver bad news. He danced around with some small talk, presumably meant to put me ease but didn’t. Then he said, “Have you ever heard of the baby blues?”
I shook my head.
“Women get a little weepy and emotional after the baby is born. It’s normal. Happens to seven out of ten women and usually lasts a week or so. We thought that’s what Jenny was experiencing.” He smiled the pained smile again. I looked at Sister Anne, who was frowning. I believe she had more respect for my intelligence than Dr. Robert did.
“It turns out that what Jenny’s experiencing is a bit more severe. It’s known as postpartum psychosis. Now I know that’s a scary name.”
I stared at him. It wasn’t scary yet, since I didn’t know what it meant, but when he said that, I swallowed drily.
“We don’t know a lot about what causes it, but we do know how to treat it. That’s the good news.” He paused. I waited for the inevitable other half, the bad news. I thought he looked—gleeful. He was percolating with the scientific details he wanted to discuss.
“Now, is there any history of mental illness in your family?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any alcoholism?”
“No. I mean I don’t think so.” I thought of Dad, his quiet spells.
Dr. Robert sat back and met Sister Anne’s eyes.
“This line of inquiry …” began Sister Anne.
“I’m trying to get a picture of the family’s mental health. We know that postpartum psychosis often occurs when there’s a family history of mental illness.”
“Maggie’s father died when she was ten. She’s now fourteen.” Sister Anne said my age a little pointedly, but Dr. Robert didn’t seem to notice.
“And how did he die?”
“Logging accident.”
“And your mother?”
“How did she die?” I said.
“Did she die?”
“I don’t know. Hasn’t Jenny told you all this already? What are you going to do to her?”
“Okay,” Dr. Robert smiled again. “I guess we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Jenny will need to go back to the hospital. We’ll be able to watch her there, and treat her of course.”
It may have been the only thing they could do for her, it may have been the right thing, but it was also the worst thing. It was just what Jenny feared.
[ TWENTY-FIVE ]
EVEN IF JENNY HADN’T asked me to, I probably would have gone looking for Mom. There was nothing I could help by staying. I couldn’t soothe her agitation or persuade her that her fears weren’t real. Besides, nearly everything she said had some ring of truth to it, and even as I spoke the words to dismiss it, my gut churned with the slim possibility that she was right. People were watching her, “observing,” as she put it. They could take Sunny away; it’s not as if it hadn’t happened before. Bad things happened to people all the time. They could happen to us. They came in threes. I knew it. Jenny knew it.
But I didn’t believe, as Jenny did, that her being held in hospital, given various doses of drugs, some that made her inconsolably sad, others that made her stony and blank, had anything to do with Mom’s disappearance. No one knew where she was, and, furthermore, everyone seemed to take it as a given that she was somewhere she didn’t want to be found. I guess there was no law against deserting your children. It was a crime only to us. And it happened gradually, like winter coming, the way you don’t put your bike away until one day it’s buried in snow and you realize that the days of bare legs and lung-burning speed are gone and you don’t really believe they’ll be back.
To an outsider, it was almost like she planned it.
“I want you to go,” Jenny said to me one evening. It was June. Outside, sunlight and long shadows spilled across the green hospital lawn. Blue hydrangeas glowed with the last light. Sister Anne and I had walked over from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, through the smells of cedar and ocean air. I had told Sister Anne I was leaving.
“I think it’s best, Maggie. There’s nothing you can do here. Jenny’s in g
ood hands. We’ll take care of both of them. I promise I’ll visit her every day. She’s a gutsy girl. She and Sunny can come back and stay with us once Jenny’s able.”
So I had been prepared to tell Jenny. But she beat me to it.
“You have to look for her. She needs to know what’s going on. They won’t let me out of here until we find her.”
I took a breath. I was about to protest. The psychiatrist had warned me not to “indulge her delusions.” But I was tired of fighting.
“I’ll try,” I promised.
“They won’t let me nurse Sunny,” she said, and the tears welled up and ran down her cheeks.
“I know, Jenny.”
“It’s because of the drugs. It’s for her own safety.”
“I know. But she likes the bottle. She’s getting chubby.”
“Do you think so? You don’t think she’ll be damaged? Sometimes an hour or two goes by and I realize I haven’t thought of her at all. It’s like I forget I even have a baby.”
“You’re a good mother, Jenny. Look at you. You’re in the hospital, you’re sick and still you’re worried about being a good mother. That’s the sign right there that you are.”
“Maybe the same thing is happening to me as happened to Mom.”
“No.”
She cried then and all through the rest of visiting hours, even when Sister Anne brought Sunny in from the nursery and Jenny gave her a bottle and Sunny clutched her finger and gurgled happily. A little baby girl trying to soothe her girl of a mother. Then Jenny fell asleep with Sunny on her chest and the tears continued to soak Jenny’s hair.
Sister Anne and I took Sunny back to the nursery, then on our way out we spoke to the nurse about the crying.
“It’s not an exact science,” the nurse said. “The doctors try to get the dose right. It might take another week or so. She’ll improve gradually. It takes time.”
—
Jenny had given me some of the money that John had sent. He had also offered to buy her a car, but that was no help to me yet. I made a list of people I could trust. It was a short list: John, Vern, Uncle Leslie. Vern had got some summer work with his other uncle near Bella Coola. John was still in California. Uncle Leslie never knew my mother, so I couldn’t picture myself asking him for help.
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