Kalila

by Rosemary Nixon

  Kalila lies in her isolette, bluish, eyes open.

  A baby girl has all her eggs at birth, a nurse chats to another at a neighbouring isolette. She twists the top of a bag of clear liquid dripping into Baby Wong. Yes, and a baby leaves some of her X chromosomes behind in the mother’s body when she’s born. The nurses fiddle and adjust the numbers. A mother carries her child forever, the nurse says. Imagine that.

  You imagine. You stare at the needle sinking into Baby Wong. On the neonatal floor, you spy a stone slipped from a purse or pocket, the bronze colour of spun gold, edges tinged brown; a tiger’s eye. You retrieve it; fit it against your thumb. Isaac Newton and his search for the philosopher’s stone. You look at the equipment that keeps your baby girl alive: oxygen tanks, apnea monitors, heart monitors, drip bags, respirators, oxygen dispensers, IVs, bilirubin bulbs, heaters. Blinking lights, flashing numbers, warnings of cardiac arrest. The stone warms against your fingertips. You look around at the exhausted babies, battling low birth weights, intrauterine growth retardation, respiratory distress, seizures, asphyxia, infections.

  One day an armoured knight rode up the hill. He opened the door of a glass castle, reached out his hands to a small boy. The knight released him from his prison, seated him on his steed. They galloped toward the sky —

  You stand abruptly. The stone clatters to the floor. You walk out of neonatal, pulling out your cell.

  Maggie, I’m coming to pick you up. Maggie. Let’s go for a drive.

  Sunday evening. Dr. Vanioc drives down Highway #1 toward Calgary, two hours of solitude, a tree every twenty kilometres, radio off, not harangued by anything or anybody. Still light low on the horizon. It was dark when he left the city Friday — heart shifting into first gear after months of splintered hammering, worries slipping like flow charts out the window, the dog keeping up an excited whine — and will be darker when he hits the outskirts tonight.

  He fought rush hour for the silence of those hours alone in the truck, and now two more, no wife, no phone, no child, in his cammo cap that Diane says makes him look mental. Two nights at Murray’s farm outside of Brooks. Two days tramping the bush, guns over-and-under, carried broken, the guys fanning out, Brad heading upstream, Cal crossing the beaver dam, Murray striding ahead, kicking at grass and thistles. One of the dogs going on point. An explosion of colour and wings. A shot cracking the air. The bird plummeting. Whit and Connor — Brad’s dog — rushing in.

  The fraternity he feels hunting is hard to express to Diane. Everything a question of how to explain to Diane. You have to trust people, that they won’t shoot you. Diane thunks the iron against his best shirt and says she doesn’t have to drive two and a half hours into the country and tramp through bush to find out her friends won’t shoot her. You don’t bring outsiders along without asking the others, Dr. Vanioc says lamely. This confirms for Diane that they’re nothing but a sixth-grade clique. You don’t let slip to other hunters where you hunt, he says. And if discovered, you certainly don’t tell them how to work the area. Never show your cards.

  Diane slaps the ironing board down, carries it to the closet, and gestures out the window. Why don’t you just build a treehouse in the big maple, swing a few ropes, and have sleepovers in our yard, pound your chests, and play at being guys. Hunting has its own kind of order. He doesn’t convince her. He never will.

  Whit didn’t run into a porcupine this year. Last November he disappeared on point. When the thing didn’t fly, Whit attacked. Dr. Vanioc shot the beast in frustration and turned to his shrieking dog. Three held him down. Cal took the hind end, Murray the body, the owner gets the teeth. Brad yanked the quills out with the pliers someone always carries. No point putting off the pain.

  Whit missed two birds this weekend, but Connor found them. Whit didn’t even know, and Dr. Vanioc is glad for that. The dog was so wiped, he had to lift him up into the truck box when it was time to roll. He’s snoring back there and once in a while he yelps in his sleep. Dr. Vanioc rubs his shoulder. The best time of the day is five to six-thirty. That’s when they sit around in the dusk and dark and visit in the field before they shower and go out for dinner. Tell stories of the day, how Connor made that perfect retrieve, then last minute swam across the creek away from Brad and plucked the bird with his teeth, ate the entire thing, eyes fixed on Brad, checking out his reaction. Never did it before. Never will again. Everyone guffawing. Brad working his mouth and scowling.

  Men only talk when they’re doing something. Say things in the dark they wouldn’t say in light. Brad’s worried about his kid — the second — Cory — who can’t settle down in junior high. Dr. Vanioc wonders if the boy’s drinking. He’s been friends with Brad and Murray and Cal for more than twenty years.

  Dark light slips past his cracked-open window. He feels sad and good and everything’s a question of perspective. There’s order in the world and part of that order is death. The medical system has created the illusion in the city that every kid will live forever. He wipes his hand across his stubble. He can feel embedded dirt. The ritual of the hunt. Whit was bred for this. There is a strange companionship between man and dog and bird. Each knows its place. And for him? The going out and doing it is an attempt to forget. Forget Diane’s cold frustration, forget the drugged infants fighting for breath.

  Hunting teaches you that life is chance. There’s a winner and a loser. That’s just the way it is.

  Dr. Vanioc looks in the rear-view mirror. He can see the top of Whit’s crate. This may well be Whit’s last year. The smartest dog he’s ever had. He remembers so many years ago, Whit flushing out his first pheasant. He went on point, just a little bit of a thing, not yet a year, quivering, not even knowing what a pheasant was. He shook for two minutes after the whole thing was over, the bird flushed out and shot. He didn’t know what had happened to him. Just stood there, trembling. Dr. Vanioc praised him and that little thing looked into his eyes, so full of a feeling he didn’t understand. Dr. Vanioc feels a ripping in his rib cage. Why does this move him more than his own child’s first steps? By instinct, that dog did everything perfectly the first time. Whit makes a snuffling sigh. It’s sad to see the decline of a dog. And of the men puffing along. They’re no longer twenty, any of them. Dr. Vanioc had his first child at thirty-nine. What was he thinking? Diane only thirty. It was money. No money until he specialized. Now he has no time. You feel time’s passage, hunting. The ranchers’ children grow up, start to tag along. Carry a gun for the first time. Dr. Vanioc looks out over the darkening prairie. All this landscape to move in, like an old familiar song. And the stories. All the stories of pheasants and kids and dogs. He stretches in his seat and listens to the tires hum.

  Here on the sunlit river path we climb, the outside air a sharp surprise, push into the flesh of the afternoon, into silence shoved by a ripping northeasterly, this outdoor room of wind.

  Brodie pulls at my scarf, fixes it around my ears, turns up my collar, protecting me from weather. The clouds riotous above. A deer starts, bounds away, a red fox glides through the underbrush and disappears in a bend of trees.

  When I open my eyes, Brodie and the world are back in view. Whipped bushes, bobbing branches, chilled grey sky. The deer appears over the crest, ready to bolt.

  The water’s lapping rushes. A woodpecker needles a sharp staccato against a fir. Everywhere, nature in song. A helicopter’s rap-beat rises and recedes. Brodie enfolds me against his thick coat. What’s this? Brodie is talking.

  Voice muffled in my hair. Maggie, she isn’t — the doctor says — she isn’t getting better.

  We look at each other, breathe in wood smoke, river water, the damp smell of the trees.

  Cogs click into place.

  There are four clocks in neonatal. No direction we can face without reminder. Time is ticking down.

  A crazy possibility thrusts its head up on this windblown path.

  Let’s make a break.

  The great escape.

  Stop thinking. It only drives you crazy.<
br />
  Stop thinking. Act instead.

  The woodpecker hammers out an exclamation.

  Dare we? Just cart her off?

  Said aloud, the thought hovers, like quotation marks in air. Words cannot be undone.

  If she stays, her days are numbered.

  No baby could flourish in that atmosphere!

  Damn it. Let’s take charge.

  The doctors have given up.

  They rarely come to see her.

  She scares them.

  We can’t stop looking at each other.

  We can’t sit back, wait for a happy ending.

  Help won’t come from the hills; you have to climb, find it yourself.

  She’s wasting away.

  She needs parents.

  She needs a home.

  She’s ours. She’s ours to take!

  There on the windswept path, the idea formulates.

  Because a photon responds to a momentum experiment doesn’t mean it has momentum. To these doctors, she will never be greater than the sum of her parts.

  Hope opens like the glimpse of a surprise zipper in the folds of a pleated skirt. Hope, a lid screwed off a jar. A lid pitched off a box.

  Brodie paces, wind pulling his hair. If a person desires certainty he has to create it himself. We’ll create her future, Maggie! Brodie’s face shines boyish, lines etched round his eyes these last few months erasing. The idea expands like light, rushing ahead. It will take concentration. It will take belief.

  We have to believe the things that matter are going to survive.

  Two wheels spin in two chests.

  There is one choice.

  Take Charge.

  You make your way, Mr. and Mrs. Solantz, into the small and stuffy side room. Maggie has the glow that luminesced her pregnancy, a fairy story blossoming within.

  The doctors wait in a semicircle. One you’ve never seen. Mr. and Mrs. Solantz have requested this meeting. Highly irregular. Fingers tap. These are busy men. The clock reads 1:03.

  Dr. Vanioc offers Maggie a chair, then you. Whatever the doctor puts in his hair, it holds its form. You sit. The doctors stand. The meeting begins.

  Introductions. The new one’s Dr. Fezner, the kidney specialist.

  Yes, there are problems at the hospital, as at all hospitals, as in all institutions, Dr. Vanioc says.

  True, no one is coordinating, the doctors nod, solicitous.

  We’re working in the direction of changing that, Dr. Byars says.

  You feel those extra cups of morning coffee swooshing to your heart. Maggie slides forward on her chair. We can’t tell if she’s getting better here. If we could have some kind of guarantee that she’s not fallen between bureaucratic cracks.

  Mrs. Solantz, we can’t just …

  Watson.

  You clamp Maggie’s hand. We simply cannot go on knowing there is nothing being done.

  A pause. There is a lot of breathing.

  The doctors confer: they feel bad about the situation. Yes, they’re still attempting to find out what’s wrong with the baby. She’s not an easy case. No, they aren’t just letting her vegetate.

  Dr. Showalter glances at his watch. Well, we’re here if you want to talk. You can always catch us individually.

  We prefer not to push parents, chimes eager Dr. Fezner.

  We wish we could tell you we could change this and this and this, says Dr. Summers.

  Maggie stands. Her chair scrapes the brown linoleum. You rise with her. We want to take our daughter home.

  A shocked and fragile silence trails on a fine silk thread. The doctors shift their eyes onto one another. All come to rest on you. They’re men. They want you to acknowledge common ground. Separate yourself from your emotional wife.

  This may not be the time, Dr. Vanioc says after a bit of throat clearing.

  Oh, Lord. You got the time wrong.

  Maggie squeezes against you, hair smelling of vanilla. We’ve talked this over. We’ve thought it through. We want to take her home.

  More glances exchange.

  It’s just, we don’t have the whole picture — Mr. Solantz — it may not be in the best interest —

  Mistakes have been made, Dr. Vanioc takes over, carefully confident. Leaning on the passive tense. A position is needed. Dr. Summers spoke to Dr. Sinclair about the heart. There was a medical decision made not to operate.

  And we weren’t told?

  It went back to the committee.

  So many experts, working in isolation. Lungs. Kidney. Bones. Heart. Sinew. Pieces of baby.

  What will be the next step to take her home?

  Dr. Vanioc clears his throat. This is highly unprecedented — You should give it more thought. Only babies —

  We have. That’s why you’re here.

  How could I force the referring pediatrician to come in? Dr. Sinclair says with sudden and irrelevant intensity.

  Everyone looks at him. You picture particles dissolving into waves that build and rush, bowling these perfect-postured doctors over. They’re trying to keep the focus, keep things within their control. Well, there’s not enough room for everyone on this stage. It’s the doctors’ turn to get off.

  Dr. Vanioc says again, quite gently, Parents’ memories depend on the final outcome. You must use common sense.

  When has common sense been a reliable guide to understanding the universe? Light cracks the small window. We will take our daughter home.

  You have a field of view, you tell your grade ten science class in your sun-dappled winter classroom. The sounds of shouts and a smacked volleyball resonate from the gym. You can measure this field with a microscope.

  The students gather their rulers and crowd in. The smell of teenagers. The smell of gum and salami sandwiches, sweat and hair gel.

  We start off on low power, you say. This is magnified forty times. Put your rulers under your microscopes. Your students comply. See the millimetre lines? Your job is to determine your circle of vision. How many millimetres it is from one side of the circle to the other?

  The students measure.

  Now increase the power by ten times to four hundred. What’s your field of vision compared to what it used to be?

  One-tenth the size it was before.

  What does this mean?

  Your students look at you.

  The more power you use — ?

  — the more detailed the observation of your specimen.

  The more power you have, the narrower your field of vision.

  Exactly, you say. The more power you have, my friends, the less you see of the whole.

  A dinner invitation. Dinah Engagement, Brodie calls it. A British couple twice our age from church. We barely know them. A sympathy invite, clearly, but what the hell. They invited us months ago, again just before Christmas, though they hadn’t in the four years we knew of them before Kalila’s birth, so we politely and firmly turned them down. But suddenly, I’m up for anything. A chinook has blustered in this Friday afternoon, the air is heady, teasing, gusty, defying anybody not to feel flirtatious. Our first outing since Brodie’s school dance. Celebration in the air. Children, pumped on the wind’s energy, race, chasing caps, laughing, pushing each other down Calgary’s melting streets. A chinook brings “miracle” into the realm of belief: There’s a chinook out there. Anything can happen.

  Brodie steps in the door as I’m slipping into my black brocade pants, a dark blue silk blouse, my blue-black sapphire earrings. Shit! I snag a cuticle on my blouse. It’s palpable: something in the air that disallows unhappiness. An energy zapping between us that we can’t ignore. Brodie takes my face in his hands, entangles himself against me, says, Maggie, you’re so pretty.

  My pants are too big.

  Last Christmas, pre-pregnancy, these were new; now they hang across my hips. Just to verify this, Brodie sticks his hand down the front, says, Good Lord! So they are! I laugh, wiggle away. It’s our Before Life. The one we were nonchalantly living when this one came along and whamm
ed us broadside, knocking us onto another track, heading god knows where. But our world has shifted: it’s veering back in the right direction.

  What are their names again? Brodie asks.

  Brodie! For God’s sake! Irvin and Virginia. Try to remember!

  Grinning, Brodie splashes cologne on his face. I know what he’s thinking: Maggie’s old voice, her irritated voice. Her the-worst-thing-in-my-life-right-now-is-your-lack-of-memory voice. Brodie hasn’t a care. Virginia and Irvin. Irvin and Virginia. The baby’s coming home! Brodie practises conversation openers. So I hear you British like to conquer. I slap his hand.

  Half an hour later we spin out the door under a sky of rolled-back blue. Gusts whirl what little snow there is, scoop leaves from shining streets and hurl them at the car. Brodie has to grab tight to the steering wheel so we don’t fishtail into oncoming traffic. I roll down the window; frenzied wind attacks my hair. I punch an oldie-goldies station. Rock and roll.

  So here it is. So here we are. The house on Mission Road. We blow up the walk. The night begins with olives.

  What do you do? the woman called Pearl asks me sternly. This second guest-couple, Pearl and Carl, are twenty years our senior too. Pearl has one eye that weeps, causing everything she says to vibrate with melodrama.

  Well, I’ve just had a ba —

  And you? She stares in the direction of the armchair Brodie’s perched upon.

  Brodie glances surreptitiously about, leans forward. I’m a physics teac —

  We clean jails, Pearl snaps. All eyes point to this pinch-faced friend of Virginia’s who sits straight-backed beside her tiny husband. Outside the chinook wind moans crankily.

  We had this couple working for us, Pearl pauses. At the jail. She is wearing maroon ankle socks over her nylons.

  Virginia bites into an olive.

  The man had no interest in sex. Poor thing. Everyone takes this in. It’s not clear which member of the aforesaid couple deserves the adjective.

  Drat it! Virginia says. These are the wrong olives. The pit appears at her lip and disappears again behind her napkin. I ordered spicy. Of all the —! They sneaked me pungent!