After River

by Donna Milner

  In the glare of the empty emergency room she breathed a sigh of relief as Dr Mumford, wearing operating room scrubs, rushed in. His unkempt hair stuck out from beneath a green cap. A surgical mask hung at his neck. He looked as if he had been up all night.

  Nettie repeated her diagnosis to him.

  Wordlessly, his expert fingers probed Natalie’s right side, then he held both of his hands cupped to her extended abdomen.

  Nettie was aware of the hum of the silent hospital, the constant white noise of the machines, the whisper of a nun’s soft shoes as she glided into the room, her daughter’s laboured breathing.

  Even as Dr Mumford glanced up at her, the surprise obvious in his arched eyebrows, Nettie was not prepared for his words. Delivery room? Birth? Those words brought images of her own pregnancy, the birth of her own children, blue serge uniforms and lost girls. They had nothing to do with her daughter, her baby girl, who was being wheeled away by the stern-faced nun.

  Dr Mumford put his arm around Nettie’s shoulders and led her back to the reception area. Boyer stood as they came into the waiting room. ‘Go home, Nettie,’ Dr Mumford said. ‘I’ll take care of this.’

  But she refused. She wanted to be with Natalie. The doctor appealed to Boyer. He, too, refused to leave.

  ‘Then wait here,’ Dr Mumford said and rushed out of the room.

  Boyer took Nettie’s arm and led her across the foyer to the hospital chapel. Inside they knelt together in the candlelight and prayed. They prayed for Natalie, for the child. For River’s child, though neither of them would say it out loud.

  They waited. When she could bear it no longer, Nettie left Boyer in the waiting room and made her way through the sleeping hospital, up the stairs to the third floor.

  The corridors were dark, as if abandoned. No night nurse sat at the reception area of the maternity ward. Nettie rubbed her chilled arms, then remembered this unit was being shut down. Our Lady of Compassion would be no more. From now on, maternity cases would be sent to the larger, regional hospitals.

  At the end of the darkened hallway, the delivery room doors pushed open. Dr Mumford hurried towards her pulling his mask aside. In the eerie emptiness of the silent ward, he once again put his arm around her, and gently turned her back to the elevator.

  ‘The baby came too soon,’ he told her in a quiet voice. ‘He was stillborn.’

  And with his words, an unexpected flood of sorrow for the lost child – her grandchild – a child she was not even aware of a few hours earlier overwhelmed her. She stopped moving and tried to pull away. ‘Natalie,’ she said. ‘I want to see Natalie.’

  ‘I had to put her under anaesthetic,’ Dr Mumford said. ‘She won’t be awake for hours. Go home now. Get some sleep. Come back and see her in the morning.’

  ‘The baby. He needs a priest, we need Father Mac.’

  ‘I’ll take care of that,’ he said as he gently steered her down the empty hallway. ‘Look, Nettie, there’s no need for anyone else to know about this. No one has to find out.’

  ‘But, the priest?’

  ‘Your family has been through enough. We can keep this confidential. Let me look after this for you.’

  And she let him. She let him lead her back to the elevator. She allowed him to gently push her through the open doors. She stood obediently inside as he pressed the button. And she convinced herself that the sound, the tiny cry she heard as the elevator doors closed, was only her imagination.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  GOSSIP SPREADS IN a small town like germs on a warm wind. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or untrue; it infects and contaminates just as quickly.

  This time the rumour mill did not need Elizabeth-Ann or Mr Ryan to get it started. Who knows who began it this time? Someone at the hospital, a nurse, or maybe even a nun? Perhaps it leaked over the grapevine of shared telephone party lines. Perhaps Dr Mumford confided in someone, who confided in someone? Wherever it originated, it leaked and spread as unstoppable as the water over a dam. Within a few days everyone in our town would hear about how the milkman’s seventeen-year-old daughter had gone into the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and delivered a baby. It wasn’t hard to imagine the thrilled whispers.

  ‘Didn’t even know she was pregnant!’

  ‘No! She must have known.’

  No, really, she had no idea.’

  ‘Impossible!’

  So now our family had one more thing to not talk about. And the town had another juicy story to feed on. Even though I was hidden away in a private room on the abandoned third floor, by the time I left the hospital everyone knew that it was more than a useless appendage I had left behind in St Helena’s.

  The next morning I lay in the hospital bed and tried not to think about the baby boy who the nuns said was born too soon. I pressed down on my tender abdomen and felt the wobble of loose stomach muscles. Was life really growing there all those months? How could I not have known? I tried to think back on missed monthly periods. How could I have not paid attention?

  I refused to give the baby form in my mind. I would not allow it a place in my heart. I felt nothing, I told myself, except relief.

  And yet an unexplained yearning, an unknown longing, tugged at the core of my now empty abdomen as if connected to some invisible cord.

  A nun appeared soundlessly with a breakfast tray. She glided in and out of my room as if on cushions of air. My mother came on the soles of determination.

  I recognized her footsteps, winter boots on tiled floor sounded in the empty hall. She paused for only a moment before she pushed open my door and breezed in, a smile set on her face. She was carrying a Tupperware container filled with cookies. She leaned over the bed to kiss my cheek. ‘Morgan and Carl send their love,’ she said. ‘Dad too of course.’

  ‘Do they know?’ I asked. ‘Does the whole town know?’

  ‘No one but our family needs to know anything other than you had your appendix out,’ she said as she busied herself fussing with my bed. ‘Dr Mumford will take care of that. All you need to do is just get better.’ She chatted on as if it really was an appendectomy I was recovering from.

  She sat on the end of the bed and lifted the lid on my breakfast tray. ‘You’ve got to eat, darling,’ she said when she saw the untouched porridge and toast. I pushed the tray away.

  ‘Ruth had her baby last night,’ Mom announced. I noticed she didn’t say too.

  I recalled an image of someone being wheeled past me as I was pushed into the delivery room. Ruth.

  ‘I guess she will be going back to her home in the Queen Charlottes soon,’ Mom sighed. ‘The boys will certainly miss her. Especially Morgan. I think I’ll just pop over to Our Lady and visit her before I go home,’ she said.

  And not talk about her baby too, I thought.

  It struck me then, that it was always that way with my mother. She knew everything; she talked about nothing. This event in my life, our lives, was just another thing to be swept under the carpet. We would all know it was there, but we would carefully step around it. That was fine with me. I had no desire to talk about it, to let it out into the daylight and give it life.

  Mom never asked who the father was. I would let her go on believing that the birth we were pretending didn’t happened was a result of the night she watched me leave River’s room. She could mourn that child, I could not. For I felt certain that the baby boy who lay lifeless somewhere in the building was Mr Ryan’s child.

  The door to my hospital room opened. Boyer stuck his head in. He must have driven Mom in to see me. I was surprised. Except for last night, he had not left home since he returned from the burn unit. For a brief moment I wondered what it must have cost him to appear in town in broad daylight, to endure the stares of the curious and the rude. Yet, when he asked, ‘Can I come in?’ I pulled my blanket around me and turned away.

  Back at home my isolation became complete. Through the grates I heard Mom tell Dad and my brothers that I would come around eventually, but I wonde
red how I would ever be able to look any of them in the eye again knowing the destruction and shame I had caused.

  From my upstairs bedroom, I watched as the last days of February vented their fury on the countryside. The days lengthened and grew milder. Gigantic icicles outside my bedroom window wept great tears, then shrunk and disappeared. The snow and ice on the roads began to recede turning our farmyard into a spring sea of mud and manure.

  All the while my mother brought trays upstairs and left them outside my door. She stopped trying to talk me out of my room, stopped pressing me to return to school. I didn’t know if I was relieved or saddened by her silent acceptance.

  But often in the evening I heard her at the piano. I buried my head in my pillow as the music floated up through the hallway grate and seeped under my bedroom door.

  Once again I began to creep downstairs in the middle of the night, or whenever I was alone in the house. But now it was not for food. I walked around the rooms memorizing the familiar objects of our home. As ritualistic as my mother fingering her beads, I touched all the things that once defined our family. My hand ran along the linoleum-topped kitchen table, the marble sideboard in the kitchen, the wooden bread bin that always gave off the aroma of baked bread, the china cabinet in the parlour, the oak dining room table, and the piano. All the reminders that I was once a part of this family. I stood in the dark staring up at the painted portrait of our farm, and at the smiling faces in the family photograph sitting on the piano top below. Then I carried the feeling back upstairs with me and tried to pretend everything was still the same.

  ‘She can’t stay up there forever,’ my father said one night in March, his voice rising up through the hall grates to find me.

  A week later I sat in the cab of the milk truck as we drove away from the farmhouse. The warm winds of a spring storm danced through the swaying trees, blowing the last of the snow through the branches. The swirling wind created a commotion of white on the road before us. I resisted the temptation to turn and take one last look at my home. I was already gone. I had left my home as surely as if I was already on the bus my father was delivering me to. The bus that would carry me away from this place, from my family, from my life, into the unknown abyss of the city.

  Widow Beckett came up with the solution. I said nothing when Mom sat down on my bed and told me about the offer. I’d heard it all from my room.

  ‘For Natalie’s sake, for your whole family,’ the Widow told Mom. ‘You have to get her away from here.’

  I’d heard the telephone calls to Widow Beckett’s brother and his wife in Vancouver.

  ‘They have a huge home,’ Widow Beckett explained. ‘They take in foster children all the time, one more in that house won’t even be noticed.’

  Mom’s carefully hoarded egg money would pay my room and board. ‘It’s only for the rest of the school year,’ she told me. ‘You have to catch up or you won’t graduate.’ I shrugged my acceptance.

  On the day I left, she stood at the kitchen table, her back to me, when I came downstairs with my suitcases. On the table, pie plates lined with dough waited to be filled. A bowl of frozen huckleberries, Boyer’s favourite, thawed in the sink. Mom slammed the rolling pin on the dough round as if life depended on it.

  I hesitated for only a moment before I pushed open the screen door with my suitcase and walked out. She did not come after me. I did not turn back. Neither of us was willing to give in to that awkward moment of goodbye.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ she’d said the night before as she left my bedroom. I think we both knew it wasn’t true.

  Dad and I rode in silence to the highway turn-off where we waited for the Greyhound bus. We both stared down the road as if we could will the bus to come sooner.

  ‘Well, this will be an adventure, hey, sunshine?’ my father finally said. ‘Off to the big city, eh?’ He reached inside his jacket pocket, then glanced up at me as he opened the silver cigarette case. I tried to return his crooked smile. He leaned into his cupped hands to light his cigarette, but not before I read in his eyes the toll the fight to keep the farm was having on my father’s spirit.

  He rolled the window down and blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Your mother and I want you to know that when you want to come home – that is, whenever you are ready – well the minute you think you can come back, you just phone us and we’ll have you on the next bus.’

  I wondered if he really believed I would ever be ready to come back and face the gossip, the town, Boyer’s broken life, the ghosts. Or even if he really wanted me to.

  I wanted to go. I wanted to spare my family the constant reminder of the havoc I had created. Yet as the bus pulled away, as I watched my father’s truck grow smaller, I could not stop the overwhelming grief that washed over me. For at that moment I believed I would never see my father, or hear him call me sunshine, ever again.

  I was right.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  THE CITY SWALLOWED me whole. It was easy to disappear, to become invisible, swept away in the throng of students who streamed through the hallways of the high school whose population was as big as the entire town of Atwood. It was not so easy in the Beckett home.

  The Beckett family lived in a two-storey wartime house in East Vancouver. It was one of the many look-alike houses built by the Canadian government in the fifties for the growing number of families of World War Two veterans. Her brother’s home was not quite as large as Widow Beckett believed it to be, but it did have four bedrooms. Four bedrooms and one tiny bathroom, hardly big enough to turn around in, for six children and two adults. And then me. I slept on a cot in the girls’ upstairs room.

  The two sisters, Judy and Jane, bickered every waking moment. Their bedroom was divided into territories by an invisible line, which ran down the middle of my cot. I was either the object of a tug of war, or ignored.

  The four boys ran amok. Unlike my brothers, they had no chores, no routine to guide them. Like frenzied ferrets, night and day they chased each other up and down stairs, in and out of slamming doors.

  The house was a constant riot of noise. Doors, cupboards and drawers were never closed quietly in that home, but banged shut, often double slammed as if in defiance of the surrounding mayhem.

  Whenever both Mr and Mrs Beckett were home at the same time, swirling cigarette smoke and angry sounding words filled the air. The normal mode of conversation was top-of-the-lungs yelling, the hurried words lost in the rush to be heard.

  Meals were an eat-where-you-are affair, most often gobbled down in front of the constantly blaring black-and-white television set in the tiny living room. Whenever two or more people occupied the same room, which was most always, everyone spoke at the same time, each unable to hear the other in the frantic attempt at getting in a say.

  I didn’t dislike the Beckett children, they were just different. They felt it too. Like animals, we sniffed at each other to find that we were different species. They found the farm odours, which they told me permeated everything I owned, offensive. I didn’t mention that they all smelled of the mildew of their perpetually damp city.

  I neither avoided them nor sought them out. It was impossible to feel a part of a family who were constantly bumping into each other in the narrow hallways, yet all living completely separate lives. And even though there were no empty corners to get lost in, it was easy to be lonely in that house.

  I tried not to compare their lives with those of my own family. Because I knew, for me, that way of life no longer existed. At night I would lie in my small cot and try to choke back the homesickness that threatened to overwhelm me. In time I would stop hearing the noise of the house, the city, the constant hum of traffic. I would stop looking up at the sky at night hoping to glimpse the same brilliance of the star-filled sky of home. And I would stop waking to the imagined sounds of piano music.

  Every week a letter from my mother slid through the mail slot in the front door with chatty news of people and a town I would rather forget. I smiled when she
told me Morgan was corresponding with Ruth, who had returned to Queen Charlotte Island. ‘I think he writes more now than he ever did in school,’ Mom said.

  I cringed when I read:

  The local gossip never ends. Yesterday Ma Cooper said she heard your friend Elizabeth-Ann Ryan and her mother are living in Calgary. Her father returned to Atwood alone, but no one sees him. He’s become a complete recluse, cooped up in his house, night and day. Groceries are delivered to his doorstep. And alcohol. Drinking himself into oblivion, the grapevine reports. Imagine that, from town mayor to town drunk. I have to say I’m not surprised. I’ve always thought there was something not quite right about that man.

  He’s no longer mayor, but he’s still causing trouble. Apparently his last act before he left was to start an order in council to revoke our business licence. Mr Atwood and his son, Stanley Junior, along with Dr Mumford, held a protest at city hall when they got wind of it.

  Dad won the fight to keep his licence to deliver unpasteurized milk, but eventually he gave in and sold to the large dairies. I’m glad I wasn’t there to see my father the first time the stainless-steel tanker trucks arrived.

  ‘Perhaps it’s for the best,’ Mom wrote. ‘I think the boys might even be relieved. With the automated barn and direct bulk sales now, there certainly won’t be enough work to tie them all down here. Maybe Boyer can go to university after all,’ she added cheerily. But I knew she saw it as just another event in the chain of tragedies that was tearing her family apart.

  It wasn’t Boyer who left in the end. Not long after Dad died, Morgan went on a fishing trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands. And to visit Ruth. When he returned, he announced he was moving there.

  ‘Morgan’s going to work on a fishing boat for Ruth’s father. It seems more than fish were hooked on his trip. Morgan has fallen in love with the West Coast, the ocean, and most of all with Ruth. I’m happy for them. I adore Ruth. But it’s such a long way away.’ Mom added that she was sure it would be just a matter of time before Carl moved there too.