by Jan Redford
My arms tightened around Jenna as I listened to the tale I’d heard a hundred times since the guys had returned home. Barry, Grant and I, being Aries, were prone to drama, but Barry didn’t have to embellish this story.
“And then the avalanches started,” Barry continued. “There was nowhere to go. Being in a gully is like being in a funnel.”
Grant, his eyes bright blue against the dark bags underneath, smiled at me, shrugged, like he was apologizing for almost dying. His face was emaciated from the expedition. His bleached blond hair, in need of a haircut, fell straight and shaggy over his forehead. It only enhanced his craggy good looks.
I looked down at Jenna. I hadn’t known a baby could be so beautiful. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent, and her hair was already lightening up, like Grant’s, after two weeks in the world.
The interviewer jumped in. “Grant, I’ve been told you were near death up there, that you would have died of pulmonary edema and hypothermia if the guys hadn’t gotten you down when they did.” Grant’s trench foot had kept him in base camp and on smaller peaks at the beginning of the trip, so he hadn’t acclimatized as well as the other guys. “What was going through your mind?”
“Well, Linda,” Grant spoke too loudly into the phone. Almost shouted. As though he could bully his nerves away. I motioned to him to keep his voice down. “We were being pounded by avalanche after avalanche, and I was suffocating from both the snow and the fluid in my lungs. There was also a lot of pressure building in my brain, and I was hypothermic.” He sounded rehearsed, uncomfortable, until he added, “To tell you the truth, nothing went through my mind except how to get it over with quickly. I wanted to unclip from the carabiner and jump off the mountain.”
I tore my eyes from Jenna again to watch Grant as he spoke so calmly about his near-death experience. That couldn’t be true. What should have been going through his mind was that if he didn’t get his ass off that fucking mountain he would never meet his daughter, Jenna Danielle. He’d never see me again.
“When we finally started rappelling I passed out partway down. The guys hauled on the rope to wake me. Then I passed out again on the ledge.”
Marc had said, “An average man would not have survived that long.”
There was certainly no mistaking Grant for an average man. None of these guys were average. They were like a special forces team—highly skilled, single-minded, tough beyond the norm. But they weren’t fighting for any altruistic cause like the protection of their country. They created their own war zone, then launched themselves into it.
“Then the fun really began,” Barry jumped back in.
“Marc threw the tent off the ledge,” Grant said.
“An accident. So he started to dig a snow cave. We had to get Grant warmed up fast. He wasn’t going to last much longer. So Kevin and I started to set up a rappel for the next day. I don’t know what happened. We were screaming at each other through the wind. Could barely see each other. I thought Kevin would hang on to the end of the rope; he thought I would. We both threw our ends of the rope off.”
Linda whistled. “So no ropes.”
“And we were out of food.”
“So no ropes, no tents, no food, stuck at what, 23,000 feet?”
“With 12,000 feet left to rappel,” Grant added.
“Yeah, we were pretty much fu—er, goners.”
Fucked. They were fucked. Even if they couldn’t say it on CBC. What had I been doing while they’d been struggling so hard to hang on to their lives? Knitting. Watching soaps. Growing a new person.
I pulled Jenna closer, tried to breathe away my growing anger. They’d suffered up there, I knew that, but it’s not like I’d found Jenna under a fucking cabbage patch. She’d ripped out of me, and no one was lining up to interview me on CBC.
“So Grant, can you tell me what happened next?”
“The next day we started to downclimb, unroped. I was perking up now that we were a bit lower down, but still pretty messed up. We were hoping we could tie together bits of old rope left behind by a Japanese team. They were the last ones up there. Four climbers disappeared in the gully we’d been avalanched in. Their team never found their bodies.”
“Barry, can you tell us what you found up there?”
“We downclimbed to a pack we’d seen on the way up. It was off route so we hadn’t bothered to check it out. Grant knifed it open and found two ropes, dozens of pitons—”
“And chocolate bars,” Grant cut in. “All of our favourites. We couldn’t believe it.”
“It was our ticket down. The Japanese team had left it for their teammates, hoping they’d get down that far and find it.”
“That’s quite the experience.”
“Like having sex with death,” Barry said.
“Well, that’s one way of putting it.” Linda laughed.
Then they talked about how, after they’d gotten down, the storm blasted Nanga for another twelve days. They’d waited it out in base camp, where they still had a good supply of food, and then, when the sun came out, they’d headed back for another less dramatic failed attempt on the mountain. While I hung out by the phone awaiting the verdict: dead or alive.
“Grant, I hear you’ve just become a father.”
“Yup. Jenna was born a week after I got home. I cut the umbilical cord.”
In the hospital, in the early part of my labour, Grant had flipped through my books on pregnancy to figure out how to coach me, since I’d done my prenatal classes solo. Then he held my hand and applied his newfound knowledge for the rest of the nineteen hours. The only time I’d felt like killing him was when the anaesthetist arrived and, lo and behold, he was a climber Grant had guided up a mountain in Peru a few years earlier. So while an epidural needle was being inserted between my vertebrae, I had to listen to them talk about climbing Aconcagua.
“I bet your wife is happy to have you home.”
“I hope so.” He looked over at me.
I smiled at him. I was. I was so grateful he’d survived.
“So, when do you boys head to Everest? I’ve been told that Nanga was just a warm-up climb.”
“We’re off in a couple of weeks. Long enough to get a bit more meat back on the bones,” Barry said.
Grant looked out the window so he wouldn’t have to look at me, and I looked down at Jenna so I wouldn’t have to look at him. I knew he was desperately embarrassed by his performance at altitude and wanted to redeem himself, but I’d been trying to muster the courage to tell him I’d be gone when he came back from Everest. But gone where? That was the problem. I had no money, barely a grade-twelve education, bleak job prospects, a newborn baby, and thirty-five extra pounds. No man would swoop in to rescue me this time. And I didn’t want another man. I wanted Grant. A living, breathing Grant.
Jenna started to mewl like a kitten and I tensed up. My nipples were cracked, so nursing was like clamping them in a vise.
Grant hung up the phone and I turned off the tape recorder. Neither of us spoke. Jenna opened her eyes and stared up at me. Dark blue rings around light blue irises. I’d had her two weeks and already I couldn’t imagine life without her. It horrified me to think she had almost not existed, and it horrified me to think her survival was almost solely up to me. When I gave Jenna her first bath in the hospital, with my mother, an RN, looking on, I’d scrubbed her back, not realizing her face was submerged in water. She’d choked and spluttered and I’d sobbed for hours. That was the moment I realized how much I had to lose.
Grant walked toward me. His jeans hung off him.
“I’ve been thinking.” He sat on the couch, put his hand on my bare knee. My leg was tanned and still looked vaguely like a part of my former body, while the rest of me seemed to have succumbed to some strange flesh-creating disease.
“I’ve decided to stay home with you and Jenna. My little family’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I won’t go to Everest.”
My body slumped in relief against hi
s. With my head resting on his shoulder, I closed my eyes. Jenna, tucked between us, squirmed against the tight walls of her receiving blanket.
21
INTO THE SHADOWS
A small gurgle came from Jenna’s car seat in the corner of the empty living room where the couch used to be. It was a cute sound, like she was blowing spit bubbles, or about to murmur mama. I froze in the middle of the kitchen, a can of Ajax in one rubber-gloved hand and a rag in the other. The gurgle became a grunt and the flannel receiving blanket started to heave. I held my breath. How could she be awake? She’d been asleep for only half an hour after screaming the whole hour here to Canmore from our new house in Field.
Two days ago, we’d moved into a tiny duplex about the size and shape of a single-wide trailer, the same size as this basement suite, but with big windows. This was our compromise: I’d be an hour away from my friends in Canmore, and Grant would be an hour away from work in Golden. Mountain limbo. But this way we wouldn’t actually have to live in Golden. I was not prepared to move to a logging town.
Field was a CP railway town with a population of about 150 colourful mountain people. Living on the same street was my good friend, Jeannette. We used to kayak together and still got out climbing when neither of us was pregnant. Now we had ski passes for Lake Louise, twenty minutes away, which had a daycare. She’d had her third baby a couple of months before I had Jenna, and I was hoping she’d be my guide into motherhood. Both of us would be on our own much of the winter: her husband, a heli-ski guide, was at a remote ski lodge, and Grant was in a logging camp.
A small wail came from under the blankets. I looked around the little basement suite, dingier and smaller now that it was devoid of furniture. I was only halfway through cleaning the kitchen. I hadn’t even vacuumed. Sharon had new tenants moving in so this was my last chance.
The small wail turned to screams that echoed in the emptiness, bounced off the walls. Jeannette had told me the vacuum cleaner lulled her kids to sleep, and she would know, so I peeled off my rubber gloves, plugged in the vacuum and dragged it into the bedroom, started passing it over the thin, brown, glued-onto-concrete carpet. But Jenna’s screams almost drowned out the sound of the motor. I dragged the machine back into the living room. She was kicking and screaming, the blanket all twisted in her pink-fleece-swaddled legs, her little earflap hat pulled down over her eyes.
I turned off the vacuum and scooped her out of the car seat. She was hot and red and sweaty, so I undid the zipper of the fleece bunting suit I’d sewn myself, slid it off her shoulders, pulled off her hat. She twisted and pumped her arms and legs, screaming as though her hair were on fire. I settled on the floor, leaned against the wall and pulled up my shirt, tried to tempt her with my nipple. She arched away, turning almost purple-black. My breasts were bloated and throbbing, double As mutated into Ds, blue veins almost bursting through the skin, but she wouldn’t latch on. I finally gave up, laid her down on the floor on her blanket and slumped back against the wall with my eyes squeezed shut. How was I ever going to finish cleaning?
Jenna had been colicky from the beginning, but this was different. Last night she’d screamed for six hours, until midnight. She wouldn’t nurse. I’d tried to feed her with a dropper, then had to squish her face against my breast until she started sucking. She’d finally fallen asleep.
The floorboards creaked above me. Sharon and Chris must have thought I was torturing her. I pressed my hands against my ears to block out the screams but they somehow managed to increase a notch, so I crawled back over to her, looked down on her little face, all contorted and swollen. Now I was crying too. I wanted to curl into a ball and wail with her. This couldn’t be normal. Jeannette’s new baby just lay on his receiving blanket smiling and looking around. Or sleeping. I hadn’t heard him cry yet.
Ripping sounds spewed out then quickly got sucked back into tiny windpipes. She was only ten pounds. How could so much noise come from something smaller than a Christmas turkey? The noise seeped under my skin, into every pore, and the stress of the past week finally caught up to me—the sleepless nights, the colic, the move to Field with a borrowed pickup while Grant was in a logging camp.
I clenched my fists, pounded them into the floor on either side of my baby’s arching body and screamed, “Just shut up, goddamn it!” then quickly scooped her up and put my wet face against her tummy, mumbling, “I’m sorry,” over and over into the fleece.
* * *
—
“She screamed for six hours last night. Non-stop. I fed her breast milk with a dropper. I finally had to squish her face onto my boob until she nursed. I almost had to suffocate her.”
The doctor looked at me impassively, professionalism plastered all over her face. “When babies scream it sometimes seems longer than it actually is.”
“No, I timed it.” My voice cracked. “She screamed from supper at six until midnight. Non-stop.”
Dr. Jenkins scribbled something on her chart. Jenna was fast asleep in her car seat on the examination table, her lips sucking at the air. She looked angelic. I could almost see the bloody halo hovering over her head.
“As I told you the last time you were here, she has colic. Not much we can do about that.”
“Colic. It can’t just be colic.” The doctor kept her eyes down, kept scribbling on her chart. She hadn’t even taken Jenna out of her car seat, hadn’t examined her, had barely glanced in her direction. “What about the blood in her diaper?” The tears started to flow. I swayed and grabbed on to the side of the examination table to steady myself. I felt like I might pass out.
“That’s normal for newborn girls. It’s similar to menstrual blood.”
I put my hands over my face, no longer able to preserve my last bit of dignity. “But she isn’t a newborn. She’s three and a half months old.”
I wanted to tell this goddamned woman to look at my baby. Check her tummy. Do some tests. But I didn’t. She was the doctor.
“She screams and screams. Until she turns purple. I know she’s in pain.”
Dr. Jenkins finally looked up from her clipboard and watched me for a moment, seemed to really see me for the first time. I felt a smidgen of hope.
“Have you considered getting some counselling?”
* * *
—
Maureen started to cluck as soon as I walked in the door and she saw my unwashed, tangled hair and wild, bloodshot eyes. Maybe it wasn’t such an uncommon sight. She was the public health nurse extraordinaire who had headed our Lamaze group. A big, hardy Scottish woman who’d raised her twins on her own, working full-time in a new country, after the father ran out on them. She could easily have told me, “Chin up!” but she never did.
Maureen rubbed my naked Jenna’s distended tummy, oblivious to the death screams filling the tiny cubicle, and murmured softly in her ear in her beautiful, lilting accent. “Oh you poor, poor baby.”
Jenna slowly calmed until her screams turned to big, shaky inhalations and hiccups. Maureen’s soothing voice penetrated my exhaustion and I slumped into a chair, tears and snot squeezing through my fingers. She handed me a Kleenex without taking her eyes off my little girl.
“The child has a bladder infection. She’s lost weight since I last saw her. The blood in her diaper means the pain must be excruciating.”
The one time I’d had a bladder infection, I’d sat in a hot bathtub all night groaning, the only way I could tolerate the pain in my gut until I could get on antibiotics.
“I’ll phone Dr. Jenkins and she’ll have you back in her office as soon as you set foot in the door.”
Within a half hour, in the doctor’s small examination room, I sat with my arms folded triumphantly across my throbbing boobs while Dr. Jenkins wrote out requisitions for blood and urine tests. When she found out I’d just moved over an hour away to Field, with no clinic, she phoned the hospital to have us admitted pronto.
Bugs. Her urine was full of them. A full-blown bladder infection. They pumped my baby full
of antibiotics and when we woke up the next morning in the hospital, she latched onto me hungrily, draining one boob to leave me lopsided. She looked up at me with a milky smile and fell back asleep.
* * *
—
Jenna and I descended the long, winding hill into the Yoho Valley, toward the braided channels of the Kicking Horse River. Field sat nestled deep in the shadows of the surrounding mountains: Mount Stephen, Mount Dennis, Mount Burgess. We wouldn’t see much of the sun till spring. The waterfalls on both sides of the highway were already starting to freeze, almost climbable in November. It was so cold that the Honda had barely started that morning at the hospital. After three days in that place, I would have ditched the car and hitch-hiked home with Jenna in a Snugli. I’d spent ten days in that hospital with Jenna under the jaundice lights after she was born. I’d had enough.
Our white duplex was easy to spot, halfway up the hill in the town site at the base of Mount Stephen. Jenna and I had only spent two nights in Field before the hospital. Grant would be home from camp tonight, our first night all together in our new home.
As I turned off the highway and started to cross the bridge, I heard the train whistle off in the distance.
“Shit!”
I stepped on the gas. There was no way I was going to sit for half an hour behind the train while the CP Rail personnel had their staff changeover, blocking the only entrance into town. Jenna had been asleep for the whole hour from Canmore but I could feel my luck running out. I ripped over the tracks and continued up the hill. The train clanged and whistled as it ground to a stop behind me, cutting the town off from the rest of the world.
* * *
—
“Can you say ‘dada’?” Grant held Jenna close to his face. “Come on. Say ‘dada.’”
“She’s a bit young for that, Grant,” I said as I pulled a steaming fish casserole out of the oven, a recipe from the Homemakers magazine my mother-in-law had signed me up for. I’d been cutting out the good ones and pasting them onto index cards to put into a little pink plastic box with headings, grateful my climbing girlfriends in Canmore weren’t privy to my mutation into a non-practising feminist. This recipe was simple: just pour a can of cream of mushroom soup over a frozen block of cod on veggies and potatoes. It was amazing how versatile Campbell’s creamed soups were.
