Dropped Threads 3

by Marjorie Anderson

  JANUARY 23, 2003

  When we arrive at the crematorium it’s raining. Nervously, we step into the empty chapel, where our daughter’s casket, plain white and only a foot long, has been placed before the altar. In the absence of an audience it’s hard to know what to do. Weep? Pray? I feel slightly embarrassed, as if my husband and I are overreacting by cremating and mourning a child who never actually was. Wayne and I caress the textured surface of the casket, while I suppress the desire to rip it open and look once again at the body that emerged from me.

  Eventually a young man in a crisp white button-down shirt appears. He carries Gracie’s casket down some steps and into a room we can see only through a pane of glass. Wordless, we watch him place her casket in the mouth of the oven, and close the door.

  FEBRUARY 3, 2003

  Gracie’s ashes have arrived. What’s left of our daughter is now just a plastic bag of grey-brown ash, no more than a couple of tablespoons, held together with a wire twist-tie and labelled with a circular metal tag.

  We don’t feel ready to scatter them. Instead we decide to put them in a cedar box I bought last November, intending to give it as a Christmas present. It’s good to have a container, something firm to hold on to now that I feel skinless, without edges.

  I’m still bleeding from the delivery, and my breasts have been leaking milk. These are not the only changes. It’s as if, since my world shifted on its axis, a new law of gravity has set in, pulling some people toward me, pushing others away. Some friends will examine photos of Gracie, while others meticulously avoid using her name. I’ve realized that, although my daughter definitely existed, to some she will never be a person. Compared to living, breathing children, she is merely a lacuna, an absence, an unfortunate mistake.

  I’ve also unearthed secrets. One of my friends has had several miscarriages, both my aunts had babies who died shortly after delivery, and my sister-in-law had a twin who died in utero. It seems these ghost babies are everywhere.

  And I can’t stop seeing live ones—giggling, snoozing, babbling, wailing—casually parked in strollers or backpacks. How can their parents ignore these precious live beings, even for a second? I have to restrain myself from rushing up to them shouting, Wake up and look at your babies! Desperate, demented, I walk on by with my mouth clamped shut and arms tightly folded.

  Wayne and I line the cedar box with eagle down collected from Jericho Park and a handful of sheep’s wool from England. Then we wrap up the bag of ashes in a fresh green Tibetan prayer flag. It feels good to swaddle Gracie.

  We hold hands and gaze at our daughter, silently. We’ve become closer because of her, and I’m glad of this. Whatever anyone else thinks, we’re Gracie’s parents. And as her mother, there’s an emptiness in me I want to savour. It’s all I have left that holds her shape.

  There’s something feral about this street. Rambling, once-grand homes now carved up into cheap boarding houses jostle for sidewalk space with immaculately restored Victorians, boasting topiaries and fierce wrought-iron gates. The tension makes the spring air snappish, and I tug at my old coat, trying to close it over my newly swollen belly. The crackheads huddled in the slushy laneway north of Dundas turn to watch me as I pass. I pick up the pace, looking straight ahead and walking briskly in what I imagine is a purposeful way. I have to work harder at this than usual since I have taken on the unmistakable sway of pregnancy; it makes me feel unbalanced, vulnerable.

  I turn in at a large three-storey brick house dripping with ornate blue gingerbread trim. There are two women dressed in puffy black jackets talking at the front gate. They watch me as I buzz the door. I can hear shuffling inside, then a pause while someone looks through the peephole.

  “I’m here for the writing group,” I say to the door, with as much conviction as I can muster. A staff member lets me in. She looks me up and down as if I’m a stranger, though I’ve been coming to this women’s shelter to lead the Writers’ Circle nearly every Thursday for three years. When I began volunteering here, I imagined I could share my passion for writing fiction and its therapeutic sidekick, journalling, with women who, perhaps more than most, need the release it can offer. I’ve stayed because their stories have stuck in my head.

  I turn to my left and lean into a large room filled with people sprawled on mismatched couches and chairs, a television blaring the latest news about Michael Jackson. A few women look up and nod languidly at me.

  Though the house has been stripped of most of its former grandeur, you can see its past carved in the ornate ceiling, intricate rosettes where crystal chandeliers must once have hung, deeply embossed crown moulding marking the perimeter of the room. There’s a laminate bookshelf stacked with donated detective novels, and some plastic garden chairs. Two girls in low-rise jeans and hoodies are sitting at a coffee table playing cards beside a woman with matted hair who’s rifling loudly through her collection of plastic bags.

  I follow the staffer down the narrow hallway, past the pay phone, past a room misty with cigarette smoke, past the showers and staff room to the dining area where the writing group meets. There’s a lingering aroma from the shepherd’s pie that’s just been cleared away and some people drinking coffee and Red Rose tea at the round tables. Behind them on the bulletin board promoting AA meetings and support groups for incest survivors and for women with AIDS, there’s the faded poster I made last year to try to get more people out to the Writers’ Circle. It’s hard to know if it worked because the group, like the population of the shelter and this neighbourhood, changes nearly every week. Sometimes two women will show up, other times there will be two tables full. I take comfort in the handful of regulars who try to make it each week though they are no longer living at the shelter: There’s the earnest young woman from Boston who lost her high-paying job at a big corporation and moved to Canada because she was convinced the government was poisoning the water; the voluptuous forty-year-old with metallic green eye shadow and ruby lips who tells me she’s a movie star, friend to Barbra Streisand; and the domineering girl with a wicked temper and a gaggle of followers who lost her baby to the Children’s Aid. I’ve been rehearsing in my mind how to tell them tonight is the last time I’ll be here.

  Each week we write for a little more than half an hour, then we read our work out loud. I come armed with pencils and paper and a general topic intended to spark their creativity (the person who has influenced you most in your life, summer memories and so on). I act as a facilitator, answer spelling questions (despite my protests that it doesn’t matter here), encourage the hesitant and generally try to make sure no one offends anyone else. Mostly the women ignore my topic and write about themselves. They all have stories.

  Tonight, an unusually large group has gathered, and we have to pull together three tables to accommodate them all. Passing out the paper and pens I suggest that they write about how they felt today and whether their mood affected their relationship to others. It’s often loud during this postdinner hour, but tonight the only sound is the hum of the fridge and someone clanking dishes in the giant stainless steel sink in the nearby kitchen. As the women settle into their writing, one girl, her eyes like narrow slashes in a grey, drawn face, tells me about the stillborn baby she had two days ago and how tired she is from walking around and crying all day; another, staring vacantly out the window, says she’ll write about how it felt when her husband beat her up.

  I write, too. I have always loved the freedom of this hour, my anonymity in this group and their easy acceptance of each other and me. Tonight, maybe because I know it is my last, I find myself writing about things I can barely admit to my closest friends. How I’m terrified to be having my first child. How the first thing I did when I found out I was pregnant was burst into frightened tears, the weight of responsibility pinning me to the bed. About the way anxiety no longer seems so easy to shake off and how some weeks, I cry about nothing every day. I haven’t told anyone this because I don’t want to acknowledge my ambivalence by releasing it into the wo
rld. I worry, too, that my friends and family will think I’m a bad mother if I confess these uncomfortable feelings. Anyway, no one wants to hear about my worries. People steer me away, telling me how happy I must be, how I can’t wait until the baby is born. To admit that the little fish thumping and swooshing inside scares me half to death is to transgress some unwritten social stricture. But here, with these women whose lives are complicated by drugs and deadbeat boyfriends, depression and poverty, my fears seem unremarkable. The words pour out sticky and messy like syrup.

  It’s seven-thirty by the time everyone has finished. The young woman with the tired eyes has slept through the last half hour, her cheek pressed against the plastic tabletop. Another girl left to have a smoke and didn’t return. But the rest want to read out loud and a native woman volunteers to be first. She calls her piece “Anxiety.” She’s anxious, she reads from her hesitant script, because she’s just been diagnosed with diabetes and she’s worried about who will care for her and how she’ll cope if it gets bad. She doesn’t know much about the disease except that lots of people from her reserve have it. She’s a former alcoholic and is thinking about quitting smoking, but even the thought of that makes her more anxious.

  The others thank her for her story, and then one woman launches into a tale about her sister who has diabetes and is going blind and might have to have both legs amputated. I wonder momentarily if I should put an end to this story before the anxious woman is in tears, but the storyteller finishes before I can decide. Anyway, the diabetic isn’t fazed. She asks questions and nods as the grim details of her future are catalogued in enthusiastic detail.

  A small, neat, grey-haired woman from Finland goes next. In short, abrupt sentences, which she reads as if they were questions, she tells us that she’s happy after a nice day spent wandering the Eaton Centre. I’m sure the other women are also wondering what she left out. They know better than anyone that no one comes here if they’re really that happy. As she finishes I can see the woman beside her breathing deeply with her eyes closed, bracing herself. A striking Trinidadian with a smooth high forehead, she reads of betrayal and violence in a gentle island lilt that makes her story sound like a song. Her husband beat her, she reads. She doesn’t know why because she loves him. She’s been running it over and over in her mind and doesn’t think she can forgive him this time. She’s crying now, though you wouldn’t know it if she hadn’t stopped to swallow the lump in her throat and dab her shining eyes. Now there are tears on cheeks all around the table, nods of recognition. When she finishes everyone claps.

  I read next, hoping to slip in while the others are still reeling from this last outpouring. The women listen quietly and nod at my story. I tell them I’m not going to be here for a while because of the baby. And they tell me that they also felt scared when they were pregnant, that I’m right to think that my life will change when I have children. That kids make you see everything differently. The woman who thinks she’s a movie star tells me that what I really need is a good nanny. I laugh. It’s a relief.

  We listen to an addict talk about how frightened she is about trying to quit crack, and the movie star rambles incomprehensibly in beautiful, carefully chosen language. Then, over the PA, someone announces it’s time for drop-ins to leave. We clear away the saltine crumbs and wet tea bags and most of the women scatter without saying goodbye or even collecting their work. Often I feel deflated at the end of our writing session, rattled by the litany of misery I’ve just heard, but today I’m oddly buoyant as I gather the pens and papers together. Liberated, perhaps, by my confession, thankful for the good-natured embrace of these women. The loud one, the woman who had her baby taken away by the CAS, helps me return the supplies to the staff room. As I’m gathering my coat and bag together to go home, she waits by the door and stops me before I leave. She puts out her arms and pulls me in toward her substantial bosom, squeezing gently. “Good luck,” she whispers in my ear.

  I walk home feeling light, even graceful, despite my lumbering gait. For the first time, I can see myself as I’ve always seen other pregnant women—strong, vibrant, beautiful. I talk under my breath to my baby. I want him to know about this unlikely community I’ve found, about the women who shared their struggles with me and made all of us feel stronger. As if in response, the baby jabs me in the ribs with a tiny, powerful foot. I rub the spot he kicked with the heel of my hand, and smile.

  My thoughts are a mother’s thoughts as Jo strides toward our little family group in the parking lot in front of the grey institutional building, the sunlight on the mountains behind her. A faint breeze lifts a few strands of dark hair across her cheek. I’m glad she made it around that construction on the highway. She’s too thin, I note, and her cheek is swollen from the dentist this morning. But here she is, bending to hug her great-aunt Lois, at eighty-four the sole survivor of the three siblings who grew up in Winnipeg during the Depression. The oldest was my mother, Jo’s grandmother, Sheila.

  Lois was always the shy one, haunted by secret fears, outshone by older sister Sheila, the beautiful and talented one. Lois was there with us fifteen years ago to bury my mother, struck down by Alzheimer’s at a young age. Now Larry, the adored, fun-loving and risk-taking baby of the family, is dead too. And Lois, the last of the three, is here to bury him.

  Jo reaches up to embrace Lois’s husband, Tom, who will give the eulogy at this afternoon’s service. My daughter Jo is twenty-nine and gorgeous (a mother’s opinion), muscles toned by Pilates and marathons in Vancouver. She has worn simple black pants and a light sweater today, no jacket. We agree that her cell phone should be locked in the trunk and then remember we should leave our bags there too, for we know they would be searched at the door.

  The last time Jo and I were in this parking lot, Uncle Larry came out to meet her. That was back in the spring, just before Larry’s eighty-first birthday. He told us he really wasn’t supposed to go as far as the parking lot but he wanted to say hello to his grandniece and her new husband. No one stopped him.

  Uncle Larry collapsed in his cell in the Ferndale Institute in Mission, British Columbia, after surviving seven years in a federal penitentiary. He died in an Abbotsford hospital on Thanksgiving weekend. He would have been eligible for parole in another year and a half. Our family dream was that we would take him back to the Lake of the Woods in Ontario where he had built his own cabin retreat he called Larry’s Last Resort when he was in his twenties. He was my favourite uncle back then, blond with soft blue eyes and a smile that promised an adult world full of fun. He had been a bomber pilot in the war and, when I was growing up, he had glamorous girlfriends who had jobs and drank beer on weekends, a red Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint sportscar and a 25-horsepower outboard motorboat that pulled water skiers bouncing over the waves. To us kids, his life was full of everything we dreamed about.

  Aunt Lois had not wanted a service of any kind. This wasn’t the way her brother’s story was supposed to end. But the prison chaplain had persuaded her to attend a simple service in the Ferndale chapel. He said it would be “important to the men.” The family agreed to come. I found an eight-by-ten portrait of Uncle Larry in his RCAF uniform, taken when he enlisted at eighteen in 1942, and brought it with me from Winnipeg. Lois and Tom worked on a simple message from the family for the service. We joked that Tom, a retired university professor, would finally have his dream: a captive audience.

  Jo’s arrival from Vancouver completes the group of about a dozen family members and friends and we file in together. While we wait to sign in, we read the names of other inmates on a chart on the wall. We recognize one: Colin Thatcher, son of the former Saskatchewan premier, convicted of killing his wife in her garage, in a celebrated criminal case many years back.

  The Anglican chaplain who will be leading the service is wearing long black-and-white robes that flap in the breeze as he leads our tiny family group to the chapel. I feel Jo beside me. Although she is looking around with curiosity, she is quiet. We hear the sound of inmates
lazily batting tennis balls back and forth on the nearby courts as we move between prison buildings. At the chapel door, an inmate has been posted to greet everyone, to thank us for coming and shake our hands. The simple gesture is calming, a welcome human touch. The usher guides us into the dimly lit chapel with its rows of folding chairs, a red hymnbook on each, and a whiff of fresh flowers and candles in the air. The familiarity of this church-like place steadies me. Jo picks up a hymnbook and begins to leaf through it. Candles and flower arrangements adorn the altar at the front and the picture of teenaged Larry in his airforce hat, smiling with youthful enthusiasm as if the world were not at war, reminds everyone why we are here.

  Jo and I sit together, Lois and Tom in the row behind us. The room holds about fifty and gradually the chairs fill up, leaving some of the men, dressed mostly in jeans and sweatshirts, lounging against the back wall and in the aisles. One man directly across from us has tied his shoulder-length hair loosely with a bandana; beside him another with a shaved head crosses tattooed, muscular arms over his chest. The men stare silently straight ahead at the altar, some clutching their hymnbooks, while the organist plays solemn church music.

  Jo and I tense as the last family member slides into the row behind us. Larry’s son, who lives in a group home nearby, has arrived. Today, he is accompanied by a guard and his social worker.

  We all know the story. When the police arrived at the West Vancouver apartment in May 1992 in response to Larry’s frantic 911 call, they found him covered with blood cradling the body of his wife of thirty-five years, blowing air into her lungs. It was a violent murder; she had been struck repeatedly with a knife sharpener and tinsnips. In the five years of trial after trial, Larry never allowed his defence to focus on the evidence that their son lived around the corner, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had a history of difficulty with his mother. Larry never let his lawyers tell the jury that like many parents he and his wife had never got around to telling their son he was adopted. It also went unmentioned that, the week before the murder, their son was deeply upset when his birth mother showed up after somehow managing to find him. Larry’s calm insistence that “it must have been an intruder” could not be backed by evidence, and he was convicted in the third trial and sentenced to life—ten years without parole. He arranged through friends to make sure his son was well cared for and could come and visit him regularly. He always maintained in discussions with me that the justice system did not show an understanding of mental illness and, consequently, the mentally ill were not protected or given proper treatment inside. When I tried to disagree, he would remind me that he was side by side with the mentally ill in prison. I had no response for that.