The Journey Prize Stories 21

by Various

  The mother and the child left the house. The mother called back to Wendy – “Thanks!” – and Wendy waved.

  That night, the mother said to the husband, “I’m not letting Wendy take care of the kids anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “They have a new cat.”

  “She’s free.”

  “Price over quality, John?”

  “We can’t afford daycare, you know that.”

  “Then you can take our son to the doctor when he gets asthma.”

  “You don’t get asthma that way. You’re overreacting.”

  “Better than underreacting.”

  While the child slaps around in the spare room at the bottom of the stairs, the mother will make homemade Caesar salad, meatloaf, and open a can of whole tomatoes. The husband went to a naturopath who said his liver wasn’t well, said no red meat. Now they only eat beef once every two weeks. He doesn’t drink milk anymore either but he understands the children need it. They used to drink two per cent but now they’re down to one. She likes the creamy taste of milk, sometimes sneaks a small carton of homo at work, but she’s getting used to the lower fat. As soon as the child hits four, she knows the husband will demand they only drink skim.

  Nobody in this neighbourhood knows how to make Caesar salad. All croutons and dressing, they think. When the mother, the father, and the son first moved here, the mother was intent on becoming part of the community. But the potlucks were full of women who talked about their husbands and brought their kids too. She wanted the company of women, but not women like that. What was the point of female company if you only talked about your husband and your kids?

  The husband is late. The mother knows she said seven and so, at seven, she puts out dishes for the child, the son, and the husband. She serves the Caesar salad, something she’s proud of.

  “Where’s Dad?” asks the son.

  The mother hasn’t even had a chance to give him his glass dish of canned tomatoes.

  “He’s probably late,” she says. But there’s no probably about it.

  She gives the child a bowl of tomatoes. The child is staring at the wall. Not at the calendar or the phone that hang there, but at some point above the kitchen table. Nothing. The mother grabs a damp cloth from the sink, moves behind the child and wipes the wall. Maybe a food splatter. The child looks away and down at her tomatoes.

  They make the child’s mouth itch. She likes the taste on the tongue but the corners of the mouth sting after. She doesn’t like canned tomatoes. Meatloaf. Full of onions. She reaches for the ketchup, a tomato paste she can handle, but her brother grabs it first. He is slow about screwing off the cap, slow about the ooze and then the plop plop of the ketchup onto his plate, slow about returning its cap, slow about putting the bottle on the far side of his plate, away from her.

  She reaches with her palm out, flaps the fingers in a sideways wave. Gimme. The brother ignores her, goes into his meatloaf. The mother is at the stove. She turns, walks toward the kitchen entrance, is met by the father. They speak. The mother opens her mouth to say more, then shakes her head and returns to the stove. Spoons out the father’s meatloaf, puts it on the table, dishes up her own, sits down. The father sits. The family, at the table. She reaches again toward the ketchup. Intent. Pointing. Stretching over her brother. Looking at the mother. The mother goes for the ketchup, but the father raises a hand and speaks. She pulls back her arm, puts her hands in her lap. Looks into the father’s face. Waits.

  “Use your words,” he says, again.

  “Chup, chup,” she says and reaches. Her brother sighs. She feels the outing of air on her arm. She hopes he doesn’t hit her.

  The mother looks at the father. He turns to her and shakes his head, speaks. She speaks back and rolls her eyes, reaching for the ketchup. She takes off the top, pours a disc of ketchup onto the child’s plate, beside meatloaf overflowing onions. A red moon of ketchup on her plate. Its edges round, then stop. She will leave the meatloaf until last. It will take the burn off her mouth from the canned tomatoes.

  “We could ask your mom,” the husband says.

  “I don’t want to ask Mom.”

  She reads one of the books she borrowed from the library. Often the second child speaks later. This is because the older child talks enough for two.

  “It’s a good time.”

  “I don’t want to ask my mother.” Puts the book on her lap, watches her feet make a point in the covers.

  “We fucked up.”

  “I didn’t fuck up, John.” She says his name to the reflection of him in the mirrored closet doors across from the bed. “You’re not going to get me on your side by saying this is our problem.”

  “Goddamnit Sheryl, do you have any better suggestions? We need the money.”

  “Do we?”

  Back to the book. If there is a problem, know that you and your child are not alone. There are resources in place in your community to assist you through this potentially challenging time. His hand on the spine. He presses it down. For the first time all evening, she looks at him.

  He says, “This is serious.”

  It is, dear John, yes it is.

  “We could lose the house.”

  Yes we could. She says, “It’s just a house.”

  The booth man speaks. The child watches his face, watches his mouth. He tells her, “The sound is like this.” A boop, like the TV going funny, echoes through the booth. She nods. She understands. “When you hear that, press the button.” He holds a black plastic stick with a red button at the top. Hold it like this. He mimes with his hand, fingers wrapped around the plastic, the thumb ready to push the button. It’s powerful. The man waves his other hand in her face, gets her attention. She watches. He says, “The sound might be loud or quiet. When you hear it, press the button. It might be soft like this.” She waits. Somewhere, there’s a sound. Maybe she hears it. She waits for his reaction. It doesn’t come. She nods. He smiles. She doesn’t want to disappoint. “I’m going to shut these so you aren’t distracted.” He pulls the navy drapes across the window. She is surrounded by felt and carpet, dark blue. “If you need me, just speak. I will hear you.” He stands and takes the headphones from the hook on the booth wall. Here. “You wear these headphones. I’m going to close the door. Your mom and me are right outside.” He fits the headphones over her ears. The silence is complete. He smiles, waiting. Yes. She nods. The door shuts without a sound, like it’s surrounded by pillows.

  The warm room closes in on all sides. The headphones make her feel like a pilot. In control. She holds the stick in her hand, the stick that drives the plane. Push it forward to fly and pull it back to put the nose in the air. Press the button and shoot the guns. The chair is comfy. The chair her father would take in a room, because he always wants the best. The largest. The warmest. Take it. The headphones click. The booth man, on the other side of the window, in his own plane. She can’t see him but she knows. He locks into his cockpit. He puts on his headset. In her ears she hears his voice: “We’re starting now.” The headphones make everything clear. She nods. Of course.

  They start easy. Boop. Button. Boop. Button. Boop boop boop. Button-button-button. He’s trying to challenge her. Boop. Softer, in the distance. She gets that one too. She waits. Boop. Behind her, off to the side. Button. She watches the closed door. Her co-pilot fiddles with his instrument panel. He swoops behind her, where she can’t see him. She concentrates. Harder. She’s on her own. Wait, was that a boop? She’s not sure. Maybe she imagined it. Button. Maybe she’s wrong. Another two almost-imaginary boops come from somewhere. Maybe they’re not even in the headphones. She buttons once, not sure either way. Silence. More silence. Trying to slip her up. Her thumb poised. Button. Shoot. A clear mistake. Relax. Boop. Loud. Obvious. He’s giving her a break. She takes it, sits straighter, ready. She can almost find the pattern in the boops, but holds off because she’s afraid she’ll miss it when it breaks. Boop-boop combos are nothing for her button-button thumb. Sh
e dismisses her earlier imaginings and every time she thinks she hears a boop, she hits the button. And then she waits, her eyes on the twists of carpeting on the back of the door. Booth man must be reloading his guns. She got him good that time. Silence. The silence warms her again. The boops have gone. She appreciates the calm her co-pilot gives her. She hopes she passed the test. She wants to fly again.

  A few days later, the husband’s at the stove.

  The mother forgot to turn on the oven. The meatloaf’s been sitting in there raw for two hours. She noticed it about a half hour ago. Let it continue cold as she sat at the kitchen table. When the son came in for dinner she told him to get himself some cereal. He went right for the sugar stuff. She had forgotten they still had some. Maybe from his birthday, or the child’s. He knew she wouldn’t protest. Everyone just another person to take advantage of. The woman at the bank didn’t give them the loan because she saw that they had nothing left to take.

  It was difficult to explain to the husband.

  “She’s deaf.”

  “What?”

  “Funny.”

  He doesn’t take off his overcoat. He wants to hear this.

  “The doctor said she’s deaf.”

  He shakes his head.

  “The ear infections,” she says.

  “She hasn’t had an ear infection in over a year.”

  “Eleven months.”

  “She’s not deaf.”

  “She’s deaf.”

  “Qualify it. How?”

  “They need to do more tests, but at this point he says it could be as much as a seventy-five per cent deficit in the right ear.”

  “So she’s not deaf. She can hear.”

  “Can you do math? Seventy-five per cent means she only hears twenty-five per cent of noises that every other child hears.”

  “But that’s the right ear. The left ear. Fine, right?”

  “No. Probably half.”

  “Half deaf, then.”

  “Goddamn you.”

  “Swearing at me because you know our daughter can’t hear you?”

  “Goddamn you.”

  The husband puts his hands on the sink and stares through the window. It looks onto the brown, blank stare of the neighbour’s wood-panelled house. Better than looking through one of their windows, he’d said when she had complained about the view, years ago. It wasn’t so bad, after all. In between the houses was a deck, instead of a yard or a cement walkway. The kids from both families charged down it in the summer. A sandbox lay hidden under removable boards, off to one side of this kitchen window. If the mother stood on tiptoes, she could watch her children play.

  “I don’t want to lose the house,” she says. “I just think you need to consider this first, that you’ve got your priorities mixed up here.”

  “I’m tired of hearing ‘I just think’ come out of your mouth.”

  “You didn’t marry me because I was an airhead, John,” she says, though at that moment she’s not sure why he did marry her. Beauty, a girl who laughed at his jokes, circumstance. Good things are so easy to forget late on a weekday evening. The house is cold with good memories past remembering.

  He seems about to say more but perhaps he too feels the chill of a home turning back into a house. He shrugs off his overcoat and escapes downstairs to his leather armchair, to a movie, to two hours of no thinking whatsoever.

  The father is angry when she says “Hawpital.” “Hosssspital,” he says through the rearview mirror. She tries not to shrink into the car seat because he’ll be more mad. “Hopstill,” she tries again. She knows her words don’t sound the way he wants them to. Since the booth, the father does this more. Makes her speak for food. No pointing. The mother sometimes looks into her face and asks with her own if she’s okay. But today the mother leans against the car window. She looks for the mother’s face in the side mirror but the reflection’s wrong. “Hossssssspital,” he says, even louder. They go again to the Children’s for a second set of booth tests. She must have done something wrong the first time. Looks down from his face in the mirror.

  “Gen-!” the beginning of a shout but the mother’s hand goes out and onto his hand on the gear stick.

  The child sees him flick off the hand and yank on the stick and under her the car pulses forward into the exit and her neck bends and the father’s mouth in the rearview, thankfully closed, and the mother’s head tucked tight against the seat. The little red car holds onto the off-ramp, the white H of the Children’s coming into view. The car stutters underneath her. She feels the car speed up and the mother’s head leaves the headrest in surprise. The child watches the mirror but she can’t see the mother’s mouth.

  “John, for Christ’s sake.”

  She drops her head. Hands in her lap. Wishes she couldn’t hear anything at all.

  The mother’s parents had come. Her mother ran around with the son all day and in the evenings rubbed her feet with lemons. The child took her time. The due date came. Went. They waited.

  The night before the child’s afternoon birth, she couldn’t sleep. Her father was still alive then. Every ten, sometimes fifteen minutes the contractions. She took the couch downstairs. Each time she woke, she found him looking at her with tears in his eyes.

  They broke her water in the delivery room. No epidural this time, she felt it all. And they didn’t know then, people didn’t know. She had hoped for a girl and out the child came, a girl so perfect, her heart rate right. The child came out perfect. The husband took the first photo and in it, the child’s smiling. Rolling to the right, gums wide at her mother, the doctor smiling at them both.

  But eighteen days later, a scare. She came home from her first evening out to find the husband pacing and the child screaming.

  “She’s been crying all night. And she has these bumps.” His fear so quiet and intense she could barely hear him. At the child’s crib they watched her squirm, her ovaries sticking out of the tiny groin. In emergency, the chart read “abdominal mass.” As if hernias could be called such a thing. The mother cried. And when the child came out fine, the almond-sized organs pushed back in and the abdominal wall stitched by a surgeon with hands as big as the child herself, the mother cried more. The husband cradled his three-week-old as if she were new, his face etched with a terrible relief.

  “Nothing so small should bear so much pain,” he had said. The mother had seen tears for the first time in his blue eyes. She had cried herself out, wondered if there would be enough fluid in her body to breastfeed. “She’s not hurting anymore,” she said to him then. But a family is designed to bear a continued series of hurts. The ear infections of months ago had abated, but they left damaging traces behind. Now, myringotomy. A scary name for something simple. A minor surgical procedure in which a small slit is made in the eardrum, allowing fluid to drain from the middle ear. All of it was very minor, yet the word minor meant nothing to the mother of an almost-four-year-old girl she had long suspected was going through life in a daze of half-heard sounds, the angry mouths of her parents moving in patterns of loathing.

  The mother wondered what was worse: hearing yelling or seeing it? She wondered if it looked like the melodrama of a silent film and if the child played a tiny piano in her head to accompany the action on screen. If the surgery was successful, what would happen to the child when she woke up? Would the world crash and bang into her head, alienating her? Would she cover her ears and demand back her silent world? The child had never complained, had not asked to hear.

  The group of sick kids sit in a circle and the nurse shows them on a bear what the needle will do. She is not scared. She hopes the other kids aren’t scared either. The nurse gives them a colouring book and inside it is a bear like the needle bear. He is going to the hospital too and he’s worried, but the hospital is a good place and he smiles in other pictures. No crayons though. She will colour in it when she goes home. She likes the hospital. The group of children breaks up. She says goodbye to her new friends. She waves at them. She
is happy, she will see them soon. Another nurse leads her to the room she started in, this morning. The mother stands and holds out a coat. She puts her arms in. She is confused. Why isn’t she staying? The other children are staying overnight. She imagined a slumber party. They would all put on hospital pyjamas and sit on their beds, separated by curtains. She doesn’t want them to be too scared.

  They will be okay.

  The mother takes her hand to leave. As they walk through the corridors ribboned with yellow and blue and red, she looks for the faces of the boys and girls in her group. She is the only one leaving. The mother pulls harder on her hand. They go down stairs, out a door, into a parkade. Their little red car waits for them. “No,” she says, pulling her hand free. The mother continues. She stops walking. The mother stops, turns around. “Let’s go,” she says. Loudly. “No!” I don’t wanna go home. I don’t wanna go! She screams, high-pitched like a baby. And the mother grabs her hand and pulls. The child wants to stay. The mother doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand. She wants to stay. She doesn’t understand.

  Family dinner.

  The mother has made pork chops. The child likes the apple sauce. Caesar salad on the side, not too much lemon in the dressing. She serves the child first, pausing at her seat to cut the chop into bites. And then the son. And then the husband. She considers telling him, “Get your own goddamn pork chop,” which would be an expression of the mood that made her put an expensive steak in the cart at Food for Less. Stay positive. Put back the steak. Got the good pork chops, on sale. Took absolute care with the oven, adjusting the temperature on a whim, seeking for once not to make the bloody things dry as pemmican.

  She sits down. The son watches her and then the husband. The child picks a leaf from her salad and puts it in her mouth. Then she puts a finger in the apple sauce and puts the finger in her mouth.

  “Eat,” the mother says to the son. He pauses, not convinced. She smiles. Smiles again, real. He picks up his utensils, begins to saw. The meat oozes some moisture, but it might be, once again, too dry.