Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  * * *

  Athena arrives as Clara leaves to answer a page over the intercom. “Honeycakes,” she says, patting my hair, looking at the blood-soaked johnny gown and robe on the floor which Clara hasn’t picked up yet. Matilda, the older nurse, comes in and puts the dirty clothes in a basket. She leaves as the doctor arrives. He gawks at Athena like she’s famous. She has that effect on people.

  The doctor composes himself. They couldn’t see the right tissue when they X-rayed the strands of flesh they extracted, he says. It was such an awkward location to do a core biopsy on. The pathologist will probably tell them to call me back in to do the test again. Or they might just do a surgical biopsy and remove the whole area.

  “That’s a lumpectomy, though, isn’t that what you’re saying?” Athena isn’t pleased. She thinks they’ve been sloppy. She feels the testing is getting too invasive too quickly when they don’t even know what they’re dealing with yet.

  The doctor nods. “Well, yes, that’s true, but we’d be doing it as a biopsy.”

  Clara comes back in and puts the bandages in the garbage. “It is impossible to know how these tests will go ahead of time.”

  “It was unusual for it to be this hard to get a tissue sample,” the doctor says with a sympathetic look on his face.

  Clara rubs her hand on my arm.

  The doctor leaves.

  Athena says she’ll wait outside.

  Clara says through the closed drapes as I dress how she wanted to tell me how much she still loves the photos. When I started taking the post-mortem portraits here, she says, she never imagined I would be taking pictures of her baby. Clara says she has the prints in a small white satin album. She looks at them only occasionally now, a year later. The first few months she looked at them on the hour.

  * * *

  Athena drives me home. We talk about facials and yoga, about novels and podcasts. The pale blue sky is an immense eye before us.

  I tell Athena about the photos I took of Clara’s little daughter. How she had died in utero the day before she was born. Clara was induced and gave birth to her dead little girl. They called me in. I came and took portraits of the baby, bundled up. And the baby in her parents’ arms. It isn’t technical skill you need as much as compassion and empathy, an ability to see beauty in unexpected places. To see the baby as a baby, not as a corpse.

  Athena cries a little as she drives.

  It’s hard to explain to someone who has never lost a child this way. The parents are still parents. It’s still their baby. Their beloved. They existed. Post-mortem photography was commonplace in the Victorian era, even in the early twentieth century. And now pathologists photograph corpses as a routine part of autopsy. And people like me come with a camera and a quiet voice, and capture those first and final moments of love.

  My brother-in-law had me photograph their little dead baby. His name was Simon and he was so tiny, born far too soon. Ruthie still can’t talk about him. She looks at the photos, though, my brother-in-law says. Those photos remind her that, even if briefly, she too was a mother.

  * * *

  The day after the upside-down ordeal, my entire breast is swollen and bruised. It’s shocking when I take the bandage off. All night, whenever I roll on it, the throbbing pain wakes me up. The pricks aren’t even visible, they were so tiny, but my breast screams at each assault. When Saul comes barging in I have to cover it up so he won’t be frightened.

  Saul goes to school and I go to visit my parents. They don’t know about the mammograms, the core biopsy.

  My mother is in the kitchen having a drink. She points at her eye. It’s an ocular occlusion, she says. This is why she’s been seeing things in shades of indigo. The doctor said the vein will occlude. It will collapse. It is going to close off the blood flow. She will lose the sight in the eye and there is nothing they can do. The doctor said she’ll adjust to having vision in only one eye.

  Dad is outside burning garbage in the burn barrel. I never argue with him about creating pollution and the diminishing ozone layer. He is a man of his time and will never see things any other way than the way he sees them.

  He pokes the fire with a long stick and black smoke curls up into the air. “Your mother drinks too much,” my father says. “That’s what’s wrong with her blood pressure. And her eye. You look, under the sink. All those Mason jars of vinegar she’s got there? That’s not vinegar for cleaning. I don’t put them there. Your mother does. They won’t believe me now, will they, not with half my brain closing down.” He sounds more lucid than he has in weeks.

  I leave him stirring his burn barrel and go inside and sniff the vodka in the jars under the sink. My mother comes in from the living room. “I can’t stop him from drinking. It’s not my fault. It’s the only thing he’s got left. Can’t you see what’s going on, Daisy?” The truth is obscured for me. Maybe they’re both drinking out of Mason jars.

  * * *

  A week later, the hospital calls before Saul and I are up for breakfast. They leave a voice mail message to say a woman is in the hospital labouring, and can I come in and take photos. They expect the stillbirth by breakfast time, from the way she’s progressing. The baby died two days earlier; this is the soonest they were able to schedule the inducement.

  A spring hoarfrost has coated the lawn, trees, and fence in magnificent ferny white ice crystals. The driveway is slippery. I carefully get Saul off to school and head to the hospital. My cellphone rings in my purse as I’m parking the car. I shut the engine off and answer. It’s my family doctor with the results of my core biopsy. She gives me my test results while I sit in the hospital parking lot.

  “They did get enough of those tiny strands of flesh. It was nothing. It was just calcium deposits,” my doctor says. “Enjoy the rest of your day, Daisy.”

  I call Athena. It goes to voice mail, so I leave a message. The phone rings. Ruthie.

  “Everything is fine,” I tell her.

  I hear Ruth take a deep breath and exhale slowly.

  Then she talks: “Wow. Maybe we aren’t cursed.”

  Next Ruth cries: “I’m so sorry, Daisy. It’s hard seeing things how you do. Maybe we can have Saul on a weekend in the city so you can have a break. If you’ll trust him with us. I know you’re a good mother. When Mum and Dad die, you’ll be the only one left in the family for me to look up to. I hope you see that.”

  What I see is how frightened I’ve always been to be the oldest, to be responsible for others. Worrying how Ruth will never unwind or soften. But we must keep going, even when we’re afraid. This is what it is to be brave, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have one good friend at your side.

  I head into the hospital, to the child and maternity unit. When I walk into the new mother’s room with my camera bag, she’s holding the baby, who is swaddled in a delicate crocheted blanket.

  I sit in the small chair at the side of the room and take out my camera. It is sometimes luck. Sometimes genetics. Many times there are no reasons that will ever make sense.

  The woman holds out her baby with the tiny brown face against the soft blue wool. “I don’t know why she died,” she says. She’s weeping. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Her husband sobs beside her. He wipes his eyes, and his wife’s. He holds his wife as she cradles the infant. Then everything is completely silent for a moment as they gaze at their baby.

  “My beauty.”

  I hold the camera up to one eye, closing the other, like my mother, adjusting to a new perspective.

  Late and Soon

  Edmund jumping off the garage roof . . . do you remember? Soaring to the earth and landing with a smile. We wanted to be him, even just for a moment. Edmund and his friend Ian headed off to the barn, leaving the ladder against the garage wall. We climbed and clung to the edge of the garage roof. We were five years old. Edmund, he was nine. We peered down from the roof over the field across the tre
etops to Cape Blomidon and the Minas Basin at low tide, blue sky plunging into the red mud. The leaves were falling so quickly then.

  We were scared without Edmund. You reached for the ladder and knocked it over. How would we get down? “Wait a minute,” you whispered. “No,” I said and jumped. I heard my arm break. Do you remember how hard you cried? Your face was purple, the colour you told me your penis turned sometimes. You’d told me in church, how your penis turned purple like the velvet robe the minister wore. I didn’t have a penis, you told me. This was the main reason we weren’t identical. I was born so quickly and then you took two more hours to come into the world. Dad nicknamed us “Late” and “Soon.”

  You were screaming as you looked down at me from the garage roof. Edmund heard us all the way from the barn and came back to find me lying there on the grass by the fallen ladder. He carried me home with you weeping at his side. Dad and Edmund took me to the emergency room. Dad recited Wordsworth poems while he drove, to distract me. Remember how much he loved the English Romantics? He would have been a scholar in a different life, Mum always said. As Dad carried me into the hospital, he kept repeating, “A host of golden daffodils beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Don’t cry, little Soon,” he said. “You’re strong.”

  * * *

  Remember when we were fifteen, picking apples after school? Edmund picked us up when we were finished in the orchard. It was already getting dark when we came home that Tuesday and Mum wasn’t making supper as she always did at that time of day. She was reading a magazine, having a cup of tea with her apron on. She told us Dad had dressed in his suit and tie for work that morning like he always did and left for the canning plant. But then he’d called in the afternoon. He had checked into the Cornwallis Inn in Kentville because he needed time alone, time to sort things out. He was depressed and needed a break, she told us as she flipped through the magazine without looking up. He wanted us to come down for supper, just us, he didn’t need her to come — she could stay home alone, have some time to herself. I think she was relieved. All summer he’d been quiet. She sipped her tea and ate a cookie. It was a Pim’s, a biscuit from France with orange jam filling. Mum loved them. Edmund was nineteen. He drove us to the hotel in his red pickup truck. He’d come home from firefighter practice just to take us.

  * * *

  Do you remember the old daphne shrub out by the barn which flowered each spring? Dad moved to the hotel a few weeks after Mum found the Cajun woman from New Orleans sitting beside the blooming daphne. She was feeling her ancestors, she said, the Acadians who had been sent away by the English in the Grand Dérangement, the Expulsion in 1755, and wondering if they ever sat beside these bushes they had planted and wondered if anyone would remember them. Mum invited her up to the house for tea. Between sips, she told us she lived in a house on stilts where moss hung off trees like ghosts.

  Normally Mum called the police about trespassers. It was a working farm, she would say, “private property,” and people had no business there. Dad had just gotten his job at the plant then, in the office. There were only three cows left in the barn.

  * * *

  Before we went up to our father’s hotel room, you wanted to look around the dusty hotel lobby at the old landscape paintings and the portraits of King George and Queen Mary with ornate gilded frames. Edmund said we should go up right away. He said we should be a few minutes early. What does it matter if we’re a little bit late? you said. There’s never a moment to lose, replied Edmund. You shrugged. And we waited for you.

  * * *

  Do you remember how Cedar went on about “the universe” back when you first brought her home to meet us? She was wearing the emerald-and-diamond engagement ring you had given her, and it sparkled when she moved her hand. The universe was sending her a message: it was telling her she could fly. This was a land of resignation, she said. In Vancouver anything could happen. Here we were all so burdened. I was living at home, working in the bookstore and teaching part-time. Mum and me in the back seat giggling when you were showing Cedar around the Annapolis Valley. Cedar asking if the cows were organic. Mum told her about the accident on the garage roof, and Cedar said this could be our origin myth, that moment when I jumped and you hesitated.

  She and I took a drive one afternoon before supper. Her hair was dyed the shocking pink of summer cosmos. We drove up the North Mountain to the Look-Off on the Brow of Mountain Road. Cedar stood with her eyes closed at the edge of the Mountain and chanted as she held out her arms ready to receive whatever was offered into her heart. She was thanking the universe for abundance and greatness. The sun illuminated her, and it seemed for a moment that diaphanous wings sparkled from her back. She looked over her shoulder and smiled at me. We thought of her as a flower child, Mum’s words, but even when I first met Cedar, her understanding of life radiated in a way it never would in us. Cedar always had lightness, even in the darkest moments.

  Later we stopped at the fire hall. You didn’t want to. Mum said even though Edmund wasn’t working there anymore you had to say hello to Ian, Edmund’s best friend all through school. Ian was working on the fire trucks. Sunday duty, they call it. He asked how Edmund was. You said you didn’t really see Edmund much. You were busy with architecture school — that’s why you were in Vancouver, after all. He looked away. You were wearing sunglasses. Ian took Cedar for a ride in the old Model T Ford fire truck, and she waved as she went by. Mum said when you got married Edmund could come home and pick you up from the church in it. You said Cedar wanted a sunrise unity ceremony on a beach on Cortes Island. Ian looked at his boots and tried not to laugh. You looked at the old fire truck when you answered. You hadn’t seen him; he lived on the other side of the city.

  * * *

  We took the brass elevator up to Dad’s hotel room. I pressed my sweaty hands against the shiny walls. Edmund was usually patient with you but that day he was angry with your cavalier attitude toward time. You told him he was too serious. I tried to escape over a path of shimmering handprints. You said it didn’t always pay to be first. The early bird was overrated, you proclaimed. We knocked but there was no answer. The door wasn’t locked so we walked right in, Edmund first. He ran over and fell down on his knees. There were four envelopes resting on the bed. Too late, Edmund whispered, too late, his voice dry and cracking, full of ashes.

  * * *

  We were thirteen when Mum made that pumpkin cake at Halloween. Dad was upstairs in their bedroom, lying on the bed in the dark. You were in the house, in the living room reading, when Nate came by to see if I wanted to go for a walk. I finished doing my chores in the barn before I crept down over the ridge to join Nate. There was one cow left. He was the first boy to kiss me, back behind the orchard, down the path. Nate loved our little old farm right in the town. He lived in the parsonage by his father’s church on the small bluff by the cemetery. It overlooked the Minas Basin to the north and behind it were the Look-Off and Cape Blomidon. It was a school night and the sky was getting darker, a cool wind blowing from the north. There were only a few dry leaves left on the trees, their whispers high in the branches. Nate and I saw Mum illuminated in the window as she threw the cake across the room. The icing was bright orange.

  We ran around to the front just as you came out the door and kicked the jack-o’-lantern off the top step. It flew across the lawn in pieces. The candle in the pumpkin set the brown grass on fire. Nate and I yelled for you to put it out. “Let it burn,” you screamed as you came running down the steps. Edmund came out the door and pushed you aside. “We have to put it out now or it will be too late to stop it,” he yelled at us. I stomped on the fiery carpet of grass in my rubber boots. I smelled burning rubber. Edmund stomping on the flames yelling, “Run to the brook.” The brook is tiny now, part of it choked off by the condo development, but it used to surge in the spring when the big rains came. I stood there in the water with my hot rubber boots steaming. Edmund and Nate dancing on the lawn,
you still standing on the top step. There was a dash of moon.

  Mum didn’t come out after you smashed the pumpkin. Supper burned. Edmund helped her clean up, threw out the food. She took us out to a restaurant. Dad just stayed in the bedroom. Nobody but Nate and Edmund talked. Nate’s an accountant now. He’s also in the volunteer fire department.

  * * *

  I called 911 as Edmund picked you up off the floor. He was yelling for me to get out of the room. I was sitting on the floor next to the bedside table holding the hotel phone. Edmund kept hollering to get out of the room. You were in his arms. Edmund was in the doorway screaming, “Olive, get out.”

  “Just a minute,” I screamed back. You were throwing up in his arms.

  Edmund wanted me out of the room. The 911 operator wanted me to stay on the phone. “Just a minute,” I whispered and held the phone out to him. Edmund was wiping the vomit off your face with his sleeve. I dropped the phone and tripped on the gun, which flew across the room as I crawled along the floor. I was drooling on my fingers. The fire trucks arrived at the hotel and Ian came in wearing his firefighter gear. Edmund carried you to the elevator and Ian took you from there. Your arms draped over his shoulders, noises like a sick calf coming from you. I crawled after you while Edmund went back to the room.