Free Swann by Carol Shields Page A

unsuspecting skin sewn neatly back in place. A pathologist will perform some tests and in a week the results will be confirmed, but there’s no real doubt about what it actually
is
.
    It doesn’t seem possible, I said at least three times. Dr. LeBlanc, however, assured me that though unusual, the phenomenon is not at all rare.
    I still can’t believe it: my own mother spread out here on her hospital bed, as calm and white as a cloud, my own mother the unwitting host to a little carved monkey ofhuman matter, her lifelong mate. This fleshy mystery drives all other thoughts from my head.
    Nelson Mandela is forgotten, the chanting demonstrators with their banners in the air, and an unknown elbow catching me under the eye—it no longer aches, by the way. Also forgotten is my completed paper on Mary Swann, now winging its way to Toronto, sadly late and less definitive than I would have wished. Template of the Imagination!—precious, precious. And Mary’s lost notebook, still resolutely lost, no longer gnaws at me—yes, the gnawing has definitely eased—nor does Brownie’s silence reach me, though I’m sure he must be back in Chicago by now.
    All these recent events, these
things
, seem suddenly trivial and rawly hatched in the light of what has happened: my mother’s strange deliverance.
    Soon she’ll be waking up again. In her sleep her lips move, mouthing a porous message. I watch her eyelids, the way they flutter on top of what must be a swirl of rolling dreams, drug-provoked dreams, and in the middle of that swirl must be imbedded, already, the knowledge of separation and loss. Or is it?
    There’s no telling how my mother will react.
    I regard her large, trunky, sleeping body and think how little I know it, how impossible it is to gauge her response when told about her “lump.”
    She may shudder with disgust, squeeze her eyes shut and shake her head from side to side,
not me, not me
. She has always been a fastidious woman, not much at peace with the body’s various fluids and forces. I can imagine her clearing her throat, ashamed and apologetic.
    Or she may surprise me by laughing. I remind myself that she has sometimes demonstrated signs of unpredictable humour—witness her chesty retelling of family stories orthe cartoons she occasionally clips from the newspaper and pins up in the kitchen. She may bestow on her little nugget a pet name, Bertie or Sweet Pea, and make a fully rounded story out of it, her very own medical adventure, suitable for the ears of her canasta cronies, more interesting, more
dramatic
than a gall bladder or thyroid condition and a lot more cheerful now that it’s out and sitting in a jar of formaldehyde. Would she ask for such a jar? Keep it up on the shelf next to her Hummel figurines? There sits my little Bertie. Or Sweet Pea. Laughing.
    Or she may grieve. Lord, I would grieve. I
am
grieving. Just thinking of this colouress little bean of human matter sharing my mother’s blood and warmth all those years brings a patch of tears into my throat. My mother was the only child of elderly parents. She had a gawky girlhood, married, bore two children, was widowed, grew heavy, grew old; and all the time she was harbouring this human husk under the folds of her skin. It wasn’t my father, it wasn’t my sister or me, but this compacted little
thing
who followed her through her most secret rituals, bonded to her plunging moods and brief respites, a loyal
other
, given a free ride and now routed out.
    Under the hospital sheets her body already looks lighter, making my body—hovering over her, adjusting her pillow, checking the i.v. needle in her arm—correspondingly heavy.
    I’m tempted to grope under the band of my skirt, grab hold of my flesh and see what it is that’s weighing me down—whether it’s Mary Swann who has taken up residence there or the cool spectre of loneliness that stretches ahead for me. Because it does,
it does
.
    My mother, still sleeping, breathes unsteadily,