Free SSC (2012) Adult Onset by Ann-marie MacDonald Page A

Sounds of traffic bulge as they near the intersection with busy Bathurst Street, but as they arrive at the lights in front of the corner store, strains of Albinoni’s statelyAdagio bathe them along with the plants that the owner is placing outside on racks.
    “Hello.” The lady almost sings it. “How are you?”
    “Hi, Winnie.”
    The music and plants create a buffer between the sidewalk and gritty Bathurst Street and as she waits for the lights to change, Mary Rose is held in a bubble of time, puffy and soft. No sooner has she turned her face to the sun, however, than she experiences a pang. She ought to phone her mother right now and just plain listen while the old darling loops on. Her mother has taken to talking about the lost babies, repeating stock phrases—Mary Rose noticed it last summer, and more recently when her parents visited in early January. Perhaps it is a feature of aging; tightly packed cargo from the past coming loose, sliding about below decks, making itself felt after decades—Mary Rose could understand if her mother’s need to tell and retell were evidence of a grief deferred. But what is disconcerting, even eerie, is the degree of animation that has crept into Dolly’s accounts. She tells them almost as if they were funny stories.
    She never recollects the events in reliable order and neither does Duncan with his steel-trap mind. At the mention of Alexander’s name, there ensues a customary muddled working back through time in an effort to determine whether Dolly’s mother died before or after he was born, and how many days he lived, was it eight? Three? … As though it had all happened in wartime and, after the bombs had fallen and the sirens were stilled, fragments of events had been put back together in the wrong order, with gaps.
    The light turns green and they push off—she coughs and feels a sudden kink in her throat—she mustn’t get sick until Hil gets home. The stroller grinds to a halt in the middle of the intersection where cars are paused like snorting horses at the lights. Maggie has managed to kick off one of her boots, which is now lodged in the undercarriage. Mary Rose bends to retrieve it, sustains a sandpapery smoochfrom Daisy and rises in time to avoid being run over by some idiot in a Smart Car.
    “Back off!” she bellows.
    Already repenting the adrenal expenditure, she shepherds them to the other side of Bathurst.
    She is uncertain how many “others” there were, but she does know, thanks to Maureen, that one of them went down the toilet in Kingston. Their house was new and therefore, she told herself, unhaunted. Although who is to say an embryo is not robust enough to haunt a house—even a suburban split-level? It had a soul, according to the Church. And yet that soul was not welcome in Heaven any more than Other Mary Rose’s had been. What did God do with all those souls in Limbo? Were they recycled? Harvested like stem souls, capable of conferring immortality? Heroes often enter the Underworld in quest of a lost soul, but Mary Rose cannot think of any who have entered Limbo—“The Other Place”—for the same purpose. She ought to make a note of this. For the third novel.
    She’ll jot it down later, they’re at the school. And there is her beautiful boy, lined up with his classmates on the other side of the glass door, waiting to be dismissed. Waiting to run to her.
    •
    She does not remember her husband having brought it, but it is sitting open on her bedside stand: a grey velvet jewellery box. In it is a ring. Milky blue, hint of iridescence, a moonstone. The box is open, so she must have opened it. This keeps happening. It is as though she opens her eyes on a scene from a movie, then the movie skips, sometimes backwards sometimes forwards. It is difficult to get hold of the story. In between the bits the screen goes black. This is probably due to the drugs they aregiving her. Why are they giving her drugs? She is not sick.
    This is her second time