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

on this ward, she was here after she had Mary Rose—the second Mary Rose, the one who lived. She is not crazy, she knows this is Germany not Winnipeg, she knows it is Christmas. The ring in the box is blue. Like a stillborn baby. This baby wasn’t stillborn though, so why has he given her a stillborn ring? This baby was born alive. She heard him cry. They did not let her hold him—“Best not to,” they said. They took him away and called a priest.
    She opens her eyes. Her husband is here, sitting by her bed behind a newspaper. He is in his uniform, he must have come from work. The ring is now on her hand.
    “It’s pretty,” she says.
    He looks up. “So are you.” He rises and leans down to kiss her on the forehead.
    Her face is wet. This keeps happening. She squeezes his hand so he won’t worry. He looks thin. “Who’s feeding you?”
    “Armgaard.”
    She lets out a dismissive puff of air through dry lips.
    “And Eileen and those gals have been around,” he adds. “They brought a stew. Wasn’t as good as yours, though.” He smiles. “And don’t worry about the baby, she’s fine.”
    It takes her a moment to understand that he means Mary Rose, who is, after all, still the “baby” of the family—the baby at home, not the one in the morgue. He closes his hand around hers and she feels the ring bite against the neighbouring fingers. He is so good to her.
    When she wakes up, it is dark and he is gone.
    •
    It is five o’clock: witching hour for children and puppies, who tend to go rangy around then, bitching hour for those returning home from work, worry-and-wander hour for old folks suffering from sundowning. It is the primal tilt between day and night that strikes low-grade dread into the heart of
Homo sapiens
, a holdover from the time when we were prey. It is why cocktail hour was invented.
    Mary Rose is successfully negotiating a cocktail-free hour, blowing bubbles in the front yard for Maggie and Daisy who lunge and snap joyously while Matthew draws calmly with chalk on the flagstones. His flaxen hair falls across his serious blue eyes as he outlines a car, a dinosaur … His ability to focus goes with a strong, well-coordinated little body and lends his demeanour a degree of maturity beyond his five years. Before leaving to pick him up, Mary Rose attempted to restore the fractal tracks and to situate Percy, Thomas, Annabel and the others amid the possibilities, but he smelled a rat. “It’s not the same,” he pronounced gravely. She considered telling him the trains had come alive and rearranged things on their own. Would he buy it? Would it be wrong? “I’m afraid Maggie was playing with your train set, Matthew.”
    She braced herself, but he was philosophical. Even indulgent. “Oh, Maggie,” he said. “She’s still a baby.”
    So it is with a sense of her tranquility being ruffled, like a glassy lake by a finger of wind at dusk, that she watches her brother, Andy-Patrick, pull up in a shiny new BMW. He is not a frequent visitor—likely to drop by only when the interval between girlfriends becomes a drought of more than a few days or, more recently, whenever he renews his resolution to remain faithful to his fiancée, Shereen, who is often away in the course of her job as a drug pusher. Pharmaceutical sales rep. Mary Rose tends to get worked up when obliging Andy-Patrick with a sisterly lecture as to his shortcomings. Like a ringsidecoach, patching him up, sending him back in, “get up off the couch, listen to her without trying to fix her, change your sweatpants.”
    “Shereen left, eh,” he says, and closes the car door with a substantial Bavarian thunk.
    The kids mob him, Daisy dances him up the flagstones, administering kisses of bovine heft.
    “Where’s she off to this time?”
    “She
left
left.”
    “Oh.”
    “It’s okay,” he says, beeping the car locked. “I’ve healed.”
    The scent of the Euro-male is upon him: coffee, cigarettes, cologne
pour lui
. He joins them