The hard, metallic feeling persists. I lie face up on the barge-sized bed, arms rigid at my sides, eyelids heavy as coins, and immediately fall asleep. My dreams feature glass high-rise buildings and insidiously clean bathrooms. Nine hours later I haven’t moved, except for unclenching my fists. I now notice that gold stars are stuck all over the ceiling, some clinging by a single point and some already fallen but commemorated by the glue mark. This sight is not disorienting. I have woken up knowing exactly where I am (the Water’s Edge Hotel, room 1014, Honeymoon Suite) and why (Abel, that bastard).
I take a shower. While shampooing my hair I sense a plunge of dim light behind my left shoulder. “The Angel of Love,” I think wearily, and let myself dwell on the prospect that I have some kind of eye disease that causes me to hallucinate light in my peripheral vision. Either that or I’m delusional. I believed Abel loved me, didn’t I? I look at my belly and remember I was going to say,“A little you in there.” Well, the mad-scientist abortion doctor in Buffalo can have the little him in there. Wrench out its tiny black heart.
I put on my blue jeans and T-shirt, tug the ballet slippers over the bloodied bandages that, despite the shower, hold fast, and limp down to the dining room, where I eat a stunningly bad breakfast of rancid orange juice, undercooked bacon, rubbery scrambled eggs and soggy toast. All the other guests are complaining and spitting mouthfuls back onto their plates. When a woman at the next table turns to me and says,“You must have a cast-iron stomach,” I say,“I can’t really taste anything,” although I can. It’s just that for the first time in days I’m not even slightly nauseated, and so taste is a negligible sensation compared with the relief of effortless swallowing. “Anyway,” I say, touching my belly,“I’ve got to eat. I’m eating for two now.”
Why do I tell her that? Because I want to shock her, I guess (and there it is—the blank expression, the eyes scanning me up and down, then zeroing in on my naked ring finger before she says,“Well, congratulations”). Also because I am eating for two, however reluctantly, however temporarily, and I’m in a mood for looking at things dead on. An hour later, in the taxi on my way back to the airport, I admire the scenery but I don’t try to see the mountains as metaphors for some noble sentiment, and I don’t worry about forgetting what geological era they belong to, either. I think,“This is how it feels to have Abel out of my life.” Everything truer to my own experience of it. In his letters he was always going on about the truth—“The truth shall make you free,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—as if betrayal and pools of vomit were fabrications. Or, even more ridiculous, as if even these things, because they aren’t fabrications, must be counted as beautiful.
I read the J. S. Bach biography. Flying out, the idea was to pick up interesting details for the sake of smartening up my end of the conversation. Going home, I find myself gripped by what now seems to be a cautionary tale about the perils of involving yourself with brilliant, artistic men. Passages such as “never would he use words to explain or justify anything he had done of a personal character” have me nodding and snorting, although I’m just as contemptuous of the saintly, obtuse Anna Magdalena and her serial childbirths (thirteen!) and then her weepy amazement at discovering, after Bach’s death, that he’d made no will. Bach, it seems,“gave no thought to his wife’s financial position.” Had he done so,“she would possibly have escaped life in an almshouse and a pauper’s grave.”
As it was, and if you ask me, she got what she deserved.
We land at sunset. Since my wallet still bulges with money, and since my feet feel like burnt stumps, I treat myself to a taxi. My father is under the impression that a chartered bus is dropping everybody off at the Greenwoods plaza, but if he happens to be looking out the window when the taxi pulls into the driveway, he’ll just assume that the bus must have broken down, some mishap. That I might have lied to him—about anything, ever—won’t enter his mind.
He’s in the kitchen. As soon as I open the front door, he springs out, face all alight. “How was it?” he asks. “How’s our nation’s capital?”
“Still standing.” I pry off the slippers. “Which is more than I can say for myself.”
“Good lord, what happened?”
“My new shoes rubbed the skin right down to the bone.”
“Let’s go into the kitchen.” He takes my arm. “I’ll have a look.”
We sit at the table, and I lift my feet onto his lap. “Did you do this?” he asks of the bandaging.
“A lady did. A nice lady. She gave me the slippers, too.”
He gingerly unpeels one of the Band-Aids that covers the big toe on my left foot. “Some swelling,” he says. “But starting to heal over. She applied iodine, I see.”
‘Yeah.”
“Who was she? A nurse?”
“No. She was just passing by when I noticed the blood gushing out. She took me to an infirmary but the nurse isn’t there on Saturdays, so she did everything herself. We never found out her name but my teacher thought she might be Judy LaMarsh.”
Judy LaMarsh is the only female politician I can think of, probably because I used to have a teacher named Miss LaMarsh. My father looks up. “No kidding?”
“She was ordering everyone around like she was a big wheel.”
“Dark hair? Glasses?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, what do you know?” He smiles. “I thought she’d left Parliament Hill but it’s possible she was back for some reason, visiting someone.”
I hadn’t intended to keep the lie going. On the plane, and even walking up our driveway, I was determined to tell the truth, right down to saying I wanted an abortion. And then I put my feet in his lap.
No, I broke before that: coming into the kitchen and seeing his Sunday dinner of warmed-up meat loaf, nothing else on the table except for the Globe and Mail cryptic crossword, a chewed pencil and his reading glasses, whose missing hinges he has replaced with twisted paperclips. That lonely little scene. Added to which he’s wearing the ugly purple-and-green diamond-patterned sweater-vest I know he thinks my mother would approve of because he bought it out of the Eaton’s catalogue.
How do you drop a brick onto that house of cards? Oh, he’d turn himself inside out trying to be understanding and helpful; there’d be no lectures or demands. He’d probably even drive me to Buffalo if I said my mind was set on going. Afterwards, he’d brood, but not for long. In spite of everything, he’d believe himself to be blessed.
He goes to the bathroom and returns with the first-aid kit. As I watch him dab my blisters with a cotton ball soaked in iodine I feel an almost painful surge of love. He’s talking about Ottawa, a city I’ve never been to and can scarcely picture. He makes it easy, though, by phrasing his end of the conversation in such a way that all I have to do is agree: “Some people think it’s too staid, even for a capital city, too institutional, too grey.”
“They have a point.”
“A shame you missed seeing parliament in session. I presume they at least let you in.”
“Yeah, we got in.”
When I’m cleaned up and rebandaged and my feet set back on the floor, he gives me a probing look that makes me wonder if, after all, he suspects something. Except I’ve had these looks from him before and never felt myself to be at their crux. Those other times I felt either that he was searching for my mother in me (a resemblance, a clue to her behaviour) or that my eyes, because they’re so much like his, had ricocheted him back to himself and his thoughts. Being pregnant, however, I may now be radiating a quality he recognizes but can’t put his finger on. “What?” I say finally.
“Oh …” He shakes his head. “Nothing, nothing. Are you hungry?”
I tell him I ate on the plane and just want to go to bed. “I think I’m still fighting off the flu,” I say. “No—” leaning away as his hand reaches for my forehead,“I don’t have a temperature. I’m just a bit weak. I think I’d better play it safe, though, and stay home from school tomorrow.”
Near dawn I creep down to the kitchen, where he’ll be less likely to hear, and throw up in the sink. I then go back to sleep until Mrs. Carver sits on the edge of my bed, sometime around ten o’clock. She, too, gives me a probing look, her third in less than a week. But where my father seemed to be trying to locate something, I sense that Mrs. Carver is urging me to confess the thing she has already figured out. So I say,“The father isn’t Tim Todd. It’s Abel.”
She blinks.
“You thought it was Tim.”
“What do you …?” She touches the rim of her glasses. “What are you …?”
“You know I’m pregnant.”
Her mouth opens and shuts, opens and shuts.
“I’m pregnant,” I say. “I thought you knew.”
She shakes her head.
I sit up. “Then why do you keep looking at me like that?”
She comes to her feet.
“Just now. I wake up, and there you are looking at me.”
Her eyes circle. She clutches her chest. “I thought …” She gasps.
“I thought … you … were on … on …”
“On what?”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs? What drugs?”
“Mrs. Sawchuk saw you.”
“Mrs. Sawchuk?”—her friend, a middle-aged legal secretary who claims to have been covered in warts before rubbing herself with one of Mrs. Carver’s concoctions.
“You were with a …” She twirls her fingers down each side of her head to describe long, curly hair.
“That must have been Abel. Where? Where did she see us?” But there could only have been the one place, and I answer for her. “At Bloor and Yonge.”
“In a park. You were smoking.”
“So?”
“A pipe.”
I find this entire turn of events incredible. “What would Mrs. Sawchuk know about that?”
“It was last June.”
“And she only just told you?”
“When I told her about the … the vomiting.”
“Well, for Mrs. Sawchuk’s information, smoking marijuana doesn’t make you throw up. You can tell her everything’s okay. I’m not a drug addict. I’m pregnant, that’s all. And I’m going to have an abortion.”
I start crying.
Mrs. Carver sits back on the bed and puts her arms around me. “Shh, shh, shh, shh,” she whispers. She extracts a wad of Kleenex from her sleeve and I blow my nose.
“I don’t know anything about babies,” I say. “I never babysat one. I’ve never even held one.”
She rubs my arm. “Are you sure?”
“I had a test. At the drug store.”
“How far along?”
“Two months.”
“Does Abel …?”
“No. And I’m not telling him, either.”
She points at the wall adjoining my father’s study.
“No, no, he has no idea.” I sink back against the headboard. “There’s a doctor in Buffalo. He doesn’t charge very much.”
She waves her hands. She doesn’t want to hear this.
“I’m getting rid of it,” I say warningly.
“I’ll do it!”
“Get rid of it?”
She nods. She looks alarmingly zealous.
“You’ll operate on me?”
“No! No!” Waving her hands again.
“How?”
“There’s a tea.”
A tea, it turns out, that she gave to her daughter, Stella, eleven years ago when Stella was pregnant out of wedlock. This is stunning news. Happily married Stella, whose childish voice asking over the long-distance crackle,“May I please speak to Mrs. Carver?” has led me to picture an even tinier, more nervous version of her mother. “Is it painful?” I ask, thinking that Stella’s nervousness may have begun after whatever the tea put her through.
Mrs. Carver shrugs. You get cramps (she digs her fists into her stomach) but you can control them by swallowing a spoonful of cod-liver oil every morning and by taking hot baths.
“How often do I take it?”
She holds up four fingers.
“Every four days? Every four hours. At night, too? How long before it starts to work?”
“Until you bleed.”
I sigh. “Okay, well, what does it taste like?”
“Bitter. Bad.”
“What’s in it?”
A disapproving look. She never tells anyone her ingredients.
So either I find my way to Buffalo and let a professional crackpot tug the baby out with tweezers (or whatever he does) but at least get the whole thing over with quickly, or I stay here and kill the baby slowly, with a secret potion that allows me to imagine I’m having a miscarriage and that, because of the cramps and the bitter, bad taste, offers a kind of penance.
Specifically, it tastes like horseradish and rotten eggs. And the cramps are constant, and she should have told me about the dizzy spells and sudden, clanging headaches. Walking, I fix my eyes on a spot in the middle distance so that I don’t stagger. Alice tries to take my arm, but I shake her off, she’s only drawing more attention to me, and I have the feeling that half the school must think I’m stoned. Alice thinks I miscarried on the flight out to Vancouver and am now in the throes of after-effects. (When it came down to it, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.) “I hogged the washroom for at least an hour,” I said. “The stewardess kept knocking on the door and asking if everything was all right.”
‘You poor thing,” Alice says,“to have to go through it all by yourself.”
“God was with me.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic. But He was. He is.”
In the evenings, in the kitchen of her apartment, Mrs. Carver brews enough tea to see me through the next day. We use a duo-Thermos method. When I get home from school I give her my empty Thermos, she replaces it with a full one. I then soak in a scalding bath, which not only eases the cramps but also, apparently, irritates the baby, or “it” as Mrs. Carver counsels we should say so that I don’t start forging a bond. Meanwhile, she prepares a douche meant to further irritate “it.” By the time I’ve finished my bath, the douche is in a miniature turkey baster on my bedside table, and I lie back and squirt into myself the warm, coffee-coloured, tar-smelling liquid, then stay there a while, keeping my legs raised. Afterwards, if I can muster the energy, I go down to the basement and skip rope. The whole point is to make “it” feel unwelcome. You can’t kill it this way but you can drive it to suicide.
My father thinks I’m suffering from menstrual complications and heartbreak. Mrs. Carver, uneasy about my telling an outright lie, said I should just steer clear of him, but I knew he wouldn’t be put off. He’s always on the lookout for a burst appendix, and here I am reeling from room to room, obsessively kneading the heels of my hands down my stomach (because why can’t I just push it out?). Nothing other than the (for him) mortifying subject of my period could have curtailed his craving to take my temperature. The supposed Dear John letter from Abel had him retreating even further. No questions, no indirect prying, only his big commiserating eyes falling on me at supper, trailing after me when we pass in the hall so that at these times my thoughts, affected by his presumption, teeter toward Abel, and beyond that, to a baby in a crib. Just for a split second, though, and then the cramps call me back.
The cramps keep me from sleeping more than two or three hours a night. In my dreams I’m covered in fur, my teeth are falling out. I have a recurring dream that instead of miscarrying I give birth to dozens of tiny babies who already talk in complete sentences but they’re no bigger than mice and they’re shrinking by the hour. I lose them in the cracks of our hardwood floor. I bundle them in winter clothes, line them up in a toboggan and send them down a steep hill. Chattering, they all go flying off. I paw madly through the snow and peer at pieces of grit, wondering,“Is that one?” The love and terror I feel in this dream vanish the instant I wake up. “I’m shaking,” I think with dull surprise. “I’m crying.”