SHE NEVER EVEN GOT IN TROUBLE ABOUT THE CARTOONS she put up, the protest cartoons, which just showed how effective they were. She spent the next two months working at The Agora, but by April, she was too big to work, and so big that even the Sarge didn’t say anything mean to her, which was alarming in and of itself—how different had this new monster body made her?
Bill borrowed a car from the union steward on the Longshore, and after giving her one of Edna’s Miltowns, they told Maureen they were just going for a ride up around the bay and would maybe stop to get an ice cream cone in Furey’s in Holyrood. Of course, that should have made Maureen suspicious, but she was so fat and so uncomfortable and so swollen up with the baby, she didn’t say anything. She laboriously got herself into the back of the car and somehow failed to notice her already packed hospital overnight bag being put in the trunk. When they sailed past Furey’s, Maureen was truly taken aback. They took her out to the Carbonear cottage hospital, where Maureen’s dad had been born, brought into the world by the famous Dr. Young. They told Maureen that she was being taken to the hospital in Carbonear to have her baby, and that all the arrangements had been made. The way Edna said “arrangements,” the set of her jaw and the hard looks she kept giving Maureen let her know that the fantasy world she’d been living in for the last couple of months—where she’d hoped and even prayed that Cuba might launch a nuclear missile that would hit directly on Princess Street, or that she’d die down dead before she reached nine months, or that the house would spontaneously combust and all hands would succumb to smoke inhalation, or, most ridiculous of all, that she would get to keep the baby, who would be brought up by Edna and Bill—was just that, a fantasy, and it was never going to be anything else. Arrangements had been made to give her baby away.
Maureen cried the whole way from Furey’s in Holyrood all the way to the hospital. She couldn’t stop. Of course, she knew that no one in their right mind would want the Sarge to be the mother of some poor innocent baby—and what help had Bill ever been to any of them?—but better the devil you know. How could she let the baby go, even though she’d prayed for its disappearance day after bloated day? But it was her baby; she’d been growing it, and, for the past month, growing it was all she could manage. She had spent days just sitting there, a huge mound of pulsing, throbbing, kicking, growing life. She was on a train where there was no getting off. She was a huge, ever-expanding blob of non-thinking. She was too big to think; all she could do was hope. She just hoped senselessly that everything would work out. Part of her wanted Edna and Bill to keep the baby, but part of her wanted the whole thing to have never happened, that somehow, magically, the last eight months had been a dream and that, through some sorcery, her life would go back to normal, and the baby would . . . Her mind wouldn’t let her go any further down that road, but now it was obvious that the Sarge and Bill had already, without ever talking to her, made their “arrangements” and that the baby, her baby, was going to be taken from her. She knew that in some secret, unknowable part of herself, she had been longing, right from the beginning, for this baby, because this baby would love her the way she wanted to be loved. She couldn’t stop crying—all the way through Bay Roberts, Clarke’s Beach, Spaniard’s Bay—though she knew that no amount of begging or crying or effing or blinding was ever going to change their minds now.
“My dear, you’ve got to stop crying. Your water’ll never break,” her father said. “Shure you got no water left in ya to break, you’re after cryin’ it all outta ya! Stop! Stop now! You’re just gonna make yourself sick, Maureenie!”
“THIS IS KIDNAPPING!” Maureen screamed from the back.
“This is happening for your own good,” said Edna. “Yes, that’s all you need now—and you a little bit of a thing—is a youngster hanging off ya. Shure you’re as wild as a billy goat already.”
Before Maureen drowned in a pool of her own tears in the back seat of the borrowed car, they arrived at Carbonear hospital and Maureen met the great Dr. Young. Bill’s people had been in service to the famous Dr. Young’s crowd. Maureen’s Gran was the housekeeper, and her Poppy, Ambrose, had looked after the grounds for the Young family, and that left Bill feeling like he was a serf and that Dr. Young was the lord of the manor, and when you were a serf and you had a problem, you could bring that problem to the seigneur, and that’s what Maureen’s parents were doing now: bringing her, the problem, to Dr. Young, who was so old he looked like he was barely alive. But he had gone ahead and set up the whole adoption thing. The baby would be taken by a couple from up on the mainland.
Maureen’s mother explained, “They’re doctors, maybe both of them, or maybe a doctor and his nurse, and they’ll know how to look after a little infant baby better than some chit of a child like you, ’cause let’s face it, Dr. Young, she can barely even look after herself.”
Since Edna had first found out about the pregnancy and had gone mad for a day or two, this was the most she had ever said to Maureen about the baby. Though someone was always talking on Princess Street, no one ever really said anything—not about anything that mattered anyway. Nothing was said about Bill’s drinking, or about what would happen to Kathleen, or about Edna’s hysterical cruelty, which exploded daily around their house like shrapnel, or about Maureen and the baby. Not that Maureen ever broached the subject herself. She was as cowardly as the rest of them, fearful of what someone might say to her, or even worse, what she might say to one of them.
“A baby . . . havin’ a baby,” her mother kept saying over and over and over again until Maureen finally screamed, “STOP IT!” They gave her an epidural and then put her on a drip. They asked her to count back from ten. Maureen was saying, “But I don’t want to be drug . . .”
AT SOME POINT, MAUREEN DREAMED THAT SHE CAME to—or maybe she actually did come to—and saw a nurse take a swaddled baby, a baby with a shock of flaming red hair, out of the room. When she really did wake up, her mother and father and old Dr. Young were at the foot of her bed. Her father, who she knew really resented Dr. Young, was standing next to him, all smiles. Bill practically had his forelock tugged right off his head. Maureen took this in before she opened her mouth and started screaming.
“For the love and honour of God, keep your voice down! Don’t mind the child, Dr. Young. She’s just, well, you know, she’s been through a good bit,” Edna said, giving the doctor her best servile smile.
Maureen kept screaming. Dr. Young, without batting an eyelash, bent down and smacked her hard across the face, which, of course, had the desired effect and immediately shut her up, but not for long.
“Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby? Mom, what have you done with my baby?”
“Now, Reenie, you gotta put all that old nonsense behind ya. Doesn’t she, Dr. Young?” Maureen’s mother had on her wouldn’t-say-shit-if-her-mouth-was-full-of-it voice, giving the old doctor ingratiating nods, grateful smiles and apologetic looks. “Now, Reenie, you got a chance, a chance to start over.”
“WHERE’S MY BABY?” Maureen screamed.
“And that’s what you’re gonna do, isn’t she, Dad?” the Sarge continued, totally ignoring Maureen’s screams, and smiling and nodding toward Dr. Young. “That little baby is gone on to a better place, Maureen.”
“What? My baby’s dead?”
“No, foolish arse. It’s gone up to the mainland somewhere with its new mommy and new daddy, who will take good care of it.” Again, the phony smile for Dr. Young.
“It? It? What did I have?”
“Shure what odds what you had, it’s done now, over and done with, and as soon as you’re healed up . . . ‘down below’ . . . we’re going back home. Now, say thank you to Dr. Young. Go ahead, say thank you to the man who helped you out. Even though God alone knows you don’t deserve any help.”
Maureen’s mother was forgetting she was in the presence of the great Dr. Young. She was forgetting her mommy act and was talking more like her real self.
“WHAT DID I HAVE?” Maureen screamed.
“Shure you’re out beatin’ the street all hours of the day and night like a common slut, up there in Montreal at the Expo, welcoming flags of all nations. I suppose God alone knows what it is you had.”
“It’s a baby, Mommy.”
“Yes, a baby, and good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“Keep your chin up, young lady,” Dr. Young said as he made his way out of the room. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
Then her mother and father left too, and for the first time in at least the last six months, Maureen felt like she’d been left completely alone. She was empty—but emptier than just not having the baby inside of her, empty in a way she didn’t understand. She didn’t know how she was going to go on now. The last few months had been all about the baby and now the baby was gone—gone out of Carbonear, if she could believe her mother, gone off the island of Newfoundland, gone . . . she didn’t know where. How was she ever going to find her baby again?