EVEN IF JENNY HADN’T asked me to, I probably would have gone looking for Mom. There was nothing I could help by staying. I couldn’t soothe her agitation or persuade her that her fears weren’t real. Besides, nearly everything she said had some ring of truth to it, and even as I spoke the words to dismiss it, my gut churned with the slim possibility that she was right. People were watching her, “observing,” as she put it. They could take Sunny away; it’s not as if it hadn’t happened before. Bad things happened to people all the time. They could happen to us. They came in threes. I knew it. Jenny knew it.
But I didn’t believe, as Jenny did, that her being held in hospital, given various doses of drugs, some that made her inconsolably sad, others that made her stony and blank, had anything to do with Mom’s disappearance. No one knew where she was, and, furthermore, everyone seemed to take it as a given that she was somewhere she didn’t want to be found. I guess there was no law against deserting your children. It was a crime only to us. And it happened gradually, like winter coming, the way you don’t put your bike away until one day it’s buried in snow and you realize that the days of bare legs and lung-burning speed are gone and you don’t really believe they’ll be back.
To an outsider, it was almost like she planned it.
“I want you to go,” Jenny said to me one evening. It was June. Outside, sunlight and long shadows spilled across the green hospital lawn. Blue hydrangeas glowed with the last light. Sister Anne and I had walked over from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, through the smells of cedar and ocean air. I had told Sister Anne I was leaving.
“I think it’s best, Maggie. There’s nothing you can do here. Jenny’s in good hands. We’ll take care of both of them. I promise I’ll visit her every day. She’s a gutsy girl. She and Sunny can come back and stay with us once Jenny’s able.”
So I had been prepared to tell Jenny. But she beat me to it.
“You have to look for her. She needs to know what’s going on. They won’t let me out of here until we find her.”
I took a breath. I was about to protest. The psychiatrist had warned me not to “indulge her delusions.” But I was tired of fighting.
“I’ll try,” I promised.
“They won’t let me nurse Sunny,” she said, and the tears welled up and ran down her cheeks.
“I know, Jenny.”
“It’s because of the drugs. It’s for her own safety.”
“I know. But she likes the bottle. She’s getting chubby.”
“Do you think so? You don’t think she’ll be damaged? Sometimes an hour or two goes by and I realize I haven’t thought of her at all. It’s like I forget I even have a baby.”
“You’re a good mother, Jenny. Look at you. You’re in the hospital, you’re sick and still you’re worried about being a good mother. That’s the sign right there that you are.”
“Maybe the same thing is happening to me as happened to Mom.”
“No.”
She cried then and all through the rest of visiting hours, even when Sister Anne brought Sunny in from the nursery and Jenny gave her a bottle and Sunny clutched her finger and gurgled happily. A little baby girl trying to soothe her girl of a mother. Then Jenny fell asleep with Sunny on her chest and the tears continued to soak Jenny’s hair.
Sister Anne and I took Sunny back to the nursery, then on our way out we spoke to the nurse about the crying.
“It’s not an exact science,” the nurse said. “The doctors try to get the dose right. It might take another week or so. She’ll improve gradually. It takes time.”
—
Jenny had given me some of the money that John had sent. He had also offered to buy her a car, but that was no help to me yet. I made a list of people I could trust. It was a short list: John, Vern, Uncle Leslie. Vern had got some summer work with his other uncle near Bella Coola. John was still in California. Uncle Leslie never knew my mother, so I couldn’t picture myself asking him for help.
That night I listened to the low rumble of traffic from Granville Street and I tried to pretend it was a river, the Chilcotin in early summer, rushing along with the sun glinting off it. I dipped a tin pot in the flow; it spilled onto my legs. An eagle whistled. I realized that I couldn’t wait to get away, from Vancouver, from Williams Lake, and from the storm of worry that boiled and thundered in the heart of me.