Friday, October 11, 2024

A Singing Tree (Part Six of Six)

 

ZOË   

     Fuck!     I am enormous.  More than six months along.  This so-called “miracle” stinks.  All my clothes have stretched way out.  I can’t turn over in bed so I’m stuck lying on my side all night, like a beached beluga.  I have piles.  I didn’t even know what they were until I got pregnant.  I’ve changed my mind.  I want to take it back.  Return to sender.  I don’t want to be a mother, or even a “co-mother” like Cass says.  “Cow-mother” is more like it, at my size.  I have big tits for the first time in my life, but they’re sloppy, like udders.  You bet this is bringing up a lot of “issues”, such as:  if it’s this bad now, how is it going to be when the little bugger is actually born? 

     And the dreams.  They’re disgusting.  Birth defects, cleft palates, extra fingers, horrible accidents, the baby sliding out of me and landing head-first on the floor.  Falling down the stairs with the little blighter and being charged with manslaughter.  Cassie’s into books on prenatal influences now and says every single thought and feeling I have will influence the baby’s development and psychic wellbeing.  At this rate it’ll be born with two heads.

     Speaking of.  Nobody knows where David is.  We’ve been collecting his mail for him while he goes on this mysterious “trip”, and not long ago he got a letter from his sister Leslie, the crazy one.  Cass absolutely would not allow me to open it. “It’s private stuff,” she said.

     Yeah, I have a sister too, and she had a baby at fifteen and gave it up for adoption.  I think she popped a mainspring mentally over that episode, although I know it’s the “noble” thing to do.  What gets me is that even though this is a wanted pregnancy, or at least a planned one, I still have all these lousy negative feelings – “ambivalence”, Cass calls it.  We still can’t agree on a name.  I don’t want to call him something that will be an embarrassment to him later on in life.  Cass came up with a real ring-a-ding-dinger the other day – “Cassidy”, which she called “a variation on my own name” (like hell it is!  Cassie’s real name is Sandra.  As a matter of fact, I saw her high school yearbook and she used to sign her name “Sandee”.)  I said, “Yeah, and he’ll be called Hopalong, you wait and see.”  “No she  won’t.”  And that’s another thing.  The sex of this baby changes like lightning.  We could find out the sex any time we wanted to but Cass thinks it would create “gender expectations”.  So how is it when Cass refers to the baby, it’s always a “she”?

     If it is, we should consider Susan Sandra, a combination of our old rejected names.  At least it’s honest, and less pretentious than the Gaias, Indigos, Quades, Netonias, Velvas and Willows that Cass keeps on coughing up.

     Who’d want to name their kid after a tree?

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     First I got a terrible letter. Even the handwriting didn’t look right (though at the best of times David’s hand looks like a long line of frazzled wire).  It was almost like a satire of someone who was mentally ill, so at first I actually felt some hope.  Then I realized with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that he was running true to form – turning into every other crazy person I had ever met, though expressed in somewhat more articulate terms.

     “God couldn’t be everywhere,” he opened cheerily, “so He created Satan.”  And I thought to myself:  Jesus God, he’s even doing the Satan bit.  That line is so old and tired, right up there with space aliens controlling your thoughts.  Next he’ll be wrapping his head in aluminum foil to keep out the negative vibrations.

     It was a long rambling thing about Leslie and life and bitterness and music, maybe based partly on Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament (David can be dramatic), but with real raw anguish peeping through.  And there were clues as to where he was.  A hospital.  A psych ward.  I was a little relieved.  Not living under some bridge, or jumping off one (there are too many bridges in this town).  Even in his letter the place exhaled the same grey atmosphere of every psych ward I’ve ever been incarcerated in, and seemed to be full of the same Nazi doctors, not that David’s current perception of people is very accurate.  In our illness, we are all the same, even surrounded by the same henchmen, prison guards with their own sick need to marshall the sick.  Of course David right now wouldn’t know human compassion if it bit him, and that too is part of the illness.

     It didn’t take much to figure out which hospital.  There were these cryptic references to Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, a mention of an August birth-date  (and he always claims that astrology is bunk – so how does he know which sign is which?), and howlingly, a statement:  "I’m telling the truth” – in other words, “not lyin’”.  So he did want me to come see him in the Lion’s Gate Hospital, but perhaps didn’t know the proper etiquette to invite someone to the psych ward.

     I had to hold my breath to keep out the stink of grey broccoli served on dull green, scratched plastic trays, hold a shield against my eyes to blot out the sight of shuffling bathrobed inmates, name and number dangling from their wrists like newborn babies.  The same East Indian woman on the pay phone, howling in a universal language of grief that she wants to go home.  The same smug, rotund European doctor striding the halls, Dr. Pavlov (Mengele?), heavily accented, hair full of oil, out of touch with the decade, if not the century.  Still touting Freud.  Still dirtily referring to penis envy and getting a hard-on behind the desk with young female patients while plying them with questions about “ze orgasm”. Oh, I shouldn’t be bitter, but sameness infuriates me.  The lack of change.  How long has it been since I’ve been in – seven years?  All the cells of my body have changed since then, so supposedly I am a new person.  But the memories are old as bedlam.  Craziness is craziness, a sort of psychic bailing out.  And people act that way, in part, because they are expected to.  It’s part of the etiquette of the deranged.

     I went through the usual heart-thudding process of getting lost in the place,blundering into rooms blue with forbidden smoke billowed out by coughing dowagers in for the fifteenth time, missing their Yorkies.  All wearing the same straining mauve polyester I remember from other places, other times.  But when I found him my heart didn’t sink.  He was even wearing clothes and looked clear-eyed.  Shockingly – no, horrifyingly – I felt a sudden, massive rush of sexual desire, unstoppable, and for the thousandth time thanked God that women don’t get erections.  “Hello, David.”

    “How are the cats?”  (He’s going to be okay.)

     “Fat and happy and unconditionally loved.”

     “Clara eating?”

     “Like a veritable fiend.”

     “How’s Stanzi?”  (Oh my God.)

     “David. . . “

     Then he wept.  “It was my fault.  I shouldn’t have let her out of the house.  She died in my arms.  I always do this.  I have a demon.  My mother always told me – “

     “Your mother was insane.”

     “Bad choice of words, Lucy!”

     “David, you’re not nuts.  You’re just having an el foldo.”

     “Is that the technical term?”

     “Yes.  This is all about Leslie and the past.”

     “Leslie.  I crushed her too.  I pushed her under the wheels as surely as I killed my Stanzi.”

     “Get me some air freshener.  I think I smell bullshit.”

     For just the flickering of a second, I thought I saw a suppressed smile in the corner of one eyebrow.  The old, ironic David.  Then the curtain closed again.

     “You don’t know the whole story, Lucy.”

     “Isn’t it time you told someone?”

     “They don’t believe me.  The memories just came flooding back when I landed here.”

     “So they’re calling it ‘false memory syndrome’?”

     “Sort of like that.  Maybe they’re afraid of lawsuits.  God, I wish I smoked.”

     “You’ll get used to it,” I said, waving a stray bedroom slipper at the creeping blue haze from the next curtained-off bed.  We heard the hollow boom of a juicy, phlegm-rattling cough, the sound of suicide on the installment-plan.

     “I used to sit with her on the front-porch swing,” he began dreamily, and then I knew it would all come out in one piece, so I waited.  “It felt as if we were the only two people in the whole world.  She understood Rachmaninoff, and Liszt.  God, you should have heard her at the piano.  Her Scriabin was like a dream.  My thug of a father wanted her to play show tunes for his stinking gin buddies.  Did I tell you she was a composer?  Just like Clara Schumann.”  He covered his face with his hands.  A nurse barged her fat head in the door and twanged, “Yes or no?”  “Yes,” David replied miserably.  The head popped back out.

    “My God, they still do that?”

     “They’ve brought it back.  Too many constipated patients.  You know, from all the meds.  I haven’t gone in three days.”

     “Everybody lies.”

     “It’s just easier to say yes.”

     “I know.”

     “We’d sit with our thighs pressed together and - . My God, it was like a desert island.  An escape from all the lunacy of the world.  You know what I looked like then?”

      “Gilligan?”

     “Worse.  Gollum from ‘Lord of the Rings’.  Just disgusting, skinny with bad skin and a stutter.  Leslie didn’t mind.  She was my haven.”

    “So now you’re going to tell me that things got out of hand and you’ve been destroyed with guilt ever since?”

     “Lucy, try to understand.  We never talked about sex in our house – I mean never.  My mother probably bathed with her clothes on.”

     “That’s the kind of house where it happens.”

     “It was as if we had discovered this transporting miracle of sensation.”

     “Orgasm?”

     “We didn’t even know what to call it,” he said dreamily, probably turned-on.  I felt an uncomfortable tightening between my legs and wondered once again why the sexual urge is so arrogant.  No wonder it leads us into temptation, not to mention abuse.

     “You didn’t rape her.”

     “Of course not.  We kept our clothes on.  But it’s amazing how much – “

     “You don’t have to tell me.”

     “We know what kind of damage incest does.  And I know it happened, no matter what kind of theories are floating around in psychiatric circles these days.  Look what happened to her, Lucy!  One psych ward after another.  They say she has a ‘chemical imbalance’ and that it’s probably ‘genetic’.  Well, that’s just the flavor of the month.”

     “I know.”

     “Maybe the whole family is crazy, I don’t know.  Dr. Karlov keeps on talking about ‘confused boundary issues’, as if the whole thing boils down to geography.”

     “Maybe it does.  Proximity, hormones, a wretched adolescence. . . Did you smoke up?”

     His eyes flew open.  “How did you know?”

     I shrugged.  “Me and Andrew. . . “

     “My parents would have had me killed, or at least incarcerated.  But it was only a couple of joints.  We pretended we were Berlioz and Harriet Smithson.”

     “Was it ‘fantastique’?”

     “Lucy!”  But then he smiled, an awful, subversive, lifeward, resurrecting smile, and then I really did know that he would recover.

     “I know, I’m terrible.  But the truth is, I’ve been there.  You learn to laugh or die.”

     “Well, the meds are finally kicking in.”

     “What are you on?”

     “Lithium.”

     “Prepare to get fat.”

     “It’s just a trial.  God, you should see the size of the pill, like an elongated golf ball – “

     “And the blood tests!”

     “And the shaky hands.”

      “And that funny taste in your mouth, like bug spray – “

      “It’s only a salt,” he said defensively.

     “Yeah, and booze is just rotten grain.  Lithium changes you.”

     “But it doesn’t take away the pain,” he murmured.

     “Nothing does. “ I brushed back a stray lock of his hair, which looked surprisingly clean.  “Well, time does.  Determination does.  This is just a way-station, David.  All part of life’s rich pageant.  You don’t live here  Remember that.  Hey, you don’t even own a Yorkie.”

    Then – miracle of miracles – a clap of thunder, a carillon of life – he laughed!

     “But the cats miss you, David.  Come home soon.  Maybe you and Leslie can talk.”

     “She’s beyond hope.”

     “Don’t be too sure of that.  Maybe she’s like you – a tough little customer.  She has her music and her intelligence.  Those are both powerful saving graces.  Look at Beethoven.  Deaf, ugly, unlucky in love – “

     “Today we’d call him socially challenged.”

     “And he made art.  No matter what.  He wrote about joy, the crazy  bastard.  What did he have to be joyful about?”

     “His Immortal Beloved.”

    ‘Phah.  She didn’t exist in fleshly form.  He was in love with art, so passionately that art incarnated into all that incredible music.”

     “You should make a movie out of it.”

     “Someone already has.”  A beat.  “Get better, David.”

     “I’ve missed half the season.”

     “They’ll understand.  Even Beethoven needed time off.”

     “I’ll be so out of practice, I’ll – “

    “You’re better already.”  I kissed him, and left.

      Update:  today I got a call from Brian’s folks asking me if I’d take back the cats, as their owner would be back home by the first of the month, only a couple of days away.  Cassandra called them, apparently.  (God, this Zoë must be about ready to pop.  I wonder what David thinks about that.)  I know lithium can be a sort of mental springboard for some people, but I couldn’t help but wonder  - .  At least our talk didn’t hurt.  Call it my social work.  Took a shower afterwards to wash the stale smell off me, the burnt-rubber stink of nicotene gas. So he’s out.  Flown the coop, and probably back at work at the earliest possible date, which is the best thing for him.

     So Jesus and cats aren’t the only creatures that resurrect.  Some of us are doomed to life.  To stick our hearts back in, even upside-down if we have to, and carry on.

   MONIKA

     I have a new theory about life – not original, really, but taken from anthropology – “punctuated equilibrium”, meaning that things go along, and go along, pretty much the same, in a state of boring stasis, and then – boom!  Change, change, change.  Everybody changes chairs, so to speak.

    When I finally did get together with Lucy she seemed kind of tapped out, even a bit fed up with her violin, and totally drained by David who is now on the mend, thank God.  He apparently received some sort of crucial letter from somebody and it let him out of the trap, so to speak.  But I know Lucy.  She gave him a transfusion and it worked, but at what cost?  Lucy has a way of receiving other people’s pain, but in so doing she becomes a sort of receptacle for their psychic poison.

     Meanwhile, I’m the one who’s up on the see-saw now, with my new venture in midwifery (at last!  Something lifeward, creative in the most primal sense).  Let’s face it, I need the extra income, and the thought of assisting at births absolutely fascinates me.  The training will be relatively long and I’ll have to sit in on a lot of births, but I can’t think of anything more enthralling and renewing.

     But it’s the other big development that really has me humming.  And the hard thing is, I really can’t tell Lucy about it, not yet anyway.  It was just one of those things but it has me foaming like hot cappuccino (can you believe what this has done to my brain?).  We ran into each other completely by accident, but I knew him from when Lucy introduced him to me several months ago.

     Rafe Williams.

     My God, Lucy was right.  Perhaps this guy is only good for one thing, but what a genius he is.  Why shouldn’t there be sexual savants?  Talent shows up in every other field of human endeavor.  Why not this one?  He plays me like a cello.  I am humming with hormones and maybe now I understand Lucy’s ripe, bursting state a few months ago.  I only resented it then.  Oh, of course Lucy picked up in a flash that I was seeing someone; frequent orgasm affects the skin, not to mention the aura, and she saw the glow before I even opened my mouth.  But I played it canny and didn’t reveal a lot of details “because I’m not sure it’ll work out long-term”.

     “Who cares?” Lucy replied.  “I’m just glad one of us is getting some.  Too bad it always seems to be one at a time.”

     “Your time’ll come.”

      “I hope not.  I have enough to do taking care of David.”

     “You’re not – you know – “

     “With David?  Are you kidding?  That’d be incest.”

     “But haven’t you – “

     “Oh, shut up.  I hate psychics.  They’re always in-seeing into stuff that’s none of their beeswax.”

     “Fair enough.  Urges don’t count anyway.”

     “Good thing too, or we’d both be arrested.”  We guffawed in the old, belly-rocking way.  Like old times, except that life keeps on rocketing us forward, events unfolding like labor-contractions that squeeze the course of  life ahead and ahead.  No one warned me that birth would keep on happening, perhaps unto my death.

 ANDREW

     There are times when seeing everything is an anguish. We have no way of stopping time, the speeding flow of events.  It frankly sickens me to know what lies ahead for Lucy, even though I’m supposed to be more evolved than that.  I should be able to see that it is all for the best, that everything happens for the sake of gaining wisdom and strength.  But at such a cost!  I look at God and wonder, “What can she be thinking of?”  She is to me as water to a fish, my ground of being, but I cannot understand her mind.  All things seem settled, then – change, change, change, and not always for the better.

     Lucy will be grateful for all her strength in the coming weeks, but events will still stretch her moral fabric as far as it can go, and farther.  “Stretch marks!” she’ll cry, never quite losing her grim survivor’s sense of humor.  Comfort will come from an unexpected source, and as always in these cases, grace will flood in.  Lucy will stand in church with tears streaming down her face, singing, “She comes sailing on the wind, her wings flashing in the sun/On a journey just begun, she flies on.”  And for the first time she will know in her core what those words mean.   Having developed a strength, she will now be called upon to use it as never before.  And yes, I see the beauty of it!  And yes – how I wish I could spare her completely from what is about to happen!

 CASSANDRA MARTIN

     You could have gagged me with a feather.  At rehearsal the other day, there he was, the prodigal son, David, sauntering in as cool as can be, blithely ignoring the palpable wash of concern swirling all around him.  He came in and stood there by his chair for a moment while everyone held their breath and tried very hard not to look at him.  Then – horror of horrors – he began to slowly unbutton his shirt.

    One button.  Two buttons.  No, no – three. Then:  “Nah,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind,” quickly buttoning himself back up again.  The room burst into spontaneous applause and David, grinning like a fiend, took a bow.  So things are back to normal, as we like to call it.

     I don’t notice any difference in his playing, but then that’s not surprising, since he’d rather practice than sleep.  He does look good.  Something must have happened when he read that letter from Leslie, though God knows what was in it.  He just sort of went back to his natural color again.  Obviously he doesn’t want anyone to make a fuss.  People expect oboeists to be a little weird anyway – it’s from forcing air into that tiny little reed.  A chronic lack of oxygen.  We’ll call his absence an “oxygen leave” and let it go at that.

       And to think we almost lived together once.  We tried it out for a few days, but I couldn’t stand the way he counted out his Spoon-sized Shredded Wheat into the bowl every morning (there had to be exactly twenty-four biscuits to match the caloric count on the side of the box.  I know Beethoven used to count coffee beans, but this was too much.)  He said I had “breath odors” in the morning.  Well, his feet smell.  I don’t care if he’s a musician, he sweats and farts like anybody.  No wonder he lives alone.

    I think Zoë’s pretty okay, considering.  We have mere weeks left and I try not to think too much about the actual event.  We’re trying to arrange a home birth because hospitals are so awful, I don’t care if they’ve improved, it’s all that technology, fetal monitors, unnecessary episiotomies, etc.  Enough to scare the hell out of you at a time when you’re supposed to be calm.  She’s down to a pack a day which for her is a miracle.  But it could affect the size of the baby, whom at the moment is named Calista (though Zoë calls her “Calista-my-ass”).

     Zoë’s tongue could open letters.  My suggestion of Cassidy, a variation on my own name, was shot down immediately.  “Why not call it Cassette?”  she snarled.

     I didn’t appreciate it.

  LUCY’S JOURNAL

     Bad dreams last night. Way bad.  Dr. Pavlov won’t leave my head.  I was “assigned” to him (or he to me) every time I landed in Silverbrooke nut farm.  Which was often.  The two of us together were a bad match; he’d talk to Michael about me while I was in the room, as if I were a bad dog at the vet’s.

     “What is your first memory?”  he asked in the manner of an interrogator, fingering a pencil in a way that seemed vaguely obscene.

     There was no hesitation.  “My father sodomizing me when I was three.”

     His lips tightened.  I had a gauze bandage with salve under it around my neck, to ease the burn from my bathrobe cord.

     “Memory doesn’t go back that far,” he stated.  “It begins at age five.”

     Thus, the price of visiting David in the psych ward.  Dredged murk from a seething, stinking past.  I’ve been jumpy lately, the “no-skin-on” feeling.  During my session with Zoltán I was attempting to play Grieg’s lovely Ich Liebe Dich, and even with my raw tone and jittery bow the sheer greatness of the music started to get to me and I felt my face swell with incipient tears.

     I felt the need to explain myself to Zoltán, who was leaning his eyeballs on me questioningly.

     “It’s just an anniversary reaction.  Sorry.  All those years ago.  I lost a brother, a musician.”

     “So did I.”  The tiny soft hairs on my face stood at attention.  It was the last thing I expected to hear.

     “His name was András,” he said.  “A great flutist.”

     “But this is impossible.  So was Andrew.” I gulped.  “I mean, he played the flute.”

     “Yes.  András, he. . . took his own life nearly twenty years ago. “ Zoltán’s voice was unusually flat.  “I found him on the floor.  It was on my uncle Gábor’s farm.  He raised foxes.”

     Something crept along my neck as the memory flashed through my head – Monika, the coffee shop, the pen, the psychometry. A blue carpet with a diamond pattern.

     “He had a gun.   He was. . .” He waved his bowing-hand as if trying to banish a cold, bad power.  “Then two years later, I lose Anika.”

    I looked at him questioningly.

     “My first wife.  Dead from cancer.  She was going to have a child.”

     “Zoltán, I don’t know what to say.  That’s so – “

     “I was very sick for a long time.”

     “Of course.”

    “Then I start over. Here, in Canada.  Was very bad at first.  I had to work as security guard.  But here in Canada, I find Faith.”  His eyes darkened with warmth.

     “She’s a lovely woman, Zoltán.”

     “And you.”

     “Thank you.  But you’re only as good as the company you keep.”

     We smiled at each other, a little tearily.  As he lifted his violin, time stopped. Freeze-frame:  on his left forearm, a blurry smudge that once might have been a number.   A long piece of memory, or something more mysterious than memory, pulled itself out of my brain like a knotted hank of yarn:

     Anyone dark was in trouble then.  Selling a horse, or, worse, playing a fiddle was suspicious.  Any interest in the psychic arts had the smell of suspicion too.  It almost didn’t matter whether his family was Romany or not.  Their eyes were the wrong color, they were musicians, they were full of charm and a defiant joy in being alive, so off to the camps they went, guilty by association.

    He brought me out of my dream.  “And now we play.”

    “Yes, we play.”  The two stringed voices, one raw as green wood, the other dark honey, twined in a soft remembrance.

    REV. MARIAN CARSON

The phone rang at 3:30 in the morning, and as I bumbled over to answer it in the dark my gut suddenly knotted up in an involuntary ball of dread.  I knew this was the kind of call I’ve only had to answer a couple of times in twenty-five years of ministry.  It was Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster asking me if I knew a Mrs. Michael Sandner.  It took a minute for me to figure out who they meant.  The knot let loose and I relaxed into the deep, dead calm of crisis.  I had to be clear and grounded, and so I was, even with thoughts swarming into my head – did she drink again?  Did she do herself harm?  Is this somehow connected to her friend who has been in the hospital in Vancouver? Or – Kate?  No, it couldn’t be Kate.

     “Mrs. Sandner has been kind of, well, I hate to use the term hysterical, but I don’t know what else to call it,” the voice said, sounding appallingly unconcerned.  “She was down on her knees just – I don’t know, making this sound, it was kind of freaky.” 

     “What happened?  How did she get there?”

     “Oh.  I’m afraid there’s been an accident.  Her daughter Kate has been injured.”

     “How badly?”

     “She’s in the ICU right now and is resting comfortably.”

     “But how – “

    “It’s Mrs. Sandner I’m concerned about.  We wouldn’t normally call you at this hour, Reverend Carson, but she’s been calling for you.  This is a bit of an emergency.  We wouldn’t want to have to put her in the psychiatric ward, but she just keeps on making that weird sound.  She won’t stop.”

    “Is she screaming?”

     “Oh, no.  Nothing like that.”

     “Is she hurting anyone?”
     “No.  But it’s just so odd, and it’s disturbing the people around her.  She won’t even let us sedate her.”

     “No, don’t sedate her.  And do not, I repeat, do not put her in the psych ward. It’s the worst possible thing you could do.  Try to put her in a quiet room somewhere and I’ll be over as soon as I possibly can.”

    Keening.  That must have been what they were trying to describe, and I heard it as I raced down the hall to the emergency waiting room.  The only sound I can compare it to is the prolonged shriek of a dog that has been hit by a car.  But this was worse; it was human.  Lucy sat clutching her chest as if in physical pain.  A nurse stood rigidly over her and several onlookers gawked in open fascination.

     “Can we go somewhere alone?” I asked the fat stolid nurse.

    “Sorry.  No space.”

     “Leave me alone with her, then.”

     “She refused the thioridazine.”

      “Just leave us alone.  Please.”  I sat beside her and began gently rubbing her back as the keening subsided into deep shuddering sighs.  I wondered if she were even capable of speaking.

     “Lucy, Kate is alive.  They told me she’s in intensive care and they’re looking after her.  She’s alive.  Can you tell me what happened?”

    “It’s her head.”

     “Oh, no.  Lucy.”

     “She and Brian went to a party tonight.  I don’t even know exactly what happened.  But the police said it was the other guy’s fault.  Drunk driver. A head-on collision.”

     “Is Brian – “

     “He didn’t make it.”  She doubled over.  Then sat up, trying very hard to compose her shivering breath.  “His parents just left.  It’s her head, Marian.  It looks like there’s going to be brain damage.  That is, if she makes it at all.  Oh Jesus, Jesus.”

     I grabbed her hands and repeated with her:  Jesus; Jesus.  There was nothing else to do.  Her keening, quieter now, sounded almost like singing.  I knew the hospital would disapprove, though she was hurting absolutely no one.  Then I began to pray out loud, almost as an automatic response:

    “Dear God, there are times when we don’t understand why we must endure suffering such as this.  We ask that you sustain Lucy in this time of terrible trial.  Be with the doctors as they. . . “

     “Save Kate,” Lucy broke in fiercely.

     “Dear God, we ask that you guide. . . “
     Save Kate!”

     “Save Kate,” I sighed.  “God, just save that girl.  I don’t care how you do it.  Just bring her back.”

     After a moment, Lucy said in a shaky voice, “That was the most politically incorrect prayer I’ve ever heard.”

    “Good.  Maybe the big lug will hear us.”

    “It’s worth a try.  A minute ago I said, ‘Look, take me.  Take me instead.’”

     “Understandable, if illogical.”

     “Too bad it doesn’t work that way.”  At that moment a distraught-looking dark-haired man burst into the room.  Lucy jumped up as if jolted with a current, then rushed into his arms.

     “How did you get here? I thought you were in Calgary.”

     “I was already here on business.  Remember?  Every three months.  I just happened to check my messages from home.”

    “Thank God.”

     “Is she alive?”

     “It’s her head.”

     “Oh, sweet Jesus, no.”

     “But she’s alive, Michael.”

       “Dear God.  God-damn it.”

     I have noticed in the long course of my ministry that even atheists become religious in their blackest moments, salting the air with curses indistinguishable from prayer.  God, Jesus, damn you, help us.  The two of them were one body, the moment almost unbearably private.

     “I want to see her,” the man said.

     “We can’t. Not yet.  They’re going to operate.”

     “Fucking Christ.”  Michael suddenly unclasped Lucy and turned to me. “I’m sorry.  You’re the minister, aren’t you?”

     “Don’t worry about it.”

    “Thanks for being here,” he said, meaning it.

     “I wish I could do something,” I replied, feeling that too-familiar sense of utter powerlessness in the face of raw fact. 

     “We’ll be here for hours. You don’t have to stay, Marian, you’ve done enough,” Lucy said, looking much calmer.  All she needed was for someone to hear her.

     “I don’t mind staying a while.”  We smiled at each other.  Smiling, in the midst of all this.  But that’s what we did.

     And we sat for an interminable, timeless time in that dull institutional room until a doctor came to tell Lucy and Michael that it looked like Kate would live.  Lucy’s legs gave way and Michael lifted her up off the floor and the two embraced, sobbing helplessly.  Then I was able to leave them, praying from my depths that love and health would win, that Kate would somehow be all right.  “Save Kate,” I said aloud again, and it was the only possible prayer. 

 MONIKA

     Sometimes I have a lot of trouble with this God Lucy claims to believe in so fervently.  When obscene and perhaps irreversible damage is done to a complete innocent, how are we to continue to have faith that something good is guiding our lives?  But it was Marian Carson Lucy called first, not me.  Not that this is any time for jealousy.

     She needed me to lay hands on her daughter, her Kate, as she lay in a coma, her soul still puzzling over whether to leave or stay.  I wanted to convey to her, through touch, through love, through whatever healing power I possess, that she is needed here more than she realizes.  That this is not a decision to be made lightly.

     Kate’s delicate young face is battered and purpled almost beyond recognition, her fractured head swathed.  A respirator breathes for her.  Lucy has barely left her side and even spent a night dozing in a chair by her bed, which she was not supposed to do.  The nursing staff looked the other way – “they don’t want me acting weird again,” Lucy said sardonically by way of explanation.  I think she’s remarkably calm and composed for someone who has just had her heart ripped out by the roots.

     Michael hovered around the room exuding a palpable air of anxiety while I attempted to reach Kate.  I sensed her far out of her body and it made my skin prickle.  Does she know how much these two people love her, need her to continue?  (Enough to accept her back even in impaired form?)  Will she re-enter a damaged vessel and live out the soul-changing consequences, or flee into some kinder, if less-known dimension?  It comes down to courage. Kate is awfully young.  I just don’t know.  I want her back for Lucy’s sake, but she may never be the full Kate, the whole Kate, ever again.  Is this a worse calamity than death?

     But Lucy – Lucy’s no quitter.  Michael won’t leave her during this; I can sort of smell it.  They’re in this together.  Both are gut-stubborn, beyond all reason, and I am beginning to think stubbornness is a prerequisite for getting through life intact.   It’s a stark refusal to let the dark side win, and it wants to.  Believe me, it wants to badly.  Brian has already crossed over, and he’s confused, disoriented, feeling lost.  I’ve asked Lucy to pray for his soul, but she’s sort of busy right now, busy drawing her next breath.  It’s taking everything she’s got to face the fact of this, the bald immoveable fact.  She will wake up in the morning and at first she won’t remember, then will slam up against the fact once again, and will steel herself.  She’ll get mad later.  She’ll fall apart later.  She’ll hate God, or not, depending on the outcome.  She’ll live through this, changed badly, forced out of shape, but generally whole.  Stubbornly, angrily whole.

 KATE

     It’s not that bad.  Really.  I think I could get used to this.  It’s such a light, loose feeling, and you can go practically anywhere just with a thought.  You can even contact people, but only certain people.  An old, old woman who lives six houses down from us suddenly sat up in bed last night and said out loud, “Kate.”  I told her it’s okay, I’m not a ghost or anything, just on a very loose thread, and she understood right away, being a veteran of such impressions.

     Then I met Andrew, Mums’s brother, even though I never really knew him in life.  He’s nice and not at all weird like he was on earth and seemed glad to see me, but really worried about Mums.  I can sense them in that place down in the old solid fleshly dimension where I used to be, and they’re dithering around in a panic.  I wish they wouldn't. Even after this short time I already think I know what “heaven” means.  There’s such a sense of love here, of love abounding, love absolutely unlimited, and I’m seriously tempted to stay.  The doctors down there are talking about a “brain-stem injury” and I have a feeling that means I’d be substantially handicapped if I went back.  But how can I leave Mums and Dad?  Mums in particular has been through enough already.  This episode has pulled the two of them back together in a way that’s nothing short of miraculous.  Andrew asked me if I was up to the challenge and said that if I turned it down this time, another opportunity would come up in my next life.  Opportunity?  To be handicapped?  But it’s a different set of rules here, with everything based on grace.  There’s no commerce, no striving, no sense of “success”, none of that.  You’re stripped down to a bare essence of love.  Since it’s all there is, being handicapped might only intensify that blazing truth.  It would force my parents to bend and stretch their hearts to accommodate; they could either grow a size, or break.  The outcome is never sure, and no one ever sees the generosity in being allowed the opportunity of such a stretch.  It must seem like a bloody curse.  I know I won’t be able to articulate any of this if I come back, either, so there is no guarantee they’ll even get it.  Do I trust their generosity, their flexibility, their amazing capacity to love?  Isn’t that what brought me into being in the first place?

 HARRIET SMITHSON

     I am only a violin.  To some minds, a mere piece of  wood.  Yet to Lucy I am a presence.  Would it surprise you to learn that she is still playing me, needs to play me, to keep up her sessions with Zoltán every week and to practice her etudes while the world crashes down around her ears?  The surgery was a partial success in that the pressure inside Kate’s skull was at least temporarily relieved.  But no one can say when she will wake up.  (At her worst times, Lucy substitutes “if”.)  She keeps vigil at the hospital, murmuring quietly to Michael who gives her the only thing he can, his presence.  She goes to her job in the afternoons, needing the sanity and structure of routine.  She talks to friends, she eats and sleeps, she prays.  A terrible calm has come over her, the calm of absolute crisis, but she knows it can be ruptured at any moment by the crashing-in of the knowledge of what might be.  A daughter dead – or, perhaps worse, permanently changed.

     Grace comes in the back door.  Her friend Manny from AA drops around the hospital from time to time just to sit with Kate.  Twenty-two years ago he suffered a brain-stem injury in a car crash and his life has never been the same.  Manny does not say much, does not have to say much, but is simply there.  He does not expect thanks.

     Her friends all give her that careful, concerned look.  Mostly they are surprised at her calm.  I am surprised at her musical focus, her resoluteness in the face of an impossible situation.  Where is all this grace coming from?  Last lesson she began to play Grieg, Solveig’s Song from Peer Gynt, with more intensity and depth of soul than she has ever shown before.  It was obvious that Zoltán wanted her to stop playing, to bend over and just sob for a few minutes, get it out of her system, like being sick.  Instead she did something else with the energy, and it opened my throat to music, real music, perhaps for the first time.

     Then she couldn’t play any more.  She took deep breaths and thought of Jesus.  The moment past bearing had almost passed.  She saw Christ’s face, ate his bread and drank his wine.  Zoltán, the depth of his respect palpable, leaned subtly towards her.

     “If there is something I can do.”

     “There is something.”

     The grave look on his face said, “Name it.”

     “Pray for her?  For all of us.”

    Zoltán stood enfolded by one of his profound, respectful silences.  How is it that silence can be so malignant in some circumstances, and so perfect in others?  Lucy grew up with a cancerous, throttled silence which came close to choking off her very life.  But Zoltán’s silences are as right as the deep pauses in Beethoven’s symphonies.  They are rests, in which one rests.

     As delicately as if he were wielding a bow, he reached out with the tip of his right index finger and touched a fresh tear at the corner of her eye.  Then he brought the finger to his lips.  His eyes shone blackly silver, like hematite.  Zoltán knew, and Lucy knew, and even I knew in that moment that there are many different ways of praying.

 ANDREW

     Of course!  I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  I’d be smacking myself on the forehead, if I had a forehead.  It’s the perfect way for me to be near the situation, but not terribly intrusive.  In fact no one will ever know, except maybe Lucy’s friend Monika who picks up on the strangest things.

     It’s been a while, after all, coming close to 20 years, since I left the material world.  I know there are still things to experience, though I took on a lot in the last life, being a schizophrenic.  And infancy, even normal infancy, is way more traumatic than most adults can ever remember.  Can I go through it all again?

     How can I not?  It’s all so perfect.  Lucy needs me close.  I know somehow she’ll take some kind of a role in my upbringing – and Lord knows the two birth custodians will need all the help they can get. 

     Eternity is such a strange place, full of unlikely thunderclaps like this one, ideas which at first seem ridiculous (and how God does love the ridiculous), but which work out beautifully in the execution.  Soon – ah, soon I will breathe again, feel pleasure and pain, and live through all the stages.  It is yet another chance to love imperfectly, which is the way of human beings.  Why do I yearn for it so? when this dimension is infinitely more perfect? 

       Because God loves broken vessels. 

       Because earthly life, the whole glorious muddle, is absolutely irresistable. 

       Because.

   MICHAEL SANDNER

     God – and I’m not even sure there’s such a being in the first place, but – God, because I don’t know what else to call you – God, if you exist, if you are there at all, if you are the healing force which Lucy seems to believe in so completely, please hear me.  I need help with my girl.  My Kate.  God, she is young.  If you have the power to do anything at all, can you heal her brain?  Can you bring her spirit back?

     Can you show me what to do here?  Suddenly after all those years of practice I have no idea how to be a father, a husband, a man.  Everything I was once certain of has been taken away in the breaking of my Kate.  I don’t know why you didn’t break me instead.  Kate has never sinned or screwed up or hurt a single soul.  All her life she has been my joy.  Why didn’t you do this to me?  Do you consider this to be a more refined form of torture, watching me squirm while my daughter’s life hangs in the balance?

     I don’t know what I’ve done to make this happen, or what I have to do to change it.  The shock of being close to Lucy again is amazing, almost like a miracle, but a bizarre one, forced like a hothouse plant.  I never thought that it would take something as horrible as this to make our family whole again.

     So I thank you for that.  Don’t leave me, because I have no idea what to do next.  I don’t know you and I only half-believe in you but if I didn’t at least try to reach you now, I would die.  So I’ll throw it all open to you, whoever and whatever you are.  Only because I have no idea what else I can do.

 BRIAN HAMPTON

     For quite a long time I really didn’t have a clue where I was.  It was like I’d been picked up and hurled halfway around the world, coming down hard in a completely foreign country.  I didn’t feel alone exactly – in fact I swear at a certain point I thought I saw my Katie, or at least felt like she was around.  Then things started to settle down a little bit.  Someone was trying to get a message across to me, that what I was experiencing is just what people would normally call “death”.  It was a woman with dark hair, the same woman who has been laying her hands on Katie.  She was telling me not to be so afraid of crossing over.  But it wasn’t my choice.  It all happened so fast.  I don’t know why I was cut loose when Kate wasn’t.  But this woman with the dark hair kept telling me I’ll soon have a sense of freedom, even power.  Then I had the strangest sort of talk with my grandfather, but without any words. He said he wanted to be the one to take care of me, look out for me and help me get used to the new place – if you can even call this a place.  I don’t really remember much about him when he was alive and I was sort of bored and fidgety at his funeral, but I guess there are no hard feelings.

     I could get used to this. There’s no pain or struggle or worry or anything like that.  I’d really like to be able to tell my parents that I’m okay but they don’t think anything happens to you after you die.  Their minds are closed.  So it’s going to take them a long time to get over this and that bothers me.  I don’t know why people have to learn so hard but they do ask for it, that much is clear.  They want the lessons.  It’s the way they’re delivered that throws people off.  I saw what they did at the funeral and the way they handled it was to say that so long as people remembered me, then I wasn’t really dead.  They’re getting warm.  If the truth came out and people realized that death doesn’t even exist, it’d set back the funeral industry for sure.  And people wouldn’t waste so much energy on too much grief.  People are so grabby, wanting to own and possess, to hold on to the people they love, when the truth is we’re all just there on loan, temporary.  At the same time, the opposite is true in that nobody ever really dies, so we’re all eternal.  It’s pretty far out and I have to admit I’m starting to like it.  I think Katie was the best thing I ever had when I was alive, and it’s sort of too bad that she’s the one person who won’t remember me.  But this sense of freedom and being awake is even better, because I know it never has to end.

 MONIKA

     I have never been so exhausted in my entire life.  I don’t know why it is that things can go along relatively placidly for so long, to the point of near-boredom, and then suddenly everything reverses and it’s one disaster after another.  I shouldn’t say disaster, I suppose, because somehow or other everything worked out okay last night, but it was only by luck, or the grace of God, or something.

     I’ve been pretty drained lately by all the hospital visits, with no real sign of improvement in Kate.  I do sense a slightly stronger connection to her body, a sort of will to continue, but at the same time I understand her reluctance to come back.  Lucy is relying on me a lot now to just be there as a sort of steadying influence.  Last night I fell into bed at midnight and was jolted awake at 2:00 a.m. by a phone call from the midwife I’ve been training with:  could I come to Kitsilano to sit in on a home birth?  It wasn’t the best of times, but this was my first opportunity to see a real birth, so I said yes.  I was supposed to meet her there as soon as I could but assumed she’d be there well ahead of me, as she lives only about 15 minutes away.  “Plenty of time,” she told me.  “It’s a first birth and might not happen for hours.”

     By the time I got to the address, which was on the bottom floor of an old house, I sensed something was wrong before I even rang the doorbell.  I couldn’t see another car parked anywhere, for one thing.  And I could hear this faint but very strange noise, definitely a voice, but not like anything human.  More like something out of a horror-movie, in fact.  When I opened the door a thin, white-faced young woman with long red hair was standing there in a lather of panic:  “Please help us!  It’s coming!”  Then I figured out the source of the noise.  There was this creature rolled up in a ball on the floor in the middle of the room, a dark-haired, nearly-nude, huge-bellied, squatting female emitting the most primitive sound I have ever heard.  The large dark gob of blood on the blanket under her crotch told me that things were well underway.

     “Where’s the midwife?  You know, Dorothy Sanders,” I asked the long-haired one.  “She’s supposed to be – “

    “Not here yet.  Car trouble.  She called on the cell phone fifteen minutes ago.  I told her we were fine, the contractions were still 20 minutes apart.  No rush.  No rush, I told her!  Then this happened.  God help us!”

     My first job was to get everyone calmed down, a nearly-impossible task since I was in a barely-controlled state of panic myself.  The young woman who was giving birth seemed barely capable of human speech except for obscenities.  She kept yelling out the strangest things, like, “Goddamn you, Calista!”  and “Fuck you, Quade, you little bastard, you’re going to kill me!”  At one point she asked for a cigarette and the long-haired woman looked at me anxiously, as if for approval.  “If it’ll help her calm down,” I said, wondering if Dorothy would fire me instantly for even saying it.  I tried to put a cool cloth on the woman’s forehead and she threw it across the room, starting up that unearthly grinding roar that signalled the onset of another contraction.

     “How dilated is she?” long-hair asked me (in my panic I had forgotten even to ask their names).  Dilated?  Am I supposed to know?  I’ve read text books.  That’s it.  Is there a way to tell?  Yes, but – would I have to –

     “It’s coming!”  dark-hair roared, and she bore down fiercely, her flesh tearing as the top of a head appeared between her legs.  Good God!  Birth!  Give me a catcher’s mitt because it is happening, and I don’t have the first idea what to do.  Long-hair knelt behind her partner supporting her shoulders while she pushed and squeezed and heaved, and I tried very hard to look like this was the way it was supposed to happen.

     Lord! but birth is messy, hot fluid and clotted blood and slime sluicing out everywhere, along with other bodily products too fierce to mention.  But when I saw a crumpled little face emerge, all compressed in that tightly-packed newborn way, my heart leapt with joy.  “Push, push,” I yelled as dark-hair roared and screamed.  Then – it happened so quickly, a spasmodic, twisting slithering-out of an entire whole, healthy, newborn-infant body.  The birth-scream came instantly, and he – yes, a he – pinkened up reassuringly, his tiny balled fists jerking spasmodically as he howled.

     “It’s a boy!” I cried.  A small arc spewed from his tiny penis.  Piss landed in my eye and both women laughed as I tried to see his beautiful little face through a haze of pee mixed with tears.

     And then the doorbell rang, and it was Dorothy Sanders.  “Goodness,” she said, upon seeing the strange tableau.

     He really is a little beauty, so dark like his mother, with something else about him, something almost exotic.  I’d say “familiar”, but maybe that’s going a little too far.  Of course you never ask about the father, these days.  He could even be one of those turkey-baster babies I’ve read so much about.  Anyway, it all ended well, I was congratulated, and there were deeply-felt hugs all around.  Even black-hair hugged me and said, unexpectedly, “Thank you, sister,” as if she really meant it.  Then I went home, threw myself down on the bed and howled from relief and exhaustion, elated and knocked completely flat at the same time.

      Accident, death, disruption, howls of atrocious pain, blood, birth – what is it Carl Sandburg said?  “A baby is God’s way of insisting that the world continue.”  It happens even without us “experts” to help it along.  Humbling, I suppose, and awe-inspiring.  And I am sure this miracle will renew my soul completely, after 24 hours or so of sleep.

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     I took Harriet out of her case this morning and practiced for an hour and a half.  Unable to spare the time because I knew I had to be over at the hospital by 10:30.  But equally unable to leave it aside.  The strange truth is, I have a gig.  My friend Sandra, the lady with the brain tumor, has suddenly died.  In going through her papers, her sister Lynn found instructions for her memorial service, including a specific request that I play the violin.  I have been working on J. S. Bach’s Bist Du Bei Mir – “Art thou with me, I go with joy, to my death and to my rest” – ever since.

     No doubt everyone around me thinks I am out of my mind to even be thinking of violin at a time like this.  But that’s just the point.  Violin is an insistent flowering in the midst of death, or the even more mysterious phenomenon of irrevocable change.

     In other news, there has been a birth.  Nothing surprises me any more now that my life is turned completely upside-down, so I wasn’t even particularly shocked when Monika phoned to tell me about her first midwifery experience.  At a certain point in the story the pieces all fell into place.  “Good God!” I exclaimed in disbelief.  “That’s David’s baby!”

     We both howled with dismayed laughter.  When she described this beautiful dark-haired infant to me, I got the strangest feeling at the back of my neck.  I called David right away and he was acting very strangely, not at all like the proud, puffed-up Papa I thought he’d be.

    Here’s the story.  He got a call from Cassie saying everything had gone smoothly and mother and child were doing just fine, but would David mind waiting just a little while to see him?

     Like, maybe a month?

     A month? Immediately all his alarm-systems went off.  Was his son deformed?  Below

 average intelligence?  What?


    “So what was it?  A birth defect, or – “

     “Worse than that.”

     “What could be worse?”

     “I’ll tell you.  I came around to their place and pounded on the door and just demanded to be let in.  Finally Cass let me through the door.  So there was Zoë looking like the virgin mother herself, giving off a sort of soft glow of maternal care, swaddling in her arms the most beautiful Asian baby I have ever seen.”

     “Oh!  So he’s – “

     “Not mine.”

    “But how – “

     “It seems Zoë neglected to tell the whole truth.  Or maybe she forgot.  The guy’s apparently back in Hong Kong by now anyway, completely off the scene.  Just one of those things.  It’s like letting your  pedigreed bitch run loose for one evening, and she comes back impregnated by God knows who.”

     “David, are you okay?”   

     “I’m – “ Then his voice cracked and he began to laugh.  “Well, what choice do I have?”

     “And what did they name him?”

     “Martin David Zwierzchowski.  At least I got second billing, even though I wasn’t even genetically involved.”

     “So what happens now?”

     “Oh, you know.  I’ve been asked to stand godfather.  Play oboe at the christening.  It’ll all work out.  A hoot, isn’t it?  My ‘son’.  Life is full of such delightful surprises.”

     “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

     “This way it’s easier.  If he turns out to be a mess, it won’t be from my DNA.”

     “Oh David.”

     “And at least the father’s a musician.  His name’s Bill.  Bill Chow.  A jazz player, but still.  Tenor sax.  Wind instrument, at least, so it’s in the ballpark.”

     “You can teach him emboucher.”

     “Yes, and breath control. Along with walks in the park, deer-hunting trips and the like.  It’ll be simply grand.”

       I’ve always felt that a person’s finest comes out under the steamroller, and in David I am not disappointed.  He asked respectfully about Kate and listened, but didn’t reassure me or try to make the situation any better, and I appreciated that.  When things are bad, they’re bad, and David is enough of a veteran of bad to know this and just let things be.

 MICHAEL SANDNER

     Sometimes prayers get squeezed out of you – “no atheists in a foxhole”, as they say.  Then things happen and you wonder if God had anything to do with it.  Kate woke up today.  Opened her eyes.  Those big clear heartbreakingly-blue eyes.  I wasn’t there, but Lucy and Monika were.  Lucy just fell down on the floor – her knees gave way.  All those cliche things really do happen in moments of epiphany. 

     “Mumma,” Kate said.  Her old name for her.  So she could still speak.

     She could sit up.  She could use her hands, feed herself.  She knew her Mum right away.  It was enough.  I rushed over to the hospital and Lucy and I crashed into each other’s arms and bawled like babies.  And for just a little, blessed while, everything was perfect.

     Then came the conferences with the doctors, the vague answers to our endless questions.  The truth is, no one really knows what’s going to happen with Kate. She seems miraculously intact and we were ecstatic to hear her speak.  But it’s the speech of a very intelligent eight-year-old girl.  “Can I go home now, Mumma?” she asked, her face crushingly innocent.

     “Never mind, she’s alive, she’s okay, she’ll get everything back,” we kept telling each other, knowing we had no idea what we were talking about.  A brain injury can do just about anything.  Sometimes they get better, sometimes worse.  The prognosis is maddeningly vague.  I look at that friend of Lucy’s who often comes around – that Manny – and I think, God, don’t let it happen to my child.  But from everything I’ve heard, Manny’s recovery has been nothing short of a miracle.

     The truth is I don’t want that “differentness” in my child.  That shadow, that handicap.  I want her perfect, the way she was before, and realizing it makes me feel deeply ashamed of myself.  What kind of love is this that can’t stretch to include imperfection?  Is that why I broke up with Lucy?  Is all this a sort of lesson?  (Don’t tell me all those New Age types are right.)  Neither of us knows.  We’ve fallen back into living together almost like we were never apart, except there’s a difference.  For the first time I feel truly married, in soul as well as in body, and it is this atrocity that has brought it about.  A horrible, obscene way to a blessed gift.  Lucy is adjusting better than I am, being no stranger to disaster.  She’s calmly making arrangements for physiotherapy and home tutoring while I’m still trying to get my mind around the fact that Kate, my Katie-cakes, is mentally disabled and may never be completely whole again.

 KATIE

        I liked it when I got to go home.  We have a cat.  Mumma says I just don’t remember from before.  He’s a nice cat.  His name is Max and he has no tail.  Some cats don’t.  Mumma said I could play the piano so I played it with two fingers and it was neat.

I don’t remember Daddy very much.  Something happened to my head and it still hurts.  I told Mumma about something I found out in school.  She said said it happened nine years ago.  I don’t remember that either. I have a new teacher coming to my house now and it’s nice.  I also get to be with some other kids who had something happen to their head, except some of them aren’t kids.  Oh I love Mumma so much.  I want to hug her.  Sometimes she cries and I don’t know why.  Daddy is nice too but he looks worried all the time.  I can’t ride my bike yet but I can walk okay.  This man named Manny comes over and he’s okay but he talks sort of funny.  I don’t talk like that.  Mumma showed me a picture of me but it didn’t look like me.  But my face is still all purple from the accident.  Mumma says I’m really pretty.  I’m glad to be out of the hospital so quick but they needed my bed.  I guess I’m not really sick any more, just getting better.  Some friends from my old school came over but I didn’t know what they were talking about.  Then they started crying and I asked them to leave.  But I can make new friends.

     Mumma plays the violin now and she lets me listen to her practice.  I even know some of the songs by heart.  Mumma was so glad I remembered them.  She said when I’m better she can take me for piano lessons again.  She says she knows a really nice teacher, the one who teaches her the violin.

     I like that.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

    In the midst of all, there is music.  In the deaths and in the births and in all the chaos in between.  Today Lucy played what Zoltán refers to as her “first gig” at Falconridge United Church.  A memorial service.  The wonderful thing about tragedy is that it produces an unnatural calm in which you can face absolutely anything.  Just the way she plucked me from the case was different.  She lifted me with assurance.  Her bowing was precise.  Her pitch was better than usual.  This was real violin.  Through it all there was a curious dearth of emotion.  Lucy had a job to do, a promise to fulfill to a friend, and she did it well.  It was only after the playing was over and the tears were dried and people began to disperse that she realized what she had just done.  She had just played me in front of other people – not in the safe bounds of a school recital, but in an actual performance.  “Come play in our church sometime,” an elderly woman said to her.  Another asked, “Are you free to play at our senior’s tea next week?”  Without thinking about it, Lucy said, “Yes, of course.”

     She has won.  I have become an instrument in her hands.  Opportunities to play will slowly spread out in all directions.  Within one year, she will be playing in an amateur orchestra.  As she copes with a daughter who has suddenly been rocketed backwards in time, as she adjusts to unexpectedly being married again after resigning herself to a life alone, she will have me, her amber companion, for always.

     When the pressures of teaching Kate to read again become too great, she will quietly withdraw to her practice room and close the door.  She will pray for a moment, gathering herself.  Then she will take out her book of Kreutzer etudes, open it to page one, and begin.

 DAVID’S JOURNAL

     Rose at 6:55 a.m.  Weight 171 pounds.  Did 45 minutes on the treadmill before practicing for 3 hours.  Yes, and I’ve seen my godson again, this time under happier circumstances.  It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a baptism.  I can’t say as it ever meant anything to me before. I also don’t fully understand why Cassie has suddenly gone all Anglican on us again, after thirty years as a so-called atheist.  I thought it was the mother who usually goes off the deep end after a birth. But Cass suddenly got the idea in her head that Martin has to be properly baptized.  He’s a cute little nipper, with those almond eyes (the Chow genes) and black hair. Zoë noted that he screams right on pitch.  “E flat,” Cass said (she always gets it right).

     But the really big news came later that same day.  Out of the blue, a friend from my university days called to say, “I hear you’re in the market for a new cat.”  Somehow or other Tom had found out about the death of Stanzi.  For the longest time I couldn’t bear to even think of replacing her.  But when I got the call, I thought to myself, “Why not?”  Fanny and Clara have been good company for each other, but I could tell they were lonely for a third, to complete the circle.  On impulse I went over to Tom’s and fell instantly in love with this wee, sleekit, tortoise-shell pussy with white gloves, a white bib and golden eyes.  She’d fit into a teacup, that’s how dainty she is.  I named her Alma (and I’m sure Mahler would approve).

    And then there were three.  It seems the surprises never end.