SSC (2012) Adult Onset Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand on her child, the other balancing the box, she struggles with the screen door and sees from the corner of her eye that the lid of the rain barrel, which stands flush against the porch, is loose and missing its bolt—she flashes on an image of Maggie floating face down in the dark water. She tightens her grip and is rewarded with a kick—she will get out there this afternoon, while Maggie naps and Matthew builds a Brio train bridge, and fix the thing. And once she has given up trying to fix it with the one tool she is capable of wielding, namely duct tape, she will call someone in to fix it … what’s the name on the side of that van she keeps seeing in the neighbourhood? Rent-a-Husband? She will do all this right after she has called the chimney guy and got him to come at the same time as the furnace guy, filled out a “simple” form for Canada Revenue Agency, booked her mammogram and phoned her mother back. How does anyone manage to keep a child alive in this world of distractions?
    In the kitchen, she lets Maggie help open the parcel for as long as she can stand it, then takes the scissors from their niche in the knife block. She loves these scissors; she bought them from a shopping channel in her room at the Fort Garry Hotel out west in Calgary on her last book tour,
the only scissors you’ll ever need!
She kneels, slits open the box … and beholds within the ingenious foolproof Christmas tree stand she ordered. She lifts it from its foam core nest, taking a moment to admire the smooth green dome, its ergonomic clamps poised to biteinto a freshly trimmed trunk. Unlike the disaster-prone stands of her childhood, it has a stable base, a patented easy-tilt mechanism and built-in water reservoir. She shakes off the pang of disloyalty that accompanies her pride in having surpassed her own father and an entire generation of family men who sweated and swore under their breath through so many festive seasons, and heads back down the hall with it. She slips through the baby gate, locks it behind her—more protests—and carries the stand lovingly all the way up to the attic, where she places it in an easily accessible spot, knowing that even though they’ll use it but once a year, she’ll thank herself every time she doesn’t have to fight her way through a ton of junk to haul it out, cursing, hot, hurt and exhausted. Mary Rose MacKinnon has a Christmas tree stand that works and is effortlessly accessible. She has that house. She has that attic. She has that life.
    She listens as the protests subside two floors below, confident there is nothing down there that can harm Maggie in the minutes she will be absent, having thoroughly childproofed their home.
    •
    The contractions are faint, it is taking too long, that can be dangerous, so they induce. They put the pit drip in her arm and rig a surgical curtain so she won’t see and she goes into labour.
    They make the delivery easier on her by compressing the infant’s skull—she is not a big woman, there is no need for her to tear. She is a nurse, she knows what they do. They had wanted to do it to her first baby, born breech way down east in Cape Breton; remove it limb by limb in order to save the mother, “That’s what we would do in my country,” said the West Indian nurse. But the young mother said, “Save the baby.” She requested apriest, who came and administered to her the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. But mother and daughter both survived. “Traumatic Parturition.” She saw it scribbled on her chart.
    This baby, however, has been dead for weeks. She knew something was wrong from the start. When she first found out she was pregnant again so soon, she felt guilty for not being happier. She confessed to the priest, who told her it was normal to miss her own mother at a time like this but that God never sends us more than we can bear. He absolved her, but she was unable to shake the bad thoughts:
If only God had waited till I was less tired. If only