SSC (2012) Adult Onset Read Online Free PDF

Mumma weren’t so far away. If only I weren’t pregnant …
    When she told the doctor she thought something was wrong, he said, “Don’t be silly,” but since she had come all the way into Winnipeg, he might as well examine her. He laid the cold metal disc on her belly and listened. He moved the disc. He moved it again. He listened, but could not find a heartbeat. He threw down his stethoscope and walked out without a word. She got off the table, collected her mouton coat and told the receptionist, “I think he’s really disgusted with me.”
    Now she wonders, did she have bad thoughts because the baby was dead? Or was it the other way around?
    Behind the curtain, no one speaks above a whisper. They have given her a sedative, but she is awake and able to push. It is big, the way blue babies often are. It does not take long. She feels a tugging. Then it is gone, and she is empty.
    A rustling sound … sound of fabric, the nurse is wrapping it up. Soft-soled footsteps retreat. They take it away.
    •
    Upon descending the stairs, Mary Rose meets with a remarkable sight: in the living room, Maggie, her back to the doorway, is sitting still, engaged in some kind of fine-motor activity obscured from view. She must be in the midst of a developmental surge. Nearby, Daisy is innocently nibbling her paw and avoiding Mary Rose’s gaze—she is a dear old thing, if a little impulsive and, like the best dogs, endlessly shame-absorbent. Pit bulls are banned in Ontario, but Daisy is “grandfathered”: having been born before the law came in, she is permitted to live but may be summarily executed if deemed a danger. As it is, she must be muzzled in public, a law Mary Rose feels befits more the authors of the legislation than the dogs themselves.
    Daisy was her name when they got her from the Toronto Humane Society—they were going to change it to Lola, but one look at her eight tired teats told them she’d been through enough. She is a tawny, brawny American Staffordshire terrier of indeterminate elderliness who snores louder than Mary Rose’s late Aunt Sadie and lives in terror of having her nails clipped. Her skull is the shape of a World War II German army helmet. Her anal glands need to be expressed every few months by the vet, an effect of her having borne so many puppies. She dozes on her belly in the midst of screeching birthday parties, legs splayed like a pressed quail. She looks like Mickey Rooney when she smiles. If the vet doesn’t express her anal glands, she drags her butt across the carpet till they express themselves.
    She watches now as Daisy rolls onto her side and stretches out behind Maggie, providing her with a backrest. Lovely—as long as Maggie doesn’t fall asleep, for there will go the morning nap. Hilary is all for letting go of said nap, arguing that Maggie will sleep better at night. Mary Rose thought, but did not say, “You mean
you’ll
sleep better. What about me with a cranky toddler all day?”
    Like every other room in the house, the living room is a hazard-free zone—unless one counts Maggie as a hazard. Just last week, Mary Rose fitted the coffee table with a shock-absorbent expandable table-edge bumper (which Hil is sure to remove when she returns) while on the table are harmless objects—books mostly, plus a neat stack of the
New York Review of Books
that Mary Rose is saving for when she has time or bronchitis, which amounts to the same thing. She will savour them through a haze of antibiotics once Hil is home and she can afford to get sick. On the carpet is a vectoring network of Brio train tracks where Thomas and his variously smiling and scowling friends are coupled up waiting for Matthew’s return—he will know if one is out of place. But Maggie shows no sign of robbing the trains or blowing up the tracks—all quiet on the western front. Mary Rose takes the chance and steals back to the kitchen.
    She is collapsing the Christmas tree stand box for the recycling when she spots