Vital Signs Read Online Free PDF Page B

signal that they should leave. Another thing that my daughter blames me for is the drive back to the city. If I hadn’t insisted we needed a simpler, back-to-nature life, just at the time when Charlotte was needing a more complicated, teenage one, she’d be travelling a few blocks instead of an hour down Highway 400. She’s right to blame me. I was the only one who needed this return to the expanses of corn that dominated my childhood. As I look out the kitchen window, I see that the stalks have grown even since yesterday.
    When they have all gone, Anna and I sit in the living room in front of the evening TV—our choices being the home video shows filled with doggy mishaps and baby surprises, or the perpetually dismal news magazine shows.
    “Leave this,” Anna says when I choose
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, and I revel in her clarity. “It’s hard,” she says after a few minutes.
    “Yes,” I say, alert to her every jitter, her flapping baby finger, her twitching foot. Maybe with these few, controlled utterances she is telling me that this is the way she needs to talk to me now: simple constructions, a few syllables at a time. So I take her up on it and decide to do the same:
    “Can I get you something?”
    “No.”
    “How do you feel?” God, I’m as bad as the doctors.
    “Frightened.”
    I inhale.
    “Would you rather be somewhere else?” And then I realize it’s not a clear enough question. What I want to ask is if we should risk leaving, if I should take her to the mountains, which she loves, or do something that will get our minds off all of this, but of course there is no getting her mind off all of this. Her mind
is
all of this. “I mean, is there anything you’d like to do, to help this all be easier?”
    “The baby will need changing and then there’s all the clouds, and the dam on the highway that will only get worse,” she says and I see that I’ve asked the wrong thing again. I hold my breath.
    “What about the baby?” she asks me.
    “What baby?”
    “The one in the corn.”
    I don’t ask her what she means. It’s my job to know. I am her husband.
    I wait.
    But then my doubt and guilt grab me by the collar and I think I might choke. I wonder if Anna is finallyconfronting me, and I think that I now must face losing her.
    “What baby in the corn?”
    “Yesterday’s,” she says softly, in a tone that seems forgiving. I feel the urge to lay my head on her lap. I must be very tired. None of us has slept much this last week.
    “Are you tired, Anna?”
    “No, no,” she says and smiles. She stands up and holds out her hand, beckoning me to join her. I take her hand, stand, and she leads me out of the house into the backyard that looks out on the field we’ve given over to the horses owned by the farmer next door. The night is warm and the punishment of the recent rainy days seems to have let up.
    “Smell it,” she says as she drops my hand, steps forward and looks up to the stars. I am beginning to see a beauty at work in Anna’s brain. I toss my head back and smell and see and even lick the air, which tastes candied. Anna turns and steps back toward me. She puts her head on my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her and we breathe in tandem. I dare not ruin this by telling her all that needs to be said.
    When Charlotte was eight and wanted to ride horses, you pretended it didn’t frighten you; you pretended for her sake that you didn’t know that a beast as powerful as a horse did not need to take commands from a tiny, if agile child who wanted the world at her feet. You told her that the horse needed her to tell it where it should take its wild energy. Charlotte blamed me
when she finally did fall, years later, because I hadn’t allowed her to ride the horse of her choice, the biggest one, the one with the blackest mane
.
    Later, when I am beside Anna in bed, her calf touching my shin as we spoon, I feel her breath quickening. Its rhythm reignites the urge I felt in